“Then perhaps that is what I should do for them. Make their dreams come true. Call it my gift. Konrad, the Blood Count.”
“Bringer of death, this immortal,” quoth the raven.
Konrad heard movement on the stairs and retreated quickly into the shadows thrown by one of the tower’s many gables, dark enough and deep enough to conceal him.
Jon Skellan walked out onto the rooftop. Bending, he began to feed a few of the birds with small strings of meat. They ate out of his hand.
Konrad watched the spectacle with growing curiosity, gradually becoming certain that the birds were talking to the new Hamaya, even though he wasn’t close enough to make out what they were saying.
“So, they talk to you as well?” he asked, stepping out of the shadows.
Skellan scattered the ravens, cawing and flapping his arms to drive them off, and turned to face his master. “They make good companions,” he said, a sly grin spreading across his face. “They ask no questions, and tell no lies. What more can you ask for from a friend?”
“Yes,” Konrad agreed. “There is something almost noble about them, isn’t there?”
“Unlike your brothers,” Skellan said.
The frankness of his words surprised Konrad. He was unaccustomed to his servants being so bold. It made a refreshing change. He knew he had chosen well in Skellan. Like Jerek, he was a truth speaker. Konrad had had enough of sycophants to last him several lifetimes. “From what I have seen of the pair, they lack any semblance of nobility.”
“Guttersnipes, the pair of them,” Konrad agreed. A raven settled by his feet. Utterly unafraid of them, it pecked and scuffed at the scraps of meat that Skellan had dropped.
“Yet they hold great power in your court, and you honour them by giving them command of your forces going to war on the morrow. One would think they have some hold over you. A fop and a whore-whipped fool, not the greatest of vampires ever sired.”
“Well, if any of the gods are paying the blindest bit of notice, we’ll both be honouring their gravesides before the war is out.”
“Keep your friends close, and your brothers closer, eh?” Skellan said.
“Or send them away and hope they drop off the end of the world.”
Konrad felt a kinship with this vampire, one that he had not felt with any of Vlad’s gets. Perhaps it was because he knew his place in the hierarchy, that as Posner’s get he could never rival a true von Carstein for power, perhaps it was his plain speaking, perhaps it was just a remnant of that foul dream. He didn’t know, but he felt an affinity between them. It was something he had little experience of. Throughout his life, he had been forced to fight for everything he had. Even before, in his old life, he had had no true friends. Mother had seen to that. Now, he knew, people sought him out for their own interests. Skellan was different. He was like Konrad. They were both outsiders. They didn’t fit comfortably into this world of the dead, and they both carried their ghosts close to their chest.
“Of course, it never hurts to give them a push,” Skellan said.
“Indeed, we owe it to ourselves to weed out the weak. In death, as in life, only the strongest should survive.”
“Couldn’t agree more.”
“In which case, my new friend, I have a task for you.”
“I am yours to command.” Skellan’s smile was predatory in the extreme.
Travel with Fritz. Become his shadow. See that he does not return to Drakenhof Even in his own ears, Konrad could hear the echo of the raven’s broken-up cadences.
“You can trust me,” Skellan said, no hint of irony in his voice.
Konrad felt a great peace settle around his shoulders. Yes, yes he could trust Skellan.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Up from the Ashes, in Flames
THE BORDERLANDS, SYLVANIA
The last rites of spring, 2057
The beast had left him for dead.
It was a mistake the fiend would come to rue, Kallad vowed, even as his world was consumed with pain and he slipped into darkness once more.
He had no way of knowing how long he had been unconscious.
Awareness returned, the world revealing itself in hallucinatory fragments: the caw of the carrion birds, the rustle of leaves, the smell of blood thick on the breeze, and with them came the pains of his wounds, but for the most part the world was a meaningless wash of colour. He couldn’t focus.
He was lying on his back. He didn’t have the strength to move.
I am not going to die.
He felt the muscles in his left arm quiver. He was burning up from the inside out.
Despite his determination to live, he knew he was dying, and that there was nothing he could do to change the fact.
Gritting his teeth against the sudden flare of pain, he tried to move. Blackness rose up to claim him.
When he came to again he was alone. The vampire had disappeared into the trees. Kallad bit down on his lip, beads of perspiration running down into his eyes as he tried again to force his body to move. He succeeded in craning his head enough to see that the vampire had stripped the dead of anything it could use.
The slight movement caused his vision to swim, blur and dissolve into a blackness of agony.
He was alone. He couldn’t move, couldn’t think.
He knew that death was close. The splotches of light leaking through the trees lay like silver coins scattered across the ground. His dead were offering Morr the price of his passage. There silver was no good to him. He lay in the dirt, staring at the canopy of leaves blocking out the sky, and imagined what it would be like.
Who would come to guide him to the Hall of Ancestors? His father? He had failed his people so he had no right to a hero’s welcome. Perhaps there would be no emissary. Would that be the ultimate price he paid for his failure? Being left to find his own way home?
“I am not going to die.” His defiance was less than a whisper, but he meant it. He wasn’t going to die—not yet.
He still had breath in his lungs. He focused on the pain, used it to remember that he was still alive.
Across the clearing, carrion birds picked at the corpses of Sammy and the soldiers.
Kallad Stormwarden lay in the dirt. He would have laughed, but there was little of amusement in his predicament. He had lost a lot of blood and even his prodigious strength was failing. The arrogance of the vampire rankled. The beast hadn’t bothered to finish him off, instead choosing to allow this slow lingering death. “Well, I’ll not give you the satisfaction,” Kallad rasped, biting back on the pain as he finally managed to roll onto his side and push himself up against a tree bole. He screamed in agony as he worked himself into the sitting position. He slumped against the tree, counting the minutes until the pain finally ebbed.
The worst of the pain was in his shoulder and left side, where he had taken two deep cuts. A slow fire burned in the wounds. He had almost no manoeuvrability in his arm. The slightest change of position sent a sharp dagger of pain lancing through him.
He felt out the wounds. Blood had dried into his armour where the rings and plates had been broken and dug into the gaping wounds left by the vampire’s blade. The blood had congealed around the metal, fusing skin and armour together. Kallad was going to have to separate it, and not kill himself in the process, if he was going to have any hope of making it out of the clearing.
His screams ought to have been enough to raise the dead.
The dwarf clung stubbornly to consciousness, focusing on the bodies of the dead, and the fact that they had been stripped, and were nothing more than food for the crows. He was determined not to go the same way.
The wound in his side began to bleed again where he had torn it open, but at least it was clean of the stink of gangrene. It was a small mercy. How long it would stay that way if he didn’t clean it and tend to it, well that was a different matter. He had seen too many good men die from infected wounds. While he burned, he knew that his body was still fighting off whatever sickness the wound
s had caused. He needed to tend to the wounds before he blacked out again.
Forcing himself into action, Kallad shrugged off his pack and took out his water flask.
He took a swallow, and then biting back against the sheer agony of movement, drew the mail shirt off over his head, and dribbled a little of the water onto the wound, wincing against the sting. He tore a strip of cloth from the muslin wrapping around his rations and used it to tenderly flake away the blood that had crusted around the wounds. They were worse than he had thought. Cleaning the gash was agonisingly slow, and used most of the water in his canteen, but it had to be done.
He clung to consciousness as he poked and prodded the wounds to be sure that they were free of anything that might cause infection. He wished he had some liquor, the alcohol would had been excellent for killing any lingering bacteria that might have gotten into the wound, but if he was going to waste his time lingering over wishes like that then he might as well wish for bigger miracles. He could wish that Nagash’s black books had been destroyed before they fell into the Vampire Count’s hands, or for his father to have slain the beast on the Grunberg’s wall and not fallen. He could wish for his clan to be beside him now, instead of these few dead boys. There were bigger miracles worth wishing for.
Next, he rummaged around in the pack for the thin needle of bone and the seamstress’ thread wrapped around it. He threaded the needle and, drawing the lips of the gash together, pushed the tip of the needle through the flap of skin and began to sew the wound shut. It was basic field surgery. It wasn’t pretty, but it would hold until he could get to a chirurgeon. More importantly, it would give him a chance to heal.
Twice during the stitching Kallad found his focus swimming and the world tilting beneath him, but he stubbornly refused to give in to it. The thread burned as he drew it through his flesh, but he welcomed the pain as a reminder that he was alive.
Only when he was finished did the dwarf allow himself to slump against the tree trunk and give in to unconsciousness.
A none too gentle boot in the side brought him sharply back around.
Kallad’s head came up. In his disorientation he still half-expected to see some emissary of the dead come to escort him to the Halls. Instead, he saw a young dirt-smeared face grinning down at him. The grin disappeared as the boy realised that Kallad was still in the land of the living. Flustered, he stuffed his hands in his pockets, obviously trying to hide whatever he had taken from the bodies of the dead.
Kallad grunted and reached out, trying to grab the boy. The exertion had the world swimming out of focus again. As it settled, he saw that the boy held a blunt-edged knife in his trembling hand, and was obviously torn between helping him up and sticking the knife in his gut to finish him off.
Biting down on the pain, Kallad grabbed the boy’s hand and pulled him close enough to taste his sour breath. “Don’t make me kill you, boy.”
The boy nodded quickly, trying to pull away.
Despite the fire in his shoulder Kallad’s grip was iron.
“Wouldn’t dream of it. I’m rather fond of breathing.”
“I’m glad to hear it. Now, tell me your name.”
“Allie du Bek.”
“And where are you from, Allie du Bek?”
“Vierstein.”
“Well Allie du Bek from Vierstein, just between the two of us, there’ll be no easy pickings from the dead, if you take my meaning?” Kallad inclined his head towards the boy’s hands where they were stuffed in his trouser pockets. “Empty ’em, there’s a good lad.”
Du Bek turned out his pockets. He had taken two rings and a Sigmarite talisman. The silver hammer was tied on a leather thong. It had belonged to the young acolyte, Reimer Schmidt. He had no more use for it where he was.
“Put the rings back, but if you want to wear the hammer, I don’t think the priest would begrudge you.”
Du Bek fastened the talisman around his neck before returning the rings to the dead.
Kallad watched him. He moved awkwardly, favouring his left side as if his hip had dropped or some such skeletal deformity hampered him. He coped well with it though, proving once again the resilience of youth.
He really didn’t want to get the boy involved, not after what had happened to Sammy, but he didn’t see that he had a choice. Kallad promised himself that he wouldn’t let Allie du Bek get too close. Part of him actually hoped that the lad would just run off and not come back, even if that meant his own chances of survival dwindled considerably. He was a fighter. He would make it. He wouldn’t have more deaths on his conscience.
“When you’re done, bring me some food from one of the packs, and then go find someone from that village of yours to help me. Your father, maybe. Another night out here in the dirt doesn’t appeal. Those birds might just get fed up of waiting.”
Du Bek nodded and crouched beside Korin Reth’s body. He pulled the pack out from beneath the fallen holy man and rifled through it. He rescued a muslin-wrapped chunk of pumpernickel bread, a browning apple and a hunk of pungent cheese, and gave them to Kallad.
Allie du Bek touched the talisman at his throat and grinned. “I’ll go fetch me pa, he’s a border warden,” he said, and ran off into the trees, leaving Kallad alone with the dead.
The healing process was frustratingly slow.
Every morning, Kallad woke in agony, fearful of exploring his wounds in case the tenderness of the day before had succumbed to infection during the night. For the first few weeks, even his own light touch was enough to make him wince.
The village of Vierstein was barely bigger than the four stones its name suggested—a double row of buildings clustered close along the sides of a brackish river. The villagers made him welcome, although many stared openly as he went through his gentle morning exercises, trying to recapture some of the strength and manoeuvrability his wounds had cost him. They had never seen a dwarf before so he bore their curiosity with good grace. Kallad chopped wood and moved grain, and laboured, stretching his endurance daily, until his strength began to return.
Lothar du Bek, Allie’s father, was a good man. He helped Kallad by burying the bones of his comrades, and saw to it that Kallad was fed and had a roof over his head for the weeks he needed to recover.
He didn’t know how to tell the dwarf the magician had not been among the dead.
The border warden was skilled at reading the play of a battle out of the dirt, discerning the signs and getting a mental picture of how the fight had unfolded. He had followed the magician to the point where the vampire had overwhelmed him, but there had been no corpse. There had been a one-sided struggle. The lack of a body had disturbed both the border warden and the dwarf. Was the magician the vampire’s prisoner? Was he lying dead in a ditch somewhere?
If he was the beast’s captive then, day by day, the magician was getting further and further away from them.
Less than a month had passed since he had vowed that there would be no more deaths on his conscience.
Kantor was turning it into an impossible promise to keep.
Kallad and the border warden talked often at daybreak when Lothar returned from his nightly patrols. The hinterland was becoming more dangerous by the day. Lothar talked regularly about huge black wolves the size of men prowling in the dark, picking off game. He regularly found the carcasses of deer and venison, mauled, throats ripped out, hides torn open, ribs cracked apart, and the innards gone, having served as a feast for the beasts.
The black wolves disturbed du Bek, not only because they were unnaturally large, or because they were more powerful than any wolf he’d been forced to hunt in his life as a border warden, but because they showed no fear of him. They didn’t retreat from his scent. They howled into the night, as if they were talking to one another, and circled him, shepherding him away from wherever they fed. The animals showed surprising cunning, and truly were pack creatures. They were never alone.
Du Bek sat down heavily at the table and pulled his gloves off. “I killed
one,” he told the dwarf. They had discussed the unnatural creatures often enough for Kallad to know what du Bek meant. “I caught it shadowing me, I don’t know if it was trying to draw me away from something or lead me to somewhere. It didn’t feel right. My skin crawled whenever I felt its gaze upon me. I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was hunting me. I couldn’t have that. I brought it down with a silver-tipped arrow through the throat.”
The border wardens had taken to using silver-tipped arrows during the time of the first vampire wars when Vlad von Carstein had tormented the settlements along the River Stir. They had seen a lot of unnatural things, including loved ones rising from the grave to terrorise the night. In defence they clutched every superstition they knew, including silver and garlic, white roses, relics and blessed water.
Tinkers and vagabonds were still doing a brisk trade in pseudo-religious artefacts. It was all about faith. People wanted to believe, so people were gulled out of their money. It gave them a warm, false sense of protection.
“I saw it go down with my own eyes, dwarf, but when I went over to reclaim the shaft the beast’s carcass was gone. The corpse of a naked man lay sprawled out in the dirt, Kallad. There was no wolf! As Morr is my witness, there was no trace of blood on the arrow’s tip as I pulled it out of the fallen man. He didn’t bleed, not a drop. I tell you, dark things are gathering over there,” Lothar du Bek said, shaking his head as he tore off a chunk of bread and dipped it into the steaming bowl of broth that his wife had ladled out a few moments earlier.
The dwarf wasn’t about to argue. He had seen enough to know that evil was abroad once more. Lothar’s stories of strangers travelling only at night, black coaches on the highways, restless wildlife, and now huge dire wolves that were really men stalking the borderlands, didn’t leave much to the imagination. After years of relative quiet, the enemy was amassing its forces once more.
[Von Carstein 02] - Dominion Page 15