“You did well, my friend.”
“But to what end? Every night there are more of them. What is one death amongst their number? A nuisance, no more, surely. They are like a black wave of death ready to bear down on the country, and all that stands between them and the honest decent ordinary folk of the Empire are a few border wardens and men like you.”
“Well, I’m no man, but I’ll forgive you. I get your meaning, but you’re wrong. We aren’t alone, far from it. Every one of those ordinary decent folk will take up arms against the beast. Don’t sell them short, they’re good people.”
“Aye, and good people die, Kallad, and much more easily than those beasts, at that. You know that as well as I do. Andreas returned last night. That accursed land has changed him. He used to laugh, but not yesterday. All he would say was that he had seen things no living man was meant to see. I didn’t want to force him, he’ll talk when he’s ready. The little that he did share though was grim indeed. A woman was taken by force. A black carriage bearing the crest of von Carstein came into her village and three men snatched her. The day before, strangers had been asking about folk in the village, peculiar questions.”
“Such as?”
“If anyone had unusual luck, say was always lucky at cards, or dice.”
“I see.”
“The woman was the midwife. She’d saved several babes, including more than one breech where the child came out upside down.”
“What would the Vampire Count want with her? It isn’t as if the dead fall pregnant.”
“This isn’t the first time the black coaches have taken someone from around here. It’s happening more and more, as if someone, or something, is collecting people like her: people who have a certain something about them, something that sets them apart, be it luck, a gift or a talent. It don’t bode well, mark my words.”
Kallad lay on his back in the dirt straining to press a sack stuffed with rocks and scraps of metal and other rubbish off his chest. His arms shook with violent tremors as he strained against the weight of it, forcing his elbows to lock. He gasped out a count of ten and slowly brought the sack back down to rest on his chest, counted once again to ten, and then repeated the press, forcing a scream between his clenched teeth as he lifted the huge weight.
His shoulder, back and sides burned, but for the first time in months, the pain was brought on by honest exertion, not his wounds. He still favoured his left side a little, taking the extra strain on his right, but he was mending, finally, and he was strong enough to help out around the farms, doing manual labour for those in need, in return for food and lodging.
Sweat beaded on his forehead and gathered in the valley where his throat met his torso.
Allie du Bek sat cross-legged on the floor, hefting a smaller stone, first in his right hand, five times, and then repeating the exercise with his left. The boy was fascinated by Kallad’s stubborn refusal to bow to his wounds.
“What news have you got for me?” Kallad asked, heaving the sack aside and sitting up. He towelled the sweat off with a rag.
“None good, Kallad,” Allie said, tossing the stone over his shoulder. It hit the wooden wall of the wood shack and bounced away.
“Tell me anyway.”
Kallad walked over to the barrel that collected rainwater as it ran from the wood shack’s guttering, and sank his head and shoulders into it. He came up spluttering, gasped three times, drawing deep breaths, and plunged his head back into the water again.
He was under for a long time.
Allie counted to twenty before Kallad came up for air.
“More of the same, really: three reports of kidnappings in the last week, lots of sightings of the black coaches, a few rumbles of the sleeping sickness striking some of the younger girls up and down the border. Father’s been hellishly busy with the border wardens. He gave me a message for you: the wardens have killed three more wolves, and each one went the same way as the last one he told you about. He said you’d know what that meant.”
Of course, he did—wolves that died as men.
“Keep talking, lad,” Kallad said, hefting his axe and burying it in a chunk of wood. He split it in half on the chopping block, and then in half again, and tossed the quarters onto the grass up against the side of the wood shack. He grabbed another piece, and split it, rolling his shoulders afterwards. It was good to feel the blood circulating again. He felt stronger than he had in months.
“Father’s gone out hunting with Jared and Klein. Why does it have to be this way?”
That was something that Kallad didn’t have an answer for. He wasn’t comfortable trying to pass off evil as some part of nature, and wasn’t any more at peace with the idea that the world needed evil to attain balance within itself. Telling Allie that good men and women died just because, well that was no answer at all. So he let his silence answer for him.
“Father says that ignorance breeds fear,” the boy said after a while.
“He’s right, but in this case, even knowing your enemy won’t help lessen the fear. The more you know about the monster, the more frightening it becomes. These things are like parasites that crawl into the mattress of your bed at night and hide there quietly, coming out when you are asleep, to feed on you, bloating themselves on your blood. They need you to survive, and yet their very nature is obsessed with destruction. They are their own worst enemies, but it’s still right to be frightened of them. Let the fear give you strength, but don’t allow it to overwhelm you. That’s the trick.”
Kallad swung his axe again, slamming it into the log on the chopping block and splitting it clean in two. With each stroke his determination to heal intensified. The monsters could not be left to ravage the countryside. Good people were dying. They didn’t deserve to disappear into the bowels of Drakenhof to feed the vampire’s bloody hunger.
He wiped off his sweat, and planted the double-headed axe at his feet.
“Come on, boy. It’s time I said my goodbyes to some old friends. I’ve put it off long enough.”
Allie du Bek hopped down from his perch and skipped towards the trees. He waved for Kallad to follow.
Splitting logs and pressing sacks of coal only took him so far towards regaining mastery of his limbs. The simplest of things, walking, lying down, still caused incendiary pains to flare if he moved even slightly awkwardly. It galled Kallad that while he struggled like some newly hatched bird, the vampire moved further and further away from him. He was not used to feeling so utterly helpless. He was Kallad Stormwarden, the last survivor of Karak Sadra. He was not about to roll over and play dead. Instead, he stubbornly drove the feeling off, and trudged after Allie as he plunged into the forest.
They were going to the graves.
He had always known that the day would come when he was strong enough to move on, and this small respite would be over. Kallad had struggled to convince himself that that was the reason why he hadn’t made his peace with the dead. It wasn’t, of course. It was guilt.
Guilt had prevented him from returning to the clearing where they had fallen, although he went there when he slept, traitorous dreams dragging him back night after night to relive his failure.
Time had destroyed every last physical reminder of the fight with the vampire. The grove was pitted with the shallow graves of a few good men. Nature had already begun the slow process of reclaiming the slight mounds that marked their final resting places.
None of them were marked. They deserved better. Every soldier who died fighting evil did.
Kallad bent his head and offered a prayer to the God of the Underworld to look after the souls of his travelling companions, and took the time to remember them one at a time: Sammy Krauss, Joachim Akeman, Reimer Schmidt, Korin Reth, the renegade magician, Nevin Kantor and the three soldiers from Grimm’s guard.
His eyes were red-rimmed with tears when he looked up. He breathed in deeply, ready to turn his back on the dead, when it stuck him—there weren’t eight shallow graves in the clearing, there we
re seven.
“Where’s your father?”
“I told you, he’s gone out hunting with Jared and Klein. Why?”
“Because something’s wrong here, boy, the numbers don’t add up. There’s a grave missing.”
“We buried all the dead, I helped him.”
“I believe you, but I need to talk to your father.”
“He won’t be home “til sunrise at the earliest.”
“Grimna’s balls… You saw the dead?”
“Yes.”
“All right, now think, boy. This is important. Did one of the corpses have its hair drawn up in a topknot, the sides shaved high above its ears?”
“Like a corsair?”
“Exactly like that, yes.”
Allie du Bek shook his head.
Kallad cursed himself for a fool. It had never even occurred to him that Kantor wouldn’t be amongst the dead. He looked back in the direction that the magician had fled all those months ago. It was impossible to tell which way he had gone. An all too familiar wave of helplessness rose up to engulf Kallad. The dwarf needed more than just a skilled tracker, he needed a miracle worker. Whatever tracks the magician had blazed in his panicked flight were long gone.
“I need your father and I need him now!
“But it’s getting dark.”
For a second, Kallad felt the cold hand of doubt close around his heart. He brushed it off.
“Find him.”
Allie du Bek nodded nervously.
“I don’t know where he is, not really, he could be anywhere along the ranges’
“It doesn’t matter how long it takes, I’ll be here.”
* * * * *
It was long into the night when Allie returned with his father and the two other border wardens.
That they had been in a lethal fight against the dark hunters was obvious.
Lothar had long raking scratches down the side of his face where claws had dug in, and his shirt was torn at the shoulder and soaked black with dried blood. He’d ripped one sleeve off and wadded it up to staunch the wound, but it was obvious, even ill-lit by the moonlight, that he had lost a lot of blood and was ghastly pale.
Both Klein and Jared bore wounds of their own, but none as substantial as du Bek’s.
The man moved awkwardly, favouring his wounded side. It was no surprise that it had taken Allie the better part of the night to return with them.
“It’s worse than it looks,” Lothar said, grinning and almost simultaneously wincing.
“Aye, I don’t doubt you.”
“The boy said that you think someone survived, or at least isn’t buried here.”
Kallad nodded. “A magician, he turned coward and ran when the fighting began.”
Then he must have run like the wind, because believe me these beasts can move. If he made it, he’s long gone, dwarf, you know that.”
“Aye, but that’d also make him my only link to the vampires. If he’s alive, I need to find him, Lothar.”
“The trail will be dead by now.”
“I know. After a couple of days it’s almost impossible to follow a trail. There won’t be footprints to follow, but maybe he got clumsy. It happens. Like as not nothing made it through the winter, but I can’t leave it like that, not when there might be a hint somewhere that’d at least point me in the right direction.”
“Well if there is, it’s nothing that we’ll find in the dark.”
“Good job it took you the best part of the night to get here then, eh?”
The border warden turned gingerly to scan the glade. The sun was beginning to rise redly through the trees, but the darkness remained fiercely determined to keep its secrets close to its heart for a while longer. He had been right, there was little to see.
“What do you remember of the fight, Kallad?”
“Too much, truth be told. Kantor, the magician, ran off that way.” He pointed towards a break in the trees. That was the last time I saw him.”
“Then that would be a good place to start, but, understand, after we step through the trees every step is guesswork. No promises, dwarf. Most likely, he’s long gone, or we’ll find a corpse that we missed first time.”
Kallad nodded.
It was a slow, painstaking search, the three wardens pausing often to examine the ground, or the break of a fine branch that had gone rotten over the winter, but which could, conceivably, have been a sign of the magician’s flight. He had no idea how they could do it. To the dwarf, a snapped twig was a snapped twig. There was no distinguishable difference between any of the many bits of deadfall they negotiated, and a leaf trodden into the dirt was nothing more than nature taking its course.
“Here,” Jared called. He’d split off from the others and was running a parallel path off the beaten track. They fought their way through the undergrowth to join him. Bracken and some kind of nettled fruit bushes had grown up around the mossy tree trunks, building a natural wall that stung and pulled at their skin and clothing as they beat a path through it.
Kallad couldn’t tell what he was supposed to be looking at, but Lothar and Klein became quite animated, kneeling to examine the dirt and the broken branches.
“There was a fight here,” Jared explained.
“Not much of one, either,” Klein said.
“How can you tell?” Kallad couldn’t see anything that could possibly indicate that a fight had taken place.
Lothar knelt, examining something trodden into the ground. He took a phial from his pocket and dripped a dribble of clear liquid onto it. There was a sizzle and a small wisp of smoke, and then it was gone. “Good find, Jared. I’d stake my life on the fact that this is where the beast caught up with your magician,” Lothar du Bek said. The good news is that there’s no body.”
“So he’s alive?” Kallad asked. He had no idea what the warden had just done, and he didn’t really want to know what magic it was, either. If it served to make du Bek certain that the magician had survived, he wasn’t going to waste time arguing.
“Well, the signs of the fight are all but gone, but there most definitely was a struggle here, and my guess is that two people walked away from it.”
“So the vampire has the magician?”
“I didn’t say that. I said two people walked away from this fight.”
“What do you mean?”
“They didn’t leave together. The tracks have all but been obliterated, but my gut feeling is that one set leads off in the direction of the blasted ruins that mark the border with Sylvania, you can see what looks like a heel print pressed into the hardened mulch of the dead leaves, it isn’t much, but it is something. The other heads south, into halfling territory. This one is easier to follow.”
“We followed the vampire south.”
“Then it is reasonably safe to assume that the beast carried on its merry way without your magician. That doesn’t explain why it let him live, or why he chose to head into Sylvania alone, but those are riddles that can’t be solved by me. You know the magician, dwarf. Is he the kind of man to walk alone into the belly of the beast?”
“Not unless the coward found his courage,” Kallad said, shaking his head.
“Frightened men do peculiar things,” Klein observed. “It is conceivable that he could have made some kind of pact with the creature, striking a bargain to save his life.”
Jared shook his head. “Unlikely, what does a magician have to offer a vampire lord? The beasts aren’t inclined to strike bargains.”
“True,” Lothar agreed. “You either get lucky or you die. For some reason he’s alive, or at least lived long enough to walk out of this forest. It’s likely the beast left him for dead, as he did you, Kallad, only we didn’t find him. He could be lying twenty feet away, rotting.”
“Or he could be halfway across the world,” Kallad said. “If he drove the beast off where we failed, well, who knows, eh? The only thing that makes any sense to me is that he’s running. He knows that his life is forfeit if he stays in
the Empire. That was a condition of his release by the Sigmarites. He was to serve the quest, and when his usefulness was done, so was his time for breathing.”
“Are you sure he knew this?” Lothar asked.
“He would have been a fool if he didn’t. The witch hunters don’t give up their prisoners lightly.”
“Well then, I think you’re right and we have at least one answer to the riddles we’ve found this morning. The man is running for his life, in the only direction he can—into von Carstein’s foul realm. So, he’s beaten, perhaps close to death, and he comes to. His instinct is to run. He can’t go back to the Empire, so he has to go forwards. It’s likely he’ll keep on running “til he falls off the world.”
“Perhaps he hopes to redeem himself by slaying the beast in his lair, after all, he faced one vampire and lived to tell the tale, which is more than can be said for most men. If it was me, I know I’d be trying to find a way to go home. You can’t run forever.”
“I have to find him,” Kallad said, knowing it was the truth. Together, his axe and the magician’s sorcery stood a chance against the fell beasts.
Alone they were doomed.
“Then we best return home for supplies and make ready to hunt down this magician of yours.”
“We?”
“No offence, Kallad, but you couldn’t find your arse with a map and a mirror. So yes, we. Jared and Klein are more than capable of patrolling the border for a few nights without me, and Allie will keep his mother company. It’ll keep the boy out of trouble.”
“What about?” He gestured towards the blood and the ragged cuts.
“They should slow me down enough to move at your pace for a while,” Lothar du Bek chuckled.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Vado Mori
MIDDENHEIM, CITY OF THE WHITE WOLF
The blistering heart of summer, 2057
The walls of Middenheim couldn’t hope to withstand them. The city would fall.
Hope, they said, was the last thing to die.
[Von Carstein 02] - Dominion Page 16