They were wrong. Hope died long before desperation, pain and fear had relinquished their hold on the living.
Even then, death was no escape: not when the dead could be pulled out of the earth and puppeted by the malicious finger of a necromancer like Immoliah Fey.
Skellan watched as Fey drew the dead out of the dirt. She lacked the grace of Vlad von Carstein, but what she lacked in grace, she more than made up for with power. The winds of magic howled around her, the air itself crackling with the intensity of the magic she wove. The incantations tripped off her tongue, staining the air around her with the putrescence of death. The necromancer revelled in it, throwing her head back, her voice spiralling in a discordant chorus as the dead danced at her beck and call.
He had seen this before, but it still unnerved him. With Vlad, it had been an awesome display of his strength and mastery over the nations of the living and the nations of the dead. He commanded the skies and the dirt, and both jerked around readily to his whims. With Fey it was different. Her magic lacked the ferocity of Vlad’s. It was subtle, toying with the fabric of the universe and cajoling it to respond to her demands. In some ways it was more unnatural.
They came slowly at first, bones clawing out of the dirt, broken and rotting, emerging in a second bizarre birth into the unlife. Then, with increasing regularity, they were drawn from the earth’s shallow graves and ditches where they had been left to rot.
Skellan could not abide the woman, but her usefulness was undeniable. As a magician, she was hardly the equal of Vlad, but what had started as a fledgling army almost certainly destined to fail, had grown into an unstoppable force of nature, because of the necromancer.
Fritz von Carstein stood two paces behind Fey, his eyes aglow with the fire of hunger. Skellan had a grudging admiration for Fritz. The vampire cultivated the image of the carefree Lothario with his harem of nubile young vixens, but Skellan had quickly come to realise that it was all an elaborate act. Beneath the foppish exterior lurked a cold ruthless cunning that outstripped anything Skellan had seen in the unstable Konrad or the earnest Pieter. Fritz was an enigma. He played the fool beautifully, so well in fact, that it became second nature, a mask to be drawn down, that rarely slipped, but for all his talk of decadence and decay there was an underlying current of dark wisdom and steely determination to Fritz that betrayed the act. Skellan harboured no illusions: the vampire played the fool to encourage those around him to underestimate him. It was a useful ploy, one that no doubt had considerable mileage in it.
Fritz was playing the long game. His plans were subtle and would no doubt have been successful, if left to root and fester.
Which is what made the assassination attempt on Konrad so out of character for the cautious Fritz. It was reckless. Three thralls against a vampire of Konrad’s strength was blatant stupidity. Fritz couldn’t have expected it to succeed, which meant that the scheme had another aim, something that wasn’t readily apparent to Skellan.
What did Fritz have to gain from driving Konrad into a murderous frenzy?
Nothing—or perhaps everything.
After Konrad’s assault, Skellan hadn’t expected to see Fritz again, but as Konrad blustered and strutted with all the pomposity of a man possessed, dishing out orders for the gathered men, Fritz had walked calmly in through the castle gates to claim his place at the front of his army. It was all Konrad could do to restrain himself. This petty act of defiance was the best laugh Skellan had had in months. He thought Konrad had been about to burst a blood vessel; the vampire was apoplectic. The wolf, Jerek, had laid a restraining hand on Konrad’s shoulder and, surprisingly, rather than brushing it off von Carstein had succumbed to it.
“You made it, I see.”
“Nothing could have kept me away, brother-mine. This is a great honour, and I intend to see your faith in me repaid manifold.”
Skellan had almost laughed out loud at that. It was a subtle threat, but it was a threat nonetheless. It was a pity that Fritz had to die, because it could have been interesting to see their little power play run its course. It would have been entertaining, if nothing else. So little of life—death—offered any amusement.
In one sly act of defiance, Fritz had turned his banishment into a not so silent act of rebellion, and a promise of retribution.
That was something Skellan could respect.
He had come to know the vampire over the months they had travelled together. The transformation was subtly stunning as Fritz came out of his brother’s shadow. He was everything Konrad was not. He was articulate, thoughtful and ruthless without the callous cruelty of his kin. Villages fell at their feet, but where Konrad would have razed them to the ground and revelled in a blood feast, Fritz used death to inspire fear. He farmed the women, bleeding them a little at a time, taking them prisoner and exerting a curious mesmerism over them, so that they willingly pandered to his whims and came to him night after night to satisfy his hungers. He kept the most beautiful for himself, rebuilding his harem one beauty at a time. All but a few of the men, he had put down, with a few survivors encouraged to flee for their lives, thus ensuring that the horrors of the vampiric horde would spread like flames across the parched countryside.
The dead were coming. There would be no mercy. None could resist.
Long before their arrival, word had reached Middenheim, ensuring that the City of the White Wolf knew fear, and that those dark imaginings had had time to fester and grow. Its inhabitants remembered the time before, when the dead had all but destroyed the city, ghosts, wraiths, wights and other ethereal dreads descending on its cobbled streets.
Unlike his father-in-death, Fritz took no great joy in the destruction. It was merely a means to an end, and that end was his ascension to power.
Mannfred was right to be wary of Fritz.
It was Fritz who had taught Skellan the greatest of truths—that sunlight need hold no fear. He hadn’t believed the older vampire at first, not until he had reached out into the sunlight itself, turning his hand slowly left and right, offering the palm and back to the sun’s glare. Even with the evidence of his own eyes, Skellan couldn’t get past the probability that it was some kind of trick, and that if he tried to replicate Fritz’s casual exposure, he would burn.
“It’s in the mind,” Fritz had assured him, stepping out into the light. “Only the weak need fear the sun. The strongest of us can move abroad even under a full sun.”
“But—”
Fritz tilted his head up to face the sun, relishing its warm kiss.
“Are you afraid, Jon Skellan?”
“Of nothing,” Skellan said, joining von Carstein in the light. It felt peculiar at first, more intense than he remembered it ever being when he was alive. His skin prickled and he felt sure that he was about to be consumed by unholy fire.
“Concentrate. You have nothing to fear. Focus on the feelings spreading through your skin and dampen them down. Do it now.”
Skellan held his hand before his face. The skin had turned an ugly red.
“What’s happening to me?”
“You are burning from the inside out, now concentrate.”
“Or?” The angry red blush had spread the length of his arm. He could feel the intensity of the fire swelling beneath his skin.
“Or you burn.” The brutal matter-of-factness of von Carstein’s answer was all he needed. Skellan focused on the searing heat beneath his skin and willed it to subside.
For a moment, he feared the worst as he felt a sudden flare in the glands beneath his arms and between his legs. Then there was nothing, no sense of feeling at all. The fire had died.
“You see?” Fritz asked.
“Can we all do this?”
“Our kind? Yes, we all have the power to master the heat. Few choose to, though, drawing comfort from the shadow world of night.”
“I pity the fools.”
“Don’t. Pity is something to be left behind in your old life, Skellan. Savour this triumph and know that the day holds
nothing worth fearing. Let that knowledge set you free.”
It had, in more ways than von Carstein could ever have imagined.
Still, as Fritz had said they would, the others clung to the darkness when they could have walked proudly through the day. It disgusted him.
Immoliah Fey brought her hands down and slumped, exhaustion taking its toll. Five hundred corpses in various states of decay and wholeness crowded around the necromancer, bugs crawled over strips of rotten flesh and flies swarmed around the corpses, drawn to the filth of the grave. They shambled and lurched to Fey’s danse macabre.
Very soon, the people of Middenheim would know the true meaning of the word fear. Theirs would be a painful lesson, learned in the hardest of ways. Then, with the White Wolves humbled, the vampires would descend with bloody fury.
“Ready?” Skellan asked the dark-skinned man at his side.
“I was born ready.”
“A shame you weren’t ready when you died, eh?” Skellan said without a hint of irony. “We go in the second wave, behind the corpses. Torch the temples and meeting halls to drive out the living. Kill the men and any children that get in the way, but leave the women for von Carstein.”
“As you wish.”
“It isn’t as I wish. If it were, I’d loose the beast within and have us go in with a vengeance, lust this once, I would give the vampires free rein. Let the world know what it is like when the aristocracy of the night feed.”
His dark-skinned companion smiled a cold smile.
“Indeed. Such cruel wonders we could unleash. Pity the cattle, then.”
“Pity? No, no, no.” Skellan said, echoing von Carstein’s admonition. “Why waste your time with something so… banal? Pity is for the life you left behind. Focus on yourself, feed on the joy their suffering brings.”
Pressed up against the portcullis, her face pale with fear, Skellan saw a woman clutching a child to her breast. From this distance, she bore an uncanny resemblance to Lizbet. The similarity didn’t touch him. When the time for it came, she would burn like his dead wife had. It mattered nothing to him.
The battle was brutal and bloody.
The White Wolves sallied forth, hooves sparking on the cobbled street as they passed beneath the keystone of the massive arch that housed the city gates, two and three at a time. War horns bugled a fanfare. The White Wolves fanned out across the plain into a rolling wall of death as their war cries sang out. This was combat at its most primal. Pennons snapped in the air. Horses stamped, impatient, smelling blood on the air.
The bugle sounded again, a single short violent bray, and the Wolves charged.
The young wolf at the head of the riders threw back his head and howled, his flame-red hair streaming out behind him in the wind as he raised his warhammer above his head and whipped it around in a savage arc.
They hit the dead at full glorious gallop, splintering their ranks, and the battle was joined. The iron heads of warhammers cracked the brittle bones of the dead.
Immoliah Fey puppeted her corpses expertly, sacrificing them beneath the hooves of the Wolves’ horses, causing the beasts to shy and fall. Blood spilled, the vampires unleashed the beasts within, and joined the battle.
Infantry followed the charging horses, dogs loping at their sides.
Arrows rained down from the walls of the city, cutting down friend and foe alike. The archers possessed no particular skills, but what skills were necessary to fill the sky with a rain of death? What was important was that the deadly rain never ceased.
Even with their forces bolstered by Fey’s zombies, the battle was hard on the forces of the dead. The White Wolves fought with the desperation of the condemned. They knew they stood to lose more than their lives if they failed. They knew that they were fighting for the lives—and deaths—of every one sheltering behind the towering walls of the City of the White Wolf. The intimacy of the battle added steely determination to their fearsome combat rage. This was their fight, their home, and they would not fail this time. They owed the dead that much.
Skellan fought like a daemon, taking the fight to the Wolves. His blade cut and cleaved and stabbed, opening guts and slicing throats indiscriminately, while he kept Fritz von Carstein in his line of sight as the vampire waged his own bloody war on the living of Middenheim. Whether drawn by recognition or merely sensing that the man had risen to replace Jerek and therefore held a pivotal position amid the ranks of the enemy, Fritz fought his way mercilessly towards the Hamaya’s kin. Blades clashed on bone. Men screamed. It was carnage.
Then the two met, the young wolf and the immortal beast, and it was over before it could become a fight, the shaft of an arrow jutted from his horse, bringing the beast down and crushing its rider’s legs, pinning the young wolf helplessly in the mud of the battlefield.
Von Carstein leaned in close enough to breathe foetid breath into the rider’s face as his hands closed around his neck.
Skellan moved quickly, disengaging the soldier he faced, shifting his weight onto his back leg and pivoting, bringing his sword around in a low arc that hamstrung his opponent, and rolling away, ducking beneath a wildly swinging hammer and coming to his feet. A thrust gutted the only soldier between him, and Fritz and the young wolf. He slipped in the mud, but still managed to cover the ground between himself and von Carstein in the time it would have taken a living man’s heart to beat once—and for the young wolf trapped beneath his dead horse that single beat was the difference between life and death.
It had to be now.
Skellan came up behind the gloating Fritz, and in one smooth move drew the arrow from the dead horse’s neck and rammed its silver tip into the vampire’s neck. The bloodless tip punched out of Fritz’s throat and suddenly, instead of strangling the young wolf, the vampire’s hands were at his own throat, clawing at the silver arrowhead that had killed him, even as the unlife spilled out of his body.
There was no dignity in Fritz’s second death.
Skellan leaned in close and, not caring that the young wolf overheard, whispered in von Carstein’s ear, “A gift from Mannfred. Nothing personal, you understand, but there can be only one heir to Vlad. Your continued existence was an irritant. It complicated things. So you see, we couldn’t allow you to live. Not that it matters any, but I liked you, Fritz. Of all of them, you were perhaps the most dangerous, the most worthy. Such is life, my friend.”
Fritz’s eyes had begun to glaze over as the unnatural ties binding him to the land of the living severed one by one.
“Soon, your brothers will be rotting in the underworld beside you. Take some comfort in that last thought, eh? You won’t be alone for long.”
Fritz tried to speak. His mouth opened and closed uselessly. He managed a pathetic gurgle before he slumped forward over the young wolfs horse and died.
“Our lord has fallen!” Skellan cried, brandishing his sword over his head. “Retreat! Sound the retreat!” The news of von Carstein’s death spread across the battlefield like wildfire. These vampires had not stood beside the first Vampire Count, they harboured no illusions that their immortality was in fact true immortality. That their leader had fallen sent Shockwaves through the survivors, crippling them with panic.
It was all Skellan could have hoped for, and more.
Fey’s zombies collapsed where they stood as panic undermined the necromancer’s hold on them. She fled, while the vampires surrendered the field, leaving the White Wolves with nothing left to slay.
Skellan loitered on the field, watching from a distance as, freed from beneath his dead horse, the young wolf hosted up Fritz’s corpse, preparing it to be dismembered. The man cut Fritz von Carstein’s dead heart from his chest and tossed it to the dogs at his feet.
Smiling to himself, Skellan turned away from the slaughter.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Victis Honor
NULN BESIEGED
The blistering heart of summer, 2057
Jerek von Carstein’s humanity refused to be snuffed out.
It lingered, haunting him, a living ghost in the kingdom of the dead. The irony was repulsive.
Instead of revelling in the dark world of unlife, Jerek found himself clinging to the tatters of memory that belonged to his life before. Inconsequential things that hadn’t mattered then, but had become more and more vital since his fall from Middenheim spire. He found himself remembering the faces of people he had barely known. They came to him in sudden flashes, accompanied by hints of what they had meant at the time, scents, accents and tiny hallucinations that drew him back towards the man he had been.
Worst of all, he welcomed them. He welcomed the pain that came with remembering. He welcomed the guilt that threatened to consume him. He welcomed the anger that smouldered beneath the memories. He welcomed them all because they were all reminders that he might be a monster, but that he hadn’t surrendered his soul. Some tiny spark of it still flickered within him. He hadn’t surrendered to the darkness and the cold. He found no comfort in pain. He took no joy in suffering.
The companionship of the dead repelled him.
Instead, he clung to his living ghost, knowing that to do so was to invite madness.
In Roth Mehlinger he saw all the world’s sickness made flesh. Even in the few months since his siring, Mehlinger had completely surrendered to the beast within. He savoured the hunt and the kill, and being Jerek’s first, he was strong, stronger than he had any right to be. He walked abroad in daylight without any fear of the sun. He infiltrated the city, not caring about the high walls and the iron gates meant to keep the wolves from the door. He took wing, metamorphosing into a ravenlike black bird. No walls ever constructed could bar a bird. Mehlinger came and went as he pleased, feeding on the young and beautiful of the city—and stupidly the peasants suspected nothing, because Mehlinger had a taste for young men and cared nothing for the pretty little bakers’ daughters or the temptations of the more worldly barmaids.
He haunted the slums, taking pleasure in the screams of otherwise strong men as he forced them to submit bodily to him, and then he fed.
[Von Carstein 02] - Dominion Page 17