In death, Mehlinger was everything the man had hated in life.
“You made me, father,” Mehlinger had sneered, seeing Jerek’s distaste for the first time. “Never forget that. I was happily drinking myself to death before you decided to play god and do this to me. Every death is on your hands as surely as if you had killed them yourself, only this way is more fun for me. For once, I don’t have to be content to live half a life in your shadow. I can be my own man, Jerek, and you know what? I like the man I have become.”
“You stopped being a man a long time ago, Roth. What you are now, well, that is not a man.”
“I’m whatever the hell I want to be, wolf. I don’t need your permission anymore. You did that much for me when you took my life.”
“I’m sorry, Roth, more than you can ever know.”
“Don’t be. This death is not such a bad place to be.”
Mehlinger was drawn to Pieter von Carstein. They were similar beasts, ruthless, callous, deadly, and suffered no compunction in killing for fun and amusement. They hunted together at night, Mehlinger feeding while Pieter played with his food. Von Carstein did not share Mehlinger’s passion for boys, but he more than made up for it by creatively torturing the cattle before offering the succulent flesh up for Mehlinger to suck greedily on. Their relationship was parasitic. They fed off each other’s sickness, exacerbating it, driving each other to acts of fouler and fouler depravity.
Jerek had turned his back on his get.
The thought of putting Mehlinger down had crossed his mind, taking responsibility for the monster he had sired and finishing what he started, but it wasn’t easy. Their bond was stronger than sire and get. There was all that went before: the wolf and his right hand. They had a history.
That he couldn’t turn his back on that history was another sign that Jerek von Carstein was still, in part, Jerek Kruger, the White Wolf. So, Mehlinger lived on, his corruption growing more and more complete by the day.
Together with Pieter, Mehlinger had rejoiced as one of Konrad’s pet necromancers, Katja von Seirt, had touched the winds of magic, drawing on Shyish, the sixth wind, to raise a horde of dead that counted in the tens of thousands. The taint of Chaos hung over their conquering army. It was the ultimate vampiric essence, bleeding the land dry as it swarmed towards Nuln, devastation trailing in its wake. The blight inflicted by Pieter’s army rivalled anything caused by his sire, Vlad. The sickness that had for so long afflicted Sylvania seeped into the Empire. Nature itself, the greens and golds of summer, withered and died, trampled beneath the shuffling feet of the dead.
In many ways, Jerek knew, an army was like a snake. It depended upon cunning against greater foes, and its body was impotent against enemies if its fangs were not kept sharp. Pieter was the head of this army, the necromancer Katja von Seirt and the wolf, Jerek, its fangs. Von Seirt was venomous, certainly, but her bites were proving ineffective because of von Carstein’s ineptitude. The vampire was no tactician. He had little grasp of the art of war. He was nothing more than a pale forgery, replicating things that he had seen done before, but without the ruthlessness that had made them successful. Like all classically insecure leaders, he ignored Jerek’s battle-hardened wisdom in favour of his own council. The siege of Nuln had lasted four months already, rendering the most basic of their weapons, fear, redundant. The citizens of the city had grown familiar with the dead at their door. They were inured to the fear that such a force ought to have inspired.
Without fear to undermine the enemy, they needed to resort to deviousness. Unfortunately, Pieter took to posturing before the city walls, demanding the living bow down before him or die, but he lacked the wherewithal to follow through. His words were little more than empty threats, or so it seemed. The corpses surged at the walls, only to be beaten back with flames and oil.
The defenders did not surrender meekly. They met his demands of servitude with jeers, throwing rotten fruit and vegetables from the battlements, which in turn only served to cause Pieter’s anger to spiral out of control. The vampire ranted and raved, cursing all humanity for the vile scum that they were, unable to distance himself from the haranguing. He spat curses as the defenders threw refuse from the walls. Three farmers struggled with the rotten carcass of a dead cow, sending it toppling from the high wall. The animal fell, stiff with rigor.
“Have you thought more about my puzzle, Katja?” Jerek asked the necromancer.
“I have thought of little else, wolf. So much so that I have come to think of it more as a curse than a question, it haunts me so.”
“Have you come to any conclusions?”
“Many and none, if that makes a blind bit of sense.”
“Not in the slightest.”
“There is nothing to prove the veracity of your assumption that your sire’s power lay in his signet ring.”
“I know it to be true, the cattle talk. The ring was stolen through treachery.” He had heard the story in Middenheim as he hunted Mehlinger. The Sigmarites had turned to thievery to bring about the fall of Vlad von Carstein. In desperate times, humanity was capable of stooping to the most desperate of measures. How they could have known of the ring’s restorative magic he had no idea, but he didn’t doubt for a moment that they were right. It explained his sire’s irrational anger as he had thrown everything he had at Altdorf in an uncharacteristic rage, and it explained why he had fallen.
The ring was the key to it all. He had to find it, Find it and destroy it before others could possess it. He had long since begun to suspect that the ring’s existence was the reason for his lingering humanity. It had become a smouldering obsession. He thought of Mehlinger, the callousness of the monster he had become, the pure blooded vampire, and of Pieter with his all-consuming hatred for the living, even Konrad with his capricious whims and fragile instability. Any one of them with the ring on his finger could rise as the ultimate dark lord. The thought chilled Jerek to the marrow.
“Indeed, in which case a magic greater than mine has fused within it some form of regenerative magic. This would not, in theory, be impossible, but it would be beyond the ken of any adept of magic that I have ever encountered.”
“So you couldn’t replicate it?”
“Forge a new ring to make you truly immortal? No.”
“That is some small mercy,” Jerek said. “Do you know anyone capable of it?”
“As I said, I’ve yet to encounter a sorcerer with the kind of mastery necessary to craft such an artefact. Fey, perhaps, but I doubt it. This is old magic, wolf. Such knowledge has slipped into darkness. The von Carstein ring is irreplaceable, and lost.”
“If Pieter has his way we march on, to Altdorf. He intends to tear the city apart looking for the ring.”
“He’s a fool.”
“Worse, he’s a desperate fool.”
“Does he imagine that the Sigmarites have buried the old Count with it still on his finger? The ring’s gone. Destroyed.”
“Who knows what he thinks—if he actually thinks. It’s a mess,” Jerek said to the necromancer, von Seirt. The man makes fools of us all.”
“So, what would you have me do, wolf?”
“Humble the fool.”
“The living are doing a fine job of that from where I am standing.”
“This cannot be allowed to continue, woman. They are making a mockery of us. It is a shambles.” He looked up at the wall where a man mimicked Pieter’s posturing, strutting backwards and forwards along the wall walk. “They even have a fool pretending to be descended from the vampire slayer, van Hal. They need to learn humility. They need to remember fear.”
“And how do you propose to teach those lessons, wolf?”
“It is not my place to propose, Pieter has made that plain enough.”
“Rubbish, you are Hamaya. You answer only to the new Count. If you will it, I will have my dead tear the walls apart, stone by stone and feast on the living. You need only say the word and it will be done.”
“And if J say the
word?” Pieter von Carstein came up behind them, Roth Mehlinger at his side like some fawning lapdog. His honeyed voice dripped with loathing. Tell me, I am curious, magician. Would you show me the same loyalty you afford this grizzled old fool?”
“I serve but one master,” Katja said coldly.
“Ah, yes, my beloved brother, we shall have to see about that. Now, answer my question, would you have your dead tear the walls down stone by blessed stone if 7 willed it?”
“Unquestionably.”
“I don’t believe you, magician,” Pieter sneered.
“Then ask me, my lord, and find out for yourself.” The necromancer inclined her head slightly, a condescending gesture meant to rile Pieter.
“Perhaps I will.”
“Do it,” Mehlinger said, a sly smiling spreading across his hateful face, “and then take a leaf from the old wolfs book and turn the vampires loose, let them feed, all of them. Let them drink their fill. No more hiding behind the zombies. Unleash the beasts, Pieter. You know you want to.”
Von Carstein’s grin was truly repulsive. He looked beyond them, to the man on the wall, the one who claimed to be Helmut van Hal. “You will know suffering like no other mortal,” he promised, not caring that the man couldn’t hear him, “and when you are finally dead and think yourself safe from pain, I will bring you back and kill you all over again.” He turned to Katja. “Come, sister in shadow, there are things I would know before I turn you loose.”
“You need only ask.”
“Ah yes, ask my little dark deceiver. That is exactly what I intend to do, although I doubt that I will enjoy your answers.”
“The truth is seldom uttered for the sake of enjoyment, lord.”
Jerek watched the pair leave, von Carstein linking arms with the necromancer. It was an intimate gesture that spoke of lovers not enemies. Jerek noticed Mehlinger’s discomfort at the sight.
“Jealousy doesn’t become you,” he said, turning his back on his old friend. Pieter and Katja had neared the wall. Jerek moved close enough to hear the vampire call up to the defenders:
“Your determination to die is impressive, mortal. However, your prancing and preening has lost its edge of entertainment. Frankly, it has become boorish. So, little man, I am here to tell you that you’ve won, but before all your stupid followers start getting excited, what I mean to say is that I will grant your wish. Tonight you die, all of you. Every last man, woman and child, unless you bow down to serve me, in life, or death. There will be no mercy!” This last Pieter screamed at the top of his lungs, his voice dissolving into hysteria.
The man on the wall smiled, which was not at all what Jerek had expected from a man hearing his own death sentence being delivered. He assayed a theatrical bow, seemingly oblivious to the undead host amassed at his door. This was a blind, Jerek realised, a ruse, misdirection. Pieter was being goaded into making an even bigger idiot of himself than he already was. The gambit put the wolf in mind of a sideshow trickster’s misdirection. They wanted von Carstein’s eyes fixed firmly on the wall, so what was it they weren’t supposed to be seeing? Where was the real threat?
He contented himself with the knowledge that he would know soon enough, and if Pieter and Mehlinger suffered as a result, well, he wouldn’t mourn either one of them. He was conflicted. Von Seirt was right, he was Hamaya, but he was also human, or at least some small part of him was. As Hamaya, he served a different master, and had no loyalty to Pieter, Konrad wanted him disposed of, after all, and as a human, he found himself praying for the same outcome, but for very different reasons.
Pieter von Carstein was dangerous.
The men on the walls knew that, the living hiding behind them most certainly did. Their game was obviously intended to blind the vampire to the obvious, like a scorpion backed into a corner, the humans were at their most dangerous when they appeared trapped.
The next few hours would be fascinating for the impartial observer, Jerek knew. Pieter’s tactical naïveté and his horde of the damned, matched up against the posturings of the man on the wall and the puppeteer playing his strings. Given the desperation of the situation, few could claim to be impartial. Both factions had a vested interest in the other’s failure. It was fascinating to Jerek, who found himself looking for the sting in the tail. It had to be there. What did the defenders have to gain by driving Pieter into a fury?
Apart from the obvious, that mad men don’t think straight, he could see no great advantage to incensing the enemy.
Instead, Jerek turned his attention closer to home. He studied Pieter and the woman at his side. Were the two lovers? He thought perhaps they were. There was an intimacy between them, a familiarity of movements, of bodies used to being close together, but there was no obvious affection. He suspected that neither cared very much for the other. For Mehlinger, their easy proximity was like a stake through the heart. The vampire’s seething was almost palpable.
Mehlinger’s rise amongst the aristocracy of the night would no doubt be spectacular. He embodied the darkness.
A flicker of movement drew Jerek’s gaze to the top of the high wall. More men had joined van Hal. They stood beside him on the wall walk, their numbers swelling, fifty, sixty, then a hundred, and more, until finally the wall was crammed with soldiers, who all turned their backs on Pieter von Carstein. Puzzled, Jerek watched as, as one, the defenders of Nuln pulled down their trousers.
The old wolf burst out laughing.
He found himself liking these unknown men. They were his kind of people. They had guts. They were real soldiers. Good men, not shambling corpses dancing to the tune of some madman. They didn’t deserve to die any more than anyone else did, but this petty act of defiance had sealed their fate. Forgiveness was not a von Carstein family trait.
They were dead before dawn.
Von Carstein unleashed the beasts, ordering his vampires over the walls. They had no ladders to climb, those were for the lumbering dead that von Seirt had swarming over one another, making ladders out of their own corpses, until they breached the walls in thirty places, bringing them down one stone at a time, just as the necromancer had promised. A cloud of bats filled the night, flitting and darting high over the streets of the city, their song an unbearable chorus of excitement and hunger. The creatures settled on rooftops and gutters, transforming as they did into their feral forms, the beast within released and ready to feast.
Nuln fell in a frenzy of feeding.
The screams were sickening. The creatures chased the living through the streets, hunting them down, tearing the clothes from their victims’ backs even as they tore flesh from the bones, and gorged themselves on so much fresh meat.
Jerek took no part in the slaughter.
He walked through the streets strewn with broken bodies and cobbles slick with blood, detached from it all.
Whatever it was the men of Nuln had hoped to achieve by angering Pieter had obviously failed. In a matter of hours, the city had become a necropolis. Death walked the streets of the Imperial city, and stalked the living, welcoming them into Morr’s dark embrace. Age, creed, colour, it didn’t matter, all were reduced to one single absolute: they were meat for the beasts.
They wallowed in the splendour of the city. They dined in the palaces and in the paupers’ hovels, and each meal tasted divine. Virgins offered up their throats and legs, and crones crawled on the floor, bleeding and dying as they debased themselves for the vampires.
It went beyond war. It went beyond death. It was an orgy of blood lust and depravity. It was sickening in the extent of its thoroughness. The vampires drove the living out of their hiding places, torching houses, and smoking them out of the temples where they had clustered begging their gods for salvation. Only there was no salvation from the dead. There was no light to guide or save them. The darkness was all consuming, the creatures of the dark invincible.
Sated, finally, after hours of gorging themselves, the vampires fell into a kind of drunken slumber. Jerek saw them lying side by side w
ith the corpses that they had drained so that it was impossible to tell them apart from their victims. He stepped over them and walked around them. He looked up at the sky. The sun would be rising soon, not that it mattered to the inhabitants of this once great city. Light, dark, it was all the same to the dead. Come dusk, the ranks of von Seirt’s horde would swell by the thousands and Nuln would be left to the rats. It beggared belief.
He hadn’t done this. He hadn’t been a part of it. There was no blood on his hands, but that didn’t matter. It didn’t absolve him of the slaughter. He was a beast now. Even the smell of the blood had his heart racing and his mouth salivating with disgusting hunger. He wanted to feed, to join in the killing, and that was enough to damn him in his own mind.
The depravity of it revolted the wolf. The sheer scale of the killing was incredible. It outstripped anything he had ever experienced, every battlefield he had ever fought on, it was worse, even, than the fall of Middenheim, because this was different: this was inhuman, monstrous. It was butchery. The dead weren’t soldiers, they were women and children, they hadn’t taken up arms or bared their arses, they hadn’t made the fight their own, it had been forced down their throats until it choked them to death.
After months of seeming impotence, the dead surrounding the city in a lake of rotting flesh, it had become a war of attrition. The living needed to feed, so the dead choked off their farmland and their livestock, polluted their water and waited, seemingly content to let disease and starvation have their way before they stormed the walls. Then suddenly this.
There was no honour in this victory.
It sickened Jerek.
Carrion birds settled on the rooftops and window ledges, drawn to the stink of the slaughter. They were legion.
They came down to feed, even as the sun began to rise slowly, red on the dead city.
Hating himself, hating the need he felt settling on his shoulders and the surety that he would succumb to it and feed, Jerek walked out of the killing ground in time to see the trap sprung.
[Von Carstein 02] - Dominion Page 18