Jerek saw the men hunched low and moving swiftly across the ground. Even from a distance he recognised the front man as the supposed descendent of van Hal. He gesticulated wildly, directing men left and right. It was all done silently. They split into smaller groups with impressive discipline, three clusters of ten apiece angling back towards the city, two more groups of ten fanning out across the undead camp, making for the black pavilions of Pieter and his loyal vampires—the same vampires who had gorged themselves senseless in the city and lay in sated slumber like stuffed pigs.
Jerek dropped down on all fours and gave himself over to the change. Focusing on the wolf inside his skin, the lupine form, the grace and power of the beast, he felt himself changing, his curiosity giving way to the most basic, primal, instincts: preservation and hunger. The bones in his shoulders broke and remoulded themselves, larger and more powerful, as the vertebrae of his spine stretched and arched, his wild mane becoming a pelt.
The wolf moved carefully across the field, his easy lope silent beneath the crackling and spitting of the burning city. The smoke masked the pungent reek of fear, but it didn’t bury it away. The soldiers stank of it: fear and faeces. Moving close to Pieter’s pavilion, he saw the red-rimmed eyes of the lookout and realised what they had done. They had traded their own, gambling that the sacrifice would be worth it, that it would give these last few men the chance to slay the beasts. It was the supreme sacrifice: not their own lives, but the lives of everyone they knew and loved. There was no way that these fifty men would be able to live with themselves come sunrise. Then, inevitably, the blood of more good men would stain the field.
Van Hal emerged from the pavilion, clutching a blackened heart in his hand: Pieter’s.
He saw the wolf and nodded, throwing the beast the dead meat.
Jerek fed.
A second soldier stepped out through the tent flaps, the fingers of his left hand tangled in Roth Mehlinger’s hair. A stump of white bone jutted out of the ragged flesh where the neck should have met the body. The vampire’s face was frozen into a death mask of ridiculous surprise.
“The beasts are dead,” van Hal said, his voice empty. There was no triumph in his victory. The cost had been too high. “Now we pray for our brothers. May Sigmar guide their swords, for tomorrow, we die.”
Behind him, moving like the ghosts they truly were, the three groups of soldiers re-entered the city through the main gates. With von Carstein’s so-called protectors wallowing in the afterglow of murder, these thirty would be more than enough to cut out the canker that was the undead in their city.
Jerek sensed movement, a shape rising beside the canvas pavilion. He knew that the fight was not over for these few, not while von Seirt had breath to command the dead. The wolf tensed and sprang, bowling aside the soldier clutching Mehlinger’s severed head. A moment later, they saw what he had seen: the dead rising. Steel rang out as the defenders of Nuln drew their swords, ready, eager, to die now that their final die was cast, the game played out.
The wolf tossed back his head, sniffing out the necromancer’s reek, her bodily fluids, the sickly sweet tang of her secretions that were so uniquely female, and then he found traces of her on the wind. She was close. He followed the smell of her. Death aroused her, making it easy.
She had taken refuge amid the cages where von Carstein kept the kidnapped villagers that he used to sate his vampire’s thirst. She was pretending to be one of them.
Jerek bounded into the enclosed circle of wagons, his momentum taking him through the wooden bars of the cage, splintering them and cutting him in the process. Snarling and feral, his teeth snapped and tore at the necromancer’s throat as she tried to ward off the attack, but the sheer ferocity of the wolfs assault drove her back further into the corner of the cage.
Her screams were desperate, but her death was no more savage than she deserved.
Jerek tore Katja von Seirt’s throat out and fed on her.
Her corpse jerked and spasmed beneath him as her nerves fired off random triggers before relaxing into death. Still, Jerek drank greedily, savouring the rank corruption of the necromancer’s lifeblood as it trickled down his throat.
When the soldiers came to free the prisoners, he had returned to his human form. Van Hal stood at the broken wooden bars of the cage, peering into the darkness within. He saw Jerek, naked, standing over the woman’s corpse.
They shared a moment of mutual recognition. The soldier understood.
“I should kill you,” van Hal said.
“And I should kill you, but I have no desire to, soldier. You have paid enough this day for a hundred lifetimes.”
“Indeed, but I cannot let you leave.”
“You can,” Jerek said. “This woman,” he toed the corpse of von Seirt with his bare foot, “would have killed you all. The dead collapsed did they not, even as they rose up to strike you down?”
Van Hal nodded.
“Her hold over them died as she did.”
“You’re the wolf I fed?”
“I am, but more importantly I was, once, the wolf. Now I am not sure what I am, but I am not one of them.”
“Nor are you one of us.”
“No, but we, I think, want the same thing.”
“I want the beasts destroyed. I want the dead driven back to the hell they came from. I want my family back. I want my world to know peace.”
“Then we are not so different, soldier.”
“Here’s what’s going to happen, I am going to leave to check on the other prisoners. When I return in a quarter of an hour, I am going to put you out of your misery. Use these fifteen minutes to make your peace with your god.”
“Thank you, soldier.”
“Don’t thank me, wolf, I am tired of being thanked for doing the wrong thing.”
With that van Hal left.
Jerek was gone long before he returned.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Sins of the Father
DRAKENHOF, SYLVANIA
The drawn-out dog days of autumn, 2057
Jared and Klein left them at the border.
Twice, they had encountered the huge dire wolves hunting, and twice they had slain the beasts. Lothar du Bek was a dichotomy in battle. While his eyes blazed with righteous fury, his every action was calm to the point of detachment. He nocked the silver tipped arrows and drew back on the bowstring, holding, waiting, judging the wind, the distance, and keeping the beast in his sight before loosing shaft after shaft with skill and precision. The arrows took the beasts between the eyes, in the throat and heart. It was over quickly.
“You’re a dangerous man, Lothar,” Kallad had observed, shouldering his axe as they stood over the corpse of a man who had, moments before, been a huge wolf.
“These are dangerous times, my friend. I am nothing more than a child of the times.”
Kallad and Lothar du Bek travelled on through the barren lands of Sylvania. The folks they passed wore the same harsh signs of malnutrition and superstition, bellies distended, bones pressed out starkly against emaciated skin. They were the physical embodiment of the land they lived in with its dead trees and infertile soil. These were haunted people. They huddled on the sides of the road as the pair passed, clutching their talismans and casting frightened gazes over their shoulders to see that they had moved on down the road. They didn’t talk. Kallad was used to trading information about the road with fellow travellers met on the journey, but not so in this hellish place. They kept themselves very much to themselves. They had no time for others.
A signpost on the roadside marked another two miles to the next village.
With night drawing in, the pair would need to find somewhere to sleep. The village would no doubt have a tavern or inn, and hopefully a room to spare, or a common room where they could bed down for the night. The cold nights were drawing in and bivouacking down on the roadside was becoming less and less appealing. A night in a warm bed sounded good to both of them.
“Let’s push on,
” Lothar suggested. “Right now I’d trade another half an hour on the road for a night by a warm fire, a minstrel and a jug of mulled wine.”
“Aye, reckon I’d trade half an hour on the road for a decent bite to eat.”
“Fed up of my cooking already, eh, dwarf?”
“Oh aye.”
A mile outside the village they past three cairns piled up by the roadside, the stone mounds marked with the sign of Morr. One of the cairns was considerably smaller than the others, and obviously covered a young child.
They paused for a moment to pay their respects to the dead before walking down into the village.
The windows of every house they passed were shuttered, although glimmers of warm light seeped through the cracks. The doors were likewise closed. There was no livestock in the fields, and no dogs or cats running wild.
It felt to Kallad as if they had walked into the village of the damned.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this place.”
“Couldn’t agree more. It feels like the life’s been sucked out of it.”
“Aye, that’s it exactly. It’s been drained dry.”
The tavern was no different from any of the other buildings. The windows had been shuttered and barred, although smoke drifted lazily from the chimney, evidence at least that there was life inside. The door, however, was locked.
Kallad rapped on the door. No one answered.
He looked at the border warden, who shrugged, and banged again, hammering on the wood with his gauntleted fist.
“Do we have to batter the damned door down?” Kallad shouted.
“Go away” a voice answered. “We don’t want your sort here.”
“Open the door, man.”
“Go away,” the voice repeated stubbornly.
“Grimna’s balls, just open the damned door before I kick it in and start pounding on your head instead.”
He slammed his fist into a wooden panel above the brace, once, twice, three times, causing the wood to splinter.
“For pity’s sake!” the voice behind the door pleaded. “Leave us be.”
“This is ridiculous, dwarf. Let’s just leave these people alone. They’ve obviously got a good reason for not opening the door. We can sleep in the stable,” Lothar du Bek said.
“All I want is a warm meal and a place to lay my bones. It doesn’t seem too much to ask from an inn.”
They heard the sound of a bolt being drawn back.
The door cracked open an inch.
“You’re not one of them?”
“What’re you blatherin’ on about, man?”
“You’re not…” he peered out at the dwarf and the hulking figure of the warden beside him. “No, you’re obviously not. Inside, quickly.” The innkeeper threw open the door and ushered the pair in. No sooner had they crossed the threshold than he was slamming and bolting the door behind them.
The taproom was dead. A small fire burned in the hearth. There were no other customers.
“Business is boomin’, eh? Not a surprise if you won’t let people in, I reckon.”
“People don’t want to be outside, not after dark, not if they know what’s good for them,” the innkeeper said, locking the final bolt into place. “Now, we ain’t got much in the way of food, but there’s some broth, a bit of yesterday’s bread left and ale enough to get you blind drunk, if that’s what you’re hankering for.”
“Sounds like a feast compared to what we’ve been living off for the last few weeks.”
“Well then, you’re welcome to it. I’ll see to the drink first. Sit yourselves by the fire.”
“My thanks.” Kallad drew off his gauntlet and held out his right hand. “I’m Kallad Stormwarden, and this lanky fellow is Lothar.”
The innkeeper shook hands with the dwarf. “Mathias Gesner. Make yourself at home, Kallad Stormwarden.”
“Are you alone here, Mathias?” Lothar asked, unclasping the hasp of his travel cloak and draping it over the back of a threadbare armchair beside the fire. He sank into the seat and planted his feet on the footstool.
“Yes.” The pain of loss was etched into Mathias Gesner’s plain face. He was obviously a simple man, not given to lying. He wore his hurt on his sleeve, as the old Reikspiel saying went. It didn’t take any great intelligence to know that it hadn’t always been this way. At some point not so very long ago, this inn had no doubt been the heart of a thriving village. Things changed quickly in this godforsaken country. That, at least, accounted for the bolts and the shuttered windows. Kallad remembered the cairns on the roadside. He had been right in thinking that they had stumbled into a village of the damned. These people were living in the dark through fear: fear that the light would draw attention to them, and with it, more death would come their way. They had given up believing that the light would keep the monsters at bay, such were the depths of their despair.
The food, when it came, was far from delicious, but it filled a hole. Mathias joined them at the fire. They ate a while in silence, all three men locked away with their own thoughts. The bread was hard, the broth bland, but after travel fare it smelled almost heavenly. The ale was good, better than it had any right to be in this out of the way corner of Sylvania.
Lothar smacked his lips appreciatively as he banged the tankard down on the table.
“Not bad at all.”
“Aye, it’s a tasty drop, for sure,” the dwarf agreed, foam thick in his beard. He backhanded his mouth dry and smacked his lips appreciatively.
“We brew it here, me and…” the innkeeper stopped mid sentence.
Kallad didn’t press him. He knew where the sentence had been going: into the territory of the dead.
Outside, a howling wolf greeted the gibbous moon.
It was a sad lament.
The cry was taken up somewhere in the distance, a faint and haunting, familiar response.
Knowing what he knew of the beasts abroad, it chilled Kallad’s blood.
Beside him, Mathias had gone pale. His hand trembled. “Soon,” he said, closing his eyes.
As if in response to the innkeeper’s prediction, the door rattled in its frame and a moment later, whoever it was out there was hammering and pleading in a pitiful voice:
“Open up, gods alive man, open up! Please.”
Lothar began to rise, but Gesner stayed the warden with a firm hand and a single shake of the head.
“Please! For pity’s sake, please. I’m begging you, man. Please.”
“Sit,” Gesner said, his face blank. “It isn’t what you think.”
“But—”
“I said sit.” The steel in Gesner’s voice was surprising.
“Oh, sweet Morr, they’re coming! I can see them! Open the door! Please, I beg you! Open the door.”
Then the begging ceased. It was replaced by thick cackling laughter. “Next time, father! Next time!”
For the next few minutes the only sound was the snap and crackle of the fire in the hearth.
“My son,” Mathias Gesner said finally, his eyes red with unshed tears. They took him two moons ago. I buried him with my own hands, alongside his mother, Rahel, and our little girl, Elsa. He returns every night, banging on the damned door to be let in as if he thinks that this time I might unbar the door and he’ll be saved.”
“I’m sorry,” Kallad said.
“It’s all rubbish,” Gesner continued. “He’s one of them now. He’d feed off me just as contentedly as he would a whore. He’s right though, one day I will be too tired to keep him out and the whole charade will be over once and for all.”
“Aye, it’s easy enough to die if’n that’s what you want,” Kallad said.
“What else is there, really?”
“Life,” Kallad said. That’s all there ever is.”
“Sometimes it isn’t enough.”
“I won’t argue with you there, Mathias, but when it comes to this, the beasts turning father against son, well, this is where good men have to draw the line.”
&nbs
p; “What do you mean?” The innkeeper sniffed, the first tears salty on his cheek.
“I mean it ends now, here, tonight,” Kallad promised.
He stood up, shouldering Ruinthorn, and strode over to the door. He pulled back the bolts one at a time and raised the bar.
The door burst open before he could get out of the way. It knocked him back, spinning him into du Bek. Kallad barely had the time to turn before Gesner’s son was through the door and on them. “Hello father, I’m home!” The beast mocked, hurling himself at the dwarf. “Did you miss me?”
Kallad saw his own weakness reflected in the creature’s lifeless eyes: his failure to protect his companions from the vampire they hunted, his inability to save Sammy Kraus, his inability to save his own people, and his guilt at his father’s death on the wall. In that moment, Kallad Stormwarden knew hatred.
He thundered the butt of Ruinthorn into creature’s gut and then reversed the blow, bringing the butterfly head of the axe around in a brutal arc that came within a whisker of decapitating the beast. Gesner’s son moved with lupine grace, rolling beneath the axe-head, back arched to the point of breaking, and then flipped, planting the flat of his hand on the floor and springing up off it. He clapped his hands delightedly as he landed.
Kallad hurled himself forwards, matching the beast’s grace with stubborn determination. He planted his feet and let Ruinthorn do his dancing for him. The twin-headed blade sliced through the air, once, twice, three times, four, blurring into insubstantiality as it pared the air. The beast mocked him, moving aside from Ruinthorn as easily as if he was dodging a drunk’s wildly swinging blows. The blade of the axe cut close to the vampire’s skin twice, drawing the thinnest tears in the fabric of his grubby shirt. The beast raised an eye, and Kallad put it out, slamming the butt of Ruinthorn into the vampire’s face, the silver hook he had screwed into the shaft ripping up the monster’s cheek and splitting its eye wetly.
Gesner’s son howled, but the old man didn’t move.
Kallad delivered a second and a third crunching blow, bringing the creature to its knees. Then, with one mighty blow, he sheared the vampire’s head from its shoulders, and stood over the twitching corpse as true death claimed it.
[Von Carstein 02] - Dominion Page 19