“Turn away,” he told Gesner, and waited until the innkeeper had done just that before he split the fiend’s ribcage with the sharp end of his axe and cracked open its chest to pull the beast’s rotten heart out.
Kallad tossed the blackened organ into the flames of the fire and watched it spit and hiss as it shrivelled in the heat.
“Come first light, bury your son, Mathias. He won’t rise again. You have my word on that.”
The innkeeper didn’t say a word. He shuffled forwards and knelt, cradling the dead boy’s body in his arms.
Kallad left him alone to grieve.
Du Bek followed him upstairs. They closed the door on a small bedroom to shut out Gesner’s stifled sobs.
“Why did you do it?” Lothar asked, still at the door. Kallad didn’t have an easy answer for him. “We could have slept the night out in the safety of the room and moved on in the morning. You didn’t have to make this your fight, Kallad. So why? Why risk everything for an old man in a damned village?”
“It’s in my blood, laddy. What would have happened if we’d gone on our way tomorrow, eh? Gesner would be dead. Hell, the whole village would be nowt more than food for the bloodsucking parasites. By moving on, we’d have condemned every living soul in this place as thoroughly and completely as if we’d driven the stake through them ourselves. Could you live with that?”
“No,” du Bek admitted.
“No, me neither. So there was no choice, not really, see? It became our fight the moment the lad started banging on the door.”
The border warden nodded thoughtfully.
“But that’s not it, is it? That’s not the truth. It’s noble and it’s the right thing to say, but it isn’t the truth, is it? I mean, it’s like saying the fight was yours the moment you opened the door. It’s right, but it isn’t the truth. So tell me.”
Kallad was silent for a moment. He turned away from du Bek, unable to meet the warden’s eye. He stared out through the window, at the darkness and the mirror of their room reflected on it in the glass.
“No,” he said at last. “It’s not the truth.”
“What is?”
Kallad grunted. “The truth. What can I tell you? All that evil needs to flourish is for good men to do nothing. Every fight is my fight. They killed my father. Cut him down in cold blood as he fought to save wives and children in Grunberg. They killed my people, not just one or two: all of them. I’m the last dwarf of Karak Sadra, the last. My family died fighting for humans, in a fight that wasn’t theirs, but they did it, “cause that’s our way. We fight for what we believe in, and I made a promise on the dead. I swore, even as the monster cut my father down, that I would bring every last one of these vile creatures to their knees and make them beg for their worthless carcasses even as I cut their dead hearts out. That means somethin’ to me. I’ll purge the old world of them single-handed if I have to, or die trying. That’s why I need the magician. He can smell their dead stink on the wind. With him, I can turn defence into attack. I can hunt them down and kill them in their lairs.”
“That, dwarf, is a grudge worth having.” Lothar moved away from the door, drew his sword and knelt at Kallad’s feet. He lowered his head and offered the blade out across his palms. “My sword is yours if you would have it.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Black Library
CASTLE DRAKENHOF, SYLVANIA
Season’s end
A thin patina of frost rimed the stalactites dripping from the ceiling of the vast subterranean library.
Library—Nevin Kantor laughed at that.
The place was no more a library than Konrad’s so-called cathedral was a place of worship. Both had all the trappings of their names, but lacked the soul that was so integral to the originals. They were little more than pale copies, like so much of the second Vampire Count’s realm.
Konrad’s library was a huge dome-shaped chamber hollowed out of the rock beneath Drakenhof, the stalactites hanging down like stony swords of doom some sixty feet above the magician’s head while he studied, an ever-present reminder of the capricious count. The walls were lined with dusty shelves that were crammed to overflowing with books, obscure arcane texts, diaries, prophecies, codices, sacred ramblings and incantations of dark wisdom, interspersed with bell jars filled with blind eyes floating in saline, salamander skins, cockroach carapaces, pigs’ bladders, spider eggs and snake venom. It was a veritable treasure trove of arcana, some nothing more than superstitious claptrap, but the rest, rare and coveted wisdom.
Unlike a real library, it was also a prison.
Thugs stood guard. Their allegiance to the clan van Carstein went beyond a simple loyalty to Konrad. The flat-headed bullies had emerged from the east with his sire, Vlad. Long-lived and yet not pure-blood vampires, speculation about the swarthy thugs was rife. Clubs hung loosely in their fists. Sneers were permanently pasted on their thick lips. Their bare arms were like ham hocks, big and fleshy, and covered with a scrawl of tattoos. Hidden within the tattoos was the key to their arrogance, sigils designed to make them impervious to all but the most insidious of magics, tattooed on their flesh by Vlad himself.
The cells behind the library were filled with yokels and superstitious morons who somehow managed to tap one of the winds, with luck or latent talent, but not genuine skill. Whether or not the sigils would have actually deterred a sorcerous attack was irrelevant—few of the denizens of this dark pit had any real magical gift. They were as likely to try and club the guards to death with heavy books as they were to evaporate the water in their bodies and leave a baked pile of human paste on the stone floor.
There were few true magicians in Konrad’s school. Tapping the winds accidentally was by no means the same as possessing true power. The bumpkins could coo about the mystical talents of the midwife who brought a brat out from a breech birth, and marvel at the soldier whose lucky trinket deflected an arrow tip destined for his heart. It wasn’t magic, not in the pure sense. It wasn’t worthy of awe.
So yes, they were prisoners, but it was the physical stature of the thugs that held them in fearful check, not the magical wards on their gaolers.
Nevin Kantor harboured no illusions: he was as much a prisoner as those poor fools were. The difference was that he was a willing prisoner. In magic, Nevin Kantor believed he would find his own immortality.
The resources that Konrad had gathered in his library surpassed Kantor’s wildest imaginings. He pored over the books, absorbing every word, every mark in the margins, every explanatory diagram, every supposition and superstition.
He also heard whispers.
Leverkuhn and Fey were thick as thieves, scouring the shelves and recessed stacks for decayed pages and spineless tomes, picking through the incantations and reassembling the knowledge therein. He heard them when they thought no one was listening. At first, it had plagued him: a doubt gnawing at his skull incessantly, and so, he ingratiated himself with Immoliah Fey. The seduction was easy. It always is when you hold to one basic truth: women, even women like Fey, have the same base urges for contact and skin as men do. They need it in the same way. They want it in the same way. Kantor said things, intimate things, drawing her into his confidence with pillow talk and promises. It wasn’t love, it was physical and practical, a means to an end, nothing more. The passion paid off. She told him their secret: they believed that somewhere in this vast uncatalogued horde of arcana were pages from Nagash’s lost books, incantations from the Liber Mortis. How else, she reasoned, sleepy after their frenzied coupling, could Vlad have raised the dead?
Their reasoning was sound in one aspect, but deeply flawed in another. Kantor knew that Vlad had indeed possessed some pages from Nagash’s lost books, in that much they were right, but Kantor had seen the same irreplaceable knowledge go up in smoke as the Sigmarites burned the dead Count’s possessions in a cleansing fire. Only self-righteous fools like the priests would have done something so unmitigatingly stupid. Wisdom, Kantor believed, should be protected not
purged—even the wisdom you disagreed with. Burning books was an act of sacrilege. It stank of smug Sigmarite stupidity.
Fey and Leverkuhn ought to have been his allies in his quest for understanding, but the two shunned him.
He shouldn’t have been surprised. He had lived a life on the fringe, not accepted by the people around him. The Sigmarites had imprisoned him, intent on snuffing out his life once his usefulness to them had ended. Oh, yes, they were happy enough to bleed him dry if it suited them, and they made no secret of the fact that they were willing to sell his flesh cheaply enough—indeed, they had, for the princely sum of two vampires.
That was the value they had placed on him. Even then, the dwarf had only bought him because of his usefulness. He could sniff out the beasts, and in doing so could help the dwarf commit suicide by tracking the monsters back to their lairs. Kallad Stormwarden had talked of nobility, of the eternal struggle against evil, of buying freedom with courage. It was all hyperbole: rubbish. The dwarf was dead, killed by a stronger foe. There was no nobility in it. Death didn’t consider eternal struggles and courage when it weighed out lives. It valued only strength, cunning, and power. He felt no regret over it. The dwarf would have seen him dead before the end of their shared road, so why should he shed a tear for his own would-be murderer?
He had long ago come to terms with the fact that he was shunned and reviled for what he was.
He had even come to accept the reasons. It was because he was different, because was he was attuned to the earth itself, because the music of it sang in his veins, because it bent to his will, and because he had power.
The only acceptance he felt came in the soothing caress of Shyish. The wind knew him. It savoured his flesh as he drew it into him. It delighted in his existence. It sang in his blood. It loved him.
In return, it was only natural that he loved it, and that he gave himself to it, body and soul.
He felt Shyish inside him even when he wasn’t consciously drawing on it. The wind was a soothing presence, a calming one. A friend. A lover. It filled him: completed him.
He knew that he was changing. The flesh he wore was nothing more than an imago, a shell that he would crack his way out of to emerge as a new, beautiful, beast. He could feel the changes taking place inside him. He could feel his blood purifying, his organs being strengthened by Shyish, and the black wind making him its perfect servant. He welcomed the changes. With von Seirt dead, the only true talents were Immoliah Fey, Aloysius Leverkuhn and himself, and he would be the greatest of them all. He embraced the black wind. That, in itself, gave Kantor a position of power in the mad vampire’s court.
Nevin Kantor understood Konrad von Carstein, probably better than the vampire understood himself, because they were not that different. He craved what he lacked. He coveted their magic to make up for his own shortcomings. They snickered behind his back and called him the Blood Count.
Kantor hunched over the desk, dipped the quill’s nib into the inkpot and scratched out the curve of a “C on the vellum stretched out on the tabletop. It was painstaking work, laborious and frustrating. The ink splashed as he drew the nib down with a flourish, giving the letter “H” an elaborate tail. Muttering a curse, Kantor took a blotting cloth and cleaned up the smear of black.
He heard footsteps, but didn’t look up, expecting them to fade away into the stacks.
They didn’t. They approached his desk, slow, measured, and echoing curiously in the vast vaulted room.
Kantor looked up as Konrad dropped a bloody rag on his desk. Anger flared, but the magician battled it down. Stupidity would only damage his situation. He wanted to bleed the Vampire Count dry of every ounce of knowledge that his black library possessed. The image brought an ironic smile to his lips, which Konrad mistook for gratitude.
It wasn’t a rag, Kantor realised. It had the texture and consistency of vellum, but it wasn’t vellum either. He touched it, spreading it thin on the desk. Black blood smeared across his work, ruining everything that he had set down over the last week. He barely noticed. The feel was immediately familiar, and yet utterly foreign. It was skin: human skin.
He looked up at the Blood Count.
Konrad’s face split in an easy grin.
“A gift, my pet. Cure it. Make a book out of it. Use it as the binding for your grand grimoire.” He held up a hand, staying Kantor. “No, no, don’t thank me. It’s nothing really. It belonged to a rather uncooperative fellow. He has no use for it now, so best not let it go to waste, eh?”
“I don’t know quite what to say” There was a mild edge of distaste to Kantor’s voice, but his fingers played almost lovingly over the various textures of the stripped skin. The thing was both revolting and curiously compelling at the same time. He lingered over the softer areas, the undersides of the arm and the throat, and the coarse skin of the heels, the palms and the elbows.
Tell me you’ll put it to good use. You have no idea how difficult it is to skin a corpse without ruining the thing. Painstaking, well more like pain giving actually, but you get the idea.”
“Indeed, rather vividly” Kantor said. He pushed the skin to the side. In his mind, he was already imagining the secrets it would bind: his first book of magic. He lifted his fingers to his lips, tasting the tang of iron that was the dead man’s blood, smelling it, stark in his nose. It was still warm.
The vampire smiled, perching on the corner of Kantor’s desk. “Good, good, good. Now tell me, how goes your research, my pet? I have high hopes for what miracles you might conjure.”
“Slowly” Kantor said, avoiding the truth. He didn’t want Konrad even vaguely intrigued with his discoveries. The knowledge he’d unearthed was his. There were things he needed to do without the ever-present shadow of the vampire lurking in the background all the time. Obfuscation, that was the secret. To give a little, without so much as hinting as to its true worth. “There is a wealth of fact and ten times as much fantasy in these books, my lord. Sifting through the dross for nuggets of gold is tiresome. So much of it is useless.”
“Ah, well, that’s a shame. I had to go to considerable lengths to acquire my collection. I am sure everything my heart desires is hidden away here on one page or another. What can I say? Don’t let fear of failure get under your skin.” Konrad chuckled, enjoying his own droll sense of humour.
“Given the usefulness of your latest gift, I’ll make a point of it, my lord Konrad.”
“I knew you were a clever boy, even when you knocked on my door begging to be let in and allowed to serve me.”
“Shyish guided my feet, my lord. The black wind wishes to aid you in any way it can.” It was easy to lie. The vampire’s vanity blinded him to anything approaching the truth. Part of the magician wanted to tell him, to whisper the name “Mannfred” and have done with it, but another part of him enjoyed the game too much to give it up so easily. The time for revelation would come, but it wasn’t now. He needed to be patient.
“Yet it mocks me, Nevin, by shutting itself off to me when all I would do is unleash its blessed darkness into the world. I would be a dark destroyer. I would bring the world to its knees, if only it would open itself up to me. If only I could be like you… You know, I could be forgiven for thinking that you mock me as well.”
“Who can understand the whims of magic, my lord?”
“Not I, it would seem,” Konrad said, bitterly.
The irony of it was delicious, but he didn’t want to spoil the Blood Count’s good humour. It was hardly surprising that since the demise of his brothers—and in Mannfred’s continued absence—Konrad had been almost cheerful, but his humour was an unstable beast. One wrong word could quite easily see that goodwill vanish. Then, who knew what desk Kantor’s skin would end up being deposited on as a so-called gift? The vampire owned his life and could, at a whim, snuff it out. The threat was implicit.
Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we flatter to deceive. Kantor picked up the dead suit of skin once more, turning it over in his hand
s. He found the face. He recognised the donor. He would not mourn the man. He would, however, make good use of his remains, crafting a book of blood and magic to rival anything seen in millennia. He also knew exactly which ensorcellment he would refine and record first: Diabolisch Leichnam.
“I am expecting great things of you, don’t disappoint me, my pet. I don’t handle disappointment well.” With that, Konrad left him.
Nevin looked at his hands. They were covered in blood. He was trembling, not with fear, but with exhilaration. The time was ripe. Konrad had given him the excuse he needed to assemble the incantations that he had already begun secreting in various hidey-holes. He laid his hands down flat on the table.
Let the madman posture, he thought bitterly. Give the fool his day, for tomorrow is mine.
That was the truth of it.
Nevin Kantor was a liar, and an accomplished one at that. It wasn’t Shyish that had guided his feet to Drakenhof Castle. Mannfred von Carstein, the true heir of Vlad’s Kingdom of the Dead, had bartered his life for servitude. When he could have struck Nevin Kantor down, he spared him, making a pact. It was Mannfred who owned his life, not Konrad. At Mannfred’s bidding, he bent and scraped to the lunatic, but he did not serve him. He had bought his life with a single promise: that he would infiltrate the court of the mad count and pave the way for Mannfred’s return. Let the others fight and swagger, and ultimately destroy each other, Mannfred’s words echoed in his mind. They are a devious backstabbing bunch of degenerates incapable of seeing the long game. Let them destroy themselves, and when the time is right, when all is said and done, then I shall return, not a moment before. You are to be my eyes and ears in the madman’s court. Serve me well and you will be rewarded; fail me and we will finish what we started here today.
[Von Carstein 02] - Dominion Page 20