He doubted that anyone here would know his sire’s final resting place. He had thought they might share some kind of bond, even now, that would allow him to sense Vlad, six feet under and riddled with worms. There was nothing.
He sank back into his chair and tried to think like a Sigmarite. How would they dispose of an evil they could barely comprehend? A cleansing fire? Ritual purification? Or would they set their blessed Sig-mar to watch over the fiend, even in death?
Perhaps there was a bond, after all. Jerek smiled to himself. Given the mindset of the priests, it was obvious what they had done with the vampire’s mortal remains. They had buried them, and where better to inter the beast than beneath the watchful gaze of the man who slew it?
That was the truth, he was sure. It was the Sigmarite way, to cover the darkness with light as they sought to sanitise it and make it safe.
He knew where he would find von Carstein. More importantly, he knew where he would find the ring that gifted the beast his incredible restorative powers: in the dirt beneath the holy man’s grave.
Jerek raised the jug to his lips and drank deeply, imagining that he could actually savour the bitter-sharp taste of the brew as it rolled down his throat.
He smacked his lips and called the serving girl over. She had her hands full, juggling mugs and tankards and sidestepping groping hands. In another life the wolf would have taught those pups a lesson in manners, but not today. Today it was important that he was one of them.
“Bonny lass,” he called, snagging the girl’s apron as she breezed by. He held her firm. She looked down at him, a smile on her lips, but nothing in her eyes. “I’ll take another.” She nodded. “And thank you for smiling for me, love. It’s made this lecherous old wolfs day.”
For just a moment her eyes brightened. That was enough for him.
He closed his eyes again.
The ale came, and went down his throat. He tuned out the hubbub, even when a piss-poor minstrel struck up a ragged tune that had the locals joining in enthusiastically. He let the noise wash over him. All he needed to do was wait it out. They all had homes and beds to go to.
The singer butchered just about every tune out of his mouth, but the punters didn’t care. They slammed tankards down on beer-soaked tabletops and cried out for more, joining in reels and shanties with noisy appreciation.
Finally, the landlord rang the bell over the bar, signifying the end of the revels with a call for last orders. A few of the hardened drinkers downed one last ale, but most began their wobbly journeys home to sleep off the worst effects of the drink. Jerek wouldn’t envy any of them come morning.
As the last of the drinkers drifted out, the wolf left his fireside seat and joined them, stumbling slightly to mirror their own unsteady gaits.
“Which way’s the cathedral?” he asked, bumping into the shoulder of the man beside him. Grinning, the man pointed off in the direction of one of the many spires.
“Had a few too many, eh?”
“Jus’ enough to forget what the woman looks like ’n where she’s waitin’,” Jerek slurred, a lopsided grin pasted across his face.
“Ah, you knows what they say fella: ain’t a woman in the world who ain’t made pretty by enough alcohol.”
“Ain’t that the truth! Jus’ a pity us fellas need to drink to make a sows purse outta the pig’s ear, eh?” Jerek agreed with a hearty chuckle and staggered on his merry way.
For the sake of appearances, Jerek walked a little unsteadily—not the exaggerated drunken lurch that would be remembered by the casual observer on his way home, but the occasional misstep that made him look like just another one of them.
He leaned against the wall on the street corner, and then pushed off again, repeating the pattern street after street until he saw the dome of the grand cathedral.
The iron railings were barred, but it didn’t matter. The surrounding wall was low enough for him to scale it, easily, Jerek scrambled over the wall, his feet scuffing up the stone as he hauled himself over the top. He dropped down to the other side with a grunt.
The grounds of the cathedral were well kept. A small glade of trees sheltering a single grave caught his eye. He walked through a neatly tended rose garden to the secluded grove and into the moonlight shadows cast by a weeping willow. There was a simple stone marking the holy man’s grave. A second smaller gate led through the wall to the street. The headstone was seeded over with lichen where the shadows of the willow lingered. A white rose bush grew beside the headstone, the thorns scraping against the words of the prayer carved into the stone.
He knelt at the graveside, but there was nothing remotely reverential about it. He reached out to claw at the dirt with his bare hands, but stopped, his fingers only inches from a curious metal disc set into the grass. He didn’t recognise the rune embossed on it, but he felt the heat of its power even before his hand closed on it. The disc seared into his skin with shocking force, hurling the wolf back bodily from the grave.
Jerek staggered back to his feet, shaking his head. He felt the residual power of the rune in every fibre of his being, as if it was somehow attuned to his dead flesh. He turned his hand over and stared at his blackened palm and the negative image of the rune that had been branded on it. Tentatively, he reached out again. He felt the fiery pain of the burn swell, long before his hand came close to touching the dirt. He tested its limits, pushing to the point of agony, and still he couldn’t lay so much as a finger on the dirt of the Grand Theogonist’s grave.
It made sense, of course, that the place would be protected.
Indeed, the talisman told him all he needed to know about the dual nature of the priest’s final resting place. Why else would it need a warding against dead flesh, if not to keep Vlad beneath the ground and the living dead from being able to reach down and bring him back?
It meant that he needed to exhume the holy man to get to the body beneath it and, ultimately, to the ring.
Only, he couldn’t, he couldn’t.
There was, however, more than one way to skin a cat. Just because he couldn’t, didn’t mean that someone else wouldn’t be able to.
Jerek looked around. He knew if he didn’t act quickly even this slim hope would be undone by the simple fact that his presence would be felt within the walls of the great cathedral, the sickness of unlife causing nightmares and heart tremors, stomach cramps and nausea, and countless other side effects within the holy men.
A beggar perhaps? He could drag one off the street and force him to do his bidding.
No. It had to be someone above suspicion if seen by watchers inside the cathedral.
Who then?
On the far side of the rose garden there was a small cemetery. A cemetery needed a gravedigger. What was more natural than a gravedigger abroad during the dark hours, preparing for the day ahead?
He could breathe the fear of unlife into the man, bullying him into this vile act of desecration. Could? He would have to.
Jerek knew then what he had to do. Stripping down until he was naked, his clothes folded beneath the willow, he drew on the wolf, giving himself over to the change. As the agony of the transformation took him, he screamed, the scream giving way to the protracted howl of a wolf baying at the moon.
No lights came on within the cathedral.
The wolf padded easily through the rose garden towards the lines of graves, and the small gravedigger’s hovel beyond them. His skin crawled this close to so many idols and effigies of the Man-God planted in the earth. He wove a path through the graves to the gravedigger’s door. Thirty feet shy of the door, the wolf sprang, hurling itself bodily at the barrier, breaking its flimsy lock open and tumbling into the small room.
He smelled the man before he saw him, cowering in his blankets, grey hair stuck up in stalks, skin sickly pale with fear.
The wolf padded slowly over to the gravedigger’s bedside, jowls slack, saliva drooling around sharp teeth.
“Mercy, no,” the old man pleaded as the beast pressed
its muzzle up to within inches of his face. Then he began to change, the monster withdrawing in favour of the man. The wolfs low-throated growl shifted into the more natural rhythms of Jerek’s breathing. His bones shifted and re-formed until he stood naked before the old man. Instead of diminishing it, his nudity only served to reinforce the old man’s fear.
“Up, gravedigger, as of now, your life is mine. You live and breathe at my whim, understand?” He baited the gravedigger.
The old man nodded so hard that Jerek almost laughed… almost.
He scrambled out of bed, his scrawny body all slack skin, bone and cavernous shadow in the moonlight, desperately eager to please the monster that had invaded his home if it meant staying alive.
“What… what?”
“What do I want?”
The gravedigger nodded again, “Yes.” The old man was shaking uncontrollably. The last thing Jerek wanted to do was cause his heart to give out in fear.
He felt remorse for what he was about to do, but the beast was still fresh in his blood, suffocating his defiant humanity. It was a sign that the monster was winning the fight. Soon he would feel no compunction in slaughter or desecration, but for now, the bitter tang of guilt reminded him of what it meant to be alive.
He stifled it because, for once, it had no place in what he was about to do. He needed to surrender to the beast’s baser nature.
“I want you to do a job for me. I want you to dig up a grave.”
It took a moment for his words to register through the old man’s fear. “You want me to dig a grave for you?”
“No, I want you to dig up a grave for me. The grave has already been dug once before.”
“I can’t—”
“Oh, but I think you’ll find you can and what’s more, you will.” Jerek curled back his lip to make sure that his meaning wasn’t lost on the old man. He needn’t have worried, it wasn’t. “Get dressed, pick up your shovel and follow me. I don’t want to hurt you, but that doesn’t mean I won’t. Do we understand each other?”
The gravedigger nodded again, grabbing and dropping a grubby shirt from the back of a wooden chair. He bent and picked it up from the floor, staring at Jerek the entire time as if, by looking away, he might incite the beast to attack.
Jerek walked out of the tiny hovel. The air felt good on his skin, cold enough to raise the prickle of goose pimples, but not so cold as to shrivel his skin.
A moment later, the gravedigger emerged, a bulls-eye lantern lighting the path at his feet. His expression was grim.
Without a word, Jerek set off into the graves. He wondered how long it would take the old man to realise which grave he wanted exhumed. Not long, surely. Then what? Would he resist? Fight? Raise the alarm? Or would he simply dig?
Behind him, the old man whimpered as they entered the rose garden. There was only one grave beyond this point.
“I can’t…”
Jerek stopped beneath the trailing leaves of the weeping willow. “Dig,” He said simply and with utter finality.
“I can’t,” the gravedigger repeated, even as he planted his shovel in the dirt.
His suspicion had been right: the peculiar metal talisman didn’t affect the old man.
“Dig,” Jerek repeated, sickened by himself even as he said it. It was easy to pretend that he felt nothing, but then lies were always believable—only not to the liar himself.
The old man dug, for his life. He turned the shovel through the soil, opening up the grave.
Jerek dressed again while the gravedigger toiled.
It took most of the long night just to reach the depth of the first corpse that the grave harboured. Tears streamed down the gravedigger’s face as he dug, begging for forgiveness even as his shovel struck the wood of the Grand Theogonist’s coffin. He shovelled away the dirt, until the silver clasps of the box were visible.
“Open it,” Jerek said. It was unreasonable to expect the pair to be actually buried together, but it would have been stupid not to check.
The gravedigger used the butt of the shovel’s handle to crack the seals and open the metal clasps. The air sucked into the wooden box as the lid cracked open and the stench poured out of it. Time and maggots had reduced the holy man to loosely assembled bones and strings of gristle. He was alone in the coffin.
“Seal it and lift it out, we’re digging deeper,” Jerek said.
The old man did as he was told. Using the edge of the shovel, he dug around the coffin, freeing it so that he could angle it upwards, and lift it out of the ground, although the task was far from easy.
Jerek had been right in his reasoning. Less then a foot beneath the Grand Theogonist’s coffin, the gravedigger unearthed Vlad’s remains. Without the luxury of a box, the Vampire Count had been picked clean by the grubs, his bones stripped completely of flesh, muscle and gristle. Only strips of rag remained of his once fine clothing, but the gold chains and more importantly, the ring, remained.
The Vampire Count’s hands were folded across his ribcage, the extravagant signet ring on his right hand. It was gold with a garish gem set amid what looked like wings, the tips studded with precious stones.
Jerek didn’t dare move.
He stared at the ornate ring with its dark gemstone setting for a full five minutes.
He couldn’t believe that the Sigmarites could be so stupid as to leave the ring—the key to the Vampire Count’s power—in place.
Exhilarated, he eased the ring off the finger of bone and slipped it onto his own finger. He expected to feel something, the tingle of power flooding into this tainted veins, the answering cry of immortality, but there was nothing. He held his hand up before his face, staring at the metal wings as they spread over his knuckled fist: nothing.
Did he need to cut himself? Would blood seal the bond between vampire and ring? Would he feel its power then?
That was when his stupidity sank in, finally. For all its ostentation, the winged ring wasn’t the fabled von Carstein ring, it wasn’t blessed with awesome powers of recuperation, it was nothing more than a pretty trinket. Why would the ring be on his finger at all? It was true: the priests had stolen it to rob von Carstein of his unearthly powers.
He couldn’t bring himself to believe that.
He dropped into the hole in the ground, scrabbling about in the dirt, grunting and scraping, pushing aside the bones.
Nothing.
The ring could be anywhere.
Without knowing who took it, there was no way of knowing where it might be.
He had no choice but to return to Konrad’s court, empty-handed, praying against reason that the trail ended here in this desolate garden of Morr. He knew that it didn’t. It began with the thief who had stolen it, and even knowing that, it was beyond his ability to track it. He could only hope to wrest it from its wielder when it resurfaced, because it would, he harboured no illusions about that. An artefact so vile could not remain lost for long.
Better to let any who came looking, sniffing around and asking questions, think he had found Vlad’s precious secret and made away with it.
Jerek dragged himself out of the grave and stood, dusting the dirt off his clothes.
He made sure the gravedigger knew what he had retrieved from the grave, making a fist around the winged ring, and cracking his knuckles. He reached a hand down to help the old man out of the hole, but then changed his mind, and left him knee deep in the bones of the dead to excuse his desecration.
“Your lucky day, old man. You get to live, at least until sunrise, when the priests will string you up for messing with the bones of their blessed saint.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Taking of the Virgin and the Hag
THE COURT OF THE BLOOD COUNT, SYLVANIA
The Night of the Ravens
Women lined the walls.
Konrad, Vampire Count of Sylvania, reclined luxuriantly in his sire’s obsidian throne, savouring the heady aromas of the feast. Vlad had surrounded himself with beauty, like many beas
ts, drawn to the darkness within the soulless art, as if it somehow filled the void shaped by their death. Konrad despised such stupidity. There was beauty in the taking not in admiring something unattainable: in the taking.
Konrad sighed and waved airily in the direction of a flaxen-haired beauty chained up against the wall. Her skin was as dusky as her almond-shaped eyes. She shook her head violently, writhing around against her captors’ grip as they unlocked her manacles. The woman sobbed, begged, kicked and screamed. Oh yes, the beauty was most certainly in taking what you wanted, Konrad thought. The girl’s fear was exhilarating. It was so much more passionate than quiet acquiescence. It was always better when they fought back. It added a sense of theft to the feeding.
One hundred and eleven women were chained, naked to the walls of the great hall, for his delectation. Their blood sang to him. He could sniff out their uniqueness, the virgins and the crones, the mothers and the whores. They all had their own unique stink. He looked at them, and at the rest of his court, coveting them.
“This,” he said grandly, “is what separates us, what sets us apart. What you want is in my power to give. Come, let us feed!”
The woman shrieked as she was thrown down at his feet, the strength of the thralls driving her to her knees. Onursal, the Hamaya, stepped up and grabbed a fistful of her hair, tangling it in his fist as he pulled her across the floor. Her bare feet scrambled and her hands slapped at the cold stone as she tried to stop the pain, even as it soared inside her.
This was power, and it was intoxicating.
It was natural that others craved what he had, and sought to take it from him.
The beauty was in the taking.
He would have been a fool to believe that he was safe. Pieter, Fritz and Hans might be dead, but treachery still lurked in every shadow, waiting to undo him. It was the nature of the beast: he surrounded himself with predators. To show weakness was to invite death. There wasn’t a creature in the room that wouldn’t have delighted in bringing him down and feasting on his corpse as a way of raising themselves up in his stead.
[Von Carstein 02] - Dominion Page 22