[Von Carstein 02] - Dominion

by Steve Savile - (ebook by Undead)

  They had arrived in Drakenhof with their heads full of stories, gathered village by village, and all sharing the same disturbing similarities: housewives, midwives, gamblers, soldiers, farmers, it didn’t matter who they were, anyone who owned even a hint of the uncanny had been snatched and dragged to the black castle of Drakenhof. It was more than just distance that separated Sylvania from the Empire. Centuries of oppression had taken their toll on the people. They had been stripped of even the most basic facets of personality, humour and hope. Kallad and du Bek found themselves pitying them, and along the way, they had convinced themselves that the poor downtrodden peasants of Sylvania would embrace them, rise up against their tyrannical master and bring down the beasts, once and for all. Poverty ruled the ruin of a city. The living shuffled like the dead and the damned through its filthy streets. It was stupid, naive, dangerous, thinking that they had turned the castle itself into an icon for the evil they hunted, and it had killed Lothar du Bek.

  Rather than embrace them, the peasants shunned their would-be liberators. They crossed the streets to avoid them and cast fretful glances over their shoulders as if they feared being seen even the width of the street away from the foreigners. Such was the long-reaching arm of their vile master.

  It should have been obvious, given the fact that the Vampire Count’s cruelty was carved into every gaunt face that stared back at him.

  “Two men can’t storm a castle,” du Bek had argued across the table in the hovel that they had found abandoned on the edge of town, even as Kallad outlined his plan.

  Plan. It wasn’t a plan, it wasn’t even close. It was a plan’s ugly sibling, a barely formed notion. The ruse meant to open the door, but after the door was open, Kallad had known that beyond that point there was nothing. “Well, they can, but not without winding up very dead.”

  “Aye, but we don’t need to storm it, we just need to get inside. We don’t need to take the walls down or destroy the place. It’s a simple kill. Remember, we’ve got our man in there already.”

  “You’ve got no intention of getting back out alive, have you?” du Bek had said, finally understanding. We’re talking about suicide.”

  “No, not suicide, my friend, it’s a trade, a life for a life. Killing the monster that killed my people is enough for me, it has to be.”

  “It’s still suicide if you aren’t planning on walking out of that place alive, dwarf, and you know it.”

  Now here he was, his friend dead, trapped in the darkness deep beneath the Blood Count’s castle.

  He would have done anything to go back just a few days and change things. Allie’s face formed in the darkness of his mind’s eye. The boy had lost a father and he didn’t even know it. He wondered how many days and weeks would pass before Allie du Bek stopped running to the window at the sound of a wagon, horses hooves, even footsteps and muffled conversation? How many months would it take for the lad to accept the truth: that his father wasn’t coming home?

  It was one thing to plan his own sacrifice, that was a price he was willing to pay if it meant his people would be avenged, but it was quite another to turn it into the murder of his friend. Too many people had died around him, good people, people who hadn’t deserved their fate. Lothar du Bek was just one of many. That hurt.

  The darkness only served to make the pain worse as his mind taunted him with flashes of memory, and snatches of conversations and long dead voices.

  He lost all sense of time as thirst took hold and hunger gripped his gut.

  Still no one came.

  Was this to be his torture? To be left alone to dwell on his failings and wrestle his ghosts?

  In the darkness, he saw Nevin Kantor, the magician, looking down in distaste at the blood on his clothes.

  If only it was as easy to exorcise the living as it was the dead.

  It would have been easy to give up, to let the darkness take him, but the grudge burned brighter than ever inside him. He would live to see it fulfilled.

  They came for him.

  They were like something out of a nightmare. Huge lumbering things that might have once been human. They dragged him between them. There was nothing comforting in the near dark. He saw things, shadows, shapes, but without the torches flickering he would have been blind to the glimpses of an underworld that didn’t bear witnessing. For all that he lived his life below the surface he wasn’t blessed with extraordinary sight—and the treacherous light was more than capable of playing tricks on him.

  The dead lord of Drakenhof had extended his kingdom far below and beyond the foundations of his castle. The thugs bullied Kallad, stumbling and staggering, through the vast network of tunnels cut into the rock. Lichen and moss grew in the deep cracks and in places a skin of water dribbled over stone.

  A familiar smell seeped into the stale air. It took him a while to place it, but when he did, the knowledge stirred the faintest flicker of hope: the Vampire Count’s thralls had mined so far that they had broken into the web of deep mines that radiated out from core strongholds beneath the World’s Edge Mountains: Karak Varn, Zufbar, Karak Kadrin. He breathed deeply of the air, needing its familiar tang to revitalise himself.

  With that vitality came a yearning for what had been, for what he had lost. It hit him hard. He reached out and touched the rough-hewn rock. He made a promise to himself: there would be a reckoning for his people. There would be justice: retribution.

  He had no idea where they were taking him until they shoved him through a door and barred it behind him as he stumbled into the holding pen.

  “Welcome to the soul cages,” a wizened old man said in a voice as brittle as his bones.

  Kallad could hear voices, cheering, banging and stamping feet. There was a narrow door at the far side of the pen, and a bench where the old man sat. Otherwise, the room was bare. Kallad pressed his face up against the bars, straining to see beyond them.

  “Opens onto the Long Walk, and then up to the fighting pits,” the old man explained. “The Count likes his entertainment raw and bloody.”

  Kallad listened at the bars. It was impossible to gauge the size of the crowd, but its bloodthirsty nature was all too plain. They bayed for blood.

  The clash of steel rang out, and then there was silence.

  The sudden surge of noise from the spectators drowned out the screams of the dying man.

  Kallad could picture it all too perfectly in his head: the clash of swords, savage cuts and wild slashes raining down, barely being parried in a dizzying fight to overcome death by the sheer strength of the sword arm, or to succumb to its inevitability.

  There was an aura of death to the underground chamber. Men, who moments before had strode out to conquer the world, came back on stretchers, dead or dying. There was no glory in the fight. It was a lie, perhaps the greatest one of all.

  The door to the pits slammed open and three ghoulish creatures dragged a body into the pen between them.

  “Best get out there, dwarf. The Count don’t like to be kept waiting.”

  He could hear them calling for him, although they didn’t know his name. The cry of: blood, blood, blood echoed back to him.

  Let them wait, Kallad thought bitterly, and let out an abrasive bark of a laugh as he walked through the door.

  It was a long walk to the surface, made longer by the haunting echo of footsteps and the muted whispers of dead men, remembered forever by the tunnels sandstone walls.

  How many men had walked this same tunnel on the way to their deaths? Too many was the answer. Images of Morr, Lord of the Dead, lined the tunnel walls, whilst nameless souls dominated the floor mosaics.

  The Long Walk, the old man had called it. Kallad was fully aware of the duality of the name.

  Dark-skinned thralls, the life leached from their eyes, guarded the entrance to the pits.

  Kallad strode out into the pit amid roars from the banks of vampiric spectators. The pit was huge, carved out of the bare rock. Stalactites hung down over the killing ground. Huge stone w
alls ringed the pit. There was no easy way to escape. Banks of seating scaled up the walls, climbing almost as high as the longest of the stalactites dripped low. The seats were filled. Thousands of hungry faces stared down at him as he walked into the centre of the pit.

  He stopped and turned, scanning the ranks of the dead for a familiar face. He found Skellan, and beside him, a darker beast with the same mesmeric features as the beast that had slain his father. The blood of other men stained the sand at his feet. The Vampire Count, Konrad von Carstein, sat high up in the stands, most of the seats around him empty. The Count, it appeared, did not like his sycophants getting too close to him.

  Kallad waited for the Blood Count to meet his gaze. The creature wouldn’t.

  As von Carstein rose to his feet, someone shouted, “Death comes!” The crowd took up the chant: “The Count! The Count! The Count!”

  Kallad let the sound wash over him. It was nothing more than bluster, meant to instil fear. He would not let it.

  In the city, he had heard talk that Konrad could trace his blood back to Vashanesh, the first great vampire, and that he enjoyed thousands of years of vampiric taint in this veins.

  The dwarf knew a lie when he heard one. A dynasty of aristocratic blood, or thirty-odd generations of cutthroats, whores, murderers and pirates? The truth was a curious beast in the hands of a ruler like Konrad and, no doubt, those close to him fed the flames of his mad delusion, their worm-tongues worshipping his lineage.

  He shrugged it off. It wasn’t his problem. He was blessedly immune to the vampire’s vanities.

  Von Carstein’s gaze filled with sick longing as he looked towards the shadowed entrance of the pit. Kallad refused to be drawn into looking for his opponent. He would live or he would die, looking back would do nothing to alter that.

  “Do you want to beg for your life, dwarf?” Konrad bellowed. His voice echoed around the subterranean pit.

  Kallad hawked and spat into the sand, “Where’s my axe, coward? Frightened I might kill your pets?”

  Servants of the Vampire Count moved out onto the killing floor. One of them carried Ruinthorn.

  He walked slowly towards Kallad, offering the axe to the dwarf.

  Kallad hefted it, felt its reassuringly familiar weight in his hands, and braced himself for the fight of his life.

  He would feed them all the dead meat they could handle. As the old dwarf proverb went, “The time will come when all gods die”, and as the traps opened on the lion pits, Kallad felt doubt for the first time in years. It was a strange sensation, a quickening in his chest: the realisation that this flesh, this body, didn’t belong to him, that it was a gift from the Creator. Intellectually, he knew what he was feeling: fear. Was this what the others felt when they faced Ruinthorn? He felt a surge of pity for them, the young who had fallen to his axe. Were they somewhere now, in the Halls of the Dead, pitying him in turn?

  He saw Skellan smiling down on him, saw Konrad seemingly hypnotised by the creature emerging from the darkness of the pits: a naked beast-faced vampire.

  The creature roared, dropping into a fighting crouch. Even as it did so, the beast’s back arched and stretched as it transformed into a huge black furred dire wolf.

  It was the largest wolf he had ever seen.

  Is it that time, Grimna, thought Kallad? Is my life counted now in seconds? Then more bitterly: it is if you think it is, fool. Fight for your damned life!

  He brought Ruinthorn to bear, kissing the rune embossed on its huge butterfly blades. His world narrowed down to the axe and the creature he had to kill. His knuckles were white. His hands were shaking.

  Skellan leaned over and whispered something to the Vampire Count, but Kallad was in no position to wonder what.

  Konrad laughed. His laughter, like his words before, rolled around the cramped subterranean pit, taunting Kallad as he stood down there in the middle of the killing floor.

  He would not die here. He would avenge his people. He would find Kantor and wring the life from his body. He would live.

  The assembly of vampires would not be satisfied by mere blood, had come to witness slaughter, and to a beast they were hungry for it.

  The wolf circled warily, jowls curled back, nostrils flared as it smelled blood on the air. It moved slowly, a curious kind of recognition on its twisted face. Kallad studied the monster as he would any other opponent, gauging it for weaknesses, assessing its strengths.

  For a second, the world froze, the beast rising out of its crouch, Konrad’s mouth wide in laughter. Kallad didn’t move as much as a muscle.

  He had long since stopped wondering what it would feel like to die. The wolf loosed a baleful howl. Still, Kallad didn’t move.

  The wolf circled him.

  He stood square and watched the creature as he would have watched any other opponent, facing it down, and showing no fear, despite the fact that he was suddenly aware of every drop of blood pumping through his veins and the very real mortality it ensured. It had weaknesses. Everything did. The trick was believing that, and not succumbing to the bone-freezing fear that was doubt.

  The wolf circled him, its massive claws raking the wet sand. Kallad’s grip on the axe tightened.

  He swept Ruinthorn through a dazzling combination of sweeps and arcs, but showmanship had no noticeable effect on the creature, and only served to tire the dwarf. The wolf continued its relentless circling, claws churning through the sand.

  A deathly hush settled over the crowd.

  Kallad held his ground, content to let the wolf exhaust itself going around and around in circles.

  He lunged forwards, shifting his weight onto his front foot and swept the butt of the axe forwards, reversing the blow to test his foe. The wolf swatted the steel blade away as if it was an irritating fly. Still, the force of the impact reverberated down the length of Kallad’s arm, giving him a very real idea of the sheer brute strength of the thing he faced.

  The wolf let out a roar of rage, reared and lunged forwards. Its claws raked across Kallad’s cheek before he could spin away. The wound stung unnaturally as the taint of unlife burned itself into his skin.

  Kallad spat at the dirt. Ignoring the fire beneath his skin, the dwarf threw himself at the wolf, Ruinthorn’s twin blades ripping into the creature’s thick hide. The wolf shrieked: a distressingly human sound as it lost focus on its bestial form and began to shift back into its human guise. The crowd roared, a shockingly animalistic sound.

  He looked up at Konrad, and beside him Skellan. The Blood Count’s smile was vicious. Kallad spat another wad of bloody phlegm onto the wet sand.

  Wounded, and caught between forms, the wolf-man was more dangerous than ever. The echo of human cunning blazed behind its eyes. Somehow, it retained the natural abilities of both forms, making it twice as deadly.

  The wolf-man slammed its half-formed fists against its chest and leapt.

  Kallad threw himself to the floor as the thing’s claws raked through the air where his head had been a second before.

  It launched a second desperate attack, before Kallad could scrabble to his feet.

  The crowd was screaming.

  The beast came down on top of Kallad, its powerful jaws closing like a vice around his nose and the side of his face. The pain was incredible. Fifty wounds punctured his ruined face. Kallad screamed, a real full-bellied desperate scream, as he fought the all-consuming blackness that threatened to engulf him. He felt his own piss run down the inside of his legs. This wasn’t how he wanted to die. There was no honour in it, no restitution for the dead, and no price for Grunberg, for Kellus, for Sammy and du Bek and all of the others.

  He owed them more than this.

  Kallad’s head swam with sickness.

  There was joy in the creature’s eyes, Kallad saw, right until the last when he brought Ruinthorn around over its back and split it open at the spine, parting hide, bone and flesh in a killing blow. In that last second of life, a flicker of recognition passed between them, killer and vic
tim, and then the beast was slain. Kallad pushed the monstrosity to the side and struggled out from beneath it.

  Struggling to his feet, Kallad felt their sickness wash over him.

  He found the beast that had killed his father, met his gaze and did not flinch as he said, “And now I am coming for you.”

  Konrad von Carstein did not look happy, but beside him, Jon Skellan looked positively delighted by Kallad’s victory.

  Then a wave of dizziness took him. He staggered, but he did not collapse.

  Kallad turned away from the Blood Count and walked back towards the soul cages.

  The vampire’s thralls swarmed over him as he entered the tunnel. They pulled at him, trying to tear Ruinthorn from his grip. Kallad snarled and cracked one of the men’s skulls off one of the many images of Morr decorating the wall. The thrall twitched as he slumped to the floor. A bloody red rose blossomed just below his receding hairline. Kallad stepped over the man’s legs.

  “Who’s next? No need to all rush at once, there’s plenty to go around.” His grin was manic as he thundered an unforgiving fist into the side of a second thrall’s head. He made the mistake of getting in the dwarfs way.

  Three more thralls stood between him and the cage door.

  Kallad dropped into a fighting crouch. Ruinthorn, held level at his waist, rested easily in his hands. He turned the blade over and over.

  “You want to die, lads, then take one step forward, otherwise get the hell out of my way.”

  They gave him no choice: as one they charged.

  Fighting at close quarters in a cramped tunnel was far from ideal, but against unarmed men with no skill for the game, it was little more than butchery.

  They were unarmed and underfed. They didn’t stand a chance.

  In less than half a minute, Kallad was stepping over their corpses.

  The old man looked up as he pushed open the door. He smiled. There was genuine warmth to it, “You made it back, then, eh? I bet that pleased the Count no end.”