Genevieve 04 - Silver Nails

by Jack Yeovil

  The door was hanging open now. Since Groeteschele and Joh had pushed through it, he hadn't bothered to pull it shut. Anything that could so neatly decapitate Freder wouldn't be bothered by a lock. Rotwang preferred to see what was coming at him.

  Outside in the gloom, he could make out a bare stone wall, interrupted by niches containing long-unlit lamps. Constant Drachenfels was rumoured to favour human oil in his lamps. It would not have been out of character for the Great Enchanter, whose reign stretched back to the time of Sigmar and beyond.

  'Mr Rotwang,' asked the child, 'when are you going to try and kill me?'

  Rotwang turned and looked at the open face of the child, feeling her words like the slap of an armoured gauntlet across his cheek. He held up his sword, out in the open. He hoped she could see it was no immediate threat to her.

  But again, he had no answer for her. Something foul-smelling came out of the darkness behind him, and a claw-gripped hand fastened on his shoulder

  The Old Woman fastened on Rotwang's mind, and burrowed deep. She found the wolf, and she turned it loose.

  Rotwang was raising his sword to the Lady Melissa. Joh assumed he had gone mad, and laid a hand on the bandit's shoulder, spinning him around.

  Rotwang's eyes were yellow, and his nose was reassembling as a snout. The creature opened its mouth and disclosed pointed, discoloured teeth. It was still Rotwang×his front tooth was still chipped×but a beast was rising inside him.

  The little girl backed away and climbed up onto her canopied bed. She held onto a bedpost and watched.

  Joh leaned against the doorjamb, a dreadful numbness seeping from his swollen shoulder through his entire body.

  Rotwang lashed out and he ducked aside. Still, the creature's claws brushed his head, tearing lines in his scalp.

  The Rotwang-thing had thrown its sword away. The bandit didn't need the knives sheathed on his belt. He had knives in his fingers.

  It was strange that you could ride with someone for five years and never know certain things about them.

  Joh's knees felt weak. His arm was useless. He was going to die soon, and he thought the easiest thing to do would be to offer his throat to Rotwang's teeth and nails. But he had been surviving too long to take the easy way out.

  His scimitar was gone, and his knives. But he still had his boots. And his silver spurs.

  Silver. If Rotwang were a true werewolf, he would be averse to silver.

  Rotwang lunged at him, coming on all fours. Joh reached up with his left hand for the top of the door and got a grip, hauling himself into the air. His left shoulder felt lanced, but he managed to get himself aloft.

  Rotwang, his charge started, passed under him. He jabbed down with his heels, and dug in as deep as he could.

  The creature howled like a wounded wolf and reared up. Joh was pushed against the lintel and lost his grip. His head smashed against the stone and he felt something break inside.

  He was falling, and he was face-down on the floor. The howling thing was on his back. He kicked upwards, hoping to slice with his spurs.

  The weight was gone and he tried to roll over.

  Melissa was still watching, as she might do a puppetshow at court. She was giggling and clapping. There was something seriously wrong with the way the little girl had been brought up.

  He reached for his heel and twisted one of his spurs off. The spiked star spun as he sliced the air with it.

  Rotwang was suffering. His clothes were torn, and his thickly-furred body was bleeding.

  Man and monster got shakily to their feet.

  Rotwang breathed noisily, blood and saliva dripping from his twisted snout. His shoulders were huge, and his claws extended.

  Joh held up the spur.

  Rotwang rushed at him, and he chopped into the monster's face, drawing the spur through his eye into his snout.

  Claws sunk into the meat of his belly, and he broke away, leaving his weapon lodged in the werewolf's face.

  He pressed the flaps of skin on his stomach, holding his insides in. He could feel almost nothing.

  That was bad.

  Rotwang was leaning against the bed, shaking and twitching as he changed back into human form. Blood streamed from his wounded head.

  Melissa reached out and patted his shoulder, smoothing the thinning fur. She could have been looking after a family pet.

  The rich. They were barely human.

  Melissa's expression changed. She looked almost sad as Rotwang's wolfish growls faded into the human sounds of painful sobs. The spur was still stuck into his head. She opened her pretty little mouth, and Joh saw the unnaturally sharp teeth flash as she fastened on Rotwang's neck, tearing through to the vein.

  A gusher of blood came out of the bandit, and Melissa suckled greedily.

  * * * * *

  The Old Woman drank the bandit's wolf-spiced blood, feeling his spirit depart as she stole his life from him.

  He had killed others. Many times, he had killed without mercy. She did only what was right.

  When it was done, when Rotwang was empty, she wrestled his head off and turned her attention to the wounded man in the corner.

  'Hello Mr Joh,' she said, 'does that hurt?'

  Melissa, the old woman who seemed to be a child, knelt by him and watched as he died.

  'You were my favourite bandit, you know,' she said.

  He couldn't feel pain any more, but from the writhing wetness he couldn't contain in his gutwound, he knew it was bad.

  'How old?'

  Melissa daintily pushed her hair aside. Her eyes were remarkable. Joh should have noticed them before. Eyes of experience in a face of innocence.

  'Very old,' she said. 'Over eleven hundred years. I never grew up.'

  The cold was settling in now. Joh felt it travelling up his body.

  'Your family?'

  She was wistful, almost melancholy. 'Dead and dust, I'm afraid. My human family, at least. I have sons-in-darkness, but none who would have paid you a ransom.'

  He was shivering now. Seconds lasted for an age. The final grains of sand of his life took an eternity to drip through the glass waist. Was this death? A slowing curve that forever dragged out the pain, but never really ended. Or was that life for Lady Melissa d'Acques?

  He had one last chance. Silver. Vampires like the stuff no more than werewolves. He scrabbled for his other heel, but his fingers seemed swollen, awkward, and wouldn't respond. He cut himself. Melissa took one of Rotwang's dropped knives and deftly cut away the spur, flipping it to the other side of the room without touching it. She smiled at him, the sympathy of a victor. There was nothing more to do but die.

  She took a dainty kerchief and dabbed the smears away from her bee-stung lips. At once a child and an ancient, she was beautiful but beyond his understanding.

  'Kiss me,' he said.

  She tipped his head away from his throat, and granted him his wish.

  The next morning, the sun rose over the Fortress of Drachenfels, and a small human figure made its way down the mountain towards the road.

  Lady Melissa left the bodies were they were. Those she had drained were decapitated. The bandits would not be her get. She was more responsible than some undead fools who let loose a plague of thoughtless offspring.

  She hauled her bulky but light trunks down to the road and made a canopied chair of them.

  Sunlight hurt her eyes a little, but she was not one of the Truly Dead bloodsuckers who burst into flames after cock's crow.

  As the sun climbed, she settled down to wait. The road below Drachenfels was ill-travelled, but someone would come along eventually.

  Under her makeshift sunshade, she closed her eyes and slept.

  THE IGNORANT ARMIES

  And we are here as on a darkling plain

  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

  Where ignorant armies clash by night.

  ×Matthew Arnold, 'Dover Beach'

  Settling Tsarina down, he saw the frozen blood
around her hooves. The last blacksmith's nails had gone too deep. The horse's ankles weren't good, and the last three weeks' ride had been hard on her. She'd barely been worth the price they'd paid for her when she was fresh. Now, she was a dependent. And they couldn't use dependents.

  'There, Tsarina, there,' he said, smoothing the horse's mane, feeling her fragile warmth through thick hair. Her flesh wouldn't be warm much longer. Not through another snow, another skirmish, or another day's ride.

  As always, Vukotich had been right. When they had bargained successfully with the trader months ago, Johann had suggested calling the pair Tsar and Tsarina in honour of the ruling house of Kislev. The Iron Man, face unreadable under his scars, had snorted and said, 'Johann, you don't give a name to something you may have to eat.'

  Vukotich had been in the northern forests of Kislev before, as a mercenary in the service of Tsar Radii Bokha, subduing an insubordinate boyar, fending off minor incursions from the Wastes. He had known what he was talking about. This wasn't the Old World, this was a cruel country. You could see it in the faces of the people, in the iron-hard ground and the slate-coloured sky. In the forests, you could see it in the gallows-trees and the looted graves. Everything had been hacked and scarred into misery. In the hostelries, the songs had been brutal or gloomy, the food was like spiced leather, and all the jokes referred to filthy practices involving the livestock.

  In the dusk, Johann saw Vukotich, a spiky shadow in furs, emerging from the trees with an armload of firewood. Stripped of the ice-threaded bark, the wood would burn smokily, but it would burn the night through. Vukotich dumped his load in the centre of the dark brown circle from which he had cleared the snow. What little light was left in the sky had to fight its way down through four-hundred foot trees. They should have made camp an hour ago to be relatively secure by nightfall, but they had been pushing on, Tsarina had been limping, and×just maybe, without consciously working at it×they had wanted to be a temptation to Cicatrice's tail-draggers. Sigmar knows, Johann thought, it would be sweet to be done with this business.

  The horse whinnied, and Johann felt her hot breath on his wrist. He loosened a drawstring and pulled off his glove, making a fist against the cold. Then he stroked the horse again, twining his fingers in her mane. The beast knew, he could tell. He could see the panic in her clouded eye, but she was too tired, too resigned, to fight back. Tsarina would welcome death. Vukotich stood over man and horse, his hand on his knifehilt.

  'Do you want me to do it?'

  'No,' said Johann, drawing one of his own knives×a hunter's pride, one edge honed to razor sharpness, the other serrated like a joiner's saw. 'I named her, I'll finish her'

  He breathed into Tsarina's nostrils, soothing the horse with his naked left hand, his gauntleted right bringing up the knife. He looked into her eyes, and felt×imagined he felt×the animal willing him to be swift. He got a good grip, and drove into Tsarina's neck, puncturing the major artery. He sawed through muscle and gristle to make sure the job was well done, and then shuffled back on his knees to avoid the spray. He felt the frozen earth through his padded knee-protectors. His britches would be speckled with Tsarina's red tomorrow. The horse kicked and emptied fast, the spirit flown forever. Johann made silent prayer to Taal, the God of Nature and Wild Places, one of the few gods he bothered to appease these days. He stood up and brushed bloody snow from his clothes.

  Vukotich knelt and put his hand in the flow of blood as one might put one's hand in a mountain stream. Johann had seen him do the like before. It was some superstition of his native land. He knew what the man would say now, 'innocent blood'. It was like a little prayer. One of Vukotich's sayings was 'never underestimate the power of innocent blood.' If pressed, the old soldier would invoke the blessed name of Sigmar, and trace the sign of the hammer in the dust. Johann shied away from magic×he had had some bad experiences×but all knew of Sigmar's harsh benevolence. If there were miracles to be had, only he could be even half-counted upon. But Sigmar's mercy, Sigmar's hammer and Sigmar's muttered name had done nothing for the horse. She was still now. Tsarina was gone, and they had meat for two weeks' journey in this forest.

  Vukotich wiped his hand clean, flexed the fingers as if invigorated, and produced his flint. Johann turned, and saw his companion had constructed a simple pyramid fire, building a tent of logs over a nest of twigs. Dry grass was hard to come by here, but Vukotich could root out mosses and combustible fungi to start a blaze. Vukotich struck his flint, the fire took, and Johann smelled the fresh smell of woodsmoke. His eyes watered as a cloud of smoke wrapped his head, but he kept his place. Best to ignore the discomfort. The smoke column passed, twisting around to reach for the other man. It was an infallible rule of the fire, that it would have to smoke in someone's face.

  'So it's horse tonight?' asked Vukotich.

  'Yes, we'll have to cure the meat tomorrow if we're to carry on.'

  'Is there any question of that?'

  'No,' Johann said, as he always had.

  'You wouldn't lose any honour if you were to return to your estates. They must have gone to ruin since we left. I'll continue the tracking. I'm too old to change. But you needn't keep up with it. You could make a life for yourself. You're the baron now.'

  He had heard the speech before and many variations on it, almost from the beginning. Never had he seriously considered returning to his ruined home, and never×Johann thought×had Vukotich expected him to. It was part of the game they played, master and servant, pupil and tutor, man of iron and man of meat. In some circumstances, Johann knew, meat breaks less easily than iron.

  'Very well.'

  Johann set to butchering the horse. It was one of the many skills he wouldn't have acquired had he been a better shot at sixteen. If his shaft hadn't missed the deer and pierced Wolf's shoulder If Cicatrice's band hadn't chosen to lay waste the von Mecklenberg estate If the old baron had employed more men like Vukotich, and less like Schunzel, his then-steward If

  But young Johann had been fumble-fmgered with a longbow, Cicatrice had realised too well the weakness of the Empire's outlying fiefdoms, and Schunzel had fussed more over wall-hangings and Bretonnian chefs than battlements and men-at-arms. And now, when he would ordinarily have been currying favour for his family at Karl-Franz's court in Altdorf, Baron Johann von Mecklenberg was gutting a nag in a clearing dangerously near the frozen top of the world. The Arts of a Nobleman. If he were ever to write a book, that's the title he would want to use.

  Together, they pulled strips off the carcass and hung them on a longsword supported over the fire by two cleft branches. It was black from many previous services, stained by dried-in grease, and could never be used in a polite engagement. Throughout his education, Johann had been taught that weapons were the jewels of a nobleman, and should be treated as a master musician would his instrument, a sorcerer his spells and spices, or a courtesan her face and figure. Now, he knew a sword was a tool for keeping you alive, and that meant filling your insides far more often than it did exposing someone else's.

  'You saw the tracks today?' asked Vukotich.

  'Four, more-or-less human, travelling slowly, left behind for us/

  Vukotich nodded. Johann sensed his teacher's rough pride in him, but knew the old man would never admit it. The schooling was over, this was life

  'They'll turn soon. If not tonight, then the next night. Two of them are weak. They've been on foot from three days into the forest. The skaven is lamed. Pus in his bootprints. If he lives, he'll lose a foot to the gangrene. They'll all be tired. They'll want to get it over with while they still have an advantage.'

  'We're on foot too, now.'

  'Yes, but they don't know that.' In the firelight, Vukotich's face was a dancing mass of red and black shadows. 'Two of them will be broken, given this duty because Cicatrice wants to get rid of them. But since the Middle Mountains, he will have stopped underestimating us. He lost enough raiders in that pass to make him think us more than a nuisance. So, two of them will b
e good. One of them will be a champion, or something very like. It'll be altered. Twisted, but not crippled. It's something big, something enhanced. Something they think will take care of us.'

  His eyes shone with flame. 'I'll watch first.'

  Johann was aware of the aching in his back, his legs, the cold that had settled into his bones when they crossed the snowline and would never×he dreaded×depart. How much more would Vukotich, with his many past wounds, with the increasing weight of his years, feel the aches and the chills? The Iron Man never complained, never flagged, but that didn't mean he had no feeling, no pain. Johann had seen him when he felt unobserved, seen him sag in his saddle, or massage his much-broken left arm. After all, the man couldn't go on forever. Then what?

  What of Cicatrice? What of Wolf?

  They ate, chewing the tough meat slowly, and Vukotich mulled some spiced wine. Warm inside at least, Johann climbed into his bedroll in his clothes, pulling the furs about him. He slept with his knife in his hand, and dreamed

  The Baron of Sudenland had two sons, Johann and Wolf. They were fine boys and would be fine young men. Johann, the older by three years, would be baron after his father, and an elector of the Empire. He would be a warrior, a diplomat and a scholar. Wolf, who would be his regent when the business of the Empire took him to Altdorf, would be Johann's strong right hand. He would be a jurist, a master huntsman and an engineer. Joachim, the old baron, was proud to have two such sons, who would, upon his death, preserve his lands and bear his responsibilities. And the people of the barony were pleased they would not have to live under the whims and woes of petty tyrants, as did so many others throughout the Empire. The old baron was much loved, and his sons would do him honour. New words were made up for old songs, celebrating each achievement of the growing boys.

  The old baron engaged many tutors for his sons; tutors in history and geography, in the sciences, in the ways of the gods, in etiquette and the finer accomplishments, in music and literature, in the skills of war and the demands of peace, even in the rudiments of magic. Among these was a warrior who had served throughout the Old World and beyond. The survivor of numberless campaigns, he never talked of his origins, his upbringing, even of his native land, and he had but one name: Vukotich. The baron had first met Vukotich on the field of combat, during a border dispute with an unruly neighbour, and had personally captured the mercenary. Neither man spoke of it, but after the battle, Vukotich put aside his profession and swore allegiance only to the House of von Mecklenberg.