“Stop staring, woman, it is quite unbecoming.” Leopold snapped. “And you, sir.” He turned his attention to the stranger. “Thank you for coming, but as I am sure you can see, you are intruding on a somewhat personal moment. My brother is failing fast and, as you only die once, we would like to share his last few minutes, just the family, I am sure you understand. If you care to wait until… ah… afterwards, I would be pleased to see you in one of the reception rooms to discuss whatever business you have with the count?” He gestured toward the door, but instead of leaving the newcomer removed his white gloves, teasing them off one finger at a time, and took Isabella’s hand. He raised it to his lips and let the kiss linger there, ignoring Leopold’s blustering, the convulsing priest and the chirurgeon as they were clearly of no interest to him.
“I am Vlad eldest of the von Carstein family—” the newcomer said to the dying count, ignoring Leopold’s posturing.
“I don’t know the family,” Leopold interrupted somewhat peevishly.
“And neither would I expect you to,” the stranger countered smoothly. He regarded Leopold as though he were nothing more interesting than an insect trapped in a jar of honey, the sole fascination being in watching it drown in the sticky sweetness. “But I can trace my lineage to a time before van Hal, to the founding of the Empire and beyond, which is more than can be said of many of today’s nobility, yes? True nobility is a legacy of the blood, not something earned as the spoils of war, wouldn’t you agree?” Vlad unclasped the hasp on his travel cloak and draped it over the back of the crimson chair. He set the wolfs head cane down to rest beside it, laying his white gloves over the snarling silver fangs, the wet hat on top of the gloves. His raven black hair was bound in a single braid that reached midway down the length of his back. There was an arrogance about the man that Leopold found disquieting. He moved with the grace of a natural predator stalking tender prey but equally there was no denying the fellow possessed a certain magnetism.
“Indeed,” Leopold agreed. “And what, pray tell, brings you to us on such a foul night? Does my brother owe you thirty silvers, or perhaps he had your betrothed executed on one of his foolish whims? Let me assure you, as the new count, I will endeavour to make good on whatever debt you feel the family owes you. It is the very least I can do.”
“My business is with the count, not his lackey.”
“I don’t see what—”
There is no need for you to see anything, sir. I was merely in the vicinity, travelling to the wedding of a close friend, and I thought it right and proper to pledge fealty to the current Count van Drak, to offer my services in any way he might see fit.”
In the bed Otto chuckled mirthlessly. The chuckle gave way to another violent fit of coughing.
“Marry…” Otto’s eyes blazed with vindictive glee. “Yes,” the dying count hissed maliciously. “Yes… yes.”
“Preposterous! I will not stand for this nonsense!” Leopold spluttered, a flush of colour rising in his cheeks so the broken blood vessels showed through angrily. “In a few hours I will be count and I will have you drawn and quartered and your head on a spike before sunrise, do you hear me, fool?”
Otto managed something halfway between a cough and a laugh.
On the floor, the priest of Sigmar was gripped by a second, more violent, series of spasms. The chirurgeon struggled to hold him fast and prevent the old man from biting off or swallowing his tongue in the depths of the fit.
“Like… hell… will… see you ruined first!” Otto spat, an echo of his true self in his final defiance.
“Sir,” Vlad said, kneeling at the bedside. “If that would be your will, I came to be of service, an answer to your prayer, and as such I would gladly accept the hand of your daughter Isabella as my wife, and would that you were alive to see us married.”
“No!” Leopold grabbed at Vlad’s shoulder.
The priest’s heels drummed on the floor punctuating Leopold’s outburst.
“Excuse me,” Vlad said softly, and then rose and turned in one fluid motion, his hand snaking out with dizzying speed to close around Leopold van Drak’s throat.
“You are annoying me, little man,” Vlad rasped, lifting Leopold up onto the tips of his toes, so that they were eye to eye. He held him there, Leopold kicking out weakly and flapping at Vlad’s hand as the fingers tightened mercilessly around his throat, choking the very life out of him. Leopold struggled to draw even a single breath. He batted and clawed at Vlad’s hand but the man’s grip was relentless.
And then, almost casually, Vlad tossed him aside.
Leopold slumped to the floor, retching and gasping for breath.
“Now, we do appear to have a priest, could you rouse him?” Vlad von Carstein told the chirurgeon. “Then we can get on with the ceremony. I would hazard that Count van Drak does not have long left, and it would be a shame to rob him of the joy of seeing his beloved daughter wed, would it not?”
Mellin nodded but didn’t move. He was staring at Leopold as he struggled to rise.
“Now,” Vlad said. It was barely above a whisper but it was as though the word itself possessed power. The chirurgeon fumbled for his bag and knocked it over, sending its contents skittering across the floor. On hands and knees he picked through the mess until he found a small astringent salve. Shaking, he smeared the ointment on Brother Guttman’s upper lip. The Sigmarite priest shuddered and came to, spluttering and slapping at his mouth. Seeing Vlad for the first time, the aged priest recoiled, reflexively making the sign of Sigmar’s hammer in the air between them.
“We have need of your services, priest,” Vlad said, his voice like silk as his words wrapped around the priest, caressing the man into doing his bidding. “The count would have his daughter wed before he passes.”
“You cannot do this to me! I won’t allow this to happen! This is my birthright! Sylvania, this castle… it is all mine!” Leopold blustered. He needed the support of the wall to help him stand.
“On the contrary, good sir. The count can do anything—anything—that he so wishes. He is a law unto himself. If he bade me reach into your chest and rip out your heart with my bare hands and feed it to his dogs, well,” he held his hands out, palms up, then turned them over as though inspecting them. “It might prove difficult, but if the count willed it, believe me, it would be done.”
He turned to Isabella. “And what of you, my lady? It is customary for the bride to say ‘yes’ at some point during the proceedings.”
“When my father dies he”, Isabella levelled a finger at the cringing Leopold, “inherits his estate, the castle, the title, everything that by rights should be mine. All my life I’ve lived in the shadow of the van Drak men. I’ve had no life. I’ve played the dutiful daughter. I’ve been possessed—and now, my father is dying and I hunger for freedom. I hunger for it so desperately I can almost taste it, and in you, perhaps finally, I can realise it. So give me what I want, and I will give myself to you, body and soul.”
“And what would that be?”
She turned to look at her father in his death bed, and saw the malicious delight in his face. She smiled: “Everything. But first, a token… A morning gift, I believe they call it. From the groom to the bride as proof of his love.”
“This is ridiculous!” Leopold shouted, his voice cracking with the strain of it.
“Anything,” Vlad said, ignoring him. “If it is in my power to give, you shall have it.”
She smiled then, and it was as though she sloughed off the years of subjugation with that simple expression of pleasure. She drew him to her and whispered something in his ear as he kissed her delicately on the cheek.
“As you wish,” Vlad said.
He turned to face an apoplectic Leopold.
“I am a fair man, Leopold van Drak. I would not see you suffer unduly so I have a proposition for you. I will give you time to ponder it. Five minutes ought to suffice. Think about it, while the priest gets ready for the ceremony, and my wife to be makes sure her
father is comfortable, and then, and only then, after five full minutes have passed, if you can look me in the eye and tell me that you truly wish me to stand aside, well then, I will have to accede to your will.”
“Are you serious?” Leopold asked somewhat incredulously. He hadn’t expected the stranger to back down so easily.
“Always. What is a man if there is no honour to be found in his word? You have my word. Now, do you accept?”
Leopold met Vlad’s coldly glowing eyes. The startling intensity of the hatred he saw blazing there had him involuntarily backing up a step. He felt the wall and the ridge of the windowsill dig into the base of his back.
“I do,” he said, knowing it was a trap even as he allowed himself to be shepherded into it.
“Good,” Vlad von Carstein said flatly. In four quick strides he was across the room. With one hand he picked Leopold up by the scruff of the neck, the other he rammed into the man’s chest, splintering the bone as his fingers closed around the already dead man’s heart. In a moment of shocking savagery he wrenched it free and hurled the corpse through the window. There were no screams.
The dead man’s heart in his hand, Vlad leaned out through the window. Lightning crashed in the distance. The eye of the storm had passed over Drakenhof and was moving away. In the lightning’s afterglow he saw the outline of Leopold’s body spread out on a flat rooftop three storeys below, arms and legs akimbo in a whorish sprawl.
Isabella joined him at the broken window, linking her fingers with his, slick with her uncle’s blood. But for the blood the gesture might have been mistaken for an intimate one. Instead it hinted at the darkness inside her: by taking his hand she was claiming him and the life he offered every bit as much as he was claiming her and the power her heritage represented.
The power.
“Your gift,” he said, offering the heart to her.
“Throw it away, now that it has stopped beating I have no use for it,” she said, drawing him away from the window.
Somewhere in the night a wolf howled. It was a haunting lament made more so by the wind and the rain.
“It sounds so… lonely.”
“It is missing its mate. Wolves are one of the few creatures that mate for life. It will know no other love. It is the creature’s curse to be alone.”
Isabella shivered, drawing Vlad closer to her. “Let’s have no more talk of loneliness.” Rising onto tiptoes she kissed the man who promised to give her everything her heart desired.
CHAPTER ONE
A Fisher of Devils
A SYLVANIAN BORDER TOWN
Early spring, 2009
The land was devoid of life. No insects chirped, no frogs croaked, there was no bird song, not even the whisper of the breeze stirring leaves in the trees. The silence was unnatural. The malignancy, Jon Skellan realised, infected everything. It was ingrained in the very earth of the land itself. Its sickness ate away at everything; decay only an inch beneath the surface. The trees, still bare despite the turning of the season into what ought to have been the first flush of spring, were rotten to the core. Scanning the skeletal branches overhead Skellan saw that the only nest was empty, and judging by the way the twigs had been unravelled by the weather, had been empty for a long time. It was a spiritual canker. The land—this land—was soaked in blood, cruelty and despair.
Skellan shuddered.
Beside him, Stefan Fischer made the sign of Sigmar’s hammer.
The two of them were chasing ghosts but what better place to come looking for them than the barren lands of Sylvania?
“Verhungem Wood. Starvation Wood, or Hunger Wood. I’m not sure about the precise interpretation of the dialect into Reikspiel. Still, the name seems disturbingly appropriate, doesn’t it?”
“Aye, it does,” Fischer agreed, looking at the rows of dead and dying trees. It was difficult to believe that less than two days walk behind them spring in all of her beauty was unfolding in the daffodils and crocuses along the banks of the River Stir. “Forests are meant to be living things, full of living things.” And by saying it out loud, Fischer voiced what had been bothering Skellan for the last hour. There was a total lack of life around them. “Not like this blasted, barren place. It’s unnatural.”
Skellan uncorked the flask he carried at his hip and took a deep swig of water. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and sighed. They were a long way from home—and in more ways than simply distance. This place was unlike anywhere he had ever been before. He had heard tales of Sylvania, but like most he assumed they were exaggerated with fishwives’ gossip and the usual tall tales of self-proclaimed adventurers. The reality was harsher than he had imagined. The land had suffered under centuries of abuse and misrule, which of course made their arrival here inevitable. It was their calling; to root out evil, to cleanse the world of the black arts and the villainous scum who dabbled in them.
The pair had been called many things; the simplest, though least accurate, being witch hunters. Jon Skellan found it interesting that the agony of grief could earn a man such an epithet. He hadn’t made a conscious choice to become the man he was today. Life had shaped him, bent him, buckled him, but it had not broken him. Now, seven years to the month, if not the week, since the riders had come burning and looting to his home, here he was, chasing ghosts, or rather looking to finally lay them to rest.
“All roads lead to hell,” he said, bitterly.
“Well, this one brought us to Sylvania,” Fischer said.
“Same place, my friend, same godforsaken place.”
The ruining of one lifestyle and the birth of their new one had been shockingly quick. Skellan and Fischer had married sisters and become widowers within a quarter of an hour of each other. The highs and the lows of their lives were bound together. Fate can be cruel like that. Skellan looked at his brother-in-law. No one would ever mistake them for family. At thirty-six, Fischer was nine years older than Skellan, a good six inches taller and a stone heavier where the muscles had started to slide into fat, but the two men shared a single disturbing similarity: their eyes. Their eyes said they had seen a future filled with happiness, and it had been snatched away from them. The loss had aged them far beyond their years. Their souls were old, hardened. They had experienced the worst that life could throw at them, and they had survived. Now it was about vengeance.
A beetle the size of a mouse skittered across the ground less than a foot in front of his feet. It was the first living thing they had encountered in hours and it was hardly encouraging.
“Have you ever wondered what it might have been like if…” He didn’t need to clarify the “if. They both knew what he was talking about.
“Every day” Fischer said, not looking at him. “It’s like walking out of the storyteller’s circle halfway through his tale… you don’t know how it is supposed to end and you keep obsessing over it. What would life have been like if Leyna and Lizbet hadn’t been murdered? Where would we be now? Not here, that’s for sure.”
“No… not here.” Skellan agreed. “No use getting maudlin.” He straightened as he said it, drawing himself upright as though shrugging off the heavy burden of sadness thinking about Lizbet always brought with it. It was, of course, an act. He could no more shrug off his grief than he could forget what caused it in the first place. It was simply a case of managing it. Skellan had long since come to terms with his wife’s death. He accepted it. It had happened. He didn’t forgive it, and he didn’t forget.
There had been seven riders that day. It had taken time, almost seven years to be exact, but six of them were in the ground now, having paid the ultimate price for their sins. Skellan and Fischer had seen to that, and in doing so they showed the men no quarter. Like their victims, like Leyna and Lizbet and the other souls they sent to Morr in their frenzy they burned. It wasn’t pretty but then death never is. They caught up with the first of the murderers almost three months later, in a tavern drunk to the point where he could barely stand. Skellan had dragged him outside, du
nked him in the horse’s watering trough until the murderer came up coughing and spluttering and sober enough to know he was in trouble. The knee is a very delicate hinge protected by a bone cap. Skellan shattered one of the man’s kneecaps with a brutal kick through the joint, and dragged him screaming into the room he lodged in. “You’ve got a chance,” Skellan had said. “Not a very good chance, but more of one than you gave my wife.” It wasn’t true. Unable to stand, let alone walk, the man didn’t have a chance against the flames and the smoke—and even if by some miracle he had dragged himself clear of the fire, Skellan and Fischer were waiting outside to see he joined the ranks of Morr’s dead.
There was no satisfaction in it. No sense of a wrong having been righted or justice having been done.
It was all about vengeance and one by one the murderers burned.
At first it had been like a sickness inside him, and it had only grown worse until it became an all-consuming need to make the murderers pay for what they had done. But even their deaths didn’t take the pain away, so for a while he made them die harder.
By the time they caught up with the fourth murderer, a snivelling wretch of a man, Skellan had devised his torture jacket. The coat had extra long sleeves and buckles so that they could be fastened in such a way that the wearer was trapped, helpless. The coat itself was doused in lamp oil. It was a brutal way to die, but Skellan justified it to himself by saying he was doing it for Lizbet and for all the others the murderer had tortured and burned alive. Lying to himself was a skill he had perfected over the seven-year hunt. He knew full well what he was doing. He was extracting vengeance for the dead.
It was guilt, he knew, that drove him. Guilt for the fact that he had failed them in life. Guilt for the fact that he hadn’t been there to save them from the savagery of their murderers, and his guilt was an ugly thing because once it had wormed its way into his head it refused to give up its hold. It ate away at his mind. It convinced him that there was something he could have done. That it was his fault that Lizbet and Leyna and all of the others were dead.
[Von Carstein 01] - Inheritance Page 2