He didn’t have an answer—at least not one he cared to share. “Trying to get… home.”
“Magda, fetch the poor man some broth. Jens, run to my house and get Olof to give you our extra blankets.” The woman commanded. She turned to Fischer, her voice immediately softening. “What’s your name, love?”
“Stefan Fischer.”
“Well Stefan, welcome to our home. You look like you need a place to rest your head. We ain’t rich and we ain’t proud but we don’t mind helpin’ folk in need. So rest up. We’ll talk when you’ve had some of Magda’s broth.” She smiled at him, and for a moment at least, the nightmares of the last few months faded away into the background. He was safe.
The boy, Jens, returned with a thick warm blanket that smelled of the woman’s home: of smoke from the fireplace, of her skin, of food cooked and spiced and long since eaten. He accepted it gratefully. A shy young slip of a girl approached his bedside with a wooden bowl filled almost to the brim with steaming soup. He tried to take it from her but his hands were shaking so badly she ended up spoon-feeding Fischer while he slurped and swallowed greedily. The broth smelled delicious and tasted better. He burnt his mouth in his haste to swallow mouthful after greedy mouthful. There were vegetables in it, and some kind of stringy meat.
When he was done, the woman came and sat by his bedside and shooed the others away.
“So, Stefan Fischer, tell me your story. Nobody ends up in Sumpfdorf intentionally. Are you running away from someone or to someone? It is always one or the other.”
Fischer closed his eyes. She obviously thought he was some kind of criminal on the run from an angry magistrate. He didn’t know where to start. Part of him desperately wanted to tell her the truth, all of it, just to unburden his soul, but a larger part insisted that this little haven would be safe from the insanities of the Vampire Count, that they didn’t need to know about the slaughter and the gathering undead army. The horrors of the world would surely pass them by. He closed his eyes as he began to smudge the truth.
“I came to Sylvania with my friend. We were looking for a man. Now I am going home and… and my friend is dead. All I want to do is go home but I think… I think I can’t… because I don’t think it is there anymore… He was my home as much as any place was. We’d been together forever and now we aren’t. So now I just want to get out of this godforsaken province.”
“A sad story, but then I expected nothing less. You are welcome here, Stefan Fischer. We don’t have much, but what we do have is yours to share. Stay as long as you need. The world will be waiting for you when you leave. It doesn’t go away, however much we might like it to.”
“Thank you. I don’t even know your name.”
“Janelle.”
“Thank you, Janelle.”
“You are most welcome, Stefan.”
“Fischer. Call me Fischer. My friends do.”
“Fischer. Sleep, rest. If you need anything call Magda or my son, Jens. When you are recovered, if you still want to get out of Sylvania, I will have Jens escort you out of the marsh and put you on the road. Carry on to Warten Downs and eventually you’ll come to Essen Ford, where you can cross the Stir back into Talabecland.”
They were kind to him.
He stayed with Janelle and the good people of Sumpfdorf for five days, gathering his strength, eating well for the first time since leaving Hollenfuer’s home, and sleeping. Sleep was a blessing. Only on one night did he dream of Skellan. It was a strange dream, tinged with nightmarish qualities but it wasn’t frightening, only sad. In his dream Skellan’s lost soul found him in the marsh and begged him for directions to Morr’s Kingdom. The most haunting aspect of the dream was Skellan’s sadness as he begged his friend. After years of searching for that final closure his soul was out there, cast aside, to wander in limbo for eternity while his soulless shell lived on, infected by von Carstein’s evil. When the shade moved on its way Fischer was left with an uncomfortable sense of having failed his friend. Come morning he wished he had the courage to hunt down the vampire his friend had become, to release his friend from his torment, but daylight didn’t bring with it false courage. The sun rising redly over the marsh only succeeded in convincing him that the whole world was going to hell and he was just one man, and alone there was nothing he could do to stop it.
True to Janelle’s word Jens escorted him out of the marsh and onto the Warten Downs road. The parting was bittersweet. In Sumpfdorf he had found something he hadn’t had for a long time, contentment. His spirit was at rest.
“You are welcome to come back to us, Fischer, when you have finished running. I want you to understand that. There will always be a place for you here.”
“Thank you, Janelle. I will come back one day, I promise.”
“You should not make promises you cannot keep. Say instead I will come back, if I can. Let there be no lies between us.”
Fischer smiled. “I will come back if I can, Janelle. I think I found somewhere I could one day call home and that is something I never thought to have again.”
“You are a good man, Fischer. You will do what you have to and then you will come back to us. We will be waiting.”
Make no promises you can’t keep, Fischer thought, remembering the farewell.
He was alone again, shadows on the road behind him, shadows on the road ahead of him. They had given him a fur-lined skin coat, and cleaned the filth out of his clothes. He had a pack with enough food for two weeks on the road and fresh air on his face. He felt almost human again.
Still, the road ahead promised to be a long soul-sapping journey.
“One foot in front of the other,” he said and started to walk.
The dream of Skellan haunted him, even under the full glare of the winter sun. He couldn’t help but feel that he was running out on his friend when, perhaps more so than ever before, he needed him. That feeling of desertion stayed with him for the long days ahead. At the end of his third day on the road a garish gypsy caravan slowed as it was in the process of overtaking him. The travellers were in good spirits, singing songs in a language Fischer didn’t understand. There were three of them up front on the flatboard seat of the painted wagon, a man, well-groomed with his fair hair wetted down and slicked back off his forehead. He was perhaps a little older than Fischer. On either side of him sat two women, one, fair like the man, who was obviously his daughter, while the other was dark and bore almost no familial resemblance. She was dangerously beautiful with pale skin and emerald green eyes. It was difficult not to stare.
“Evening, neighbour,” the man called down as the wagon drew level with Fischer.
“Evening.”
“You’re on the road late, where you headed?”
“Home.”
“Indeed, and where would that would be?”
“Talabecland.”
“You are a long way from home, neighbour. Want a ride? There’s room up here for one more. We don’t bite.”
The dark-haired young woman leaned forward, her hair falling in front of her face. She brushed it aside slowly, her smile the first thing to appear from behind the cascade of raven black hair. “Unless you ask us to,” she said mischievously.
“Saskia!” The man shook his head as though to say, “What can you do?”
“If it’s no trouble,” Fischer said, reaching a hand up. The man grasped it and hauled him up to the flatboard seat. The women slid along to make room for him.
They travelled well into the night.
The conversation was full of places the unlikely trio had travelled, from Kislev to Bretonnia and Tilea, far to the south of the Border Princes. They were entertainers, jongleurs. Their art was filled with music, juggling and acrobatics. During the night the man, Kennet, recited Das Leid Ungebeten in its eerie entirely. The Ballad of the Uninvited was the perfect ghost story for a dark night and Rennet’s performance was spellbinding. His voice ached as he spoke, carried away by the keen lament of the restless dead. Ina, Rennet’s other daughter,
was quiet most of the time, content to listen to her father and play second fiddle to her sister. They drank cider and bitter wine, joking and telling stories. Fischer found it hard to imagine good people like these surviving in Vlad von Carstein’s Kingdom of the Dead. During the ride he found his eyes wandering back to Saskia. There was something utterly compelling about her pale skin and emerald green eyes. Even though she was less than half his age Fischer found his thoughts wandering to places they hadn’t visited for a long time. Desire was an emotion he had thought long since lost to him. Unlike Janelle who had made him feel safe, warm, content to be alive, Saskia set his blood on fire. Had he been a younger man it would have been easy to surrender, as it was, Fischer was not about to make a fool of himself so he contented himself with stolen glances and carnal imaginings.
That night Fischer slept fitfully, his dreams fragmented and troubled. The most disturbing snatches of them threatened to wake him. They revolved around Saskia, her dark hair falling across his face, her fingernails dragging down his chest as she nuzzled into his neck, her teeth nibbling, teasing, her breathy promise, “Unless you ask us to” hot in his ear as her teeth sank into his neck.
He awoke in a feverish sweat, his clothes in disarray. Instead of feeling refreshed from a good long sleep he was exhausted. He felt as though he could sleep for another eight hours comfortably. He was alone inside the caravan. The caravan itself moved to the gentle sway of the road. He touched the curve of his neck, half expecting to feel a stab of pain from bite wounds. It was unblemished.
“Stupid old man, Fischer. Dreams are just dreams.”
He stretched and rearranged his clothing, making himself decent before he opened the back door. He climbed out and used the ladder on the side of the door to climb up onto the roof and join Kennet and the ladies in the driving seat. The sun, he noticed, was already setting.
“Why didn’t you wake me?” he scratched his head as he sank down beside Saskia.
“We thought you needed your sleep.”
“Seems you were right. I haven’t slept well lately. A lot on my mind.”
“I know. You talk in your sleep.”
“No.”
“Oh yes. You must have been having some pretty colourful nightmares. At one point you were screaming and clawing at the blankets. Were you being buried alive?”
He had vague memories of the nightmare, but all of the fragments of his dreams were disjointed. After Saskia fed off him he found himself back in Drakenhof s great hall, facing his friend over the corpses of the fallen, Skellan urging him to join him in von Carstein’s vampiric horde, and then the bodies on the floor had begun to seethe and writhe as the undead slowly began to rise.
Fischer shook off the memory.
He broke his fast on a chunk of hard bread and cheese and watched the evening world go by.
As with the day before, Kennet told stories to help the time pass, and the girls sang songs. One in particular stood out. The troubadour, Deitmar Koln, had sung it in the Traitor’s Head back in Leicheberg: “The Lay of Fair Isabella”. Saskia’s voice held Fischer mesmerised as it wove though the tragic story of the Vampire Count’s bride, though in their telling Isabella was more than a victim, she was the instigator of her own sickness, hungry for the power of eternity. The retelling was revolting given what he knew—what he had seen with his own eyes: the countess covered in blood asking for reassurance that she was pretty, even as the monsters fed on the dead and dying. He wondered what death had done to her mind. Was she the same scheming power-hungry woman she had been in life? Or had death unhinged her mind and turned her into something far more dangerous?
“Stop,” he said. He was physically shaking. “Stop. I don’t want to hear this.”
But Kennet just laughed and the girls sang on.
Several hours down the road they came to a fork, one turning point leading away toward Hel Fenn, the other into Grim Wood. Kennet steered the caravan into the forest. Fischer lay back on the flat roof of the caravan, listening to another of Rennet’s sagas. The leaves of the trees twined and intertwined overhead forming a perfect canopy. He couldn’t see so much as a sliver of moonlight through them. Sleep soon claimed him.
Again, his dreams were troubled with hallucinogenic splinters of memory fused with the conjurations of his imagination, and again, woven in and out of those splinters of memory were fragments of dream that verged on the erotic: Saskia’s lips touching his cheek, his neck, finding the hollow where his pulse was so close to the surface, and feeding off him. He struggled to pull himself out of the dreams but the more he struggled the more Saskia drank and the weaker he grew.
He had no sense of time when he awoke. The leaves of Grim Wood kept out the sunlight as well as they fended off the moonlight.
The jongleurs sat together upfront, singing a haunting refrain from the “Trauerspiel von Vanhal”, the tragedy of the great witch hunter himself. It was a melancholy song, and though Fischer knew it well he had not heard it sung since he was a young man. It was one of those pieces that had fallen out of fashion as he had grown older. It was surprising that these travelling entertainers knew it, and so many of the older ballads. There couldn’t have been a huge call for this kind of material in the taverns and taprooms of the Empire.
Fischer felt utterly drained. He reached into his pack and ended up eating three days’ worth of his food without entirely satisfying his hunger. He felt light-headed. The movement of the wagon made him feel vaguely sick.
His dreams on the third night were the worst of all.
In one jagged splinter of memory-cum-imagination he dreamed he was a man who dreamed he was a wolf who dreamed he was damned for all eternity to be locked in the flesh of a man. He dreamed of Saskia too. Her gentle touch and the sheer sensuality of her lips as she kissed his skin caused his pulse to trip and skip erratically. The smell of her as she leaned in, the sensation of her teeth sinking into his neck and sucking the very lifeblood out of him was intoxicating. And through it all, the laughter of Jon Skellan rang in his ears, taunting him as he surrendered to the blackness of oblivion.
He came awake with a start.
Sweat streamed down his forehead and chest. Again his clothes were in disarray, the buttons open. Red bite marks and abrasions covered his chest. Instinctively he touched his neck where Saskia had fed on him in the dream. He felt the sharp rise of a swelling just above the hollow between his neck and collarbone and within it the serrated edge of bite marks.
Panic flared in his mind. He scrabbled around looking for his sword, his knife, anything to defend himself with. They were gone. His pack was there, with its dwindling supply of food. He looked around the inside of the gypsy caravan but couldn’t see anything that could be used as a makeshift weapon. He was groggy and struggling to think straight. The rational part of his mind insisted it had all been a dream, that in fact he was still dreaming, but the cold hard truth pressed against his fingers when he touched his neck.
He was trapped in a wagon travelling with at least one vampire through dense woodland thick enough to turn day into night, and he was defenceless.
He tried to listen to see if he could hear anything but through the wooden walls and over the trundling wheels it was impossible. His every instinct screamed: flee!
Fischer grabbed his pack and slung it on his back. He crept over the mattress and the tangle of sheets to the door, cringing at every creak and shift the wooden floorboards made beneath his weight. He braced himself inside the small doorway with his hand on the doorknob.
He closed his eyes and counted silently to ten, gathering his courage and mastering his breathing. The next few minutes were going to be vital, he knew. Whether he lived or died at the hands of these bloodsucking fiends depended on what happened next. He twisted the doorknob and eased the door open inch by cautious inch until it was wide open. The caravan was juddering as its wheels bounced over ruts and stones in the so-called road. The branches dragged down low in places, almost scraping the roof of the wagon. F
ischer crouched down and watched the road, trying to judge a rhythm so that he could best time his jump.
“One… two… three!”
He sprang from the open doorway, hitting the dirt road hard, and rolled.
“Hey!” Kennet cried.
Fischer struggled to get his feet under him and hared off into the undergrowth, hoping the trees would give him cover enough to run for his life. He scrambled forward, slipped and had to use his hands to keep him on his feet as he barrelled forward deeper into the trees. Branches and leaves slapped in his face. Brambles tore at his arms as he pushed through them. Behind him Fischer heard the cries of pursuit as they crashed through the forest after him.
“I can smell you, Fischer! You can’t hide. There is nowhere to go and your fear stinks! So go on, run!” Rennet’s voice taunted loudly, goading him into running faster. “Run “til your heart bursts! Your blood will be good and hot. Soon enough we will all feed!”
Please no, Fischer prayed, pumping his arms and legs harder. It was almost impossible to run properly in the forest. His lungs burned. Fire flared through his thighs and calves. He slipped on a mulch of dead leaves and tripped over a piece of deadfall lying across his path. He barely succeeded in keeping his feet as he ducked beneath a huge overhanging branch. Pushing a swath of leaves out of his face he careened into a rotten tree trunk, pushed himself off it. Gasping for breath, Fischer continued his frantic flight. All the while the taunts of Rennet grew closer, harrying him. He stumbled and staggered on even when his legs wanted to buckle and collapse.
He heard them all round him, playing with him as they shepherded him toward wherever it was they had decided to kill him: Rennet behind him, Saskia to his left, Ina to his right. They called out to him, pushed him in different directions until his legs collapsed under him.
[Von Carstein 01] - Inheritance Page 14