“You saw us. You looked upon the tide of death creeping silently across the land, and now you join its ranks.” The moon burned through the vampire’s dull black eyes. The smell of his blood only served to inflame the fell creature and its pinch-faced master. Kaspar’s eyes found his sword, lying in the dirt twenty feet away, the corrosive blood of the dead man still smeared on its blade in places. There was no way he could reach it before the construct snapped him in two.
The laughing fiend stepped closer. There was a sourness to his sunk.
The forest around him was reduced to rock and dust and dirt and wood, basic elements.
The creature lumbered towards him, reaching out in the parody of affection, as though to draw him in to its bosom. Only instead of holding him close like a lover it sought to absorb him into its huge swollen gut, digesting him as it had the cow and the birds before him.
Kaspar hobbled three steps to the left, wincing as every footfall jarred, the reverberations moving up through his body in wave after wave of pain. The fractions between agonies became, conversely, ecstasies by dint of the respite they offered from the pain.
“Death,” the vampire repeated, savouring the word.
The leaves and grass that bound the foul beast susurrated with the sibilant breeze, a moan beneath the baleful groan coming from its makeshift mouth. Its breath reeked of the ash of burned corpses more than it did of peaty loam.
“Not today,” Kaspar Bohme said, with a certainty he did not feel.
His glance flickered again towards the sword. He edged a few inches to the left, toying with the notion of hurling himself full-length in a desperate attempt to reach the blade, but even entertaining such ideas was foolish. He would have to make do without the blade, which left the long dagger in his boot as his only weapon, and save for a miracle the pig-sticker was going to be about as useful as a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. The beast roared its melancholy cry once more, convincing Kaspar that there was more to it than merely mud and wood. Somehow the laughing lord of the undead had bound a human soul to the construct, creating a torture within a torture with his black arts. Then it surged forward. Its huge trunk legs uprooted from the earth and came thundering down, the ground shuddering with each violent impact.
It swallowed the space between them in three enormous strides, barely enough time for Kaspar to react. He snatched the dagger from his boot. He felt like a boy with a toy sword facing down a huge dragon of old: worm food.
The beast’s wood and bone talons slashed through the air inches from his face. Kaspar rocked back on his heel, spun inside the swing and slashed back, cutting the construct from hip to groin. The wound spilled dirt and stone, but as quickly as it opened up the mud and leaves shifted sealing the cut. Staring at the healing wound cost Kaspar, as the thing spat a cloud of ash in his face. Flinching, he closed his eyes for a split second. It was enough for the construct to land a crunching blow in his midriff that sent him sprawling backwards in the dirt to the manic laughter of the nose-less vampire.
“Yes, today,” his tormentor cackled. “Finish him, my beauty.”
Kaspar rolled over onto his back as a great leafy fist slammed into the dirt where his head had been a heartbeat before, and then back again onto his stomach as a second gigantic fist ploughed into the dirt where he had just rolled to. He scrambled forward, launching himself face-first. A great clubbing blow slammed into his left leg, below the joint of the knee before he could drag his leg clear.
“Squash the bug, squash the fly, squash the little man, bleed him dry,” the vampire cackled madly, crouching low so he could get a better look at the torment etched into Kaspar’s face.
A second pulverising blow crunched into the base of his spine.
“Say good night, sweet prince,” the man mocked.
“Good night, sweet prince,” Kaspar rasped, flinging his dagger underarm. The long blade turned end over end. It wasn’t weighted to be thrown, but that didn’t matter. It missed the laughing man’s face by inches and slammed into his shoulder, cutting off his laughter in a choke of pain.
It wasn’t enough.
And he wasn’t ready to die.
Kaspar waited for the killing blow but it never came. He struggled to roll over, to face his own death, to look it in the bogged eye. He slumped onto his back, gasping through clenched teeth as another wave of agony surged through him, from the wounded knee up through his chest. The beast echoed his moan of pain. He saw the bite of degradation peeling leaf and bone from the power of its frame, dribbling out like the grains of sand from an hourglass. Through the fog of pain clouding his mind, it took Kaspar a moment more to realise what was happening: the vampire’s control of his construct weakened, the fell fiend was coming undone. It was decaying before his eyes, the rot rapid. Soil fell away depositing the stolen bones, until it was nothing more than the muck of the forest sinking back into the ground.
Kaspar’s knife landed by his side, the mocking laughter silenced. The vampire discarded his ruined effigy, crushing it beneath his foot. He held his hand to his shoulder, blood leaking through his fingers as he came to stand over Kaspar.
He looked down at Kaspar’s ruined leg, harsh laughter bubbling back up through his throat.
“You are dead, little fighter. I shall leave you here to die like a pig in your own filth,” the fiend rasped, spittle flying from his bloodless lips. “Without food, without water, unable to drag yourself the miles home your death will be so much more agonising than a single crushing blow from my beautiful creation. It will be an ugly death filled with deliriums. You will beg the ghosts to take you, to have mercy. We shall not meet again, warrior. Our fates are not intertwined. Your road ends here, in this godforsaken forest, where mine goes on and on, with the thunder of battle, the clash of steel on bone and the fall of cities down to ash writ bright in its future.” He left Kaspar in the dirt to die.
CHAPTER SIX
The Oncoming Storm
In the Shadows of the Drakwald Forest, Middenland
The Autumn of Sweet Deceits, 2532
He did not die.
Weakness suffused his body but the pain, mercifully, was gone.
His leg was a mess.
He had no idea where he was, or how to get back to Grimminhagen.
He tried to stand, but his leg wouldn’t take his weight. Biting back against the flare of pain he sank against the trunk of the nearest tree.
The laughing man had been right, that one blow to his leg had killed him as surely as a knife to the throat.
“No,” he said through clenched teeth, “I will not die here. I will not.”
As though in answer to his stubbornness he heard the distant call of a hunting wolf, the howl rising sharply at the end. It was a distinctly human sound. It had to be Metzger, Reinhardt had mastered the lupine voice years ago. He was letting Kaspar know he was out there, giving him hope. Kaspar waited, to be sure. It came again a few moments later, and again the howl contained a peculiarly human quality. Kaspar Bohme smiled for the first time in more than twenty-four hours. It was a fleeting smile, gone before he cupped his hands around his mouth and gave an answering call.
He looked around the clearing — there was enough left from the collapsed construct to fashion a splint for his leg and a stick to take his weight. For now all he wanted to do was close his eyes and sleep, but he couldn’t allow himself the luxury. Instead he waited five minutes and gave the call again. Metzger answered, noticeably closer. The image of the big man charging through the undergrowth heedless of the risk, to get to his side brought the glimmer of a smile back. There was a reason he had followed Reinhardt Metzger into the jaws of death time and time again. The man was a true hero and the world had so few of them left. He would follow Metzger into the flaming pits of the hellish Underworld to tackle Morr himself if Metzger willed it, so fierce was his loyalty to the man, and it was a loyalty repaid in kind.
Metzger called out again, closer still, his wolf rabid by the sounds of his frantic howl.
The babe’s cries were shrill, its discomfort obvious even before Metzger found him.
The old knight stormed into the clearing, brandishing his sword in one hand and cradling the grubby white bundle of screaming child in the other. Metzger took it all in in an instant, though what he made of the huge pile of composted mulch in the centre of the clearing Kaspar hesitated to think. “What happened to you?”
Kaspar winced. “My leg’s buggered, can’t bend it, can’t take any weight on it.”
“Don’t worry about that, we’ll get you home if we have to drag you, won’t we, Lammert?” Metzger said to the wailing child.
“You named the baby then? Is that wise?”
“Nothing is ever wise, my friend.”
Metzger slapped him on the shoulder in a familiar gesture. This time it brought a reflexive wince and had Kaspar twisting slightly to protect his injured side. The movement didn’t go unnoticed.
“Off with your shirt, let’s have a look at that wound shall we?”
He knew better than to argue. He turned his face slightly, so Metzger couldn’t see the twist of his face as he raised his arms and pulled the ruined shirt up over his head.
The damage was both less, and worse, than he had suspected; he could see it in his friend’s face as he peeled off the bloody leather. The frayed edges of the punctures had pressed into the wounds, and his blood had coagulated around the leather, fusing the ruined armour to his skin. Metzger teased it at first, but it didn’t want to come away so he was forced to tear the leather free. Kaspar screamed, tears mingling with the sudden fever of sweat on his face and neck.
“Keep still,” Metzger ordered, placing the flat of his meaty hand beside the first of the line of holes, pressing down around the redness, feeling out the inflammation and the tenderness where infection had already begun to spread. The third puncture still contained some of the filth that had caused it, a shard of old yellowed bone that had dug deep into his side, snapping off as the construct lost its grip on him. “This isn’t good; some of the wounds are already infected. I’m going to have to cut it out, my friend. This is going to hurt.”
“I trust you,” Kaspar said. “Just give me something to bite down on because I am pig-sick of screaming like a little girl.”
Metzger laughed, offering up one of the branch’s that had made up the fell fiend’s musculature. Kaspar took it, biting down hard on it as Metzger took the bone between thumb and forefinger and drew it out in a single smooth pull. Kaspar screwed his face up, his jaw clenching so tightly that his teeth virtually sheered through the length of wood in his mouth. He spat it out, panting raggedly as Metzger drew his dagger and placed the silver length of its blade in the embers of the makeshift cooking fire. When it was sufficiently hot he pulled it back out of the flames and cut the pus and dark tissue from each of the puncture wounds, the heat of the blade sealing the blood vessels as it cut through them.
It went beyond pain.
Metzger heated the blade again before widening the worst of the holes in an attempt to cut away all of the poisoned flesh. As the searing hot metal slid into his side Kaspar Bohme lost his grip on consciousness and slumped back against the tree trunk. When he came to Metzger was done, the dagger cleaned and sheathed, and his ribs and side were bandaged with scraps of the old man’s shirt that had been torn into strips and tied tight against the wadding over the cleaned wounds. Metzger sat beside the babe, fashioning a splint out of another length of wood from the decomposed construct. Kaspar didn’t have the strength to argue against the irony of using the very thing that had caused the damage to help heal it. Instead, he lay beside the tree and kept his eyes closed while Metzger worked and talked to the child he had taken to calling Lammert.
He worked the wood like scrimshaw, peeling away the coarse bark to fashion a smoother splint with a tiny pocket knife. “We’ll take you to your new home, yes we will,” the old man said softly, making the kind of baby noises Kaspar associated with the feebleminded. “It’s a grand old house, is the manse on the hill, a real manor. You’ll be warm and safe there and nothing will be able to hurt you.” As he said it Kaspar almost believed him, until the memory of the endless ranks of the marching dead walked across the back of his eyelids.
Metzger took up a second spar of wood and began stripping it to match the first.
“We lived in a bigger house once, a castle high in the mountains that overlooked the entire protectorate our family served. There was a lake, and trees like these. It was beautiful, like in a fairy tale. It’s gone now, like so much else, but back then, it used to stand sentinel over a mountain pass, guarding one of the old dwarf roads. That was a long, long time ago. I don’t know why I am even thinking about it now,” he said wistfully, losing himself somewhere for a moment. Kaspar had never heard his friend talk about the old days and the history of his family. He had heard whispers growing up, about dark secrets buried deep, but had forgotten most of that stuff and nonsense as soon as he had heard it, dismissing it as fishwives with nothing better to do with their time than gossip. Metzger breathed deeply, exhaling slowly, emptying his lungs completely.
“The dead,” he said suddenly, as though that explained everything, “that’s why I am remembering it now. All of those dead men marching through my land, that must have been what it was like back then, like we’ve stumbled back in time or found a way to glimpse what was once more. Ghosts, that is what they were, little Lammert, ghosts walking the world, cast out from the Kingdom of Morr. There are bad men in this world, little one, bad men who league with things so vile they do not bear thinking about. There are men who own twisted, repulsive souls, yet to look at their face they look just like you or I. We owned a castle once, but it is gone now, lost to five hundred years of elemental torment, the road it guarded long since abandoned. This must be how my forefather felt that last morning, waking up to face the day when it would all end with the coming of dusk, the world he knew, the things that were so right he took them for granted. Do you think he was frightened when he walked out wearing his suit of burnished bronze armour? I do. I think he was a real man and walked out to face his death, terrified every single step of the way, and yet he did not run away from it. He felt just like we do now, but we will not run or hide either, and do you know why? Because people like you need us to stand up and be counted. We didn’t live our lives turning and running and we won’t end them that way, no matter what we face. We fight, and when we do, because we are frightened, we hack and hack and hack and hack and they see us, our enemies and our friends and they think of us as daemons of war, great killing machines, but we are only men, frightened like them. That’s the great secret of war, Lammert, we are all of us, everyone who raises his sword in defence of something he loves, frightened all the way down to our souls. We hide it as best we can, or we embrace it, and at the end, well, it isn’t all happy endings, Lammert, not even close. The monster cut him down and Felix Metzger failed. He lost his fight, all of his men, everything. Courage wasn’t enough, just as he must have known it wouldn’t be when he took that first step on his own, and yet he took it. Do you know why he took it, Lammert? Because he was a hero, that’s why. A real hero, like your parents who must have risked everything to hide you away so that you had a chance. That took real courage in the face of despair, and we won’t forget that, not even for a day. It isn’t for glory or honour or any of that. It is always about protecting the people that you love. That’s the life lesson for today, little one. That’s what your mother and father did, that’s what Felix Metzger did and that is what I will do now.”
He fell silent, the bark stripped clean away from the second spar of wood. He cut them to a length and then pushed himself to his feet and began to cut away some of the thinner tendrils of vine with which to bind them to Kaspar’s damaged leg.
“I know you are awake, Kaspar,” he said at last. “How do you feel?”
“Like I have been beaten and kicked by a herd of snotlings.”
“That good, eh? Well that’s
something. We need to be moving soon. Do you think you can stand on that leg of yours?”
“Doesn’t matter if I can’t, does it?”
“Not really,” Metzger admitted, “we’re moving out anyway.”
“The horses?”
“Gone. We’re on foot until the nearest settlement. Time is of the essence. We have to get word to Grimminhagen, send for reinforcements, and batten down the hatches. The long dark night of the soulless has begun again.”
“It will come to swords,” Kaspar Bohme agreed.
“And when it does, when the clash of steel is greeted by the death cries of the human storm, when flames and the crack of black powder cannons enshroud the night sky, when Morr wends His cruel path between the press of men on the battlefield, touching shoulders and claiming souls, we will be in the thick of it, my friend, side by side, same as it ever was.” There was no bitterness in his voice, no anger, not even resignation. This was what the bull-necked warrior had been born for, this never-ending fight against the darkness of mankind. Bohme was in no doubt his friend believed he was taking the first step towards finishing what his ancestor had begun: the last great human crusade.
“Same as it ever was,” Kaspar agreed.
Metzger braced his leg, securing the wooden frame tightly with vines, and helped him stand. Kaspar tried, tentatively, to put a little weight on his damaged knee and felt the heat flare within the joint. “I’ll need something to lean on.”
A storm was coming.
Across the land, the dead walked.
Metzger had stripped a third branch while he was unconscious. This one was stout enough for Kaspar to use as a walking stick. Improvising, Kaspar wadded up his ruined shirt, wrapping it around the end of the stick so that he could use it as a makeshift crutch instead. With its support Kaspar walked slowly across the clearing, each step drawing a wince from him. He nodded to Metzger.
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