He was nothing. He had nothing. Time had taught him that as it had taught him little else of any value.
He was merely a construct, only the sum of the parts, parts that had been so key to his life once, long ago when they had meant something. He had been the battle. He had been the armour and blade. He had been nobility. He had been service. He had been honour, loyalty, faith. He clung to the tenets of his long-dead existence, not lest he should cease to exist, for he knew that he could never cease to be, but lest his existence become not only futile, but also structure-less. The routine was all that remained. The observances were all that reminded him of what he had once been. He knew not how to pray like a Bretonnian knight, but he knew that a Bretonnian knight must pray, and so he prayed the only prayer that he knew. He knew that a Bretonnian knight must be noble, strong, faithful and brave. He knew that he had once been all of those things. What he was now, what he had been this past millennium was none of those things. That he could act as if he was what he had once been must be enough.
He had not died an honourable death. He would not die in honour, now, and so he must make his observances, follow his routines, and preserve a receding corner of sanity in his hindbrain.
He settled a camp, not because he needed to rest, but because he had been taught how to settle and strike a camp as preparation for his first crusade. He lit a fire, not because he needed the heat or the light, or to cook food, but because fire was the essence of life. He mended his clothes, cleaned his armour and oiled his blade, not because those things made a difference to his capacity for combat, but because the routines made him feel alive, human, humble again for a moment, as if his continued existence mattered, as if he had a cause, a reason for being.
He sat before the fire he had built, a neat, perfectly symmetrical cone of twigs, giving off a warmth that he could not truly feel, and worked lapping powder into the smooth, curving steel of his cuisse. He wove small, regular circles across the metal to the rhythm of the words in his head, trying to think of nothing else.
It was impossible.
He had been sitting like this when the elf had come upon him. He had used this same cuisse as a shield when he was forced to improvise to save himself from the great warrior’s onslaught.
To save himself.
How had he come to save himself?
Why had he fought to save himself?
The Vampire Count sat still, silent, without even the words in his head for company, without the mantra, the improvised prayer that kept all other thoughts from his fragile mind. He polished the armour only because that was what he did, and now the very act that helped to keep him sane brought with it the madness of the question, ‘Why had he fought to save himself?’.
The humans were as nothing. He had never been a man in the prosaic sense. A knight is not a man, for he is so much more, and so much less than other men. He had not sought to defile men in the way that had been so popular among his kind for so long. He had taken the solitary path. He must battle when the battle came to him, but he would not raise the dead nor bring with him the destroyed. For those who were less than nothing, for the hordes that were destroyed only to be brought back to destroy anew, were less than pitiful, less than pathetic.
He had fought to save himself for he could not fail to do what he had been schooled to do. He could not fail to be that knight, that paragon, that exemplar. A few decades as that living, breathing knight could not be wiped away, not even by a thousand years of undeath.
The elf, whose name he knew not, was the closest he had come in a thousand years to real, final, ultimate death.
His face showed no expression. His lip did not quiver, nor did his pupils dilate. His nostrils did not flare, nor did his brow rise. The thought in his head was not visible on his face.
The Vampire Count began his mantra again, his lips working the sounds of the words that he spoke fervently, aloud, filling the clearing with increasingly stentorian tones. With every repetition his voice grew stronger and firmer.
Hail mine liege lord the night
Hail mine liege lady the moon
Hail mine steed of might
Hail mine blades of doom
Hail mine eternity of life
Hail mine eternity of death
Hail mine duty of strife
Hail mine sacrifice of faith
He knew what he must do. He must fight to the death for the right, for the privilege of being expunged, of being removed wholly and completely from existence. He could not sacrifice himself, so he must find a worthy opponent and die at his hand. He must find the elf. He must challenge him, and he must trust that the magical being would finally best him in combat.
The knowledge freed the Vampire Count from the pall of ages, liberated him from the threat of eternal life, and lifted him. He did not know what it was to feel happiness or even contentment, and he did not feel them now. He did feel a little less dread, a little less resignation. He wondered if what he felt was hope, but he dismissed the thought almost before it had a chance to come to life in his mind. The rhythm of his mantra was broken for a moment, and his voice faltered. The feeling did not last, and the undead creature began his prayer again, from the beginning, as he kicked over the remains of his fire, folded away his tin of lapping powder and his polishing cloth, and took up the first piece of armour to strap to his body.
The elf had sought to destroy the skaven. The Vampire Count resolved to descend below ground, and, perhaps, the skaven would find they had an ally, after all.
Despite there being little to party with, there was great reason to party, and party they must.
Dozens of their men had been returned to the community, both to the town and to the surrounding tracts of farmland. The men had returned and borne with them tales of the rout of the skaven.
They did not know who had slaughtered the ratmen in such numbers, or how he had done it. Only one or two of them had seen the warrior, so tall and lean, so ethereally handsome. A very few had seen him wield his weapons, killing and maiming with every thrust and strike. Those few told their stories long and loud to whomever would listen. Their audiences of women and children were large and growing, and, within a day or two, all the men were claiming to have seen the wondrous creature. Some even dared to call him an elf; although so rare and extraordinary a creature had never been seen by any of them before.
Most claimed to have seen him, some claimed to have been standing within feet of him when the tide of skaven was broken on his blade, and a few even claimed to have fought alongside him. One told of how he had been back-to-back with the elf, of how he had been urged on by the creature and then praised in dulcet tones for his bravery.
‘“No man ever fought so bravely”, that’s what he said,’ said Varn Holst, a short, portly man, who had come away from the undercrofts with a long tear in the skin of his shin, which was red and raw and infected. He’d taken the injury falling over a skaven blade abandoned in one of the underground tunnels before he’d even joined the fray. He’d laid low after taking the injury, and had only begun to run for his life when he heard the cries of his fellow humans behind him. Just a few days later his mother-in-law removed the leg below the knee, and only a week after the battle with the skaven, Varn Holst died of a fever. He’d had his moment of glory, had told a good yarn, and there was no shame in that, but everyone knew that if he’d ever actually seen an elf, at best he would have soiled himself or fainted clean away, and, at worst, he would have died of fear where he stood.
The merrymaking continued for days, half-party, half-wake. There was little enough to eat at the best of times, but someone somewhere was always willing to brew beer, and even the hard stuff, from whatever rotten peelings, unripe fruit, or even flaking tree-bark might be available, so there was a surfeit of alcohol. Several of the younger men and one or two women were made sick by ale that was too young to drink, after all the properly brewed stuff was gone. For t
he rest, there was more than enough alcohol of the kind that burnt all the way down and then all the way up again, and might cause temporary blindness in anyone who had the constitution to drink more than a pint of it. Indeed, it had been a huge help to poor old Varn when his leg had to be amputated.
They did not know what the rout of the skaven meant for the land, for their families or for their futures, but for now, for these few days, the townspeople and folk from the surrounding countryside were content to make merry and celebrate the small victory bestowed on them by the mysterious warrior.
They did not notice the strangers in their midst. They did not see the tall, elderly man or his taller, younger companion. They did not lower their voices when the slumped, hooded interlopers sat quietly in the corners of their drinking holes.
The strangers watched and listened and registered everything. They heard the humans’ drunken stories, as incoherent and elaborated as they often were, and they pieced together some semblance of the truth.
The creature the humans had mistaken for the villain of the piece, the mysterious figure they had shrunk from and feared, the ethereal being that they credited with the decimation of the land and all the other hardships they had suffered these many years, had become their hero, his praises sung in every word that passed their lips.
The unlikely pair of strangers watched and listened. They entered and left the cookshops and drinking holes without being confronted, or even noticed, and they moved from street corner to street corner, from farmstead to lowly hovel to garner as much information as they could. They were not disappointed.
Some of the stories were contradictory, for what elf could be hunted and tracked by the coarse humans? Some stories were embellished to the point of being almost comedy, for what elf had ever worn full plate armour of the type described by one over-zealous story-teller? And still there were mysteries left unanswered.
There were dozens of stories of bravery and derring-do, all involving the mysterious, fearless warrior, often with a phalanx of eager humans in support. There were dozens of descriptions of blades flashing faster than the eye could follow their trajectories, and of ratmen being killed and maimed in the onslaught, or running screaming from the valiant swordsman. One human, surrounded by an eager audience, even blew out every lamp in the windowless hovel, which was his theatre, putting the very last and smallest, with its meagre glow, between his feet under the table, so that everyone could experience the miserable dark below ground in the tunnels that made up the labyrinthine warren the skaven inhabited.
The strangers left under the cover of darkness, after the story-teller began to weave tales so absurd and unbelievable that the older of the two could hardly contain his mirth, while the younger was filled with scorn and indignation.
‘They talk of him as if he had wrought some great magic,’ said the youth.
‘They should,’ said his older companion. ‘He does that.’
‘They do not talk of where he is,’ said the youth, ‘nor of what happened after his great victory.’
‘No,’ said the other.
‘It is him, though?’ asked the youth.
‘You’ve heard the stories. He is the subject of tales that will be told and retold for a thousand years by the humans. If we cared to tell his tales, we would tell them for millennia.’
‘But the discrepancies? There are so many, and they are of the strangest kinds,’ said the youth.
‘The humans tell stories in a particular fashion; the truth is less important to them than the romance of the tale. They know not what an elf truly is, and so they embellish, ornamenting a character in their own terms, in ways that define the sense of a being rather than the reality of it.’
‘So, it is him.’
‘It is him,’ said the older man as they walked into the darkness away from the edges of the town.
‘Do you know where to find him?’ asked the youth.
‘He said that he would find me,’ said the other, ‘but since there is no sign of him, and no word of him leaving the skaven warrens, I fear we shall have to follow him underground.’
The old man stopped suddenly, and watched for a moment or two as the youth, failing to notice that his companion was not at his side, strode purposefully onward.
‘So like him,’ the old man said to himself. ‘So young and tall and headstrong, and so very, very like him.’
The youthful figure stopped and turned to face his old companion.
The old man lifted a hand in acknowledgement, and began to walk towards the youth. He dropped his head, so that no part of his face was visible beneath his hood, and he muttered under his breath, ‘Where are you Gilead te Tuin? Where are you my old friend?’
The Vampire Count had very little in the way of tracking skills. He was drawn by blood, and could smell it on everything, creature, monster, human. He could smell the difference between the carrion-eating, lower mammal life-forms that he had been forced to feed on in the past few years, and the sweeter subtler aroma of the grass-eating mammals whose blood he preferred. The skaven smelt like the lower orders, like the rodents they got their common name from, but even more vile. Nothing would induce him to sate his appetite on those loathsome monsters. Humans, while they had their undead uses for many of his brethren, did not represent the richest of pickings for him, their omnivorous appetites and their indiscretions with alcohol, tobacco and other drugs made their blood tannic and greasy. A young, female vegetarian human who did not sully her blood with drugs and drank only water was the highest prize of all, and virtually impossible to resist, but there were so few of those around that he had not partaken of one in more than a decade.
The elf had not smelt of blood at all, and was so skilled at leaving no evidence of his existence that the only trail he had left was a trail of bodies, of skaven dead.
The Vampire Count stopped for a moment while he allowed this thought to foment. If he could not track the elf by his blood scent, nor recognise the clear, spring-water smell of his adversary, he would simply follow the trail of rat bodies, for the elf would surely be found at the site of the biggest pile of slaughtered skaven.
Fully armed and armoured, the Vampire Count stowed his belongings, and stood beside his war steed, waiting for the sun to set. His best chance to track down an entrance to the skaven labyrinth below the earth was in open ground, since the ratmen were too lazy to dig through the roots of trees. He would have to wait for several hours in the woods before emerging at twilight, but he was used to the passage of great tracts of time and could wait out these hours without recourse to thought or movement, food or rest. As he waited he would recite his mantra, over and over again, and try to remember the true meaning of honour.
Hail mine liege lord the night
Hail mine liege lady the moon
Hail mine steed of might
Hail mine blades of doom
Hail mine eternity of life
Hail mine eternity of death
Hail mine duty of strife
Hail mine sacrifice of faith
‘Tell me of the skaven,’ said the youth as the companions sat together over a small fire, eating the roasted flesh of the tubers and corms that grew in the mulchy layers of earth close to the surface.
‘The ratmen?’ asked the older man. ‘They live no life at all, but fill what little time they have with retched thrashing and mewling and scavenging for carrion. Their weapons are primitive and their usage crude, but predictable. But talk is meaningless. You are well-trained and will confront the skaven soon enough.’
The stench in the air was of putrefaction, animal and vegetable, but there was no smell of fresh blood or of living beings, not even of the skaven.
The Vampire Count stood soft in the knees and low at the shoulders in a dark, earthy tunnel, his eyes glowing, shedding enough light for him to see a yard or two of the path ahead. He could hear nothing, and his touch was impeded
by the covering of leather, chain and metal that encased his body. He must rely on being able to smell and taste the air to find his quarry.
The Vampire Count did not draw his weapon in the confined space, since there was nothing nearby to attack nor to defend himself against, but he was eager for the fight. He could move more easily in open spaces, and in tunnels built of brick or hewn from rock rather than dug out of the earth with claws. At every junction, the Count took the wider tunnel with the higher ceiling, while still working his way down into the earth.
The scents changed little, but the confined spaces seemed to concentrate them. Many of the smells were as old as time, unable to escape and dissipate into the air above ground. None of the smells were dry, none clean, none fresh or enticing. The tunnels smelt not of sweet earth or baked brick, or hewn stone, but of rot and decay, of damp and infection and death and putrefaction. It did not dawn on the Vampire Count to wonder what he smelled of. It did not occur to him that his body smelled of age and death, of disease and fear.
None stopped his passage through the tunnels and burrows that drew him deeper underground, for there were none to stop him.
The first skaven that the Vampire Count encountered were a clutch of mewling infants, pink and mottled of skin, crusted of eye, transparent of claw. He drew his sword through their pitiful bodies not in self-defence but in revulsion. They made no sound as they died. The only sound the Count made was to exhale with the stroke, as he had been taught hundreds of years before, despite the fact that breathing was redundant and his lungs were petrified, rendered useless at the time of his undeath. He had maintained his habits forcibly at first, afraid that he would forget his old self as his undead state took precedence over everything that had gone before. Now he wished that he had forgotten, that he could forget. Nothing in his undead life gave him pain so much as the loss of the old way of living.
Hammer and Bolter 19 Page 7