by Nathan Long
‘How so?’ asked Ulrika.
‘The mysteries of our forebears’ blood and the elixir that gave it its fell power cannot be charted out like some alchemist’s formula. There is no precise “if A is added to B then C will occur”. The blood affects each who receive it in different ways, and who they were in life has as much to do with who they become in undeath as whose blood they inherited.’ She raised a gloved finger. ‘Also, there are very few vampires existing today whose blood comes entirely from one line.’
Ulrika frowned. This seemed to go against everything she had read in The Nehekharan Diaspora. ‘But how is that possible? Vampires do not breed. Their children are not the result of two parents, but only one. How could the blood become mixed?’
Gabriella smiled. ‘We do not breed, no,’ she said. ‘But we do sometimes mate. And we do not always find love within our own families. Sometimes a son of Vashanesh will fall for a daughter of Neferata. Sometimes a daughter of Abhorash will lose herself in the wild animal embrace of a son of Ushoran. And when they do, blood is exchanged – and mixed – and any progeny that either of them birth may have the traits of one or both.’ She tapped her breast. ‘I am a blood-daughter of a woman who had the blood of both Vashanesh and Neferata within her veins. It was one of the reasons I was asked to be my queen’s eyes in Sylvania, for I could pass as a von Carstein. It is also the reason that my “son” – your blood-father, Adolphus Krieger – joined Mannfred’s cause and hoped to bring back the Golden Age. It was in his blood. He was as much a son of Vashanesh as he was of Neferata – perhaps more so in the end, for Mannfred surely blooded him at some point, if only to ensure his loyalty.’
‘So…’ said Ulrika slowly as she tried to work it all out. ‘So, I am both Lahmian and von Carstein?’
Gabriella shrugged. ‘And probably much more besides. But as I said before, who you were in life has as much to do with who you become in undeath as whose blood you happened to inherit. What aspect of yourself you choose to allow to dominate is up to you.’ She raised her head and looked Ulrika in the eye. ‘I hope you choose wisely.’
Ulrika nodded, more than a little overwhelmed. She hoped so too.
Just then there was a loud bang and a shout from outside, and Ulrika and the countess were thrown forwards as the coach slowed sharply, slewing left and right. Lotte shrieked and clutched at Quentin. The coach juddered to a stop with the neighing of horses, the cursing of drivers and the angry cries of Rodrik and his knights. Then a commanding voice rose over all.
‘Stand and deliver, gentles, and y’won’t be hurt!’
‘Back off, dogs!’ growled Rodrik’s voice. ‘Dare you attack a noble lady? You’ll lose your heads for this!’
‘Not before y’lose yers, sir knight,’ said the commanding voice. ‘I have ten guns pointed at ye and yer men. It would be a shame t’ruin all that fine filigreed plate to stop ye, but I’ll do it if I must.’
Countess Gabriella cursed in a most unladylike fashion as she resumed her seat. ‘We must be out of Sylvania,’ she said. ‘Sylvanian bandits know better than to stop a black coach.’
She began weaving her hands in a complicated pattern while muttering strange foreign words under her breath. Ulrika edged back as curls of shadow began licking around the countess’s fingers like black worms.
‘Fire, then,’ Rodrik was shouting. ‘Your bullets won’t stop me before I ride you down.’
Ulrika opened the louvres of her window and looked out into the night. Even with the ability to see in the dark that Krieger’s gift of blood had granted her, she could see little. There was a bright glare off the snow on the ground, but the trees were too thick on either side of the road to see into. There might have been no one within them. There might have been an army. She wanted to leap out and hunt them down, however many there were.
‘Restrain yourself,’ said Gabriella. ‘Rodrik and I will handle the situation.’
Ulrika turned back. The countess’s hands were now hidden in a ball of writhing shadows.
‘But they will shoot him,’ she said.
‘They will not,’ said Gabriella, and then flung her arms apart. The sphere of shadows shredded into darting tatters of black that wiggled out through the cracks in the doors of the coach and vanished.
‘Ye asked for it!’ said the commanding voice. ‘All right, lads! Ready? Fire!’
A second later the night was filled with hissing and soft pops – but no explosions.
‘Fire, I said!’ cried the commanding voice.
‘My powder’s fizzled,’ came a second voice.
‘Something wrong with my gun,’ said a third.
The countess smiled. ‘So unreliable, these modern weapons.’
‘Charge!’ roared Rodrik, and Ulrika listened, her hands gripping the bench, to the sounds of thundering hooves and clashing steel and the hoarse cries of combat.
She turned to the countess, pleading. ‘Please, mistress. Let me defend you!’
Gabriella chuckled. ‘You care not a whit to defend me. You only want to get your claws wet.’ She shook her head. ‘No. I have said you must learn the Lahmian way, and this is not it. We are ladies. We let the men do the heavy work.’
‘But–’
‘It is precisely because it calls to you that you must fight it,’ Gabriella interrupted. ‘You will not succeed in our society if you give in to violence.’
Ulrika threw herself back on the bench and crossed her arms angrily. ‘I am a warrior. I was bred to fight.’
‘You were a warrior,’ said the countess.
Ulrika listened with rising anger and bloodlust as the sounds of battle raged all around the coach. Curses and cries and the thud of weapons biting flesh filled her ears as the smells of fear and anger and freshly-spilled blood filled her nose. She glared at Gabriella, who sat primly beside her, apparently unconcerned. Did she feel nothing? Did the song of battle touch her not at all? Or was her control that much greater than Ulrika’s own?
But then the countess did react. A grunt and a low curse that sounded like it came from Rodrik reached them, and she looked up.
Another knight’s voice rang out. ‘Sir, are you hurt?’ then, ‘Defend him!’
The countess swore in what sounded like Bretonnian.
Ulrika turned to her again. ‘Mistress, please. Let me help him. Please!’
Gabriella chewed her lip for a moment as the shouts of the knights grew more desperate, then nodded her head stiffly. ‘Very well.’
Ulrika let out a cry of relief and spun to the door.
‘But you must kill without passion,’ called the countess from behind her. ‘And do not feed!’
‘Yes, mistress,’ said Ulrika, then threw open the door and leapt out into the night.
Outside, all was carnage. The scent of blood hit Ulrika like a blast of forge heat. Scrawny corpses in battered leather jerkins littered the snow, and one of the baggage cart ponies was dead, as was the driver. The knights on their horses were clustered at the front of Gabriella’s coach, guarding a fallen figure, dead bandits surrounding them in a ring. They faced no living opponents, but all had their shields up, pin-cushioned with crossbow bolts and arrows.
The commanding voice came from the woods. ‘Lay down yer arms, gentles, or we shoot the horses next.’
Ulrika could still not see the bandits through the thick cover, but she could smell them, and hear their shifting. She darted for the trees and dived into the brush, then cursed as the long skirts of her beautiful dress caught on twigs and branches. No wonder ladies didn’t fight. They were too encumbered.
She gathered her skirts around her as best she could and weaved through the closely set trees towards the scent and sound of the hidden bandits.
‘I shall give ye to three to put yer weapons down, gentles,’ came the voice again. ‘Then ye’ll be walking to town, and dragging yer coach besides.’<
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‘Though we’ll make it lighter for ye!’ laughed another voice.
Ulrika circled a dense patch of brambles and ducked a branch. She could see one of them now, a scruffy crossbowman, crouched behind a screen of shrubs. She padded towards his back.
‘One!’ called the commanding voice.
Ulrika caught the man under the chin with one hand and gashed his throat with the claws of the other. She spied an archer hiding behind a tree to her left as she let him drop.
‘Two!’
Ulrika snatched the bow from the archer and garrotted him with the string before he could make a sound. The rest of them were just on the far side of a fallen tree, hidden by its branches.
‘Three!’
Ulrika vaulted the dead tree and leapt amongst them just as they were about to fire. There were five of them left – a tall man with a staff and a cocked hat, and four ragged archers. She attacked the archers first, knocking them down and tearing their bows from their hands.
They bellowed in surprise, drawing knives and rusty swords as they recovered themselves. She sprang at the first as his sword cleared its sheath, pinning his arm and tearing his throat out, then hurling him at the others as they dodged away. His sword fell at her feet and she snatched it up.
Two of them charged her, howling. She knocked their blades from their hands with two flicks of the sword, then ran the first through while the other shied away. It felt glorious to be fighting again. She was so fast, so strong, quicker and more aware than she had ever been alive. She had all at once achieved the level of prowessof which she’d always dreamed. She could see every intention in her opponent’s eye, seemingly before they knew themselves what they meant to do, and she reacted so fast to those intentions that they appeared to be standing still. Her blade, clumsy rusting thing that it was, still slipped around theirs with ease and tore bellies and throats and groins before they even knew she had attacked. She hacked the arm off one as he fell, then decapitated another, the scent of blood turning the world red around her. She wanted to bathe in it.
Something hard cracked her across the back. She turned. It was the last man, the leader, backing away into the brush, his quarterstaff held out before him, his air of command lost to a quaking, mewling terror.
‘Ranald save me,’ he whimpered. ‘What are you? Leave us be!’
Ulrika laughed and tore the staff from his hands then grabbed him by the throat and lifted him off the snow-covered ground with one hand, though he was twice her weight.
She bared her fangs. ‘I shall leave you dry.’
‘Ulrika!’ came a voice from behind her.
Ulrika froze, cringing, and looked over her shoulder.
Countess Gabriella stood just outside the tree line, looking in at her coldly. ‘What did I say?’
Ulrika shrank from the countess’s displeasure and glanced at the ground around her. She cringed with embarrassment at what she saw. The bandits were hacked to pieces. She had not killed without passion. She had ripped them apart, and she had been about to feed on the man she held in the air.
Ulrika hung her head. ‘I… I’m sorry, mistress,’ she mumbled, then lowered the leader to the ground and snapped his neck. She picked her way awkwardly back to the countess as the man toppled amongst his comrades behind her. ‘I was carried away.’ She looked down at her dress. It was torn and muddy and drenched in blood. ‘And I have ruined your lovely dress.’
‘The dress is the least of my worries,’ sniffed the countess. ‘Do you see why I feared to bring you with me? It is one thing to maintain restraint in controlled circumstances. It is another when one is out in the world. Even in my defence you must be discreet. Had this slaughter happened in the city, it would not have gone unnoticed. We go to quiet a crisis, not to enflame one, do you understand?’
‘Yes, mistress,’ said Ulrika, staring at the ground. She wanted to be mad at the countess for scolding her, but there was no denying she had lost control – and after she had promised herself that she would not. ‘I apologise. It will not happen again.’
‘Be sure that it doesn’t.’
Rodrik pushed through his knights, glaring at Ulrika and cradling his right arm. A crossbow bolt jutted through the armour above the elbow. ‘She should have stayed in the coach, mistress. We did not require her help.’
Gabriella gave his wound a look. ‘It was clear to me that you did.’
He grunted. ‘Well, we would not have, had she not bled poor Quentin near to death. At full strength we would have bested them.’
‘Of course you would have, Rodrik,’ said Gabriella, patting his cheek as she passed him. ‘My champion never fails me.’
Rodrik looked sullen at that and shot Ulrika a venomous look as she followed the countess into the coach.
CHAPTER FOUR
LADY HERMIONE
The rest of the trip passed without incident – indeed, there was so little incident that Ulrika nearly went mad. She had never made a journey like it. They passed into the Moot on their way to Eicheshatten, where she and Gabriella, Rodrik and Lotte boarded the riverboat, the Aver Queen, while the rest of Gabriella’s knights and drivers turned around and went back home to Nachthafen. Then Ulrika and the countess remained within her stateroom for six days and nights as the boat made its way down the River Aver to Nuln. They travelled a distance of more than three hundred miles, and Ulrika saw none of it!
Things may have been happening outside – she heard fellow travellers passing them all the time, and often the distant howling of wolves and stranger cries, but in the coach, with the louvres closed during the day, she had seen nothing, and by night there had been nothing to look at but snow and black trees. In the stateroom of the riverboat there were no windows at all, only four panelled walls. On more than one occasion, Ulrika had the strange fantasy that they were going around and around in circles and would emerge from their room at the same place they left from. There was certainly nothing to tell her otherwise.
How could one travel like this? Trapped in boxes with no wind on one’s face, and no idea of what was going on in the world outside the walls. She had grown up riding across the vastness of the northern oblast, and had been a traveller ever since. She liked seeing the scenery change, and the passing of the clouds. She liked the smells of earth and air and water. She liked the rain and the snow. To hide from them like this seemed almost a blasphemy.
It was, therefore, a great relief when they at last berthed at the docks of Nuln, and stepped down onto the warped grey wood of the wharf just as the sun vanished behind the belching black smokestacks that rose from the Imperial forges to the south of the river.
Ulrika knew Nuln’s reputation as the iron heart of the Empire, and she had had many reasons to thank its cannon makers and forge tenders in the past, when the magnificent field pieces and long guns they made had helped defend the cities of Praag and Kislev, and even her own father’s estates, but she had never visited the city before, and as she waited with Gabriella on the quayside while Rodrik hired a wagon and a coach – another coach! – to carry them to their final destination, her first impressions were that it was dark, ugly and sooty, and smelled much too strongly of hot iron, burning coal and unwashed peasants. Even the snow was black! Still, it was not the inside of a stateroom, and therefore she welcomed it, turning her face to the pungent wet breeze that licked up off the wide river and looking with delight at the crowds of stevedores, sailors and fishwives who moved to and fro along the wharf. She had not realised how strongly she missed the hustle and bustle of human life.
When Rodrik returned with the hired coach and wagon and they started through the city, Ulrika couldn’t stop herself from opening the window and continuing to drink in the passing parade. The smell of living blood was everywhere. The throb of a thousand pulses rang like a symphony in her ears. Everywhere she looked there was meat on the hoof – soldiers and priests and lawyers, butcher
s and drivers and shopkeeps, all going about their business wrapped in their scarves and cloaks, utterly unaware of the predators that travelled through their midst.
Actually, that wasn’t entirely true. The sheep might not sense her looking at them, or know Gabriella for what she was at a glance, but Ulrika could smell fear in the air along with the rest of the overwhelming bouquet of scents, and the broadsheet sellers were crying its name.
‘Vampire seen in the Halbinsel!’ cried one, holding aloft a gazette with a garish woodcut of a thing with foot-long fangs printed on it.
‘Daughter of councillor tested with garlic!’ called another. ‘A pfennig to know the story!’
‘Sisters of Shallya held in the Iron Tower!’ bellowed a third. ‘Disappearances in Shantytown! Whole family goes missing!’
A woman at a makeshift stall was selling high leather collars that rose all the way to the ears. ‘Don’t fear the night, lords and ladies! Protect yourself with a witch hunter’s collar!’
A woman beside the first hawked silver hammer pendants on ribbon chokers. ‘Repel the fiends with the symbol of Sigmar’s power and grace!’
The people who moved through the slushy streets did so at a scurry, looking over their shoulders before entering their houses, and eyeing dark alleys with suspicion.
The countess sighed as she listened to it all. ‘It is as bad as I feared. Panic in the streets, and a full-fledged hunt. This must be stopped.’
Ulrika nodded, but continued looking out the window. They had turned onto a quieter, more prosperous street now, and the noise of the crowd had faded, but the few people abroad still hurried from place to place like frightened rabbits. She had to quash the thought of bolting after them like a greyhound.
‘Dear one,’ said Gabriella.
Ulrika cringed and turned. Had the countess read her thoughts? But no, she didn’t look angry. In fact she looked positively pensive, her hands pressed together in her lap and her lips pursed. What had made her so nervous?