by Nathan Long
The gun went off as she grabbed at his wrist, and she slammed down with him on the grass not knowing if he was alive or dead. She rolled off him and came to her knees, looking down at him. His arm was flung over his face, the spent pistol slack in his hand. She pulled his arm away, then breathed a sigh of relief. His face was black from exploding powder, and his eyebrows singed, but the ball had missed. He lived, though he did not seem grateful for it.
He jerked his arm from her grip and rolled on his side, facing away from her. ‘Leave me be!’
‘Templar Holmann,’ she said. ‘Friedrich–’
‘I killed my own family because of their sin,’ he choked. ‘My mother and father! Yet I cannot kill you.’ He covered his face with his hands. ‘I am not worthy to be called a Templar of Sigmar. I am not worthy of life!’
Ulrika held herself still beside him, wanting to comfort him, but knowing her touch would not be welcome. ‘And I cannot kill you,’ she said softly. ‘Though you denounce me and threaten my kind and burn down a house around me.’
Three slow-burning heart-fires bloomed at the top of the ridge and Ulrika looked up. More ghouls in the cypresses. She stood and took up her rapier to face them.
‘Get up, Templar Holmann,’ she said. ‘There is work yet to be done.’
The ghouls sped down the slope, gibbering and shrieking. Holmann looked up at the sound and groaned, but got to his feet as well.
Ulrika leapt to meet them, hacking one across the shins, then spinning as it stumbled and transfixing a second with her blade. The third crashed into her side and she rolled down the hill with it as it clawed and bit at her.
They slid to a stop on the wet grass and she caught its throat in her left hand, pushing its mouth away from her as it raked her with its talons. She tried to free her sword arm, but it was trapped awkwardly against the ground.
‘Foul maggot,’ she growled. ‘I have claws too.’
She extended her nails and closed her free hand around its neck, then jerked it back, tearing its throat and windpipe out in a red gush. It reared back, clutching at the ruin of its neck and trying to scream. She freed her arm at last and chopped it in the side, shattering ribs and finding organs.
It sank to the side and she extricated herself from its limbs. Up the hill, Holmann was finishing off the one she had lamed earlier. It fell with his sword through its right eye, and the witch hunter turned to face her, breathing heavily. His eyes were full of pain and uncertainty.
Ulrika raised a hand as she stood. ‘Let us not go through it again, shall we?’ she said, then nodded up the hill. ‘Our purposes are the same here. We both seek to discover what is beyond those trees. We both seek to kill it. Let us put what lies between us aside for this common goal.’ She sighed. ‘Perhaps it will slay us both, and our troubles will be ended.’
Holmann frowned. ‘You seek to kill it too?’
‘Did we not track it here together?’ Ulrika asked.
‘But, I thought–’
‘That I led you here as a ruse?’ Ulrika laughed. ‘Herr Holmann, had I wished to kill you, there would have been no better place for it than the plague house, or the sewers where I first discovered you. No. I may have lied in all else, but in this, at least, I spoke the truth. I am a vampire hunter.’
She whipped her rapier through the air to shake the ghoul blood from it, then started up the hill towards the trees. ‘Now, will you come? Our prey awaits.’
Holmann stood undecided for a long moment, but then followed at last. As he joined her at the line of cypresses he frowned and sniffed. ‘Is it you that smells of rose water?’
Ulrika cringed with shame. ‘They are borrowed clothes. Pay it no mind. Now, hurry.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
INTO THE CRYPT
Holmann stopped, stunned, as he pushed though the row of cypress trees with Ulrika and looked around at the bowl of the misty circular valley.
‘Why could I not find this before?’ he murmured.
‘An enchantment,’ said Ulrika. She smiled. ‘You see, we help each other. You can speak to priests. I can see what is hidden.’
She pushed her senses ahead of her, hunting heart-fires or footsteps, and found neither. She started stealthily down towards the cluster of crypts that surrounded the dry fountain at the bottom.
Holmann followed behind her, still troubled. ‘I understand none of this,’ he said. ‘Why would a vampire hunt another vampire?’
Ulrika paused behind a statue of a winged saint holding a sword. She raised her head and inhaled. The rotten corpse smell was so overpowering here that it blotted out almost everything else. ‘Do you imagine us more united in purpose than humanity?’ she asked. ‘We have feuds. We have murderers and madmen among us that threaten the rest. And others who work for the common good.’ She moved on.
‘There are no good vampires,’ said Holmann, creeping after her. ‘They are all monsters that drink the blood of humans. Even you.’
‘And if that blood is freely given?’ asked Ulrika.
Holmann grunted angrily. ‘Do you say it is freely given when you take it from some beglamoured slave?’
Ulrika was about to snap off an equally angry retort, but she paused. His words aligned uncomfortably with her own feelings about the blood-swains she had drunk from. Quentin and Imma had lost all self will when she had fed from them. And could she say they had been willing before they had fallen under their mistress’s influence?
‘Then let us just say that some are worse than others,’ she said at last, then added to herself, just like witch hunters. The thought raised a question in her head, and she turned to Holmann again. ‘Why have you come here alone?’ she asked. ‘You were overwhelmed the last time. You should have brought reinforcements. Where are your comrades?’
Holmann snorted. ‘Captain Schenk is convinced that he already knows who the vampires are, and continues to hunt them in the Faulestadt. We went to the Wolf’s Head because a woman told him it was a nest of vampires. And indeed, we found you, but when you vanished, he would not listen to me when I mentioned this crypt. He said that vampires could not live on sanctified ground.’ He snorted. ‘So I came alone.’
Ulrika hardly heard half of what he said. ‘What woman?’ she asked, clutching his shoulder. ‘Who told him about the Wolf’s Head?’
Holmann shrugged and drew away from her. ‘I know not. I wasn’t there.’
Ulrika cursed under her breath. Had it been Hermione? Who else could it be? And yet, as Gabriella had said, could she have been so stupid as to endanger herself by exposing her ‘cousin’?
They continued on, and after a moment reached the flat bottom of the valley. Nothing but a broad swath of grass separated them from the crypts than ringed the fountain. Ulrika paused, looking around, then hurried across the grass to the back of one of the mausoleums with Holmann hunching after her. Burdock and thorny rose vines grew up all around the stone structure, and moss and mould mottled it like mange. Ulrika strained her ears, but heard nothing untoward, either in front or behind. She edged around the tomb and padded down the overgrown alley that ran between it and the next with Holmann coming slowly behind.
As they neared the front they squatted down and peered around at the faces of the crypts. All were in great disrepair, their marble sooty and crumbling, their sculpted figures weathered to ghostly amorphous lumps, and their heavy wood and brass doors rotting and green with verdigris, but one, directly across from them beyond the fountain, was wide open. Its black portal yawned like a mouth, and exhaled the reek of death in a nauseating cloud that seemed to fill the valley and cling to Ulrika’s skin like an oily film.
‘That… is it,’ she said, gagging.
Holmann nodded. He took a handkerchief from his coat and tied it around his nose and mouth, then checked his pistols, drawing back the hammers before settling them back into their holsters. ‘Ready,’ he sai
d.
They crouched forwards, then circled around the dry fountain and approached the dark opening. Ulrika couldn’t hear any movement from within it, nor could she sense any heart-fires, but then a vampire hadn’t one, and could be as still as a corpse, if it wished.
They stopped on either side of the portal, then listened again. Still nothing. Ulrika motioned for Holmann to wait, then peeked around the door jamb and looked inside. The interior was square and small, no more than five paces to a side, and the walls were lined with large brass plaques, all with weathered names engraved upon them. In the centre, a flight of marble steps sank into the floor, disappearing into darkness. Ulrika saw no ghouls waiting in ambush, nor any vampire, just drifts of dry leaves in the corners and muddy, clawed footprints leading to the stairs.
Ulrika turned back to Holmann and beckoned him in. They crossed to the stairwell together and looked down. The corpse stink rose from it like heat from a stove. The steps descended straight ahead of them, and ended at an open door that appeared to be directly under the back wall of the mausoleum. The dirty flagstone floor beyond the door flickered with shadows and orange light from some hidden fire.
‘It is bigger underneath than above,’ said Holmann.
Ulrika nodded and started down the steps. Holmann drew a pistol and followed. Halfway down Ulrika stretched out her senses again. Now she heard the ghouls. Now she felt the banked fires of their corrupted hearts.
‘Five or six,’ she murmured. ‘Maybe more.’
‘Be there a hundred,’ said Holmann. ‘I will not flinch.’
As they crept down the last few steps, more of the room revealed itself, and Ulrika paused to survey it.
It was bigger than the mausoleum but, as above, the walls were lined with brass plaques that named the dead buried behind them, and there were a few grander sarcophagi rising out of the floor in a line going down the centre of the room as well, stone statues of ancient knights lying on them with hands clasped over their armoured chests. Two doors on each of the side walls appeared to open into further chambers.
She edged forwards to the door for a better look, Holmann at her shoulder. The flickering yellow light came from the far end, a rubble-ringed camp fire that revealed a scene of contradicting elements. Nests of twigs and leaves were mounded against one wall, and Ulrika could see ghouls sleeping in them, but on the other side of the room there was a true bed as well, with a headboard and blankets and a night cap hung on one of the bedposts. To the left of this was a writing desk, complete with inkwell, papers and books. Ulrika found it disorientating to see such domestic things in such a macabre location. Even more confusing was the wooden coffin that lay open to the right of the bed. The box was so large it looked like it might have been built for a beastman or an orc. Ulrika thought it must be eight feet tall by four feet wide. She swallowed, remembering the monstrous thing she and Gabriella had fought in the cloud of unnatural darkness at Guildmaster Aldrich’s house. That horror might well have been big enough to require such a coffin. But where was it now? She was too far away and at too low an angle to see inside the coffin. Was it inside?
She turned her gaze to the threats she could see. Huddled close around the fire were the ghouls she had sensed earlier – a handful of them, squatting on their haunches and pulling meat off a human carcass and stuffing it in their mouths. A huge midden heap of stripped and cracked bones was mounded against the wall behind them. Torn and bloodied clothes were buried within it.
Ulrika pointed at them. ‘Human bones,’ she whispered. ‘Is this what became of the vanished?’
‘Aye,’ growled Holmann, raising his pistol. ‘Depraved cannibals. Let us cleanse them.’
Ulrika was tempted to follow his lead, but the risk was too great. She put a hand on his arm. ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘What if the owner of the coffin lies within it?’
‘Then I will cleanse it too.’
Ulrika rolled her eyes. ‘Your faith in your abilities is inspiring.’
‘My faith is in Sigmar,’ he said.
‘That’s all very well,’ whispered Ulrika. ‘But I have faced this thing before, and it will take more than faith to defeat it. We will need reinforcements. Come. Let us go before it wakes.’
Holmann glared at her. ‘Do you protect your own kind?’
Ulrika groaned. ‘Have you listened to nothing I have said? This thing is my enemy! Now–’
The slap of naked running feet echoed from the crypt above them. Ulrika and Holmann looked up and back, then rolled left and right out of the doorway to press against the wall of the chamber.
Two ghouls ran down the stairs into the chamber, each carrying a dead comrade in its arms. They threw them down in the middle of the room, croaking to the ghouls at the fire and pointing to the stairs. The ghouls stood and turned, then stared past the newcomers, gape-mouthed. One pointed a clawed finger right at Ulrika and screeched a warning.
Ulrika froze as all eyes turned on her and Holmann. The two ghouls who had run in leapt back in fright and dropped into fighting crouches. Holmann fired his pistol at one and missed.
A small, rational part of Ulrika’s brain was shouting at her to run. There was no enemy between her and the stairs, and she needed to get back to Gabriella and tell her what she had found here. But she didn’t want to run. The ghouls’ fright was like a drug. It enflamed her. It made her hungry and ready to kill. If the horror was in the coffin, so be it. She was ready.
With a joyous howl, Ulrika pounced on the closest ghoul, slashing it with her rapier then smashing it to the ground with a shoulder to the chest. The other dodged aside, yelping, but Holmann’s second pistol cracked and this time found its mark. The thing went down with a hole in its chest.
Ulrika tore the throat out of the one that struggled beneath her, then jumped up again and found herself shoulder to shoulder with Holmann between two of the stone sarcophagi. The ghouls from the fire were coming, swarming left and right in an attempt to surround them.
‘Abductors of the innocent!’ Holman shouted, tearing a glass vial from his bandolier and hurling it at them. ‘Come and die!’
It shattered on a sarcophagus and sprayed them all with holy water. They screamed and flinched away but still came on, howling in rage and pain.
One leapt up on a sarcophagus and launched itself at Ulrika. She caught it by the wrist and swung it past her to smash into the sarcophagus behind. Its spine snapped and it dropped to the floor, folded in half. Then the others arrived, all leaping at once to try to drag her and Holmann down by weight of numbers.
Holmann’s heavy sword severed a ghoul’s arm. He crammed another vial down the throat of a second ghoul as it bit his hand. ‘Fiend! This will be your last meal!’
Ulrika blocked two attacks with slashing parries and kicked a third ghoul back into the wall.
The throat of the ghoul that had swallowed the vial disintegrated from the inside out, but the dying thing’s fangs were clamped around Holmann’s hand and wouldn’t let go. He hacked at another with his sword, but missed as he tried to shake free.
Ulrika made to help him, but a third ghoul leapt on her back, sinking its teeth into her shoulder. She hissed and drove herself back against the sarcophagus behind her, crushing it. It gasped and let go with its teeth. She threw an elbow into its jaw then lunged forwards over Holmann’s trapped hand to impale the shoulder of the one that threatened him.
The thing fell back, shrieking, then scurried for the stairs as two more leapt in. Ulrika buried her blade to the hilt in the chest of the first one, while Holmann split the last ghoul’s mangy, scabrous head down to the teeth.
Ulrika turned, ready for more, but the fight was over. Two more wounded ghouls were scampering through the door to the stairs, wailing with fear. All the rest were dead or dying around them.
‘We should go after them,’ said Holmann, tugging his hand free from the dead ghoul’s maw at last. His
glove was torn, as was his flesh beneath it.
Ulrika shook her head and turned towards the outsized coffin. ‘They are only dogs. I want their master.’
She killed the ghouls that still breathed as she stepped over them, then started towards the big wooden box. Holmann joined her, drawing a wooden stake and a hammer from his belt. They gagged and choked as they got closer. The death stench boiled up from the coffin in great reeking waves. Ulrika pinched her nose shut. Holmann winced and held his stake and hammer high, ready to strike.
They looked in. The coffin was empty except for a layer of wet, mouldy earth that covered the bottom, in which was pressed a deep impression of a huge, misshapen body.
Panic welled up all at once in Ulrika’s breast. If the killer wasn’t here, where was it? What was it doing? Who was it after now? She had a sinking suspicion she knew.
‘A monster indeed,’ said Holmann, coughing as he slipped the wooden stake and hammer back into his belt. ‘This is what tore the walls and floor of the plague house.’
Ulrika stepped away too. ‘Aye,’ she said. ‘And rended the bodies of the victims.’
‘The vampires, you mean?’ said Holmann.
‘They were still victims.’
Ulrika turned to the bed that stood near the coffin. It had been neatly made-up, and the juxtaposition with its ruinous surroundings made her head spin. Surely this hadn’t been used by the monster? She lowered her head to the pillow and inhaled. Faintly through the all-pervasive corpse stink she could smell the clove scent of the little man, the sorcerer she had chased through the sewers, and who had been in Aldrich’s house when the monster had attacked Gabriella.
She stepped around the bed to the little writing desk. This smelled of the sorcerer too, and showed the same neatness as the bed. A tidy row of leather-bound journals were lined up on a shelf at the back, while pens, blotters, sealing wax and a sheaf of parchment sheets were all fit into little pigeon holes below. A stack of heavier tomes, ancient, eldritch and mouldering, was squared up along the left edge of the desk as if with plumb line and rule.