00.1 - Death's Cold Kiss

by Steven Savile - (ebook by Undead)

  “He isn’t an old man anymore. Victor Guttman is long gone. The thing down there is a shell, capable of ruthless cunning and vile acts of degradation and slaughter. It is a beast. Forty-two young women of this parish have suffered at the beast’s hands, witch hunter. Forty-two. I would have you root out the canker by killing the beast so that I do not find the words forty-three coming to my lips.”

  “Good. Then we understand each other.”

  “So we kill to stop more killing?” Brother Meyrink said, unable to hold his silence. “That makes as much sense as going to war to end a war.”

  “We love to hate,” the witch hunter said matter-of-factly. “We love to defeat and destroy. We love to conquer. We love to kill. That is why we love war so much we revere a killer and make him a god. In violence we find ourselves. Through pain and anger and conflict we find a path that leads us to, well, to what we don’t know but we are determined to walk the path. It has forever been so.”

  “Sigmar help us all,” Meyrink said softly.

  “Indeed, and any other gods who feel benevolent enough to shine their light on us. In the meantime, I tend to help myself. I find it is better than waiting for miracles that will never happen.”

  “How do you intend to do it?” Meyrink asked.

  Messner paled at the question. Details were not something he wanted.

  The witch hunter drew a long bladed knife from his boot. “Silver-tipped,” he said, drawing blood from the pad of his thumb as he pricked himself on the knife’s sharpness. “Surest way to do it. Cut his heart out of his chest, then burn the corpse so there’s nothing left.”

  Messner shuddered at the thought. It was barbaric. “Whatever it takes,” he said, unable to look the witch hunter in the eye.

  “Stay here, priest. I wouldn’t want to offend your delicate sensibilities. Ziegler, come on, we’ve got work to do.”

  They descended in darkness, listening to the chittering of rats and the moans of the old man, faint like the lament of ghosts long since moved on. His cries were pitiful.

  The candles had died but tapers lay beside fresh ones. Metzger lit two. They were enough. Death was a dark business. Too much light sanitised it. His feet scuffed at the silver wrought into the floor on the threshold. It was nothing more than mumbo-jumbo. There was no magic in the design. Some charlatan had taken the temple for all it was worth. It was amazing what price people would pay for peace of mind.

  The fretful light revealed little of the dark’s secrets.

  Carefully Metzger moved through the crypt, Ziegler two steps behind him, sword drawn in readiness for ambush. Metzger had no such fear. The only things alive down in the crypt were either too small or too weak to cause any serious harm. There was no sense of evil to the place. No taint. He raised the candle, allowing the soft light to shed more layers of pure black in favour of gentler shadows.

  The old priest was huddled in the corner, naked and emaciated, his bones showing stark against the flaked skin. He barely had the strength to lift his head but defiance blazed in his eyes when he did so. Suppurating sores rimmed his mouth. There were dark scars where he had been bitten. Metzger had no doubt about the origin of the wound. It was the cold kiss of death: a vampire’s bite. The old man had been fed on, of that there was no doubt. But that didn’t mean that he had been sired into the life of a bloodsucking fiend.

  Again, there was no residual evil that he could discern, only a frightened old man.

  He trod on a plate of food that lay untouched at Guttman’s feet, the plate cracked and mouldy cheese smeared beneath his boot. A nearby jug of water was nearly empty.

  “Have you come to kill me?” The old man said. It sounded almost like a plea to Metzger’s ears. The poor pathetic wretch had obviously tortured himself to the point of madness with the dreams of blood feasts. It was natural, having been fed upon to dream of feeding in the most feverish moments of the night when the kindred vampires were abroad. But dreams were not deeds. A true vampire would feel no remorse. There would be no tortured soul beginning for slaughter. There would be only defiance, arrogance, contempt, as the love of hatred boiled away all other emotions.

  “Yes.”

  The fear seemed to leech out of Guttman, the puzzle of bones collapsing in on themselves as his body slouched against the cold crypt wall.

  “Thank you.”

  “It will hurt, and there will be no remains for loved ones to come cry over, you understand? It can be no other way. The curse is in you, whether you killed these women or not.”

  “I killed them,” Guttman said forcefully.

  “I doubt it,” Gundram Metzger said, drawing the silver dagger from his boot. “Does this scare you, priest? Does it make your skin itch and crawl?”

  Guttman stared at the blade as it shone in the candlelight. He nodded.

  “Make your peace with Sigmar,” Eberl Ziegler said from behind Metzger. He turned his back on the murder.

  A litany of prayers for forgiveness and for the safe passage of his soul tripped over Victor Guttman’s lips, not stopping even for a moment as Metzger rammed the silver knife home, between third and forth rib, into the old man’s heart. His eyes flared open, the truth suddenly blazing in his mind. His screams were pitiful as he succumbed to death’s embrace. He bled, pure dark blood that seeped out of the gaping wound in his chest and pooled on the floor around him.

  Metzger stayed with the old priest as he died, a pitiful old man in chains.

  He hung there, limbs slack, body slumped awkwardly, head lolling down over his cadaverous ribs, where the knife protruded from his chest cavity.

  “It’s over,” Ziegler said, laying a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Come, let’s leave this place. Bringing death to a temple leaves me cold.”

  “In a moment my friend. Go to the priests, tell them the deed is done, and fetch the paraffin oil from the cart. This place needs cleansing of the stench.”

  “But—”

  “No buts, old friend. The place must be purged. The priests can find more walls to praise their god. But not here. Now leave me for a moment with the dead, would you? I need to pay my respects to a brave old fool.”

  He sat alone for an unknowable time, the candle burning low in his hand, unmoving, waiting, alone with the dead priest.

  The pungent reek of paraffin drifted down from above. It was a sickening, stifling smell. Disembodied voices argued, Ziegler’s the loudest as he continued to douse the temple in oil. The place would burn.

  Victor Guttman’s eyes flared open in the dying light and his hand flew to the silver blade still embedded in his heart. He screamed as he yanked it out and sent the knife skittering across the crypt floor. The flesh around the wound was seared black.

  “I tasted his blood,” Victor Guttman rasped, his head jerking up as he strained against his chains, all trace of the man gone. “I want more!”

  Guttman twisted and jerked, tugging at the chains that bound him, but there was no escape.

  “No,” Metzger said softly. “I told you I was here to kill you, consider this my promise delivered.” With that he stood, collected his silver knife and slipped it into the boot sheath, the gesture itself a mocking bow to the beast chained to the cold stone wall.

  He walked slowly up the stairs, the creature raging in the darkness he left behind.

  Ziegler was waiting at the crypt’s entrance, his face grim. He held a bottle in his hand, a rag stuffed into its mouth. He passed it to Metzger who lit the end with the last of his candle’s dwindling flame.

  Together they stood at the huge wooden door, the cocktail of lamp oil and fire burning in Metzger’s hand. He tossed it deep into the body of the temple where the glass shattered off the statue of Sigmar. Flames licked at the stonework, tongues of blue heat lashing out to consume the wooden seats. Metzger and Ziegler backed out from the intense heat as the conflagration took hold and consumed the temple.

  He turned to the younger priest, Messner, who had begged his help.

  “
The beast is dead.”

  “But…”

  “There are no buts, the beast’s evil cannot survive the fire. It is done. Deliver payment to Herr Hollenfeuer’s wine cellar.”

  “How can we pay? We have nothing left. You’ve destroyed everything we ever had!”

  Metzger shook his head sadly. “No, young sir, you did that. I am merely the tool you chose for its destruction. Do not blame the sword for the soldier’s death, blame the man wielding it.”

  High above the blaze, three men stood watching the towering inferno with perverse delight.

  Vlad von Carstein, the vampire count of Sylvania, watched the flames intently. Beside him, Herman Posner turned to his man, Sebastian Aigner: “Go out and feed. Make sure the fools down there know that they killed an innocent man. I want the knowledge to tear them apart.”

  Aigner nodded. “It will be as you wish.”

  “Poor, stupid, cattle,” Posner said, a slow smile spreading across his face. “This place promises a lot of sport, my lord.”

  Von Carstein said nothing, content to watch the Sigmarite temple turn to ashes and smoke.

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