by Remic, Andy
"What did you do out in the real world? So that I dragged your arse to this chaotic shit-hole?"
Grak the Bastard grinned at Kell with a mouthful of broken teeth from too many bar brawls. "I killed my last General," he said, turned his back, and strode across the planks of the hangman's platform.
Kell stood on the battlements as night closed in. Snow fell on the plains beyond, and a harsh wind blew across the wilds. Kell shivered, and considered the enormity of what he was doing. Kell knew he was no general, but he was going to lead an army of convicts across Falanor and engage the vampires and the Army of Iron in bloody battle. And the Army of Iron alone had slaughtered King Leanoric's finest Eagle Divisions, more than ten thousand men. And here, Kell had a mere three.
"It's an impossible task," he muttered, but he knew, deep down in his heart, deep down in his soul, it was something he had to do. Something nobody else would, or could.
Kell sighed, and Ilanna sang out in a vertical slice as a shadow moved behind him.
"Hell, man, I nearly cut off your bloody head!"
"Sorry, Kell, sorry!" It was Myrtax, wearing a fresh robe and rubbing his hands together, eyes averted from Kell's cold steel gaze. "Listen. Kell. I came to apologise."
"Ach, forget it, man."
"No, no, what I did was cowardly."
"Horse shit. You were protecting your family. I would have done the same."
"Very noble of you to say so, Kell, but I know that isn't the case. You would have stood, and fought, and overcome your enemies. I stand before you a broken, humbled man."
"Yes. Well." Kell was uncomfortable. "We can't all be a…" he smiled sardonically, "a Legend."
Myrtax moved to the battlements and stared off into the distance. Snow landed lightly on his hair, making him look older than his advancing years. Then he glanced at Kell.
"We're getting old."
"Speak for yourself."
"What you up to, Kell? You want to fight off all the vampire hordes?"
"Aye. It's the only way I know."
"I was speaking with Nienna."
"Yes?" Kell looked sharply at Myrtax. "And?"
"She said you're tired. That you didn't want to come here. Didn't want to do this. You said Falanor would look after Herself."
"Aye, I said that. And it's true." He sighed. "You're right. We are getting old. This is a young man's war."
"You're wrong, Kell. This is a time when the world needs heroes. Heroes who are not afraid of the dark. Heroes who will," he smiled, looking back off into the snow-heavy distance, "walk into a fortress prison of three thousand enemies, and turn them to good deeds."
"They can only do what's in their hearts."
"They will fight for you, Kell. I can feel it. In the air. In the snow. They are excited; horrified, frightened, but excited. You have inspired them."
"Maybe. But they won't be inspired when the vampires rip out a few hundred throats and crows eat eyeballs on the blood-drenched battlefields."
Myrtax squinted into the snow. "Somebody comes."
Kell shaded his eyes, and through the haze of snowfall they watched a cart slowly advancing, being pulled by two horses. More men walked beside the cart, which had a heavy tarpaulin thrown over the back.
"Let's go and see what they want. The hour is late, and men don't wander to prisons in the dead of night for naught."
Kell and Myrtax descended the steps, and were soon joined by Saark and Grak the Bastard. They marched to the gates and stepped out, the huge walls looming behind them and seeming to cast a deep, oppressive silence over the world.
"They look cut up," said Saark, voice grim. "Like they've been in the wars."
As they neared, they slowed, and each of the six men carried swords, unsheathed.
"If you've come for a fight, lads, better be on your way," said Kell, hefting Ilanna and taking a step forward.
"We don't want trouble," said one man.
"We've come for help," said another.
"What's your story, lad?" said Governor Myrtax, not unkindly.
"We're from Jalder. The city was overrun weeks back, but near fifty of us escaped through the sewers. Women and children as well. No soldiers were sent after us, and after a few days' travelling, running, we camped up in an old farmhouse."
"I think we should invite them in, hear their story over an ale and broth," said Myrtax.
"Wait," said Saark, holding out his hand. Then he shook his head. "What's under the tarpaulin, gentlemen?"
"It's them," snapped one. "Two of the bastards who came hunting us." He looked suddenly frightened, a terrible look on the face of such a big, brutal man.
"Let me guess? They came at you in the night, slaughtered most of you, but you six escaped?"
The man nodded, and Kell strode forward, lifting the edge of the tarpaulin with the corner of his axe. "Did you cut off their heads?"
"No. They're still alive."
"You did well capturing them. They usually fight to the death."
"Well, forty of us died trying. We thought we'd bring them here, to Governor Myrtax. My dad always said he was a good man. He could… put them on trial, or something. I haven't got it in me to kill women, no matter how vile."
Nienna had appeared at the gates, rubbing at tired eyes, yawning. She padded to Saark's side and touched his arm lightly. He smiled down at her, and said, "You not sleep?"
"What, with you all making a racket out here? What's going on?"
"They caught some vampires."
"Oh."
Kell glanced up at Nienna. "Stand way back. These are vicious, especially if they've been tied down for a while. You don't know what they might do."
"Are you sure you know what you're doing, Kell?" Myrtax had gone deathly pale. Saark had drawn his rapier, and Grak held a short stabbing sword in one meaty fist.
Kell shrugged, and threw back the tarpaulin. On the cart lay two beautiful women of middle-years, their hair glowing and glossy, their skin pale white and as richly carved as finest porcelain. They were tied up tight with rope and field-wire, and they moved lethargically as they glanced up, struggling to move. Kell saw the rope which bound them had been nailed to the cart. Their yellow, feral eyes fell on Kell and one hissed, but the other, the more elegant of the two, stared hard at him and rolled to her knees, elegant despite the bindings. She licked her lips and Kell swallowed, mouth suddenly dry, hands clammy on Ilanna. Fear sucked at him, sucked out his courage and almost his sanity.
"No," he whispered.
"You! Bastard!" hissed the vampire.
"What is it?" snapped Saark, running forward and clutching Kell's huge iron bicep, and he realised too late Nienna was with him, and her run was pulled up short by the clamp of Kell's fist.
The vampire laughed, eyes glittering, snow settling gently on her long dark hair and smooth black dress. She stood, and stared down at them, tugging gently at her bindings, and Nienna fell to her knees in the snow, weeping and staring up.
"What's going on?" snarled Saark, feeling the panic of the situation rising.
"Saark, meet Sara," growled Kell, grimly, his eyes never leaving the yellow slits of the tall vampire. "My daughter. Nienna's mother."
CHAPTER 9
Song of the Ankarok
For a while, Kuradek the Unholy spent his days recovering, basking like a lizard on a rock. The journey from the Chaos Halls had been a long, hard journey, fraught with peril and indeed, filled with violent bursts of fighting simply to survive… even for one as savage as Kuradek.
Kuradek turned several humans into slaves and they brought him meat, and fresh blood, the near-dead bodies of children and babes on which he could gorge until full, until bloated. He would lie, in the Blue Palace, on a couch of silk, his skin smoking and squirming with evil religion, and his hatred was palpable, like a haze of ocean fog, and his red eyes surveyed the turned and he smiled with crooked smoke fangs.
Slowly, Kuradek fed, and he recovered his strength, and thought long and hard. He broo
ded. He remembered a time, the time of the vachine and he spat out black lumps of smoking phlegm with rage. He reached down and tore off a baby's arm, ignoring the dead blue eyes which stared up from a bloodied pile of infant corpses. He chewed on the fingers for a while, and having gnawed to the bones, moved up to the wrist, sucking at the bone marrow and picking strips of flesh clean with his fangs.
The vachine!
Bastards!
He remembered like yesterday their magick, how they had taken control from the Vampire Warlords by their deceit, them, the slaves he had allowed to live! And even the sacrifice of Silva Valley did little to cheer Kuradek, even the death of so many vachine did little to satiate his lust for revenge. For Kuradek knew, knew they had expanded north, past the Black Pike Mountains, and there were hundreds of thousands still remaining, still breathing air, still breeding human cattle and mixing their blood with foul oil-magick. They were impure, the vachine; they were deviants of the vampire. They were an outcast race. They were a clockwork race, and Kuradek would not have it! His eyes glowed, and his long arms flexed, talons dropping to shriek against stone with an array of sparks. No.
Kuradek would make the vachine pay.
One day.
All of them…
Slowly, Kuradek rose from his bloated slumber and blinked lazily. He stepped up to the high window in the west tower of the Blue Palace, and stared out across the blackness of Jalder. No fires burned, now, and a cold ice wind blew across what appeared a deserted city. And yet… yet he could smell those who still lived, could smell the blood in their veins, hear the pumping of their hearts like discordant music, off-key notes, a poisoned orchestra. Kuradek breathed deep, and leapt from the high tower window, landing and cracking the ancient stone flags of the courtyard. A group of the turned scattered in shock, then fixed eyes on their master and returned slowly, smiles on pale faces lit by the moon.
Kuradek hissed, and gestured the slaves back, then he moved, running through the darkened streets, moving with awesome speed across snow and ice, talons gripping with surety, smoke-trailing head weaving from side to side as he sniffed, as he hunted… he reached a cottage, skidded on ice, kicked the door across the room in an explosion of splinters and stood in the centre of the space. One talon smashed down through floorboards, and the whole room seemed to erupt in violence as screams rent the air and Kuradek leapt down into the hidden cellar where eight people hid, and swords struck at him but seemed to slow through his smoke-filled, symbol-tattooed body then emerge from the other side without harming the Warlord. His talons lashed out, punching holes through men's chests. He grabbed a woman, and his long limbs pulled apart and both her arms came off at the shoulders spewing blood and leaving her screaming, her blood describing fountains across the walls. Kuradek loomed over a four year-old girl with curly brown hair, brown eyes looking up at him in awe and shock and wonderment. He reached down, and with a quick bite, removed her head, swallowing it whole.
Kuradek lifted his smoky muzzle and… howled, howled at the city, at the moon, at the stars, at his tortured past, at his escape from the Chaos Halls, at the bastard vachine and their curse and imprisonment, but most of all, Kuradek howled with enjoyment and hatred and rage and impotent fury and the joy, the pure acid joy of the hunt.
Throughout Jalder, Kuradek's howls and screams seemed to stimulate the turned vampires into action. They rampaged through the streets, breaking into houses, searching through attics and cellars, finding more hidden humans and either drinking their blood and leaving drained corpses, or as they had been instructed, turning them into yet more vampires. Into Kuradek's Legion.
For Kuradek knew.
Falanor was full to the brim with human offal. And they would bring the fight to him. They always did. It was their nature. But he would crush them. Unlike a thousand years ago, when the vachine turned on their masters, this time Kuradek and the Vampire Warlords would be ready…
As the hours passed, and day turned to night turned to day, so Falanor fell under the spread of the vampire. And unlike the vachine before them, who had sought simple extermination for blood-oil magick, and for sacrifice, the Vampire Warlords sought slaves, sought an army of the impure. For that way, they could expand. That way, they could create Dominion.
In Vor, Meshwar the Violent uncurled like a snake and stood tall, stretching, smoke curling from the corners of his mouth. His blood eyes dropped to survey the slaves before him, and he strode down the once pure regal steps of King Leanoric's beautiful Rose Palace, and stared out through huge iron gates, out over the destruction and desolation of Vor, Falanor's capital city.
Smoke curled along midnight streets, swirling about the feet of many slave vampires bearing the mark of Meshwar. He grinned, a smoke grin of tightly reined insanity, and surveyed his handiwork. He was not called The Violent for no reason…
In the City Square, a huge pile of corpses burned, their drained, angular figures like wooden stickmen seen through flames. Meshwar's eyes drifted impassively over the thousand or so unfortunates, their clothing, skin and bones turning to ash as fire roared and crackled like feeding demons, illuminating the palace with an orange glow.
What Graal had begun so many weeks earlier with his ice-smoke and blood-oil magick, with his invasion of Vor by the Army of Iron – well, now Meshwar was finishing the task.
The Army of Iron were camped out of the city. All vachine camped alongside them had been taken into the forest and executed. Some vachine had put up a fight, several bands even escaping into the woods; but Meshwar sent squads of vampire killers after them, hunting them down, ripping out throats and clockwork hearts, spilling gears and cogs to the forest undergrowth,
Now, though, now it was all his. And the worm Graal was the problem of Bhu Vanesh. Slowly, through Meshwar's mind eased a thought web, for he did not think like normal mortals. This multi-threaded strand held ideas of death and destruction for Graal, but also amusement for it would annoy Bhu Vanesh. It would not be long, decided Meshwar, until Graal died a horrible death, despite his misplaced loyalty in their Summoning. To Meshwar, Graal was an imposter. A twisted impure. A melding of that which they sought to stamp out…
Meshwar's eyes surveyed Vor once again, then again, and again, taking in the destruction, the rampage, the violence. There, the Five Pillars of Agrioth had been chained and pulled to the ground by teams of horses and cattle. Five thousand years of history destroyed, because it was the history of the Ancient, the history of the Ankarok, and they were a pestilence long dead and better ground into the dirt, into dust, even moreso than the vachine.
The Great Library had first been ransacked, the books burned, then the ancient building itself set alight. That had been a particularly pleasing night's work, Meshwar nodded, smoke-filled mouth forming a smile, skin changing and shifting like a chameleon, and the image of the violence flashed across his flesh like moving, animated tattoos on smoke. On Meshwar's skin, the other slaves could see the re-enactment of the Great Destruction, as it would come to be known. Even after fires had died in the Great Library, leaving the teetering blackened walls smoking and charred, stinking and unstable, so Meshwar had personally led a team of vampires in pulling down the remaining walls until only rubble remained.
"No man should read," emerged Meshwar's guttural voice, as around him his vampires bowed and nodded and wondered when they would be fed. "He does not have the ability to utilise any such knowledge with wisdom and clarity. The only use for a human, is that of a slave."
Now, Meshwar watched the Three Temples of Salamna-shar burn, huge shooting flames of orange and yellow roaring at the night sky illuminating the huge piles of rubble and snow throughout the city on all three sites. Fireflies danced over the once magnificent domes, towers and crystal spires. And Meshwar smiled again. Kuradek the Unholy would have liked this moment. This utter destruction of Falanor religion. The annihilation of man's petty gods and their base vanities. After all, the only religion now would be of their own making… worship of the Vampire Warl
ords.
Meshwar moved to the high iron gates of the Rose Palace. He reached out, touching the ancient, pitted iron, and looked up at the incredible artistry thousands of years old. Then he glanced back to the Rose Palace, in all its glory, and violence flooded his brain but he calmed himself, with small breaths, as a man would calm himself before ejaculation. "No. Not yet." He would destroy the Rose Palace, but it was the single largest symbol of freedom and the Royal spirit of Falanor. It would have to die last. But die it would.
Meshwar pointed at a young vampire girl, and she padded over to him. His talons caressed her face, then he lifted her from her feet and clamped fangs over her throat, and bit, and fed, her arms and legs kicking spasmodically as he fast-drained her to a husk. He allowed her skin-filled bones to drop with clacks, and rattle off untidily down the steps.
Meshwar turned, fast, to see the Harvester watching him with a smile on his curious, blank face. Small black eyes were fixed on Meshwar and his own blood-red gaze narrowed.