Bloodforged

by Nathan Long

  Of course, it wouldn’t take an army for Ulrika to enter. The maids and men-at-arms knew her, and some little lie would be enough to get her through the door. The difficulty would be getting Famke out again. She was sure Hermione could lock the doors and windows with a snap of her fingers, and then she would be trapped inside. Hermione might kill her for trying to steal her protégée from her, or worse, bring her back to Gabriella.

  But perhaps she wouldn’t have to enter the house. Perhaps Famke was still in the garden. With renewed excitement Ulrika dropped down from the rooftop to a narrow side street and circled the block until she reached the back wall of Hermione’s estate. Her heart surged as the tinny strains of an inexpertly played lute reached her ears. That could be only one person. Ulrika tiptoed to the wall and made to spring to the top of it, then paused. What if Hermione was with Famke? Or some of her gentlemen? She strained her senses. No heartbeats, but Hermione might still be there. Ulrika would have to spy it out.

  She jumped up and caught the top of the wall with her fingers, then pulled herself up slowly until she could just peer over the wall. Trees and shrubs and statues of lovers dying in each others’ arms screened off much of the house, but by craning her neck and leaning to the left she could just see the veranda, and Famke.

  She was alone on the bench where Ulrika had left her, her golden hair gleaming silver in the moonlight as she bent assiduously over her lute, wrestling with a Bretonnian melody – and losing.

  Ulrika breathed a sigh of relief, then slipped over the wall and dropped down into the garden. She padded through the trees and shrubs to crouch down at the edge of the lawn, not wanting to step out where she would be in view of the windows.

  ‘Famke!’ she whispered.

  Famke looked up, peeking through her long straight tresses.

  ‘Who?’ she asked, her playing faltering. Then she saw Ulrika and stopped altogether. ‘Sister! What are you doing here?’

  Ulrika put a finger to her lips and beckoned to her. ‘Shhh,’ she said. ‘Come here.’

  Famke looked back towards the house, then stood and hurried down the steps and across the lawn. ‘What is it, Ulrika? Why are you sneaking around like a thief?’

  Ulrika grinned. ‘I have run away. The countess revealed herself to be without honour or respect, so I have decided to strike out on my own, and I’ve come to take you with me.’ She took Famke’s hand. ‘Come. We haven’t much time.’

  ‘You… you’ve run away?’ asked Famke, stunned.

  ‘It was that or die.’ Ulrika stood. ‘Now to the wall, before anyone comes looking for you.’

  Famke pulled back. ‘Ulrika, I… How can we do this? It was only a joke. A dream.’

  ‘It is no joke for me,’ said Ulrika, impatient. ‘Not any more. I tore apart the countess’s house and robbed her blind. There’s no going back.’

  ‘But it’s impossible!’ said Famke. ‘We will need a coach, and blood-swains, and places to stay.’

  Ulrika hefted the purse at her belt. ‘We’ll buy all that. Now, come on!’

  Hermione’s voice rang from inside the house. ‘Famke? Famke, where are you?’

  Ulrika turned back to Famke. ‘Come, sister,’ she whispered. ‘Before it’s too late.’

  Famke shook her head, looking as if she would cry were vampires able to shed tears. ‘I cannot. It won’t work. I’m sorry.’

  Ulrika stepped out of the bushes towards her, anger growing in her breast. ‘What is the matter with you? Do want to live under the thumb of that horrible woman for the rest of eternity? How can you stand to be shut up like this? You are like a doll in a box. Wouldn’t you rather die free than live caged?’

  Famke hung her head. ‘I’m sorry, Ulrika. I am a coward.’

  Ulrika groaned, and considered slinging the girl over her shoulder and carrying her over the wall by force, but just then the veranda door opened and Lady Hermione stepped out, two of her gentlemen at her back. Famke squeaked.

  ‘What goes on here?’ asked Hermione coldly as she stepped down to the lawn.

  Ulrika fought down the instinct to attack, and bowed instead. ‘For-forgive me, Lady Hermione. I heard Mistress Famke playing while I was walking, and thought I would pay my respects.’

  ‘I see,’ said Hermione, swishing forwards through the grass as her men spread out behind her. ‘A social call, over the garden wall.’

  ‘Ah, yes, mistress,’ said Ulrika. ‘I-I know I should have presented myself at the front door, but I thought I would surprise–’

  ‘So you were only being social,’ said Hermione, cutting her off, ‘when you asked my darling Famke if she would rather die free than live caged?’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE WALLS OF NULN

  Ulrika stepped back, keeping her hand away from the hilt of her rapier with difficulty. Famke shrank back too.

  ‘I–I’m afraid you misheard me, mistress,’ said Ulrika.

  ‘Did I?’ asked Hermione. ‘Then what did you say?’

  Ulrika opened her mouth. Nothing came out. She cursed herself. Had she been the countess, the lies would have flowed like wine. Gabriella was never at a loss for words, but Ulrika had not been trained in parlour fencing. She shot a look at Famke, but the girl seemed paralysed with fear.

  ‘I… don’t remember,’ she said at last.

  Hermione shot her a withering look. ‘If you are going to come wooing my ward for Gabriella, you really should be better prepared.’ She held out her hand as more men filed out of the house behind her. ‘Surrender your sword. You will be held here until the countess can be sent for.’

  Ulrika took another step back and felt the bushes pressing into her back. The garden wall was close.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I–’

  With a sudden spring, she shoved Famke into Hermione, then turned and bolted through the shrubbery.

  Hermione shrieked in anger, then started chanting an ear-blistering incantation while her gentlemen bellowed and plunged into the bushes. Ulrika didn’t look back. It would only slow her. A tree before her offered a low branch. She leapt up and kicked from trunk to branch to the top of the wall like a cat, but the air above the wall rippled and thickened as Hermione’s incantation neared its conclusion. It dragged at Ulrika as she struck it, holding her in mid-air and slowing her like a fly caught in honey. The gentlemen burst from the bushes and leapt and flailed below her, trying to catch her ankles.

  Ulrika fought against the thickened air, pushing through it with her arms and pushing it away with her mind. Let me go! she screamed to herself. Let me be free!

  Suddenly she was free, and crashed down ungracefully to the cobbled alley, landing hard on knees and elbows. She scrambled up and ran as the voices of Hermione’s gentlemen roared from behind the wall.

  ‘Lower the wards, mistress!’

  ‘She’s escaped!’

  ‘Fetch lamps, someone!’

  ‘Goodbye, Famke!’ Ulrika shouted over her shoulder, then turned left at the end of the alley and sprinted away, twisting and turning through the deserted streets without thought for where she was going. She heard no sounds of pursuit, but that was no guarantee. She had no idea of the extent of Hermione’s powers. For all she knew, the lady could fly, though it seemed likely she would be too concerned with appearances to go flitting over Nuln in her fancy dresses. That was not the Lahmian way.

  No, Ulrika thought with a tremor. The Lahmian way was to use their influence and position to get what they wanted. Hermione wouldn’t hunt her. She would ask the authorities to do it. Suddenly Ulrika felt the walls of Nuln closing in on her. She had to get out before Hermione blocked off her routes of escape, and she had wasted too much time already, running around like a headless goblin.

  She stopped and looked around, getting her bearings. She was in the Temple Quarter, with the towering spires and battlements of the temples of Sigmar, Shallya and Myrmidia looming all around her. Fool! She had run almost to the Garden of Morr – completely the wrong direction. She turne
d and started south, moving this time at a swift but measured pace, and praying to the gods who would no longer hear her that she was not too late.

  A few minutes later, she came to a stop near the High Gate, the main portal through the wall which divided the rich Altestadt quarter from the common commercial vulgarity of the Neuestadt. She had climbed the wall once before, coming the other way, and had almost been caught. She was loath to try it again.

  And perhaps she didn’t have to. She had climbed before because she had looked like a scruffy and disreputable foreigner whom the guards would have been unlikely to let into the Noble Quarter in the middle of the night. Looking down at herself now, in her handsome black doublet and expensive boots, she wondered if she might risk the direct approach. She looked like a noble now, and she was only going into the Neuestadt, and the guards didn’t care so much about that.

  She looked ahead. All was quiet at the gate. The guards in their black uniforms and breastplates trudged through their duty as if half-asleep. It was now or never. She strode forwards, chin high. As she approached, the guards looked up, peering at her, then straightened and grounded their spears when they saw the cut of her clothes.

  She nodded coolly to them and they pushed open the pedestrian door beside the larger gates.

  ‘Evening, mein herr,’ said the bearded gate captain, saluting.

  ‘Evening,’ said Ulrika, stepping into the narrow tunnel that passed through the wall.

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw the captain do a double-take. Either her face or voice had told him she was a woman. She kept going, forcing herself not to increase her pace. She could feel his eyes boring into her back, but he said nothing as she stepped out of the other side of the little passage into the Neuestadt. One gate down. One more to go.

  But just as she let out a sigh of relief and began to stride away, there came a clatter of hooves behind her. She looked back and saw four horsemen ride up on the Altestadt side of the gate, calling for the captain to open it. Ulrika froze. She recognised the men. They were all Hermione’s dandies. She stepped into the mouth of an alley and listened.

  ‘We’re looking for a thief,’ one of them was saying. ‘A woman disguised as a gentleman. She stole my lady’s jewellery.’

  The captain gaped. ‘We just let her through, seconds ago!’ He turned and shouted to his men. ‘Open up! Open up!’ then peered through the bars of the opening gate. ‘She’s just – why. she’s gone! Where could she have got to!’

  ‘We’ll find her, captain,’ said the first horseman, and plunged through the gap with the others behind. ‘Bergen, Standt!’ he cried. ‘Warn the other gates! Folstad and I will search here.’

  ‘Aye, m’lord!’ called the men, and thundered off into the Altestadt as the leader and the other went more slowly, looking into every doorway and alley.

  Ulrika shrank deeper into the shadows and watched them pass by, groaning to herself. She was fast, but not so fast as a horse. They would reach the gates long before she could, and then she would be trapped. Was there another way? Could she climb out? She had climbed the Altestadt wall, but the exterior walls were another thing entirely - heavily patrolled, and much higher. The drop to the ground would likely break her ankles or legs, inhuman strength or not.

  No. The walls were not an option. She must find some other way out of Nuln, and quickly, for it was too confined a place to hide for long. It would only be a matter of time before Hermione and Gabriella or the witch hunters tracked her down.

  She started down the alley, avoiding reeking puddles and keeping an ear out for horses, while cudgelling her brains for an escape route. If she were human, she could just disguise herself and slip through the main city gates once they opened in the morning and the crowds began to stream in and out, but that was impossible for her, for she would burn to a cinder under the sun’s angry rays. Worse, this would never change. Every night the gates would close, trapping her inside Nuln at the only time she was able to move around, and then open again just after she was forced to seek shelter indoors. Aristocrat of the night? What a joke! More like prisoner of the night.

  But then, in the middle of the Handelbezirk, just as she was about to give up and start to seek shelter for the coming day, she walked into a thick, spreading fog, and the rank, wet stink of the river hit her. Her head came up as she inhaled it. The river! Now there was a gate that was difficult to guard.

  She cursed as she started through the muffled streets towards the docks. Why hadn’t she thought of it sooner? She and Gabriella had travelled from Eicheshatten to Nuln in a riverboat stateroom and never once had to fear the sun. Of course, booking passage on a passenger ship, even under an assumed name, was not wise. If the Lahmians came asking after her, Ulrika did not have a face and manner a purser was likely to forget. She would have to stow away. But that was even better. No sun ever reached the holds of cargo ships. She could get away in perfect safety, and she wouldn’t have to wait until tomorrow night to do it.

  Even before sunrise, the riverfront was acrawl with industrious activity – both legal and illegal. Captains and harbourmasters checked manifests by lantern light and pried off the lids of crates to inspect the goods inside, while skulking figures made more furtive exchanges in the shadows of the grey wood warehouses. Longshoremen loaded cargo nets and rolled barrels up gangplanks, while in the dark places between the bigger docks little skiffs, hidden by the fog, offloaded contraband directly into the broken-gated outflow pipes of the sewers, through which it would be distributed to a hundred destinations across the city. Women with little wheeled grills rolled them up and down the quayside, selling river trout and hot chowder to the crews, while women in more colourful clothes sauntered at a slower pace, ready to sate the men’s baser appetites. Beggars clutched at Ulrika’s cloak, moaning for coins, as she edged through the crowd, and hard-looking men eyed her fine clothes and beautiful rapier as they lounged in the doorways of the dockside taverns.

  The furious bustle of it all surprised her. She had expected the wharfs to be quiet at this time of day, and had hoped to be able to climb on board an unmanned ship and slip down into the hold without much difficulty. But there were no unmanned ships. All of them were swarming with men.

  She glanced to the east. There was a definite orange glow to the fog in that direction now. If she didn’t get on board something soon she would have to give up and try again tomorrow. Then she saw her way – the grill women. When they trundled their little barrows up before a ship and called their wares, the men aboard would drop their work and hurry forwards for a hot mug and a quick bite. All she had to do was time it right.

  She began trailing a woman who pushed a bright red barrow and wailed, ‘Hot chowder! Couldn’t be prouder! Hot chowder! I’ll sing it louder!’

  The men from a long, flat riverboat got the nod from their bo’sun and filed down off the gangplank, rubbing their hands and calling cheerful vulgarities to the grill woman, who answered in kind.

  Ulrika sidled casually up to the boat and looked over its rail. A yawning black hatch was open in the centre of the broad deck, a pallet of blackpowder barrels hanging over it on a rope and tackle. She looked back at the men. They were all crowded around the grill woman, jostling and making jokes. Unfortunately, the bo’sun had stayed on board, pacing and going over a sheaf of papers on the aft deck.

  Ulrika clenched her teeth. She would have to risk it – just as soon as he turned his back. There! With a swift leap she was over the rail and light-footing across the deck, then dropped into the hatch.

  She landed with a soft thud in a dark, cavernous hold, her shoulders tensed as she waited for cries of surprise. They didn’t come, and she relaxed. The hold was as long as the boat, and stacked with blackpowder barrels and wooden gun-crates with the brand of a local forge burned into their sides. The stacks were covered in heavy canvas tarps, and stretched all the way back to the aft bulkhead. Ulrika crawled over the piles until she was as far from the hatch as she could get, then wormed under
a tarp and nestled amongst the barrels.

  A thrill went through her as she pulled off her makeshift pack and made a pillow of it. She had done it. She had escaped Gabriella and Hermione and found a way out of Nuln. She was free. She could go where she pleased, do what she wanted to do, be who she wished to be!

  The thought brought her up short. Where did she want to go? What did she want to do? Who did she wish to be? She had been so concerned with getting free, she hadn’t until this moment given any thought of what she would do with her freedom once she had gained it.

  When she had thought Famke would come along, she’d had some vague idea of going off and starting a new life with her outside the confines of the sisterhood, but she hadn’t imagined any specifics, just a few jumbled images – galloping down a winding road on a pair of chargers, sleeping in some farmer’s hayloft, finding some out-of-the-way place they could live in peace – all storybook nonsense, now that she thought of it. It would have been nothing like that.

  The boots of the crewmen thudded on the deck above her, and she heard the calls of rough voices and the squeal of the winch as the pallet of barrels was lowered into the hold and men climbed down after it to roll them into place. Good. They would be off soon.

  She returned to her problem. Now that she was on her own, she had no idea what she wanted to do, or where to go. She didn’t even know where her boat was going. Should she go to Altdorf? She’d never been to the Empire’s capital before, and had always wanted to see it. Should she return to Middenheim, where she knew the graf? Perhaps not. She certainly couldn’t renew the acquaintance, and Middenheimers were even more suspicious and fanatical than other Empire folk. It would be a dangerous place to be a vampire. Should she leave the Empire entirely? That was an attractive notion. She could go to Marienburg or Bretonnia, or Tilea, where it was warm and she knew no one, and could start again from scratch.