[Von Carstein 03] - Retribution

by Steven Savile - (ebook by Undead)

  “This is your curse,” Chovihani rasped, “to be trapped between both worlds: the dead and the living. Listen well, mulo. You must give in to your nature. You are a beast, the man you were is no more. You are a predator, a vampire. You must feed or lose yourself.”

  “You don’t know me, witch,” Jerek growled as he shrugged off her hand and rose angrily.

  “We are your people, mulo. We know you better than you know yourself. Bring him the girl, Vedas. Slit her throat in front of him. The blood will answer everything. Mulo will feed the beast within. He won’t be able to resist that hot sweet liquid as it flows. It is his nature. He is a beast.”

  “I am not the beast here, witch.”

  Jerek stalked away from the campfire.

  He loathed himself for the monster he was. He loathed the Strigany more for reminding him of it.

  Moroi and Arminus Vamburg were both a long way from home.

  The witch hunter and his companion walked the dusk streets of Nuln. Moroi drew the collar of his greatcoat up around his throat and the wide brim of his felt hat down low over his eyes. He had a vile headache. The pressure of the blood against the bones of his skull was intense. His vision blurred as he walked, the rain-slicked cobbles pitching and rolling like the deck of a ship beneath his feet.

  Vamburg walked silently beside him. His eyes scanned the rooftops for the slightest untoward movement. The rain made it difficult to see much of anything and it showed no sign of slackening before dawn.

  The storm had nothing to do with Moroi’s pain.

  There was trouble coming. He could feel it in his bones.

  The black ship haunted Moroi even as it haunted Nuln, spreading disease and discord through her fusty streets. It was as though a plague had taken root within his mind. Whispers came to him, men’s tongues loosened by fear. A weaker man could easily have believed that dead men cursed to sail on black seas for eternity were pacing her decks, but Moroi was cynical. Flesh-and-blood zombie pirates were little more than bogeymen invoked to frighten children.

  He knew enough, however, to trust his instincts. Whatever it was, it was close. His prescience was a gift, or a curse, of his profession. Hunting those corrupted by the winds of magic, twisted by the taint of Chaos or defiled by the canker of evil changed a man. To fight evil, one needed weapons. His hand sought the reassuring presence of the repeating six-shot crossbow clipped to his leather belt. The pair of them had been through a lot together. Not every creature earned the right to a trial, sentencing and hanging. More often than not circumstance demanded that Sigmar’s justice be dispensed ruthlessly.

  He had thought, a few years ago, of replacing the weapon with a percussion pistol but when it came to it he preferred the crossbow. There was something satisfying about its weight and heft. With his back in a corner, he knew he could trust it not to let him down. So the notion of a pistol had been discarded.

  The blue-oil lamp on the street corner had burned out, leaving the night darker there. He stepped into the shadow and froze. He had heard something. A single sound: the slow sigh of a breath leaking out. Moroi turned slowly in a full circle, looking for the source of the sound.

  He saw someone, the indistinct outline of a man.

  “You sir! Hold!” Moroi cried as the man turned and fled. He set off after the panicked stranger, Arminus Vamburg on his heels.

  The harsh slap of their footsteps echoed along the street.

  Moroi skidded on the rain-slick cobbles, losing his balance. He hit the floor hard but was up and running again without missing a step.

  What he saw beggared understanding. The man—for man it most certainly had been—dropped to all fours but didn’t slow. His spine arched, tearing through the shirt on his back and bursting the waist of his trousers as he tossed his head back and howled at the moon. Before his eyes the man shifted into the form of a great dire wolf, leaving a trail of ruined clothing in its wake.

  Moroi dropped to a crouch and unclipped the crossbow, levelling it and sighting down the short stock. He breathed deeply, once, twice, and on the third exhalation squeezed down on the trigger, loosing the bolt. It flew true, taking the werebeast in the hindquarters. The creature howled its agony but didn’t slow. Moroi loosed a second bolt but it flew wide, the wolf bucking and thrashing as it sought to dislodge the shaft buried deep in its flesh.

  Then it disappeared around a narrow corner, squeezing through little more than a crack between two buildings.

  Vamburg charged past Moroi, skidding around the corner after the creature. Moroi rose and gave chase. Coming around the corner the werebeast was nowhere in sight. There was blood though, a telltale drip leading to a crooked spiral staircase that descended into the bones of the Alt Stadt. He knew that the stairwells led down to the Unterbaunch, the underbelly of the city, providing a haven for thieves, murderers, vagabonds and the whole gamut of undesirables. It was ironic that, by most people, the witch hunter would have been judged among that group. The werebeast was wounded, but short of tearing the miles and miles of catacombs and tunnels apart inch by inch there was nothing they could do.

  “Do we follow it down there?” Vamburg asked, looking pointedly at the blood. His accent was thick, the words coming between ragged gasps of breath. He had a short silver dirk in his hand. He didn’t need to say what he was thinking: it’s wounded, it can’t get far.

  Moroi looked to the moon. It was, as he thought, a gibbous moon. “That thing was no lycanthrope, my friend. The moon is a week from full.”

  “A vampire?”

  “Almost certainly.”

  “A renegade, then. One of the last.”

  “Stop thinking like a true son of the Empire, Arminus. What is the evidence of our eyes? Tell me that which we know and no more.”

  Clarity was a good exercise for Arminus. If the apprentice were to become the master he would need to think with logical precision.

  “There is a vampire in Nuln.”

  “Exactly. And what do we know of the beasts?” Moroi smiled. His friend was learning. The secret was to follow the evidence, not invent it.

  “Vampires must feed on the blood of the living.”

  “Good. He was undoubtedly out tonight in search of succour. We disturbed him. That means he is hungry and wounded. That in turn means that he is weakened.”

  “So we go down then?”

  Moroi shook his head. “We would be fools to walk into the unknown. There could be a nest down there. We have no proof that the creature is alone. No, we use our heads, Arminus. We out-think the beast. We do not rush headlong into the heart of darkness. We bide our time, wait for day when the beast is at its weakest and then we flush it out from its sanctuary and kill it. Now I have a job for you my friend. Go rouse the Burgomeister. I would have a crew of navvies here within the hour. We might not be able to enter the sewers, but we can most assuredly make it difficult for the beast to evade us in the meantime. I want to seal off as many of these stairways as possible. There are eight I know of in this quarter, but I have no idea how many are spread across the entire district. It doesn’t matter, we can’t hope to block them all up, but the fewer exits the beast has, the better our chance of snaring him on our terms. It is, as ever, about dictating the manner of engagement. We do not allow our enemy to take us by surprise.”

  But take them by surprise the beast did.

  The navvies, under Vamburg’s supervision, worked through until dawn and deep into the heat of the following day sealing thirty-six stairwells down into the Unterbaunch. For all their toil there were countless other entrances that were overlooked. They bricked up the narrower of the openings and nailed thick wooden planks across the mouths of wider ones.

  Moroi did not contradict his companion as he gave his orders. To have done so would have undermined his authority with the city watch. Moroi judged it better to allow his man to learn from his mistakes. They would inevitably come at a price, but lessons paid for were ones remembered.

  The watch posted guards, two to a s
tairwell, although as the day wore on complacency crept in and they grew lax with their patrols. In a moment of sublime stupidity the Burgomeister ordered their recall three hours before dusk, deeming the threat to have been extinguished by the valiant witch hunter and his companion. Only then did Moroi intervene. He argued hard against this idiocy but, mind made up, there was nothing he could do to dissuade the Burgomeister from his withdrawal.

  Four hours later they were counting the cost.

  Vamburg knelt down beside the splintered beams scattered across the mouth of the same stairwell they had chased the werebeast down the night before.

  “It took a shocking amount of force to break this,” Arminus Vamburg said, turning the timber over and over in his hands. Moroi agreed. He refrained from the obvious retort. Vamburg was doing exactly as he had been taught, quantifying the known. It had taken a shocking amount of force to splinter the beam. It was three inches thick, solid oak, and it was shredded apart as though it were nothing more substantial than a page of vellum.

  “The beast is out there and it is that idiot bureaucrat’s fault.” Moroi felt a gnawing sickness in his gut. It was always the same when he was near an abomination. It was a physical reaction to the wrongness of the entity. He felt it now. The blood in his skull pounded against the bone plates. He rubbed at his eyes.

  Vamburg saw his friend’s distress. “It’s near isn’t it?”

  Moroi nodded, a pained breath leaking slowly between his lips. “Close enough.”

  He scanned the rows of blind windows and then raised his gaze to the gables and eaves of the crowded houses, looking for the beast. “It’s watching us.”

  Vamburg followed the direction of his gaze.

  Nothing.

  “Sir! Sir! Come quick sir!” A young lad charged up to the witch hunter, grabbing his hand and trying to drag him away.

  “What is it, boy?”

  “It’s my ma, sir. Please come quick.”

  “Show me,” Moroi said, that cold stone of certainty sinking sickly to the pit of his stomach. He knew they were too late even before he pushed open the door to the hovel. The cramped room reeked of it, the filth of death. The woman lay in the centre of the floor, her throat torn out. The man at her side wept. Moroi felt wretched as he crossed the threshold. All he could think was that it was yet another death that could have been prevented had the bureaucrat simply listened to him. But then, men in power weren’t famous for listening to underlings and outsiders.

  The man looked up. Even in the dim light of the foetid room Moroi could see that his eyes were rimmed red with tears. “My wife…”

  “When did you find her?” Moroi asked, ignoring the man’s grief. There were farts he needed. The time for mourning would come. He had spoken with widows and widowers too many times to feel pity for their plight. If they had information locked up within them he wanted to prise it out of them. That was the extent of their relationship.

  “When I came home… I don’t know…”

  “Think man, whatever you can tell us could well be the difference between life and death for someone else’s wife.”

  The man sniffed, snot dribbling down his face. He wiped it away with the back of his hand, succeeding only in smearing it across his cheek. “I don’t know. Thirty minutes, maybe more. I don’t know.”

  “Thirty minutes is long enough for him to be anywhere in this damned city by now,” Vamburg said, hitting the doorframe in his frustration.

  “No,” Moroi said, “I can feel him. He isn’t far away. He’s watching, and now he knows we have found her. It is all a part of his game.”

  “You give the beast too much credit.”

  “And you, my friend, do not give it enough.”

  “Beast?” The man asked. He touched the ruin of his wife’s throat and held his bloody fingers up for Moroi to see. “What sort of beast is capable of such…?” He stopped mid-sentence. “A vampire. Does that mean she…?”

  Arminus Vamburg laid a comforting hand on the bereaved man’s shoulder. There was nothing either of them could say to ease his pain. Death was no respecter of love or happiness. It didn’t care if the deceased was a mother or a wife. It didn’t matter if those left behind would never be the same again.

  A fly moved sluggishly around the open wound, its presence the most natural and repugnant thing in the world.

  Moroi saw it first—the wound on the man’s arm. Some of the blood on the woman was his. “Did you see the murderer? Speak the truth man. Did you see him?”

  The man nodded and held out his wrist where he had been cut during his struggle with the vampire. “She’s infected isn’t she?” He pushed at the cut, trying to close it, as though by doing so he could undo what had been done to him. “So am I, aren’t I? Don’t lie to me. He killed me as well didn’t he?”

  “No,” the witch hunter said shortly, “but your woman… I am sorry; there is no way of knowing, so we must perform the ritual for her own sake, lest she be born again into the unlife for our impropriety.”

  “Ritual?”

  “Arminus, take him outside. Prepare a grave for this poor woman. There are things a husband should not have to see. I will need the roses from the bed beneath the window.”

  Vamburg nodded. “It will be done.” He handed Moroi the canvas satchel that he carried slung across his shoulders. Moroi took it, and began rifling through the bag looking for the instruments he would need to complete the ritual. “Come with me,” Vamburg said, seeing the witch hunter draw the wooden stake and iron hammer from the satchel. He held out a hand for the man to take.

  “I should be here…”

  “No, you will be of more use to her and to us preparing a place for burial. Do not remember her this way. You do not need to see more. It will never leave you. Every time you close your eyes and see her face, you will remember the blood instead of the smile. Is that what you want?”

  The man shook his head. “No.”

  “No,” Moroi agreed.

  Vamburg led the man by the arm.

  “Go with them, boy. This is no place for you.”

  Vamburg returned a moment later with the heads of fifteen white roses. He closed the door to the hovel, leaving Moroi alone in the charnel house with the dead woman. He walked around her corpse three times, slowly, counter-clockwise, looking at the mess the beast had made. She might have been pretty before, it was impossible to tell. He knelt, gripping her jaw to open her mouth. He filled it with the heads of the white roses and pressed her jaw shut. He had no reason to believe that the beast had given her his blood curse, but unlike the bureaucrat he wasn’t about to risk the lives of others by being anything less than meticulous. He had a duty to the living. He had, for that matter, a duty to the dead.

  He withdrew a wooden stake, fashioned from the trunk of a hundred year old ash tree, and hammered it through her breastbone, piercing her heart.

  His head pounded. The ache had faded for a while but it had returned with savage vengeance. He couldn’t allow the beast to undermine his resolve. He rooted around in the satchel for the small diamond-toothed saw he needed to decapitate the woman. It was an ugly business. He looked around the room for a blanket to use as a shroud. Moroi wrapped the corpse in the coarse blanket he found on the pallet that the couple had obviously shared as a bed. He had known too many distraught husbands return, curious, sad or just numb in the head from grief. No man needed to see his wife laid out like a slab of dead meat.

  He stuffed her neck with more petals.

  She would not rise again.

  The pain in his head intensified. The beast was close, arrogantly so. It was mocking him with its nearness and there was nothing he could do.

  He pushed himself to his feet and staggered back to the door. His head swam dizzyingly. He opened the door. Vamburg and the husband had dug a shallow grave where the roses had grown. Moroi nodded to his companion. Together they laid the woman to rest beneath the window, face down. They covered her, replanting the denuded roses above where she
lay.

  The man knelt in the dirt. “Would you say something? I want to send her to Sigmar, but I don’t know what to say?”

  Moroi knelt beside the man. “What was her name?”

  “Kathe.”

  Moroi took the silver hammer from around his neck and pressed it into the dirt at the foot of the tallest rose bush. “Sigmar will know her with this, my friend. He needs no pretty words to find his own. Her flesh is part of nature now, joined in the cycle of life. Her soul though is unfettered. She flies with the gods. She would not want you or me to grieve for her. She knows that one day you will be together again. That is the beauty of love. It is eternal, unending.” Thank you,” the man said. Thank you for everything.” Again, a fierce stabbing pain lanced through the witch hunter’s skull. He couldn’t keep the pain from registering on his face. Vamburg put a steadying hand on his friend’s shoulder.

  The pain came again, brutal this time. Needles of fire speared into his brain, the lancing pain so hot it was blinding. Despite Vamburg’s hand, Moroi convulsed and slumped forwards face first into the dirt. His cry died on his lips. The last thing he saw as he fell were the garish colours of a Strigany caravan crossing the mouth of the street not fifty feet away.

  The air was thick, the night without a sound.

  They had gathered outside the Sigmarite temple, firebrands blazing, torches held high, armed with pitchforks and hoes and other makeshift weapons. They wanted blood. There was a beast within the walls of the city. It had slain one of their own.

  Moroi stood on a wooden crate.

  He had their attention.

  It was always difficult to judge the animal that the crowd became, to know when tempers would rise, how quickly and when finally they would go on a rampage.

  He held up his right hand for silence.

  “It is true,” he said, and then waited for the murmur to subside. There is a killer in the city.”

  “A vampire!” someone shouted.