[Von Carstein 03] - Retribution

by Steven Savile - (ebook by Undead)

  Whether it had stumbled or had been hit he couldn’t say. It was gone. Gunfire rifled the air, adding to the chaos of battle. He heard a brief whinny and then there was a moment of shocking silence. He tumbled through the dirt and staggered to his feet, drawing his sword. He stumbled forwards. His head reeled. Though the roar of battle was at hand, he could see none of it. Smoke rendered him utterly blind. Occasionally he heard the drumming hooves of a horseman galloping by, but he was gone again before he could call out, and just as quickly he was lost in the smoke again.

  Then… then the tide of battle took another turn.

  Vorster heard the clash of steel.

  It was an unmistakable sound, and it meant only one thing: the Talabecland army was on the field!

  Vorster raced blindly towards the din, his sword outstretched, thinking only to fight his way free of the slaughter. Twenty paces into the smoke he came face to face with a mighty Talabecland cavalryman bearing down on him, sabre raised.

  Vorster stood his ground, braced for the blow to land. He struggled to regulate his breathing, slow it so that panic didn’t overwhelm him. He waited, only to side step at the very last moment and ram the tip of his blade into the side of the charging animal. The gash was deep and bloody, cutting into the horse’s stomach and spilling its guts. The horse bucked furiously, throwing its rider to the ground ten feet beyond Vorster.

  The rider landed badly. His neck was obviously broken, but he was still alive and struggling to breathe. The fallen man’s eyes bulged with fear as he watched his enemy approach, utterly helpless to do anything about it.

  “Please…” the man begged, barely forming the word.

  Vorster was merciful and quick.

  He hoped, when it came to it, that some Talabeclander would do the same for him.

  * * * * *

  The end, when it came, was inevitable.

  He fell beneath the swords of two men, beaten into the ground by the savagery of their blows.

  He crawled in the dirt, but he would not beg.

  His sword had fallen so far from his fingers. He did not want to die without it in his hand. He needed to reach it. He tried to move, but a fierce kick in the side of the ribs lifted him bodily from the mud and left him clutching at his gut in agony. He gasped but couldn’t catch his breath. A second kick turned him over so that he lay face up, looking at the sneering face of his enemy.

  Vorster, tried to breathe, but the heel of a well-placed boot came down to crush his windpipe.

  He clawed at the leather, but was helpless against its force.

  He gave up, waiting for the inevitable killing stroke, be it stamp or stab.

  The cold tip of steel rested against his eye socket; the enemy was not ugly, not some monster. He could have been looking at himself. He felt a surge of sadness that it should come to this, here. The young Talabeclander officer leaned over him. “Why?” his voice shook with raw emotion.

  Vorster struggled for air, aware that there were others surrounding him, but he would not answer.

  “You knew it was madness.

  Vorster felt the rage within. He could see his sword. The leather wrapped hilt was five feet away, no more, if he could just reach it…

  The boot pressed down harder.

  “For all your leader’s folly, you showed great courage this day, soldier,” the young Talabeclander said, admiration in his tone. “It would be a shame to kill you, so please do not give me the excuse. You will be our heroic guest. I cannot say whether it will be a long stay.”

  The last thing Vorster Schlagener heard as he slipped into unconsciousness was, “Dress his wounds. Then bind him and take him away.”

  Under flags of truce the dead and wounded were brought back from the silent valley.

  There was an air of disbelief about the high command. Anger at the stupidity of one man grew into grief as they built huge pyres for their dead.

  Of the 365 men who had charged down the valley less than sixty returned. Ignatz, the man responsible for the debacle, was not amongst them. Corpses littered the battlefield.

  Horses streaming with blood and unable to get to their feet bit at the short grass with froth-covered teeth.

  The occasional sharp, melancholy cry of a horse dying beneath the farriers’ knives filled the air.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Lahmian Temple

  Nuln, the Imperial City

  The woman, Narcisa, fascinated Skellan.

  She was an enigma.

  She moved freely amongst the living while he was forced to hide in the gutters and the Unterbaunch beneath the Alt Stadt, eating off scraps while she played the social butterfly, moving from arm to arm of the rich and influential, laughing, charming and seductive. They loved her. Night after night he spied on her from the shadows, watching her nocturnal promenades with actors, merchants, aristocrats and men of undeniable power. She gravitated towards those who had power, or had some kind of influence over the power-mongers. No one seemed to notice her nature. Certainly there was none of the hysteria that would have accompanied Skellan revealing his presence to the cattle. They adored Narcisa. They flocked to her, feted her and pandered to her, all in the hope of getting closer to her flame that they might bask in her glory. Though of course if they succeeded in getting close enough, Skellan knew, they would get burned, but how many moths cared about that as they flocked to the flame?

  She was clever, ruthlessly cunning and selective in her feeding pattern.

  He quickly realised she was feeding off each and every one of the gentlemen callers he saw her with—a little here, a little there, a kiss turned overly playful, a cut tenderly administered. There were ways of drawing blood that they didn’t even notice. Narcisa was tender, loving and amused by their jokes, and she made them all feel like fortunate fools. It amazed Skellan that none of them noticed just how “too good to be true” the Lahmian was. Still, the cattle were not the brightest of creatures.

  Occasionally he followed her back to her chambers and would sit while she put on a show for him, seducing the bright young things, and then taking what she wanted in return for what they wanted. He appreciated her performances, but resisted the urge to take a lead role in her little tragedy of passion.

  Over nights of watching, Skellan came to realise that she was not alone, far from it. When he knew what to look for it became easier to spot them. During his stalking of Narcisa she encountered perhaps fifteen more of her kind—blood-sucking females seducing their way into positions of influence in the hierarchy of Nuln.

  Walking still pained him. The witch hunter’s bolt had left its mark, the head buried deep in his arse. He had pulled it out, but the damned thing was tipped with silver so it had burned him deep inside and refused to heal. So he walked with a limp, dragging his left leg slightly. It added to the illusion though. Any who spotted him would have assumed, naturally, that he was some sort of cripple left to beg, following the mayhem of the civil war.

  Some nights he followed Narcisa, other nights he followed one of the other girls. They were all curiously similar, beautiful, more beautiful than the courtesans and hangers on that had flocked to Konrad, most certainly, and easily as beautiful as Vlad’s own Isabella who, in Skellan’s memories of her, was an exquisite beauty. He had never thought to see such beauty in the flesh again.

  The darkness held, refusing to give way to dawn.

  It was cold. Winter was close.

  A horse drawn carriage rumbled past his hiding place. The animal’s hooves sparked on the cobbles and streamers of steam coiled out of its flared nostrils. It stamped hard on the ground, whinnying.

  Skellan backed away into deeper shadow, willing the beast to walk on.

  The horse shied, kicking out, and then came down, breaking into a canter. The carriage driver pulled back on the reins and cried, “Ho, girl!”

  The horse didn’t calm until it was well past Skellan’s hiding place.

  The clouds were thick, promising snow.

  Skellan wal
ked in the shadows, never far from the woman’s side. She knew he was there. Still he refused to step out into the false glow of the streetlights. He felt uncomfortable, the beast stalking beauty. He had to remind himself that she was no damsel. The woman was every bit the predator he was. Moreso, perhaps, as she fed on countless men, keeping them alive as long as they furthered her ambitions. There was a callousness to it that was exciting to him.

  He was moving into familiar territory.

  It felt like an age since he had hunted these streets with Mannfred, but they had not changed so much. He remembered, with a sly smile, the various tastes of the Family Liebowtiz as they had succumbed. That night of the long knives had been one like no other. He had revelled in the culling. They had died in so many inventive ways, defenestrated, despoiled and degraded, that the ingenuity of the murders challenged him even now. It sent a thrill of pleasure through Skellan just thinking about it.

  Indeed, the city still reeled from it.

  The influence of the family had been severely weakened—to the point that a splinter of the family had emerged with a variant pronunciation of their name: Liebewitz. It was a subtle difference in tonal delivery, but it set them apart from the tragedy. Rumour had it that it was a half-brother of one of the dead that had surfaced from somewhere to claim the family fortunes and with no one to stop him, he had succeeded. There were all sorts of suppositions about him having been drummed out of the family when they were still alive, but Skellan wasn’t interested. The original pronunciation of the name had all but died out, it seemed. But then, few liked to be reminded of the horrors Skellan and von Carstein had visited upon the city. It was natural that the survivors would try to distance themselves from that dark time. It had been then that he had learned the truth about the stranger he travelled with and about his hungers—that it was Mannfred, Vlad’s first born. Soon after that, Mannfred had left him to travel into the Lands of the Dead in search of the dark wisdom of the great necromancer, Nagash.

  She led him through the Sonder district into the Smalz quarter. Businesses became few and far between and the houses grew gradually more impressive with colonnades and almost skeletal stone structures. A great many of the houses were dominated by sharply pointed ogive arches, ribbed vaults, clustered columns, sharply pointed spires, flying buttresses and decorative detail. On one such mansion, Skellan saw grim-faced gargoyles and on another what appeared to be butterflies attacking a terrified man. It was all an exercise in indulgence, a way of showing off the owner’s wealth. It was gratuitous and ugly to his eye.

  Further removed from the press of people it became colder, too. He drew his collar up, covering half of his face. The cold was no real discomfort; it was more the illusion of fitting in. One of the cattle seeing him wrapped up against the elements would think nothing of it, just another poor sod out in the cold, making him instantly forgettable. The alternative, Skellan standing on the corner in his shirt oblivious to the cold, would stick in the mind of any who happened to see him.

  She stopped at a set of imposing iron gates, easing them open and slipping through. A serpent had been woven around the black iron bars of either gate, fangs bared in threat. Skellan didn’t follow, at least not directly.

  He waited across the street from the iron gates, watching. The mansion was walled off. The wall was nine feet high and topped with creepers and flowering vines. The trick was making it look as though he belonged. An interloper stood out a mile if he acted like one… Skellan was not by nature a patient man, though. Waiting went against the grain. He looked up and down the street for a good spot from which to carry out his surveillance. The street was empty save for two carriages. Lime trees lined the far side of the road. The lime was a fascinating species of tree, said to grow on unmarked graves. The wind dragged through the leaves, creating an unnerving susurrus that sighed through the trees.

  He was grateful that there were no horses or dogs for him to concern himself with.

  He walked slowly across the cobbled street, approaching the gate. The wall, he saw, was actually topped with shards of broken glass that were hidden beneath the flowering vines. A few of the broken pieces poked through the green.

  The snake appeared to be made out of copper, the elements having oxidised it a bilious shade of green, and they were deceptively well crafted, cast from a single mould and used as a sheath on the iron bar. He touched one of the copper snake’s teeth. It was sharp enough to draw a bead of blood with the least bit of pressure.

  Skellan focused his senses, picking out the sweet fragrance of a woman’s perfume and the damp of bark surrendering to mould, with the faint overlay of a more astringent musk. It took him a moment to isolate it: catsfoot, or cudweed as they called it back home. It was an aroma he hadn’t smelled in the longest time. Lizbet had sworn by it as a cure-all, good for loosening bowels and efficacious against even the most potent snake bites. He heard the caw of a crow, the rustle of the wind through the lime leaves, and the more distant murmur of water.

  He felt the first snowflake of the night on his upturned cheek.

  Skellan looked at the sky. A storm was coming.

  He eased open the iron gate, pushing it back on protesting hinges, and slipped into the grounds of the mansion house. The grounds were well tended, the rose bushes dead-headed, the japonicas cut back, even the vines dinging to the facade of the manse were well maintained in a careful state of managed disrepair, giving the old house an edge of wildness that Skellan found appealing. Left of the serpentine drive lay a small lake, frozen over, and behind it an architectural folly that acted as a small boathouse. On the right were more gardens, a grove of beech trees and a huge stone mausoleum.

  He skirted the high wall, keeping to the fringe of the well-cultivated garden until he reached the mausoleum. A line of gravestones stood like broken teeth across the front of the building giving it something of a grim smile. Each of the tombstones was engraved with the mark of the snake. It was obviously some sort of family crest tied for who knows how long to the old house. The motto “Es liegt im Blut” was carved into the lintel above the mausoleum’s door. “It runs in the blood.” Skellan couldn’t help but smile at the obvious irony of the words.

  He tried the door. It was sealed.

  Instead of forcing his way in, he sat with his back to one of the gravestones, watching the comings and goings of the house and its nocturnal visitors. They came and went in pairs and alone, the women of the night. It seemed they all returned to the manse after feeding, to share whatever they had learned with whoever dwelled there—almost certainly their hidden mistress, just as Mannfred had assumed.

  The manse evidently served as the focus for their infiltration of the echelons of Nuln’s society.

  Again he was disturbed that the Lahmian’s could live in such obvious opulence and not attract the wrath of witch hunters and bigots claiming the holy bloody right of Sigmar to crush anything they didn’t understand. The depth of their deception was staggering.

  Flakes of snow were drifting down, whipping up over the top of the gravestone and away, melting before they reached the ground. Skellan wrapped his cloak around him and pulled the hood up over his head so that only the broken profile of his nose protruded. He itched at the leather patch across his eye. Judging by the moon’s position it was well past the middle of the night.

  Despite, or because of, the lateness of the hour, the manse was far from deserted. He watched as two young debutantes in high boots and long fur coats walked arm in arm out of the main house. They talked lightly, giggling as they walked around the rim of the lake. Together they slipped through the gate and back out into the city proper, destined, no doubt, for some aristocratic bed somewhere. The trailing edge of their laughter reached him as they passed by on the other side of the wall.

  Still he waited.

  More women came through the gate, more left.

  The women frequently turned and seemed to stare right at him as though sensing his presence in the grounds, but none saw him.<
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  Finally Narcisa emerged from the house.

  Skellan detached himself from the shadows and moved up behind her, catching the Lahmian by the throat as he wrapped his other arm around her waist. He leaned in close, whispering in her ear: “My master would meet your mistress, Lahmian.”

  The woman didn’t flinch. “Then perhaps he would care to ask instead of sending his brute in to force an invitation?”

  Skellan added pressure to her throat, knowing even as he did so that she had no need of breath. Frustration caused him to squeeze savagely enough to crush her windpipe. He felt her stiffen against him, resisting. Beneath the pretty curves her musculature was a match for iron. He struggled to hold her.

  “Make it happen.”

  “The Eternal does not see commoners, vampire,” Narcisa said, sneering.

  “Oh I think she will make an exception for this commoner.”

  “Do you think we don’t know who you are? Who your uncommon master is? You really are a clueless brute, aren’t you Jon Skellan?”

  “How could you…?”

  She twisted, so that her mouth was beside his ear, reversing their roles of captive and captor. Her eyes, he saw, were different: one glaucous blue, the other flecked with hazel. The imperfection only served to make her all the more appealing.

  “We are observers. We watch; we listen. We do not bluster and preen, craving attention and approval for our wickedness. We simply observe. It is amazing what you can learn by paying attention to the world around you. Of course, you wouldn’t know as you are too busy playing the thug for your master. Does he call you whelp?”

  “I could end your life here, with my bare hands, woman. Do not push me into something you would not live long enough to regret,” Skellan rasped.

  “See? Bluster. You need my help to see to it that your master, the new Count of Drakenhof, if I am not mistaken, and I am seldom mistaken, meets with my mistress. Do you think ending my life would please either of them? One might go so far as to suggest it would bring a world of hurt down upon your head, vampire. So, why don’t you try again? Tell me why I should help you?”