[Von Carstein 03] - Retribution

by Steven Savile - (ebook by Undead)

  “Ten!”

  Still with his eyes closed, he exhaled, inhaled, exhaled.

  “Turn!”

  He opened his eyes, spun on his heel and levelled the pistol at Dietrich Jaeger’s face, but he didn’t squeeze the trigger.

  Jaeger was marginally slower in the turn, but he brought the gun up quicker, snatching the shot.

  Vorster felt a sudden burning in his left shoulder and saw the horror sweep across his opponent’s face. He’d hit, but in rushing the shot he had failed to make it count. Vorster had all the time in the world to take his aim and fire at the helpless Jaeger. They all knew it. It had ceased to be a duel and had become an execution.

  All colour fled from Jaeger’s face. He threw up his hands and whimpered: “Please.”

  Vorster waited, allowing the adrenaline to seep from his system, for his heart to slow to a regular beat, and for the breeze to still.

  Jaeger staggered back a step. “No, man! Stand!” Brandt barked.

  Vorster drew slow and careful aim. One shot. He didn’t need more.

  He fired.

  The lead shot took Dietrich Jaeger through the right wrist, shattering the bone into splinters. The man screamed and fell to his knees, clutching his ruined hand. He looked up at Vorster. He knew. It was in his eyes. “You could have killed me,” he rasped between clenched teeth, biting back on the pain. “You didn’t. Why?”

  Vorster walked towards the fallen man. “I didn’t need to,” he said simply. You’re humiliated in front of these men. You panicked when it came to the moment of truth, just as you always panic. You couldn’t run away despite every nerve and fibre of your being screaming out for you to flee, and you would have if Brandt hadn’t chastised you. You would have run for the hills, no better than a common deserter. You are finished Jaeger. Everyone here has witnessed your fall. You’ll never hold a sword again. That is good enough for me. Hell, most likely the field surgeon will have to amputate. I did that, but I will not have your death on my conscience.”

  Brandt came to stand beside him. He took the gun from him.

  “Compassion isn’t weakness. Believe me it will cure more sins than condemnation, my friend.”

  “There is wisdom in that,” Martin von Kristallbach said. Neither of them had heard the young Elector Count approach. “So, tell me soldier, have you decided to take me up on my offer? It would seem I have a vacancy for an experienced officer.” Martin looked down at Jaeger, his distaste all too apparent on his plain, open features. Before the shamed officer could object he told him, “You brought this on yourself Dietrich. Own your mistakes. Be a man. Now get up, there’s no need to add to your humiliation.”

  Dietrich Jaeger struggled to his feet. He was bleeding quite badly, but Vorster’s shot hadn’t ruptured the main artery. He would live. Zenzi supported him.

  “Go see the chirurgeon. A soldier who can’t hold a sword is no good to me,” Martin said. He turned to Vorster. “Now, tell me, soldier, what am I to do with you? Wilful disobedience, calling out a superior officer, endangerment of life.” He looked squarely at Ackim Brandt as he said, “Consorting with the enemy. Your list of crimes is a lengthy one.”

  “I will suffer whatever punishment you deem fit, my lord,” Vorster said solemnly.

  “Indeed you will,” Martin agreed, “Sergeant Schlagener.”

  It took a moment for Martin’s words to register. He thought for a second that he had misheard. “You’re not discharging me?”

  “Why on earth would I do that? I am surrounded by fools. A rough diamond is far preferable to a lump of coal, sergeant,” he turned back to Brandt. “Now, about that offer—”

  Before he could finish a murmur arose from the surrounding men. They turned to see a plume of snow-dust rising from one side of Ramius Point, and out of the mist came a rider, pushing his mount to the point of collapse. Ribbons of steam corkscrewed from the exhausted beast’s nose. The rider kicked hard, spurring the animal on. Unease spread quickly through the ranks. Whatever word the messenger carried it most certainly wasn’t good news.

  “They’re coming! The vampires are coming!” the man yelled over the wind.

  For the second time in as many minutes Vorster Schlagener didn’t trust his ears. Only this time, he prayed he had heard wrong. It was impossible, the threat was ended. There were no vampires. It had ended at Grim Moor. The dead did not rise, not now. They stayed dead. He wanted to ask if the man was sure. Then he saw the pure horror wrought across his pale face and knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that they had all been idiots, tearing each other apart, while in the shadows the vampires had been watching, enjoying the savagery that only mankind was capable of.

  Vorster knew fear.

  CHAPTER NINE

  A Band of Brothers

  The Dwarf Stronghold of Karak Raziac

  Beneath the Worlds Edge Mountains

  Kallad Stormwarden couldn’t rest.

  The dwarf dearly wanted to just close his eyes and have the world go away into dreams, but there was no hiding, even here, deep under the mountains.

  He had hoped after Grim Moor that he would be able to find some kind of peace. He had faced his father’s killer and watched the daemon struck down by Helmar and his Runefang, but there was no peace.

  Peace, such a fleeting thing, even for one as long-lived as Kallad. When he closed his eyes he heard the raven’s caw: Mannfred! And recalled the vampire, Skellan’s words: The greatest of all is coming. You do not want to be here when he returns. It was impossible to shake the memory, to move on.

  He had been content to pick up the hammer for more useful purposes, for a while. He had worked in the smithy with Keggit and his brother Rerle, but Kallad had had no great skill for it. Despite his brother’s patient teaching, everything he turned his hand to ended up going back into the fire to be melted down again. He quickly tired of failure. Gegka Darkcutter offered him a place in his crew, mining the deeps of the Underway. Kallad had no wish to go deeper; memories of the subterranean prisons of Drakenhof plagued him still. For a while he ran with Iori Slatebreaker’s hunters, bringing down mountain game to feed the families of the Karak, but he tired of that, too.

  Even in Karak Raziac, surrounded by his own kind, the dreams tormented him, making sleep impossible. He prowled the stone halls of the stronghold or went out beneath the sky and haunted the mountainside. He was a ghost, a shadow. He slowly came to understand the truth. He had died out there on that battlefield, not a physical death, but a death all the same. If his nocturnal perambulations disturbed the others they were loathe to say so, at least to his face. They knew his pain. Few he encountered spoke with him. He was, they whispered behind his back, cursed. He was the son of Kellus, the last child of Karak Sadra. He had fought the vampires, stood beside Grufbad at Grim Moor, and for that they welcomed him among them, but he was not one of them, and he never would be. Instead of friendship they offered pity.

  He was disaffected.

  He had had his reckoning, but rather than completing him revenge left him hollow.

  He sat alone on the hillside, waiting for the spectre of death to come and claim him. He shouted a challenge to the mountain, his axe Ruinthorn above his head, shaking it at the thunderheads and the sky. He looked for ghosts coming over the peaks. He knew what it was: survivor’s guilt, they called it. He lived where his family, his entire people, had died. He was the last of them. He carried all the guilt that went with outliving his clan, the guilt that went along with failing them.

  “At least they died free,” Kallad whispered, his breath conjuring wraiths of mist to hang like a veil between the living and the dead. The failing sun was a sickly yellow eye on the horizon. The snow was cold beneath him, but he wrapped himself in furs. It was true, though it was little consolation. His people had died free. They had marched to Grunberg and they had laid their lives down in a fight that wasn’t theirs. They had done it for the manlings. They hadn’t run away, hadn’t hidden in the mountains waiting for the evil to pass over them
. They had stood up, and because of that they were heroes, each and every dwarf of Karak Sadra.

  He was proud and sad.

  He had to believe it had been worth it.

  Mannfred is coming!

  That one line undermined their sacrifice.

  The ground beneath him was colder than death. His sweat had become a brittle frost that clung to his face like a second skin. A fine dusting of snow had settled on his jerkin and rough trousers. Kallad ignored the icy chill worming its way into his heart.

  Behind and before him, the many ridges of the Worlds Edge Mountains and their snow-capped peaks reared, reaching into the sky. Beneath him lay Blutfurt, Nachtdorf and the forest between the two, her white-laced leaves rustling. The north wind whispered fragments of the wood’s darkest secrets, hints of the hearts it had stilled and the dreams it had buried in its rich soil. Beyond that were the rolling hills that the manlings called the Unhiemlich Hügelkette, or Eerie Downs. Their name was apt. The nearness of the rolling hills was oppressive.

  He shook off the uncomfortable sensation of eyes watching him and resumed his laborious trudge down the mountainside, the wind crying traitor in his ear. He ignored its mocking voice, knowing that the whispers would be endless and unforgiving. It was the burden of being a survivor. The ghosts he had left behind whispered and taunted him with the voice of his own guilt, ghosts that could never forgive him for being alive while they rotted in some unmarked grave.

  Kallad pushed on until he came to the edge of a frozen tarn, his thoughts introspective, jagged memories weighted down with the sorrows of a dwarf who had turned his back on his friends when they had needed him most.

  It didn’t matter if it wasn’t true. It didn’t matter if he had carried the fight to von Carstein’s aberrant army. It didn’t matter that he had been with them at the end to slay the beast. His guilt didn’t care for any of that.

  “What good would it have done for me to die with ’em?” he yelled at the wind, finally sick of its taunting. His voice was thick, raw, strained.

  It’s not about dying, the wind whispered, it’s about living. You’ve stopped living, Kallad Stormwarden. He might have stood there, frozen, for an hour or a day, listening to his guilt echo off the rocks; a dwarf on a mountain being judged and found unworthy by the ghosts inside him. Worse, you’ve stopped watching for the oncoming storm… and now it comes. Can’t you feel it? Can’t you feel it in the air? The presence of evil is building.

  “I could lie down now.” He barely breathed the words, taking their silence as judgement. “I could close my eyes and never wake up. The cold would take me before dawn.”

  To join them in death would have stopped the shades from being alone, but it was not them who were alone, it was Kallad. The wind knew that. It had stopped listening to the survivor’s lies. It knew he could no more lie down and die than the sun could cease to shine or the seasons stop turning. It was a survivor’s nature to survive, to go on living no matter the costs to those around him. A survivor would find a way.

  He wiped the sweat from his brow before it could freeze there. His lips were chapped from the wind’s perpetual kiss. Kallad hadn’t realised just how thirsty he was until he knelt and brushed away the thin coating of snow from the surface of the frozen lake. Quickly, he used the wooden handle of his axe to chip a series of cracks in the ice, breaking a small slab free. He teased his gloves off and rubbed some life back into his hands before he pushed the ice under so he could scoop a handful of water to his lips. It tasted heavily of minerals and dirt, but it could have been wine to the lips of a drunkard. He drank deeply, wiping at his beard where the water ran down his chin, and scooped up another mouthful.

  When he lowered his cupped hands from his face, Kallad faced a miracle reflected in the still water. Not one face but three looked back at him: his own drawn, exhausted reflection and two faces he knew better than his own, faces haunted by the death he had left them to back at Grim Moor. Skellan’s ruined features showed a spider web of cuts and purple bruises that stood in stark contrast to the other man’s: Jerek von Carstein.

  Mannfred is coming!

  No matter what he had told himself the beasts were far from slain. The storm had abated. It hadn’t blown itself out. There was fighting, and dying, to be done. The vampires were out there, alive, as alive as those things could ever be. They were eternal. Their blades were like snakes of lightning on the battlefield, weaving a deadly magic as they danced. Kallad’s fingers moved towards the illusion painted so thinly on the water. He wanted to reach out to banish the illusion, to drive the dead away.

  Kallad plunged his fist into the icy water.

  He swirled the water with his fist, dragging it around the small hole in the ice to drive the faces of the dead men away.

  “It’s the cold,” he told himself even as his nostrils flared at the scent of death carried by the wind. “It’s the cold making me jump at ghosts.”

  He felt unbearably old, despite the fact that he was a child beside others of his kind. Kallad had long since ceased counting years and instead racked up experiences. He had lived through more than almost every dwarf in Karak Raziac. There were a few of their number who had lived even half as much life, heroes like Grufbad, Goriki Earthrunner or even old Runik Greybeard, who was rapidly becoming Runik Whitebeard, though none dared tell the old curmudgeon. Kallad had seen more than anyone should have to.

  He remembered his father giving him his full name, Stormwarden. It could have been yesterday. He had pledged to guard against the oncoming storm. Looking at the snow churning across the bleak mountainside, he couldn’t decide if he had failed in that as well.

  Mannfred is coming!

  He made a decision. He would seek out King Razzak and explain that he couldn’t simply wash his hands of it, not while he knew the vampire nation was growing once more. They were licking their wounds, they weren’t banished. That was why peace eluded him.

  He trudged back towards the stronghold.

  It felt good to have made a decision.

  For once his ghosts were silent.

  His decision pleased them.

  King Razzak’s great hall was a monument to dwarf architecture and engineering. Eight giant foe-pillars supported the vaulted ceiling. They were three hundred feet high, carved with giant frescos of battle depicting great triumphs of the clan: scenes of death ranged back beyond the War of the Beard, ores blinded by crossbow bolts, trolls slain by axe and warhammer, the skulls of ratmen and goblins cleaved in two. Each foe-pillar held a thousand deaths.

  Kallad looked up at the ceiling; it was impossible not to. The builders had designed the central hall as a spectacle to be entered from above and descended into, allowing their craft to be best displayed. The second and third tiers of the ceiling were threaded with gold and silver wires that caught and reflected the light from the torches blazing all the way down the winding staircase to the mosaic-tiled floor of the grand hall. A huge bas-relief of Grimnir dominated the centrepiece of the ceiling, the dwarf god clutching his fabled twin axes, one either side of the aisle carved through the heart of the mountain. More carvings showed the defeat of the dwarfs foes.

  Hammers rang out, bellows hissed and huffed, the engineers hard at work developing, Kallad seemed to remember, a huge mechanical water pumping system to aid the excavations of the Underway. Kallad walked slowly down the twisting stair, drinking in the grandeur of Karak Raziac. This was the artistry of his people at its finest. His fingers trailed along the outer wall. He imagined the memories locked within those old stones.

  His footsteps echoed as he walked the length of the wide aisle. Midway down the aisle a huge iron fist, twice his height and more than four times his girth, dominated the floor. It was a symbol of the Karak’s might. Kallad walked around it.

  Razzak’s throne was on the other side of the fist, on a raised dais of black stone. Like the dwarf lord himself it was a squat robust piece of furniture carved from the very rock of the mountain and set down in the middl
e of the great hall, as immovable as Razzak was when he put his mind to it.

  The dwarf king was not on his throne. Razzak was a hands-on ruler. He didn’t have his dwarfs do anything he wasn’t prepared and capable of doing himself.

  Kallad found him with the engineers, sleeves rolled up, getting his hands dirty, lifting and carrying immense cogs and wheel-gears for a huge water pump. They were in a vast chamber with a foundry at one end, steaming water vats and other curious devices churning out an infernal amount of heat. Hammers clanged and dwarfs grunted, and then the rhythm of the work broke down and one red-headed engineer cursed, sucking at his thumb where he’d hammered it solidly with the head of his tool. That shift in timing turned the regular clang-beat-clang into a discordant cacophony of hammering, cursing and beating that had Kallad covering his ears.

  Thoken Kragbeard, one of Razzak’s wreckers—engineers who specialised in demolition and destruction—looked up and saw Kallad standing in the doorway. He took his goggles off and wiped the sweat from his brow, smearing a great link of soot across his forehead. Thoken put his fingers to his lips and whistled sharply. The hammering stopped almost immediately.

  Razzak looked up from the sharp-toothed cog he had been rolling across the floor as Kallad walked towards him. One look at the dwarfs face told the king all he needed to know. He passed the huge cog-wheel to another one of the crew and dusted his hands off on his bare chest.

  “Can we talk, sire?”

  “Aye, we can. It’s one of the marvels of Grimnir. That an” opposable thumbs. You got something you need to get off yer chest?”

  Kallad looked around the room. These people had done their best to make him feel a part of their clan, but he didn’t. In that, he had failed them more than they had ever failed him. “Yes.”

  “Walk with me, lad.”

  Razzak untied his apron, rolled it into a ball and left it on one of the many work benches. “She’s gonna be a beauty when she’s up and running. You should hear the motor purr. Grakchi is a genius with this stuff. She ought to be able to pump three or four hundred buckets an hour. We’ll have the deeps cleared in no time.”