[Von Carstein 03] - Retribution

by Steven Savile - (ebook by Undead)

“I have told no lies.”

  “Oh I think you have,” Narcisa said. “I can read men. You lied like all men, to get what you want, only this time it wasn’t soft legs around your head. You truly do intend to kill him, don’t you?”

  “I do. His head is yours, if you would have it, to appease his violation.”

  She laughed again, this time genuinely amused by his offer. “Oh, men have violated me in worse ways than his brutish assault. I live through their abuses day and night for my mistress. Do you think I lie with them for my own pleasure? A suitor would offer me his heart if he sought to impress me. Or are these pretty words nothing more than a tisane so that I will offer my throat to you as well?”

  “I am not tempted by your blood, woman,” said Jerek.

  “Again, you lie. I can feel your hunger. You would take me in your arms and deliver the sweetest, tenderest bite, and then you would feed. You are starving. Do you think I cannot tell? You stink of vermin; the blood of rats and mice is on your breath. You are weak and yet you would go up against a monster. That makes you either a hero or a fool.”

  “Isn’t foolishness the trademark of a hero?”

  She ignored him. “I take you, at first glance, for a fool. You hunger for a taste of me and my blood would give you the strength you need to match the beast you hunt, yet if I offered my wrist you wouldn’t bite, would you? That is why you stink of animal blood. You wouldn’t give yourself an advantage because you hate what you are. You loathe yourself to the point that even if I offered myself willingly out of hatred for your enemy you would not drink.”

  “You have the right of it,” said Jerek. He met her gaze with defiance. “I will not drink of you, woman. I come here to end things, not begin them anew. Blood solves nothing.”

  “You are a peculiar creature.”

  “I am a wolf,” Jerek said, summoning the image of Ulric’s blessed white wolf in his mind. For a moment he felt whole, strong. The feeling faded as the image dissolved.

  “And I am a lamb,” the Lahmian said, with no hint of irony in her voice as she held out her wrist for him. “Feed on me. It is your nature, surrender to it. You must if you hope to defeat him. Alone you are not strong enough.”

  Jerek found himself thinking about it, imagining lifting her wrist to his mouth. A heady rush of sensations washed over him. Even the awareness of the possibility was euphoric. He couldn’t begin to think what the effect of the actual blood would be.

  Jerek pushed her hand away.

  “No.” He shook his head, backing away from her.

  Narcisa sighed. “Then you truly are a fool.”

  “I’m not a fool,” Jerek said, “but more importantly, I am not a parasite.” Jerek clenched his fists in frustration. You don’t understand. I am damned already. I will not make matters worse.”

  She laughed in his face. “You cannot make matters worse. You can only die. Your only option is oblivion. Is that what you want? It is isn’t it? That’s what you want.”

  “Not yet,” Jerek said. When this is over, perhaps, but there are things that must be done before I can rest.”

  “You mean killing. There’s killing to be done before you can rest.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you better hope he doesn’t kill you before you kill him.” Narcisa re-tied the silk scarf around her throat. “On the far side of the shaft lie three tunnels,” she said matter-of-factly, as though their conversation had never veered into the realm of murder. “One leads to the lair of the rats. One, eventually will take you to a dawi stronghold in the Worlds Edge Mountains if you walk to its end, and the other branches out into countless tributaries. You could walk them for a thousand years and not find your way back to the surface.”

  “How will I know which to take?”

  “Vou won’t.”

  She left him there, alone, in the dark.

  Time lost all meaning.

  The dark was his lord and master.

  He searched.

  He walked.

  He listened.

  Every so often he made a mark on the floor with a fragment of stone he had found. It worked like chalk. He drew a crude sign of Ulric, hoping his god would lead him back home when he was done.

  It could have been a day, a week or a year. He heard strange things, chitterings and skitterings, but stayed away from their source, respectful of whatever daemons lurked in the underways. Mostly the passages were silent but for the occasional drip of damp water from above and the scuff of his own feet. More than once he jumped at his own shadow, mistaking the shambling shape for something more fearful. He felt the touch of hunger returning, the seductive lure of those fragmented truths that heralded the onset of the depravation-madness. He tried to push them aside, focusing on the white wolf. It was a majestic creature.

  Finally, he heard whistling.

  It was faint at first, almost lost beneath the rush and swell of some louder sound.

  It took him a moment to realise that he was hearing the crash of water. It was deafening in the confines of the underways. Rivers, he knew, ran underground as well as over land in places. The boom and crash was the cry of a subterranean waterfall. That he heard the whistling at all had to be the result of some freakish acoustics. Jerek said a silent thank you to the quirk of geology.

  Jerek stopped. He closed his eyes, focusing purely on the sound. It barely carried to him, but he recognised the whistler’s tune. He had heard it before: The Lay of Fair Isabella. The last time he had heard it was during the long siege of Altdorf all those years ago. Jon Skellan had been whistling it as he walked amongst the bones of the dead, picking a path back towards the Vampire Count’s pavilions. It had stuck with Jerek because it said so much about Skellan’s casual disdain for life. It was then he had known—known for sure and certain—that some small relic of his old self had survived the siring. So, in a peculiar way, he owed Skellan for proving he wasn’t the monster he had thought he was.

  Hearing the same song now went beyond mere coincidence. Jerek had long since stopped believing in random happenstance.

  The whistling moved nearer, reverberating around the old tunnels. Jerek crept towards the edge of the burrow as it opened up into a vast cavern.

  There was beauty in the Old World, or under it. The cavern was living proof of it. A river ran through it, falling away into blackness as it plunged over the lip of a huge chasm. The way the sounds echoed and folded back on themselves suggested it was a substantial drop. Spray rose back up from the depths creating a fine white mist that hung over the entire cavern.

  Skellan sat on a rock, kicking his feet and whistling. He picked at his fingernails with a long thin sliver of wood. Jerek watched him for a moment, hatred bubbling inside him. He quelled it. Hatred would not serve him. Skellan was a stone cold killer. Hatred, rage, they were emotions, and emotions were weakness. That was Skellan’s mantra. In this instance the old wolf knew he was right.

  Skellan’s lantern picked out the crystalline structure of one of the walls. Quartz and other facetted minerals caught, reflected and refracted the glare, conjuring ghostly rainbows across the mist.

  Jerek walked slowly out into the centre of the cave.

  He hadn’t imagined a glory-hound like Skellan being capable of biding his time in some stinking tunnel when he could have been out in Altdorf revelling in the slaughter being wrought by his master. So what brought him down here and left him sitting idly twiddling his thumbs? The only thing Jerek could imagine was power. The vampire obviously believed there was something to be gained by hiding out down here while Mannfred fought. Did he hope to steal in and take advantage of the weakened count? Or was there something else down here in the darkness, some other fiend he sought to enlist? A fresh treachery to unleash? Nothing Jon Skellan ever did was simple or obvious.

  The crash of water masked his footsteps until he was almost halfway.

  “You don’t appear to be a rat,” said Skellan, looking up at his approach, apparently unbothered and equally unsurprise
d by Jerek’s sudden appearance. “But then you don’t look like much of anything.”

  He tossed the wooden pick away thoughtlessly, and swung his legs down and slid off the rock.

  “Well, you’ve seen better days.”

  Skellan grinned. “So what are you? Apart from lost?”

  “I’m not lost, Skellan,” said Jerek. His voice betrayed him, he realised. For all the magic masking his face, his voice was still his voice.

  Skellan raised an eyebrow in mock puzzlement. There was no indication that he recognised Jerek’s voice, but then why would he? It had been a long time since their last encounter, Jerek reminded himself. “Well, well, you seem to have me at a disadvantage, fellow. Obviously you’re not a woman, so I haven’t left your bed before dawn and broken your heart. No, to be fair, you could conceivably be a woman, but if you are, you aren’t a particularly attractive one and I can’t imagine I would have crawled into your bed in the first place, so that pretty much discounts an illicit tryst. Yet you obviously know me and I haven’t the slightest idea who you are. I have to admit I am curious.”

  “You know me, Skellan,” said Jerek. He walked slowly into the centre of the room. Skellan’s small bull’s-eye lantern was trained on him. Jerek didn’t shield his eyes despite the discomfort.

  “No, I don’t think I do.”

  Jerek knew he was babbling. It was too late for regrets, but he couldn’t help but wish he had taken Narcisa up on her offer of blood. “Oh, come on, Jon. We go back a long way, you and I. I’m hurt you don’t remember me. I had hoped after our last encounter that I would be the face that haunted your dreams… Oh, that’s it of course. You don’t recognise this face do you? How about the voice?” Skellan said nothing. “No? You disappoint me, Jon. You don’t recognise a fellow Hamaya? Did Konrad mean so little to you? What am I saying? Of course he did. But Vlad? Surely you remember us standing side-by-side with my sire, facing the great walls of Altdorf together in those last days before his fall?”

  Jerek slipped his other hand into his pocket and cracked the small clay talisman the girl had given him. He didn’t feel anything, but he knew from Skellan’s face that the glamour had slipped as soon as the token had broken. He savoured the momentary glimmer of fear in Skellan’s one good eye.

  “See, you do remember me. I knew you couldn’t have forgotten me after all we’ve been through together, Jon.”

  “What do you want, wolf?”

  “What do you think? To finish what I started at Grim Moor. I tire of this perpetual dance of death and would have it over once and for all.”

  “You’ve come to kill me? You don’t have it in you, old man. You think you are a colossus, but I’ve got news for you, you’re not the mountain you think you are. You’re a mountain goat. There’s a difference.”

  “You talk too much, Skellan. You always have. I’m not here for you, you’re the whipping boy. I’m here for your master.”

  Skellan slapped his forehead in mock despair, and then burst out laughing. You’re priceless Jerek, do you know that? Truly, I don’t know how I will live without you in my life, but I suppose I will have to if you are hell-bent on hunting Mannfred. This is just too delicious for words’ Skellan moved forwards, arms open wide, as though to wrap him up in a huge bear hug. He stopped five paces from Jerek, a look of pure perplexity spreading across his ruined face. “Oh my word, you actually think you can kill Vlad’s heir, don’t you? Wonderful—and yet so utterly tragic. Have you looked at yourself lately, wolf? You can have all the glamours in the world cast on your mangy carcass, but they won’t disguise the fact that underneath them all you are a wreck,” said Skellan. He appeared to think for a moment. “I don’t like you, Jerek. You know that. Even so, I have no reason to lie to you. You won’t last two minutes if you go up against him. He isn’t like Konrad, and even that madman whipped your arse for you if I remember rightly. Trust me, wolf. I’ve seen him fight. He is everything Vlad was and more.”

  “I’ll take my chances if it is all the same to you, Jon. You are obviously down here waiting for him. Just tell me where he is.”

  “Ahh, but see, I can’t do that, old man. As much as I’d like to see your ashes scattered to the four winds, I can’t let you take that fight just in case by some miracle you do go and kill him. It would all become so terribly messy if you did. You see, as unlikely as that is, Mannfred’s demise would cause rather a problem for me. We’ve got plans. You don’t think I enjoy loitering in this pit do you? Let me just disabuse you of that notion if you do. I don’t, but there’s a reason for it. I’m waiting for Mannfred, you see. The war has begun and the living are completely oblivious. He’s the greatest of all of us, wolf: the grand schemer. Do you think Konrad’s insanity was mere chance? Do you think Vlad’s fall was a divine gift of Sigmar? It was all him. He has been playing the longest game of all. Even now he brings the greatest force the Old World has ever witnessed to bear, and the humans are clueless, because they cannot see it with their own two eyes. He will be culling them before they even realise he has come up from underground. To allow you through, to help you kill him, hurts me, not in any sentimental way; it’s all about self interest. It would undermine my power.”

  “Then it would seem we are at an impasse. I am here to kill him, you can’t have me succeed.”

  “There’s no impasse, wolf. I’ll just have to kill you myself. I hope you have coin enough to pay the ferryman. Oh wait, you don’t have a soul to take that particular journey, do you? Shame; you’ll just have to content yourself with oblivion.”

  “And you think that should frighten me? What have I got to fear from oblivion? I am made from the dust of the earth and to the dust I shall return. Death, a second death, holds no fear for me.”

  “I almost believe you old man, but then I look at you and see how desperately you’ve clung to this half-life of yours and that tells me different. You’re scared. You’ve grown fond of this stinking place haven’t you?”

  Jerek reached slowly for the warhammer at his belt, but it wasn’t there. He couldn’t remember the last time he had held it. His heart sank.

  Skellan laughed, seeing him come up empty handed. “Well you are in a pickle aren’t you, old wolf? I almost pity you. As it is I’ll just have to kill you all the more quickly.”

  “This is the beginning of the end, Skellan,” said Jerek as he unleashed the beast within. His hands stretched, fingers elongating, nails hooking into talons. His face shifted too, altering as completely as when it had been under the spell of the urchin girl’s glamour. His brow broadened, the ridge of his eye sockets arching, becoming more atavistic as he connected with the beast.

  Grinning, Skellan cracked his knuckles and squared up to the wolf. He moved quickly, spinning on his heel and lunging backwards for his sword, which he had left leaning against the rock.

  Jerek reacted instantaneously, springing forwards and slamming into Skellan’s back.

  They came down hard, sprawling across the rocky ground.

  Jerek grabbed a tangle of Skellan’s hair and slammed his face hard into the ground. The sickening sound of bone splintering was lost beneath the roar of the waterfall and Skellan’s matching howl as he unleashed the beast within.

  Jerek tried to hammer Skellan’s face back down, but Skellan contorted around beneath him, prying his fingers up into Jerek’s face and mouth, pushing his head back as he sought the leverage he needed to dislodge the wolf from his back.

  Jerek crunched down into Skellan’s fingers, taking a huge bite out of the bone. Skellan shrieked, partly in agony, partly in anger, and wrenched his arm back, throwing Jerek bodily. Jerek sprawled sideways, rolled over and came to his feet panting hard.

  Skellan dropped into a fighting crouch.

  They circled one another warily.

  Skellan’s grin was feral.

  “Are you frightened, wolf? Yes, yes you are. I can smell it right there with the stink of rats and dead birds on your breath. Why would you be frightened if you hadn’t falle
n in love with this life, eh?”

  “I have no love of this life, believe me.”

  “This life,” Skellan mocked, “but what of your life before? That’s it, isn’t it? You still yearn for what you were! That’s possibly the most tragic thing I have ever heard! I love it!” Skellan’s arm snaked out and he slapped Jerek open-palm across the face. Jerek rocked back on his heels, rolling with the blow. His head came back around slowly.

  “Don’t tell me you don’t see ghosts, Skellan,” said Jerek, answering Skellan’s slap with a double-handed clap to either side of the vampire’s throat, a blow that would have shattered a mortal man’s neck. Skellan barely registered the strike, backhanding Jerek contemptuously. “I know what happened to your wife,” Jerek said. “Don’t tell me she doesn’t come to you at night, in your dreams. If one of us had cause to long for his old life it is you, not me.”

  Skellan hawked up a wad of loose phlegm and spat in the wolfs face. “She doesn’t come to me. She is at peace, something neither of us shall ever know.

  The bellow of the waterfall was an indelicate thunder booming throughout the cavern. Jerek straight-armed Skellan in the forehead, snapping his head back. He followed the blow up with a savage left hook, driving his fist into Skellan’s throat. Skellan answered with a clubbing right and four successive rabbit punches to Jerek’s kidneys, lifting him bodily into the air. As he came down Skellan hammered a right cross into his face, shattering his nose in a bloody spray.

  Jerek shook his head. His vision swam alarmingly, the world tilting around him as Skellan followed up the initial onslaught, stepping inside his wild swing and hammering home an elbow to the side of his head that had Jerek sprawling at his feet.

  He stood over the wolf, a look of utter disdain on his ruined face.

  “You really thought you could do this?”

  Jerek swept his leg around, cutting Skellan’s feet out from under him. Skellan came down hard.

  Jerek pounced on him, tearing at his face and throat with his teeth. Skellan tried to throw him, but couldn’t break Jerek’s hold. He slammed his head forwards, his forehead connecting viciously with Jerek’s already broken nose. Jerek clutched at Skellan’s face, thrusting his fingers into all of the soft places they could find. He felt the heat of Skellan’s tainted blood swell up around them. Skellan screamed and threw his weight to the side. They rolled, Skellan’s greater strength giving him the upper hand momentarily. He straddled Jerek, pummelling his fists over and over into the vampire’s face. Jerek took the beating. He delivered a single savage roundhouse of a punch, his fist cannoning into the underside of Skellan’s jaw. Skellan spat blood as he sank back, shaking his head, even as Jerek pushed him away.