[Von Carstein 03] - Retribution

by Steven Savile - (ebook by Undead)

  “No change,” Vorster said. They’re waiting for something, but I’m damned if I can work out what it is. It’s obviously not the night, it’s darker than a Shallyan priestess’ puckered behind out there, and it’s not the snow. Not even the damned phases of the twin moons seem to be making a blind bit of difference. I don’t get it.”

  “Hmmm,” Brandt mused, moving around the table. He steepled his fingers thoughtfully. The map spread out before him depicted the entire battlefield. It still fascinated Vorster to see a war played out so clinically with coloured flags for forces, hostile and friendly regiments, mounted knights and pistoliers. He had spent years down there on the killing ground unable to see the elaborate dance that was any given battle in all of its complexity. To him it was all about the fog of war, the fighting narrowed in around him in a clash of steel and spray of sweat and spill of blood, with him never really seeing anything more than a few feet beyond the tip of his sword. Brandt’s world was different. Brandt saw it all dispassionately, like a hawk from above. It was like a ballet as opposed to a jig or a reel, every dancer moving in time to create something grander, something so much more than the sum of its parts.

  That was what marked Brandt as special.

  Interestingly, over the course of the year they had spent fighting together, Vorster had come to think of Brandt as a friend, but that didn’t prevent him from being awed by the man’s stratagems. He had never imagined they might end up on the same side, but petty feuds had been buried with the resurgent threat of the undead.

  The Talabeclanders joined forces with Stirland’s greater strength to fight back the skeletal armies of von Carstein as they came swarming up from the underground.

  Even together they were constantly being pushed back. Something eventually had to give, and they all knew what it was. The alliance was a fragile one, both sides knew that, but if they hoped to live out the storm of the Winter War they knew that they had to stop tearing at each other’s throats and fight side by side—fight as one.

  They could and would turn on each other again if they survived. As he had promised, Ackim Brandt requested Vorster be seconded to his force. Martin had been more than happy to grant the request. It was a tie that bound their pact. Vorster knew that the elector count was using him as a diplomatic manacle around Brandt’s ankles. It was a strange position to be in. He liked, even admired Brandt, but his loyalty lay with Martin. The pair of them had fought side by side during the opening months of the campaign, each gaining the trust of the other and creating a bond quite different to the one that captivity had formed between Brandt and Vorster.

  Brandt crumpled a paper knight in his fist and threw it on the floor, unable to mask his frustration.

  There were heroes out there freezing to death and the galling thing was that the cold didn’t touch their enemy. It was not an equal battle. Vorster knew that they needed to find a way to neutralise the elements, but for the life of him he couldn’t see a way around the simple truth that the cold was their biggest enemy. They had fought the dead for so long, they were almost common place. The sight of reanimated bones didn’t immediately strike fear into the hearts of the men. It galvanised them. They knew that the dead could die again and again and again. They knew that the vampires could fall and the zombies could be returned to the dust of the earth. They knew that they could live. It was what they did, they were soldiers. They lived.

  “Can’t you feel it?”

  Vorster nodded. He could. He had no idea what it was, but he could feel something. It was like a clawed finger hooking down into his gut and agitating the digestive acids. “Do you think it’s him?”

  “Von Carstein? Taal’s teeth, I hope not,” admitted Brandt. The man was a champion, a conqueror, but he wasn’t a fool. The Vampire Count would be more than a match for their already exhausted forces. The dead had kept them on the run for four weeks already, harrying them and picking away at the men one night after another. He looked down at the map. Even he could see they were being shepherded into a dead end.

  If they couldn’t choose their own place for a last stand—the thought was interrupted by a peculiarly uncomfortable sensation, what his mother had called a goose walking over her grave. Vorster turned, his hand instinctively going towards the sword on his hip. There was no one behind him. He couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched.

  “I felt it,” he said. “We aren’t alone.”

  Brandt nodded. “It’s been out there a while.”

  “What is it?”

  “If I were being forced to bet my life on it, I’d have to say a vampire. Its presence is repugnant.”

  “An assassin?”

  “I doubt it,” said Brandt. “Murderous stealth isn’t exactly our enemy’s style.”

  “Look at us, jumping at ghosts.”

  “Not ghosts,” Brandt said, pointing at the shadow-thief creeping around the side of the pavilion wall. The guttering oil lamps picked his silhouette out against the canvas. Brandt held a finger to his lips. Vorster watched the intruder move towards the tent flaps. He drew steel, ready to fight for his life. His palms were slick with sweat, his heart palpitating. He stepped aside, blade-tip levelled at the black gash that was the tent flap.

  The intruder never came through it.

  They waited.

  The creeping edge of fear made turning his back on the entrance impossible. Vorster couldn’t think straight. He strained to listen, but there was nothing out there to be heard beyond the faint susurrus of the snow falling. He moved towards the tent flap, ready to throw it open. Brandt held up his hand, stopping him. “We do not rush out into the unknown, my friend. Haste is a death sentence.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  Brandt moved away from the corona of light, withdrawing a dagger from his boot and slashing through the tent’s wall where the shadow was deepest. He slipped out into the night on the other side.

  Vorster followed.

  They circled the pavilion until they found the interloper’s prints in the fresh fall of snow. The track’s betrayed his passage. He had moved off beyond the tents. They followed, expecting the tracks to lead to the owner of the shadow. They didn’t. They led them into the first stand of trees and then deeper before they petered out into nothing, leaving Brandt scratching his chin, perplexed.

  Vorster turned in a slow circle, but with the leaves and branches intermeshing to blot out the moon it was nigh on impossible to see anything beyond shadow and more shadow.

  He heard something, a crackling of branches. The sound echoed from tree to tree. He looked up instinctively and saw something black scamper from branch to branch scared out of its hole.

  Then the creature swooped down on them from above, black fur cloak billowing out behind it as it came.

  Vorster lashed out with his sword blindly, catching the black shape high across the shoulder. Before he could follow up with a reverse cut and thrust, the creature had him on his back in the snow, the wind knocked out of him.

  “Listen to me,” the creature rasped and then it was spinning away to the side as Brandt’s blade lashed out, slicing deep into the fusty wool of the beast’s tunic.

  Brandt edged forwards in a tight fighting crouch, black blood on the edge of his sword. Vorster scrambled to his feet. His sword had fallen ten feet away and there was no way he could get to it. Fear gripped Vorster, a cold fist clenching around his heart. He looked around frantically for a weapon, anything he could use to defend himself with. The beast’s blood stained the snow between them.

  No one moved.

  “Listen to me,” the vampire repeated.

  “Shut your vile stinking mouth, beast,” Vorster snarled.

  “I could have killed you if I wanted to.”

  Vorster stared at the creature. It was wild, feral. Its very nearness gnawed away at his gut. Brandt edged closer.

  “You want to speak, beast, then speak,” Brandt said. There was blood on his shirt from a cut high on his left arm.

  Looking
from one to the other it was impossible to tell which was the monster. Brandt’s face twisted into a bestial snarl whereas the vampire’s face remained devoid of any emotion.

  “I have a message. I need it delivered to Altdorf.”

  “And why should we believe you, beast? You come skulking in the night like some cut-throat assassin. What is to say this isn’t a lie to disarm us? What is to say that there is any message for the capitol? Your kin are renowned as princes of deceit.”

  “I am not one of them,” the vampire said. There was something in his eyes that terrified Vorster. It took him a moment to realise what it was: compassion. Of all the traits of the living it was the last thing he had expected to encounter in the dead.

  “Then what are you?”

  “My name was Jerek Kruger. I fought as Knight Marshall of the Knights of the White Wolf. I was the wolf itself. I slew the first Vampire Count. This… this incarnation… is my punishment. The beast robbed me of my humanity. Now I am nothing. I would end things. There has been too much death.”

  “Yet you come to us in the night? You creep among us. You do not enter my tent and seek to parlay. Instead you fall on us from the trees.” Brandt pressed a hand to the shallow cut in his arm. “You draw blood.”

  “But,” the vampire countered, “I do not feed.”

  “Why should we believe you?” Vorster asked, finding his voice. The fear inside refused to subside.

  “Because I am your only hope, young man and because you do not want to suffer my fate. Because on the morrow the dead will come swarming down from those hills and you cannot hope to resist them, because without me you will die.”

  “You paint a grim picture, dead man.”

  “I tell the truth. I do not waste words painting pretty pictures or whisper sweet sounding deceits. There is no point.”

  “What do you want from us?” Vorster cut to the chase. He cast a calculating glance in the direction of his sword; there was no way he could possibly reach it before the beast fell on him. Would Ackim Brandt be fast enough to get between them and save his life if he made a rush for the blade?

  “Don’t think about it, soldier,” the vampire said as though reading his mind.

  Vorster took an involuntary step backwards, his boot scuffing up snow. Wraiths of foggy breath corkscrewed from his nose and up through the air in front of his face as though he were a bull gathering himself to gore his enemy. He saw Brandt watching him, saw Brandt’s left hand flex into a fist. It was a subconscious reflex. It was Brandt’s tell. Vorster had fought alongside the man for long enough to learn the idiosyncrasies of Brandt’s fighting style. Every soldier had certain tells that betrayed them in combat: a twitch, a flick of the eye, something that telegraphed their intentions a split second before the actual attack. Such a weakness could be lethal against a foe familiar with it, although it was seldom that one man would face another in anything like ritual combat. War was dirty and fast, the brutality of it more than outweighing the finesse of reading an opponent’s body language. That clenching of his left hand was an unconscious thing, a tic, but Vorster had seen it often enough to know that Brandt was bracing himself for violence.

  “I am not a great lover of magic, but I have seen enough to pay heed. A creature came to me inside my head, painting a memory for me and bade me deliver it to you. His message could turn the tide of the war in favour of the living, forever. Can you take the risk of ignoring it?”

  “You had a dream? You expect us to spare you because of some damned dream?” Vorster asked harshly.

  Jerek shook his head. “It was no dream. The creature’s name was Finreir, his words carried on the winds. He had power, true power. He was unlike any living creature I have ever encountered. He showed me things, secrets.”

  “What are these great secrets then?”

  The vampire shook his head. “They are not for you to know.”

  “Then deliver the message yourself.”

  “Are you naive enough to believe that is a possibility, soldier? No, I thought not. We both know I cannot walk amongst the living, not now, not with the dead coming up from the underways and the vampires abroad. I would be hunted down, staked, mouth stuffed with white roses and my corpse buried face down in the dirt. I can see it as clearly as I could if I had been gifted with foresight. You must send runners where I cannot go. I’ll write the message down. It has to be this way.”

  The urgency of the vampire’s words disturbed him.

  “I am not comfortable with this,” Vorster told Brandt. “I feel as though we are being played for fools’

  “Deliver the message and you will be undoing the Vampire Count’s threat.”

  “It cannot be that simple,” said Brandt doubtfully.

  “It was the first time,” said Jerek. “There was no gift from Sigmar. It was a message, yes, but there was no divine source. The message that proved the key to the fall of Vlad came from his own get. He was betrayed.”

  “Now you intend to emulate the betrayer,” Brandt said, ironically. “What is your price, daemon?”

  “Peace,” said Jerek.

  “Are we to believe that a bloodsucking fiend could suddenly turn pacifist?”

  “I don’t care what you believe, soldier. The truth is all that matters to me now.”

  “Come with us to Martin,” Brandt said. “Make your case. The import of your message will decide whether you live or die.”

  “No,” Jerek said, shaking his head. “I will not beg Stirland. As grateful as I am sure he would be for my betrayal of his enemy, I am not fool enough to believe that his benevolence would extend to me walking away from his Runefang with my head still attached. I was the Wolf of Middenheim, but to van Kristallbach I am von Carstein’s get, nothing more nothing less. No, if I had wanted the elector count I would have drawn him out here. I chose you. I have watched you. You are soldiers, much as I once was. Those are your men out there freezing to death. You care about them. You don’t want them to die needlessly so you will send runners to the cathedral in Altdorf. You will see that my words are heard by those who need to hear them.”

  “What would you have us say?”

  The fate of the living hung on the seven words Jerek told them.

  Mannfred von Carstein’s legion of the damned marched on through the driving blizzard, oblivious to the battering of the elements.

  The snow swirled in their wake like white devils and crunched under the bones of their skeletal feet.

  The dead came on endlessly.

  They had no need of comfort.

  They keened and cried and wailed, their lament tormenting the landscape. Not once did they stumble or fall.

  They were a relentless tide.

  Thousands upon thousands of rotting corpses and bare bones, clad in scraps of armour, leather straps rotted through, and breastplates and cuirasses hanging lopsidedly off the cadavers, marched on.

  The ghosts were the worst. They were both pitiful and terrifying. The restless shades seemed ignorant of their own deaths and fought blindly, against and among themselves, over and over. Their non-corporeal forms re-enacted the battles that had seen them fall, only for the ghosts to rise over and over for “One last push!” and “One more charge!” before they fell to the cries of, They come, they come!”

  Ethereal screams haunted the fields as the shades threw themselves once more into the fray.

  The clash of ghostly swords and the cries of the fallen were ever present.

  Adolphus Krieger stood in the middle of it, basking in the memories of slaughter. Feeling the sorrow and fear radiate from the ghosts deep into his bones was akin to the joy he felt during torture and the rapture that the act of killing delivered. He fed on it every bit as greedily as he fed on blood. He was a cruel creature. Mannfred had turned to him when Skellan had failed to return. They were similar monsters. Their natures were the same. They were a match in their appetites for cruelty, as bloody as cleaving a co-joined twin at the spine. They were butchers. Krieger turned and turn
ed again, brushing his fingers through the ghostly warriors, shivering with delight at the static lightning-charge that coursed through his body at the contact. He drank down their misery like the finest of wines, the headiest of liquors. The screaming and wailing and gnashing of teeth rose into a symphonic roar swelling over the field.

  Soon the dying would be real enough.

  Soon the screams would be true.

  Soon the ghosts would be joined by more, newer, fresher shades.

  Soon the living would join the dead.

  For now they fled, in utter terror. The priests in the temples had sworn, had promised, that these armies could never return, but they had been proved liars and fools.

  The skeletal fingers of the long and recently dead clawed up through the earth around Krieger, as the rank and file of von Carstein’s armies shambled out from the underways.

  They emerged within a day’s march of Altdorf itself, behind the lines of the defenders.

  The Winter War would be remembered for its legendary suffering. With the men out chasing shadows, the women and children were left alone within the city walls to bleed and die, and to satisfy Adolphus Krieger’s need for pain.

  He strode ahead of the main body of the army.

  The vampire was the vanguard, the hammer to the forge’s fire.

  The ripple of fear would chase away from them, all the way into the heart of the city. There was no time to flee. No time to panic.

  In the distance the grand spires of Altdorf reflected the moonlight back up to the heavens, and the dead marched on.

  Confession wasn’t good for the soul, and when committed to paper in the form of history those weighty tomes were nothing more than links in hefty chains. They weighed down upon the reader, testing his faith to the core.

  Kurt III, Grand Theogonist of Sigmar, holiest of holies ran his crooked fingers across the spidery scrawl of his predecessor’s submission, and he was afraid, deeply afraid. Outside the walls of Altdorf the dead gathered, but Kurt was besieged both from without and from within.