by Ben Galley
‘Who is she anyway? Why is she so important?’ asked Eyrum.
‘She’s the princess, King Bane’s daughter,’ replied Durnus, and he hoped he was wrong about her and Farden. He would keep it secret, for now, he decided.
Eyrum picked up another potato and nibbled at it. ‘Maybe there’s something in Krauslung they need, or something they want,’ he said around his mouthful. ‘Not the ships, or the Written…’ The big Siren clicked his fingers as if he had suddenly stumbled across the answer. ‘Maybe they think Farden is here. Maybe it’s him they’re after. Vice isn’t exactly fond of the mage is he?’
Durnus shook his head slowly. ‘Understatement,’ he said, distracted, mumbling. ‘But why would he bring her here, where it’s less safe?’ His voice trailed off like smoke in a gale. He had an inkling of what Vice was after, and once again he hoped he wasn’t right. The bothersome thoughts were back again. They had brought reinforcements. Durnus rose from the table and went to the window, stretching his old bones as he did so.
The windowpanes had steamed up in the heat of the candles and Durnus wiped his hand across the glass to peer into the black night. Something caught his eye as it fluttered in circles outside their room and he quickly opened the window to let a tired hawk flap onto the windowsill. As soon as its talons touched the brick, the poor bird almost collapsed with exhaustion. Durnus scooped it up and carefully carried it to the table.
‘Another message?’ asked Eyrum. Durnus placed the brown bird on the tabletop and untied the tiny scroll that had been wrapped around its left leg. The hawk waited patiently until the vampyre was finished and then it began to preen itself. Eyrum fed it some of the fish as a reward, and the bird gobbled it down hungrily, beak clacking.
Durnus meanwhile unfolded the little scrap of paper and read it to himself. His lips moved silently as his pale eyes scanned over the short message. ‘Same as usual. No word from Farden, and the Long Winter is getting worse.’
‘Bad news all round then,’ mumbled Eyrum. He gave the hawk some potato and stroked its head. ‘We should just kill Vice and be done with it.’
Durnus went to a nearby candle and held the parchment in the flames. ‘If only it were that easy,’ he sighed. Once the message had been reduced to cinders, he went back to the window and tossed the ash outside. The air was refreshing after the clammy heat of their room. Instead of a fireplace, the owner of the inn, which to be precise was actually more of a brothel, had provided them with almost fifty candles, of all different shapes and sizes, to keep their measly room warm and lit. It was not ideal, but thankfully the inn-come-brothel was a soldier-free haunt, full of undesirables and beggars, washed-up alcoholics and the once-rich, the fallen on hard times lot and the barely-surviving lot, hidden away in the backstreets and deep in the city where people looked the other way if you had the right amount of coin. In a starving and beaten city, gold and silver could turn you invisible.
The vampyre looked down at the dark alleyway several floors below and sniffed the cold air. He could smell the city; its chimney smoke and ale, precious food both cooking and rotting, the overflow of the gutters, the powdered damp smell of brick, and people, countless people. Most of all he could smell the sickly scents of cheap perfumes and affordable sex from the windows below. Here in the backstreets, the people did all they could to escape what Krauslung had become, and for a few brief hours they succeeded, drowning themselves in women and wine. Durnus could hear them writhing around: the occasional joyous yelp leaping from throats, floorboards quivering with the sounds of rhythmic pounding. It was almost pleasant compared to the other noises of the city, the sounds of smashing glass and screaming, the sounds of drunken soldiers torturing the helpless. The people, the noise, the fear, Durnus drank them all in. Like a hunter he could smell their blood on the faint breeze, he could hear their veins throbbing, their arteries groaning, and it made his heart pound in his chest. His fangs ached. There was a reason tame vampyres didn’t venture into cities, and it had nothing to do with the superstitious reprisal.
Durnus closed the window quietly and reached for the black cloak that was hanging over the edge of his bed. Eyrum looked up from stroking the hawk, and gave him a questioning look. ‘Going somewhere?’ he asked. Durnus took a breath.
‘Don’t worry yourself. I will be careful.’
For a moment Eyrum didn’t reply. The hawk screeched once, and then the Siren nodded. ‘I trust you will,’ he said, reluctantly.
The vampyre nodded and smiled faintly and Eyrum went back to feeding the scattered remnants of his dinner to the tired bird. Durnus pulled his cloak tightly around him and hoisted the hood over his short grey hair. He moved to the door and gently pulled it open. It creaked as it always did. The corridor was empty.
‘I’ll be back soon.’
‘Hopefully,’ replied Eyrum, and with a click the vampyre closed the door behind him, leaving the hawk and the Siren alone in the clammy room.
Outside the air was cold and brittle. The clouds had gathered as promised but as yet no rain or snow had fallen on the city. Durnus looked up at the black sky and felt the cold breeze make his skin ripple. There was no moon, no stars, and only the orange torchlight to burn away the thick shadows. A fine night to hunt.
Durnus followed the thin alleyway as it curved through the buildings like a cobblestone river through a narrow canyon of doorways and walls. It had been weeks since his last hunt, and now like a caged predator let loose on the city he could feel the hunger pumping through his veins. His eyes lit up the night like a cat’s and illuminated everything with a bluish glow. The shadows hid nothing from him. His ears pricked with the sounds of the city around him. Water trickled through pipes. Fires crackled behind brick walls. A mouse gnawed on something in its nest. A man coughing on his way home from whatever drinking hole he had found. Durnus crept on.
Durnus was not a murderer, he had learnt that lesson the hard way a long time ago, but he had learnt it well. The vampyre ignored the unfortunates sleeping on the streets, huddling for warmth. He ignored the broken windows, the unlocked doors, and the people snoring within. Luckily for them, his prey for the night had already been chosen, and it would be whichever Skölgard soldier he came across first. In his own small way, Durnus was getting revenge.
Hearing something ahead, the old vampyre pressed himself against a wall and sniffed the air. The sour smell of sweat floated on the night breeze towards him. And steel. Tangy, metallic steel. He could smell it all.
Inch by careful inch, Durnus crept forward until he came to where the alleyway ended and met with a wider street. Every window was dark and candleless. A deep gutter ran along the opposite side of the street, splashing and gurgling like a stream. A small waterwheel churned softly somewhere in the darkness. Sacks of mouldy flour had been stacked in a doorway.
Someone nearby hawked and spat. Durnus tensed. Carefully the vampyre peeked around a corner and saw a lone soldier relieving himself against the corner of a building. The street was empty but for a lone torch that flickered quietly behind the man. Durnus allowed a satisfied smile to creep across his face and pulled his hood over his face. Crouching in the shadows, Durnus kept his pale eyes on his prey and made a low whistling sound from between his sharp fangs. The taste of his own venom was intoxicating.
The Skölgard soldier jumped and turned around, cursing as he dribbled on his own hand. Quickly wiping himself with the end of his sleeve, he grabbed his spear and peered into the shadows of the street. Something whistled again, and the man reached for the torch above his head. All was silent except for the sound of running water. Slowly, the man walked forward with his spear in one hand and torch in the other, squinting into doorways and trying to steady his beating heart. There was an alleyway up ahead, to the right, and there, lying on the ground was a small black object. The soldier cursed his luck and steeled himself.
‘Who’s there?’ he called, hoping it would be a harmless drunk or a cat. ‘Show yourself or I’ll stick you like a pig!’
The soldier crept closer to the alleyway and breathed a sigh of relief. It was just a black cloak lying on the ground. The noise had been nothing more than a figment of his imagination. Reaching down to pick it up, he wondered who could have left it there. It was a nice cloak, barely any holes. Pleased with his find, the soldier smiled to himself as he held it up, completely oblivious to the thin figure that stood behind him, fangs bared and ready.
In a blur, an arm wrapped around the soldier’s neck and pulled him to the ground. The torch hissed as it fell from his hand. His head collided with the cobbles, stunning him, while another strong hand pressed his face to the stone and held him very still. The fingers pinning him down were as cold as ice. In the dying light of the torch, the man caught a glimpse of a pale face with wild eyes and a pair of two needle-like fangs hovering above him, and he went rigid with fear. The torch fizzled out and something sharp dug into his neck. His scream was a hoarse whisper. Fingernails prized his jaw apart, scraping his throat.
Nobody saw the dead man being dragged across the street, nor the thin old man who pulled him. Nobody heard the sounds of the corpse being dragged head-first into the gurgling gutter to be left for the rats. Nobody was any the wiser. The old man disappeared into the night like a ghost, just as the first drop of rain fell on the city streets.
In the spaces between the stars cold and silence reigned. There, between the glittering fingerprints of light and roaming dust clouds, far, far above the dangling, glittering jewel that was Emaneska, there was a place. Nobody would have called it that, for a place would be something, even ambiguous and empty to the mind as it was. No, that would still have been something open to imagination, and this place was truly nothing, simply a vast chasm of nothingness that stretched on for more miles than the mind could count or imagine. An endless plain without a plain.
Darkness was eternal there, for neither the sun nor the moon had any business in this place. Quite the opposite; they barely knew of its existence. The hot sun circled far below like a tiny candle in the night, and the moon was just a pale ghostly face staring out of the gloom, wondering at the stars above her. And in this place, this ghostly plain of nothingness, daemons stalked the shadows of gods…
Chapter 3
“Gods? Daemons? Elves? They aren’t gone. I see them every time the stars come out. All you have to do is look in the right places.”
From an unknown source
Modren was extremely cold, and very wet, and he wasn’t particularly fond of being either. For the tenth time that morning, he clenched his fist and cast a heat spell to warm his chilly bones. His attire did nothing to keep the weather at bay. His mustard-yellow captain’s cloak was too thin, his ornate folded steel armour too cold and too heavy, and his left boot had the beginnings of a hole in the heel. At least his black under-tunic kept the armour from rubbing.
As always, the mage couldn’t stop staring. There had been a murder. That was obvious, the pale body lying in the gutter said it all. No, Modren was concerned and befuddled by something else: no matter how long he stared, he still couldn’t make up his mind as to whether the Skölgard general was a man or a woman.
Simply put, General Agfrey was huge. She was not fat, nor was she particularly tall, but she was bulky from every possible angle. Muscle clung to her legs like moss to a tree and scrabbled for space on her arms. Her shoulders hunched like teetering boulders. Thick studded armour hung from her barrel-chest and tree-trunk limbs, only adding more to her measurements. There was a large broadsword hanging loosely from her hip. Annoyingly, her menacing expression never seemed to break, and her upper lip constantly pestered her nose for attention. She looked as though she had wrestled a bear to death to get the rank of general.
Agfrey was, of course, a woman, but she walked like a man, barked orders like a man, and despite her long black hair and sizeable chest, she looked like a man. There even appeared to be a shade of stubble on her jaw, but it could have been dirt. The general hung in the middle, suspended between genders like an ambivalent bridge.
The mage wiped rainwater from his confused head. Modren wondered if anyone had ever asked her. He wondered if anyone had ever lived to find out the truth. Modren shook his head and shivered. He needed sleep, he decided, his mind was beginning to wander to the absurd.
‘What is all this fuss about then?’ he asked Agfrey. She scowled at him as though he had just spat on her cheek.
‘One of my men has been assassinated, that’s what all the fuss is about,’ she replied frostily. The general put her hands on her large hips. ‘I’m sure if it were one of yours, you would feel the same.’ Modren tried not to laugh. He would have liked to see someone try to stuff one of his Written in a gutter. He crossed his arms and sighed impatiently.
‘We are at war, General Agfrey. It was probably a Siren spy, or a disgruntled drunk.’
Agfrey snorted and then grinned a little on the sarcastic side. ‘Do spies and drunks bite their victims in Krauslung?’
This, Modren had to admit, they did not. Agfrey pointed to the body and the mage stepped forward to take a closer look, running his sleeve across his face. The dozen or so Skölgard soldiers moved out of his way, and he bent down to examine the body. Even for a soldier like him, the smell still made his nose wrinkle. The stench of the gutter was bad enough, but the overpowering scent of flesh on the cusp of rotting made it even worse.
But Agfrey was right.
Below the dead man’s right ear were two distinct purple bite-marks. The corpse looked like it had been sucked dry. The skin was a grey puckered parchment.
‘Roll him over,’ said Agfrey, from behind him. Modren grabbed the man’s breastplate and heaved and the body squelched and clicked. Grimacing, the mage kept pulling until he noticed that the other side of the dead man’s neck was missing. His throat had been ripped out. All that had been left was a mess of flesh and exposed bone.
Modren rolled him back and stood up with a dismayed sigh. This was all he needed, a vampyre in the city. He wondered how it had gotten past the gates and guards. Wild vampyres were sneaky, cowardly things that hunted in packs, or covens as they were called, more beast than man, and they avoided cities like the plague. Though they weren’t unusual, Modren had only met one “tame” vampyre in his life, that friend of Farden’s, the dusty old scholar from Albion, the one who had disappeared, and it couldn’t have been him. Durnus had been a dusty, docile, old man, quieter than a mouse. Modren shrugged. He was without a clue. He turned to face the Skölgard general. ‘Double your guard, get rid of this body, and above all keep this quiet. I don’t want to worry the people any more than I have to,’ ordered Modren. Agfrey visibly prickling at being told what to do. She glowered at him as he began to walk away.
‘Where are you going?’ she demanded, hands swiftly back on her hips.
Modren didn’t even look at her. ‘I’m going to tell the Arkmage we have a rogue vampyre in the city,’ he replied. He left the big woman alone with her men and strode off into the downpour, wondering what else in the city could go wrong.
Vice had not slept. He had not eaten. In the last hour he hadn’t even moved. His weary eyes moved back and forth over the same spot on the same page that he had stared at for hours. The same line of glyphs. Vice was oblivious to all else. Near his elbow, the incessant rain pattered on the windowsill. Wine bottles in varying stages of fullness dotted the tabletop, cornered and surrounded by scrolls covered in hastily scribbled notes, names and places. The fire had died sometime in the early hours. A nearby candle had stood guard until the sky had begun to lighten. The room was filled by the sounds of silence and breathing.
Outside the city was waking up to slate skies and veins of heavy granite cloud. But Vice was oblivious to all. Without taking his eyes from the tearbook, he reached for a nearby wine bottle, one of the empty ones, and gripped it with both hands. Skin squeaked against glass as he strangled it. Suddenly the glass cracked. It didn’t smash, not yet, but with a h
arsh popping noise a crack appeared around its neck. Vice released it and slammed the bottle down on the marble table.
How had he missed it all these years?
How had he not seen the glaringly obvious under his very nose? He had been there all along.
Alive.
Seething with anger, Vice got to his feet and, careful to keep his thumb between the pages, swiped the tearbook from the table. He stormed towards the door rubbing tiredness from his eyes. Just as he reached for the door-handle, somebody knocked on the other side. Vice wrenched open the door and found Modren standing alone in the corridor. The mage was soaking wet. His hands were white with cold. Nevertheless, he bowed, squelching as he did so. ‘Your Mage,’ said Modren.
‘What is it?’ snapped Vice.
Modren wiped rain from his forehead with the back of his hand. ‘There’s been some trouble in the city,’ he answered quietly. Vice stepped into the corridor and slammed the big door behind him.
‘There is always trouble in this godsforsaken city,’ Vice snarled hoarsely, before striding down the corridor. Modren tried to keep up with the Arkmage’s long strides.
‘I hate to be the bearer of bad news, sire, but this is a little different.’
‘Well, deal with it, Captain, like you and your Written are supposed to. If you did your job properly then there wouldn’t be trouble in the first place.’
No, there would be blood and fire in the streets, thought Modren. His job for the last six months had largely consisted of trying to keep the city from falling apart, and that usually meant keeping the Skölgard soldiers at bay. “His” Written had been scattered around Emaneska in the hunt for fresh soldiers and the infamous and extremely elusive Farden. Modren sighed for the tenth time that morning. At least he was out of the rain. ‘Yes, your Mage,’ he consented, and followed his superior up a short flight of shiny marble steps.