Clockwork Phoenix 4

by Mike Allen

  “But I stayed where I was, and she, my Teda, with me. Each day was, and is, to us like a year, so long, so reasonless, so barren, so sad. We have aged, I think? Yes, I think so. In fourteen months she and I, we have aged more than five decades. But we do not go away, you see. Do you see, young gentleman? Nothing does go. Even the wolf that he tamed, the wolf our master called Hris for the pagan god of sunset, even he remains. How strong he must be, the wolf. But he can no longer hunt. We feed him milk and a little blood. But the last cow is dead, since yesterweek. And there is so little in a rat.”

  Corlan closed his eyes. He saw images of fire and heard a sort of thunder, miles off. An earthquake followed.

  Tils was shaking him.

  “What?” said Corlan vaguely.

  “Did you hear me, sir? Did you hear what I must say?”

  Corlan came back. “You’re more than fifteen years my junior,” said Corlan spitefully, “and a slave. Don’t put your damned hands on me. I heard all you said. And now I’ll depart this cursed and stinking hole.”

  “You will never depart,” said Tils. “Only through death, perhaps not even then. Some nights,” said Tils, “I hear them weeping still, in the walls, the others.”

  “And what about him, your Herren—” snarled Corlan, grabbing the ancient man—seventeen, eighteen?—by his corded throat, “does he weep? or does he visit in his doubly undead state, and sink in his teeth?”

  “He is done, sir,” said Tils, as if the fingers that gripped his windpipe were straws—perhaps they were. “He is over.”

  Letting go, Corlan said quietly, “He’s eating everything up. You, your aged wife, the wolf, the rats, the plaster and the stone. How can such a carnivorous force be dead?”

  “Oh sir,” said Tils. And now tears ran out of his eyes that seemed themselves mostly fashioned of water, “sir—sir—it is not him. He was the strength of this house, its vitality—its soul. No, no, it is—” Tils stared beyond Corlan, beyond the castle, the forest, stared and stared, seeing in horror and anguished acceptance what was not there at all. “It is,” Tils concluded, “his absence. All that is left—the emptiness—without him. The hollow. The nothingness. The vacant pit. That is the vampire. That is the thing which feeds.”

  Three: The Night

  An eagle swept out from the König Ragen, as the masonry cascaded downwards. Its wings filled heaven, darkness, without a spark of light. The captain jumped to his feet. Beyond the door the occluded sky was swarming, not into black but white. Snow, not stonework, fell.

  How long now had he slept here, the fool? (The old man was gone. The fire was out.)

  Corlan lurched about the kitchen. He felt drunk, as if he had been drinking for days, as once in youth he had, ill with drink yet needing it more. The bottle though was used up. No doubt he had finished it.

  He knew he must go up through the House of Veltenlak, and take himself to the small door in the larger one. He must undo it, or beat it down. It was straightforward. One proviso: he must not, at any time, sit, must not even lean on a wall or against any upright thing—post, pillar—

  Staggering along the corridors, the snow hitting his head like omissions of life. The passages were longer now. Miles of them. They were catacombs. It was a library shelved and paved with the dead. Bones and tiny corpses stacked everywhere, shrivelled remains of beetles, spiders, mice, a slender lizard like a lady’s fan, close-folded … there had been a dance, the music drifted in his ears, a gorgeous girl in a white lace gown—no, forget the girl, and the music. A dead rat lay on its back—step over. Look, the vast pillar was ahead—Christ help me—wake me up—

  Abruptly he was stumbling into the colossal hall.

  Absence, not presence.

  It is the Void that is the vampire.

  It is the Void which feeds—

  Corlan cried out, a crazed battle-scream he had heard other men give when hit by blade or shot, crumpling over, ending—

  I won’t end here.

  Nothing is worse than this, whatever it is. I can survive the winter earth, the heartless forest. Or if not, I can die out there.

  They were seventeen, eighteen, the man, the woman. He believed it, and how they had decayed.

  The great tower crashing down. The house giving way when the central support of supernatural life was extracted.

  The black eagle of Nothingness filling up the sky.

  The Night.

  Too much of the bloody night—

  But the Night was there with him. Finally it showed, unmasked its faceless face.

  It must be exactly here, just beyond the hall and the passages, just where—somehow—now he found himself. Instead of debris, for a moment he had the impression of the ghosts of walls that had once risen solid as mountains, but they were gone and a crater replaced them, as if the full moon had been thrown down and struck the spot. But what fell was the king Tower. And now, it was Nothingness. Corlan stood on nothing and nothing surrounded him, and all things faded from him. He was blind and deaf and dumb. Even his mind lost its voices and its pictures. All erased. And yet—he felt, without sensation, the painless fangs fasten on him, eating him up. The void had hunted him for sport and now the void was feeding, and he was its feast. It had been much simpler with him, obviously, in his human misery, having lost everything. Easy prey—he had believed his life was over already. And here he was in life, in the midst of death, beyond which lay only total annihilation. Let go. Give in. Softly merge with Nothing, and be nothing.

  Perhaps no man can strive against a demon, the vampire or the ghoul. But mankind its very self enters the dangerous world already under orders, each a warrior, to resist the Enormous Nihil of the abyss. How else would any of us live five minutes?

  Years and continents away a crazed voice was bellowing. No denial, for the abyss was all Denial. Instead an assent. Yes! bellowed the voice. YES.

  In the centre of the hall, while he was flailing and bellowing unintelligibly, Corlan’s foot slithered over some mess on the floor—bones, stones—And as he careered and swerved to save himself, he found he had come about to confront the staircase that rose up to the wreckage of floors above.

  At the staircase top something stood. It was the ancient ruined wolf.

  How heavy was its head. The ruff of fur seemed to weigh it down like a collar of lead. One golden eye, filmed to stagnant treacle, staring. The other stayed shut.

  Damn the wolf. It was the monster’s familiar. Like the moronic servants, Tils and Teda, stuck here like dying flies in grey jam—No—it was fodder, as they were, of Nothingness—

  The wolf put down one paw toward a lower step. Then drew it back, as if afraid of treading in freezing water.

  Corlan swayed with fatigue. He flung his arms about his own body in a ludicrous attempt to keep himself upright. If you fall down you will lie here till Judgement Day. Longer. You will be nothing.

  “Hris,” he called out to the wolf. Why? But the wolf had remained alive, if only barely, and maybe, just as he did not, it did not want to be consumed, but had not itself been able to fathom a route of escape. It did not grasp what it must fight … was Corlan the only one who could? None of the others had wanted to … even he—even he—

  “But I can,” Corlan said stubbornly aloud, “I can get free. Hris,” he called, his voice strengthening suddenly again, “Hris—come on, my boy—come on.”

  The wolf dropped its heavy head right down, and turned away. It padded off into the dark above the stair.

  A blazing rage filled Corlan Von Antal.

  He found he ran forward up the stairs, leaping from shallow stone to stone, all his body, his skeleton, protesting, but never missing a step.

  When he reached the very top Hris had vanished.

  Corlan stood panting. Then he drew the sabre, and deftly sliced a thin line along his left arm, ignoring vital veins but letting out the blood. Its colour astonished him, as if never had he seen a drop till now. Vermilion beads dripping from a thread of air—What in God’s n
ame had he done?

  “Well, Hris,” Corlan said, leaning only his right elbow next on the upright of the door. “Well, wolf. What do you say?”

  Outside in the corridor the bowl of blood-milk was dry.

  Here the wolf was, fully leaning his side on the four-poster bed, but his head back to look at Corlan through the cobweb draperies. Both the wolf’s eyes were open now, if one rather wider than the other.

  “Come on.”

  The long nose of the wolf wrinkled.

  Without further preface it shoved itself off from the bed, turned right round, and slunk across the floor. Its claws ticked on the stone. It halted about a metre from him.

  “All you’ve had is blood with this muck in it. And I’m poisoned too, but only yesterday, and I’m still fighting, still alive. Let me share the life with you, wolf. No, not that way—” for Hris had thrust his head down to the floor to lap up one of the glowing drops. Corlan held out his bleeding arm. (Oh, how the vampire would have exalted. Fresh young blood, offered up. Insanity on insanity. He’ll tear my arm off—)

  The wolf’s tongue slipped along Corlan’s wounded skin. It felt like silk. The man reached out and dug his fingers into the coarse rich fur of the ruff. The wolf drank, stopped, politely lifted his head, both eyes wide and gleaming. They were like the eyes of a young man, a comrade. Human. Brother.

  “Now we go out, Hris.”

  The wolf watched him.

  Corlan covered up his arm with the torn coat, and swung out of the room. He felt like a dry husk inside which pain and flame and courage were writhing in a wild knot: the desperate agonies of a living thing.

  He did not need to look back. Heard the measured tick of the claws padding after him, and the occasional sponge-like gourmet note as Hris licked his snout.

  In the unlight everything had grown ghostly and insubstantial. The stairs, the floor, seemed spinning off in all directions. On the high cliffs of the walls banners and weapons nearly transparent.

  Corlan reached the barrier of the outer door.

  Its bolts—were all undone.

  He pushed against it brutally, and the quarter door sighed and tumbled back.

  Night was coming in after all behind the snow. The landscape seemed to Corlan like a shattered mosaic, white, black, the whole globe flying to pieces.

  A voice without voice or words called behind him, silently, deafening as a trumpet note:

  Behold Emptiness. Behold Nothingness. Behold the Abysm of Unremitting Death.

  The hot nose of the wolf punched Corlan hard in the side.

  “Behold,” Corlan whispered, grasping the wolf’s snow-glittered mane, “behold rebellious life. No surrender.”

  Swaggering, staggering, halting, faltering, they crossed the remains of the drawbridge above the cavity once a lake and white with swans, now patched white with snow. Down the steep hill they went, the man and the wolf. When they reached the first trees, those whose boughs were snapped, Corlan dropped headlong on the ground. He was laughing. Then he forgot to laugh.

  He saw a ballroom, lit like topaz. The snow was warm and kind. He was barely aware when Hris came closer and his meat-breath steamed across Corlan’s face. Oh he’ll kill and eat me now. God bless him. “Welcome, my friend,” murmured Corlan. And he sank into the depths of what must be the night. But only that.

  Because of it he did not see, and could only afterwards surmise, how the wolf got hold of him, by coat and boot leather, probably, and hauled him on beneath the first impoverished pines, on and on into the thicker shadow of the forest. Forest-deep Hris dragged Corlan Von Antal, out of the Night of Nothingness and back into the night of the winter world. Behold the rebellion of the living. Pines tall as mountains posted up into the snow-starred ether; later a moon, ivory and aquamarine, rising to pierce and to engulf the dark with the bright.

  And Hris lifted his platinum head and howled the lunar love-song of his kind, before the snow closed in again. Then the wolf sat down beside the fallen man. Then the wolf lay down beside him. The snow began to cover them both, as if caringly, with a long pale quilt.

  Afterword

  Nacek was unable to sleep.

  The untold story of Corlan Von Antal kept running through his head.

  Of course, for Nacek, it was a compendium of rumour and gossip, which the old Commander—Ursus—had never confirmed or denied.

  They said, back then, he had killed a fellow officer, some shameful scum the army was glad to be rid of, the murder therefore blamed on enemy action, and Von Antal exonerated. Yet by then he had gone missing. He was found some two weeks later, in deep snow—and protected by a huge hound at least part wolf, (evidently the progenitor of Von Antal’s current companion.) The oddest thing about this tale was not the dog, let alone the murder and its hushing-up, but the fact—according to all versions—that Von Antal, then in his early thirties, appeared to have aged ten years: a man of barely thirty-four had become a man of forty-four. However, if anything he was soon proved stronger than he had been, courageous and cunning in the chess game of conflict. More than a score of secret missions (they said) had been successfully undertaken by him since. While his men loved and admired him, and for the many battles in which he and his troops shone, a whole galaxy of medals and concomitant wealth had been awarded. At last retiring from the field, he had found this remote place among the forests, some antique, ruined castle, and from its stones, its bones, had had rebuilt the colossal keep and lowering tower, a König Ragen more than seven storeys high. From miles off, as Nacek had seen, you could make out its crenellated skull looming up above the team of pines, and after dark always with a russet light burning like a beacon, or a vow.

  No doubt Ursus was there now, in his rooms, sleeping, or reading—for old men did not sleep the way young ones did. Not that Nacek could sleep.

  He swung himself off the narrow cot, pulled on his greatcoat, and went out into the passageway, where a single candle offered light.

  Confound the old boy. He must know how they all fretted to hear the truth. Like some coquette, flirtatiously hiding it from them.

  Up above the last twist of the stone stair, something shouldered forward. It was the wolf-dog, Hris, caught like a phantom between glim and gloom. It had a ruff like a lion’s. Two blue emeralds for eyes.

  Nacek braced himself. Hris’ Master was not here now, and wolves were wolves—

  A voice said mildly from above, “Come up, why don’t you?”

  In God’s name! Had the bloody wolf spoken to him? Then a man’s shadow, long and lean, fell sword-like downward from a blur of copper lampshine: Von Antal. Laughing maybe at Nacek, who had thought a dog might talk.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” Nacek said humbly.

  “At your age? Well it happens. Come and take a glass of Italian wine. You’ll sleep after that. Even I do.”

  His own rooms were spacious, Nacek presently saw. Some swords, an old flintlock, hung on the walls, and two oil paintings, one a landscape, the other the portrait of a stern and upright old man, not so unlike Ursus himself. “My Grandfather,” the Bear said, handing Nacek a silver cup of wine.

  Afterwards Nacek was aware, given this rare chance with Ursus alone, he had meant to try to persuade from him some of the facts behind the stories. And so, as he sipped the full and fragrant wine, Nacek asked, “Is it true, what they say about your cloak, Sir? The bearskin.”

  “What do they say?” inquired Ursus, almost lazily.

  In this lower, older firelight, despite the goblet-silver of his hair, Von Antal gave a definite illusion of youth. He had the effortless physical grace of a young man, while the clearness of his black eyes was remarkable; it always had been.

  Nacek told him the consensus was that the dog—that was the first dog (wolf) all those thirty or forty years back—had killed the bear.

  Von Antal smiled. He lowered his eyes for a second. Yes, he was a flirt where the truth of this was concerned.

  He did not explain to Nacek that the wolf now was the same
wolf, Hris, that he had redeemed from Veltenlak, the very wolf too that grappled and pulled him through the forest, and warmed him in the snow. The wolf he had given his blood, as perhaps Hris’ original master, the vampire, had given it. As for the bear, they had killed it between them. Hris by leading it to the clearing, Corlan Von Antal by looking into its eyes, then touching it. It had died swiftly, quick and clean, but even in that moment he had learned that he need never kill his prey. As the Herr Veltenlak had done, Corlan required only very little to sustain him, and by a transfer—less will than desire—in return he could give back an incredible enduring energy and vigour to any who served him.

  He wore the skin of the bear afterwards not as a boast, but to honour it for the lesson.

  Corlan had been hesitant initially, concerned at what he had become. But subsequently, that way, he never harmed another. And soon his doubts were done. When at length he returned to the ruin, as he had surmised, the Absence was gone. Hunger had destroyed it. The pines grew close and thick. And so he had the tower rebuilt from its own stones. He did not take on the name of Veltenlak. For it was not the vampire lord of the castle who had remade Corlan Von Antal. It was his own duel with that infinitely more terrible demon, Absence, Nothingness, the Void. In such a pass the vampire and its power represented the vitality of Life itself. As Corlan’s violent and frantic war with the void had also done. The vessel had been drained—but given that influx of courage and rage, vitality rushed back like a river breaking through a riven dam. This world lives, and, always, Absence must give way to Presence. While the transposition from decay to renewal aged Corlan, thereafter it made him slow to age. Just as the same force did with the wolf. They might not now be set to live for ever, but they would live longer and more hale than most. The phoenix rises from the ashes because the surrender to the personality of the Abyss must never be. Poor Tils, poor Teda, crumbled away by the hour Corlan reclaimed the Schloss, had not known to fight, had missed the basic principle of survival. But Corlan and Hris knew all along inside their warrior souls.