Skellan pushed aside the curtain. As he had suspected, the red cloth hid a passageway. This one led off deeper into the castle but there was no sign of a staircase leading up to the gallery so he let the curtain fall closed again. The second curtain hid a barred door. The third opened on to another passage that disappeared into the darkness of Drakenhof s lower levels. He slipped behind the final curtain and into a tight embrasure that turned into an even tighter staircase.
The music started up again behind him.
Skellan climbed the stairs. Countless thoughts chased through his head like blind runners stumbling across each other. He couldn’t think straight. It didn’t matter. He didn’t need to. His hands trembled with anticipation as he pulled the leather thong over his head. The glass phial was all that he needed.
He was glad Fischer had become trapped within the surging crowd. He hadn’t been entirely truthful. He knew the risks coming here. He was going to kill Aigner in front of hundreds of people. He didn’t expect to walk out of Drakenhof. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that Lizbet was finally avenged, that the circle of violence closed here, tonight.
Death had long since ceased to frighten him—after all, what was there to be afraid of? Lizbet would be waiting for him in the Kingdom of Morr. They would be together again. In that, von Carstein had been right when he said death was cause for celebration.
He paused before he stepped out onto the gallery. The violins rose in shrieking chorus, masking the sound of his footsteps.
There were four men on the gallery with Aigner.
Skellan didn’t care, he only had eyes for Aigner. The others were insignificant. His fist closed around the glass phial. One of the others, the shortest of the four, turned and saw him. A look of distaste spread across the man’s face.
“Downstairs, you ain’t allowed up here.”
“I go where I please,” Skellan said.
Aigner turned at the sound of his voice.
For a moment Skellan fancied he saw a glimmer of recognition in the murderer’s eyes, but more likely, he saw it because he wanted it to be there. A cunning smile spread across the shaven-headed man’s skeletal face.
“You do, do you?” Aigner said. His voice was every bit as hateful as Skellan remembered. “Well, not today. Back downstairs before I decide to teach you a lesson you won’t quickly forget.”
“I don’t forget anything.” Skellan moved forward two more steps until Aigner was just beyond arms reach. “Not my wife, not my daughter, not my friends.” He touched his temple. They’re all in here. Like the murdering scum you brought to my village. They’re in here. Burning.”
“Ahhh,” Sebastian Aigner said, realisation dawning. “So you’re the witch hunter, are you? I was expecting someone… taller.”
“Is this going to be a problem, Sebastian?” The swordsman with the twin curved blades asked. He instinctively moved to put himself between Aigner and Skellan.
“No,” Aigner said, shaking his head. “No problem at all, Posner. Our friend here was just dying.”
Aigner’s slow smile flashed in to a dangerous grin. His lips curled back on sharp teeth.
“You first,” Skellan said, taking one step forward and slamming his fist up into Aigner’s face. The glass phial shattered spilling its contents into Aigner’s eyes and down his cheeks.
Aigner’s hands flew up to his face, slapping and clawing at the acid as it seared into his skin. Pink froth sizzled between his fingers. Blood ran down the backs of his hands. Skellan didn’t move. Aigner staggered forward a lumbering step. His mouth moved but the incessant violins drowned out his screams; violent music to match Aigner’s violent contortions as the acid ran into his mouth and down his throat eating away at his flesh as it did so. He lifted his hands away from his face. Half of his right cheek was gone, dissolved in a mess of blood and bone. A rash of pustulent blisters seethed across his cheeks, chin and neck, popping, sizzling and spitting as the acid continued to melt into what was left of his face. Rage burned in his one good eye. The other was gone, black and blind where the acid had burned through it.
Skellan moved quickly. He reached for the hand-held crossbow at his waist, unclipped it and levelled it squarely at Aigner’s chest.
“You killed my wife… Death isn’t good enough for you.”
He squeezed the trigger mechanism twice in quick succession. Two feathered shafts slammed into Aigner’s chest, punching him back off his feet. He sprawled across the gallery’s floor, blood and gore leaking from the wounds. Writhing on the deck, Aigner gripped one of the bolts in his bloody fist and yanked it free. His face contorted with pain.
Standing beside him, Herman Posner drew one of his twin blades and tossed it to Skellan. “Finish him off. This isn’t pretty.”
“It shouldn’t be pretty,” Skellan said flatly. He stepped over Aigner’s body and raised the borrowed sword. None of the others moved. It was as though a spell held them transfixed. “And it shouldn’t be fast.” He plunged the blade into Aigner’s gut, wrenching it left and then right to open the wound wider, then pulled it out.
“That won’t do it,” Posner said. “Take his head off.”
Skellan hesitated.
“Do it.”
Suddenly, Aigner reared up, his face contorted in a mask of rage. The skin had dissolved around his cheeks and lower jaw, baring razor-sharp fangs. His claws raked blindly toward Skellan’s face.
Skellan stepped sideways and back a step, bringing the sword around in a savage arc. The wickedly curved blade cut clean through the murderer’s neck and spine, sending his decapitated head bouncing and spinning across the floor. There was precious little blood, considering the wound. A trickle rather than a fountain. One of the count’s men stopped it with his foot. Aigner’s dead eyes stared accusingly at Skellan. For a heartbeat Aigner’s body continued to rise before it slumped to the floor, dead.
The waspish violin music swarmed around them as the musicians played on, oblivious to the killing that had taken place mere feet from them.
Skellan stood over the corpse of the man who had ruined his life. This final vengeance did not taste sweet. There was no satisfaction in the slaying. He looked down at the ruined face, still hissing and sizzling as the acid burned away more and more of the fatty tissue. Given time the acid would strip the head of all its soft tissue and dissolve the brain so all that remained would be the clean white bone plates of the dead man’s skull.
“That was personal, was it?” Posner asked.
“Yes.”
“And it is over now? Finished?”
“Yes.”
“Good. That is good. My man did wrong by you and you claimed your justice, I can respect that… but it leaves me with a problem.”
“How so?”
“You killed my man, I can’t let you walk away from here without recompense.”
“I understand.”
“And yet you aren’t grovelling pitifully for your life. I can respect that as well.”
“I am not afraid to die. I came here tonight expecting to. It doesn’t matter to me if I walk away from here. I have done what I set out to do. From now there is no purpose to my life. The sooner I die, the sooner I am reunited with my wife.”
“Ahhh, so that is your story? I understand. But if I were you I wouldn’t look forward to any tear-filled reunions in the halls of the dead just yet. What is your name?”
“Jon Skellan.”
“Well, Jon Skellan, you killed my man. As I said, this causes me a problem.”
“And I said kill me,” Skellan said.
“In time. But you see, killing you doesn’t hurt you. You’ve said it yourself, you want to die. You are finished here. You have avenged your loved ones. So killing you doesn’t give me my justice.”
Skellan saw Fischer lurking in the door behind Posner’s shoulder. He had come up a different way to the gallery. His hand rested on the handle grip of his own short crossbow. Skellan shook his head. This wasn’t what he wanted. This
was about his life, not his friend’s. He turned, as though to look over the balcony at the guests of the count’s masquerade.
Posner followed the direction of his gaze.
“Oh, their time will come. But you, Jon Skellan, what to do with you? My instinct, I must admit is to kill you, but as we’ve established, I can’t do that, and besides killing you doesn’t solve the fact that I am a man short.”
“Just do what you want to do and have done with it.” Skellan said. Posner’s curved sabre slipped through his fingers and clattered to the floor. “I’m finished here.”
The music down below lapsed into momentary silence.
“No, you’re not,” Herman Posner said thoughtfully. “It’s just beginning.” His grin revealed predatory fangs. In the lull between arrangements, with the others laughing, Posner’s face shifted, his smile disappearing as his features stretched. His cheekbones lifted and the bones beneath his face formed and reformed as though liquid. His jaw elongated and the line of his ears sharpened as the animal beneath his skin rose to the surface.
The transformation complete, Posner’s roar was purely animalistic.
He flew at Skellan, slapping aside his ineffectual defence, grabbed a fistful of hair and yanked his head back, exposing his neck. For a full five heartbeats Posner held him like that, locked in a parody of a lover’s embrace, before he sank his teeth into the soft, ripe flesh and drank greedily.
Skellan’s limbs flapped, for the first few seconds, fiercely as he fought for his life, and then more and more weakly as his will to live faded into oblivion. He felt himself slipping away, his sense of self fragmenting into innumerable shards, parts of his life, forgotten memories of childhood, of Lizbet, of happiness, sadness, anger, and all he could think was: so this is death…
Then he felt the warm sticky wetness in his mouth as it filled with blood. His own blood and Posner’s blood mingling.
Sated, Posner threw his head back and howled before hurling Skellan’s limp body over the balustrade and into the middle of the revels below.
It took a second and then the shrieks and the screams began.
From the doorway Fischer loosed two crossbow bolts; one fired high and wide into the ceiling of the great hall, the other embedded itself in the neck of one of Posner’s men. He didn’t fall. Reaching up the man wrenched the bolt free of the wound in his neck even as a tiny dribble of blood oozed from the gaping wound. The man snarled and dropped into a crouch, his face undergoing the same hideous transformation Posner’s had moments before.
Fischer turned and ran for his life.
Down below, Vlad von Carstein’s voice cut through the pandemonium. “Ah, first blood has been drawn. Yes. Yes. Reveal yourselves. Let out the beast within! The festivities can truly begin! Drink! Drink the wine of humanity!”
From both galleries above the great hall von Carstein’s vampires leapt over the balcony and fell upon the revellers.
What followed was nothing short of slaughter.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Kingdom of the Risen Dead
CASTLE DRAKENHOF
Early winter, 2010
Ganz had always known the truth.
But knowing and believing were two very different beasts.
They were animals.
No. They were worse than animals.
When the music stopped there was only the sound of the screams.
The fiends leapt from the galleries and fell upon the terrified revellers in a frenzy of feeding. Their teeth and claws ripped and rent at the pretty dresses and the pale flesh tearing their prey apart piece by bloody piece.
Alten Ganz looked away.
On the gallery opposite him Herman Posner watched the slaughter with disinterest, as though he had seen it all before, which, Ganz realised with a shudder, he probably had. The man’s face had metamorphosed into that of a beast: the beast within. Posner wasn’t a man any more than the count was, or Isabella or any of the others. The night travelling, the thick velvet curtains to keep out the day, his preternatural grace, it all made sense. Ganz thought of all the evenings he had stood on the battlements listening to von Carstein lament the transient nature of life, his obsession with beauty, even the portrait gallery, the countless paintings of the count. It all made sense.
Posner saw him staring and, teeth bared, flashed him a dangerous grin.
Ganz looked away again.
People were dying all around him. There was nowhere he could look without seeing some act of brutality. Death, this death offered by von Carstein’s vampires, was not pretty. It was bloody and wretched. There would be nothing left to bury but bones.
The count was in the centre of it, detached from the bloodlust of his kin. Unlike the others, his face had not undergone a grotesque transformation. The countess, though, had given herself to the feeding frenzy. Her gown was soaked in the gore of countless partygoers’ lives and still she threw herself into the slaughter. The carnage was incredible.
In a matter of minutes they were all dead.
Only then did Posner join his monstrous kin on the killing floor. He walked through the bodies without thought for who or what they had been.
“Was it everything you dreamt it would be?” Posner said, his voice echoing weirdly in the suddenly silent hall.
“And more,” Isabella answered. She was on her knees, her face smeared with the blood of the newly dead aristocracy. She jumped up and rushed over to the dais where her portrait had been knocked to the floor in the fighting. She knelt over it, staring at the face she hadn’t seen for so long. “Do you think I’m pretty?”
“It does not do you justice, countess,” Posner said.
“You think?” A flush of happiness brought a smile to her bloody lips.
“Gist is a master, but even a master cannot hope to render such flawless beauty with a clumsy brush.”
“Gist is dead,” Isabella said, lost suddenly in the memory of it. “I ate him.”
“Is, was, it matters not, countess. The choice of words is nothing more than semantics. The proof of his labours is there in your hands, a timeless reminder of your beauty. If you forget yourself you need only gaze upon it as it hangs on the wall to be reminded. And for us beauty never fades’
“Yes.” Isabella mused. “Yes. I should like that. I am beautiful, aren’t I?”
“Yes, countess.”
“And it will always be this way?”
“Yes, countess. For eternity.”
“Thank you, Herman.”
Posner turned to see the count reaching out to his wife. There wasn’t a single fleck of blood on him. “Come,” he said. She rose and picked a path through the corpses like a butterfly flitting from flower to flower. Posner followed her and von Carstein to the battlements. Alten Ganz knew where the count was going—there was only one place he would go—so he raced up to the rooftops via the servants stairs, panting and gasping as he pushed himself to keep on running up the different staircases. He was already there when von Carstein arrived. The battlements were thronged with ravens nesting along the crenellations and in the eaves and crevices of the gothic architecture. Feathers ruffled and wings beat as the count burst out onto the roof with Posner and Isabella trailing in his wake.
“Geheimnisnacht,” von Carstein said, no hint of breathlessness in his voice. “A night like no other. Do you have it, Ganz?” He held out a hand expectantly.
Ganz reached inside the folds of his cloak and drew out a single sheet of parchment. His hand trembled as he handed it over to his master. He had looked at the parchment and though he couldn’t read most of the arcane scrawl he recognised it for what it was: an incantation.
“My thanks. This single piece of paper will change the world as we know it.” His words snatched away by the rising wind, von Carstein savoured the thought. “No more will we walk in fear, no more will we hide in shadows. This is our time. Now. With this single piece of paper we change the world.”
Isabella wrapped herself around her husband’s side, he
r hair streaming in the wind, naked hunger in her eyes.
Posner stared out over the battlements at the city below, shrouded in fog and darkness.
Ganz didn’t move. He stared at the brittle parchment in his master’s hand. Only it wasn’t parchment or paper or even vellum, he knew, it was flesh and blood, or rather skin and blood. The incantation written in blood on a sheet of cured human skin. The letters were the faded rust of blood and the texture of the parchment was unmistakable.
“Read it, my love,” Isabella whispered.
“Do you know what this is?” Vlad asked. Without waiting for an answer, he continued. “One page from the nine Books of Nagash. Hand-written by Nagash himself, the blood on this page was shaped with his own hand. This is but a fraction of his wisdom, a hint at the wonders that held the key to his immortality. These words unlock the Kingdom of the Dead. This one page is precious beyond money. This one page… the power in it… The words give life, revification of the flesh… They offer a way back for all those who have gone—imagine—with this there can be no death. Not as we know it. Not as a meaningful thing, the end of a life lived to the full. With this the dead will rise to stand at my side. If I will it they will fight at my side as I march across the Empire of mortal men. Death shall have no dominion. With these words I shall command the flesh. I shall return life where I see fit. Fight me, face my wrath, I shall kill my enemies and then raise them to fight for me as I conquer the world. With these few words I shall raise the dead from their earthly prisons. I shall speak and in speaking become a dark and hungry god. I, Vlad von Carstein, first of the Vampire Counts of Sylvania, shall have dominion over the realms of life and death. As I say, so it shall be.”
“Read it,” Isabella pressed. She nuzzled in close to Vlad, her tongue trailing luxuriantly across his cheek, kissing and nibbling up to his ear. She breathed heavily into his ear before the trail of hot wet kisses led to the Vampire Count’s neck, her teeth closing to bite in a sensuous re-enactment of her own siring.
“No,” Ganz said. He held out his hand as though asking for the parchment back.
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