“You would that it stays the way it is? The way it has always been? With my kind forced to hide from daylight, vilified by the stupid masses? Hunted by fools with stakes and garlic cloves like wild animals fit for nothing but slaying?”
“No,” Ganz repeated. He was visibly trembling. Still he held his hand out as though he truly expected the Vampire Count to surrender the incantation without unleashing its curse on the world.
“Are you afraid, Ganz? Are you afraid of a world full of the risen dead? Are you afraid that they will see you as I see you? As meat?”
Ganz looked at them all one at a time, studying them and seeing them for what they were for the first time in his life. They were nature’s predators. They hunted to survive. The slaughter downstairs was evidence of that. What was he to them? He knew the answer. The truth. He always had.
Prey.
They weren’t equals. They weren’t even comparable. They had eternity where he was a mote caught in the eye of time. One blink and he was gone.
“Kill me,” he said, looking the Vampire Count in the eye. “Make me like you.”
“No,” von Carstein said, breaking eye contact.
“Why? Aren’t I good enough? Haven’t I proved my loyalty?”
“You are nothing more than meat,” Posner said, not bothering to hide his distaste of Ganz’s humanity.
“Quiet, Herman. Of course you are loyal, and valued. It is precisely because of that that I cannot—no I will not—turn you. I need a man to walk in the world of day, to be my voice. I trust you Ganz. Do you understand? You are more valuable to me as you are.”
“As meat.”
“As meat,” the count agreed.
“When this is over?”
“It will never be over. Not truly.”
“And if I throw myself off the battlements?”
“You will serve me in death, a mindless automaton. Would you wish that upon yourself?” von Carstein asked in all seriousness. “Would you choose an undeath as a shambling zombie?”
“No,” Ganz admitted.
“Then be happy with what you are, and serve me with all of your heart. Or I might let Herman eat it.”
“I’ll be the last of my kind… the last living man in the Kingdom of the Dead.” The thought of it was more than he could bear. Ganz sank to his knees, and lowered his head until his forehead touched the cold stone of the castle’s rooftop. “Kill me,” he pleaded, but von Carstein ignored him.
The Vampire Count stood upon the highest point of the castle, the mountain’s teeth rising into the moonlight behind him like ghostly fangs.
“Hear me!” he called out into the darkness. “Obey me!”
And he began to recite the incantation. Even as the first words left his mouth the heavens above split with a mighty crack and the first fat drops of rain began to fall. The ravens exploded from their nests, cawing frantically as they circled, a seething mass of black wings. From nothing rose a storm so violent it ripped and tore at the roof slates of Drakenhof and sent the loose ones spinning into the night to shatter on impact as they fell from the sky. Posner stood implacably in the midst of the driving rain. Beside him Isabella’s expression was one of delicious expectancy. Vlad’s obsessive chant was caught and ripped away into the night by the rising wind, the impact of his words carried to the farthest corners of Sylvania. Driven, he plunged on, calling out to the vilest forces in the universe, demanding they bend to his will.
Ganz raised his head to stare at the man he revered. The winds howling around the battlements rose to gale force. Sheets of rain pounded the mountainside. Amid the eye of the storm the Vampire Count threw back his head and bellowed another command from Nagash’s damned book. The words meant nothing to Ganz. The wind tore at von Carstein’s clothes and hair, buffeting and battering him. He read on, caught up in the sheer power of the incantation, his words tripping over themselves in their eagerness to be free of his mouth. Thunder crashed. A spear of brilliant white lightning split the night.
The transformation of Vlad von Carstein was highlighted in another jag of lightning; in the space of a few gut-wrenching syllables his face elongated and hardened into the bestial mask of the vampire, the contours of his brow sharpened, a feral snarl curling his lips, baring long canine incisors. The Vampire Count threw his head back against the wind, demanding the dead rise and do his bidding.
“Come to me! Rise! Walk again my children! Rise! Rise! Rise!”
And across the land the dead heard his call and stirred.
Bodies so long underground the flesh had been stripped by maggots and worms clawed and scratched at the confines of their coffins, chipping and splintering their skeletal fingers as they tore through first the cloth shroud and then the coffin lid. In their mass graves, newly dead plague victims sighed and shuddered as the agony of life returned to their revived corpses, the sickness that had stolen their lives, eaten away at their flesh and stilled their heart not enough to deny the call of the Vampire Count. In secluded corners of the province, forgotten by all but the murderers who left them there, the dirt of the unconsecrated graves hidden in forests and fields and roadside ditches rippled and churned as their restless residents gave themselves to a slow painful rebirth.
And below them, in the great hall of Drakenhof Castle, the revellers stirred and sighed and found life once more in their bodies, their souls denied eternal rest, the demands of von Carstein’s magic bringing them back as nothing more than mindless zombies; all that was, save for one.
Jon Skellan.
He tasted the blood of the vampire on his tongue where it mingled with his own, and felt the aching need to feed, the burning hunger that accompanied his damnation and the madness of knowing, of understanding, suddenly what Posner had done to him. Skellan knew what he had become and finally understood the tragedy of it: how his last greatest peace had been stolen from him. There would be no reunion with Lizbet in this life or the next.
Skellan’s tortured screams rent the night in two.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Into the Barren Lands
SYLVANIA
Winter, 2010
Stefan Fischer ran for his life.
He staggered and stumbled and forced himself to run on. Hunger ate away at him. Some days he was lucky and feasted on die meat of a giant rat or long nosed tapir, other days he subsisted on roots from plants, there were no fruits or berries. On the worst days he went hungry.
After three weeks of running the snows came. At first gentle, they didn’t settle but as the climate continued to drop the snow stopped melting as it fell. Winter arrived.
It would be the death of him if he didn’t find warmth and shelter soon. A few roots and bugs weren’t going to be enough to keep him alive. And that was what it all came down to: staying alive.
He stumbled on, into the boggy marshland west of Dark Moor, the spectre of Vanhaldenschlosse black in the distance like the ghostly claws of a revenant shade. Insects and mosquitoes swarmed all over him day and night, biting and sucking at his blood. For every one he slapped away or killed, ten more swarmed in to take its place feeding on his fresh meat. The only respite he got from the bloodsucking insects was at night, if he managed to gather the fixings to make a fire. The smoke drove them away.
By cover of night he stole a coracle from a small settlement on the outskirts of the marsh and for the last three days had been poling the small boat slowly through the reeds and rushes. He had eaten nothing for two days. Hunger left him dizzy and delirious. In the delirium he remembered snatches of Geheimnisnacht, the masquerade, the beautiful people in their bone masks, and the slaughter that followed. There was a nightmarish quality to it but that was no surprise, every minute of every day since Geheimnisnacht had been part of one long unending nightmare.
His only thought now was that he had to escape Sylvania. He had to make it back to the Empire so that he might warn people of von Carstein’s true nature.
Not that he expected anyone to believe him.
The
dead rising from their graves, the count and his cohorts gathering an army of the damned to their side. Who in their right mind would believe him? It was hard enough for him to believe and he had lived through it. It was still fresh in his mind—and it always would be. The images of death and destruction had seared themselves into his mind’s eye.
Fischer stumbled down the narrow stairs, his heart hammering in his chest. Skellan was dead. That… that… thing had thrown his corpse over the gallery rail. The Totentanz was a trap and Skellan’s death acted as the spring that sent the jaws slamming down. He staggered out of the stairwell. A woman still clutching her bone mask stumbled into his arms. Her throat had been torn out. The blood and the gore spilled from the open wound, down the front of her dress. She died in his arms, her lifeblood oozing out all over him. The great hall was in chaos. People screaming, running, dying. The vampires descended in a feeding frenzy. Flight was impossible. Everyone who ran for one of the exits from the great hall was chased down and slaughtered by one of von Carstein’s vampires. He was going to die here, in this foreign place, unmourned, food for one of the damned. He staggered forward. The woman’s dead weight dragged her from his hands. People were dying all around him. There was nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.
Something slammed into his back, propelling him off his feet. Fischer sprawled forward, arms outstretched to break his fall, and landed in a bloody pool of spilled viscera. The blood was still warm on his hands and face. The screams were unbearable. He slipped and slithered through the gore, pulling a dead man across his body and lay there under the gutted corpse, staring blankly up toward the ceiling and praying fervently that the vampires would miss him. It was almost impossible not to gag on the wretched stench of death. He wanted desperately to breathe but couldn’t, not more than a sip of corrupt air at a time. It was all he could do not to cry out in revulsion. Tatters of flesh were stripped and thrown around the death room. Blood sprayed over everything. The feeding frenzy went on unabated, the vampires playing with the last few revellers, spinning them from vampire to vampire, cutting them and pushing them away until they tired of the game and hit their victims’ throats out and drained every last ounce of blood before they discarded their corpses like rag dolls.
The vampires moved through the room, pulling trinkets and jewellery from the corpses and arguing over the spoils after von Carstein disappeared upstairs. He was lucky—they weren’t looking for survivors, they were sated from the feeding and interested in gold and jewels. He had neither on him so he was left alone. The silence was unerring but it did not last long. Long minutes later it was replaced by cracks of thunder and the sound of rain lashing at the windows as a storm raged outside.
Still Fischer didn’t move, even as around him the nightmarish scene of slaughter became a macabre resurrection, one after another the gutted, slashed, and gored partygoers rose awkwardly, answering some unheard call-in the midst of it all he saw Skellan rise, his hands going to the wound on his neck where Herman Posner had bitten him. Mimicking the dead, Fischer pushed himself jerkily to his feet. He wanted desperately to go to his friend—for a moment he though that it really was Jon Skellan there, that somehow he had survived the slaughter, where the others shambled about the great hall like mindless zombies Skellan appeared to be thinking, remembering what had happened. Then he screamed and his scream was far from human. It was the last trace of humanity fleeing from his vampiric form. Silent tears slid down Fischer’s cheeks as he said a final goodbye to his friend. With the milling corpses bumping into each other as they struggled to retain control of their awkward limbs Fischer slipped behind one of the velvet curtains, moving slowly, like one of the lost souls he had just abandoned. No one followed him as he snuck into the kitchens and then down again into the cellars. And then he was out into the fresh air, the rain soaking him and washing the blood from his face as he staggered about in the darkness looking for a way out.
He stole a black stallion from the count’s stables and rode it into the ground. The horse died beneath him. He cut the dead animal open, filleting a few cuts of meat from it, which he stuffed into his pockets, and then he ran.
The resurrections were not contained to the revellers either. In the six weeks he had been running Fischer had come across pockets of shambling undead, recently raised from gardens of Morr and mausoleums across the countryside, the dirt of the graves still clinging to their rotten flesh, all moving unerringly in the direction of Drakenhof Castle.
They were answering von Carstein’s call.
The Vampire Count was drawing the dead to him, summoning them from the grave to his side. More and more bodies, almost as though he were raising an army… a monstrous undead regiment. But why? And it came to him then. Von Carstein could only have a single purpose for raising an undead army: to wage war on the Empire.
Fischer pushed the pole deep into the saturated ground, propelling the coracle deeper into the marsh.
He had to survive.
He had to warn people what monsters were coming their way.
Without his warning town after town would succumb to the same bloody slaughter that he had lived through on Geheimnisnacht.
He wouldn’t—couldn’t—allow that to happen.
He had to survive.
CHAPTER NINE
Succubus Dreams
SYLVANIA
Winter, 2010
The insects were gone and the air was fresh for the first time in more than a week.
Fischer was weak with hunger. The last thing he had eaten was a water rat that he had caught by dragging the net he had found beneath the wooden seat of the coracle through the marsh water. He had been hoping to find some kind of fish but for a starving man meat was meat. He ate it with relish only to throw most of it up less than an hour later.
He lay on his back in the small boat, looking up at the sky. Ravens circled above his head, drifting silently on high thermals. The winter sun was bright in the clear blue sky. Not for the first time he regretted not having returned to his room above Hollenfuer’s wine cellars. As the winter deepened the risk of hypothermia heightened. The cold was his greatest enemy now. He had pushed himself to the point of exhaustion knowing instinctively that sleep could be as deadly as a knife in the gut. Not that sleep was something he welcomed now; every dream, no matter how fleeting, took him back to Geheimnisnacht and the slaughter in the great hall, the faces of the dead as they came back from whatever hell their souls had been consigned to, the bone masks scattered across the floor, slick with the blood of their wearers, and the vampires.
It was a constant struggle though, not giving in to the lure of exhaustion.
A smudge of black smoke on the horizon gave him a surge of fresh hope. Fire.
He pushed himself to his knees and grasped the wooden pole, sinking it deep into the muddy bottom of the marsh waters, his gaze focussed on the smoke in the distance, a litany of mumbled prayers tripping off his lips. Smoke promised habitation, a settlement of some sort, a place to get real food, warm clothing, and a real bed for a night.
Turgid brown water lapped against the side of the coracle as he propelled it toward the column of smoke.
As he neared he began to make out more shapes and details. It was a settlement, the thatched roofs glittered yellow in the sun. The realisation that he would be sleeping under a dry roof, out of the elements, for the first time in almost two months was almost too much for him to bear. He drew the pole out of the water, and hand over hand, plunged it back into the murky water, punting the small boat closer to the settlement. He began fantasising about roast meat and vegetables, a cooking fire with a grill spit and a haunch of wild boar turning over the flames, dripping fat that sizzled on the coals beneath it. Such was the intensity of the imagined sight Fischer began to salivate at the very thought of it.
He moored the coracle up against a small wooden jetty and clambered out. There were fifteen houses in total and they were all built on stilts so that they rested above the water level. Gangplanks and rope
bridges joined the buildings, and each had its own small jetty where coracles and canoes were moored. Fischer had no idea why anyone would choose to live in the marsh, but at that moment he was not about to start complaining. The smoke was coming from one of the central houses, which was slightly larger than the others. The rope bridge swayed beneath Fischer as he traversed from one building to another. He lost his footing twice but didn’t fall. His vision swam as dizziness threatened to overwhelm him.
He opened the door and stumbled into the welcoming warmth of a small communal hut. There were tables and chairs and a fire crackling in the hearth. There were three men in the room, who looked up, surprised by his sudden arrival. He knew what he must have looked like, collapsing through the door, his face and neck swollen with bites and stings and smeared with blood from his constant scratching at them, his hair tangled and foul with stagnant rain and sweat and his clothes utterly filthy with ground-in muck and gore, hanging off him as though he were a bag of bones, so much weight had he lost since fleeing Drakenhof.
Fischer staggered forward then stumbled and fell to his knees. He reached out a hand to grab on to something for support then fell forward. He blacked out. He had no idea how long for but when he came to he was lying on a makeshift pallet by the fire and there was a ring of concerned faces looking over him.
“Give the poor fellow some air, woman.”
“Hush your chatter, Tomas Franz, he’s waking up.”
“Where?” Fischer’s voice cracked. He hadn’t spoken for so long it was difficult to form the words. “Where am I?”
“Right “ere. Middle of nowhere.”
“Take no notice of Georg. Welcome to our little village, stranger. You are, in Sumpfdorf. Vanhaldenschlosse is two days walk north-east of here, once you are out of the marsh. From there, it’s maybe five days on to Eschen, ten due north to Waldenhof. A better question might be what brought you to us?”
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