by Nathan Long
Ulrika reached out a hand to touch her shoulder, then stopped. Any touch would likely bring her pain. She leaned down beside her instead.
‘Please don’t die, Famke,’ she whispered. ‘I am taking you home.’
Famke did not respond.
Ulrika directed the coachman to the service alley behind Hermione’s Kaufman District mansion, and told him to wait, then wrapped Famke tighter in the leather coat and gathered her up in her arms. The movement jarred a cry of anguish from her, and her eyes flared open. They were rheumed with a white fog, but she seemed to recognise Ulrika nonetheless.
‘Sister,’ she hissed in a voice like dead leaves rattling. ‘Sister, I did as you said. I looked before I went home. There was no one. No one!’
‘I’m sorry, Famke,’ said Ulrika, a lump forming in her throat. ‘They must have–’
‘They came. They knew I was there. The whores and the witch hunters. They knew!’
‘And I will kill them,’ said Ulrika. ‘Every last one of them. You will be avenged.’
Famke didn’t seem to be listening. She closed her eyes again, and her skin cracked as her face twisted into a mask of grief. ‘I wish…’
‘Aye?’
‘I wish I had never met you,’ she whispered. ‘I wish I had never left my mistress.’
Ulrika’s guts turned to lead and her arms trembled. ‘But – but, Famke…’
Famke’s head sank back into the depths of the voluminous coat and the tension went out of her charred limbs. She had lost consciousness again. Ulrika almost shook her to wake her again, wanting her to explain what she had said, but now wasn’t the time.
She kicked out of the coach and carried Famke to Hermione’s carriage gate, then jerked at the service bell. The sun beat down upon her unmercifully as she waited, cooking her head and shoulders through her coat and hat, but she bore it without flinching. She deserved the pain for failing to save Famke. She deserved it for telling her to go home without her. She should have been there! She should have protected her!
Footsteps approached and a little window opened in the service door. One of Hermione’s handsome swains looked out, wary. ‘What do the witch hunters want here?’
Ulrika raised the brim of the wide hat. ‘It’s Ulrika, Gabriella’s ward. I have Famke with me. She is badly wounded. Open the gate. She must get out of the sun.’
The man blinked, surprised, then looked back towards the house. ‘One moment,’ he said, then started away at a run.
Ulrika cursed. He was going for reinforcements. There would be a fight while Famke lay untended.
‘You fool! She is dying!’
The steps ran on.
Ulrika ground her teeth with frustration. She would have to leave. It was the only way the swains would see to Famke instead of attacking her. She lowered Famke to the ground in a shadow beside the gate, then turned to the coachman, who watched her every move with terrified attention.
‘Your cloak,’ she said, snapping her fingers.
He hesitated only a second, then pulled off his cloak and handed it down to her. She took it and laid it over Famke, then started to tuck it around her, but raised voices and footsteps from behind the gate made her look up. The swains were coming back.
She lowered her head to Famke. ‘Sister,’ she said, ‘I promise you. I will not return until all who have hurt you are dead.’
Famke made no response. Under her cover of cloak and coat she lay as still and silent as death. Ulrika took a last look at her draped form, then spun and hopped back into the coach.
‘Drive on!’ she barked. ‘Back to the Faulestadt. Hurry!’
The coachman whipped up the horses just as the carriage gate opened and the swains starting shouting after her.
Famke’s last words to her tore at Ulrika as the coach took her under the High Gate and rattled her through the Neuestadt.
‘I wish I had never met you.’
That Famke had said it was understandable. Had she never met Ulrika, she would never have left the safety of Hermione’s house to warn her of Casilla and her Lahmian assassins. She would never have agreed to run away with Ulrika and attempted to live on her own without the protections of the sisterhood. She would never have gone into the city alone at Ulrika’s bidding.
Ulrika curled up on the bench, sobbing and raking herself with her claws as Famke’s burnt hair and charred, skeletal face flashed through her mind again and again. It was her fault Famke had burned. Ulrika was the worldly one, the one who had travelled to Praag and back on her own, without the shelter of a closed coach or a swain to feed upon. She was the one who knew how to survive in the world of men. She should have been there to watch over Famke. How could she have left her alone? What a fool!
And the worst of her foolishness, it seemed to her now, was that she had thought that there was any good at all in mankind. They were kindness itself if they thought you were one of their own. They would invite you into their homes, feed you, aid you, fight beside you, but the moment you showed even the slightest hint of being ‘the other’, whether you were a different species, a different nationality, even if you were just from another village, their fear of the unknown would take over. They would brand you enemy, monster, fiend, and call for the witch hunters, without ever taking the time to discover if you were good or bad, noble or corrupt, hero or villain. They didn’t care. You were other, and therefore you were to be burned. How could she have thought any of them worth saving?
As the coach rumbled over the Great Bridge, Ulrika saw through the gap between the drawn curtains, the witch hunters’ rust-black Iron Tower a half-mile to the east, thrusting up like a mailed fist from the rocky island upon which it sat in the middle of the Reik. The place was their prison, their torture chamber and their headquarters. She curled her lips at the sight of it and extended her fangs. Schenk would be there, somewhere. She would like to hunt him through its dark corridors, him and all his rotten brethren, and paint its walls with their blood.
‘The Faulestadt, witch hunter,’ called the coachman as they thudded off the end of the bridge. ‘May I return to my master now? I–’
‘No!’ barked Ulrika. ‘To the dockside, near the Laughing Bear. And go slow.’
She would have her vengeance upon the witch hunters soon enough, but there were others who needed to die first.
Ulrika feared at first she wouldn’t see them. Harlots and drakes were like vampires, at least in one regard – they only came out at night. And, of course, they’d had a long night of it, leading the witch hunters to Famke and watching her burn. But at last she saw them, the blonde and the maroon-haired one and their drake. They were in a group of other Faulestadt residents, shop-keeps, street hawkers and gangsters, and it looked like they were telling the story of their exploits to the eager crowd.
‘Stop here,’ Ulrika called.
‘Witch hunter,’ came the coachman’s voice. ‘I beg you. I–’
‘Stop here!’
The coach stopped, pulling to the side a block from the gathering.
‘Now give me your lanterns,’ said Ulrika. ‘Light them and hand them down to me.’
‘Yes, witch hunter,’ he said, sullen.
A minute later, a shaking hand lowered two coach lanterns to the window. Ulrika took them and set them on the floor, then returned her attention to the whores, waiting. Her pain came back to her as the minutes ticked on. Her face was an agony of blisters from her seconds in the sun, as was her right hand and wrist, from where the blessed water had splashed them, while the dull ache of the pistol wound in her thigh throbbed in counterpoint. In her haste to get Famke to safety, she had not fed properly, and she was starving and weak and nauseous with sun-sickness. But it was only what she deserved, and she welcomed the pain as a penitent welcomes the lash. She hoped it would eclipse the agony in her heart.
Finally the harlots and the drak
e finished telling their story and started off down the street, yawning and leaning on each other, seemingly ready for bed.
‘Follow them,’ called Ulrika. ‘The two whores and their companion. But at a distance.’
‘Aye, witch hunter.’
The coachman crawled his coach after them as they continued down the Brukestrasse, then turned into a side street. Two blocks later, they entered a narrow shadowed alley.
‘Pull to that alley!’ barked Ulrika, picking up the lanterns. ‘Quickly!’
The coachman geed the horses and trundled to the mouth of the alley. Ulrika exploded from the coach, drawing her rapier and holding the lanterns behind her as she ran. The harlots and drakes were thirty paces ahead, but Ulrika halved the distance before they had even turned, and she was among them before they could cry out.
She hacked at the hand of the drake as she tried to draw her blade, severing a finger and thumb, then slashed the faces of the whores and cut their legs as they turned to run. In seconds they were all on the ground, wailing and cursing in pain and fright. She could have killed them all in another second, but she didn’t want them to die so easily. Unlike herself and Famke, who would suffer the eternal torments of the damned once their unlife ended, these vile children might know oblivion or even bliss in the halls of their gods when they died. Their last minutes, therefore, should be something they would remember for the whole of their afterlives.
She moved among them quickly, hamstringing each with quick flicks of her rapier so they could not crawl away, then dragged them into a rough pile and raised one of her lanterns high.
‘No!’ shrieked the blonde. ‘Please! I beg you!’
‘Did you listen when Famke begged you? Did you stay your hand?’ Ulrika’s voice cracked. ‘I saw you! You laughed when she was burning! You laughed!’
Ulrika smashed the lantern down on the skull of the drake and it shattered, spraying them all with glass and volatile oil. They screamed and tried to drag themselves away using only their arms, but Ulrika tore the cover from the other lamp and touched its flame to them. Flags of fire flitted across them like orange butterflies, and their screams became shrieks. Ulrika laughed, then shattered the second lantern and poured its oil all over them.
They writhed and flailed like pinned snakes as their skin bubbled and hissed, but they could not escape the flames. Ulrika backed away, triumphant in her vengeance, then for some reason gulped out a sob and ran as the flames blazed higher and higher behind her.
At the mouth of the alley, the coachman stood, staring past her as she came.
‘Away!’ she cried, as she neared him. ‘Back to your seat, quickly!’
He stepped back, his face white and set, and shook his head. ‘I – I do not believe you are a witch hunter,’ he said. ‘I do not believe you are even a man.’
‘Of course I’m a witch hunter,’ choked Ulrika. ‘Witch hunters burn people. Do you not see them burning?’
The coachman took another step back. ‘I’ll not take you further. I want none of this business. Just let me go back to my master. I’ll say nothing–’
Ulrika sprang forwards and caught him by the front of his doublet, then yanked him back into the alley and punched him in the face with the cage of her rapier. She felt no pang of remorse as she sank her fangs into his neck and drank. It was true that he had been nothing but a bystander in this, dragged into it when she had needed an escape, and he had done her bidding with little complaint, but that didn’t make him innocent. Despite his promise that he would say nothing, she knew he would speak of it. She knew he would tell his master, or the witch hunters. She knew he was no better than the rest. Famke had been right. There were no innocents.
A scream from the street brought her head up. A cabbage-seller was cowering behind her barrow, pointing at her.
‘Vampire! It’s killing him! Help!’
More people were coming at the woman’s screams. Ulrika cursed and broke the coachman’s neck, then turned and sprinted down the alley, dodging wide to avoid the pyre of blackening bodies that partially blocked it.
Ulrika lay curled up in a tiny wedge of space in a slant-ceiling attic of a mouldering tenement, hiding from the shouting rioters that strode through the streets below, searching for her and baying for her death.
It was hours later, and the coachman’s blood had done much to heal her blistered skin and cracked ribs, but it had not soothed the burning agony of her heart. Indeed, with her other pains receding, that ache seemed all the worse. Killing the whores and their drake had brought her a swift, savage joy, but it hadn’t lasted. How could it when Famke was still a blackened skeleton and still blamed Ulrika for her fate – and when Ulrika still blamed herself. The handful of deaths hadn’t been enough to ease such a multitude of hurts – not nearly enough. They were but a few drops of blood vanishing into a raging black ocean of pain. It might take the deaths of hundreds, thousands, the death of a city or a nation, to finally drown Ulrika’s agony. She bared her teeth. She wanted the world’s throat under her fangs so that she might drain it dry, and as she lay there, she suddenly knew who could give it to her.
She knew where she needed to go.
chapter thirteen
THE TEMPERED BLADE
‘So, you have changed your mind at last.’
Ulrika spun around, hand on her hilt. A dark figure stood on the roofline above her, shrouded in shadow. She hadn’t heard him approach, but then she could hardly hear anything. A steamy summer storm had broken over Nuln before sunset, sheets of warm rain dropping straight down out of the sky without a breeze to stir them. The noise of it on the roof was a deafening hiss. Why couldn’t it have come a day earlier? Why couldn’t it have blocked out the morning sun?
‘There’s no need to hide your face, Sylvanian,’ Ulrika sneered. ‘You are the “vampire slayer” that set the crowd after me. And he who goaded them to burn the Shallyan hospital.’
The Sylvanian walked down the slope of the roof and the shadow slid from him like he was stepping out from under a ledge. His face was as she remembered it, hard and strong, with a trim black and grey beard, but the fanaticism that blazed in his eyes when he addressed a crowd was replaced now with cold amusement, and he was no longer dressed like a vampire hunter. Now he wore black riding gear and the boots and spurs of a cavalryman under a long rain cloak.
‘Observant as well,’ he said in his rich, resonant voice. He was half a head taller than her, and broad in the shoulder. ‘I knew I was right about you.’
‘And I am certain I am right about you.’
‘Yet you are here,’ he said, pushing wet locks out of his eyes. ‘Your heart full of fury and ready to join me. Why?’
Ulrika’s fists clenched. ‘Vengeance.’
‘Upon whom? Your sisters? Your mistress? Those who burned your beloved Famke?’
Ulrika stepped back, staring. ‘How do you know about that?’
‘The sisterhood have been talking about nothing else,’ said the vampire. ‘My spies – the ones you have not yet exposed – have told me you are wanted dead. Even your mistress has agreed.’
Ulrika swallowed. ‘Have they – did they say if Famke…?’
‘She lives, but the burns are very severe. She may never heal.’
Ulrika’s heart clenched. Every fear that had plagued her since she had left Hermione’s gate had been realised. Ulrika could not imagine a more horrible fate for Famke. And it was her fault.
She raised her eyes to the Sylvanian, shaking with rage. ‘All of them,’ she said. ‘I want vengeance on all of them. The humans must die for their close-minded fear. My sisters must die for driving us out when we had done nothing, and my mistress must die for turning her back on me and going along with their idiotic edicts. And Lady Hermione. She above all must die. If not for her spite, I would still be in the arms of Lahmia, and Famke would be whole.’
‘Then
I could almost thank her,’ said the Sylvanian. ‘For without her spite, I would be deprived of a brave and capable blade. That is, if you are truly here to join me.’
‘I am,’ said Ulrika.
‘Are you certain?’ asked the Sylvanian. ‘Our aim is to kill the Emperor, Karl Franz, and prepare the way for my master’s invasion. Are you willing to aid us in this? Are you willing to kill a paragon of human virtues and cast the world of men into a storm of war and revolt?’
The faces of the mob that had watched Famke burn rose up in Ulrika’s mind, leering, laughing, hateful. ‘There are no human paragons,’ she spat. ‘They are frightened children who lash out at what they don’t understand. I would see them all burn.’
The Sylvanian raised an eyebrow. ‘Even the innocents? The women, the children, the men of peace?’
‘There are no innocents,’ said Ulrika. ‘Women are no better than men, and every child grows to be a fool just like his parents.’
‘And you would have no qualms about facing your sisters in battle? You would not stay your hand against your mistress?’
‘My sisters are a pack of backstabbing cats,’ sneered Ulrika. ‘And my mistress will not stand against them though she knows them for fools. She is no better than the rest.’
‘You do not answer my question. Would you fight them?’
‘Aye,’ said Ulrika. ‘With a will.’
‘Even the countess?’
Ulrika hesitated, but the Sylvanian had said that Gabriella had agreed with the others that she should be killed on sight. ‘Even the countess.’
The Sylvanian nodded. ‘I see no deception in your heart or mind. Your hate and anger are real, though it remains to be seen whether they will cool in time. For now, however, you are a finely tempered blade, still hot from the forge, and if you wish it, I will put that keen edge to use.’