by Nathan Long
‘And have him take his troops with him?’ asked von Messinghof. ‘No. Kodrescu may complain, but he would never disobey a direct order. His honour would not allow it.’ He turned to Lassarian. ‘I’m sorry, my lord. You are better used here. The camp needs your steady hand while I play at fox and hounds in Nuln.’
Lassarian bowed, not pleased, but resigned. ‘Very well, lord count. Then, by your leave?’
Von Messinghof dismissed him with a salute, then turned to the others as he left. ‘Forgive me, gentlemen. Your questions?’
The old steward bowed. ‘A list of concerns from the human troops, lord, but–’
‘More Lahmians,’ said Rukke, the scarred vampire, once again cutting the old man off. Ulrika saw the steward twitch with some emotion at the interruption, then smooth it over with a servant’s practiced calm. She was surprised that the emotion had not been anger, but something closer to pain.
‘They’re sniffing about the perimeter again,’ Rukke continued. ‘An old crone with strong witch sight and her protectors. They’ve found the wards and are trying to slip through undetected.’
The general nodded. ‘Let them. We will send a friend to welcome them.’ He turned to Ulrika. ‘I believe you when you say you despise your sisters, but it is one thing to hate. It is another to act on that hate. Go with Rukke and kill these Lahmians. I will speak to you again when you return.’
Ulrika stiffened. ‘You are testing me?’
Von Messinghof smiled as he turned to the white-robed vampire. ‘Think of it more as an initiation.’
‘He already has a lover,’ said Rukke as he and Ulrika moved through the dense, dripping woods.
‘Who does?’
‘Count von Messinghof. He won’t fall for you.’
Ulrika sneered. ‘You think that is why I am here? I came to fight. I came for vengeance.’
Rukke sneered in return. ‘A Lahmian who fights? I haven’t seen one yet.’
‘I am as much von Carstein as Lahmian. And I was a warrior before I was either.’
Rukke snorted. ‘We will see.’
They had headed south out of the Sylvanian camp at the same time as General Kodrescu and his company of vampire knights and human lancers had ridden north. The lance sergeant who had complained of bad fodder was one of them. Ulrika had looked after them enviously as she had followed Rukke. Kodrescu might be a pompous ass, but he was leading cavalry to battle, and fighting on horseback was her first and greatest love. Once she had proven herself to von Messinghof, then she would ride.
If Rukke was to be the one to grade her initiation, however, she wasn’t sure how she would fare. He didn’t seem to like her much. Despite the fact that she moved as swiftly as he, and as silently, he belittled her abilities and seemed to resent her presence. Was he jealous? Why should he be?
‘Are you his lover, then?’
He turned, snarling. ‘I am his son! He is my father in darkness!’
Ulrika shrugged. ‘The two things aren’t mutually exclusive.’
‘It is nothing like that,’ he said, and started through the trees again. ‘You know nothing.’
Ulrika followed, frowning. If it wasn’t that, it was certainly something. She could not imagine a cautious, far-thinking leader like von Messinghof deliberately giving the dark kiss to so unprepossessing a youth. Even without the scars that puckered the left side of his face and neck he would not have been handsome. He did not seem particularly bright, and couldn’t have much potential as a leader or his father would have given him a more prestigious position. Perhaps he had hidden depths.
A short while later, Rukke held up a hand and slowed to a crawl, sinking into shadow so thoroughly that even with her unnatural sight Ulrika had a hard time seeing him. The boy had inherited one thing from his father at least.
She crept after him as best she could until he neared a thicket of underbrush. She heard heartbeats within it and her hand edged to her rapier, then a choking death reek invaded her nose and she drew her weapon. Ghouls. She would know that rancid smell anywhere.
‘Put it away, fool! whispered Rukke. ‘You forget what side you’re on!’
A misshapen, snaggle-toothed head rose from the brush and looked at them.
Rukke hunched to it. ‘Where?’ he asked.
The ghoul pointed west, grunting, and Rukke continued on without giving it a second glance. Ulrika edged past it, grimacing with revulsion. It was hard to allow the thing to live. Ghouls had nearly killed Templar Holmann. They had nearly killed her. They were subhuman cannibals that should be slaughtered on sight.
She shuddered as the strangeness of her situation became suddenly overwhelming. What had she done? How had she come to be on the side of such horrors? Because the other side was just as horrible, her rage answered. Her erstwhile sisters might hide their vileness behind beautiful faces, but they were no better. Indeed they were worse. A ghoul was too stupid to betray anyone. Lahmians were more duplicitous by far.
After a few more moments of stealthy creeping, Rukke held up his hand again, then melted into the darkness between two close-set oaks. Ulrika crouched behind him, looking over his shoulder through gap between of their trunks. Twenty paces on, three Lahmians stood in the rain, waiting behind a fourth, a hunched hag in grey robes who stood with arms outstretched and fingers probing like a blind woman feeling along a wall for a door, though there was nothing before her but air.
No. There was something, though Ulrika, with her practically useless witch sight, could barely see it – a faint shimmer, barely distinguishable from the downpour, which wound through the forest like a filmy curtain hung among the trees.
The other three Lahmians waited with obvious impatience as the hag mumbled and moved her hands across the curtain. Two of them Ulrika did not know – a pair of wiry bladeswomen in the boot-tucked pantaloons and embroidered tunics of Ungol nomads, one with a string of severed ears around her neck and hooked knives in her belt, the other with a tight top-knot and a cruelly curved tulwar in her hand. The third, however, Ulrika remembered from the meeting in the Lahmians’ council chamber. She was impossible to forget – the towering, ogre-fat vampiress who had sat naked but for the smears of blood she had daubed on her white skin, and who had argued that leadership should be decided with trial by combat. Yusila, she had been called.
Ulrika swallowed. So much for an easy initiation.
chapter fourteen
SISTER AGAINST SISTER
Yusila was again naked, but not weaponless this time. Slung across her back on a cord was a tall spear. No, not a spear, but a sharp-pointed, fire-hardened wooden staff – a stake! Ulrika looked to the Ungol women. Bandoleers of stakes crossed their breasts. Ulrika shuddered. It was strange to see vampires outfitted like vampire hunters, but how else did one go to war against one’s own kind?
‘Will they see us through the ward?’ she whispered.
‘See and hear,’ said Rukke. ‘It blinds only witch sight.’
‘But once they are through it?’
‘The seeress will sense us, aye.’
And she will have magic, thought Ulrika. Despite Yusila’s intimidating size, the most dangerous of them was the hag, who could cripple Ulrika at a distance while she fought the others. She had to be dealt with first, but how? Ulrika doubted she could charge quickly enough to outrace her incantations, and if she hid in ambush, the hag would detect her.
‘Summon your ghouls,’ she said.
Rukke gave her a look. ‘You are to kill the Lahmians.’
‘And if I die? Are you enough to finish them?’ Ulrika looked behind her. ‘Or will your father step out from the shadows to catch us if we fall?’
Rukke glanced back as if the thought hadn’t occurred to him. ‘No one watches,’ he said, though he sounded suddenly unsure.
‘Then summon the ghouls,’ said Ulrika. ‘Have them attack the seeress as so
on as she parts the ward. They will be my distraction.’
Rukke looked like he was going to refuse again, then nodded and closed his eyes, murmuring under his breath. Ulrika didn’t wait for the result. She extended her claws and climbed the tree beside her, keeping its wet trunk between her and the Lahmians, then made her way branch to branch and tree to tree to a spot just inside the ward and just above where the hag was working to pierce it.
The magics of the barrier must have been as complex as they were powerful, for her brow was furrowed with concentration and her arms shook as she worked, scribing symbols in the air with one hand and probing hesitantly forwards with the other like someone feeling underwater for a sharp knife. In the corners of her eyes Ulrika could see nearly invisible churnings in the air around her, and a thinning of the membrane in front of her.
Then, like a hole poked in a stretched skin, an opening expanded in the shimmer and the Lahmian’s shoulders relaxed, though she held her hands firmly out before her.
‘It is open,’ she said. ‘Go through.’
The Ungols crept through like hunting cats, eyes every-where, and Yusila followed. It was the first time Ulrika had seen the big woman walk, and she was unhappy to see that for all her bulk, she strode with the powerful grace of a bear.
The hag was the last through, and as soon as she was within the barrier she paused, turning her head this way and that, then looked up.
‘Wait,’ she said.
Ulrika tensed as the Lahmians turned and the hag’s eyes roamed the branches, searching for her. Where were the ghouls? That jealous fool Rukke was leaving her to die! But just as the Lahmian found Ulrika through the leaves, a high shrieking echoed through the forest and a dozen hunched white figures bounded from the undergrowth on all sides.
Yusila and the Ungol women spun, raising their weapons, and the seeress flinched back. Now was the time! As the seeress raised her hands to blast the ghouls, Ulrika dropped down on her, driving her to the ground with her knees. Eyes bright with power and as deep as time glared up at Ulrika from the hag’s ancient face, nearly paralysing her, but her rapier was already slicing down, and instinct carried it through. It severed the hag’s neck like parchment and dry sticks, and Ulrika wasn’t crouching on an old woman’s body any more, but a pile of ash and bones.
‘Mistress Yaga!’ cried the Ungol with the knives.
She sprang at Ulrika, slashing, but a ghoul caught her leg and she stumbled into Ulrika’s thrust. The rapier sank deep. Ulrika twisted it in her guts, then jerked it out and turned for the others.
Yusila and the Ungol with the top-knot were moving to encircle her, the bodies of the ghouls behind them – dead and dying. A few lay butchered by blade cuts, while those who had faced Yusila were torn limb from limb and scattered in all directions.
Top-Knot glared at Ulrika and pulled a stake from her bandoleer with her off hand, holding it like a main gauche. ‘You have killed my mother. I will send you to her so she can torture you for eternity.’
Ulrika curled her lip. ‘I mat tvoja konskaya podstilka, Mujika,’ she said – a traditional Ungol insult that suggested that her mother was overly fond of horses.
The woman snarled and started forwards, but Yusila waved her back.
‘You’re Countess Gabriella’s brat,’ she croaked as they circled. Ulrika noticed she had yet to take her spear off her back. It appeared she preferred to use her fists. ‘She who burnt Hermione’s pretty porcelain dolly.’
Ulrika tensed at that, but held back. She wouldn’t take the bait.
‘I should bring you back alive.’ Yusila laughed, her pendulous belly and breasts quivering. ‘So she can have her way with you. You would be decades dying.’
‘And you would be decades in the killing,’ Ulrika sneered, turning again to keep them in front of her. ‘It would take a year just to cut through the fat–’
Arms wrapped around her legs and she stumbled. The gutted Ungol woman was still alive, and had caught at her as she stepped past.
Ulrika cursed and slashed down, lopping the woman’s left arm off at the elbow with a butcher-shop chunk. It was the distraction Yusila and Top-Knot had been waiting for. They charged in as the wounded Ungol screeched and clutched her gouting stump. Ulrika parried Top-Knot’s wooden stake, but her tulwar sliced her shoulder, and Yusila’s cannon ball fist struck her head a glancing blow.
Ulrika wobbled away, slashing blindly behind her as the world spun like a carnival ride. An angry roar and the sting of impact told her she had struck meat. She turned, blinking fog from her eyes, and saw she had opened a wide cut in Yusila’s bulging back flesh. Frighteningly, the wound was already puckering shut, leaving only a swath of dripping blood behind. Ulrika had never seen a Lahmian heal so quickly.
Yusila grinned, showing filed teeth like a ghoul. ‘No, girl. It won’t take a year to cut through me, just the rest of your life.’
She lumbered forwards again with Top-Knot spreading out to her left and her one-armed sister rising and edging to the right. The wounded Ungol looked pale, but the blood had stopped pouring from her stump, and she held a wooden stake steady in her remaining hand. Ulrika’s chest tightened. She couldn’t fight them all, but she didn’t want to call for help either. Rukke would tell von Messinghof she had failed. She couldn’t have that. She edged away and found her back against a tree.
‘I can smell your fear, girl,’ said Yusila.
‘And I can smell your fundament,’ spat Ulrika.
Ulrika put her dagger between her teeth and scrabbled up the trunk of the tree one-handed, pulling herself up onto a rain-slick branch and looking back. Top-Knot was following, vanishing into the branches of a tree on her right, while Yusila was hoisting One-Arm into another on her left. Immediately, they converged on her, springing from branch to branch like cats, One-Arm unnervingly surefooted despite her wound. She was still the weakest, however, and Ulrika gripped her dagger again, then ran along a twisting branch towards her, determined to finish her so she could focus on the others.
One-Arm crouched at a place where the branch split, waiting. Ulrika stamped as hard as she could, making the branch bounce, then lunged. Off-balance, One-Arm twisted to avoid the thrust, and fell into the split, dropping her stake to cling for dear life.
Ulrika raised her rapier to finish her, but the branch bobbed under her feet and she turned to see Top-Knot skimming along it, tulwar cocked back to slash. Ulrika skipped back and they clashed steel to steel over the dangling Ungol’s head, the branch dipping and swaying like a ship’s deck under their shifting feet.
‘That’s it!’ howled Yusila from the ground. ‘Knock her down so I can drink her dry!’
After the first pass, however, Ulrika knew she could beat the Ungol. Swift and deadly as she was, it was clear she was used to fighting from horseback. She had little experience facing rapier and dagger, and did not know how to guard against the off-hand stab. Of course, she did have one advantage. Her wounded sister had wedged herself between the two branches, and was swiping at Ulrika’s ankles every time she stamped by.
Ulrika kicked One-Arm’s head in passing, then lunged at Top-Knot, blocking her stake and tulwar before dipping her rapier and impaling the Ungol’s thigh. Her opponent fell back, hissing and swiping wildly, but Ulrika did not advance. Instead she spun and slashed down as One-Arm clawed for her foot.
The Ungol’s head fell to the ground as Ulrika parted it from her shoulders. The rest of her, however, remained wedged between the branches, twitching, as blood pumped from the stump of her neck.
Top-Knot shrieked with rage and bounded in again, slashing madly, and Ulrika could not stand before her fury. She backpedalled, then kicked off another branch and leapt up to a third. The Ungol followed behind, nimble as a cat, and they danced and ducked from branch to slippery branch, swiping and stabbing and sending chunks of bark spinning away as their steel struck wood instead of flesh.
The dream ended as something white blurred in the corner of Ulrika’s vision. She turned, and the limbless torso of a ghoul struck her full in the chest, knocking her off her branch and sending her bouncing down through the rest before she caught one amidships and folded over it like a dish-cloth. Her ribs bent almost to the snapping point at the impact, and her rapier flew from her hand to land beside Yusila, who guffawed up at her, a severed ghoul arm in one hand, ready to fling.
Ulrika groaned and fought to move, wanting to leap down and tear the grin from Yusila’s fat face, but she could hear Top-Knot hopping down towards her, branch to branch, and knew it would only be seconds before she stabbed her in the back.
Desperate, she struggled up off the branch, her arms shaking. Top-Knot landed beside her, stabbing with her stake. Ulrika let go and dropped towards the ground, then caught the branch again at the last second with her claws, and swung under and up, kicking out to smash her knees into the Ungol’s legs from behind. Top-Knot flailed and dropped her tulwar to catch another tree limb, but ended up stretched precariously between two, scrabbling to right herself against the slippery bark, as Ulrika pulled herself back onto her branch.
‘Drop, you fool!’ shouted Yusila.
Top-Knot dropped. Ulrika shot her hand out like a cobra and caught her by the collar as she fell. The weight was almost too much, but Ulrika braced and hauled her up, then plucked a stake from the Ungol’s bandoleer and stabbed her in the heart with it, pinning her to the branch.
Another hurled ghoul arm nearly knocked Ulrika off the branch as the impaled Ungol spasmed and gasped and shrivelled beside her. She caught herself and looked down. Yusila was bending to grab a dismembered leg.