by Andy Remic
Nienna thought back. Back to Kat. Katrina. Her friend. Now dead. Now a corpse, rotting in the cold bunkhouse where she'd been nailed to the wall by Styx's Wi dowmaker. Nienna thought about that weapon. Thought about it a lot. With a weapon like that, she could really even the odds – no matter that she was a thin, physically weak, and hardly able to lift a longsword. With a Wi dowmaker she could punch a hole through Styx's face and run for the woods…
No. She would have to kill all three if she expected to escape.
But Kell! Kell would come and rescue her! Surely?
Maybe Kell was dead, spoke a dark side of her soul. He went into battle with King Leanoric – against the albino army. Maybe now he was just another corpse on the battlefield, crows eating his eyes, rats gnawing his intestines. She shivered, and gritted her teeth. No! Kell was alive. She knew it. Knew it deep in her heart.
And if Kell was alive, then he would come for her.
Nienna drifted off into sleep; coldness ate the edges of her flesh where skin poked from behind the blankets. She snuggled down as far as she could go, and her eyes suddenly clicked open. What was it? What had woken her? She was instantly wide awake – totally awake – and adrenaline surged through her system.
Nienna sat up. Her eyes searched the darkness. She turned to her right, and looked down at Myriam; the lithe woman snored softly, face lost in a haze of tranquillity that softened her features, made her more feminine. Nienna realised that when Myriam was awake her face was a constant scowl, as if she hated the world and every waking moment upon it.
Nienna turned to her left, and nearly leapt from her skin at the face mere inches from her. She felt the edge of the Wi dowmaker crossbow prod her under the blankets, and she nodded quickly as if to say, "I understand". Styx moved his mouth to her ear and whispered, "Scream, and I'll blow a hole through you, then I'll slaughter Myriam in her sleep and make my own way to Silva Valley."
"I won't scream," panted Nienna, fear a bright hot poker in her brain.
Styx pulled free the blankets, and lifted Nienna up by her elbow. Her eyes fell, and locked on that wood, brass and clockwork weapon. She was sure she could hear a tiny tick tick tick from within the stock. As if it was somehow powered by clockwork.
"What do you want?" she whispered.
Styx ignored the question, and eased her away from Myriam. Nienna gazed back at the sleeping woman, confused; it had been Myriam who, on both of Nienna's escape attempts, had heard the flight. Myriam slept light, like a dozing feline. Now, however, she continued to snore.
"Don't worry about her. I drugged her soup. She'll not be troubling nobody tonight."
Nienna felt icy fingers claw her heart. Realisation sank from her brain to her feet. Styx meant to rape her. Tonight. Now. And there was nothing she could do about it; not a thing on earth.
Styx marched Nienna through the woods, and he was panting hard, and he stunk of sweat and… something else. Liquor? Gin, like they used to sell in the Gin Palaces of Jalder?
Nienna was numb, not from the cold, but from fear. She allowed herself to be manhandled through the woods, stumbling. She did not complain. She could not complain. Fear had become her Master. Fear had stolen her tongue, and seemingly, her recent will to fight.
Finding a spot, Styx threw her to the ground. She landed heavy, a tree root slamming her spine and making her cry out. Even this was not enough to snap her from her cold embrace. She watched, with a mixture of horror and revulsion as Styx struggled from his leggings, one hand still holding the Widowmaker pointed loosely at her prostrate form.
Then, with the lower half of his body naked, he grinned at her and she hated him, there and then; she wanted him dead like she had wanted no other person dead in the world, ever. This man had killed her best friend. And now, this man sought to remove her chastity by force.
"If you touch me, I will kill you," she said. She wanted her words to come out strong and proud, like a sneer of contempt for this petty hateful specimen. But her words dribbled out, a mewling from a kitten, the slurred and feeble trickle of the wanton inebriate. Kell will come, she thought with tears in her eyes. Kell will rescue me!
But he didn't come. Here, and now, Nienna was on her own.
Styx dropped his Widowmaker to the frozen woodland carpet, and pulled out a knife. The blade gleamed. He smiled, showing stubby black teeth. "I think it's time we got to know each other a bit better, pretty one," he said.
CHAPTER 5
Dark Vision
In the hills above Old Skulkra a small squad hunkered behind rocks. One, the tallest of the men, a soldier with broad shoulders and narrow hips, held a long tube filled with a series of finely shaped lenses to his eye. The delicate mechanism glittered when it caught the dying rays of the winter sun.
"Can you see him?" asked Beja.
"Yes. He returns," said Cardinal Walgrishnacht. His voice was even, devoid of emotion, but his dark vachine eyes shone. He watched, apparently impassive, as the scout approached. The man bowed low, as befitted somebody as exalted and dangerous as Walgrishnacht.
"You saw what happened?" snapped the Warrior Engineer.
"Yes," said the scout, eyes lowered to the snow. "General Graal called out his daughters, the Soul Stealers. Our Princess was…" he swallowed, then lifted his head and met Walgrishnacht's powerful clockwork gaze. "She was beheaded," he said.
Walgrishnacht stood, stunned, and when he looked around there were tears in his eyes, tears staining his pale cheeks. Never, in twenty years of combat and murder, had Walgrishnacht cried.
Beja watched the Cardinal of the Vachine Warrior Engineers, that specially chosen and infinitely deadly elite squad who had followed – secretly, in reserve – in order to protect Princess Jaranis should events turn sour. A violent blizzard had separated the two groups, and stubbornly the proud Princess pushed on regardless, no doubt eager to observe General Graal's progress and report back to the High Engineers instead of making textbook camp until the storm broke.
Now, she was dead. And Walgrishnacht could not quite believe the turn of events. General Graal was, and had been, a servant of the vachine religious culture for nearly three centuries. With Kradek-ka, he had helped usher in a new age of advanced clockwork technology, which elevated their race from savagery to high art. Graal was a founding member of Engineer Council Lore, and a harsh advocate and defender of the Oak Testament. Graal had been instrumental in the taming of pale-skinned creatures, the alshina, from beneath the Black Pike Mountains, and of training these soldiers in warfare and tactics; thus, he was the strategy behind many successful invasions and harvesting north past the Heart of the Mountains in Untamed Lands. After the recent breakdown of several Blood Refineries, it had been Graal who spearheaded Council and carried the vote to invade south. In High Engineer Philosophy, Politics, Ethics, History and Honour, Graal was unquestionable, and untouchable. He was Core to the Vachine Society. Integral. Like a Heart Cog.
Walgrishnacht chewed his lip, and wiped tears from his face with a long, brass talon.
"What shall we do?" said Beja, voice soft. He fidgeted. His body echoed uncertainty.
Walgrishnacht stood and stretched with a tiny tick tick echoing from his clockwork internals. He stared off across distant snow-fields, to the camped army of albino warriors; and he knew, in his heart, in his soul, that in an unprecedented move they were betrayed. But what was Graal's plan? What were his goals? Whatever they were, they did not involve saving the vachine race from blood-oil extinction…
Walgrishnacht shook his head. Confusion spun like a snowstorm. The whole situation was… inconceivable! Impossible! Unwarranted! And yet there had been murder, and worse, betrayal.
Walgrishnacht turned on Beja. "We must take the platoon back to Silva Valley. We must explain that General Graal has betrayed the vachine, and everything our world stands for."
"We may not survive the mountains," warned Beja, not through fear but tactical understanding. He was aware they may never deliver the message, and thus warning
, to the Engineer Council.
Walgrishnacht nodded. "We will give our lives to cross," he said. "The High Engineers must reconvene the War Council and assemble the Ferals – for if Graal plans an invasion after the snows have passed, and Silva Valley is unprepared…" He left the sentence unfinished. They both understood; without warning, Graal with his highly trained, disciplined, and experienced Army of Iron would roll through Silva Valley like a tidal wave. In an ironic twist, it was the General who commanded the army, not the Council. But then – the General was incorruptible, was he not? Walgrishnacht's face fell into a maelstrom of hatred. "Instruct the men. We move in ten minutes."
"As you wish, Cardinal."
The Warrior Engineers readied their packs and weapons, a sombre mood descending on the platoon. Then, as they headed back north through deep snow, away from Old Skulkra and the sour betrayal that had occurred, so in the distance a howl rent the air, a long, high-pitched note that seemed to linger in the deep forests and dark places of the night.
Beja looked to Walgrishnacht. "Wolves?" he said.
The Cardinal showed no emotion. "Maybe," he said. "Move out."
Anukis, of Silva Valley, had been born to Kradek-ka, one of the founding fathers of modern vachine society. Kradek-ka, like his father before him, had risen through Engineer ranks until he attained the exalted position of Watchmaker. He had achieved this level by ingenuity, cunning, and a technical skill which far outweighed most who lived in Silva Valley. Kradek-ka's skill had been with clockwork; not just the machining of parts, or the intricate assembly of clockwork components, but with the design of new clockwork machines – machines which, more importantly, could integrate with the vampire society, keeping the dying race alive. This engineering also formed the basis of their religion, accelerating them in an evolutionary arc which left them… superior.
However. With his daughter, Anukis, Kradek-ka made changes. For a start, unlike normal vachine, Anukis could not drink the refined narcotic blood-oil, which every vachine relied on to sustain their clockwork mechanisms and, it was said, lubricate their clockwork souls. No. Anukis was different. Anukis was special. Anukis could not take the blood-oil like normal vachine. She could not mate with the magick. She could not feed as a normal vachine would feed… and, technically, this made her unholy, her very existence sacrilege to the High Engineer Episcopate.
Still. Here, and now, Anukis had other problems to worry about.
She was tall, and beautiful, and in possession of long, flowing, golden curls which shone and sparkled in the sunlight. Her fangs were brass, and as she had recently found, her clockwork was built to a more advanced design than any in the vachine society had before witnessed. Kradek-ka had made her a Goddess – and in making her a Goddess, had at the same time cursed her, and condemned her under Vachine Law.
On a mission to find her father, Kradek-ka, whom the Silva Valley needed to repair their malfunctioning Blood Refineries, Anukis had soon found herself in position of victim, of slave, at the hands of Vashell, one of the youngest ever Engineer Priests to achieve such a rank; and a vachine who had sworn to love her until the end of time, marry her, and sire a hierarchy of proud and vicious vachine warriors. That was, until the day he discovered her impurity, her living sacrilege. After vicious humiliation, they thus set upon a mission to discover her father's whereabouts within the dangerous and daunting Black Pike Mountain range. After a series of violent events which saw Anukis discover her true nature – that she was no longer vachine, but something more pure, something infinitely more primal… a word which taunted her with its haunting echo of millennia – vampire, she was vampire – Anukis had been separated from Vashell, and the kidnapped Falanor Queen, Alloria, and found herself on an Engineer's Barge deep within hidden tunnels under the Black Pike Mountains, drawn inexorably towards the fabled Vrekken in the hope it was an esoteric pathway which led to her missing father, whom she believed trapped in the near-mythical world of Nonterrazake.
The Vrekken.
The Vrekken roared. It surged. And it pulled… nearly half a league across, and filling a cavern of such incredible scale it veered off around Anukis to impossible heights, distant sheer walls glinting with dark rock and lit by wrist-thick skeins of mineral deposits.
The Vrekken howled, like a primal giant in pain. It was a huge circular portal, a juggernaut of churning spirals leading down in massive, sweeping circles towards a savage cone depth… a whirlpool, thought Anukis, eyes taking in the scene in an instant, head tossing back golden curls as her lips came back, brass vampire fangs snarling in horror, her clockwork ticking inside with increased rhythm as gears stepped and cogs spun, twisted, clicked, and Anukis grasped the edges of the Engineer's Barge. There was nothing she could do. The powerful current had her, pulled the boat towards the Vrekken, towards its vast circular sweep and tears ran down Anukis's face for here, here she had discovered her true identity and suddenly realised what her father wanted of her – to help revert the vachine to the pure, to the vampires of old, and away from the twisted merging with deviant clockwork technology, away from a reliance on the machine.
Anukis breathed out in a hiss.
And sped towards the huge underwater whirlpool…
The Engineer's Barge was tugged, then flung into the Vrekken and caught like a toy. It powered in circles, nose in the air leaving a wide wake through churning waters and Anu spun down, and down, and round and down and she realised the mighty whirlpool consisted of layers and she passed down, through layer after layer of this oceanic macrocosm, of whirling dark energy, of raw power and violent fusion and screaming howling thrashing detonation and mighty primordial compression, and she thought…
There is no fabled Nonterrazake. It does not exist.
Just death. Death in this place…
Anukis screamed… and waited to be crushed, eyes closed, hunched down on the brass barge with its thumping clockwork engine, her heart thundering in her ears like the ticking of the strangest, deviant clock. Spray burst over the barge, drenching her, and she could taste salt and bitterness and the whole world was a confusion. Round and round she spun. Down down through dark layers. She felt the pressure, and heard squeals as the Engineer's Barge started to buckle, to compress and crunch and fold in upon itself and Anukis hunkered down further, a ball of foetal fear, and then there came a crash and wrenching of iron and something slammed her face and darkness rushed in like a surge of sea water into a drowning ship – and Anukis remembered no more.
A dark lake lapped a dark shore. It was raining, fat droplets pattering across the lake. Anukis fluttered open butterfly eyelids that felt stretched to the point of breaking, and wondered if she were dead. But then pain slammed her like an iron oar, and she realised she couldn't be dead; the world hurt too much, and in her experience, this sort of pain only came from being alive. With a tiny hiss, her vachine fangs ejected, and then retracted. This, too, told her the world was real. Only Man could have invented the vachine.
She pushed herself up on her elbows, and listened. Nothing, but the lapping of water and the fall of rain. She frowned. Wasn't she inside the mountain? Then, slowly, as if dissolving from a dream, a gentle rhythmical hush hush hush came to her ears, and she looked up, and her mouth dropped open. Above her, the Vrekken spun, massive and violent and dark, a whirlpool in the sky, black and blue and gold and laced with traces of occasional purple. Rain fell from the mighty whirlpool, and Anukis climbed to her knees, and then to her feet, her body aching, every joint complaining, her eyes still fixed – locked – to the truly stunning and magnificent sight above. For long minutes everything was forgotten, but slowly Anukis came round, her clouded mind clearing, and she was brought back to the present. She glanced right, to where something lay crumpled by the dark lake's shore. She began to walk, soft boots silent on slippery wet rock, and with a start she recognised the crumpled thing; it was the Engineer's Barge, crushed into a loose tangle of metal as if folded and squeezed in a giant's mighty fist. With a quick movement, Anukis look
ed down at herself, as if fearing, for a few seconds at least, that she had been crushed also. But she hadn't; and except for a dull throbbing in her bones, as if her internal frame had somehow taken a battering but left her flesh intact, she felt fine. More than fine. She felt… invigorated!
Glad to be alive.
She stopped and gazed around, and wondered if this was Nonterrazake, the fabled mythical underworld and, more importantly, the secret home of the Harvesters. She moved to the wall, which followed in parallel with the lake's shore, and began to walk, footsteps quick, urgent now, for she was certainly trapped down here, in this underground place, and of one thing Anukis was certain beyond all doubt: there was no way she could head back up through the Vrekken. It was a one-way journey.
She stopped, by a small tunnel. She would have to crawl. She got down on hands and knees and peered in. She could see light, a distant eerie glow, and began to crawl through the rock. Gradually, the mountain beneath her hands, and indeed above and around her, began to fade, a graduated change from black through grey, and finally to the colour of ivory. Of bone, bleached and old. Beneath her hands the rock was no longer black, but a rough-textured white. Her nostrils twitched, for she could smell fresh, cool air. She emerged into a larger tunnel, and saw immediately she was in a mass of inter-connected tunnels which led off, seemingly randomly. Anukis swallowed. She imagined wandering down here in a labyrinth, forever, or at least until she starved and died.