by Warhammer
‘And where was it published?’ He looked over at her. Behind her veil her eyes seemed to glitter in the dim light. The subtle, spicy smell of her perfume filled the coach’s interior.
‘In Altdorf, by the Altdorf Press. In their anthologies of new Imperial poetry for the most part.’
‘So you wrote it in Imperial, not Classical.’
‘It’s the modern manner,’ said Felix, a little defensively. Like most educated men he could read and write quite competently in the old tongue if he had to, but the idea of writing poetry in it had no great appeal. Too many of the great masters had used the language, and that invited unfavourable comparisons. ‘Most publishers these days are aiming at the vernacular audience. It’s larger.’
‘Quite,’ said the countess, a little sharply. ‘But Classical is a much more elegant language, don’t you think?’ There was something a little challenging in her tone. Felix felt as if he were being quizzed by his professors back at the university.
‘I don’t know that I agree,’ he said. ‘I think it’s the choice of words that makes a statement elegant, if that’s what you wish, rather than the language it’s written in. Certainly I can think of just as many bad poems written in Classical as Imperial. More, actually, since it was the language of scholars and poets for so much longer.’
‘Interesting,’ she said. ‘You are a most unusual young man, Herr Jaeger, with an original turn of thought.’
Felix looked at her to see if she was being ironic. He had just told her what most intellectuals and professors would have told her. It had been something of an orthodoxy for the past twenty-five years. Yet there was no trace of mockery in her voice or manner. He supposed it was possible. Sylvania was after all a backwater place, far from the mainstream of intellectual life. Most of the books back in the Waldenschlosse library had been hand-written, copied by scribes rather than set in movable type. Considering the explosion in publishing since Johannes of Marienburg introduced his printing machine over a century ago that was unusual. Felix had heard someone say more books were now printed in any given year than had been scribed in all of Imperial history before the introduction of printing, and more new books were published in any year than had been written in any previous century. He did not know if that was true, but it certainly sounded correct to him.
He mentioned this to the countess just for something to say.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Things used to be so different. Once you could keep up with all the new trends in literature and philosophy and natural philosophy. Now, sadly it’s impossible. The world is racing forward at a much faster pace, and I fear it’s rushing headlong toward no good final destination.’
She sounded very definite about that. ‘I think the expansion of knowledge is a good thing,’ said Felix. ‘I think the more we can learn the better.’
She sighed. ‘The confidence of youth.’
Felix was not sure he liked her tone. He did not feel very young these days. He worried that his experiences had aged him prematurely. The countess continued speaking as if she had not noticed his frosty look, although he was certain that she had. She was a very observant woman.
‘Do you think it’s good that knowledge of the dark cults is spreading? Or that soon the secrets of the darkest sorcery will be available to any lout who can read, where once they were the preserve of those who knew their dangers and their costs?’
‘The wizards’ guilds and the temples still hold their secrets close,’ said Felix. ‘So do the engineers and the alchemists.’
‘How much longer do you think that will continue? How much longer do you think the world has?’
That was a fair question, Felix thought. He had seen the armies of Chaos on the march. It was all too likely that they were living in the final days. All the bright promise of natural philosophy and magical research might well never be fulfilled. Instead, the whole of the Old World might be ground under the iron-shod hooves of the Chaos hordes. Still, you could hardly blame the spread of printing for that. The countess watched him intently, as if deeply interested in his answer.
Felix felt as if he should say something reassuring, that the Emperor would triumph, and everything would turn out all right in the end, but he had seen too much to believe it. The forces of Chaos might have been halted at Praag but that was a temporary setback for them. They would soon recover and push ever deeper into the lands of men.
‘I don’t know,’ he said eventually. ‘These are dark times.’
‘Darker than you think,’ she said.
Felix clambered down from the coach, oddly disturbed by his conversations with the Countess Gabriella. She had a way of making him think about the things he did not want to, and she was a very erudite woman in her old-fashioned way. She seemed particularly interested in him as well, and he was not sure why. He would have said it was in the normal way a woman was interested in a man, and yet there was a reserve about her, a holding back, a quality of waiting and watching and judging so intense that it seemed abnormal. A most peculiar woman, he decided, trudging back through the snow to the supply sledge.
He drew his cloak tight against the wind. At least he felt a little better. His nose had stopped running, his cough no longer scourged his body and brought tears to his eyes, and he was not quite as feverish as he had been. Perhaps the stay at the castle had done him some good after all.
He clambered back up onto the sledge beside Gotrek and took the reins of the pony.
‘Best be careful, manling. There’s a fellow who looks like he might want to slip a dagger into your back.’ The Slayer sounded amused in his own bleak fashion. Felix glanced around and saw Rodrik glaring at him, his handsome face contorted by what might almost have been hatred. It looked as if Rodrik were jealous of the time he had spent with the countess.
‘Rodrik’s too honourable to put a knife into my back,’ Felix muttered.
‘He might try a sword into your belly then.’
Felix laughed. ‘I don’t think now is the time to be fighting duels for the hand of the countess.’
‘He might disagree with you.’
‘I’ll worry about it if it happens.’ The Slayer chuckled maliciously. ‘Might be too late by then.’
‘It smells a bit fusty,’ said Roche.
Adolphus Krieger looked around the entrance hall of Drakenhof. It looked good. His servants had undone some of the damage done by those vandals two centuries ago. The scorched walls had been rebuilt, the vegetation clogging the gateways had been removed and the huge tree growing through the roof had been chopped down. A fire burned in the hearth. He did not need the heat but he liked the look of it. Unlike many of his kind he did not take the fear of fire to great extremes. It was a good beginning, he decided.
‘It smells wonderful,’ said Adolphus, and meant it. ‘It smells like home.’
He was surprised by how much that meant to him. He felt as if his decades of rootless wanderings were over. He sensed the flow of old magical energies course through the stones. This was a place of power where he could do what he needed to do. Here he would take the final steps on the road of his destiny.
Ulrika entered the chamber. She looked pale and she staggered a little. Her eyes had the glazed ecstatic look that so many mortals got after the dark kiss. She looked at him with a mixture of resentment, hatred and longing that had become familiar down the centuries.
‘Show the girl to the guest chambers,’ he said to the chambermaid. The faint flicker of jealousy that appeared in the woman’s eyes amused him. She was one of his most faithful servants and bore herself with appropriate modesty although once she had been the proud daughter of one of the noblest houses of Kislev. She was beautiful but she had been too weak to interest him for long.
What was he going to do about Ulrika, he wondered? She was beautiful, intelligent and ambitious, and in his own cold way, he liked her. Her blood enchanted him, and there was a latent viciousness in her that he thought would make her truly one of the Arisen. Perhaps it was time f
or him to create a get. Perhaps he would grant her the gift of immortality. Not yet though. She was not quite ready. She still had to be won round to his point of view. If he granted her the final kiss, she might well go mad, or kill herself, or worse yet break free of him entirely and go her own way. He did not want that. It defeated the whole point of the exercise, which was to have someone at your side to go through eternity with. Thinking about himself and the countess, he did not know if he wanted to face that.
Of course it was inevitable she would leave. All gets eventually did. He had himself broken with his progenitor and made his own way out into the world. It was better if that did not happen too soon though. Still, if all went according to plan with the Eye of Khemri that was not something he needed to worry about. Using its power, he could well bind her and any others among the Arisen he wished to his will.
How the countess would regret ever sharing that knowledge with him! He chuckled. He would make his honoured progenitor sorry she had ever spoken of it all those long years ago. Of course at the time, it had been necessary to hide the desire that burned in his heart for the Eye. He had needed to acquire power and knowledge before making the break from the elder vampire and that had taken decades of quasi-servitude. It was not that he hated the countess for it. It was just that her cloying affection and concern for his wellbeing had reminded him too much of his own mother’s overpowering interest in him. It had enfolded him and choked him and made him feel trapped and imprisoned. Just thinking about her brought those feelings back.
Soon now, he would not have to worry about her or any others of the Arisen. The ancient enchantments Nagash had woven around the Eye of Khemri would see to that.
EIGHT
Adolphus finished chalking the pentagram onto the floor. Around the edges he had made the symbols of all four of the great Powers of Chaos. He himself stood within a triangle in the centre of the pentagram. The scared young girl lay naked and bound before him. The Eye of Khemri glittered between her breasts. He could see the panic and bewilderment in her eyes. Only yesterday she had gone to sleep in her parents’ hovel near the castle. Tonight she had awoken in its deepest dungeon, spirited away by his servants.
The witch-knife glittered sharply in his hands. She looked as if she wanted to scream.
Adolphus chanted the names of the Dark Gods, invoking their presence, as the ritual prescribed. The girl began to thrash, terror overcoming even the potent compulsion to obey he had laid upon her. Perhaps he should have bound her physically. Perhaps he had been too confident in his own abilities. He pushed the thoughts aside. Any loss of concentration now might prove fatal.
Dark magical energy rose all around him. To his magesight it appeared reddish, blood-like, droplets of it dripping from the stones of the cellar walls and flowing around the boundaries of the pentagram. To the girl’s mortal eyes, nothing would have changed, but she seemed to sense what was going on and whimpered.
Adolphus breathed deeply. Dark magic had a scent uniquely its own, like blood but more so. It made his skin tingle and his brain buzz. He felt the beast start to stir inside him. What was happening? He had not felt like this since Praag. Why was the fury within him emerging now?
With an enormous effort of will, he fought the bloodlust down. He could not afford any loss of control for now. The girl started to rise. If she broke the edges of the pentagram, the dark magic would surge in uncontrollably. Worse, some of the daemonic entities that it attracted might enter too. Adolphus was not sure even his strength might prevail against such things, at least not until he had the Eye attuned.
He strode over to the girl, still chanting, and grabbed her by the throat. He lifted her easily with one hand despite the feeble beating of her fists and feet against his body. He raised her until her eyes were level with his and his gaze struck her with the impact of a hammer. Her pupils dilated, her mouth fell open slackly and soft whimpers emerged from her mouth as her whole body went limp in his grasp. Easily, he lowered her to the desecrated altar once more.
Ripples appeared in the tide of dark magic, taking on the shapes of evil entities. The ritual was starting to attract daemonic presences: huge hounds with great fleshy crests on their necks fought with clawed androgens; monstrously obese, pustule-covered things writhed on the floor in combat with strange disks whose edges were covered in eyes. They battled over a small proportion of the energy he drew up from the dark depths beneath the keep. It was enough to give them shape and form. Now even the girl’s mortal eyes might be able to perceive them as shimmering shapes in the darkness. The beast howled within his breast, desperate for the combat that would ensue, even though that combat would most likely end in his destruction.
He needed to progress faster. If he did not use the power he had gathered before the creatures fully manifested, terrible things might happen. The dark magical energy rushed in through the gaps in the point he had left at the northern edge of the pentagram, the arm of the star that pointed towards the Chaos Wastes. Ancient Nehekharan poured from his lips as he continued to chant the words of the ritual. His thoughts were inexorably drawn into the necessary configuration for the spell to be complete. The torrent of words continued even as the evil presences surged around the pentagram’s edges, attracted now to the souls they sensed within.
Adolphus fought down panic. He was not the best of sorcerers. There were mages who could have accomplished what he intended without the rituals and the extra power he needed to draw from the ancient evil beneath the keep. Perhaps he had made a mistake; perhaps he had attempted something beyond his ability. Perhaps this was the end.
No! He would not let that happen. He steeled his will and continued the chant he had memorised so long ago. He moved the knife through the elaborate ritual gestures, thrusting it in the direction of each point of the star in turn before finally raising it high above the girl and then plunging it into her heart.
She gave one long despairing wail as her soul was drawn from her body, and her blood splattered the altar. At that exact moment Adolphus felt the dark thirst within him. The beast wanted to lap up that blood. He fought with the urge and let the blood flow, until the trickle overflowed the altar and reached the floor. It touched the streams of dark magic and began to sizzle and dance, droplets jerking upward from the paving stones. A fine red mist filled the air inside the pentagram. From outside the spell walls Adolphus thought he heard the thin wailing and howling of the daemons. He continued to chant and gesture, guiding the twisting writhing mist until it touched both his flesh and the Eye of Khemri.
At that moment, a link was formed between him and the amulet. He sensed the power within it, and the ancient spells. He felt almost as if he was being sucked into it and he fought against it as a swimmer fights against the current of a raging river.
Then suddenly it was done. The amulet was his. He began the ritual of dismissal and the energies he had summoned began to drain away. The daemonic entities fought against it but there was nothing they could do to stop the process. As the flows of dark magic departed they were left high and dry like fish flopping on the bed of a sun-dried lake. One by one they disappeared, returning to whatever extra-dimensional hell from which they had come, leaving Adolphus alone with his prize. It pulsed in his hand as he attuned it to his own mystical energies.
As he did so he noticed lines of force shimmering through the night, so faint as to be almost invisible, leaving the pentagram through its open edge and flowing away towards the distance. These did not have the feel of the power within the amulet. They felt more recent, and bore the signature of a different wizard. Well, no matter. Adolphus reached out with the witch-knife and cut them. In a heartbeat they unravelled.
The amulet was his now, and he was about to use its power to serve his ultimate purpose. The dead girl looked up at him with empty sightless eyes. He reached down, dipped his fingertips in her blood and raised them to his lips. The blood tasted very sweet.
Felix saw Max crumple forward and almost fall off the supply sledg
e. He jumped down from his own seat, leaving Gotrek clutching for the reins, and raced forward.
‘What is wrong?’ he asked. The wizard looked pale and drained. Sweat crossed his brow and he gave every impression of being a man in extreme pain.
‘The spell I placed on the Eye of Khemri was just broken,’ he groaned. ‘It was not a pleasant feeling.’
‘Can you still find it?’ Max shook his head despairingly.
‘No. I can’t sense it any more.’
‘Do you have any idea where the Eye might be?’ Slowly and painfully the wizard nodded.
‘I know the direction we must go. I can give a bearing from here, judging by the position of the sun.’
‘That won’t be much help. This trail winds its way through the forest. We can easily lose the way.’ Max gritted his teeth and nodded once more.
‘It gets worse,’ he said.
‘Oh good,’ said Felix. ‘Tell me all the cheering details.’
‘Just before my spell was cut I had a strange sense that something was happening to the amulet. I could sense a surge of power, and a soul screaming in terror. I suspect that Krieger has used the darkest of all magic to bind the amulet to him. I think he sacrificed someone.’
From Max’s expression, Felix could tell they were both thinking the same thing. ‘Ulrika?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Max. ‘Maybe.’
‘Damn!’ said Felix, crashing his fist into the side of the sled. The pain of hitting the wood helped bring him back to his senses, and get control of his mounting panic and anger. He looked at Max again. The magician did not look too healthy.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
‘I will be. Whatever Krieger has done, I intend to punish him.’
