[Von Carstein 00.1] - Death's Cold Kiss

by Steven Savile - (ebook by Undead)

  “Found ’im on the roadside a couple of miles back. Carried ’im ’ere.” Henrik grunted beneath the strain. He held the old man in his straining arms like a sack of coals. “No idea how long ’e’d been there. ’E’s still breathing but ’e’s not in a good way, mind. Looks like ’e’s been attacked by wolves or summink. ’E’s got some frightenin’ wounds where ’e’s been bitten round the throat.”

  “Put him down, put him down,” Meyrink flapped. “Not here, no, no, not here. In his room. In his room. Take him to his room. What happened? Who did this to him?”

  “I don’t know,” Henrik said, tracking the storm into the temple. Behind him, Messner wrestled with the door. Meyrink moved in close, feeling for the old priest’s pulse. It was there, faint for sure, but his heart was still beating and his blood was still pumping.

  They carried the broken body of Victor Guttman up the winding stairs to his bare cell and laid him on the wooden pallet he called a bed, drawing the blanket up over his chest to his chin. The old man shivered. Meyrink took this as a good sign—there was still life enough in him to care about the cold.

  He sent Henrik on his way, urging him to summon Gustav Mellin, the count’s chirurgeon. He pressed a silver coin into his palm. “Be convincing, lad.” The wine merchant’s boy nodded and disappeared into the storm.

  Meyrink went back to the old priest’s cell where Messner was holding a silent prayer vigil. He cradled Guttman’s fragile hand in his, whispering over and over entreaties to Sigmar, begging that His divine hand spare the old man from Morr. It was odd how the young man could be so adamant in the face of theory and yet so devout in the face of fact. His blind faith was as inspiring now as it had been annoying a few hours ago. Meyrink hovered on the threshold, looking at the young man kneeling at the bedside, head bowed in prayer. Guttman was clinging to life—a few words, even to the great and the good, wouldn’t save him. It was down to the old man’s will and the chirurgeon’s skill, if he arrived in time. When it came down to it that was their prime difference: Meyrink was a realist, Messner an idealist still waiting for the brutality of the world to beat it out of him.

  Meyrink coughed politely, letting Messner know he was no longer alone.

  “How is he?”

  “Not good. These wounds…”

  “The bites? If that is what they are.”

  “Oh that is what they are, without doubt. Whatever fed on him though, it wasn’t wolves.”

  “How can you be sure?” Meyrink asked, moving into the cell.

  “Look for yourself. The first set of puncture wounds are precise and close together, suggesting a small mouth, certainly not a wolf. And there are nowhere enough teeth or tearing to match the savagery of wolves. If I didn’t know better I’d say the bite was human.”

  “But you know better?”

  Messner shook his head.

  “Then let us content ourselves with the fact that the world is a sick place and that our dear brother was set upon by one of the flock. It makes no difference to the treatment. We must staunch the blood loss and seal the wounds best we can, keeping them clean to keep out the festering. Other than that, perhaps you are right to pray. I can think of nothing else we can do for our brother.”

  They did what they could, a mixture of prayer, medicine and waiting. Mellin, the chirurgeon arrived at dawn, inspected the wounds clinically, tutting between clenched teeth as he sutured the torn flesh. His prognosis was not good:

  “He’s lost a lot of blood. Too much for a man to lose and still live.”

  “Surely you can do something?”

  “I’m doing it. Cleaning up the wounds. If he deteriorates, my leeches will be good for the rot, but other than that, he’s in the hands of your god.”

  Guttman didn’t wake for three straight days. Mostly he lay still, the shallow rise and fall of his chest all that distinguished him from the dead, though he did toss and turn occasionally, mumbling some incoherent half words while in the grip of fever dreams. The sweats were worst at night. In the darkest hours of the night the old priest’s breathing was at its weakest, hitching and sometimes stopping for long seconds as though Guttman’s body simply forgot how to breathe. Messner only left his bedside for a few moments at a time for daily ablutions. He ate his meals sitting against the bed frame and slept on a cot in the small cell, leaving Meyrink to oversee the day-to-day running of the temple and lead the congregation in prayers for Brother Guttman’s swift recovery.

  The fever ran its course and on the fourth day Victor Guttman opened his eyes.

  It was no gentle waking: he sat bolt upright, his eyes flew open and one word escaped his parched mouth: “Vampire!” He sank back into the pillow, gasping for breath.

  The suddenness of it shocked Meyrink. He thought for a moment that he had misheard, that the dry rasp had been some last desperate plea to the gods for salvation before the old priest shuffled off the mortal coil, but it wasn’t. He had heard correctly. Guttman had cried vampire.

  Meyrink stared at the sutured wounds in the old man’s throat, his mind racing. Could they truly be the mark of the vampire? The thought was ludicrous. It hadn’t even crossed his mind. Vampires? But if they were… did that mean Victor Guttman is one of them now? Tainted? He was a priest of Sigmar surely he couldn’t succumb to the blood kiss…

  Meyrink took the old man’s hand and felt none of the revulsion he was sure he should if Guttman had been born again into unlife.

  “It’s not too late, my friend,” he said, kneeling at Guttman’s bedside. “It’s not too late.”

  “Kill… me… please,” the old man begged, his eyes rheumy with pain. The chirurgeon had left nothing to dull the pain and Meyrink was loathe to let the man loose with his leeches. “Before I… succumb… to it.”

  “Hush, my friend. Save your strength.”

  “I will not… kill. I will… not.”

  Reinhardt Messner turned the brittle pages of the dusty old tome. He was tired, his enthusiasm for the search long since gone and the ink on the paper was a degree less intelligible than a spider’s scrawl. The words had long since begun to blend into one. Beside him Meyrink grunted and shifted in his chair. It had been three days since Brother Guttman’s return to the land of the living. During that time he had faded in and out of consciousness. He refused food, claiming he had no appetite. He drank little water, claiming he had no thirst. This disturbed the young priest. No hunger, no thirst, it was unnatural. It added a certain amount of credence to the old man’s story of vampires but Messner refused to believe there was any real truth to it. Still, he studied the old tomes looking for some kind of geas that might be used to seal Guttman in the temple. It was useless. There was nothing.

  The few references to the vampiric curse he had found revolved around fishwives’ gossip and stupid superstitions about garlic and white roses. The only thing of any use was a single line about silver being anathema to the beasts. Other than that there was nothing of substance. One had ideas of how to keep a vampire out of a building, not keep it trapped within one—though for a while he hoped the solution might be one and the same.

  “This is out of our province,” he admitted grudgingly, closing the book in a billow of dust. “Short of sealing Brother Guttman in a silver lined vault, which is both impractical and impossible given the cost of the metal, I have found nothing. I hate to say it, but this is useless. We are wasting our time.”

  “No, it has to be in here somewhere,” Meyrink objected, for once their roles of donkey in the argument reversed. Meyrink was being the stubborn ass refusing to see the impossibility of their situation. If Guttman had been infected—and that was how he thought of it, a disease—then the best thing they could do for the old man was drive a stake through his heart, scoop out his brains and bury him upside down in consecrated ground.

  If…

  “You know it isn’t, brother. This is a wild goose chase.”

  “What would you have us do? Slay our brother?”

  That was a ques
tion he wasn’t prepared to answer. “Nothing good comes of death,” he said instead, hoping Meyrink would take it as his final word.

  “Yet we cannot stand guard over him night and day, it is impossible. There must be a way.”

  A thought occurred to him then: “Perhaps magic runes…?” They could place runes on the doors and windows to act as locks barring Guttman’s ingress and egress, thus confining the vampire to the crypts.

  Meyrink spat. “Would you consort with the servants of Chaos?”

  He was right, of course. The practice of magic was outlawed—it would be next to impossible to find anyone to craft such magic, and even if they could, for how long would the magic remain stable? To rely on such a warding was to court disaster, for certain, but Messner knew there was hope in the idea. Could such a series of runes be created to turn the old temple into a sanctuary for Guttman?

  “The count would have access…” and then he realised what he was saying. The count.

  Von Carstein.

  The vampire count.

  He made the sign of Sigmar’s hammer.

  There would be no going to the castle for help.

  The doors and window frames of the temple had been inlaid with fine silver wire; bent into the shape of the runes the mage had sworn would keep the undead at bay. Meyrink had had no choice but to employ the man, despite his deep-seated distrust of magicians.

  Meyrink studied the silver swirls.

  There was nothing, as far as he could tell, remotely magical about the symbols that had cost the temple an Emperor’s ransom. The man had assured the priests that the combination of the curious shapes and the precious metal would turn the confines of the temple into a prison for any of the tainted blood. He had sworn an oath, for all the good it did them now.

  Like the windows and doors, the entrance to the crypt itself was protected by a serious of intricate metal swirls that had been laid in after Victor Guttman had been led below. Together, the mage had promised, these twists of metal would form an impenetrable barrier for the dead, keeping those without a soul from crossing. Again, Meyrink had no choice but to believe the man, despite the evidence of his own eyes.

  Meyrink descended the thirteen steps into the bowels of the temple.

  The crypt was dank, lit by seven guttering candles that threw sepulchral shadows over the tombs, the air fetid. Guttman had refused the comforts of a bed and slept curled up on a blanket in a dirty corner, ankles and wrists chained to the wall like some common thief.

  It hurt Meyrink to see him like this: living in the dark, hidden away from the world he so loved, shackled.

  This was no life at all.

  “Morning, brother,” he called, lightly, struggling to keep the grief out of his voice.

  “Is it?” answered the old man, looking up. The flickering candlelight did nothing to hide the anguish in his eyes or the slack skin of his face. “Time has lost all meaning underground. I see nothing of light and day or dark and night, only candles that burn out and are replenished as though by magic when I finally give in to sleep. I had the dream again last night…”

  Meyrink nodded. He knew. Two more girls—they were no more than children in truth—had succumbed to the sleeping sickness and died during the night. Two more. They were calling it a plague, though for a plague it was a selective killer, draining the very life out of Drakenhof’s young women while the men lived on, seemingly immune, desperate as those they loved fell victim. It was always the same: first they paled, as the sickness took hold then they slipped into a sleep from which they never woke. The transition was shockingly quick. In a matter of three nights vibrant healthy young women aged as much as three decades to look at and succumbed to an eternal sleep. Meyrink knew better: it wasn’t a plague, it was a curse.

  “Did I…? Did I…?”

  He nodded again.

  “Two young girls, brother. Sisters. They were to have been fifteen this naming day.”

  Guttman let out a strangled sob. He held up his hands, rattling the chains in anger and frustration. “I saw it… I…” But there was nothing he could say. “Have you come to kill me?”

  “I can’t, brother. Not while there is hope.”

  “There is no hope. Can’t you see that? I am a killer now. There is no peace for me. No rest. And while I live you damn the young women of our flock. Kill me, brother. If not for my own sake, then do it for theirs.” Tears streaked down his grubby face.

  “Not while you can still grieve for them, brother. Not while you still have compassion. When you are truly a beast, when the damned sickness owns you, only then. Before that day do not ask for what I cannot do.”

  “He has to die!” Messner raged, slamming his clenched fist on the heavy oak of the refectory table. The clay goblets he and Meyrink had been drinking from jumped almost an inch, Meyrink’s teetering precariously before it toppled, spilling thick bloody red wine into the oak grain between them.

  “Who’s the monster here? The old man in the dungeon or the young one baying for his blood?” Meyrink pushed himself to his feet and leaned in menacingly. It was rapidly becoming an old argument but that didn’t prevent it from being a passionate one.

  “Forty-two girls dead, man! Forty-two! What about the sanctity of life? What is the meaning of life, brother, if you are willing to throw it away so cheaply?”

  “We don’t know,” Meyrink rasped, his knuckles white on the tabletop. “We just don’t know that it is him. We have no evidence that he gets out. He’s chained up in there. There are wards and sigils and glyphs and all sorts of paraphernalia aimed at keeping him locked up down there, helpless… harmless.”

  “And yet every morning he feeds you stories of his dreams, talks of the young ones he has seen suffering at the hands of the monstrous beasts. He regales you in glorious detail, brother. The creature is taunting you and you are too stupid to realise it.”

  “No. Not too stupid. It is compassion. The old man raised you as he would his own son, from when the temple took you in fifteen years ago. He cared for you. He loved you. He did the same for me in my time. We owe him—”

  “We owe him nothing anymore. He isn’t Victor Guttman! He’s a daemon. Can’t you get that into your thick skull, man? He barely touches the food we take down for him for a reason, you know. It doesn’t sustain him. Blood does. Blood, Brother. Blood.”

  “Would you do it? Would you turn murderer and kill the man who might as well have been your own father, everything he did for you? Would you? Take the knife now, go down into the crypt and do it, cut his heart out. Do it, damn you! If you have so little doubt, do it…”

  “No.”

  “Well I am not about to.”

  “I know men who could,” Messner said softly, wriggling around the impasse with a suggestion neither man really wished to consider. Bringing in outsiders. Part of it was fear—what would happen if people realised the priesthood of Sigmar had been infected with the tainted blood of vampires? Another part was self-preservation. The streets had been rife with rumours for days. Two witch hunters were in Drakenhof, though from what little Messner had managed to learn they were not church sanctioned Sigmarite witch hunters, and were barely in the employ of the Elector Count of Middenheim. Their charge had been issued nearly a decade ago, now their hunt was personal. They had come to town a week ago, looking for a man by the name of Sebastian Aigner, who, if the gossips were to be believed, they had been hunting for seven years. He was the last of a bunch of renegade killers who had slaughtered the men’s families, burning them alive. Metzger and Ziegler, the witch hunters, had found the others and extracted their blood debt. They had come to Drakenhof looking to lay their daemons to rest, and perhaps, Messner thought, they could purge the temple of its daemon in the process. “They could tell us for sure. This is what they do.”

  Meyrink looked sceptical.

  “Forty-two young women, forty-two. Think about it.”

  “That is all I have been doing, for weeks. Do you think I don’t lie awake at nig
ht, imagining him out there, feasting? Do you think I don’t sneak down into the crypt at all hours, hoping to catch him gone, so that I know beyond a shadow of doubt that he is the killer my heart tells me he isn’t? Always I find him there, chained to the walls, barely conscious, looking like death itself, and it breaks my heart that he is suffering because of me!”

  “Forty-two,” Reinhardt Messner said again, shaking his head as though the number itself answered every objection Brother Meyrink voiced. And perhaps it did at that.

  “Talk to them if you must, but I want no part of it,” Meyrink said, finally, turning and stalking out of the room.

  Alone, Messner righted the spilled goblet and began mopping up the mess. It was, it seemed, his destiny to clean up after Meyrink.

  Messner greeted the younger of the two with a tired smile and held out a hand to be shaken.

  Metzger ignored it and didn’t return the smile. There was something distinctly cold about the man, but given his line of work it was perhaps unsurprising. The older man, Eberl Ziegler, nodded and followed Metzger into the temple. He, at least, had the decency to bow low before the statue of Sigmar Heldenhammer and make the sign of the hammer whereas the other just walked down the aisle, toeing at the seats and tutting at the silver runes worked into the window frames. His footsteps echoed coldly.

  Messner watched the man, fascinated by his confidence as he examined every nook and cranny of the old temple. Metzger moved with authority. He lifted a thin glass wedge from the front table, beside the incense burner, and tilted it so that it caught and refracted the light into a rainbow on the wall.

  “So tell me,” Metzger said, angling the light up the wall. “How does this fit with your philosophy? I am curious. The taking of a human life… it seems… alien to my understanding of your faith. Enlighten me.”

  Behind Messner, Meyrink coughed.

  “Sacrifice for the good of mankind, Herr Metzger. Sacrifice.”