Sobbing, Fischer looked up as Rennet approached, his face twisted into the mask of the monster he actually was. Saskia no longer looked like some heavenly creature; her face was hard, daemonic and Ina’s grin was feral as she moved to stand beside her bestial kin.
“Mine,” Saskia said, crouching down beside Fischer. She reached out and tenderly stroked his cheek. “He always was.”
Fischer spat in her face.
“I’d rather die!”
“Oh you will, believe me, you will.” Her fingers sought out his pulse as it fluttered through his neck. She drew in a slow breath through her nose, savouring the feel of his life beneath her fingertips. “Blood… such sweet music it makes.”
“Do it,” Ina urged.
“Come on then,” Fischer said stubbornly. “Finish me, you freak! Do it!”
Saskia pricked his cheek with a fingernail, drawing a ribbon of rich red blood. She leaned in and laved the blood up with her tongue, playing with the blood across her lips.
Fischer went cold. He didn’t move. He didn’t panic. He didn’t close his eyes.
He met her gaze and rasped: “Do it, damn you!”
He felt her teeth close on the soft flesh of his throat and in that last second as he waited for death heard a sound, like a sharp intake of breath. Fischer winced as the first prickling of teeth sank into his throat but it wasn’t matched with the agony of the vampire’s feeding. Instead Saskia’s head jerked back, her eyes flaring open. The blooded silver tip of an arrow protruded through the front of her throat, the fletching of the shaft tangled in her beautiful hair. He touched his throat. It was wet with a trickle of blood from where the arrow had scratched him. A second arrow thudded into her back, its tip piercing through her breast. Saskia’s mouth worked in a silent scream. She slumped into Fischer’s terrified arms. He held her, not knowing what else to do.
More arrows rained into the clearing, taking Kennet high in the chest, spinning him around and dumping him, dead, on his back. Ina took three arrows in the chest, and one in the face.
Six men stepped into the clearing. Quickly and efficiently they decapitated the vampiric jongleurs and began to dig two separate shallow graves, one for the three heads, the other for the bodies.
“It’s your lucky day,” one of the men, a flaxen-haired youth, said, slinging his bow over his shoulder and helping Fischer to rise.
He felt an unwelcome hollowness inside at Saskia’s death. It was as though he had lost something. A part of himself. It felt wrong in so many ways. She had been inhuman. A monster. She had been feeding off him for days, bleeding the life out of him. And yet, there was an ache where she had once been. He shook his head, trying to dislodge the unpleasant feeling. She was dead. He was alive. That was it. End of the story.
“Let me have a look at that,” the archer said. Fischer titled his head to expose the shallow wound. The archer prodded and probed the gash. “Sit.” Fischer did as he was told. The man drew out a small sewing kit, and a hip flask. “Drink a good swallow, it’ll take the sting out. We need to stitch this up otherwise it’ll never heal properly.”
Fischer uncorked the bottle and took a hearty swig. The liquor burned as it slid down his throat.
The archer talked while he doctored the wound.
“You’re a lucky man, my friend. Another minute and we’d have been chopping your head off and burying you with the other fiends. Makes you believe in Sigmar, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t tend to believe in much of anything anymore.”
“Don’t talk, it pulls at the stitching. I’ll try and answer your questions without you having to ask them. My name is Ralf Baumann. I serve in the Ottilia of House Untermensch’s grand army, beneath Hans Schliffen. For the last month we have been experiencing an uprising of sorts, undead, all along the Talabheim borderlands and the Ottilia herself ordered us into the field to police the situation.”
“It is worse than you fear, by far. Undeath is an epidemic in Sylvania.” Fischer said, ignoring the archer’s instructions. “The dead are rising to the call of Vlad von Carstein. The man is a monster. Man. Gah! He is no man. His humanity is long gone. The Vampire Count is a monster. He has slaughtered thousands only to bring them back as mindless zombies. I saw it with my own eyes on Geheimnisnacht. It was butchery. Anyone who has stood against him, he has seen them cut down and replaced by one of his own kind, a bloodsucking fiend. And once dead they get no rest. Oh no, he is raising an army of the dead to do his bloody work!”
Baumann remained impassive as he finished stitching the gash but the second he tied off the final stitch he exploded into action, running across the clearing to where his fellow soldiers were burying the dead and animatedly explaining what he had just heard. An army of the dead being raised by a Vampire Count was more, by far, than this small battalion of soldiers were equipped to handle.
Being caught in this no-man’s land between the two factions, living and dead, would mean their death, no one harboured any illusions about that. And as they were all coming to understand, death at the hands of von Carstein was not the clean death a soldier deserved. It was the vile unending “undeath” of a zombie resurrected to swell the ranks of the Vampire Count’s immortal army.
They had to return to the main body of the Ottilia’s army.
Schliffen had to know what they were facing.
And for that to happen they had to survive.
CHAPTER TEN
The Storm Before
ESSEN FORD, SYLVANIA
Winter, 2010
The more he got to know him, the more Ralf Baumann reminded Fischer of Jon Skellan.
It was the little things at first, gestures, throwaway comments, the way he talked of life and his philosophy of living, of his daughters back home in Talabheim, and of the wife he had lost to sickness two summers gone. They suggested the two men were not so dissimilar, yet the true mark of their brotherhood came in the form of their damnation. Neither Baumann nor Skellan were fully at peace with the world around them. They had lost their place in it. It was the most basic thing a human being had, the knowledge of his own place in the world, that sense of purpose that came with knowing who you were, but because these men lived on while those they loved rotted in the dirt, the serenity that came with innocence was lost to them.
Haunted by old ghosts who loved them too much to leave them alone, both men were victims of the survivor’s curse.
It weighed as heavily on Baumann as it had on Skellan.
Given the choice of grief or action, Baumann, like Skellan had before him, chose to fight back and gave himself to it body and soul. It was in how they dealt with all the things they had in common that made the two men different. The fact that Baumann was not given to the same brooding introspection and fits of violent temper that plagued Skellan, but rather was quick of wit and passionate in his camaraderie made him a good companion for the long journey. The more he thought about it, the more Fischer came to think that the two were twin aspects of the same soul, darkness and light.
He found himself liking Baumann, a lot, and felt as though he had known the man far longer than he actually had.
It had snowed for seven consecutive days without letting up.
Every day the seven of them pushed on, matching the weather with their own stubborn determination, through valleys and along ridgelines of precarious rock, across frozen streams and snow-laden glades. It was tough going but on the evening of the eighth day they met up with outriders from Schliffen’s force. They were camped outside of Essen, close to the fording point of the River Stir, waiting for the main body of the Ottilia’s army to cross over from the Talabecland side of the water.
A pile of bones replaced the campfire.
“We’re taking no risks,” Frank Bernholz, one of the outriders, explained. “Twice now we’ve had to fend off these creatures. The fire attracts them. They aren’t smart enough to stay away from Mouse’s mace so he ends up grinding them down one at a time while we do our damnedest to keep the r
est of the buggers at bay.”
Mouse, the smallest of the crew, grinned and patted the hefty studded mace by his side. “Big pile of walking bones ain’t no match for Bessie here.”
“I can well imagine,” Fischer said.
“When are you expecting the general, Frank?” Baumann asked, settling down on a stone beside the outrider. He cracked a piece of hard travel bread and started to chew on it.
“Yesterday. I sent Marius out to see what was holding him up. I don’t like being marooned out here like some kind of sitting duck. Not my idea of a fun way to pass the time. I like it clean and honest. I like to know what I am fighting and to be able to look my enemy in the eye, knowing that he has as much to lose as I do when it comes to the crunch. Can’t do it with these… these… things. We’ve lost three scouts in the last week, Ralf Three good men.”
“It’s a dirty business, for sure.”
“And it’s only getting dirtier.”
“You do know what’s coming, don’t you?”
“I’ve got my suspicions, yeah. Not looking forward to facing whatever it is they decide to throw at us. It’s not like fighting men. Men you know, you know the fear pulsing through their veins, you know the exhilaration, the weakness, you know when doubt sets in and more importantly you know when they are broken. A pile of walking bones doesn’t think for itself and those walking corpses… They just keep coming and coming and coming. What have they got to lose? They’re already dead. They don’t know fear or doubt. They just keep on coming, wave after wave of them, and eventually even a good man will break. Maybe not on the first day or the second or even the third but the time will come when exhaustion wears him down, when doubt gnaws away at the back of his mind, when he makes a mistake and then what happens? He dies. Only it doesn’t end there… Oh no, his corpse swells the ranks of the enemy and minutes after his death he is fighting against his friends. It’s ugly.”
“Ain’t that the truth.”
“They’re out there now. You’ll hear them when the sun finally goes down. Wolves howling at the moon and this eerie keening moan that seems to float all around the camp. We’re in the jaws of a trap here and Schliffen knows it. We’re his bait. That’s why he’s late.”
“That’s a pretty cynical way of looking at the situation, my friend.”
“Is it? Take a look around, this is the ideal battleground, or as close as you’re likely to get around here. You’re not exactly wide open to surprises. This way Schliffen is picking the battleground. He knows the fight is coming. Like any good soldier he wants to make the best of what he’s got. The water at our back means we’re only vulnerable from three sides, and we’re between two major branches of the Stir so von Carstein can only bring his army over piecemeal, buying us time to dig in. We’ve been fortifying for a week. There’s some nasty surprises out there beneath the snow, for what good they will do us.”
“Every little bit helps. So, honest opinion: when’s this all going to go down?”
“Reckon you boys got here in the nick of time. The natives are restless. They’re gathering all around us, have been for the last few nights. They fall into some sort of daze during the day, but like I said, come sunset you can hear them and there are lots of them. The noise has been getting louder every night, as more of them gather. It’s creepy as hell, let me tell you. I heard them feeding last night. It isn’t a sound I particularly want to hear again. It’s like pigs at the trough, but, well, they aren’t pigs are they. They’re just like you or me. Or they were. Once. Anyway, sundown tomorrow would be my guess, unless they are waiting for something special.”
“I assume Schliffen will be thinking the same way.”
“I’ve long since stopped trying to second-guess the general but I certainly hope so. Morr’s balls, I’ve got no desire to end up shuffling around with strips of rotten flesh hanging off me. That isn’t a way I want to go.”
Baumann patted the outrider on the back and rejoined his own men, filling them in on the situation. He painted a bleak picture.
“So we’ve become the bait in the trap?”
“That’s about the sum of it.”
“Nice,” Fischer said ironically.
The men ate in silence, watching the sun dwindle and finally disappear beneath the horizon.
A cold wind blew through the camp. Baumann busied himself by sharpening his sword on a whetstone. The regular scheeeel scheeeel scheeeel of his stropping motion rang out into the darkness. It was met by the ululating cries of the undead as they crowded in around the camp. Fischer caught glimpses of them in the darkness, bone-white flashes picked out by the moon, darker shapes shambling inside the shadows. In the most basic of ways they reminded him of wild animals playing with their food. They weren’t trying to hide. They wanted to be seen. Being seen inspired fear in the minds and hearts of the soldiers.
By nature men who dealt in death were a superstitious lot. They believed they would hear an owl call their name the night before their own deaths and insisted on having their sword in their hand as they died as though the blade itself would prove to Morr’s attendants that they were warriors, and always when they went into battle they would carry two silver coins to pay their passage into Morr’s halls should they fall. Burdened with these superstitions it was hardly surprising that the men saw the shuffling corpses as a promise of the fate that awaited them on the battlefield. Today those putrefied zombies were their enemy, but tomorrow they would be their sword brothers.
More and more as the night lengthened they heard the low keening echo around them. The enemy were moving and they were blind to it. Bernholz had them prepare firebrands to fight off any of the creatures who stumbled too close to the camp but he wouldn’t allow his men to light them for fear that the fire would attract the zombies, wraiths and wights like moths.
Fischer thought the man was an idiot. Those things out there weren’t human and they weren’t moths attracted by curiosity to the bright light. They were either oblivious to it or they were afraid of it. Dead or alive, they still burned. So as he saw it fire was their one and only friend. He didn’t speak out against the Bernholz though.
The listless apathy of resignation had settled about the small camp. The conversations were muted, the men slipping into their own thoughts as they prepared for the inevitable battle. They knew that Hans Schliffen was sacrificing them in order to draw von Carstein’s undead out onto the battlefield of his own choosing. They accepted it. It was what they did. They were soldiers. They sacrificed themselves for the greater good. It was a simple maxim: soldiers died for what they believed in. Every one of the men in the camp that night knew it and accepted it.
They were even coming to accept the fact that their general had condemned them almost certainly to an afterlife of living death in order to give the rest of his men the best chance of survival. There were always casualties during any engagement. Tough decisions had to be made. People would die: friends, brothers, fathers, no one was immune to the bite of a sword or the punch of an arrow. While they honed the edge of their weapons they did their damnedest to empty their minds. None of them wanted to dwell on the day ahead. They might accept what Schliffen was doing to them but they didn’t have to like it. They were soldiers. They followed orders; even ones they knew would get them killed. There was no point in arguing with the strategy. Schliffen had made his mind up, and in his mind baiting the trap was their best hope of defeating von Carstein’s horde.
All they could do was wait.
Fischer pressed his back against one of the cold stones the outriders had ringed around the empty fire pit and closed his eyes. He was asleep in moments, this time dreamlessly. The younger men lay awake most of the night, unable to sleep. The calls of the dead plagued them and their own black thoughts tormented them. They envied veterans like Fischer their ability to sleep with the sword of Morr hanging over their heads.
Before dawn the snow gave way to rain: a few spots at first and then more persistent. An hour after sunrise the sky
was still dark with steel grey clouds, bulbous thunderheads, and the rain sheeted down turning the snow into slush and the soaking the ground beneath. By noon, Schliffen’s precious battlefield was mired. Fischer picked his way toward the centre but walking was almost impossible as every step sank into the sludge almost as far as his knees.
He scared a single raven up from the muddy field and sent it cawing off into the torrential rain.
Fighting in this was going to be a nightmare.
Their one hope had disappeared with the mud—their mobility. Now they were going to be slopping about in the mire, flailing around for balance and moving like zombies themselves. A bitter part of him wondered if von Carstein wasn’t somehow behind the foul turn of the weather. The man was a daemon after all, why shouldn’t he have mastery over the elements?
The mud soaked up his calf and over his knee as he struggled another step forward. He turned to look behind him. There was no sign of the body of the Ottilia’s army. There were, however, plenty of signs to suggest the encroaching presence of the Vampire Count’s.
Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. Sprawled out all across the killing ground between him and the line of the second tributary that formed Essen Ford.
Bodies.
Fischer stood, rooted to the spot, as his feet sank deeper into the sludge.
From what he could see the dead had simply collapsed where they stood and lay in a sprawl of limbs. He wanted to believe that whatever hold von Carstein had over them had failed, that they were safe. But he didn’t believe it, not for a second. They were puppets, their strings had been laid aside but von Carstein could easily pick them up again and make them dance to whatever whim he saw fit to satisfy. Even with Schliffen’s rearguard they were doomed. No quarter would be asked or given. The Vampire Count would bring the full wrath of his army down on their heads come sunset and all of the strategies and all of the gamesmanship in the Old World wouldn’t save them.
[Von Carstein 01] - Inheritance Page 15
