Kruger watched helplessly, feeling wretched, responsible and helpless at the same time. The fact that the wraiths came shrieking into his face and then pulled away to claim another soul tormented the grand master. He bellowed his rage and chased the bodiless entities into the open square beneath the Middenheim Spire, slipping and stumbling on the frosted cobbles as the shadows writhed and good men died.
“It’s me you want!” Kruger yelled, his cry whipped away by the icy wind. He had killed von Carstein once, but death held no dominion over the count. He had heard the stories of Bluthof where five lances had skewered von Carstein to the ground before the Count of Ostland had buried his Runefang deep in the beast’s heart. Three days later von Carstein returned to order the crucifixion of prisoners outside the town gates. At Bogenhafen Bridge a cannon ball had decapitated the Vampire Count. An hour later the cannon crew were dead and Bogenhafen was overrun, Vlad von Carstein at the head of the conquering army.
The beast refused to die.
Von Carstein’s mocking laughter haunted Kruger until he finally saw the monster crouched between the leering gargoyles of the spire hundreds of feet above. Kruger didn’t hesitate. He charged into the vault of the cathedral, the massive wooden doors banging closed behind him, the echoes folding in on themselves as they reverberated through the massive dome above his head. Stained glass images of Ulric and the White Wolves let in a wondrous array of hues, reds and golds and greens dappling the stone floor like a scattering of coins.
Kruger ran down the aisle. The leather grip of his warhammer was soaked with the cold sweat of fear; its reminder spurred him on. He crashed through the door at the rear of the temple and started up the spiral stairs two and three at a time. There were two hundred and seventy-six in total, curling up almost two hundred feet to the bell tower. The grand master’s lungs were burning before he was halfway up, his legs on fire, but guilt drove him on viciously. Kruger gasped for breath as he slammed the door to the bell tower open.
Von Carstein was there, ringing a death knell with the hilt of his damnable sword on the huge brass bell, the sonorous clang resonating through the very fabric of the tower.
Kruger sucked in a deep breath, battling to regulate his breathing. He wasn’t a young man anymore. He felt every one of the stairs he had just climbed.
“I wondered how many you were prepared to sacrifice before you remembered you were a man and came to face me,” von Carstein said, amicably. He sheathed his sword.
“All of this was to get me?” Kruger said, images of the slaughter flashing through his mind. He shook his head, trying to dislodge them. He focussed on the undead count’s sardonic smile, his cold eyes that delved deep inside, stripping away secrets and fears as though they were layers of clothing draped over a soul. He gave his hatred for the monster facing him time to fester.
“So it seems, does it not?”
“I killed you once before, von Carstein. Who’s to say I won’t do it again?”
“Well,” the Vampire Count said, appearing to give the question serious thought, “me. You interest me, something most humans fail to do. You have… qualities that it is easy to admire. I could use a man like you.”
“Over my dead body,” Kruger spat.
“That was the general idea, yes.”
The Vampire Count moved away from the prayer bell. He came toward Kruger, his smile widening with each step closer. He moved like a spider, cautious, with predatory cunning.
“If you kill me, this ends. You have your revenge. Let my men live.”
“Too late for that, I am afraid. My pets are hungry. I promised them some succulent morsels to eat and nothing tastes better than fattened wolf meat, believe me.”
“You disgust me. You aren’t human.”
“Don’t you ever feel it, Wolf? The thirst for blood? Oh, I can see it in your eyes. You do. You do. You feel it now. You feel it on the battlefield when you ride for your precious honour. You hide behind your fatuous code of chivalry but we aren’t so different. You choose to justify your violence and thirst for blood behind mysticism, claiming devotion to your pathetic warrior god so you can make it holy. At least I am honest about it. I allow myself to delight in the hedonistic rush of killing. I revel in the naked savagery of death. It is in you already, Wolf. The beast is in your soul. You keep it caged but it comes out every time you hold that hammer of yours. Believe me, you would make a good vampire. You already have the taste for blood.”
“I am nothing like you.”
“No, of course, you are the honourable and decent savage whereas I am just the savage.”
“Shut up!” Kruger hissed, lashing out with his warhammer.
Von Carstein didn’t move. He didn’t even breathe.
Kruger lunged forward two steps, the old wooden timber beams of the floor groaning under his weight. He swung again, wildly.
Von Carstein exploded into brutal, astonishing, action. He sprang at the White Wolf, his black cloak billowing out behind him. His economy of movement was both lethal and hypnotic; there was a brutal precision to his kicks and punches as they came, hard and fast. It was all Kruger could do to ward off the first few. In the space between heartbeats he was driven to his knees by a rain of punishment so shockingly violent it was irresistible. He threw up his warhammer desperately but it made no difference. An open-handed strike to the throat had Kruger choking as he swallowed his tongue. Vlad stepped back, watching curiously as the grand master choked slowly to death.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “You don’t get away from me that easily, Wolf.”
He reached down and grabbed the pelt around Jerek Kruger’s shoulders and hauled him effortlessly to his feet. The grand master’s eyes flickered convulsively as he hovered on the edge of death. Von Carstein waited until his enemy was a second from death and sank his teeth into Kruger’s throat. He drank hungrily, savouring the hot sweet coppery taste of the White Wolfs blood as it trickled down his throat. He pulled back before he completely drained the grizzled old warrior, grabbed a handful of hair and yanked his mouth open. Slowly, savouring the final delicious irony of the moment, the Vampire Count sank his teeth into his own wrist, drawing blood. He held the wound over Kruger’s mouth, letting it drip down his throat.
Kruger’s body shuddered, every ounce of the man’s being revolting against the tainted blood as it pooled in his mouth… and then he swallowed and his eyes flared open as he gagged and gasped a first desperate breath in minutes.
He lurched away from the Vampire Count’s Blood Kiss, reeling as his legs betrayed him. Clutching at a low beam, Kruger staggered toward the moonlight as it poured in through an open arch.
He turned to look back at von Carstein.
“It ends here.”
He turned back to the arch. He felt the kiss of the fresh air on his face, savoured it, one final proof that he was alive, and threw himself from the height of the great spire.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Alone in the Dark
MIDDENHEIM
Spring, 2050
He awoke in claustrophobic darkness. He couldn’t move. His arms were crossed over his chest. He could move his legs sideways about six inches. No more.
The darkness pressed down on him. He tried to move his arms, sliding them down his chest, working them around to his side. It felt worse. He was trapped. He couldn’t think.
Then, in hallucinatory flashes it came back to him. The wights, the wraiths, the rime of frost across the city—his city—as the ghosts of the conquered ravaged it and up above, the mocking laughter of von Carstein as his friends—no, men, he didn’t have friends, his men—died, and then he was falling. The space in between was blank. Each fresh revelation stripped away another little piece of his humanity. He felt no grief, only curious detachment as his life came back to him fragment by bloody fragment, his identity establishing itself there in the dark.
He had been Jerek Kruger. That was before. He didn’t know who he was now. Or what.
Only tha
t he was something else—something altogether alien to the man he had been, though he possessed all of Kruger’s memories and longings and no doubt wore the dead man’s skin and bones.
Jerek Kruger was dead. He knew that with cold certainty.
Von Carstein’s taunts came back to him: It is in you already, Wolf. The beast is in your soul. You keep it caged but it comes out every time you hold that hammer of yours. Believe me, you would make a good vampire. You already have the taste for blood.
The fall…
He tasted something sour in his mouth. It took him a moment to realise what it was: dried blood.
You already have the taste for blood. He knew then what had happened to him, what the taste of rust in his mouth signified. He writhed about in the tight confines of the coffin, kicking and gagging at the same time. His feet drummed dully on the wooden lid of the coffin, the weight of the earth dampening the sound to a dull thud. He was underground. They had buried him. Panic flared in his mind. He wasn’t just trapped he was buried beneath tons of dirt. The sudden understanding was suffocating. The thing that had been Kruger shrieked its terror, bucking and writhing against the tight confines of the coffin.
He worked his hands around until they were either side of his face.
The darkness was all consuming.
Through the haze of fear one single need emerged: hunger. He needed to feed.
The thought simultaneously revolted and excited him. He could taste the blood in his mouth and it tasted good. He wanted more. He needed more. Fresh blood.
He had to find a way out of this prison. He had to feed.
Von Carstein had turned him into a monster… or had he always been a monster? Had the vampire been right? Had the beast always been shackled within his soul just waiting to be set free?
He knew who he was. It came to him with shocking clarity. He was a vampire, like von Carstein who had fathered him.
He was von Carstein, as much as any son was part of its father: by blood.
Jerek von Carstein. He tasted the name in his mind, Jerek von Carstein.
They would pay for doing this to him. All of them.
Anger blazed inside him. White-hot fury. He had fought monsters all his life and in doing so had become the worst sort. He roared in pain and frustration, and pushed at the wooden lid with his feet and his knees and the flats of his hands. The thin wood cracked and began to splinter beneath the strain. A trickle of dirt spilled into the coffin, hitting him on the chest. He roared again and pushed with all of his might but the lid didn’t give another inch. The hard-packed earth kept it lodged in place.
He was trapped. Buried alive… Only he would be alive forever.
Forever trapped in the suffocating darkness, unable to move, unable to do anything but think. It would drive him to madness.
But it would save lives up there… The thought came to him unbidden. As long as he was a prisoner in his earthly tomb they were safe up there: his men, their families, the people he had fought to protect against the beast that was von Carstein.
But their safety would be his undoing. He wasn’t strong enough. He knew that already.
The taste of blood was metallic on his tongue, taunting him.
He didn’t just need to feed, he wanted to. Von Carstein had turned him into a monster.
He beat his knuckles raw and bloody against the splintered wood in frustration. Clawed at the splinters, tore his nails scrabbling at the wooden lid trying to tear through it. Jags of wood cut into his fingers, shredding the flesh and paring it down to the bone in places.
And then the dirt came. Like rain.
The lid gave way, a huge crack opening down the centre, and the mud and the worms and the stones spilled into the coffin, trapping Jerek von Carstein completely. He opened his mouth to scream and the dirt poured into it, filling him.
He lashed out wildly but could barely move. Choking, he thought desperately as he swallowed mouthfuls of dirt. Can’t breathe… Can’t…
But there was no pain in his lungs. No light-headed dizziness. No desperate retching for breath. He didn’t need it. He was dead already. The thought ripped away one of the final shreds of his sanity.
He raged against the suffocating press of the soil and the jagged splinters of the coffin lid, tearing at the dirt, clawing upwards, dragging himself through the hard-packed earth until, finally, his face broke the surface.
He was born again.
Born into death in a brutal parody of the way he had been born into life, the earth yielding him up, his mother in this undead life.
He opened his eyes to see his father looking down at him.
Jerek coughed up a lungful of worms and black dirt.
“Why?” he managed to ask. “Why did you do this?”
“Because you owed me a death. Because I lost a good man but in you I found a better one. Because I saw into your soul. Because you were already a wolf. All of these reasons and none of them. Because I wanted to. You will work it out, in time. Now come, let’s feed. There is a world of flesh and blood out here. Satisfy your hunger, Wolf.”
Vlad gripped Jerek’s wrist and hauled him free of the grave.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Dusk Chorus
ALTDORF
Winter, 2051
Jon Skellan had all but forgotten what it was like to be human.
It had been so long since he last felt anything.
That was what he missed most, the simple sensation of feeling the air in his lungs as he drew a deep breath, of smelling the fresh cut grass and the bread rising in the baker’s oven, the kiss of sunlight on his face.
Sunlight.
He had taken it for granted all his life. The sun rose, the sun set. It was as simple as that. He was sixty-nine years old, though he hadn’t aged a day in decades. Skellan hadn’t felt the sun on his face in forty-one years.
Forty-one years.
He couldn’t remember what it felt like.
The only thing he did feel now was hunger. It was a dark desperate sensation that gnawed away inside him constantly, demanding to be fed and with an appetite that could never truly be sated. He wasn’t the man he had once been; the base lust for revenge that had driven him for so long had faded with the death of Aigner and his siring. The traces of humanity had faded gradually over the years, being subsumed by the fundamental vampiric urge: the need to feed. He had come to enjoy the hunt and the kill. A predatory smile spread across his face. He could taste it, thick in the air:
Blood.
The coming days promised slaughter; a rare feast of blood, old, young, innocent and soured by bitter experience. The city of Altdorf offered a smorgasbord of death fit for the entire vampiric aristocracy of Sylvania. Von Carstein’s malignant kin swelled the undead army for the final glorious assault on the heart of the Empire itself.
Altdorf. The Imperial capital stood on a series of islands amongst the broad mud flats at the confluence of the Reik and Talabec rivers.
The city’s defences were pitifully inadequate. In desperation the fools had dug ditches and planted stakes as though they expected the vampires to rush forward and throw themselves blindly on the sharpened wooden spikes. More old wives’ tales had driven the citizens of the capital to redirect the flow of the Reik itself so it formed a moat of running water. Inside the city walls the riverbeds had run dry and the defenders had taken to using them as expedient footpaths. It was quite ingenious how they had managed it but then, the city was renowned for its learning.
The effort was unnecessary, of course. Superstition turned them all into fools. They prayed blindly to their impotent gods for salvation and turned to legends, needing them to be true. They bent the Reik because they needed to believe doing so gave them immunity from the vampires; that the count and his kin couldn’t cross a river of fast-flowing water.
Holed up in their damp cellars, hidden behind planks and boards that blinded their windows, the Altdorfers deliberately forgot about the zombies, the ghouls, the ghasts, and other r
evenant shades at von Carstein’s disposal. They had little hope. Mothers cradled their babies in their arms, shivering, backs pressed against the cold stone walls, listening for the sound of the vampires coming, trying to summon the courage to kill their own flesh and blood rather than give them over to the monsters to feed off. Desperate sobs haunted the darkest places of the city. This was their doom.
Skellan thrived on it.
War had accelerated the process of decay; what could fail and powder and flake and rust and collapse, did. Nature had already begun the long process of ridding the land of the pestilential hand of man. The first stage was rendering the once-grand buildings to dust returned. Vines and creepers crawled up the sides of the great surrounding walls, undermining the strength of their foundations as they rooted in between the cracks where the stones mated, working them wider and making them weaker.
What nature started they would finish.
Mankind would suffer in its final hours.
Skellan looked up at the sky. Dawn was less than an hour away. He could sense the complacency creeping into the defenders as they manned the battlements. The archers knew that they were safe, for a few hours at least; von Carstein would not launch an attack so close to sunrise.
Safety was an illusion.
He turned to look behind him. Along the mud flats tens of thousands of mindless automata were crowded, piles of bones and rotten flesh gathered in an endless wave of violence waiting to crash against the defenders, and at the lumbering siege engines rolling slowly forward to the front line. Von Carstein’s army appeared endless, stretching as far as the eye could see. He could only imagine the effect it had on the morale of the men facing it, waiting, grimly relieved that at least they had another day of living allotted to them, thinking that they would get to return home to their wives and children one last time before the nightmare was turned loose.
[Von Carstein 01] - Inheritance Page 20
