How wrong they were.
The sky remained black as the heart of night, no sign of dawn’s first blush of light.
Skellan turned to the grizzled old wolf of a man beside him, as (Jerek von Carstein in turn shifted to look at the first of the massive siege engines of fused body and bone lumbering into position. Skellan didn’t entirely trust the count’s pet even if Vlad himself seemed to think the White Wolf had been entirely tamed. There was something about him that rankled, though it was impossible for Skellan to put his finger on what it was. Of course duplicity and deceit were hardly strange bedfellows for any member of the vampiric aristocracy; they were all a bunch of murderous liars, cheats and thieves, Skellan included. Trust was not something to be blindly given.
The first of the huge siege engines lumbered into place, hundreds of von Carstein’s zombies hauling on ropes to drag it forward. The vampires patrolled the lines, whipping the creatures to greater and greater efforts. The infernal machine was like some freshly rendered vision of hell, a confusion of arms and legs and screaming contorted faces fused together in an impossible jumble that towered over the battlefield. Carrion crows circled overhead, drawn by the stench of death that clung to the monstrous trebuchets and catapults.
Mouths moved, still screaming. The constructs were alive, or at least alive in death, animated by dark magic. Their screams echoed the caws of the carrion birds.
Eight machines were locked in place, in range of the high city walls, another eight waiting in reserve.
The sun showed no sign of rising. There would be no dawn to save them.
He wondered when the defenders would realise that in their final hours night had become eternal.
Skellan walked a slow path through the dead to von Carstein’s white pavilion, where the count sat, the wailing blade in his lap, toying with the signet ring on his left hand, rolling it slowly around his long thin finger. Von Carstein looked up, his already pale features emaciated now with the strain of war. It was obvious he needed to feed. Skellan drew one of the count’s aides aside and instructed him to bring fresh blood that he might share with von Carstein before they delivered the ultimatum. The swarthy manservant scurried off.
“Can you taste it?” von Carstein said without looking up from his sword. The blade moaned slightly beneath his fingertips.
“The fear? Oh yes, delicious isn’t it. They are waiting for their precious sun but it isn’t coming.”
“Everyone is afraid of the dark, Skellan. It is a primal fear. It goes back to when we lived in caves and used fire to keep the monsters of the night at bay. We could sit here for a month, in perpetual dark and then walk into Altdorf unmolested because fear will have done the fighting for us. I can feel it already, undermining them. They huddle in the dark places praying death will pass them by.”
“They know nothing,” Skellan said.
The manservant returned with a young girl. Her feet and face were covered in grime and she was trembling uncontrollably.
“Ask her,” von Carstein said. “Ask her what is more frightening, being here with us now, or being locked in the dark waiting to be dragged before us. Well girl, which is it?”
“Yes,” Skellan said, moving in close to stand just behind her, his hand touching the softness of her cheek as silent tears fell. His accent shifted into a much purer Reikspiel, and he began talking to the girl in her own tongue. “Which is it? The wait or the kill? Which frightens you more?”
The girl shook her head.
Skellan tangled his fist in her hair and yanked her head back. “I asked you a question, I expect an answer.”
“W…w… waiting,” she stammered.
“That wasn’t so difficult was it,” Skellan said, almost tenderly. “Now, let’s get you cleaned up shall we? Can’t have you covered in mud like this. Manners cost us nothing.” He gestured for the lurking servant to bring a wet cloth and gently cleaned the grime from the girl’s face, lingering over her tears. Done, he turned her around. “Better, and now you only stink of fear, not mud,” he said approvingly, and sank his teeth into her neck. Even as she screamed and fought against him, until the strength left her limbs and her arms hung slackly at her side. Her eyes rolled up into her head. Skellan broke away, gasping as he swallowed the last mouthful of warm blood and tossed her over to von Carstein to finish off.
“Feed/ Skellan said. “You need your strength.”
The count drained the last of the girl’s blood and threw the corpse to a ghoul who dragged it outside so that it could strip the flesh from the bones and feast out of sight of its master.
Von Carstein stood, sheathing the hungry sword and fastening his cloak about his shoulders. He looked at Skellan and nodded. “It is time.”
With that, he walked out into the eternal night, Skellan two paces behind him.
The Vampire Count moved through the ranks of the dead, eyes fixed on the city walls.
Skellan studied his master as he led the way. For all that he had come to admire von Carstein’s ruthlessness in the pursuit of his vision of a Kingdom of the Dead the man was deeply flawed. He was not the perfect monster. He could be insufferable with his brooding and his philosophising. It was melancholic and introspective and had no place in the armour of a great leader. It was too human; too close to weakness and those other damnable human traits. It was a game to Skellan, and whether the cattle played by the rules or broke them the results were the same, he fed off them. He didn’t care about them. They were just meat. Von Carstein’s attachment to them left him with a cold feeling in his gut. And the woman, Isabella, she was nothing short of insane. Her instability however made her interesting. She understood, in some basic way, the game.
Skellan had heard tales of her habits, bathing in vats of virgin blood to preserve her good looks, drinking thirty and forty maidens in a single night in a glut of ecstasy, painting the walls of the palace with the blood of her victims after an orgy of killing and an hour later complain that she was lonely in the draughty old castle. That she was alone.
Von Carstein stood on a stone butte amid the mud flats and called out: “Who speaks for your city?”
His voice carried easily, his accent thickening even as it amplified. It sounded brutal in Skellan’s ears, lacking any refinement or culture. But that was the way of the new world: the monsters ruled.
There was a bustle of activity on the battlements, the guards obviously unsure how to respond to the situation. Von Carstein waited patiently, as though he had all the time in the world. Skellan knew well enough what they were trying to do. Soon enough they would learn that stalling for time was going to get them nowhere. The sun wasn’t going to save them this time.
After a few minutes, a man wearing a simple white shift with the hammer of Sigmar emblazoned on it appeared. He looked surprisingly tranquil given the massive army of undead spilled out across the mud flats as far as the eye could see. Beside him stood an effeminate dark-haired fop who, even from a distance, looked mortally afraid. Skellan smiled to himself. The old man was a priest but he carried himself like a warrior, the simpering fool by his side, more likely than not, Ludwig von Holzkrug, pretender to the Imperial throne. Skellan ignored him and stared at the priest. He knew who he was. The man had aged in the years since they had last met but he was still recognisable as Wilhelm von Ostwald. The last time Skellan had seen him the man was a fanatical witch hunter. It seemed that the fanatic had found religion. It was a shame it wouldn’t save his immortal soul.
“I, Wilhelm III, Grand Theogonist of Sigmar, speak for the people of Altdorf,” the old priest called down coolly.
“I, Vlad von Carstein, come in faith to make you an offer I urge you to consider and answer for the best of your people.”
“Speak then.”
“The sun will not rise today, the long night has begun. This is my offer to you, serve me in life, or serve me in death. The choice is yours. There will be no mercy if you chose to stand against me.”
The fop looked visibly shaken,
imagining no doubt the unlife of servitude, a mindless zombie at von Carstein’s beck and call. The priest on the other hand was unmoved.
“That is no offer, vampire. That is a death sentence. I will not sell my people into slavery.”
“So be it,” von Carstein said flatly.
He signalled for the siege engines to fire the first volley of flaming skulls into the heart of the Empire.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Curiosity Killed the Thief
ALTDORF
Winter, 2051
One final job, the thief promised himself, and then it’s time to get out.
It was all about portable wealth. Felix Mann was a rich man by anyone’s measure. He had assets: he had invested wisely in property in the Empire’s capital, a society house close to the Imperial palace and the Sigmar monument in Heldenplatz, on the border of the affluent Obereik and the Palast districts. The property was worth an Emperor’s ransom but it couldn’t exactly be packed up on a cart and shipped out to Tilea or Estalia. He could see the great bronze statue of the Empire’s patron deity from the window of his bedroom. He wondered what the Man-God would think about the fate that was befalling his city.
“All good things come to an end,” he said to himself.
Talking to himself was a bad habit that he had developed recently.
There was a ship waiting in Reiksport that would spirit Felix out of the doomed city before it succumbed to the inevitable and fell. It was all down to timing, circumstance and taking that final opportunity. Felix wasn’t a greedy man. He had no need of exceptional wealth; for all the majesty of his house and its finery, the trappings of the rich held no interest for him. Theft was a game where he pitted himself against the wits of his victims, the wealth he walked away with nothing more than a way of keeping score.
The thousands of undead feet shuffling across the mud flats sent vibrations running deep through the heart of the old city, tiny tremors of revulsion where nature shied away from the unnatural touch of the dead. Flaming skulls shrieked intermittently over the high walls, smashing and burning where they landed, spilling vitriolic fire throughout the timber-framed houses, and terror through the citizens. The skulls brought the horrors of the war home to them. Those skulls belonged to people who had stood against the Vampire Count. Tomorrow or the next day it might be their skulls shattering against the walls of the Imperial palace, their brains scooped out to feed von Carstein’s ghouls. Felix found it all quite barbaric.
He walked slowly, thinking, planning. One last job. Portable wealth. He knew full well what he intended, a crime so audacious it would live on in the folklore of Altdorf as long as the city itself. The walls above were thick with archers but the streets themselves were virtually deserted. It wasn’t like that everywhere in the city, of course: in Amtsbezirk the Tower Prison and Mundsen Keep were surrounded by people desperate to liberate their loved ones so that they might flee, or free the vile murderous scum locked up within their walls so that they might be fed to the count’s ghouls as an offering in the belief that it might save the rest of the populace. It was desperate. Hopeless. In Domplatz they stood at the doors of the Tempel Haus begging the handful of Knights of the Fiery Heart to ride out and save them despite the overwhelming odds and the impossibility of their survival or success. In Oberhausen they petitioned at the jet-black building of the Temple of Morr for the god of death to protect their souls.
In Suderich the fish market was long abandoned, the fishmongers with no wares to sell due to looting in the first days of the siege, and in Reikhoch the Ruhstatt Cemetery was the scene of desecration with many of the tombs and crypts of the dead exhumed, the bodies burned and destroyed so that they might not rise up against the living and bring down the city from within.
His wandering took him down narrow alleyways and wider streets to Kaiserplatz on the opposite side of the Imperial palace. The gallows was the only thing left in the vast square. He skirted the edge of the Hofgarde barracks, his feet leading him toward the Imperial mint and counting house. The street was empty so he took the opportunity to really look at the Kaiserliches Kanzleiamt. In this part of Altdorf it was near nigh impossible to tell how the city’s population had swollen with thousands of refugees from the surrounding countryside, the road wardens and the militia had crammed them down in the poorer districts of the city, allowing at least the patina of civilisation to remain intact where there was money to appreciate it.
One last job, he promised himself, his smile wide.
In the distance men were barking like dogs, shouting out orders, screaming as the fires caught and burned fiercely, the echoes of flame haunting the empty streets. Felix wasn’t surprised the majority of Altdorfers had scurried off into hiding like rats; look at the example their spiritual leader had set—the Grand Theogonist had disappeared into the bowels of the huge Sigmarite cathedral three days ago, though differentiating between day and night had become a thing of the past. Night was eternal. Felix had. heard fools blathering about how von Carstein had the power to prevent the sun from rising which was patently absurd but the idiots believed what they saw, and what they saw was night’s black heart.
The counting house was a three-tiered masterpiece of stone and wood, as secure as any building ever built. It reminded Felix of a mastiff: squat, determined, stubborn, unbreakable, like some immensely powerful beast that would take every ounce of his nous to tame, but that was what made the game fun. Anything else would have been boring.
With all eyes turned outwards to the Vampire Count’s undead on the mud flats the watch patrols had become lax.
A flash of fire whistled overhead, the skull crashing into one of the high towers of the Imperial barracks and showering flame. The fire clung to the stone but it burned itself out quickly. In that moment though the flaming skull was every bit as brilliant as a sun, throwing its light over Kaiserplatz. Felix stood stock still, trapped in its red glare, waiting for a cry that never came. It was amazing how a few days could undo the discipline of years.
More blazing skulls arced high over his head, showering sparks and trailing tails of fire as they lit the night. Despite the horror of what was actually happening there was a curious beauty about the fire set against the black sky.
It was only a matter of time before the dead scaled the city walls and the desperate efforts of the archers and swordsmen along the battlements wouldn’t be enough to repel them. Everyone in Altdorf knew it but few were willing to accept it, hence the near anarchy in some parts of the city with shops being looted and stalls stripped of any kind of food that might help some hidden family last another day or two of the siege. It was as though the Vampire Count was deliberately stripping them of their humanity, turning them into rats, scavengers.
The speed with which so called civilised people sacrificed the rule of law and order was dizzying. Thousands turned to Sigmar and the other gods for deliverance but an equal number turned to crime, helping themselves at the cost of others. For an ordinary decent thief like Felix, for whom there was honour and a certain panache to their criminality, this descent of mankind into the pits of degradation and despair was sickening. He wanted to shake people and force them to see that their selfishness was only accelerating von Carstein’s victory.
Signs of the dead were everywhere he looked. Von Carstein was playing with them, like a cat playing with a rat before feeding time. Felix knew the stories of how Middenheim had fallen to the wraiths, and how the Ottilia’s army had been swept away by the zombie tide. There was no magic that made Altdorf immune. Cities could fall. Empires could fall.
He needed to get out before the walls came crumbling down and the dead flooded the cramped streets. The instincts of civilisation wouldn’t stand up to more than a few hours of that heinous horror before it succumbed to the dark side of its own nature. He wasn’t a fighter. He lived by his wits, by the sharpness of his tongue, not his sword. He was a rogue.
Felix turned his attention back to the counting house. He wasn’t intereste
d in money—a vast sum of coins would be impossible to ship out in a hurry. What he wanted was gems, pure cut and uncut pieces of flawless quality: a fortune that could be carried in his pocket. The value of precious stones was universal.
The guardhouse outside the courtyard was empty where ordinarily there would have been five skilled swordsmen patrolling the courtyard alone.
Felix walked casually across the street, resisting the urge to look to the right and left first. The secret was in making it look as though he had every right to be there. He peered in through the glass of the guardhouse window. The fire in the hearth had burned out and there was no sign that the guards had been there for days. Probably manning the walls, Felix reasoned, liking the way his train of thought was leading him. It was logical of course that with such a visible threat on the other side of the wall few eyes would be turned inwards.
He walked a slow circuit around the counting house; looking for points of ingress and egress. “There are more ways to skin a dead cat,” Felix said to himself, rounding the corner back into Kaiserplatz. A good thief always knew all the options available to him, and didn’t merely rely on the front and back doors, or even first or second floor windows. He craned his neck to measure the distance between rooftops in various places, several of which were probably jumpable. People tended to forget about rooftops when planning the security of their houses. Of course, given the heavy manning of the battlements, entry via the roof was not the most secluded of the options available to him. He had no wish to be seen by some distracted guard who just happened to turn to look back longingly at his home, or needed spiritual strength so turned to the spires of Altdorf’s cathedral.
There were too many opportunities for things to go wrong for his liking so he turned his eyes to lower, less overlooked ledges and the darker crannies where the building butted up against others.
[Von Carstein 01] - Inheritance Page 21
