[Von Carstein 01] - Inheritance

by Steven Savile - (ebook by Undead)

  Felix smiled at the veteran’s logic. What you don’t see doesn’t hurt you, he added silently, willing the boy to let it drop.

  The boy mumbled something that he couldn’t make out and then started to wander off. The others followed. Felix watched them leave and didn’t move until they were out of sight. He rose slowly into a tight crouch, scanning the line of white pavilions to make certain no one was watching. Satisfied, he crept along the rim of the riverbank.

  He knew what he had to do. It was suicide, he knew, but the priest knew how to play his ego. Not for the first time that night he cursed his stupidity. The Grand Theogonist was taking a massive gamble, but if it worked… On the humiliating walk down through the counting house the priest talked about an army being like an animal.

  And what do you do to a wild animal? You cut its head off, Felix thought, the voice in his head sounding very much like the priest’s.

  He didn’t have much of a plan beyond sneaking in to the Vampire Count’s tent, taking the ring and running for his life. Felix had already reconciled himself to the fact that he was unlikely to reach the third step of the plan.

  In a way, that didn’t matter.

  The first few fat drops of rain fell. In five minutes it was pouring from the heavens. The moon was a thin silver sliver in the cloudy sky.

  He counted forty-three fires scattered across the mud flats, and guessed there were a dozen men per fire out there warming themselves on the flames. These were the living contingent. About five hundred men, give or take. He didn’t want to think about the rest of the Vampire Count’s malignant army.

  He waited, giving them time to get tired.

  Tired men made mistakes.

  He closed his eyes and pictured himself walking among them. Cutting their throats while they slept. The image wrapped a chill around his heart not because it was murder but because it was useless. Dead or alive they served the count.

  Dead or alive.

  The camp had been quiet for more than an hour, soldiers lying in their bedrolls around the dwindling fires.

  Felix laid his crossbow in the tall grass and rested the quiver with his extra bolts in it across the wooden shaft. He wouldn’t need it where he was going. He took first one dagger and then the other from his boot sheaths and tested their edge with his thumb. Satisfied, he kissed both blades and slipped them back into their sheaths and rose into a crouch, creeping forward a dozen paces through the litter of corpses, his eyes on the nearest fire.

  Carrion birds picked at the dead.

  He moved slowly. His heart hammered as he lowered himself to the ground again and scanned the circle of fires. It was so loud in his ears it was a wonder von Carstein’s soldiers didn’t hear it. He didn’t move a muscle. The soldiers there were oblivious to his presence. Some slept, others talked, their conversations muted. He couldn’t make out what they were saying but as long as no one was yelling and pointing in his direction they could say whatever the hell they wanted for all he cared.

  He knew what he had to do even though it revolted him. He looked around for some particularly wretched corpse, ripped his clothes and smeared himself in its blood and rotting flesh until he looked like one of the count’s disgusting flesh-eating ghouls.

  The darkness was his strongest ally. He clung to it as he crossed the no-man’s land between the dry river and the officers’ pavilion. To his left, someone moved, rolling over in his bedroll. Felix stood still.

  “What you doin’?” the soldier grumbled sleepily.

  “Takin’ a leak, man,” Felix muttered, hoping he sounded aggrieved enough to mask the sudden swell of fear he felt rising.

  “Well, hurry up about, would ya, some of us are tryin’ to get some shut-eye. Next time drain the snake before ya hit the hay.”

  He waited. Sweat ran down into the palms of his clenched fists. He felt so exposed and vulnerable his skin itched. He looked up into the rain and savoured the feel of it on his face. The kiss of the rain was seductive. He could have stayed there savouring the sensation of it running down his face because he knew it could so easily be the last pleasant sensation he ever felt.

  Felix started to move, quietly. The soldiers slept on.

  Von Carstein’s pavilion was in the centre of the camp, ringed by smaller tents, but none of them were close enough fall into the pavilion’s shadow.

  A slow grin spread across Felix’s face when he saw that there was no one guarding the entrance and the oil light in front of the opening had been left to burn low enough that even the peripheral shadows remained untouched. The rain masked the sound of his footsteps. Instinct told him to be wary. It was too easy. This time he listened to it. The spot of skin between his shoulder blades prickled. It was almost as though von Carstein’s men were being deliberately sloppy, letting the lights burn low so that the unguarded flaps of the count’s pavilion were nothing more than the bait on a trap set to lure him out into the open and into their steel jaws.

  He stopped dead in his tracks.

  The figure of a tall, thin man stepped out from between two of the pavilions. The man was hooded but Felix recognised him from the way he moved. It was the stranger from the alleyway; the one who had told the priest about the ring’s supposed powers.

  The priest had promised help. Felix understood the seemingly lax defences around the count’s tent now. The stranger had had a hand in it, he was sure.

  The stranger nodded, but said nothing before he strode away into the heart of the darkness beyond the flickering lanterns.

  The stranger moved with grace, barely making a sound, barely even disturbing the air with his passage. It was, Felix knew, unnatural.

  A priest and a vampire, strange bedfellows indeed, Felix thought, gliding between the canvas walls of two pavilions. He could hear the muted sounds of conversation coming from inside. Rain drummed on the canvas. He walked slowly toward the count’s pavilion, waiting for the challenge that never came. He looked over his shoulder, towards the dark shadows of the spires of Altdorf, and slipped through the opening into the tent.

  It was darker inside without the lantern to illuminate anything beyond the vaguest of outlines. Felix drew the tent flap closed behind him again. The soft regular sound of his breathing filled the darkness.

  He couldn’t allow himself to think about what he was doing or he wouldn’t be able to do it.

  Reaching out, Felix felt his way through the darkness toward the coffins at the rear of the tent. There were two: one had to be the count’s, the other his wife’s.

  The air had a strange tang to it. Some kind of perfumed wood had been burned in the makeshift hearth and the residue still clung to the air.

  Felix knelt beside the first coffin as though in prayer. It was considerably larger than the other, decorated with black iron clasps that were open. Steeling himself against the sudden swell of fear, Felix eased back the coffin lid.

  The rain was loud on the roof of the tent.

  He looked down at the dead man in the coffin. In the flickering light he appeared surprisingly young. Lush dark hair spilled loosely around his shoulders. He was handsome, his smooth, almost aquiline features giving no hint of the depravity that had replaced his soul.

  The Vampire Count’s hands were folded across his chest. He wore an extravagant signet ring on his right hand, with a garish gem set amid what looked like wings, the tips studded with precious stones. It was ostentatious. On his left hand the count wore a dull band of what looked like black iron.

  Felix didn’t dare move.

  He stared at the ornate ring with its dark gemstone setting for a full five minutes, barely sparing a second glance for the plain iron ring, before he reached into the coffin and began to prize the signet ring off the count’s cold dead flesh.

  Von Carstein didn’t stir.

  Felix weighed the ring in his hand. It was undoubtedly worth an Emperor’s ransom but… something about it nagged at the back of his mind. It didn’t make sense. Surely the priest wasn’t thinking of collecting
treasures—and the best grift is the one you don’t see. Felix smiled to himself and pried the plain black iron ring from the count’s other hand. He laid signet ring on the vampire’s chest.

  Felix caught himself in the process of slipping the ring onto his index finger. “Stupid,” he muttered, realising he hadn’t brought a pouch or purse to carry the stolen trinket. If it was magic who knew what kind of damage wearing it could do? He had sudden flashes of being paralyzed and being held helpless in von Carstein’s pavilion until the count rose.

  He closed his fist about the ring and backed cautiously out of the pavilion.

  He stared at the coffin, expecting the vampire to come raging out of it at any second, fear hammering against his breastbone as he crept toward the tent flaps, conjuring a mass of putrefied zombies to swarm over him as he slipped out of the tent into the everlasting night, but, mercifully, the dead didn’t rise.

  He ran for his life.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Out of the Darkness, Rising

  ALTDORF

  Winter, 2051

  It was a night for ghosts, ghouls and wraiths, for zombies, ghasts and wights.

  It was a night for the dead.

  The theft of his ring had unleashed von Carstein’s wrath. The Vampire Count stood on mud flats before Altdorf, gripped by a feverish, wild rage. His fury had summoned a blizzard, the elements buckling beneath his black madness.

  The rain turned to snow, the snow fell thick and fast without settling on the sodden ground. Jon Skellan and Jerek von Carstein stood beside the count as he raged against the heavens and threatened to tear down the walls of Altdorf with his bare hands. Neither had ever seen the count so utterly devoid of reason or control. It was truly frightening. Von Carstein stood in the centre of the mud flats, his hands raised and head thrown back, shrieking as the wind and snow buffeted him. It was as though his furious incantation drew the storm to him.

  Lightning appeared to dance across the tips of the Vampire Count’s fingers before it clawed its way back up into the heavens, piercing the dark heart of the night with its ribbons of jagged blue.

  Thunder cracked.

  The ground beneath their feet and all around them rippled with unnatural life. Small tremors and their aftershocks ran in concentric circles out from von Carstein’s feet as the summoning took shape. Drawing strength from nature and all that grew around him, Vlad von Carstein channelled his raw anger into the pattern being formed by his fingers, feeding it to the fallen buried beneath the snow and dirt.

  “RISE!” he shrieked. “RISE!”

  All around them the dead were rising.

  The trees along the riverbank nearest Skellan had already begun to wither, the needles of the evergreens tinged brown as the life was leached out of them to feed the count’s black magic.

  The dead lurched and staggered to their feet, even as the ground beneath them buckled and trembled with revulsion. Ghouls cried out in anguish. Wights shrieked as they wound themselves around the rising corpses and tore off into the night sky.

  Von Carstein’s fury was terrifying.

  A moment later the first dead fingers breached the wet surface of the mud flats, clawing at the air for the life that had already been taken from them once.

  “Here they come,” Skellan said unnecessarily. His awe at von Carstein’s strength resonated in his voice. That the Vampire Count could draw the long dead of Altdorf out from beneath the damned city and onto the plains was incredible. Even fuelled by von Carstein’s wrath it was an agonizingly slow process. Bone by bone the dead crawled out of their graves, impelled by von Carstein’s ranting spell. At first they came out of the earth one or two at a time, but then they clawed their way free of the dirt in their tens and twenties, all the poor souls who had fallen on the fields before the greatest city of the Empire. Friend or foe, it no longer mattered as they were born again into von Carstein’s army.

  And they weren’t all whole.

  Some of the dead rose in pieces, an arm clawing the surface, torso and head dragged up behind it, without legs to support itself where the rot of decay had eaten through it. More and more body parts rose, drawn by von Carstein’s hateful summons.

  The snow swirled around the mud flats, whipped around by the bluster of the wind. Gradually the snow turned to hail. Hard pellets pelted the dead as they rose.

  The Vampire Count’s face was taut, his lips moving as though with a purpose of their own, reciting over and over again a litany of pain and anguish as he drew the dead from the dirt.

  When he was done close to five thousand dead had risen to swell the ranks of his pestilential force, looking once more with amazement upon the walls of their beloved city. Their bodies were in various states of decay, from the stripped and yellowed bones of the long dead to the rotted flesh of the newly deceased. Von Carstein screamed at the heavens, his voice ringing out the death of a thousand seasons as it duelled another thunderclap.

  “Look upon the fall of mankind! See death before your walls. The dead rise. The dead reclaim what once was theirs. Look around you. Behold the Kingdom of the Dead! Behold. Behold! Tremble before its majesty. Fear its might. Fall to your knees. The dead rise and the living fall!”

  When his gaze came down, Skellan saw Vlad’s eyes were glazed with a wild staring madness.

  “The dead are crawling out of their graves, even Morr can’t hold them back,” Jerek seethed. “Ten thousand today, another ten thousand tomorrow? Next week? A world full of dead men and cattle.”

  “I know,” Skellan said, savouring the delicious thought. “The Kingdom of the Dead. Who could possibly stand against it?”

  Von Carstein pointed his finger at the wall and the bone siege engines rolled forward. The dead screamed and yelled and shrieked and wailed, and threw themselves at the huge stone wall. Others clung to the towers, riding them as they rolled remorselessly toward the high walls, sixty feet high, twenty feet wide, ballistae, catapults, and ladders. Suddenly von Carstein was the calm amongst the storm.

  Frightened archers fired wild arrows from the battlements.

  Skellan watched it all in mute admiration, though at times it was difficult to see through the driving hail.

  Along the walls the defenders set up notched poles to help repel the siege ladders while others lined up hundreds of clay jars filled with oil as soul-searing screams rent the darkness.

  Skellan’s mind was icy calm as he took it all in. He let von Carstein waste his energies with fury. Wrath, vengeance, they were all human emotions. Surely the Vampire Count understood that? It was nothing more than pride and arrogance.

  The siege engines lumbered toward the walls, straddling the mud flats like something out of myth, colossal giants of flesh fused with living bone. Fires burned at their tops, casting ghastly shadows down the lengths of the infernal machines. The dead clustered around them, heaving them relentlessly toward the high walls.

  The city would fall, Skellan knew. It had no choice.

  That was the apocalyptic reality of the Risen Dead. Nothing would ever be the same again. The skeletal arms of the onagers cranked back and released scores of flaming and rotting skulls, catapulting them high over the walls. The second volley was different. The buckets of the catapults were loaded with huge chunks of granite, basalt and other hard stones that the dead had scavenged from the land around Altdorf.

  The archers on the walls looked on in frozen horror as the sky filled with deadly stone rain that hammered down all around them, shattering the stones, fracturing the walls of buildings and caving in slates and roof tiles as though they were tissue paper. The third volley was, again, fire. The flaming skulls whistled as they swooped through the air. This time, they burned where they hit, the fires catching inside buildings as well as outside. The fourth volley was stone.

  The boulders crashed into the battlements and arced over the walls in a monstrous rain of rock and debris.

  The noise was horrific.

  But the silence that followed it was twi
ce as terrifying as the carnage revealed itself from beneath the clouds of smoke and dust the bombardment had caused. Fifteen archers and another thirty pikemen died beneath the crushing weight of the gate tower as it collapsed beneath the onslaught of huge granite boulders. Moments later their broken and battered bodies were jerking around awkwardly trying to stand on shattered bones as they answered von Carstein’s summons to undeath. With the enemy suddenly risen within their midst the defenders along the wall fought for their lives as their brothers in arms turned on them in death. Silver blades flashed in the firelight as they threw themselves at friends they had been talking to only moments before. Von Carstein’s curse was sick. It shattered the morale of the defenders to see their friends fall only to rise again as puppets of the beast. There was no safe place. Death could come from any side, in any guise.

  Skellan couldn’t begin to wonder what they were thinking as they threw the broken corpses over the crenulated wall as though they were garbage.

  Still the pile of broken bones writhed at the foot of the city wall, desperate to rejoin the fighting.

  The walls withstood the first wave of horror.

  For five hours the deadly rain of stone and fire continued, smashing the bodies of the defenders to bloody wrecks, powdering huge segments of the city walls, completely obliterating the spires of three temples and setting light to hundreds of houses. It was merciless. The hail ceased but it was still bitterly cold out there. Stretcher-bearers had two grisly jobs, to tend to the wounded and hack up and burn the dead. They couldn’t allow sentimentality to get in the way. They built massive funeral pyres in the squares across the city, dragging the fallen into the flames before they could turn on them and attack the defenders on the wall from behind.

  The city reeked of burnt flesh.

  Skellan breathed deeply of the smell.