Lunatic rage flared in the count’s dead eyes. He held up his right hand contemptuously, showing the priest the ornate signet ring on his middle finger.
“Your man failed, priest.”
The priest raised his head high, catching the first fresh flakes of white as the snow returned, whirling in the air. Life, hope, drained from him. Mann had failed. They were doomed, all of them.
Von Carstein hit him.
He felt as if he had been slammed face first into a stone wall. A pang of fear went through him, rising up from his gut to his throat, a desperate urge to vomit. Terror dried his mouth, seized his body. Cold specks of snow kissed his face, melted and slid down his neck and beneath his armour.
The darkness closed around him.
He was an old man, his strength slowly fading with each blow given and received, whereas his enemy was immortal, strengthened by the blood and death all around him. He knew deep down in his bones his death was inevitable. They traded blows, hard blows. Fits of coughing shook him. The vampire was merciless, driving his advantage home. His blade whipped out again and again, nicking the priest, shallow cuts that stung more than they bled. Two cuts were bad though, slicing deep into his upper left arm and low on his left side. Both bled profusely, yet still he faced von Carstein, defying him with sheer bloody determination.
He winced at another stabbing pain as the wailing blade slammed into his left side, forcing the rings of his mail into the deep cut. The pain was incredible. His vision blacked out for a heartbeat, his head filled with the sheer agony of the blow. He staggered but refused to buckle. The priest lifted his head up.
“Come on, vampire. Is this it? Is this the might of Vlad von Carstein? Stealer of souls, king of the dead?” He shook his head. “I am an old man. I haven’t lifted a weapon in thirty years. You are nothing, vampire. Nothing. It ends here.”
The fighting raged on around the two combatants, death a constant companion on the battlements and the streets below. Screams of anger and pain met the clash of steel and the insidious rasp of fire.
He was dying. He was bleeding out his strength ounce by red ounce.
“You’re a fool, priest, like all of your kind. You talk of good, of evil,” von Carstein said, advancing once more. His eyes blazed with naked savagery. There is no good, there is no evil. I have passed beyond death, priest. Understand that, there is nothing. I have been there. I have seen the lie of your promised land. My body died a long time ago, far, far away from here, yet here I am. Living. There are things—powers, priest, powers—so far removed from your philosophy they would dwarf your mind, things so old death no longer touches them. Death no longer weakens them. Look at yourself, priest, and then look at me. You can feel it in you, can’t you? You can feel it creeping through your limbs, from the cuts in your side and your arm reaching down through the tiring flesh into your soul. Into you. Death. It’s in your eyes.”
A huge boulder smashed into the wall-walk; the floor didn’t split but it shivered beneath his feet and the existing cracks began to tear themselves apart under the strain.
The priest ignored the rumbling. He did not look down. He only had eyes for the vampire.
“Cling to your half-life, fiend. Live in an eternal dark, for all the good it will do you. You have failed. Here, this is where it ends. Look around you. Altdorf stands defiant. Through the smoke and the dust the people are already beginning the process of healing. They go on living, it is what people do.”
“They go on dying,” von Carstein rasped, slicing a cut deep into the priest’s right arm. The steel chain linked rings splintered and broke, gouging deep into his flesh.
He bit back on the pain.
With an immense effort he hefted his huge axe. He could barely see though the veil of pain the vampire’s cuts had pulled down over his eyes.
“You can burn us and bleed us, von Carstein, but you won’t crush us. Cut me down, another will rise up in my stead. You have failed, vampire. An old man and some brave-hearted boys have beaten you.”
“Hardly, fool. You can barely stand, let alone fight on. You’re done. It’s over… but,” the Vampire Count added, almost as an afterthought, “you would make a good vampire, priest. I have never taken a priest.”
The priest tilted his neck, exposing the hard pulse of his jugular. His hands clenched around the shaft of the axe. He straightened his head up and snorted. “I thought not.”
Wilhelm III, Grand Theogonist, drew himself erect. It took all of his will and strength not to cry out against the biting pain of his wounds. His head swam. He didn’t have long left and he knew it.
Von Carstein cut him again, a slash that sliced through his ear and buried itself deep in his shoulder.
He staggered a step forward, barely keeping his feet under him. The pain was unbearable. His vision misted momentarily, then cleared, and he saw with stunning clarity what he had to do.
Tears stung his cheeks.
Von Carstein rammed his sword into the priest’s left shoulder; the pain of withdrawal as the vampire wrenched the wailing blade out of his flesh was blinding. A second thrust plunged into his chest, between his ribs, and into his lung. He had felt nothing like it in his life. He was dead, living on borrowed seconds, a final gift from Sig-mar. He knew what he had to do. The axe weighed heavily in his hands. He dropped it.
Von Carstein laughed, a bitter mocking sound.
“It seems you were wrong, priest, when you promised me I would die here. This is my city now. Mine, priest! It is you who has failed, you sanctimonious fool. Look at you. Look at you! You are a wreck of a human being. You shame your god do you know that? You shame your god.”
The priest swallowed the pain even as it consumed him. He looked at his lifeblood leaking out of him. There was nothing left. Nothing. He could barely raise his head to face the monster.
Instead of wasting his life on words the priest screamed, embracing the rawness of it, using the blistering pain to drive him on, and in that scream he became like an animal, primal and deadly.
He threw himself at the Vampire Count, his body slamming into von Carstein, his staggering momentum carrying them both back into the bracing wall of the machicolations.
They hung there for a heartbeat, balanced precariously between the wall-walk and thin air, von Carstein using every ounce of his incredible strength to push back against the priest but even as it looked as though the priest’s last desperate lunge would end in futility his foot stumbled into a deep fissure in the stone floor. With the full weight of the priest pressing down on him von Carstein couldn’t recover his balance. He was helpless. The priest had his arms pinned. He couldn’t even reach out to grab hold of something. The priest’s grip was iron.
The priest couldn’t make out more than a blurred outline of black where von Carstein was trapped in front of him.
With a massive grunt and the very last ounce of his strength, the priest pushed. The vampire strained, struggling to keep his footing but there was nothing he could do. In desperation the priest found the strength to take them both off the battlements.
They fell, locked together in a deadly embrace.
Neither screamed, even as their bodies were broken by the fall. The arc of their descent carried them out into the closest of the shallow ditches, behind the fast flowing moat of the Reik.
The ditches lined with sharpened stakes.
The stake pierced von Carstein’s back, bursting out of his chest even as it sank into the priest’s. The vampire’s eyes flared open in shock even as the weight of the priest drove him deeper onto the spike.
A sound like thunder cracked through the world. He felt it bone-deep.
The vampire gagged, blood leaking out of his mouth as he tried to speak. The priest couldn’t make out a word. It didn’t matter. The blood told him all he needed to know. He could walk the path of souls now to Sigmar’s side.
“I did not fail you…” And though no one heard him, it didn’t matter.
There was no pain, onl
y blessed relief.
He bowed his head and let his life go.
The first chink of sunlight broke through the black sky, the ray of light a column of gold on the black of the battlefield.
They died there, trapped together in the sun, vampire and holy man.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Streets of Ash and Hope
ALTDORF
Winter, 2051
Cities, unlike men, are immortal.
A scholar had said that. Felix couldn’t remember whom—Reitzeiger perhaps? He agreed with the sentiments completely. Where flesh and blood failed stone stood firm, and when bricks and mortar failed, well it could always be rebuilt surpassing its former glory. That was how cities flourished. They healed themselves and in doing so they rose like phoenixes from the ashes, resplendent. Those early dark days would slip from the memory as moments of beauty and ingenuity replaced the ruins.
Over the last few days, with the rebirth of the sun, Altdorf had begun the long painful process of survival. Those left behind had said their goodbyes to loved ones fallen defending their right to freedom; normal men who neither wanted nor asked to fight were buried alongside soldiers who had given their lives willingly. That was the cost of survival. Innocent blood.
It weighed heavy on the populace.
An innocence had died among the people of the city. Safety, the most basic of liberties, had been stripped from them. They no longer took the sanctity of their homes for granted. This was a double-edged sword. Good, because it meant they suddenly appreciated what they had. Bad, because the lesson it taught was that anything good could be taken away without a moment’s thought. It heightened the grief the city felt. Buildings could be rebuilt, fortified. People would survive, but that sense of comfort, of being protected once the door closed at night, that took a long time to recover. Some would never get over it.
The city was in ruins. It would be a long time before the spires of Altdorf commanded the majesty they once had; broken slates exposed the burnt timbers and gaping holes where homes had stood. The architects of necessity and desire would fix that of course, roofs and walls were only stone, but the wounds betrayed the true hurt Altdorf had suffered. It wasn’t about bricks and mortar, it was about children growing up orphans, about wives kneeling at grave markers unable to think beyond what might have been, about mothers wondering if they had enough love, enough strength, enough hope to face the world each day. It was about people.
Felix Mann walked through the ruined streets, listening to the dawn chorus breaking out all over the city.
This was his home. These were his people.
Despite the fact that days ago he had been ready to abandon them to their lot he hurt with them. In the last few days he had become a part of this great city, and soon he would be leaving it never to return. That was his loss to bear. For the first time, emerging from the vampire’s tent carrying the iron ring, he had found a sense of belonging, and now he was turning his back on it.
He looked up at the windows of his house. He couldn’t go home. That was the crux of it. Things had changed. He couldn’t go home. He found himself clutching von Carstein’s ring all the harder, pressing it into his palm. Was it truly possible that a trinket had kept the vampire alive?
The talk on the streets, of course, was far more miraculous. The Grand Theogonist’s holiness and the grace of Sigmar, they said, had finally undone the monster. They were far more willing to believe the ridiculous than they were to accept the mundane.
Felix loved that about people.
The bigger the lie the happier they were to embrace it. Already they spoke of Wilhelm III with the reverential tones normally reserved for a saint or a martyr. Felix was sure the old man would have approved; it was the icing on the cake as far as his grift was concerned. And, surprising himself, Felix didn’t begrudge the holy man in the slightest. The people of Altdorf needed heroes now and magic or not, that was exactly what the priest was, an honest to gods hero.
He walked away from his apartment. He knew where he was going: the Sigmarite cathedral. This morning it felt as though every street led there. The press of people was claustrophobic compared with the emptiness the last time he had walked these self-same streets. Even the smallest avenues were teeming with life.
Felix looked around as he walked, bumping between people. Their relief was palpable. They were talking. Laughing. A few days ago the thought of laughter ever ringing out again in Kaiserplatz had been inconceivable. But there it was. People survived. Adapted. Found joy in the smallest of things.
Still, it would be a long time before anything even remotely resembling normality returned.
Indeed, so heavy were the losses to the men of Altdorf that even with Vlad himself dead, and more than half of his damned vampires vanquished, the rest were able to flee without serious pursuit. It was difficult to watch the enemy flee without giving chase but to do so in their condition was suicide. Reluctantly, the heroes of Altdorf had manned the walls, jeering as their enemy fled the light.
Felix walked slowly, not in a hurry to get to where he was going. He would say his own quiet goodbye after the pomp and circumstance of the state funeral. It was a matter of practicality. He had a price to collect from the lector before he headed north to Reiksport and took the boat. He wondered if it would be difficult to disappear and decided it probably wouldn’t. He knew the lies he needed to say for people to accept him as someone else; he had been lying most of his life. He would miss the city though, and the house, but both were just stones that could be rebuilt elsewhere. It was time to start thinking about a different kind of life: a scholar’s. Perhaps. He could picture himself locked away in dusty libraries growing old surrounded by even older books.
Then again, he was a thief, and there was a reason for the adage once a thief, always a thief.
No matter what he called himself he knew in his heart he would still be Felix Mann, thief, even though he wouldn’t be able to take credit for the greatest job of his career. It didn’t matter. He knew and he would take the secret to the grave with him.
It was his second funeral in as many days, though very different to yesterday’s, a quiet affair within the walls of the cathedral grounds that he wasn’t actually invited to, when the lector had interred von Carstein. Curiosity had Felix taking up residency among the rooftops where he had a good view of the cemetery grounds. The creature’s grave had been dug beneath the holy ground they intended to use for Wilhelm, a last defence against the beast’s rising.
The lector had decapitated von Carstein’s corpse, taking the head and scooping the grey matter and soft tissue out to burn, and buried the rest of the head in an unmarked grave, a white rose in its mouth, his eyes replaced by cloves of garlic.
There were only four people at the vampire’s burial, Mann, the lector, Ludwig the Pretender and lastly, Reynard Grimm, the new captain of the Altdorf guard. The body was buried face down, the arms bound behind its back with wire, kneecaps shattered, von Carstein’s black heart cut out of his chest and burned along with his brain. He was not coming back. Not this time.
They levelled the inside of his grave and prepared it to receive Wilhelm’s body. The Holy Father would serve one last duty for Sigmar, as eternal guardian watching over the Vampire Count even in death.
Felix had expected tears but the outpouring of grief as he entered Domplatz was unlike anything he had ever witnessed. Mourners lined the streets. They sobbed hysterically, a babble of voices choked between gulps and hiccoughs:
“He saved us.”
“Without him we’d be living in the dark.”
“You have to believe… You have to… He was sent by Sigmar to save us.”
“The way he looked at you, he saw into your soul.”
“He was special. There will never be another man like him.”
“He wasn’t a man at all, I tell you, he was Sigmar himself.”
“He shone out as a beacon against the dark times!”
“He was the light
of our lives!”
“He was our saviour.”
And to them it was all true, to degrees. It didn’t surprise Felix to hear talk of the Grand Theogonist’s sainthood. It was the perfect end cap to the greatest grift of all time. He had sold a miracle to the entire world and they bought it.
Some had wrapped themselves in flags of Altdorf and banners of Sigmar, others sat quietly on the cobbles weeping openly as though they had just lost their best friend. Felix pushed between them, working his way toward the side door into the cathedral. He wouldn’t be going in through the gates.
A young novitiate answered his knocking, obviously expecting the thief, nodded and ushered him inside.
“The lector is in the vaults, dealing with the… ah… prisoner. Captain Grimm has yet to return from the field with his finds from the vampire’s pavilion. Would you care for a drink while you wait? The interment will be a few hours, no doubt. You could of course avail yourself of the chapel.”
The novitiate scurried away down the cold corridor gesturing for Felix to follow. The cathedral was surprisingly simple, lacking in ostentation. It had none of the gilt-edges or plush velvets he expected from the priesthood. It was simple, bare, even austere. It was a place for worship without the trappings of the material world. Felix liked it. It reflected well on the personality of the Grand Theogonist. It was unassuming. Down to earth. Of course the public face of the cathedral was anything but, but back here, out of sight of the common man, the hand of Wilhelm III was most noticeable.
“He was a good man,” Felix said to the novitiate’s back.
“He was. He listened, you know. He cared. He truly cared.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.” And he was.
“We do not mourn his passing, we celebrate the time we shared with him.”
He led Felix to a small chamber, barely large enough for it to be considered a room at all. There was a hard wooden chair, a small table and a jug of water. Felix couldn’t help but smile to himself; the young man had led him to what looked like a penitent’s cell.
[Von Carstein 01] - Inheritance Page 26
