[Von Carstein 01] - Inheritance

by Steven Savile - (ebook by Undead)

  “Wait here.” With that he left Felix alone.

  With time on his hands to think, the thief was forced to do just that.

  The last few days had been a strain. He had learned some things about himself he wasn’t entirely comfortable knowing.

  He heard footsteps a while later, and the flickering light of a candle lit the corridor outside the small room. A man appeared in the doorway, his long shadow reaching deep into the room. He was dressed in the formal robes of the clergy, and did not look pleased to have been dragged away from whatever it was he had been doing.

  “Yes?”

  The curtness put Felix off balance slightly. He had expected to come, be paid and leave. Business was business, after all.

  “I’ve come for my price.”

  “What are you blathering on about, man?”

  “My pardon and the money I was promised. I’ve come to collect.”

  “Is this some kind of joke?”

  “Hardly. I was… ah… hired… by the Grand Theogonist to do a job for him. I held up my side of the bargain, and now I want you to hold up yours.”

  “No such bargains were made, I assure you. Our most benevolent brother did not treat with thieves.”

  “No, he walked with hand in hand with Sigmar. Yes, yes, very well, I am scum. I know that. Now give me my money, priest, a deal is a deal. Where’s the lector?”

  “He’s detained currently, now, I suggest it is time for you to leave. Whatever business you believe you had with our beloved holy father, I assure you does not continue with this office today. Good day.”

  Felix bristled. He stood, the wooden chair grating back on its legs as he pushed it out of the way. “I don’t think so, priest. A deal is a deal and I intend to collect, with your blessing our without. You do know who I am, don’t you?” His lips twisted into a grim parody of a smile.

  “I know who you are and I know that you will be leaving here empty-handed.”

  He grabbed the priest, throwing him up against the wall. His fists bunched in the priest’s cassock, pressing up hard into the man’s Adam’s apple. The man gagged, his arms flapping ineffectually at Felix’s, unable to break the thief s grip.

  “I don’t make a habit of hurting priests but in your case I’m willing to make an exception. Now, where’s the lector?”

  “In the vaults,” the priest gasped. “With the captain.”

  “Take me to them.”

  “No.”

  “I said take me to them. I am not in the habit of asking twice.”

  “I can’t,” the priest pleaded.

  “Don’t make me hurt you, man.”

  “I can’t.”

  Felix hit him, once, hard, driving a fist into his gut. The priest doubled up in pain. Felix slammed him up against the wall again. “I could lie and tell you that hurt me almost as much as it hurt you but it didn’t. Actually it felt pretty good. Now, we’ll try this one last time, priest, take me to them.”

  The man’s head came up defiantly. “They are in the vaults with the prisoner, you can wait or you can leave.” Felix raised his fist again. “They are not to be disturbed. Hit me again, my answer will be the same no matter how many times you do so.”

  Disgusted, he pushed the priest out of his way and walked out of the room.

  “Where are you going?” the priest shouted after him.

  “Where do you think?”

  He stalked down the chill corridor, listening but only hearing the echo of his own footsteps. The entrance to the vaults would, he reasoned, be off the main chapel, assuming that the vaults were part of the crypt or could be reached through the mausoleum. The other logical choice was the kitchens. There was no guarantee of course. With these old buildings the vaults could actually be some long forgotten dungeon with a secluded stairwell hidden away somewhere. He stopped at a corner as a whiff of nutmeg and cinnamon hit him. He followed his nose and found the kitchens, but more importantly, he found a staircase leading down to the depths of the cathedral’s cold stone heart.

  The air was noticeably colder as he descended, prickling his skin. Even the texture and quality of it changed. It was older air. Stale.

  He paused at the bottom of the stairs, listening. He could hear muted voices from deeper in the darkness. He followed the sounds. Warm orange light suffused the corridor.

  They were torturing the prisoner when he walked into the cell. The priest and the captain, Grimm, stood over a man who was bound by thick chains to a chair in the centre of the room. The prisoner’s head was down so Felix couldn’t see his face but it was obvious he had taken severe punishment. His clothes were stained darkly by blood, his hair matted with the stuff. The cell smelled of vomit and urine.

  “What in Sigmar’s name are you doing here!” the lector spat, seeing Felix in the doorway.

  “I’ve come to collect the money promised to me, then I will be on my way.”

  “Get out, fool!”

  The prisoner’s head came up. It was bruise-purple, swollen and bloody from the beating he had taken. Felix stared at the wretched man. The beating had rendered him barely recognisable as a human being. The sheer brutality of it shook Felix. His eyes darted about the small cell, saw instruments of torture, tongs and pincers, a brazier of hot coals. Grimm held a bar of red iron to the prisoner’s throat, the skin sizzling blackly even before the kiss of the metal seared away the top layers of flesh. The prisoner’s scream was harrowing. The man bucked and writhed against his chains.

  Felix backed out of the room. This was wrong. War drove men to extremes, he knew, but they were extremes of necessity, not wanton acts of evil. The torturing of a prisoner moved very definitely into the realms of evil.

  The prisoner’s screams haunted the passageway.

  The lector came out to join him, sweat blackening his forehead. The man was clearly exhausted.

  “This is not for your eyes,” he said, closing his own as the prisoner cried out once more. When he opened them again Felix was surprised at the depth and intensity of grief he saw in them.

  “I made a deal with the Grand Theogonist, I rendered him a service, ah, appropriating a piece of jewellery he desired. In return I was promised a pardon and coin enough to begin a new life away from here. I want what is my due.”

  “Impossible,” the lector said bluntly.

  “I really do urge you to reconsider. I have a feeling that someone would pay very handsomely for this trinket, and in the wrong hands it could almost certainly prove to be far more trouble than it’s worth.”

  “Are you threatening me, thief?”

  “Not at all, threats are idle. I will have my due, priest. Your temple owes me. A deal is a deal.”

  “So you say, but I see no evidence of any such deal. Do you have a notarised contract? Do you have a shred of evidentiary proof to support your word? No, I thought not. So as far as I am concerned, thief, you are also a liar. You are wasting my time.”

  “You would be dead if it wasn’t for me!”

  The priest laughed at that. “I think not, thief. We are all alive by the grace of Sigmar and his divine hammer, Wilhelm III. Now leave before you try my patience further.”

  Felix turned on his heel, disgusted, and left them to torture the prisoner. He wanted to be as far away from this godforsaken place as possible. He would take his price and be damned. He didn’t need their permission, a deal was a deal. Their coffers would open long enough for him to take his due. He took the stairs two and three at a time, almost running up them. He was seething. At the top, he looked left, then right, and plunged into the heart of the cathedral, following a narrow passage as it opened into the grand chapel. The huge vaulted dome was magnificent, humbling, with its murals and gilt decor. Marble statues of the beatific Man-God Sigmar stood watch over the holiest of holies, impassive to the comings and goings his chosen sons. A scattering of the devout knelt at prayer in the wooden pews. Felix walked through the middle of them, looking left and right for something of value to take.

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bsp; He saw nothing. For all the obvious wealth on display it was art, sculpture, the decoration itself. In frustration he overturned a pew and lashed out at one of the multi-pronged iron candelabra lighting the room. It fell, the candles snuffed out as the rolled across the stone floor. Felix stalked out of the chapel, slamming the huge oaken door behind him.

  The first dark blush of dusk was drawing in. He had lost all track of time while he waited inside the house of Sigmar.

  Three novitiates were tending what looked like a funeral pyre in the cathedral garden. There was no body; they were feeding the fire with scraps of paper, drawn one sheet at a time from the old tomes spread out by their feet.

  The flames sparked and hissed as the sheets were fed to them, blazing blue in the instant of immolation before being consumed by the red flames.

  Felix barged through them in his hurry to be away, kicking aside one of the books. It fell open on a vicious scrawl of unintelligible black ink. His eyes were drawn immediately to the brittle pages that so obviously weren’t paper. He was an intelligent man. He could read and write but even a cursory glance was enough to know this was no language he had ever seen before. Instinctively, he knew it to be a grimoire.

  He would have his price.

  Whatever secrets the book contained they were dangerous enough for the Sigmarites to be burning them. That made them the kind of secrets someone would pay a lot of money for.

  Without thinking he grabbed the book from the floor and ran for the street.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Let Us Not Go Gently Into That Endless Winter Night

  DRAKWALD FOREST

  Winter, 2051

  They were lost within the dark heart of the old wood.

  They were the last. It was hard to believe.

  A few days ago they had been part of the most awesome fighting force the world had ever seen.

  They had been invincible. They had been immortal. Warriors of the Blood!

  What were they now? A few stragglers, beaten, driven from the field of battle, forced to run, to flee, to cling to the shreds of their unlife as their world unravelled. The von Carstein bloodline was all but extinguished, those few that remained pale shadows of the great vampires that had fallen. They were third, fourth, even fifth generation gets. They were not their sires. They lacked the awesome strength of those who had fallen. They were shadows. They were weak.

  A spent force.

  The Kingdom of the Dead had crumbled on its foundations of dust. The horrors of von Carstein’s army, the skeletons and the zombies that had ravaged the country, had sunk slowly back into the dirt as the necromantic magic of Nagash binding their bones came undone with the count’s death, transforming the ground before the bleak stone ramparts of Altdorf into one vast garden of bones.

  Jerek von Carstein blundered through the undergrowth, dead leaves mulching beneath his feet as he drove himself on, slapping aside the cut and sting of withered branches even as exhaustion suffused his limbs and muddied his mind. They followed him blindly even though he was lost both physically and metaphorically.

  All was quiet save for the passage of the dead.

  A single raven sat on a skeletal branch, watching them pityingly. The castle’s ill-omened birds had followed them from Drakenhof itself, feasting on the offal and carrion the army left trailing in its wake. They scavenged the fields of blood beneath the walls of Altdorf, cawing and shrieking and picking at the rotting flesh of the fallen. While the others lingered to feed this lone bird haunted them. It was always there on the edge of his vision, black wings blurring as he tried to focus on them. He had seen the bird four times since they had entered Drak Wald.

  He didn’t know if they were following the bird or it was following them.

  It didn’t matter.

  They were all dead.

  It was only a matter of time before the humans abandoned the security of their walls and set about finishing what they had begun. They had days, a week or two at best while the enemy regrouped and healed, then the bloodline would be wiped out in one almighty purge.

  In a way it was a relief—an end to it.

  Jerek was finding it harder and harder to remember who he had been. At times, like now, it saddened him that his personality had slipped, been subsumed by the monstrous beast von Carstein had sired, though these moments were fleeting and few and far between. A pang. Nothing more. Hour by hour he lost himself. Facing von Carstein in the bell tower he had imagined it would all be over in a heartbeat, that his mortal soul would be wiped out, he had never considered the possibility that he might remember what it was like to be Jerek Kruger. The torment was pulling him apart. The need to feed went against everything he had been, and yet it represented everything he had become. Jerek loathed himself and the monster von Carstein had made him.

  But that was who he was: Jerek von Carstein. Kruger was dead and gone but for a few rogue memories.

  There had been a dark presence inside Jerek, ever-present like a second heartbeat, an echo that tied him to his sire. It had been a comfort of sorts, binding him to von Carstein’s twisted mockery of a family. Now nothing lived on. The vampires had lost and in doing so became hollow creatures. The link had been severed brutally and suddenly they were bereft. They all felt it: the ache of loss. The emptiness engulfed them all. They had lost their father and without him, suddenly, they were nothing. It seemed inconceivable. In a few hours the Kingdom of the Dead had come undone. Vlad had fallen, returned to dust by a rag-tag army of humans.

  “We need to feed,” Pieter said, sniffing the air for even the faintest trace of humanity, his teeth bared. He had regressed almost to the point of becoming animalistic. Grief brought out his base nature. The man was a weasel: a dangerous creature not to be trusted despite its innocent appearance. “We need blood and I smell cattle.”

  The others crowded around, their faces betraying their desperate need.

  “Then go hunt,” Jerek said. The woods are filled with trappers’ cottages and tiny settlements. All of you, go hunt, feed. Do what you need to. Leave me alone.”

  No one moved.

  “You heard me,” he said, turning his back on their hungry faces. Their expectancy disgusted him. He hefted his warhammer, felt a thrill course through his fingers as his flesh came into contact with the weapon. It sang in his blood.

  Still none of them moved to follow Pieter.

  They looked to him for guidance, he realised, because for all their finery and sophisticated ruthlessness, he was the only true warrior left amongst them. He understood their enemy better than any of them because he had led them. They were rats, weasels, ferrets, and stoats, animals used to sneaking, hiding, fighting from the dark, striking fast and moving on. In contrast, he was a White Wolf, fearless, powerful, a majestic beast. They grasped and grasped at the twin illusions of strength and power, desperate to cloak themselves in the stuff, to wear the trappings they offered. Avarice pumped the dead blood through their veins. Hunger for power and hunger for blood, were, he knew, the twin dimensions of the vampire’s world. Jerek von Carstein might have been Vlad’s get but before his birth into the Kingdom of the Dead he had been born and raised in a world of fear and violence. Raised a warrior from birth, he was a knight, but more than anything else he was a survivor. Their diffidence wouldn’t last. He knew that.

  Once they were safe the murderous succession would begin. They were liars, cheats, thieves and killers, each and every one of them. There was no honour in their dead hearts. They feared power. They respected ruthlessness. They coveted everything they lacked. Some, no doubt, were already planning his downfall simply because he was Vlad’s get and in terms of the blood his claim was stronger than all of theirs.

  “Go!”

  They scattered, some transforming into their lupine aspects, others loosing the beast within.

  He was alone. He sat on an old tree stump, rotten to the core. He heard them crashing through the trees, heard the screams when they came. They were animals.

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nbsp; “You should have forced her to return with us.”

  Jerek turned to see Emmanuelle, Pieter’s wife, standing behind him. She had come up on him without him hearing a sound. Blood dribbled down her chin. Her porcelain skin looked so fragile in the gloom. In contrast her eyes were flint.

  “She was beyond that. To leave would have robbed Isabella of the man she loved. In her madness she believed that staying there, where he fell, she could somehow keep his memory pure, alive, but to return to the castle without him, he would weaken, fade and eventually cease to be the man she loved.”

  “So instead you left her there to die.”

  “I took pity on her.”

  “Pity is for dogs’

  “So what would you have had me do? Drag her kicking and screaming to Drakenhof?”

  “If needs be, yes. She is one of us, we don’t abandon our own to the cattle. We owe her. We owe Vlad.”

  “We owe no one!” Jerek said vehemently. His ferocity surprised him. He mastered his anger quickly. “We didn’t ask to be sired, they chose us, we did not choose them. Now we start fighting for our lives because behind us the humans are coming and they intend to exterminate us like vermin.”

  “Humans,” Emmanuelle said contemptuously.

  “Yes, humans. Like it or not, the cattle stand on the verge of wiping us out.”

  In the distance a woman screamed. Her cries died out quickly.

  Emmanuelle’s smile was cold. “Did you hear that? That is how we deal with humans.”

  “I know,” he said, afraid of himself, afraid of what he had become, afraid of what his future held. “I know.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  The Stalking Ground

  ALTDORF

  Winter, 2051

  Felix Mann cradled the book to his chest as he ran.

  He pumped his one free arm hard, mouth open as he ran. The spine of the book banged into his chin. His heart hammered in his chest.