[Von Carstein 01] - Inheritance

by Steven Savile - (ebook by Undead)

  He skidded around a corner into one of the seedier districts of the city. Two dogs fought over scraps still on the bone. They snarled as he dodged around them, nearly tripping over the foot still attached to the shinbone they were fighting over.

  Two of the Sigmarite novitiates gave chase while the third raised the alarm. Cries of: “Stop! Thief!” rang through the narrow back alleys but they didn’t slow him. People heard and turned and by the time they did he was past them and careening down the street, around the corner and away.

  He ran on, through the narrow warren of streets, crashing through laundry hung so low it almost dragged on the cobbles as the wind stirred it.

  The sky shifted into dusk, clouds obscuring what little was left of the sun. Night, for the first time in what felt like forever, was his friend again. It promised shadows—places to hide. It was his time.

  People stared at him. They would remember the way he had come. He stopped, breathless and gasping, back pressed against a wall, listening for the sounds of pursuit.

  He began to understand what he had done.

  It wasn’t just a book, he knew. He could feel it. The thing was vile. Corrupt. He felt its taint wherever his skin touched the skin of the binding. He didn’t want to hold onto it any longer than he had to. It had seemed like a good idea, a means of securing payment and forcing the Sigmarites to keep the old man’s word, but like so many good ideas it was not as simple as that. Felix tore a strip out of a laundered sheet and wrapped the book in it. He tucked the book under his arm. The cloth did little to shield him from the book’s taint but at least he didn’t have to feel the dead skin.

  He hurried away from the wall, pushing aside another sheet. He heard footsteps behind him. When he turned there was no one there. He carried on through the alleyway. He didn’t know where he was going to go. None of his usual fences would handle something like this. Despite the fact that the ring looked like a worthless trinket, it wasn’t. Like the book, it had power—of that he had no doubt. He would need to find a specialised seller but who in the Old World would be prepared to traffic in dark magic. And that is what it was, Felix reasoned. It had to be, judging by the way the Sigmarites had been tearing the books apart page by page and feeding them to the fire. Even the fire hadn’t been natural—it had burned blue with the taint of the accursed pages. He put two and two together: von Carstein had animated an army of the damned, bringing them back from beyond the grave to do his bidding. Was that was this was, some dark grimoire containing the secrets of reanimation?

  Felix shuddered and cast a frightened look back over his shoulder.

  As much as he wanted to think otherwise, raising the dead wasn’t outside the realms of possibility. The Vampire Count’s war had proved that. If the book he had stolen contained anything close to dark magic powerful enough to raise the dead that made it dangerous in so many ways, not least of which was to him.

  He had to think. He wanted to move it on quickly, get his price and leave Altdorf. He could try Albrecht’s down by the Reiksport, or Müllers in Amtsbezirk, though that would mean working his way back along the west bank of the Reik to the Emperor’s Bridge and then over the Three Toll Bridge. There were a lot of dangerous places for a thief along that road, governmental ministries and influential nobles, and of course Schuldturm, the debtors prison. The prison would be guarded. A cry of alarm could see the chase become a lot more deadly that a pair of blathering priests shouting, “Stop! Thief!”

  No, Müller’s was out of the question; too many opportunities for things to go wrong. That left Albrecht. Rumour had it he had a taste for the outré. Perhaps he would know someone interested in the book and the ring. A collector perhaps? A lover of antiquities or a scholar with a taste for the obscure. Together they had to be worth a small fortune. Hell, if the book was even half as dangerous as he believed it was, it was priceless.

  He paused at an intersection between two streets. Looked left, where an old maid was on her knees scrubbing down the stoop of her tenement house, and right, where children chased each other in circles in the street. He nodded to the woman when she looked his way and scuttled across the street.

  He could of course smuggle both items out of the city and sell them to the surviving vampires. They would know the true worth of the book and von Carstein’s signet ring. He was angry enough to consider betraying the city and just walking away, leaving them to their greedy fate. The anger would wear off, he knew, and be replaced by bitterness. Without the righteous anger fuelling him Felix knew he wouldn’t be capable of selling the lives of friends and neighbours for a few coins, no matter how much he detested the priests.

  He would have to hope Albrecht knew someone interested in the kind of arcane curiosities he was peddling, and if not, knew a man who knew a man whose brother’s neighbour’s nephew knew a man who might be.

  His thief sense tingled, the hairs along the nape of his neck bristling as his skin crawled.

  Someone was watching him.

  He had no idea how long they had been following him. He slowed his walk, giving a chance for them to catch up or reveal themselves by slipping into a shadowy doorway.

  He felt their eyes on his back. He had been a thief long enough to know to trust his instincts. He had gone against them once already this week.

  “Fool me once,” he muttered. “Shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

  He looked left and right furtively, scanning the streets.

  There was no sign of anyone but that didn’t mean there was no one there. It paid to be paranoid in his line of work. He waited, counting to eleven, concentrating as he listened. He tried to pick out any out of place sounds.

  Nothing.

  He knew that if he stalled much longer his hesitation would tip off the watcher. He needed to move. His instinct was to make for the Reikmarkt but there was no guarantee it would be anywhere near busy enough to lose the watcher in. The siege had decimated trade. The Süderich Marketplatz was closer, and now that a few trawlers had started arriving again, the chances of there being some fresh fish to sell increased, meaning the chances of there being people to disappear amongst increased. Fresh produce was at a premium still, with the trade caravans only just beginning to arrive in the city.

  He moved away from the wall. It was difficult not to look around. He was conscious of his every move. Felix pictured himself as he walked, visualising the street in his head, the points of access, places where it was overlooked, places where he would have hidden if the roles were reversed. There were three obvious vantage points but two were useless because they offered little or no chance of pursuit. The third though was a gem, good cover to see without being seen and it covered any number of possible escape routes. Felix had a philosophy: he always considered the predator at least three degrees more prepared and therefore more dangerous than the prey. He was in trouble here and he knew it. Whoever was following him knew about the ring; that was the only logical explanation he could think of. They couldn’t have known about the grimoire, the theft had been far too spontaneous and his stalker was far too skilled in the hunt to be one of the novitiates from the temple. So it was the ring they were after.

  He knew then who it was.

  The stranger with the ancient eyes he had followed out of the Sig-mar cathedral before all hell broke loose. The one who had materialised out of thin air and told him to forget what he thought he’d seen. It made sense, of course. He had suspected that the stranger was one of the major players in the Grand Theogonist’s grift. This proved it. It stood to reason that he knew about the ring, Morr’s teeth, the man had probably told the priest of its existence. That was the Grand Theogonist’s divine intervention. Extrapolating the thought, it made sense that if anyone in Altdorf knew the signet ring’s true nature it was the stranger.

  Felix couldn’t fault his reasoning, which didn’t make him any happier with the mess he was in.

  He couldn’t help himself; he cast a worried look back over his shoulder. His eyes instinctively
sought out the best of the three vantage points available to the hunter. It only took a fraction of a second to see that the hiding place was empty. The man wasn’t as skilled in the hunt as he feared. Felix smiled, a wave of relief washing over him.

  He had a chance of getting out of this alive.

  He turned to check the remaining vantage points—which of the two the stranger had chosen decided his escape route for him.

  Both were empty.

  Doubt flooded through him.

  Had he misjudged the street?

  Had the stranger somehow worked his way around in front of him without him realising?

  And then it hit him: the cold hard realisation of just how much trouble he was in. The stranger could have been anywhere, stood right at his shoulder even, and without the slight shifting of the shadows to give him away Felix wouldn’t be able to tell until it was too late and the assassin’s blade was slipping into his chest or his back or his throat.

  He bolted.

  He didn’t care if the stranger knew he’d been rumbled, he just wanted out of there, away, somewhere less exposed. Somewhere he could dictate the terms of the encounter, though of course Felix knew no such place existed. He ran because it was a matter of survival.

  His heart hammered against his breastbone. Adrenaline coursed through his body. He ran—really ran. He didn’t look where he was going. It wasn’t important. All that mattered was getting away. Within two minutes he was breathing hard. His head swam. He crashed into an old woman on the corner of Rosenstrasse, sending her sprawling. He tumbled and rolled and was up again and running as though nothing had happened even as her curses chased him down the street.

  The sounds of pursuit haunted him, the slap of running feet on the cobbles, the ragged breathing, but every second Felix wasted looking back over his shoulder revealed nothing but empty streets. Occasionally he thought he saw a glimmer, a peculiar refraction of light, a snatch of shadow moving oddly but he daren’t risk slowing to look properly. He ran because anything else meant almost certain death.

  He ducked down a narrow alleyway and scrambled over a low wall into an overrun garden, weeds and junk sprouting out of every nook and cranny. He scrambled over the next dividing wall and the next into another back yard full of weeds and broken planks. The back door of the house was open.

  He didn’t think about it. He ran inside, through the kitchen and down the hall before anyone had even noticed he was inside. An emaciated stick of a man with greasy hair and sweat stains ringing his tunic stood between Felix and the door, a scowl set on his bony face. He crossed his arms.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Move!” Felix didn’t wait. He hit the man full on, slamming him into the door. The man buckled. Felix dropped the grimoire and drove a fist into the man’s gut, doubling him up, then a vicious uppercut with his left. The man went down and Felix put the boot in, kicking him once, twice, three times in the stomach and a fourth time between the legs. The man writhed on the floor in agony. Felix stepped over him and opened the door. The fight had lost him precious seconds.

  He turned back to pick up the book and saw the light coming through the kitchen door shimmer strangely, the doorframe bowing as though bending around something that plainly wasn’t there.

  He didn’t wait. He grabbed the book and ran.

  Behind him, the hunter laughed: cold mocking laughter.

  He was being driven further and further away from the busy streets into the slums of the city.

  Worse though, by far, he could feel himself tiring. His legs burned. His knees felt it worst; the impact of each frantic step triggered another fiery burst of pain. He cast a desperate look back over his shoulder and his legs betrayed him. He stumbled and fell, sprawling across the cobbles.

  The laughter was close: almost on top of him.

  Felix scrambled back to his feet and managed five more steps before he stumbled again, sheer exhaustion tying his legs up. He didn’t fall this time and he didn’t look back. He ran on expecting the stranger’s blade to slam into his back at any moment. In desperation he ran into a gap between two houses; it was too narrow to be called an alleyway. It was barely a passage. Halfway down it he realised sickly that he had run himself into a dead end.

  This is where I die, he thought desperately. Here in a piss-stinking, alleyway. For a stupid lousy ring. The irony of it wasn’t lost on him. All the distance he’d put between the slums of his childhood and all the privileges of the life he had stolen for himself, the fancy clothes, the gourmet dinners, the pretty women—and the ugly for that matter—and here he was, returned to the filth and stench to die.

  He turned to face the hunter as the man shimmered into solidity right before his eyes. The effect was disconcerting. It was as though the stranger simply stepped out of the shadows where he hadn’t been a moment before.

  Felix backed up a step, shaking his head as though trying to dislodge the stranger from his eyes.

  The man’s expression was somewhat pitying as a black-edged blade whispered clear of its sheath. He held the sword naturally, with all the assurance of skilled swordsman; as though there was only one way in his mind this encounter could play out. His balance was good; he moved lightly on his toes, narrowing the gap between them.

  “You want the ring?” Felix said holding the grimoire out in front of him like a shield. He hated the way his voice sounded: weak, frightened. But he couldn’t master his fear.

  “Yes,” the stranger said coldly, eyeing his clenched fist. “And the book.”

  “Take them. They’re yours. I-I don’t need them.”

  “No I suppose you don’t,” the stranger agreed matter-of-factly.

  “Here—”

  Before he could finish the sentence the stranger rocked forward on his toes and the black sword lashed out, snakelike, slicing clean through his wrist. The pain was staggering. Hand and book fell to the ground as Felix screamed in agonised shock. The ring chimed on the cold stone as it rolled away. Blood gouted from the stump of his wrist, spraying everywhere.

  Felix screamed, insensate, his shrieks a babble of wretched pleas and curses that rose in an agonised spiral. He staggered forward clutching at the stump, every trace of colour gone from his face as his lifeblood spewed from the wound.

  There was a reason the stranger had shepherded him into the heart of the slums: violence was a way of life. People could scream blue murder without the locals raising an eyebrow.

  “Hold out your other hand,” the stranger commanded.

  Felix shook his head stupidly, the world span wildly out of focus. The pain was overwhelming. Sunbursts of pure white agony flared behind his eyes. The street was gone. There was only a world of pain. He lurched forward another step and slipped on cobbles slick with his own blood, stumbled and fell to his knees. He held his hand up to cover his face and saw only blood red darkness as the stranger’s black blade severed it mercilessly.

  Felix fell the rest of the way to the floor. He felt his blood, warm, on his face. The cobbles swam in and out of focus.

  He saw the man’s shoes as he knelt to pick up the ring.

  “You don’t look good, Felix,” the stranger said conversationally. The way I see it, if you live, your days as a thief are over, but I believe beggars can scratch a living on the streets of most cities in the Empire. So that is a small mercy. It would obviously be better if you died, because, well, your legend is assured. Your name shall live long into the future, when they realise what you have done they will laud you as the greatest thief of all time. The fact that you simply disappeared, well that only adds to the enigma. It makes it into a story. For my own part, I am indebted to you for securing my… ahh… inheritance. And the book, such a wonderful, wonderful surprise. Who could have known Vlad had such treasures? I cannot thank you enough. The night, however, is running away from us and I must, alas, leave you to the whim of Morr. Farewell, thief.”

  The stranger walked away and he was alone, bleeding out onto the c
obbles.

  He couldn’t move. He felt warm liquid trickle down the inside of his trousers and didn’t know if it was blood or urine—and didn’t care.

  He just wanted the pain to end.

  “Help… me.” It was barely more than a croak. It didn’t matter; no one would come to his aid.

  He lost all track of time, all sense of self. It just slipped away from him in the pain.

  Felix tried to crawl towards the mouth of the narrow passage but he blacked out long before he reached the light waiting at the end.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  All That Remains

  ALTDORF

  Winter, 2051

  Captain Grimm was torturing the prisoner when the novitiate hammered on the cell door.

  The lector was glad for the interruption.

  He had no stomach for Grimm’s brutality or the obvious gusto with which the man went about his task; it made him sick to the core. His head swam. More than once he thought he was about to pass out. And still the prisoner wasn’t talking. The man stared straight ahead, the madness of pain blazing in his eyes as Grimm applied red-hot tongs and other instruments of torture to his flesh.

  The stench of burned meat clung to the small chamber. The sizzle of hot metal on skin would haunt the lector for years, he knew. He struggled to rationalise it with thoughts of the greater good; one monster’s pain set against the suffering of his entire congregation. It was difficult.

  He answered the door.

  “Yes? What is it?”

  The young priest in the doorway was pale, shaken.

  Your holiness… things… you need to come up stairs. The guards have taken a prisoner… a woman. She was raving and trying to dig up the Grand Theogonist’s grave. They have her in the tower. The chirurgeon sedated her with laudanum. She is most disturbed, your grace. Her face… she is one of them. The creature tears out of her face as her grip on reality slips, your grace. She is incoherent. Before the drugs she was throwing herself at the walls. She tore her fingernails bloody trying to claw through the stone. She was ranting and raving about her beloved. Now she merely whimpers. There is no talking to her. Her sanity is gone.”