[Von Carstein 01] - Inheritance

by Steven Savile - (ebook by Undead)

  “I see,” the lector said thoughtfully. It was possible then that the damned creatures shared similar bonds to the living, love, friendship, the ties that bind brother to brother. Could it be that the woman was in some way tied to the dead count? “Come, walk with me. I have no liking for the business of torture. It is time I saw the light of day. Now, you say she was found trying to disinter the Grand Theogonist? Perhaps you have read the situation wrong. Think about it. Is it not more probable that she was trying to get to von Carstein’s remains?” The lector closed the heavy cell door on the prisoner’s screams and walked the dank corridors back toward the sun.

  He had no idea whether it was day or night. Time and hours and minutes had lost rhyme and reason in the vaults beneath the cathedral.

  The novitiate said nothing until they reached the stairway back up to the surface.

  “There is more, your grace.”

  The lector stopped, one foot on the stair and turned.

  “Tell me, lad.”

  “The books given to us to destroy…”

  “What about them?”

  “The thief… stole one.”

  “Then find him and recover it. Those damned books cannot be allowed to stain the world any longer than they already have. There was a reason I bade you destroy them, lad. They are dangerous books. I have no idea if they were original or copies, but I do know they contained the necromancer Nagash’s dark wisdom, his incantations, and his defilements. Their presence in the Vampire Count’s horde explains his army of living dead. This kind of power cannot be let loose in the world again. Find Mann and get that book back.”

  “We have… ahhh… Mann was found in the slums of Drecksack in the shadow of the Muckrakers’ Guildhall.”

  “Then I see no problem. Mann is caught, the book is returned. We were lucky this time. See to it that the book is destroyed immediately, lad. We can’t risk any more mistakes.”

  “Ahhh… but… you see… the thief didn’t have the book, your grace. He had been attacked. Both of his hands lay on the cobbles beside his body, severed. He was barely alive when they brought him back to the cathedral. Whoever attacked him has the book.”

  “Then let us pray they do not know what it is.”

  “We will know more if the thief ever regains consciousness, your grace, but I fear his fate is an ill omen. The attack was made to look like natural comeuppance for his thievery but according to the muckraker who brought him to us the only words Mann uttered before slipping into unconsciousness were: “Shadows… shadows… he walks in shadows.” It could be a thief turning on his own, I suppose. The whole concept of honour amongst thieves is ridiculous, after all, but it doesn’t ring true.”

  He walks in shadows.

  Those words froze the lector’s blood in his veins. He knew.

  There was no doubt in his mind.

  Wilhelm had bargained with the devil and the devil had already claimed his due. It wasn’t over. Far from it, it was just beginning in earnest. His mind’s eye swam with visions of slaughter, fields of blood, corpses being picked over by carrion birds even as they stirred back to unnatural life. How many more would die?

  “If you are fool enough to treat with daemons, you get what you deserve, I suppose.”

  “Your grace?”

  “Just talking to myself, lad. Just talking to myself.” He suppressed a shudder. “So, one problem at a time. Take me to her.”

  Together they climbed the stairs to the highest spire in the cathedral, the Tower of the Living Saints, to the barred door. Two guards stood watch. Both as wooden as the door, both distinctly ill at ease with the task they had been charged with. The lector nodded to the bar. “Open it.”

  “Your grace, the prisoner was drugged incoherent an hour back by the apothecary because she was a danger to herself and to those near her.”

  “I will take my chances, soldier. Open the door.”

  The man nodded and slipped the bar out of place. The door opened on a threadbare cell. Once, in a past life, the room might have been majestic with its vibrant red velvet drapes and its sumptuous divan but the moths had been at the fabric and decay lay heavy on the furnishings. The woman was huddled in the far corner of the room, a wild animal cornered. Her black hair fell in lank ringlets across her face. She craned her neck to look at him. Her eyes ached with the pure madness of grief.

  “Do you know where my pretty one is?” Her voice was painfully childlike in the way it trembled. The hope in her eyes was heartbreaking. And then, as quickly as it came, the innocence was gone and the woman’s face was split and stretched by a ferocious animalistic howl as the beast within tore free for a split second before being harnessed again. She twisted and writhed, slapping at her own face, clawing at her eyes fiercely enough to draw runnels that ran like bloody tears down her cheeks. Gasping and panting, the woman looked up at him beseechingly. It was difficult to reconcile the beast and the beauty owning the same form.

  The lector made the sign of Sigmar in the air before stepping across the threshold.

  “He is dead.”

  The woman thrashed about wildly as though being beaten. He saw then that she was shackled and chained to the bedstead.

  “No he is immortal! He cannot die! You are a liar!”

  The chains jerked and gouged at the wood but they held.

  He knelt before her. There was nothing but pity in his voice when he told her: “I am many things, woman, but I promise you this, the Vampire Count is no more. He is gone.”

  She pressed herself up against the wall, shaking her head, drawing her knees up to her chin, wrapping her arms around them and rocking. The chains dug into her bare legs. “No, no, nonono. No. Not my pretty one. Not my love. He wouldn’t leave me here like this. He loves me. He does. He wouldn’t leave me.”

  “He had no choice in the matter,” the lector said, resting a hand on her knee. She laid her hand on his. It was a moment of false tenderness. She snarled and gouged long claw-like fingernails through the back of his hand, tearing the skin before he could pull away. The wound stung. Blood dribbled between his fingers as he clenched his fist.

  Someone entered the room behind him.

  “Put the bitch out of her misery, priest,” the newcomer said, harshly.

  The lector turned to see Ludwig, pretender to the Imperial throne, both craven and coward, with his personal bodyguard.

  “You are not welcome in the temple of Sigmar, pretender,” the lector said, turning his back on the pair. “Neither is your thug.”

  “You forget yourself, priest. Remember, in your secular world I have considerable sway, including for instance, the power to confer the title of Grand Theogonist on whomsoever I see as a valid recipient. If you have any ambitions in that quarter I suggest you remember yourself quickly. Now, I say again, put von Carstein’s whore out of her misery and let’s be done with it.”

  The lector ignored the Pretender and reached out for the woman’s chains. With great compassion, in part triggered by the fact that she looked so vulnerable, in part through the survivor’s guilt of still being alive when others better than him had gone, and, no doubt because of the atrocities he himself had been party to in the dungeon, he took her hands in his. Despite the revulsion her daemonic aspect inspired he held her hand for a long moment. “Let me release you, you are not an animal and should not be treated as such.”

  “Do you know where my love is?” she asked again, real tears mixing with the blood streaming down her cheeks as she held out her wrists. “Will you help me find him? I need to bring him home. If I can bring him home everything will be all right.” Without the keys there was nothing the lector could do.

  “Use this,” Ludwig said, holding out a sharpened wooden stake. “Put the beast out of its misery. We have more important things to concern ourselves with. These things must be exterminated.”

  The lector stared at the piece of wood uncomprehendingly.

  “Do it man. She’s not a woman. It’s all lies. She is an animal. Wo
rse, she is an animal that has gone rabid.”

  “Murder is never the answer,” the lector said.

  “Don’t think of it as murder, priest. Think of it as offering her salvation.” The Pretender rationalised. “You are giving her a way back to your precious Sigmar, or at least a path into Morr’s underworld.” He pressed the stake into the lector’s hands, his face implacable.

  The transformation of Isabella von Carstein was both immediate and shocking. Her face contorted in a feral snarl. The snarl betrayed other subtle changes; her rich full lips peeled back on sharp incisors that grew into brutal fangs, her back arched and her brow and bone ridges elongated, thickening. Her nostrils flared and her eyes radiated sheer hatred. She lashed out at him, claws raking down his cheek, drawing blood.

  The lector reeled back, falling on his backside and scuttling away from the beast that was the countess. She could, he realised, easily kill him. She wasn’t an innocent to be saved, she was a monster to be slain. It was the nature of the beast. She couldn’t be tamed. She couldn’t be brought back to the light with the love of benevolent Sigmar. Moreover, she didn’t want to be saved. The woman she had been was long gone; all that remained was an abomination of nature, a by-blow of death, a daemon.

  He knew what he had to do but still his hand trembled.

  “Do it man, drive it into her heart, kill her.”

  He stared at the stake in his hands: a tool of death. He held it poised to strike. Despite her bestial strength the woman was helpless. It was nothing short of butchery. Cold-blooded slaughter. The thought stayed his hand. He was a priest—he cherished life, creation, and all things holy. He did not bring death. He was not some filthy servant of the murder god. He had given his life in service of Sigmar. His nature was to nurture, to treasure, and to save, not to wipe out.

  “Are you a coward, man? She isn’t human. She is everything your faith abhors! You can feel her taint beneath your skin. She is evil! Do it! Purge the world of her vile existence.”

  “She is not the one demanding murder, Pretender.”

  “How dare you!”

  “I dare because I am not a killer,” he said softly. He couldn’t do it. He let the stake slip through his fingers and pushed himself slowly to his feet. “You though, I could make an exception for.”

  Ludwig the Pretender was apoplectic. His face was purple with rage. A vein pulsed in his forehead dangerously. Spit frothed at his mouth as he swore and cursed at the priest. Beside him his bodyguard remained curiously impassive, as though he were used to his master’s fits of pique.

  “As I remember it you were the one who suggested ceding Altdorf to the vampires and begged the Grand Theogonist to open the gates to save your own precious hide. So, I believe of the two of us, life has cast you in the role of coward, Pretender.”

  “You will pay for your insolence, priest!”

  “No doubt,” the lector agreed. “But not with my immortal soul.”

  “Where is he?” the woman shrieked then, her anger more than a match for the Pretender’s as she fought against her chains. She pulled, twisting and kicking, lashing out again and again until the bed leg cracked with a sound like breaking bone. “Where is my husband?” She had grabbed the stake from where the lector had discarded it and held it to her own breast. Tears streamed down her face. The blood made her look like something spawned from the blackest of nightmares. She knew the answer but she needed to hear it out loud.

  “Gone! Dead! Rotting in the dirt!” the pretender yelled. Ludwig backed off a step behind the safety of his bodyguard. For all his anger he was still a coward at heart. “Which is where you should be!”

  For a split second it was impossible to tell which of the two was inhuman. The anger in the Pretender was vile to see.

  Her voice broke, barely a whisper: “Where is he?”

  “He is gone,” the lector said.

  “Where is he?”

  “Gone,” the lector repeated but there was no getting through to the woman. “He is dead. Truly dead. He is dust.”

  “No… I don’t believe that… He is immortal.”

  “All things must die.”

  “No.”

  “Yes,” he said sadly. “That is the indifference of the world. It doesn’t care. We are mere motes, specks in the eye of time. We are all born of dust and to dust we return. He is gone, woman.”

  “He wouldn’t leave me!” and softer, with less confidence: “He wouldn’t leave me…”

  “He had no choice,” the lector said for the second time since entering the room, his tone of voice more than anything conveying his mixed emotions. “He was destroyed. There is no way he can return for you.”

  “Then I have nothing,” Isabella von Carstein said.

  The lector nodded. He made to reach out and brush away the hair from her face but she was too quick, ramming the sharp end of the stake into her own breast. There was a sickening sound, the tearing of wet flesh, and the splintering of bone being forced apart as she impaled herself on the wooden stake. Her eyes flared open as the pain registered in her brain and in them he pretended he saw relief.

  She couldn’t finish what she had begun. The wooden stake protruded from a shallow wound in her chest, not deep enough to finish her.

  “Please…” she mouthed, the word barely audible. Her hands still clutched the shaft of the stake. The lector closed his hands over hers and pushed, forcing the point deeper and deeper until he felt her body yield beneath it and it plunged into her heart, stilling it once and for all. Her tainted blood leaked from the wound, over his hands and down his arms.

  He backed away, staring at the woman’s blood on his hands. He had killed. No matter that there was mercy in it. He had killed.

  Isabella slumped to the floor, her skin already beginning to desiccate as the years of unnatural life gave way to accelerated decay. The skin crumbled, the flesh beneath rotting and collapsing in on itself as the air itself seemed to strip away the flesh from the bones. In the end there would be nothing but dust.

  The lector turned away only to see the Pretender gloating.

  “You have got your way.”

  “As I always do. You are a strange man, priest. You grieve for a monster and yet thousands of our own lie dead and buried at her hand. I cannot pretend to understand your loyalties.”

  “She was a girl once. I grieve not for the monster she is but the girl she was, the woman she might have been.”

  Behind him the dissolution continued apace. Isabella von Carstein’s face crumbled and powdered. The sound was sickening, like a plague of insects feasting on flesh, skittering and chittering. And then she was nothing more than dust.

  The lector pushed past the Pretender and left the tower room. He made a decision halfway down the narrow winding stair. He looked in on the thief. “The man is to be cared for, and when he is recovered he is to be offered a new life, here, in the cathedral. He does not deserve the life of a beggar. The man is a hero, one of the last, I fear. We shall treat him as we would any brother.”

  The young priest tending to Felix Mann nodded understanding and returned to his tender ministrations.

  That left the monster in the vaults.

  Steeling himself, the lector descended deep into the darkness.

  Captain Grimm was still about his work when the lector pushed open the heavy door. The prisoner was barely recognisable as human, which of course it wasn’t, not any more. Blood had swollen one eye shut and the man’s flesh was a mess of charred streaks and burns. A single deep bloody gouge ran from throat to groin, almost a hand’s breadth, in places burned through to the bone. The room stank of seared meat and fat.

  Grimm looked up from his labour.

  “End it, I have no stomach for this, captain. Don’t you see what we have become? How we have fallen? In a matter of days we have reduced ourselves to the level of animals. We have stripped ourselves of the dignity and compassion that served as our humanity more effectively than von Carstein’s brood ever could have hope
d. We have looked into the abyss, Grimm, and instead of conquering the beasts within we have embraced them and become monsters ourselves. That is our reward for surviving. We have become more monstrous than the things we were fighting.”

  Grimm ran a sweaty hand over his brow, his eyes blazed in the reflected sickness of the brazier.

  “He is stubborn, I’ll give the beast that,” he said, as though he hadn’t heard a word the lector had said. “But I’ll break him. Mark my words, your grace. I’ll break the beast.”

  “No, Grimm. No more torture. No more death. I’ll have no part of it.”

  “But the beast is breaking, I have him!”

  “At what cost, man? At what cost?”

  “It costs me nothing!”

  “It costs you everything, you fool. Everything.”

  “You have no idea what you are talking about, priest. This thing has no right to life. It doesn’t breathe. Its heart doesn’t beat. The blood in its veins is rank. It isn’t alive. It doesn’t deserve your compassion. It is evil. Pure evil, plain and simple, priest. Save your sorrow and regret for something that deserves it. The beast is an abomination. If we can learn from it before it dies then it has served its purpose. No matter how weak your stomach is the beast must die. There can be no reprieve. You cannot save the man he was. The man is dead, long gone. Now only the beast remains. And believe me, priest, the beast must die. Good men died for us and they deserve nothing less.”

  The prisoner laughed then, a sick dead rattle. “Deserve, deserve, deserve. You speak a lot of deserving, soldier. Now listen to me. The beast has a name,” he said, his voice cracked and broken almost beyond understanding. There was madness in his one open eye. “It is Jon… Skellan. And believe me, I have no intention of dying, not for a very, very long time.”

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