[Heroes 05] - The Red Duke

by C. L. Werner - (ebook by Undead)

  The Red Duke stared at his new minion, curious that the witch’s spirit had been strong enough to use his magic to restore itself in such a formidable fashion. But her will was not her own. Like the zombies, she would obey without question the commands of her master.

  Obedience was the duty of a peasant, whether living or dead.

  The head of every patron inside the Broken Plough turned as the tavern’s ramshackle door was kicked open, several planks being knocked free from their fastenings. They quickly lost interest in the violence of the intruder’s entrance when they saw that he was a knight. Nothing good came of inquiring into the business of the nobles and it was the smart man who kept his curiosity tempered by a pot of ale or jug of wine.

  The taverner wrung his hands at the damage done to his door, but didn’t even think about raising his voice to the armoured warrior who stood in the doorway. Instead he rounded the log he used for a bar and hurried to place himself at the service of his noble guest.

  “Sir Leuthere d’Elbiq!” the taverner exclaimed with more exuberance than he felt. “It is indeed an honour for so noble a personage to visit my humble establishment!” The fat little man tried to be discreet as he wiped his sweaty palms on his apron, mentally calculating just how much money he would owe Earl Gaubert if his lordship had learned how large the tavern’s real revenue for the past year had been.

  The knight didn’t take any notice of the taverner, sweeping his gaze across the common room, studying the peasants huddled on their benches. None of the commoners cared to meet Sir Leuthere’s inspection, being careful to keep their faces focused on their drinks. Their attitude didn’t bother the knight. He could find the man he was looking for without needing to see his face.

  “I fear my humble establishment is too humble to have the fine provision to which you are accustomed, my lord,” the taverner continued to sputter. “But if you will allow…”

  Sir Leuthere marched past the proprietor, leaving him to blink in confusion as the knight made for one of the rear tables. A peasant wearing a grubby cloak that looked to have been cut from a horse blanket was huddled over a clay pot of brackish-tasting wine. He didn’t look up until the knight set his hand upon the man’s crooked back.

  The peasant flinched away from Leuthere’s touch, a curse snapping from his lips. The oath died half-finished when he saw that the man accosting him was a knight. His face turning pale, the peasant shrank away until his crooked back was pressed against the wall.

  “The kitchen staff told me I might find you here, Vigor,” Leuthere said. “They also said that five days ago Earl Gaubert left the castle with you and two of his knights. My uncle and his bodyguards haven’t been seen since. Where did they go, Vigor?”

  Vigor winced at the question. He reached for the pot of cheap wine on the table. Leuthere’s armoured hand slapped the cup from the peasant’s trembling fingers, dashing it against the wall.

  “Where is he, damn you!” Leuthere snarled.

  “I didn’t go with him!” Vigor insisted. Seeing his words increase the anger on the knight’s face, he quickly abandoned the pretext of ignorance. Vigor glanced across the tavern and lowered his voice. “I took him to see Jacquetta the wise woman,” he said in a low whisper.

  “You mean the witch?” Leuthere gasped, shocked that a lord of Aquitaine would treat with such a vile creature.

  Vigor nodded his head. “I didn’t know what Earl Gaubert wanted from her. By the Lady, I swear I didn’t! When I found out… I left him… I slipped away when his lordship wasn’t looking…”

  The knight’s face became livid. Turning away from the trembling Vigor, he fixed his furious gaze upon the taverner. “Your establishment is now closed, Pierre! Clear every filthy peasant from this pig-sty, and that includes you and your staff! I want to speak to this worm alone.”

  Ashen-faced, the peasants did not need Pierre’s encouragement to vacate the Broken Plough, fairly falling over one another as they quit the premises. Soon, Leuthere had the solitude he had demanded. Discussing the dishonour of his uncle was not the sort of subject for prying ears… even those of mere peasants.

  Leuthere grabbed the front of Vigor’s tunic, pulling the blubbering man to his feet. “A peasant can be hanged for abandoning his lord!” he snarled.

  “Mercy!” Vigor cried, grovelling at the knight’s feet. “I did not want to abandon his lordship! If I had known why he wanted to see her… why he needed the witch…”

  “Why did Earl Gaubert go to see Jacquetta?” Leuthere asked, inwardly dreading the answer he might hear. For a knight of Bretonnia to stoop so low as to employ black magic to avenge himself upon his enemy was a stain that would impinge not only the earl’s honour but that of the entire d’Elbiq line. Leuthere considered that his uncle must be mad to set upon so infamous a path.

  Vigor shook his head, an inarticulate moan rising from his trembling body. “I cannot tell you! I cannot tell anyone! Do not make me, my lord!”

  Leuthere jerked the peasant back to his feet, glaring into Vigor’s face. “You’ll tell me if I have to drag you to the dungeons of the chateau!” He felt a tinge of sympathy when he saw the effect mention of the castle’s torture chamber had upon Vigor. It was almost as if the man’s twisted body were already stretched out upon the rack.

  “No! No! I’ll talk, my lord!” Vigor whined. “Hang me, take my head, but don’t send me to the Black Room!” The peasant glanced guiltily about the tavern. He didn’t want to betray the confidence of Earl Gaubert. He had enough loyalty to his lord to spare Earl Gaubert that indignity if he could.

  Vigor’s voice dropped to a feeble whisper, forcing Leuthere to strain to catch every word. When he heard what the peasant had to say, the knight understood the reason for Vigor’s hushed tones.

  “Earl Gaubert seeks the tomb of the Red Duke,” Vigor said. “He hopes to use the Red Duke’s power against the du Maisnes.”

  Leuthere released his grip on the peasant’s tunic. Icy horror ran down his spine. First a witch, now a vampire! The thirst for revenge had driven his uncle insane!

  “The Red Duke was destroyed by King Louis the Righteous,” Leuthere stated. “The vampire burned with the rest of his unholy army.”

  Vigor shook his head, staring guiltily at the floor. “Jacquetta said that a monument was built to the Red Duke, a place to trap his spirit. That is where she took Earl Gaubert.”

  The knight glared down at the crook-backed peasant. “Then that is where you are going to take me,” he told Vigor. Inwardly, Leuthere prayed to the Lady, prayed that he would be in time to stop his uncle.

  After five days, however, he knew he would be too late. Barring a miracle, whatever evil could come from Earl Gaubert’s madness had already been set into motion.

  The afternoon sun did not brighten the gloomy atmosphere of the graveyard overlooking Ceren Field. Sir Leuthere could feel the clammy fetor of the place oozing through his armour, seeping through his skin and into his very bones. The feeling sickened him, made his flesh crawl in a way he hadn’t felt since he was a headstrong knight errant scouring abandoned villages for ghouls and dereliches. The sensation of inhuman evil and dark magic was something a man did not forget.

  Leuthere glanced back down the grassy slope of the hill to the old tree where they had tethered their mounts. The animals had refused to be led any closer to the graveyard, forcing Leuthere and Vigor to hike up the side of the hill. Such timidity from Vigor’s burro wasn’t especially surprising. Like the peasant, a burro was not endowed with a sense of courage and valour. But for Leuthere’s magnificent destrier Gaignun to show fear was something that shocked the knight. Gaignun had been his steed for five years, had fought with him against orcs and beastmen many times and never shown a moment’s hesitation when charging headlong into the enemy.

  The mounts were not the only animals repulsed by the unnatural taint surrounding the graveyard. Entire stretches of the hillside were black with crows, the scavenger birds drawn to the cemetery by the stench of de
ath but too frightened to descend upon the tombs. It was an eerie sight that did nothing to ease Leuthere’s nerves or quell his fears for his uncle. Whatever doubts he had that Jacquetta had really led Earl Gaubert to the secret grave of the Red Duke were quickly fading away.

  The two men marched into the sinister silence of the graveyard, the last warmth of the afternoon sun abandoning them as they moved among the graves. Leuthere felt his pulse quicken as he noticed a dark splotch splashed across one of the headstones. Vigor hurried to the grave, setting his hand against the discoloured stone. He rubbed his fingers as a crusty substance adhered to his skin. His face was grim when he announced his discovery.

  “Blood, my lord,” Vigor said. “About three, maybe four days old,” he added as he considered how dry the material was. Before his injury, Vigor had been one of Earl Gaubert’s most trusted servants and had often been called upon to attend the nobleman on his hunts. Leuthere was ready to trust Vigor’s estimate regarding time.

  The knight looked hard at the graves around him. All of them seemed somehow too ignominious to be the tomb of the Red Duke. He didn’t know what to expect the secret grave of a vampire to look like, but somehow he felt he would know it if he saw it.

  “Let’s press on,” Leuthere said, pointing deeper into the maze of tombs. Vigor blanched at his words, but the peasant’s contrition was genuine. He did regret setting Earl Gaubert upon this path and would make amends if he could. If that meant following Sir Leuthere straight into a vampire’s lair, then so be it.

  The sun was just beginning its descent when the two men finally reached the marble column at the heart of the graveyard. Throughout the afternoon, they had followed a winding course among the graves, sometimes finding more evidence of old violence, sometimes even discovering a discarded sword or broken dagger. Vigor had identified one of the knives as belonging to a man named Perren, one of Jacquetta’s followers.

  As soon as he set eyes upon the column, Leuthere knew they had found what they were looking for. Intuition, foreboding, whatever strange humour worked upon his mind, the knight knew that it was here the vampire had been entombed. It was here that Earl Gaubert had come to seek vengeance upon Count Ergon and Sir Armand. It was here that the honour of the d’Elbiqs had been shattered. As shattered as the broken face of the column.

  “Shallya’s mercy!” exclaimed Vigor, pointing in horror at the statue atop the monument. Leuthere followed the peasant’s gesture and felt his blood grow cold. There was a body impaled upon the statue’s upthrust sword, a body that he recognized only too well.

  Earl Gaubert had found what he had sought, and it had destroyed him. Leuthere, like all the children of Aquitaine, had been reared on tales of the Red Duke’s evil. He could still remember accounts of the forest the vampire had erected around Castle Aquin, a forest made from the impaled bodies of those who had resisted his murderous rule. Five hundred years in the grave had not lessened the vampire’s appetite for horror.

  “I have to get him down,” Leuthere said, his voice a sullen growl. Whatever his uncle’s crimes, it offended his very soul to see the earl’s body treated with such disrespect. Leuthere knelt before the column, beginning to remove his armour so that he might climb the monument more easily.

  “It would be wiser to leave him where he is,” a sepulchral voice intoned from among the graves.

  Leuthere swung about, his sword at the ready. Vigor worked a dagger from his belt and positioned himself where he might guard the knight’s flank. Both men glared defiantly at the dark figure standing between two granite tombs. How long the other man had been standing there, neither of them could guess.

  The stranger strode out from the shadows, revealing himself to be a powerfully built man dressed in black armour, a dark surcoat marked with the figure of a raven billowing about him in the breeze. Both Leuthere and Vigor breathed a sigh of relief when they saw the knight was dressed in black and grey. They had feared the stranger would be clad in crimson.

  “That is my uncle up there,” Leuthere challenged the black knight. “Spitted like a snail upon a stick!”

  “Kin or liege, you would do well to leave him up there,” the black knight warned. To illustrate his point, the knight reached down and grabbed a rock. He cast the stone at the monument, striking the leg of the impaled corpse. Earl Gaubert’s body thrashed into motion, pawing and scrabbling wildly.

  For an instant Leuthere believed his uncle might still be alive, but the ghastly way in which Earl Gaubert’s body had been mutilated and the even more horrible way in which he now moved made the knight realise the hideous truth. His uncle was dead, and his body had been abused in a manner more foul than Leuthere could have imagined.

  “If you will leave him until midnight, I shall bring him down myself,” the black knight offered. “I know a ritual that will banish the corruption that infests your uncle’s remains. Then, perhaps, his spirit can know some peace.”

  “You would have my gratitude, if you can do what you say,” Leuthere told the strange knight.

  “I can. I am Sir Maraulf, Custodian of the Chapel Sereine,” the knight said, bowing to Leuthere. “The dead have few secrets I do not know.”

  Sir Leuthere shook his head. He had heard dim rumours of a knight who had taken residence in a village called Mercal, but he had never given them much credit. “If you know so much, then perhaps you can tell me what did this to Earl Gaubert d’Elbiq?” he demanded.

  “You already know what did this,” Sir Maraulf said. “By accident or design, your uncle has unleashed an evil that has not been seen in these lands for centuries. That evil has gone, for now, vanished into the darkness to bide its time and gather its strength. In the past months, I have come often to this graveyard, drawn by a fear I could not place. But at the last, I was too late to prevent the doom I feared.”

  Sir Maraulf fixed his stern gaze upon Leuthere. “Three nights ago, my premonition grew too great to ignore. I rode here from Mercal in the dead of night, but I was too late. The evil had already been unleashed. All that I could do was remain and bring peace to the poor soul who had been left behind by the monster he had released.”

  Leuthere replaced his sword in its sheath, casting a forlorn glance at the scrabbling thing atop the monument. “On behalf of my lord, I thank you for your vigil,” Leuthere said. “But would it not be better to track down the thing that did this?”

  “The ‘thing’ you speak of has a name, though now you fear to use it,” Maraulf said. “There are any number of shadowy places to which the Red Duke may have gone. Too many for one, or even two knights to search. And there is no guarantee that the knights would succeed in their quest. Few things are more dangerous than a vampire fighting on its own ground.”

  Leuthere clenched his fist. “Then we just allow the Red Duke to escape?”

  Maraulf shook his head. “That would be an evil even greater than releasing him. No, we prepare ourselves. The Red Duke will not hide for long. He will strike when his hate and his madness grow too strong to deny.” The black knight pointed at Leuthere. “You must ride to Duke Gilon and warn him of the menace that is abroad in his lands. It will be hard to convince the duke that this evil has returned to again plague Aquitaine, but you must prevail.”

  Leuthere nodded in agreement. “I will seek an audience with Duke Gilon, but what will you do?”

  “I will return to Mercal,” the black knight stated. “I will return to the Chapel Sereine and prepare it to withstand the Red Duke’s attack.”

  “How can you be so certain the Red Duke will come to you?” objected Vigor, his doubt causing him to forget his place and trespass upon the conversation between the knights.

  Maraulf fixed his cold gaze on the peasant. “The Red Duke will come to Mercal,” he said. “He will come because he left something there five hundred years ago.”

  CHAPTER VI

  It sat upon a lone hill at the edge of the Forest of Châlons. The River Morceaux knifed its way around the western approach to the hill,
ripping a deep fissure through the limestone, a great canyon hundreds of feet deep. The river curled away to the north, continuing its winding course to its headwaters high in the Massif Orcal.

  The hill was a rocky, lifeless mound of stone, its soil swept away into the river by the merciless violence of wind and rain. Even the most desperate shepherd could find no pasture for his flock upon the barren hill. Only vultures and panthers made their lairs among the dead rock, using the higher vantage point to sniff out prey in the valley below.

  If not for the accident of its location, the dead hill would have been left to crumble into the river roaring at its feet. However, the hill presented too valuable a position to be ignored. The vantage it offered was something valuable to more than vultures and panthers. From the hill, sentinels could observe the high passes within the Massif Orcal and watch the borders of the sinister Forest of Châlons. A vigil maintained upon the hill could pass warning quickly to Aquitaine about enemies mustering to raid into the pastures and vineyards of the dukedom. The threat of goblins and orcs descending from the mountains was an ever present one and the presence of beastmen deep in the interior of the forest was not to be discounted.

  So it was, in the earliest days of the dukedom that a stone tower had been erected upon the hill, entrusted to a margrave whose fief was close to the site. For many generations, the tower was maintained, but as years passed without the feared incursion of marauding monsters, the margraves began to neglect their duty. From a garrison of knights and archers, the tower’s defences dwindled to a single man-at-arms whose chief duty was to collect tolls from peasants seeking to shelter from storms within the decaying fort.

  Looking upon the hill from the plain below, the Red Duke did not see its crumbling walls and broken gate. He saw what the old dukes of Aquitaine had seen: a position that could be fortified and held against almost any army. Bordered on two sides by a sheer precipice and the River Morceaux, an attacking army would find its options for siege limited. Anyone doing so would be forced to put his back to the Massif Orcal and the danger of having a horde of greenskins set upon him from the rear. The longer such a siege went on, the greater the likelihood of drawing out the goblins and orcs who infested the mountains. A prepared defender could do more than withstand his enemy here. He could break them.