Swords of the Empire

by Edited by Marc Gascoigne

  'No, no,' Calixte grumbled, watching his companion warily. It wouldn't do to kill their guide, especially whilst they still had use for him. 'Just be quicker.'

  'Yes,' the tavern keeper mumbled, 'quicker.'

  So they marched on. Grigori pushed himself until his clothes became as damp from sweat as from melted snow, so that they clung to his skin in a constant freezing embrace. Soon his legs began to burn with the agony of wading through drifts and over ridges. The pain was unbearable. He bore it anyway.

  Night, as tight as a strangler's fingers, closed in around them.

  'Are we almost there?' Calixte asked, his tone as light and pleasant as a man enjoying a summer's stroll. He seemed not to feel the frost that covered his forehead, nor the tiny icicle daggers that hung from his frozen hair.

  'Not long now,' Grigori assured him, calling back over his shoulder as he led them upwards. He stopped.

  Suddenly, with the violence of an axe stroke, the forest ended at a straight-edged cliff. Grigori looked over the edge and, even in this dim light, could make out the forest far, far below. The black-spired pines that clung to the foot of the cliff looked as small and thin as the hairs on his arm.

  'How can you see in this light?'

  'I can see enough.'

  'Liar.'

  'No, it's just over—'

  Calixte's grasp cut off the old man's word. He had somehow blinked into existence directly in front of Grigori, his silhouette as black as a hole cut out of the snow choked sky beyond. Pressing frozen palms against Grigori's cheeks he held his head and stooped to examine him, rolling the old man's skull back and forth like a strigani with a crystal ball as he peered into its depths.

  'Look at me,' he commanded, peering into Grigori's eyes. Calixte grunted. There was something there, hiding behind broken veins and despair. Something…

  With a piercing scream he recoiled, flinging the old man to one side as if he were no more than a straw doll. Staggering backwards, his mouth and eyes wide with shock, Calixte's fingers fluttered down to rest, pale as moths, upon the knife hilt which now sprouted from his stomach.

  'Liar!' he hissed, plucking the knife from his midriff with a wet, sucking sound. He glanced down at the blade and pursed his lips.

  'What's going on?' asked Viento, warily advancing through a curtain of quickening snow. For a moment his master ignored him, turning his attention instead to the vanishing track of their fading footprints. The blizzard, he realized, had been filling them almost as quickly as they had been made.

  'Our guide has been trying to get us lost,' he said, absentmindedly brushing the torn cloth of his waistcoat back down.

  'You should have tested his obedience before following him out here!' Viento whined. 'I'm hungry!'

  'Oh, don't worry. This old fool will lead us back Won't you?' Calixte's grin was invisible in the darkness. Grigori, ignoring the bright flare of pain in his broken shoulder, dragged himself to his feet. A blast of wind crested the edge of the precipice behind him, ruffling his hair.

  'Yes, you'll lead us. Take my word for it, you will. I am something of an expert in these things. What will it be, old man? Pain? Terror? The blood kiss? Somehow I don't think it will be gold.'

  Grigori took a step backwards. Then another. With the rattle of falling earth the ground beneath his foot began to slip.

  He stopped.

  'No escape that way,' Calixte gloated, enjoying himself.

  'Let's kill him!' Viento suggested, starting forward.

  'Not yet.'

  'Why not?' Grigori asked in a voice as warm as honey. There was nothing left in it of fear, or of pain. And if there was a despair, well then, it was despair that had collapsed under its own weight into something else, something infinitely more dangerous. 'Why not kill me? Or are you too much the coward?'

  For the first time in a century Calixte Lesec found himself at a loss for words.

  'No…' the old man continued, with a sneer, 'no courage.'

  Viento hissed.

  'Ah,' Grigori mused, 'so your monkey has something to say after all.'

  'Monkey?'

  'Yes, that grovelling thing which follows you.'

  The blizzard chuckled appreciatively.

  'That's hardly pol… No! Wait!'

  Calixte snatched at his companion, but it was too late.

  As swiftly as a serpent, as silently as an owl, Viento struck. The impact shattered Grigori's bones like frost-rimed boughs, the snapping of them loud even above the growing cacophony of the storm. And yet, even as the splintered bone bit into his lungs, the old man was screaming out a cry of terrible victory.

  'Wait!' Calixte howled at his unheeding companion. He lunged forward, the white claws of his frozen hands crunching as they tore at the ice hard folds of Viento's cloak. With a savage tug the vampire hunter felt himself pulled forward into a sudden slush of blinding snow.

  It covered his face, thick and unmelting upon the cold orbs of his eyeballs.

  'Viento, stop,' he hissed, blinking furiously.

  But Viento was deaf to everything now, the world outside eclipsed by a hunger so intense that it verged on insanity. With a sigh he bit down into Grigori's exposed jugular, battening on to his victim like a leech as the hot blood began to spurt.

  Calixte, his foothold crumbling away to nothing beneath Viento's steady advance, tried to release his grip on his companion, tried to push him away.

  Tried and failed.

  He stared disbelievingly at his hands, his fingers lost in the crackling depths of his companion's cloak. Somehow, beneath the silver gloves of ice that had enveloped his fingers, his fists seemed to have fused into a dead iron grip.

  'Viento!' he screamed, ignoring the snap of his own finger bones as he pulled backwards.

  But Viento was feeding. With a last, gurgling snarl he hoisted his stricken companion close, oblivious to their peril even as the world began to turn around him.

  The ruins of Grigori's vocal chords hissed as he tried to curse and added his own small weight to Viento's maneuvre. With the last of his energy he wrapped his arms around his tormentor and, locked together in an embrace tighter than any lovers, he pulled the three of them backwards and down, down into the void beyond.

  Of the three falling figures only Calixte screamed.

  FOR A TIME there was nothing left in the world but the roar of the quickening blizzard, and the agonized groans of the forest upon which it vented its fury. The darkness was complete now, the falling snow thicker than pyre smoke as it choked the air between the huddled trees.

  And yet, eventually, something crawled back into this terrible world. Something huddled and dark, its form hunched as, hand by trembling hand, it dragged itself up and over the lip of the crevasse.

  The wind whined jealously and tried to push the emerging figure back into the abyss from whence it had come. It tore at his clothes, plucked at his hair, pushed against his chest.

  Its efforts were all in vain. Slowly, weakened by a dozen terrible injuries and anemic from blood loss, Grigori fought the wind and scrambled to his feet.

  He staggered towards the forest, fumbling for his fire tin as he did so. Through the numbness he felt the lump of it, safe in a pocket, and grunted. The expression ignited a flare of red, jagged pain in his throat.

  The Kislevite ignored it, just as he ignored the numbness and the small, insistent voice that begged him to lay down in the comforting embrace of the snow and sleep.

  He wasn't dead, and he wasn't going to give up.

  Not now.

  Not ever.

  As if to mock him, his left leg chose that moment to give out, sending him sprawling into the snow. The soft, warm snow. How nice it would be to rest here for a while, to sleep safely in the knowledge that when he next opened his eyes it would be to see his wife and son.

  Grigori swore, welcoming the pain that the curse brought. It helped him to bully himself back up to his feet and to renew his struggle onwards. The snowstorm followed him close, buryin
g the bloody trail he left as swiftly as a guilty secret.

  No. He would never give up. He'd hole up until the storm passed, build a fire and pull together a shelter. When the numbness abated there would be pain, he knew, terrible pain. So be it. He'd endure, as he always had, and find his way back to the village. His way back to Piotre and…

  He stopped suddenly, eyes widening in horror. One hand fluttered up to his throat. It flitted over the torn flesh at his throat and stroked the two jagged holes that burned beneath the crusting of snow that clung to his beard.

  Beneath the frozen tips of his fingers Grigori felt blood weeping from the torn flesh, the drops sliding sluggishly down into his collar: blood from the vampire's bite! Gradually, even as he probed the wound, the trickle of blood ceased.

  Another man might have been relieved. Grigori wasn't such a fool. With a wound this deep the blood didn't stop until the pulse did.

  It occurred to the tavern keeper that there was now nothing that could stop him from returning to his village. There was nothing that could stop him from returning to his friends, and their wives and children. Nothing that could stop him from returning to their open arms and unsuspecting hearts.

  Had he still been breathing the old man might have sighed. As it was he just turned his face back into the onslaught of the blizzard and stumbled back towards the crevasse.

  A burst of driving snow scoured his face as he reached the edge and stood for a moment, peering into the void beyond. Sudden drafts snatched dangerously at his heels, and driving snowflakes brushed into the dead chill of his mouth. They collected there to lay, still and unmelting, upon the icy blade of his tongue.

  As the angry shroud of the blizzard wrapped itself around him, Grigori closed his eyes and thought back to a summer long ago when, bathed in the green light of a forest glade, he had taught Petrokov how to dive into a pool.

  'It's easy,' he mouthed silently through frost-blackened lips. 'You just stand up straight, throw forward your arms… and dive!'

  He hurtled downward, his body slicing through the wild eddies of the blizzard as he fell. And as he plunged towards the jagged rocks that waited below Grigori was smiling, for he heard not the storm's triumphant howl, but the ring of his son's delighted laughter.

  MEAT WAGON

  by C. L. Werner

  THE DOOR OF the coaching inn was flung open with a loud bang, causing the denizens of the place to look up with varying degrees of alarm and surprise. The figure framed momentarily in the doorway was a brutish one, a head below average height but nearly twice as broad as most men. A leather hat with a wide brim was scrunched about his head, covering the blonde fuzz that clung to his skull. The brute’s face was full and meaty, a bulbous nose crushed in some long-ago brawl looming above an expansive mouth filled with black teeth. In one gloved fist, the man held a coiled whip; the other gripped the edge of the door.

  “Coach be leavin’ soon,” the harsh voice of the wagoner grunted. “Suggest you lot get yerselves organised.” With no further word, the hulking drover turned, stomping back out the door and slamming it closed as he left.

  “Wretched villain,” muttered one of the seated patrons of the inn’s bar-room. He was a middle-aged man, his body on the downward spiral towards obesity. His raiment was rich, more of his fingers burdened with bejeweled rings than without. “Why I should suffer such disrespect from that creature…”

  “Because, like the rest of us, you want to be in Nuln, and you want to be there quickly,” responded the man seated at the table just to the left of the complaining merchant. He was a tall, young, thin man, his striped breeches and double-breasted tunic as refined as the clothes of the merchant, though more restrained in their opulence. The bearded man with the long, gaunt face flipped over two of the small bone cards set upon the table, smiling as he saw the faces of the cards revealed.

  “And why are you in such a hurry, might I ask, Feldherrn?” the fat-faced merchant grumbled. “Surely there are pockets you have not yet picked in Stirland?”

  Feldherrn didn’t look up, continuing to turn over cards arrayed on the table before him, matching them into pairs and sets. “I don’t hold a knife to anyone’s throat. If a man loses the contents of his purse in my company, it is by his own carelessness. But I am sure that taking the silver of those drunkards who crawl into the bottles of vodka you caravan down from Kislev is a much more noble vocation, Steinmetz.” The gambler looked back at the merchant, then turned his gaze to the person seated beside the fat man. Steinmetz’s sullen glower at the gambler’s words turned into an open scowl as he noted the direction of his antagonist’s gaze.

  The woman seated beside Steinmetz was pretty, young and frail in build. Her skin displayed the pallor of the north country, the hue of Ostland and the Kislev frontier where the rays of the sun were weak and the hours of night were long. A flush of red coloured her face as the young girl noted the gambler’s attention. She smiled slightly, but the smile was quickly banished as Steinmetz gripped her forearm, his chubby fingers pinching her skin.

  “Ravna,” the merchant called, his tone sharp. A towering, broad-shouldered man rose from a stool set against the back wall of the room. Unlike the other occupants of the room, this man wore armour, steel back and breast plates encasing his torso and similar ones upon his legs and upper arms. The bodyguard marched toward Steinmetz, one callused hand resting easily on the pommel of the longsword sheathed at his side. Without rising from his own seat, Steinmetz pulled the girl to her feet as Ravna came near. “Escort Lydia to the coach,” Steinmetz ordered. “We are to be leaving soon.” With a dismissive flick of his hand, the merchant turned his smirking face back toward Feldherrn. The gambler gave Steinmetz a look that suggested indigestion.

  “Indeed, we should all be boarding that travelling termite circus,” rumbled the deep voice of the person seated at the table beside that of Feldherrn. The speaker was a dwarf, just under five feet in height, but broader of shoulder than most full grown men. A long, flowing black beard engulfed his face, only a bulbous nose and a pair of stony grey eyes emerging from the mass of hair. The dwarf tipped the clay stein he had been drinking from, draining the remaining two-thirds of the tankard in a single swallow. With a belch of satisfaction, the dwarf slammed the stein down and returned the rounded steel cap of his helmet to his head.

  “Revolting,” complained a voice both rich and husky. It belonged to a woman seated alone, nearer the door. Tall, her features even, too devoid of warmth and softness to properly be termed beautiful, the woman wore a travelling dress of rich green fabric, her gloves and boots trimmed with white ermine. Like the departed bodyguard, she wore a slender bladed sword at her side, but unlike the weapon of Ravna, the woman’s sword bore a gilded hilt and there were gems set into the pommel. The woman stared at the dwarf for a moment, then wrinkled her nose in distaste, putting such effort into the grimace that it set her chestnut-hued tresses bouncing about her face.

  “I must agree with you, Baroness von Raeder,” Steinmetz’s thick tones rolled from the fat man’s mouth. “Quite a disagreeable sight. To travel in the company of such crude creatures is more of a trial even than that loutish coachman. Why we must tolerate their kind in our lands…” The merchant cast a snide, condescending look at the dwarf. “They should all crawl back into their burrows in the mountains and stop pretending that they are men.” The dwarf glared back, clenching his fists until the knuckles began to whiten.

  “Hardly an enlightened statement,” Feldherrn commented, still intent upon his cards. “When we get to Nuln you might have a look at the walls, or perhaps the sewers. They have stood for centuries, and are as sturdy today as when they were first laid down by Fergrim’s ancestors,” The gambler looked up as he finished his speech. Fergrim Ironsharp nodded his head slightly in the gambler’s direction.

  “The walls and sewers are built,” Steinmetz grumbled. “We don’t need their kind anymore.”

  “I understood that Herr Ironsharp was to be an instructor at the eng
ineering school?” the Baroness von Raeder commented.

  “That is so,” Fergrim said, turning to face the Baroness. “By invitation of your master engineers.” The dwarf smiled at the noblewoman. “I apologise if I offended you, my lady.” The dwarf bowed at the waist and clicked his heels together in the fashion of young officers of the Reiksguard presenting themselves in social situations. The Baroness smiled back at the dwarf engineer. Fergrim jabbed a finger over his shoulder to indicate Steinmetz. “Don’t mind him. He doesn’t like my people because we prefer good wholesome beer that puts meat on a person, not the poisonous bear-piss he brings down from the north.” Bowing again, and with a last malicious look at the merchant, Fergrim left the room. Steinmetz mumbled several colourful oaths about the dwarf’s tastes under his breath.

  “We should be going as well,” Feldherrn declared, rising from his chair and gathering up his cards. “Our coachmen look to be just the sort of villains who would leave us behind.” The gambler walked towards the door. As he walked near the noblewoman, he extended his arm. “Shall we repair to your carriage, Baroness?” Her hand lightly resting on Feldherrn’s arm, the noblewoman allowed the adventurer to escort her to the waiting coach.

  Steinmetz grumbled a few more coloured expressions as they left, waiting a full minute before rising to his own feet and making his own way outside.

  The coach stood just before the small roadside inn. It was a large, oak pannelled carriage with two massive stallions hitched to the yoke at its fore. Dark leather curtains enclosed the carriage itself, providing some insulation from the elements for the passengers within. The roof of the coach was laden down by the packs and luggage of the travellers, lashed into place by heavy ropes. A small iron seat had been folded out at the rear of the coach, a similarly tiny ladder allowing Fergrim to ascend to his position behind the carriage. The dwarf cast an appraising eye at several wooden boxes lashed atop the coach, each box bearing a single dwarf rune burned onto its surface, his keen gaze looking for any hint that they had been disturbed. The other passengers were seated within the carriage itself, awaiting the arrival of the merchant, Steinmetz.