Warhammer - Curse of the Necrarch

by Steven Savile

The old woman’s eyes widened in fear as the intimacy of death reached her heart and mind, but shook her head in mute defiance.

  “There will be no blood kiss for you. You are not worthy.” Casimir leaned in and with shocking ferocity tore out her throat. Her blood sprayed out in a huge arc, soaking the faces of a dozen more around the fire. The vampire looked up, the weather witch’s throat still in his mouth. He spat the flaps of skin out and wiped the thick crimson juices from his lips as he stared at each and every one of them in turn. “You will all suffer the same fate if you do not surrender the child.”

  “Why do you want her?” another asked. Messalina’s blood ran down the side of his face. He did not move to wipe it away.

  “She is mine, as you all are,” the vampire hissed. “You reside here under sufferance, you feed our thirst for knowledge. That reason, and that reason alone, is why you live.” His hand snaked out to punch clean through the man’s ribcage and tear out his still-beating heart. It took a moment for the shock to register on his face but by then he was already dead. The vampire sank his teeth into the bloody organ, taking a deep bite from the soft, succulent flesh before he cast it aside. “You do understand how the reek of blood drives my kind to madness? I can smell your fear. It is a violent delight just waiting to dribble down my throat. Your suffering is my ecstasy. Deny me the girl and I will take particular pleasure in devouring each and every one of you. Now, where is she?”

  “Here,” Agnes said, pushing between the legs of the adults. “I am not afraid.”

  “You should be,” the vampire said, holding out his hand for her to join him.

  “Why? Elis came to me. He promised me he would be there to meet me. Why should I be afraid of you if it means seeing him?”

  The vampire’s grin was cruel, “Because, sometimes, child, there are worse fates than death.”

  “Harm her and I will kill you,” Fehr said, crouching to wrap his arms protectively around Agnes. She was tiny in his arms, shivering with the cold.

  “Oh, such tender bravado, but I don’t think so, Fear. I think you are aptly named for the coward you are. Now let go of the child before I run out of patience and kill you both here.”

  “No,” Fehr said. The beast was right, he was a coward. His heart beat wildly against his chest. His mind raced with imagined pain. She wasn’t shaking, he realised, feeling the tremors worsen. He was. Like the rest of her foul kind she craved the unlife that the beast’s kiss offered. Yet still, he did not give her up.

  “Then you are a fool, Fear, and you have damned all of your cohorts with your stubbornness. I trust you are happy with your new-found courage?”

  “Mock me, beast, it matters not. Call me a coward, you would be right, call me a fool and you would be equally right, but for all my failings, for all my fears and weaknesses, I am not the sort of man capable of surrendering a child to murder.”

  He remembered Jessika’s face as the beast had compelled her into the earth to retrieve the box, and worse, by far, he remembered her fear.

  “Pretty words. Did you practise them? A dying man should say something important with his final words, don’t you think? Now give me the girl and let this miserable charade be over. I am bored with it.”

  Fehr said nothing.

  Agnes wriggled out of his arms and went to the beast.

  Fehr could not bear to watch as the creature led the little girl towards the darkness of his tower.

  They burned the weather witch and the other hapless fool who had got his heart torn out. There was no ceremony to it, no dignity. Two men dragged the corpses through the dirt by the heels, tossing them into the fire pit. For a while, as they all stood around and watched, it did not seem as though the flames were fierce enough to sear away the flesh and bake the bone, but as the juices dripped out of their bodies the flames roared and the heat forced the mourners back step after step.

  Then they brought the pieces of their lives, the weather-witch’s gaudy tent and the geegaws of her magic, and threw them into the flames beside the bodies. The clutter of life was quickly reduced to smoke and ashes. The flesh took considerably longer but it too went up in the sickly smelling clouds, and like that they were gone.

  He had lived amongst the deformed death seekers for the best part of a month and still he had no idea who the man had been, only that he had lost his heart for the little girl they all adored in their own way Fehr felt sick.

  He wanted to tear the place apart stone by stone. He wanted to bring it down until it was nothing more than a pile of dust. The strength of his anger surprised him. It seemed disproportionate to the death of a child he barely knew, but then it wasn’t about Agnes and it wasn’t about the old woman Messalina or the fool who had lost his heart. It was about Jessika and his parents, his home, the four walls he had been raised in, the grass outside the kitchen window where he had played as a child. It was about Metzger and Bonifaz and the soldiers he had betrayed in fear, and most of all it was about him.

  More than anything, he wanted to beat down the tower door and confront the vampire face to face even if it meant dying.

  That thought meant he was just like the rest of them: a seeker of death. The only difference, slight though it was, was that he did not seek immortality in the endless night of the soul. He sought oblivion.

  He did not throw himself at the door. Instead, Fehr watched the flames as though it was his own life they so greedily consumed. The pattern they wove was hypnotic. There was a tragedy here above and beyond the existence of these wretched folk, above even the beast that haunted their nights. It was the tragedy of the human condition and it’s ability to survive where truthfully it had no right to. It was the confession that mankind was nothing more than another parasite feasting on the bloated corpse of the world. It was the blight of this unnatural selection that had the dead walking hand in hand with a youngster too willingly naive to know that her brother couldn’t be waiting for her.

  He might crave death but he did not belong here. He never had, no matter what Agnes had said. He didn’t belong anywhere.

  It had never been so obvious. He was not one of these pitiful creatures. He refused to be. And yet what was he? Fear? Were they right in naming him? He could feel the pull of the place. It grew more insistent day by day. Their wretched ghetto was claiming him for its own. He could feel it seeping into his blood like a rot had set into his will.

  He looked down at his clothing, the shirt with the torn sleeve and the trousers caked thick with mud that had dried into a crust. The toe of his boot had worn through. His belt was little more than a frayed rope that kept his trousers on his bony hips. He looked every bit as pitiful as the next man in the castle. He turned away from the fire, hating what it showed him about himself. Instead he clung to the anonymity of the shadows along the curtain wall. His breathing was harsh, ragged. His skin itched, not just the pink flesh of the healing wound, but all of it, every inch of skin. Fehr looked up at the moon and wanted so desperately to howl out his frustration. He had to cling fiercely to the knowledge that there was one subtle difference between them: he did not yearn to be some bloodsucking monster.

  Fehr huddled up against the chill brace of the stone wall and wept for the girl, Agnes, and for himself, for all of them. He had to get out before the ghetto claimed his soul as fully as it had claimed his body.

  When he thought of what he knew about Kastell Metz and its wretched denizens he couldn’t believe it would be enough to buy his life back from Reinhardt Metzger. No, he needed to know more. He needed to know all of its most intimate secret places. He needed to strip it of its mysteries. Within those hidden things lay its weaknesses. With those, perhaps he could buy his life back.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Nine Lives

  Kastell Metz, Deep in the Heart of the Howling Hills, Middenland

  The Winter of Buried Grief, 2532

  Casimir dragged the girl behind him.

  She did not kick or struggle; it might have been better if she had. No, she
was lifeless in his hand. The irony of it did not escape the necrarch’s thrall. Shadow shapes twisted as the baleful wind coiled around the tombstones. Curls of mist roiled around the withered stems of twisted thorns. There were no flowers in the boneyard. Huge stone sarcophagi and mausoleums leaned drunkenly, their foundations slipped over the centuries of disuse and disrepair. Each slumped silhouette cast another gnarled show across the cemetery lawn. Shadows of gargoyles leered, their faces stretched by the moon. He dragged the girl between standing stones and behind echoing mausoleums towards the subterranean tunnels that led down to his hidden workshop.

  Together they descended into the earth and along the dank tunnels to the pit beneath the graveyard where he laboured. The chill of emptiness stole into the chamber as he pushed open the heavy wooden door. It was the same chill that crept into Agnes’ hand, born from a similar emptiness. The child had given up the vitality of life even before he had fed her to the machine. He was almost disappointed, almost. He would have been but for the fact that she was precisely what his little experiment needed.

  He pushed open a second oak door and propelled her through in front of him, down a narrow flight of stairs carved into the clay of the earth, and deeper until he emerged into a second, lower chamber hidden away beneath Radu’s workshop. Alchemical globes lit the vast space. It was not as grand as the necrarch’s but it was secret, and it was his. The globes did not gutter in the draught that blew through the open door. The machine stood in the centre of the pit, itself sunk in the centre of the room. It was an elaborately welded bronze and tin framework of beams and cross braces, and in the centre of the machine were the leather cuffs waiting to harness the little girl beside what remained of her brother.

  She did not recognise the wretched creature as her kin, but how could she?

  The boy had at least looked like a boy when she had last seen him.

  Not so now.

  Now he bore little resemblance to anything remotely human. His musculature had been torn apart, his heart kept beating by arcane manipulations even as his skin was peeled back and the muscle and tendon drawn away from the bone to wrap around another skeletal frame, this one fashioned of brass and tin. The notion of replacing the skeleton, so brittle and pointless with something unbreakable fascinated the vampire. Could the essence of the boy, Elis, survive or would the new creation be new in every way? There was so much he did not know, but the processes would reveal the truth; that was the beauty of scientific reasoning, the truth could not hide from it.

  He stood behind the girl, imagining his creation through her eyes: part man, part monster, which was which though was more difficult to differentiate. The metal frame was eight-limbed, like a giant spider, for balance. Because of that it needed more than one body to flesh it out. It needed several, eight, in fact. All eight hearts still beat on in the centre of the construct, one set in the cavity before each of the limbs, still linked by veins and arteries to the flesh of the dispossessed. Likewise the grey matter of their brains had been placed within a web of pulsing blood vessels, still controlling the most basic automotive functions.

  The girl was to be the final element, the soul of the monster. Once fastened into the framework he would open her skull and fuse the eight to her one mind so that she might will life into his great creation. She would be its mind, its eyes, its very core. She would turn eight into one and become a creature of immense power in the process.

  He saw a thing of great beauty, a thing that could not have existed without his vision. For all his age and wisdom, Radu could not have done it, but then he was capable of so little, bastardising the genius of those around him. The thought of Amsel having the power to fuse flesh and recreate life so immaculately was laughable. No, he was unique in his vision as well as his gift. The others were ciphers, pale shadows of their kind. How could such noble ancestry be diluted into this weak blood? How could their sires allow it to happen? But he knew, of course, the insidious whisper of the truth niggled away at his mind as it had done for years. They allowed it to happen because they wanted it to. Paranoia prevented them from allowing their gets to truly inherit the gifts of their kind. Instead they subjugated them, undermining them, leading them into failure whilst gleaning what little they could of their genius.

  Not so Casimir. He had out-thought his brethren. Soon his scheming would come to glorious fulfilment and he could throw off the shackles of the servitude he endured. The vampire gritted his teeth, a physical manifestation of his will to overcome.

  He pushed the girl towards his creation, close enough for the rancid stink to overwhelm her senses and sting tears from her eyes.

  “Such a noble beast,” he said with conviction. She did not disagree. She said nothing. She did, however, shiver. He relished that single tremor.

  Casimir shoved the girl towards the metal and flesh monstrosity. “In,” he demanded.

  She did as he bade her, clambering into the belly of the construct. He fastened the harness, buckling the leather straps at ankles, wrists and throat before adjusting the tin pins to hold her head forever in place. When she was secured, he tightened the pins, drawing beads of blood where they burrowed in to the bone. He walked around the frame, tutted and furrowing his brow. He took a saw-toothed blade and cut through her screams, first slicing down to the bone and tearing away the girl’s scalp, then deeper, through the bone, careful not to bite into her brain lest he damage it. Carefully, he opened her up so that he might affix the dreadful tissue of the eight freaks from Amsel’s coterie that had preceded her into his great creation and fuse them all together.

  She screamed again, the pins holding her in place even as the blood streamed down her face and her cheeks and ears, but he did not hear so much as a stifled sob, an artfully crafted glyph on the floor absorbing all of her torment so that he did not need to hear it.

  On another day he would have savoured the suffering of a mortal but today he needed to concentrate. There were a dozen glyphs set in a circle around the frame, each serving its own specific purpose: one to hold back the inevitable moment of death that ought to have greeted his invasion, another to hinder the putrefaction of the meat and yet another to dampen the maddening lure of the blood. There was a sigil for every eventuality and complication he could anticipate. That, too, was a gift of the scientific method. The theoretical drove the practical, and step by step it offered solutions for all that could possibly stand between his creation and its rebirth as a glorious monster.

  The vampire offered no platitudes to the child; there was no need. In that single sawing cut through the sanctity of her skull she had learned the truth. There were things worse than death, many, many things. He began the slow ritualistic chant, drawing the bloody flesh together. Ropes of the stuff ran slick with blood between his fingers. He did, however, offer a chilling smile as the light of recognition flared behind her frightened eyes, her brother’s thoughts melding smoothly with hers.

  Before she could begin to come to terms with the presence of a second mind within hers, the ritual opened her up to the third and fourth, the screaming minds of the freaks drowning out any trace of sanity the child might have retained.

  He walked the circumference of the circle around the infernal machine. The line was drawn with fine gold filament laid deep into the stone, forming an unbreakable cage for his rituals. Too many times Casimir had read of great sorcerers and daemonologists undone by careless preparation. The use of gold, smelted and poured into the runnels carved into the floor was one of many safety measures that he had taken to ensure he did not end up a cautionary tale for scientists. At each of the seven points within the circle, where the gold triangle and square set inside connected with the outer ring, he stopped to utter another line of the incantation. Within the geometry of gold, the construct sculpted around the girl mutated, embracing young Agnes into its heart. As he left the third point, there was little of her left side that was not somehow melded with the muscle of the frame. By the fifth she was unrecognisable as the young gir
l she had been. By the seventh she was unrecognisable as human, so complete was her sacrifice.

  Even so, Casimir did not know if she would survive to breathe life into the marvellous creation. One by one he needed to remove the glyphs, knowing that in doing so he was breaking the sorcery that supported the child’s life with no guarantees that her flesh was strong enough to survive the transition.

  His creation could still prove to be stillborn despite the months of secret labour that he had devoted to bringing it to life.

  He could not allow doubts to creep into the ritual. Even the slightest flaw in the intonation of a single syllable could have untold ramifications. Casimir held up a hand, like a puppeteer manipulating phantasmagorial strings, and reverently commanded the creature of nine souls to, “Dance.”

  And it did, slowly, with no rhythm or coordination to its spasmodic movement.

  A cruel smile curled across the vampire’s bloodless lips. He made a second pass around the circle, scrubbing out the magical symbols that he had so carefully inscribed. With each one Casimir held the breath he no longer needed to breathe, willing his creation to live on independent of the sorcery that had thus far bound it together.

  With the collapse of each warding spell and protection, it survived, until with all of the glyphs removed his creation of nine minds fused into one glorious whole, lived on.

  Casimir threw back his head and laughed, his cry of, “It’s alive! It’s ALIVE!” filling the subterranean laboratories. Mammut, the beast of Nine Souls, was a perversion of magic and madness but it lived!

  Wolfgang Fehr crouched, the side of his face pressed up against the wall.

  There was a crack in the mortar and brick of the wall that allowed him to peer through and spy upon the vampire’s vile experiment. He shivered impotently. He knew, even as he watched, that his failure to intervene had cost him a part of his soul. The chill sweat of fear ran down the ladder of his spine, making a mockery of his new resolve. He had followed the beast back into its lair, his mind fired up with thoughts of confrontation, of saving the girl and going back out to the others as a hero.