Moving through the workshop with its mad scrawls on the walls and piles of bones was akin to walking through the gates to the Underworld. He could not breathe for the cold hand of dread around his throat as he slipped through the second door and began to descend still further, sure that he would never again feel the luxury of the sun on his face or the wind against his cheek. The sickly subterranean light cast its pallor across the clay stairs exposing their thick cracks and many more deep fissures in the walls as though the passages and chambers cut out of the earth were buckling from the constant pressure bearing down on them from above.
Instead, he was on his knees, his face squashed up against one of the widest cracks, shivering violently as he watched Agnes absorbed into the hellish monstrosity of the necrarch’s making.
He retched, helpless to prevent his body’s betrayal.
The sound of his revulsion echoed loudly in the hollow earth.
Fehr sank forward, the contents of his guts spilling across the cold stone of the floor.
On the other side of the fissure the beast turned, drawn by the noise. Its face shifted in the shadows cast by alchemical light. Shock at the intrusion was quickly masked as the vampire’s pale brow furrowed. Its cheekbones narrowed, casting deeper shadows as its jaw distended. In the silent echo between heartbeats the vile creature shifted shape from the withered old man into something primal, animalistic. The vampire tossed back its head, nostrils flaring as it scented his vomit on the stale air.
“How dare you?” the creature rasped, moving with shocking speed across the floor.
Fehr lurched to his feet and tried to run for the stairs but his guts cramped and he vomited again. Behind him the oak door slammed open as the vampire burst out of the workshop to snatch him up off his knees and hurl him into the wall. Fehr hit the stone hard and slumped down into a pool of his own vomit.
“You invade my sanctuary,” Casimir said, driving his boot into Fehr’s gut, lifting him bodily to the snap of ribs. “That is a violation, Fear. I suffer your existence for my master, but at a distance. You are a fly on a dung heap to me, a necessary evil. I should have killed you when I had the chance.” Then he broke off, distracted by a sudden notion. His lip curled back on feral teeth. “No, no, this is better. This serves a purpose. It is ordained. You were brought down here to feed my child. Of course. Yes. You desperately crave freedom from your hellish existence. I understand you now, Fear, you are just like those other wretched mortals. You seek oblivion. Should I share my blood with you, Fear? Or should I share yours with Mammut of the Nine Souls?”
When Fehr did not answer the vampire’s smile spread, the beast taking his silence as tacit agreement. “It is good yes, very good. She needs to feed. You understand her needs. You always did, that was why you gave her to me. I see it now. I understand. It was not the child you surrendered, it was yourself. How many times have you spied on me down here? How many times have you crawled on your hands and knees so close to my beautiful creation longing to be a part of it? I ought to punish you, but I will give you what you want. I will feed you to the Nine, though I do not think she will absorb you, merely digest you, a coincidence of needs. How opportune. You, Fear, will be meat for the beast.”
Fehr lifted his head as another cruel kick drove into his chin, snapping it back.
The beast grabbed him by the wrists and dragged him into the workshop, and across the floor, throwing him bodily inside the gold circle, then hunkered down beside him. Casimir stroked Fehr’s cheek almost tenderly. “I can smell your fear, little man. It oozes out of every pore, soaked into your sweat. It is such a delicious stench, fear.”
“Please,” Fehr begged, drawing his legs up to protect his damaged ribs.
“Do not beg, Fear. It is a revolting trait, so mortal in its pointlessness. Think instead that what you are doing is a great thing, a noble thing. You will not be forgotten. You will live on within Mammut. Surely that is better than the unremarkable life you have fled from?” Casimir took Fehr’s bandaged arm in both hands, drawing back the cloth to expose the soft pink under-skin that had healed over the bites. He lowered his head to the wound, his nostrils flaring as he savoured the thrill of the blood so close to the surface. Their eyes met and their gazes held. It was the perfect parody of a lover’s moment, broken only when Casimir’s teeth pierced the raw flesh, opening the vein. The beast suckled at the wound, savouring each pulse as he swallowed. When he drew his head back up his chin was covered in a thick crimson smear.
The circle did not dampen his screams.
“Are you ready to become a part of history?” the vampire crooned. He wiped the blood from his lips and moved in close to the cluster of meat and muscle that had been the girl Agnes, and held out his hand until a ragged maw opened and a grotesque tongue laved across his fingers, Mammut of the Nine Souls tasting blood for the first time. Casimir smiled his satisfaction.
“Run,” he said, without turning, and chuckled as he heard the frantic slap of Fehr’s hands trying to protect his face from Mammut’s reaching talons as the monstrosity sought to bury them inside Fehr. He screamed and thrashed out, but the beast was relentless and remorseless in its hunger.
Fehr’s screams were pitiful.
The more he resisted, the worse the pain became as the bones of his chest tore apart to breaking point, his struggles opening him to fresh agonies. He refused to die here, like this, grubbing in the dirt at the feet of the vampire’s pet. He needed to live. He needed to carry what he had learned to people with the strength to put down the rabid animal. He owed them that much having failed them so many times before. Wolfgang Fehr lifted his head defiantly, feeling the bite of bone breaking. He pulled his good hand away from the suckling flesh of the bloodstained mass of flesh that was Mammut. The abomination’s juices had dissolved patches of skin, stripping it down to the muscle beneath.
He scrambled away from the monster, cradling his ruined arm against his broken ribs.
The vampire stood over him, eyeing the hurts appreciatively. “Death becomes you, Fear. See how willingly your flesh succumbs? You are truly one of the damned.”
“No,” Fehr said, stubbornly. His voice barely carried the inches between them.
“What was that? Resistance? You seek to deny me still? You are a curious creature. Such spirit for a coward. I did not expert that. I had you down as a runner, Fear, a man always taking to his heels come the pain. Tell me, Fear, did you think I could simply allow you to walk out of this place with your head full of our secrets?” He swept his arms around to encompass all of the walls. Like the workshop above they were covered with meaningless scrawls of formulae and invocation.
Fehr shook his head. It was a frantic desperate denial. “I don’t know anything,” he promised, but he knew that he knew too much. How could he not? He had seen the kind of diabolical experiments these mad creatures were capable of, and in them glimpsed the true nature of their dead hearts.
“So much for those gallant final words, Fear. To die with self-confessed ignorance on one’s lips is less noble by far, but it is good that you have rid yourself of those heroic notions of saving the world.”
The vampire turned, as though hearing some inaudible voice over his shoulder.
He nodded, and inclined his head.
Still with his back to Fehr the vampire said, “Perhaps I won’t kill you, what then?”
Fehr did not dare hope the question was anything more than another part of the beast’s cruel madness.
He said nothing.
“You cannot leave like this, oh no. No that would not be right, but then, you cannot stay I have no need of you if you are not to feed my child. No, but perhaps you can be used,” he said, turning around to look at the wreck of a man curled up on the floor. “Can you be used, Fear?”
“Anything,” Fehr said, and knowing even as he said the word, he meant it.
“Good, good. Perhaps we have a second coincidence of needs, you and I?” Casimir knelt taking Fehr’s face in his hands and pr
essing lightly with the index fingers of each one, pushing the grubby nails through the layer of skin as though thinking to probe the man’s mind with heavy hands. Blood trickled down Fehr’s temples. “You want retribution. It burns in your blood like every one of your wretched dreams. You would strike down the monster that ruined your life.”
It was a trick of petty fortune telling. It took no great skill to guess that revenge motivated the majority of the tortured souls in the old world. He bore the stigma of loss, made plain by both his reluctance to hand over the child, and his failure to protect her. It marked him out as clearly as any leper’s mark. That, at the last, he had still tried to save her was as pitiful as it was heroic and smacked of a need to salve his own daemons.
“If I could offer you vengeance, would you take it? If I could give you the vampire that destroyed your life, would you slay him?”
“At what price?” Fehr asked.
“Your immortal soul,” the vampire said, and then threw his head back and laughed, not the menacing laugh of maniacal evil, but honest laughter. It took him a moment to realise that the beast was making a joke. “I jest,” Casimir said, grinning. In that moment Fehr had a glimpse at the man the beast might once have been. It was a shocking revelation in that they were not so different, the two of them. “I want what you want.”
“It can be arranged,” Fehr mumbled, still unable to move from the beating he had taken. “Give me a piece of wood and I’ll drive it through your heart right now.”
“Believe me, Fear, I am not the one you want to kill. Like you I am a mere servant. I do the bidding of another. We are both soldiers in a fight that is not ours, no? You serve your master, I serve mine and neither of us is our own person. That is how it is the world over, a power play of master and servant, no? We are not free. No one is. Your life is controlled by the whims of another, just as mine is. You seek approval and fear that you disappoint in everything that you do. So you strive to do more, no? Even now you are thinking how you might bring about my undoing and thus save yourself from the cowardice that brought you to my door. That is how it is. Life reeks of subjugation. I would be free of the shackles that bind me as a thrall. Yet the master returns.”
The promise chilled Fehr. He lay at the feet of the vampire, broken, being taunted by the fact that a greater evil neared. He felt as weak and helpless as a newborn fly trapped in an infinite web. “What would you have me do?”
“Only what you would do anyway: betray us to your masters.”
And so the vampire proposed an alliance that neither man could trust. “Radu nears. I can sense his presence in my blood. The press of his will on mine has been long absent, leaving me my own master. I would have it no other way. I will deliver the master unto you and yours, in return for the peace I crave.”
“And in that peace you will continue with this?” Fehr asked, nodding towards the monstrosity that was Mammut, his face unable to mask his revulsion.
“I will be no threat to you,” Casimir said, not answering the question. Fehr did not believe him for a moment. “Ask yourself all the questions you need to, Fear, but do not allow superstitions to cloud your judgement. You can avenge your people or you can die here like a wretched piece of offal smeared beneath my feet. Vengeance or failure, which is it to be?”
“You will deliver your master to us? You are willing to betray him, and yet you ask me to trust you? I was not born yesterday, vampire. Your kind are masters of deceit. You promise one betrayal, why should I not expect a second? Why should I think beyond these words of yours being the sprinkle of sugar to bait a bigger trap? I would be a fool to trust you.”
“And you will be a dead fool if you do not. There is a way out of here through the old tunnels. It takes you beyond the lake’s edge. Return to your people, Fear. Bring them back to our door. Or don’t. Stay and become one with the damned. I could taste their taint in your blood. Day by day you weaken, becoming more and more like them, don’t you? You sense it within yourself. You have twin destinies, Fear. Which do you choose?”
Casimir stood on the high tower, savouring the elemental fury of the storm. The wind howled around him, bullying him but he was not about to back down from it. It was a risk, but then all of death was a risk. Fear was out there now, somewhere in the wilderness, running for his life. He closed his eyes, listening to the symphony of nature’s instruments as they played for him. It was a beautiful and haunting melody, so simple, so pure, and yet so cunning in its construction.
He moved close to the edge, clambering up onto the parapet. The movement frightened the ravens into flight. Black wings swirled and flapped around him, and for a moment, even set against the moon, the vampire was invisible. It was a subtle deception, as simple as a sleight of hand trick, and as effective as the most powerful of magics. One moment he was there, the next he was gone.
The birds broke with the wind, riding the thermal currents to settle all along the battlements.
Their scattering did not return Casimir. The illusion was complete. The vampire took to the air, merging with the madness of ravens, and became one of them.
The master had chosen to side with his precious Amsel. He would regret slighting Casimir.
The seeds of his downfall were even now scattering to the four winds.
Along the battlements a raven cawed, sighting the master and his entourage returning. The cry was taken up by all of them save one. Likewise, all save one bird took flight, filling the sky. That one bird remained on the battlements, watching, waiting, and imagining what it might be like to be truly unfettered.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Lost Rites and Resurrections
Kastell Metz, Deep in the Heart of the Howling Hills, Middenland
The Winter of Rancid Flesh, 2532
The sight of the castle lifted Radu’s withered heart.
His birds took to the air in greeting, filling the sky with tenacious feathers as he walked around the long path skirting the lake. A grey empty mist lay thick on the ground.
“Soon,” he whispered, caressing the simple wooden box he clutched tight to his chest. “Soon.”
He had not let the object out of his sight since the girl had brought it up from the earth, but neither had he dared to open it again, not out here where so many eyes might see.
No, the contents of the casket were a secret worth savouring. It was enough that he could feel its presence through the wood. It stirred with his touch as though whatever lay hidden was somehow alive, though rather than sentience he suspected it was the proximity of his flesh that triggered the excitement. He had tested the hypothesis with one of the Amsel’s loyal creatures, bidding the miserable wretch place his palm flat on the lid of the casket and describe what, if anything, he felt. The man’s answer had been an utterly unremarkable, “Wood.” Then Radu had placed his own hand down alongside his. There had been no need to ask again; the man recoiled in shock as the casket pulsed with hateful life. That single touch had been enough for Radu.
Amsel fussed around him. He saw the covetous way his thrall looked at the casket, and the hurt in his eyes when Radu snapped and snarled and drove him away so that he might have some peace. Worse though was the way he acted. The prissy little fool carried on as though he had somehow gifted Radu with such an amazing thing. Did he not understand that Radu’s hand had been slowly steering him towards the relic’s resting place? It was pitiful, really.
Amsel spent most of the march with his wretched coterie, pretending to be their master. It was a miserable charade. Watching the birds, he made a silent vow to remind the thrall of his place within the scheme of things.
But first things first, he was eager to return to his laboratories and fully examine the treasure they had found.
He scuttled spider-like towards the great gates. Behind him the waters of the lake rippled, the mist spreading to mask it completely from view. The trees might have been emaciated sentinels watching his return, their gaunt spectres casting black shadows through the thickening banks of
fog that rose up in his wake. The coterie of damned hauled the black iron-bound gates open at his approach, and then scuttled away back to their hovels in the outer bailey and courtyard. Behind him Amsel’s few loyal servants grunted and cheered, their chants spiralling as they marched in step to the rhythm of the noise. There was no army now, and no need for one. He had allowed the bones to fall, leaving the skeletons to rot where they fell, and cut the tethers on the zombies, allowing them to shuffle mindlessly, his last order imprinted on their minds: fight! When the imperative failed, they too would fall, their resurrection temporary.
Casimir was not at the door to meet him.
Radu had no interest in the ugly faces that stared at him as he entered the courtyard. The casket pulsed in his hands as though it sensed that the moment of revelation was near. Twisted thorns were carved into the brickwork of the walls, a relic from the castle’s past life. Set into the abutments and wall braces death masks and chiselled faces fell under the shadows of the twin moons, their visages hideously twisted by the elongated shadows. The wretched death seekers huddled beneath their canvases, their faces every bit as twisted as the shadow-tortured carvings. Ignoring them, he walked through the courtyard, the lord returned to his demesne. He craned his neck, scanning along the wall walks to the high tower, the disused chapel, and then across the outbuildings and back in a slow circuit.
He hissed back one of the damned who dared approach, and swept through the courtyard, his cloak flapping around his legs, eyes fixed on the door ahead that would lead him down to his arcanum and workshop.
“Soon,” he crooned again feeling the heat radiating from the box. Radu hunched over it protectively There was no sense of homecoming as he bustled over the threshold. Nothing had noticeably changed in his absence. “Casimir!” he barked, throwing open the tower door. The thrall did not come running. Wings clipped, that’s what it needs, yes, yes. Put them in their place. Put them down.
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