Department 19: The Rising

by Will Hill

  Five sets of chair legs screeched across the floor of the Ops Room as the Operators hauled themselves to their feet. Major Turner shot Jamie a look that made it very clear they weren’t done, but Jamie ignored him; he wanted to get away from everyone apart from Larissa, wanted to take her to his quarters, tell her about Kate and Shaun, and try to find a way to fix what appeared to be collapsing beneath them all.

  They walked down the corridor, and piled into the lift when it arrived. Jack and Angela were heading to the mess for a drink before they turned in, and Shaun Turner was going to his quarters on Level D, so Jamie and Larissa were first to exit the lift.

  “I have to tell you something,” Jamie said, as soon as they were alone in the Level B corridor. “You’re not going to believe it. It’s about Kate and Shaun Turner. I saw—”

  “Where were you this morning, Jamie?” interrupted Larissa, her eyes narrow.

  “What?” asked Jamie, frowning. “I’m trying to tell you something here.”

  “I don’t want to talk about Kate right now. I want to know why you were late to the briefing this morning.”

  Jamie paused. “I can’t tell you,” he said, slowly. “It’s classified.”

  “And aren’t you just super pleased about that?” said Larissa, her smile curling into a snarl. “Isn’t the descendant of the founders just so happy that he gets to know things that we mere mortals don’t, gets to run off to the infirmary to check one of his squad without taking the other one with him. What a hero you are.”

  “What the hell’s going on here?” asked Jamie, his temper rising. “Why are you so angry?”

  “I’m not, Jamie,” she sighed. “It’s just a relief for me to know what your priorities are. The Department. Then Kate. And then is it me? Or am I further down the list?”

  Jamie stared at her, incredulous. The attack had come from seemingly nowhere, and his head was spinning. He opened his mouth to answer her, but Larissa turned away from him and flew quickly along the long corridor.

  16

  ALWAYS AND FOREVER

  TELEORMAN FOREST, NEAR BUCHAREST, WALLACHIA 13TH DECEMBER 1476

  The creature that had, until recently, been Vlad Tepes stood silently in the dark forest and watched the bodies of his army burn.

  The roaring pyre of Wallachian soldiers rose in the middle of the battlefield, some distance from where he was standing, but Vlad found that he could see every detail, as though his eyes had been replaced with those of an eagle. The metal of the soldiers’ armour was glowing white-hot as the flames rose around the bodies, and he could hear the crackle of roasting skin with ears that were now unnaturally sharp.

  He felt grief for his fallen men, but no guilt; they had died in the heat and fury of battle, died for their Prince and for their country, and there was no more honourable way to depart this earth. The guilt he was feeling, in the furthest corner of his heart, was reserved for three men, who had deserved better than to be abandoned by their master when it became clear the battle could no longer be won.

  Three men only.

  The three men he had returned to the battlefield to look for.

  Although he tried, straining his new hearing until his head began to thud with pain, he could not hear them. The air of the battlefield still rang with the screams and moans of dying men; occasionally a high-pitched shriek would pierce the cool night air as a Turkish soldier put an injured man out of his misery with the blade of his scimitar. Yet in the distance, how far away he could not accurately estimate, were Wallachian voices, full of fear but alive, and he knew that these were the fleeing remnants of his army.

  Vlad listened closely, searching the tumult of noise for any suggestion that the Turks had sent men after them, but heard nothing. Three parties of the enemy were still scouring the woods for Vlad himself, or his body at least, and the bulk of the victorious army were either celebrating or helping to move their caravan of tents and carts down on the field itself, where it could be pitched within sight of the fires. The survivors, it appeared, were being allowed to flee. Vlad raised himself slowly into the air, and set off towards them.

  The first vampire floated through the warm, still air at the edge of the woods, marvelling at the sensation. It was not weightlessness; his body still had mass, and he could move his limbs as normal. It was as though the air around him had somehow thickened, as though his body’s relationship with it had changed; he could push against it, like he could the solid ground that usually lay beneath his feet. Vlad flexed his new muscles, or altered muscles, or whatever he now possessed instead, and accelerated in the direction of the distant voices. He had floated no more than five or six feet when a hand wrapped itself tightly round his ankle and hauled him to the ground.

  Vlad sprawled on to the cool grass. Anger, hot and wide, burst through him; he turned to see who had dared to touch his person, pushing himself up on to his knees as he did so.

  Lying in the deep shadows at the edge of the forest was a Wallachian soldier. His face was pale, flecked heavily with drying blood, but his eyes were clear and staring. They regarded Vlad without fear; they appeared to be full of a dreadful resignation. With one hand, the soldier was gripping his Prince’s ankle; with the other, he was holding his intestines inside his body. A vast, gaping slit had been sliced across his belly, and glistening purple ropes bulged round the man’s hand, pulsing and shifting. Vlad’s expression did not change as he observed the man’s injuries; he had ordered horrors inflicted upon men and women that were a thousand times worse than disembowelment. But he felt pride, as he looked down at the soldier.

  Such courage, he thought. His insides are escaping, but still he lives.

  The soldier whispered something that even Vlad’s newly powerful ears could not detect. He lowered his face down beside the man’s, and encouraged him to repeat his words. The soldier took a deep, rattling breath, and Vlad moved even closer.

  “Devil,” whispered the soldier, and spat a thick wad of congealing blood into Vlad’s face. The vampire recoiled, despite himself. A crimson pillar of outrage burst through his chest, and he grabbed for the man’s sword, which was lying on the ground beside him. He raised it above his shoulder, turned back to the soldier and found blank eyes staring up at him.

  The soldier was dead, a final expression of satisfaction etched on his face for all eternity. Vlad stared down at the man, then slowly wiped the blood from his face with the back of his hand. He hesitated for a second, staring at the dark smear on his skin, then raised his hand to his mouth and licked it clean. He threw back his head as a momentary wave of shuddering ecstasy flooded through him, then lifted himself back into the night air and resumed his course.

  Four and a half miles to the west, a ragtag column of Wallachian soldiers made their slow, halting escape from the battlefield.

  They numbered perhaps two hundred; all that remained of the army that had begun the battle four thousand strong. The majority were injured; men held bleeding arms tightly against their armour, dragged themselves forward on damaged legs, pressed dressings against running wounds. The small number who had survived the battle unscathed helped their fellow soldiers, hauling them onwards, towards a destination that was unknown. At the head of the groaning, staggering crowd, three men walked slowly side by side.

  Valeri, the eldest of the Rusmanov brothers, walked in the middle. His General’s armour was dented and nicked, but he had sustained no injuries beyond a dislocated shoulder when his horse had been hacked from beneath him. He had killed the Turk that brought him down, then ordered the nearest Wallachian to pull the shoulder back into place. It had crunched into its socket with an audible pop, causing Valeri to grit his teeth momentarily. Then he had thrown himself back into the battle, without giving it another thought.

  To Valeri’s left walked a nightmare. Alexandru Rusmanov strode easily along the dusty road, a wide smile on his face. He was covered in blood from head to toe, crimson spilled from the veins of innumerable Turkish soldiers; his armour gleamed red, h
is face ran with gore. His eyes were wide and shining, flickering with the madness lurking beneath the thin layer of humanity that Alexandru wore like an ill-fitting coat. The battle had found him in his element, free of even the mild veneer of civilised behaviour that was expected of him during peacetime. In battle, quarter was not expected, nor mercy either, and he was able to give himself over entirely to the animal that squatted inside him.

  Alexandru had appeared to onlookers as nothing less than a blur of death; Turks had fallen to the ground in droves around him, hacked and slashed and sliced to bloody ribbons. There had never been the slightest concern that he might sustain injury; such a thing had never happened at any point in his violent, chaotic life, and it had not happened here either. Now he walked calmly beside his brother, his mind racing with blood and violence.

  On the other side of Valeri, his expression unreadable, walked the youngest of the three Generals of the Wallachian Army. Valentin Rusmanov had also escaped injury, but his demeanour was nonetheless sombre. He did not share Alexandru’s visceral love of violence, or Valeri’s belief that the deaths of thousands of their soldiers constituted, at worst, an inconvenience.

  No. The annihilation of their army had filled Valentin with disgust, and sorrow; he had left the bodies of men he considered friends behind as they fled, men who had fought bravely in the face of insurmountable odds. The battle could never have been won, and should never have been fought; it had been obvious to Valentin, and even to Valeri, although the older Rusmanov would never have admitted it, long before the first sword was swung in anger. It came down, as battles almost always did, to simple numbers, and those numbers had favoured the Turks by a wide margin. Occasionally, the numbers could be upset, by brilliant leadership or favourable geography, but this had not been one of those occasions; the rout had been fast, and merciless.

  Valentin walked with his eyes fixed on the middle distance. To anyone watching it would have appeared that he was staring at nothing, but that was not the case. Beneath his outer calm he was, as always, assessing everything around him, searching for potential threats; beyond the dusty curves of the narrow road, within the thick rows of trees that ran on either side, and from the muttering crowd that was trudging along behind him and his brothers. His sharp ears could hear an increasing number of whispered voices beginning, inevitably, to question the circumstances that had seen them brought this low. Valentin knew that it would only be a matter of time before their search for answers led to the questioning of their officers, and, in particular, of their absent Prince.

  It came even sooner than Valentin was expecting.

  “Why has he abandoned us?” shouted a voice from within the crowd of soldiers, followed by a clatter of metal as a sword was thrown down in the road. The mass of men began to shift and draw back, revealing the man who had called out. His armour was filthy with blood and dust, and crimson was running steadily from his left arm, dripping from his fingers and pattering to the ground. His eyes blazed with anger as he stared at the brothers Rusmanov, who had turned towards the source of the commotion.

  “Why are we creeping away like rats in the night?” asked the man. “When our brothers lie dying behind us, and our Prince has fled? The same Prince who promised us victory.”

  Alexandru Rusmanov took a step towards the man, a look of anticipation on his blood-streaked face, but Valeri raised a hand, and he held his ground. Valeri stepped forward instead, eyeing the soldier as though he was a particularly interesting species of insect.

  “What is this you say?” he asked, softly. “What manner of treason?”

  “Is it treason to speak the truth?” demanded the soldier, who Valeri believed was named Florin. “Prince Vlad left us behind to die in his name. How could he do so? How could he turn his back on us in such a manner?”

  Valeri forced himself to remain calm. “If Prince Vlad left the field of battle,” he said, as evenly as he was able, “his reasons will have been sound. It is not for the likes of you to speculate about them.”

  “The likes of me?” cried Florin. “What are the likes of me? Good enough to die at the end of a Turkish scimitar, but not good enough to ask where my Prince was when we were down to our last? Not good enough to—”

  The rest of the soldier’s sentence would go forever unheard.

  Valeri stepped forward, drawing his sword as he did so, and plunged the blade into Florin’s throat.

  The man’s eyes bulged, so widely that Valeri wondered for a split second whether they were about to tumble from their sockets. Florin made an awful gurgling noise, and slowly raised his hands to the blade, gripping it with what strength he had left. Valeri noted the man’s resilience admiringly, then pushed the blade forward again, sending the soldier’s severed fingers tumbling to the dusty earth. He felt the blade connect with the man’s spine, and gave a final heavy shove. The spinal cord broke with a dry crunch, and the tip of Valeri’s sword burst through the skin at the back of Florin’s neck. His eyes rolled back, and his body went limp. Valeri’s sword was suddenly the only thing holding the man up, and he withdrew it. The soldier crumpled to the floor, blood gushing out of the gaping hole in his throat.

  “For heaven’s sake, brother,” said Valentin, mildly.

  Valeri shook the blade clear of Florin’s blood, but did not place it back in its sheath. Instead, he held it out towards the remaining survivors.

  “Anybody else?” he bellowed. “Is there anybody else here who would speak against their Prince?” He stepped forward and levelled his sword at the nearest soldier, who took half a step backwards. “You?” asked Valeri, then swung his blade towards the next man in line. “You?” The soldier shook his head violently, his eyes wide and terrified. “Good,” said Valeri, and finally sheathed his weapon. “Then let that be the last of such talk. You are soldiers, regardless of whether the battle is over or not, and you will remember your places or I will make you. Is that clear?”

  “I believe they understand, General,” said a voice from behind Valeri. The Rusmanov brothers and the frightened, angry mass of soldiers turned as one towards it, and let out a loud communal gasp.

  Standing calmly in the middle of the road was Vlad Tepes.

  The former Prince of Wallachia’s royal armour was gone; he was standing in the cool night air in his chain mail, his billowing tunic and his leather trousers and boots. He wore a thin smile on his narrow face, and his eyes flickered with what almost appeared to be red in their very corners. He stood easily on the flattened dirt of the road, looking at his men.

  Valeri was the first to react, dropping sharply to one knee and bowing his head. “My lord,” he said, his eyes fixed on the ground. Alexandru and Valentin quickly followed their brother’s lead, with the ragged group of soldiers close behind.

  “Rise, my faithful subjects,” said Vlad, walking forward. “Rise and attend to me one last time.”

  The crowd of men hauled themselves back to their feet and looked at their Prince. Valeri’s face furrowed with concern as he considered his master’s words.

  One last time?

  Vlad walked between the Rusmanov brothers, favouring them with brief nods of his head as he passed, then stopped in front of the remains of his army. The three Generals turned and stood silently behind their Prince.

  “My loyal soldiers,” said Vlad, casting his gaze across them. “I could have asked no more from you than you gave on the field of battle. The day may have been lost, but our honour remains unbroken, and for that you should be proud.”

  “Thank you, Your Highness,” said one of the soldiers, dipping his head deferentially, and a murmur of assent rose from the crowd.

  “I cannot tell you what the future holds for Wallachia, or for myself,” Vlad continued. “But I can tell you the future of each man standing before me; the answer is that it will hold whatever you can make of it. I hereby release each of you from your oaths of service, and I wish you all the best of fortune. A chapter closed today, men, and a new one began, and from this po
int forward, our paths must diverge. So go, and live well. You are all dismissed.”

  Not a single soldier moved. Shock stood out on every face; mouths hung open in gaping expressions of surprise. Vlad stared at them for a long moment, then his eyes suddenly clouded a terrible red, and his mouth twisted open in a snarl.

  “You are dismissed!” he roared. “Do you not hear me? Go now, before I regret my generosity!”

  The paralysis among the soldiers broke, and they scattered, screams and shouted prayers rising from them as they did so. A small number turned and ran back in the direction they had come, towards the orange glow on the horizon that marked the location of the battlefield, but the majority simply fled into the dark woods on either side of the road, melting quickly into the darkness between the ancient trees. Vlad watched them go, able to do so for far longer than any of the fleeing men would have believed was possible, then turned to face his Generals, his eyes returned to normal, the thin smile back in place.

  “My lord,” said Valeri, his face the deep purple of outrage. “I must—”

  “You must do nothing, Valeri,” interrupted Vlad. “None of us must again do anything beyond what we wish to do. My friends, this day I have been favoured by a great gift, a gift that it is my intention to share equally among us. Set camp, and I will explain all.”

  “You wish to make camp here, my lord?” asked Valentin. “In the middle of the road?”

  “Do not worry, Valentin,” replied Vlad, his smile widening. “Nothing will approach without my knowledge, I assure you.”

  “Very well,” said Valentin. “We will see to the tents.” The three brothers began to walk towards the packs abandoned by the fleeing soldiers, in which lay the materials for making camp.