by Nathan Long
‘You seem disappointed,’ said Chesnekov. ‘Are you not relieved?’
Ulrika shook herself from her misery. ‘I had hoped for vengeance. I wanted to make the hordes pay for the death of my family. Now… now I don’t know what I will do.’
Chesnekov nodded solemnly. ‘You have a warrior’s heart. Well, there are still chances for revenge. Indeed, one of the warlords still lurks in the hills to the north – a mad, perverse thing known as Sirena Amberhair, neither man nor woman – who leads the debauched reivers we fought just now. If you wish to apply to my captain, I will put a good word in for you. You won’t be the first she-Gryphon. The northern families have sent us daughters before.’
Visions of riding with the lancers and cutting down swathes of marauders from horseback flashed through Ulrika’s head, and she suddenly ached for it to be possible, but of course it wasn’t. A vampire could not live among men. The Gryphons bunked together, ate all their meals together, and patrolled in the sun. She would be discovered in an instant. And even if she wasn’t, her hungers would not allow it. She was having trouble keeping her teeth from Chesnekov’s neck as it was. Imagine being surrounded by an entire barracks full of heart-fires. No. If she was going to fight the marauders, she must do it on her own, in the shadows, away from temptation.
Memories came to Ulrika as they rode under the imposing arch of the Gate of Gargoyles and into the city at the tail of the lance company. She recalled standing on the walls with Max and Felix and the Slayers, watching Daemonclaw’s endless horde advance on the city, the vortex of black energy his sorcerers had summoned swirling above them in the sky. She remembered the siege towers spewing forth their cargo of hideous beastmen, and fighting them while slipping in pools of their blood.
The devastation continued inside the walls as well – collapsed tenements, burnt-out homes, shops and workshops of the Novygrad all reduced to blackened rubble. Markers had been raised here and there in the debris, honouring the lost and the dead, and decorated with mementoes from their lives – a broken sword, a horse-shoe, a spray of wilted flowers, a stuffed doll.
With each turn of Ulrika’s head came more memories – the hordes breaking through the outer wall and rampaging through the streets, the duke’s men closing the Old Town gates on the survivors in order to keep the invaders out, the terrible fires. She shivered and upbraided herself for having selfishly wished the hordes would come again just to assuage her discontent. Her few brief moments of glory and violence would mean months and years of slow death by starvation, exposure and disease for those who actually lived here.
And yet, there were signs amongst the ruins of rebirth. Here and there new timbers were laid over old, patching smashed windows and doors. Half-built houses and tenements rose out of the wreckage, their pale, naked frames like saplings growing from the ashes of a forest fire. A tavern with no roof and no doors had ‘Open for Business’ scrawled on its soot-smudged wall in the Kislevarin alphabet, and shadowy figures huddled around an open fire within it, dipping their mugs in an open keg of kvas.
Ulrika’s chest swelled with pride to see such activity. Praag had always rebuilt. Even after the Great War against Chaos, when the very buildings had screamed and wept blood from the nightmarish energies unleashed during the final battles, the city’s indomitable spirit had not faltered. Though the very walls were filled with ghosts, though ruins like the Old Palace and the towering Sorcerers’ Spire remained malignant tumours of madness and mutation, the people had built again, exorcising what spirits they could, and ignoring or living with the rest.
She wondered if Praag would ever be long enough at peace that it could lay all its ghosts and become a normal city again. Somehow she doubted it.
Not far inside the gate, a few square blocks had been cleared of rubble, and a vast military encampment had risen in their stead. The banners of rotas and companies from across all Kislev rose from a multicoloured sea of tents, with a parade ground lined off in the centre for drills and inspections. It was to this camp that the lance company was headed, but as they approached it, Chesnekov smiled over his shoulder at her.
‘Where does your cousin live?’ he asked. ‘I will deliver you to her doorstep.’
Ulrika froze for a moment. She had almost forgotten her earlier lie. She had no address to give him, and she didn’t want him to know where she intended to go. ‘Uh, could I impose you for a moment longer before we go there?’ she asked.
‘But of course, madam,’ he said. ‘What do you require?’
‘I… I am famished, and I wouldn’t like to wake my cousin in the middle of the night and immediately ask her to feed me. If I could beg from you a little bread, or something to drink?’
Ulrika saw the faintest cast of doubt enter Chesnekov’s eye, as if he wondered if she had befriended him just to get a meal from him, but he inclined his head politely and turned his horse after his fellows. ‘The mess is for troopers only, but if you will consent to wait in my tent, I will bring you something.’
Ulrika hid a smirk. In his tent, was it? Bread for bed, then? Fair enough. At least it made it easier for her to get away. ‘I thank you, sir. You are most kind.’
They followed his company through the camp, at this hour silent and still, most of the soldiers asleep in their tents. Only a few lonely sentries watched their passage down the central avenue to a roped-off enclosure with the red and gold standard of the Gryphon Legion rising at the front.
As the troopers entered and trotted through the ranks of tents to a stable area at the back, Chesnekov slowed to a stop before a tent.
‘Wait inside,’ he said as he handed her down. ‘I’ll return shortly.’
‘I will,’ she said. ‘And thank you again–’ But he was already cantering after the others.
She saluted him, smiling wryly, and turned to leave the camp, but then paused, looking down at her leather jerkin and shirt. She couldn’t walk through Praag covered in blood. She stretched her senses towards his tent. There was no one inside it. She ducked through the flap and looked around in the darkness. A cot sat on either side, with battered trunks at their feet and bits of gear and horse tack scattered everywhere.
Ulrika crossed to the cot that smelled like Chesnekov and opened the trunk. A second uniform and a neatly folded pile of civilian clothes lay within it. Ulrika pulled out a voluminous white shirt and held it up. Perfect. She quickly shucked her coat, jacket and blood-soaked shirt. There was a washbasin on a stand between the two cots. She filled it from the jug, washed her leathers, face and hair until the water no longer turned pink, then put on the new shirt.
She cocked an ear as she reassembled the rest of her costume, listening to see if the lancer was coming back. He was not. She sighed. The poor fool would return with bread and sausage and something hot to drink, expecting an amorous trade, and she would be gone. Ah well, at least he could eat the sausage. She turned to the tent flap, then stopped. If she had made the decision that thieves were predators, and therefore permissible prey, she could not allow herself to be a thief, even if it was only something as trivial as a shirt.
She took out one of the silver coins she had collected from the bandits she had met in her travels, and flipped it onto the pillow of Chesnekov’s cot. It would more than pay for another shirt, and would keep her on the path of honour, which was more important.
She bowed to the empty cot. ‘Thank you, Petr Ilanovich Chesnekov,’ she murmured. ‘You have done me a great service. May you win glory for your name, and peace for Kislev.’
And with that, she turned and walked out of the tent.
CHAPTER NINE
OLD FRIENDS
It was well after midnight, but though the ruins of the Novygrad were quiet, and the soldiers in the camp asleep in their cots, much of the rest of Praag seemed wide awake. As she wandered through the Merchant Quarter, people spilled into the street from taverns ablaze with lamplight and loud with manic laughter and singing. Young men argued philosophy on the corners while rich merchants and
their wives rolled by in open carriages, bundled in furs and surrounded by well-armed escorts, and mercenaries from all over the Old World swaggered the streets, calling out to harlots, and women who only dressed like harlots.
But side by side with all the frivolity were scenes of abject misery, and painful contrasts assaulted Ulrika everywhere she looked. In high windows, noble men and women, their faces hidden behind elaborate masks of enamel, gold and velvet, stuffed their faces with imported delicacies, while in the alleys below them, starving refugees, displaced by the devastation of the horde’s passage, huddled in makeshift tents, making meals of rats and cockroaches. In the taverns, strutting dandies toasted the duke and his great victory over Chaos, while in the streets, weary watchmen guarded barricades behind which whole neighbourhoods had been evacuated because of the spectral horrors that had risen from the bloody cobbles during the Chaos attacks, and which had not yet been laid to rest. In the squares, wild-eyed priests of Ulric and Ursun prophesied doom at every hand, while boys with rouge on their cheeks and girls wearing their corsets on the outside of their dresses laughed at them and sang rude songs.
Music was everywhere. Every tavern and kvas parlour had a singer or a group performing for the crowd. Raucous drinking songs rattled the windows of crowded inns. Sharp-faced poets sang scathing satirical ballads to groups of laughing students. Refugees crooned sad lullabies while rocking their hollow-cheeked children to sleep. Even on quieter streets, Ulrika heard snatches of wild melodies on the wind – a strummed lute, a drunken flute, the haunting keening of a mournful violin. In a dark courtyard, she saw a barefoot young refugee girl dancing to some song only she could hear, as silent tears streamed down her cheeks.
And the musical madness seemed to reach even the highest ranks. As Ulrika moved through the crowds, she heard that the ruler of Praag, Duke Enrik, a distant cousin of hers, was putting on a victory concert at the Opera House in a week’s time. It was to be the social event of the season. Ulrika found it offensive. It was indeed a great thing that the hordes had retreated, but to claim one’s armies had defeated them and won a valiant victory when in reality the invaders seemed to have destroyed themselves with infighting and then retreated in the face of a brutal Kislev winter, was exaggeration on a grand scale.
Ulrika shook her head. From the duke to the lowliest beggar, the people of Praag seemed to her like drunks dancing on the edge of a precipice, and putting on blindfolds so they couldn’t see it. Had the city always been like this? She didn’t remember such wild merrymaking going on before. But of course, when last she had been here, it had been in the middle of a crippling siege. Perhaps, after the fear and horror of the long, terrible winter, Praag had only gone mad with relief.
Finally she arrived at the place she had been edging towards since she left Chesnekov’s camp – the White Boar Inn. It had been inevitable she would come, but even as she’d headed for it, she had dragged her feet, and spent more time than was necessary watching the passing parade. At the same time, though her hunger had grown ever more insistent, she had put off feeding to come here, wanting to see the business to the finish before she did anything else.
The White Boar had been where she and Felix and Max and the Slayers had spent all their time while waiting out the siege. It had been here that she had fallen out of love with Felix, and into love with Max. It had been in a room above the taproom that she had nearly died of plague before the wizard had used his powers to drive the illness from her body. If her old companions were anywhere in Praag, they would be here. Just a few more steps, and she could be reunited with them.
She hesitated on the threshold, wondering again if that was what she wanted. Would they welcome her? Would they fear her? Would they attack her? Was she ready to fight them if they did?
A burst of harsh laughter came from within the tavern. She thought she heard a deep dwarfish guffaw amidst it. They were here. Knowing it, she almost turned around and walked away, but then she straightened. With the hordes not returning, she had lost one of the reasons she had journeyed to Praag. She wouldn’t give up on the other out of fear. Thrusting out her jaw, she pushed open the door and stepped in.
The taproom was just as she remembered it, dark, smoky and filled with soldiers, mercenaries, and the women who made their living from them. Gospodar lancers with drooping moustaches stood in one corner, toasting each others’ girls with kvas. Squat Ungol tribesmen hunched around a table, drinking fermented mares’ milk and murmuring to each other. Men in uniforms from Kislev, the Empire and beyond crowded the long bar. Ulrika saw Tilean pikemen, crossbow men from the Reikland and Hochland long gunners, all talking to each other at the top of their voices.
‘Another one gone, I hear,’ said a mercenary with an Erengrad accent as Ulrika eased past him. ‘That little beggar gal who sang so sweet down by the bridge. Hasn’t shown up at her patch for three days now.’
‘That’s the fifth I heard of this week,’ said a man who might have been a winged lancer once. ‘Too bad. I liked her. Gave her a coin for luck every time I passed. What d’ye suppose is happening to ’em?’
‘Who cares?’ said a third companion, a dour-looking swordsman in Praag’s colours. ‘Good riddance, I say. Filthy refugees spreading disease and stealing our food. Why don’t they go back where they came from?’
‘Because it isn’t there any more, y’clot,’ said the ex-lancer.
A loud cheer drowned out his friend’s reply, and a deep voice bellowed. ‘Harder! Strike harder!’
Ulrika turned towards the voice and saw, in a room at the back, a crowd of hard-faced mercenaries surrounding a short broad figure who sat on a bench and gripped the table before him, while a man with a hammer stood behind him, raising it over his head. There were too many men in the way for Ulrika to see exactly what happened next, but she saw the hammer swing down at the skull of the short figure as another cheer went up.
‘Good!’ cried the deep voice. ‘Once more to set it!’
Ulrika started across the taproom, alarmed. What was going on? As she walked up the three steps to the back room, the man with the hammer stepped back and raised it one more time, and she got a clear view at last of the figure sitting on the bench. It was Snorri Nosebiter, Gotrek and Felix’s ugly Slayer companion, and he was having a nail pounded into his head.
Ulrika stared at the sight. She knew it was not the first time Snorri had had nails pounded into his head. A row of three rusty spikes had jutted from his skull in lieu of the traditional Slayer’s crest since before she had first met him, and he’d still had them the last time she saw him, when he and Gotrek, Max and Felix had left her in the care of Countess Gabriella, in the ruins of Castle Drakenhof. Now it seemed he was adding to his collection. Four lesser nails, some bent, had been interspersed among the spikes, and he was in the process of adding a fifth.
He sat hunched, naked to the waist, his massive arms braced on the table before him, while a trickle of blood welled from the base of the new nail to run down between his bushy black eyebrows and drip off the end of his bulbous, oft-broken nose. A puddle of red was spreading between the mugs and plates on the table. Neither Gotrek, Felix nor Max was among the witnesses to this act of decoration.
The man with the hammer struck again, and the new nail sank another quarter of an inch into Snorri’s skull as the men around him cheered and raised their fists and mugs.
‘That’s it!’ called the hammerer. ‘It’s set! Your crown is complete, Slayer!’
‘Snorri will be the judge of that,’ said Snorri, and reached up to grip the nail. Ulrika winced as he tugged experimentally at it, but he seemed to feel no pain. He nodded, satisfied.
‘Good!’ he said. ‘Now Snorri needs a drink!’
‘Then Snorri better go get a drink,’ said a big man with a cheerful, red face and a kerchief around his neck. ‘For ’tis his round.’
Snorri wiped the blood from his brow with the back of his hand, then frowned. ‘Wasn’t it Snorri’s round last time?’
&nb
sp; ‘Aye,’ said the man, who looked to be the leader of the others. ‘But ye wagered it would take four strikes to pound that nail through yer thick skull, and it only took three, so ye owe us. Ye don’t remember?’
Snorri shook his head. ‘Snorri doesn’t remember that.’
The man with the neckerchief laughed. ‘Well, who would, if they’d just been hit on the head with a hammer. But it’s Ranald’s truth, ain’t it, boys?’
The boys all agreed it was indeed Ranald’s truth, and laughed and pounded Snorri’s back, calling him stout fellow and old friend.
Snorri grinned and shrugged. ‘Well, Snorri guesses it must be true, then. Snorri will get the drinks.’
Ulrika shrank back as the Slayer stood and stumped past her, roaring for the barmaid to take his order. She wasn’t certain she wanted to renew her acquaintance with him. Particularly not at that moment. Even if he didn’t want to slay her for being a vampire, he was just the sort to blurt it out at the top of his lungs in public. Unfortunately, he caught her motion out of the corner of his eye and looked her way. At first he didn’t seem to recognise her, for his eyes moved away again, uninterested, and she breathed a sigh of relief, but after five heavy paces he slowed to a stop, then turned back, frowning thoughtfully.
Ulrika shot a glance at the Slayer’s companions, who were joking amongst themselves now, and not paying any attention. She didn’t want them seeing him coming back to her, so she stepped to him.
‘Hello, Snorri Nosebiter,’ she said, keeping a hand on the hilt of her rapier in case he attacked. ‘It’s good to see you again.’
‘Snorri knows you,’ said Snorri, still frowning. ‘You are young Felix’s girl.’
‘Y-yes,’ said Ulrika, a bit stunned he had taken the reappearance of a woman he had last seen as a vampire so calmly. ‘At least I was. Ulrika Magdova, Ivan Straghov’s daughter.’
