[Von Carstein 03] - Retribution

by Steven Savile - (ebook by Undead)

  “Indeed. Circumstance has made you wise, I see.”

  “No, Mannfred. It was age that did that. Circumstance made me vengeful. Give me a reason, Mannfred, a single reason why I should not unleash a thousand agonies upon you and your manservant as retribution for violating my home, one reason.”

  Skellan bristled, ready to fight if the witch was intent on forcing their hand. It would be on his terms, not hers. He tensed, cracking the bones in his neck as he turned first left, then right. He breathed deeply, drawing upon the beast within, summoning it. His face contorted, the scar tissue of his cheeks tearing and changing as he growled.

  Mannfred laid a hand on him, stilling him. “It is not time for brute force, my friend. There are other answers at our disposal.” He turned to the woman, Kalada, the Eternal as she had mockingly dubbed herself. He held out his hand to her. She saw it immediately, the plain band amid the more elaborate rings. Her eyes widened. She looked up at his face as though seeing him properly for the first time. She held out her hand to him. He took it and raised it to his lips. She in turn took his and duplicated the kiss. Something had happened between the pair, but Skellan was baffled as to what exactly it was that had transpired.

  “What do you want of me and mine?” The Lahmian asked bluntly.

  “I would call on the old bonds, Kalada. I would, for a short while at least, offer truce between my blood and yours.”

  “Why do you think I, or my queen, would countenance such a thing?” Skellan could tell she was genuinely curious.

  “To cause strife among the living.”

  “Again, why do you think we would seek such a thing? We are well situated here. We have influence, power: true power. We don’t have to skulk in the shadows and hope the masters of this other world don’t come looking to slay us. They crave our company. They dote on us. We are a status symbol, something to be associated with not shied away from. We have the ears and hearts of the aristocracy, the artists and artisans. We are the true rulers of the world above us, or at least this part of it. So why oh why would we want to meddle with what so obviously suits our purpose? We are not the fools who would kill the goose that lays our golden eggs. To put it simplistically for you, we like this city—our city—just the way it is.”

  “Think beyond a few streets woman. Imagine grand designs of power. Dare to dream what is possible.”

  “You make the mistake of assuming we want or need more than what we have, von Carstein. It was ever thus. You and your kind seek to impose your greed for glory and lust for power onto the rest of us, turning us into something you can understand.”

  “Not so.”

  “Oh but it is, it is, painfully so.”

  Something stirred in the darkness, deeper in the belly of the temple. Skellan spun around, fangs bared, ready to launch himself. He was jumping at shadows. There was nothing there.

  And yet…

  And yet he could smell something, something he couldn’t see. Skellan’s lips curled in a threatening snarl, a low growl percolating in his throat.

  “Down boy,” the Eternal said, derisively. “Rein your beast in, Mannfred. I’ll have no blood spilt in my home.”

  “A little late for that,” Skellan said, grinning spitefully. “One of your little reptiles had an accident.”

  “At ease, Skellan, we are guests here.”

  “For now,” Skellan rumbled. He didn’t trust the woman. Anyone who adopted a snake for a fetish was inherently conniving and mistrustful. She would reveal her hand eventually, and when she did he would bite it, tasting her old withered blood.

  “We have a bond, Kalada, you and I, my people and yours. There are old ties between our bloodlines. Was Vashanesh not husband of Neferata? Did he not sup of the elixir at her side, sharing blood with your queen? Those ties, no matter how much we might profess otherwise in our anger and arrogance, cannot be broken. They are the ties that bind. They are the threads that make us who we are. It has always been so.”

  “That was a long time ago,” the Eternal conceded grudgingly. “It is irrelevant now.”

  “Not so. As ruler of my people I am, to put it rather simply, heir to the great one himself, and as such would invoke those old bonds, Kalada. I would have you and your people at my side, equals in the new Kingdom of the Dead.”

  “Why?”

  “You said it yourself. You can go places we cannot. Where we are forced to hide from humanity, you seduce it. Together we would pose a threat far greater than we do alone. Imagine. We would be irresistible, mighty. Join us, Kalada. Undermine the cursed Empire from within while we muster the dead and attack from without.”

  “You assume again that we dream of conquest. What you offer is hypothetical. Your sire and your mad brother both failed, why should we believe that you are capable of anything other than the same miserable failure? You talk of dominion but offer no proof of your might, no proof that you are capable of matching your words with actual power. What we have now is concrete. You ask us to risk what we have, throw in our lot with a bloodline of failures, on the promise that you are different? Somehow more than your sire? More than your mad brother?”

  “What would you have me do to prove myself, Kalada?”

  “Show me your might. Show me your armies. Show me what makes you more than your kindred, von Carstein. Show me you have what it takes to back up your pretty words with actions. Show me you are more than just another failure. Then, and only then, I will consider your plea. Now leave me. Seeing you once more has not been a pleasant experience. Some corpses are best left dead.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A World of Victims and Executioners

  Obelheim, Talabecland

  Ackim Brandt was true to his word. They had been treated well by the Obelheimers, though well was a relative term. They were prisoners of an opposing army. They were not the honoured guests of some sultan in a far-flung corner of Araby. They weren’t beaten. They were fed and although the gruel was far from nutritious, the lumps of potato and occasional chunk of rancid pork and strips of gristle kept them alive.

  That was what it was all about, keeping them alive.

  Ackim Brandt was no fool. Living they had at least some basic economic value to the victors. They could be used to barter for concessions and the return of their own people from the Stirlanders. Martin, in turn, would be feeding the Talabeclanders he held captive. Anything else would have been inhuman. Both Brandt and Kristallbach understood the basic folly of war: that there was no more stupid a notion than the one that claims a man has the right to kill another simply because he lives on the other side of a river and their rulers have a quarrel. The men have no quarrel with each other, and yet they are supposed to do the dying.

  Vorster Schlagener huddled up against the stockade wall, rough logs digging uncomfortably into his back. The weather had turned, finally. It was bitterly cold. He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt warm. They each had a blanket, but the wind cut through them, rendering them useless. The others moaned. They were soldiers, it was what they did. If they weren’t complaining they were most likely dead. He barked out a short bitter laugh at that.

  Meinard stood guard with two other men, Jasper and Brannon, although they hardly “guarded” anymore. Tonight, as last night and the night before, the hours were being passed in a game of chance.

  Meinard stank almost as badly as the men he tended.

  It was no surprise.

  When he wasn’t playing gaoler he was tending the pigs, mulching the swill and mucking out the slop. Vorster could see the similarity in Meinard’s dual responsibilities—they were all animals, after all.

  The other two weren’t much sweeter.

  The guards were a lot friendlier towards him than he would have been in their place, but none of them were prepared to talk about the conflict. He had no news of home and no idea how the war was being played out. They could have been days away from rescue or hours from damnation and none of them knew either way. The world had stopped for them afte
r Ignatz’s bloody stupid charge.

  Soldiers loved to talk, though, so they found other things to moan about. Days and weeks of captivity locked up in a rat infested, pigswill reeking pen gave them precious little else to do. During all that time Meinard had never come across as much of a liar. Vorster had slowly and carefully drawn him and his replacements, when they came to relieve him, into a conversation that went beyond the pillow virtues of women, the various flavours and tastes of beers brewed traditionally in oak vats in different regions and things of equally minor consequence. Still, even when they had formed something approaching friendship, mere was no talk of the war or the bravura of comrades-in-arms marching out to face the world as he would have expected.

  Brandt was a little more forthcoming about the things that really mattered. He visited Vorster after sundown on three consecutive nights, pulling him out of the stockade to question him about the Stirland command and what he knew of Martin von Kristallbach’s plans. Brandt was no simpleton. He knew that Vorster was little more than a foot soldier, but he had taken a special interest in him. He had heard of the existence of tunnels within the mountains, some that might even stretch below the plains, though how far and how extensive they might be he had no clue. He was, he explained at great length one evening, acutely aware of the possibility of one or more of those tunnels being dwarfish in origin and going through the earth from the Worlds Edge Mountains, beneath cities like Eichenbrunn, Leicheberg, Langwald and perhaps beyond like some great subterranean road winding beneath the Empire leading who knew where. Halstedt? Julbach? Schollach? Kircham? Blutdorf? Ramsau? Further afield into Averland? Reikland?

  It wasn’t, Ackim Brandt assured Vorster, a major concern. The way in which he said it gave the lie to his words. It was a problem. It was precisely the sort of problem that would drive the soldier to distraction trying to puzzle through it. Brandt didn’t like the fact that these supposed underground roads existed. They were unknown variables that impacted upon his carefully thought out strategies. Worrying about them drove Brandt to distraction. Did Martin know of these tunnels? Indeed, were there any tunnels at all or was it all just smoke and mirrors to distract the Talabeclanders?

  It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that Martin was to blame for the disinformation, if it was disinformation. The man was nothing if not shrewd. He would have been well aware of the uncertainty such a rumour would spread in the enemy camps. No one wanted to fight an enemy he couldn’t see. No one wanted to chase his own shadow across the battlefields. No one wanted to fight against an army of what might as well have been ghosts, able to disappear out of sight, beneath the ground, at will.

  Vorster understood that these evenings together were intended to give him a unique insight into the mind of the enemy, but perhaps the most startling revelation of all had been how utterly normal Brandt’s men, and Brandt himself for that matter, were. It was difficult to cast aside prejudices, but if he were to be truthful, Brandt was not so different from Vorster. They might have been cut from the same cloth.

  Vorster was impressed with how Brandt looked out for the good of his men.

  Vorster had been a soldier for a long time. He had served with good men, great men and fools. He had seen those good, great, and foolish men forced into making some tough decisions. They seldom flinched from those unsavoury choices and neither, he was sure, would Brandt if it meant the difference between one life or many.

  In that way Vorster’s captivity was an eye-opener.

  Every day it became a little more difficult to think of them as the faceless enemy so full of evil, child killers and murderous swine, because every day he grew a little more familiar with their faces and their dreams, heard talk of their families and realised that in another time he would have been proud to call Meinard, Jasper and Brannon friends, and wouldn’t have hesitated to serve in a battalion led by Brandt.

  Does that make me a traitor, he wondered, and not for the first time? It didn’t help matters knowing full well that he was their prisoner, alive still only because of Brandt’s whim. The man had admired his courage in the face of stupidity. For that he had given him, and the others, their lives.

  He couldn’t decide if it was natural that he should feel some kind of bond being forged between him and his captors or if it was another layer of deceit in the enemy’s game?

  Their chosen games were knucklebones and five card blind, not that he had anything to lose. Jasper assured him they were happy to take his marker because, given the circumstances, it was the least they could do. Vorster lost a lot of money that he didn’t have in the hope of loosening a tongue or two, but it was useless.

  Jasper studied the five dog-eared cards in his hand and tossed a coin onto the makeshift table. “I’ll take one blind,” he said, laying the fifth card face down.

  Brannon dealt Jasper a fresh card and turned to Meinard, “In or out, big man?”

  “In,” Meinard grinned, dropping his own coin onto the tabletop. “I’ll take two, one for each eye.” He discarded two of his cards.

  Brannon turned to Vorster. “How about you? You want to gamble your life away on the turn of a card?”

  Vorster smiled. “With sweet talk like that how could I resist? Give me two.” Vorster took the cards and arranged them in to the familiar pattern of the Blind Man’s Curse, a good hand. Not the best, but probably better than anything anyone else at the table was holding.

  “So ladies, let’s be seeing you, shall we?” Brannon laid his own pattern on the table with a cock-eyed grin. Beggar’s Bluff, not worth the paper the cards were painted on.

  “Not your day, is it sunshine?” Jasper remarked, arranging his own pattern on the table, the Penitent Vagabond. A fair hand and on another day it might have walked away with the pot, but not today. Jasper licked his lips nervously as he watched Meinard place his own cards down, the Blood of the Gypsies. No wonder Meinard was smiling. The Blood of the Gypsies was a very good hand. There was only one problem; to make the pattern he needed the Gypsy Child card, which was part of the Blind Man’s Curse pattern. Meinard, Vorster realised, was cheating. He wondered how the man was doing it, but then thought of the unusual dexterity that Meinard had with ropes and assumed it was down to some form of palming. The others were looking at him expectantly.

  “Ah… I think we are about to witness a miracle my friends,” he said with a smile and laid his five cards down, one after the other, resting the Gypsy Child on the top of the pile and holding a finger over it.

  “Why you no good son of a bitch,” Jasper muttered, but he wasn’t looking at Vorster, his eyes were firmly fixed on Meinard.

  Meinard grinned and shrugged.

  Brannon reached across the small table and grabbed Meinard by the wrists, triggering whatever mechanism Meinard had secreted up his sleeve and sending the hidden cards scudding across the table.

  “I want my money back.”

  “Of course, of course,” Meinard said placatingly, still pinned by Bran-non. “It wasn’t as if I was going to keep it.”

  “Of course you weren’t,” Jasper agreed amicably.

  Vorster felt it first, the earth shivering beneath his feet. It was subtle but unmistakable. He stopped listening to the accusations and placed his hand flat against the dirt floor. The tremors were steady, rhythmical—marching feet. “Shut up,” he hissed, dropping to his knees and pressing his ear to the ground. The others fell silent. Vorster listened. They were still a long way off, a league or more at least, but it was as though the very earth itself were protesting at their passing.

  “Oh, Sweet Shallya, Mother of Mercy,” Meinard said, his face grown suddenly pale.

  “How far?” Brannon asked curtly. He had already begun packing the cards and the makeshift table away.

  “Not far enough,” Jasper answered for him.

  They weren’t the only ones who had heeded the signs. War was coming closer. Outside the tent the commotion mounted, and the horses whinnied and fought against their handlers as a palpable
air of fear descended on the camp. The tent flaps were drawn aside and Brandt stepped through the gap. Instead of his usual implacable calm he wore a harried expression.

  “Good news, boys,” Ackim Brandt said. “Word’s come from Martin. An exchange has been agreed. You’re going home.”

  Vorster studied the man’s face, looking for the lie. He had come to know Ackim Brandt well during their months of captivity.

  “Up,” he said. “Come on,” he gestured for Vorster to stand. “Come with me, there is something you need to see. You three, escort our reckless hero.” Brandt was breathing hard, Vorster realised. He was afraid. It was obvious. Martin had brought Stirland to their door. He had good reason to be afraid. Vorster got to his feet. Brandt turned and left. Jasper nodded for Vorster to do likewise.

  Outside, the air had a real bite to it. He sucked it down in great mouthfuls, having not tasted fresh air for days. The camp was a hive of activity, soldiers moving purposefully about their business dousing campfires and ordering their possessions as though they expected the order to move out at any moment. Vorster looked up towards the many peaks of the Farlic Hills. Freedom was close enough for him to taste it.

  “Thank you,” he said to Brandt.

  “Don’t thank me soldier. You proved yourself more than merely a worthy adversary. Indeed, after that irrational charge your damned idiot of a leader Ignatz decided upon, you handled yourself well enough for me to wish you were one of my men. I do not say that lightly. In another time I like to think we could have…” He didn’t finish the thought. “For all that though, the reality is that you were lucky. If it weren’t for the fact that the day after that debacle Oskar Zenzi captured Jakob Schram you would all be dead by now.” He paused, as though expecting Vorster to interrupt, question him. Vorster remained silent. “Schram is a runt of a man, for sure, but he is a well-connected runt of a man none the less, a distant relation of Ottilia herself, I believe. Your man has agreed to a trade, all of your lives for this one aristocratic buffoon. It speaks well of Kristallbach that he was determined to see you all returned. Indeed, it is the mark of the man that he values his men-at-arms as highly as another ruler values her family, no?”