[Von Carstein 03] - Retribution

by Steven Savile - (ebook by Undead)

  That was his life now—he ran.

  Jerek hunched up against the doorframe. His hands trembled, as if he was some addict coming down from a Crimson Shade high.

  He shook with an undercurrent of violent seizures that wracked his corpse. He wanted nothing more than to cease to be, but he couldn’t die, not while the fractured visions still mocked him.

  And they did, day and night, night and day.

  They refused to leave him be.

  He killed rodents and birds when they dared come too close, and drank. They offered little more than a dribble of blood, but it staved off the fiercest of the madness, though day by day it was growing evermore difficult to resist the pull of delirium. He forgot who he was at times. His only anchor on sanity was an image: a white wolf. As long as he could recall the wolf he knew what he was. At the worst of times that was enough.

  He opened his eyes at the sound of a carriage rolling by. There weren’t many carriages in this part of the city. Those who could afford them had little business in the squalor of the Alt Stadt, little respectable business.

  The beautiful, open-topped carriage, was pulled by a black mare. A woman of uncommon grace disembarked. The dress she wore would have paid for the entire street with its sequins and pearls alone. He was drawn to her face. It was haunting though not attractive in any traditional sense. She moved past the window of a thruppeny bazaar with all sorts of junk and curiosities on display through the glass. The place was a veritable cornucopia of enticements and behind it, Jerek knew there was a low-rent knocking shop aimed at satisfying all the other curiosities a body might have. There was something about the woman, not merely that she was out of place in the Alt Stadt’s hovels, something more than that. It took a moment for him to see what it was.

  Though she faced the sun, he saw that she cast no shadow.

  He looked at the glass window as the shopkeeper dimmed the oil lamp. Her reflection wasn’t caught by the window, but seeing and understanding were two completely different things. It took Jerek the longest time to realise what he was seeing, or what he wasn’t.

  She cast no reflection and no shadow.

  He stared at the woman, praying fervently that she would not turn and see him. He struggled to his feet, needing the wall for support. His head swam dizzily. The woman was half way down the street before he managed a first unsteady step. Jerek lurched forwards. A rat scuttled over his foot. He twisted and saw that two more of the fat-bellied rodents had come out of the cracks and were sniffing around him in search of food. Without thinking he leaned down, almost falling, and scooped one of them up and crammed its wriggling body into his mouth. The rodent died in a shrill squeal. Its blood dribbled hot and thin across his tongue. Jerek swallowed, wishing even as he did that it was human. He fell to his knees and snatched up the second and third rats, draining them greedily.

  When he looked up, momentarily lucid, the woman had gone.

  He stumbled forwards, lurching down the street, looking left and right for any trace of her, but she had disappeared.

  It didn’t matter.

  He knew that he had seen a female vampire walking through the slums of the old city, and that was just the beginning of the peculiarities he began to notice.

  A few days later he saw a black bird perched on a blacksmith’s sign. The bird took flight in a burst of feathers leaving the weather-beaten sign creaking in the wind. He turned away, thinking nothing of it until he saw a second black bird perched on a roadside marker, watching him, and a third on a fence post. Their scrutiny was unnaturally attentive. He ran at the birds, scattering them.

  They didn’t fly far, one coming to rest on the guttering of a nearby hovel, the two others landing on the top of a low broken wall. Jerek turned wildly and the nearest bird squawked, but it didn’t fly away.

  He walked towards it slowly, reaching out. The raven cawed harshly and sank its beak into the soft skin of his hand. Jerek wrenched his hand away and swore as the raven took flight. It circled his head three times before flying away over the rooftops. He turned on the two birds perched on the wall. They studied him with their yellow beady eyes, and as he reached towards it the nearest bird cawed, sounding for all the world as though it said, Jerek? He flinched, startling the birds.

  They were gone a moment later—disappearing in a flurry of black wings.

  He stood alone in the middle of the street, turning left and right.

  The bird had known him. It had recognised him.

  Was it part of the madness? Had he imagined it? Was he like Konrad now? Hearing voices and threats in all these unlikely places?

  Three nights later he saw Jon Skellan.

  He knew it was Skellan even though he never saw his face. Jerek followed him a while, long enough to see him slip into the grounds of a huge manor house on the outskirts of the city, in one of the more affluent districts. Jerek stayed back, following at a distance. His only thought was that if Skellan was there then his master couldn’t be far away.

  He saw women come and leave the house that Skellan had entered, hauntingly beautiful courtesans. Each one put him in mind of the woman he had seen leaving the carriage, the woman with no shadow or reflection. They were vampiric in nature. He sensed the blood curse on them. How pretty they were and yet how lethal. He mourned for the women they had once been before they had become these loveliest of the dead.

  He slept in the old mausoleum within the grounds of the manor house. It was the first good day’s sleep he had had in months and he was forced to take it amongst the dead. Come dusk he left the house of corpses in search of a man who could help him, not that he expected help. He skirted the better neighbourhoods, moving by rooftop until he found a staircase leading down into the Unterbaunch. He ran along the dark passages, more vital than he had felt in months. He ran up to the first man he saw and pressed him against the wall. “Do you know where I can find a hedge wizard?” Terrified, the man shook his head. Jerek dropped him and ran on, going from person to person asking them the same desperate question. Time and again he was greeted by fear and ignorance until he slammed a young woman up against the lichen-smeared wall of the tunnel and instead of collapsing in fear she nodded hurriedly, eager to please.

  “Where?” Jerek rasped, not letting her go.

  “I know some stuff, little tricks mainly,” she said.

  He grinned, and as his smile widened so too did her eyes as she saw his fangs and understood what he was.

  “Please, no, mister. Don’t kill me. I—”

  “Can you change this?” He put his hand in front of his face to show her what he meant. “Can you make me look different? I need to look like someone else.”

  “I don’t know,” the girl said, “never tried to do stuff to someone else.”

  “Anyone else, please.”

  “And you won’t kill me after, like? So I can’t say what you look like to no one?”

  “No,” he promised.

  “Why should I believe you? I mean you are… you are… you know.”

  “I know,” Jerek said. “Please, do what you can. I need to be different. I need to get close to a man so that I can kill him.”

  “Oh, no, I can’t do that I mean, no. I—”

  “He’s not a living man. He’s a monster. I promise you.”

  Then his knees buckled. He could smell the heat of her pulse so close to his lips. He could hear the echo of the great song of her life that pumped in her veins. He could just lean in and taste her, take just a little of that vitality for his own. All he had to do was bite… He shook his head, struggling to quell the blood lust. “It is the creature that killed the witch hunter in the temple of Morr.”

  He knew it was true. He knew that Skellan was the vampire the witch hunters had been tracking when they had raided the Strigany caravans. It made a sick sort of sense. Skellan had been dogging his trail every step of the way.

  “You aren’t lying to me are you? I mean…” she left her second question unasked.

  Jerek
trembled as he let go of her. “He is one of the beasts that served the mad count, and his sire before him. He is the worst sort of monster, this I swear. He is a killer to the core and his presence in your city augurs ill.”

  “And you can kill him?” the girl asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jerek admitted. “I am not the man I was.”

  “But you are a vampire.”

  “I am, but I was a Knight of Ulric before I was damned to this unlife. I would rather be the man I was.”

  She looked at him and instead of fear he saw pity in her eyes. He hadn’t expected that. She reached out and touched his cheek. “I will try,” she promised.

  It was all he could ask.

  * * * * *

  She laid her hands on his face.

  There was an uncommon cold to the touch, but it quickly flowered into heat. Jerek felt it below the skin, rising to the surface. She whispered words of power as her hands moved, reshaping his face. Only he didn’t feel different; his eyes, his nose, his cheeks, he felt like himself. Still she moved her hands, feeling out the contours of muscle and bone, re-imagining them in her mind, reconstructing them in the glamour she wove around his face.

  She held a fragment of mirrored glass up for him to see when she was done. He had been about to knock it from her hand, determined not to see the emptiness, but he was there, trapped in the reflection. Only it wasn’t him, it was some other, unlike him in almost every way. Fine narrow boned features, light blonde hair and eyes of pale midsummer blue looked back at him. The face she had given him was handsome, too handsome he feared for a moment. It would draw attention to him. People would remember seeing him, and then he realised it didn’t matter because once the glamour fell he would be himself again. For a little while at least he could pretend to be human. “Thank you,” he said, feeling out his new face.

  “I don’t know how long the glamour will last,” the girl admitted. “I’ve never done it on someone else. A day? A month? An hour? I have no idea, but I hope it is long enough for you to do whatever you have to.” she handed him a small clay disk. “If you need to be rid of it for any reason, break this. They’re tied together. With the disk broken the illusion won’t be able to sustain itself. I don’t know how it works, only that it does. My father taught it to me. He liked his tricks.”

  Jerek smiled, trying out his new face. “I don’t know how to thank you.”

  “Don’t kill me,” the girl said.

  He touched her face, his fingers lingering on her rich red lips. She shivered beneath his touch. He felt her pulse, felt the lure of the blood, and rested his fingers to his own lips.

  “You have my word,” Jerek said.

  Jerek left the Unterbaunch a new man.

  The sun was low in the sky. He felt it sting his skin. He covered himself as best he could for fear that any exposed skin might suddenly ignite. He was weakened, but he didn’t know how weak he was. He clung to the shadows, scant as they were.

  He knew where he had to go. The manor house.

  It was the only link to Skellan that he had, and that made it his only link to Skellan’s master, Mannfred.

  He had no thought other than to confront the Vampire Count and, if he could, to slay him. If he failed, well he would be dead, truly dead, and then he would know peace. Given the choices and the torments of his unlife Jerek knew he couldn’t lose, no matter the outcome.

  He walked the snow-covered streets, watching the early evening bustle as businesses closed for the night. It was too early for the city’s other life to begin in earnest, though here and there as he crossed the entertainment district he saw the red glass oil lamps light up in the windows, welcoming business. Row upon row of ladies of every imaginable shape and size sat on their window ledges whistling and calling down to the wide-eyed young men on the street below. The street had its share of tenements with leaking gutters and grimy stoops as well as almost palatial buildings with mosaics and marbled pillars. “Eclectic” best summed up the contrary building styles in this modest district, but perhaps that shouldn’t have been such a surprise, considering the variety of tastes the street hoped to cater to.

  The first thick flakes of snow were in the air as Jerek hurried towards the manor house.

  “Up here, handsome, you can shelter from the snow,” one of the street’s ruddy-faced matrons called from her window in a brownstone tenement. The years hadn’t been kind to her.

  For a moment Jerek didn’t realise she was talking to him. “Ah, not tonight, gorgeous,” Jerek said with a smile and a hand on his heart. “Tonight there is only one lady for me.”

  “Ah, then she’s a lucky girl.”

  “Let’s hope she sees things the same way, eh?”

  A pair of young men staggered arm in arm out of a door across the street, nearly tripping as they navigated the short flight of stairs down to the icy cobbles. At the doorway an equally young girl with the feathered hair of a raven blew the boys a kiss.

  “You could have left one for me,” the old matron called to the girl from her window.

  “Next time you can come over and join us, Esme,” the girl called back. “Between us, we’ll kill “em.”

  “Aye, that we will, lassie, but at least they’ll drop happy.”

  The banter continued as Jerek ducked around the corner into a side street. His thoughts ran wild. He could smell them all, the ripe flesh leaning out of the windows, the blood pumping through their breasts as they forced themselves into their corsets and cinnamon and strawberry coloured dresses. It would be easy to walk into one of the bordellos and take a girl. Her death wouldn’t be noticed until morning and he would be long gone by then. Feeding would give him strength. He would need strength if he hoped to face Skellan and his master. That was how his mind worked when the hunger was upon him, it reasoned with him, showed him how he was weak and told him what he needed to be strong. It wheedled and pleaded, and finally cursed and kicked, and demanded to be fed.

  It was growing more and more difficult to resist it.

  He hurried away from the temptations of the street.

  He found a stray dog four avenues down. The mutt was on its last legs. Jerek got down on his knees and whistled low and slow, calling the dog over. It came willingly enough until it was a little less than ten feet away and then its fur raised in a ridge along its back. Before the dog could bolt Jerek lunged forwards and grabbed it by the scruff of its scraggy neck. He dragged it close and even as it snapped and snarled, feral, he broke its neck and fed. The blood was sour. It barely touched the need inside him, but it was blood.

  It would sustain him, keeping the fractured memories and the madness at bay a little while longer.

  He left the dog’s carcass at the side of the road, the snow stained red around it, and walked back to the black iron gates of the manor house.

  He waited a while, watching from hiding. As on his last visit the courtesans came and went, always in pairs, giggling and preening as they walked out of the gates only to return hours later, their cheeks ruddy from their nocturnal jaunts. They had fed, he knew. He could smell the blood and the sex on them.

  Jerek waited until the street was clear and eased open the gate. He slipped inside, moving quickly. He darted into the cover of the trees, using the shadows to edge closer and closer to the house. Oil lights burned in the lower windows. He watched as two courtesans closed the gate behind them and walked arm in arm up the drive to the door. He followed them, breaking into a run over the last few yards. By the time they realised danger was close it was too late. He caught up with them on the porch.

  “Good evening, ladies,” he said, leaning in close, an arm on each of their shoulders.

  The women turned, pleasant smiles gone. They were neither frightened nor surprised. “You stink, but then your kind always does,” her voice was coldly mellifluous. “What does your master want with the mistress now?”

  “Ahh, what doesn’t he want? You know how he is, after all,” Jerek said, imaging it was something Skellan
might have said in similar circumstances. They obviously thought he was working with Mannfred, just another lackey, so he thought better of correcting their mistake and decided to play the part. Being taken for an ally would make things easier. “Better take me to her, wouldn’t want to keep the lady waiting would we?”

  * * * * *

  They led him through a hall dedicated to a vast array of serpents, and without preamble down into a vast subterranean labyrinth with countless tunnels feeding into one another. Somewhere, almost certainly, they linked into the warren beneath the Alt Stadt.

  Jerek followed the women.

  He followed them through a series of turns and twists and narrowing corridors into wider tunnels until they reached an antechamber, and beyond it a door that led into the nave of a vast subterranean temple. The mistress reclined lazily on a grotesque snakeskin throne.

  She was ugly, though not merely physically. Her essence was ugly. Jerek walked into the grand chamber and felt it, a physical thing that had sickness clogging in his craw. He looked at the woman even as she looked at him. She was old, gaunt, her skin slack as though, like the reptiles she venerated, she was in the process of shedding it. She wore a simple black gown and a tiara of gold and copper hammered into a perfect circle. The serpent’s head, he saw, consumed its tail. The blood-rich rubies of the tiara’s eyes glittered in the torchlight.

  “What does Mannfred want with me now?” the woman asked, cutting to the quick. “He has our aid; does he seek to bleed us dry?”