by C. L. Werner
Slowly, the Commander of the Kaiserjaeger, the man who was feared throughout the Reikland as ‘the Hound of Boris’, raised himself from the cold stone slab he rested upon. Dried weeds and the moist foulness of animal entrails fell to the floor as he moved. With a trembling hand, he started to wipe away the ghastly symbols that had been inked upon his naked flesh.
‘Your strength returns, commander,’ a soft voice purred. There was amusement and superiority in that voice, but also an alluring suggestiveness that sent a shiver rushing through Kreyssig’s body.
It would have taken more willpower than even he possessed to keep from looking at the possessor of that voice. Kreyssig felt the shiver rise as he stared at his benefactor. The little chapel built into the side of the Lindenhaus was a shadowy, vault-like hall, a place of nigh perpetual cold and gloom. Even the head of the Emperor’s secret police wasn’t entirely sure what might be hiding in the murky chapel. There were some secrets even he was shy of uncovering. For now, it was enough that the darkness disgorged the one person in all Altdorf who had the ability to heal his ravaged body.
She stalked from the shadows, her slim body draped in crimson folds, smooth milky skin bared by the scandalous cut of her raiment. Flowing tresses of fiery hair fell about her shoulders, more vibrant in the darkness than her red gown. A beautiful face, so fair it might have been carved from alabaster, smiled at him. There was a coy, teasing quality in that smile. The grin of a cat toying with its prey.
‘It does not hurt so much to move the arm,’ Kreyssig told her. He flexed the muscles again, managing not to wince as another tingle of pain rushed through him. There had been times when any betrayal of pain on his part had been cause to undergo a second regimen straight away. He had learned to hide his pain after a few such extended treatments.
‘That is good,’ the flame-headed woman said. She approached the stone table, her eyes straying to give an almost mocking look at the cobweb-shrouded statue of Verena standing beside the wall. ‘In time, you will be as strong as ever.’
‘How soon?’ Kreyssig asked, a quiver of uneasiness in his tone. He was both excited and revolted when the woman’s slender finger stroked his injured arm. Her beauty was enough to set his heart pounding whenever she was near. At the same time, he felt the very core of his being sicken at her approach. No man encouraged the attentions of a witch lightly.
Even when that witch bore the title of Baroness von den Linden.
The witch stopped pacing around the table. She fixed her intense gaze upon Kreyssig. ‘Your hurts are many,’ she said. ‘Even I cannot say how long it may take to heal them. You are lucky to be alive.’
Kreyssig turned his head as he heard something creeping among the dead weeds. Glancing down, he was revolted to see one of the witch’s cats chewing at a piece of intestine he’d knocked from the table. He’d given up trying to count the filthy creatures — every time he visited the baroness there seemed to be at least one cat he hadn’t seen before. This one, a great bloated beast, he was reasonably certain she’d called Grimalkin.
‘Man makes his own luck,’ Kreyssig retorted. He used his irritation to find the strength to pull away from the witch’s touch. The effort seemed to amuse the baroness. Laughing, she reached down and drew the great fat cat into her arms, cradling it against her breast.
‘An interesting perspective,’ Baroness von den Linden mused, scratching the brute’s head until a loud purr rumbled from its furry body. ‘Would you say that my decision to render aid to you was also of your own creation?’
It was Kreyssig’s turn to laugh. ‘If you didn’t think I was useful, you would have let me rot,’ he stated. ‘If I wasn’t the Emperor’s strong right hand, I think you would have let me wither and die.’ He flexed his own right hand, feeling the dull ache of old wounds. ‘I do not blame you, of course. Your family has a history of acquiring those who are useful. Your mother, as far as my investigators can determine, was a simple Nordland peasant who seduced your father when he was hunting in the Middle Mountains. Curious how he died so soon after their wedding.’
‘Perhaps he was no longer useful,’ the baroness suggested. ‘Perhaps his ambitions were too short-sighted.’
‘And what are your ambitions, Kirstina?’ Kreyssig wondered. ‘How far are you trying to go?’
The witch shook her fiery tresses as she laughed. ‘As far as I can go! As far as my magic will take me!’
‘Your magic?’ Kreyssig asked, strangely stung by the thought.
The baroness laughed again. ‘My magic brought you to me,’ she said. ‘It has protected both of us from the plague that runs amok through the city.’
‘I have wondered about that,’ Kreyssig confessed. ‘How is it that you have warded off the plague when even the priestesses of Shallya are powerless?’
‘They try to save too many,’ the witch said. ‘The greater the effort, the more power the spell demands. The priestesses don’t know how to make such magic. They would shudder at what such rituals require.’
‘But you aren’t afraid,’ Kreyssig observed.
The witch dropped the cat to the floor. The beast dashed back to the entrails lying about the table. ‘To work magic, one must be afraid,’ she said. ‘Those who do not fear the power are soon devoured by it. To master the dark arts, there must be a balance of respect and fear.’ She threw back her head. ‘I have found that balance,’ she announced proudly.
‘Every shield has its weakness,’ Kreyssig warned, thinking of the way Kranzbeuhler and Ghal Maraz had slipped through his fingers.
‘Wisdom lies in finding the limits of your strength,’ the baroness said. ‘The plague, it is said, is spread by swarms of black beetles. Long have I guarded myself with spells to drive away any insect, so already I am guarded against the plague beetles.’
‘And what is the limit of your strength?’ Kreyssig asked as he strode to where his clothing lay piled on the chapel floor. He pointed to the cobwebs shrouding the statue of Verena. ‘It seems the spiders don’t share your respect for magic.’
The baroness frowned. ‘The spell afflicts only the six-legged vermin,’ she said. ‘Though it has a peculiar effect upon ants. They flee from me, but if I trespass too near an ant hill, the brutes come trooping out in a frenzied swarm.’
‘Protecting their home,’ Kreyssig said. ‘Any man would do the same when threatened by a witch.’
‘Would he?’ wondered the baroness. In a few gliding steps she crossed the vault and plucked the breeches from Kreyssig’s hand. She laid her hand on his chest, running her fingers through his hair. ‘What would you do if threatened by a witch?’
Baroness von den Linden laughed as Kreyssig took hold of her and crushed her against him.
‘Kreyssig-man late-late!’
Adolf Kreyssig scowled at the scrawny, rat-like creature as it scurried out from behind a pile of rotten timber. With most of the river trade dried up because of the plague, the once bustling shipyards along Altdorf’s riverfront had become derelict and abandoned, shunned as reminders of better, more prosperous times. They made a perfect site for clandestine liaisons, even with bestial mutants. During his long convalescence, he had come to dislike the subterranean haunts these brutes preferred. Better by far to draw them out into more accommodating conditions.
‘You forget who is master here,’ Kreyssig snarled at the creature, his hand dropping to the sword at his side. The rat-creature’s head drooped as it followed the motion, then the beast leaped back, raising its paws in a warding gesture.
‘Calm-peace,’ it whined. ‘No harm-hate! Know you take-need time for breeder-witch.’
The sword left its sheath as Kreyssig stormed towards the retreating mutant. He had engaged these creatures to spy for him, not on him! His liaisons with Baroness von den Linden were a carefully kept secret, something that could explode into a ruinous scandal if it were made known. Married to a baroness himself, involvement with another noblewoman would be bad enough, but there were already enough rumours about Ki
rstina to make such talk doubly dangerous.
‘You’ve been spying on me,’ Kreyssig snarled at the retreating rat.
‘No-no!’ the creature whined as it crawled away. ‘Not follow-see!’ The creature lifted a paw and tapped its long snout. ‘Scent-smell cat-devil on Kreyssig-man!’
The abject terror in the mutant’s voice as it mentioned cats added a note of such absurdity to the scene that Kreyssig returned his blade to the scabbard. What possible menace could such cringing vermin pose? Even if they knew more than they should, they could hardly make it public. Even in the best of times, the men of the Empire would hang them as abominations… And these were far from the best of times.
‘What do you have to tell me?’ Kreyssig asked the mutant.
The beast came slinking forwards, paws folded before it. ‘Listen-learn much-much,’ it said. The creature’s voice dropped to a conspiratorial hiss. ‘Boris-king leave Altdorf-nest soon! Hide-stay in Carr-o-burg!’ The mutant’s chittering voice stumbled over the unfamiliar name.
Kreyssig’s blood froze as he heard the report. He owed his rank and position to the favour and indulgence of Emperor Boris. As a peasant, he was held beneath contempt by the nobles of Reikland and Altdorf. Without the Emperor’s backing, Kreyssig’s authority would be compromised, perhaps even supplanted entirely. The despot’s courage would pick this time to desert him! Not for an instant did he doubt the mutant’s report. Droves of nobles had already quit plague-ridden Altdorf to go into seclusion in country estates. It stood to reason that Boris would follow their example. With the execution of Baron Konrad Aldrech, the Emperor had inherited the holdings of the Grand Count of Drakwald, including the immense Schloss Hohenbach. No, the only surprising thing about the report was that Boris had waited so long to go into hiding.
The mutant’s next words, however, did come as a shock. ‘Boris-king leave-hide! Make-declare Kreyssig-man Protector when king-man is gone!’
He could only stare at the verminous mutant in disbelief. Kreyssig, for once in his career, was dumbfounded. Emperor Boris was abandoning Altdorf and making him, a peasant, Protector in his stead?
Adolf Kreyssig, Commander of the Kaiserjaeger, would soon be Adolf Kreyssig, Protector of the Empire. He would become, in effect, surrogate emperor, the most powerful man in Altdorf!
Drakenhof
Brauzeit, 1112
Wine dripped from the nobleman’s thick moustache, staining the ermine collar he wore and trickling down the sleek steel plates of his armour. He lowered the ivory chalice, jiggling it in an irritable fashion. Timidly, a young servant girl glided forwards to refill his cup. Despite her best efforts, she wasn’t nimble enough to transfer the wine from the jar to the moving cup without spilling some of it on the ground.
Immediately, the nobleman’s eyes were fixed on her, blazing like living coals within his swarthy face. His hand whipped out, smashing the chalice across the girl’s jaw, shattering the cup and gashing her cheek. The girl crumpled to the ground amid the broken ivory, sobbing more from terror than pain.
Count Malbork von Drak sank back in his chair, sneering at the woman’s fear. Imperiously, he stabbed a finger at the wine-soaked dirt. ‘Clean it up, wench,’ he snarled. When the still crying servant leaned forwards and started to sop up the mess with her skirt, the nobleman brought his armoured boot cracking against her skull, sending her sprawling.
It was an ugly, sadistic sound that bubbled up from Malbork’s throat as he congratulated himself on his callous brutality. Then he turned away from the bleeding servant and turned his vicious gaze on the courtiers gathered about the mouth of his tent.
‘A fine jest, your excellency,’ a fat, piggish man with foppish curls in his hair and a lisp to his voice whined.
Malbork ignored the man’s fawning admiration. With an irritated gesture, he waved him aside. ‘You are blocking my view of the castle,’ the count said. With indecent haste, the courtier scrambled away.
It was well that he did, for the vista that was visible from the opening of his tent wasn’t one conducive to an improvement in Malbork’s humour. Voivodes of Sylvania, the von Draks had administered their domain from the walls of Castle Drakenhof for generations. The brooding vastness of the fortress loomed over the green hills and rolling fields around it like some slumbering monster, casting its menacing shadow across the villages clustered about its foundations.
They were deserted now, those villages. Devastated by the cataclysm that had struck Sylvania, the disaster the simple peasants were calling ‘Starfall’. The night sky had, for a terrifying moment, become ablaze with eerie green lights, an uncountable multitude of ghoulish flames that winked down from the heavens. The length and breadth of Sylvania had been pelted with noxious green-black stones, the toxic embers of those ghoul-fires. The whole of the land had been afflicted by the dark sending: crops smashed flat, pastures poisoned, creeks turned foul with glowing scum, homes enflamed as the smouldering stones crashed through thatch roofs.
Nowhere had the destruction been greater than at Drakenhof. Elsewhere, the Starfall had consisted of tiny rocks, seldom bigger than a man’s hand. Drakenhof had proved the exception. Here the stones had been far larger. In one village the mill had been obliterated by a rock the size of an ox-cart, in another a watchtower had collapsed under the impact of a stone bigger than a warhorse. Even these star-sent missiles were insignificant beside the stone that had ploughed through the face of Castle Drakenhof to embed itself in the very heart of the Drakenfelsen, the great rock upon which the fortress stood. With grim humour, some of Malbork’s courtiers had christened the stone ‘the Jewel of Morrslieb’ after a superstitious rumour that it had been flung down at the castle by an angry moon.
The count took small amusement from such prattle. Several of those aristocratic jesters were even now labouring alongside the conscripted inhabitants of the stricken villages, working to clear away the rubble and repair the damage inflicted upon the castle by their ‘moon-stone’. It was hard, unrelenting and dangerous work. A relay of corpse-carts made a constant circuit of the Drakenfelsen, retrieving the corpses overseers tossed from the broken battlements. Fires yet burned unchecked in some of the galleries, and falling debris had turned some of the lower vaults into veritable ovens. Poisonous dust waited wherever the ‘Jewel’ had scraped the walls and floors. Unstable halls were prone to collapse, spilling tons of stone and masonry upon the peasants desperately trying to shore them up. To all of these had to be added the biting cold of the Drakenhoehenzug, the mountain winds whistling through the broken fortress like hungry wolves.
And above all the rest, there was the Black Plague. It cut down the workers by the bushel despite the best efforts of Malbork’s Nachtsheer to dispose of the sick as soon as they were discovered by the soldiers. The disease was unforgiving and insatiable, slaughtering the workers by the hundreds. The count was only thankful that it confined its depredations to men rather than more valuable things like horses and oxen. Even so, the mortality of his workers was becoming tiresome.
Staring up at the castle from his camp on the other side of the River Draken, Malbork frowned as he watched a peasant slip from the scaffolding that framed one of the towers. For an instant, the man clung to one of the gargoyles glowering from the edges of the tower’s sharply angled roof, then he lost his grip on the statue and went plummeting to his doom. It would take a judicious amount of whip-work to get more labourers into the tower after this accident. Malbork didn’t mind the violence, but peasants were less efficient after a beating.
He could almost find it in himself to envy that rebel maniac rampaging across the heart of the county. Some crazed priest unable to cope with the plague. The man had turned to black magic, and wielding such profane power he’d started drawing the dead from their tombs, creating an army of skeletons and corpses. By all reports, the madman’s legion was unstoppable, tireless and unquestioning. They marched across the heaviest snow, through the darkest forest, into the most pestilential marsh in obedience t
o their master’s murderous whims. With workers like that, Malbork would have Castle Drakenhof rebuilt in a month. Why, with an army like that he would deny his oaths to Stirland and make Sylvania a province in its own right, answerable to none save the Emperor — and perhaps not even him!
The smell of blood intruded upon the count’s daydreams. Irritably, he turned his gaze from the castle to regard the piggish Clucer Scarlat. The foppish courtier was holding a pomander under his nose, taking deep breaths to inundate his lungs with sweet-smelling air. Scarlat, like many of the boiers of Sylvania, subscribed to the theory that the plague was brought about by foul vapours and the surest defence against them was a healthy regime of pungent perfumes. It was a theory Malbork held in as much contempt as he did the peasant belief that the disease represented the punishment of the gods.
Irritably, Malbork snapped his fingers at Scarlat, motioning for the clucer to drop the pomander. Other courtiers hurriedly followed the clucer’s example, fear of their count far outweighing even their fear of the plague. ‘I believe I smell his grace,’ Malbork stated, not without some condescension in his tone. ‘Go and admit the prayer-peddler into our presence.’
Clucer Scarlat grimaced, but bobbed his head and scrambled down the slope. As a precaution, Count Malbork’s tent had been pitched behind a timber palisade, putting a wall between his personage and any sick enemies who might seek to deliberately infect him. He’d dispatched too many plague-ridden messengers to the grand duke’s court in Stirland to allow himself to be victimised by his own strategy.
The clucer returned presently, leading not one but two men. Malbork was mildly surprised to see the armoured figure of Dregator Petru Mihnea. The man was supposed to be leading a Nachtsheer expedition into the Haunted Hills to round up the peasants that had escaped there from their fiefs. Fear of the plague had stirred up a great many curious ideas in the heads of peasants, not the least of which was giving survival precedence over their obligations to the boiers who owned them.
