01 - Inheritance

by Steven Savile - (ebook by Undead)

  “It ends here, now. I claim this woman as my bride by right of strength. Any who would dare to challenge that right, speak now or forever hold your silence.”

  “I challenge you,” said a voice Posner had thought never to hear again.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  From Dust Returned

  ESSEN FORD, SYLVANIA

  Winter, 2010

  He was looking at a ghost.

  It wasn’t possible.

  Death for a vampire was final, there was no return from the torments of eternity. It was the end.

  Your soul was shredded. There was no rest. No resurrection. No return. You were an empty vessel. There was nothing that could come back.

  And yet…

  Vlad von Carstein stepped through the crowd. His mane of black hair was blown back in the wind, exposing the line of dried and flaking blood that marred his neck.

  But it couldn’t be von Carstein. Posner’s mind ran wild, impossible thoughts tumbling over each other in their clamour to be heard. One thought though was louder than all of the others: von Carstein was dead.

  Posner had seen it with his own two eyes. Schliffen had taken the Vampire Count’s head clean off his shoulders with that damnable wailing blade. It was impossible. He couldn’t be alive. It had to be Ganz. The weasel had to be behind this charade somehow. Posner couldn’t see the man.

  This had to be some kind of trick. It had to be.

  “I would be grateful if you would unhand my wife,” von Carstein said casually. Posner felt the coldness of his stare.

  “You aren’t him. He’s dead.”

  “Aren’t we all?”

  Some of the vampires chuckled at the count’s gallows humour. Posner didn’t raise so much as a smile. It felt as though his hastily-constructed world was coming down around his shoulders.

  And then he did smile, and it was full of cunning; a predator’s smile.

  “You’ve got nothing here. Your sycophants are gone. Even the weasel Ganz has abandoned you. My vampires are all around you. Mine. They are loyal to me.”

  “Loyal?” the Vampire Count said mockingly. “What do any of us know of loyalty, Herman? You especially. I would have thought you knew better.”

  Posner pushed the woman away from him. “You want her? She’s yours. You have,” he glanced up at the sky, “until the cloud has passed completely across the face of the moon to run for your life. Otherwise I will strike you down where you stand. You already died once. Killing you again shouldn’t be so difficult if one of the cattle can manage it. Go on, run.”

  “No.” It was Isabella, stumbling through the mud toward von Carstein. “No. No.” She repeated. She ran into him, hammering her clenched fists on his chest and shrieking hysterically: “Nononononono!”

  Von Carstein didn’t flinch.

  “I liked you, Herman,” he said, his voice laced with disappointment. “But we all make mistakes.”

  The Vampire Count snarled, releasing the beast within. The bones in his face cracked and elongated, his jaw distending to reveal lethal fangs. He pushed Isabella aside and dropped into a fighting crouch.

  “Fight me.”

  Posner reached back and with a hiss drew his twin blades. The moonlight glittered off the silver. He circled warily, eying the count. “You intend to fight me with your bare hands, Vlad?” His grin was maniacal. The twin blades danced in his hands, weaving a hypnotic pattern of death between the two combatants.

  And then he heard it: the keening wail of von Carstein’s damned sword.

  He couldn’t turn. He daren’t take his eyes off the Vampire Count as he slowly circled, looking for a weakness in Posner’s defence.

  He saw the cadaverous figure of Ganz out of the corner of his eye. He had the wailing sword in his hands.

  Posner launched a lightning-fast assault. He threw himself forward, his swords whickering through the air either side of von Carstein’s head but the count, with ungodly timing, rolled away from both lethal cuts without seeming to actually move. Posner dropped and swept out a leg, looking to topple his opponent, while matching it with the left-handed blade, slicing it in perfect time with the leg sweep. The manoeuvre would have eviscerated a lesser man. Von Carstein leapt backwards in a tightly controlled somersault and landed easily. He held out his hand for Ganz to give him his sword while Posner regained his balance.

  “Herman, Herman, Herman.” Von Carstein hefted the wailing blade, switching it from right hand to left and back again. He moved up onto his toes then rocked back onto his heels. “You’re a man of few words.”

  Posner’s answer was silence.

  Deep within himself Posner heard a sound. It repeated itself over and over. A howl. It was animalistic. Its grip on his soul was absolute. His face shifted as the beast within, the vampiric side of his nature, was unleashed.

  “Death is too noble for a piece of filth like you.”

  Posner sprang forward and lunged in a single fluid motion. It was so incredibly fast it was virtually impossible to see his blade as it flicked out in search of von Carstein’s heart. Steel rang on steel as the count turned his blade away with an almost negligent flick of the wrist. In response, von Carstein’s sword slipped inside his guard and twisted up toward his throat. Posner’s parry was a blur. His left-handed blade caught the count’s wailing sword and locked it there for a split second, giving his right-hand blade the fraction of a heartbeat it needed to lance inside von Carstein’s defences and drive the tip toward his stomach.

  Von Carstein caught the blade in the palm of his right hand. Posner stared at the blood as it leaked between the Vampire Count’s fingers and across his signet ring.

  The distraction was all von Carstein needed.

  He stepped in, his left hand deftly disengaging his blade from Posner’s and unleashing a high swing that buried the edge of the wailing sword deep in Posner’s neck. At the last moment he pulled the ferocity from the blow, deliberately preventing it from cleaving through the man’s neck.

  Posner staggered sideways, his eyes wide with the shock of agony as his tainted blood gouted from the gaping wound. His left hand spasmed and his fingers lost their grip on the curved blade. It slipped through his fingers and fell. It landed tip first in the mud and stuck, quivering. His hand went to his neck as though trying to staunch the flow of blood. He tried to speak but all that came out was a strangled gurgle.

  He saw the weasel Ganz standing beside Isabella.

  It was all so close.

  He could almost touch it.

  He raised his right hand and hurled the sword end over end, like a dagger. The remnants of a smile twitched across his lips as he saw the heavy blade slam into the centre of Alten Ganz’s chest, shattering the bone and piercing his heart.

  Ganz staggered back. Posner saw him try to right himself before he toppled. It was a reflex action. He was already dead.

  “Never did… like… you,” Posner managed. He broke off into a bloody gurgle of coughing. He raised his eyes to meet von Carstein’s condemning gaze. “Finish it then.”

  “No,” Isabella von Carstein said, lucid for the first time in hours. “Let me.” She held out her hand for her husband’s blade.

  The Vampire Count gave her the sword willingly.

  Posner lowered his head, waiting for the final killing blow to fall.

  And then he was dead.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The White Wolf

  SCHWARTHAFEN, SYLVANIA

  Dead of winter, 2049

  Death was a constant companion.

  It had been a long and bitter war. At times the Empire emerged triumphant and other times the forces of darkness swept over the living mercilessly. Death was never far away. They lived hand to mouth. They dared not look to the future. Still, in the darkness, a flicker of hope refused to be extinguished. They had lived with this evil, many of them, their entire lives. A few, the oldest of the men, could remember a time before the threat of the Vampire Count, von Carstein, of Sylvania. It had become so
mething of a myth amongst the soldiers.

  They had all lost someone to the conflict: brothers, fathers, friends, sisters, wives, mothers, daughters and lovers. Death was no respecter of sex. It didn’t limit itself to the battlefields and the trenches. It spilled over into the streets of their home towns. Food was scarce even with the women planting and reaping the harvest. The bakers, the butchers and the grocers made best use of what little they had, eking out the precious ingredients like misers in the hope of fending off famine.

  The war was harshest on the children and the elderly; those who knew no better and those who still remembered the life before, when fresh fruit and meat and dairy produce had not been luxuries money couldn’t buy.

  Sickness was prevalent. Disease flourished in the wretched conditions with scurvy claiming victims daily when food stores ran dry. Cholera and dysentery did the work of von Carstein’s army, killing thousands.

  The people of the Empire lived with it. They had no choice. Death was all around them, wearing many guises.

  Forty years of fighting.

  Forty years of dying.

  Forty years of losing loved ones.

  Forty years trying to cling on to the hope that one day, one day, they would be free of the blight that was Vlad von Carstein, Vampire Count of Sylvania.

  Forty years.

  Jerek Kruger shuddered at the thought. The undying count had been an ever-present bogeyman throughout the White Wolfs life. The dark was coming. The grand master could not remember a time in his life when he hadn’t considered darkness the hour of the enemy. He wasn’t a superstitious man; he had yet to meet a foe his two-handed warhammer couldn’t vanquish. Even the dead could die, a fact that came as no great surprise to the warrior. Those things were animated, like puppets, they weren’t living, and they didn’t breathe. Cut the strings and they fell down.

  He scratched at his wild beard. The cold sting of the wind numbed his face. It wormed its way beneath the heavy pelts he wore over his red lacquered armour. The waiting was the worst. He had lost a lot of good men over the years and seen them come back to haunt him in a way that most leaders could never imagine—on the battlefield, shambling forward, clutching the weapons that had failed them in life, their spirits crushed, their souls gone, he prayed, to a better place. Ulric protected them; that is what the men believed as they threw themselves willingly into the slaughter.

  Jerek Kruger planted the carved head of his huge two-handed warhammer into the snow between his feet. The rune of Ulric sank more than halfway into the pure white. He knew full well what awaited him and his men over the coming hours. It had passed beyond glory. They were fighting for survival. It was a desperate fight and only grew more so as every casualty added one more to the Vampire Count’s horde. If they fell here, if the Knights of the White Wolf failed on the fields of Schwarthafen, the gateway would be open all the way into Altdorf itself, the very heart of the Empire.

  “We will not fail,” the grand master said, his voice like flint. Beside him his second-in-command, Roth Mehlinger, grunted his agreement.

  “We cannot.”

  This was his test, Kruger knew. This was the moment that would give meaning to their lives. These coming days the Knights of the White Wolf would face their greatest foe since their inauguration in the wake of the Chaos Wars. This was the moment they had been born for.

  And yet the seed of doubt was there in each man’s mind. Their foe was immortal. He had been struck down time and again only to rise with vengeance and unholy fury. No sword, no axe, no hammer could banish the fiend. Kruger couldn’t allow himself to think that way. Thinking about von Carstein as eternal sealed his own fate and the fates of all of the men who looked to him for leadership. Von Carstein was a vampire. The beast possessed unholy strength, cunning, gall, but was a beast nonetheless. Johann van Hal, the witch hunter, had first named the evil, and naming is the first stage in slaying it. For all its power the beast suffered from the Hunger, the thirst for fresh, warm blood. They had to feed to survive. That was their weakness. For all their cold and cunning they were still driven by the most primal of all instincts, survival.

  And to survive they had to feed.

  Which meant they could not hide.

  The sunlight was deceptive. It offered the illusion of safety. The white pavilions of the Vampire Count were visible across the battlefield. The dead were there, lying where they had fallen, waiting for night to rise again. Most sickening of all, though, were the humans who had flocked to von Carstein’s banner. The fools allowed themselves to be fed on, night after night, and guarded the undead by day. These were men and women, innocent, stupid. They saw some tragic romance in the vampire’s plight. They flocked to the undead lord, no doubt desperate to be given the Blood Kiss and join the ranks of his true followers. Jerek Kruger couldn’t bring himself to think about their stupidity. These were the people he was fighting to save.

  Sadness smouldered in his soul.

  They could not see; they were children lost in a wilderness of mirrors where the hunters cast no reflection.

  It was his duty to protect them, to save them from the darkness within themselves and guide them out of the maze of lies and deceits they had lost themselves inside.

  He had sworn an oath to the Elector of Middenheim. He was a knight protector. They all were. Each and every wild-haired red-armoured warrior on the field of Schwarthafen. They were not there for glory. They were not there because some ancient principle of honour had been slighted. They were there to protect those that could not protect themselves. They were the last chance.

  The last hope.

  And they were a long way from home.

  Middenheim with its lofty viaducts and deep catacombs was an impregnable fortress on a sheer-sided pinnacle of rock rising out of dense forestland. That was a fortress built to withstand almost any assault. Drawing up the wooden bridges effectively cut the city off from the outside world. But they weren’t in Middenheim; they were in the Ulric-forsaken wastelands of Sylvania and they were lining up to face the greatest evil known to man. It was a fool’s fight.

  Kruger knew it. Mehlinger knew it.

  And every other man out there that evening knew it.

  Still they stood there implacably, ready for the fight of their lives.

  The mood in the camp was sombre. Some men busied themselves tending to their mounts, rechecking the barding and the braces, the stirrups and the girth, while others oiled their platemail or knelt in prayer and supplication, offering devotion to the warrior god.

  “Walk with me,” Kruger told Mehlinger.

  Together they moved down the line, offering words of encouragement to the younger knights, sharing fond reminiscences with the older ones. Jerek Kruger was, among many things, a leader of men. They looked to him for guidance in this dark time. He made a promise to himself that he would not let them down. He knew them all by name and face, he knew their families, their stories. He was their father, for many of the men the bond was stronger than it was to their own flesh and blood. He took an interest in their lives, in them as people.

  Mehlinger moved silently beside him. Kruger knew the men called him the Grand Master’s Shadow. There were worse epithets for a knight. He was taciturn and dour, preferring his own company or the company of Aster, his horse. People were a burden, they thought and did strange things, acted in peculiar ways, and more often than not let you down. Mehlinger needed things he could trust around him, and in the Knights of the White Wolf he had a brotherhood he could trust but trusting still came hard to the man, Kruger knew. They all had their weaknesses but it was their strengths, when combined, which set them apart. Alone they were weak, together they were giants.

  That was what made them what they were. They thought and acted as one. United.

  That was what made the Knights of the White Wolf the most feared and revered fighting force in the Empire.

  Nothing could stand against them. Nothing.

  Until now.

  He stood a
lone at the head of the army, gazing out into the lowering dark at the white pavilions of the Vampire Count. They were a thorn in his soul, drawing blood every time he moved within their shadows. The von Carstein banner snapped in the wind, the sigil impossible to make out from this distance. Kruger knew it well. It was a vile loathsome icon.

  “When this is over, Mehlinger, I’ll burn that damned banner and dedicate whatever years I have left to purging this blighted province of its taint.” He said it forcefully enough to be heard by a few of the men who were using oil and rags to tend to their warhammers.

  “And we’ll be right there with you!” one of the knights, a flame-haired bull of a man, Lukien Karr, roared.

  Kruger nodded. “Damn right you will be.”

  He turned his back on the pavilions and looked up at the sun, already setting behind the hills and the treeline of Ghoul Wood. He slammed a gauntleted hand off his breastplate, saluting the men as he passed them on the way back to his command point.

  “Ready the men. We ride when the sun dips beneath the horizon. I want every second rider equipped with burning brands, for the first pass their warhammers will be their secondary weapon. Understood? I want—” he very nearly said chaos but that wasn’t right, he didn’t want to invite chaos into the battle. He raised his voice so it carried down the line, a rallying call. Von Carstein’s army is a shambles. These creatures burn, so we burn them. We purge their ungodly taint from the world. We hammer them into the ground and we sear them off the face of the earth. These things aren’t human. They aren’t our friends, our loved ones. They are diabolical shells, shades sent to taunt us, to draw out our grief and unman us. Well, no more. We will purge this wretched land of their daemonic taint with oil and fire if we must, but purge it we will. We ride tonight for more than valour, we ride for everything that is right. We ride for every innocent child of the Empire so that they might live in a world worthy of them! We ride for the survival of all mankind!”