by Nathan Long
Ulrika lifted him by the shirtfront and pinned him to the back wall as the door swung closed behind her.
‘Take off your robe.’
He goggled at her, sputum dripping from his chin.
She put her dagger to his throat. ‘Your robe. Now.’
The boy pawed at his robe with trembling hands, trying to get it off, but was racked by another convulsion. Ulrika spun him around and shoved his head down the hole, wincing. Maybe she should have tried the taproom after all – or perhaps not. The mob was pouring down the alley beyond the fence, shouting, ‘Find the vampire! Kill her!’ and there were echoing shouts from the tavern. The students were picking up the cry.
When the boy’s heaving had finished she pulled him up again. ‘Hurry.’
‘Why’ya pickin’ on me?’ he slurred, slowly taking off the robe. ‘Can’cha see’m sick.’
Ulrika slammed him against the wall again and he went faster, then handed the robe to her. It was only slightly soiled. She shoved him onto the bench and pulled it on, covering her head with the cowl, then turned to go, but as she put her hand on the latch, she paused. She didn’t want the boy telling tales of someone stealing his robe, at least not for a while.
She turned back and punched him in the temple. He sagged against the wall, unconscious, and she stepped back out into the yard, weaving as if drunk. A quick glance to the rooftops from under her cowl didn’t reveal Gabriella, Hermione or Mathilda, but she couldn’t assume they weren’t there. She had to continue to act as if they were still watching.
She staggered through the back door into the tavern. A throng of students were hallooing and hurrying out the front door to join the hunt. Ulrika followed them out, and joined the tail of the mob, all stumbling and reeling as much as she was pretending to.
She tagged along behind them for several blocks, all the while sneaking glances at the roofs around them. Finally, satisfied that Gabriella and Hermione were not watching, she turned off into an alley, as if stopping to vomit, and let the parade go on as she slunk into the shadows.
She shook her head in dismay as she continued on. Only a few hours back in Nuln and she was on her own again, at war with her mistress again, hunted by her sisters again, but this time it would be different. This time she would prove herself.
This time she knew what she was doing.
chapter five
THE HIDDEN ROAD
For a time, Ulrika skulked around the Altestadt, searching for a safe place to hide during daylight hours, but then remembered she already knew one, and turned her steps towards Shantytown. Several times she had to wait in shadowed alleys for drunken, torch-bearing mobs to pass by before going on. The original mob seemed to have fragmented when its hunt for her proved fruitless, and now a handful of lesser mobs wound through the city like blind worms, looking for hapless victims to consume.
More than once she saw witch hunters as well, watching the mobs and their leaders with cold eyes, but doing nothing to deter them from their rioting. Once she saw Captain Meinhart Schenk, Countess Gabriella’s nemesis during the Strigoi murders, and shrank back, the hairs on the back of her neck rising. Schenk knew her face, and were he to see her now, he would realise that she and Gabriella, Hermione and Famke had not been the proper ladies they had pretended to be. Nor had they been massacred by ghouls as Gabriella had made it appear. He would resume his hunt for them, and that would only make the Lahmians’ grim situation worse. She slipped into the darkness and made a wide circle around him and his men before continuing on.
A few blocks later, just south of the corner of Messingstrasse and Hoff, she found the tenement with the black door and the white X that marked it as a plague house. The front door was still locked, and the back door, which had been months ago broken open by Murnau the Strigoi’s ghouls, was again boarded up tight. She smiled at that. The plague had come and gone years ago, but the people of the neighbourhood still shunned the house with a superstitious dread. Good. That was precisely what she wanted.
She left the boarded-up door untouched and scaled the wall. A broken window on the top floor had been smashed in by Murnau. She would make it her front door, so no one would see her enter or leave the place from the street, and no mortal man would be able to get in without her knowing. In fact, she would reinforce the doors below and set belled tripwires on the stairs just in case.
She eased through the splintered window and searched the place top to bottom. It was just as she remembered it – the top floor scarred and stained with blood and claw marks from the fight in which Murnau the Strigoi had killed Mistress Alfina, the one-time leader of the Lahmians in Nuln, but the rest undisturbed. On every floor she found room after room of desiccated plague-corpses in cots, with other bodies in white robes fallen among them – the Shallyan sisters who had been locked in with them to comfort them in their final hours.
Ulrika didn’t mind the corpses. They were withered and dry, and the smell of death faint and faded. She cleared a room of them and gathered what meagre furniture she could find from the other rooms – a pair of mismatched chairs, a table with a missing leaf, a small bed with dusty sheets, a few candles. The windows were already boarded up, but she covered them with blankets from the plague cots to make sure no sun stole through the cracks, and made certain there were no holes in the ceiling.
At last she took off her boots and lay down in the bed, thinking ahead. Tomorrow she must begin her search for the Sylvanians and their army, though she had no idea where to begin. The Lahmians had searched for them for weeks and hadn’t found them. How was she to find them when a coven of women well versed in sorcery, spycraft and rumour-gathering could not?
Ulrika’s guts knotted as she thought of it. Lying alone in a cobwebbed plague house, without an ally to turn to and no resources but the few coins in her purse and the sword at her side, her vow that she would bring Gabriella and Hermione the Sylvanians’ heads on pikes now seemed a childish boast. Still, she had to try. How else was she to make things right? How else was she to return home?
The next night was as hot as the last, but despite the heat, Ulrika pulled on her stolen student’s robe and drew up the stifling hood to hide her white hair, then set out to spy on the Lahmians. Her hope was that she would catch the Sylvanians also spying on the Lahmians, and would then be able to spy on them. This proved harder than she could have imagined. Even finding Lahmians to spy upon was turning out to be difficult.
She knew there were hundreds of vampiresses in Nuln, all gathered to combat the Sylvanian threat, but though she hunted through the Handelbezirk and watched the Chalice of Caronne for hours from a gable across the way, she saw nothing suspicious. No black coaches or veiled women coming or going from the brothel, and if there were Lahmian guards watching for spies, she did not see them, nor did she notice any Sylvanian spies observing the place from nearby rooftops or circling the block in disguise.
Ulrika didn’t understand it. The Lahmians were preparing for war. There should have been messengers going back and forth between Hermione’s mansion and the brothel. There should have been Sylvanian agents doing their best to intercept those messengers. No matter how hard both sides tried to hide it, there should have been some evidence of the trouble brewing under the surface.
Under the surface. Ulrika groaned.
Of course.
With witch hunters everywhere and rioting mobs stoning anyone who looked even remotely undead, both the Lahmians and the Sylvanians would be fools to do anything on the street. They would be deep beneath the city, playing endless games of chess in the dark.
Ulrika dropped from her perch and made for the nearest sewer grate.
An hour later, after much skulking and searching, creeping and climbing, Ulrika found herself far below the stinking brick channels of the sewers, crouching in a dank, claw-dug tunnel, musty with old animal stench, and leaning forwards to examine tracks in the dirt.
&nb
sp; Overlaying old impressions, made by human-sized clawed feet and scaly tails, were dozens of more recent prints. Some were from the dainty pointed shoes of women, some were from the heavy square-toed boots of men, some were bare and some were strange and inhuman, but all had a dry cinnamon musk about them that Ulrika knew well.
Lantern light flickered on the curved earthen walls to her right, and footsteps and voices were approaching. Ulrika edged back into the side tunnel that had brought her there, and watched as an armed patrol heaved into sight around a bend. There was a Lahmian in flowing robes leading them, but the others were living men, all with lamps on poles held high over their heads. The Lahmian was chanting in a low voice and moving her hands in complicated patterns, and though her eyes were closed, she turned her head slowly from side to side.
Ulrika tensed. The Lahmian was using magic to look into chambers and passages that were hidden from her eyes – searching for spies. Ulrika turned and hurried up a side tunnel, moving as fast as she could without making noise. She took a branching right into a long passage and sped along it until she reached a low-ceilinged crawl space littered with long-dead skeletons, some human, some with tails and chisel-toothed skulls. The space had no exit. She turned back to the passage. If she tried to go back and find another way, she might enter the limit of the Lahmian’s sight. Had she got far enough away? She hadn’t enough witch sight to tell. She could only wait and hope.
Finally, after standing motionless amidst the skeletons for what seemed an aeon, the footsteps vanished into silence again. Ulrika let out a sigh of relief and crept back out to the big tunnel, then started along it in the direction the patrol had come. After only a few minutes, she came to a ward so powerful even her miserable witch sight could see it, a glowing barrier that stretched across the width of the tunnel. A ward like that must mean she was approaching the catacombs beneath the Chalice of Caronne. She edged as close as she dared and tried to see beyond it.
Ahead, the rough tunnel intersected with two others at the base of some ancient foundation made of massive stones. Piercing this cyclopean wall was a door, carved by later hands, and flanked by Lahmian guards with silver-tipped spears. This had to be the underground entrance to the Chalice of Caronne! Even as Ulrika watched, a trio of female figures stepped from the door and strode into a west-going tunnel, while a human man carrying a satchel trotted from a south-opening tunnel and was challenged by the guards.
Ulrika smiled. Here was the activity she had been looking for. This was the frenzied to and fro of war and espionage. It would be here that she would find Sylvanians lurking in the shadows, watching and trying to intercept messengers and follow Lahmian agents. All she had to do now was be patient and lie low and the spies would reveal themselves, and when they did, she would follow them back to their lair and discover their masters. Then she could return in triumph to Gabriella and give her what she needed to win the war.
Frustratingly, however, the Sylvanians did not reveal themselves. Though Ulrika searched every inch of the maze of tunnels and caverns and long-forgotten cellars that surrounded the brothel’s depths, she found nothing to indicate spies of any kind had been there recently, and though she lay in wait at various points along the most heavily travelled paths for a day and a night and another day, growing hungrier by the hour, she neither saw nor sensed anyone following any of the Lahmian agents or blood-swains that passed.
Were the Sylvanians ignoring the Lahmians? Did they hold them in such contempt that they weren’t bothering to watch their activities? Ulrika couldn’t believe it. They must be here. Perhaps she was simply unable to sense their presence. Were they hiding around her without her knowing? A chilling thought, but there was another possibility that disturbed her even more. What if the Sylvanians didn’t need to watch the brothel’s comings and goings because they had a spy on the inside? What if there was a Lahmian traitor? If so, Ulrika should be following her to a rendezvous with her Sylvanian counterpart, but who was she? In her hours in the dark, Ulrika had seen scores of Lahmians and swains go by on various errands, carrying papers, books and packages. It might have been any of them. Which one should she follow?
She picked a few at random, and got nowhere, returning again and again to her place near the catacombs, desperate and close to despair, but in the end, it wasn’t Lahmian traitors that gave Ulrika her way to the Sylvanians, it was her nemesis, Mistress Hermione.
She had seen Hermione and Famke come and go on several occasions, carried to and from the underground entrance to her mansion on a swain-borne litter, and had scrambled silently away each time, afraid Hermione’s powerful witch sight would sense her lurking in the shadows. But no matter how far away she ran, nor around how many corners, she could always hear Hermione’s shrill, ceaseless complaining echoing after her.
Hermione complained about everything – the fact that Ulrika had yet to be found, the colour of Famke’s dresses, the taste and manners of her Lahmian sisters, but most of all she complained about the fact that the Lahmian leaders were gathering under Gabriella’s roof instead of hers. ‘The cunning witch is meant to be assisting me, not taking over,’ she said once, and on another pass, ‘I shouldn’t be going to them. They should be coming to me. I am the leader here!’
Then, late in the afternoon of Ulrika’s second day in the tunnels, just as she was about to return to the surface to feed and try to think of another way, Hermione’s hectoring voice came once again down the tunnel, following Ulrika as she retreated. This time she wasn’t complaining about being away from the centre of things, or Famke’s failure to practise the lute, or Ulrika’s escape, but instead about the incompetence of her sisters and their swains.
‘Four hundred men and horses cannot just vanish!’ she cried. ‘Mistress Cherna saw them pass through Franzen two days ago under cover of night, and Gizel did not see them pass through Mikalsbad the next night, nor have they arrived in Nuln. Does that not suggest to you that they have taken to the woods somewhere in between?’
Ulrika could not hear Famke’s quieter reply, but whatever it had been, it did not seem to have soothed her mistress.
‘And yet these foolish chits say they have found no trace of them in the Stirwood!’ Hermione continued. ‘Are they blind? Where did they go? Human troops mean daylight raids. What if Sylvania plans to kill Karl Franz under the light of the sun? What are we to do then? These horse soldiers must be found and slaughtered!’
Hermione’s rant grew faint as the litter continued down the passage, but Ulrika had stopped listening anyway, for she suddenly knew what to do.
What seemed a dead end to the Lahmians was an open road to her. Trapped in their airless drawing rooms and locked into century-spanning court intrigues, the vampiresses had forgotten – if they ever knew – the mundane realities of war and soldiering, but Ulrika was the daughter of a Kislev boyar, and had been raised in the saddle. She had led her own company of Kossars. She had fought and marched in the wilderness and made all the preparations for lengthy campaigns.
She might not know the telltale signs that undead troops left behind. She might not know how to sense the presence of an invisible Sylvanian spy, but she knew that while living men and horses could vanish into a wood, they could not live in one unprovisioned. If the Sylvanians were hiding human cavalry in the forest near Nuln they could not sustain those troops with magic. They would have to be fed and watered. There would be meals for the men and fodder for the horses, and it had to come from somewhere.
She turned and started eagerly back for the passage that led to the sewers and the surface. This was a trail she could follow.
chapter six
EYES WITHOUT A FACE
‘Hay for four hundred warhorses, you say?’ asked the halfling.
‘Aye,’ said Ulrika. ‘Or it might be five hundred, or it might be three hundred. A large number, anyway.’
The halfling shook his head. He was a ruddy-faced little feed broker in Nu
ln’s hay market, in the Weston District, and stood on a tall podium from which he conducted his business. It was before dawn and the market had not yet officially opened, but the hay wagons were already coming in from the outlying farms, and stevedores were unloading and stacking the bales in a big brick warehouse behind him.
‘Naw,’ he said. ‘I’ve standing orders for that much with the city and with the Four Seasons coach line, but no new customers.’ He spat into the litter of straw that covered the hard-packed earth of the market square. ‘If I was t’get an order like that, I’d tell the Black Coats. The army likes t’know when big companies of horsemen are movin’ about in the vicinity.’
Ulrika paused at that, her skin prickling. She didn’t want anyone telling Nuln’s forces that armies were gathering in the woods. They might go and make a mess of things. This had to be her victory.
‘Yes,’ she said, then leaned in to speak in his ear. ‘Uh, tell no one, but the army is precisely who I am asking for. Countess Emmanuelle’s marshal has got wind of armed men mustering somewhere near Nuln, and is trying to find out where they’re hiding. Do you know of any brokers less reputable than yourself, who would be willing to take such an order, no questions asked?’
The halfling raised a shaggy eyebrow and gave her a sceptical glance. ‘A Kislev hoyden working for Old Longshanks? Pull the other one.’
Ulrika glared. She didn’t know the marshal of Nuln’s name, or anything about him, so she’d have to get by on bluster. ‘A Kislev Kossar, halfling, brought to Nuln to teach these clumsy southern oafs something of horsemanship. The marshal sent me here instead of his men because he doesn’t want it known the army is aware of the threat.’ She smiled conspiratorially and put a hand on the hilt of her rapier. ‘I tell you because I can see you are honourable, and will not betray the confidence.’
The broker’s eyes widened at the veiled threat, and he swallowed. ‘Oh, aye, fraulein, you can count on me,’ he said. ‘My best customers, the countess’s army. Never had a problem and they always pay up front. Always.’
