Soul Stealers cvc-2

by Andy Remic

  Alloria placed her arm on Vashell's steel bicep. "Don't attack," she said, urgently. "Maybe it is a friend? Any enemy of the Harvesters is surely an ally of mine…"

  But before Vashell could make any informed decision the wolf stood, a fluid blur, then stretched languorously. Its every movement held contempt for Vashell. With every nuance, every glint of those bright green intelligent eyes, the wolf seemed to say: I know you, you are vachine, I do not fear you, I do not fear the Harvesters, I will rend you and slay you until you are no more.

  The severed head, hanging by a thick flap of skin and spinal column, was blank and white and smeared with dirt. The tiny black eyes were lifeless – but then, Alloria thought, they always looked like that. The narrow nasal slits no longer hissed with their customary fast intake of breath.

  Slowly, the wolf dropped the Harvester's head to the snow. It licked its lips, again embodying contempt, then accelerated into an attack so fast it was a blur of black…

  Vashell stumbled back, sword slamming up but the wolf's jaws rattled left and right, clashing bone with steel and almost disarming Vashell. He rolled, battle instinct returning, dropping one shoulder and shifting, hitting the ground, coming up fast in a crouch with sword ready, head down, eyes narrowed. The wolf's huge pads hit the snow, and it shook itself like a raindrenched dog. It chuckled, a huge rolling rumble, turned to face Vashell, then attacked again with a savage scream, a bestial show of prowess. Vashell launched himself forward, sword held two-handed, intending to power the weapon into the wolf's lungs and beyond, into the pumping heart. But the wolf twisted, one huge paw lashing lazily across Vashell's face and sending him tumbling, skidding over snow towards the treacherous precipice. Below, rocks waited, ten thousand pointed daggers which mocked him.

  The wolf paced around in a tight circle, and to one side sat the rest of the pack, a few yelping, all pelts covered in a fine sprinkling of snow, whilst on the other side stood Alloria. Her face was shocked, for without Vashell to protect her she would be dead in an instant.

  The wolf moved forward, slowly, head lowering, green eyes fixed on its intended victim. "No!" gasped Alloria, hand to her mouth, and she realised in horror how in this savage wilderness, in the Black Pike Mountains which she had so casually underestimated, she now relied on one who, a few days earlier, would have quite happily slaughtered her. How mad was the world? How ironic? A sick sense of humour, for sure.

  Vashell grasped at his sword, fingers clasping steel, and the wolf bunched for the final leap, a snarl erupting from its muzzle as its whole frame tensed and muscles writhed like snakes under fur and it leapt, and Vashell's sword came up but was knocked aside, away, down, spinning onto the rocks far far below and Vashell rammed arms and legs between himself and the beast, and its fangs snapped in his face, fetid rotting breath rolling down his throat and he screamed, the vachine screamed as clockwork gears went click and a surge of blood-oil strength powered through veins and with awesome effort he heaved, and twisted, and rolled from the ledge of the high mountain pass. The wolf was dragged into the gap by its own weight, and claws slashed wounds down Vashell's throat, jaws snapping, as it was suddenly whipped away, spinning, into oblivion. Vashell's hands snapped out, grasped rocks, but his body slid over the edge and his fingers grappled and his healing fingers cast for purchase. If he'd had his vachine claws, he would have been safe. Instead, he slid for several feet on near-vertical icy rock, his movements panicked, until his boot wedged in a narrow V, nothing more than a crevice for hardy mountain flowers. He caught his descent. He glanced down. The huge wolf spun away, silent, eyes fixed on him with that bright green gaze. And then it was gone in swathes of mist, smashes of blizzard, and Vashell struggled for a minute and wearily heaved himself back onto the frozen trail where he lay, panting.

  Alloria was there, cradling his head, but Vashell pushed himself to his feet and turned to face the rest of the pack. He clenched his fists and snarled at Alloria to get back in the cave, his words almost unrecognisable as human, his head lowered for the final battle which he knew he could not win…

  The wolves sat, watching him, then turned as one and disappeared into the storm.

  Alloria helped Vashell into the cave, and he slumped, breathing harsh, blood running from the claw gouges in his throat. "Let me help you," she said, and tearing a strip of cloth from her clothing, went as if to bind the wound. Vashell caught her by the wrist, and shook his head.

  "I do not need your help."

  "You are bleeding."

  "I've bled before. I'll bleed again. Listen, you want to make yourself useful, go and get the Harvester's head. They left it. Like I won a prize." He smiled weakly, face a horror mask of scars and weeping wounds.

  "I cannot."

  "You will not?"

  "I cannot touch that thing. It's abhorrent!"

  Vashell jacked himself to his elbows, then sighed and left the cave. He returned holding the dead head by the spinal tail, and he threw it next to the fire.

  "What were you thinking? Cremation?"

  "Not yet," said Vashell, and started warming his hands. They were battered, scratched from the fight with the black wolf, and from saving himself the terrible fall. "Look in my pack. There's some dried cat, and my hunting knife."

  "Cat?"

  "I caught a small snow panther. Or rather, it attacked me in a frenzy of hunger. Without a sword, it was difficult; but my dagger eventually made a good job of it, although I would rather have used vachine fang and claw." He dropped into a silence of brooding, and Alloria felt it wise to remain quiet.

  She moved, and rummaged through his pack, pulling out strips of dried meat and the knife. As she turned, she saw Vashell had taken the Harvester's head and stood it on a rock. The spinal column had curled around the bloodless stump like a snake around a staff. Alloria shivered.

  "It almost looks alive," she said.

  "I am," came a faint, drifting, almost unheard voice from the Harvester's mouth. "Fetch me some water."

  Alloria stood, frozen, but Vashell carried a small bottle to the creature's lips and poured. The Harvester spluttered, and wetted its mouth, and Alloria watched in absolute disgust as the water leaked from the creature's severed neck stump.

  "But it's dead!" she cried, finally, moving to Vashell as if for protection; but he knelt before the head, and Alloria found herself doing the same thing, her eyes locked on those tiny black orbs, almost fascinated now as a tongue licked necrotic lips.

  "Thank the gods you came," hissed the Harvester. "I thought I would spend an eternity in that beast's stinking maw."

  "How can you still live?" said Alloria, stunned into gawping stupidity.

  "Hold your tongue woman. He has limited strength." Vashell's brow was narrowed, but he did not show the surprise he ought to. Which meant he had seen this kind of thing before.

  "They are immortal?" whispered Alloria.

  "Not immortal," said Vashell. "Have you ever seen a cockroach?"

  "Yes, once they infested the palace stores; we lost much food, and it took the servants an age to sort the problem. What of them?"

  "If you take a knife, and cut off a cockroach's head, it takes the tough little bastard a week to die. And the only reason it dies? Because it can no longer eat and sustain its body as a complete entity. Harvesters are the same. Decapitation can sometimes be the end; but not always."

  "That's unbelievable."

  "Believe what you like, woman. But I have seen this before, once, when I was a child. Hunting snow lions with other vachine royalty; I was along for the ride, with my father. We had a Harvester with us, a tracker named Graslek. The lion surprised us in a circle of rocks, and as we fought a hasty retreat it bit off Graslek's head. My father carried the severed head back to the other Harvesters, who returned it to their world. I do not know what happened then, all I know is that the head talked the entire journey back. Gave me nightmares for months. My mother had to calm me with a strong blood-oil infusion."

  "What happened to the sn
ow lion?"

  "Regrettably, it survived. Loped off into the peaks with half of a Harvester's body for a prize. Ruined the hunting trip."

  Vashell sat down, cross-legged before the head. A tongue wetted lips, and at its request Vashell poured a little more water onto its eager, questing tongue. Five times more he did this, and gradually the Harvester's eyes grew bright, its features more relaxed.

  "What is your name, Harvester?"

  "Fiddion."

  "How long ago were you…"

  "Killed?" The Harvester chuckled, a low and nasty sound. "I have become arrogant, it would seem. I was performing a religious rite. I was secure in my own observation skills; I did not see, nor sense, that wolf approach. But then, maybe the Nonterrazake have removed some of my skills. In their eyes, I would deserve such a humiliating punishment."

  "You have been cast out?" said Vashell, eyes wide in shock. It was the greatest show of emotion Alloria had ever witnessed from the vachine, but hard to read on his scarred features.

  "Yes. And although it shames me, their treatment of me burns with hate. I would avenge myself on those who did this; I would bury their whole world under fire and ash!"

  "What did you do?" asked Alloria, in awe, and Fiddion's small black eyes turned on her.

  "You dare ask that of me, child? Begone! Away! I am not here to lay my soul bare before humans. That would be base and pathetic. But what I would seek…" he paused, small eyes blinking in a long, slow movement more to do with thought than anything else. "Yes. I would seek to give you information."

  "Why?" snapped Vashell, feeling uneasy. Everything in his vachine world spoke of honour and loyalty to the Engineer Religion, to the Episcopate and Watchmakers; and they in turn, the vachine as a whole, trusted the Harvesters implicitly. They had fought wars together. They had died together. Whatever information Fiddion wished to share, it was born from bitterness, resentment and a need for revenge. And for Vashell, this sat worse than any ten year cancer.

  "I would give you information," said the Harvester, "you can make an informed choice. Would you save your race, Vashell? Would you nurture the vachine into a new millennium?"

  "We can do that without your help," said Vashell, quietly, but his eyes flickered with nervousness, almost like the orbs of a hunted creature. He knew he wasn't going to like what he was about to hear; he knew, instinctively, it would change his life forever.

  Fiddion laughed. Quite a feat for a severed head. His spinal column seemed to relax and contract with delicate slithering sounds, like snake scales gliding over rock.

  "Listen, vachine," he said, and his black eyes glowed like the outer reaches of space. "Your whole race, your whole religion, your whole world is threatened. By the Harvesters. By Kradek-ka. By General Graal and his stinking Army of Iron. They work together, can't you see?"

  "To do what?" snorted Vashell.

  "To bring about the return of the three Vampire Warlords. They are like Dark Gods, and once they walked these lands with a malice and depravity you could never comprehend. The world shivered when they awoke; and it breathed again when they died."

  "They are legend," said Vashell, head tilted, one side of his scarred face illuminated by the flickering fire. Wood crackled, and woodsmoke twitched his nostrils. Outside, the wind howled mournfully and Vashell felt a great emptiness, a bleakness, in his soul. "Even if they did return, they would do us no harm. We are of the same blood. We are allies!" But even as he spoke the words, he could see the twisted logic of his own argument. They were not of the same blood. That was the whole point. The vachine were a hybrid clockwork deviation.

  "No," said Fiddion, almost sadly, although Vashell was sure sadness was an emotion denied the Harvesters. "You are vachine. You are a dilution, my friend, of the feral wild Vampire Warlords; the vampires of old. Your clockwork is anathema to everything they believed in. Your race would be an abomination to everything they stood for; alien to their very essence.

  Vashell shook his head. "We are mighty," he said. "We would fight them! We would destroy them!"

  "No, because you will already be dead."

  "What?" mocked Vashell. "The entire vachine civilisation? Don't be ridiculous."

  "And do not be so arrogant," snapped Fiddion. "That is your curse!"

  "And how would this miracle occur?"

  Fiddion went silent for a while, face impassive, but then he licked at narrow lips showing his pointed teeth. "I do not know," he said, finally. "It was not introduced to our One Mind. All I know is that it involves Graal, and his army, his recent invasion of Falanor and the rivers of blood-oil now being gathered for the great magick required to resurrect the Vampire Warlords."

  "You are forgetting one thing. Graal invaded Falanor on our instruction; on the command of the Engineers, and the Watchmakers."

  "Yes. But why?"

  Vashell frowned. "Because we run dry of blood-oil."

  "But why, Vashel? Use your intellect, use your mind, don't allow the stagnant mental decadence of a thousand years pollute your ability to reason."

  "The crops began to fail. The Refineries needed fresh blood. Some of them began to break down; to become inefficient. Do you think Kradek-ka had a part to play in all of this?"

  "I think we can guarantee that," said Fiddion gently.

  "What must I do?" But it came to him, a strike of lighting in the thunderstorm of his raging mind. Clarity sparkled like sunlight on a raging sea. "I must find Kradek-ka. I must track Anukis. She has gone to her father; but she does not understand his betrayal of the vachine." Understanding pulsed through him in waves. Kradek-ka had made Anukis, his daughter, in a different mould; when he introduced clockwork to her, it had been different, advanced, like nothing before ever seen by the vachine. She was awesome. And now Vashell knew why. She was an instrument, somehow, a tool to be used in bringing back the Vampire Warlords.

  "Kradek-ka has a larger part to play in this than you could ever believe," said Fiddion, and Vashell nodded, and he knew Fiddion, the bitter, desecrated Harvester, was right.

  Vashell turned. He stared at Alloria. He blinked. "You understand all this, woman?"

  "I understand thousands will die," she said, voice small and yet run through with a fine-lode of iron. Alloria took a deep breath. After all. She was Queen of Falanor. "Our fates are entwined, are they not?" she said. "The people of Falanor. And the vachine. It is not a simple case of invasion. The puzzle is far more intricate than that."

  Fiddion's eyes adjusted, and focused on Alloria. She felt her breath catch in her throat; felt her heartbeat stutter and stop. "You are correct," he said, eyes boring into her like the granite and diamond drill-bits used for mining under the Black Pike Mountains.

  "The Vampire Warlords will kill you all," Fiddion said, voice little more than a whisper. Then his tiny black eyes closed, and he slept.

  Winter in the Black Pike Mountains was a savage, relentless mistress. The nights were long, hard, cold, the frequent storms a show of temper like nothing seen across the Four Continents. For Alloria, shivering in the corner of the cave, peering occasionally at the motionless, decapitated head of the Harvester, and fearing a return of the feral mountain wolves, it seemed to take a month just for the cold dawn to arrive.

  With light came an abatement of the storm, and the mournful howling reduced to nothing more than occasional, scattered shrieks. Snow flurries decorated the cave mouth, random snaps of hail and gusts of icechilled wind.

  Alloria sat, nearer the fire now, arms wrapped around her legs, hugging herself in a need for heat. Terrible icy draughts entered the cave, and she could feel her teeth chattering, jarring her skull. She had never experienced such savage weather in the warm southlands of Falanor. She looked over to where Vashell slept, and envied him his peace. His scarred face seemed strangely calm, his breathing regular.

  What have I got myself into? thought Alloria, and gave a deep, bitter sigh. How violently her world had changed in a few short weeks. From her rape and abduction at the whim of Gener
al Graal in an effort to subdue King Leanoric, through to a nightmare journey through Falanor, and secret subterranean tunnels under the mountains, to her final accidental rescue by the vachine Anukis, Alloria's life had become a journey of insanity and confusion. Abused, both physically, sexually and mentally, she knew she teetered on the edge of breaking. And yet… and yet her country, Falanor, needed her. King Leanoric used to say: I am the Land, and the Land is me. Now, Falanor had no King and Alloria was – as far as she could ascertain – the only living member of royalty. Sourly, this led to her boys and she sank deeper into depression.

  What did life matter now if her babes were dead?

  Why did anything matter?

  And she thought back, further. Images of betrayal flittered through her skull. She could picture a gem. A small, dark gem. With a sour taste in her mouth, she refused the memories, and pushed them away, feeling pain at simple understanding. Betrayal, echoed the halls of her memory. Betrayal.

  Smoothly, Vashell rolled to his feet. He glanced at Alloria. "Somebody is coming."

  "Who?"

  Vashell ignored her and drew his knife, staring at the cave entrance. A few moments later, like a ghost from the snow, came a figure. He was tall, athletic and broadshouldered. He moved warily into the cave with short-sword drawn, then stopped, staring at Vashell.

  "Llaran!" exclaimed Vashell, and took a step forward, then paused, and lowered his face. When he glanced up, his eyes were bright with tears. Llaran lowered his sword, and his face softened.

  "Vash? Is that you?"

  "Llaran, little brother, it's been a hard fight."

  Llaran moved closer. Icicles clung to his hair and heavy furs. His boots were crusted with ice. He stopped, staring at Vashell, his handsome face shocked, his mouth open. Llaran flexed his golden claws, and his vachine fangs ejected.