“Well,” the knight prompted his host after a moment or two, “could you find such staves of which I speak?”
Francois, the bafflement which marked his liver-spotted features reflected in the faces of the rest of the assembly, nodded slowly.
“We can certainly make some, and that within the hour. But, my lord, Charles and Pierre were woodsman, with woodsman’s axes. If their weapons failed them, what use will sticks be to us?”
Claude watched a touch of irritation flicker across the brown depths of the knight’s eyes before he answered.
“Using steel against the thing which now preys upon you is like trying to drown a fish. No, don’t ask me why. Only the Lady knows how these things gain their terrible strengths. All I know is that against the vampire the peasant’s only weapon is wood, his only shield garlic.”
“The… vampire?” Francois asked, eyes widening in horror. A chorus of whimpers and low curses rushed through his fellows, the sound as soft and insistent as the chill wind that even now tried the locks and hinges of the inn.
Claude felt the hairs raise themselves one by one along the back of his neck as he moved unthinkingly with the press of bodies that huddled closer to the knight. As the crowd around him shifted with the restrained panic of a herd of cattle before a storm, he noticed the furtive glances they cast towards the shadowy corners of the inn and the rattling shutters of the windows.
Vampire! It was a name to chill the hardest of hearts, a name to conjure up a thousand half-remembered terrors from the darkest nights of childhood. Claude was suddenly very grateful for the claustrophobic mass of warm bodies that were packed so tightly around him.
“Am I right in thinking, my lord,” Francois began with all the caution of a man taking the first step out onto a tightrope, “that you intend to lead us against this beast?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Sir Gilles replied. There was a sudden, angry murmur of protest from the crowd and, for the first time, the knight seemed to notice them. He looked up and the granite wall of his gaze cut off their protests with a guillotine’s speed.
“I won’t be leading you good people anywhere,” he continued, turning back to Francois as if there had been no interruption. “I will go now to await this monstrosity in the crypt you mentioned. Such things are usually tied to their burial grounds, making a mockery of these resting places with their filthy presence. Meanwhile, you’ll bring everyone back here tonight and arm yourselves against the creature’s attack.”
A thoughtful silence descended upon the villagers. Claude could almost taste their relief. “Any further questions?” the knight asked.
“I don’t think so, sire.” Francois shook his head. “But is there naught we can do for you?”
Sir Gilles looked into the old man’s eyes and smiled, the expression cold and humourless. “Yes. Make sure that nobody goes anywhere on their own until this is finished.”
“Even to the latrines?”
A ripple of nervous laughter spread through the confines of the room at this. Sir Gilles was pleased to hear it. Better foolish catcalls than blind terror.
“Even to the latrines,” he replied presently. “Now, who will show us to this sepulchre?”
It was dark and, despite the bulk of Claude’s borrowed blankets, cold. He could smell the thin, metallic scent of rain on the wind and feel the choking weight of cloud that blocked out even the scant light of moon and stars. Only the guttering red fire of their rush lights gave the two figures any trace of light by which to keep their lonely vigil.
They sat like mismatched bookends on either side of the burial pit, these two, their very presence defying the hungry shadows of the sepulchre’s maw. Claude glanced across at his master, a little awed as always by the man’s inexhaustible capacity for stillness.
Only the silvery glitter of the knight’s hooded eyes gave any indication that he was awake, or even alive. That same glitter was reflected in the straight-edged length of steel which lay across his begreaved knees. Sir Gilles had been strapped into his full armour as he had given the villagers their last instructions.
“Stay together. Even if it breaks in, don’t panic. Stand shoulder to shoulder and call for me. But don’t pursue it. Remember, stay together.”
Claude, remembering the earnestness of the young knight’s expression and the terrified eyes of the villagers, smiled. Had Sir Gilles really believed any of that frightened herd would have charged a vampire, a drinker of souls?
The old retainer’s grin faded as he studied the reassuring lines of his master’s face. The steel dome of his helmet was gone, a concession against the near-blinding darkness that enveloped them, and even in the flickering half-light of their peasant torches Claude could see the look of peace which had fallen across Sir Gilles’ trail-hardened features. The expression reminded him of the knight’s father. He had had the same look about him on the night before the Battle of Ducroix. It was only at times like these, whilst sat in the very eye of the storm, that the Lady’s chosen warriors seemed to find true peace.
A sudden burst of wind whistled around his ears and the old man shrank down further into his blankets. It had started to warm up within this little cocoon. Claude yawned and stretched, luxuriating in the rare feeling of comfort. Gradually, little by little, his thoughts melted away into dreams.
He jerked back into wakefulness with a guilty start, eyes springing open like traps. It was too late. Sir Gilles was regarding him with the tolerant composure that the older man found so irritating. Claude opened his mouth, fumbling for an apology, but the knight silenced him with a gesture.
“Try to sleep, Claude. I will need your wits about me in the morning.”
“Sire, I said I would share your watch and I will.”
“And I said there was no need. Sleep. If I have need of you I will wake you, have no fear of that.”
“Well…” Claude begin, then stopped and shrugged. The heavy droop of his eyelids weighed more than any arguments. And, at his age, what did he have left to prove?
“Thank you, sire.”
Sir Gilles nodded, the gesture almost imperceptible amongst the wind-chased shadows of the night, and returned to his silent meditation.
A few moments later Claude began to snore. The wind, as if in response to the old man’s guttural breathing, blew harder. It screeched through the draughty eaves of the burial pit, groping with icy fingers at the chinks and hinges of the knight’s armour and setting the forest-lined slopes of the valley aroar. The distant trees rushed and splintered as though some mighty beast had been set loose amongst them.
Sir Gilles, unmoved by the rising tumult, sat and waited. Soon even the rise and fall of his servant’s breath was drowned beneath the howls of the wind, but this hardly concerned him. And when the rush lights started to die, one by one, he merely smiled at the memory of how darkness had frightened him as a child. That fear was gone now. It had gone the way of all other fears during his training as a knight.
All other fears but one, of course, the last and the greatest. And with the Lady’s help that final fear would be vanquished tonight.
The last of the torches died, its flame strangled by a sudden gust. In the blinding depths of the darkness that remained, Sir Gilles sat and awaited his destiny, a murmur of thanks on his lips.
If he survived this night’s trial he knew that he would be blessed indeed. If he survived this night all would know that the blood of his line ran true in his veins and that his faith in the Lady was true. Yes, all would know it. Even himself.
He just hoped that the vampire, when it came, would be the equal of its reputation.
Claude awoke to dew-soaked blankets and tingling joints. His knuckles felt hot and swollen, blistered from within. There was no real pain, not yet, but in the vulnerability of the single unguarded moment that separates sleep from wakefulness he made a mistake. He thought about what might be going on beneath his reddening skin.
He imagined the gristle in his fingers swelling, choking
off the blood. He imagined the nerve endings rasping and sawing against granite-edged bone, fraying like lengths of twine. He imagined a colony of rat-headed creatures eating into the very stuff of him, their burrows growing deeper and more painful by the minute.
With a low moan he clenched his fists, damning the first sparks of pain the movement ignited. The cold, he knew, would fan those first few sparks, tend them and feed them until they twisted his hands into crippled, burning claws.
Well, to the hells with it. If he had need of his hands the Lady would unclench them. And if the pain became unbearable the Lady would take it away. In one way or another, She would take it away.
The old man sighed and opened his eyes. The dawn sky above him was as sombre and cheerless as a shroud, lacking even a smear of cumulus to cut through its grey monotonous weight. Claude shrugged indifferently and climbed to his feet. At least it wasn’t raining. He wrapped his blankets around his thin shoulders and yawned. Time to start on breakfast. Now where had he left those damn horses?
He coughed, more out of habit than anything else, and swept the camp with his gaze. It wasn’t until he noticed the dark bulk of the sepulchre that remembrance hit him with an impact as dizzying as vertigo.
This was no trail camp, no woodland clearing or rocky overhang. There would be no quiet breakfast routine here, no wistful meditations. This was Celliers, the village where Sir Gilles had finally found a monster worth killing.
But Sir Gilles was nowhere to be seen.
“Sire?” Claude called, his voice cracked with sleep and uncertainty.
“Sire?” he called again, louder this time against the dumbing curtain of fine mist that had begun to dampen the air.
There was no reply. Claude wrapped the roll of blankets tighter around the frail stalk of his neck and studied the ground. A deep depression still marked the spot where the knight must have kept his vigil last night, although some of the crumpled blades of grass had already sprung defiantly back. The old man shook his head and hissed. His master must have been gone a fair while.
“Sire?”
No reply.
He looked further and studied the semicircle of burnt out torches that surrounded the spot. Their black stumps jutted out of the damp earth like a jaw full of bad teeth. None of them, it seemed, had been disturbed.
“Si-?” Claude began, and then froze. He listened, straining his ears against the blanket of drizzle that had begun to fall. For a while there was nothing more than the muffled sounds of a damp and dreary morning and the distant croak of pheasant. One minute crawled towards the next, then the next. Finally the old man began to relax. His ears must have been playing tricks on him, he decided.
Then he heard it again.
The low moan drifted as softly as a dandelion seed on the morning’s breeze. Claude listened cautiously as the cry faded back into nothingness and shivered suddenly as it ceased. His fingers, arthritis forgotten, clenched tightly around the heft of his stake.
Surely that weak and inhuman keening couldn’t be from a man, he told himself, let alone a knight.
Yet where was Sir Gilles?
Once more the cry came floating through the haze, raising the wiry hairs on the back of Claude’s neck. He waited until the fell voice began to wane and then, with a blasphemous combination of curses and prayers, the old retainer lurched forwards towards the sound.
He left the burial pit behind him and stomped past the dripping grey bulk of the village shrine and the first of the houses. The village seemed as desolate and empty as any ghost town. There were no scurrying children or scolding women or singing artisans. All that moved here was the drizzle, its silent rain weighing down on an atmosphere already leaden with dread.
The moan came again, louder this time. Louder and closer. In fact, Claude decided as he shivered the weight of blankets off his shoulders, whatever was making the noise seemed to be around the next corner.
A ghostly reflection of his master’s wolverine smile played around the old man’s lips, a nervous reaction as he plucked the dagger from his belt with his free hand. Then, with a last murmured prayer to the Lady, he stepped around the corner.
And froze.
Sir Gilles was there, the centrepiece of the huddled mob of peasants. The sight of his broad armoured shoulders shook a delighted bark of laughter from Claude, who allowed the wavering point of his stave to drop.
“Sire! You’re all right?”
“Yes, of course,” the knight replied, a pair of puzzled lines marking his brow as he turned. “Why shouldn’t I be?”
Claude shrugged, still smiling with relief. Then the plaintive wail that had brought him here rang out again and for the first time he noticed the girl.
She squatted in the cold and damp of the earth, supported on either side by two solidly built village women. They flanked her protectively, like two mother hens with a single chick, but she obviously drew scant comfort from their presence. The girl herself was pitifully thin, the bundled rags she wore incapable of hiding the frailty of her frame. Every shuddering breath she took seemed to rattle down the knuckles of her vertebrae, every choking sob seemed ripe to burst the tight cage of her chest.
Claude felt obscurely glad that her face was turned away from him. He had heard such misery before, of course. From battlefields and deathbeds and scaffolds he had become familiar with the sound of the human heart torn and bleeding. Yet had he ever heard such horror mixed in with the grief?
Without giving himself time to think the old man pushed forward into the mass of cringing villagers who encircled the girl. He looked over her shoulder to the… the shape that lay upon the crimson turf.
Just think of it as meat, he told himself. It’s not human. Not now.
But the signs of the thing’s humanity were still horribly plain to see. Almost half of its face had been left, the exposed tendons and drained flesh conspiring to lock the man’s face into a final eternal scream. Some of its fingers also remained. They were as rigid and gnawed as the branches of autumnal trees and even more dead. Claude studied the savaged expanses of the man’s forearms, shoulders and neck. The frenzy of half-moon bite marks somehow reminded him of a head of corn.
Biting back a sudden rush of bile, the old man looked away and studied the faces of the villagers whilst composing himself. He read the disgust and frightened rage he had expected, the emotions as clear as any sculpture could ever make them. But there was something else there too, something that skulked guiltily behind their horror like rats behind a skirting board.
It took Claude a moment to recognise it as relief. The realisation snared his revulsion, gave it a target. Selfish swines! Relieved for their own worthless skins even with this child choking her heart out over the corpse of her father. His lips drawn back in a silent snarl, he turned to Francois, the village elder.
“I thought you were told not to let anybody go out on their own,” he spat.
But if Francois heard the anger in Claude’s voice he gave no sign of it. “We didn’t let anyone go out on their own. Jules here, Lady guide and protect him, went out with Jacques. Jacques whose absence from the village stopped the killings. And whose return brought them back.”
Claude stepped back and dug thumbs into his forehead in an effort to stop the turmoil of his thoughts.
“Look at the wounds on Jules,” Francois added. “What beast leaves marks like that?”
Claude gazed steely eyed at the carcass. It was the same as a hundred others he had witnessed. His career had led him through many valleys a lot more death-filled than this one. He had seen savaged bodies abandoned by all manner of wild beasts. Aye, he thought grimly, and ones trained to it too. Yet something about this one was different.
“Of course!” he finally cried out, voice thick with horrid realisation. “The teeth. The bite marks. They’re like mine. I mean like any human’s,” he added hurriedly—even this far from the border, Sigmar’s hungry witch hunters had ears—and daggers. “So Jacques was the vampire?”
“No, he’s no vampire,” Sir Gilles cut in with a sigh. “He only has human teeth. He’s just a man. A sick man.”
“Sick?”
“Yes, sick of mind. Or Chaos-tainted perhaps. It matters not. My cousin told us of it the last time he returned from the Empire. There they call it the madness of Morrslieb, the contagion that flows from the Blood Moon when it’s at its zenith. That is when your problems began, isn’t it?”
This last was addressed to Francois. The old man shrugged vaguely, then nodded.
“Madness indeed,” Claude muttered, taking a last look at the corpse which lay congealing in front of its daughter. “Shall I prepare the horses, sire?”
“Yes. Light tack. Against this pitiful creature we’ll need speed more than power. Francois, are there any hounds here?”
As Claude turned to ready their horses, he heard the bitterness of the disappointment that edged his master’s words. But he realised that above the sobs that still wove through the mist he alone had heard it, and for that he was thankful.
The day’s hunt was a futile affair. The only hounds to be found in the village were a trio of aged boar hounds, gaunt beasts whose stiff movements and swollen joints made Claude wince in sympathy. Sir Gilles, still hiding his disappointment behind a flawlessly polite mask, had decided to leave the motley pack behind, overruling Francois’ attempts to press the dogs into service by explaining that speed of horse and clarity of vision would suffice to hunt down the fugitive.
It had proved to be a foolish boast. The beast of Celliers, although only a man and a crazed one at that, had vanished with all the ingenuity and cunning of any other animal. As Claude followed Sir Gilles out of the village the impossibility of their task struck him. What chance did they stand of finding the fugitive in the mighty swathe of forests and crevasses that covered this, his native territory?
By the time they had cleared the fields and broken into a canter the old man had begun to wonder why the same thought hadn’t occurred to his master. It wasn’t until Sir Gilles, with a wild cry that ignited frustration into exhilaration, closed spurs that Claude finally understood.
Tales of the Old World Page 49
