[Warhammer] - Ancient Blood

by Robert Earl - (ebook by Undead)

  “Who are those people around the giant’s handler?” he asked, his jubilation beginning to fade, as a sudden, terrible suspicion seized him. “I offered the damned man an escort, but he refused. Clerk. Clerk! Where’s my damned telescope?”

  That was when Vespero smelled it, the delicious, delightful scent of Ranald’s favour. It took a sensitive nose to detect it, especially through the blood and filth of the battlefield, but Vespero had the gift.

  A slow smile spread across his face, and he turned to his second-in-command. No words passed between them. None needed to. The twinkle in Vespero’s eye was enough to convey the order to get ready.

  “Look at them run,” Blyseden said, trying to sound cheerful, but failing miserably. Vespero looked, and some of the Strigany were indeed running. The giants, though, paid no more attention to them than they had to the fleeing mercenaries. It was the ogres they seemed intent on.

  “Who are those men around the giants’ handlers?” Vespero asked Blyseden.

  “They must be volunteers,” he answered uneasily.

  Vespero nodded.

  The giants stepped over the inner stockade. They dwarfed the ogres, who, oblivious to the reinforcements coming up behind them, continued to chew through the Striganies’ ranks.

  “In Tilea, we have a saying,” Vespero said, as one of the ogres turned and bellowed a greeting to the giant behind it.

  “What?” Blyseden muttered. He watched the giant lift its club, and suddenly felt as though he was a gambler watching a roulette wheel.

  “Yes,” Vespero said, nodding, “we say that to outrun a lion you don’t have to run faster than the lion.”

  The giant swung its club down. The length of timber blurred as it blitzed down, and then exploded in a mass of bloodied splinters, as it cracked open the ogre’s skull. The creature collapsed without a sound, and, before its comrades knew of the twenty feet of treachery that was upon them, it struck again, smashing its second club on another ogre skull.

  “To outrun the lion, you just have to run faster than the other man it’s chasing.”

  Recognising the signal, Vespero’s men pounced. The dozen men from Averland’s household, whom Blyseden had kept as bodyguards, spun around to face their erstwhile comrades, but they didn’t stand a chance. Against the speed and viciousness of the Tileans’ attack, they fared little better than fumbling peasants. Razor-sharp rapiers blizzarded through the air, arcs of arterial blood spouted from severed arteries and the remains of lost limbs, and, even as Blyseden remained glued to his telescope, the last of his men had fallen to Vespero’s company.

  “Sigmar curse them,” Blyseden whispered, oblivious to the carnage that had taken place around him. He was too focused on the battlefield below.

  The first of the giants, its clubs destroyed, looked pleased to have done away with such sophisticated technology. The loss of its weapons certainly did little to stop its onslaught. Blyseden watched as it picked one of the ogres up, snapped its neck as easily as a chicken’s, and then took a bite out of it for good measure. Satisfied with its work, the giant looked down at another, who swung a cleaver at its legs as though it were a lumberjack felling a tree.

  The giant seemed not to notice the terrible wound that must surely have reached its bone. Nor did it seem to notice the loss of blood. Instead, it concentrated on lifting the ogre from its feet, fingers finding purchase in the sockets of the thing’s eyes, and hurling it across the battlefield.

  “Blyseden,” Vespero said.

  For the first time since the attack had begun, the Tilean’s voice commanded Blyseden’s attention. There was an edge in it, a dangerous edge. Blyseden left his telescope, and turned to look at the captain. Then he looked beyond him to the dead bodies of the elector count’s men, and the hungry expressions of Vespero’s own.

  “En garde,” Vespero said.

  It didn’t take Blyseden more than a moment to take in the situation: the dead Averlanders, and the victorious Tileans, their rapiers red, and their eyes alive with greed. Another man might have panicked, might have tried to fight or run, or reason.

  Not Blyseden; he reacted to his rapidly changing circumstances with the lightning reflexes of a falling cat, twisting to land on its feet.

  “En garde indeed,” he said, pretending to misunderstand. “All is lost here, and we can only hope to withdraw and reorganise. Menheer Vespero, I would like to offer you and your company a bonus of half the paychest to escort me back to our lord’s demesne.”

  Vespero blinked, his mind racing. Half the pay chest would be riches enough, or, to put it another way, half the pay chest would be worth losing in order to avoid becoming fugitives.

  He smiled, ran a silk handkerchief down the blade of his rapier to clean it, and bowed to Blyseden.

  “We would be honoured,” he said.

  Blyseden smiled, hiding the rage that had already started to boil up inside him at the Tileans’ treachery, and went over to the tent. The clerk was cowering inside, a blanket over his head. Blyseden lifted it with the tip of his sword.

  “Still got that shovel?” he asked.

  The clerk whimpered an affirmative.

  “Then get digging,” Blyseden told him, gesturing towards the earth where the chest had been hidden. “If ever there was a time for a strategic withdrawal, it’s now.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “A king is a king though he wears a beggar’s coat.”

  —Old World saying

  The baron liked to think that that he was a sophisticated man. He wore underbreeches, even when it wasn’t snowing. He drank his wine with water in it. He never spat indoors unless he needed to, and when he went to the fighting pit it was only ever to watch animals.

  However, the baron believed that the very hallmark of his civilised nature was in the company he kept. Eager to please maidservants may have been good enough for his father, the old rascal, but not for him. Instead, he kept a fine Tilean mistress in a house in the town, an activity paid for by the taxes of a hundred of the baron’s peasants.

  Esmerelda Dolacita Fangollini, she called herself, and the baron believed her. She claimed to be a disinherited princess too, although he was a little more sceptical about that, not that he ever told her so, or that she ever stopped trying to prove it. She even had the word Desheritato tattooed onto the small of her back, just above the cleft of her perfectly rounded, perfectly white buttocks. The baron had spent many a happy moment reading the word, and had learned it by heart.

  This afternoon, he was engaged in another lesson in the Tilean dialect. He and Esmerelda were lying naked on her bed, entwined with each other, and with the silk sheets. The glass tubes of half a dozen oil lamps glowed with a warmth that turned her white skin golden brown, and made her hair glisten as though it were made of living onyx. The scented oil of the lamps mingled with the smell of her perfume and their sweat, and, from outside, the distant noises of the town drifted through her shuttered windows.

  The baron smiled as she prattled on. Despite the fact that she had spent the last few meetings trying to teach him the Tilean for “diamond necklace”, something that he was beginning to fear was a hint, he was a contented man.

  “Colier de diamante,” she repeated, brushing back her hair so that he could see how her lips formed the words.

  “Calor dente,” he said.

  “No, no, no. That’s not it. You also have to roll the r, like this,” she said, rolling the r, and the baron wondered vaguely how she kept her teeth so perfectly white. “Now you try.”

  The baron tried, but the best that he could manage was the guttural, choking sound of a man trying to swallow a frog.

  “Barbarian,” Esmerelda said, frowning. The baron reached down and tweaked her cheek, and she screamed most delightfully.

  “Bastard.”

  “I thought I was a barbarian.”

  “You’re both.”

  “If you insist.” He rolled her off him and, as she pretended to struggle, he seized both of her ank
les and pulled her back towards him.

  “Get off me, you swine!” she said, almost as though she meant it, and her eyes flashed with the fire that the baron loved so well and paid so dearly for.

  “Colier de diamante,” he said, his pronunciation perfect.

  “Oh darling,” Esmerelda cooed, and her struggles became more purposeful and more professional.

  Afterwards, the two of them lay on the bed exhausted.

  “I’m going to wash,” Esmerelda said at last, “and get that lazy old woman Agatha to bring us some food. What do you want, my darling? I think that we have some honeyed pigs’ trotters.”

  “Fine,” the baron said, slapping her rump playfully as she got out of bed. “Bring some wine, too. Oh, and get her to give my guards something too, would you? Bread and ale should do them.”

  “As you say,” Esmerelda said, “although I don’t see why you can’t leave them in the tavern. They always tramp mud into the house, and argue with Agatha.”

  “They only argue with her because the old witch robs them so skilfully at stones,” the baron said, grinning.

  Esmerelda grinned back.

  “Yes, she’s a clever old thing. So, pigs’ trotters for my barbarian,” she said, turning back to kiss him.

  “Your bastard,” the baron reminded her, as she slipped on a shawl and went to find her servant.

  He stretched out on the bed and yawned happily. It was a good life, although it did have its troubles. Thinking of bastards, there was that idiot Martmann, for instance. How anybody could have suspected that he could have been even an illegitimate relation had always struck the baron as quite insulting, but he had had to go along with his father’s will and give the fool the stewardship of an outpost.

  Not anymore, though. Martmann had taken the quietest of all the barony’s outposts and managed to get both him and his whole garrison slaughtered by some strange sort of orc.

  The baron had seen one of the thing’s corpses, and it hadn’t looked much, all skin and bone. Still, tomorrow he’d lead his men up into the hills to see if he could find any more of them. No doubt he’d find some heads for the gibbet while the outpost was rebuilt. Maybe he should have battlements instead of a sloping roof? Mind you, that would be expensive, and Sigmar alone knew how much diamond necklaces cost.

  It was thus trying to decide between fortifications and jewellery that he started to drift off to sleep, a happy man without a care in the world.

  The next thing he knew, Esmeralda was shaking his arm and hissing something into his ear.

  “Not now,” the baron grumbled as he stretched and opened his eyes. “At least give me a minute to get my strength back first.”

  “Get up,” she hissed, and the baron realised that she was genuinely frightened. “There’s somebody downstairs.”

  “Of course there’s somebody downstairs,” he said, frowning. “Look, if you don’t want my men in your house—”

  “Idiot!” she said. “Not your men. Your men are dead, murdered.”

  “Impossible,” the baron said. Even so, he rolled out of bed, and drew the sword from the scabbard that lay on top of his pile of clothes. The sheen of the blade was a comforting antidote to the anxiety in Esmerelda’s eyes.

  “Not impossible at all,” Esmerelda said, and, for the first time, he noticed the stiletto that she held in one white-knuckled fist. She held it underhanded like a real warrior, and despite the adrenaline that had started to pulse through the baron, he felt a moment of pride at his choice of mistress. Tilean women, he thought with a smile, were magnificent.

  She scowled at his expression.

  “Don’t you believe me?” she asked, and the baron thought better about trying to tease her. There were, it seemed, more important matters at hand.

  “Yes, I believe you. What did the assassin look like? And what in Sigmar’s name is that smell?”

  “The assassin?” Esmerelda said, shrugging, and looked nervously at the door. “He was robbing the bodies or something. I didn’t wait to see more. Are you going to kill him?”

  The baron, who had been contemplating leaving through the window, saw the vengeful gleam in her eyes and changed his mind.

  “Of course,” he said.

  He took a step towards the door when, with a sudden violence that smashed the heavy wooden rectangle off its hinges, and sent it spinning into the far wall, the assassin burst into the room.

  It was not quite the same monstrosity that the baron’s doomed garrison had seen. Its spine was straighter, and the bulging power of its musculature was more evenly proportioned. Its skin had lost much of its translucent quality too, although, beneath the filth that begrimed it, that was hardly any improvement. Its claws remained as sharp as ever, and so did the sharpness of its needle teeth, and the even sharper stink of it.

  As the baron looked at the thing, he had the sudden, absolute conviction that this was a dream. Things like this didn’t exist. He stood, mouth open in shock, and would have stood there until his death had Esmerelda’s piercing scream not roused him, like a slap across the face.

  He looked at her, and realised that, dream or reality, he would die to protect her.

  So he did.

  It was a brutal, one-sided fight. The baron used one of the silk sheets as if he were an Estalian in a bull ring, snatching it off the bed, and whipping the material towards the monstrosity’s face. Takoned claws snatched the thing away, the razor-sharp tips shredding the fabric with ease, but already the baron had lunged forward, the tip of his blade finding the soft spot just beneath the bony plates of the thing’s ribcage.

  It was a blow skilful enough to have gutted a deer. Against this monstrous assassin, it was less effective. The baron felt a shock run through his arm, as though he had tried to punch his sword through the trunk of a tree. As he staggered back, he saw the small, black-blooded wound that was the only damage his blow had done. The edges of the wound rippled and closed.

  “Esmerelda!” the baron cried, waving towards the shuttered window. “Get out. Run!”

  However, Esmerelda Dolacita Fangollini, born Gudrun Schweinfurt and raised in the Sigmarite nunnery in Altdorf, had no intention of running. Everything she had, she had earned, and neither man, woman nor the daemon which stood before her was going to take it from her.

  She moved with a viper’s speed, the blade in her hand blurring, as she leapt onto the bed, and slashed her stiletto towards the intruder’s throat.

  The blow never landed. With a flicker of effort, the foul-smelling beast clipped her with the back of its hand, and she was sent spinning back onto the bed.

  The sight of her sprawled form was too much for the baron. Forgetting every lesson of swordsmanship he had ever been taught, he reversed his grip on his sword and raised it two-handed to stab down towards his target. Before he could strike, the creature grabbed the blade, its taloned fingers closing around the razor-sharp steel tightly.

  The baron was being lifted off the floor, but, before he could react, his world exploded into pain: pure, unadulterated pain.

  He had never known that pain like this could exist. The perfection of agony was so great that, after the air hissed from his lungs, he couldn’t even draw another breath to scream with.

  The hilt of his sword slipped through his nerveless fingers and he staggered backwards. He looked down, still unable to comprehend how such agony could exist, and saw that his entrails had been spilled. They hung from his unzipped belly, pink and glistening, and fresh coils of them squirmed from his abdomen as he stepped back. He wheezed, trying to breathe, but he couldn’t draw breath. The pain was so bright that he wasn’t even sure he wanted to.

  He looked back up into the glowing eyes of the thing that had undone him. He wanted to beg it for Esmerelda’s life, but, when he tried, his mouth opened and closed as silently as a landed fish.

  I will consider sparing her, a voice answered inside the baron’s head. It was as smooth as silk, although, the fact that it was inside his head made it e
ven more horrible than the pain. I will consider, if you can explain why you gave the order to slay my people.

  For a moment, the baron, the last of his life evaporating in a furnace of agony and blood loss, had no idea what the creature meant. Then, pushed into his thoughts as easily as a branding iron into butter, there came the image of a Strigany caravan.

  It was Averland, the baron tried to say, the elector count. I was only obeying my liege’s orders.

  He was interrupted, not by that silent, insistent voice, but by the sudden flash of teeth. The monster buried them in the baron’s jugular, and, as the beast satiated its thirst, the baron turned to snatch one, final glance at Esmerelda.

  Desheritato, he thought, and then died.

  Ushoran, that had been his name.

  Ushoran: a good name, a noble name, a name as powerful as the northern winds, and as searing as the desert sun. How many monuments had been carved with that name, the very bones of the earth chiselled into an homage to his beauty? How many men had whispered the name, making a tribute of their living breath?

  Yes, Ushoran he had been, and Ushoran he was again. As he stared down at the drained husk of his victim, the name beat within his consciousness like a beacon, beckoning through a fog-cloaked sea, and he rejoiced in it.

  The blood that he had taken from the baron had been a rich, heady mixture, sparkling with will and pride and energy. After an eternity skulking amongst carrion, the borrowed life filled Ushoran with such a terrible brightness that he wondered why he had forgone the joy of it for so long.

  Of course, he had been forced to forgo it. After the green tide that had obliterated his land, there had come the betrayal by his own cousins. That betrayal had been the ultimate catastrophe. He and his kind had been scattered to the four winds, and hunted like lions by the wolf packs of lesser bloodlines.

  It was only by feeding, unseen and unheard, in graveyards and plague pits that he had been able to remain hidden from his cousins. Those of his kind who had been unable to forgo the more succulent juiciness of living prey had long since gone, betrayed by rumours carried by their prey, and killed by their cousins for sport or for spite.