The Red Duke Read online

  “There is a price,” Jacquetta told him. “Are you willing to pay it?”

  “Anything,” Earl Gaubert answered, not even bothering to consider what such an agreement might mean.

  Jacquetta smiled at the nobleman’s reckless offer. She stepped over to the smelly idol of Onogal, holding her hand to its mouth and letting the snake slither across her fingers, careless of the death that lurked in its fangs. “Anything,” she mused. “Very well. I and my followers are not without our sensibilities. We tire of lurking in the shadows, hiding in filthy caves and deserted hovels. We desire a certain… respectability, accommodation more befitting our hedonistic proclivities. We want to leave the shadows behind us and step out into the light. To do that, we would need your protection, Earl Gaubert d’Elbiq.”

  The price was one that made even Earl Gaubert hesitate. It was scandalous enough to have dealings with the witch and her cult in the dead of night where no one could see them. But to have the witch operate out in the open, and with his protection, to allow her to worship her obscene gods and spread her foul beliefs among his peasants…

  “You shall have everything you ask,” Earl Gaubert said, deaf to the shocked protests of his knights. “When Sir Armand du Maisne has been ruined and destroyed more thoroughly than any knight of the realm, then shall I order a great temple built for yourself and your followers.”

  The witch nodded her head, pleased that the earl’s hate had been great enough to forego any quibbling over her price. “I know that the word of a nobleman is the one thing he will not violate. But know that there are powers I serve who will visit untold horrors upon you should you break faith with me.”

  To illustrate her point, Jacquetta lifted her hand. The serpent twined about her fingers suddenly became rigid. With a violent motion she dashed the adder to the floor, its petrified body shattering like a clay vessel.

  Earl Gaubert went pale at the cruel display of the witch’s power, intimidated by forces he did not understand and which he had been taught from the cradle to loathe and despise. At the same time, the display of black magic crushed the last of his reticence. However mighty Sir Armand’s skill with the blade, it could not defy such sorcery.

  “How will you destroy him?” the earl asked, staring down at the broken snake.

  Jacquetta came closer to the nobleman, her soft hand caressing the maimed lump of his arm. For an instant, Earl Gaubert felt strength flow through him once more. Then the witch withdrew her touch and he was a cripple once more.

  “Living in the shadows, I know others who have hidden themselves from the prying eyes of the ignorant and the blind. There is a man I know of who has some talent for evoking the spirits of the dead. My followers have helped him collect… materials… for his researches. More importantly, he knows and fears my powers. He will help us achieve your purpose, Earl Gaubert.” A cold light crept into Jacquetta’s gaze. “Your enemy is reckoned the greatest living swordsman in all Aquitaine. With magic, we shall evoke the spirit of the greatest swordsman Aquitaine has ever known!”

  CHAPTER IV

  King Louis stared out across the bloody battlefield, watching as peasants armed with torches drove off the hungry crows and vultures. The carnage was unspeakable, the noble dead of Bretonnia laid out in ghastly rows, their lifeless eyes gazing up at the uncaring sky. Smoke rose from the great bonfires where the corpses of the Red Duke’s vanquished army were being consigned to the flames. This odious chore had fallen to the few living knights who had served the vampire and survived the battle. King Louis was at a loss what to do with these men. Part of him wanted to simply exile them from the kingdom, allow them at least the chance to redeem their honour in some foreign land. Then, as he considered the horrors the vampire had visited upon Aquitaine, the king found himself wanting to cast these men into the flames alongside the husks of zombies and wights.

  So much misery. It would be generations before Aquitaine could recover from this carnage, be more than a shadow of the land King Louis had known and loved. History would say he had won a great victory upon Ceren Field, but he did not feel like a conqueror. All he felt was tired and old, his heart filled with a sadness that tore at his soul. So much had been lost at Ceren Field, things that no victory could restore. The Aquitaine he had known was gone, as dead as the knights of Cuileux and the dragons of Tarasq.

  The king lowered his eyes and looked upon the body laid out at his feet. The crimson armour shone like a mantle of rubies in the blazing sun, the jewelled necklace about the corpse’s throat was like a burning star. There was no cruelty or malice in the lean face of the dead man, only an expression of peaceful repose. How hard had that face fought to have that look upon it, all down the Estalian peninsula and out across the sea to the desolate shores of Araby and the thorny walls of Lashiek. The dead knight had fought so terribly hard to find peace. In the end, it had taken the king’s lance to bring it to him.

  “Sire, it is time.” The words were spoken with reluctance by the armoured knight standing beside the king. Sir Thierbalt was one of the king’s generals, a knight who had drunk from the grail and who had campaigned alongside his king in the lands of the heathen. Sir Thierbalt found his current duty the most onerous of all the trials he had ever endured.

  King Louis stared at his old friend, a blank expression in his eyes. Sir Thierbalt felt tempted to turn away, to leave his king alone with his sorrow. The knight knew he couldn’t. Sometimes even a king needed to be reminded where his own duty lay.

  “Sire, he must be burned with the rest,” Sir Thierbalt said.

  King Louis turned away, watching as the rotting carcasses of the Red Duke’s army were tossed into the bonfires. The sickening stink of burning flesh and the putrid juices of mortification struck the king’s senses. He cringed at the obscene sound of bones cracking in the flames. Even in the worst years of the crusades, he had never seen such a ghastly sight.

  “No,” the king said, his voice low but firm. “He will not burn like a piece of rubbish.”

  “The Red Duke must be destroyed,” Sir Thierbalt repeated. “The Prophetess Isabeau has warned that every trace of the vampire must be annihilated.”

  King Louis stared down at the body, studying the peaceful expression on the corpse’s face. “The Red Duke has been destroyed. There is nothing left of the monster, only the man remains’. The king quickly wiped his eyes. “I will not see the Duke of Aquitaine burn with the rest of the vampire’s carrion! He shall lie with our own dead. I will build a monument to the heroic deeds of the man and shall forget the horrors of the monster!” King Louis saw the uncertainty on Sir Thierbalt’s face. “This is my decree,” he said sternly. “Not the prophetess, not the Lady herself shall make me alter my decision.”

  The king’s will was law. The body of the Red Duke was not consigned to the flames, as Isabeau had ordered, but was instead borne from the field of battle. A great column of marble was erected upon the hill overlooking Ceren Field and into this pillar the vampire’s body was placed. A bronze statue depicting the Duke of Aquitaine at the height of his heroic glory was set atop the pillar and rich engravings chronicled the life of the noble warrior before he had descended into darkness.

  The Prophetess Isabeau warned against honouring a thing that had turned to evil and visited such wickedness upon the land, but her words fell upon unheeding ears. The king’s grief was great; only by paying tribute to his dead enemy could he ease the burden of his heart.

  Isabeau did prevail upon the king to allow her to place enchantments upon the monument, spells that would protect the tomb and hold it inviolate against all manner of evil. King Louis never recognised the import behind her magic, never suspected that Isabeau’s purposes were other than those she had professed to her king. So certain was he that death had cleansed the body of the Red Duke’s evil that he would have resented it had Isabeau confessed her fears to him.

  The damsel’s spells would protect the tomb from the ravages of wind and rain, but they would also protect the land
from that which lay within the tomb. For in the vampire’s body, Isabeau sensed a seed of evil, an evil that must never be allowed to rise again.

  In the darkness of the first night after Isabeau’s spells sealed the tomb, something stirred within the marble pillar. Something engorged by the darkest of magic. Something that ripped the broken lance from its heart. Something that sneered at the foolish compassion that had prevented King Louis from destroying its body. The king would suffer for his mistake. All Bretonnia would suffer.

  Then the vampire attempted to leave his tomb. The unseen power of Isabeau’s wards drove him back. The vampire found it impossible to even approach the walls of his crypt, repulsed by the enchantments that saturated the marble column. The Red Duke could only turn within the small interior of his prison and curse at the walls that confined him, the walls he couldn’t even touch.

  Alone in the eternal darkness of his own tomb, the Red Duke passed the long years, tormented by the bloodlust that consumed his corrupt body. Hour by hour, his ravenous hunger swelled, torturing him with pangs of longing he was powerless to satisfy. Vainly he cast his thoughts upon the past, trying to forget his hunger by reflecting upon his deeds, losing himself in moments heroic and infamous with equal abandon.

  Once, twenty years after being imprisoned in his tomb, the Red Duke heard banging sounds against the walls. Desperately he cried out, little caring if those who assailed the marble walls brought rescue or destruction with them. The louder he cried, the faster the banging sounds came. For the better part of a day, the vampire listened to the walls of his prison being struck by hammer and chisel. But never did the enchantments which held him falter, never did a single ray of light or wisp of new air creep into the darkness.

  The vampire could not know that King Louis was dead and that with his death, Isabeau had ordered workmen to visit the Red Duke’s tomb and efface it of all trace of the vampire’s name lest it become a shrine to his evil. Only one mark did the workmen forget to remove before they left, a single stylised sword, a tribute to the knight whom the Arabyans had named “El Syf”.

  When the workmen left, the vampire was abandoned once more to the silence and the darkness. His only companions though the years his haunted memories and his eternal hunger.

  Sometimes, the Red Duke would imagine he heard again the sound of hammers cracking against the walls of his prison, shrieking out in desperation to these mocking phantoms of memory, begging them for the release that would end his hunger.

  An icy night wind slithered through the weeds, making it sound as though a phantom army was marching through the cemetery. It was an impression Earl Gaubert d’Elbiq found particularly disturbing. With only the feeble light of Morrslieb, the sickly Chaos moon, shining down upon the hilltop, any number of goblins and ghouls might be hidden among the gravestones.

  Strangely, it was the thought that human eyes might be observing him from the darkness that worried Earl Gaubert the most. Ghosts and fiends could only kill him. A man could do much worse to him. If word reached Duke Gilon and his fellow lords about this midnight excursion to Ceren Field, far worse would befall Earl Gaubert than mere death. He would be disgraced, condemned for consorting with followers of the Dark Gods. His lands would be stripped from him, his house abolished. He would be executed with a noose, killed like a peasant, denied the headsman’s axe which was the proper death for a nobleman condemned by his lord.

  Earl Gaubert cast a defiant scowl across the long shadows of the graveyard. He was willing to risk even such disgrace and ruin in order to avenge himself upon Count Ergon and the cursed du Maisnes. What tortures could Duke Gilon visit upon him that were worse than the pain of burying his sons, of watching their murderer roam free?

  The earl pulled his bearskin cloak tighter about his body, fending off the chill of the night. He nodded to his companions, Sir Aldric and Sir Jehan, two of his most valiant and loyal knights. Men who could be trusted to obey his every order without question and who would keep their mouths shut about anything they saw or heard. Slowly, the three men made their way through the maze-like confusion of headstones and crypts, the overgrown weeds clutching at them as they forced their way among the tombs.

  After a few yards, a grey mist began to rise from the earth, clinging to the headstones like ghostly cobwebs. The deeper the men penetrated into the cemetery, the thicker the mist became, at last becoming a smothering blanket of fog. Natural fogs seldom penetrated so far inland as Aquitaine, and Earl Gaubert knew this cloud did not belong to the natural world. It was some magical veil conjured up by Jacquetta to cloak her activities in the graveyard. The witch was nothing if not cautious. It was one of the reasons Earl Gaubert had tolerated her foul little cult for so long. It was easy to harbour evil in one’s fief if the evil in question was discreet.

  A green light suddenly shone within the fog, beckoning Earl Gaubert and his knights onwards. The nobleman motioned for his men to precede him and advised them to keep their swords drawn. The witch might be their partner in this enterprise, but it was imprudent to trust her too far. Whatever her occult powers, she was still only a peasant and therefore a creature without any understanding of honour.

  Through the grey veil, the three men marched, following the witch light as it manoeuvred among the tombs. Earl Gaubert lost count of the twists and turns the beckoning light demanded of them, certainly it was impossible to tell where in the cemetery they were. With the stars and moon hidden behind the fog, there was no way to determine even which direction they were moving. The nobleman accepted the annoyance of this circuitous journey with a grudging tolerance. Jacquetta was being careful, leading her lord on such a confusing path in the event that there had been spies lurking in wait. There wasn’t a man born who could make sense of the route Earl Gaubert and his knights had taken. Even one of the fay would have been lost in the witch’s fog.

  When the witch light finally flickered and died, Earl Gaubert proceeded towards its last position. The fog began to grow thin, the night sky once again stretched across the heavens, and the nobles could once more see the dark bulks of crypts and tombs looming all around them. Their course had led them to the centre of the graveyard, to a spot where a great column of marble thrust upwards from the ground. The earl could feel the soft, subtly disturbing aura of the column, a feeling somehow owing some kinship to the divine atmosphere of a grail chapel where the relics of those who had seen the Lady were enshrined. It was not quite the same though. Where a grail chapel evoked a sense of peace and purpose, what Earl Gaubert felt emanating from the column was more visceral, more aggressive. There was a sense of alarm, of warning attached to the enchantment.

  Almost, Earl Gaubert allowed the ancient magic to sway him, to make him forget the sinister purpose that had brought him to the graveyard in the dead of night. Then the earl saw the laughing faces of Count Ergon and Sir Armand flash before his eyes. Hate swelled his heart, stifling the fear that had moved him. The du Maisnes would pay and the spells of a long-dead damsel were not going to keep him from his revenge.

  Black candles were arrayed about the base of the column, their flame writhing in the darkness like a living thing. Before the candles stood a grisly altar, its surface cloaked in the flayed skin of a woman, and upon this unspeakable symbols had been written in blood. Tiny grinning skulls, the fleshless heads of murdered children, rested in each corner of the altar, their empty sockets staring accusingly at the three noblemen. Sir Jehan, offended beyond endurance by the sight of the obscene altar, began to draw his sword. Only the reprimanding hiss of Earl Gaubert restrained the knight from casting down the loathsome tabernacle. He shared his knight’s disgust, but unlike Jehan, he understood the necessity behind the abomination.

  From the shadows, cloaked figures shuffled into view, the diseased shapes of Jacquetta’s cult. The witch herself emerged from behind a headstone, smirking at Earl Gaubert’s disgust. She caressed one of her long, sinuous legs as she stepped into the light.

  “You came,” Jacquetta said. “I
half imagined you would be too timid. Knights seldom have the stomach for sorcery.”

  Earl Gaubert scowled at her. “Do not mock me, you peasant trash,” he hissed. “Witch or whore, I’ll see you quartered if you trifle with me!”

  Jacquetta shrugged, the gesture causing her black cloak to slip and expose a milky white shoulder. “You need my magic to have your revenge, my lord. It would be wise not to forget that.”

  “You spoke of some other warlock whose magic we also needed,” Earl Gaubert reminded her. “I trust you have found him?”

  The witch nodded, gesturing with her hand towards one of the tombs. From the recessed doorway, a tall, cadaverously thin man stepped into view. He wore a long black coat, bone buttons running down its front in double rows. A battered, almost shapeless hat was crushed about his greying hair. The man’s face was gaunt, with a wide forehead and a square jaw. There was a sneaky, calculating quality about his eyes that reminded Earl Gaubert of a rat or a goblin.

  “You are the warlock?” Earl Gaubert asked.

  The man in the black coat bowed at the waist. “Renar of Gisoreux, your subject, my lord,” he said, his voice surprisingly stentorian and with a cultured inflection about it. It still bore the accent of a peasant, but a peasant who had come from a more affluent setting than some rural village.

  Renar did not wait for the earl to acknowledge him, but instead pointed to the grisly altar. “You have brought the goblets, my lord?” He nodded as he watched one of the knights remove three silver cups from a bag tied to his belt. “Place them upon the altar,” he said, walking towards the monument as the knight moved to carry out his command.

  Renar rounded the altar, studying the three goblets. After a time, he nodded once more and drew a small leather pouch from one of the pockets of his coat. Even Earl Gaubert cringed at the suggestive shape of the thing and tried to tell himself the pouch had been crafted from the paw of a monkey. Renar opened the bag where it had once been attached to a wrist. Carefully he poured a dark powder from the pouch, dumping an equal measure of the substance into each of the cups.