[Warhammer] - Zavant Read online

  “Vesper, we’re walking into an ambush! Look at the flame! The black radiance indicates that one of the greater orders of the undead—almost certainly a vampire of significant power—is close by! Look at the flame!” he insisted again, reaching out to grasp Klasst’s arm. “Call your men back. It’s a trap, man! It’s—”

  Klasst was cut off by the sound of a scream from further up the tunnel, a sound followed seconds later by an abrupt tearing sound and then the splash of something heavy—a body, Vido realised, in sick fear—falling into the water-filled gutters of the tunnel.

  Alerted by Konniger’s warning, Klasst and his men had a few extra precious seconds to react before their attackers struck. Vido had to give Klasst credit for the quality and skill of his cadre of bodyguards. They were drawn not merely from the finest cut-throat scum that the back-alleys of Altdorf had to offer, but also from the pick of the best mercenary bands and warrior castes in the whole of the Old World.

  Under the circumstances, then, it was greatly to their credit that any of them actually managed to survive the battle for quite as long as they did.

  Having swiftly dealt with the scouts that Klasst had sent ahead up the tunnel, the ghoul things swept down the passage towards the rest of the group. Riflemen and handgunners stepped forward, and suddenly the tunnel was filled by the crashing roar of gunfire and the stinging reek of flintlock-ignited blackpowder, followed moments later by the screaming howls of pain from the ghouls as musket-fired lead balls tore into leprous, grave-rotted flesh and shattered gnarled, inhuman-shaped bones.

  The surviving ghouls trampled over their own dead and injured, slashing at them with tooth and claw, in their eagerness to get at the humans. Klasst’s gunners pulled back to reload, giving way to their comrades armed with other missile weapons. Vido saw a crossbowman who must surely have been a marksman in some Elector Count’s army before seeking better-paid employment in the service of Vesper Klasst step forward and calmly put a crossbow quarrel straight through the eye of a shrieking ghoul, felling it in its tracks. He stepped back to reload his weapon, just as another creature leaped at him, only to be spitted on the sword point of a big giant of a Middenheimer who had all the makings of a one-time champion duellist.

  After that, the rest of the ghoul pack descended on the first line of bodyguards. It was then, in close combat, in the narrow, near-lightless confines of the stone tunnel, that the battle descended into chaos and the true killing began. Crossbowmen and riflemen had no time to reload or little chance of a good, clear shot at an enemy target amongst the confused press of bodies. Swordsmen and axemen had little room to swing their weapons.

  Here, tooth and claw were at their most effective, and only one set of combatants had those.

  “Back!” shouted Klasst, over the sound of his men’s screams as ghoul fangs and claws tore at throats and gouged into vulnerable flesh. His remaining bodyguards needed little urging, a rearguard of them instantly forming protectively around their master as they retreated back up the passage and away from the slaughter of their comrades. Konniger and Vido were caught up in the press, Konniger reaching out to grab hold of Vido’s cloak collar to prevent his servant-companion from being trampled underfoot in the panicked rush of bodies pushing away from the combat further up the passage.

  Amidst the noise and confusion, Konniger somehow kept hold of the still-burning candle, and Vido saw that the black flame was burning even brighter now, its weird, otherworldly luminescence wildly pulsating in warning.

  Forewarned again, Konniger and Vido were almost, but not quite, prepared for what happened next, as the vampire burst out through the stone brickwork wall of the tunnel.

  Vido had never seen a vampire—indeed, had never, ever wanted to see such a being—but he had heard much about them. Vampires were the lords of the night; cruel and aristocratic, dwelling in remote, bat-haunted, ruined citadels on the outer fringes of the Empire, where they brooded on past glories of their ancient and glorious lineage.

  The creature that crouched for a moment before them in the tunnel was like nothing from the gloomy, gothic-romantic imaginings of some doom-haunted Bretonnian poet. It crouched there, savage and monstrous, drooling a bloody black ichor from a face that was alternately part rat and part pig. It flexed its body, shaking off the remains of shattered stonework, and Vido saw evidence of inhumanely powerful muscles shifting and flexing beneath its skin. He saw too the multitude of vermin and maggots crawling amongst the coarse, filth-encrusted fur that covered its naked form. Its arms—impossibly long and corded with lean muscle—ended in extended, cruel finger talons that stupidly reminded Vido of the Empire folklore legends of the Struwwelpeter, the scissor-fingered daemon spectre who snipped off the thumbs of misbehaving children.

  The creature snarled, a sound that came from somewhere dark and primal, but, despite its bestial appearance, there was a gleam of frightening intelligence in its large, blood-glowing eyes, and beneath the shifting mask of its feral features, you could see the last few fitful remnants of something still almost recognisably human. The creature’s ghoul-thing servants had once been human too: vile degenerates who had been curse-altered by their blasphemous eating of human flesh. They had fallen far, transformed into wretched carrion-hunter things, but their master’s fall had been greater still. Vido could only guess at just how ancient this creature was, and what gods it must have offended or taboos it must have transgressed to have become the foul thing that stood before them now.

  All this Vido saw or thought in the blink of an eye following the creature’s eruption out of the wall. The moments following that were filled only with blood and the sounds of human terror.

  The vampire beast leaped forward, casually scooping away the face of the nearest bodyguard who tried to block its way. Before the man could scream, it had snapped first the sword and then the spine of the fellow next to him. Klasst’s pet sorcerer opened his mouth to hurriedly chant the words of a spell, but all that emerged was a gurgled choke as the creature, with one savage sweep of its claws, stole away his voice along with much of the rest of his throat.

  It was right amongst them now, killing and tearing with every slash of its claws and lunging wrench of its fanged jaws. Vido hurled a dagger at it, a well-aimed throw that struck the thing’s chest dead centre over its heart but bounced uselessly off its impervious, iron-hard skin.

  Konniger was reaching into his robes for something—some esoteric device or item that might have more effect on the creature than sharpened Nuln steel—as the creature bore down on him. Vido knew how fast his master’s reactions were, but, compared to the speed of the vampire’s movements, Konniger seemed to be moving in some kind of fugue state. The creature lashed out, sending the sage-detective smashing into the side of the wall. Vido saw Konniger’s blood splash against the rough stonework, but as he rushed to his master’s aid he was felled by the weight of another falling body. The body had no head—presumably it had been sheared away by the vampire’s terrifyingly lethal claw-hands—but it still lifelessly thrashed and shook as the soul within it fought against the inevitable moment of departure from its now useless physical shell.

  Vido felt panic well up within him as the corpse’s mindless death-spasms pushed him facedown into the mud and water of the passage floor. He struggled for breath, trying to prevent himself from drowning in the shallow stream of sewer slurry as he tried to wriggle out from beneath the pinning weight of the corpse. Even if he succeeded, he knew that he would still be trapped in an underground sewer tunnel with an apparently invincible vampire lord, and he suspected that, one way or another, he was only moments away from death.

  With a final, desperate heave, he succeeded in wriggling out from beneath the dead weight of the now motionless corpse. Oblivious to all else happening around him, of men screaming and dying, of the presence just a few feet away of the vampire, Vido staggered over towards the fallen figure of his master, hauling his head out of the water, saving him from a similar drowning fate to which himself
had nearly succumbed.

  It was then, as he struggled to drag Konniger away to some foolishly unlikely point of safety, that he noticed the change in the candle flame.

  Konniger’s black light candle was lying forgotten in a pool of slime nearby, its unearthly black flame still somehow burning. Now, even as Vido watched, he saw the flame once again begin to shift and alter. It divided, another second flame growing out of the first, the two of them angrily twisting round each other.

  Two black flames, each warning of the nearby presence of a vampire.

  Konniger groaned, starting to awaken after being knocked unconscious. “Master,” Vido whispered, pointing to the candle’s dual flame. “Look!” Rationally, Vido realised that there was little Konniger could do under the present circumstances, injured as he was and still half-unconscious. Vido raised his voice, trying to alert the others still there in the tunnel, but his feeble warning efforts were lost amidst the bloody chaos and confusion all around them.

  It did not matter anyway. Those who were still alive would understand soon enough what he was trying to warn them of.

  The creature had reached Klasst. Clearly the crimelord had been its intended target all along. He faced the creature alone, his bodyguards either dead or run off. Swiftly, Klasst reached into a hidden pocket and pulled out a small black-powder weapon. It was a duelling pistol, Vido realised; rare and expensive, hand-crafted by the finest dwarf gunsmiths and reputedly extremely lethal at close ranges such as this. Klasst pressed the blunt, wide-barrelled mouth of the weapon into the flesh of the creature’s face, and pulled the delicate, wrought-silver firing trigger.

  The sound of the weapon’s firing was curiously muffled, but the creature’s bellowing roar of pain rang out terrifyingly loud in the confines of the tunnel. It managed to turn its face away just at the moment of firing, but it did not escape unscathed. The creature may have been immune to normal bladed weapons, but, ancient as it was, it had not realised its vulnerability to these new and terrible black-powder inventions.

  Part of the creature’s face was blown away, strips of blackened skin hanging in shredded tatters from the exposed, yellowed bone of its skull. The wound would have killed or incapacitated any mortal creature, but it merely delayed and further angered the vampire. The creature savagely backhanded the crimelord, its talons gashing his face to the bone. Klasst cried out, dropping the now spent pistol and clutching at his ruined face. The vampire snarled in furious triumph and lunged forward at its prey’s exposed throat.

  Klasst’s last, desperate gambit had not killed the creature, but he had delayed it by a second or two, and it was that delay which was now to save his life.

  The first vampire had announced its presence in a characteristically savage and brutal manner, coming out of a stone wall to instantly begin slaying and butchering all around it. The second creature’s arrival too was to be characteristic of its kind; it came seemingly out of nowhere, rushing along the tunnel cloaked in darkness and moving with an effortless, ancient grace, making a sound barely more audible than the whisper of a night breeze brushing over the crests of an endless sea of desert dunes.

  The beast vampire reacted, perhaps sensing the approach of another rival member of its kind. Fast as it was, it could never be fast enough. It reeled back, allowing Klasst to fall from its grasp, as the second creature slammed into it. There was a blur of motion, and suddenly the beast staggered back further, blood gouting from fresh wounds torn in its chest and flanks. It roared in fury, a summons answered seconds later by the watery splash of ghoul feet scampering towards it from up the tunnel.

  The living blur that had been the second vampire came to rest, the shadows around it folding away for a few moments to reveal something of its true form. It was female, and Vido saw a face of dark and terrible beauty distended horribly across the features of a monster. It turned its head towards the advancing ghoul pack, its blood-rouged lips stretching wide into a ferocious, smiling snarl. It opened its mouth, sending the pack scattering in panic with one shrill hiss. Whatever hold the beast creature had over them, it was now broken; however much they had feared their original master, they feared this new vampire more.

  The beast creature roused itself, its supernatural powers healing its injuries with terrifying speed. Already, the flow of blood from its wounds had been staunched, and now the ragged, torn edges of the wounds in its flesh were starting to close and knit together. It looked at its she-thing opponent, hatred burning bright in its feral, luminous eyes. It opened its mouth, and spoke.

  The sounds that emerged were clearly and shockingly words, although, even if they were not formed in the rough, bestial throat of the vampire creature, they would still have sounded strange and unfamiliar. They belonged, Vido suspected, to a tongue not spoken by any living being these last few thousand years.

  The she-thing vampire hissed in anger, baring its fangs in contempt. “Strigoi beast!” it spat. “Do not dare to think yourself worthy enough to use the ancient tongue of my homeland. Your kind are as vermin beneath our feet. Had I these millennia to live again, I would see to it that you and your entire polluted bloodline were wiped free from the face of this world.”

  The beast vampire snarled more words, each of them sounding like an ugly and twisted parody of human speech. The she-thing hissed again, replying in the same strange tongue, but, coming from its mouth, the words sounded antique and powerful, like mystic incantations. Just hearing them somehow brought to Vido’s mind the image of vast and primal sandstone buildings and edifices rearing up out of the sands of some far-off and ancient desert land.

  Then the she-thing vampire turned its head, looking for the first time directly at the few survivors of the beast creature’s ambush, favouring them with a single cruel and arrogant glance.

  “Little mortals,” it hissed, mockingly. “You would do well to leave now. Go quickly, and do not so much as dare glance behind you. The death of one of our kind—even one such as this foul creature—is not a sight that mortal eyes are privileged enough to witness.”

  Vido swayed in confusion, torn between the frightening, impelling tone in the vampire’s voice and yet drawn in by the alluring blood call of the creature’s gaze. That gaze held the promise of many things: life eternal and the forbidden, final ecstasy of the vampire’s kiss; secrets from beyond the veil of death and the lost, hidden glories of a mighty civilisation that had fallen before the first primitive wooden stockade settlements had even been built by the forest tribe ancestors of the founders of the Empire. Seeing those eyes, glimpsing just a hint of the dark promises flickering within them, Vido understood at last part of the terrible allure that the vampire cast over its victim.

  “Leave!” hissed the she-thing again, this time with enough command to break the spell of its mesmerising presence, and seconds later Vido found himself scrambling madly through the darkness and filth of the tunnel, somehow half-pulling, half-carrying, half-dragging a dazed Konniger after him. The sage-detective’s face was a mask of blood, and he was rambling incoherently to himself, suffering from a combination of concussion and blood loss from the wound to his head. Klasst and a mere three of his retinue—a bloodied but otherwise unharmed Scholke amongst them, Vido was disappointed to see—scrambled after them. The six of them were the only survivors of an ambush that had lasted less than a minute but claimed the lives of almost two dozen men. The beast creature roared in anger as it saw its prey escaping, but there was a weak, pitiful tone to the sound, like the fearful snarl of a predator cornered by a larger and greater foe.

  They kept running. After that, they heard only the screams and howls of the unimaginable struggle now taking place in the darkness of the tunnel behind them.

  Vido stayed close by his master’s side, fearing at any second that Konniger would succumb to the effects of the head injury he had suffered. “Its face,” mumbled Konniger to himself, almost incoherently, as he ran. “I’ve seen it before, but where? Yes, of course… the Remas frescoes… da Venzo’s work
on the ceiling of the Temple of Shallya…”

  Hearing this, Vido feared the worst: that Konniger was more seriously injured that he looked, his mind permanently disordered by that blow to the head.

  After all, the halfling reasoned, how else could his master possibly believe that the she-monster creature they had just encountered in any way resembled the great da Venzo’s famous representation of the blessed and holy Goddess of Mercy?

  Five

  Somehow they made it back to Konniger’s residence; somehow, their bewildered, panic-filled flight through the dawn streets of the city passed by generally unnoticed. Perhaps the jaded citizens of the Imperial capital were used to the sight of a group of wild-eyed, blood-stained and filth-covered figures running pell-mell through the streets, or perhaps it was merely that those few hardy souls still up and about their dubious business at such an hour may have recognised at least one of the figures as being Vesper Klasst, and then thought better of asking too many potentially risky questions.

  Konniger passed out twice on the journey, and Vido had to bodily drag his master’s unconscious form over the threshold of the house, from where it had been unceremoniously dumped by one of Klasst’s men. The sage-detective was suffering from shock and blood loss, but Vido knew that it would be no use summoning a physician to attend to him. Konniger and Altdorf’s resident practitioners of the healing arts shared a mutual loathing; those that he had not publicly dismissed as quacks and charlatans he considered to be mere fools and incompetants. Even if any of them could now be bribed or persuaded to attend to the sage-detective, Konniger himself had long ago issued stern instructions to Vido: “Never let any of those saw-bone butchers near me, even if, Sigmar help me, I’m lying in my deathbed and already halfway through Morr’s Gate.”