[Von Carstein 01] - Inheritance Read online

  Food was brought to the room an hour before noon: a plate of fresh fruit, pumpernickel bread, aromatic cheeses and thick slices of various cold meats. It was a platter fit for nobility. Ganz ate ravenously. He hadn’t realised it had been so long since his last real meal. The mélange of flavours on his tongue was mouth-wateringly delicious. He ate until he was sated then he checked the sun through the window. It was a few hours past the meridian.

  “Time to end the dance,” he said to himself. He looked around the room for some kind of bell-pull to summon the chamberlain but there was nothing of the sort that he could find. He opened the door. The passageway was empty. He walked back the way the chamberlain had led him a few hours earlier. Ganz found a servant boy walking hurriedly up the main staircase.

  “Boy!” he called. The youngster stopped in his tracks and turned to look back quizzically. “See my bags are brought from my room and have my coachman ready my carriage.” The boy nodded and skipped back down the stairs. Saying nothing, he hustled down the passageway Ganz had just left. Ganz made his way out to the courtyard. A few servants were busy with whatever chores their daily life forced on them. He crossed the courtyard to the stables. His black brougham was parked outside. The moribund coachman sat on the flatbed, reins wrapped tightly in his fist as though he had been expecting Ganz’s imminent return. With a shiver, Ganz realised the man had in all probability never left his seat since dropping him off earlier.

  “We are going to meet up with the others at the tavern down the hill, a boy is tending to my luggage.” He opened the door and clambered into the velvet cool darkness of the carriage.

  He was seething by the time he found Posner, asleep in his own carriage in the courtyard of the Pretender’s Arms twenty minutes later. Posner and his men hadn’t bothered with renting out a dormitory. Instead they chose to sleep in their broughams just as they had done every day for the last month. No doubt Posner had decided that whatever the outcome of Ganz’s treating with the old baron, Rothermeyer would be dead come morning and they would be back on the road, so there was no point in making themselves comfortable. Giving the circumstances of his return from the keep he couldn’t fault Posner’s logic.

  The soldier was laid out in a state of what looked like peaceful repose when Ganz opened the door to his coach and clambered in. Posner lay on his back, arms folded across his chest, heels together, on the velvet banquette. He was amazed the man could sleep like that. The carriage smelled stale—damp earth and mildew. It was a graveyard reek.

  “He wasn’t prepared to give so much as an inch,” Ganz said, sitting himself down on the bench opposite Posner’s makeshift bed.

  “You didn’t seriously expect him to, did you?” Posner said, without opening his eyes.

  “No,” Ganz conceded grudgingly.

  “Then why the long face? You gave him his chance; he chose his own fate. It is more than many people get to do, remember that, chancellor. The consequence of his choice might be a visit from my men but it was still his choice. In his place I like to think I would have the courage to make the same choice. It is uncommon for an old man to have the courage to die gloriously. They prefer to slip into their dotage and dwell on things that once were and might have been but for one twist of fate, one bad decision, one love lost, one mistake made. Now, however, it is out of his hands. Come nightfall death will walk in his house. I fully expect that he has left the door open for us.”

  “Just make it quick and clean,” Ganz said, a bad taste lingering in his mouth from the whole business. “He is an old man.”

  “It won’t be either,” Posner said. “Now leave me in peace, I must clear my mind for the killing to come.”

  Ganz waited out the hours to nightfall in his own carriage. The minutes and hours dragged by, giving his guilt time to fester. The plain-speaking old man had gotten under his skin. He was fully aware of the consequences of his stupid rebellion and yet he refused to simply bow to the rule of von Carstein, which would have been enough to save his life. Instead he chose to stand up against the storm of the count’s wrath even though it meant his own death. He didn’t know if it was bravery or stupidity but whatever it was, it made Ganz respect the old man as much as he pitied him.

  Somewhere during the long wait he fell asleep. He awoke to the frenzied sound of wolves baying in the distance. He opened the carriage door and staggered out into the night. A sickle moon hung in the clear sky. He had no idea how long he had been asleep or what time it was. The four other carriages were empty. For once, the coachmen were nowhere in sight. Their absence disturbed Ganz more than it ought to have, but the more he thought about it the more he realised that he had never seen the strange men leave the coaches.

  The wolves howled again, a lupine chorus that echoed around the hilltop. He had no idea how many of the beasts there were out there but it was certainly a hunting pack and judging by the rabid baying they had scented their prey.

  The sound caused the fine hairs at the nape of Ganz’s neck to rise like hackles, prickling with the black premonition of fear. He knew, unreasonably, what they were hunting, long before the first wolf came loping back into the courtyard of the Pretender’s Arms, the baron’s blood still fresh on its muzzle. More of the great beasts came padding back into the forecourt, jowls slick with the blood of Heinz Rothermeyer and those unfortunates who loved the old man enough to die with him.

  A huge wolf, almost twice the size of the others, came bounding into the courtyard. Ganz backed up against the side of one of the brougham coaches, feeling the door handle dig into his spine. The great wolf veered towards him, head thrown back as though driven crazy by the smell of his fear. Less than a foot from Ganz it raised up onto its hind legs and slammed its fore paws into the carriage door either side of Ganz’s face. Its foul breath stung his eyes. He squirmed but there was no way he could wriggle out beneath the creature’s claws before its jaws closed on his neck and ripped his throat out if it so desired. The wolfs feral eyes regarded him as though he was nothing more than a slab of meat.

  Posner’s words came back to him, ghosts in his mind: It is uncommon for an old man to have the courage to die gloriously.

  There was nothing glorious about it, he realised. Death was dirty. He felt the warm trickle of urine dribbling down the inside of his leg.

  The wolf’s huge gaping maw appeared to stretch as the beast arched its back and let out an almost human howl. It was as though the wolf had raked its claws over his soul. Ganz felt his knees begin to buckle and the world around him began to shift and lose its shape and definition as it swam out of focus.

  He fell amongst a curious mix of howls and laughter from all around the courtyard. He blacked out. He had no idea how long for. Seconds. Minutes. It was impossible to say.

  When he looked up he saw Herman Posner standing over him, smears of fresh blood around his mouth and across his cheek. Of the wolf there was no sign.

  “The baron is dead,” Posner said, scratching behind his ear. As are most of his household. It is time we left town, chancellor.”

  There was something about Posner’s eyes as he stared down at him that stirred up Ganz’s most primal fears.

  He realised what it was.

  They were feral.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Night of the Dancing Dead

  DRAKENHOF

  Early winter, 2010

  It had been a hard year for Jon Skellan.

  Failure weighed heavily on him.

  The agony of dead ends and false hopes were etched now in every crease and wrinkle of the witch hunter’s face. His eyes betrayed the depth of his suffering.

  Jon Skellan was a haunted man.

  His ghosts were not kindly spirits come to shape his future, they were bitter revenants that came tearing up from his past with hate enough to turn any heart black. Wearing the guises of loved ones they taunted him with his failure. They threw it in his face, branding him useless, their accusations dripped with the venom of self-loathing because that, after al
l, was exactly what these ghosts he carried with him were: projections of his own self-loathing, his own bitterness, his own hate. It was Skellan who couldn’t bear to look at himself in the mirror anymore.

  He knew that and yet still he let them get to him.

  He obsessed on one unassailable fact: Sebastian Aigner was still out there. Still alive.

  The murderer’s continued existence taunted Skellan day and night.

  It was as though the pair were locked in some perverse game of cat-and-mouse that was being played on the streets of Drakenhof. Several times since their arrival in the city Skellan and Fischer had come within a whisker of confronting Aigner, Aigner having moved on mere minutes before their arrival. They were close enough they could smell the man’s rank body odour in the musty air of the taverns and gambling dens, only for them be left scratching their heads with the murderer having seemingly vanished into thin air by the time they made it back out onto the street.

  A long time ago Skellan had reached the only reasonable conclusion he could: that some very powerful people were shielding his wife’s murderer.

  It wasn’t a pleasant thought. It made him doubt who he could trust, made him spurn help where it was offered and made him turn on those who offered friendship.

  So he stayed, and he waited, forcing himself to find patience where there was only the desperate need for resolution and restitution. He listened to the stories surfacing almost daily. First it was tales of the wasting sickness ravaging the Sylvanian aristocracy, and the tragic accidents that befell those who sought to oppose the rule of Vlad von Carstein, and then it was the anti-Sigmarite outbreaks that saw more and more of the old temples defiled.

  More and more of the whisperers offered their own copper coin’s worth of wisdom along with the rumours. Every third or fourth gossip fastened on the Cult of the Risen Dead and how they were not so slowly removing all traces of Sigmar from the Sylvanian countryside. Some could not hide their glee at the return to the older faiths; others remained more sceptical, sensing that there was more to this religious purge than simply some resurgence of the old ways and pointed to the name chosen by the cult, the Risen Dead. It played on centuries of fear, something the peasantry were all too familiar with.

  Perhaps the most telling gossip revolved around the miraculous recovery of the count’s wife Isabella and the fact that, unsurprisingly, she was a changed woman after the sickness, forever wan and pale. The gossips spoke about how she never left the chambers she shared with her husband, save by night.

  Even now, almost a year on, Skellan remembered well the clandestine meeting he and Fischer had had with Viktor Schliemann, one of the two physicians who had attended the countess during her prolonged illness. The man had been terrified, always casting glances back over his shoulder as though afraid of who might overhear their conversation. The most memorable thing about the meeting though was the fact that Schliemann was adamant that Isabella von Carstein’s heart had stopped. That she was in fact dead when he left the room.

  This was immediately before the count had called the physicians fakes and dismissed them from his service.

  Schliemann had been brutally murdered the morning after that meeting with Skellan.

  Skellan had no fondness for coincidences. It was obvious that Schliemann had paid the highest price for his loose tongue.

  Someone had wanted him silenced, which only went to convince Skellan that he had been telling the truth, that Isabella von Carstein had died and been resuscitated. It was no wonder that she had become so important to the followers of the Risen Dead. She was one of them. She had crossed over to the other side, she had breathed the foetid air of Morr’s underworld, and yet she was back, walking amongst them once more, pale-faced and afraid of sunlight. She was a creature of the night, a human owl.

  The old temples destroyed, the dead risen, the nobles falling victim to the same peculiar wasting sickness that meant that the castles across the land had become home to sallow-skinned nocturnal folk, these rumours all pointed to the same fundamental truth: that there was something rotten in the province of Sylvania.

  Skellan made the sign of the hammer reflexively, and gazed up at the spectre of the count’s gothic castle perched like some bird of prey on the mountainside, all sharp edges and jagged black towers with their blind windows staring back down at him. The castle was like nothing he had ever seen teetering there on the sheer face of the rock. The bird of prey analogy was a good one, Skellan thought wryly, though it could easily have been some misshapen gargoyle perched up there instead.

  With money running low they had had a small stroke of good fortune and taken to lodging with Klaus Hollenfuer, a wine merchant in one of the less run-down parts of the city. Hollenfuer was a good man, sympathetic to their quest for justice. He could have charged them an arm and a leg for the spacious room above his wine cellar but instead of taking money he had them work off the rent, running the occasional delivery, but more often than not simply guarding his stock.

  Hollenfuer didn’t need them, he had a small legion of guards on his payroll and there were plenty of boys in the city who could have run his errands. They both knew that Hollenfuer kept them around because he felt sorry for them. The merchant had lost his own wife and daughter to bandits on the road to Vanhaldenschlosse a few years earlier. Part of him, he confessed one drunken evening over half-empty glasses, envied Skellan and Fischer for their relentless pursuit of Aigner and his murderous band of brothers and wished he had the guts to do the same to Boris Ear-biter and his filthy horde of bandit scum.

  The three of them were in the attic rooms above the wine cellar on Kaufmannstrasse. Skellan, his back to the other men, stared intently out of the small round window.

  A low-lying fog had begun to settle in, it masked the city streets with a real peasouper thickness that made it difficult for him to see more than a few feet when he looked down at the streets below. Looking upwards though, toward the castle, the air was still bright and clear. The fog, however, was rising. In a few hours it would shroud the castle as completely as it already did the city streets.

  He couldn’t have wished for better weather for what he had in mind.

  It was the perfect cloak for the subterfuge he was hoping to employ.

  A steady procession of coaches and carts carrying the rich and the beautiful had been making their way up the curving road toward the black castle’s lowered drawbridge all day. From a distance the gateway looked like a huge gaping maw waiting to swallow them. Totentanz, quite literally the Dance of Death, or at least a masquerade in honour of the departed, marked the eve of Geheimnisnacht. Vlad von Carstein had seen to it that absolutely anyone who was anyone would be under his roof to see in Geheimnisnacht.

  Many of the coaches’ passengers had travelled from the furthest reaches of the province to pay tribute to the count and his beloved Isabella, and in the process witness the unveiling of the artist Gemaetin Gist’s portrait of the countess. That Gist, an old man deep into his final years, had undoubtedly created one final masterpiece was cause for jubilation. Gist hadn’t accepted a commission in over a decade and many thought the old man would never hold a brush again until he was creating art for Morr in the halls of the dead. It was no small marvel that the count had somehow coaxed the man into doing one final portrait.

  But then, the count was persuasive.

  Drakenhof had been alive with talk of Totentanz for weeks. Seamstresses and tailors worked their fingers to the bone hurrying to create gowns to rival the beauty of their wearers. The vintners and dairy farmers crated and casked up the finest of their wares, delivering them up to the castle, the bakers and butchers prepared fresh meat and delicacies to make the mouth water. It seemed as though everyone had a part to play in the masked ball apart from Skellan and Fischer.

  “Are you absolutely sure you can’t be talked out of this?” Fischer asked, knowing that his friend had well and truly made his mind up and there was nothing he could do about it. He didn’t like it, and he h
ad being making his unhappiness plain ever since Skellan had shared his plan but the only thing to do now was to go along with it—ride the wave and see where it took them.

  “Certain,” Skellan said, scratching his nose. It was something he did when he was nervous and didn’t know what to do with his hands. “He’s up there, my friend. I know it. You know it. Can’t you feel it? I can. It’s in the air itself, so thick you can almost touch it. It’s alive… It feels as though there is some kind of charge… A frisson. If I close my eyes I can feel it seep into my skin and cause my heart to hammer. It makes my blood sing in my veins. And I know what it means: he’s close. So close. Here’s my promise: it ends tonight, after eight long years. One of us will meet with Morr face to face.”

  “Can you promise me it won’t be you?”

  “No,” Skellan said honestly. “But believe me, if I go, I will do my damnedest to take the murdering whoreson with me.”

  “Good luck to you, lad,” Hollenfuer said coming up behind him to rest a hand on his shoulder. “It’s a brave thing you are doing tonight, walking into the beast’s lair. May your god guide your sword.”

  “Thank you, Klaus. All right, let’s go over this again, shall we?” Skellan turned away from the window. “The final delivery is in little more than an hour, thirteen casks of various wines, two will be marked as Bretonnian. Those are the ones Fischer and I will be hiding in. Your man is waiting at the other end to uncork us, so to speak. A third cask, marked with the seal of Hochland, will contain our swords, and twin hand-held double shot crossbows along with eight bolts in two small belted sheaths. The weapons will be wrapped in oiled skins and floating in the actual wine.”

  “We’ve been over this a thousand times, my friend,” the merchant said placatingly. “Henrik is already up at the castle unloading an earlier shipment, your weapons are wrapped and ready to hide in the barrel. The last cart is loaded. All that remains is for you to go downstairs and for me to seal you in an empty cask of Bretonnian white. The journey to the castle will take an hour, perhaps a little more. Worry about what you will do once you are inside the castle. Let me worry about getting you in there.”