[Von Carstein 03] - Retribution Read online

  Rats infested his quarters, fat, bloated, slick furred vermin.

  There was a timid knock on the door.

  “Come in.”

  The door opened slowly. The crewman dragged a young girl in by the hair, pushing her to the floor at the vampire’s feet. Her loose cotton shift was torn across the shoulder and down the front, the flesh beneath grey with grime. She hadn’t just been plucked off the streets for his delectation, she’d been brought up from down below. The bruises from the chains were still livid, fresh. She’d never stopped fighting, hoping to be free. He wondered, idly, what fate the wretched girl thought lay in store for her. She couldn’t possibly have imagined the truth when the sailors of the black ship had snatched her away from her home all those weeks or months ago. Her eyes fixed on the coffin. She opened her mouth to scream. Mannfred back-handed her hard, delivering a stinging blow across the mouth. His hand silenced her. He nodded approvingly.

  “Good, good. My dear, it is so good of you to join me for dinner.” He turned to the sailor, mildly amused by the eagerness in the man’s jaundiced eyes. “You can leave us now, man, unless, of course you would prefer to stay, join in the feast?”

  The girl whimpered, turning to plead with the sailor, to beg for her life. The sailor shook his head. Instinctively, his hand closed around Manann’s talisman, a small black iron trident he wore at his throat. The old wives’ tales amused Mannfred. The cattle were so sure that they understood his nature. They clutched their white roses, garlic cloves, Sigmarite hammers and other gewgaws meant to scare him off, took refuge in sunlight and hid behind other seedless superstitions, such as vampires not being able to cross fast-flowing water. They seemed to forget that his kind had minds and were capable of applying them. They were not so easily tied to their domains as they had once been—grave dirt could be moved, the sun could be resisted. It took strength, but he was strong. The notion that the dead must retreat to their coffins come sun-up was quaint but stupid. No such stricture bound him so long as he carried with him a handful of dirt from the site where he had been reborn into the world of the dead. And blood of course. He needed blood.

  “Get out,” he told the sailor. The man didn’t need to be told a third time. The door grated back into place. Mannfred circled the girl slowly, twice around. He knelt beside her, taking her chin in his hand, gripping it hard enough to make her wince as he forced her to look him in the eye.

  “What is your name, girl?” He didn’t need to know, didn’t care. It was a gesture, a courtesy. She wouldn’t thank him for it, but while she spoke it focused her mind, making it easier for him to impose his will on her. It was a simple conjurer’s trick. She opened her mouth, and then shook her head as though her name had been there on the tip of her tongue only to escape her. He smiled. “Don’t be shy, my dear. In a moment we shall know each other quite intimately, I promise you.”

  “Margarete.”

  “Such a sweet name: are you a sweet girl, Margarete?”

  “I… I…”

  “I am sure you are, come here, let me taste you.” He laid a hand gently on her shoulder. He wanted to enjoy this moment, so he let his hold on her slip, allowing her to feel the agony of his touch as his fingers sank into her shoulder. She screamed and blood followed. Still he forced his fingers in deeper, to the bone. He hauled her up until her feet were three inches above the floor. Her dress, slick with blood across the shoulder and red down the back, fell open on her nakedness. He studied her for a moment, the rapid shallow rise and fall of her breasts, the sudden rash of goose bumps that prickled her otherwise flawless skin, the dark shadows around the curves of flesh.

  “Exquisite,” he sighed. With his free hand Mannfred tipped her head back, baring the main artery in her neck, and sank his teeth into her throat. Her legs kicked twice and then dangled lifelessly, the fight sucked out of her. He drank deeply, greedily. Her blood dribbled down his chin as he dropped her corpse. He ran the back of his hand across his lips.

  It wasn’t enough.

  It was never enough.

  He turned his back on her, leaving the corpse for the rats. It didn’t take them long to come scurrying out of the woodwork. They chittered and squeaked as they burrowed into her body, teeth tearing through her sodden shift to get at the feast. The sound of them eating provided an eerie counterpoint to the constant ebb and flow of the Reik against the barque’s hull.

  Mannfred lowered himself into the coffin, allowing himself a moment’s respite, the calm before the coming storm, while the black ship sailed on, deeper into the heart of the Old World.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Bridge over the River Aver

  The Plains of Stirland, North of the River Aver

  Even an idiot like Dietrich Jaeger had to be aware that the triangulation of land between Brandstadt, Eschendorf and Furtzhausen was strategically important for one reason and one reason alone: bricks and mortar. Not the scattering of houses that were home to the fishermen, farmers and ferrymen, but something else entirely.

  Even an idiot…

  Vorster Schlagener stopped thinking about it and counted out thirty steps, pushing through the thick grasses along the riverbank. He turned and counted out thirty more, returning to his mark.

  It was a lonely duty for his last night. Vorster shook his head. He was calm. He had expected to be frightened, but he wasn’t. He had had plenty of time to wonder why the fear wasn’t more intense, more paralysing. The truth was black—fear came when the possibility of death neared. Vorster had long since faced up to the grim reality of his plight: come the morning he would die. It would take a miracle for the events of the coming day to play out any other way. That was why he wasn’t afraid. He had accepted it. Good men sat huddled around the campfires. Their conversation was muted, their spirits low as they too came to terms with the stark reality of their situation.

  They would be dead before sundown on the morrow.

  And yet, none of them ran.

  They sat, warming themselves by the flames, looking over the river at the curls of smoke rising up from the enemy’s fires. There were so many fires littering the field. They were outnumbered almost ten to one judging by the campfires. Worse, Ackim Brandt led the Talabeclanders.

  Brandt was everything Jaeger wasn’t.

  War might well have been a collective punishment, but the fate of a battle could still be tied to individuals.

  Brandt was a soldier forged in battle, fiercely loyal to his command, blessed with a quick mind and a gift for strategy. He was able to read a battlefield and make split-second decisions capable of turning the tide of any given combat. He was a soldier’s soldier.

  Yet, the common soldiers like Vorster had to follow the whims of fops like Jaeger, because their families had enough money to buy their commissions. This kind of nepotism was all too common in the new armies. They called them organisations of opportunity, because with so many young men dying so senselessly there was always the chance of advancement for those lucky enough to survive a campaign or two.

  Dietrich Jaeger was just one of many, no better or worse than the rest. He lacked the experience to carry out the task he was charged with and worried too much about his own reputation. That, alone, had proved enough to damn those under his command—like Vorster’s younger brother, Isidor.

  Vorster picked up a small stone and cast it out across the river. It fell short, splashing and disappearing. For a moment, he wished he could have been that stone; that the water could just close over his head…

  He turned to look at the bridge.

  There was a reason the dwarfs had chosen to build the only stone bridge on the Aver on this strip of land—outside of the cities of Averheim and Nuln—and join Stirland and Averland. It was pivotal to the defence of the entire region. This meant that it was pivotal to any attempted conquest of the region. It wasn’t just the only stone bridge, it was the only bridge. There were ferries and punts dotted up and down the river, of course, but for an army the bridge at Legenfeld was the onl
y way to cross the Aver in numbers and at speed. Lose the bridge and surely everything else would follow. That was the way of war—one defeat led to another, the enemy gaining momentum day by day, mile by mile of conquered ground, until their forces swept down like a giant wave, relentless and irresistible.

  That was the nature of war—the strong came crashing down on the weak.

  The fact that pretender had turned upon pretender and the Empire was being ripped apart from the inside out mattered nothing to any of those who would be emperor. With no great evil from the east to keep them occupied it hadn’t taken humanity long before, like the great wyrm, it had coiled around to consume its own tail. Treachery and betrayal were the two great constants of mankind. Vorster had joked with his brother, Isidor, that, as a soldier he would never find himself without work—there was always someone to fight even if it was his own mother. Powerful men would always find a way to make normal folk like him die to settle their arguments.

  Isidor had died three weeks later, gutted by a marlin pike on a faraway field. He had been running at a blackpowder cannon emplacement with eight other men, ordered to charge by an idiot of a man who was determined to sacrifice them to feed his own vanity. He wanted the cannon. He would have it, at any cost.

  That idiot was Dietrich Jaeger.

  Vorster hadn’t forgiven the man for surviving when better men had fallen to sate his ego.

  That, too, was the nature of war.

  Idiots and cowards had a tendency to live.

  Vorster turned his back on his comrades. He gazed along the river, first towards Nuln, though of course he couldn’t see anything but water skaters and the occasional ripple where a vole or water snake slipped into the river, and then back towards Averheim.

  The bridge was too wide to be properly defensible with so few men. When Brandt came they would be overwhelmed relatively quickly. Holding the line would be flat out impossible. It wouldn’t take more than a handful of riders to cut through their ranks like a knife through rancid butter. With the defenders scattered, the cavalry would swing back and come at them from the behind, causing havoc. Then, and only then, the footmen would come surging in to finish the job. Pandemonium and death would reign. It would be brutal and it would be bloody.

  But it would be over quickly.

  That was the only mercy to be had from the coming day.

  The senseless nature of Jaeger’s orders betrayed the fact that the man didn’t have so much as the faintest inkling what he was doing. He lacked confidence in his judgement, though he would never own up to it. He covered his doubts with bluster and arrogance. Even now, on the verge of battle, he set himself alone, aloof from the men under his command. He had left Vorster with one instruction: the bridge must be held at all costs.

  That was it.

  Exactly how the men were to achieve that miracle he didn’t share with them. Jaeger made it sound so simple, where in truth that lack of confidence gnawed away at him, creating great holes of doubt. He was constantly second-guessing himself, trying to anticipate where the attack might come from. The man didn’t have the common sense to listen to better men when they offered wisdom hard won on the battlefields of the Old World facing the Sylvanian vampires. It didn’t matter to him that they were more experienced soldiers. Instead of listening he insisted on posturing and posing and pretending to be a strategic genius.

  Well, Vorster thought bitterly, come the morrow that lie will be well and truly put paid to.

  It all came down to this: a bridge. They couldn’t afford to give the bridge up and they didn’t have the strength of numbers to prevent it from being taken from them.

  Vorster knew what the orders really meant: buy time and hold the bridge until the reinforcements from Brandstadt and Furtzhausen arrive. Failure would mean that Averland had a precious foothold in their homeland. One they wouldn’t give up cheaply. If they failed, hundreds, perhaps even thousands, would die unnecessarily. That was the weight Vorster felt, not his own mortality but theirs, all the other nameless men, women and children of the soon to be dead.

  The road to Wollestadt, a few miles to the south of Legenfeld, was a major trade route from the Black Fire Pass to Nuln. It came close to the river in a few places, but none closer than this. The territory on the border was the location of frequent skirmishes, advantage changing hands regularly. It wasn’t so long ago that the forces from Stirland had been on the offensive, threatening Averland’s trade roads. The trade roads were like arteries all across the Old World. Thanks to them, an army could plunge deep into the heart of Stirland, Talabecland and Middenheim, to Marienburg, Erengrad and as far north as Praag—as far as Pfeildorf, Grenzstadt and Meissen southwards—west to Delberz, Bögenhafen and Carroberg, and east across the Worlds Edge Mountains to places he could barely imagine beyond their strange sounding, exotic names. They were all joined.

  For all that, the trade roads were the last place a reasonable man would have expected Averland’s forces to attack from. Certainly they were a goal that Averland would strive to achieve if they wanted to push on to the north, consolidating their territorial gain. Jaeger argued passionately with his number two that that was the precise reason the road needed guarding. No man in his right mind would expect an attack from there, so that was where the enemy would strike first. He was prepared to stake his life on it, his life and more importantly, the lives of his men. They would, he reasoned, traverse the river upstream on one of the ferries and seek to work their way around behind his army; not the full force of course, just enough troops to guarantee success for the main body of the army.

  It didn’t matter for a moment that there was no legitimate reason for Dietrich Jaeger to divide his forces, which was precisely what he had decided to do.

  No legitimate reason…

  Dietrich Jaeger himself led the thirty riders patrolling the Wollestadt road. The man was a coward; that was the only thing Vorster could think.

  He had deliberately placed himself as far away from danger as was humanly possible. It was, to all intents and purposes, desertion, only the idiot was too much of a coward to actually run away. Instead, he’d crawl back to the elector count with some cock and bull story of how he had done his very best, of how valiant he had been. Yet, it had broken his heart because it still wasn’t enough. Good men died and they would forever stain his conscience. Jaeger was an inveterate liar, capable of spinning the most self-serving yarns and making them sound convincing. Vorster had heard a few, and even when he had known better, he had found himself almost wanting to believe Dietrich Jaeger… almost.

  It was hard to feel anything other than loathing when the man’s lies condemned ordinary decent soldiers.

  A coward was a coward no matter how he chose to dress up his spinelessness. The irony in Stirland’s banner, the skeleton wrapped in the proclamation “Victory or Death”, had never been more apparent to Vorster.

  And so they were alone, a few good men left to hold the Legenfeld Bridge, come hell or high water.

  Of course water was the least of Vorster’s problems.

  The bridge itself was majestic. Not some low span of stone, its span had a high parabolic camber, the elaborately carved arch tall enough to allow the brisk river traffic to pass easily beneath. It was a wonder: the intricacy of the carvings, the sheer magnitude of the construction and the agelessness of it. Vorster looked at the stones. They had been there before him and would be there long after he was gone. He was in no doubt about that. Vorster couldn’t begin to imagine how old the bridge actually was. It was certainly more substantial than any of the houses in the vicinity. Vorster knew the lie of the land better than most of the defenders because he had been born and raised in the village of Furtzhausen, which stood only a few miles down the river from the bridge. He certainly knew it better than their erstwhile commander.

  Vorster Schlagener scratched at his head where the chiggers had taken chunks out of his shaved scalp. It itched worse than a dose of the clap. The tiny red insects had had a field
day, but only on him. No one else sported so much as a rash. As his old ma always used to say, they went for the bad meat first. He had already picked bloody six of the more livid bites along his forearm. The chiggers thrived in the combination of the heat and humidity, congregating in the tall grasses close to the water. It was typical, he thought bitterly, that Jaeger had chosen him to stand sentry on the riverbank. The man was spiteful. Vorster picked away at the bite behind his left ear, burrowing into the irritation with his grubby fingernails.

  The fact that across the river Ackim Brandt and his men made their final preparations for his death while he worried about insect bites was mildly ironic.

  There was nothing personal about it. It was war. Lives were reduced to acceptable losses and collateral damage. They stopped being human. The dehumanisation of the enemy was a sad necessity. To think of them in human terms, to give them names and faces and lives, well that way lay madness. Still, for all the hopelessness of his situation, Vorster promised himself, for his wife and his family, that Ackim Brandt would pay for the bridge. Vorster had no intention of dying cheaply. Women he had never met and had no argument with would wake up widows because of him. There was a simplistic eye-for-an-eye kind of justice to it. His wife would be a widow, his son, barely a summer old, would grow up never knowing his father. It wasn’t fair and it wasn’t a comfortable thought to live with, but then his life was measured out in minutes, so he could bear it for as long as he had to.

  He took the top off a chigger bite, scratching so hard he drew blood.