[Von Carstein 03] - Retribution Read online

  He did not consume the women at once. They were taken down to the cages in the hold, to be brought up when the hunger was at its height. Their screams as they were forced below decks sent a thrill of pleasure coursing through the Vampire Count. There was nothing like fear. It was intoxicating.

  In Altdorf, under the noses of the holy men, Mannfred disembarked to hunt.

  The Shade of Death still hung from the towers around the city wall. He remembered when the citizens of the capital had adopted the mocking banner and the rage it had inspired in his sire. Vlad had not taken resistance well. Neither, it seemed, had the city. Much had changed since Mannfred had last walked her cobbled streets, little of it for the better. There was an air of poverty and desperation about the city. Even the great spires seemed somehow less than they had been before Vlad’s reign.

  A fool tried to extract a pfennig toll from him to cross a narrow footbridge. Mannfred rummaged in his pocket and pulled out something that flashed silver. The fool leaned in closer, to see better, and wound up clutching the slick ropes of his intestines in his hands as he toppled sideways into the Reik. Mannfred crossed the bridge, moving to one of the older parts of the city. Crossing the river he noticed the shift in smell. The dock side of the city reeked of rotten fish and the sewers where they washed out into the river, whereas this side of the bridge had a more distinct odour, or odours—the mix of sweat and vomit from drunken sailors trying to make their way back to their berths was overlapped by the rich leather tang of the tanneries. There was a marked contrast between the buildings as well. The architecture this side of the river was eclectic to say the least. Adjacent buildings mimicked exotic building styles, Tilean columns supported Kislevite domes. They were tall, at least four storeys, the upper levels hanging out over the streets, throwing the alleyways and streets below into deep shadow. They made it easy for Mannfred to move through the capital. He drew his cloak up over his head, fusing with the darkness and becoming, like the black ship, a ghost.

  As with the barque, to catch a glimpse of his black shape was to foretell one’s own demise.

  He tilted his head slightly to the side, catching the faint whiff of humanity on the wind. He listened, pressed up against the wall, blending almost perfectly into the shadows: voices. They came grubbing down the curb, five children ranging from five years up to a more worldly teenage girl. They were emaciated, slack skin draped over sharp bones. He thought they would pass him by until the girl froze mid-step and turned to look directly at him, as though she knew full well what kind of monster he was.

  “Please mister, can you spare us a coin or two? We’re starving.” He had no doubt she was telling the truth. She came towards him, holding out a hand thick with a cake of grime.

  Mannfred didn’t move. He breathed deeply. It was her time; he could smell the blood on her. “Yes,” he breathed. “Yes, yes, yes.”

  Her face lit up. “Megan, you look after your brothers for a few minutes. I’ll catch up with you by the stage door of Zeigmuller’s theatre. We’ll eat well tonight, I promise.”

  She planted a kiss on her younger sister’s forehead and skipped—almost running in her eagerness—across the street to him.

  Mannfred opened his arms and folded her into an embrace.

  She didn’t resist.

  Instead she gave herself to him, bringing her hands up to trace the line of his ribs and breathing into his ear: “Take me somewhere nice mister, two new pennies and you can do whatever you want, but not here, please.”

  His smile widened. “Oh, I don’t need to pay you, my dear.”

  He touched a finger to her ear, craning her neck to the side with the slightest pressure from a nail.

  “Please,” she breathed, looking into his hungry eyes. “You promised.”

  “I don’t think I did.”

  He leaned in, teeth and tongue touching her porcelain flesh. He breathed deeply, letting the breath leak out slowly over her skin. She sighed. It didn’t bother him in the slightest that she was faking pleasure at his nearness. He bit. Not hard enough to pierce the skin, but enough to cause her breath to catch in her throat. His hand pressed hard against the small of her back, drawing her to him. He bit a slow teasing path up to her ear. “Follow me,” he breathed, pulling away.

  He knew she would, and not just for want of the coins.

  He led her through the narrower streets on to Templestrasse, towards a richer district, letting her think he was some local merchant wandered too far from home. He paused outside the Vargr Breughel Memorial Playhouse, smiling at the artist’s rendition of the haunting thespian currently performing the female lead in Genevieve & Vukotich. Before them the rooftops of Altdorf rose in tiers, seven and eight high, towards the richest homes of the city, the walled estates of the gentiles. “Not far now,” he promised. Her hand slipped into his. It was a cruel parody of some lover’s intimacy.

  He led her towards the gates of Salzbrunnen Park, and through into the confusion of the trees and shrubberies run wild. He paused under the dark shadow of a weeping willow, the long trailing leaves casting daggers against the moonlight. He drew her close. He felt her heart beating hard against his chest. It was… seductive.

  “Give yourself to me, dear. It hurts less that way,” he promised.

  She touched his face.

  Her breathing was shallow, fast, urgent.

  “Two pfennigs, mister.”

  He smiled indulgently at her. “Yes, of course.” he took two silver coins and pressed them into her palm. “There, my dear, happy now?”

  She looked down at the coins. She had been expecting brass pennies, not silver coins. Her hand closed quickly around them and secreted them away inside the folds of her frock before he could change his mind and take them back.

  “Come to me.”

  She hiked up her skirts around her thighs and pressed herself up against Mannfred.

  This time he bit her hard, sinking his teeth deep into her sweat-salted skin and sucking greedily at her lifeblood as it pulsed down his throat. She shuddered in his arms but he didn’t let her fall, even as the strength drained out of her limbs. He drank, emptying her. Her blood invigorated him. A low sigh escaped her ruined throat, like the wet collapse of a blacksmith’s bellows. It dwindled into a blood-clogged gargle and then nothing as the last breath left her. She died in his arms, feeding him.

  He lay the girl down tenderly beneath the willow, rummaging within the folds of her frock to find the two silver coins he had given her. He straightened her dress and closed her eyes. It looked for all the world as though a pretty little maid had fallen asleep beneath the tree, until he knelt and placed a silver coin on each eye. Then it looked as though a pretty little maid had died beneath the sad tree.

  He left her, knowing there were four more unsuspecting souls waiting for him outside the stage door of Zeigmuller’s theatre.

  He would feed well as the black ship continued its ghostly passage on to Nuln and beyond.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Schönheit und das Tier

  Nuln, Imperial City on the Reik

  Jon Skellan was at play.

  The city was his for the taking.

  He had shaken off the disguise of a cripple that he had worn in his final days with Konrad, and had come some small way towards recapturing his strength—at least in part. The disguise had served him well, both on the battlefield, and later in retreat, but it felt good to be powerful once more.

  His face still bore the disfigurements of Jerek’s beating. The lacerations around his cheek and eye-socket were still livid. He wore a black leather patch over his ruined right eye, enjoying the look of sinister menace it afforded him as he prowled. He knew he would heal even more, given time, though time was something he felt he had precious little of. It was a curious dichotomy for an immortal, to have all the time in the world and yet to be pressed by such urgency. He could feel it, the oncoming storm, as though the pressures in the air changed to accommodate the coming of Mannfred von Carstein. He h
ad become curiously aware of it since Grim Moor. At first he had put it down to the regeneration his body was undergoing, but it wasn’t that. It was true his kind had phenomenal regenerative powers. The scars around his cheek had already hardened and begun the process of re-knitting. The eye itself would take longer, though he was unsure he would ever regain sight in it; but it wasn’t that. It was something else: a prescience, his hyper acute senses sparking off at some unseen threat, an awareness, a feeling deep down in his craw. He couldn’t explain it.

  He stalked the fog-bound streets of Nuln, slaking his thirst for blood on the ample supply of prostitutes and vagrants in the Alt Stadt district. The place was wretched, hidden away behind a high wall, out of sight and mind from the rest of the wealthy city. Skellan enjoyed the anonymity the place offered. Only the sick, the cast out and the homeless resided in the Alt Stadt, and it was a place where the Watch feared to tread, making it the perfect haunt for him to take refuge in while his wounds healed. The food was plentiful, if emaciated and diseased. He hungered for the vitality of youth, a fresh-faced girl in the throes of puberty or a boy in his teens, bursting with hormones and untapped strength, instead of the varicose veined whores and the slack-jowled tramps.

  The pure white walls of the great Temple of Shallya seemed to mock the grimy desperation of the city. It stood; pure, commanding, a thing of beauty surrounded by decay and hardship. It was a beacon of hope. Skellan lurked in a recessed doorway across the street from the temple doors, watching the anonymous guards in their rags change shifts. Despite what he hoped, the Sisters of the Dove were not alone. A shame, Skellan mused, as he had a hankering for a fresh, healthy, woman; one that would put up a fight, kick and scream a bit, and make a game of it.

  The area around the temple was a maze of shanties. They were hovels. There was no other word for them. He had seen poverty before, but these hastily erected slums went so much beyond poor housing; they were lawless holes where hope was beaten out by desperation and hunger was king. Life was cheap. It was nothing to find a corpse slumped in a gutter, come dawn, beaten to death or having simply given up fighting for life against the adversities of the city.

  It was the perfect place for him.

  He had spent a month in Nuln, never once venturing out of the Alt Stadt.

  For a while, when he had first arrived he had feared discovery. He had clung to the dark spaces, skulked like some rat, picking through the gutter for scraps. That had all changed when he had found the stairwells. They were dotted throughout the Alt Stadt: crooked stairways, narrow twisting flights of cracked and broken stones leading down far below the surface. They clung to the sides of the shanties, existing in the tight crevices between crumbling walls. At first he wasn’t sure exactly what he had found, but curiosity led him deeper.

  Some of the stairs went far below the street level—one hundred, two hundred feet, leading to layer upon layer of tunnels and dark passages linked and woven one on top of the other in a honeycomb of possibilities. The longest of the tunnels meandered indefinitely, curling up towards the surface and the river. It ended in a tight metal staircase that came out in what looked to be a natural cavity in the side of the Reik, forming a wide stone quay far out of sight of the City Watch. The weed-choked opening was, no doubt, favoured by river pirates and smugglers. Skellan used it several times for mischief-making on nocturnal missions. The secret passages became a second home to him.

  They called this Unterbaunch—underbelly—of the city the Zufluchtsort, a sanctuary, and that was exactly what it was for Jon Skellan. He had crawled down those stairs, the blood of Grim Moor still fresh on his hands, a wretched, contorted half-man, and had dragged himself into a corner amid the dregs of society. Down there he was anonymous, left alone like any other leper, to lick his wounds and fester—only Skellan was healing, getting stronger.

  The severity of his wounds was such that it would be a long slow process, and it would hurt.

  He dragged himself beneath the crypts of an abandoned temple, taking refuge in what had once been the grave dirt of the quarter. It offered some small respite, but even here the pain was unbearable. He would cry out, sleeping only fitfully, his dreams tortured by memories he thought long gone—abandoned along with his mortality. He found the ghost of Lizbet’s face returning in the delirium tremens that plagued him. At first his anger ripped through her smile, tearing away to the ephemeral nothing that was the substance of dream, but later, as he succumbed to the tortuous healing process of his kind, Skellan welcomed thoughts of her. They were so much better than the other thoughts he tortured himself with.

  When at last he was strong enough to emerge he succumbed to a feeding frenzy. Six women in as many hours found their way into his arms and then fell away into the gutter.

  The worst of the Alt Stadt was hidden below the ground, the thieves highways or rather lowways, offering access to the richer areas of Nuln: the Meer district, Gerechtstadt and the Justice Palace with its warren of scribes and petty bureaucrats at work, the Sonder district with its nautical trade, and of course, the Unterhaltungsstadt, the entertainment district with its bordellos and a constant supply of ale from the tap houses along the Drog Strasse.

  He turned his back on the temple.

  It was time to venture deeper into the city, somewhere his hungers could be sated, while others sought to sate their own: Drog Strasse.

  * * * * *

  The Unterhaltungsstadt was an exercise in overindulgence. It reeked of oversweet perfumes used to mask the sour stench of humanity. Scratch beneath the surface, Skellan thought, and you’d be able to see the worms.

  Two women of the night stood side-by-side at the mouth of the street, cheeks rouged and temples powdered white. They were squeezed into their bustiers, laces drawn so tightly the ripples of fat spilled over them. The doxies called him over, but then stopped, mid-beckon, sensing something wrong with him. They backed up physically, pressing themselves into the dark shadows of a recessed doorway, praying fervently that their would-be mark would pass them by.

  Skellan savoured their fear.

  It didn’t matter that they had no idea who or what he was—their most primal urges drove them to hide from him. That was power unlike anything he had tasted in life. It was intoxicating.

  Oil lamps flickered as he passed them by, their blue flames guttering. Black horse-drawn carriages rolled down the cobbles of Drog Strasse, their drivers cracking the whip to spur them on. A gaggle of voices laughed, enjoying some private joke as the press of theatregoers came streaming out of the Herrscahft Theatre’s side doors. Skellan stopped fifty feet away, stepping back into the door of a red-velvet bordello. He felt a hand on his shoulder, the gentle touch of fine delicate fingers, and snarled. He didn’t turn to see the effect it had on the woman. The hand withdrew, that was enough.

  Two figures emerged from the theatre.

  The man was obviously a fop, worried only about surrounding himself with pretty things. Every gesture and movement was effeminate. His powdered face made him look like a porcelain figurine, something a child could easily break.

  Now the woman, she was mesmerising.

  She had vitality.

  She radiated raw sensuality.

  She was, Skellan reflected, numinous.

  Even from fifty feet away Skellan felt the pull of her presence, and the awe she inspired in passers-by as they moved in and out of her orbit.

  She was almost certainly a courtesan, the fop’s paid companion for the evening.

  Skellan watched, reminded strangely of Vlad von Carstein’s brooding charisma. Hers was different. Von Carstein’s draw was darker, more nihilistic in nature. The woman was dark, certainly; her hair was a curling cascade of black that spilled halfway down her back. Moonlight froze within the pearls braided into her lush curls, each one no doubt worth a pretender’s ransom, but her darkness was physical, not spiritual. For all of von Carstein’s brooding intensity she offered the kind of frission that caused grown men to act like slobbering idiots ar
ound her, and she was well aware of her power. In that way the courtesan and the vampire were not so different after all.

  Skellan studied her as she moved; it was almost luxurious. Where men of steel prided themselves on economy of movement and effort, this she-devil was extravagant with her gestures. She loved the world around her and lavished it with her attention. There were no half-measures, no incomplete or distracted shrugs. She was a lady of committed passions, passionately committed. He envied her that. He envied her a life outside of the gutters and the shadows.

  She passed him in a hush of linen and silks. The cloths rubbed against one another to conjure a sussurant river of sound. She had one hand in the fop’s. The other held a delicate peacock feather fan that was little more than an artifice. It was useless for cooling her face. The white ruff of her collar gathered around her throat. Her delicate skin was pearlescent in the lamp light, but it was her eyes—strangely knowing in a face so young—that snared him.

  He stepped out in front of them, causing the fop to start. The she-devil didn’t miss a beat. She lowered her eyes coyly and smiled.

  “Sigmar’s hairy backside! You scared half the life out of me,” the fop exclaimed. It was such a ridiculous thing to say that Skellan couldn’t help but chuckle. No doubt the Man-God did have a few hairs back in his day, but it wasn’t an epithet he would have been proud of. It certainly wasn’t an all-conquering appellative. “Are you mocking me, sir?” Then he stopped, seeing Skellan’s wounds in the lambent glow of the oil lamp.

  Skellan touched his scars, his fingers finding the leather eye patch. “Ah, this…” he said. “Got it at Grim Moor,” he dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, “fighting a vampire.”