[Von Carstein 03] - Retribution Read online

  “On my word… begin!” The second cried.

  Skellan counted off six paces, deliberately walking half a step slower than Niculai Gaspard. On the seventh he drew the hammer back to full-cock. On the eighth he vented a primal roar, scattering the birds for a moment. On the ninth he listened for the telltale snick of Gaspard thumbing back the hammer on his own percussion pistol. On the tenth he turned to face down the barrel of the fop’s gun. Gaspard drew aim first, levelling his gun. Skellan could hear his breathing, fast and shallow, and could see the muzzle wavering unsteadily. There was a crisp detonation and pain exploded within Skellan’s chest. The lead ball had taken him clean between the third and fourth ribs. He looked down at the powder burn where it had torn through his shirt. He dug a finger into the hole, rooting around until he picked the hot lead out of his chest with a grubby fingernail. He dropped it on the ground, shaking his head.

  “I’m sure those damnable birds would, if I still possessed a soul,” Skellan said, levelling his own pistol.

  Before he could squeeze off his first shot Gaspard triggered his second. Skellan felt the sting of lead as it tore away part of his left ear.

  “Well now, that was hardly in the spirit of things, was it?” He said as he squeezed off a single shot, blowing away the lower part of Niculai Gaspard’s face and jaw. The man staggered back pitifully, the pistol spilling from his grip as his body slowly began to register the fact that it was dead. Gaspard lurched one step to the side and fell.

  Narcisa applauded mockingly. “You owe me dinner, Herr Skellan,” she said walking towards him.

  The birds swooped down, settling on the corpse. They picked away at it even before the man’s nerves had ceased their spasms. The raven came to rest on his upturned hand. It tilted its head curiously, beady yellow eyes boring into Skellan.

  “Speak then, bird,” Skellan said, knowing this was no ordinary spectator.

  “Mannfred is coming!” The raven cawed, its beak stretching hideously wide. “Mannfred is coming! Prepare for the Count! Mannfred is coming home!”

  “Do birds always talk to you?” Narcisa asked, fascinated by the winged messenger. She reached out to stroke its ruffled feathers, but the bird took flight before she could touch it.

  “More and more of late,” Skellan confessed.

  “And do you always listen?”

  “Without question.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Heart of Darkness

  Nuln, Imperial City on the Reik

  Jerek refused to feed.

  The Wolf had been plagued by birds for months. The black, slick-feathered carrion eaters were drawn to him. They spoke to him with the voice of madness. He had heard that withdrawal from blood could have that effect. By not feeding he was driving himself to the point of insanity. The madness was incipient. It crawled around inside his head before coming to life in the strangest of ways. It was so specific. The ravens and crows would settle on his lap, their yellow eyes looking up at him as they delivered their message: Mannfred is coming. It was always the same message. Mannfred is coming. The birds urged him to return to Drakenhof to prepare for the new count’s coming. He broke their necks and discarded their convulsing bodies along the roadside, without feeding upon them. They were his madness. Over and over cawing the same message: Mannfred is coming. Mannfred is coming.

  The more he denied them the more frequently they came.

  He had fled Grim Moor, taking the form of the great white wolf, running for days before collapsing with exhaustion. He wandered, lost. The cravings plagued him, but he would not feed. He walked barefoot, wrapped in a blanket he had stolen from a clothes line on the edge of a small hamlet in the middle of nowhere. He slept huddled against the boles of trees and in the dark corners of farmers’

  barns. Despite his immense will, the old wolf could not completely deny the need for blood. He subsisted on rats and field mice, water voles and once, a fourteen pointed stag that, in wolf form, he had brought down with his teeth. The meat was good; the blood was better, but it wasn’t pure. His kind needed more to survive; their cravings sang for the blood of humanity. It was so rich and full of vitality and each body held so much of it. To drink was to sate one’s appetite completely.

  He had been lying at the roadside, naked and tired in his blanket, when a line of Strigany caravans had slowed to offer him a ride. He had been hesitant at first, expecting a trap, until the leader had introduced himself as Vedas, Guardian of the Old Ways, and offered his hand. The tattoo on his forearm was curiously similar to the von Carstein wolfs head. The feral-faced Vedas had smiled reassuringly and said, “You are safe now, mulo.” It was an odd word, an old word meaning, literally, dead person. Jerek took his hand and hauled himself up into the wagon. They clothed him and offered sustenance, knowing full well what he was.

  Vedas was an entertainer, a mountebank and a tinker of sorts, his vardo caravan filled with pots and pans in need of repair, old boots and other oddities. He liked to talk, as Jerek came to learn over the coming days. He was an endless font of gossip, though with no way to verify the veracity of his wild stories it was impossible to separate fact from fancy.

  Still, a lot of what he said supported things that Jerek had witnessed in the months since Grim Moor. The Empire was tearing itself apart, but that was the stupidity of mankind. Such was their blind arrogance that they believed themselves superior to every other creature, including their fellow man. The Strigany caravans skirted minor battlefields and killing grounds still fresh with carrion. The story was always the same. One petty noble with pretensions had thrown away the lives of his subjects, sending them up against another equally petty aristocrat with grand delusions. The play of life was ever the same.

  The punishments for the conquered were harsh. Corpses were nailed to stakes as a message to the living: to resist is to die. It had taken years for this to become commonplace once more after the fear of the risen dead. The living had grown bolder, though whether it was through arrogance or stupidity he did not know.

  There was a bitter irony to the slaughter. What the cattle did to their own was worse by far than anything Vlad von Carstein could have conceived for them. So they had liberated themselves from the tyranny of the night only to set themselves up as the darkest, most brutal, of all tyrants. He wondered if they would have appreciated the irony in the hallowed halls of Altdorf.

  As the Strigany caravans travelled they picked up other whispers. One recurred more and more the closer they ventured to the Reik: a black ship sailed her waters, and where she came death surely followed. Hamlets and towns were alive with gossip. The black ship had been sighted and soon after there had been a spate of disappearances. Few dared give voice to their fears as though by simply naming the black ship they would bring its curse down upon their heads.

  They travelled on towards Nuln.

  The Strigany caravan was made up of actors, tumblers, acrobats, jugglers and other physical entertainers. They travelled from place to place performing their plays across the old world.

  They revered Jerek, or mulo, as they called him because of his nature. They were guardians, living protectors of the dead. They brought him gifts: the electrum figurine of a jaguar, a black obsidian brooch that had once belonged to a lady of wealth and means, a jade funeral mask from Cathay, so exquisitely carved it that appeared almost alive, and so much more. The jaguar fascinated him. It was so detailed, utterly accurate in every way as though the beast had somehow been miniaturised by the craftsman. Its perfection was unnerving.

  They also brought him food.

  Their proximity, though taunting because of the strength of their pulses, was a blessing for they kept the birds at bay.

  They made camp outside the walls of Nuln.

  They were not the only ones. The city gates were closed and would remain so until first light. Merchants and travellers alike were forced to wait.

  Before they entered the big city Jerek decided he would break away from the caravan, he was uncomfortabl
e with this nearness to humanity. It was tempting fate, asking to be discovered and slain. He moved carefully, leaving the moon as little of himself to illume as he could. He touched a finger to his tongue, the memory of blood still lingering there, its tang strong enough to taste.

  He turned his gaze back to the city with its high, defensive walls patrolled by weary bowmen. Behind the walls, rooftops rose in a clutter of slate. A city was a city was a city—narrow streets of cobblestone and filth crowded by buildings carved from the same dull grey stone as the city wall, the high domes of the citadel with its weather-beaten gargoyles, and the masts of the few tall ships and cutters down in the harbour, cluttered by dingy dockside taverns, whorehouses and warehouses: Nuln.

  A raven cawed a mournful, haunting cry.

  Jerek studied the harbinger as it settled in the branches above his head. A half-smile touched his lips. An ill-omened bird come to watch over me, he thought, barely sparing the raven a second glance, even as it shrieked, Mannfred is coming! Mannfred is coming!

  It had been a long time since he had first heard the bird’s message, back on the battlefield of Grim Moor, though he had heard it too often since. The animal blood the gypsies fed him had kept the incipient touch of madness away long enough for him to know that the birds were no figment of his broken mind. That was a small mercy.

  A second city of canvas was being hastily erected on the plains to either side of the Kemperbad Road. Amid the tents, the garish swirls and flashes of colour marked the Strigany caravans. Jerek closed his eyes, and abandoned himself to the emptiness curdling inside him.

  The bird loosed another cry and took flight, Jerek’s gaze followed the harbinger until it was a black spot in the eye of the moon.

  “Go tell your master I refuse to bend the knee, little wing. Go warn him that death walks his way… he will not win.”

  Jerek moved with deceptive grace, steps sure on the treacherous shale, a fleeting shadow within the dark, ghosting across the plains. He paused again, listening this time to the silken rush of the river, the crackle of the campfires, the lulls in the droning conversations. He slipped his hand inside the folds of his cloak, feeling the reassuringly familiar weight of the old hammer at his hip. The hammer was the last relic of his life as Jerek Kruger, White Wolf of Middenheim. It marked him for what he was. It was a simple double-headed hammer with a worn leather-wrapped hilt, impossibly woven into the fabric of his soul from the moment he had accepted it and joined the ranks of the wolves of Ulric all those lifetimes ago.

  Jerek took pains to ensure that the iron head was covered before he set off again, breaking into a steady lope that ate the grass in long, easy, strides. Slowly at first but with steadily more insistency it began to rain. The thin veil of rain stung his face. The elements were a mental rather than physical discomfort. He was always cold. Cold was death.

  He skirted the ring of campfires, keeping the shadow’s edge between him and the light. The voices were louder here, and the conversations almost understandable. A second-rate minstrel was butchering a commoner’s ballad on his mandolin. His voice was weak, the intonations and resonance noticeably off-key and lacking even the simplest melody. For all that, there was a simple magic in the minstrel’s tale that captivated his audience, sang to the shadows of their dark souls, their rapt faces dancing in the firelight. Or perhaps it was the fire’s warmth that held them still and not the minstrel’s song at all.

  Jerek moved on, stepping around the back of a tent, careful to avoid tripping over the trailing guide ropes as he edged out of sight. From within he could hear the murmur of voices, more campfire gossip, the grunting of one-night lovers coming to grips. He slipped away from the tent, creeping along the side of a high-wheeled Strigany caravan with gaudy side panels.

  The calls from the crowd sparked another song from the minstrel, Jerek waited, loitering on the edge of the gathering until Vedas came up beside him. The gypsy drew on a briarwood pipe, exhaling deeply. Pungent smoke rafted up in front of his face.

  “What troubles you, mulo?”

  Jerek didn’t answer, not at first.

  “Spirits are high. They appear happy, no? Yet it is a rare thing for our people to be anything other, no? They are always happy as they tread the unending road. Not so. Strigany do not show their true feelings. Where you see singing and laughter there is sadness and despair. Listen closer to the lyrics of the singer, the shifting chords of his instrument, those low mournful notes he intersperses amid the joyous salutations of the melody. It is all a lie, mulo. Scratch beneath the surface.”

  Jerek listened. Vedas was right. There was an air of melancholy to the song that he hadn’t appreciated until the Strigany had pointed it out to him.

  “We are guardians of the old ways. That is no easy burden. We bear the secrets of our people, and the secrets of those long forgotten. We nurture their wisdom. The world was not always so old, mulo. Once it was young and men were rash. They did things without thinking. They traded on their mortality for gratification. They were hedonistic in their pursuit of pleasure. We are the last keepers of their rituals, the last beneficiaries of their wisdom. They live on through us, and when they return we will be there, waiting.”

  Jerek knew who those hedonistic old ones were; his immortality was, after all, the legacy of their blood curse.

  “Inside me lie secrets that would break a weaker man. The same, I am sure could be said of you, mulo, no? Come, Chovihani would see you.”

  Chovihani, the crone, was the caravan’s grandmother. She was a seer, gifted with second-sight. It was traditional for all Strigany caravans to travel with a grandmother, one familiar with the old ways. She was the most pure. Chovihani was a pox-riddled hag. Her face was a rash of warts and wiry black hairs and her eyes without irises were pure white save for the small black pupils in their centres. Vedas led Jerek to the old woman’s campfire.

  “Little mother? May we join you?” Vedas asked politely.

  Jerek had expected a little more reverence for the hag. Vedas, though, treated her as family, no more, no less.

  The hag craned her neck, peering up into the darkness beyond the circle of firelight. “Is that you little Vedas?”

  “It is, mother.”

  “And you’ve brought the dead man to me.” Her face broke into something approximating a smile. She rubbed her wizened old hands together briskly. “Good, good. Yes. Sit, sit awhile. Join me.”

  There was a canopy between the tent and one side of the fire, offering shelter from the downpour.

  Jerek sat cross-legged across the fire, Vedas beside him. The gypsy took a tin cup from beside the fire and filled it from the pan heating over the flames. He passed it to Jerek. The liquid was tart. It tasted vinegary. Vedas poured himself a cup and drank deeply, swallowing the entire contents of the cup in a single mouthful. He smacked his lips appreciatively. “Arafulo: few can make it today. The secret of the infusion is lost to all but a few. We are lucky, Chovihani knows her herbs. It is said to heighten the mystical aura of the drinker. Indeed, our spiritwalkers drink Arafulo prior to entering their trance state.” He turned to the witch. “It is good, little mother.”

  “The dead man doesn’t agree with you, Vedas.”

  Jerek laughed. “She doesn’t miss a thing, does she?”

  The old woman pricked her finger and put three drops of her blood into the liquid. Her blood altered the flavour only subtly, but the difference was enough for Jerek to think it tasted like ambrosia.

  “She doesn’t,” the crone rasped, cackling delightedly, “but she’s not so far into her dotage that you need to talk about her as though she were some feeble-minded cretin.” she tapped her temple with a crooked finger, “Sharp as a tack, my mind.”

  “I am quite sure it is,” Jerek said.

  The crone leaned across, taking his hand in hers. “Oh,” she said. “Such sorrow, in you, such sorrow. Dark, not dead. Dark, not dead. Such sorrow in the dark. Eternity, surrounded by the dark, not dead. Dark as a crow’s wing.�
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  Jerek pulled his hand away sharply, breaking whatever trance the old woman had slipped into.

  Her white eyes turned on him. “Let me tell you a story, dead man, of Hajnalka and her brother Anaztaz for they are in many ways kin to you.” Jerek began to rise, but Vedas urged him to remain seated. Jerek shifted uncomfortably. He had never been fond of soothsayers or seers. It all smacked of a human need to map out the unknown. He had been around them long enough to know that men made their own destinies. No matter how sage, soothsayers were rarely right. Their prophecies were translated and twisted to match the future the listener wanted. Few were ever able to hear the original prophecies and live long enough to see how the foretold future differed from the days they lived. Jerek had lived his life happily ignorant. He saw no reason for his death to be any different.

  “Sweet Anaztaz, nothing more than a boy who failed his sovereign, fell on the field of battle to a bitter blow, his body cleaved in two. His father, his lord, decreed that the boy was not to be buried for he had disgraced the family with his failure. “None shall grace him with sepulchre or lament, but leave him unburied, a corpse for birds and dogs to eat, a ghastly sight of shame,” proclaimed his father. It was a curse beyond fathoming. Hajnalka though, pretty Hajnalka, a loving sister, had pity in her heart. She gathered all of her courage and defied their father the king, standing proud. “I owe a longer allegiance to the dead than to the living: in that world I shall abide for ever,” she whispered, sprinkling grave dirt over her brother’s broken corpse. Livid, her father, the lord, walled her up in his castle for he was a vengeful soul that did not like being shamed in any way. He was mighty. He was king. He was conceited and vain and his vanity incurred the wrath of the gods twofold—one, for trapping the dead amongst the living, refusing the burial of his son, and two for keeping the living, his own daughter, trapped among the dead.