The last volari, p.10
The Last Volari, page 10
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘Captain Takora!’
The child shouting for me had a voice sharp enough to break glass, but I didn’t bother turning. I was watching the waves crash into the rocky breakwater that protected Gowyn’s harbour. Their mindless motion deadened my thoughts, a lulling reminder that the water, the realms and the gods themselves didn’t care about what happened in this lost corner of Aqshy. I’d hated that indifference for most of my life. The knowledge that this long, ugly war was just a footnote in someone else’s reports back in Hammerhal had made me furious, that all this blood and death was nothing to the lords of that great city.
Now though, after so many years of begging, the Broken Plains were finally being paid attention to. Here were Celasian and his Spears of Heaven to end this war once and for all, the answer to my prayers. Prayers. Finally, a god himself had spared me and this place some attention, and I wondered if I would ever be able to pray again.
‘Captain Takora!’ The child ran up and danced in front of me, his skin striped grey with volcanic dust even though distant Temero had settled days ago. ‘I’ve a message!’ The boy finally came to a stop and spoke in what was a pitiful attempt at a serious adult tone. ‘Lieutenant Galeris sends word that you’re to meet with the abbot-general at the Temple of Sigmar!’
‘Did he say why?’ I asked the child, who shook his dirty head.
‘Nah. But he started swearing something fierce about those Church soldiers right after he told me to find you!’
I flipped the boy one of the small yellow pearls the locals used for trade and told him to tell Galeris that I was coming. Then I looked out over the harbour. It was quiet, only a few fishing ships drifting across the water. The rest of the abbot-general’s forces were expected in ten days, if the winds stayed steady. The whole might of the Spears of Heaven, warriors who would march up the Irewater and tear down the Grey Palace brick by brick.
The thought should have pleased me, but after what had happened with the Biting Flames, it only made me shudder.
It had been bad enough a day ago when a single ship had sailed into the harbour, a heavy-beamed barque flying the blue-and-white lightning sigil. That ship’s main cargo had been Erikil, Celasian’s mount. Erikil was a griffon, a fierce beast with hooked beak, huge talons and shimmering azure wings. Seeing her climb out of the hold had sent a storm of emotions through me. I’d seen a battle lord riding a griffon as a child at some great victory parade in Hammerhal Aqsha. I’d wished then with all my young heart to be the lord who rode it, a warrior in gleaming armour mounted on a fierce, beautiful beast. Yesterday… I’d watched the griffon pace down the dock, the boards creaking beneath her, and dip her crested head to Celasian, and my heart had been filled with jealousy and a terrible sense of wrongness. I’d barely noticed the line of Demigryphs that had been led out of the hold after, fierce beasts with their sharp-eyed eagle faces and lean, fast bodies. All I could think of was that lord mounted on his majestic war beast, marching through the cheering crowds… overlaid with my image of Celasian moving through the Biting Flames’ camp, his holy spear dripping blood and his eyes dead.
‘What are you going to do now, abbot-general?’ I said to the waves and the wind. Better to ask them, for they wouldn’t answer. When I got to the temple, I doubt I’d like what I heard when I asked that question.
I sighed and started walking back to the centre of the city. But I stopped after two steps, and sat on a heavy stone near the harbour edge. I pulled off my boot, shook out an imaginary stone, then as I pulled it back on I swept my fingers through a hollow just below one edge of the stone outcrop. There was a scrap of paper hidden there, and I tucked it into my palm and walked away.
I took the long way to the temple, walking through neighbourhoods populated more by vermin than people. Gowyn’s population still hadn’t recovered from Ire Crossing. Maybe it would, after Celasian was done.
And gone.
I stepped through a broken door into an abandoned bakery. A few rats stirred and ran, unhappy with my arrival, but I ignored them, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the dim light. When I could see well enough, I brought out the paper I’d recovered.
Trouble in the Grey Palace. The Kastelai have broken. All is falling, as I have promised. What of your promises?
I crumpled the tiny message. My promises.
With a whispered curse I punched the brick wall, stirring ash and dust from the rafters above. My promises. Damn me, they’d seemed so necessary not so long ago. This plan, this bit of treachery, had seemed the only way to end this damn war. Now… Now it was a complication that could see me in chains.
I snorted. As if Celasian would chain me. He’d kill me without a thought.
I needed time to think, to figure out what to do. Why had I let myself get pulled into this stupid plot? Bargaining with death. How could anything good come from that?
I pulled out a slip of parchment, a vial of ink and a pen. I scratched the words in tiny letters, slow and careful.
Our visitors make things difficult.
More than difficult. Impossible. How could I honour my promise with Celasian breathing down my neck? There was no way I could explain this, and it was driving me insane. The plan was working, the vampires’ ruler was dead and their hold on the Broken Plains was fracturing. Would Celasian thank me for making his war easier? No. He’d kill me for it. He’d killed the Biting Flames for less.
So what could I do? Run? I smiled at the shadows. That wasn’t in me anyway, and even if it were, Erikil would catch me. I put away pen and ink. I needed time. I needed to think. I shredded the message I’d been left and the one I’d started, pricked my finger, and smeared the tiny pieces with blood.
I left them in the dust for the rats to eat and walked away, heading towards the temple, trying to pretend that there was not only some way to save myself, but to save the Broken Plains, too.
Sigmar’s temple was the grandest building in Gowyn, but that wasn’t saying much. Its walls were hewn of dark basalt, and it was a squat, rude thing compared to the soaring spires of the great temples of Hammerhal Aqsha. But it was grand for the Broken Plains, and the inside of the wooden ceiling had been painted to look like the night sky with storm clouds ringed around it. Sigmar stood in the middle, lightning curling around his fist. The painting was crude, and Sigmar looked more like an angry farmer than a god, but there was an enthusiasm to it which I admired. I couldn’t guess what Celasian was thinking, though, staring up at that painted face with his dead eyes, and to be honest I didn’t want to.
‘Abbot-general. You sent for me?’
‘And you finally answered.’ His voice was flat but cutting. ‘What matters are more pressing than my will, Captain Takora?’
‘None,’ I said. I didn’t try to meet his eyes. I couldn’t face their pale, empty blue even if I hadn’t been lying. I just stood at attention and stared at his chin and waited, silent and obedient. Waited for a long time, while he considered me. Waiting to see if I would break under his regard, and spill ugly secrets like a shattered chamber pot? That’s what it felt like, but that’s what his dead gaze always felt like.
‘None,’ he echoed, his voice cold and distant as the uncaring clouds. Then he did something that surprised me. He reached out a gauntleted hand and the white-armoured guard standing beside him handed over a sheaf of notes. I recognised the cramped, narrow hand. It was a sheaf of my reports. ‘You say that the leaders of our enemies, these Kastelai, each have their own holdings.’
‘Yes,’ I said. I hadn’t thought he’d read any of those reports, no matter how much I pointed out that they existed. I was firmly convinced that the decades my predecessors and I had spent creating them were time wasted, as well used as trying to teach a lixx to read. ‘When the Kastelai were taking over the Broken Plains, they seized the ruins of the hill forts that had been built by the old kings of Temero. They used them for the same purpose, to protect against raids from the nomads.’ Or they used to. Now they used them to protect against raids from us.
Celasian picked out one of the sheets and held it up. It was the crude map that I’d sketched out, showing the position of the Kastelai holdings between Gowyn and Maar. ‘These two are closest. Which would you target first?’
I felt a subtle pressure ease in my chest. Celasian was preparing for his coming battles, as he should. He wasn’t focused on me. ‘Skulltop,’ I said. ‘Durrano’s hold.’
‘Not the one that belongs to Salvera?’ There was an edge of accusation in the question, but that edge seemed to be in every one of the abbot-general’s questions. ‘Bite Harbour? Your notes say that it is in worse condition.’
‘It is,’ I answered. ‘But Salvera keeps better watch, and his force is more mobile. He’d see us coming, and if he thought he couldn’t win, he’d run.’
‘Is he a coward, then?’
‘No.’ Salvera liked to raid in Gowyn’s territory, and I’d seen what he left behind. Whatever was wrong with that bestial vampire, it wasn’t cowardice, but it was profoundly evil. ‘He’s practical and vicious. He’d leave us nothing but dust and traps, and then his forces would attack us where we were weakest. He’d hit our flanks and bleed us slowly.’ Painfully. The Kastelai were all good at that, especially their damn little Princess Bloodeyes. Salvera might not be as effective as her, but the way he did it was uglier. ‘The dead don’t need supplies, or rest. They don’t stop. Fighting them is… difficult.’ I left thirty years of pain and frustration in that word.
‘For you.’
When Celasian said that, with that thread of cool contempt in his voice, I couldn’t stop myself from finally looking at him. Decades of bravery, decades of pain, of loss and heroism and sacrifice. My people and I had bled for years, fighting this forgotten fight, and we’d forced a stalemate with the monsters that lived in Temero. I wouldn’t be denigrated so easily, but Celasian just stared back at me, as uncaring about the rage on my face as he’d been about the pain on Neria’s before he killed her.
‘We’re not like you, Captain Takora. The dead will not stop us.’ He handed back the sheaf of notes to his guard. ‘But I’ll listen to your advice. I’ve no wish to spend the start of my campaign chasing a band of cowards across the plain. We will strike Skulltop first. Begin your preparations, we leave at dawn the morning after tomorrow.’
‘The morning after tomorrow?’ I asked.
‘I would rather tomorrow, but your lieutenant was insistent that you wouldn’t be able to prepare all your forces that quickly.’ Celasian spoke as if he couldn’t fathom how the Sun Seekers could be so incompetent. As if putting together five hundred soldiers and the supplies they’d need for battle were something that could be done in moments. Doing it in a day would be insanity, and I was going to skin Galeris, even though I knew it wasn’t his fault.
‘Why?’ I said, making my voice stay level. ‘Your army arrives soon. Why start now?’
‘Because our foes surely know that too,’ Celasian answered. ‘It is an unfortunate truth that before every battle, traitors ply their trade. If we wait, we give the Soulblight vampires time to prepare. Best we hit them early, to put them on the defensive. Best we show them that the Spears of Heaven can be… difficult.’
So true, I thought to myself, so true. He turned his back on me, clearly done, and I walked away, leaving the Temple of Sigmar behind.
The ruined bakery in the deserted section of Gowyn was even more silent in the dark of the night.
I walked through the shadows, moving carefully. I couldn’t be seen here, now. It would be difficult enough to justify coming here during the day, but this late? At least that made it easy to make sure no one was following me.
Before every battle, traitors ply their trade.
Celasian’s words had kept echoing in my head as I worked with Galeris to sort out our forces, organising boots and blades, fodder and bandages, all the thousand details necessary for moving even as small a force as mine. It wasn’t a threat, wasn’t some clever way to make me squirm. The short time I’d spent with him had given me a solid understanding of Celasian’s character. If he suspected something of me, he’d have wasted no time forcing it out. But the realisation that his fanaticism didn’t make him stupid, that he was as aware as I that the dead had eyes on us here in Gowyn, made me want to scream.
I wasn’t a traitor. Everything I’d done had been to help my soldiers and the people of the Broken Plains. Damn me, I cared about them all, even if I hated them all sometimes, but I knew just how much mercy that would buy me from the abbot-general. Just as much as it had bought for Neria, and for Rhysha and the Biting Flames.
In the dark, I made my way to one of the ovens in the back of the ruin. I stopped in front of it, and pulled out a thin slip of paper, tightly folded. Much bigger than the messages I usually sent, but it had to be.
You’ve kept your part of the bargain. I’ll keep mine. But the situation grows dire. The Spears move against you…
That was how it started. Damning words.
Damn me.
I reached up into the chimney, found a rough gap between two bricks, and pressed the message into it. Then I slipped back into the night, like a thief, like a spy, like a traitor. But I was just a soldier, doing everything I could to keep the world from falling apart into blood and ruin while hiding from the eyes of the dead and the blessed.
CHAPTER NINE
Vampires didn’t sleep. But sometimes death came for us in small ways, and we were gone from the world for moments, days, years, millennia. When I roused from that fraction of death, I was hungry, angry, shamed and alone.
Alone.
My awareness came back, and with it all my senses, sharp and strong except for sight, and I lacked that only because my eyes were closed. First came the scents of my private room in the Grey Palace, the smell of dust and old blood, the oil I used on my swords, the familiar scent of myself. There was also the harsh odour of ash that was ever-present at the foot of Temero, mixed with the hot-sulphur stench of the boiling Irewater. The only scent out of place was something that smelled like old death and fur, but it had been here for a while, days at least, and I ignored it as I catalogued the rest of my senses.
The soft cushions of my favourite couch were under me, and the slick, silky touch of my robe was wrapped around me. Outside this room, but in my apartment, voices were talking, low and muffled but close. Erant and Rill, and I could smell their scents on me. If I concentrated, I could pick out the words they were saying.
‘Don’t you have enough arrows by now?’
‘Don’t you have enough wooden animals?’
I stopped listening and opened my eyes. The room was dark, but I could see. A stand stood against one wall, holding my black ceremonial armour. The thin clothes I wore beneath my armour were laid out on a table beside my swords, a simple steel circlet for my hair, and my boots. Everything had been cleaned, though I could still smell a thin trace of Magdalena’s blood on the swords.
Lying on the floor between me and the door was a heap of fur and bone and teeth, a monstrous pile of death that was the source of the familiar yet unfamiliar smell. The giant dire wolf that I’d taken from Salvera. The red points in the hollow black circles of its skull flared brighter as I turned my head to look at it, and its huge tail thumped against the floor.
Not totally alone then.
Never alone.
Vasara’s voice was the same as always – quiet, calm, detached. Mine was not.
‘Where were you?’ I snapped as I jerked myself to my feet. The sudden motion made the hunger in me spike. It felt like I hadn’t eaten in weeks, and I wondered how long I’d been out. But the fresh smell of Magdalena’s blood argued only a little while. What was going on?
Where I always am. Here, haunting you.
‘You were not!’ I snapped. Across the room, the door opened and I could see Rill staring at me, Erant standing behind her. The dire wolf snarled at them, and Rill shot it an impatient look.
‘Nyssa. Are you–’ Rill started, and I waved a hand at her.
‘A moment,’ I said, and she nodded. She shut the door, leaving me alone with the wolf and the ghost in my head.
‘You left me!’ I said. ‘Right in the middle of that council. Right before Magdalena called challenge on me!’
She called challenge?
‘She did,’ I said, and raised my hand to my throat. The place where her sword had pressed to my skin was smooth, unmarked, but I could still feel her steel. ‘I lost.’ The words came out of me soft, but the shame that followed burned.
To Magdalena? The usual smooth certainty was gone from Vasara’s voice. She sounded confused. Confused! How?
‘Amethyst hells, I don’t know.’ The memory of the fight was so clear. How my blood had been so liquid, pounding through me with every beat of my heart, and then that cold had come and made me slow, helpless… I raised my hands, looked at them, but all I saw was smooth skin. I spun and went to the mirror that stood beside the stand holding my armour. My face was the same as always, the skin unmarked, though the deep brown of it was tinged grey with hunger. When I ran my hands through my hair the thick strands fought me as much as they ever did, and my eyes… I moved closer, staring at my eyes. The red striations in my irises were thin and few, another mark of hunger, but in the left eye there were two stripes that weren’t red. They were grey, grey as the ash that sifted down from Temero’s peak, and a shudder went through me.
The curse.
‘Quiet,’ I snarled. ‘You don’t know that. You don’t know anything. You weren’t there.’
