The last volari, p.16
The Last Volari, page 16
‘And you think I can?’ Galeris said.
‘I do.’ And I did. One of the reasons I relied on Galeris was his calm. He wasn’t emotionless like the abbot-general, he could love and he could hate, but Galeris did both with the same unflappable equanimity.
‘All right. I’ll get the infantry aboard the boats and get them home.’ He didn’t walk off, though. He stood looking at me for a long time in the gloom. ‘Captain Takora,’ he said, ‘I just want you to know… Things, all these things, they aren’t your fault. They aren’t none of our faults, except maybe the gods’, and to be honest I don’t think they really have anything under control either. So try not to beat yourself up too bad about them.’
‘That’s…’ Sigmar’s beard, I didn’t know what to say to that. ‘Just get the Thirty-Ninth back safe, right?’
‘Right,’ he said, and finally started to go. But not before saying one last thing. ‘Good luck, captain. With whatever you’re doing.’
I stared after him, a shadow moving towards the bright fires of the camp. ‘With whatever you’re doing.’ Did he know? What could he know?
There’d been another message waiting for me beneath Sugar’s saddle tonight.
Remember your promises.
My promises. What were they worth? The villagers of Skulltop would argue not much. But these promises… So many might burn if I broke them, so I’d written a message back, marked it with my blood, and spiked it to a twig on a branch over Sugar.
It was time to make one more gamble. To try to end this stupid war once and for all. And to see who I could save along the way.
CHAPTER TWELVE
From darkness through the painful light of day, our Nightmares bore us over the Broken Plains, silent, constant, unyielding. There’s no sleep in the second life, and for those blessed with the blood, dreams take us when we’re unwary, pulling us into fantasies of ambition unrealised or fear anticipated. As I rode Thorn across rolling hills, wrapping us all in silence, those waking dreams spun through my head. In some I united the Kastelai houses in my grip and crushed the mortal threat of Takora and Celasian. In others the cursed cold that had cut through me while fighting Magdalena came again, reducing me to ruin like my father. The other Kastelai stared at me with sad contempt as they laid me in the tomb beside him and my mother, sealing me in darkness: helpless, but still aware of everything, a ghost locked in a shrivelled corpse forever.
When Arvan reined in at the bottom of a narrow valley between tall hills, I had to shake myself out of one of those dark dreams, and its despair left a bitter taste. ‘What is it?’ I said, pulling Thorn to a stop and circling to face the black-eyed vampire.
‘One of my spies.’ Arvan held out an arm and a bat flew from one of the fire-twisted trees which grew beside the stream that marked the bottom of the valley. The leather-winged creature landed on his hand, sniffing at Arvan’s palm, then sank its sharp teeth into Arvan’s wrist. The vampire didn’t move, letting the little bat lap up the blood that welled from the tiny punctures in his skin, his dark eyes staring at the feeding animal.
‘The mortals at Gowyn are gathering,’ he said as Rill and Erant rode up, both of them keeping a wary eye on the brush around us. ‘Takora’s pulling in all her patrols, and Celasian’s guard has received reinforcements of a kind. Their mounts, some kind of Azyrite beasts.’ Arvan spent a long moment staring at the bat. ‘They’re readying themselves for something.’
‘An attack?’ I said. It was too soon. By the hells, we had so little time, but we were supposed to have more. ‘I thought you said the ships bringing the rest of the Spears of Heaven weren’t supposed to be here for at least ten days?’
‘They’re not. This is just Takora’s army, and the few new ones that have come.’ Arvan tapped the bat with his finger and the little creature squeaked, took one last drop of blood, and flew away. ‘An attack would be foolish with reinforcements coming so soon. Why would this abbot-general risk himself when most of his strength is so close?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t know anything about this mortal, except that you and Magdalena say he’s as dangerous as a spark adder. So treat him as such, and make sure you know where he is. Always.’
Giving orders like a leader now. Good.
‘I’ve always liked yelling at people,’ I said silently. ‘Doesn’t mean I want it to be my job.’
Vasara might have said more, but I’d caught something drifting in the air. A scent – old death, dried blood, earth and fur. Vasara kept silent as I raised one hand from my reins and circled a finger, a tiny gesture but Rill and Erant caught it instantly. They shifted in their saddles, not drawing their weapons but readying themselves. It took Arvan a moment longer, but he saw the shift in them and looked up, his dark eyes flashing around the valley.
Maybe that was enough, or maybe he thought it was just time, but that was when Salvera appeared out of the tall grass that crowned the steep earthen bank on the other side of the stream. Behind him crouched two massive vargheists.
Colours flickered over Salvera and the beasts behind him. Browns and blacks, the colours of shadows and grass, melted away. Salvera had camouflaged them, made them invisible until he let his magic go. But I’d smelled him, and the vargheists he’d brought with him.
The hunched creatures looked like vampires and bats twisted together, with long-fanged maws and tattered membranes hanging from their arms. Their eyes were bestial, hungry, but there was a strange cunning that flickered through them. Vargheists were vampires who had lost themselves in their beasts, traded their humanity for predatory power.
Most vampires avoided those creatures and the fate, the temptation, that they represented. Salvera seemed to enjoy having them close.
‘Young Nyssa.’ Salvera smiled down at me, a wolf’s smile, all threat and no humour. ‘I thought you were locked in the Grey Palace, with Durrano watching over your slow demise.’
‘I’m not dying, Lord Salvera.’ Out here in the open, flanked by his monstrous companions, Salvera looked more the beast than ever. His yellow eyes gleamed over his muzzle, his pointed ears twitched at every rustle of the grass, and his nose quivered, testing the air. His hands moved restlessly up and down the handle of his scythe as if they didn’t know where to settle, but I knew that for a lie. I’d seen Salvera handle that heavy weapon as precisely as a razor.
‘But you are,’ he said. ‘You all are. Jirrini and Durrano and Magdalena. Dying, every one of you, and all the ones you’ve spawned.’ He paused, and an ugly laugh spilled from between his teeth. ‘Except you never did make spawn, did you? Too afraid to leave the shadow of your sire? Or did Vasara tell you no? She kept you on a short chain when she was still alive.’ He tilted his head, ears slanting forwards. ‘I heard rumours she still might.’
Damn me, who didn’t know about that?
It doesn’t matter, Mother said. See if you can sort some meaning from his madness, and find some handle to use to point his sharp edge away.
‘And what about you?’ I said. ‘You don’t seem to be holding together yourself, Lord Salvera. Your beast has you by the throat, and I think it’s doing most of the talking.’ I breathed deep as I spoke, testing the air. Was the rest of his house close, sneaking up on us? I didn’t taste them on the breeze that rustled through the dry grass.
Salvera shook his head. ‘My beast saved me. It’s why I didn’t fall apart into dust like those others, caught in the curse of the Crimson Keep. I stayed alive because of my beast, not because of will, or honour. Those things don’t make you strong, they make you weak. What has your honour given you? Blood out of fancy cups, gifted to you by mortals who want to earn your favour? No wonder your father rotted away from the inside. No wonder the same is starting to happen to you. The beast is strong in me, fed on blood torn from living throats, and I survive because that’s what beasts do. They hunt, they feed, and they survive. If you want that, if you want your second life to stretch until the Mortal Realms fall to final ruin, you’ll listen to me. Give up your vows. Forget the Crimson Keep, forget Corsovo, forget Nagash, forget everything except the hunger and the hunt, and the curse will fall away. What happened to the one you called Father won’t happen to you.’
‘Oh, is that all?’ I asked. ‘Just be like you? Mad as a rabid dog, preying on farmers and children? Is that all? That curse is worse than whatever happened to my father. I’ll give myself to the final death itself before I become what you’re becoming, Lord Salvera.’
‘Would you?’ he said, smiling that wolf smile again. ‘Because I can give you that, too.’ His scythe shifted in his hands. ‘It’s said that the blood of another vampire can be potent.’
Rill, Arvan and Erant all put hands on their weapons, but I stayed still. I wanted to fight him. I wanted to call challenge and draw my blades bright and black and slide them both across his throat. I wanted to humiliate him and his stupid beast, but I didn’t want to risk the cold curse that had taken me when I fought Magdalena.
What are you going to do, Nyssa? Mother asked. He’s awful, but we may need to use him.
‘I know,’ I told her silently, and then I reached out with my magic, into the vargheists.
Their spirits were strange things, not quite beast, not quite human, but something in between. They slipped through the grasp of my magic, sometimes slick, sometimes painfully sharp, and when I tried to close my grasp on them it hurt. I made myself ignore the pain and gripped them as tight as I could. One of them slipped away, but in the other I found the spirit of its beast and took hold of it.
‘You say the beast will save you?’ I pulled on my connection with the vargheist, and it dropped one of its taloned hands onto Salvera’s shoulder. ‘I say the beast may end you.’
The Kastelai snarled, realising what was happening, and I felt him trying to flex his magic, to bring the vargheist back under his will. I bared my teeth at him and kept my control over the creature. Salvera gave up suddenly and moved, jerking away from the vargheist’s grip. When it went for him again, the other vargheist, the one that had slipped away from me, stepped in front of it. The two monsters faced each other, claws flexing, eyes burning.
Salvera glared down at me, his body as taut as Rill’s bowstring. He was preparing himself to jump down from the bank, preparing to fall on me with his great curved blade. I could read his intentions in his coiled stillness, as easily as I could tell that his beast was taking over by the pinpricks of red that glowed in the centre of each yellow eye. In my chest, my heart thudded and my blood moved, but I didn’t reach for the hilts of my swords.
‘You speak of the power of the beast, Lord Mad Dog.’ I flexed my magic, getting ready to try something I’d never done before. ‘You forget, though, that beasts can be tamed.’ I dropped the hold I had on the vargheist, and turned all my strength on Salvera, biting into his soul.
I couldn’t control vampires, or even a mortal. My mother had those gifts – she could force all but the most wilful mortal to serve her, at least for a little while. But souls, the spirits of intelligent creatures, were harder for me to control than animal spirits. I could never grasp them right, which is why I had such trouble raising skeletons or zombies – finding even the fraction of a soul necessary to animate a corpse often eluded me. My strength was with animal spirits, and unlike Arvan it was with the ones that had already died once, whose spirits were set looser in their bodies.
Salvera should have been beyond me, his soul too hard for me to grasp. But he’d let his beast take much of him and that had scarred his soul, given me something to grip. He had let the animal part of him take control, and I could touch animals. So I grasped him, pressing my magic in tight, trying to crack his soul like a wolf cracked a bone to feed on the marrow, and for just one second I felt him in my grip–
Then he was gone. Salvera leashed his beast, pulling it back and shutting me out. He stared at me across the stream, the red once again absent from his yellow eyes, his nostrils flaring. Then he was gone, his magic wrapping around him and the vargheists, making them almost invisible, just a flicker of colours as they turned and vanished into the night.
It was late afternoon and our shadows were long when we finally came to Splitrock. The hold was a mass of basalt standing alone at the edge of the Broken Plains. Beyond it the land grew flatter, dryer, grasslands fading into a desert of rocks and scrubby thorn bushes, the barren territory of scorpions and nomads.
The sides of Splitrock were marked with great vertical grooves which gave it its name, rough open chimneys that stretched from ground to sky. A steep switchback climbed to the top of the great stone where the hold was built. The road was wide enough for two horsemen to ride abreast, provided that the one on the outside of the path was either very brave or very stupid. The rise ended at a gate at the top, guarded by twin towers. Splitrock might be easier to take by force than Ruinview, but the difference was slight, and the cost of attacking either would be too damn high.
‘Jirrini has pulled her mortals out of their villages,’ I said. Two small farming villages sat below us, built along the stream that curved around the basalt outcrop, the last visible water before the Broken Plains became desert. There was no sign of life from either, no people or animals or thin trails of smoke rising from campfires. ‘She’s brought them into the hold with her.’
‘What is she up to?’ That was the most Arvan had said since Salvera. Something about the encounter had shaken him.
You, Mother said. Almost bending Salvera to your will.
‘You’d think he’d be pleased with that,’ I whispered. I was. Jirrini I’d always thought I could reason with. She was cautious, especially for a Kastelai, but she wasn’t a fool. Salvera – I’d had no idea how I was going to convince that mad dog to join us. Now, though, I had a possibility.
Arvan would be thrilled to see you thrash Salvera. But binding him to you like Rend? Mortals are terrified of being caught like that, and vampires even more so. She laughed in my head. I know. Even your father was wary of me. You were positively petrified of me doing it to you, as I recall, and I’d sworn to you that I wouldn’t.
I remembered. Very well. It was strange to think of someone fearing me that way. I was used to people fearing my blades. Fearing my magic felt strangely unfair, as if I were cheating, but at least I didn’t care about cheating with Salvera. He didn’t deserve anything.
‘I don’t know,’ I finally answered Arvan. Did Jirrini really think she could weather a siege, if all the rest of us were gone? Her mortals would starve, and then the vampires of her house would grow hungry enough to turn on each other.
Jirrini’s not stupid, Nyssa. Cautious, but not stupid. She’s planning something.
‘I’m going to find out,’ I said, and urged Thorn forwards, cantering towards the hold in the last light of day.
We wound our way to the top of Splitrock in a single-file line well away from the sheer edge. We stopped before the gates at the top, massive wooden doors set in a heavy stone arch between the towers. The road curved and rose here, a twisting ascent that would be hell on horses and wagons, but made it almost impossible to bring a ram to bear against the gate. With a good-sized force, Splitrock could hold out for years, but to what purpose? It was meant to be a rallying point to defend against invasions from nomad bands, not a place to ride out a siege.
I pulled Thorn to a stop before the gates, took a deep breath, and caught the scent I was looking for. Vampires, ten or so, the smell of their blood strong against the aroma of heated rock and ancient wood. But their scent was the only sign of them. No one stood atop the towers, no one called down to us. The red banners with their cup symbol that usually hung from each tower were gone. Splitrock might have been deserted, except for those scents on the wind.
‘Splitrock!’ I shouted, and my words echoed off the gates. ‘It is Nyssa Volari, of the Grey Palace, come with urgency for Lady Jirrini! Open your gates!’
The only answer was silence.
‘What are they playing at?’ Erant said. ‘We know you’re there!’ he shouted, but his words just echoed back, unanswered.
In my chest, I felt the first stirrings of heat. The vague ache that came before my heart began to beat. They were here and ignoring us, and I wondered how fast I would have to move to run part way up the gates and make the leap for the top. Very fast up that steep ramp, but I might be able to make it.
If I didn’t go cold part way up.
I shoved that thought away with a silent snarl, but it made me pause and I took another breath, focusing on the blood scent. Jirrini wasn’t there. I’d know her scent. But there was something I thought I recognised.
‘Trevin! Knight of Plenty!’ I called out. ‘Answer the Rose Throne!’
There was a long moment of nothing. Then, finally, a shape appeared at the top of one of the towers. A silhouette against the glowing sky on a failing day. ‘What Rose Throne, Lady Volari?’
‘The one you took an oath to.’ I tipped my head back to stare up at him. ‘You and all your house.’
‘The Rose Throne is broken, and so are our oaths.’ His voice was as bleak as the stone we stood on. ‘The king is dead, and so follows the kingdom. Give up on Corsovo Volari’s dream, and just keep going.’
‘Into the wastelands?’ I said.
‘Better than into the final death.’ Trevin shook his head. ‘Lady Jirrini won’t speak to you. Go, Lady Volari. Find some new dream to replace this dead one. If Nagash grants you life enough to do so.’
He pulled back, disappearing into the tower, and my heart thudded in my chest. I wanted to try it. To see if I could vault my way up there. But…
‘Damn her to the lowest hells,’ I swore. And damn me too, for the doubt that kept me from trying to scale that wall.
