“The count would have access…” and then he realised what he
was saying. The count.
Von Carstein.
The vampire count.
He made the sign of Sigmar’s hammer.
There would be no going to the castle for help.
The doors and window frames of the temple had been inlaid
with fine silver wire; bent into the shape of the runes the mage had sworn would
keep the undead at bay. Meyrink had had no choice but to employ the man, despite
his deep-seated distrust of magicians.
Meyrink studied the silver swirls.
There was nothing, as far as he could tell, remotely magical
about the symbols that had cost the temple an Emperor’s ransom. The man had
assured the priests that the combination of the curious shapes and the precious
metal would turn the confines of the temple into a prison for any of the tainted
blood. He had sworn an oath, for all the good it did them now.
Like the windows and doors, the entrance to the crypt itself
was protected by a serious of intricate metal swirls that had been laid in after
Victor Guttman had been led below. Together, the mage had promised, these twists
of metal would form an impenetrable barrier for the dead, keeping those without
a soul from crossing. Again, Meyrink had no choice but to believe the man,
despite the evidence of his own eyes.
Meyrink descended the thirteen steps into the bowels of the
temple.
The crypt was dank, lit by seven guttering candles that threw
sepulchral shadows over the tombs, the air fetid. Guttman had refused the
comforts of a bed and slept curled up on a blanket in a dirty corner, ankles and
wrists chained to the wall like some common thief.
It hurt Meyrink to see him like this: living in the dark,
hidden away from the world he so loved, shackled.
This was no life at all.
“Morning, brother,” he called, lightly, struggling to keep
the grief out of his voice.
“Is it?” answered the old man, looking up. The flickering
candlelight did nothing to hide the anguish in his eyes or the slack skin of his
face. “Time has lost all meaning underground. I see nothing of light and day or
dark and night, only candles that burn out and are replenished as though by
magic when I finally give in to sleep. I had the dream again last night…”
Meyrink nodded. He knew. Two more girls—they were no more
than children in truth—had succumbed to the sleeping sickness and died during
the night. Two more. They were calling it a plague, though for a plague it was a
selective killer, draining the very life out of Drakenhof’s young women while
the men lived on, seemingly immune, desperate as those they loved fell victim.
It was always the same: first they paled, as the sickness took hold then they
slipped into a sleep from which they never woke. The transition was shockingly
quick. In a matter of three nights vibrant healthy young women aged as much as
three decades to look at and succumbed to an eternal sleep. Meyrink knew better:
it wasn’t a plague, it was a curse.
“Did I…? Did I…?”
He nodded again.
“Two young girls, brother. Sisters. They were to have been
fifteen this naming day.”
Guttman let out a strangled sob. He held up his hands,
rattling the chains in anger and frustration. “I saw it… I…” But there was
nothing he could say. “Have you come to kill me?”
“I can’t, brother. Not while there is hope.”
“There is no hope. Can’t you see that? I am a killer now.
There is no peace for me. No rest. And while I live you damn the young women of
our flock. Kill me, brother. If not for my own sake, then do it for theirs.”
Tears streaked down his grubby face.
“Not while you can still grieve for them, brother. Not while
you still have compassion. When you are truly a beast, when the damned sickness
owns you, only then. Before that day do not ask for what I cannot do.”
“He has to die!” Messner raged, slamming his clenched fist on
the heavy oak of the refectory table. The clay goblets he and Meyrink had been
drinking from jumped almost an inch, Meyrink’s teetering precariously before it
toppled, spilling thick bloody red wine into the oak grain between them.
“Who’s the monster here? The old man in the dungeon or the
young one baying for his blood?” Meyrink pushed himself to his feet and leaned
in menacingly. It was rapidly becoming an old argument but that didn’t prevent
it from being a passionate one.
“Forty-two girls dead, man! Forty-two! What about the
sanctity of life? What is the meaning of life, brother, if you are willing to
throw it away so cheaply?”
“We don’t know,” Meyrink rasped, his knuckles white on the
tabletop. “We just don’t know that it is him. We have no evidence that he gets
out. He’s chained up in there. There are wards and sigils and glyphs and all
sorts of paraphernalia aimed at keeping him locked up down there, helpless…
harmless.”
“And yet every morning he feeds you stories of his dreams,
talks of the young ones he has seen suffering at the hands of the monstrous
beasts. He regales you in glorious detail, brother. The creature is taunting you
and you are too stupid to realise it.”
“No. Not too stupid. It is compassion. The old man raised you
as he would his own son, from when the temple took you in fifteen years ago. He
cared for you. He loved you. He did the same for me in my time. We owe him—”
“We owe him nothing anymore. He isn’t Victor Guttman! He’s a
daemon. Can’t you get that into your thick skull, man? He barely touches the
food we take down for him for a reason, you know. It doesn’t sustain him. Blood
does. Blood, Brother.
Blood.”
“Would you do it? Would you turn murderer and kill the man
who might as well have been your own father, everything he did for you? Would
you? Take the knife now, go down into the crypt and do it, cut his heart out. Do
it, damn you! If you have so little doubt, do it…”
“No.”
“Well I am not about to.”
“I know men who could,” Messner said softly, wriggling around
the impasse with a suggestion neither man really wished to consider. Bringing in
outsiders. Part of it was fear—what would happen if people realised the
priesthood of Sigmar had been infected with the tainted blood of vampires?
Another part was self-preservation. The streets had been rife with rumours for
days. Two witch hunters were in Drakenhof, though from what little Messner had
managed to learn they were not church sanctioned Sigmarite witch hunters, and
were barely in the employ of the Elector Count of Middenheim. Their charge had
been issued nearly a decade ago, now their hunt was personal. They had come to
town a week ago, looking for a man by the name of Sebastian Aigner, who, if the
gossips were to be believed, they had been hunting for seven years. He was the
last of a bunch of renegade killers who had slaughtered the men’s families,
burning them alive. Metzger and Ziegler, the witch hunters, had found the others
and extracted their blood debt. They had come to Drakenhof looking to lay their
daemons to rest, and perhaps, Messner thought, they could purge the temple of
its daemon in the process. “They could tell us for sure. This is what they do.”
Meyrink looked sceptical.
“Forty-two young women, forty-two. Think about it.”
“That is all I have been doing, for weeks. Do you think I
don’t lie awake at night, imagining him out there, feasting? Do you think I
don’t sneak down into the crypt at all hours, hoping to catch him gone, so that
I know beyond a shadow of doubt that he is the killer my heart tells me he
isn’t? Always I find him there, chained to the walls, barely conscious, looking
like death itself, and it breaks my heart that he is suffering because of me!”
“Forty-two,” Reinhardt Messner said again, shaking his head
as though the number itself answered every objection Brother Meyrink voiced. And
perhaps it did at that.
“Talk to them if you must, but I want no part of it,” Meyrink
said, finally, turning and stalking out of the room.
Alone, Messner righted the spilled goblet and began mopping
up the mess. It was, it seemed, his destiny to clean up after Meyrink.
Messner greeted the younger of the two with a tired smile and
held out a hand to be shaken.
Metzger ignored it and didn’t return the smile. There was
something distinctly cold about the man, but given his line of work it was
perhaps unsurprising. The older man, Eberl Ziegler, nodded and followed Metzger
into the temple. He, at least, had the decency to bow low before the statue of
Sigmar Heldenhammer and make the sign of the hammer whereas the other just
walked down the aisle, toeing at the seats and tutting at the silver runes
worked into the window frames. His footsteps echoed coldly.
Messner watched the man, fascinated by his confidence as he
examined every nook and cranny of the old temple. Metzger moved with authority.
He lifted a thin glass wedge from the front table, beside the incense burner,
and tilted it so that it caught and refracted the light into a rainbow on the
wall.
“So tell me,” Metzger said, angling the light up the wall.
“How does this fit with your philosophy? I am curious. The taking of a human
life… it seems… alien to my understanding of your faith. Enlighten me.”
Behind Messner, Meyrink coughed.
“Sacrifice for the good of mankind, Herr Metzger. Sacrifice.”
“Murder, you mean,” Metzger said bluntly. “Dressing the act
up in fancy words doesn’t change it. You want me to go down into the basement
and slay a daemon. I can do this. It is what I do. Unlike you I see no nobility
in the act. For me it is a case of survival, plain and simple. The creatures
would destroy me and mine, so I destroy theirs. So tell me again, why would you
have me drive a stake into the heart of an old man?”
“He isn’t an old man anymore. Victor Guttman is long gone.
The thing down there is a shell, capable of ruthless cunning and vile acts of
degradation and slaughter. It is a beast. Forty-two young women of this parish
have suffered at the beast’s hands, witch hunter. Forty-two. I would have you
root out the canker by killing the beast so that I do not find the words
forty-three coming to my lips.”
“Good. Then we understand each other.”
“So we kill to stop more killing?” Brother Meyrink said,
unable to hold his silence. “That makes as much sense as going to war to end a
war.”
“We love to hate,” the witch hunter said matter-of-factly.
“We love to defeat and destroy. We love to conquer. We love to kill. That is why
we love war so much we revere a killer and make him a god. In violence we find
ourselves. Through pain and anger and conflict we find a path that leads us to,
well, to what we don’t know but we are determined to walk the path. It has
forever been so.”
“Sigmar help us all,” Meyrink said softly.
“Indeed, and any other gods who feel benevolent enough to
shine their light on us. In the meantime, I tend to help myself. I find it is
better than waiting for miracles that will never happen.”
“How do you intend to do it?” Meyrink asked.
Messner paled at the question. Details were not something he
wanted.
The witch hunter drew a long bladed knife from his boot.
“Silver-tipped,” he said, drawing blood from the pad of his thumb as he pricked
himself on the knife’s sharpness. “Surest way to do it. Cut his heart out of his
chest, then burn the corpse so there’s nothing left.”
Messner shuddered at the thought. It was barbaric. “Whatever
it takes,” he said, unable to look the witch hunter in the eye.
“Stay here, priest. I wouldn’t want to offend your delicate
sensibilities. Ziegler, come on, we’ve got work to do.”
They descended in darkness, listening to the chittering of
rats and the moans of the old man, faint like the lament of ghosts long since
moved on. His cries were pitiful.
The candles had died but tapers lay beside fresh ones.
Metzger lit two. They were enough. Death was a dark business. Too much light
sanitised it. His feet scuffed at the silver wrought into the floor on the
threshold. It was nothing more than mumbo-jumbo. There was no magic in the
design. Some charlatan had taken the temple for all it was worth. It was amazing
what price people would pay for peace of mind.
The fretful light revealed little of the dark’s secrets.
Carefully Metzger moved through the crypt, Ziegler two steps
behind him, sword drawn in readiness for ambush. Metzger had no such fear. The
only things alive down in the crypt were either too small or too weak to cause
any serious harm. There was no sense of evil to the place. No taint. He raised
the candle, allowing the soft light to shed more layers of pure black in favour
of gentler shadows.
The old priest was huddled in the corner, naked and
emaciated, his bones showing stark against the flaked skin. He barely had the
strength to lift his head but defiance blazed in his eyes when he did so.
Suppurating sores rimmed his mouth. There were dark scars where he had been
bitten. Metzger had no doubt about the origin of the wound. It was the cold kiss
of death: a vampire’s bite. The old man had been fed on, of that there was no
doubt. But that didn’t mean that he had been sired into the life of a
bloodsucking fiend.
Again, there was no residual evil that he could discern, only
a frightened old man.
He trod on a plate of food that lay untouched at Guttman’s
feet, the plate cracked and mouldy cheese smeared beneath his boot. A nearby jug
of water was nearly empty.
“Have you come to kill me?” The old man said. It sounded
almost like a plea to Metzger’s ears. The poor pathetic wretch had obviously
tortured himself to the point of madness with the dreams of blood feasts. It was
natural, having been fed upon to dream of feeding in the most feverish moments
of the night when the kindred vampires were abroad. But dreams were not deeds. A
true vampire would feel no remorse. There would be no tortured soul beginning
for slaughter. There would be only defiance, arrogance, contempt, as the love of
hatred boiled away all other emotions.