The Court of the Midnight King: A Dream of Richard III (60 page)

Oh! hateful shadow!

Oh! pallid companion!

Why mockest thou my grief and woe?

Heine, “Der Doppelganger”

The battlefield was deserted now. The fighting swept onwards, leaving an uneasy lull that lay as thick as fog, shuddering with distant explosions. As he moved across the devastated plain, the vampire paused to look up at the sky.

Shellfire punctured the skin of night. A mile away, scarlet spheres of light rose against blackness; sparks fountained and fell in showers. The vampire was arrested by yellow fire-trails and the soundless fall of smoke. Beauty, even here. A rocket, drifting down on a silk parachute, lit up the landscape. The freezing light filled shell-holes with phantom movement.

Underneath the fire of the sky lay craters, ruined trenches and lines of barbed wire trodden into the mud; and everywhere, the dead and dying.

The vampire walked through no man’s land where men had been buried by explosions, thrown out of their rough graves, half buried again; where the wounded were left to die because their comrades could not reach them. He walked unhurriedly: an impossible apparition to anyone left alive. The thud of shell-bursts that drove men mad did not trouble him. Several bullets had passed through him, but his flesh healed swiftly in their wake. The carnage could not touch him physically, yet his eyes were clouded.

The dying: he sensed them all around him. Through the stink of mud and smoke rolled the smell of blood, heavy and sweetly enticing. His thirst rose, independent of his horror. Thirst and revulsion. The powerful tang of death and blood congealed in the back of his throat.

No human could hear the cries of the injured above the barrage, but the vampire could not shut them out. Screams and sobs, the last dry groans of those who were past calling for help. One voice, plaintive and piercing, cried in German for his mother.

No one would come to help them. No one could.

Deep in a crater, the vampire found a soldier submerged in mud. His uniform was plastered to his body, his face black with dirt, but his eyes flickered white with each burst of false daylight. An English soldier, this one. Viscera gleamed through a great hole in his abdomen. To the vampire’s enhanced sight, the reds and purples of raw flesh were vivid. Blood seeped into an oily pool in the floor of the shell-hole.

The man was in agony almost beyond speech, but he reached out to claw at the vampire’s legs. A grimace broke like a wound across his face.

“Knew you’d come if I hung on. It’s this ruddy ’elment. Can’t get comfortable.”

The vampire knelt beside him, supported his head and removed the tin helmet. The hair beneath was baby blond, the face under the grime so young; too young... yet old enough to die in war.

“Thanks, mate,” said the soldier. “Where’s Harry, did they find Harry?”

“I don’t know,” the vampire replied softly. He bent down, looking at the pulse beating in the boy’s throat; avoiding his eyes. God, so young.

“They coming with a stretcher?” The young man swallowed dryly. “Gawd, it hurts. Will it be long?”

“No,” said the vampire. “Not long.”

The skin of the boy’s neck tasted foul, bitter with ingrained filth. The hot pulse of blood laced the foulness, drawing the vampire on until the skin broke and fluid burst onto his tongue.

Crystal sweetness. A ruby light that out-dazzled the battle flares, the two-edged ecstasy of feeding: a compulsion so strong that it almost sickened. Wrong to take pleasure in this death, impossible not to... The vampire closed his eyes in bliss as he drank, but the bitter taste remained.

Only once the boy cried out, more in shock than pain. Then he sank into unconsciousness. His heart rolled on tenaciously like the endless rumble of guns, each throb softer and heavier than the last, clinging to life... until there was stillness. One moment of utter silence and peace.

As the vampire let the boy go, the reality of battle came down like a booming tarpaulin. He felt warm, on fire, but the young soldier’s skin was icy and his head hung to one side. Free of pain, at least.

The vampire raised his head. He wanted to move on, but something made him pause: an unmistakable tightening of the ether.

The air crystallised in the image of a stained glass angel, stark black and white. Stepping from a hidden dimension, this apparition became flesh and blood: An immense, forbidding man with dark hair and waxen skin. The face, too angular to be handsome, radiated the solid conviction of a born leader. There was a mole on his left cheek, a black singularity against the whiteness.

The newcomer looked down at the vampire, his eyebrows a severe dark line.

“I find you in the strangest places, Karl,” he said. His voice was deep and resonant. A priest’s voice.

The vampire Karl sat back on his heels. The intrusion wearied and alarmed him equally.

“I didn’t ask you to look for me, Kristian. I don’t want you here,” he replied.

“You don’t want me?” There was keen, sweet menace in the intruder’s voice. “You can’t deny me, any more than you can deny the existence of air! Not the air, nor God, nor myself. You shouldn’t be here, beloved. I am your master, and I want you back.”

An explosion shook the air. Kristian looked up, distracted, even shocked. His profile was harsh against the red glow.

Karl waited for the noise to fade. Then he said, “It’s four years since we last had this argument. I hoped you had let me go. Why confront me here, now?”

“I’m trying to save you from yourself.”

Kristian squatted down, eyeing the corpse that lay between them.

“Did the boy die fast, or slowly?” he murmured. “Did he suffer?”

Karl, repulsed, didn’t answer.

Kristian spoke in a harder tone. “There’s no need for you to be here. There are cities where lights glitter and living people throng the streets, the war no more than newsprint. You could feed among them and return to the comfort of Schloss Holdenstein, with the rest of my flock. Why immerse yourself in this horror?”

“Why not?” said Karl.

“Because it’s nothing to do with us, this human mess!” Kristian struck the ground. “We are above it!”

“Are we?” Karl feared Kristian, but would never let the fear win. “Why shy away from evil, when our kind personifies evil? You dismiss it now – but later you’ll want every detail. Vicarious thrills from afar. Perhaps the war horrifies you because it is a greater evil even than you.”

“Do not speak of evil, Karl.” Kristian’s dark eyes gleamed. “The only Devil is mankind. This is the very folly for which we must punish them. What should I do but watch and laugh as they destroy each other? Yet you immerse yourself in it. You’re no better than a boy poking a dead rat with a stick. Do you think you are doing any good here?”

Karl stood up slowly. He was caked with filth, but the dirt was nothing to him. He felt divorced from the squalor. He and Kristian were spectres glimpsed only by the dying.

“No,” he said quietly. “What I do is wrong. But some of them... they’re only children.”

“Do you think I don’t know what you feel?” Kristian moved beside him and rested a heavy hand on his shoulder. “You cannot die, yet you’re still obsessed by death. The more you pursue it, the further it recedes. So why torment yourself, when I’ve given you the answers a thousand times?”

“You think you know everything,” Karl said wearily. “How you can stay so arrogant, after seeing this?”

“There’s nothing arrogant about the truth.” Kristian’s grip tightened. “I could pass along those wretched lines of soldiers like a hurricane, an angel of death worse than any shell-fire. I’ll show them war, I am war!” His lips drew back from long white teeth. “Still, I choose to remain apart because it’s nothing to us, merely insects battling in an ant-hill. We have the whole sky, the Crystal Ring. Why obsess over the petty concerns of men? Come back with me, Karl.” Kristian’s voice became fatherly, persuasive. He ran a finger along Karl’s cheekbone. “Still such a beauty. You shine like a star in this filth. It can’t touch you.”

The other vampire was silent.

“I can make you come back.”

“I know,” said Karl. “But you won’t.”

Kristian’s smile was poison. “I’m waiting for the happy day when you return of your own free will.”

“Do you have infinite patience?” As always, Karl felt trapped by Kristian’s domineering power, but he pushed the feeling away. Rashly, he spoke his mind. “I look at you and see no answers. Only hollowness. God and the Devil... they’re just words, attempts to give shape to the unknowable. Yet they evaporate even as you speak them and the world is still here, unchanged. Cling to your beliefs, if you must. Don’t impose them on me. They give no meaning to this madness.”

“Blasphemy!” roared Kristian. With one hand he held Karl’s arm hard enough to crush the muscles; with the other he thrust a sharp fingernail deep into the flesh of his throat.

Gasping at the savage pain, Karl tried to break his grip. But Kristian was as unyielding as rock. He kept his fingernail in the wound as Karl’s swift-healing, un-human skin closed around it.

“I could tear your heart from your chest!” cried Kristian. “How will it feel, to be bodily pulled apart when you cannot lose consciousness? To be torn and heal, over and over? I’ve done worse to others less wayward than you!”

He ripped his fingernail out of Karl’s throat. The wound reopened in a jagged flower of agony. By instinct Karl stepped sideways into the dimension from which Kristian had first appeared, a world aslant that only vampires could enter: the Crystal Ring. Kristian dived after him.

To mortal eyes they became invisible. To their own sight, the battlefield lost perspective, as if compressed into two dimensions. Instead, the sky unfolded into a new and miraculous realm: a vista of infinite depth, rolling with fiery colours. The lower air currents solidified into bronze and violet hills. Higher still, mountains towered like thunderheads, gleaming black and deep blue. Crimson light from above washed over the slopes. These formations were translucent and changed shape like clouds in their majestic drift across the heavens.

Karl fled towards the lower hills, felt Kristian’s claws snagging him. As world and sky changed, so their bodies transformed to slender ebony creatures cloaked in lacy wings. Angel-demons, fighting in their own realm, a dream-terrain flowing like liquid glass. On cold slopes of cloud they struggled, Kristian lunging with bared fangs, Karl thrusting him away with all his strength.

“You owe me everything!” Kristian’s voice echoed like thunder. “I made you. You are mine! Without me you’d be dust. How can you look on your creator, saviour, master and not adore me?”

Karl broke his grip by dropping out of the Crystal Ring and back to Earth. He emerged twenty feet up in the sky and fell hard onto the ground. Kristian landed beside him.

Back in human shape, the two vampires rose from the battlefield mud and stood apart. Kristian radiated anger like a furnace, but Karl stared past him, feeling empty, only wishing to be left alone.

“Speak, Karl,” Kristian snarled. “To fight so hard, you must be full of rage.”

“Is that what you want from me? A reaction?”

“Yes! Anything!”

“I owe you nothing,” Karl said coldly. “I didn’t ask for this existence.”

“Does a child ask to be born? I made you a feather in God’s dark wings. In His name, I gave you eternal life!”

“How long have you lived? A few hundred years? You cannot conceive what ‘eternal’ could possibly mean. No one can.”

Kristian only blinked, and for a moment Karl thought that he had won.

“I’ll never come back, Kristian, because I feel nothing for you. Why can’t you accept that? All I ask is to be left alone.”

Kristian moved closer, his voice low. “I have the power to destroy those I create. You would not be the first to enter the Weisskalt. Don’t think yourself so special.”

“Oh, I believe you. I no longer care, that’s all.”

Kristian’s savage face relaxed. “You are a liar, beloved. You care.” He came close enough for Karl to feel the soft, scentless breath on his cheek. “You may not fear for yourself, but what of those you love? The sins of the fathers...” He opened his hands, his skin gleaming through the dirt in bone-white lines.

“There is no one left.”

“What of Ilona? Don’t pretend she means nothing!” Kristian exclaimed. “There, I have only to mention her name to see the pain in your eyes.”

Karl kept his anxiety out of his voice with a struggle.

“You love her. You wouldn’t harm her.”

“Would I not?” Kristian retorted. “How else to make you understand that I would make any sacrifice to bring you back?”

Karl turned to him in shock, giving Kristian his moment of triumph.

“Kristian, in God’s name—”

“Ah, now the heretic calls on God? I’ll give you time to think.” Kristian began to scrape Karl’s dried blood from under his fingernails. “But don’t be too long. A pity, if Ilona has to pay for your defiance.”

Before Karl could respond, Kristian stepped away, palms open in malediction. His body elongated to a dark streak as he arced away and vanished back into the Crystal Ring. An after-image of his face – pale granite, etched with the severe brows, the dark pits of his eyes, the single black mole – lingered for a second.