If Yann Groeteschele died here in Drachenfels, there would be nobody left. When Joh himself passed on, there would be nobody left alive who knew the workings of the Three Gold Crowns Scam, the mechanics of the Vault-Piercing Screw, the profit to be had from the Joh Lamprecht Stagecoach Switch Manoeuvre. Without Groeteschele, Joh's life would be a waste.
In the back of his mind, Joh knew these thoughts weren't like him. Groeteschele was another crossbowman, no more nor less. Warden Fanck and sheer chance, not a bond of affection, had shackled them together. And yet, here in the dark of Drachenfels, something was coming out of him. He thought he was being worked on, and tried to resist.
Joh found Groeteschele backed up in a blind corridor, squeezed into a corner, still chanting. His eyes were shut tight, crusted over with his scabbing blood, and he was tracing symbols in the dust. Joh recognized a few gods' names - Shallya, Verena, Ulric - in Groeteschele's litany, and the scrawl on the floor included approximations of several sacred signs.
"Come, lad, there's nothing to fear," Joh lied.
Groeteschele kept up his mad prayer. Joh set down his lantern and went to his comrade, and bent over, hoping to help him to his feet, to guide him back to Melissa's room to await the dawn.
Groeteschele's right hand was still tracing signs, but his left was at the belt he had drawn around his nightshirt, gripping something tightly. As he touched the young man's right upperarm, Joh realized what Groeteschele was holding.
He kept his quarrels strung on his belt.
Joh tried to pull back, but Groeteschele was fast. His eyes flicked open, and his left hand shot upwards. He spat a curse, and lodged the point of the crossbow bolt between Joh's chest and shoulder.
Joh felt the weapon scrape his upper ribs and sink through the joint. Pain flowed up and down his arm, and he dropped his scimitar. Groeteschele was standing up now, working the quarrel deeper, his right hand caught in Joh's hair.
They struggled together. The lantern was knocked over under their feet, and a small spill of burning oil spread in the dirt. Joh saw red shadows dancing on the walls as he wrestled with Groeteschele. He punched the young man in the belly with his left hand, and knocked the wind out of him. Groeteschele broke the clinch and staggered away. He let go of the quarrel with a final yank that shot another bolt of pain into Joh's torso.
Groeteschele was going for Joh's dropped sword. Joh kicked him in the side, and tipped him over. He fell into the burning pool, and his flimsy cotton nightshirt caught in an instant, flaming upto his legs.
Screeching curses, Groeteschele came at Joh, the flames spreading over his entire body.
Joh stepped back, and there was a wall where one hadn't been before. He struck the stone with his wounded shoulder, and screamed out loud, nearly fainting with the agony. He held up his left arm like a shield as the fiery Groeteschele lurched forwards. The bandit's smooth face was on fire now, the features running like wax, and the enclosed space was thick with the stench of burning flesh.
Joh's scimitar was ten yards away, and Groeteschele stood between him and it. He only had one weapon available.
Clenching his teeth against what he was about to do to himself, he got a proper grip on the barbed bolt in his shoulder. He hoped to be able to pull it out as easily as one draws a dagger from a sheath, but the arrowhead tip tore muscle as he extracted the spike. He invoked the name of Khorne and held up the dripping quarrel like an offering.
A great scream was building up inside Groeteschele's chest, and emerged through an enlarged and ravaged mouth as he leaped at Joh, his flame-tipped hands reaching out to throttle.
With his left hand, Joh stabbed, aiming for the cut on Groeteschele's forehead. He struck home and, thumb over the end of the quarrel, forced the steel into his friend's brain.
Groeteschele's eyes died, and Joh pushed the dead man away from him. His left sleeve was alight. He tried to reach for it with his right hand, but as his elbow bent a crippling wave of pain made him sink to his knees. He scraped his burning sleeve against the wall, and the fires went out.
He felt like curling up and going to sleep, letting his pains fade away. But he knew that would be fatal.
At least his legs were uninjured. Unsteadily, using the wall as a brace for his back, he got to his feet.
Now, he realized how little notice he had taken of the path to this place. He had no idea how to get back to Rotwang and Melissa.
The fires died down, and he was in total darkness, alone with his pain.
Trusting to instinct, he pushed himself away from the wall and followed the corridor.
The Old Woman's brain buzzed with the emotional discharge from the clash between the former friends. Their pain and fear was so much the greater for the bond between them broken by their fight. Her mouth was dry, but jolts of pleasure coursed through her human-seeming body.
Over a thousand years ago, when she was truly young, her coach had been stopped by a bandit. Not a gold-seeking thug such as these, but a wild-haired monster of the bloodline of Belada the Melancholy, an unlettered savage who could live for an eternity but who lacked the refinement to make such an existence bearable.
She was that vampire's get, his daughter-in-darkness, and she had birthed many a blood herself. The lady Genevieve, whose finest moment had come in this castle, was her granddaughter-in-darkness, the get of her get. It had been a proud, productive life...
Freder's blood flowed through her veins, mingling with her own ichor. It was time she killed again, took more sustenance.
Two bandits and their little captive. They were alone in Drachenfels. The configuration was amusing.
In the morning they would all be dead. But the Old Woman's death would be like life. The others would be gone, used-up husks thrown away to rot.
Her eyeteeth extended and grew sharper, and she ran her velvety tongue over them.
The little girl smiled innocently at Rotwang. A few minutes ago, he had realized he was nervously walking up and down the carpet and resolved to calm himself. Now he stood stock still, barely breathing, swordhilt in his hand. He didn't have too tight a grip - that made you too inflexible when it came to responding to an attack - and he was visualizing a stylized wolfs head in his mind. It was the symbol he had worn as a pit fighter, and it always helped him relax before a battle to dwell upon its shape. Maybe, the wolf was his personal talisman. He had always favoured Ulric, God of Battle, Wolves and Winter, over the more obvious Khaine, Lord of Murder, as the protector of his profession.
Sometimes, he dreamed that he was a wolf. He had been thickly-pelted as a child, although he was not abnormally hairy now, and he wondered if his unknown parents had lycanthrope blood in them. He had never shapeshifted, but he was not like other men in many ways.
The girl was singing to herself, a Breton lullaby he didn't recognize.
"Mr Rotwang?"
"Yes, my lady?" He hated himself suddenly, for lapsing into the servile form of address. But it was only natural to him. "What is it?"
"Tomorrow, when the sun comes up, will we be here?"
He had no answer.
Melissa scrambled out of bed. She wore a long, gold-embroidered nightdress that could almost pass for a ball gown. Her bare white feet were silent on the thick carpet. She danced around the room to her lullaby, holding her skirts out and curtseying to an imagined courtly admirer.
When Rotwang was her age, he had been killing for seven years. He resented the Lady Melissa for her family, her wealth, her childhood. All these things had been denied him. He hated his possibly wolfish parents for abandoning him among men. He should have been suckled on the steppes, raised with the pack, and taught the trick, the trick of shaking aside human form.
The door was hanging open now. Since Groeteschele and Joh had pushed through it, he hadn't bothered to pull it shut. Anything that could so neatly decapitate Freder wouldn't be bothered by a lock. Rotwang preferred to see what was coming at him.
Outside in the gloom, he could make out a bare stone
wall, interrupted by niches containing long-unlit lamps. Constant Drachenfels was rumoured to favour human oil in his lamps. It would not have been out of character for the Great Enchanter, whose reign stretched back to the time of Sigmar and beyond.
"Mr Rotwang," asked the child, "when are you going to try and kill me?"
Rotwang turned and looked at the open face of the child, feeling her words like the slap of an armoured gauntlet across his cheek. He held up his sword. It was out in the open. He hoped she could see it was no immediate threat to her.
But again, he had no answer for her. Something foul-smelling came out of the darkness behind him, and a claw-gripped hand fastened on his shoulder...
The Old Woman fastened on Rotwang's mind, and burrowed deep. She found the wolf, and she turned it loose.
Rotwang was raising his sword to the Lady Melissa. Joh assumed he had gone mad, and laid a hand on the bandit's shoulder, spinning him around.
Rotwang's eyes were yellow, and his nose was reassembling as a snout. The creature opened its mouth and disclosed pointed, discoloured teeth. It was still Rotwang - his front tooth was still chipped - but a beast was rising inside him.
The little girl backed away, and climbed up onto her canopied bed. She held onto a bedpost and watched.
Joh leaned against the doorjamb, a dreadful numbness seeping from his swollen shoulder through his entire body.
Rotwang lashed out, and he ducked aside. Still, the creature's claws brushed his head, tearing lines in his scalp.
The Rotwang-thing had thrown its sword away. The bandit didn't need the knives sheathed on his belt. He had knives in his fingers.
It was strange that you could ride with someone for five years and never know certain things about them.
Joh's knees felt weak. His arm was useless. He was going to die soon, and he thought the easiest thing to do would be to offer his throat to Rotwang's teeth and nails. But he had been surviving too long to take the easy way out.
His scimitar was gone, and his knives. But he still had his boots. And his silver spurs.
Silver. If Rotwang were a true werewolf, he would be averse to silver.
Rotwang lunged at him, coming on all fours. He reached up with his left hand for the top of the door and got a grip, hauling himself into the air. His left shoulder felt lanced, but he managed to get himself aloft.
Rotwang, his charge started, passed under him. He jabbed down with his heels, and dug in as deep as he could.
The creature howled like a wounded wolf, and reared up. Joh was pushed against the lintel and lost his grip. His head smashed against the stone, and he felt something break inside.
He was falling, and he was face-down on the floor. The howling thing was on his back. He kicked upwards, hoping to slice with his spurs.
The weight was gone, and he tried to roll over.
Melissa was still watching, as she might do a puppetshow at court. She was giggling and clapping. There was something seriously wrong with the way the little girl had been brought up.
He reached for his heel, and twisted one of his spurs off. The spiked star spun as he sliced the air with it.
Rotwang was suffering. His clothes.were torn, and his thickly-furred body was bleeding.
Man and monster got shakily to their feet.
Rotwang breathed noisily, blood and saliva dripping from his twisted snout. His shoulders were huge, and his claws extended.
Joh held up the spur.
Rotwang rushed at him, and he chopped into the monster's face, drawing the spur through his eye into his snout.
Claws sunk into the meat of his belly, and he broke away, leaving his weapon lodged in the werewolf's face.
He pressed the flaps of skin on his stomach, holding his insides in. He could feel almost nothing. That was bad.
Rotwang was leaning against the bed, shaking and twitching as he changed back into human form. Blood streamed from his wounded head. Melissa reached out and patted his shoulder, smoothing the thinning fur. She could have been looking after a family pet.
The rich. They were barely human.
Melissa's expression changed. She looked almost sad as Rotwang's wolfish growls faded into the human sounds of painful sobs. The spur was still stuck into his head. She opened her pretty little mouth, and Joh saw the unnaturally sharp teeth flash as she fastened on Rotwang's neck, tearing through to the vein.
A gusher of blood came out of the bandit, and Melissa suckled greedily.
The Old Woman drank the bandit's wolf-spiced blood, feeling his spirit depart as she stole his life from him.
He had killed others. Many times, he had killed without mercy. She did only what was right.
When it was done, when Rotwang was empty, she wrestled his head off and turned her attention to the wounded man in the corner.
"Hello Mr Joh," she said, "does that hurt?"
Melissa, the old woman who seemed to be a child, knelt by him and watched as he died.
"You were my favourite bandit, you know," she said.
He couldn't feel pain any more, but from the writhing wetness he couldn't contain in his gutwound, he knew it was bad.
"How... old... ?"
Melissa daintily pushed her hair aside. Her eyes were remarkable. Joh should have noticed them before. Eyes of experience in a face of innocence.
"Very old," she said. "Over eleven hundred years. I never grew up."
The cold was settling in now. Joh felt it travelling up his body.
"Your... family...?"
She was wistful, almost melancholy. "Dead and dust, I'm afraid. My human family, at least. I have sons-in-darkness, but none who would have paid you a ransom."
He was shivering now. Seconds lasted for an age. The final grains of sand of his life took an eternity to drip through the glass waist. Was this Death? A slowing curve that forever dragged out the pain, but never really ended. Or was that life for Lady Melissa d'Acques?
He had one last chance. Silver. Vampires like the stuff no more than werewolves. He scrabbled for his other heel, but his fingers seemed swollen, awkward, and wouldn't respond. He cut himself. Melissa took one of Rotwang's dropped knives and deftly cut away the spur, flipping it to the other side of the room without touching it. She smiled at him, the sympathy of a victor. There was nothing more to do but die.
She took a dainty kerchief and dabbed the smears away from her bee-stung lips. At once a child and an ancient, she was beautiful but beyond his understanding.
"Kiss me," he said.
She tipped his head away from his throat, and granted him his wish.
The next morning, the sun rose over the Fortress of Drachenfels, and a small human figure made its way down the mountain towards the road.
Lady Melissa left the bodies were they were. Those she had drained were decapitated. The bandits would not be her get. She was more responsible than some undead fools who let loose a plague of thoughtless offspring.
She hauled her bulky but light trunks down to the road and made a canopied chair of them.
Sunlight hurt her eyes a little, but she was not one of the Truly Dead bloodsuckers who burst into flames after cock's crow.
As the sun climbed, she settled down to wait. The road below Drachenfels was ill-travelled, but someone would come along eventually.
Under her makeshift sunshade, she closed her eyes and slept.
HAMMER OF THE STARS
by Pete Garrett
They came by night, so it was whispered, moving through the forest in the dark, leaving no traces. It was not known, among those who rumoured in dim recesses of the city's kitchens, how they had passed the sentries on the outer gate.
Peredur Mappavrauch heard the news from Saskia Whiteflower, quite early on the first morning while collecting his wrapped lunch of apples, black bread and red smoked cheese from the cook's assistant.
"Isn't it exciting, Peredur? Haven't you heard? Strangers in the Lower Town - a whole caravan, travelling folk, and they say the weirdest, wildest me
n seen here for years and years!"
The cook's assistant added to the news: "Ladies too, they say, beautiful as anyone can imagine but heavily veiled."
"Them too. Though how these gossips know they are beautiful when they are veiled, I cannot guess."
Elen, Peredur's mother, entered as usual to ensure he left for the Academy on time, not forgetting his slate, chalk, lunch or precious books. She must have overheard the conversation, for she stressed: "Do not dally on the way, my dearest, to look at parades of idle foreign mountebanks. There are always strange men in the Lower City, and it's better not to know them. Many a young scholar has been distracted from his hard and honourable career by adventurers, magicians and slaves of forbidden gods."
Peredur, though nearly eighteen and over six feet tall, knew better than to argue with such advice. Whiteflower, an orphan but niece to the Graf, seldom heeded warnings: "Surely our city is guarded against spells by ancient protective charms?"
"It's the temple of Our Lady Verena which casts the mantle of safety over us," Elen said. "Even that only covers the Upper City. The Academy is in the Lower, with its temptations, so the initiates can learn to combat the forces of evil." She turned to Peredur. "Go straight there, and be thankful you live here with Uncle Rhenhardt, in Wurtbad with its Academy. On what's left of your poor father's estate, you'd be lucky to learn your letters."
Round the first corner, Whiteflower popped out of a nook: "Are you coming to see the strangers? I hear the Graf will speak to them within the hour, demanding to know their business. That'll be a spectacle not to be missed."
"Well... I should go straight to the Academy."
She did not, as she often did, cast aspersions on the Academy and the clerics. "That's all right. I've found a new tunnel... a short cut to the postern gate. You can do both."
Peredur nodded, and she led the way down to the wine cellar. No one knew the underworld of Wurtbad like his cousin Saskia Whiteflower. Noble born, but not due to inherit anything, the ladies in waiting turned a blind eye when she ignored girls' lessons and trained with the squires, if they would have her, or spent hours by herself exploring dungeons and tunnels. She had found a passage under the barrack block, but he thought it led only to more cellars - no faster way out.