Zavant Page 14

  'Zavant!' Konniger turned at the shout of his name from a nearby side-street.

  It was Klasst, accompanied by a mob of anxious-looking, armour-clad mercenary bodyguards. One half of the crimelord's face was swathed in thick, blood-stained ban­dages, and Konniger saw that the pupils of Klasst's eyes were fixed and dilated. Powdered southlands lotus, thought Konniger, with possibly a little dreamweed mixed in for extra potency. The pain from the wounds to Klasst's face must be considerable, Konniger knew. The crimelord could afford the very best in magical healing, but the process required patience and rest, two things that the crimelord had little time for at present.

  Although the creature that had injured him and killed so many of his men was now dead, killed by the Lahmian Sisterhood's own vampire assassin, Klasst had to re-establish his authority over his shaken organisation. He was supposed to be the undisputed ruler of his own crime empire, after all, so he had to mount a strong show of force against the ser­vants of darkness who had dared try to use him as a prize or pawn in their own private feuds. Wounds inflicted by the undead were notoriously painful and difficult to heal prop­erly, but the crimelord had chosen to risk permanent disfigurement, seeking to fight off the attendant, constant pain with drugs, so great was his desire to see this challenge to his authority rooted out and destroyed.

  Vengeful bloodlust and a mind dulled by pain and potent narcotic, thought Konniger; it was not a good combination in someone who was supposed to be leading the hunt for one of the most dangerous and cunning kind of supernat­ural beings in the entire Old World, when caution and sound judgement were needed at a premium.

  'Fine work, Zavant! I don't know what you did to that bitch-thing, but it came through that window like a living

  fireball!' Klasst's voice was thick and slurred, heavy with the effects of the pain-relieving narcotic substances now flowing through his bloodstream. 'Ranald's eye, half of its flesh was burned away, and yet it was still alive and screaming! It had its servants waiting close by. They cut through the first line of my men, but we took a toll of them in return. I've got men combing every street in this quarter. It won't get away from us now.'

  'Perhaps, Vesper, but the sooner we bring this matter to a conclusion, the better for us all,' answered Konniger, reach­ing into his robes for something. He took out a small, cloth-wrapped bundle, carefully unwrapping it to reveal a needle-like object tied on the end of a length of thin cord. Vido watched as Konniger gingerly took up one end of the cord, the sage-detective careful never to bring his skin into contact with the needle's fine point. Looking closely, Vido saw that the surface of the needle was finely coated in a dried, crystalline substance.

  'Sorcery, Zavant? I thought you always claimed to be above such parlour tricks?' Even now, the crimelord could not resist continuing the old enmity between himself and Konniger.

  'Sometimes needs must, Vesper. Do you wish me to track down the creature so that you and your men can destroy it, or do you wish it to escape and return later to take its vengeance on us all, as it most surely will if we fail to put an end to it tonight?'

  Some of the fire went out of the crimelord's eyes and he stepped away, indicting for Konniger to proceed. They watched as the sage held the cord delicately between two fin­gers. Instead of hanging loosely from the cord's other end, the needle rose, seemingly of its own volition, and hung there suspended perpendicular to the cord before slowly starting to spin round in the air, twitching from side to side as if seeking something. Vido had seen Norscan navigators perform a similar trick with a metal needle device. A 'mag­netic compass' Konniger had called such devices, assuring Vido that there was a perfectly natural, non-magical expla­nation for the phenomenon, but how then did this seeming marvel work, and what was its real purpose, wondered Vido?

  'A sliver of ghoul bone - though bone material taken from any undead creature will do, although the effectiveness may

  vary from case to case - coated with the venom of an Araby tomb scarab,' explained Konniger as he watched the spin­ning, twisting needle. 'Of course, great care must be taken when applying the venom or handling the needle after­wards, since, as far as I can determine, the venom never loses its potency, and the merest contact of it with unprotected skin will result in almost immediate death.'

  If Konniger noticed that Vido and almost everyone else nearby took an instinctive step away from the twisting bone- needle, he gave no indication. Instead, he continued to closely study the needle's mystic contortions. 'In conjunc­tion, the two materials combine to make a most useful means of detecting the presence of the undead. With a little patience and skill, it is possible to... Ah yes, here we are now,' he said, as the needle ceased moving and instead pointed steadily in one fixed direction. Konniger slowly moved the hand from which the needle hung, only to see the needle swing slowly round again to fix on its original bearing.

  'The Volker Weg!' exclaimed Klasst. 'It's probably heading for its lair in the Reikhoch. Well, it'll be in for a surprise before it gets to the Ostlander Bridge. I've got Scholke and a full line of men waiting for it down that way, and this time we're more than ready for its tricks!' With an excited, unpleasant-sounding laugh he ran off, high on lotus pow­der and dreamweed - and the anticipation of imminent victory.

  Konniger and Vido chased after the crimelord and his body­guards. Once picked up, the vampire's trail was not difficult to follow.

  At the top of the Volker Weg, near the junction with the Street of a Thousand Taverns, they found two drunken rev­ellers who must have had the misfortune to be on their home when they ran into the fleeing vampire and her ser­vants. Both revellers had had their throats slashed to the bone. Most likely, they had both been dead before they hit the ground. Possibly too, they had been lucky enough to be too drunk to even understand what was happening to them.

  Further down the street, a tavern girl lay screaming over the butchered remains of her chosen customer for the night,

  an off-duty watchman. Instead of finding him cosily amongst the sheets of her bed, the next day's dawn would find him lying on a slab in the temple-mortuary of the house of Morr. And from the look of the girl, Vido thought as they ran past, seeing the mad, vacant stare of horror on her blood-splattered face, she herself would soon be on her way to the city asylum, a fate he wished on no one, not even his worst enemy.

  A hundred yards further down the street, and they came upon the next of Klasst's men. A mercenary lay dead in the middle of the street, one of the packs of wild dogs that roamed the city streets lapping eagerly at the spreading pool of blood as it drained away between the cracks in the cob­bles. One of the vampire's black-robed servants was nearby, pinned to the front door of an apothecary shop. It was still alive, making a sickening mewling noise as it weakly tried to pluck at the haft of the spear impaled through its chest. One of Klasst's bodyguards - a veteran Greatsword turned merce­nary captain - decapitated it with one swing of his blade as they ran past. The head bounced off down the steeply slop­ing hill of the Volker Weg, sending the dog pack chasing after it in a cacophony of excited barks and yelps.

  They ran on, following the trail of butchery and the sound of screams as the city awoke to the realisation of the terror now abroad amongst it.

  At the bottom of the great street, at the junction where the main thoroughfare of the Volker Weg crossed the Reik at the Ostlander Bridge and intersected with the waterfront bawdy houses of Luitpoldt Strasse, the hunters finally caught up with their quarry.

  The quayside area by the riverfront was a confused tumble of combat and close-range killing. There were more lifeless mercenary bodies lying broken and bleeding on the cobbled ground - each death would have to be compensated for, and the final bill that Klasst would have to pay for the night's work would be high indeed - but mixed amongst the human dead were several more of the vampire noble­woman's black-garbed servants.

  It may have been the vampire's intent to flee across the Ostlander Bridge, possibly hoping to lose its pursuers

  amon
gst the rogues' nest maze of the Reikerbahn, but that option was now lost to it. The bridge swarmed with activity: what looked like an entire company of the City Watch accompanied by armoured horsemen of the Reiksguard, the Emperor's own household troops, were marching swiftly across the broad-spanned bridge to join the battle on the near bank. Already outnumbered, the vampire and her ret­inue would stand no chance against these new odds.

  Hurrying along and doing his best to keep up with the longer-limbed humans - halflings may be swifter and more agile than their larger cousins, but they are poorly-formed for the purposes of an enduring, all-out sprint - Vido caught a few and, frankly to him, terrifying details of the battle that he was now rushing headlong into. He saw three spearmen stabbing the points of their weapons into the squirming body of one of the vampire's gaunt-faced human servants, pressing down hard on the stout wooden hafts of the polearms to pin the thing to the ground while an axeman took swing with his weapon at the creature's neck.

  He saw one of Klasst's men stagger screaming away from the outer fringes of the battle, the doomed man's hands try­ing in vain to staunch the jetting spray of blood from his vampire-torn throat.

  He saw another of the vampire woman's servants - this one itself a vampire, but of a lesser sort than its mistress - flail a path wildly through the crowd of combatants. Someone had thrown a pitcher of lit tar or oil upon it, and it was ablaze from head to foot, screaming horribly and lash­ing out blindly at anything around it. A pack of swordsmen pursued it, hacking their blades into it, herding it towards the water's edge. They drove the creature over the edge of the quay, where it plunged into the chill night waters of the Reik. Incredibly, the water seemed to do it as much, if not even greater, damage than the fire, and the creature howled in agony as its undead flesh dissolved away into the suddenly bubbling, broiling water.

  'Running water,' Vido heard Konniger murmur to himself. 'It is of the bloodline that is vulnerable to running water. Does it share the same bloodline as its mistress, I wonder?'

  And then they were in amongst the battle proper, sur­rounded on all sides by desperate, struggling forms. Another

  one of the lesser vampire creatures ran roaring at them, its fangs and hands stained red with the blood of its night's kills. Its body was peppered with crossbow quarrels, and Vido saw small gouts of bright, unnatural-coloured flame spurting from several of the points where the deadly wooden shafts were buried into its body, and suddenly Vido realised what Klasst had meant when he had spoken of he and his men being ready this time for the vampire's tricks. At least some of the crossbow bolts unleashed at the vampire woman and her thralls had silver-tipped points, and now the bolts' silver heads were reacting against the creature's unnat­ural substance, burning deep into its flesh. But however severe the injuries to the creature, none of them were appar­ently yet fatal, and now, maddened by pain from its silver-poisoned wounds, it bore down enraged on Vido and Konniger.

  Vido hurled a dagger, feeling a surge of relief as he saw its blade take the creature through the throat, that relief quickly turning to despair as the thing kept coming relentlessly on at them. Konniger stepped out in front of it, striking it hard in the chest with his bare fist. The vampire staggered back, star­ing at the gendeman sage in hate-brimming disbelief. At first, Vido thought that his master had stopped the creature in its tracks with some manner of special blow from his mys­terious repertoire of Cathay unarmed combat tricks. It was not until the creature burst howling into flames, consumed from within by mystic fire, that Vido saw the wooden, silver- tipped stake which had been concealed in Konniger's hand and which was now protruding from the vampire's heart.

  Konniger contemptuously kicked the burning thing aside. It tumbled to the ground, bursting apart into greasy, char­coal ashes and releasing from within itself a vaporous, stinking cloud of black mist which dissipated away into the night air. Vido queasily blanched in horror at this sequence of unnatural, horrific events, but Konniger took it all in his stride, brushing the ashen dust from his cloak as he strode through the battle in search of greater prey

  He quickly found it.

  She was over by the quayside, savaging a bloody swathe through any of the human warriors foolish or slow enough to get caught in her way. Her garments and most of her skin

  were gone, burnt away by the furious radiance of the sunbox, and her face and body were a charred ruin. Only in the way she moved - graceful and lightning-quick, merciless and completely assured - did she in any way resemble the being which Konniger had entertained in his study earlier that night.

  The sage moved swiftiy towards her, dodging the swiping claws of one of her vampire followers, fending off the attempted crushing grapple of one of her human slave- things. She was through Klasst's last line of defence now, leaving behind her a half dozen more corpses that just sec­onds earlier had been living men. Konniger ran after her, pausing to scoop up an unfired handbow from the dead hand of yet another one of Klasst's men. Whatever the sup­posedly victorious outcome of this night's events, the crimelord's organisation would be a long time recovering from the losses it had sustained in these last few bloody days.

  She was on the bridge now, probably moving purely on instinct but trapping herself there between the human forces on either side of the river. And running water was probably deadly to her, Konniger knew. She was trapped and isolated, with nowhere left to flee.

  He stopped running, and levelled the handbow. He gener­ally detested the use of weapons and was, at best, an indifferent marksman, but Sigmar's favour must have been with him that night. The shot caught her in the back, high up on her left shoulder, and, grossly weakened and injured as she was, the impact made her stagger and almost fall. She turned with a snarl, grasping the half of the wooden quarrel and plucking it contemptuously from out of her body. It had not been one of the silver-tipped quarrels, and Konniger knew that the wound would not unduly trouble her.

  His shot had, however, achieved its purpose. It had cap­tured her attention.

  'Konniger,' she hissed, seeing him standing there some ten yards behind her. Uninjured, she could probably cover the distance between them effortlessly in a second or two. Konniger wondered how fast she could make it in her present weakened state, and how much warning time he would have to react to what would surely be a fatally-intended assault.

  'My lady', he nodded to her, surprised at the genuine tone of polite respect in his voice. 'We seem to have reached something of an impasse in our dealings. I regret that we were not able to continue our earlier and more pleasant con­versation for any greater length of time.'

  'As do I,' she hissed. Her face was a hideous, blackened mask, most of her hair gone and patches of skull bone show­ing through the places where her scalp had been burned away. Her lips too were gone, fire-flayed away, revealing the sharp, strong fang-teeth that lay hidden behind them. Only her eyes were recognisably the same, and they stared at Konniger in something approaching grudging, wary respect. 'Perhaps we shall be able to continue at some later and mutually agreeable time. Perhaps, though, the outcome then will differ from the one we have reached here.'

  'I regret, my lady, that I do not think that will prove possi­ble,' said Konniger, raising the reloaded handbow.

  From behind her, before he could take aim and fire, came the fast clatter of hooves, one of the mounted knights on the other end of the bridge had broken ranks from amongst the troops there and was even now galloping across the bridge towards the Lady Khemalla. His sword was drawn, and he was shouting out some inaudible but no doubt worthy noble battle-cry. Probably some hot-headed Panther young- blood, Konniger judged, keen to earn his spurs in combat against a creature of darkness. Even in her current injured state, she would probably kill the young knight. Him, and the first one or two of his comrades who charged after him to avenge his heroic death. But she could not kill them all, Konniger knew, and eventually she too would fall.

  The Lady Khemalla had apparendy reached the same con­clusion. She turned away
from the charging knight and faced Konniger, grinning a savage, lipless smile at him. 'We'll meet again, Konniger, and then I think there shall be a reckoning between us.'

  And then she was gone, leaping in the blink of an eye over the wall of the bridge and into the surging, fast-flowing waters of this segment of the river.

  Konniger rushed over to the stone parapet, leaning over to stare into the river below. The waters there heaved and broiled, just as they had done earlier when they claimed the

  substance of her vampire servant, but of the Lady Khemalla herself, there was no sign.

  They would dredge the riverbed, he would see to it, but he already knew that there would be nothing there to be found. The older the vampire, the less remained of it when it was destroyed, and if she was as ancient as the evidence sug­gested, then the swift-moving waters of the Reik would leave little trace of her. All that remained would be dust, and even that would be swept away by the river's current. Thousands of years of undead existence had ended, and all that was left of her would most likely end up mixed in with the silt deposits anywhere all along the hundred league length of the River Reik between here and Marienburg.

  For a brief moment, Konniger considered the possibility that she might have survived the effect of the river waters on her unnatural flesh. After all, the sunbox would have almost certainly destroyed one of her minions, and since she sur­vived that, could she not also have...

  No, it was impossible. She - no, it, he reminded himself - was dead, of that there could be no lingering doubt. He spared the surging river current one last glance and then turned and walked back towards the near shore, ignoring the growing clamour around him as the troops of the Reiksguard and City Watch moved across to quell the last few struggles of the still-continuing battle there.

  Even before the battle was over, Klasst and his surviving army of mercenaries and rogues were already starting to slip away, abandoning the fighting and its bloody aftermath to Altdorf s forces of law and order, and vanishing into the wel­coming shadows of surrounding alleys and backcourts, from where they could disappear unobtrusively to any other point in the city. Vido was with them too, but he had a purpose other than simple flight.