Bloodforged (11 page)

She almost vaulted up behind him, but then remembered who and what she was meant to be. So instead she waited while he dismounted, held the stirrup for her, assisted her in climbing up onto the horse’s rump, then at last remounted.

‘There,’ he said. ‘All comfortable?’

Ulrika circled her arms around his waist and pulled in tight behind him as he nudged the horse forwards. ‘Very comfortable, thank you.’

She smiled to herself as she felt his heart start hammering in his chest. Yes, she thought. She was getting better at the Lahmian way.

Chesnekov returned to his company and filed in at the rear as they kicked their horses into a canter and thundered down the road towards Praag. As they rode along, Ulrika began to wish she had been able to find some way to feed before mounting up with him. Spending so long in such close proximity to the lancer’s bare neck and the heat of his blood was going to be difficult to bear. Her lips kept inching forwards towards the pulsing vein beneath his skin, and she had to forcibly pull herself back to keep from nuzzling and biting him.

After more than an hour on the road, the cavalry company approached Praag’s towering red walls. Ulrika looked with wonder upon them, amazed that, having taken such damage, the city remained undefeated. The great outer bastion was horribly scarred and smashed, riddled with black pockmarks where the vile missiles of the daemon cannons had struck it, and where the massive rams and towers had crashed into it. In places it was down entirely, with wide gaps where it had been reduced to mounds of rubble. Around these, rickety scaffolding had been erected, and men worked through the night to pile the fallen stones on top of one another again.

‘I hope they are in time,’ Ulrika said in Chesnekov’s ear as they rode closer. ‘Spring is almost upon us. The hordes will return soon.’

Chesnekov looked over his shoulder at her, then turned back and frowned. ‘They’ll be in time. The hordes aren’t coming. Not this year at least.’

Ulrika blinked, baffled by his words. ‘What? Of course they’re coming. They vowed to destroy us.’

‘Then they lied,’ said the lancer. ‘The army has watchers from here to Black Blood Pass. No one has seen them. They haven’t even started massing. If they were coming in the spring, they would be on the move already. They are not.’

Ulrika’s skin prickled with dismay. The world seemed to shift beneath her. ‘But… but I don’t understand. What happened?’

Chesnekov shrugged. ‘No one knows. Some say it was the death of their leader, Arek Daemonclaw – that without his strong hand, the other leaders fought amongst themselves. Some say it was the disappearance of his twin sorcerers – that only their magic had held the alliance together. I heard an ice witch say something had happened with the winds of magic. Some great balance had shifted, and they had receded, and the hordes receded with them; at least, most of them did. Whatever the cause, there will be no invasion – at least until the next time.’

Ulrika still couldn’t quite believe it. ‘But the supply caravans, the troops. Why would they keep marching north if there is to be no war?’

Chesnekov laughed. ‘Oh, Duke Enrik isn’t fool enough to tell Tzarina Katarin the invasion’s off. If he did, she’d cut off all the money that’s coming to Praag. There’s plenty of rebuilding and resupplying to be done, and plenty of marauders still to hunt – as you’ve just seen.’ He shrugged. ‘No, we need what the Tzarina is sending, make no mistake. But if she thought there was no longer any threat, she’d find other uses for the money, so Enrik keeps sending dire warnings south, begging her to help rebuild the “Great Bastion of the North” before it’s too late.’

Ulrika hardly heard the half of what he said. The hordes weren’t returning. Her biggest reason for coming to Praag had vanished. She had planned to lose herself in blood and slaughter, to fight for her people and her land, now it seemed there was nothing for her to do. She had travelled across two countries for naught.

‘You seem disappointed,’ said Chesnekov. ‘Are you not relieved?’

Ulrika shook herself from her misery. ‘I had hoped for vengeance. I wanted to make the hordes pay for the death of my family. Now… now I don’t know what I will do.’

Chesnekov nodded solemnly. ‘You have a warrior’s heart. Well, there are still chances for revenge. Indeed, one of the warlords still lurks in the hills to the north – a mad, perverse thing known as Sirena Amberhair, neither man nor woman – who leads the debauched reivers we fought just now. If you wish to apply to my captain, I will put a good word in for you. You won’t be the first she-Gryphon. The northern families have sent us daughters before.’

Visions of riding with the lancers and cutting down swathes of marauders from horseback flashed through Ulrika’s head, and she suddenly ached for it to be possible, but of course it wasn’t. A vampire could not live among men. The Gryphons bunked together, ate all their meals together, and patrolled in the sun. She would be discovered in an instant. And even if she wasn’t, her hungers would not allow it. She was having trouble keeping her teeth from Chesnekov’s neck as it was. Imagine being surrounded by an entire barracks full of heart-fires. No. If she was going to fight the marauders, she must do it on her own, in the shadows, away from temptation.

Memories came to Ulrika as they rode under the imposing arch of the Gate of Gargoyles and into the city at the tail of the lance company. She recalled standing on the walls with Max and Felix and the Slayers, watching Daemonclaw’s endless horde advance on the city, the vortex of black energy his sorcerers had summoned swirling above them in the sky. She remembered the siege towers spewing forth their cargo of hideous beastmen, and fighting them while slipping in pools of their blood.

The devastation continued inside the walls as well – collapsed tenements, burnt-out homes, shops and workshops of the Novygrad all reduced to blackened rubble. Markers had been raised here and there in the debris, honouring the lost and the dead, and decorated with mementoes from their lives – a broken sword, a horse-shoe, a spray of wilted flowers, a stuffed doll.

With each turn of Ulrika’s head came more memories – the hordes breaking through the outer wall and rampaging through the streets, the duke’s men closing the Old Town gates on the survivors in order to keep the invaders out, the terrible fires. She shivered and upbraided herself for having selfishly wished the hordes would come again just to assuage her discontent. Her few brief moments of glory and violence would mean months and years of slow death by starvation, exposure and disease for those who actually lived here.

And yet, there were signs amongst the ruins of rebirth. Here and there new timbers were laid over old, patching smashed windows and doors. Half-built houses and tenements rose out of the wreckage, their pale, naked frames like saplings growing from the ashes of a forest fire. A tavern with no roof and no doors had ‘Open for Business’ scrawled on its soot-smudged wall in the Kislevarin alphabet, and shadowy figures huddled around an open fire within it, dipping their mugs in an open keg of kvas.

Ulrika’s chest swelled with pride to see such activity. Praag had always rebuilt. Even after the Great War against Chaos, when the very buildings had screamed and wept blood from the nightmarish energies unleashed during the final battles, the city’s indomitable spirit had not faltered. Though the very walls were filled with ghosts, though ruins like the Old Palace and the towering Sorcerers’ Spire remained malignant tumours of madness and mutation, the people had built again, exorcising what spirits they could, and ignoring or living with the rest.

She wondered if Praag would ever be long enough at peace that it could lay all its ghosts and become a normal city again. Somehow she doubted it.

Not far inside the gate, a few square blocks had been cleared of rubble, and a vast military encampment had risen in their stead. The banners of rotas and companies from across all Kislev rose from a multicoloured sea of tents, with a parade ground lined off in the centre for drills and inspections. It was to this camp that the lance company was headed, but as they approached it, Chesnekov smiled over his shoulder at her.

‘Where does your cousin live?’ he asked. ‘I will deliver you to her doorstep.’

Ulrika froze for a moment. She had almost forgotten her earlier lie. She had no address to give him, and she didn’t want him to know where she intended to go. ‘Uh, could I impose you for a moment longer before we go there?’ she asked.

‘But of course, madam,’ he said. ‘What do you require?’

‘I… I am famished, and I wouldn’t like to wake my cousin in the middle of the night and immediately ask her to feed me. If I could beg from you a little bread, or something to drink?’

Ulrika saw the faintest cast of doubt enter Chesnekov’s eye, as if he wondered if she had befriended him just to get a meal from him, but he inclined his head politely and turned his horse after his fellows. ‘The mess is for troopers only, but if you will consent to wait in my tent, I will bring you something.’

Ulrika hid a smirk. In his tent, was it? Bread for bed, then? Fair enough. At least it made it easier for her to get away. ‘I thank you, sir. You are most kind.’

They followed his company through the camp, at this hour silent and still, most of the soldiers asleep in their tents. Only a few lonely sentries watched their passage down the central avenue to a roped-off enclosure with the red and gold standard of the Gryphon Legion rising at the front.

As the troopers entered and trotted through the ranks of tents to a stable area at the back, Chesnekov slowed to a stop before a tent.

‘Wait inside,’ he said as he handed her down. ‘I’ll return shortly.’

‘I will,’ she said. ‘And thank you again–’ But he was already cantering after the others.

She saluted him, smiling wryly, and turned to leave the camp, but then paused, looking down at her leather jerkin and shirt. She couldn’t walk through Praag covered in blood. She stretched her senses towards his tent. There was no one inside it. She ducked through the flap and looked around in the darkness. A cot sat on either side, with battered trunks at their feet and bits of gear and horse tack scattered everywhere.

Ulrika crossed to the cot that smelled like Chesnekov and opened the trunk. A second uniform and a neatly folded pile of civilian clothes lay within it. Ulrika pulled out a voluminous white shirt and held it up. Perfect. She quickly shucked her coat, jacket and blood-soaked shirt. There was a washbasin on a stand between the two cots. She filled it from the jug, washed her leathers, face and hair until the water no longer turned pink, then put on the new shirt.

She cocked an ear as she reassembled the rest of her costume, listening to see if the lancer was coming back. He was not. She sighed. The poor fool would return with bread and sausage and something hot to drink, expecting an amorous trade, and she would be gone. Ah well, at least he could eat the sausage. She turned to the tent flap, then stopped. If she had made the decision that thieves were predators, and therefore permissible prey, she could not allow herself to be a thief, even if it was only something as trivial as a shirt.

She took out one of the silver coins she had collected from the bandits she had met in her travels, and flipped it onto the pillow of Chesnekov’s cot. It would more than pay for another shirt, and would keep her on the path of honour, which was more important.

She bowed to the empty cot. ‘Thank you, Petr Ilanovich Chesnekov,’ she murmured. ‘You have done me a great service. May you win glory for your name, and peace for Kislev.’

And with that, she turned and walked out of the tent.

CHAPTER NINE

OLD FRIENDS

It was well after midnight, but though the ruins of the Novygrad were quiet, and the soldiers in the camp asleep in their cots, much of the rest of Praag seemed wide awake. As she wandered through the Merchant Quarter, people spilled into the street from taverns ablaze with lamplight and loud with manic laughter and singing. Young men argued philosophy on the corners while rich merchants and their wives rolled by in open carriages, bundled in furs and surrounded by well-armed escorts, and mercenaries from all over the Old World swaggered the streets, calling out to harlots, and women who only dressed like harlots.

But side by side with all the frivolity were scenes of abject misery, and painful contrasts assaulted Ulrika everywhere she looked. In high windows, noble men and women, their faces hidden behind elaborate masks of enamel, gold and velvet, stuffed their faces with imported delicacies, while in the alleys below them, starving refugees, displaced by the devastation of the horde’s passage, huddled in makeshift tents, making meals of rats and cockroaches. In the taverns, strutting dandies toasted the duke and his great victory over Chaos, while in the streets, weary watchmen guarded barricades behind which whole neighbourhoods had been evacuated because of the spectral horrors that had risen from the bloody cobbles during the Chaos attacks, and which had not yet been laid to rest. In the squares, wild-eyed priests of Ulric and Ursun prophesied doom at every hand, while boys with rouge on their cheeks and girls wearing their corsets on the outside of their dresses laughed at them and sang rude songs.