Bloodforged (29 page)

‘From the beginning?’ said Evgena in a voice like ice. ‘Precisely how long have you known this von Kohln?’

Ulrika’s skin prickled with dread. Her tongue had betrayed her. ‘I…’

‘How long?’ snapped Evgena.

‘Since… since the night you found me at the kvas distillery,’ Ulrika said, hesitantly. ‘He helped me fight the cultists.’

Evgena’s eyes bored holes into Ulrika. ‘So, you admit you knew him before you came to us. Indeed the two of you discussed allying with us, and yet, when you swore your oath to me, you hid this from me. Why?’

‘I… I…’

‘Enough!’ cried Evgena. ‘I will hear no more lies. You are no dupe! You are a Sylvanian spy! A foresworn traitor to your own bloodline! You and your von Carstein master have come to kill me and my daughters!’ She sneered. ‘Well, von Kohln will have to do his own dirty work from now on.’ She flicked her fan towards Raiza and her men-at-arms. ‘Kill her.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

THE VIOL OF FIEROMONTE

Raiza and the men drew their swords and moved in as Ulrika stepped back and put her hand on her hilt.

‘Please, mistress,’ said Ulrika. ‘I swear I have not conspired against you. Can you not see it in me? Did I not push Raiza aside when the Blood Shard was thrown?’ She turned to Raiza. ‘Sister, tell her!’

The swordswoman looked uncertainly at Evgena. ‘She did, mistress,’ she said. ‘It would have been my heart.’

‘Can you say she wasn’t trying to push you
into
its path?’ said Evgena, then waved her fan dismissively. ‘It matters not. Spy or dupe, she made oath to us under false pretences. She must die.’

‘Yes, mistress,’ said Raiza and started towards Ulrika with the others.

Ulrika drew her rapier and backed away as they surrounded her and Evgena began some sort of incantation. If she stood and fought she would die. Either Evgena’s sorcery or Raiza’s blade would kill her while she was engaged with the rest. With a shout, she spun and leapt at the two men between her and the door, slashing at them as Raiza and the others bounded forwards.

Ulrika cut down both men and sent one crashing into Raiza’s path. The swordswoman jumped him, raising her sabre, but Ulrika threw open the door and caught her edgewise on it, then slammed it shut behind her as Raiza staggered back. Heavy thuds shook the panelling. Ulrika laughed wildly, surprised she had made it out of the room, then turned and ran down the corridor towards the entry hall. Could it be this easy? Just a few more paces and she was free!

Something shrieked in her ear and clawed her face, wings flapping and beating her. She ducked away instinctively, then caught it and dashed it against the wall. It was a hawk, but she had felt no pulse beneath her fingers.

Another bird attacked her, and a third, tearing her flesh with their claws and beaks. She looked around wildly as she slashed at them. More were coming, diving down from their perches on the walls. Ulrika stared. The hunting trophies – they weren’t stuffed, they were undead!

Raiza and the men burst from Evgena’s drawing room and raced towards her. Ulrika ducked through the storm of birds, throwing her cloak over her head, and bolted into the entry hall, then skidded to a terrified stop.

The two giant bears on either side of the door were lumbering down from their pedestals and loping towards her across the floor. Glass-eyed wolves were padding from the side rooms, trailing cobwebs. The wild boar knocked the Cathay vase to the floor and charged her, its sharp hooves skittering on the marble tiles. The whole house had come alive.

Ulrika knocked more birds of prey from the air, then darted for the stairs and vaulted the banister, inches ahead of the boar. Severin the majordomo thundered down from above, roaring and swinging an immense curved sword of eastern design. She ducked it, then grabbed him by the belt and hurled him down the stairs behind her, flattening a pair of wolves.

The great bears mauled him as they climbed over him towards her. She ran up to the first-floor gallery, flailing at the birds that screeched around her head, and sprinted to the nearest door. Locked. She tried another. Also locked. A wolf leapt at her throat as she tried a third. She hacked its head off in a spray of dust and twisted the latch. Again locked. The bears shouldered into the narrow corridor side by side, and advanced on her, growling.

Ulrika backed to a fourth door, her rapier out in front of her, and felt behind her for the latch. Before she found it, Raiza leapt over the bears and landed before them, on guard.

Ulrika’s fingers touched the handle and twisted. It turned. She let out a sigh of relief. ‘I’m sorry, sister,’ she said. ‘I’m not ready for another lesson.’

She backed through the door as Raiza darted forwards, and slammed it in her face, then leaned hard against it, fumbling with the lock and feeling the swordswoman’s implacable strength pressing at the other side. Finally the bolt shot home and she backed away, then turned, afraid she might have locked herself in a room with more undead animals.

There were none. She was in a conservatory of some kind, with leaded glass walls on two sides and flowering trees that reached up to the arched glass ceiling. A sunroom was a strange room to find in the house of a vampire, but from the look and smell of the unsavoury plants that grew from the pots and urns that cluttered the room, Ulrika guessed Evgena must use them in her necromancy.

A heavy clawing shook the door. The bears. They would tear through it in short order. She stepped to the glass wall and looked for a door. There was none. No matter. She picked up a potted succulent in her off hand, but just as she made to throw it at the glass wall, it smashed in from outside.

Ulrika stepped back as shards spun past her and Raiza crashed through the hole, her handless arm shielding her face. Ulrika threw the plant and charged in behind it, but Raiza blocked both pot and sword and returned to faultless guard.

Ulrika clenched her teeth. She would have to fight her after all. ‘Very well, teacher,’ she said. ‘If you insist.’

But as she edged forwards, Raiza lowered her sabre.

‘Cut me,’ she said.

Ulrika frowned. ‘What?’

‘Cut me and go,’ Raiza whispered, and looked over Ulrika’s shoulder to the door, which was beginning to splinter under the bears’ attacks. ‘We haven’t much time.’ She turned her right shoulder to Ulrika. ‘I will say you bested me. Now hurry. Make it deep.’

Ulrika hesitated. ‘Are you certain?’

‘Yes! Hurry!’

Ulrika nodded, then raised her rapier and hacked Raiza in the shoulder, cutting through cloth and flesh and hitting bone. Raiza staggered aside and fell against a table full of potted plants, grimacing and hunching in pain.

‘Good,’ she said through her teeth. ‘Now hurry.’

Ulrika stepped past her to the hole in the glass wall, then turned. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘I told you I would not forget,’ said Raiza, clutching her wounded arm. ‘But my debt is cleared now. I will not disobey my mistress again.’

Ulrika swallowed, caught off guard by sudden emotion, then saluted Raiza with her sword, ducked out through the hole and leapt to the garden below.

As she raced through the grounds towards the street she heard the smashing of a door and Evgena’s angry cry.

‘Where has she gone? How did she get past you?’

She ran on.

Ulrika walked into the yard of the kvas distillery and looked around. Stefan was not to be seen.

‘Stefan!’ she called, turning in a circle. ‘Come out. They are not coming.’

There was no response. She frowned. Her hand dropped to her hilt. Had he left? Had he given up? Had something happened?

‘So,’ came Stefan’s voice from behind her. ‘They would rather lock themselves away than confront the dangers that face them?’

She turned.

He stood on the broken wall of the distillery, a sardonic grimace twisting his face. ‘I expected as much.’

‘It isn’t that,’ she said, as he jumped down and crossed to her. ‘I… I blundered.’ She hung her head. ‘I let slip that I had allied with you before I pledged myself to them, and Evgena cast me out for treachery. She ordered me killed.’

Stefan’s jaw clenched, and a flash of anger flared in his eyes, but he let out a breath and it passed. He lifted her chin and looked at her scratched face. ‘You fought your way out, I see. Did you kill any of them?’

Ulrika turned from him, pulling her chin from his fingers. ‘Raiza let me go. She said she owed me for saving her from Kiraly. She made me cut her so it would look like we’d fought.’

‘Most noble of her,’ said Stefan gravely. ‘But I cannot say the same for Evgena. She is a fool to do this. She makes war on her allies when enemies abound.’ He sighed. ‘And it leaves us to fight Kiraly and the cultists alone. We are back where we began.’

Ulrika nodded, but did not speak, nor did she look at him. His mention of Kiraly had returned Evgena’s words to her. She had been turning them over in her head since she left the Lahmian mansion, not wanting to believe them, but not able to dismiss them either.

‘Is something wrong?’ Stefan asked.

Ulrika raised her eyes and looked at him. ‘Evgena did not believe Kiraly lived. She said she thought
you
were the cultist who threw the Blood Shard – that you had come here to kill her.’

Stefan stared, then sighed and shook his head. ‘I admit I have been tempted. She is a bad leader – a cloistered fool too long set in her ways. But no, I am not Kiraly. I am not here to kill her, though…’ He chuckled darkly. ‘Though, after this I would willingly use her as bait to draw him out.’

Ulrika frowned. What he said sounded plausible, but it also sounded like the sort of thing a cunning villain would say to draw suspicion from himself, and Stefan was undoubtedly cunning. She just couldn’t tell if he was a villain.

‘If you ask for proof that I don’t want to kill her,’ he continued as she remained silent. ‘I’m afraid I have none. It is notoriously hard to prove a negative.’

Ulrika nodded, still thinking. She could ask him to turn out his pockets for the Blood Shards, but it would prove nothing if he didn’t have them. He could have hidden them anywhere. She could ask him for his word, but a villain would give his word without hesitating. All she had to go on was what she knew of him already.

Of her acquaintances in Praag so far, only he and Raiza had treated her well. Raiza had honoured her debt, and Stefan had saved her life and helped her against the cult, and both had been at least civil, if not friendly. Evgena, on the other hand, had tried to kill her from the start, had openly mistrusted her even as she accepted her vow of service, and had attacked her after welcoming her into her house.

So, in the final tally, she couldn’t be certain Stefan wasn’t out to kill Evgena, but if he was, she couldn’t blame him. She was beginning to feel the same way herself.

She raised her head and looked at him. ‘I think,’ she said slowly, ‘that I don’t care. If you are with me against the cult, then I will ask no more. If you tell me there is no Kiraly, and that it is you who seeks to kill Evgena, it will not prejudice me against you.’

Stefan laughed. ‘To thine own self be true,’ he said with a wolfish smile. ‘I believe you are at last becoming a vampire.’

She shrugged, uncomfortable. ‘I am only thinking of Praag.’

‘Precisely,’ said Stefan, then sighed. ‘Unfortunately, there is indeed a Kiraly, and I must still kill him, but…’ He paused, then turned back to her, coming to a decision. ‘But I begin to fear I will not be able to do so before your cultists intend to strike, and I am afraid of what madness will follow if they succeed – even if they fail. Kiraly may retreat. I may lose him. I could be killed before I found him. Anything could happen, and so I think I must put aside my hunt for him and help you first.’ He turned and looked at her. ‘Tell me again what leads you have. I’m afraid I didn’t listen further once you told me of Kiraly last night.’

‘There was little else,’ said Ulrika. ‘When I chased Kiraly, I lost the man who led the sacrifice and couldn’t find him again.’ She frowned. ‘But now that I think of it, he did let something slip during the ceremony. He said the cult would be stealing something tonight called the Viol of Fieromonte, and that the success of their venture depended on it. If we could stop them, or steal it first, we might end their threat in a single stroke.’