Bloodforged (7 page)

The captain raised his cutlass. ‘All together, lads,’ he said. ‘In Sigmar’s name.’

The men surged forwards, finding courage in their numbers, and Ulrika sprang, but not at them. Instead she leapt back on the rail and ran along it, weaving like a drunk in the throes of her weakness.

‘Keep back!’ she cried. ‘Put me ashore! Ashore!’

A great, juddering jolt rocked the ship, slewing it sideways. The rocks! In the excitement, the steersman had forgotten them. Ulrika staggered and grabbed for a rope, but missed. She toppled from the rail and plunged into the swirling black water of the river.

The pain as the waves closed over her head was worse than any she had felt since her rebirth – worse than the ache of blood hunger, worse than the blistering caress of the sun, worse than any wound she had ever taken, live or undead. A bubble of memory pushed through her panic as she fought to reach the surface again – Gabriella afraid of travelling in an open boat, saying that vampires feared water. She knew it from tales told around the fire in her youth as well, but in her frenzy to keep away from the boatmen she had forgotten it.

It had been a fatal lapse. The water was killing her, and all her flailing wouldn’t save her. The current was flowing through her body as if she were a ghost, and dragging at her essence. Ulrika could feel it ripping, like a flag in a high wind being torn from a pole. Little translucent tatters of self frayed off and floated downstream, taking with them memories, emotions, joys and sorrows, and each one hurt like her arm being twisted off.

She heard the men from the boat shouting as her head broke the waves again, but she couldn’t understand them. She couldn’t think. She couldn’t see. Then a rank, loamy scent came to her. Earth! The shore! She thrashed towards it, praising the gods that had abandoned her that she could still smell.

The water made her clothes heavy and dragged her below the surface again. As a vampire, she had no need to breathe, but it wasn’t drowning that would kill her, it was the merciless current, trying to separate her essence from the undead body to which it unnaturally clung. It sucked at her like a leech, sucked the strength from her arms and the will from her heart. More pieces of self ripped away, taking faces and feelings with them. An insidious voice whispered that the pain would stop if she just gave up and died, but she knew it was a lie. Vampires clung to life so tenaciously because they knew the eternal torment that waited for them with the true death, and she was still too much of a coward to face that.

She struggled on, though in her blindness she had no idea if she made any progress at all. Then her boots struck bottom. Had she sunk, or had the riverbed risen to meet her? The current dragged her sideways along it. She kicked forwards, digging in with her heels, and found she was slogging up a submerged slope. She was nearing the bank.

She reached out her hands and struck what felt like a tree branch. No. A root. She clung to it, trying to draw herself out of the river. The current fought to keep her, tugging on her clothes, weakening her fingers, sucking at her soul, but finally she pulled herself out and collapsed on the bank, blind and shivering uncontrollably, her mind a whirling jumble of pain and broken thoughts.

But one thought remained whole – she had to keep moving. She couldn’t stay in the open. The men might come back, the sun
would
come back. She had to hide, but how, when she could not see or stand?

The rancid scent of man came to her nose – sweat, shit and alcohol, faint and faded, and the sharper reek of fish. A fisherman? Was his shack nearby? Was he in it? Would she be able to feed on him? Would she at least be able to hide from the sun? She turned after the scent, like a blind mole sniffing through the earth after grubs, and inched along on her stomach, fingers digging weakly into the dirt and leaf mould.

Every yard seemed a mile, and nausea and vertigo racked her with each slow movement, but after pushing through bracken and pulling herself over the roots of trees, her head struck something flat and hollow. She struggled not to vomit, then reached forwards and ran her hands over the obstruction. It was wooden, and curved, and covered with flaking paint.

Ulrika sobbed. It was a boat. There was no shack, and no fisherman to feed from, just a weathered old skiff pulled up into the trees and turned upside down. She slumped against it. She could go no further. She was too weak to search any deeper into the woods. With the last of her strength, she pushed her way under the boat and curled up on the ground and closed her eyes. She had never been so cold in her life.

She stood naked next to her father’s blazing pyre, knee-deep in Sylvanian snow and trying to weep for his death, but the heat from the fire dried the tears before they could be shed. Then, like paper curling as it was eaten by a flame, her father rose up, his hair and beard a mane of fire and his skin melting.

‘Join me, daughter,’ he said beckoning. ‘You must die for what you have become.’

She backed away from him, terrified, but he stepped down from the burning logs and staggered stiff-legged after her, bits of blackened flesh falling from him with each step.

She tripped and fell backwards in the snow, and suddenly it wasn’t her father that was closing in on her, but Gotrek the Slayer, the runes on his fell axe glowing cherry-red.

‘It won’t be quick, girl,’ the dwarf growled, as he lowered the axe closer and closer to her throat. ‘You don’t deserve it.’

The heat from the glowing rune burned her face and chest as she shrank away from the axe’s razor edge.

The axe touched her skin.

She screamed.

And woke to the smell of burning flesh.

A tiny crack in the bottom of the boat was letting in the smallest needle of sunlight, and it had worked its way across her clothes as the sun moved, to the exposed flesh of her neck.

She jerked away and bumped into the side of the boat, then lay gasping and shaking and mewling in pain. She was still shivering with cold, but at the same time burning up as if with fever. The bright glare of the sun showed under the edges of the boat all around her, blinding her, and the heat of it beat down on the overturned bottom, broiling her. Her limbs felt made of twigs, and looked it too. Her wrists, where they stuck out of her velvet cuffs, were nothing but tendons and veins, and her fingers were bone-thin. She couldn’t move, couldn’t lift her head. If the little lance of light followed her to the side of the boat, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to escape it again.

How had she come here? Why was she under a boat? Who… who was she? Fresh panic welled up inside her as she realised she could not remember her name or who she was. She didn’t know where she was or why she had come there. The stifling heat and the bone marrow cold had taken all that away, leaving only pain.

She struggled to recall the dream she had just woken from, hoping it would give her clues to who she was. She could not remember. There had been snow, and a burning man, and another with an axe, but she couldn’t see their faces. She didn’t know their names.

The only thing she did know was she was hungry, a black, empty ache worse than the cold, worse than the heat. It made her want to throw aside the boat and hunt through the forest for blood, but some instinct told her that would be death, that the sun would kill her, burn her like the man on the pyre, so she just lay there, baking and shivering, with her ravenous heart eating her from the inside, watching as the needle of sunlight carved a slow path across the shadowed ground under the boat.

More dreams came, each stranger and more unsettling than the last – Felix burying her, though she called out to him that she wasn’t dead, Adolphus Krieger and Countess Gabriella feeding on Friedrich Holmann as Ulrika fought to break free of a cage over a fire, and more delirious wakings, where the boat and the ground spun around her in nauseous loops, and her shivering grew so strong her teeth chattered and she could not lie still.

Then, after a mad dream where her veins broke through her skin like earthworms and nosed off in all directions in search of sustenance, she woke to find that the sun and the heat had gone and all that was left of her was cold and hunger. The cold was worse than ever, but the hunger was even stronger. Her sickness had disorientated the beast for a time, but now it was back, and would not be denied.

Ulrika cursed it. She was too weak to move. She was too broken in her mind. She couldn’t even begin to think of hunting for food, but the beast howled and clawed at her insides, uncaring, and she found she had strength to move after all.

Trembling and limp, she crawled out from under the boat and pushed herself to her knees, then fell as she tried to stand. Her legs wouldn’t support her. She crawled instead, away from the river and the boat, deeper into the dark wood, bushes raking her face and rocks stabbing her palms. She could barely see where she was going. Her unnatural vision, which usually allowed her to see in the dark, had grown dim, and the world was nothing but looming tree shadows and river fog.

A while later, the clatter of many hoof beats reached her and she shrank back, fearful. The hooves thundered past somewhere ahead of her, then faded away to the right. Was there a road? She crept forwards again, and moments later found it. She turned in the direction the hooves had gone and inched along in the ditch beside it. If there was a road, there might be a town, and if there was a town, there would be men, and if there were men, she could feed.

Some endless time later she saw firelight in the distance. At first she thought it was a house, but then she saw it was a coaching inn, a great black shape hunched beside the road with a flickering lantern hanging above its door. She licked her lips. There would be men inside. There would be blood.

She paused to collect herself. Though her mind was still fogged, she knew she would never get close to her prey if she remained on her hands and knees. They wouldn’t let her in the door. She gathered her strength and levered herself painfully to her feet, then stood swaying for a moment, fighting swirling vertigo. When she had found some semblance of balance, she lurched forwards, throwing one leaden foot ahead of the other as if it were made of granite.

As she got closer, the heart-fires of the people inside the inn called to her, promising comfort and warmth. Her veins ached at their nearness, and her steps quickened with need. Unfortunately, they grew no more graceful and, as she reached the stable yard gate, she toppled forwards to land on her face on the cold dry ground.

A cry of surprise came from the yard, and she struggled to get up and away, but she could go no further. She could not rise again. She was too weak, and the pain was too great. She pawed uselessly at the dirt as heavy footsteps drew nearer.

CHAPTER SIX

MERCY’S REWARD

‘Old man,’ said a male voice. ‘Old man, are ye well?’

Ulrika didn’t know who the voice was talking to, and didn’t care. All she cared about was getting away. With a supreme effort, she got her elbows under her and dragged herself an excruciating inch.

A hand cupped her shoulder and rolled her over on her back. She squinted up at the round face of a sturdy middle-aged groom. ‘Old man,’ he said. ‘Are ye havin’ a fit–’ He started back, frightened, and made the sign of the hammer. ‘A-a lass? Sigmar preserve us, girl, you gave me a fright. Skin and bones and pale as death. What’s wrong with ye? Are ye sick?’

Ulrika could do nothing but moan. His blood scent was overwhelming. She reached for him, trembling with hunger.

He edged away, unnerved, then a calculating look came into his eyes. ‘Well, ye look rich enough, though. What have ye done? Run away in yer brother’s clothes? Mayhap yer people’ll pay t’have ye back. Aye, mayhap.’ He took her hands, then tsked. ‘So cold. Yer near frozen through.’ He knelt down and scooped her up in his arms like she weighed nothing. ‘Can’t have ye dyin’ can we? No money in that. Come on.’

Ulrika clung to him as he carried her through the yard to the stables, her head resting on his shoulder. His bare neck was only inches from her teeth. She strained to reach it, but he put her down on a pile of hay bales next to a little iron stove and turned away. As he rummaged through a cupboard, Ulrika could hear the stamping and shifting of stabled horses to her right.

‘Soon have ye bundled up,’ he said, ‘Then I’ll fetch ye some broth from Frau Kilger’s kettle. That’ll warm yer insides.’

He turned back to her, his arms full of horse blankets, then proceeded to drape them over her one at a time until she felt as if she was being buried. She wanted to curse the simpleton and tell him, ‘These won’t warm me. I need blood!’ but all she could do was moan and struggle futilely.