Bloodborn (35 page)

She put the pomander back and examined the folded papers. Each had originally been sealed with wax, but no sigil had been pressed into it. She picked up the pile and opened one at random. There was a short note inside it, in plain Reikspiel, but the words made Ulrika’s skin prickle with horror.

They go to M’s. H and G in one coach, D in another. D has only two guards.

Ulrika read it again. M for Mathilda. H for Hermione. G for Gabriella, and D for Dagmar. Dagmar – this note had been the madam’s death warrant. It had told the killers that she would be travelling without the others on her way back from the meeting at Mathilda’s. Someone had been spying on them! But who?

Ulrika turned the paper over, looking for a signature or mark. There was none. She looked again at the writing, a graceful looping script. It looked familiar to her. She had seen it somewhere before, but couldn’t remember where. She closed her eyes, trying to think. It wouldn’t come.

With a curse she put the note aside and opened the one on the top of the stack, hoping it would goad her brain. It certainly did that.

No word of G. At your order, H has been convinced to retreat to MH. M has been summoned too. Map enclosed
.

The prickling of Ulrika’s skin became a bath of ice. Hermione and Mathilda had been tricked into going to the country, to Mondthaus, Hermione’s country estate. The monster and the sorcerer were no doubt lying in wait. And… and Gabriella was going there too!

Ulrika bolted to her feet, knocking over the chair and nearly upsetting the desk. Her mistress was in danger!

Holmann looked up from throwing the arcane books on the fire. ‘What is it?’

Ulrika turned and started across the room towards the stairs, stuffing the note in her doublet as she went. ‘I must go.’

Holmann started after her. ‘Wait! What have you learned?’

She ignored him, dodging around the sarcophagi and the dead ghouls and running through the door to the stairs. He ran after her.

As she reached the top and entered the mausoleum, she saw that the doors were closed. She ran to them and shoved. Her wrists and elbows stung at the impact. The doors didn’t move.

She glared at them. Perhaps they swung in instead of out. Unfortunately, there were no handles on the inside. She caught at the heavy brass bosses that studded the weathered wood and pulled with all her might. The doors remained immobile. She stepped back, snarling, as Holmann puffed up the stairs behind her.

‘What’s happened?’ he asked.

‘The beasts have locked us in!’ she growled. ‘We’re trapped!’

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

A RELUCTANT VOW

Holmann stepped to the doors and tried them for himself, then began to look around the frame for a lever or knob, but Ulrika’s sensitive eyes had already sought for such a thing and found nothing. She got down on her hands and knees and looked through the gap between the bottom of the door and the threshold.

‘Cunning dogs!’ she said, and let her forehead sink to the floor with a sigh. ‘They have piled gravestones before it.’ She closed her eyes, then cursed and rose to her feet again. ‘Here. Push with me. We must at least try.’

Holmann nodded and they put their shoulders to the same door; then, on a count of three, heaved as hard as they could. It did not move an inch.

‘Again!’

Still nothing. Holmann’s considerable strength and her inhuman power were not enough. The marble floor beneath their feet was too slippery, the gravestones too heavy.

Ulrika shoved away from the door with an angry growl, then charged it and kicked it. She only hurt her foot.

‘It can’t be like this!’ she hissed. ‘I must get away! I may already be too late!’ She turned to the stairs again as a hope came to her. ‘They must have a back door! They must have a way to escape in case of trouble!’

She flew down the stairs again and into the fire-lit crypt, then began pacing its perimeter and examining the walls. Holmann thudded into the room a moment after and crossed to her.

‘What was in the note, fraulein?’ he asked. ‘What has alarmed you?’

Ulrika hesitated. So far she had mentioned the other Lahmians as little as possible when talking to Holmann. He was the enemy, after all, and she didn’t want to expose them. On the other hand, he must know already, and the other witch hunters too. Schenk had come to find them at Mathilda’s, hadn’t he? That thought brought another. Schenk had said a woman had told him Gabriella would be at the Wolf’s Head. Was it the same traitor who had informed the sorcerer of their movements? Who was it? Who would want to turn both the witch hunters and the undead against them?

‘Lady,’ rasped Holmann. ‘If what you learned is some threat to Nuln or Sigmar’s Empire, then I insist I be told of it!’

Ulrika cursed with frustration. She had completed her circuit of the crypt and found nothing – no holes, no loose marble sheets, no telltale footprints. She turned to the side rooms. ‘The woman I serve has walked into a trap,’ she said, distracted. ‘She has gone unsuspecting to a house outside the city where the monster and the sorcerer wait to kill her. I must go to her.’

The first of the side rooms was dark, but Ulrika could see well enough. Holmann however went to the fire and took a brand from it, then returned to her. She had already moved on to the second room. There was nothing in the first but more beds of twigs and piles of gnawed bones.

‘She is a vampire, your mistress?’ Holmann asked as she walked the walls.

Ulrika curled her lip. ‘Does it matter? The thing which is after her is, and its companion is a follower of the black arts. It is they who are the threat to Sigmar’s Empire, not my lady.’ She cursed again and flung herself out of the room as she found no signs of a hidden door in it.

Holmann followed her into the third room. ‘You must take me with you,’ he said. ‘I must be sure they are destroyed.’

Ulrika laughed. ‘I think not. I would not trust you to stop at killing only the beast and the sorcerer.’ Nor would I trust the countess not to kill you, she added silently.

‘I’m afraid I must insist,’ said Holmann.

Ulrika pushed past him out of the room and crossed to the fourth. ‘You are hardly in a position to insist on anything,’ she said.

She stalked around the last chamber, punching and kicking the marble sheeting methodically and listening for the hollow boom of a cavity. There was none. She cursed again and turned back to the door.

Holmann stood there, his sword pointed at her heart. ‘You will not stay me from my duty.’

She sighed. ‘Herr Holmann, the point is moot, I think, for I can find no way out of this place.’ She spread her hands. ‘Neither of us is going anywhere. We are trapped here.’

He squinted suspiciously at her. ‘Is this a trick? Do you seek to keep me from this encounter?’

Ulrika laughed. ‘At the cost of keeping away myself? Don’t be a fool. If I wanted to leave you behind…’ She stepped forwards and caught his wrist before he knew she was moving, then twisted it. He hissed in pain and his sword clattered to the floor. She leaned in to him. ‘I would not have to trap myself to do it.’

She pushed him away from her, then stepped out into the central room again and slumped against a sarcophagus, burying her face in her hands. ‘I will wait for the return of the monster and the warlock, and then I will take vengeance upon them for what I could not stop.’

She heard the scrape of Holmann’s sword as he stooped to pick it up. ‘And if they do not return?’

She looked up at him, then paused, thinking what would happen if she remained locked in this place with Holmann for a day or longer. When had she last fed? It had been Lotte, that morning, just before Gabriella had thrown her to the crowd. She could most likely last another day or two, but then…

‘If they do not return, then you should reload your pistols with silvered shot,’ she said. ‘For I will eventually become the thing you think I am.’

A strange look came upon Holmann’s face. ‘You would have me kill you?’

She shook her head. ‘No. I would have us both escape, but should things come to such conclusions, I–’ She swallowed, then continued. ‘Let us only say that I have more often thought about killing myself than I have killing you.’

Holmann’s face grew more troubled, and at the same time more excited. ‘You would rather die than take human blood? You cannot live with what you have become?’

Ulrika chuckled. ‘Let us not tumble into melodrama, templar. I am not some tragic heroine from a Detlef Sierck play. As I have been told more than once, I have the opportunity to right the situation every day at sunrise.’ She shrugged. ‘I am a coward, and when it comes to it, I will do what I must to stay alive. I only tell you so that you may prepare yourself to do the same.’

Holmann nodded, and looked away. ‘I… I shall.’

Ulrika pushed away from the sarcophagus, grinning and gesturing to the ghoul’s campfire, a morbid humour overtaking her. ‘And if you succeed, then you can burn me on this fire and make all right with Sigmar. If
I
succeed, I will lay you behind one of these plaques and say what I remember of my father’s prayers over your body–’ She stopped suddenly, staring at the walls, her eyes going wide.

‘What is it?’ asked Holmann, looking around uneasily. ‘Do you hear them coming back?’

‘The plaques!’ Ulrika cried. ‘I didn’t check the plaques!’

She sprang to the wall and pried at the edges of the nearest plaque. The things were slightly more than two feet on a side, and bolted into the marble at chest height. The one she tugged at wouldn’t come. She extended her claws and hooked them behind it, then gave a mighty heave. With a screech, the thing came free, its bolts ripping from the wall and clanging to the ground. Ulrika looked behind it. A skeleton dressed in the fashions of half a millennium ago lay inside a deep narrow niche, its arms folded over its chest. She looked at the back wall of the hole. It was solid and undisturbed. She cursed and moved to the next plaque. Holmann stepped to another.

‘If it doesn’t come easily, it is likely not the one,’ he said. ‘They would not have bolted shut an escape hatch.’

Ulrika snorted, embarrassed. ‘Very true, Templar Holmann. Forgive me. I was carried away.’

They went swiftly around the room, pulling at the plaques one after the other. Ulrika’s spine began to tingle with dread when they reached the last one and it was as firm as the others but, at last, in the second of the left-hand side rooms, she found it. The plaque came away with a single tug and she barely caught it before it hit the floor. Inside, the niche was empty but for a smear of dirt, and when she looked at the back she saw a black hole smashed through the marble with a tunnel of raw earth behind.

‘Herr Holmann!’ she said in a loud whisper, for he was trying the plaques in the next room. ‘Here!’

After a second he ran in, torch high, then crossed to the open niche, exhaling with relief. ‘Praise Sigmar,’ he said. ‘I was beginning to doubt.’

Ulrika drew her sword and laid it in the niche. ‘I will go in first,’ she said. ‘So that we will not betray ourselves with light. I’ll call for you if it’s clear.’

For a moment, Holmann looked as if mistrust was going to get the best of him, but then he just nodded. ‘Good luck,’ he said.

Ulrika stuck her head and shoulders into the niche, then levered the rest of her in. She pushed her sword ahead of her and went forwards on her elbows and knees. Six feet in, she edged through the hole in the back wall and into a narrow tunnel of moist earth. She had a hard time believing that the monster that slept in that huge coffin could squeeze through such a small space, but perhaps it could change its shape, or maybe it was tall but very skinny.

Clumps of earth came down on her as she pushed on, and she shuddered. The idea of being buried alive but never dying was enough to make her want to scream and tear at the walls. After about two body lengths, the earth tunnel took a sharp left-hand turn, then continued. Now even Ulrika’s sight failed her. There was no light at all, just blackness, and the sound of her own movements, too close in her ears. She had no idea how much further the tunnel went, or where it was leading. She had expected it to angle up towards the surface at some point, but so far it hadn’t.

Then, another body length beyond the bend, she pushed her rapier forwards again and it struck something hard ahead of her. She poked it. It felt like rock. She clenched her jaw, nervous, then elbow-walked ahead and reached out. It was rock. Smooth and masoned. The fools had run into the foundations of one of the other crypts!