Bloodforged (5 page)

She tried to push through them, but two grabbed her arms. She snarled and lashed out, tearing at them. They fell back, shouting and clutching bloody wounds, and the rest backed away, staring and terrified.

‘Sigmar! She’s got fangs!’

‘She’s a fiend!’

‘Kill her!’

Ulrika dropped into a crouch, howling, the beast urging her to attack – to slaughter and feast. But a tiny kernel of pride held her back. She would
not
be slave to her hunger! She would not let it choose the time or place or victim! Those were her decisions to make!

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.

Finally he stepped back and shook his head. ‘What must have happened to ye to turn yer hair white so young? Ah, it’s a wicked world, a wicked world.’ He tsked again, then turned for the door. ‘Broth’s coming. Won’t be a moment.’

Ulrika frowned as he padded off across the yard. Her hair wasn’t white. It was dirty blonde. She worked her arm laboriously out from under the heavy strata of blankets, then reached up and tugged down a wet lock. It was just long enough for her to see the ends of it, and it was white as milk.

Panic and uncertainty welled up in her. When had this happened? Had she always had white hair? Did she just not remember? She tried to think back to the last time she had seen herself. She couldn’t. She couldn’t even remember what she looked like. Who
was
she? The pain in her head wouldn’t let her focus long enough to work it out.

The groom’s heart-fire re-appeared at the edge of her senses, and after a moment he came back through the door, balancing a bowl of steaming soup on a plate.

‘There we are,’ he said soothingly as he crossed to her. ‘Hot from the pot, and I brought ye some bread too.’ He set the bowl down on the hay bale next to her and pulled a wooden spoon from his belt. ‘Now then, have a sip of that. Er, ye are from money, aye?’ he asked, pausing with the spoon hovering over the bowl. ‘Not some damned play actor?’

Ulrika swallowed convulsively. The smell of the soup did nothing for her, but his blood scent once again filled her nose, and she could think of nothing else. The voice of her pride admonished her not to break her vow, but it was weak and faint and she squashed it like a cricket. She must feed. It was that or die.

With the hand that was free of the blankets she beckoned to him.

‘C’m ’ere…’ she murmured. ‘Cl’ser.’

‘What’s that yer sayin’, lass?’ he asked, and put his ear to her mouth. ‘I can’t hear ye.’

With strength born of need, Ulrika clamped her hand around the back of his neck and pulled him down, her fangs shooting out. He grunted in surprise, then yelped and reared back to his feet as she bit deep into his neck.

‘What are ye doin’?’ He shrieked. ‘Get off! Get off!’

Ulrika came up with him, clinging like a limpet, and sucked in his blood in great gulping swallows, her senses reeling with the taste and power of it.

The groom staggered around the stable, cursing and struggling to push her away, but with each mouthful of crimson elixir she grew stronger and stronger. All her senses came back to her. The dark corners of the stable became clear, and her mind sharpened. She wrapped her legs around his middle and held tighter, drinking all the while. Then, revoltingly, his struggles slowly turned to caresses, and he moaned and crushed her to him.

‘Yes,’ he murmured. ‘Kiss… more…’

Ulrika’s stomach turned. It was always the way, and she hated it. The victims got as much pleasure out of feeding as she did, which was a kindness, she supposed, but their mewling revolted her. Even disgust, however, was not enough to stop her feeding. Her veins begged for more, and still more, and she could not deny them.

Only when the groom collapsed and sprawled on his back did she wake to the fact that she was close to draining him entirely, and even then it was hard to pull away. Finally, however, she shoved back, gasping and cursing, and knelt over his prostrate form, blood dripping on his broad chest from her wet red mouth. She had broken her vow, but at least she could refrain from killing him. With no mistress around to feed his desire, he would recover eventually from the kiss, at least she hoped so.

‘I’m sorry,’ she mumbled. ‘I’m sorry.’

She reached for the purse on her belt, thinking to pay him for what she had done, but it wasn’t there. She had lost it somewhere during her long crawl, or maybe even before. Had she had it while under the boat? Had she ever had a purse?

A door slammed as she wiped her mouth. Footsteps and heart-fires were coming out into the yard from the inn, accompanied by hearty voices and slurring laughter. She froze, praying they would go away.

‘Ho, Herman!’ called one of the voices. ‘Our horses!’

‘And ye better have that stone out of Cecile’s shoe,’ said another. ‘She’s miles to go by morning.’

‘By the hammer,’ swore a third. ‘Where
is
he?’

The footsteps started towards the stable. Ulrika surged up, ready to flee, but then collapsed on top of the groom again, nauseous and dizzy. She had drunk too much too fast. Her belly felt as full as a wineskin. Her head throbbed and her vision blurred. She pushed up again, fighting down the urge to vomit.

A man loomed in the open stable door. ‘Herman! Where–?’ He stopped dead when he saw Ulrika hunching over the unconscious groom. ‘Sigmar’s beard!’ he gasped, and backed away, clawing for the pistol he wore at his belt. Ulrika saw the badge of Wissenland on his right shoulder. He was a roadwarden.

‘A fiend!’ he cried. ‘A vampire!’

Three more wardens crowded the door behind him and cursed in their turn, drawing swords and pistols. Ulrika staggered up then dived aside as the first warden fired. The shot was deafening in the small space and the horses reared and whickered in their stalls.

‘Shallya’s tears,’ a warden cried as they pushed through the door. ‘It’s killed Herman.’

Ulrika looked around as she scrambled for the shadows. She’d trapped herself. There was only one exit from the stables, and the roadwardens were standing in it. There was nothing here but stalls and horses.

She heard another hammer draw back and threw herself into an empty stall just as a second pistol thundered. She groaned and clutched her bloated stomach. All she wanted to do was lie down and sleep. She was too sick to fight.

‘Did you get it?’ asked a warden.

‘Might have winged it,’ said another. ‘Reload and go cautious anyhow.’

Ulrika looked up. Perhaps she could leap over the wall of the stall when they reached her, and get around them that way. But wait. There was a hole in the ceiling, leading to the hayloft.

‘Ready?’ came the first warden’s voice.

‘Aye,’ said the others.

Ulrika heard more hammers drawing back, and gathered her legs under her, preparing to spring and praying her belly and wobbly limbs didn’t betray her.

‘Now!’

The roadwardens charged forwards. Ulrika jumped to the top of the dividing wall as they fired blindly into the stall. She teetered, dizzy, then leapt for the hole in the ceiling.

The edge caught her painfully in the ribs, but she dug her claws into the straw-covered planks and pulled.

‘Where’s it gone?’ rasped a warden.

‘Above us!’

A blast shot between Ulrika’s feet just as she scrabbled out of the hole. She collapsed, groaning, on the loft floor, and this time she did vomit, splashing a flood of blood across the weathered boards and watching it vanish down the cracks between.

‘Blood! We’ve wounded it!’

‘Fetch a ladder!’

She pushed to her hands and knees and looked around. The walls angled to a peak above her head, and there was hay stacked all around. At the far end was the hay door, through which they winched the bales when they put them up for storage.

A ladder slapped against the edge of the hole, and she heard it creak as someone started to climb.

Ulrika lurched to her feet and stumbled towards the closed door, but just as she reached it, she heard a soft voice croak from below. ‘Masters, don’t kill her. Please.’

There was a general swearing, and then the first warden spoke. ‘He’s alive, poor fellow.’

‘Aye, that’s worse,’ said another. ‘Have to kill him now, before he turns.’

Ulrika stopped, the hay door half-open. What nonsense was this? He wouldn’t become a vampire. She hadn’t given him the dark kiss. She turned back, wanting to go down and kill them all to protect the groom from their ignorance.

A warden rose through the hole in the floor and fired. A hammer-blow impact punched her backwards through the hay door. She fell, flailing, then slammed hard on her shoulders in the cold mud of the yard, a sick, burning pain blossoming in her shoulder as her body rang with shock and the world dimmed and wavered.

There were shrieks and feminine cries from nearby, and then the voice of the shooter calling from inside the stables. ‘I hit it! It’s fallen into the yard!’

Ulrika’s vision cleared and she struggled to sit up, hissing in pain. People were pouring out of the inn, drawn by the sound of the pistol shots, and gabbled and pointed at her. From the stables came shouts and the thudding of boots.

She forced herself to her feet and ran unsteadily for the fence at the back of the yard – and the dark stand of trees beyond it. The wardens roared for her to stop, and a pistol ball whizzed by her as she vaulted the pickets and crashed through a thick cover of brush into the trees.

A few yards in, she crouched down behind a broad trunk and puked again, spilling more of poor Herman’s blood, then wiped her mouth and looked back. Two of the wardens were on top of the fence, one leg slung over, and staring into the woods as they reloaded their pistols. Neither, however, looked eager to venture into the darkness, and after a moment they turned back and dropped back into the inn yard.

Ulrika let out a sigh of relief and slumped down against the bole of the tree, then winced in pain. They would likely come after her soon, but she had a few moments while they gathered lanterns and torches, and she could not move on until she took the ball from her shoulder. It ground against her clavicle with every move, and if she left it where it was, her swift healing, fuelled by the blood she had ingested, would seal it inside her.

She pulled off her doublet and shirt, and winced at the sight of her emaciated arms and her ribs showing through her skin. It seemed it was going to take more than one feeding to return her to her old self. Then, pressing against the tree to steady herself, she extended the claws of her left hand and probed gently into the wound until she found the little lead nugget. The pain of her exploration was nothing compared to the agony of digging behind it and pulling it out through torn shoulder meat, but the relief when she threw it into the brush was exquisite.

As she tore her sleeve into strips to make a bandage, her mind, fogged and confused since she had crawled from under the boat, began to clear at last. She knew who she was again. She knew who she had been and what she was now. She knew where she was heading. But there were terrifying gaps – faces with no names, names with no faces. Was her father dead? She thought so, but couldn’t be sure. Had she made love to Max Schreiber, or had they only been friends? She no longer knew.

The biggest hole was the most recent. She could remember the pain of sinking in the river, and crawling from it to the little boat, but the last clear memory she had before that was fleeing from Hermione’s house and running through Nuln. How had she got from there to the water? She had vague flashes of lying for a long time in a confined space, and others of men shouting at her, and of falling, but that was all. The rest was gone. She had no idea what had transpired.