Bloodborn (34 page)

They continued on, and after a moment reached the flat bottom of the valley. Nothing but a broad swath of grass separated them from the crypts than ringed the fountain. Ulrika paused, looking around, then hurried across the grass to the back of one of the mausoleums with Holmann hunching after her. Burdock and thorny rose vines grew up all around the stone structure, and moss and mould mottled it like mange. Ulrika strained her ears, but heard nothing untoward, either in front or behind. She edged around the tomb and padded down the overgrown alley that ran between it and the next with Holmann coming slowly behind.

As they neared the front they squatted down and peered around at the faces of the crypts. All were in great disrepair, their marble sooty and crumbling, their sculpted figures weathered to ghostly amorphous lumps, and their heavy wood and brass doors rotting and green with verdigris, but one, directly across from them beyond the fountain, was wide open. Its black portal yawned like a mouth, and exhaled the reek of death in a nauseating cloud that seemed to fill the valley and cling to Ulrika’s skin like an oily film.

‘That… is it,’ she said, gagging.

Holmann nodded. He took a handkerchief from his coat and tied it around his nose and mouth, then checked his pistols, drawing back the hammers before settling them back into their holsters. ‘Ready,’ he said.

They crouched forwards, then circled around the dry fountain and approached the dark opening. Ulrika couldn’t hear any movement from within it, nor could she sense any heart-fires, but then a vampire hadn’t one, and could be as still as a corpse, if it wished.

They stopped on either side of the portal, then listened again. Still nothing. Ulrika motioned for Holmann to wait, then peeked around the door jamb and looked inside. The interior was square and small, no more than five paces to a side, and the walls were lined with large brass plaques, all with weathered names engraved upon them. In the centre, a flight of marble steps sank into the floor, disappearing into darkness. Ulrika saw no ghouls waiting in ambush, nor any vampire, just drifts of dry leaves in the corners and muddy, clawed footprints leading to the stairs.

Ulrika turned back to Holmann and beckoned him in. They crossed to the stairwell together and looked down. The corpse stink rose from it like heat from a stove. The steps descended straight ahead of them, and ended at an open door that appeared to be directly under the back wall of the mausoleum. The dirty flagstone floor beyond the door flickered with shadows and orange light from some hidden fire.

‘It is bigger underneath than above,’ said Holmann.

Ulrika nodded and started down the steps. Holmann drew a pistol and followed. Halfway down Ulrika stretched out her senses again. Now she heard the ghouls. Now she felt the banked fires of their corrupted hearts.

‘Five or six,’ she murmured. ‘Maybe more.’

‘Be there a hundred,’ said Holmann. ‘I will not flinch.’

As they crept down the last few steps, more of the room revealed itself, and Ulrika paused to survey it.

It was bigger than the mausoleum but, as above, the walls were lined with brass plaques that named the dead buried behind them, and there were a few grander sarcophagi rising out of the floor in a line going down the centre of the room as well, stone statues of ancient knights lying on them with hands clasped over their armoured chests. Two doors on each of the side walls appeared to open into further chambers.

She edged forwards to the door for a better look, Holmann at her shoulder. The flickering yellow light came from the far end, a rubble-ringed camp fire that revealed a scene of contradicting elements. Nests of twigs and leaves were mounded against one wall, and Ulrika could see ghouls sleeping in them, but on the other side of the room there was a true bed as well, with a headboard and blankets and a night cap hung on one of the bedposts. To the left of this was a writing desk, complete with inkwell, papers and books. Ulrika found it disorientating to see such domestic things in such a macabre location. Even more confusing was the wooden coffin that lay open to the right of the bed. The box was so large it looked like it might have been built for a beastman or an orc. Ulrika thought it must be eight feet tall by four feet wide. She swallowed, remembering the monstrous thing she and Gabriella had fought in the cloud of unnatural darkness at Guildmaster Aldrich’s house. That horror might well have been big enough to require such a coffin. But where was it now? She was too far away and at too low an angle to see inside the coffin. Was it inside?

She turned her gaze to the threats she could see. Huddled close around the fire were the ghouls she had sensed earlier – a handful of them, squatting on their haunches and pulling meat off a human carcass and stuffing it in their mouths. A huge midden heap of stripped and cracked bones was mounded against the wall behind them. Torn and bloodied clothes were buried within it.

Ulrika pointed at them. ‘Human bones,’ she whispered. ‘Is this what became of the vanished?’

‘Aye,’ growled Holmann, raising his pistol. ‘Depraved cannibals. Let us cleanse them.’

Ulrika was tempted to follow his lead, but the risk was too great. She put a hand on his arm. ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘What if the owner of the coffin lies within it?’

‘Then I will cleanse it too.’

Ulrika rolled her eyes. ‘Your faith in your abilities is inspiring.’

‘My faith is in Sigmar,’ he said.

‘That’s all very well,’ whispered Ulrika. ‘But I have faced this thing before, and it will take more than faith to defeat it. We will need reinforcements. Come. Let us go before it wakes.’

Holmann glared at her. ‘Do you protect your own kind?’

Ulrika groaned. ‘Have you listened to nothing I have said? This thing is my enemy! Now–’

The slap of naked running feet echoed from the crypt above them. Ulrika and Holmann looked up and back, then rolled left and right out of the doorway to press against the wall of the chamber.

Two ghouls ran down the stairs into the chamber, each carrying a dead comrade in its arms. They threw them down in the middle of the room, croaking to the ghouls at the fire and pointing to the stairs. The ghouls stood and turned, then stared past the newcomers, gape-mouthed. One pointed a clawed finger right at Ulrika and screeched a warning.

Ulrika froze as all eyes turned on her and Holmann. The two ghouls who had run in leapt back in fright and dropped into fighting crouches. Holmann fired his pistol at one and missed.

A small, rational part of Ulrika’s brain was shouting at her to run. There was no enemy between her and the stairs, and she needed to get back to Gabriella and tell her what she had found here. But she didn’t want to run. The ghouls’ fright was like a drug. It enflamed her. It made her hungry and ready to kill. If the horror was in the coffin, so be it. She was ready.

With a joyous howl, Ulrika pounced on the closest ghoul, slashing it with her rapier then smashing it to the ground with a shoulder to the chest. The other dodged aside, yelping, but Holmann’s second pistol cracked and this time found its mark. The thing went down with a hole in its chest.

Ulrika tore the throat out of the one that struggled beneath her, then jumped up again and found herself shoulder to shoulder with Holmann between two of the stone sarcophagi. The ghouls from the fire were coming, swarming left and right in an attempt to surround them.

‘Abductors of the innocent!’ Holman shouted, tearing a glass vial from his bandolier and hurling it at them. ‘Come and die!’

It shattered on a sarcophagus and sprayed them all with holy water. They screamed and flinched away but still came on, howling in rage and pain.

One leapt up on a sarcophagus and launched itself at Ulrika. She caught it by the wrist and swung it past her to smash into the sarcophagus behind. Its spine snapped and it dropped to the floor, folded in half. Then the others arrived, all leaping at once to try to drag her and Holmann down by weight of numbers.

Holmann’s heavy sword severed a ghoul’s arm. He crammed another vial down the throat of a second ghoul as it bit his hand. ‘Fiend! This will be your last meal!’

Ulrika blocked two attacks with slashing parries and kicked a third ghoul back into the wall.

The throat of the ghoul that had swallowed the vial disintegrated from the inside out, but the dying thing’s fangs were clamped around Holmann’s hand and wouldn’t let go. He hacked at another with his sword, but missed as he tried to shake free.

Ulrika made to help him, but a third ghoul leapt on her back, sinking its teeth into her shoulder. She hissed and drove herself back against the sarcophagus behind her, crushing it. It gasped and let go with its teeth. She threw an elbow into its jaw then lunged forwards over Holmann’s trapped hand to impale the shoulder of the one that threatened him.

The thing fell back, shrieking, then scurried for the stairs as two more leapt in. Ulrika buried her blade to the hilt in the chest of the first one, while Holmann split the last ghoul’s mangy, scabrous head down to the teeth.

Ulrika turned, ready for more, but the fight was over. Two more wounded ghouls were scampering through the door to the stairs, wailing with fear. All the rest were dead or dying around them.

‘We should go after them,’ said Holmann, tugging his hand free from the dead ghoul’s maw at last. His glove was torn, as was his flesh beneath it.

Ulrika shook her head and turned towards the outsized coffin. ‘They are only dogs. I want their master.’

She killed the ghouls that still breathed as she stepped over them, then started towards the big wooden box. Holmann joined her, drawing a wooden stake and a hammer from his belt. They gagged and choked as they got closer. The death stench boiled up from the coffin in great reeking waves. Ulrika pinched her nose shut. Holmann winced and held his stake and hammer high, ready to strike.

They looked in. The coffin was empty except for a layer of wet, mouldy earth that covered the bottom, in which was pressed a deep impression of a huge, misshapen body.

Panic welled up all at once in Ulrika’s breast. If the killer wasn’t here, where was it? What was it doing? Who was it after now? She had a sinking suspicion she knew.

‘A monster indeed,’ said Holmann, coughing as he slipped the wooden stake and hammer back into his belt. ‘This is what tore the walls and floor of the plague house.’

Ulrika stepped away too. ‘Aye,’ she said. ‘And rended the bodies of the victims.’

‘The vampires, you mean?’ said Holmann.

‘They were still victims.’

Ulrika turned to the bed that stood near the coffin. It had been neatly made-up, and the juxtaposition with its ruinous surroundings made her head spin. Surely this hadn’t been used by the monster? She lowered her head to the pillow and inhaled. Faintly through the all-pervasive corpse stink she could smell the clove scent of the little man, the sorcerer she had chased through the sewers, and who had been in Aldrich’s house when the monster had attacked Gabriella.

She stepped around the bed to the little writing desk. This smelled of the sorcerer too, and showed the same neatness as the bed. A tidy row of leather-bound journals were lined up on a shelf at the back, while pens, blotters, sealing wax and a sheaf of parchment sheets were all fit into little pigeon holes below. A stack of heavier tomes, ancient, eldritch and mouldering, was squared up along the left edge of the desk as if with plumb line and rule.

‘Those should be burned,’ said Holmann, staring at them balefully.

‘Be my guest,’ said Ulrika, distracted. She sat and took down the right-most journal and flipped through it, hoping for some clue to the whereabouts of the killer, or the plans of the sorcerer, but the precisely written entries were in a language she could not understand. She did not even recognise the letter forms. What she did recognise was the hand that wrote it. The same neat hand had written the blackmail note that had tricked Mistress Alfina into leaving Aldrich’s residence and going to the plague house.

She glared at unfathomable words before her. The answer to the mystery of the killings was in these pages, she was sure of it, but the foreign script locked that knowledge away from her as surely as if it had been sealed in a vault. She held the journal out to Holmann, who was gingerly picking up the vile tomes and carrying them to the fire.

‘Can you read this?’ she asked.

He paused and squinted at the writing, then grimaced. ‘It is the arcane script of magicians,’ he said, sneering. ‘We are taught to recognise it, but not to read it, lest it corrupt us.’

‘Very wise,’ muttered Ulrika wryly. ‘But not very useful.’

She fluttered through the sheaf of parchment, but the sheets were all blank. Then she noticed a drawer under the writing surface. She opened it. A very curious collection of objects lay within it. On the left were three golden pomanders on decorative chains, in the middle, a small pile of folded papers, and on the right, the severed forelegs of an animal – a large dog it looked like, sawed off neatly at the elbow joint and bound with tidy bandages. She stared at the black-furred legs as realisation rocked her. The paw-prints in the mud, outside the Silver Lily – they had been made with these! The warlock had killed some poor dog to set a false trail that led to Mathilda. No doubt the tufts of fur had come from it too.

She shook her head as she turned to look at the pomanders, admiring in spite of herself the depth of planning that had gone into the plot. She lifted one of the latticed golden orbs and smelled it. It was filled with cloves – another piece of the puzzle made clear. So the warlock didn’t care for his companion’s smell any more than she did.