Bloodborn (4 page)

Ulrika grew hot at this and her fists clenched.

The countess saw this and smiled sadly. ‘I mean you no offence, beloved. I only tell you the truth. I see great potential in you, and you may rise high with us, but you start at a disadvantage, and you should know that from the beginning.’

Ulrika nodded, curt. ‘And how far up the ladder are you?’

Gabriella shot her a sharp look and Ulrika lowered her head, glaring at the floor.

‘How far up the ladder are you,
mistress
?’ she repeated through her teeth.

‘Much better,’ said Gabriella. ‘I am little more than halfway up. It has been my duty, for the last two hundred years, to watch Sylvania for my queen. To make sure that lunatics like Krieger and others of his ilk do not try to bring back the time of the von Carsteins. But I have been seconded to other places during that time, as now, when situations have arisen.’

‘And the situation in Nuln?’ asked Ulrika, then caught herself. ‘Mistress?’

‘Very good,’ said Gabriella, then turned and looked out through the louvres into the winter night. ‘Nuln is troubling. We have six sisters there. Two of them have been killed in the last two weeks, torn apart by an unknown assailant. Worse, they were exposed as vampires – their corpses left to be seen by the cattle, their fangs and claws extended. This has of course led to panic in the streets. The two sisters were prominent figures in Nuln society. One was Lady Rosamund von Andress, mistress to a prominent general. The other was Karlotta Herzog, who posed as a Shallyan abbess. They were also the most senior Lahmians in Nuln, which makes their deaths doubly suspicious.’

‘You suspect a coup?’ asked Ulrika. She had experienced enough of Kislevite politics to know what a purge looked like.

‘Not by another Lahmian,’ said Gabriella. ‘With the exposure of Rosamund and Karlotta, the witch hunters will have begun to suspect every powerful woman in Nuln of being a vampire. No Lahmian would bring that on themselves.’ She shook her head. ‘The queen has ordered me to help our sisters discover the murderer, stop him and defuse the situation somehow, so that the cattle will again forget we exist.’

‘Have you any idea how you will do this, mistress?’ asked Ulrika.

Gabriella closed her eyes. ‘No. It would not be easy even if I could expect complete and cordial cooperation from my sisters there, but I doubt that will happen.’

‘Why not?’

Gabriella sighed. ‘With Lady Rosamund and Sister Karlotta dead, the senior Lahmian in Nuln is Lady Hermione von Auerbach. We… we have a history.’

Ulrika waited for the countess to continue, but she did not.

‘A history, mistress?’

Gabriella opened her eyes and smiled wryly. ‘There are only so many positions available in the hierarchy of the Lahmian sisterhood, my dear, only so many of us who can live in one city without risking detection. Lady Hermione and I were turned at roughly the same time, and have, throughout our unlife, vied for many of the plum posts – Altdorf, Nuln, Miragliano, Couronne. Sometimes I won, and sometimes it was her, but unlike me, she has never considered it a friendly game.’ The countess’s smile began to show more teeth. ‘It was she who reminded the queen that Krieger was my get, and had me assigned to that dreary Sylvanian backwater Nachthafen to watch him.’

She shrugged and the smile faded. ‘I bear her no ill-will for that. Krieger was indeed my fault, and I accepted my punishment. And the post was an important one. I have kept more than just Krieger from achieving their mad goals in my time there. But Hermione reflects everyone through the mirror of her own jealous mind, and so will not be happy to see me. She will think that I manipulated the queen somehow, in order to get her to send me to Nuln. She will think I have returned for revenge. She will think I want her position, or mean to destroy her in some way.’

‘And do you, mistress?’

The countess lowered her eyelids and stared coolly out of the dark window. ‘Not unless she tries to destroy me first.’

The countess did not let Ulrika feed that day, saying it was too soon after Johannes, but the next morning, when they had stopped at a second coaching inn, she brought Quentin, the youngest and fairest of her knights, to Ulrika’s room. She also brought the hourglass.,

‘We will try again,’ she said as Ulrika stood before her in one of her new dresses. ‘Again, you will wait the length of the glass, and then feed with restraint and delicacy. Am I understood?’

‘Yes, mistress,’ said Ulrika, attempting a curtsey. But she was far from sure if it would matter if she understood or not. She was famished. Though she had drunk Johannes dry two nights previously, she had vomited up most of his blood along with the inedible meat she had eaten, and this past day had been an aching misery of need. She was trembling with hunger now, and could hardly keep her eyes off Quentin’s throat, which pulsed rapidly above the rich blue broadcloth of his collar.

Rodrik, hovering at the door, was also uneasy. ‘Is this wise, m’lady?’ he asked. ‘Quentin is a seasoned man, not some pot-boy like the last. Let her take one of the grooms.’

‘The grooms have not been blooded,’ said Gabriella. ‘Quentin knows what to expect.’

‘But we are at an inn, m’lady,’ said Rodrik, trying another tack. ‘If she makes a repeat of–’

‘She will not!’ snapped the countess. ‘She will succeed in controlling herself, or perhaps it will be time for us to part company. I will not be embarrassed in Nuln.’

Ulrika’s eyes widened at this. ‘You would leave me behind, mistress?’

Gabriella raised hard eyes to her, and it was a moment before she spoke. ‘No,’ she said at last. ‘No, I would not. I made that mistake with Krieger. I dismissed him when he displeased me, and you see what occurred. This time, I will leave no loose ends.’

Fear constricted Ulrika’s chest. Did the countess mean she would kill her rather than abandon her? Did her life depend on how well she controlled herself with Quentin?

Before she could ask the questions, Gabriella turned the hourglass and set it down sharply on a table by the bed, then turned and strode out the door without a backwards glance. Rodrik stepped aside to let her pass, then looked back in and gave Ulrika a black look. She glared back sullenly, but he turned his gaze to Quentin, who stood at attention in the centre of the room.

‘Courage, lad,’ he said.

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Quentin, his voice shaking.

Rodrik closed the door. Ulrika could smell the boy’s terror. It was nothing compared to her own.

CHAPTER THREE

THE LAHMIAN WAY

Ulrika pressed her extended claws into the palms of her hands, fighting down with difficulty the urge to leap on the young knight then and there. She could not fail this time. She must not!

When she had regained some measure of control, she turned from him and stepped to the table with the hourglass.

‘Stand away from me,’ she said. ‘As far as you can. By the fire.’

‘Yes, mistress,’ said the knight.

‘And don’t speak. Don’t make a sound. I want to forget you’re here.’

‘May… may I sit?’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Ulrika. ‘Just be silent.’

She heard him draw up a stool beside the fire as she took a chair at the table facing away from him. She picked up the book Gabriella had given her,
The Nehekharan Diaspora
, a vampire-written history of the times of Neferata and Nagash, opened it to the place where she had left off and tried to read.

It was no use, of course, the strange foreign names – W’soran, Abhorash, Ushoran – jumbled senselessly in her head, and she found she was reading the same sentence over and over again. And it made no difference how silent Quentin was. She could still smell him, and hear his blood beating in his veins like a hawk’s wings. Her eyes continued looking blankly at the pages of the book, but all her other senses were focused behind her, noting every change in the youth’s breathing or the tempo of his pulse.

How was she going to resist as she must? She had no illusion that the countess would not follow through on her threat to destroy her if she failed. Gabriella seemed to have some affection for her, but she had seemed to have some affection for Johannes as well, and she had left him to be torn to pieces without a second thought. Ulrika was certain that if she disappointed her here, the countess would have no compunction about ‘taking care of loose ends’. She even understood the necessity of it. If all one’s children had the potential to become Kriegers, abandoning them to their own devices was foolishness. They would have to be controlled or killed.

This put Ulrika very close to death. If she failed to control herself with Quentin, she was finished. Of course, there was another option. The windows of the room were not locked or barred. She could run again, and this time she could hide, find shelter in the forests and never have to worry about control again.

Her eyes slid to the windows. The thought was terrifyingly appealing. What a glorious feeling to just let herself go, to surrender completely to the animal within her and hunt like a wolf in the night. What a joy to run and howl, to bring down her prey at a sprint and drink it dry as it thrashed beneath her.

But there was another side to that savage freedom – the hunters, the men with torches. Ulrika remembered a time from her youth when her father had roused his lancers and they had gone in search of something in the woods, something that had been dragging off the peasants in the night. She hadn’t known what it was then, and he had never said, but she knew now. That was what she could expect if she lived like an animal – to die like an animal, to be hounded at every turn, to hide and starve and never know peace.

And there was another thing, perhaps more important than all that. A wolf had its pack. A fox had its mate. Would there be others of her kind to run with out in the wild? Ulrika had never been entirely comfortable alone. At home she had enjoyed the company of her father’s men and the camaraderie of patrol and watch. Even when she had left for the south as her father’s envoy she had always found someone to travel with – Felix, Max and others before them. And now, in this new existence, where nothing was familiar, and she knew none of the rules, she felt even more unwilling to be alone. She hardly knew the countess – Gabriella had plucked her from the haunted ruins of Drakenhof little more than two weeks before – but the thought of leaving her, of being without her guidance and wisdom, was paralysing. She would be lost without it. She might have her wild run in the night, but it would be short. Too soon the hunters would come, and she would die alone – alone and damned.

Quentin shifted on his stool behind her. Ulrika glanced at the hourglass. The bottom chamber was a quarter full. Her heart leapt. She was doing better. Johannes had already been dead by this time. Not that bettering a complete failure was anything to crow about.

She cursed as a fresh wave of hunger rolled over her. She had distracted herself with her thoughts for a few moments, but now the craving had returned, stronger than ever. The room was perfumed with the scent of the young knight’s blood. It throbbed with it. Red visions of carnage shot through Ulrika’s mind as she inhaled it. She saw herself in mid-leap, she saw Quentin’s stool smashing to kindling, the youth slamming to the floor, her claws tearing his doublet, her fangs sinking into his neck.

With a hiss of effort she forced herself to remain in her chair, closing her eyes and clamping her hands around the armrests until they creaked. Frozen there, as flexed as a drawn bow, she let her mind play out the rest of the scene – the guzzling, the rending, the gorging, the bloated stomach, the pounding head, the nausea, the puking, the shivering in the puddle of red vomit and undigested meat – the shame.

The shame. That was the most painful part – worse than all the physical agony. How could she, the daughter of a boyar, with all the strength of a Kislev winter bred into her bones, with the iron will of a warrior of the marches – how could a woman with such a heritage have let herself become a mindless beast, a thing that rolled in its own sick, a monster with no control over its hungers and urges? It was beneath her. It was beneath her dignity and her heritage.

Had not her father and all his march warden forbearers stood for ten generations at the very edge of the Chaos Wastes, that desert of madness and mutation, and remained untouched by it? Had they not kept their sanity and humanity when all else around them had surrendered to the siren call of carnage and corruption? Could she allow herself to dishonour their memory? Could she allow herself to give in to savagery and slaughter when they had not?