Bloodforged (9 page)

‘Thank you, Snorri,’ she said. ‘I’m going to look for Max now. It was good to see you again.’

‘Snorri thinks it was good to see you too, Ulrika, Ivan’s daughter,’ said Snorri, pushing his coins across the counter to the barman. ‘Goodbye.’

Ulrika turned to go, then paused, shooting a look towards the mercenaries, who were laughing and miming pounding nails into one another’s heads.

‘Listen, Snorri,’ she whispered. ‘Your friends are taking advantage of you. They’re cheating you. They’re making you buy drinks for them when you shouldn’t, and probably worse besides. If I were you, I’d find other friends.’

Snorri frowned at her. ‘Ragneck wouldn’t cheat Snorri,’ he said. ‘He’s a good man. He drinks almost as much as Snorri, which is pretty good for a manling.’

Ulrika sighed, then fished in her coin purse, still bursting with stolen gold. ‘Well, you can’t say I didn’t try,’ she said, then dug out enough coins to cover Snorri’s round, and then some. She put them in the Slayer’s hand as he was reaching for the mugs. ‘Here. At least let me pay for the next one.’

Snorri beamed at the gold in his hand, then grinned at her. ‘Snorri thinks that is very nice of you.’

‘It’s nothing,’ said Ulrika. ‘Goodbye, Snorri. And good luck. I hope you find your doom soon.’ And before those villains rob you completely blind, she added to herself.

‘Goodbye,’ said Snorri as she turned to go. ‘And good luck to you too.’

It was much too late for that, Ulrika thought. Her luck had died in Sylvania, at the same moment she had. She pushed through the crowd to the door, then stepped out into the cold night.

As she turned towards the Noble Quarter, her hunger tugged at her again, like an eager dog straining at its leash, but she again pulled it to heel. She had to find Max first. She had to know. Everything else could wait.

The house with seven towers was harder to find than Ulrika expected. Towers were all the rage amongst the rich of Praag at the moment, and no mansion was complete without a handful of unlikely spires and cupolas poking from the roof, and as Snorri had said, none were even remotely practical. They served only as pedestals for glittering, mosaic-covered, onion-shaped domes of every size, colour and description.

Finally, after prowling all the streets in the vicinity of Miska’s statue and counting the towers of every house, she had found one that had seven, and also looked as if it might house sorcerous occupants. There were dwarf runes set into the walls protecting the grounds, and she could see strange sigils and symbols ringing the tops of all the towers. Extending her senses, she could detect invisible barriers overlapping every wall. They didn’t feel very strong, but she was certain pushing against them would be enough to alert the dwellers within.

Ulrika briefly considered just brazenly knocking on the front door and inquiring if Magister Schreiber was at home, but quickly dismissed the notion. For one thing, it was long past midnight now, and even though some lights still burned in the upper floors, it was much too late to make a polite call. For another, she had no idea who Max was staying with. A wizard of some kind, almost certainly, but she had no way of knowing their temperament or abilities. Would they sense what she was? Would they attack her instantly because of it? She had no interest in finding out.

She sighed. She needed to get Max alone. She knew he was even-tempered enough to at least listen to her before he made any kind of decision about her. He had agreed, after all, to allow Countess Gabriella to take care of her. It would be wisest for her to come back the next night and wait for him to come out, but she was impatient. She wanted to know what had happened to Felix. She wanted to see somebody she cared for. She wanted some part of her arrival in Praag to go the way she had thought it would. Maybe she could work out which room was his and get his attention somehow. Would a thrown pebble wake the wards?

A watch patrol appeared at the end of the street, and she melted into the shadows as they trudged by, then stepped back out when they had passed, and raised herself on her toes, trying to see over the walls of the mansion into the windows. Most were curtained, and those that were not held nothing of interest. Even the lit one showed nothing but the corner of an armoire and a bit of table. Perhaps around the back.

She circled the block, looking for the back of the property. It butted up against another mansion that fronted the next street over, but fortunately that house had no wards, and she leapt the gate and padded around to the back garden without raising any alarms. The rear of the sorcerous house was very close to the shared garden wall, and the windows were tantalisingly near. One, high up, glowed with warm light.

The garden wall was warded, of course, but there was a tall tree on Ulrika’s side of it. She shot out her claws and climbed it like a cat until she was level with the window, then edged out on a branch and crouched down. Through the glass she could see a beautifully appointed bedroom, done in dark woods, with white draperies and alabaster vases set upon intricately carved ebony dressers and, half-hidden behind the window frame, the curtains and posts of a canopied bed, a candle burning on the bedside table.

She was about to hop to another branch to get a different angle on the room when a pale figure in a robe of ice-blue silk stepped into view. Ulrika stopped and watched. It was a woman of perhaps forty years of age – tall, slender and beautiful, with a regal bearing and skin so white Ulrika might have thought her another vampire, but for the fact that she could sense the heart-fire pulsing in her breast. She could also sense the woman’s power. It was her magic that guarded the house, a cold crystalline energy that seemed to well up from the ground like hoarfrost.

The woman untied her gown and let it slip from her shoulders, exposing a slim, exquisite body, then stepped to the bed and pulled aside the curtain. A naked man lay on his side within the canopy. He rolled over, blinking sleepily, then opened his arms to her and smiled.

It was Max Schreiber.

CHAPTER TEN

SONGS OF HOME

Ulrika stared as the pale woman sank into Max’s arms and kissed him deeply. His hands slid down her back to grip her waist, then the curtain fell closed again and they vanished from sight.

Quivers of rage made Ulrika’s arms shake, and her claws dug deep into the bark of her branch. A growl started low in her throat and she crouched forwards like a hunting cat. How dare he take another lover! Hadn’t she come a thousand miles to see him? Hadn’t she run away from a life of luxury to be with him? And this was how he repaid her? She wanted to tear him apart. She wanted to tear both of them apart. She would leap through the window in a shower of glass and rip them limb from limb! She knew there were wards on the house. She didn’t care. As angry as she was, she would tear through them like they were mist, and strike before either Max or the woman could prepare incantations.

She tensed to spring, the muscles bunching in her legs, but then a small voice inside her head laughed at her and told her she was being ridiculous. What did she have to be jealous about? She and Max had never been lovers – at least she had no memory of it. It was possible they might have been, given time, but Adolphus Krieger had intervened and stolen her away.

Ulrika tried to ignore the voice. Perhaps they never consummated their love, but she had been in love with Max, and he with she. She knew it! And it had only been four months. Had he got over her so quickly?

Max had remained true longer than she had, sneered the voice. Hadn’t she given herself to Krieger not two weeks after he had kidnapped her?

Yes, but Krieger had used his unnatural charisma to weaken her will, Ulrika argued. She hadn’t been herself.

Oh? And what was her excuse with Friedrich Holmann? He hadn’t seduced her. Just the opposite in fact. She hadn’t spared many thoughts for Max then, had she? He hadn’t even entered her mind. And what did she expect, anyway? Max knew she had become a vampire. Did she truly think he would pine away for her for the rest of his life – a woman he would never see again, and could never have?

Ulrika’s cat crouch collapsed and she hung her head. The faint notes of a far-off violin came to her on the wind. It seemed to be laughing at her. She agreed with it. She was a fool. Why had she come? Every reason she’d had, every hope for what Praag would give her, had crumbled to dust as soon as she looked at it. The hordes weren’t coming, her homeland wasn’t in danger, Felix was lost, perhaps dead, and Max had moved on. There was nothing for her here, not even her father’s grave, for he had been burned on a pyre in Sylvania.

She flopped back against the trunk of the tree, hollow and lost. Praag was to have given her a purpose, something to do for the endless years of her eternity. What would she do with them now? She had no friends – nowhere she fit. She couldn’t live among humans, and couldn’t stand to live among vampires. What would she do? Where would she go?

A muffled cry of ecstasy and a billow of the curtains of the canopy bed made her look through the window again, then away. With a sigh, she climbed down the tree. She might not know where she wanted to go, but she knew she didn’t want to stay here. She couldn’t bear it.

Ulrika wandered aimlessly after that, her mind numb and listless. She was too lost to think, too glum to face her dilemma. Not even hunger could pierce her mood. She took streets at random, drifting through clusters of refugees and beggars and drunks like a ghost – unseen, unseeing, and untouched by the misery and madness around her. She walked past a clutch of poets who, for only a pulo, would write a poem of mourning for one’s relatives lost in the war. She walked past an entire company of soldiers, armed to the teeth, who were descending, one by one, down a hole into the sewers, while corpsmen were winching dead soldiers up out of the same hole and laying them in neat piles on the street. She walked past the Opera House with its statues and its scars, and around the barricades that walled off the Sorcerers’ Spire, the huge destroyed tower which had once been home to Praag’s college of magic, and which was sometimes known as the Fire Spire because of the huge explosion that had destroyed its upper reaches during the Great War.

Stepping out of the tower’s long moonshadow, she crossed the Karlsbridge over the River Lynsk into the western half of the city, skirting the enormous park that the long ago rulers of Praag had dedicated to Magnus the Pious after his victory over Asavar Kul, and into the area of shabby, garreted tenements and cheap taverns that surrounded Praag’s famed Academy of Music and its College of Art, both of which were situated in the north-west corner of the park.

The streets in the student area were narrow and winding, and emptier than those of the Merchant Quarter. Many of the taverns were boarded up, as were quite a few of the shops that sold or repaired instruments or printed sheet music. Their walls were crudely painted with ‘out of business’ and ‘temporarily closed’ signs. But though the streets might be deserted, the air was still filled with music. It spilled from the few taverns that remained open, it shrilled from the tin whistles of beggars squatting in the shadows and it murmured from the throats of watchmen making their lonely rounds.

Ulrika was too trapped in the bleak whirlpool of her thoughts to pay attention to this cacophony. Should she stay in Praag? Should she go to some other city? Should she go back to Gabriella? She couldn’t. She had sworn she wouldn’t. But what else was there? Should she go looking for Felix? Where would she start? And what if she found he had moved on to someone else, as Max had? Would she kill him? Kill herself? She didn’t know.

Then a voice pierced the darkness – a girl’s voice, high and clear, singing softly in the distance. At first Ulrika paid it no more mind than any of the other music that assaulted her, but then the melody caught her ear. It was a song the peasants on her father’s estate used to sing in the evenings – a sad old Ungol folk ballad about a boy who went to war and a girl who stayed behind.

Ulrika paused, turning her head to hear better. She remembered old Anatai, her father’s cook, singing the same song as she shuffled around the kitchen, preparing the evening meal. She remembered a wounded young horse soldier singing it at the campfire after a deadly battle against trolls. She remembered singing it herself as she left her father’s lands to travel to the Empire for the first time. She swallowed. The song tugged at her like it had reached into her chest and wrapped fingers around her heart.

As if of their own volition, her feet started in the direction of the song, turning corners and crossing streets until she came at last to a run-down kvas parlour in the middle of a block. Its sign was a blue jug hung from a string over the door, and despite the bitter cold of the early spring night, Kossar soldiers in fur hats and fingerless gloves sat outside it on three-legged stools, drinking from little clay cups.

Ulrika squeezed past them and ducked under the low door. Inside was a big square room with trestle tables all around. It was nearly as deserted as the streets outside. A few old men slouched at the bar, and a few robed students and tawdry women huddled at the tables, but that was all.

Ulrika didn’t give them a second glance. Her whole attention was taken by the source of the voice, a slight, olive-skinned figure that sat on a bench on the stage, an old balalaika in her lap. She was a striking young girl, with the thick dark hair and almond eyes of an Ungol, and the straight nose and high cheekbones of a Gospodar – a beautiful half-breed. Her clothes were old, and oft mended, but clean and seemly – the clothes of a farm girl – though Ulrika doubted she had ever done much farm work for, from the way the singer held her head as she sang, she was certain the girl was blind.

She brought the song to an end with a last high quavering note, and there was appreciative applause from the students and their women, as well as a few gruff salutes from the old men at the bar. Some of the students tossed coins into the balalaika case that sat open at the blind girl’s feet, and she bowed her head appreciatively as she heard the coins clink against one another.

‘Thank you, masters,’ she said, in a strong north country accent, and then began another song.

Ulrika knew this one too. Her mother had sung it often before she died, and it had made her father cry ever after when anyone else sang it – a tale of a young bride called from her marriage bed by something in the woods and never heard from again, though her bridegroom searched all his life.

Ulrika found a table in the shadows, far from the other patrons, and listened as the girl sang ballad after ballad in her pure sweet voice. The songs hurt to hear. Each one was a knife in the heart, but Ulrika couldn’t stop. The pain was terrible, but the memories that spilled from the wounds were exquisite, and well worth the agony – sitting on her father’s lap in the big dining hall as the musicians played a wild reel and the peasants danced their complex circles, being sung to sleep by her mother after a nightmare, riding out with the lancers when she was barely big enough to sit on a horse, and singing along in her squeaky little voice as they bellowed out a marching song, kissing Yusin, the farrier’s boy, behind the forge as his father whistled a tune in time to the clanging of his hammer, dancing with Felix before he went off to the Wastes with his dwarfen companions, reuniting with her father after the siege of Praag as the streets rang with songs of victory.

The songs were a bright window to a world she could never return to, a world closed to her by a poisoned kiss. It had never been a perfect world. The shadows of death and destruction had loomed over it since her birth – constant companions to any child born so near the madness of Chaos – but still it was a world that had allowed for hope, for sunshine and love and family and true companionship. Now her world was darkness without hope of light, love was a blood-sport, her family were backstabbing intriguers, true companionship seemed impossible, and it would last for all eternity. The longing to step through the window to her old life was so strong she felt her dead heart might burst from her body and vanish into the songs. If she could have cried, she would have, but tears were another thing her new world was without.

It was therefore something of a relief when the girl took a short break to have something to eat and drink. Ulrika too was feeling hungry, the urge to feed she had put off for so long returning stronger than ever, but she could not leave before the girl finished singing. If she sang until dawn Ulrika would gladly walk out into the sunrise and die content, so she forced her hunger back into its cage and looked around for something to take her mind off it until the girl resumed.

Near her, some of the students were arguing over their kvas about the singer.

‘You’re mad,’ said one with a scruffy beard. ‘Training would ruin her. She’s a pure talent, as wild and free as a horse of the oblast. If you tamed her, she would be just another Opera House donkey.’

‘But she can barely play,’ said a round-faced one with a tiny hashmark moustache. ‘Her singing’s lovely, but she’s clamming one note in five.’

‘You want to take away her charm – her passion,’ said the first. ‘You’ll make her like Valtarin. Look what happened to him when old Padurowski took him under his wing.’

‘He got better,’ snapped his friend.

‘Better? Aye, he’s the finest violinist in Praag now, but all his heart is gone. His playing is all just technique and posturing. It’s like he’s lost his soul.’

The round-faced boy laughed. ‘I’d part with my soul too, if I could play like that.’

‘That would assume you had one to part with in the first place,’ sniffed the scruffy boy.

After that their conversation dissolved into friendly name-calling and Ulrika became more interested in the pulse in their necks than their words. Perhaps she would have to feed now after all, but just then the blind girl returned to the stage, a small boy guiding her by the arm, and Ulrika’s hunger faded as she once again sat down to play.

Ulrika let herself drift back into memory on the wings of the songs, forgetting her despair as they called up images of the broad plains and vast painted skies of her youth, of riding and hunting on snowy mornings, of wheat fields and pastures on golden afternoons, of sunsets never to be seen again.

Her reverie was momentarily disturbed as three toughs came in through the back door and leered at the blind girl as they passed the stage, and then again a little later when raised voices came from the bar and she saw the same men were arguing with the barkeep.

‘Please, Shanski. Business is still slow,’ he was saying. ‘The Academy is barely open since the siege. So many young men gone to fight and not come back.’

‘Your lack of business is not our business, Basilovich,’ the leader of the toughs replied. He was a short, heavy-set gangster with rings on every finger. ‘Now pay up.’

Ulrika glared at them for a moment, wanting to tell them to be quiet, then returned her attention to the singer and they were forgotten again.

The girl was singing a soft old ballad about Mother Miska saying goodbye to her children and riding off into the north to her destiny. Ulrika knew it from the womb, and was mouthing the words along with her, when the gangsters intruded again. As they filed out the back door, the leader, the one the barman had called Shanski, stopped beside the stage, grinning and making rude gestures at the blind girl. She of course saw nothing and continued to sing, but Ulrika growled in her throat. What an ass.