‘But not unwelcome,’ Elize said. She drifted towards Anark, and rubbed a spot of blood from his cheek. ‘Tomas was a fool, and we all know it. His end has been a century in coming, and I, for one, am glad that we do not have to put up with him longer than was absolutely necessary. If we are trapped here, then Mannfred is our best chance of escape. And besides, Tomas had no concept of honour or loyalty. Anark will make a better Grand Master, I think.’
Anark grinned and ran his hand along his blade, stripping Tomas’s blood from it. ‘Unless someone objects?’ He looked at Erikan as he spoke. ‘Well, Crowfiend?’
Erikan didn’t rise to the bait. ‘I wasn’t under the assumption that we had been given a vote.’ He inclined his head. ‘Long live the new Grand Master.’ The others followed suit, murmuring their congratulations.
Alberacht even looked as if he meant it.
THREE
Mannfred strode through the damp, cool corridors of Sternieste, trying to rein in the anger that had threatened to overwhelm him for days now. The hunched shapes of his servants scurried out of his path as he walked, but he gave them little notice.
Gelt’s barrier of faith still resisted every attempt to shatter it. He had wrung his library dry of magics, and had made not the slightest bit of difference. Soon enough, once the northern invasion had been thrown back, as they always, inevitably were, Karl Franz would turn his attentions back to the festering boil on the backside of his pitiful empire and lance it once and for all. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to go. It might take centuries, or millions of lives, but Mannfred had studied the Emperor for a decade, and he knew that there was no more ruthless a man in the world, save himself. Karl Franz would happily sacrifice Ostland and Stirland, if it meant scouring Sylvania from the map.
Mannfred wanted to scream, to rant and rave, to succumb to the red thirst and rampage through some village somewhere. Everything he had worked for, everything he had conquered death for, was coming apart in his hands before he’d even begun, leaving him still in Vlad’s shadow. Tomas had scored a palpable hit with that painful truth, before Mannfred had dealt with him. That the blow was not physical made it no less painful, nor any less lingering. Most of his followers knew better than to question him, either out of fear or because they lacked the wit to see the trap for what it was. In a way, the preponderance of the latter was his own fault. He had eliminated most, if not all, of his rivals amongst the aristocracy of the night. Vlad had bestowed the gift of immortality as a reward, without much thought as to the consequences, and Konrad had been even more profligate, turning dockside doxies, common mercenaries and, in one unfortunate incident that was best forgotten, a resident of the Moot.
Mannfred had dealt with all of them, hunting them down one by one over the centuries since his resurrection from the swamps of Hel Fenn. Any vampire of the von Carstein bloodline who would not serve him, or was of no use to him, he destroyed, even as he had destroyed Tomas. Most of Vlad’s get had been swept off the board at the outset. Tomas and the other members of the inner circle of the Drakenhof Templars were among the last of them, and with Tomas’s death, Mannfred thought that they were sufficiently cowed. Elize was more pragmatic than the others, and could be counted on to keep them under control. At least in so far as monsters like Nictus, or weasels like Markos, could be controlled.
He reached up and ran both hands over his shorn scalp. He wondered if, when all was said and done, he would finally be free of Vlad’s ghost. When he had finally broken the world’s spine and supped on its life’s blood, would that nagging, mocking shade depart.
No. No, I think not, Vlad’s voice whispered. Mannfred neither paused, nor responded. The voice was only in his head. It was only a trick of long, wasted centuries, some self-defeating urge that he could ignore. Am I though? Or am I really here with you still, my best beloved son? the voice murmured. Mannfred ground his teeth.
‘No, you are not,’ he hissed.
The voice faded, leaving only the echo of a ghostly chuckle to mark its passing. Mannfred hated that chuckle. It had always been Vlad’s signal that he was missing something that the latter thought obvious. And perhaps he was. But he had weighty matters on his mind at the moment. Most notably that his demesnes were already subject to invasion, albeit not a large one, and not one initiated by the Empire. But it was still enough to give Mannfred pause. His nascent realm had already suffered attack once, by a horde of daemons. Those had been easy enough to see off, but this new threat was proving to be more persistent. He’d sent out wolves and bats to shadow the intruder’s approach, but every time the beasts came closer to the newcomer, Mannfred’s control over them had slipped away. That could only mean that the invader was another master of the Corpse Geometries, and one unlike the other wretched creatures that had thus far made it across the border.
Whoever it was had made no attempt to either openly challenge or offer fealty to the lord of Sylvania. Mannfred had at first suspected that it was the self-styled Lichemaster, Heinrich Kemmler, who’d been his ally for an all-too-brief moment, before he’d chafed beneath the goad and taken his leave of Mannfred’s court, his hulking undead bodyguard Krell following behind him. Mannfred had kept tabs on the necromancer, and the last he’d heard the lunatic sorcerer had raised an army of the dead to lay siege to Castle Reikguard, for reasons fathomable only to him.
But the intruder’s aura, the taste of his power, was different from Kemmler’s. It was older, for one thing, with its roots sunk deep in disciplines that had existed for millennia. And it was greater, possibly even a match for Mannfred’s own. There were few creatures who could wield such power so negligently – that wretched creature Zacharias the Ever-Living for one, or that perfumed dolt Dietrich von Dohl, the so-called Crimson Lord of Sylvania. And this newcomer was neither.
Which left only one possibility.
Mannfred forced down the anger as it threatened to surge again. If the intruder was who he suspected, he would need all of his faculties to deal with him in the manner he deserved. But before he marshalled his energies for such a conflict, he would need to be certain. Time was at a premium, and he could not afford to waste his carefully husbanded strength battling shadows. That said, the thought of such a conflict did not displease Mannfred. Indeed, after the weeks of frustration he had endured, such a confrontation was an almost welcome diversion. To be free at last to strive and destroy would be a great relief to him.
The loud, raucous communal croak of a number of carrion birds let him know he’d reached his destination, and he quickly assumed a mask of genteel calm. It wouldn’t do to show any weakness, emotional or otherwise, to a creature like the Crowfiend. He’d asked Elize’s creature to meet him in the castle’s high garden. There were things Mannfred needed to ask him, to lend weight to or dismiss those theories now burgeoning in his mind.
A brace of skeletons, clad in bronze cuirasses and holding bronze-headed, long-hafted axes, guarded the entrance to the open-air, walled garden. He stepped past them, and as he entered the garden, a flock of black-feathered birds leapt skywards, screaming in indignation. He watched them swoop and wheel for a moment. Vlad had always felt a ghastly affection for the beasts. Mannfred had never understood how a creature as powerful as Vlad could waste his attentions feeding sweetmeats to such vermin, when there were more important matters to be attended to.