Arkhan had felt it, as he crossed the mountains and journeyed to Sylvania, though it had taken him the quiet weeks since to process those ephemeral stirrings into something approaching a conclusion. They were approaching a pivotal moment, and they were not doing so unobserved. Eyes were upon them, even here, in this place. Arkhan could feel the spirits of Chaos whispering in the spider-webbed corridors and rumbling far below the earth, and he had cast the bones and understood the signs. There were powers gathering in the dark places, old powers, no longer content to simply watch.
Time was their enemy now. And he could not allow Mannfred to cede any more ground, not if their shared goal was to be accomplished. ‘They are part of it, you see. The magics used to bind you here, like a cur in a kennel, are your own, twisted back upon you.’ He decided to sweeten his bitter draft with a bit of flattery. ‘Why else did you think it was so powerful, vampire? The living have no capacity for such magics, not on their own. You have made your own trap and you can break it, if you so desire.’
Mannfred twitched. His eyes narrowed and he asked, simply, ‘How?’
‘There is a ritual,’ Arkhan said.
‘What sort of ritual?’
‘I doubt that you would agree to it.’
‘Let me be the judge of that,’ Mannfred hissed. ‘Tell me!’
Arkhan said nothing. He scratched the cat’s chin. Mannfred’s upper lip curled back from his teeth and he glared at Arkhan furiously. Arkhan met the glare patiently. He could not force Mannfred into what needed doing, not without fear of provoking the vampire. No, the easiest way of getting a vampire to do something was to tell them not to do it. Mannfred snarled and struck the stone sill of the window with his fist, cracking it. ‘What sort of ritual, damn you? We do not have the time to play these puerile games of yours, liche.’
‘A sacrifice,’ Arkhan said. He removed the cat from his shoulder and deposited it on the table. ‘You possess nine prisoners, do you not? That is the number required for the blood ritual you enacted to seal Sylvania against threats divine and worldly, if my memory serves.’
Mannfred started visibly. ‘You know it?’ he asked.
‘I know more than you can conceive, von Carstein. All such sorceries derive from a single source, like the rivers of the Great Land. And I am most intimately acquainted with that source, if you’ll recall.’ Arkhan gave a negligent wave of his hand. ‘Sacrifice one of the ones whose blood you’ve used to anchor your rite, any one of them, and it will create a momentary breach in the wall of faith that encircles your land.’
‘Sacrifice?’ Mannfred asked. He shook his head. ‘Madness. No. No, I’ll not cripple the very protections I worked so hard to create.’
‘Then, we’d best get used to one another’s company,’ Arkhan said. ‘Because we’re going to be here for a very long time. Out of curiosity, how long can one of your kind last without blood? A few decades, I expect. After that, you’ll be too withered and shrunken to do much more than gnash your fangs fetchingly.’ He cocked his head. ‘By my calculations, your servants will have drunk this province dry within a month, at least. They glut themselves without consideration for the future, and you let them, to keep them distracted and under control.’
‘How I control my servants is my business,’ Mannfred growled.
‘Correct,’ Arkhan said, ‘I cannot force salvation upon you, von Carstein. I merely offer my aid. It is up to you to accept it, or to gnaw your liver in continued frustration. But you are correct. Time grows short. What happens in a month, or a week, when your prisoners are the only living things left in this place? How long will your control last then? How long before you face revolt from your servants, and from your own unseemly thirst? Is it not better to sacrifice one now, so that you might be free to utilise the others as you wish, unimpeded?’
Mannfred turned away. ‘Which one?’ he asked.
‘I will need to see them to answer that. I have ways of determining which of them is the least necessary for your pattern.’
‘And now we come to it,’ Mannfred snapped. ‘All your offers of aid and books are nothing more than your attempt to burrow your way into my vaults, are they not? You could not defeat me in open battle, and now you seek to trick me. You came to Sylvania to claim those items I won by my guile and strength, and to demand that I swear fealty to the broken, black soul whose cloak hem you still cling to. Well, you’ll get neither!’ Mannfred whirled and caught up the table, wrenching it up over his head in a display of monstrous strength, spilling books and the yowling corpse-cat to the floor. His lean frame swelled with inhuman muscle as his face contorted, becoming as gargoyle-hideous as that of any of his more bestial servants. ‘Nagash is not my god, liche. He does not command me!’
Arkhan looked up at the table, and then at the face of he who held it. He could see, though just barely, an enormous, ghostly shape superimposed over Mannfred’s own, and heard a rustle of sound in the depths of his own tattered spirit that might have been laughter. Mannfred’s face twisted, and Arkhan knew that the vampire heard it as well. The tableau held for a moment, two, three… And then Mannfred set the table down with more gentleness than Arkhan had expected. He seemed to deflate. The library was as cold as a crypt, and frost clung thick on the windows, as if something had sucked all of the heat from the room all at once.
‘Which are you, I wonder – servant or mask?’ Arkhan asked.
‘I am my own man,’ Mannfred grated, from between clenched fangs. He closed his eyes. ‘Nagash holds no power over me. I am merely in a foul humour and my temper is short. Forgive me.’ The excuse sounded weak to Arkhan. The defiance of a mouse, caught in the claws of a well-fed cat. Mannfred was bowing beneath the weight of another’s will, no matter how much he denied it, and he knew it too. The thing that held his soul in its talons had done so for far longer than Mannfred likely suspected, Arkhan thought. It battened upon him, like a leech, and only now had it grown strong enough to be felt.
Memories of his own life, in service to Nagash, before things went wrong, spattered across the surface of his mind, brief bursts of colour and sound that pulsed brightly and faded quickly. It had taken him years to understand the plague that was Nagash. How he infected his tools, both living and inanimate, with himself, with his mind and thoughts. He hollowed you out and took your place in your own skull, pulling the red rags of your psyche over himself like a cloak, emerging only when necessary. Mannfred had never had a chance… Vampires were the blood of Nagash. It was his essence that had transformed Neferata into the creature she now was, and from her had sprung fecund legions, whose veins ran with the black blood of the Great Necromancer. While creatures like Mannfred persisted, Nagash would never truly be gone.
Arkhan felt a pang of something that might have been sympathy for the creature before him. For all of them – puppets on the end of his master’s strings, though they knew it not. Some were more wilful than others, with longer strings, but they were still puppets, still slaves to the song of blood and the Corpse Geometries that hemmed them in.