Run, she screamed.
Volkmar ran, and the dead world pursued him. And as his limbs failed, and his blood pounded in his ears, and the rattle of bones grew thunderous in his ears, he grasped at her words, her voice, grabbing for any shred of salvation, of hope, and, as all of the dead of Altdorf heaved beneath him, the Grand Theogonist woke up.
Volkmar’s eyes sprang open, and he sucked in a lungful of stale, damp air. He shuddered and twitched, unable to control his limbs. His heels drummed on the stone floor, and his palms flapped uselessly against his battered cuirass. He moaned and tried to roll over, but the manacles about his wrists prevented it. He was forced to squirm about and haul himself up into a sitting position. His body ached, much as it had in his dream. He coughed, trying to clear his throat, and looked around blearily.
‘Still alive, my friend?’ someone asked. Volkmar peered through the gloom, and caught sight of golden armour gleaming still beneath a layer of filth. He struggled to recall the Tilean’s name, through the mugginess of his aborted sleep.
‘If you can call it living,’ Volkmar coughed. His throat was parched and drier than the deserts of Araby. He squinted at the knight. ‘You’ve looked better, Blaze.’
Lupio Blaze, Templar of the Order of the Blazing Sun, laughed shallowly. ‘As have we all,’ he said, rattling his chains. His once-handsome features had been bludgeoned into a shapeless mass of dried blood and bruises, but his eyes were still bright, and his torn lips still quirked in a smile. ‘Still, it could be worse. It could be raining.’
Overhead, thunder rumbled. The soft plop of water was replaced by the steady downbeat of falling rain. Blaze laughed again, and craned himself backwards, so that his head and torso was caught in the downpour. ‘You see, Olf? I say that the gods still watch over us, eh?’ Blaze called out, gulping at the rainwater. He made a cup of his hands, and caught a handful of the rain. Then he kicked the legs of the figure chained next to him. ‘Up, Olf, have a drink, on me,’ he said, pouring the handful of water into the cupped hands of the burly Ulrican priest who was chained to the lectern next to his.
Olf Doggert eagerly slurped the water, and then grudgingly passed the next handful of water to the next prisoner in line, the pinch-faced young priest of Morr, Mordecaul Cadavion. Cadavion drank his share and passed along the next handful, emptying his cupped hands into those of the wan-faced matron named Elspeth Farrier, a priestess of Shallya. Volkmar turned his attention to the figure of the man chained beside her. Wild haired and raggedly dressed even before their captivity, Russett, blessed of Taal looked like a living corpse now. He hadn’t eaten in days, and he’d barely drunk anything. His flesh was mottled with bruises where he’d thrown himself at the walls, and bloody marks chafed his wrists where he continually yanked on his chains. One of his ankles had been gnawed to the bone, not by any of Mannfred’s beasts, but by the man himself in an attempt to get free of an earlier set of chains.
The nature priest had suffered more physically in captivity than any of them, save Volkmar and Sindst, the sour-faced priest of Ranald, who’d lost a hand and several chunks of his flesh on their journey across Vargravia in Mannfred’s bone cage. Russett crouched, wrapped in chains and silently rocking back and forth. Like an animal that had been caged too long, he had gone quietly mad. Now he stared at the cockroaches and rats that shared their prison, as if trying to communicate with them. But whatever esoteric abilities Taal had granted him were not in evidence, not in Sylvania. The voices of the gods, ever faint, might as well have been the only fevered imaginings of a flagellant, for all that they reached their servants here, Volkmar reflected.
He watched Elspeth help Sindst drink. He slurped greedily at the water in her hands, and nodded weary thanks when he’d finished. Volkmar looked around. After Mannfred’s last visit, they had been moved from the walls to the lecterns, and had their chains shortened. The reason hadn’t been shared, but Volkmar suspected that it was another of Mannfred’s demented games. He knew that the vampire enjoyed their futile escape attempts, just as he knew that they couldn’t stop trying. Wounded, exhausted and filthy as they were, none of them were yet ready to give up, save perhaps for poor Russett and the Bretonnian, Morgiana, whose mind and soul had been taken by Mannfred long before they had met her. She belonged to von Carstein now. She murmured to herself in the far corner of the room, unchained, but unmoving. She lay on her side on the cold stone, and stroked the floor as if it were a beloved pet, whispering constantly to it. He caught a flash of a delicate fang as she muttered, and looked away, sickened by what she had become.
Volkmar caught Elspeth’s eye, and the Shallyan priestess shook her head slightly. Volkmar sighed and winced, as the wound on his head split and began to leak blood and pus. He reached for it, but Elspeth hissed, ‘Don’t touch it. It’s having enough trouble healing without you picking at it.’
‘I don’t think it’s ever going to heal, sister,’ Volkmar said. ‘Mannfred won’t give us that time.’ He looked around. ‘You can all feel it, can’t you? That heaviness in the air? We’re in the eye of a storm, and one that Mannfred wants to unleash on the rest of the world. He needs us for that.’
‘Otherwise why keep us alive, right?’ Sindst muttered, hugging his wrist-stump to his chest. ‘We know all of this, old man. That’s why we keep trying to escape. Badly, I might add,’ he spat, glaring at Blaze and Olf.
‘Keep talking, sneak-thief,’ Olf growled. ‘Seems to me, if Mannfred needs you alive, I’d be doing us all a favour by wringing your scrawny neck.’
‘Do as you will, brute,’ Sindst said, tonelessly. ‘We’re not getting out of here upright, none of us. We’re all dead, even the pointy-eared witch over there.’ He motioned with his stump to the elf maiden.
Volkmar looked at the elf. He pushed himself to his feet and moved as close as he could to the lectern where she was chained. Her eyes were closed, as they had been for the entirety of their brief, inhospitable association. Volkmar gathered water from Elspeth, and got as close to the elf woman as he could. ‘Drink, my lady,’ he croaked. ‘You must drink.’
Her eyes flickered open. Volkmar realised that she was blind, and felt his heart twist in his chest. ‘Aliathra,’ she murmured. Volkmar blinked. He recognised her voice instantly as the same one he’d heard in his dream, urging him to run. A weak smile flickered across her face and was gone. She leaned forward, and he held his hands out. She reached up and took his hands in hers and bent her face. She drank deeply, and sat back, frowning. ‘Tainted water from tainted skies,’ she said. ‘It tastes of his sorcery.’
‘Funny, I thought it tasted of smoke, maybe with a hint of a Sartosan red?’ Sindst said.
‘Quiet,’ Elspeth said sharply. ‘That’s quite enough out of you, servant of Ranald. If you can’t be of use–’
Sindst’s manacle clattered to the floor. He stretched his good arm and Volkmar saw a twist of metal sticking from the raw stump of his other wrist, poking through the filthy bandages. He grinned in a sickly fashion and said, ‘It took a while. I had to hide it where the flesh-eaters wouldn’t sniff it out. And wait for the flying fang-brothers to go wherever such creatures go when they’re not watching us,’ he added, referring to the two vargheists that Mannfred had left to guard them.
He heaved himself up and began to free the others. ‘This is useless, you know,’ he said, as he worked on Volkmar’s manacles. ‘We’re all dying by inches – no food, no water, no weapons, sick, hurt and bled dry thanks to Mannfred and his cursed spell. We won’t get far.’
‘Then why bother?’ Volkmar asked, looking up at him.