No, that wasn’t true. There was one thing. He lifted his wrist to his lips. He opened his mouth, exposing long, curved fangs and readied himself to plunge them into his wrist.
He paused when he saw that Obald was watching him. Blood and spittle clung like pearlescent webs to the old man’s beard. He smiled, revealing a mouthful of rotting teeth. Obald patted him on the cheek. ‘No need to bloody yourself, Erikan. My old carcass wouldn’t survive it, anyway.’
Erikan lowered his arm. Obald lay back on the travois. ‘You were a good friend, Erikan. For a ravenous, untrustworthy nocturnal fiend, I mean,’ the necromancer wheezed. ‘But as the rain enters the soil, and the river enters the sea, so do all things come to their final end.’
‘Strigany proverbs,’ Erikan muttered. ‘Now I know that you’re dying.’ He sat back on his heels and watched the last link to his mortal life struggle for breath. ‘You don’t have to, you know. You’re just being stubborn and spiteful.’
‘I’ve been stubborn and spiteful my whole sorry life, boy,’ Obald croaked. ‘I’ve fought and raged and run for more years than you. I saw Kemmler’s rise and fall, I saw Mousillon in all of its pox-ridden glory and I visited the secret ruins of Morgheim, where the Strigoi dance and howl.’ The old man’s eyes went vacant. ‘I fought and fought and fought, and now I think maybe I am done fighting.’ His trembling, wrinkled fingers found Erikan’s wrist. ‘That’s the smart choice, I think, given what’s coming.’ His glazed eyes sought out Erikan’s face. ‘Always get out before the rush, that’s my advice.’ His voice was barely a whisper. Erikan leaned close.
‘I miss my pigs,’ Obald said. Then, with a soft grunt, his face went slack, and whatever dark force had inhabited him fled into the crawling sky above. Erikan stared down at him. He’d been hoping that the old man would make it to Sylvania. After leaving Couronne, they’d learned that the other survivors were going there, drawn by some bleak impetus to travel across the mountains. There were stories of walls of bone and an independent state of the dead, ruled by the aristocracy of the night. They’d even heard a rumour that Arkhan’s forces were heading that way.
It was the beginning of something, Erikan thought. Obald had mocked the idea, in between coughing fits, but Erikan could feel it in the black, sour hollow of his bones. There was smoke on the air and blood in the water, and the wind carried the promise of death. It was everything he’d dreamed of, since his parents had gone screaming to the flames, the taste of corpses still on their tongues. He’d seen a spark of it when Obald had rescued him then, flaying his captors with dark magics. In those black flames, which had stripped meat from bone as easily as a butcher’s knife, Erikan had seen the ruination of all things. The end of all pain and hunger and strife.
And now, that dream was coming true: the world was dying, and Erikan Crowfiend intended to be in at the end. But, he’d been hoping that Obald would be by his side. Didn’t the old man deserve that much, at least? Instead, he was just another corpse.
At least he was free, while Erikan was still a captive of the world.
Erikan carelessly pried the old man’s fingers off his wrist and stood. He dropped his hand to the pommel of his blade and said, casually, ‘He’s dead.’
‘I know,’ a woman’s voice replied. ‘He should have died years ago. He would have, if you hadn’t been wasting your time keeping his wrinkled old cadaver from getting the chop.’
‘He raised me. He took me in, when anyone else would have burned me with the rest of my kin, for the crime of survival,’ Erikan said. His hand tightened on the hilt of his blade and he drew it smoothly as he whirled to face the newcomer. ‘He helped me become the man I am today.’
In the sickly light of the moon, her pale flesh seemed to glow with an eerie radiance. She wore baroque black armour edged in gold over red silk. The hue of the silk matched her fiery tresses, which had been piled atop her head in a style three centuries out of fashion. Eyes like agates met his own as she reached out and gently pushed aside his sword. ‘I rather thought that I had some part in that as well, Erikan.’
He lowered his sword. ‘Why are you here, Elize?’
‘For the same reason as you, I imagine.’
Erikan stabbed his blade down into the loamy earth and set his palms on the crosspiece. ‘Sylvania,’ he said, simply.
Elize von Carstein inclined her head. A crimson tress slipped free of the mass atop her head and dangled in her face, until she blew it aside. He felt a rush of desire but forced it down. Those days were done and buried. ‘I felt the summons.’ She looked up at the moon. ‘The black bell of Sternieste is tolling and the Templars of the Order of Drakenhof are called to war.’
Erikan looked down at the pommel of his blade, and the red bat, rampant, that was carved there. It was the symbol of the von Carsteins, and of the Drakenhof Templars. He covered it with his hand. ‘And who are we going to war with?’
Elize smiled sadly and said, ‘Everyone. Come, I have an extra horse.’
‘Did you bring it for me?’
Elize didn’t answer. Erikan followed her. He left Obald’s body where it lay, to whatever fate awaited it. The old man’s cankerous spirit was gone. His body was just so much cooling meat now, and Erikan had long since lost his taste for such rancid leavings.
‘Are we all gathering, then?’ Erikan asked, as he followed her through the trees, towards a quiet copse where two black horses waited, red-eyed and impatiently pawing at the earth. Deathless, breathless and remorseless, the horses from the stables of Castle Drakenhof were unmatched by any steed in the known world, save possibly for the stallions of far Ulthuan. He took the bridle of the one she indicated and stroked it, murmuring wordlessly. He’d always had a way with beasts, even after he’d been reborn. He’d kept company with the great shaggy wolves that Obald had pulled from their forest graves, leading them on moonlit hunts. The day Obald had taught him how to call up the beasts himself was the closest he had ever come to true happiness, he thought.
‘All who still persist, and keep to their oath,’ Elize said. ‘I arrived with several of the others. We decided to journey together.’
‘Why?’ Erikan asked.
‘Why wouldn’t we?’ Elize asked, after a moment, as she climbed into her saddle. ‘Is it not meet that the inner circle do so? I saw your trail, and decided to see if you were interested in joining us. You are one of us, after all.’
‘I don’t recall you asking me whether I wished to be,’ he said, softly. Elize kicked her horse into motion and galloped away. Erikan hesitated, and then climbed up into his own saddle and set off after her. As he rode, he couldn’t help but muse that it had always been thus. Elize called and he came. He watched her ride, her slim form bent low over her mount’s neck, her armour glinting dully in the moonlight. She was beautiful and terrible and inexorable, like death given a woman’s shape. There were worse ways to spend eternity, he supposed.
She led him into the high barrows and scrub trees that populated the hills and valleys west of the border with Stirland. Ruins of all sorts dotted the area, the legacy of centuries of warfare. Shattered windmills and slumping manses towered over the gutted remains of border forts and isolated farmsteads. Some were more recent than others, but all had suffered the same fate. This was the no-man’s-land between the provinces of the living and the dead, and nothing of the former survived here for long.
As they left the trees and the fog that had clung to them, he hauled back on the reins of his horse, startled by the sight of the distant edifice of bone, which rose high up into the sky, towering over the area. It was far larger than the rumours he’d heard had intimated. It was less fortress rampart than newborn mountain range. Only the largest of giants would have had a chance of clambering over it. ‘Nagash’s teeth,’ he hissed. ‘I’d heard he’d done it, but I never expected it to be true.’ The sense of finality he’d had before, of endings and final days, came back stronger than ever. Sylvania had always seemed unchanging. A gangrenous wound that never healed, but never grew any worse. But now, now it was finally ready to kill. He wanted to laugh and howl at the same time, but he restrained himself.