Kuradek strolled across the clearing, and a cool wind blew in as the world was restored to normality, as blood-oil magick eased from the mountains like a backdoor thief slinking into the night. Kuradek climbed up a rocky wall, his thin limbs and talons scarring the rock. Pebbles rattled down in the wake of his climb. Then he stood, on a narrow pinnacle of iced slate, and gazed out over Silva Valley, once home to the vachine civilisation, now flooded, thousands of vachine drowned to seal the magick that would return the Vampire Warlords to the mortal realm.
Shortly, his brothers joined him, and the three tall, spindly creatures, their shapes a mockery of human physiology, their flesh constantly shifting in chameleonic phases of smoke and symbols, stood tall and proud and surveyed the world like newborns.
"The vachine are dead," said Kuradek.
"Mostly," observed Meshwar.
"Those that live need to be hunted," said Bhu Vanesh, a smoke tongue like a rattlesnake's tail licking over black fangs. He anticipated the hunt in all things. It was what gave his existence simple meaning.
"Not yet," said Kuradek. "We are new again to this world. We are weak from escape and birth. We need strength. We need to build the vampire clans. Like ancient times, my friends. Like the bad old days."
"Suggestions?" Meshwar turned to Kuradek, narrow red eyes glowing with malevolence.
"I remember this country," said Kuradek, looking back over hundreds of years, his mind dizzy with the passage of time, coalescing with images of so many people and places and murders. "This is the homeland of the Ankarok."
Bhu Vanesh made a low, hissing sound.
"They were imprisoned," said Meshwar. "Just as we."
"Yes. We must watch. Be careful. But until then, I feel a stench in the air. It is an unclear stench. It is the stench of people, of men and women and children, meat, unhealthy and unclean, with no pride or power or natural dignity. We must separate, my brothers, we must head out into the world and," he licked his black fangs, eyes glinting by the light of the innocent moon, "we must repopulate."
"So we go to war?" said Meshwar, and his voice held excitement, anticipation and… something else. It took little for Meshwar to become aroused.
"Yes. War. Against all those deviants, lacking in vampire purity!"
CHAPTER 1
Events were a blur for Saark, the rich dandy, the flamboyant womaniser, for all that interested him in life was fine wine and raucous sex, silver platters of finely carved pig-meat, juicy eyeballs soaked in thin apple sauce from the figarall fish caught in iron traps under the Salarl Ocean. He was obsessed with pleasure, with joy, his own unstoppable and unquenchable lust; Saark was a hedonist, a narcissist, a nihilist, and unashamed of his open succulent fire. And yet now, now it was a blur. His life was a blur, and everything in it filled with a dreamlike quality, a haze of misunderstanding, of confusion – and more importantly, of Pain.
The knife cut into his chest and he may have screamed, his kicking limbs lurching in epileptic spasms. The knife was burning hot then ice cold, burning, burning as the tip skewered his skin, and his muscle, and sawed rhythmically and with razor-eagerness through his breast-bone leaving him gasping, teeth clacking repeatedly, fingers flexing as he begged begged to make it stop make it stop, but the face over him was hard and brutal, the face of the vachine Watchmaker, Kradek-ka and Saark's blood flushed down his chest, his belly, and he felt something removed from him.
Saark lay there, gasping, flopped like a fish on the Granite Throne and black snow fell and a cold wind whistled, disturbing his long black curls. The wind smelled good, smelled of ice and freedom beyond the mountains, beyond this imprisonment of the blade which had sundered his pale weak brittle flesh. The mountains. The Black Pike Mountains. Skaringa Dak. Helltop.
These names were distant, now, tails of smoke, and his blood pounded in his veins and he was different. Saark had been infected by the bite of the Soul Stealer, her venom pumping round his veins and infusing him with the toxin of the vachine, the vampires, a secondrate disease for a second-rate hero… Saark laughed. Blood bubbled around his lips from punctured lungs. He felt like he was dying. And he knew: surely he was.
Saark could ascertain noises, shouting, the clash of weapons, but they were all gone and lost to him. Consciousness fled like a startled kitten, and when he awoke the cool granite of Helltop was pressing his face like a lover. He heard more shouts, and sobbing, and one eye could see the dark sky filled with a portal into the Chaos Halls, the Blood Void, the Bone Graveyard, and a fist of fear punched through Saark as he listened to the steady thump thump of his heart, open to the world, and slowly his hand crawled across the ground. His fingers crawled across his own slick flesh, slick and cold, drenched in iced blood, and he found a hole gaping over his heart, and his fingers could feel the trembling of his heart within because he was open to the world, carved up like a pig on a slab, and that was so sweet, so ironic, so frightening.
A hand soothed his brow. Beyond, he could feel a terrible presence, of death and hatred and omniscient rage. The Vampire Warlords had arrived. And Saark, even in his disorientated state, knew desolation.
"It will be all right," soothed a voice in his ear, and he recognised Nienna and he smiled, and her hands were stroking his face. He could see fear in her eyes, though, and knew then he would die. What could she see? How could she save him?
Saark tried to speak, but could not.
Saark tried to move, but could not.
Distantly, through a mesh of fractured thoughts, words came to him, all tangled, interlaced, like the stranded threads of cotton his mother used to repair his trews. We must go. We must! We cannot! He's dead. Bring Saark. Bring Saark. He's dead. They echoed backwards and forwards, reverberating as if they were a drunk's uneven song in the bottom of a sediment-layered tankard. Bring Saark! Bring him! A woman's shriek. Oh how he longed for a woman's shriek, but that was a different world, a different age.
Movement. Ice. Cold. Wind. And then Plummeting. A feeling of weightlessness. And Saark remembered no more.
On the icy plateau of Helltop, with the Vampire Warlords solid and real behind him, newborn demons and dark gods and vampires from the Chaos Halls, Kell, with Saark over one shoulder and dragging Nienna behind him, his mighty axe Ilanna in one huge fist and rage and fear pumping through his breast like molten hate, Kell leapt for the hole in the mountain's summit, leapt for the vertical tunnel so recently brimming with waters which spilled out, were forced out under awesome pressure to flood Silva Valley and drown the vachine living within…
Kell's logic was simple. Leap down the vertical tunnel. Escape! It had water, down there, somewhere, spoke his desperate mind; and that would cushion their fall. If not? Well, a grim side of Kell's soul decided, if not then sudden impact, sudden death, it would be better than living as slaves to the vampires.
Kell blinked. General Graal was in his way.
Nothing stood in Kell's way.
In reflex, Ilanna flashed up, smashing Graal's sword aside as if wielded by a tottering toddler, and in the same movement singing blades sliced Graal's left cheek apart as if paring tender braised beef from bone. Graal stumbled back with a shriek, and Kell and Saark and Nienna tumbled into the hole, into the ancient tunnel worn through rock by a million years of probing meltwater. In that instant, Kell glimpsed three figures on the Granite Thrones. They were fashioned from black smoke. Their eyes were blood red. And they were watching him.
Gravity caught Kell in its fist and pulled him downwards, separating him from his companions. All thoughts and fear were smashed aside like a blow from a helve. Acceleration became his mistress, fear glued his teeth shut, and Kell fell into a headlong dive that seemed to last forever…