"I do not believe it," said Nienna finally, placing hands on hips. Her eyes were narrowed, brows dark with thunder. "Are you sure, grandfather? Sure about all this? I watched you fight those Soul Stealers. You killed them! Like they were children!"
Kell laughed sharply. "Oh, how the young do so romanticise. They almost had me, girl; if it had not been for Skanda's help, I would be slaughtered horse-meat on a butcher's worn wooden slab." His gaze transferred to Myriam. "You came here for help. To help yourself, yes, through fear of your new masters; but to help Falanor was an after-thought. I am sorry, Myriam. Battle weighs heavy on my old body, and my twisted mind. There is nothing I can do. For once, Falanor must help Herself."
Myriam bowed her head. Tears lay like silk on her cheeks. "So be it, Kell," she whispered.
They travelled for hours down narrow tunnels barely wide enough to accommodate Nienna. Eventually, when exhaustion crept upon Myriam, the hardy and seemingly tireless vachine, and Nienna was like the walking dead, they called a stop in a small alcove. It was cold, and damp, but then so were all the tunnels under Skaringa Dak.
Nienna lay, wrapped in a thin blanket, her finger stump throbbing. After an albino soldier amputated her finger in retaliation for Kell's defiance after they had been taken prisoner, events had moved so fast, so frantic, she had barely a moment to consider her new severance. But now. Now, despite her exhaustion, sleep would not come. Her eyes moved through the darkness lit by strange mineral lodes, and came to rest first on Kell, snoring, lost in the realms of distant dreams and memories and battles; then on to Myriam, breath hissing past her small, pointed fangs. Vampire fangs. Vachine fangs. Nienna rubbed at her finger, and winced as pain flared up her hand, up her arm. Kell had expertly stitched the wound, the amputation, slicing a flap of skin and pulling it over the neatly cut bone. He had tears in his eyes. Tears of sorrow, but also of guilt. He blamed himself. He felt completely responsible. And Nienna supposed he was, to a large extent; but then, if he was to blame for the loss of Nienna's little finger, he was also to blame for saving her life time after time after time. She could forgive him one small mistake, if mistake it was. She grimaced. In war, they all had to make sacrifices. And at least she was still alive.
Nienna rubbed her finger. It had been the most painful moment of her life, and the act of butchery, the look on the albino soldier's face – well, it was something she would never forget. Just like Kat's murder was something she would never forget. The vachine, the cankers, the soldiers, the battles – her grandfather striding with axe in hand, with Ilanna in hand, and turning from an affectionate old soldier, a retired old soldier, white-haired, funny, loving, ruffling her hair, cooking vegetable soup, polishing her boots with spit and polish and hard elbow grease, chastising her for neglecting her studies, nagging at her to smarten up her clothes, eat better food, be nice to her mother even when her mother shouted at her, neglected her, allowed her to starve. Nienna laughed bitterly. Oh yes. Her mother. A good strong woman, everybody said. A religious woman. Pious. When she died, she had earned a place in the Bright Halls. But Nienna remembered a different aspect to her character. Nienna's mother, Kell's daughter – Sara, the daughter who had disowned Kell and swore never to speak to him again. Well, to Nienna she was a cold woman. A hard woman. A woman of iron principles. A woman who made Nienna's flesh creep, made her hackles rise, a woman who'd made her life a misery with constant religious studies, muttered prayers and the eternal, submissive worshipping of the bloody gods!
Damn the gods, thought Nienna.
Let them burn in the furnaces of the Blood Void!
Let them rot in the Chaos Halls!
Yes. Kell might be a hard man, a drinker of whiskey, a pugilist, he might be a butcher and all the other things people called him – and what she had seen. But he had a core of goodness, Nienna knew. He had a kind heart. A kinder soul. And to her, no matter how others tried to deviate matters, he was still a hero. He was Kell. Kell, the Legend.
Sleep finally came.
And with it came a dream, a dark dream, a dream in which Bhu Vanesh hunted her, panting and giggling through a dark, deserted city, through empty streets and temples and cathedrals, running over slick greasy cobbles. And as he caught her, his fangs gleamed and he reached for her succulent throat…
As Nienna tossed and turned in her sleep, so Myriam's eyes flickered open. She uncurled, like a snake unfurling from the base of an apple tree. Myriam stood, and stretched, revelling in the feel of new muscles, new bones, and the death of the cancer within. How could cancer survive in a being which was itself a predator? A cancer on civilisation? How could cancer cells eat her own, when her new vachine cells were far more aggressive and vicious and violent than anything Nature could possibly conjure? Where Nature had failed, man had stepped forward. Myriam's eyes narrowed. In her opinion, the vachine were the pinnacle of evolution. It could get no better than this.
Gently, she reached down. Beneath Kell's arm was sheathed his Svian, his reserve blade for when Ilanna was lost. It was also, according to ancient, esoteric legends (although Kell would never admit it as such), a ritual suicide blade. For when times got bad. Real bad.
Myriam withdrew the Svian. The pattern of Kell's snoring altered, then he snorted and relaxed again, and she toyed with the blade for a few moments, running her finger up and down the razor edge. A bead of blood appeared on her pale white finger. She licked it clear, tongue stained berry-red for just an instant. Then it was gone, the blood-oil was gone, and she gave a little shiver.
Inside Myriam, something went click. She felt the rhythm of springs and counter-weights. She felt the spin of gears. She felt the stepping of advanced clockwork mechanisms, entwined with her flesh, her bones, her organs. And Myriam revelled in her advanced evolution.
Could she let anything get in the way of her vachine existence?
Could she let Kell get in the way?
Of course not.
And something pulsed deep in her mind. In her heart. In her clockwork.
She felt the need growing. Growing strong. And Myriam did so need to feed. It burned her, like a brand. Like birth. Like death. Like existence. Existence.
Myriam lifted the Svian blade. It glinted in the reflected luminescence of the mineral-layered walls.
Her eyes shifted to Kell.
And her smile was a cruel, bloodless slit…
CHAPTER 2
General Graal was sucked through the blood-magick lines, and it felt like dying, and felt like being born, and eventually he was lying on a cold tile floor in a kitchen, staring up at the smoke-stained, wood-beamed ceiling in the High Fortress at Port of Gollothrim. The High Fortress. He smiled a sickly smile. It was also known locally as Warlord's Tower.
The world was a blur for Graal. First, he could smell woodsmoke. Then he could smell the sea, a distant tang of salt, the taste of fresh sea breeze. Stunned, for the blood-oil magick sending was like being punched into the earth by the fist of a giant, Graal gradually fought for his senses to return. He heard distraught sobbing. He breathed, breathed deep, and inside him clockwork went tick, tick, tick.
Graal moved his head to the left. Kradek-ka lay unconscious, blood leaking from his eyes. His flesh was pale and waxen, and at first Graal thought he was dead – until he heard a tiny stepping of gears, witnessed the gentle rising of Kradek-ka's chest. Then Graal looked right, and jumped at the savagery of the sight…
Bhu Vanesh was there, seven feet tall, narrow, smoke-filled, long arms and legs crooked. One hand held a limp figure, a plump woman bent over backwards, blood dripping freely from where her throat had been entirely ripped out. Her eyes, dead glass eyes, were staring straight at Graal. He shivered. Bhu Vanesh turned a little, as if sensing Graal's return to consciousness. Blood-slit eyes regarded him, but Bhu Vanesh did not break from his task: the task of feeding. His second hand held another woman, this time slim, petite almost, and wearing the white apron of a kitchen attendant. She had long blonde hair, very fine, like silk, which spilled back from her tight entrapment revealing her throat, pale and punctured and quivering.