'What do you want?' growled Kell, and slowly stood. He flexed his shoulders, and his face was thun der. Saark stood next, and he placed a warning hand on Kell's shoulder.
'Look,' said Saark. 'They have Widowmakers.'
The dandy was right; some of the warriors carried the same weapon that Myriam and her little band had used back in Falanor; the same weapon which had taken Katrina's life.
'If you know what these Widowmakers are,' said the leader, smoothly, with no hint of fear or panic, 'then you obviously know what they can do. I suggest you drop your weapons. My soldiers have been primed to kill the girl first.'
'Why, you bastards,' frowned Kell, stepping forward. The Widowmakers lifted in response to his antagonism. They were surrounded, heavily outnumbered, and even the mighty Kell could not fight with thirty arrows in his chest.
'We have to do it,' urged Saark, and was the first one to lay down his rapier. Nienna, wide-eyed, fearful, threw down her own sword and reluctantly Kell knelt and placed Ilanna reverently on the rocky ground.
'Take care of her, lads. I'll be wanting her back real soon. And if there's a single mark on her, I'll be cracking some skulls.'
'Fine words,' smiled the leader, but then the smile fell like plague rain. 'Restrain them.'
They had hands tied tightly before them, Kell grumbling and growling all the time, facing out into the great hatching chamber where yet more newborns were eased from their larvae pods and into the cool air of the chamber; into the real world. Like insects, thought Kell with a shudder. They are hatched like insects.
He was spun round by surprisingly strong hands, and a huge white-skinned soldier smiled at him, crimson eyes fixed on his, hand on the hilt of his short black sword. 'You'll be cracking skulls will you, Fat Man?' he hissed.
Kell's head snapped forward, delivering a terrific head-butt that dropped the albino warrior in a second, and had him crawling around in circles, blinded.
'There's the first one,' growled Kell. 'Any more fools want to try me out for size?'
The leader pressed a razor dagger to Nienna's throat. He still retained his air of calm, of clarity, as he stared down at his disabled soldier who – even as he watched, died on the floor. His skull was indeed cracked. Broken, like a raw egg.
'Anything else, Kell, anything at all, and I'll cut her up. A piece at a time.'
'You've made your point, lad,' said Kell, showing no surprise that the leader knew his name. 'Just as I have made mine. So tell me – what happens next in this vile and acid-stinking albino piss-hole? You got any more surprises for us?'
'Just one,' said the leader, words soft as he caressed Nienna's trembling throat with his blade. 'Somebody wants to meet you.'
'And who would that be? My mother?'
'No,' said the leader. His crimson eyes twinkled. 'His name is Graal. He's been expecting you.'
CHAPTER 15
Soul Gems
Skaringa Dak was a huge, evil mountain, even by the usual standards of the Black Pikes which in themselves had a reputation for being huge, evil, merciless and downright impenetrable. Skaringa Dak towered over surrounding peaks, and to one side, between hooked crags and violent obstacles, if one was to stand just right between jagged teeth, a person might, when the mists and snowstorms cleared, see the distant, widening spread of Silva Valley, home of the vachine, home of the engineered vampire race.
Near the summit, surrounded by glossy knives of rock sat ragged slopes containing millions of glossy, polished marble daggers, impossible to traverse on foot and a natural – or maybe not so natural – barrier to the flat circle of Helltop, five hundred metres beneath the mountain's true summit.
Helltop.
A place of mystery and magick for ten thousand years, surrounded by walls and fissures, crevices and crags, hooks and knives, and accessed only by a narrow, sloping tunnel which led deep inside the bowels of Skaringa Dak, and welcomed the foolish to explore.
Helltop.
A five hundred-metre circle of flat rock, polished marble, inlaid with natural lodes of silver and gold so that it twinkled under snow-melt. The surrounding peaks lay deep in snow, but not so the circle of Helltop. Helltop was immune to snow. Some said it was a volcanic fissure from deep within the mountain that channelled heat from unfathomable places; others said it was acts of evil magick which had taken place there over the centuries, ranging back past even the Vampire Warlords of Blood Legend – and which lingered, invisible, like esoteric radiation.
Set in the centre of Helltop and criss-crossed with thick bands of gold and silver in the glossy floor, sat the three Granite Thrones. They were ancient, and hewn by primitive hand-tools centuries before. They were jagged, and rough, and basic. And they were old beyond the comprehension of modern civilisation. Before the three Thrones there was a small, circular pool of liquid, like a glass platter of black water. This natural chute fed down, down through a thousand vertical tunnels, natural fissures and chutes and stone tubes cutting through the rock to the very roots of the mountain. These were the arteries of the mountain. These were its life.
Graal stood beside the Granite Thrones dressed in a white robe. Wild mountain winds whipped his fine white hair, and his unusual blue eyes surveyed this, the scene he had awaited for nearly a thousand years.
A mournful howling echoed through the mountains. Graal smiled. He could feel the pull of so much bloodoil and its associated magick of the soul. Now, all they needed were the Soul Gems and the Sacrifice to finalise and bind the spell. To bring back the Vampire Warlords. To control the Vampire Warlords.
Graal looked left. Kradek-ka, Watchmaker of the Vachine, gave him a single nod. He checked on Anukis, his daughter, who stood, swaying, blood-oil on her lips, her eyes rolled back, the honeyed drugs in her veins flowing thick now with a necessity of oblivion.
Graal opened his arms, and he opened his mind, and he felt the mountain beneath him within him and he felt its great veins of silver and gold, and they were one for a moment, he, Graal, and Skaringa Dak, and he knew this was the mountain of the Vampire Warlords: Kuradek the Unholy, Meshwar the Violent, and Bhu Vanesh, the Eater in the Dark. Can you hear me, children? he whispered, flowing through the mountain's vast caverns and tunnels, flitting like a ghost through the hatching chambers of his Army of Iron.
We hear you, sang the Soul Stealers.
Have you brought them to me? he whispered.
We have brought them to you, sang the Soul Stealers.
Then we have the final Soul Gem, he said. His eyes flickered open and he stared at Kradek-ka. 'We have all three,' he intoned, voice like a lead slab, the flesh of his face quivering as if in prelude to a fit.
'Then we must prepare,' said Kradek-ka, and placed his hand gently over Anukis's chest where her heart, a heart entwined with the clockwork augmentations of the vachine, beat with the ticking of a finely engineered timepiece.
Under her skin, something glowed in response to his touch, in response to Skaringa Dak, in response to Graal and Helltop and the Granite Thrones. Beneath Anukis's skin, beating with the pulse of the clockwork machinery which kept it alive, glowed the implanted Soul Gem.
Snow whipped Vashell as he crouched, hidden in a narrow V of rock, and stared with open mouth down at the plateau of Helltop. 'I cannot believe it,' he hissed, and glanced back down to Alloria. She was weak with cold and fatigue, even wrapped in furs from the wolves Vashell had skinned to keep her warm. 'Fiddion was right. They seek to bring back the Vampire Warlords!'
Alloria tried to creep under an overhang of rock, out of the wind and the blizzard. She was dying, Vashell knew, and guilt tore at him. But this was different. This was the vachine. This was Silva Valley. Now, in this place, he realised what evil magick they were about to perform… and more importantly, what sacrifice they needed to make it work.
