'The weather is against her.' 'Convenient. For Graal.'
Sa puckered her lips, brooding. 'I, also, have noticed changes in Graal. However, I do not see how one man could be a threat to the High Engineer Episcopate. To the Vachine Civilisation! Even with our obedient Army of Iron under his direct control. What would he do? Turn them against us?' She laughed, a sound of spinning flywheels.
Tagor-tel shrugged. 'I doubt he would have the persuasion. The alshina have served for too long.' He thought for a moment. 'We need to discover what happened to Jaranis. She had the Warrior Engineers, did she not? Walgrishnacht? He is one of our ultimate soldiers. If anybody will return word, he will.' 'We will see. But let us assume, for a moment – away from concepts of heresy – that Princess Jaranis has failed. That she and her entourage are dead. What then?' 'We can ask…' Tagor-tel paused, and checked the chamber, making sure they were alone. His voice dropped. 'Fiddion.' 'You think he will cooperate?'
'He has, shall we say, passed us sensitive information before. Graal seems to have some bond with the Harvesters; and the Harvesters play by their own rules. It is worth a try. For whatever reason, Fiddion despises his own kind.'
'Do it. Contact Fiddion. Let us see if the Harvesters know what Graal plots.'
Sunlight glimmered between towering storm clouds, rays of weak yellow that cast long, eerie shadows over the forests surrounding Old Skulkra. Graal strode through the camp, trailed by three Harvesters, one hand on his sword hilt, his pale-skinned face unreadable. Albino soldiers moved from his path, and he stopped only once, head turning left, as the snarls from the canker cages set his teeth on edge. Damn them, he thought. Damn their perverse twisted flesh! They reminded him, painfully, of his brother. Dead, now. Murdered, so he later discovered, by the bastard Kell and his bloodbond axe. 'I'll see you burn, motherfucker,' he muttered as he continued through the camp and reached the edge of the tents where albino soldiers still had campfires burning.
Several soldiers looked up at his approach, glances subservient, as if waiting for instruction. Graal did not acknowledge their existence. Instead, his eyes were fixed on the three huge black towers which sat on the plain: angular, cubic, squat, their surfaces matt black, their intentions not immediately fathomable.
'Are we ready?' said Graal.
'We are ready,' hissed one of the Harvesters, sibilantly.
'Is he here?'
'He is here, General Graal.'
'Good. It is about time.'
Graal strode out across the plain, and the closer he moved to the Blood Refineries, the larger they seemed: mammoth cubic structures, the black surface of unmarked walls flat, and dull, like scorched iron. Wisps of snow snapped in the air as Graal strode across frozen earth, and as he came near his nose wrinkled. He blinked. The corpses, four thousand in total, stripped of armour and boots, had been laid out in rows before the three Blood Refineries. Graal glanced down, but no flicker of emotion showed across his pale face. He had more important matters on which to worry.
The Refineries towered, and he walked in their shadow. There was a man, tall and lean and bearded, reclining against the first Refinery. Graal reached him and stopped. This was Viga, Kradek-ka's personal Engineer Assistant, come to oversee the Blood Refineries and their absorption. He had travelled all the way from the Black Pike Mountains to help.
'Well met, Graal,' said the man, eyes glittering, and Graal could just distinguish tiny vachine fangs, like polished brass, peeking over his bottom lip.
'I thought you would never come,' said Graal, fighting hard to keep his annoyance in check. He was not used to being treated so… casually. 'Was the journey difficult?'
'More difficult than you could comprehend,' said Viga, rubbing at his beard. 'Although I hear you suffered some disturbance yourself; something to do with an old, bearded soldier? A resident of Jalder, or so I was informed.'
Graal forced a smile. 'A nothing,' he said. The Harvesters were watching him, waiting for his command; as if waving away an insect, he gave instruction, and the Harvesters started to lift the half-frozen corpses and feed them into long, thin slots at the base of the Refineries. It took very little effort: the instant a body touched the slot, it was sucked inside. A deep thrumming seemed to well up beneath the ground, and Graal fancied he could sense, if not necessarily hear, the huge but subtle clockwork engines within the Blood Refineries; mashing up bodies, extracting blood, and refining it into blood-oil: the food of the vachine world.
The bearded man turned, and watched for a while. Then he tutted. Graal stared into his eyes, and the man lowered his head.
'There is a problem?'
'Kradek-ka's daughter.'
'She was always a problem.'
'Do not be flippant with me, Graal; you know her existence is the reason you stand here now, you know the experimentation Kradek-ka performed on her was the central reason why we can do this; without her, without Anukis and her,' he laughed, 'her jewel, there would be no quest for Kuradek, Meshwar and Bhu Vanesh.'
'You are of course, correct,' said Graal, and straightened his back. Beside them, the Harvesters continued to pick up corpses and feed them into the Refineries. Deep inside, now, the meshing of gears could be heard; and huge pendulous blades working.
Graal glanced up, at the towering wall of the Refinery, and then back to Viga. He reached out to place a comforting hand on his arm, but the man recoiled.
'No. You must not touch me. I am impure!'
'We are all impure,' said Graal, head tilting a little; he could see, now, that the man before him was a man ready to crack, a vachine teetering along a blade-edge of insanity.
'We should never have treated her like that. It was wrong of us to push her; to humiliate her!'
'It is too late for regret,' said Graal, voice steady.
'Not so! She has escaped, gone looking for her father! Nobody should have undergone such humiliation!'
'Well, she will save us the quest,' said Graal, voice hard now. This man's weakness was starting to upset him. He had great respect for Viga, especially as Kradekka's most trusted Engineer servant; but to whine thus? To whine was to be weak; and Graal so hated the weak. He placed his hand on sword-hilt.
'This whole situation is an abomination,' continued Viga.
Graal drew his sword, and shook his head, and stepped close to the man and the blade touched his throat, cold black steel pressing flesh and his fangs ejected, suddenly, with a hiss of fury but Graal leant on the blade and blood bubbled along the razor edge and he felt Viga relax beside him. 'It is too late to back out now,' said Graal, voice little more than a whisper.
'I know that. It's just… she was an innocent vachine! We ruined her life!'
'She is in the past…' said Graal. 'So be silent, and be still, and be calm; the Refineries must work, and we must build the store of energy… of magick! Only with the Refineries at optimum power can we bring about the return of the Vampire Warlords!'
'But you do not have the Soul Gems,' whimpered Viga, from behind Graal's blade.
'I am working on it,' growled Graal, and sheathed his weapon.
Viga had gone. Graal sat on the ground, cross-legged, and watched as the last of the bodies was fed into the huge machines. He looked around, as flakes of falling snow whipped back and forth in the wind. The distance was hazy, just like Graal's memory.
In silence, the last of the Falanor corpses were fed into metal holes. Then the Harvesters did a strange thing. They moved, each to their own Blood Refinery, and they spread arms and legs wide and shuffled forward towards blank metal walls – so they were stark contrasts illuminated against wide plates of iron. And then they – merged, sinking into the metal of the Refineries, becoming for a moment at one with the machines as flesh became metal and iron became flesh, and Graal blinked, licking his lips, nervous for just an instant – not nervous of pain or mutilation or death, even his own death, but nervous in case it did not work. Graal blinked, and the Harvesters were gone; absorbed into the machines. Distantly, he could hear a tick, tick, tick, as of huge, pendulous clockwork.
He smiled grimly. They called it Interface. Where the Harvesters used special ancient magick to refine blood, into that chemical agent the vachine craved, and indeed needed, to survive.
