become a country of troglodytes. Winthrop could not think of that. He could think only of hunting hunters, of stalking eagles and dragons.
The telephone rang and was in Allard's hand. The captain listened, nodded, and hung up.
'It has begun,' he announced.
41
Kaiserschlacht
She could not breathe. Of course, breathing was a habit, not a necessity. Her chest was under something hard and heavy. All feeling was whipped out of her limbs. Jagged pain in her shoulder suggested silver.
Kate blinked in the dark. Her glasses, jammed to her face, kept dirt out of her eyes. Since turning, which had brought the vampire power of night sight, she had not known blackness so total. The silence of the grave was eaten by tiny, distant sounds. Screams, explosions, engines, single shots, machine guns.
She had been dead for years. Her condition was not changed.
A pain rushed through her shoulder, down her right arm to her hand. She made a clawed fist, digging her nails into the meat of her palm. It was hard to punch earth. She had no leverage. Her whole arm strained. Her injured shoulder wrenched. She had to press her lips tightly together to swallow the shriek that wanted to escape.
There was a crack in her coffin of earth and her arm could move. Her fingers scrabbled filth as she reached upwards. She jammed her claws into a dead man and had to reach round him. Holding the corpse's arm, bearing the pain, she pulled hard, trying to shift her whole body upwards. The bar across her chest wouldn't budge.
If she fell into her lassitude now, she might live insensible through years, centuries. Perhaps she would awake into a Utopia where mankind had outgrown war. Or perhaps she'd find Dracula absolute ruler of a desolate Earth. To sleep was to desert. Her responsibility was to the present.
Her fist burst through to the surface. She felt air on her hand and stretched out her fingers.
The thing on her chest was a beam, or maybe a heavy chunk of her ambulance. It was deeply embedded in the earth. She tried pressing herself down deeper, hoping to wriggle loose and burrow up like a worm.
If only her father could see her now.
Writhing her shoulders, she displaced soft earth beneath her. Everything was wet. Enough struggling turned packed-down dirt into moveable mud.
Someone took hold of her hand and gripped tight. She grasped a man's hand, trying to retract her nails so as not to pierce her rescuer. She tried to imagine the man. Hot pain came in her palm as a metal point - not silver - was forced through the skin into the flesh. Her saviour was shoving a bayonet into her. An eager mouth, tongue like a cat's, lapped blood from her hand, sucking greedily.
She grabbed a face, feeling a moustache, and tried to latch on to a skull with her nails. As the man who was stealing her blood stood, she was pulled through earth. The barrier scraped across her chest and hips. Then she was stuck again. Her shoulder burned. She thought her arm would be wrenched off. Then her face was out of the dirt and she was screaming.
Her glasses, miraculously unbroken, were smeared with earth, and the sun had set. But the light seemed intense. Her eyes stung. And she was assaulted by incredible din.
She stood up, still grasping the scavenger, and shook, trying to get the dirt-clumps off her clothes. Layers of earth between layers of clothes formed three or four skins of cold mud.
She let go of her captive. Her hand was enlarged and knobbly, meat stretched over a swollen skeleton. Her fingers had shot out, stretched to six-inch twigs with three-inch blades. As she thought about it, her hand dwindled. A deep-buried shape- shifting power had come with direst need.
If the new-born soldier staring at her had worn a German uniform, she would have killed him and eaten his heart. But he was a maddened Tommy, bleeding in a dozen places, her blood on his mouth. The soldier backed away and darted off, leaving Kate alone on a mound of mud. She was still enraged, fighting off the red thirst that came with this carnage.
As her eyes recovered, she distinguished pieces of her ambulance and the former trench-shorings. Dead men, smashed to pieces, lay all about. Mercifully, none was recognisable. She assumed Tietjens and Bartlett must be among them. There was no trench any more. Explosions had filled it in. She stood on the restored ground level, exposed. She saw the ditch-lines of nearby trenches. Most of the system was still intact. Men swarmed through, rushing to and away from the front.
A fragment worked its way out of her shoulder and she plucked it free. The pain was already fading.
There were explosions all around. Still ringing from the one that had nearly killed her, she was not further shocked. Turning, she looked to the front. Though her position was foolishly dangerous, she had a remarkable view. From her mound, she saw the busy line of the Allied trenches, the wire tangles of No Man's Land, and the puffs of the German guns. She even saw the distant fortifications of the enemy positions. Eerie music - Wagner? - was falling from the sky. In No Man's Land, steel monsters crawled. Above floated a leviathan of the air.
Again, Stalhein was high man. This time, he remained in his own shape and was detailed to the
The armoured gondola was a conclave of commanders, a nightmare of priorities eliciting a frenzy of salutes from the junior men of the airship service. The airship's captain was Peter Strasser, a fanatic for lighter-than-air flight who had carried out bombing raids on London early in the war. Outranking Strasser was Engineer Robur, director of the Imperial German Airship Service, the great designer of and propagandist for such devices. And outranking all was the Graf von Dracula, who stood alone, paces ahead of his black leather guards, looking at the mud- crawling battle through the observation ports. It was fortunate room had not been found for the Graf von Zeppelin, Field Marshal von Hindenburg and the Kaiser. The combined weight of their medals would have prevented the
Everybody aboard the dirigible had precisely assigned duties, with the exceptions of Stalhein and the Graf von Dracula. Stalhein, feeling the cold of the height in his unshifted shape, had the sense he was being held back. JG1 would come into play soon.
From his chair, Strasser issued orders into a speaking-tube. His efficient crew scurried like uniformed monkeys through the fantastical arrangement of levers and struts.
A long shadow fell on the sunset-reddened land.
As befitted a craft of such magnificence, the
Stalhein, with unaccustomed meekness, approached the observation port, a circular glass window three yards across set into the floor of the gondola. It was the eye of the
He had expected to feel more in the presence of the Graf. At one remove, Dracula was Stalhein's father-in- darkness. His bloodline, passed on through the elder Faustine, had given him shape-shifting aptitude. He was one of Dracula's creatures. Stalhein's blood did not sing. He did not feel compelled to kneel before his master. He joined Dracula at the port, and looked down.
There was light enough from the dying sun to see clearly. Formations of tanks crawled forwards, the first wave almost at the Entente trenches. Men advanced in their rutted wake. From this view, the troops were reduced to ants. The tanks seemed big beetles, ploughing through tiny obstacles. Bursts of flame burst throughout No Man's Land. This would be costly.
Spitting fire burst from the most advanced tanks, squirting liquid flame into the enemy trenches. Stalhein, though inured to fiery death, shuddered. This war prompted men of genius like Robur to develop weapons which could extinguish vampires as easily as gunfire and the sword killed warm men. Sections of the enemy trench system turned into rivers of fire, burning frontiers in the blackened map.
The
