Soul Stealers: The Clockwork Vampire Chronicles (8 page)

    He sat, squatting at the centre of the stone circle, watching the snow falling around the outskirts. He loved the winter, the cold, the snow, the ice, the death.

    He looked down at himself, analysing his body in wonder. This is what he always did. This is what made him what he was. Narcissistic was not something in the Graverobber's lexicon, but had it been there he would have agreed; for the Graverobber loved himself, or rather, he loved what he had
become
. What had been made of him, by the Hexel Spiders, over a long, long, long period of time… a journey so long, so arduous, so painful, he no longer remembered the beginning. Now, only now, he knew that he was nearing the end.

    Jageraw looked down at himself, at his twisted, corrugated body, his skin a shiny, ceramic black like the chitin of the spider,
the spider I tell you – can you smell the
hemolymph? It flows in my veins and in my blood
and he stared down; his limbs thin, painfully thin, so thin you would think they would snap but Jageraw knew they were piledrivers, ten times stronger than human bone and flesh and raw tasty muscle; a hundred times more powerful yes yes. His head, he knew, for he had seen it reflected in puddles of blood, was perfectly round and bald and he had slitted eyes and a face quite feline, like the cats he used to eat,
I like those cats, tasty, all mewling
and scrabbling with pathetic claws
against his ceramic armour until he snapped their little necks and ate them whole, fur, whiskers and all.

    Warlords!

    He almost screamed, for he had made himself jump.

    He had dreamed about them. About the Warlords, the Wild Warlords, the Vampire Warlords, the precursor to the vachine that lived in the mountains; their kindred, from baby to ape and beyond, and he laughed, a crackle of feline spider and something else dropped in there like oil in water; the cry of a child.

    And now! The sheer concept made Jageraw shiver. For the Warlords were an enemy to be feared, he could sense it, he could feel it, and Jageraw had played out the dream, the events to come, the promise, the
prophecy
yes I did in my mind a thousand times; and despite his strength, despite his awesome killing powers, despite his supernatural abilities of skipping and murder; well, he was afraid.

    "The King is dead, the King is dead, the King is dead," he crooned to himself, voice a lullaby, voice music to his own ears, on a different level of aural capability, if not to the pleasure of anybody else. He knew it would happen, for he had seen it would happen, and the mighty had fallen, the great had toppled, and King Leanoric the Battle King was dead and his army erased and fed into the machine, the nasty black machine to make the drug for vachine.

    The Graverobber rocked, chitin covered in a fine layer of snow. He heard a laboured breathing, panting, something under the hunt; interesting, he thought, because usually – in these odd scenarios – he got to feed on both hunter
and
hunted. A double feast. Lots of food for Jageraw. Lots of food including (he winked at himself and I like it, I do like it) those slick warm organs. How he did like a bit of kidney to wash down the old claret; how he did lust after a morsel of shredded lung. Tasty as a pumpkin.

    The breathing was louder now, but it was hard for the Graverobber to see through thick tumbling snow; it swirled this way, it swirled that way, it swirled every damn way, but it certainly got
in the way
. Jageraw hunkered down, muscles bunching, and decided to kill the
hunted
first. Then turn on the attackers and rip off their heads, no matter how many there were. Three or thirty, it made little difference to the Graverobber; when he was in the mood for killing and feeding, then he would take his time and savour and hunt, until all of them were dead. They left a stink trail worse than any cesspit odour; it was never hard to follow.

    The
thing
burst through the circle of stones and stopped, stunned, when it saw the Graverobber. Jageraw half leapt, but checked himself and twisted in mid air, landing lightly, on all fours, like a cat. Jageraw stared suspiciously at what could only be described as a
thing
in his very own circle of stones. Surely, Le'annath Moorkelth had never been witness to such a creature? But then, Jageraw had never seen a canker, and certainly nothing as twisted with clockwork and golden wire as
this
specimen.

    "Help me!" growled the bulky, deviant, clockwork creature. It struggled to form the words, for its mouth was wrenched back, jaws five times wider than any normal mortal man's. Thick golden wires were wound around and
in
its flesh. Every single breathing moment looked like an agony of pain and suffering.

    The Graverobber's head tilted, and he moved lithely forward, pacing, like a cat. He stopped by the edge of the stones; there was a myth that he could not, or would not, pass beyond. But it was simply a myth; Jageraw could do what the hell he liked, especially when searching for food and a sliver of kidney which tasted so fine and slick on its way down his throat, yum yum.

    The soldiers were toiling up the hill under snow; but there were many. Quickly, Jageraw counted. At least a hundred. He turned, eyes narrowing at the deformed creature in his circle
his damnfire circle of stones! his home!
and he had two choices; kill the creature, or hide it. If the soldiers saw him, and they looked well armed and trained and not liable to put up the weak comedy fight of the average villager with screams and skirts and pitchfork; if they saw Jageraw, they might decide he was on the military cleansing agenda.

    The Graverobber turned, slowly, and eyed the canker. Damn. That would take some killing, he realised.

    So, instead, he leapt, cannoning into the shocked warped creature and in a
flash
of connection and integration and blood-oil
magick
they stepped sideways through time; skipped, simply, a few seconds
forward
. Making Jageraw and the hunted canker, effectively invisible.

The world had been, or at least
seemed
, young and wild and violent, to General Graal. Wild Warlords ruled the land with gauntlets of spiked steel and fangs of brass, and nobody,
nobody
questioned their authority. Theirs was an authority of fang and claw, steel and fire; of impalement and decapitation, where the only rule was that there were no rules: and humans were truly the despicable cattle of legend.

    Graal dreamed. And in his dream, he
lived…

Graal rode the six legged stallion through tall crimson grass
towards the marshes, where blue flamingos squawked and
flapped heavily into the night sky, bright by the light of the
moon, recognising his inherent threat upon approach. Flamingos had far better, more primal, instincts than men. He cursed,
wishing he had his power lance; he would have speared a bird
for supper. He grinned at that, blue eyes narrowing, fangs
ejecting, and turned his mount and rode for the nearest village.
This was a new area, new settlements, and they did not know
him; at the gates he leapt from his mount, head high, eighteen
years of life stark on his cruel, narrow face. When they saw
him, his eyes, his fangs, his talons, the five men on the gate
shouted and started to heave closed the heavy timber portal
but Graal strode forward, slamming a hand through the thick
timbers with crunches of destruction. The men screamed,
shouting for help, two grabbing long spears of black ebony and
steel. Graal stepped in, batted aside a spear, pulled the man
towards him and snapped his neck like tinder. He lifted the
man, mouth cracking open, and plunged his fangs into the
flesh, rooting for the jugular. Blood fountained, coated his pale
skin, soaking his white hair, and he laughed as he drank for
the blood was nectar and the high took him in gossamer wings
and flew him through velvet heavens–

    
Pain slammed him, and he stared down at the spear protruding from his chest. Near the heart. Too damn near the
heart! Graal dropped the ragdoll corpse, cursing himself, his
youth, his naivety, his greed, his addiction to blood and the
high which brought recklessness to feeding. He had forgotten
the second man with the spear. Such a simple omission; to assume he had fled in fear and panic.

    
Graal grabbed the spear, embedded in his own flesh and
bubbling with black blood through his fine white silk shirt;
he swung it, knocking the panic-stricken guard from his feet,
then snapped the haft and strode forward, towering over the
man. "You want to impale me, little creature? Like this?"
Graal plunged the broken spear down, into the man's eye, and
he screamed and gurgled and kicked for a while, blood a fountain, gore bubbling. Graal stood, and pulled free the broken
splinter of wood, a stake he realised, from his breast. An inch.
An inch away!

    
Graal brayed at the moon, a howl long and mournful, and
when he lowered his head it was to see the line of villagers approaching. There were thirty of them, dressed like peasants,
stinking of woodsmoke and shit and piss, their faces bubbled
with toxic disease, their hair lank, eyes lifeless, and could they
not see his sheen, could they not read the supremacy in his very
fucking skin tone?

    
They carried weapons, and coolly Graal slicked back his
hair, full of fresh blood and its heady scent, and surveyed the
array of swords, daggers, sharpened stakes, and even a few
pitchforks (oh, the fools!). One woman carried a bundle in outstretched, shaking hands and Graal nearly vomited with
laughter. Garlic. For the love of the Bone Halls, garlic? How
pure and most beautifully ridiculous! Did she not realise? Did
they not realise? Graal adored garlic. Most vampires did. It
helped take away the breath of the dead…

    
Graal pushed back his shoulders, stepped away from the
two corpses, and grinned. This seemed to shock the villagers;
maybe they were expecting him to flee. Instead Graal moved
fast, fast into them, a fist through a chest there plucking free a
beating heart, ducking a sword strike by a clumsy village idiot
with no teeth, his index finger driving into a woman's eye and
beyond, into the brain, taking a longsword from another man
and cutting his legs free in a single stroke and then Graal was
into his stride, and into the slaughter, and the sword sang and
slew, cutting heads from shoulders, hands from arms, arms
from torsos, and Graal took particular delight in slicing a pregnant woman in two from the crown of her head, straight
through fat chest and pumping spasming heart and belly and
child, right down to her groin. A twin murder with a single
sweep. Beautiful! Economical! Damn, in fact it was sheer Art.

    
Within a few heartbeats of human duration, Graal had
killed all the villagers. He heard a cough, from beyond the
gates, and kneeling, Graal pulled free a heart with a wrenching tear of clinging tendons and strands of muscle, then strode
to the gates, where he surveyed the five stocky vampires, all
mounted, all staring down at him.

    
"Yes?" said Graal, head high, arrogance shining in his eyes
despite his youth. He bit the heart like an apple, and savoured
the texture, savoured the warm slick muscle in his mouth and
throat, and then squeezed the warm organ like a fruit, draining the remaining blood off into his mouth. "You caught me
during a moment of indulgence. May I be of service?"

    
"Mount up. There's work to be done."

    
"Slaughter?" Graal's eyes twinkled.

    
"Is there any other kind?"

Graal sat, watching the Refineries, the dripping pipes, listening to the churn of clockwork machinery. All gone, he thought. Long dead, and gone. Just like his mother, the queen, and his father, the king. Killed. Murdered!
Slaughtered
like human cattle. Graal's lips drew back, making his face incredibly ugly, a baring of the vampire within him, trapped within his now weak flesh, the flesh of the combination, the pathetic shell of the vachine.

    We will be free again, he nodded.

    We will be free.

    He stood, and stretched his back, and rolled his neck, and gazed around. Behind him, the war camp was running smoothly; the albino soldiers ran like – he laughed, a little – like clockwork. They cooked and cleaned, oiled weapons and armour, sharpened blades, tended to prisoners and the cankers; they needed very little organisation from Graal, for they were like insects, workers in the hive, busy with their own little jobs and all part of the Great Wheel.

    Graal turned back to the Refineries and waited, patiently, until in the blink of an eye the Harvesters oozed from metal walls, pulling free as if from a thick liquid. They moved before Graal, a triumvirate of consummate evil. Graal smiled. Evil was something he could work with.

    "It is complete?"

    "As you wish. The blood-oil is refined. Do you not feel the rise in energy? The surge of usable power?"