Dominion (The von Carstein Trilogy Book 2) by Steven Savile

Author:Steven Savile [Savile, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2011-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

chapter thirteen

Vado Mori

MIDDENHEIM, CITY OF THE WHITE WOLF

The blistering heart of summer, 2057

The walls of Middenheim couldn’t hope to withstand them. The city would fall.

Hope, they said, was the last thing to die.

They were wrong. Hope died long before desperation, pain and fear had relinquished their hold on the living.

Even then, death was no escape: not when the dead could be pulled out of the earth and puppeted by the malicious finger of a necromancer like Immoliah Fey.

Skellan watched as Fey drew the dead out of the dirt. She lacked the grace of Vlad von Carstein, but what she lacked in grace, she more than made up for with power. The winds of magic howled around her, the air itself crackling with the intensity of the magic she wove. The incantations tripped off her tongue, staining the air around her with the putrescence of death. The necromancer revelled in it, throwing her head back, her voice spiralling in a discordant chorus as the dead danced at her beck and call.

He had seen this before, but it still unnerved him. With Vlad, it had been an awesome display of his strength and mastery over the nations of the living and the nations of the dead. He commanded the skies and the dirt, and both jerked around readily to his whims. With Fey it was different. Her magic lacked the ferocity of Vlad’s. It was subtle, toying with the fabric of the universe and cajoling it to respond to her demands. In some ways it was more unnatural.

They came slowly at first, bones clawing out of the dirt, broken and rotting, emerging in a second bizarre birth into the unlife. Then, with increasing regularity, they were drawn from the earth’s shallow graves and ditches where they had been left to rot.

Skellan could not abide the woman, but her usefulness was undeniable. As a magician, she was hardly the equal of Vlad, but what had started as a fledgling army almost certainly destined to fail, had grown into an unstoppable force of nature, because of the necromancer.

Fritz von Carstein stood two paces behind Fey, his eyes aglow with the fire of hunger. Skellan had a grudging admiration for Fritz. The vampire cultivated the image of the carefree Lothario with his harem of nubile young vixens, but Skellan had quickly come to realise that it was all an elaborate act. Beneath the foppish exterior lurked a cold ruthless cunning that outstripped anything Skellan had seen in the unstable Konrad or the earnest Pieter. Fritz was an enigma. He played the fool beautifully, so well in fact, that it became second nature, a mask to be drawn down, that rarely slipped, but for all his talk of decadence and decay there was an underlying current of dark wisdom and steely determination to Fritz that betrayed the act. Skellan harboured no illusions: the vampire played the fool to encourage those around him to underestimate him. It was a useful ploy, one that no doubt had considerable mileage in it.

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