Valkyrie, Chapter IV: Coffins (Patreon)

Vampires, Saskia forced herself to remember as she stood by the mountain road’s drainage ditch, staring at the coffin, could be killed. Stanislav had shown her how to do it. Silver garrots, sunlight or, at night, white phosphorus, garlic concentrate delivered by bullet or bolt — it could all be brought off with no more than a steady hand and the element of surprise, or sufficient weight of numbers. Even overfeeding could be fatal to them. She’d seen photographs of bloodsuckers that had burst like mosquitoes held in place while feeding on a vein. 

But no matter how much she learned, nothing had yet quelled the nauseous twist of fear with which the sight of those yellowed claws shifting that rosewood lid seized the pit of her stomach. Something deep inside her, some stupid-smart animal buried in the threads of her genetic archive, began to shriek as soon as it saw the vampire’s long, curved fingernails and the ratlike pink glow of his eyes. Her hard-won skill at magic felt as insubstantial as wet paper under that stare. What would this ancient creature care if she set her wights against it, or tried to drain its life force dry? Well-fed, it could tear through dozens of trained soldiers in a minute flat. Less, if they were rabble.

Once the living had hunted them, she reminded herself as Kazimir pushed his coffin lid aside and rose up to his towering nine-foot height, resplendent in his moth-eaten tailcoat. The slaughter had been legendary. For three hundred years, though, the Red Pact had held Verangia together. The vampires, hunted to the brink of extinction, agreed to limit transmission of their malady to simple maintenance of their numbers, and to protect the republic, and in exchange the people of Verangia opened up their veins and gave tribute of their own free will. Saskia paid her tax in the months of Fenrue and Kenning. The scars of the chirugeon’s needle made a neat little double line on her inner left forearm. Eighteen marks. Nine years since she had become eligible on her sixteenth birthday.

Three hundred years of peace wiped from her memory by the grin on Kazimir’s gaunt, bone-white face as he rose into the air like a feather snatched up by the wind, his gossamer wings buzzing to life. She nearly jumped out of her skin when Stanislav put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “Sorry,” she whispered, but he only gave her a comforting smile. Out over the fields the planes were circling back toward their hillside. Kazimir shot away through the night air toward the smoking wreck of the messenger ship in the field below. Saskia wondered for a morbid instant what the Rastish had traded for that dead hulk’s engine. The stormlords sell nothing cheaply. Some farmer’s life’s work paid for that thing. How many of them are up there, that they take so much from us?

“I know he frightens you,” the old changeling said, “but you’ll have to get used to working with them. The Pact’s the only thing keeping the Chancellor’s airships from leveling Udarest within the week.”

The whine of the wights’ Khussers grew louder as the three remaining planes roared low over the treetops, dipping toward the bald plateau from which they’d launched. Saskia couldn’t hear herself breathe until they’d passed overhead. You’re embarrassing yourself. 

“I’m sorry,” she said, looking down to hide her burning face. “I know he’s our comrade, sir. I’ll try harder to show it.”

I think about him sucking me dry like a wineskin and I’m scared because part of me wants to see what I would look like after.

“You’re a grown woman now, Saskia,” said Stanislav, not unkindly. He lit one of the hand-rolled black cigarettes he carried, the kind infused with mercury and denatured saltpeter that would kill a human in five minutes flat. He exhaled a jet of bluish smoke. “I rely on you.”

Shame crushed her throat shut in its grip. She looked down at her feet, or where they would have been if not for the swell of her belly blocking her view. Why would anyone rely on me? Her breath came hard past the lump in her throat. She wanted to scream.

In the field below the sodium-white beams of hand lamps cut the dark around the crashed messenger ship. Its crew was spreading out from the wreck, surveying the crash site.

“I’ll see to the planes,” stammered Saskia, turning to go. Her feet ached after so long spent standing. Her sweating thighs were already chafed raw and rubbed against each other with each step. As the roar of the propellers died another sound reached her, faint and high on the evening wind. She dug her nails into her palms, trying not to listen.

The men in the field were screaming.

__________________________________________________________________________________

Ursula dreamed of a city in the clouds. She dreamed of black rings turning within rings, of fire caressing her, tearing her clothes with burning white fingers. She dreamed she dove to strafe a gun emplacement and when she pulled the trigger her fighter bled away around her into smoke and she fell through it, tumbling toward the ground below which raced up at her like the palm of a great hand. Wings flurried around her.

When you die in the cockpit, a valkyrie comes to carry you to your reward in the land beyond the moon. But will they know my name? Will they fix my broken body? Will they sew my wounds and cut me open where I’m wrong? 

Ursula woke. 

She lay on her back in the dirt near the smoldering wreckage of her plane, watching the stars come out. It was warm. Her shoulder hurt and somewhere nearby she could hear people screaming. Her head swimming, she propped herself up on her elbows and squinted through the smoke and flickering firelight. Her vision swam. You have a concussion. You crashed. Shot down.

A tall, thin figure stalked among the fleeing crew. It wore a strange coat, or else kept wings folded at its back, or perhaps both. Pink eyes blazed in the dark. Blood dripped from long, cracked nails and a chin as dry and pale as parchment. As Ursula watched the stranger kicked a man in the stomach, sending him flying to strike the Musk Ox’s starboard side with a dull, final crunch. He had already moved on to snatch up an airman in one hand, like a toy. He sank his teeth into the hollow of the screaming man’s neck and quicker than her eye could follow some long, pale spar of bone punched through his throat and out from his right cheek in a spray of blood and teeth. Machine pistol fire thudded harmlessly into the creature’s ribs.

Vampire.

The beast slapped a charging crewman out of his way and lurched into the air, wings buzzing with a nauseating roar, like a band saw cutting green wood. He disappeared into the downed airship through one of the broken airlocks. The man he’d struck lay horribly still a few meters distant, facedown in the dirt. A moment passed and then voices rose in panicked, desperate squeals from the ship’s interior. Machine guns chattered. Flesh smacked wetly against metal. He’s going to kill them all, Ursula thought. Major Schroeder had the silver on him. He had the phosphorus bombs in his safe. They’ll never—  

Another scream, long and high and anguished. Silence again. The horrible waiting of it. Ursula trembled in the shadow of her wrecked and smoking plane, wishing she could crawl to it and wrap its smoldering fuselage around herself, armor her frail body in its lethal strength. But it was ruined. If I run, he’ll hear me. He’ll rip me apart. If I stay here he’ll see me.

Metal shrieked and groaned against metal. The sound brought the taste of bile to the back of Ursula’s throat. It went on for what felt like hours. She squinted through the darkness at the deeper blackness of the treeline, limbs frozen, heart pounding. Could the bloodsucker hear her over the din? She imagined being caught out in the open in a sudden silence, lungs burning, the sickening ache in her right knee slowing her to a lurching limp. She imagined the vampire’s fangs punching through her throat, strangling every word she’d never managed to spit out, imagined his proboscis ripping through her and suckling at her veins until shock stopped her heart. The cacophony went on.

Ursula rose to her feet. Her mouth felt filled with cotton. The stretch of field between her plane and the trees, too dark to accurately gauge, seemed ten miles across. She took a step, then another. Her knee ached and clicked but held her weight. You can make it. She forced herself to take a deep, steadying breath. Watch the ground. Don’t look back. 

Light swept over her. The sound of an engine penetrated the nerve-shredding wall of sound emanating from the messenger ship. Something was coming. Ursula scrambled back into the lee of her plane, the cut in her palm making itself known as she slipped on a half-buried stone and bit her tongue to keep from crying out. A truck. An old-model Royal flatbed from just after the last war. It bumped and clattered over the field, cutting twin trails through the furrows as its headlamps bounced in the thickening dark. Loose-tied canvas flapped over the bed where a trio of pallid wights held onto heavy chains padded in nylon-banded oilcloth. It passed another plane she hadn’t noticed in the chaos of the vampire’s assault on the Ox. Kermann’s, she thought, fuselage crushed, port wing shredded by gunfire and jutting up from the dirt.

The truck squealed to a halt not far from the messenger ship and two figures got out of the cab. A changeling, Ursula thought, old and bent in a worn coat and a long dark scarf, and a hugely fat young woman, her moon face pale and sweaty in the light of the flatbed’s headlamps. 

The din from the Ox halted and the two figures broke off their conversation as the wreck’s aft cargo ramp began to open with a whine of stressed hydraulics, barely audible over the ringing in Ursula’s ears and the thready whisper of her breath. The vampire emerged, bent double and gripping a pair of massive iron chains. He was dragging something after him, something like a coffin but far larger than any such Ursula had ever seen, four meters long and a third as wide, made of black stone cut with geometric patterns. He pulled the coffin down the wheezing, smoking ramp and out into the furrow the messenger ship had plowed into the field, muscles bulging under his papery skin. 

They all died for that thing, whatever it is.

One last scream of stone on steel and Ursula bolted for Kermann’s plane. She skidded to a halt in its shadow while the wights scrambled down from the truck like pale spiders. Two loped to the furrow to help the vampire pull the coffin out onto the dirt. The remaining wight circled the truck and rose up on its hind legs to unlock the cargo gate. Her right hand found something soft as she bent to peer between the blades of the plane’s twisted propeller. Kermann stared up at her, a vague smile still plastered across his ruddy face. Below the neck he was wet and red and a thousand little mouths glistened through the sodden rags of his flight suit. Ursula clapped her wounded hand over her mouth to stifle her scream. She tasted blood and forced herself to breathe, to steady her racing heart.

The wights and the vampire hauled the coffin up over the trench’s lip. Loose earth flattened under its enormous weight. The chains attached to the dark rings at its end groaned as the undead labored toward the truck’s lowered tailgate. It looked very old. Whatever that thing is, it was important enough to run darker than dark, no paper orders, no escort. Ursula took Kermann’s sidearm, finding it by touch, not daring to look at him again. They’d fucked, once. She’d felt cold and dead afterward as he lay snoring beside her. She found two stick grenades thrust through the loops of his belt, considered working them free, and instead opted to unbuckle it and pull it taut around her own waist. His blood soaked her flight suit.

He wanted you to put it in him, but you wouldn’t.

The undead finished loading the truck. The wights secured the stone coffin with chains and canvas straps as the vampire, brushing dust from his trousers, sauntered toward the other two Verangians. He said something to the changeling, then crouched down low and launched himself into the air like an obscene grasshopper taking flight. His wings whined, high and insistent, and in a heartbeat he was gone into the dark. The idling of the Royal’s engine was the only sound remaining.

Ursula looked at the shadows under the truck, the low-hanging suspension carriage and the mounting of the axle. The wights were occupied with the restraints. The changeling and the fat girl were absorbed in conversation. They’d walked a little toward the Ox and the fat one, who must have been the necromancer holding the wights’ leash, seemed to be inspecting the bodies strewn around the messenger ship. 

You’ll die. The wights will smell you, even through the oil. Or they’ll see you coming. They’ll kill you. That fat pig will make you one of them.

She imagined herself pale and rat-toothed, black eyes beady in deep sockets. Slender. White. A ghost-thing, past fucking and names. 

You aren’t going to get another chance.

She broke cover and ran. 

__________________________________________________________________________________

Stanislav drove the Royal at speed down a muddy logging track under the boughs of shedding summer pines. It was near dawn and Saskia felt every one of the two hundred-odd miles they’d made down other forest roads and game trails in her bruised tailbone and aching hips. She hadn’t dared ask for a rest to stretch her legs, not when Stanislav — three times her age, stoop-shouldered and arthritic — had driven without complaint for hours on end. She’d never learned to drive. 

The truck’s bouncing headlamps cut the gloom under the trees. It handled poorly with the black sarcophagus lashed to its bed. The great dark thing had threatened more than once to overturn them when the road’s grade shifted. The weight of it made Saskia uneasy. She longed for her little worker’s apartment on Komovi Street in Udarest, for the battered tin biggin she and her roommates used to brew thick, sweet Barkultish coffee and the blanket her aunt had knitted her when she was only fourteen. It was a good place, her snug room with its bookshelves and its windchimes hanging outside the window. When they weren’t on assignment from the Akademe they would sit up together drinking raki and Mileva would brag about fucking workers and sometimes Saskia would even get drunk enough to forget the way her slender, giggling friends looked at the soft hill of her body, the way they avoided her gaze while they whispered about who was fucking who. Sometimes they’d reanimate dead rats from the rubbish bins out in the alley and their neighbors would bet on fights between the snarling, undead rodents in the basement of the dormitory.

They hit a bump and Saskia tried to fight down her blush as she jiggled in her seat. Kazimir’s coffin, tied down just ahead of the sarcophagus, atop which the wights sat curled and dormant like pale insects, jumped in its chains and thumped against the huge black front of it. She watched it in the rearview mirror, marveling at the intricacy of the markings carved into its sides. “What is that thing?”

“Old. Alephi, I was told, from before the cities-under-earth collapsed. The Rasties dug it up at Hinterberg.”

“And we’re bringing it back to them?”

He chuckled. “To Control, in Udarest. The trans-Kalima is the fastest way.” Wet branches slapped the windscreen as they barreled onward down the track. “The Rastish have Hinterberg, but they can’t touch our trains without bringing Caprina into things. The strega would love an excuse to send all those shiny new warplanes across Shrapnel Bay and bomb Lundheim back into a sheepfold and a shithouse.”

He knows more than that, thought Saskia. He knows what it’s for. What it does.

She decided not to press the issue.

A few hours later they came out of the pines along a service road that crossed a set of train tracks. The road continued onward, zig-zagging north through rugged, barren upland country to the port of St. Kossell on the Caprinian border. To the northwest, visible down the aisle of the cut in the forest, lay the smudged skyline of Hinterberg on its looming hill. The trans-Kalima express was waiting for them, wisps of smoke drifting back from its locomotive’s carbon-blackened stacks. Stanislav’s contact, a wiry old elven conductor named Kofax, stood on the connector between an empty flatbed car equipped with an ancient hydraulic crane and the express’s rearmost cargo container, its corrugated sides plastered in scuffed customs stickers and emblazoned with the Hofstadt Labs chevron. He waved hello as they pulled up alongside.

“Stani,” he called warmly. “What have you got for me?”

“Nothing but trouble,” said Stanislav, forcing the Royal’s rusted driver-side door and getting out. Saskia scrambled out her side. She felt a surge of hungry awareness from one of the wights and jerked its arcane leash with an effort of will, deadening its thoughts and bringing it to heel for at least a little while. The other two kept quiet. They watched her with their dead, cold eyes as she came back to the bed and began undoing the canvas-wrapped restraints securing the sarcophagus. From Kazimir’s coffin she heard an irritable cough. The vampire had overfed last night; he was sleeping poorly.

Will he go back to living on his little red stipend of vials when the war is over?

“You can send the crane over,” Saskia called, undoing the final restraint. It felt good to be up and moving. “The wights can handle rigging the lines.”

“I hate those things,” Kofax shouted back conversationally over the groan of hydraulics. The crane was moving. Its pitted iron hook swung at the end of its chains. 

Make it secure, Saskia commanded, and the wights hurried to obey, their withered limbs trembling with strain as they raised the interlocking chains still securing the sarcophagus to meet the crane boom’s hook. Her thoughts ached after so long spent holding the undead creatures’ reins. She set her hands against the small of her throbbing back.

Whatever this thing is, I want to be done with it. I want to be home in my dormitory with the curtains drawn and the radio on and nobody looking at me. I want— 

“Saskia!” 

The panic in Stanislav’s voice snapped her out of her frustrated trance. 

“Tell them to stop! Tell them not to unload!” The old changeling came limping back around the cab at speed. His face was ashen. He leaned on the truck’s wheel well for support.

Saskia dropped the compulsion at once and the truck’s suspension groaned as the wights ceased to tighten the chains and the great stone coffin settled back onto the bed. “What is it? What’s happening?”

“What is it?” came Kazimir’s voice from his coffin, lashed to the truck’s bed ahead of the sarcophagus. The vampire sounded dull and sleepy. “Why aren’t we offloading?”

Stanislav pointed north. Smoke hung over Hinterberg like a shroud. Even as they watched, a pillar of fire and dust rose up from the city. Lightning flashed from the clear sky above it. “We’ll go around,” the changeling said grimly. “Through the Hornwald.”

What could do that? Are the stormlords coming? Are they taking the city from us? She ignored the panicked fluttering of her thoughts and returned her attention to the wights. Unhook the crane. Secure the sarcophagus. They obeyed, but with an oily and considered slowness that she didn’t like. She watched them set to work, circling the truck’s bed as Stanislav heaved himself back up into the cab. The Royal’s ancient engine wheezed to life a moment later. 

“Where are you going?” Kofax yelled as Saskia came into view around the tailgate. He stood at the crane’s controls, a lever in one hand. “What the hell’s happening? ”

“Something’s attacking the city,” said Saskia. Her thoughts were slow and muddled. The wights were testing her. They still hadn’t unhooked the sarcophagus from the crane. “We’re taking the long way. Stanislav says—” 

Kofax’s eyes widened. He scrambled back into the baggage car and pulled the door shut after him. Saskia turned to follow the elf’s sightline and saw in the narrow gap between the sarcophagus and Kazimir’s coffin a slender, sandy-haired man in a soiled coverall sprinting away from the truck and toward the treeline. She wondered for an instant where he could have come from before like a magnet the stick-handled grenade lying unpinned on the truck’s bed drew and held her gaze.

Oh, no.

An explosion ripped the Royal in two. A wall of searing air shook rains of needles from the pines and knocked Saskia over, rolling her onto her hands and knees. She covered her head as hot glass and shrapnel blew over her. Bright, stinging cuts on her cheek and forearms. A nauseating pain driven deep into the muscle of her thigh. She moaned into the earth beside the train tracks and tasted dirt and rust and coal. Another shockwave washed over her, flattening her clothes against her body and sending ripples through her soft, pale flesh. In her mind’s eye, one of the wights winked out, its unlife severed. A second fought her for control and sloughed apart as the arcana binding it together destabilized and ripped themselves to pieces. The third snapped its arcane leash with a short, sharp tug and vanished totally from her awareness, leaving her nauseous and gasping in the dirt. Her ears rang. The earth shook beneath her.

Saskia vomited, her whole body fighting back against the sudden convulsion. Hot bile spilled over her fingers. How long has it been since I’ve eaten? I can’t think. I can’t hear myself think. I’m so hungry but if I eat then they’ll see me eat. 

She looked up. The truck’s cab and bed were yards apart at the ends of deep ruts driven into the muddy roadway. The sarcophagus had overturned, dragging the express’s flatbed car off the tracks and pinning the Royal’s trailer at an angle, its corner not a meter from where Saskia had fallen. Both had sunk some ways into the muck. A dozen yards toward the treeline, at the end of a trail of black and pink ichor leading from the wreckage of the bed, Kazimir was burning. The vampire smoked in the sunlight. His skin bubbled under a shroud of pale fire as he crawled over soil peppered with chunks of shrapnel. Blood ran out of him in torrents through abscesses which formed before Saskia’s eyes, eating away at his stomach, his flanks, his throat. His feet and calves looked like chewed gum. Parts of them sloughed away as he went, sticking to the grass and dirt.

“Get the blackout tarp!” Stanislav shrieked as he tumbled from the smoking cab and staggered a few steps before righting himself. The changeling’s left cheek was covered in hairline cuts. His left arm looked broken. “The tarp, Saskia! In the trailer’s undercarriage!”

Saskia forced herself to stand. The pain in her thigh redoubled bright enough to blind her for a moment. Behind her, the trans-Kalima had decoupled from its tilted flatbed and begun to pick up steam. She couldn’t spare any attention for it, or for the massive bulk of the sarcophagus looming beside her. She made her way slowly and carefully through the scorched and flattened grass between the Royal’s ruined halves. Get the tarp. Throw it over him. He’ll be too weak to hurt you, even if he wants to, even if he’s hungry enough to bite whatever comes close. 

A gunshot. Stanislav dropped to the ground with a strangled curse, clutching at his leg. Saskia stared stupidly. A man stood a few yards away from the changeling, close to the treeline. Most Rastish men kept their hair cropped close to the scalp, but this one’s sandy blond mop brushed his shoulders. He wore a soiled flight suit with lieutenant’s daggers on the collar and a patch on the shoulder depicting a sword gripped in two hands. He had huge blue eyes and a pinched, narrow face that gave him a nervous look.

Kazimir wailed, sludge running in rivulets from his empty eye sockets. Flames licked between the vampire’s teeth. Liquefied flesh drooled from his gnarled and yellow bones. “Shit,” hissed Stanislav. He dragged himself back toward the treeline, the heel of his wounded leg digging an erratic furrow in the earth. Runes flickered in bright orange rings around his right arm as he struggled to point a finger at the gunman. The Rastish pilot strode toward him, raised his pistol, and shot the old changeling in the head. Fire spurted from Stanislav’s first two fingers as he fell.

I rely on you, Saskia.

The Rastish pilot shot him again. 

Saskia’s nails bit into her palms hard enough to draw blood. Black runes flickered in her vision. The veins in her arms burned with cold fire. She spoke a cant to deflect bullets, rings of light pulsing around her wrists and elbows, and then another to draw a long splinter of blood out from her cut palm and freeze it in midair over her hand. I’m going to kill this man, she thought. I’m going to kill him. 

She blew over her palm and the sliver shot downhill and pierced the pilot’s shoulder. He screamed and dropped his gun, clutching at the glistening red spine. His hand opened against its killing edge. Saskia drew another from her palm. Chills wracked her. Her fingers trembled as she inhaled a deep breath. Behind her, from the burning tangle of the Royal’s bed, came an earthshaking crash. She looked back, the sliver dissolving into droplets of hot blood that slicked her wrist and stained her dress, as a hulking figure pushed its way out of the darkness within the fallen sarcophagus. Blunt fingers sank into the earth. Massive shoulders shoved the lid aside and raised a blinding cloud of sparks and smoke. A dark thing rose up from within it. Ten feet? Twelve? It seemed unbothered by the flames. It looked at her. Pinprick white eyes burned in the black outline of its head. The pilot began to shriek. Saskia felt— 

A needle tearing skin.

My name is Ursula.

A black glyph. 

Kill me.

Flesh bunching against blood-slicked steel.

Hold me.

A white flame.