Apotheosis, page 28
Janek smiled at the warm compliment and shook his head. “No. I promise, I will stay with you, and go only where you order me, at least until we’ve won this little war,” he replied.
Ana nodded once, satisfied, then pivoted on her heel, already beginning to harangue the miserable humans who had damaged the valuable machine.
Janek felt a presence at his side and turned to face the newcomer. Tomaz had emerged from the shadow of a mound of rubble where he had been hiding, avoiding the afternoon sun. His face bore a small smile, but Janek had served in Ana’s squad alongside Tomaz for more than a century, so he could tell that the Assassin was struggling with barely contained tension.
Tomaz held out his hand as he greeted the younger member of Ana’s squad: “Welcome back, Janek.”
Janek shook Tomaz’s hand warmly. “Thank you, Tomaz,” he replied. It was good to be back among friends, people he could trust absolutely. He waited patiently for Tomaz to tell him about what was worrying him, but Tomaz first said: “Join me in the shade; there’s no point standing in the sun when we don’t have to.”
Janek nodded and followed the older man into the shade of the rubble pile, where Tomaz dropped down into an easy crouch, well out of sight of the work crew – and Ana. Confused, Janek also squatted next to him, and started idly playing with a small pebble his fingers found in the dirt beneath him as he waited.
Eventually, Tomaz spoke, but with a pained expression. “Janek, you asked Ana about the wall… I am worried that she might try to guard Chișinău for longer than is wise,” he explained, his voice a strained whisper. “All of the coven’s best scouts died during the last Karpati invasion. Right now, the Pax is in place, so those scouts we have can travel safely; but they do not observe much. Once the war starts, any of those scouts we send out there will die. We will have no idea how many humans, vampires or heavy matériel assets gather to descend upon us. Please, tell me that Luka gave you a message for her, to fall back to Odesa and then Varna, and thence to Istanbul, that she will live to fight our enemies rather than risk dying defending this pointless patch of dirt!”
“I spoke to Miroslav,” Janek replied. “He did say that I was to make sure that no harm befalls Ana, that she is too valuable to Lady Tamar to be allowed to die. But he also bade me to assist with the defence of Chișinău. We cannot walk away from here prematurely. The Karpati and von Runstedts must be made to pay for every inch of our lands.”
At these words, Tomaz nodded slowly. “Of course. But without information, we risk staying until it is too late to leave.”
Janek nodded, his expression thoughtful. “It is so.” His expression firmed. “Once the war starts, I will personally take the rest of our squad out into the maelstrom every few days to try to get some idea of the disposition of the enemy. We will be Ana’s eyes and ears.”
Tomaz relaxed. “Thank you, Janek,” he said. With that, he grasped Janek’s forearm and shook it firmly, and then the tension was gone from his face, leaving only the smile.
Janek crouched in the brush, the pre-dawn gloom hiding his features. Marianna was lying prone just beside him, and Zsolt was crouched on the opposite side of her. Marianna’s breathing suddenly slowed, and at the end of her second breath out, she pulled the trigger of her Yalguzag. She leapt up and they ran, ghosting through the forest on the route they had planned out beforehand, circling out to the west. After twenty minutes of dashing madly through the darkness, Janek used hand signals to tell his companions to stop. They hid amongst the trees, and Janek strained his senses to listen for the sounds of pursuit. Distant sounds trickled through the forest like water seeping through rotting wood – the rumbling of engines, the chopping of wood, metal striking metal as humans hammered steel pegs into the ground as they pitched their tents, shouts and yells as companies of soldiers were being readied for the assault. Janek ignored those noises and tried to listen for closer sounds, quieter sounds – the sounds of stealthy hunters approaching their location. His mouth was slightly open and his head was cocked to one side. To him, it seemed like he was drifting on currents of air as he extended his senses outward through the forest. A faint crunching noise caught his attention, and his head whipped toward the south; it had been the sound of a boot crushing a clump of leaves. Without conscious thought, Janek melted into the shadows, leaving his KNT-76 beside a tree and bringing his silenced Glock 19 to the ready, and started creeping south-west to flank those who were approaching. Time seemed to slow as he reached a point that gave a clear line of fire toward where it seemed to him that the hostiles would approach from. Knees slightly bent, his eye already on the sight, he breathed out calmly just as a flicker of movement alerted him to their presence. The barrel of his gun moved automatically from target to target, as if it had a mind of its own: precise and bloodthirsty. Dark shapes filled his sights and then collapsed as he compressed the trigger again and again. Mere moments had passed, but it was over – his senses told him that the immediate vicinity was clear of further hostiles. He stalked over to the bodies, reaching them just as Zsolt and Marianna arrived from the north.
“Just three,” Janek whispered quietly. “Von Runstedt.” He looked at Marianna.
“Yes, this was the squad whose leader I shot,” she confirmed. “There is one missing. I suppose that one was taking a message back to their captains while the others chased us.”
Janek nodded agreement. Zsolt was still peering at the bodies, trying to figure out how the engagement had gone down. After a moment, he whistled under his breath, eyes narrow, looking at Janek with newfound respect, before handing him the KNT-76 rifle he had left behind earlier. Zsolt was a good soldier, although young compared to the rest of Ana’s squad, and had served alongside Janek for many years, but whatever he had intuited about the engagement, it was clear that Janek’s abilities exceeded Zsolt’s expectations. Janek shrugged inwardly: including his recent two months of rest in a coffin at Narikala, enough time had passed for him to have digested the blood of the Von Manstein brothers sufficiently that his capabilities far outstripped what they had been a few short years ago, and little of that time had been spent in the company of his comrades. Janek knew that he now walked the intricate paths of chaos and reaction in a way few others in this world could. At the same time, he knew that the Ardisi would be best served by keeping his growing power a secret for as long as possible; he would have to be very careful during this war not to make too overt an impact, until that impact could prove decisive.
Marianna glanced south-east toward Chișinău, then north toward the main encampment of the enemy, before looking back at Janek. “What next? We have kicked the ants’ nest already; perhaps it is time to return to Chișinău,” she suggested.
Janek shook his head. “Not yet. I would like to try to get a glimpse of what they’re bringing against the walls today, so that we can pass the information onto Ana.”
“Alright,” Marianna sighed. “Let’s go, then.” Janek could see she knew it was dangerous, but she trusted Janek’s skills to extricate them from the forest should hell break loose.
Janek led the way, followed by Marianna, with Zsolt trailing. They dashed through the trees like ghosts, following barely sensed contours in the ground and currents in the air. The forest was thick with the lush, green foliage of late spring, offering them plenty of cover for now, but the sky was brightening as dawn approached, and Janek knew that they had less than an hour to get the intel that he wanted and then get out. From the rumble of diesel engines that had filled the forest all night, Janek knew that at least some of the von Runstedt armoured units had arrived, but he wanted to know how many tanks there were; even a rough estimate would be extremely useful information. The minutes fled by as they crept closer to the main encampment, and Janek felt the keen pressure of time, a need for haste, like a knife against his throat. Twice they had to remain motionless and wait for patrolling vampires to pass them by. The relatively inexperienced Karpati scouts noticed nothing, their senses dulled by the encroaching dawn, something that Janek had known would give the Ardisi squad an advantage in their infiltration. Nonetheless, Janek breathed a quiet sigh of relief both times once the hostile patrols were safely gone.
Eventually they reached a small escarpment that looked down on the main camp a couple of kilometres away. Much of the vegetation had been cleared by hands and by vehicles, leaving their line of sight mostly unobstructed. Janek and Marianna lay prone and raised binoculars to their eyes to start counting vehicles and men. It didn’t take long for Janek to realise that the von Runstedts had brought close to their entire armament; although he couldn’t see them all, judging by their formations and positioning, he judged that the camp housed perhaps thirty Leopard-2 main battle tanks, and at least a dozen PzH 2000s with howitzers. With that much artillery, they could shower the entire wall with shells in short order, then start shelling everything on the other side and be finished with their work in time for dinner… Janek looked to Marianna to see if she shared his grim opinion, and noticed that she was stiff as a board.
“Do you see her?” she hissed.
Wondering who she was referring to, Janek put the binoculars back to his eyes, and started methodically scanning the camp. It only took a moment for him to see whom Marianna was talking about: Katalin Székely was standing outside of a command tent, discussing something with a von Runstedt Captain. The members of her squad stood in a rough arc around her, seeming carefree and relaxed but at the same time ready to leap into immediate deadly action; they had the physical grace of born killers, honed to perfection by centuries of combat. Proud of their warriors, the Karpati had earned their reputation for ruthless ferocity, and Katalin Székely’s squad was Julianna’s favourite for the most sensitive and violent wet work. Janek and Marianna knew every one of those squad members’ faces, every form, in intimate detail.
“Katalin!” Marianna hissed, trembling with uncharacteristic hatred. Janek knew that Marianna ached to fill Katalin’s skull with lead; for a moment, he considered mentioning that if Marianna used a .50 BMG sniper rifle like the McMillan TAC-50 instead of her Yalguzag, she might have been able to fulfil her wish right here and now – but then decided that levity might not fit the situation, and kept his mouth closed.
Janek turned his attention to the von Runstedt Captain, whom he did not recognise. Perhaps Ana would have recognised him, he thought idly, trying to absorb all of the details. The Captain was dressed in military fatigues, as were the members of his squad: five men and one woman, each of them hugely muscled, powerful specimens of athleticism. They did not seem to radiate violence the way Katalin’s squad did, but Janek supposed that it was simply due to their soldier-trained professionalism – these were clearly von Runstedt Storm Troopers, vampires who had spent centuries on the front lines against the Karpati and the Cordova, and still lived. Suddenly, two kilometres seemed altogether far too close to Janek, and he tapped Marianna on the shoulder and started crawling backward until he was far enough away from the small ridge that his silhouette could not be seen when he stood, back where Zsolt waited, keeping guard. Marianna joined him, and Zsolt raised an eyebrow at them quizzically, curious as to what they had seen.
“A dozen howitzers, and maybe thirty main battle tanks,” Janek whispered to Zsolt, who nodded darkly. “And Katalin Székely and her squad, along with von Runstedt Storm Troopers. Chișinău will fall either today or tomorrow, even if we try to defend,” Janek surmised.
He looked at Marianna briefly, to see if she agreed with his assessment. She nodded, slightly reluctant; Janek knew that she craved a chance to find Katalin in her crosshairs from a defensible position. He shrugged inwardly; it would have to be some other time, unless Marianna wished to die.
“Let’s go,” he ordered, quietly, and they started running through the rapidly brightening forest once more.
Ana tried to ignore the devastating noise of artillery bombardment, which was giving her a nasty headache. The low rumble of the diesel engine shook her body as she headed away from Chișinău while it burned. Even though she had known that Chișinău would fall and had been planning its evacuation mere minutes earlier, a sharp stab of disappointment and pain pierced her as she realised that this was the second time she had failed to defend the coven – although she knew that neither time was her fault.
She considered the information that Janek had brought back for a moment, thinking about the disposition of the Ardisi forces north of Istanbul. Large amounts of matériel had been captured from the Karpati near Plovdiv previously, temporarily offsetting the general scarcity of small arms, heavy guns, and ammunition that had plagued the House since the Upheaval. Portions of it had been dispatched to Odesa and to Varna, while the bulk was kept in Istanbul and the surroundings, in order to turn the narrow peninsula on the European side of the Bosporus Strait into a vast killing field. However, the heavy equipment they had was mainly Soviet-era D-20 howitzers and T-72 and M-84 tanks, nowhere near as effective as the far more modern PzH 2000s and Leopard-2s that the von Runstedts had brought south, and north of Istanbul the Ardisi had less than half the number of main battle tanks that their enemies had brought.
She had radioed the information on to Sandor Jandieri – whom Luka had placed in command in Odesa while Zurab had taken over the leadership of the Varna coven – and Sandor had told Luka and passed back orders to Ana: evacuate immediately.
“I hope that we can defend Varna,” she murmured, feeling Tomaz nod his agreement beside her. She raised her voice so that the rest of the squad could hear her words clearly over the noise of the engine. “Sandor is evacuating Odesa. Luka has already given him the order to destroy all boats and wrecks in the marinas with explosives, then head south toward Varna. Our convoy will join with his somewhere near Galați. We are leaving some D-20s with human crews at various locations, with orders to start shelling probable approach routes at predetermined times over the next couple of weeks. The Karpati vampire squads will find and murder them all eventually, but every hour that we can delay their main convoy, the better. The important thing is that we get the bulk of our forces and matériel to Varna safely and quickly,” she explained, and then had to stifle a small sigh of worry. On the one hand, she agreed with the plan – it gave the Ardisi the greatest chance of success, so long as the enemy didn’t have ships to allow their forces to bypass Istanbul. On the other hand, Varna had been her true home for centuries, and Evksinograd Palace was beautiful and held immense personal importance for Ana. Now the city would be the front line of Ardisi defences against its enemies, and it seemed improbable that they would be able to hold it against the forces arrayed against them. It had been a miracle to her that the Karpati had left it untouched when they had occupied it last time – but then, at that point in time they had assumed that it would become their own coven. It seemed extremely improbable that they would decide similarly this time. Artillery would pound it to rubble.
She decided that any time spent worrying about Varna’s buildings was time wasted, and instead resolved to spend her energy thinking about how best to defend it. Thinking was not something she could do properly while suffering from her current headache, however, so for now she decided to snuggle comfortably onto Tomaz’s shoulder and rest. She was quickly asleep.
TWENTY-FIVE
Mud and Steel
More than six months of constant warfare had taken its toll on Ana. She glanced at Sandor Jandieri: his face was as grim as death also. The group walked south out of the smoking rubble that had been Varna, shivering in the cold. They had held it valiantly for longer than anyone had thought possible. It was now late autumn, and it was finally time to admit that the city was lost. It had been pounded by artillery until its buildings had been reduced to mounds of rubble, but each day the defenders had hidden from the explosions in underground labyrinths and then emerged to repulse the invaders with small arms. City block by city block, they had slowly given ground, trading blows with the enemy and making them pay in blood for every inch gained. The human soldiers of the Ardisi army fought valiantly, digging into their positions and refusing to die, requiring the Karpati and von Runstedts to send their own vampire soldiers to kill them. When they did so, Ardisi death squads had sallied forth at night and destroyed howitzers and tanks that had been left that much less defended. The battle had ebbed and flowed, as the von Runstedt supply lines had been attacked and then reinforced, and advantages were won and lost on either side; but it was not possible for the Ardisi to hold the city against them any longer. Trucks and artillery rumbled south, heading toward strategic locations where they would prepare to rain fire and death upon the Karpati column as it advanced past the city. The human soldiers in the trucks looked scared, knowing that they would be tasked with defending the tanks and artillery from Karpati vampires who would move like ghosts in the night and strike like the scythe of the Grim Reaper himself. Other soldiers carried Javelins or modernised RPG-7s and would be bedded down into ambush positions, with little water, less food, only a couple of rockets each, only a sliver of hope that they would successfully land a shot on the enemy armour, and no hope to survive afterward. Some squads of Ardisi vampires had been ordered out into the forest also and would provide some screening defence against Karpati scouts; but they, too, were unlikely to survive for very long. Varna would fall, and then the invaders would begin the difficult work of pushing the defenders back, step by step, toward Istanbul. Ana was too exhausted to weep, but she felt aching sorrow and smouldering rage: Varna had been her home for centuries. Tomaz walked beside her, calm as always, but even his face was tight with loss and pain. Marianna, Janek and Zsolt shared the emotion of the moment: all of their faces were dark. But none were as grim as Sandor; he had been the leader of the Varna coven for centuries, and even though he had recently been ordered north to Odesa, Varna was his true home. Now it was in ashes. Before the war, some had hoped that the von Runstedts would spare the palace from destruction by artillery, but lightning rarely struck the same place twice – at least, not when the lightning came in the form of restraint from the enemies of House Ardisi – and this time it had immediately been reduced to ruins. Ana tried to be insouciant: Varna had been her home, and Evksinograd Palace had been beautiful, but humans could be ordered to rebuild palaces. Avoiding the deaths of too many Ardisi vampires was infinitely more important than defending Varna successfully, in the long run. Her mind swirled with possibilities for how the enemy advance might be slowed during the winter. Any army depended on logistics to provide sufficient supplies – primarily food and fuel – to continue advancing, and the Karpati had limited logistical capability. They had some oil production facilities, primarily in the south of what had been Hungary, but many of their trucks had been captured by the Ardisi during their previous incursion, so they were relying on the von Runstedt clan for logistical support. Ana knew that if the invading army could be slowed long enough, their ability to resupply food and fuel would be stretched thin, and their advance could be halted for the winter… She realised that it was probably a vain hope: the von Runstedts had extremely effective logistics capability, and their commanders were veterans of many long campaigns. Their army would be impeccably well supplied with food, fuel, ammunition and fresh human soldiers. Weather alone might slow their advance but would not stop it, not until it reached the gates of Istanbul, unless human soldiers with RPGs or Javelins waiting in the mud were able to ambush it. Ana hoped that the ambushes and artillery strikes would be effective in destroying parts of the column as it moved south, causing useful damage and delaying the Karpati advance enough to provide the defenders in Istanbul with more valuable time to prepare.
