Andy Remic - Soul Stealers

The Refineries towered, and he walked in their shadow. There was a man, tall and lean and bearded, reclining against the first Refinery. Graal reached him and stopped. This was Viga, Kradek-ka's personal Engineer Assistant, come to oversee the Blood Refineries and their absorption. He had travelled all the way from the Black Pike Mountains to help.

"Well met, Graal," said the man, eyes glittering, and Graal could just distinguish tiny vachine fangs, like polished brass, peeking over his bottom lip.

"I thought you would never come," said Graal, fighting hard to keep his annoyance in check. He was not used to being treated so… casually. "Was the journey difficult?"

"More difficult than you could comprehend," said Viga, rubbing at his beard. "Although I hear you suffered some disturbance yourself; something to do with an old, bearded soldier? A resident of Jalder, or so I was informed."

Graal forced a smile. "A nothing," he said. The Harvesters were watching him, waiting for his command; as if waving away an insect, he gave instruction, and the Harvesters started to lift the half-frozen corpses and feed them into long, thin slots at the base of the Refineries. It took very little effort: the instant a body touched the slot, it was sucked inside. A deep thrumming seemed to well up beneath the ground, and Graal fancied he could sense, if not necessarily hear, the huge but subtle clockwork engines within the Blood Refineries; mashing up bodies, extracting blood, and refining it into blood-oil: the food of the vachine world.

The bearded man turned, and watched for a while. Then he tutted. Graal stared into his eyes, and the man lowered his head.

"There is a problem?"

"Kradek-ka's daughter."

"She was always a problem."

"Do not be flippant with me, Graal; you know her existence is the reason you stand here now, you know the experimentation Kradek-ka performed on her was the central reason why we can do this; without her, without Anukis and her," he laughed, "her jewel, there would be no quest for Kuradek, Meshwar and Bhu Vanesh."

"You are of course, correct," said Graal, and straightened his back. Beside them, the Harvesters continued to pick up corpses and feed them into the Refineries. Deep inside, now, the meshing of gears could be heard; and huge pendulous blades working.

Graal glanced up, at the towering wall of the Refinery, and then back to Viga. He reached out to place a comforting hand on his arm, but the man recoiled.

"No. You must not touch me. I am impure!"

"We are all impure," said Graal, head tilting a little; he could see, now, that the man before him was a man ready to crack, a vachine teetering along a blade-edge of insanity.

"We should never have treated her like that. It was wrong of us to push her; to humiliate her!"

"It is too late for regret," said Graal, voice steady.

"Not so! She has escaped, gone looking for her father! Nobody should have undergone such humiliation!"

"Well, she will save us the quest," said Graal, voice hard now. This man's weakness was starting to upset him. He had great respect for Viga, especially as Kradekka's most trusted Engineer servant; but to whine thus? To whine was to be weak; and Graal so hated the weak. He placed his hand on sword-hilt.

"This whole situation is an abomination," continued Viga.

Graal drew his sword, and shook his head, and stepped close to the man and the blade touched his throat, cold black steel pressing flesh and his fangs ejected, suddenly, with a hiss of fury but Graal leant on the blade and blood bubbled along the razor edge and he felt Viga relax beside him. "It is too late to back out now," said Graal, voice little more than a whisper.

"I know that. It's just… she was an innocent vachine! We ruined her life!"

"She is in the past…" said Graal. "So be silent, and be still, and be calm; the Refineries must work, and we must build the store of energy… of magick! Only with the Refineries at optimum power can we bring about the return of the Vampire Warlords!"

"But you do not have the Soul Gems," whimpered Viga, from behind Graal's blade.

"I am working on it," growled Graal, and sheathed his weapon.

Viga had gone. Graal sat on the ground, cross-legged, and watched as the last of the bodies was fed into the huge machines. He looked around, as flakes of falling snow whipped back and forth in the wind. The distance was hazy, just like Graal's memory.

In silence, the last of the Falanor corpses were fed into metal holes. Then the Harvesters did a strange thing. They moved, each to their own Blood Refinery, and they spread arms and legs wide and shuffled forward towards blank metal walls – so they were stark contrasts illuminated against wide plates of iron. And then they – merged, sinking into the metal of the Refineries, becoming for a moment at one with the machines as flesh became metal and iron became flesh, and Graal blinked, licking his lips, nervous for just an instant – not nervous of pain or mutilation or death, even his own death, but nervous in case it did not work. Graal blinked, and the Harvesters were gone; absorbed into the machines. Distantly, he could hear a tick, tick, tick, as of huge, pendulous clockwork.

He smiled grimly. They called it Interface. Where the Harvesters used special ancient magick to refine blood, into that chemical agent the vachine craved, and indeed needed, to survive.

Blood-oil. The currency of their Age.

Graal sat, grimly, thinking about Kradek-ka. The vachine was a genius, no doubt; he had helped usher in the civilisation and society they now enjoyed. However, he was unpredictable, and a little insane. And his daughter was another problem entirely. Graal's face locked. She was yet just another problem he would have to face.

General Graal sighed, and sat staring at the exhaust pipes on one of the Refineries; slowly, the pipes oozed trickles of pulped flesh to the snowy ground. Graal brooded, waiting for his Harvesters to return.

If only all life was as simple as war, he thought.

When the Vampire Warlords return, there will be more war. He smiled at that, and dreamed of his childhood… over distant millennia.

They called him Graverobber, and he lived amidst the towering circle of stones at Le'annath Moorkelth… The Passing Place. The name, and nature, of the stones had long since been lost to the humans who inhabited the land, with their curious ways and basic weaponry. But the Graverobber knew; he had researched, and learned, and been privy to a knowledge older than man or vachine.

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.