NO GOLD IN THE GREY MOUNTAINS 
by Jack Yeovil
	
	On the opposite crag, the seven towers of the Fortress of Drachenfels thrust skyward like the taloned fingers of a deformed hand. The sunset bloodied the castle as Constant Drachenfels, the Great Enchanter, had done in life. Joh Lamprecht had heard all the stories, all the songs. He knew of the long-lived monster's numberless crimes, and of his eventual downfall and defeat. Brave Prince Oswald and Fair Genevieve, his vampire ladylove, had ended the horror, and now the castle was untenanted, all but the most earthbound ghosts flown to the beyond. However, it was still shunned. No peasant of this mountain region would dare set his boot upon the path to Drachenfels while the stories were told in whispers, the songs remembered by ill-favoured minstrels. And that was what made the place ideal for Joh's purposes.
	Big, slow Freder was too lackwitted to be concerned with superstition, and dark, quiet Rotwang too wrapped up in his own skills to take any notice of the rumoured creatures in the darkness. Which left only young Yann Groeteschele to be frightened by the old legends, the shadows and the night winds. Joh could count on the young bandit's unswerving loyalty for as long as Groeteschele's fear of him outweighed his fear of the name of a dead sorcerer. That should be a considerable time.
	Groeteschele had only heard the songs about Drachenfels' Poison Feast and the Sack of Gisoreux, but he had been present when Joh broke the back of Warden Fanck and led the mass escape from the penal quarrypits of the Vaults, to the South, and in the Loren Forest he had held down the writhing body of Guido Czerepy, the silk merchant, while Joh tortured out of him the location of his hidden cache of gold.
	In the still air, the rattle of the coach was audible from several miles away. Joh keened like a crow, and Rotwang answered from his position of concealment down by the road. Joh tapped Groeteschele, and indicated the youth's crossbow. The lamps of the coach became visible in the evening haze. Joh felt the old excitement in his vitals, and gripped the hilt of his curved sword. He had taken the scimitar from the corpse of a slain envoy of Araby, shortly after relieving the man of the jewelled tokens of esteem he was bearing to the Imperial Court, and found it a more satisfactory item of killing steel than the common straight sword of the Old World.
	Groeteschele slipped a quarrel into his crossbow, and steadied it against his cheek. Joh kept his eyes on the coach. As robberies went, this was simple. Three times last year, he had held up the same coach - carrying gold from the Kautner seam down from the Mountains and through the Reikwald Forest to Altdorf - and the trick had been easier each time. Once the miners had paid their tax tribute to the Emperor's collectors they were hardly disposed to buy guards to escort it to Karl-Franz's coffers and so it was placed on the regular mail and passenger run.
	Tonight's plunder would serve to equip Joh and his band for a more daring, more profitable exploit. Joh had a nice little Tilean princedom marked down, its vaults ripe for plundering, but he would need to hire specialists, to buy equipment that could not be stolen, and to make arrangements with a slightly dishonourable banking house to dispose of the accrued funds. A chest of Kautner gold should set the job up perfectly.
	The coach was near enough for Joh to see the horses' breath frosting. The coachman sat alone on the box, draped in a cloak. He would be wearing a breastplate under his garments, but killing the coachman never stopped anything anyway.
	There was a long, creaking sound and a crash. A tree fell on the road just as the coach had passed. Good. Freder had done his part well. Joh nodded, and Groeteschele stood up, firing and reloading. His first quarrel took the lead horse of the four-strong team in the side of the neck and it tripped. A figure darted into the road, sword flashing. Rotwang drove his blade deep into the animal, and it fell. He leaped aside, and the team continued, dragging its dying comrade a few yards.
	Joh made his way down from the rocky mountainside towards the road, Groeteschele following. He had complete confidence in Rotwang's expertise with this manoeuvre. It was tricky. Many bandits were crippled or worse when they got tangled up with the horse they were trying to immobilize. But Rotwang was the best killer Joh had ever seen, trained to it from birth.
	When he came out of the trees, all was well. The coach was halted, and Rotwang stood a little way away from it, red sword dripping. Freder held the still-standing horses and glowered up at the coachman. His height, broad shoulders and apish appearance helped to deter many a solid citizen from interfering in the band's business. Joh nodded to Groeteschele, and the young man climbed up beside the quivering coachman and sorted through the luggage, throwing parcels and packages to the dirt road. Someone inside the coach was complaining loudly.
	"It's not here," Groeteschele said.
	"What!" snapped Joh. "Idiot, it must be. Look harder."
	It should be in a small chest with the Imperial Crest and a fine Breton lock. It usually was. Groeteschele rooted among the remaining cargo.
	"No, nothing," he said.
	Joh signed to Rotwang, who walked towards the coach. The coachman was trembling, praying to all the Gods. Groeteschele climbed down, and Rotwang pulled himself up to the top of the coach. He moved like a big cat, with strong but apparently lazy gestures, and he could strike like a daemon. He sat beside the coachman, plucking and throwing away the man's whip, and then did something to the man with his hands. The coachman screamed, and Joh knew Rotwang's inexpressive face would be wearing a slight smile. Rotwang whispered, passed his hands over the coachman's body again, and there were more screams.
	Little knives flashed red in Rotwang's hands, and he paid some attention to the coachman's face. Finally, the bandit spat into the road, and pushed the coachman off his seat. The man sprawled, dead, beside his vehicle.
	Joh looked up at Rotwang.
	"No gold," the killer told him. "The Kautner seam petered out three months ago. No more gold in the Grey Mountains."
	Joh swore, calling down the wrath of Morr on this venture. He had blundered badly, and would have to redeem himself or lose position. Groeteschele was young and Freder was a clod, but Rotwang - who had so far displayed no taste for leading the band - could easily take his place.
	"What is the meaning of this?"
	The coach door opened and a well-dressed man stepped out. His elegantly booted foot landed on the coachman's body and he cringed away. He looked at Joh and Groeteschele and drew a long, fine duellist's sword. He assumed a fighting stance and looked at Joh, waiting for the bandit to strike the first blow. Groeteschele shot him in the head and he staggered back, shaking from the blow. Freder pulled his purse away from his belt and threw it to Joh. It was heavy, but not heavy enough to make this job worth its while. The ill-advised hero slid down the coach and sat, dead, in the road beside the coachman, eyes staring either side of Groeteschele's bolt.
	Joh went to the open door, and looked into the coach.
	"Hello," said a musical female voice, "are you a bandit?"
	She had golden curls, and was dressed fit for the Imperial Court in a brocaded dress with pearls worked into the bodice. She was not ostentatiously bejewelled, but her fingers and ears yielded more gold than many a small miner's claim would in a year. Her pale oval face was lovely, delicate and lightly painted.
	She sat on the plush seat of the coach like a dressed-up doll, her feet not touching the floor. Joh judged her to be about twelve years old.
	"Is there anything worth stealing?" Groeteschele asked.
	Joh smiled at the girl, who smiled back.
	"I think so."
	Her name, she told them, was Lady Melissa d'Acques, and she was distantly related to both the Royal Family of Bretonnia and the Imperial House of the Second Wilhelm. She had insisted the bandits bring her luggage to Drachenfels when they took her there, and from the number, quality and expense of the dresses in her travelling wardrobe, Joh knew her family would be capable of paying a substantial ransom for her return. So far as he could make out, the girl was somewhat simple for her age. She treated her captors as if they were servants pretending to be bandits and this whole episode a game to while away a dull afternoon in the gardens. So far, this had worked to Joh's advantage - she had ridden on Freder's saddle and given them no trouble - but he dreaded the inevitable moment when she tired of play and wanted to be taken home. Typically, she seemed to have found a soulmate in Freder, with whom she was laughing and joking, exchanging nonsense rhymes. If only she knew how many men and women the rough-faced giant had killed with his hands alone.
	She didn't complain at the quality of the food they gave her at their camp, which was pitched in one of the courtyards of the fortress, and she tried cheerfully to answer all his questions. His problem was that, in order to convert his stroke of luck into gold crowns, he needed to know more about Melissa's family. How he could get in touch with her father, for instance. But Melissa, although only too willing to expound at childishly tedious length about the minutiae of her family life, was unwilling or unable to give an address where her family could be contacted, and only had the vaguest awareness of anything outside the cloisters of her aristocratic circle. Joh gathered her family maintained households in Parravon, Marienburg and Altdorf, and that several of her male relations could be found in the courts of Bretonnia and the Empire.
	As Melissa spoke, Freder squatted by her grinning, enraptured by her stories about playthings, pets and servants. Everyone and everything in the d'Acques circle had a nickname. She experimented with several unflattering nicknames for Freder, and tried to extend the practice to Joh and Groeteschele. The wolf-faced Rotwang she was - wisely - a little afraid of, and so Joh had him see to business elsewhere, settling down the horses. It was vital that he learn more...
	"Tell me, Melissa, where is your father now? Were you travelling to him?"
	Melissa cocked her head to one side and then the other. "That depends, Mr Joh. Sometimes, he's in his castle, sometimes he's in his palace. Now, he's probably in his palace."
	"And where is his palace?"
	"He's a Count, you know, and a Baron. It gets so confusing remembering. The servants have a terrible time. In Bretonnia, he's a Count, and in the Empire, he's a Baron, and there are fearful penalties for getting them mixed up. We travel between Bretonnia and the Empire quite a bit."
	Melissa yawned, forgetting to cover her mouth, and stretched. She didn't appear to be very comfortable in her starched and formal clothes. That might mean she was being sent on a short journey, that she had people nearby. She hadn't known the man in the coach at all before setting out, and hadn't formed a good opinion of him. "He pinched my cheeks and patted my hair too much. He deserved to be killed."
	Lady Melissa was quite a startling little girl. The aristocracy bred its young bloodthirsty, Joh guessed. Certainly the Duke's son he had had to kill all those years ago, after the fop had run through Joh's father from behind on a minor quarrel, had been a death-happy fool. That had been the first step on the road to outlawry. There was a song about Joh Lamprecht, telling of how he was driven to the bandit life by injustice and tyranny, but Joh knew he would never have been content to be a copper miner like his father and grandfather. He would have been a bandit even if he had been born on the estates of Benedict the Benevolent, rather than the Iron-Fisted Duke of Diijah-Montaigne.
	"I'm tired," she said. "Can I go to bed now?"
	Joh nodded to Freder, who took the child up in his arms like a fond father, and bore her away. Joh had had Rotwang air out one of the bedrooms in the castle, and do his best to clean the cobwebs away. They had chosen a room with a still-functioning lock and an available key. It had no exterior windows, and would serve as a comparatively luxurious cell.
	Freder came back, grinning, to the campfire.
	"Well?" Groeteschele asked Joh.
	Rotwang came out of the shadows suddenly.
	"We could do very well out of the Lady," Joh said. "But we'll have to take it slowly. She's rich. They aren't like you and me, Groeteschele. They have strange ways. I think we'll be able to find out about her family, and then we'll bargain for a ransom."
	"What if they don't want her back?" Rotwang asked. He was a foundling, sold for a pit-fighter before he could walk, and had no ideas about his real family. Joh sometimes wondered if Rotwang were entirely human.
	"Of course they'll want her back, Rotwang. She's a precious package."
	Freder tried to say something. It took him a long time to get a sentence out, and usually it wasn't worth the wait. Because they were all tired, Joh, Rotwang and Groeteschele sat back and let him speak.
	"Cuh-cuh-cuh-couldn't w-we cuh-cuh-cuh-keep her?"
	Rotwang spat in the embers. They hissed. The shadows closed in.
	In the darkness of the Fortress of Drachenfels, the Old Woman crept, her fingers curved like claws, her still-sharp mind reaching before her. She had no need of her eyes after all these centuries. As a creature of the night, the cursed stones were comfortable to her. There were intruders now, and she would have to see them off or be destroyed. Her veins were thinned, and her sharp teeth slid in and out of their gumsheaths. It was too long since she had slaked her red thirst.
	Drachenfels was gone, but he had left something of himself behind. She could taste the residue in the foul air. The spirits writhed deep in the shadows. But the living beings stood out like beacons. She latched onto them all, sipping their thoughts - although she would rather have been sipping their blood - and fixing them in her ancient mind.
	The bandits and their prisoner. It was an interesting situation. She found human relationships endlessly fascinating. There were so many ways they could be broken down, set aside and tampered with. For her, there was pleasure in the panic and fear she could whip up in the bandits before the feeding frenzy fell upon her, just as an epicure would prepare his palate for the main course with a selection ofaperitifs or a great amorist postpone lovemaking with extensive foreplay.
	She was pleased that the strongest physically of the living men was the weakest in mind. That made things so much easier. His strength would nourish her, help her get through the long night, and deal with the more dangerous of the intruders.
	Her eyes filled with blood.
	Joh was startled awake, as if by a mailed fist clenching around his heart. He was sure he had cried out. Groeteschele was shaken out of sleep at the same moment. They bumped heads. Blinking in the afterlight of the fire, they looked at each other. Something was wrong, but they couldn't tell what it was. Joh had been dreaming, he knew, but the dream vanished from his head as he was jolted out of the fug of sleep. It had been a bad one, and he was sweating.
	Rotwang was up, daggers in both hands. He kicked something, and it rolled towards the light.
	Groeteschele let out an involuntary oath, his voice womanish and shrill. Freder's head lay at his feet.
	"The rest of the oaf is here," Rotwang said.
	Joh stabbed a pitch-covered torch at the embers. It caught, and he held it up. Rotwang stood over Freder's bulky body. The head had been taken off neatly, and there was almost no blood. This was not a natural killing.
	"It's this place," Groeteschele said. "It stinks of that devil Drachenfels."
	"The Great Enchanter is dead and gone," Joh said.
	"So is Fat Fool Freder," said Rotwang.
	"There's someone else here with us." Groeteschele was shivering, but not with the cold. In his nightshirt, with his long, milky-white face, he looked himself like a cheap engraving of a ghost.
	"That's obvious. It's a big place."
	"The girl?"
	Joh had a moment of concern for the Lady Melissa. He did not want her dying in any manner he could not profit from.
	The three bandits pulled on jackets and boots over nightclothes. Joh swore as he cut his palm open on the silver spur he had forgotten to remove from his rough-riding boots. There was no time now. Weapons in their hands, they entered the wing of the castle where the captive's room was. Rotwang lead them through the dark. The sharpness of his eyes in shadow was among his most valuable attributes.
	Joh knew how serious their trouble was when he noticed that Rotwang wasn't sure about the path he was taking. The Fortress was legendary for its labyrinthine and contradictory byways. That was one of the reasons Joh had chosen to pitch camp in the courtyard.
	After a moment of near panic, they found the room. "Look," said Rotwang.
	The wood around the handle was deeply scored, as if a knife-fingered hand had tried the door.
	It was still locked. Rotwang fumbled with the key, and opened the door.
	"What are you doing?" Melissa said, sitting up in bed, her hair loose. "Am I to be murdered in my bed?"
	As soon as he saw Freder's bodiless head, Rotwang knew that Joh Lamprecht's time as a King of Banditti was over. It only remained for Rotwang to live out this night in the castle, and leave. Perhaps he would turn to the mercenary life again, and enlist in one of the many armies of the Old World. There were always opportunities for people with his skills, and many employers uninterested in the legalities of his previous adventures. He was not profligate in the deployment of his abilities, and liked to see gold from each of his killings. So far, the coachman had not been worth the effort. The little girl would never bring more than her jewellery. Kidnapping was a fool's crime, and had Joh proposed it outright Rotwang would have left there and then. The business of the bungled coach hold-up had been bad enough but the kidnapping - and now the death of one of their number - told him that the days of easy plunder were at an end.
	Currently, Joh was trying to talk to the Lady Melissa, to no great purpose. The girl knew nothing. Groeteschele was sitting in a chair, hugging himself. The youth was badly scared. He had been as courageous as any in the band's previous exploits, but had only faced cold steel and human muscle. Whatever it was that walked this castle was no natural thing, Rotwang knew.
	Prince Oswald should have had the place razed to the ground once the Great Enchanter was dead.
	"We stay here, and protect the girl," Joh ordered.
	Rotwang didn't know if his chief fully meant what he said. He had not hitherto been noted for his sense of chivalry. Still, a farmer would guard from wolves a calf he fully intended to butcher on the morrow.
	Groeteschele was too deeply frightened to answer. Joh looked to Rotwang.
	This was as good a position as any to defend.
	He nodded.
	Joh sat on the Lady Melissa's bed, and told the child to lie back and go to sleep. He stroked her hair, almost tenderly.
	"Good night, Mr Joh."
	The little girl smiled, shrugged, and pulled the covers up over her head.
	"Shut the door and wait, Rotwang," Joh said. "It'll come to us."
	"I know."
	Joh wondered if the only dangers in the castle were outside the room. Groeteschele was nearly mad with fear, and the mad can be dangerous to those who mean them no harm. The lad was gripping his sword with both hands, holding it vertical in his lap, his forehead pressed against the flat of the blade. His eyes were active, looking at every corner of the room, but empty of intelligence. Joh had never bothered to find out what Groeteschele had been before Warden Fanck shackled them together in the quarries. They had shared days and nights ever since, but Joh still knew nothing of Groeteschele's antecedents, his former life, his original crime. Somehow, he knew it was too late now.
	And Rotwang was slow to respond to his orders, taking a second to think things through. Obedience was no longer automatic. The killer was out for himself, and would not hesitate to leave the others to a ghastly death if he thought he could survive the better for it. After all, the man had lasted so long in his profession precisely because he was dangerous, treacherous, conscienceless. Often, Joh had wondered what the result would be if he were to duel with the killer. Rotwang would have the edge in training, experience and simple skill, but Joh thought the other man was dead inside. He killed without passion, without interest, and Joh suspected - hoped - his own brand of hot-blooded combat would prove superior to Rotwang's chilly discipline. It was a question he had never felt the need to put to a practical test.
	The torch burned in its sconce, filling the room with red shadows. The Lady Melissa slept, or seemed to, the covers rising and falling as she breathed.
	Joh had to turn the situation around to his advantage. He had to extort a suitable ransom from the d'Acques clan. He had to proceed to his Tilean pickings, and make his name as a strategist. There would be more songs about Joh Lamprecht. More odes to his glories.
	Outside, in the bulk of the castle, there were sounds. Joh knew the same winds that had blown the night before were setting shutters to rattle and old furniture to creak. But amid the thousand tiny natural sounds of night, there were silences that betokened huge and malevolent presences. Drachenfels was dead. There was no question of that. But the dead could still be dangerous. Perhaps something of the Great Enchanter remained behind in his fortress, waiting, watching, hungry...
	Like Groeteschele, he clutched his weapon as a cleric does the symbol of his deity.
	He could only wait.
	The Old Woman was glutted with the first of her victims. Freder's blood had proved rich, and with it came a rush of the memories of his body. She felt his pains and his pleasures as she drained him lustily. She had absorbed his life, and freed his tethered, childish spirit from its cage of meat. As an afterthought, she left him for the others to find. She found it easy to pass through the castle. Locked doors, walled-up passages, and trap-laden corridors posed no problems for her. Like a mist, she could pass where she willed.
	From Freder's dull memories, she learned about the others. It was easy to see how to proceed against them. So easy. People never changed, never learned. They were always easy.
	In the warm darkness she made and unmade fists, extending and retracting her hard, sharp nails.
	Her thirst was quenched. The rest of the night's work would be for the pleasure of it.
	Considering who her prey were and their intentions towards their captive, the Old Woman believed she served the cause of Justice as surely as any Imperial man-at-arms or thrice-blessed servant of Verena.
	She could still taste the blood in her mouth.
	She reached out for the weakest of the minds against her, and forced herself in.
	After sitting still for over an hour, Groeteschele screamed. His sword leaped slightly in his hands, and blood trickled down his forehead. He stood up, the blade scraping his skin. Joh was startled out of a half-sleep by his friend's cry, and pushed himself off Melissa's bed. The child miraculously stayed asleep. Rotwang took an apparently casual interest.
	Groeteschele dropped his sword. He was bleeding profusely, but his self-inflicted wound looked comparatively minor. His scream died away, but he kept whimpering.
	"Calm yourself," Joh ordered.
	Groeteschele didn't take any notice. He was gabbling to himself, his meaning impossible to gauge. Blood dropped from his cheeks and chin onto his nightshirt. He shook his head, and wrung his hands. He could have been posing for a statue of the muse of fear.
	Joh reached out to take hold of Groeteschele's shoulder, but the younger man dodged back, his terror increased by the prospect of human contact.
	Rotwang stood aside, impassive.
	Groeteschele began to chant something in a language Joh didn't recognize. It was the unknown tongue the bandit used when he sometimes talked in his sleep, the tongue Joh assumed was that of the never-mentioned land of his birth. As he chanted, he made signs in the air with his fingers. Droplets of blood detached from his face and fell to the floor.
	Groeteschele hit the door, and passed through. Joh heard him blundering down the corridor, still chanting.
	The bedclothes rose in a hump, and the Lady Melissa burrowed her way sleepily to the surface.
	"What's going on?" she asked.
	Joh's face was wet. Groeteschele had splashed him with his own blood.
	"Watch the girl," he told Rotwang. "I'm going after him."
	Rotwang nodded. Melissa smiled and rubbed her eyes.
	Lantern in one hand, scimitar in the other, Joh stepped outside. He could still hear Groeteschele babbling.
	He walked slowly, towards the noise.
	Joh Lamprecht was a sentimental old fool, Rotwang thought. The boy, Groeteschele, was dead, and Joh should have left him to rot. But Joh had formed an attachment to the youthful Yann, and would not be dissuaded from plunging into the darkness to face whatever horrors lay dormant in Drachenfels, waiting for him with claws, pincers and hot coals.
	He paced the bedroom, struggling with unfamiliar feelings. Hitherto, he had faced death with a cool reserve born of a knowledge that those who let their emotions take over in a crisis were those least likely to walk away whole. In combat, he was as dispassionate as a surgeon, and he still lived, while all the berserkers he had faced were wormshit.
	Now, he felt fear. Not just the healthy quickening that kept you cautious in the pit, that reminded you to keep your body away from your foeman's blade, but a deep-down fear that whispered to him, incessantly compelling him to throw down his sword and run like Groeteschele, run until he was free of Drachenfels, free of the Grey Mountains...
	He knew that was the way to die, but the temptation was still there.
	The little girl was sitting up in bed now, playing with her long, fine hair. Although roused in the middle of the night, her curls seemed naturally composed rather than tangled. Joh was right; the rich were different.
	He had pledged his sword for the rich all his life. In the pits as a child, he had been wagered on by aristocratic sportsmen who prided themselves in picking a winner. Later, he had fought for the Elector of Middenland when his tenant farmers tried to resist a raise in the tithe. So much blood spilled, so much profit made, and so little of it, in the end, for his own benefit.
	"Mr Rotwang?" the girl asked. He didn't reply, but she continued. "Mr Rotwang, are you a really brave and ferocious bandit, like Blaque Jacques in the songs?"
	He ignored her. Brave and ferocious. That is what he had been earlier in the evening, before the accursed Joh Lamprecht led him to this doom-laden castle and exposed him to the terrors of the dark.
	Brave and ferocious. Now, he was not so sure about that.
	He could still hear Groeteschele chanting. The monotone had changed now, and the young man seemed to be singing. He was breathing badly, interrupting the song in the wrong places, and Joh assumed he was near the end of his strength. Good, he didn't want to have to fight his comrade to bring him back.
	He had never realized before how much the young man meant to him. Freder had been a cretin, and Rotwang was beyond conversation, which meant Groeteschele was the only person in the band Joh could talk to, could hand down the benefit of his experience to. Unconsciously, he had been training the lad to be his successor on the outlaw path. Without him, Joh's nights would be long and empty. All the passed-on wisdom would go to waste.
	If Yann Groeteschele died here in Drachenfels, there would be nobody left. When Joh himself passed on, there would be nobody left alive who knew the workings of the Three Gold Crowns Scam, the mechanics of the Vault-Piercing Screw, the profit to be had from the Joh Lamprecht Stagecoach Switch Manoeuvre. Without Groeteschele, Joh's life would be a waste.
	In the back of his mind, Joh knew these thoughts weren't like him. Groeteschele was another crossbowman, no more nor less. Warden Fanck and sheer chance, not a bond of affection, had shackled them together. And yet, here in the dark of Drachenfels, something was coming out of him. He thought he was being worked on, and tried to resist.
	Joh found Groeteschele backed up in a blind corridor, squeezed into a corner, still chanting. His eyes were shut tight, crusted over with his scabbing blood, and he was tracing symbols in the dust. Joh recognized a few gods' names - Shallya, Verena, Ulric - in Groeteschele's litany, and the scrawl on the floor included approximations of several sacred signs.
	"Come, lad, there's nothing to fear," Joh lied.
	Groeteschele kept up his mad prayer. Joh set down his lantern and went to his comrade, and bent over, hoping to help him to his feet, to guide him back to Melissa's room to await the dawn.
	Groeteschele's right hand was still tracing signs, but his left was at the belt he had drawn around his nightshirt, gripping something tightly. As he touched the young man's right upperarm, Joh realized what Groeteschele was holding.
	He kept his quarrels strung on his belt.
	Joh tried to pull back, but Groeteschele was fast. His eyes flicked open, and his left hand shot upwards. He spat a curse, and lodged the point of the crossbow bolt between Joh's chest and shoulder.
	Joh felt the weapon scrape his upper ribs and sink through the joint. Pain flowed up and down his arm, and he dropped his scimitar. Groeteschele was standing up now, working the quarrel deeper, his right hand caught in Joh's hair.
	They struggled together. The lantern was knocked over under their feet, and a small spill of burning oil spread in the dirt. Joh saw red shadows dancing on the walls as he wrestled with Groeteschele. He punched the young man in the belly with his left hand, and knocked the wind out of him. Groeteschele broke the clinch and staggered away. He let go of the quarrel with a final yank that shot another bolt of pain into Joh's torso.
	Groeteschele was going for Joh's dropped sword. Joh kicked him in the side, and tipped him over. He fell into the burning pool, and his flimsy cotton nightshirt caught in an instant, flaming upto his legs.
	Screeching curses, Groeteschele came at Joh, the flames spreading over his entire body.
	Joh stepped back, and there was a wall where one hadn't been before. He struck the stone with his wounded shoulder, and screamed out loud, nearly fainting with the agony. He held up his left arm like a shield as the fiery Groeteschele lurched forwards. The bandit's smooth face was on fire now, the features running like wax, and the enclosed space was thick with the stench of burning flesh.
	Joh's scimitar was ten yards away, and Groeteschele stood between him and it. He only had one weapon available.
	Clenching his teeth against what he was about to do to himself, he got a proper grip on the barbed bolt in his shoulder. He hoped to be able to pull it out as easily as one draws a dagger from a sheath, but the arrowhead tip tore muscle as he extracted the spike. He invoked the name of Khorne and held up the dripping quarrel like an offering.
	A great scream was building up inside Groeteschele's chest, and emerged through an enlarged and ravaged mouth as he leaped at Joh, his flame-tipped hands reaching out to throttle.
	With his left hand, Joh stabbed, aiming for the cut on Groeteschele's forehead. He struck home and, thumb over the end of the quarrel, forced the steel into his friend's brain.
	Groeteschele's eyes died, and Joh pushed the dead man away from him. His left sleeve was alight. He tried to reach for it with his right hand, but as his elbow bent a crippling wave of pain made him sink to his knees. He scraped his burning sleeve against the wall, and the fires went out.
	He felt like curling up and going to sleep, letting his pains fade away. But he knew that would be fatal.
	At least his legs were uninjured. Unsteadily, using the wall as a brace for his back, he got to his feet.
	Now, he realized how little notice he had taken of the path to this place. He had no idea how to get back to Rotwang and Melissa.
	The fires died down, and he was in total darkness, alone with his pain.
	Trusting to instinct, he pushed himself away from the wall and followed the corridor.
	The Old Woman's brain buzzed with the emotional discharge from the clash between the former friends. Their pain and fear was so much the greater for the bond between them broken by their fight. Her mouth was dry, but jolts of pleasure coursed through her human-seeming body.
	Over a thousand years ago, when she was truly young, her coach had been stopped by a bandit. Not a gold-seeking thug such as these, but a wild-haired monster of the bloodline of Belada the Melancholy, an unlettered savage who could live for an eternity but who lacked the refinement to make such an existence bearable.
	She was that vampire's get, his daughter-in-darkness, and she had birthed many a blood herself. The lady Genevieve, whose finest moment had come in this castle, was her granddaughter-in-darkness, the get of her get. It had been a proud, productive life...
	Freder's blood flowed through her veins, mingling with her own ichor. It was time she killed again, took more sustenance.
	Two bandits and their little captive. They were alone in Drachenfels. The configuration was amusing.
	In the morning they would all be dead. But the Old Woman's death would be like life. The others would be gone, used-up husks thrown away to rot.
	Her eyeteeth extended and grew sharper, and she ran her velvety tongue over them.
	The little girl smiled innocently at Rotwang. A few minutes ago, he had realized he was nervously walking up and down the carpet and resolved to calm himself. Now he stood stock still, barely breathing, swordhilt in his hand. He didn't have too tight a grip - that made you too inflexible when it came to responding to an attack - and he was visualizing a stylized wolfs head in his mind. It was the symbol he had worn as a pit fighter, and it always helped him relax before a battle to dwell upon its shape. Maybe, the wolf was his personal talisman. He had always favoured Ulric, God of Battle, Wolves and Winter, over the more obvious Khaine, Lord of Murder, as the protector of his profession.
	Sometimes, he dreamed that hewas a wolf. He had been thickly-pelted as a child, although he was not abnormally hairy now, and he wondered if his unknown parents had lycanthrope blood in them. He had never shapeshifted, but he was not like other men in many ways.
	The girl was singing to herself, a Breton lullaby he didn't recognize.
	"Mr Rotwang?"
	"Yes, my lady?" He hated himself suddenly, for lapsing into the servile form of address. But it was only natural to him. "What is it?"
	"Tomorrow, when the sun comes up, will we be here?"
	He had no answer.
	Melissa scrambled out of bed. She wore a long, gold-embroidered nightdress that could almost pass for a ball gown. Her bare white feet were silent on the thick carpet. She danced around the room to her lullaby, holding her skirts out and curtseying to an imagined courtly admirer.
	When Rotwang was her age, he had been killing for seven years. He resented the Lady Melissa for her family, her wealth, her childhood. All these things had been denied him. He hated his possibly wolfish parents for abandoning him among men. He should have been suckled on the steppes, raised with the pack, and taught the trick, the trick of shaking aside human form.
	The door was hanging open now. Since Groeteschele and Joh had pushed through it, he hadn't bothered to pull it shut. Anything that could so neatly decapitate Freder wouldn't be bothered by a lock. Rotwang preferred to see what was coming at him.
	Outside in the gloom, he could make out a bare stone wall, interrupted by niches containing long-unlit lamps. Constant Drachenfels was rumoured to favour human oil in his lamps. It would not have been out of character for the Great Enchanter, whose reign stretched back to the time of Sigmar and beyond.
	"Mr Rotwang," asked the child, "when are you going to try and kill me?"
	Rotwang turned and looked at the open face of the child, feeling her words like the slap of an armoured gauntlet across his cheek. He held up his sword. It was out in the open. He hoped she could see it was no immediate threat to her.
	But again, he had no answer for her. Something foul-smelling came out of the darkness behind him, and a claw-gripped hand fastened on his shoulder...
	The Old Woman fastened on Rotwang's mind, and burrowed deep. She found the wolf, and she turned it loose.
	Rotwang was raising his sword to the Lady Melissa. Joh assumed he had gone mad, and laid a hand on the bandit's shoulder, spinning him around.
	Rotwang's eyes were yellow, and his nose was reassembling as a snout. The creature opened its mouth and disclosed pointed, discoloured teeth. It was still Rotwang - his front tooth was still chipped - but a beast was rising inside him.
	The little girl backed away, and climbed up onto her canopied bed. She held onto a bedpost and watched.
	Joh leaned against the doorjamb, a dreadful numbness seeping from his swollen shoulder through his entire body.
	Rotwang lashed out, and he ducked aside. Still, the creature's claws brushed his head, tearing lines in his scalp.
	The Rotwang-thing had thrown its sword away. The bandit didn't need the knives sheathed on his belt. He had knives in his fingers.
	It was strange that you could ride with someone for five years and never know certain things about them.
	Joh's knees felt weak. His arm was useless. He was going to die soon, and he thought the easiest thing to do would be to offer his throat to Rotwang's teeth and nails. But he had been surviving too long to take the easy way out.
	His scimitar was gone, and his knives. But he still had his boots. And his silver spurs.
	Silver. If Rotwang were a true werewolf, he would be averse to silver.
	Rotwang lunged at him, coming on all fours. He reached up with his left hand for the top of the door and got a grip, hauling himself into the air. His left shoulder felt lanced, but he managed to get himself aloft.
	Rotwang, his charge started, passed under him. He jabbed down with his heels, and dug in as deep as he could.
	The creature howled like a wounded wolf, and reared up. Joh was pushed against the lintel and lost his grip. His head smashed against the stone, and he felt something break inside.
	He was falling, and he was face-down on the floor. The howling thing was on his back. He kicked upwards, hoping to slice with his spurs.
	The weight was gone, and he tried to roll over.
	Melissa was still watching, as she might do a puppetshow at court. She was giggling and clapping. There was something seriously wrong with the way the little girl had been brought up.
	He reached for his heel, and twisted one of his spurs off. The spiked star spun as he sliced the air with it.
	Rotwang was suffering. His clothes.were torn, and his thickly-furred body was bleeding.
	Man and monster got shakily to their feet.
	Rotwang breathed noisily, blood and saliva dripping from his twisted snout. His shoulders were huge, and his claws extended.
	Joh held up the spur.
	Rotwang rushed at him, and he chopped into the monster's face, drawing the spur through his eye into his snout.
	Claws sunk into the meat of his belly, and he broke away, leaving his weapon lodged in the werewolf's face.
	He pressed the flaps of skin on his stomach, holding his insides in. He could feel almost nothing. That was bad.
	Rotwang was leaning against the bed, shaking and twitching as he changed back into human form. Blood streamed from his wounded head. Melissa reached out and patted his shoulder, smoothing the thinning fur. She could have been looking after a family pet.
	The rich. They were barely human.
	Melissa's expression changed. She looked almost sad as Rotwang's wolfish growls faded into the human sounds of painful sobs. The spur was still stuck into his head. She opened her pretty little mouth, and Joh saw the unnaturally sharp teeth flash as she fastened on Rotwang's neck, tearing through to the vein.
	A gusher of blood came out of the bandit, and Melissa suckled greedily.
	The Old Woman drank the bandit's wolf-spiced blood, feeling his spirit depart as she stole his life from him.
	He had killed others. Many times, he had killed without mercy. She did only what was right.
	When it was done, when Rotwang was empty, she wrestled his head off and turned her attention to the wounded man in the corner.
	"Hello Mr Joh," she said, "does that hurt?"
	Melissa, the old woman who seemed to be a child, knelt by him and watched as he died.
	"You were my favourite bandit, you know," she said.
	He couldn't feel pain any more, but from the writhing wetness he couldn't contain in his gutwound, he knew it was bad.
	"How... old... ?"
	Melissa daintily pushed her hair aside. Her eyes were remarkable. Joh should have noticed them before. Eyes of experience in a face of innocence.
	"Very old," she said. "Over eleven hundred years. I never grew up."
	The cold was settling in now. Joh felt it travelling up his body.
	"Your... family...?"
	She was wistful, almost melancholy. "Dead and dust, I'm afraid. My human family, at least. I have sons-in-darkness, but none who would have paid you a ransom."
	He was shivering now. Seconds lasted for an age. The final grains of sand of his life took an eternity to drip through the glass waist. Was this Death? A slowing curve that forever dragged out the pain, but never really ended. Or was that life for Lady Melissa d'Acques?
	He had one last chance. Silver. Vampires like the stuff no more than werewolves. He scrabbled for his other heel, but his fingers seemed swollen, awkward, and wouldn't respond. He cut himself. Melissa took one of Rotwang's dropped knives and deftly cut away the spur, flipping it to the other side of the room without touching it. She smiled at him, the sympathy of a victor. There was nothing more to do but die.
	She took a dainty kerchief and dabbed the smears away from her bee-stung lips. At once a child and an ancient, she was beautiful but beyond his understanding.
	"Kiss me," he said.
	She tipped his head away from his throat, and granted him his wish.
	The next morning, the sun rose over the Fortress of Drachenfels, and a small human figure made its way down the mountain towards the road.
	Lady Melissa left the bodies were they were. Those she had drained were decapitated. The bandits would not be her get. She was more responsible than some undead fools who let loose a plague of thoughtless offspring.
	She hauled her bulky but light trunks down to the road and made a canopied chair of them.
	Sunlight hurt her eyes a little, but she was not one of the Truly Dead bloodsuckers who burst into flames after cock's crow.
	As the sun climbed, she settled down to wait. The road below Drachenfels was ill-travelled, but someone would come along eventually.
	Under her makeshift sunshade, she closed her eyes and slept.