Vampire Crusader (The Immortal Knight Chronicles Book 1) Read online

  VAMPIRE CRUSADER

  The Immortal Knight Chronicles

  Book 1

  Richard of Ashbury

  and the Third Crusade

  June 1190 to November 1192

  Dan Davis

  Copyright © 2015 Dan Davis

  All rights reserved.

  For B.B. Dade.

  Author, historian, sick man

  Plot Summary

  England, 1190. Sir Richard of Ashbury hunts Earl William de Ferrers, a great lord returned from the dead with enormous strength, speed and an insatiable thirst for blood.

  While Richard chases William, he fights in the Crusade for glory and for King Richard the Lionheart. He falls in love with Alice, a beautiful and lonely young widow. But can Richard be a good husband, a famous knight and also destroy his enemy?

  His battles lead Richard ever closer to a shocking discovery about his own origins and a climactic confrontation in a cavern of blood...

  Table of Contents

  Plot Summary

  Chapter One - The Oath

  Chapter Two - The Chase

  Chapter Three - The Beast

  Chapter Four - The Lionheart

  Chapter Five - Renown

  Chapter Six - Loss

  Chapter Seven - Rebirth

  Chapter Eight - Valley of Death

  Chapter Nine - Cavern of Blood

  Chapter One - The Oath

  Riders galloped away from Ashbury manor house at dawn. I had slept in the wood again. The shadows were long but the first rays of the morning sun warmed my face as I walked to the house.

  Though I was tired, I hurried. My brother’s crossbow had to be returned before he woke, as I had promised never to touch it again.

  It is impossible to sleep late when you sleep outside. You wake to the din of birdsong and light. Yet waking early has its rewards. The thought of fresh bread, hot from the ovens, made my mouth water.

  But then hooves drummed against the earth and men jeered from beyond the hedgerows. The clamour shattered the morning and startled a pair of crows into flight overhead, cawing in protest.

  I knew the sound of men with their blood up when I heard it. I ran forward, crashing through the mature barley.

  The manor house was not a popular place. Visitors were rare, especially since my brother had turned even more sullen than he used to be. He had a handful of friends but none of those dour knights and lords would holler and whoop in such a way. Not at sunrise. Not for any reason.

  My sword and mail I had stashed in a chest back at my woodland camp. The crossbow in my hands was useless because Martha had lost the last of the bolts in the undergrowth.

  I tossed it and ran on. The only weapon I had was my dagger.

  From the noise of the hooves and whinnying and the cries of the men, I guessed there were five or ten of them galloping off. By the time I pushed through the hedge onto the road they were almost away.

  The last rider glanced back as he disappeared beyond the hill on the wooded road to Lichfield. He was a knight dressed in mail with a shield slung across his back. His surcoat was red. I could make out no further detail and yet something about him was familiar.

  But he was in shadow and then he was gone.

  I ran to the boundary of the manor house and leapt the drystone wall and ditch.

  My brother’s horses whinnied from the stables on the other side of the house. None of the dogs barked.

  The hall door was open. A splintered hole had been hacked through the centre. The doorway was a black void.

  I threw myself into the great hall.

  The stench of warm blood and torn bowels was overwhelming. I retched.

  The mutilated bodies of the servants lay all over. The old, the young, the men and the women had all been dragged into the hall and slaughtered.

  I knelt by a few, hoping that some would yet live. Most were still warm to the touch but their wounds were terrible. Throats gouged out. Bellies slit open. Daggers punched through the eyes. There were no survivors.

  The fire was unlit and the windows shuttered so I could not see clearly but none of the dead appeared to be my brother, his wife or their children.

  A noise. From the floor above. No more than a faint scraping upon the boards.

  I gripped my dagger and ran through the great hall through to the rooms beyond, crying out for Henry and for Isabella.

  There were more bodies lying in the passage to the pantry and buttery but I went the other way, into the parlour. Streaks of blood led through the door out to the stable and more stained the stairway up to the solar. I leapt up the stairs, ran through the solar and barged through the open the door to their bedchamber.

  I froze.

  “Isabella,” I cried.

  She lay on her back by the bed in a pool of blood. It soaked her dress and her eyes had rolled up, the lids half closed. A jagged gash had ripped through one shoulder and half her neck was in tatters. The splintered edge of her collarbone jutted from the wet, sucking wound.

  I knelt in her blood and lifted the back of her head with one hand. Only the fact that blood flowed and bubbled from the lacerations suggested she had not yet died. But there was no chance that she would live.

  “Henry?” Isabella mumbled, her eyes flickering open.

  “It is Richard.” I clutched her hand in mine. Her skin as cold and white as marble.

  “Richard.” Her voice a whisper. Her eyes unfocused.

  “What happened? Who were those men?”

  Her eyes stared through me, unseeing. Or perhaps she saw Death.

  Blood had been flung about the room; sprays of it reaching the painted ceiling above us. I could taste it in the air. Yet there was no other body.

  “Where is Henry, my lady? Where is your husband?”

  “Gone,” she whispered. “Slain.”

  “The children?” I said, though I did not want to ask.

  She squeezed her eyes shut. “He killed them.” She sobbed and blood streamed from her mouth. “Oh God, he killed my babies.”

  I struggled for breath. “Who?”

  “Satan himself.” There was blood in her voice and she coughed, struggling for breath.

  Perhaps I should have told her that she would soon see her sweet children in Heaven.

  I could have told her that I loved her, that I would do anything for her. But in that moment the weeks and months of my romantic infatuation were insignificant. Absurd, even.

  I should certainly have told her to lay still and held her as she drew her last breath.

  Instead of compassion, I was full of outrage and wrath.

  All I wanted was to destroy.

  “Who do you name as Satan?” I demanded, lifting her head up further. “Isabella. Who were those men?”

  Her head rolled back and I grasped it and held it up to mine.

  My voice rose. “Isabella.”

  Her eyes flickered open and she breathed, shuddering then coughed a spray of blood.

  “Richard?” Her voice was weak, confused. She had always been so slight, so delicate but she clung on to the last moments of her life.

  “I am here.” I squeezed her cold hand, blinking away tears.

  “Richard.” Her voice was so quiet I stilled my breath to hear it. “Richard, it was William.” She coughed more blood, fighting for breath.

  I struggled to understand. I had assumed that war had come to Derbyshire. That the Welsh had attacked across the border or the Scots had somehow raided this far south.

  “William? Earl William de Ferrers did this?”

  I should not have been quite so surprised.

 
; “Richard,” she said, grasping my arm with desperate strength and opened her beautiful eyes wide to look deep into mine. “Richard, you must avenge your brother’s death. Avenge the death of his children.”

  “I will, my lady.”

  “Swear it!”

  “I shall not rest, I shall not live, I shall not die until William lies dead by my sword. This I swear to you and to Almighty God with all my heart.”

  Her mouth twitched. “Amen.”

  She died. Her last breath was a sigh that stoppered with blood. I held her as she choked and drowned on what little blood remained in her body.

  It was 1190. In the eight hundred years since that day, I have travelled the world in pursuit of my enemy, William de Ferrers. Many times, over many centuries and in many lands I fought him.

  William left a trail of horror in his wake. I did my duty to avenge all those that he and his followers slaughtered. I spent centuries hunting and destroying the monsters that he made. Always he made more.

  Wherever there was great death and evil in the world, William was never far. I fought him in the New World, the Far East and in Napoleon’s Europe. I tracked him through the horrors of the Black Death and the overwhelming destruction on the Eastern Front.

  He was crusader, outlaw, khan. He was a count, a cavalier and a cardinal.

  William was a murderer, a devil.

  A vampire.

  ***

  My brother Henry lay eviscerated, beheaded and dismembered in the courtyard between house and stables. I gathered the pieces of his body together.

  His strong face, in life so often twisted in anger, was now blank. One eyelid was open and full of blood. As though it was staring at me in silent accusation.

  “I slept in the wood again, Henry,” I told his head, holding it in my hands. “I only just missed them.”

  It was a scorching summer morning. Yellowhammers chirped and warbled in the trees above as I dug graves for my family. I lined them up next to the recent grave of our father and the much older grave of our mother.

  The ground was baked hard but I was young and strong and hacked through into the softer soil beneath.

  I laid Henry’s limbs in the grave beside his torso. His guts I had pushed back in as much as I could. Luckily, I had not eaten for a day or so, otherwise I would certainly have vomited.

  I stopped and eased off Henry’s rings from his pale, stubby fingers. One was the signet ring that had belonged to our father. The ash tree emblem was worn almost flat. I ran my finger over it and I felt an echo of the anger that had flared up between my brother and me over that ring. I had argued that it should have been buried along with the old man. In truth, I had wanted it for myself. After all, Henry had inherited every other object, title and land. But Henry had flown into a blind rage at my suggestion and had remained sullen until I acquiesced. By then he had already taken to wearing it.

  I scooped out a handful of dirt from my father’s grave and pushed the ring into it.

  I found few remains of the children. The baby Henry had been barely out of swaddling and Joanna was still often falling when she tried to run. There was not much of them to find.

  I gathered those parts together in a blanket and wrapped them up into a bundle. I placed them in their grave together even though I was unsure whether such a thing was allowed. But those sweet children had been inseparable in life and I wanted them to share their resting place.

  I knew I should summon the prior from Tutbury to speak the necessary prayers. But I was numb. And there was much work to do that day.

  The servants I dragged into a single long grave along the edge of the consecrated area. I hoped they would not mind sharing their burial. I was sure to dig it north to south and laid the bodies side by side so that everyone would wake, on the day of judgement, facing the rising sun. Ashbury was a small estate by any standard but still we had two dozen servants and labourers to see to the house and to the land.

  Many of the bodies had their throat and neck hacked out, just as Isabella had suffered.

  Almost all slain in such a manner were women.

  I found Barbary, Isabella’s wet nurse, strung up by her ankles from a beam in the kitchen. There were pails under her that had the residue of fresh blood coating the inside. A funnel, still dribbling blood, had been tossed into a corner. Barbary’s skin was as white as chalk and she seemed to have been drained from slashes through her neck.

  It reminded me of the time I had watched a pig slaughtered at Duffield Castle. The creature’s blood was drained and saved for sausages and blood cakes. I watched that pig screaming and bucking as it died, flinging itself around in mindless terror.

  Barbary must have gone the same way but there were also teeth marks gouged into her breasts and belly. I cut the poor woman down and covered her up with sacking before carrying her to the grave.

  Most knights favoured the sword for its versatility and prestige. Others used mace or falchion or axe. I wondered what form of weapon the murderers had used to tear and shred the necks of my family and servants. Likely a dagger, worried back and forth. I was training to be a knight from the age of seven and we learned the quickest, simplest ways to kill a man. That the murderers had used such elaborate, unnecessary methods was alarming.

  In the cellar were three more bodies in a heap. Their blood pooled along with the cider and ale leaking from barrels hacked open and thrown over. I kicked the rats away from the bodies and carried them one at a time up the long grave.

  My mind was shattered. I’d never seen much death and blood and it seemed the horrors would never end. I felt the world turn under me, somehow. When I had awoken that morning the world had been one way. Then, after I stepped through the door to the hall, everything had changed, forever.

  The last of the bodies in the cellar was that of Mabel. She was a simple old woman with a twisted back who cleaned in the kitchen and scrubbed the floors. Her neck was slashed almost clean through. When I lifted the body the last vestiges of her decrepit skin ripped off and the head thudded to the floor and rolled over once.

  Someone gasped and whimpered in the darkness.

  I lay old Mabel’s body down by her head, grabbed the lamp and explored behind the remaining barrels in the corner where the noise was coming from.

  The girl hunched in the corner, her hands over her hair. She was the daughter of Osbert, the man who tended the gardens and brewed sour ale. I had already dragged his body to the grave.

  “Rose,” I said, my voice so loud and sudden that she jumped out of her skin. I tried again in a soft whisper. “Rose. It is Richard.”

  She kept up the whimpering to herself. The girl could manage no more than fragments of words. No amount of coaxing could elicit any further response so I scooped her up as gently as I could. She flinched but then clung to me. Rose was an ugly child, with prominent teeth and no chin. She had pissed herself and was shivering in a thin dress that stuck to her legs.

  “The bad men have gone,” I whispered as I held her to me. “No one can hurt you now.”

  She buried her face into my chest and I held it there as I stepped over Mabel’s remains.

  “Keep your eyes closed, child,” I whispered.

  Not all the servants were killed. Walt and Marge had hid in the orchard and when the killers had left they ran through the wood all the way to the priory for help.

  I stepped out of the house carrying Rose and found Prior Theobald riding his pony toward the manor house with a group of brothers scurrying behind on foot.

  They were almost up to the door and when they saw me they froze. The monks turned to the prior and the prior’s face drained of what little colour it had.

  I glanced down. There was blood all over me.

  Poor Rose. Blood covered the girl, too, where I had carried her against my sodden clothes. I must have looked like a creature from a nightmare and still she had allowed me to carry her away from that cellar. To the prior we must have appeared as the risen dead.

  “Help u
s,” I cried.

  Prior Theobald spurred into action and rode up. Even mounted he seemed small.

  “By God, Richard,” the old man’s voice shook and his eyes betrayed the horror they saw. “What have you done?”

  I did not understand at first so I merely stared in response.

  But, thank God, he took control. He took control of me, of the girl and the surviving servants.

  “Ride hard for the sheriff,” the prior said to a young monk and handed over the reins of his pony. The prior kept his eyes on me.

  “I did not do this thing,” I mumbled. “There were riders on the road.”

  The prior looked disturbed. He nodded.

  “For the love of God, someone take this child away from him,” Prior Theobald said.

  Our servant Marge came hurrying after the prior. She took Rose away toward the village. The girl seemed to be staring back at me from over Marge’s shoulder. But her eyes looked through me, into the past. Into Hell itself.

  “It is a miracle that the girl survived this,” the prior said, reaching for something holy to say. “We should all be thankful for that small mercy.”

  I wanted to smash his teeth down his throat for uttering such nonsense. There was nothing to be thankful for. But the good prior was kind enough to have his monks and lay brothers help. They took over the burials while I sat in dumb shock upon the wall outside.

  “You are the lord of Ashbury now, Richard,” the prior said, perched next to me.

  The new sheriff, Roger de Lacy arrived with his men in a thunder of hooves late that afternoon. He had me escorted to the Priory. His men even watched while I scrubbed the blood from myself and dressed in clothes the prior provided. The prior insisted I be allowed to wash before being questioned.

  The Bishop of Coventry had been visiting the sheriff. He came along to Tutbury Priory to question me, too. The bishop was one of the most powerful men in the kingdom. Not merely a bishop, he was also Sheriff of Warwickshire, Leicestershire and Staffordshire.