by Sarah Roark
They both sat there for the space of several deep mortal breaths, absorbing what had happened and what could have happened. Jervais flung an unfriendly look up at Hermann, who regarded them both impassively.
“Well? Are you all right?” the knight asked after a moment. “Can you continue?”
“Of course, Brother.” Jervais hauled Fidus to his feet. Despite the promise otherwise, the apprentice cringed in clear expectation of a blow that didn’t come. In truth, Jervais could feel his anger rising now that the danger was over. No alchemist’s apparatus! He’d have to acquire a new one from the chantry before they left. That meant he would have to ask, no, beg for it from someone. But he said nothing as they got back into single file and continued upward. A thin fog seemed to descend as they went, though perhaps they were simply passing through a layer of it from beneath.
“How much further?” Hermann wanted to know.
“I’m not sure. We should be almost there.”
“This mist, is it natural?”
“How should I know? What difference does it make?”
Jervais sighed as they came up to what he’d thought for certain was the final bend and saw a massive gray ridge rise up on their left.
“And what is that smell?”
Jervais ground his teeth together, willing them not to lengthen any further.
Behind them, Fidus’s disheartened steps slowed to a stop. He’d been running his hand along the ridge, more out of habit and for something to do with his empty fingers than for support.
“This isn’t…” he murmured. He felt at the edge of a rocky projection. His fingertips slipped off the pebbly surface and plunged into sudden, fragile softness. He snatched them away, viscerally repulsed. “Master, this isn’t stone.”
Jervais and Hermann, too, had turned toward the ridge, identifying the direction of the smell at last if not its nature. Hermann took out his dagger and picked at it. “No,” he said, lip wrinkling in disgust. “It’s flesh.”
They stood back as far as the mountain edge would allow. The thing was enormous, easily the size of a respectable fishing boat’s hull laid along its side. The hide was leathery, stretched tight over the armoring bone-spurs of what looked like the spine, but it had decayed in places or been eaten away, leaving half-hollowed tunnels of rotting meat.
Jervais walked around the hulk, getting a view in the round. The two others followed uneasily.
“What is it?” Fidus quavered. On this side, by what had once been the softer underbelly of the thing, the stench was far more noticeable, although the fact that it could be borne at all testified to its age and state of decay. Most of the actual innards had already rotted away, and the rest was frozen through.
“A trebuchet,” his master answered.
“A what?” Hermann gave him an incredulous look.
Jervais gestured at the long arm that straggled outward from the wreck of the ribcage. It was about as thick as a pine tree’s trunk and ended in a three-pointed—hand? foot?—with the tattered remnants of pouchy webbing between the points. “Here’s the sling, you see. I’ll bet this arm could rotate freely in a near-perfect circle; it would have simply reached back and thrown forward, and sent boulders each a good yard across flying at whatever you liked. It was a living, breathing siege engine.”
“But how could it see what it was aiming at? Where the devil is the head?”
“There doesn’t appear to have been a separate head, which makes sense enough, as there wouldn’t have been much need for it. I’d guess the eyes were set somewhere in this region, atop the torso. I’ve seen others built that way.”
“If you’re saying this is the work of the Tzimisce flesh-twisters, then I too have seen such beasts. But even they were not quite this…bizarre.” Hermann bent over the place where the head should have been, as if unable to believe that it could possibly have been omitted.
“Bizarre is the Fiends’ stock in trade, I fear,” Jervais said dryly. “We can only hope they never figure out how to make the infamous things reproduce.”
“God above forbid!” Fidus interrupted in an uncharacteristically devout tone, and raised his hand as though to cross himself. Jervais made a silent note to correct the boy later.
“Anyway, this is what they charmingly call a vozhd, their king of monstrosities,” Jervais went on. “The voivodes sometimes capture whole villages of men, women and children to provide the raw material for such creations.”
His horse (whose only name so far was “my horse”) shied and strained at the halter. He turned away to calm it and suddenly noticed that they were not alone.
“Well, hallo there,” he said. The other two vampires turned to glance at him, wondering why his voice had richened and sweetened all at once. Standing at a respectful, or wary, distance was a boy of about eight years.
“Are you going upstairs?” the little boy asked with startling gravitas.
“Yes. In fact, we were just going to do that now.”
“Upstairs?” The knight finally tore himself away from the massive, incomprehensible corpse for long enough to take in what lay beyond it. Less than an arrow-shot’s distance from the vozhd, upon the small plateau-shelf on which they now found themselves, stood a long half-collapsed stone wall about five yards high, through the gaps of which they could spy the thatched roofs of a cluster of dispirited little stone houses. A narrow wedge that looked as though it had been carved directly out of a spur of mountain-rock sprung out from behind the wall like some fairy-tale beanstalk. It was terraced into what must have been several hundred stairs, thrusting up into the peak’s continuing heights.
“That’s where they put the keep.” As they passed between the houses, many of which bore holes and gouges in their walls, or black scorch-marks licking along their sides, the residents came out to gaze at them.
“And what are these people? Your…stair guard?”
“No, they raise the food for the mortal staff that live up in the chantry.”
“They do, eh?” Hermann pointedly swept his gaze from left to right, surveying the war-pocked ground of the plateau, upon which precious little visibly grew or grazed at the moment.
“Well, they did.” Jervais laid an easy hand on the little boy’s shoulder. One of the women in the crowd that was slowly gathering broke away from it and ran up to him, jabbering in a rapid pidgin of Magyar and Latin.
“What’s she saying?”
“Nothing important.”
“Don’t give me that, warlock.” Hermann turned to the woman and repeated in slow Magyar. “What are you saying?”
The woman stared at him. “Please…you must talk to the lords above. The evil magic, it doesn’t go away.”
She seized the boy away from Jervais and bodily turned him around, peeling back his shirt to reveal an ugly, purplish boil partially scabbed over. “Look. He went to play in the stream and came back stricken.”
“Then I wouldn’t let him play there again, if I were you,” Jervais said. “Those Tzimisce curses hang on.”
“My niece is the same. And another boy…”
“How long since the battle?” Hermann asked her. “The battle? When?”
She took a moment to digest his accent, then nodded her head sharply. “Yes…summer.”
“That stinking leviathan has been lying there since summer? Hellfire, that must have been a treat for their lungs. Surprised these people haven’t all keeled over with plague,” Hermann muttered. “Come to that, some of them don’t look far off from it.”
“They don’t look so deathly ill that they couldn’t have at least started rebuilding the damned wall,” Jervais answered. “I think I will have to speak to the ‘lords’ at that.”
“These are your clan’s own villeins, Meister Tremere,” the knight began with a frown. “You’re their protectors.”
This from the man who’s meant to fight Fiends and Lupines for us if need be, but couldn’t be bothered to stop poor Fidus from plummeting off a mountainside. Well, I suppose M
agog is more useful to the Black Cross than my apprentice.
“I’ll mention it when we get in, Brother.”
Two men-at-arms stood nominal guard at the foot of the stair. Jervais took the hand of one of the men and made a certain signal into his palm. The guard nodded and waved them up. Tied to his belt were two little bells, one with a red handle and one with a white handle. He unhooked the white one and gave it a ring. It was a gentle, barely audible shimmer of sound, but to Jervais’s wizardly senses the very air seemed to ripple around it in response. The other guard took their horses. Hermann released Magog only with the greatest reluctance—clearly whatever stabling once existed in this village was going to be much the worse for wear. They slung their saddlebags over their shoulders and began the long climb.
Jervais had discovered long ago that it was best to stare straight ahead at the next steps and move quickly, because something in the pattern of the mountain rock tended to give one the sudden impossible conviction that the stair was listing to one side. (The sensation could make even a vampire woozy.) As they neared the halfway point, he spied a large shale-colored lump that blended in perfectly with the stair stone. It uncurled and stretched like a cat waking from an afternoon nap, then separated from the rock, spreading bat-wings a good six yards wide. If it had chosen to, it could easily have swooped down and knocked them off balance one by one—a prime reason why enemies found this invasion route so difficult. Instead it only circled them, keening, several times then flew up toward the top. Hermann drew his sword but, seeing Jervais march on unconcerned, made no further complaints. The fog grew denser again, rolling past them in visible billows. It got under the clothes and turned the little hairs on Jervais’s arm damp.
“Stop it,” he murmured. It didn’t do any good—the tendrils continued to reach, probe, register.
By the time they reached the top, the mist had so thickened that they didn’t see the keep until they were practically on the threshold. The enormous portcullis of what Jervais still thought of as the “new” gatehouse rose up out of obscurity. A figure robed in dark green satin stood holding a lantern and gazing out at them from behind the grating, one white hand resting lightly on a horizontal rail. As Jervais reached it, the figure doffed its hood. The face was young and unfamiliar, the hair and beard white-blond.
“You must be our wandering vis-master,” the strange Cainite said. “I’m told things are not the same here since you left. I don’t know if that’s meant precisely as a compliment, but I thought you might take it as one regardless. My name is Torgeir. Welcome to the eyrie, my friends.”
Chapter Six
“His Lordship the Councilor is expecting you,” Torgeir said as he pattered through the Great Hall. His pace was just slightly quicker than plausible, and whisper-quiet on the flagstones, causing Jervais to privately imagine him ever after as a species of rodent.
Jervais’s strongest memory of this chamber was of his initiation into the Second Circle of Mystery. A world ago, easily. He’d still honestly believed House Tremere to be the axis of all power and grandeur in the world, and the Great Hall had strengthened that impression, lined as it was with rows of tall stone stalls like a massive choir. Statues of history’s great sages and wizards stared down from the pillar capitals. A knife-thin, glittering floor tracery of inlaid silver outlined a ritual circle of such exquisite construction that one could work in it all night without headache or fatigue. Harmonized with the very fundamentals of the vis energy that wound through the Southern Carpathians, all one had to do to ignite it into liquid fire was to strike the bell at hall’s end and chant a perfect fifth above it. The circle’s adornments still drew their reverently calculated geometry of vesicae, gnomonic spirals and Golden progressions across the floor, but the stalls had been allowed to fall into terrible disrepair. And despite the standing candelabras and chandeliers, the hall overall seemed dingier, gloomier than Jervais could remember it being even in the longest mortal nights.
Looking up, he stopped and gave a little involuntary noise of dismay. The others stopped too, quizzically following his gaze.
“What happened?” he exclaimed.
Torgeir peered up into the black reaches of the upper arches. “Ah…yes. There was stained glass in the windows once, wasn’t there?”
“Stained glass! There were depictions of the founders of the twelve Houses along with the signs of the zodiac, starting with Bonisagus and ending with Tremere. As day or night passed, the light would cast the different portraits upon the wall…” He stuttered to a halt, remembering his audience, who stared at him as if he had suddenly sprouted horns.
“Yes, well, we had an especially nasty siege a few years back, and it was decided that it just wasn’t worth the risk. Besides, it isn’t as though there are any mortal magi to complain of the dark anymore, is it?”
“No.” He didn’t expect Fidus to understand, and certainly not Hermann, but the casual tone of the other magus galled him. He gazed up forlornly at the stone window frames, hastily bricked up with blobs of stray cement drooping down from the joints, and streaked from end to end with rough incantations in…hard to tell from this distance even with senses honed, but doubtless dried blood.
“Well,” he said at last. “We mustn’t keep his worship in suspense. Lead on, Torgeir. Let’s find some pleasant corner for Brother Hermann to wait in.”
If there is a pleasant corner left in this basilisk’s den.
The thought itself seemed to wing naked up into the darkness, meeting with a sour reception. Jervais would not have retracted it, however, even if he could. Anything that might hear him no doubt knew the truth of the sentiment at least as well as he did.
“If milord is busy with his magic, I can certainly come back later tonight,” Jervais murmured, not straightening from his bow.
“Don’t be dense, Jervais. What do you think this is all for?”
Jervais rose and surveyed the room, noting the rather malodorous assortment of things scattered across the counter. He knew some of their uses individually but had no inkling of their effect in combination.
“I have no idea, milord,” he replied, wishing he didn’t still have it in him to feel foolish when Etrius disparaged him.
“For you, of course. Or perhaps you thought I had you come all the way out east just to have the pleasure of your insincere abasement once again?” There was a great crunching noise as the Councilor crushed something in a little handheld press. Thin brown legs stuck out at crazy angles from the edges. Spiders or scorpions, probably.
“Of course not, milord. But…what exactly…” Jervais eyed the contents of one particular jar with special distaste, but there could be no argument. As Etrius’s direct subordinate, not only his labor and his talents but his very body were at the archmagus’s complete disposal. No sacrifice was supposed to be too great for the sake of the Art, and to quail at participating in a necessary spell, however ominous, was one of the greatest dishonors a Tremere could suffer.
“I’m not about to let you wander into the midst of the Telyav cult without some protections. And certainly not without helpers.”
Jervais nodded hopefully. “Yes, I was assuming it would take several of us to have even a chance against Deverra.”
“Indeed, I’d strive for a full sodalicium, if I were you,” the Councilor agreed.
Strive? “I see. Then there aren’t six already waiting for me here?”
“I’m afraid I don’t have six spare Tremere, Jervais. They don’t exactly grow on trees, and as you must have noticed, Rustovitch hasn’t forgotten us on this lonely rock even with all his other pressing engagements. I did call Master Antal back from the Bistritz front for you—he should be arriving any night now. He’s quite the war-wizard. I don’t doubt his talents will prove invaluable. Surely you can also convince your sire to let at least one of her juniors go with you?” Something dankly amused in his tone suggested he knew quite well how unlikely that was. “As for the rest: I will write you a letter of credit to take
with you to the chantries along the way, directly authorizing you to recruit as you see fit for the enterprise. It’s, what, three hundred leagues to Livonia? You should be able to fill out your sodalicium by then.”
“Doubtless, milord.”
“Oh, and you may wish to take a gargoyle or two. They don’t scout as well as they fight, but there’s nothing quite like a bird’s-eye view.” The Councilor studied Jervais for a moment—his tired, jowly face and the dark smudges under his eyes contrasted sharply, as always, with the alertness of his keen blue gaze. Then his long-nailed fingers reached for the pestle and picked it up, and he turned his black-robed, bulky back on the younger magus. “You didn’t ever meet Deverra, did you?”
“No, milord.”
Etrius was silent for several moments. “Dea de verra…’goddess of strife.’ That was what her old master called her when he was cross with her, and the other apprentices nicknamed her Deverra for sport. When she became full maga she took the name he’d saddled her with, but with a different meaning, de vera, ‘of truth.’ She had a way of doing that, of taking what was meant as an insult and turning it into a mark of pride.”
Jervais said nothing. When elders cast their minds back into the past like that, they had a way of dredging up the most interesting details, and he didn’t want to break the reverie.
“But I’m afraid even she couldn’t manage what comes so easily to you: to be proud of what your grandsire’s ‘experiment’ turned us into. She asked to be sent away from Ceoris, to study the witchery of the Tzimisce and see whether we could adapt it. That’s what she told me. Evidently she thought I wouldn’t approve of her true purpose.” Was that a note of injury? “She told those she tried to entice along, however, that her homeland held formidable powers, vital spirits of nature that might be able to restore the walking dead to true life again.” He shook his head. “You find that droll, I’m sure.”
“No, milord. Certainly I believe that ‘true life’ is often overrated by those who never got much of it, or those who prefer nostalgia to accurate recollection. But there are some gifts only true life provides, that can’t be denied.”