by Sarah Roark
The man spoke. Jervais shook his head, then said, “I don’t understand,” in Saxon just to make himself perfectly clear. He was tired of playing spring-god for the night.
“So the devil speaks Saxon these days?” the man said. “Well, I should not be surprised. You look surprised. I have not come here for years. I asked you for many things in my youth. You took the salt of my blood, and I made many wishes, and none of them came true. Not one.”
He came closer. His gaze was fixed and intense. Jervais could read it very clearly, could see the span of decades in it. He’d endured much bitterness, many disappointments, for which he was now deliberately choosing to hold Jervais solely responsible. At the moment, Jervais could find no fault in that.
“Now even to the one son I have left, I am like a dog at the door. There is no part of my body that does not pain me.”
The man bent down to the ground, kissed it and whispered into it for a moment.
“I know that God will not forgive, because He will not forgive me even the crime of living, so I beg matka ziemia, Moist Mother Earth, for forgiveness,” he explained, sitting up. “Perhaps she will be kind. Perhaps not. Of you, whatever you are, I make no more wishes. I ask only what I know you can give me. Spiteful spirit, I ask you to spite me unto my death.”
Jervais sat there, awestruck, for several moments. Then he stood.
“That,” he said hoarsely, “I can do. Come.”
He held out his hand to help the old man into the pool.
Chapter Eleven
It wasn’t so very different from the Christian country they had now left behind. Or at least Jervais didn’t think so. Though he knew intellectually that Poland and Silesia were considered “settled” and Prussia was not, it had all felt more or less like forest primeval to him. At no point in the journey had he encountered a juncture where he could have said, “Here ends civilization; here begins savagery.” Nations, churches and landscapes shaded into each other. None of it was Saxony, and certainly none of it was his France, where man and nature had long ago reached their eternal détente. Here, even in the places where fields and pastures stubbornly interspersed themselves between dense, looming tracts of forest or heath or marsh, they always seemed somehow tentative. It was as though they knew they would be swallowed up again at once should the slightest misfortune strike.
They came to a fork in the dirt road. Hermann pulled up short. The company of Black Cross knights, both Cainite and mortal, who had joined them at Stettin halted behind him in perfect formation. Even together with their squires and men-at-arms they weren’t many, but their discipline at least was cheering to see.
“Which way now, Meister Tremere? It looks like we must choose between woodland and marsh. Are we still following the whim of your rock?”
Jervais snorted, but just to be sure his fatigued eyes weren’t beginning to deceive him, he fished out his lodestone pendulum and let it swing until it found the ley line.
“We make for the trees.”
They rode uphill toward the stately line of pine and fir. Just at the wood’s edge Zabor, the lone Pole among the Tremere, shivered and held up his hand.
“Wait! We shouldn’t be here.”
Jervais turned quizzically. “What do you mean, ‘shouldn’t’?”
“It’s an alkas.”
“It’s a grove,” frowned Jervais.
“That’s just what I mean, master,” the apprentice said irritably. Jervais’s brow wrinkled and he opened his mouth to reprove the lad for his rudeness, but Master Antal interrupted with one of his rare, typically blunt contributions.
“The Prus worship in certain groves, like the Tzimisce slaves in Hungary.” He didn’t look up from shaving his bit of hawthorn branch, carefully letting each strip fall into the open pouch at his waist.
Jervais dismounted, then bent down and touched the earth. His hand was greeted with warmth, pleasant and tingling now, but then it grew suddenly sharper, and he snatched his fingers away.
“Yes. Perhaps we’d best go around…” He brushed the dirt off. “But we must keep following the flow of the vis. It’s our best chance of finding the Telyavs.”
“You mean we don’t know where they are?” Torgeir spoke up.
“They’re like their Gangrel allies,” Jervais snapped, “nomadic. We have a vague notion of their territory; within those bounds they might go anywhere. But I doubt they stray far from the wells of power. What magic-worker does?”
Torgeir’s face seemed to wobble alarmingly in midair for a moment. Jervais started, then realized that something was rippling the ley line, plucking it like a lute-string.
“Someone’s doing a working,” he hissed at his murmuring brethren. They all immediately fell quiet and looked to him.
“We’re not ready for witch-war, Master Jervais,” Antal said definitively. “We haven’t even trained properly yet. And we don’t know this terrain.”
Deciding that now was not the time to establish who would and wouldn’t pronounce their troops battle-ready, Jervais nodded. “Right. I want everyone but Captain Hermann, Master Antal, Zabor and myself to withdraw behind the hill. We’ll scout it out and see whether this is koldun conjuring or the Telyavs already or something else entirely.”
“In there? But why me, master?” Zabor interrupted.
“Because you were the first to claim to know something about it,” Jervais returned.
“Well, that will teach me, I suppose.”
“Yes, I trust so.” Jervais spurred his horse into the forest’s cool dim depths.
Ah, I was mistaken, Jervais thought a little later. The edge of this alkas, that was the line. Here ends civilization.
The motley crowd seemed exclusively mortal, if their rosy soul-colors were any guide. Some rode at a stately pace through the trees, some walked, some were old, and some were children. All clustered together into a tight mass. Jervais poked his head a little further out from behind the massive tree that hid him and sharpened his eyesight to get a better look. In the midst of the crowd rode a thin man in a bloodied white robe covered over with a black scapular, his hands bound behind his back.
“A Dominican. One of the Teutons’ missionaries?” he whispered to Hermann—then he turned and saw it was quite unnecessary. The knight had already caught that much, and he nodded grimly.
As they watched, the people gathered around the fire that burned in a stone-and-wood pillar set in the forest’s clearing. The maid tending the fire had already been there when Jervais and his companions first arrived, a good while before the rest of the crowd made it in. It might even be that she or one just like her was always there, keeping it perpetually lit, though he saw no sign of a temple or even a shrine anywhere about. An old man in rather more fanciful garb than the rest—the priest, Jervais assumed—separated himself from the mob. He said something to their prisoner, who shook his head wearily in response. The priest drew out from among the people a pretty young girl of perhaps fifteen, her head crowned in a wreath of rue and dressed in a fine clean dress of new-spun linen. The priest gestured expressively at her. The friar shook his head again. The people murmured.
“Zabor, what are we looking at?” Jervais prodded.
The apprentice squinted toward the scene, but it was plain he couldn’t make out the level of detail that Jervais could. “I—I don’t know. She’s dressed as a bride, but…”
Antal gave a contemptuous, gusting little noise. “They are offering him a wife.”
“Why on earth would they do that?” Jervais murmured, fascinated.
“Because they’re stupid superstitious savages, and they fear his ghost,” the Hungarian answered. “They think if a man or woman dies unwed, and thus incomplete, then the vengeful spirit will haunt the earth forever.”
“He must not have explained the Dominican vow to them properly,” Jervais said with a wry glance at the fuming Saxon.
“Oh, I’m sure he explained it, they just couldn’t believe it.”
“If he said yes
, would they kill the girl too?”
“Not sure. They might, or they might simply make her go through mourning.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Hermann put in, aggravated. “He won’t say yes.”
“Now what, Zabor? Is he to be sacrificed in the fire?”
“He must be,” Hermann rumbled, his hand already gripping his sword-hilt. Jervais plucked at his gauntlet to warn him to quiet.
“Well…he’s mounted,” Zabor frowned. “When their warriors die, they’re cremated in the saddle along with their horses…so if he’s a sacrifice, he’s an honored one. That, or they’re just afraid to murder him without the proper funeral rites. Superstition, like Master Antal said.”
“If this were just murder, they’d kill him and then perform the rites, not burn him alive,” Hermann protested. “This is demonolatry. They mean to feed their loathsome gods on his ashes.”
“What is this business with the horse?” interrupted Jervais. “Looks like they’re trying to spook it.”
“No, they’re trying to get it to lift a hoof,” Zabor corrected.
“Either hoof.”
“Yes, the horse chooses. It’s a lottery.”
All at once a great cheer rose up from the people in the glade. “Death,” Jervais translated.
“I’d imagine so.”
“This ends now.” The knight glared at them all, as though they’d contradicted him already. “I won’t stand here in the dark and permit this sacrilege. You hang back if you like—”
“No, mein Herr,” Jervais implored him. “For all you know, one foot on that holy earth might destroy you.”
“Unholy earth. I do not fear the demons of the savages!” Hermann hissed.
“Just look at the man. He’s half dead already. Even if you did rescue him, what would you do then? Give him the blood and hope he doesn’t wind up as one of us?”
The knight’s face was a mask of unadulterated hatred. Jervais stared back blankly.
“Well? If you really must, then risk it. But why cheat any mortal’s short life of a martyr’s crown—to say nothing of one of the holy brothers of Dominic?”
“You have…the reason of it, warlock.” Hermann cast his half-drawn sword fully back into the sheath and settled back down again. “It is a poor night when reason rules.”
Not long thereafter, the thick stench of burning hair and flesh filled the glade. The vampires recoiled from it as from the sight of a sunbeam, leaving the magpie friar to his saint’s end, melting back into the shadows that led out of the alkas.
Jervais contemplated the man as he sat unmoving on a little ledge of weathered rock. A noble mien, when it wasn’t wreathed in choler as it was now.
In the short term, I need him. In the long term, we need his master.
He approached Hermann, allowing his quiet footsteps to make just enough noise for warning.
“I don’t pretend to be a knight or a monk,” Jervais said softly. “And God knows you would never make a wizard.”
Hermann snorted, not looking at him. “You’ll forgive me if I take that as a compliment.”
“Of course. I forgive all our differences. I must, because our purposes are one. Be patient, mein Herr. Heathenism will fall here, just as it fell in Sweden and Denmark.”
“Why do you say that?” he returned. “It makes no difference to you.”
“But it does.” He sat down on a fallen log. “You see, as the old ways crumble, the Tzimisce and their allies crumble also. The night will arrive when they can no longer play gods to their people, and then they will become our prey. Indeed, all vampires will have to grow more careful as the Church’s power waxes, and that’ll do us all, Tremere included, a great deal of good. It’ll be a milieu where only the cleverest and subtlest survive.”
Falco’s ungainly gray body loped out from the shadows, toward them and up to Jervais. The gargoyle had a fox in his jaws, which he shyly dropped at Jervais’s feet. Jervais lifted his toes away from the bloody carcass.
“Which of course suits you admirably.” Hermann shook his head wearily. “Pious talk, master wizard. Sometimes I think the pagans we fight are more steadfast in their bastard faith than most so-called Christians are in theirs.”
“Take heart,” Jervais urged him. Then, to the gargoyle he said, “No, no, Falco. I mean, thank you, you have it.” He put his hand briefly and gingerly on the monster’s head. Falco removed his prize to a few yards’ distance and began tearing into it with a good will.
“Take heart, Captain,” he repeated. “That faith will be the Telyavs’ downfall, and the Gangrel’s, and the Tzimisce’s.”
“Will it?”
“Such complete trust won’t bend,” the Tremere explained. “It can only break. The Telyavs have made their fatal mistake in teaching their kine to regard them as holy. It will be only too easy to expose them, and then they’ll lose everything in one great blow. The mortals will acknowledge the power of almighty God, and all will be just as you wish it.”
“You seem to regard faith as a simple matter of bowing to the stronger of two parties.”
“I think for most people, that’s exactly what faith is,” he allowed. “But since the one true God cannot be anything but victorious, isn’t that enough?”
The silence yawned between them, and Jervais had to resist the urge to smile. Hermann was wrestling with the unavoidable limitations of both sword and sermon to truly change the hearts of men. Jervais would not be the one to tell him his entire purpose in existence was a futile lie, but if he reached that conclusion on his own, so be it. There was little danger of it, however. The Saxon was nothing if not stubborn.
“I suppose it is…a first step, as his Highness would say,” Hermann murmured at last. “And what about you, Tremere? Is that your creed as well, always to bow to the stronger?”
“A true wizard…” There was a relish in saying these words, taking them out of Etrius’s mouth and appropriating the right to change their meaning. “A true wizard’s body may bow before the victor of the moment. His heart doesn’t bow to anything or anyone, ever.”
“Not even to God Himself?” Hermann replied, shocked.
“God chose to give me free will. That was His choice, His mistake perhaps. As for myself, I will honor the gift in the only way it deserves. I will exercise it. If there is a hell, here or in any other realm of being, I am sure it need consist of nothing more than that—the taking-away of choice.”
“By those lights, servitude is hell, in and of itself.”
“Yes,” Jervais agreed. “Servitude is hell.”
“And your masters at Ceoris,” Hermann went on thoughtfully, “would they agree with that?”
“My teachers at Ceoris,” Jervais answered. “Their wisdom justifies their position, not the reverse.”
“I see.” Hermann rose. “Well, it sounds like a very comfortable philosophy, Meister Tremere, up to a point.”
“And which point would that be?”
“The point where death is with all certainty upon you, and all your power and free will can no longer help you.” He smiled thinly, sketched a military bow and left.
And that is probably the very moment you pray hastens itself to you, Jervais thought.
“Servitude…is hell,” Falco informed his mate Rixatrix and Master Antal’s gargoyle, Cabo. He enunciated the words as carefully as he could through his crooked fence of teeth. His darling’s answer was straightforward and to the point. She swatted him down off his branch to land face-flat in the dirt. “No,” she said. He shook his head free of the filth and flapped up into another, slightly more distant tree.
“Master said it,” he huffed, pushing out his chest.
“Mother says we must serve,” Cabo pointed out reasonably. “Is honor.”
“Master said is hell.”
“Mother must be right.”
“Master must be right.”
They all pondered this for some time.
“Master has a Master,” Falco went on. “If Mas
ter must serve his Master, but Master says servitude is hell…”
“Stop talking,” Rixatrix rumbled. “You think like rock. Mother is right and Master is right. They are both right.”
“How?”
For a moment she seemed stumped by this, but she soon recovered. “They are both right—in different ways,” she pronounced.
“How?”
“I do not know,” she said serenely.
“Perhaps,” Falco said at last, “is hell for Masters, and honor for us.”
“Perhaps,” Cabo acknowledged. He scratched himself behind one of his curling ram-horns, shaking the branches and sending a drift of leaves falling to the ground.
“Then…we are luckier than Masters,” Falco concluded, uncertainly.
“Of course,” Rixatrix scolded him.
And that ended the argument.
Chapter Twelve
“This is ill country to stop in,” Antal argued. “Too open. Too many birds overhead for so late in the year. The Telyavs might well speak with birds if their sorcery is as much like the Fiends’ as you say.”
“I understand that, but we can’t get a really good survey on the move like this. At some point we’re going to have to sit down and scry.” Jervais shifted in his saddle. One thing he’d never thought quite just was that the horse should get a saddle blanket to prevent chafing, but no such comfort was extended to the rider. He threw an unfriendly glance in Hermann’s direction. The knight looked as comfortable in the saddle as though he were under some enchantment to that effect. Now there was a thought.
“You can do some things on the move,” the Hungarian said, an unusual (and worrisome) note of enthusiasm entering his voice. “Once a detachment of Brancoveanu’s forces chased us for a solid week. I had a spell to drive them off, but only if we could find a well of vis. I soon discovered that one can briefly attune a gargoyle to the ley line, such that they instinctively fly along it…because they’re very earth-heavy, you see.”
Jervais restrained the urge to roll his eyes. Everyone thought he was a vis expert if he knew one trick. “Ah, clever. Still, I think we’ll want to be able to make a chart. How familiar are you with that process?”