by Sarah Roark
“Get on either side!” Hermann shouted. “Let’s herd them off west!”
“No, these beasts won’t be driven!” Antal shouted back at the top of his lungs. “They’re bewitched! Kill them!”
Jervais repaired to enough distance to get a good view of the scene. It looked as though Antal were right. Surely it wasn’t in the nature even of these fearsome creatures to destroy with such determination. And while the mass of gleaming black bodies did flow and change shape under the assaults of the camp’s fighting men, the beasts didn’t seem at all inclined to take fright, which went against Jervais’s admittedly vague ideas about bovine behavior. As he watched, Miklos was borne down to the ground and trampled.
“Bonisagus,” he muttered. “I’m not going to see my sodalicium broken by a bunch of cows…” Spurring his horse over the little rise, he rode down to the stream and leapt down onto the ice, which was thin and cracked at once under his falling weight. He plunged thigh-deep into frigid, fast-flowing water. A moment later a rush of warmth spread through his veins as he drew out his ash-wand and called upon the Blood to steep his incantation with the authority of the element that ruled all others.
“Ourior amen im tar chob klamphob phrephror ptar ousiri saiob telo kabe manatathor asiorikor beeinor amoun om menichtha machtha chthara amachtha aou alakambot besinor aphesior phreph amei our lamasir cheriob pitrem pheoph nirin allannathath cherioch one bousiri ninouno amanal gagosarier meniam tler O A etne ousiri ousiri ousiri ousiri menemb mnem brabel tnekaiob. Hear me, Thou who drowned and thus mastered the Nile and all the waters of chaos, for I conjure Thee by Thy secret names, and if Thou do not my Will, then I shall no longer guard Thy names from profanation or defilement. As I raise my arms, so raise these waters, and follow me! Nun, nun! Êdê, êdê!”
The response was immediate. With a roar, the water of the stream reared up in a great sheet, bursting through its crust, bearing him like a chariot back to the shore and then taking up its battle-position behind him as he remounted his horse. He led it back over the rise, rousing it to greater speed with shouts and imprecations in two or three different tongues. It seemed quite willing enough, at least—perhaps even eager.
“Move!” he shouted down into the camp. “Out of the way!” He was pleased to see that the other apprentices seemed to have recovered their wits a little and now stood just yards removed from the battle with hands joined, presumably readying some spell or other. Even Fidus stood chanting along with them. But Antal, the knights and soldiers, and the gargoyles were still interspersed among the thronging herd, slaughtering them one and two at a time with lightning, iron and claw. Miklos was nowhere to be seen.
“Antal, hold your fire! Stop, damn you!” The Hungarian at once looked up and his eyes widened in comprehension. The unnatural radiance in his palms guttered and died. Jervais lost no more time. “Exede armentum,” he muttered. The water-wall rushed down past him. As it did, it rolled into several huge beads, like mercury skating along metal, which each swallowed up a portion of the herd and held them suspended, floating like motes of dust in air, feebly kicking as their lungs filled up. Jervais then rode down to meet the bewildered knights and Antal, who reined up beside him.
“Good!” Antal puffed.
“Yes, good,” he repeated. “But where the hell’s Miklos?”
“He must be caught up in one of the globes.” With that, they scattered to peer into the gloomy depths of each one. Jervais saw the shadow of a human form, reached in, pulled it out and was irritated to see it was only one of the Esths, who had already died anyway.
“No, here, this is him! Jervais, tell it to let me in.”
“Antalo licet.”
Antal tugged Miklos’s muscular frame free of the water’s grasp. The Czech vomited out the contents of his sodden lungs and struggled up to his feet, leaning on Antal’s elbow. The plentiful gashes on his face and arms began to close up, and he put his dangling leg down to try his weight on it.
“That’s it, use the blood,” Antal urged him. “That’s a lad.”
“How long can you hold them in there?” Brother Wigand asked, rather awed despite himself. He dismounted and examined one of the water-globes but didn’t dare touch its curious surface.
“Long enough,” Jervais answered. He looked for further signs of movement within the water and found none. Then he made a gesture. At once the globes lost their form and dropped to the ground, leaving the vampires up to their calves in water that slowly began to drain downhill. The bodies of the cattle, too, collapsed limply.
“Abi! Abi!” he snapped, and the water began to flow away more quickly. “Let’s see what we can salvage out of this mess.”
“No!” Hermann called. He rode over toward them, sword still out. “Back on your horses. Master Antal, back at it! They’re coming.”
“Who’s coming?” Jervais asked in annoyance, but Antal was already leaping to obey, and Miklos was waving off Jervais’s reaching hands. The apprentice took hold of his own upper arm and, with a wet crack and a grimace, reset a bone that had come out of joint. Then he limped away, stopping to pick up a lance that someone had dropped.
Jervais grabbed the reins of his horse—which seemed distinctly annoyed to find its hooves suddenly wet—and got back up in the saddle just in time. Some ten or twelve of Qarakh’s raiders splashed into the camp, shrieking warcries, standing in the stirrups with bows raised high. Hermann called a charge and his warriors rushed to obey.
The other apprentices had already run up beside Jervais and Antal, with Olena at their head. “Command us, masters!” she exclaimed. “What should we do?”
“Stay out of the way,” Jervais returned. An arrow flew past his cheek.
She scowled at him and turned her hands palms-up. As she did, she floated up several feet into the air.
“Ah,” said Antal. “Don’t do that. Stay on the ground or in a tree, and knock their arrows out of the air instead. That’ll help.”
“Yes, master.” She turned and shot up into the dark canopy of leaves.
“All right, the rest of you out of the way,” Jervais snarled. A rider charged directly at them then, but Miklos thrust his lance between the horse’s forelegs and tripped it, sending the rider crashing to the ground. A tang of vampire blood began to scent the air. Hermann and Wigand were doing well. Antal knocked a rider off his mount and then jumped down himself. An instant later they were fighting hand-to-hand, their movements so unnaturally rapid that they were nigh impossible to follow. Suddenly his opponent screamed in pain and began to shiver. Antal thrust one of the hawthorn stakes he’d spent the past weeks carving into the rider’s chest. The vampire’s entire body decayed into dirt in the span of a mortal breath. Antal stowed the stake, now blood red and glistening all over, somewhere in his robe, then rose heavily to his feet.
While Jervais sat desperately trying to think what else he could do that might be helpful (he didn’t think he had any more water-witching in him tonight), a pair of the riders converged on him with swords drawn. He spurred away from them, but they easily changed direction and closed. He drew out the dagger at his belt and caught one of their sword-strokes. The other dealt him a glancing slice to the back. He roared and turned, catching his assailant by the wrist. Years of training were channeled into the instinct of the moment: he felt the other Cainite’s blood lying fallow in the veins just beneath the white skin and willed a portion of it to rouse, to diffuse through the tissue. The rider gave a shout, his rage stoked by the sudden unnatural engorgement of blood. He bared his fangs and sprang out of his saddle to land on Jervais. Jervais thrust his blade up through the rider’s belly toward the heart, then pushed him away with the strength of panic, letting him fall. He heard the other rider shout and turned again to see a blade whistling toward his neck, but then it suddenly flew up into the air, tumbling end over end, and returned to cut its owner’s flabbergasted head off. Olena, no doubt, but there was scarcely time to thank her. Jervais hastily got down. These Cainites were so much bett
er horsemen than he was that he might as well stay on foot and have one less thing to think about.
“Master!” Zabor caught him by the arm.
“Get away!”
“But master, look!” The Pole pointed frantically.
“What, Hermann?”
“No, right beside him! Look. See it coming up out of the water?”
He’d let his vision slip back to its usual, slightly blurred state at some prior point in the chaos. Now he focused it once again. If it hadn’t been shiny he still might have missed it, but there it was: what looked like a silver ritual mirror. It rose from the water, surrounded by a slight shimmering in the air rather like a heat haze. A moment later it, too, shimmered and disappeared.
“Whore’s bastards—” Jervais gasped. He stretched out his hand, but the apprentice beat him to it. With a short, sharp invocation to the forces of Light and Truth and a precise hand gesture, Zabor sent a gust of wind into the center of the haze, which blew away to reveal a slight, green-robed Cainite girl who hissed at them. Hermann wheeled around.
“Witch,” the Saxon cried out in his battle-passion, “to hell with all sorcerers…” He raised his sword high and turned his cross-emblazoned shield toward her. She cursed and flung her arm before her face, then fled in a blur.
“There must be more of them,” Jervais said to Zabor. “Find them! Stop them!”
“Right!” For once, not a word of argument. He and the apprentice fanned out, all but ignoring the deadly fights going on around and above them. Jervais caught another Telyav almost at once and barreled headlong into him to prevent his escape. The next moment he had nothing in his hands but a slim green snake that wriggled out of his grasp and swam away from him, its body whipping sinuously in the water.
“Verdammt!”
“I did not think that was a word Christians uttered lightly,” came an accented sneer from above his head. He looked up. It was a fierce-looking rider with a beard that actually grew up over his cheekbones and cat-yellow eyes. The rider’s bow thrummed. An arrow plunged into Jervais’s chest, piercing his ribcage through.
Jervais had taken sword blows before, but never an arrow. He was unprepared for the scope and depth of the pain. The entire left side of his chest throbbed and his veins seemed to have caught fire, the flames of which licked hungrily at the edges of his heart. The look of triumph on the rider’s face (perhaps he thought at first he’d struck his target) soured as he saw Jervais’s own expression change. He snapped his reins and his horse sprang away with a swiftness only blood could impart.
Jervais twisted his arms in a strangling gesture, and an eel-like column of water rose and snagged the rider around the neck, dashing him to the ground. The rider came up again, trying to pull free of the tendril’s grasp. Jervais was already bearing down on him with fangs stretched taut. He literally sat on the man as he drank down the sweet, thick ichor in his throat.
All at once hands were on his shoulders. “Easy.” Antal recoiled as Jervais turned toward him bloody-mouthed. “No, no, take him, keep him. But I think you have plumbed that well, brother.”
Jervais looked at the body in his hands. It had begun wasting already, caving in on itself. In moments it would be ash. He dropped it in sudden disgust, then wobbled to his feet and looked around.
“Where…where are…”
“They turned tail,” Antal answered. “Gone, just like that. We have two—rather, three dead raiders, or at least their armor. No Telyav remains, alas.”
“And it’s not even worth chasing after them, we know exactly where they’re going,” came Hermann’s disgruntled voice. “And their horses are faster.”
“But we must…Master Antal.” Jervais shook his head, trying to clear it of bloodlust. “They were taking things. The Telyavs. She tricked us. The riders, just there to keep us busy. The ghost to distract from the sap. And the cows, the damned cows.”
Baghatur coughed politely at that. “Not ‘cows,’ master. Julius Caesar spoke of beasts like these long ago. Great black forest oxen that only the bravest warriors dared face, that couldn’t be made to submit to man.” He gestured at the massed carcasses, still majestic even in waterlogged death.
“Though obviously they submit to woman, or to one woman in particular, at least,” Jervais muttered. “But the Telyavs—”
“No, Master Jervais. We cannot chase them now,” Master Antal decreed. “No profit in catching witches if we have no place to hide from the sun’s face afterward. Come here. I will take out your arrow.”
“Tremere’s gory fangs!” Jervais stepped back just in time. Rixatrix bent over Falco, determinedly licking her mate’s belly with an enormous pebbled tongue. A brackish flood of blood and vomit spewed out of the little gargoyle’s maw a moment later, and he gave a doglike whimper.
“Now there’s a pleasant oath—” Hermann began, but he immediately trailed off into something rather close to a retching noise. “Faugh.”
Fidus looked distraught, twisting the front of his robe. “Lady Virstania said no large herbivores,” he lamented. “She said it, I just—didn’t think about it ‘til too late.”
Jervais glanced at him. Truth be told, he had no idea how little Fidus would have stopped any gargoyle from doing exactly as it liked, and he’d forgotten too, but if the boy wished to take blame…”Well, that’s why you get to clean this up, Fidus. And make sure the other two can carry him all right. I’d hate to have to kill him just because he’s got a tummy ache and can’t keep up.” Rixatrix looked up at him and whimpered a little herself.
“Is everyone fed, at least?” he asked, turning away.
“Yes, that’s why we’re down to six slaves,” Torgeir said gloomily. “And they look faint.”
“Well, that won’t do, we’ve got to find more vessels. At least there’s no lack of raiders hereabouts to blame it on. Captain, you’re still cut up.”
“I can manage,” Hermann said.
“I’d rather have you better off than that,” Jervais demurred. “Perhaps one or two of your troops could, ah, fill a cup on their commander’s behalf…”
“I can manage,” the knight repeated.
“Right.” Jervais straightened up and raised his voice. “This is what we’re going to do. The Cainites are going to take the horses with the good shoes and get as far away from here as we can before dawn.”
“Taking into account that we’re going to have to dig some holes once we get there,” Hermann interrupted. “None of these tents are going back up tonight, and unless I’m mistaken, that means you can’t work your charm to keep the sun out, doesn’t it?”
“I’m afraid so. That means the Kur had better come with us. Meanwhile, the other mortals are going to take the rest of the horses, the carts and the gargoyles, and go in the opposite direction. Tomorrow night, assuming we all survived, we’ll meet back up and figure out what to do next.”
“Schnell!” Hermann beat his gloved hands together, and his men moved even faster to get things loaded up.
“Heirs of the Seven,” Jervais said in a warm tone as the knights busied themselves. The Tremere drew in uneasily about him. “It’s clear what the Telyavs were really after with this raid. Our things. Ritual links. Now. Who lost what? Master Antal?”
“Everything I had is accounted for, Master Jervais,” Antal said coolly. “What about you?”
“Well, I seem to be all right. But obviously someone wasn’t so lucky. Children?”
They all blinked back at him. All their colors were a muddle of fear and fatigue. No help there.
“Oh, spare me! Nothing tries my patience worse than a bunch of blood-wizards trying to look innocent. Now I distinctly saw one of them make off with a ritual mirror. Whose was it? Come, I’m not going to get angry. This is important for all of us. Well?”
No one spoke.
“Is everyone finished looking?” he asked at last.
“Not, not quite, master,” Fidus said very quietly. This was followed by an immediate chorus of “not fini
shed yet, haven’t had a chance yet” and what-not.
“Well, get finished!” he roared, and they literally jumped to obey.
Chapter Eighteen
He trudges down the Via Dolorosa. He carries no cross, but his body is bent all the same, wracked with thirst pains that have long since spread from his slack belly into his limbs and head. It is a cold night. He can’t remember Jerusalem ever being so cold when he was there, long ago, in mortal nights. His belt hangs loose around his thighs and threatens to slide down his legs. The tip of his scabbard scrapes on the paving stones. His sword, too, droops in his hand, rusted away, useless. Church bells ring from every direction. The streets are empty, lay folk and clergy alike all gathered in the safety of the altar’s glow for night prayers. There is no one left to fight.