Dark Ages Clan Novel Tremere: Book 11 of the Dark Ages Clan Novel Saga

by Sarah Roark

  Well, what else could be expected, really?

  Chapter Twenty

  Since Deverra’s grove was laid waste, the ceremony had to be held at a local cup-stone instead. In daytime, it served the mortal natives of the region, but doubtless they wouldn’t mind too much if a throng of witches and devils borrowed it in the small hours. If they did, they would remember Qarakh’s raiders and think better of interfering. The alkas in which the stone lay bristled with ancient congregations of oak and linden, betraying it as a resting-place for the siela-souls of men and women. The broad top surface of the slab was flat, and hundreds of indentations pockmarked it—tiny little mouths hungry for satiation. Some of the indentations were already filled with beer or mead or blood. Those Deverra did not disturb. Local lore also held that if you pressed a coin to a wound or boil and then deposited it in one of the cups, the stone would devour your disease as well. Clearly it wasn’t a fussy eater.

  The chosen mortal—a fine-boned Samogitian convert—stood before the stone, offering his final supplications. He prayed that Telyavel would find his blood nourishing, and he begged the god also to mediate with both Veliona and Dievas, and to guide him by way of the stars to the blessed abode of Dausos. Then he rose. Deverra nodded. Each of the other congregants, both mortal and Cainite, came forward one by one, carefully biting off the tips of their fingernails and placing them in baskets of oak-bark for burning. This was a gesture of profoundest gratitude for his gift. Every fraction of fingernail they donated would help his spirit hang on during its long climb to heaven. Other baskets contained cheese to nourish him for the journey.

  At last he lay on his stomach across the stone. Deverra placed a sheaf of barley across his back, a reminder that like the grain, he too would rise again after death. She lifted his head and kissed him goodbye. Then she took her bone-knife and cut open his throat. The blood gushed forth, drenching the stone and welling up in each little hole. She let him bleed until the god was replete. Then the vampire priests and priestesses gathered in a close semicircle and drank of the remaining blood, which she drained into a large bowl for them to share. At her gesture, his livid body was removed, carefully washed, robed in white and adorned with jewelry, then set aside for later burning.

  It was now time for the more earthly preparations. Razors and bowls were brought out, and paints and lengths of linen and nets of knotted hair. Deverra smiled at the young woman who came to her with a pot of lead white and sat down facing her.

  Tremere were notoriously difficult to impress—although she hoped that her herd of aurochs had been unexpected, at the very least—but she was sure the effort would be well worth it in the end.

  “And there we are.” Jervais attached the little pendant to the chain that lay across Fidus’s robe. Since there was no way to make a real Fourth Circle sigil-charm out here, Fidus had to content himself for now with the appropriate symbol drawn on a piece of parchment and folded into a sheet of lead. Jervais made a minor fuss of arranging the chain’s drapery nonetheless. He remembered how much these little honors along the way meant to one who labored so long and hard between rewards. To deny such ornaments would be like denying a bride her wedding-finery—improper and unwise. “And now you have a war story of your own to tell, Fidus.”

  Fidus tried not to glow too brightly. “Yes, master.”

  “Hold out your hand.”

  The lad did so without question, nor did he seem surprised when Jervais brought out a shunt and extract a small vial’s worth of blood from his fingertip. Jervais hadn’t had near as many options open to him for choosing Fidus’s thread, but he’d at last settled for a bit of linden bast from one of the slaves’ bast shoes. Linden wood was easy to carve, another virtue Jervais hoped would transmit.

  “One House, One Clan, One Bloo d. Our sodalicium is restored,” he announced. “We mustn’t falter now.” Then he turned to Miklos. “What is it, my lad, that the Telyavs got of yours? No more games.”

  The Czech rubbed at the back of his neck. “A blood-stone, master. Forgive me. Honestly, I didn’t realize at first. The bag spilled, and I just gathered them all up willy-nilly and didn’t count them ‘til later.”

  “Well, that’s damned unfortunate, isn’t it? Since you have matching stones, we may be able to reach the one they have and destroy it. That’ll be risky…” He shook his head, thinking better of it. “Or perhaps we can craft a talisman instead. Not nearly so risky, but far more difficult…I don’t know. We’ll have to see.”

  “That’s if we even get a chance to cast any more big spells,” Torgeir said gloomily.

  “Well, we got a chance to promote Fidus at least. Even they have to rest sometime.”

  “I don’t know, master.” The Dane shook his head. “There were something like thirty Telyavs at the camp. Plus Deverra. Thirty to our eight…seven.”

  “Ah, but our seven are bound in a sodalicium circle, whereas they’ve repudiated the House and Clan. Neither can they call upon the power of Seven nor benefit from the centuries of workings performed by Great Tremere himself on down to hallow that number to our use. They’re little more than hedge-wizards now, Torgeir. Powerful examples of the breed, but hedge-wizards nonetheless. And they rely overmuch on their queen, who still remembers the true learning. If we can kill her…and that Bernalt as well, he’s another relic of the old days…then the rest of them should be far easier to wipe out.”

  They looked rather skeptical; not that he blamed them. Certainly they’d all been lectured on the importance of Seven before, but the true intricacies of the numerology, the full scope of those centuries of workings, were hardly common knowledge among the young.

  “Just trust me,” he finished lamely.

  “They also have more raiders than we do knights and men-at-arms,” Olena pointed out.

  “One of the captain’s knights is worth four of those mangy bandits,” Miklos said with feeling. Antal flinched.

  Jervais raised an eyebrow. “Exactly. So we’ll manage.”

  “They’ve also got a lot of vessels,” she pursued. “We don’t. We can’t keep up like this. We don’t want to go on using Hermann’s men.”

  “Well, I think the captain was planning to go raiding tonight for that very reason.”

  “Wizards.” Hermann came over.

  “What is it?”

  “This mist, is it natural?”

  What mist? Jervais looked out across the camp. There was indeed some kind of haze, a bank of it rising up sheer like a fortress wall in every direction.

  “Of course not,” he retorted after a moment, “or else it’d be coming inside the ward, wouldn’t it?”

  “I can try to drive it off,” said Antal.

  “No, don’t leave the ward.”

  “I’ll do it from within.”

  Well, that was unlikely to work if anyone on the other side actively opposed him, but Jervais didn’t argue. “Fine. What the deuce is your gargoyle’s name again?” he called after Antal’s retreating back. “Never mind. Rix! Falco! You other beast there! Get up there and scout! Tell me where the enemy is.”

  The gargoyles looked up quizzically from grooming each other, then lumbered up into the sky.

  Hermann went to his knights and men. “No, don’t mount,” he ordered the ones who were already getting on horses. Instead, he made all of them but the handful who were good archers stand at intervals just inside the perimeter of the circle, where he assigned each soldier, man and Cainite, a number from one to fourteen. At his command, they marched forward out of the circle in a spreading ring, calling their numbers in sequence.

  “What in hell is he doing?” Olena muttered.

  “Trying to buy us a moment’s warning,” said Jervais. “Be sure to use it.”

  She nodded and started fishing through the purse at her belt.

  “Twelve!” “Thirteen!” “Fourteen!”

  The second round of calls ended; the third began. They were slightly further out now.

  “One!” “Two!” “Thr
ee!” “Four!” “Five!” “Six!”

  Silence.

  “That way!” Jervais shouted. Except for Antal, who continued chanting, trying without much success to drive off the fog, the Tremere turned in the direction Jervais pointed. Olena had a globe of bale-fire readied in her hands, which she threw heedlessly outward. It hissed and dampened as it passed the ward’s perimeter, but continued on until the mist obscured its light. Lightning poured forth from Jervais’s fingers. He had no idea what or if it struck, but he thought he heard a groan. Torgeir had picked up a handful of dirt and molded it into something vaguely bat- or bird-shaped. At his whispered word, it flew out to do Tremere alone knew what. The archers, too, fired shot after shot into the unknown distance. Jervais could hear that some of the arrows were striking something, though it could be mostly trees.

  Meanwhile, the other Black Cross soldiers had retreated back within the ward’s confines and now pressed up against the edge where the attack seemed to be coming from, peering vainly to see the enemy.

  “Bonisagus. They’ll probably try for the ward,” Jervais suddenly realized. “We should shore it up. No, not you, Miklos. The rest of you. And Torgeir, you lead them.”

  “But master,” Miklos said rapidly.

  “No arguments!” Jervais snarled.

  “Then what do I do?”

  “I’d recommend hiding,” said Jervais. “And maybe drawing a circle in the ground with your knife.”

  The young war-wizard looked stricken, but he withdrew into a tent.

  The others spread out to the perimeter of the ward. Torgeir called out: “Una Domus, Una Gens, Unus Sanguis,” and then they sat and dug their fingers into the earth. To Jervais’s wizard-sight, those streams of vis that welled up from within the heart of the hill at the ley lines’ intersection and then flowed through the geometry of his beautiful ward design flickered momentarily, then brightened.

  But there were other sorcerous energies out there as well, not belonging to the Tremere.

  “Enemy everywhere,” Falco reported proudly as he circled to land on one of the wagons by Jervais’s head.

  “Yes, I can see that now…” Jervais snapped. He ran over to Torgeir.

  “My God,” Torgeir said as he came up. “Look at them all.”

  The mist literally teemed. A hundred bizarre forms appeared and disappeared within it. There were skull-faces and beast-faces and glimpses of hood with no face visible at all. Here was a woman in a circlet of tubular gold beads and heavy neck-rings, garbed in white, blood tracked down the front of her gown. Here was a figure in wisps of torn gauze, carrying a scythe. Jervais sent a ball of lightning straight into its chest, but it only whirled unconcernedly and glided back into obscurity.

  “Ghosts…” Torgeir shuddered. “Unhallowed dead.”

  You should talk. Jervais put a hand on his shoulder. “No. Keep your cross by your heart, my young friend. They can’t get past the ward anyway. Hold on. It’s coming.”

  “The attack?”

  “Yes.” Jervais cursed under his breath. He could see glowing motes, traces of spell-work moving suspiciously, weaving. But he couldn’t see what they were attached to because of the mist. Where were the Telyavs? They had to be here. Someone had called up all these ghosts.

  Antal ran to join them.

  “There, there, there!” he shouted.

  “What did you see?” Jervais shouted back. He let his vision retract into the natural.

  “There!” Antal repeated frantically. With a grimace of supreme concentration he thrust his arms at the fog directly before them, his fingers curled in a clutching gesture. A small portion of the mist fled as though fanned away. Another eldritch figure stood there, decked from head to toe in medallions and figurines of amber and veiled in a long, trailing white length of linen.

  Then Jervais saw the bare, wrinkled feet.

  “Deverra!”

  The figure raised its arms. The mist at its fingertips seemed to solidify into streaking lines of frost, which reached left and right to catch two of its fellow apparitions. They stretched out their hands in turn, joining in. A great thick ice fog rolled from them into the boundary of the ward. Jervais was safe behind it, but he could still feel the chill radiating hungrily toward him, could sense his design crystallizing and threatening to shatter under the assault. The four Tremere buttressing the ward cried out as one. Torgeir stiffened, his eyebrows and hair suddenly bristling with ice, but then his voice rose in the Hermetic cant. Jervais hurried away, to the tent where Miklos crouched, peering through the flap, sword drawn. From the look on the lad’s face, he already felt the attack on the ward. At least Jervais hoped that was all it was.

  “Miklos,” he grated in Latin, “Torgeir calls the power of Seven. Join the chant. Ambrath Abrasax sesengenbarpharangês. I am barbadônaiai barbadônai who conceals the stars, who preserves heaven, who establishes the cosmos in truth.”

  Miklos nodded. “Ambrath Abrasax sesengenbarpharangês…”

  Jervais went back out again. Antal had already sat down at the ward-border and stuck his fingers into the earth, and Jervais did likewise. The ward, supported at least vocally now by the entire sodalicium, waxed in strength and drove off the probing frost tendrils of Telyav magic that sought to penetrate and crumble it as ice cracked stone.

  We’re doing well. She must have been expecting to find the sodalicium broken…We could even push back. Unfortunately, he couldn’t tell Torgeir that without breaking the chant, but he let the notion steep in his consciousness, willed it to diffuse, hoping that in the intimacy of the circle Torgeir would pick up on it regardless.

  He didn’t have long to wait; or perhaps the Dane, who was certainly a bright boy as they went, thought of it on his own. Jervais’s hands and the tip of his nose buzzed with a sensation rather like the tingling of a foot that had fallen asleep.

  Deverra. Get Deverra, lad…

  Torgeir’s chant had changed slightly as well. Words of mere summoning and potency were now bolstered by harder sentiments. Jervais echoed as many of them as he caught. He could feel their working change tenor, then it flooded outward all at once, racing back through the conduits the Telyavs had created. Jervais saw two blossoms of bale-fire burst on either side of Deverra—her unfortunate compatriots—and a veritable pillar of it rise up where the high priestess herself had stood.

  Keep going, keep going… They poured all their will and strength into the counterassault for several more long moments, and finally, as one, they released, spent.

  There was a vast silence. Even the throng of ghosts momentarily faded.

  Then suddenly a new apparition lunged forward from the mist toward Jervais. It was an iron face with iron fangs, to which bits of charred detritus clung, and its open maw glowed with red heat. The blackened remnants of the amber tunic clacked as it reached for him, but its talon stopped at the ward’s edge. Then it sat back on its haunches.

  “Deverra,” he choked. He meant to shout it, to warn the others, but the air wouldn’t come.

  “We are strong in the Lord and the power of His might,” the Deverra-thing said. It hefted a hammer that it had in its iron hand and brought it down upon the earth. A boom of thunder rolled through the ground, pealing and echoing. Jervais felt nauseated. The iron cheeks bent, with the scream of a rusted hinge opening, into a smile. Then it drew backward, out of sight.

  He leaped to his feet. Hermann was just behind him, his face lengthened into a rictus of dread. He grabbed the front of the knight’s tunic. “Some of the ghosts are Telyavs.”

  “They’re all demons!”

  “You and Torgeir,” Jervais hissed. “They’re vampires, that’s all. I’m telling you some of those ghosts are flesh, just attired to frighten and confuse us! Tell your men to shoot them, throw spears at them, throw rocks at them. All of them.”

  The Saxon nodded dazedly. “Yes…yes.”

  Jervais went for his tent and his chests. Deverra’s alkas was ash. The old crone should be weakened, lost. Yet here sh
e was, leading the charge and apparently still under the aegis of some vastly powerful witching.

  “We are strong in the Lord,” he muttered. He wished they’d all stop dragging religion into this. Only Deverra surely didn’t mean the Lord. She must have meant her own god, Telyavel. Flesh into iron…well, there were other Tremere who could do such things, though only the mightiest of magi, and then there was that glow like hell-fire from her maw… No wonder the Saxons were spooked. He felt more than a little spooked himself.

  Miklos peered out of the tent, but he couldn’t see whether the working had ended because his brethren had finished it, or because something terrible had happened. It felt more like the former than the latter, but still…at last he could stand the uncertainty no more, and he stepped out. The knights and men-at-arms were running around shooting arrows and hurling spears into the fog, and it looked as though everyone but Jervais still guarded the ward. Where was the old scoundrel? Surely he hadn’t gone out after the witches alone, while Miklos himself stayed hidden in the tent like womenfolk.

  “Miklos.”

  It was a woman’s voice. For a moment he was sure it was his mother’s, but she was long dead. He turned. His tent stood quite near the edge of the ward boundary, and the ridge of the fog was only a few feet away. He peered out into it.

  “Miklos, look.” The voice belonged to a young woman there, robed in a blue cloak embroidered and decorated in metal. A snake brooch clasped her garment shut. Twin chestnut braids, thick and glossy, descended almost down the length of her body. She was beautiful, but he didn’t allow himself to notice that. Instead, all his attention was on what she had in her hand: a tiny red pebble.

  “I brought it for you,” she said, “They told me that we must kill the evil sorcerers, but they lied—you are fair and brave.”