by Sarah Roark
There were few things more dangerous than almost slaying a Cainite, and Jervais knew it. He sent a fork of lightning toward it before it could regain its balance, knocking it flat. The bear-form melted away then, hair drawing up and muscles rearranging themselves in the space of a blink, leaving behind the naked body of a young man. Jervais brought the sword down again. Before it even connected, the young man had vanished. Jervais looked around in a panic. He felt a tickle and saw a beetle land on his hand; in the next instant, a vicious hunting hound was hanging from his hand. It tore off a chunk of his flesh and sprang away. He screamed (and berated himself a moment later for making the noise, but too late).
“Puteresse, lichieres pautonnier,” he muttered savagely, clamping his good hand to the wound and finally recovering his ice-filled glove to put on over it. Then he ran after the dog. It was already invisible in the mist, but at least it had bled far more copiously than the woman.
“Yes, good…” Antal moved forward slowly, down from the hilltop, knights on all sides of him, the Tremere clustered behind and the gargoyles gliding along above. “Clear all this rubbish out. Then we can see what we are dealing with, whether they’re even still here.” As he moved his arms in a sort of swimming and scooping gesture, the mists separated and rose.
“Dear heaven,” Torgeir said. He looked up. “Is that the time? Master Antal—”
Antal looked up too, noting the height of the moon. “Yes, young Master Torgeir, I see it now.”
“Master Jervais and the Herren may not be able to. Hadn’t we better…”
“Yes, we’d better. Cabo! Rixatrix! Falco!”
The gargoyles descended, floating down like autumn leaves in spite of their stony bodies.
“Now let me think. Falco is the sharp-eyed one? Falco, go look for your master.”
“His mate should—” Fidus began to volunteer, then stopped. Antal stared at him, as did everyone. Evidently Fourth Circle lent one new airs.
“Yes, Fidus?” Antal prompted.
“His mate should go with him,” the apprentice gulped. “Master Antal. She’s the fighter of the pair…ah, as you can see…and Lady Virstania said they almost think in concert. If Master Jervais and the knights are in trouble, then…”
Antal blinked at him.
“Of course,” he said after a moment. “Cabo should be enough for us. Rixatrix, go with Falco. Cabo, you stay with us.”
“Rix go,” the big female grunted. She and her mate took off, and Cabo returned to circling just overhead.
The dog’s trail ended abruptly at a little brook of melt runoff. Jervais didn’t know whether that meant that he’d splashed into the brook, or that he’d turned into a bird and flown away, or something else equally aggravating.
He sat down, pulled off the glove and examined his wound. It would take only a few nights to heal—that was if he could hope for regular meals in the meantime, which seemed a slim and uncertain hope just now. But it was a good-sized hunk of flesh, enough for some really malicious spell-work. He certainly hadn’t set out to become the next risk to the sodalicium. Damn Miklos for a fool. If he’d only stayed in the tent. Evidently the boy would follow any order without question except the order to lay low…
He shook his head and took a little lodestone out of the purse at his belt. He dripped some of the blood from his wound into the finger of his glove, then dropped the lodestone in and settled in to wait. In this fog, there was no way to see an hour’s passage, so he quietly recited a chant he knew took about that long to get through.
When it was done, he took the lodestone back out and suspended it on his purse-string. Naturally it pointed further in to what he had already determined was an alkas of some size. With a gusting sigh he got up again to follow it. Come what may, he had to recover his missing portion.
Not long afterward he found the stone slowly turning left, then whirling. Just in time he dodged out of the way as they both came at him from behind. He spun to face them. Having now seen the enchantment once before, he spotted the vines beginning to sprout from the woman’s hands and caused them to wither with a gesture and a phrase invoking the forces of decay. The naked young man who had been a bear slashed at him with long clawlike fingernails. The woman flicked her hand and sent a rock flying up from the ground and dashing into Jervais’s injured jaw. He roared and lunged at her, seizing her arm and twisting it as he pulled downward. She gasped.
He sent a good solid bolt into her while still holding onto her arm and threw her aside. Then he did the same to the man and straddled across him, pressing his blade into the Telyav’s neck.
“What did you do with it?” he hissed.
“With what?”
“My flesh.”
“I ate it,” the young man grinned through a bleeding mouth.
“Unwise.” Jervais lifted the blade and made to plunge it into his abdomen. The young man laughed at him. “Son of a whore…”
Something he could only have described as a sensation of pure malevolence brushed across Jervais’s back. He stumbled to his feet. The Telyav was still laughing, pulling himself up unhurriedly. The woman had also begun to rise, but she made no move to attack. Jervais peered up to see what was diving at him now. Another ghost?
Then it happened again—this time to his face, a much sharper pain. As it did, a faint patch of brightness showed through the roiling mist above him.
The first fingers of dawn, seeking to reach down and touch them.
All thought of battle was abandoned. Jervais looked wildly around. It was still difficult to see much on the ground, but there was no sign of any hole or hollow he could jump into. For one dazed moment he thought of simply covering himself in a mound of slush, but no, that might well melt away completely if the day turned warm.
The Telyavs slowly backed away from him, no longer laughing but eerily silent and smiling in the purple light. Jervais ran toward the young man with a cry, thinking he would take one with him, anyway, and drove him up against the bole of a great tree.
A moment later he had hold of nothing. The young man’s maddeningly serene face grayed, softened and flowed backward into the very wood, soon followed by the rest of him. Jervais turned. The last of the woman’s arm was fading into the bark of a slim linden.
“Trees. Double-damned trees…”
This had been the plan all along, he realized. Or it had been the plan ever since he’d undertaken the supreme idiocy of charging out of the ward. He deserved this fate every bit as much as Miklos. More.
Purple took on roseate hues, and the mist rose like bread. The pain began in earnest now, and the fear. He ran back and forth. There was nothing but snow. Surely he could do better than snow. There must be some charm, some incantation… It dimly occurred to him that these were his final moments and he should do something, say something. Now was the time to pray or curse or utter some deathless sentiment, if there were anyone here to hear it. He offered up all he had to offer to the burning face of Heaven: a cry of cheated hate.
And Heaven answered. He thought at first the darkness that fell upon him was Judgment, wings of demons come to drag his soul to hell, but then he put out his hands and touched a familiar, pebbly texture. The smell, too, of niter caves and butcher’s stalls.
“Falco?”
“Shh. Master must be still…”
“Sleep now,” came Rixatrix’s rumble. They were embracing him between them, arcing their wings until their bodies met at every seam, blotting out every last bit of the horrible light.
“Master is safe.”
He could feel their skin calcifying around him, entombing him immovably in the mountain-rock of Carpathia. Yes, he remembered now, Goratrix had had to invent the spell, gargoyles weren’t always bright enough to get themselves out of the sun in time—of course, given the circumstances perhaps he shouldn’t disparage… The danger now over, the lethargy of daytime took him with unaccustomed speed. So, then. He would owe the next night, and every night thereafter, to the luck of fools and
gargoyles.
It was certainly better than the alternative.
Chapter Twenty-One
“No sign yet?” Torgeir called up to Antal, who had actually climbed a tree just outside the ward circle in order to get a better vantage.
“No sign,” the Hungarian called back.
“There you are,” Torgeir said, clapping a hand on Fidus’s shoulder. “Now next time you can just ask him yourself.”
“Aren’t you at all worried?” Fidus entreated him as he walked away again.
“Why, what would be the point of worrying?”
“Well—” Fidus stopped in the middle of what he’d been going to say, realizing that none of the reasons it personally worried him mattered nearly as much to Torgeir. “Well, Master Jervais was the only one who really knew what we’re supposed to be doing, and why.”
“We’re out here to kill Telyavs because the Lord Councilor told us to,” the young magus replied easily. “What else is there to know? Peace, Fidus. Either he’s all right or he isn’t. But knowing Master Jervais, I’d wager the former. If there’s one thing the man excels at, it’s taking care of himself.”
Jervais doubled over in pain and fell to his knees, clawing at the stake in his belly to dig it out before the buds on it had a chance to sprout. It wouldn’t come loose, though, until he choked out a formula of revocation. Right away the broad-set one was charging again. Evidently all the savage had to do was slather himself with a bit of mud to heal his wounds, or at least he didn’t seem to feel them anymore. Rixatrix picked the man up and hurled him away.
Five. He’d fully expected to awaken to two, but not five. Evidently he’d walked into a damned orchard of Telyavs. At least the naked young man was still looking worse for wear, and the iron-shod woman’s wound didn’t seem to have healed either. They hung to the rear. The new three, however, were considerably fitter and haler for battle than Jervais himself.
Jervais stayed where he was for a few moments, hunched over, pretending to be grievously wounded. Sure enough, the little blond girl with the bone-tipped spear decided to press her advantage and ran at him with a battle-yell. He knocked the spear away with his sword. She raised her arm to strike again. With his other hand he drove the stake into her foot. Its magic had fled, but it could still cause terrible pain. Falco swept down and knocked her on the head with a thick fallen branch—a choice of weapon Jervais found most gratifying.
Jervais got up then and, with a sweeping motion, sent a clump of dirty snow-slush into her face. That bought him some time to get out of the way. All of a sudden the smell of Cainite blood completely suffused the air. Rixatrix had taken the naked young man’s head the rest of the way off. She shot up into the air, carrying the head aloft with a triumphant shriek. The iron-shod woman screamed and ran up directly underneath her. Rixatrix snuffled—it wasn’t a laugh exactly, but it was as close as most gargoyles got—and dropped her prize at the woman’s feet.
The broad-set man was back from wherever Rix had thrown him. Now he stood aghast at seeing his comrade’s body so used. Jervais tried to run him through, but he overbalanced. The man easily caught him, wrapping his powerful arms around Jervais’s own, turning him toward the iron-shod woman.
“Daine!” he called hoarsely. “Daine!”
The woman turned to stare, but then seemed to understand. Once again the vines and thorns shot out of her fingers with deadly speed, and this time Jervais couldn’t make the sign necessary to stop it. As they enveloped his head, the man who held him hastily stepped back. Jervais flailed at the vines with his sword, but it became entangled as well.
Something yanked on the vines, and he fell facedown on the ground. Wriggling to raise his head, he saw that Falco had barreled into the woman and was now worrying at her flesh. Leaves and coils of green twined around him as well, locking him and his opponent together.
And now the third one, the sharp-faced old man, was chanting in Jervais’s direction.
“Rix!” Jervais shouted. The big gargoyle landed beside him and caught up the vines in her mouth. She put her front talons down on them, pulling and shearing with all her might until they tore just above his head. Then she seized hold of him and struggled clumsily up into the air. A burst of orange and a flash of heat exploded under Jervais as they rose.
A rock flew up and battered against Rixatrix’s wing, laying open a gash. The spear flew at them and the old man sent another blossom of fire toward them, but she managed to dodge them and stay aloft. They spiraled upward. Jervais stared down at the battle that continued on in his absence. The Telyavs descended on Falco now. The poor creature tried to break his wings free of the strands that bound them, and he put great rakes of gore across any Cainite flesh that was unlucky enough to come within range. Then the bone-spear plunged into his chest, and he gave a piercing cry that echoed across the canopy of the alkas.
Rixatrix gathered Jervais up into her vast arms now, so that he no longer dangled like an overripe fruit.
“Master is safe,” she said for the second time in as many nights.
“I hope so,” he answered, “though I fear the same can’t be said of Falco.” Virstania would be most displeased. Then again, the old harridan had never quite managed to get it through her skull that the whole purpose of her charges’ existence was to die in their owners’ stead.
“Is true,” she rumbled.
He glanced up at the gargoyle’s grim, knobby face. For him, at least, it was impossible to read feeling in it. “Don’t you care?” he asked curiously. “He was your mate.”
“He dies for Master. Is great honor. My great honor come another time.”
“Ah yes. The kind and noble masters…” He didn’t expect her to catch his irony, but to his surprise she made a little demurring noise.
“Some Master is cruel. No matter.”
He wondered where he fell by the gargoyle reckoning. “No?”
“For Mother’s children, is honor to serve whether Master is kind or not. Master do as he wish. If I serve well, then honor is mine in any case.”
“I see.” He’d never thought to see a moment when he would envy one of these creatures, especially knowing the existences they led, but here it was. “Then your Mother has taught you well.” Better than I was ever taught, certainly.
“Yes,” she said, and banked left to catch a favorable wind.
Rixatrix delivered him to the center of the Tremere campsite like war booty, and he once again had to endure the indignity of being pried free of greenery.
“Master! Thank Great Tremere!” Fidus exclaimed with evident relief.
“Here, boy. Take this vial and put it away safely,” Jervais gasped, squirming to get his arm out. “Herr Hermann, Herr Wigand. You made it back in before dawn?”
“Just barely. But for Miklos,” Hermann said solemnly, “you are the tardiest of us, master wizard. I’d hoped you would recover him.”
“I wish any of us had—” Jervais retorted, stung. Hermann bared his teeth, and only then did Jervais see the great wound in the knight’s chest. He hastily added, “Not for lack of trying, I’m sure. For that matter, I wish we’d managed to stick together. I could have used you.”
“Forgive us. Something ran in a circle around us, and suddenly there were two witch-lights, and we didn’t know which one was you anymore. Obviously we guessed wrongly.”
“Well, I got a little distracted myself, so I suppose fair’s fair.”
“Open up your hand,” Hermann said. Jervais did so warily. The knight deposited a pair of fangs into his palm.
“It isn’t just their ghosts that fear the cross,” he went on. “They do themselves. They recoil at the sight of it. I thought I saw it during that last battle, but I wasn’t sure. This time there was no doubt. Brother Wigand made the sign of the cross and invoked the name of Our Lord, and the witch screeched and fled straight into my arms.”
“My vigor and hope are restored,” Wigand agreed heartily. “This time God blesses our endeavors. Jürgen was ri
ght—sorcerers to kill sorcerers, it’s all in His plan.”
“Is that so?” Jervais pondered. “Well, it certainly helps my plans, anyway.”
“Why? What are you going to do?” Hermann asked.
“Learn by imitation, like any good scholar.”
The Saxon nodded heavily, despite having not the slightest idea what Jervais meant, and made for the slaves’ tent. Antal started and ran after him. Seeing the look on the Hungarian’s face, Jervais shook off the last of the clinging vines and hurried along as well.
“Captain,” the Hungarian was saying. “Captain, I must warn you—”
Hermann stopped short in the doorway in the tent. The two magi crowded up behind him.
“There is but one left. And he’s ill.”
Hermann stared at the Kur, who sat up from his rags of bedding with wide eyes.
“So he is,” the knight murmured. And came forward.
“No. No, no,” the mortal man begged. Hermann paid him no heed. “No, please—I can tell you things.” He looked pleadingly at Jervais. “I can tell you useful thing!”
Hermann stopped again then, but his mouth was partway open already.
“If you can do that, why haven’t you done it before?” Jervais asked.
“About Telyavel. About his shrines.”
“Stay…stay out of this, wizards,” Hermann said huskily.
“You’re right.” Jervais held up his hands in a pretense of apology. “It’s your decision. After all, he’s the only one left for you, isn’t he? The only infidel.”
“About his shrines, please. If your enemy is high priestess of Telyavel, one thing she must have, one promise she must keep. I tell you—if you promise no to bite me!”
The knight drew up his knees and sat. He raised his hand to push his metal coif back off of his head, revealing the linen arming-cap beneath.
“So you guessed,” he muttered to Jervais.