Clan Novel Nosferatu: Book 13 of the Clan Novel Saga

by Gherbod Fleming

  Gradually, he found peace. The briny water soothed and supported his deformed, aching body. The solid darkness crowded away the continual influx of information, the overwhelming stimuli of his nightly existence. The gentle swooshing of the lake filled his mind.

  He opened his mouth, exhaled, allowed the water to enter him as the swarm of bubbles rapidly spent itself. By force of will, he averted his gag reflex. Slowly, he sank more deeply into the depths.

  How tempting to keep going, to abandon his repose and kick, swim downward. And to find what? The center of the earth? The Nictuku, the great hunters? Is that what Augustin had done? Had he found what he was looking for?

  Deeper still, Calebros sank. He opened his eyes, could not tell the difference except for the brief sensation of water against his corneas. He could have been floating in space, in a vacuum, beyond the reach of earthly promise or menace.

  Silence…almost. Distant swooshing of water against shore, the sound of the heartbeat that was absent. Farther away, the howling, pain, exhilaration, rapture. There were deeper sounds, more difficult to make out. Rumblings of the kine, perhaps a subway train, or the rhythmic turnings of a monstrous printing press.

  Calebros took these things into him like the briny water, accounted for them, factored them out.

  Deeper…

  He strained to hear that which he sought….

  There. He heard it, felt it. Faintly. But then he was sure, like a searching finger at last finding the pulsing vein. A deeper sound, a hum, distant but strong. The sound of the bedrock, of the earth itself, of the world that was left to him, the world that was forced upon him. What a cruel gift, the steady hum of the earth, the subterranean world that was his legacy.

  Augustin was foolish to seek out destruction, Calebros thought. They had eternity. Could the very earth whispering in his ear be wrong? Old wives’ tales, the great hunters. Perhaps it was in the blood after all; perhaps Augustin had had no real choice in the matter, just as Calebros, night after night, had no real choice but to be true to his blood. To search for answers.

  Calebros allowed his thoughts to float beside him, there far beneath the surface; he let them float away until thought, any thought, was his only in vague memory. There was the gentle hum of the earth. And nothing else.

  Before he broke the surface, he heard the sand-like spray upon the water and knew who he would find beside the lake. Calebros made his way to the shore. He felt gravity take its hold upon him once again, felt it pull at his leathery flesh and his twisted body. He crawled. The stone of the beachhead was warm now against his callused knees. His talons clattered like the legs of a beetle. He retched, purging the eternal waters from this, his frail eternal prison. Water, bile, and blood mixed in shallow pools. Eventually, he rolled over and sat on his bony haunches. He neither clothed himself nor looked at his brother.

  Emmett sat atop the canvas sacks of salt, sifting through the crystals, letting them run through his fingers like the grains of an hourglass. Every so often, he tossed a handful of the salt into the water.

  “I guess you’re a damn pillar of the community,” Emmett said humorlessly. With his other hand, he played with the strand of knucklebones hanging from his neck, his inheritance. “You and your mudhole.”

  Calebros did not respond.

  “Here,” said Emmett. He took up from the shadows behind him a large goblet fashioned from bone and handed it to Calebros. The goblet was full of blood. “You gotta learn to take care of yourself. Scuba diving doesn’t take the place of dinner, you moron.”

  Calebros took the offered vessel. The blood was tepid but not yet cold. The howling, the kennels. He drank.

  “Geez, what am I, your mother?” Emmett asked.

  “No,” Calebros said. “You are my brother, my broodmate.”

  “Brood, litter, whatever. We were both chosen to suck the old blood tit, so who am I to ask questions?”

  Calebros sighed. Blood tit, indeed. “That’s not how you remember it.”

  Now it was Emmett’s turn to sigh. “Don’t do this. Don’t get all… You always do this, get all touchy-feely we’re-all-brothers-in-the-blood, when you soak your head, blah, blah, blah…”

  “Make light of it if you will—”

  “I will. Thank you very much. Got enough salt here?” Emmett flicked some at Calebros.

  In the bags beneath Emmett, there was at least a ton remaining. Initially there’d been five times as much, or, if not in the truest sense of the word initially, there had been after Calebros had spent the better part of two years hauling sacks down here.

  “You know,” Emmett said, “if you get tired of bobbing in the Dead Sea, you could always just Embrace a masseuse. Now that I think about it, I bet Hilda would be willing to—”

  “Have you moved him yet?” Calebros interrupted.

  The effect of a smirk on Emmett’s features was singularly unappealing. “Not yet. Soon as I get back. I wanted to check things out with you first, and not over the phone or SchreckNET, if you know what I mean.”

  “I do.”

  “So you don’t want me to clue in Montrose. You’re sure?” Emmett asked.

  “I’m sure.”

  “Could cause problems later…if he finds out.”

  “Make sure he doesn’t find out. Or can’t you handle him?”

  That elicited a wry laugh from Emmett. “I’ll make sure he doesn’t find out. I won’t use our places in Vegas itself. Maybe Cactus Springs, or Shoshone.”

  “That’s what I was going to suggest. How long do you think—?”

  Emmett shrugged. “Not long. Maybe a few weeks.” Calebros nodded. “You know,” Emmett continued, “Abbot Pierce is a real pain in the ass.”

  Calebros nodded again. “That’s one reason I thought it best to move Benito.”

  “From Pierce’s to Montrose’s.” Emmett shook his head disdainfully. “I say when this whole mess is over, we sell both their asses down the river.”

  “You know we can’t do that.”

  “You might know that,” Emmett said. “What I know is that Pierce is a self-righteous, toothless excuse for a Kindred who’d rather piss his pants than cross the Giovanni, and Montrose… Montrose is a slimy son of a bitch who’s so far in the Giovanni’s pocket that he’s sucking their collective dick.”

  “Eloquently put, as always.”

  “Pierce is a dick. Montrose sucks dick. That’s how I see it.”

  “Didn’t Pierce prove useful this time?” Calebros asked. “Would you rather have grabbed Benito on short notice and hung out in Boston, in the city, and waited for the Giovanni bloodhounds to track you down?”

  “If they could.”

  “If,” Calebros agreed. “But that’s a fairly ominous if that we avoided. And we might not trust Montrose with everything, but he’s another source of information about what’s going on in Las Vegas, a source fairly close to the prince, I might add.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Whatever you say.” Emmett’s protests trailed off into incomprehensible muttering. Then he grew silent altogether. The two Kindred sat quietly, the only sound echoing above the underground lake the distant plink, plink of dripping water.

  “You came all this way for that?” Calebros asked at last.

  “‘All this way’. Listen to you. Boston is not that far. You really need to get out more. I didn’t just walk from Las Vegas.”

  Calebros knew that, of course. Movement up and down a significant portion of the East Coast was not a great ordeal for the Nosferatu. Several generations of the clan had spent decades creating, through construction and appropriation, a network of underground tunnels stretching, more or less, from Boston to Washington, D.C. And with but a few above-ground lapses, a Nosferatu could travel as far as Richmond and even Atlanta in relative safety. Less safety, now that the Sabbat had swarmed through those cities, but it wasn’t that difficult to stay out of sight. Of the Nosferatu that had thrown in their lot with the Sabbat, most knew of portions of the network, but even they weren�
�t about to betray that information. The antitribu might have philosophical reasons for their sect alliance, but they had no great love for their ‘masters’, the Lasombra or the Tzimisce.

  Emmett had come only from Boston. Not that great an undertaking, true. But he was about to head west on an incredibly sensitive assignment. Calebros couldn’t help but wonder if what had brought Emmett, aside from practical matters, was not something more…personal.

  “What do you remember?” Calebros asked, finally. “It wasn’t a litter. I don’t remember you until after…after…”

  “I don’t remember nothing,” Emmett said, “because I don’t need to remember nothing. There was before, and now there’s now. Right?”

  Calebros knew he was right. There were some things that he and the clan would never forget: debts and debtors, favors and betrayals. Other things, there was no reason to remember. Nothing lay down that road except confusion and regret.

  “Right?” Emmett asked, more insistently.

  Calebros nodded. “Right.” He stood up and gathered his clothes. The stiffness was returning to his body already. He picked up the bone goblet from where he’d placed it on the shore of the lake and handed the cup to Emmett. “Take this back. Please.” To the kennels.

  Emmett took the goblet. “Well then,” he said. He nodded curtly and turned back toward the tunnel that had brought him here.

  “Emmett,” Calebros said. Emmett paused, turned back. “Good luck.”

  “Yeah,” said Emmett. “You too.” And then he was gone.

  Thursday, 22 July 1999, 3:49 AM

  A subterranean grotto

  New York City, New York

  Calebros hunched over his desk and typed madly, compiling, composing. Emmett was on his way back to Boston and then to Las Vegas. He would take care of Benito; Emmett would do what needed to be done. That was a relief. Maybe that was why Emmett had come in person, Calebros pondered, pausing at the Smith Corona. Security was important, true, but there were couriers that could be trusted… Had Emmett come just to set Calebros’s mind at ease? Was Emmett capable of such ulterior thoughtfulness?

  Calebros laughed. If Emmett were, he certainly would never admit to it. It was enough, Calebros decided, to have one less thing—one less major thing—to worry about. There was still plenty else. Much of it dire, and a significant portion ostensibly Calebros’s fault.

  The most potentially damning problem was that of the Sabbat. At least the monsters had paused in their rampage up the East Coast. In under two weeks, they had stormed cities from Atlanta to Washington, D.C., in most cases annihilating the existent Camarilla power structure and assuming, as far as Kindred were concerned, de facto control. It would take them quite some time to root out the considerable Camarilla influence in those cities. Perhaps the barbarian Sabbat would never manage to scourge the halls of power. In this, the computer age, physical proximity was not necessary to exert leverage. Control on the ground, however, was not a negligible advantage. Over time, Camarilla ghouls would be found out, removed, destroyed.

  The changes in territory were considerably less of a burden to Calebros and his clan than to others. A Nosferatu could pass unseen through a Sabbat city as easily as a Camarilla one. With the shift in power, there were still as many secrets, and, in a way, the services of the Nosferatu became more valuable to his allies, for whom access to certain areas was barred, or, at the very least, far more dangerous. So the Sabbat advances could be seen, from that perspective, as a gain for the Nosferatu as well.

  Not so for the Ventrue, who was accustomed to playing prince and having his subjects bow down before him. Nor for the Brujah, who liked to flaunt his defiance in the streets. Now those streets were filled with cavorting devils, devoid of reason or thought except to destroy their enemies and revel over the broken bodies. The warlocks were holed up in their citadels. The Toreador, normally parasites upon both kine and Kindred societies, would be lost. The Gangrel cared neither one way nor the other. No, the Nosferatu were likely to come out of this upheaval relatively strengthened. Therein lay the danger.

  Perceived strength invited envy and fear. Envy and fear invited persecution. And what would be the justification? For surely the Kindred were too sophisticated a people to found genocide upon tenets so subjective as jealousy and hatred? (For to fear is to hate.) The justification would be complicity, treachery. If the other clans, seeing the Nosferatu strengthened, ever had reason to suspect that the dwellers beneath had aided the Sabbat in their conquest, revenge would spring to the lips of every firebrand and echo throughout the halls of power.

  And what reason might the others have to suspect the Nosferatu? Calebros, unwittingly, had given them ample grounds for suspicion.

  His head was beginning to hurt. He leaned back from his typewriter, stretched his gnarled fingers, his arms and shoulders, his back. His vertebrae sounded like popcorn.

  Even had his expectations of a minor Sabbat raid in Atlanta proved correct, Calebros knew, he and Rolph had still taken a chance. It was a calculated risk: withholding knowledge of the raid and risking Prince Benison’s profound displeasure. Rolph, being a subject of Benison and residing within the prince’s territory, had borne the main burden of the chance. The two Nosferatu had agreed that the risk was worthwhile, the opportunities presented too great to overlook: resolution of the Benito matter, and repayment of an old debt to the Setite, Ruhadze.

  But the raid had turned out to be a full-scale attack of a scope none had imagined the Sabbat capable of pulling off. Borges, archbishop of Miami and long covetous of Atlanta, could never have gathered, much less successfully commanded, such a force. Even Polonia, the capable archbishop of New York, could never have garnered enough support from the fractious warlords of the Sabbat. Sascha Vykos had been spotted, reportedly ensconced in Washington and installed as its archbishop. That, too, merely added more questions.

  Jon Courier, as reliable and trustworthy a Kindred as Calebros had ever met, had established contact with an Assamite-playing-ghoul in Vykos’s camp. A strange situation, that. The assassins had contracted with Courier independent of Calebros, which was how Calebros liked it. The fewer dealings with the Assamites and the less reason they had to know he existed at all, the better. Even so, the contact was a source of information, since Courier passed along what he learned. What Courier passed along these nights was that there was no sign the Sabbat was ready to continue its northward march. The initial blitzkrieg had left them as disorganized in victory, if not as desperate, as was the Camarilla in defeat.

  So there it stood, the uneasy status quo, and any Kindred that found out about Calebros’s part in the affair might be only too willing to point a finger and make accusations that could topple the fragile balance of power among the clans. Who else knew? There was Rolph, but he was in the same boat as Calebros. There were a few of his informants, and a few of Calebros’s own in Miami. But how few? Calebros needed to know exactly; he needed to make sure that no one talked. No matter what. For the good of the clan. For several minutes, he struggled with thoughts that he didn’t dare entrust to the permanency of writing. How far would he need to go, not merely to save himself embarrassment, but potentially to safeguard the very wellbeing of the clan? How far was he willing to go? Calebros knew what Emmett’s answer would be to that question, but not his own.

  He ripped out the sheet of paper that was in the typewriter. There was plenty else to worry about without getting mired in situational ethics—hypothetical situational ethics, at that. Time tended to answer many questions, and others it rendered moot, which, as far as Calebros was concerned, was just as good as an answer. Maybe better.

  He turned readily enough to the next report, which dealt with another great concern: Hesha Ruhadze. The Setite shouldn’t have been such a worry. He had a long history of dealing honorably with Clan Nosferatu. On occasion—the Bombay incident sprang to mind, but there were others—he had gone out of his way to aid Calebros’s brethren. That was why it had seemed such a reasonable
idea to hand over the Eye of Hazimel. Hesha had been searching for it for decades, and considering the curiosity’s hiding place, Victoria Ash’s coming-out party seemed the ideal place for the transaction.

  How quickly things changed.

  Now the Eye was missing, Hesha’s man who had been sent to the doomed party was dead, and Calebros was left pondering a disturbing string of deaths and Assamite activity that conveniently coincided with Hesha’s whereabouts on a disturbing number of occasions. Calebros shuddered. The thought of Hesha joining forces with the Assamites was almost too much to bear. His record of cooperation with the Nosferatu was no guarantee for the future. What if he blamed the Nosferatu for the loss of the Eye? And what if he was prepared to address his displeasure by calling on allies who just happened to be lethal and fanatical assassins? Calebros tried to suppress another shudder but failed.

  He took a very deep, unnecessary, yet highly therapeutic breath. Trying to convince himself that everything was the same as it had always been, he leaned back in his chair and propped his sizeable feet on the desk. Several of the piles of papers and folders stacked precariously on the desk quivered, but none toppled over.

  Thoughts of assassination turned Calebros’s mind naturally to Baltimore and all that was transpiring there. Just three nights ago, a band of Sabbat assassins had sneaked into the city and attempted to destroy Jan Pieterzoon, scion of a notable Ventrue line and the emerging leader of the Camarilla resistance—now that the sect was finally managing to regroup and mount a resistance. For a week or more, Calebros had almost expected the Sabbat war machine to keep rolling north, on through the Mid-Atlantic states, on through New England. But the blitzkrieg’s momentum was spent by D.C, and there the Sabbat sat. For the time being.