by Alex Oliver
Besides, she didn't want to think of her father's reaction if he had to watch. Her rifle felt heavy and reluctant on her back at the thought.
So she pulled her hood more firmly down over her face and went back to her father's train. There would be time when they arrived at Tomisovara. In a crush of different nobles all trying to embark their entourages on different ships, there would be a chance to lurch against Vacarescu in the back room of a harbor inn, and slip a blade between his ribs. Or find a room upstairs in a cheap hotel, where she could sit in a window and shoot him as he passed below.
She had not reckoned on arriving at Tomisovara at night. The road ran out into sand. The wagons drew to a halt, and from the back of Vacarescu's covered carts - which had been so innocently empty up to now - an army climbed down.
They had all of Stefan's eerie stillness. Drawn up in rough lines on the quayside, they stood without fidgeting, without breathing, all looking out together at the Turkish troop transport ship that was rowing with long sweeps toward the town's single jetty. Anchored out in the bay, a second ship waited its turn to take on her father's men, and a third was just dropping anchor beside it. That one would come in in the morning and transport whichever noble arrived next.
The first ship tied up to the dock. From the first of Vacarescu's wagons a white figure emerged, followed by a smaller one clad in flickering blue. Ecaterina had been tired and dispirited - a long way away from home, having second thoughts. But the sight of him, white bearded, with a starburst of diamonds in his hat, made prickly cold roll over her skin, stopped her breath.
So Mirela hadn't lied. Vacarescu knew of the strigoi, was in league with him, and by malice or neglect had caused her brother's death.
She strode forward, shrugging her rifle into her hand. Vacarescu dismounted from his horse and stood beside the white lord. She saw with a certain feeling of betrayal that Frank Carew was there too, though he looked as though he would not be removed from his horse by anything short of lightning strike, his eyes as wide and frightened as his mount's.
Already the sailors, jumping from their ship like fleas from a big dog, had flung down a gangplank and begun to help with the unloading of the wagons. This was her chance. In the middle of such bustle, in the dark, who would see her preparing to fire until it was too late? She took another couple of steps forward, getting a better angle, rammed powder, shot and wadding into her rifle, primed the pan and raised the long heavy weapon to her shoulder.
Just almost... yes. Her finger tightened on the trigger.
The white strigoi stepped in front of her prey, and at the same time a long arm knocked the barrel of her gun up towards the sky, grabbed it firmly and resisted her every attempt to pull it back down.
Cursing, she turned to find an elderly gentleman with a moony mustache and a coat embroidered all over with flowers. "Let me go!"
"Son," said this pest, in a tone of paternal concern, "don't. A bullet can't stop him. All you'd do would be to make them all very interested in you, and you don't want that. Am I right?"
He thought... she recovered from the shock quick as she could. He thought she had been aiming for the white sire. He had not attacked her, he was trying to protect her. The glamour had not failed again. She was safe.
Safe, but thwarted, because Vacarescu had taken this chance to walk up the gangplank and disappear into the belly of the ship.
Ecaterina let go of the rifle, allowed her unwanted rescuer to lift it out of her hands, and lower it to rest - nicely away from the muck of the seashore - on the tip of his boot, mouth still facing the sky. The moment allowed her to think. "Son," he'd called her. So all was well.
"All of them?" she pitched her voice low and husky, hauling it out of her stomach and making her throat ache, trying for an incredulity that did not give away the fact that she already knew this. "You don't mean Vacarescu's army is all strigoi?"
"Ah," he stroked his moustache, first one side, then the other, and she thought he recalculated himself, after an inadvertent slip. "Not all. I'm not, for example. But many. It doesn't please you, the thought of unleashing our monsters on the Turks?"
This must be some country retainer of Vacarescu's. He would never have lasted five minutes in the Voivode's court, with that tendency to tell all his master's plans to anyone who would listen. "The Turks? I thought we were fighting the British?"
He laughed, half warm, half rueful. "So I'm sure we will, once we've dropped off our little friends in the city of Istanbul. But now I've told you this, it occurs to me that it's not a story I want you to spread around." He ran a suddenly much shrewder eye over her clothes. "Who's your lord?"
"I have none."
"You're certainly dressed as a bandit, though young for it. Run away from home to go to war?"
She decided that her own truth was safe enough to share. "Ran away for vengeance. That thing - that white thing - it killed my brother. I'm going to kill it in return."
Vacarescu's household army of demons had begun trailing up the gangplank after him, some of them carrying what looked like cases of rifles between them - cases large enough for a man to squeeze inside. Where would they bury them on a ship? What would they do in the day time, if they fed on the sailors at night? Did Vacarescu have enough control to stop them feeding? If not, the whole ship was doomed on the second day, with no one left to work the sails. That... would not be such a bad thing.
The older gentleman followed her gaze. For a moment she surprised a look of great weariness on his face. "Shot won't do it," he said quietly. "If you are capable of getting close enough to behead him, and drive a stake through his heart, you are a better man than I."
Stefan's final moments returned to her, as though a spray of blood had spattered the back of her eyes. She and Frank pinned, unable to move, magic users as defenseless as if they had none at all. Then it is a good thing it isn't him I'm really after.
For a moment her heart faltered. Why was it not the strigoi on whom she meant to wreak vengeance? What if Vacarescu himself had not known what his pet was up to? Would he have spared Stefan, if he could?
There were a hundred dead men here who would not have been dead if Vacarescu had stayed in his mountains, and every one of them was someone's brother, lover, husband or father. He was owed repayment for them too.
"I have to try."
"You can't be happy just to know that our country is rid of him? That he is to become our enemy's problem?"
Truth be told, she did rather like the idea of the strigoi rampaging through the Ottoman Empire. That would teach them what came of killing Wallachia's princes and subjugating them to a Greek. If Vacarescu had proposed the idea before Stefan, she would have had no quarrel with him. She might have found it ingenious and rather funny. A dead brother changed many things. "I want him to know that he dies for my brother's sake. Out of all the hundreds of people he has killed, I want him to regret he ever touched my kin."
Another laugh, and then her rescuer handed her her rifle back and began to shrug out of his coat. She looked askance at him as he held it out to her, and he shrugged. "I too would be happy to see Constantin finally sleeping his long sleep, and my lord would be indebted to you if you could manage it."
"Does he care?" That came out harsher than she wished. He stepped back, and she caught the moment the power of her glamour reasserted itself, his offense and suspicion vanishing in the flood of her magical trustworthiness.
"Of course," he said, frowning. "He is as much a prisoner of the things as the rest of us. Perhaps more. Take my coat. They hunt by scent, and they will recognize mine as that of someone who is not to be harmed. It should cling for a couple of days. If you try, and succeed, I will put you in a boat afterward, before the scent has time to fade."
So easy was life when everyone liked you - it was like being a princess in one of the old tales, where a good fairy appeared at every hurdle to make the most impossible of quests routine. "My thanks," she said and gave him her own coat in return. It was one her
father had worn in his youth, before he grew so round, and fitted him not too badly. But the good fairy's coat was well-worn and well-loved, often repaired, with tiny stitches of trailing vines of roses and honeysuckle and water lilies. The colors had faded, but there was no mistaking the devotion that had led someone to pour weeks of her best work into the craft.
"Your wife made this?" Guilt struck Ecaterina suddenly. At the censure and insults, the petty harms and shunning of the court, since she had been exposed, she had felt nothing more than anger and contempt for them. But at this easy cozening of a man out of his most treasured possession, she began to see why they had felt so used.
"Yes," he stroked a gentle hand down one sleeve and smiled. "She's dead now. Has been for some time. I don't believe she'll mind my giving it to one with so noble a purpose if she's peeping out of the grave to see."
"I will make sure it comes home to you," Ecaterina could not quite understand why her eyes pricked with tears. "What is your name, kind sir?"
"Cezar Dobre."
"I am Catalin." Impulsively she reached out and clasped his arm, hoped too late that he would not feel how thin and unmanly was her bicep beneath its bulky sleeve. But if he did, he didn't mention it, just nodded and, turning, began to walk up to the ship. Falling in beside him, feeling the gangplank's spring beneath her feet and then the unquiet heave of the deck, she was grateful for his reassuring presence beside her.
On the deck a cauldron of frantic activity seethed. Sailors clustered around a tall wooden cylinder that rose out of the planking towards the front. They were fitting long bars into the slots at its top, getting ready to... wind something up? From the rear of the ship, where there was a raised deck, four more sailors were taking bundles of material and rope out from a wall of it and handing them to Vacarescu's soldiers.
The owner, captain or master of the ship - she didn't know which he was - stood on top of the rail that separated the raised deck from the lower, bellowing into a brass trumpet. From his sour look and his beautiful coat she guessed he was a successful merchant, pressed into service by the agents of the Sultan to transport the army, and not at all happy about it.
"Take a hammock, then get below. Someone will teach you how to sling them. When that's done, get into them and out of our way. Stay there. You'll be assigned to watches and fed when they are fed, but apart from meals I do not want to see you on my decks. Anyone who interferes with my men or my discipline on my ship will be flogged. Are we clear?"
Rhetorical question, obviously. He didn't wait for an answer, jumping down and striding off to the small wooden hut at the back of the ship. Ecaterina felt suddenly very aware that she was standing in the middle of the deck, conspicuously doing nothing, and there was no sign of her prey anywhere on board.
Would he too be in the cabin? If that was where the high-ranking people went, then probably. She headed for the steps up to that part of the deck, but was caught before she could put a foot on the first riser. Warm hands on her arms, not cold. Sailors then, not strigoi. She wasn't sure she liked either, but they wore the tolerant grins of grandmothers left in charge of a room full of boisterous toddlers.
"Can't go up there, mate. You've got to go down below. Didn't you hear? Now," a surprisingly heavy bundle of cloth was thrust into her arms, making it impossible to draw rifle or sword. "Take this and go 'downstairs,'" - he said downstairs as if it was a foreign word and he found it distasteful to pronounce. "Get yourself a good space before it's all snapped up."
Compared to the deck, the next level down was ghostly silent, but for the creaking of timber and wind. In the center of the vaulted space a large cast iron range stood cold, and hammocks did indeed hang from every inch of the floor above, but they were limp and flaccid, the reworking larvae inside prematurely escaped.
Ecaterina unwound hers and found cleverly made eyes of rope on either end, which, after studying how the others had done it, she hooked to the first available beam with a couple of s-shaped hooks. There was still a little space left unclaimed towards the front, where a latrine stench filtered through the heavy wooden walls.
Down here there was no sound of footsteps, but when she had hung her bed and turned, she saw a steady movement of figures down the steep stairs and down again into the next level. Uncanny how they walked, as though they were made of wax and not bone. Once or twice one would pause and look at her, lift its head and snuff the air, but Cezar's coat did its work - they frowned and drifted away.
There was no one else on this level. No sign of Vacarescu. He was either up in the great cabin or down in a lower deck. Unable to look in the cabin, she joined the cold, silent procession of bodies down into the hold.
Cold struck her to the marrow the minute she ducked her head below the floor. The walls around her glimmered as water seeped through the planks of the hull. A lantern shone over a half-deck to the squarer back end of the ship, and there, because God was righteous, she made out the voice of her prey.
She could just see him through a doorway in a wall made of canvas. He stood on one side of a scrubbed wooden table, covered with gruesome instruments, and on the other side stood a man in the blood soaked apron of a ship's doctor. Even as she watched, the doctor took his apron off and set it aside in a small chest, poured himself a bowl of water and began scrubbing the brown stains from his fingers.
The quiet procession of strigoi down and further down continued. Vacarescu was gesturing at the doctor's scalpels now. Concocting some tale, presumably, that would convince the man to wash them too. She wondered why he bothered, when he had done nothing for Stefan.
It couldn't hurt to see what the strigoi were up to. She climbed backwards down the final ladder into the hold. It was shaped like the rib-cage of a whale, the dim light from the lantern on the deck above only just showing looming bulks of equipment carefully stacked and tied. Beneath that, the keel was covered with a deep layer of gravel, wet from the constant snake of water down the walls. One by one, the strigoi were sinking to their knees and shoveling this aside, tunneling down into the ballast like razor worms sucking themselves under the beach. The wet cold air was full of a swish, swish sound as the sea's movement stirred the little pebbles on the top of these watery graves.
The roll of the sea was far more marked now, Ecaterina realized. The lantern above made a restless circle as it swung. They were no longer docked. The swish noise was joined with a lower, more urgent thrum, as the pillars of the masts trembled with stress. She had barely time to notice they were underway when the pirouetting light slid over something icy blue, and then the rope ladder on which she hung jerked and clattered against the side as a body joined hers on it, and a small hand with a sapphire ring closed over her ankle.
A pause, where it seemed the world froze with her. She was aware of big blue eyes examining her face, of fine white cheeks and a blush like a rose, and a red mouth parted in surprise. "You smell like Cezar, but you don't look like him."
The clues joined up into certainty - she'd seen a little figure, blue like this, come out of Vacarescu's cart on the white sire's arm. The hand on her foot was cold. She didn't think, just drew her sword and hacked down blindly at that upturned face, felt the tip of the weapon catch in something firm. A ripping noise. The strigoi flinched and Ecaterina kicked out, freed her foot and scrambled back up into the light.
When her feet were on the orlop deck, she glanced back once, saw she had dislodged the thing's headdress and it was struggling with askew masses of torn silk and pins. Strangely clear, at the prospect of immanent death, Ecaterina thought, Vengeance. I can die satisfied if I kill him first. Turning on her heel she bolted for the doctor's office.
The door was shut now, but it was only a canvas door. She slashed it open with her sword, burst through. The small room was crowded with witnesses, but that hardly mattered if she was going to die soon. Nothing mattered. What power there was, in the instant before annihilation.
There was her victim, struck dumb by the violence of her entry. He had s
carcely begun to frown in bemusement before she had lunged and skewered him right through the ribs.
Then everything went to hell.
Vacarescu clutched at the wound, bowed forward, hissing between his teeth at the pain, but he did not fall. Bright red liquid bloomed under his fingers, filling the cabin with its warm metallic scent. Almost instantly, the canvas walls on three sides of the room bulged and rippled with seeking fingers, before they were torn out of their moldings and ripped apart.
Their places were filled with a shrinking circle of animated bodies, all bones and teeth and hunger. Two paces before the foremost of these inferior revenants, the beautiful young maiden strigoi, with her hair hanging down to the backs of her knees, grabbed Ecaterina by the throat and pulled her in to bite.
End Of Part Two
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Will Ecaterina live or die? Will poor old Alaya ever manage to get her teeth into anyone? Oh Radu, what have you done? Surely Zayd has troubles enough of his own without an army of vampires on his doorstep?
These questions and others will be answered in Angels of the Ottoman Empire - Atlantean Devices Part three. Coming on 1st April 2019
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Please drop me a review if you can - the business of a professor in this august institution, when not immediately life-threatening, can be somewhat isolated, and hearing from a reader is always a treat.
I hope to make your acquaintance again in part three.
Alex
(Professor the Right Honourable Alexis Octavius Oliver, PAD, MVril, MSocEC.)