“Maids will have their work cut out for them,” said the voice that Parmenides had come to recognize almost as well as his own. Parmenides cocked his head. All summer this voice had acted as messenger, from the first night that Parmenides was just remembering, when he’d failed to destroy Vitel, till the present time. The voice was soft and kindly like whispering moonlight. “I bring a message,” it said.
Parmenides listened carefully. With the exception of that first night that seemed so long ago, the voice had always sought news to take back to those whom it called Parmenides’s masters. Unusual as the voice’s announcement was, Parmenides was more intent upon the very sound of the voice itself, the tones that caused his ear to prick up. So closely did he listen, that he could almost feel the rippling of the air as the sound passed.
“You bring news?” Parmenides asked. “Are you not confused?”
“I am not confused, young Assamite,” said the voice, the slightest trace of humor apparent.
“And I am not so young,” said Parmenides. He moved slowly away from the center of the suite toward the pierced landscape print. He paused, changed direction. “Are you so old?”
“Old enough to know when a hunter tracks the sound of my voice.”
Parmenides halted. He was indeed trying to follow the voice, to trace its direction, but each way he turned it sounded no closer. Parmenides laughed. “Old enough to play your voice like a huntsman’s whistle, while the young pup chases his tail in circles.
Would you have me show myself, young Assamite? Do you wish me to grow no older?”
“I do wish you to show yourself,” Parmenides said to the empty room. “I have no reason to harm you.
My blood is not reason enough, young pup?” Parmenides shrugged. “Our masters wish us to work in concert. I would not defy them. And if that is not enough guarantee of your safety, I give you my word.”
There was a long pause before the voice responded: “I pity you—you who have been given over to fiends. I will face you. Come into the lavatory.” Pity? Parmenides wondered at that, but he moved toward the closest bathroom. As he stood in the doorway, scanning the spacious facilities, he couldn’t help glancing in rapt fascination at the porcelain fixtures. He’d heard so many stories about the comings and goings of the monstrous Nosferatu, of their warped proclivities. They lived in the sewers. Could the messenger take that route?
But then a quiet scrabbling caught his notice, not from the toilet but from the tiny fan recessed in the ceiling. The cover of the fan shook just a little. A moment later, it was detached from the ceiling and suspended two or three inches below. Slowly the fan unit lowered, and Parmenides could see that it was held by…a hand? But the fingers, if fingers they were, were too few, as well as elongated. The long, painfully thin hand emerged, then a wrist no thicker than a single bone, and a forearm.
Parmenides could not fathom what he saw. The opening where the fan had been attached was no more than six inches square. Was the messenger going to unlatch a larger, secret portal? Surely it couldn’t hope to…
The rest of a long, emaciated arm followed. In the light, Parmenides could see that the skin was scaly in patches and dark, dark green. Then the surreal scene grew stranger still. A misshapen, bulbous joint—a shoulder—wriggled through the opening. And then the head began. It seemed to fill the opening, but then somehow contracted like a deflated ball. The wrinkled crown crossed the threshold and expanded again, filling out somewhat. The rest of the head passed similarly, slowly rippling. Parmenides steadied himself against the doorframe. He wondered if perhaps the message needn’t be delivered in person after all.
Even when the head was through, Parmenides wasn’t sure exactly how the chest fit. The ribcage seemed to compress, to fold in on itself. He kept expecting to hear bones grating or the pop of joints dislocating, but the passing occurred in virtual silence.
After the torso, it went much more quickly; though in truth, much less time had passed than Parmenides at first believed, so engrossed was he in that which was literally unfolding before him. At last, with one dexterous foot still grasping the edge of the opening, the messenger was able to stretch all the way to the floor. He seemed a long string of body parts only inadvertently connected—drawn-out limbs and over-sized joints. His eyes were small and black and almost lost among the splotchiness of his irregularly bulging cranium; his nose and mouth would have been delicate on a beautiful woman, but seemed disconcertingly out of place on this misaligned, cadaverous heap.
A few seconds more and the messenger was squatting on the floor, his spindly arms hugging his folded legs to his chest. Those parts of his body not covered with scales were darkened by severe bruising.
“Greetings, young Assamite,” said the same kindly voice, now somehow originating from the creature before Parmenides. “I am Jon Courier.”
“Well named and well met,” the Assamite said stiffly. “You may call me Parmenides.” The creature already knew that. His kind supposedly knew everything. And though the voice was still gentle, the eyes watched Parmenides as if he were a predator.
“Vykos is away for the evening,” Parmenides said, hoping to ease the beast’s agitation. “We are alone.”
Courier nodded. He looked as if his spine and neck had trouble holding his head aloft. Perhaps he was more at home in the tight crawl spaces of city and sewer. Indeed, he appeared at a loss sitting there, huddled in the middle of the cold bathroom floor. Then, just as Parmenides had these thoughts, Courier reached out a hand. Parmenides’s instinct was to step back; he checked his response and held his ground. He was too far away for the creature to reach him.
But Courier did reach him. The hand kept coming, the arm stretching out to the doorway. The assassin froze, gripped by a revulsion as deep as that he’d felt upon awaking mid-experiment and finding Vykos tinkering with his internal physiology. The hand came closer—mottled green, purple, and black; thick, shingled skin and deep bruises. Finally, it came to rest on his forearm. Thumb and three fingers, one half as long as it should have been, stroked the hair on Parmenides’s arm. Courier seemed slightly bemused. Then, more quickly than he’d reached out, the Nosferatu withdrew its hand, and a crinkled piece of paper rested on Parmenides’s arm.
He took and unfolded the paper. It was a soup label peeled from a can, but on the back were scrawled the names of two streets, an intersection not too far from the hotel.
“Go there,” Courier said. He seemed calmer for having touched Parmenides, or maybe the fact that the message was now delivered comforted the creature. Without waiting for a reply, Courier uncoiled his body and easily reached the opening in the ceiling. He thrust a hand through first and pulled himself upward. Not until his skull had collapsed and slipped through the hole did his second foot leave the floor. In the other foot he held the fan unit. In a matter of seconds, the cover was reattached, and Parmenides stood alone in the bathroom. There was no sign of the creature’s brief visit; none, at least, other than the goosebumps still standing on Parmenides’s skin.
He gave another look at the sink and toilet—those receptacles that Vykos only used to dispose of liquefied flesh that she no longer had a purpose for—then closed the door.
The gray Land Cruiser pulled to the curb within seconds of Parmenides reaching the intersection. A flurry of thoughts rushed through his mind as he stepped deliberately toward the vehicle. He had little reason to suspect treachery. If Vykos desired him destroyed, there were simpler ways. That did not rule out the possibility of betrayal from Vykos’s putative Sabbat allies, if one wished to move against the new archbishop of Washington. But why go to such trouble to eliminate a mere ghoul? Parmenides felt confident that none had seen through the Ravenna charade.
Unless Courier was not what he professed to be. Or not who he claimed, at least. There was no doubt what he was. Nosferatu. But it was he who had contacted Parmenides; it was he also who had asserted his role as go-between for the Assamite and his masters. There were Nosferatu that served the S
abbat. Had Courier duped him?
Parmenides watched as Ravenna’s hand reached for the door handle. No interior light shone when he opened the door.
“Get in,” said the driver, obscured by darkness.
Parmenides did so and pulled the door shut. The car was in motion immediately, pulling away from the curb quickly but not recklessly, nor with so much haste as to draw attention.
“Your sire sends his greetings,” said the driver, still obscured by darkness though Parmenides was only a meter away.
“My sire…? She went to her Final Death nearly two hundred years ago.” It was the type of test of non-confirmation that Parmenides would expect, but which, in the end, proved nothing. The Tzimisce were capable of replacing a contact with a credible doppelganger, or of uncovering many secrets through torture. This driver could be a forgery—and if truly a child of Haqim, undoubtedly was skeptical of Parmenides’s identity.
But then the darkness faded away within the car, and sitting across from him was… “Fatima.” Fatima al-Faqadi. Parmenides, though he hated to admit so even to himself, was surprised. That Fatima, most highly regarded of the brotherhood, assassin without peer, should be here could only mean that he had been chosen for great deeds.
“It is strange…” she said, “to see you with this other face, and voice.”
Parmenides nodded. “And not altogether pleasant, even for myself.”
In those first seconds, his trained eye took in every detail of Fatima. She wore a loose, long-sleeved shirt over close-fitting pants, with her dark hair pulled back. She had been sitting with only one hand on the steering wheel, but now she casually raised her left hand to the wheel as well. Her eyes were in constant motion, not jerking about nervously but scanning calmly like a bird of prey, watching—the road before them, other cars, the scattered pedestrians, the side and rearview mirrors. The rearview mirror, Parmenides noted, was not oriented to show her the scene behind the car. He suspected it was trained on his hands, which rested easily in his lap.
He noticed, too, her voice. He had not recognized it at first; he had not even realized that it was a woman who spoke. It was not some crude disguise, merely a complete failure to register. Just as she had shielded her image from him, she had masked the true nature of her voice. These were stratagems Parmenides well knew, that he could perform himself; but she was strong enough in the blood to employ them against him.
Fatima offered no further conversation, and that being the case, it was not Parmenides’s place to do so. They rode along in relative silence. Even the sound of pavement under the tires and the jostling of the heavy vehicle over potholes seemed muted and distant.
Parmenides was reassured that this was indeed Fatima and not an imposter. The Tzimisce might be able to duplicate her physical form, but he had met her in person on several occasions before, and she had made a lasting impression on him—her quiet grace and severe dignity. She was of the blood, and her nature shone through in a way that he felt no doppelganger could imitate.
With that realization, a wave of relief washed over him. For the first time since the beginning of this ordeal, he was in the presence of a clansman. Never before had he craved such contact; never before had he needed it. But the indignities he had suffered at the hands of Vykos, the despair and isolation that had welled up within him upon learning that he’d been abandoned by his elders to the foulest of fiends, and the guilt at how he’d begun to feel toward Vykos when he was in her presence… It was all nearly too much to bear.
He had clung to the connection that the Nosferatu had offered, yet even in that, Parmenides had not been sure. Until now. Until the message the hideous creature brought had proved to reunite Parmenides with the children of Haqim. Courier had been true to his word.
I pity you—you who have been given over to fiends. The words that the Nosferatu had spoken had struck Parmenides as odd and did doubly so now that he had actually seen Courier. How could that wretched being pity anyone else? Parmenides’s appearance had been altered, yes. Maybe permanently so. But strength returned to his body. He was no outcast. He was not pariah to eyes mortal and undead. His befuddlement began to give way to indignation. How dare that creature pity him!
The sensation of pain reached him slowly. He became aware of his own fingers digging into his legs. He purposefully did not look at Fatima as he gradually relaxed his hands. No doubt she had seen. Why was he so nervous, so out of sorts? He couldn’t understand. This reunion with his clanmate should have been a balm to his soul after all he’d endured.
But in the presence of elders, he realized, there was always judgment. Had Fatima been sent to reward him, to offer him opportunity for glory and honor? Or had she come to judge? Had Parmenides somehow offended or disappointed his elders?
These were worries that had never plagued him before… before Vykos….
Parmenides reached for the button to lower his window—the night air would do him good. Fatima casually lifted her left hand from the steering wheel again and rested that arm at her side. Realizing that he’d moved more quickly than was perhaps advisable under the circumstances, Parmenides left his hand on the button for a long moment. He watched Fatima’s reflected silhouette in the lowering glass of the window, then slowly and deliberately returned his hand to his lap. Shortly, Fatima’s hand returned to the wheel.
She drove them out of the city proper and on through the sprawling subdivisions that spread outward, encircling the diseased city like so many vultures. A glance at the stars confirmed what the road signs told Parmenides: They were heading west. He knew the disposition of many of the Sabbat defenses around the city—though the majority were to the north, toward Baltimore—and considered offering Fatima guidance. But through intuition or reconnaissance, she chose the routes that would not bring them into conflict with patrols or static defensive positions.
Within an hour, the sights and smells of tightly packed humanity gave way to more open spaces and larger runs of trees. Fatima kept them heading generally westward. When at last she turned from the highway, she seemed to know exactly the path she wished to take. There was no hesitation as she turned onto this two-lane road and then a few miles later onto a gravel track. City and subdivision had both given way completely to rolling countryside, and when she pulled the Land Cruiser off the gravel road and came to a stop in a sloped, grassy field, there were no signs of civilization other than the road itself and a barbed-wire fence in disrepair about a kilometer distant.
Parmenides had grown used to the gentle growling of the large engine. When Fatima turned off the car, the absence of that sound was deafening. The night was full of other noises: crickets and tree frogs in the distance but loud nonetheless, moths fluttering wings before the headlights, other insects that were unfamiliar to Parmenides, the mechanical pop of Fatima’s door opening, and the quiet pinging to remind her she had left the key in the ignition. Parmenides joined her in standing beside the vehicle. The headlights, still shining across the field, threw the rest of the night into dark relief.
He wondered briefly what this place was, how she had come to choose it. Perhaps this property was owned by some mortal owing allegiance to the clan, or perhaps by an actual member of the brotherhood. Parmenides wondered also why she had brought him here. Did she merely need a place to speak uninterrupted? Or perhaps she was taking him away from that city, from Vykos, for good.
Parmenides felt sudden elation at the thought, but there was a twinge of regret as well that caught him quite off guard.
“We have received your reports,” Fatima said curtly before Parmenides could examine his own mixed emotions. “You have served admirably…and in trying circumstances.”
Parmenides bowed respectfully. These words were the first words of praise Fatima had ever offered him.
There was satisfaction in that, but at the moment, he was more interested in what else she had to say, what other purpose she had in mind, for surely Fatima al-Faqadi had not summoned him merely to speak kind words to him
. He stood patiently with his arms crossed, keeping his hands in view. He couldn’t shake the feeling he’d had during the drive that judgment hung over him. Fatima’s left hand never strayed far from her side.
“Do you think there is value in your remaining where you are, with Vykos?” Fatima asked.
Again, pride swelled up in Parmenides’s breast, but he promptly held that in check and answered deferentially: “The elders know far better than I the value of the information I am able to gain.”
Fatima frowned, as if Parmenides’s answer was problematic, or as if perhaps she had not asked exactly the right question. “Do you have Vykos’s trust?” she asked.
“I doubt any creature on earth has—or would want—Vykos’s trust. She does confide in me…at times,” he said, but then thought to correct himself: “Or if not confide, I think I am conveniently at hand sometimes when she talks. I think her mind is always in action, and if she did not speak to someone…” Parmenides stopped. He realized that, at that moment, he was describing himself as well as Vykos. He was running on with pure supposition, wasting an elder’s time. He scrambled for a succinct way to complete his thought—”She would speak to a pet, or to a chair, if I were not there”—but did not care, after the fact, for the implied belittlement of his own role. He was not so insignificant as a pet, and he could not believe that Vykos would think of him so.
For a long while, Fatima stood silently pondering, exactly what Parmenides did not know. But he was more greatly confused by himself than by Fatima. He was confused by what he was feeling for Vykos, his torturer; by the sense of regret that tugged at him when he thought of being taken away from her. At times, it was true, he had feigned affection toward her, but that was all part of the act, all part of the effort to gain her confidence—or at least to allay her suspicion. She could not know that he was passing information, via the Nosferatu and therefore the Camarilla, to his own elders. His attentions toward her were purely subterfuge, yet now he felt her loss keenly before he was even taken from her. That fact disturbed him—no, more than that, frightened him—and caused him to cast a wary glance at Fatima. How canny was she at reading him? How much of this was she aware of?
Clan Novel Assamite - Book 7 of The Clan Novel Saga Page 10