by Zan Safra
Upiri.
The first upir’s bulbous eyes fix on mine. A gargling hiss dribbles from its mouth. The rest do the same, flexing their grasping hands.
Belle, Jette, and Yurei stare at them. “What are you doing?” I scream. “Run!”
I charge down the nearest passage, the others close behind. The storm of hisses follows us. Glass bursts and light glares as an alchemical lantern explodes. I cast a look back just as an upir tears another lantern from its mount and smashes it against the floor.
The fiend sent these creatures. The Greater Dead can command lesser variantele, armies of them. The kudlak couldn’t kill us. These will.
The passage turns to the right. The churning roar of the machineworks loudens. The corridor ends at a door, a stretched oval of metal with a round wheel set in its middle.
Yurei staggers, catching hold of a rivet. I grab one of his arms and Belle seizes the other. Jette skids into the door and grabs the wheel, heaving at it. It doesn’t so much as squeak. “Locked! It’s locked!”
The mob of vampires rounds the corner. Their glowing eyes fix on us. Jette lets go of the wheel and slams her fist against the metal.
Yurei’s legs buckle. Belle and I hold him as Jette bangs her fist against the door, again and again. Another lantern bursts. The upiri shuffle closer. I’ve no space to draw my glaive. No room to fight.
Jette punches the door. Bang.
The upiri creep towards us, a tangle of mouths and claws and slimy squelching flesh, eyes alight, strings of black ikhor dripping from their teeth.
Bang.
We drag Yurei back. The battering, the clanking, the slobbering hissing merge into a fog of noise, sinking and melting into the leaden air.
Bang.
Yurei finds his footing. I drop his arm and run to Jette, to use my strength however I can, but Belle grabs me and pulls me back. “No! Don’t touch her!”
The upiri stagger nearer. Those clinging to the ceiling crawl towards us, yard by scrabbling yard—
Bang!
Jette brings down her fists like hammers. The metal door rips from its threshold and crashes down the corridor beyond.
Jette sways on her feet. Belle grabs her, dragging her with us, over the wreckage of the door. “Go on!” she screams.
She pushes Jette into us and spreads her hands. Blue sparks flit from her fingertips. A humming fills the corridor. Belle’s hair rises, drifting around her head like tentacles. She lifts her hands, quivering, teeth bared with strain.
The metal door creaks. A violet glow streams from its edges. It lifts from the floor as though weightless and hurtles down the corridor, into the swarm of upiri. It flattens the first of them with a wet crunch. The rest climb over the door and the broken bodies, unscathed.
Belle drops her hands, sparks dying, staring at the vampires in horror. “Leave it!” I scream. “Hurry!”
The four of us stumble on. The thunder of the machineworks rattles the floor. A single bluish light dangles ahead, swaying as though caught in a breeze.
The smell of the sea wafts over us. The last lantern swings like a pendulum, casting watery light over a suspended wooden bridge that stretches away into the blackness.
Belle gasps, covering her mouth. Red eyes shine in the dark behind her. I look about. There’s no other way forward. We’ve nowhere else to go.
“Follow me!” I start across the bridge, pulling Yurei with me. Belle follows, dragging Jette. Spray lashes us, flying out of the raging dark. I stare straight ahead, squeezing the guarding rope as we slog forward. A weight strikes the bridge, making it sway beneath us.
I look back. Upiri crawl after us. Another leaps from the corridor’s ceiling, flying over the platform to land on the bridge. Its impact shudders through the planks.
Another blow rattles the bridge from the opposite direction. More red eyes shine through the mist, further down the bridge, as a new crowd of upiri slither out of the dark. Trapping us.
The strength burns in my muscles. I grip the guarding rope in both hands. I know what I must do.
I take a long, final breath. “Keep hold of each other.”
I rip the rope in two. The bridge overturns, throwing us into the void.
I plunge into water. The cold smashes me, piercing like a sea of needles. Bubbles pour from my mouth. The current spins me through blackness. I flail and kick until my head breaks the surface, gasping a breath so thick with damp that it feels like a lungful of water. The roar of the machineworks batters my ears, a great invisible beast gnashing its teeth. I try to cry out but the water throws me against a wall, rolling me along it, sweeping me away.
I scream their names. The clanking crushes my voice. The river drags me on, pulling me under the water, into a tunnel. Its walls batter me and then fall away. The current spins me about again, now pushing me upwards—
My head breaks the surface. Rusty air pours into my lungs. I kick and sweep my arms, turning about in utter darkness. The growl of the machineworks shivers through the water, echoing among unseen walls.
In a welling of water someone surfaces beside me. Two others splash to the surface, coughing. “Hello?” Belle quavers.
A spot of gray-white light blooms beside me, brightening inside a glass vial. Jette raises it over her head, casting its light about. The four of us float in the center of a small pool, with a domed roof of tarnished metal plates. Ladders rise from the water, leading to four wheel-locked doors.
I struggle towards the nearest. Somehow I’ve kept hold of my glaive. I hook it onto my belt underwater as I reach the ladder. “This way.”
I heave myself out of the pool, climbing rung by rung as pounds of brackish water pour from my clothing. I’ve no idea what’s above. I don’t care, as long as it’s away from here.
I climb onto the top rung, balancing there as I turn the wheel. The door opens into another well of blackness. I feel about with my foot and find a solid stone floor. The gray-white glow follows me as Jette steps through the door, illuminating a flooded crypt. Its floor is a lake, reflecting the pale walls like a mirror. At its opposite end a stone altar presides over five granite sarcophagi. The odd light makes the sculpted figures atop them seem to stir, uneasy in their sleep.
I cross the crypt, stepping from sarcophagus to sarcophagus. The others follow me to the raised altar, a stone slab large enough for us all. Belle sits. Yurei crouches like a cat. Jette takes two vials and an unfolding bowl from inside her coat. She pours the contents of the vials into the bowl and sets it in the center of our circle. Red flames rise from inside it, casting their heat.
The quiet lasts an eternity. Curls of steam rise from our clothing as the air warms. I clench my teeth to stop their chattering as I glance at the others. They watch the fire, Yurei and Jette shivering, Belle sitting with her skirts spread elegantly about her, red flames dancing in her eyes. When one of them sneaks a glance at me I lower my eyes to watch the fire myself.
The memory of the fiend’s voice twines through my head like a tendril of smoke. You will not rob me of this…
“Who are you?”
I raise my head to find Jette watching me. The others look to me as well. At any other time I’d be discomfited to have the attention of so many strangers, but every drop of fear has been wrung out of me. “My name is Ayanda Draculesti.”
Jette bites her lip, her hands resting on the staff lain crosswise across her lap. I make out a name scratched into its surface, but her hand covers it before I can read it. “Jette.”
Yurei speaks, in a voice so soft I must strain my ears to hear it. “How do you know what you know?”
“I…it’s my Unnatural ability.”
All of them stare at me. I know how strange it must sound. I’ve never heard of any Unnatural with a power so singular.
“I know everything of the Dead. The knowledge is part of me. I gain strength in their presence, strength to match theirs. And at times I have…visions.”
Ut
ter silence fills the crypt. The statues atop the sarcophagi seem to drift closer, listening.
Belle throws up her hands. “What is happening in this place?”
My voice sounds strange, flattened. “For the past three weeks, the fiend, one of the Greater Dead, has murdered Venetians and left their bodies strewn about the city,” I say. “One victim per night.”
“I saw it,” Jette whispers.
Of course. The vision. “How did you escape?”
Jette’s mouth tightens. Her hands lock around her staff. “With…my ability.”
I needn’t ask further. Yurei speaks instead. “It killed the priest of San Fedele.”
He lowers his head, his chin nearly to his chest. I watch him, worried. What happened to him? We can’t have been separated for more than an hour…
When he speaks again he forms his words carefully, with effort. “It’s said these creatures feed upon blood.”
“Yes.”
“It left his blood. Everywhere.”
“It did not feed upon the sailor either,” Jette says. “It only savaged him to death.” The shadows hollow her cheeks, darkening her eyes. “The vampires of London devoured their victims.”
London.
I know it well, as does everyone, Natural and Unnatural alike. The London Conflagration. The worst disaster of the modern era, the invasion that took the world utterly unawares.
Belle looks between us, confused. “London?”
I nod. “At moonrise on the twenty-third of December, 1855, a horde of the Lesser Dead emerged from the sewers and slaughtered everyone they came upon. The Londoners that escaped with only injuries succumbed and transformed themselves.”
I’ve read the accounts. The news spread in hours, telegraphed across a horrified world, reports of risen corpses, mass graves, roaring fires. “Continental cities sent help, but they arrived too late. London fell.
“The armies evacuated those they could. The aethercorps dropped incendiary bombs. In the following months the Naturals exterminated the Dead that escaped the bombardment while the militaries barricaded the city with walls. They still stand, guarded. They say there are Dead that survived, waiting in the ruins.”
“How many died?” Belle whispers.
“Seven hundred thousand.”
Her mouth falls open. I understand her shock. There had never been a catastrophe so great since the Red Plague of five hundred years past. Ever since I first learned of it I’ve told myself that such a thing could never happen in Venice. Even then I understood that the city would become a trap. A single railway bridge anchors it to the mainland. The only other means of leaving is by boat or aethership. There would be no other escape for a hundred thousand souls.
Jette’s voice pulls me back to the present. “The vampire did not mean to kill us.” She lifts her chin, her voice suddenly proper, as though she’s delivering a scientific report. “Its moroi attempted to injure me with a strange weapon. A modified crossbow quarrel armed with a hypodermic syringe containing a viscous black substance.”
Belle stiffens. Her eyes widen, as though a sudden thought occurred to her, but she says nothing.
A viscous black substance. I know what it must have been. “Dead blood. I…I thought it had to be consumed to have its effect, but injecting it into the body may…it meant to turn you into a moroi.”
Every drop of blood leaves Jette’s face, turning her even paler. Yurei clenches his fists. “It wants us.”
He speaks in the fiend’s rasping croak, an imitation so perfect that a shiver grabs me by the neck. “What a marvelous modern age this is, to create ones such as you.”
The air in the crypt weighs upon me like a blanket of lead. I never imagined this.
“We should leave,” Yurei murmurs.
“Yes. Yes, we aren’t safe yet.” I gather my skirts. I can’t bear this place any longer. “I think I’ve a notion of where we are. If we can—"
“No. Leave Venice.”
Belle and Jette turn to look at him. He crouches on the altar, staring into the flames, coiled like a spring.
I can’t have heard him properly. “Leave?”
“What should we care?” His voice is without cadence, lifeless as an automaton’s. “It’s nothing to do with us.”
I stare at him. “Dozens of people have died.”
A tremor crawls into his voice, a thread-thin current of volta. “Dozens of Naturals.”
His hand grasps his right wrist as though cradling an injury. “They torture us. They enslave us. They use us for their own ends and beat us to death when they’re through.”
He lifts his head. “You would risk yourself for them?”
His eyes blaze, reddened by the firelight, points of hot iron. I can hardly believe he’s the boy who saved me twice, who seemed so quiet, so wary and shy…
I hardly know him.
But I never thought I’d fear him.
No. I’ve had enough of fear.
“You saw the fiend’s work,” I say through my teeth. “You would have me do nothing?”
“Have they done nothing to you?” His gaze bores into me. “Have you always lived free?”
Everything I might have said flees my mind.
His head falls onto his chest. “You have.” A sobbing laugh wheezes from his throat. “You have.”
Belle reaches out to touch him. “Yurei?”
He jerks away as though burned. Words return to me, the wrong ones. “I-I know what the Naturals—"
“What do you know?”
He bounds to his feet, hands locked into claws. “What can you possibly know?”
His roar thunders through the crypt. “They did this to us! They made us this way!”
Shadows rise around him, thrashing like mad snakes, tentacles of darkness solid enough to grab. “Their world can burn for all I care.” A rabid snarl contorts his mouth. “Let them suffer. Let them die. Let them rot in hell!”
The force of his scream nearly flings me from the altar. I clap my hands over my ears. When I open my eyes Yurei is gone.
I stare at where he stood, frozen, benumbed. Belle looks frantically about, searching the empty crypt, her eyes welling with tears. Jette sits motionless as a carving, watching the fire, jagged tendrils of steam stringing from her coat.
She takes her staff from her lap. Its metal base scrapes against the stone altar as she stands. She wraps her coat around herself, her head lowered, strange ragged hair shadowing her eyes. She steps off the altar and onto another sarcophagus, moving towards a stone staircase I didn’t notice before.
“Jette?” Belle asks.
Jette shakes her head. “No.” Her quavering whisper echoes about the crypt. “Let me be.”
She reaches the foot of the stairs. Belle struggles to her feet, yanking her dripping skirts out of her way. “Wait—”
Jette stops, gripping the stone threshold. A shudder rattles her. In a burst like lightning her colors change, inverting, her skin flashing iron-gray, her hair lusterless black.
She turns. Her stare nearly stops my heart. She watches us like a feral thing, through eyes turned black, their irises a violent glowing white.
The colors vanish. Jette falters, catching herself on the threshold. She wheels about and stumbles up the staircase. Her footsteps fade into the distance.
Belle wrings her hands. She looks to me, then the staircase, tears rolling down her face. She shakes her head, mouthing the words, I’m sorry.
She jumps from the altar and bounds over the sarcophagi, pelting up the stairs, leaving me alone, in the silence of the crypt.
Act Two
Chapter Eleven
Belle
Moonrise
9 February 1865
THE EVENING MOONLIGHT STREAMS through my window as I pack clothing into the carpetbag. Olympia brought her newest creations to me an hour ago, gowns in three different shades. I did not know how precisely to describe a design and measure
ments to an automaton, but the gowns she delivered should fit Jette well enough. Anything is better than a prisoner’s shift.
I stifle a yawn. I hardly slept. Every chime of the hallway clock woke me. I lay there for hours, watching the shadows tilt, waiting for the mist to dissolve and the night to fall. Everything that happened haunted me, the same events racing through my head again and again. A Dead creature swathed in black. Yurei’s scream. Jette’s horrifying stare.
I pack an underskirt into the carpetbag and go to the window. A sleek black gondola glides down the canal, bearing a gondolier and six passengers who must be visitors, from the way they point and stare about.
They torture us. They murder us. They use us for their own ends and beat us to death when they’re through…
I leave the window, rubbing my eyes. Jette told me where she has hidden, a warehouse on the southern docks of the Grand Canal. After breakfast I found a map in the library and committed it to memory.
I have not told anyone of my plan. Ayanda is troubled enough and I doubt Madrina would approve. Perhaps if she discovered that there was another Unnatural in the city she would venture out to find Jette herself. That is something I cannot risk.
Jette cannot help what happens when she is threatened, but I cannot chance a stranger taking her by surprise. If the worst should happen I can contend with Jette alone.
I hope.
Someone knocks. “Permission to enter?” Andreas calls.
I throw the carpetbag behind the bed and plaster a smile onto my face. “Come in!”
The door opens of its own accord. Renzo appears, eating something from a gold-papered box. Fiorella drifts after him, hugging a beautiful wooden doll.
I hope my smile does not falter. The children do not seem as wary of me as they did, but I do not want to unnerve them by accident.
In a flash of color Andreas appears, bowing. “Good evening to you, fair lady. I come bearing gifts from abroad.”
“Gifts?”