“A toad, dear, that’s a frog.”
Exit startled toad, Enter flying frog. “And there we are… And I think that frog is one of Tina’s pets, so I’d put it back where you found it.”
Tina’s frog swims its way back outside to the pond and drops back in with a plop.
“Sorry Nan…”
“It’s fine, dear…”
Elspeth looks down pointedly at her watch, an incongruent digital deal in aluminium and liquid crystal that’s a veritable relic. Lady alone knows where she’d picked it up, some dead town before the scavenger found it. “You go back to whatever it was you were doing. I’ll use the cards instead.”
“Lucky frog.” Elspeth observes as the frog splashes away and Nan picks up an old tarot pack.
Humming and cards sliding against a wooden table in a practised deal. “Rescue, rescue, rescue… There we are, that’s about as good as it gets.” Nan points over the cards. “There’s an opportunity on fourth night, motion and trickery in spades. I see… mostly puppet warders in tracks, one of their ‘agents’ but distracted. One of the better ones, a killer of necessity not choice.”
“That’s good news, Nana.”
“Here, and here.” Nan nods to herself, a picture of satisfaction. “Gather the ladies and get young Ariadne back, her talents will come in useful and that looks a lot like her in this pattern don’t you think?.”
Elspeth pulls a face.
“Oh don’t be like that Ellie, the girl may be awful at botany but she’s enthusiastic, strong and she’s been out in the world longer than any of us village dwellers. And look at the paths if you just blend her into the mix.”
“Let me take a look Nan.” Elspeth considers the patterns in the cards, flipping and turning to test the parameters. Each card hisses as it embeds itself, the patterns adjusting to the new shapes, tracing the future in pictures. “Oh my. I see your point Nan. There are some wonderful opportunities for us associated with this old fellow if the young lass is there.”
Nan nods, satisfied, taking particular pride in the way that Ellie tests out the hypotheses, the scientific method applied to witchcraft had been a boon to her coven for the last two centuries, once the stick in the muds had been turfed out by Grams.
“Well there’s that and then there’s the truth that we agreed to help this one a long time ago. We keep our promises dear, we’re good people. Not Fae. You should remember that.”
“I do, Nan.”
“And if there just so happens to be something in it for us for keeping that promise in a particular way then all the better. It’s like gingerbread. Gingerbread is good,” she reaches for the tin, “but chocolate dipped gingerbread is delightful. You can never have enough gingerbread stored but if you happen to have some chocolate sauce on the boil…”
Elspeth gives Nan ‘the look’. “Do you want me to simmer up some chocolate sauce, Nan?”
Nan nods, gratefully, gesturing at the book stack. “Lots of reading to do dear girl. Lots and lots of reading.”
She picks up her ‘borrowed’ monocle and soon the rich smell of chocolate permeates the kitchen beside the miasma of a deep crossword clue fugue.
4
A Cell of Silver Chains
I spend the next three days locked in a more obvious gaol, pacing space, held in a loose captivity by silver chains with links as thick as my thumb. Every two to three hours I experience a little ineffectual interrogation and some equally ineffective torture. It’s amusing. Like watching a puppy bowling along a path chasing a carriage, the effort is immense, the impact is adorable.
In terms of technique, a subject on which I am a bit of an expert, my captors appear to know the basics of vampire physiology and nothing more. Book learning, or experience of new-borns dribbling their first blood meal. They clearly have never met a mature Vampire such as myself…
“You mean ‘decrepit’ or maybe ‘ancient’ Master Albrecht.”
“Shush Helene. If we have to travel that road I prefer “a vampire in his later-prime.”
A deep liquid chuckle.
“Or one nearing the summit of his powers.” I crack my knuckles back into place, wincing as the tendons stretch out. “Even if they do seem a little faded from lack of exertion right now.”
My captors resume their ministrations.
My goodness, but this is torture as black comedy. Do they not understand who it is with whom they deal?
A cup of blood just out of reach. The assumption? I’m starving. But it smells old and curdled and I only drink for pleasure anyway. Bright lights in the beyond blue spectrums shone in my eyes? I blink for a moment and then bask in the memories of the sunlight of my youth and the poets of the time.
I even get a dousing in holy water on the third day of my captivity which at least has the merit of being refreshing.
I use my time alternately mocking the inability of my torturers to cause me meaningful pain and pondering my next moves when they stop reacting to the jibes, muttering in bastardised French.
Mockery. When you’re as old as I your skills in these areas are developed to a fine edge, sharp, a razor. The use of which I was, in fact, practicing just before my previous incarceration, and to some good effect.
My opposition in that endeavour being considerably more effective interrogators than these French gentlemen. Though I balk at the thought of according such a status to any subject of that benighted realm.
Cold water sprays with considerable force through the door of my cell. Back to this again? Did I lose an hour there?
Now. Thinking on the literal benighted world outside my place of incarceration, the question I ask is what has happened during my rest and what resources do I have available to address the situation?
I taste silver on my tongue, and the water is Orthodox this time. How quaint.
It occurs to me as I receive what must be the most expensive shower in history, that whatever it is that has blotted out the sky can’t have happened that long ago, in absolute terms. Progress may have halted, been pushed back a little in placed, but this is still a world of wonders.
A shock as powerful as losing the sun would have stopped progress dead even in the world of steam and iron I left all those years ago, along with the lives of much of the human race.
One has to acknowledge that they can be persistent and resourceful, but it took half a millennium for the literate kings of bronze to recover in an age of iron and alphabets as warlords in the ruins. Centuries for Rome to rise again in the West, the cold and plagues of my happier days a hiatus of decades.
Electric sticks applied to a variety of places.
Zap! I chuckle to myself and offer up a barb to the hirsute young interrogator cursing me in beastly French.
“That would have hurt if I worked like you young man but I don’t. Try harder! No half measures!”
More swearing in the French of the gutter.
As if there is any other kind.
I let them work as I work my own magic.
The clouds are seething with magical power and monsters coalesced from that power. That can’t be an error. To do that and seed it with the power of, well, I cannot imagine a source for what I saw outside. That would have taken a whole new level of monstrousness powered with purest madness to produce such a result.
A jab, and a cut. I chuckle.
“Try harder!”
Mechanical devices and the thralls that operate them bluster and sweat as they blunt razors on my skin. I assume somewhere in the offices above my prison the cogitators which provide them with their faulty information have fresh new entries tapped in by the cotton ladies of the pool. Rapid-fire rifles patter against my chest and basic spell craft numbs my arms and legs without stopping me moving them.
Though I do get the most awful pins and needles. There is some talent here. I applaud a greying lady with be-runed and be-muscled forearms for causing me a sharp jolt of discomfort with a gouging instrument.
She shoots me an incredulous look. I shr
ug, she leaves.
A billion souls, more maybe, to create the soup above us. Why do it? Who would be so clumsy when all the power in the world is in a single sacrifice.
“Are we done here?” I ask the empty room, the puddles freezing into ice.
There is an extended pause at the end of the third day and then another of my enforced leg-dragging expeditions to the sad wreck of the outside world. The guards are silent as they pull me along. The red light of day is an interesting contrast to the cold blue of my prison cell and I feel the dawning of a certain joy at the possibility of new experiences.
Something has changed. Definitely off to pastures new.
There is an enormous metal coach waiting outside the base, into which I am bundled and then caged. My captors have decided to send me to another new home, though I may have to demur the invitation. I notice the dragon skin scales of its outer skin and the iron taste of weak protection runes scratched into hidden layers below the visible.
My steed has companions, another three great boxes of steel and ceramic each sat on quad heavy inflatable wheels. A more capable version of the marching guards’ automatic rifles sits in a turret atop each vehicle pointing upwards towards the monster-ridden skies.
They remind me a little of Da Vinci’s sketches. The vehicles, not the monsters. More practical though. Da Vinci’s vehicle sketches could have doubled as bathtubs and were half as mobile even when powered by a dozen of my colleagues.
Another of my commissions wasted by that delightful fraud, the one who got away.
Painted grey the vehicles blend into the half-light and dust which pervade everything. A moment’s brightness is stolen as the shadow of some great serpent or abominable insect passes across the sky. The creatures are echoes of the old legends from my childhood, of the Titanomachia , or those vignettes of the gods of the chaos time from before the sky and the earth were set in place, so beloved of the eastern kings in their gaudy finery.
There’s a buzz from the floor beneath my feet as my view is blocked by a rising gate, and some motive power cuts in.
For all my philosophising in my captivity I feel that I have made little progress towards a solution. I have questions I cannot answer. Who would benefit from demons in the clouds spiralling in some idiot dance? The clouds are an element I recognise from… well.
It was my fifth plan. It had merit, it had problems.
Ah, interjects an onlooker. Why would the oldest vampire plan in the book be my fifth and not my first? Blot out the sun and run free, blood suckers!
An easy enough objection to answer, we are all creatures of our times. I, as case in point, spent the first five hundred years of my existence believing that the sun was a god-chariot. Others of my era held that the sun was a dung-beetle (or was it there was a dung-beetle pushing a… dung-ball?)
So it’s not that I didn’t include removing the sun from the equation. It’s that the plans were… well.
Embarrassing as it is, looking back with the benefit of hindsight, I confess plans one through three (respectively) involved breaking the spokes on the god-chariot’s wheels, spooking the horses with monsters and poisoning divine oats after climbing to their stables using an ingenious array of pulleys attached to a convenient mountain, to heft the feed given their prodigious appetites.
They did not curry favour with the Masters of the day. They were of the be-shelled insect party and fairly objected that divine dung beetles don’t have spokes, fear monsters, nor eat oats.
All bar Master Orgh who might have held a different view but no one could understand a word that relic said. He was obsessed with shadows, or maybe sandals. Who could tell?
Plan five though? Even those who dissented from my views wanted to be the rulers of this world and plan five tacked closer to the practical world of dust and fire, objections of a theological nature were irrelevant to anyone who saw the great volcanic eruptions of my youth.
To have seen Thera. Oh my.
I’d updated the plan periodically as the light of science had illuminated additional factors that my younger self had failed to consider. None of my plans had involved monsters however. My feeling on the subject is that something that big tends to wish to rule.
And we do not like to be ruled.
These fine gentlemen with whom I sojourn appear as clueless on the matter as I. They have demonstrated no affinity with the clouds, nor any of the powers that could be drawn from them by a sufficiently cold and heartless being. We all equally cower beneath the gaze of those who should never have been raised above us.
I turn my attention outwards into the little heated cabin of my conveyance and its solitary occupant.
‘Master Johnson' sits quiet and contemplative, his thoughts elsewhere much as mine have been.
Judging by the distance and distortion in the sound of oversized wheels on the road we are travelling in the third vehicle in a line, two ahead and one behind, spaced approximately fifty yards apart.
These pointed ears are not solely for appearance!
After a time Johnson appears to reach a conclusion in his morbid self absorption, and starts to talk into a stick set in a rather fetching earpiece, an accessory which has been de rigeur for many of my captors. Few of them have pulled off the business-like manner in which he is dictating facts and suppositions to some invisible, or tiny, friend residing within.
It really would be outstanding if there were a little person in those miracles of modern science. A little Fae in a box for knowledge. Communication via chattering away to a tiny friend across an ether bridge.
Why didn’t I think of that! The trick would be feeding the creature and hiding it from the Courts who are protective of their miniature subjects. Also, chastising it when it deviated…
I have not seen Johnson since my original interrogation, and from the patter of his voice I have a feeling that he is not happy about that.
“… thirty years of work, nearly wasted…”
We must be friends. That is the only possible explanation.
I’ll have to see if I can keep him from whatever grisly fate my associates have in store for him. When my rescue arrives. As it surely will.
This world has changed much in my lost years but the old bonds are still strong and some, at least, of the old powers are still active.
That rescue is on its way, I can feel it in my bones. The lines of power and the contracts binding them in place remain, criss-crossing the world and I am like a spider in my web with ripples of wind and the feel of prey vibrating against my legs. The longer I am away from my original and depressingly effective incarceration the more my senses awaken and the more I can feel that this world has an awful lot of power coursing through it.
There are other newer powers at work too. Noises on the wind and whispers in the lightning that plays across the clouds. I lack ears to hear in the present, that will change with time, I must however remember to listen.
There are so many distractions. Forgetting is my bane.
“... no. I can’t delay them any longer. The locals say they need to transfer the package now... I don’t care about the politics... tell London.”
A crackle of words from the earpiece. Johnson holds the stem of the device in place, an unconscious and seemingly unnecessary affectation.
“Turk, I need you to speak to London now. Protectorate staff aren’t up to this and the ruin is simply not secure. The route is not secure, this will be Paris all over again, and my team is… We're... hold on.”
What is propelling the vehicle so very smoothly? Whatever it is it is remarkably silent. Not steam. Too fast. Another mystery to consider. One of those computers would be very helpful if I could figure out how they worked. Maybe an earpiece to go with it to be a true man of the century?
Helene is looking up at me from the floor again. She has a twisted smile that shows off her ruined mouth. She fought hard. I’m still proud of her. I’m sure she’d have loved an earpiece to pull apart and decipher its inner workings.
I smile at my friend from my cage. It’s rather comfortable after so long in a box.
“So, your name is Pole? Very upstanding” I interject, before he can revert to the sullen silence in which he had been indulging before his recent outburst of vocalisations.
He settles back against the armoured side of the transport. “Codename. You’re not getting my real name. Obviously.”
I nod with what I hope is the gravitas of millennia. I have it. Just a difficult trick to pull off when your hands are tied and you are squatting in a flimsy cage. “Very sensible. I’d applaud if name magic were a real thing, but… A question perhaps?”
A raise of the Pole’s eyebrows.
“When did you English work out the rules of the arcana?” There’ll always be a London.
He considers the question. “No comment on the English thing. And arcana? We haven’t. Who has? We go with what works,” He points at the slapdash sigils inked on my wrists and ankles which are making my fingers tingle with a feeble flow of power. “Locals know less than the people I work for. Having to work with them? Not ideal. But there’s background. It’s how things are.”
“Politics?”
“Politics.”
A sunny smile. I’ve practiced this for centuries. “May I know who it is you work for? It might colour my cooperation in the future.” No reason not to ask. From listening into conversations I know that my torturers of the past few days (I use the term humorously I have been in tickle fights which were more likely to make me talk,) work for something called the “Northern Protectorate” and they have interestingly French accents and language skills for purported Irishmen.
Master In His Tomb Page 4