by Eric Griffin
With a slight upward curl of his hand, the Assamite gestured toward the sigils.
“A fascinating exercise,” Vykos countered, “and let us assume for the moment that I believe unquestioningly your account of what I have just seen.” She held up a hand to forestall any protestations.
“But this still tells me only that the hand belonged to a Tremere witch. It does not tell me that it belonged specifically to Hannah.
“Appearances,” Vykos intoned, “can be fatally deceiving.” She sat down at the desk. As she spoke, her hands absently brushed aside a few wayward strands of Hannah’s hair that had drifted down over the pallid face. She ran both of her hands slowly downward, stroking the unresponsive flesh of cheek and throat.
When she again addressed her guest, her gaze never lifted from the death mask before her. “I have seen her, of course, but only in photographs.” Her fingertips came together at the nape of the neck. “Do you think her beautiful?”
The question seemed to take her guest by surprise. He snorted dismissively before regaining his composure. “Lady, these considerations, they have no place in my work.”
Vykos smiled. Her thumbs swung up, tenderly smoothing closed the eyelids.
“No, of course not.” Her voice was soft, her eyes lowered. Her thumbs lingered upon Hannah’s sealed eyes, pressing slightly as if to ensure they did not flutter open again. “But I was not asking a professional opinion. You surely had ample opportunity to see her, to study her. Would you say that she was beautiful?” The assassin wheeled away from her and muttered a few syllables in a harsh and foreign tongue.
“You will, perhaps, forgive me if I say that you are the most exasperating of clients. Of course, I observed the movements of the witch. How could I not do so? There is room neither for error, nor hesitation, nor mercy when dealing with her kind. She is there before you now. Judge for yourself whether she is beautiful!”
Vykos, apparently unmoved by his outburst, regarded the unmoving face before her with a critical eye. After some deliberation, she opened a desk drawer, extracted a silver hairbrush and began to brush Hannah’s long auburn hair.
“Yes, but you saw her in the full flush of the blood—when she was yet ‘alive’—when there was still movement and gesture, expression, emotion. These are the things that the photographs—and this little keepsake—cannot tell me.”
He paced the room briskly and was a long while before answering. “Yes, I saw the witch living. I was, as you well know, the last person who might make such a claim.” His gaze fixed on some imaginary point in the middle distance as if seeing, not for the first time, people and things that were no more.
“I felt the arch of her back as my hand closed around her waist. I saw the delicate throb in the line of her throat as the flowing hair pulled taut. I saw the lips part to form words of power that they would never complete. Yes, she was as beautiful in dying as she is in death.”
Vykos smiled and continued her brushing, counting softly under her breath.
Her guest stirred uncomfortably but did not resume his pacing.
An uneasy silence ensued, filled only by the regular stroke of the brush. As if suddenly struck by a thought, Vykos looked up and fixed her gaze upon him. From beneath half-closed lids, she asked, “What then shall I call you, my sentimental assassin? You have not yet told me your name.”
He cocked his head to one side and regarded her for a moment as if to determine whether she really expected an answer or if she were simply goading him further. There was a peculiar undertone to her question. Something subvocal, almost feline, certainly dangerous. It belied the innocent allure of her gaze. Without willing it, he slipped into a more defensive stance.
“Nor am I likely to. You may call me Parmenides.
Ah, a philosopher then. I had nearly mistaken you for a poet.” She continued to muse aloud. “You do not appear to be a Greek and you surely are not so wizened as to have walked among the luminaries of the School of Athens. You are, then, something of a classicist, a scholar…a romantic.”
He almost visibly shrank from this last epithet and began to protest.
“No. Say nothing more of it. The conclusion follows inevitably from the premises. But have no fear, your secret shall remain safe with me.” She picked up her brush and resumed her task, apparently forgetting him entirely.
He stared at her in open disbelief, but she seemed completely absorbed. Under her unrelenting brush, Hannah’s hair came away in great tangled clumps. Soon the surface of the desk was covered, but still she did not pause.
“My lady, I believe we yet have business to discuss.”
Vykos still did not look up from her labor. The brush began to scrape gratingly across the exposed stretches of scalp now visible through the remaining patches of hair. The sound seemed to play directly upon the nerves without first traversing the intermediary of the ear.
The flesh began to blacken and bruise. After a long while, Vykos said absently, “You were endeavoring to prove that this is indeed Hannah, the Tremere witch and the leader of the Atlanta chantry. The more I subject this specimen to scrutiny, however, the less resemblance I see between the two.”
She set down her brush and pushed her chair back to study the results of her efforts. She nodded, satisfied.
“There is a certain…luster missing.” Vykos pinched the cheeks gently as if to bring up the color in them but seemed disappointed at the result. “A certain defiance no longer apparent in this delicate line of jaw.” She illustrated with a slow caress of the index finger.
“And the eyes. Even in the photographs one could see that the witch’s eyes were set deep—as if shrinking from the things she had witnessed in the dark hours. These eyes bulge noticeably, and without any of the fire that is the legacy of the Tremere devilry.”
Vykos ground her thumbs into the sockets as if to set things aright. Parmenides made a noise of disapproval or disgust and turned away. “Enough. You know these signs for what they are, my Lady. They are the marks of the grave, of the Final Death, nothing more. If you continue along these lines, however, you will certainly mar the remains beyond all recognition.”
Vykos pushed back her chair and stood. Her voice was conciliatory. “Now you have gotten your feelings hurt again. Come here my young romantic, my philosophe. If you tell me that this is the witch, I will accept your pledge.” There was a scraping noise as she rotated the head on the desk to face him.
“Look upon her. Do you not find her beautiful?”
Almost against his will, he looked. The flowing auburn hair was gone entirely. The flesh of face and scalp was bruised to a uniform blackness. The line of jaw was set proudly, powerful and masculine. The cheeks had lost their full feminine roundness and drawn taut so that a hint of the skull was discernible beneath. The eyes had become wary—small, dark, recessed.
None of these individual changes, however, made the slightest impression upon the stunned Parmenides. He had fallen victim, instantly and completely, to the sum of these alarming alterations. The face that stared back at him was unmistakably his own.
Vykos’s voice, when it broke in upon him, came from directly behind him and very close. He could feel her breath upon his neck and ear…The reason I do not place my trust in photographs. Images maybe altered.”
He felt her lips upon his throat and let his eyes fall closed.
Monday, 21 June 1999, 10:21 PM
Chandler Room, Omni Hotel at CNN Center
Atlanta, Georgia
If anything, Polonia’s announcement in the previous night’s council meeting had only increased the intensity of the infighting among the Sabbat war councilors. There had already been no fewer than three casualties during the evening’s proceedings and the pace did not appear to be slackening noticeably.
The grave news that Polonia had brought to the council was that all their plans had suddenly and irrevocably changed. Months of effort and sums of money that would have put many nations’ gross national products to shame had bee
n expended on positioning the Sabbat for a Blood Siege. Forces from as far afield as Miami, New York and, most startlingly, Madrid had moved stealthily into position. The forward agents had whittled away at the Camarilla’s infrastructure, fueling the Anarch revolt and jeopardizing the Masquerade. They had summoned the leading powers, advisors and specialists of two continents to attend this council of war. They had argued and threatened and eventually forged a strategy that would bring the city of Atlanta slowly and inexorably to her knees.
And now all of that effort was overturned in a single evening, in a single utterance. There would be no siege.
It had taken some time to quell the initial commotion (which bordered on total riot) that accompanied this pronouncement. Only then had Polonia been able to explain his enigmatic declaration.
“There will be no siege, gentlemen, because the battle for Atlanta will be decided by one single, irresistible assault. We will sack the city, smashing every last shard of resistance in an all-out offensive. That offensive, gentlemen, will take place tomorrow evening at precisely midnight.”
The stunned silence that had met that pronouncement was a marked contrast to the unbridled chaos that reigned in the council chambers tonight. The news had had its chance to sink in, to work its transformations. Where last night’s gathering had been a somber council of war, this night’s assembly was a whooping war party waiting to be loosed that it might massacre its unsuspecting victims.
Polonia was not entirely pleased by this turn of events. For one thing, the unruly crowd was rearranging things, and not entirely to his satisfaction.
He had gone to some effort to ensure that everything was just so for this momentous meeting. He noticed the first of the glaring changes immediately upon entering the council chambers this evening. It seemed that for some inexplicable reason, someone or -ones must have broken into the hall for some early-morning mischief. The stolid circular conference table that had dominated the room—which he had brought in at considerable expense—was gone. Missing. A seven-hundred-pound table.
It had been replaced with a much more contemporary conference table. In Polonia’s eyes, the immediate disadvantage of this arrangement was that the long rectangular table had a distinct head and foot—a small fact that radically altered the rules of precedence for seating the assembled dignitaries. A small fact to which Polonia attributed at least one of the three—now four, he corrected himself—untimely deaths this evening.
To make matters worse, the table itself was made of an opaque black glass, polished to a mirror-like shine. This last property was causing not a few of the Lasombra some measure of ill-concealed discomfort. More than once, Polonia noted, his lieutenant Costello jerked back sharply as if stung, when his forearms accidentally came into contact with the table.
Polonia could see the already strained tempers beginning to grind together. Fortunately, the foul mood of his fellow Lasombra was somewhat offset by the capering of the Tzimisce. The fiends were in their element. Foraging parties burst in upon the assembly at odd intervals, bearing grisly trophies of their excursions into the city. These they hung up about the room until there were no fewer than a score of corpses dangling from the ceiling.
Some, like the young Toreador, were hanged by the neck. Others were inverted and slit to the sternum, their blood spilling into commandeered ice buckets. Others still were bent double and hauled up by ropes bound about their waists
The rest of the room was in a similar state of utter disarray. Carefully drafted and numbered plans for the assault were strewn haphazardly about the table. Photo dossiers on important Camarilla targets had grown hopelessly mingled and many of the pictures had been pinned to the wall and then slashed into tatters. The carefully arranged placecards were swept to the floor to clear the way for impromptu bouts of arm-wrestling.
Presiding over this reign of chaos, the heady scent of blood filled the room. The guests poured generously, sloppily from cut-glass decanters brimming with that most common of all red wines. They passed silver trays of jellied candies that gave every sign of only recently having coagulated.
Polonia’s nerves, however, were on edge and he did not give in to the temptations of these delicacies. Tonight it would be very easy to indulge himself, to drink deeply of the blood until it sang in his ears and formed a crimson film before his eyes. To allow the Beast within to test its tether.
But tonight he must remain vigilant—not only against the desperate Camarilla who would be fighting for their very unlives, but also against his brothers in the Sabbat who would be looking to improve their lot through any means at their disposal.
For many, this would mean a grab for glory on the field of battle. Polonia did not doubt that many hunting trophies and keepsakes would be harvested this night—mementos that could be brought out as a diversion to while away some cruel and brutally short winter evening, decades hence.
For others, the assault would mark the culmination of their intrigues and plays for political power. In the unfolding of the final act, these powerbrokers would be bringing to bear all of their resources. And very few would balk at crushing anyone so foolish as to stumble in upon their dark compacts.
And then there were always the opportunists, who knew full well that the assault would provide the perfect cover for the disappearance of a careless rival, or the entertaining of any of a host of other vices that even the Sabbat normally frowned upon.
Polonia found himself hoping that enough of the council would survive the remaining two hours before the assault to carry the project through to its completion. Fortunately, the captains of the pivotal forces spearheading the attack were already dispatched and taking up their positions in the field around the High Museum of Art.
There had been a good deal of argument, of course, over which forces should have the honor of leading the attack and incidentally securing the lion’s share of the glory—discussions to which Polonia attributed two more of the evening’s fatalities.
Tonight’s high-society gathering at the High would bring together all the notable Camarilla leaders in the city under one roof. All the Sabbat had to do was bring down that roof.
Polonia was reflecting upon how this might be best accomplished and watching an altercation that was probably casualty number five developing, when his attention was caught by the sound of the chamber’s door opening. He was perhaps overly sensitive to this occurrence as he was presently seated with his back toward it.
The choice was his own, of course. This option was far preferable to the only other alternative: to have at least one of his fellow councilors seated between himself and the only means of egress from the chamber. Given the nature and disposition of his guests, Polonia had decided he would be better off at the mercy of whoever might be lurking outside the room.
The figure who entered was Polonia’s own herald, who had been stationed directly outside the door. Polonia was not such a fool, after all, as to leave his back unguarded.
The herald bowed to his master and then, in answer to a questioning look, rolled his eyes upward. The gesture nearly dislodged one of the orbs that clung precariously to its sunken socket.
Inverting his axe, the herald rapped once sharply upon the floor. “The Lady Vykos, legate, nuncio and ambassador extraordinaire of His Eminence, the Cardinal Monçada.”
He stepped aside as the elegantly attired figure swept forward. She was dressed in the style of a sixteenth-century noblewoman—the long flowing gown, the puffed sleeves cuffed midway up the forearm, the rigid tombstone-shaped collar that stood out well above her shoulders, razor-straight in the front and gently curving around to meet behind the nape of her neck.
Her looks were unexceptional. Her mouth was terse, slightly lined perhaps, with the telltale hint of cruelty barely discernible at the corners. Her large dark eyes were half closed in an affected languor, but they missed nothing. Her hair was piled high upon her head and bound in place with perfumed ribbons.
As the unremarkable lady entered the room
, the assembled Tzimisce went absolutely berserk. A chorus of cries went up from the capering mob.
“The Blood Countess!”
“It is she, I tell you. Bathory!”
“The coat of arms. There! Embroidered on her collar.”
“Yes, the dragon swallowing its own tail. It is she!”
“What are those maniacs going on about?” Sebastian leaned over to ask his master.
“Carefully,” the venerable Borges exhaled the word rather than spoke it. “Tread lightly. I think they say that there is a serpent loosed among us.”
“No, master, what they said was…” Sebastian suddenly fell silent. He knew full well that Borges’s hearing far surpassed his own. Decades of living without the benefit of eyesight had fine-tuned his master’s hearing to a level far beyond even what a Cainite might expect.
No, Borges had not misheard. He was, rather, supplying his protégé with additional information that might well prove necessary to Sebastian’s wellbeing. If Borges said there was a viper in their midst, Sebastian was not about to leave his feet dangling within easy reach of the floor.
Borges was not unaware, of course, of the legendary and sadistic exploits of the Blood Countess. The name of Bathory itself was like a familiar and not altogether pleasant exhalation from the Old Country. The syllables were inexorably linked with dark tales of the methodical torture, maiming and murder of countless young women. What had begun with the taking out of a furious temper upon the serving maids of her estate, was then nourished by the devising of elaborate and ingenious punishments, and eventually culminated in a predilection for bathing in the rejuvenative blood of young maidens. By the time Bathory was finally brought to trial in 1610, her accusers had conservatively placed the total number of her victims at just about 650 souls.
It was much more likely that Vykos was deliberately exploiting this myth to her advantage rather than the alternative—that she was, in fact, the Tzimisce patron saint in the flesh.