The woman started back briskly as Day turned, the sentries running forward in the corner of his vision. Behind Day another servant of the Temples in a kilt made of hide and salvaged cloth and a bright yellow plastic vest, his arms as thick as wooden beams, wrestled the lasso taut and started pulling Day off-balance.
Day tried to reach for Finn’s knife, but his upper arms were lashed tight to his sides. He yielded several steps towards the man with the rope, but he kept his footing.
“Draw the gun!” Day hissed at Anu.
His golden-haired woman had fallen to her knees in the dirt and both hands covered her now unmasked face. Horror filled her eyes and somehow Day knew it was more than just the disaster unfolding. Her bright brown eyes swam with fear and Day could barely hear her repeating “No no no, not yet, not so soon.” It was a nervous litany, like a religious chant bereft of the power to heal. Her gods, whoever they were, weren’t listening.
Day tried to twist his lower arm behind his back. As the wrestler succeeded at yanking him onto his side, Day drew one of his silver knives.
“Get the gun, Anu!” Day yelled, the footfalls of the runners coming near. He could feel the rope around his chest and arms squeezing the holstered vampire weapon into his ribs under the fur coat. He cursed again, but at least Anu rose from the ground and began towards him.
Her actions never carried through. As the sentinels hurried forwards, the woman with the bent sword stopped to swing it at Day’s lover. Anu’s scream cut short. Day was twisting and writhing in the cruel rope’s grasp, kicking with his heels to try and get upright. He only saw half of what happened. The blow fell across the side of Anu’s neck and she went unconscious, lying there in the dirt with her sari pooled beneath her.
The heavyset guard with the lasso came forward once things seemed safe. He was bent on trussing Day up, eyes averted as if shy about the tears he could see on the prone man’s cheeks. The woman came closer too, but just to look, her offsider the one now bare-handed to help do the dirty work.
“That’s the one,” the woman said. “Frisk him for the weapon.”
“Are you sure he has it?” the rope-man asked.
“You heard him shouting it out? Darrell saw him with it before,” she answered.
Day lay with the side of his face on the ground encrusted with sand, slitted eyes looking up almost dolefully at the glinting curve emanating from the woman’s hand. Without giving much thought to his actions he moved quickly, getting a foot underneath as he stood, the deadly silver wedge of the knife in his hand.
The woman’s original partner was closest. Day almost shrugged, his upper arms still tight. It was his intention to kill them all so it didn’t matter which one he chose first. Using his free hand he grabbed the man and pulled him closer by the belt and then the silver blade stabbed twice into the man’s midsection.
Day pushed the stunned, gargling man away and began hoisting the lasso up and over himself. Unfortunately the man with the lasso was more than casually proficient at his task. In an eye blink he doled out another length of the rope and looped it again over Day’s shoulders. Freed of one circlet it didn’t matter. The second one caught him tight again. At the same time the woman with the sword crouched, hitting him hard across the side of the knee with the blade’s flat. Pain blossomed in a flower of neurones and he fell again.
While their comrade rolled cursing on the ground, blood oozing thick as syrup between his fingers, the swordswoman expertly put her sandalled boot on Day’s wrist while the one with the lasso kicked him in the side of the head. Things went dark for a moment and then he came to with a burning sensation in his wrists, both of them crossed behind his back, coarse fibres lacerating him like a suicide in slow-motion.
“I’ll get Darrell and Obi.”
The woman lifted her knee from the middle of Day’s back. The kick came again and things went black.
He wasn’t out long. When he opened his eyes he was looking across at the man he had stabbed. The sentinel wasn’t moving, his back slightly arched, throat taut and mouth open as if he’d died of thirst – to Day, in pleasing agony.
The concealed handgun wasn’t troubling him any more, which Day knew meant the guards had taken it. The knives as well, all his precious escape gear, was likewise stolen. He closed his eyes, Anu’s shrieking face in his vision, and he didn’t know which to mourn. He tried to move about, but he couldn’t see her. And then the weight of a foot settled upon his back.
Eventually he was lifted by more than one pair of strong hands and propelled in the direction of the Huddle. He kept looking around for sign of the woman with the sword and the chance to kill her, but she was nowhere to be found. Just a trio of sun-swarthened men were hurrying him along, carrying him like a torpedo ready to be loaded into a cannon. Day knew he couldn’t do much, the pain spidering through his neck and skull like his head was a jar of fractured pottery ready to collapse in on itself at any moment.
The sun was westering by the time the shadows of the Temples crossed over them. The day felt strangely hot even though he knew it wasn’t. Being thrown down in the shade was like a blessed relief. It was the only kind of blessing he knew these temples could give. Flopping onto his back and looking up at the plastic faces of the priests’ men before they departed, Day could feel no trace of empathy let alone sympathy for him and his plight.
“Hood and gag him,” a barbed-sounding male voice said.
Day moved up on an elbow, some vague thoughts about resistance bubbling to the surface of his morassed thoughts. A booted foot kicked away his prop and as he fell back flat, another foot took him in the opposite side. Someone else, a man with a pushed-in face the colour of tuna, lifted his head by pulling on the front of his coat. The fur tore away once before the hand regrafted itself to the cloth. From behind, the gag and hood took him instantly, without any chance of defence.
Separate sets of hands took each wrist. The thongs around them were cut and then Day felt himself getting dragged backwards across the rough ground.
He was inside a moment later. The hood admitted no light yet he sensed in his surroundings that there wasn’t much to see anyway. His dark-adapted eye and his preternatural senses could more than make up for the absence of light, but the unyielding fabric of the hood stymied his vision completely. Other senses, though – those often ignored traces by which he was now able to construct a complex image – opened up as if cut loose by the darkness.
The smells assailed him first. So many different scents, it could only be a larder. If the priests used their power to control the field, then the Temples were where they stockpiled their tribute. Though it wasn’t just edibles stored inside, their smell overrode almost everything else. Underneath the better smells sat the stink of human flesh – living meat gone long unwashed.
Day’s ears picked out the tiny movements of the man that gave him away: the gentle rasp of his smile, the course brush of whiskers against a hand as he rubbed his face, the change in posture that came with anticipation, and then the slight quickening of his breath. With senses so sharp, Day could only wonder how the guards had caught him so.
The ground of the hut was still earth and the air tasted of mixed parts wealth and corruption. Day didn’t need his eyes to tell him he was in the priest’s presence, so when the man opened his mouth and started to speak, Day wasn’t surprised. He kept his attention focused on the air around him, waiting for a chance to make his own luck, rather than absorbing the prattling of this self-styled authority.
“You killed Gabriel. Did you know that?”
The priest’s voice sounded strange, almost disdainful. Day only adjusted his hooded head a fraction, zeroing in on where the priest sat, slouched on a throne made of pine crating.
“He won’t be the last,” Day said in a cracked and dry voice. The gag made his words a nonsense.
The priest chuckled. Day could hear the man’s hands squeezing the wooden armrests of his chair. He could almost believe he discerned the man’s pulse quic
ken, the blood surging angrily through his veins.
“Obi, Mattias . . . remove the gag and mask.”
Day blinked as the already stinking cloth was removed from his head. He tried to bite the fingers of the man who removed the bit from his mouth, but the man, the one who had wielded the lasso, was too cautious. Day half-snarled and the pressure returned on his arms, shoulders and wrists, bent up and behind his back.
“I want you to see your doom as it befalls you,” the priest said.
He was a dark-featured man with a beard undecided between stubble and tangle. His almond-shaped eyes would almost have been pretty were it not for the dark stains of tiredness and fatigue beneath them. His swarthiness was corrupted by a jaundiced pallor. Overlong hair was swept back in oily strands of disregard. Badly bitten nails clutched the arms of the makeshift throne. Walls of shelving behind him contained jars and cans and a ragged assortment of goods that all added up to a fortune in the economy of the farm. Haunches of cured meat swung gently from a rail close to the hut’s low roof. That everything was dented or salvaged meant nothing. Day thought that if this was the priests’ fortune, then they should more properly be called kings.
He worked his tongue loose and asked, “What do you want me for?”
“You’re strange. Our sentinels don’t know you.” The priest looked at him for a moment. “There’s only two explanations. One is that you’re an outsider. The other is that my people made a mistake. I doubt the latter, so. . . .”
Day tried to shrug and failed. Pain burnt between his shoulder-blades like a cattle brand. “What does it matter to you?”
“We are in charge here, if it has escaped your notice,” the man replied in a spiteful voice.
“You’re in charge?” Day got the impression he’d interrupted much sooner than the priest would’ve liked. “I think you’re mistaken.”
“We rule this hex,” the priest said.
Day looked to see if there were any others to justify the man’s use of the plural. A ripple-soled boot lifted and nudged his face forward.
“We are in direct contact with the vampires since we now worship the same god,” the priest said.
Day somehow knew the man was lying, as if cynicism alone wasn’t already a good determinant for that. Though he was doubtful there even was such a thing as a vampire god, Day was certain the petty tyrant before him and the sub-class he represented lived in as much fear of the night-goers as anyone else. Their religion was just a way of subverting that fear, turning it into a desperate, cunning sort of power.
“I don’t believe any of it,” Day said. “Does it matter? Your man’s dead because he attacked me.”
“You’re trespassing,” the priest answered with a nasty, self-satisfied smirk. “The masters of this enterprise do not approve and we are here to mete out the punishment.”
“You’re talking nonsense,” Day said.
Pain flared at the base of his skull and, gasping and choking, he spent a short interval hanging suspended by his sockets over the now-moist floor of the shelter. When he finally lifted his sodden face, hair hanging wet with spit in his eyes, the priest was watching him with a pleased expression.
“The vampires are especially displeased with you,” the priest said after a long moment had passed.
Day heard the special emphasis and looked on, intrigued and cautious by turns. “‘Especially displeased’? What is that supposed to mean?”
“They will be pleased we’ve found you. An interloper. You must’ve thought yourself unbelievably lucky when you slew the vampire. Now that luck has turned on you.”
Day’s gaze flickered. “Vampire? I don’t know anything –“
“Come,” the priest chuckled, one hand lifted. “You didn’t smuggle that pistol in by yourself.”
Day blinked down at the floor and couldn’t think of anything to say.
“And is that silver on the knife blades?”
The priest laughed lightly at Day’s predicament; and after a moment Day swore softly to himself and shook his head, looking down now more to avoid the triumphant expression he could smell emanating from the priest rather than worrying about giving himself further away.
“Well, you have me,” Day said. “What will you do?”
“I will do nothing. We priests maintain these sanctuaries where the vampires come. You will feature in their prayers . . . their prayers of blood.”
Day grimaced. But, caught in the act of trying to give the priest no satisfaction, he had to swallow his fear and anger and keep his thoughts shying away from the inevitability to which he was being lead.
“I don’t see why you serve them,” Day said. “Men like us should die fighting.”
“Do you fight the tide? Or the passing of the hours? The only hope lies in service.” The priest made a sour face and stood, surprisingly tall in his tattered dark clothes, a square of grimy blue-black material fashioned like a cloak. “Enough of this, though. I’m not debating it with you. I’m sending you to the altar.”
The priest looked past Day and said, “Gag him, but leave the hood. I want him to watch them come for him.”
Day started to curse them, but again the leather thong went deftly around his face and he only ended up hastening his own silence as he all but swallowed the soft-chewed braid. As he struggled, he heard the guards in their obeisance, the name Maledictus springing from their lips to Day’s ear like a spark. He levelled hate-filled eyes on the rangy figure, but even then, Day was being hauled backwards away.
His mother used to tell him grisly stories as a child about the man-god called Christ. They were mercifully cut short by her death when he was still young. Now the simplistic images he had formed of the Crucifixion leapt back into his head after more than a decade lying dormant. Much like memories of his mother themselves, they were irretrievably faded and distorted by the myopia of years. Now, though, he fathomed he knew how it began.
The priest and the men dragged him through a mob of people. Their irate voices buzzed like wasps around him. Stones, such as any could be found on the featureless plain, pelted him with neither mercy nor aim. Several times the men kicked his legs as they became tangled and threatened the haste in which he was being transported. Then Day felt shadows fall across him again and the anger in his surroundings seemed to recede. A sharp hardness, the blockiness of wooden steps, dug into his back as he was dragged upwards and lifted. He strained his neck around, several times trying to shake the bridle free, but his efforts were finally stilled by a blow to the jaw.
His arms, wrists and back were aching when he came to, hours later. His other hurts, the bruises where blows had landed, seemed of secondary importance to the ongoing injuries directly stemming from his confinement.
It was night, the cold having soaked deep into his unmoving limbs. Strangely there was no one in with him, yet the closest sentries weren’t hidden from him despite their being hidden from his gaze. Day cast his night-sensitive eyes over the small stockade in which he was penned, the wooden stakes gapped and staggered with their insufficiency. All sorts of twine and rope had been used to lash the flimsy structure into being. In a few places stretches of fabric, hides and old rugs were tied in place to maintain the illusion of closure. As the stars dwindled silently in the curious sky, the significance of there being no roof slowly recurred. Day worked his jaw slowly, ignoring the swelling and the pain, and watched the deep blue heavens above him as if at any moment one of the hated blood-drinkers might leap down, just as he knew they really might.
The hours passed, though, and elsewhere in the camp as Day remained awkwardly awake and alert he heard the choked sobs and cries of bereavement in motion. The night creatures were about their harvest. He figured it was only a matter of time before they came for him.
Although the sky lightened, the few remaining stars all but disappearing, Day knew it was an illusion and that dawn was still several hours off. The unbearable ache in his shoulders and arms slowly wound into numbness. The dull heaviness s
eemed to seep into his chest and if it wasn’t for his current plight he could’ve believed his heart too risked going to sleep. Yet a caustic mix of adrenalin and fear kept him ready, trapped but desperate for action the moment the vampires came.
More time passed. The minutes almost seemed to have a texture as Day lay helplessly stretched backwards, his newly unleashed senses ranging madly like those of a child in a locked room.
The crystalline stillness of the moment he imagined to be among his last was suddenly shattered by a harsh cough and then the stretch of wooden palisade closest to his feet collapsed inwards. A sentinel in a black suit coat and the familiar hide-and-cardboard kilt fell among the broken struts, blood sluicing from his neck like a torrent. Day’s already shallow breathing halted completely and his strain-bloated eyes swelled further with anticipation, his vision penetrating seemingly to the spectral as he desperately scried the night for dangers.
Fox stepped through the gap he had made with Anu close behind him. Quickly the woman got past, rushing to where Day was racked, a small knife carefully but briskly making short work of his bonds. Meanwhile Fox gave him only the slightest look before he crouched in readiness by the side of the wreckage.
Day couldn’t say anything with the gag across his mouth. Nor was there any need for questions. The motives for what was happening fell into place as neatly as tiles in a pattern. Day instead tried to hasten Anu’s work, pulling the bit from his mouth the moment he had a hand free.
The next sentinel came through the gap an instant later. Day was still caught by one numb arm to the altar. His eyes flashed as the solidly-built man in his day-glo safety vest rushed in, the familiar rope in his hands. Anu’s desperate rescue attempt was anything but ambiguous.
Fox rose up behind the guard and slung the garrotte over his throat in a single efficient movement. Day didn’t pause to ponder the irony as the lasso-wielder’s life left him. Instead he rubbed his bleeding wrists, desperate to get them awake to join in the havoc and make good the escape.
Endless Night Page 16