Rucker pulled his pistol from under his pillow, for all the good it would do him.
“Except that,” he said, referring back to his assurance that there was nothing to fear.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
North of Piteşti
Wallachia region of Romania
Eastern Europe
Rucker, Terah, Nick, and Deitel retreated to the far side of the fire pit. The clay monster stood opposite, blocking the only way out. It had stopped and howled again, a sound that unnerved all four of them. Oddly, Rucker noticed, the horses bedded over in the adjacent cavern hadn’t reacted at all to the commotion or to the seven-foot-tall mud creature.
All four had their pistols trained on the thing. It hadn’t attacked, really, but it was not exactly a nonaggressive presence. They all stood frozen in place.
“Is not something you see every day, even in Romania,” Filotoma said.
The thing took a menacing step forward, and that was enough.
Rucker and Terah emptied their pistols into the giant. Deitel had taken to carrying a small Walther 9mm; he emptied it into the creature as well. The sound of the gunfire was amplified by the stone walls all around them.
There was a moment of deafening silence following the explosion of gunfire, when the only sound getting through the ringing in their ears was the whinnying of the now frightened horses. They all stood frozen, realizing their shots had done nothing to the creature.
Then Filotoma raised his one-shot Derringer and fired.
Terah, Rucker, and Deitel all turned to look at him.
“Really, Nick?” Rucker said.
“What? My business is business, not shooting monsters, smart guy,” Filotoma said.
The thing hadn’t made a sound or reacted at all to the gunfire. The bullet holes seemed to close up. Now it stalked toward Rucker. From the satchel by his bedroll he pulled the Tesla pistol. He charged the weapon and fired it straight at the creature’s chest.
The whole Tesla gun vibrated, hummed, and the blue glass bulb at the back lit up. A nearly straight arc of what looked like blue lightning shot outward at the creature, striking it right in the chest.
It lit up the night.
It had absolutely no effect.
There was only one smart thing to do—run for his life, but that wasn’t the choice Rucker made. He had to distract the thing so the others could run. He charged at the creature, leaping up and wrapping his arms around its neck and yelling to the others, “Run!”
The creature didn’t even struggle against Rucker, who realized, to his embarrassment, that the thing barely deigned to notice he was on its back. Deitel picked up a thick branch from the pile of firewood to hit the thing repeatedly in the face. Its face would become misshapen and then mold back into place. Finally, it reached behind, grabbed Rucker by the collar, and threw him to the ground.
The four squared off against the beast then, forming a semicircle.
The beast lunged clumsily after one and then another of them, knocking over the supplies unpacked from the horses. It stepped through the fire, sending burning logs rolling through the cave.
“What is this thing?” Rucker asked as it came closer to him. “A Transylvanian monster or something the Nazis cooked up?”
“Like I wrote the Necronomicon. How should I know?” Terah asked. “I’m betting it’s one of the Black Sun’s creations. The Germans are some sick bastards.”
“Thank you,” Deitel said sarcastically, dodging as the creature lashed out at him.
“Sorry,” Terah said.
“It’s big and mean, but a little slow,” Rucker said.
“Just like every other Nazi I’ve ever met,” Deitel said.
“Gavver! Atch!” came a woman’s disembodied voice.
The thing stopped. Its hands fell to its sides and it stood up straight, almost mashing its head against the cavern ceiling.
“I give you one chance to answer, and I know if you lie,” said the voice from the shadows. “Who are you?”
Filotoma spoke in the language of the Romani: “We’re friends of the travelers; friends of the widow’s son.”
The voice and Filotoma both fired off at each other, too fast for any of the others to follow even if they had spoken Rom.
Finally, the voice said, “Gavver, avree.”
The giant thing lowered its arms.
A young Gypsy woman stepped out into the light of the campfire. She wore a black hooded cloak but was dressed in an all white, low-cut blouse a white, loose skirt that fell below her knees, white sandals and gloves. The brightness of her clothes stood in stark contrast to the cloak, her dark olive skin and black hair. She was only fifteen, but fully mature and beautiful.
“You know the Romani,” she said. It was not a question. Rucker knew what Filotoma had said was a cant—code between the Romani and those they considered friends.
“What the hell is going on?” he asked, reloading and then holstering his Colt pistol.
“What is going on here is none of your business. You are not Romani. You are free to go. And I would go if I were you—there will be blood in the nights to come,” she said. Her voice revealed fury and pain.
“What happened to you?” Terah said softly.
Tears came to the girl’s face but her voice did not break.
“The Nazis are going to pay for what they have done to my people,” she said. “What they did right here on this very ground soaked in the blood of my people.”
Pain was etched deeply on the girl’s face. But not as deeply as resolve. And hate.
“Your tribe was camped here?” Rucker asked.
“Yes, that was my family. Before the devils came.”
“And they’re all dead?”
“Yes. I am the last.”
“The Danis family?”
“How could you . . . What do you want?” she asked. She waved her hands in a strange pattern and for a moment they started to glow. The giant creature swiveled its head to look straight at Rucker. Even without expression, the menace was obvious.
“Look, easy,” Rucker said. “We may have common cause here. If you can get the big pottery man-thing to stop glaring at us, we can offer you some hot food and coffee.”
She was as wary as she was tired.
Rucker slowly reached out and lifted her face by her chin with his finger. He smiled warmly.
“Come on, I’d be a dilo—a fool—to try to trick someone with a monster.” He had picked up a few Roma words from Nick.
She didn’t smile, but she did nod her assent. The Gypsy girl spoke a few unrecognizable words to her creature, which then walked off into the woods.
The fire was going out. Deitel and Terah began gathering some of the scattered kindling and piling it in the pit. The only light now was from the lanterns.
“It will take a moment to get the fire going again,” Terah said to the girl.
The girl brought her hands together, palms up, fingers curled, as she whispered, “Yagg,” and wiggled her fingers.
A jet of flames burst from the smoldering dry wood thrown in the fire pit. It settled down and the fire was once again burning steadily.
“Okay, so there’s that,” Terah said.
“First things first,” Rucker said as he poured her a cup of coffee. “What’s your name?”
“Jaelle— Amria. Amria Damara.”
Filotoma nodded. “The ‘bitter curse’ it means, yes?”
The girl cupped her hands around the ceramic mug.
“Yes. I chose the name for myself. To hide from both the devil and from God, because I don’t want Him to see what I will do,” she said.
The silence around the campfire that followed stretched out like a rubber band pulled too tight.
“All right, then,” Deitel finally said. “Hungry?”
Amria accepted a bowl of the lamb pasta, and then another. Terah offered her a blanket as the night air grew colder.
Whether it was exhaustion or the fact that so much injust
ice had been placed on the shoulders of a girl so young and innocent—the weeks alone as the last survivor of her tribe—Amria let go of her burden. She told her story—the night the Nazis came and destroyed everything.
It was the story of how her life ended on her wedding day, and how all of her people came to die in terror. Even the children. Even her little brother, just eight. The day Jaelle died and Amria was born.
All because the Nazis wanted the Sacred Tshurri.
“I am the guardian of the Sacred Tshurri. They all died and not me,” she said, spitting out the bitter words. “I would trade it for all their lives back, I think sometimes, but then I know that all would die—the whole world—if dark men gain the power of this.”
From within the folds of her cloak she pulled a foot-long object wrapped thickly in oilcloth and tied with black twine.
“It is for this that they died,” she said. “It is for this that I will exact my vengeance. It is through this—how it makes my eldritch weaving even stronger—that I will take their lives and their souls.”
The supreme and tragic irony of it all, she said, was that none of her family members even knew that she was the guardian for this season of the Sacred Tshurri. None of the adults who were interrogated one by one by the skull-faced madman. Their minds ripped asunder. Their bodies torn apart and buried in a mass grave.
And then the children.
When she told the four what happened to the children, Deitel felt his body go numb. Terah and Filotoma wept. Deitel could never have believed such evil truly existed. Whether it was because the sane mind couldn’t accept it, or because Deitel—like so many other Germans in the face of the New Order—just didn’t want to believe it, he could hide from it no longer.
This was no longer a grand adventure. This was reality. Black, bleak, meaningless reality. Evil, death, and decay were the only victors in life, and the takers and the killers were the ones who . . .
Deitel saw the piercing fury in Rucker’s eyes. It burned white hot like a furnace. A day, an hour, even a moment before, the look would have terrified him.
But not now. No, now it brought the German doctor something else. A spark that glowed against the darkness, rising and burning away all the despair.
It gave him something he didn’t expect to feel.
It gave him hope.
Their eyes met. Rucker nodded. He understood.
Righteous fury. Resolve. Justice. Hope.
These existed in this world, too, and in men, as much as did evil, despair, and horror. One could choose to give in to the despair and evil, or one could find hope—and even justice—in the unlikeliest of places or people.
One could even be that hope.
The fury in Rucker’s eyes alighted something in Deitel. For just the briefest hint of a moment, he felt a passing sense of pity for those upon whose heads that fury would fall.
Against the overwhelming forces of darkness and death a man could stand—unbending and undaunted—and refuse to yield.
“We can help you,” Rucker said to the girl. “We can protect you. We can help you protect the Tshurri. We can take you and it to a place far away from the evil men who did this to you.” He looked her level in the eyes. “I will help you balance the scales.”
The girl saw in his eyes what Deitel had. She placed a hand on his face and closed her eyes. Her hand started to glow. It wasn’t that he felt something in his mind so much as in his heart, as if she read what he was feeling rather than thinking.
“I believe you,” she said.
She waved her left hand in a circular motion and pointed two fingers on her right hand upward. Again a glow without a source enclosed her hands.
“Gavver will patrol the grounds for us, keeping us safe,” she said. “An ancient weaving gift from our Hebrew cousins.”
She curled up in the blanket, the Tshurri secreted away in her cloak again, and was immediately asleep.
“All the same,” Rucker said as he checked his pistol and took a blanket to the cave entrance.
While the others bedded down, Deitel went out to where Rucker sat vigil.
“Now we have the Spear of Destiny,” he said after a moment. “It even came to us. I can’t believe we are this lucky.”
Rucker nodded. “Oh trust me, I can’t, either.”
“What next?” he asked.
“In the morning we convince the girl first to let us get it and her as far away from Europe as we can, as fast as we can,” Rucker said. “She’ll understand the reasoning there.”
“And then?”
“And then I figure out a way to help her visit vengeance on them that murdered her family.”
Deitel was about to ask, because after all, it wasn’t part of the job he was being paid for. And then he stopped himself. Rucker had given the girl his word. That was enough.
Deitel climbed back into his bedroll by the fire. Off in the night, he could hear a wolf howl.
He nodded. He knew how it felt.
Then he found himself smiling.
It was the same smile he’d seen on Rucker’s face.
Deitel awoke to the sound of quiet conversation. The fire was smoldering. He checked his watch: 5:00 A.M. Rucker had said sunrise wouldn’t be until 6:45 here.
Rucker, Terah, and Filotoma listened as Amria told them the story of the spear and how her people were its guardians through the ages. Deitel sat up. Terah placed a mug of hot coffee in his hands.
“None of us know when it first came into our hands,” the Gypsy girl said, “but it was sometime after the second incursion from the east, before Martellus drove the easterners away in the long before.”
“Charles Martel. That was the eighth century,” Terah said.
Amria explained that for centuries the Romani had kept the Spear of Destiny—the Sacred Tshurri—safe from the world, and the world safe from it. The fathers of the Hebrew tribe that had spirited it away believed that only their Romani cousins would understand the dangers of such power in the hands of those with power.
The Romani drabnari divined its powers, and how its power could be affected by their eldritch weavings and consecrations. They also knew its potential for evil. So they kept it secret even from their own tribes. The drabnari women, in typical Rom fashion, even sowed misinformation about the Sacred Tshurri, ensuring it would be lost to the winds where rumors beget rumors further from the truth in every telling.
They did not count on the brutality and resolve of one man, so obsessed with power and with overcoming death that he cut through all the secrets and lies and webs of misinformation. His name was Vlad Tepes.
He sought it, he found it.
No one knew what became of the spear after he was said to have died. In part, it was because Tepes didn’t really die.
“For almost four hundred years no Rom or even drabnari would venture closer than a night’s ride from Poenari Citadel,” Amria said.
And yet the drabnari women continued their ancient custom of passing down the stories of the Sacred Tshurri, certain that one day they would again safeguard the holy relic from the world of men.
They were wise, Amria said.
“Just a half century ago, the ancient spirit of the demon count was driven from Poenari Citadel. Driven away by mere mortal men of faith and science. I’m told some penny novelist named Stoker even wrote a book based on it. Shortly after the real events of their incursion into the castle, there was—well, they called it a rock slide, but we know better. A portion of the castle’s southern tower fell into the valley. One of the sister drabnari—the curse finally broken—retrieved the Sacred Tshurri, and we began anew our sacred trust.”
“And it just so happened,” Terah said, “that when the demons of this day—the soldiers who bear the mark of the broken cross—came hunting the Tshurri, it was you who protected it.”
Amria nodded.
“My people were slaughtered not even knowing it was I the swine were searching for. Now I will not hide the Tshurri any longer. I wi
ll use it to destroy them. We Romani have long known the secrets of the Tshurri. It is much more powerful than those small minds could ever imagine.”
Rucker stopped her.
“Amria, the Nazis know the secret of the spear as well. They’ll hunt down and execute every last Romani in Europe to find it.”
Her dark eyes flashed equal parts anger and passion, but they also held bitter regret and guilt. She felt guilt for surviving the Nazi massacre. She felt guilt because she should have thought of some way to stop them.
“Amria, your . . . that thing in the woods—Gavver, you called it? Is it, too, connected to the spear?” Rucker asked.
“That is my golem. Gavver, the soldier. I made him from the sacred earth of the Rom to protect me,” she said.
Terah nodded.
“What is the power of the Tshurri?”
“It can bring death and summon the legions of the underworld,” she said. “From the mindless, rotting feeders that eat the living to the ancient Lords of Darkness, like what Vlad Tepes became.”
Silence.
Rucker shook his head.
“I am so renegotiating my contract with Lysander,” he said. “I know he didn’t mention Lords of Darkness.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Campsite
Near Poenari Citadel
Wallachia region of Romania
Eastern Europe
For a while everyone was quiet, sipping on lukewarm coffee. Amria wiped her mouth with her sleeve.
“Amria,” Rucker said, “you know we have to get you and the Tshurri—the spear—far away from here, don’t you?”
She cast a wary look at the pilot.
“Don’t fear. Just listen. You know what will happen if Hitler and his minions get hold of it. They will march across the world, and they will have their Thousand Year Reich,” Rucker said. “Or worse, the dead will rise and march across the earth—same outcome.”
Death's Head Legion: The Spear of Destiny: Part Two of Three Page 13