The Mortality Principle

by Alex Archer

  Garin was way off in the distance.

  He had to hope Garin was still fixated on the road and hadn’t seen his stupid maneuver in the rearview mirror.

  He didn’t seem to have seen him.

  Roux followed him, keeping his distance, until they were well out of the city.

  Garin gave no indication that he knew he was being followed.

  That was the one benefit of a rental car—anonymity, even if Roux had a penchant for big bulky four-by-fours with off-road capabilities. One set of headlights at night was much like any other set of headlights at night. Now it was so dark that even he was riding Garin’s tail hard, and there was no way he’d be able to see the face of the driver in the car behind him.

  On the road ahead the blue flashing lights of a police car bit into the night.

  Roux understood their destination now. They were heading out to the site of the latest murder.

  But Garin showed no sign of slowing.

  Maybe he was wrong about the lights. It seemed unlikely, but Prague was a big city. That murder wouldn’t be the only crime committed tonight. But as long as he followed Garin he’d get to the truth eventually, even if it was only a confirmation of what he already knew: that thing was killing again.

  The Ferrari accelerated once they were clear of the police cordon and started to pull away with serious intent, Garin opening up the engine, its roar filling the night. It didn’t sound like a dragon at all, Roux realized. It sounded like a banshee’s wail.

  His headlights picked out a road sign. Roux saw a name he hadn’t thought about in a long time. It conjured a memory that he had worked so hard to bury.

  20

  Roux had found the tracks within an hour of seeing the bodies laid out in the church.

  The incessant rain had left the ground sodden and slippery.

  He crouched over the oversize prints of a shoeless foot in the mud. They were filled with rainwater.

  “As ever with you it comes to either/or, doesn’t it, old man? This time it’s love or adventure. It’s not much of a choice, is it?” Garin asked, no anger in his voice, just a kind of resigned amusement. Roux already knew his answer from the tone of his voice. It wasn’t love. Garin didn’t have any conception of what love actually was. His definition focused purely on the physical side of things and kept the spiritual as far from the relationship as possible. The cook—Roux didn’t even recall her name, so transitory were these kinds of relationships for his young squire—had done well to capture his attention and hold it for this long, but the first flush of passion was already gone and the novelty of waking up beside her was wearing thin.

  Their mistake was delaying their departure. They should have left the village immediately, not returned to the villa to gather their belongings, and for Garin to disappear for ten minutes while Roux hunted high and low for him. He knew exactly what Garin was doing in those ten minutes, too. Kissing the cook farewell across every inch of her buttermilk skin. She’d forget him soon enough, unless, of course, he’d left a seed in her that would grow. They needed to move on, be gone and forgotten.

  So they followed the tracks around the lake, thankful that the storms had made their task so much simpler. More than once they were treated with suspicion. News of the killings had spread like wildfire, outpacing them. Boatmen out on the water shared the story until it became the only talking point. Stranger was shunned and sent on their way without ceremony.

  Their biggest problem, though, was that as the weather continued to improve, the tracks began to fade.

  For days they followed those footprints as they set firm in the ground. But they never seemed to gain even an hour on the killer, arriving in villages two days after another spate of killings had taken place. Always two days behind the murderer. They needed horses if they were going to stand any chance of closing in on him. It was Garin’s task to locate a pair and liberate them, knowing that the men would be long gone before their crime was discovered. They rode as if the devil himself was at their back, driving their heels into the flanks of their horses, hanging on with hands tangled in their mounts’ manes for want of a bridle and tack. It was a wild ride like none Roux had known before, a race and a chase, filled with an exhilaration that made his heart pound. They were the hunters, their quarry a merciless killer who had racked up more than twenty corpses to his name in the month since he had stared in through the villa’s window.

  But somehow they lost him.

  Despite everything, the trail grew cold.

  They were forced to move from village to village, hoping to hear news of another killing, knowing how sick that hope made them, but without it they would never find the right path again. Someone had to die. They sought out any hint of death, relishing each report as they gleaned what little information they could before setting off on their journey again, no closer to catching up with the killer than they had been that first night as lightning tore the sky asunder. So close and yet so far away.

  They had to rest from time to time, their mounts able to take them only so far in a single day before exhaustion claimed them. To push them harder risked running the horses into the ground. Yet the killer never seemed to tire. His endurance was inhuman. He could outrun the horses, pushing himself faster and farther.

  “There must be a way to anticipate his destination,” Garin said one night as they warmed themselves over a makeshift fire pit. “We’ve traveled this world a dozen times. There isn’t an inch of ground we haven’t covered. If we knew, then we could find a shorter route, travel smarter not faster. We could take a coach, travel through the night instead of sleeping. Change the horses every few hours through the daylight ride.”

  Roux knew that it made sense.

  They would need to change horses regularly. Though that was not impossible, there was nothing to say their fresh mounts would be Thoroughbreds capable of matching the punishing pace the chase demanded. They had plenty of coin between them to purchase passage and to have bought the horses ten times over and then some. Work was something Roux chose to do, rarely something that he needed to do. He said it kept him honest. That was the beauty of having lived so long. Their wealth, secreted at different establishments throughout the nations under different names, may have been accumulated as the spoils of war but that didn’t make it any less valuable. Some of the treasures he had hoarded would be worth a great deal in years to come—fortunes beyond imagining—and he was determined to enjoy that money when he was ready. But for now, adventure and excitement held more value than any currency or trove of gold.

  He lived by challenges.

  He lived for a different kind of worth.

  His single purpose was to find the shards of Saint Joan’s shattered blade and reunite them so that the curse may be lifted. He had no hankering to live forever. He was tired. He had been tired for years. That was why he hunted this killer. Perhaps it might bring about an end for Roux and his apprentice.

  21

  A name on a road sign rang a bell somewhere deep inside her mind.

  A mile or so ahead there was a fork in the road, and to the left a place called Benátky. She’d heard that name not so long ago, but couldn’t remember quite where or in relation to what. It was unlike Annja to not be able to place something to do with a story. Maybe there was something important there, some piece of history in relation to her segment and what was supposed to be the live show going out in a couple of days.

  The killer could not be that far ahead of them if he was heading for the border, she reasoned, so deciding to take the brief detour she saw no reason to delay Turek.

  She made the call.

  “I’ll meet you there,” she promised.

  “Got a better offer?” Turek asked.

  They had decided to take both cars, but he was only a matter of twenty yards ahead of her.

  “Something I need to take care of,” she said. She didn’t elaborate because she didn’t really know what she could say to explain the hunch.

  “And it�
��s something that can’t wait?” the journalist asked, sounding slightly exasperated. It wasn’t that she was bailing on him that annoyed him; he was only after the story, not the killer, so it didn’t matter if he was an hour behind the monster or a day, as long as he got to the truth before any other reporter. The gold was always in being the first. That was what got the book deals.

  “Not sure,” she said. “I’ll see you at the border. Let me know if there’s anything strange going on while you’re waiting.”

  “Will do, but be honest with me, you’re not cutting me out, are you? You’re not off chasing a lead that will take you to the killer and leave me with nothing?”

  “I promise,” Annja said.

  “I’m serious. I need to be the one who breaks the story. I’ve done all the groundwork. No one else was interested in what the people on the street were saying. This is my story, Annja. It could change my life, see me on the staff of one the nationals.”

  “If I turn anything up I’ll let you know, but I promise you, I’m not trying to screw you. I don’t even know what it is about this place. It just rings a bell so I need to check it out. I won’t be more than an hour. Cover the border, and don’t let the killer escape, Jan. This is bigger than just the story. Lives are at stake.”

  “I know that, Annja. I’m counting on you,” the reporter said as he hung up. Counting on her. He wasn’t the only one who was counting on her, was he? Every vagrant between here and the border was counting on her to stop the killer even if they didn’t know it. Everyone sleeping on the street that night and every coming night was counting on her even if they never met Annja Creed. That was the burden of who and what she was, and only she could carry it.

  She tripped the blinker and took the turn toward Benátky, hoping that the hunch would pay out.

  As she drove, Annja half expected to see something to suggest she was on the right track, an omen, a portent, something, even if it was just a murder of crows lining the trees at the roadside. But there were no more blue flashing lights up ahead to indicate anything out of the ordinary. And that was what she was looking for, wasn’t it? Something out of the ordinary.

  She scanned the silhouettes of the buildings as she approached the town. The sky was full of stars, a reminder of just how far outside the city she’d traveled. A few of the houses still had lights on in their windows, but the streets were deserted.

  She drove slowly through the streets, looking, but not sure what it was she was looking for.

  This would be the perfect hunting ground for the killer if its prey could be found on these streets, she realized.

  The needle on the speedometer barely touched fifteen kilometers an hour. No matter how much she looked, she couldn’t see anything to suggest she was on anything but a wild-goose chase.

  Annja pulled the car over to the side of the road, ignoring the parking restrictions painted on the asphalt. There wasn’t anyone around to enforce them.

  She needed to think.

  She wanted to know where Roux was. More importantly, she wanted to know why he had left her in the hotel room.

  He knew more than he was telling her, that much was painfully obvious. He felt some sort of personal guilt, too. So somewhere in between his secrets and his guilt was the difference between success and failure, whatever that might be. His tight lips frustrated her. They always did. So many times he had known things that he had chosen not to share until it put her at risk or dragged her deeper into trouble. He’d always protested it was for her own good, to keep her safe, but that was nonsense. It was to keep Roux in control. He was a control freak.

  She killed the headlights, turned off the engine and listened to the silence of the street.

  There was nothing.

  The silence was absolute.

  There were no background sounds of the city life Prague offered.

  She settled back into her seat and waited.

  So much for instincts. What was she supposed to do now that she was here? There was no point in sitting and waiting for something to happen. She had to be out there looking for the killer, who could be anywhere in the world—or if not the world, in the miles of countryside surrounding Prague—and almost certainly not here in this silent township in the middle of nowhere.

  She looked down at her hands, wondering if she’d just made the mistake that would let the killer slip through her fingers again.

  22

  Garin slipped out of sight for a moment when he entered the town.

  There was no other traffic around and following Garin too closely would only serve to arouse suspicion. There was nothing to be gained by giving the game away now, so close to the finish line. So much of the place remained recognizable despite the passage of time. There were changes, of course, subtle ones, little things like the overhead wires of the telephone network that would no doubt disappear again in a few years as 4G took hold and wiped out the need for landlines. But none of those subtle changes were enough to turn the town into an unfamiliar place.

  Roux waited when Garin’s sports car—as out of place as that fine craftsmanship could ever be—took a turn and disappeared out of sight.

  He rolled down his window so he could listen for its engine as it negotiated the narrow streets.

  He heard the sound of the engine change, grumbling throatily one last time before being silenced.

  Garin had stopped not far around the corner, close enough for Roux to hear the echoing slam of the door as he closed it.

  Roux left his own car where it was and climbed out, but unlike Garin, he closed the door as quietly as he could so as not to betray his presence. He hugged the wall as he made his way to the corner.

  Hearing the sound of footsteps moving away from him, he chanced a look around the building’s edge to see Garin disappear into an alleyway.

  He knew that the winding passage would lead the way to the castle.

  This was the place where it had all started.

  It was also the place where he had thought it had all ended.

  Roux had been wrong. He knew that now. Their presence here was all he needed to know just how wrong he had been.

  But would the killer really return to this place?

  Or was it worse than he had first suspected and it had never left? He couldn’t bring himself to believe that, because that would mean someone else was mimicking its actions, and the only person capable of something like that—of having the knowledge, the skill and the sheer bloody ruthlessness—was Garin. And that was his deepest, darkest fear. Garin was capable of everything that killer had done. Had fighting monsters for so long, finally turned him into one? They had spent six centuries and more waging battles of one kind or another.

  What had that cost them in terms of their souls and selves?

  23

  Prague. They had pursued the killer across Europe, through every valley and ridge, to finally find themselves in Prague, and yet they were still a decent morning’s ride away from the site of the most recent death. They were always traveling in the killer’s footsteps, gaining a little but never enough, and no matter how hard they’d ridden their horses, how many times they had changed their carriages and how little they had slept, the murderer was always ahead of them.

  They had done everything humanly possible to keep up the punishing pace, taking it in turns to drive the coach they had bought, switching out the horses for fresh ones at inns along the way, but nothing helped. They still had to eat. They still grew tired. They still had to rest, pausing inevitably for longer than they needed to.

  But always they gave chase again, dogging the killer’s trail.

  There had been stories of murders here—one of them recent, the other many years ago, but somehow a connection had been drawn between the two. In drinking houses in the back alleys of the town it was the only topic of conversation. The legend endured. “This has to be the end of it, surely?” Garin said. “We can’t keep chasing this shadow forever. There has to be a place along the road where we say en
ough is enough.”

  “Admit defeat?” Roux asked, shielding his eyes from the early-morning sun. “Why would we want to give up? The killer can’t keep going forever. It is impossible. We are closer today than we were yesterday. We have to catch up with him eventually.”

  “Can’t it? How do you know that? Apart from optimism? Who says he can’t keep going? I don’t like the word can’t, old man. After all, we seem to defy that word quite a lot ourselves, don’t we?”

  Roux fell silent.

  There were things that he had no intention of sharing with his protégé, things that he would rather take to the grave. The idea of giving up, though, stuck in his craw.

  Until that moment, until Garin voiced the possibility, it hadn’t even crossed his mind.

  “If you have all the time in the world, why would you give up on anything?” he asked. It was a philosophical question, but there was an element of truth to it. There was no finite “end” that said they had to give up the chase. There was no clock inside their bodies counting down to oblivion.

  “There will always be another tomorrow,” Roux continued, “and beyond that there will always be another day when we can think about doing something else. Today we catch a killer. It doesn’t matter how many todays that takes, does it? When you have all the time in the world, why would you worry about wasting any of it?”