Blood Red (9781101637890)

by Lackey, Mercedes

  “Well, that depends,” Dominik replied.

  “Depends upon what?” She looked at him curiously, wondering what, exactly, was going to come out of his mouth. And whether or not she was going to be annoyed with him over it.

  “On whether you think you’ll be able to move and act more freely if you are ‘just’ our sister, pretending to be a mere girl bored with us and our fascination with stupid old tales, or if it will be better for you to be the equal partner in this scholastic fishing expedition.” Dominik shrugged helplessly. “I haven’t a good answer either way.”

  “Why not both?” she suggested. “When we get to Casolt, I can see what happens when I play the scholar. If we happen across a village on the way there, I can see what happens when I’m the bored sister. We’ll use whatever works best.”

  “Well said, O Solomon,” Markos put in from inside the wagon. “Selimbar is on the way, and it is a good place to stop and eat and make some inquiries.”

  “Well that was unproductive.” Rosa glanced back at Selimbar, and pulled a sour face. Not because of the village—but because the town of Sibiu was clearly visible in the distance, visible enough to make out the spires of that impressive church.

  The difference from Sibiu could not possibly have been more obvious however. Out here, white, brick buildings were nowhere near as common as wooden ones, and tile roofs gave way to shingle and thatch. Many houses had a beehive-shaped oven near the kitchen door. And these looked like German villages.

  That makes sense . . . with the houses so close together in the city, fire could easily leap from one to the other if they were wood—and thatch and shingle can catch fire quickly from a single spark. And in the city, it is easier and cheaper to buy bread than make it yourself.

  “Well I certainly heard enough stories of wolves carrying people off in winter to fill ten books,” said Markos, who had taken Dominik’s former spot beside Rosa in the driver’s box by the simple expedient of getting there first. Dominik was sulking in the wagon itself. “Lots of stories of witches and ghosts, too. Oh, and did you know Vlad Dracul’s bad son was the ruler back in Sibiu until he was stabbed to death?”

  Or perhaps she was doing him a disservice. He might actually be writing their notes up in a more legible format . . .

  In a moving wagon? Not likely.

  “Well I got nothing except questions about my dowry and attempts to find out if my virtue was negotiable,” she replied, and made a rude noise. “More of the latter than the former, so pretending to be a modest and bored sister was no defense. I think the assumption was that you two were trying to market me.”

  Markos made a choking sound; she pounded him on the back when it appeared he actually was choking. “I am . . . very sorry I was not aware of that,” he managed. “You should have said something! I would have—”

  “Dear heavens, I wasn’t going to tell either of you until we were well away!” she retorted. “I’ve killed vampir, I’ve killed shifters, I’ve turned trolls to dust. The day I can’t deal with some idiot who thinks because I come from a city I have never seen a real man before, the sun will probably rise in the west! The only time I suspected the cad would not take no for an answer, I spitted a fly on the table between us with my dagger, then sweetly apologized. That shut him up.”

  “Um,” Markos said, after a moment. “I expect it would shut me up, too.”

  “What did you learn, besides tales of wolves?” she asked. The road wound its way along the valley between the hills. There were a lot more woods than fields, now. It was beginning to feel like home, actually.

  “Mostly that wolves are bad enough hereabouts in the winter that a real shifter could probably kill at will and no one would notice,” Markos said, thoughtfully. “Summer is different, though. The wolves go back to the steppes; they come with the snow and leave when it is gone. So all those disappearances in summer are definitely not natural.”

  The wagon jounced and swayed over ruts in the dirt road, despite Rosa’s careful driving. This was very pretty country; it was a pity she couldn’t take the time to appreciate it. She was too busy trying to keep the wagon on the best bits of the road. It seemed to be hay time here; many of the fields were either full of drying hay, or there were hay carts gathering the dried fodder up. It would not be stored in barns, however. All up and down the road, there were peculiar haystacks in various stages of formation, from the foundation of tree branches around a center pole, to the tripod of crude racks upon which the stack was formed, to the finished stack, tall and conical. They were carefully raked before they were considered finished, groomed so that rain would run right down the outside and not spoil the hay, then topped with a heavy wreath and perhaps some branches to keep the stack from blowing away. Rosa had never seen haystacks like this. It made her want to burrow into them like a child.

  “The road will get better soon,” Markos promised. “Not as much traffic. These roads get churned up near a village in summertime.”

  “I hope so; we are making wretched time,” she grumbled. “At this rate, it will take us two days to get to Casolt, and I had thought we would be there by nightfall. So tell me more, if there is anything.”

  “Nothing, except ‘unnatural’ things that are strictly related to the village. Local haunts, local curses, local witches. And that tells me that the predation hasn’t gotten this far—that outside of Casolt is probably where it starts.” He tapped his finger on the side of his nose. “And since I know how much territory a shifter can cover, that gives me a good idea of the spread.”

  “If it is a shifter,” she pointed out.

  “If it is a shifter,” he admitted. “It’s just within the realm of possible that it is a real wolf pack that remains here in summer, having discovered that humans are easy to hunt and tasty.”

  She raised her eyes from the immediate mess that the road was, and saw, to her pleasure, that things did get a little smoother a little further ahead. “It could be something else entirely, too,” she replied absently. “Is there anything—well—local that you know about that it could be?”

  “These mountains hold a lot of secrets, but everything I can think of is a variation on a vampir or a shifter,” Markos said, after a moment. “I can’t imagine it could be a balaur, I should think someone would have noticed a dragon with more than one head.”

  “I would think someone would have noticed a dragon with only one head,” Rosa said dryly, as the wagon finally got to a part of the road that was not as rutted, and she clucked to the horse. “And it would take an awfully powerful one to manifest physically enough to eat people.”

  Markos was silent. “We keep coming to the same conclusion. A shifter,” he said, finally. “The only question is, what kind is he?”

  “What have you got that is native—besides your family?” she asked. “The vampir I killed was a little different from the ones I hunted in Germany.”

  “Moroi, maybe,” Markos mused. “I don’t know, some of our vampir are also shape-shifters, like the strigoi. And, of course, there are completely human sorcerers that use blood magic to transform . . .”

  “That could be why all the killing. He has to keep killing to renew and power the transformative spell.” She let go of the reins with one hand to rub her temple. “If so, he’ll be the most powerful shifter I’ve ever seen. It will take all of us to track him and kill him.”

  “If he’s too much for us, I could call on the family, maybe,” Markos said.

  “Then we’d take the chance that by the time they got here, he’d flee or go into hiding. The reason this is working for him is that he’s in a remote area where wolves kill people all the time, and his chances of being discovered were almost nothing until you and Dominik showed up.” She frowned. “If he retreats into Russia, we’ll never find him again.”

  “And he’ll know who was hunting him.” Markos went a little pale. “It wouldn’t be that hard f
or him to pick us Nagys off one at a time. We don’t have that much magic.”

  “And by the time you’d gotten help, he could be gone again.” She nodded grimly. “The one advantage we have right now is that he doesn’t know he’s being hunted. We have to get him before he realizes that. My mentor told me about a vampir once that not only figured out he was being hunted, but by who and what, and over the course of a century completely destroyed a White Lodge and every family that ever had a member in it. On the whole, shifters aren’t nearly that smart, and they tend to succumb to the beast the more they shift and the older they get, but if this one has been killing for the past forty years—he’s not the usual sort of shifter.”

  “And . . . maybe it is just wolves, robbers, and anarchists,” Markos added, after a long silence.

  “There’s one other possibility . . .” she said reluctantly. “The God of the Hunt taking sacrifices.”

  That happened sometimes—mostly in England, Scotland and Wales. Even Ireland. Never in living memory in Germany or Austria, but—

  But to her relief, Markos laughed. “We don’t have any such thing,” he assured her. “You go back to the Dacians, and we have the god Heros, who never hunts humans, only beasts. The goddess Bendis was a huntress too, but she never hunted humans either.”

  “Well that explains why the being I called up before was so willing to help me,” she replied.

  Markos nodded. “He’d have been irked at the shifter in his woods, a thing that is unnatural, a hunter that kills without discrimination and wastes what he kills. Both he and Bendis aided human hunters. But of course, Heros had to play with you a little before he helped you, that’s just how supernatural creatures are. Especially gods, though I have to say, our gods were never as fickle or contrary as the Greek and Roman ones. Simple people, we Dacians, and we had simple gods. Give them their sacrifice, and they were right on your side, and no trickery about it.” He paused a moment. “The Nagys—my family anyway—are almost pure Dacian.”

  Rosa shook her head. “I’m no scholar, I have no idea what that means.”

  “Well, when the Greeks ran into us, they called us the ‘people of the wolf,’ and although most historians think that’s because we had wolf battle standards, or wolf totems, or some wolf-inspired warrior society, my family knows better. We were of the Appuli tribe. We were never conquered by the Romans, for obvious reasons. Hard to exterminate a village that can turn into wolves and run away, harder still when we can load everything onto our horses and donkeys and drive them ahead of us.” He chuckled, and her eyes widened.

  “That far back?” she exclaimed.

  He nodded. “We became part of the ‘free Dacians’ eventually, although the family always stayed a little apart. That’s why we are different from most shifters. It’s in our blood. It’s a lot harder for the beast to get control—not impossible, but a lot harder. That’s also why my people supposedly told Alexander the Great that we could not die, it was mistranslated. What we told him was that his people could not kill us, which in wolf form is certainly true.”

  “How do you know all these things?” she demanded, a little suspiciously.

  “Because when Dominik went off to study medicine and I came to join him, it wasn’t as if I needed to learn a—a trade or anything. We don’t need a lawyer, or a doctor—just shift, and almost anything heals, even most illnesses.” He raised an eyebrow at her. “So I decided to study history, our history. I put together what I was taught with what our family traditions were, and suddenly a lot of things in the oral tradition made a lot more sense.”

  “You’re going to make a convincing folklorist,” she observed. “Which is good, because now that we are on a better road we might well make Casolt just after sundown.” She glanced back the way they had come. Finally the spires of Sibiu were out of sight.

  “I’ve had some practice; when I first came back home, I went around to all of the oldest people in the clan and collected stories.” He shrugged. “Mostly, you listen and take a lot of notes. If something isn’t clear, you ask questions. And if anyone asks you why you are doing this, you tell them it’s because young people don’t listen anymore. That’s something that has always been true.”

  She laughed, and the horse flicked his ears back at her. “Old people like to hear that. That’s something that has always been true, too.”

  “Oh hey, look!” He pointed ahead. There was a clearly artificial point showing at the top of a hill far ahead. A steeple.

  “Basilica?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “Saxon church. There are a lot of Saxons hereabouts. You might get more out of the locals if you speak German than if you speak Romanian.”

  “Well we can try both.” She clucked to the horse, who seemed a bit more eager to move ahead. Maybe because it was afternoon and he was hoping for a stable.

  Sheep, a few cattle, herds of goats. Fewer animals than there would have been in the fields of home. “Why Saxons?” she asked.

  “The Hungarian Kings—including dear old Vlad!—invited them to come as mercenaries,” Markos said. “The commanders and officers got land and titles, the rest got land. Thanks to the Turks, there were no living Hungarians or Romanians to claim it, and that meant there wasn’t much intermarrying and the old customs were held onto. That was a long time ago, of course, so no Lutherans here, just good Saxon Catholics.”

  That could be very advantageous, since living in the Schwarzwald meant Rosa was more Catholic than Lutheran. She pondered all the ways she could use that as they slowly neared the distant steeple, and the sun passed behind them.

  It was down by the time they reached Casolt, and they arrived in the village in the blue dusk. The church was high on the hill above the village itself, and unlike Sibiu the houses were painted in many colors and seemed to be wooden. Some had tiled roofs, but most were shingled. As they drove along the main road, with the houses all about them, a few people came out of their doors at the sound of cartwheels, but most probably thought they were fellow villagers, late-come from the fields.

  The horse picked up his head and his feet, and a moment later Rosa saw why. There was a tavern or an inn ahead of them, people sitting outside at little tables drinking the incredibly potent plum liquor that was ubiquitous in this part of the world. Rosa had already encountered it in Brasov and knew to be wary of it.

  Even though the horse was moving faster than he usually did, it still wasn’t anything like a headlong gallop, and the people sitting about had plenty of time to take them in, recognize this wasn’t a farm cart or a Roma wagon, and call to the people inside to come and look. So by the time the horse stopped, looking about eagerly for a stable, everyone was out and curious. But in time-honored tradition, they waited for the innkeeper in his long white apron to come up to Markos.

  “Welcome to Casolt, strangers,” he said. In German.

  “Thank you very much,” Rosa replied. “My brothers and I are scholars.” Then she nodded to Markos to indicate he should say something.

  But that was when Dominik popped his head out of the door behind them. Exerting himself to the utmost, he described their little group, and somehow, from the bare bones of “we are going to be folklorists,” he managed to construct an entire history for the three of them as Rosa sat there, astonished.

  It seemed they were not just scholars themselves, but the children of scholars, and their father was associated with Budapest University. Which presumably accounted for the extremely eccentric notion of a female getting a university education and traveling with her brothers to collect stories. Rosa could only marvel; it was a good, strong, simple story, and having him pop out and tell it right now meant he wouldn’t have to repeat it. Nor would they, which also meant there was far less chance they would contradict each other.

  Dominik continued to elaborate. Their mother had died young, so their father had brought them all up alike. He was not wealthy
, so he augmented his income by writing, and particularly wanted to collect tales from around Transylvania so they wouldn’t be lost. He couldn’t go himself, so he sent his children out. They’d had great success west and north of Sibiu where people were universally friendly and helpful.

  Oh that is good, Dominik! That puts them in competition to show us equal or better hospitality.

  By this time, most of the villagers at the inn had gathered about them. “We were hoping that either there were rooms to be had, or that we could put our wagon somewhere and sleep in it,” Dominik concluded. The innkeeper eyed them all dubiously.

  “I am not sure fine young gentlemen and the lady would care for my rooms,” he said.

  Markos chuckled. “We are all hardier than you think,” he said. “We are not soft, even though we have lived in cities! As long as the weather holds, we have traveled for three years now, and camp like shepherds in the hills as often as not.”

  Rosa noted he didn’t say “like gypsies;” the poor Roma had a poor reputation among village folk. Though it had to be said; there was some truth in the reputation. They certainly did steal whenever they got a chance.

  Some clans did, anyway.

  Now the innkeeper brightened a bit. “Well, if you would come see the rooms . . .”

  “I will,” said Rosa, handed Dominik the reins, and jumped down off the box. The innkeeper led her into his unprepossessing building, while presumably Dominik maneuvered the wagon into a place where it was safe and stabled the horses.

  The main room was dark, and held the ubiquitous aroma of meat and vegetable stew heavily seasoned with paprika that she expected. But beneath that, was the smell of cleanliness, which was a good sign, and the place had a good wooden floor, which was another good sign.

  There were two tiny rooms, with beds taking up most of the space. But the linens were clean, the beds were featherbeds, and there was no sign of lice or other undesirable bedfellows. So Rosa set to bargaining with their host, and by the time the young men came in with the two small bags they would use for overnight, she had struck a deal.