Tale of The Thunderbolt

by E. E. Knight

  "That is bad, especially if it is a centipede. Turn yourself so it rests in your trousers, rather than against your skin."

  Valentine shifted, wondering if after all the hazards he faced he would finally be brought down by an insect. Whatever it was decided to cling to his thigh.

  "It's still there."

  "Take down your pants."

  Victo woke up and looked at the operation. Valentine got into a position as if he were doing a push-up, and Narcisse helped him take down the loose cotton pants.

  "It is a centipede," she said, smiling. Valentine looked down. It was long and black, with painful-looking pincers waving back and forth. Narcisse maneuvered her head and blew on the centipede. It didn't care for the breeze and began crawling down his leg. Still blowing, she herded it onto his lowered trousers, and from there used a stick to encourage it to return to the debris on the floor.

  "They can kill, though for a man as healthy as you, it might just be very painful."

  "The same thing happened to a friend of mine," Victo said. "It bit his sack-he said it swelled up like a mango. Oh, how he howled."

  Valentine grimaced. "Thanks for waiting to tell me that."

  Valentine heard the guerrillas first as he cast about that morning with his hard ears. The dog-led trio was following a game trail west up yet another hillside. Five or six men, keeping concealed, paralleled their track up the slope. He picked out their step from the cacophony of the Haitian forest: birdcalls, creaking trees, and wind in leaves.

  He called a halt. The dogs startled at the sound of the guerrillas' approach down the hillside. Two came down to greet them; the rest observed from above. Valentine was relieved to hear glad words of greeting rather than a challenge when they caught sight of Victo. They were well fed if scantily dressed, with rifles tied across their shoulders and short wooden spears tipped with metal and thorn-bristled clubs. They embraced and descended into a bantering conversation Valentine couldn't begin to follow.

  Victo turned to him with a smile. "They were sent to find us, Captain Valentine. Word of your escape reached the hills. They are also in contact with your ship. It is waiting off Labadee not far from here."

  Valentine's growling stomach asked the next question. "Do they have food?"

  "Soon, soon. Their company watches the road out of Limbe at the river. They have a camp there. It is a downhill walk."

  "Thank God."

  "But soon you will be climbing mountains again, my friend. You must see the keeper of the weapon against Kur."

  "So you do know. What is it? Don't tell me I traveled a thousand miles for an old voudou curse."

  "No. Papa Legba will tell you more. I do not know much about how it works. A very old magic, they say. But even the Whisperers fear to cross into this part of Haiti."

  "Where do I find Papa Legba?"

  Victo's eyes furrowed. "They did not tell you? You must go up to the Citadelle. To meet the Kurian there. We call him Papa Legba. He will show you the weapon."

  Chapter Seven

  La Citadelle, Haiti: A black revolutionary known as "the Tiger"-who earned his reputation by sawing people in half-dreamed of Haiti's Citadelle as one of a ring of forts to guard Hispaniola against a return of the white slaveholders. The work of two hundred thousand laborers, of whom twenty thousand perished and, according to island legend, had their blood used as mortar to cement the stones, reshaped the top of the mountain with battlements faintly resembling a giant ship. This grim monument looks out on eroded mountains, now being reclaimed by the lush forests of the days when Christopher Columbus viewed them.

  Set in walls a hundred feet high and fully thirty feet thick at their base, gunports like shaded black eyes look out on the north coast of Haiti and the steep track leading to La Citadelle. It is exactly the kind of cyclopean monument the Kurians make their refuge as they order the affairs of men. Behind walls of cannonballs piled like banks of skulls, there are storerooms and cisterns enough to feed an army for a year, space for troops, and catacombs beneath ready for untold horrors. The Kurian Lord has perches aplenty to stand, brooding at an altitude of three thousand feet while the stars whirl overhead. He could contemplate his domain in security, knowing that even a United States infantry division of the twentieth century would have a tough time blasting his men from the mountaintop, but their like no longer exist on Vampire Earth.

  Were the Citadelle's lord looking out from his sun-bleached battlements one bright April morning, he would have seen a strange column ascending the switchback trail to his door. A black man hikes in the lead, being helped up the hillside by his sniffing dogs. Behind him a muscular mass of apelike Grogs, using their arms as much as their legs to negotiate the slope, followed by a taller, fawn-colored relative carrying a gun with a six-foot barrel. Behind him a handsome, dark-haired man with a slight limp uses a staff to get help up the worst parts of the trail. Ragged black soldiers, all wary eyes and ready weapons, follow in single file. The Kurian might think it a strange, pathetic assortment to challenge the stronghold atop the Pic La Fer-riere, let alone the entire Kurian Order.

  David Valentine's second thoughts collided with third- and fourth-thoughts on the long climb. He had thrown the dice with his life lying on the table on more than one occasion, but never on such a strange gamble as this. Were it not for Ahn-Kha's steady presence beside him, locking his long toes around tree roots and rocks as he helped him over washouts on the trail up the mountain, he would have returned to the Thunderbolt days ago and quitted his task. Despair had never struck him when the bullets were cracking all around, but waited to infiltrate once he had a full belly and a decent night's sleep.

  He had rejoined the Thunderbolt after a morning with Victo spent following the Limbe River to the coast, and from there a short canoe trip to her anchorage off Labadee. Following a freshwater shower and a change of clothes, he held an open-air meeting on the stern, telling his story to the Jamaican pirates and New Orleans mutineers, and explaining what would happen over the next few days.

  As sunset fell, the officers and men decided that Carrasca and Post would stay with the ship, and a few members of the crew would join Grogs and the Haitian guerrillas on the next step: making contact with the "Kurian ally" in his moun-taintop fortress. This stirred the interest of the crew; they had more questions than he had answers. The Thunderbolt would be safe enough. Her main armament had been repaired, and she was as ready to face a seaborn challenge as the day she sailed into Cape Haitian.

  With that finished, the Grogs and men took their arms from the locker, and such provision as the NCOs could force them to carry. A beach party of sorts welcomed them to the mountains of Haiti, with comic sign language and a babble of English, French, and Spanish along with island patois the method of intercourse. Two mornings later, Valentine found himself sweating up La Ferriere's escarpment with his odd conglomeration, guided by Victo.

  Two silent sentries in tiger-striped uniforms stood in the lot before the main gate to the fortress. A rusting wall of aged jeeps and trucks was the first, and least impressive defense of La Citadelle, blocking the last few feet of what was left of the road up the slope.

  A circle of Haitians Valentine took to be porters lounged in the shade of the high point looking out over the path like the prow of a massive ship. Some slept, some talked, one or two eyed the visitors with interest when a pair of sailors lit cigarettes. Valentine thought of the thousands of their forefathers it must have taken to build this castle among the clouds.

  The guards and Victo exchanged more singsong words in their Creole. Valentine caught "Papa Legba," and "oui" but little else. A man in a clean white uniform appeared at the main gate and led them to an inner courtyard. There did not seem to be many inhabitants in evidence, just a handful of sentries keeping watch on the approaches to the fortress. The faint cry of a baby came from a high, narrow window. Below it the sound of the visitors echoed between the courtyard's stone walls.

  "Papa Legba awaits," Victo translated. He looked eag
er, like a child about to be taken to Santa Claus himself on Christmas Eve.

  The majordomo in the white uniform had the rest wait, then led Valentine and Victo deeper into the fortress. The air inside the thick walls was cool and still. They went up stone staircases, past small galleys which once held cannon, and into some kind of common room. Shafts of light came in from openings in the roof to splash yellow on the high walls. A sizable fireplace dominated one wall, fronted by chairs and tables of mahogany, roughly finished as if the resident eschewed form for function. An old man sat before the fireplace. Nothing but dead ashes filled the hearth. He stood, his back still to them, and took a crutch from the wall.

  "So they sent a Valentine to see me. My cousins to the north do have a sense of irony."

  Victo fell to his knees, hands clasped under chin, and began to weave back and forth.

  "I really am old. It's safe to say I'm the oldest sentient you shall ever converse with, unless you touch one of the minds encased in what you call a touchstone. But I hardly think they'd count,"

  Father Max used to talk about the touchstones, cryptically carven rocks containing a world's worth of information. Touching one caused what the old priest called a "revelation of sorts"-if it didn't drive you mad. Valentine had never heard of minds being encased in them.

  Papa Legba turned around. He was a hunched-over, wizened figure, resembling a Haitian great-grandfather, right down to toothless gums. Weariness colored his every movement and expression.

  "What's your game, Kurian?" Valentine asked.

  "Show some respect," Victo interjected, his prayers over. "Papa's been protecting you since you came to this island. If you don't see that, you're a fool."

  "You have no reason to love us, Valentine the younger. And I have even less reason to love you: I was once a Great One in the north. My mind-mates-what you would call a 'family'-are dead at your father's hand. From the perspective of my years, it hardly happened yesterday."

  Valentine kept his face a mask, confusion and suspicion and interest all warring within.

  "But that is war, and I hardly blame your race. I returned here to forget. Out of my sorrow came thinking, and from thinking came wisdom. After all, you've been supplanted out of your birthright, and you're being consumed even now. It is no wonder you struck back, though many said you'd be happy with Kur setting the parameters of your existence."

  "Came to play god? I'm supposed to kneel before you and thank you for your divine intervention?"

  The Kurian sighed. "One definition of man: a biped who is ungrateful."

  He looked Valentine in the eyes. The Cat felt the same vertigo that he'd felt in Jamaica when he met the Specter's gaze across the sights of Ahn-Kha's rifle. He shifted his eyes away, feeling a little like a cowed dog.

  The Kurian's toothless mouth turned up. "Let us turn from dark thoughts. Have a seat. Would you care for refreshment? No? Very well. To your duty, then."

  "My duty is to bring back this weapon you claim to have. What is it?"

  "A powerful one, a tool that can stop my brethren's avatars."

  "What's it do? Shut down the connection between you and your Reapers, maybe? That would be handy."

  "All in good time. You're an impatient race. Excuse me, I must sit. I tire easily," the Kurian said. "Valentine, surely you know that the first Door opened in the Western Hemisphere was right here on Haiti. There was a rich, rich harvesting of auras during the revolts against the colonial powers. I, and one or two others, encouraged some of the excesses. Papa Legba is the keeper of doors and gates, according to local legend. In this case, they were right. The door to the 'other world' was in my care. It is in my care now. The 'other world' just happened to be Kur."

  Valentine bit his tongue. He envisioned what was beneath the mask the Kurian wore; a shriveled, blue-skinned bat-winged octopus lurked behind the grandfatherly fakery. But to see one of the legendary doors-

  "You'd like to see the gate, wouldn't you? I will show you. It's safe enough. This island isn't important anymore- my cousins do not use it. They have others, bigger and better located. Those hungry for their own principalities go through the newer ones on the larger continents. Asia is popular at the moment: they're much less troublesome than you North Americans. I'm 'just minding the store' as your kind used to say up North."

  Valentine pushed at the old ashes in the fireplace with the toe of his boot. "You want to aid us against your 'cousins'?"

  The Kurian shimmered for a moment in thought or emotion. "This is a beautiful world, with a gifted though primitive people living on it. I don't care to see it become a corpse, like Kur. Sad. Kur is a husk. The surface has been cleaned of all life save lichen. The same could happen here. That's why I stopped feeding on your kind."

  "You aren't afraid of discovery?"

  "I keep up appearances with the help of my scoundrel friend on the Cape, and a few others. Though it might be hard to say with whom the good Boul really sides, just as he does not know all my devices."

  "I don't believe you," Valentine said in English, to prevent another outraged ejaculation from Victo. "How do you stay alive? I thought you needed to feed to live."

  "I do feed, off vital aura, as you call it. Though you might say I just wet my lips, rather than drinking great drafts as my cousins do."

  "You kill only once a month, I imagine. I'll write the Vatican and nominate you for sainthood."

  "Your letter would be laughed at. There is still a powerful figure at Saint Peter's, true, but he comes from Kur, and his cardinals are to be feared. I will show you how I feed. No one dies. No one is hurt. I shall give you a tour, starting with the Door to Kur. Then you'll see me feed."

  Valentine took his hands from his weapons. "You have me curious. 'Curiosity killed the cat' is another saying we have up North, though I hope it won't prove out today."

  A pair of Haitian servants-"Voudou priests," Victo whispered in his ear-emerged at a wave of Papa Legba's hand. One had a small chair, like something a child might be carried in, on his back. The Kurian slid into it and crossed a seat belt across his chest.

  "I have a litter for going outside, but this works better on some of the stairs, as you will see."

  The priests led the way, through narrow corridors and down shoulder-width stairs. Valentine's sensitive nose noticed a change in the quality of the air, and he knew himself to be underground. The priests lit and took up oil lamps. They came to a wider corridor. A heavy door stood at the end, and Valentine startled when he saw two pinched-looking Reapers slumbering in alcoves to either side. The skin was stretched tight over their bony faces, and lips were rolled back from black pointed teeth.

  "They sleep," the old Kurian said. "Have no fear."

  Valentine found his heart beating in the vicinity of his Adam's apple as he passed the motionless robed figures. If they came around, they would make a quick end of him and Victo.

  "I wake them once or twice a month, when sacrifices of goats and cattle are brought to Baron Samedi," Legba said in English, winking at Valentine. "I'm not the only one using that convenient charade. I would suspect there are a dozen or so Baron Samedis on the other side of the island, though the ceremonies may be a little more gruesome. Religion is useful. Don't think it applies just to ignorant Haitians. When we took your country in the days of your father and grandfathers, many of my cousins appeared as Jesus, and his supplicants were taken to Rapture in the embrace of the avatars. Dressed in white they look like tall, thin angels, and their serene eyes held many a Christian spellbound."

  Beyond the doors was a well-room, less finished than the rest of the fortress, built around a pit, perhaps two and a half meters across. The stones lining the walls were not cut and shaped, but irregular, larger at the bottom and growing smaller as they neared the curved ceiling. The priests lit two more torches standing in brackets, and the room quickly filled with an oily reek. The Kurian slid off his chair-backpack. Thanks to the torchlight, Valentine could see that the wall stones formed a vaguely unsett
ling mosaic of light and dark rock, rather like tentacles reaching from the dark well.

  "That leads to what is purportedly a cistern, Valentine. Care to climb down?"

  Valentine looked down the granite-walled well. A series of metal rungs descended into the bottom. Only a single row of bricks acted as a warning of the depths beneath. Valentine's sharp eyes picked out a bottom lit by a dim red glow. He looked at Victo. The spy shrugged, wide-eyed-and kept clear of the pit.

  Valentine felt a curious pull from the depths. "Why not? I've always wanted to see one of these Doors."

  "If you hear anything on the way down, or while you are there, climb up quickly," Legba advised

  "You can count on it."

  Suppressing a shudder, Valentine clambered down the ancient metal rungs, testing each with a foot before resting his full weight on it. As he neared the bottom of the cistern, he felt if grow a good deal warmer. Appropriate enough for a descent into hell. The rungs gave way to handholds carved into the stone, placed closer together than the rungs on a regular ladder. Feeling for the holes with his feet, he descended until he stood inside the cistern.

  Clammy sweat coursed down his back, but its source was not the heat. He loosened the machete in the sheath strapped to his thigh and touched the automatic at his hip. Three rings of characters resembling Chinese ideograms surrounded him, melted into the rock and lit from within. Curious, he probed one with his foot. His eyes adjusted, and he peered at the walls. Several tunnels, also circled with the ideograms, emptied into the room, the letters glowed red, like the heating coils on an electric burner. He walked over to one and looked more closely. It gave off no heat, and reminded him of an old present from the Lifeweaver who Oversaw his training as a Cat. He walked back to the ladder and looked up.

  "There are different doors down here. Do they all go to Kur?" he whispered up the shaft.

  "In a way, Valentine. You're looking at me from Kur itself. The gate is in the middle of the well."

  With two hands and two feet again on the ladder, Valentine looked around. "You must be joking. How can that be? I didn't feel anything when I descended. It just got warmer."