by Dave Gross
His smile vanished. “You will pay for that,” he said, “a thousand times over.”
Clutching his arm, Tara sighed and blinked like a sleepy lover. “He does not remember,” she said. “Tell him.”
“He does not deserve the satisfaction,” Casomir said. Behind him, the villagers continued to pour in, shambling to either side to stand listlessly against the walls. Whatever charm enslaved them, it did not seem to rule Casomir.
“Yes, tell me, Casomir,” I said. “Why have you chosen to follow this creature?”
“Tell him, Casomir,” murmured Tara again. She tugged at his arm, wobbling as if drunk or ill. She appeared to be exhausted from the journey, but it was equally possible she had been weakened by too much time spent in sunlight.
“But my lady—” Casomir began.
“Why not tell me yourself, Tara?” I addressed her in her native Vudran.
“It is more satisfying to watch him writhe as I make him tell you,” she said. “Bring me the book I seek, and you may take his place.”
“What do you wish of this book?”
“What is he saying?” demanded Casomir. A glance from Tara chastened him, but he raised the point of his sword as he turned back to me. I sensed Radovan was tensing to intervene. I showed him my palm and trusted he would similarly restrain the Sczarni. Tara was obviously stalling us with this talk, but what we could learn from it could be worthwhile.
“Tell him, Casomir,” said Tara a third time, and this time the voice brooked no argument. “Tell him everything.”
“We have come for the Lacuna Codex,” he said. “In it are spells mightier than any known since before the first death of Tar-Baphon. They shall be returned to my mistress in the name of the Pallid Princess.”
“How did you find us?” I asked.
Casomir barked a scornful laugh. “You think we let you keep my uncle’s sword without good reason? It calls to my mistress. Wherever you take it, she can find you.”
Considering that the blade had also saved Radovan and Azra from the restless dead at Virholt’s tomb, I did not feel entirely foolish for falling into that scheme. On the contrary, judging from the sword’s reaction to my last encounter with Tara, I suspected they were the fools for letting me retain it.
“What occurred on the Senir Bridge?” I said, hoping my own stalling was not so obvious that it would provoke Casomir to impatience. He had revealed so little, and yet it made perfect sense of my fragmentary understanding. Casomir and Tara, or one of them, had known of my Pathfinder’s mission long before her arrival at Willowmourn. Who had tipped them off? Carmilla, Doctor Trice, or any of a hundred others who had heard their gossip could have done so. More to the point, why?
“It was as I told you, except that the last of the werewolves fled when the bridge itself exploded,” he said. “That was no work of ours.”
“And at Willowmourn,” I said. “What happened to me there before your mistress took my memory?”
“It was much as you remember after your second awakening. She gave you the freedom of the library, and you searched for the books your Pathfinder had disturbed. You said you were close to discovering her path when you began to snoop around the house. You disturbed my mistress at dawn as she returned from her hunt.”
I ignored Casomir and addressed Tara, who continued to luxuriate as if waking from a long slumber. “The pregnant maid,” I said. “The one I don’t remember. You chose Anneke because she too was with child.”
“A delicacy in my land,” said Tara in her native tongue. Her head was erect now, her eyes bright and open. She had awakened. She tugged off her velvet choker, revealing an angry red line around her throat.
“Penanggalan,” I said. My memories were still missing, but I felt I had made this revelation before. I had only read of such abominations, undead whose heads and organs rise out of their torpid bodies at night to fly out and prey upon the living, especially newborns and pregnant women. I understood the vinegar bath now: the creatures needed to steep their organs in mildly acidic liquid to squeeze them back into their bodies at dawn. Penanggalan were prominent among some of the world’s most hideous death cults, and they were known by many names. I pointed an accusing finger at Tara. “I know you now, marsh hag. Bodiless witch. Daughter of Urgathoa.”
“Stop speaking that savage tongue!” demanded Casomir. Behind me, the Sczarni growled, but Radovan stayed them with a word.
Tara shuddered, her arms falling limply to her side as she raised her chin. The wound around her throat opened, and a stench of vinegar and rotting flesh swept over us. I plucked the handkerchief from my sleeve and covered my mouth, gripping Galdana’s sword in my other hand. The freaks began to scream, cowering at the transformation of their enslaver. Some turned away as if to flee, but their feet would not disobey the terror that pinned them to the floor.
With an ugly wet sound, Tara’s head rose from her body. It dragged out its spinal cord, esophagus, and its central veins and arteries, all bearing the putrescent fruit of her internal organs. The lungs expanded after passing through the impossibly narrow passage of her neck, gasping with respiration. Her heart throbbed, dripping glistening amber ichor. Liver, spleen, kidneys, bladder, and intestines followed with a half dozen other sordid lumps I recognized from the cadavers I studied in my earliest days at the Acadamae.
“What is it?” cried Cezar.
“Vampire,” I said, using the Ustalav term.
Behind me, Tatiana screamed a curse that dissolved into a fearful yelp as she shifted into wolf-woman form. Radovan’s expletive was both succinct and unmentionable, and I heard the familiar sound of his knife escaping its sheath. I wracked my memory for known weaknesses of the Vudran vampire, but if I had ever learned them, they were as absent as my first days at Willowmourn. I dropped my handkerchief and signed to Radovan, Wait.
Casomir released Tara’s headless body and let it fall unceremoniously to the ground. Before it struck, he lunged at me. No doubt he expected to catch me off guard, but I parried with Galdana’s sheathed sword. Casomir’s blade sliced the white leather of the scabbard, but its point passed several inches from my thigh. I felt Galdana’s blade humming inside.
Surprised by my defense, Casomir retreated a step. I shook the scabbard off the blade and adopted an elementary guard. The blade blazed white, and I heard Tara’s disembodied head shriek at the touch of its rays. I kept my eyes on my immediate opponent. Recognizing my stance as a learner’s position, Casomir sneered. “What makes you think you can defeat a Lepidstadt master?”
Even without the corroboration of the fear he tried to disguise as bravado, I knew the answer at once. I drew his attack with a feint to the knee. When it came, I caught his blade and bound it upward, snicking the point of my sword across his cheek, a hair’s breadth from the scar I had given him before Tara obliterated my memory of our previous duel.
He raised his defense, expecting another attack to the face. While I confess I felt the temptation to mock him with another Lepidstadt scar, this was no student’s challenge. I slashed his wrist and beat his blade out of guard. As if anticipating my vengeful desire, Galdana’s sword leaped up to sever Casomir’s throat. For an instant, the arterial fountain created the illusion that his head, like Tara’s, would rise up above his body. Instead, it flopped back as he staggered two steps in retreat and fell to the floor, already halfway to Pharasma’s acre.
A foul wind blew down on my face, and I raised the blade to block it. Miraculously, it did exactly that, dispelling the noisome exhalation of the floating face. If I had not seen it rise from Tara’s body, I would never have recognized its transformed visage as belonging to the beautiful young woman I had met in Caliphas. Its skin had shrunken like a withered gourd, waxy yellow like a weeks-old corpse. The eyes engorged with blood, leaving not a sliver of white. Tara’s hair, once resembling spun copper, now hung in undulating tendrils like earthworms bleeding on the edge of a farmer’s hoe. Where the rays of light from Galdana’s sword passed over them,
the bloody locks writhed and shriveled.
I raised the sword above my head and bellowed the opening lines of an Ulfen epic in the original Skald. The face of the vampire creased in perplexity, rewarding my ludicrous gambit as she struggled to identify the strange “spell” I was casting, the somatic components of which were a Pathfinder sign to Radovan and Azra—Run, now.
With the vampire’s eyes focused upon me, the first of my companions snatched up torches and entered the waterfall passage before I abandoned my ruse. I turned my mind to the problem of retreating without opening myself to an attack. I had never seen the creature in combat, only witnessed the awful remains of her victim.
“Come on,” said Radovan, ushering Azra through the waterfall. “I’ll cover you.”
I lifted Galdana’s sword an inch, and stood defiantly between the vampire and my company. He understood the message. I would not let him fight this foe for me.
“If she kills you,” he said, “try to drop that sword where I can reach it.”
Before I could tell whether he was joking, the screaming began.
The sound came from about a third of the village freaks. Above their agonized voices rose an eerie song from the mouth of the monster. Its words were in a language even I could not identify, despite its Vudran lilt. The villagers clutched their arms and shuddered, their skin rippling like the surface of a storm-blown lake. I hesitated, deciding whether to advance with the humming sword or to discharge a riffle scroll. An instant was too long.
Beads of bloody sweat formed on the villager nearest the vampire. He was a big brute with one stunted arm dotted just beyond the elbow with buds that should have been fingers. The blood oozing from his pores swelled to bullet-sized globules and rose up like a flock of startled birds to fly toward the monster, splashing onto its exposed internal organs. After a brief glistening, the organs absorbed the blood, and the villager dropped dead to the floor.
The vampire’s face softened, briefly resembling the youthful beauty whose body it had ridden from Vudra. I prayed for Tara’s sake that the vampire was an invader, and that the young woman whose body it inhabited was long since dead, not corrupted into the abomination that hovered before me.
A backward glance assured me that my companions had made it through the waterfall. I backed away from the monster, holding Galdana’s humming sword at guard. The vampire smiled as it slowly followed me at a distance respectful of the sword rather than of me. The remaining villagers marched forward at her silent command, farmer’s weapons clutched in their trembling hands, their faces etched in fear of the task before them and horror of the monster they were bound to serve.
The sword might keep the thing at bay, but I had no doubt the vampire would throw all of the remaining villagers at me. I had no desire to murder the enslaved wretches, so I backed through the opening beneath the waterfall until I felt my heels touch the slippery moss. With a quick upward stroke of the sword, I knocked aside the tiles Radovan had placed to divide the stream. For a second, I saw the vague images of the vampire and her minions through the sheet of water, and then strong hands gripped my ankles and pulled me down. I hit the slick floor hard and slid helplessly backward into the gloom. Every stair cracked my chin until I turned my head.
I barely managed to retain my grip on the sword. By its diminishing light, I saw Radovan clutching my legs and pulling me backward, letting himself fall in a painful slide before me. I crashed into him as we landed on horizontal ground, but before I could rise to complain of his rough treatment, he gripped my shoulder and held me low to the ground.
“Follow me,” he said, crawling on elbows and knees. “Keep your head down, way down.”
I imitated his example. By the light of the sword I saw we were traversing a narrow passage, its walls adorned with crumbling bas relief images depicting men bending down to transform into bestial figures, and then into running wolves. Above them was the ancient seal of Virholt, marking them as the Prince’s wolves.
I paused and raised my head for a better view, but Radovan pulled me down. Scant inches above our heads, I felt a powerful gust of wind. It came several times in rapid succession, and I crouched lower.
“Stay down,” cautioned Radovan shortly before a second series of gusts brushed the back of my head. He moved fast, and I came so closely behind him that we collided in a most undignified posture when he suddenly stopped.
The floor was slick with sticky fluid, black in the magical light. Even before detecting its coppery pong, I knew it was blood. Radovan grabbed some object from the floor and dragged it along with him. I brushed against a warm and bloody object lying beside the wall. Unlike Radovan, I did not have the stomach to lug it along with me. By the time we reached the ring of formed by the torches the others held, we were bloody hand and foot.
A horrified gasp escaped Tatiana’s mouth. She gaped at the gory object Radovan had collected. It was the mutilated head and upper torso of Sandu, sliced diagonally as if he had leaned forward to run himself onto a tremendous razor, then sliced again across the face and chest as his severed body had fallen back through the blades that had killed him.
“Nasty trap,” said Radovan bitterly. “Only wolves can pass.”
I was grateful that Radovan had not been the one to lead the way, and that Sandu had not fully transformed before serving as a warning to the others. I considered how much of a threat the trap posed to our pursuers. I doubted it would long delay the vampire, but at least the villagers’ screams would serve as a warning to their approach.
“Where are we?” I asked, raising the sword high. This far from the undead thing, its light was barely stronger than that of the torches. Radovan commanded the troops to spread out, and Azra took Tatiana by the arm to draw her away from what was left of Sandu. A minute later, we had made a ring of light around a circular vault. Above us, a brazen dome, enchanted to resist verdigris all these centuries, reflected and magnified our light.
The walls were cut like miniature bank vaults, four levels of perhaps a hundred compartments each. Many were left open, their empty interiors crusted with limestone sediment, but others were enclosed by leaden doors marked with arcane glyphs. A chiseled legend between each column warned of dire curses upon the heads of trespassers, each sealed with the ancient crest of Virholt.
The center of the room had collapsed, yet fifteen feet or so below the level of the remaining floor hung a central dais of green-veined white marble. It remained suspended above a deep chasm by a reinforcing framework whose exposed metal rods were weirdly untarnished, even where their mangled fingers clutched the walls of the sinkhole.
“Boss?”
“Yes?” I replied before realizing it was Cezar who had spoken, and not to me but to Radovan.
“What is it?” said Radovan.
“What we do now?” said Cezar. “There is no more place to run.”
Radovan looked to me, but not for permission. I saw in his eyes what he saw in mine. There was no other choice.
“Now we fight,” he said.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The Dead Undead
The shrieks went on for so long that I thought none of the villagers the monster had enchanted would survive the trap. Finally one emerged, crawling on knees and flipper-like hands. Cezar and Fane, both in half-wolf form, immediately grabbed him. It was Tudor, and he struggled as they pulled him through. Against a couple of men he might have broken free, but the Sczarni were monstrously strong in their man-wolf forms. I nodded my approval as they bound him with rope from their bottomless bag, as I’d ordered.
The boys resumed their positions beside the entrance while Malena gagged Tudor with one of her scarves and shoved him against the wall. She pointed at the chasm and warned him in Varisian, “One move, and down you go.” I liked her better all the time, but I hoped it wouldn’t come to that. If we could survive this fight, I hoped Tudor would as well.
The second freak saw the werewolves waiting for him. He froze, equally terrified of what lay before
and behind him. He tried to crawl backward, but someone blocked his way, and they began screaming at each other. I didn’t want to see them killed, but while the vampire’s spell lasted, they saw us as the enemy. Besides, we had only so much rope to go around.
Fane turned to me for guidance. I said, “Grab him.”
Fane stepped into the passage and grabbed the freak by a forearm the size of a man’s thigh. Just as he pulled the man back, the monster shrieked out a string of foreign gobbledygook. With a sound of a cart full of melons crashing to the ground, the body of someone in the corridor burst open. Fane stumbled backward in a hail of flesh and blood, slipping on the gore-streaked stone. He fell back toward the chasm, still clutching the dismembered arms of the villager he had grabbed.
I grabbed him by the scruff and whirled him against the vault wall, just in time. From the entrance, a cloud of shrapnel blew across the room. Jagged metal, shattered bone, and wads of bloody flesh smashed against the opposite wall to form a rough circle of carnage. The boss crouched at the edge of the blast, clutching a wound on the shoulder of his sword arm. On the other side, Azra held up a starknife that radiated a buckler-shaped light, shielding herself and Tatiana from the blast.
Between them, the bloody chunks of villagers slid down the vault walls to plop on the floor. There they bloomed with a sickening sound, growing at incredible speed into gory figures the size of puppets. They had no skin, no eyes, no human features of any kind, only blood-slicked muscle and bone. The villagers who tried burying me would definitely have called these things the dead undead.
Azra and the boss attacked, she with divine radiance, he with the sword held awkwardly in his weakened hand. Arnisant dashed past the boss and bit into one of the bloody little horrors. The manikin’s toxic flesh burned his jaws, sending the hound whining in retreat. I plucked the throwing knives from my boots to aid him, but then I smelled the rot and vinegar stench of the vampire emerging from the trapped passage. I backed up and watched the guts and head float out above the sunken floor. The vampire smiled, murmuring in her foreign tongue and turning slowly to observe the vault doors.