Nightingale

by David Farland

  Sommer didn't argue. Her face was a study in wonder.

  She stared around in shock as realization dawned on her. There was a smear of blood where the old man had fallen, and one of his shoes still lay in the middle of the floor, but the body had been dragged out and dumped into the swamp.

  "Oh, Pappy!" she moaned. Sommer just sat there, weeping, and swiping her face.

  I had a grandfather? Bron wondered. He felt sad. The only memory Bron would ever have of the old fellow was of him training a gun on Bron as he drove the truck and boat and marched through the swamp for hours.

  Mosquitoes buzzed around Bron's face but didn't land. He felt exposed. He worried that a Draghoul might be out in the swamp, under the trees, still hunting. They could come back at any moment.

  He took the night-vision goggles from one of the Draghouls, snapped them over his face, and peered about.

  The room looked as if it was daylight inside, everything in shades of green. He checked one of the Draghoul's cell phones. It was 2:14 a.m. Bron found himself worrying.

  I can't afford to waste a moment; he thought. I need to find Olivia. But what chance did he have of finding her? The Draghouls all had night-vision goggles. If she was out in the swamp, they'd have seen her, unless she'd run as fast and as far as she could.

  He headed out the door.

  "Be careful," Sommer said. "There may be more out there!"

  Bron stepped out cautiously, peered around. No one seemed to be near the porch. The goggles magnified the light, but the brush outside was so thick that it formed a living curtain. In many places, one couldn't see a dozen yards into that jungle.

  He crouched outside on the porch, peering into the night. The swamp had begun to cool, and the croaking of frogs, while still a dull roar, had lessened. He looked up. Bright stars pierced the night, and he watched an owl soar over the cypress trees, hunting on silent wings.

  He searched down in the water. His grandfather was floating not forty feet from the dock. There were two rubber rafts down on the dock, too, with quiet little electric motors. Everywhere there was movement—frogs croaking like madness and making small waves, alligators floating like logs in the still swamp. They were no longer hunting, no longer sliding up behind frogs in the darkness. Apparently they'd had their fill.

  Off to his left, Bron spotted a pair of raccoons tripping along on a rotten log that poked out into the water. They were dabbling about, hunting for crayfish or minnows in the shallows.

  Bron wondered if he should go search for Olivia, but decided against it. There was no telling where she had gone, which direction. He might search, but even these goggles wouldn't help much. They magnified the starlight, but they didn't show the heat of living bodies, like some military goggles might.

  Bron didn't know how many Draghouls might still be out there, but he reasoned that they were under orders not to kill him. That gave him a huge advantage.

  Maybe there were none. He decided to take a risk. "Olivia," he shouted. "If you can hear me, come on in!"

  For just an instant, the nearby frogs went silent, and then they sounded again.

  He wondered if Olivia could hear him. With so many frogs croaking, his voice wouldn't carry far.

  Even if she did hear him, would she come? Or would she be afraid that he'd been possessed?

  Bron went into the shack, brought the lantern out. If Olivia was within sight, she might spot the light, and she'd see him standing beside it, and that would beckon her as well as anything that he might say.

  He tried waiting a few minutes, and then remembered something that Mike had said. Bron went into the house, took one of the pistols, and brought it to the porch. He pulled the trigger, and it wouldn't budge. He looked at it closer, realized that the safety was still on. He flipped it into the off position, and fired into the air, three times slowly.

  That quieted more than a few frogs.

  He hoped that Olivia was alive, and that she had heard.

  He waited for her on the porch for long minutes, and Sommer came out of the cabin. There was a look of fear and awe in her face. "You sure put those Draghouls down."

  He nodded.

  She handed him a drink, and Bron realized that though it felt a tad cooler outside, he was still sheathed in sweat. He pulled the tab, drank it down. Applebeer.

  "We don't have a lot of time," Sommer said. "Lucius will get here before dawn. We don't want to be here when he comes."

  "One of the prisoners tell you that?" Bron asked in surprise. He hadn't heard her questioning anyone.

  Sommer tapped the side of her skull. "The girl knew, their leader. Now she can't remember...."

  "What else does she know that I need to know?" Bron asked.

  Sommer peered out into the darkness. "Too much," she whispered. "She knew entirely too much of evil."

  They stood in silence for a moment, serenaded by the myriad calls of frogs, and Bron suddenly realized that the world had changed around him.

  "They underestimated you this time," Sommer whispered. "They underestimated you by far. They should have put you out. You can't fight them when you're sleeping. Oh, you might leech them a little, but not enough to hurt. They won't make that mistake next time, though."

  "Who said there's going to be a next time?" he asked.

  Bron suddenly had an urge to hide, to get far away from here, possibly to go somewhere he'd never been before. The Outback in Australia sounded good just now.

  Sommer's eyes filled with tears. "Lordy, boy, the things that you don't know!"

  He glanced at her.

  She said, "You can hide from someone like Lucius for awhile, but not forever."

  Behind the house, a cry sounded above the clamor of frogs. Bron turned, and Olivia called out, "Bron? Are you all right?"

  "Yeah," he said. "We're clear."

  Olivia crashed through the brush.

  He lowered his weapon as he shined a flashlight. She stepped out of the forest, then clambered along a thin trail.

  "There was one more following you," Sommer told Olivia in alarm. "Did you lose him?"

  "Yeah," Olivia said. "Yeah, I lost him permanently."

  "How?" Bron asked.

  "Let me put it this way," Olivia said. "If you ever get stuck in quick mud at night, don't thrash around too much. It just makes the gators hungry."

  Olivia walked past him, peered into the house, and covered her mouth as if she might retch. All of the prisoners were down, but the expressions on their faces revealed utter horror, as if each of them were peering into the depths of some private hell. "Oh." Olivia went in, came out with a pistol in hand.

  "They're all alive," Bron said.

  "Not that they'd thank you for that kindness," Olivia said.

  Just behind the cabin, in the brush up on the hill, a coyote began to howl, joining the chorus of frogs, the hoot of owls. The noise of the swamp was maddening, so different from anything that Bron had ever imagined.

  "We should get going," he warned Olivia, but she looked at the Draghouls and just shook her head.

  "We can't leave them," she said. She looked up at Sommer. "She should have told you that."

  Bron suspected that he knew what she was suggesting, but he shied away from it. "We can't take them with us."

  Olivia shook her head, looked down at her pistol, and gritted her teeth. "I don't know if I can kill them. Can either of you?"

  Sommer looked to Bron. He was the man of the group, and somehow he knew that it made him the designated shooter.

  "No," he said, in fear and revulsion. He'd been carrying a weapon now for half an hour or so, and he imagined that if it came to a gunfight, he'd use it. Exchanging shots at someone out in the dark, hidden behind trees—that would be a fair fight. But sticking the barrel of a gun up to a man's skull when he was tied up, and then pulling the trigger? "No," Bron said again.

  The women looked at each other, and Sommer said, "I can do it. Heaven knows, they all deserve to die for what they did to Pappy. You two stay
out here, if you like. I wouldn't want you getting your hands dirty."

  Sommer was already holding a rifle strapped over her back. Now she took it off wearily, began to walk into the cabin.

  "Wait!" Bron said desperately. "Isn't there something else we can do? Can't you, can't you just make them forget what happened here?"

  Olivia gave him a patient look, as if Bron were still just a child.

  "They're Draghouls," Olivia said. "You don't leave them alive. If you do, they'll just breed more of their kind—or worse, they'll come after you with a vengeance. Sure, I could rip their memories—empty them down to nothing. But Lucius's men would just load their own memories back in, possess them all over again."

  "Then why don't we do that?" Bron demanded.

  "No time," Sommer said. "Possessing even one of them would take hours at the least—days if you want to do it right."

  Olivia pleaded with him. "You don't know what kind of people you're dealing with. They're not...." words failed her.

  "Let's show him," Sommer suggested.

  "What?" Olivia asked.

  "We have time, an hour or so. Let him interrogate the prisoners."

  That's what I came here for, isn't it? Bron thought. I came to learn about my heritage, about the Draghouls.

  "I'll ask them some questions," Bron suggested.

  Olivia gave Bron a pained expression, as if surprised at how dense he was. "You could ask questions all night, and they'd never tell you a thing. We have better ways to interrogate a prisoner, and they don't involve water boarding."

  Chapter 29

  The Memory Merchants

  "Knowledge carries a great price. Few are willing to pay it. But who can really afford the even-greater price of ignorance?"

  — Monique

  Olivia and Sommer had Bron sit in the same chair that he'd been strapped to, and then together they dragged the Draghoul's leader close. She was taped hand and foot, completely bound, and posed little threat, yet she could have struggled if there were any fight left in her.

  Instead, she was like a bloated fish pulled from the bottom of the sea, too worn to resist.

  Olivia unstrapped the woman's helmet, and told Bron, "They like to wear these. If they get in a fight with another masaak, it gives them a little protection. Most of us can't use our powers very well unless we make contact."

  Squatting on the floor, facing Bron, Olivia reached down and took hold of the prisoner, placing a thumb over one of the woman's eyes, then placing each finger carefully over the right hemisphere of the brain.

  Bron hadn't noticed before just how precisely Olivia's fingers sought out their mark, but he realized now that he knew what she was doing. By some animal instinct, he also knew just where to touch.

  "Close your eyes, and hold onto your seat," Olivia said, peering up into his face. "This can be disorienting."

  With her left hand, she reached up and took the right half of his skull. Immediately Bron entered the woman's mind. He found himself lying upon the floor, struggling to breathe. His stomach churned as he struggled to remember what had happened here, as he wondered at the incapacitating lethargy he felt.

  Bron was two people at once. He looked about, and saw the world through both his own eyes and through the slits of the Draghoul's eyes. It was disorienting, nauseating. He clenched his eyes shut.

  With one hand Olivia was reading the woman's mind, with the other she channeled the memories to Bron.

  The Draghoul prisoner's name was Ramira, and she growled in anger at being violated, invaded.

  Yet she was no stranger to being violated. It had happened so often before.

  Lucius required it of her—weekly interrogations, so that his police force might detect whether she had had a disloyal thought. After nine hundred years in his service, Ramira was proud that she no longer had any disloyal thoughts.

  Bron groaned. Nine hundred years? Instantly, he was transported to a tiny cottage in the Principality of Galicia, and Bron saw it as their prisoner had—a wealthy farm built of stone, with a fine roof of new thatch. The family had geese and sheep on their farm, and two white milch cows. The Draghoul remembered lying awake at night as a child, while mice scurried about in the thatch overhead, squeaking, and she would pretend that they were fairy princes, telling her tales.

  The skies back then were so much bluer than now, and summer rains seemed to wash the daisies clean on the wooded hill behind their home.

  Then Lucius came one night, his troops of Draghouls creeping into the house, and taking it as if it were theirs, while all the family was at the dinner table.

  The house was filled with the scents of a feast—roast venison covered in a gravy of wine and mushrooms, fresh-baked brown bread, baked apples with cream. Father had just bent his head to pray for a blessing on the food, and Ramira sneaked her eyes open, admiring the feast laid out on the table before her.

  The Draghouls rushed in, throwing the door open, one man bowling in through a window. They had their swords drawn. They all wore tunics and breeches of black, with helms of blackened armor and leather cuirasses.

  Before her father could even rise from the dinner table, a Draghoul grabbed him from behind, with a gleaming sword bared to his throat, so that he could not move.

  Lucius wore armor, a princely breastplate with the emblem of a dragon emblazoned upon it in lacquer, red and black. He wore a fine helm, too, with a leather neck guard hanging off the back, and he strode into the room with supreme confidence, as if he were more than a general, more than a king.

  Her father stood tall, proud. He wore only a landowner's robes the color of red wine, with a fine cloth belt at his waist, but he dared look Lucius in the eye.

  "Why do you seek to live here among the humans, old friend?" Lucius demanded of her father. Ramira had never seen Lucius before. He had dark hair and brooding eyes, a severe face, worn with lines of care. He looked to be forty or fifty, but there was a gleam in his eyes, a look of fierceness and cunning, that she had never seen before in another man.

  He was older than fifty, she thought, understanding the situation on some instinctive level. He was many times older than fifty.

  "Please," her father said. "I served you long enough."

  "Mayor of this town?" Lucius mocked, pulling the chain of office from her father's neck. He laughed. "Is that all you've made of yourself?"

  "It's a good town," her father argued.

  "And you want to be its mayor," Lucius derided. "You alone could slaughter every man in here with half a thought. You could ride their women like horses, and butcher their children for food. Why would you... lower yourself to consorting with these... animals?"

  Her father stiffened. "They are our equals in the eyes of God!"

  "Oh," Lucius lamented, as if he had heard this before, "not you, too. You offered your life in my service. You cannot now give it to some imaginary god, not when I'm so much more deserving."

  "I gave you more than a lifetime of service," her father growled.

  "And each time that you did," Lucius replied, "I gave you more life as a reward."

  Bron gasped and pulled away from Olivia's hand. "They can steal life?" he asked. She had not told him that before.

  "Yes," she said. "That is what Lucius does. There's something in the body, something on the cellular level that he can tap into—the power to rejuvenate. As we age, our old cells forget what they are supposed to do. Pancreas cells stop producing insulin. Liver cells seem to 'forget' how to synthesize proteins. Lucius and his kind can take a healthy young person, and somehow re-teach his own cells, rejuvenate them.

  "If Lucius drains enough vitality from someone, he can grow young, while his victim expires."

  Bron opened his mouth to speak, but said nothing. Olivia touched him again, transported him into Ramira's memory....

  "A thousand years should be enough for any king," her father retorted.

  Lucius studied him regretfully, as if her father was deserving of pity. "Tell me, when you scou
rged Jesus, drove him through the streets of Jerusalem dragging a cross on his back, did you see anything in him that made you want to worship him? When you pounded the spikes into his wrists and palms, and lifted him up on the cross, did he not cry out like any other man? You did not think him to be a god then. I mean, really, after all of these years, what has changed?"

  Ramira's father peered down at the floor, his jaw shaking, as if he might break down and blubber. Guilt smote him. Until that moment, Ramira had not known that her father was one of the Christ killers.

  "You are running with the humans now," Lucius said, shaking his head in pity. "If they had any idea of what you were, they would roast you and your family in this fine house as if it were an oven. If they had any inkling of the things you've done...."

  "No!" her father sobbed, as if afraid that Lucius might expose his secrets.

  "You owe me your life, Cassius, and I shall have it," Lucius said. "If you will not serve me, then perhaps your wife or your daughter...."

  Lucius snapped his fingers, and the guard that held Ramira's father—a man named Adel Todesfall—made a quick cut.

  Her mother had been standing by, restrained by a guard, but as her husband fell, she screamed and launched herself at Lucius, fingers splayed wide, as if she might gouge out his eyes.

  But it was not his eyes that she was after. They fought, Ramira's mother struggling to get her fingers beneath his helm, but Lucius butted her forehead, and she staggered. Lucius grasped her by the skull with his sizraels, then began draining her vigor away. An amazing thing happened—sheets of red fire seemed to leap from her, streaming into him, so that she was wrapped in flame. One moment she was whole and healthy, and the next she wailed in pain, a wail that echoed in Ramira's memory down through the years, and Ramira's mother struggled and began to age beneath a sheen of fire, crow's feet forming at the corners of her eyes, age spots blossoming purple on her pale skin. Ramira's mother often sang so sweetly that her neighbors called her "the nightingale," but now her beautiful voice turned into the croaking sobs of an old hag.