by Alex Kosh
“We have a choice: either wander through the Craftsmens’ studies looking for teleports, or go to the standard teleports and lie in wait for a troll ...”
“The point being?” I asked, confused.
“Well ... we’ll find a non-standard teleport in one of the studies and jump from level to level, until we find the seventieth floor ...”
“I didn’t mean that,” I interrupted. “Why should we lie in wait for a troll?”
“Well now ...” Kelnmiir said with a smile, “that’s the spirit of the hunt ...”
It cost me a serious effort not to tell the vampire where he could shove his dragon’s spirit of the hunt.
“Let’s leave hunting trolls for later,” I said as calmly as I could.
“All right then,” the vampire agreed. “Where do we start?”
“Logically speaking, the teleports must be in the Higher Craftsmen’s studies,” I reasoned. “So we just have to read the plaques on the doors.”
“So read them,” Kelnmiir said with a shrug.
I trotted off towards the start of the corridor, but before I had gone a few steps, I heard a terrible crash behind me.
“Did you find one?” I asked, running up to the door that had been smashed open.
“I don’t know,” the vampire said with a yawn. “Read the plaque if you like, but there’s definitely no teleport in here.”
Then Kelnmiir went up to the next door and kicked it open.
“Great,” I sighed. “Now we can add doors to the list of malicious damage ...”
I had a feeling that if trolls turned up on our floor anytime soon, they’d realise straightaway which way they ought to go. Unless, of course, it was a stone-deaf troll who turned up ...
While the vampire smashed the doors open one after another, I leaned against the wall and tried to gather my thoughts. To be quite honest, I still didn’t understood Kelnmiir’s plan. He didn’t know how to tune the non-standard teleports, so we could end up on absolutely any floor ... or we could simply disappear. If we ended up on a floor with windows, we could climb down to any other floor ... but what good was that? There weren’t any windows on the level where the Main Hall was in any case, the only way to get there was through the teleports. And that was a dead-end.
After about ten doors Kelnmiir gave a shout of joy: “Found one!”
I hurried across to him. As I walked into the study, I read the plaque lying on the floor: “Shinesimus Speedwell”. We had brazenly smashed our way into my favourite teacher’s study.
“Well then?” Kelnmiir enquired. “Who’s first into the teleport?”
“You, of course.”
“Why me?” the vampire asked in surprise.
“Of course it’s you! Forward into the unknown ... the spirit of the hunt ...” I chuckled.
“There’s no arguing with that,” Kelnmiir sighed. “Then let’s agree: if I don’t come back in a minute, it means I’ve been smeared across all the floors and it’s better not to step into this teleport, or I’ve been captured ... but no, they wouldn’t be able to capture me that quickly ...”
“That’s logical,” I agreed. “But maybe we should just forget about this teleport? Let’s try to get to the Main Hall some other way.”
“Sure, we’ll gnaw through the wall ... forget it,” the vampire said. “And anyway the probability of an unsuccessful transfer is only two per cent. All right, I’m off ...”
Kelnmiir set his sword and poleaxe against the wall, stepped into the teleport and disappeared.
Some time passed ... definitely not a minute, a lot more than that. I was already beginning to wonder what to do, now that I was left all alone, when the teleport flashed and Kelnmiir appeared in the study.
“Why were you gone so long? That was a lot more than a minute!” I snapped angrily.
Kelnmiir was unconcerned:
“I had to take a look around, check this and that ... Let’s go, quick, why waste time?” he said, grabbing his beloved lumps of iron and darting back into the teleport.
These vampires were certainly interesting all right.
There was nothing to do but follow Kelnmiir into the teleport.
According to the plaque, I emerged on the eightieth floor. Which meant that to reach the Main Hall, we had to go down ... sixty floors. Well, there certainly wouldn’t be enough curtains for that ... well, there would, of course, but we’d be tying them together for hours.
“Don’t bother checking the teleports, they’re not working,” said Kelnmiir stopping me in my stride.
“So now what do we do?” I asked. “How are we going to get down sixty floors... and even if we can get down, there aren’t any windows on the twentieth floor.”
“Everything’s fine,” the vampire reassured me. “I have a few ideas on that score. The important thing is that there must be windows on this floor.
“There are windows here,” I assured the vampire. “This is our dining hall
“Oh? You don’t happen to feel like eating, do you?” Kelnmiir enquired.
“What are you talking about, I couldn’t get a thing down,” I declared.
“But I wouldn’t mind,” Kelnmiir said dreamily, smacking his lips.
I backed away warily.
“I don’t taste good,” I told him, just to be on the safe side.
“I believe you,” Kelnmiir agreed. “Right then, shall we go to the nearest windows?”
We quickly found a window at the end of a corridor, but I had only the vaguest idea of what to do next.
“And now what?”
“Now you have to climb on my shoulders.”
“Your shoulders?” I asked in amazement. “You mean we’re going to fly?”
“Fly?” the vampire asked. “Are you out of your mind? I hardly have any strength left as it is. No, we’re not going to fly, we’re going to crawl ... and better climb on my back, not my shoulders.”
“Crawl?”
Just where was he going to crawl to, I wondered?
Kelnmiir knocked the glass out of the window with his fist and cleaned the fragments off the windowsill.
“Climb on, you’ll soon see for yourself.”
I was just about to refuse ... but then I decided, why not? There was no reason to think the vampire had decided to commit suicide.
So I had to clamber onto his back. It felt as if I’d climbed onto a statue, not a living being. At least I was glad that we had to leave the incredibly heavy poleaxe behind, although I still had to tie the sword and the broom on my back anyway.
“Ready?” the vampire asked.
“No, but what choice do I have?”
“Precisely,” the vampire agreed and jumped lightly up onto the windowsill. “Hold on tight.”
What he did after that reduced me to a gibbering wreck. He jumped backwards out of the window (which meant that I went first) and fell several yards before he grabbed the windowsill on the next floor.
“We should have tied those curtains together,” I whispered, totally freaked.
“Don’t give it a thought,” the vampire said blithely. “It isn’t the first time I’ve done this trick, and no one’s ever complained.”
“When we get to the twentieth floor, I won’t complain, I won’t even be able to talk,” I hissed.
“We’ll see,” Kelnmiir replied, releasing his grip and falling to the next floor.
I must confess that I found the sensation of free fall a little bit frightening and exhilarating at the same time.
“Would you like me to distract you?” Kelnmiir suggested, releasing his grip again.
“Ho-ow?” I asked as my heart shot back down into my boots.
“With an interesting story about my life.”
“Why not?” I sighed. “It will probably be educational to hear an interesting story about the life of a ma ... vampire who has lived for thirty centuries. But you won’t fall, will you, if you get carried away by the story?”
“What an idea,” the vampire laughed,
releasing his grip again. “This isn’t a strain for me. Physical strength is our gift, and when vampires use this gift, it’s like relaxing. Using the techniques of the Art is a different matter, acceleration, levitation ... those really do take effort.”
I said nothing, because it seemed to me that our fall was taking longer than usual.
Kelnmiir grabbed hold of another windowsill.
I knew what it was! We’d just fallen two floors at a time, apparently there were no windows on the previous floor.
“Right, I’ll start with the background. It began ten centuries ago, when the universal persecution of Magicians had ended and my reign in the Kingdom of Miir was just beginning. I ascended the throne quite unexpectedly, because until the very last minute everyone, including myself, believed the next king would be my uncle. But for some reason he refused, and I was obliged to accept the throne instead. To be quite honest, I was fed up with ruling after a year. In one year I had waged three wars, exposed eight conspiracies, survived dozens of assassination attempts ... basically, life was pretty lively, but at the same time far too monotonous. After another twenty years on the throne, I would have left the stupid job, if not for ... Alicia.”
“Alicia?” I echoed.
“Yes,” the vampire sighed. “Alicia. She was divine. The first time I met her was at an official reception. Alicia was involved in a conspiracy against me ... but one night over dinner we settled all our differences and discovered that we enjoyed talking to each so much, that both of us forgot the conspiracy (naturally, I knew even more about it than she did). From that moment until the very last day, we were practically inseparable .... well, if you don’t count a few excursions I made into the Distant Mountains.”
“The last day?”
“Yes, the last day of her life. On the day of our wedding ... she was killed.”
“I’m very sorry,” I said sincerely.
The vampire was quiet for a while.
“For a long time I thought Velkheor killed her,” Kelnmiir went on.
“Velkheor?” I asked.
Judging from his terrible reputation, it would have been just like him.
“Yes ... now I realise that was stupid. He really loved his sister, but at the time ... he was framed very skilfully, and I only found out that I was wrong a few months ago.”
His sister? So Kelnmiir almost married the sister of “bloody Velkheor”. That was interesting, especially bearing in mind that vampires had always disapproved of interclan relationships.
“It turned out that my uncle Kelnmiir killed her,” the vampire sighed.
“Wait, I’ve heard that name before somewhere,” I said, trying to remember. “I think ... isn’t that the name of our Emperor’s adviser?”
“Precisely,” Kelnmiir agreed. “He’s the one.”
“Then I understand why you and Velkheor made that assassination attempt. It wasn’t the Emperor you were after, was it, it was his adviser? What a shame the attempt was unsuccessful.”
“We didn’t make an attempt on anyone’s life,” Kelnmiir protested. “To my great regret. He made an attempt on our lives. Which happened to be unsuccessful too.”
“The rotten villain.”
“Yes, a rotten villain,” Kelnmiir agreed. “But this story isn’t about him. Recently I found out that my Alicia had a son.”
“A son!” I exclaimed in surprise, almost falling off the vampire’s back. “And you only found out after ... how much time had gone by?”
“Seven centuries.”
Way to go – discovering that you had a child seven hundred years too late!
“But how did it happen that you didn’t know about your own child?
“Well you see,” he began, and I thought he sounded embarrassed. “My trips into the Distant Mountains weren’t exactly protracted, but they did last for ten or twelve months. That must be when she gave birth, I see that now. While I was away, Alicia lived in the Ancient Forest ...”
“With the druids?” I gasped in amazement.
“Yes, Alicia must have been the only vampire who was a welcome guest in the Ancient Forest. She was always interested in the druids, their culture ... she liked to talk to them ...”
“Incredible,” I exclaimed.
“Yes,” Kelnmiir agreed. “She was always surprising me. And even now that she’s dead she’s still surprising me ...”
I’d never heard so much sadness in a man’s voice ... let alone in the voice of a vampire ...
“She left our son to be raised in the Ancient Forest and never said a word about him to me. Maybe she was going to tell me after the wedding, but she never had a chance ...”
“Stop,” I cried, suddenly realising where this was leading. “This story isn’t connected with Alice, is it? You said she was your great granddaughter ...”
“Yes,” said Kelnmiir. “She’s my great granddaughter, and her father is ...”
“Your grandson!” I exclaimed. “So the Day Clan is the result of a union between vampires and druids, and that’s why Alice knows so much about fruits and doesn’t drink blood!”
“Why do you think that? She can drink blood,” Kelnmiir corrected me. “But she doesn’t have to drink it. Alice is a half-breed – half-vampire and half-druid.”
Kelnmiir stopped falling from one windowsill to the next.
“Don’t drop off because you’re so surprised.”
“I’m not going to,” I muttered. “After I just learned the secret of the Day Clan? No way!”
“Remember, you mustn’t tell anyone about this. The secret wouldn’t be a secret any more ... and I don’t want that.”
“But Alice knows about this?” I chuckled.
Silence.
“What! You haven’t told Alice?”
“Told her what?” Kelnmiir suddenly asked fiercely. “That her great-grandfather is a former king who couldn’t protect the woman he loved, and her uncle is the bloodiest vampire in three millennia?”
Well yes ... Alice certainly did have a fine family tree. That was on the vampire side, and what else was there on the druid side?
“No,” I disagreed. “You’ll tell her what you just told me. That you loved her great-grandmother. That you were happy together ...
Kelnmiir released his grip again, and this time I was frightened that his excess of emotion had done for both of us.
But after five floors he grabbed hold of another windowsill.
“I’ll definitely tell her some day,” the vampire promised. “But so far our relationship is purely a matter of business, and don’t you even think of telling her what I just told you.”
A matter of business?
“Yes,” said Kelnmiir, opening his fingers again. “I helped her get into the Academy, and she helped me to hide ...”
Ah, now I was beginning to understand a few things. For instance, why Alice had thrown me out of her room so quickly the moment I tried to enter the bathroom.
“You mean, you lived in her room?”
“Precisely,” Kelnmiir agreed
“But how did you get inside the Academy? It can’t be that easy ...”
“It’s difficult, really difficult.” Kelnmiir said and paused during a long drop. “But I know how to deceive ...”
“But how did you get in?” I asked.
“You saw me,” he laughed. “Do you really not remember?”
I pondered for a while, trying to recall that day.
“No, I would definitely have remembered you,” I replied eventually.
“I’ll give you a hint. At that moment I looked a bit different.”
“I don’t know,” I said, starting to get irritated. “Stop teasing and tell me.”
“I ran past you, surely you remember that?”
This time I didn’t have to think for long.
“No one ran past me apart from Alice ...” Then it suddenly hit me: “Oh no, don’t tell me that was you!”
“All right, I won’t,” Kelnmiir agreed. “But you’ve already
guessed anyway.”
“But how?” I asked in amazement.
“A slight change of appearance – nothing to it,” the vampire replied.