by Alex Oliver
A patch of long grass by the stream's edge looked firm and dry enough to sit on. He sank down there and wound his now painless arms around his knees, gathering himself. There was a lot more of him to take stock of now. Just as it had healed his body, the machine had given him back most of his mind, only a few of the most frustrating things still missing. He knew now, with some relief, that his magic was innate and not the result of him paying some terrible price. Not a witch, then. But possibly still a murderer. Frustratingly, that last answer lay still just outside his grasp.
“I don't know exactly what happened,” he began, as Vacarescu detached himself from the rock wall and came to sit down beside him. “I felt like I touched...” No, this explanation was the wrong way around. He started again. “How much do you know about what the device is?"
Vacarescu leaned in to check Frank's shoulder again, as if reassuring himself that he had not imagined the sudden healing, but Frank didn't think that he needed to let his hand linger so long, spread fingers curved gently over Frank's collarbone and throat.
"Nothing. As I say, it's a holy place we associate with St. George. It's said that when he went to kill the dragon, he put on a blue cloak that was stored in this place. The cloak carried the blessing of God and enabled him to do miracles.” His hand flexed again on Frank's bared shoulder, and his expression shifted from suspicion to awe. "I didn't believe it, but this is too plain for me to ignore. You somehow did the same? You drew on the cloak?”
"It isn't a bad metaphor,” Frank agreed, easing himself closer, carefully not allowing himself to think that decency required he demand Radu remove his hand. He was more at ease now with the chaos and roiling potential of the glade, but happy to cling to Vacarescu's obdurate normality wherever he could touch it. This sea was far less threatening when he had an anchor. “You know of The Rising, I suppose?”
"I read of it in the newspapers. It seemed fantastical, but I am not in a position to disbelieve the fantastic."
Frank laughed, "I'm not explaining this very clearly, am I? I should start from the beginning, which in this story is Atlantis. Ancient records tell that the Atlanteans had access to a type of energy called 'vril', which Protheroe defined as the life force of all of creation. They built a network of devices across the world to store and transmit the vril energy, all of it dependent on a master device in Atlantis itself."
"And that's what this is?"
"Yes. Most countries have at least one. Typically in mountains, but sometimes in artificial structures instead. There are functionally two in England. Our own is hidden in man-made caves under Glastonbury Tor, but we also fall under the radius of the larger device in Newgrange in the Kingdom of Ireland. Neither of them is as powerful as this one, apparently. This was Protheroe's subject, however, not mine. I was only there to translate..." and to escape.
"When Atlantis sank, taking the master device with it, they went largely inert. Real magic stopped working, the supernatural receded, miracles grew sparse, and the stage was set for Enlightenment, in which only the material world could be proved to be true.”
A blue cloak – such a telling little detail. St. George had obviously found something here, even in the barren times. Something Frank recognized.
“Protheroe thought that the accumulators still held a small field around their local area, that they continued to charge themselves very slowly even while the Atlantean source was gone. Not enough to make a worldwide difference, but enough to maintain local supernatural activity. Like your strigoi, perhaps. But then came the Rising twelve years ago, when Atlantis returned and the master location suddenly became available again.”
Frank laughed. “At which point, Protheroe said, 'things began to get a little weird'. I wish he was still around to see how true that was. I wish I'd paid more attention. I was much more interested in the verb forms. If this proves to be one of the rare Atlantean-constructed accumulators it may be our chance to unlock the secrets of hundreds of ancient languages - to learn to read the Egyptian hieroglyphs, to decipher messages from civilizations so ancient we can't imagine their thoughts. Voices from ten thousand years ago..." He trailed off, smiling, though he felt a little opened up, vulnerable – missing one or two layers of protective wariness. "Protheroe always told me I was missing the point."
"The point being?"
"Power, I suppose." Frank waved a hand at the distant door. He could 'see' it still, even though a rock wall was in the way. "It's concentrated magical power. A network of it, feeding back to the main storage systems on Atlantis and flowing in a long wave back out from there, across the world, to every country where their accumulator still survives. That's why, after the Rising, people began to discover their talents. One person might click their fingers to start a fire, another might have prophetic dreams, or keep flowers from withering, or..."
He opened his hand to demonstrate how he could summon a little ball of sunlight to his palm. In a soundless explosion, the valley filled with it, white from wall to wall. The water dazzled like diamonds and Vacarescu's eyes looked pale as hoar frost in a face washed out of anything but glare. Oddly, Vacarescu didn’t react at all, didn’t even squint, just carried on looking at Frank with a measuring, curious look, poised on the cusp of a decision.
Somewhat shocked, having expected only his normal globe-like glimmer, Frank let the light go as if stung and blinked the afterimages from his vision. So his eyes were closed when Vacarescu’s hands closed hard on the nape of his neck and in his hair. He pulled Frank to him bodily and kissed his mouth.
It was a very thorough kiss, with no doubt behind it - this was a man, after all, used to giving commands and being immediately obeyed. Used to demanding what he wanted and being given it without argument. And Frank for a long while was quite willing to be another unresisting conquest. Only when he started to respond, trying to worm his hands under coat and waistcoat, so that he could pull out the tucked shirt beneath and touch warm skin, did Frank's still-healing mind tell him that this was wrong. Vile. Against the laws of nature.
“What are you doing?” Refusing to contemplate what this could mean, he untucked his hands from layers of clothes, pushed Radu away, nowhere near as horrified as he thought he ought to be. That too – that lack of deep down abhorrence – told him something he didn't want to hear. He pushed the thought away, resolutely. He was cursed, and probably a murderer. He did not need to add another flaw to worry about.
"I'm not apologizing.” Radu – and Frank felt they must certainly be on first name terms after such an indignity as this – sounded puzzled but unrepentant. “You enjoyed it."
Frank lifted his head. "And so long as your conquests enjoy it, that's all that matters?"
"Isn't it? You are hardly some marriageable maiden whose life I've ruined."
Frank thought of the girls who had been offered up for Radu to marry. That too would never have happened in England. Perhaps this sort of behavior was perfectly all right by the standards of Wallachia? After all, one couldn't expect foreigners to have the same morals expected of one at home. That thought made him almost giddy with relief.
“My father said I was a curse on anyone who got too close to me,” he offered nevertheless, because that was a dread that didn't go away. It was only fair to warn the man off. "I bring death and destruction wherever I walk. You are a man whose life I could ruin. I never mean to, but I seem to have made something of a habit of it. Just look at my friends."
Sighing, Radu stood, offered Frank a hand up. When Frank had risen, he was pulled into a brief, warm hug, Radu's mouth at his ear. "Frank—"
"Carew," Frank interrupted, flushed and uneasy at the intimacy. “The Honorable Frank Carew, son of the Earl of Hungerford. I remembered."
"Well then, Frank Carew. Mine is a life I would like to see ruined. There is always the prospect of building something better afterward. But even if that were not so, I would be pleased to think you bring the fall of my house and the end of my line, so long as you get us all."
&nbs
p; "I don't..." said Frank, flustered. Don't want this responsibility. I'll gladly take care of your library, but if you want a savior you're looking in the wrong place. You're supposed to be taking care of me.
Radu put his head to one side, considering. "If I'd known Death was so beautiful, I'd have courted him earlier."
Frank had to laugh at that, nervously. "Oh, now you're just being ridiculous. You don't mean anything of the sort."
Radu leaned down and began to work his way into the tunnel that lead back to the outer world. His voice sounded wry and patient as Frank followed. "I think you'll find that I know myself better than you do at this point. Not all of your memories are back yet, I gather?"
There was a gap still, everything closing up around it – the central part of the wound where the blade first went in. He still could not remember his crime. Perhaps his mind held back the details because it was as reluctant as he to relive them again. I think I murdered someone called Gervaise. I don't want to remember how or why. I don't want to know myself capable of such evil. "To tell you the truth, I dread them. What could be so bad that even with everything else healed, I cannot look at this last thing?"
The ghost of laughter preceded him as they crawled back into normality. “I doubt there is anything you could have done, Frank, that would horrify me. We are two wretched specimens of humanity together. Whatever it is, I shall not have any grounds on which to condemn you.”
That too Frank found surprisingly comforting.
At the landing where they had left the horses a fire was now burning. Cezar and Liviu had a black pot of coffee in the ashes, and dark rye bread, cheese and sausage unwrapped on the blankets on which they sat. The horses, hobbled but not tethered, were delicately pulling clumps of grass from the cliffs, or supping up the water of the stream. The sun was a band of bright gold above head height on the far cliff face, but below, on the ground, it was already growing chill and evening dews were settling on the rocks.
Frank could still feel the accumulator, but at this distance the fidgeting of universes was settled into a distant hum. He resonated with it still, but it no longer took up all his mind, and all the staring eyes that had watched him seemed to have lost interest for now, turned away.
"It's a horrible thing," said Cezar unexpectedly, handing him a little enameled cup and a hank of bread.
"Strange," Frank smiled at him, glad to hear as much – he had imagined from Radu's reaction he was the only one who could feel it. "Awe-inspiring."
"But ultimately useless," Radu looked up as the darkness widened and widened on the hills. "No matter what happened there, still the night falls and we have to go home."
And yes, Frank thought, once they'd eaten and were packing everything away, mounting up and riding back to the castle that had become his prison this past, anxious week. He had a point.
Frank hoped Protheroe was satisfied now. He himself would gladly go back for longer - if he could bring his anchor to ground him - with a notebook and sketch pad to take down as many of the inscriptions as he could find. Perhaps, if he compared them with those in the Pritenic language as carved in the British chamber, he might learn to read them. If he could translate the long workings out of this most fundamental stratum of Atlantean magic, he would then be the first man in the world - outside that hidden and reclusive island - to understand something of how their astonishing minds worked.
But all this hope rested on the belief that he would be alive tomorrow, and as they rode into the castle, the moon already in the sky and the windows gleaming, he remembered that was no safe assumption to make. Radu might have jokingly called him Death, but there were two others with a better claim to that title. In only a few hours they would be shaking the grave mold from their hair and rising to rule.
Having spent the day awake, Frank tried to snatch a few hours of sleep before nightfall, but he had scarcely lain down before his door eased slowly open. Silk brushed against the floor outside. All of Frank's thoughts focused suddenly into fear as he scrabbled up to sitting, his back against the iron rungs of his headboard.
Alaya still smelled of sour earth and too much perfume, and he didn't know how he had managed to miss the implication of that before. How had he ever mistaken her graceful glide into the room, skirts dragging and rustling around her, for something human. Now he knew... Now he knew, he could see that unless she spoke her many ropes of pearls did not stir with her breathing, that no kind of youth or beauty could make a woman's skin so silvery-pale as hers, or her eyes so huge and luminous.
She had brought her sewing basket with her, as always, and her face was sweet and bright and innocent as ever. But at the sight of his defensive huddle in the corner, of the fear on his face he hadn't thought to conceal, she put down both occupation and disguise and licked her lips.
"Dear Frank," she laughed - still the little girlish giggle of before, while her smile stretched into an eerie sickle of delight. "Are you afraid of me?"
"Yes."
"Who's been telling you tales?" A sweet voice and a pretty pout, but her eyes full of the same smug and predatory amusement he had seen from the demon on the riverbank. It occurred to him that there had been a chance to keep playing along, to keep her acting the role of dutiful daughter, and he had royally fumbled it.
That didn't mean he needed to take Mirela with him. "Nobody. I was outside the room last night when you were all talking. I worked it out."
"I thought I smelled you there," she agreed, and it would have been a beautiful smile if there were not something subtly wrong with it, and it were not on the face of a dead girl dragged from her untimely grave by malice and the powers of Hell. "Oh well, this farce always had to end at some point."
She drifted closer, quite gently, carefully, as if not to spook him. His back was already to the wall and he could go no further that way, so he scrambled out of bed - he'd done no more than take off coat and shoes before turning in - and tried to edge around her until he could make a dash for the door.
"Would you like to run, Frank? I prefer it when they run. Because you're wounded, I'll count to ten, if you like. That would be fair, wouldn't it? That would make it lots more fun."
He wished he had quizzed Mirela more thoroughly about exactly what the strigoi could do, wondered if he faced only a girl's strength or something far greater. Instinct told him to run until his heart burst, but it would mean brushing past her, touching her. Even fleetingly that was not something he wanted to do.
"I'm not interested in making this fun for you," he soothed his mind enough to reach out for the memory of sunshine. It was Frank's theory that Radu hoped he had the power to annihilate both of the creatures with a gesture. That was why he had been moved to kiss Frank as soon as he had blinked the blinding dazzle out of his eyes. Time to test that theory.
His hands tingled with the beginnings of power. He could feel where sunlight still rested, half way across the world. Searching deeper inside himself, detached from this single moment, his thoughts went inward to the place where everything welled up, available to the mind out of time. Sunlight - it never truly went out. He closed his hands, began to pull it towards him.
Alaya stepped closer, her angelic face creased with sharp suspicion. "What are you doing?"
He felt something gentle touch the edges of his thoughts, something gray, misty, and slick. It flinched back as Alaya's mouth opened in shock. Her eyes widened to match. And then her expression slammed shut again, ugly as it had been when they argued about Bucharest. "Frank, that's cheating."
He had time to feel smug. Just one moment of bright, uncomplicated triumph, clear as the light in his head. And then she stopped him. She reached out with her mind and closed it around his as if she had closed iron manacles around his wrists. The greasy feeling of her mind tightened around his as she pried her strong little mental fingers into his defenses. His focus wavered. He scrabbled after it and she got her tendrils into the gaps and tore it into pieces.
For a moment he was so little in
control of his own body he couldn't remember how to breathe. She could have stopped his heart with a thought, could have made him feel anything she wanted him to feel. She chose to leave him breathless panic, the feeling that he had been walking all this time on a glass floor above the pit of Hell. Now it had broken. He fell, and reason abandoned him. It didn't matter that running was what she wanted from him, running was all he could think of. It didn't matter that if she was anything like Constantin she would keep pace effortlessly in a cloud of pale smoke.
Nothing mattered. He had to get away. Alaya smiled and leaned forward to kiss his forehead. Blood dripped in his eyes when she pulled away. The muscles of his legs screamed to run, but he couldn't, pinned through the chest by her will.
Do you think, if it was that easy to kill the strigoi, it would not already have been done? Mirela's warning echoed in his head. He had ignored it unthinkingly, because obviously a natural born Englishman would do better than any amount of foreigners, that went without saying.
Shame joined his terror. As if that was exactly what she'd been waiting for, Alaya stepped aside, gave him a clear path to the open door. The mental bonds fell from his limbs like rubber shattering under cold, and Frank took in a desperate gasp of air and bolted like prey.
Frank tore out of the door, down the corridor, his new boots thudding against the floorboards with a thud as fast as his heart. His mind came back enough to jabber to him that he didn't know where to go. Out to the entrance hall and then into the forest? He had barely escaped that last time. He caught himself on the corner of the main staircase - not that way. Not out into the night.
The girls had come and gone from the sitting room some other way. There must be a back entrance going down into the kitchen or the servants' quarters. Would Alaya murder him in front of the servants? Surely they wouldn't stay here if they'd ever seen such a thing?
He had almost bolted past the door to the sitting room, but now flung out a hand and caught the edge of the lintel, used it to spin him into the room, braced his back against the door and slammed it behind him. His wild eyes fell on a wide bar of iron propped up behind it, and he coughed a laugh, snatched it up and barred the door with sweat-cold hands. "Ha!"