by James Kahn
At the base of the outer wall, she looked up: mortared granite, straight to the sky: she could not see the top. Near the gate, she heard a rustle—one of the three-headed Cerberi had picked up her scent.
No point in thinking about the top until she was there. And only one way to get there. She put her claws out, jumped to the first obvious foothold and, head up, began the vertical climb.
It didn’t take her long to reach the hundred-foot top. She looked for the wires Jasmine had spoken of, to avoid them. They were immediately apparent, one every two feet, stretching into space toward the castle. The castle itself looked simultaneously foreboding and warm. It was dark, gothic, impregnable; yet the windows were all alight, inviting. The whole city, in fact, twinkled with the incandescence of street lamps and porch lights. Isis sat coolly on her haunches, observing with circumspection.
She dilated her nostrils, twitched her ears, scanned with her eyes; sensed with her Cat-sense. She sat thus for an hour. Then, deliberately, felinously, she descended the inner face of the outer wall.
The four figures moved slowly through the shadow turnings. The water was only a few inches deep here, barely trickling over the cold stone, so they sloshed as they walked, each footstep a jumble of echoes.
Periodically they passed a dim light. Here they would pause, examine the maps to ascertain position and direction; mark the wall with an arrow; proceed in silence.
Tunnels branched, stopped, doubled back. All was shadow. Josh felt a continuous strain on his eyes, his nerves, his ears. His ears. Focusing suddenly on his auditory powers, he thought he heard something.
“What’s that?” he whispered.
“What’s what?” said Sum-Thin.
“Footsteps,” whispered Josh, “somewhere behind us.”
They stood stone-still.
“I hear nothing,” said Sum-Thin.
“No, he was right,” whispered Lon. “I heard them too, but now they’ve stopped.”
They all listened: silence, save for the water’s low and omnipresent shhh.
Delicately, they began to walk again. This time they all heard it—the muffled clump and splash of footfalls in the impenetrably dark recesses behind them. Then, just as suddenly, the sounds faded and disappeared.
“Biped, I think,” whispered Jasmine.
Sum-Thin and Jasmine drew their scalpels; Josh held his knife. Lon marked the place in chalk. They resumed walking.
It remained quiet for two more turns; then once again, the footsteps. Then a new sound: a soft, short scratching. The hunters—or were they now hunted—stopped. The sinister footsteps echoed in the distance once more, closer perhaps, then farther again. Then they ceased; then the scratching sound again; then the footsteps again; then silence yet once more.
“Come on, then,” said Jasmine, looking all directions at once. She led the way to the next dim light, twenty yards up. They all stood under it to read the map.
It was a crossing of six major tunnels, some inches deep in fast water: and two smaller tunnels, both dry. Jasmine drew an arrow on the wall pointing back down the way they’d come. “This is where we split up,” she said, studying the map closely. Josh kept one eye on the diagram, one on the tunnels. “Sum-Thin and I go this way,” Jasmine continued, pointing down to her right, “and you two go up this channel toward Bal’s house.” She pointed up a smaller, dry cavern.
Joshua’s mouth felt parched with exhilaration. Unknown, imminent dangers awaited him. He licked his lips. “Good hunting,” he whispered, pressing one of Jasmine’s hands in his left, one of Sum-Thin’s in his right.
Jasmine felt keyed, alert. She’d played this part so many tunes in her long life; but always the final moments were like opening night. Still, underneath it all resided a great calm within her. She returned the squeeze of Joshua’s hand.
Sum-Thin said: “There is no luck but destiny. However: good luck to us all.”
Lon regarded the blueprints one last time. Jasmine checked her flashlight. Suddenly Josh froze: he felt a presence somewhere near. The next moment, Lon, too, became motionless, staring into the darkness. A shadow moved across Jasmine’s face. From the opposite tunnel: slowly emerged the Minotaur.
It stood upright—easily eight feet tall—with the body of a man, the head of a bull. A huge man, a fierce bull. It stood unmoving, smiling grimly in the shadows at the four who stood grimly unmoving beneath the light. Slowly, it raised its powerful hand to the wall, where it made a short, soft scratching. When it lowered its hand, the others could see it had drawn a chalk arrow on the wall, pointing up the tunnel it stood near.
Still facing them, still smiling, the beast moved sideways to the next tunnel, where with another scratching sound, it drew another arrow, pointing in a different direction. Then a third arrow, at the mouth of a third tunnel. The same scratching sound they’d heard following them, accompanying them, down how many turns in how many tunnels.
The Minotaur’s mouth was open, and he drooled as he watched the dawning comprehension on the faces of his prey. He suddenly let out a brief, insane burst of laughter; then with a speed incomprehensible in a creature so large, he lowered his head, rushed at Sum-Thin, gored her almost in half with his massive horns, and returned to where he’d been standing.
The others stood mesmerized as Sum-Thin crumpled and fell. Her belly was torn pole to pole, her red oily fluids spilled on the water. Her eyes remained open, but she was dead. The fast, shallow water bounced and scraped her broken body down the tunnel and out of sight. The Minotaur threw back his head: another short, mad laugh.
In that instant, Josh threw his knife, Jasmine knocked out the light, and all three of them separated. There was a strangled hiss in the blackness, a shuffling of feet, a growl, a tumble. A flashlight beam shot on, flashed over a terrifying purple eye, flashed off again. Josh heard a body thrown against the wall. Two lights flashed. One beam fell over Lon, his side bloody; one shone upon the Minotaur’s terrible face. Squinting, the creature charged the light. The light went out.
Josh rushed toward the source of the extinguished light, where the beast had lunged. He ran into a giant muscled form, the thing’s fetid breath hot on his face. He brought his scalpel up into the twisting flesh, as a massive arm circled him, squeezed him, threw him to the ground.
There was a spastic scuffling, which stopped immediately, and suddenly all was silence.
Josh raised his head out of the water. More silence. He shook the water from his ears.
“Lon?” came Jasmine’s voice, to Joshua’s right.
“Yes,” came the choked reply, immediately behind him.
“Is it over?” asked Josh.
Both flashlights came on. Lon played his over Josh, then over Jasmine, who was crouching at the mouth of a small recess. Jasmine shined hers on Lon. “You’re hurt!” she gasped.
There was a two-inch wound in his right side, bleeding freely. “It is nothing. Where is the monster?”
They both scanned their lights around until they located the felled beast. He lay sprawled on his side, half in the water, half up a dry tunnel. Joshua’s knife stuck angled into his throat; Lon’s claws had gouged deep tracks across one eye and through the great black nose; his hand was impaled on Jasmine’s scalpel, and Joshua’s scalpel was buried in his shoulder. He was very dead.
“Looks like your first knife-throw did the trick, Joshua,” Jasmine commented. “He kept fighting just out of sheer meanness.”
Lon sat up against the wall. “We were lucky,” he said quietly. He was shaken.
The others gathered around him, and they all assessed the damages. Lon’s bleeding was slowing—the abdomen had been penetrated by the tip of the Minotaur’s horn, but the severity of the wound wasn’t immediately apparent. Jasmine was unscathed. Josh had several large bruises, and the skin over his left arm had somehow gotten scraped bare, but nothing major seemed to be wrong.
“Sum-Thin is dead,” Jasmine spoke blankly. Her friend of two hundred years.
Lon li
ngered his light over the monster in the corner, still frightening even in death. “We were lucky,” he repeated.
For some minutes, they pondered in silence. Neuroman bodies were unable to cry, but Jasmine wailed on the inside. She felt as if a large piece of her had been wrenched out, leaving her raw, empty, exposed. She tried filling up with determination, or anger; but the hole was large and didn’t yet want filling. Sum-Thin was gone.
Josh stopped his shaking. It was close, but they’d won, and now they were one devil closer to Dicey. He breathed deeply. He felt ready for anything.
“Well, let us proceed,” Lon finally halted contemplations. “Yasmeen, you go on to the power station alone. Joshua, if you think you can rescue your people from Bal by yourself, go do so. I need to collect my resources. I shall wait here, replenish myself on the monster, attend to my wound, and guard your rear in the event there are more such demons in this labyrinth. If you do not meet with success, come back to me here.”
It was a less than satisfactory plan, but alternatives were scarce. Ultimately, they agreed. Josh and Jasmine retrieved their weapons, each took a map and a flashlight, and set off up their respective tunnels; to the power plant, and to Bal’s house.
Josh looked back as he made his way up the dry tunnel. The last thing he saw in the diminishing light was Lon’s winged shadow-form, its face buried thirstily in the neck of the dead Minotaur.
Isis crouched just inside the inner wall. A soft wind ruffled her fur: she made no other movement. Black on black, she was invisible.
Voices mingled with footsteps in the streets around her. She sniffed the air: no Joshua.
Like a fog she glided silently over the ground, pausing once more in a lightless hollow. Towering in the near distance was the resounding castle. Obviously, the castle was the place to be.
She found herself at the castle wall with all the furtive speed of a small dark thought. Nicely done. She sat up. Fitfully, she remembered she hadn’t cleaned herself lately, and quickly became totally absorbed in the process of licking the fur of the inner side of her right hind leg.
Beauty slid silently into the moon-shimmering river. The current pulled him along effortlessly, as he steered himself with an occasional stroke down the central tributary, directly toward the body of the castle. On his back coiled many pounds of sinewy vein.
He registered his fatigue, then ignored it. It was not helpful to dwell on liabilities. Especially so near the end.
The critical branching approached, and passed, veering Beauty to his dark destination. In the near distance the wall loomed, soon obliterating all else. Twenty yards; ten. With a muffled thuk, Beauty floated gently into the towering stone. The river flowed on past him beneath the wall, through an enormous hole whose upper limit was just below the water line. Beauty pulled himself along the wall, feeling the upper lip of the tunnel mouth until it began to curve downward into the river’s depth. He estimated the width of the subaquatic entrance to be about fifty feet. Looking north and south, he could barely make out the banks of the river, flowing ever faster around the outer walls of the city before it tumbled into the sea.
He waited until the moon hid behind a fat cloud, then dove under the wall. He stayed underwater, swimming with the current, until he could hold his breath no longer; then let his face break the surface gently, without a splash. He found himself floating up a waterway perhaps twenty-five feet wide, the clatter of activity ringing from both banks: microcephatic Clones washed clothes, Neuromans sat talking, Vampires walked their Humans. Beauty looked ahead to see the inner wall quickly approaching. He took a deep breath and slipped underwater once again.
With a combination of fear and triumph he felt the cool river carry him swiftly to the end of the hunt. What the conclusion would be he refused to think about. Jasmine he refused to think about. All he thought of was Rose. He hoped she was well. He hoped he could play a part in her rescue.
Once more he lifted his head—just in time to see he was fast reaching the point at which this small inner city tributary dove into the knoll on which the castle stood, to branch into its subterranean maze of tunnels. He caught the edge of the portal, stopped himself from riding the current in, and deftly tied one end of his coiled vine to a jutting rock. Then, with a last look around to make sure he’d not been observed, he ducked his head under the stone arch, and unraveling his length of vine, rode the flow into the underground tunnels.
With long-practiced stealth, Josh climbed rung after rung up the shaft to Bal’s quarters. He was possessed by the studied calm of the hunter closing in. Every sense, every inkling told him this was the moment: his prey run to ground; the beast so vulnerable in the imagined safety of its own lair.
Josh reached the topmost rung. Lightly he held the dagger between his teeth as he barely lifted the lid of the shaft. What he saw was an empty, candlelit bedroom. In a single motion he raised the lid and jumped out of the shaft. It took him only a few seconds longer to lower the lid silently and crouch in tense readiness beside the tube he’d just left.
All was quiet. He looked around the room. Candles, mirrors, an enormous four-poster bed. He steadied his hand around the hilt of his blade and crept to the doorway.
A dim corridor, perforated at intervals by open doors. With feline precision Joshua tiptoed along the paneled wall; stopped; peered into the first room that led off the hallway. It was a large kitchen, lit by electric bulbs. An older man—Human, by all appearances—stood at the sink, washing dishes. Josh left him undisturbed and proceeded silently to the next door. Here he found what seemed to be a great dining room: there was a connecting door to the kitchen; a long wooden table surrounded by twenty or thirty chairs; windows floor to ceiling, overlooking the night. At one end of the table three more Humans sat chattering, playing cards. Josh left them to their game and continued his cat-walk down the corridor.
He paused a moment before peering into the next room. Many voices could be heard inside, conversing in a low register. Taut as a spring, he crouched; subtle as half-shadow, he peeked around the lintel into the murmuring chamber. There in the candlelight lounged twenty Humans: men, women, boys, girls, jeweled, perfumed, naked, veiled, sitting, reclining, smoking, laughing, teasing, dancing, sleeping, weeping, pale, thin, and generally purplish about the neck: the harem.
Joshua’s hair stood on end. He seethed, but made no sound. Carefully, he studied every face. None were familiar. With increasing tension, he moved on.
He made to inspect the next room down the line, when something caught his ear: at the end of the hall, a soft-lit room; and somewhere inside to the right of the doorway, two voices. Clear, precise voices. One baritone, controlled; the other high, young: a voice Joshua knew. For a moment, he was paralyzed by this knowledge. Fear rode him wildly, alongside uncertainty, excitement, and rage. Finally, gripping his knife more tightly than was good, with every muscle ready, he walked toward the door at the end of the hall, toward the sound of the two voices.
“Bal-Sire,” whispered Dicey, “something for your palate?” She parted her lips, tilted her head, exposed her neck.
“Begone,” he mumbled. He was absorbed in his book.
“Please, Sire,” she stroked his arm, “I’d like to—”
“Begone, I said.” He pushed her off. “You have no judgment, you never know when you’ve had enough.
Besides, I’m reading.” He paused, tried to read again, but his concentration was broken. He slammed the book shut with a scowl. “Besides which, your blood is so thin now, it tastes like beet broth.”
She walked behind his chair, her breathing fast and shallow. With delicate fingers she rubbed his temples, cupped his cheeks, massaged his neck and shoulders. He drew away at first, then ignored her; then tolerated her; then began to respond. Her lips drew wider, her breath quickened. She guided her palms down his chest, caressed his bulging pectorals, played her fingertips over his nipples, lightly at first, then harder. His head lolled to the side. She brought her head behind his, then beside
it, as her hands went farther down, over his belly, to spread his flexing thighs. She kept one hand there, and brought the other up to grasp a bush of hair at the back of the Vampire’s head; turned his head forcefully until it faced hers; pushed his wet mouth against her hot, ecchymotic neck. “Bal,” she whispered, “take me to the edge.”
He bit deeply into the side of her throat. Her eyes shut, her grip tightened around his blood-thick phallus. He lapped and sucked at her flowing wound. He bit again. She purred; swooned.
With uncontained fury, Joshua leapt into the coupled lovers, knocking them to the floor, plunging his knife to the hilt into the Vampire’s heart. Bal screeched and twisted, simultaneously throwing Josh and Dicey to opposite sides of the room.
Dicey lay there without moving, bleeding from the neck. Josh and Bal slowly stood, facing each other, twenty feet apart. Both were wide-eyed, panting, tense. The commotion had also aroused all the members of the harem, who now gathered around the doors to stare in confusion and horror at the confrontation.
Josh stood poised, scalpel in hand.
Bal loosely unfurled his wings in the attack position. He looked down to the knife sticking straight in his chest; then up at Josh in disbelieving rage. He pulled out the knife, then dropped it to the floor. Blood spurted, then poured from the slender hole it had left.
Bal hissed, and grinned the ritual grin. Josh crouched. Bal flew at the invader with all his immense strength, knocked the scalpel away in a stroke, and set his angry fangs deep into Joshua’s neck.
Josh had never known such pain. The Vampire’s teeth were like electrified spikes, sending waves of agony from their point of entry, across his entire body. It paralyzed him, blinded him. Yet it left his mind perfectly clear as to the nature of the pain. Nerve pain. Death pain. Vampire pain.