“The people of Elmoryn. The congregation. The public,” the vampire stammered, still on his knees.
“That’s who you should’ve served all along. Not some organization. Not a group of people keeping old secrets buried in vaults, covered in dust and old blood. Valid that they remain out of the public eye or not, the best path would have been to take no lives, and instead find a better way to make change,” Mal said.
“It’s too late to change the past,” Aleksi said.
“Believe me I know, and my sister does as well. We’ve done horrible things in the name of what we thought to be a righteous cause, and I will suffer that guilt until the day I die. All I can do now is affect the future. Find a better cause.”
Aleksi’s broken eyes snapped up to Mal’s, a tiny glimpse of hope in his eyes. “Yes. The future.”
“What now, Oathman? You have seen what I am made of. Grime and polish. You know how this will end if we continue to war like this. We seek answers. Not violence.”
“They must die, Aleksi!” a female vampire called out from feet away. She had bright red hair like lava and flame. Mal couldn’t tell if it was because she was bathed in the blood of his friend.
Aleksi looked to her with the same pain Mal had felt and she turned away, unable to hold his gaze. “We must... discuss this. All of the oath bound here. We must reevaluate. Decide on a better way.”
“Wise,” Umaryn said as she and Chelsea joined Mal’s side. Chelsea limped up and leaned on Mal. She looked to be in some pain, but Mal caught her smiling at him.
“What will you do now?” Aleksi asked them.
Umaryn spoke. “We know there is another entrance to whatever you’re protecting below near here to the north. We believe we can enter whatever lies beneath the ground there and find out what is below. We can’t leave until we know what caused the deaths of our entire family.”
“I see,” Aleksi said. “I understand you more now. I grant you safe passage to the village on condition that you await our answer before you go anywhere else. I know the door you speak of, and should we find an amenable way to move forward, I will lead you there peacefully.”
“How can we possibly trust you?” Umaryn asked the vampire as he stood.
“My name is Oathman. I swear to you I speak the truth, and I will hold accountable all those who go against my will. Let it be known that whatever we decide after this shall be binding to us.” Aleksi said as he stared down all the other vampires. They too couldn’t hold his gaze. When he looked back to Umaryn he wiped the blood off of his face with the back of his hand. The look of hunger and righteousness left him. Shame remained on his face as he looked at the red smear.
“So be it,” Umaryn said, and turned to face James’ body. The vampires parted for her, revealing his mauled corpse. He looked as if he’d been ravaged by wolves. She walked to him and the vampires backed further away in a mixture of fear and respect. The tall woman hooked her hammer on her belt, knelt down and scooped up the dead man. Without another word or a backwards glance, she started walking down the twin rails towards the village of New Falun and the consecrated grounds James had prepared for their safety. The holy area would serve as a meager legacy in the wake of his death.
“Go, please. Await my arrival. Give your friend kind words, and try to prevent him from coming back. It is not much to offer, but the consecrated grounds will delay his reanimation some. I... I am sorry,” Aleksi said.
“We are too,” Malwynn said as he put his arm around the woman he loved.
As the vampires stood in the rain, heads held low, trying to find a way to a new future, Chelsea rested her head on Mal’s shoulder. They began to walk away. “What did you do to him to make him change?” Chelsea asked him in a hushed voice.
“I showed him how much I love you,” Mal said without a smile.
Without a word Chelsea stopped, and turned Mal to face her. She looked into his eyes and despite the sadness, the pain and turmoil, they shared each other for a moment in the storm. After the falling rain washed their faces clean, they shared the tiniest of kisses, and followed Umaryn back with shuffling feet.
Neither he nor Chelsea sheathed their blades on the wordless walk.
The night settled in, and with the darkness the rain fled. It felt like a cruel joke to the three survivors for the world to bring the darkness early enough to lose a friend in it. It felt even stranger that they didn’t fear the black night, and the clear sky above with the moons Hestia and Lune. The long nights prior featured death and gore central, and tonight... it would feature only the feelings of loss, and sadness.
All the mounts were scattered or dead, and most of their supplies had been ransacked or destroyed somehow by the vampires while they were gone. Their small fire had been quenched by the storm, and now they sat huddled around the desecrated body of their friend, each staring at his robe-wrapped corpse, waiting with dread for the moment when he would rise as one of the undead.
Umaryn had kept her anger in check after Aleksi’s transformation back on the rails, but now it flooded back. She’d only just sat down from kicking nearly everything that wasn’t a stone in the consecrated area, and screaming for minutes on end. Her face was red and flushed, making the new scar on her face stand out against her bright white skin. “Will he come back as one of them?”
“A vampire?” Mal asked from his seat on a rock. Chelsea had her face buried in her hands as she tried to fight against her emotions. He had an arm on her back, but had no idea what to say or do beyond that to help.
“Yeah. A blood drinking thing. One with brains. Will he be able to think like them? I mean, if he came back could he conceivably be smart enough to still be a good person?” She almost pleaded with her brother for that to be the truth.
“I doubt it,” he said, shattering the hope in her. “These vampires aren’t like the normal ones. Rare as those are, these things are even rarer. Aleksi called them the oath bound, and that makes me think they were made with a ritual. Some kind of unique spell that gives them the undead state they have. If I could find the spell, I might be powerful enough to cast it, but I have little hope of that. I’m also fairly certain James wouldn’t want to be an undead, intelligent or not. I think he’d prefer oblivion to eternity as that.”
“I’d rather be an undead, if I could keep my mind. All I could do with that time...” Umaryn said without thinking.
Chelsea sobbed, her emotions overtaking her. “It’s all my fault.”
The twins turned to her. “How do you get that?” Umaryn asked her.
Chelsea stammered out a grief-stricken reply, making less and less sense as she spoke, “My leg,” she said, sticking out the previously broken limb like as if it were a traitor in their midst. “If I hadn’t landed on the rock, and broke my leg, he would’ve had enough power to stay alive. If I’d just jumped a moment earlier. Or a moment later. Any moment but the one I chose. Oh grandmother, please take me and bring him back. Mal and Umaryn need a healer more than a sword...”
Umaryn stood up, and walked over to Chelsea abruptly, still angry. She squatted in front of her and grabbed her hands. Chelsea looked up as Umaryn spoke to her. “Look at my face. Look at it. Do you see anything different about me?”
Chelsea’s bloodshot eyes looked at Umaryn’s porcelain skin, searching for something. Umaryn watched the path of her eyes as it traced down the red line that marked where she’d split her face earlier on the train when it rolled. “Yes, you were hurt,” Chelsea said.
“That’s right. Hurt badly too. James healed me though, and I’m here, alive, because of him. The same way you’re here, whole and alive. He gave that to us willingly. He knew what the stakes were when he dug deep to heal us. He took a part of himself and cut it out. He gave that piece to us to make sure we survived. And you know what? If he knew what he did would cost him his life, he’d do it again. I know this, because that’s who James was, wasn’t it?”
Chelsea continued to cry, but she nodded emphatically. Umaryn stayed
in front of Chelsea until the storm of emotion passed, and the hard warrior-woman regained her composure. “So what now? What do we do with him? How long until he comes back?”
“It’s odd,” Mal said, looking at the previously white and cream colored robes wrapped about James’ body. Now they were drenched in rainwater, seeping blood and the dark brown mud of Duulan. “It’s been... well over two hours since he died. And look at him,” Mal said, gesturing at the still body. “He hasn’t moved an inch.”
Umaryn turned and looked at the body. “Does that mean something?”
Chelsea answered her. “It could mean something. He might be... a saint.”
“Come again? James a saint? How does that work?” Umaryn said.
Chelsea explained, “My mother told me a fair amount about saints. She works at the Cathedral of Saint Kincaid, right? It’s called that because this old dude named Kincaid became a saint, and his body is interred there. It’s magical now, his body. And it imbues the whole church with special properties. Saints are a prerequisite for a holy site to be called a cathedral I think.”
“What does that have to do with James not reanimating as undead?” Umaryn asked.
“When a person dies, if they don’t reanimate, it could mean their spirit is so pure their soul doesn’t rot. It’s the first sign of sainthood,” Chelsea answered.
“What’s the second sign?”
Chelsea shrugged. “I don’t know much beyond that the body won’t physically rot either. But I do know the Church of Souls has a team of apostles who confirm sainthood. His body should be brought back if it continues to remain in rest unchanged.”
“Do we want anything to do with the Church after all this? Remember, we’re still criminals in Daris. They think we murdered Alisanne in cold blood,” Mal said with a grim laugh.
“That’s because we pretty much did, brother,” Umaryn said, matching his laughter in the dark. It helped, to laugh.
Chelsea seemed offended by Mal’s comments. “Look, there are good people in the Church. Hundreds if not thousands. You’ve both met my mother. Is she a bad person?”
“Of course not,” Mal said. “I’m sorry. But we need to see what’s in that damn hole before we do anything else. How deep does this go beyond Alisanne? Was she alone, or was she working with others in the Church? We’re far from being able to know what the hell we’re talking about, or who we can trust. And as of right now, there is one less person in this world I trust, and that number was already small and dwindling fast.”
“Yeah you’re right,” Chelsea said, looking down at her healed leg. “So what do we do with James in the meantime?”
“Mal, dead bodies are your department,” Umaryn said, standing.
He exhaled, thinking of what to do. “Well. He’s wrapped. Let’s get some rope or something we can tie him up with so if he does animate he won’t be any danger to anyone. Beyond that, we put him somewhere animals won’t get to him, and we deal with Aleksi and the vampires, and whatever door this key in my pocket opens. If he’s still the way he is after that, then we bring him somewhere, and let the Church canonize him, and do whatever it is they do with saintly bodies.”
“The vampires stole all our rope,” Umaryn said, looking around the foundation they currently called home.
“It’s here somewhere, or something else is. We also need to build some kind of shelter to protect his body,” Mal said to his sister.
“Tell you what, I’ll do that. You two find stuff to tie him up with,” Umaryn said, and the three set out on their collective mission.
Less than a mile distant, still in the gorge of New Falun and the mine, all of the remaining vampires sat in the damp, storm shaken woods around a meager fire. Somehow the group of living humans had whittled the number of vampires down to just thirty. They’d started their defense of the mine and what lay below it with three times that number and more but somehow, the living had found a way to decimate them over and over again, despite Aleksi’s calculated efforts and their vampiric ferocity.
Aleksi’s determination to turn them away at the very least, and kill them if possible, hadn’t abated despite the losses, and now, with his mind invaded for the better by the inside of Malwynn’s thoughts, Aleksi knew something had to change. The vampires weren’t strong enough to turn away another group of explorers after this, not without bolstering their numbers, and to do that...
“We are broken,” Aleksi said, breaking the near silence. Only the crackling of the fire and the dripping of water had dared to do so prior to his words. “They have taken too many of our number for us to continue on successfully, and we do not have the ability to make more of our kind.”
“We mustn’t abandon our oath,” an elderly vampire said. His white hair and gray beard were speckled and stained with red. James’ blood. “We exist to serve in this way, Aleksi, and you have led us successfully for over twenty years in this. We cannot give up hope.”
“I know, Stephen. And I have proudly done so. But now, all has changed,” Aleksi said with profound sadness. “We must still uphold our oath, but we must find a new way to do it.”
“First we must kill these people. They are too dangerous to be let go,” the redheaded vampire said. Her eyes were as wild as her hair, wide and ravenous.
“Camille,” Aleksi said in a tired way, “we’ve not the strength to do it, I fear.”
“You killed their apostle,” she said, challenging her leader. “How could they possibly have enough strength to stop us?” She stood, gesturing to the remaining undead as if they were an unstoppable force.
Hours ago, Aleksi thought they were. “Sit; please do not be angry or rash.” Aleksi looked at the log she’d sat on before, and after a brief moment of defiance, she took her seat. “Yes, I took the life of the apostle. Yes they are less than when they arrived, but I have seen the mind of the death mage, and he is not who I thought he was. They are not who I thought they were. They are not here for plunder. And Camille—everyone—please think of what we’ve done tonight. What I’ve done. We killed a man of the robes. An apostle. A sworn servant of the Church of Souls and the people of Elmoryn. We destroyed the train. A priceless artifact that the Guild left here. Who I remind you, we also serve in kind. Two brands of heresy in one night and for what? We don’t even understand what we protect so fervently. We serve evil on strangers for a reason we don’t fully comprehend, and I cannot abide by blind loyalty to a woman who is now dead.”
“They mustn’t enter the door,” the old man named Stephen said, to quiet approval.
“If we wish to survive this, and carry out our duty, there is strong sense in letting them in. They claim to have a key,” Aleksi said.
“We too have a key, but that doesn’t mean we allow them in. And what sense is there in allowing them in?” Camille said her voice more rational now. “What if they see what’s inside? What if they tell others?”
“We cannot make more of our kind on our own. It requires a necromancer who can read the rites,” Aleksi said.
“And the rites are inside the door,” Stephen said, seeing the puzzle come together.
“Yes. They are. I believe we could strike a deal with the one called Malwynn to increase our numbers again. That does not change the fact that, moving forward, I think we must change our ways. Murder for the sake of secrecy cannot sustain itself for long. We must learn to turn strangers away. Not kill them without thought. We are not savages,” Aleksi said. “But I fear we are becoming savage.”
“How will we feed?” Camille asked, frightened.
“With our reduced numbers the deer will return. We can raise animals. Pigs, cows. Their blood is good enough for us to live on. Rebuild the village perhaps. Make a real existence instead of hiding in the woods like feral monsters. I don’t know. I know we must change, but I do not know exactly how yet.”
Stephen nodded solemnly. “I would like to sleep in a bed again, even if it is during the day.”
Camille said nothing, but her downward face an
d interlocked fingers said she had anger in her heart.
“I will lead them to the other door,” Aleksi said, asking for no advice on the matter. “If their key opens it, we will go in, and I will guide them to the answers they seek. If I feel they wish to do damage with what they learn, then we will kill them or die trying. If I feel they seek to do good with what they learn in the vault, then we will set them free.”
“You are taking a great risk, Aleksi,” Camille said, her words hissing out like drops of venom.
“As have they. They knew we were here, and they came anyway. Perhaps not unafraid, but brave to say the least of them. I think of that, and I think of how far they have come, and what they have achieved, and I think that there is providence in that. Signs that the ancestors perhaps act on their behalf as well as ours. I wonder if their journey and our duty are not at odds with one another, but instead perhaps they can be as one, somehow.”
“Bah,” Camille muttered. She stood, and walked off into the black, wet forest, defeated.
The rest of the vampires stayed, accepting Aleksi’s decision.
“I will go to them now. After we leave the vault, I will bring them back to the village, and we will consult on whether or not they must be killed. May the ancestors ever have our best interests in their hearts, and I pray that I make the right decision in this.”
Aleksi left a group of very unsettled undead behind.
He too, felt unsettled.
—Chapter Twenty-Three—
THE BLOOD RED PLAINS OF VARRLAND
Not long before Umaryn fell asleep at her post in New Falun, trying as best as she could to not think about Marcus, he rallied his surrounded cavalry in besieged Ockham’s Fringe.
The Echoes of Sin (The Kinless Trilogy Book 3) Page 29