by Max Turner
“You called him Timur,” I said, relieved that Istvan had changed the subject.
“Yes. Timur Lenk—Timur the Lame.”
“Perhaps you know him by another name,” said Vlad. “The Mighty Tamerlane, founder of the Timurid Dynasty. It is said that during his campaigns, nearly five per cent of the world’s population was sent to the grave, although I think those numbers, like his prowess, are exaggerated.”
“He is more formidable than when you last faced him,” Istvan said. “Doubtless, when the Changeling raised him up some vile sorcery was used to augment his power. We would be wise not to underestimate him.”
Vlad grumbled. “I have plans for him, and for Bathory.”
“Who is that?” I asked.
“The Countess Elizabeth Bathory,” Istvan said. “Once a living vampire, she has the power that inspires the mindless hunger of the horde. Hence the name Famine. She makes them positively ravenous.”
I understood. A vampire who was starving would do just about anything for blood. It was a perfect explanation for the savagery Charlie and I had witnessed at Iron Spike Enterprises. So, Famine was behind it.
“It is said that only the most practised elders can resist her voice,” Istvan continued. “That you were able to do so is unprecedented.”
It must have been a trick of the light, but it seemed a smile flickered across Vlad’s face. “I would expect nothing less from my progeny.”
I wasn’t sure if he was complimenting me or himself. “What about Pestilence?” I asked.
“I believe he is Donatien Alphonse François, the Marquis de Sade. The physical resemblance is uncanny, but his mind is too twisted a labyrinth for me to navigate, and he has given up his voice, so his identity has been impossible to confirm.”
“What does that mean, given up his voice?”
“As Ophelia’s ward, you must know something of the Dream Road. To find a dreamer, you must follow their voice. The voice of the Marquis has been taken from him—his master’s doing, no doubt. Since he cannot speak, he cannot be found. It leaves him free to stalk the Dream Road, torturing rival vampires in their sleep without fear of reprisal.”
Vlad bristled. “I should have had the body of that pus-filled worm destroyed centuries ago.”
“He should be pitied,” Istvan said. “I doubt he even remembers who he is. What remains of him is more animal than human.”
“He was barely human in life!” Vlad said. “If his talents are so impressive, perhaps he’d like to visit me on the Dream Road. That would put an end to his meddling.”
“And so that leaves us with Death,” Istvan said, his eyes on me expectantly.
A nervous tension crept back into my bones. I stalled. “What about the Changeling?”
“Of the Grand Master we can be sure of nothing,” Istvan answered. “Each time I think I have discovered something valuable and dig further, I find a contradictory set of facts. He is from the Far East, the Middle East, Europe, the north of Africa, the New World. He is a Zoroastrian, a Buddhist, a Muslim, a Sikh, a Christian. He is a wampyr, an alchemist, a revenant, a golem, a ghoul. He is the First Emperor of Qin returned, Genghis Khan, Murad the Conqueror, Cortez the Killer, Attila the Hun, the incarnation of Quetzalcoatl. He could be any of these things and none of them. He has saturated our networks with so much misinformation, I have no strategy for sorting through it. As if we were not burdened with enough trouble.” He glanced at the desiccated corpses lining the room. As his eyes passed over each, he named them: Matthias Corvinus, John Hunyadi, Radu the Handsome, Stephen Báthory, Mihály Szilágyi. I recognized some of the names from a biography of Vlad that Ophelia had given me to read. Some of these men had supported him; some had betrayed him.
“We will be reunited with our friends soon,” Vlad promised. “There is a way, Istvan. There is always a way.” His eyes moved to me. “Mark my words, pup. We will twist the very fabric of reality if we must.” He turned his attention to a beaker, removed it from its burner, then set it under a vertical tube and began to add another mixture to it. “But the question that concerns us at the moment is Death. Who is he?”
I couldn’t trust him with that information. “You still haven’t told me where my friends are, or why I can’t see them.”
“Your friends are close by,” Istvan said. “Their exact location must be kept a secret.”
“Why?”
Vlad was suddenly towering over me. “You are not so strong that your mind can’t be opened. If we tell you where your friends are, you might just as well announce it to our enemies. You will be reunited with them later, once Ophelia is safe. Now tell us what you know.”
Reunited with them later? I didn’t believe a word of it. I looked into Vlad’s eyes for some sign that he was telling the truth, but all I could see was darkness. In Istvan’s, I saw only pity. Hardly encouraging.
“Your friends are safe,” Istvan said. “Our concern must be for Ophelia.”
“They should be involved,” I said.
“Impossible,” snapped Vlad. “They are not equal to the task. And I have no intention of compromising my efforts by acting nursemaid to a gaggle of children.”
“We were outmatched on the ship,” Istvan said. “If we bring your friends with us, they will be easy targets. It does not serve our cause to place them in peril.”
I suddenly understood why the good-cop/bad-cop routine was so effective. It really threw you off to have someone in the room you liked and wanted to trust, and another whose aggression inspired fear and hatred. I resisted the urge to engage with Istvan. Vlad was my enemy. I couldn’t become complacent about that.
“I don’t trust you,” I said to him. “If you know where the Changeling is keeping Ophelia, tell me. I’d rather try this on my own than have you stab me in the back.”
“Try this on your own? Did you hear that, cousin? The little cub wants to save Ophelia by himself. Well, good luck. You are free to leave and pit your skills against the New Order. Perhaps, in your next encounter, you’ll manage to stay alive for more than a few minutes.”
He turned back to his potions, then took his eyedropper and forced what must have been poison down the throat of the next rat in line. Once it stopped moving, he injected his newest concoction into its stomach. The rat shuddered and convulsed, then sat up and nearly scurried off the counter. Vlad’s hand shot out so quickly I barely saw it. I could feel his sense of triumph. Then, after a few short seconds, the rat hissed, shook wildly and grew still. Triumph turned to rage. Vlad drew his fist back and would have smashed the entire apparatus in front of him had Istvan not grabbed his arm.
“We are out of time,” Vlad growled. “Ophelia’s trial is at sundown. If the Changeling is there, how will we survive this?” He raised his hand as though referring to the corpses. Istvan seemed to know what he was talking about.
Vlad turned around and glared at me. “Why do you linger?” He reached up and grabbed the lever above the counter. A second later, the door in the wall rattled open for me. “If you aren’t going to help us, be gone.”
I couldn’t believe he was going to let me go. I wondered if it was a trick. I took a cautious step forward. My head screamed for me to lie down. The foreign blood was still causing havoc in my system.
Istvan waved for me to stay still. “We have one chance at this,” he said to Vlad. “Let me prepare him. It will make a difference to have him involved. Consider Ophelia. She will take great comfort in knowing he is under our protection. And our enemies … what a terrible doubt we could sow in their ranks with the weight of the prophecy behind us and you two fighting side by side, elder and younger together. Leave Zachariah here with me. Get yourself some rest. I will proceed as you have planned.”
Vlad glanced back, then returned to his work. “And what of Death?”
Istvan’s eyes bounced quickly to me and then back to Vlad. Something passed between them.
“I will meet you here after the sun sets,” Vlad said. Then he shifted through the exit and was gone.
CHAPTER 27
ONE TALENT TO RULE THEM ALL
I STVAN CLOSED THE door of stone. With Vlad gone, the air in the room felt suddenly lighter.
“You must understand the pressure he is under. If he fails, our cause is finished, and he knows it.”
“He …” I didn’t know where to begin.
“I trust you’ve heard the old adage ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend.’ The Changeling has no greater rival than Vlad. Try to think of him as an ally. Perhaps, in time, you will appreciate his strengths and forgive him his trespasses.”
“After what he’s done?” I took a deep breath to try to calm myself. The result was more nausea. “I can’t imagine why anyone would want him alive again.”
“You don’t have to imagine.” His eyes flickered over the corpses. “Look around you. Our list of allies grows shorter by the day. Do you think we can stop the New Order without him?”
I would have been willing to try. “How is he even alive?”
Istvan sighed, then sat slowly, as if the weight of his troubles might crush the stool beneath him. “His remains were in the silver case. The one your uncle was hiding.”
The silver case … Should I have known? Probably. what other reason could there have been for all the secrecy surrounding it? “So Ophelia knew?” I asked.
“Yes,” he answered.
“Was she going to bring him back?”
Istvan paused, thinking. “Had that been a priority for her, I’m sure it would have happened before this.”
He stood, then started dismantling some of Vlad’s equipment. “I know this must be hard for you. Vlad is a complicated man … And his history with your father is a complex tapestry. Years later, I am still having trouble unravelling the threads.” He waved me over, then handed me some glass tubing. “Help me with this, would you?” He nodded towards one of the cabinets mounted on the wall.
“Vlad believes strongly in the maintenance of order, as do I. When he led the Coven of the Dragon, vampires who broke the law, particularly those who threatened to expose our existence, were dealt with harshly. Then your father came along and things changed.”
He squirted some dish soap into a basin and began filling it with hot water.
“Dr. Robert Thomson … We often found ourselves hunting the same quarry.”
I remembered reading this in my father’s journal two summers ago.
“Needless to say, his approach was very different from ours. We offered death or undeath. He offered redemption, a chance to start over—something Vlad believed these vampires had forfeited by wilfully disobeying our laws. So we tried to stop him.”
Istvan handed me a dish towel. He washed. I dried.
“It wasn’t personal. Not at first. It just wasn’t proper that a human, even one as well intentioned as your father, was interfering in our affairs.”
This didn’t make sense to me. “I thought my dad was part of the Underground. Wasn’t he supposed to be doing that stuff?”
Istvan paused to scrub the scoring off the bottom of a beaker. “The Underground was a different beast back then, in the days before the Internet and cellphones and instant global communication. It was more of a loose affiliation. A network that evolved into being because some vampires needed help, and others got noticed. But the Underground had no charter back then, no clear mandate. Certainly none of the internal structures you’d expect to see in a modern institution. President. Board of directors. That sort of thing. Do you understand what I mean?”
“Not really,” I said.
He laughed quietly, then handed me the beaker. “I suppose it isn’t relevant. What matters is that we found ourselves, Vlad and I, at odds with your father. We came close to catching him several times, but Dr. Robert had an aptitude for slipping through our fingers. It was almost amusing at first. We were two of the most powerful vampires in the world, with a global army of informants at our disposal. But as we continued to fail, Vlad became more and more obsessed. In the end, paranoia set in.”
For a time, he was quiet. All I could hear was the clinking of glassware and the squeak of my drying towel.
“I should have seen how it would end, and I am ashamed for not preventing it. Vlad became convinced that someone within our organization was abetting your father’s escapes. He soon saw a traitor in every face around him. In time, he even suspected me and Ophelia. Once he stopped listening to her, his descent into madness began.”
He shook water from his hands, then waved for the towel and dried them.
“You know the outcome.” His voice slowed. “I am sorry for it. And in his moments of lucidity, Vlad is sorry, too. But you must not press him about your parents, Zachariah. He is a proud man and quick to anger, all the more so when challenged, or when his failings are exposed. When Ophelia is back, she will help restore some measure of calm. But for now, do as he says, because we cannot save her without him.”
He opened a cupboard and starting stacking crucibles on a shelf. “Vlad is under considerable duress. We are weeks, perhaps months away from an antidote, assuming one can be found.”
“An antidote for what?”
Istvan stared at the grey-skinned corpses along the wall. “The Changeling is venomous. His poison is so powerful we cannot bring our friends back, no matter how much blood we use. Think on that. Death forever, from a mere scratch. This weapon is in the hands of a vampire who could be anyone, at any time, and who now commands a legion. We are badly outmatched.”
I was suddenly mindful again of why Ophelia had wanted my friends and me to stay indoors. “Where is Luna and everybody?” I asked. “Is Vincent all right? He was bleeding badly.”
Istvan began disassembling the burners, then pointed to a drawer under the counter so I could put them away.
“Vincent and the others are hiding. They are as safe as we can make them.”
“What about Suki? Is there nothing …?” My tongue got stuck and I couldn’t finish the sentence.
Istvan’s face took on a sombre cast. “I am afraid she is gone.”
I knew this already, but a part of me insisted that this must have been a mistake, that if I thought hard enough, some solution would present itself. Istvan’s face told a different story. Tears formed in my eyes. I closed them and turned to the wall. It was a while before I could speak.
“Charlie … is he okay?”
“No.”
“And Luna?”
“Devastated. The situation with her parents is tense. They want details, and we can’t provide them. It’s tragic. But what can be done in such situations? There is no time to mourn. We are at war.”
“Can I see them?”
He sighed, then collapsed back onto his stool. “Vlad will not allow it, and I will not cross him. He claims it is for their safety, which is true … in part. There are those among our enemies who could pry their location from your mind. But I suspect the real reason is that with your friends as hostages, he can compel you to aid us. This includes providing us with information. You have seen the face of Death. If you are not willing to tell us who he is, I have little doubt that Vlad will threaten to kill them.”
That sounded more like the vampire I knew.
“If you don’t wish to tell him who Death is, perhaps you could tell me?”
I sealed my mind as tightly as I could. I wasn’t ready to declare John Tiptoft our enemy knowing his death might also mean the death of Mr. Entwistle.
“We will speak of it later,” Istvan said. “We must get you ready to travel.”
Unless I was going to the nearest bed and breakfast, I didn’t want to go anywhere. “I need more rest. I can’t even stand.”
“We have no choice. You heard what Vlad said. Ophelia’s trial begins at sundown. The New Order plans to execute her. It must be done legally, if they wish to authenticate their position as caretakers of our species. Ready or not, we must press forward.”
“What is the matter with me?”
“Vlad has given you
some of his blood. Because of his age, it will accelerate the development of your talents. Regrettably, it will behave, at least in the short term, like a poison. Dizziness, nausea, what you’re feeling now.”
“I thought a vampire’s blood was fatal to another vampire.”
“The dose Vlad gave you would certainly have killed me or anyone else, but you are his progeny. Have you never wondered why it is that Vlad can do so many exceptional things?”
He stood and crossed the room, then examined the rat cage. “Their food is in that cupboard.” He pointed to my right. There was a box inside that said Mâncare Pentru Pisici. It had a picture of a cat on it.
“You seem to have inherited his talent,” he said.
“I thought you just said he has many talents.”
“Let me explain. He has but one: he is immune to vampire blood. As are you.”
“It doesn’t feel like it.”
“Your discomfort is to be expected. This first time will be the worst. But you will not die from it. In fact, from this one immunity springs near limitless power, because for a time afterwards, as a kind of side effect, you will gain the talents of those from whom you have fed. So it is with Vlad. Turning to mist. Shapechanging. Slipping like a shadow through cracks. Moving from one area of darkness to another. Compelling others to obey. Reading thoughts. Phenomenal strength and speed and endurance. Many talents, all spawned from the one.”
He shook some dry cat food into a row of containers, then handed the box back to me so I could put it away.
“For over five hundred years he has collected the corpses of vampires who broke Coven law. His dungeons overflow with the undead. He need only raise them up, feed from them, and his power is renewed. Every possible talent is at his fingertips. And now they are at yours.”
I could scarcely believe what I was hearing. Any vampire talent at Vlad’s fingertips. And mine! The one thought was horrifying; the other, unbelievable. For the first time since the disaster on L’Esprit Sauvage, I felt real hope stirring within me. Rescuing Ophelia was now more than just wishful thinking.
“It is not adequate compensation for what has been taken from you,” Istvan said, “but it will facilitate your survival. Now, you must tell me about Death. For the sake of your friends, you must put your reluctance aside, for if you do not tell me, I cannot predict what Vlad will do to compel you.”