Blood 20

by Tanith Lee

  BLOOD 20

  TALES OF VAMPIRE HORROR

  Tanith Lee

  Published in 2015 by Telos Moonrise: Dark Endeavours

  (An imprint of Telos Publishing)

  5A Church Road, Shortlands, Bromley, Kent BR2 0HP, UK

  www.telos.co.uk

  Telos Publishing Ltd values feedback. Please e-mail us with any comments you may have about this book to: feedback@telos.co.uk

  Blood 20: Tales of Vampire Horror © 2015 Tanith Lee

  Please also see the individual story copyright details at the end of the book.

  Cover Art © 2015 Iain Robertson

  Cover Design: David J Howe

  Internal illustrations: © 2015 Carolyn Edwards

  ISBN: 978-1-84583-909-3

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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  CONTENTS

  ‘On Reflection’

  ‘Bite-Me-Not’ (or ‘Fleur de Fur’)

  ‘The Vampire Lover’

  ‘Winter Flowers’

  ‘Il Bacio’ (‘Il Chiave’)

  ‘Blood Chess’

  ‘The Isle is Full of Noises’

  ‘Israbel’

  ‘Remember Me’

  ‘Night Visitor’

  ‘The Third Horseman’

  ‘Mirror, Mirror’

  ‘Nunc Dimittis’

  ‘La Vampiresse’

  ‘Scarabesque: The Girl Who Broke Dracula’

  ‘Vermilia’

  ‘Vhone’

  ‘Real and Vire’

  ‘The Beautiful Biting Machine’

  ‘Beyond the Sun’

  ‘On Reflection: The Epilogue’

  ON REFLECTION

  The patrol had been that way before. They had even once stopped at the well, to drink and to water their horses. This time the well was in a bad state. Part of its stony shell had collapsed into the shaft, fouling the water, leaving the opening wide to the dusts, and making it difficult of access, however desperate the visitor. This well though had always been vulnerable, and besides often missed by travellers – since not a single tree any longer grew there, not even a straggly shrub. Laurus had asked Corbo if he thought the Madmen had vandalised the well purposely. Corbo thought it possible, but unlikely. Even the Madmen would surely stick to that oldest code of the desert peoples: to damage a water-source, whatever the excuse, was a crime beyond forgiveness.

  He would remember, after, that a slender golden lizard darted suddenly across the path of his horse. Battle-trained, the animal did not shy. It was an omen, perhaps, but he had missed it.

  There was an added reason for that, of course.

  They decided against sampling the well water. Instead a couple of the men marked its broken shell in chalk with the large warning shapes of the Caveat. It was not, for the column, a major difficulty. They had their water flasks, and besides, the fort and its attendant township were now less than twenty miles off. They should be there by sundown.

  It was only as they rode away over the first up-sweep of a hill that Corbo became aware – almost as if, until then, something had hidden it from him – that the seal-ring had vanished from his right hand.

  The ring had been his father’s, and he valued it. It bore the family crest of the black Crow, bedded in agate.

  Marcus Scorpius Corbo trotted his horse aside, and gave the lead of the column to the reliable Laurus. ‘I have to go back – one further thing I need to be sure of.’

  ‘Very well, sir.’

  ‘It’s not even a mile. I’ll be with you again shortly.’

  He would, Corbo, later remember too those words, those ominous words. I will be with you. I.

  The gods maybe had tried to show him. But then, the gods also should respect his care of his father’s memory and goods. When the Tablet had been written, the Eastern mages said, none could unwrite it.

  Corbo rode back down the slope to the wreck of the well.

  He saw swiftly now that a smallish animal seemed to have been burrowing about the well. He had not noted this before in the immediate churning up of the sand by the hoofs of the patrol’s horses.

  Corbo’s heart sank. Had the creature, some rat or other desert beast, since come up after the ring, carried it away and down?

  He dismounted, and unwillingly and superficially at first began to kick the sand about. Then – a glint of something caught the westering sun. Corbo knelt. He scuffed the dune over, more lightly, with one hand. Something hard lay under the surface.

  Next moment he had uncovered some portion of a piece that was unlike anything he had ever, in his life so far, encountered. What was it? Metal? No – nothing so uncomplex. Nor was it so small. Certainly no seal-ring, this. Going more cautiously than ever, he brushed off the grains with his fingers, which were scarred and hardened and numbed by the calluses of his work: a legionary officer of what, by now, was known here in the Exterra as the Crow Battalion.

  As he revealed then lifted free his discovery, Corbo was blinded a second by the sun-struck flash it gave. Then it lay there, balanced on his hand, an indecipherable object. It was filthy mostly, some extra disguise, the accretions of sand, damp from the nearness of the well, baking by heat, the mess of things that had decayed across it – the defecations, blood, demises of little animals, insects, and of time itself. But under the muck, in patches, was an extraordinary, never-before-witnessed by the onlooker, glacial yet metallic gleam – ice and steel, and the sword’s edge. It was in shape completely and, as it seemed, perfectly, round. Like the full moon in a clear sky.

  Corbo put down the moon-thing. And then noticed that his seal-ring, obvious as a visual shout, was lying about four arm-lengths off, glinting reproachfully black and gold. Only one blind, surely, would not have seen it until then.

  He had an urge to leave the other thing behind. Even to cover it over again. But that was superstitious unwisdom. He had a sense it was worth something, and also a partial idea as of what, incredibly, it might really be.

  And so, standing up, the ring safe again on his finger – how had it come off?; it was firm enough that replacing it had taken some work – he stuffed what else he had found in his satchel. Re-fastening the straps, he was already thinking, in an odd mixture of idleness and irresistible lust, of Yeila.

  Arida: the fortress, and the straggle of half-born town. Like its name, this place in the low hills above the desert plains, was a country neither fertile nor in any way, other than strategic, valuable. That value nevertheless persisted, and sharply. Among these sparse and shallow water-courses, these stunted groves, the fort kept itself alert.

  The name the local Romans had chosen for those desert tribesmen who had recently risen in the south was the Vecordia – the Insanity – the ‘Madmen’. Their own name for themselves was apparently the Elect of the Gods. They had come at first, it seemed, from nowhere, like a stultifying mist, overwhelming, obscuring, even often vanishing with little trace. Aside, that was, from the mutilated corpses, human and beast, and the burned and hacked masonry ruins left behind. Any not of their own, sworn to their law and their specialised deities, the Madmen would eradicate. While they themselves fought, so the stories had it, without fear, regardless of injury or death. Such as their inimical kind had, inevitably, come and gone, in the past. But now R
ome’s long-reaching might, her infallible arm, had weakened.

  Rome had become remote. Who among her legions, at such far-flung outposts as Arida, did not now know? The Mother of Cities was sinking like a sun. There could, no longer, be any help expected of her. And all over the wide, wild world of the Empire, her orphaned citizens, her armies, once themselves the Elite of the Earth, maintained her rule, and their personal lives, merely as best they could.

  The desert’s own sun was almost gone too, when the column reached the town of Arida. The last miles to her gates had taken longer than expected. They had encountered a small procession of refugees from elsewhere. Fearful of the Madmen, they had left their village and gathered themselves in toward the fort. Women and children, and carts of belongings, and goats bleating. It was the men who wept. Save one man, more a westerner, Corbo thought him, brown as a nut, and with a look of purpose … They crowded the gate. The patrol cursed quietly, longing for shade and wine.

  All this was virtually forgotten now, however, as Corbo stood alone in the presence of his Commander, and made his report of the patrol; things seen, or not seen, evidence of the elusive yet concrete enemy. Of which anyway, it turned out now, the Commander already had extra information.

  ‘They have occupied Aquaelis. You saw the refugees? The messenger was just ahead of them. He might almost have crossed your path, and left for you blood-stained hoof prints in the sand. Aquaelis has not been razed, it seems. But most of its occupants, including the Roman garrison, were slaughtered, just a few taken for slaves – most of those blinded, crippled, their tongues cut out, genitals cut off.’ Julusarus cursed, controlled himself, and downed his wine. ‘We know, don’t we, Marcus, that any foul Madmen’s nest should be scoured out to its bones, before they can spread their bloody claws any farther. We don’t want them in Aquaelis, let alone coming on here. And we Sons of Empire move fast. So, we must move fast. Eh, Marcus?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘It’s only – how, by Pater Martis’ fiery Spear? Their numbers are, allegedly, impressive. Their stealth, if not organisation, remarkable. But no. That won’t do. We are the Legions. What’s left of us. So, we must move, act – we must win.’

  The fort Commander Julusarus paced back and forth through the bleak stony room. Here and there a sword, a pilum, a saddle, hung on the wall. A lamp, unlit, stood on a table, and the unfull wine flagon. In the three western windows, unglazed and hollow as air, any red sun-blood had all but seeped away, down into Hades’ own blue night. A dog or two howled lamentingly in the town below. A bird whirred by a window, crow-black. One more omen, and flying the wrong way; right to left.

  ‘Go get yourself some food, Marcus. Get some rest. You’ve been on the road some while. We’ll meet tomorrow.’

  Corbo saluted. As he left the room, Julusarus was swearing again, bellowing for a slave to light the lamp. Probably to fill up the flagon, too.

  Corbo ate in the mess, with his men and the others present. The place was alight with chat of the latest Vecordia incursion.

  There was a mood of anger, impatience, and doubt. The messenger had relayed information that, conceivably, a full thousand of the Madmen were in Aquaelis. Until then it had been filled by Roman officials, ex-patriots, or affiliated locals who had bloomed into Roman ways, as generally all, or most other peoples did. What needed resistance, after all? You could even keep your own gods, provided you were respectful to those of the incomers. Aside from that, the rule of Roman law was effective, and there were too games and festivals, a theatre perhaps, baths and public latrines, a system for feeding those in need, and elevating those who earned it. But despite this, rebellion, when it flared, would always break in horrid extremis. Remember, some muttered, the mad sorceress-queen Woadica in the Tin Isles, or the fanatics of Hierosolyma. Back then, however, Roma, stronger than lions, had stamped upon dissention with a giant’s boot.

  Tonight, these frustrated debates and fears and militancy’s irritated Corbo. Though he concealed his mood, he soon went to the old bathhouse. This building was past its best also, but the decrepit slave boiled him up the decrepit hypocaust enough so he could get clean. None of the rest of the fort, it seemed, often bothered. But then, Corbo meant to see Yeila tonight.

  Before that, though, he must go to his own cell and clean the moon.

  When he entered the cramped space, he felt a curious kind of pressure, as it seemed on the air, like that of an approaching storm. It must be his sexual desire, building for the evening ahead. He had no qualms she would not welcome him. She was, after all, favoured, whatever her looks or skill, to receive the custom of a Battalion Leader from the fort.

  He lit the lamp himself, and sitting down, undid the satchel. The moon-thing from the well slid outward, and he turned it instantly to face the lamplight. And with an oiled and a dry rag, some salt, a splash of wine, he began to clean the face of the object. The dirt started at once to slough off, in chunks, and then in slimes. Beneath, against his hand, a strange, almost malleable smoothness resulted. Corbo, during this procedure, looked at the thing only indirectly. That seemed, although he did not ask himself why, the surest way properly to attend to it. Inside what would have been half an hour, by the ancient water-clock in the mess that no longer functioned, the surface of his find had come clear, gleaming and blazing back the ray of the smoky lamp.

  By then Corbo knew exactly what it was he had found. Really, from the first, he had guessed. Yet not believed it. Elsewhere, in the sophisticated Roman provinces, he had seen many mirrors in the homes of the wealthy. They were fashioned of metal, normally bronze, very occasionally silver. They gave a fascinating impression of the person who stood or sat down before them and stared to see their own resemblance. But there was, of course, often great distortion – a flaw in the metal, the wear and tear of a life of burnishing. Old rich women, he had heard, and some old rich men, preferred this kind of an image, slightly fuzzed and gauzed, to the sudden vivid jolt they might observe, say, in a black bowl filled by clean still water. Once or twice, though, Corbo had heard of another type of mirror, in the East, these used mostly by mages or tricksters. Such a mirror had a face of glass, and could reflect with this accordingly the face of man or woman, and so flawlessly it might drive them mad, unless they took care with it, or were, too, extremely young, and beautiful.

  Which, it went without saying, and despite her trade, the Romanised Eastern Yeila was.

  Now however Corbo himself must glance, if quickly, in the mirror, and check the surface of it, both for its refreshed material and for any flaws.

  He took it up, its countenance yet turned away, and fully to the lamp. How the light was strengthened! The room seemed to blaze from torches. As for its shiny carapace, this priceless beetle from the dunes was pure and whole.

  He might, therefore, why not, just slide it back into the satchel? No. Before doing that, he had better also be sure of the frame of it.

  Corbo lifted the mirror up. Round as the moon, the rim was also smooth and solid, but narrow as a woman’s smallest finger. Ivory, he thought, that had turned dark brown with age and wear and ill-use, but had stayed mellifluous to touch as a lovely skin …

  Well, but best be certain that the image it relayed, at least, made sense. Could there be some terrible inner fissure, unfelt but monstrously distorting whatever looked in it? That would spoil his gift for Yeila.

  He was most reluctant to do this last prudent thing. Since to check it that way, he, Marcus Scorpius Corbo, really must, himself, if only for the fraction of an instant, look into the glowing, lake-like, moon-like orb. The dragon’s eye.

  Ah. He had, almost unthinkingly, turned it back to him, without quite realising –

  And there – there – there he was. A man. Not Corbo. Of course, how could it be he? A stranger – a youngish man, still dark, his black hair and olive skin – familiar in fact from visual traffic with the rest of his own body – torso, arms, legs –

  No, he could not see himself properly, anyway. The fl
ame of the lamp had slopped, and tilted a little, was smoking worse. The reflection was of a shadow, a shadow of – some man.

  Corbo sat still and silent now, transfixed. As if the Gorgon herself had peered out from this magic and impossible glass. Not a total paralysis to stone. Very nearly.

  These eyes – are – mine.

  That mouth – mine.

  That is the face – the mask – the self I have lived within, behind, aside from, all this while. Other men I know, by their appearance, as well as the brothers of my youth. But not myself. Never – me.

  I, Corbo.

  I.

  I am there –

  And then a sensation passed over Marcus Scorpius Corbo, peculiar and unnerving as finding abruptly the floor gave way beneath, and he stared down into an emptiness of unknown distance and otherness.

  He felt and saw the blood smear vaguely over his eyes, dimming them, as in that awful time when he had fainted from loss of such blood after the fight at Goria. But the darkening faded, it went away. And now his eyes were open wide, and clear, themselves, as a razor’s edge, or the edge of a polished mirror.

  He must have blinked. Or had he, like a total fool, slumped asleep, in the manner of some elderly watchman after bread and beer.

  At least, he had not dropped the bloody mirror.

  Odd – something odd – he was now no longer visible in it – or – it had only swerved a little to one side. It reflected instead, again, the lamp, although from a different angle, enhancing its ray into a sunblast.

  The mirror was perfection.

  All was well.

  He must get up now, and seek out his pretty whore. The Lion Star was already high in the east, he could see it through the window-slit, over the walls of Arida.

  Corbo rose to his feet. Then everything seemed to shatter, glittering, away. But next everything was once more where it needed to be, the earth firm, the night open. No time to waste. Mirrors were the toys of women, and idiots.