Bachiyr Omnibus

by David McAfee

  “The end of the hall, Headcouncil?”

  Herris stood, nodding. “Indeed.”

  Ramah’s expression showed his desire for more information, but Herris simply stood and walked into his study, beckoning Ramah to follow. His second in command would have all the information he needed soon enough. More than he wanted, actually.

  Once inside Herris’s opulent study, surrounded by his vast collection of books and luxurious furnishings, Herris felt a little better. He loved this room. Every book, every statue, and every filigreed, overstuffed chair was a trophy, taken from kings and emperors thousands of years before. Men, mere humans, who thought they could stand against his power. They soon realized their error, though in each instance the knowledge came too late to save them.

  Once inside, Ramah took a seat in a wide, soft walnut chair with thick red cushions. He eyed Herris, waiting for his instructions. Herris couldn’t help but notice the odd contrast of Ramah’s civilized surroundings and the blood on his face and shirt.

  “It’s Theron,” Herris said, getting right to the point.

  “You found him?” Ramah’s face split into a grin.

  Herris nodded.

  “Where is he?” Ramah asked, his face bright with anticipation. Theron had been a thorn in the Council’s side since he failed to stop Jesus in Jerusalem. The Council had tried to capture him, but he escaped and had been running ever since. Theron had spent the last forty-six years thwarting the Council and doing everything he could to endanger the race of Bachiyr.

  “In Italy,” Herris replied. “Near Pompeii. We believe he is living in a cave on the southeastern slope of Vesuvius.”

  “Vesuvius? Are you certain your report is accurate?”

  “Quite certain. Our renegade is dwelling near the fire, it seems.”

  “If that is true, we might as well not hunt him at all,” Ramah said. “Sooner or later, Vesuvius will take care of him for us.”

  “Sooner rather than later,” Herris agreed. He’d heard of the rumblings of the mountain. The Bachiyr were much more attuned to such things than humans, and Herris knew Vesuvius would make its presence felt soon enough. “But we cannot wait for the mountain to finish him. We cannot risk his escape, by chance or by design.”

  “Why is this so urgent?”

  “Because,” Herris replied. “We believe he has discovered how to use the White.”

  Ramah’s jaw dropped. His hands clenched the arms of the chair so tight that the wood cracked under the pressure. For the first time Herris could recall, true fear showed in the Lead Enforcer’s expression.

  Herris understood all too well.

  “No,” Ramah said. “Your reports must be inaccurate. Theron could never have learned the White. Who would have taught it to him?”

  “We don’t know. But the report is reliable. Several of our best Bachiyr died gathering the information. The only one who made it back was Marco, and I searched his memories myself before I killed him. I saw the things Theron did to them. There can be no doubt.”

  “The White,” Ramah mused. “It has not been seen outside The Council of Thirteen since…”

  “Since Baella,” Herris finished.

  “You think she is involved?”

  “It’s possible. None of the scouts have seen her, but that means little.”

  “I will leave tonight,” Ramah said, rising from his chair. “With your permission, Headcouncil, I must go prepare at once.”

  “Use caution, Ramah. Theron may have discovered the White, but I doubt he knows many of its secrets or the extent of its use. As such, it will be impossible to predict what he can or will do with it. He will be more dangerous than ever.”

  Ramah nodded and left. Herris watched him go, feeling a curious mixture of guilt and relief. He disliked sending his second-in-command into battle with false information, but what else could he do?

  If Ramah knew the whole truth, he would have come after Herris instead of Theron.

  ***

  Theron led Galle back from the huge stone chambers where he performed his experiments. The shuffling, smoking Bachiyr woman was barely conscious of her surroundings. Her tattered tunic hung like curtains from her sparse frame, terminating a few scant inches below her waist in a ragged, charred hem.

  He’d failed. Again.

  Galle’s skin was burned and black, covered with blisters and, in some patches, missing altogether. Theron’s new Psalm had not protected her from the fire. In fact, it seemed to have made her skin even more combustible than before, if such a thing was possible. It almost seemed as if she’d rolled in pitch prior to the evening’s events.

  Damn it all. Where had he gone wrong?

  He would be in for a long night of review. Possibly several long nights. The utter failure of this latest experiment meant he would have to go all the way back to the beginning and try again. What parts of Galle’s body did he need to infuse with blood? What parts did he need to drain? What were the verbal components, if any?

  He shook his head. Too many variables. Perhaps it was simply not possible to grant a creature of flesh and bone immunity to fire.

  Galle moaned as she stepped through the doorway to her cell. Her arm brushed against the rough stone wall, leaving a patch of blackened skin behind. Beneath the patch was a section of raw, unburned skin. Her body was already working hard to repair the damage. Having been severely burned more than once in his thousand years, Theron could well understand the pain Galle must be feeling.

  He reflexively glanced at his own right hand, which remained black and sooty even now, some forty years after his encounter with the rabbi from Galilee known as Jesus. It did not pain him physically, and he still had full use of his hand and fingers, but the discoloration annoyed him, serving as a constant reminder of the events in Jerusalem that led to his ouster from the Halls of the Bachiyr.

  The hand had never fully healed, and neither had his anger.

  I spent a lifetime serving the Council, he thought. Twenty lifetimes! To think they would turn on me after a single failure…

  Although, to be fair, it wasn’t his first failure.

  Baella, he thought. She escaped Ephriam and me in Alexandria. The Council hadn’t liked that much, and they detested the loss of the library. Also, something changed in Ephriam that night. He’d never been the same since. Doubtless the Council blamed me for that, as well, but what was I supposed to do? She was trying to run.

  Setting the library aflame hadn’t worked, however. Baella had escaped to torment the Council again and again, and Ephriam, then-Lead Enforcer, had started to slip away from the Council’s grip. It was the first black mark on Theron’s previously spotless reputation, and it followed him around for decades. He’d been given the opportunity to redeem himself when Ephriam left the Halls of the Bachiyr to seek the counsel of the human rabbi, Jesus. The Council of Thirteen sent Theron to deal with them both. Again, Theron failed miserably, and the events in Jerusalem had sealed his fate.

  A Lost One, he thought. A twice damned Lost One!

  His blackened hand clenched into a fist, and Theron launched a punch at the wall. The stone chipped underneath his knuckles, and his skin tore away from the bone. A few droplets of blood spattered to the floor, and the smell of it surrounded him. The pain was intense, but brief, as Theron’s body automatically began to heal the torn flesh. He glanced at his knuckles. The bones were visible for a few moments before the skin knitted back together. Like the skin, the bare bones in his hand showed a darkened hue.

  Father help me, even my bones are blackened!

  Yet for all his sacrifices and his previously sterling record, Headcouncil Herris wanted to make him a Lost One after Jerusalem. Well, to the Abyss with Herris, then. Theron didn’t need the Council anymore. Galle would survive this night. And soon he would try again. By the Father, he would conquer fire, and when he did…

  Galle moaned a second time, interrupting his thoughts, and fell to the floor, squirming and mewling like a dying animal.

/>   Pitiful.

  He would have to feed her again. Her body could heal itself, but it would need new blood in order to do so. Without a fresh supply, the healing process would only get so far before her body simply shut down, unable to perform basic functions. That meant Theron had to make a trip to Pompeii to acquire another child. Judging by her condition, he would need to go tonight. Hopefully his man in the city had a suitable specimen waiting. Theron could hunt the city streets, but it would take time, and his patience was not at its peak after his failure in the cave.

  “Do not move,” he told Galle. “Rest. I will return soon with another child.”

  “No-ooo,” she croaked. “No…no more children. Please. Just let me die.”

  Theron shook his head. “You know I can’t.”

  “You mean you won’t.”

  “True enough.” Theron didn’t see any point in arguing. She was right. He could find another Bachiyr to use in his experiments. He simply didn’t want to. Too much trouble, especially when he had a suitable subject already in hand. He turned his back on her and left the cell. He closed the door behind him, not bothering to lock it.

  What in the nine hells was wrong with her? Other Bachiyr didn’t hold on to their ridiculous morality after the transformation, so why did she balk at feeding? Was it because he only brought her children? Why should that matter? He’d never met another of his kind with any sort of maternal or paternal instinct. Why her? And why Taras?

  Like Galle, Taras clung to a precious thread of morals, only killing those he felt deserved his wrath. Theron was at a loss to figure out the reason. As far as he was concerned, every human deserved his wrath. Humans were little more than cattle, to be fed upon as deemed necessary by need or desire. Granted, their superior numbers dictated that the Bachiyr had to be careful, but humans still lacked the minds or the powers to be anything more than livestock. Though they imagined themselves atop the world, they were really just a ready supply of nutrients for the Bachiyr.

  So why did every Bachiyr Theron created in the last few decades retain the odd human reluctance to harm others? What was he doing wrong?

  The idea that he’d made a mistake bothered him. True, watching Galle struggle between her hunger and her principles provided him with a fair amount of entertainment in what would otherwise be a dull and boring setting, but the fact that he couldn’t seem to get the conversion right meant that his skills were not complete. If he could not perform such a basic Bachiyr task as converting a human, then how could he hope to conquer fire?

  Theron stormed out of the cave, more angry than he thought he would be. In his mind he conjured up all his failings—they were starting to pile up. He’d failed to capture Baella in Alexandria. Then he’d failed to kill Jesus in Jerusalem, and then he’d failed to kill Taras, accidentally converting him instead. And in that, he’d failed doubly so, because Taras still possessed a remnant of his Roman Legionary morality. He’d failed numerous times in his experiments with fire, and he’d failed in Galle’s conversion, as well. In Londinium, he’d even had another chance to capture Baella, and he’d failed at that, too.

  In the years since Jerusalem, it seemed the only task he hadn’t failed to complete was to kill the Iceni queen, Boudica, shortly before her forces lost the battle of Watling Street eighteen years before, and even that had been close. The queen’s daughter had demanded her death in exchange for releasing Theron from Boudica’s mobile jail cell, which was open to the sun. He probably could have escaped without the young princess’s aid, but her assistance assured it. At the time, sunrise was only about an hour away and he’d needed to find cover.

  Killing the princess on the way out of the cell was simply a matter of need.

  Killing the queen had been more about revenge than obligation. The woman had locked him up and tried to execute him. She deserved what he did to her, though the Romans denied the rumors of her mutilated corpse.

  Thinking about Boudica and her daughter cheered him up a bit. He’d never enjoyed killing a human as much as he had enjoyed killing the Iceni queen. The memory allowed him to calm down as he walked through the stone passages to his private chambers.

  Perspective, he thought. I need to put things into perspective.

  True, he hadn’t accomplished his objective yet, and he’d had a few setbacks, but he had time. All of eternity, in fact. Sooner or later, he would find the right combination of blood, symbols, and words to achieve his goal, and the world of the Bachiyr would change forever.

  But first, Galle had to heal, which meant he needed another child.

  Theron grabbed his cloak and left the caves, making his way to Pompeii.

  Chapter Two

  Somewhere in Hispania…

  HIS heart felt as though it would burst from his chest at any moment, and the sweat on his palms made the rough bark slick to the touch, yet Raphial “de Pene Grande” Falero pulled himself up the tree branch by painful branch. The skin of his palms was cracked and bleeding, and his breathing ragged and shallow, but the man whose brothers had long ago nicknamed him “The Big Cock” dared not stop for anything. Each time he felt his strength flagging, he pictured the creature’s face. In his mind, he again saw the red eyes, pale skin, and long, sharp teeth that had no place in a human mouth. That image would follow him for the rest of his life, however long that might be. He could still hear the thing’s snarling voice laughing, mocking him even as it told him to run.

  Run, it had told him, smiling, its face drenched in the blood of Raphial’s brothers. Run as though your life depended on it.

  Raphial needed no further urging. He’d watched the creature tear into his brothers with a savagery that Raphial could only describe as demoniaco. The sight was more than enough to convince him to take flight. And so he had run, leaving the broken, bleeding bodies of his three brothers behind. He could not have helped them in any case. The thing had torn them apart. Literally. Raphial had leapt over Fredericko’s headless torso on the way out of the clearing.

  For the first time in many years, Raphial began to question his decision to join his brothers in their raiding. The life of a bandit had seemed so easy when he started. Stop people traveling on the road and take their valuables. Usually this meant they preyed on local farmers, but every once in a while they encountered a poorly armed merchant. On those days the Brothers Falero ate well. Sometimes they would even find women on the road. Those were Raphial’s favorite encounters, especially when it was his turn to go first.

  But nothing he’d experienced in over fifteen years of ambushing people on the road had prepared him for the sight of the tall, yellow-haired stranger who tuned into a monster.

  His hand slipped, and he almost fell to the ground. He cursed under his breath and grabbed the branch tighter, squeezing it hard so that the sweat on his palms would not hinder him. Once certain of his hold, he looked down to see how far up the tree he’d come.

  There, standing at the trunk, was the creature.

  It stared at him with wild red eyes that blazed like torches. The massive tangle of ratty blond hair surrounded a face as pale as a long dead corpse. The ragged clothes barely covered its tall, muscular frame. It was so covered with filth and offal that most people would have taken it for a poor beggar. The thing looked like a man. It walked upright on two legs like a man. It spoke like a man, but it was most certainly not a man.

  Its lips parted in a grin, revealing two long, sharp teeth Raphial had seen earlier.

  “I expected you to get farther away,” it said. “You are not as fast as I thought you were.”

  “Mercy,” Raphial whimpered. It was all he could think to say. “Mercy. Please.”

  “Mercy?” The smile vanished from the creature’s face, replaced by an angry scowl as it reached up and grabbed the lowest hanging branch of Raphial’s tree. “You attacked me, did you not? Tell me, bandit, if I had begged you and your brothers for mercy, would I have received it?”

  Raphial tried to say yes, but he could not get the wor
d past his throat. Many times over the last fifteen years he had seen men and women beg for mercy from his band, always with the same result. The reason was simple: it was safer for Raphial and his brothers if no one was able to talk of their deeds. Since the dead do not speak, it was simpler to just kill their victims and be done with it.

  “That is what I thought,” the creature said. “You, who has killed so many without remorse, will find no mercy this night.”

  “I have never killed anyone,” Raphial lied. “I only steal to eat, that is all.”

  “You lie,” the creature said, reaching for another branch. “I can smell their blood on you. It surrounds you like a cloud. Old blood, and there is a great deal of it. In any case, you have something I need, and I mean to get it.”

  Raphial was on the verge of telling the thing it could have anything it needed from him when a second voice, a female voice, broke the silence.

  “Still chasing rats, Taras?”

  The thing called Taras turned toward the voice, and the snarl on its face deepened.

  “You,” it said. The tone of its voice was cold. Angry. It withered Raphial’s skin and raised the gooseflesh on his arms. “What are you doing here?”

  “Hardly the warm welcome I would have expected,” came the reply.

  Raphial watched, shaking, as another figure emerged from the shadows underneath the tree. The newcomer was decidedly female, yet still possessed of the same red eyes and sharp teeth that marked the yellow-haired creature. But where the male creature was filthy and ragged, the newcomer was clean and well dressed. Her posture was straight and purposeful, and her luxurious black hair spilled over her shoulders unburdened by a shawl or other such ornamentation. Had he seen her anywhere else, Raphial would have taken her for noblewoman. The fangs and glowing eyes ruined the illusion, however.