To Speak in Lifeless Tongues: Book 2 of the Grails Covenant Trilogy (The Grails Covenant Triloty)

by David Niall Wilson

  TO SPEAK IN LIFELESS TONGUES

  Book Two of The Grails Covenant Trilogy

  By David Niall Wilson

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  To Speak in Lifeless Tongues is a product of White Wolf Publishing.

  White Wolf is a subsidiary of Paradox Interactive.

  Copyright © 1998 by White Wolf Publishing.

  First Printing January 1998

  Crossroad Press Edition published in Agreement with Paradox Interactive

  LICENSE NOTES

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  Table of Contents

  PART ONE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  PART TWO

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  EPILOGUE

  PART ONE

  ONE

  Evening dropped slowly over the walls of the Convent of Our Lady of Bitter Tears. Against the backdrop of orange sunlight and multi-hued clouds the structure stood silent, cresting a small rise with the huge expanse of the Cambrian Mountains rising up from behind. The last of the sunlight seeped over the tips of the peaks, slipping down at odd angles and sending huge, elongated shadows to grope at the old stone walls, as if trying to pry loose secrets long buried.

  There was no movement in the gardens, and the bell in the small chapel was silent. The hour of meditation had arrived and transported the sisters to communion with their Lord. Each had taken to her quarters, waiting expectantly. Each expected that He or His servant might come to them. Each believed in her heart that it would be her time.

  Behind the heavy oak doors of the Mother Superior’s chambers the silence was broken by heavy, rasping breaths that wheezed and scratched their way free of one darkened corner of the room. The small table that sat before her window, commanding a view of the valley below, was set for a meal that had gone untouched. Flies buzzed lazily about the rotting remains of that meal and the sickly-sweet stench of rotted meat permeated the air. As the last of the light leaked from the room a chair creaked. Old bones crackled as limbs too long in one position were set in motion. A wracking cough, brittle and harsh, broke the silence followed by the grating sound of a flint being struck. The wick of a tallow candle came to life, wavering softly in the slight breeze from the window, and a thin, frightened face came into focus.

  Mother Agnes sat with both hands cupped about the base of the candle, unmindful of the hot wax dribbling slowly down the sides toward her withered hands. She stared straight through the window into the black void beyond, waiting. As did the sisters who no longer took her counsel, she considered that He might come, and the thought chilled her to the center of her brittle, arthritic bones. There was no warmth in her anticipation. Death comes to all who wait in His own good time. Agnes felt that her time must be near. There was no other way to explain away the madness, and her God wasn’t answering her prayers.

  So many days had passed since He’d first come to them, so many dark and endless nights. Such beauty. Never, in all the years of her service to her savior had she felt drawn so completely to a man. She should have known then—should have felt that it was wrong. Nothing had mattered when he turned his eyes upon her. Nothing but pleasing him—not even her faith. He had taken that faith and twisted it, returning it only after it was worn away and useless.

  Beyond the window a wolf howled, and a shiver shot through her weakened frame, nearly dropping her from her seat to the cold stone of the floor. What light there had been the night had swallowed whole. The moon had not yet risen to her throne of white light, leaving the world cloaked in black. A cloak of mourning. There was no way to know what might be out there, and yet Agnes knew. She felt it in her heart of hearts, the approach of eternity and the lack of light.

  She prayed under her breath, a low, keening moan of words that were no more comprehensible to her mind than they would have been to any who listened. The verses were mismatched and random, blending and molding themselves to her grasping attempts at coherent thought. One anchor remained to her sanity and she clung to it with the patience of the damned and desperate.

  The supply train would arrive soon. There would be contact with the villages below the mountain, and Father Joseph would be with them. He would arrive, God willing, by the light of day, and she would find some way to make her tongue function properly. She would gather the strength to go to him and to tell him of the Hell that had descended upon her convent. She would make him drive that evil forth, or they would all perish in the attempt, but it would happen in less than a day.

  A whisper of cloth brushing against stone sounded beyond her window, and she cowered further into the shadows, willing her heartbeat to silence and clamping down on the suddenly raucous sound of her own breath. She felt the wood of her chair and the cool stone of the wall behind her, and she imagined herself a part of them, inanimate and uninteresting to whatever might be seeking her out. It was a vain hope. The shadow slipped across the sill of her window and came to rest, upright and towering above her, just within her chamber. She didn’t have the energy left to scream.

  The shadow figure stood suddenly at her side. She couldn’t remember if He’d walked across that space, glided, or merely appeared at her shoulder, but He leaned forward and his lips brushed her ears as He spoke. She tried to pull away. The words of her prayers became more chaotic and meaningless, and the strength bled from her frame as she pressed against the stiff back of her chair, digging her fingernails into the wood until they broke from the pressure. She stared straight ahead, avoiding the sight of Him, but His words seeped through the wall of concentration she’d erected as easily a
s wind beneath an ill-fitting door. The taste of anticipation altered, but she continued her prayer.

  “I have waited for this moment,” the Dark One whispered, breathing the words into her ear and sending tingles of energy rippling down her arms, standing the soft hairs on end as it passed. She’d never been so intimately close to a man, not since her vows had removed her from the mainstream of life. She felt the magnetic pull of his flesh and nearly cried out in shame and desire at once.

  “Leave me…” she rasped, surprising herself with the strength of her words. “Return to whatever shadow spawned you, leave me—us—in peace.”

  “I cannot do that, Agnes,” the shadow continued smoothly. “You mean so very much to me now. I have learned from you, but I have shared so little. It is time for you to learn what I have to offer, as your little sisters have done. You want that, don’t you, Agnes?”

  She turned her head farther away, aware that the motion bared her throat, and tossed the graying locks of her hair aside in the same motion, though she knew it was not proper. There was no touch, not of breath or of pain. All that she sensed was His nearness, and it wore away at her control as he continued to speak.

  “You pray to a savior who has been too long gone from the earth,” he said. “You waste your life and your love on one who will see you only after you have fallen to dust, if ever. You were a beautiful woman, Agnes…full of life.”

  “I serve my Lord,” she whispered desperately. “I will stand at his side in Glory, and this will be nothing but a dark moment in time—a nothingness without meaning.”

  “You are wrong,” he said, laying one hand gently on her shoulder. “You will still be standing when he comes again, in the flesh that binds you now, and he will turn away.”

  Then the pain came, the bite of something sharp penetrating her throat, followed by wave upon wave of pleasure. She shuddered, and her arms dropped to her sides in sudden release, then returned to their grips on the chair. She felt the life draining swiftly from her aged frame, and she felt the faith of a lifetime being stolen away. It was too much.

  A small flame still burned within her, a light that she could make out through the murky haze of sensations that began where the flesh of his hands gripped her frail shoulders and radiated out in waves that threatened to consume her humanity. Blanking her mind, she ceased her struggles and concentrated on that light.

  There were other pressures. He assaulted her flesh, but he was attempting to violate her mind as well, her memories. He was seeking something, and the sudden knowledge that denial of that information would be the same as a victory gave her the focus to draw herself slowly toward the flame of her own being. He might have her blood—she knew that it was her blood he stole—but he would not have her soul. He would not drag her into the nightmare that was his own existence, and he would not find the answers he sought within her.

  As her strength ebbed and the light grew to fill her mind, she felt a sudden influx of energy. He would not have her. Flesh was the cage that held her to the world, but within the light that grew and pulsed before her she felt the hands of her savior reaching out to draw her in.

  He shifted her in his arms, drawing her up and out of her chair and tilting her back so that she faced the ceiling. His dark eyes filled her sight, threatening for a moment to blot out the light from within, then fading to a blur of shadow at the fringes of her consciousness. The world receded, but something was important about his actions. He held a wrist above her now, and he reached over almost casually with his free hand to slice at that wrist with a fingernail too long to be real, and too real to be pure. Her mouth opened, and she stared into the dark pits where his eyes should have been, but she did not see him.

  His intent was clear, and as he raised the weeping wound above her, blood dripping in a steady stream down his forearm, she drew on the awesome strength of the light that called to her so strongly. She released herself from the world, wrenching herself from her flesh and soaring free.

  From above and far away she saw her body convulse in the Dark One’s arms. She saw the crimson flow of blood from the cut of his arm as it dribbled meaninglessly off over the lips of the shell that had housed her, but she felt no emotion at the sight. No disgust. No violation. No victory.

  Her body was lost to her, but it was lost to him as well. She sensed that his words had not been metaphorical. There was an ageless quality in the glint of his eyes and a detached loneliness in the tones of his voice that hinted at knowledge beyond the scope of human years. There was hunger there as well, and not all of that hunger was directed at her blood, though that was a large part of it.

  As she drifted away she sensed that he, too, fought his way through bondage. He sought answers, but the essence of his being forced other issues to the forefront of his mind and robbed him of time and concentration. He fed because he had to, but there was more that he’d wanted from Mother Agnes of the Convent of Our Lady of Bitter Tears. He would get nothing.

  Other voices called out to her now, musical and inviting, and the light had grown so bright that all else disappeared from her thoughts. She slipped within that glow, and her essence co-mingled with the energy of the light. It was a true communion, a joining, and the voices became her own, or she became the voices. The chambers and the stone walls of the convent dropped away until nothing remained.

  The dark figure felt the life slip from his aging victim’s body, and he cursed. It was not directed at God, or at himself, but at eternity in general. Montrovant felt the rivulet of blood making its way down his flesh and cursed himself for not cramming the cut between the old one’s lips before she could escape him. She was gone, and the blood that splattered and dribbled over her wrinkled, silent face was nothing but strength and sustenance wasted.

  The wound healed quickly, and with a contemptuous toss he flung the husk that had been Mother Agnes across the room. Her bones shattered on impact with the stone of the wall, and her blood-drained flesh made a wet, smacking noise as it spread out on impact and fell to the floor, limp and empty. He hadn’t meant to throw her so violently, but she’d been his best hope and now he would have to move on and try again.

  Montrovant strode to the window, wiping his sleeve across his lips to clear away the last of the Mother Superior’s blood. He’d shared enough of her thoughts before she escaped him to know that his time in the convent was at an end. That meant that he, or le Duc, would have to find an answer—any answer—this very night.

  The supply train would arrive in the morning, or the next. It didn’t matter. They would arrive soon, and that was enough. Montrovant knew that he and le Duc could take precautions that would lead those arriving off on false trails, away from the truth. They could make it look as if bandits had raided the convent for food and shelter, perhaps even for a taste of the virtue of the good sisters, but eventually there would be discoveries, information that didn’t fit the motives or patterns of mountain bandits.

  They would notice the wounds on the women’s necks. They would notice the broken, blood-drained carcass of the Mother Superior and wonder what kind of man could perpetuate such violence with such disregard to their Lord. They would put the facts together, and they would know what to look for. He and le Duc had to be gone before the dawn, and they had to find a place that none would think to look for them, or it might be the last night of their existence.

  He stared out into the darkness. He had vague ideas where the Brotherhood might have gone, where Kli Kodesh might have sent them, but it seemed a step beyond him to draw even with his prey. They always seemed a few miles ahead; or else they slipped away as he followed a false lead into one form of trouble or another. Montrovant had not been patient in life, and the virtue had not forced itself upon him as his mind matured and his body ignored time. Now this. Another delay.

  He had purposely kept them as far from the cities as possible. The clans were beginning to grow in strength, and any hint of interference from outside forces drew unwanted attention. Montrovant had no
patience for games of politics that involved the power of others. He had his own concerns.

  He burned to find the treasure he sought…the Grail…to bring it back to his sire, to drink from that most powerful of cups and feel the power beyond anything he or any other had experienced…to rule. Surely one who drank the blood from such a cup would rule the world, and as long as he walked the earth, Montrovant would see to it that no other took that position. Perhaps even Eugenio would get a bit of a surprise, once the Grail was his.

  He was tempted to go for le Duc that instant and leave the convent behind. They’d been lazy, staying too long and enjoying the solitude and the attention of the sisters, who’d come to view them as visiting angels or gods in human flesh. Only the Mother Superior had eluded Montrovant’s control. It had been many years since he’d encountered such complete, unwavering faith in another. His faith was strong, but it was in darker gods and his unnatural instincts. Those instincts told him that it was time to change tactics.

  He reached out with his mind and felt the subtle presence that was le Duc. It had been several years now since he’d Embraced the Frenchman, and though he missed having a living, breathing servant to care for his needs during the daylight hours, it was good to have a companion. Since beginning his quest, he’d been voluntarily cut off from Claudius and the rest of his clan. There had been communications, of course, reports back and forth, but he’d not seen any of the others since he’d left for Jerusalem decades prior. It seemed a lifetime, and even for one whose years had spanned several mortal lifetimes, it was a lonely burden.

  Jeanne was feeding. For just an instant Montrovant maintained the link, savoring the beauty of the sensation—the joining. He knew Jeanne would pull free before the sister was gone completely, leaving her weak and trembling on her bed to wake with visions she’d never truly escape. Le Duc was more dramatic with the humans than Montrovant. Briefly, the elder Cainite wondered if he was becoming too jaded. There had been a time when he’d enjoyed the hunt and the kill as much as le Duc did now, but that was fading. His obsession was costing him his sanity.