Favst nodded, looking confused. “Yes, an old man called Sigismund.”
“Good. We shall need his assistance. I don’t wish anyone but him to see us, at least at first.” He waved a hand at his childe’s questions. “Later. For now, follow the trail, but keep a sharp lookout. I shall ride and lead your horse.” They walked back towards their mounts; Favst’s horse shied away from them.
“Do they sense evil?” asked Favst.
Jürgen rolled his eyes. “They sense power. Now, follow the trail.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Following the trail was difficult, but Jürgen knew they were on the right path. Favst’s tracking skills were superb, and with Jürgen occasionally reading the memories of the trees to make sure they hadn’t lost their way, they continued on at a decent pace.
Jürgen decided, however, that he should have brought Bertolt along. The knight was not so impressive a tracker as Favst, but that was due chiefly to his still-mortal status. Besides, he could ride a horse without frightening it half to death. Jürgen’s Beast had already demanded more than once that Jürgen put the poor, frightened creature out of its misery; only Jürgen’s detestation of wasting resources allowed him to ignore that demand. For what he guessed was the sixth time, Jürgen took a moment while Favst searched for another clue to look at the memories of the area.
Snow. Hard, frozen ground. People running, but not being chased. Running to find someone, help someone, save someone. It had been the same each time. The memories were old enough that the people running were gray and faded in the vision, but still potent enough that he could make out their direction. Still, he didn’t like to rely on memories—he knew how easily they could be changed in a mortal or even a Cainite’s mind. The visions, coupled with a trail, however, were a good enough lead for him.
“How far are we from your house, Favst?”
“Not too far, my lord. Perhaps an hour’s walk on this ground.” The ground, quite in contrast to the frigid earth in the visions, was soft and pulpy.
“If we continue on this trail, will we move away from the house?”
Favst pursed his lips. “Hard to say, my lord. The trail hasn’t been in a completely straight line.”
Jürgen frowned. That was odd, considering the impressions he’d received from the trees. Why take a roundabout route if the end goal was urgent? But then, perhaps taking a straight line would have led the runners into a bog, or a pack of Lupines, or some equally primitive danger. “We’ll chance it for a bit longer. Keep your bearings; if we’re caught here during the day we probably won’t survive.” His own Beast hardly moved; it had long since grown used to Jürgen’s attempts to inure it to the threat of the sun. Favst, on the other hand, grew wide-eyed and his mouth dropped open in a feral leer as his Beast wailed in terror. Jürgen caught his attention. “Trail, boy.”
From behind them, Favst’s horse gave a shrill whinny and snapped its tether. It charged straight for Jürgen and Favst. The younger vampire leapt for safety; Jürgen simply drew back a fist and punched the horse in the head. It fell dead at his feet, splashing to the muddy ground, blood running out of its nostrils.
Favst stood, his mantle soiled, and opened his mouth to speak. “Quiet,” hissed Jürgen. “We are not alone.” If the horse had snapped its tether in fear, Jürgen reasoned, it would have run away from the Cainites, not towards them. He clucked his tongue to call his own steed closer. The horse did not move. Jürgen walked towards it; it stared at him with more malice than he had seen from any creature in his unlife. Jürgen looked around the forest for signs of whatever was making the horses behave this way, but saw no one. He heard his horse move slightly, but the sound was so familiar that he paid it no mind.
“Look out!” Favst’s warning came just in time. Jürgen jumped backwards just as his steed reared up and lashed out with both hooves. Jürgen drew his sword, but held back. He had no wish to kill his steed if it was possible to avoid it. Favst drew his own blade and rushed to his sire’s defense; the steed’s hoof lanced downwards and caught him in the temple, knocking him backwards. Jürgen drew back his sword to impale the rampaging stallion, but it backed up as if anticipating the blow.
Jürgen kept a wary eye on the horse, but glanced over to his childe. Favst lay flat on his back, a chunk of white bone visible through the gash on his forehead. He had apparently had the foresight to jam his torch into the wet ground before charging into the fray, however. Jürgen saw no other movement in the forest, and advanced on his steed slowly.
The horse continued backing up, and Jürgen tensed himself to spring. He couldn’t allowed the horse to flee—any creature that could command a blood-steed to turn on its master could certainly coax information from it as well. Just as he was about to leap forward and sever the horse’s head, a body landed at his feet.
The body was clearly a Cainite of the Gangrel clan. It was pale and thin, like most vampires, but tufts of fur protruded from its ears and its hands were black and padded like a dog’s. It wasn’t moving, but Jürgen could see no stake in its heart. He glanced to his left, from where the body had come, and saw that the forest there was brighter, as though the shadows fled from that small area.
Jürgen smiled. “Gotzon,” he said, turning his attention back to the horse.
The horse looked down at the body, and then shuddered and collapsed to its knees. Almost immediately, the Gangrel’s body began to stir. Gotzon stepped from the trees, grabbed the vampire by his scraggly hair and threw him against a tree. “Immobilize him, quickly,” he murmured.
Not having a stake to hand, Jürgen jammed his sword through the Gangrel’s chest into the tree behind him. He screamed in pain, now fully awake, and clutched at the blade, but only managed to slice his hands open. Jürgen noticed that his screams sounded very much like a horse’s whinny, and glanced back at his steed. The horse stood there as placidly as ever, unaware, apparently, that anything had happened. Jürgen offered his hand. The horse nuzzled against it.
Jürgen rounded on the Gangrel in fury. “You cowardly bastard, you’d strike at me through my horse?”
The Gangrel spit out a curse in his native tongue. Jürgen cuffed him across the head and went to revive Favst. His childe was sitting up groggily, gingerly feeling at the wound on his head. Jürgen knelt down beside him. “The wound would kill a normal man, my childe, but you are under the Black Cross now. Simply will the wound to be gone, and it will heal in seconds.” Favst looked up at his sire, confused, but the wound did indeed begin to close. Jürgen heard a series of crunching sounds as the bone beneath reset itself, and then the gash sealed without even a scar. “Perfect. Now get up. I need you to translate what this creature is saying.”
Favst stood, but stumbled. “My lord, I… this feeling…” He parted his lips and Jürgen saw his fangs had extended. He glanced around the clearing hungrily. Jürgen ground his teeth in frustration. He hadn’t had time to discern what sort of blood appealed to his childe. The boy was not even a week from his Embrace; likely as not those preferences weren’t even set yet, and ingesting any mortal blood at all would simply leave him ill and smelling of congealed humors. Jürgen bit open his own wrist and held it to Favst’s mouth, watching momentary disgust change to rabid hunger. He allowed Favst to drink enough to keep him sane and functional, and then pulled his wrist away. Time enough to explain the problems of refined tastes later.
They walked back to the prisoner. Gotzon stood behind them, unnoticed. Favst winced a bit when he saw the Gangrel trying to extract Jürgen’s sword from his chest, and a bit more when the feral vampire lurched out with his arms. “Ask if it is the same creature that chased you on the night of your Embrace.”
Favst spoke to the Gangrel. The Gangrel merely laughed and spit blood at Jürgen. Favst asked the question again, and it answered with a rapid-fire string of strange syllables.
Favst turned back to Jürgen. “He says that it was his brother that pursued me, but that they are all one with the land. I don’t think he mea
ns “brother” as a literal relative though; the word he used is one that…” he frowned, thinking. “It’s much the same as we might call a fellow soldier ‘brother.’”
“Brothers in arms, then.” Jürgen suppressed the urge to curse. If the Gangrel here considered themselves a military force, then they were better organized than Jürgen had thought. “Ask him where the Telyavs are.”
Favst asked the question, but the Gangrel did not answer. His eyes rolled back in his head and his hands began to flex. Jürgen listened carefully and heard rustling in the forest, a good distance off, but growing closer. He leapt forward and sank his fangs into the Gangrel’s neck, drinking his coarse, bitter blood, holding his head against the tree to prevent any counterattack. The blood began to run dry all too soon, and Jürgen felt something there beyond the blood, something potent, a taste that he had never—
He stopped and withdrew. The Gangrel, now bled dry, roared in rage and pulled even harder at the sword. Jürgen planted a foot against his stomach and jerked the sword free, then swung it around and lopped off the Cainite’s head.
Favst gaped at his sire, staring at the blood still smeared across his lips. “Those taken in battle, alive or dead, I own, and will claim my tribute,” Jürgen muttered. “You’ll find your way of claiming tribute some night soon.” He turned to Gotzon and waited expectantly.
“I see you’ve taken someone else under the Black Cross,” the Lasombra remarked.
Favst glanced at Gotzon and peered closely at his eyes. “My… God…” he gasped. He backed up against a tree and crossed himself. “It’s true… we really are demons. I see Hell… in his eyes.” He fell to his knees, trying to clasp his hands, but didn’t seem to be able to move them.
Jürgen turned to his confessor. “What on God’s Earth did you do to him?”
Gotzon shook his head. “Nothing. He looked.”
Jürgen pulled his childe up to standing and locked eyes with him. “Lie still and at peace, and do not think, until I awaken you,” he hissed. He barely felt resistance from his childe’s mind, and Favst dropped over into a catatonic slumber. He turned back to Gotzon. “What are you doing here?”
“You seem somewhat ungrateful. Had I not arrived, you might have had to kill—or worse, chase—your prized steed.”
“I am grateful, forgive me.” Jürgen checked himself. Gotzon was a peer, not a servant, and he had no right to treat him as one. “But I still would like to know how you found me.”
“Serendipity,” said Gotzon, “or God’s will. I was hunting for the same demons as you, the Telyavs and their pagan herd, or whatever remains of it. I found them, but then I heard your horses screaming, so I decided to find you.”
“You found them?”
Gotzon nodded. “Not far from here. Most of them are dead, but not all. The survivors look to the Gangrel chieftain as a leader.”
“The chieftain,” mused Jürgen. The one that killed Alexander.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
“What did you do to him?” gasped Favst as the cellarer, Sigismund, wandered out of the kitchen, dazed.
“Nothing permanent, childe,” hissed Jürgen. “He’ll sleep soundly tonight, and he’ll behave as if he never saw us, but he won’t open this door until an hour after sunset.”
“We shall burn in Hell for bringing a demon here,” moaned Favst quietly.
“Gotzon is not a demon, boy.” Jürgen was losing patience. “He is a man and a Cainite, much like us, he simply hails from different lands and follows a different road.”
“His eyes…”
Jürgen’s Beast snarled that leaving the boy here as a decaying corpse would be preferable to listening to his moaning. Jürgen shushed the voice, but agreed that the general attitude towards Gotzon wasn’t acceptable. He tapped his childe on the shoulder and locked eyes with him, then looked back into his recent memories for what he had seen in Gotzon’s eyes.
He didn’t have to look long; the image hadn’t left Favst’s head for an instant. He’d looked too deeply into the Lasombra’s eyes and seen, as he’d said, Hell therein. Jürgen understood—looking at Gotzon for any length of time was disconcerting and, with the heightened perceptions that his childe probably possessed, it was apt to be downright horrifying. Still, Jürgen could fix that horror.
He reached into Favst’s mind and closed his will around the memory as a gardener might close his hand around a weed, and then concentrated, pulling the image from his childe’s mind. The memory floated free for a moment, threatening to become part of Jürgen’s own consciousness, but he released it, and the memory winked out like a candle flame.
He was about to release his childe from his mental grip, but then looked a bit deeper. Perhaps some memory of the battle with the Telyavs lingered; perhaps he could see why the details were so blurry. He peered into his childe’s mind, looking past the memories of the last night, the pain of the horse’s strike, the trek through the woods, and came upon a memory of blackness.
A memory of hunger, cold, emptiness, pain. A memory of light, beckoning, and then washed away by a torrent of blood.
The memory of the Embrace.
Jürgen ignored it. He had been fortunate in his Embrace; he knew as much. Though he had chosen his sire, Hardestadt had not Embraced him right away. He had been under his sire’s blood for some time before Hardestadt granted him undeath, and during that time he had prepared meticulously for what would happen to him. Favst had never had that chance, and his Embrace was a black hole in his mind, the single most important event in his existence.
That will change, my childe, thought Jürgen as he plumbed deeper. You’ll see such things as to make your own death and resurrection seem nothing more important than a piss in the woods.
He found the battle then, but seeing the memory was like trying catch a minnow in his fist. He could see some of the things he expected—men, horses, swords, chaos—but none of it came clearly. Jürgen was reminded of Albin the Ghost’s memory, how it had been cut away so brutally, and wondered what had happened to Favst to cause this. He looked further back, and saw Favst and three other knights, still mortal, still breathing, walking through the woods. One of the knights beckoned, speaking in the local tongue, following something…
Following a light…
A trap, Jürgen realized. They weren’t out hunting or on orders, they were led into a trap. The light bobbed and weaved through the trees, and then vanished, and the three knights stood there blinking for a moment. Then the chaos began.
Jürgen watched Favst’s fragmented memories of the battle, but he wasn’t sure exactly what had happened. Battle was chaos, and so of course a memory of it wouldn’t be terribly revealing. But Jürgen couldn’t accurately guess how many combatants there had been and whether everyone involved had fought the knights or if the combatants had fought each other as well. He saw bodies in the chaos too large to be human, but standing on two legs. He heard snarls of wolves and snarls that sounded like wolves, but were just slightly… wrong somehow. The pitch was too high for an animal, or one particular sound in a growl was drawn out too long. Lupines, then? But why wouldn’t those cursed creatures ally with the Gangrel and the Telyavs?
Because, decided Jürgen, the Telyavs are pagan, while the Lupines are debased servants of Lucifer. The pagans can be taught, after all.
He tried to watch the rest of the battle, but it did not clear until something very large and very strong hit Favst, knocking him from the clearing into the woods. He stood up and began to run, but was immediately knocked to the ground by a wolf. He stabbed it and it rolled over, yelping in pain; it must have been one of the wolves that had accompanied the Gangrel chasing Favst, Jürgen realized.
Favst didn’t have much memory of the run towards Jürgen’s monastery. It had been an act of God that he’d reached it at all, bleeding, afraid, tired. Jürgen gently released his hold on his childe’s mind. He was impressed; the knight was inexperienced, but tenacious and brave, and those were both qualities that Jürge
n prized. Perhaps after he had made firm his holdings here, he would devote some time to teaching the neonate himself, rather than fobbing him off on another Cainite lord. Rosamund could help with that instruction, if she’s willing. It might be good for both of them.
Jürgen’s Beast howled in rage, and Jürgen did not know why. He ignored its protests and helped Favst out of the reverie.
Favst blinked, calmed, and then his attention snapped to the door. Gotzon, who had been checking around the chapter house for any sign that the Telyavs or the Gangrel had been there, entered the room.
“We should sleep,” he said, and with that, he lay down in the corner and shut his eyes.
“Who is that?” whispered Favst.
Chapter Forty
The next evening, Gotzon was gone from the cellar when the two Ventrue awoke. Jürgen wasn’t surprised; Gotzon was never comfortable being in close proximity to anyone for long. He shook Favst awake and then led him out of the chapter house, deftly avoiding notice. They caught up with Gotzon a few minutes away; he was standing near Jürgen’s horse.
“Amazing,” said Favst. “He stayed.”
Jürgen smiled and bit his fingers, then offered them to his steed. The horse chewed on the bloody offering and nuzzled at his master. “He has his reasons.” Jürgen turned to Gotzon. “You say you know where the Telyavs are. How many are they? Could we three—”
“Yes.” Gotzon kept his eyes downcast. Jürgen hadn’t explained that he had altered his childe’s memory, but Gotzon had probably realized it, and in any case didn’t wish to let the curious neonate see his eyes again. “I think we could, if your childe slays the mortals, what few remain, and you and I destroy the heathen Cainites.”
“What of the chieftain?”
“Not in the area. They will summon him the instant we attack, of course—I have no doubt that their sorcery allows this—but it will take time for him to reach us.” Gotzon didn’t speak further, but Jürgen knew what he was thinking. And then we can add his ashes to the forest.
Dark Ages Clan Novel Ventrue: Book 12 of the Dark Ages Clan Novel Saga Page 24