One blow, Abraham told himself. You have one blow, and that’s it.
He kept the images simple and precise, transferring them from his own mind to the bishop’s limbs. The axe rose, held steadily over the priest’s head. One step closer, then another, focused, the lock, the axe, making that image one…and…now!
The axe sliced through the air, whistling in a steady arc. Abraham closed his eyes…seeing in his mind the lock struck. Time slowed in that instant, his life, and then a second life flashing through his mind like a nightmare jumble of emotion and regret.
Then there was the hard chink of metal on metal on stone. He released the bishop and was immediately rolling away, when an excruciating dart of pain ripped through him. The axe clattered to the floor, and Antonio’s body slumped beside it, lying in a silent heap.
Abraham opened his eyes, crazed by pain, but free. He brought his arms around before him and stared. There were deep lines where the metal had cut into his skin, and the skin on the back of one hand had been shaved away to the bone by the stroke of the axe. He cursed softly, reaching down and finding the lock on the back of the band that bound his legs. He knew the lock was the weak link, and, taking it firmly in his hand, he twisted hard.
At first nothing happened. Then Montrovant’s mocking laughter floated free of Abraham’s memory, and he twisted again. The lock snapped, releasing the bands suddenly, and Abraham slumped back against the wall.
As his thoughts cleared, he remembered the bottles of blood, and with a soft groan he began to crawl slowly across the floor, then faster and faster as the hunger gripped him and drew him onward. Knowing his control was weakened, he skirted the bishop’s prone form carefully. He had no other ally on earth, and it would not serve his purposes to make that ally a meal.
The first bottle went down in a single long gulp, and the second. No thought accompanied his feeding. His hand began to heal, and the marks from the metal bands slowly disappeared, but he paid them no notice. So long, so long since he’d been full, and even though the animal blood was weak, teasing him with the promise of strength it could not quite deliver, it was like sweet nectar. It had been so long since he’d moved except to scream and to claw with bound, helpless hands at the box that had been his prison, that the freedom was intoxicating.
The ravages of the sun would never completely disappear. There was a scar along one side of his face that he would bear for the rest of his nights. He was unaware of it all until, holding the last bottle high, upturned between his lips, he felt the final drop sink down his throat.
His eyes focused slowly, and he remembered the priest. It would not do to have his new ally awaken to find himself in a heap on the floor. Rising for the first time since the dark one had grabbed him and spirited him away, he stretched his limbs…then leaned down and scooped up Santorini’s unconscious form easily, moving into the outer hall and down to where the fire still roared. Abraham didn’t care for the fire or its warmth, but he knew it would be comforting to his companion, and after what he’d just done, it might take a considerable effort to achieve that comfort, or any level of trust. The only thing in Abraham’s favor was that he had not taken the fool’s life.
Laying the bishop out on a small couch, careful not to cause any bruises or lumps, or aggravate those already forming, he seated himself in a chair in the shadows to wait. If he’d learned only one thing from his ordeal it was the ability to be alone with his own thoughts.
Antonio was dragged from the darkness by a throbbing drumbeat that grew clearer and clearer as he approached coherent thought. It was not until his eyes were fluttering open and the dancing light of the fire split the darkness that he knew that beating for his own pulse, and the throbbing from a head that felt as if it had been clubbed into pulp. He tried to rise, but moved too quickly and fell back…the motion, and the soft impact on the couch, both served to redouble the pounding, and he closed his eyes a second longer, trying to regroup his thoughts. Then memory flooded in and his eyes flew open once more. In a sudden burst of energy remarkable in one so recently unconscious, Antonio sat upright, his eyes scanning the shadows in sudden terror.
“Calm yourself, my friend,” Abraham’s voice slipped like silk from the shadows. “If I wanted you dead, trust that you would be.”
Antonio spun toward the sound…just able to make out the vampire’s shadowed form seated in a chair, off to one side of the fire and set back in an alcove. The urge to rise and to run, not looking back, taking his chances on reaching the courtyard outside and his mount, was strong, but the calming influence of common sense proved the stronger. Antonio leaned back in his seat.
“For one so eager to set me free, you are remarkably unappreciative of your own success,” Abraham said, chuckling softly.
Antonio’s hand flew to the knot on his head, rubbing it gingerly. He looked dumbly around at the room. “How…”
“You must forgive me, but I did not trust your wielding of the axe. I took…steps…to insure that I would lose as little flesh as possible in my release. Even so, it was not without its danger…or its pain. I find that you have saved me twice now…once by rescuing my body, and the second time by allowing me the use of your own. I thank you, my friend…but I wonder, what is it that you think you can gain by keeping me alive? You have seen how the dark one dealt with me the last time we met…what makes you think another meeting would turn out differently?”
Antonio fought to order his thoughts. He knew he was alive only because this other allowed it, and he wanted very much to ensure that nothing about that situation changed.
“Alone, I have no chance of ever seeing Montrovant again,” he said at last. “Not unless he desires it to be so, and when such a meeting comes about at his will, he will triumph. The Church is not without resources that could better handle the dark one than I myself, but I do not wish to call their attention to my own failures or shortcomings.
“I want you to track him for me, and for yourself. I want you to work with me to find a way to either bring him back, along with that which he seeks, returning both to the influence of Mother Church…or I want him dead, and I will present you as the new guardian. It makes little difference to me.”
Abraham sat in silence for a while. He sat so long, in fact, that the bishop was about to speak again, fearing he’d failed to make his case.
“You are a fool,” the vampire said at last. “You believe Montrovant was working with you, that you had a pact. The dark one is well known to the Order I served, and I have heard a great deal of his history. He has never had a “pact” in his life except with his own desires. If he could make you—or the Church—believe that he was your ally to gain what he wished from you, he would not hesitate. Neither would he hesitate to bring the Vatican to ruin or to hang your plump carcass from a tree and lie beneath it, feasting on the blood as it spilled.
“So,” Abraham continued, “what you would have me undertake in your name, or in the name of your Church, who cannot even know I exist if we are to preserve your shaky position, is a fool’s errand. You don’t know it, but there are those in the Vatican who know of my kind, of Montrovant, even. How will you protect me from them? How do you suggest I go about doing as you ask? You would have the prey chase the hunter across the countryside, supported indirectly by those who will not acknowledge him. You would have me seek a nearly certain second death at the hands of the one I have so narrowly escaped this time. I will ask you then, what is in it for me? An alliance with the Church is a precarious situation at best for one such as I, and hardly worth risking my existence over.”
Antonio thought fast. He thought back to Montrovant, sifted through what little he knew. “If Montrovant seeks to be guardian of the Grail,” he began, wording his answer carefully, “there must be some personal gain in holding that relic…something he would not share with me. If you return that treasure to the Church, the guardianship could be yours. You could begin your own order, gather your own dark knights. I can offer handsome payment in gold
and treasure, but something tells me that if such was your goal you could acquire it easily enough on your own. I could offer you blood—a ready, virgin supply of it, but again, I doubt you need my assistance, for if you did, you would not have lived long enough to be saved by me this time. The sweetest thing I can offer is revenge.
“I won’t go so far as to say you owe it to me, even though I dragged you from the wall and the burning of the sun. I will say that you owe it to yourself. You owe yourself a chance for revenge. I have heard the dark one say on many occasions that the one thing that grows more and more scarce in his existence is entertainment. Can you afford to deny yourself this chance?”
Abraham was laughing softly again. Rising slowly, he stepped from the shadows into the flickering light of the fire. His skin was healed in great part, except for the single scar, his hair was clean and luxurious…his eyes bright and reflecting the laughter on his lips as Montrovant’s never had.
His hair was blond now, where it had been stringy and graying, and it swept back over his shoulders. He stood half a head taller than the bishop, but more slender, and built with the strength of youth, though there was a hint of experience and age to his eyes that belied that initial impression.
“You speak well, as one would expect from a man of your calling, but your words are unnecessary. Montrovant himself ensured that I would follow him if I survived…he bid me do so, and you yourself have named the reason for his madness. He is bored. He invited me to exact my revenge, though I doubt he expected I would be afforded the opportunity, or that I had the means to carry out that revenge should the opportunity present itself.
“He follows the Order, and I myself must find them again. He has his quest, and I have mine, and now my own is sweetened by the knowledge that I may find what I seek and take my revenge at the same moment. Since I am already planning this adventure,” the vampire’s eyes began to flicker brightly, as if amused, “I would be a fool to not accept aid from one who could prove a detriment if I refuse.”
“I pose no threat to you,” Antonio babbled quickly. He would have gone on, but Abraham held up a hand for silence.
“I know that you think this is true, but it is not. If I were to refuse you, and to leave, you would seek another, or another means of carrying this out without my help. That other would be a hindrance—perhaps a serious danger—to my own efforts. It is in my best interest to be your ally, my friend, and I am not ungrateful for the rescue.”
Antonio rose then, and Abraham strode closer, offering his hand, which the bishop took uncertainly.
“It is settled then,” the vampire concluded, smiling. “There are things I will need before I can depart, and I must build my strength a bit…but there is little time to lose.”
“Whatever you need, if it is within my power, I will provide it,” Antonio answered eagerly.
“In that case, I have a request that will test just how far you are willing to go, my friend. It is not a good idea for me to be hunting near here. I might be seen, and, should I return, my mission a success, I would not want the locals to remember me in hatred or fear.”
Antonio shivered, knowing what was to come and dreading it.
Abraham watched him closely…a grim smile twisting his lip. “Do not fail me in this, Antonio. I will consider it a gauge of how close our…friendship…is to grow. Make her young…pretty…sweet. Bring me something to make up for those days and hours screaming hopelessly in the darkness of that crate. I am very hungry, Antonio,” Abraham’s eyes flashed suddenly, yawning before the bishop like an endless cavern and calling out to him to leap into their depths. “I am starved.”
Antonio turned then and fled. He could sense Abraham’s eyes focused on his back, could hear the vampire’s mocking laughter floating after him down the hall. In that instant he knew he’d traded one dark master for another, gaining little but his sanity. His heart cried out to him to turn away, but his mind was already working over the details of how he would obtain the girl.
The laughter floated about him like a cloud, seeping up from his mind to haunt him as he rode swiftly back to Rome. His lips began to form the words of a prayer out of habit, but he bit them back suddenly, ashamed, and thrilled at the same time. As he rode the darkness seemed to swallow him whole.
FOUR
Montrovant and his followers were not long on the road before the approaching daylight forced the first halt. His men did not question him, being familiar with his oddities. There were certain places known to them all, safe, hidden places, that allowed for discretion and secrecy. Montrovant wanted to be beyond the annoying, clutching reach of Bishop Santorini and the longer, more insidious grasp of the Church itself. He could easily have spent the night in his own keep, made his farewells the following day, and gone at the sun’s next setting, but once the scent was firmly planted, he needed to act. Even the few miles they gained that first night were too much for him to resist.
Rising as he now did to a new night, the day and the pitiful, annoying existence of the weakling Abraham behind him, he felt a freedom he’d not experienced in some time: that of the road. It had been too long since he’d shared time with that finest of companions, and he found himself itching to be gone, far from Rome, far from those who knew him. His old hunger filled his senses.
He had been close enough to grasp the treasure he sought more than once, and the faint scent of it that remained had fermented over the years. Now he felt it growing strong once more. He’d sat too long in that keep, letting the Order’s empty words and the “alliance” with the Church numb his senses. He had not followed the Grail so many years to sit and watch others possess it: the time for such foolishness was past.
His followers felt the freedom as well, coveted it. Le Duc in particular glowed with renewed vigor. The dark one’s progeny’s eyes sparkled and his wit was recovering the sharp, stinging quality Montrovant remembered well from past adventure. The two understood one another in ways that the rest would never comprehend. Dark men, all of them, with secrets and hungers they preferred not to share and pasts that would see each dangling from a dozen scaffolds; none of them had been born to sit and watch the world pass.
The first night they spent in the ruins of an ancient abbey, Montrovant and Le Duc in the cellars below, the others finding what comfort they could among rotted pews and the shattered remnant of stained glass. Many years had passed since any had celebrated the mass between those walls. The only worshipers who remained were buried beneath stone monuments in the cemetery behind the building, overgrown with weeds and vines and crumbling to the dust that had spawned them.
Montrovant led the others out at dusk, keeping off the main roads but paralleling them as he wound their road away from Rome. In the distance the umbrella palms lining the ancient roads were in clear view, marking their way as they set off across country.
With nothing else to guide his choice, Montrovant headed for France. It was there that he’d last encountered the Order, there where he’d faced them down, watched the ancient creature Santos crumble, seen his own sire Eugenio clash with the ages-older Kli Kodesh. There might be no answers waiting in France, but it was home, and there were those there with the wisdom, influence, and contacts to guide him in his quest.
They did not wear the colors of the Templars openly. That order had been banished by King Philip, its leader, Jacques de Molay, put to the stake and torched before Montrovant’s own eyes. The Templars had gone underground, their meetings held in secret and their rites closely and jealously guarded from outsiders. Their influence had lessened only slightly, and Montrovant had kept his own ties to the Order as firm as possible without truly involving himself in their affairs.
He was believed to be a direct descendant of another Montrovant, one who’d helped to found the Knights, and who’d saved them more than once from certain destruction at the hands of mythic evils. He was not questioned, and only a very few suspected the truth, that he and that other Montrovant were one and the same, and that the knight
who fought most closely at his side, Jean Le Duc, had been one of the first Templars ever to wear the cross.
Their road veered off shortly from the straighter route of the Romans and through a brief range of mountains. It would cut a considerable amount of time off their journey, though the going would be more difficult. Montrovant was indifferent to the difficulty. Either way was the same to him, except that the mountains would bring him more swiftly to his goal.
It was on the second night’s travel that they found the passage leading upward and began their ascent, taking the trail more slowly and in single file as it began almost at once to grow more steep.
“This is a lonely way,” Le Duc commented, riding up beside him. The moonlight cast long shadows over the way ahead, the sky gray, stark, and the mountains looming overhead were lined with a silvery sheen.
“Our way has always been lonely,” Montrovant replied softly. “Whether or not there are others about makes no difference, unless one is hungry.”
Le Duc grinned at this, but shook his head. “I know you better than that, dark one. The boredom would drive you underground and you would never surface.”
Montrovant grinned. “That much is true, but it has been too long since I got out of that moldy keep and onto the road. It is one thing to crave society and its intrigue, quite another to spend endless dreary nights in the company of the same few.”
They rode on in silence for a bit longer, the others filing silently along behind. None could find the energy to break the lethargic silence. The weight of the journey was on their shoulders, as always, at the beginning. Everything lay ahead, nothing behind, and it brought solitary thought and introspection to each.
Finally Le Duc spoke once more.
“Do you know this trail? I have never traveled it myself, and wondered if we would be seeking shelter before sunrise, or if you had a stop in mind?”
To Dream of Dreamers Lost: Book 3 of The Grails Covenant Trilogy Page 4