Beyond the thick stone walls, a silent, solitary figure made his way up the mountain, walking his mount slowly. He saw the structure looming before him, and his eyes scanned the walls, shifting over each shadowed alcove, and finding nothing. The dawn was not far away, and he passed by the face of the monastery as quickly as he could, making his way to a line of trees at the base of the mountain and moving quickly beyond the cleared courtyard. He continued until a small graveyard appeared, and a smile flickered across his features…then died.
Abraham dismounted and secured his horse, leaving it to graze as he shifted aside the stone entrance to an old tomb and slipped in. He knew that the mount could be discovered, but that the odds it would not be associated with the tomb were in his favor. All that he carried he took with him as he entered to rest through the day. The following night would be soon enough to make his presence known. He had his letters of identification from Bishop Santorini, but they would not aid him against the light of the sun.
He closed the tomb behind himself and lay down on the cool earth beside the bones of those long dead. The wind outside whistled about him like the voice of God…laughing softly.
SIX
Despite the obvious possibility of treachery, Montrovant and Le Duc met and survived the hours of daylight without incident. The others had kept watch, two awake, three asleep, throughout those hours, but it was obvious upon Montrovant’s awakening that none of them had gotten much rest. He had been convinced of Rachel’s honesty, but it seemed they had been less impressed.
In any case, they rose, and they exited the chamber, making their way to the dining hall in silence. The soft chanting of many voices rose to them from the depths of the monastery, floating out along some hidden passage, or up a shadowed flight of stairs. The cadence was steady and rhythmic, eating at the concentration. Montrovant recognized its essence immediately, but it did not drag at him as when he’d heard it in the past, nor did the energy behind it seem as malevolent.
This did not prevent the sudden shocked glance from Le Duc, or the mumbling, muttered curses of his men. They were not quick to forgive young Louis’s death, and more than once he heard words of revenge, or oaths meant as protection. Frowning, he stepped forward more quickly and pushed the doors to the dining hall open wide. There was a soft blaze going in the firepit, and the main table, that nearest the fire, was laid with food and wine. There was no sign of the others, and Montrovant gestured the others forward quickly. He knew they needed the food, and he took that moment to consider what was to come next.
“Eat quickly,” he said, turning away and moving to stand near one wall. “We must be up and out of here. The trail grows cooler and more difficult with each passing moment.”
Le Duc moved to his side, but kept enough distance to acknowledge his sire’s silence. Both knew they would require a very different sort of sustenance soon, another reason for Montrovant’s urgency for the road.
They had learned some things from Rachel, but not nearly enough to be of any real help in their quest. Bits and pieces of an ages-old puzzle were falling into place, but the trail, the hunt, was no different than before. The Order had not come this way, had not passed through the monastery. This meant either they had stayed on the main road over the mountain, gone around the mountain, or not headed toward France at all. None of these possibilities made Montrovant’s mind easy.
“They would have known,” Jeanne said softly from behind him. Montrovant spun, catching Le Duc’s gaze.
“The Order were Nosferatu, before they left Kodesh. They are mostly Nosferatu now, though changed. They would have sensed those within the walls…might even have been aware of them all along. They would also know we might stop here. It is not a sign that they did not come this way…if anything it is a sign that they suspected you might follow.”
Montrovant considered his progeny’s words. It was certainly possible that the Order had had him in mind and led him toward France, but the truth was it was only instinct that had guided him in that direction. Every time he had been near to what he sought, the road had led him home. France.
“You may be right, my friend,” he said softly, “but somehow I wonder if I am such an important thing to them? I do not see why they would wish to draw me after them. Kli Kodesh found me entertaining, but he is ancient, and mad. The Order is not so ancient, nor so powerful. I am nothing but a thorn in their side. That being the truth, why would they wish me to follow, unless it was a trap?” Le Duc grinned. “A trap we will, of course, spring?”
“Of course,” Montrovant’s grin widened, and a flicker of light danced in his eyes. “How could I resist?”
They turned back to the table to find that the others had made short work of the meat and wine, and were packing away what remained for the road. It seemed that Rachel and her followers had chosen not to be present to wish their guests a friendly good-bye, and that suited Montrovant fine. He sent du Puy and St. Fond for the horses and led the others out the front, letting the heavy wooden doors close behind them with finality. With the walls no longer surrounding him he drank in the freedom of the night, and the road.
They mounted, turning quickly back down the mountain, and were gone, the two scouts moving ahead to their point positions and the others gathering in a tight knot about him. They were one less, and so soon in the journey it was a poor omen, but Montrovant was not moved by omens. Too many bodies were strewn behind him, leaving him strong and free, for one more to make a difference. If he were the only one to reach his goal, the price would be small.
He spurred his horse down the curving road and onto the main trail, moving up the last leg toward the peak of the mountain pass.
As they disappeared from the court, a lone figure appeared from the tree line. Abraham stood for a long moment, watching them ride down the trail. His mind whirled with thoughts of revenge, of anger and pain. His first instinct was to fly down the mountain in their wake.
His horse had been grazing casually where he’d left it. None had come near where he rested, and his passage was unnoted by Montrovant, or those who might or might not still live within the walls of the monastery. Abraham hesitated. He needed to feed, and soon, but if the dark one had already entered, and departed, from the stone structure before him, then the odds were good that there were none left inside to breathe his name in their nightmares. The other possibility was that Montrovant had allies, and that was equally dangerous.
He opened his pack, glancing over the safe passage and the other documents with which Bishop Santorini had presented him, then closed the bag and moved to his mount. There would be others on the mountain, and it would not be the first time he was faced with the possibility of animals as his only sustenance. He would follow, remaining as close as he could without putting himself in danger of discovery.
Glancing over his shoulder as he turned down the mountain toward the trail beyond, he saw shadowed figures slipping over one wall, near the back.
Smooth, sinuous motion and the speed of shadows sliding past on the wind marked the passing of these apparitions, and his eyes remained locked to that panorama as they bled into the deeper shadows of the night and were gone.
“Damned,” he breathed.
Turning he moved more quickly down the mountain and away. There was no way now to know what Montrovant had done with or to those within the monastery’s walls, but even if there was blood to be had there, it would be jealously guarded. There was nothing to gain and far too much to lose for Abraham to risk a visit within those walls.
His plans, from the beginning, had been nebulous and incomplete. Santorini had ushered him out the door of Montrovant’s keep, sent him on this “mission” without thought to how exactly it was to be accomplished. Montrovant was old, powerful, and all that fueled Abraham was the fire of revenge and the hunger to find the Order of the Bitter Ashes once more and to confront them for abandoning him. He had served them long and well on the simple hope of joining. Of knowing for certain truths that he’d long s
uspected.
His own Embrace had stolen him from a family led by a father with a vision, a vision of religious fervor. Holy relics, and a church gone deaf, dumb, and blind to the heritage that had spawned it were the topics of conversation at their dinners. There were the precious handful of scrolls and books, works by learned men of other nations and times. There were maps, both fraudulent and true, all geared toward the same fixation.
Abraham’s father would have understood Montrovant’s obsession, but he would have insisted that the focus was off kilter. He had not, of course, felt the draw of the blood, nor had Abraham’s father walked the roads or times the dark one had lived and seen. It was within his mind the old man had shone, the conviction of his words, and his thoughts, the things he’d passed on to his adoring son.
“There are powers, Abraham,” his father Joseph would say, late at night, a tankard of ale in his hand and an ancient tome of one sort or another open before him, “powers we cannot comprehend. The Church is not the only power in the world, nor the oldest, but it has brought a focus to those powers that others have not. That power is brought together, and hidden away, discovered only to be obscured more thoroughly, shared with a select few…so select, and so few, that even the priests of that faith do not know the complete truth.
“Among the Holy Fathers in Rome, there have been those who knew and those who merely suspected, even those with no notion of what went on between and beneath their own walls. Scrolls, artifacts, bits and pieces of the past, even pieces of the saints themselves, the cross, the Ark of the Covenant.
“These things, Abraham, are the keys to the power. The words in the Bible are cryptograms, hidden now even from those who created their coding. It is an uncertain guide, steeped in twisting roads that lead in endless circles.”
It was at this point, usually after more than one of the tankards of ale, that Abraham’s life would become clearest to him. The things his father had told him had sent him searching, seeking, seeing things that others did not, or that they ignored, reading the ancient texts with his father and seeing the magic that swirled through their words.
To Joseph, the secrets had been an obsession to be sought in tomes and the quiet sifting of the words and treasures of others. He was content with what he could find, and when the urge to move beyond this called out to him too strongly, he would himself call to the ale. That did not stop the fires from burning free of his eyes and infecting his son, who took that fire and placed it fully in his heart.
Twenty years of age, striking out on his own, Abraham had been filled to bursting with those dreams. The Holy Land, the mosques of the Muslims, the vaults of the Vatican. He’d sought them all, and found none. Not more than a week on the road he’d caught a rumor, a dropped word in a drunken conversation, and his life, and death, had been sealed.
He had been seeking anything that might lead him toward knowledge of the powers and secrets his father had hinted at, and fate had dumped him near a low valley. It was a place feared by all, a dark, shadowed story used to frighten children at night, and it called to him like a siren to those long lost at sea.
He’d entered that valley that very night, not even waiting for a good night’s rest or common sense to point out to him that such stories rarely grew from nothing. They claimed that there was a place within that valley where strange men dwelled, a low-slung fortress cut into a bedrock of deep-set stone. Those who lived within were rarely seen, and never heard from, but had been seen abroad, always by night.
Those who entered the valley in search of them never returned. Very simply. No bodies, no horrible scenes of death or destruction, just nothing. It was as if those foolish enough to seek beyond the rim of that valley vanished from the Earth.
There was a road leading down the sloping trail, but it was overgrown from disuse. There were no ruts from wagon wheels, nor signs of passing riders. Although the valley was a natural bridge to the borders of the next village, the road all used wound around, skirting the valley carefully.
None of this had mattered. His father’s dreams carefully tucked away in his heart, Abraham had entered that valley. He’d made his way to the bottom without incident, and through the line of trees toward the center, where he found and followed a clear, bubbling stream that coursed up from beneath the stone and wound into the distance.
Along that stream was another trail, this one more worn, and his heart had quickened. Someone did inhabit that valley, and they did move in and out, just not through the villages. The secrecy of it thrilled him, and he moved down that trail, heedless of the danger, until the structure he’d heard mentioned came into sight.
He’d had a single glimpse of that structure, one moment to impress its image in his mind, before he was grabbed roughly from behind, lifted from the ground like a child and carried screaming into the trees. A powerful hand had slammed into his head then, silencing him, and the pain that followed was both exquisite and intense.
He felt himself dancing weakly in the grip that held him…his throat pierced by twin blades, transfixed, eyes shifting to black and mind fighting for control, for understanding. One thing flashed brightly through his mind. He had sought powers beyond his understanding, and they had found him. “Please,” he’d managed to beg, his breath slipping away, dying from his lips, “Please…show me?” And for reasons that still itched at his mind, that still tore at his heart and raked through the remnant of his soul, his request had been granted. As he’d fallen, the life seeping from him swiftly, blood no longer his own and eyes going swiftly from bright blue and intense, to gray and dull, a drop of something had fallen, glittering in the bit of moonlight that filtered down through the trees hypnotically, splashing into his lips and slipping within, winding down his parched throat like molten fire…and then another.…a small stream.
Before he realized it was blood, he was latched to a slender, torn wrist, and feeding violently, drawing that sustenance into him, that power and sight, that amazing feeling of completion. An eternity passed and he was cuffed again, knocked free as she sprang back, crouching and watching him with dark, feral eyes.
Her hair had swept back over her shoulders wildly, dark and windblown. What remained of her gown was nearly shredded, revealing white, smooth skin. She watched him, not speaking, for a long time.
He could not move, still, though he felt strength returning, surging through his veins…and things shifted, his sight blurred, then clear, thought lucid and incoherent in short bursts.
“Why?” he’d asked her. “Why?”
“You asked me,” she replied, a soft lilt to her haunting voice. “None ever asked before.”
And so it had begun. Lori, for that was her name, had taken him away, lifting him again as easily as she would a small sack of grain and carrying him over her shoulder to a narrow crevasse in the stone wall of the valley. Beyond that crack was a small cavern, and deeper still another, cool and damp, her steps echoing in his mind like the beating of a huge drum. She’d taken him deep inside, dumped him, and left him, not returning until he’d passed into a deep darkness.
When he saw her again she did not speak immediately. She took him by his hand, led him from the cavern into the valley beyond, and up the side of the valley furthest from the village from which he’d entered. They moved quietly, his own speed and agility nearly a match for hers, though he’d lain ready for death the night before.
That night, he had fed, a young man, out hunting too late and too close to the rim of the valley. She’d been on him in seconds, dragging him down, and the hunger drove Abraham to join her before his mind could attach meaning to his motion. He had pierced the boy’s throat and begun to drain that sweet blood, hands clutching hair and clothing, dragging the young, warm body closer, before the reality of his actions slammed home.
Not even looking back, she’d turned and left him there on that trail, the dying body of the boy in his arms, and moved into the shadows toward the village, her own hunger still to be sated. Abraham had watched, wanting to
scream, to tear free, to turn and to run and run until his steps had carried him from the valley, through the village, and beyond…back to sanity, to his father, to the world he’d left behind. He did none of that. He held, and he fed, and he reached for tears that were beyond him, failing him as thoroughly as his humanity.
That was the beginning. He’d stayed with Lori for several years, feeding along the rim of the valley, watching those within, but never seeing them move, or leave. The fire within him for knowledge had not died with his heart. He craved even more strongly that which lay just beyond his reach, but those early years were years of learning. Lori was not a patient teacher, but she was fierce, and loyal, and had been too long in those trees and rocks alone.
At times they would talk, in the early morning, just before the sun would rise and press them to the earth with the weight of certain destruction, driving them to the caverns. She told him tales of those within the walls of that small keep, naming them the Order of the Bitter Ash. Great secrets, she said, were what they guarded, jealously and tirelessly, dragged into her valley many years before.
The structure had once lain empty. She could remember a time when the valley had been ruled by her own father, and the keep, not so strong, or secret, had been a place where weary travelers came for rest. It had always been sheltered, and because of that was often overlooked in the violent feudal disputes that rocked France in those times. That seclusion had brought her own sire, seeking a respite from the trials of remaining hidden and active in the world.
He had killed them all, her family, slowly, her father first to go, leaving a wife and daughter to rule in his stead, and that dark presence seeping between the two of them, claiming both and setting them against one another. The tales were dark, and the images they brought softened the lines of Lori’s face in Abraham’s mind. He knew loneliness, as well, though he’d always had his father. His mother had died at an early age, giving birth to a brother that Abraham was never to know. Mother and child had left as one, and only Abraham and his father had been left to share company, and life, and love.
To Dream of Dreamers Lost: Book 3 of The Grails Covenant Trilogy Page 7