chapter 15
Thalya crouched within the sloping entrance of the cave, relaxed as a coiled spring.
Her back was to the stone wall, and one sun-browned hand was knotted in her black mare’s dangling reins. Her other hand guided the tip of her broad-bladed hunting knife through the dirt caking the floor, making idle patterns which her eye did not follow. Instead her narrowed gaze pierced deeper into the cave, past the roiling haze of smoke that clung to the ceiling on its way to the night sky, to fix upon the men gathered below around a feeble campfire.
Her target sat among them, staring into the tiny remaining flicker of flame amid a bed of glowing embers, looking like nothing more than an ordinary, tired, silver-haired old man. She wondered if he was as vulnerable at the moment as he appeared, and she considered the bow and single black arrow that were meticulously positioned at her side. No, she admonished herself; he was merely goading her to make another attempt just as he was affecting the sad and weary expression he wore like a jester’s painted mask. Moreover, he had kept the arrow he caught outside, and that left her with but one remaining that was capable of slaying the fiend. Another wasted shot would be her undoing, leaving her without the means to fulfill her mission as well as putting her at the mercy of the monster. She would have to bide her time, then. When she struck again, she would ensure he could not avoid it.
Thalya forced her eyes from Bellimar and let them rove over the others, disembodied faces floating in the gloom above the banked fire. She had to admit, these were not the dark, soulless men with which she had expected the fiend to surround himself. They seemed stricken by her words and awaiting an explanation, but she reminded herself that evil came in many packages, often wrapped in layer upon layer of deception.
Syth, one of her rescuers, turned to gaze up at her. He was a strange, scruffy fellow somehow wrapped in his own perpetual gust of wind, and unless she had lost her skill at reading such things, there was desire in his eyes when he looked upon her.
“Lass, are you certain you will not join us?” he called. “I can give you a hand down the slope, if you are still unsteady on your feet from your earlier ordeal.”
“I have a fine view from here,” she returned. She held up the hunting knife. “And I will be removing any hand––or other appendage––directed my way.”
Syth let out a guffaw and settled back with a broad grin of admiration.
“Will you not at least reconsider the offer of our skilled friend Halthak here to heal your injuries, then?” he asked, indicating the quiet Half-Ork at his side.
Halthak raised his eyes to meet hers, their wide, childlike innocence incongruous amid a countenance that was so ugly as to be nearly deformed. In truth, she ached and stung all over from the earlier scuffle, but there was no way she would permit a cohort of the Black One to work his magic on her. No, she was in this cave against her better judgment and only long enough to hear what lies the fiend would spin; if these men knew not whom they harbored, perhaps they could be swayed to join her against the monster. She gave a sharp shake of her head, and the Half-Ork dropped his gaze.
Amric, the tall, powerfully built warrior with the storm-grey eyes who had been the other of her rescuers, cleared his throat and the others grew still. This one had a hard look about him, and yet his voice carried at once both the ring of command and a steady underlying current of compassion. It was clear he was the leader of this motley group, but she had yet to puzzle out why a creature such as the Vampire King would pretend to defer to him, even for a time.
“Bellimar,” the warrior said. “As you urged, we have withheld all questions while we took shelter from the hazards of the open night. There can be little doubt that you have proven an invaluable companion on this dangerous road, but it is no longer possible to look past the lurking ghosts of your secrets. The time has come to have answers.”
Bellimar said nothing for long moments, still staring into the meager campfire. Thalya fidgeted. She was eager to hear the monster’s admission of guilt, but she refused to be the one to break the silence, and so she clenched her fist over the hilt of her knife and waited. When at last the old man spoke, it was in a whisper that somehow carried throughout the cave with startling clarity, like a chill breeze through a darkened crypt.
“I will save you the trouble of asking outright,” he said. “The lady named me truly. I am indeed Bellimar the Destroyer, the man whose rise and fall I recounted to you a mere handful of nights ago in this very cave. I am the conqueror whose vile deeds were scrawled in the blood of innocents on the dim-shrouded pages of history now long lost to this world, and I am guilty of countless more offenses than were ever chronicled.”
His eyes rose from the fire, but drank its flame. Gone was the old man, weary and resigned, shed and discarded like a dried husk. In his place was a man of fierce, primal intensity, his lean face set in ruthless lines and his eyes burning with blood-red power. His voice crowded out the other sounds of the night until even the echo of his words from the stark ribcage of the cave retreated in dread. Thalya felt a chill along her spine. It was as if he were whispering at her very shoulder, his bloodless lips at her ear.
“Know, friends, that in my time I have crushed entire nations under my heel. I turned mortal men, good men as well as bad, into unfeeling killing machines. I raised armies of the dead when there were not enough mortal men at hand to corrupt, and I commanded things of deepest shadow. The world, a more primitive place so many centuries ago, trembled at my very tread. I grasped for power, eternally more power, and dark forces granted my every excess. There was a terrible price to be paid, but I paid it then with nary a second thought. I suspect I have been further over that black precipice than any man in the history of this world, and it embraced me as its own. I became the Lord of Night, the Vampire King, and not even the combined might of nations could stop what I had built, what I had become. I had cheated mortality, abandoned my humanity. Time no longer held sway over me, and nothing remained with the power to stop my undying reign.”
He paused, glancing around at their pale faces. “Nothing in this world, at least.”
“And yet you were struck down, by some force,” interjected the Sil’ath, Valkarr. Thalya suppressed a start. Until his words, spoken in a coarse, guttural tone that lingered on the sibilant sounds, she had all but forgotten the presence of the reptilian warrior.
“So I was,” Bellimar admitted. “I was struck down at the height of my power, even as I was on the verge of plunging the world into an age of shadow such as it had never before seen. I was struck down by a gathering of forces from beyond that dwarfed even my own strength.”
“So the tales were true?” Amric asked, incredulous. “The gods themselves intervened in the mortal arena?”
The old man barked a bitter laugh. “First, tell me your definition of a god. What are the gods, anyway, except beings above us in power, capable of demanding obeisance and inflicting their will upon lesser creatures such as ourselves? By that standard, yes, it was most certainly the gods who struck me down. Whatever you call these beings, they appeared to me as men and women of great power, and were not content to defeat or even destroy me. Instead, they changed me in ways I still do not understand, and then cast me out into the world, even as they dispersed the dark forces I had assembled around me.”
“I do not understand,” Halthak said. “What did you become after your fall? What are you now?”
Bellimar swung his gaze to the Half-Ork. “In many ways, I am what I was before, an affront to nature by my very existence,” he said. “I am an ancient vampire.”
Halthak started back from the man as if struck.
“Whatever is the matter, healer?” Bellimar asked, baring his teeth in a blood-chilling smile. “Are you thinking, perhaps, of all those nights I feigned sleep whilst listening to the languid pulse within your senseless, slumbering form only a few tantalizing feet away? Ah, but listen to your heart race now!”
In what Thalya would have deemed a physical impossibility, the Half-Ork whitened even further.
“Enough, Bellimar!” Amric said, slicing his hand through the air in a curt motion. “Leave him be.”
Bellimar swung his gaze over to the man.
“And you, warrior,” he hissed. “Your pulse remains strong and steady, scarcely rising under threat of violence even though I can smell your fear. A testament to the steel of your nerves, no doubt, but is your composure misplaced? Aura or no, I suspect your blood carries hidden power.”
Amric met the vampire’s fevered stare, unmoving, unrelenting. “If you were merely some blood-mad fiend,” he said, “you have had ample opportunity to strike. Instead you saved us in Stronghold, and you gave me your word you were our ally.”
Thalya snorted, but Amric ignored her and pressed on. “What game are you playing at, Bellimar?”
The old man met his iron gaze for a long moment, and then sagged back, looking suddenly aged and weary once more.
“I am no longer certain,” he said at last in a low, brooding tone. “At first it was the drive for knowledge. I sought to end this new curse, to understand how I had been changed, to unravel the riddle of what they had done to me so that I could return to my former glory. I realized the obvious from the beginning, that I had somehow been stripped of my sorcerous powers; they eluded my will even though I retained the full extent of my arcane knowledge itself.
“The more subtle aspects of my transformation soon began to settle upon me, however. I still required the blood and life force of living creatures as sustenance, and the infernal craving was with me always, but I could no longer bear to take sentient life as I had so casually done before. In fact, I felt nausea, revulsion and pain whenever I contemplated doing harm to another creature. And so I was consigned to feeding on game and lesser creatures like some depraved scavenger, and even that only in the extremes of my hunger, when necessary to sustain my very existence. Perhaps in exchange, I could once more endure the light of the sun and other things considered anathema to my kind. I felt their searing kiss on my flesh, and yet somehow I was not destroyed. I had been thrust into some half existence, and thus it has been for all these centuries, as I pay penance for my sins.”
“Are you living or dead, then?” Syth asked in a hushed voice.
“What does it mean to be living?” Bellimar replied with a shrug. “I have free will, and so by that definition––”
“No more word games,” Amric interrupted. “Answer the question or be gone from here.”
“I do not mean to equivocate, swordsman,” Bellimar said with a sad smile. “In truth, I do not know the answer. I have been altered in ways beyond my understanding, and I suspect I am either none or all of those things at this point. My aura was altered in some way every bit as fundamental as when I passed from mortal life and became a vampire. By strict definition, I am not living, dead or undead now. And since I have been each of them at one time or another, I may be in a unique position to know. No, I am in a purgatory all my own.”
He lapsed into silence, and the shadows cast by the sinking flames writhed along the deep lines of his face. When he spoke again, his voice was lower yet, almost inaudible. “I now feel like my quest for this knowledge is––has always been––the final spasm of a dead man, the twitch of limbs that do not realize the spirit has already left the body. I am a hollow shell pursuing a remembered impulse, when the motivation for it is long lost. I no longer know if I seek the knowledge in order to gain release from my constraints, as I once did, or to prevent an accidental reversion to my former self. Perhaps I seek the knowledge simply to put an end to my wretched existence, once and for all.”
Thalya scowled and reached out to brush her fingertips against the black arrow. If he truly desired an end to his existence, she was more than ready to assist. As if reading her mind, Bellimar glanced toward her. The firelight performed a lurid dance in his eyes as he regarded her for an instant with an unreadable expression. Then his gaze slid away.
“Your interest in the unusual auras of others,” Amric was saying. “You hope to find in them the key to your own.”
The old man gave an approving nod. “Very good, swordsman.”
“And your extensive knowledge of them comes in part from your years feeding upon the life force of others, as the monster you were,” the warrior continued in a cold tone.
Bellimar flinched as if struck, and gave an almost imperceptible nod. “Regrettably true as well,” he whispered.
“I have seen your face become flushed when you are in the presence of spilt blood,” Amric pressed. “The farm, the bloodbeasts, the Wyrgens. I mistook it for an aversion to violence, but now I realize it was the strain of controlling your hunger. And what of the night you disappeared, after the fight with the bloodbeasts in the forest?”
Bellimar looked away. “There was so much blood, everywhere. So much of your blood, and Valkarr’s, and it had been so long since I fed….” He raised his eyes, lifted his chin. “I did not trust myself around you in your weakened state. My hunger threatened to overwhelm my imposed constraints and my willpower both, and I was left with only one course.”
Amric studied him over the campfire. “Did you feed that night?”
“No, there was no suitable prey to be found nearby, and I was loath to range beyond earshot for fear of more creatures finding you while I was gone. The forest is tainted to such a degree now that few natural creatures remain within its confines, I fear. I merely kept my distance until I could regain my composure.”
The warrior rubbed at the stubble on his chin, seeming to mull this over. “And yet you returned, to later be exposed to more bloodshed within the fortress of the Wyrgens.”
Bellimar sighed. “You must understand that there are three primary factors that drive my hunger,” he said, raising his hand and beginning to tick off points on his slender fingers. “First, exposure to mortal blood or to a particularly tantalizing life force. Second, heightened emotion such as being in the frenzy of combat or other life-threatening situations. And third, intense physical exertion such as tapping into the unnatural strength I possess as a centuries-old vampire.”
His hand fell to his lap again, and he shook his head with a rueful smile. “It has been no easy thing, warrior, being in your company.”
Amric leaned back, frowning. “I confess that I do not know what to make of you, Bellimar,” he said. “It would seem that you put our lives at risk by your very presence, yet your knowledge has been invaluable and you have given no evidence of wrongdoing in our presence. I am left to wonder if you are truly friend or foe, and further, if you can be trusted to know which, yourself.”
“Perhaps the results are the same,” she snarled, causing the men around the fire to glance up toward her. “His enmity is boundless, as we know from the tales. Lesser known by history is how his purported friendship is no prize to covet either. Is that not true, foul one?”
“Ah good, we come to it at last,” Bellimar said. “How fares your father, dear girl? You were but a wisp of a child when last I saw you, in that light green cotton dress of yours.”
Thalya reeled as his words churned to the surface a flood of images from a more joyful time she had thought long and well buried. She clenched her fists until the knuckles whitened to conceal the sudden trembling. When she was certain she could speak without tremors in her voice as well, she said, “He died years ago, demon.”
The vampire studied her, his eyes searching her enraged expression. “He was a good man, Thalya. I am greatly aggrieved to hear of his death.”
“Empty words,” she said as she turned her head and spat in the dust of the cave floor. “You know nothing of grief, or loss, or guilt. To you, he was just another pawn to be used and then discarded, and his death lies at your feet just as surely as if you had slain him with your own hand.”
Bellimar gave a slow shake of his head. “I can see that my familiarity with this tale is incomplete, but I will begin it nonetheless, with the hope that the young lady will supply the ending.”
The huntress said nothing in reply, maintaining a level glare at the old man. Bellimar sighed and began speaking.
“Over twenty years ago, my wanderings brought me once more to the beautiful city of Hyaxus. I trusted that enough time had passed since my last disastrous visit there, and no one would recognize my face, unaltered by the years as it was. One can only lose oneself in the remote corners of the world for so long, after all, before the need to return to true civilization becomes unbearable. It was in that elegant city’s academy that I met Thalya’s father, a jovial fellow with an honest face by the name of Drothis. He was a devoted scholar of the arcane and a middling talent at alchemy, as well as being a recent widower with an infant daughter.”
“He was a renowned professor of the academy,” Thalya gritted, “and a gifted alchemist.”
“He had an unusual aura,” Bellimar said, continuing as if she had not spoken. “Erratic, unsteady, somehow incomplete. Having learned of the recent loss of his beloved wife, I had a clinical curiosity as to whether profound grief and depression might be the cause of his flawed essence. My studies were hampered, of course, by my not having had the chance to observe him before the loss.”
“How dare you speak of my father thus?” Thalya demanded, rising to her feet. Behind her, Shien shifted and gave a nervous whicker. “He was a good man, not some specimen in a jar!”
The old man favored her with a look of mild reproach. “I have already admitted that he was a good man, Thalya, but these are my memories, given forth unembellished. It may not be flattering to you or to me, but these were my initial motivations for making your father’s acquaintance. Now, please sit down and lower your voice, as the countryside out there is veritably crawling with things that would like nothing more than to find so many beating hearts trapped in this small cavern.”
Thalya paled, throwing a glance over her shoulder and out into the darkness. She knew his words to be true, for in the days of lying in wait for the return of her prey she had witnessed a multitude of things skulking through the night, misshapen things that turned her flesh to ice. Always she had been able to give them a wide berth, at least until earlier that night when she stumbled across the strange black man-creatures on the trail outside. No, it would be foolhardy in the extreme to remain out in the open night, or to draw its denizens to them now. And since she refused to allow her target from her sight now that she had tracked him down, she was forced to share this cave with him until she determined how he could be slain.
It was some small consolation, she had to admit, that she found herself hungering for every new word of her father, even if the vampire’s words stirred as much rage as recollection. She patted Shien’s neck and sank to her haunches with a scathing glare at her nemesis.
“Drothis and I became friends,” Bellimar continued. “We shared some common interests in the field of arcane studies, and I presented myself as a traveling scholar, though I was always careful to mask the true extent of the knowledge I had gained over many centuries as well as through my, shall we say, former preoccupation with certain subject matters.”
He paused, staring into the fire. “I stayed too long,” he said. “I had made the same mistake in the past, and so I knew better, but I had come to value his company. For Drothis, I seemed to fill some of the companionship void that his wife, a highly intelligent scholar herself and a shrewd foil for his theories, had left behind. As the years passed, I knew I should move on, for the peculiarities of my nature cannot be concealed forever. But I hesitated to leave him alone and bereft again. I had become convinced that his broken nature would never fully mend after the loss of his bosom companion, and somehow my presence soothed his pain for a time.
“I grew too comfortable, or perhaps the buried part of me that knew I had overstayed was trying to force my hand. Whatever the reason, I began to make mistakes. I let slip references to things from the distant past, and glimpses of my dark side peeked through cracks in my carefully constructed façade. Mayhap I meant to scare him away, but my actions seemed to have no effect. I should have known better. Drothis was hardly a fool, and his intellectual curiosity was ever more ravenous than one would know from his affable outward manner.”
Bellimar lapsed into silence then, and as the seconds slid by it seemed he had entirely forgotten his audience. At last, Thalya spoke into the stillness.
“The night of the attack,” she prodded.
The old man glanced up from his reverie, meeting her narrowed gaze and flashing a wan smile in return. “Indeed so,” he said. “Thank you, dear girl. Everything changed that night. We were returning home from the academy, having stayed long past nightfall debating some dusty topic or another in its great library. Drothis was fretting about how the family hosting young Thalya here would be angry at the late hour, when we both knew this to be false, since she was all but a member of their family by that point. A band of brigands set upon us, emboldened by the late hour and the richness of our attire. They did not even demand the handful of coins in our purses, for they made clear their intent to leave no wagging tongues behind that might betray them to the city authorities. Corpses seldom make objections to parting with their possessions, after all.”
Bellimar sighed, shaking his head. “Even these murderous cutpurses, more akin to rats than true men, I could not bring myself to harm. Of course, they did not know that. It was an easy thing indeed to part for a few moments the mortal veil I maintain about myself, to bring forth the shade of my former self, to give these cutthroats a glimpse of the fearsome sorcerous warlord who had scattered legions of terror-stricken foes before him on one bloody battlefield after another. For a fleeting few seconds, my dark presence expanded to fill that deserted street in Hyaxus, sucking the very light from the torches in their quavering sconces, and I was once again Bellimar the Black, the Vampire King of old. The brigands screamed and scattered as if a host of demons were nipping at their heels, and though I quickly shrank back into myself, I knew I had gone too far. I had tried to shield Drothis from it, to direct it only toward our attackers, but I had failed; he had seen my past, my other side, and he stared at me, open-mouthed and dumbstruck.
“I tried to explain it away, offering up feeble stories of possessing a modest talent at spinning illusions even though I had never displayed such ability to him before. He believed none of it. He confronted me right then and there in the street with an astonishing amount of evidence he had collected against me over time, and though he had been astute enough to piece together much of the truth about me, he had not wished to credit the possibility that his friend could be such a monster. He even deduced my real name, as I had labeled myself with a derivative form of it, in my boundless arrogance. Unwilling to insult him with further lies, I admitted to it all.
“He became furious, no doubt due in large part to my deceit, but also because his reasoning had already taken him in directions I had not foreseen. He accused me of befriending him to gain unfettered access to the academy and its resources, which was, of course, initially quite true. He further believed that I had arranged that access for some nefarious purpose, that I was planning some new effort to shroud the world in darkness as I had come so close to doing before. He was incensed and no longer heard my protestations. He flung himself at me, soft and kind at heart though he was, and I vanished into the night rather than see him injured. I was gone from Hyaxus by the morn, and have never returned.”
Bellimar fell silent once more, and his last words hung quivering in the air like strained notes. The campfire sputtered, casting a strobing, fitful glow across the faces of the men seated around it. Thalya sat frozen, stunned and lost in her thoughts. Damn the fiend, but he sounded so bloody sincere! She still managed a venomous glare at him, but inwardly it felt as if he had stolen the very breath from her chest.
“Thalya,” Bellimar prompted gently. “I would hear the rest of your father’s tale now.”
The huntress took a steadying breath and began speaking, her voice thin at first but gaining heat as the words tumbled out, one atop the other.
“My father would brook no discussion of that night. He would only say that you were gone, and that we were well rid of you. He became obsessed with new research, neglecting his obligations at the academy and locking himself away for days on end. Sometimes he was away for months at a time as well, traveling to some remote corner of the lands to meet with obscure experts. About what, he would not say at first. Only when the heads of the academy threatened to cast him out for dereliction of duty did he reveal what he had discovered.
“He believed he had borne witness to the return of a great evil, and he felt compelled to take action against its rise. He said that he had foreseen the world being swallowed by darkness, and that the end of all we know would be accompanied by the return of the ancient conqueror, Bellimar the Unholy. Further, he claimed that the kindly old man that had wormed his way into our family’s trust was no less than the bloodthirsty tyrant himself. He was ridiculed for his statements, and his fervor to warn others was dismissed as the ravings of a madman. My father would not be swayed from his convictions, however. In the end, he was cast out of the academy and branded a lunatic. He left the city, taking me with him, and we withdrew from all we had known.”
Thalya stared at the old man across the cave. “My young life became a living hell, demon. My father was convinced that I must be prepared for war, for whatever cataclysm was to come. If he were to fail in his mission to find and destroy you, I was to carry out this all-important task. He impressed upon me the consequences our world would suffer if we failed in this. We were always on the move, never remaining anywhere long enough to put down roots, always seeking signs of your passage. We learned the use of weapons, and the bow in particular. Picture it, devil: we trained endlessly, a little girl and a man who should have remained a scholar, so that we would have the skill to slay the monster when our chance came. Years passed as we continued this nomadic existence, and I became far more acquainted with the harsher ways of this world than I would wish on anyone.
“My father grew frustrated, despairing, for he had long lost the trail. He withered under the long years of fear, obsession and self-imposed isolation. His health finally failed such that we could no longer travel freely, and we were forced to settle into a village near Velnium that boasted all the charm of a cesspool. I had begun to think it was over, that despite my unflagging faith in him he was after all just a deluded old man obsessed with nothing more than feverish visions and vaporous fears.
“Then word came to us of the corruption of the land’s magic to the north, of a desolate wasteland spreading to engulf the lush plains at the foot of the Hoarfang mountain range, of dark and twisted creatures spilling from the forest at night to prey on the countryside. My father was convinced this was the inception of the dark vision he had feared for so long, and he was certain that the Vampire King was at the black heart of it all.”
The huntress paused, her gaze locked to Bellimar’s with an expectant air, as if awaiting a confession. The old man sat as still as a marble statue, offering nothing in return.
“My father was too frail to continue his quest, demon,” she said. “He sickened and died in that miserable village. Grief-stricken and alone, I came north. I owed him that much more at least. I was skeptical that I would find anything to support his predictions, but much to my amazement I discovered that you had indeed been lurking about Keldrin’s Landing for some time, and I had only just missed your departure. And here I find you, run to ground at last, having aged not a day in twenty years.”
Thalya rose slowly to her feet, her recurve bow in one hand and the black arrow in the other.
“Bellimar,” she intoned. “I hold you responsible for the death of my father. You poisoned his soul back in Hyaxus, though it may have taken twenty years to claim him. You took my life from me as well on that same night. And I accuse you now of all that he foresaw, of being at the root of the upheaval which threatens to destroy our world.”
The other men stared at the vampire, their expressions ranging from calculating to stricken as they waited for his response. Bellimar, for his part, did not permit his gaze to waver from the huntress.
“I accept your accusations on all points but the last one,” Bellimar said in a solemn tone. “I now hold myself responsible for the downfall and demise of Drothis, even as you do. I conceal my nature in part because exposing it never leads to anything but fear and suffering in others. Whatever remains of my soul is blighted by your father’s death, though I suspect it can be blackened no further. I deny, however, being the cause of the spreading corruption. I am tempted to admit to involvement, if only to honor your father and give you the closure you seek, but I cannot do this. I have enough sins for which I must atone without laying false claim to others.”
Thalya eyed him, her face a frozen mask as she rolled the arrow back and forth between her fingertips.
“No one can fault you if you choose to fire that arrow,” Bellimar said. “But it appears to be your last, and understand that I am not prepared to perish in that fashion.”
The huntress said nothing. The glow from the bed of coals glinted from the curved blades of the arrowhead as it spun in her hand. Amric rose to his feet in a swift, lithe motion and stepped between them.
“Enough!” he commanded. “We have heard from both of you. Now, if you wish to slay each other, depart the cave first so that the rest of us can get some sleep.”
“I’ll not be sharing a camp with this devil,” Thalya growled.
“You cannot survive out there,” Syth objected.
Bellimar flowed to his feet like a long, slender shadow cast against the stone wall. “She will not have to,” he said. “I am long overdue to feed, and this is an opportune time to find game, away from both the corruption of the forest and the sweaty confines of the city. If you will step aside and let me pass, dear girl, I will depart. If Amric wishes to send me away for good when I return in the morning, I will accept his judgment.”
Amric turned to face him, but the old man shook his head. “Do not fear for me, warrior,” he said with a tight-lipped smile. “The night has ever been my element. I will be safe enough in its embrace.”
Thalya guided her mare down the sloping floor to where the cave widened enough to permit the vampire’s passage at greater than arm’s length away. Her emerald eyes followed him warily until he glided from the cave and disappeared into the yawning darkness beyond. Ignoring the other men, Thalya left Shien with the other horses at the back of the cavern and stalked back to the entrance, where she slid to a seat against the rock wall with bow in hand and black arrow nocked. Only then did she address them, without a backward glance, as she stared out into the night.
“The first watch is mine.”
Thalya awoke with a start as a chill breeze played across her cheek, and her hand tightened convulsively on her bow. Her frantic eyes raked the darkness beyond the mouth of the cave, and then darted to the deeper blackness of the cave’s interior. Outside, nothing moved except the lazy, star-stroked grasses on the hillside, waving in the capricious wind. Inside, nothing stirred either, and her straining ears picked out the soft, rhythmic breathing of the men sleeping against the larger humming backdrop of the night. Her fingertips brushed the fletching of the arrow, still resting at the string of her bow, and the cool press of the stone at her back brought her comfort.
Her momentary waking panic gave way to relief, which then evaporated before the advancing heat of her anger. What a fool she was to have dozed off, she chided herself savagely. The night was swarming with dangers, her vile nemesis foremost among them, and here she was napping like a babe in arms, as if she could afford to be without a care. That she was worn down from her days and nights of constant, solitary vigilance in the midst of a hostile countryside was little excuse; her foe could exercise the cold, calculating patience of the immortal killing machine that he was, and so she simply could not make such mistakes.
The huntress cast another swift glance around, assuring herself that nothing approached the cave. She laid her bow across her legs and made to set the arrow aside on the ground so that she could rub her eyes to force herself further awake. Suddenly she froze in mid-motion, the blood congealing in her veins.
Lying neatly beside her leg on the rocky ground was the other of her black arrows, identical to the one in her hand.
The first of her priceless enchanted missiles had been destroyed in slaying one of the foul man-like creatures which had attacked her at dusk. The last of the three was still in her possession. This, then, was the one she had fired at Bellimar, which he had caught and kept.
She lifted the arrow and inspected it closely in the dim light. There was no trick that she could see; the fiend had returned the arrow undamaged, leaving her once again with two chances to slay him. She grimaced as she pondered the implications. The monster had slipped into the cave while she dozed, swift and soundless, and had come within inches of her to set the shaft at her side. Had he wished her dead, he could have torn out her throat with ease and been lost again to the darkness before her gurgling cry could bring the others running. Instead, he had restored a deadly weapon capable of ending his existence to someone who wished exactly that, though for what reason she could not begin to fathom. Was it a show of confidence, meant to intimidate her, indicating that he would swat aside any future attack as contemptuously as he had her first? Or did he truly wish to die?
Thalya recognized her fatigue and knew she should get someone to relieve her and take the next watch, but sleep was suddenly far from her thoughts. She made certain her quiver remained within reach, leaning against the cave wall beside her, and then she settled back as well and gazed out into the darkness. All around her the night stole onward in a hushed whisper as life struggled to endure beneath the spreading mantle of death.
The first breach of the mighty city wall surrounding Keldrin’s Landing came that night.
In the somber hours preceding the dawn, the cry rang out even as the city was preparing to release the collective breath it had held throughout the night. The wall-walk guards, having raised the initial alarm, watched in stunned silence as a seething wave of motion swept toward the city from the east. What had appeared at a distance to be a vast ripple of vegetation before a forceful wind soon resolved into something much more sinister: an advancing tide of dark, twisted creatures clawing their way over and past each other in their eagerness to reach the city and its people.
Huge, bulky things drew themselves up from the very ground and shambled forward amid the smaller forms, scattering them with spiteful blows when they got underfoot. Long, sinuous shapes carved through the mass, preying indiscriminately on the smaller spiked creatures even as the entire heaving mass crashed toward Keldrin’s Landing.
City guards gathered at the eastern gate, their faces and knuckles white as they clutched shaking swords, spears and halberds. The heavy gate doors stood closed and barred. These days, after the sun fell, they parted only to permit the occasional caravan or group of travelers bold enough––or foolish enough––to brave the landscape at night. In recent days, rumors had spread with greater and greater frequency from the guards patrolling the city wall. There were tales of strange things sighted beyond, sometimes approaching the wall to scrabble at its surface and shriek in outrage, or to gaze upward at the guards in hateful silence. There were also rumors of wall-walk guards and gate watchmen vanishing or being slain in gruesome fashion, but most people dismissed all these stories as fear-mongering, at least in the comforting warmth of the morning light.
Even if a portion of the tales were true, others reasoned, the perimeter of Keldrin’s Landing had been built to withstand a siege. What was there to fear?
There was no denying the approaching horde or its numbers, however, and now even the towering gate doors looked vulnerable. City guards with longbows raced to the wall-walk, sending volley after volley into the charging mass as it drew near, but they were unprepared for such a sudden onslaught and their initial numbers were few.
The horde struck the eastern wall with shrieking fury, clawing for purchase against the sheer wall and hammering into the gate. The great gates shuddered under the weight, and the captain of the guard, a square-jawed man named Borric, started at the sound. He knew the gates would have splintered under that first assault had the force been organized enough to concentrate on that point alone rather than spreading across the entire wall in haphazard fashion.
He raised his sword above his head and bellowed, drawing the eyes of his dumbfounded men to him. Borric shouted orders, shoving and cuffing the frozen men nearest him to get them moving. In a widening circle from his center, the guards sprang into action. Men carried forth huge timbers at a run, bracing the creaking gate doors. Barrels of oil arrived by cart and were swiftly unloaded beneath the gateway portico. Additional archers raced up the stairs to the crest of the wall, while those inside the courtyard below formed defensive squares that could move quickly as a unit in case the wall was breached at any point.
Atop the wall, longbows and crossbows thrummed in a frantic, disjointed symphony. Huge, heavy forms battered at the base of the wall, while the smaller spiked creatures swarmed over and around them to climb the wall like spiders. Blazing yellow eyes glared up at the guards as the creatures sank long, tapered talons into the stone and wormed their way upward. Their grip seemed precarious on the smooth stone, however, and a direct hit with arrow or bolt usually proved sufficient to dislodge one, even if it did not kill it outright. But the archers were few while the spiked creatures were many, and the attackers came onward with chilling determination.
In the courtyard, the gates shuddered under a steady rain of titanic blows. Captain Borric shook his head in disbelief. Stout hardwood doors as thick as a man’s arm was long, bound by iron, and still they threatened to fracture. He ordered his men back from the gate’s outer arch and directed them to lower the portcullis recessed in the inner arch. A massive curtain of iron bars, it may not hold when the doors had not, but it was another line of defense against which the attackers would have to hurl themselves.
As the portcullis rumbled down, a great splinter of the wood door shot into the courtyard, leaving a gaping hole through which the starry night sky beyond could be seen. A face out of nightmare filled the gap, leering through at the men behind a long muzzle that bristled with crooked fangs. The guards gasped and fell back, raising their weapons. The thing shot through the hole in the door, wriggling and undulating its way past the narrow aperture and under the descending portcullis like some great, hideous eel. Its legless mass struck the flagstones with a slap, and in a flash it was among the men. It thrashed about, its flailing bulk sending several men sprawling, and then it lunged forward like a striking snake and one of the men disappeared into its gaping maw. The hapless man’s scream was cut horribly short as the jagged jaws snapped shut, and the creature whirled and tucked its head back into its coils, gliding and flexing in some rapidly spinning complex knot formed of its own sinuous body.
The guards rushed forward, hacking and stabbing at the creature, and it keened in pain and fury. Whipping free of the knot it had formed, it lunged in a new direction, sliding out from under the sharp blades. Another guard vanished into its gullet, and again the vile creature convulsed into its eye-baffling knot of twisting flesh. The remaining guards converged on it with a vengeance, and in moments the creature sagged quivering to the ground beneath their attack before it could claim another victim.
High above, the spiked creatures clawed their way over the crenellations to drop among the guards like drops of ink spattering to the floor. More and more archers were forced to cast aside their bows and draw the swords at their hips to defend themselves against the slavering fiends. In turn, without the hail of missiles to suppress their advance, more and more of the bristling shadows worked their methodical way up the sheer outer surface of the wall. The men drew together into defensive islands against the encircling tide, fighting almost back to back as the creatures slunk toward them, shaking the glistening spikes on their bodies in an eerie, rattling chorus.
At the gates, huge misshapen claws tore at the ragged edges of the holes in the doors, widening them one cracking shard of wood at a time. The smaller spiked creatures poured through the fissures, crawling down the door and along the walls of the arch, their amber gazes fixed upon the men clustered beyond the iron grating.
Borric shouted an order, and his men fired hammer-nosed arrows into the barrels of oil, shattering the plank sides and spilling their viscous contents upon the flagstones just inside the door. Another shout, and several torches spun in unison between the bars of the portcullis. The oil ignited with a roar, and the resulting wall of flames licked hungrily skyward. A number of the spiked creatures were engulfed in the sudden blaze. They perished, shrieking and thrashing. The rest shrieked in frustration and clawed their way back through the gaps in the gateway doors, disappearing out into the night.
Captain Borric smiled in grim satisfaction. He ordered his men into position for the next wave that would likely burst the battered doors asunder. All together they waited with eyes wide and weapons clenched in fists slicked with sweat, but the next assault never came. The towering doors of the gate no longer shuddered under dread impact from outside.
Suspicious of the abrupt stillness, Borric tilted his head upward. The sky was beginning its slow brightening with the coming morn. He heard the faint shouts of the men high atop the wall, and he could see them waving down to him and pointing into the distance, outside the city. The enemy horde had retreated, fading back from the city as suddenly as it had come. By the time slow, pink fingers of light were reaching across the heavens, the twisted creatures had all disappeared like wraiths into the pre-dawn gloom. All that remained to give testimony to the brief, fierce struggle that had transpired were the scorched and ravaged doors of the eastern gate and the scattered bodies of the slain from both sides.
The men of the city guard gave a weary shout of victory, but their captain did not join in the cheer. Borric looked about and saw only the vestiges of an attack by an unknown, implacable enemy turned aside more by the looming approach of day than by the efforts of his men. Keldrin’s Landing would require a great deal of preparation if it was to withstand the next such assault, and nightfall would be on the heels of the coming day all too soon.