by Sarah Roark
“Meister Tremere.” Jürgen’s voice had gone rock-hard now. “Answer me. What the devil has taken your famous tongue?”
“I…” Was there some way to salvage the blackmail potential of the thing? No time to calculate it through. He attempted to sense the instinct of his soul. It seemed to say no. All he could do now was use the truth to play upon the man’s emotions. Still, he had to thank the Lady Rosamund for providing even that much. “I… I’m sorry, milord, I’m feeling a bit—confused. I…” He hesitated, judiciously.
“Speak!” the Ventrue demanded, and then underscored it with the coercive power of his august blood. “Speak!”
“Yes, your Highness. I don’t know what exactly to say. I—I did mention there was a sorcerer, or sorcerers, aiding Qarakh. I told her what little I could at the time about it. I assumed that meant you’d been told as well. Forgive me.”
There was an uncomfortable pause. Jürgen moved his feet, as though to stand, then didn’t.
“Perhaps she didn’t quite catch that part,” he said at last. “She’s a lady of court, not a general…” But it didn’t sound as though he were even convincing himself.
“Quite possibly, quite possibly I didn’t impress upon her enough how significant it was.” He let that hang. “After all, her grief at Alexander’s death was…quite apparent for all to see.”
Enough. Yes, that was good. Jürgen was in that terrible half-state between outright confidence and outright suspicion. Leave him there. It could only make the Tremere look better by comparison.
“You were saying about this Deverra.”
“Yes, your Highness. She leads a cabal of sorcerers. A large one by now, I’d fancy, for they’ve been bringing natives of the region into the blood. They have a magic that’s not unlike that of the Tzimisce.”
“But I take it they aren’t Tzimisce.”
“It’s possible they may be…a sort of offshoot of that blood,” Jervais replied. There, one of the finest shadings of truth he’d managed for years.
“But you’re not sure.”
“One would have to get closer to examine them better. But that’s all right. It’ll certainly be necessary to get closer to destroy them, in any case.”
The corner of Jürgen’s mouth twitched. “You are a cheerful man when it comes to the business at hand, Meister. I’m sure the Tremere would rather there were no other sorcerers in the world, Tzimisce or otherwise.”
“These sorcerers are a threat, your Highness. Not only to the Black Cross and the mortal knightly orders, but also to the entire cause of Christianity in the region.”
“Come. What do the Tremere care for the cause of Christianity?”
Now there was a question, with only one simple answer among the many possible ones. “For better or for worse, milord, we’ve cast our lot with those who care quite passionately. Their welfare is our welfare. Your welfare, to be frank, is our welfare.”
“And Ceoris, it would seem, agrees with your assessment.”
“Yes, Highness, it does.” Jervais nodded. Then something struck him about the way Jürgen had said that. “I beg your Highness’s pardon?”
“I hope you’ll excuse an old man’s wariness,” Jürgen began, suspiciously amiable. “You see, it’s not as if we don’t have a history, you and I. Or rather, your childe Alexia and I, as I suppose you’d have it.”
Jervais frowned, trying not to let show his annoyance at having that particular diplomatic evasion thrown back in his face so casually. “I take full sire’s responsibility for my childe’s mistakes, Highness.”
“Of course. In any case, since Alexander’s death I’ve begun seriously reconsidering the question of my relations with the House and Clan. And so I thought it meet to write Ceoris and confirm with them that you were indeed their designated envoy, and did in fact have license to make and seal such bargains on their behalf. You’ll be pleased, I’m sure, to know that they fully endorse you.” Jürgen got up, strode over to a side table, picked up a parchment letter and brought it over. “They were impressed with your initiative. In fact, your master Etrius expresses such confidence in your good faith and ability in this instance that he agrees completely with my idea of the best disposal of the matter—and at my urging has appointed you chief, leader and director of the entire expedition.”
He handed the parchment to Jervais, who examined it bewilderedly. The secretarial hand looked familiar, and the seal was indeed Etrius’s seal. Jervais would not insult the prince by testing it here and now, but the likelihood of anyone in Magdeburg successfully faking the careful angles and intricate filigrees, even given a genuine model to work from, was rather low.
“Expedition, Highness?” The letter had made ridiculously good time, then. Perhaps Ceoris had sent the reply by gargoyle. Damnation.
“Yes. To Livonia, to take care of this Deverra and whatever other magicians Qarakh may have attracted to his banner. The advance wizard’s guard, if you will. That is more or less what you had in mind, isn’t it?”
Jervais had grown quite used to the taste of bile over the years. He knew when it was time to swallow another dose and smile. “More or less, your Highness. Yes.”
“Good. Then I shall look forward to the tale of your success. If you wish, I can offer you the services of Brother Hermann, one of my lieutenants, good man to the core, along with a reasonable portion of my order’s forces. They may be of some use to you—not only in Livonia but also on the journey there, which you doubtless already know to be a hard one.” He picked up another folded parchment from the same table. “Oh. And this letter came along as well. It’s for you.”
Jervais took it without making a move to open it. He fancied he already knew the contents anyway.
“And allow me to be the first to offer my congratulations.” Jürgen no longer bothered to hide the pleasure this was giving him, though he tried to soften it by clapping a manly hand to Jervais’s shoulder on the way out.
“Thank you, Highness.”
“The hairy, flaxen, petit-noble, thundering son of a Bratovitch brood-bitch flanked me!”
Fidus silently handed Jervais a bronze goblet, and Jervais flung it across the room. It bounced off the wall plaster, knocking a chip out. He peered at it as it spun to a stop on the floor.
“There was nothing in that,” he accused his apprentice.
Fidus shook his scrawny head. Sometimes it wasn’t at all flattering to be known too well.
“Well, how about putting something in it?”
The younger Tremere collected it obediently, then went over to a little ewer with a silver band of hieratic engravings and a jade stopper. He poured out its contents into the goblet, which he carried back to Jervais. He sloshed the remainder around within the ewer. “Not much left, master. Shall I fetch more?”
“No, don’t. I’ll make a visit downstairs later. There are some nights…some nights when you need to bring down the stag and not just have it served to you on a spit.”
Fidus nodded and went back to scrubbing down the ritual sickle with salt.
Jervais took a swallow of the blood, lukewarm and kept almost tolerably fresh by the spell on the ewer, and continued disgustedly, “Don’t nod as though you had an inkling. My idea. My work! Two years of spy-mongering; three years of crawling through the diplomatic mud. I knew that Livonia would be next. The very moment I heard the Teutons were going into Prussia, I knew it would come to this and I started preparing for it. Did Etrius direct me? No. In fact, how much would you like to bet that if I’d mentioned it he would have told me not to be a fool? And now that the idea turns out to be worthwhile, suddenly the great toad wants it for himself and connives with the blasted Saxons to steal it out from under my very nose!”
“Master… No, never mind.”
“What is it? Bonisagus’s beard, Fidus, either finish a thought or don’t start it in the first place.”
“Well, if you’ll forgive me, master, not exactly stolen. You are in charge of the thing, aren’t you?”
“Oh, I’m in charge of the thing all right,” Jervais grumbled. “Right up in the general’s saddle, where everyone can get the clearest shot. You do not seem to grasp the magnitude of the reversal here, Fidus. I was brokering the most sage and immortal Councilor’s services. Now the Councilor is brokering my services, and by the way, bear in mind that that means you’re going to Livonia too.”
“I know, master.”
“With a prior stop at Ceoris itself.”
That stopped the fledgling vampire cold. He looked up at his master. “Ceoris?” he repeated, in what Jervais was gratified to note as precisely the right tone of apprehension.
“Yes,” Jervais returned grimly.
“But, but Ceoris, that’s not on the way to Livonia, is it?”
“No, it’s not even close to on the way.” Jervais picked up the letter Jürgen had handed him and waved it. “But evidently it’s necessary to further remind me of my place before I embark on this little venture. I am to report to the High Chantry immediately to discuss plans and collect my informers—forgive me, I mean my assistants—for the mission.”
Fidus returned to his chore, his face carefully neutral, but the older Tremere could easily let his slightly blurred eyesight unfocus just a bit further, revealing the array of soul-colors skittering uneasily in a tight halo around his apprentice’s body. Fidus hadn’t yet been to the High Chantry, had never delved the chambers of the clan’s cold stone heart. He was afraid. He frightened easily sometimes.
But Jervais, for his part, was glad no one was there to see his own colors.
Chapter Four
“All right, all right,” Brother Hermann shouted, “that’s what this training is for. Quickly, rope!”
The rider who’d just plunged mount and all into the ice looked like a slight lad of perhaps twenty, although to be fair he was armored. Jervais, who was a bit barrel-shaped himself—he would have placed the middle of that barrel in his chest, though some observers wouldn’t have been nearly so charitable—drew his horse up sharply even though he was well removed from the crack. Around him, squires and knights, mortals and Cainites alike rushed forward.
“Remember, biggest of you to the back. If any more get pulled in, it’ll be up to you. And—heave! Heave!”
The Cainite himself soon scrambled out with minimal help, though his skin had gone even whiter from the water’s intense cold. The beast’s struggles, however, almost took a few of the men into the hole with it. Its horrible noises echoed from the walls of the streambed for what would have been more than sufficient time to chant many charms.
“And that’s why you don’t want to ride too near the edge, as I said before,” Hermann called out once the horse was out, the rest were calmed, and relative order had prevailed again. “Or…you see over there, at that inlet, where the water is moving more swiftly underneath? That’s where the ice is thinnest. Wipe those looks off your faces. If the Sword-Brothers can march across a frozen sea to kill the Osilian pirates, you can manage this. We’re about to journey to a land of mire and muck, gentlemen, death to horses and horsemen, especially in battle! And so the iced-over rivers must be our highways and the snow our paving. And God Almighty above, as always, will be our conductor.” He raised a hand halfway, toward the moonlit sky.
“This time,” came a sour mutter from among the knights. Plainly the tale of Alexander’s disaster had spread within the order.
“I was rather hoping for more earthly help along the route,” Jervais said dryly.
“Don’t worry. We’ll provide the earthly help and leave the unearthly to you.” Hermann frowned and ran a gloved hand through his dark hair, cut in a short, rather bristly tonsure. “Are you sure you didn’t make the ice a bit thin?”
“I hadn’t thought so, but no doubt it’s gotten at least a bit thinner over the past few hours. Not nearly cold enough out.”
“Hm. Well, I suppose there’s only so much even a wizard can do with a few magic words.”
Jervais said nothing and concentrated on not wavering in his saddle. Fidus had better have the larder restocked when he got back in. A few magic words, indeed.
“That ash-wand, must you always use it for your enchantments?”
“No, only for some.”
“Good.” At the Tremere’s questioning look, Hermann went on. “I’d hate to have you turn out to be like one of those sorcerers in the old tales, where all one need do is steal his staff or his talisman or the box that holds his heart, in order to render him useless.”
Jervais changed the subject. “Are there any of your brotherhood left in Hungary? If so, I assume that’ll affect the route.”
“There are a few there that still serve the Hochmeister.” He looked away a moment after that and called out, “All right, men, that’s enough! Back onto the banks, we’re going home.” Then he said to Jervais, “Why, don’t the Tremere have some sure path of their own through that country?”
“East of Buda?” Jervais snorted. “Nothing’s sure after that.”
“I’m not sure I see the wisdom of this diversion in the first place. But since your masters demand it.”
“And they do demand it. It’ll just be us and your little mortal squadron through Hungary then—is that right—while the rest of the company proceeds east from Saxony along the coast?”
“Yes.”
“And then we meet them—where? Thorn?”
“No. I don’t want to wait ‘til Thorn to be sure I have an army, thank you,” Hermann returned. Even though he clearly didn’t mean it at all humorously, Jervais could not help an appreciative quirk of the lips. “No, we’ll meet them in Stettin.”
“Oh! Then we could sail out of the gulf up to Riga, try to recruit a little support there, and then come southward to meet the enemy.”
“No, it’ll be too late in the year by then, too stormy. You’ll never get the mortals on board…”
He trailed off. The image came to Jervais very powerfully then, almost as though it had journeyed directly from Hermann’s mind to his: a crash, a creaking splinter of woo d, and while the mortals buoyed—at least for a little while—to the surface, the vampires would spiral down and down into the inky murk. Frozen from the water’s chill and soon empty of blood, wasted down to the bone, perhaps unable even to move, drifting aimlessly with the leviathans…
“Yes, no doubt you’re right about that. No help from Riga, then?”
“Oh, we’ll have help from Riga if there’s any there to be had. Once we’ve made Stettin I’ll try to send a scout up north to see. Perhaps we could even squeeze the pagans from both directions, but right now even his Highness isn’t sure what remains of Cainite Christianity out there.”
They urged their horses up onto the road, eager to get back now that they were on less treacherous ground. Jervais glanced wistfully at his creation, a sheet of ice winding through a trough of green grasses and wildflowers, pleased with its very unnaturalness. A short-lived but eloquent testament to his skill. Though no one besides Hermann had mentioned it so far (much less thanked him), he felt it wise to make little demonstrations here and there so that the knights would feel able to rely on him by the time they engaged the enemy. Costly, though. His eyes ached to droop closed, yet he could also feel the dry thirst convulsing in the core of his body, throat to belly. The smell of his horse suddenly seemed overpowering.
“As for the Hungary leg, we should go through Prague,” Hermann continued. “And Brno, and then south to Bratislava.”
“No,” Jervais managed. “Vienna.”
“Vienna? Oh yes, I suppose it does make sense to stop in Vienna instead. That way, should anything happen to us, your brothers will at least know we got that far. Dare I hope—”
At that moment a loud toneless fluttering started up in Jervais’s ear, as though an insect had flown into it. His hand involuntarily rose to cover it over, but he restrained it. “I’m sorry, mein Herr. What was that?”
Hermann looked at him oddly. “Where did I lose you? I w
as asking whether your brothers would come looking for you right away if you went missing.”
The scrabbling sensation in his ear canal grew from a tickle to a wide, frantic wobble. “Yes, yes,” Jervais assured him hastily. “Pardon me, mein Herr—you won’t mind if I ride on ahead? I just—just remembered something.”
The knight nodded tersely. “If you must, certainly. Be careful. You may be under his Highness’s official protection, but the rogue Cainites and wolf-demons lurking hereabouts won’t likely ask.”
“Thank you. Gute Nacht,” Jervais called as he spurred his horse into a brisk canter. The jogging motion made the sensation even worse. He hunched over the saddle and tried to blink his watering eyes clear. Luckily neither enemy vampires nor werewolves appeared, and his mount knew its own way back home once they were back inside the town.
Fidus hurriedly rose from his book and inkpot as Jervais pushed aside the invisible curtain of the ward on the house and stumbled in.
“Master?”
“Chalk bounding circle,” Jervais said hoarsely. “Hurry.” He fairly ran over to the brazier and set it on the floor, then got its coals going with a bit of kindling from the hearth. He set the lumps of dragon’s-blood incense in it and dribbled several drops of blood from the pad of his thumb onto it.
“Where in hell did you put the moucheron?”
“It’s on the second shelf, master.”
Reaching the second shelf required straightening up, but he managed to fish the little silver device down without knocking anything off or injuring himself. “Fidus, the Saxons have already bled me half dry tonight. I’ll need…”
“Yes, master.”
“I tell you, whatever it is, it’d better be bloody important. That Hermann must think I’m mad.”
They quickly drew and fortified the circle and Jervais censed the quarters. He settled himself inside the circle and did his best to descend quickly into trance. In this his fatigue actually aided him. Soon the insect that seemed to have taken up residence in his head grew smaller but louder, becoming a low humming that vibrated his entire skull. When the humming had steadied somewhat, he took the moucheron—the “stinging gnat”—in his left hand, gourd-end in his fist and shunt-end pointed into the white flesh of his inner arm. Its true name wasn’t moucheron. That was simply what Jervais called it because the blood it stole was irretrievably devoured, boiled away by the wine-red carbuncle hidden inside the crucible of the gourd. With a deep breath he squeezed his fist and bent his wrist so that the shunt entered deep into his skin. Then he arranged his arm by his side so that the blood’s own weight would conduct it into the gourd. Once the gem got going it would need no further help. Like a vampire itself, it would draw on him hungrily and swiftly.
