by Sarah Hoyt
With a sense of relief, of almost joy, d’Artagnan poured out the story of his adventures. Monsieur d’Astarac interrupted only now and then with questions that encouraged more detail, understanding d’Artagnan’s horror in seeing Jean killed. “There, there, my boy,” he said reassuringly. “While I’m sure it’s terrible to see a man killed like that, you must admit he was a Judas goat and it could be said . . . ”
“No one deserved that,” d’Artagnan said, heatedly.
A slow gaze examined him, but then Monsieur d’Astarac looked very sad and shook his head. “No, perhaps not.” He tapped his fingers on the top of the table and said, in a tone designed to distract d’Artagnan from the thought, “What did you say, earlier, about escaping from your room through a secret passage?”
D’Artagnan poured out the whole story to him, complete with his father’s decision to encrust the room in fleurs-de-lis.
“Ah,” Monsieur d’Astarac said. “That would have been the year before your honored father offered me the post as his accountant and I was put in the way of several other lucrative business deals, which made it much easier for me to move here. Though we’d known each other as boys, of course, long ago. So you see, I’d never heard of your escapade.” He smiled. “I imagine you were a handful as a four-year-old. You still were at six, when you became friends with Pierre.”
At this, d’Artagnan wondered why he hadn’t seen Pierre and opened his mouth to ask, but Monsieur d’Astarac grinned. “He’s away from home, of course. Believe me, if he were home, he would be here this minute, to see you. Like brothers you were, and I often said he had more in common with you than with the parents who brought him into the world.”
Monsieur d’Astarac stood and went to the window. He seemed to consult the curtains at length—at least he looked at them for considerable time—and then spoke in a ponderous voice, “You’ll be desiring your bed, I’m sure. I should leave you to sleep.”
D’Artagnan rubbed the middle of his forehead, suddenly realizing that he hadn’t slept beyond fitful dozing in the carriage in a very, very long time. He said, “Yes, I should be seeking my bed, sir. Thank you for all your kindness.”
But once he’d lain in bed, he could not sleep. He could do nothing but stare at the distant ceiling, wondering what to do next. Was his house occupied by vampires? And if it were, how did he rid the house and the village of them?
Monsieur d’Astarac had told him next to nothing about the situation. D’Artagnan had noticed the bells no longer rang over the city, but had all of it been taken over by vampires in his short absence? Or had it become a mini-Paris, with two divisions, night and day, vampires and humans?
It couldn’t have been taken over by vampires, could it? Not completely, otherwise the d’Astaracs would have left or been turned. He twisted the other way upon his bed, feeling the deep feather bed adjust under him and the razor press against his wrist.
He’d forgotten to remove it from his sleeve. In the morning, he must ask for a sword.
He turned again. Lucky the d’Astaracs had been awake and dressed. At two hours before dawn, this was not always a given, nor even, in fact, expected. Of course, maybe he’d just returned from one of his business trips. How fortunate that all their servants had been up too. He thought of the well-dressed, liveried servants, who’d come in with bath and table and dinner. They couldn’t have all dressed so quickly and in the dark, just minutes before. While he had never been a servant, he had lived with servants all his life, and he knew that not even the best servant in the world could look that way after being suddenly awakened. How odd they’d had the whole house awake . . .
He shifted in bed again. How could it be that in such a large house, there had been so little food? The one scrawny chicken and bits of aged cheese and a few old apples. He remembered how in years past, the house would be redolent of roasting meat and spices, of burnt sugar and cooked fruits.
The region must be starving indeed, if this family had to do with so little. Not that the rest of the house, from their clothes to the multitude of candles gave the impression of scarcity.
He banished the matter from his mind as something he could not think about now. He was sure there must be an explanation, but none he would discover now, half asleep as he was. Instead, he thought of Monsieur d’Astarac’s fascination with the location of the tunnel, exactly what it felt like in it when he’d taken a step and felt as though he were submerging himself in evil. He’d even asked very carefully where the rock was that hid the exit from the tunnel.
Which surely went to prove that men retained always, within themselves, a bit of the child. Monsieur d’Astarac had, in just such a way, listened to Pierre’s and d’Artagnan’s adventures when they were very young.
With this came a pang of longing for Pierre and the wish that his friend were home. As understanding as Pierre’s father might be, d’Artagnan felt sure that—though Pierre had always been more faint at heart than d’Artagnan—he would have entered into d’Artagnan’s sentiments more exactly and been able to understand what disturbed d’Artagnan and how he needed to know what was happening in the bastide.
Restless, wishing he weren’t so tired, wishing he could know more about the city today, d’Artagnan got up from the bed, kicking aside the eiderdown. He went to the window and pulled the curtains wide. There were two pairs of them, both tightly shut. A surplus of curtains that d’Artagnan didn’t remember from before—when, admittedly, he’d had little reason to open and close curtains—but which seemed to him, now, as excessive.
On the other side of the impressive buttresses of fabric, there was a cool, clear morning, with the sky just brightening in shades of coral pink and pale yellow. There were noises from the wakening city, though it seemed to d’Artagnan that it was quieter than it had been, once upon a time..
Even the d’Astarac’s house was quiet. Very quiet. There was no more than the sound of hushed footsteps up and down the stairs, and those infrequent for a house with so many inhabitants, between family and servants.
He frowned. A house this quiet at early morning? The scant food, though other signs of wealth remained. So many servants, more than he ever remembered d’Astaracs having. And the whole house awake before daylight. He fingered the material of the curtains and frowned.
He was being suspicious of nothing, he was sure, but . . .
Another thought intruded, uninvited. How did Monsieur d’Astarac know about the death of d’Artagnan’s parents? It had all taken place just hours before dawn, while the servants in the house lay sleeping, while even the housekeeper was not up. When the housekeeper had awakened, d’Artagnan had dug shallow graves for their ashes, put crosses over them and told the housekeeper his parents had been killed by a vampire—which was the truth.
Short of someone digging up the graves and finding no bodies, and even then . . . How and why would Monsieur d’Astarac know they’d been unwillingly turned and not . . .?
He shook his head. No. It was impossible. But he remembered thinking that as cautious as his father was, only a trusted friend could possibly have got close enough, without suspicion, to turn him. He felt a cold finger of foreboding run down the back of his neck.
If only Pierre were here. He could talk to Pierre and Pierre would make d’Artagnan laugh at such absurd suspicions.
And yet he could not sleep. He would explore the rest of the house. He would see—he was sure—windows open in the hallways and in the rooms, and the d’Astaracs sitting in the parlor in the sunlight. All these suspicions and horrible thoughts would vanish like snow in summer.
He went to the door and tried the handle, but it would not turn, and forcibly pushing it did nothing. The hair now stood fully on end at the back of his neck.
What had he done? He’d escaped one captivity only to find another. He redressed completely. Feverishly, he removed the linen from the bed and tied sheets end to end. He was three stories up, and he knew without looking too closely, that the sheets would not reach the gr
ound. Looking out the window and saw one of the d’Astarac’s servants lurked underneath, casually leaning against the wall of the house.
A Judas goat, d’Artagnan thought and knew he could never go that way. But looking down he saw an ornamental frieze that ran around the house. The ledge was wide enough—just barely—for his feet. And the sheet would reach—just barely—that far. If he walked along that ledge, he could reach the lower roof next door and climb onto it. Once there, he could study another way down.
He closed the shaving blade and slipped it into his sleeve again. Then he tied the end of the sheet to the leg of the bed, pulled the rest over to hang out the window. It fell barely short of the ledge.
He prayed the guard would not look up. And he was off.
From On High
WALKING along the ledge was harder than d’Artagnan had expected, requiring holding on to window ledges and ornamental molding. Every window he passed—and he noted there were seven—showed curtains or shutters, tightly closed against the light of day.
At least his prayers held, though it seemed to him it took him endless time to cross the front of the building. The guard did not look up. And by the time d’Artagnan reached the lower roof, he was sure the man was a guard, meant to keep him in the house, and that the d’Astaracs were vampires. The silence in the house and the closed curtains had confirmed it. He wondered only about his friend Pierre.
Gaining the neighboring roof, he climbed to the other side of its sloping length, careful to position his feet so that no stray roof tiles would fall below. At length he made it from rooftop to rooftop, quietly, till he was near where a stone cistern touched the edge of it. From the stone cistern he jumped to an abandoned trough on a house at the edge of town. And, from there, to the ground, where he fell almost on top of a very young boy.
d’Artagnan jumped back. He started apologizing profusely, hoping this child wasn’t a Judas goat who would denounce him, hoping that—
He stopped sharp, as the face of the boy came into full focus and he recognized the rounded face, the blue-gray eyes, the slightly parted lips of Madame Bonacieux, however well disguised in a suit of dark wool cloth, having bound her breasts so that no hint of her soft loveliness showed through the male apparel.
“Madame!” he whispered.
And he had her in his arms, warm and pliant and smelling of roses, her lips finding his with almost desperate hunger, her body glued to his.
“Madame!” he said again, in quite a different tone, as she allowed him to pull back enough to look at her. Not that it wasn’t flattering to be kissed this way. They’d parted with a kiss and it was fitting they should reunite with one. His body felt lighter than it had since she’d last kissed him, his heart soared and he bent his head to her and kissed her again, deep and long. He still felt hesitant and not sure exactly what to do once their lips were joined, but she led him, gently, her tongue on his.
He parted again, suddenly wondering what those inhabitants of the city who were awake would feel if they saw their lord kissing a boy outside a house on the outskirts of town. On a long drawn breath, his fingers pulling back straggles of her honey-blond hair that had gotten loose from beneath her hat and framed her face as though in a nimbus of light, “You? Here?”
“I scried,” she said, and took a deep breath. “On a pond, early morning. It showed this place and how to get here, and it showed your falling from above. I thought, to be sure, it had to be wrong, but . . . ” She drew in breath again, like a woman drowning, and she pulled him to her again and kissed him hard, before releasing him and smiling tremulously up at him. “I cannot tell you how and why I came,” she said. “We . . . I do not wish to talk here. The rumor in the countryside hereabouts is that half of your city is vampires and Judas goats, and no one knows which half, save that the leader of the vampires is one Monsieur d’Astaracs and the leader of the humans his runaway son, Pierre.”
“Pierre,” d’Artagnan said, and half laughed. “Pierre, my friend, who was always more like me than like his parents, as his father says.”
Madame Bonacieux gave him an odd look, as though wondering what he meant by that, and d’Artagnan shook his head. “It is a long story and painful. But where can we go, that we can talk? If we could speak to Pierre . . .”
“Likely you could have, two days ago, but now the vampires have taken over your house, and the humans have taken refuge somewhere, no one is sure where.”
“Oh.”
Her small hand dug into his arm, holding close. “If you will listen,” she said. “We must find a safe place or a place we could be . . . ” She frowned again. “You wouldn’t know where an ancient temp– No, wait, you almost certainly would not. How about then . . . do you know of any standing stones hereabouts?”
“Standing . . . ” he said, and frowned. “Do you mean like the King’s Men?”
“If those are standing stones, ancient ones, I most assuredly do.”
“Outside the city. A mile or so. The legend is that a king and his men were turned to stone there, and stayed thus, forever. Other legends say that if the stones are ever moved, that will be the end of the world.”
She frowned at him a little then gave him her hand. “Take me there.”
They judged it better not to go through the gates of the city. You never knew which side the guard might be on. But d’Artagnan, a son of the region, knew the place where a couple of stones had fallen and been put back up, which could be removed to allow a young man and woman to squeeze through at the back wall of the town without exciting notice.
D’Artagnan remembered his father saying that a town could never be secured against the vampires by stones. You had to be vigilant every moment. Too bad he had relaxed his own vigilance.
While they walked to the standing stones, under the growing light of day—d’Artagnan grateful for Pierre’s boots and even more grateful that Pierre was still alive and that he’d not been mistaken in him—d’Artagnan told her the story of his adventures.
She, in turn, told him about Athos’ misadventure and about what he’d found out. “Now, I’m not sure why the vampire allowed him to see that,” Madame Bonacieux said. “For you can be sure she did, considering what vampires are and what they do.”
It worried d’Artagnan too, as did the idea that there was some significant thing or event of great importance, to which he was so integral that the highest ranking vampires in France had dragged him all the way back to Gascony.
“I think,” he said, thinking of d’Astarac’s interest in his story, “That the vampires wanted to know where that secret tunnel under my house was.”
She frowned up at him, her pretty nose wrinkling. “Do you know how vast the cave the tunnel leads to is, or where the branch that you felt was evil goes?”
D’Artagnan shook his head. “It was pitch dark. Deep, dark, blind. Now, the memories I have of it . . . ” he shook his head again. “It might mean nothing.” And to her quizzical gaze. “I was very young and might have confused it with other places and times. I remember a vast cavern and the sound of a river somewhere, and also several paths, branching off from it.”
The look she gave him was worried. “And the feeling of evil.”
“I don’t remember that from when I was young,” he said. “Perhaps I never went near that place.” He thought about it. “If I’m not confusing it with somewhere else, there were paintings too.”
“Paintings?”
“Or at least drawings,” he said. “With lots of painted blood. I remember the blood.”
He wished she did not look so worried. Given what blood had come to mean for humanity, the idea there were paintings of blood in a cave made him feel distinctly uneasy, and her expression did not help. “What can it be, though?” he asked, forcing a smile onto his face. “It’s not as though the monsters aren’t walking our streets already. How much scarier can anything underground be?”
She took a deep breath. “I’m thinking of all the vampires they’ve released from
underground tombs.”
D’Artagnan shivered. During his whole life, his happy childhood, had there had been a sleeper army of vampire wraiths underneath his house waiting? Had he never been secure at all?
“Sometimes,” Madame Bonacieux said. “These vampires and the secret of their existence are passed in families from generation to generation. Sometimes it is because the ancestor of a family, long ago, was a Judas goat and kept these places as a shrine, performing certain rituals believing they kept the vampires alive. The knowledge passed from generation to generation until it was a religion. Most of the blood gods, I think,” she said, “who have tainted human religion from the beginning were of that nature.”
D’Artagnan started to say that he didn’t believe any of his ancestors could have been a Judas goat, then had to admit he did not even truly know people he’d been acquainted with all his life.
The idea of his ancestors worshiping those creatures, though, made him squirm with discomfort. “What,” he asked, “would be the reason for them wanting these armies of old ones?”
She shrugged. “No one knows, but they seem intent on freeing all of those that they can from their captivity, and letting them out to wander the world of the living. They must serve some purpose. Are those the stones?”
They’d crested a hillock, and they had come into full view of the stones on the slope just below. They were thirteen large stones, one of them as tall as two tall men standing one atop the other, and then twelve more surrounding them, which were just a little taller than Porthos and twice as broad around. They were local granite, roughly hewn, their surfaces covered in lichens and mosses though they were, looked clearly manmade and yet naturally blended with the grassy slopes surrounding them.
