by Sarah Hoyt
“I am surrounded,” Aramis called out. “You go on, my friend, go on.”
Athos, who hadn’t noticed that Aramis had fallen behind, could not have stopped himself going if he tried to.
The wraiths moved out of his way, and he ran, stumbling, into the corridor ahead.
Vile, Abject
D’ARTAGNAN had grabbed a sword from amid the ashes of the burned wraiths and cut his feet loose, jumping up and killing the remaining wraiths.
He trotted back, along a corridor that paradoxically seemed much, much longer when he was running back, on his own, torch in one hand, sword in the other.
The pictures on the wall, displayed by the light of the torches made him shiver, and he tried not to look.. He soon realized the way seemed longer because he’d taken another, more direct path, than before. It made a strange sense to him that of course, there were multiple paths. Torches burned on these walls as well , illuminating more paintings. The same woman was depicted again, and again the same man with a crown.
There were also scenes of harvest and seeding, scenes of what looked to d’Artagnan’s confused mind like a multitude of slaves working for the royal pair. More scenes of feeding. Always and onward there were scenes of vampires feeding on humans, of blood dripping, of golden cups filled with blood.
He tripped on skeletons, and on what the dusty, spun-sugar remains of ancient vampires. He wondered if he’d lost his way and was going the same way, round and round.
His head felt as if it were exploding,, him mind seized with the same dull confusion that he’d experienced when he was very young and had a fever. Everything ran together, till he wasn’t sure that he was in this labyrinth under the earth—or perhaps he was a small child, in his bed, suffering from bad dreams and hallucinations.
But even in his worst nightmares, he could never have imagined the sheer evil surrounding him. He wanted to run toward the surface, wanted to escape, but it was like being at the bottom of the sea and not knowing in what direction lay the surface.
In his native mountains, in winter, he’d heard of people buried by snow, who—with no clue as to direction—could not find their way out and who, in confusion, dug deeper and deeper rather than toward the surface, dying in their attempt to get out.
He heard noises, too, from the other tunnels. Suddenly, with startling clarity, he heard the sound of someone approaching—running fast, and with an odd gait, as if partly on all fours, the hands now and then helping the feet.
D’Artagnan’s mind gave him the image of the Minotaur, part man and all beast, charging toward him. The thought came to him that perhaps the mythic minotaur had really been a vampire, never part bull at all? Were all the monsters and horrors of human history built on the ugly reality of vampires?
He pressed himself to the wall, sword in one hand, torch in the other, and prepared to sell his life dearly.
But when the person appeared, into the full light of torches, looking toward the wall and pausing for a moment before resuming running in the strange position—almost as if he had forgotten how to walk properly—d’Artagnan was shocked that he wore the hat of the musketeers. He was bare from the waist up, displaying a muscular torso; his hair was golden and familiar.
When he turned toward d’Artagnan, a shock of recognition startled the Gascon. Athos.
He stopped himself from calling out as he saw Athos’ face more clearly. . His features were pale and drawn, as if carved in white marble. Were it not for the convulsive movement of his throat, as though he were swallowing, over and over, trying to clear an obstruction, d’Artagnan would have thought that his face was paralyzed. But his throat moved, as did his body, scrambling inhumanly along the passage.
The most frightening thing of all were his eyes—Athos’ wide, jade-green eyes. They seemed bigger than ever, opened to an extreme, glittering like ice by the light of the torches.
His eyes burned with a fever like nothing d’Artagnan had ever seen or experienced before.
The shock, the feeling that this was—somehow—not Athos, kept d’Artagnan still, pressed against the wall. That Athos didn’t notice him, but ran past him and down the dark corridor filled d’Artagnan with more fear than he’d felt at any time in this gloomy, evil place.
It was, he thought, as his throat closed, worse than seeing a horrible monster charging toward him. It was worse than any demon or imaginary Minotaur. This was the familiar mingled with the abhorrent, as if he’d opened the door to his kitchen as a child, and found his parents cooking and eating the neighbors.
A shudder shook his entire body, as he stared at Athos, running down the dark hallway and dropping, effortlessly, into the open shaft in the ground.
D’Artagnan recalled the staring eyes, the rigid, fixed features, and it reminded him of the painting of the vampire king and his near-twin. Their familiar but not immediately identifiable features reappeared in d’Artagnan’s memory. Both looked . . . like Athos. They could be members of the same family.
With utter horror, he realized that he would have to follow Athos. He didn’t want to, but he was sure there was more at stake here than his own desires..
Memories of the scenes on the wall assailed him. The man resembling the king opening a chamber, lighting yet more torches around what looked like the sleeping king; the mortal being drained of blood and then the vampire king rising.
Swallowing hard against the bile rising in his throat, blinking to keep sweat from his eyes, d’Artagnan followed the receding sounds of Athos’ passage. Not this time, he thought. Not this time, no, not the fields and the willing slaves overseen by vampires who pretended to be gods and goddesses.
Not if d’Artagnan could do anything to prevent it.
Blind
COME!
And he went, tripping over his own feet, blind and lost and full of nothing—nothing—but the driving need to obey that voice.
His feet moved of their own accord, caves and galleries and endless corridors moving past him, and he could no more stop and look at things, no more defend himself, no more fight the compulsion than he could stop breathing.
His sword fell from a numb hand, and he removed the cross from his neck by pulling so hard on the chain that it broke, and then dropped it to the ground. He stepped on it as he ran. It ceased to matter.
His clothes were tight, suffocating him, and his vision came in narrow, focused snatches amid what seemed to be fog.
And through it all the call, irresistible: Come, my son, come.
His fingers fumbled at his doublet, untying it, pulling it off. He tore his shirt off, completely unable to understand how to pull it over his head.
Still, the first picture on the wall, with a torch burning in front of it, made him stop. He blinked at it, in shock, as Charlotte’s lovely face smiled at him. He swallowed hard against what seemed to be a constriction in his throat. Charlotte. He wanted Charlotte. Needed Charlotte. The bite marks she’d given him, at neck and thigh, pulsed like living fire—the pain was pleasure too, the pleasure pain—and his whole body was a bridge stretched, long and thin, over an abyss of need.
He swallowed hard again. His mouth felt so dry, but he didn’t want blood. He wanted . . . he didn’t know what he wanted. Charlotte.
Come, the voice said, again. It was a male voice, but it had the same effect as Charlotte’s and it drove him with the same need. He must get to it, he must.
Glimpsing a wall painting again, he saw what looked like his face, but was not his face, and there was a man lying still, like a crusader dead atop his tomb, like the stone effigies in the church of Athos’ childhood.
Come, Raphael.
It was his father calling, though it wasn’t his father. Athos jumped down a shaft and ran down another corridor, feeling as if he’d done this before, as though his entire life had aimed him at this moment and dropped him here to . . . what? He didn’t know..
On the wall, there was a picture of himself being bitten, drained, by a crowned version of himself. He remembered the pleasure
of Charlotte’s teeth on his neck, and he longed for it with a painful desire.
Come, I will give you what you need. Everything you need. I will satiate all your longings.
In The Peril of Death
D’ARTAGNAN followed Athos as he ran past all the torches, past all the places that had been marked, into the dark corridors beyond.
He followed Athos in the dark, as Athos shuffled, now more animal-like than ever, scratching at the walls, touching them as though he had to find his way by coming in contact with certain points.
Coming up behind, d’Artagnan saw that the points Athos had touched were where frescoes of the vampiric queen and the king were. A frisson of fear ran down his neck.
It was as though Athos were in a trance and being called.
He remembered legends his grandmother had told him, when he was very young. How the people of old used to pick a king for a year, a king they killed to improve the crops, and to preserve their one, true, immortal king.
Of course! The vampire king’s double, sacrificed to . . .
To what?
d’Artagnan thought of the standing stones. The king and his companions. They’d guarded something deep and evil. If they were ever overturned, it would be the end of the world.
Madame telling him his ancestors had been devoted to the army of vampires that slept beneath his house. The picture didn’t fit. It was like looking at a stained glass window in the dark and not being able to tell which pane was the wing of the angel, and which the tail of a demon. d’Artagnan blinked.
No. It had never been an army. It was the king of vampires, the king who would reunite with the queen. Together, they’d enslave humans and make them all into armies of vampires.
Sweat dripped down his naked back. He wished they hadn’t captured him when he was completely naked. He wished they had let him dress.
And yet― there was something right, something proper about facing ancient evil naked, with nothing but a sword.
He knew, all of a sudden knew with absolute certainty that what was painted on the walls was the truth and not some fantasy or some foreseeing. Here—or rather outside, where the fields now lay fallow, the forests overgrown—in the fields and mountains of Gascony, and all over the rest of the world, unless he guessed wrong, a king and queen of vampires had once ruled over a captive and helpless humanity.
Harvests had been grown, and livestock tended to nourish humans. But those humans had been no more than livestock themselves for vampires who were worshiped like gods and goddesses.
And then—though the walls didn’t tell of it, he knew it was so—something had happened. The humans had rebelled. They’d fought back. Step by step they’d fought back, until the king and queen—perhaps more than one king and queen—were immured in caves, sleeping, awaiting the call. Recalling all the legends of sleeping kings and sleeping warriors made d’Artagnan shiver.
His heart pounded. Vampires, sleeping under the earth, waiting for reawakening. He was sure, suddenly deadly sure, that there had been spells or some force, which his ancestors could not break, and therefore they had built their house over the cave of the sleeping vampire.
His ancestors were not worshipers, but prison guards, keeping the vile things confined, keeping watch, a secret duty passed from father to son through the centuries, through the generations, till somehow the idea of where the passage was had been lost, but not its purpose or its reason for existing.
He imagined how frightened his father must have been when he found his small son wandering the secret corridors. And yet he hadn’t dared close them off for good, because the watch must be kept.
He heard Athos stop ahead, and stopped in turn, raising his torch just a little, not wishing to call attention to himself. Athos, in his trance, didn’t seem to notice light or movement.
He’d come to a large boulder, like the one that had blocked his exit at the end of the passage, beneath the city wall.
There were symbols there, graven in the rock itself. Crosses, stars, a rose. Sacred symbols, d’Artagnan thought, probably carved by the religious guardians who tried to keep this place inviolate.
Athos ran his hands over the rock, as if not sure what he was doing, and then, to d’Artagnan’s horror and surprise, he put his hands up and started scraping at the rock, seeking to move it.
It was firmly wedged, and as Athos fought with it, his fingers left long bloody streaks on the gray surface of the boulder. Little whimpers emerged from the musketeer’s frantically working throat. He must have torn more than one nail off by the roots. But he continued trying to pry his fingers into the space between the rock and the wall, trying to pull.
And. unbelievably, the massive rock started to move.
It should have forever resisted the efforts of a single mortal or even of a single vampire. But it didn’t. It moved slowly, inexorably, accompanied by Athos’ sobbing groans.
The King
THERE, there now, that will do, the voice in his mind said as Athos—bleeding, in pain—moved the stone just enough to enter the chamber.
The royal chamber, his mind supplied, and he nodded his head in understanding, as he squeezed past the granite, feeling the broadcloth of his breeches tear and catch, till all he had left on his body were the tatters of his clothes. It did not matter.
His fingers hurt—lacerated and mangled, most of his nails torn. His legs hurt from his nonstop run down the endless corridors. That too didn’t matter.
What mattered was that he’d finally found the chamber to which he’d been called. Entering it, he felt as though he’d emerged from unbearable pressure into sudden relief. It was like being kept underwater, without air, and now here, at last, he could breathe.
The chamber itself was large and almost sumptuous, the sort of room one would expect in a palace or a temple.
It was all natural, Athos thought—a vast underground chamber, with a vaulted ceiling above, on which someone had painted a blue sky and a huge, glowing sun.
In the middle of it, on a stone that might be bed or altar, lay a man. No, not a man, a vampire. He looked like Athos himself, but larger, taller. He lay on the stone bed, his face impassive, his hands crossed on his chest. By his side lay a sword.
Athos’ first attempt at touching him did not work. Any attempt at approaching was met with rebuff, as though there were an invisible dome over him, an inverted vast bowl of glass, forbidding all approach.
You must break the wards.
Wards. Guards. He walked around the floor, which was made of soft sand, following the edge of the barrier in a perfect circle.
His eyes, now used to the dark, distinguished on the ground, a cross, a rose, a star and other, older symbols, including what seemed to be the numeral eight turned on its side. They were made in stone and in metal, carved and molded.
He pulled at them, and it was like lifting endless weights. They dragged his arms down, but he pulled, and continued pulling, fighting, struggling.
The rose came loose first, and he tossed it over his shoulder, then the other symbols, one by one. He could now approach the king, and his heart was filled with peace and contentment, singing with joy.
Good, good. You’ve done well.
Something in Athos fought like a man kept prisoner in a chamber of stone, but it was no match to that voice gentling him, calling to him, You’ve done well my son. Now come closer. Closer. Closer.
He obeyed, trembling but rejoicing, longing for . . . longing for the feeling he’d had when Charlotte drank his life. Though this creature was a man, he felt the same toward him as he’d felt toward Charlotte, the same need, the same longing.
Something small and ignored at the back of his mind told him this was wrong, this was terrible, this was an illusion. Glamour, all glamour . . . His lips formed the word and pronounced it, trying to ward off whatever it was that was holding him captive. “Glamour.”
Closer. One of his hands was reaching out, touching the cold, cold arm of the king.
The
king opened eyes like burning embers, eyes that called and bound like flames in the darkness. Eyes made of ice and fire and primeval need.
He moved fast. Athos couldn’t have moved if he’d tried to.
In a single, seamless movement, the king sat up. His hands, like bands of iron, tightened on Athos’ shoulders.
His fangs pierced the vein in Athos’ neck like daggers. His lips, cold, cold, cold, fastened on Athos’ skin, and sucked.
Bliss and pain entwined blotted out all thought.
Only Human
D’ARTAGNAN dragged himself to the hole left between rock and wall of the cave, forcing his body to step closer to what rational sense told him to run from.
There was, as he’d expected, a sleeper, a king of old, just as the legends spoke of, sleeping till he should be needed. Only, he now realized, the legends never told just why he was needed.
He watched, frozen in place, as Athos approached the king. The musketeer moved like a sleepwalker, touching the king’s arm, then exposing his neck.
Everything that made him a musketeer at heart rose in d’Artagnan , all that had brought him to this place in time. The boy who had a damnably hot temper, the young man who could never be disciplined into behaving, the man who’d gone to Paris to kill vampires. All of them rose in him, overpowering the feeling of the fear that was blanketing his reason, making all thought dull and slow.
His fury moved him. He didn’t know how or why. He didn’t pause to think that Athos was, after all, a vampire. He didn’t pause to think that the creature who slept here must be powerful, very powerful, and have resources beyond physical strength with which to crush such as d’Artagnan.
No. All he could think was of the paintings on the wall. The king, drinking the blood of the half-mortal resembling him, and then rising with the sun, impervious to its rays. He and his consort becoming unimaginably powerful and controlling the whole world.
