Adele couldn’t help but laugh. “He has you there.”
CHAPTER 9
Adele blew into her chapped hands. She settled in a patch of sun on the floor of a large room upstairs. The fixtures here were lavish and Gothic, the ones that were still unbroken in any case. There were even a few remnants of thick glass in the windows and paint on the walls. The floor was littered with trash, but there were no bones or human remains of any sort that typically littered vampire dwellings. Rummaging through her pack, Adele pulled out the cheese and bread that she hadn’t had time for at the safe house. “So, what do you make of them?”
“What can I make of them?” Gareth paced before the windows with his head down. “Baudoin’s nephew, here, thinking of me as some sort of leader.”
“More than a leader. Nearly a prophet.”
“Yes. A prophet.” Gareth laughed angrily. “Truly, what is wrong with the younger generation?”
“So you’re not a prophet?” Adele arched an eyebrow with a playfulness that belied the seriousness of the question.
“Speaking as my own biographer, I can assure you I’m not.”
“But Kasteel does have a point, of sorts. You have always felt that your people were going in the wrong direction. You told me yourself that their day was near an end, like mayflies, you said. A great dying off would soon occur.”
“That’s just the cycle of our nature. I didn’t intend to start it off myself by killing my entire clan.”
“That’s not what I meant, Gareth,” Adele said gently, through the hurt she felt. “And you had nothing to do with it. I killed them all.” She did her best to conjure any thoughts to replace the vision of thousands of living creatures, vampires to be sure, but still young and old, some likely blameless, swept to their sudden and terrifying destruction by her geomancy.
She always asked herself the same question. Why had she stopped it? She risked her life to halt the wave of death at the edges of Britain. Vampires had plagued humanity for millennia before the creatures rose up in that horrible winter of 1870 and obliterated human civilization in the northern hemisphere. Those humans that escaped the Great Killing fled with their guns and science to the tropics, where vampires couldn’t easily survive because they were susceptible to heat. The refugees clashed and then blended with the indigenous populations to form new societies like Adele’s own Equatorian Empire.
The vampires crouched on the ruins of the north and kept herds of humans for food. The world would be a better place without those creatures, wouldn’t it? Adele was the ruler of an empire that was fighting a war to liberate the northern humans from the vampire clans. She could have wiped every one of the blood-drinking monsters out of existence. She would have been the savior of humanity.
Instead Adele had risked her life struggling with the Earth to save one man, one vampire.
She felt Gareth taking her hands. The confusion that had filled his eyes about the rebels was now replaced by worry for her.
“There are reasons why men or women become leaders,” Gareth said. “You are born to it. You took a chaotic nation on the verge of civil war and brought it under your control. You understood your options and your enemies. I am not that person. I hardly know what I’m going to do in the next hour, much less what path my people should take in the future.”
Despite the truth of that statement, Adele shook her head. “Not all leaders are planned. You’ve obviously sparked something, whether you wanted to or not. This group wouldn’t have sprung up around you for no reason.”
“There’s a reason. It’s called madness. Vampires are losing the war. Not just in Europe, but in North America too. But it’s more than that. Our society was reforged by the Great Killing less than two hundred years ago. We think of it as our ancient birthright, but it’s very recent. And now it is flying apart. We know we’re failing, but we don’t know why or how to stop it. The signs of madness are everywhere. Cesare used humans to fight his war. This little band of ridiculous outcasts here. Even me. I dress up like a character I saw in a children’s storybook and fight my own kind.” Gareth laughed without humor, his agitation growing as he talked. “That’s all madness, isn’t it?”
“As usual, you underestimate yourself. Your actions have inspired these rebels here to question the cruelty of your people.”
Gareth pursed his lips and his eyes moved back and forth, as if searching with puzzled resentment. “Rebels? No, they find me temporarily fascinating because I seem to stand against authority. Prince Gareth is a hated figure in every court. So, that makes me a hero to this lot. All youth rebels against their parents’ values.”
“Even vampires?”
“Of course. That’s why most of us leave our clan and wander for years when we come of age. Sometimes we don’t go back. It isn’t as common with the new clans these days.”
“Are the clans different now than they used to be?”
“Very. My kind has always lived in clans or tribes. And there have always been kings or queens. Kasteel calls me lord even though he hates the clans, because we’ve always had rulers. But in the old days, clan identity was fluid. It was more common to move and choose your place. Power was limited. Then as we approached the Great Killing and ever since, we’ve had more rules to protect the powerful and preserve their herds. The hierarchy grew more rigid. Territories became more defined. Vampires have become sedentary and suspicious of one another.”
“Like humans?”
Gareth let the comment lie with a disagreeable nod. “These children here are just exploring some of the old mentality. It’s all very romantic and mysterious and exciting. Like donning a cape and mask.”
Adele kissed his cheek to calm him. “The mere existence of vampires who express some concern for humanity is a remarkable phenomenon. You’re not alone anymore.”
“I believe I said I was the only one with an interest in human history and culture, and none of these children show any of those interests.” Gareth wrapped a grateful arm around her waist. “They only want to play vampire, what they perceive as real vampire.”
“They seem eager to learn from you.”
“I have nothing to teach them. I’m not their father.”
A sound came from the stairs leading from the lower chamber. Kasteel and Nadzia stood watching.
“Yes?” Gareth asked in English with an imperiousness that came naturally.
“Do you need anything, my lord?” Kasteel asked.
“No. Thank you.”
“Perhaps.” Adele’s hand went to her neck. She touched the chain that just showed above the top of her rough tunic. She eyed Gareth. He seemed concerned, but then nodded. She pulled out the blue stone talisman taken from the vampire in London. It glinted in the faint light. The two young rebels exchanged glances of recognition.
“You’ve seen one of those before,” Gareth said. It wasn’t a question. “Tell us about it.”
“Yes.” Nadzia swallowed. “I can show you.”
Kasteel nodded toward Adele. “She won’t like it.”
“There.” Kasteel crouched behind a rocky outcropping. Down a snowy slope and two hundred yards across an open glade, stood a small gathering of tumbled huts and cottages.
Gareth helped a lagging Adele to the top. They studied the area. She used a brass spyglass; his natural eyesight was superior to her enhanced optics. There was no sign of occupation, either human or vampire. Adele felt a wave of nausea and dropped the telescope. Cold sweat broke out on her forehead. She took deep breaths, fighting the urge to vomit.
“Adele!” Gareth took her arm. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been feeling sick for the last few miles.” She fought the dizziness, and bringing the glass back to her eye, she said to Nadzia, “You saw vampires here with crystals like the one I have?”
“I did.” The reply was meek.
“We’re twenty miles from Bruges. You just happened across them?”
“No. We saw strangers in town from another
clan. They had those blue crystals and gave them to the prince of Bruges. Then a whole group came out here, some from Bruges, some of the newcomers. And there was a human with them, but he didn’t act like food. So I followed them.”
“The Witchfinder,” Adele growled. “How long ago was this?”
“Within the last month.”
Gareth asked, “Have these foreign vampires returned to Bruges since?”
“To Bruges? Not to my knowledge. But out here, I don’t know. I haven’t been back here since that day. I didn’t care about some lord’s private herds.”
Adele labored to push herself up. “Let’s have a look around.”
Gareth rose too. “I think it’s safe, but it’s hard to tell with the wind swirling.”
Adele and the others climbed over the rocks and slid down the hill. Snow fell in thick wet flakes, slapping against her face. Another bout of vertigo sent the white nightscape spinning around her. She stopped to steady herself, but felt another strange sensation picking at her brain as if a ferocious headache was starting. Her eyes dropped to her feet. Something made her lean down and sweep the snow away. Her fingers hit something hard that skittered aside. Adele reached into the snow pile and came out with a stone the size of a hen’s egg. It was a faceted crystal. She needed only her practiced eye to tell that a skilled craftsman of geomancy had worked it, not simply a jeweler.
Kasteel and Nadzia watched in confusion as Adele tugged a glove off with her teeth. Gareth merely stood by with interest. Taking the cold crystal in her bare hand, crippling light flashed behind her eyes. She felt as if a horse had kicked her in the stomach. Adele toppled face first into the snow.
“Adele!” Gareth pulled the stone from her clenched fist.
She rolled away from him to retch.
He put a strong hand against the back of her neck. “We should go back.”
“No.” Adele wiped her mouth. “There’s something here. I’ve never experienced anything like that.”
Gareth’s head suddenly jerked to the side. “There is death here.”
Adele reached for her dagger.
Kasteel scented the air. “I don’t smell blood.”
“Not blood.” Gareth pointed toward the shadowy huts. “Death. All around us. Look at those mounds in the snow. Corpses.”
Adele could detect only slight rises in the fresh clean snowfield. If Gareth hadn’t called attention to them, she would’ve assumed they were the natural rise and fall of the ground or clumps of grass. She trudged toward the closest one, her unsteady legs whooshing through the deep powder.
Gareth slipped in front of her and knelt by the mound. He cleared the snow until there appeared a human face framed by glittering ice. The skin was bluish and the features slightly bloated. The expression, however, was inhuman and ghastly. Eyes were wide and his jaw was distended as if frozen from a scream too ragged to escape a normal mouth.
“Good God,” Adele hissed, again fighting against a wave of sickness. “What happened to him?”
Gareth continued to brush snow away from the cadaver. He checked for wounds of feeding, but there were none.
Adele spun in the snow to another lump. Frantic fingers swept snow off what turned out to be a pair of feet. She worked her way up the body, white spray sparkling around her. Soon another face was revealed, this one also contorted in terrible pain or fear.
Adele staggered to yet another snow-bound body. She cleared this one and found a woman with long blond hair. Something fell when Adele pried open the cracking fingers. It was a small cross woven from simple grass.
Adele took the artifact and held it carefully in her hand. “Nadzia, how many humans were out here?”
“Perhaps thirty.” Nadzia was quiet, as if fearful of being the target of Adele’s righteous anger at the slaughter of her kind.
Adele set the simple cross on the dead woman’s chest. “There’s a sickness in the Earth here.” She took several breaths to prepare herself. She didn’t want to contemplate her next step, but she had to. “I’m going into a rift to try to understand better.”
“No,” Gareth said emphatically. “It’s too dangerous and you’re not strong enough. Just being here sickens you. If you try to engage it, there’s no telling what could happen. These bodies are human, and whatever happened here killed them.”
“That’s what frightens me. First we’ve seen vampires able to resist geomancy. Now humans, killed by some unknown force. I don’t think there’s any other reasonable possibility except that Cesare’s Witchfinder is still alive and active. We have to find him and stop him. Looking at this place, I can’t conceive of what horrors he could set in motion.”
“So you’re doing it no matter what I say?”
She touched Gareth’s hand. “If it gets too dangerous, I’ll withdraw.”
“What if you can’t?”
“Then remove me bodily from here.” She turned to Kasteel and Nadzia. “You two should move far away. Gareth, you too. I don’t know what your limits are.”
“I’ve been burned before.” He stood rooted. “Do what you’re going to do, I’ll be here.”
Adele shook her head at his obstinacy but in the wake of her own there was little she could argue against. Then she tossed him the talisman before sinking onto her knee. Fighting down growing apprehension, she pressed her hands onto the frozen ground.
Immediately, she tasted bile. The colors and sounds that wafted from a nearby rift were different, muted. She felt a surge of rage at the foul stench and garish blasts of light. Instead of warm comfort, she was met by raucous pollution. A stain of black sludge undulated in a turbulent sea. With teeth clamped, Adele pushed deeper into the disturbing mire. She couldn’t keep her sense of direction. The anchoring cold air from above was gone. Lances of light seared her skin and her ears throbbed with the beating of her heart.
Battling the cacophony around her that threatened to pummel her senseless, Adele reached out for the lines of the Earth’s power. She could sense them around her, but they were jagged and twisted into a thicket. She took them in hand, and shouted with pain as the lines cut deep into her palms. The threads jerked away, quivering and rabid, dripping with her blood.
Adele dared another step deeper into the terror. She saw a rift slashing back and forth, fearful of her approach. She seized it and it jerked against her grip. A razor sliced deep into her hand, tearing through the flesh and muscle and wedging against the bones. Adele nearly blacked out from the agony, but she traced the line even so. She could feel its wildness, its lunacy. It was dying and fighting against whatever was killing it, and failing.
She followed the line, walking the rift in spite of the cuts that appeared in her hands and up her arms and across her body. Her feet were drenched in blood. The rift ran south until Adele saw a city in the distance. The line in her hand tugged slightly as if someone on the other end felt her presence. She wondered if this was what a fish experienced just before a sharp hook plunged through its cheek.
Adele released the rift and struggled to move away from the city. Noise and smells buffeted her, trying to push her ever downward. Adele swam up, ignoring the pain and exhaustion, focusing on getting back to Gareth. Then she saw white and felt cold. The near silence deafened her and frigid air seared her lungs.
Adele felt the frozen dirt between her fingers. The snowy landscape stretched out before her. She searched for Gareth’s face and gave him a comforting nod as he took her sagging shoulders. Adele sat back in the snow, ignoring the wetness. She rubbed her face in exhaustion. “Gareth, you told me that your friend was the king in Paris. Lothaire? Is he still the king there?”
His curious gaze showed that he was concerned she was still rattled from her trip into the rift. “As far as I know. Why?”
She looked into his eyes. “The Earth is polluted here and that’s obviously the source of this slaughter. I followed one of the distressed rifts and it ran toward Paris. That’s where we’ll find the Witchfinder.”
“That�
�s not possible. Not Lothaire.”
“I hope not.”
Gareth was no longer looking at her. He was staring off to the south through the snow.
CHAPTER 10
Adele had settled into the upstairs room in Bruges to continue her study of her mother’s notebook while Gareth went out to feed. The sickness she had experienced out at that death camp had finally faded, except in her angry memory. Her muscles ached, but she didn’t show any of the wounds that had occurred in the rifts. Nadzia had helped by bringing food, bland but serviceable, plus a local beer that was quite good.
Adele did her best to pierce the aspects of the blue crystal but found it murky going. There were few stones that didn’t open their secrets to her with only a touch and a minimal amount of study. Her natural skills allowed her to penetrate crystalline surfaces and explore the lines and internal facets that channeled and reflected energy. Normally Adele could determine any number of things from even cursory examinations, from a stone’s place of origin to its age. If a crystal had been carved or altered, particularly by a geomancer, she could typically determine for what purpose.
This blue stone remained a mystery to Adele. She couldn’t extend her power into it. She knew it had been altered, quite skillfully too. The Witchfinder had cut the raw stone with stunning precision. He had used normal tools because it was a rare geomancer indeed who could modify a stone with pure energy, as Adele could. Even so, she was unable to fathom exactly the result of the alterations. She didn’t understand the feel or sound or smell of the crystal’s energy. So she took whatever time she had to turn to her sources, limited as they were, for some hints. She wished she had her texts in Alexandria, or the great arcane library of Sir Godfrey Randolph. Alas, she had only her mother’s notebook, but it would have to serve.
The time for study would be short because she and Gareth were leaving for Paris in the morning. Gareth was nervous about what they would find there. He held King Lothaire in unique regard and feared what had become of him under the pressure of the Equatorian war from the south. Adele was nervous too, but her concerns seemed to have a simple answer, to a certain extent. Find the Witchfinder and put an end to his activities, one way or another. Adele might not comprehend how he did his work, but she knew it was dangerous and had to be stopped.
The Geomancer Page 7
