by Eric Griffin
She had experimented, of course, with disabling the pain sensors, the emitters, the receptors, the processors. But each of these efforts had inevitably produced clumsiness and led to numerous injuries to the extremities that went unnoticed by the subject until he reached the threshold of critical blood loss.
But this was something else altogether. Something astounding. There was not a square inch of this subject’s body that had not been battered or poked or pinched or prodded or twisted or torn or pounded or kneaded or…worse. And unless she was greatly mistaken, he was about to spring for her throat.
With a bestial howl, Parmenides sprang for her throat.
He came up several feet short and collapsed face down on the hardwood floor.
Painful, Vykos noted. In most subjects, this would prove a strong deterrent to further attach.
But the subject was pushing himself back up onto hands and knees, apparently trying to regain his feet. This last endeavor was, to some extent, doomed to failure or at least frustration as the subject’s legs were still fused together at the knees and ankles.
The Assamite turned a gaze upon her that was all shards and jagged edges. Ice and razors. A look full of the haunting calm and total focus of a great cat in mid-pounce.
“Enough. I have already warned you that you would only injure yourself in such foolish displays of bravado,” Vykos scolded. “I have labored some hours on your behalf and I am not about to sit idly by while you recklessly undo all of my efforts.”
Vykos took him by the hair, effortlessly lifting his head and chest off the floor, and pressed her face very close to his. “Now, think.”
The reproach struck him like a physical blow. He reeled backwards at the very cusp of defiance—caught midway between spitting in her face and lunging forward (at the cost of a mere fistful of scalp) to tear at her face with his fangs. Vykos shook him once and pressed on before he could resolve the issue. “Think!”
He lunged.
Parmenides was expecting, relying, upon the fact that he would hear the sound of hair and scalp ripping free before the first wave of pain actually struck home. It would buy him a crucial fraction of a second.
He was thus utterly unprepared for what actually happened. It was over more quickly than even his adrenaline-tuned senses could follow. It was as if Vykos had suddenly loosed her grip. Or so he thought, as his face, freed of this restraint, slammed resoundingly into the floor.
Only Vykos had not loosed her grip. He was assured of this when the very next moment she yanked his head back up to face her again. For some reason, he had the hazy, pain-fogged impression that his hair had actually stretched—pulled out to a length of about three feet before snapping back again.
His first reaction, of course, had been one of elation. It was as if some passing spirit had granted his dying wish. His entire will had been focused on bridging the tantalizingly slight gap between his fangs and the face of his tormentor. And something within him—some previously unguessed reserve of strength or will or spirit—had risen up and answered his one defining need.
He felt hot blood welling out of his lip and streaming from a gash above one eye. He was broken in body and his legs did not respond to him. But he did not feel broken. He felt strong and whole and indomitable. He smiled broadly and savored the familiar taste of the blood trickling into his mouth. He saw the briefest look of surprise flicker across the cool, sculpted face of his adversary.
“Ah, you have seen it yourself, then,” Parmenides crowed. “The righteous anger of the masters is a hammer. It thunders from distant mountaintops. It chums the intervening waters. It reaches its shadow over you and you tremble beneath it. Your blood is mine.”
Her hand fell away and she backed away half a step, unbelieving. Somehow, against all expectation and in open defiance of his pitifully wracked body, Parmenides stood.
Vykos cursed softly. She could swear like a soldier when pressed. In fact, if the truth were known, she could swear like a legionnaire in perfectly conjugated Latin. She could swear like a crusader (in the vernacular). She had even been known to make the most hardened Tartar, Magyar, or Cossack blush, giving each a scourging with his own tongue.
On this occasion, however, such eloquence seemed to have deserted her. She was distracted by the ferocity of his determination, and perhaps by the rigors of the experiment. There was no denying that this subject was unique and the effort of monitoring its responses in such minute detail was fatiguing.
She could feel the intensity of his twin passions—to survive and to kill. She could measure each of them, plot them, analyze the resulting graphs. But she resisted the temptation toward detachment. It was much more intriguing to interact with the subject directly.
She could feel his need. It rolled away from him in waves. It was as if both drives were but a single passion, one instinct, one volition—his live-kill. She immediately dismissed the clumsy term. The sentiment was more meaningful in German, but translated into English poorly. It was an instinct simultaneously toward and away from the grave. A rushing in and backing out. A frenzied dance on the edge of the precipice.
She was both surprised and delighted at the speed with which his body consumed itself.
She could not help but feel the warm glow of pride when she thought of that trick he had pulled with expanding and retracting his hair. Inspired! She would not expect such aptitude—such a seamless fusion of need and fulfillment—even in a servant many months his senior.
His desperate attack might have succeeded had she not felt the first familiar stirrings of the Gift moving within him. Even with this slight warning, however, it proved all she could do to remove herself from the direct path of his fury. She was warier now. And he, well, the subject was about to start testing the controls of this experiment in earnest.
She thought it immensely improbable that he would be able to free his legs. She had seen to it that the bone itself had been fused, and bone was a harsh and unforgiving medium. Mastery over the hair and nails—the Inanimates—was something well within the power of a trained novice. Bending the Inanimates to the dictates of the will, however, was mere child’s play compared to the true Bonesculpting—a difference like that between working in play-dough and Florentine marble.
The fact that he seemed oblivious to what should have been debilitating levels of pain was a challenge, but one which Vykos found both novel and exhilarating. Here was something that merited further examination—if the subject should survive these initial tests.
For the present, Vykos turned her critical eye back to the subject’s first blind, childlike steps into the Great Art. Vykos was watching him keenly now, noting each flicker of emotion as the subject passed from the initial elation into doubt and, very soon now, into fear. These changes were but the outward symptoms of the revelation writhing within him, tearing its way toward the surface of his awareness.
“Gently, now. Do not fight it, my young romantic, my philosophe. Even your vengeful masters will not begrudge you this one small indulgence. It is a gift. Drink deeply and be content.”
The doubt had clearly won the upper hand. He struggled to free his legs, but to no avail. “You cannot imagine that you will be suffered to…” His voice was choked with indignation, forcing him to begin again. The damage he was doing to the musculature of his legs was growing quite extensive. One small part of Vykos’s mind kept a resigned tally of the hours of work wasted and the weeks of bedrest and physical therapy that he was accumulating.
Parmenides raged on. “Even if you should manage to prevent me from feasting upon your black heart…” He paused. The admission had cost him dearly.
Vykos could see the fight leaking out of him. He swallowed hard and rushed on. “Even so, there will be others. The masters will forge a special hell to receive you and they will not rest until they have seen you dragged, screaming and begging for your life, into the fires that burn eternally, but consume not.”
Unmoved, Vykos clapped her hands slowly. As she did so,
their flesh began to blacken and peel. Soon, each clap was accompanied by a small cloud of crumbling ash, gusting outward and settling gently to the floor. Parmenides could see the glaring white of bone peeking through. He heard knucklebones popping and cracking as if from extreme heat. He saw jagged blackened stubs of bone clatter and bounce noisily to the floor.
“Enough,” he cried, jerking his head away from the grisly spectacle. “Enough of your infernal parlor tricks. You are not impervious to harm. The masters have had centuries to perfect their art. They will know how to accomplish your end. You may rely upon it. Do you think we have not slain your kind before? You deceive yourself, lady.”
“Ah, but you, yourself, do not know the trick,” she said matter-of-factly. “The wooden stake through the heart, perhaps? Immersion in running water? Garlic-flavored holy wafers?” Her hands were whole once more, all trace of the charring gone. She circled him warily. As she neared the doorway, she stooped to kneel over something on the floor, just out of his angle of vision.
He kept his gaze fixed rigidly forward as he strove to master himself. He found he was actually trembling with frustration. Through an extreme effort of will, he managed to hold his tongue, and refused to be goaded into responding to her jibes.
After a few moments he saw, out of the corner of his eye, Vykos straighten up again, righting an overturned chair. She propelled it before her, rolling it forward as she approached.
“Very shortly now,” she explained, “you will collapse. Already you are pushing the point of no return—of doing irreparable damage to your legs. Will you please sit down and cease these senseless threats and posturings? There are weighty matters to discuss and time has already grown short.”
He wheeled upon her, as if to lash out once more, but the effort proved too much for his maimed lower body. He went down with a sound like a canvas tent collapsing.
“This humiliation,” he raged at the floorboards, unable to rise or even to turn. “It will not go unavenged. You are doomed as surely as I am.” He caught a rasping breath. “Even if you were to restore me now and set me at liberty, it would be too late to buy even one additional night of your cursed unlife. Though I have fallen among fiends, it is you, my tormentor, whom I pity.”
There was a long pause, during which Parmenides did nothing but suppress the racking sobs that convulsed his entire frame. But no sound of this inner struggle escaped his lips.
“My young poet,” the voice was gentle, soft with affection and perhaps a touch of pride. “Be still now. It is enough. In you, I am well pleased.”
It was some minutes before he felt strong hands take him firmly under each arm. He did not struggle against them. His eyes were shut tight in humiliation and defeat. Through cracked and bleeding lips, he began to spit broken prayers for the dead. He hardly noticed as he was settled into the hard, straight-backed chair. The grisly device barely registered upon his consciousness. His prayers became more fervent, as if by drowning out the sound of what was going on around him, he could deny the events themselves—shout them down, banish them.
From somewhere very far off, he heard a familiar female voice which, for a moment, he could not seem to place. It was a pleasant voice, an attractive voice, and one which seemed full of concern for him and for his well-being.
“Only in this one thing am I disappointed,” the voice crooned. Parmenides pitched forward, his head nearly bouncing off his shattered knees as the chair rolled forward. “That you would, even for a moment, believe that I would be so reckless as to take you into my care without the knowledge—much less the encouragement—of your cherished masters.
“There will be no retribution, my gentle assassin, because you are a gift. A very special gift. A peace offering from the Old Man of the Mountain. You are to be a pledge between our two peoples.
“You have been given into my care. Do you understand this? You are mine completely, to do with as I will. Just think of it! The fun we shall have together.”
Parmenides may have screamed. Through the haze of pain and horror, one part of his mind, a very well-disciplined part that had been rigorously trained for weeks on end to respond to just such an occasion, instinctively groped for the Words of Undoing that would preempt his suffering.
Wednesday, 23 June 1999, 4:41 AM
CSX freight yard
Atlanta, Georgia
These moments of peace seemed filled with as much eternity as the hours of pain that preceded them. Victoria Ash, Toreador Primogen of Atlanta—very nearly, she felt, Prince of Atlanta—could not look at herself. It would shatter her peace, as the scent of her own blood that drenched the wooden chair nearly did. So with eyes closed, she deferred the horror of her current situation and turned to the future.
Despite Elford’s worst—and it was terrible, evil and sadistic work indeed—Victoria now knew that she would survive. She would be a ruined heap, potentially for decades; the scars of this night alone would take months to repair, and there were likely to be many such nights in her future. As the cruel Sabbat had savaged her, however, Victoria had actually discovered a tiny ray of hope shining through the darkness of her torment.
At first, her fear had convinced her that she would succumb easily to such torture, that her mind would snap, and that she would cry and beg and plead and resist as Elford desired. While her vampiric flesh was indeed weak to the will of the Tzimisce flesh-crafter, Victoria’s mind remained intact. More importantly, though, through Elford’s wicked alterations, she was learning what made him tick, what he desired, what titillated and enthralled him. And so she resisted. She channeled the pain he inflicted. Her every groan and contortion was timed and shaped by his sadistic yearnings, which his words and deeds made clear to her; her reactions to his abrasive caresses pleasured him to distraction. Until he crawled away panting, and slammed the sliding door of the boxcar closed behind him.
How many other boxcars concealed playthings for the torturer, Victoria had no way of knowing. But surely there were others. Sometimes Elford smelled of their blood, or came to her with unidentifiable specks of their matter on his skin.
Victoria knew that her physical beauty was great enough to seduce Kindred. She had done it many times. Now she suspected that the promise of the degradation of that beauty was enough to seduce a Tzimisce. The Toreador felt that Elford would be hers—not tonight, or next week, or next month. But his desires were a scalpel in her hands, and she wielded it as expertly as he did any of his implements. Time would test her, indeed, but she would persevere, and time would bring her reward—and then her captor would pay. For everything. From the greatest malformity to the tiniest blemish.
The pain she’d endured when he had slid his hand into her chest and grasped a rib had been excruciating. His operations were filled with sexual innuendo, and that had been Victoria’s first clue. The fool had spoken too much. He’d not only revealed the means of his own defeat, Elford had also given Victoria a focus for her thoughts when she’d been reaching desperately for anything to mask the pain. His intrusion within her had surrendered all significance, and from that moment onward, she’d laid her plans.
These were the marks of Elford’s pleasure. In his hands, the Toreador’s rib became like clay, and bent to fit his vision of how Victoria was meant to look. The former primogen could no longer resist examining herself. Her right breast, already studded with oval burns inflicted by the Tzimisce’s fiery fingertips, was now impaled by one of her own ribs. Elford had bent it outward and threaded it expertly, painfully, through her body so that its tip jutted out in place of her nipple, the so-called blemish that earlier had been removed by a savage bite.
And so began a line of visible bone decorations, small horn-like protrusions that made the skin around them itch and burn unrelentingly. Her clavicle was twisted and separated into a series of outcroppings connecting those on her right arm to her bone nipple. The spurs on her arm had been massaged from her humerus and stretched until they too extended beyond her skin.
Final
ly, there were two more such spurs on the back of her hand, perhaps meant eventually to join with the other row.
All these wounds, these grotesque surgeries, could be healed, she thought. She hoped. Unless Elford bore much older blood than she imagined, or unless she was wrong in her beliefs about Tzimisce flesh-crafting—and her real knowledge of the fiends’ powers, despite her present, terrifying exposure to them, was slight indeed—unless a hundred other possibilities that might leave her a scarred, misshapen monstrosity, unless just one of these multitudinous possibilities was true, she might eventually be able to restore her pristine form to its previous beauty. That was what she had to believe. That was the only hope she had, and she clutched it to her heart like water in a desert land. Her body was indeed her temple, and to dwell upon the damage done to it would be to surrender to despair. It would render her incapable of taking the strong, decisive actions that might eventually free her.
Victoria sank back into her chair. Her mind turned from the future to the past—either a preferable alternative to the present. She could scarcely believe the turn of events that had brought her here. Her party and plans at the High Museum had been meticulously prepared, had come so close to fruition. She had entered the gallery through the door of Heaven. Now she had descended into Hell. Assuming she did in fact survive this Hell, she would carry a valuable lesson with her, for now she knew that she was never completely safe. No matter how many tests she applied to her plans before execution, no matter how great the power she might gain, no matter how formidable the defenses she might erect—she was never safe. Even if she escaped this railcar dungeon—when she escaped it—she would never feel safe again.
While Victoria’s confidence in eventual freedom increased by modest degrees, her short-term prospects remained monumentally grim. She possessed no desire to suffer the degradation and torture that Elford planned for her. If she could escape sooner rather than later, then so much the better.
