by Eric Griffin
He laughed then. It was a barking and scornful laugh. “They would not betray me. They would not betray me and suffer me to live.” He realized even as he hurled these refutations against her that the two assertions were not at all the same thing.
With every new twist of this convoluted situation, he came face to face with the same realization. “I should not be alive.”
“Do not speak so, my young romantic, my philosophe. Can you not see that this whole complicated orchestration has been arranged so that you might yet live?”
Parmenides did not see it. He made no response but continued to regard her with open suspicion. He was uncertain from which front this new attack would come, but he would not be taken unprepared. This time.
“Your masters would not see you fall victim to the retributions of the hated Tremere. There is no greater indignity—not only for you, but for them as well. It is within my power to help them, to help you, my dearest. But you must let me help you.”
“You will help me,” he said flatly. “You will shield me from the dread Tremere. You will keep me here indefinitely, confined to a wheelchair, serving as a guinea pig for your demented experiments. Here, I have no doubt, even the Tremere will not venture. Here, I am perfectly safe, my every need provided for. Shall I thank you now? Or are there other debts I owe you of which I am as yet unaware? I would not want to appear ungrateful for your hospitality.”
She regarded him quizzically. “You still do not understand, I think.” She walked around to the back of his chair and took hold of the handles. “Even I do not plan to be here for more than a week at the most. And I am wasting valuable time setting and resetting your legs. But I am willing to invest this time in you because you are so dear to me. I am hoping, in fact, that you will chose to accompany me when I depart.” They wheeled around and began a slow circuit of the room. Apparently, the servants Vykos had alluded to in their initial meeting had returned and hastily completed their unpacking. Or perhaps not so hastily. He had no idea how long he had been unconscious.
“I do not do these things so that you will feel indebted to me. I do them for the sake of the growing friendship between our peoples. Or at least, that was the reason I initially agreed to ‘recycle’ you for your masters.
“After you had arrived, of course, I had the additional pleasure of doing it for the sheer pleasure of your company and for the affection I hold for you. Do not shake your head. You are a rare jewel, my sensitive young killer. All cold calculation and poetry. I find your outlook, which I must admit is quite foreign to my own, refreshing.
“We are not so different, you and I. We are joined by our common passion. Our undying enmity for the foul Tremere will be a bridge between our two peoples. You will help me by removing certain obstacles—certain sorcerous obstacles—from my path. I will help you and your people in return by rehabilitating those of your brothers who are experienced at such dangerous work but who are put in dire peril by the very fact that they have succeeded in such a mission.
“Our peoples will forge an alliance before which the entire Cainite world will tremble, and we—you and I—shall be the peace-hostages, the ambassadors of good will, the glue cementing that relationship. It is a great and terrible responsibility. You have been honored above all of your kind, young Parmenides. Your name will, no doubt, echo through the secret places of the mountain many generations after your passing.”
She is deranged, Parmenides thought. He had always been told that the Tzimisce were unhinged, warped from the moment of their Becoming. Rumors of the Sabbat’s dark initiation rites, of neonates being buried alive and having to claw their way up out of the grave or spend eternity entombed in the earth’s arms—such mind-rending torments were parceled out even to the delicate Lasombra. The forging of a Tzimisce was an ordeal made of sterner stuff.
Parmenides was no stranger to harsh discipline. The rigors of his intense physical, mental, and spiritual training had left uncounted scores of his fellow novices—every one already enhanced with the supernal strength and endurance that were the birthright of his brotherhood—dead or begging for Final Death.
Even Parmenides, however, would rather summon up the Words of Undoing than undergo a single night of a Tzimisce apprenticeship.
The fiends’ reputation for both physical and emotional sadism—and their unsettling power to inflict their demented predilections not only upon their own bodies, but upon those of their neighbors—made them universally feared and shunned.
If the Tzimisce were hard on outsiders, however, they were even more fearsome to their own kind. They were fiercely proud of their clan’s mastery of the physical form and delighted in demonstrating their art and mastery at every opportunity. A Tzimisce novice was literally a captive audience to such inhuman experiments.
“And if I will not cooperate with this ‘alliance’?” Parmenides challenged.
Vykos paused. “Oh, I will be so disappointed. I have already invested so much in your rehabilitation. I think you will be pleased. And your masters, they are relying upon you as well. It is a grave responsibility you must bear, as well as an honor. There is no honor without responsibility.”
She wheeled him around to face the large hand-carved looking glass. It was made of blackened bog-oak and stood easily seven feet high. Parmenides recoiled in apprehension.
“Oh, I know it’s a bit much. Overly dramatic. But I always keep several largish mirrors about the office. It has such a disarming effect on visitors, especially when one has numerous business contacts among the Lasombra. Makes them uncomfortable. Puts them off their game.
“Oh, you must forgive me. You are unfamiliar with their ways. I assumed that such interactions with our brothers in the Sabbat are commonplace to you, but I see that is not the case. I hope you will soon have the chance to meet them. Yes, I will have to arrange it at the earliest opportunity.
“The Trojans would have appreciated this dubious honor. For them, however, it would have been sufficient to beware of Greeks bearing gifts. With the Lasombra, you must have a caution of even of those of indifferent bearing. But you will see them for yourself and then you can judge whether I have spoken rightly.”
Parmenides’s gaze was locked on the mirror in open incredulity. He cursed himself for a fool, knowing he should have been prepared for just such an eventuality. But still, he could not stop himself from gaping.
The face that stared back at him was not his face. Of course it’s not our face, a distant part of his mind scolded him, our face is still sitting on the desk—draped over that war trophy we carried from the Tremere chantry and laid at her feet like a sacrifice, an offering. “A peace offering,” he muttered aloud.
The fact that the internal voice seemed so rational, so composed, terrified him. The face that mouthed the words a peace offering belonged to the ghoul. The ghoul he had struck down and strode over when first entering this foul den. What had Vykos called him? Ravenna.
Parmenides’s skin was no longer the enviable true ebony that was the trademark of the Assamite line—the legacy of decades of unrelenting, moistureless, desert climate working upon a complexion devoid of the normal healthy, ruddy undertone that was the outward sign of the humble miracle of circulation.
His new complexion was not unpleasant. It was the uniform olive of a gentler Mediterranean clime. His features deceptively placed his point of origin somewhere on the Italian peninsula. Parmenides found himself thinking, uncomfortably, of Venice.
“Well, what do you think?” Vykos prompted. “You must admit that even the devilish arts of the Tremere will not be able to penetrate such a disguise. Because it’s not a disguise, really, when you come right down to it.”
Parmenides nodded absently. Then his gaze traveled downward. He braced himself against the first glimpse of his maimed lower legs, but a neat red woolen blanket draped across his lap spared him the worst of it. Although he could not feel his feet he noted, with some distracted gratitude, that they were no longer fused together.
Taking the arms of the chair firmly in hand, he tried to push himself to his feet. He succeeded only in unbalancing the chair, tilting it dangerously forward. But Vykos’s steadying hands did not allow him to overturn.
“No, do not try to rise, my dearest. You are still bound to the chair. Your legs will not bear you up and I have not the leisure at present to dedicate the coming nights to setting things right. Great things are afoot. I am afraid you will have to remain in the chair until,” she paused as if carefully considering her words. “Until you have recovered enough to stand on your own.”
Parmenides did not relish the thought of spending weeks, more likely months, in such confinement.
He threw the blanket in his lap to the floor with the intention of loosing the restraints that held him to the chair.
He immediately wished he hadn’t. There were no restraints. He could not tell where the grisly chair ended and his lower body began. He sat unresisting as Vykos recovered the discarded blanket and smoothed it back into place. He stared blankly straight ahead.
“There, there. Soon you will be able to walk again. You have my word on it. I will not permit you to damage yourself beyond the point where that damage can be undone. But you must control your extreme emotions. Your passion will be your undoing. You must focus your impatience, your rage, your will upon remaking your broken body. Only then will you ever be free of this….”
She made an open gesture which might have been meant to indicate this chair, this room, this situation, or even this broken shell of a body.
“In the meantime, I have important work I need for you to do. No, do not argue. This work requires no great feats of leaping and bounding. You will do quite well with your current means of locomotion. Now listen and do whatever I shall tell you.”
No response.
“If you will not do it for my sake, or for the sake of your own recovery, I am instructed to tell you this: that you will do it for the sake of the one who, diving toward green waters, catches his heel. You are given to know that he is a stone dropped upward into the river of night.”
Parmenides bowed his head in resignation. Nor did he stir until he had received all the words that she had to entrust to him.
Friday, 25 June 1999, 11:58 PM
Oregon Hill
Richmond, Virginia
Three staccato crashes cut through the night. Don Carlos immediately recognized them as gunshots. They were fired several blocks away, but he had no way of knowing who had fired them. Were the mortal drug dealers, who refused to give up this neighborhood to the young couples who had moved in and renovated block after block of the turn-of-the-century homes, settling some score? Or was the gunplay part of the grand drama that was playing out with Don Carlos at its center?
He supposed that as long as everyone assumed the former, there was no danger to him. And wasn’t that the whole point of this exercise that was unlife—to accumulate as much power and wealth while subjecting himself to as little actual danger as possible?
Don Carlos marched toward one of the houses that most distinctly had not been renovated. Prince Thatchet was patently resistant to the concept of progress in any guise. The old fossil, Don Carlos surmised, would prefer the entire city to crumble around him. He had probably felt right at home when the Yankees had bombarded Richmond to within an inch of its life a hundred and thirty-odd years before. Don Carlos had not been around back then, not even as a mortal, but from what he’d heard and from what he could see with his own eyes, those glory days of the Confederacy had been the last hurrah for this city. Yes, it had been rebuilt, but history had passed it by.
Only constant pressure exerted by the primogen and by the prince’s own clanmates, those Ventrue enmeshed within the world of corporate banking and high finance, kept the city moving forward and keeping pace—falteringly, at that—with other emerging centers of vitality in the New South, such as Atlanta and Charlotte.
Otherwise, a larger portion of the city would more closely resemble the house Don Carlos approached, the prince’s primary haven. Decades had passed since ever a paintbrush had touched those walls. The roof was intact, for the most part, and several windows retained actual unbroken panes of glass. The two obviously armed men standing guard on the front porch—Don Carlos knew them to be the prince’s ghouls—lent the building the air of a crackhouse, but since the police department answered to the prince’s beck and call, there was no danger of harassment on that front.
But other fronts remained available.
“You are sure he is there?” the albino had asked.
“I am sure,” was Don Carlos’s confident response.
The albino was a profoundly disturbing creature. Perhaps it was his eyes, the palest pink, that added to his Sabbat mystique, that made him somewhat unnerving even to other undead, those who had seen enough of the unnatural and the macabre that they should long ago have ceased to be squeamish about anything. Don Carlos had observed how the albino’s own followers glanced uneasily at him, how they kept a certain distance as if his touch might be poisonous. And they were anything but normal themselves. Don Carlos had, of course, heard of the Sabbat since shortly after his Embrace, but he’d always considered the tales to be the Kindred equivalent of bogeyman stories intended to frighten unruly children—or childer, in this case—toward acceptable behavior. Now, having come face to face with actual specimens of the subject of those tales, he was no longer so sure. The vampires with whom he had associated previously had been members of the Camarilla, and while many of them were certainly monstrous in their own right, there was something…different about the albino and the few of his followers whom Don Carlos had seen. Something more—and something less.
More menacing. Don Carlos had survived as long as he had among more powerful Kindred because he had a knack for anticipating their wants and pleasures. More than once he had performed some minor favor for an elder before she even realized that she wanted the favor done. In so displaying his own ingratiating and foppish nature, he ensured, to a degree, his safety. Not that the elders or the prince trusted him, for they rightly perceived that his fealty rose from a self-serving appreciation of their station, rather than any particular loyalty to their person. Indeed, none of them would be surprised in the least to find Don Carlos taking the side of any prevailing faction. To the victor would go the spoils. Always. The trick was twofold: to know in advance who the victor would be, and to survive long enough to enjoy the spoils. The elders, constantly locked in schemes of conquest and one-up-manship, and knowing Don Carlos’s transparently opportunistic nature, did not trust him. But they trusted that they could predict his actions, and thus in their eyes he was disarmed as a threat. He reaped the benefits of their struggles as surely as any vulture on a recent field of battle.
But this albino, this creature of the Sabbat, he was a wildcard, and knowledge of his actions gave Don Carlos an advantage over even his aged brethren of the Camarilla. The albino was more menacing because he was not part of the static power structure that provided Don Carlos’s security. As an unknown, the creature was more dangerous, but also potentially more useful. Either eventuality stemmed directly from the second half of the equation—the albino was less predictable. Don Carlos had been constantly weighing the advantages and disadvantages of the developing situation since he was first contacted by agents of the Sabbat months ago. Was the body half empty or half full? He had decided that the possible benefits of cooperating with the Sabbat outweighed the dangers, and despite his qualms while in the actual presence of the disturbing albino, he still believed that to be the case. For the Sabbat to establish a presence in Richmond, they would need the assistance of someone who knew the city, who knew the habits and havens of those Kindred residing there. That someone was likely to receive certain considerations in return: the disappearance of a rival, inside information that would allow him to eliminate a “threat” to the prince. There was no shortage of ways, in Don Carlos’s mind, that he could help the Sabbat, and they him.
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br /> The brief meeting with the albino merely served to introduce even loftier aspirations into Don Carlos’s thoughts.
“We require a demonstration of your unfettered access to the prince,” the albino had said.
Now, as Don Carlos trod closer to the prince’s haven, a small microphone strapped to his chest beneath his shirt, his mind was full of the possibilities revealed to him. They want to know how to get to the prince! The audacity of the Sabbat amazed him. Not only did they wish to strengthen their presence in Richmond, they were laying the groundwork for what could only be the assassination of the prince at some future date. Knowing what was going to happen, Don Carlos reasoned, he might be able to position himself so as to influence the selection of the next prince. Looking farther down that road, he might be able to assume that mantle himself at some point. The mere thought made him giddy. Never before in his nights of endless scheming had Don Carlos felt so completely alive, so completely aware of the pulse of his city.
As he climbed the front steps, the ghouls on the front porch returned his nod. They were expecting him. Earlier that evening, he’d sent word that he had discovered important information that he must deliver to the prince at once. Respectfully, he petitioned for an audience. “The survival of the city may hang in the balance!” Don Carlos had included at the end of his note, resorting to a level of hyperbole he normally avoided, but thereby securing timely acceptance of his request.
The porch creaked under Don Carlos’s weight. How unseemly, he thought, for a prince to comport himself in such a manner. I will arrange things differently. The ghouls seemed unaware of the tight-lipped smile that Don Carlos could not quite restrain.
He quickly mastered himself and was met inside by more ghouls, at least a half dozen. They were a sorry-looking lot, rattily dressed, unshaven, foul in both odor and demeanor, unconcerned with or unschooled in the most basic facets of decorum. But they were no less lethal for their ramshackle appearance. Prince Thatchet selected them—his corps of ghouls, for he trusted his own kind so little that he would have no Kindred for his bodyguard—for their adeptness with knife or gun. Theirs was not to receive dignitaries, and they maintained no illusions in that direction.
