DARK AGES
TZIMISCE
Thirteenth of the Dark Ages Clan Novels
By Myranda Kalis
Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
Dark Ages Tzimisce is a product of White Wolf Publishing.
White Wolf is a subsidiary of Paradox Interactive.
Copyright © 2004 by White Wolf Publishing.
First Printing August 2004
Crossroad Press Edition published in Agreement with Paradox Interactive
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Table of Contents
What Has Come Before
Prologue
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Interlude
Part Two
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Interlude
Part Three
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Interlude
Epilogue
What Has Come Before
It is the year 1232, and decades of warfare and intrigue continue among the living and the dead. The Teutonic Knights and Sword-Brothers have embarked on campaigns to conquer and convert pagan Prussia and Livonia, spreading the crusading zeal into new lands. Bloodshed has, as always, followed in its wake. In the shadowy courts of the undead, the situation is no better. Lord Jürgen of Magdeburg, called the Swordbearer, has followed these knightly orders into the east with his own vampiric warriors, the Order of the Black Cross, bent on taking new territory and feasting on the blood of those he bests in battle.
During this conquest, Jürgen seized control of a monastery of the Obertus Order, an order of monks transplanted from Byzantium in the wake of that city’s destruction almost three decades ago. In it, Jürgen discovered a surprising secret, and has sent that secret, along with his diplomat and consort Rosamund d’ Islington, to the Tzimisce ambassador Myca Vykos.
As Jürgen continues his quest to conquer the east and Rosamund approach Vykos’ stronghold in Brasov with her lord’s message, Vykos himself finds himself entrenched in the centuries-old war and blood-feuds within his own clan….
Prologue
Sredetz, c. 1210
In the house of the Archbishop of Nod, a single light burned.
A shielded candle-lantern sat on the corner of a long writing table, covered with neat piles of correspondence sealed in wax and ribbon, a stack of ledgers, four personal journals, and a wooden box with a complicated lock. The Archbishop would soon be departing the seat of his power for a journey of indeterminate duration, and he was putting his affairs in order accordingly. Most of the letters were addressed to various prominent members of the Crimson Curia throughout Christendom and the Levant, and would leave for their destinations on the morrow in the saddlebags of his couriers. The ledgers contained the financial arrangements he had made, to be executed in his absence by his seneschal, a record of the precise amounts of monies to be spent and how his material estate was to be dispersed.
The journals were his own most private writings, his ruminations on his existence and its most important facets, its most formative events. Each was deceptively slender; he had long ago effaced himself of the ego needed to write of himself at embarrassing length. The last lines had been written in those books years before. He would never open them again, having said all that he wished to say. Soon, they would go into the box and the box’s lock would be set, to be opened only after he was gone.
The silence in the Archbishop’s study was broken only by the sound of a freshly sharpened quill on parchment, as he wrote one last letter. In the servants’ quarters downstairs, an Obertus revenant waited to carry it to its destination in the south, a small nunnery in which the eldest and wisest of his surviving childer found shelter.
My beloved daughter, dearest of the comforts left to me in this world, I give greetings to you.
By the time this letter reaches your hand, I will have already departed Sredetz for the journey of which I spoke in my last missive to you. I am resolved in the course that I have chosen, and I write you this last time to thank you for the many years of companionship and wise counsel you have generously granted to me. The strength of your faith has sustained my own soul, during the darkest hours of my existence. Your calm words have soothed my heart and soul in the hours when I felt that no balm of comfort would ever ease my pain again. Were it not for the duty that I owe to my own dead, I would come to see you again, and lay a father’s kiss on your brow, and wish you peace and joy in all the long years left to you.
Would that I might witness what you will become, and what you might accomplish, at your side.
But the fallen call to me softly, with voices that I cannot deny, and I must bring an ending to both their suffering and to my own.
I remain, and I shall always remain, your sire and your friend.
He gave the letter no signature. Instead, he dripped a medallion of deep red wax at the bottom of the page, and sealed it with the imprint of his house, his true house, not the signet of the Archbishopric of Nod. He tied the letter closed with a length of blue ribbon shot through with gold, his daughter’s favorite colors, for they reminded her of the sky she had long ago forsaken.
Then, he blew out the light.
Part One
Dragon’s Blood
Sângele apã nu se face.
(Blood is not water.)
—Romanian proverb
Chapter One
Just outside Brasov,
Winter 1232
The last snow of the
winter was falling as the column made its way up the steep, circuitous road leading to the monastery. It departed Brasov late in the day—too late, strictly speaking, for absolute safety beneath the threatening sky—but nonetheless made good time on the frozen roads. When the last of the day’s wan light failed, they lit torches and lanterns filled with fat tallow candles and continued on, albeit more slowly. They also released the diplomat traveling with them from her daylight conveyance and set her a-horse in the middle of their formation, protected on all sides yet in a position to display her importance to their mission. They refrained, however, from raising her standard into the stiffening wind. Her mount’s barding, deep green silk marked with a many-petaled white rose, had to suffice on that score. A pair of senior officers, also traveling protected from the light of the sun, emerged as well and took their places near the head of the column.
From their vantage point atop the hill on which the monastery stood, the monks watched the column’s progress and prepared. A message had arrived some days earlier, indicating the presence of the visitors and politely craving permission to approach concerning a matter of some urgency. After a suitable interval passed, that permission was formally and politely granted. The monks made ready, preparing pallets and sleeping spaces, and making certain adequate supplies were laid in to feed the guests and their mounts. By the time the column reached the top of the hill and came to the monastery’s high, heavy doors, all was in readiness. As the column made its way into the monastery courtyard, dragging a heavy sledge loaded down with a wooden casket, those doors opened, and the superior came forth. In his gnarled hands he carried a friendship cup of blood, hot from the vein and steaming slightly in the chilly air. A half-dozen novices followed him out into the snowy courtyard and filtered among the armed and armored knights, assisting in dismounting, accepting reins and murmuring quietly to cold and disgruntled horses.
The ambassador dismounted with the aid of the column’s commander and, after a fractional hesitation, handed her reins to the novice who offered his assistance. She lifted the hem of her heavy winter skirts and swept forward, her carriage regal, bending her spine only to offer the elderly superior the courtesy he was due. He responded with equal gravity, bowing carefully from the shoulders, and extending to her the greeting-cup. When he spoke, his voice was unexpectedly stentorian, showing almost no sign of his physical age. “Welcome, friends and brothers, most honored sister, to the house of God. Welcome, in the name of my Lord Vykos, who stands ready to greet you. Welcome, and be safe and sheltered within our walls.”
Rosamund d’Islington rose and accepted the cup, taking the sip that courtesy required. “We accept Lord Vykos’ gracious hospitality in the name of our lord and prince, Jürgen of Magdeburg, and in our own. I am Lady Rosamund d’Islington, Ambassador of the Rose, and my companions are Sir Gilbrecht and Sir Landric, of the Order of the Black Cross.” Each of the knights, in turn, accepted the cup and drank of it, both being well schooled enough to hide any distaste or distrust they might harbor for the gesture. A brown-robed novice accepted the cup and, bowing quickly to his superior, carried it inside quickly. “We seek counsel with Lord Vykos on a matter of some urgency, and not inconsiderable mystery.”
One elegant hand, gloved in fur-lined leather, gestured down at the sledge and its burden. The old monk nodded gravely. “I am Father Aron. Come, my lady, and my brothers, my Lord Vykos awaits you.”
It had been a long journey and Rosamund was already deeply, deeply tired. Traveling rough across half the east in the dead of winter was most assuredly not how she had hoped to begin the year, much less undertaking that journey with the intent of treading deep into the lands of the Voivodate. The laboriously negotiated truce between Jürgen of Magdeburg and Vladimir Rustovitch held—tenuously, at times, given some of the provocations flung back and forth across the Obertus territories that lay between them—and Rosamund did not particularly relish the task of putting its elasticity to a serious test despite the love, and the duty, she bore her lord. She did not, even to herself, admit to fearing the task she was assigned. To do so was beneath her dignity as an ambassador of her clan, and a woman raised to rule. She was more than a little frightened, however, as she followed Father Aron through the halls of his monastery. She endeavored not to let it show in her posture or expression, and kept her emotions rigidly controlled, lest someone with keener eyes than most notice her discomfiture.
Even in the west, tales circulated of Tzimisce savagery, the brutality of their rule and the horrors that they wrought with their unnatural magics. Rosamund, as a youngster newly come to the blood, had listened to those tales the way mortal girls listened to their grandmothers’ ghost stories, half-afraid and half-laughing, in every way certain that those tales were as exaggerated as the lais in a book of romances. She knew the truth now, and if the truth was more complex than the frightful tales of wandering storytellers, there was still enough horror in the reality to justify caution.
Rosamund refused to admit to fear, even inside the walls of the dragon’s den – though she was forced to admit that this particular dragon seemed far more civilized than most. They had met once in Magdeburg, she and Myca Vykos. The impressions that she retained of that brief encounter were of a man whose graceful use of language nearly matched the diplomats of her own clan, whose intelligence and grasp of subtle political nuance gave a certain lie to the tales of simple-minded Tzimisce barbarity. Rosamund hoped profoundly that those impressions were true, for what she needed to deal with now was a politician and a diplomat, not a warlord.
Father Aron opened one of the doors branching off the main corridor, revealing a staircase descending in a slow, gentle curve. Rosamund lifted the hem of her kirtle and followed, summoning to mind, for the thousandth time since leaving home, everything she knew about Tzimisce greeting protocols. The sum total of this knowledge, she realized early on, was something less than satisfying and reassuring, but repetition of what she did know lent steadiness to her nerves. She also cherished a fleeting hope that a Tzimisce diplomat would be fractionally more tolerant of the lapses of ignorant foreigners than a Tzimisce warlord looking for an excuse to separate an ignorant foreigner’s head from her shoulders.
The staircase terminated in a wider, shorter corridor at the end of which lay a highly vaulted doorway, lacking a door, but guarded by two towering figures swathed in heavy robes. They bore no obvious weapons or, beyond their great height, any obvious sign of deformity—both stood a head and more taller than her knightly escorts. At the doorway, Father Aron paused and nodded politely to them both. They returned the gesture, and permitted him to pass. Rosamund followed the priest’s lead, offering each figure a suitable curtsey, and her escorts both bowed. They were motioned through without further ceremony. Rosamund half expected to be led to an antechamber where she would be required to wait an interminable length of time until her host saw fit to allow her into his exalted presence. It was the sort of tactic used extensively by the western princes whose means of establishing dominance she was most familiar with, and she suspected that some things held true everywhere. It was therefore with considerable surprise that Rosamund found herself stepping into a small but luxuriously appointed receiving chamber, confronting Father Aron’s bent back as he knelt in supplication before a low-backed wooden chair and the man occupying it. Myca Vykos was much as she remembered him, which came as a bit of a surprise, given the Tzimisce tendency to alter their forms at whim—she could not recall another Tzimisce of her acquaintance, though there were precious few of those, who was entirely the same every time they appeared at court. The flesh-shaping arts of the Fiends could be used in manners subtle and grotesque. It was Rosamund’s experience that grotesque seemed to predominate among many in the clan, and the possibility that some short-tempered barbarian might choose to warp and twist her own flesh for some imagined offense never failed to fill her with dread. It was oddly comforting to set eyes on a man who seemed to change himself so little.
Even seated
, he seemed tall, though not so tall as her Lord Jürgen.He was slender and well formed, his black hair loose, unadorned, and trailing over one shoulder. His features were sharp and fine, if saturnine. His dark eyes set deep beneath slightly arched brows, the shape of his mouth suggesting he spent little time smiling. His hands, ringed in gold, rested on the carven arms of his chair, long-fingered, slender, and completely devoid of nervous gestures. Rosamund dropped her eyes before those hands, and the elegant clothing he wore, drew her in more deeply than she wished.
Next to that chair knelt the brown-robed novice, still holding the friendship-cup she had drunk from, and who now offered that cup to the object of Father Aron’s veneration. It was accepted, and Myca Vykos rose in a swirl of heavy Byzantine robes, drawing her forward into the room with a languidly regal gesture of greeting. “My Lady Rosamund, my Lord Gilbrecht, my Lord Landric, I offer you welcome in the name of my sire, in the name of the house in which dwells the blood of my making, and in my own name as lord and protector of this place. Come among my people as friend and guest, and know that within my walls you shall receive all honor, peace, and safety. I swear this, in the holy names of Earth and Sky, and by the Waters of Life and Death.”
And, so saying, he raised the cup to his lips and drained it. Rosamund, recognizing a ritual cue when she saw one, offered her deepest court presentation curtsey. After a moment’s hesitation, her companions offered their honors, as well. Lord Vykos, she noticed, actually acknowledged those gestures with a formal, ceremonial inclination of his head, before gesturing them to rise. Father Aron and the cupbearer both rose as well and took the opportunity to excuse themselves, returning the way they had all come.
“My Lady Rosamund,” Lord Vykos stepped forward to claim her hand and kiss it quite properly, “no amount of graceless flattery on my part could truly encompass my pleasure at seeing you again. Our conversations in Magdeburg remain one of the finest memories I possess of that time. That you have traveled so far while winter still lay on the land, however, suggests much to me concerning the urgency of your mission—and the chill in your hands suggests much about the lack of comfort on the road. I suggest,” his dark eyes flicked back to gather up the two knights, whose expressions Rosamund could clearly imagine during this little speech, “that we repair to more pleasant quarters, where we may take our comfort and break our fast.”
Dark Ages Clan Novel Tzimisce: Book 13 of the Dark Ages Clan Novel Saga Page 1
