The Mortality Principle

by Alex Archer

  Garin only shrugged, but despite his grand words Roux knew exactly what he meant; he was growing bored of the chase. This had nothing to do with being concerned about wasting time or watching life pass him by. Garin knew that Roux was interested in finding the shards of Saint Joan’s sword—he cried out in his sleep often enough, his guilt at the memory of watching her burn all but overpowering even after all this time. He even knew why he was so driven to find it: the belief that it might offer an end to their seeming endless time in this mortal coil. But unlike the old man, his apprentice had no hankering for death. He would quite happily live gloriously and eternally, sucking the marrow out of the bones of the world and all of the people he encountered along the way.

  “So,” Garin asked, letting that one word linger as he did his best to shift the conversation in a less contentious direction. “What do you think of all this gossip? Could we have been chasing a golem all this time? A man-made man?”

  “Nonsense,” Roux said. “There’s no such thing. It’s a fairy tale.”

  “How can you say that after everything we’ve seen?”

  “Because it’s all nonsense. No matter what else, we both know that it’s impossible to make something out of nothing. You can’t take a handful of dust and clay and turn it into a living thing. It cannot be done. It’s wishful thinking. It’s not magic or alchemy or any form of science. It is pure fairy tale.”

  “Or is it? Just because we haven’t come across it on our wandering doesn’t mean it’s not possible, that there’s not some underlying universal law beyond our understanding.” Roux understood the point well enough.

  “Yes, of course there is an element of truth to that,” Roux agreed. “There is more to the world than any one of us knows. But do you really think there could ever be a science so powerful that it could fashion life not from the living?” The thing was, Garin was right; there was no way that he could be absolutely sure it wasn’t possible. Living almost four centuries wasn’t possible, and yet they had done it, hadn’t they? And in those four hundred years Roux had seen a great many things that should not have been possible and yet they had happened.

  But could that mean the killer they sought had emerged from myth? Surely not. It made no sense, no sense at all.

  “It’s the last great miracle, isn’t it? Over the past century man has taken every power believed to be supernatural and found a way to harness it. All save the creation of life. So surely, that’s the next step? That’s the next great scientific leap? The mortality principle?”

  Roux really didn’t have the words to argue with the younger man. The world was changing. Fast. So many of those changes were happening faster than he could comfortably adapt to. This wasn’t the world he had been born into. There would come a time when it had all advanced beyond him, he knew, and he did not look forward to that day.

  “If you truly believe we are nearing the end of this journey, we need to find him before he moves on,” Roux said. “End it here.”

  “You think the killer is still here? Surely he has already moved on. Kill and move. Kill and move. How else could he stay ahead of us?”

  “I don’t think he’s left yet,” Roux said. It had taken a while for a simple idea to percolate in his brain, becoming an itch that he couldn’t quite scratch. It had nagged away at him for so long that there had been nights when he had lain awake trying to unravel a jumble of thoughts to find the irritant. But it was always there, and it always came back to the same question: Why had no one seen a stranger traveling alone despite the distance that the killer had covered?

  It didn’t make sense.

  How could the brute make his way from town to town without ever being seen? Surely his simple presence on the road would raise suspicion. A lonely traveler leaving death in his wake? People should see him. People should be talking about him, fearful, suspicious…

  Roux and Garin had raised enough eyebrows and they had been following the trail of death, always too late to be treated as suspects.

  “Why?” Garin asked.

  “I think he travels by night. And only by night.” He said it almost before the thought had entered his mind, as if he had known the answer all along but no one had asked him the right question until that moment, not even himself. “That’s why he hasn’t been caught. He rests during daylight hours, moves on at night.” He looked up at the sky. “Which means we have a few hours yet. He cannot be far away.”

  “So we rouse the neighborhood, have them out on a witch hunt beating down the doors to every place until we shake him out of the woodwork?”

  “At the first shout of alarm the militia would have been out hammering on the doors. He’s not in a house. He has to be somewhere no one would think of looking. Somewhere that would never fall under suspicion. Somewhere above reproach.” His eyes drifted up the hill, toward the towering walls of the fortress overlooking the township.

  “The castle,” Garin said, following the direction of his gaze. “It makes sense. Who would think of looking there? It’s impregnable, but more than that, it’s symbolic. It represents safety, not threat. They look to the castle for protection.”

  “And behind its walls it’s harboring a monster,” Roux said, finishing his thought.

  Garin fell silent.

  Roux knew instinctively that they were right.

  The castle was a bastion of safety. No one would ever imagine it could be sheltering a monster.

  How many other similar havens had they passed along the way, châteaus and forts fallen into disrepair, the great family homes of the nobility? Hundreds all told. And it had never once crossed their mind the blue bloods could be harboring the creature. Never once. That was their first true mistake. He looked up at the castle now, the high walls casting thick shadow down over the forested slope and the towers that rose up like fingers clawing desperately at the sky. They had time to rectify their mistake.

  At the very least they had nowhere else to look that they hadn’t looked a thousand times before, so it was something.

  But was it enough to give him hope that they might truly be at the end of the road?

  24

  Annja was alone out there.

  The streets were deserted.

  But why should it be any different? It was a small town, not a city. There was no expectation of nightlife. It was the kind of town that closed as the sun went down and didn’t open again until it rose. There was no reason for anyone to go out after dark in a place like this. None whatsoever. But still, the quiet gave her the creeps. It just felt unnatural.

  The castle on the hill was lit up like a watchtower, but were there sirens on the rocks below? Her eyes were drawn to the bright lights. Were they calling to the killer? It didn’t feel like a good place to hide or to find his next victim, but there was something about that place that sent a shiver right down into her core.

  Annja was so intent on looking in the direction of the lights that she almost walked straight past the bundle of rags that betrayed a vagrant huddled in the doorway of the convenience store.

  She paused, waiting to see if he responded to her presence.

  The man didn’t move.

  For one sickening moment she thought he was already dead—if not at the hands of the monster, then at the mercy of the elements—but he grunted and shuffled inside the sleeping bag. The bag was pulled up around his head and the drawstring pulled tight so that the only part of him exposed to the night was his eyes, and even they lay in shadows.

  Annja took another step toward the man, then hesitated, realizing that there was every chance that she was about to meet the killer. She had no reason to believe the thing she’d seen on the roof hunted like some lion on the Serengeti, maybe it was more like a fisherman dropping a lure into the water.

  The thought pulled her up short, the cold stone of doubt settling in her gut.

  But…

  That word.

  Always that word.

  But what if she was ahead of the killer and the man in th
e bag was a victim in waiting? Did he even know he was in danger? Why should word of the killer have reached him? Didn’t his very presence in this doorway mean he’d dropped out from the world in many—if not all—ways?

  Annja didn’t have a choice; she had to warn him even if he chose to do nothing about it.

  She crouched beside the man, not sure how to catch his attention. Shaking him felt unnecessarily rude, aggressive. She placed a hand on the bag, not sure he’d even feel it through the downy padding, and said, “Don’t be afraid,” hoping he would understand.

  The figure moved, shuffling about uncomfortably in the bag. Annja pulled back her hand, waiting for him to show that he was alert. The man pushed himself into a sitting position. Fingers emerged through the face-hole to draw down on the toggle and open the space wider, until the man’s head emerged like some grotesque moth breaking out of its cocoon. The homeless man did not move any closer to the streetlight’s yellow puddle of light.

  “It’s been a long time since a woman frightened me,” the man said, amused. “But if anyone was going to, it would be you.”

  It took her a second to place the voice and words.

  “Garin?”

  She saw the grin through the dark.

  “What are you doing out here? You do know the killer is heading this way.”

  He grinned again. “I’m banking on it. What am I doing out here? I’m bait. Better that than I find some unfortunate wretch to play the part and risk his life, don’t you think? I’ve got no intention of trailing this monster halfway across Europe again.”

  Annja caught the last word, but made no reference to it.

  Instead, she said, “You shouldn’t be doing this on your own.”

  “I can handle myself.”

  “I know you can, but you don’t know what you are going up against.”

  “Oh, believe me, I know exactly what I’m up against.”

  “And so do I,” another voice said. She hadn’t heard Roux approach behind her. The old man stood beneath the streetlight, bathed in its sickly yellow glow. “We’ve faced down this threat once before, haven’t we, Garin?”

  “Roux,” the man in the bag said.

  “But this is what I don’t like. We killed it and placed its body where it would never be discovered. So how can it be at large? Can you answer that, Garin?”

  There was more than a trace of anger in his voice. There was barely contained rage. Annja glanced back at Garin just as he was shucking off the sleeping bag and clambering awkwardly to his feet.

  She had assumed they were together, but that wasn’t right. Garin hadn’t known the old man was there.

  Was that where Roux had disappeared to? Had he been stalking Garin all evening? She’d thought on some basic level he had ditched her to go after the killer. But she remembered his question: Did she trust Garin? She studied the old man’s face. She knew he didn’t trust him on a fundamental level, and with plenty good reason. Garin had broken his trust and betrayed him more times than could be counted, but as long as she’d known them they’d always been on the same side.

  Not always, she thought, remembering the Mask of Torquemada.

  But even then, Garin hadn’t been a murderer.

  This was wrong.

  “It wasn’t dead,” Garin said.

  Roux shook his head in denial of the only answer Garin offered. “Impossible. How could it not be dead?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Let me try asking another way. How could it have survived for more than a hundred and fifty years when we left it for dead, dismembered, buried away in an impossible prison?” Roux waited but Garin had no answer for him.

  “I really wish one of you would tell me what the hell is going on.” Annja cut into their conversation. Even without hearing the end of Roux’s story, it was obvious there were links between Mary Shelley’s immortal tale and the creature at the window, but how did all of that possibly relate to this place, this time, these very real murders?

  “It might make more sense if I just showed you,” Roux said. “If Garin wants to wait here all night in the hope that the killer happens to stumble across him, let him. I’ve got better things to do with my time. But mark my words, Annja. This is all his fault.”

  Roux turned away and started walking.

  Garin had extricated himself from the sleeping bag and stood half in, half out of the doorway.

  “You coming?” Annja asked him.

  “I’m not sure I’m invited.”

  Annja heard the grunt from Roux, who had clearly registered the comment. “That’s as close as you’re going to get to an invitation,” she said.

  Garin offered a wry smile. “Then I guess I’m coming.”

  25

  Sunlight glinted from the windows of the houses.

  People moved through the streets, giving them little more than a passing glance.

  There was no sign of the fear that was expected.

  Were they unaware of the danger they were in?

  Ignorance was no shield to fend off death.

  The main doors set into the castle wall stood closed to the outside world. They were thick timber, sturdy enough to repel an enemy horde if not impregnable. Bands of iron studded across the timbers, adding to their strength. A smaller door set into those huge doors was also locked and bolted, the hatches battened down for the night. It would demand more strength than either Roux or Garin possessed to break it down. Garin studied it, wondering if the great brute they’d pursued this long could have broken through, and realized it was possible, given its incredible strength, but there was no sign of forced entry. In his mind’s eye he imagined the killer’s version of subtlety was to wrench the doors off their hinges and hurl them aside, but even if not, there were no obvious signs of damage. The doors had not been cared for beyond being oiled for centuries to protect them against exposure to the sun.

  “We could be wrong,” Garin said.

  “We could,” Roux agreed. “But we are not. Just because nothing has gotten inside this way doesn’t mean there aren’t other ways into the fortress.”

  “A back door?” Annja supplied.

  “An escape route?” Garin countered.

  “Same difference,” Roux replied. “Just not an actual door. Maybe a passageway from the dungeons that opens up in the forest, away from the threat. No one wants to trap themselves when the wolf turns up at the door.”

  Garin was doubtful. He thought the older man was clutching at straws, but there was no point in arguing with him. There either was a secret passage or there wasn’t. They’d either find it, or they wouldn’t. And if it was secret, the odds were that they wouldn’t.

  They patrolled the perimeter of the castle, looking up at the walls and down the slope for any sign of passage. There was nothing obvious to suggest the killer had found his way inside. Roux was convinced that the killer was still somewhere close by, but Garin had his doubts.

  The younger man led the way, pausing every now and then to examine the ground, looking at the broken twigs blown from the trees as deadfall, and the stems of grass blown back in the wind, at anything that might prove someone had stood there in the past few hours. There was no sign of anything on the walls to hint that anyone had tried to scale them, no scrape of a muddy footprint on the stone, no deep imprint on the ground to announce that a ladder had recently stood there.

  He was being more thorough than he needed to be, but he didn’t want Roux claiming he’d screwed up.

  If the killer had managed to get inside to hide, it was unlikely that it would have fashioned a ladder to climb onto the wall. Even the calmest of murderers would surely be concerned about the danger of being caught so quickly after killing his latest victim. So it would have chosen stealth over speed. Garin tried to put himself in the brute’s place. If he could not put a distance between himself and his victim before the body had been discovered, he would have wanted to find a hiding place as quickly as possible. The question was, had it planned it
s hiding place before it committed the crime? That would make it ten times harder to find.

  And was Roux’s theory about the killer going to ground during daylight correct?

  It was a simple answer to why no one reported seeing the brute, but if he was wrong that meant the hours spent searching only put more distance between them.

  Roux seemed lost in thought. Garin pulled him back from his ruminations.

  “Over here,” the younger man called, his voice a mixture of excitement and urgency. Roux closed the distance quickly and crouched beside him to take a closer look at what Garin had discovered.

  A metal grille had been set into the stone paving slabs close to the wall.

  Garin tugged at it with one hand and it began to lift with little more resistance than a door that needed oiling.

  “Not used every day,” Annja noted as the metal grated back on rusted hinges. “And it’s been locked until recently.” She pointed out the different quality of the rust on the iron.

  “Then we might just be on the right track, after all.” Roux smiled, but seemed reluctant to get his hopes up. He and Garin had been close before only to fall tantalizingly short.

  The shadow of the wall revealed nothing of the blackness that lay beyond the grate. Garin reached inside and felt a metal handhold set into the foundation of the wall. A way down. Or, more importantly, a way out if the castle’s occupants needed it.

  “After you,” Garin said.

  “We need a light,” Roux pointed out. “We can’t face a killer in the dark. We need to be able to see what we are up against.”

  Garin slung the pack from his back and kneeled beside it. A moment later he had pulled out a small glass lantern with a stump of candle inside. They each caught the sudden smell of sulfur that wafted close by as Garin struck a match. He had the candle lit and the door of the lantern latched back into place a moment later.

  “And Roux said let there be light,” Annja quipped.

  Garin slung the bag back onto his shoulders and strapped the lantern to it.