Blood Red (9781101637890)

by Lackey, Mercedes

  There were some gashes on his neck and legs that he allowed her to examine gingerly, but they were healing even as she poked at them. “Do we have to worry about you being bitten by him?” she asked.

  He shook his head in the negative. Presumably he would know if it was possible to be infected by the bite of a shifter.

  “I’ve found what’s left of the gypsy boy!” Dominik called from inside the cave, his voice sounding strange and hollow, as if he was calling from the Underworld. Well, in a way, he was. “It’s ugly, but it’s definitely him.”

  Dominik emerged from the cave, looking shaken, but not ill. Well, he was a doctor. Presumably he had seen dead bodies before, even mutilated ones. “Do you think you’d be able to run back to the village?” she asked Markos, who looked at her with his head to one side, puzzled, but nodded.

  Dominik slipped and slid his way up the slope and joined them. By this time she already had her plan in mind. There was no point in pretending they were anything other than what they actually were—not after the way those old men had reacted to the alvar. She could use that to their advantage.

  Well . . . except for Markos. He had better not be known as a shifter. But there was no reason why he could not reveal he was also an Elemental Magician. “I’d like you two to go back to the village where Markos left his clothing,” she said. “The villagers all know we went tearing out of there, and they’re going to be wild with questions—and a couple of the old men at the inn saw that haus-alvar you sent for me, Dominik. So they know, or some of them do anyway, that we’re not just folklorists. Markos, you shift back and make sure they don’t see you until you do, and then the two of you get the gypsies and any of the villagers that want to come. I’ll stay here and see what I can learn until you return.”

  Dominik nodded, and after a moment, so did Markos. “How do we explain—” Dominik began. She cut him off.

  “We explain nothing. If they ask questions about how we knew where the beast was, we look inscrutable and say that’s a secret we can’t divulge.” The long tradition of the Bruderschaft in keeping the curious from getting too curious stood her in good stead, now. “If they had a Master, or even a magician here, we’d have sensed him, and they would have known where to send for help when these killings started forty years ago. All they have are sensitives, maybe some hedge-wizards and herb-witches. So any time they start to ask a question that we don’t want to answer, that’s what we say. We’re not at liberty to divulge that information.”

  “But how do we explain why we’re here?” Dominik asked—then before she could reply, she saw him come up with the answer himself. “Of course! The truth! We passed this way, found out about the killings, and sought out a monster-slayer: you.”

  She nodded. “Exactly. And we don’t have to be too exact about where you found me, or how. Just say that because you are magicians, you know monsters exist, and you know how to find people that can kill them.”

  “And our motive?” Dominik persisted.

  “To please the Good God,” she said firmly. “As the properly pious knights of old did. That’s one motive they won’t ever question. And it has the added value of being true as well. The Bruderschaft was originally a small order of knights who were also Masters. We found we could move about more easily, and do more good, if we left off the knightly trappings and became foresters.”

  Markos stood up, and shook himself all over; from all that Rosa could see, his wounds were completely healed now. The foolish horses, too stupid to find the game trail in their state of panic, had crowded together into a little side passage. They had at least jammed themselves in with their rears to the rock wall, and they seemed relieved to see Dominik and Rosa. Both of them were foaming with nervous sweat, but were otherwise all right. Dominik got the reins of his without any problem; Rosa saw the horse calm instantly when he touched its nose, so he was using his own Earth powers on it. Rosa imposed a firm mental control on hers, despite some resistance. Once it was tractable, she led hers over to a tree where she tied it, taking no chances on its running off in case the silly thing decided to take fright again.

  Then again, running off was probably the smartest thing they could have done, and it certainly got them out of the way of the fight. Having a couple of rearing, thrashing horses in that melee would have been very. . . .awkward.

  Dominik mounted his horse, and he and Markos trotted off down the game trail; the thudding of hooves in leaf litter quickly faded to nothing. Now alone, Rosa went to examine the bodies.

  First she slid and scrambled all the way down into the cave; there wasn’t much light coming in from the entrance at all, and she didn’t have the advantage of Markos’ superior night vision. So once on relatively level ground, she closed her eyes for a moment and concentrated. This spell didn’t come easily to an Earth Master; it was generally more of an Air or Fire ability. A simple Earth Magician couldn’t have done this, it required a disproportionate amount of power than an Air or Fire Mage would need to supply. Come on. You’ve done this before. Earth power didn’t want to produce visible effects. Earth power preferred to make things grow, not glow. But when she opened her eyes again, her hand was glowing as brightly as a lit candle, or two.

  She held it above her head, so as to avoid blinding herself, and waited while her eyes adjusted to the cave. It wasn’t a very deep one, and after a moment, it was easy to see the gypsy boy’s body, brought unceremoniously down into the cave and left in the middle of the floor. Brought, not dragged: an important distinction. There was no sign of dragging at all, no smears on the rock, and given how the throat had been torn out, there would have been. And the body itself was in a heap, not pulled straight, as it would have been if it had been dragged. She moved to the body, knelt beside it with her hand casting light on it, and examined it. The shifter must have brought the body here in its half-form, then dumped it.

  Then fed. That was what Dominik had meant by “not pretty.” It looked as if he had done the feeding in full wolf form, which would correspond with Markos finding him asleep. Wolves generally slept after a heavy meal.

  But there it was. The creature had not just killed the boy, it had fed on him. Fed.

  This was the worst sort of shifter. One that not only killed humans, but ate them. And given that the beast had brought the boy here in half-form, he didn’t even have the poor excuse that the wolf had taken over. He had knowingly brought the body here, knowingly gone full-wolf, for the purposes of feeding on the body. Obscene. Cannibalistic.

  She had seen all she needed to see. She extinguished the light on her hand, and made her way slowly, slipping in the loose rock, back up the slope to where the shifter lay.

  She paused beside him, and examined him with a frown on her face. He looked . . . wrong. Not in the way that shifters always looked in the half-form, twisted, warped amalgams of beast and man, but wrong in other ways. Diseased. As if, even in human form, there would have been things obviously wrong with him.

  The fur was patchy—mangy, she would have said, if it had been a true wolf or a dog. The skin where there was no fur had swaths of red, roughened, flaking areas. The face—she was used to the half-wolf, half-human faces of the shifters in this form, and this creature . . . the skull was strangely flattened in front, and the eyes set too close together. The claws were yellow and brittle, and looked unhealthy. The tail had lost half its fur. In fact, the only area of fur that looked healthy was the band around its torso that represented the wolfskin belt that all sorcerous shifters used for their transformation.

  She caught a glimpse of something glittering around its neck, and reached down, fingers catching on a thin chain hidden in the patchy chest fur. She pulled. It broke. And as she pulled it off the body, she was strangely unsurprised to find there was a little copper medallion dangling from it.

  A medallion that showed the Stag of St. Hubert, with the inverted cross between its horns.

  Th
at was two of these medals now. Both found on shifters in Romania—in Transylvania, to be precise. There was something going on here, something besides the usual “sorcerer uses blood magic to become a shifter.”

  One such medal could have been a fluke, but two?

  One—well, a sufficiently motivated magician could very well have had the medal made just for himself. Or he could have made it himself. It wasn’t that hard to carve wax into a medal form, press it into clay, and pour in some molten copper.

  Two identical medals meant someone had made a more permanent mold, one that could be reused, and then had them cast or cast them himself. Two identical medals, found miles and miles apart, meant someone was giving them away to shifters.

  Why?

  Just how many more were there?

  And what did this mean?

  Was there a sorcerer out here who was taking like-minded fiends and teaching them? Turning them into—what? A kind of counter-Bruderschaft?

  Or had the plot to do so only just begun?

  12

  THE sound of many horses pushing through the forest alerted her to the arrival of Dominik, Markos and . . . whoever they were bringing with them. They were coming at the trot, so there was a dull rumble of hooves on the ground, and the noise of horses that were less skittish than the cart horses pushing their way through the underbrush on either side of the game trail.

  Dominik was in the lead as they came up the defile, with Markos on a borrowed horse behind him. The borrowed horse was even more stolid than the two cart horses were; it clearly did not care what was on its back, as long as whatever was there wasn’t actively sticking teeth or claws into it. When Rosa invoked Earth Magic to touch its mind, she was amused to discover that all it was thinking about was whether there might be something to eat when they got where they were going.

  And behind him was a procession of mixed gypsies and villagers, mounted singly or double on horses and ponies. They gypsies all looked stricken; the women were weeping, and the one woman that Rosa thought was the boy’s mother was nearly collapsing with grief.

  At least she’ll have a body to bury now. Cold comfort, but what was worse? Always wondering what had happened, or knowing the truth? In Rosa’s experience, it was uncertainty that was the harder of the two.

  Rosa moved off to one side, discretely out of the way, as soon as Dominik came into view. Really, at the moment, she didn’t want to be seen at all. It wasn’t that she felt at all guilty—how could she have done anything, when they hadn’t even reached the village when the boy was killed? But her presence was a complication that simply didn’t need to happen, and wouldn’t, if she stayed out of the way. She let Dominik be the one to show them the shifter, and take the gypsies down to the cave to deal with the boy’s body. Dominik had been the one who had been talking to them after all . . . and if they assumed that Dominik had been the one that killed the shifter, that was fine with her.

  They all left their horses at the top of the scree tied to a couple of scrawny saplings there. Then they divided into two parties; Markos led the villagers, and Dominik led the gypsies. The gypsies solemnly got torches out of bags tied to their saddles, as the three village men huddled in subdued and nervous consultation around the shifter’s body. Two of them were the old men who had seen her talking to the haus-alvar. She had a pretty good idea they knew exactly what they were looking at. In the folktales she had collected, there were plenty of stories of shifters.

  It must be a shock to actually see a dead one.

  Dominik got out a little tin matchbox, pulled out a lucifer match, and struck a light to one of the torches; the rest lit theirs from the first once it was properly burning. They all made their way gingerly down the scree and into the cave—and as she had pretty much expected, almost immediately wailing and lamenting echoed hauntingly out of the cave mouth and up the slope. It put a cold chill down her back to hear it, for it sounded as if spirits were crying from deep inside the earth.

  Well, at least now they have a body to mourn. Dominik emerged from the cave mouth and scrambled his way up the slope, as Markos joined the three villagers at the shifter’s body. Dominik paused there as well, and that was, she considered, her signal to join the group.

  They all turned to look at her as her feet rattled a little stream of stones down toward them. From the looks on their faces, the three village men expected some answers out of her. But they waited until she had joined them before speaking.

  “So . . . you are the monster hunter then?” said one of the two old men, looking at her with a piercing gaze. “The one that Markos Nagy told us about? Even though you are a woman?”

  “I am,” she affirmed, and turned the lapel of her coat so they could see the Bruderschaft badge pinned there. “I have been with the Brotherhood of the Foresters in the Black Forest since I was a child.” At their puzzled looks, she realized that their knowledge of geography probably didn’t extend past Sibiu. “That is in Germany, a long way to the west past Sibiu, past Budapest.”

  That got nods of recognition, and she continued. “The Brotherhood was formed to kill monsters. They rescued me from another like this one—” she toed the dead shifter. “It had murdered my grandmother. They learned that I was born with the magic of the Earth, which is what they use to fight these creatures, and took me in. I have been one of them ever since.”

  Another frown of puzzlement creased all three brows. “But . . . you speak as if you come from here—” said the second old man hesitantly. “Your speech is just like ours, and even people from Brasov sound different from us.”

  She nodded. “Magic gives me the gift of tongues,” was all she said. They all nodded sagely. So . . . they were all familiar enough with magic to accept that statement—or else they were just going by “the gift of tongues” mentioned in their tales and in the Bible.

  Then again . . . there was a half-wolf shifter at their feet. How was the “gift of tongues” any harder to believe in than that? It was actually not so bad having to explain all of this to people who were “backward” and “old fashioned” if not “medieval” by the standards of the folks living in cities. If I ever need to hunt a shifter or other terrible creature in a city, I could have a hard time keeping out of trouble with the police. How would you explain to a policeman in, say, Hamburg that you were hunting something out of what he considered to be a fairy tale?

  Well, even if one or two of these men had had doubts about what was roaming their hills, they had none now. Something that solid and real lying at his feet was likely to make a believer out of the most hardened of skeptics.

  And this is a part of the world where they take witchcraft seriously.

  “And you—studied to do this sort of thing?” asked the third, and slightly younger man. He was middle-aged, rather than old, and seemed a bit dazed by all of this. “You are a woman!” He said it as if it was an accusation, which was—well, it was something she had heard before when hunting. As if a woman was completely incapable of doing anything other than being a victim.

  At least he didn’t say, “You are a girl!”

  “The Brotherhood has several women in it,” she said, and pulled the coach gun from the sheath on her back. “I don’t need to be strong, I just need to be properly armed, trained, and prepared to kill. It doesn’t take being a man to shoot, and shoot well. And like a gun, magic does not care if the person using it is a man or a woman.”

  The first of the old men burst into laughter at that, and slapped his leg. But the laughter cutting across the gypsies’ mourning sounded brittle and fragile, and the old man cut himself off rather quickly. “Pardon,” he said. “That was unseemly, and rude, even if they are gypsies down there. They still have feelings, and they have lost a child. But she certainly put you in your place, my friend! She reminds me of my Tatya! Especially the day I found her skinning the wolf she had shot at the back door! ‘Do you think I was going to wait fo
r you to come home, old faker?’ she said, ‘The wolf wouldn’t!’” He laughed again, only this time, more of a hearty chuckle behind a formidable moustache.

  “This is Petrescu,” Dominik said, quickly, nodding at the first old man. “And Vasile—” the second “—and Lungu.” That was for the middle-aged man. “Petrescu is the mayor of the village.”

  Markos nodded. “I went to the inn to see who in the village wanted to come to see what we had killed, because there was always the chance that this thing, when it was a man, had lived in the village. These three thought they had the best chance of recognizing it, if so.”

  “And I saw you speaking to the—” Petrescu paused, and shrugged. “Well, you know. At the inn. So I knew you were a magician. We have not seen a real magician, not a good one anyway, for a long, long time. We had a witch—a good witch—” he added hastily. “But she died before she could take anyone as her successor. Some of us can see things, the little things that aren’t animals, but no one has been able to use any magic here for a very long time.”

  She thought about that a moment. “Fifty years?” she guessed. “Fifty years since you had a magician, and not a witch?” She thought that the “witch” had probably been a herb-wife with a little Earth Magic. Just enough to make her medicines more effective, and to allow her to get advice from Elementals, when they chose to speak to her.

  He nodded after a moment of thought. “Probably that much. It was in my father’s time, for sure.”

  “And you don’t see anything familiar in this creature?” she asked.

  All three men shook their heads vigorously. “Nothing about it,” Petrescu said for them all.

  “Do you know anyone in the village with a habit of wearing a copper saint’s medal?” she asked cautiously.

  That elicited a laugh and headshakes. “We might be poor by what city folk have,” Vasile said, with a snort. “But we have our standards! No one here would make a saint’s medal out of copper. That would be an insult to the saints!”