by Amy Cross
“Go to her, Absalom.”
“Edgar -”
“Go to her!” he says firmly. “By all that's holy, you know full well that I am not a man who understands the ways of love, but even I can see that you must visit her at least one -”
He stops himself just in time.
“At least one more time?” I ask, feeling a shiver of fear in my chest. “You think we'll all die in battle tomorrow, don't you?” Sighing, I push my tankard away. “Don't bother to deny it. Everyone's thinking it. Look around, there's fear in the eyes of every vampire in this hall. Even if by some miracle we win, the cost will be enormous.”
“All I know,” he continues, “is that Cerulesis has a crumbling mind. She has spent so long trying to devise a strategy to defeat the spiders once and for all, and she has achieved great wonders, but there has been a terrible price to pay. I saw her recently, shuffling along a corridor near the central chamber.” He pauses again, and I can see the sadness in his eyes. “Again, I'm no expert, but she looked like someone who needs a friend. Even if you are no longer lovers, can you not put aside your pain and go to her as that? For her sake?”
“More drink!” Makho yells, slamming his fist against the table again, causing it to shudder. “By the name of Gothos,” he continues, turning to us, “what is wrong with these servers? Why does everything take so long?”
Getting to my feet, I slide my tankard toward him. “Here,” I mutter, “you can finish mine while you wait. I have somewhere else to be.”
***
She's in the strategy room.
Of course she is.
Where else would she be at a time like this?
When I reach the doorway, I look through and see that the room is in darkness, save for a solitary candle flickering on a shelf at the far end. The great circular map table, hewn from rocks carved out of the underground sun of Narm, is covered in markers and symbols, and I'm just about able to make out a dark, thin figure hunched over the table's far side, furiously scribbling notes and muttering to herself. She reaches out a bony arm to move some counters across one of the maps, and I feel a shiver as I realize that all this time alone must have taken a heavy toll.
She hasn't noticed me yet.
I'm tempted to turn back, to let her work alone, but Edgar's words still ring in my ears. It has been a long time since Cerulesis and I were in the same room together, and even though time has not healed the wounds at all, I still believe that I can offer her friendship. Unfortunately, as she scurries over to another section of the map, I can already tell from the way she moves that many of the rumors were true. This is not the young, happy, energetic and brilliant woman I knew all those years ago; this is someone who has spent far too long alone in darkness, disappearing into her own mind, twisted by her own genius and now, finally, coming up against a challenge that might yet prove insurmountable.
Some battles just can't be won, not even by the greatest tactical mind in the history of the eight worlds. I always wondered how she might react if she faced certain defeat. Now I know.
“You look busy,” I tell her finally. “I hope I'm not interrupting.”
She doesn't reply, not at first. She simply hurries around to another section of the map and leans down, making more notes. This time, however, I'm able to see a line of flickering candlelight on the side of her face, and I'm struck by how gaunt she looks now, and how tired.
And there is madness in her eyes.
True madness.
Yet still she is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in my life.
“Cerulesis -”
“I heard you,” she snaps, her voice sounding old and tired. “Wait. I'm in the middle of something.”
Making my way over to the huge table, I look down at the map and see that she has covered the surface in her usual notes and annotations. Long ago, Cerulesis developed her own highly complex language designed specifically for expressing military possibilities; that language has served her well and has allowed her to perform brilliant calculations to seal her strategies, but no-one else has ever been able to understand the scribbles she leaves behind. That was fine in the old days, when she could explain her ideas to us lesser creatures, but lately it is said that she can barely communicate at all, and that there is little point in her coming up with these strategies if she can't convey them to anyone else.
She might win the war in her head, but the rest of us will die on the battlefield.
“What do you want?” she mutters after a moment. “Who are you, anyway?”
“Who -” Pausing, I realize that she's so lost in her work, she doesn't recognize me. Either that, or madness has erased her memories. “It's me,” I tell her.
“I don't have time to play games. Who are you and what do you want?”
“My name is Absalom,” I reply, “and I have come to see Cerulesis one final...” I take a deep breath. “One final time.”
She pauses, and then slowly she turns to me. From the tears that have suddenly gathered in her eyes, I can tell that I've managed to get through to her.
“I know you wanted me to stay away,” I continue, “but... Well, to be honest I was persuaded by Edgar Le Compte and a few others that I should come to see you again. The idea made sense at the time, although now I'm starting to think it was a mistake. The last thing I wanted was to trouble you.”
I wait for an answer, but she simply stares at me until a tear starts trickling down her cheek. At that, she turns away and reaches up to her face, wiping the tear away.
“Did you come for some useful purpose?” she asks finally, leaning over the table and making more notes. “Do you have a message for me? Word from a scout, perhaps, or news about the spiders having been spotted? Any kind of message at all?”
“No,” I reply, before realizing that maybe that's not quite true. “Well, I suppose... A message from myself, perhaps.”
“No time.”
“But -”
“I'm close,” she continues, hurrying around the table and physically pushing me out of the way so she can add yet more notes. “I can still do this. I've run the possibilities and I think we can defeat the spiders tomorrow, but I need -” Suddenly she lets out a gasp and leans forward, squeezing her eyes tight shut as if she's in pain. She tries to speak, but all she can manage is a few garbled sounds.
“Cerulesis -”
“Leave me!” she gasps, bending over until a trickle of blood runs from her lips. Opening her mouth, she wipes the blood away and makes more notes. “I'm so close. There's a way for us to win this, no matter how many spiders come at us, but I need to close down all their routes of attack and all chances of retreat. I need to think like them, but that's not easy. They're nothing like us, their minds are completely different, they view the world through a kind of matrix. I think so, anyway. I took apart a spider corpse and examined its brain, I ate...”
She pauses for a moment, as if she's horrified by something.
“I ate a mouthful,” she whispers finally. “I thought maybe the taste would help me to understand it better.”
“Did it?” I ask, shocked to find that she has fallen so far into madness.
She stares ahead for a moment, before shaking her head. “I just need to keep working. I need to view the battlefield from a spider's perspective, and then I can find a way to destroy them all.”
“Perhaps I should leave you to work, then,” I mutter.
She doesn't reply; instead, she makes more notes on the map, while whispering under her breath.
“Just one thing, though,” I continue, figuring that I might yet get her to listen to me. In the distance, Makho and the other drunk soldiers can be heard reveling, but right now they might as well be another world away. “Cerulesis, would you like to come with me and get a cup of tea?”
She pauses, before slowly turning to me, and I swear the madness has lifted a little from her eyes.
Jonathan
Today
Stopping suddenly, I watch as the w
oman looks up at me.
“I'm sorry,” I stammer, taking a step back, “I didn't mean to -”
“It's okay,” she says with a smile. “You can come in and say hello. If you'd like, at least.”
Looking across the stone room, I watch as half a dozen children play on the floor. Most of them look to be only five or six years old, with a couple maybe around the nine or ten mark, and they're playing like normal children, happy and free, just like... For a moment, I think back to the side-room at the library in New York, where children would come to spend a few hours with their parents on Saturday mornings. Still, even as I watch the children here in Gothos, I feel a slow sense of concern as I realize that despite appearances, they're not human.
They're...
“Vampires,” the woman says after a moment.
I turn to her, shocked.
“Don't worry,” she continues, wiping some clay from her hands and coming over to join me in the doorway. “I can't read your mind. Word travels fast. I simply guessed that you must be Jonathan, Abby Hart's brother, and I realized that all of this must seem very new to you. My name is Clarissa, I'm... Well, for want of a better word, I'm managing the kindergarten here at Gothos.”
“Kindergarten?” I watch the children for a moment longer. “Why would anyone bring children to a place like this?”
“They have to be near their parents,” she replies. “Where else should they go?”
“Somewhere safe.”
“This is the safest room in the whole building.”
“But there's a war coming!”
“So you'd rather they were separated?” She pauses. “You'd rather they were sent away, the way you and your sister were sent away?”
“At least they'd be safe.”
“And alone.”
“You could find them other families, other people to raise them.” I turn to her. “By having them here at Gothos, don't you risk... I mean, they could be killed.”
“You overestimate our ability to protect them from afar,” she replies. “Consideration was given to transporting the children to some other place, many leagues from here, but the fear was that this would make it easier for the spiders to go after them. If they were anywhere but in this house right now, they might well be dead already. At least here they have a chance, albeit a very slender one.” She pauses. “The spiders have spies everywhere. Everywhere except here, anyway. If these children were sent away, they'd be found and slaughtered.”
I continue to watch the children. One of them, a little girl with golden hair, is sitting slightly apart from the others, playing with some wooden bricks.
“They look so...”
My voice trails off for a moment.
“Normal?” Clarissa suggests.
“I didn't mean it like that...”
“Just because they're vampires, that doesn't mean they're monsters.” She smiles. “Why don't you go and talk to them? See for yourself what a vampire child is like. I think you might be surprised.”
I shake my head.
“Why not?”
“I...” Pausing, I realize that something about these children makes me feel nauseous. Yes, they seem perfectly normal right now, but I have no doubt that they're hiding sharp little fangs in their mouths, and that they have a nascent form of the same blood-lust and anger that I've seen in all other vampires, the same qualities that I keep expecting to feel burst through in my own body. I know I'm like them, I know I should welcome them as brethren, but the truth is...
Maybe it's wrong, but right now these children disgust me.
Suddenly the little girl glances up and sees me and offers a faint, cautious smile.
“She's something of a loner,” Clarissa explains, lowering her voice to a whisper. “I've tried encouraging her to play properly with the others, but she... Well, she had a difficult time recently, and I think she feels as if she's somehow separate from the others. To be honest, I've run out of ideas and I genuinely don't know how to get her to join in. I'm worried that the rest of the children will come to see her as an outsider, and then it'll just be a vicious circle until she's completely ostracized.”
“I -”
Before I can finish, I sense something nearby, just over my shoulder. Turning, I wait for someone to appear, but the corridor is empty. Still, I swear there was a presence behind me just now.
“I was thinking,” Clarissa says after a moment, “that maybe you could help her.”
I turn back to her. “Me?”
“You know what it's like to be the loner, don't you? The outcast?”
“You don't have a clue what my childhood was like.”
“I'm not talking about your childhood.” She pauses. “I'm talking about right now.”
I want to tell her to go to hell, but I know deep down that she's right. Glancing over at the little girl, I realize that maybe, just maybe, we have a few things in common after all.
“What's her name?” I ask finally.
“Ask her yourself.”
Taking a deep breath, I briefly consider turning and leaving before, finally, I make my way over to where the girl is sitting alone. Every fiber in my body is screaming at me to get out of here, to leave these monsters alone, but finally I kneel next to the girl and watch as she plays. She's focusing on the wooden blocks, not daring to look at me, and I'm struck by how normal she seems. How can a monster look so ordinary?
Damn it, I was bad enough with human children. How the hell am I going to talk to a little vampire?
I look over at Clarissa, but she simply smiles and nods at me, as if she senses my discomfort. After a moment, she goes to help some of the other children.
Turning back to the little girl, I try to think of some way to break the ice.
“Hi,” I say finally. “Are you... My name is Jonathan. What's yours?”
She pauses, before glancing at me. When she replies, her voice is so quiet, I can't make out what she says.
“Can you repeat that?” I ask. “A little louder?”
“Lilith,” she says cautiously, her voice sounding low and soft.
“Lilith?” I pause. “That's an odd name for a -”
I catch myself just in time.
“For a what?” she asks, frowning.
“For a... Well, for a vampire.”
“My parents chose it,” she replies. “I suppose.”
“Why aren't you playing with the others?” I ask.
“I don't know.” She fiddles with the wooden blocks for a moment. “I don't think they like me much. I tried once, but they didn't really let me join in and I didn't want to play with them after I realized they felt like that. Anyway, my belly hurts.”
“It does?”
She nods.
I look at Clarissa, but she's busy helping some of the other children. Turning back to Lilith, I can't help but notice that there's a hint of discomfort on her face; maybe it's new, or maybe I just didn't notice it before, but she seems to be genuinely in pain.
“Did you eat something bad?” I ask.
She shakes her head.
“Have you told anyone?”
She pauses, and then she nods.
I glance at Clarissa again, and this time I can see that she's helping a little boy who seems to be having similar pains. In the distance, I can hear a faint rumbling sound, as if the others are continuing to get Gothos ready for war.
“I'm sure it's nothing,” I continue, turning back to Lilith. “Everyone gets little pains every so often. It's part of life.”
She pauses, before leaning closer to me until her lips are almost against my left ear.
“Can I tell you something?” she whispers.
“Of course.”
Another pause. “I'm scared.”
“There's no need to be,” I lie.
“Clarissa keeps telling us there's nothing wrong,” she continues, “but I can tell she's scared too. My father's scared, my mother's scared, everyone I see here at Gothos is scared. Even you.”
“I'm not -”
“You are,” she adds. “I can tell.”
“How?”
“A million ways. And every time another adult tells me not to be scared, I get a little bit more scared.”
Staring at her, I'm struck by a sense of wisdom in her eyes. Yes, she's a child, but there's something else in there too, a kind of knowledge that seems far deeper than anything I've ever seen in a human. She's an old child, and with the way thing are going right now, I don't even know if she'll ever get the chance to grow up.
“How old are you?” I ask.
She hesitates before answering. “Two hundred and ninety,” she tells me finally. “And a half.”
“Two hundred and ninety?”
She nods. “And a half.”
“And a half.” I feel a shiver pass through my chest. “But you still... I mean, you still look like a child.”
“That's because I am. I'm a type of vampire that has a long...” She frowns. “I can't remember what Daddy called it now, I think it was a long... gesti...gestinal...”
“Gestation period?” I suggest.
She nods again, and for the first time a faint smile crosses her lips.
“Well, I can believe that,” I tell her. “Still, it's hard to believe that anyone can be a child after being alive for almost three hundred years. You must have seen so much.”
“I'll grow up eventually,” she says proudly. “Clarissa says I'll be pretty, too, and -” She gasps suddenly, clutching her belly, but the pain seems to pass within just a fraction of a second. “It's coming back more and more,” she whispers. “I've never felt anything like it before, I hope it stops soon.”
“It will,” I reply, putting a hand on her shoulder, hoping to reassure her. “I promise. Wait here.”
Getting to my feet, I head over to Clarissa, and I can tell that she's worried.
“See?” she says, as if she hopes that I've changed my mind. “They're not monsters after all. Just children. Do you understand that now?”
