Dark Horse

by Marilyn Todd

  The light told Claudia she had no choice in the matter. Give up the fight, said the light. Come with me. And the light was faint, a dull yellow glow, but then it grew brighter and brighter, until— Fresh air blasted her face. Thank you, thank you, you gods on Olympus. Thank you so much. The light was not that of the Ferryman rowing across, but that of a common or garden oil lamp. She was saved. Greedily, Claudia sucked in the clean, wholesome air. And with it the scent of the demon.

  Fifty-One

  Lamp held high, the demon gazed down on its handiwork.

  Perfect. The ligatures around the victim's neck, wrists and ankles had chafed the skin raw. Blood oozed in thick red dribbles from the leather straps that bound her and dreamily the demon wondered what it would be like to lick one. To taste her blood on the tip of its tongue. The demon recoiled. Disgusting idea! Ugh! Ghoulish. Vile. Worse than necrophilia!

  It watched, fascinated, as its victim's wheezing lungs gasped to fill up with air. It reminded the demon of a salmon thrashing and writhing on the river bank. Drowning in air. At first, the gasps came in short, shallow bursts. Then they juddered and shuddered as they returned to normality, and the salmon's hair was wringing with sweat. Her eyes, unfocused still, were bloodshot. The demon hadn't expected that. An unexpected bonus, if ever there was one. Just like with Clio. Some of the effects there had been particularly stimulating in their unexpectedness and their—

  'Thought - no one would - come.' Claudia's strangled voice startled the demon out of its reverie. 'Thought - I'd been -buried alive.'

  Buried alive? Good gracious, where was the pleasure in that? Actually, there was quite a lot of pleasure in that - but there was even more pleasure in watching them suffer. Bringing them to the brink again and again and again. And, thanks to the genius touch of the glass panel, this was a show the demon could follow at the closest of quarters.

  'Untie me.' Good. Her senses were slowly returning. 'I'm strapped in.'

  'The best thing about this piece of equipment,' the demon crooned, 'is its capacity for multiple usage.'

  It leaned forward to drink in her terror as understanding finally dawned. Fear, the demon decided, made her even more beautiful.

  'I plan to visit in Medea's footsteps,' it confided. Claudia's eyes were bulging with horror. Beautiful eyes, terrified eyes, with long, sweat-soaked lashes. 'Corinth, for example. A wonderful city, full of excitement.' A veritable mine waiting to be tapped. 'Athens, perhaps. Ithaca, definitely. Rome, though, is where I shall settle.'

  Home to the homeless, succour to the sick, comfort to the companionless, this was a city where the demon could live out its ancestral fantasies without arousing suspicion. It laughed softly. Everyone trusts a priest!

  'Leo trusted me,' Llagos whispered. 'Enough to show me the Scythian war spear. Enough to explain the significance of its feathers and carvings. Enough, even, to let me hold it.'

  'Enough to play act with him.'

  Llagos was surprised by her perceptiveness. This would be more satisfying than he had imagined. A woman who understands. Days could pass, he mused, maybe weeks, bringing her to the brink and throwing her back. He could toy with her like a ball.

  'Yes, indeed,' he said. 'Dear Leo. He was laughing, even as the bronze point buried itself in his flesh. Squelch.'

  The demon delighted at the heave of Claudia's stomach. Should he elaborate on Leo's agonizing linger in full consciousness, the pattern the blood made on the threshold, the things he'd told Leo about his whoring ex-wife? There was no hurry. Maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day he could share his reminiscences over that delicious brutality.

  'Bulis trusted me, too, but in a rather different way.'

  One more perversion in which to experiment, and that had been some erection the boy had had, Llagos thought enviously, as he'd fastened the chains. He'd learned a lot from Bulis, however. He'd learned that killing wasn't the food that sustained his inner self, it was power and control that kept it alive. A trick he had been employing for some time with Clio.

  Clio had trusted him, too, his being a priest. Short, thin and clumsy, with his sticky-out teeth, no one took Llagos seriously. It was an image he'd cultivated over the years, until he had been spinning Clio's trust like wool on a spindle. Reducing her to caressing her own naked body for the sake of a few silver coins had been just the start. Llagos had planned a lengthy process of further physical degradations, until the moment he saw her talking to Marcus. Disaster! Clio was his own special toy, a pet to push and pull at his whim. He could not let her sail away. Not after he had invested so much.

  7 created the vampire myth,' he told Claudia. 'It was me, who kept the old traditions alive on this island. Me, who told the islanders not to follow false Roman gods.'

  'Because you want them to serve the old ways like you do, you deviant sonofabitch.'

  'Claudia, Claudia, calm yourself.' He stroked her cheek with his thumb. 'I told you before. Bindus, Poseidon, Neptune, it

  doesn 't matter by what name one invokes the God of the Sea, or any of the gods for that matter. It merely suits my purpose to divide the islanders from their overlords.'

  Dissent, anarchy and bloodthirsty legends were all weapons in Llagos's armoury. He alone had whipped up suspicions of Clio's lifestyle and voluptuous beauty. Through their priest, the islanders had been drip-fed tales of flesh-eating monsters preying on their community, and he had played his part to perfection the night he ran, scared shitless as they believed, from the screaming banshee.

  'But you're married,' Claudia said. 'You have children.'

  'Four,' the priest nodded. 'Who will travel with me. Perfect cover, you see.'

  'Like your pidgin Latin.'

  Better and better, Llagos thought. She was on the same wavelength, this woman. He adjusted his shoulders to their accustomed public droop, let his chin hang a little. 'Iss better if everyones laugh at me,' he said, lapsing into his act. 'Thiss way I can moves around freely, and everyones trust me, you see.'

  Thin fingers closed the lid once more over Claudia Seferius.

  Outside, the first blackbird of the morning broke into song.

  Fifty-Two

  The stiletto hadn't fallen on to the floor as the woman Clio had seen with Leo's cousin on the gangplank had thought. When she'd realized the raw, twitching lump in the stone cottage on the hill had been human, the knife had fallen from her hand, but it landed on the mattress beside Clio.

  Then Llagos arrived. Clio fought back the surge of terror, which gripped her now as violently as it had when his silhouette had first blocked out the sun as the woman went to fetch help. Through waves of pain and fear, Clio had been able to see what the woman could not, that Llagos had drugged her and followed her here. Two for the price of one, she'd thought bitterly. To her credit, the woman had wanted to fight. She'd backed up, inch by inch, towards the bed, feeling with her toe for the knife.

  'Here,' Clio had rasped, but either the drug was too strong or her voice was too weak, because the woman didn't heed her. Then it was too late. The woman's legs had given way; she had collapsed in a heap. Stronger than he appeared, the priest had scooped her up and carried her out of the cottage, leaving his River of Fire victim screaming with pain and frustration.

  How could the gods do this to her?

  Llagos hadn't noticed the knife . . . but it didn't matter, because the knife was beyond her reach.

  Or was it? Perhaps there was another way. Every time Clio strained against the chains, lightning bolts of agony wracked her body as the flesh from her wrist fell away. The bastard had burned her hands and feet first. Tied her down at the elbows and knees, then burned the flesh off her extremities before chaining those same terrible injuries to the bed. He wanted her to die in as much pain as he could possibly inflict, but just as a wild animal will gnaw

  off its own leg to free itself from a trap so Clio pulled at the irons now.

  Twice she passed out from the pain, saw the white of her own bone through the blood. But each time she came to,
she was an infinitesimal fraction closer to wriggling one apology for a hand free of its shackle.

  Let me reach the knife before he returns.

  Let me end this unendurable suffering.

  With the woman in his arms, Llagos hadn't thought to close the door and now the light of a new dawn was flooding the cottage. Clio could hear whitethroats and warblers, the croak of a sea raven, the mewing of squirrels, and tears pricked her eyes. The pond - the pond she had hated - would be a silver mirror by now, reflecting another perfect and cloudless sky. Frogs would croak in its margins. Deer would come down to drink, bringing their spindly, spotted fawns with them, just as deer would be drinking at the stream which fed her Liburnian village. Whitethroats and warblers would be singing there, too, and a lump formed in Clio's throat. They had laughed at her, the villagers, because she had been drawn to the harp. Even her own family had ridiculed the waste of a fine, strong, Liburnian wife. A waste of good childbearing hips.

  'If you must play an instrument,' her father had growled, 'why does it have to be something so bloody highfalutin?'

  How could you explain to a woodsman that, in the beauty of the strings, Clio had discovered her soul? The harp freed her spirit, left it unburdened by dependence or convention. She became one with her music. Equally, though, it left her with a sense of being apart, of not belonging. As the years passed and her success grew, so the urge to return to Liburnia had grown stronger. What stopped her was pride; the prospect of going home poor. Told you the harp were kind of no bleeding instrument, her father would snarl. Poor and barren, the women would sneer. Clio would be a pariah in her own village. Unless, of course, she returned in style. The buggers would see her differently, then! Respect her for what she was, not what they thought she should be! The thread of fate began to unravel.

  Men. All bloody bastards. They had put her in this position, the motherfuckers. Her father. Her brothers. Leo. Especially

  Leo, who'd cheated her out of her share, even though she'd taken the risks. The anger drained out of her, sucking self-pity with it. Because finally, of course, there was Llagos. The biggest bastard of all. Far from the buck-toothed, spitting buffoon he made out, Llagos had systematically stripped her of clothes, her dignity and her flesh. But there was one thing no man, even Llagos, could defile. Clio's spirit.

  Outside, the first spear of sunlight pierced the sky, sending a shaft of brilliance across the earth floor like a gold fissure. Redstarts and chaffinches, she noticed, had joined the avian chorus.

  Finally, the footsteps she had been waiting for. Only once before in her life had Clio prayed. It had been in this same cottage, when the islanders had crowded around and she had prayed to her falcon god to give her strength. She had felt the brush of his wings against her cheek then. Just as she felt them now.

  Clio blocked her mind against the approaching footfalls, the shadow that blocked out the gold, the fingernails that raked her blistered skin.

  Instead she drank in the song of the warblers, the gentle rasp of the crickets and imagined the vivid blue of the sea, the liquid eyes of the deer, the soft touch of her mother's hand on her hair. From somewhere else, far away, she heard the gentle plucking of strings on a harp.

  'I am coming,' she said.

  Fifty-Three

  Sunshine was reflecting off the cloud concealing the peak of Sorcerer's Mountain on the Istrian mainland, turning it into a soft cap of baby hair. Fine and golden, wispy and innocent, it belied a horror, which had not been played out on the Isle of the Dawn in three and a half centuries.

  Orbilio was the first across the threshold of Clio's hilltop cottage, Jason and the others hot on his heels. He hadn't slept. For the second time in less than a week, he had been scouring the villa and its outbuildings for a woman with more courage than sense, and this time it was he who turned on Junius, not the other way round. Why had he left her? he'd demanded to know. He was her bodyguard, it was his bloody job to watch over her! White-faced and stiff with shame the young Gaul explained his orders. Goddammit, did that woman never listen to a damn word he said? Orbilio's fist punched into his open palm. He'd bloody told her it wasn't Jason behind the killings, proved the point several times over, but what does she do? Tells Junius to stick closer than a bud graft, because she's too damn stubborn to admit she was wrong!

  Mother of Tarquin, if he's killed her.

  Orbilio tore up every room, every shed, every store, but nothing. No sign of her anywhere. Someone had seen her near the stables, Qus said, and sure enough, there was an ivory hairpin stuck in a hay bale, but an ivory pin, goddammit, meant nothing. Orbilio clenched it in his fist until the blood oozed through his fingers and someone prised it out of his hand.

  If she's dead.

  Then one of the slaves said rumours were going round that the vampire had returned. Lights had been seen in the middle of the night in the stone cottage up on the hill. Orbilio's ears

  pricked up. Clio? Or did the answer lie in something more sinister?

  The answer, it transpired, was both.

  The pitiful creature that had once been a vibrant young woman with a cloak of black hair lay in a pool of blood on the mattress. The blood wasn't all hers. In his neck, where it had been twisted with a savagery which Marcus had rarely seen, even in battle, protruded the hilt of a thin-bladed stiletto. The neck into which it had been plunged belonged to the priest. His eyes and his mouth were open, as though caught by surprise, and he had been dead barely a few minutes. The blood hadn't even congealed. But the effort of stabbing him, of not letting go of the knife, had been too much for Clio. It had, Marcus thought as he closed her staring eyes, been a merciful release. His body started to tremble.

  'Where's Claudia,' he rasped, grabbing Llagos by his thin shoulders. 'What have you done with her, you bastard?'

  It was Jason who pulled him off. 'He's dead, Marcus. The priest can't give you answers.'

  He knew that, of course. But if Llagos couldn't, who the hell could?

  Strapped into her blackened oaken hell, Claudia experienced the first small fluttering of panic.

  Once she realized that Llagos intended to torture her by suffocating her almost to, but not beyond, the point of death, she began to plan. In the hourly intervals during which she was trapped in the box, she could niggle away at the ligatures round her arms in the hope that she might be able to pull at least one hand free. One hand meant the other hand, meant the neck, meant the feet. It would take time, of course, but time was all she had. In fact, it was the only thing on her side.

  Slowly, as it climbed above the hills, sunlight began to stream in through the glass panel in the lid. If only she could be sure that was responsible for the increase in temperature in here. She breathed slowly to conserve air, bracing herself for the moment when the gloating apparition appeared at the window, loathing herself for wanting to see it, but praying all the same, because with it came release, however short.

  He was going to pay a call on Clio, he'd said, but Claudia knew that control was Llagos's stock in trade and that he would not submerse himself in one victim's torment at the expense of losing another. She waited, forcing herself to be calm. He would be back.

  Her mind wandered. To a different place. A different time. Still black. The fire in the granary was raging. Two figures tussling on the stone steps leading up to it.

  Act I. The stage props were already set in place. When the pirate ship dropped anchor, that was Leo's cue to drug his own nightwatchmen and pour oil around the grain store. Like any theatrical production, the principal character wouldn't know that the villain had seen him lugging jars of oil up from the cellar. Or that he intended to use those same props to his own unspeakable end by luring Bulis to the building while the soporific took effect.

  Act II. Leo sets the first flame to the oil. The fire quickly takes a hold. The corn crackles. Bulis, gagged in all probability, struggles helplessly against his shackles.

  Act III. Llagos enters, villain disguised as priest. 'Please let me pass,'
he pleads, as the flames lick ever higher. 'I muss try put fire out.' Knowing damn well Leo would not allow him to enter the burning building, it was too dangerous, and besides, it was only grain.

  Another badly scripted, badly acted drama.

  Except it wasn't a theatrical production, was it? It was every bit as real as the coffin which held her prisoner.

  Still no face appeared. No smirk to block the sunlight from the panel in the lid, and all the while the air grew thinner, the heat intensified, and the blood thundered in her ears. At this point, Claudia realized something had gone badly wrong.

  Llagos wasn't coming back.

  He had killed her, and buried her, and now he would never know where.

  Spewing his fear over the path outside the cottage, a nightmare vision swam before Marcus of Claudia's body being dug up by foxes. It was the rasp of the crickets in the coarse grass,

  of course, but equally, it might have been the sound of their teeth crunching into her bones.

  Death was too good for him. Clio meant well, but in killing Llagos she had denied Orbilio that most primeval right, the right of revenge.

  All he could do was hope, and pray, that somewhere in the middle of this theatre of horrors, Claudia was still alive.

  She was.

  Just.

  But the red mist was forming, and her throat had arched back, and her breath was shallow and rapid.

  'Beware the Trojan Horse,' a voice lisped in the stillness of the dawn light outside Clio's cottage.

  Orbilio wiped the bile from his mouth. 'Excuse me?'

  In the early morning sunshine, the gold bands in Shamshi's ears glinted obscenely. 'It was the warning I gave to Claudia,' he said smugly. 'Beware the Trojan Horse.'