“May it please your ladyship,” he drawled, “there is no inn, but the widow Mordabot takes in such travellers as pass our way.” The boy pointed at a tired-looking house at the edge of the village.
“And where lies the convent of the Sisters of Death?”
“Theba’s temple is there, your ladyship — about a quarter of a mile to the east.” Again he pointed, lifting his arm as with considerable effort.
“Do you bring a sack of grain to the widow’s, for my animals,” she said, “and do you be quick.” To observe his reaction, she deliberately overpaid; she tossed the boy a small coin of gold. It was worth more than the larger ones of silver that crowded her bag.
Though his eyes sparkled with instant greed, his hand was too slow. Listless, she mused. No vitality. She watched him retrieve the coin from the dust and shuffle off with what was probably his notion of haste. It cut Tiana’s heart to see such waste of a lad who should be full of energy and mischief. He didn’t even ogle, she mused, for Tiana of Reme knew her body, and she knew males.
The widow Mordabot proved just as tired-looking as her little weather-bested house. After tending her animals and buying a halter and lead line for the mule, Tiana examined the room the listless woman had rented her. Like all the town, it appeared past its prime. At least the place was clean; despite the harsh life that had been hers, Tiana loved her comforts. She looked fondly upon the bed with its feather-stuffed mattress and clean white sheets — and at the strong bolt on the room’s single door. It was firmly secured.
Perhaps, she thought, with an attempt at lightness, the graveyard has no new graves because all the dead don’t know it — they’re still walking about, like Mordabot and that boy!
She knew she was whistling in the dark. To offset the feeling of unease, she busied herself for her night’s work. Whirling off her black cloak, she carefully daggered off its gold braid and other ornamentation. Then she stripped and sprawled to luxuriate on the bed. She’d simply sleep till midnight and then rise to go and do what she’d come for: steal the left hand of long-dead Derramal from the convent of Theba. The nuns surely regarded it as the prized relic of some saint.
But — guard it? Nuns? Tiana smiled at the ceiling. Not likely!
Still smiling in confident anticipation, she lowered herself into sleep.
Slumber slid into formless nightmare, vague and shadowy and red-shot, full of a brooding, heightening menace she could not name. Fear, then intense anger rose in her breast and she fought, seemingly clawing her way through a maze of cobwebs. Waves of warmth and erotic desire swept over her, enveloped her. It was lovely…
Submit… submit… submit… so sweet, so lovely, submit…
Tiana did not hear the urging; she felt it, as desire spread a tingling glow through the heaving fullness of her breasts, down her muscular stomach and into her loins, throughout every part of her nakedness. Submi-i-it. You will be delicious s s s… submit…
Her limbs quivered in anticipation, expectation. So nice… Her breath came in rasping gasps. Sweeter than honey was the demanded submission, sweeter than that its promise. It challenged even the fiercely independent spirit of she who had been captain of Vixen, preying on other ships —
Preying! Submission was too attractive, and Tiana resisted. Her efforts intensified; she seemed to be enveloped in moist pink silk. Anger flamed. With all her will, all her strength, she struck out at the sweet pink haze that enveloped her. It retreated; again she struck.
The haze dissolved like fog beneath the sun. Her mind struggled — and was clear.
Yet wakefulness was as disconcertingly unreal as dream-filled sleep. She was astonished to discover herself in the centre of the room, still naked, covered with sweat — and clutching her dagger!
She lifted her fisted hand and stared. The dagger’s blade was red-smeared and dripping.
By the bright moonlight streaming through the window, Tiana’s wild eyes saw that her bed was not empty. On it, swathed in black lay a nun of Theba — a Sister of Death. Her eyes were wide open, but she was motionless. Her throat was slashed out. That scarlet splotch indicated that her heart was pierced as well. Tiana stared, looked again at her dagger, glanced about.
I… awoke from a nightmare, still dazed, and… slew a nun?
The door was open. The bolt was back, showing no sign of having been forced. It was as if the iron cylinder had come alive to slide itself back.
Tiana was shaken, but on the instant she firmed her mouth and stood straight. Sorcery! I awoke from a nightmare and slew a sneak-thief who entered the room by… means arcane. That explains why I didn’t waken as usual; totally, and at once. Explanations to the villagers might be troublesome — though surely she isn’t a nun at all, but a thief disguised.
“By all the mud on the Great Turtle’s Back, too many mysteries haunt Woeand! Past time I fetched that accursed hand and departed this noxious place!”
Hmp, she thought, going still naked to the window, second time today I’ve talked to myself. Tiana, Tiana — ’tis unworthy!
She peered out into the night. Every home in the village was dark. There was no sign that anyone else was awake at this late hour. Yet — a shudder-some clot of black figures moved slowly along the street. Robes dragged in the dust. While Tiana watched, pressed back in darkness with one damp hand to a bare breast that tremblingly bespoke her rapid heartbeat, members left the group by ones and twos to enter the darkened houses. After a few minutes inside, they came hastening back, flowing black robes flapping like the wings of bats, to re-join the main body. She was surely looking down upon above thirty nuns — nor were they afflicted by the listlessness of this land!
Tiana strove to tell herself that the nuns were merely taking up a strange ritual collection…
At midnight?
Her mouth was dry and her spine had gone chill and seemed acrawl with worms. It was not just that the Sisters of Death had no difficulty entering the homes of sleeping folk through doors that should be locked; there was an intangible aura of the wrong, of a nameless loathsome evil hovering about those mysterious figures in black. It seemed to emanate palpably from their very robes.
Straightening from the window, Tiana ran her palms down bare flanks. Hands and hips were dry; when confronted with circumstances frightening or worse, she tended ever toward calm and inflexibility of plan. She’d not be dissuaded. Thinking apace, she whirled for her clothes. The fact that the nuns were still up and about impelled her to hasten her planned theft, not delay it. Dressing rapidly, she gathered up her possessions, swung the unallayed black of the long cloak about herself, and silently stole to the front door of the widow’s house.
Tiana peered out into an empty, silent street.
Just as she started to step forth, a nun emerged from the house next door. Raven robe fluttering susurrantly, she hurried down the street after her companions. Suddenly she paused, glanced at a house at the village’s very edge, and entered.
Overpowered by curiosity, Tiana rushed after the Sister on feet as silent as she could make them.
The door by which the nun had entered was only ajar, but Tiana could see within. Around a table a family sat in the darkness, seemingly asleep. The Sister, her back to the door, was bent over a girl in her teens. Though no one moved, Tiana heard an odd, sinister noise — a sucking. Easing out her rapier, she kicked the door fully open.
“In Theba’s name, what are you doing?”
The nun whirled, still a-crouch. The moon’s glow highlighted her face like that of an awful lich, and Tiana stared. Eyes that were glowing pools of unnatural hunger glared at her from above a mouth stained with the blood that dripped crimson from parted lips — and ran down the throat of the seated girl.
Pure reaction sent Tiana lunging at the heart of that abominable apparition, her own face set in lines of horrified rage.
Partway to its target, her rapier seemed to enter soil; it slowed. The eyes of the fiend glared, growing ever larger. Baleful power seemed to issue from th
em in a palpable force that struck her attacker. Clenching her teeth, straining, Tiana forced her blade forward with an arm that was like lead packed in wet sand. She was unable to wrest away her gaze; the ireful eyes of the vampire now merged into a single great orbiculate light that filled her vision, owned and possessed her vision.
Cold winds seemed to blow through her body, which prickled as though assailed by needles of ice. The eye, the eye…
The eye was a whirling vortex, sucking at her soul, seeking to wrest and drag it from her body. Tiana’s teeth ground; her muscles quivered with effort; she strove to press on…
Having reached the fiend’s black-shrouded breast, the rapier point seemed frozen there, as the winds blowing through Tiana’s body were freezing her, blood and bone. By the Cow whose rumination created the world — what power she strove against!
Tiana’s long career as a pirate asea coupled with her certain knowledge of her own bastardy, had given her an ever-fierce thrust for independence and a will that was passing strong. Both drove her now. Her being flashed with scarlet anger. Every ounce of her strength channelled into the arm that strove to drive her sword into this monster in human form. Though she seemed set in a block of ice and there was a dull roaring within her head, her rapier’s tip moved — and entered the vampire’s breast. Black robe yielded and was pierced. The dreadful eye widened even more, but then crimson clouds appeared in its ghastly freezing glare.
Fear abruptly replaced the expression of unnatural hunger. The eye began to shrink as the vampire’s power failed her. Quivering from crown to toes, Tiana forced her slender blade another inch into helplessly accepting flesh — vile flesh.
The eye filled with dread. It dimmed and shrank. Then it became two ordinary eyes, and Tiana completed her lunge as though a mighty axe had cleft through chains that bound her. The eyes stared — and glazed in death. Tiana nearly pitched forward as the human monster fell backward off her blade. With an unsteady hand on a poorly wrought chair back to support her on jellylike legs, Tiana of Reme stood shaking as much in horror of revelation as from the terrible strain of that unnatural duel. Her jaws ached from the long clenching of her teeth.
O Great Cow, small wonder these villagers were too weak to farm or hunt or make simple repairs! The convent of the Sisters of Death was a coven of vampires, whose ghoulish members nightly fed on the villagers’ lifeblood!
Yet mystery remained, she knew as she stood, regaining strength and control of herself; not all was solved. Many of these people could not long survive this nightly taking of their vital juices. None could withstand it indefinitely. Then — why was the graveyard abandoned, rather than overflowing? Where are the corpses, Tiana demanded within her own mind, and with a sickly sinking sensation, she knew there remained a grisly secret yet to be discovered.
She felt an urgency in her to run, flee… but, again, that only firmed her to her purpose. She left the doomed village and walked eastward. Her sword, naked in her hand, was a comfort — small comfort! Yet it had slain, she told herself while she walked through darkness in which horror and the yet-unknown hung heavy as some noxious fog. The nun was a living vampire a demon that could be slain, not one of the Undead.
The walk was at once too long and too brief; a stone building loomed before her. While it covered little more space than a house, its walls were high, running up into a rounded dome worked with the sacred symbols of deathless Theba. A chapel… she stared at it, the abode of Theba and the Sisters of Death, and the hiding place of the left hand of the dismembered mage, Derramal.
She had come far for that long-severed hand. She would have it, vampires or no.
No nun showed herself, nor came any sound from the chapel. A little distance away, a smallish shed was silent and dark, and that wooden door in the terrace must be a wine cellar. Circling warily, Tiana looked up. In windows thirty feet above, faint light flickered. Was the chapel empty, with a few ceremonial candles left to burn while the Sisters were absent on their ghoulish errand of sustenance? Or, Tiana wondered, were the nuns amid some silent, faint-lit ritual, following their inhuman repast from the veins of humans?
She circled the building until she was in shadow on the side opposite the moon. From her pouch of thieves’ tools she withdrew her silken rope. But then, frowning, she stepped closer to the wall.
“Ah.” The thick old ivy cloaking the wall held firm; it could be climbed in absolute silence, while even the padded grappling hook could make noise enough to betray her. She returned the rope to her pouch, took off her sword against its clanking and saw to her dagger.
With the consummate ease of the natural athlete in fine condition, Tiana glided up the wall, a shadow among shadows. She reached the window without experiencing other than the most minor of mishaps. Clinging to the ivy and with one foot braced on the sill, she peered within, and down.
The nuns had preceded her. They were there, in strange ceremony. In their black robes they were like large bats, kneeling before their high altar in absolute silence. The scene might almost have been one of normal worship of devoted adherents.
It was not. Behind the altar against the chapel’s back wall stood a tall figure, its head and most of its body lost in the darkness. Apparently some sort of statue — not Theba — it seemed to preside like death itself over a tangled heap of white forms at the base of the altar.
They bring them here, she thought in new revelation. Ah the monsters — those are the naked bodies of the villagers — or the farm folk whose home I found abandoned in mid-meal!
She wondered. Did the Sisters collect blood by night and whole families by day? Why? What further obscenity did they perform on the innocent victims of their need and lust for human blood?
The head of the tall presiding figure was well above the level of Tiana’s window. Most of that rearward north wall was covered by black drapes that swept out from the… figure. Tiana looked elsewhere. Just below her window she noted a thick wooden beam, one of several that spanned the chapel at regular intervals.
With a last look within, Tiana climbed down to consider her problem.
Somewhere within that temple of ugliness was a relic she sought. And so were thirty or forty of the nuns. She was but one; how to gain the hand — and preferably rid the world of the obscenity of this abominable company the while? True, she found them conveniently all in one place, with but one way out — but locked doors opened for them. Knowing they possessed deadly hypnotic powers, she had to assume they had other powers as well, though Caranga had taught her that the greatest abilities, natural or arcane, were little or naught without courage.
Tiana honestly believed herself fearless. If she was wrong, she had yet to come upon that which overpowered the courage that was like instinct within her.
She pondered, letting her mind range. That second nun she’d slain; her hypnotic power had failed when rapier point had first pricked her breast. At first blood, she had abandoned her horrid weapon — and since she had not fled, she had apparently frozen in panic as well as lost all courage. And the others? If only I could lock them in the chapel!
Are they demons? That lamia I slew aboard the Narokan ship that started all this questing and confronting the Otherworld; she was a demon, and was held by the slimmest chain — of silver! By the Cud! Silver! Steel slays demons and were-things; silver holds them. She touched her money pouch. If only I could find the things I need… their shed!
Taking her sword, she rushed to the little building just west of the chapel. Inside, she drew the door behind her, sure there’d be a candle or lamp just within. Within seconds she’d put her hand on a candle; in less than a minute her flint and tinder raised its flame. As she’d hoped, she was in a tool shed. Walls were lined with shelves containing various supplies and tools, including several large jars of oil. Their number indicated the nuns had not burned the sacred lamps of Theba overmuch, of late! In one comer squatted a small grinding wheel, a bucket of water beside it. And there hung a hammer by its leathern handle-strap.
Tiana felt both elation and a touch of awe. Chance was completely on her side this night — or the Goddess had appointed her to work justice on the heretic nuns who were traitors to Theba and humanity alike.
She set to work with the enthusiasm of a fanatic. From her pouch she took out a dozen large silver coins of Bashan mintage; good hard coins, and strong. It was the work of but a few minutes, using the rotary whetstone, to put a sharp edge on each Bashan eagle. With a couple of hide strips from hanging tools, she rigged a little harness for a large jug of oil; now she could carry it while leaving hands free. Smiling, humming, she doffed her cloak and soaked it with water from the pail that was set to cool and clean the grinding wheel. Her silken rope she soaked too, and rubbed it in the silver dust from the grinding.
Jug bound at her side, Tiana snatched up hammer and bucket and hurried to the chapel’s door.
The unholy sisters gave voice now to what was superficially an orthodox Theban chant — but which was strange, twisted, seemingly in praise of evil rather than good. Tiana smiled anew: Good! Chant on — loudly! The door fit its frame most accurately — wonderful!
Hoping the chant covered the noise, Tiana set to work: she used her sharpened silver coins to nail shut the chapel door.
Once their chanting stopped abruptly, and she only just checked the stroke of her hammer, gasping when she directed its shortened impact onto her own hand. She waited, holding her breath — and the nuns began a second, eerily repellent chant or incantation. Tiana drove home the last of the silver coins-become-nails.
By the time she had secured the door, Tiana’s belief in her being a divine instrument was running a bit thin. Fanaticism waned when it occurred to her that if her plan failed in any of its several parts, she’d simply have made the vampire nuns a present of a free meal: Tiana of Reme.
Well, this was battle, she told herself firmly, and no battle is without risk.
In the shadow beside the temple, she set down the pail, looked up at the window once more. Rope, dagger, and oil were what she needed for this task; the rapier would be of small value, and might well betray her with a clank. Again, she discarded it. Once again, jar of oil thumping her hip, she mounted the vines that hugged the wall.
Demon in the Mirror Page 4
