'Yes indeed,' his partner agreed with a strange little giggle.
Grigori, chewing on a strip of dried venison, watched the two of them. For the hundredth time he found himself wondering at their confidence. They were hard men, yes: strong and well armed. Yet their eagerness to meet this monster, in its own lair, too, seemed strange.
'Are you ready yet, old man?' Calixte suddenly asked, shifting his weight from one leg to the other in a dance of impatience.
'Yes,' Grigori said, finishing his lunch with a swig of vodka. 'No more speaking, now. We're barely half a mile away.'
'Fine, fine. Off we go then.'
The tavern keeper stood, stretched, and led them into the deepening gloom of the forest.
They went slowly. Even beneath the triumphant sun of high summer the twisting paths that linked one pine pillared cavern to the next remained dim and shadow haunted. Now, roofed with snow, Grigori found that he could hardly see. Had he not hunted within this realm for the last half a century he would have found it impossible to find the way.
As it was, he merely found it difficult. It took little more than an hour for them to reach the jagged grey walls of the Bear's Teeth; granite towers thrown up to loom menacingly over the threesome.
Cupping his hands, the tavern keeper leant forward to whisper into Calixte's ear.
'This is the place. Look there, between the first two teeth. Do you see it? The entrance to the caves.'
Calixte nodded, eyes shining in the gloom as he studied the cave.
'Well done, old man,' he hissed, baring sharp, white teeth in a hungry grin.
'Wait for us here.'
'I'll come with you, I reckon,' Grigori replied.
'No need.'
'You'll be hard pressed to find your way out without me.'
The two vampire hunters exchanged a glance. With a fine boned hand, Viento smoothed a mocking smile off his perfect face. Calixte rolled his eyes.
'Very well. But stay well back.'
'Agreed.'
Cautiously now, hardly making a sound as they picked their way across the snow, the three men closed in on the cave. As they reached the mouth, Grigori reached out to stop Calixte.
'Torches,' he mouthed, unslinging his bundle. Again Calixte and Viento exchanged a glance, the wordless communication of men who have hunted long together, and Calixte shrugged his assent. With a strike of steel on flint Grigori lit his torch, the smell of burning pitch sharp in the cold air. He then followed the two mercenaries as they descended into the blackness beyond.
They moved quickly into the depths, their feet finding silent purchase as they glided forward. Grigori stumbled behind them. He began to sweat with the effort of keeping up.
The torch he held flickered and flared in the drafts that followed them into the fastness of the labyrinth. It painted sudden, looming shadows onto the crumbling walls that sent the tavern keeper's heart galloping into many a false alarm.
Somehow, the vampire hunters ahead of him seemed to have little need of this treacherous light. They bounded forward into the darkness with all the eagerness of unleashed hunting dogs, their supposed guide forgotten as he struggled along in their wake. And even now, as the rain-smoothed stone of the upper reaches began to give way to crumbling shale, the rush of the two men remained as silent and effortless as that of a cat's across a deep carpet.
Grigori, wincing every time he kicked a stone or sent an alarm of shifting shingles echoing around the labyrinth, began to wish he hadn't come. The realization of how badly he had underestimated these two mercenaries was followed by the knowledge that he was becoming a hindrance rather than a help.
Ahead of him, black and orange in the uncertain light of his torch, Grigori saw that a fall of stone had all but blocked the passage. Calixte and Viento hardly broke their pace as they ascended the barrier. Floating upwards like two dark clouds, they disappeared into the blackness beyond.
Grigori, biting back a curse, wiped the sweat from his brow and followed them up the scree. Moving as cautiously as he could, testing each jagged handhold before resting his weight upon it, he crawled laboriously upwards. Even so, by the time he had crested the top of the mound he had sent the echoes of at least a dozen falling stones chasing each other into the labyrinth beyond.
Still struggling' to remain quiet, he worked his way down to the other side of the barrier. At last, with a sense of blessed relief, he felt himself once more on solid ground. After spending a moment tending to his torch he looked up and around in the renewed light. He was completely alone.
'BE CALM,' HE told himself nervously, trapping the tip of his moustache between his incisors and biting down. 'Be calm.'
Trying to ignore the accelerating beat of his heart, Grigori fought the temptation to turn and run. Instead he put one foot in front of the other and lurched reluctantly onwards. As he did so, a mad urge to call out to his companions seized him. It was as attractive and horrifying as the urge he sometimes felt to throw himself off the high precipices of the spring pastures.
'Gods give me strength,' he muttered, blinking a stinging drop of cold sweat out of one eye. 'They can't be far off.'
Yet in the absolute silence of this deep cavern, the only sound was the pumping of his own blood in his ears, the only sight that of shadow and stone. Pressing on, Grigori fought the impression that he was totally alone.
'They can't be far,' he told himself. Repeating the phrase over and over like a mantra, he marched miserably onwards.
After a few hours, or perhaps it was minutes, he felt himself becoming calmer. After all, he had been down here before, many times. He and his father had used these caves as a food cache, just as he had with Petrokov. And as a boy he'd often come down here with his friends, using the claustrophobic depths to test each others' courage. The wind-burnt leather of his face wrinkled into a smile as he remembered jumping out to frighten Piotre, almost a lifetime ago. How the boy had screamed!
Lost in a fog of long forgotten reminiscences the old man trudged on. He remembered hunts and feasts and fights, won and lost. He remembered his wife, dead these eight years past. He remembered Petrokov's birth.
Then the first rumour of his enemy's approach reached him and he remembered why he was here.
It was not footstep or challenge that warned him of the monster's approach. Instead, it was a whispering out of the darkness: a rapid, scuttling rush that was as staccato and insistent as a crone's knitting needles. It echoed around the labyrinth, stroking cold sweat out of Grigori's skin even as it clenched his stomach into a tight fist of nausea.
With a start, the tavern keeper realized that the sound was coming from behind him, blocking any chance of retreat.
'It must be Calixte,' he lied to himself, spinning clurrisily around to face his pursuer.
His torch flared defiantly as it swept it through the air. For a moment its guttering light chased the shadows all the way back to the fall of rocks, the barrier over which Grigori had lost the two vampire hunters. He was beginning to suspect that he'd lost them for good.
The scuttling grew louder, scratching the inside of Grigori's skull.
Reaching for his belt the old man drew his knife. No great sword, this, no weapon for a hero. But it was sharp. Over the years he had honed it down to a sliver of blade that fit snugly beneath his forearm, stretching from Grigori's wrist to his elbow just as neatly as if it were cousin to the bone beneath. Even in the darkness of these depths it gleamed with a dull menace.
Now the patter of claws upon stone seemed closer than the rockslide. Much closer.
Grigori narrowed his eyes, squinting into every shadowed corner, but there was no movement other than that caused by the flickering of his torch.
The old man curled the fist that held the knife backwards, trying to hide the blade behind his sleeve. If he could manage just one slash at this monster… well, who knew?
Now the clatter of claws was so loud that it couldn't be coming from more than a dozen feet away.
&nbs
p; 'Invisible, are you?' Grigori whispered, teeth bared defiantly.
It drew closer. Faster.
'Where are you?' the old man whispered, eyes flitting nervously from side to side, hunting through the shadows.
Then he looked up.
It was almost upon him, the twisted bulk of its form hanging like rotten fruit from the jagged ceiling of the cave. Even though it was twisting and swinging from one handhold to another, it was terrifyingly quick, filled with all the twitching eagerness of a cockroach.
There was nothing remotely human about it. It had two arms and two legs, true, and the muscles which writhed beneath its leprous skin had their own counterparts on Grigori's own frame, but crawling forward on taloned feet and hands, torchlight gleaming blackly on its carapace of a hide, it looked like nothing so much as a massive insect.
A massive and hungry insect, Grigori thought, stumbling backwards away from it. As he did so, the torch flared and the vampire's head, which had so far been hidden in the shadows, emerged into the light.
Grigori, for the first time since childhood, screamed.
Ivan had described its head as bat-like. It was as good a comparison as any sane man might make: the sharp, ragged ears, the vicious little wrinkle of a snout, sneering over a splintered mouthful of razor-sharp teeth, the tiny, sunken eyes, they all had something of the rodent about them.
There was something more, though, something about the things face that spoke of a horror beyond the power of any natural creature to inspire. Perhaps it was something to do with the intelligence that leered out of the blood red pits of its eyes, an intelligence that was both more and less than human.
Grigori stared stupidly at the thing as it closed the last few feet that separated them. Its mad, insect rush slowed now, as if the beast was gloating as it closed in. Still hanging upside down from the ceiling, it pushed its head slowly forward until its eyes were only inches away from Grigori's own.
He didn't want to meet the thing's gaze. He wanted to close his eyes and hide them in his hands.
To tear them out if need be.
The vampire opened its maw, revealing shards of glistening teeth, and it lolled the arrow point of its slimy tongue out towards Grigori. It switched spasmodically back and forth, rippling as it savored the aura of terror that had wrapped Grigori in its iron embrace.
The tavern keeper felt the acid rush of his gorge rising as the stench of the thing's breath hit him. As sweet and ripe as rotten fish, it hung greasily on the air: the smell of ancient corruption.
With a distant, unrecognized clink, Grigori's knife fell from his nerveless fingers.
In the back of its throat, the vampire made a gargling noise that could almost have been a laugh. Then it drew back a little, rolled its head to one side, and struck.
Grigori's mind remained frozen, mesmerized, a hare in the snake's spell.
His hand didn't.
Even as the vampire's head whipped forward, eyes blinking shut as its tangle of fangs snapped towards the old man's neck, some deep, forgotten instinct sent Grigori ducking backwards, and thrust out with the torch.
So it was that instead of tasting the warm rush of pulsing blood, the vampire tasted fire: clean, bright fire.
It screamed as it fell, but even through its pain it managed to turn, twisting to land on all fours. The slap of its feet punctuated its cry of pain, its sudden leap ended it. One great taloned hand swiped the torch out of its prey's hand and, as the flame crashed against a far wall, Grigori saw it leap.
Darkness, as pure as blindness, rushed in on him.
But before it did the dying flames granted him one last sight. It was of the vampire hunters' return.
They came together, their separate attacks timed with the perfect harmony of a boxer's fists. Viento was the first to emerge from the gloom, appearing like an apparition from the darkness behind Grigori's tormenter. He raced along the roof of the passageway, his fingers obviously as skilled in finding purchase as the strigoi's. Inverted above the trailing volume of his cloak the pale moon of his face shone, its fine features contorted into a mask of unholy joy.
Calixte came from behind the tavern keeper. His porcelain cold fingers pushed down on Grigori's head as he vaulted over him, a rush of displaced air marking his passage. The confusion of his attack - a blur of speed and savagery - was burnt onto the tavern keeper's retinas as his torch died.
Cowering in the darkness, he listened to the sound of the battle, and prayed.
IT LASTED FOR no more than seconds, yet in that time Grigori felt years pass. The screams that echoed from mouths to walls to the inside of his head had a madness in them that made no distinction between joy and pain, terror and lust. Tearing flesh, splintering bone, the splatter and sliver of dismemberment rang out in hellish counterpoint to the unmistakable high pitched squeal of Viento's giggle, his laughter interrupted only by sudden grunts of exertion.
Calixte remained silent.
The worse was the warm, wet rain that began to fall, sticky to the touch and iron to the tongue.
It was too much.
Grigori collapsed helplessly on the cold floor, wracked with spasms of nausea. For a while he remained lost in the world of fear and disgust. Then, slowly, he became aware that the sounds of battle had gone. Once more, silence reigned, broken by neither breath nor movement.
For all of that, though, Grigori was passed falling into any illusion that he might be alone. Bent double he groped forward in the darkness, fingers slipping across newly dampened stones as he searched for his torch.
Still trying not to think about what its rekindled light might reveal, he took out flint and steel and scraped a shower of sparks onto the pitch. The torch took the flame, sputtering out an uneven light. With an effort of will the tavern keeper forced himself to look up.
The vampire hunters stood on either side of their foe's ruined body, bookend statues of tranquility. Neither of them seemed harmed, or even shaken. Blood drooled in thick black slicks from their perfectly carved lips and glistened on their delicate hands, but Grigori didn't think that it was theirs.
'A good fight,' Calixte said with the sigh of a man who has just enjoyed a fine meal. He turned to Grigori and bared his pink stained teeth in a smile.
The tavern keeper tried to return the gesture, pulling his lips back even as he realized that Calixtes eyes now gleamed with the same blood red he had seen in the vampire's.
The other vampire's.
'No…' Grigori said, slumping back into the cold embrace of the wall.
'Now, now,' Calixte said, his smile growing wider as he winked at Viento. 'No need to worry. The deal remains the same. All you owe us is a season's food and board. I'm sure that we won't eat you all out of house and home.'
Calixte glanced at Viento, but his companion was beyond appreciation of any wit. He had the dazed, happy look of a satiated drunkard.
A sudden fear seized Grigori, sharper than any other in this nightmare his life had become.
'Petrokov…' he began, 'my son?'
'Don't worry about him,' Calixte advised, looming up as he approached the tavern keeper. 'You have more pressing concerns.'
One wet, darkly stained hand dropped upon the old man's shoulder. Squeezing as tightly as a vulture's claw, it bruised flesh and ground bones together. Slowly, without any sign of effort, Calixte lifted his host clean off the floor and held him there, the better to gaze into his eyes.
'Now you will take us home,' the vampire told him with all the confidence of a man who has seen the future. And perhaps he had. Perhaps the twice-stolen blood that squirmed and flowed beneath the transparent lenses of his eyeballs granted him that power.
'But, my son…'
'Gone. Now, let us go.'
As gently as a cat with her kitten, he lowered Grigori back to the floor. The old man slumped, his jaw dropping foolishly. Suddenly he looked a lot more than his sixty years.
'Lead on,' Calixte said, with a theatrical bow. 'I'm hungry!'
One step followed the next as Grigori, with the aimless shamble of a broken man, led them back out of the labyrinth and into the world beyond.
THEY EMERGED INTO the icy blast of an enraged wind. It snapped and whipped around them, sending great sheets of blinding snow swooping across the entrance to the cave. Even the two vampire hunters hesitated before venturing out to brave its full fury. Only Grigori seemed unconcerned. He barely broke his step as he trudged out into its embrace, not even stopping for his snowshoes.
'This way,' he said, his voice as flat as ice and as weak as broken straw.
Calixte savoured his guide's despair as he led them out into the storm. He studied the stoop of the old man's shoulders as, stumbling like an octogenarian, he trudged back into the relative shelter of the forest. The vampire was content to let him pick his way hesitantly forward along trails blanketed with thick falls of driven snow, his hood forgotten, his head low.
Calixte smiled, and in that moment decided to let the tavern keeper live. He could be a sort of breathing trophy. Sometimes the subtle pleasures were the best. After all, any animal could destroy a body. It took a master to break a soul.
Here and there, sheltered by overhanging boughs or cleared by strange eddies of the blizzard's energy, dark patches of frost rimed earth glistened black and silver in the gloom. For the most part, though, the ground was a rippling ocean of grey snow, stretching out endlessly in every direction.
'This way,' Grigori repeated, the wind leaping up to snatch the words from his mouth.
The three dark figures tracked through a deep, stone-walled crevasse, the ribbon of water that had cut it hidden beneath deep drifts. Then they began to climb, one crest following the next in a confused jumble of hillocks.
'Grigori!' Calixte called, his voice almost inaudible beneath the gathering storm. 'I don't recognize this place. Are we lost?'
'I'm hungry,' Viento complained, his gaze fastening on the thin strip of flesh visible between Grigori's beard and cloak. Calixte scowled at him.
'Lost?' Grigori repeated apathetically. 'No, this is a short cut. Do you want to go back and start again?'
Swords of the Empire Page 2
