“You mentioned that you read much of the four great books.”
Max nodded, wondering where the discussion was going. Leaning forward, the mage raised her finger and began tracing in the air between her and Max. Her fingertip left a silver strand as fragile looking as a spiderweb floating in the air. Finished, she leaned back, shooting Max a questioning look.
Max bit his lip, entranced by the silver shape before him. “This isn’t a rune I’m familiar with,” he said slowly, “which isn’t a big surprise since I didn’t quite finish Magik, but it seems to me that…” Raising his own fingertip, he touched her rune, instinctively filling in the spots she’d purposely left blank. The temperature in the room grew as he traced, and he paused to wipe a drop of sweat from his nose. Oewaelle hissed at one point in his tracing, but intent on his work, Max ignored her. Sweat stung his eyes, and he had to force his finger to move the last inches to complete the rune. The moment his crawling silver thread touched Oewaelle’s, there was a flash of intense heat and a sharp snap in the back of his head. He sighed with relief as the temperature in the room began to drop. Oewaelle, as damp and sweaty as he, gave him a small nod. From the rune he’d drawn, Max knew that there was only one word it could be.
“Inspiratio!” Max and the mage said at the same moment. A wave of pure energy rolled over him, and for an instant, he felt as if he were everywhere at once. All his myriad pieces came back in a rush, and he was sitting at the table in sweat-soaked clothes, his hands shaking.
“Very good, Max,” Oewaelle murmured in a trembling voice. “I knew you could do it.”
“Cool.” Max rested his forehead on the table before him. “Do what?” He rolled his head slightly so that he could look at the woman.
Oewaelle’s eyes sparkled. “There are five hundred thousand people on Aeyaqar at last count. Of those, perhaps one hundred thousand are magic users of one sort or another. Of that one hundred thousand, fifteen hundred are vampires. Most of the vampires can use the gateways, but only one percent have the ability to travel. Of the remaining ninety-eight thousand five hundred magic users, fifty have the gift of traveling, and none can use a gateway. Of the fifty, only a handful still remain on Aeyaqar.” She gave him a wide smile, and for the first time, Max noticed her fangs. “I just taught you the rune for traveling.”
He frowned, knowing that he was missing something important. “Define ‘traveling.’”
“Moving instantly between two points on this world. You cannot create a gateway to your own world, and you must be able to visualize where you are going to.”
Max sat back up. “That’s too bad. I would kill for a good hamburger and french fries.”
Oewaelle snorted a laugh. “We should practice the rune, to set it in place. Are you familiar with the north tower of this city?” she asked, her finger tapping her lips lightly.
“I got here and passed out,” Max reminded her. “I woke up in bed. I do know another place, however.” He was so totally drained, getting to his feet was an effort.
Oewaelle turned to the other seated mage. “We’ll be back when we’re back, Styvius. We should be back for dinner.”
Styvius nodded solemnly. “As you wish, Oewaelle. I envy you and Maximilian the ability to travel, but perhaps it’s better this way. I fear that I would run away from too many confrontations.”
Oewaelle laughed as she turned to Max. “Shall we go?”
Max concentrated, and the runespell flickered into existence almost as soon as he moved to trace a section of the complex pattern. “Inspiratio!” he said, picturing the location in his mind.
Shoulder to shoulder, they stepped to the isolated hilltop overlooking South Brosthik. The burned remains of the guildhall, mere stumps of the three grand mushrooms, still smoked, and the air was thick with the scent of char. Beside him, Oewaelle gasped with a sound of physical pain.
“Oh, my lovely guildhall.” Tears streaked her pale cheeks. Taking a deep breath, she sat on the grassy hilltop, watching as twilight descended over the small town. “Are you aware that magic users and vampires are not native to this world, Maximilian, or to yours?” she said, not turning her eyes from the village.
“I kind of figured that one out, Oewaelle.”
She sighed. “One hundred thousand of us arrived nearly two thousand of your years ago.” At his quick glance, she laughed. “I was not aboard the ship but was born one thousand years later.” Her eyes turned to him finally. “Two thousand vampires were the crew of the ship, and the world of Aeyaqar was selected after years of careful study as a new home for our kind.”
Max gave her a sad look. “This world is killing your people,” he said softly. “Your society has stagnated, and your population is falling. After two thousand years, this world should have a population in the billions.”
She gave him a sad look. “We are aware of that. However, there are none left alive that can fly the Divine Guidance, the vessel that brought us here.”
He frowned. “You make it sound like you have a starship tucked away in your hip pocket.”
Lying back on the soft grass, she gazed up into the night sky for a long time then finally pointed. “There.”
Max lay beside her and stared at the bright dot crawling across the sky. After having seen so many satellites moving over Earth, it no longer evoked a sense of wonder, but… “That’s just a small moon,” Max declared adamantly.
“The Imperial Colony Ship Divine Guidance,” she whispered, “is a globe two thousand meters in diameter.” There was more than a touch of awe in her voice. “My parents told me that after they arrived on the planet, the smaller ships that brought them to the surface were returned to the Divine Guidance for storage and to keep them out of the wrong hands. The ship is sitting in a point of stability between the planet and the sun, where it remains safe from the pull of gravity, and from us.” Her chuckle was bitter. “Many vampires have tried traveling to the Divine Guidance, but none have returned.”
“I know about Lagrangian points,” Max commented in an unemotional voice, thinking of the poor bastards who’d transported themselves into the vacuum of space.
“Two years after we arrived, people began to change, and the birthrate plummeted,” Oewaelle continued. “The goblins you encountered were once people like you and I, as were the elves, dwarves, and witch breeds. One group, living in the far north almost as far as the ice, shrank to a mere forty centimeters and grew wings.”
Max gave her a stunned look. “Holy shit! You’re talking about fairies.”
The mage nodded gravely. “They are known more commonly as nixies on Aeyaqar,” she said in a soft voice. “Other creatures like imps, brownies, sprites, leprechauns, and a variety of daemons aren’t quite so benevolent.” She shut her eyes and sighed before she went on. “Some people became ‘were’ creatures.”
“You’re kidding.” Max scoffed. “You mean like werewolves?”
“Werewolves, werebears, and things that don’t have names. The council of mages suspects that the dragon that killed the king and queen was a were.”
“A fucking weredragon!” Max cursed. “This place isn’t a world—it’s an insane asylum.” He threw her a hard look. “Of your one hundred thousand magic users, right now, how many are normal—and by that I mean you and me and Shyilia normal.”
She returned a wry glance. “Perhaps sixty or seventy thousand remain normal. For some reason, the population of normal vampires has remained consistent at two thousand, as has the population of mundanes who lived here when we first arrived.”
Max frowned at that piece of information.
As she studied him, her look softened. “Yet you are a child of both worlds, Maximilian, and we beg your aid, or we will die.” She bit her lip. “We have brought others from your world to help us in our fight. All that were not turned died within the first year. None had the
command of magic as you do, nor, it now seems, your technical skills.”
“Turned?” Max questioned. “Doesn’t that just make them vampiric slaves or something?”
Her smile was sly. “There are ways around that, Maximilian.”
Max glared at the beautiful one-thousand-year-old vampire who had neatly painted him into a corner. “Well played,” he growled sourly. “You boxed me into a corner with no way out.” A slow smile spread across his shadowed face. “Fine, I’ll help you, but my assistance has a price.”
Oewaelle gave him a nervous look. “I know that you find me attractive,” she said in a resigned voice. “If you want me, you may have me.” She raised her chin proudly.
“Oh, get off your soap box.” He snorted. “You’re damned good-looking, but…” His finger pointed toward the retreating dot in the sky. “But that is what I want.”
Chapter 6
PLANS AND STRATEGIES
The mage lay there on the grass, her mouth hanging open. “What?”
Max was watching the mage closely, and the flicker of disappointment that crossed her pallid and beautiful face made him laugh. “On Earth, I grew up in the dawn of the Space Age. Every boy and girl watched the very first astronaut step out of his crude spacecraft and out onto our moon. It was a thrilling moment. We all wanted to fly a spaceship to the stars. In most, the desire died slowly and faded; in others, it didn’t. Those few harbored a secret love for space and became fans… or science fiction writers or NASA engineers. I’m still a fan.” He waved his hand at the sweep of stars overhead. “Look at that! From the density of the stars, we must be much closer to the galactic center than Earth.”
Oewaelle laughed lightly. “Are all those from your world so… enthusiastic about your sciences?”
“Only some.” Max rolled onto his side to stare at the mage. “Why did your kind ever come here, Oewaelle, cross all those light-years to arrive at an uncertain future?”
The woman shut her eyes. “There was a great war long ago, with a species we only call ‘the slayers.’ They fight, our greatest thinkers speculated, for the sheer pleasure of battle.” She looked at him with stricken eyes. “Who could do such a thing? Even in our darkest dreams, we couldn’t imagine such a race. World after world fell to them until finally, after our greatest scholars discovered Aeyaqar and its unique attributes, we fled here with all that we could fit into our vessel.” Her eyes were tormented. “My parents said we left billions of our kind behind to be vanquished by the slayers.”
“Yeah,” Max replied with a crooked smile. “That sounds kind of like the Klingons.”
“The who?”
“An imaginary race created in a science fiction epic of my time. They, too, lived for battle and conquest and little else.”
“What happened to them, this fictitious race of warriors?” Oewaelle sounded intrigued, despite her abhorrence.
Max frowned. “This race mined their moon for an element vital to the production of power. This power was used primarily to build warships but also provided the power that kept their civilization going. Greedy, the race overmined their moon, and there was an explosion that destroyed half the moon and the entire mining operation. This race of warriors had to beg assistance from their enemies for the race to survive.”
The mage leaned forward. “And what happened then?”
Max grinned. “That’s the beauty of a good story. Unless it’s a tragedy where everyone dies, it never really ends. The battle may end, and the adventure may conclude, but the characters, or their children, still move on. The Star Trek stories have been around for seventy years, with new characters, new species, and new adventures. It was a favorite of mine,” he admitted. “Why Aeyaqar? Why this world?” He asked, although he already knew part of the answer.
Oewaelle gave him a thin smile. “Aeyaqar is the richest world in magical energy that any have ever discovered. Some say that it is the very heart of magic in our galaxy. It also has gateways to escape through.”
“Won’t this race of slayers follow you through to Earth?”
She shook her head. “The slayers have no magical ability. They neither use nor see nor are aware of etheric energy… like the people on your world.”
Max bit his lip, thinking that this quirk had possibilities and might just prove to be the slayers’ Achilles’ heel, but that was a problem for the future.
Watching his face, she continued, “Our final insurance is a single runespell that will disable all six gateways to your world. After that, only exceptionally powerful vampires will be able to travel between worlds, without the gateways, but at the current thin spots.”
Max sagged with relief. “I’m glad you took some sort of precautions.”
“We did,” Oewaelle said reassuringly. “Now lie back in the grass, and I will teach you the closing runespell. It’s not quite as hard as the traveling rune.”
She was right—in quantity. The quality, however, was much, much harder to master, and when he’d finally committed it to memory, he was shaking with the effort.
“One last thing you should know before we return to Sloobork.” She stood and began to brush the damp grass from her cloak. “Vampires can also marry and have children, and the vampiric gene will breed true.”
Max could actually feel the heat of a blush rising in his cheeks, and he was just as happy that it was dark.
“Yeah, well, I’ll remember that if I ever find someone who would marry a vampire.” His voice was as dry as dust.
The mage straightened her hair and shot him a small mysterious smile. “I can think of one or two who wouldn’t turn down the offer.”
Max’s jaw sagged open as Oewaelle waved her hand in a seemingly negligent gesture, opened a traveling gateway, and calmly stepped through. Max had to jump through in a rush before the gateway snapped shut on his heels.
Shyilia stood before him, her hands on her hips and fire in her eyes. “I am going with you to your Earth.” She nearly spat out the word.
“No,” Max said calmly as he eyed the young woman standing before him. She was dressed for the trail in conservative leather pants and a jerkin, her bow in hand and a small pack on her back. A quiver of long arrows was lashed to the side of the pack.
He bit his tongue to keep from grinning. Under normal circumstances, he would have welcomed her as a companion, but traveling in war-torn Turkey with no documents wasn’t a normal circumstance.
With a completely straight face, Oewaelle, who was standing beside the fuming young woman, reached into the voluminous pocket of her robe and withdrew two small items, which she placed on the table before Max.
He started in surprise at the US passport with Shyilia’s picture on it and a newly minted photo ID VISA card, also with Shy’s smug picture. “How did you ever think to…” He saw his arguments evaporate, and he turned a flat stare on the placid mage. “Thanks a lot.”
The corner of her mouth twitched up slightly. “You’re welcome. It will be better for you with a companion, and good for Shyilia, as well, to find out what your world is really like.”
Max held her gaze. “You’ve been to my world before, haven’t you?”
Her imperturbable expression twisted slightly, perhaps with a recalled grimace. “Once or twice, a few hundred years ago,” she replied in a thoughtful voice. “It was… educational. Tomás de Torquemada was active as the grand inquisitor at that particular time.”
Max felt pity for the mage. “It was a dangerous time for all women, especially female vampires.” He turned to Shyilia. “Fine, you can come, but know this: it is almost as dangerous in the world I left as it was during the Inquisition. For your own safety, I want your promise that you will do what I say.”
The young woman’s face had paled, although there was still a stubborn set to her narrow elfin jaw.
“If you will n
ot agree, I cannot guarantee that I can return you to this land alive, let alone unharmed.”
Her jaw worked, and she finally got out, “I agree,” through clenched teeth.
He gave her a wide smile and a small bow. “Thank you,” he replied sweetly. “I see you are ready to go?”
She gave him a curt nod, and for a moment, he could practically see steam curling from her ears. “Good. Lose the bow and arrows. The clothes are good, but we both will have to wear something like my old burnoose in order to blend in. I can fight with my staff and my knife if I need to. Do you have a good knife?”
She picked up the cleaned and polished goblin sword. The hilt, Max noted with interest, had been rewrapped with leather strips.
His smile widened. “You’ll have to lose the sword, too.”
Her eyes widened in anger.
“I have to leave the Saracen blade I picked up, and I could get a small fortune for it on the other side.”
“Fine,” she snarled, pulling out a curved fighting knife with a gleaming seventeen-centimeter blade.
“The knife will be good.” Max turned to Oewaelle. “Now we come to the part about the charitable donations. If I remember my Sunday school, charity is one of the seven virtues, along with chastity, temperance, diligence, patience, kindness, and humility.” He shot her an impudent grin that quickly sobered. “I’m quite serious that we will need something to trade for money and supplies. The silver and bronze coins I have aren’t worth much, except as curios, and hauling a Saracen blade across Turkey is bound to get me in trouble.”
She reached into another pocket and withdrew a fat leather bag, pouring the contents on the table before them in a tinkling, glittering cascade. “Will this do?” she asked blithely, raising a single curved eyebrow. Even Shy looked awestruck.
Max touched a large green gem with a finger. “Is this stuff real?” he asked, eyeing the pile of gems and what he guessed was easily a half kilogram of golden aureus.
Destiny of the Vampire Page 7
