Adept tegw-1

by Michael Arnquist

  Syth, one of her rescuers, turned to gaze up at her. He was a strange, scruffy fellow somehow wrapped in his own perpetual gust of wind, and unless she had lost her skill at reading such things, there was desire in his eyes when he looked upon her.

  “Lass, are you certain you will not join us?” he called. “I can give you a hand down the slope, if you are still unsteady on your feet from your earlier ordeal.”

  “I have a fine view from here,” she returned. She held up the hunting knife. “And I will be removing any hand-or other appendage-directed my way.”

  Syth let out a guffaw and settled back with a broad grin of admiration.

  “Will you not at least reconsider the offer of our skilled friend Halthak here to heal your injuries, then?” he asked, indicating the quiet Half-Ork at his side.

  Halthak raised his eyes to meet hers, their wide, childlike innocence incongruous amid a countenance that was so ugly as to be nearly deformed. In truth, she ached and stung all over from the earlier scuffle, but there was no way she would permit a cohort of the Black One to work his magic on her. No, she was in this cave against her better judgment and only long enough to hear what lies the fiend would spin; if these men knew not whom they harbored, perhaps they could be swayed to join her against the monster. She gave a sharp shake of her head, and the Half-Ork dropped his gaze.

  Amric, the tall, powerfully built warrior with the storm-grey eyes who had been the other of her rescuers, cleared his throat and the others grew still. This one had a hard look about him, and yet his voice carried at once both the ring of command and a steady underlying current of compassion. It was clear he was the leader of this motley group, but she had yet to puzzle out why a creature such as the Vampire King would pretend to defer to him, even for a time.

  “Bellimar,” the warrior said. “As you urged, we have withheld all questions while we took shelter from the hazards of the open night. There can be little doubt that you have proven an invaluable companion on this dangerous road, but it is no longer possible to look past the lurking ghosts of your secrets. The time has come to have answers.”

  Bellimar said nothing for long moments, still staring into the meager campfire. Thalya fidgeted. She was eager to hear the monster’s admission of guilt, but she refused to be the one to break the silence, and so she clenched her fist over the hilt of her knife and waited. When at last the old man spoke, it was in a whisper that somehow carried throughout the cave with startling clarity, like a chill breeze through a darkened crypt.

  “I will save you the trouble of asking outright,” he said. “The lady named me truly. I am indeed Bellimar the Destroyer, the man whose rise and fall I recounted to you a mere handful of nights ago in this very cave. I am the conqueror whose vile deeds were scrawled in the blood of innocents on the dim-shrouded pages of history now long lost to this world, and I am guilty of countless more offenses than were ever chronicled.”

  His eyes rose from the fire, but drank its flame. Gone was the old man, weary and resigned, shed and discarded like a dried husk. In his place was a man of fierce, primal intensity, his lean face set in ruthless lines and his eyes burning with blood-red power. His voice crowded out the other sounds of the night until even the echo of his words from the stark ribcage of the cave retreated in dread. Thalya felt a chill along her spine. It was as if he were whispering at her very shoulder, his bloodless lips at her ear.

  “Know, friends, that in my time I have crushed entire nations under my heel. I turned mortal men, good men as well as bad, into unfeeling killing machines. I raised armies of the dead when there were not enough mortal men at hand to corrupt, and I commanded things of deepest shadow. The world, a more primitive place so many centuries ago, trembled at my very tread. I grasped for power, eternally more power, and dark forces granted my every excess. There was a terrible price to be paid, but I paid it then with nary a second thought. I suspect I have been further over that black precipice than any man in the history of this world, and it embraced me as its own. I became the Lord of Night, the Vampire King, and not even the combined might of nations could stop what I had built, what I had become. I had cheated mortality, abandoned my humanity. Time no longer held sway over me, and nothing remained with the power to stop my undying reign.”

  He paused, glancing around at their pale faces. “Nothing in this world, at least.”

  “And yet you were struck down, by some force,” interjected the Sil’ath, Valkarr. Thalya suppressed a start. Until his words, spoken in a coarse, guttural tone that lingered on the sibilant sounds, she had all but forgotten the presence of the reptilian warrior.

  “So I was,” Bellimar admitted. “I was struck down at the height of my power, even as I was on the verge of plunging the world into an age of shadow such as it had never before seen. I was struck down by a gathering of forces from beyond that dwarfed even my own strength.”

  “So the tales were true?” Amric asked, incredulous. “The gods themselves intervened in the mortal arena?”

  The old man barked a bitter laugh. “First, tell me your definition of a god. What are the gods, anyway, except beings above us in power, capable of demanding obeisance and inflicting their will upon lesser creatures such as ourselves? By that standard, yes, it was most certainly the gods who struck me down. Whatever you call these beings, they appeared to me as men and women of great power, and were not content to defeat or even destroy me. Instead, they changed me in ways I still do not understand, and then cast me out into the world, even as they dispersed the dark forces I had assembled around me.”

  “I do not understand,” Halthak said. “What did you become after your fall? What are you now?”

  Bellimar swung his gaze to the Half-Ork. “In many ways, I am what I was before, an affront to nature by my very existence,” he said. “I am an ancient vampire.”

  Halthak started back from the man as if struck.

  “Whatever is the matter, healer?” Bellimar asked, baring his teeth in a blood-chilling smile. “Are you thinking, perhaps, of all those nights I feigned sleep whilst listening to the languid pulse within your senseless, slumbering form only a few tantalizing feet away? Ah, but listen to your heart race now!”

  In what Thalya would have deemed a physical impossibility, the Half-Ork whitened even further.

  “Enough, Bellimar!” Amric said, slicing his hand through the air in a curt motion. “Leave him be.”

  Bellimar swung his gaze over to the man.

  “And you, warrior,” he hissed. “Your pulse remains strong and steady, scarcely rising under threat of violence even though I can smell your fear. A testament to the steel of your nerves, no doubt, but is your composure misplaced? Aura or no, I suspect your blood carries hidden power.”

  Amric met the vampire’s fevered stare, unmoving, unrelenting. “If you were merely some blood-mad fiend,” he said, “you have had ample opportunity to strike. Instead you saved us in Stronghold, and you gave me your word you were our ally.”

  Thalya snorted, but Amric ignored her and pressed on. “What game are you playing at, Bellimar?”

  The old man met his iron gaze for a long moment, and then sagged back, looking suddenly aged and weary once more.

  “I am no longer certain,” he said at last in a low, brooding tone. “At first it was the drive for knowledge. I sought to end this new curse, to understand how I had been changed, to unravel the riddle of what they had done to me so that I could return to my former glory. I realized the obvious from the beginning, that I had somehow been stripped of my sorcerous powers; they eluded my will even though I retained the full extent of my arcane knowledge itself.

  “The more subtle aspects of my transformation soon began to settle upon me, however. I still required the blood and life force of living creatures as sustenance, and the infernal craving was with me always, but I could no longer bear to take sentient life as I had so casually done before. In fact, I felt nausea, revulsion and pain whenever I contemplated doing harm to another creature. And
so I was consigned to feeding on game and lesser creatures like some depraved scavenger, and even that only in the extremes of my hunger, when necessary to sustain my very existence. Perhaps in exchange, I could once more endure the light of the sun and other things considered anathema to my kind. I felt their searing kiss on my flesh, and yet somehow I was not destroyed. I had been thrust into some half existence, and thus it has been for all these centuries, as I pay penance for my sins.”

  “Are you living or dead, then?” Syth asked in a hushed voice.

  “What does it mean to be living?” Bellimar replied with a shrug. “I have free will, and so by that definition-”

  “No more word games,” Amric interrupted. “Answer the question or be gone from here.”

  “I do not mean to equivocate, swordsman,” Bellimar said with a sad smile. “In truth, I do not know the answer. I have been altered in ways beyond my understanding, and I suspect I am either none or all of those things at this point. My aura was altered in some way every bit as fundamental as when I passed from mortal life and became a vampire. By strict definition, I am not living, dead or undead now. And since I have been each of them at one time or another, I may be in a unique position to know. No, I am in a purgatory all my own.”

  He lapsed into silence, and the shadows cast by the sinking flames writhed along the deep lines of his face. When he spoke again, his voice was lower yet, almost inaudible. “I now feel like my quest for this knowledge is-has always been-the final spasm of a dead man, the twitch of limbs that do not realize the spirit has already left the body. I am a hollow shell pursuing a remembered impulse, when the motivation for it is long lost. I no longer know if I seek the knowledge in order to gain release from my constraints, as I once did, or to prevent an accidental reversion to my former self. Perhaps I seek the knowledge simply to put an end to my wretched existence, once and for all.”

  Thalya scowled and reached out to brush her fingertips against the black arrow. If he truly desired an end to his existence, she was more than ready to assist. As if reading her mind, Bellimar glanced toward her. The firelight performed a lurid dance in his eyes as he regarded her for an instant with an unreadable expression. Then his gaze slid away.

  “Your interest in the unusual auras of others,” Amric was saying. “You hope to find in them the key to your own.”

  The old man gave an approving nod. “Very good, swordsman.”

  “And your extensive knowledge of them comes in part from your years feeding upon the life force of others, as the monster you were,” the warrior continued in a cold tone.

  Bellimar flinched as if struck, and gave an almost imperceptible nod. “Regrettably true as well,” he whispered.

  “I have seen your face become flushed when you are in the presence of spilt blood,” Amric pressed. “The farm, the bloodbeasts, the Wyrgens. I mistook it for an aversion to violence, but now I realize it was the strain of controlling your hunger. And what of the night you disappeared, after the fight with the bloodbeasts in the forest?”

  Bellimar looked away. “There was so much blood, everywhere. So much of your blood, and Valkarr’s, and it had been so long since I fed….” He raised his eyes, lifted his chin. “I did not trust myself around you in your weakened state. My hunger threatened to overwhelm my imposed constraints and my willpower both, and I was left with only one course.”

  Amric studied him over the campfire. “Did you feed that night?”

  “No, there was no suitable prey to be found nearby, and I was loath to range beyond earshot for fear of more creatures finding you while I was gone. The forest is tainted to such a degree now that few natural creatures remain within its confines, I fear. I merely kept my distance until I could regain my composure.”

  The warrior rubbed at the stubble on his chin, seeming to mull this over. “And yet you returned, to later be exposed to more bloodshed within the fortress of the Wyrgens.”

  Bellimar sighed. “You must understand that there are three primary factors that drive my hunger,” he said, raising his hand and beginning to tick off points on his slender fingers. “First, exposure to mortal blood or to a particularly tantalizing life force. Second, heightened emotion such as being in the frenzy of combat or other life-threatening situations. And third, intense physical exertion such as tapping into the unnatural strength I possess as a centuries-old vampire.”

  His hand fell to his lap again, and he shook his head with a rueful smile. “It has been no easy thing, warrior, being in your company.”

  Amric leaned back, frowning. “I confess that I do not know what to make of you, Bellimar,” he said. “It would seem that you put our lives at risk by your very presence, yet your knowledge has been invaluable and you have given no evidence of wrongdoing in our presence. I am left to wonder if you are truly friend or foe, and further, if you can be trusted to know which, yourself.”

  “Perhaps the results are the same,” she snarled, causing the men around the fire to glance up toward her. “His enmity is boundless, as we know from the tales. Lesser known by history is how his purported friendship is no prize to covet either. Is that not true, foul one?”

  “Ah good, we come to it at last,” Bellimar said. “How fares your father, dear girl? You were but a wisp of a child when last I saw you, in that light green cotton dress of yours.”

  Thalya reeled as his words churned to the surface a flood of images from a more joyful time she had thought long and well buried. She clenched her fists until the knuckles whitened to conceal the sudden trembling. When she was certain she could speak without tremors in her voice as well, she said, “He died years ago, demon.”

  The vampire studied her, his eyes searching her enraged expression. “He was a good man, Thalya. I am greatly aggrieved to hear of his death.”

  “Empty words,” she said as she turned her head and spat in the dust of the cave floor. “You know nothing of grief, or loss, or guilt. To you, he was just another pawn to be used and then discarded, and his death lies at your feet just as surely as if you had slain him with your own hand.”

  Bellimar gave a slow shake of his head. “I can see that my familiarity with this tale is incomplete, but I will begin it nonetheless, with the hope that the young lady will supply the ending.”

  The huntress said nothing in reply, maintaining a level glare at the old man. Bellimar sighed and began speaking.

  “Over twenty years ago, my wanderings brought me once more to the beautiful city of Hyaxus. I trusted that enough time had passed since my last disastrous visit there, and no one would recognize my face, unaltered by the years as it was. One can only lose oneself in the remote corners of the world for so long, after all, before the need to return to true civilization becomes unbearable. It was in that elegant city’s academy that I met Thalya’s father, a jovial fellow with an honest face by the name of Drothis. He was a devoted scholar of the arcane and a middling talent at alchemy, as well as being a recent widower with an infant daughter.”

  “He was a renowned professor of the academy,” Thalya gritted, “and a gifted alchemist.”

  “He had an unusual aura,” Bellimar said, continuing as if she had not spoken. “Erratic, unsteady, somehow incomplete. Having learned of the recent loss of his beloved wife, I had a clinical curiosity as to whether profound grief and depression might be the cause of his flawed essence. My studies were hampered, of course, by my not having had the chance to observe him before the loss.”

  “How dare you speak of my father thus?” Thalya demanded, rising to her feet. Behind her, Shien shifted and gave a nervous whicker. “He was a good man, not some specimen in a jar!”

  The old man favored her with a look of mild reproach. “I have already admitted that he was a good man, Thalya, but these are my memories, given forth unembellished. It may not be flattering to you or to me, but these were my initial motivations for making your father’s acquaintance. Now, please sit down and lower your voice, as the countryside out there is veritably crawling with thing
s that would like nothing more than to find so many beating hearts trapped in this small cavern.”

  Thalya paled, throwing a glance over her shoulder and out into the darkness. She knew his words to be true, for in the days of lying in wait for the return of her prey she had witnessed a multitude of things skulking through the night, misshapen things that turned her flesh to ice. Always she had been able to give them a wide berth, at least until earlier that night when she stumbled across the strange black man-creatures on the trail outside. No, it would be foolhardy in the extreme to remain out in the open night, or to draw its denizens to them now. And since she refused to allow her target from her sight now that she had tracked him down, she was forced to share this cave with him until she determined how he could be slain.

  It was some small consolation, she had to admit, that she found herself hungering for every new word of her father, even if the vampire’s words stirred as much rage as recollection. She patted Shien’s neck and sank to her haunches with a scathing glare at her nemesis.

  “Drothis and I became friends,” Bellimar continued. “We shared some common interests in the field of arcane studies, and I presented myself as a traveling scholar, though I was always careful to mask the true extent of the knowledge I had gained over many centuries as well as through my, shall we say, former preoccupation with certain subject matters.”

  He paused, staring into the fire. “I stayed too long,” he said. “I had made the same mistake in the past, and so I knew better, but I had come to value his company. For Drothis, I seemed to fill some of the companionship void that his wife, a highly intelligent scholar herself and a shrewd foil for his theories, had left behind. As the years passed, I knew I should move on, for the peculiarities of my nature cannot be concealed forever. But I hesitated to leave him alone and bereft again. I had become convinced that his broken nature would never fully mend after the loss of his bosom companion, and somehow my presence soothed his pain for a time.