by Garon Whited
“If, if, if,” Mary said, gently. “You can drive yourself insane with ifs. No. They were going to kill you and kill her, even kill me, and Dantos, and Tianna—everyone. It’s clear they don’t care who they hurt, as long as they destroy this place. So, no matter what, we resist.”
“They have Tianna,” I told her. “She’s a hostage. And maybe she’s dead by now.”
“I don’t know about that. We’ll have to ask.”
I leaned my head back against the wall and closed my eyes.
“I’m so tired.”
“I can imagine.”
“I’m angry, and I’ve killed thousands to avenge Bronze. It isn’t enough. I still want to kill everything. Show me a row of throats and I will. But… right now I’m tired. I’m tired of fighting everything, resisting everything, being the upright guy. I want a rest. I want to go back to our farmhouse and tell everyone to leave me alone, but I can’t because a bunch of paranoid vampires burned it down.”
“I know,” Mary said, softly. “I know. We’ll take a vacation. Let’s go. We can pop over to Apocalyptica and you can do some universe-hopping from there, find us a nice world to settle on, all that stuff.”
“Apocalyptica?”
“The post-nuclear-holocaust world? The one where you put Diogenes in charge?”
“Oh. Good name, I guess.”
“Thank you. So what are we waiting for? Let’s go.”
“They have Tianna. I can’t leave while they have her.”
“And if they’ve killed her?”
“Then I can’t leave until I crush a religion.”
“Fair enough, I suppose. All right.” Mary stepped out of the waterfall and made a quick brushing movement. She was clean and dry. “You take a brief break and pull yourself together. I’ll see what’s going on out there and get back to you. Okay?”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
I didn’t stay exactly there. I eventually crawled out of the water and dressed. I didn’t go far after that, just to the bedroom to lie there in the dark.
It still seems strange to me. Darkness, I mean. During the day, I’m as dependent on light as any mortal man.
Mary came back after a while. I don’t know how long. I smelled food, though, as her movement wafted air from the living room to the bedroom.
“I see you didn’t bother with lunch,” she observed.
“I wasn’t aware anyone brought it.”
“Would you have eaten it if you had?”
“Probably not,” I admitted.
“I thought as much.” She settled to the edge of the slab that served as a bed. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.”
“Okay. Can I borrow Firebrand?”
“Firebrand can decide for itself.”
“Thanks.” She leaned over and kissed me, softly. “You’ll be okay. It just takes a while.”
I didn’t say anything. I’m sure she’s lost people in her life. I’m sure she’s lost people she loved. But it’s never the same for anyone. It’s always a new and different pain, even if it’s the same loss. It’s like being cut in half and still forced to live.
I wanted Bronze back.
Mary rose and glided out, silently. I heard the whisper a brief psychic conversation, then Firebrand directed a thought at me.
Boss?
What?
I’m going to go help Mary kill some stuff. Will you be all right without me?
No. But I won’t be all right with you here, either. It doesn’t matter.
I’m sorry, Boss. I loved her too, in my own way.
Go away.
The outer door closed with a grinding thump. I lay there in the dark and hurt.
Even Johann never managed a pain like this.
Someone dealt with the food, switching old dishes out for new. During this, I felt someone enter the room and move close to me. Something soft pressed against my arm. I opened an eye and, in the light from the other room, saw Caris standing by the bed, putting a stuffed toy beside me. It was a simple thing, meant to be a stuffed man, I suppose. Then I saw someone had stitched a face on it, including a big smile and fangs.
Caris hugged my arm for a moment, then ran from the room.
I cradled the doll in one arm and wondered if it could bandage a broken heart. I doubted it.
Mary slid into the bedroom, skidding to a halt, talking rapidly. She smelled of smoke and blood.
“Come with me immediately you need to see this and help fix it!”
A vague sense of urgency penetrated my black mood.
“What is it?”
“Tianna! Come help now!”
Slowly, I floated up through the gloom into a more alert state.
“Tianna? What’s wrong?” I asked, climbing up from the bed.
“Come with me!” Mary sprinted from the room.
She means it, Boss! Move! came from Firebrand as it bounced at her rapidly-departing hip.
I’m not sure what else could have gotten me up and moving. I still didn’t feel like doing anything—depression is like that—but if it was Tianna, it was important. I lumbered along after Mary and realized she was outdistancing me. I leaned into it and ran after her, pumping my arms and bearing down. I didn’t close the distance, but I did follow closely enough to keep from losing her.
Mary ran right out through the mountain’s southeastern gate and sprinted through the city. I recognized where we were going—right into the territory controlled by the Church of Light. It was late afternoon, but the sunset wasn’t my concern. Getting killed by bunches of troops when I’m mortal, now that’s a concern.
We didn’t encounter any. We did pass a lot of people who saluted, though. I started to wonder what was going on.
Mary almost came to a stop in front of the building I thought of as the headquarters; making the turn required slowing her headlong pace. Two grey sashes stood out front and they saluted. We both staggered in, panting for breath. Call it a two-mile sprint. Downhill all the way, sure, but I’m overweight. I think I have a right to be out of breath.
She led me upstairs to one of the third-floor rooms. Blood was all over the floor, most of it from the armored men and the priests lying in various states of dead. T’yl was kneeling with a pair of knights—I recognized Sir Varicon of the Shields, but the other one was Seldar!—as they worked on someone lying on the floor.
“Got him,” Mary gasped. Seldar nodded at me and pointed at the person lying on the floor. T’yl moved, gesturing me over. The person on the floor was Tianna. Someone had cut her throat and done a damn fine job of it, too. From the look of it, it was a right-handed person standing behind her, using a short, heavy blade of great sharpness. The cut went through veins and arteries and windpipe, severing muscles and tendons, almost all the way back to the spine.
Whoever did the first aid did it quickly, before she died from blood loss. Her veins and arteries were welded together and no longer spurting. However much of the blood on the floor was hers, at least she wasn’t adding any more to it. Her windpipe was at least tack-welded, as was the esophagus, to open them up properly. Breathing wasn’t a problem. They hadn’t paid any attention to the muscles, yet, since those aspects of her injury weren’t life-threatening.
The real problem was the blood loss. She was pale, almost chalky. Her breathing was fast and light and her pulse was racing. The only thing I knew to do for her was tell her spleen and bone marrow to get busy—and to thank goodness I looked up where the spleen is. Then I formed a globe of force over her nose and mouth to pull in oxygen, push out nitrogen and carbon dioxide. But getting the oxygen to the rest of her body was a job for her blood, most of which seemed to be all over the floor.
Blood carries oxygen in the red blood cells. What if I build a spell to target red blood cells and mimic what they do? Would that work? It shouldn’t interfere with the red blood cells doing their job and it might even help. I gave it a shot, hoping it would at least double the oxygen-carrying effect of whatever bl
ood she had left.
Her color didn’t improve, but she did seem to breathe more easily.
“My lord,” Varicon began, and Mary slapped her hand over his mouth.
“If she dies because you interrupted him, we’re all dead,” she whispered. “Speak only if spoken to and try not to attract his attention.” He didn’t even acknowledge her; he simply shut up. Wise man.
I considered Tianna very carefully. She seemed to be surviving, at least for the moment, but blood loss and shock can kill hours after the injury. Her body was working at full tilt to try and rectify the situation, but it had to draw on her own resources—amplified, of course, by magic—to do it. I wasn’t sure she had the necessary reserves. At least someone had already elevated her legs to concentrate her remaining blood in her torso and head.
I sure as hell wasn’t giving her any of my blood. Not only was I not sure if she and I shared a blood type, I didn’t even want to think about how it would look to Sparky. To say nothing of the possibilities of a descendant of two avatars being a nightlord Priestess of the Flame. Oh, and I almost forgot—my otherself is worshiped as a god of fire by the sea-people. Double fire jeopardy. The possibilities boggle the mind, and mine is boggled enough.
I texted Diogenes about saving someone from massive blood loss. This is not really my area of expertise. I focus more on causing massive blood loss. But he had a solution.
“Don’t move her,” I ordered. “Lend her vitality, operate her heart and lungs manually, whatever you have to do to keep her alive until I get back.” I cleared people away from a doorway, scratched on the stonework around it, and had four grey sashes lend me some magical muscle. The makeshift gate flickered into being, flushed into my upstairs gate room, and I stepped a couple miles. Much faster than running.
Then I did some running, out of the gate room, around a curve, and into my workroom. I flipped open the shift-box, grabbed three bags of milky fluid and some tubing, and ran right back to my gates. Up here, I had plenty of stored power, so opening a gate wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was targeting it. They still hadn’t taken down the defensive, anti-scrying spells around the building!
Cursing, I targeted a doorway across the street and opened the gate. Even with the run up the stairs, the whole process took far less time than sprinting both ways.
I half-knelt, half-fell to my knees beside Tianna and started hunting for a vein. I handed a plastic sack to Varicon and told him to stand up and hold it. He did so without hesitation or question.
It sometimes bothers me how people in Karvalen will simply obey me when I give them a direct order. I’d blame the Demon King, but he stayed mostly on the other side of the Eastrange, I hear. I’m not sure if it’s a case of royal perogatives, religious awe, or scary monster. I’m not even sure which of the three I find least disturbing.
Meanwhile, I kept hunting for a vein. You’d think, as a vampire, I could insert an IV needle with my eyes shut. I mean, it’s a vein. It’s got blood in it. I should be able to do all sorts of things with veins and arteries and whatnot, right? Wrong. Inserting an IV is a skill, and one I don’t have, no matter how much of a blood-sucking monster I am. I can open a blood vessel and get the blood out, but I at that moment I needed the exact opposite.
I finally gave up on doing it by hand and used magic. With the proper spells as tools, it’s simplicity itself to isolate a vein, open it up, insert a tube, and have the vein close itself around the tube.
With one bag working its way into her, I handed Varicon a second one and plugged the other IV into Tianna’s other arm.
T’yl was sitting on the floor with Tianna’s head in his lap, eyes closed, concentrating. He was working his magic on her neck, flesh-welding everything the knife separated back together. If she survived, everything should heal up nicely. At worst, she might have an interesting scar. He was also helping maintain her vital functions, which suited me fine. If he could keep it up for another twenty minutes, everything should be great.
Mary raised a hand without speaking. I looked at her and realized she was the only person in the room willing to make eye contact. Everyone else found something else to look at.
It made me angry. Not at them, but at myself for being… well… me. They didn’t do anything to me. On the contrary, I should be grateful for all their efforts at trying to save the life of my granddaughter. And I would be grateful. Later.
“Yes, Mary.”
“What are you putting in her?”
“Diogenes says it’s a blood substitute he uses in an early stage of his cloning process, but it works perfectly well in adult humans, too.”
“Oh. Is it tasty?”
“I have no idea. Now, do you want to explain to me how she got her throat cut?”
“Not really.”
I drafted some people in the hall to hunt around in other rooms and drag in more furniture. After stacking some tables and chairs, I let Varicon off the hook as an IV stand. I hung the third bag, flesh-shaping my way into a vein in Tianna’s ankle.
“She’s doing better,” T’yl announced. Her color hadn’t improved, but her pulse slowed slightly. I kept telling myself the synthetic blood substitute wasn’t red, so her color wasn’t a gauge of her health. But I lie a lot, so I didn’t reassure myself.
“Good.”
At least I was feeling something besides overwhelming sadness. It was a coldness, an emptiness, completely unlike sadness. On the scale from happy to sad, this was all the way through sad and as distant from it as happy was.
“Mary. Come with me, please.” I showed her out of the room and down the hall. We occupied another room, this one somewhat less bloody, and I closed the door. “Please tell me what happened.”
She did. It wasn’t too complicated a story, really. She organized an assault on the place. It was easy; there wasn’t much in the way of resistance, so getting to it was easy. T’yl and half the wizards in town put magical defenses on the troops. Troops led by Torvil, Kammen, and Seldar went in through the ground-floor doors.
“What are the Big Three doing here?” I asked.
“I called for help.”
“And they came on such short notice?”
“Oh, yes. I don’t know if they asked the Queen, if the Queen sent them, or if they decided to show up on their own, but they seemed awfully eager to help.”
“I love those guys.”
“I think I do, too,” she added. “They also brought friends, a bunch of other really big men in armor. They’re still out hacking apart anything that doesn’t salute your banner fast enough, with Dantos’ and Beltar’s men scrambling like mad in their wake, trying to keep up. Those guys are murder machines.”
“I know, but I tried like hell to make them ethical murder machines. So, they went in on the ground floor. Then what?”
“I went in through a third-floor window. While the fighting was going on downstairs and coming up, I was looking for Tianna. She was out cold and tied to a chair. They also had guards in the room with her. They didn’t even threaten when I opened the door, just cut her throat on the spot. Please unclench your hands!”
I did so, noticing how I’d cut my palms open. Like my teeth, my talons work perfectly well during the day, too. I stopped the bleeding and started them healing.
“All right. Then what?”
“I screamed for help while I killed guards, then started repairs on the arteries. About then the other guy—Varicon—came in and I drafted him as a healer to finish stopping the bleeding. Then Seldar came in and took over. I may have saved her life, but I think most of the post-bloodletting credit should go to Seldar. He’s amazing at gluing people back together.”
“Lots of practice.”
“I guess. Seldar suggested I go get you—actually, he snapped it at me like a throwing knife past my head—so I decided I might ought to do it. That man gets results!”
“I know. And T’yl?”
“I guess he came in after I left. Maybe Seldar sent for him?”
/> “Probably. Did it at any point occur to you that you might be risking Tianna’s life by assaulting the place?”
“Yes. Please don’t kill me. Hear me out, at least.”
“I have no desire to kill you. I’m too far past sad to be angry. I don’t know what to call what I’m feeling, but it isn’t anger, and it isn’t directed at you. Besides, I always want to hear you out. Please go ahead.”
“The Church of Light is a religious organization that wants to eradicate all other religions, right?”
“Right.”
“They wouldn’t let her live even if you offered to trade them the city for her life.”
“I know.”
“You do?” she asked, startled.
“I tried to get them to see her as a talisman, a tool to keep me at bay. If I could inflict that sort of thinking on them, they wouldn’t kill her until they had no other choice. At the time, I thought it would give me time to find out more, gather intelligence, come up with a plan.” I rubbed my forehead and leaned against the wall. “Then they disintegrated Bronze and… things… got… out of hand. I lost focus.”
Mary came over to me and pinned me against the wall with a hug.
“I’m sorry they killed your spirit animal,” she said. It struck me how accurate her statement was. If I had to have a totem or whatever, you’d think it was a bat, or a wolf, or some other stereotypical vampire-related thing. Maybe even a dragon, like Dracula. But Bronze was very much the better part of me. She gave me strength in ways I will never comprehend and will sorely miss.
“You know, that may be the best definition of her I’ve ever heard?”
“Glad to hear it. And I’m glad your granddaughter is still alive.”
“So am I. Do I need to discuss with you the level of unpleasantness involved if she had died during the attack?”
“No. I have some vague idea. Please don’t explain.”
“I won’t. Mainly because I don’t have a good idea about it, myself. But I do want to know whose idea it was.”
“Dantos,” Mary said, instantly. “He’s running the war in the city, with input from Beltar and Seldar and anyone else he respects. You did sort of leave him in charge.”
