by Eric Griffin
Sturbridge blinked uncomprehendingly at the vast, rough-hewn cavern, doubting the evidence of her eyes. She would never have guessed such an expansive space could exist below the cramped confines of the chantry. The light that Eva held aloft was a small, lost, fragile thing against the immensity of that emptiness. The pinprick of a single star against the entirety of the night sky.
“He circumvented most of the security system,” she replied in a hushed tone. “He could navigate through the chantry defenses. He could disarm any troublesome mechanical systems, but he could not take the human element offline—the security teams, Helena…”
“And yourself. Yes, very true. But the watchers failed to note anything out of the ordinary that night. Until it was too late. And you, yourself, were otherwise occupied….”
Sturbridge was acutely aware that she had come to the still point, the very center of the downward spiral. She could feel the weight of mountains looming over her.
“Yes, trading words with that fool storyteller. I have not forgotten that you were the one responsible for drawing me into that little exchange. You were blatantly fishing for information about me, about my past—and you were goading Talbott into a story that he knew better than to relate in so public a forum. And while I was occupied with trying to suppress the worst of Talbott’s tall tales and wild embellishments, Foley was dying.”
“Yes.” The voice was almost a purr of satisfaction. “Not exactly fiddling while Rome burned, but I think you are on the mark.”
Sturbridge forced down the unsettling thought of tons of granite and limestone poised above her and defiantly struck out into the cavern, aimed directly at the source of the accusation. The darkness seemed to resist her every step.
“You had caught me unawares once. I was not about to be so outmaneuvered again. You must have realized this. You waited until I was safely out from underfoot, at the council meeting in Baltimore, before you struck a second time.”
“Your appointment to the council was not simply a fortuitous coincidence. But no, we had no intention of ‘striking again’—I assume you are referring to removing Jacqueline—at least, not until she became a wildcard.”
Eva’s words were coming to Sturbridge only sluggishly now, as if the darkness they struggled through were thicker than mere air. Minutes had passed already as the syllables fought their way across the intervening distance. But Sturbridge could not let that monstrous assertion go unchallenged. She knew she must make some response, else all was lost. In the final reckoning, it was not, however, the need to speak out against the injustice of Jacqueline’s death that drove her. Nor any compulsion to condemn the casual brutality of it. Nor was it the reflex to defend herself, to rationalize her own failure. No, the need that drove Sturbridge to answer was something more humble and less noble. Her response was her only means of clinging to that tenuous lifeline of words that connected the two antagonists. That bond was all that kept each of them from being isolated, swept away, lost amidst the rising dark.
“Damn you. Damn you to hell.” Sturbridge’s voice shook. “A wildcard? A random element? She was a person. A novice of your own order. A sister. A childe. We do not eat our own young. It is one of the few points on which the laws of God, man and the Pyramid all agree. Each of them reserves a special dark hole for monsters like you.
“What did Jacqueline do to you? What could she have done? She came upon you going through Foley’s things. She saw something,” Sturbridge accused.
Eva’s voice was unruffled. “Quite the contrary. It was I who came suddenly upon her. I think she was doing a little investigating of her own—in addition to removing evidence that might later incriminate her, of course. But that was to be expected.”
Her tone became contemplative. “It is perhaps ironic. But I think Jacqueline may have been the only one of the secundus’s would-be murderers who actually harbored any ill will toward him. By all accounts, he was far too unpopular an individual to be done in for such impersonal reasons, don’t you agree?”
Hand over hand, Sturbridge slowly closed the distance between them.
Eva ignored her struggle. “Jacqueline’s own death was another story altogether. In her clumsy efforts, she had stumbled upon certain inconsistencies in the story we had chosen to cover Foley’s murder. She knew too much about the ritual, about its preparations, about Foley’s predilections….”
Sturbridge felt the darkness break over her like a wave. She sagged against the lifeline, nearly losing her grip. Somehow, she managed to find her voice. “It was Jacqueline who realized that the protective wards had been erased, that Foley’s notes were being suppressed, that you knew altogether too much about the secundus’s secrets—his ‘eye’, his treasure box. She realized that she was not the only one falsifying evidence.”
Eva shrugged and continued with her preparations. “I had been waiting for her to make her attempt. She had been obviously anxious and behaving in a suspicious manner since we first questioned her. It was really only a matter of being patient until she had gathered enough courage to put her head into the noose.”
Sturbridge closed her eyes against the callous litany of crimes. She plodded steadily forward, counting off the precise number of paces between her and retribution.
“What I did not expect,” Eva’s voice thrummed along the umbilical, “was for Jacqueline to pull off a full-blown translocation to gain entry to Foley’s sanctum. Such unexpected promise; such wasted potential. So few of the novices nowadays have the necessary prudence to ensure that their gifts have the opportunity to mature and develop. It is one of the signs of the decline of our order. I fear the Final Nights are at hand for us, Aisling.”
Sturbridge recoiled at the sound of her own name—at the familiarity taken by the novice. Even under less threatening circumstances, it would have struck a jarring note. “Jacqueline, at least, was not intent on hastening that decline through sheer force of attrition. You will receive your reward for your part in this, you know. Just as Aaron received his, kinslayer.”
The hissing invective brought Eva up short, chalk poised midstroke. “We are a race of kinslayers, Aisling. Our founder was the first of a long and distinguished line of kinslayers. Oh, not the old wyrm caught in the throes of nightmare beneath motherhouse in Vienna, but our First Father. He was the first murderer and he ushered Death himself across the threshold and into this world. That is a weighty responsibility that we all must bear each and every night.”
Sturbridge had more than a passing familiarity with Death. The mere mention of that name conjured up a wave of unwelcome thoughts—thoughts of her own death and of her daughter, Maeve. She felt rather than heard Eva’s words. A vibration transmitted along the ghost-vein, the trailing strand of life that bound them. Pleased with herself, Eva put the finishing touches on the diagramma hermetica with a flourish.
“Come now, Aisling. What is the fall of one novice compared to such a solemn charge? Do you know that, for all my patient waiting, Jacqueline still nearly managed to escape me? Her adaptation of the translocation ritual (which she stole from Master Ynnis, incidentally) was an unexpected turn. But in the end, I think it actually worked to our advantage. By coming upon her in a clearly compromising position, I was able to pressure her into making a covert appointment with me—alone and in an out-of-the-way place. In effect, I allowed Jacqueline to choose the time and place of her own death. There are many who might envy her that gift.”
Sturbridge strained to pick out the faint light, gauging her distance. It bobbed slightly like a lantern swinging from the bowsprit of a ship far out to sea. It seemed further away now than when she had first begun. In another, this might have been an opening for despair. But, with great deliberation, Sturbridge planted her feet, leaned into the rushing darkness, and loosed her grip upon the lifeline.
The light swung wildly, now overhead, now behind her. Sturbridge tumbled through the darkness. Eva’s voice was still there, an anchor line amidst the maelstrom should Sturbridge only choose to
reach out for it. The words streamed past her in a blur, barely registering upon her consciousness.
“It was her wild tales of Master Ynnis and his translocations that led me to the method of dispatching the troublesome novice. I do not think it dawned upon her, even in those last moments. Even when she reached up to close the cabinet above the sink, which had swung open, seemingly of its own accord. Even when she saw the flicker of metal and felt its hot kiss upon her throat. Yes, you should have been there. Her expression remained unworried, even as her head rolled free of its pedestal and splashed into the sink, vanishing beneath the murky waters.”
Sturbridge tumbled end over end, caught in the riptide, buffeted, borne down. Her lungs filled with dark water.
She managed to gasp out (or imagine she had gasped out) “You seem to have acquired a taste for casual atrocities. Tell me, the ambassador, did he lose heart, threaten to betray you?”
Eva waved the question aside distractedly. “He had become unstable. He was teetering on the brink of the abyss and had been staring too long into darkness. His utility no longer justified the uncertainties he introduced into the equation.”
Sturbridge felt the calculated indifference of the silent waters close over her head.
As the light receded, she became gradually aware of the swarm of wriggling shadows surrounding her. The sea was alive with writhing, struggling forms. Hundreds of drowning bodies all frantically clawed towards the surface. The blue and bloated limbs of those who had already succumbed to the struggle snatched at her, clung to her, bore her down.
Sturbridge tried, in vain, not to pick out the familiar faces among the drowned—their features reproachful, distorted, water-gorged. She knew precisely where she would be confronted by the one she could not face. She could feel her presence behind her like the ache of a raw tooth.
Still, Sturbridge could not help twisting to peer through the press of bodies, trying to catch a single glimpse of the receding figure. She caught the barest hint of gawky girlish lines, limbs long and straight as a pin, tresses dark as a battle raven.
Sturbridge writhed in her attempt to free herself from the icy press, to pursue the fleeing figure. A swollen face, its eyes bright and round as saucers, interposed itself and pressed uncomfortably close to her own. It bobbed gently, aimlessly, from side to side, its hair fanning out in the current. It regarded her with a clinical, almost serene detachment. Thick, sausage-like fingers experimentally probed and prodded her. Sturbridge batted at the corpse, trying to dislodge it. Draped languidly in fetters of clinging seaweed, it embraced Sturbridge, entangling her flailing limbs as the pair tumbled over and over.
There was something familiar about the Drowned Man as he pressed uncomfortably close—a lover bent on confiding a dark secret. Its chill lips brushed her ear.
“Visita Interiora Terrae, Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem.”
Her thoughts flickered inward for the briefest of moments and then flared out again with renewed fire. Sturbridge turned the warmthless kiss upon the startled Light-bringer and, with a crow of triumph, kicked out toward the surface.
Clinging hands fell away from her on all sides as she realized that they were much like the sea. And the sea was much like the pervasive darkness. And the darkness was much like the weight of mountains. They were not external threats, but merely shadows of the true threats—the internal ones. Eva had laid her snares well. Yes, she was indeed familiar with the burdens of command. She had reached into Sturbridge’s uncertainties and drawn out the weight of the regency—of Sturbridge’s failures to guide her novices safely through danger—and brought it crashing down upon her with the weight of mountains.
She had opened the floodgates of Sturbridge’s ignorance—of her inability to unravel the brutal murders that threatened to tear her chantry apart—and very nearly drowned her in a sea of pervading darkness.
She had turned a hand offered in trust—and perhaps even a genuine affection, as monstrous as that possibility might be among their kind—into the bloated and groping hands of the drowned.
And she had very nearly succeeded.
Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem.
Sturbridge broke from the dark water like a stone skipped inexplicably out of the well.
She found herself, not in a vast cavern mantled in darkness, but in a small, disused crypt, deep within the bowels of the chantry. Eva was waiting for her there.
She smiled. “I had hoped you would come through. But you were taking such an awful time about it I feared I would have to fall back upon the contingency plan. No matter, I have completed all of the preparations. All that remains is for you to speak the words.”
Sturbridge lowered her head and started forward, toward her young protégée. Vitriol streamed off her like water. Eva held up a hand in warning.
“Careful, please. I cannot advise you to break the line of the diagramma. The ward was not really designed with you in mind, but rather those who must follow. I did not anticipate that you would use such a circuitous route to come to me. It would have been far more efficient merely to pick your way through the tombs like anyone else. Sometimes you can be quite exasperating.
“But since you have come by way of the Well, you are bound by the same prohibitions as those who will come after you. Now, if you would simply recite the words that have been entrusted you…”
Sturbridge ignored this demand, but stopped short of the ritual warding. A seething fury peeked through the cracks in her composure. She glared at Eva, only a few inches and a crude chalk line separating the two antagonists.
“You have the temerity to make demands of me? Make no mistake, little one. Of all the things you have entrusted into my care—your calculated deceits, your feigned compassions, your casual betrayals—there is none that you would care to have returned upon you now.”
Eva spoke slowly and deliberately, as if addressing a particularly slow child. “All the words that have passed between you and me to this point are nothing. The empty exhalations of the grave. The muttering of the wind through two exhumed skulls.
“No, the words that are required were entrusted you long before we ever met. The Words of Fire and of Blood. It is time to loose what has been bound. It is time for the nightmare to end.”
A feeling of vertigo crashed over Sturbridge. Her eyes refused to focus. Ghost images flickered in the periphery. Ancient verses and snatches of song hopelessly intermingled into a uniform muttering, pitched just below the range of her hearing. It was if two competing worlds vied for her attention.
“The Words of Fire and Blood,” Eva prompted again. Sturbridge recoiled from her. Staggering backward, she caught the sudden impression of something vast rising up behind her. She spun upon the Well.
Something dark brooded over the silent waters—an ancient and unappeasable hunger that refused to be contained within the cramped confines of the mausoleum. It rose head and shoulders above the crypts, ignoring the protests of intervening walls and ceilings.
Sturbridge caught a momentary glimpse of an immense rough-hewn idol, the cool black stone of its feet worn to a perfect smoothness by the passage of centuries of blood.
“Too much blood already,” she thought aloud, not knowing from whence the words arose, or that they had already been uttered once, long ago. “Blood of the firstborn. I know you, Cromm Cruaich. You were their Moloch, their Kinslayer, a nightmare of an older order. Chidden of God, you were banished to the dark places of the earth, sheltering from the light of life-giving day. You have had centuries to brood in those shadows, marking time by the spilling of blood into your dark well.”
Somewhere, far beneath them, the Dragon stirred.
Sturbridge tried to fight off the sudden ambush of the mythic, to cling to the literal. She could almost imagine that the Well was only the dry and empty shell of a broken crypt. She could pretend that the blasphemous features of the Stooped One were nothing more than the play of shadows and torchlight upon the rough-hewn wal
ls of the crypt.
She closed her eyes and clung fast to that image. “This is what it is all comes down to, then, isn’t it? It’s all about the Children. All the lies, the betrayals, the murders. It was never about the revenges of abused novices, or the ambitions of would-be journeymen. It’s not about intrigues or infernalism; assassinations or political maneuverings. It’s not even about manipulations from Vienna or the damned Sabbat war. It all comes back to the Children.”
“You only have to say the words,” Eva coaxed. “You can call them forth, they will answer to your voice. My calculations have been exacting, they cannot be mistaken on this point. The Children will hear your call and they will not refuse you. And then all this,” she made a broad gesture intended perhaps to indicate their current predicament, or perhaps the chantry itself, or perhaps the carefully ordered ranks of crypts—the Tremere dead, their history, the sum of all their struggles. “Then all this doesn’t matter anymore. We will finally be free of the nightmare. Say the words, Aisling.”
Sturbridge’s voice began faint and unsteady, but grew in confidence with each syllable. “Logos Etrius,” Sturbridge recited. “Jacqueline. Aaron. Foley…”
“No! You fool, you will ruin…”
“The Children are your accusers, Eva, not your redemption. Can you not hear their voices? They clamor for your blood.” Sturbridge’s own voice rumbled through the crypts. The ancient walls rang with her authority. “As regent of this house, it is my judgment that your blood has been tainted with the unabsolvable stain of kinslaying—and is forfeit. May God have mercy upon the quick and the dead.”
Eva drew back as if struck. Sturbridge instinctively reached out to her, shrugging free of the mantle of judgment as quickly as she had donned it. In her eyes, concern for her young protégée found room enough room to coexist with the determination to see justice served.
“Come, Eva, it is time to go home. The nightmare is over for you now.” Sturbridge’s hand extended awkwardly, hesitating just outside the faint chalk line.
