The Heir of Garstwrot

by Veras Alnar

  “I overheard a story from my father,” Durgia had insisted, “and you would know above anyone if it were true. Years ago there was a child stolen from a dead noblewoman who died in Garstwrot keep, they locked the little boy in a tower and kept him there. People said he was put to death but- that's not true is it? Amis isn't from here originally, is he? I could tell just from looking at him.”

  “People from anywhere can live in Elaine,” Fulk said, “just because their skin is sallow doesn't mean they're a foreigner.”

  “That's not what I meant,” Durgia said, “the way he acts he might as well be from another world like a fairy person.”

  There were plenty of stories of the grim fairy folk and their thin faces and wan figures flickering in the forests at night and Fulk had supposed in an amused way, that Amis certainly fit the description of some wild thing when he neglected to wash or brush his hair for several days.

  “The cat's out of the bag now I suppose,” Fulk had said, “it's true. Little whelp’s the heir of Garswrot. He was the child locked in the tower years ago that the people in Fairfax talked about and your father still knows.”

  It had been a persistent rumor for years, a scandalous mark on the Lord and Lady of Fairfax who otherwise had a sterling reputation of being fair and honest in their dealings. He had seen the tower of castle Fairfax from a distance while riding to Croglin for some digging jobs. It had been a grim looking building set apart from the main courtyard, it would have been easy enough to hide someone in such a place for any number of years. But anyone inside would have been quite alone as a prisoner and that would certainly explain Amis' strange behavior when he had first come to town; his shyness, the way he looked anywhere but the eyes. How he loped and shuffled clumsily until finally, the wide open fields did their work and he began to act like he could do as any village boy could and run through the town square if he so wished. And even after some time Amis was still furtive and alone with a markedly bad temper, Fulk knew there was some story to be had in its origin and some plot that was yet to unfold. He could smell it like a stink hovering on the air and where there was intrigue, there was always gold to be made if he were clever enough about getting it, without getting his neck cut in the acquiring.

  “I see,” she had said, “so it's not only his sword arm that has you humoring him.”

  “What of it,” Fulk said.

  “Well I had wondered,” Durgia said, “it's as if he's been stunted in the brain somehow. But if he's nobility than that explains it all, he was shut up in the tower like a kept animal. Is that why you spend time with him, or is there some other reason?”

  Durgia looked at him with a curious coolness that didn't suit her comely features; her mind was working and turning its gears and Fulk had to admit, she was far too clever and with too little scruples for a town grown woman, if she had lived anywhere else she'd be in some deep wickedness he had no doubt and come out all the richer for it. Perhaps then he'd have called her a friend but small places made everyone grasping and even the clever would sink themselves in the mire of the petty and inane. He couldn't trust anyone in Garstwrot and they, in turn, couldn't trust him. Except perhaps, for one man too foolish to ever understand the nature of scheming wickedness and that made him a rare commodity indeed.

  “Perhaps I fancy his pretty eyes,” Fulk said.

  “I very much doubt that. It must be because of something, some plot to take Garstwrot,” Durgia said, “or he wouldn't be alive, I bet. Unless they already have plans to take his inheritance and it's you they've called upon-”

  “I'm not planning to do him in,” Fulk said, “though you're right, there's been talk of it by interested parties.”

  “Is he your friend then,” Durgia pressed, “I just want to know what you're on about, the type who fills your pocket aren't exactly kind to anyone who interferes.”

  “What the devil are you thinking,” Fulk said, “if it's money you want, the idiot would marry you if you asked, he's besotted.”

  Durgia snorted a laugh, “oh goodness, no, he's hardly my type. But he has an interesting face doesn't he? It's almost pretty. Or it would be, if he weren't so skeletal. I wonder if his father and mother were from some foreign country?”

  “She was the heir of Garstwrot, maybe,” Fulk said, “or perhaps it was his father. Maybe they were foreigners who had a claim, it's hard to tell with all these noble families. One runs into the other and go outside of little towns like this and out past Medlam castle and into Ellenshire where the King's court is, they're all a mix as far as Micidea. You'll not figure it out no matter how hard you try, not without some real digging into family trees.”

  “But sometimes in the right light his skin is so pale, he looks like he's dying,” Durgia said, “and the shadows fall on his face just so, making him look sad. Like a lost and lonely foreign lord...”

  The sound of Durgia's dreamy tone somehow irked him. He had plans for the idiot man that took them far away from Garstwrot and all its wretched denizens and here was Durgia, cranked like a cuckoo clock. All he could do was wait for some wild notion to pop out of her head at any moment.

  “One whose been struck on the head maybe,” Fulk said, “and very much lacking in social graces.”

  Durgia snickered, “the illusion doesn't last long when he opens his mouth, no. Much like with yourself.”

  “What are you going on about?” Fulk said, narrowing his eyes.

  “You sound like a man from the town gutters but that's not the truth, is it? I heard all about Micidea from my father when he got drunk with Martin,” Durgia said, swaying her hips as she got close to him, “seems they knew your parents and were commenting on what your father had gotten up to, how far the great architect had fallen when he was in league with thieves. And what the role of a bandit prince might be during a castle siege-”

  Fulk grabbed her around the throat and yanked her close. He knew what he looked like when he was angry, how his own eyes narrowed until slits and his crooked teeth poked over his lower lip like the sharpened fang teeth of a wolf.

  “I'd be keeping that pretty mouth shut about that business,” Fulk said, “if your lips still want to draw breath without my filleting knife lodged in the windpipe.”

  “I'm not afraid of you grave master. You can't kill me any more than you can kill my father,” Durgia said, an ugly smile on her normally pretty face, “you're the fly wriggling in my web, now.”

  He let her go with a shove. She only smiled at him placidly with those calculating, knowing eyes.

  “Why would I kill you,” Fulk said, “who do you know that would care in this burg of a town?”

  “My husband-to-be,” Durgia said, “he runs a market business in Fairfax and travels widely. He's very well connected with the merchants of Micidea, you know the type, with all the red velvet and illustrious families. From the sounds of it some of those people would love to find you, Fulcis.”

  Horror of horrors, she had spoken it aloud. Like a dreaded backwash, the smell of Micidea's sewer rose up and threatened to swallow him whole.

  “That's a name that's been dead for years,” Fulk said, “and if you utter it again, I'll make sure you're put in the ground before your corpse cools, father or no.”

  The door to the shack burst open and Fulk nearly went cold at the thought someone had overheard their conversation, but it was only Amis with his sword drawn and face red.

  “Unhand her, knave!” Amis shouted.

  He'd have no idea what went on and probably hadn't heard, more likely to have followed Durgia to see what they had got up to. Fulk had to admit, the last few times they had met had been a bit more bawdy in nature. Amis had finally caught on to their affair, though as was his way, in the stupidest manner possible.

  “If you'd come charging in here,” Fulk said, “with any real foulness going on, you'd have been clubbed on the head and left for dead in an instant.”

  “I'd have taken their head first!” Amis said, bursting with confidence since he had his
sword, “leave Durgia alone!”

  “He's not hurting me, Amis,” Durgia said, “we were just playing.”

  She leaned nearer to Fulk and he smirked and put his hand over her waist, watching Amis turn a ferocious and angry red.

  “There's a bruise around your neck,” Amis sulked, “a man shouldn't treat a woman in such a way, it's abominably cruel.”

  “I don't need your rescuing,” Durgia said, sharply, “I was on my way to my father's and had a mind to pay a visit. Come with me and forget about Fulk, I'll take you to the barn and teach you a few lessons.”

  Durgia winked at him and Amis went red, from exertion or flushing it was hard to be sure. It made his sickly pallor stand out all the more when it returned.

  “Not feeling so well, are we?” Fulk said.

  “Who cares about it, then?” Amis snapped.

  “I care because in two days time that graven boneyard hill has both our names to climb,” Fulk snarled.

  “I'll be fine,” Amis insisted, “I always am,”

  The man had said it as his thin chest heaved and Fulk had been a smidgeon concerned that his business partner, the only one who he could really convince to swing his sword at the right man when things went pear shaped, was perhaps not long for this world in his state. But it really hadn't been the flesh that had been dying, Fulk could understand it now. It had been his soul worn away by a constant fear that some creeping nightmare was ready to crawl from the dark and snatch him away, back to that cloistered tower.

  Terror as a child never left a man, Fulk had it figured. It hadn't ever left Amis and it certainly had never left himself. When he slept he could still smell the sewers of Micidea and hear the angry words behind closed doors and feel the snapping belt of a tutor's punishment against his cut palms for misspelling a word. It was all the same, when it came down to it. Devils and monsters and evil men. Both waiting to burst from the shadowy corners of the mind and gob on a man's life. Fairy tales were a comfort with their tidy ends, explainable situations that worked properly and left little of the random horror Fulk found himself faced with on particularly bad days digging open graves, whose maws were like a craggy mouths waiting to eat up anyone who came by. Death was ever present and Fulk wanted the most he could scrounge from life before he was hacked to pieces by it; notions like that led him to manipulate the man with the impressive sword swipe to do something worthwhile and not the half arsed whims Amis was so fond of that were bred into him by his miserable would-be parents. But that had almost led no where, and here they were trapped in a keep with a dead noble, a wiped out village and who knows what else scratching behind the walls.

  Leaning over Amis, Fulk pressed his hand against his thin, pale chest and realized with some fear that the heart that had once beaten inside had gone still. It was the eyes that gave it away, half lidded and glassy, the way only the dead could be. Fulk sat at the desk with the mirror again and saw the man's reflection in it and tried to consider what the order of things might be now.

  “Some can still walk during the day and act as ordinary men, others are like him. Weak to the dawn.”

  The voice from nowhere shocked him and Fulk jumped up from the desk only to be confronted with Lord Guain looking very much alive, though a bit bruised and bloody.

  “I loathe competition,” Lord Guain said.

  Before he could react, Lord Guain smashed Fulk in the head with his own mace and everything after that moment went dark.

  VII

  It was some time before Amis cam back to himself. He felt something warm being poured down his throat and then dizziness set in and he woke up feeling like bricks had been laid on every limb. Blearily and with some difficulty, he tried to lift his head.

  “It's difficult to know how much refined opium to use,” Lord Guain said, “the body changes so much during these things, I may have given him a stronger dose than I should have. Did you know that they called Garstwren a vampyr in the northern countries because of his taste for blood? All his kin had the same predilection for stealing life from other creatures and they say in other corners of the world, there were vampires that weren't related to his illustrious line who did the same. But despite the decades I've spent searching the world for any proof, I've never found a trace of them. However, even outside the vampire legends Garstwren himself was special; he could only sup on the blood of his fellow vampires and not those who still lived and walked as ordinary men. It's a rather striking difference to the traditional tales, I wonder what he did to himself to have such strange tastes? Perhaps, he too gave himself over to the devils for their secret knowledge and that was the price he had to pay in doing so.”

  Blinking several times, Amis felt a rug under his finger tips and noticed the warmth coming from a lit fireplace next to him. The gaudy plaster crumbling from the walls gave away where he was; the great hall.

  “So it is Gessetto,” Fulk said.

  The voice was so welcome to hear that Amis could have cried from relief.

  “Yes,” Lord Guain said, “that is my real name. Although I've enjoyed playing Lord for the past few years even if Garstwrot lacks in civlized niceties.”

  “If you are him, master alchemist or no,” Fulk said, “how the hell did you become young again?”

  Amis got up on his hands and thought he had to have been dreaming. While Lord Guain's fine white clothes were stained with blood, he sat at the table with a goblet of wine looking very much alive and very much himself. Fulk unfortunately, hadn't fared as well and was strapped to a chair with heavy chains Amis recognized from the dungeons. The blood that ran over Fulk's face was alarming but he seemed alert despite the bruise across his brow.

  “While all manner of legend exist concerning blood and all its properties,” Lord Guain said, “it was the blood of Garstwren that was the only real cure for my troubles. I opened his tomb and scraped a few flakes some years ago when I had visited Count Castille but it took another decade of study before I understood its properties.”

  “And a lot of dead animals,” Fulk said, “and children, I suspect.”

  “Oh, very many,” Lord Guain said with a half smile, “and so many failures. When I had my first success, it would only last for a few days which was extremely disappointing. I was resolute however and refused to give up, the change had to be permanent to be convincing. It was only when I finally returned after escaping my brother's tower for the second time that I knew the land was the important element I had been lacking and the real secrets were sealed away in the keep itself. So with some help from the crag's astonishing denizens and, yes, Amis I can see your fearful expression in the fire light the ones you've met are in fact real, I regained an image any man could be proud of. Then I made my way to the keep and seduced Lady Anna with an offer she couldn't refuse.”

  “Someone got wind of your experiments early on,” Fulk said, “that explains why Amis was dumped on us.”

  “One of Castille's old servants must have recognized me when I was walking through the fens collecting herbs before I had met with my first success,” Lord Guain said, “the terror that went through Fairfax Castle must have been prodigious enough to abandon any prior plans for Garstwrot keep's inheritance.”

  “That still doesn't explain the how,” Fulk said, “even if devils do exist, I've never heard of anything on earth that could change a man like that.”

  “Trust me when I say such diabolical things come with steep prices,” Lord Guain said, “and certain costs even I find hard to pay. It's far easier to steal what you want than empty one's pockets when you don't have the coinage, wouldn't you say grave master? Spells and blood sacrifice are only half of what I owe, the rest will have to come later when I feel more charitable. It's an unfortunate fact as half the artifacts of Garstwren are behind that blocked up wall by the library, it was my study.”

  Fulk had gone rather white at this admission and looked quite frightened by it and Amis certainly felt the same. So he hadn't been dreaming, not exactly, and there had been rea
l devils living in the crag. But where are they now, was his only frightful thought.

  “Did you shut up the rooms before or after you killed Lady Anna,” Amis asked in a trembling voice.

  “Ah, Amis, the rightful heir of Garstwrot what an asinine question to ask but I'll humor your curiosity seeing as you're very dear to me. Oh, and keep the ring plucked off my finger as a gift. I'm not fussed about it though it was supposedly worn by Garstwren himself, there are many others in my personal collection for me to choose from. As for the Lady Anna, those rooms were shut up a bit before,” Lord Guain said, with a charming smile, “she caught me at the well one night and all I had to do was convince her to walk with me into the hall by the sarcophagus and that was that. She was extremely kind but a very, very stupid woman. Do you know what the main exports of Lorix are? Sheep and cheese made from the cattle who so resemble the sort of men that live there. Not Elaine's best and brightest to be sure.”

  “Is Amis one of your devilish tricks then,” Fulk said, “he should be dead but he's not.”

  “I'm not dead!” Amis insisted, then faltered because he really wasn't sure what was what, any longer.

  At least his limbs were coming back to life, and though still sluggish he could manage to sit himself up without feeling like he was going to be sick.

  Lord Guain smiled a strange, whimsical smile and held his wine glass up to the candle sitting on the table.

  “In a manner I suppose he is technically deceased,” Lord Guain said, “for it was said in a druid's tale that the weakest bloodlines of Garstwren would only show their true natures once they had passed at least one mortal death. I knew the heir of Garstwrot must be nearby when I heard about the boy in the tower. In Lady Fairfax's panic, she wouldn't have thought to do anything else but clumsily hide him in the town. So I poisoned every well I could and waited. I'm sorry about the half-cut hair Amis, it may be permanent for whatever dies remains the same, forever.”