Sons of Devils

by Alex Beecroft

  Frank laughed. “At which point, Protheroe said, ‘Things began to get a little weird.’ I wish he was still around to see how true that was. I wish I’d paid more attention. I was much more interested in the verb forms. If this proves to be one of the rare Atlantean-constructed accumulators, it may be our chance to unlock the secrets of hundreds of ancient languages—to learn to read the Egyptian hieroglyphs, to decipher messages from civilisations so ancient we can’t imagine their thoughts. Voices from ten thousand years ago . . .” He trailed off, smiling, though he felt a little opened up, vulnerable—missing one or two layers of protective wariness. “Protheroe always told me I was missing the point.”

  “The point being?”

  “Power, I suppose.” Frank waved a hand at the distant door. He could “see” it still, even though a rock wall was in the way. “It’s concentrated magical power. A network of it, feeding back to the main storage systems on Atlantis and flowing in a long wave back out from there, across the world, to every country where their accumulator still survives. That’s why, after the Rising, people began to discover their talents. One person might click their fingers to start a fire, another might have prophetic dreams, or keep flowers from withering, or . . .”

  He opened his hand to demonstrate how he could summon a little ball of sunlight to his palm. In a soundless explosion, the valley filled with it, white from wall to wall. The water dazzled like diamonds and Văcărescu’s eyes looked pale as hoar frost in a face washed out of anything but glare. Oddly, Văcărescu didn’t react at all, didn’t even squint, just carried on looking at Frank with a measuring, curious look, poised on the cusp of a decision.

  Somewhat shocked, having expected only his normal globe-like glimmer, Frank let the light go as if stung and blinked the afterimages from his vision. So his eyes were closed when Văcărescu’s hands closed hard on the nape of his neck and in his hair. He pulled Frank to him bodily and kissed his mouth.

  It was a very thorough kiss, with no doubt behind it—this was a man, after all, used to giving commands and being immediately obeyed. Used to demanding what he wanted and being given it without argument. And Frank for a long while was quite willing to be another unresisting conquest. Only when he started to respond, trying to worm his hands under coat and waistcoat, so that he could pull out the tucked shirt beneath and touch warm skin, did Frank’s still-healing mind tell him that this was wrong. Vile. Against the laws of nature.

  “What are you doing?” Refusing to contemplate what this could mean, he untucked his hands from layers of clothes, pushed Radu away, nowhere near as horrified as he thought he ought to be. That too—that lack of deep down abhorrence—told him something he didn’t want to hear. He pushed the thought away resolutely. He was cursed, and probably a murderer. He did not need to add another flaw to worry about.

  “I’m not apologising.” Radu—and Frank felt they must certainly be on first-name terms after such an indignity as this—sounded puzzled but unrepentant. “You enjoyed it.”

  Frank lifted his head. I did not! “And so long as your conquests enjoy it, that’s all that matters?”

  “Isn’t it? You are hardly some marriageable maiden whose life I’ve ruined.”

  Frank thought of the girls who had been offered up for Radu to marry. That too would never have happened in England. Perhaps this sort of behaviour was perfectly all right by the standards of Wallachia? After all, one couldn’t expect foreigners to have the same morals demanded of one at home. That thought made him feel considerably better, almost giddy with relief.

  “My father said I was a curse on anyone who got too close to me,” he offered nevertheless, because that was a dread that didn’t go away. It was only fair to warn the man off. “I bring death and destruction wherever I walk. You are a man whose life I could ruin. I never mean to, but I seem to have made something of a habit of it. Just look at my friends.”

  Sighing, Radu stood, offered Frank a hand up. When Frank had risen, he was pulled into a brief, warm hug, Radu’s mouth at his ear. “Frank—”

  “Carew,” Frank interrupted, flushed and uneasy at the intimacy. “The Honourable Frank Carew, son of the Earl of Hungerford. I remembered.”

  “Well then, Frank Carew. Mine is a life I would like to see ruined. There is always the prospect of building something better afterwards. But even if that were not so, I would be pleased to think you brought the fall of my house and the end of my line, so long as you get us all.”

  “I don’t . . .” said Frank, flustered. Don’t want this responsibility. I’ll gladly take care of your library, but if you want a saviour, you’re looking in the wrong place. You’re supposed to be taking care of me.

  Radu put his head to one side, considering. “If I’d known Death was so beautiful, I’d have courted him earlier.”

  Frank had to laugh at that, nervously. “Oh, now you’re just being ridiculous. You don’t mean anything of the sort.”

  Radu leaned down and began to work his way into the tunnel that lead back to the outer world. His voice sounded wry and patient as Frank followed. “I think you’ll find that I know myself rather better than you do at this point. Not all of your memories are back yet, I gather?”

  There was a gap still, everything closing up around it—the central part of the wound where the blade first went in. He still could not remember his crime. Perhaps his mind held back the details because it was as reluctant as he to relive them again. I think I murdered someone called Gervaise. I don’t want to remember how or why. I don’t want to know myself capable of such evil. “To tell you the truth, I dread them. What could be so bad that even with everything else healed, I cannot look at this last thing?”

  The ghost of laughter preceded him as they crawled back into normality. “I doubt there is anything you could have done, Frank, that would horrify me. We are two wretched specimens of humanity together. Whatever it is, I shall not have any grounds on which to condemn you.”

  That, too, Frank found surprisingly comforting.

  At the landing where they had left the horses a fire was now burning. Cezar and Liviu had a black pot of coffee in the ashes, and dark rye bread, cheese, and sausage unwrapped on the blankets on which they sat. The horses, hobbled but not tethered, were delicately pulling clumps of grass from the cliffs, or supping up the water of the stream. The sun was a band of bright gold above head height on the far cliff face, but below, on the ground, it was already growing chill and evening dews were settling on the rocks.

  Frank could still feel the accumulator, but at this distance the fidgeting of universes was settled into a distant hum. He resonated with it, but it no longer took up all his mind, and all the staring eyes that had watched him seemed to have lost interest for now, turned away.

  “It’s a horrible thing,” said Cezar unexpectedly, handing him a little enamelled cup and a hunk of bread.

  “Strange.” Frank smiled at him, glad to hear as much—from Radu’s reaction he had almost forgotten he was not the only one who could feel it. “Awe-inspiring.”

  “But ultimately useless.” Radu looked up as the darkness widened and widened on the hills. “No matter what happened there, still the night falls and we have to go home.”

  Yes, Frank thought—once they’d eaten and packed everything away, mounted up, and were riding back to the castle that had become his prison this past, anxious week—he had a point.

  Frank hoped Protheroe was satisfied now. He himself would gladly go back for longer—if he could bring his anchor to ground him—with a notebook and sketch pad to take down as many of the inscriptions as he could find. Perhaps, if he compared them with those in the Pritenic language as carved in the British chamber, he might learn to read them. If he could translate the long workings out of this most fundamental stratum of Atlantean magic, he would then be the first man in the world—outside that hidden and reclusive island—to understand something of how their astonishing minds had worked.

  But all this hope rested on the belief that
he would be alive tomorrow, and as they rode into the castle, the moon already in the sky and the windows gleaming, he remembered that was no safe assumption to make. Radu might have jokingly called him Death, but there were two others with a better claim to that title. In only a few hours they would be shaking the grave mould from their hair and rising to rule.

  Mirela had spent her first week at the castle too busy to think about her family. Anca, the housekeeper, had put her through a whirlwind training plan on how to properly scrub floors and tables, build fires, black boots, polish silverware, and remove stains from carpets, upholstery, and linens. She had been given a bed in the girls’ dormitory in the cold attics of a tower turret, five other iron bedsteads radially arranged around the walls, and five other girls trooping up at the same time each night. There were many crucifixes in that room—rosaries looped over the headboards, garlic and salt on the windows and doors. Seeing the defences, Mirela concluded that the girls didn’t believe they were safe at all.

  That first night, she sat on her thin mattress as the others undressed, and bounced, testing the creak of the springs beneath. What if her form reverted to its natural state while she was asleep? While she had waited to be chosen, she had been treated as a potential mistress of the house, and locked in a room of her own. The sound of a key in the door had woken her in time to be sure she was presentable. Here she was under constant scrutiny and would get no such warning.

  One by one, the other servants had fallen asleep around her. Could she somehow ensure she would wake up first, so she would be in control of her appearance before they opened their eyes?

  That made her think of the back of her parents’ wagon—mother and father in the shelf of their bed, Danior, Kem, Kisaiya, and herself in a warm pile of quilts beneath. Always the earliest to get up, Kem had once trodden on her arm without waking her.

  Her heart gave a great wrench of longing and fear for her brothers. Had the villagers done as they promised and let them go? Told to sacrifice one of their maidens, knowing Mirela’s talents, the villagers had taken her whole family captive, hostages for her good behaviour. And she had been good, hadn’t she? She had kept to her side of the bargain. It hadn’t been her fault that Radu Văcărescu had seen through her guise, had seen her as she was.

  Why hadn’t he given her away?

  She shook herself—that was a question for another time. Right now, she needed to concentrate on making it through the night. Careful not to wake her bunkmates, she rolled up her thin mattress and blanket together, picked it up, and padded back downstairs. In the service way behind the dining room was a huge cabinet that held cleaning supplies. She cleared a space in there, set down her mattress bent in half, levered off the top of a can of beeswax and turpentine to conceal her smell, closed the doors, and curled up there.

  The swoony smell of furniture polish soon filled the cupboard and seemed to slick the inside of her mouth and lungs, but the closed wooden doors felt familiar and comforting, an echo of home.

  She woke early enough to be sure her disguise was still complete, and to sneak back upstairs unobserved with her mattress. But she found Anca standing by the sad springs of her bed, hands on hips.

  “Well?” Anca asked, sounding more curious than angry. “Do you have an explanation?”

  “I didn’t feel safe,” Mirela confessed, honestly enough. “I wanted to be somewhere I couldn’t be seen. I slept in a cupboard.”

  The housekeeper sighed. “They don’t attack the staff,” she said, loud enough so the last couple of departing girls could hear. “But partly that’s because it would be too easy. If they find you in a cupboard, though, they might think it was a challenge. I’m not going to stop you—I have enough on my conscience—but consider what I say.”

  Mirela did, as she followed Anca around the house that day, paying careful attention to the layout. Was this how they were among each other then, the Vlachs? Kinder by far than they were to her people.

  But that didn’t explain Văcărescu’s silence. He knew what she was. Every so often during the days that followed, she would catch the corner of his eye and watch him startle and then deliberately look away. It was almost as though she could trust him, and the thought made her uneasy. She didn’t want to feel obliged or thankful to anyone. Him least of all.

  On the first day she was permitted to do the fires on her own, she met again the foreigner who had freed her from her sacrificial stake. The surprise of him still being alive felt like a good omen, and she had revealed herself to him. She wished she hadn’t, now. It had been a foolish, impulsive decision born of the wish to have a friend, but he might also give her away at any time, and that thought joined the swarm of biting fears that beat against her sanity every time she let up her self-control.

  On Sundays, the servants were given a half day off and marked, if they wished to leave the castle, with a spot of pungent jasmine oil beneath the collar.

  With her ability to wait all but worn through by then, the moment she’d been scent marked and seen out the door, she was running, back down to Bircii village and then up the stream to the hamlet in the woods where she and her family had stopped to make music for a wedding and had ended up in chains as a result.

  The hamlet was almost as silent as the deserted streets of Bircii. Over-ripe plums lay fermenting beneath the fruit trees in a great swarm of hornets. She reached up to the few still on the branches and they dropped into her hands as if grateful. The juice was sweet in her mouth as she knocked doors and had no answer.

  May they all be damned! They’d gone—they’d used her to buy time and they’d fled. Furious, she sprinted to the centre of the town, the little green where ducks even now sunned themselves with their heads under their wings. “Hey!” she yelled. “Hey! Come out here. Anyone who’s left, come out!”

  There were no corpses, at least. No burnt shell of a wagon. Flowers drooped limply around the tiny chapel door, and the grass had barely bent back upright in the place where she had danced for the bride.

  “What do you want?”

  She turned abruptly, found a grandmother had limped out of one of the houses she’d thought to be empty. A flash of movement in the chapel said someone was in there too. Probably there were suspicious eyes on her from other windows, where those who couldn’t face a long walk into another country had stayed on to cope or starve.

  “I wanted to know what happened to the Roma family you caught,” she asked, too impatient for subtlety. “You said you would let them go free once their daughter had been taken to the castle.”

  “How do you know about that?” The woman smoothed out her head scarf while she creaked to a seat on the butter churn that stood by the door. Her hands were steady, but her face had greyed.

  “I’m from the castle.”

  The woman’s face paled even further, and an ugly satisfaction curled through Mirela’s guts. It was good to see these people afraid because of what they’d done. “Do they know what she is?”

  “Tell me what happened to her family,” Mirela insisted, her breath catching under her breastbone as though it was full of fishhooks.

  “Nothing happened to them,” the Vlach grandma scoffed. “We let them go, just as we said.”

  The hooks retracted, leaving what felt like a smooth bubble of joy in her chest. Thank God!

  “And they left. Normally they’d come back around twice a year, but—” the grandma shrugged and looked at the pile of spoiling plums. “There’s not much to come back for, is there? If they knew what was good for them, they would go with the people into Transylvania. But perhaps there is some ill feeling there.”

  “After your village killed their daughter?” Mirela spat. There had been joy for a moment, knowing that her family was alive, unharmed, and free to move on, but it rolled away once the wave of grief and anger swept back in. They had been sent off believing Mirela was dead, mourning her. They probably had headed into exile in another land, since this one was emptying. And perhaps they had not sunk house foun
dations into these hills, but they had groves, camps they remembered dearly, spots on the riverbank, a well-known round of villages who had once welcomed them as friends. They would be mourning that too. She ached for them.

  “Does he know about the girl? Văcărescu. Does he know?”

  Mirela probably shouldn’t have felt fond of Văcărescu for inspiring this fear, but he was in some unstated way her ally now, and she did.

  “He knows.”

  “Oh,” the woman wailed, clutching the sides of her head and hunching forward in such distress that even Mirela wavered in her anger. “We are undone! I knew I should have stopped them, but the lottery fell on the major’s daughter and he . . . What could I have done? And now I’m the one left to pay. They wouldn’t impale me, would they? Not an old woman, who never did any wrong?”

  She had begun to weep, rocking back and forth, wiping her eyes with dirty fingers. Mirela’s thirst for vengeance took another hit and crumpled. She was, after all, not dead, nor were her family. This situation was therefore recoverable, if she was smart enough.

  “The next blacksmiths or singers who come through, you’ll tell them to find Mirela Badi’s family and give them this message: ‘She is not dead. She is finding a way to make it safe for you to come home.’ Yes?”

  The words stemmed the rocking at least. A final burst of tears were wiped, and then the mildewed eyes stayed red and dry. “This country will never be safe. There is little a single Roma girl can do about that.”

  Mirela’s family was fine. The knowledge restored the heroism of her heart. And she wanted to prove this woman wrong. She would free that poor kitten of a foreigner. She would kill the monsters at the castle and give the land back to the people who loved it. That was what she would do. She had only to work out how.