Blood & Rust

by S. A. Swiniarski

  I stepped through the threshold, still suspecting that I had somehow mistaken the address. “I’m here to meet with Gabriel,” I said.

  She shut the door behind me. “I know. Come with me.”

  The woman was a striking example of exotic beauty, pale as marble and as finely carved as any Grecian Aphrodite—but it was a cold beauty, withdrawn and wary. If anything was out of proportion in the otherwise perfect face, it was her eyes. Even in their half-closed scrutiny of me, her eyes were of startling size, dominating her features. When she turned to lead me, it was her eyes I remembered.

  She took me through the house. Despite the high ceilings, the broad corridors, and the lights shining everywhere, the overwhelming impression was one of gloom. There was something oppressive about the decor, and about the placement of light. The disturbing part of it was the elusiveness of the mood the house evoked. I couldn’t find a source for the mood that pervaded the house in any particular part. It seemed to be part of the gestalt.

  My hostess didn’t say a word.

  “Is this Mr. Gabriel’s residence?” I asked to break the silence.

  “Just Gabriel,” she said.

  “Okay. Is this his house?”

  “While he is here, it is here he resides.” She looked back over her shoulder, and I noticed a small turn at the corner of her upper lip, as if she found my confusion amusing. “This house belongs to Gabriel’s circle. This is where he stays when he is in town.”

  I noted that for future reference. It explained the identityless business card, as well as the voice-mail system. “Circle,” was also an interesting word, it implied some sort of societal unit.

  “Are you part of Gabriel’s circle?”

  She laughed. The laugh matched her appearance, lovely and cruel. “So impertinent.” She stopped to turn and brush my face with her hand. She touched me with a heat that didn’t quite reach her skin. “So,” her eyes stared into mine as she appeared to search for a word. Her eyes drank me in, and it felt as though she pulled something out of me as she stared. “Raw. Yes, so raw you are. So unschooled. Perhaps you need a teacher....”

  She drew me toward her, and I felt such a hot rage of desire that it numbed out every other sensation. Everything but those too-large eyes, so violet that they were almost black. She bent and briefly touched her lips to mine.

  “Please,” I said. Somehow I managed to keep my voice steady.

  She released me, a ghost of a smile on her face.

  “I’m here to see Gabriel.”

  “Of course you are.” She turned with no explanation or apology, and resumed walking down the hall. “To answer your impertinent question. Of course I am of Gabriel’s circle. My chosen name is Rowena, should you care to remember it.”

  I was still recovering from that near-kiss. I could still feel her lips, as if someone were holding a candle too close to my face. I also felt it in places that I didn’t know vampires were supposed to feel anything.

  “Why was it an impertinent question?”

  “Why is it impertinent for a peasant to interrogate his prince?” She stopped before a large oaken door and knocked. Before she left me she said, “But then you aren’t quite a thrall, are you? Pity.”

  From beyond the door I heard a Southern voice say, “Come on in, Mr. Tyler. Come on in.”

  I pushed open the door and entered Gabriel’s office. I stood for a moment in the threshold. If the rest of the house was designed to have an effect on the mood, that effect was all focused in this one odd-shaped room.

  The room was a huge pentagon, the door at one vertex. The entire wall opposite the door was a vast window. Through the window, the city lights were filtered through gnarled trees as old as the house itself. The other walls were of golden wallpaper that fit some garish nineteenth-century motif, embossed so that the shadows formed shifting geometric patterns that changed depending on where I stood relative to the light.

  To the left of the great window, an Egyptian sarcophagus stood against the wall, surrounded by a box of glass. On the other wall hung a full-size reproduction of the center panel of Hieronymous Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights.

  My addled memory gave me the name and the artist without telling me where I had learned of him.

  “Come in, my friend. Have a seat.” Gabriel stood behind a desk of black wood. And motioned me toward a waiting chair.

  I sat down, looking at Gabriel. He had a look of wild authority about him, with his cane, his lined face, and his long white hair. Authority and passion that made his gray-blue eyes seem less the color of ice than the color of a gas-jet.

  He sat, his long hands enveloping his cane. “Again, I offer my apologies, sir.”

  I clutched my left hand. “I am still trying to understand what is going on here. No offense, but I don’t know who the hell you are or what you have to do with what’s happened to me.”

  “We are here to illuminate each other’s ignorance.” He leaned forward. “We shall have a fair exchange, question for question. I shall give you the first two as compensation for our prior misunderstanding.”

  Misunderstanding? This person, who looked to be seventy, had thrown me through the air fifteen feet—one-handed. That had to be one pretty big misunderstanding.

  “Let’s start there, then,” I said. “Exactly what was your misunderstanding? You were threatening me one minute, and the next—What brought on the sudden change of heart?”

  “A mistake about your status, Mr. Tyler. I am not infallible. I knew that you were mortal when I first began the search for Childe, and I knew, when I saw you last, that the thirst had claimed you. The thirst could not have been upon you for more than a few days. The possibility that you could have been masterless never occurred to me until I tasted the strength of your blood. You do not have the blood of a thrall, which is what I treated you as.”

  I didn’t feel as if I understood things any better. I shook my head. “You’d better start describing the society I’ve stepped into, because I don’t know anything about masters or thralls, other than what the words usually mean.”

  “Now that is a broad question, but I did give you two.” He paused in thought for a moment.

  “We keep a Covenant, sir. That is the first law we hold to. Without the Covenant, our race would swiftly die. There are three things the Covenant holds us to. First, no one who holds to the Covenant may slay another who holds to it. Second, no one who holds to the Covenant may act so as to reveal those of the blood, or allow the revelation of those of the blood. Third, a master is responsible for the actions of all of his blood. Any of the blood who don’t hold to the Covenant, even those who are not part of it, forfeit their existence.”

  I nodded. It made a certain amount of sense, too much sense. It reminded me of the code of a Mafia family: don’t kill family, keep your mouth shut about family business, keep your own house in order.

  “Our society is larger than the Covenant, but I think of the Covenant as central to it. Within my circle, my duty is to enforce the Covenant—” He looked at me and shook his head. “I suppose I need to explain that as well.” He raised a hand and began tracing circles on the desk in front of him. “We are a race of hierarchies....”

  14

  It seemed that we spent hours in that room. Gabriel spoke of hierarchies, and explained them at length, and I saw the master-thrall relationship mirroring itself throughout the whole society Gabriel described.

  A thrall was the lowest someone could be within the society, little more than the animate property of his master. In terms of relationships, a thrall was treated almost as if he were an indivisible part of his master.

  The thrall’s master was usually the vampire responsible for creating him. According to Gabriel, almost all vampires began as humans chosen by a vampire in search of material for a thrall. Those choices were consciously made; no thrall was ever created by accident.

  A thrall remained bonded—physically and psychically enslaved—until his master chose to free hi
m, or until the master was destroyed. From what Gabriel said, I wondered if it was an unusual occurrence for a thrall to end up killing his master. Even if the enslavement was as much mental as physical, I doubted that it could be maintained permanently, or vampire society would stagnate. If there weren’t an implicit threat of eventual rebellion, there would be no incentive for any master to ever release a thrall and create a new one.

  Though the Covenant forbade masters from slaying one another, a thrall operated under his master’s responsibility. If a thrall killed his master, it was the master that was responsible—essentially suicide. I noticed that Gabriel said nothing about any of that. It was probably a touchy subject.

  What he talked about, at length, was the web of associations among those of “free blood,” as he called it. Just as with any culture, there was a definite pecking order, high to low. The circles that Rowena mentioned were levels of power, or—more accurately—associations of vampires who had roughly the same status. It seemed that individuals could gain status on their own, or the circle as a whole could rise and fall, a combination of a political party and a noble house.

  Gabriel explained the relationship between higher and lower, and I began understanding why Rowena would consider my question about her circle impertinent. Vampire society seemed divorced from the material world. The more so the closer to the center you came. In such a society, information was a valued commodity. Information about relationships within the community, especially.

  In a way, Gabriel was telling me how grave his mistake was in the way he had first shaken me down, and at the same time telling me how well he was making up for that mistake.

  After information, what this society valued was reciprocity—in all its forms. A favor granted meant a favor returned. A wound inflicted meant a wound repaid. It went beyond that, into areas that were hard to understand in one sitting. Favors were exchanged like gifts, but status and power dictated who could initiate such an exchange. Offering something to someone of a level much higher than my own could be seen as a bitter insult, while asking anything of that person could disadvantage me, incurring a social debt that I’d be obliged to repay.

  After he was done with his lengthy description, I was taken by one question that he had not answered. “Where do I fit in this? I’ve been dropped in here without a script.”

  Gabriel held up a hand. “This is your third question, sir. You must give me leave to ask you one of my own.”

  I understood what he was doing now. By allowing me those first two questions, he had expunged a debt between us, a debt that he’d incurred by his “misunderstanding.” Now we were in a game of reciprocal questions. I nodded to him, “Fair’s fair.”

  “Who was it that granted you the thirst? Someone must have taken your mortal life, or have fed upon you before your mortal life was taken.”

  His gaze held me, and I felt the distinct fear of disappointing someone more powerful than I was. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “If I do know, it’s a memory that’s inaccessible to me at the moment.”

  Gabriel looked at me, and I had the uneasy feeling that those blue-gray eyes could see if I lied. “It is an answer of sorts,” he said. “My own answer, to your question: You do not ‘fit’ into our society. You have not pledged yourself to the Covenant. You have taken no name. You are a rogue as outside us as is the human from which you sprang. You are of the blood, which means I must respect you. But you have no status, high or low. I treat you as a peer because I disadvantaged myself to you, but others will treat you as is their fancy.”

  That disturbed me. It meant I was at a considerable disadvantage in dealing with others of my kind.

  “My kind,” I whispered, surprised at the form my thoughts had taken.

  “Pardon me, sir?”

  “No, nothing. This has all been a little much for me. I had a life—”

  Gabriel shook his head. “You have a life, Mr. Tyler. Don’t mistake what has happened for death; those who do taste the true death before long.” He leaned back. “But that was not a question.”

  “No, it wasn’t.” I sat up a little straighter in my chair. “How could I fit into this society?”

  “You need to accept the Covenant and choose your Name before us. However, you need one of us to accept you, and such a boon will not be granted lightly or freely. Some measure of responsibility shall attach—not absolute, your sponsor did not create you—but enough that your actions will reflect well or ill upon the one granting you this. Something in return will be asked, and only someone great in his own position would not demand some indenture.”

  “Someone has to open the door and take responsibility for letting me in.”

  Gabriel nodded.

  “Your turn.”

  “I presume you’ve seen Childe’s thralls at one point. Describe the last time you saw any of them.”

  “I can’t be certain who his thralls are, but if they are the teenagers he’s supposed to be collecting, the last time I dealt with any of them was yesterday. They rammed a van into a car I was in....”

  The question game went on for hours. I answered Gabriel’s questions truthfully, not because I trusted him—I didn’t—but because he never asked anything that was worth it to risk a lie. The only personal questions he asked me were about me becoming a vampire, the sequence of events immediately afterward, and about Tony.

  Everything else was about Childe, directly or indirectly.

  I learned as much from Gabriel’s questions as I did from my own. It was clear that he hunted Childe for some violation of the Covenant. Specifically, Childe bore the responsibility for his thralls’ violations. His thralls—apparently the people identified with Childe’s cult—had broken the second law of the Covenant, “revealing those of the blood.” I had the uncomfortable feeling that I was the one, through my investigation, to whom things were revealed.

  Listening to Gabriel, I had the sense that he had some personal stake in finding Childe, beyond the fact that Childe seemed to have violated the Covenant. He seemed to view Childe with the same distaste that the neo-pagans did, and I could not figure out why he would feel that way. However, Gabriel’s attitude toward Childe raised my suspicions.

  I felt Gabriel was too ready to convict Childe, especially now that I knew the nature of the Covenant. The Covenant now made it even harder for me to fathom what Childe’s people—his thralls—were doing. I couldn’t account for it even as some sort of mass rebellion, a slave revolt. That wouldn’t explain the outward-directed violence. It didn’t explain the attention drawn in Childe’s name. A thrall rebellion would have at its focus the master.

  I wondered what Gabriel gained by dealing with those who violated the Covenant. What did he gain in status and power? I wondered if his gain was roughly proportional to the level of the person he brought down. I didn’t question Gabriel about these points. I didn’t want to allow him into the routes my own mind was taking.

  My questions were more basic to my immediate survival. I kept asking questions about vampirism in general. I didn’t want Gabriel to think of me as a fellow investigator. The more he saw me as a neophyte, the safer I thought I was.

  So I asked if I had to kill.

  Gabriel said it wasn’t necessary. Life was the important thing, not death. He explained that I had been in such a diminished state when I had taken Tony that I had no choice but to take all he had to give.

  How much blood?

  The answer depended on too many things, from innate physical strength to the level of exertion.

  Garlic, crosses, and holy water?

  He gave me an amused smile and a comment about superstition. “Belief is all you have to fear,” he said. “Yours and your adversary’s.”

  Stakes, decapitation, and fire?

  Such things would be anathema to any being.

  The sun?

  Gabriel’s expression turned grave as he said, “The light of the sun is insidious. A more spiritual pe
rson would say it drives the soul from the flesh where it is bound. From my point of view, it is simple death. Exposed to that light for any length, and you shall become a corpse.”

  “Speaking of that light,” I said, “there are things I must do before dawn.”

  He nodded at me. “I appreciate all your answers, Mr. Tyler. Your information may yet help me find him, or at least make the case that he must be found.” He stood and extended his hand.

  I stood and clasped his hand. I didn’t know what to make of him now. His comment came uncomfortably close to what Sam had said about getting a warrant. I didn’t trust Gabriel, or his motives.

  “I apologize for the gaps in my memory,” I said, hoping that I had at least gotten as much out of him as he had out of me.

  “As I said, what you do know may yet help me.” He smiled at me, a smile that managed to condense all the darkness in this house into a single facial expression. “I’m sure you can find your way out.”

  When I drove away from the house, it was nearly three in the morning. When I arrived at the Lakewood address of Manuel Deité, a.k.a. Childe, it was closer to four. It wasn’t that it took an hour to drive from Cleveland Heights to Lakewood. I just needed the time to digest what I had learned—and what I thought I’d learned—when I talked to Gabriel.

  Childe had an Edgewater Drive address, and at first I thought that he lived in one of the ranks of ice-tray apartment complexes that claimed the view of the water. However, one look at the address told me that he resided on the other side of Edgewater. The apartment buildings on that side were stone and brick as opposed to concrete, and a few decades ago, these would have had the view of the water—

  Now they just had the view of apartments that were more expensive, newer, and uglier.

  The building had a parking lot in back. I pulled the Olds up over a hump of snow and looked up at Childe’s building. It would have been at home overlooking the Rhine. Most of the buildings on this side of Edgewater would. Childe’s building was a Tudor study in stone detailing and leaded glass.