by Karen Chance
I leaned against one of the concrete block walls and watched the mob take the place apart. “No one here,” Olga said, squinting about with her inadequate eyes. I doubted she could see very well despite the numerous holes that had been knocked in the place, letting in midday light, but her sense of smell was probably as good as mine and I didn’t smell anyone.
“Should we tell them?” I asked, lighting up.
“No, let them have fun.” She hopped up on the counter, which groaned slightly under her weight, and watched the destruction. “What you think?” she demanded when I didn’t comment.
I closed my eyes and mentally filtered out the smell of weed, mildewed pleather and sweaty troll. A faint but discernible trace of stale air wafted to me from somewhere nearby. I opened my eyes. “I was wondering what’s behind all the shoes.”
Olga hefted her ax and swung around to face the collection. She cleaved the center section clean in two. “That,” she said helpfully.
I regarded the set of stairs going down into bare earth with disapproval. I hate dark staircases, especially when I know I won’t like what I’ll find at the other end. I glanced at Olga. “It might be better if we don’t try to take everyone down. Don’t want anyone blocking the exit.”
She nodded and called a huge troll over. He had on a pair of jeans, which surprised me, since I hadn’t known they made them in that size, but no shoes. I caught myself staring at his knobby feet, which had the usual number of toes for a troll—three—and made myself stop. “Wait here,” she told him sternly. “Don’t let others pass. If we not back in half an hour, come down and kill everything.”
He grunted, which I had trouble deciphering, but Olga apparently understood. No one else appeared to have noticed us, which wasn’t surprising considering that the demons were setting the red pleather booths on fire and the trolls had started throwing bowling pins through the unlit beer signs. Their aim was pretty lousy, but there were a lot of pins, and the resounding crashes and tinkles of glass seemed to amuse them. Troll bowling.
I turned to Olga. “There’s no chance in hell anyone down there doesn’t know we’re coming. Let’s take a quick peek, but if I tell you to run back up the stairs, you do it, no arguments. Okay?”
“You funny little woman,” she said, and started down the stairs. I sighed and followed.
I have better-than-human eyesight in the dark, but even I couldn’t see much on those stairs. I don’t doubt that Olga was completely blind, but she never faltered. Trolls aren’t exactly graceful, but they have a low center of gravity for climbing around mountains and fjords, so I figured I was more likely to fall than she was. Luckily for me, four hundred pounds of troll stood between me and whatever was down there, something I found vaguely comforting.
When we finally ran out of stairs, we found ourselves in a tunnel carved out of the local sandstone. It looked like some of the deeper areas of MAGIC—those the vamps preferred to the upper levels belonging to the mages—except for the claustrophobically low ceiling. There was only the faint illumination from the stairway to guide us, and I couldn’t see a candle or lantern lying about, which was odd in a place even infrequently used.
Olga and I changed positions, after I explained that I might have more luck detecting the various nasty surprises a group of dark mages could have left for us, but she chafed at my pace. Drac had taken my key ring and its charms along with everything else, but I compensated somewhat by scattering clumps of dirt ahead of us to see if any obvious traps had been left. Nothing happened—not even a minor early-warning ward sizzled—which made me steadily more nervous as we progressed. It didn’t help that the farther we went from the stairs, the harder it was even for me to see anything.
Because of the almost nonexistent light, I found the rockfall by running into it. Olga plowed into me and I got a mouth full of sandstone dust before we sorted ourselves out. So this was why nothing had tried to stab, incinerate or crush us on the way in.
“Rockfall,” I said, spitting. “There must be another way in, on the other side.”
“Yes, but where?” Olga asked sensibly, pushing me to one side. “We go through here.” With sheer brute strength, she hacked her way into the blockage, clearing a path twice as wide as me through a six-foot-deep pile of rocks and dirt. Even at my best, it would have taken me thirty minutes or more of hard labor to make that hole; she managed it in about two. I made another mental note: avoid wrestling trolls.
When I stopped choking on clouds of dust, I found that I could see again. Olga’s patient expression was visible in the light of a nearby lantern tucked into a nook. It threw hard shadows on the walls, showing us a wide, innocent-looking stretch of corridor that I didn’t trust at all. The mages might have caused the fall to block off a vulnerable entrance, but any regularly used areas were going to be guarded by someone or something. And since these were dark mages, it would probably be something lethal.
“We’re going to have to be more careful from now on,” I told Olga, who gave me an impatient look. I noticed that she had her ax in hand, and nodded. We were on the same page.
It took us almost ten minutes of very cautious movement to get to the large cavern at the end of the hall. But maybe ten seconds after we entered, I got two big clues as to why nothing had grabbed us. A complex ward called the Shroud of Flame leapt up behind us, blocking the way back, and a wall of emotion hit me so hard that it literally knocked me off my feet.
The sensations were familiar, and highly unwelcome. So was the scene that accompanied them, superimposed over the real one like a movie shown on a see-through screen. I could still see the cavern, but most of my attention was caught by the images of my past that flickered and changed in front of me. It was like someone had accessed the part of my memory labeled “good riddance” and was doing a top-ten most-hated-events countdown. Only it seemed they were starting with number one.
A dark-haired child woke up in a nest of blankets next to a fire. It was summer, so there was no need to sleep inside one of the cramped wagons, which always smelled of body odor and garlic, in the surrounding circle. The only others up at this hour were two camp dogs worrying something near the edge of the clearing. The girl threw off her blankets and smoothed her clothes before going to see what it was. The food was usually hung from tree limbs to keep animals out of it, but sometimes a rope would break, and she knew she’d catch hell if the dogs were eating the smoked ham they had acquired at the last village. I wanted to scream at her to run and not look back, but knew it wouldn’t do any good. She couldn’t hear me, and even if she could, she was far too stubborn to listen. Then or now, I thought as my eyes followed her small form toward the two large dogs.
The shaggy gray creatures were part wolf—wild, half-feral things, kept around by more food than they could scavenge, and used to scare off interlopers. They were about as far from domesticated as they could get, but it had never occurred to her to consider them dangerous. Dogs of any kind don’t usually bite the hand that feeds them, but Dili, named after the fact that he had never been quite right in the head, was gnawing on something that looked a lot like a human arm. Baro, his huge mate, had something in her mouth, too, which a beam of early-morning sunlight showed clearly as the head of a middle-aged, bearded man.
The girl screamed then, at the sight of Tsinoro, leader of their kumpania, being breakfast for dogs. She screamed for quite a while before she realized that no one was coming out of the brightly painted wagons littering the small clearing. Her cries would have raised the deaf, much less a company of people used to reacting quickly to any sign of trouble. She should have been able to sense immediately why no one had come—her sense of smell was good enough to discern the miasma of blood and feces that radiated out of the small wagons even without her entering them—but she wasn’t thinking clearly. Wasn’t, in fact, thinking at all, being in a panic to find someone, anyone, still breathing.
She ran to the nearest wagon, one of the largest since it belonged to Lyubitshka, the chovexan
i of the clan, who was respected for the power of her magic. But it quickly became obvious that it had not been strong enough to help her this time. The girl stared at the mutilated body of the most powerful person she knew, and began to shake. She was afraid, not only that whatever had killed the wise woman would come for her, as well, but also because Lyubitshka had yelled at her just the day before for tearing a hole in her favorite blouse when laundering it, and now there was no way to obtain forgiveness. Having someone so strong go into the spirit world angry with you was the worst thing her young mind could imagine. Lyubitshka would make a powerful muló, a vengeful spirit that returned to seek out those who had wronged it in life.
After stumbling down the steps of Lyubitshka’s wagon and looking wildly around for the angry muló, the girl went a bit mad. She ran to throw open the doors of each wagon, but found only more corpses inside. After her increasingly panicked investigation proved that she and the dogs were the only living things left in the kumpania, she collapsed near the fire, exhausted, tearstained and shivering in shock. Even after her natural resilience kicked in to calm her slightly, she didn’t bother to wash herself or even look for salvageable items to pack. She was not so young that she didn’t know the proper way to treat the dead, and there was no one else to do it.
I watched her dig a pit in the middle of the clearing, to which she dragged each body after wrapping it in a blanket to avoid handling it directly and risking marimé, or uncleanness. They should have been dressed in their best clothes, but there was so much blood, and some were not even whole anymore, that she didn’t know where to start making them presentable. She arranged the bodies in the hole, and piled on top of them their extra clothes, jewelry, tools and best dinnerware as custom required. There was no beeswax to use to close their nostrils and prevent an evil spirit from entering them, but considering how many wounds most of them had, she doubted the spirits would find animating these bodies very useful.
As she piled earth on top of the heap of the dead, she sobbed for them, even those who had considered her unclean because of her parentage. They had been her family, or as much of one as she had ever known. And now they were gone. Sweat and dirt mixed with her tears, and her nose started to run, but she didn’t wipe it away. She wasn’t finished yet.
She turned the horses loose and ran them away from the camp, since tradition allowed their continued survival. But everything else had to be destroyed. It was a laborious process, but she finally managed to break every remaining plate and glass, kill the two dogs and pile great armloads of brush around each wagon. She lit the fire and stood off to one side, watching everything she had ever known go up in flames. She would soon start to feel hungry and worry about how she was to survive when all the money and salable objects of her kumpania were now cursed and useless. She would wonder who would take her in, since the other Gypsy bands would certainly blame her for the tragedy, just as she was starting to blame herself.
She was not very old, but she knew what they whispered about her when they thought she couldn’t hear. She knew why they had taken her in, and what she could do. Killing the occasional vampyre who tried to hurt the kumpania was no more difficult for her than any of the other chores—gathering firewood or doing the wash—that were regularly demanded. She remembered nothing of the night before except going to sleep as usual, but there had been other odd periods of blackness in her life, and stories told of actions she had taken during them that she knew nothing about.
And one irrefutable fact stared her in the face: she was the only one left.
The fire spread to some nearby trees as she stood there, but she made no move to escape the heat. I felt again her despair, and knew she wouldn’t have cared much if the fire had consumed her, too. The kumpania had fed and clothed her for years, and all they had asked in return was protection. She was there to ensure that the ancient nightmares that walked abroad at night, the things that even the strongest Rom man couldn’t fight, did not decimate their small group. The group had not always been kind, but they had kept their bargain. What did it matter if she had to drink from a separate bucket or if they went out of their way to keep from touching her? They had seen to it that she never wanted for anything. And how had she repaid them? With the very fate they had been trying to avoid. She ought to let the fire take her. They were right—she was unclean, and her birth had ensured that she would never be anything else.
Chapter Eleven
I came around to find myself sobbing against a vast, hairy expanse, and vaguely realized that it was Olga’s beard. For a second, the grief continued to pound against me, hot and fierce. I swallowed and tried to concentrate enough to throw it completely off. I took a deep breath, then another. And as the sea of memory retreated, an odd thought occurred.
Whatever spell this was, it couldn’t manufacture such accurate memories, not of events that no one else had ever seen. It had to be pulling them from my own mind, and if that was true, what I had just seen had been created from what my eyes had recorded long ago. And that left me with a very important question.
“Where was the blood?” I croaked, sitting up.
Olga looked at me strangely, and I stared back at her. Of course, she hadn’t seen the vision, or at least, not the same one I had. But she didn’t ask any questions, which was good because my brain was already crowded with them.
I’d deliberately refused to relive those memories after I escaped from that cursed forest. They’d sat in the back of my mind like a fresh bruise, tender and unpleasant every time I touched them. But maybe it had been a mistake to shy away. If I was the killer as I’d always assumed, why had I not been drenched in blood? Everyone else had; even the dogs had looked like they’d been soaked in it. But when I smoothed my apron down that morning, there had been no sticky residue on my hands, no splotches of dried brown on my clothing. And even I couldn’t manage a slaughter like that without leaving traces, especially not in one of the berserker rages.
But if I hadn’t done the deed, I should have woken up during it. Even without enhanced sensory perception, it would be hard to sleep through something like that. But if there was no blood…
“You through?” Olga inquired patiently. “Lars will come soon if we do not return, and make much noise.”
I suddenly noticed that, unlike me, Olga had not broken down into a huddled mess. “Why isn’t the spell affecting you?” I demanded.
She looked at me levelly. “My husband die today and my business ruin. What could be worse?”
I started guiltily. I hadn’t known Benny had a wife. No wonder the spell didn’t work on her—she was already living her worst day. Any memory the spell brought up would probably be a relief if it blocked out the present. I, on the other hand, had five hundred years of nightmares for it to pick among. I could still feel tendrils of the spell trying to weave their way around me, but the shock that my biggest fear of all time might have been a lie allowed me to push them aside. Sometime very soon I was going to sit down and ask myself some hard questions about that night, but now was not the time.
I got a good look around and realized that someone else had been trapped by the spell. Louis-Cesare was huddled in a corner with his back to me. He must have been following right on our heels to have made it through the door before the spell blocked the way. It looked like he was wishing he’d been slower.
I saw him shudder, a slow vibration that started at the small of his back and ran up his spine. His once-pristine leather jacket and slacks looked like someone had been clawing at them, and one glance at his broken and bloody nails told me who. He didn’t appear to have enjoyed the show any more than I had.
He began slowly rocking back and forth, the muscles of his back clenched tight, only the graceful curve of his neck visible under the curtain of hair that hid his features. He was moaning softly, and said something, to some figure from his past, presumably. My French is adequate if not elegant, but he was slurring his words too much for me to understand. Then he began to laugh, a broken
, bitter sound, like glass under boots. It hit my raw nerves like fingernails on a chalkboard. I reached for him, not thinking, just wanting to stop that awful sound. The minute my hand touched his skin, I was dragged into his little corner of hell.
A darkened cell, where he lay helpless and bound. The jailers stripped him roughly, tearing at his clothes, the knife at his neck a silent threat. It didn’t stop him from trying to fight, from thrashing until they beat him almost senseless, fists and fingernails gouging mercilessly. Eventually his limbs refused to obey him and the taste of dust and straw and the metallic tang of blood filled his mouth. The hitching of his breath sounded far away; he could almost imagine that it came from someone else. Until a new pain started, something they had not dared before, that snapped him back into himself in horror.
Clamping his teeth on a scream, he panted in a red haze of pain and fury as his body flinched away from invasion, its desperation beyond his control. He couldn’t master the shaking in his limbs, the reflexive struggle or the half-choked gasps, but he wouldn’t scream. The humiliation settled like stone in his gut, blending with the agony as they took their turns and their time. One of them laughed, and he could feel it in his belly, letting him know this wouldn’t end anytime soon. Bile burned the back of his throat, but an icy calm settled over him. He would find a way out of here, he promised himself, and when he did, no one would ever make him a victim again.
I jerked away, shivering in a cold sweat, damning whatever mages had set this trap all to hell. After my breathing returned to something like normal, I borrowed a handkerchief from Olga and wrapped it around my hand. No more skin-on-skin contact, not here.
I squatted and tried to make eye contact, but I couldn’t see his face until I brushed a snarl of hair back from his forehead. His usual pale perfection had faded to chalk white and his eyes were bruise dark. I felt a surge of unaccustomed compassion. He looked so young, without the superior, closed expression he usually used around me. He didn’t look like Louis-Cesare, Senate member and arrogant bastard. He looked like Louis-Cesare of the auburn hair and the blue eyes and the devastating smile. I reached out, my finger tracing the line of a single tear down his cheek. Then I slapped him.
