There’d been trouble with vampires further north, up near the River Ruby, so we should have given some thought to them – but we didn’t, not I nor our retainers nor Captain Balsam Remane. No crush had been as far south as Tajan in living memory …
Everyone is dead now – Gurny, Remane, Ahjan, Errera, even little Uadalure – everyone, as I say, except me, so placing blame elsewhere is both pointless and ungentlemanly. The blame is mine, because I’m alive to bear it.
THEY CAME ON the night of my younger sister Ahjan’s anacator. In olden days she’d have actually been married at fourteen, but civilization has advanced since those darker times; now, among our class, a cator is an assumption of some adult responsibilities and privileges, and an excuse for a party. Father and Mother were due to arrive the morning of her birthday, leaving Ahjan and her friends to have their more traditional unstructured fun the day before. And they did – Ahjan had two dozen of her friends with us, and a few of the boys got a little more drunk than was seemly, and a few of the girls got kissed rather thoroughly – but in all no harm. One boy whose name I did not know conceived a passion for Ahjan’s best friend Olinia, and we had to throw him in the lake to restore his senses; but once he’d dried off and perhaps sobered some he apologized, and in round Ahjan’s anacator was a success.
Gurny and I watched the sun set from the front porch that evening. Ahjan and her friends were inside the lodge putting on a play – decent work, some of her crowd were the children of professional entertainers and knew the business of it. They’d invited the townpeople for audience, and about forty had come; and a dozen of the rope people as well. Gurny was worn and I was restless – I’m only three and a half years older than Ahjan, but Gurny was my grandfather’s man and he’d been principle chaperone to Ahjan and her friends in addition to managing logistics and transportation for some forty people. By the time the younger crowd had gone inside for their show, Gurny was moving slowly and was plainly grateful to settle into the biggest of the wooden chairs on the long redwood porch.
I pulled a chair more suited to my size over and sat beside him, a bit upwind. Gurny made a small gesture with two fingers, and I shrugged – he smokes flatweed, and my parents disapprove. I don’t care as long as I don’t have to breathe it. The cigar shook slightly as he lit it – exhaustion, more than age, though the exhaustion was the result of age….
Getting old is unpleasant, Gurny said sometimes, but all the alternatives are worse.
We sat in a comfortable silence while the blue sky took up streaks of pink and orange. Gurny was easy to be with; he’d taught me to read and ride, to hunt and shoot, to fight with and without weapons; had taught me more about being a soldier and a man than my own father. I didn’t resent it, much; Father was a busy and important man and I liked Gurny. Gurny had even taught me the little bit of military magic he knew – not much: witch sight to see far, or in the dark; how to find true West; how to minimize hunger and fatigue; how to find water.
There was enough of a breeze to be comfortable, to stir the Lake off to my left into choppy small blue waves whose peaks caught the sunlight with orange and then red accents, as the sun sat across the long stretch of the Infinite Desert.
Gurny smoked half his cigar before saying, “Your parents are coming in the morning, first thing.”
Even a couple of years ago he’d have known he didn’t need to belabor the obvious to me. “I’ll see things cleaned and boys and girls bedded down in their own wings, before heading to bed myself.”
“Good boy,” said Gurny absently, which might have cost another man his teeth.
I smiled. “And I’ll see Remane posts a guard or two on the corridors.” Later that comment haunted me – the knowledge my only thought for safety had been to put our troops in between the youngsters, rather than around them.
Gurny nodded and puffed away at his cigar. I heard small footsteps behind us, and found my youngest sister Uadalure in her night clothes, fresh from her bath and her hair still wet, her nanny Errera trailing behind her. Uadalure was four years old, dark-haired and dark-eyed and Middle Earth’s happiest child.
It was already near her bedtime and she’d had a busy day. She climbed up in my lap and whispered, “Tell me a story, Tari.” She curled up against my chest, rested her wet hair against my shoulder, and closed her eyes. “A story about Fluffy,” Fluffy being her ted who’d been left behind in Arch. I’d never thought there was anything much fluffy about her ted – or anyone else’s – but she doted on him and it was the name she’d chosen.
Gurny closed his eyes and smiled a bit as I started in on the tale. It was the same story every time, Uadalure had objected strenuously the few times I’d tried to introduce changes. “When Fluffy was a baby,” it began, “he wanted a little girl of his own. And he was luckier than any other ted, because the little girl he got was the smartest and nicest and prettiest girl in all of Arch or Tajan –”
Arch was about twenty thousand times the size of Tajan, but they were the two places Uadalure knew.
“Nicest,” she mumbled, half asleep already. “Me.”
“You,” I agreed, and kissed her on her damp forehead. She snuggled a little closer, and her breathing gentled. “When Festival came, Fluffy made sure he was there, because he knew Uadalure’s mother would take her there to play. And because he was so handsome, so pretty, so fluffy, all the little girls who saw Fluffy wanted him to be theirs. But Fluffy said no!”
“No,” came the whisper of agreement.
“Fluffy knew that Uadalure would come and love him and have him forever, if only he was patient. And teds aren’t very good at being patient” – for my measure they were the dumbest creatures that breathed – “but Fluffy knew how important it was that he be patient for Uadalure, because Uadalure’s mommy didn’t like to go the Festival too early in the day. So one little girl after another came and saw Fluffy and wanted him to be hers, one after another after another, but every time Fluffy said …” I waited a beat. No sound came from her but her rhythmic breathing.
“No,” said Gurny very softly. “He said no every time, because Uadalure loved him more than anyone else, and he loved her just as much.”
I stood and handed Uadalure back to Errera. “Put her in our parent’s room. She should wake up about the time they arrive.”
“Very good, sir. Good night, sir.”
“Good night, Errera.” I turned to Gurny and held out my right hand.
The faint smile died. “I need help getting out of my chair now?”
“No Gurny, I know you can get out of the chair on your own. I also know you won’t and I’ll have to wake you after you’ve stiffened and you’ll be unpleasant about it.” I paused and amended, “More unpleasant than you’re going to be anyway.”
Gurny observed that I was impertinent and that my parents had been unmarried when I was conceived. I nodded. “So Father has indicated on occasion. But I’ve seen the paperwork, and it appears to show a decent interval between wedding and birth.”
“You can pay special for those sorts of papers,” growled Gurny, taking my hand. I hauled him out of the chair. It was much easier than it would have been even a year ago – I was stronger, and he was lighter.
“You can pay for anything in Arch,” I agreed, and something in my tone struck him – he peered closely at me for a moment, not letting go of my hand.
“What have you been paying for, young sir?”
/>
“Nothing unseemly,” I said, without changing expression. “Those sorts of things cost more than Father is willing to release from my accounts.”
He barked laughter and released me. “You’re old enough to work.”
“I’m old enough to fight, too,” and Gurny merely nodded at that, and clapped me on the shoulder.
It was nearly dark out, so we lit the porch lanterns and went back inside as the thin line of scarlet on the horizon faded to black.
WE TOTALED FORTY-four people at the lodge – five permanent staff, and the 39 people we’d brought with us for the cator. Over half of them, including my sister Ahjan and all of her female guests, were dead before I awoke. I don’t sleep heavily as a rule – but the girl’s wing was the other side of the lodge and the truth is I heard nothing before the door of my room burst open. I came out of the bed with my knife in hand, angry clear to the bone before I was even fully awake: it had been years since Gurny had tested me like this, and by my ancestors, aged and forgetful Gurny might be, the knife at my bedside these days was not blunted –
All that came and went in a moment. Of course Gurny would not test me at my age, and fully awake I knew it. And even in the dim light from the sleeping lantern, Specialist Bend, a man with twenty years war behind him, looked more agitated than I’d thought possible for one of Remane’s well-respected staff. “Invaders,” he whispered loud enough to be understood, “sheathe that,” and tossed me a heater. He’d a gun in each hand and after throwing me one produced another so quickly I was not sure I’d seen either hand empty. “Boots!”
I’d kicked them off at the side of the bed before retiring, and as I stamped into them I heard, for the first time, the sounds of disturbance, a distant high pitched wavering noise that resembled nothing I’d ever heard from a person’s throat. Bend stuck his head back into the corridor, glanced both ways, and gestured to me to come. I ducked into the corridor, hunched over, and ran, Bend behind me, toward the garage. I’d have shot anyone I didn’t recognize but we saw no one.
Inside the garage the lights were up and I found Remane, another of his specialists, six or seven of Ahjan’s young male guests, and Gurny – with Uadalure. Alone among the crowd Gurny appeared injured, bloody and with some blackish fluid spattered over him –
Andad Samise, the youngest of Remane’s specialists, only a few years older than me, swung wildly about as we entered the garage and fired on me. The heat of her shot seared me as if I’d stood too close to a bonfire and blackened my white nightshirt, but it missed, and she didn’t get another shot – from the other side of the garage Remane shot her through the wrist with his wiregun. She screamed and he held his gun on her and spoke in a voice suitable for a wine tasting. “It’s Tariq.” He held her gaze. “You see your lord’s heir?” After a moment she nodded, and without looking at me Remane said, “Sorry, sir, vampires.” And then I understood why Andad had shot at me, and what the black fluid was that Gurny had on him. “This is everyone left,” Remane continued. He lowered his weapon and said to Andad, almost kindly, “You can drive left handed.”
We had come in a convoy of four vehicles – a spotter, a small gun truck with two mounted guns, and a pair of long limousines. Gurny was already behind the wheel of one limo, strapping Uadalure into the seat beside him. She’d said nothing since I’d come in, staring wild-eyed about her and clinging to Gurny’s arm – he didn’t shake her off, but her grip didn’t slow him as he prepared.
Speaking to the boys, the urbane and elderly and sometimes effeminate Remane abruptly sounded like a drill instructor: “Young men!” Somehow the boys came to a ragged imitation of order. “Aboard the limo and strap in! At speed! Move, move!”
Andad was climbing, right hand dripping blood, into the gun truck.
Remane glanced at me. “Samise drives the gun truck, Bend on the wire and me on flash. We go out first when the doors open. There are vampires outside, I don’t know how many; we saw dozens in the initial assault. Then Gurny, then you last on the spotter. You can ride one handed?”
So that I could hold the heater with the other. “Yes.”
He nodded. “Save manna for a last shot. Clear?”
“Yes.” It was childish and I knew the answer, but it came out anyway, hoping. “This is everyone?”
He looked away. “Gurny went in and brought out the child. No one else came out of that wing.” The last of the boys was in the limo now, and Remane swung away from me and leaped onto the gun truck. “Wear the helmet!”
The spotter lifted off the floor at my approach, as if eager for work. I swung into the saddle and settled my feet on the pegs. The helmet that hung from the backbar wasn’t mine, and when I put it on and lowered the faceplate it smelled of Gurny’s flatweed. I had enough presence of mind to know that I wanted the gloves and jacket I didn’t have, it was going to be cold when I got the spotter moving, in that north mountain night air.
Abruptly the interior of the garage brightened, as the limo’s headlamps came on. I turned on the spotter’s single headlamp, and Remane shouted two words I didn’t know in the Old Speech.
The garage door slid upward, not too slowly. In a few seconds we could see the courtyard and beyond it the long landscaped green lawns out in front of the lodge, the narrow road cutting through them and then down the mountainside. In the lights of our vehicles we could see eight or nine vampires, gathered around a bloody small bundle of rags. They looked up when the lights hit them, blood on the mouths of a few of them. Then they made a noise, a scream if you wish since it must have come from throats and been made of air, but it was a high cutting wavering scream that no one who has ever heard it will ever forget.
They were pale and thin and silver-eyed, and their fine white hair streamed about them in the breeze.
They looked very much like me.
REMANE FIRED FIRST, and two of the vampires burst into flames when the flash touched them. I saw the path where Bend raked the wiregun across the field, chewing up turf and paving and marblework, though I didn’t see if he hit anyone. The vampires scattered and then we were among them, and then through and they were behind us, roaring down and into the blackness at increasing speed. I never had occasion to blast anything, never had a moment with a clear look at one of them. Once we were past them I stowed the heater in my right pants pocket and turned to sneak a quick look back –
Ancestors know what hit me. A stray bullet from one of ours, perhaps a thrown rock – vampires are strong. The faceplate shattered and I nearly lost control of the spotter. I turned back and pulled the spotter around again as it threatened to slide sideways beneath me, had one sick wobbly moment when I thought the whole spotter was about to flip … and then I had it back, facing forward and flying level, aware of shard from the faceplate cutting into my cheeks and lips – I blinked blood out of my eyes, and my eyes felt slick but unharmed and my vision was unimpaired – the shards hadn’t cut an eye, at least.
The spotter was the fastest and most maneuverable of the three vehicles, by a lot. I accelerated to catch the gun truck and shouted up at Remane. “Scout?”
He shouted back. “Are you hurt bad?”
“Broken faceplate. I can see well enough. Scout?”
“Let me think,” he yelled down at me, and then fell silent.
We were in only a slightly improved condition. The road curved in a series of severe switchbacks down the mountainside, all the way to the Naranda onramp. Vampi
res don’t fly as fast as the best wind witches, but they’d catch us before the Naranda if they showed discipline and any planning – an unknown quantity, that. Some crushes were led by vampires so ancient and cunning and wicked they could near pass for people; others were little better than wolves.
DISCIPLINE THEY HAD.
They had no guns. Vampires don’t use them. They use their hands, and their teeth –
And their firebombs.
They caught us at the fourth switchback downhill of the lodge.
It happened in seconds. One of the bombs hit the gun truck squarely. Remane went up like a torch catching fire, and Bend caught the splatter. Even half ablaze Bend kept firing up into the night sky, screaming and shooting wildly into the darkness. Remane slumped over the flash, flames crawled along the flash’s mount and crawled down the gunport and into the truck, and then the entire gun truck went up in an explosion of scarlet light and blistering heat. The fireball climbed up into the sky and set half a dozen vampires alight, and Gurny, forty feet back of the gun truck, had no time to stop and no room on the narrow road to cut around. Even at the end he made the right decisions, tried the only thing with even a distant chance of success, swerved left out along the edge of the road, left side of the limo out over the long drop and drove the other half through the edges of the fire. For a moment I had a wild hope he’d make it, he got the limo past the fire, I could see both his intent face and the top of Uadalure’s head in the light of the burning gun truck, the ghostly shadows of the boys further back in the limo, as Gurny slewed the vehicle back toward the road, got the nose over the pavement … but the rear was still hanging over air, and without a noise the limo slid backward, tilted so that the nose was pointed almost straight up, and fell down into the black, into a drop of at least four hundred feet.
Tales of the Continuing Time and Other Stories Page 27
