Blood Brothers

  He followed her back down to the great hall, where there was little of activity now. Several female thralls were still out and about, however, and a group of them stood in secretive conversation. Seeing Nathan and Orlea together they fell silent, frowning, and apparently frustrated. Then, when he would have made for his room, Orlea took his elbow and guided him in a different direction, down a passageway carved in pumice.

  “Where are we going?” Nathan inquired.

  “To a place where those women won’t bother you,” she told him. “For they fear me almost as much as they fear Maglore.”

  “And where is the Seer Lord now?” He felt uneasy, but was not quite sure why he wanted to know.

  “Asleep,” she answered. “He has his routines. This is one of the times when he sleeps. Sunup will rouse him from his bed, when he’ll retreat to his workshops in the lower levels. Unlike the other Lords, most of which work only at night and cower in the dark when the sun stands on high over Sunside, Maglore has regulated his sleeping evenly between day and night.”

  They reached the outer wall where a narrow window looked towards the north-east, and stone steps spiralled down around a mortared stone core. At the bottom was a lesser hall like a warren, with passages leading off. She led the way down one of these to a room with a door like Nathan’s. It was Orlea’s room, but inside … the door was fitted with a bolt. This wasn’t the only difference, for her apartment was very well appointed. She had a bath, furniture, furs on the floor, and tasselled drapes at a tiny window punched through the massive wall; and her bed was curtained with gauzy drapes, which hung to the floor from rails between the posters.

  There were several gas jets with low yellow flames. She went about the room plugging them with bone dowels, until the light was reduced to a smoky dusk. And as Nathan’s imagination began to run rampant, she said: “No one will bother you here. Here you may sleep safely.”

  “Orlea,” he headed for the door, “I appreciate your concern for me, but I fear that if Maglore knew I was here…”

  “He does,” she cut him short, stopped him in his tracks. “Do you think I would dare if he did not? He ordered it.”

  Mind whirling and senses numb, Nathan faced the door, his hand reaching for the bolt. But hearing the rustle of curtains, he turned and looked back. Her clothes lay where she’d tossed them on a stool beside the bed, and the drapes were still mobile, shivering into stillness.

  Tingling with an electric awareness, scarcely daring to breathe, Nathan asked, “What… did he order?”

  “Everything,” her voice came back to him, very small and somehow sad. “I’m to take your innocence, until there’s nothing left for them.”

  “His vampire women?”

  “Yes.”

  He went back to the bed. “Orlea, I know better now. I know that I’m to avoid them, which in turn makes this unnecessary.”

  “Do you spurn me and defy Maglore?”

  “No, I don’t spurn you,” he said, trying hard to make her understand, without belittling himself. But in the end he knew there was only one way, which was to tell the truth. “It’s just that I have no experience of women,” he finally blurted it out. “I don’t know … anything!”

  “Well,” she answered, “and weren’t we all innocent, upon a time?”

  Even as she spoke, Nathan’s ringers were trembling as if they were some other’s where they removed his clothes. “I mean it,” he said. “I really don’t know anything at all.” Even now it wasn’t the whole truth, but close enough.

  “But you will,” she whispered, “you will. Even as I know, so shall you.”

  He was naked. “Orlea, I…”

  “Come to bed and warm me,” she told him. “At least I’ll know that there’s only one of you, that your actions are your own and not directed by some other. At least it will be you, and not some slimy-black thing inside that drives you on.”

  He passed through the curtains to where her slender hand greeted him. She turned back the covers and he slid in beside her. She covered him with the blankets, then with her strange cold love …

  Later, in the dusk of the curtained bed and the musk of their bodies, Nathan asked: “How did you come here?”

  “I was a child on Sunside,” Orlea told him, “just fourteen years old, when the headman of my village, Gobor Tulcini, noticed me. He was a brutal man, Gobor, with a frail and much abused wife. But then, he abused everything: his position, his people—phah!—the very air he breathed. Why, wild dogs are better behaved! One tithe time, he engineered a deficiency, and at the last moment chose my father to make up the number. After my father was taken, my poor mother died of grief. Then Gobor took me into his house, so that he might ‘bring me up as his own’. So he said …

  “My duties were to look after the village children, which I loved. For after all, I was only a child myself. But while I looked after them, Gobor … looked after me. His wife knew but feared him terribly, and so made no complaint. Twice in a year, by his order, she helped me lose the child he had made in me.

  “I bided my time, until I could stand it no longer. Then, one night when the tithesmen came out of Turgosheim, I crept to the square and offered myself for the taking. Gobor would have snatched me back and beaten me, but a lieutenant, seeing that I was more comely than some of the girls on offer, questioned me. I told him my mother was dead and my father had been taken by the Wamphyri, and Gobor had kept me for himself, out of sight of the tithesmen. Well, the truth was that I was too young for the tithe, but most of what I said was true.

  “Also, I said that I vastly preferred Turgosheim to the great brute Gobor, which was the whole truth. Even death was preferable, though that was not the entire reason. But being a child and still naive—in my thinking, at least—I also thought I might find my father here. And despite that I was young, I was brought into Turgosheim.

  “Luckily, a man of Maglore’s drew me in the fatesaying, and so I came here. I had learned the ways of men from Gobor, and used a woman’s wiles on Maglore. He was fascinated to know how I, a child, was such a woman. And when he knew … then he arranged for men of his to be tithesmen for a spell, going into Sunside to collect the pitiful human tribute of the Szgany. And he instructed his men to choose a new leader for the people of my village, and to bring Gobor back with them. Thus the great brute met his end in the provisioning of the Lord Vormulac’s melancholy Vormspire, which I believe was my father’s fate before him …”

  As she finished her story Nathan slipped out of bed and began to dress himself. She watched him through the curtains a while, then said, “You don’t have to go.”

  “But I do have my own place here,” he told her, “which I had better get used to.”

  “As you wish. And there will be another time, when you will be more at ease. Then I’ll show you the things you still don’t know.”

  “By Maglore’s command?” Even as he said it, Nathan knew that it was churlish of him. Especially now that he knew what her life had been. But with the words already out, it was too late to make amends.

  And after a moment she answered quietly, “Maybe … and maybe not. We all must do as we’re told, but the way in which we do it is our own concern …”

  He left and made his way to his room. There were several vampire thralls in the great hall, a handful of women and one or two males. The latter glanced at Nathan, perhaps enviously, but he was pleased to note that the females ignored him. They had learned Maglore’s lesson. And anyway, he was no longer an innocent. Oh, he was, in many ways, but not in that way. That part of him was gone forever.

  In one way he felt more the man, but in another he felt dejected, made small. And he remembered what his mother Nana had used to tell him when he’d been hunting, that good meat is always the tastiest when you’ve caught it yourself …

  From then on time passed quickly, and as Nathan got to know Runemanse, so its menace receded a little, but never entirely. And Orlea had been right: there were times when he would wake up in
the night (even during the long days), with his nerves screaming and his heart pounding in his chest. It was simply the knowledge that terror and morbid works were all around, and that every other creature in Runemanse, and indeed Turgosheim, was a plague-bearing vampire. With the sole exception of Orlea herself.

  And as for Orlea: she was as good as her word and showed Nathan those things he still didn’t know. She took him to her room a second time, and on a third and final occasion he made his own way there by prior arrangement. And again he saw how she had been right, for he was more at ease and pleased to take the initiative. Being young and potent, he enjoyed her slender body and might easily have fallen in love with her, except she warned him against it.

  “I am Maglore’s,” she told him, when on that third occasion he proved hard to drive from her room. “And I have done my duty by him and obeyed his orders.”

  “Maybe,” he said, at her door. “But you’ve loved me anyway, and you found it pleasant.”

  “No,” she shook her head, “but I made you think so.” And as his face fell: “From now on you must never look at me with those eyes, Nathan, for if he sees it he’ll punish both of us, which in my case would be unfair. You mean nothing to me, not as a lover. But as a friend …?”

  “Shall we be friends, then?” She was closing the door on him, for good.

  “Best if we are,” she answered. “There are a hundred rooms and workshops in my master’s house, and he wants you to see all of them. But if you would prefer the company of some other …?”

  “No,” said Nathan, as the door closed in his face, and he heard the bolt slide home. “No, but I’ll always be grateful for your company, and for your friendship.”

  “So be it,” she whispered from beyond the door …

  After that she was cold and withdrawn as ever, and Nathan made no further advances towards her. But when it was Maglore’s time for sleeping, and when Nathan would see Orlea on her way to her master’s apartments … sometimes he felt embittered.

  Maglore called for him often during that early period, and whatever Nathan was doing he must rush to the Seer Lord’s side. Once, entering Maglore’s apartments, he found a handsome, slim, broad-shouldered vampire Lord waiting there. But as this stranger spoke to him he started, and actually staggered from the shock. For the voice, if not the vibrant body it came out of, was unmistakable: it was Maglore’s!

  “How do I look?” Maglore inquired, when Nathan had recovered.

  “Young!” He blurted out the first word that came to him. “A man in his prime, forty or forty-five! You look … like a Lord!”

  “Like a ‘real’ Lord, do you mean?” Maglore chuckled. But his amusement was brief, and in a moment his brow clouded over. “All my life I’ve denied the thing within,” he growled. “Except when I may no longer—when I cannot deny it! Then, briefly I am as you see me now. For this is how I am ‘rewarded” for my cooperation. Which only goes to prove that however much I deny my creature, and myself, still the blood is the life. Now go, my son, and reflect on the wonder you have seen, and how it was achieved. And always remember, I am Wamphyri!” And to give his words more emphasis yet, he yawned his jaws to show Nathan the forked tongue that flickered in the red vault of his mouth.

  But as Nathan headed for the spiral stairwell, so Maglore called after him: “My son!” He looked back, and the young Seer Lord stood there smiling. “Now tell me, do you understand the provisioning?”

  Nathan shook his head. “There’s a great deal of Rune-manse I’ve not yet visited.”

  “Then do so, today, now.”

  Nathan nodded. “And shall Orlea take me there?”

  “Ah, no—not this time. Take yourself there, or go with one of my men. But along the way, you may tell Orlea that I am waiting …”

  Nathan did as he was told. The last had been a cruel command and Maglore knew it, but not as cruel as ordering Nathan to visit the rooms and workshops of the provisioning.

  He went there with Karpath, a thrall of Maglore’s for three years, a lieutenant for eleven, and now the Seer Lord’s right-hand man. Karpath was interested in Nathan, and as they descended through the many levels asked him: “How do you find our master?”

  Nathan looked at the other. Two inches taller than Nathan, Karpath was broad as a door, heavy-jawed, grey as slate and more than three hundred pounds of solid vampire flesh. His eyes held an inner fire which, however mutely, spoke volumes. No common thrall—nor even an ordinary lieutenant—it was obvious that Karpath had known the virulent bite of a true Wamphyri Lord, and often. Something of Maglore himself was in his blood.

  “How do I find Maglore?” Nathan repeated him. But then, remembering the Seer Lord’s emphasis, he replied: “He is Wamphyri, and I’m not even a thrall. I find him awesome!”

  “You would like to be like him, then?” Karpath kept his voice low, but it was full of some inner passion. Nathan read his mind, made open and receptive through previous invasions of Maglore’s. He was thinking:

  This one grows close to the Seer Lord. But is he a rival? I crave Maglore’s egg and will have it, come what may! There may not be room for the two of us—this Nathan Paleblood and Karpath Seerson—in Rune-manse.

  Nathan had to work hard to avoid recoiling from the several vicious, bloody, and terminal scenes which came seething out of Karpath’s skull then, and knew he must take care how he answered. Not only had Karpath chosen his own name in advance of his anticipated succession to Maglore’s seat, but that of his supposed rival too!

  “Be like him? Like Maglore? Wamphyri?” Nathan’s shudder was only half-feigned. “I think I would prefer to die first!”

  And you would, most assuredly! Karpath thought. But … perhaps I concern myself unnecessarily. This Nathan’s blood is indeed pale, and weak as water. Out loud, he said nothing.

  They reached the lowest level of Runemanse. Below lay Madmanse, and Karpath showed Nathan the dank, disused steps: “an old stairwell, winding down, down”, just as Eygor Killglance had described it.

  Nathan wanted to know: “Can we go down there?”

  Karpath looked at him. “We can—but we won’t. Now that Wran and Spiro are flown, it is an empty place. Only a ghost dwells there now.”

  “A ghost?” Nathan played the innocent, but knew very well who Karpath meant.

  The ghost of Eygor Killglance,” the other confirmed it. The Seer Lord suspects that he was murdered but no one knows the truth of it, except perhaps his murderers. Eygor was very powerful and had the Evil Eye: he destroyed his enemies with a glance! His ghost is strong, too, and wafts like a giant shadow in Madmanse. When Wratha and her traitors fled from Turgosheim, their spires and manses were sacked and offered to others. Several tried to dwell in Madmanse, but all felt Eygor’s presence there and could not stay. The place is hollow and echoing now. Maglore goes there from time to time, but alone.” Karpath gave a shrug. “Perhaps he will extend his holdings downwards. I do not know …”

  Then Nathan was shown the provisioning:

  The granary, where grain, fruits, wines and other produce out of Sunside were stored; the mill and mixing rooms where the raw materials of food were ground down and prepared in various ways, for many of Maglore’s creatures had special requirements; the bakery and kitchens, and finally … the slaughterhouse and storerooms. The first of these was not in use at the time. Nathan saw huge stained chopping blocks, saws, cleavers and other implements, buckets for blood and troughs for offal, that was all. But it was enough.

  He had already visited the odious pens in a high, south-facing flank of Runemanse, from which at sunup goats and pigs were driven out on to a false plateau to enjoy a few brief hours of sunlit freedom in a small field of shallow earth, scrub, and coarse grasses behind a low stone wall. And there, where a handful of rabbits ran wild, such animals spent the last of their days. For these larger beasts were hard to breed; they sickened quickly in Turgosheim and could not be kept alive. That was no great problem; the provisioning was an ongoing process; R
unemanse’s turnover was swift.

  Karpath took him into a cold-storage room with huge windows open to the north, where the draughts were freezing cold. In there, rows of heavily salted carcasses hung from hooks—but not all the cadavers were of animals. Suddenly and without warning, Nathan came upon two which were not…

  Then, as he choked and reeled dizzily from the room, he found himself caught up under the arm, and supported until his stomach had stopped churning. Finally Karpath released him and said, “This is what Maglore wanted you to see. It is something of an incentive if men see what might befall them, should they fail in their duties.”

  “In there,” Nathan choked the words out, “I saw two men. One of them was a surly youth out of Kehrlscrag. He was taken in the tithe at the same time as I myself, so that we came to Runemanse together. And the other —”

  “—Was Nicolae Seersthrall, aye,” Karpath grunted. “The first was too surly, and the second—too talkative, I think? Had you stayed long enough, you might also have seen the girl Magda. But obviously you’ve no stomach for it.”

  Fighting to control his gagging, Nathan said, “I take the water which I use for drinking and bathing from the catchment sluices in Runemanse’s outer walls. So does Orlea, Maglore’s woman. It’s rainwater, pure and simple. But I also know that the majority of Maglore’s thralls and creatures drink water which has been passed through and purified by a … a man, or what’s left of a man, a siphoneer. Then there’s … my food?” He looked at the lieutenant pleadingly. “Karpath, I’ve got to know. Have I eaten food which was prepared here? Just how are those human bodies used?”

  The other grinned. “Don’t you trust Maglore, then?”

  “Trust him?” Feeling desperately ill, Nathan leaned his upper body out of a window embrasure.

  Karpath was right behind him, whispering, “Can you trust any of us, in Runemanse?”