Morley distributed the lethal instruments and flares and rehearsed everyone on using them. We packed it all up, filled canteens, drank too much water, and finally the sun was high enough to suit me. “Let’s go.”
Morley muttered, “Wish I knew if they knew we were coming. Then we might not have to leave all the metal hardware. Especially the silver.”
He was talking to no one but himself. My own contribution to nonconversation was, “I haven’t been so loaded down with junk since we landed on Malgar Island.” I’d been scared witless that day, too. Now those Venageti looked like friendly puppies.
The centaur’s route took us to the wasted camp. He knew we wanted to know.
We had an idea, of course. We’d watched the vultures circle for hours.
We heard them squabbling first. Then we heard the flies. Out on the Cantard those sidefliers of death get so thick they sound like swarms of bees.
Then we pushed between boulders and saw it.
I guess it was no more gruesome than any other massacre. But the bodies were so badly torn by attackers, vultures, wild dogs, and whatnot, that we had to count heads to find out that only four of the major’s party had been left for the carrion eaters. Two pasty-skinned, black-clad bloodslaves had been left too, but they remained untouched. Even the flies and ants shunned them.
Nobody said anything. None of the dead could be identified; there was nothing to say. We went on, fear perhaps tempered by the rage that makes men hunt down the maneater, be it wolf, rogue tiger, or one of them.
Nearer the gate we spread out, Morley and I flanking the hole and doing a cautious scout for surprises. Nothing seemed untoward. We assembled closer to the cave. Bat reek rolled over us. There was no sign of vampires, but I had a bit of red hair twisted around my finger. It had come off a thorn bush nearby.
Morley and I went in first, each with a sword and unicorn horn. Dojango followed with flares and fire bombs. The grolls backed him with spears and crossbows. Zeck Zack was rear guard because we expected him to turn ghost on us anyway. He wouldn’t have to stumble over anybody when he decided to leave.
We would change up on weapons and tactics if we reached the nest proper.
I gave a signal. We all closed our eyes, excepting the centaur. He counted a hundred silently, snake-hissed. Eyes barely cracked, we mouse-footed into the mouth of hell.
We advanced a few steps, stopped, listened. Morley and I knelt to let the triplets have more freedom to support us. We continued in that fashion. The deeper we sank into the darkness, the more frequently we paused.
By right of better eyes Dojango should have been in my place. But Morley feared his nerves weren’t up to it. I agreed. Dojango had buckled down and tightened up a lot, but he wasn’t ready for the front line.
Gods, the stench in that hole!
The first hundred feet weren’t too bad. The floor was level and clean. The ceiling was high. There was daylight at our backs. And there was no sign that anyone was waiting for us.
Then the floor dropped and turned right. The ceiling lowered until the grolls had to duck-walk. The darkness tightened and filled with the rustle and flutter of bats disturbed. Within a few yards we were saturated with the filth that was the source of the stench. The air grew chill.
Zeck Zack hissed.
We stopped. I was amazed that he could move so quietly on hooved feet. I’d assumed he was hell-bent for wherever already.
The hiss was the only sound. The centaur handed something forward. It gleamed through Dojango’s fingers as he passed it.
It was the lucifer stone Morley had given the centaur before shutting him in that tomb.
An iron chill dragged its claws up my back. By the stone’s light I saw Morley entertaining the same question: was the centaur announcing payback time? Burying us here would solve several of his problems.
I watched Morley struggle with the urge to kill Zeck Zack. He put it down. Barely. He gave me the stone because I had poorer eyes. I folded it into my right hand, under my fingers, against the grip of my wooden sword. I could lift a finger or two and leak light when I needed it.
Onward. Already the sun, freedom, and fresh air seemed a thousand years and miles behind us. Progress slowed as we examined every cranny for ambushers.
It looked like a dried-out corpse. Mouth open. Eye sockets empty. Hair gray and wild. One buzzard claw came reaching out of a crack at me. I fell away, throwing a wild backhand stroke with the stone-set edge of my sword. Bone parted like dry sticks.
The thing that had pushed those old bones leaped out.
A groll’s spear drove through it. Dull eyes stared into mine as it pitched forward onto the unicorn horn I raised to meet it. Cold, stale, awful breath washed my face. Again I saw that look I had seen on that butte about a century ago: immortality betrayed.
It tried to sink fangs into my throat. They weren’t yet well developed. Its disease was not far advanced.
I was terrified anyway.
A Dojango toe connected with its head.
I grabbed the lucifer stone and got up. Neither old bones nor the bloodslave did. But brothers of the latter had come for the party, too.
They had no weapons but tooth, claw, ferocity, and a conviction of invincibility. None of that did them any good.
Morley and I held them. Dojango retreated behind his brothers and lit a flare. The night people made little squeaks and pawed at their eyes. A moment later it was over.
There were only four of them, plus somebody who had been dead for years. It had seemed like a battalion.
Morley and I inspected each other for wounds. He had one shallow gash but waved off attention. He wasn’t human enough to have to worry.
The enemy had been met. He had been overcome in the opening encounter. Our nerve solidified. Our fear came under control. Dojango was proud of himself. He had proven he could think despite his terror.
We regained our breath and went on. Without the centaur Zeck Zack. There was no telling when he had deserted. Probably during the excitement, when he was sure no one would notice him going.
Behind us, the flare burned out. The bats began to settle down. The air grew colder.
46
The second bunch were more difficult than the first, though they were no more successful. They were bloodslaves farther along the scarlet path, harder to kill, but as vulnerable to blinding and more sensitive to the power of the unicorn horn. They did make us work up a sweat.
The third bunch was bad.
They let us know we were near the nest. They were bloodslaves who had slipped past all the perils of snares and pitfalls and were so far advanced in the disease that they were on the verge of joining the masters. Which meant they were almost as fast and strong and deadly as the two we had destroyed on the butte. After we skewered one with a horn it was almost impossible to touch the other three, even with them flare-blind. In the darkness where they dwelt, they had little use for sight. They ignored their pain and used their ears.
One got past me and Morley. The grolls pinned him with their spears, then finished him with unicorn horns. Dojango’s fear-fevered arm gave us the other two. He hit them with fire bombs. We finished them while they thrashed in the flames and screamed.
“And that’s it for the element of surprise,” Morley said. “If ever there was one.”
“Yeah.”
They were the first words spoken since our entry underground, save a soft grollish curse from Doris on breaking a unicorn horn pinning a bloodslave.
The fires died. We readied ourselves. “Not far now,” I guessed. Morley grunted. “The odds have got to be better,” I said. Morley grunted again. Some conversationalist. He looked odd in the glow of lucifer stone. Was he going to flake out?
He got himself organized inside, stepped forward, whacking the flat of his sword with his horn and listening to the echo. After about fifty steps there was no echo.
I let light leak between my fingers.
No cave wall. No ceiling. “Dojango.
Give Doris a flare.”
The groll knew what to do. They threw for height and distance.
We were on the platform overlooking a floor about forty feet below. Man-made stairs ran down a widening sweep. Below, nearly a hundred . . . creatures . . . faced us and started screaming, pawing at their eyes. The dozen or so in white made me think of maggots on a dead dog.
Marsha snapped a spear down the stairs. It hit a youngster who had been rushing up when the flare ignited. He tumbled.
“How do you figure chewing it now that you’ve bitten it off?” Morley asked. He shivered in the cold.
“Sure won’t do any good to change our minds. We have to keep pushing, keep them panicked.”
He growled at the grolls. I looked out along the line that began in my head, and saw a half-dozen women in white, some leading children born to the blood. I couldn’t pick her out.
Morley seemed to be looking for someone, too.
“There they are.” Dojango indicated cages to one side. A score of prisoners stared at us, most of them forlornly.
The flare was almost out, but the grolls had shed and opened their packs and were pasting the crowd with fire bombs. Dojango was assembling a powerful lamp. Morley and I snatched bows and scattered arrows wherever it looked like the panic was fading.
I told Morley, “Like the pregnant lady told her guy, it’s time we took steps.” I started down the stair, again armed with sword and unicorn horn, straining against the weight of my pack of lethal confections.
Morley elected the same weapons and snuggled his pack a little tighter. Dojango chose to bear horn and crossbow. His pack was empty, so he left it. The grolls shrugged their packs back on but didn’t arm themselves with anything but their clubs, which they had dragged in through all the difficulties of the entry cave, tied to their belts and trailing like fat, stiff tails.
“Prisoners first?” Morley asked.
“I wouldn’t. Even if they could be trusted they’d get in the way. Straight ahead. Where the women are going. That will be where the masters hole up.”
We reached the cavern floor. The grolls went ahead, swinging their clubs. Muttering to himself, Morley minced around an ankle-deep pool of filth. He flicked a toe at a night creature. Some were trying to fight back now.
Tinnie and Rose added shrieks to the uproar. In a free second I saluted them with my sword. They didn’t appreciate the gesture.
Morley kicked a human thighbone out of his path. “You ever wondered what bloodslaves feed on while the disease is running its course?”
“No. And I don’t want you to tell me.”
We climbed toward the gap through which the females had fled. It was a hole maybe four feet tall and three wide. It was clogged with bloodslaves trying to reach the protection of their masters.
The grolls hammered them with all the passion of miners who’d hit a gravel reef.
“And you wanted to bring mules,” Morley crowed.
Dojango’s crossbow thunked, creaked, thunked again as he sniped at a hero with designs on the lamp we had left at the entrance.
The night people began to press in. Not good. Armed or not, there is only so much that can be done against such numbers.
I still had a few tricks folded up my sleeves and tucked into my boots, but I wanted to hoard those as long as I could.
The grolls opened the hole.
Morley spoke to them. They threw once-human trash aside and wriggled through. I followed with the lucifer stone. Morley came last.
Nothing tried coming through after us.
“Well. We made it to the heart of the nest. Just like the heroes in the old stories. Only that was the hard part for them. The hard part is just beginning for us.”
The brides of blood had ranged themselves before the stone biers of their lovers, who had not awakened. There were fifteen of them. In only four had the disease run its full course. One of those I had faced across a table in Full Harbor, in a house where I had loved another in whom the disease was only a few years along and still reversible. Beside her stood a man whose face betrayed him as he who had passed me a note. She shuddered when she met my gaze, slipped her hand into his.
Well. Did you ever want to cry?
From the hole behind us Dojango said, “They’ve got the lamp. And the fires are out. Don’t look like they’re up for breaking in here, though.”
“Figure we got troubles enough already. She here, Garrett?”
“Yeah.”
“Cut her out of the herd and let’s get on with it.”
I beckoned Kayean.
She came, eyes downcast, towing the man. The other brides, and the eight or so bloodslaves with them, hissed and shuffled.
The tip of Morley’s unicorn horn intercepted Kayean’s man and rested on his throat. “Where is he, Clement?”
“Kill him here, Dotes. Don’t take him back.”
“If I don’t take him back, they’ll kill me. Where is he?”
Which was all very interesting.
What the hell was going on?
“Back there.” The bloodslaves pointed past the brides. “Hiding with the children. You won’t get him out without waking the masters.” He stared at me, eyes filled with appeal. “Take her out. Before they wake up.”
An excellent suggestion, and one I would have loved to have put into effect. Except that, though unspoken, we had come in knowing that if we went out again we would be leaving them dead behind us.
It had less to do with emotion than necessity. If we left them alive, they would be after us as soon as the sun went down. There would be no outrunning them. And they dared not let us go. They would have the Karentine army all over them as soon as we reported the location of the nest.
“We need to talk, Morley.”
“Later. Come out of there, Valentine.”
Something stirred, hissed, back among the biers. The hissing formed words, but just barely. “Come get me.”
I said, “Folks, things are going to get nasty in a minute. Some are going to die the real death. You don’t want it to be you, I’m taking volunteers to sneak out to the big cavern. We pull this off, you can migrate to another nest.” And if we didn’t we would be their midnight snack.
After a few seconds one of the newer females started toward us, eyes downcast. Most male bloodslaves become what they are by choice. Few women do. They are selected and collected for the masters by night traders like Zeck Zack.
One of the old females objected. She tried to stop the deserter.
Dojango’s bolt hit her square in the forehead, driving four inches into her brain,
She fell and flopped around. The bolt wasn’t enough to kill her, but plenty to scramble her mind.
I let the volunteer through. “Anybody else?”
The old females looked at the fallen one, listened to the creak of the crossbow rewinding, hissed back and forth, and decided to leave us to the mercy of their masters. One by one, the crowd departed. The little ones too.
They have no loyalty to one another at all.
47
“Kill that thing,” Morley snapped. He repeated himself in grollish.
Marsha thumped the flopping woman till she stopped.
“Valentine. Come out.”
Hissing again. I raised the lucifer stone overhead so I could look at this creature who so interested Morley Dotes.
Then a lot came together.
I knew that face. Valentine Permanos.
Six years back the kingpin’s chief lieutenant, one Valentine Permanos, and his brother Clement had vanished with half the kingpin’s fortune. There had been rumors about them running to Full Harbor. Morley would have to come across with more numbers to make it all add up, but I saw enough of the edges to relax with my allies.
“Let’s do it, Garrett,” Dotes said, getting a two-handed grip on his unicorn horn.
Valentine Permanos began shaking one of the still forms.
His face was a horror. They say the swiftness of the disease’s
progress depends a great deal on the will of its victim. This one was much farther gone than his brother. He wanted to become one of them.
I recalled old rumors that he had been dying a slow death when he scooted on the kingpin.
Morley drove his horn straight into the heart of the first vampire he reached. So did I. The body shuddered. Its eyes opened for a moment and filled with that look of betrayal, then glazed over.
Morley did another one. So did I. He got a third. I lined one up. Morley cursed. “Dojango. Throw me another horn.”
“That’s a hundred marks, Morley. What’s wrong with the one you got, actually?”
“It’s stuck in his goddamn ribs! Now throw me another horn.”
I moved to my fourth victim. My shakes were going away. Six more after this one. Over the hump. We would be headed out in a few minutes.
I drove the horn down.
With no warning, the one Valentine was shaking flung itself toward me.
I twisted away. Dojango’s hasty bolt ripped its face open. Morley whacked it with his horn. The ceiling was so low the grolls had to stay on their knees. Still, Doris managed to bounce his club off the vampire’s chest.
The monster leaped back from whence it had come, eyes burning, amazed, hissing something we weren’t meant to understand. I noted the huge ruby pendant it wore, then grabbed Morley’s shoulder and kept him from pursuing it. “Get back here! Now!” I backed up. “That’s the bloodmaster himself. Touch me. Everybody touch me.”
“What the hell?”
“Do it!” Hands clasped onto me. “Close your eyes.” I palmed a sweaty slip from my sleeve, ripped it open. I counted to ten, expecting claws and fangs to rip me with each beat.
I opened my eyes.
They were all up now. They had their hands to their temples and their maws open in soundless screams. They swayed back and forth with the madness.
“Two minutes!” I yelled. “Less than two minutes to finish it! Let’s go!”