The Keep

  The light struck Magda like a blast from a furnace, good and clean, dry and warm. Shadows disappeared as everything within sight was etched in blinding white light. The fog melted away as though it had never existed. The rats fled squealing in all directions. The light scythed through the standing corpses, toppling them like stalks of dry wheat. Even Rasalom reeled away with both arms covering his face.

  The true master of the keep had returned.

  The light faded slowly, drawing back into the sword, and a moment passed before Magda could see again. When she could, there stood Glaeken, his clothes still ripped and bloodied, but the man within renewed. All fatigue, all weakness, all injury had been wiped away. He was a man made whole again, radiating awesome power and implacable resolve. And his eyes were so fierce, so terrible in their determination that she was glad he was a friend and not a foe. This was the man who led the forces of Light against Chaos ages ago…the man she loved.

  Glaeken held the reassembled sword out before him, its runes swirling and cascading over the blade. His blue eyes shining, he turned to Magda and saluted her with it.

  “Thank you, my Lady,” he said softly. “I knew you had courage—I never dreamed how much.”

  Magda glowed in his praise. My Lady…he called me his Lady.

  Glaeken gestured to Papa. “Take him through the gate. I’ll stand guard until you’re safe on the causeway.”

  Magda’s knees wobbled as she stood up. A quick glance around showed a jumble of fallen corpses. Rasalom had disappeared. “Where—?”

  “I’ll find him,” Glaeken said. “But first I must see you where I know you’ll be safe.”

  Magda bent and grabbed Papa under the arms and dragged his pitifully light form the few feet that took them across the threshold and onto the causeway. His breathing was shallow. He was bleeding from a thousand tiny wounds. She began dabbing at them with her skirt.

  “Good-bye, Magda.”

  It was Glaeken’s voice and it held a terrible note of finality. She looked up to see him staring at her with a look of infinite sadness on his face.

  “Good-bye? Where are you going?”

  “To finish a war that should have been over ages ago.” His voice faltered. “I wish…”

  Dread gripped her. “You’re coming back to me, aren’t you?”

  Glaeken turned and walked toward the courtyard.

  “Glaeken?”

  He disappeared into the maw of the tower. Her cry was half wail, half sob.

  “Glaeken!”

  TWENTY-NINE

  Darkness within the tower…more than mere shadow, it was the blackness that only Rasalom could spawn. It engulfed Glaeken, but he was not entirely helpless against it. His rune sword began to glow with a pale blue light as soon as he stepped through the tower entrance. The images of the hilt laid into the walls responded immediately to the presence of the original and lit with white-and-yellow fire that pulsated slowly, dimly, as if to the rhythm of a massive and faraway heart.

  The sound of Magda’s voice followed Glaeken within and he stood at the foot of the tower stairs trying to shut out the pain he heard as she called his name, knowing that if he listened he would weaken. He had to cut her off, just as he had to sever all other ties to the world outside the keep.

  Only he and Rasalom now. Their millennia of conflict would end here today. He would see to that.

  He let the power of the glowing sword surge through him. So good to hold it again—like being reunited with a lost part of his body. But even the power of the sword could not reach the growing knot of despair tangled deep within him.

  He was not going to win today. Even if he succeeded in killing Rasalom, the victory would cost him everything…for victory would eliminate the purpose of his continued existence. He would no longer be of use to the Power he served.

  If he could defeat Rasalom…

  He pushed all that behind him. This was no way to enter battle. He had to set his mind to victory—that was the only way to win.

  And he must win.

  He looked around. He sensed Rasalom somewhere above. Why? There was no escape that way.

  Glaeken ran up the steps to the second-level landing and stood, alert, wary, his senses bristling. He could still sense Rasalom far above him, yet the dark air here was thick with danger. The replicas of the hilts pulsed dully from the walls, cruciform beacons in a black fog. A short distance to his right he saw the dim outline of the steps to the third level. Nothing moved.

  He started for the next set of steps, then stopped. Suddenly, there was movement all around him. As he watched, a crowd of dark shapes rose from the floor and the shadowed corners. Glaeken swiveled left and right, quickly counting a dozen German corpses.

  So…Rasalom wasn’t alone when he retreated.

  As the corpses lurched toward him, Glaeken positioned himself with the next flight of stairs to his rear and prepared to meet them. They didn’t frighten him—he knew the scope and limits of Rasalom’s powers and was familiar with all his tricks. Those animated lumps of dead flesh could not hurt him.

  But they did puzzle him. What did Rasalom hope to gain by this grisly diversion?

  With no conscious effort on his part, Glaeken’s body set itself for battle—legs spread, the right slightly rearward of the left, sword held ready before him in a two-handed grip—as the corpses closed in. He did not have to do battle with them; he knew he could stroll through their ranks and make them fall away to all sides by merely touching them. But that was not enough. His warrior instinct demanded that he strike out at them. And Glaeken willingly gave in to that demand. He ached to slash at anything connected with Rasalom. These dead Germans would feed the fire he would need for his final confrontation with their master.

  The corpses had gained momentum and were now a closing semicircle of dim forms rushing toward him, arms outstretched, hands set into claws. As the first came within reach, Glaeken began to swing the sword in short, slicing arcs, severing an arm to his right, lopping off a head to his left. A white flash ran along the length of the blade each time it made contact, a hiss and sizzle as it seared its way effortlessly through the dead flesh, and a rising curl of oily yellow smoke from the wound as each cadaver went limp and sank to the floor.

  Glaeken spun and swung and spun again, his mouth twisting at the nightmarish quality of the scene around him. It was not the pale voids of the oncoming faces, gray in the muted light, that disconcerted him, or the stench of them. It was the silence. No commands from officers, no cries of pain or rage, no shouts of bloodlust. Only shuffling feet, the sound of his own breathing, and the sizzle of the sword as it did its work.

  This was not battle, this was cutting meat. He was only adding to the carnage the Germans had wrought upon one another hours earlier. Still they pressed toward him, undaunted, undauntable, the ones behind pushing against those closest to Glaeken, ever tightening the ring.

  With half of the cadavers piled at his feet, Glaeken took a step backward to give himself more room to swing. His heel caught on one of the fallen bodies and he began to stagger back, off balance. In that instant he sensed movement above and behind him. Startled, he glanced up to see two cadavers come hurtling down off the steps leading to the next level. There was no time to dodge. Their combined weight struck him with numbing force and bore him to the floor. Before he could throw them off, the remaining cadavers were upon him, piling on one another and pinning Glaeken under half a ton of dead flesh.

  He remained calm, although he could barely breathe under the weight. The little air that did reach him reeked with a mixture of burnt flesh, dried blood, and excrement from those cadavers with gut wounds. Gagging, grunting, he marshaled all his strength and forced his body upward through the suffocating pile.

  As he raised himself to his hands and knees, he felt the stone blocks of the floor beneath him begin to vibrate. He did not know what it meant or what was causing it—Glaeken knew only that he had to get away from here. With a final convulsive heave, he thr
ew off the remaining bodies and leaped to the steps.

  Behind him came a loud grinding and scraping of stone upon stone. From the safety of the steps he turned and saw the section of the floor where he had been pinned disappear. It shattered and fell away, taking many of the cadavers with it. A muffled crash arose as the tumbling stone and flesh struck the first-floor landing directly below.

  Shaken, Glaeken leaned against the wall to catch his breath and clear the stench of the cadavers from his nostrils. Rasalom had a reason for trying to hinder his progress—he never acted without a purpose—but what?

  As Glaeken turned to make his way up to the third level, movement on the floor caught his eye. At the edge of the hole a severed arm from one of the corpses had begun dragging itself toward him, clawing its way along the floor with its fingers. Shaking his head in bafflement, Glaeken continued up the steps, his thoughts racing through what he knew of Rasalom, trying to guess what was going on in that twisted mind.

  Halfway up, he felt a trickle of falling dust brush against his face. Without looking up, he slammed himself flat against the wall just in time to avoid a stone block falling from above. It landed with a shattering crash on the spot he had occupied an instant before.

  An upward glance showed that the stone had dislodged itself from the inner edge of the stairwell. Rasalom’s doing again. Did Rasalom still harbor hopes of maiming or disabling him? He must know that he was only forestalling the inevitable confrontation.

  But the outcome of that confrontation…that was anything but inevitable. In the powers each of them had been allotted, Rasalom had always had the upper hand. Chief among his powers were command over light and darkness, and the power to make animals and inanimate objects obey his will. Above all, Rasalom was invulnerable to trauma of any kind, from any weapon—save Glaeken’s rune sword.

  Glaeken was not so well armed. Although he never aged or sickened and had been imbued with a fierce vitality and supernal strength, he could succumb to catastrophic injury. He had come close to succumbing in the gorge. Never in all his millennia had he felt death’s chill breath so close on the nape of his neck. He had managed to outrun it, but only with Magda’s help.

  The scales were nearly balanced now. The hilt and blade were reunited—the sword was intact in Glaeken’s hands. Rasalom had his superior powers but was hemmed in by the walls of the keep; he could not retreat and plan to meet Glaeken another day. It had to be now. Now!

  Glaeken approached the third level cautiously and found it deserted—nothing moving, nothing hiding in the dark. As he walked across the landing to the next flight of stairs, he felt the tower tremble. The landing shook, then cracked, then fell away, almost beneath his feet, leaving him pressed against a wall with his heels resting precariously on a tiny ledge. Peering over the toes of his boots, he saw the crumbling stone block of the floor crash down to the landing below in a choking cloud of dust.

  Too close, he thought, allowing himself to breathe again. And yet, not close enough.

  He surveyed the wreckage. Only the landing had fallen away. The third-level rooms were still intact behind the wall against his back. He turned around and inched his way along the ledge toward the next set of steps. As he passed the door to the rooms it suddenly jerked open and Glaeken found himself facing the lunging forms of two more German cadavers.

  They flung themselves against him as one, going slack as soon as they made contact, but striking with enough force to knock him backward. Only the fingertips of his free hand saved him from falling by catching and clinging to the doorjamb as he swung out in a wide arc over the yawning opening below.

  The pair of corpses, unable to cling to anything, fell limp and silent through the darkness to the rubble below.

  Glaeken pulled himself inside the doorway and rested. Much too close.

  But he could now venture a guess as to what his ancient enemy had in mind: Had Rasalom hoped to push him into the opening and then collapse all or part of the tower’s inner structure down on him? If the falling tons of rock did not kill Glaeken once and for all, they would at least trap him.

  It could work, Glaeken thought, his eyes searching the shadows for more cadavers lying in wait. And if successful, Rasalom would be able to use the German corpses to remove just enough rubble to expose the sword. After that he would have to wait for some villager or traveler to happen by—someone he could induce to take the sword and carry it across the threshold. It might work, but Glaeken sensed that Rasalom had something else in mind.

  Magda watched with dread and dismay as Glaeken disappeared into the tower. She yearned to run after him and pull him back, but Papa needed her—more now than at any time before. She tore her heart and mind away from Glaeken and bent to the task of tending her father’s wounds.

  They were terrible wounds. Despite her best efforts to stanch its flow, Papa’s blood was soon pooled around him, seeping between the timbers of the causeway and making the long fall to the stream that trickled below.

  With a sudden flutter his eyes opened and looked at her from a mask that was ghastly in its whiteness.

  “Magda,” he said.

  She could barely hear him. “Don’t talk, Papa. Save your strength.”

  “There’s none left to save…I’m sorry…”

  “Shush!” She bit her lower lip. He’s not going to die—I won’t let him!

  “I have to say it now. I won’t have another chance.”

  “That’s not—”

  “Only wanted to make things right again. That was all. I meant you no harm. I want you to know—”

  His voice was drowned out by a deep crashing rumble from within the keep. The causeway vibrated with the force of it. Magda saw clouds of dust billowing out of the second- and third-level windows of the tower.

  Glaeken…?

  “I’ve been a fool,” Papa was saying, his voice even weaker than before. “I forsook our faith and everything else I believed in—even my own daughter—because of his lies. I even caused the man you loved to be killed.”

  “It’s all right,” she told him. “The man I love still lives! He’s in the keep right now. He’s going to put an end to this horror once and for all.”

  Papa tried to smile. “I can see in your eyes how you feel about him…if you have any sons…”

  Another rumble now, much louder than the first. Magda saw dust gush out from all the levels of the tower this time. Someone was standing alone on the edge of the tower roof. When she turned back to Papa his eyes were glazed and his chest was still.

  “Papa?” She shook him. She pounded his chest and shoulders, refusing to believe what all her senses and instincts told her. “Papa, wake up! Wake up!”

  She remembered how she had hated him last night, how she had wished him dead. And now…now she wanted to take it all back, to have him listen to her for just a single minute, to have him hear her say she had forgiven him, that she loved and revered him and that nothing had really changed. Papa couldn’t leave without letting her tell him that!

  Glaeken! Glaeken would know what to do! She looked up at the tower and now saw two figures facing each other on the parapet.

  Glaeken sprinted up the next two flights to the fifth level, dodging falling stone, skirting sudden holes in the floors. From there it was a quick climb out of the darkness to the tower roof.

  He found Rasalom standing on the parapet at the far side. Below and behind him lay the mist-choked Dinu Pass; and beyond that, the high eastern wall of the pass, its crest etched in fire by the awakening sun, as yet unseen.

  Glaeken stared at him. He’d had only a glimpse of this man who was more than a man when he’d reached the threshold. He didn’t recognize him now with his pale face, yellow teeth, and long, bedraggled hair, waiting with his cloak hanging limp in the expectant hush before sunrise.

  “You can drop the sham,” Glaeken said. “I’m not impressed.”

  Rasalom gave a careless shrug and changed. In a blink a tall, rather ordinary man with raven-black ha
ir and piercing dark eyes stood naked where the vampire had been.

  He might have meant his smile to be disarming, but it looked forced. “It worked so well on the mortals.”

  Glaeken started forward, wondering why Rasalom waited so calmly in such a precarious position. When the roof suddenly began to crumble and fall away beneath his feet, he knew.

  In a purely reflexive move, Glaeken made a headlong lunge to his right and managed to fling his free arm over the parapet. By the time he had pulled himself up to a crouching position, the roof and all the inner structure of the third, fourth, and fifth levels had fallen away to crash onto and break through the second level with an impact that shook the remaining structure of the tower. The tons of debris came to rest on the first level, leaving Glaeken and Rasalom balanced on the rim of a giant hollow cylinder of stone. But Rasalom could do nothing more to the tower. The images of the hilt laid into the outer walls made them proof against his powers.

  Glaeken moved counterclockwise around the rim, expecting Rasalom to back away.

  He did not. Instead, he spoke in the Forgotten Tongue.

  “So, barbarian, it’s down to the two of us again, isn’t it?”

  Glaeken did not reply. He was feeding his hatred, stoking the fires of rage with thoughts of what Magda had endured at Rasalom’s hands. Glaeken needed that rage to strike the final blow. He couldn’t allow himself to think or listen or reason or hesitate. He had to strike. He had weakened five centuries ago when he had imprisoned Rasalom instead of slaying him. He would not weaken now. This conflict had to find its end.

  “Come now, Glaeken,” Rasalom said in a soft, conciliatory tone. “Isn’t it time we put an end to this war of ours?”

  “Yes!” Glaeken said through clenched teeth.