The Book of Blood
Rites of the Dragon: Book Two
Vampire the Requiem - Covenant - Ordo Dracul - Rites of the Dragon
The Book of Blood
Book Two: The Book of Blood
If all is flux and change, how is it that I find myself returning to the same places once, and again, and once more? As a mortal I gained my throne and lost it, and gained and lost twice more. Now undying, I nevertheless find my feet once more tread the cobblestones of Castle Dracula.Perhaps change cycles like the seasons, with spring inevitable after winter. Perhaps my own unholy nature—a permanent thing in an ever-changing world—draws me back time and again, here, to my home.
Yet even as I return to the same place, it is not the same nor am I. The walls, bulky and strong, are thick with vines and lichen. Wooden roofs have fallen in and even mortar has given way.
The vault remains secure, however. That will do for the time being.
In that crypt I found my old writings, and I wince at the callow and preening peacock I was. To think I could rule, or that I had, or that any reign is aught but trickery and misdirection in this vale of tears and deceit! It’s laughable.
Who can truly reign when the choice between darkness and light is always and utterly within the human heart?
If the years have wrought their changes upon my castle, they have done so upon my spirit as well. Has it grown toward greatness like an oak from an acorn? No. Like the home of my body, the home of my heart is worn and decayed.
In life, as a man, I thought no glutting on blood and death could sate me, but my murderous sojourn in the lands of the Turks taught me otherwise. I killed nightly, striking high and low alike, as impartial as Fate, and I, Dracula, wearied of it. The physical bliss remains as rapturous as always, but even rapture stultifies the mind with incessant repetition.
I needed more. I needed something to make me think and feel, and to that end I traveled to Jerusalem in search of the Lancea Sanctum.
Should any reader beside myself one day peruse these pages, let me clarify that there is a vampire religion that reveres Longinus the centurion, holding him to be the representative of God’s will among our kind. They have studied our condition and delved deep into the mysteries of our blood, and for a time I hoped their Theban sorcery would illuminate the dark questions in my mind.
They welcomed me eagerly—their leader had been Christian in life and despised the infidel Turks even in death, so a hero such as I was folded quickly to their bosom. Their initiations—by fire, temptation and the sword—were little compared to trials I have inflicted on myself.
Yet ultimately, I turned aside from the Centurion’s path. They were able to push against the limits of our state, but only briefly, only in reprieve. Their changes to the world were miraculous, to be sure, but as impermanent as the dew which fades at sunrise. Further, they still trembled before God in the manner of those who secretly crave punishment for their sins. Now I regret turning aside from that wisdom, but then, I sought only the means to make my reprimand from God retribution unto Him in turn.
Perhaps Mara’s blandishments led me astray, for she was ever disdainful of the Sanctified, as they called themselves. Yet I cannot blame a lowly woman (even an immortal one) for the poor decision I made. No, it was my hand that burned the bridge, my own willful tread that led me away from wisdom. That door is closed to me now.
Before I turned aside from them, their master had spoken, with the contempt that masks fear, of a band of pagans in the steppes who terrorized even the fearsome Tatars and whose blasphemies against God had lured demons to give them worldly power. In my madness and heresy, this sounded honey-sweet, and so to the mountains I went.
After a year of pointless searching and frenzied questioning of any who might know, I found the Circle of the Crone. It took another year to pass their tests and learn their litanies— madly rapid progress by their usual standards, but painfully slow to me. At last, I was initiated into the rituals of Cruac.
The pagans had much to teach, and their crescent symbol made me wonder much about that same symbol being used for Islam, but in the end I find their secrets as hollow as the Theban rites, and their so-called philosophy far more so.
It is certainly accurate to say that only through testing and trial can one overcome limitations, but the Passion of Christ proves this far more readily than the pains of Odin. The assertion that we are creatures of nature but beyond it will not stand rigorous scrutiny, for what else in the world of the earthly is as inalterable as we? Only the stars in their orbits show the same eternity, and to brag that we have their lofty matter within us is bold indeed for creatures who die every day and live only by the grace of suckling in need at the veins of the living.
Further, for all their claims about the infinite and absolute, the Acolytes can bend the world but lightly to their will, and only for a time, before it springs back with the vigor of a green twig.
Holding a boulder over one’s head does not alter the nature of the stone, and to say that it is higher or lighter is to attribute to rock that effort which wearies one’s own sinews. Both the Theban and the Crescent paths are strong, and not to be mocked nor taken lightly, but ultimately they share they same failing: They can deform the world, but not truly change it. They write their power with air on the wind, and in an instant it fades.
To truly make the changes I seek, I must delve within and work my wonders upon myself.
This is the reason for my return to Castle Dracula, with Mara still at my side. While she has myriad flaws—most of which I counted as virtues when I gave her the dubious gift of our condition—disloyalty is not one of them. Yet can steadfastness be a virtue in a creature immune to change? Does she remain with me from devotion, or the inertia to which our kind is inevitably prone? I know I will get no meaningful answer if I ask her, any more than I would receive a thoughtful reply quizzing a dog about its faithfulness. Mara hunts and kills and is a wellhoned predator, but she will never look deeper into the world than at her next source of blood.
I have progressed with the great work.
Theban sorcery is predicated on the submission of self to another—to the higher power of the blood and to Longinus himself, who is a dark Christ to his followers and revered beyond all reason. Cruac is in some sense the opposite, the submission of another to the self—but self as blood wielder, self as monster. The Sanctified sacrifice the man to the Beast, and the Acolytes sacrifice the world to it, but these are ultimately temporary sacrifices because the Beast cannot change, while world and man always must.
I have found a third way.
Both those practices move on straight lines, but any leader can tell you that the real course to power is often a crooked path. I have found that path, and it winds and binds the very essence of what I am. With its coils, I can sacrifice the Beast to the Beast. Observe. What are the qualities of the strigoi, the ghuls, the vampires?
CRAVING is the first quality. We are incomplete creatures, robbed of something essential by our curse, and to offset this lack we take blood. We take sustenance from blood, we take meaning from blood and we take our only unalloyed pleasure in blood. The emptiness and hunger defines what we are. If we do not feed, we shrivel into nothingness.
STAGNATION is the second quality. We do not age, we resist illness and poison, we change ourselves only with the greatest exertion, we breed more of our ilk only through the most grievous straining against what can laughably be called our “nature.” This is why fire and the sun are our banes, because they cleanse, renew and give life. Life is the only thing that can overcome our suspension from time.
UNREASON is the third quality. Our Rational Souls are crippled by our transformation, leaving us animals with a man’s contempt for our bestiality. This curse makes us craven against our elders and vicious to all others, makes us cringe or rave, makes us act on instinct and not by proper thought.
These are the chains that bind us. Yet each link can be forged with another into a key for the third.
To overwhelm my first, fiercest and most enduring flaw, the thirst that makes me murder, the hunger which makes me unclean… this is the challenge, to coil upon the blood and squeeze that need into submission. What allies can I find in the fight against this need?
Stagnation is my best and most powerful ally. Already my body is built to change not, already its power resists time and decay. It is but necessary to marshal this prowess against a new foe, against the thirst which, when thwarted, dries my skin and withers my sinew. Stagnation calls me already. I need but heed the call on my own terms.
Blood is not mere sustenance for me, of course. It is not only the gross physical matter of the sanguine fluid, but also the stuff of soul which beats through it—the passion for love that warms it, and the passion of hate which boils it. Blood is not solely blood but also vigor, strength, and it is for this purpose that my angry unreason can be harnessed. The rage, the heat, it is within me already and need not be borrowed from without. Let the Animal Soul bite and suck itself and thereby be sated.
The second challenge is the terror of the flame and that penultimate flame, fiery Phoebus above. Fire is the principle of change and therefore my blight and anathema. Yet am I not the Dragon? Is flame not my very breath? Am I not the fire’s kin?
Fire consumes and grows as it is fed, and do I not as well? I turn to the craving, turn to the red thirst, and know what it is to be fire, to crave all, to have an overwhelming passion to feed. I recognize fire’s hunger in my hunger and fire’s nature in my nature.
If the spirit of fire is one of hunger, I know also that it is one of wrath—heedless, remorseless, caring not that the destruction of its fuel inexorably starves it away. This madness also has is cousin within me, in my unreasoning Beast. If I turn rage on rage, what merely natural flame can overcome the wrath of the All Powerful?
The third and most insidious opponent is one that dwells, lover close, within me. It is my own damned nature, my unreason, my urge to live in an endless crimson now of slaughter and animal fulfillment, heedless—indeed, incapable of considering!—the demise my madness invites.
This battle seems doomed to stalemate, for my enemy is very much my self, perhaps my self of selves. What offsets this? My lacks. My emptiness. My thirst. Oh, compared to what I am missing, what I have is very weak indeed.
Too, my own eternity bolsters me in this fight, for while the Beast is always and essentially a creature of the Now, I am forever composed to be a creature of Forever. In the blank depths of eternity, the rage of an instant, no matter how fierce, is ultimately but a spark. I can stretch a rope between my stagnation and my wrath, and climb cross the abyss upon it.
It is demonstrated thus. What force is stronger than the curse of God above? The strength of two divine curses combined. Such is the philosophy of the matter. Now to test my airy thoughts against the fire and the blood.
God is cruel.
I read the pages that lie beside this one and see my pride once more pushing higher my hopes. Indeed, my theory of Coils has proven correct, and my explorations have been profoundly promising. I had dared think that the mercy of the Lord is truly boundless and that even a wretch such as I, a murdering fiend of the stripe I have been, might find freedom from His curse in the fullness of time.
I thought and hoped and dared dream of becoming more than a bloodied night-taker, and then Fortune, God’s mastiff, growls and bites.
My castle home has been invaded.
The intruders are no mere gypsy band, of the type I have affrighted away before. Nor are they a troop of soldiers, who could easily be my prey for long months. No, they are but three, traveling alone and lightly armed. Surely they should hold no fear for terrors like Mara and myself?
Yet they built four fires at sunset, large and bright from the seasoned timber of old doors and outbuilding walls. They built their fires and slept in the middle of them, despite the warmth of the night.
One fire is sufficient to repel wolves and vermin. Their intrusive camp is set so that none may enter without passing between two fires—something many strigoi would be loath to do.
I gave them their first night. I watched them from beyond the fire’s glow. Each in turn kept guard. Each in turn I examined closer, in bat form, relying on the Coils to offset my instinct to flee the flames.
The first, who took the early watch, is a scholar. To the eye, a lean man of monkish mien, elderly—perhaps as old as fifty. He had no cleric’s tonsure, but his back bore the bend of a habitual reader. Perhaps a Jew but more likely French or Italian. Upon his face he bore some of the waspish suspicion those nations lend their people. He carried a dagger in his belt, and kept a crossbow nearby, loaded. Yet when I flew past him as a bat, he peered at me with great suspicion, and even drew forth a small and polished mirror with which to inspect me. I believe I flew off before he could sight me.
The midnight shift saw the rise of a woman of middle age, perhaps twenty or so, heavyset and with a complexion that spoke of a racial miscegenation. She carried a sword with strange decorations—a straight edge but with a tassel on the pommel and oddly curved letters inscribed upon the blade. He clothes were of Eastern silk. Among her possessions was a spiked buckler, which she kept close to hand.
The third is a Saxon, of the same stripe who so plagued me from their tidy, industrious towns during my reign. Barely of age, he was a strapping youth with a mane of blonde hair and a fuzzy wisp of beard already decorating his chin. He wore a chain shirt and carried a sword with a confidence that told me he himself had put the notches upon its metal.
How pleasant I would have once found it, to arise from sleep to the sound of screams.
Before repose last night, I gave serious thought to the entertainment of my guests (who did not, at that time, understand that they had that honor). While a strike by night appealed to my Animal Soul, and to Mara, I felt compelled to give them a better chance. How can I ever transcend what I am, if I succumb to any fleeting thirst for viciousness? I therefore decided this evening to greet them in a style befitting my station.
One who knows me only by the written boasts of decades past, recorded in these frail pages, would think I meant a banquet meant to thrill and impress—or else a feast of blood meant to repel and terrify them. No, now I am not as I was. I am a philosopher now. I have a simple existence fit for one who seeks treasures that are grasped with the mind, not held in the hand. I sent Mara to the village to procure some victuals last night (she is a marvel of pragmatism on such missions), while I took measures to defend those treasures I do possess—my writings, my thoughts and the records of my studies.
From the bellows I heard upon waking, I was forced to conclude that our guests had attempted to enter my library. A pity, yet not unexpected. I asked Mara to watch unseen, while I went out through the old postern and crept around, that I might present the appearance of a traveler at journey’s end.
The shouts were those of the Scholar, with the Woman setting his broken leg. The Saxon aided the endeavor by sitting upon the patient’s shoulders, lest his thrashing undo the Woman’s work.
Entering, I steeled myself, that the scent of blood would not arouse me. “Good evening,” I said.
The two whole of limb looked up at me.
“You seem to have fallen upon some mischance,” I said.
The youth spoke in German. “The stairs gave way beneath him.”
“How unfortunate! I was told this old place was unsafe…”
“And I, that it was abandoned.” The Scholar had, with impressive effort, composed himself. “Might I ask your name, stranger?”
“I am Paolo Jaroslavic,” I said. “I have been awarded this property for recent service to the crown.”
“I am Hermes,” he said, pronouncing it in the French fashion. “These are my associates Anoushka and Ivor.” Ivor was the Saxon.
“I am grieved that my first guests should be in such straitened need, but I can, at the least, offer you the rude hospitality of a meal, with perhaps some wine to dull the pain of your leg.”
“We would not be beholden,” Ivor said in rough Latin.
“Nor would I hold you indebted,” I said. “My country has a tradition of hospitality. It is a matter of honor.”
“We prefer to see to our own needs.”
“Do you not trust my taste and my table?”
He shrugged. “It is you who say so.”
“You damnable whelp! I find you squatting like bandits upon my property, I offer you the grace of my hospitality in your time of need and I am repaid with the uppity bleating of a stiff-necked child? I’m not sure if I should demand satisfaction or look for your father to have him cuff your ears!”
Ivor was stung and growled, verily growled like a beast, as he reached for his weapon, but the woman Anoushka restrained him.
“Please forgive my comrade,” she said. “I am sure you meant us no harm, even as he meant you no disrespect. We would be delighted to share your meal.”
“You would be wise to heed your elders,” I told Ivor. He muttered something in his native tongue, something I didn’t catch. I am trying, truly trying, to resist my more violent impulses, but this lad seemed determined to tempt them.
I claimed the simple meal that Mara, hidden, prepared for them. They, with some trepidation and suspicious sniffing, consumed it. I demurred, saying that I had eaten earlier, in the village, and was merely bringing back supplies for my own later meals. I caught Hermes peeping at me in his mirror several times, but with some effort I made firm my reflection.
I begged them to regale me with tales of their travels, and was met in turn with questions about myself and how I had come to possess the fortress. I spun them a plausibly dull fabric of lies—my knowledge of courtly life has rusted over the decades, but surely it cannot change much and is still the usual swamp of treason and selfishness. I presented myself as a loyal warrior whose honesty was inconvenient at court, and who was therefore “rewarded” with an obscure and run-down fiefdom. I said my escort had abandoned me after a dispute in a brothel, and mentioned in passing that a squad of soldiers was soon to follow, with builders after them.
The trio exchanged glances at that.
With my tale told, I again asked them what business brought them so far off the major trade routes, and how so varied a group had come to travel together.
With a shrug, Hermes the scholar replied.
“We call ourselves the Circle of Three Sides,” he said, “And we are seekers after esoteric truth.”
“That sounds fascinating,” I replied, pouring more wine. “Pray, tell me more.”
“Are you aware of the history of this castle?”
“It was built by the great crusader Dracula, was it not?” I could not resist the temptation.
“By his ancestors, but it is the Impaler’s involvement that interests us. Many years ago, at Easter, he ambushed some rival Boyars, clapped them in chains and worked them to death at sword point, thickening the walls here to resist Turkish cannon.”
“I believe I’ve heard the tale.”
“Have you heard more recent tales of a haunting spirit? They say it takes the form of a bat, or a wolf, or a ravenous black shadow. The villages nearby live in terror, saying it flies and hunts by night.”
“Hunts for what?”
“For blood,” Ivor said.
There was a pause before I replied, “By merciful heaven. Surely this is just a peasant superstition?”
“We mean to find out. Blood can call to blood. Unholy shades may uneasy lie.” Hermes was keeping his counsel guarded, but Anoushka had become loquacious. I had noticed her tendency to blush and look away every time I met her gaze, yes, look away and sip at her wine. I made sure to look often.
“How can such a thing happen in a Christian nation?”
“It can happen anywhere. When the shape of the land, and the tears of the dead, and the stories of the people all lie in a proper configuration…that is where the dragons nest, that is where…” She said something in a strange language, and then Hermes made sharp reply in the same tongue. She flushed again, this time I think with shame.
Interesting.
“Dragons? The Prince of whom you spoke, ‘Dracula’—his name means ‘Son of the Dragon’ does it not?”
“Or ‘Son of the Devil’,” said Ivor.
“The Dracula I know is a patriot, a loyal defender who protected Christendom at great cost.”
“At the cost of murdering twenty thousand helpless prisoners and nearly a like number of his own people!”
“Those stories are spread by the Germans,” I said. “He taxed the Saxons as he did the Wallachians and they hated him for it, so they spread tales that he committed many atrocities.” I shrugged. “It is all in the past, is it not?”
“If an evil is deep enough,” Hermes said, “It can echo on through time, repeating until it is stopped.” He looked me right in the eye as he spoke thus, and I found myself unnerved. Yet it would be a poor Prince who let any fanciful worry show.
“How would you go about purifying my land, if it is haunted by sorrow as you say?”
Hermes shook his head. “Too early to tell.”
It is the first time in several days that I have been able to sit, write, and gather my scattered thoughts.
I was unimpressed but unsurprised by the repayment of my hospitality. The next nightfall, they were suspicious of me, as I had known they would be. They had forced entry into my library during the day, and were braced for siege. Bright torches lay in each stone windowsill, while a roaring fire sent smoke up the chimney. They had smashed down the door after getting to the top of the broken stairs somehow, but as a replacement they leaned a sturdy table in the empty doorway. I’m sure it was well braced.
They couldn’t hold me at bay forever, but neither did they need to. By dawn, the sun would oppress me and they would be able to flee. I could pursue them at night, but such a chase would be fraught with perils and uncertainty.
No, it was clearly time to parlay. My only fear was that they had harmed my works.
“What knavery is this?” I demanded. “I serve you food from my table and grant leave to sleep ‘neath my roof, and as reward you burgle my home? For shame!”
“You have no position from which to decry us, you wampir fiend!” Ivor, of course.
“Ah. You’ve read my papers and added spying to your list of offenses. Tell me, if those same documents had proven me harmless, would you be so cavalier about your transgressions?”
“What does it matter?”
“It matters because an action is right or wrong when it is taken, not when a selfish guess proves right.”
“Selfish? We have come here at great peril to confront you! We have come here to free the countryside of your curse, to untwist the cruel knot you have tied upon the nature of the land!”
“Bold words from a stripling hiding behind barricades. Is your plan to bruise me by cowering, or to wound me with selfrighteous language?”
He howled, by all Heaven! My anger had called to his and touched him quick. I heard the sounds of struggle within the library and, though it grieves me to confess it now, I rejoiced at the thought of hurting him.
What a splendid show he made, flinging aside the barricade and leaping like a spring buck the gap in the staircase. He charged clattering down the steps at me, sword raised, eyes mad, and I met him steel on steel.
He was stronger and quicker, as I’d guessed, but his skill surprised me. I did not expect him to have the discipline that expertise requires, yet he had leashed his fury with study. I fought defensively and immediately began giving ground. From the doorway, Anoushka was shouting at him to cease but he was battle-mad and would not have heeded God Himself.
I know that madness well.
Why did I not give in to my own unreason, spending each last drop of strength to overcome him? Is it because I have recovered some greater measure of that which makes me Man? Or is it because I simply did not think I could best him?
It matters not. I had a plan.
I made a good show of fierceness but gave way, gave way, luring him in even as I once lured the Sultan’s army to disaster. We turned a corner at last, each using the stone edge as a shield around which to strike, then a few steps further and no one from the library could see us.
Mara flew above him as a bat and fell upon him as a woman, but a woman bedecked with claws fit for a tiger. She has the skill of rapid change. She tore his flesh and bit his neck and that rich crimson scent filled the air.
The lust for murder filled me and I wanted nothing in the world so much as to drink the whelp dry, but I did not. Perhaps only to prove to myself that I could resist, but that is something, is it not?
I disarmed him and reined in Mara. She obeyed, albeit grudgingly.
“You crave my blood?” I asked him. “Taste, then, that which you longed to shed.”
He resisted, but Mara wrenched open his mouth that I might poison him with love of me. Then I seized him by the ear and hauled him back to where his comrades might see him.
“Were I the fiend you think me,” I said, “Would I have left unspilled one drop of this odious Saxon’s blood?”
Anoushka had her buckler and sword ready, and Hermes aimed his crossbow from the doorway’s edge, but they did not fire.
“I am trying to escape my curse! I am trying to become more than I am! I am trying to earn God’s forgiveness for my transgressions—yea, and if you but read the papers you have stolen, you will see that I speak the truth!”
“Let him go!” cried Hermes. “Release him or we will burn your work!”
I was relieved that they had not already done so, but concealed it. “Is this how you carry out your noble quest for knowledge? By ruining it like the Muslims at the library of Alexandria? I have documented my great labor of atonement, and you would have that be all for naught? Your hypocrisy disgusts me. Whether you claim to love knowledge or hate destruction, you are a liar to me and I think to yourself.”
There was a pause.
“I fear I have misjudged you,” Hermes said at last, and from her hiding place Mara laughed—the first I’ve heard her laugh in decades, since she saw a pregnant woman get her legs broken by a runaway carriage.
I hushed her.
“I fear you have,” I said. “I cannot abide the abuses you have shown my hospitality. Get out, leave immediately, and do not return under pain of death.”
“You have little right to demand…”
“I have every right! This is my land, my home, and if you care little for that, I have all the power I need to halt, enslave or destroy you. Oh broken limbed scholar, how will you descend from your lofty retreat?
Ivor here is now too weak, too battered to lift you, though I suppose your Anoushka might be able to lower you by rope. Did you bring rope?”
“We did!”
“Splendid! Now you can hang yourselves, and be spared such punishment as I would design. For if you would hold out, how long can you last without provisions? If you would flee by day, how far do you think you would get by next nightfall? One lame man, one direly injured, on ruined trails, without horses… oh, did you carry your horses up into the library with you? No? Such a pity.”
“Your papers…”
“Burn my papers and be damned! What I have discovered once in twenty years I can recreate in ten, or five. You, however, can only carry out that threat once before its protection is denied you.”
“Let them go,” said Anoushka, and there was aught in her tone that gave me pause. No bravado, no force, no diplomat’s hauteur, just…resignation.
With, mayhap, a breath of desire underneath it?
“You say ‘them,’ let ‘them’ go and not ‘let us.’ I am intrigued, most intrigued, by that ‘them’.”
“I will stay. I will be a hostage to their behavior.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Clasp a viper to my bosom? Invite an assassin to my very chamber? You must think me no end a fool.”
“How dare you speak of her that way!” cried Hermes, and I then knew who loved whom. “She is the best of us, the highest and most noble, her honesty is without equal!”
“Ah, the first among thieves, liars and traitors. You’ll forgive me if I do not rush to accept her.”
She cast her shield and weapon down unto the cobblestones beneath the stairs.
“Surely the great Dracula can secure one woman. If all three of us were no threat to you, what can one be?”
“You would remain here, my prisoner, to protect this braggart and that sneak?”
“They are not those things to me,” she said.
I narrowed my eyes. “Do you not fear that I will slake my blasphemous thirst upon your lovely throat?”
“I…” Yes, that ‘lovely’ made her words uneasy, it made her blood rise, I knew. “Of course I do. But I believe in you.”
“You…?”
“I understand what you want, what you’re trying to do, and I believe in it. I believe it’s possible, that you can do it. I want to help you defeat your curse. I want to help you heal.”
“You extend your aid to one befouled by God?”
“Universal mercy is unbounded,” she said. “If you truly repent, if you truly want to step off your evil path, I believe you can.”
“Will you pledge your life upon the good behavior of your companions?”
The scholar would have spoken, but her gesture silenced him.
“If it should come to that, my life will be forfeit. But it will not. They are good men. They will keep their word.”
I narrowed my eyes and she beseeched me yet again.
“I know how much you desire this. It is clear in every line you have written.”
Perhaps, until that moment, I did not know myself how much I dared hope for redemption.
That was three nights ago. Two days past, Ivor and Hermes set off stumbling and, I expect, cursing my name and weeping for the lost side of their circle.
As for Anoushka, I have had two nights to become increasingly fascinated.
She is a half-caste from far India, the byblow of a snake-charmer and a temple dancer who was orphaned by shipwreck at age twelve, rescued by an Italian trade vessel, and raised to the age of twenty in a Venetian nunnery. She fled the convent after wounding the local prelate when he came to hear the nun’s confessions and made amorous advances to her. She left Venice for Padua and there met Hermes, who recognized a previously hidden talent for comprehending the occult.
Hermes’ eye was sharp, I happily grant him that. Anoushka readily grasped my theory of Coils and has suggested my progress to date is partially due to Castle Dracula. She has explained to me, with great clarity, the means by which the shape of the land sculpts the lives of those who dwell upon it. Not merely in the rude sense of affecting military events or influencing the growth of crops, but in an unseen and magical dimension as well. When the land is wholesome, the people prosper.
I asked her what the effect was if the land belonged to something undead, and she could not meet my eyes.
Is this some new level to God’s depravity? That my curse falls not only on me, but upon everyone nearby?
No, I cannot blame the Lord for what my hands have wrought. It was not God who picked the freshest, youngest necks from which to feed, it was I. God did not give Mara the tools to avenge herself on mankind eternally—it was I, seeking a sister in carnage and creating something that has only become more depraved, more vicious, less human with each passing year.
Anoushka believes that there is a reason for all, and that even the vilest of us can be redeemed.
“Think of it,” she said. “What great fortress of good would this castle be, if it was here that you were saved? Here that you defeated your curse? I believe that the greatest evils are twisted virtues—the rape that takes the act of love and makes it an act of hate, or the priest who abuses the faith of his congregants to enrich and debase himself. So, too, can the greatest virtues arise from redeemed evil. What is the Christian story, if not the inversion of suffering, treachery, callousness and death into forgiveness, transcendence, acceptance and life? If you can save yourself, you who were so degraded as to merit judgment directly from heaven, what mortal could despair?”
Her words are a balm, soothing the fever of doubt which plagues my hopes.
I nearly killed Mara.
More, I nearly destroyed her, I nearly feasted upon her soul as I did so long before. I would have. I should. She is a cancer, a plague upon the land, a vexation to mankind.
She is all that I wanted her to be and I regret the day I clapped eyes on her chain-clad, wretched body.
I nearly killed Mara but she is too strong for me. While I delved into the secrets of the Crone’s circle and the Centurion’s believers, she bent her study to the more blatant strengths of the blood. At the time I felt no small contempt, thinking that she had chosen the easier path, a fit course for an unlettered female slave.
Tonight my arrogance is my punishment. Mara dealt me to the ground with the ease of a parent cuffing an angry child. “I could never hurt you,” she said, “You who gave me all that I am. But neither will I humbly suffer your blows. You have forgotten what you are, have become drunk on sweet Christian lies, but their liquor is not what you need. You are a creature of blood.”
Mara has put her ghul lips to Anoushka and made that poor gentle thinker into a creature like ourselves. When I demanded an explanation for this crime, her answers mocked me like an echo of my own words.
“How could you do this?” I asked, and she showed her white teeth behind dark lips and said, “It is you who showed me the way.”
“But why? What does it gain you?”
“Yours was not the only interest roused by her words. She said the greatest evils are perversions of good.” She chuckled, low in her throat. “Consider her an experiment to prove it thus, great philosopher.”
“I am trying to atone! She wished only to help me!”
“Surely her urge to aid you in your atonement will be all the keener, now that she is your granddaughter in defilement.”
That was when I struck her, and she struck me, and our exchange ended with her holding me down on a table and peering into my eyes.
“My lord and Prince,” she whispered. “Either you are right or you are wrong. Either God can forgive you or you cannot be forgiven. If you are right, then your weak and sentimental new friend will be the first fruit of your efforts to heal us all. If you are wrong, then we are nothing but damnation made manifest, the First Sin made flesh and given reign to torment all sinners. If that is so, I can think of no act more apt for my station than to corrupt so well-meaning a soul.”
With that, she leapt into the air and flitted away as a bat.
Thirty years ago, I would have pursued her. I would have spared no least slim shaving of effort, existing solely to avenge her insult to me. Tonight, I comforted Anoushka instead.
It is several nights since Anoushka’s change and, while tears still frequently wrack her, I think there is a courage in her that will give her the strength to travel.
For now, just as I have reclaimed my home, it is time to leave it. Anoushka insists that Hermes has the answers we seek, and that once he sees what was inflicted upon her he will be driven to help me find my cure. Therefore, we are off to the great university in Paris.
It grieves me to leave my home, but I will be taking a part of it with me. By bearing my native soil with me, I hope to maintain a link to the lands of my birth.
I find myself of two minds. While I feel an urge to remain in my den, feeding at leisure off the people I know, I fear that is the counsel of my static curse. The contrary urge—to see great Paris, to delve into the secrets gleaned by the world’s greatest scholars, to test myself against my curse in the very heart of Europe—that is my own courage speaking. That is my drive to become greater, to learn more, to overwhelm any difficulty.
To be a man.
Type
Journal, Personal
Signatories (Organizations)