“But in this particular instance.” I went on. “The answers that are being withheld from me seem to always be regarding people that I care about.”
Regis either didn’t notice, or didn’t care about my bitterness.
“In this case,” he went on. “The answer is that we are being carefully placed on a board. The Elder is, well, older than the rest of us, keeping a charge and a watch that only he knows anything about. I think he gets bored and occasionally, he will choose to play a game with those of us that owe our existence to his whims.
“Personally speaking I wouldn’t mind, except that he is far more intelligent than you and I put together. Made so, partially at least, by the fact that he is the oldest thing on this continent, possibly on this plane of existence. That amount of experience alone can artificially give him the appearance of being more intelligent than he actually is.”
He was leading me back to where the horses had been tied and that Kerrass was waiting for us.
“What that means,” Regis went on. “Is that being subservient to the Elder is like playing a game of cards. Do you know Gwent?”
“I do.”
“Fascinating game, a cross between tactics and random chance. The sort of game where you can win the game before you sit at the table by studying your opponent. Doing that properly will mean that you can know, or make a good guess, about what deck a person is going to use, followed by what kind of gambits they are going to employ.”
“Do you play?”
He chuckled. “No. I am not nearly decisive enough to play it. Just choosing which of the five decks I would want to play with is difficult enough, let alone what kind of deck I want to play, which leader I want to choose and which type of that particular deck I want to use. Let alone how many weather cards and decoys and so on and so on. Then we get to the game itself and what do I do? When do I stop and let them take a turn? When do I go for broke? I would analyse the matter to a loss and the person I would be playing would die of old age before I lay my first card down.”
“You could have simply said that it does not appeal to you.”
“But it does appeal, that’s part of the problem. However, we have gone off topic. Dealing with the Elder on any level, especially those of us that owe him our allegiance, is like playing a strange variation of gwent that involves blank cards against someone who won’t tell you the rules and who is always smiling. The difference for me and the lady whom you adore, is that we are not the people playing the Elder, we are the cards that are placed on the table.”
I let that sink in for a moment as we sat down.
“You make it sound like I should pity you.”
“And if the Elder was angry at me, I would deserve your pity.”
“So he is angry at Ariadne?”
“I very much fear so.”
“Why?”
“You will have to ask the Elder himself when you see him. There is a common saying about rulers that applies doubly to him. In that, on any given day, there is absolutely no knowing what the Elder is going to choose to care about.”
“Lovely.” Kerrass had been listening to what we were talking about.
“Let us leave that topic of conversation for now.” Regis said “And let me tell you something of the history of this place before we go down to the party.”
As should, by now, be evident, Regis and I share the character trait that we are rather in love with the sounds of our own voice. He is, even more than I am, prone to vanishing off on tangents to the main narrative to a rather extreme degree. So I am paraphrasing what he said here.
“The place where we came into the world during the Conjunction was actually far below ground.” Regis told us. “The Elder and his immediate companions emerged into a cave. It is a strange place now, the rift is still there although much diminished from when it would allow the passage of beings through. However, it distorts the area around it. If you end up in there then I would suggest keeping your eyes towards the ground as otherwise, your sense of what is up and what is down can become turned around, leaving you disoriented and nauseous. It is enough to make one quite dizzy, let alone a human who has not been there before.”
“I shall remember that.” I said as Kerrass nodded.
“At first, according to what our parents told us, we waited in the cave for a long time, expecting that the portal would open and that we would all return back to where we came from. As to why we came, I have no idea and the Elder isn’t telling us. My father had the theory that we were once a vanguard of an invading force that was coming through the portal in order to invade this realm before the closure of the portal rendered the matter moot. Another theory was that we were a patrol that was on it’s way somewhere.”
“What’s your theory?” Kerrass asked.
“I think that it was magic.” Regis answered promptly. “As Geralt’s paramour is so fond of saying, Magic is art, science and chaos all the same time. The portal was opened at the same time that magic entered the world and as such, at the time, Magic would have been more chaos than it would have been anything else. Therefore, my belief is that the sheer amount of magical chaos in the air would have meant that we were just the ones that were sucked through. I think that such military theories would not hold water due to the sheer amount of magic in the air.”
Kerrass nodded.
“So we waited.” Regis said before grimacing. “I say we, this was still over a thousand years before I was born. But the Vampires of the time waited until it became necessary to look outside of our little cave in order to find sustenance. Through our own means we were able to find a way to head towards the surface of this world and from there we tunnelled to the surface to look for nourishment. The place we came to the surface was this place. Tesham Mutna.”
“Who called it Tesham Mutna?” I wondered.
“Not us.” Regis replied. “My people are not given to artistic expression, not really. It is the kind of thing that we have absorbed from the humans and the Elves around us but we did not come here with anything in particular. It is another argument in favour of the theory that we were soldiers before we came here. I might get punished for suggesting this but it is also possible that we were not very important soldiers either, despite the other vampiric creatures that came with us. It did mean that we had plenty of scouts however, the garkain, plumard, fleders and the rest.
We also had relatively little written language, an art that we stole from the elves in the main. So we don’t really have a written record of the time. There were elves in our local vicinity and again, I might get punished for saying this, but I rather feel as though we were afraid of the elves at that point in time.
“For whatever reason, we stayed in the local area, whether due to the designs of the Elder keeping us here, or because the pressure of outside concerns forced us to maintain our presence. As to that, I truly don’t know the answer. What I do know is that Tesham Mutna was built as a fortress to guard the entrance to our caves and tunnels. It was a garrison.”
“It is a bit grand for a Garrison.” I argued.
“There were intimidation factors to take in. When it was built, we were done hiding and we needed to dominate the countryside. One of the things that you have to remember is that we were relatively scarce in number. Yes, we are powerful and if we put our minds to it, a single, elder vampire would make relatively short work of a company of men, even if he was unsupported. It might take us some time to draw off, isolate stragglers and things but a short while ago, Detlaff and I assaulted a fortified manor house with Geralt…”
“He has told us the story.” I said, “He said that he felt as though he was being escorted into a place rather than what normally happens in his world, where he is the one doing the escorting.”
“Yes well, he is being a little harsh on himself there. But it is true that Detlaff and I were making short work of the relatively experienced, well trained and equipped guards and mercenaries. But there are still relatively few of us. A concerted, knowledgeable attempt to destroy us all by the mages, Witchers and armies of the north and, or the south, would destroy us.
“So we built a massive Fortress in order to terrify the locals. We had our lesser races protect us and work in that area.”
“Lesser races?”
“The Fleders, Ekkimoras and so on.” Kerrass supplied for me.
“Quite so. Detlaff was the first that tried to treat them as equals. He was not entirely successful in that matter although his efforts meant that they were all devoted to him. It was he that all but created the more feminine of them, the Bruxae in particular were his doing. I am enough of a scientist to wonder how he did it while being enough of a vampire to have a good idea. And unfortunately, I am also enough of an elitist to think that the idea of how he probably did it is disgusting. But he reasoned that we would need go-betweens, that brute force against the elves and the coming humans would not work and would bring far too much attention down on ourselves. So he came up with the beautiful seductresses of the Bruxae in order to lure and seduce. He was incredibly successful.
“So that is why there is a castle here. It is a fortress, designed to protect the portal and prevent the local races and the local humans from looking too closely.”
“But this place is ruined.” I said, “It takes effort to ruin a place like this. Concerted effort. It wasn’t neglect that leads to a castle becoming as ruined as this one. People came and tried to destroy it. What are the odds that if I took a spade, dug a little way down for a couple of hours, how long before I would find a layer of ash from the fires that were set around here.”
“Not that long.” Regis admitted.
“So what happened?”
Regis looked uncomfortable and I got the sense that we were coming to one of those topics that he wasn’t allowed to talk about. Then a female voice came.
“There was a crime committed here.” Ariadne said and we spun to see her standing nearby. “A terrible crime that had been expressly forbidden by the Elder and it brought down the wrath of the local humans upon us. Many lesser Vampires died and it was only because some of our arts were not understood by the local mages that we were able to retreat and consolidate. The humans thought that they had destroyed us, or driven us off. They were wrong.”
Regis rose to his feet and dusted himself off during this little speech.
“He wants you.” Ariadne told him.
“Then I shall, I have no doubt, see you later gentlemen.” Regis shook our hands one by one before briefly embracing Ariadne and kissing her cheek. Then he seemed to leap into the air before turning into a reddish, black smoke that drifted over the castle walls and vanished.
Ariadne seemed to sag when he left.
She was different now
When we had come out to Tesham Mutna, she had been as she always is. She had the appearance of a young lady. If you didn’t know who she was, you would guess that she was somewhere in her early twenties. Roughly my own age. She prefers to dress simply in relatively plain dresses except when the occasion demands it. She likes long skirts and when she is travelling, she prefers a belted waistcoat type of thing over a long dress that is belted in the middle. She also wears trousers and boots under her skirts that are often divided for riding or walking long distances.
She also, in these times, carries a leather shoulder bag that she wears across her body which contains, among other things, some soap, a journal, a piece of writing charcoal, some kind of small food snacks, a small amount of money, a hair brush and some kind of strange contraption that she uses to tie her hair back when she needs it. There are also some small healing herbs and bandages.
The bag, for something that is being carried by a Sorceress, is only magical in that strange form of female magic which means that she can pack a truly dizzying amount of things in that bag without seeming to distort its shape, and that she can root around in it for ages before finding exactly what she needs, often with a spoken incantation like “I know I put one in here,” and “I have just the thing for something like that.”
She carries a long Knife on her belt as well as a standard eating knife. Not that she needs it to defend herself but the absence of such a weapon would draw more attention.. There is also a pouch that contains some jars for the taking of samples if she sees anything out and about that she might want to take back to a lab and study.
For travelling about, she wears one of several off-white, creamy dresses. A colour she chose precisely because everyone expects her to wear black. The color black is reserved for her “Lab smock,” her words, as well as some night gowns or if she is playing up to her role and other people’s expectations.
Colours and things are reserved for special occasions or when she is choosing to defy preconceived notions. On any given day, there is no telling which of these she is going to choose to do. She wears her hair loose, or tied back in a braid or tail which she pulls over her shoulder when she needs to see to work on things. Also, because she knows that I like that style.
And that was how she had come to Tesham Mutna. Simple travelling clothes, hair simply tied back. She had changed somewhere now though and it was suddenly a reminder, not that I particularly needed one, that she had once been considered a Queen.
The dress was rich and regal, Black with strange dark gems sewn into the material. She wore a corset which was reinforced in order to emphasise her shape. The skirts were large and just as ornate as the corsetry. Around her neck hung a heavy Golden, elaborate looking monstrosity of a piece of jewellery that I didn’t like. It was not far off looking like a chest, or neck plate for a suit of armour. More gems were embedded in this thing. They were also dark colored, but due to them being bigger than before, I could see that they were not black, but rather the darker and deeper shades of other gems. I saw emeralds, rubies and sapphires in this thing. It must have been monstrously heavy and if Ariadne had been human, I would have guessed that it would give her some difficulty in breathing.
She was heavily made up as well, cheek bones accentuated, lips cloured and eyeliner applied and those were just the cosmetics that I could recognise. Her hair was arranged over her ears and down her back in some kind of elaborate hairstyle that seemed to involve braids. There was more jewellery there as well that weighed the hair down. On top of her head was a crown, the center of which contained a deep red ruby.
In her hand was the Golden Spider staff that was a little taller than her, the head of the staff depicted a rearing spider as though it was just getting ready to strike.
At first, I thought that she had decided to wear an illusion for the purposes of… whatever was going on. But then I realised that there was a movement to the dress and to her face that betrayed that she was really there which, in turn led me to another realisation.
She was wearing a costume.
“I am bid to take you below to where the assembly awaits us.” She told us formally. “On the way down, I can answer any questions that you may have regarding Tesham Mutna and its history. If you will follow me.”
“Ariadne, is everything ok?” I wondered, rather redundantly. It was clear that everything was not ok so I don’t know what I expected her to say.
“Everything is fine.” She said as she led us over to a wall.
Her tone lightened a little as she waved us to the wall.
“Regis likes to play a game whenever people come here. He tells people to look for the entrance to Tesham Mutna itself. Did you find it?”
“I did not.” I admitted. I knew her well enough by now that it was clear that I needed to play along. She wasn’t going to tell me what was going on and I felt as though we had reached a place where I just needed to aim myself at the end of the night and hope for the best.
“By all rights.” I went on, “The entrance should be in this wall somewhere. If the keep followed any kind of realistic pattern of the time, which hasn’t changed much in the intervening years. This should be where the entrance is.”
“So you haven’t been able to find it then. Kerrass?”
“I didn’t look.” Kerrass sniffed. “I was given the feeling that Regis was laughing at me. I did not enjoy the feeling.”
“Yes.” Ariadne almost gave us a genuine smile. “He can occasionally give that impression. He has mellowed out a little since his most recent brush with death at Stygga. But he still likes the sound of his own voice, still prefers to use a hundred words when ten words would do the job and always wants to explain things to people that are experts in the field that he is explaining.”
Kerrass just turned and looked at me.
“Yeah, alright.” I admitted.
“Also,” Ariadne went on. “He has a tendency to want the last word on something. In this case, however, it is an odd trick. It is not magical but I wish I knew how it was done. You have both looked. Can you see the entrance?”
Kerrass sighed and walked forward, producing his Witcher medallion and walked up and down the wall a couple of times, frowning in concentration before shaking his head.
“No, I cannot.” He admitted.
“Freddie?”
I shook my head.
Ariadne nodded, a glimmer of sad humour seemed to twinkle in her eyes for a moment before she walked towards the wall and into the entrance to the keep.
“Yeah.” Said Kerrass. “I saw that coming.”
It was a strange kind of optical illusion. The entrance didn’t just appear out of nowhere. There was no shimmering as it came into view. No pop or magical sparkles to show where it was. It had always been there and now that we could see it, it seemed impossible to think that we had not seen it, or that we couldn’t find it again if we went looking for it.
The entranceway was a large tunnel, not particularly wide. It was well lit by torches along the walls. On the wall was a series of hung travelling cloaks and weapon racks that contained many different varieties of weapons that had clearly been placed there.
Two large… creatures were waiting for us and were pacing with some agitation. For those that know, they were Garkains. For those of you that don’t know what these things look like, then all I can say is a variety of “Lucky you.”
Try and imagine a large bat. Only imagine him to be heavily muscled, lacking in wings and with these strange kinds of bony protrusions instead of ears. They have huge jaws, elongated arms and legs that end in long, thin, hands and feet with excessive claws that can tear through metal armour as easily as you or I may tear into a loaf of bread.
They are typically found in caves, or in sewers for the more urban areas. Remarkably adept at moving around stealthily, they can squeeze through the tiniest holes that you wouldn’t believe. They possess a grim kind of sense of humour and a low kind of animal cunning. They certainly possess intelligence of some kind..
They are the kind of intelligence that knows exactly what they need to do to survive and don’t see any reason why they should bother with bettering themselves any further than that.
One of them licked it’s lips as it gazed at me.
“More snacks.” It hissed.
“Honoured guests.” Ariadne told it firmly.
“Pity.” The thing said, extending a claw towards me. “That one looks nice and plump.”
I tried not to look at Kerrass who was using a coughing fit to palm a potion into his mouth.
“As Regis should have told you.” Ariadne said to us, as the two garkains flinched at the sound of Regis’ name. “Your horses are in no danger. Please hang up your cloaks as I assure you, the tunnels are quite warm. Also, it is required that you leave your weapons behind. The Elder guarantees your safety and you will come to no harm here.”
“Resist.” One of the Garkains told us. “Please resist. It has been years since I’ve eaten a Witcher.”
Ariadne snarled something at it in a language that I didn’t recognise. It snarled back at her. She moved and the thing went flying back across the room and crashed into a wall. When it rose to its feet, black blood was leaking from a cut across its face. It bowed down low before Ariadne’s expression.
“Apologise.” Ariadne told it.
“I am deeply sorry, Witcher,” It whined. “I meant no offence.”
“None taken.” Kerrass replied, placing his swords on the rack alongside the others. “It has been some time since I killed a Garkain as well.”
The two Garkains hissed at this.
I sighed and put my spear next to Kerrass’ swords, propping my belly spear and boot knife next to them. Ariadne nodded and led us further down the tunnel. We got a little way down the tunnel before I couldn’t hold it in any more.
“That was a show wasn’t it.” I said, “That was for someone’s entertainment.”
Ariadne said nothing.
We came to a flight of stairs. There was a feeling that there was much more to what was going on but I couldn’t see it. It was similar to how we hadn’t been able to see the entrance to the complex. There was one route into the depths of the place and that was the route that was lit. Kerrass and I just followed, what else were we going to do.
“What did Regis tell you about this place?” Ariadne asked.
“He said that it was built to protect the entranceway into the world for the Vampiric race.” Kerrass said. “That it was here that the Vampires emerged into the world and they wanted a fort to protect it.”
“That is true as far as it goes.” She said. “The castle and the tunnels that we dug were not solely for those purposes though. After all, the cave that houses what remains of the portal has no entrance or exit. It is only possible to breathe down there due to the powers that exist inside it. The truth is that, from there, we had to teleport to a cave further up and work our way to the surface from there. Everything that Regis told you was correct. But he was born long after Tesham Mutna had served its purpose and everyone but the Elder had moved on. Tesham Mutna had another purpose as well.”
“What purpose was that?” I wondered.
There was a pause before Ariadne answered. Just a small pause but it was there nonetheless. If I didn’t know her as intimately as I would like to think I did. I suspect that I probably wouldn’t even have noticed it.
“It is easier to show you.” She said. “Through here.”
We entered a small antichamber. I was again struck with the surety that there was more to this place than I could easily see. Whatever strange form of magic that had kept me from seeing the Entrance to the greater complex of Tesham Mutna was affecting me. Again, I have some distance from these events now and as such, I have a certain amount of hindsight to work with. I think it was about here that I came to realise that what was happening now, was part of the show that was being put on for me.
The Antichamber looked a lot like a study. It was small, utterly without ventilation, but I suppose that that wouldn’t matter to the Vampires. There was no furniture in evidence but there was shelving built into the walls where I would have stored scrolls, books and ledgers. I could well imagine some kind of filing system at work.
There were also three large… well… banners that were hanging from the ceiling. They looked old, faded with the centuries but it was still clear to see what they showed.
The imagery was striking and unpleasant.
“What are these banners?” Kerrass asked before I could.
“They are the banners of the Vampire Clans.” Ariadne told him. There was a strange note to her voice that I could not recognise. Relief maybe? Wariness? “As I told you, do not be too excited. We would all look the same to you, or so I’m told. The other two clans left before I was born. Shortly after we came to the surface of the continent.
“Which clan do you belong to?” I wondered, mouth automatically speaking and asking questions as I took in the three flags.
“That one.” She said pointing. “Along with every Vampire that you will meet tonight, have ever met, or will ever meet unless you travel far across the horizon. And for all we know, they have found other portals and ways off this sphere of existence. It is impossible to say for certainty. Only the Elder might know and he isn’t telling anyone. We are clan Gharasham.”
I looked at the banner that she pointed to. It depicted a hand. My guess would be that it was once a stark, white hand on black background but the ravages of time had reduced the white to a kind of chalk colour, with the black fading to an off-grey kind of colour. The hand was depicted, palm towards the viewer and the painter had depicted palm and knuckle lines. At each finger tip there seemed to be a wound that was leaking red colouring. The palm had a large, teardrop shape on it that was also leaking as though it was bleeding. At one time, I guessed that the image would have been quite striking.
I found it intensely depressing.
“It looks like a battle banner.” Kerrass said.
“That is undoubtedly what it was.” Ariadne told him. “Our historians do tell us that when we came through the portals to this place, we were fighting a war and that these were our standards.”
“How do you know that?” I asked. “Regis seemed to suggest that that was only a theory.”
“I have… other information.” She said.
“What are the other clans?” Kerrass asked, heading off the debate and the questions that he knew I would ask.
“That one was the symbol of the Ammurun.” She said pointing.
The flag depicted another pale hand, but the fingertips of this one were elongated into claws. The hand was wrapped around a long, pointed dagger in the traditional, theatrical, underhand stabbing grip. The dagger was depicted in a similar shade of chalk white to the hand. The dagger pointed down with a pointed blade and round pommel. Again, blood was a theme as it seemed to run between the fingers of the hand and dripped down the blade. I got the feeling of assassins and being stabbed in the back. I said so as well.
“It is impossible to say.” Ariadne said. “The only thing that we know about them is that no sooner did they get here than they went West over the sea
“Which leaves us with the Tdet.”
She gestured to the last flag.
Of the three, despite there being no blood on the image, I rather think that this one would be considered by Mark as being the most profane of the three. Again, there was another hand held up, palm facing the viewer with the thumb and the fifth finger brought together in the same gesture that priests use to bestow a blessing on a large group of people.
Wrapped around the wrist of the hand, underneath the thumb of the grip and rearing up above the fingertips of the hand was a mottled, golden, fanged serpent. I know that it was fanged because it had its mouth open, ready to strike.
“Cheery.” I muttered.
“As the Ammurun went West, the Tdet went East over the Blue mountains.” Ariadne told us.
“Sounds like scouting missions.” Kerrass said.
I found myself nodding. “Form a beachhead with one unit protecting the way home while one force scouts to the east and the other scouts to the West.”
“What did they find I wonder?” Kerrass muttered.
“A much better question is why did they not come back?” Ariadne ventured.
I shook my head. “Off the top of my head, there could be any number of reasons. There could have been a falling out amongst the leaders of the clans and they have settled elsewhere. We know that the Elder and your people strictly control your population to avoid drawing attention to yourselves. Maybe the threat of having so many vampires in one place was dangerous?
“And that isn’t the most paranoid reason.” I went on. “What if, over the seas and the mountains, there are predators, monsters that we haven’t met yet or haven’t been able to migrate to come at us here on this continent. Things that have destroyed these other Clans.
“What do you think, Ariadne?” I wondered, turning towards her.
Her face was still, shadowed in the torchlight so that I couldn’t see her eyes. For the first time in a long time as I looked at her. I felt an old thrill of fear.
“I think it is time to move on.” She said.
“Another reason,” I suggested, more out of pique than anything. “Is that we only know what happened because the Elder tells us so. We only have his word for it after all. Who knows what happened? As a historian, I am loath to believe only one source.”
Ariadne continued to say nothing.
We entered a hallway. If I didn’t know better, I would say that it was a jail. There were metal...bars down the side of the room with similar metal shelves so that all of the bars and shelves formed small cubicles that were stacked, one on top of the other from floor to ceiling on either side of the central corridor.
There was a smell here and I didn’t like it, even if I couldn’t identify it.
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Each of these cubicles was about three foot wide by one foot tall by six foot long. The floors of these cubicles seemed to be made up of rollers of wood that, when I touched them, rolled smoothly and evenly. I guessed that they would make it easier to get large and heavy things into and out of the cubicles.
Ariadne had stopped and was watching us.
I examined the metal bars carefully and I saw places on the bars that had once formed brackets for things to be hooked in. Raised semi-circles of metal that had holes punched in for hooks. I looked around and couldn’t find any of these hooks although I looked quite extensively.
“What are these for?” I wondered.
“I know what they are.” Kerrass hissed.
Turning to him I could see that he was rigid with some emotion, probably several emotions. Breath was hissing between his teeth. He was pale and clammy to look at and his eyes were bugging out of his skull.
“You kept humans in these cells,” he hissed. It was not an angry hiss, more as though he was forcing the words out between his gritted teeth.
“And Elves.” Ariadne agreed in a neutral voice. “Dwarfs and Halflings too when we could find them.”
“That smell.” Kerrass went on. “No matter how hard we scrubbed, we couldn’t get that stench out of the walls, out of the cages. We scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed, but still the smell of piss and shit and vomit and fear and madness and….”
“How far does this corridor go?” I asked Ariadne, breathing deeply to keep calm.
“Just a little way and…”
“I think you should take Kerrass away from this place.” I told her, “It will remind him of the cages that he was kept in once.”
I was again being struck by the suspicion that I was being tested. That I was being watched and toyed with in some way. I looked at the bars, the cages again and felt something change in my head.
“Take him away and get him something to drink.” I told her. “I want to stay here and look around a bit.”
Ariadne’s expression was still a mask and I wondered if she had slipped into her illusion of herself. I used to be able to tell whenever she did that but now I was not so sure.
She stepped forward to take Kerrass by the arm and tried to lead him to the end of the corridor.
“Don’t fucking touch me.” He snarled, reaching for his sword that, of course, wasn’t there. “He wailed in fear and pain for a moment and covered his face. Ariadne took him by the elbow and this time succeeded in steering him to the end of the corridor.
I found myself alone and took a moment to try and identify how I was feeling. It’s a habit that I have come into since the depths of my illness, both in Angral and in Toussaint. That habit of self-assessment in order to see if it is a form of my illness that is making me ill, or if I really am angry or upset.
I decided that I was legitimately angry. Someone had literally set that up, bringing Kerrass to a place that would remind him of the horrors of his old life. Now they were setting me up and I found myself wondering what was next. What was the thing that I was here to see?
The answer came clear to my head.
“Well fuck you.” I muttered, half to myself and half to my unseen and unknown Watcher. I was a historian and a scholar dammit and by the Eternal Flame, I was standing in the depths of ancient history. So I would damned well do my job and if I came through all of this then I would damned well find the person that had put Kerrass through that in order to cause them pain.
I bent to examine the metal bars. They were ice cold and the edges were sharp. You would not be able to stand up, turn over or move easily if someone forced you to lay down in one of those things. I guessed that you would have to go in, feet first in order for you to be fed and to be able to breathe and if I assumed that that was the case, then the holes and the hooks would be meant for the restraints to be hooked on to.
I turned around and looked for where the restraints might be kept.
Further down the corridor of cells was a hollow place. In the middle of this place was a wooden lectern and I finally found some proof that this was being staged. The bars had been immovable and had been built into the walls, the floor and the ceiling of the corridor so they had definitely been around as long as the hall had been here. But the Lectern itself was relatively new. You could tell by the wear and tear on the wood which was unvarnished. If that wood had been here as long as the steel Bars had been, then it would have rotted away.
There was also a torch, bracketed to the wall so that I could see the book that was resting on the lectern easily. It was almost funny to see.
The book itself was old and had that feel that comes when large reference books have had spells placed on them in order to preserve them. Lady Yennefer has many of these kinds of books and I was lucky enough to be allowed to study some of the same in the libraries of Oxenfurt that had escaped the book burnings of the Eternal Flame.
Another idea for a scholarly work if anyone wants one. A work describing the heroism of those Librarians that archived and hid away the most important and valuable books from the Eternal Fire fanatics. They were not entirely successful, but what they did manage to preserve will form the basis for modern education in the future of the North.
There is a feel to such books. The paper is that little bit more flexible than it should be. The pages turn in a uniform way. The book doesn’t smell of anything and the paper and bindings seem too uniform and smooth to the touch.
It was a scientific journal. The last page entry read “The first stages of the experiments are over and it is time for me to present my findings and properly begin my own research. The subjects are too broken to be released and I will recommend extermination.”
There was another set of pages that was over there that I was clearly meant to read. For a while, I was tempted to set it aside as I felt sure that I was being manipulated. But in these cases, it is also true that you can learn from the things that people want you to be manipulated by, as not.
The one on top was particularly chilling. It was written in an older form of the elder speech used by the southerners at that time. I say southerners as, by my reckoning, this page was written long before Nilfgaard had a name, let alone had developed a written language. It is true that those humans in the South seem to have gotten on well enough with whatever form southern elves seemed to take although those elves seem to have disappeared a long time ago. But they got on well enough that the elves taught the southerners language and writing.
But I’m digressing again.
The original paper has been taken off to be placed inside a museum. It was badly degraded and we nearly lost it when it was exposed to the open air. I had not been prepared for archeological work when I went to Tesham Mutna but it seems clear that I would not be invited back. And even if I was invited back, it was not clear that I would go.
This was what was written as best as I can remember it and translated from the original.
I will die soon.
I will die soon and I can no longer bring myself to care. I wonder if this is what despair feels like.
When I was being carried back to my cell, a piece of parchment fell from the book that one of them carries with… her?... At least I think it's a her…. But the parchment fell and I took it. That, and a piece of the coal that I have pilfered from the fire bowl that is kept alight nearby in order to keep us warm.
One of the prisoners who was here before my arrival, claimed that the bowl was first lit because a couple of prisoners had frozen to death while lying in their own filth. It would seem that the filth froze first and that cold seeped into the person’s body, killing them.
A piece of parchment and a piece of coal are my tools with which I can tell my story, such as it is. But I can no longer remember my story. I am so tired.
I have no idea what time it is. They cycle through the prisoners and bleed us accordingly and I have decided that these bleedings are now mornings which, according to my math, means that they bleed someone every day, whereas each individual is bled once every third day. They bleed us so much that afterwards, I am too weak to move, barely able to drink the broth that they bring us to feed us and keep us alive.
I can’t do this much longer.
The man in the cage above me died yesterday. They had brought him back from being drained and he just died shortly afterwards. The female came and was angry, making a note in the book that she always carries with her. She reminds me of someone but I can’t remember who it is. There are so many things that I can’t remember now. I know that I used to walk in the sun and feel the wind on my face, but I can no longer remember the colour of grass or the sky. I know that grass is green and the sky is blue but I do not know what that LOOKS like.
The man above me died and when he died, his bowels opened and the excrement dribbled down between the bars in the cage, just as mine will dribble down onto the person below me when my time comes.
It will not be long now.
They brought some new people in, maybe three days ago. The female was happy. She is the only female voice amongst all of them. I know that there are other females but from those that deal with us. She is the only one that works with us regularly. The female was excited. Something about this new batch of people was interesting to her.
The monsters that they use as servants brought the new people in and jammed them into their slots while the woman and a couple of other men supervised. There was the jangle of chains and rustle of leather straps as they were secured in place. For a while there, there was music to the movements as chains rattled and clashed. Coupled with the howls of terror as the newcomers settle in.
They no longer need to chain me in. I am too weak to escape. The newcomers will learn, although I envy them their terror and their energy. Someone is telling them to try and bash their brains out against the mettle. It has been tried before, sometimes it even works.
They don’t know yet. They don’t know the real terror that is to be found deep in these tunnels. When the skittering things come for us and take us down to the chambers where we are strapped down and bled, only for our blood to fall into carefully maintained troughs and run away. At first, I gave a lot of blood so that the liquid sloshed in the metallic instruments. Now though, it ebbs thickly and sluggishly.
The first time it happens, it is terrifying. You are there, not knowing what is to come and that lack of knowledge terrifies you. You struggle, uselessly against monstrous strength and inhuman grips, but that only makes the blood flow faster. They laugh and comment to each other.
I don’t struggle now. What’s the point.
But that first fear is…
They will learn.
I have lost count as to how many times they have come for me. The next one will kill me, I am all but certain. If not the next one, then the one after that. It is now, the one thing that I will look forward to. The blood looks so beautiful as it stains their blades.
I can no longer remember my own name.
-
I felt sick.
I could feel the fragility of the parchment and I set it carefully aside, returning to the book, flipping towards the first entry that I could recognise what was written. Before that entry, the writing was in a language that I did not recognise, using letters and sentence structures that made no sense to me.
Entry 1
The learned one has died. I am really quite… he would have called it ‘angry’. As a basis for my argument that this new cattle has some form of… brains and therefore intelligence, he would have been invaluable. He was bled too much and died on the table. The corners of his mouth were turned upwards when I insisted on being taken to view the corpse before disposal. I suspect sabotage. I leave this entry in their written language that the learned one was teaching me, as evidence against the future.
Entry 2
I have decided to keep recording my findings in the language of these creatures. If my suspicions are correct, and the learned one’s death was as a result of sabotage, then it is possible that they learned… so many weaknesses in the language… that the learned one would provide evidence for my case and as such, he was killed. Therefore, I will write in the cattle language in order to throw them off. They will decide that I have invented a code in order to stymy them. I find that thought… amoosing. No, that doesn’t look right. Amusing. That is better. I wonder if the learned one would consider that a form of vengeance.
Entry 3
To repeat certain observations from earlier for ease of reference. Their physical development from youth to age is similar to our own. However, they have no control over their physical development when adulthood is achieved. Superficial signs of age begin to accrue, delayed or sped up by life factors such as illness, lifestyle, cleanliness, diet and other factors that have yet to be identified. Signs of age include hair turning grey and then white, an increasing stoop, mental infirmity and loss of energy.
We have realised that age of the subject does influence flavour but not strength of the effects. I suspect that this would be a matter of personal taste. Speaking personally, I prefer an older vintage.
I skipped over a few pages as a growing suspicion was forming in my mind by this point. Another entry caught my eye. I have no idea which number entry this one was.
I have made a breakthrough. These creatures do not fear death, or rather, it does not hold the same terror as it does for us. This is really quite extraordinary. The great mystery of our existence is what happens when our physical form is destroyed. Apart from the fact that such a matter is all but impossible barring intervention of another of our kind. We had always assumed that we would simply cease to exist. It is why the application of language in it’s written form is so vital. If we do not record what we see, hear, learn and do then that will be lost in the eventual destruction of ourselves.
But these… They call themselves ‘Humans’. These humans do not fear that coming event. My competitors in the argument as to how to treat these new species that we have encountered would argue that, given the pace of their natural degradation and the inevitable nature of their expiration, their lack of fear is due to the inevitability of it. They claim that they have merely come up with a way to console themselves as to what happens when they die.
The humans have convinced themselves about the existence of something called a ‘Soul’. They claim that when they die, the soul carries on to go to… wherever they go next.
I am fascinated. I mean to find this soul and examine its nature.
Following entry
I am concerned that my competitors might be correct on this count. I have dissected three subjects now and can find no evidence of anything that might resemble this so called “soul” that gives these humans so much solace. We had already identified many of the internal workings of their bodies. Their hearts, reproductive organs, pulmonary and nervous systems are close to our own. Their digestive systems are not nearly as efficient as ours and I suspect that, if we had better equipment, we would learn that the nervous systems do not work in the same way that ours do.
But I have ground down every single part of the human, both alive and dead, including the most likely candidates for the housing of the soul and I have found nothing there.
I am disappointed.
The capacity for self-delusion is not a catastrophic obstacle when it comes to arguing for the intelligence of these creatures, but it would argue against the free roaming method. After all, if they are more capable of self-delusion, then they are more capable of deluding themselves into other, much more harmful beliefs.
Following entry
I have conducted further interviews on the subject of a Soul and after an initial disappointment, I think that there is something interesting here after all. It seems to be a concept that is shared amongst all of the “human” subjects no matter where they are from on the sphere that we find ourselves on, no matter which sphere that they came from themselves, they seem to share this central concept. It is described as an unknowable ‘something’ that means that existence becomes more than it is. It is an ongoing thing that was there before a human is born and continues long after they are dead.
There is even some belief that this ‘soul’ can be reborn into many lives and bodies over the course of its existence.
I charged the hunters to find me one of the shorter, doughtier races that refer to themselves as Dwarves as well as one of the beings that seem responsible for what passes for written language in this particular guise. I intend to put the question of the “soul” to them.
The immediate following entries seemed unremarkable and I skipped over them until I found the entry about the interview with the dwarf.
Fascinating. The Dwarf, A name that seems a little insulting to me, it’s a descriptor, not a name for a race, not only claimed to believe in the existence of the Soul, but also believed that the Souls of his ancestors watched over him while he lived and worked. He actively looked forward to seeing his parents and elder brother again in the future.
And then the Elven entry.
The hunters have outdone themselves, coming up with two Elves, a male and a female. I wonder if I can breed them. They have claimed the production of offspring would not be possible due to their advanced age. I am not sure I believe them on the grounds that they still seem to appear at an equivalent age to relatively youthful humans. But one of the hunters reported that the elves did not respond to threats of death on the grounds that, and I quote “My soul will go to a better place”. Words cannot express my excitement.
I leant back from the small lectern for a long moment before bending back to the pages. Flicking through them until I came to the end. The notes appeared to be an examination of human emotion.
My learned colleagues have been sitting on a discovery that would have been useful to my own lines of enquiry for some time. I am really quite beside myself with rage and I have registered the complaint with the attendants of the Elder for his review. We are supposed to be working together on the “humanity project” with regards to deciding their eventual future and as such, they have been keeping things from me.
It would seem that humans, elves and dwarves all have something of a claim towards emotion. Or if not emotion, some kind of primitive equivalent. So far, things that have been identified include fear, anger and hatred. To be honest, none of these things are particularly surprising to me as I write this. These emotions are common throughout the animal kingdom and it should not be at all surprising that such emotions are present.
However, my fellows are trying to identify these things and seeing where they lie as the concepts are new to them. I find this frustrating. It is true that we do not feel fear. Anger is a waste of time to be set aside as soon as possible or, at best, used as a focus where possible, and hatred is pointless. These are the instincts of lesser beings after all. I put it to them that the reason that they are so fascinated is because they are finally able to communicate with a being that can feel these things and as such…. They were most offended by the prospect. I wonder if they finally understood what Anger means.
They are obsessed with understanding fear and are tearing subjects apart in order to understand it. They think that fear is something that you can find, that it lives somewhere in the heart. They are finally approaching the realisation of the human concept of the soul. I have decided not to disabuse them of the notion.
Fear is an instinct that we have moved beyond. After all, what is there for us to fear?
They are also trying to elicit different emotional responses with a view to seeing if the blood of a terrified man tastes different to the fear of an angry man. Further evidence that their research is not about learning new things. But rather about learning how the world can benefit themselves.
The truth is that I did not investigate down these lines due to my conviction that such matters are pointless. The Fight or Flight instinct is common to just about all living creatures, regardless of any level of intelligence. The real question here is what happens if other, more advanced stimuli were applied in order to draw out more complex emotion. They have words for them as I was finally able to perfect the magic to be able to pull the language and writing out of their minds. But what is hope? What is compassion? What do humans mean by love, desire or lust?
I snapped the book closed. I didn’t want to read any more. I went back to look at some of the cages and the, for want of better phrasing, cells that these humans would have been kept in. I was just, experimentally, climbing into one, feet first and on my back, to see what it would feel like when I felt her presence.
“Actually,” Ariadne said. “We used to put them in there facing downwards.”
“That sounds uncomfortable.” I said before I could stop myself. “Why?”
“Two reasons.” She said. “The first was that it discouraged escape attempts. We never found out why but humans struggled to move when they were kept face down. They needed to push themselves up to get out and they found that much more difficult to do so when they were facing down. It also meant that they would not drown in their own vomit when the nausea became too much for them to bear.”
I nodded and pulled myself out of the hole that I had pushed myself into. I felt the need to brush myself off, even though the place was clean. It took me a moment to find where she was. She was standing near the other entrance to the room. The opening that she had taken Kerrass through. I walked towards the Lectern.
“This is your book isn’t it.” I said, not really asking the question. I was as confident as I could be. The handwriting was different but there were flourishes that I thought I could recognise. “You made these journals and these notes.”
“Yes.”
“And this record of a prisoner. You were the female that he was talking about.”
“Yes.”
I couldn’t see her expression. Too much of her face was in shadow.
I made another guess. I was less certain of this one but I was pretty confident that I was right.
“You let the leaf of parchment fall. Yo unwanted to see if he would use the paper. You also arranged the piece of charcoal to fall close to his hand so that he could use it. I bet you even stood in the shadows and watched him write where he couldn’t see you.”
She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. I was right and I knew it.
“Can I keep this?” I asked, gesturing at the book. “This is a historical find that will reverberate through the scholarly world.”
“I believe that it is intended as a gift for you.” She said.
“Not worried that it will spark a pogrom against Vampires, against you?”
“No.” She said. “I have spent enough time among humans to know that the majority of people in the more learned areas would struggle to believe it. They will see it as an effort, by you, to justify the existence of Witchers and Mages and the like. They will argue that it is fear based propaganda arranged to control them. And for the less learned people, they already know to be afraid of the dark.”
I nodded. It was a brutal assessment, but also rather accurate I thought.
“Are there any other documents that they want me to see?”
“Yes. There is a cubbyhole in the base of the lectern containing a binder of similar documents to the prisoner’s notes.”
I looked for, and found the bundle, added the prisoner’s note to the stack and re-tied the bundle. I was both fascinated and appalled at the prospect of going through the papers.
I also hated myself a little for the excitement that I felt.
“I shall have them taken and placed alongside your spear ready for the return journey.” Ariadne said. “It is time that we moved on.”
“Hold on,” I said, taking a deep breath and looking around myself. It is important when you find yourself in places like this. Places where there has been so much horror in the past, to just take a moment to take it in. The mind can skip things over. Memories can be erased and destroyed and as a historian, moving through the torture chambers of those that would consider themselves better than me, it is important to take these things in. Not to try and experience these things for yourself. But rather to imprint them on your memory.
“You knew.” I said as another insight occurred. “You knew what was going to happen to Kerrass when you brought him in here. You knew that he would be reminded of his cage and the cave that he lived in. You knew how he would react.”
“I didn’t know.” She said.
“Come on Ariadne,” I felt the first stirrings of anger and was surprised that I hadn’t felt it before now. “You have forgotten more about how the brain works than our society will ever know. You knew.”
“I didn’t know.” She insisted, her tone of voice not changing. “I didn’t. I strongly suspected.”
Her gaze had not wavered. Her expression, what I could see of it, did not change.
“It is time to move on.” She said again.
“How much more is there to see?” I wondered
“There is some.” She said.
I will skip over the blood-draining chamber. There was nothing new to say about it. It was a room where there were tables situated for people to be tied down and into them. There were tables with sharp blades and wicked looking hooks placed upon them. There was an aesthetic beauty to them. Obviously, I would not want to compare the two different things to them, but they reminded me of the tools of religious worship in the Church of the Eternal Flame. It was as though they had a religious significance and that they had been made to be physically beautiful as well as being very very sharp.
There were several draining tables and I, along with the faint kind of distancing of self that comes with going to places where horrible things occurred, I also found myself beginning to be amused by some of the things that I was seeing.
There was a smaller table, designed for those beings of shorter stature. I don’t know why I found this funny, but I did.
I looked underneath some of the tables and found that they were made from wood. And like the Lectern, these tables were new. I looked as carefully as I could and could see no signs of recent blood flow, either on the knives, on the tables themselves or in the channels that had been carved through the stone for the passage of the blood. There is always some sign of blood. Even if you scrub and scrub and scrub, there are always some signs.
These tables were new. Brand new. You could still see the lighter colouring of the new, injured wood from where someone had attacked it with the carving tool.
It was not a small effort to keep myself from laughing.
I also noticed that Ariadne did not try to chase me out of this room with any kind of “We need to move on.” I guessed that the show was over, or at least, that the first act was over.
“I am ready to move on.” I told her after making my examination. “Unless there is something else that you need to show me?”
She led me through a doorway. We collected Kerrass on the other side of that room. He had been sat on a stool that someone had provided for him and had a skin of water in his hand from which he was taking occasional sips.
“You good?” I asked as he looked up to see me.
“I’ve been happier.” He took a deep breath which seemed to shake as he breathed in. “That was, less than pleasant.” His gaze flickered past me to Ariadne. “Tell me.” He said in a flat voice. It had been a while since I had heard one of his Witcher voices. In this particular case, it was the voice of a Witcher who is getting necessary information out of someone that he knows is going to lie to him.
“Tell me. We are taking a very circuitous route down into the depths of the earth. It occurs to me that, even Vampires would value efficiency and understand the need for straight lines. Is there not a staircase or a central corridor that could have carried us to where we need to go without all of this moving around?”
Ariadne said nothing.
“I thought so.” He said. “Well, let’s keep moving then.”
We went a little way down the corridors and I felt some more questions starting to come to the surface.
“So this place wasn’t just built to protect your entrance way into this world.” I said, “It was to house your food and drink.”
“Tesham Mutna had many purposes.” Ariadne said. “It was, indeed, here as an anchor point to link us back to the old realms that we came from. And yes, it was a place where we conducted our experiments on discovering what humans were and how they operated. It was indeed here where we discovered that, to us, your blood is like a cross between strong alcohol and a strong narcotic. The fortress was also built, partially, in order to protect our wine stores.”
“What were the other reasons?”
“Punishment.” Ariadne said with relish. Just for a moment, the old Ariadne, the woman that I fell in love with, was shining through
“It sounds like there’s a story there.” Kerrass muttered as we came to a spiral staircase
“There is and if I had heard it before the pair of you had released me, I might not have been quite so… ignorant when I emerged as to thinking that the world would just bow to my whim.”
“Do you have time to tell us this story now?”
“I do, if we could just walk a little slower.”
Kerrass chuckled quietly. I did not as I was still grappling with all of the implications of what I had seen and been told.
“As I say.” Ariadne began. “Human blood is like a cross between the finest wine and the highest quality narcotic. My competitors in my research were in the process of arguing that all that humans were good for was breeding in order to produce better vintages. Whereas I preferred the idea of giving humanity their freedoms and that that freedom would produce both, better humans and better vintages.
“I stress that I had to put my opinions in those terms in order to get anywhere.
“My lead competition in the other faction was a Vampire called Khagmar. Or at least, that is the closest that it would sound like in your language. He never bothered with having a human sounding name like mine, or like Regis for example.
“Khagmar was a similar character to me in that we were both insatiably curious and scientific in our reasoning. Our parents were friendly and it was even mooted that the two of us would make good parents for any future children that we might wish for. What our parents had not managed to understand is that when two scientific minds meet, they either get on really well with each other, or they despise each other on sight and spend all their time arguing. Khagmar and I did the latter.
“I cannot pretend that it was entirely his fault. We just... annoyed each other. We would deliberately take the opposite view of each other in order to annoy or anger the other. At the time, I would insist that I was doing so because I did not agree with his hypothesis. But in being honest with ourselves we must occasionally admit that we are not perfect. In my case, there were times where I would just take the opposite view and work to undermine him because I didn’t like his face.”
Again, Kerrass laughed, but I was too deep in thought. Kerrass would later tell me that Ariadne was watching my face and that her performance was largely for my benefit.
“I stress that, the human project, was not one of those. I realised that the potential for intelligence was high. Not just in the humans but also in the Elves and the Dwarves.”
“Not halflings or Gnomes?” Kerrass wondered.
“I am sorry to say that if we came across any of their people, it is far more likely that we confused them with Dwarves. Realising that there were separate species there, was a thing that was a little way beyond us. It was just a question that didn’t occur to us to ask.
“To my shame, I still believed that Vampires were superior to humans, but I believed that the freedom that could be offered would work better than having humans in cages and controlled breeding camps.”
“You mentioned this.” Kerrass said. “The difference between industrialised farming and the more free range methods.”
“Precisely. Khagmar was a proponent of industrial methods. I thought that the cruelty would make matters worse. But anyway…
“I went North to continue my work around Angraal. Khagmar stayed here and from what communication I had with what remained of the community, Khagmar was deteriorating. I said earlier that blood is like alcohol and drug combined, that also translates to how it acts on the body. Eventually, Khagmar’s methods started to become sloppy. He became more insistent on procuring more humans. I lost track here because I was imprisoned.
“I am told that Khagmar became dangerous. He stopped being careful with his hunts and his blood parties. The parallels between human and vampire debauchery are really quite fascinating. His friends and he would go out into the world, find a village, drink it, far beyond the point of death and then move on. What that meant was that they were leaving a trail of broken bodies and destroyed villages in their wake. Just as dangerous was that their actions caused the lesser vampiric races to become complacent themselves. So the fleders, the alps and the rest started to kill and feed indiscriminately.
“As I could have warned them all, humanity was far from stupid and they were soon able to realise the pattern. witchers existed by this point and the mages had begun to properly harness magical force. Realising that this new type of monster was there, the witchers and the mages took to hunting and studying vampires with interest. And because Khagmar was foolish and addled with blood, he had left a pattern to be tracked.
“The mages and the witchers started to zero in on the location of Tesham Mutna and attacked it. That is what led to the ruin of the place. As a result, the Elder became concerned that they would find the portal and possibly take it to destroy it or worse, study iy. This was not to be considered. So the Elder and the nearby elder vampires took matters into their own hands. They captured and imprisoned Khagmar and discussed how to punish him.”
“Imprisonment?” Kerrass wondered again.
“Far worse. They decided to punish him with his addiction. They locked him in a cage, trapped him so that he would be unable to move and kept him imprisoned far above the ground in a hallway, the very hallway that we are going to. Then the vampires had a party. Pouring blood into the place they got drunk, they got high, they did everything that you would, correctly, consider to be depraved and all the way through this, Khagmar could not get involved.
“As I say, I was not there as by this point, I was imprisoned in my tower. But I’m told that he went mad. The scent of so much blood rose to meet him and he threw himself at his bonds. Tearing himself apart in an effort to get free in order to partake in what was going on. An elder vampire is strong, but his cage had been forged to be stronger.
“When the party was over, the blood was cleaned away, or as much as any such things can be cleaned away, the watching assembly was appalled when Khagmar came down from his cage, fell to his knees and started to lick the stone floor.”
“Sounds overly cruel.” Kerrass said. “It would have been easier to just kill him.”
“I was not there, so I can’t really comment.” She said. “I agree, but the Elder insisted that the worst crime that can be committed in our society is the killing of another elder vampire. Therefore, it would be immoral for us to do the same.”
“What happened to Khagmar?”
“He went mad. Mind broken mad. He was put to sleep, placed in a coffin and buried in the ground until such a time as he regains his senses.”
“Will that happen?” Kerrass was astonished.
“Eventually.” Ariadne said. “What is not really known about my people is that we can hibernate in order to rejuvenate. It’s how we can recover from serious injury. It can be helped along by another of our people if the recovery is taking too long. Regis told me that he was reduced down to a… his words ‘A slightly damp and oily smear on a castle wall’. We can also put ourselves into such a state for whatever reason. It was this state that you found me in when you broke into my room. It can also be used in order to recover from serious mental injuries. If one of us goes mad from something or because of something we can enter a similar state until our brain and thought patterns reset.
“I have seen that humans often have an urge to almost hibernate after extreme shock, upset or heartbreak. They wrap themselves in blankets and insulate themselves from potential future hurt. It is essentially the same process only taken to an extreme. Humans are far better at… rolling with the emotional punches, than we are. You fall in love, break each other’s hearts, recover and then fall in love again with a speed that we would find terrifying.”
Kerrass let that one go without comment. I was half listening by that point. I sensed that Ariadne was trying to tell me something but I was not feeling wise enough to take the point. Instead, I decided that it was time to ask a question.
“Have there ever been any other Vampires punished in Tesham Mutna?” I wondered.
“There have. Regis is being punished as we speak. I do not know what will happen to him. He was using our habit of ‘Out of Sight, out of mind’ and was hiding in the south somewhere. It is generally accepted that he needed to do what he did, but escaping murder of another Vampire is a serious thing. It is a matter of some controversy that he is here now and his punishment seems so… small. For my mind, I suspect that his punishment is only just beginning though.”
I nodded. “Anyone else?”
“Yes. There was a vampire couple named Tregard and Camille. They created a newborn without permission. As I think I have said, the creation of a new Vampire is strictly controlled by the Elder.”
“What happened to them?”
“They love each other. They really do and also as I’ve said, Love, for us, is an all consuming thing. So their punishment was to be kept apart on the Elder’s whim. One of them is kept entombed in hibernation while the other is allowed to be free. They are allowed to swap at any time which is the only time that they are allowed to see each other for one day.”
Kerrass stared at her in open mouthed horror. “So one is free to miss the other and suffer the guilt over the fact that they can enjoy life. While the other is imprisoned. And when it gets too much, or the desire to see the other becomes too much, they swap over and consign the other to the same fate?”
“Pretty much.”
“That’s awful.” Kerrass considered. “Is there a minimum period before they are allowed to swap again?”
“A decade. At the moment, Tregard is free. If you ever hear stories about a dashing vampire kidnapping winsome young women, then that’s him. They always disappoint him however and he casts them aside. He gets closer to the other major crime that we have which is to betray our presence to the world. To bring the mages and the witchers down on our heads. Some would even say that, in the elder’s mind at least, this exposure is a worse crime than anything else.”
Kerrass chuckled.
I did not.
“Here we are.” Ariadne said. We had come to the bottom of the flight of stairs and walked along a corridor before we came to a large set of double doors. She stopped and turned to face us. “I once told you that you would probably find Vampire parties incredibly boring. Well, now you will get your chance to find out. The pair of you will be the biggest sensation that our society has seen in centuries. It has been promised that no harm will come to you. Some will be curious to see what your blood tastes like. Do not be offended at this. They should accept a refusal calmly.”
“And if they don’t?”
“Call for Regis or myself. There will be plenty of people there who are going to be violently against open indulgence in such a formal setting. So do not worry. Remember also that, unlike humans, we do not decorate ourselves with signs of our wealth or prestige. There is a lady in here who is dressed, to you, like a whore. But to us, she is important and well respected. There is also someone in here that dresses in the skins of animals and nothing else. Do not be alarmed by what you see. Also, people might ask you to perform. Do not do anything that you are uncomfortable with and remember that our society moves slowly. Take your time and consider your actions. Brace yourselves, it will likely be an assault on your senses. It is also true that they will be putting on a show for you, seeking to get you to be emotional in some way.”
She turned and pushed open the doors.
She did right to warn us.