He was only hunting for half an hour before he sensed another of his kind.
He wasn’t precisely sure what it was about the person he started following that’d given the game away. There was no single element to it: the vampire didn’t have a particularly unusual odour – certainly nothing like the actual corpses Lodus had been able to smell back in that Sticktown graveyard. Nor did the vampire really exhibit any of its speed and power, make any overt supernatural motions.
Yet he knew what it was. It was of his kind. Just like a pet-owner picking out their loyal animal from a line-up of identical creatures, Lodus could pick out his brethren.
Or at least he hoped he could. He’d been following it for almost ten minutes by this point, and it would be embarrassing if he’d got it wrong.
The figure, bent against the wind, was hooded and cloaked, making its way through the crowds teeming outside the Undernight’s bars, brothels and bazaars. The throngs of strolling customers were impeding its movements, the smiling faces of people out enjoying their Fullday evening, unaware of their proximity to a deadly entity.
Still, his quarry was agile. It slipped through gaps in the horde with an ease, a fluidity that bordered the unnatural, making its way towards the lower streets, the less-travelled alleys that were farther from Firenight Square.
He supposed it could’ve been a diviner, but it wasn’t dressed properly. They were giving the game away if they were undercover. No, a vampire made the most sense.
From his rooftop vantage point, Lodus followed, watched, and waited.
Is it my maker? he wondered. The general stature was right, but it was impossible to say for certain without going down there and ripping the hood off the vampire’s head. Is it my murderer?
My teacher…?
It was simpler to use the roofs, even if it made identifying his mark a little trickier. Here he could leverage his strength to cross wide distances with no one below any the wiser – as a rule, Mundians had little reason to look up over their heads, and Lodus readily took advantage of this oversight. He’d done his fair share of roof-hopping as an ordinary assassin. Now he could almost glide over the roadways and passages, leaping lightly over expanses in feats of acrobatics the likes of which he could’ve only dreamt in the past.
If he was wrong about his chosen target, there wasn’t anyone here to see his mistake. He’d left Dirk and the others behind, politely requesting that they go on about their business as normal. They were definitely in thrall to him. He had no idea how long it would last or how far he could go with it. These were things he’d test over the coming days.
First, he had to do this. Find the one who killed him. Hear exactly what had been done to him.
But do I unmake my maker after interrogating him?
Perhaps. It’ll have to depend on the quality of his answers.
When his quarry moved into a secluded alleyway – that was when Lodus drew back his hood and pounced.
The wooden bolt gleamed in his hand as he arced down, streaming its silvery residue through the air –
Just as he was about to land, pierce the vampire’s shoulder with one of Lady’s projectiles – it spun around to face towards him.
He knew, right from the first instant, that this wasn’t his maker. The shape of the chin, visible under the hood – all wrong.
But it’s still a vampire, right?
He landed a little more awkwardly than he’d been intending, and that was all his prey needed to turn the tables.
A hand closed about his wrist, trapping his weapon. Another hand pressed against his chest, slamming him back against the brickwork behind him.
The powder of crushed bricks and little chips of material showered down about him as the other vampire forced his resilient body into the masonry.
“Who are you?” it – she – asked urgently. “What do you want?”
He was close enough to penetrate the shadows of the cowl with his vampiric eyesight.
“I remember you,” he murmured.
She released him, stepped back.
“You were in the Albatross,” she said in a thick voice. “You – you were the one who was going to stop him…” Then her tone became angry. “Why? Why didn’t you stop him?”
She never even cast back the hood of her cloak. She gripped his jerkin with fingers that wrenched holes in the leather, flinging her arms about him and weeping.
And she explained.
Shandarah had been spurned.
Whilst Lodus had surrounded himself with degenerates, outcasts from society, killers-for-hire, Shandarah had lived an ordinary life. She had a husband, two children. She’d been out drinking with four women from the rug shop where she worked, when the Incursion occurred and the vampire entered the pub, entered their destinies, warping them all forever.
Her husband had rejected her outright, she explained. Lodus knew she’d been a woman of not inconsiderable attractiveness – he’d remembered her in the first place because she’d been the most striking woman in the bar – but the minor change in her appearance had obviously clued her husband into the, well, major change in her circumstances. And it had been enough to cause her husband to drive her screaming from the house in which they’d lived for almost a decade.
“He said, that I couldn’t, be around, around the k-kids anymore,” she said as though the words were being dragged from her chest. “I wandered… I got as far as, as the Square, and then everyone was around me, all the noise, all the… everything. A-and then d-day came and I hid under some crates because I was scared the light of the sun would hurt my eyes – and then I couldn’t move, and if someone had moved the boxes I don’t even know what might’ve happened to me…”
“I understand,” Lodus said. “Much the same happened to me.”
“But what am I?”
The assassin looked around the alley – sniffed around, checking they weren’t being spied upon – then said, “We’re vampires. I came after you hoping to find out more, to be honest.”
“V-vampires… But – but I don’t want to dri-“
“Drink blood? Tell me about it.” Lodus sighed, straightened his shoulders. “I think there’s something wrong in the myths. Vampires aren’t just evil monsters. We’re the people we used to be, but… a little changed, that’s all.”
Shandarah touched her face, the features which to Lodus had merely been enhanced by undeath’s caress. Her hair was now a luminous white, like his, and while she’d gained the otherworldly eyes and pointed canines of the undead, she’d retained the roundness of her face, the dimples in her cheeks…
She was probably twice his age, but that didn’t stop Lodus considering her a possible future vampire-paramour. What were a few years to a vampire? He had eternity to enjoy.
“So, Shandarah… I was out here tonight looking for our begetter. I want answers. And if I’m not satisfied,” he brought the undead-slaying bolt into view, weaved it between his fingers, “he might just end up as a pile of dust at my feet.”
“Oh, I’m in,” she said at once. And for the first time since he met her Shandarah stopped quivering, and bared her beautiful fangs in her own deadly smile.
* * *
Vampire team-up time was in full swing. Two hours had passed. The thick crowds of mildly-inebriated, happy-looking revellers had thinned out, replaced with the thick crowds of heavily-inebriated, hostile-looking yobs. Where before most moved in couples or small family groups, now everyone was moving in large packs, gangs or wannabe-gangs of useless layabout scum. Lodus didn’t see any violence, but he could sense it brewing there, under the surface of almost everyone he passed. Then, slowly, even these crowds petered out as a light drizzle started to fall from the clouds.
More so than violence itself, he found that he could sense the comings and goings of others of their kind.
They moved together across the rooftops, Lodus and Shandarah and Kirian.
They’d found Kirian in the back-alleys of the Square, and brought him with them on their quest. He’d been the serving-boy at the Lost Albatross, and he more than any of them, Lodus reflected, seemed enraged by what had been done to him. Lodus was plenty mad, but his madness was an abstracted thing of cold steel and silence; Shandarah’s anger was emotional, but unfocussed, liable to distract her more than serve her; but Kirian was berserk.
He’d have to be held back until they got their answers.
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Lodus had gifted one of the ensorcelled bolts to Shandarah, but had claimed he had no more, the other two tucked away inside his jerkin, their radiance thereby dampened. He didn’t think he trusted Kirian with one – not yet, at least.
The boy didn’t just want their begetter dead. He wanted him extinguished from all the planes forever.
That, however, was probably out of their reach. It would require sorcery, and probably a higher calibre of sorcery than the guild’s coffers could afford. Until he found a way of leveraging his newfound abilities to allow him to rob a noble…
It’d be simple, actually, wouldn’t it? Lords and ladies get protected, but do their staff? I could just bewitch the servants, and wait there shining my shoes in the trees beside the manor while my new lackeys bring all the most precious, expensive items right out to me…
Or have them brought to another associate, while I wait in the headquarters…
I could assassinate the same way too…
“Lodus!” Kirian hissed.
He hadn’t been paying attention. The assassin looked at the young, heavy-browed serving-boy in his grey tunic and leggings. He was crouching near the edge of the roof, indicating the street below.
Lodus bent his ear. There were lots of conversations taking place in the street, but he rifled through them rapidly, even though they were several storeys up.
The posh voice stuck out like… well, like a mage in a street full of lowborn.
“… better get those new eyes looked at if this is what you saw in our future. Alley-crawling?”
“They’re here. It’s close.” This voice was different. Lowtown, if he was correct, though the man was trying his best to mask it, sound all prim and proper. “Laintor, can you get Orvati to do a sweep?”
“I’m on it.” A new voice – highborn again.
“Osselor, I’ve got something.” Another highborn. “They’re – oh, yeah –“
The posh-boys’ voices cut off suddenly.
Dropping magisters! Lodus cursed silently.
“Quick!” he whispered. He took Shandarah by the arm, and moved towards Kirian…
But it was already too late for him by the time he heard the sonorous chanting, a sound that should’ve been drowned out by the crowd’s chatter –
It wasn’t just a sound. It was a scent. A caramel, cinnamon-like fragrance that should’ve been imperceptible over the crowd’s odours…
Oh, it was too late for all three of them.
The words were something… something…
Something I knew when I was dead.
That was it! That was his true tongue! He understood –
Dark-dwellers of the altered hour
Come hence, and sense this subtle flower
That by my spell thou shouldst abide and
Forget all dreams thou hadst of power
And the three vampires descended, the lethargy of their thoughts befitting the languor with which they moved through the air, falling, sweeping down softly to stand on the ground before the magisters. The sorcerer’s incantation resounded in Lodus’s skull, a perpetual lullaby that set him adrift, dulled his violent urges.
Fat magister in red; bearded magister in blue; little magister, also in blue –
But the mage right in front of Lodus was a tall sorcerer, wearing a grey robe that was marked on the right side of the chest with its gold, ten-pointed star. A tiny winged imp, no bigger than a kitten, was curled up on his shoulder. The sorcerer held a purple rose in his upraised, gloved hand – a rose that dripped with a fluid that was thick like paint, strands and globs of wine-red, fuchsia and grape-coloured material pouring off it, pooling on the cobbles.
It smelt like food – it smelt edible.
The vampires were transfixed, staring at it. Lodus sensed it as home; it reminded him of… reminded him…
Shrieks and jeers filled the air, and the remaining crowds parted, giving the mages and their opponents a very wide berth. By the time Lodus stirred the fog in his mind enough to let the noises through, they were almost alone in the street – some drunks loitered about fifty feet away outside a disgusting-smelling, all-hours fried-fish place; there were a few faces murmuring at windows…
“… believe it worked as well as it did,” the fat magister in red was saying, drawing a wooden dagger from his sleeve; and Lodus returned his attention to the sorcerer standing in front of him, the beautiful flower…
“They’re supposed to be kneeling,” the sorcerer said. “They might not’ve drunk before. Hurry. You’ve got to… pierce the heart right through, not just stab it.”
It was the worried quiver in his voice that did it.
Nothing triggered the parts of Lodus’s brain that detected peril, even as the fat magister drew his vampire-killing weapon, but this… this tremble in his voice did it.
And not just for him.
It was Kirian who moved first, taking the sorcerer’s upraised arm and, with a snarl of spite, twisting it into a knotted mess.
The sorcerer shrieked; his imp disappeared in a flash of crimson flame, and something was suddenly lost… The sweet, desirable scent vanished – the echoing song in their skulls faded away to nothingness.
Something new was there instead, diverting all attention.
The scent of the magister’s blood, pouring freely from the mangled limb.
“Celestium,” Kirian breathed, sinking his teeth straight into one of the finger-stumps.
Oh – oh no –
It wasn’t a case of temptation. It wasn’t something you could just resist. There was a reason that the vampire in the stories, the one who could live peacefully amongst humans, was always presented as one-in-a-million.
This was resistible in the way that the man lost in the desert could resist plunging into the long-sought oasis, cleansing his body and soul in its depths.
This was a temptation like that of the drowning man, tempted to break the surface of the sea, take his first live-giving breath after minutes that lasted years.
In the moment that the sorcerer’s skin split open, Lodus realised. He understood. Why the myths were true. Why Shandarah had to be driven out of her home. Why it was lucky she hadn’t yet figured out how to bewitch her husband, persuade him to let her stay.
She would’ve eaten her children alive the first time they had an accident.
As swift as darkness closing in on the last candle when it was extinguished, and well before the aghast magisters could even take one step towards aiding their colleague, Lodus and Shandarah joined Kirian in his feast.
The blood consumed him as he consumed it – they were as one, and he knew who he was at last.
I walk the glass plain. My spirit has flesh, flesh that falls apart like ribbons, heals back in the same manner. But not without the pain.
The pain.
As minutes turn into hours, I shiver under the many moons – but I cannot lie down, cannot subject myself to that; so I stumble on, sacrificing my feet, over and over.
And when I find it I fall into the red river and drown myself.
The relief.
It is as I arise from the river that I am reborn.
Even one of them on their own would’ve drained the sorcerer dry in seconds – with the three of them, he was a husk before his heart could beat twice. They let the corpse fall down, grey and floppy as the robe it wore.
Lodus knew it now. He was death. Death was his purpose.
The fight was incredibly brief, considering their enemies were the much-vaunted magister-defenders of Mund. The sorcerer had been the only real threat, and he’d made mistakes.
The flames that burst into life in the fat man’s hand vanished just as quickly as he went down to his knees in a puddle of blood, his throat not just torn open but torn off. A female magister at the rear started chanting a spell, and she swelled up, ten, fifteen feet in height; by the time she arrived, swinging her massive fists, beard-mage and small-mage had joined the others on the cobbles, dying.
By using her druidry to increase her size, the magister had merely increased the amount of blood they could drink from her. When she toppled, the tall glass window of a nearby ground-floor shop shattered, and they lay like leeches upon her body, taking every drop.
The horrified sounds of the onlookers and their flight from the vicinity mattered little to Lodus and, as far as he could tell at least, the other members of his small but burgeoning cabal of vampires were similarly disinterested.
They’d found what they’d really been seeking all this time. They’d been empty inside, and now they’d been filled. They were complete.
They hadn’t needed answers. They needed this.
He withdrew his fangs and cleaned off his mouth on the still-enlarged druid’s still-enlarged robe.
“Let’s not linger,” he said. “That little demon disappearing – it doesn’t bode well. There might be more.”
Kirian and Shandarah broke off too, following his example, wiping their gory chops on the sail’s-worth of fabric.
“Let them come,” Kirian said. There were little bits of flesh in his teeth as he grinned. “Man, I feel like I can fly!”
The vampire-boy sprang into the breeze from his crouched position, and, while he wasn’t actually flying, Lodus could see the way the air seemed to catch him even more than before, carrying him up almost to the height of the surrounding buildings in a single bound.
Kirian sort-of hovered as he slowly descended again.
“They’ll be even more prepared next time,” Lodus warned as the boy reached the ground once more. “We came really close to dying, just then.”
“We’re already dead,” Shandarah whispered.
She was staring down at the marks on the magister’s robe left by the blood on her lips… Lodus could see she hadn’t even come close to getting all of it off – her cheeks and throat remained slathered in the red stuff.
“I’m still me,” he said firmly. “We’re still us. Just…”
“What?” Kirian snapped. “You saying we won’t do this again?”
Because the man in the desert will abandon the oasis after a mouthful. The drowning man will take just a single breath before diving back beneath the waves.
“But… it felt so good.”
Lodus shuddered, hearing the words come, not from Kirian’s lips, but Shandarah’s, knowing she was right.
He led them away from the killing-ground and, exploring his own increased abilities, moved lightly to the rooftops in order to take them to their new home, where they would be safe.
He got it now. He understood.
Their begetter was gone. The vampire would have easily dug him up, dug them all up, if he’d wanted to have a chat with them about their recent transformation. Every day that passed made finding him less and less likely. And the magistry would’ve been after him, the trail of destruction he’d left in his wake over the last few days, if he was still around. Not after their little trio of newborn vampires.
They would learn the lesson from him all the same. They would go into hiding, and grow stronger. They would figure out how best to survive the day, and how to make more like them, eventually. Figure it out on their own. Trial and error.
It didn’t take long for them to get back to base. Lodus halted on the corner of Welderway, on the roof of Strippey’s Plate-Merchants, not fifty yards from the entrance to the headquarters. His headquarters, now, he supposed.
He knew it wouldn’t matter – they could just enchant the mortals as they saw fit – but even still, he didn’t want to bring this argument in with him when he introduced his vampire-fellows to his assassins for the first time.
“Look, Shan, you’ve got to let it go,” Kirian was saying. He sounded almost placid now. “We killed them. They were about to kill us. Did you see what they did to us? Casting a spell to turn us into animals, all trussed-up for the slaughter…”
“Did you see what we did to them?” Shandarah asked, gleaming eyes downcast. “You wouldn’t treat animals like that.”
Lodus didn’t have the same misgivings as either of them.
“I know what we did,” he said softly, and they both shut up, turning to him. “Murder. I’ve got no illusions, no delusions about it. It wasn’t self-defence, and it wasn’t wrong, either. We could’ve fled from the mages as easily as kill them, couldn’t we? But did they deserve to live, trying to return us to the grave, just like that?
“No. We drank deep, and we were at peace – you felt that, right? Our maker be damned – we had the power, tonight, and we murdered the murderers. Well, you know what? We will do it again.”
He looked at them, and even Shan met his eyes.
Emboldened, he went on, “We’ll do it right. No butchery, like that was, bleeding them out in the street. We’ll find the bad guys, the wrong ones, and we’ll eat them. Keep it real nice and quiet. I’m going to show you how. And we won’t be in danger, we won’t be causing harm. Just removing the vermin from Mund.”
There was a pause, then Kirian asked, his voice halting in its eagerness:
“W-when, Lodus? When can we do it again?”
The assassin smiled, and picked a surprise piece of magister from his own teeth with his tongue, spitting it aside.
“Soon.”