Edda (27 page)

“Greetings, mortals.” It was a voice out of eternity, it was a voice full of harm, and it was a voice that Erik recognized.

“Blood and thunder! It’s the vampyre, Count Illystivostich!”

“Is that bad?” Ghost was holding her pistol steadily in front of her.

“It’s as bad as it can possibly be. He’s the most powerful creature in Epic. Your bullets won’t hurt him. My weapons won’t hurt him. Jodocus’s elementals won’t hurt him. He can fly faster than we can run. But the worst thing is his voice. Don’t listen to him or you will find yourself agreeing with whatever he proposes.”

“How kind of you to sing my praises, although perhaps you might use a more elegant and poetic turn of phrase in the future.” The vampyre came into view: a white-faced demon whose fangs glistened in a sensuous, red-lipped mouth. His dark eyes burned with a feral hunger and, instinctively, Erik looked away. But there was something wrong with the count. The vampyre was leaning heavily against the chair. His black leather tunic and dark velvet sleeves hung on a body that was emaciated to the point of being skeletal, nothing like the robust physique that Erik remembered from their last encounter. Where the vampyre’s long hair had been as black as a moonless night before, it was now gray and brittle-looking.

“All right then, how about using my music trick again? That seems to be pretty effective in this world.” Athena reached into her satchel. “If you all put your earphones in and turn up the volume, I’ll broadcast some music through our coms.”

“Good idea,” replied Erik, “except I want to talk to the count. Tie my hands and don’t let me move toward him.”

While Cindella held her hands out behind her to Athena, who wrapped a cord tight around them, the vampyre looked on with a sneer.

“Have you no manners? To disregard your host so! Desist in that rude practice and converse with me like a well-bred person should.” But the others had taken Erik’s warning seriously, perhaps affected by the note of genuine alarm in his voice, and they had their headsets in place; Erik could hear the faint tinny sounds of the music of Milan’s favorite punk band escaping from the headsets. Unable now to hear the vampyre, they were nevertheless watching with expressions of concern.

“So, my dear, you seem to know me. Perhaps you can address my disadvantage and tell me who you are and why you want to speak to me?” Count Illystivostich smiled, hiding his fangs.

“My name is Erik. I’m a human. Do you understand what that means?”

“I’m sorry, my hearing is not what it was. Would you mind coming a little closer, please, and saying that again?”

Cindella tried to step toward the vampyre, but the cords that bound her hands checked her progress. Setting Cindella’s face to show a scowl, Erik turned his avatar toward Athena. But it was no use; she simply shook her head.

“I’m a human.” Erik spoke more loudly. “This is only my avatar. Do you understand that? Are you sentient, or are you simply a sophisticated NPC?”

The vampyre looked back at him blankly. “Curious. You are lying and yet you are telling the truth.” As he spoke, the count’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Come closer, please. Speaking across this distance is a strain for me.”

“I’m afraid I can’t, even if I wanted to. What is stopping you from coming closer to me?” Erik asked.

“Hunger, my child. Hunger beyond mortal comprehension. It has exhausted me. You would have died of starvation four years ago had all your food been taken from you. But not me. I linger on, immortal, a survivor of a conquered world.”

“The army invaded four years ago?”

“It did. Through a magical gateway. They killed everyone, razed every building to the ground. They even destroyed my castle high in the mountains. Not that I cared. Castles can be rebuilt. But these creatures are not food. There is no blood in them. Not like there is in you, in all of you. How the scent of it fills my thoughts. Feed me. End the torture that assails me beyond mortal measure. Give me just a mouthful of your blood and I will assist you in whatever way I can.”

Erik felt sorry for the vampyre. It was impossible for him to imagine what it would be like to be in a state of starvation for four years, far beyond the point at which a human would expire. And perhaps the vampyre really would help them; they had a common enemy, after all. As if reading his thoughts, the vampyre slowly nodded his head.

“Spare me a mouthful. You are young and healthy, you will barely notice, but for me it will”—he slumped a little and his voice dropped even further—“bring me out of the abyss.”

Again Cindella turned around to Athena, this time waving her hands. Frowning, Athena shook her head once more. In order to create some slack in the cord, Cindella took a step toward Athena and gestured for her to remove her earphones.

“What?” asked Athena cautiously, raucous music billowing around her head. She was standing with her arms raised, ready to push the earplug back into place. The others were watching, alarmed.

“It’s not like you think. He’s nearly done for. I’m just going to give him a mouthful of blood from my arm. Then we’ll get his assistance.”

Athena rolled her eyes. “Oh come on.”

“My dear lady,” croaked the vampyre. But Athena had already replaced her earphones and wasn’t listening. Instead, she was pulling Cindella away from the throne.

“I’ll be back,” Erik called out over Cindella’s shoulder.

Not until they were at the wall, as far away from the vampyre as they could be, did Athena ease up. Now that he had a chance to think about it and now that the heartrending words of the count were no longer causing his head to swim, Erik was no longer so sure that feeding the vampyre even a little blood was such a good idea.

“What’s happening?” asked Ghost, with a rather suspicious look on her face.

“He is very persuasive still,” Erik answered, “but he’s incredibly weak. When our opponents took over this world, they replaced all the Epic NPCs with their own units. But their units don’t have the blood he needs and so he’s been starving for four years.”

Ghost looked unconvinced. “So he’s no threat?”

“Well, his charm effect remains powerful and he may have enough energy to make one last assault if we got too close. But he doesn’t seem to be able to walk, let alone fly.”

“Why don’t we leave him, then?” asked Ghost. “Let’s find a path that leads to the portal and get out of here.”

“That’s fine with me. I just wanted to see if he was sentient. In our version of Epic, he became self-aware.”

“And is he?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t think he understood what I was talking about.”

“Beware!” cried Gunnar.

While they had been talking, the vampyre had been crawling stealthily toward them. Realizing he had been spotted, the count moved faster still, pushing himself with emaciated legs and scrabbling with his long fingers for a hold on the flagstones that made up the tower’s floor. And through all this urgent motion the vampyre’s burning gaze was fixed greedily upon Cindella.

Erik shouted “Run!” and made for the ramp that led up the side of the tower. Once there, he paused and turned to see flashes of red.

“Just trying a Higgs on him.” It was Ghost who had opened fire. Although she was scoring repeated hits on the creature, all they did was slow him for a moment.

“It’s no good. We have to run a stake through his heart and we can’t do that while he’s awake and able to drain life out of us with his touch.”

This information, and perhaps the urgency in Erik’s voice, caused Ghost to turn and sprint in order to catch up with the others.

Behind her, a feeble travesty of his former self, the vampyre nevertheless strove to close the gap with the ferocity of a starving wolf. He was ten meters behind Ghost, and the distance between them increased slightly as the vampyre slowed upon reaching the ramp. All the same, the count kept on forcing his body toward them, and if willpower alone could give him the speed he needed, it was clear they would all have fallen victim to him.

“Quick! Look into each silver thread. See if you can spot one that would take us close to the portal.”

The silver openings of the ethereal pathways ran all the way up the tower and they made it seem as though the building were packed with stars. When you looked into one, the image swam and buckled before you could focus on the distant horizons and it took a few seconds to check a path—time enough for several heartbeats and the horrible feeling that the vampyre was getting closer.

They ran from pathway to pathway, leapfrogging each other, but the vampyre was gradually gaining on them. Unless someone found the right pathway soon, they would have to skip a whole section or more to get away from him.

As Erik glanced back to see the vampyre pulling himself over the top of the ramp to the level they were currently on, Ghost’s voice rang out triumphantly.

“I think I have it!”

They hurried to join her. Unlike all the views from the other doorways, this one included a patch of gray that shimmered with the same texture as the surface of the portals they had used. Moreover, around the edges of the gray circle, Erik could just make out distorted green and olive colors that matched those of the tanks and troops of their opponents.

“That must be the one we need,” he said confidently. Cindella prepared to step onto the ethereal path. “Hurry. We had better hold hands again.”

As soon as everyone was linked, Cindella raised one foot to move onto the silver path beyond, but before leaving the tower Erik couldn’t help but turn her head.

Five meters away was the pitiful ruin of the vampyre. It was staring at Cindella with an unbearable look of desperation, and Erik, for all his desire to get away from the vampyre, felt a great wave of sympathy for him. The count was being tortured in a manner that was terrible to contemplate.

“Help me!” Count Illystivostich cried, and Erik’s heart lurched. Before he could turn Cindella around, however, Athena shoved her through the doorway and with a gasp he was free of the spell. Erik still felt some pity for the count, but knew that if he had listened to the vampyre, they would all now be lying on the stone floor of the tower, empty of blood. Not just Cindella and Gunnar—that didn’t matter—but Ghost, Athena, and Jodocus; they would have been slaughtered without mercy and without conscience.

Only twenty steps were needed to bring them to the vicinity of the shimmering gray rectangle that was the portal. From their perspective on the silver road, the world was swirling around them like a scene from a hall of concave mirrors. It was a world full of soldiers and military vehicles, but for once they represented no danger. Confident that ethereal travel was unknown to the portal’s makers, Cindella walked right through the army until she could get no closer to the portal.

“I’m not sure how far we can go from the path before we cease to be in the ethereal world, but we can run from here; the portal’s right beside us.” Erik checked that everyone was close, and as he did so, he saw with horror that the vampyre had not given up, but was scrabbling its way along the silver road.

“He’s almost on us. Let’s go!”

It took almost no time at all for Cindella to leap into the portal and once again Erik experienced the now familiar flickering of gray light and the hiss of static. Then Cindella was through to a new world, to a rainy day in a large military compound that was coming quickly into focus.

“Run! Run!” Cindella pushed Ghost and then Athena. There was a new problem: they were rapidly leaving the ethereal plane and coming into view to those on the material plane. “It’s wearing off. Run!”

“Yes. I feel my elementals grow strong again.” Jodocus began to sprint, Gunnar just behind him. Bringing up the rear, Erik felt considerable anxiety as they rushed through ranks of silent troopers. It seemed as though moonlight were streaming from their bodies and all about them the distortions of the landscape grew less. By the time they were past the camp, the world had settled. It was possible to hear everyone’s footfalls and see the wet splashes they made as they ran. There was no doubt about it, they were all firmly back on the material plane.

Glancing back across the field to the tents of the camp they had just come through, Erik looked for signs of alarm among the guards, but there were none. They had done it! They were through to what was probably the final world, the world of their mysterious opponents. His delight, however, was immediately replaced by astonishment as a howl of pain preceded the appearance of the vampyre, still striving after them, still looking into Erik’s soul with tortured eyes.

“Mudgrubber!” panted Athena. “Doesn’t he ever give up?”

“Come on,” urged Erik.

Not until the group had run for more than a mile through a copse of trees and over a hill did they rest, Ghost and Athena panting with exertion. All of them were staring back the way they had come. And after about two minutes, the vampyre crawled into view once more. But there was something wrong. Steam was pouring from his elegant clothing, as if he were on fire.

“It’s daylight in this world!” exclaimed Gunnar, looking up at the sky.

It had been after sunset in Epic when they had embarked on their ethereal journey. But here, to judge from the light, it was mid-morning. Even as Erik studied the sky, the clouds parted enough that a patch of sunlight flowed across the field. The moment it ran across the vampyre, a terrible and horrifying scream broke from the creature, as though he had been stabbed. Dark steam rushed upward. And where the count had been lying, there was now only a black silhouette against the green grass.

“Ha!” shouted Athena. “Got you!”

Ghost looked equally delighted. But for Erik, what they had just witnessed made him feel rather sad. Perhaps it was just the aftereffect of the count’s charm. Or perhaps it was the memory of the benevolent avatar from his version of Epic. In either case, Erik had to force himself to turn away and concentrate on this new world.

As the others gave vent to their relief that the vampyre was no longer a threat, Cindella bent down and touched a moss-covered stone. “This place seems darker than Epic, grittier or something. But perhaps that’s just because it’s overcast.”