Much Fall of Blood-ARC (3 page)

She sheathed the claws again, as he fell with barely a whimper. There was a slight clatter from his sword. She paused for an instant to enjoy the look on his face. She loved that look of startlement and betrayal. It suited men so well.

Her fingertips were once again without blemish, her nails beautifully manicured. There was a cost to turning your own body into the perfect assassin's killing tool, but Elizabeth had paid that price long ago. Long, long, long ago. More than a century before.

She opened the door to the chambers of the captive duke of Valahia with a smile on her lips. There was something about killing that awoke certain hungers in her. But magic required that she should not use the boy within to satisfy those lusts. He had other value to her. Mindaug had given her a time and place at which he would still have to be alive and, for best effect, virginal. At the time and a place when the shadow ate the moon. And her control of herself was superb. After that, he could be abused and die.

* * *

The prince in the tower had not spent long hours mooning out of the windows or singing to passers-by. Heredity had shaped him into a silent man—that and a lack of company, perhaps. Besides, neither were practical options. There were no windows he could see out of.

King Emeric had seen to it that his hostage lacked for nothing—except his liberty, and the freedom to use his mother tongue. The prince had had instruction in several others, Frankish, Greek, Aramaic. He had had tutors for these subjects, of course, Hungarian ones. But other than those and the silent guards, he saw few people, and certainly none of his own age or speaking his own tongue. He had kept the language alive somehow in his memory, reciting the stories and songs of his childhood—silently, under his breath every evening. He had been forbidden to speak or sing them aloud.

He'd done so at first to escape the crushing fear and loneliness of being a small boy taken far from everything he loved and knew, and imprisoned here. And then terrified out of his wits—after being beaten and shown slow death—an act of brutality that as an older, more logical man, he understood had been to ensure that the king of Hungary had a suitably cowed vassal. Instead, his spirit had been shaped by the experience into a secretive but fiercely resistant one. A spirit that sometimes indulged in cruel and wild fantasies of revenge, but more often just longed to be free.

As for sanity . . . was he mad? Sometimes he wondered.

As prisons went, his apartments had every luxury—except windows. There was a narrow arrow slit high up on the wall above the stair. From a certain angle, he could see the sky through it. Not direct sunlight, but daylight, and sometimes cold breezes wafted in from the outside world, strange in their scents, unfamiliar in their chill.

By the age of twenty he had, to some extent, forgotten the world outside the walls. Not forgotten a desire for it, no, never! But forgotten the details of it. Books, for all that he loved them, were not the same. And Father Tedesco, his most frequent companion, was more inclined to talk of the glories of Heaven, than the glories of the world outside.

Vlad heard someone outside the doors, and wondered if the old priest had come to visit him again.

There was a faint clatter and the door swung gently open.

It wasn't the elderly priest.

It was a vision.

An angel.

Naturally she had come to save him from this hell.

So why was he so afraid?

The hills echoed with the howling of the wolves. The slim, dark-complexioned man with the silver earrings did not appear to find that a worrisome thing. He slipped along the ghost of a trail as silently and as sure-footedly as a wolf himself. The full moon shone down casting spiky shadows on the pine-needle covered forest floor. The wyvern was just a slightly more spiky piece of darkness. Spiky darkness with red eyes that glowed like coals. Wyverns could shift their opalescent colors to match their surroundings. Here she did not have to.

"So, old one. The blood moon time is coming. The signs say she will capture him," said the lithe man, looking warily at her.

The wyvern nodded. "She will watch over him carefully. And she has killed many of our kind." It spoke his tongue. That was part of the magic gift of the creature. A small but vital part.

"Blood calls. We must answer. We have a compact to honor. Blood to spill." His teeth flashed briefly at that.

"You are too fond of blood, Angelo."

He shrugged. "It is in my nature. My kind needs to see it flow. Life is just the song of the hunter and the hunted."

"There is more to it than that," said the wyvern.

"Not for us. Prey or predator, all part of the one or the other, and part of the same."

The wyvern was a hunter herself, and understood the wolfish Angelo and his kin better than most. "But which one is the boy? Hunter or the hunted?"

Angelo laughed humorlessly. "We will just have to see, won't we? And she considers all of us prey. Him more so than us."

The old wyvern sighed. "True." She bowed her head. "Strike cleanly."

Angelo drew his blade. It was an old, old knife, handed down from generation to generation. The flakes of razor-edged chert were still sharp. The magic would not allow metals to be used for this deed, the start to the renewing of the compact. It came from a time of stone, tooth and claw. "When have I ever done otherwise, old friend?" he said grimly. "It is the least I can do."

Afterwards he gathered the blood, and cradled his burden, cut from the creature's belly. The wyvern was one of the old ones, a creature woven of magics, not designed by nature. There was no other way to get her egg out. The wyvern had to die so that the new ones could be born. And the young wyverns were needed, if the old oath was to be renewed.

Blood must flow. It was all in the blood.

The wolves howled as he walked the trail back towards the tents. Angelo howled in reply. By morning they must all be gone. They were not welcome here any more. The local residents did not approve of the gypsies. Angelo found that funny. They were not the recent incomers, traveling people from the south, barely in these lands for a few centuries. They had roved this land for always and always. But the "gypsies" were a good cover. The old ones had adopted some of their ways, just as real gypsies had taken on some of the ways of the pack.

Well, it should be a year before they came back to this part of their land, in the normal course of events. Of course this year might be different. Angelo stalked out of the woods and slipped past a neat farmstead as silently as he'd come. Somehow, the dogs chained there still barked. It was, he supposed, inevitable that they would know he was near. Dogs did. It was an old kinship, even if they were estranged now.

Instinctively, Angelo surveyed the property. The hen-coop beckoned, but he had more important things to do than harvest it. The camp must be broken, and that took time; time they could not spare. They must be miles away before dawn. The evil old woman had her creatures too. They would bring her word that the old wyvern was dead. She'd been investigating the subject of the Dragon's blood, and word got around.

The settled ones deemed this their property and the "gypsies" to be trespassers and something of a nuisance. Amusingly enough, that was just how Angelo and his clan regarded the settlers. A nuisance that was cluttering up part of their ancient hunting range. The settlers were too numerous to eliminate, but the tribe made up for it as well as possible by preying on them, as wise predators do, not too much or too often. That way prey went on being prey, and available.

* * *

Gatu Orkhan stared narrow-eyed at General Nogay. "I will need more gold. Much more."

"I have been told that this can be provided," said Nogay. "But gold, Orkhan, is not all we need."

Nogay knew his master to be a weak reed. A good fighter, true. A general who had used his forces well, carefully pitting them against foes he could beat. But while he might have blood of khans in his veins, he lacked that which made men love him.

Lithuanian gold from across the northern border, gold landed in secret on the beaches to the east, had helped. But thanks to the legacy of Ulaghchi Khan, the clans—especially the traditionalists such as the powerful Hawk clan—frowned on ostentation, away from feasts and weddings.

"Yes. We will need more magics," said Gatu, misunderstanding him.

Nogay contained his sigh. He was no magic worker. No shaman who could move through other realms. He had simply used some simple spells provided by his northern paymaster, Grand Duke Jagiellon. The spells required certain rigid conditions—clear sight of the victim, and items of the victim's essence—hair, nail clippings, skin. He'd killed for his master before, with these tools. And he'd been very careful to make sure that he had some hair from Gatu, and he disposed of his own hair and nail-clippings in the fire.

Sitting back in his chair in his office in the Castel a Terra of the Citadel of Corfu, Benito Valdosta raised his eyebrows. "And you want me to come out to your estate for some hunting but not to tell anyone. Guiliano, how stupid do you think I am?"

Guiliano Lozza had begun to acquire a little layer of comfortable plumpness again that had made the recruits in Venetian Corfiote irregulars call him
Loukoumia
. Marriage to Thalia, and with a babe on the way, had eased some of the bitter lines that the murder of his wife and child had brought to the face of the former guerilla-captain. Guiliano had turned down offer of the job of Captain-General of the island without a second thought. He was more interested in his olives, his grapes and the possibility of a pack of plump children to spoil. It would be easy for a fool to forget that the
Loukoumia
was a master swordsman and strategist.

Benito was only a fool some of the times, and this wasn't one of them. Guiliano smiled. "Spiro told me I might as well be direct with you. It's a dangerous business, Benito. One I wish I was not involved in."

"Then why are you involved, Guiliano? Just what is going on?"

"Listening ears, Benito," said Guiliano quietly. "Trust me. For old time's sake."

Benito sighed. "I've got responsibilities, Guiliano."

"She—they'll do without you for a day, Benito," said the swordsman-turned-olive-grower, understandingly.

Benito looked at the crib in the corner of his office. Times changed. He now had an office, not to mention the crib. "But will I do without them?" he asked wryly. "Very well. Tomorrow."

Guiliano shook his head. "Tonight. It must be tonight. The wind is right," he said, cryptically, "for the kind of game we're after."

The wind was setting westerly. Good for Albania, if not wild boar. The hairs on Benito's neck prickled. "I'll be there."

"So will our old friends, Taki and Spiro."

That confirmed his suspicions. Every second local male was called Spiro, and every fourth, Taki. The conversation would mean nothing to a listener who was not aware that their mutual friends Taki and Spiro—referred to together—were the skipper and the mate of a small fishing boat. They were principally fishermen, anyway, although it could be argued that they were actually principally drinkers of mediocre to bad wine, and incidentally extremely good seamen and fisherman. Like all skippers around these parts, Taki fished for some targets that were best fished for on moonless nights, landing goods when and where duties were not collected on cargoes. Benito would have trusted them with his life. He'd had to before.

Whatever was going on, it had forced a man who would rather grow olives to mess with politics. A man who would rather farm than adorn the most powerful military and second most powerful political office of the island. It had to be worth looking into. Corfu was a Venetian possession, but it was also a small island close to Byzantine Greece and the wild mountainous tribal lands of the Balkans. As much as the tribal clans up in Albania and the hinterland accepted any one leader, it was Iskander Beg, the Lord of the Mountains. Iskander Beg had held off both the Byzantines and Hungary—no small feat.

Some of the tribes had occasionally raided Corfu in the past. Corfu was a soft place compared to their iron hills. The Venetians, and the local magic, had made that an expensive exercise—but the cost had been counted by both sides. As the temporary Deputy Governor, Benito wanted to avoid any more attacks again. Corfu needed a time at peace to recover and grow. An enemy might see this as a good opportunity to attack.

Benito had put out feelers to Iskander Beg, with those who did a little legitimate trade with southern Illyria. He had not expected a reply from this source. He smiled ruefully to himself. He should have. He'd learned a great deal about politics in the two months he'd waited for Venice to send out a new governor, much of which he hadn't wanted to know. The underlying principle seemed to be that nothing in politics was ever straight or direct.

He sighed and looked at the clock. He had yet another meeting with the surviving Libri di Oro, the aristocratic landlord parasites that Venice had created from the Corfiote nobility. Created, and then made rotten and idle. They would pour platitudes on him, when what most of the ticks wanted was for him to drop dead, and the opportunity to get their old lives back, with as much extra land-loot as they could steal added to their wealth. Benito would be polite in return, although he wanted to break them. Going off in the dark with Lozza would be a relief. He hoped that it would be to do something stupid and dangerous. At least he would be more in control then.

* * *

The water was black, nearly as dark as the mood on the boat. Even the wise-cracking Spiro was less than himself.

"You realize," said Guiliano, "that if this goes wrong, Maria will kill all of us tomorrow." He was being perfectly literal. She would, and Guiliano understood Maria's "wifely" role with Aidoneus better than most Venetians. His wife believed firmly in the Goddess, and had told him where things stood.