Secret History of Elizabeth Tudor, Vampire Slayer (15 page)

We cross the river again by stealth, taking care to avoid the watch. I am concerned that they may interfere with my plans but Walsingham reassures me, “After the horror the watchmen witnessed last night, they will not be on the streets, Majesty.”

I want to believe him but remain concerned. “How can we be certain?” Surely among the watch are at least some men of valor and conscience who will not be deterred from their duty even in the face of such peril?

“They have been told to tend to the safety of their families and let their betters deal with the rest,” Cecil says.

“And they are content to do so?” I ask.

“Should they not be?” Dee faces me in the wherry, his cloak drawn close against the chill, his ruddy face alight with excitement. However much the rest of us dread what we are about to encounter, Dee knows no such burden. All things in the universe, be they good or evil, fascinate him.

“Ordinary folk endure much,” he continues, “at the behest of their betters. But in return they are supposed to be protected. That is the compact the nobility strikes with them, otherwise surely they would revolt rather than be treated as they are.”

I am tempted to ask what is so bad about the lot of ordinary folk, but I suspect the magus of adhering to the radical idea that as all men are equal in the sight of God, they should be equal in each other’s as well. Truly, if that addled
notion ever becomes common currency, the world will be undone.

We alight at the bottom of the High Street, as before, and quickly make our way up the bank. Barely have we done so than I am struck by the change from the previous night. Whereas before the street and lanes were crowded with drunks, whores, beggars, and the like now they are empty. Scarcely a soul is stirring out of doors. The men of the watch may have held their tongues, but others have been whispering. Sensible folk, well aware of how swiftly disaster can descend, are taking no chances.

For just an instant, I think that a lack of prey may discourage the vampires and make my task all the harder. The thought dismays me. Surely, I have a better care for my people than that?

And yet, I must be realistic. True enough, I have come to stop another wave of killings, but even more important, I have come to do as I must to increase my own power. I make no apologies for that.

“If they hunt tonight,” I say, “the vampires will have to go where people think themselves safe.”

Every stouthearted Englishman wants to believe that his home is his castle, but I suspect people feel better protected against danger in other places. To our right, I see the dark mass of St. Savior’s Church, its square towers looming above the cluster of its outbuildings. The church appears quiet, but even as I watch, a small group scurries through the wisps of fog rising from the river and slips through the gate. A moment later, when the sanctuary door is opened to admit them, I glimpse lamps burning inside and what looks like a considerable mass of people huddled there.

“Perhaps we should make for Southwark Manor,” Cecil suggests. “If Mordred really is in residence there—”

“We cannot be certain of that,” Walsingham says. He has reported to us earlier about his investigations into the manor, but now he adds, “The absence of property records is suspicious, of course, but hardly unique.”

He alludes, without actually saying so, to the confusion regarding property that has plagued the realm since so many church holdings were seized and sold off, whether for profit or to buy the loyalty of the great families. Clear title, so prized and defended in this land down through the centuries, is just one more casualty of my father’s reign. Slowly, the records are being reassembled but there are still notable gaps.

“I have confirmed that the property was sold by the late Archbishop of York,” Walsingham says, “but as to who purchased it or whether it has been sold again since, I cannot be certain.”

I glance again toward the church and decide. “It does not matter. We cannot take the risk that while we look elsewhere, the vampires will come here and wreak havoc.”

Cecil looks aghast. “Surely they would not dare to enter a church?”

Would they not? Mordred truly appears to believe that he and his kind are as much a part of God’s plan as are we. Or else, he suggests, there is no God. In either case, why would there be any barrier to the vampires entering holy ground?

“I don’t know whether they would or not. But I will not leave my people in such peril.”

We conceal ourselves as best we can near the approach to St. Savior’s. For a time, nothing happens. I am chilled to the bone and at the point of questioning the wisdom of my strategy when a flicker of movement near the treetops catches my eye.

Beside me, Cecil gasps as a pair of vampires come out of the sky and settle lightly on the snow-covered ground. My startled
Spirit and I only just manage to grab hold of Dee in time to stop the magus, in his fascination, from revealing our position. Only Walsingham appears unaffected, standing silently and unmoving as he observes our adversaries.

“Remain here,” I say under my breath, and step forward. Hours before, I watched the ritualized combat of the joust with all its rules and conventions. Men argue that the same code must be observed in warfare lest the killing be without honor. Yet from what I have heard, once battle is joined, such niceties are forgotten.

I dispense with any such nonsense from the start. As I draw my next breath, I raise my arm and, without warning, send a spear of light hurtling at the nearest vampire. It hits him full in the chest. He stops stock-still, stares down at himself, and in an instant splinters into nothingness.

The other is turning toward me when I strike again. Give him credit, he manages to leap away from my first blow, gaining the sky before I strike him down with the second. He splinters as he falls toward the ground, showering it with tiny fragments of light that blink out and are gone in a heartbeat.

Power fills me. Glorious, blood-heating power unlike any I have ever known save at the peak of physical pleasure when the world falls away and the spirit soars free. Far from feeling the exertion of my efforts, I am renewed and reborn in a way I could not have imagined possible. Eagerly, I look for more prey.

They come floating out of the sky, hesitating as though they are able to sense the deaths of their kind yet not quite believing what is happening. The light swells within me. Without hesitation, I strike again … and again, twice more in quick succession. I am in the lists, on the battlefield, whirling, turning in all directions to confront my enemies, who fall before me, chaff on the wind.

Dimly, I am aware of my counselors, huddled in the shadows under the broad-branched trees where they are illuminated again and again by the bursts of dazzling light that come from me. Their white, strained faces contorted with shock put me in mind of the Greek theater masks portraying tragedy and comedy, the twin aspects of life between which we reel. Dee, Cecil, Walsingham … they are my chorus urging me on yet at the same time warning of disaster when pride outstrips reason.

With each death, my strength grows. I feed on those I kill, gaining in power by the moment. Growing, too, in hunger. My appetite is ravenous; I am insatiable. I will kill and kill and kill without ceasing until—

“Stop!”

For an instant, I falter. The vampire I am about to kill shoots into the sky, escaping me. Suddenly, all is stillness.

Mordred walks out of the night onto the killing ground where I stand, the greater blackness of his cloak flaring around him. He is pale as moonlight and as bright. His presence rolls over me, a wave from the deepest sea of eternity.

“What in the name of all creation are you doing?” he demands.

Face-to-face with him, the yearning I have come to know all too well rises in me, an elation that fills my spirit and body alike, banishing all sorrow, all doubt, all mortal weakness. So powerful is it that I can almost believe that Mordred must be right, we are fated to be together. Before such a treacherous notion can take greater hold of me, I must act.

With no thought but to strike him down, I try to raise my arm, only to find that the weight of it is suddenly too much for me. I let it sag instead.

“I am defending my people!”

He comes closer still. I see again how beautiful he is. Longing for him threatens to consume me. I resist with all my strength.

“No, you are not!” he exclaims. “If you want to defend them, you will seek peace with me. Instead, you declare war. Are you mad?”

Truth be told, I wonder at times at my own sanity, dark times when the scaffold looms ever present in my thoughts and I cannot rest for the terror it provokes in me. But I am not in the grip of any such dread now. I am reborn as Morgaine’s heir; I have her power. I need fear nothing, not even Mordred.

“There can be no peace between us!” The very thought terrifies me, reminding me as it does of my weakness concerning him. “Your kind wantonly butchers mine and you imagine—what? That I will surrender to you?”

A flicker of regret crosses his face, enough to tell me all.

“You did think that!” I crow, unable to contain my glee that he could be so deluded. “You thought to beat me. Let me tell you, that will never happen! From the time of my birth, enemies have sought to destroy me. One by one, they have failed, and so, by God, will you!”

He looks away, long enough for me to wonder what he sees in his mind’s eye, what landscape so engages him.

At last he turns back to me. “I thought to give you a lesson. A handful dead, sacrificed so that many more can live and this realm be safe for all time. But you refuse to learn. You go forward blindly, heedless of what damage you do.”

He raises his hands and I brace, thinking he means to attack me. But a moment later, he lets them drop as though in resignation.

“Heed me, Elizabeth. Morgaine had to kill hundreds of my kind …
hundreds
… before she had enough power to come against me, and even then she failed. I survived, she did not.
Have you thought of that? Even more, have you given an instant’s thought to what happened to this realm afterward? Or do you imagine that men sit about their fires of a winter night and reminisce about the golden age that followed Arthur?”

“Darkness fell over this kingdom
because
you killed Arthur, not because of what Morgaine did to stop you.”

“Arthur was a man, nothing more. Had I not killed him, he might have lived a few more years, but then he would have died, as every mortal man must do. He would have been cut down by an enemy or an injury or by any of the ailments that strike without warning.”

Mordred’s audacity threatens to rob me of breath. It is all I can do to respond. “You cannot excuse what you did on the grounds that he would have died anyway! He was your father! It is for God to say when that happens, not you.”

“Then God has been oddly silent on the matter! Darkness was poised to sweep over England long before I ever made the bargain that I did. And it is poised to do so again. Had Morgaine made the right choice and allied with me, all the centuries of suffering that followed could have been avoided. Will you equal her for wanton foolishness?”

What twisted reason is this? Does he truly think to convince me that he did all for England’s sake?

“It is not I who is mad, but you! Your kind
feed
on mine!”

“So do
yours
!”

At my look of shocked disbelief, he flings out an arm. “Look around you, Elizabeth,” he commands. “You and your nobility take the lion’s share of everything this realm possesses and leave mere bones for the rest. A single failure of crops and there is starvation. A chill winter and the frozen dead stack up like cordwood, while summer fevers sweep away legions too weak to fight them off while you sit in comfort in your palaces.”

“That is how God has ordered the world,” I insist. “It is not for us to question.” I know what I say to be true, yet the words ring hollow all the same.

“How very convenient. But you take far more than my kind ever have. We need only feed in moderation, rarely causing death. Being fed upon is how more of us are made, or did you not know that?”

I did not, nor do I wish to. There is nothing about him that concerns me.
Nothing.
He is the very Devil with his silver tongue. Feed on my own people. What a perverse notion. I serve my people. My life is theirs. There is nothing I would not do for them—

“There would have been no deaths last night,” he says, “but for my holding my own kind back too long, denying them all but the smallest opportunity to feed in hope of reaching an accord with you.”

“Such restraint.” I think to mock him but my effort is a poor, limp thing. What he says strikes me to the core. Worse yet, I am all too aware that I can scarcely control my growing hunger for him. He seeks to undermine my will at every turn, and I, God help me, fear all too greatly that he can succeed.

“And as we are on the subject of moderation,” he continues, “you may wish to reconsider before you feed again with such abandon on my kind. Morgaine learned to her regret that such gorging comes at a price.”

“I did not—” Horror sweeps over me, driven by the hideous realization that what he says possesses at least a grain of truth. I have fed and ravenously, growing in power each time I killed. But those I slew were vampires, deserving of death. Indeed, all I truly did was release them from their hellish existence. To suggest any parallel between me and Mordred is—

He steps closer, so close that I feel his breath against my skin.
To my heightened senses, he smells of the night wind that blows from distant places under a blaze of starlight. My mind whirls as I struggle not to reach out to him.

He bends closer to me, so close that some fragment of his power seems to leap across the short distance separating us to brush against my neck. Weakness steals over me. The thought of his power … his sensuality … his possession…

“I could kill you now,” he says with perfect calm, and yet I see again the flicker of regret in his gaze. “More than a few will say I am mad not to do so.”

Abruptly I return to myself. My life is not my own, it belongs to my people and it is of them that I must think. “Then why don’t you? What stays your hand?”