Much Fall of Blood-ARC (52 page)

Vlad could see how much richer this lower land was. Much of the forest had plainly been cleared away and burned to make more grazing, and there was a lot of it. And a lot of grazing animals on it.

So where were the all the people?

It was plainly worrying the Primore, too. "It smells like trouble, Drac. I'm beginning to feel that we should head back up into the hills, horses or no horses. And please, Sire. Don't even suggest helping ourselves."

Vlad shook his head. "I would not do that," he said, seriously.

The Primore nodded. "I'd heard that. You know, Drac, it's a good thing you ran away. King Emeric would have put his appointees between you and the people. We need you."

"I was helped to escape. Emeric was going to kill me."

"Oh. We were told that you were going to be made our Prince. Why did they wish to kill you, sire?"

"Because my father was dead," explained Vlad. "I hear that the King planned to put the Danesti in my place."

"Oh. It was one of them who told the Székely council you were coming back," said the Primore, surprised. "He seemed very certain. And quite . . . relieved, Sire. So I was just surprised."

So was Vlad. He'd accepted unconditionally the certainty that he was to be executed. Surely Elizabeth Bartholdy could not have been wrong?

Like the way that Rosa had disappeared . . . there were too many mysteries. Too many things he did know or understand. He felt he was being moved about a game board he couldn't see by forces beyond his control, and he really did not like that.

The great wheel of heaven turns and there are forces chained and liberated in regular sequences by the rotation. Even in ancient Babylon the workers of magic had established that. Earth, sun and moon are yoked together, in a long and endless dance. And the pattern repeats. Every nineteen thousand seven hundred and fifty six days it completes one full cycle. One great turn. The blood moon returns when the shadow devours the moon and the old magics are made strong again.

The wolf-people lived by the moon. They had known these things for always and always, before the Dacian tribes, before the Romans. Back when these forest cloaked mountains were not the last refuge of the first ones. Before blades cut at the forest. Before iron. Before bronze. When the only things that cut were sharp edged stone, and tooth and claw.

Now the ancient cycles called, called the children of the wolf back, back to their cradle-lands. Back with worrying word. Grigori ran through the daylight, and the young one ran beside him, in the easy lope that was the way of their kind, even when they were tired and harried. As Grigori had expected she had tracked them, sent her servants, possessed and driven men, to hunt them. She was afraid of the dragon. Not of them. Against the dragon she moved circumspectly now, wearing her cloak of lies and a mask of magical deceit. Against the wolves she deployed her minions. She had plainly gone back to her place of evil and immediately set her forces out to wait.

They only had teeth. The foes had steel, and she directed them in their hunt. Not all the cunning of the old wolf had shaken the persuit.

But a man, even in daylight with her guidance . . . was still just a man. There were five of them, with steel blade and firearms, in a narrow defile. More close behind. Dozens.

Grigori did not wait for them to fire. The first one died with his neck snapped as the great wolf pulled him down. They had nets. Heavy, weighted nets. One flung his, enmeshing Grigori and the next man. Another tried to catch Miu. In the folds of the net Grigori's white teeth ripped again, finding a throat. To tear and shake as something stabbed him in own vitals.

Despite the agony he changed. Only hands would do to free himself of the net.

Miu was younger and faster. He slipped the net and tore the hamstrings of the one who had speared at his uncle. He was younger and less skilled too, so he failed at the clean snap of the neck as he bore the other victim down. A bullet burned across his side from the last man still standing. The man drew his sword. Staggering, bleeding, free from the net, Grigori turned on him, with nothing more than a rock. Miu worked tag now, ignoring the pain as the man, predator moments before, tried to keep the blade pointed at the white-fanged wolf and the man holding his own intestines in with one hand and a rock in the other. The wolf darted in, ripping flesh and tendons on one leg. And as the man turned slashing at it, Grigori closed swinging the rock at his head, oblivious of the blade that cut at him.

The man Miu had merely felled to the ground had found his feet. He fired at the tangle of man and wolf. Hit man. And man-wolf. But not . . . the wolf. Miu was merely bullet-burned from the previous encounter. His leap was neither elegant nor anything but a fury of savage biting and scrabbling paws but he knocked the man down and they rolled, the desperate man wrestling, trying to fend him off. Miu bit at his face and arms, and eventually found the jugular. Once he'd torn it, he kept biting in fury. Then he got a grip on himself and pulled free.

The man he'd so cleanly hamstrung first was quick to finish off. He turned back to his uncle.

Grigori was half changed. The vast bloody muzzled wolf-head, the grey eyes unseeing, maw contorted in a last defiant snarl, teeth in the throat of the foe . . . .set on a man's torso.

Miu knew that he could do nothing more for him. The other hunters would have heard the shots. He nosed the letter from his uncle's pocket, and took it in his teeth He bowed his great head respectfully, briefly and turned to run on, again.

The hunters would find something they all believed in, but had never seen. That was unavoidable. If the Drac, or his sister, did not renew the compact, they might all be hunted like this. And the little ones of the pack were easy prey.

Full of fear and hatred for the old woman and her magics, Miu ran on alone. His kind were not solitary, and he was very afraid. Instinct said to hide, but the passing time pulled at him to run. To return to the heartlands.

* * *

Emil looked at his hands, looked at how his nails had been pulled away from the quick, and how the dirt was still stuck there. He shook his head trying to clear it. It was full of such terrible visons, like a cobwebbed maze of nightmares, with the same horror at every turn, no matter how he tried to flee from her, from the memory of her head at such an unnatural angle, and a dribble of blood leaking from the corner of her mouth. And now he was trapped, condemned and doomed. There seemed no way out of what he'd done. He'd buried her. There was still dirt under his nails from his efforts to make that shallow grave. Why had he killed her? Rosa had been a friend of his, in the way that she was a friend of half of the camp, including the Drac. It was all so confused, so misty in his head.

He was so very afraid. And still so very compelled to do what he had to do.

"Where do we go now?" asked one of the men he had taken with him.

He couldn't answer at first, still knotted up inside with guilt and fear and uncertainty. He couldn't possibly escape the consequences of what he'd done. Surely, surely the Drac, or even Mirko, would realize that something was wrong, that he had chosen the worst, not the best.

Emil waited for an answer that he knew would come unbidden to his mind. An instruction. A direction from the power that had usurped his mind the power that controlled him and drove him. Until now, it had had him pursuing a wolf hunt for days, but that was over now, it seemed.

His orders came. "We need to go North west for a little to avoid the Hungarian patrols. After that we go south again."

" It's amazing, Sergeant," said the pockmarked soldier, the one who was always trying to butter him up, "you always seemed to know exactly where they're going to be."

He did. Because she did.

* * *

In her southern bastion, the nunnery she had had constructed on her estate near Caedonia, Elizabeth once again allowed herself to revel in the amenties of life that she felt were a necessity. Fresh linen, well cooked hot food, and suitably inflicted pain were what made life worth living. That and the use of her power. She had had little vengeance on the wolf-changers, but they were easy enough to track, magically. It was very satisfying to use her power again. It would appear though, that one had avoided the fate she had in mind for them. He was dead.

Her sendlings were supposed to have brought them back to her, alive. She had ideas and uses for humans that could become wolves, interesting and terror-filled uses. Well, the other would be an interesting addition to her menagerie, when she finally caught him, but there were other matters more pressing to deal with. Along with the other preparations that had to be made, she was going to be busy. Some things she had to do herself. The staff here in the nunnery were all entrapped in her darkness and could not betray her, but still, some things had to be done by the worker of the magic. There was much labor, which she despised, in the ritual.

She turned her attention to those other matters, and was rudely interrupted in her exercise of inflaming the lust of the victim for tonight's bloodletting. She could not make them love her, but lust, yes. And that was a good enough substitute for Elizabeth Bartholdy. The moment of betrayal when they realized that she had not brought them to the desecrated chapel for a passionate, shameful, but desperately desired tryst, but to be defiled, tortured and killed for their blood, was always sweet. And only Emeric would dare to interrupt her. He was almost too gauche to live.

"We will see each other later, Narine," she said smiling at the daughter of some small provincial noble, knowing that the poor girl was desperately in love with some ineligible merchant's son, and was now terribly conflicted by the enchantment that her hostess, so sympathetic, had set in her flesh.

When she was found dead, it would be suicide. Or perhaps she would arrange things to make it appear that the little merchant's boy killed her . . . The sacrifice-to-be was not a peasant girl with no relations and no-one to notice if she disappeared. The body would have to be found, and still be recognizable. Noble blood was riskier, but it would do more for her complexion.

"Grooming your newest victim?" said Emeric, not caring how offensive he sounded.

Really, he contrasted badly with young Vlad. Emeric was stupid and willfully sadistic. Vlad was not stupid, and the streak of bloody murder and fascination with pain that was in him was well controlled . . . it would be entertaining to free it. And he could lead . . . she put the thought away from her. Crocell had warned her of his danger, and although she liked to toy with danger, she would never willfully endure a long term threat that she could not utterly subjugate. Vlad was unnaturally strong, and seemed to be better armored to resist or throw her coercions off. Better to endure this crass puppet, even if he was getting far too many ideas of his own. She sniffed. He stank. He'd always been a little erratic about bathing. "What is it now, Emeric?" she said tartly.

"I've been south to see Ban Alescu of Ironguard. I don't trust him. He's ambitious."

"We've dealt with ambition before, Emeric. Put a little fear into him."

Emeric nodded. "I did that. And I think I'm going to find a town to make a similar example of. There's too much support for that little upstart. Ban Alescu told me he was popular with a number of burghs. Besides I want some replacement coin for my pay chests from them."

"Besides taxes." She knew he'd increased those.

"Sometimes taking all of the substance at once is a more worthwhile exercise than bleeding them slowly."

Bleeding them slowly. She'd never thought of that. She could keep them alive for a while. Let them replenish their blood. Occasionally even the stupidest fool could say something wise. She smiled on him. "So long as it is not too close to here. I have things happening that I do not wish disturbed."

"I have a list. Ban Alescu is not to be trusted, but he's a useful source. More effective than my own spies have been. I'm bringing another thirty thousand men in, over winter. The first ten thousand will be arriving in a few days. I'm going to make these mountains untenable, and remove his support by ensuring that the towns remain mine. Then we can strike before Vlad is ready in spring. Now, I came to ask what you could tell me of his troop numbers, disposition, weaponry and so on."

She shrugged. "They are on the move. He seems to have mostly peasant levies with arquebuses."

"I'm going to have to take steps against the freemen and peasantry in this part of my Kingdom. Punish some relations."

He really was not very bright, thought Elizabeth. He'd bite off too much and have a civil war on his hands. He did have enough troops to put one down. It was not something that Vlad and his partisans could win in the long term, even if Elizabeth was going let him survive. Then it occurred to her that it had been a while since she'd been around civil strife. It was a good time to find plenty of displaced people looking for sanctuary. And people went missing. "What a good idea," she said. Once Vlad was gone, it could always be fixed.

Ban Alescu sniffed. He could only smell cloves. He had always considered himself the biggest, wiliest and nastiest dog in the pit. Now, although he'd burned the soiled breeches, and washed himself repeatedly, he knew that he was not. That shame and abject terror would live with him for the rest of his life. His mood was as black as the weather outside. And that was very black indeed. Rain was sheeting down. Not all of it could wash away the shame and embarrassment. But, he thought, allowing himself a moment of satisfaction, he might not be the biggest and nastiest dog in the pit, but he was still wily. He'd successfully convinced Emeric that several of his rivals and the towns and cities that fell in their ambit were sympathizing with and supporting Prince Vlad.

He had the sworn declarations now of a nursemaid, and a bishop, who attested that his mother had married Radu—Vlad's father, in secret, and that he, Ban Alescu, was the offspring of that union.