The Iscariot Sanction (32 page)

She tried to say his name, but no words would come. Her throat was claggy from what she still could not admit was Arthur’s blood.

Lillian’s own arm was adorned with a similar apparatus, and as her thoughts cleared, and her eyes traced the path of the second hateful tube, a weak, lilting laugh reached her ears. She looked towards the sound, the lights burning her eyes, until she saw a dark figure, seated, which slowly came into focus.

Lord de Montfort was laughing at her. His posture was an idle one, like an opium addict spent too long acting the epicurean, and now barely able to summon the energy to face his daily reality.

Black shapes moved around de Montfort, amorphous at first, then coalescing into the forms of his cohorts. Two black-clad figures—women, as diminutive and subservient as the one that had followed Valayar Shah—helped de Montfort to his feet, and gently removed the tube from his mouth, where, unlike Lillian’s, it had been clamped in place with painful-looking metal clips. One of the women dabbed at de Montfort’s mouth dotingly with a handkerchief.

‘Your face is a picture,’ he said. His voice was tired, breathless, though he tried to disguise his discomfort with a sardonic tone. ‘I could barely guess how you would react to the process; you are the first, after all. But the agony, your sheer terror… exquisite! If you only knew what was to come, you would embrace this moment, savour it, for it is the last time you shall truly
feel
anything.’

‘Wh… what have you done to him?’ Lillian surprised herself with her own voice. It was raw, phlegmy, but stronger than she had expected.

‘To him?’ De Montfort cocked his head to one side, and then tossed it back as he laughed again, musically, beautifully almost. ‘Oh, my dear girl, you really are priceless. You stand upon the precipice between life and death, salvation and damnation, and yet your first thought is for the Majestic?’

Lillian tried to raise herself from the floor, but her body behaved as though it were not her own. She could barely feel her own limbs, nor anything else save the cold of the room. Electric lights hung high overhead from long cables. The walls were wooden, and old.

She gave up trying to stand, or even to crawl, and instead curled herself up into a ball, rubbing at her blood-slicked arms to aid the circulation.

‘Is he dead?’ she asked, her voice finding strength. Fear and revulsion began to part before her growing anger like the sea before Moses.

De Montfort shrugged, infuriatingly nonchalant. His consorts helped him on with his jacket. ‘Maybe. If not, he soon shall be. We are both beyond caring about this little blood-sack.’

‘Where am I?’ Lillian needed to keep de Montfort talking while her senses returned. She could not fight like this. She did not even know if she had the heart to ever fight again. She was soiled irrevocably. She felt barely human.

‘Irrelevant,’ he said, a look of amusement upon his alabaster features. Lillian began to take in more of the room; the searing lights became a manageable glow, and the shape of a large barn manifested about her, appearing to solidify all at once. Dark forms stood silently around the edge of the cavernous space—the hunters, perhaps the same ones who had pursued her and Arthur across the moors. At that, she felt horribly exposed. She was fumbling upon the dirty floor like a newborn calf.

‘What have you done to me?’

‘Ah, now at last you ask the only question that matters. Now perhaps you are ready to see.’

‘See what?’ Lillian’s eyes flicked to Sir Arthur’s prone form. She thought she saw his chest rise and fall, but weakly. She hoped it was not wishful thinking on her part.

‘Life, in all its savage glory, as it was meant to be seen. As it was meant to be experienced.’ De Montfort nodded to one of the women, who padded across the pool of blood—Arthur’s blood—towards her, bare soles sucking at the wet floor. Lillian saw that the creature was clothed only in a robe, pinned loosely at the breast, but was otherwise naked. Her skin was ghost-white, and her body hairless from bald head to clawed toe. As the vampire drew nearer, Lillian discerned uncountable scars upon the creature’s body, criss-crossing her skin, some horribly deep and puckered, others shallow slits. The creature’s head was malformed, with bony protrusions jutting from the back of her skull, half her nose missing, and another great scar that ran vertically down the centre of her face, so deep that Lillian fancied she could see the skull beneath. Even over the stench of blood, Lillian could smell the woman, a heady, musky scent, with the underlying odour of a hospital; iodine and antiseptic, masking a sweet, gangrenous decay.

The creature stopped a single pace from Lillian, pausing as if expecting an attack. Receiving none, she stooped and draped a cloak around Lillian’s shoulders. Lillian’s eyes were level with the creature’s navel, which was pierced with a long, metal barb. With disgust, Lillian observed similar adornments across the creature’s body, from its forearms to its scarred legs. Blades, hooks, the sharp teeth of predators, carved ivory fetishes, hoops of gold, all pushed through the necrotised flesh, deep and sore-looking.

Lillian allowed the creature to fasten the cloak about her with a pin, and only watched as it withdrew slowly, padding backwards, with blood from Lillian’s matted hair staining its pale waist. The creature ran long nails through the blood lasciviously, sucking it from bony fingers, her large, glittering eyes locked with Lillian. Lillian wanted to stand, to find her strength, to kill the thing with her bare hands. But she surprised herself once again, and began to sob. Her shoulders heaved, and she fell forwards, using all her strength to hold herself up from the bloody floor, which served now as a repugnant reminder of both her greatest failure, and her greatest shame.

‘Do you know how the Knights Iscariot came to be?’ de Montfort asked.

Lillian looked at him, her body trembling, full of hate. He mistook her silence for curiosity, and began to pace around her in a circle, carefully avoiding the spreading blood-pool.

‘The oldest of us still living remembers the Roman Empire; fought for the Romans, some say. The gift of immortality was given to him by creatures older still, who some say lived long before the Christ-child ever trod the earth. They say that Judas Iscariot himself was one of us, but he cast aside his true nature in order to follow Christ. In return, the Messiah stripped him of his weaknesses—his aversion to sunlight, his morbid degeneration—and promoted him to the ranks of the blessed disciples. Judas, having been denied the pleasures of the flesh for all of his long life, sinned and fornicated, creating progeny who were, to his dismay, ugly beyond measure and filled with the bloodlust of which he himself had been freed. He asked Jesus Christ why his offspring were cursed so. Christ told him that he had been spared his ill fate not to further his foul race, but to serve God, and in doing so to seek redemption for the impurities of his kind.

‘From that day forth, Judas Iscariot plotted against Christ, trying—and failing—to find his own cure for the cursed bloodline he had spawned. At last, frustrated, he betrayed Jesus, and saw him crucified. When he visited his former lord on the cross, Judas was overcome with remorse, and yet Christ forgave him. In that moment, Judas knew that Jesus Christ was the perfect being, and that within his veins lay true divinity. And so he gave in to his base urges, and drank of the rivulets of blood that flowed down the True Cross. He was for ever changed.

‘Judas left the Holy Land, and travelled west. For several hundred years he tried to bring salvation to the race of vampires which, he found, subsisted across the world. Legend has it that, possibly due to the blood of Christ within him, he was able to create others of his kind, made almost in his own image. These creatures were the first born—the Blood Royal, and a handful of them still survive to this day.

‘Judas founded a cabal of vampires from all walks of humanity—warriors, sages, holy men, slaves, farmers… it mattered not. But he elevated all of them to be his equals, and shared with them his knowledge—most of it, at least. He never shared the secret of creating others of the Blood Royal, and every attempt by one of Iscariot’s progeny to sire an heir ended in disaster. These offspring always bore terrible deformities that Judas believed were the work of the devil, and punishment for disobeying the express wish of Christ not to continue his line. Eventually, Judas left—perhaps he grew tired of enduring the centuries in a world that would only ever shun him, surrounded by ugliness and increasing depravity. He left behind scant fragments of knowledge, upon which our kind built a sacred code of laws. The Blood Royal—the first of them—scattered similarly. The most devout, the chosen few who followed the teachings of Judas Iscariot most resolutely, distinguished themselves during the Crusades, where they lent their formidable powers to a human cause. Perhaps they sought absolution for the sin of being born? In any case, the Knights Iscariot were founded, blessed by the Vatican, no less, and thus believing themselves finally to be free of the curse.’

De Montfort paused in his slow, circuitous path when he reached the slouched form of Sir Arthur, stopping by the chair and running a finger down the baronet’s sallow cheek. Lillian felt her blood boil in rage, but said nothing.

‘It was not so,’ de Montfort continued, looking absently at Arthur. ‘The craving for blood—the necessity for it—did not pass. The vast majority of their offspring still bore deformities, and were little more than beasts; walking dead, trapped between life and the grave. The Knights Iscariot, for the longest time, kept to their cloisters, refusing to sully the earth with their kind. But they saw the ongoing struggle between their kind and humanity, and they knew that, should the truth of their nature come to light, they would be hunted to extinction by the very Christians who had elevated them to knighthood. And so they began to take control of all vampire-kind, to establish themselves as rulers of a degenerate race that lived a pitiful existence in the shadows. They came to love these creatures as their children—in essence, many of them were exactly that: children, grandchildren, cousins… spreading across Europe and the east, living in crypts, caves, sewers and crumbling ruins. Those of us who herald from the Old Country call these poor creatures
vârkolak
. You might call them ghouls—the eaters of the dead.’

Lillian was starting to recover some semblance of her wits, though de Montfort’s prattling was serving as its own kind of torture. She tried to block out his lilting, sardonic tones, and focus on Arthur, on thoughts of vengeance. She needed that thing she had always struggled to improvise: a plan.

‘So what are you?’ she blurted. She needed to buy time, even if it meant listening to more of his diatribe. De Montfort paused, a flicker of annoyance crossing his features. He raised an eyebrow. ‘Are you one of the “Blood Royal”?’ she asked. ‘Have you walked the earth since the Roman Empire?’

‘Not nearly so long,’ de Montfort snapped. He folded his hands behind his back, and pursed his lips. She had forced him to lose his place in his narrative. ‘No, I have lived for over a hundred years, and the Blood Royal does in part flow within me, but I cannot claim to be one of the chosen. I am… a poor cousin.’

‘But you lead the Knights Iscariot?’

‘No. I speak for the King. There is a great difference.’

Lillian was wracked abruptly by a hacking cough, and more blood was expelled from her body violently, adding to the ever-growing lake beneath her.

‘Wh… what—’

‘Do not fear, child, it shall pass.’

‘What is happening to me?’

‘I was coming to that,’ de Montfort smirked. ‘When a human concubine gives birth to one of our own—the
wampyr
—it is to a mewling, vicious infant, which more often than not kills its mother on its entry into this world. If the child is a boy, then within the first hour of its life, the decision must be made to grant it the gift of un-death, by allowing it to suckle the Blood Royal, or to cast it aside as a ravening, mindless beast—a mad cousin—whose only hope is to be trained as a hunting hound, the taste for human flesh nurtured within them so as to better aid their masters in sport. We pity them, for are they not our kin? Females, on the other hand, are raised to maturity, in the hope that they can birth a pureblood, raising the offspring of their own father in an attempt to preserve the sanctity of the lineage. Yet the true curse of our kind is that our women are almost always barren, and so we must stoop to mating with humans if our line is to continue. Can you understand the ignominy? It is an act akin to bestiality, or playing with one’s food. Can you imagine if humans could reproduce so? Copulating with apes for the sake of their species’ survival? Perhaps Mr. Darwin would be first in line for a hairy bride to vindicate his own theories, though somehow I doubt it.’

‘I don’t understand…’ Lillian was hardly listening any more. But she managed to bring her legs up beneath her, and for the first time since her release from bondage she felt enough strength in her legs to support her own weight. She concentrated on that; she might yet have to fight her way out of here.

‘Of the male children, perhaps one in a thousand can pass as human, though we certainly are nothing of the sort. It is a freak accident, a circumstance of our birth. If we are deemed worthy to complete our transformation, we grow to join the hallowed ranks of the Knights Iscariot. But none of us can create a pureblood vampire. Few of us would want to, for the Knights Iscariot have become so single-minded in their doctrine that they view what was once a gift as a heresy against their purity. The secret of transforming a weakling human into one of the
wampyr
was lost with Judas. Until now.’

‘You have… you have made me like you?’ Lillian could not breathe. Everything closed in on her dizzyingly.

‘Vampires who can pass for human, in a certain light, are of great usefulness to the Knights Iscariot, but only as agents, go-betweens, middlemen. I, on the other hand, was elevated to the upper echelons of my house for one very specific reason. When the Awakening swept the land, I was gifted great insight. I am what you would call an Intuitionist, and, for my sins, a Majestic. A rare coupling, no? And unique in my kind; a quirk of fate no doubt inherited from my human mother. My field of expertise was medicine—I studied at Geneva with some of the greatest minds of my age, and yet all of that learning paled in comparison to the whispers that reached my ears from the Rift. I set about creating a series of experiments, all of which bore early promise, and have now come to fruition. For the first time in millennia, perhaps the first time in history, humans—your pitiful, weak race, can become so much more. I have blessed you, child. Before you woke, you took the distilled essence of the Blood Royal from my veins. It should have killed you, but you triumphed over death. You repaid my faith in you. You, Lillian Hardwick, are the first recipient of the Iscariot Sanction. You are the first of many more to come.
You are wampyr!
’