The Strain, the Fall, the Night Eternal (104 page)

I have been here alone. Do you, by chance, remember who I am, Mr. Fet?

Fet did, vaguely. He remembered that this one had once held an iron spike at his neck, inside an old apartment high above Central Park.

“You were one of those hunters. The Ancients’ personal bodyguards.”

Correct.

“But you didn’t vaporize with the rest.”

Obviously not.

“Q something.”

Quinlan.

Fet freed his right arm and tried to connect with the creature’s cheek but the wrist was clamped and twisted in the blink of an eye. This time it hurt. A lot.

Now, I can dislocate this arm or I can break it. Your choice. But think about it. If I wanted you dead, you would be by now. Over the centuries I have served many masters, fought many wars. I have served emperors and queens and mercenaries. I have killed thousands of your kind and hundreds of rogue vampires. All I need from you is a moment. I need you to listen. If you attack me again, I will kill you instantly. Do we understand each other?

Fet nodded. Mr. Quinlan released him.

“You didn’t die with the Ancients. Then you must be one of the Master’s breed . . .”

Yes. And no.

“Uh-huh. That’s convenient. Mind me asking how you got here?”

Your friend Gus. The Ancients had me recruit him for sun hunting.

“I remember. Too little, too late, as it turned out.”

Fet remained guarded. This didn’t add up. The Master’s wily ways made him paranoid, but it was precisely this paranoia that had kept Fet alive and unturned over the past two years.

I am interested in viewing the
Occido Lumen
. Gus told me that you might be able to point me in the right direction.

“Fuck you,” said Fet. “You’ll have to go through me to get it.”

Mr. Quinlan appeared to smile.

We seek the same goal. And I have a little more of an edge when it comes to deciphering the book and Setrakian’s notes.

The
strigoi
had closed Setrakian’s notebook—one that Fet had reread many times. “Good reading?”

Indeed. And impressively accurate. Professor Setrakian was as learned as he was cunning.

“He was the real deal, all right.”

He and I almost met once before. About twenty miles north of Kotka, in Finland. He had somehow tracked me there. At the time I was wary of his intentions, as you might imagine. In retrospect, he would have made for an interesting dinner companion.

“As opposed to a meal himself,” said Fet. He thought that perhaps a quick test was in order. He pointed at the text in Q’s hands. “Ozryel, right? Is that the name of the Master?” he said. Fet had brought along with him on his voyage some copied pages of the
Lumen
to study whenever possible—including an image Setrakian had first focused on upon opening the
Lumen.
The archangel whom Setrakian referred to as Ozryel. The old professor had lined up this illuminated page with the alchemical symbol of three crescent moons combined to form a rudimentary biohazard sign, in such a way that the twinned images achieved a kind of geometric symmetry. “The old man called Ozy ‘the angel of death.’ ”

It’s “Ozy” now, is it?

“Sorry, yeah. Nickname. So—it was Ozy who became the Master?”

Partially correct.

“Partially?”

Fet had lowered his sword by now and leaned on it like a cane, the silver point making another notch in the floor.

“See, Setrakian would have had one thousand questions for you. Me, I don’t even know where to start.”

You already started.

“I guess I did. Shit, where were you two years ago?”

I’ve had work to do. Preparations.

“Preparations for what?”

Ashes.

“Right,” Fet said. “Something about the Ancients, collecting their remains. There were three Old World Ancients.”

You know more than you think you do.

“But still not enough. See, I just returned from a journey myself. Trying to track down the provenance of the
Lumen.
A dead end . . . but something else broke my way. Something that could be big.”

Fet thought of the nuke, which made him remember his excitement at returning home, which made him remember Nora. He moved to a laptop computer, waking it from a weeklong sleep. He checked the encrypted message board. No postings from Nora since two days ago.

“I have to go,” he told Mr. Quinlan. “I have many questions, but there might be something wrong, and I have to go meet someone. I don’t suppose there’s any chance you’ll wait here for me?”

None. I must have access to the
Lumen
. Like the sky, it is written in a language beyond your comprehension.
If you produce it for me . . . next time we meet I can promise you a plan of action . . .

Fet felt an overwhelming urge to hurry, a sudden sense of dread. “I’ll have to talk to the others first. This is not a decision I can make alone.”

Mr. Quinlan remained still in the half-light.

You may find me through Gus. Just know there is precious little time. If ever a situation called for decisive action, this is it.

INTERLUDE
I
MR. QUINLAN’S STORY

T
HE
YEAR
40
AD
,
THE
LAST
FULL
YEAR
OF
THE
REIGN
OF
Gaius Caligula, emperor of Rome, was marked by extraordinary displays of hubris, cruelty, and insanity. The emperor began appearing in public dressed as a god, and various public documents of the time refer to him as “Jupiter.” He had the heads removed from statues of gods and replaced with images of his own head. He forced senators to worship him as a physical living god. One of these Roman senators was his horse, Incitatus.

The imperial palace on the Palatine was extended to annex a temple erected for Caligula’s worship. Among the emperor’s court was a former slave, a pale, dark-haired boy of fifteen years, summoned by the new sun god at the behest of a soothsayer who was never again seen. The slave was renamed Thrax by the emperor.

Legend held that Thrax had been discovered in an abandoned village in the savage hinterlands of the far East: the frozen regions, inhabited only by the most Barbaric tribes. His reputation was that of a being of great brutality and cunning despite his innocent, fragile appearance. Some claimed he was gifted with the power of prophecy, and Caligula was instantly enthralled by him. Thrax was only seen at night, usually seated at Caligula’s side, where he exerted great influence for one so young—or else alone in the temple under the light of the moon, his pale skin glowing like alabaster. Thrax spoke several Barbaric tongues, and quickly learned Latin and science—his voracious desire for knowledge surpassed only by his appetite for cruelty. He quickly earned a sinister reputation in Rome, at a time when it was considered an achievement to distinguish oneself by cruelty alone. He advised Caligula politically and dispensed or withdrew imperial favor with complete ease. Regardless, he encouraged the emperor’s rise to divinity. They could be seen sitting side by side at the Circus Maximus, fervently supporting the Roman Green stables in the horse races. It was rumored, in fact, that it was Thrax who suggested they poison the rival stables after a loss of their team.

Caligula could not swim, and neither could Thrax, who inspired the emperor to erect his greatest folly: a temporary floating bridge, more than two miles long, using ships as pontoons, connecting the port city of Baiae to the port city of Puteoli. Thrax was not present when Caligula triumphantly rode Incitatus across the Bay of Baiae, attired in Alexander the Great’s original breastplate—but it was said that the former slave later made many night crossings, always in a litter carried by four Nubian slaves, dressed in the finest garments, an unholy
sedia gestatoria
flanked by a dozen guards.

Habitually, once a week, seven handpicked female slaves were brought to Thrax in his gold and alabaster chamber beneath the temple. He demanded they be virgins, in perfect health, and no older than nineteen. Tiny swabs of their sweat would be used to select them during the course of the week. At nightfall on the seventh day, the ironwood door would be barred from within.

The first killing took place on a green marble pedestal at the center of the chamber, with sculptural relief depicting a mass of writhing, pleading bodies, raising their supplicant eyes and arms toward the heavens. Twin canals at the base redirected the flowing slave blood into gold cups encrusted with rubies and garnets.

Thrax emerged out of a passage, wearing only his
subligar,
and quietly ordered the slave to climb upon the pedestal. There he drank her in full view of the seven bronze mirrors hanging from the chamber walls, biting her fiercely as he punctured her throat with his stinger. The suction was so sudden, so swift, that one could actually see the veins collapsing beneath the slave’s skin as the color drained from her flesh within seconds. Thrax’s wiry arms restrained the slave’s torso with great strength and expert control.

When the entertainment of the ensuing panic faded, a second slave was swiftly attacked, feasted on, and brutally killed. There followed a third and a fourth and so on, until one terrorized slave remained. Thrax savored the final kill the most. Satiating.

But one night late in winter, Thrax slowed before finishing the final slave, having detected an extra pulse in the slave’s blood. He felt her belly through her tunic and found it firm and swollen. Confirming her pregnancy, Thrax brutally slapped her down, her blood trailing from his mouth. He went for a gold dagger, kept next to a cornucopia of fresh fruit. He sliced at her, going for the neck—only to have his expert blow deflected by her bare forearm, severing her outer muscles and missing the tendons by mere millimeters. Thrax lunged again but was stopped by the girl. Despite his speed and skill, he remained at a disadvantage due to his underdeveloped, adolescent body. So
weak
in spite of his time-honed technique
.

The Master thereby resolved never again to occupy any vehicle younger than thirteen years of age. The slave girl wept and begged the Master to spare her life and that of her unborn child—all the while bleeding deliciously. She invoked the names of her gods. But her pleas meant nothing to the Master—except as part of the feeding process: the sizzling sound of bacon in the frying pan.

At that moment, palace guards came pounding at his door. Their orders were to never interrupt his weekly ceremony, but, because they knew his penchant for cruelty, the Master knew that their reason for disturbing him must be one of importance. Accordingly, the Master unbarred the door and admitted them to the gory scene. Months of palace duty had inured the guards to the sight of such desecration and perversion. They informed Thrax that Caligula had survived an assassination attempt and summoned him to the emperor’s side.

The slave needed to be dispatched and her pregnancy terminated. The rules dictated as much. But the Master did not want to be cheated of his weekly sport, and so Thrax ordered that the doors be guarded until his return.

It turned out that the supposed assassination plot was simply a bout of imperial hysteria, resulting in the slaying of seven innocent orgy guests. Thrax returned to his chamber not much later to discover that while he was away assuaging the sun god, the centurions had cleared the palace grounds, including the temple, in order to quell the phantom coup. The pregnant slave—infected, wounded—was gone.

As dawn approached, Thrax persuaded Caligula to dispatch soldiers into all the surrounding cities to find the slave and return her to the temple. Despite a near-sacking of their own land, the soldiers failed to find her. When nightfall finally returned, Thrax went out in search of the slave, but his imprint upon her mind was weak due to her pregnancy. The Master was only a few hundred years old at the time and still apt to make mistakes.

This particular omission would dog the Master for centuries to come. For within the first month of the new year, Caligula was indeed assassinated, and his successor, Claudius, after a brief period of exile, came into power by procuring the support of the Praetorian guard—and the evil slave Thrax found himself purged and on the run.

The pregnant slave girl kept moving south, back to the land of her Dear Ones. She gave birth to a pale, nearly translucent baby boy, its skin the color of marble in moonlight. He was born in a cave amid an olive field near Sicily and in that dry land they hunted for years. The slave and the baby shared a weak psychic bond, and although they both survived on the blood of humans, the boy lacked the infecting pathogen necessary to turn his victims.

Rumors of a demon spread throughout the Mediterranean as the Born grew—and grew quickly. The half boy could sustain limited exposure to the sun without perishing. But otherwise, tainted by the curse of the Master, he possessed all of the vampiric attributes, with the exception of the enslaving link to his creator.

But if the Master was ever destroyed, so he would be too.

A decade later, as the Born was returning to his cave just before dawn, he sensed a presence. He saw, within the shadows of the cave, a deeper shadow still, stirring, watching him. Then he felt the voice of his mother waning within him—her signal extinguished. He knew instantly what had happened: whatever was in there had done away with his mother . . . and now awaited him. Without even seeing his enemy, the Born knew the intensity of its cruelty. The thing in the shadows knew no mercy. With absolutely no hesitation, the Born turned away and escaped toward his only refuge: the light of the morning sun.

The Born survived as best he could. He scavenged and hunted and occasionally robbed travelers in the Sicilian crossroads. Soon he was captured and brought to justice. He was indentured and trained as a gladiator. In exhibitions, the Born defeated every challenger, human or beast, and his unnatural talents and peculiar appearance drew the attention of the senate and the Roman military. On the eve of their ceremonial branding, an ambush by multiple rivals jealous of his success and attention resulted in multiple sword wounds, fatal blows that, miraculously, did not kill him. He healed quickly and was immediately withdrawn from the gladiator school, taken in by a senator, Faustus Sertorius, who had a passing familiarity with the dark arts and held a considerable collection of primitive artifacts. The senator recognized the gladiator as the fifth immortal to be birthed by human flesh and vampiric blood, and thus named him Quintus Sertorius.