Once she’d stripped all the useful information she was going to get from Victor’s tomes, Sulis had been hard at work modifying and reversing his ritual. Quite impressively the whole cast had turned up to see whether her experiment would be a success or monumental failure. Caravaggio and Harris had come reluctantly, the cardinal wishing to look after his friend. The reverend was standing with his hand paternalistically on Agata’s shoulder. The blonde woman had been critiquing the sireless’ rusty spell craft, helpfully and irritatingly. She adjusted the circle as she drew it. Victor’s usage of yew charcoal was extensive and inspired. Pity about literally everything else concerning the man. Sybil and Judith were busying themselves arranging Deliah’s body in what Sulis was going to term the ‘receiver circle’. Like sending a telegram. But for souls.
As she begun to write the invocations within the extensive geometry, memories of Sam and her constructing a similar circle emerged. She’d been in tears that whole night. Though rather than a receiver circle, theirs had been a series of instructions. The coffin had originally been designed to last the full length of her mortal life. Clearly it had been modified. She warned the married couple not to leave any metal on Deliah, lest she wake up with significant burns. That sheer amount of power, particularly when conducted with pure metals like gold and silver, would burn down to the bone in seconds.
“You will have her in hand when this is done, right?” Sulis confirmed with them. Even for an old vampire, the ritual was likely to take a toll. And it wasn’t going to be light. After receiving their affirmation, the sireless connected the last curve before sealing it with a drop of her own blood. The necessary catalyst that aided all vampiric rituals. “Gentlemen I suggest you turn your backs or better yet, sod off. I don’t imagine Big J has much enthusiasm for this sort of thing,” she warned before approaching the pool that held the heart of her castle. The sanctum was the only place close enough to the beyond to make such a ritual possible. Besides the dungeons and fuck that. Victor had chosen a place in Ireland for his initial ritual, much to her chagrin. The emerald isle had always been a safe place. Much like Ireland, the clergy refused to leave. “Well, I tried my best” Sulis shrugged at Agata, throwing a cheeky grin over her shoulder. The nun glowered at her before turning to the fathers. It was time they had their talk.
But Sulis was not there for ecclesiastic drama. As she listened to their increasingly hostile conversation, she knelt next to the pool. Running her fingers over the piton, she sighed with relief. She could feel the familiar power. It radiated from every pore of its bronze-coloured surface, etched with runes and invocations. It had been a bronze brand once. But centuries steeped in unearthly power had fundamentally changed it. And as she hefted it, she felt its power almost like electrical discharge. It invigorated her, almost as if she’d drank an entire sea of blood. But like anything, holding the piton for too long was bad for her. Reluctantly, she dropped into the pool to the sound of Caravaggio threatening excommunication.
In the tepid water, warmed by the crystal orb set within it, Sulis struggled against her clothes to reach the slot. The piton’s weight helped, dragging her to the depths. It was deep enough to submerge two grown men standing on top of each other. It had to be to keep the heart cool. Staring up with eyes blurred by the water, she noticed the slot facing upward with a flat look at her own fortune. One negligent gesture of her hand later, the heart rotated to face the missing piton’s slot toward her. Honestly, that feature alone had been a triumph.
She strangely felt as if the moment required something. An end to her journey, so to speak. The final repair to the castle’s core elements. But for this piton, the doors would soon open again. Wherever she wanted, to whatever world she wanted. She smiled, hair floating freely as she looked to her tattoos. An impossible moment without her infuriating eldest familiar. Realising that she was at risk of taxing her reserves with her prolonged dive, she lifted the piton with a silent thanks to Puck.
It slid home with surprising ease. The ticking turning of tumblers sounding brought a satisfied smile to Sulis’ lips. They still worked and they’d keep it firmly in place. For once, there wasn’t a complication. She locked the piton into place with a turn of its capstone, sending streams of light throughout the gem. It began to sing its strange ethereal song, like a thousand violins droning out the same note. A tone that soared and fell along the scale, heating the water around her to steadily higher temperatures. Realising her clothes would slow her down, Sulis pushed off the rough bottom of the pool with all her might. She practically soared through the water, erupting from a now gently smoking surface. Aware that her time without boiling was shortening, she swam to the shore with expletives in her wake.
“Next on the list, remote operating” Sulis grumbled as she got to her feet, wringing out her sodden clothes. She wasn’t about to disrobe in front of strangers after all.
She needn’t have worried. The chamber before her was bereft of men. A sullen Agata stood holding Deliah, her eyes cast to the ground. Turning her attention to the couple, Sybil subtly mouthed the word ‘excommunicated’. Sulis felt her heart sink. So, that was the way of it. The nun had chosen her path and it now diverged from the Church. It was always going to happen with a woman as brilliant as her. But it didn’t sting any less for that fact.
“I wanted to help you,” Agata explained as the vampire placed a hand on her shoulder comfortingly. “They said it was heretical. That you should do it rather than me risking my soul.”
“Makes sense from where they’re standing. Let the thousand-times damned woman do the damnable thing to save your damned friend,” Sulis observed with an attempt at humour. The three disapproving stares she got told her how that had gone. “Whatever you decide, I’d be glad to have your help. Given everything you’ve put into fixing up the place, you’re welcome in my home any time.” The sireless was attempting to be reassuring, but realised it sounded like temptation in hindsight. But that had always separated her from the likes of Yorwen. Her temptations were tangible. Sampleable.
She gave Agata time to think it over while she began to draw on the power of the heart, feeling with her preternatural senses as it begun to resurrect her castle. She could feel its power heating the floors, igniting the ovens and reanimating the guardians. She made a few quick modifications to their orders. No more civilian casualties. A bad look at the best of times. The circle begun to emit a ghastly blue glow, reminiscent of the white goat’s flaming eyes.
“Whenever you’re ready Deliah, I can begin” the witch offered with her fingertips touching the pommel of her friend’s sword-shaped prison. Her eyes then flicked up to meet Agata’s, who wore her conflicted thoughts on her sleeve. It was a binary choice, in the end. Flee back into the arms of the church, a picture of contrition. Or take the monster by the hand and realise her potential. Perhaps dilemma would be more accurate. Sulis knew her friend well enough to see that for a woman like Agata, taking a step away from her habit would be a step towards the woman who’d destroyed her world.
“Could you ever forgive her?” Agata asked, striking Sulis with her words. There was only one person she could mean.
“I…” Sulis began, her usual confidence stalling as the question sank in. The Ansa of her objective recollection wasn’t the monster she’d narrativized her into. Even so, that woman was far from innocent. Neither was she, in the end. She scratched the back of her head, looking to Sybil and Judith for a moment. The two of them looked fairly clueless until they were told. They wasted no time in voicing their concerns over the second European vampire. “Assuming I even have the right, no. At least, not yet,” the sireless grumbled. “I’m not sure she’s capable of seeing the world differently. But if she started to, or tried to?” she continued, working through her thoughts out loud. Her friends didn’t seem to appreciate the curveballs. “I want to forgive her so badly. Just like I hope my wives will. They deserved better than what I gave them.”
“Then I will help you,” Agata smiled with a clasping of the sireless’ hands. Seeing her confused expression, the nun relented as she began organizing her ingredients. “Being forgiven is very important to us,” she teased with a finger pointed toward her habit. “If the oldest vampire shows grace, all those she sires can too. Which means you are people, loved by the almighty just like humans” she reasoned, somewhat spuriously in Sulis’ opinion. She resisted the urge to ruin the moment by correcting her.
The two witches begun their work with enthusiasm, placing Deliah in a circle much like the one she’d occupied five centuries ago. Out of deference to that fact, Agata and Sulis worked quickly with their hands making quick confident strokes that left glowing trails in their wake. Sybil’s eyes grew wide, having never seen the like. Judith, ever the stoic of the two, pulled her wife close with anxious eyes as the spell begun to take effect. The ruby set in the sword was torn free wreathed blue fire, its blade and hilt unwound by the power at play. A bead of sweat worked its way down Agata’s face as she concentrated, smiling as Sulis encouraged her. Despite projecting confidence, the eldest vampire was bricking it. The signs and order of operations were exacting, causing blood to drip down her chin as her fangs bit into her lip.
Then something went wrong. Horribly, impossibly wrong. A variable that Sulis, in all her boundless optimism, hadn’t accounted for. In her solipsistic grief, she’d forgotten about the Lady.
She watched the spell freeze as if a goddess had set her hand to the sundial of the universe. Sulis’ eyes flicked to Agata, barely visible through the flames of the spell. She stood completely still, leaning impossibly to the side as she begun a sprint to correct a sign. With a curse, Sulis realised it had been modified. Though how, she couldn’t imagine. With her blood running cold, she remembered her orders to Sybil and Judith before leaving for the mountain. Feed the crypt vampires. Compulsion, just as she’d used on the police. As the realisation dawned on her, she heard the tapping of wood on stone. Lowering her hands from their casting, she looked toward the iron door that rolled aside as if pushed by a bulldozer.
The form of Rhian stood with her grey hair rustling in the wintry wind she walked with. Her eyes were the same intense blue, gnarled fingers curled about a staff hanging with tokens from familiars. But Sulis could tell even with the dullest of senses that they were empty. She watched as the old woman lifted her skirt to step into the chamber, eyes running over the spell with a twisted gap-toothed grin.
“My patience has reached its limit,” Rhian’s decrepit voice informed her. “We shall bargain now. Or the souls within these halls shall ever be forfeit.”
“Spirits take you. Can’t you just accept a rescheduling with grace?” Sulis barked as she saw the petrified forms of Sybil and Judith sheltering themselves with their arms. Her eyes then returned to the old woman, draped in the patchwork rags of a cloak and the yellow dress splotched with blood. A reminder of the final fatal fate of Rhian. Hunted down by Leofric, who carved his way through an entire clan of vampires to reach her. The sireless wondered if she knew then what her goddess had planned. “Was it the whole castle or were you feeling a little weary after your trip up from the dungeons?” she added sarcastically as she mithered after the spell.
“For well over a century I have languished in need of your aid. I will not be denied any longer” the spirit answered tersely before motioning to the ritual circle. “Attend me and I shall complete this ritual as you intended with no modification to its result.”
Sulis didn’t imagine she had many options. The Lady had always enjoyed her Hobson’s Choices. It had been Rhian who feigned ignorance at her behest, sending Gunnar to his death. Ansa’s familiars had the answer. Prod the ancient vampire witch, that would end well. As she followed the surprisingly spry form of Rhian, the tattooed woman wore a searching expression. The mosaic of the horned woman opened for them at the old woman’s motion, drawing even more unease into Sulis’ eyes. As they briefly walked beneath the dome, the timeless forms of her refugee guests sat in impossible situations. A child mid-fall. A man shying from a flaring brazier as the castle powered it, its flames hanging like aurora in the air. Not a single breath or heartbeat could be heard by the well-fed vampire.
It wasn’t until then that Sulis heard a strange sound coming from her stranger antagonist. The clinking of metal on metal. With her attention piqued the vampire looked down to see manacles hanging from Rhian’s fingers. Made of a dreadfully familiar black metal that whispered with power from the beyond.
“Those don’t belong to you!” Sulis snapped, lashing out to take Tallas’ manacles from the spirit. She whipped them out of the vampire’s reach with a smile, citing that they would be needed. “Tempting offer but I’m a married woman,” she spat before making another ill-fated attempt at the shackles. Apparently, she was free to take them if she found the terms unacceptable. Which made walking to the dungeon a necessity. Only there was the connection strong enough.
So through the galleries carved into the rock they walked. Like the crypts only far larger, lit by luminescent crystals that the castle now powered. Set into the walls were small alcoves, large enough to fit a human comfortably. Their arches had been carved with words of warding, locking the occupants in with invisible strands of power. Warily, Sulis met the eyes of a few spirits she’d contained. Old hauntings, malicious dark entities and demons. At least, that was what Agata would call them. Horns functioned similar to crowns in the spirit world. So naturally every vain human spirit daubed themselves in false glory. The deluded tyrants of their own little fiefdoms.
They cried and jeered as she passed, demanding release after so long steeped in boredom. She rolled her eyes, calculating the remaining days a few of them had. Some were fit to be released into the wild, given another chance in a new life. Others had stolen so many days that Sulis doubted she would ever release them.
It was this cursed part of the castle, the loud stadium of her worst accusers, that the Lady had made her home. She took Sulis to the deepest part of the dungeons where the fragile film of normalcy began to fray. There were no cells so close to the schism, which roiled beneath them like a cauldron of stars. Intermittently, one would tear itself free from the confines of the pit and try to float freely. Then it would be snatched up by the spirits Sulis had set to protect her palace from such influences. Above them the ceiling was pockmarked from how long that system had been failing. She sighed inwardly. Just one more repair job. She took her seat at the table provided by the Lady. They sat with the swirling confluence of lights as their backdrop, the vampire’s lips drying out by the second. Her earlier irritation and wit had vanished as it all became suddenly real. Agata’s advice was prescient as the ancient spirit’s power began to settle around her like a stifling blanket. She heard the distant echoes of her memories, hopes and fears sound in the great starry pit below them.
“Before we begin, why did you modify Judith and Sybil’s vampirism?” Sulis asked with trepidation. It had been a question stinging the back of her mind since she met the pair in the 1870s. Since the ennui had taken the blonde noblewoman.
“They required it to survive their ordeal,” the Lady answered with a confident grin. She stretched a hand downward, withdrawing a tea set from her realm. It almost brought an absurd laugh to Sulis’ throat. Instead, she settled for a sceptical look. “You don’t think me capable of love? Of compassion? Sybil is at the very least. And she has such delicious potential in her realm.”
“So you’ll be stealing them back to serve an empire they hate?” the tattooed woman asked with a grim frown. Ansa’s mistress was every inch what she’d expected. A vicious spider, toying with anything that fell into her reach.
“An empire they created?” the Lady answered back with that same satisfied smirk. “It strikes me that they looked to what their opulence cost and felt a tinge of unease. One that already wanes. Because, like you, I think they grew a taste for it. The power. The respect” she teased as Sulis’ thoughts entered her perception. A vindication as the crone felt her plaything’s discomfort. “There’s no need to be shy. Leofric should have taught you that much. The plebians rarely know how much blood must be spent to pay for their comfort. That’s our truth, isn’t it? We give people what they want and hide from them the cost,” she observed with a sinister chuckle, sipping her tea.
“I hid from the cost and made others pay it on my behalf,” Sulis sniped back with a husky tone. Her irises were gone, replaced by featureless black. “No more. You need me for something, and I want all those souls freed. A good faith payment.”
“The good faith was on my part, Sulis” the Lady answered condescendingly. “I kept this place functional whilst you were off stealing lives. How many have died, do you think, to the power vacuum you left? It’s constant rumblings? How much has the growth of the world soured without your pruning shears?”
Sulis heaved a deep breath, struggling with her temper as the sore spot came into view. It was shallow manipulation, all of it. The crone was even using her own techniques. A few facts, a few questions and she could make someone question morality itself.
“I don’t know why you care for them, truly. You are the predator, are you not? A lioness, training her unruly cubs,” the spirit trailed off. She was enjoying herself far too much at the sireless’ expense. Though Sulis didn’t doubt she actually believed that. She briefly wondered whether spirits could have something like a child. A favourite underling? “Oh very well I’ll give you their souls. I’m in a generous mood.”
At the heart of ‘too easy’ sat that sentence. The tea-sipping demon or whatever she was when she was at home clearly wanted to sweeten her after that deluge of confidence breakers. Almost petulantly, Sulis hardened her heart against whatever she really wanted. Though she didn’t seem keen on getting to the point, removing a ring from her finger and spinning it tauntingly. It was only once the sireless’ eyes sized up the gesture that she noticed. Leofric’s ring, bitten from his hand at Rhian’s request. A challenging, uncomprehending look crossed Sulis’ face. Another jab? A trick?
“It’s important that before I make my offer you understand the gravity of your choice,” the Lady eventually conceded, taking up the ring in her fingers with a thoughtful expression. “As you mentioned, your world has become insulated from spirits. This is because they fear a creature known as the black goat,” she began with her eyes sliding to meet Sulis’. “They sense their power. So it falls to me to sustain the balance. To that end” she stood suddenly, walking to the edge of the platform and holding her hand expectantly. “I have created this” she said, a spear leaping from the schism into her waiting palm almost faster than Sulis could see.
It was a long broad-headed weapon, similar to a boar spear. It was forged from a single solid piece of shimmering dark metal, similar to Tallas’ manacles. It was carved with the curving, looping knots that the Lady favoured. She’d even taken pains to create grips and wrap them in leather. But it wasn’t the form that was impressive. Sulis’ senses were rocked by its presence. It was so powerful that if its aura were audible, it would be a jet taking off.
“You already have a bow, why do you need that?” the sireless groaned, holding her head as the vibrations began to soothe themselves. The Lady ran her fingers along the spear’s length, as if trying to calm a wild animal.
“I do not. But it will be needed, I’ve sensed that much. We have to have faith,” the ancient spirit advised with an almost reverential voice. Sulis scoffed, taking a few steps away from the spear. “You think yourself a better judge of what is to come? You, who strides across the barrier at my will? Who steals the life of others with Tallas’ blessing? Who frets for an immortal soul bound to a coffin of her flesh?” the Lady spoke with sudden anger, her power flaring and sending Sulis to her knees with its intensity. “You will bless this spear with your blood. Only then will I free the spirits,” she commanded.
“You don’t need me. Go ask another sireless,” the witch spat through gritted teeth. She reached out for Tallas’ power, hoping to at least banish the spirit from her castle.
Only there was no Tallas. Nyx and Nugget were there but she wasn’t risking them. With panic flaring her nostrils and driving her breath to stall in her chest, she desperately looked for her oldest companion somewhere in the spirit world.
“Tallas isn’t here, child” the Lady informed her coldly. She sauntered forward, levelling the spear with Sulis’ nose. She couldn’t take the blessing. She hoped. “You will strengthen this spear. You will take Leofric’s ring to Lucy,” she continued with a disgruntled expression. “And you will give me the chains of Tallas” she added, removing the clanking manacles from her robes. Defiantly, Sulis struggled to her feet. With heaving breaths against the tide of the creature’s strength, she spat on the whole notion. “In exchange, I will free the souls. I will protect Lucy Devereux. I will restore the power of the Throne of Tribes,” she rattled off hoping to tempt the vampire staring daggers at her. “I will also free Ansa of her obligations to me.”
Sulis took a few seconds, her expression falling as she placed a hand against her chest. Had that come from her? It had to have. She swallowed hard, looking with a helpless expression toward the crone before her.
“Is that who I am now? From tyrant to teacher?” she demanded, eyes flicking to the spear tip thoughtfully. An end at last. Purpose, direction. Solid ground beneath her after the terrible, dizzying fall she’d imposed on herself. “Or is it just another sweet fantasy? Healing her after all the damage we did to each other?”
It felt right. An elder vampire and her beloved wives. Her students, prodigal and mundane. Putting down the axes and walking away from them. But not her people. She would be there for them, as she’d always been. To advocate for a better way. The Lady seemed to consider the questions before withdrawing the spear and taking a friendlier stance.
“You want me to reach into your heart and tell me your most fervent desires,” the woman drawled with a distant look. Almost as if she’d done it before. “I agree to your terms. Do you agree to mine?” she asked with an extended hand.
