The corridors beneath the mosaic opened up once more as the power had been partially restored. Sulis walked the halls with a torch held up for her human companion’s benefit. In her habit and tactical gear, Agata walked alongside the sireless with a borrowed sword in her hand. The two were seemingly walking toward the meditation cave or sanctuary, depending how you viewed it. But as they approached the great metal door, propped open by a chair Sulis had found, the sireless veered off down a corridor to the right. Ansa had thankfully repaired the doors and all four of them were now stood open. As they passed under the heavy steel, a hand’s width thick, Sulis supposed they looked like bulkheads. Although the things they kept in check were far more dangerous than water. Far more patient too. And they weren’t even the worst part of the castle.
The pair of them came to a warding spell which Sulis dispelled with clear instructions to Agata, who nodded with a student’s eye. The tattooed woman was excited to be teaching again but found her unease growing. Nobody was this enthusiastic or diligent. It had been going on for days. Something to take Sulis’ mind off things, had been the excuse. She realised that here, in the crypts beneath the castle, they were least likely to be overheard.
“Why the sudden fascination with my skills?” Sulis asked innocently enough as she removed another of Ansa’s wards, replacing it once they were through. She smiled at the efficiency, the skill of her former love’s craft. Before stomping on that emotion. “You seem to be spending less time with the clergy. Did you have a falling out?” she asked with what she hoped sounded like genuine concern. While Agata was a friend, and the two men were quick with good advice they were still Church. They still, on some level, believed her to be an abomination. There was no reconciling a kind word and a genuine smile with an idea that horrendous.
“The Fathers and me have had disagreements,” Agata answered with a shrug. Her eyes were alert, slipping from place to place with what little light she had. “They do not like me going beyond doctrine. Learning to control my power properly.”
The two made their way into the crypts in silence after that. Sulis considered the nun’s words with a taut expression. On the one hand, it was wonderful to see a young witch expanding her repertoire and worldview. On the other, Agata had built her life in reaction to her lover’s betrayal. Rather like she had, Sulis thought with a small look of realisation. Although perhaps that wasn’t fair. Ansa and she had simply grown apart. Different perspectives. Just one of those perspectives was abhorrent. She still couldn’t see how her thoughtful, shy bookworm before books had adopted such extremism. Sulis resisted the urge to blame herself. Ansa had made her choices. If that made their love impossible, then so be it.
Holding aloft her torch, she allowed Agata to see as much as the room as she could. A grand and spacious mausoleum, the room had been carved from the mountain itself. The stone was dark, giving the whispering gargoyles that grimaced and screamed silently above them an even more ghoulish expression. The stone slabs beneath their feet were engraved with all manner of magical symbology. Though Agata was unlikely to know, Sulis remembered well the process it had taken to forge the chamber properly. It had to be a spiritual bomb shelter. A bunker that protected its inhabitants against the worst outcomes. She even remembered protecting it from the collapse of the castle itself. It would appear in the manor her throne sat in, if she had it right. Shaking her head, her fingers ran over the nearest of the sarcophagi. It had been carved with the stone likeness of its occupant. A former knight who’d served as her praetorian guard. At least, that was what Livia called them. Even dressed them up with purple sashes too.
“Why would you keep the dead so close? Why not the town’s graveyard?” Agata asked breathlessly. She could probably feel their proximity to the spirit world. It was tempting fate. But at this point, Sulis had nowhere else to turn. Victor’s books had been very clear.
“None of them are dead. Well, not unless I am too,” Sulis joked over her shoulder as she resumed walking toward the middle of the chamber. As the torch lit their way, the stone steps of a dais inscribed with a ritual circle loomed out of the darkness. She didn’t need it for her purposes but explained for the nun’s benefit. “The sarcophagi are essentially cryostasis pods. They slow the vampire curse down to a crawl. It’s like being in a long, endless sleep. A vampire can exist in here for centuries. Some of them are resting, some are bored, some are hiding. And some unlucky ones are stuck here until I can fix them,” the witch explained with a gesture toward the coffin next to her. With confusion giving way, Agata saw the likeness of Deliah’s sword painted onto the lid. “When Victor tore her soul out, knowing I was fond of her, I had to find a solution. So I awakened her body before it died of thirst. And put it in here” the sireless continued with a moroseness filling her stare. “After that, I savaged Victor. He hoped that he could extort me for a vial of my blood. Silly boy forgot that the Draugr Queen doesn’t negotiate.”
There was silence then as Sulis held her hand expectantly for the crowbar. Agata, now knowing why she’d been asked to bring it, handed it over with a curious expression. Probably wondering why she spoke with such fondness for that moment. It was simple, in the end. She had the power to excise a monster from the world and did it. Perhaps it was her age or her vampirism, but it had always been easy to end men like Victor. It was Yorwen and Leofric, the true believers that gave her pause. She wondered why that was as she pried the coffin lid open.
Within, a pale woman dressed in the ragged moth-eaten remains of a green velvet dress lay with her hands clasping a staff. She had long orange hair with classically beautiful features. The very picture of a perfect medieval bride. Elegant and graceful, Sulis sighed as she retrieved her staff. Agata watched as her teacher replaced the lid and laid a hand on it. It would be over soon. With the physical body, it was merely a case of breaking the binding. She looked to her staff sceptically, checking whether it was still useful. While many staves were made of wood, hers had been crafted from cold metal. It whispered with voices from beyond, a ghostly sheen twisting within the metal. At the butt was a spike, a boar spear-like protrusion. The head was a spiralling filigree that contained an orb of diamond and one of onyx.
“Can’t say I’m pleased to be using this again,” Sulis sighed as her grip tightened on the implement. “Ansa was always the better practitioner. I’m a warrior, not a witch,” the elder vampire explained thoughtfully as Agata questioned her reluctance.
“That obviously isn’t true. Why did you turn away from that side of yourself?” the nun continued probing. It extracted a momentary discomfort from the vampire, her eye twitching slightly. “Even when you fought Sam, you didn’t use your power. But it’s still there” Agata observed with growing distrust. Nothing good ever came of witches suppressing themselves. It was one thing to prefer doing things with your hands. Quite another to shut yourself off from the spirits and their power. You couldn’t close the door once it was opened. The life of a practitioner blew normalcy off its hinges.
“Memories, what else?” the sireless answered with a crooked grin. One that felt even to her like a bad attempt at joking. Realising she wasn’t getting off the hook, Sulis pushed the shores of the black lake away. Say the words, don’t think about it. “Ansa and I were originally the only vampire practitioners in Europe. We used our power to gain an edge over other vampires. Spread the lie that only we could be both. My faith died on the vine, twisted to serve a baser purpose. After that, I felt unclean using it properly. After my hard reset, I enjoyed using it for a little while. But the memories came back. Every time I used a spell, that version of myself stung my thoughts,” she remembered grimly. Here in the castle had been the first time she’d been at peace enough to use her knowledge. But the other aspects remained dead. The sense of awe, of seeing the beauty and majesty of creation. The sensation that could only be described as spiritual.
“You wanted to be a better person, right?” Agata asked with a hand reaching for the sireless’. Sulis looked at her with a mixture of trepidation and confusion. “You don’t cut parts of yourself off to be better. Speak to them,” she indicated to the graves that surrounded the pair. A refusal had almost left the vampire’s throat before Agata silenced it with a firm shake of her head. “Tell them the truth. Just the truth” she commanded.
The echoes of Auset’s commands rankled Sulis’ nerves before she soothed herself. Both her and Agata were right, ultimately. While her priestess was insistent, the nun guided her to the circle on the dais. She was proud of her student for figuring out what it did. With her staff in hand, she crossed her legs and attempted to clear her mind. To reach for the rusted and ruined parts of communion. Like a great wreck rising from the sea floor, her skills crashed through the ice of the black lake. She began to feel the flow of the beyond, the spirits entombed within her castle. What had once been the dull plodding footsteps of a wounded animal turned into flight. The keen senses of a witch in her prime. She was still shaky at the tiller, almost falling into the dark waters around her ship. But she wouldn’t allow it. The shades of her darkest self, laughing cruelly and hunting screaming humans with her tribe, couldn’t breach the surface.
She opened her eyes in the spirit world with a gasp. Her breath froze in her lungs, blood running like meltwater through her veins. She looked about with blue eyes knowing full well that her black ones were out of reach there. She expected to find the carefully cultivated cul-de-sac of charming Georgian cottages she’d hidden. The dream in which her sleepers could live a pretend life, acclimate to the new language and morals of the modern day. Instead, she stood on a cold rocky outcropping in a sea of black. It was lit only by the eerie bluish glow of a flickering flame. Her eyes searched the darkness for any hint of a flaw, some unknown bug that had caused her spell to slip.
Coming up short, the vampire made her way through the creepy ravine the flame guided her through. With anxiety twisting in her gut, she saw flakes of snow begin to fall. Someone was playing a very cheap trick that was about to get them killed again. With her hands held like claws out of habit, she stalked through the lean-tos and hide banners toward the cave. The cave that had birthed European vampirism. At least she would have, had a spectral form not given her pause.
Standing upright and gripping her staff, pointing toward the cave with her other hand, stood Seren. It looked like her at the very least. Her irises had been lost to the milky film of starvation. Her form was gaunt. Sulis strode closer to get a better look at her traveller’s garb, trying to determine if it really was her Seren. She’d made it to the 18th century before needing the sleep.
“She has us in her grasp!” the ghostly form shouted suddenly. Sulis jumped back, holding her staff like a club as Seren’s neck cracked with a jerky motion. “You left us here and she took us hostage!”
“I know, I’m fixing it” the sireless answered calmly. A forced calm that began to crack when more figures began forming. The ghastly renditions of the souls held within the coffins. From every time period, every walk of life, the vampires who’d trusted their care to her formed from the mists and swirls of snow. All of them pointed toward the cave eerily, staring at her in stony silence. All except one, that was.
“I told you not to meddle with dark spirits” Seren accused, baring her fangs in fury.
“I said I’d fix it!” Sulis barked back, chest heaving as she tried to keep her nerves in check. Before she could be questioned further, she marched toward the cave’s entrance with a determined gleam in her eye. All about her, blue-tinged fire began to crawl up the walls. The screams of Mora’s family, the cursing of Rella dug into her ears. Impossibly, the proclamations of Yorwen as he ordered her family destroyed taunted her. “Is this your idea of enticement? I should banish you back to whatever hell you crawled out of for this display!” the sireless threatened with all the authority her centuries could manage.
Authority that vanished as she reached the bottom of the cavern.
She hadn’t manifested her true form or even a human form, but Sulis knew it was her. The Lady of Avalon. She wore the guise of a goat with white fur and elaborately carved horns. It was the size of a horse, eyes lost to the same blue fire that burned all around them without offering an ounce of warmth. It only offered light and destruction as it consumed the reagents and totems Rella had built over the years. Even in this absurd form, she projected enough power to rock Sulis to her core. It felt like standing before a supernova or black hole. Something cosmic and grand that existed on a scale beyond human comprehension. As the goat’s blazing eyes turned on the vampire, she felt her soul quake at the raw untamed glory.
It did not speak. The caprine form was probably incapable. Sulis understood it for what it was. An invitation coupled with a threat. Summoning her courage, the vampire righted herself from the half-crouch she’d sunken into. Even if she ran it wouldn’t make a difference.
“Tell me where the piton is if you want to talk that badly,” the vampire bargained. It was a long shot and as the goat’s form blazed with flames, she took that to be a rejection. But Sulis wasn’t so easily dissuaded. “I’m not going to run away. I can’t. But there are innocents above. They’re not involved in this. They deserve a shelter that doesn’t feel like a struggle,” she continued to haggle. Then, her expression fell as she came to a realisation. “Besides, what would I be running back to? Wives in love with a fiction? A brother who resents me? An old flame that tempts my worst impulses? The accusing eyes of everyone I ever wronged?” Sulis spoke bitterly, using the goat more as a wall to sling her troubles against than the invitation it was. “I don’t even know who I am anymore! They don’t deserve to suffer on my account!”
The goat, or rather the Lady, did something strange in response. Pawing the ground with hooves that sparked the stone beneath her feet, she seemed to consider something before nodding her horned head. Creeping over, Sulis noticed the word ‘Puck’ blazing in large capital letters. She lifted her head to question what he had to do with it but swiftly had the wind knocked out of her by a ramming pair of horns.
Sulis fell onto her back in the material world, grunting with pain and patting blue flames from her overcoat. She quickly noticed Agata grunting with exertion, turning her head to see the nun struggling with an emaciated vampire. Sulis’ eyes widened as she noticed several others emerging from their coffins. So, this had been the Lady’s price for her help. Letting all those angry spirits have a pop at her. The tasty human was just a bonus.
With a guttural war cry, the sireless joined her friend in the fight. She broke the knees of the nearest vampire, Guilliam by the looks of him. Thankfully they were beyond reason and pain, Sulis thought as she impaled another. He refused to stop moving however, forcing Sulis to break his neck. She began a mental tally of how much blood they’d need, barking at Agata to get to the exit. There wasn’t a hope in hell she’d survive if every coffin opened. The nun wasted no time in removing a female vampire’s leg before scurrying toward the wards and bulkheads. Nodding to herself, Sulis took Deliah’s coffin under one arm and began to hack and stab her way toward the exit.
Their claws were vicious, unrestrained as they raked through any segment of flesh they could reach. Her hair, ragged and unkempt, became just another handle for their groaning zombified forms. With a quick swipe of her sword, Agata gave Sulis a haircut and sent her careening through an opened ward. The sireless, in the grip of pure panic, bellowed for it to be resealed. To her surprise, the nun didn’t even have trouble. It brought a smile of relief to her lips as the vampires began to claw ferally against the immaterial wall. The pair looked at their blinded, gasping, gnashing faces before dragging themselves through the heavy doors sealing themselves one by one.
“What in God’s name was that about?” Agata gasped as they practically crawled into the corridor leading to the castle proper. Sulis could only explain it as the Lady’s doing. She was getting impatient after all. “Won’t they starve in there?” she added, gesturing to the bulkheads that would probably hold fully fed vampires back.
Sulis looked at her friend incredulously, almost insulting the nun with how disbelieving she was. As the sireless rose to her feet, she opened the loosened coffin lid to check Deliah’s body was intact. Though it didn’t look as restful, it was the vampire version of intact. A few cuts and scrapes that wouldn’t last two minutes.
“We’ve got a time limit. By design, I think. Outside the room, this coffin is just a box” Sulis explained before turning her eyes in the direction of the crypts. “They’re luckier. If they sleep, we’ve got a week. Less if they mull around. With Deliah, four days? Ish?” she thought for a few moments, pressing her fingers to her charge’s cheek. Pliant enough. She added four hours to her estimate.
The two of them took Deliah’s body to the library, where it would be somewhat safer than in Sulis’ room. The refugees and Bourdais’ both had been dropping by at every opportunity to add to her list of things to do. Most of it mundane but manageable. Finding Puck was less so. Dealing with the monster in her basement somehow less manageable than that. Already, she’d worked three lines of circumstance to her advantage. It was like dealing with Cavendish. If he were at all threatening. As they arrived at the library, they placed Deliah on the table with as much decorum as they could. The coffin wasn’t needed and would probably be uncomfortable. For her benefit, Sulis placed the sword between the prone form’s hands. It would at least let the spirit see herself for the first time in centuries.
“Are you sure you’ve worked it out?” Deliah asked nervously as she was transported to the hands of her body. “That the monster won’t interfere?”
“I think she knows I’m too bleeding-hearted to leave you stuck in the sword for much longer. I’ve gone soft,” Sulis smiled somewhat sadly. It wasn’t like the Lady was impressed by the mythology. Or really cared, by her estimate. “So I’ll take care of you after I’ve found Puck. Then I’ll have a chat with my squatter.”
“You don’t think she’ll kill you, do you? Sireless don’t die” Agata asserted almost to reassure herself in the vampire’s eyes.
“Everything dies eventually,” Sulis replied with a cavalier grin. “And if anything can kill a sireless, it’s a Precept” she continued before noticing the look on her friend’s face. “Don’t worry. Too much. She has no reason to kill me. We have a contract. Which with her is almost as bad,” the vampire considered with a daunted expression. She’d met good lawyers and bad lawyers, crooked lawyers and politicians. None of them quite liked to twist the ‘spirit’ of a contract like the Lady of Avalon. The worst part was of all the cases she’d known, the Lady had given every petitioner what they’d asked for. And not in the ‘I read every word literally to be a dick’ way.
A silence drew out between them as Agata appeared deep in thought. Sulis didn’t notice too much, fussing over Deliah’s dress and hair. She’d ask the Bourdais’ for blood once she woke up. Then the arduous task of teaching a fresh one how to manage would begin. Though it’d be easier, considering she’d been living in a sword for five hundred years. Ish.
“Aren’t you afraid of her? Of all this?” the nun eventually asked. She gestured to the castle, but Sulis took it to mean how she’d gone from urban to high fantasy pretty quickly. In her defence, she’d always been very clear about the castle’s nature. The sireless denied it, obviously. She was the Draugr Queen, a legend. The woman who sent the vampire world into chaos just by retiring. It was facetious but ultimately true. “Why is it so much more complicated than Sam’s hut?” Agata continued. She was clearly driving at something. Probably noting that out of all things, a castle was a defensive structure. A shack in the woods was not.
“Good thing I didn’t let Mary in or all of New Orleans would know about this place by now,” Sulis commented with a roll of her eyes, adjusting Deliah’s necklace. Gold, corrosion resistant. Nice choice. “Briefly, it’s because I was more willing to deal with the Lady than any of the sireless. And because I was the engineer, the architect. Once upon a time, a scientist. All gone now though. Just me” the sireless said, dropping herself into a chair now that her machinations were complete. “If the Lady taught me anything today, it’s that I’ve lost my touch. Probably for the best that I retire before I hurt more people.”
“Have faith, Sulis” Agata suggested with a mocking grin. The sireless giggled at the irony, returning the smile up at the nun. “Let’s go get some food before the rush,” came the suggestion. One that Sulis was all too happy to take up. They both headed to the exit, giving Deliah some much needed time to think. With a whisper of power on her fingertips, the ancient witch locked the doors to her library and began thinking about where to find Puck.
It was obvious he wasn’t in the castle. She’d searched every inch of it. Which meant he was somewhere in the valley beyond it. A daunting task at the best of times. Carpeted with forests and impromptu farms and barns, not to mention the roving dead in the town. She knew of a place he might be, but she was reticent to go there. In the end, she’d been outplayed. Forced by compassion and compulsion alike, she looked from the kitchen window up the forested slopes of the mountains opposite the castle. In those snowy peaks, hidden in a ravine much like her grandmother’s home, was a memorial to Mora.
