The Chaos Curse Page 5

With a roar of outrage, Rufo spun and heaved the man away with an arm still hooked behind his back. The dead man flew head over heels, his back striking the nearest column. Rufo slid to the floor and lay very still. He felt nothing in his lower body, but his chest was on fire, burning with poison.

  “What have you done?” Kierkan Rufo demanded, looking to the rafters and the perched imp.

  A creature of the horrid lower planes, Druzil wasn’t usually afraid of anything the material world could present to him. But Rufo could see that the imp was afraid then, justifiably fearful of the thing that Kierkan Rufo had become.

  “I wanted to help you,” Druzil explained. “He could not be allowed to escape.”

  “You tainted his blood!” Rufo roared. “His blood …” the monster said more quietly, longingly. “I need … I need …”

  Rufo looked back at his would-be mortician, but the light of life had gone from the man’s eyes.

  Rufo roared again, a horrible, unearthly sound.

  “There are more,” Druzil promised. “There are many more, not far away!”

  A strange feeling came over Kierkan Rufo. He looked at his bare arms, held them up in front of his face, as though he’d realized for the first time that something very unusual had happened to him.

  “Blood?” he asked, and sent a plaintive look Druzil’s way.

  Druzil’s bulbous eyes seemed to come farther out of their sockets as the imp recognized the sincere confusion on the dead Rufo’s face. “Do you not understand what has happened to you?” Druzil cried.

  Rufo went to take a steadying breath, but then realized he wasn’t breathing at all. Again that plaintive, questioning look fell over Druzil, who seemed to have the answers.

  “You drank of Tuanta Quiro Miancay,” the imp squealed, “the Most Fatal Horror, the ultimate chaos, and thus you have become the ultimate perversion of humanity!”

  Still Rufo didn’t understand.

  “The ultimate perversion,” Druzil said again, as though that should explain everything. “The antithesis of life itself!”

  “What are you talking about?” asked a horrified Rufo, the dead priest’s blood spewing from his lips.

  Druzil laughed wickedly. “You are immortal,” he said, and Rufo, stunned and confused, finally began to catch on. “You are a vampire.”

  FOUR

  DELUSIONS

  Vampire. The word hung in Rufo’s thoughts, a dead weight on his undead shoulders. He crawled back to the stone slab and flopped down on his back, covering his eyes with his skinny, pale hands.

  “Bene tellemara,” Druzil muttered many times as the moments passed uneventfully. “Would you have them come out and find you?” Rufo didn’t look up.

  “The priests are dead,” the imp rasped. “Torn. Will those who come in search of them be caught so unaware?”

  Rufo moved his arm from in front of his face and looked over at the imp, but didn’t seem to care.

  “You think you can beat them,” Druzil reasoned, misunderstanding Rufo’s calm demeanor. “Fool! You think you can beat them all?”

  Rufo’s response caught the imp off guard, made Druzil understand that despair, not confidence, was the source of the vampire’s lethargy.

  “I do not care to try,” Rufo said.

  “You can beat them,” the imp quickly improvised, changing his emphasis so the reversal suddenly didn’t seem so ridiculous. “You can beat them all!”

  “I am already dead,” Rufo said. “I am already defeated.”

  “Of course, of course!” Druzil rasped, clapping his hands and flapping his wings to perch on the end of Rufo’s slab. “Dead, yes, but that is your strength, not your weakness. You can beat them all, I say, and the library will be yours.”

  The last words seemed to pique Rufo’s interest. He cocked his head at an angle so that he could better view the untrustworthy imp.

  “You are immortal,” Druzil said solemnly.

  Rufo continued to stare for a long, uneasy moment. “At what price?” he asked.

  “Price?” Druzil echoed.

  “I am not alive!” Rufo roared at him, and Druzil spread his wings, ready to launch away if the vampire made a sudden move.

  “You’re more alive than you’ve ever been!” Druzil snapped back. “Now you have power. Now your will shall be done!”

  “To what end?” Rufo asked. “I’m dead. My flesh is dead. What pleasures might I know? What dreams worth fancying?”

  “Pleasures?” the imp asked. “Did not the priest’s blood taste sweet? And did you not feel the rush power as you approached the pitiful man? You could taste his fear, vampire, and the taste was as sweet as the blood that was to come.”

  Rufo continued to stare, but had no more complaints to offer. He had tasted the man’s fear, and that sensation of power, of inspiring such terror, must have felt wonderfully sweet to a man who’d been so impotent in life.

  Druzil waited a little while, until he was certain that he’d convinced Rufo to at least explore his vampiric existence.

  “You must be gone from this place,” the imp said finally, looking to the corpses.

  Rufo glanced at the closed door then nodded and swung around, dangling his legs over the side of the slab. “The catacombs …” he hissed.

  “You cannot cross,” Druzil said as the vampire began shuffling toward the door. Rufo turned on him with suspicion, as if he thought the imp’s words a threat. “The sun is bright,” Druzil explained. “It will burn you like fire.”

  Rufo’s expression turned from curious to dour to sheer horror.

  “You are a creature of the night now,” Druzil said.

  It was a bitter pill for Rufo to swallow, but in light of all that had happened, the man accepted the news stoically and forced himself to straighten once more.

  “Then how am I to get out of here?” he asked, his tone filled with anger and sarcasm.

  Druzil led Rufo’s gaze to rows of marked stones lining the mausoleum’s far wall, the crypts of the library’s former headmasters, including those of Avery Schell and Pertelope, and not all of the stones were marked.

  At first the thought of crawling into a crypt revolted Rufo, but as he let go of those prejudices remaining from when he had been a living, breathing man, as he allowed himself to view the world as an undead thing, a creature of the night, he found the notion of cool, dark stone strangely appealing.

  Rufo met Druzil by the wall, in front of an unmarked slab set waist-high. Not knowing what the imp expected, the vampire reached out with his stiff arms and clasped at the edge of the stone.

  “Not like that!” Druzil scolded.

  Rufo stood straight, eyeing the imp, obviously growing tired of Druzil’s superior attitude.

  “If you tear it away, the priests will find you,” the imp explained, and under his breath he added the expected, “Bene tellemara.”

  Rufo didn’t reply, but stood staring, his eyes flickering from the imp to the wall and back again. How was he to get inside the crypt unless he removed the stone?

  “There’s a crack along the bottom,” Druzil remarked, and when Rufo bent low, he did see a line running along the mortar at the bottom of the slab.

  The vampire shrugged, but before he could ask Druzil how that crack might help, a strange sensation, a lightness, seemed to come over him, as though he was something less than substantial. Rufo looked at Druzil, who smiled widely, then back to the crack, which must have suddenly loomed much larger to him. The vampire, black robes and all, melted away into a cloud of green vapor and swirled through the crack in the slab.

  Kierkan Rufo came back to his corporeal form inside the tight confines of the stone crypt, hemmed in by unbroken walls. For an instant, a wave of panic, a feeling of being trapped, swept over the man. How long would his air last? he wondered. He shut his mouth, fearful that he was gulping in too much of the precious commodity.

  A moment later, his mouth opened once more and from it issued a howl of laughter.

  “Air?” Ru
fo asked aloud.

  He needed no air, and he was certainly not trapped. He could slip out through that crack as easily as he’d come in, or else he could simply slide down and kick the slab free of its perch. He was strong enough to do that—he knew he was.

  The limitations of a weak and living body had come clear to the vampire. He thought of all the times when he’d been persecuted—unfairly, by his reckoning—and he thought of the two Oghmanyte priests he’d so easily dispatched.

  Lorekeepers! Wrestlers, warriors … yet he had tossed them about with hardly any effort!

  Rufo felt as though he’d been freed of those living limitations, free to fly and grab at the power that was rightfully his. He would teach his persecutors. He would …

  The vampire stopped fantasizing and reached up to feel the brand on his forehead. An image of Cadderly, of his greatest oppressor, came clear to him.

  Yes, Rufo would teach them all.

  But there, in the cool, dark confines of his chosen bed, the vampire would rest. The sun, an ally of the living—an ally of the weak—was bright outside.

  Rufo would wait for the dark.

  The highest-ranking Glyphscribes of the Deneirrath order gathered that afternoon at Dean Thobicus’s bidding. They met in a little-used room on the library’s fourth and highest floor, an obscure setting that would guarantee them their privacy.

  Seclusion seemed important to the withered dean, the others realized, a point made quite clear when Thobicus shut tight the room’s single door and closed the shutters over the two tiny windows.

  Thobicus solemnly turned and surveyed that most important gathering. Some of the priests sat in chairs of various sizes, and others simply stood leaning against a bare wall, or sat on the weathered carpet covering the floor. Thobicus moved near the middle of the group, near the center of the floor, and turned slowly, eyeing each of the thirty gathered priests to let them fully appreciate the gravity of the matter at hand. Scattered conversations dissipated under that scrutiny, replaced by intrigue and trepidation.

  “Castle Trinity is eradicated,” Thobicus said to them after another long moment of silence.

  The priests looked around at each other, stunned by the suddenness of the announcement. Then a cheer went up, quietly at first, but gaining momentum until all the gathered priests, except the dean himself, were clapping each other on the back and shaking their fists in victory.

  More than one called out Cadderly’s name, and Thobicus winced each time he heard it, and knew that he must proceed with caution.

  As the cheering lost its momentum, Thobicus held up his hand, calling for quiet. Again the dean’s intense stare fell over the priests, silencing them, filling them with curiosity.

  “The word is good,” remarked Fester Rumpol, the second-ranking priest among the Deneirrath. “Yet I read no cheer in your features, my dean.”

  “Do you know how I learned of our enemy’s fall?” Thobicus asked him.

  “Cadderly?” answered one voice.

  “You have spoken with a higher power, an agent of Deneir?” offered another.

  Dean Thobicus shook his head to both assumptions, his gaze never leaving Rumpol’s. “My attempts at communion with Deneir have been blocked. I had to go to Bron Turman of the Oghmanytes to find my answers. At my bidding, he inquired of agents of his god and learned of our enemy’s defeat.”

  That information was easily as astonishing as the report of Castle Trinity’s fall. Thobicus was the dean of the Edificant Library, the father of their sect. How could he be blocked from communion with Deneir’s agents? All of the gathered priests had survived the Time of Troubles, and all of them feared that the dean was hinting at a repeat of that terrible time.

  Fester Rumpol’s expression shifted from fear to suspicion. “I prayed this morning,” he said, commanding the attention of all. “I asked for guidance in my search for an old parchment—and my call was answered.”

  Whispers began all around the room.

  “That is because …” Thobicus said loudly, sharply, stealing back the audience. He paused to make sure they were all listening. “That is because Cadderly has not yet targeted you.”

  “Cadderly?” Rumpol and several others said together.

  Throughout the Edificant Library, particularly among the Deneirrath, feelings for the young priest were strong, many positive and many negative. More than a few of the older priests thought Cadderly impetuous and irreverent, lackadaisical in the routine, necessary duties of his station. And many of the younger priests viewed Cadderly as a rival that they could never compete against. Of the thirty in that room, every man was at least five years older than Cadderly, yet Cadderly had already come to outrank more than half by the library’s stated hierarchy. And the persistent rumors hinted that Cadderly was already among the very strongest of the order, in Deneir’s eyes.

  Dean Thobicus had apparently confirmed that theory. If Cadderly could block the dean’s communion with agents of Deneir, and from all the way across the Snowflake Mountains … !

  Conversations erupted from every corner, the priests confused as to what it all might mean. Fester Rumpol and Dean Thobicus continued to stare at each other, with Rumpol having no answer to the dean’s incredible claim.

  “Cadderly has overstepped his rank,” Thobicus explained. “He deems the hierarchy of the Edificant Library unfit, and thus, he desires to change it.”

  “Preposterous!” one priest called out.

  “So thought I,” Dean Thobicus replied, remaining calm. He had prepared himself well for the meeting, with answers to every question or claim. “But now I have come to know the truth. With Avery Schell and Pertelope dead, our young Cadderly has, it would seem, run a bit out of control. He deceived me in order to go to Castle Trinity.” That claim wasn’t exactly true, but Thobicus didn’t want to admit that Cadderly had dominated him, had bent his mind like a willow in a strong wind. “And now he blocks my attempts at communion with our god.”

  As far as Thobicus knew, that second statement was correct. For him to believe otherwise would indicate that he had fallen far from Deneir’s favor, and that the old dean was not ready to believe.

  “What would you have us do?” Fester Rumpol asked, his tone showing more suspicion than loyalty.

  “Nothing,” Thobicus replied quickly, recognizing the man’s doubts. “I only wish to warn you all, so that we won’t be taken by surprise when our young friend returns.”

  That answer seemed to satisfy Rumpol and many others. Thobicus adjourned the meeting then and retired to his private quarters. He’d planted the seeds of doubt. His honesty would be viewed favorably when Cadderly returned, when the dean and the upstart young priest inevitably faced off.

  And they would indeed, Thobicus knew. He’d neither forgotten nor forgiven the young priest for his actions. He was the dean of the library, the head of his order, and he would not be treated like a puppet by any man.

  That was Dean Thobicus’s greatest shortcoming. He still couldn’t accept that Cadderly’s domination had been granted by Deneir, by the true tenets of their faith. Thobicus had been tied up in the bureaucracy of the library for so long that he’d forgotten the higher purpose of both the library and the order. Too many procedures had dulled the goals. The dean viewed his upcoming battle with Cadderly as a political struggle, a fight that would be decided by back room alliances and gratuitous promises.

  Deep in his heart, of course, Thobicus knew the truth, knew that his struggle with Cadderly would be decided by Deneir himself. But that truth, like the truth of the order itself, was so buried by false information that Thobicus dared to believe otherwise, and fooled himself into thinking that others would follow his lead.

  Kierkan Rufo’s dreams were no longer those of a victim.

  In his dreams he saw Cadderly, but it was the young Deneirrath, not the branded Rufo, who cowered. In his dreams, Rufo, the conqueror, reached down and calmly tore Cadderly’s throat out.

  The vampire awoke in absolute dark
ness. He could feel the stone walls pressing in on him, and he welcomed their sanctuary, basking in the blackness as the moments turned into hours.

  Then another call compelled Rufo. A great hunger swept over him. He tried to ignore it, consciously wanted nothing more than to lie in the cool black emptiness. But soon his fingers clawed at the stone and he thrashed about, overwhelmed by urges he didn’t yet understand. A low, feral growl, the call of an animal, escaped his lips.

  Rufo squirmed and twisted, turning his body completely around in the crypt. At first the thrashing vampire thought to tear the blocking stone away, to shatter the barrier into a million pieces, but he kept his senses enough to realize that he might need that sanctuary again. Concentrating on the minute crack at the base of the slab, Rufo melted away into greenish vapor—it wasn’t difficult—and he filtered out into the mausoleum’s main area.

  Druzil, perched on the nearest slab, canine chin in clawed fingers, waited for him.

  Rufo hardly noticed the imp, though. When he assumed corporeal form, he felt different, less stiff and awkward.

  He smelled the night air—his air—and felt strong. Faint moonlight leaked in through the dirty window, but unlike the light of the sun, it was cool, comfortable.

  Rufo stretched his arms into the air, kicked off with one foot, and twirled around on the other, tasting the night and his freedom.

  “They didn’t come,” Druzil said.

  Rufo started to ask what the imp might be talking about, but as soon as he noticed the two corpses he understood. “I’m not surprised,” the vampire answered. “The library is full of duties. Always duties. The dead priests may not be missed for several days.”

  “Then gather them up,” Druzil ordered. “Drag them from this place.”

  Rufo concentrated more on the imp’s tone than his words.

  “Do it now,” Druzil went on, oblivious to the fast-mounting danger. “If we’re careful …” Only then did Druzil look up from the nearest corpse to see Rufo’s face, and the vampire’s icy glare sent a shiver along the normally unshakable imp’s spine.