42. Bane
Chapter 42
Bane
T he guards were not on the wall when Ravenscry came into view. The torches flickered over empty parapets.
I launched myself from the ground, landing heavily on the stone and making it shudder, clawing my way up and over the side.
I half expected to see an abattoir as I crested the wall, slithering over the parapets with a thirst burning in my throat.
Blood. I needed the dungeons, the prisoners, and there would be no decanting, no consideration for them at all. I would sink my teeth in and suck them dry one after another, until every cell was engorged, every fiber prepared to make the full shift into the primordial beast under my skin.
The ultimate hunter, the apex predator, the one chance I had to reclaim my bride.
But the guards were gone… no, not gone.
They had abandoned the wall, surrounding something in the torchlight of the keep’s bailey.
I bared my teeth, descending into the open inner keep, prowling towards them. Deserters of their posts, useless under command…
It was Koryek who saved their lives.
“My Lord.” His handsome face gleamed warily in the flickering light. “The Fae things have moved from the library—are still moving. They’ve been at it for hours.”
Several guards stepped aside, all of them frowning, and I saw why they had abandoned the walls.
The golems, Rose and Thorn, stood there, facing the gates. They were positioned strangely, like people fighting against a strong headwind—no, like people fighting a hurricane-force gale, shoving forward and yet completely still.
There was something uncanny and disturbing in their forms, so humanoid and yet so alien, hunched over like that.
I drifted closer, looking over Rose. Her head was down, bowed against the intangible force, one foot forward, fists curled.
Perhaps it was the wavering flames, but it looked as though she were moving, as slow as a bead of sap rolling over a frozen tree.
I held my breath, watching, and as the minutes passed her foot came forward, centimeter by centimeter, the fell thing struggling against an unstoppable force…
No. She struggled against a command .
Thorn did the same; as I watched, he heaved himself forward, so inert to the eye that it was impossible to pick out any actual forward momentum.
My lungs emptied of air.
They were made of Cirri’s blood; as they had followed her through Ravenscry, they would follow her anywhere. They faced northeast, struggling against her orders to stay put.
I’d last seen them in the library, standing at the windows; had she told them to wait there? Combined with the weight of the order to never leave Ravenscry, it was astonishing they could move at all.
But they could serve as my compass. With them I would find her, unerring and unfaltering; they were neither of flesh nor blood, and would have no need to rest until they’d found her.
“Leave them be,” I said harshly, and the guards immediately backed away. “Do not touch them, and do not open the gate until I command.”
I touched Rose’s cheeks, and did I imagine it, or did I feel the golem’s head strain towards me, every line of her body screaming to be released?
Blood. My throat burned, a dusty, aching fire begging to be quenched. First—to save Cirri’s life, I had to take life.
The guards returned to the wall, keeping wary eyes on the golems.
I went to the dungeons.
The Ark was still warm, heating the cool stones of this miserable place. The warden, a vampire woman with hair the color of fresh-churned butter and a face chiseled from stone, stood from her post and bowed to me. Her brown eyes were usually as cold as frozen Nordrin earth, but there was a touch of confusion in them at my presence.
“There have been no orders to prepare a harvest, my Lord—” she began, but I held up a hand.
“Quickly now,” I said, casting my gaze down the lines of cells. How many prisoners did we have? Almost forty, at my last recall, but I wouldn’t need them all. This was not a full transformation, merely a glut. “Begin with the worst of them—the child killers. Bring them to me directly, as quick as you can. Do not stop until I tell you otherwise.”
She stared at me, the little color in her porcelain face blanching away.
All vampires knew what this meant. I wondered if it was simple disgust with fiend appetites that put them off, or envy that they were forbidden from doing the same while they fed.
I didn’t look in the cells or observe the prisoners as I passed them. I would look into their eyes soon enough, and drain them dry without so much as a last word.
Thus I would begin with those whose lives had caused the most pain, the deepest damage to others; now their blood would serve some purpose besides keeping those miserable hearts pumping.
I stepped into the room with the Ark, the heat still radiating from Ellena’s pyre. Their corpses could fill its iron gut for its next meal.
The warden shoved a human man through the door.
He was filthy, in chains, his hands clasped behind his back in shackles; she kicked out the backs of his knees, sending him to the floor, and turned her back on him even as he babbled through tears, begging her for another chance.
“Please, please,” he gasped, and I gripped him, claws sinking into the meat of his shoulder, cutting through his scalp, and wrenched his head to the side, exposing his corded neck. His pleas became cries of pain.
A shudder of disgust went through me as my teeth sank in, cutting off his sobbing screams. After Cirri’s sweetness, it was like drinking sewage, unclean and filthy.
But now he could do some good with his worthless life. Remorseless, unfeeling, I drained him dry, and waited for the next.
The world was torn between satiation and agony.
The soothing warmth of blood in my throat, overridden by the pain of my body melting, warping, expanding; and then my teeth would batten on another throat, a new hot flood, and the relief of the blood would soothe the pain—only to fuel my transformation further, a fresh wave of agony swamping the relief.
In this form, the world was simple.
It was a tapestry of scents, rich and abounding, from the cooling ashes of the furnace to the chill stone, the sharp fear-sweat of the prisoners, the warden’s floral perfume mixing with the musty scent of her anxiety at being near me.
From this killing ground I smelled the fever slowly killing a man, the dusty pages of a book, the faintest aroma of baking bread from the kitchens far above.
I tossed aside the dry bundle of bones and meat I’d been clutching, drawing from greedily, and sat upright on my haunches.
Nothing could destroy me; I was the deliverer of death, the hand of punishment, every muscle corded with strength, my body a bristling tower of organic armor. Let the wolves come; I would have her back, and gorge myself on their blood.
The warden moved aside, eyes averted, as I prowled from the dank pit where I’d had my feast.
None would look upon me without disgust, without terror, but let them see. Let them fear.
None mattered but the woman, my mate, the one who was lost. I was her monster, her creature, and it seemed to me now that it was futile to resist this fate. Why had I wanted to pretend to be a man?
This was what she needed.
I climbed into the world above, where the sun just touched the horizon. The golems were nearly at the gates, still forcing themselves headlong against a binding of commands.
Pain slivered through my back, muscles quivering as new appendages tried to tear themselves free. No, not yet. Hunt by land, find her scent, follow it.
The golems twitched, trying to push past the invisible barrier in the air, and three horses emerged from the stables, their riders upright and grim.
Visca, on a fresh horse, and Wyn at her side, freshly-fed, her blonde hair no longer streaked with silver and what few wrinkles she’d cultivated smoothed from her face. She wore light armor instead of robes, blood sigils dripping on her forehead and the backs of her hands.
I blinked, time shifting around me for a moment; it was like the old days had returned, the three of us stepping out of the past and into the present.
But as Visca rode forward, raising her hand for the guards to open the gates, Wyn’s horse danced by, and the bloodwitch nodded to the golems. “Your blood is in the guardian, so you’ll have to give them the orders. We’ll be behind you. The horses can’t stand to be near you in that form.” She held up a palm to show me the bleeding mark she’d carved into herself: an open eye. “I’ll see you.”
No, no living creature had been able to stand me. Even now, holding still and silent, their mounts gave me a wide berth, refusing to come close—but a tantalizing scent drifted from one of them.
Roses, and skin musk, the softest whiff of soap.
Wyn raised her chin in the air as I crept closer, her horse’s eyes rolling wildly. “Bane… I’d rather not be thrown from the horse and die of a broken neck before the hunt begins.”
The scent emanated from her saddle blanket; I crouched, nostrils flexing as I considered the padded wool.
Cirri had touched it, somehow; sat on it, or laid on it. She never went near the stables, completely disinterested in them. And yet she’d touched that horse blanket, her scent relatively fresh, the comforting smell I’d grown accustomed to breathing as she slept.
By will or by force, she had left the keep on a horse or a wagon, and now I was sure I knew which one.
I looked to the thorned golem, the darkness of his looping, coiling body straining to run. The gates creaked open, revealing the road.
“Follow her,” I ordered, the words struggling to force their way past distended, overgrown jaws, a mouth meant for rending, not talking. “Find her.”
For three seconds that lasted an eternity, the golems remained frozen in place.
Then Thorn shook his head, his body jerking like he was breaking free of unseen chains, and Rose followed suit. With eerie grace they went from stillness to movement, dashing through the gates and into the waning night.
I followed, my strides bringing me to their speed with ease. They ran faster than the average man, cutting through the forest, leaping trees and brambles like deer, never stopping, never faltering.
And as they led the way, I breathed deep, taking in the scents that mattered: the fading sweat of a horse, of fresh wood splinters dug into the mud and stone of the road.
The scents that meant Miro… and Cirri.
Without warning the mist opened on a sharp slope, the northern road below us.
Rose and Thorn leaped as one, landing lightly on the balls of their feet, following the paved stones.
I spilled down the slope, tracing the dry aroma of wagon splinters, the horse that I knew to be a young chestnut gelding. The mist obscured some of the scent, but not enough to dissuade me; without the golems, I could follow it as clearly as the road itself.
Hours passed, my body moving even as my mind fell into a lull; thoughts of Cirri swirling below the constant workings of my nose and ears.
The golems ran past Tristone, and kept going north; well into the upper reaches of the Rift, where the people accepted the rule of a vampire, but didn’t stand on ceremony when it came to bowing the knee; the northerners often preferred to be left alone.
Of the small villages tucked into the misty reaches, I saw none. They were hidden behind foggy veils, marked by dolmens raised well away from the road—a silent warning that they didn’t wish to be found, and visitors weren’t entirely welcome.
But the trail never deviated to any of these secluded homesteads; the scent of horse sweat was still fresh, strong enough to sting my sensitive scent organs.
Miro had been driving the horse hard; the sweat had the scent of driven prey.
The golems ran tirelessly, moving almost as one; when their course deviated by so much as an inch, they moved seamlessly, shifting at the precise same moment, but always north.
And as the sun fell, the mist overhead fading from brilliant, eye-blinding white to a soft veil, it hit me hard.
Like a sword to the gut, a brick to the skull; I had been following the horse’s sweat trail for so long it had become expected background noise, and suddenly there was Cirri .
“Halt,” I garbled at the golems, and they obeyed, but slowly. Without nostrils, perhaps this scent meant nothing to them; they stood quivering in the middle of the road, clearly fighting my command.
But she was here . Cirri all over this tattered patch of road, in the highest reaches of the Rift; a place she should never have stepped foot, never had reason to see.
And it was not her usual scent, but the odor she’d given off in Tristone: roses and musk tainted by metallic fear, the raw bite of anger.
I snuffled over the ground, jaws aching, and reared back as she filled my nose, scraping at the leaves with my claws.
Bloodrose petals, and a tangled knot of her own hair.
I held it up, examining the crimson threads, burning with their own inner light. There was something deliberate in this, and I could picture my brave, stubborn Cirri leaving it for me.
A conjecture that seemed more likely as my tongue flicked out as I crept over the ground, tasting her sweat, even her spit: she had made a mess, a damned deliberate one.
Miro’s scent was here too, his own fear acrid and bitter, mixed with powerful cologne. I traced his footsteps, imagining it in my mind: he halted the wagon. He laid her on the ground. Cirri wriggled, spit, tore out her own hair…
And where was the wagon?
The grooves on the edge of the road told a clear story, and I peered over the edge at the shattered wagon. It was a damp pile of wood, weapons gleaming amongst the splinters, sacks split open and spilling grain into the creek.
My tongue flicked out; I tasted it all, but not Cirri. No, her scent continued up the road, mixed with Miro’s cologne and the horse’s sweat… and then the trail was all horse again.
I smoothed out her tangled hairs, wrapping them around a finger like a ring of scarlet spider webs.
“Go,” I ordered the golems, and they were back in motion like they had never stopped at all.
Half an hour later, they turned east, departing from the main road and following a forest trail, a worn rut of smooth dirt that climbed upwards steadily, ascending towards the mountains bordering Foria.
The trail followed a slope under a thick canopy of trees, and I smelled it before I saw it, the entrance obscured by the thickening evening mist.
A mine shaft, the ragged entrance shored with old timbers, coated in decades’ worth of cold iron charms and protections.
It smelled old, deep. The ancient mineral belly of the world, gusting its breath down over the mountains, sending a chill up the spine of anyone who smelled it; it was a scent tinged with danger, with unknowable things. A scent I was too familiar with from my youth; the Fae had once walked those dark paths.
This close to Foria, they still might.
Fear prickled at the nape of my neck, my heart skipping a beat; my mind stumbled, tripping over a terrible thought— what if she’s in there what if she’s dead in that darkness —before the golems calmly walked under the charm-laden timber.
They still hunted her, so she lived. I clung to that notion as I followed, my eyes adjusting to the deep shadows in an instant.
And there it was again, her scent, as powerful as if she was standing right here beside me: it coated a lump of cold iron, dropped in the dirt.
I carefully maneuvered my claws around it, brought it to my nose. Flicked my forked tongue over it, tasting her fear and desperation.
Shredded in two, between blinding rage that she had been stolen, and the comforting knowledge that she had left this as a sign. Left it for the one person who could track her by blood or scent.
For me .
She had not run from me, she had been taken. My Cirri… somehow, I knew, she had not left me of her own accord. Had Miro forced her to write that letter? Had he threatened her, put a knife to her throat?
It was of no consequence now. The letter meant nothing.
She had left her petals, her hair, this cold iron, for me.
I wore no shirt; my body’s rippling conversion had shredded it. I finally did my best to tuck the cold iron into my trousers, torn and useless as they were, sloughing from my body with every step.
Every piece of Cirri, every clue she had left… I could leave none of it behind.
She was waiting, afraid and desperate.
Following the golems, my living compasses, I plunged into the dark.