Chapter 29
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Estrys was built straight into the sheer cliffs, magnificent and grand.
The fortress was stone, with accents of searing red—columns topped with gold stretching stories high, angular peaks coming to speared points, arched doors and windows painted crimson.
A red wall encircled it, bearing a massive golden gate.
But I couldn’t admire any of it. Because all I noticed was the silence. Silence like I had not heard since that terrible night in Hegaella.
There was no movement in the windows or upon the balconies.
No guards in the outposts along the walls.
Only three of the posts had their torches lit, flames dancing with every gust of wind.
Flags bearing the House of Blood crest—a bloody sword and a weeping woman—rippled sadly in the breeze.
One of them was torn, leaving half of the lady’s face dangling weakly in the breeze.
There were no voices. Not of guards on the wall, or merchants beyond it, or any sounds at all to indicate that anything but stone stood before us.
Neither Septimus nor I spoke. But I could feel the slow realization in his body as we approached—first curiosity, then confusion, then dread.
He urged our horse into a trot with two urgent kicks.
When we rounded the final corner of the path leading into the city to see the gate swinging sadly in the breeze, he went rigid.
I felt him stop breathing. I felt it because I did, too.
Neither of us spoke. Neither of us had to.
Zefiah at last said softly, {Something terrible has happened here.}
Our horse paused, perhaps sensing it too, but Septimus urged her on.
We came to the gate. Up close, we could see that it had been damaged, the metal twisted so that it no longer opened all the way—as if someone had forced through it. A gust of gold air doused us in a sickening, rotting scent, which had vomit lurching halfway up my throat.
Septimus was silent as we stared up at the fortress. The windows were dark. Some, I could see now, were broken. With the breeze, singed curtains swayed sadly from a set of open doors leading to a balcony above us.
We dismounted, our horse groaning in appreciation. When Septimus put his hand on the twisted gate to push it open, I found myself grabbing his shoulder.
“Wait,” I said.
He turned. The look on his face still startled me, even though I had been expecting it—every feature forced into stillness. His jaw was so tight, I could see the muscle twitching in his cheek.
“I’ll go,” I said, in a breathless rush. “Tell me what we’re looking for. The—the harp. I’ll go get it by myself.”
His expression didn’t change. He didn’t speak.
It was naive, I knew. Foolish. But I thought of a version of myself standing before the gates of the temple of Hegaella.
When Zefiah had warned me not to go, not to look.
Right now, I saw that version of myself in Septimus, standing at this door, and I felt such a sudden, fierce compassion for him that it actually hurt.
“You’ll never forget it,” I blurted out. “It will follow you forever.”
A barely there twitch over his expression. A slight softening—anger to despair.
He said, voice tight, “It already does.”
My chest ached with a sad understanding. This was not the first time Septimus had stood at a gate like this one. Perhaps not even the second or third or seventh. His innocence, like mine, was long past saving. It had just seemed worth it to try.
I drew Zefiah and, together, we pushed through the gate.
A single, grand set of stairs led up to the fortress entrance.
Those doors were ajar, too, like the gate.
The first body lay on the steps, back against the door.
She had ash-blond hair in a bloody plait over one shoulder and wore golden armor.
Her sword was still crossed over her chest, as if she was attempting to hold her post even in death.
Her black blood fell down the steps like a waterfall, sickeningly graceful.
Septimus took this in with no reaction.
We ascended the steps and pushed open the doors.
The smell. Gods, the smell. It was horrific. After ten years of death, you get used to the stench of rot. But this was something else—you could feel it, taste it, in the air, all that pain trapped in this massive stone box.
A grand atrium spread out before us. It must have, once, been beautiful.
The ceilings were high, supported by gold-lined arches; the windows vast, set with stained glass.
Wrought iron framed the hallways of five stories above this one, stretching up to the vaulted ceiling.
The slick black marble floor reflected the starlight through the windows.
I could not count the bodies. There were so many that my mind didn’t even try—just slipped right by them, as if they were a part of the scenery. They were everywhere. On the ground in heaps of armor and flesh. Dangling over the railings, weapons still clutched in their hands.
Septimus looked up, and I followed his gaze and let out an involuntary choking exhale.
Bodies were strung up from the rafters, swaying with the breeze from the broken windows. They were held up by their ankles, clustered together, perhaps half a dozen of them. Some had ropes around their wrists as well, tied to the railings, to splay out their limbs.
I recognized this. It was how religious vampire hunters used to kill vampires before the darkness, letting the sun do the work, slowly and painfully, over many hours.
There was, of course, no more sun, but the hunters still favored the method, instead gutting their game and allowing them to struggle until they died of blood loss, exhaustion, or starvation.
I had witnessed a hunter do this once. I had come across him on the road, covered with gore, teeth stark against the smear of vampire blood in his beard.
The vampire was dead by the time I got there, dangling upside down from a bridge, and the hunter was laughing and laughing to any traveler who passed by.
“Took him thirty hours to go,” he cackled at me. “Bet he misses the sun now, don’t he?”
I had little sympathy for the vampire then, even if I thought the method was barbaric. But now, my stomach turned as I stared up at those bodies. Some of them looked terribly small. I wondered how long they had taken to die.
Septimus silently turned and began walking down the hall.
My boot stuck to the floor with my next step, and I looked down to see that it was because of the sticky coating of vampire blood. The floor was not black at all.
We continued through horror after horror.
There were very few soldiers, at least that I could identify.
But so many dead. In the ballroom, we found a pile of corpses, still burning.
In the dining room, bodies splayed out and staked through the heart on the table, spears of silver buried in their hands and feet.
In the library, naked corpses pinned to the shelves.
Every room, a greater display of cruelty.
Whoever had been here had taken their time, and they had enjoyed themselves.
I was sweating. I was shaking. My breath trembled in my ribs, quick and shallow, and my fingers were so tight around Zefiah’s hilt that I could feel the carvings biting into my skin.
That physical sensation was no escape. Each body was one I had seen in Vostis or Hegaella. The suffering was the same.
It had genuinely never occurred to me that a vampire society could sustain these sorts of losses. For ten years, I had seen vampires as the monsters at the door—never the ones hiding within it.
In some rooms, the sick-sweet scent of magic still hung in the air. Who could have done this? I asked Zefiah.
{They had been greatly outnumbered,} she said. Even she sounded mournful. {The traces of many different magics still remain here.}
I touched a bookshelf to find a purple, shimmery residue on my fingertips.
A lump rose in my throat. Illusionism dust, from Kajmar’s followers.
Perhaps even the very same one that I’d let put his hand up my skirt.
He could have been at the pleasure house celebrating this victory. The thought made me want to vomit.
But could Kajmar’s power be enough to do this?
{Perhaps. If the numbers were in his favor.}
Alone?
{There was more than Kajmar’s magic here. I can smell it. But I cannot identify whose.}
Septimus was silent, expressionless, observing every horror. We continued deeper into the fortress, then down a winding set of stairs. When we opened this final door, I couldn’t contain a choked gasp.
The bodies were everywhere. Piled on top of each other.
Staked to the walls. Soldiers, mostly, but some who looked to be civilians, though they held weapons.
There were more human corpses here, too, red blood mingling with the black.
The ground was littered with crossbows wrapped in red fabric. Vampire hunters.
The question I had asked myself earlier—where were all the warriors?—was now answered. They had been here. For all the battles that had happened elsewhere in this castle, whatever had happened here put them all to shame. This was where the vampires had made their final stand.
Septimus stepped gingerly through the bodies, crossing the room to the open door on the other side, and I followed.
In the last room, there had been countless corpses. But this one, smaller than the last, was nearly empty.
I stopped short. At first, my mind couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing.
Limbs, yes. A body, of sorts—or many? The room was covered in .
. . were those roots? Vines? They were bright red, pulsing slightly, all running along the walls like ivy, all converging on the opposite side of the small space.
I took a step closer, and my stomach lurched. Zefiah let out an involuntary hiss.
The thing on the other side of the room did not look like a person, and when my mind finally snapped together the pieces of the figure, it was so revolting, so wrong, that my every feral instinct railed against it.
The figure—the person—was pinned against the wall, in front of what looked to be a small door.
They were naked, and so drenched in blood, both red and black, that I couldn’t tell what color their skin was.
Their limbs were long, as if stretched out, and their eyes were pools of red.
Their chest was a mess of gore, from which the appendages burst. Their face was slack-jawed, teeth too long and pointed to fit in their mouth.
Ropes of red and black peeled from each limb, too—from forearms, fingers, ears, mouth.
Human and vampire blood intertwined, as if this thing had been sucking up all the death in this fortress and using it as a weapon.
Septimus let out a long breath. Only here did I see the first crack in his composure. The faintest, barely audible hitch in his voice with that exhale.
He slowly crossed the room, and I began to follow.
{Stop—} Zefiah started.
And that was when I realized: This thing was alive.
The figure’s head snapped up. Their mouth gaped. Slitted nostrils opened. The cords of dripping red slithered, as if drawing in a great gasping breath.
The thing let out a piercing wail. Those empty eyes snapped to me. I lifted Zefiah—
But before I could move, Septimus yanked one of the swords free from the wall and silently, calmly, pierced the creature through the heart.
The scream cracked like ice, shifting from hunger to pain. I stood there, frozen, as the blood on the walls thrashed.
Septimus stood there, motionless, holding the blade. Twisting it slowly.
The scream faded to a moan. The figure lifted its head. Their eyes closed, then opened again, and for one split second, so brief that I might have imagined it, there was some lucidity in them as they flicked between us.
And then, at last, closed.
A cascade of droplets rained from the ceiling, all those vines collapsing to liquid.
Septimus pulled the sword from the figure with a nauseating wet sound.
Slowly, I crossed the room to stand beside him. I noticed for the first time that the sword in his hand—a sword that had been pinning the figure there—was not hunter weaponry. It had the distinctive swirled carvings of the Bloodborn.
I whispered, “What is that?”
Septimus said quietly, “Who. Not what.”
Up close, I could see that something had been pinned to the figure’s flesh, right over their heart.
Septimus pulled it free, and I realized it was a piece of parchment, soggy with blood, folded many times.
Then he yanked the remaining sword from the wall, letting the body slump down.
Behind it, I could see now, was a small alcove built into the stone. A cupboard.
“His name was Erekkus,” Septimus said.
He pressed his palm to the door, and it slid open. Light doused us, drenching all this carnage in gold.
{God made,} Zefiah said softly.
A golden harp sat inside.
I did not need to be told what this was. The weapon intended to help us kill Kajmar. The second step of the prophecy we followed. An item so valuable that every person here had protected it, even at the cost of allowing their fortress to fall.
Septimus turned to me. His face was still, like stone. No—like glass, on the verge of shattering. But those eyes peered straight through it. The ring of red around his irises was darker than I’d ever seen it.
“I told you that my people died for this, Vindica Ultis,” he hissed. “Let us make their blood worth something.”