Assassin of the Damned

— 21-

There was an awful moment of stretching, as if a judge had chained my ankles and wrists to separate teams of horses, and the horses stained to tear me in two. I writhed in agony. Then my head struck wood. That deflected me. I struck something else, staggered and pitched onto my face in dreadful blackness.

I groaned. Erasmo had laid a trap. He was a sorcerer, a tricky card player. Here is the king of diamonds. Now it’s the queen of hearts. Here is the door to Earth. Now it’s the door to a dark prison. He had outthought me at every turn. He-

I heard something stir. With my charred fingers, I groped for my deathblade. It was almost pathetic how hard I clung to life. Was a beast in my cell here with me?

Hellish red light appeared. I snarled and tried to lift myself off the floor.

“Darkling!”

I blinked my good eye, confused. Images blurred before me.

“By the moon, you’re burned.”

Behind the hellish light, I spied elfin features. They eloquently spoke of horror and pity.

I tried to speak.

Lorelei knelt beside me, and her hand dipped toward my face, hesitated, dipped closer and then hovered. She clutched her shining ruby in her other hand.

“You’re too big for me,” she said. “You’ll have to crawl.”

A whispering laugh was all I could manage. I was too ghastly to touch. She was too dainty to dirty her fingers on the likes of me. I couldn’t fathom her presence here.

I began to slither, using my burnt elbows to propel myself an inch at a time. The passage through the door had stolen most of my remaining strength. I despised my groans. I lost the ability to sense my surroundings. I crawled because it was my only meaning. I crawled because Erasmo had lured me to a swamp and there had stabbed me in the guts. He’d left me for dead and others had sought to use that. I crawled because instead of burning me, he had buried me because he had once seen tears in my eyes. Erasmo had beaten me too many times. If I stopped, he won everything.

But I didn’t stop. I crawled past barrels in a cellar. I crawled up stairs, through corridors.

“That way, Gian,” someone shouted. “No. Left, left, your other left.”

I crawled blindly and spilled down steps, and I felt cooling rays upon my face. I lay as one dead and soaked the rays. It gave me peace. It eased my hurts.

“Darkling, you must crawl back into the shop. If you draw upon too much of the Moon Lady’s power at once, she’ll be able to trap your will.”

I struggled up, leaning against the Alchemist Shop. Moonbeams still bathed me. I had no idea how long I’d been lying here.

Lorelei crouched nearby, with concern upon her face. “You must heal by degrees,” she said, “just like you did in the swamp.”

I nodded, thinking I understood. So I arose stiffly, with pain, and shuffled back into the hated building.

***

Healing by degrees meant healing a little each night.

“I counsel you to wait until you have all your strength, all your abilities, before you meet Orlando Furioso again.”

Lorelei and I sat in the dungeon of my former palace. Rusty chains adored the walls. A rat-nest was a rack’s lone tenant. Lorelei told me she’d escaped out of the castle that grew after she’d learned the priestess of the Moon had departed. She’d then raced to Perugia.

“By my arts, I realized the Lord of the Night had departed this place,” Lorelei said. “In his pain, Erasmo failed to cover his trail and I found the Alchemist Shop, the stairs, the cellar and the tunnel to the door. It’s been difficult, but I’ve kept it open these past weeks on the assumption-on the hope-that you were too stubborn too die.”

Apparently, I owed her my life.

One portion of the tale troubled me-this long passage of time. The evidence supported Lorelei, but it was still very strange. I’d entered the ruins of Perugia at the beginning of spring. Now it was summer. Yet I’d only been on the doomed Earth less than a day.

Lorelei tried to explain. “How long does a journey take moving from this Earth to the doomed one? By your reckoning, it was a moment of time. But the actual journey took much longer. There is also the possibility that time moves differently on that Earth than ours.”

I shook my head.

“Maybe a minute there is half a day here,” she said.

“That seems contrary to reason,” I said.

“What it means,” Lorelei said, with growing enthusiasm, “is that the Lord of Night has been gone for months. During those months, his grip upon his minions weakened.”

“They must have believed he died,” I said.

“Exactly,” Lorelei said. “And that began a subtle positioning for power. It’s as if the king had died and the sons began jockeying for nobles or hiring mercenaries. What it also meant was a weakening of Erasmo’s grip over his subjected cities. The priestess of the Moon discovered that, and she decided to strike. I think she believed you’d failed. She thus left to exhort the subjected princes to form a league and storm the Tower of the East.”

“But Erasmo returned,” I said.

“Badly wounded,” Lorelei said.

“You say he’s a powerful sorcerer. Can’t he simply heal himself?”

“Ordinarily, that’s true. But you wounded him with the deathblade.”

A fierce grin stretched my lips. “The knife smokes when I cut people.”

“The wounds smoke, not the knife.”

I studied Lorelei, although with just one eye. The burns on my forearms and face had scabbed in a ghastly manner. When she spoke, Lorelei looked elsewhere. She presently played a card game called ‘Solitaire.’ Her dainty fingers flipped a card, a ten of spades.

“How is it that you know so much about Darklings?” I asked.

“If you live long enough, you hear just about everything.” She laid down another card.

“Why can’t Erasmo heal from my deathblade?”

“I didn’t say he can’t heal,” Lorelei said. “But with your blade…it’s harder to heal, even for a Lord of Night.”

“What is the deathblade?”

Lorelei shook her head as if to say she didn’t know.

I scratched at a rough edge on the table. Lorelei had been at the door between worlds to keep it open for me. She’d been at the castle when I’d decided to leave, playing cards in the warrens. She’d warned me about healing too fast lest the Moon Lady absorb my will. In my years as ruler of Perugia, I’d learned to suspect too many fortunate occurrences.

Lorelei was small, dainty, with elfin features and a quick smile. Her jester’s attire seemed to fit her well. She tucked her hair under the belled cap and her chin came to a pretty point. Yet she was an Immortal. She had survived the ages and would therefore reasonably be tougher than her appearance would warrant. What schemes took place under her jester’s cap? What occupied an Immortal’s thoughts? What would an Immortal want?

I laid a half-healed hand over hers. She looked up, and I saw her battle the distastefulness of my touch.

“If you’re not the Moon Lady,” I said, “you’re here to do her biding.”

She tried to jerk her hand out from under mine. I gripped hers so she could not.

“You’re wrong,” she said, “although I’m pleased to see that you’re becoming suspicious. For someone like you, it’s as needed as breathing.”

I did not breathe. Did she insult me? “What is the deathblade?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“It’s impolite for a gentleman to call a lady a liar. Yet what if the lady lies?”

“I’m here to help you,” she said.

“Just how does one become an Immortal?”

“That’s much too personal to explain.”

I tightened my grip.

“You’re hurting me,” she said.

“It’s an odd thing. But every sorcerer and sorceress I’ve met has tried to use me. Maybe Immortals possess greater cunning and let the pawn believe he makes his own choices. The thought…troubles me. Whether I’m the prince of Perugia or the Darkling, I refuse to be anyone’s lackey. From the first, I’ve wanted answers. I still want them.”

I let her go.

She stood so her chair scraped the floor and she turned away.

“Do you know what else is interesting?” I asked. “It concerns the priestess of the Moon. Is she a fool? Having met her, I doubt it. She must have known you helped me. How otherwise could I have found the secret corridors, never mind the Pool of Memories? In any Italian city, that would have been considered treason and the culprit would have hanged. Is the priestess too queasy to commit justified bloodshed? Is the woman who buys corpses afraid of dealing death? Now consider your punishment. She locked you in a room, allowed you to practice spells. I combine that with the realization that you know much about Darklings and even more about the Moon Lady. Do you know that Erasmo offered me life if I’d join him? He wanted knowledge concerning the Moon Lady. Now that I’ve had time to think, I wonder if the Moon Lady is secretive. She must be secretive if her very own priestess doesn’t know about the hidden corridors in her castle.”

“Knowledge is power,” Lorelei said, with her back to me. “You seek to strip me of my accumulated wisdom.”

“Madam is clever and seeks to change the topic. I’ve merely said that I refuse to be your dupe. Yet you’re suggesting an interesting thing. Knowledge is power. The sword is power. The will to act is power.”

“What if the sword is swung at the wrong person?” she asked.

“I see your point,” I said. “But I still desire-”

“What do you offer me in return for this knowledge?”

I considered that. “What do you want?”

Lorelei turned around, although she wouldn’t look at my burns. Slowly, she sat at the table, on the edge of her chair.

“I want to know what happened on the doomed Earth.” There was eagerness in her voice. “Tell me every word the Lord of Night spoke there. Describe it all.”

“You seek to strip me of my unique knowledge.”

“Quid pro quo,” she said.

I wasn’t a lawyer, but I assumed she meant an equal trade.

So I told her what I remembered. She sat absorbed, this dainty Immortal, idly fingering her cards as I spoke. When I finished, she began to speak about the deathblade. It was a fantastic tale. The Moon Lady had once sought out a monstrous smith named Mulciber, and in the dawn of time, he’d forged a dagger with dreadful spells. The Moon Lady paid the price and from it conceived a misshapen brat. In later times, the brat designed the castle that grew. The deathblade had the power to give lycanthropes and other hard-to-kill creatures wounds. The blade’s bite corrupted the flesh of normal folk, its poisoned metal needing only the slightest touch to be lethal. Lycanthropes healed from other kinds of cuts, although silver blades could also mortally wound them.

“What are the lycanthropes?”

“Creatures from another place,” she said.

“A place like the dead Earth?”

“You’ve paid for some knowledge,” she said, “not all my accumulated wisdom.”

“What I would like to know is who you are and why you’re helping me.”

She became thoughtful until she dared peer into my good eye. It was artfully done. Then she concentrated upon her cards.

“I was born a mortal, just as you were. But that was in the days when the Old Ones walked in power, before the curse put them to sleep. I was born in the lands now called Greece, near Athens. It was a handful of stone dwellings then.” Lorelei shook her head. “It will be light soon and you’ll sink into deathlike oblivion. So I’ll shorten the tale to this. I sought out the Moon Lady and became one of her maenads. I remember your ancestor. He was a reckless man, handsome and bold. He, too, sought out the Moon Lady, and he won her love. He was also vain, and refused to pay the price for her embrace.”

Lorelei pursed her dainty lips. “There is a spider called the black widow. It kills her lover. The Moon Lady practiced a similar rite. The first Baglioni must have known about that. He was handsome and bold, and after his night with the Moon Lady, he sought out a maenad and taught her forbidden delights. That was a terrible crime. For the maenads had to foreswear intimate relations with men in order to gain acceptance by the Moon Lady. This maenad fell from grace, knew the man and fled with him. He lived out his mortal span, and he received the Moon Lady’s child, which he raised. As unbelievable as it sounds, the Moon Lady refrained from killing him. And she favored the Baglioni line ever since. I think…I think he wooed her beyond the believable. I think the Moon Lady loved him, although she loved herself and her ways more.”

“You were that maenad,” I said.

Lorelei laughed sadly and shook her head. “The maenad was my birth sister. The Moon Lady sent me to kill her, which I did. In those days, I ruthlessly sought power. No. I killed my sister, but that planted a seed that sprouted hundreds of years later. I rebelled only when it became safe to do so, after the Old Ones had entered their eon-long slumber.”

Lorelei turned over a card, a nine of spades, and after a thoughtful pause, she placed it over the ten of spades.

“You’re helping me in order to pay back an old debt to your sister?”

A flicker of what might have been pain appeared on her face. It vanished as she shook her head. “I’m not a fair maiden in one of your Italian poems,” she said. “I’m an Immortal, which is to say, a survivor. You’re suspicious of me because I happened to be in the castle when you wandered in the warrens. I was there partly because the Moon Lady’s Darkling had taken too long in arriving. There were other reasons, but since those don’t concern you, I’ll keep them to myself. Why do I help you? The answer is simple. I fear Erasmo. He is a true acolyte of Old Father Night. That grim one loves death. Look at the destruction his servant plans. Although…I think Old Father Night may have miscalculated with your friend.”

“Meaning what?” I asked.

“That I believe Erasmo plans to supplant the Old Ones. I think he strives for power over them. Others have tried that in the past, those with unbridled ambition and deep cunning. That’s another reason I’m helping you. These upheavals are always dangerous to Immortals.”

“That doesn’t explain why you’re trying to thwart the Moon Lady,” I said.

“But it does. Erasmo and his master are worse. Yet she’s bad enough, if given half a chance. If we’re not careful, she’ll supplant them once they’re gone, and she’ll raise a dark kingdom devoted to her worship. She might forgive my past rebellion, but she might not. I don’t care to give her the chance to decide.”

“Why would the moon priestess allow you in the castle then?”

“Are you sure you were a Perugian prince?” she asked. “You Italians are noted for your deceit and backstabbing, for making an alliance one day and selling out to someone stronger the next. The Moon Lady accepts my aid because she hates Old Father Night more than she hates me.”

With a fingernail, I pried at the rough table edge. “Then you seek to return our world to what it was before the plague.”

“No. That’s impossible, although it would be ideal. I think your Italian cities were about to enter a golden age, say, in another hundred years. All the elements were in place.” She shrugged. “As I’ve said before, I think some of the Old Ones may have become insane. The plague and now this trumpet…mass death unleashes terrible forces. The world is awash in sorcery as I suspect it might have been in the beginning. There is the possibility that this chaos might unravel everything.”

I thought about the dead world, the comets that blazed across the heavens and hit with shattering force. Erasmo took us on that road so he could forge…whatever his ambitions had conceived. He was like a man who whipped a team of horses, with his wagon careening along the edge of a cliff. He could plunge over the cliff at any moment, but he could also arrive at his destination. In this instance, his wagon was our world.

“Did you cause me to sleep longer in the swamp than the Moon Lady had planned?” I asked.

Lorelei laid down another card. “I wish I knew how to do that. It would take great cleverness.”

I noticed she didn’t say no or yes. But I left it at that, deciding she would lie about it if she had.

***

The nights passed and my hurts healed. The eye took the longest. Without Lorelei and in my impatience, I would have lain in the moon’s rays all night. I began to wonder if Lorelei told the truth about that. Maybe she wanted me to linger here for reasons of her own.

To test my suspicion, I remained under the moon longer that night, long enough that I felt the Moon Lady’s tug. I hurried indoors and refused to take out my coin, much as a siren urge tickled my curiosity.

Lorelei reappeared two nights later, the closest to angry I’d seen her.

“I doubted you,” I said. We were in the dungeon again, and it made me feel like a vampire.

Lorelei reflected on my words and her anger dwindled. “I fled because I’m unsure how much the Moon Lady can sense while communing with you. I certainly don’t want her to know I’m here. If you do that again, I’ll leave for good.”

“Do you wish to come with me to the Tower of the East?”

She laughed. “Only a fool would join the Darkling on one of his quests. He has a way of surviving dangers, while those around him die hideously.”

“You make ‘Darkling’ sound like a title.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Is Orlando Furioso truly the famous paladin from Charlemagne’s court?”

“Do you doubt it?” she asked.

“Why are his eyes red?”

“Ask him next time you meet.”

“Is he immortal?”

“He’s extremely dangerous, if that’s what you’re asking.” She completed her sets, gathered and slid the cards into a small box, which she secreted in a pouch. “I think Erasmo knows you’re alive.”

“How would he-”

“While you’ve healed, powerful sorcery has occurred. I have my ways of knowing, and no, I won’t tell you them. Maybe as troubling as the sorcery, calls have gone out. Rumors tell of Anaximander marching for the Tower of the East.”

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“A particularly vile servant of Old Father Night,” she said, “who is commonly associated with the Forgotten Ones. But on a more personal note for you, there is word Erasmo has raised Lord Cencio.”

“Who?”

“You slew him, I believe.”

“I’m not aware-”

“He was an altered man. He led the pack that hunted you.”

“Signor Fangs for Teeth?” I asked.

Lorelei frowned.

“There was a noble who had wolf-like fangs,” I said, “but otherwise seemed normal.”

“Lord Cencio wore a hat with a crow’s feather.”

“That’s him,” I said. And it was my turn to frown. “What do you mean, Erasmo ‘raised him’?”

“The term is sufficiently descriptive,” she said. “It’s a rare occurrence, because it’s a difficult spell, but sometimes sorcerers who serve Old Father Night hold a grim threat over their minions. Namely, failure sometimes means returning as a dead-alive. Such creatures are driven with infernal desperation to perform their task. That being so, you should leave Perugia tomorrow.”

“Are you suggesting I should have burned the man’s body?”

“You couldn’t have known this would happen,” she said.

My left eye only saw things in a blur, although my Darkling strength had almost returned. I lacked my former speed, although Lorelei had assured me it too would return.

“You seem to be well informed,” I said. “Is my wife alive?”

“I wish I knew.”

“What about my children?”

Lorelei spread her hands, shrugged.

“Where would Erasmo keep them?”

“I can’t say for certain,” she said, with an evasive edge.

“Can’t or won’t?” I asked.

“A little suspicion is reasonable. But surely by now you should trust me.”

“Knowledge is power,” I said. “How can I know that anything you’ve told me is true?”

She stiffened. “Your bitterness is understandable, signor. But I think-”

My hands clenched. I wanted to throttle Erasmo, smash his head against paving. He had my wife! And for all I knew, Laura thought he was me.

“You must leave Perugia,” Lorelei said softly.

I forced my hands open. “You suggested earlier that these sorcerers and Old Ones act like Italians. If I were to go to the priestess of the Moon, would she help me against Erasmo?”

Lorelei gave me a shrewd look. “The priestess is brave, if foolhardy. An army of desperate soldiers gathers on the edge of Venice’s old swamp. It threatens Erasmo and surely diverts him to some degree. That helps you. You must beware of her, however. She is the Moon Lady’s servant, although she holds some articles dear to Darklings of the past. You must do as you think best.”

I touched my bad eye. Tomorrow night, I would begin.