By Blood Betrayed (The Kingsblood Chronicles) (29 page)

“I am many centuries old, Lian,” he said dryly, “but some passions even death doesn’t cool. Over the course of the evening, I watched her. She was a delight to my senses, and her manner and intelligence were as attractive to me as her appearance.

“That night, my desire slowly turned to obsession, and I forgot the pact I had forged with your father. I didn’t care about the consequences; I wanted Adrienne.”

The vampire king sighed deeply. “When a vampire bestows the Dark Gift, it can be given in one of two ways. He can force the change upon the victim, which almost always destroys their sanity. The vampire so created is a creature of lust and hunger, and must be kept in check or it will run wild, rampaging around the countryside glutting on the peasants. In some cases, the Gift doesn’t take well, and the vampire fledgling will rapidly decline and eventually die.

“The second way is to offer the Gift to a willing recipient, as I did with Teg. This creates an intense bond between the older vampire and his offspring, and what they were remains intact. There is still the vampiric bloodlust to contend with, and some never do master it. But for the most part, the vampirism enhances the person’s nature rather than steals their humanity.”

“Which way did you intend to take my mother?” Lian asked, his throat dry. Snog handed him a flask of water. It tasted faintly of mushrooms.

Kolos sighed again. “I wanted her to accept me freely, Lian. I was convinced that given enough time she would return the love I felt and willingly take the Gift. But I knew that Evan’s forces were departing soon, and that my time to initiate her into the fold was short.

“I drew the closest of my Companions to me and outlined the plan I had devised. I had already killed the Dunshor ambassador and as many of the Theocracy’s spies as I could find, but Shaidrak and I used sorcery to locate one last spy. That he happened to be a part-time assassin fit into my plan perfectly.

“A second Companion was recruited to help me. Sileth, a woman who had been a thief when she was alive procured for me a single unbroken strand of your mother’s hair. With this and the knowledge I have acquired over the long centuries, I constructed a duplicate of your mother’s body. Now, this creation had no mind or soul, but it had a life of sorts, and was a perfect image of Adrienne,” Kolos continued, shaking his head ruefully.

Lian was astonished by the vampire’s tale, for it was wholly unlike anything that his parents had told him.

Kolos continued, “We had studied the wards around your parents, and we knew what would be required to breach them. Revé, the third Companion I drew into my little plot, was a summoner, and he called up a fiend for me, one which he had used before to deadly effect. Revé gave it very careful instructions and armed it with the knowledge of the wards and several enchanted weapons and defenses from my treasury.

“The night before the van was to depart, the fiend teleported through Adrienne’s wards and attacked. Working quickly, it struck the general, your father, unconscious. An alarm had been raised, and Adrienne was weaving a spell to destroy it. Before she could release the bolt, however, Shaidrak and I teleported into the tent, behind her. I sank my fangs into her neck while holding a cloth soaked in an extract of Black Lotus over her face. The sudden pain and pleasure of my bite, combined with the power of the Lotus, robbed her of consciousness. I ripped her nightshift from her and handed it to Shaidrak. She hadn’t been wearing any jewelry, fortunately.

“Shaidrak was carrying the duplicate, which he tossed with the clothing to the demon, who began shredding and ripping the empty husk of a body to shreds. After a short spell from me to remove our footprints, Shaidrak returned us to the keep,” Kolos said, crossing his arms as he leaned more heavily on Teg.

The ogrish vampire was gazing at his sire with a great deal of sadness, and he had shed several bright red blood-tears during the telling. “You do bad stuff, Saul?” he asked.

Saul/Kolos looked up at the ogre and smiled sadly. “Yes, I did, Teg. It was very bad, even though no one was actually killed. The duplicate wasn’t really a person, and we were careful to keep the demon from dealing a lethal blow to any of the rebels. From reports we received the next day, the demon had mauled several soldiers, but had been driven off before it managed to kill anyone else, as it had been instructed.

“The mages of the army had traced its flight back to the spy, but when they got there, they found pieces of him scattered about his house. The demon, to all appearances’ sake, had been poorly bound and had returned to its summoner to take vengeance upon him,” he said sardonically. He rose and began to pace back and forth along the street. Lian and Snog both shifted position to allow them to rise quickly, but the king took no notice.

“While the priests attached to the army vainly tried to save the duplicate’s life, Shaidrak and I situated the real Adrienne in comfortable quarters. We removed all of her warding spells, and while she slept I gave her some Tincture of Amaranth laced with
akrylthra
-root. The combination robs the drinker of the ability to manipulate mana. Long-term exposure can damage one’s mage talent, but a few doses are safe enough.”

Lian interrupted. “I presume that when you referred to ‘comfortable quarters,’ you actually meant, ‘comfortable prison?’”

Kolos stopped his pacing and pursed his lips. “Yes, Highness. The room was one I had used for half a century to restrain a Companion who had gone mad. She eventually found a way to kill herself, but we’d kept her as comfortable as possible in there while she lived. I wasn’t concerned with Adrienne’s escape without her magical talents.

“In the morning, Evan and his advisors, escorted by my own guard captain, came to disturb me. My castellan, observing the gravity of their expressions, had informed them that yes, it was possible to disturb His Majesty before sundown. Evan hadn’t seemed surprised at this news.

“Sileth and Shaidrak were roused as well, and we met in my thronehall. I had already been informed of the night’s events by my people, and I told Evan that I hadn’t gone to sleep when I’d learned of it. I told him that I was using my resources to try to find any remaining Theocracy spies, but since we’d missed this one they were likely well underground.

“Evan was keeping his grief tightly reined, but when I mentioned the name of the Theocracy, his eyes gleamed with such ferocity that it impressed even me. He informed me that Adrienne’s body had been cremated, as per the custom of her family, and that after an additional day they would be moving on. Coldly, he told me that Adrienne had been well loved by the army, and that her death would probably fuel quite a bit of extra motivation for his men.

“Guilt panged at me, but I shoved it aside. It was evident how much I had hurt him, but I thought in vampire terms, not human ones. Their love would last only for a few decades, and then would be extinguished. With me, she would have a love that would last for centuries, and perhaps even millennia.

“I compounded my deception by reaffirming my intention to support his bid to overthrow the Theocracy, and by promising that he’d have Shaidrak’s magical support until he got too far from Greythorn. It was common belief then, as now, that my Companions and I are unable to stray too far from our homeland. I had no reason to believe that he would know otherwise.

“He accepted my offers of further aid politely, then left my thronehall. I believed that I had executed my deception without a hitch, and went to ground to rest until nightfall. Though I was fully capable of moving about during the day, it was exhausting.

“I hadn’t counted on two things, though, and they were my undoing.

“The first was that Adrienne was not simply a mage, but an artificer as well. I had designed the room to contain no wood, because of its original occupant. The bed, chest of drawers, and the chairs were made of braided copper and bronze. Very pretty and very heavy, but also very useful to a determined woman who wasn’t sure exactly how long it would be until night. There was also a polished silver mirror, hammered so thin it was almost silver leaf.

“She used everything she could work loose to build an apparatus which she could raise up the ventilation shaft. She could see that it led to sunlight, since it was day outside, and she was trying to get a piece of the mirror up to the top of the shaft as a makeshift signal. Or perhaps she had merely wanted an opportunity to look around with the mirror. I don’t know.

“At the same time, the priests who cleaned up the manikin’s remains had noticed something that I simply hadn’t considered. It had taken them a while to figure out what was missing, but figure it out they did, during that long day when I slept oblivious of the dangers that were brewing,” Kolos stopped pacing and sat down in the middle of the street, appearing suddenly weary.

“I have killed many, many men and women over my long life, and there’s one thing in common among most of those deaths. After the life has fled from a person, especially if they were experiencing fear or terror at the time of death, the bladder and sphincter relax and the body urinates and defecates. I knew this, as did Shaidrak, but we’d long ago learned to ignore it as a mildly unpleasant side effect of our meals. This complacency was a mistake.

“The homunculus was devoid of wastes, for it had never eaten nor had it drunk. It had been created merely a day before, and despite the fact that its intestines had been tossed about the room, there were no feces to go with it. The sheer horror of the death must have kept them from noticing the anomaly sooner, or I’m sure Evan would have brought armed men to that first meeting.”

The vampire continued his tale. “By mid-afternoon, Evan had deduced that his lover was probably still alive, and the most likely culprit for the kidnapping was obvious. He’d observed, but dismissed, the looks I sent Adrienne during our meetings, but considered in context it must have made sense.

“One of his guardsmen had noticed an unexplained flashing light beside one of the castle towers, and Evan had determined somehow that this was the location of Adrienne’s prison. Perhaps he had arranged for some kind of communication with her. He knew if his suspicion was correct that once night fell she was again in danger. My castle was fortified with a variety of permanent wards against teleportation and other magical means of entry, but the majority of my garrison was about the city since our relationship with the rebels was supposedly as allies.

“Evan decided that he must attack, and bring the fight to bear before the sun set and he lost his advantage. He likely surmised that almost all of the mages available to my army were Companions, and that most of them were far afield. He assembled his forces, as if to begin the march to the pass, and led them past the castle walls, from east to west. Splitting one of his infantry companies, he ordered them to take control of Greythorn City. Resistance was weak, and his men rounded up and subdued my soldiers without much of a fight.

“Simultaneously, he launched an assault directly upon the castle gates. They were traditionally kept closed during the daylight hours, when the Companions and I needed the most protection, but they weren’t tightly barred, simply for convenience’s sake. The rebel mages shattered the gates in a single strike, and calvary streamed through unhindered, securing the gatehouse and the outer wall. My men managed to close the main door to the keep, but the rebels controlled the walls and courtyard within minutes.

“By this time, the resident Companions and I were quite awake, for nothing rouses a vampire faster than a threat to its resting place. I realized at once that my deception had failed, yet I was still so enamored of Adrienne that even this certainty didn’t make me willing to give her up. I knew, as did the Theocracy, that if Evan fell the army would be without direction and thus easier to destroy. It was his military genius that had led to so many victories.

“I assigned Sileth to guard Adrienne and to prevent rebel soldiers from reaching her. She took a cadre of my best troops with her, and while they held the corridor, she took to the shadows.

“Revé, Shaidrak, and I assumed the task of repelling the invading troops, but we quickly became embroiled in a magical duel with the rebel mages. Evan’s use of hedge wizards for communication was not the only battle tactic he’d developed, and they were very effective in ways that kept the three of us distracted and unable to inflict real damage. They employed diversions such as small swarms of birds and sudden sunbeams, focused by magical ‘lenses,’ and other such things which a traditional battle mage wouldn’t have stooped to use. However, we didn’t really know how to deal with them.

“While the hedge wizards’ small spells kept us occupied, his battle mages pitched lightning at the doors and broke into the main hall. Too late, we realized that we’d been duped by the lesser mages, and rushed to the great hall. The spells which burned back and forth between us made our recent duel with that necromancer seem like a traveling illusionist’s show. Soldiers on both sides were caught in the detonation of deflected spells, and the castle itself caught fire.

“Revé fell early, destroyed by two mages singing their spells in a deadly duet. His deathstrike shattered the outer wall, and claimed the lives of those two wizards as well as about thirty troops. Revé was one of my youngest, yet he’d been practicing magic for centuries.

“Revé’s death enraged me, and I left Shaidrak to weave defenses while I leapt into direct combat with the soldiers. I was looking for Evan, while simultaneously summoning the wolves and the weres of the forest to my aid. They had already begun streaming into the city from the woods, for I keep them nearby at all times, but without direction from me, the wolves, at least, were little danger to well armed, well disciplined troops.

“The weres drew the hedge wizards and priests away from the fighting in the castle, however, for they had charms effective against the lycanthropes. Each unit of the rebel vanguard, it turned out, was equipped with some weapon of silver, be it a dagger or a few crossbow bolts. Weres are a ferocious adversary, but they are accustomed to being immune to harm. The army held up well against them.