Death's Head Legion (14 page)

“What?” Deitel said.

“He means smuggling,” Rucker explained.

“Alleged smuggling,” Filotoma said.

“Alleged smuggling,” Rucker said. “You see, Nick hires people like me to deliver things that local authorities forbid, and which therefore become even more profitable in the black market.”

“Governments can pass a lot of laws,” Terah added, “but they can't repeal the law of supply and demand.”

They arrived roughly an hour before sundown at the terraces above the right bank of the Argeş where the river met its tributary. Deitel didn't realize until he climbed off his horse how sore his inner thighs would be.

The terraces gave way to a series of overlays and caves.

“We can set up camp in these,” Rucker said. “It offers protection from the elements and it will shield our fire from sight. There's enough room for the horses as well.”

Terah surveyed the area. “Good defensive position,” she said.

Rucker nodded. “Let's hope it doesn't come to that. This is about stealth, not engagement.”

Rucker had everyone unsaddle, unbridle, and brush out their horses before they could do anything else. He then led the horses to the river's edge, where he didn't have to urge them to drink.

While the countryside was beautiful, he got an uneasy feeling.

“Something's not right here,” he said. Many blooms remained, but many were dead. It seemed almost like a regular pattern—something nature never provides.

“I think that's where lurks Poenari Citadel,” Filotoma said, pointing off in the distance to where the silhouette of the Carpathian Mountains could be seen in the twilight.

“Doc, you and Terah unpack the gear,” Rucker said. “Nick and me will look to the horses, gather wood, and boil some river water. I'll do the cooking when I'm done with that.”

Deitel did a double take.

“Don't say anything,” Terah whispered. “He loves to cook and he's really good at it.” She noticed Deitel still had a slack expression. “Yeah, I know,” she said.

Rucker had walked away from where Filotoma was caring for the horses. He was down on his hands and knees, studying the ground.

“Now what?” Deitel asked Terah.

“Shhh,”
she said.

Rucker, back on his feet, jogged up the embankment. Terah and Deitel followed him up to the natural promontory.

Deitel started to ask what was happening when Terah held a finger up to his lips. Rucker was all over the place, his eyes daring and his brow furrowed. He was touching the grass here, feeling the leaves of bushes there. He tasted a pinch of soil, and quickly spit it out as if it were poison. He rubbed one of the loose leaves from a tree between his hands and smelled it.

Deitel looked at Terah with eyes that asked if Rucker had gone crazy.

“He's reading,” she whispered.

Then Rucker was off again, jogging through the underbrush farther away from the riverbank. When they caught up to him, he was standing over ground that even Deitel could see was freshly disturbed—divots and furrows of fresh dirt and bent weeds.

Rucker was holding a tuft of wiry hair caught on a tree branch.

“Fox?” Terah finally asked.

As if he were speaking more to himself rather than them, Rucker started recounting what he read.

“There was a campsite here,” he said. “All around us. Large. Something bad happened.”

He moved about as he talked, pointing out signs he'd read. He picked up a scrap of pink printed cloth, dirty and stained with a brown that Deitel knew could only be dried blood. He peeled drying clay where it was splattered six feet up on a tree trunk.

“Men, women, and children. Wheeled caravans. The campsite was new. What attacked here . . . I've never seen tracks like this,” Rucker said. He held out the tuft of hair. “I've never seen fur like this, either.”

He stopped and stared intently at a stone with a natural-looking but unnaturally regular burn pattern.

“There was an attack. From all sides. They were gathered in the center. The bodies were dragged in that direction,” Rucker said. He was still staring at the rock.

“How do you know?” Terah asked. “I see no drag marks. I see nothing in that direction. Like the ground has been swept clear.”

“Exactly,” he said.

Another thirty yards into the undergrowth and they found it. A large pit had been dug and filled.

“It's very large,” Rucker said. “Whatever came upon them came upon them quickly. And then it buried the evidence. Animals don't tend to do that.”

“Who were they?” Deitel asked.

“No idea. Some very unfortunate souls, I reckon,” Rucker said.

“How do you know they didn't bury their own?”

“In a mass grave with no markers? This was a pretty professional job. They buried them deep,” Rucker said. He squatted down near the edge of the freshly covered pit and pulled a handful of leaves away from four deep gashes in the earth. “What dug this hole is something I don't want to see.”

Terah looked around. It was growing colder as the sun set.

“How long ago, Fox?” she asked.

Rucker smelled his hands again.

“Ten, maybe twelve days,” he said.

“Is it safe to establish camp here, so close to whatever happened?” Deitel asked.

“Probably the best place to be. Last place they'll be looking for anyone,” Rucker said. “Besides, best not to travel farther in the dark.”

It was a morbid logic even Deitel couldn't deny.

T
wo hours later they all sat around a fire pit deep enough in the cave that no light would escape. Deitel was impressed by the dinner. Rucker had taken the smoked lamb meat they'd packed and added it to penne pasta. He made a demiglace with the fat and marrow, which served as a sauce. Wild mushrooms, spinach, and some feta cheese Filotoma brought along were tossed with the lamb.

“I expected the franks and the beans,” Deitel said. “This is . . . this is
vunderbar
.”

“Don't make a big thing of it,” Rucker said. “I like to cook because it's when I can just focus on the moment, and not worry about anything else.” Secretly he was glad they were making a big thing of it.

Filotoma had a second bowl of the pasta. Terah and Deitel put away almost as much.

Afterward, they rinsed the pots and bowls in the river and prepared to bed down around the fire. No one wanted to be too far from it.

“Fox, I have to tell you something,” Terah said. “I'm a little spooked by all this.”

“Me, too,” Deitel added.

“And I,” Filotoma said.

“Look, y'all, we don't know whose campsite that was or what it was that got them,” Rucker said. “We stay on our flight path. With any luck and if Nick's information is correct, we should get to where the Danis tribe is supposed to be by sundown tomorrow. So ease off and calm down. I'll take the first watch, then Terah, then Nick, then you, Doc. Just, everyone don't let your imaginations go giving you the willies. There's nothing to fear.”

A wolf bayed in the distance.

“Oh, nice timing,” Rucker said, rubbing the palm of his hand down his face. “There is nothing—and I mean nothing—to be afraid of.”

Thunder crashed just outside the entrance to the cave and an unearthly howl echoed off the walls. Then a creature crashed into the cave, each step shaking the ground and loosening dust from the rock overhead. It was seven feet tall and almost as wide. It was the color of river clay and shaped like a man. The maw in its face opened and again they heard that horrible, melancholy howl.

Rucker pulled his pistol from under his pillow, for all the good it would do him.

“Except that,” he said, referring back to his assurance that there was nothing to fear.

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

North of Piteşti

Wallachia region of Romania

Eastern Europe

R
ucker, Terah, Nick, and Deitel retreated to the far side of the fire pit. The clay monster stood opposite, blocking the only way out. It had stopped and howled again, a sound that unnerved all four of them. Oddly, Rucker noticed, the horses bedded over in the adjacent cavern hadn't reacted at all to the commotion or to the seven-foot-tall mud creature.

All four had their pistols trained on the thing. It hadn't attacked, really, but it was not exactly a nonaggressive presence. They all stood frozen in place.

“Is not something you see every day, even in Romania,” Filotoma said.

The thing took a menacing step forward, and that was enough.

Rucker and Terah emptied their pistols into the giant. Deitel had taken to carrying a small Walther 9mm; he emptied it into the creature as well. The sound of the gunfire was amplified by the stone walls all around them.

There was a moment of deafening silence following the explosion of gunfire, when the only sound getting through the ringing in their ears was the whinnying of the now frightened horses. They all stood frozen, realizing their shots had done nothing to the creature.

Then Filotoma raised his one-shot Derringer and fired.

Terah, Rucker, and Deitel all turned to look at him.

“Really, Nick?” Rucker said.

“What? My business is business, not shooting monsters, smart guy,” Filotoma said.

The thing hadn't made a sound or reacted at all to the gunfire. The bullet holes seemed to close up. Now it stalked toward Rucker. From the satchel by his bedroll he pulled the Tesla pistol. He charged the weapon and fired it straight at the creature's chest.

The whole Tesla gun vibrated, hummed, and the blue glass bulb at the back lit up. A nearly straight arc of what looked like blue lightning shot outward at the creature, striking it right in the chest.

It lit up the night.

It had absolutely no effect.

There was only one smart thing to do—run for his life, but that wasn't the choice Rucker made. He had to distract the thing so the others could run. He charged at the creature, leaping up and wrapping his arms around its neck and yelling to the others, “Run!”

The creature didn't even struggle against Rucker, who realized, to his embarrassment, that the thing barely deigned to notice he was on its back. Deitel picked up a thick branch from the pile of firewood to hit the thing repeatedly in the face. Its face would become misshapen and then mold back into place. Finally, it reached behind, grabbed Rucker by the collar, and threw him to the ground.

The four squared off against the beast then, forming a semicircle.

The beast lunged clumsily after one and then another of them, knocking over the supplies unpacked from the horses. It stepped through the fire, sending burning logs rolling through the cave.

“What is this thing?” Rucker asked as it came closer to him. “A Transylvanian monster or something the Nazis cooked up?”

“Like I wrote the Necronomicon. How should I know?” Terah asked. “I'm betting it's one of the Black Sun's creations. The Germans are some sick bastards.”

“Thank you,” Deitel said sarcastically, dodging as the creature lashed out at him.

“Sorry,” Terah said.

“It's big and mean, but a little slow,” Rucker said.

“Just like every other Nazi I've ever met,” Deitel said.

“Gavver!
Atch!
” came a woman's disembodied voice.

The thing stopped. Its hands fell to its sides and it stood up straight, almost mashing its head against the cavern ceiling.

“I give you one chance to answer, and I know if you lie,” said the voice from the shadows. “Who are you?”

Filotoma spoke in the language of the Romani: “We're friends of the travelers; friends of the widow's son.”

The voice and Filotoma both fired off at each other, too fast for any of the others to follow even if they had spoken Rom.

Finally, the voice said, “Gavver,
avree.
”

The giant thing lowered its arms.

A young Gypsy woman stepped out into the light of the campfire. She wore a black hooded cloak but was dressed in an all white, low-cut blouse a white, loose skirt that fell below her knees, white sandals and gloves. The brightness of her clothes stood in stark contrast to the cloak, her dark olive skin and black hair. She was only fifteen, but fully mature and beautiful.

“You know the Romani,” she said. It was not a question. Rucker knew what Filotoma had said was a cant—code between the Romani and those they considered friends.

“What the hell is going on?” he asked, reloading and then holstering his Colt pistol.

“What is going on here is none of your business. You are not Romani. You are free to go. And I would go if I were you—there will be blood in the nights to come,” she said. Her voice revealed fury and pain.

“What happened to you?” Terah said softly.

Tears came to the girl's face but her voice did not break.

“The Nazis are going to pay for what they have done to my people,” she said. “What they did right here on this very ground soaked in the blood of my people.”

Pain was etched deeply on the girl's face. But not as deeply as resolve. And hate.

“Your tribe was camped here?” Rucker asked.

“Yes, that was my family. Before the devils came.”

“And they're all dead?”

“Yes. I am the last.”

“The Danis family?”

“How could you . . . What do you want?” she asked. She waved her hands in a strange pattern and for a moment they started to glow. The giant creature swiveled its head to look straight at Rucker. Even without expression, the menace was obvious.

“Look, easy,” Rucker said. “We may have common cause here. If you can get the big pottery man-thing to stop glaring at us, we can offer you some hot food and coffee.”

She was as wary as she was tired.

Rucker slowly reached out and lifted her face by her chin with his finger. He smiled warmly.

“Come on, I'd be a
dilo
—a fool—to try to trick someone with a monster.” He had picked up a few Roma words from Nick.

She didn't smile, but she did nod her assent. The Gypsy girl spoke a few unrecognizable words to her creature, which then walked off into the woods.

The fire was going out. Deitel and Terah began gathering some of the scattered kindling and piling it in the pit. The only light now was from the lanterns.

“It will take a moment to get the fire going again,” Terah said to the girl.

The girl brought her hands together, palms up, fingers curled, as she whispered, “
Yagg,”
and wiggled her fingers.

A jet of flames burst from the smoldering dry wood thrown in the fire pit. It settled down and the fire was once again burning steadily.

“Okay, so there's that,” Terah said.

“First things first,” Rucker said as he poured her a cup of coffee. “What's your name?”

“Jaelle— Amria. Amria Damara.”

Filotoma nodded. “The ‘bitter curse' it means, yes?”

The girl cupped her hands around the ceramic mug.

“Yes. I chose the name for myself. To hide from both the devil and from God, because I don't want Him to see what I will do,” she said.

The silence around the campfire that followed stretched out like a rubber band pulled too tight.

“All right, then,” Deitel finally said. “Hungry?”

Amria accepted a bowl of the lamb pasta, and then another. Terah offered her a blanket as the night air grew colder.

Whether it was exhaustion or the fact that so much injustice had been placed on the shoulders of a girl so young and innocent—the weeks alone as the last survivor of her tribe—Amria let go of her burden. She told her story—the night the Nazis came and destroyed everything.

It was the story of how her life ended on her wedding day, and how all of her people came to die in terror. Even the children. Even her little brother, just eight. The day Jaelle died and Amria was born.

All because the Nazis wanted the Sacred Tshurri.

“I am the guardian of the Sacred Tshurri. They all died and not me,” she said, spitting out the bitter words. “I would trade it for all their lives back, I think sometimes, but then I know that all would die—the whole world—if dark men gain the power of this.”

From within the folds of her cloak she pulled a foot-long object wrapped thickly in oilcloth and tied with black twine.

“It is for this that they died,” she said. “It is for this that I will exact my vengeance. It is through this—how it makes my eldritch weaving even stronger—that I will take their lives and their souls.”

The supreme and tragic irony of it all, she said, was that none of her family members even knew that she was the guardian for this season of the Sacred Tshurri. None of the adults who were interrogated one by one by the skull-faced madman. Their minds ripped asunder. Their bodies torn apart and buried in a mass grave.

And then the children.

When she told the four what happened to the children, Deitel felt his body go numb. Terah and Filotoma wept. Deitel could never have believed such evil truly existed. Whether it was because the sane mind couldn't accept it, or because Deitel—like so many other Germans in the face of the New Order—just didn't want to believe it, he could hide from it no longer.

This was no longer a grand adventure. This was reality. Black, bleak, meaningless reality. Evil, death, and decay were the only victors in life, and the takers and the killers were the ones who . . .

Deitel saw the piercing fury in Rucker's eyes. It burned white hot like a furnace. A day, an hour, even a moment before, the look would have terrified him.

But not now. No, now it brought the German doctor something else. A spark that glowed against the darkness, rising and burning away all the despair.

It gave him something he didn't expect to feel.

It gave him hope.

Their eyes met. Rucker nodded. He understood.

Righteous fury. Resolve. Justice. Hope.

These existed in this world, too, and in men, as much as did evil, despair, and horror. One could choose to give in to the despair and evil, or one could find hope—and even justice—in the unlikeliest of places or people.

One could even be that hope.

The fury in Rucker's eyes alighted something in Deitel. For just the briefest hint of a moment, he felt a passing sense of pity for those upon whose heads that fury would fall.

Against the overwhelming forces of darkness and death a man could stand—unbending and undaunted—and refuse to yield.

“We can help you,” Rucker said to the girl. “We can protect you. We can help you protect the Tshurri. We can take you and it to a place far away from the evil men who did this to you.” He looked her level in the eyes. “I will help you balance the scales.”

The girl saw in his eyes what Deitel had. She placed a hand on his face and closed her eyes. Her hand started to glow. It wasn't that he felt something in his mind so much as in his heart, as if she read what he was feeling rather than thinking.

“I believe you,” she said.

She waved her left hand in a circular motion and pointed two fingers on her right hand upward. Again a glow without a source enclosed her hands.

“Gavver will patrol the grounds for us, keeping us safe,” she said. “An ancient weaving gift from our Hebrew cousins.”

She curled up in the blanket, the Tshurri secreted away in her cloak again, and was immediately asleep.

“All the same,” Rucker said as he checked his pistol and took a blanket to the cave entrance.

While the others bedded down, Deitel went out to where Rucker sat vigil.

“Now we have the Spear of Destiny,” he said after a moment. “It even came to us. I can't believe we are this lucky.”

Rucker nodded. “Oh trust me, I can't, either.”

“What next?” he asked.

“In the morning we convince the girl first to let us get it and her as far away from Europe as we can, as fast as we can,” Rucker said. “She'll understand the reasoning there.”

“And then?”

“And then I figure out a way to help her visit vengeance on them that murdered her family.”

Deitel was about to ask, because after all, it wasn't part of the job he was being paid for. And then he stopped himself. Rucker had given the girl his word. That was enough.

Deitel climbed back into his bedroll by the fire. Off in the night, he could hear a wolf howl.

He nodded. He knew how it felt.

Then he found himself smiling.

It was the same smile he'd seen on Rucker's face.

D
eitel awoke to the sound of quiet conversation. The fire was smoldering. He checked his watch: 5:00
A.M.
Rucker had said sunrise wouldn't be until 6:45 here.

Rucker, Terah, and Filotoma listened as Amria told them the story of the spear and how her people were its guardians through the ages. Deitel sat up. Terah placed a mug of hot coffee in his hands.

“None of us know when it first came into our hands,” the Gypsy girl said, “but it was sometime after the second incursion from the east, before Martellus drove the easterners away in the long before.”

“Charles Martel. That was the eighth century,” Terah said.

Amria explained that for centuries the Romani had kept the Spear of Destiny—the Sacred Tshurri—safe from the world, and the world safe from it. The fathers of the Hebrew tribe that had spirited it away believed that only their Romani cousins would understand the dangers of such power in the hands of those with power.

The Romani
drabnari
divined its powers, and how its power could be affected by their eldritch weavings and consecrations. They also knew its potential for evil. So they kept it secret even from their own tribes. The
drabnari
women, in typical Rom fashion, even sowed misinformation about the Sacred Tshurri, ensuring it would be lost to the winds where rumors beget rumors further from the truth in every telling.