Slave Of Dracula (30 page)

This was something, he thought, that he’d have to do alone. For many nights now he’d timed the length
of that sensation of power, of heightened strength, that came at the turning of the far-off tide, just as,
during his days of enforced wakefulness on the way up to Veresti with Nomie in her earth-box, he’d
timed the period of his ability to change his shape at noon. Part of Dracula’s skill, Nomie had told him
once, was simply his expe-rience. He knew to the split instant when the tide would turn, and was ready
for it; could feel the dawn coming with the ex-actness of a chronometer, and was poised to attack or
retreat when the final sliver of sunlight vanished behind the shadow of the earth.

Still, for a novice vampire, Renfield didn’t feel he did at all badly. He overtook the launch shortly after
sunset, trotting through the underbrush of the bank as the darkness thickened on the water. Icy wind
flowed down from the mountains, and the men on the few barges that he passed wore sheepskin coats
and hats of wolf or rabbit fur. The road here was little more than a tow-path, and a badly eroded one at
that. Here on the higher river the current was stronger, and the launch’s engines labored, though Renfield
could see she was running at full steam. Now and then a soot-black figure would emerge from the
engine-room; in the ruddy glare from the door Renfield saw the young, clerkish face beneath hair growing
rapidly as white as an old man’s.

Jonathan Harker.

And if he is stoking, is it likely there will be a hired crew? Wolf-Renfield watched, and for a long
time saw no one else.

Then Godalming appeared, from the tiny cabin that was all the shelter on the launch’s deck, roughly
clothed in a bargee’s heavy jersey with a knitted cap over his golden hair. He looked dirtv and rumpled,
and given the small size of the launch, Renfield’s suspicion was confirmed. There were only the two of
them.

Van Helsing must be ashore then, with Morris.

He felt it, the instant the tide began to turn. The launch had overtaken a small barge hauling iron, cloth,
salt, and other goods up-river toward the settlements of the foothills; Godalming turned the bright electric
searchlight on them, while Harker minded the tiller. The glare of the searchlight showed the big Romanian
flag prominently displayed on the launch’s jackstaff. Renfield wondered whom Godalming had paid for

that, and how much.

Mist already lay on the river, so it was the easiest thing in the world to slip into it, and so across.
Renfield didn’t resume his human form until he was in the cramped dark of the engine room. He’d been
aboard a hundred such little steamers on the Hooghly and the Ganges, and found the pump without
diffi-culty, at the far end of the battery of cylindrical black boilers. With a screwdriver from the neatly
stowed repair kit, he ripped and shredded the leather drive-belt nearly through, then opened the cocks
on half a dozen of the boilers, to let the water drain away.

In the dark of the engine-hold it might be hours before any problem was detected.

As mist, he flowed up onto the deck. The little Romanian barge was disappearing behind them in the
freezing darkness. Godalming said, “We can’t have taken the wrong way! If the Count continued up the
Sereth instead of coming this way, he’ll add fifty or sixty miles to the overland part of his journey. In
country like this, and weather like this, that could be the better part of a week!”

“He can command the weather,” replied Harker quietly. “And to some extent, he can command men.
But Mina w-as right. Though he’s paralyzed on running water, it’s still the safest way for him to travel.”
His hand stroked the hilt of the huge knife at his belt.

Get closer to him! urged Renfield frantically. The two men stood six or eight feet apart, Godalming at
the prow beside the electric searchlight, Harker amidships at the wheel. Get closer and I can take you
both!

Neither moved; the moments of freedom and mobility were sliding away. Stay in the hopes of being
able to strike both and run the launch aground, or flee to avoid being trapped ….

His nerve broke. For an awful moment he thought he’d waited too long as it was, that he wouldn’t be
able to leave the boat: couldn’t summon the will, the physical ability, to cross the water.

If they find me aboard, they’ll know the engines have been tampered with.

Nomie will be the one to suffer for it, if I cannot kill them both almost at once.

If I throw myself into the river, I suppose I can wade out in twelve hours when the tide turns
again …

He flung himself forward, with a sensation of icy tearing, of bitter cold somewhere in his chest. Then his
flittering bat-wings bore him up, and he flopped, trembling, onto the river-bank.

With a great sloshing of her screws, the steam-launch churned on toward the next set of rapids.
Renfield sat up in the wet weeds, chilled and exhausted from his daylong trot, wanting only rest and
knowing there would be none for him, for he had left his earthen bed-roll far behind.

But he had succeeded, he thought. He had accomplished what the Count had ordered him and Nomie
to accomplish–the first time the launch tried to climb rapids, she’d tear her en-gine to pieces. Now, in the
few days at most that remained before the Count reached out to summon him to service once again, he
was free, to seek what doom he could.

Drawing a deep breath, Renfield shifted that portion of his consciousness that controlled his shape, and
felt himself melt again into the guise of a wolf. With luck, he thought, he’d be dead-truly dead-by morning.

***

Though it was after midnight, the shore party was still on the move, some ten miles behind the barge.
Wolf-Renfield heard and smelled the horses before they came into sight in the broken and heavily
wooded country of the banks; smelled Quincey Morris’s chewing-tobacco and the more bitter stench of
cigarettes. The scents of the night, the attenuated moonlight flickering on the water, were wildly
exhilarating, and he found himself wonder-ing if he could kill both men before he remembered that there
was no longer any need for him to do so.

He was free. The night was his. His single dread was that the Count would feel himself safe enough to
re-establish contact and control before Renfield could hail his deliverers.

He saw them now, from the shelter of the woods above the road. Six horses, two men, riding as swiftly
as the dim moon-light would permit. The moon would set soon, and as bad as the road was, Renfield
guessed they’d camp. Quincey Morris hadn’t ridden the American cattle-trails for as long as he had
without learning how easy it was to break a horse’s leg in the darkness. A little to Renfield’s surprise, he
saw that the other rider was Dr. Seward, not Van Helsing as he had supposed.

Which can’t be right, he thought, alarm-bells ringing in his mind. Any o f the men could have been
left back in Galatz to guard Mrs. Harker. The logical guard is Seward: Harker knows the ground
around Castle Dracula, Godalming can pilot the launch, Morris is the best rider and shot. They
are the Rooks and the Knights … and they send a Pawn out, to do the work o f the Queen-piece
that the Persians call the Vizier?

Where is Van Helsing? Were they really so foolish as to leave Mrs. Harker alone, or under the
guard o f hired help?

The horses would react to the smell of a wolf, the men, to the sight of a bat fluttering along in their
wake. As mist, Renfield flowed down close to the river-bank, drifting and curling between water and
road, listening for the voices of the men. Both were dog-tired, for they had been riding, Renfield guessed,
almost steadily for three days, most of it without benefit of grooms to do the added work of looking after
six horses. Once Morris’s horse-a scrubby little Hungarian beast who looked ridicu-lously tiny beneath
the Texan’s six-feet-plus height-shied, and that soft Texas voice drawled, “Don’t you go jigger on me,
you slab-sided vinigaroon, I been scrapped with by real two-dollar Mexican plugs and you ain’t even in
it,” and Seward made a ghost of a chuckle. But neither man spoke to the other until the crescent moon
sank into the cloud-banks above the mountains.

“That’s it.” Morris drew rein. “Damn blast it to fucken’ hell. How they look?”

Seward dismounted, kindled a lantern that had been tied to the back of his saddle. “They seem all
right.” He moved among the other horses, feeling legs and withers. “I don’t like this cold, though, nor the
smell of the wind.”

“Too damn much like Siberia. Or Montana.” Morris kindled a lantern of his own, led his mount to a
spot sheltered by rocks from the wind, and proceeded to cut and yank at the weeds and brush, to clear a
spot for a fire. “Van Helsing and Mrs. Harker’ll be higher up than we by this time, and God knows what
the road’s like up Borgo Pass, this time of year. All the guns in the world won’t help, if they get caught in
a deep cold and Mrs. Harker freezes to death. I wish a thousand times we’d left her in Galatz.”

Seward said, “And I,” but Renfield hardly heard him.

Borgo Pass? A qualm passed through him of sickness, of shock.

Van Helsing was going up the Borgo Pass. That would mean …

“I understand that he has to do it,” Seward went on. “You know it’s useless to pursue a fox unless his
earth has been stopped before him.” He slipped bit and bridle from his horse’s mouth, pulled free the
saddle. The springing color of Morris’s firelight made Seward’s unshaven face look younger, thin and
strange and very different from the neat, self-contained doctor Renfield had first encountered in the office
of Rushbrook Asy-lum in the spring.

“Van Helsing knows what he’s doing. I trust his judgement more than that of any man living, and I think
Mrs. Harker will be safer in his company, even on the threshhold of our enemy, than she would be back
in Galatz with one less experienced in the ways of the things that we fight. Harker told us, remember, that
once at his Castle again he will have command of the gypsies who acknowledge him their lord. We’ll be
hard-pressed to fight all of them. And once we get close to the Castle, the Count won’t be the only
vampire with which we’ll have to con-tend.”

Nomie.

Renfield felt a chill pass over him, as he had at the moment of his own death.

He melted into the form of a bat, and flew away into the night.

At the tide’s turn he crossed the river and, taking on the form of a wolf, ran on into the growing day.
The country here was truly rough and broken, thick forest alternating with stony meadows where sheep
pastured in the summer. Ahead of him, the moun-tains were heavily curtained with snow-clouds, the wind
bitterly cold. Though there was little direct sun, the daylight made Wolf–Renfield woozy and sick. At
times he could barely recall who he was or what he was doing, save that he knew he had to reach the
Castle. That he had to follow the twisting track up to the Pass.

Just before nightfall he passed a band of gypsy men, riding their shaggy ponies around a leiter-wagon, a
sort of loosely built, skeletal farm-cart he had glimpsed negotiating the turns of the winding road as he’d
followed the river northwest. The Count’s mortal servants, he assumed, and wondered how Drac-ula
communicated with them, and what bargain had been struck between the old boyar and the hetman of
their tribe. There were about twenty of them, mustachioed and indescribably dirty, armed with knives but
only a few decrepit flintlocks, very like the badmashes who robbed travelers in the passes of the Hindu
Kush.

Like the Afghani robbers, Renfield thought, they almost cer-tainly scorned the laws of the settled lands.
Like the Afghani robbers, they would recognize and obey only strength.

His own resting-place far behind him, he loped on into the night.

He saw the Castle just after dawn on the second day. In morn-ing’s splendor, Wotan had sung-the
real Wotan, the Wotan of Das Rheingold-it lay masterless, and gloriously beckoned to me.

The night had refreshed him, but he knew the weariness of daylight would be crueler still and harder to
bear; it was diffi-cult, even now, to set one aching paw down before the other. The Castle seemed
unreachably distant, from the place where he came out of the woods, where the road climbed toward the
Pass. It stood on a coign of rock where the eastward end of the Pass first narrowed, guarding the road
that the Turks must traverse to invade the green lands beyond. Towers and battlements over-hung the
way, nearly five hundred feet above it. Indeed the morning’s splendor dyed the grim walls pale gold, but
all around it the snow-clouds made a pall of shadow. Even as Renfield watched, they closed upon it like
a ghostly hand, hiding the walls from sight.

By the smell, it was snowing in the Pass before noon. Through the day he trotted, stumbling with
weariness and unable to rest. At the Castle he could rest, he thought-None had told him that the earth of
the Master would shelter the fledgeling, and vice versa. He wondered what the adventures of the
Countess and Sarike had been on their way back home, and whether, when night came, they would
watch from the walls for their Master’s return.

By this time the steam-launch must have crippled itself trying to ascend the upper Bistritria’s rapids:
Harker and Godalming would be forced to abandon it, and continue on whatever horses they could find.

Their delay would probably give Dracula time to reach the Castle in safety, but it would not affect Van
Helsing’s implacable mission. And the only thing that Renfield could think of more horrible than Dracula
winning his race and summoning Renfield back to the Castle to be his slave, was the thought that he must
serve him through Eternity alone.

When lying still in the shadows of the icy afternoon, he tried to sink his mind into half-sleep, to reach

out to Nomie and warn her to flee, but he could not.

He could only stagger to his feet and trot on, praying he would reach the castle before Van Helsing did.