The Darkangel (9 page)

"For the witch, the witch."

"For a toast to the witch," shrieked another above the rest. She then fell to the floor writhing and tearing her hair. The other wraiths tried to comfort her, but there was little they could do, for comfort comes from the reaching out of one heart to another, and they had no hearts. "Who is the water witch?" said Aeriel, bending over the distraught wraith.

"His mother," said the wraith who stood.

"His lover," another said.

"She lives across the desert," said another still, "far and a long way away."

"In a lake," said the fourth, or perhaps it was the first. Aeriel listened now without looking at them—it was impossible to tell which one was speaking; their faces and their voices were all the same.

"They call it the Mirror, or the Dead Lake, sometimes. She has seven sons and they all are vampyres, except this youngest, who will be, very soon. She has sent them all out into the world to prey upon the kingdoms."

"But this one is not quite a vampyre yet," the same, hollow voice from a different quarter continued. "She has not yet taught him all her evils. And he still has his own soul. Nor has he tasted another's yet."

"He has drunk our blood, but not our souls. He is keeping them in the vials the witch has given him. When all twice-seven of them are full, he will return to the Dead Lake and give them to the witch as tribute."

"Then she will drink up our souls and we shall perish—perish truly. Our souls will not ascend as others' do. They will sink into the witch's dark and be
nothing."
Silence a moment. "Though the death of our souls would end our torment, it would be the lorelei's triumph. Even we cannot long for that, Aeriel."

Aeriel looked up at the sound of her name. She had told it to them, but they had never used it. She thought they had forgotten it—as they seemed to forget a dozen other things she told them. She had thought they could remember nothing long.

"You know my name," she said, and the wraiths nodded.

The one who stood before her pulled her features into a grotesque sort of grimace, more like a skull's grinning than a human smile. "We whisper it to ourselves sometimes when you are gone," she said. " 'Aeriel,' we say, 'Aeriel will help us.' "

A sister wraith leaned past her to gaze at Aeriel. "Before you came, little one, we wanted only to forget: our pasts, our present suffering, our fate."

"But you, you brought us back to ourselves a little," another one said; "lightened our despair. Some of us can even bear the remembering now, in tiny snatches."

"A few of us," one wraith said softly, "can even remember our names."

Aeriel's hand went to her throat. She felt as if she were strangling. "Eoduin," she whispered, scanning their withered, wasted faces. "Which one of you is Eoduin?"

The wraiths drew back, shifted uneasily, eyed each other with their hollows. "We shall not tell you," one began.

"Why?" demanded Aeriel. Anger throttled her.

"... unless you help us." Her sister wraiths hissed and nodded their agreement.

Aeriel dropped her hand from her throat, sat a long moment gazing at the wraiths. "What would you have me do?" she said lowly.

"Steal back our souls for us," they cried. "Return to us our souls."

"How can I?" exclaimed Aeriel. "How should I get the necklace from him?"

"You must kill him," said the wraiths.

"I have told you, I cannot."

"You must," said the wraith who stood by her. "Aeriel, you must. How long have you been here?"

"A sixmonth," said Aeriel, feeling a vague dread creep upon her.

"Then in another sixmonth," said the wraith, "he will bring home a bride. Can you bear it? Can you bear to hear her screams? And we shall scream with her, and the gargoyles.

He will make you weave her bridal gown___"

"Her shroud," broke in another.

The first continued, "And attire her...•"

"Stop!" cried Aeriel.

"It drove the other one mad," said the wraith. "She had only been here for a year—as you will have been when the time comes. She spun the thread for the bridal gown all day-month before the darkangel flew."

"And he paced restlessly through all the rooms of the castle," another one said. "He came to us and cried, 'All my wives; why are all my wives so ugly? I must have a new one.

Spin, girl; spin!' "

"She spun it," continued another one, "but it was of pure horror—so sharp it cut her fingers as she spun—a thread of white terror, and blood."

"And at noon, when the thread was spun," returned the first, "the icarus flew and then the girl wove a long scarf, a sari for the bride, while the sun descended slowly through the star-littered sky—until Solstar was nearly down, and the cloth done, and the vampyre come again with his bride...."

"That would have been Eoduin," cried Aeriel, standing. Pain and frustration tore at her.

"Please," she implored them, "tell me which one."

The wraiths looked at each other, and then at her. They shook their hands. "Help us," they said, "and you will know."

Aeriel stood stupidly, not knowing what to do.

"The girl spun the thread," another wraith continued, "your predecessor." Aeriel shook her head to clear it. "She wove the thread," the withered woman told her, "and the darkangel returned with his bride. The girl washed her and attired her as she was bidden, then brought her to the vampyre's chamber, as she was bidden."

"By then Solstar was down," a wraith that sat at Aeriel's feet said. "The land lay dark, the gargoyles beginning to howl. And the little tiring maid ran all over the castle, trying to find some room where the sound could not be heard, and when she could not, she ran down into the caves and stumbled deep into their darkness before the screaming stopped and she found peace."

"The duarough searched for her long," the wraith beside her said.

"He told us so," her companion murmured.

"Searched for her long and finally found her, convinced her to eat a small something, but she was afraid of the light, and it took him nearly till

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sunrise to persuade her to come out of the dark into the air of the garden."

"But no sooner had they gone twenty paces," another broke in, "before the sun was up, and the duarough bedazzled. And the girl saw the steps she had strayed to so often, and this time she took them, for the duarough could not call her back."

"Stop," said Aeriel, "stop."

"You know the ending of the tale."

"Yes," gasped Aeriel, "yes."

"Then you must kill him," said the wraiths, "before others die of him."

"I can't," said Aeriel, weeping—for herself, for Eoduin. "He is too beautiful."

"Now," said the wraiths, "while his soul is still his."

"How can such poison be so fair?" cried Aeriel. "How can he be both beautiful
and
evil?"

"He is beautiful," said a wraith, "because there is still some little good in him."

"Good in him?" echoed Aeriel. Could that be? The words put a sudden, irrational hope in her.

"Only a very little," said one of the wraiths. "Not enough to matter."

"He has been taught not to heed it," said her fellow beside her.

"He is evil," insisted another. "He is still woefully evil."

"But there is yet some good in him?" Aeriel cried.

The wraiths muttered among themselves, nodded reluctantly. "His soul is still his," said one. "The witch has drunk his blood, but not his soul."

"But she will," said another, "when she has drunk our souls, then she will drink his. We shall die, die utterly, but he will live on after a fashion, for she has left him his heart."

"It is lead, not flesh," her sister interjected.

"There will be no good left in him then," the one who had spoken formerly continued,

"and he will grow ugly. As ugly as we are----"

"No, uglier."

Aeriel sank down on the stool again. She could not speak. A wraith on the floor beside her touched her arm. "As now he drinks blood trying to replenish his bloodlessness, then he will drink souls, in effort to fill up his soullessness—in vain!"

"He will become a drinker of souls, and a true vampyre."

Aeriel put one hand to her mouth; she felt stifled. "The water witch will do this to him,"

she choked, "drink up his soul and make him ugly?"

Her throat was tight and sore. Pity and anger rose again in her suddenly. "No. I cannot let her have him."

"Then you must kill him," said the wraiths.

"No, I... I must think on it," she finished lamely.

The wraiths gazed at her, hopelessness deepening the hollows of their eyes.

"Perhaps—perhaps there is a way to overcome him without his death...," stammered Aeriel.

"It cannot be done," the wraiths replied.

"I must try."

"He will kill you," they all cried, miserable.

"Then I shall die," she answered, voice trembling; she trembled.

The wraiths turned away from her and started to moan. "Aeriel, Aeriel will not help us!"

Aeriel sat down on the stool again and said nothing more for a time. She unwound the spindle and looped the thread around her elbow into a skein. The skeining took a long while, for the thread was so fine that many yards could be wound onto that tiny spindle, and all the while the wraiths keened and wrung their hands in despair. Aeriel took the skein from her arm, twisted it, and tossed it into the basket, half-full already of the golden skeins.

"I must go down and talk to the duarough," she said, rising from her stool. The wraiths shrieked and wept in defeat. Aeriel left them.

"The wraiths say I must kill the vam-pyre," said Aeriel as she waded carefully across the lighted stream to the far bank where the duarough sat fishing a quiet back eddy with a hook of thorn, a horsehair line, and a rod of cane. Aeriel sat down on the bank beside him.

"What's that you say?" he asked sleepily, head nodding in the fragrant white smoke of the little fire beside him. "Ah well, I thought they would come to it."

Aeriel looked at him, puzzled, and he roused himself enough to notice.

"Oh, yes, they asked all the others, too, you know: the one before you and the one before her. Yes, they asked them all, and all refused—no, I retract that. One of them actually attempted it. She failed, of course." He shook his head. "The others? One of them took her own life rather than face it; another missed her step on the tower stairs and plunged to her death. Another died for loneliness. The last lost her mind and tried to run away." The duarough glanced at Aeriel. "Ah, that castle above is only death and death. Don't spend too much time up there, child. Come down to the caves. Here is life."

At that moment, Aeriel saw a nibble on his line, and the little man fell silent to concentrate on hooking a tiny cavefish barely as long as the hand is broad, and quicker than quicksilver. Aeriel watched him in silence until the fish was caught and strung on the fishline, and the duarough sat baiting his hook again with a white cave cricket.

"I do not want to kill the vampyre," she said at last. "I want... I want to save the wraiths, but not... not to kill him."

The duarough glanced at her with upraised eyebrows, then back at his rush pole quickly.

"And how would you propose to do that?" he asked slowly, as if not greatly interested.

Aeriel gazed off across the lighted water and sighed, but she could see out of the corner of her eye that the duarough was watching her intently as she spoke.

"I do not know," she said, "but there must be a way." Her voice did not tense or rise with frustration now. She spoke softly and with conviction. "I am determined to find it."

The duarough eyed her for a long moment then. She did not turn to him, but continued to gaze off across the water. Then he, too, turned back to look out over the lighted stream.

He shook his head a trace. "Ah, daughter," he said, "it is a strange thing you would do.

Perhaps it is possible; perhaps it is not. But granting for the moment that I might brew a draught that would render the ica-rus insensible..
."

Aeriel turned to him, startled. "You can do that—make such a dram?" She said, "But how?"

He smiled a little then. "I am a son of earth, child. I know a little magic."

"But if you knew how this was to be done," she cried; it was the first time she had ever found herself angry with the duarough, "how is it you have not done it before?"

The little man shook his head again. "I did not say that I could do it," Talb answered gently. "I said that I
might
—with your aid. I could only do the half of it. Another must do the rest."

"But there were others before me," insisted Aeriel, still angry and refusing to soften.

The duarough sighed a trace, very sadly. Aeriel saw a crayfish take his bait without being caught. "But think, daughter; think," her companion said. "What good could lie in such a scheme? He'd only steal the souls of fourteen other maidens to refill his vials."

Aeriel looked away; her anger had faded. "But," she murmured, "if he could be prevented..."

"How, child?" the little man inquired, as solemn as Aeriel had ever seen him. She watched him gather in his line. "Do you propose to chain him, like the gargoyles?"

"No!" cried Aeriel. Her own vehemence surprised her.

The duarough laid his pole on the sandy bank beside him. "Tell me," he said quietly,

"why you do not wish the vampyre to perish."

Aeriel drew up her knees and clasped them, stared off toward the wall of the opposite strand. She felt suddenly very cold. "I love his power and his beauty, the magnificence and majesty of him, his splendor and his authority, his surety...." Her voice trailed away.

The little man rose, a bit stiffly, from his sitting place on the bank and looked down at her thoughtfully. "But do you love
him,
child?" the duarough asked.

Aeriel fell silent. "No. I cannot. He has murdered—worse than murdered—my friend Eoduin and twelve other maidens. No. I do not love him." She closed her eyes, defeated.

"The wraiths are right. I know that he must die."