The Essence Gate War: Book 01 - Adept (36 page)

“
Your words will not smooth this one over, swordsman. She speaks the truth.”

Amric stiffened and turned to stare at him
. Bellimar did not spare him a glance, however. His tight-lipped smile parted to bare gleaming teeth at the huntress.

“Greetings, Thalya,
” Bellimar said. “You are a long way from home.”

Thalya crouch
ed within the sloping entrance of the cave, relaxed as a coiled spring.

Her back was to the stone wall
, and one sun-browned hand was knotted in her black mare’s dangling reins. Her other hand guided the tip of her broad-bladed hunting knife through the dirt caking the floor, making idle patterns which her eye did not follow. Instead her narrowed gaze pierced deeper into the cave, past the roiling haze of smoke that clung to the ceiling on its way to the night sky, to fix upon the men gathered below around a feeble campfire.

Her target sat among them
, staring into the tiny remaining flicker of flame amid a bed of glowing embers, looking like nothing more than an ordinary, tired, silver-haired old man. She wondered if he was as vulnerable at the moment as he appeared, and she considered the bow and single black arrow that were meticulously positioned at her side. No, she admonished herself; he was merely goading her to make another attempt just as he was affecting the sad and weary expression he wore like a jester’s painted mask. Moreover, he had kept the arrow he caught outside, and that left her with but one remaining that was capable of slaying the fiend. Another wasted shot would be her undoing, leaving her without the means to fulfill her mission as well as putting her at the mercy of the monster. She would have to bide her time, then. When she struck again, she would ensure he could not avoid it.

Thalya
forced her eyes from Bellimar and let them rove over the others, disembodied faces floating in the gloom above the banked fire. She had to admit, these were not the dark, soulless men with which she had expected the fiend to surround himself. They seemed stricken by her words and awaiting an explanation, but she reminded herself that evil came in many packages, often wrapped in layer upon layer of deception.

Syth,
one of her rescuers, turned to gaze up at her. He was a strange, scruffy fellow somehow wrapped in his own perpetual gust of wind, and unless she had lost her skill at reading such things, there was desire in his eyes when he looked upon her.

“Lass,
are you certain you will not join us?” he called. “I can give you a hand down the slope, if you are still unsteady on your feet from your earlier ordeal.”

“I have a fine view from here,” she returned
. She held up the hunting knife. “And I will be removing any hand––or other appendage––directed my way.”

Syth let out a guffaw
and settled back with a broad grin of admiration.

“Will you not at least
reconsider the offer of our skilled friend Halthak here to heal your injuries, then?” he asked, indicating the quiet Half-Ork at his side.

Halthak
raised his eyes to meet hers, their wide, childlike innocence incongruous amid a countenance that was so ugly as to be nearly deformed. In truth, she ached and stung all over from the earlier scuffle, but there was no way she would permit a cohort of the Black One to work his magic on her. No, she was in this cave against her better judgment and only long enough to hear what lies the fiend would spin; if these men knew not whom they harbored, perhaps they could be swayed to join her against the monster. She gave a sharp shake of her head, and the Half-Ork dropped his gaze.

Amric, the
tall, powerfully built warrior with the storm-grey eyes who had been the other of her rescuers, cleared his throat and the others grew still. This one had a hard look about him, and yet his voice carried at once both the ring of command and a steady underlying current of compassion. It was clear he was the leader of this motley group, but she had yet to puzzle out why a creature such as the Vampire King would pretend to defer to him, even for a time.

“Bellimar,”
the warrior said. “As you urged, we have withheld all questions while we took shelter from the hazards of the open night. There can be little doubt that you have proven an invaluable companion on this dangerous road, but it is no longer possible to look past the lurking ghosts of your secrets. The time has come to have answers.”

Bellimar said nothing for long moments, still staring into the meager campfire
. Thalya fidgeted. She was eager to hear the monster’s admission of guilt, but she refused to be the one to break the silence, and so she clenched her fist over the hilt of her knife and waited. When at last the old man spoke, it was in a whisper that somehow carried throughout the cave with startling clarity, like a chill breeze through a darkened crypt.

“I will save you the trouble of asking outright,” he said
. “The lady named me truly. I am indeed Bellimar the Destroyer, the man whose rise and fall I recounted to you a mere handful of nights ago in this very cave. I am the conqueror whose vile deeds were scrawled in the blood of innocents on the dim-shrouded pages of history now long lost to this world, and I am guilty of countless more offenses than were ever chronicled.”

His eyes rose from the fire, but
drank its flame. Gone was the old man, weary and resigned, shed and discarded like a dried husk. In his place was a man of fierce, primal intensity, his lean face set in ruthless lines and his eyes burning with blood-red power. His voice crowded out the other sounds of the night until even the echo of his words from the stark ribcage of the cave retreated in dread. Thalya felt a chill along her spine. It was as if he were whispering at her very shoulder, his bloodless lips at her ear.

“Know, friends, that
in my time I have crushed entire nations under my heel. I turned mortal men, good men as well as bad, into unfeeling killing machines. I raised armies of the dead when there were not enough mortal men at hand to corrupt, and I commanded things of deepest shadow. The world, a more primitive place so many centuries ago, trembled at my very tread. I grasped for power, eternally more power, and dark forces granted my every excess. There was a terrible price to be paid, but I paid it then with nary a second thought. I suspect I have been further over that black precipice than any man in the history of this world, and it embraced me as its own. I became the Lord of Night, the Vampire King, and not even the combined might of nations could stop what I had built, what I had become. I had cheated mortality, abandoned my humanity. Time no longer held sway over me, and nothing remained with the power to stop my undying reign.”

He paused, glancing around at their pale faces
. “Nothing in this world, at least.”

“
And yet you
were
struck down, by some force,” interjected the Sil’ath, Valkarr. Thalya suppressed a start. Until his words, spoken in a coarse, guttural tone that lingered on the sibilant sounds, she had all but forgotten the presence of the reptilian warrior.

“So I was,” Bellimar admitted
. “I was struck down at the height of my power, even as I was on the verge of plunging the world into an age of shadow such as it had never before seen. I was struck down by a gathering of forces from beyond that dwarfed even my own strength.”

“So the tales were true?” Amric asked, incredulous
. “The gods themselves intervened in the mortal arena?”

The old man barked a bitter laugh
. “First, tell me your definition of a god. What are the gods, anyway, except beings above us in power, capable of demanding obeisance and inflicting their will upon lesser creatures such as ourselves? By that standard, yes, it was most certainly the gods who struck me down. Whatever you call these beings, they appeared to me as men and women of great power, and were not content to defeat or even destroy me. Instead, they changed me in ways I still do not understand, and then cast me out into the world, even as they dispersed the dark forces I had assembled around me.”

“I do not understand,” Halthak said
. “What did you become after your fall? What are you now?”

Bellimar swung his gaze to the
Half-Ork. “In many ways, I am what I was before, an affront to nature by my very existence,” he said. “I am an ancient vampire.”

Halthak started back from the man as if struck.

“Whatever is the matter, healer?” Bellimar asked, baring his teeth in a blood-chilling smile. “Are you thinking, perhaps, of all those nights I feigned sleep whilst listening to the languid pulse within your senseless, slumbering form only a few tantalizing feet away? Ah, but listen to your heart race now!”

In what Thalya would have deemed a physical impossibility, the
Half-Ork whitened even further.

“Enough
, Bellimar!” Amric said, slicing his hand through the air in a curt motion. “Leave him be.”

Bellimar swung his gaze over to
the man.

“And you, warrior,” he hissed
. “Your pulse remains strong and steady, scarcely rising under threat of violence even though I can smell your fear. A testament to the steel of your nerves, no doubt, but is your composure misplaced? Aura or no, I suspect your blood carries hidden power.”

Amric met the vampire’s fevered stare, unmoving, unrelenting
. “If you were merely some blood-mad fiend,” he said, “you have had ample opportunity to strike. Instead you saved us in Stronghold, and you gave me your word you were our ally.”

Thalya snorted, but Amric ignored her and pressed
on. “What game are you playing at, Bellimar?”

The old man met his iron gaze for a long moment, and then sagged back, looking suddenly aged and weary once more.

“I am no longer certain,” he said at last in a low, brooding tone. “At first it was the drive for knowledge. I sought to end this new curse, to understand how I had been changed, to unravel the riddle of what they had done to me so that I could return to my former glory. I realized the obvious from the beginning, that I had somehow been stripped of my sorcerous powers; they eluded my will even though I retained the full extent of my arcane knowledge itself.

“
The more subtle aspects of my transformation soon began to settle upon me, however. I still required the blood and life force of living creatures as sustenance, and the infernal craving was with me always, but I could no longer bear to take sentient life as I had so casually done before. In fact, I felt nausea, revulsion and pain whenever I contemplated doing harm to another creature. And so I was consigned to feeding on game and lesser creatures like some depraved scavenger, and even that only in the extremes of my hunger, when necessary to sustain my very existence. Perhaps in exchange, I could once more endure the light of the sun and other things considered anathema to my kind. I felt their searing kiss on my flesh, and yet somehow I was not destroyed. I had been thrust into some half existence, and thus it has been for all these centuries, as I pay penance for my sins.”

“Are you living or dead, then?”
Syth asked in a hushed voice.

“What
does it mean to be living?” Bellimar replied with a shrug. “I have free will, and so by that definition––”

“No more word games,” Amric interrupted
. “Answer the question or be gone from here.”

“I
do not mean to equivocate, swordsman,” Bellimar said with a sad smile. “In truth, I do not know the answer. I have been altered in ways beyond my understanding, and I suspect I am either none or all of those things at this point. My aura was altered in some way every bit as fundamental as when I passed from mortal life and became a vampire. By strict definition, I am not living, dead or undead now. And since I have been each of them at one time or another, I may be in a unique position to know. No, I am in a purgatory all my own.”

He lapsed into silence, and the shadows cast by the sinking flames writhed along the
deep lines of his face. When he spoke again, his voice was lower yet, almost inaudible. “I now feel like my quest for this knowledge is––has always been––the final spasm of a dead man, the twitch of limbs that do not realize the spirit has already left the body. I am a hollow shell pursuing a remembered impulse, when the motivation for it is long lost. I no longer know if I seek the knowledge in order to gain release from my constraints, as I once did, or to prevent an accidental reversion to my former self. Perhaps I seek the knowledge simply to put an end to my wretched existence, once and for all.”

Thalya scowled
and reached out to brush her fingertips against the black arrow. If he truly desired an end to his existence, she was more than ready to assist. As if reading her mind, Bellimar glanced toward her. The firelight performed a lurid dance in his eyes as he regarded her for an instant with an unreadable expression. Then his gaze slid away.

“
Your interest in the unusual auras of others,” Amric was saying. “You hope to find in them the key to your own.”

The old man
gave an approving nod. “Very good, swordsman.”

“And your extensive knowledge of them c
omes in part from your years feeding upon the life force of others, as the monster you were,” the warrior continued in a cold tone.