They Thirst (46 page)

He touched Roach's shoulder; the man looked up at him, his face as joyous and dumb as a devoted puppy's. "You're safe now," Vulkan said quietly. "You recognized your weakness down there, and you were wise to call for me . . ."

"I could've killed all those fucking cops," Kobra said. "I could've done it easy, the Death Machine and me, killed them all. . ."

"I didn't speak to you," the prince said, angered at being interrupted. "I didn't ask you to speak. Did I?"

"You don't need
him,"
Kobra said, his gaze burning with a sullen glare. "You said I was going to sit at your right hand. You said that's why you called me from Mexico, because I was special. . ."

"I didn't speak to you!" Vulcan's voice was like hot steel.

Kobra stared back at him for only a second or so, then dropped his gaze and flung the bone into the fireplace. "I need both of you," Vulkan declared, "equally."

"Why do you need one of
them?"
Kobra said, and this time he looked away immediately because Vulkan's green eyes had flared like blasts of napalm.

"Because," the prince said, "we'll need a human to go before us when we've finished here. I'll need him to arrange passage, to care for the crates, to secure a proper dwelling just as my last servant did. And sometimes I forget how humans think, I forget what their needs are, what motivates them. Having one of them here is essential. Look on Roach as a . . . a mascot."

Kobra stared down at his knuckles.

"You are at my right hand, Kobra. You're inexperienced yet, but before we're through you'll lead my army to victory . . ."

Kobra looked up again, his eyes shining like headlights.

"Yes!" Vulkan said. "I called you from Mexico because I could
feel
your presence, and the Headmaster helped me find you. Even as one of
them
you knew how to use Death. You were a true brother, even as a human." He placed his fingertips together and looked from Kobra to Roach. "To each their special place. Think back to Alexander . . ."

"Who?" Kobra asked.

Vulkan looked shocked. "Alexander! The boy king, the greatest warrior this world has ever seen! Don't you read?" Don't you know anything about military strategy?" His lips curled in answer to his own question. "No, I suppose not. You'll have to be taught, won't you? Alexander the Great carried a full contingent on his campaigns—archers, infantry, carpenters, cooks, scholars, prophets, even women to serve the needs of his men. He left nothing to chance, and each man knew his proper role. Am I less than Alexander? Would I not follow his example? As I say, to each their special purpose."

Kobra shrugged. He didn't know what the Master was talking about exactly, but if the Master said it was important, then it was. The Master closed his eyes now, leaving Roach to fawn at his feet. Kobra didn't like that one. On the way up the mountain, the human had sat behind him on his Harley, grasping him with hot hands. If Kobra hadn't already fed tonight, he might've borne him down to the ground and . . . but no. The Master wouldn't like him even thinking like that; he wouldn't like it at all. But he still couldn't see what good that one was going to be. He would be slow and stupid, a lap dog trying to keep up with wolves. Already Kobra was delirious with the sense of power that coursed through him. Right after he fed, he felt invincible, tuned like a perfect 750cc flying along the hot currents on the highway, able to concentrate on the glittering plain of the city and pick up bits of a hundred thousand conversations going on all at once, like overlapping radio stations that faded in and out when the antenna moved. It must have been easy for the Master to find him just by concentrating on the
feeling
Kobra had in his brain, the dark attitude under the trapdoor of his soul. Every time he fed, the power was going to grow stronger; he was going to learn more, see more, know all the secrets in human hearts and minds. It would take time, yes, but he was going to be twenty forever, and time coupled with ageless youth was the great gift the Master had bestowed on him.

"Leave me," Vulkan said. He opened his eyes and stared at Kobra. "Take Roach to his quarters. See that no harm comes to him."

Kobra stood up. "Come on," he said to Roach. He motioned with his hand, and the man scurried after him. "No one is to touch him, Kobra," Vulkan ordered. "Do you understand that? He is to have free run of the castle, and the one who touches his flesh or blood will answer to me."

Kobra bowed his head slightly and ushered Roach through the door. It closed behind them with a hollow noise that echoed up toward the vaulted ceiling.

Prince Vulkan turned his head and stared into the fire. He thought he'd felt a cold breath stirring across the back of his neck, and his senses snapped on, vivid and aware. Paige LaSanda's blood thrummed in his veins; it had made him sleepy for a while, but now he sat straight-backed, the pupils of his cat eyes slowly widening. The red embers in that fire reminded him of the ironsmith's forge in his father's castle, a long time ago. He remembered watching the ironsmith—a huge bear of a man with gray hair on his arms and shoulders—hammering out the raw blades that the swordsmith would painstakingly fashion into rapiers that glimmered like blue lightning. And he recalled those afternoon drills in a dusty hall with the sunlight streaming in through high, arched windows. Forward and back, forward and back, parry, thrust, attack. His father had been proud of his progress and proclaimed him an even better swordsman than his own father, Simon Vulkan the Strong. Now his father had been dust for many hundreds of years; now the castle of his birth was so many broken stones on a mountain ridge; now the pieces of the carriage that had crashed over a serpentine road on that wild, windswept night lay in a Budapest museum along with other odd memorabilia of the Vulkan brood. That night—September 29, 1342—had forever changed him and forever kept him the same. He remembered the scene vividly, could recall it down to the finest detail simply by closing his eyes. His father, Jon the Hawk, sitting across from him in the swaying, gold and ebony coach, his father's wife Sonya beside her husband, pressed close to him because the storm made her fearful. Sonya the Barren, she was called in the village mead halls, though never loudly enough for any of the Hawk's mercenaries to overhear. Conrad knew she wasn't his mother. The Hawk was regaled by the minstrels for his prowess in bed as well as on the battlefield. Sonya bore him no grudge because the Hawk was aging now and had needed a son.

The land was a wild, crazy quilt of powers, men building mountain fortresses and calling themselves kings and hiring mercenaries to take the next man's land. The Vulkan province had spread in all directions as far as a horseman could ride in a day, encompassing a great deal of what is now the northern part of Hungary. It was a varied landscape of harsh rock citadels, sudden deep valleys of dense, unexplored woodland, grassy plains, and lakes that caught mirror images of the sky. The land was beautiful, though unforgiving, but never at peace; there were very few nights when the torches of some ragged army or another didn't burn along the strategic mountain passes. The Germanic tribes were always on the march, and if the Hawk was not battling them in the wild northern forests, he was faced with the crawl of the Huns or the mercenary army of some jealous neighbor.

As the Hawk grew older and slower, assassination attempts became bolder. Three nights before that fateful coach trip, returning from the new fortifications the Hawk had built on the eastern frontier where groups of barbarians had been seen gathering in the mountains for a raid, one of his most trusted advisors had been caught rimming a wine goblet with poison. The man's arms and legs were torn from their sockets, his mutilated torso thrown to the castle dogs. Such was the fate of all traitors.

Conrad Vulkan had been weaned on warfare, drilled in classical military strategy by such warriors as Jozsef Agna and Ernst the One-Eyed, taught to ponder the scope of his world by the philosopher Bran Lazlo, tutored in the myriad ways of man at the knee of his father. He was destined for greatness, the Hawk had always said. Conrad's mind had been steadily honed like the blade of a newly fired rapier. Even now, sitting in a high-backed chair worlds away from strife-torn Hungary, he recalled a favorite lesson his father had taught him:
Attack like the wind. Seem to be in all places at once. And never be there when the enemy turns to grasp at you.

Before the coach incident there was only one moment of foreboding in Conrad's life. It happened during the celebration of his tenth birthday in the castle's great hall. One of the guests had brought, as a gift, a gypsy woman who read fortunes in the palm of the hand. In the ruddy light of hearth and torch, she had grasped his wrist and bent over to see, her toothless gums masticating raw tobacco. Instantly she'd recoiled and asked him—through a translator because she spoke only a crude, Germanic gypsy language—if he'd had those few hairs at the center of his palm since he was born. He'd nodded, and she'd begun clucking like a frightened hen. She'd gripped his hand and said something else, which when translated conveyed that she saw a great and terrible change ahead for him. His line of life had hardly begun when it seemed to disappear
under
the flesh and manifested itself in a thin, blue thread that curved around the base of the thumb and circled the wrist once, twice, three times, and again. She refused to read anything more and had been sent on her way with a loaf of black bread.

But it was that night in September that remained most prominent in his memory—that night of terror and magic. The coach was moving through the Keyding Pass escorted by four soldiers when the driver suddenly slowed. One of the soldiers had sighted huge rocks, fallen from the slab of stone overhead to block the road. Suddenly, as the horses pawed the earth wildly and the driver tried to calm them, figures leaped from the rocks and trees, attacking the mounted soldiers. The horses screamed and reared. They took off with the coach racing, and suddenly a filthy, grinning death's head of a face peered in at a side window. The horses broke their harnesses; the coach shuddered and pitched off the road, crashing over and over down a rocky incline into the cold arms of a mountain stream.

Conrad had opened his eyes inside the coach to see dark, ragged figures scurrying outside, breaking in through the shattered wood. His father and Sonya lay before him like broken dolls, and he knew at once that they were dead. He'd tried to fight off the things as they came swarming in, but one of his arms wouldn't work, and a hulking form covered with filth and lice grabbed him up like a piece of kindling and carried him off into the night. Others chased after, and he was flung aside several times as the things fought, rolling over and over on the ground, hammering at each other, hissing and snarling with demonic fury. Finally, a long way from the Key-ding Pass, he was carried into a cavern that smelled of Death and vermin. The thing that held him threw him to the floor, and it was then that he saw the
vampir'
s face and recognized it for what it was. The thing looked more like an animal than a man, with long, dirty black hair and a scraggly black beard. Its eyes glowed with bursts of red and silver, its fangs dripped saliva, and its fingernails were hooked like claws. The
vampir
had approached, whining in its eagerness to feed, and had leaped upon the boy like a leech.

And the following night Conrad Vulkan had awakened as one of the Undead.

For a while he'd lived as the rest of them did—in
a
series of deep, winding caverns cut through the mountains, feeding independently on whatever he could find, usually rats, boars, or an occasional human who'd taken the wrong road. He fought like an animal to defend his sleeping and eating spaces, losing both of them many times and always digging out new ones in the cavern's clay floors. Eventually he realized that several of them always followed him to the stream where he washed the lice and roaches out of his clothes. They watched him curiously and eventually began to do the same thing. Many of them babbled in strange tongues he'd never heard before, and most of them couldn't communicate at all. After a while he began to speak with several of them through a crude sign language and organized them into hunting parties. And then came the great realization of his new existence. He was, after all, a prince. Why could he not be a king to his new subjects? He organized the group into foodgatherers, scouts, and firetenders, and he began teaching them
a
common language. It was a slow process, but after a long while they began to trust each other, to see themselves as brothers and sisters of the night. They expanded their hunting range, raiding the nearby villages for children who would add the gifts of youth and speed to the collective. In those days Conrad knew very little of what he was or the powers he could control; he simply craved survival and recognized blood as Life.

And finally he was ready to return to the castle of his birth.

His scouts reported that it was in Germanic hands now. So this was to be a mission of warfare as well as a mission of survival. Vulkan contemplated the problem of taking the castle. He knew its interior as well as he knew the palm of his star-crossed hand, but its high, sheer walls would stop even an army of the Undead. And while he contemplated, he watched a rat scurrying back and forth from its nest down in the guts of the cavern where the rock was riddled with cracks and holes.

He began to stretch his power, to test its limits. He stared at the scuttling rat and, concentrating fiercely, made it freeze in mid-step. He made it turn, made it run backwards, made it spin like a child's top. Then he let it go deeper into the cavern, following it with his mind, and made it return to him day after day. Then he did the same to two rats. Three. Four. A dozen rats, spinning in circles before him while the other
vampir
looked on in amazement. He laughed and clapped his hands because now it was becoming effortless. He could feel his will build upon itself, like the dark stones of his father's castle piled one on top of another. Soon a hundred rats danced for him, chittering and squeaking in mindless ecstacy. When he could bring three hundred rats out of the cavern's bowels and control them with a mere squint of his mind, he sent his army out into the mountains.