Warnings for blood, gore, and underage, non-explicit sex. This story has been overhauled from the previous version, as of Sep 2011.
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But this blue I'm compelled to glorify
it's not robin's egg, navy, or indigo;
it's a shade that should be
named "devastation blue,"
the excruciating, lacerative blue of today's sky
whose incandescence suggests
that its nearest blood kin is neither
violet nor emerald,
but gold.
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The tavern wasn't big enough for stables, but had its own whore.
And in a tiny trade town like this, that was saying something.
Wooden buildings, their planks rough-hewn and unfinished, clung close alongside a single mud-choked, deeply rutted street. The place had no fortifications. Filthy animals and filthier children wandered the shadowed alleys - proof enough that the humans in this place, in this era, had no fear of the creatures that stalked the night in less settled times.
Kain lifted his head, nostrils flared with distaste. His sense of smell seemed to grow only more acute as the ages passed, but at times like this, that dark gift seemed more a curse than a blessing. The streets were open sewers - the dim drizzling rain only muted the stench. Tepid, dirty water dripped from the hem of his thick cloak.
Nowhere could Kain find evidence of Sarafan lordship, though that didn't mean much, in a place as squalid as this. Eventually, the clouds would surely clear to reveal the stars, but until then...
Kain stepped nimbly aside to avoid being splashed by a kicking mule, the animal dumbly terrified by the nearness of a vampire, its handler cursing it roundly. Under better weather conditions, Kain would not have hesitated to simply fly to a larger town, someplace that might hear news of Nosgoth more frequently.
Flying in the rain, however, was a misery that overshadowed even spending the night among humans.
Crude music was beginning to drift from the ramshackle tavern, punctuated with drunken laughter. With a great deal of luck, the place might be hosting a traveling minstrel, someone who could tell Kain in exactly what era he had landed. Kain was familiar with the history of Nosgoth, of course - there was probably no one who understood the land as he did - yet tales of this era, some five hundred years before Kain's own birth, were largely myth or legend even to him. No reliable historical texts even existed.
Oh, Kain knew that he'd emerged from the chronoplast in roughly the correct era. His research told him that much. But did he find himself here at the height of Sarafan rule, while his sons still drew breath? Kain could be a year or a month too late, or a hundred years too early, for all he knew.
A drunken ore miner staggered from the tavern as Kain approached. The human began relieving itself in the street. Kain's lip curled in disgust. No matter the age, one could always expect humans to behave like the beasts they were. Even the noble classes, such as existed, were hardly better mannered than this sordid creature.
Steeling himself against the reek of sweating human, Kain pushed open the tavern doors, shaking back the hood of his cloak. Rain no longer harmed him, but neither was its touch a pleasure.
Wrapped in beguilement, Kain's features seemed perfectly human, and so his entrance garnered little attention from most of the half-drunken men. One rotund little man however, alert to the signs of wealth and nobility, pushed through the crowd towards him. The innkeeper, he assumed. The little human bowed as deeply as its fat belly allowed, abasing itself, as was proper. Less reverently, the man kept up a steady stream of words, offering Kain the finest seat in the inn, a comforting drink, the whore, a warm peg near the fire for his cloak...
"Your minstrel," Kain said, interrupting the innkeeper's inane babble. "From whence does he hail?" The player in question had climbed on a table, presumably finding that a better vantage from which to ill-treat the lute he carried. The men around him laughed and shouted, apparently finding the discordant tunes highly entertaining. They squabbled over ale and tattered playing cards. The tavern whore - a ragged, frail thing - writhed half-heartedly on one reveler's lap.
"Him?" said the innkeeper, twisting around to look, as if there could be two such musically disinclined humans in the room. "He be no mistral, Lord. Just a local boy. But if the Lord will wait, a better is due into town any hour. An' he's surely worth waiting for! In the meantime, we has a fine stew, fit even for your lordship, and bread, the very best in Nosgoth, fresh from the ovens, it are! An'..."
Kain swallowed his aversion and allowed the innkeeper to lead him to a table near the fire. Bowing and scraping, the creature chattered away, listing the goods and more... personal services offered by the tavern, punctuated with fawning flattery. At last, Kain cut the human off. "Red wine," he said, "mulled, if you have it."
He waited until the innkeeper backed away, bowing, before he pulled out the rough wooden chair and sat slowly. Damn and damn again. If this were any other era, Kain would have happily laid waste to the entire village. He could have flown to the Sarafan stronghold and seen for himself what was transpiring. But history disliked tampering. A certain... pressure weighed on Kain, the knowledge that he was the grain of sand within the oyster's shell. One false move, one disruption of a vital event or even life, and Kain might very easily find his presence rejected by the timestream.
Kain was in this age for one purpose, and one alone. He would witness Raziel slay his brethren. And in that moment, the fate of all the world would be decided.
If this minstrel could at least pinpoint the exact date, then Kain might...
A drunken roar was taken up by the crowd of gambling men, and the tavern's whore was shoved to the floor, where it crawled between another man's spread thighs. Tired, stringy women lofted trays of steins overhead to weave through the crowd, unconcerned by the uproar. The serving wenches in places such as this could be bought for the price of a few drinks. But they weren't generally available till after closing, and innkeepers strongly frowned on customers that permanently injured the girls.
Thus, the tavern whores. The lives of orphans or runaway slaves were nasty and brutish, no matter the era or the town. "Employed" as tavern whores, their existences were invariably short as well. The thin, dirty human, its face buried in an unwashed ore miner's open breeches, looked to be near its end. Even in the sweaty heat of so many humans crushed in so small a space, the whore shivered.
An engraved goblet was placed before Kain, and he turned his attention to the innkeeper, who also trembled, though for a far different cause. Kain's nostrils delicately flared, catching the rancid bite of fear-sweat. Beneath the rough notes of liquor and flavoring herbs, the wine smelled of bitter almonds.
Kain's lips twitched, nearly a smile. Few toxins could harm a vampire, and fewer still could harm one as ancient as Kain. He withdrew a small silver coin - payment for the drink ten times over, no matter the era - and rubbed it hard between two fingers before placing it on the table in front of the innkeep.
The man's thick fingers reached eagerly for the coin. Kain laid a manicured nail on the metal, forcing the human to glance up. One look, and the human's rotted little mind was caught, hooked like a worm upon Kain's barbed will. Kain smiled. "Watch for the minstrel. Bring him to me when he arrives," he said calmly, "and there will be another of these for you."
The human nodded in frantic agreement, its rolls of jaw-fat flopping. To any onlooker, the innkeeper appeared to have stuck a simple bargain. But a compulsion had been planted in the human's mind, an inescapable command. No matter how it tried, no matter how it struggled, the human would not be able to avoid following Kain's directive.
Kain withdrew his hand and the silver coin was snatched up. The innkeeper studied the coin briefly and then bit down on the rim. The silver, of course, was real enough. But the massive strength of Kain's touch had effaced the impression stamped on the coin - the coins of Kain's empire were all marked with a lieutenant's profile.
The human backed away, bowing, its piggishly crafty eyes alight with murderous avarice. Kain waited until the human retreated to the bar before palming the goblet of spiced wine. The warmth of the liquid was enjoyable, though a cautious sip confirmed that the flavor was not. A pity, for Kain occasionally enjoyed human-made liquors, even if his body tolerated them only in very small quantities.
If innkeepers made a habit of poisoning travelers - Kain couldn't imagine it was the fat man's first such attempt - it surely meant that Sarafan law and order currently waned. Perhaps Kain found himself inserted too late in history, in a time when the Sarafan scrambled to maintain control after the deaths of their living saints.
Or perhaps Kain was early - the Sarafan hadn't yet extended their control to this hamlet. Kain shook his head in disgust, setting the goblet back down. Human history was simply so... so very transitory. An empire in its glory one decade could be crumbling the next. Spheres of power waxed and waned; little border towns like this one were lawless one year and taxed to extinction the next. There was no stability under human rule - there never could be.
This stinking town was no place for him. There was nothing to be found here worth this aggravation. He would find someplace sheltered in the forest and move out once the rain cleared. Kain laid his palms on the table and stood.
His knees nearly buckled.
Kain closed his eyes against sudden nausea, against encompassing weakness. He could hear - could smell - the innkeeper sidle closer. The wine... but no, no chemical could... but what if...
Crippling vertigo rose in pulses. Reality bowed, distorted, warping into patterns as wholly familiar and as unnatural as the edge of a coin, flashing as it spun in the sun. Something was about to go history-shatteringly wrong.
Nascent paradox.
Oblivious humans shouted, crude furniture cracking loudly as a drunken fistfight broke out. Wenches shrieked, fleeing for the kitchens. Some creature whimpered as it was kicked aside. Baked clay plates shattered on the floor.
And the paradox ended. Just like that, in less than a second, without Kain's intervention, just... over.
A slender body thumped onto Kain's table, hardly rattling his wineglass. Teeth bared in a snarl, nails gouging furrows in the table's soft wood, Kain opened his eyes...
...into blue. Not bird's-egg blue, not navy, nor indigo. Rather, devastation blue, glory-blue, lacerative, eyes of a shade more familiar to him than any other color in the whole of Nosgoth.
The whore's name was on his lips before he knew it.
"Rahab..."