Chapter II

In which Corin is a philosopher

The Main Hall was illuminated by dozens of heavy iron candlestands lined up near the walls. The flickering flames of the tall white candles cast a warm light on the faces of the present company. It was a situation Jane and Alec had been in countless times since their master had brought them home. Whenever they had a visitor in Volterra, he would be brought before the assembly, regardless of any previous plans the wanderer might have had. The ones who did not know about the Volturi would be educated; the ones who knew would get a firm reminder. For hundreds of years, the twins had escorted visitors to the Main Hall and kept things strictly under control, and had thus become experts in Volturi protocol. There was a certain solemn air about the entire procedure, almost like in a church ritual, abided to and shared by all.

With the distinct exception of their leader.

"Dear ones, impeccable timing!" he congratulated from his throne. Marcus and Caius were sitting on each side of him, the former gazing absently at the candles and the latter studying the guest with a mixture of curiosity and revulsion. "You've arrived just in time. Demetri has found our friend here wandering throughout the city, looking for us." The bodyguards, dressed plainly in jeans and t-shirts, were standing near the thrones and putting on what the twins recognized as their best poker faces.

As for their guest, he had turned to face the trio when they entered. He was a tall, gaunt looking man with short, cropped black hair and a bushy beard, dressed in a Russian monk's garb: frayed black cassok, a rope belt around his waist, plain sandals. Jane tried not to grimace at the sight of his too long, filthy toenails. A small wooden cross was hanging from his neck and he had a faded messenger bag slumped across his shoulder. He smelled faintly of myrrh and moss, and the scent brought forth the image of a derelict church overgrown with lush greenery to Jane's mind. The most remarkable aspect of him however, was his face. It looked as if the skin had shattered into a thousand tiny pieces that had been put back together by a precise and expert hand. Jane had never seen anything like that before. With morbid curiosity, she waited for him to speak, to see how his skin looked when stretching. His eyes were golden, a sign of animal blood and a source of unpleasant memories for everyone present. Jane found his more subtle facial features harder to discern because of the myriad of thin, white vines that crept on his face like rivers on a map. He looked at them for a few seconds, and the disbelief on his face was chased by horror. Unfazed, still holding hands, the twins approached the guest and stopped at a reasonable distance.

"These are my precious Jane and Alec, and the rusalka behind them is Corin. You have already met Felix and Demetri, and this shy one is Renata." Renata was half hidden behind Aro's throne, teeth clenched and eyes alert. The visitor turned to Aro.

"They are children..." his voice was tinged with nervousness and his discomfort was plain for all to see.

"Nobody here is young, my esteemed guest."

The man looked down, as if trying to gather his thoughts. Aro was looking at him patiently, fingers interlaced and smile unchanging. Finally, the man looked up and began:

"My name is Timur. I come from Russia. I live on Mountain Beshtau, near Pyatigorsk. I come here because I was told you were law. You keep peace."

"As we have been doing for thousands of years."

At that, the man seemed to be at a loss for words. Caius began tapping his fingers on the arm of his throne. A candle flame trembled in Marcus' eyes.

"And to what do we owe the pleasure of this visit?" coaxed Aro, with what Jane thought was saintly and certainly undeserved patience.

"I see something. People like us. I live on my mountain for one hundred and thirty years. I dig a small cave inside the mountain and I sit there and pray. I hide the entrance with rocks and mounds of leaves and snow. A month ago I want to go out to drink and then I see people running up the slopes. Moved too fast, could not be humans. At first I think to myself that they are just passing through so I stay in my cave until the next day. The next day, I see them again, and the day after that. Once, they meet so close to my cave that I can hear what they are saying, but I do not know their language. One week later they are still there so I am worried."

"May I ask why? You obviously do not share their diet..."

"I have family in Pyatigorsk. Great-great nieces and nephews. The one who change me tells me that contact with... people should be as little as possible. This is good for me because I live alone on mountain Beshtau, but I come down once every few years to see how they are. I do not want them killed, or worse."

"I understand your concerns Timur, but the Volturi cannot forbid vampires to feed. As long as they are careful not to expose themselves, they are free to do as they please."

Disappointment was obvious on the twin's faces. This man had been spending his vampire life in a hole on a mountain, eating squirrels. He was practically a savage with little knowledge of the vampire world, and he was asking the oldest and most powerful coven of vampires to chase off a bunch of nomads who happened to settle for a week on a pile of frozen rocks north of nowhere.

"I am well aware of that," Timur continued carefully. "I want to ask them to leave, but they are too many and I have bad feeling in my heart."

"And how many were there?"

"Twenty one."

Aro's smile fell off his face. "How many?"

Timur repeated the worrying number.

"Twenty one as in dvadsat' odin?"

"Dvadsat'odin," the stranger confirmed.

A stunned silence engulfed the hall. Jane exchanged a look with Alec. Even Marcus turned his head to stare at the guest. Encouraged by the reaction of his audience, Timur continued his story.

"When I see that they stay and stay, I dress in winter clothes and leave to see someone like me, who tells me large groups are forbidden and that the Volturi can help me. He give me map and money for road and here I am. They have broken the law and I ask for Volturi justice."

Aro rose from his throne, his composure regained. Renata followed him behind like a shadow.

"You have done well to inform us, regardless of motives. However, before we go on, I must tell you that the Volturi punish those who give false testimony. If what you say is true, we will send someone to disperse the coven, if it is indeed one. If you have lied to us, I am afraid we will have to follow the word of the law, as much as it pains us."

Aro's voice was the kind which you would expect a father chiding his son to have, but Timur seemed to feel the threat buried underneath. He shook his head. "I swear I tell truth and only truth."

"I believe you, friend." Aro glided down the steps toward him. "You have undertaken such a long journey. I think we should let you catch your breath for a few hours." Felix and Demetri inched closer to the guest. If he noticed them, Timur gave no sign of it. He was looking straight at Aro with his strange, intense gaze that not even fear could overshadow, and hesitantly took the vampire's extended hand and shook it. In a split instant, an endless river of thoughts opened wide inside Aro's mind. He swam upwards the waterfall of foggy human memories and saw a monastery with painted walls, a fall, the change, the boulder rushing towards him, a cave dug in stone and earth, its ceiling so low that you had to crawl on hands and knees to enter, the makeshift altar with the wooden crucifix, thin yellow candles and paper icons. And from that cave he peeked outside through the pile of stones and branches and saw them, smelled them and heard them talking, only he understood what they were saying because it was ancient Greek and it was something indeed...

"Timur, you have done well to seek our justice. Right now I must speak to my dear ones, but do not leave us yet. I have a wonderful collection of manuscripts from the Middle Ages which I am certain you would enjoy, isn't that so?" Timur nodded, a little uncertain. "Corin here will show you the way."

"Happy to oblige!" Corin threw the guest her most winning smile. The only thing that stopped Jane from rolling her eyes as hard as she could at that was the fear that the force of it would make her go blind. That, and the protocol.

"Our Corin really is a joy to have around, isn't she?" said Aro, looking pleased.

"This way," gestured Corin and led him out of the Main Hall. As the echo of their footsteps receeded, Aro turned to his guard, who had gathered around him in a circle of anxiety.

"My dearest ones, I will have to ask you to gather everyone."

The only thing that he could tell for certain was that the book was very old. The paper looked different from the ones he had seen before, and the pages were yellowed with age. A beautiful miniature of the Virgin was gazing sadly at him from the right page. Timur shifted his eyes from the glass case to the woman accompanying him. She had long hair the color of wet sand that she kept twisting into ringlets around her fingers and an uncommon face. In fact, all the Volturi members that he had met had something different about them. The woman, Corin, noticed him looking at her and took this as a cue to proceed into the sculpture gallery. As they were making their way trough the sealed, thermo-isolated rooms, she began to talk about the people whose works they had gathered and how difficult it was to rein down the ravages of time. The Volturi vaults seemed endless, with room after room of treasures glittering in display cases. There were bejeweled crowns and circlets, laquered boxes inlaid with ivory and mother of pearl, orante golden chalices, coins, amphors, mosaics, scrolls, lavishly decorated clothes and an entire room dedicated to weaponry: halberds, scimitars, maces, daggers, steel or iron, their hilts plain or encrusted with gems. The ancient vampires also seemed to have a knack for oddities; Timur noticed a pearl lager than his fist resting loftily on a velvet cushion, a few death masks of people he did not recognize, a pair of glass hands, strange looking musical instruments, an assortment of bottles of all shapes and sizes filled with liquids he could not identify and a pair of nightmarishly large jaws that could not have come from any animal he knew.

"These make a trophy, Caius got them in Asia Minor after a good fight with a child of the moon."

"One of us?..."

"No, children of the moon are werewolves. They are merely a legend now. We eliminate any threats to our kind."

Timur dared to ask if they were stronger than the vampires. "It depends on many factors, such as size and experience, and in the vampire's case, age and any talents they might have."

"You know much. How old are you?"

"Very," she answered, looking at the glass case filled with stuffed birds, their colorful wings extended and their beaks half open. "This little blue one is extinct. Such a shame. I can still remember a time when its kind filled the forests. Nature has such a way of setting things right. Like a great living body, endlessly growing and regenerating. It pains me that we have turned to its cancer."

"Humans are part of life as much as birds or grass," replied the monk.

"That is true, yet when you have existed for as long as I have, you can tell that something went wrong in the past few centuries. Much like weeds, humans have become invasive. They trumped natural selection and bred aggressively, making things difficult for our kind. You are probably thinking that I have it wrong, that more humans means more food and less hassle, but it is not so. They filled their cities with surveillance cameras and gave every one of them identification cards. They can find fingerprints and extract DNA from a strand of hair. Getting a meal has never been more difficult. Perhaps it is a sign that the Volturi need to change. We adapted by using blood bags... how did you adapt, if you do not mind me asking?"

"God showed me the way," answered Timur looking at the leather-bound books filling the shelves of the study they were passing through. All had golden years written on their spines.

"Jane's herbarium collection. She enjoys collecting plants," explained Corin and added "Did God also give you the scars on your face?"

"Everything has a price," came the morose answer.

"Indeed," agreed the other vampire somewhat absently.

"Why do you keep these things? Did they belong to your kind?"

"Not all of them. Some are for money or bribery, others for nostalgia."

The room they were in contained such an unsettingly realistic statue of a girl that Timur froze in the treshold.

"Felix made this, believe it or not. He told us it is supposed to be a girl he once kissed when he was human, but I think he is only playing with us. He loves doing that, you should know."

The girl had curls and dimples, and Timur wondered when she had lived and what would she have thought if she had known of this. The kiss of immortality.

"We vampires like to keep certain things to make sure that our lives really happened. You are too young to understand this, Timur (he was startled by the use of his name) but you need to live a few human lifetimes before you actually notice time. Humans write about it since script was invented, about how it saddens and buries them, but there is nothing that can compare to a vampire's experience of time. Everything changes, people, cities, ideas, and the longer you exist, the more you see that Earth is just a stage for whatever play people are acting in. Storms sweep across the desert, rain washes filth off the roof of the cities, wind eats away at everything and the only elements that change are the rules. At the very core, the players are all the same. You are a boulder in the middle of the stream of time, with people exploding in and out of existence around you, never to return, making you wonder sometimes if you did not perhaps just dream everything. I remember the past so well and yet nothing of it remains... Maybe this is why our role as keepers of history is so important."

"I think vampires are not very useful. People are good without them." It must have taken Timur a great deal of courage to express his conviction - Corin knew a religious man like him tends to have convictions in lieu of opinions - and the older vampire almost marveled at the boldness of the statement until she remembered that it was fueled by inexperience.

"You do not see us as useful? As, but you are still young. It will come to you, this sense of greatness. We are essential to this world, kindred, because without us there would be no one else left in the world to remember how Alexander the Great looked as he charged towards the Persian king in the battle os Issus, or how the heat blooming from Pompeii felt like the day after Vesuvius sealed its fate with ash. Who would remember how silphium smelled in spring? You cannot find it on the face of the earth anymore. The shouts of Roman peddlers as they passed through the streets, the sun rising over Babylon two thousand years ago, the tears in Caligula's little Julia as she tried to defend her mother from the assassins who would end both their lives... Bactrian wedding sons, Spartan war cries, the color of Cleopatra's eyes. Without us, all of this would be lost in time. Our perfect memories of these sights and sounds and people are the purest form of history. If we disappear, there will be nobody to remember anymore. And in this large and frightening darkness that is the universe, we are the ones who can give the closest thing to immortality to our beloved world." Thus spoke the ancient vampire, and there was such tenderness in her voice that the monk could not help but feel strangely moved.

"I am quite the philosopher when I want to be, but then most vampires become afflicted tendency with this over time," she smiled. "Would you like a drink? I can arrange to have some animal blood delivered."

When her guest nodded, Corin hurried to mention that he might also benefit from a new set of clothes.

"I know I look poor, but I like my clothes," he answered simply.

"At least let us give you a new pair of sandals. You can take the old pair with you, but - she crinkled her nose - if you walk around like this, you might attract unwanted attention."

"A poor man has nothing worth stealing."

"A man who looks like a vagabond dressed in foreign clothes may be questioned by the police. The bane of every law-abiding vampire is the policeman," spoke Corin as they were crossing room after room of antique treasures. "There is a certain irony in here somewhere."

"How did he look?" called Timur after her. "Alexander riding in the battle against Darius?"

At this, Corin stopped and turned.

"Magnificent," she breathed, and in her face was the fervor of a witness.

"What he first saw was a group of fifteen vampires running up the slopes one night. Over the next few days, more and more vampires joined the interesting summit, until their number reached twenty one. And this is only what he saw - for all we know, there could be more."

The Main Hall was overflowing with Volturi. Some of them were normally called upon so rarely that they did not have the time to find their ceremonial cloaks and so they had come wearing their street clothes. Black shrouds were mingling with colorful prints and sleek office blazers. There were even one or two Star Wars t-shirts in the crowd, and Alec could have sworn that he saw Hartley from Treasury struggling to pull the zipper of his hoodie over a Zelda t-shirt. All eyes were on Aro, who was speaking in a calm, measured manner. The alarmingly large gathering from mount Beshtau had stirred a boiling anxiety in his followers, and most of all in himself. There hadn't been so many vampires together since the Cullen confrontation, and Aro had feared it had set a dangerous precedent.

"They ran up and down the slopes in pairs, in something akin to shifts. I did not recognize any of them, but some had the features found in old ones, and others looked newly minted. Once someone gives me a pencil and paper, I will draw portraits of each and every single one. "

There was a shuffle throughout the hall as Sybil from Accounting was dispatched for that purpose.

"The one time when they got close enough for our friend to hear them, the pair running up was met by the ones getting ready to descend and asked about whether they had found anything. The answer was that combing the city was harder than expected. While I am not certain in regards to what they were looking for, I find the situation intriguing enough to send a special delegation to investigate. Alec dear, Jane sweetheart."

The twins bowed their heads, obviously pleased at the prospect.

"Felix and Corin will accompany you in the guise of your parents and make sure everything goes smoothly. Take a day to organize the trip and then depart with our Russian friend. Use him as guide when you arrive at the scene, I am sure you can make some use of him in spite of his quirks. As for the rest of us, I want us all to see this as an excellent opportunity to further consolidate our role on a global scale. If we are very lucky, we have stumbled upon a conspiracy - which our guard will eliminate before it has a chance to grow into a real threat."

"Perhaps we should inform our contacts in Russia about this, brother. See if they know anything," suggested Caius.

"Not at this stage. It would be better to send our eyes and ears there first, and then act accordingly. Time is of the essence."

Sybil from Accounting, armed with paper and pencils, squeezed her way between Jane and Alec, leaving a soft trail of linden blossom perfume behind. Alec inhaled deeply.

Thousands of years' worth of practice had given Aro the ability to produce photographic drawings, and it was not long before his guard could look at the faces of the enigmatic vampires. The youngest looking was judged by all to be the oldest - a lanky boy of around sixteen, with a head full of curls and the telltale skin of someone who withstood centuries. The rest were an eclectic band of individuals: a middle aged man dressed in running clothes, a Roma woman of uncertain age with a genuine Hermès scarf wrapped around her face, a blond man with a pouting bottom lip and a sleek smartphone which he checked obsessively. One by one, they were committed to the twins' memory. The papers were then passed on to Afton to be scanned and mailed to Jane and Alec's joint e-mail account.

Nobody from the hall had ever come across any of the vampires from the drawings, which in itself was odd, as the Volturi outer circle was regularly dispatched on reconaissance missions all over the world. The small hope nurtured by Aro in that regard vanished as his question was met with absolute silence. Twenty one nobodies emerged from nowhere to search for something on a mountain in Russia. At that point, everybody was so intrigued that the vampires could have been searching for Waldo and the Volturi would have still investigated, thought Jane idly.

"Do you think there is a deep and dark plot against us, my heart?" asked Alec as the Volturi began to file out of the hall in neat rows. He unsuccessfuly tried to trip Maurel from Procurement and got discreetely flipped off.

"I certainly hope so," replied Jane and, upon rearranging her hair clip, realized her brother had stuck a grotesquely large stag beetle in it. She mentally gave everyone points for not mentioning it. "Do not start with me, brother - you will not win."

Alec just smiled mysteriously.