37

FRESH TOMBS

"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals... we patronise them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err.. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves within the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the Earth."

Henry Beston

Helen clutched her chest.

One of the heartbeats was gone. Her world shifted off balance, broken by the loss. She faltered, reaching for the wall, dragging her sweaty palm over the silver. Her torch slipped and clattered to the ground where it rolled toward the creature who barely moved as it touched its insectile leg.

"NIKOLA!" Helen shouted frantically down the shaft. Long minutes passed until his weak torchlight shone up at her. The beam cut through a steady waft of acrid smoke and dust churning in the cold.

"What?" he hissed, unhappy about being dragged from his work.

She let out a sigh of relief, steadying herself. That damn vampire. "Nothing..."

Nikola muttered something in Serbian, vanishing back into the remains of the navigation room.

Helen turned around, hand on her chest. A vampire was dead – she could feel it in her soul. Two vampires, two immortals; the scales were even. Her panic was followed by a wash of harmony. It was a peace that she had never experienced in her long life – a lull as though the universe had fallen in step. This was the balance her father had spoken of locked away in Tesla's house with snow tapping softly at the window. It had not been felt since ancient times when the world was awash with their twin species.

The creature twitched, dragging its sharp pincers against the silver. It was watching her with more interest than normal, blinking multiple sets of eyes one at a time. Helen was its pet science project. It was directly responsible for the eternity she found herself in, for the hundreds of years of bloodshed, torment and loss. The truth made her skin crawl.

"How do you do it?" she whispered, inching closer to it. "Am I to walk eternity like you, hiding in the darkness? Do you have any idea the havoc you wreaked on this world?"

It did not answer her.

THE SANCTUARY, OLD CITY

Dr Will Zimmerman dangled from a wire suspended high above the chasm. He peered at the concrete pit below, littered with half-dead vines and tangles of tree roots. It was difficult to tell where the building ended and the bedrock began as it was all a sickly conglomerate of shale and pebbles.

"Oh, I don't like abseiling. Last time I tried this there was sand – and death – and bullets..." Will complained, kicking off the rock. He swung over to an outcrop of wood that may have once been a ladder. It crumbled in his hands, dissolving into a cloud of dust which wafted steadily toward the ground. Will looked appalled as he thumped back against the wall, boots kicking another puff of dirt free. So much for that plan.

"Lighten up," Bigfoot zipped town the wall effortlessly. "We're not in Egypt."

"No. We're in Magnus's vault, buried under the Sanctuary. Just another one of those things she failed to mention in our briefings. I mean, who the hell keeps a sink hole under their house?"

Bigfoot made a sound that could pass for laughing if you were really drunk or related to a fury species of mountain abnormals. "Don' be so dramatic," he replied, landing on a ledge that considered buckling under his weight. "It's a quarry not a tomb. They used some of the rock to build the Sanctuary after it closed – the rest is littered 'round the tall buildings in th' city."

"Well, forgive me if I find its existence a wee-bit disconcerting," Will replied, stumbling onto the ledge next to Bigfoot. He peered off at the next drop. It was infinitely worse than the paltry wall he'd scaled. "How far down did you say the electrical disturbance was?"

"All th' way at th' bottom," Bigfoot replied, securing the ropes.

"And no one thought, 'oh perhaps stairs might work?' No?" he sighed. Will looked back up to where they'd spent the last few hours scouting a route through the half-collapsed ex-mine. "Aw hell, are you sure there's something down here?"

"The shield's don' extend this far un'er the Sanctuary. Anythin' tapping onto an' EM transport could get in."

"You mean like John-the-sodding-local-serial-killer?"

"Or one of them pesky vampires. I don' know about you but I'd rather find out now then wait for 'em to crawl up into the Sanctuary."

Will flinched. A hungry vampire hovering over his bed while he was asleep was not a pleasant fantasy.

Zimmerman knew there was a problem as soon as his boots hit the ground. There wasn't a vampire down here – there was part of a vampire. He held his hand over his mouth, fighting the urge to hurl at the gruesome sight. An arm and half the lower torso – legs attached – was strewn over the rubble.

"Amasis?" Will whispered, unclipping himself from the rope. He wasn't sure why he whispered it in question. The corpse could not reply.

"What's left of him," Bigfoot knelt down beside the mess.

"Kavanaugh, you seeing this?" Will said into his radio. There was a small camera mounted to his shirt with the feed leading back into the lab where Joe Kavanaugh had set aside his lunch and rolled closer to the screen.

"Holy hell – that's a nasty bit of vampire arse."

Will nudged Amasis' remains with his foot. "I wonder where the rest of him went. Could be a transporting accident."

"No – look at the blood patterns."

"There's hardly any," Will replied, moving so that Kavanaugh could get a better look.

"Exactly. If this was an accident and he landed in two bits there would be blood all over this place."

"Creepy but who on Earth would deposit half a corpse in the heart of the Sanctua-oh..."

"Druitt..." they all said, at exactly the same time. "All right," Will continued. "Let's bag it. Magnus will want to see this when she gets back."

KASHMIR, PENSI LA MOUNTAIN PASS

Ashley stared into the clogged throat of the tunnel.

"Holy shiiiiiiit," she breathed, securing her guide rope to the ice. "We sure as hell trashed this place," Ashley hissed into her radio. "There's a bit of an opening up ahead, I think I can get to it. There's a mess of ice in the way."

"Be careful Ash," Henry insisted.

"Do me a favour and don't lose the chopper, eh?" she replied, with a side of sass.

"Yeah, one helicopter. Check." Henry sighed and sat back on the snow.

The helicopter was perched a safe distance from the edge with the team huddled around a makeshift fire, indulging in lunch. Declan was strutting around trying to find a signal for his satellite phone but everything electronic refused to work.

What the hell was under this damn mountain?

Nikola snapped his hand away from the navigation panel as it sparked at him.

"Aw, don't be like that!" he frowned.

Despite being the world's foremost genius, Nikola spent most of his time fixing other people's half-assed attempt at technology. This was no different. Sure, it was an ancient alien spaceship capable of inter-galactic travel but the fact remained that it had crashed. To Nikola it was just another bird with a broken wing. He sighed, running his hand over the warped panel. The entire edge had melted onto the floor in what must have been a hell of a fire.

Finally, the room hummed. It lit up with holographic panels flashing on and off as the ship started calculating where it'd parked. He heaved the navigation crystal back into place and surveyed the final task.

There was another, much smaller hatch on the floor. Nikola knelt beside it, dug his claws under its edges and hauled it open. A noxious cloud of trapped smoke funnelled out leaving a light dusting of soot through his hair. Tesla scowled.

"Why do I always get the dirty jobs? I mean, isn't there a contract or something I can put this in?" Nikola glanced over his shoulder and found that there was no one to rant at.

Nikola sat on the edge and shone his torch down. Jutting out halfway down the shaft was a growth of angry, black mountain biting into the spaceship. With no choice, he lowered himself into the narrow gap, propping his spindly frame up with his back and feet. Carefully, Tesla descended, awkwardly clambering around the rock which rudely left a sharp mess of silver to navigate. He cut himself several times, recoiling at the metal's sting.

When he thought he was at the bottom, the shaft took a sharp turn, heading horizontal along the outer shell of the ship. He laid flat on his stomach, torch between his teeth as he hauled himself through. His shoulders ground against the walls, trying with every movement to trap him in the metal shell.

Purely to test his patience, the end of the shaft was covered by a grill. Nikola snarled at it, beating the flimsy sheet of metal with his torch until it buckled and fell noisily into the room behind.

"Ancient ship 0, Tesla 1..." he purred, clambering head first after it. "Yikes..." he added, when the first thing to catch his torchlight was a pair of empty eye sockets. A row of desiccated corpses grinned at him, sagging against the wall with demonic grins of rotten teeth and upturned lips.

Nikola startled, backing away from the grisly sight. His ancient history concerning the rest of the world was a bit hazy but there was something overwhelmingly Asian about the twisted tails of their moustaches touching the floor.

Assured that they were dead, Nikola dutifully snapped a photo on his phone for Helen's archives.

"Where'd you lot come from?" It took him only moments to spy the repaired panel on the ship's wall. The workers had welded it from the inside, trapping themselves forever. As ambivalent as the creature upstairs claimed to be, it clearly didn't mind wasting a few human lives here and there. He doubted it would be any more careful with his and Helen's. He wished that she'd see that. Survival turned the nature of every creature – Nikola didn't care if it was from this world or another.

"Excuse me," he said, shifting one of the worker's arms off the final control panel. Nikola was momentarily horrified as the appendage tore off and thumped onto the floor. "S-sorry..."

Ashley hacked the thin layer of ice from the cave's mouth. The delicate sheet shattered, covering her in crystals that melted against her face. A foul stench flew at her. She turned her head and coughed the wretched air out of her lungs.

Fresh tomb...

Her stomach turned but she had no choice, crawling into through the crevice. Ashley rolled down the ice on the other side, running her hands over it for purchase. She found nothing, bouncing onto the rock floor with a groan. The blackened innards of the tunnel were as violent as she remembered; brutal surges of rock, unstable columns of ice and the limbs of sand creatures, frozen in their eternity.

A flare of purple in the depths of the tunnel caught her eye. Ashley frowned, rolling onto her side. There it was again, darting about in the distance like a drunk fairy.

She stood, hurrying to the edge of the tunnel. Ashley clung to it, sidestepping the ice and rubble without her light. Invisible, Ashley crept closer to the strange light.

"Amasis?" she whispered, seeing the vampire slumped against a boulder not far ahead. He looked oddly peaceful, gazing toward the enormous doors and their eternal flames.

Amasis' black eyes were open, reflecting the firelight. His soft, dark hair was fanned against the rock, parts of it frozen thick with blood. He had been very handsome – a Prince and a philosopher. He'd seen civilisation born out of the sand and watched one world bleed into the next amid a storm of swords. In his hand was a stone – a perfect sphere of milk quartz with a heart of lapis lazuli. The Sanctuary of the Moon, a dream that had died with him.

Ashley fell to her knees when she rounded the rock and saw pool of blood. A vampire's death was akin to the senseless felling of an ancient tree. She lowered her head in respect and bid him farewell.

"Nikola – you there?" Helen whispered into her radio. Static. Always static. Dammit. He'd been down there a long time and she couldn't rouse him any more by calling down the shaft. He must have gone deeper into the ship.

The creature tapped the air with one of its limbs, moving a holographic display to the side. It flashed a few times causing the creature to make a low, hissing sound.

The ship was waking up.