3 The Lightning Struck Tower
The day that marks the end of this existence ends like any other. Thick grey rain clouds cover the sky, engorged by the smoke from the furnaces and glowing fitfully from the light of the fires below. At dusk, the sun struggles to break through; it weeps into the clouds, dark amber tears, like pus seeping from an open sore, until the night comes and mercifully smothers its corrupted radiance.
Jas sees none of this, for she is still unable to stand even this poor excuse for daylight. As she emerges from the tower that night, she curses Kain's vanity. The clouds cover the moon even more effectively than they blot out the sun, leaving her visible and unable to hide.
The night is uneventful. Her hunting is moderately successful and she returns to the tower with hunger satisfied. In her mind however, she is not at ease. A vague feeling of discontentment nags at her. When did she last touch any living thing that she was not about to kill? To whom did she last speak?
She cannot remember either occasion.
As she enters the clearing where the tower stands, she is trying to shake off these morbid thoughts. What she sees, drives them from her mind in an instant. The door to the tower is open. Even more shocking, the entry has not been forced.
Silently, she walks inside and listens. Nothing.
She looks around the entrance hall; everything is as she left it. The skeletal reaper remains poised by the door, scythe upraised. Jas scrutinises the floor carefully. There is not so much as a drop of blood anywhere. Uneasily, she mounts the narrow staircase. She watches her reflection in each step as she climbs up to the armoury.
Again, nothing has been touched. She listens carefully, but no sound comes from the floors above her or below. Before leaving the armoury, she takes a sword, one carried by a Sarafan Glyph Knight long ago. Despite her care, the metal lets out a thin, metallic sigh as she unsheathes it, almost as if it wishes to betray her presence. Jas curses under her breath. If her visitor is one of her own kind, and she suspects this to be the case, they must now be aware of her and also know that she is armed.
Climbing cautiously upwards, she enters the library. The bookshelves, which line the walls, are all full now, and the central table is cluttered with manuscripts and open books. A cursory glance is all she needs to see that this room too has been left untouched. She continues up the stairs, there is only one floor above her. Whatever awaits her, awaits her there.
No lamp burns in this room but all three windows are open to the night and she can see well enough. A cloaked figure sits hunched between two of the arched windows. As she approaches, he raises his head and stares at her impassively. Now she can see the face beneath the hood. There is something familiar about this man, though her mind takes a few seconds to make the connection.
The statue in the Sarafan stronghold! Sitting before her is the time streamer, Moebius. He continues to stare at her for some moments. Finally, he speaks,
"You may put the sword down, I think. Surely, you can have nothing to fear from an old man such as myself."
She does not move, except that her fingers instinctively tighten around the hilt.
"The statue in the stronghold would suggest you are more than merely aged, Moebius. You are supposed to be dead!"
" I am flattered that you know my name but that is an unfortunate choice of phrase. 'Supposed to be dead'! Kain killed me before my time, before my work could be completed." He spreads his hands out and allows a thin smile to stretch his lips. "No matter. Whether I am 'supposed to be dead' or dead indeed, here I am."
"and how is that possible? Unless you are a ghost!"
The time streamer's smile widens a little, as if the idea amuses him, but he does not answer her. Jas takes a single step forward, frowning, "and what is it that you want?"
Again, Moebius does not answer; instead, he turns and gazes out of the window. When he turns back to her he merely says,
"I do wish that you would come closer. I can barely see you, lurking in the shadows there." Still she does not move. He beckons, "Come, if I had meant to harm you, I would have done so by now. The defences of your tower were easy enough to break after all."
"You have not answered my question. What do you want from me?"
He sighs, folds his hands in his lap and contemplates them for a moment.
"So distrustful, like all your race. It will be your downfall, believe me."
"I am distrustful with reason, old man."
"Really? What is it, I wonder, that you think you know about me? Something you learned from the dusty tomes you have gathered downstairs perhaps?"
"I trust them about as much as I trust you. They were written by Sarafan historians after all! Consider how they treated the time of my death. It merits but a single sentence, and I quote: 'It was necessary to seek out the traitors.' Do you know how many innocents the Sarafan killed in that particular misguided quest? Nosgoth could barely contain the blood those butchers spilled!"
An impatient look crosses his face.
"I did not come here to bandy words, and you are in no position to moralize about the killing of innocents!"
He looks down for a moment as he recovers his composure, then he leans back and gestures vaguely around the room. "Of course I know the contents of your stolen library, better than you know them yourself, perhaps. I have also been admiring your collection of artefacts, quite impressive." His gaze settles on the orb. "This, for example. Have you managed to unlock any of its secrets?" He lowers his voice to a confidential whisper, " I know that you have. What did you ask it, I wonder? The manner of your death? The time and place? Just think what you could do, armed with such knowledge. You might cheat destiny itself! How inevitable is death really, when one can see the events that lead to it and avoid them?" He leans forward as he speaks and there is something obscenely intimate about his expression, almost as if they in collusion. She is repulsed, and increasingly alarmed by his presence.
"For someone who didn't come here to talk, you are talking a great deal. State your purpose, Moebius. I have heard enough."
"Very well," he says, rising to his feet and edging towards the table, "I can see my wisdom would be wasted upon one such as you. A pity, there is so much you need to know, so much I would have been willing to teach you. However, your decision is made. All that remains for me now is to recover that which you have taken."
As he speaks, the bony fingers of his left hand stretch out across the table towards the orb, nestled in the central depression.
Jas is quicker. In an instant, she has the orb in her grasp. She flips herself backwards through the nearest window before Moebius' fingertips so much as graze the tabletop.
She looks up as she makes her descent, expecting to hear some exclamation of dismay or anger from her unwelcome guest. Instead, she hears the baying of dogs in the distance, and, listening harder, the voices of men and women. Vampire hunters!
Devious bastard! Was his plan to keep her talking until they had her completely encircled? Her ears tell her that the hunters are approaching from the direction of the swamp, and that her best chance of breaking through the circle is to head towards the Sanctuary of the Clans.
She is met by a dog almost as soon as she leaves the clearing. It leaps to attack her and she pierces its side with her sword while it is in mid-air. As it falls, a swordsman comes rushing towards her.
"Come," she calls to him, "I have a cure for what ails thee, too!" The man is alone and his skills are no match for hers. She kills him quickly and continues her dash down the path away from the tower. She runs for several minutes, with no great thought of where she is heading or what she will do when she gets there, straight into an ambush. Six of them and two dogs. The path here is narrow with cliffs on either side. Her only choice is to fight, or go back. Jas chooses to fight.
She is met first by two women bearing pikes. They are obviously used to working together and attack her from both sides. The dogs also rush into the fray, and harry her as she fights. She uses all her skill to dodge around them, avoiding blows from the pikes and slashing at her foes where she can. One of the dogs is the first to fall to her blade, then one of the women. The other pike-bearer tries to back away, edging towards the four swordsmen who, up to this point, have hung back, but she slips on the blood-soaked stones. Jas stabs her through the heart, feeling the sword jar against the path as it goes through her body. As she withdraws the blade, the last dog leaps for her throat. She slices it open in one clean movement and then turns to face the remaining swordsmen. They come at her in pairs. She engages the first two and draws them back to a narrower place, so that they are forced to fight her singly. Compared to Jas they are slow and clumsy, and it is not many minutes before both lie dead before her. Two swordsmen remain, and now they are advancing towards her, sensing their prey is beginning to tire.
Jas has not reached this point in the battle unscathed. She has taken three deep wounds and many minor cuts; much of the blood on the path is hers. She decides it is time for something a little less conventional than swordplay. She backs away a little, gathering her energy as she does so. The two men advance, drawing level with each other as she had hoped they would. As they approach, she hurls a single bolt of freezing energy at the pair of them. They are stopped dead in their tracks, quite literally. However, this is not the end of the battle, the sound of footsteps behind her alerts her to the approach of two more hunters. They must have lain hidden as she made her flight down the path. She spins around to face them, but her strength is ebbing. For the first time, she begins to feel concerned about the outcome of this skirmish. She raises her sword, ready to block, as the first one rushes towards her.
To her surprise, he never reaches her. He stops suddenly, throwing up his arms as if struck from behind and then falls down, dead at her feet. Beyond him lies the second swordsman, decapitated.
As she takes in the scene, several young vampires appear. They are all dressed for combat, wearing both cuirass and greaves and armed with either swords or spears. All of them wear violet cloaks, decorated presumably, with their clan emblem. Three of the youngest also have this symbol drawn in blood on their foreheads, the mark of a successful first hunt. Their eyes shine with excitement. More vampires appear behind them. One of them, clearly the leader, strides towards her.
He is of similar appearance to the others, though less heavily armoured, raven-haired with alabaster skin and lips so dark as to be almost black. He stands well over six feet in height, and is powerfully built. His long hair is worn in a tight knot at the back of his head, a style favoured by most of the males in the party and his eyes are of the deepest gold, though Jas finds herself thinking that they are set just a little too closely together for perfection. At this moment, the golden eyes are examining both her and her handiwork, a slightly bemused smile playing around the corners of his mouth as he regards the scene before him. Although he carries no arms, his whole bearing immediately suggests authority and power.
As he draws closer, Jas finds herself staring at him in wonderment, though it is none of these details that has caught her attention. She is astounded to see that this vampire has neither hands nor feet like the fledglings, nor indeed like herself. Three massive claws take the place of fingers on each hand and he wears no boots, for instead of feet, he has cloven hooves. He stops when he reaches her and she looks down, embarrassed at having been caught staring so openly.
"Do you not know who I am?" He asks softly. "It is custom to kneel before the son of Kain."
Jas immediately drops to one knee, her head bowed. This new development complicates things considerably.
"Forgive me, Sire. Your appearance here was so… unexpected." she finishes lamely.
"Indeed? Rise," he adds.
When she stands up, she finds that he, is now staring at her. His gaze openly admiring the slight figure before him, despite the fact that she is dressed in what must appear a most incongruous costume. She is wearing a man's shirt, which is several sizes too big for her, open at the neck and with the sleeves loosely rolled up to her elbows. A leather waistcoat, of rather ancient appearance, all means of fastening it long gone, and brown leather trousers and boots, the last two items being recent acquisitions and reasonably well-fitting. Her hair has been simply pulled back into a single plait and this falls down her back, nearly to waist-level. Its colour intrigues him, never before, has he seen a vampire with hair of such vibrant hue.
It's as though she has been crowned with flames.
She looks away, feeling awkward at receiving such notice and very unsure of how she should react. She is relieved when he turns his attention to surveying the carnage around them.
"You fought well," he says approvingly, "though I suspect our interruption was not entirely unwelcome."
He smiles as he speaks and she finds herself smiling back at him.
"I confess, I was tiring when your people appeared."
He walks over to one of the frozen swordsmen and taps him lightly on the shoulder.
"Interesting," he muses. He walks all around the two bodies, observing them closely. When he turns back to her, he is frowning slightly "You did this?" She nods her head in reply and his face becomes more serious, no trace of amusement now. "Who are you? What were you doing here, alone in the clan territories? Who gave you leave?" He does not give her time to reply to any of these questions. "I must report this at once," he says, "and," he adds, "I will bring you with me."
He turns to his people and issues orders for them to secure their prisoners and to head straight to the sanctuary. From their replies, she quickly ascertains that her new acquaintance is none other than Kain's third son Dumah. As his troop begins to move out, he turns his attention back to Jas. He looks her over, appraising her wounds. "Feed now. The distance is not great, but you're no shape to travel as you are."
She obeys him in silence. After all, where else is she to go?
When she is finished, she is unpleasantly surprised to find her arms roughly seized and pinned behind her back.
"Bind her," orders Dumah, his claws digging into her flesh. Her sword is taken from its sheath and her silver wrist guards are removed; she can feel leather thongs being looped around her wrists. "Make sure those bonds are secure!" He urges. "She has powers beyond most fledglings. I do not want her getting loose."
"This is unnecessary …" she begins, but he ignores her, positioning two males, one on either side, to guard her. He turns to the first, "If she so much as steps off the path, Darra, you know your reward."
They make their way to the Sanctuary in silence. Jas thinking about all that has happened to her that evening and wondering what fate awaits her when they reach their destination.
Her meeting with Moebius seems even more sinister now, in the light of its consequences, and on reflection, the explanation he had given her for entering her tower in the first place, makes no sense at all.
Her flight towards the Sanctuary of the Clans no longer seems to be a chance event. She is beginning to suspect that she has been driven there. Though to what purpose, she cannot fathom.