Atlantean Devices - Sons of Devils: Atlantean Devices, #1

By Alex R Oliver

When the magic returned, the monsters came with it.

Pursued by his father's assassin-butler, British scholar Frank flees to Romania to study the newly working Atlantean technology on nobleman Radu's land.

His arrival sparks Radu's ancient vampire parents to want more than their traditional tithe of terrified peasants.

As the vampires take their bloodlust to the capital, and then to the Ottoman Empire, it soon becomes apparent they will be satisfied with nothing less than the world.

They are masters of mind-control, able to double the size of their army every night, and their only opposition is a nervous scholar, an ugly enchantress, a shape-shifting Roma girl and their own loving son.

Things are not looking good for the human race.

• "an enthralling mystery and would be enjoyed by anyone who enjoys a dark narrative with moments of humor." - Foreword Reviews
• "The castle itself is absolutely hair-raisingly scary. These are not your sparkly or nice vampires. These are your old-fashioned predators who see humans as food." - Scattered Thoughts and Rogue Words
• "The world in which this story – these stories – take place is different in ways that … well, I was going to use the word "fascinated" again. Put it this way instead: It's a great time, and I can't wait for more." - Stewartry

• Language: English
• Publisher: Beecroft Books
• Release date: Sep 20, 2019
• ISBN: 9781386713760

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

In which the Student life proves Perilous.

STEBBINS WAS THE FIRST to die.

Frank had grown to loathe the boat, his posterior aching from endless hours perched on his own traveling bag as the mountains grew closer and chill winds blew down the valley of the Olt. Stebbins was crowded so close on one side he could not move his elbows. Protheroe, on the other, continually joggled him as he tested the ever increasing vril saturation with an etherometer of brass and crism.

Recently, Protheroe had begun to squeak in surprise and delight every time this happened. We must be getting close now, lads. We're already at a concentration twice as high as Glastonbury Tor. I don't see how it can go up much higher without buckling the nature of reality wholesale.

Protheroe's obvious excitement went a long way towards soothing Frank's guilt. Neither of his friends would be out here in the Wallachian wilderness but for loyalty to him. They had turned the escape of a criminal into a respectable theurgic expedition. Though they had done their best not to grumble about discomfort, he still felt terrible if they so much as frowned, and unfortunately, there had been a great deal to frown about. Not only cold nights on cold stones, strange food and stranger customs, but also a terrible run of bizarre accidents that had approached life-threatening at one point. Misfortune had dogged their heels like a hunter.

This morning however, had started well. Stebbins – the naturalist – was smiling as he sketched the approaching mountains, and Protheroe was all but bouncing on his seat. We should see it today. You have to be a member of the Royal Society to be permitted to study the vril accumulator in England. I didn't think I'd ever get the chance to see one active. I can't wait.

Frank grinned back at him, unwilling to dampen his enthusiasm, but the prospect of reaching their goal was not as appealing to him as it was to his friends. They would go home afterward. He, who faced only a noose in England, would be left alone, revealed as the fugitive from justice that he was. He didn't relish the prospect.

So Frank was leaning his chin into his hand, reclining awkwardly sideways out of the way of Protheroe's contraption and trying to sleep when it happened. They rounded a bend in the river between two sugar-loaf shaped hills, there came a crack and a flash, sharp as lightning, and Stebbins shouted something unmannerly and flung himself into Frank's lap.

What on Earth? Frank shoved him in the shoulder. His hand slid in something warm and red. The scent of black powder reached his brain, blessedly chemical in contrast with the slippery organic reek he could smell from Stebbins. As he was bending over to try to catch his friend's shoulders, Stebbins convulsed on Frank's knees twice. His mouth filled with blood and overflowed.

Stebbins? Frank cried. Stebbin's chest was unmoving against his own, his torn waistcoat turning crimson, beginning to drip. William!

Nicu's hand came down between Frank's shoulder blades and pushed him off the seat. Lie down. Lie in the boat. Do not get up.

Frank laid Stebbins in a position of as much dignity as he could manage, as a second shot splintered the gunwale next to him, peppering him with splinters. In the bows, Apostol, one of their bearers, unslung his own rifle and took aim back. At the stern, silent Mihai bent double to the boat's pole, trying to speed past the attacker.

Bandits, young sir. Nicu gave a fierce and chilling grin. The mountains are full of them. Stay down.

Frank caught Protheroe's matching expression of terrified determination. Oh God, let me not bring ruin on these, the best of all friends. We can help!

You have rifles? You can shoot?

Protheroe dropped his notepad and pulled the long bag out from beneath the heaps of luggage. An English gentleman is always proficient in firearms.

Nicu flinched out of the way of another bullet. Good. Then you will lie flat and return fire, and I will take up the second pole, so that we may be through the ambush faster. Do not let them shoot me.

Protheroe passed the first rifle to Frank, followed it up with a box of shot, a rammer and a powder horn. As Frank wriggled to get the gun loaded, Nicu joined Mihai at the stern. The boat speeded a little, though a trotting horse could still have outpaced it.

With the rifle primed, Frank propped himself on his elbows, stock pressed to his shoulder. He swarmed cautiously up until he could raise his head above the gunwale. Nothing to see but pinkish-brown rocks against a clear blue sky.

One of the ledges of the foothills sprouted a dark blur as a hidden bandit stood up to shoot. Frank's world twisted and chilled as he got a good look at the man's face. Surely that wasn't ... Lewis?  No. No, my father would not...?

A flash of fire, a puff of white smoke and then the bang of a report, and Frank had aimed and squeezed the trigger in return before he took a second thought.

The distant figure recoiled and dropped. A cry came down the wind, harsh and sharp as the cry of some strange bird. Apostol, ahead of Frank, gave an approving laugh. The scholars are not such children as we thought.

Something froze solid in the pit of Frank's stomach, leaving him feeling as though his viscera had turned to stone. He didn't have time to consider the feeling. On the contrary, as the rock-sides abruptly swarmed with motion, his mind felt clearer than it had ever done before. He could not return fire against a whole pack of bandits. What could he do instead? What did they need?  To spoil their aim. We need cover. Darkness.

Letting go of the rifle, he spread his hands and pulled at the shadows, as he had pulled at the sunlight in Gervaise's room. The wild, instinctive ability that lived at the back of his head had come out once and saved his life. Perhaps it would do so again.

Obedient to his summons, darkness flowed across the water and wrapped the boat in a thick smoke. Within it, the light turned to tar and the bright sky became dim as if seen through dark spectacles. But it did nothing to stop the thunder of a dozen carbines firing so close together one could not distinguish the shots. All he had achieved was to spoil any aiming at individuals – he could not prevent the bandits from simply blanketing the area with shot.

If that was Lewis, it meant they'd come for Frank alone. It meant they should be aiming at him only, that if they slew him, they might perhaps allow Protheroe and the boatmen to live. By concealing them all he had put his friends at greater risk. Damn it.

Changing his mind about the need for cover, he struggled with his talent. He didn't know, on an intellectual level, how he'd summoned the darkness, didn't know how to get rid of it. A small, cowardly part of him didn't want to stand up and die in the hopes that that would make things better for others. Indeed, if he'd wanted that he could have just stayed in England to be hanged.

Pushing the cowardice aside, he pictured himself letting go, letting the shadows bounce back into place as though on springs. It didn't work. He tried again, mentally pushing them away. This time they went, slowly, reluctantly, leaving him visible and exposed. Leaving Protheroe and the bearers equally so. What the hell was he doing? What was he doing? What could he do to make this right? Please don't punish Protheroe for my sins. Please spare him from my curse. Please!

Around the boat, the river spiked up in spatters, and the timbers shivered and smashed. A swarm of sharp bladed splinters slammed into Frank's cheek, but he scarcely felt it, because one of the bullets had struck Protheroe's gun, dinting the barrel just as Protheroe was returning fire.

Blocked, Protheroe's rifle exploded, taking off half of his face and utterly destroying both of his hands. At the same time Mihai gave a soft 'huh' that was almost laughter. With blood trickling from his back, he fell slowly outward from the stern of the boat, still clinging to his pole. The river current caught him and washed both away. Numbed by his friends' death, Frank could not grasp the magnitude of this disaster for a moment. But the loss of one pole meant that now it would take twice as long to get away.

Only three of them left:  Frank and Apostol on their bellies in a boat filling up with blood, Nicu boldly upright in the stern, laboring with all his might at his own pole. Both Apostol and Nicu had begun to sing beneath their breath, the heathenish, eerie music of the orthodox liturgy, asking God for strength and protection and, if He didn't feel inclined to answer that one, for forgiveness in the instant of death.

Frank had long been told that it was his fault his mother had died in childbirth. His fault his father had grown cold and bitter. His fault that his elder brother had died at sea. He was indisputably responsible for Gervaise's death. When Nicu fell, shot through the temple, just as they passed under the deepest shade of the hemming boulders, the responsibility of that fell on him too. His fault, all of this.

Leaping up, he grabbed Nicu's pole. Apostol came running from the bows, his almost skeletal face flapped about by long hair the color of crow wings. We must stop trying to get through! We must go back.

Yes, Frank agreed. Yes, absolutely. He twisted the pole to push them into a curve that would eventually end with them heading downstream.

You go to the... Apostol indicated the sheltered spot where he had lain amongst the baggage, and he was shot twice as he gestured. A third shot grazed along Frank's bicep like the press of a hot poker, but did not do him the courtesy of killing him too.

No! Frank protested as the last of his companions dropped and left him alone. He might have stood there longer, stupidly gaping, if the boat had not obeyed his last push and driven its nose into the rocks at the river's edge. The grating shudder woke him up, forced him to take stock.

Seeing their victory all but complete, the bandits had begun to come down out of the cracks and crannies of the rocks to line the shore. They were so close on his right he could read the intent in their grins, and everything in him revolted from the thought of letting such grimy, greasy looking creatures get the better of him.

Frank jammed the pole into the river-bed and pushed with all the strength in him. The boat was a brutal heavy thing, but it turned. If he could just get it facing into the current, let it be swept away downstream, he could outrace them, get away, get back to somewhere more civilized, where he would be safe.

Then his right arm stopped working. His grip weakened and his hand fell limp to his side. He looked down and found he had been shot in the juncture of chest and shoulder. The blood that welled out was making his shirt feel chill and damp. There was, for the moment, no pain at all.

He wrapped his left arm around the pole, pushed again and felt the blood come rushing up and grating past the embedded bullet to pulse out, burning now, from his wound. His mouth was full of saliva, and he couldn't swallow.

Then the current caught the boat, lifted it and ground it again into the shore, smacking the bow hard on the rocks, making him lurch forward and stumble into the ankle deep gore beneath the many corpses of his companions.

Jeering laughter broke out along the banks. Frank hauled his aching, ton-weighted head up to see hands clutching at the gunwales, pulling him in closer to the ugly, grinning crowd. Women stood behind the men, and the thought gave him a moment's relief until he saw that their hands grasped sickles. There were blood stains all down their aprons and a matching red glint in their eyes.

Panicking, Frank dropped the pole and scrabbled for his rifle. Unloaded, and no time to prime it, the bayonet still tucked away in its bag. Reversing it, he smashed it down on the grappling hands as if it was an ax.

The shoulder wound made him cold, shaky and nauseous. He was grateful for it because it was that much harder to feel terror. He swiped at a dirty face as, with a roar, the man leaped from the bank into the punt, swatted him with the tines of a rake, tearing the coat over his ribs and leaving long, shallow scores, as though from the nails of a giant.

Frank doubled over the pain of it just as two more men jumped aboard. Outside, other bandits seized the boat's sides and pulled the whole thing out of the water, grounding it. A hand curled around Frank's shoulder wound and squeezed. His own scream choked him as he was lifted out by many hands and thrown into a ring of thin, hungry looking outlaws.

He had just time to close his eyes, to think that finally, finally he was doing something that would please his father, and then all thought fled in favor of instinct, of curling in to keep his stomach and his face from the boots. Here too, the wound was a mercy. He flapped in agony like a dying fish, but didn't have the strength to fight back. They beat him with with reaping flails. The first man kicked him in the ribs - a burst of heat in his ribcage, as though he'd swallowed coals - and he looked up, mouth open, eyes streaming, in time to see his own rifle butt poised above his forehead.

A grim expression above it. He tried to say No! but could only spit blood, and then someone laughed and the steel capped rosewood came down. He thought very clearly So this is it then and had time to regret that his last thoughts had not been more profound, before a giant hand tore the world in two, and him with it, and nothing else remained.

PAIN. FOR A LONG TIME, pain was everything. Then gradually other sensations joined it - cold all down one side, a moving cold that stroked him steadily, in contrast with the dry and burning cold of his other side. He became slowly aware that he was shaped like a man, that both sides had arms and legs, some of the bones of which were probably not broken.

There was a pinkness in front of him, and once he had identified eyelids, he opened them to find the sun shining on his face. Other things came quicker now:  the cold slide was water flowing over his right arm and leg, which hung off the riverbank and waved like water-weed in the shingle-bottomed pools at the stream's edge.

Words flooded into his head, welcome and reviving, proving to him that he was man, not animal. That pain in his chest? Broken ribs, perhaps. That taste in his mouth, and the thick fluid that clogged it? Blood.

He spat it out and with infinite pains drew both his arms and legs under him. Tried twice to push up to hands and knees and failed both times. The first time, he slumped down after and agony exploded under his ribs like a... like a... blocked gun bursting in someone's hands. He lay whining and weeping while his slowly healing mind picked at the thought that he ought to know who that someone was.

The third time he went slower, every part of him shaking. He got his knees under him, was able to lever his torso upright, though all it did was make his head split again and the brains run out of his ears. His stomach rebelled, but fortunately he only had to turn his head a little to vomit cleanly in the stream and wipe his face after with a wet hand.

Now that he was upright, blood dripped into his eyes. He couldn't raise his left hand at all, but he felt the wound above his eye with his right hand, and his clumsy touch grayed out the world around him for what seemed hours. There was something he should remember about head injuries...

Something he should remember about himself. What was it?

When he looked down, he found he had been stripped naked. The ground around him was scuffed with the marks of many feet, but nothing else. He had expected...

What had he expected? Bearers, perhaps. Equipment. People who would help him. A way home.

Around him were foothills and mountains beyond. Pine forest on the other side of the bank, on his side scrubland. An eagle in the sky above. The sounds of water and stone, and the shapes of strange clouds that flowed from the mountains along the river.

He recognized none of it. He was utterly lost in a country he could not remember. And he didn't even know his own name.

Turning downriver, he limped along the bank through tussocks of coarse grasses and purple mallow. Dimly, he felt that help must be available downstream rather than up. He disliked the shapes of the hills, yet the thought of going back where he had come from awoke a kind of sick hopelessness too, and he didn't know why.

But as the day went on, the question of hope became unimportant beside the more pressing urgency of having the strength to put one foot before the other. Agony coiled about his chest, making his knees shake. Though he stopped, early on, to drink from the river, later he found it so hard to get up again he dared not try it again, just stumbled forward with his tongue drying in his mouth and hunger adding to the gnawing he carried under his ribs.

He had begun to have periods where darkness bloomed behind his eyes even while he was walking, When they cleared he found he had staggered four or five steps blind and insensible. It could only be a matter of hours before he fell and could not get up again, and by that time the night would have fallen, and the wolves come out from beneath the wood, and he would not live to see the morning.

A hedgerow covered in small white flowers stopped him. He leaned on it with his eyes closed, sucking in air and luxuriating in not having to hold himself upright. It was only when he had picked up a stick that lay under it, something to prop his ailing limbs with, that his mind caught up with what he was seeing:

The branches had been cut, bent and interlaced to form a sturdier barrier. This was the work of human hands, meant to keep the flocks inside and the predators out. He had finally come to somewhere inhabited.

Trying not to let his heart race or his breath pick up - it hurt too much - he scanned his world from horizon to horizon. And yes! There, streaky against the paling sky, a trail of gray-white smoke rose from a distant coppice. Ah! he said, and was startled by the sound of his own voice - he had forgotten what it sounded like.

The goal gave him strength to find a dead patch in the hedge and scramble through, to go haltingly but unfailingly in the direction of the fire. He wanted to shout for help, but couldn't bring himself to breathe in enough.

The trees parted and he came out of their shade into a hay meadow glorious with flowers. In its center five wagons were drawn up in a circle about a small fire. In the distance, a group of men were working around what looked like a small portable forge - turning a sheet of metal into a bulbous, cauldron-like shape.

The wagons had been topped with arching structures of willow withies, covered in tarpaulins. As he watched, a couple of naked toddlers tumbled out of one, and out of another came a woman with her flower-embroidered blouse tugged down so she could nurse her child.

It was one of the toddlers who spotted him, bounding to his feet and pointing. A grandmother, by the fire, hushed the boy without looking in Frank's direction. But now the other toddler had seen him and was shouting, being backed up by an increasing chorus of the younger children.

Frank understood that the adults didn't want to help him. He carried on walking anyway, because he had no other choice. When he had staggered past some invisible boundary that marked the edge of their concerns, all the faces in the camp turned towards him together and he was struck with the thought that he had suddenly become real.

Help me, he choked around the hot sand in his throat. Please.

The nursing mother put her child into the older woman's hands. Both of them wore wary expressions, closed up around private thoughts, but she still came and put a small, calloused hand under Frank's elbow, held him up with almost a man's strength, and helped him stagger the final hundred yards to the fire and fold himself down beside it, gasping, shivering and weeping with relief.

For a long, quiet moment, he did nothing but sob. Someone passed him a glass of mint and sorrel tea, and he sipped and sniffled until the fit passed. When it did, the young woman took away his glass and tapped him on the head, making him look up smartly into the older woman's gaze.

Who did this?

He shook his head, swayed as the movement seemed to dislodge his brains and make the world swirl around him. I don't... Up in the hills, I think.

Who are you?

The bald question shocked a word out of his mouth before he had time to think. Frank, he said, and for a moment all the pains went away in the realization that he had recovered his own name. Should there be a second name with it? A family name? That, he couldn't recall no matter how he tried. I... they hit me in the head. It's all... I can't remember.

Hm, she turned to one of the older girls, who was squatting on her heels under one of the wagons, and spouted something rapid-fire in a language he didn't recognize. The girl gathered two friends and took off into the largest wagon, returning with a sheet, tweezers, a cake of hard soap, and a pot decorated with painted flowers. Her little helpers carried more cloth, gray with use and age.

He looks Saxon, the younger woman had her hand in his hair, pulling the lengthy curls of it out as if to demonstrate her position. He saw with some surprise that he had blond hair, the color of freshly sawn oak. His bared body was milk pale, very different from his companions' brown skin, black hair, dark thoughtful eyes. A villager? Or a visitor?

A foreigner, said the old woman, drawing water from a barrel into a cauldron and setting it over the fire. You heard his accent. She pared a little of the soap on top and gave the remainder back to the child to be placed carefully away. He gathered it was a treasured thing and felt a great shame that it was being wasted on him.

Speak some more, stranger, so that we can hear what you are.

I... He could think of nothing to say. Even less so when the younger woman laid hands on his bare skin, turning him to examine his injuries, tutting at what she saw. Is it bad? It feels bad.

Where?

Here, he hovered his hand over the worst pain. They shot me here. I can feel the bullet, lodged inside... I think a few ribs are broken. Apart from that it's mostly bruises and my head, up here where... a flash of rifle butt descending, and he cringed, he hit me with a gun. There were lots of them. And they were laughing.

Hm, the old woman gave the hint of a smile. That kind of game, we know well. So. It's not so bad. You'll live. She pried apart the edges of his shoulder wound with dirty fingers, took hold of the shot with the tweezers in her other hand, and tugged. Frank bit through his lip at the pain, but managed not to cry out.

Then she dipped a cloth in the soapy water. This will sting, but it will help the cuts not to fester, so you must bear it. He felt fragile, as though too hard a breeze might shake him apart, but her matter-of-factness was comforting, telling him that others had survived such things, that all was not yet lost. So he endured the cleaning and the bandaging without protest or flinching, feeling better for it.

By this time the youths of the group had begun to return from every direction:  girls from the river-bank, laden with herbs and the roots of reeds, boys from the fields with slingshots through their wide belts and rabbits dangling from their hands. There was a great deal of talk in that language he couldn't follow, and even more staring. If he tried to catch any one person's eyes in return he found their gaze slid away; not obviously enough to give offense, but regularly, implacably, letting him know they were not interested in making friends.

What are your names? he asked, belatedly, as the young mother helped him into the clothes they'd brought for him - big, baggy, once-white shirt and flimsy once-white trousers. I should know who to thank. He put together the scrupulous care with the soap and the fact that their young people had been out scavenging in hedgerows for their food, and felt again a gnawing of guilt. They had so little and he was making them give it to him. I should know who to repay.

We are nobody. The old woman smiled again, wise and harsh. We belong to Vacarescu. We are his slaves, and slaves have no need of names, or payment. It is enough that we are permitted to live, and to serve.

Did she say this because she thought him some kind of spy? She thought that even after receiving all this help, after they had saved his life, he would give them up to some sort of punishment? I can carry no tales except of kindness, he insisted. Who would I betray you to? I have nowhere to go. I have no one to turn to. No family, no nation, barely even a name.

I am Constanta. The younger woman handed him a rabbit and a knife with which to skin and gut it. And this, our mother, is Lyuba who is married to—

Lyuba cut her off in a flood of angry speech that made him lean in and pay attention to the rhythm. Something practiced in him stirred with interest, trying to pick out individual words, listen for repetition and patterns. She saw him doing it and snapped her mouth shut, hard, giving him the first overtly hostile look he had had from these people. But he understood it better now - he was a master stumbled defenseless among slaves. Whatever he individually had done or not done, they must look at him and see the enemy.

You will not be alone for long, Lyuba said sternly. You are not a person whose death is shrugged over like a dropped pot. They will come looking for you. When they do, you will tell Vacarescu that we are good servants and loyal. That is all we wish or need of payment. You will not give him cause to punish us, and you will not give him our names.

I swear it, he said, holding his hand as though it rested on a book. I have so much to thank you for, I will say nothing to harm you. I swear it.

After this, he chopped meat for a while, in an ever increasing daze. He was just awake enough to eat a bowl of the resulting stew and drink another cup of brackish tea before someone snorted at the sight of him and he was picked up, walked carefully across the camp and put to bed in one of the wagons.

The mattress was stuffed with straw, laid out over a bench of small cupboards, painted like the pot with vivacious flowers. He looked up at overlapping canvas that billowed slightly with passing breezes, and a moment later - or so it seemed - he opened his eyes to find everything around him had grown dim. The light of the camp fire threw silhouettes of angry men against the bowed top of the wagon and there were voices shouting. Lubya's and Constanta's, and two or three men's voices.

You are a disgrace to my name and to all our ancestors! Yes, be gone with you, and Frank? I am not expecting you to return. Do you understand? You are no longer welcome in this house.

He breathed in, sharp. Seized up as the incautious movement struck through his ribcage like a saber. His eyes prickled, and he pressed the heels of his palms to them to hold the tears in, devastated and still not sure why. Who had said that, and why? What terrible thing had he done to deserve all this?

It didn't matter. The voices were still wrangling outside. Now was not the time to worry about himself. He pushed himself to his feet and staggered the short distance to the door. Everything in him flinched from more anger, more fighting, more pain, but he pushed the fabric aside nevertheless and limped down the steps with as much pride as he could gather.

The argument cut off with his appearance and all the faces turned to him.

He took a cautious breath, and resolved not to be selfish. If you're arguing about me, be assured that I do not wish to cause you any difficulties. Tell me what I must do.

We cannot keep you here, said an old man's voice. The patriarch who stepped into the firelight had long white hair and a sweeping mustache, his face lined with hard wear, but there was nothing infirm about him. Not in the night. You are bleeding still. They will smell it and come for you. You will bring them to us and we will be lost.

Wolves, Frank thought. Or bears perhaps. He looked around at the children asleep by the fire, and bit down on his internal scream of 'but what about me?' They were clearly not the first people in his life to want him gone.

Of course. I'll... Which way? Maybe I can make it to the nearest town.

Even Constanta smiled at this. He hoped with approval, but he thought truly it was relief, and his belly filled with a despair that seemed familiar.

The elder came to him and turned him by the shoulders, pointing him toward a gap in the hedge at the other side of the field. Go there. You will find a path which slopes upwards through the orchards and out onto the foothills where the goats graze. When you come to the shrine at the crossroads, take the path which leads upwards. At the top of the hill you will see below you the bridge and the lights of Bircii village. They have stone walls to defend them. It may be that you can make it in time. With the help of God, it may be.

It had the weight of an epitaph. Frank swallowed. As he braced himself, he found a cane pressed into his hand. One of the women wound her headscarf around his waist as a sash, and a hank of rye bread was tucked into it, along with a cross of ash-wood that the whittler had been working on.

Thanking them all, Constanta a little more warmly than the rest, he leaned heavily on the cane and shuffled back out into the dark.

It was marginally easier to walk now, with his ribs bound up and his shoulder padded. The cane he'd been given was lighter than it looked. There was a hole down the center of it that made him think it was the outer part of a sword-stick, orphaned from its blade. It was certainly an improvement on the heavy branch that had supported him as he limped into camp.

For a while, he made good progress, following a level, grassy path through lanes of flowering trees, their white and pink blossoms gathering a silvery sheen in the blue twilight. The landscape teased Frank with familiarity as he walked. He kept thinking he remembered these fields, until he raised his head and saw the looming indigo bulks of the mountains beyond. Then he knew that although he had no idea where home was, this wasn't it.

The breeze picked up as he emerged from the shelter of the trees. The colors had begun to drain from the world - he saw all now in shades of white and blue - and behind him there came a yellowish bony light from a swollen moon at the level of his shoulders.

The air that had been balmy with spring sunshine now nipped at his fingers, as if it had wound down from the high mountain ice. No sign yet of a crossroads or a shrine, and his knees had begun to feel loose, the sinews of his legs badly attached to the bones, threatening to slide apart with every step.

But even as he thought this, he caught sight of something white up ahead, and yes it was a small house-like shape topped with a white cross. In an alcove in its center, bunches of wilted flowers lay on a platform in front of a carved figure of which the halo was the only part he could properly parse.

By the time he reached the top of the first hill, the sky was black. Not even his slowly adapted eyes could pretend night had not fallen. His chest was red-raw and bruised with every breath, and but for the stick he would have fallen a dozen times.

When the land evened out he had to stop, fear of wolves or not, and lower himself to his knees to breathe and pray and sob a little at the hardness of life. It was when he had finished his entreaties and fallen silent that he heard a voice ahead of him, a woman singing in a sweet whisper, as sad as his own thoughts.

His mind clutched at the sound as if rescued. It gave him strength to stagger to his feet and lurch on down the path towards it. He could see something now that wasn't a tree, something standing upright in the center of a hollow on the other side of the peak, brushed with starry pallor.

His footsteps faltered just as the song faded into silence. The tall thing's head turned towards him - or at least, a shrouded shape atop what might have been shoulders swung around at the sound of his approach. It bore some resemblance to the saint he had just passed - a long sweep of pale drapery and a blurred nothing for a face. It was crowned in flowers, and only the fact that it did not move towards him kept Frank from bolting away, spooked by the eeriness of it.

Help me, it said. If you are man and not devil, help me please.

It sounded like a woman, young and frightened. Frank swallowed his night fears and limped closer. The white pillar of her resolved into something that both made sense and only disquieted him more. This was no animated statue, but a woman in a white shift with a bride's long veil over her head. It covered her face, fell to her knees and made her look like an upright corpse in a winding sheet. A circlet of flowers added a grotesquely festive touch to the fact that her hands were bound behind her, secured fast to a sturdy post embedded deep in the ground.

What on earth...? Frank exclaimed in a language he didn't recognize. He folded back the veil from the woman's face, revealing a glitter of tear tracks, a tumble of loosed pale hair, and a gleam of impatiently bared teeth. Who are you?

My name is Mirela. Please, the rope. Free me. They're coming. They'll take you too if you're out here. I can help you fight. Quickly!

The bonds were a bewildering mixture of cords. He managed to pull free the knot of heavy rope, though his bruised fingers shook and cramped by the end of it. Beneath it, a second layer of white cords were so tight around her wrists he could see, even in the darkness, that her hands were swollen and dark. They felt cold to the touch. The loops of her bonds were cutting off the flow of blood.

These cords were made of something soft, slippery and fine, and the knot had pulled so close he couldn't get a fingernail into it. He fumbled, tugged and cursed while the woman hissed with pain, but the bonds held and at last he had to reel away, clutching his beaten fingers to his chest and curling protectively over them. I can't!

Do you have no knife?

No. He scanned the hilltop wildly for tumbled rocks. There was a kind of rock that could be split to make a sharp edge. He remembered this. But the hillside was smooth under goat-cropped grass, and he could see no convenient stone. Why have they done this? Frank asked. What have you done, to be left out for wolves?

Wolves? she laughed at him, sharp and high. It is not wolves I fear. It is Vacarescu to whom I am sacrificed, and if you do not move fast he will have you too.

The bride's crown and veil made some sense to Frank now. Oh, he thought, repelled. It was some feudal droit de seigneur he interrupted? The lord of the region exercising his right to bed a new bride before she went to her husband? Repellent, certainly, but surely something these girls were raised to expect - and therefore something that should not provoke such pleas and struggling. "I'm