Chapter 342 - Not Even Dust

Bad Wildbach was a scintillation of lights at our backs, flickering amid the winter bare branches of the forest. Once, not too long ago, those lights were a bronzy gleam, the glow of candles and oil lamps and the ruddy radiance of a hundred cozy fireplaces. The lights of the city were cold and hard and blue now, the stark glare of contemporary utilities, but that is the cost of progress. Convenience before beauty. I wondered what advances the next millennium would usher in, then realized I would not be around to see them. It was a small shock, followed by a mishmash of complex emotions: regret and excitement, fear and longing.

I stood now at the foot of the mountain we called Old Stone Man. Once it had reared its head over all the other mountains in this range, a queerly shaped peak whose protuberances of stone gave it the rough likeness of a human face, but time had whittled its features to a bland blank visage. The shelves of stone that were once its furrowed brow had been soothed by the elements. The outcrop of rock that was its great hooked nose had fallen away to rubble, clawed from the face of the mountain by the scrabbling fingers of rain and ice and snow. It still looked down upon its ancient fellows, but it no longer regarded them so haughtily. Time had stripped it of its dignity, as it strips all men of their dignity. It hunched along with all the rest now, back bent by the weight of the ages, with a scarf of wind-stunted pines trailing down its spine.

It was here, in a small cavern near the summit of this mountain, that I retreated from my mortal life after I was transformed into this thing that I am. I was unable to control my lust for blood in those days, a danger to every living creature around me, and so I became a hermit and watched over my loved ones from a safe distance.

It was hard to believe that my headstrong Nyala had climbed this mountain once. She was an ancient crone then, her time in this world all but run out, but some Foul Ones had kidnapped our granddaughters and she came here to find me and set me on the fiends. The mountain was not so stooped with age then, and she nearly fell to her death before I knew that she was searching for me. I destroyed the raiders who abducted our children, returned our daughters to the bosom of our tribe, but Nyal died from the injuries she'd sustained during our adventure. She was so very old then, flesh as thin and fragile as onionskin, hair like spider silk. She was the last of my mortal lovers to perish. I took her body from our village, as I had retrieved both Brulde and Eyya before her, and brought her remains here, to this mountain again, to rest for all time among the dust of our beloved spouses.

Brulde, Eyya, Nyala… they were all here, in a small cavern at the peak of this mountain, my home for all those endless ages.

It was from here that I watched over the People. It was from here that I protected them-- from man, beast and nature-- until I was confronted by a foe I was powerless to resist.

The coming of the last great ice age.

I still remember those long ago nights, watching helplessly as the glaciers crept over the great northern alps, enveloping the mountains first and then slowly, inexorably, the valley that had been the home of my tribe since time immemorial. My people forsook the valley, moving south to more hospitable climes. But I did not leave. I remained, unwilling to relinquish the bones of my loved ones, unwilling to abandon the land of my birth. I still remember the smell of those glaciers, a sharp and desolate smell, like snow and chalk, and the way the ice floes creaked and thundered in the night, the low constant grinding of their slow but relentless advancement. That grinding, the sound of millions of pounds of ice slowly erasing the land of my people, I thought it would drive me insane at times.

As if I were not already mad by then!

I finally surrendered to the monstrosity, went down and threw myself into its all-devouring maw. I went down to the glacier to end myself, thinking that vast white god, that hungry behemoth, would surely end me when all else I'd tried had failed, but the great white beast had merely chewed on me for a few millennia before spitting me out in the southern steppes, the land of the mammoth hunters, a mindless and ravening thing.

Still alive… Still alive!

"Brulde, Eyya, Nyala, I have come home," I called out, my voice echoing in the wintry silence. Errant flakes of snow drifted onto my upturned face, where they did not melt.

"This is where they are, huh?" Lukas said, jogging me from my reverie. Standing at my side, he peered up at the mountain. His face betrayed little real interest. Only boredom, impatience.

"In a small cave near the top," I said with a nod.

"You think their bones are still there?" Lukas asked. "I read a magazine article once. They found a cavewoman and her baby in a cave somewhere out in the Middle East. The place they died was very alkaline, it said, and it preserved them like mummies."

I shook my head. "There are no remains. No bones. Not even dust. There is nothing of my loved ones here but my own ancient recollections."

"So why come here?" Lukas asked. "If there's nothing left of them. Why couldn't we do this in Liege? It would have saved us a lot of aggravation."

"I wish to die here, among my memories," I said. "If their spirits await me, they will be here, in this place. This is a sacred place."

"Sacred?"

"Of course. Can't you feel it?"

Lukas went still beside me. I felt him reach out with his own formidable senses, scanning our environs.

"Nope," he said after a moment.

I could. The forest was all but silent, just the hooting of the wind and an occasional brittle snap as winter ice pruned back another season's worth of deadwood, but there was a subtle energy in the air, barely perceptible. You have probably experienced it yourself. It was a feeling of hushed expectancy, the feeling of being watched, by someone (or something) unseen to yourself.

For some reason I thought of Zenzele.

She would be furious if she knew what I was planning to do, horrified by the lengths I had gone to carry out my schemes. She would probably blame herself when she discovered what I had done, thinking her abandonment had contributed to my fatal compulsion. But I had long wished to end my interminable existence. Her company had only made living more tolerable. My cravings for oblivion were always there, just like my cravings for blood. Even when I was sated-- for blood or human companionship-- it was always there.

I wanted it to end, and as terrible as it sounded, that want had nothing to do with her.

Where was she now, I wondered. Tramping through some equatorial jungle? Crossing the dunes of some Saharan wasteland? Or was she prowling the rooftops of a glittering modern metropolis, hunting some remorseless evildoer as we had done so often together in the past? Wherever she was, I sent my love and my apologies. I had loved many women, and even a handful of men, in the past thirty millennia, but no immortal lover was the equal of Zenzele-- my beautiful, untamable Zenzele! It was only for her sake that I felt any remorse at all.

That sense of being watched grew stronger and stronger until I felt compelled to turn and look to the lights of Bad Wildbach. The village was almost entirely obscured by the intervening alps, though its lights shone on the lowering clouds, a silvery glow. Was some immortal watching us from there, wondering perhaps what a pair of foreign vampires were doing in its territory? I had sensed no other vampires when we arrived in the village, but some of us had a knack for avoiding detection, even of the most powerful of our kind.

Paranoia, I said to myself.

I felt shame at what I was preparing to do and so I imagined the scrutiny of some unseen observer.

That sense of being watched had grown almost palpable. I had the impression, very faintly, of an Eye, a great invisible Eye careering in the darkened sky, seeking me out.

Perhaps Zenzele was casting about for me. Perhaps my suicidal intentions had triggered in her mind some grim foreboding, and she had sent out her Eye to check on my wellbeing. If that were so, if it was truly her, then she was very far away, and her Eye, as powerful as it was, was attenuated to all but the faintest glimmering by the intervening distance.

Too far away to stop me now, I thought, smugly satisfied.

"What is it?" Lukas asked suspiciously. "You sense something. Is someone coming?"

"It is nothing," I said.

I must not have sounded very convincing, for he wheeled around in a circle, lips peeled back from his teeth, eyes narrowed. I could see his nostrils flaring.

"It is nothing," I said again. This time I said it with more assurance. "I think perhaps some other immortal took notice of us for a moment, but they are very far away, whoever they were. Don't worry. I do not sense them anymore. They have dismissed us."

"Move along. Nothing to see here," Lukas smirked. He turned his back on the city lights.

Perhaps it was true, or I convinced myself it was true, because the sensation of being watched had faded. But I could not help but worry as I picked up my axe and started forward. "Come," I said. "Let us finish this climb. I wish to kneel in the dust of the ones I loved most before we put a bow on this little melodrama."

"That's pretty morbid, Drac," Lukas said. "Maybe you want to get naked and roll around in them a little. You know. One last toss before you ride off into the sunset?" He grinned, tongue thrust out just a little, curled at the tip. Waiting for me to rise to the bait.

"Charming as ever," I sighed.

Lukas snorted.

I started up the mountain with no further comment. Lukas followed.

Despite my efforts to dismiss it, that worry stayed there in the back of my mind as I ascended the mountain: the niggling concern that someone might interfere with my plans. Apollonius, maybe. Or maybe it was Justus that I had sensed. After what Lukas had done to his mortal lover Agnes, Justus had every reason to pursue us. Perhaps he wanted revenge. He knew where I was going, the crime that I intended to commit. Justus had visions. He saw the future in his dreams. He had seen my death, he told me. He might be waiting for Lukas down in the village this very moment, plotting to destroy my new fledgling as soon as I was gone. As a member of the Court of the Night's Watch, Justus had killed countless degenerate vampires. He would have no trouble dispatching Lukas. It was probably for the best.

Probably?

That made me scowl.

It is for the best, I thought.

It had always been my intention that Lukas be destroyed after I perished. The sooner the better, too. A fiend like him was far too dangerous to be allowed to live. I figured some other powerful elder would do away with him after I was dead. Clean up my mess for me, as the Americans say. It might as well be Justus, one of my own immortal progeny. It was fitting. And Justus certainly deserved his revenge.

There was a slim chance that Lukas might best him in combat, but I thought that rather unlikely. For one thing, Justus would see Lukas's actions before he even thought to make them. It was one of the advantages of being precognitive. He was also older and a veteran of countless vampire battles. Lukas would have my memories, but there was a big difference between Shared memories and firsthand combat experience.

I just couldn't, for the unlife of me, figure out why I now had mixed feelings about Lukas's destruction. He was beyond redemption. Amoral. Self-serving. Sadistic. Yet I felt pity for him, and shame at my own contrivances.

Ancestors, forgive me, I prayed as I climbed. Were I not so weary of living, I would turn from this path. I would do the honorable thing. Abandon my plans and destroy this reprobate thing myself.

Or try to redeem him.

But I so very much wanted to die!

"So finish your story," Lukas said behind me, boots crunching in the snow. "Not that I care really, but it will pass the time."

I chuckled. He found even his own curiosity too much of a weakness for comfort. How small he was! How small and afraid.

"All right," I said. "I'll tell you."