Furthermore, whereas Ngasholga itself haunts its inhabitants with afflictions and ailments of all descriptions, the masters could harness these afflictions, wield them, perhaps even distill their own strains from within their subterranean laboratory. With their magics they manipulated the forces of entropy itself: of atrophy, and rot, and plague. They experimented on living creatures to do so, no doubt vivisecting them, pinning them to shelves, watching the bodies labor under the symptoms of the administered oozes and essences. The masters did claim to be experimenting only on those who had broken Caurgast law, but that never stopped their subjects from looking over their shoulders when they walked alone at night; wondering, superstitiously, who would be snatched from the crannogs next.
No further extrapolation should be needed into the cruelty and the malice of the Caurgasts, both as amorphous and bottomless as the Soulfount itself. This serves only to explain that they feared very few forces, for they were clever, and ruthless, and they returned tenfold the injuries they were dealt. But what they feared they feared bitterly and vividly. The fear fermented in their narrow breasts until their hearts were sacs of venom, pumping only hate through their veins, hate and black ichor. They hated the sun, so they went where the sun seldom shone. They hated silver, so they conquered a people who could not mine, who had no riches, whose brooches and pendants could not be melted in a pot and fashioned into a Caurgast-smiting dagger.
And the four eldest heirs of the last great bog-baron, Lord Malviad—they hated the fifth, their brother, whose name was Gharekh.
At first, Gharekh earned his siblings' loathing for the same reason as any other creature: he was not like them. Too unsightly was he to hold court, too small and scrawny to best even the house's most unimpressive men-at-arms in single combat; always succumbing to the very plagues and fevers he was meant to rule. He was a pest, a runt, whose mewling, sniveling image served only to soften the house's brutal repute. For many decades this was the full extent of their feelings, and Gharekh could have survived such a relationship; he, in kind, had eventually wearied of trying to please his snake-charmer big brother and his whore sisters. But as he settled into his role, and wisened, and grew, he gave them another reason to hate—to fear.
Vampires and their breeds can vary in their mental and physical capabilities almost as strikingly as the whole panoply of other races dwelling in the Land Under Shadow. One can crush rebellions and strengthen realms while appearing to others as a mere toddler and, in the same lifetime, spend a thousand years in maddening solitude. Primogeniture would only confuse such a society, where wisdom and power are not purchased with age alone. It is tradition, ergo, for the heirs to compete for their patriarch's affections. Regardless of where he would fall in a classical line of succession, even the youngest child, the weakest, the sickliest, can rise to claim the house seat, provided that he earns the reigning baron's endorsement in the right respects. Of course some vampiric overlords have invented some truly asinine contests—take, for example, the late King Zachaeus's contest of marriage—but Lord Malviad was no such ruler. All the Caurgast children understood that he would choose the one among them who could most elegantly, and efficiently, wield their weapons of terror: the castle and its grounds; the Pool of Apostates; the laboratory, and the legacy of the family's entropic magic; the loyalties of his court, his subjects, and, yes, his family.
Even one century is a long time to kneel and to serve, however, and the other Caurgast children could not survive the thought of serving a master as feeble and pathetic as Gharekh for even a fraction of that. Yet this was their inevitability, were they to accept their father's judgment. He adored Gharekh. What time the child lost in his martial training he found again in his studies; while he was bedridden he would ponder the fictions of other lands, their philosophies, their sciences. He extended his grasp o'er the alchemical arts, quickly learning how to pour his malice into weapons and imbue them with uncanny properties. Lord Malviad seemed certain that Gharekh might even create a True Phylactery someday, achieving for their house both invincibility in war and impunity in vampiric politics. But, irrespective of this lofty hope, the baron had found a companion in his youngest son. They spent hours and hours engaged in their bedside dialogues, discussing and debating as equals, a respect even Khvresh, the eldest, was seldom offered.
For hundreds of years the other heirs had honored an agreement between themselves: that they waged civil war only within the confines of Castle Caurgast, the only suitable arena for their ambitions. That way the vampire king's courts could not laugh and make bets as the younger, littler dynasty tore itself apart. Hunters from the mortal kingdoms, also, could not peer into the shrouded lands of Ngasholga and seize an opportunity of weakness. The Caurgast heirs may have slept in poisoned beds and drunken from poisoned goblets, but they would hang at dawn before they splintered against the shields of their true enemies, those whose machinations would see their house annihilated, finally and forever. Enemies at home; eternal, unbreakable allies against the world; that was the deal. And it held true, until the greatest threat of all to Malviad's inheritance—until Gharekh. Someone as feeble as he, trying to lead House Caurgast into its future, was unthinkable. It was unforgivable.
Siblings gathered under the cover of morning to discuss the scandal. Adezde, the youngest save for Gharekh, did need some "persuading." But when all four had conceded, if reluctantly, that any one of them deserved the inheritance more than the runt, they formed their fateful pact. They schemed, and they set into motion the betrayal which would define the remainder of Gharekh's meek existence in Castle Caurgast.
First, they concluded that they could allow no harm to come to their father. It was he who made any inheritance possible at all; without such a decisive decree, the children would be left to squabble and backstab until one or none remained, rendering the whole plot pointless. No, they were fighting to save their house from carnage, and ironically that meant they needed the erring patriarch's consent and his blessing to ensure a peaceful transfer of power. The conspirators swore to each other that they would stand by the outcome and support their new baron, no matter who was chosen. As for the standing baron, he had to be turned against Gharekh somehow. And it would take a gruesome crime indeed to make the father forsake his prodigal son.
The siblings next established that simply throwing Garekh into the Soulfount was far too risky. For one thing, they had no guarantee that he could not escape. In all his experimenting and studying and scrying, Gharekh may well have been practicing any one of the several flying techniques which are common to vampires: transforming into a bat or a cloud of mist, developing a winged war-form, even levitating from the pit. Then, father would undoubtedly discover the plot. He would not entertain the idea that Gharekh had thrown himself into the Soulfount in despair, nor that he had undone himself in some freak accident, and that only left murder—treason, which Malviad could not forgive, not from the peasants and not from his own offspring.
What, then? When the answer came to Khvresh at last, following many hours of wearying deliberation, he waited for the opportunity, when all the materials were gathered and the roles deliberated. Then he called for his sisters to speak with him in the laboratory.
Yleneth and Lornhir had already been warned of how they were to proceed once brother Khvresh pulled a fishing knife from his robe, reached around young Adezde's neck, and slashed her throat. He also scooped out her tongue as she gulped and gasped on the ground. She would not die, but also would not speak again until her wounds regenerated, days after Gharekh's trial had already closed. And in that matter they needed her utmost silence.
They also needed her blood, which her sisters collected in flasks and phials, ignoring the writhing.
Gharekh, in the days to follow, made a startlingly swift recovery. With an unprecedented vigor did he leap from his urn, gulp down his breakfast (a bowl left outside his door each morning, the contents only slightly coagulated), and dress to take back the nights he had lost to his infirmity. He had a lot to work to catch up on, and a lot of books to read. But he did not get far. Outside his chamber waited his father's own vampire knights, waiting with their barbed catchpoles. The silver-tipped spikes impaled Gharekh's neck and braced it tight. He could not breathe as they dragged him down the halls, dragged him outside, affixed him to a chain with a click in the collar, and hurled him down the Soulfount. Soon he reached the end of the chain's length while his body tried to keep falling. The weight yanked at the collar, its blades still deep in his neck, and he felt ready to tear in two. He had never known such agony. What has happening? Had they been usurped while he was asleep? Were the others already dead?
Vampires do not need to breathe, but the sensation of being strangled feels much the same. Gharekh kicked until he was too weak to kick. He grabbed at the chain and pulled himself up until his arms quaked and the links tore the flesh of his palms. The walls gave him nothing to grasp, nothing to climb. With the silver in his throat suppressing all his magics, he could only suffer, suffocating without dying, sometimes twisting his gaze up at the entrance to wonder if the sun would rise to just the right angle and beam down into the well and end his misery. But the sun was not so merciful. It must have been two whole days that Gharekh waited to be fished from the oubliette. Eventually the pulleys spun, the chain creaked, and he was dragged back up to the gibbet, choking and sputtering and coughing up threads of brown blood onto his lord-father's boots.
Tears sprung from Gharekh's eyes as he took his first gasp of sulfurous swamp air, snuffing the fire which had staled in his chest. He did not know what to say, what to ask, what to beg for.
Malviad, on the other hand, explained the state in which he had discovered his youngest daughter: motionless on the ground, too weak to even crawl from the puddles of ichor and urine she had left behind; streaked with her own fluids; mute, whimpering, helpless, and very nearly dead. Someone had tried to wipe up the mess and made poor work of it. Someone had disposed of the weapon, probably down the Soulfount, though that was no matter.
Gharekh started to beg and to explain himself but Malviad was already moving forward with his interrogation; his sentencing; whichever this was supposed to be. The baron's men held Gharekh down, one to a limb. Malviad himself drew a knife. Gharekh watched him hesitate and wink a speck of regret out of his eye and wished he hadn't; the anticipation of the knife was worse than anything the blade itself could inflict, he thought, until it plunged into his belly and his breath bubbled up through the wound. The knife dragged a path across the abdomen until Gharekh's breakfast flopped through the slit and slid across the platform, a blackening jelly of congealed blood. One of the alchemists was stepping forward to investigate this substance; in one hand he carried a vial of fresher, redder blood, and one of their measuring instruments in the other. Gharekh watched a copper needle flicker and tip-tip-tip the ends of the dial to which it was affixed.
This, said Malviad, proved his worst fear: his own son had attempted diablerie, the most heinous act one can inflict upon another vampire; and upon his own sister, no less. Perhaps Gharekh was delusional with fever or hysterical with lust, and struck to take by force what he would never have by his own merits. But no doubt he had meant to recover from his bodily ailments, quickly and permanently, by stealing Adezde's own life force. It was no secret that Gharekh was sick of the mockery, the whispers. Moreover he eventually would have needed more strength than he possessed if he wanted to claim, and keep, what Malviad had wanted so dearly to give him.
But it did not matter now. Gharekh would not inherit the Caurgast estate. Nor would he hurt his family ever again.
It was when Malviad raised his hand to plunge the knife through his son's heart that the elder son, Khvresh, approached. He begged his father to show mercy, though Gharekh noticed the smile as he said it. Was it poorly concealed? Or had Khvresh meant for him to see it? Gharekh still wonders.
Either way, with great distress knocking at his heart did Lord Malviad relent to this request. He could not hide that he still loved Gharekh, and must have meant to slay him quickly so he had no time to ponder whether it was what he wanted, whether he would regret it, whether he was even capable of striking down the blood of his blood. The knife dropped to Malviad's side. A true, red tear dropped from each eyelid. The wastes, he declared, would finish the work that he could not. Thus, Gharekh was banished. If he wanted to get somewhere then he had a very long way to crawl over dank, flat lands, with no food, no shelter from the sun, and a large, gaping wound in his gut. Obviously this was meant to be impossible; his death sentence. Malviad even threw him an entropic blade in a hollow gesture of pity. But life is quick to surprise. Gharekh's questions, his burning indignations, gave him much strength during his slow, painful slither to the nearest human city: why have they done this to me? What god did I anger, which king did I slight to deserve this torment? Will Adezde recover? How did her blood end up in my stomach?
When the horizon blushed tangerine Gharekh would settle down into the mud, encasing himself in it, sleeping in his little cocoon 'til he was sure the dark had swept overhead again. With his nails he hollowed out the mud from his gash, and plucked leeches from the larger pools. These he drained of fish blood and frog blood. He wept as he ate them. For sixteen days he traveled like this, arriving at the march-city of Ortheoc an abject creature, a wretched creature, his heart a pool of hate distilled from fear. There he remains, sowing misery and chaos as a common cutthroat for hire. |
