History According to Aegon Nightshade

Aegon Nightshade

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"Dreams of Darkness are but reflections of reality." -- Aegon

Prelude: Berlin -- December 21st, 2042

I had barely spoken the words and reality was rent asunder by a darkness older than creation. I felt humbled to be granted a momentary sight of the unknowable and limitless Abyss. It reaffirmed my dark faith and inflamed my need to fully understand the dark truth that served as the underpins of creation itself. Please understand, I am not a monster, I just understand that the Abyss existed before creation as we know it. It exists now and without question, it will exist when creation finally burns. These are incontrovertible truths that I would be happy to discuss with you, save that they are also holy secrets, and thereafter I would either have to Embrace you or kill you. Its simply a matter of orthodoxy, after all the Abyss is my calling, my quest and my god.

Momentarily, my eyes stung from the brightness of the German night. With a few blinks, my sight adjusted and I found myself in a winter wonderland. Berlin. The very name conjures so many images and memories for me. Obviously, like everyone born in the twentieth century it makes one think of World War II and the Third Reich. But there is so much more to this amazing city than that and to make so much of so short a period in history is a disservice to Germany in general and more specifically, Berlin.

Yaldabaoth

I could paint a fanciful scene and relay to you the might of a Titan's strike and what that might feel like, but then I didn't feel a thing.

It all happened so fast, I was lucky to catch a glimpse of something larger than a man as it closed with me. I would swear that the giant appeared, literally, from nowhere. And even as he closed with me, I knew it was too late. Then...nothing, the absence of sensation. As a mortal youth, I had a similar experience with a skittish gelding and had awakened seconds later and a good fifty feet away. This was far more terrifying.

They say in that moment before you die that your life flashes before your eyes, but that isn't true because all I saw was darkness...for the longest time. Then, at first at the edges of my peripheral vision, and slowly sliding into my primary line of sight came the images of other people's lives lived in reverse. Ghost-like flickerings of 21st century Berlin, then other locations appeared with people all rushing backwards, undoing... everything. As the days and nights sped backward into months and then years, I understood that I was watching history unwind itself. Not something one expects to see when one has died.

It is indescribable and awe inspiring to watch all of history played backwards, as if I stood like one of the angels upon the edge of creation as God worked his will, a master artisan at the easel and I alone his sole audience. From the darkness beyond the ghost-light came the voice of a woman, at first the voice was unplaceable and yet hauntingly familiar, like something half remembered from a dream. Her words only subliminally audible as if felt rather than heard. More disturbing than the vibration of whispers was its unseen source which teased that primal human instinct to see what could only be heard.

Feverish with the need to know the unknowable, I called upon that most basic ability of Abyss Mysticism and inverted my sight. And it was if a veil had pulled from my eyes, the darkness gave way to sublime illumination. As I gazed about myself I perceived that I hung suspended at the heart of a storm beyond measure, like the Great Red Spot of Jupiter, the storm could likely have consumed Berlin in an instant and shortly thereafter all of Germany. In truth it was a tempest, a funnel cloud of infinite rainbow hues cycling counterclockwise at unfathomable speeds wherein piceous lightening arched between cloud layers of cerise pink, actinic blue and dark tangerine.

As I glanced about myself, I saw that a swarm of ignis fatuus clung to me and upheld me above the towering top of the tempest. A look down produced intense vertigo, fear and gratitude. The churning vertigo made me want to vomit, but all I experienced was dry heaves for I was already empty. The fear was visceral, but there was no escape, only an infinite down into the heart of the storm. Raising my eyes to regain my balance, I felt only gratitude to the minute will-o'-the-wisps who upheld me from a fatal fall into the storm of history.

As I raised my eyes, it was as if I looked into the heart of the sun. Its brilliance so intense it left a palinopsia of afterimages that would remain forever. Unable to bear the pain of what I had seen, I returned my sight to the mortal spectrum and was granted the respite of darkness. The woman's laughter came to me not from the storm, but from utter darkness that exited above it. And while it was clear to me that the source was that Stygian dark which spoke to me, it did so through the shadow-motes which buoyed me.

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Paris, Kingdom of the Franks -- Western Europe -- March of 1096

I woke in my tent. Even before I opened my eyes I knew I wasn't alone. It was an undefinable feeling, something primal, instinct coded at the genetic level informing humanity that a predator is close. Without opening my eyes, I spoke to my visitor, the one who watched me in utter silence.

"My Lord? Forgive me if I do not rise. I do not believe I am capable. Have I been sick long? I have vague memories of something going wrong in Alexandria and then indistinct recollections of illness and nightmare."

{Theodoric} "Salivius, you were poisoned outside the Memory City, or so I am told, by a giant albino scorpion. Were it not for my Vitae, you would have died. Still, you have been abed a fortnight. But, do not worry, my other servant has been looking after your duties while you have rested."

"Thank you my lord for your generosity, I am unworthy and will seek in vain to repay your kindness."

In the darkness of the tent's interior, I could not precisely see Theodoric, but I could see his shadow. His dark form came closer until it stood directly over me and then I saw the flash of a blade. In that second, so many possibilities passed through my mind, my liege could well have decided I was no longer worth his effort and waited until I was conscious just to kill me. But then there was the sound of flesh being sliced and cold, viscus blood spattered my face and I instinctively opened my mouth to receive this gift.

The feeding session seemed to go on forever and its took all my willpower to gag the vile black blood down and to swallow it. Then Theodoric was simply gone. I lay there patiently counting out sixty seconds against the beating of my heart and then leaned over the edge of the cot and barely found the chamber pot as all of Theodoric's black blood, bile and whatever they had most recently fed me came up in a rush. It was a noisy and unpleasant business, in my original mortal life, I had always hated vomiting more than any other symptom of sickness. This time however, it was much easier and afterwards, I felt a distinct sense of relief. I rummaged around near my cot until I found a wine-skin and washed the taste from my mouth. With effort, I nudged the chamber pot under the camp table and lay back to think.

If Theodoric ever realized that my body was rejecting his vampiric blood, he would almost certainly kill me. I would need to dispose of the chamber pot's contents personally as I could not afford one of the camp followers being a spy and reporting this back to the vampire.

It had not always been so. In the nights immediately after joining the pageant, I had been able to ingest the elder's vitae without difficulty. But over the weeks following, the black blood seemed to slowly sicken me and finally my body began to expel it. In all my years as a vampire, I had never seen or heard of such a thing and it produced such sheer unreasoning terror in me that when the blood would leave me, thereafter I would collapse in shivering terror.

To stem the fear, in my mind, I tried to reorder the events leading up to the attack on the temple of Ereshkigal. Despite my efforts, those memories seemed hazy as if I were remembering the events from more than one perspective. It made me uneasy with the thought that such a long convalescence could have been due to a brain damaging fever. I quickly dismissed the possibility, for if I did have brain damage, I probably wouldn't have had the wits to notice anything out of the ordinary.

My sickbed stank of old sweat, nightmares and vomit. And I could tolerate it no more. Sitting up made my head spin and I broke out in a sweat. Getting to my feet took a great deal more effort as my muscles felt like gelatin. But I managed with a bit of difficulty. Thereafter, I retrieved a cleaner set of clothing from the chest at the foot of my cot, a bar of soap I had bought in Alexandria and a towel and headed outside.

As I emerged from the tent, I turned to see the eastern horizon fully aflame. It burned with bands of gold, ruby, and opalescent orange. It would be dawn within just a few minutes. Somewhere within the encampment, the vampires of the pageant were hiding away in dark places to wait out the day. Like cockroaches they scurried for the shadows and for reasons I couldn't name, that made me smile.

But I immediately noticed something was not completely as I recollected. The humid, almost tropical breezes of Alexandria and the city itself were just...gone. We were somewhere else. Looking up at the fading night sky, I spotted several constellations and calculated that we had traveled several degrees of latitude northward and many degrees of longitude westward. We were somewhere in western Europe. And it was cold.

Returning to my tent, I retrieved a cloak and sought out someone within the camp who could answer my questions. As I worked my way through the slowly awakening pageant, the first individual I ran across was Frater Eadweard. The good brother had just come through the double wall of canvas even as I sought egress. Coming face to face, we exchanged the morning greeting and I asked after the pageant's current whereabouts. He replied that we were in the Frankish lands, just outside the walls of Paris. I thanked him for his information and lightly brushed past him in my haste to dispose of my pot of night-soil and spoiling vampiric vitae.

To be honest, I had never really paid much attention to the fat monk with his greasy pitch of religious righteousness sold like a snake-oil-salesman. But when he grabbed me by the arm, he spun me around like a little girl. Startled, I dropped my burdens and by reflex my sword blade slid free of the scabbard. As we confronted each other in the dark gray twilight, I realized the monk was far stronger than he looked. Fat and tonsured, the good brother looked soft, but clearly that was far from the truth and like an accountant, I noted it down in my invisible record book. As we stared at each other, he must have sensed something was different about me, because he suddenly released my arm and mentioned that there was a killer loose outside of Paris and that I should be careful. I nodded my understanding, but I did not thank him this time, we both knew he was not warning me so much as trying to scare me. When I offered nothing further and did not sheath my sword, he backed away and resumed his walk towards the House of the Profligate.

Gathering my fallen items from the snow covered ground, I kept my sword in my hand and passed through the first lay of yellowing canvas. The space between the two canvas layers was only about four or five feet wide, but it created a strange corridor in the twilight that seemed to stretch away into darkness to both the right and left. I did not tarry and even as I was pushing my way through the outer canvas, I heard the whisper of a woman's voice calling my name. As I turned to look in that direction, I beheld a beautiful woman with hair like living flame and iridescent green eyes that seem to gather the light like those of a cat. She was no more than five feet tall and could not have weighed more than ninety pounds soaking wet and yet she radiated age and power like an elder vampire might.

"Lady Astarte, I take it?" She offered a polite curtsy in reply and I set aside my bundles to bow in return. As I straightened, I noticed for the first time the elegantly pointed ears that were only partially hidden by her glorious mane of hair. As if she had read my mind, she smiled and nodded in answer to my unspoken question. "My lady, please forgive my appearance, I have been ill for a fortnight or more and I was making my way to the Seine to bathe." Despite myself, I found it difficult not to stare at this fae woman. Her feminine attributes where not lost on me as my body began to involuntarily respond to her proximity, but there was so much more to it than mere mortal lust. The air around her seemed to crackle with unseen electricity and I could feel it crawling across the backs of my hands and down my spine. I was in the presence of something far greater, older and eldritch, a fey princess.

I knelt there before her and recalled the three things my old mentor had to say about the fay: creatures of faerie are not to be trifled with, pure iron can kill them, but one must never ever make a deal with them. For the fay are more clever than mankind, subtle and worst of all, fickle.

Jotunheim -- Seventh of the Nine Worlds -- April of 1096

All along the wagon-train, men and draft animals shivered in the cold dim twilight following dawn. The snowstorm had only partially abated as the sun rose in the east tinting the gray horizon there with rose and amber. Flakes of icy crystals still fell thick on the left bank of the Seine where the pageant prepared to depart Paris on its eastward trek. Beautiful as the dawn might have been, my eyes were turned to the south where the last vestiges of Bolverk's Army vanished over a low series of hills. As I turned back to look at Paris, I could see that despite the sudden and heavy spring snowstorm, some buildings still smoldered after the fires and riots of the most recent chaos. As the line of wagons and riders began moving towards the dawn, my mind drifted over the events of the preceding nights and the part we had played in them. There was a sense of destiny in all that had transpired and as the only living man to witness such momentous events, the responsibility fell to me to record what I knew of this new history.

Less than a Roman mile from the walls of Paris, the pageant encountered thickening snow and fog. Visibility became so labored that riders like myself were obliged to tie our horses to the rear of the closest wagon and walk afoot through the knee deep snow. Most lit torches and called back and forth to one another so that individuals might avoid getting lost in the foggy blizzard. I tied a length of rope to the nearest wagon, then about myself and had each of my men do so at three foot intervals. In such conditions, it would be all too easy to lose one's footing or get turned around and separation from the pageant would almost certainly mean a long cold death. Before the blizzard caught us unawares the pageant had been moving along the Roman track the Franks now called the Eastern road. Fairly early on, I lost track of time and a sense of plodding continuity took its place. It seemed forever that we wandered through that freezing white storm, not that I questioned this, rather it seemed only natural. But somewhere along the way, the pageant had left behind the fallow snow covered fields of the Left Bank with its numerous peasant hovels and occasional aristocratic manses for a single snowy track through a twilit forest.

I shook my head as if to clear it of too much drink or too little sleep, an indiscriminate fugue that in future days I would come to anticipate each time the pageant moved in that peculiar way wherein it traveled impossible distances in only hours or days. Later, I would with difficulty remember something of the terrors the pageant had passed through on its journey from Paris to wherever we were now. As if in a half-remembered dream, I recalled the pageant's passage through a blasted arctic landscape. Snow still fell in thickening gusts and eerily the fog clung to the wagon-train in spite of the freezing wind. So cold was the air that my breath smoked like Argont's forge and I felt the first tinges of numbness that would eventually become hypothermia. But as I looked up, I beheld a cold blue sun many times the size of the golden Sol and its azure radiance gave the icy landscape an alien ambience. The white plain seemed to stretch as far as I could see, but it was anything but flat and periodically whorled pillars of ice would rise from the surface, carved by the wind into fractal shapes that shattered the cerulean light into a kaleidoscope of rainbow hues like a prism. Further interspersed, sometimes by miles, were barren hills and ridges of black volcanic rock rising from the icy surface. Although it did not touch the pageant, the wind shrieked like a banshee and beneath its icy keen I heard something else - a low rumble that was omnipresent and felt deep in the bones. The sound was that of massive ice sheets grinding together for the surface of this world was composed of endless glaciers.

In disorienting flashes these memories surface and only with meditation and occasionally magic. Reconstructing what happened while the pageant journeys as it does is most like assembling a child's puzzle cut from the center of an old tree. The whole is lacquered and polished to reveal the very specific pattern of the wood's rings, then its cut into countless pieces and dumped willy-nilly into a box to be sorted by bored children trying to rearrange the original whole. With time, patience and a bit of sorcery the memories can be reconstructed, but its clear that the powers-that-be never intended that the pageanteers should be aware of the eldritch nature of their constant sojourn and of the myriad of worlds used as way-stations betwixt here and thrice cursed infinity.

Our journey across the arctic landscape eventually brought us to a ice-floored valley squeezed between two high escarpments of black volcanic stone down which layers of hoarfrost glittered like blue diamonds dying in the fading light. The days on this world were long, even compared to arctic summers, and with a sky empty of clouds the nights would be too cold for humans caught outside. Despite the cold, instinctively, I welcomed the false night between the canyon walls as only a creature of darkness or a former creature of darkness might.

The valley's width narrowed until we moved through a crevasse like defile. Eventually the crevasse emptied onto the frozen surface of a lake that lay in a crater many miles across. The pageant's pace across the great ice lake slowed to a crawl as men and beasts lost their footing with alarming regularity. I was among those and as I began to rise, I had occasion to look down into the glass like ice to see what lay below. At first uncertain of what I thought I saw, I knelt down on already numb legs to brush away the wind drifted snow.

The frozen lake was as crystal clear as tropical seas and there, only a few feet below me I saw them, countless men, women and children caught forever in the moments of their deaths. They were spaced out every few feet in all the cardinal directions, if the entire lake floor where so meticulously filled with human corpses, then an entire race of man lay forgotten below the ice. I scrabbled to my feet and resumed my zombie's walk towards the unknown, like all those around me, only partially aware of the graveyard across which we walked. Beneath my feet the open staring eyes of countless people looked upward at the dying light, perhaps in envy of our still warm flesh and the freedom of motion of which we were still capable.

As twilight betook the land, the arctic zephyr ceased to rage and in the stillness I heard a woman's voice raised in song. Incomprehensible were the words which were foreign to mortal ears and I felt my heart quicken with a surge of the arcane. Like whale song her mellifluous coloratura carried far across the glistening ice and was answered by a chorus of baritones as bleak as a funeral dirge. This alien opera progressed even as the wagon-train approached the center of the vast and frozen lake. There at the heart of the crater was a monolith of ice, carved by the wind, into a towering crystalline structure the equal of any twentieth century skyscraper. As the sapphire sun began to sink below the horizon, its last rays seemed to ignite the arctic monolith throwing shards of fractured light to the farthest extremity of the cold crater lake.

Somewhere up ahead, a brazen and sonorous note sounded, that of a rams-horn. This ancient symbol brought the caravan to sudden halt. In that place, the light died with surpassing speed and violet shadows pooled within the crater-lake like dark water rising up from below and leaving only half of each animal, wagon and man visible to the mortal eye. As horses and oxen stamped their feet reflexively for warmth, men and woman shivered without the heat of exertion generated by our sleepwalker's march and the breath of all the living smoked in the half-light adding to the aberrant mist that still clung to the caravan's periphery.

From my position towards the middle of the pageant's convoy, the tower or towers of ice, for they were two and intertwined dominated the landscape before me and it was impossible for me not to see that windows, doors and stairs of all sizes had been carved from the monolith's exterior. Looking out and down upon our twilight parade from countless windows were faces, indistinguishable in the dying light, but both familiar and alien. Down the frozen exterior of the monolith trailed flights of stairs and down these stairs came men who were not men, their skin was painted as blue as Pictish woad and their hair although dark shown with many metallic hues. None were dressed for the arctic cold and some were not dressed at all. As they grew closer it became apparent that these alien men were proportionally larger than mortal men twice over and not all who descended were masculine in character for many beautiful if fierce looking amazons traversed the cold crystal stairs to the surface of the frozen lake.

At the base of the monolith they gathered, several hundred and more looked on from above. They stood in an archway a hundred feet high that served as the entrance to a tunnel that made its way through the base of the ice towers and out the other side, an otherworldly Eiffel Tower formed entirely of ice. From the throng before the great arch, a small contingent of a dozen or so made their way across the frozen lake to stand before the head of our motley column. I could not see them well from my vantage point and my attention drifted from time to time. When next I was aware, the group was once more in motion along the caravan's port side giving me a good view of them. In the lead was a naked woman who stood twelve feet tall, her voluptuous blue body swayed with predatory grace like a Balinese dancer or a Bengal tiger and her black hair tinted in shades of violet hung down to her ankles in a thick braid. I knew before me was a queen for upon her head was a delicate diadem of arctic ice like a crown of pale blue Tiffany glass.

Beside her, and so much smaller was Astarte, but not as I had known her. Her hair was like molten copper as it flowed out behind her in an otherworldly breeze and her dress of amethyst and verdigris bore a corona of eldritch emerald fire that gave off sparks of gold. Never in all my countless lives had I seen anything to compare with such alien beauty, both terrible and majestic, a unearthly vision made manifest and given life eternal. Such sights mortal man was not meant to see and I came to understand that the fugue that held us all prisoners in our own flesh and robbed us of our reminiscence was meant in part to insulate us from the madness such sights could instill and alternatively to protect these alien, but beautiful beings from humanity.

Behind this otherworldly duo came a cadre of blue giants, bodies sheathed in armor of iridescent reptilian leather trimmed in long fur the color of a Russian grey cat. I could not imagine what animals gave up their lives to cloth these blue warrior men, but as they approached, I could see that like Astarte, their ears were distinctly pointed and each marked with ritualistic black scars that I had originally taken for tattoos. Like their armor, they bore no ordinary weapons, but creations of ice, glittering deadly spears, swords and axes that seemed glow of their own accord. And yet, despite each of these unearthly features, it was their eyes that captivated me, red the color of blood and with a vertical pupil reminiscent of felines more than those of a serpent. Despite their initially humanoid appearance, I understood on an animal level, that these creatures were in no way related to mankind and as they looked upon us and spoke among themselves in a harsh guttural tongue that they bore us an ancestral enmity that must one day be slaked in a genocidal holocaust. What is more, somewhere in my own mortal heritage, every fiber of my being, bones to blood called out to me to attack without mercy or else flee for my life. I could not imagine under what fey truce we the children of humanity stood in this place alive without being butchered to the last.

With the death of the sun, the sky's amethyst turned atramentous and from the unfamiliar void burned alien constellations whose meanings I could not fathom. These things my down cast eyes perceived in the mirror of the darkening lake. No more the staring eyes of countless corpses were seen, but rather the Oculus of Niflheim.

This mirror darkly, reflected many things, all the more so as an eldritch aurora spread across the foreign firmament casting all those present as aspects of incandescent. It was neither Astarte's reflection bound up as it was with the entwining image of a great black serpent, nor the gathered host of azure giants whose reflected raiment consisted of the bones of human children that surprised me, but the reflections of the nearby pageanteers.

Of course, I could only see the reflections of my men and those closest to us. Several of the pageanteers bore distorted visages, some looked starved like concentration camp victims, while others were obviously sick as their reflections bore terrible lesions or oozing pustules. Like the host of the damned revealed to Scrooge by Marley's ghost in A Christmas Carol, all of the pageanteers were weighted down with chains of varying lengths. Some were bound to additional weights like coin chests or beautiful weapons or even stranger things.

What I saw of myself and my men in the oddly illuminated ice brought on a moral terror and revulsion that would later manifest itself as twisted déjà vu and the occasional nightmare as the memories sought to break free of the pageant induced amnesia.

In the ice, my form possessed a distinctly draconian aspect, like a man sized dragon standing on two feet with a tail like an alligator and wings like a gargoyle, clearly my reflection was both strong and hungry, but not the least bit human.

My reflected self was covered in black gem-like scales that became horn-like ridges over both the eye sockets and where the ears should have been. My scaled hands ended in obsidian claws three inches long, and the leathery midnight wings upon my back possessed ebony spines for both defensive and offensive purposes. It was my face that stayed with me the longest, my face was like that of a crocodile with a broad short snout and rows of savage teeth visible even with my mouth closed. The worst part were the eyes, reptilian and golden, they seemed imbued with both calculated cunning and predatory intelligence.

Around my neck was a thick slave's neck-chain and hanging from it was the amulet versus demons made for me by Mordblund. A single thick chain hung around my waist like a belt and from it hung three books, the arcane tomes I had stolen from the library of the French king's palace in Paris. But that was not all, in each hand, I held a thick iron ring and bound to those rings were chains that bound my men to me. Strangest of all, at my feet sat a black house cat with not a care in the world.

The group behind my cadre were camp followers, a mixture of men, woman and children. In the coldly reflective ice, each and every one of them looked like a corpse. In the back of my mind, I knew what was going to happen to them, but I was powerless to even twitch an eyelid let alone change the outcome of a foregone conclusion.

As the delegation of blue giants passed my men and I, for the first time I understood their conversation. Astarte and the blue giant queen were haggling over the price of passage for the pageant through this realm, the cost would be paid in human lives from among our camp-followers. The powers-that-be within the Pageant were obviously possessive of their chosen and indentured servants, those the giants could not have. But those poor fools who had sought to find safety and an easier journey following the pageant to Trier would pay a far higher price than they ever might have imagined.

Astarte matched the blue queen's stride with several smaller steps and she personally helped the giantess select the sacrifices. As each victim was chosen, a blue warrior would step forward and take the unresistant mortal by the arm and lead them several feet out onto the ice. There beyond the confines of the mist that surround the Pageant, the individual would start into wakefulness. Like drugged animals they were slow to realize their plight and when it finally dawned upon them that they were being systematically cut off from escape and the safety of the Pageant, they began to panic and begged for their lives.

The blue giants treated this behavior the same way a farmer or butcher might the bleating of a sheep or goat. But rather than gentle kindness or casual indifference, the blue warriors obviously relished the terror of their human victims and sought to enhance it with savage intimidation and physical cruelty. How many times had this sort of scene played itself out as the pageant moved from the mundane world to another realm and back again? How many human lives had been lost paying the toll between worlds? Only Astarte would know for sure.

When a full two dozen men, women and children had been selected, the queen of giants trailed her warriors and their charges a bit further from the pageant and there she had them herded at weapon point into a rough knot inside a circle of blue warriors. Those within the circle, save for the children, knew that their time was up and as the cold began to afflict them, the chatter of their collective teeth carried over the ice to where I stood. Like animals to the slaughter they bleated and cried, screamed and tried to push through the warriors. One of the men called for calm, and brought order to the chaotic, weeping group.

Then unlike animals to the slaughter, they all knelt down and began to pray. Their chattering prayers served as feeble counterpoint to the the rich notes hummed by the queen of giants as she walked the perimeter of the circle and chanted in the harsh tongue of her people. As she completed her first rotation fine traceries of blue-white light delineated a perfect circle below the surface of the ice. I did not need to see what was happening, although I could peripherally glimpse the action – rather I could feel the gathering of power, of air and water as they interacted to momentarily imbue a significant quantity of fire and then just as quickly drain it away.

I expected screams and the sounds of splashing, but that never happened. One moment they were kneeling on the ice praying and the next, they were just – gone.

From some long forgotten store of human emotions passed down to me in my first life or perhaps from my most recent reincarnation, I felt rising within me a primordial rage that for just a few brief seconds allowed me to brush off the fugue. Astarte had not even bothered to watch what became of her human sacrifices, she was striding back towards the head of the caravan when she must have sensed something of what I was doing. She stopped before me and as our eyes met, I saw that her eyes, from iris to sclera had turned infinitely black – the Abyssinian stare. The emptiness of the Abyss drained away my rage and my spell collapsed before fully forming. Once again the fugue held me, distancing my mind from thought and emotion, insulating memory and injecting absolute bliss – once more I was as serene as the Buddha.

The queen of giants had a much longer stride and caught up to Astarte only a moment or two after my spell fizzled. She inquired what Astarte was looking at, the Autumn Queen's reply was nominal, just enough in the language of the giants to dispel the giantess' suspicions. In that second as she still faced me she must have looked down and seen my reflection, what she gleaned there, I cannot know ever were I to remember the event. But as she lifted her head high and the eldritch nimbus of cold fire blossomed anew around her, she turned to face the queen of giants. Although coldly polite, she now dictated terms, the Pageant would pass through the portal within the frozen monolith and we would leave this world for the realm called Midgard.

The blue giant queen, frostily agreed as she eyed all the other potential sacrifices with something resembling regret. But then, Laufey, queen of the frost giants and mother of Loki – the lord of lies, remained painfully aware of her pledge of hospitality and the golden oaths that bound her to deal fairly with this wispy princess of the Autumn Court. And perhaps to reassure Astarte that her obligations and responsibilities were not forgotten, she recited the compact between the courts of Autumn and Winter. She never looked back at the dirty fire haired human, the surge of power could never have come from a mortal member of the Pageant, and her assumption of Astarte's fickle anger were correct save for their source. But while Laufey was many things including sublimely powerful among the fae, one thing she was not, was overly imaginative.

From somewhere at the head of the column, the long lonely call of the rams horn reverberated across the ice and the caravan that was the Pageant began to move forwards on legs long since gone numb into a gateway of glittering blue-white light that swallowed the humans, horses and wagons like a dragon of ice swallowing a giant serpent of flesh.

Trier, Duchy of Upper Lorraine in the Kingdom of Germany -- near Luxembourg -- May of 1096

I came to myself leaning against a frost covered wagon for support. I was bone tired, weary in the way soldiers are after a forced march and my body was completely numb from my feet to the scalp of my head. Everywhere I looked, pageanteers and camp-followers and even the horses began to collapse in their tracks. We all drew in deep gasping breadths of moist seemingly warm air and every object bore a rhyme of frost. I had trouble remembering how long we had been traveling and where precisely we were. The details of our journey seemed fragmented and fuzzy, and the harder I tried to make sense of them, the more swiftly they flew away from me like the black birds of Paris.

I was literally jerked into the moment as the man closest to me and tied to me by a frost covered rope, lost his footing and began dragging me down. Without any feeling in my feet, keeping my balance was difficult. I could not feel my hands as I grabbed the hilt of my dagger and once again I nearly lost my footing as I wrenched it from the scabbard with too much force. It had been necessary however, as the blade itself was thickly covered in ice crystals. With a single strike, I severed the length of rope binding us and he along with rest of my men hit the ground hard. My second strike severed my bindings to the wagon allowing me to totter a bit before kneeling next to the first fallen. For a few moments, I struggled even to think of the fallen man's name. Then it came to me, Agilulf, born in the northernmost reaches of Italy he was a Lombard and all of my personal guard called him Little Wolf. As I inspected Agilulf on my knees, I could see that his normally tan face was far too pale and as cold as we all were, he should have been shivering. But the boy was not shivering and by the lack of visible breath he clearly was not breathing either. I know, its ironic that I call him boy because physically there could not be more than a year or two between us and he could easily have been my older brother, but then appearances can be deceiving and I had lived many lives before this one.

As I bent over him, with the knife in hand it occurred to me that this life might very well be my last.

From that point forward, I thought of nothing other than what might be necessary to save his life. A lifetime of combat training has other uses than just the acts of war. In my hands the dagger made a series of precise cuts to remove his leather armor, a woolen vest and a stinking linen shirt that had not been washed in months. Then sheathing the dagger, I leaned yet closer and began to breath life back into the boy's mouth. Those around me starting to become aware and stared at me in a dumbstruck fashion which was a shame, because resuscitation is a two person effort. I made do as best I could, but without the right rhythm, I was likely doomed to fail. Then a shadow fell upon me and I glanced up to see Blagoy the barber-surgeon, it must have been his wagon we had been tied to during the journey, and a turn of good luck for the dying Agilulf.

In the Bulgarian dialect of the southern Slavic tongue, I said:

"Master Blagoy, the boy is dying, the cold has stopped his heart and breath. We must quicken the life-force within him and I need your help to do so."

His reply was typical of the man.

"If the boy isn't breathing, he is already dead. In this, he is not alone and there are others more likely to survive if I attend to them this night."

As he turned to walk away, I grabbed his wrist and pulled him to his knees. So detached was he that this assault merely drew a questioning glance and a raised eyebrow.

Blagoy was a man that I admired for his deep calm and utterly rational behavior, he would never make a decision based on emotion, nor allow emotion to sway him. With him the only appeal that would move him would be one of enlightened self interest.

"He is not yet dead and if you do exactly as I tell you, we can save his life. What price would you pay to know how to restart a man's heart and make him breath again?"

My grandfather was the fisherman of our household, but I knew the best morsels with which to bait a hook.

His voice did not change, nor did he seem to breath any harder, but the widening of his pupils told me what I needed to know even before he voiced his reply:

"Show me."

I placed Blagoy on one side of the Little Wolf and showed him the palpitations needed to compel the heart to beat again. I emphasized the need to synchronize our tandem routine, of my breathing for Agilulf while he palpitating the young man's heart. Blagoy as my partner needed only to see me do this thing once and he had mastered it. In those moments, it seemed as if time contracted and stretched out infinitely. This then was the opposite of battle, the struggle to save a life became a labor alike and yet different than childbirth and both of us were straining and sweating even in the evening chill. I am not sure how long this went on, but eventually we were rewarded by the convulsing of Agilulf's body as he returned to the land of the living.

Blagoy and I looked at each other over the young man as he struggled to get enough air and then we were both laughing. It was the first time I had heard the serious surgeon laugh at anything and it was an explosive thing. After propping up Little Wolf's head, I got to my feet and looked around while Blagoy remained at the boy's side.

My other men lay where they had fallen, as had at least half the pageanteers. The forest around us was showing signs of spring, the budding of trees, new shoots and even a few flowers were visible from where I stood. About a hundred feet from the road on which the caravan had settled, the true forest began, it was a wild tangle of trees and undergrowth and also a means for our survival. Turning back to my men, I stopped and knelt down to speak a few words of encouragement to each, but they just shivered where they lay.

In this life and those that preceded it, I had known many taskmasters, some had favored positive reinforcement, but most had understood that men are just animals that walk upright and must not be coddled. I walked to my horse and from the saddle I pulled a whip and to each of those still lying down I gave a taste of the lash and repeated my command.

"Get up! Move!"

A couple screamed and a couple cursed me, but all came to their feet panting. As an analogy, men are most like dogs and I mean this in all ways. One must establish dominance and then show them affection, too much of one spoils the animal or turns it savage. I walked up to each and offered a long pull from my wine-skin filled with Frankish brandy. While the alcohol provided only a false warmth, it did galvanize each of them and remind them that their master could give them punishment or reward depending on their actions, but he would never accept failure. Once I had them moving, I took them into the nearest edge of the forest to collect deadwood. Despite the feeling that it should be true night, we could all see the sun had barely set and the dimming light would last for some while longer.

I did not waste the opportunity this situation presented, rather I sought to instill each of my guard with the understanding that each of them was important to the whole and that as a group we could survive anything. As a team building exercise it was perhaps imperfect, but it got their blood flowing and allowed us to collect considerable wood with which to create campfires. As we returned from the forest, I could see Vulo Vodach riding slowly along the line of wagons giving directions from atop his dark warhorse. Momentarily our eyes met and he nodded ever so briefly and then continued on his way. His directions told me that a clearing had been found ahead and that the Brotherhood of the Blade were pushing the exhausted pageanteers forward to a defensible location. I led the men to the head of the column and down the road where a pair of scouts waited. One already had a fire going and we added our fuel to the blaze and created other fires around which the half frozen travelers could warm themselves.

While it took longer than it should have, the wagon train followed those on foot until everyone was gathered together in the clearing. Tonight the wagons were arranged in a circle to protect the exhausted pageanteers. Only one of the large tents was erected, the Tent of Dionysus, which was used to shelter the sick and the tired while food was cooked outside in black iron pots over each of the campfires. Slowly, other small tents were erected around the mess-tent and while fat Rodolph and his helpers made a quick stew for everyone, I commandeered one of the small fires to brew up some coffee for myself and my men. When I gave each of them a tin cup of the bitter brew, each looked dubious and some spit it out immediately while the more pragmatic made faces but drank it down. I needed them both alert and warm, food would only make them sleepy and none including myself would sleep until we had scouted the area and determined potential risks to the Pageant.

As they warmed themselves by the fire and drank their coffee, I watched each of them. Of the three remaining Mochán was the eldest at around his middle forties, home for him was Dublin Town, a Viking stronghold on the east coast of Eerie (Ireland). The men called him Early Bird for the fact that he seemed to need less sleep and was always the first to awaken. After killing a Norman knight who had mistaken one of his daughters for a whore, he had been obliged to leave his old life behind if only for the sake of his family, for the Normans did not take the killing of one of their own lying down. The Hiberno-Norse look after their own and he found passage on a long-ship to the port city of Bordeaux in the Duchy of Gascony. There he took up with a mercenary company in the endless border wars between the duchies of Gascony and Toulouse. His mercenary company was eventually destroyed by the Army of the Red General as it made its way from Nimes to Clermont. He was a man who could tell a story and keep the men fascinated and he had a decent singing voice as well, but his finest asset was a solid head on his shoulders and the capacity to keep it there. Being the eldest of my guard, the other men looked up to him as an older brother and I found over time that I could entrust him with instructions that would not be questioned, at least not before the other men. For myself, I liked the Irish man, although he would offer to fight me if I called him that for his sire had been a full blooded Norseman with a taste for adventure and war.

Next to Mochán sat Gebahard, a proud Saxon from Büren in Westphalia. Dark haired and stout, the German was hardheaded but pragmatic, until you got him drunk. The men called him Hardy and that sobriquet described him well. Born the third son of landed but destitute knight, on his sixteenth birthday his father placed him on his second best horse, given him a sword and a small pouch of silver and told him to make his own way in the world for he was a man. Gebahard rarely spoke of the years immediately following, but I got the impression he joined a gang of bandits and did a number of things for which he was not proud. On only a few occasions had he reminisced about what his life had been like before he joined the Army of the Red General, and I did not press him, for men will tell you their tale when they are ready and every man has secrets. I did not pry and in return I found Gebahard to be an amicable man of deep humor who was always playing harmless pranks in the dull day to day of the pageant.

The last man was also the most complicated, Waramunt was the youngest son of Veremund, 11th Baron of House Hasek of Augsburg in Bavaria. In the summer of 1094 Bavaria had been under the protection of the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV since its old duke had taken up arms in rebellion against his lord twenty years before. Henry had appointed a imperial seneschal, Lord Carolus to oversee the Duchy of Bavaria until such time as a new duke or duchess could be found. But the emperor must have failed to mention that he planned to select a new ruler for the duchy himself, for when a prospective heir - a young woman named Eadburga of Nordheim had appeared the noble houses of Bavaria decided to take matters into their own hands and ignited a civil war. In all likelihood, the emperor's absence from the Kingdom of Germany and the war being wagged between himself and his eldest son in Italy had much to do with the Bavarian noble houses belief that they could choose from among themselves a new duke or duchess. At the time of the advent of the Bavarian civil war, Waramunt has been the wastrel and black-sheep of House Hasek, and as such had been given in pledge by his father to Leudoberct - Baron of House Adler to shape into a reputable nobleman. Waramunt for all his lack of experience, had fought bravely for the Southern Alliance, but had been captured by the Western Alliance of Bavarian houses early on in the civil war. The boy must have learned something from the Old Eagle of Adler or found some nobility in his own blood, for only a month into captivity he organized a group of low ranking nobles and led them to escape into the Duchy of Lower Lorraine. This disparate group of young nobles quickly left the civil war behind to seek fame and adventure for themselves as they traveled ever westward. In Orléans a squabble over a woman led the group to fragment and Waramunt chose to join the Army of the Red General rather than return to a homeland shattered by war. The White Rabbit as the men like to call Waramunt, a vague reference to his heritage and his luck with games of chance, is a handsome lad with a ready smile for the ladies and a surprisingly keen wit in general and specifically in the arena of politics. Although I like the White Rabbit, I show him not a hair more favor than the Little Wolf who was born of simple peasant stock. His station outside of my cadre and the pageant does make him useful in dealing with the Christian nobility of Europe and he serves as my agent in matters political.

Taking Mochán aside, I outlined my intent to scout the area and that I was going to speak to Vulo Vodach. His stoic nod was all I received in reply, but we had worked long enough together for me know he would prepare the men and all would be in readiness. On my way to speak with the leader of the brotherhood of the Blade, I only stopped once to retrieve my shield from one of the pack animals.

The clearing chosen as the campsite lay upon a flat-topped hill, about one hundred feet wide and a little over three hundred feet long, perfect for the pageant, one could almost say - too perfect. Already the pageanteers were erecting the Wyrdling Wall creating an eye-shaped space oriented north to south with a gate located in the east wall at the head of what looked like an old road that zigzagged down the heavily forested slope to cultivated fields half a mile east of our position. The location offered an excellent view of the local farmland between us and a wide slow moving river, and just on the other side, a city with well fortified walls.

All this and more I noticed on my way to Vulo's tent which lay in the pupil of the eye-shaped encampment. The tent itself was shaped like a bee-hive and formed from numerous skins sewn together. Smoke poured from a small hole at the top and fire light threw orange and gold illumination onto the moist dark earth before the tent, it also partially illuminated two of Vulo's guards as they stood at attention on either side of the entrance. Both men were Slavs and of dour disposition, as a point of interest I found it odd that the leader of the Brotherhood of the Blade would surround himself with such a homogeneous group when the rest of the pageant seemed to be made up of an almost random grouping of peoples from across Eurasia, the Middle-East and Africa.

Both men focused on me as I approached. Rather than risk a confrontation I kept my hands away from my weapons and offered a greeting to them. One of them stepped forward and placed a well muscled hand on my chest and queried me on my business with the Vodach (leader). Succinctly I told him that I needed to speak to Vulo on the matter of a scouting mission. Behind him, his fellow guard chuckled while the man before me smirked. Obviously I had violated some social taboo or stepped above my station in their eyes. Despite this, the second guard entered the tent to inform Vulo while the first guard locked gazes with me in a contest of dominance, he was the first to look away.

A moment later, the second guard emerged and gestured for me to come forward and enter his master's tent. As I entered, I could feel the first guard's gaze boring into my back, but I focused on the fire-lit interior. The smell of dung-fires and an almost drowsy heat enveloped me as I entered, off to one side were two men seated upon the rug covered ground facing each other, Vulo and his second in command Arnviðr. Both looked up as I entered and they exchanged comments in the Slavic tongue. Strangely, I had to work to understand them and only caught the gist of what they said. The Varagarian thought I should be taught a lesson for over stepping my place among the pageanteers, but Vulo seemed genuinely curious what might have brought me to his tent. I had only spoken to the war-leader a few times and he had largely ignored me since.

In the vulgar Latin that was so popular with the common people, I offered the evening greeting and waited for Vulo's response. Even while seated, Vulo seemed to radiate authority and I noticed his shadow was much larger upon the wall of skins that it should normally have been. I spent a few moments interpreting this sign and determined that like myself, Vulo had some power over the shadows and that there was far more to this man than met the eye. In turn both men watched me, with measured interest on Vulo's part and obvious scorn on the part of the Varagarian.

Vulo's deep bass voice was like the low roll of thunder when he spoke. "What brings you to my tent Aegon?"

"Vodach, I came to offer the services of my men and myself in scouting the local territory."

This response drew an immediate snicker from both men who drank from their cups and exchanged jokes at my expense in the Slavic tongue. In response, I smiled sheepishly as if I too found this funny, but did not quite get the joke. Sometimes it is best to humor those above you, it stokes their egos and sometimes they show you a bit more of themselves than they realize. My continued presence and patience in waiting for a real response eventually killed the mood and then Vulo spoke again.

"Aegon, neither your assistance , nor that of your men will be required. Arnviðr is in charge of all scouting missions and his men have already determined the lay of the land. You may go about your business as Arnviðr and I have business of our own. Goodnight."

The dismissal was obvious as both men returned to their conversation and joking at my expense. It did not really surprise me, but then this was simply an exploratory foray into new political territory. I had learned a fair amount, but I wanted to leave them with a bit of an impression to make future advances more profitable.

"Of course, Vodach, I look forward to visiting Augusta Treverorum again. The city seems to have prospered since my last visit and I long to once again soak in the Imperial Baths and visit the Temple of Mars. Shall I offer a sacrifice in honor of the Brotherhood of the Blade?"

Arnviðr had just told his lord a ribald little joke wherein a eunuch accidentally finds himself in the most renowned brothel in Constantinople and when presented with the options he is dumbfounded. Both men were so amused that Arnviðr had fallen over and Vulo nearly choked on a mouth full of expensive red wine. The Varagarian's implication that I was somehow like the eunuch was meant to insult me. In that moment it occurred to me that were I so inclined I could kill both these men before the guards interfered, but what would be the gain and did I really care what Arnviðr or Vulo thought of me? The answer was hard, but then the truth usually is, yes I cared both emotionally and intellectually. I needed the good will of both men if I was to rise within the pageant and that was my goal. I could not afford to alienate or kill either of them and killing out of wounded pride would be stupid. Taking life is a necessary evil, in the defense of oneself or a loved one, to prevent a greater loss of life or to achieve a greater end. None of these things would be served by needless butchery, so I turned off my emotions and offered them my best retort.

"Asphodelus Albus."

Both men stopped laughing and looked questioningly at me.

"The White Asphodel is the most renowned brothel in Constantinople. It is run by a dangerous little man who calls himself Aristidis Michelakos, who if rumor holds true, has ties to the imperial court and the emperor himself."

Vulo Vodach narrowed his eyes as he looked at me and asked:"Why is the brothel called the Asphodelus Albus?"

I was already turning on my heel and had stepped out into the night when I looked over my shoulder and replied: "Ah. Because the unopened flower, in shape, closely resembles a man's erect phallus."

Arnviðr gave me a cold look that told me that he knew of the White Asphodel, but that he had never been there, either due to lack of personal influence or coin. Vulo on the other hand, offered a minute nod of appreciation before I stepped fully into the night.

---

I walked away from Vulo's tent and the Pageant, down the the wooded hill recently turned green with springtime green and towards medieval Trier. My men met me at the edge of the encampment, like loyal hounds they fell in behind me as I passed.

Erdach Kodesh -- The Tarringan Castinate -- November of 1096

In the early hours before dawn, I rode my horse hard out of Wifilisburg in my return to the Pageant which was camped just outside a forgettable little village of Bökenförde. That little village lay twenty-six Roman miles north-west of Wifilisburg though what the locals called the Wälder bei Büren, a mere remnant of the ancient old growth Teutoburg Forest which has once covered most of this region and beyond. I only made two stops, one at midday as I passed through the village of Geseke which lay at the halfway point between Wifilisburg and Bökenförde and a few hours later at what I guessed was the halfway point between the two villages, a campsite at the ridge line between two valleys.

I arrived at Bökenförde an hour before dusk and both the horse and I were bone tired. I left the horse at the Bestarium with Wilkin the fodder-boy. Before leaving, I placed a trio of silver coins in his hand and instructions for the horse's care. Wilkin was a ginger-haired youth from the Anglo-Saxon islands of Britain. I had heard in the Tent of Dionysus that Wilkin had been with the pageant a long time, though no one could remember exactly when he might have joined. I knew little enough about him, but we got along and I enjoyed bargaining with him, for he had a shrewd way about him.

As I walked away towards my tent, I wondered about what I really knew about anyone in the Pageant. A kid like Wilkin could well be a thousand years old and would I even begin to guess? Everyone in the pageant had secrets. I was no different. Perhaps Cronus had placed me in the path of the Pageant on purpose. After all, what was the pageant really? What purpose did it serve and who or what lay at its center? On the surface, the pageant was a sometimes shabby medieval circus, but the deeper one looked the more terrifying it becomes. Like a predatory plant, the pageant was seductive, luring in the gullible, the hungry, and the vain.

Caught between fatigue and the myriad mysteries of the pageant, I found my bed and dreamless slumber.

For a time there was black oblivion and then without warning, I found myself wandering a scorched landscape that mirrored in the large the burning thirst I felt within. Dust swirled around me filled with screams, and as I searched with stinging gritty eyes for their source, I stumbled over half-seen bodies in the dying light and there followed a bone-deep chill turned my breath to pale vapor. In that moment, so very fast my living heart beat, something horrible rose up before me and the fear was so very real that I could not breath.

Then a shudder passed through my body, beginning in the soles of my feet and arching up through my body like the fire from the heavens, directly into my skull. I was overwhelmed by a kind of horizontal vertigo, the sensation of sliding over a slippery surface and the gaining of traction that heralds a controlled stop. As my eyes finally opened and my conscious mind took over from my frightened animal brain, I shook off the last vestiges of slumber. I could see firelight flickering on the fabric of the tent wall opposite where I lay and upon the dusty gravel before my cot.

From my bed I rolled, feet forward and sat up with a naked sword in hand. Before I slept, I had nothing to drink and yet my head buzzed and throbbed as it would following a marathon drinking contest. But I wasn't hung over. The familiar feel of cobwebs on the brain and of slow moving thought processes told me that I had only slept two or three hours rather than the whole night.

As the disorientation began to fade, I stood up and peered outside. Beyond my tent flap the pageant was and was not as it should be. Night had fallen and the cook-fires burned brightly enough, but there were too few pageanteers hovering about those fires and despite the silhouette of tents placed properly, I could tell something about the encampment had changed. While I did not know it then, it was to be a night of revelations, a time of great possibilities and terrible deeds and already, some of us were dead - never to return.

Sword in hand, I emerged from my tent and walked to the nearest campfire. I was a bit unsteady on my feet as if I had just stepped off a merry-go-round, but I found my footing fast enough. The smell of freshly brewed coffee caught my attention and I quickly poured myself a cups worth and sipped the hot bitter brew as I cast about for any of my men. A cursory search revealed no one, inside or outside the the tents.

My next stop was the Tent of Dionysus. The tracks between the tents were wide enough for two, sometimes three men to pass abreast and as I passed the coordinated camps of each of the venues I observed a similar absence of those I knew from their habitual activities: food cooked unattended over dwindling fires, clothing or bedding that had been brought out to air or be beaten lay where they had been dropped, and most telling of all, the dray animals stood around nervously awaiting their grooming and feeding. Where was everyone? {Pageanteers present: Giulia, Ratan Orell & Vítor}

But before long I found the bulk of the pageanteers gathered on one edge of the encampment, staring towards the rising moon with a rapt kind of fascination.

The shadowed throng huddled together like herd animals fearful that a predator is about. But there was also a hush of expectation, the kind of anticipation that precedes public executions. Dread and a lust for blood emanated off the crowd in distant imitation of the mobs of Rome as they and their favored gladiator awaited the traditional thumbs up or down that presaged a warrior's death. Nowhere however, did I perceive a source for such visceral behavior, only the brightening of the horizon.

As I pushed my way through the gaggle of goggling pageanteers, I saw many familiar faces, not all of whom could I pair with a name. More than a few parted for me as if I registered to them as an authority figure. When I breached the foremost rank I found myself standing near Theodoric.

Even in a setting as uncommon as St.Calenda's Wandering Pageant, Odeum & Lunar Fair, one cannot just walk up to one's vampiric master and offer public obeisance. No, after our first encounter, Theodoric suggested that I treat him as just another member of the Lunar Fair. If I had been bound to him by the Cainite blood-oath, that would have been impossible. But for reasons even I do not understand, I seemed to be immune to the curse enforced loyalty that emotionally chains all ghouls to their vampiric domitors. However, this unexpected benefit came with significant danger, were Theodoric to realize his blood held no mastery over me, he would almost certainly have killed me as a potential threat to his survival. Under such circumstances it would be the vampiric thing to do and for that reason I had worked tirelessly to behave as if I were indeed bound to him by the Cainite blood he gave me from time to time.

As I moved to stand next to Theodoric, I glanced in the direction of the moon's rise, much as anyone would. But as I began to speak, it struck me, and I looked not once, but twice. The horizon was wrong, the pageant should have been camped next to the walls of Bökenförde. But there was no town. A forest should have surrounded both the town and our encampment, it too was missing. Involuntarily I stepped forwards and away from the crowd to partake of a full one hundred and eighty degree look at our surroundings. The pageant was now camped at the very center of a bowl-shaped valley. Every step I took stirred up small clouds of fine gray dust and everywhere I looked there was nothing but desolation, save for occasional clumps of spiny vegetation not unlike yucca. The valley's floor sloped away, gently gaining elevation as it moved from our location to the distant gray cliffs that formed the rim of the valley, several miles away.

Standing there, gaping like a fool, the broken pieces of my nightmare returned to me and the sensations that immediately followed had been a side effect of whatever had brought us to this inhospitable locale. As I strode back to Theodoric with several questions in mind, he made the faintest of nods towards me or rather at something behind me and I spun about to witness the rising of an alien moon. It came up fast, clearing the horizon in what I estimated to be mere moments and its silvery light quickly illuminated the darkened valley to the brilliance of twilight. But the speed and brightness of the moon were not its only effect for I could feel a change come over everyone present, a kind of nervous energy that was followed by what felt like a faint tremor in the ground and a stirring of the air.

When the full silvery moon was a hand's span from the horizon another illumination followed it and the silent crowd began to murmur. This time, the entire horizon took on a ruddy gold glow and I feared that the sun was rising in this strange place. As I turned to warn Theodoric, I found him standing next to me and before I could speak he shushed me with a faint shake of his head. The second moon was many times the size of the first and as it came up over the edge of the valley I felt it in the pit of my stomach and in the trembling of the soil, a tidal effect without the sea. The smaller moon had been too bright after the dark of night to see the details of its surface, but this second moon was huge, and it rose far more slowly. I saw quite clearly with only the naked eye and in great detail the countless craters that pockmarked its gibbous surface of salmon and gold.

Hypnotic as the rising moons were, I turned towards where Theodoric should have been, and he was gone. Even as I pushed my way back through the gathered onlookers, I could hear the long solemn sound of the ram's horn signaling our departure. Fear and confusion pulsed through me as I walked back to the tents of my men, where I found Theodoric waiting for me.

Before my campfire, the storyteller spun a tale both frightful and fascinating. Countless eons ago, theoretically at the beginning of time, this world was one of the first created by the elder gods. And it was here, a world called Heimur Byrjunar, that gave birth to both gods and giants. The prehistory of the pantheons of Earth began with the childlike races of gods and giants testing their powers against each other, warping first the land and then the very rules of nature until they created some kind of supernatural blight. This corruption of natural laws poisoned the land and twisted the native flora and fauna into monstrous predatory forms, and even the magical energies of this place became dangerous to use.

An unspoken truce evolved due to these events and the gods of the earliest pantheons worked together to seal off this realm from all other realms for fear that its corruption might spread to the rest of the multiverse. After the vanishing of the gods, the sentient races of this world found sorcerous ways to protect and nourish isolated locales from the encroaching desert that slowly covered the planet.

Millennia later, about the time of the rise of the city of Rome, there was a decline in the faith of the White faced Priests for their goddess Carna who had originated the lunar carnival in the distant years of prehistory. One of Carna's high-priests found a scroll containing not only the history of Heimur Byrjunar, but a means by which to travel there. Seeking to scare his priesthood into renewing their faith to the goddess of masks and exchange, he used the scroll to bring that ancient carnival to this world and here they wandered for a year.

Eventually the survivors, for many members of that Roman era carnival were lost here, found a way back to Earth located just outside the city of Tsev Fuabtis. This desolate desert world is known in the oral histories of the Pageant as Erdach Kodesh, the world abandoned by all the gods. We would find no cults or religions here, not temples or priesthoods and all the miracles both light and dark of the Pageant would be absent. In Eradach Kodesh, there was no Weirdling Wall to protect the pageanteers from external and internal threats, all bargains are suspended as are their miraculous gifts, and for those who died here no hope of rebirth as could be expected elsewhere.

In the light of the two moons, Theodoric's face looked more corpse-like than before and the firelight seemed to add to that impassive and noble face elements of fear and uncertainty, but only for an instant. When I looked away and back again, he appeared as he always had, like a statue that had been waiting there on the other side of the fire for years. I mulled over all that he said while around us the pageanteers worked at double time to break camp and prepare for a new journey. But to where?

After mulling over all that the Night Minstrel had revealed, I rose and asked his permission to scout the surrounding terrain. He watched me with hooded eyes like chips of arctic ice that seemed florescent in the queer moonlight. He merely nodded and as I turned to make my way to the Bestarium, his voice followed me, low and like an auger it bored into my back. This region was called the Tarringan Castinate and it was where the pageant always arrived when it transitioned to Erdach Kodesh. As I turned to ask him more of what he knew of this place, I saw that once again he was gone and in frustration I returned to my original objective.

I encountered my men on the way to the Bestarium, two I sent to pack up our belongings and the other two I took with me to reconnoiter. Once beyond the borders of the Pageant, we took off at a gallop, leaving a trail of dust behind us to mark our passage. As we had materialized in the very center of the Tarringan Castinate , a wide open flat floored valley from which the light and the smoke of our cook-fires would have been seen for many miles in all directions both before and after the rising of the moons, I felt no need to try and hide our presence. If there were anyone or anything in this mournfully empty land, they had already spotted us hours ago.

The sudden burst of speed, the violence of the horses bodies as we raced across the floor of the valley answered the strange waves of emotion that moved through me like lightening. As a mortal, I had always struggled with my emotions, that strength of passion diminished after my Embrace and for decades after my mind was largely calm. When it came time to train with my mentor among the Abyss mystics, I learned a much greater depth of calm, almost the death of emotion that was required to embark upon the study of Stygian secrets.

But since my mortal rebirth in Alexandria earlier this year, I found myself once again struggling with those very emotions I thought I had put to rest forever. In hues both bright and dark those emotions plagued my every waking hour. The Pageant with its constant temptations made this situation all the worse as desires I had long thought dead rose from the ashes of my formerly cold heart. Worst of all was loneliness, as a Cainite, I had never really felt the need of companionship or intimacy. Darkness served as my closest friend, my lover and my god. In becoming mortal again, I was severed from the perfect unity with night, shadow and the Abyss. Like a man falling out of love, I was bereft of that which had sustained me for decades.

A rigorous schedule, constant meditation and a host of new threats kept me from sliding down the slippery slope of humanity. But since the rising of Erdach Kodesh's two moons, I was once again struggling. I had seen that mere mortals were affected by that strange light, I could not imagine what the shape-shifters of the pageant must be feeling. My senses seemed enhanced as colors and details leapt out at me and my emotions were a wild riot of vibrant hues where once there was only darkness. But riding, the unity of beast and rider, the need for watchfulness and the wide open spaces seemed to dim my chaotic emotions as I tuned into the horse's need to be free and wild. It would take me a little longer to understand the source of my emotional struggle, after all there were many concerns with which to distract myself, but even so I should have realized sooner.

We rode for several miles in the direction of the rising moons, which I labeled east. The flatness of the valley's floor made judging distances harder, but not impossible and my guess is we had ridden for five or six miles when we noticed a slow increase in elevation and sighted a number of small mesas that extended out from the canon wall of the valley's edge in our general direction.

It was then that I wished for spyglass so that I could see further than mortal eyes would allow. I added it to a growing list of items I intended to create for myself, just because I was marooned in the tenth century, did not mean I had to give up all the benefits of a twenty-first century technology. But such innovations had a tendency to escape into the wider world and like the proverbial genie, once out of the bottle it would be very difficult to put things back to normal. I would need to be cautious in that regard.

We stopped long enough to water the horses from leather buckets and half empty our own water skins. We were all breathing with difficulty for the air was thin and dry, and that was affecting our horses more than us as they were the ones exerting. I had no idea when the sun had set in this world, but it must have been an oven for I was only now feeling the night air growing cool. It made sense that without any kind of real vegetation most of the heat from the surface of the planet would radiate out into space.

That meant the next few hours were going to get colder, a lot colder and we were still some distance from high ground. I took a horse blanket from my saddlebags and cut a v-shaped hole in the center large enough for my head and neck to fit through, a poncho. My men quickly imitated me and soon we were in the saddle again riding hard for the mesas.

An hour later, we were probably twenty miles from the last location of the pageant as we started working our way up the gentle slope of the low lying mesas. The horses were winded from our ride and struggled to make it up to the flat hilltop ahead. We had plenty of light from the two moons, the smaller of which was almost halfway across the vault of the sky, and the larger slower moon well above the eastern horizon, I calculated it would take more than a night to complete its orbit. Still we took it slow. Out here working our way up a rubble strewn hillside, even with good lighting risked breaking a horse's leg and the horses were now irreplaceable. We could not know for sure if this world even had horses or anything like them and while I was in good shape, I had no desire to walk all the way to our destination.

When we finally attained the level high ground, I realized that the valley, was actually a massive crater about forty to fifty miles in diameter, we had come halfway to the crater walls, but there was no sign of civilization in sight. The mesa's surface held the bleached white bones of what I took to be herd animals from their numbers and the locations of the skeletons. We also found wooden spears with obsidian heads and I took one as a souvenir, along with a few curious bones and horns we hacked off with our swords.

During the ride back, my mood was one of contemplation. Theodoric was not one to impart knowledge without purpose and his history lesson while epic and informative seemed to have as its point something other than mere educational value. As we rode, I turned his words around and around in my mind trying to understand his point.

Obviously this primal world figured deeply into the Pageant's power struggles, I could see the advantage of bringing the pageant here. Everywhere else, the pageanteers were essentially immortal, they could be slain, but would likely return which made succession difficult. Those who wished to advance themselves within the Pageant needed to bring us here so that they could kill or subjugate their chosen targets. But clearly this strategy was a risky one for those seeking to elevate themselves could just as easily be slain and if the rules of politics held here as they did on Earth, then the incumbent individual would have the upper-hand even here.

Still a nagging feeling told me I was still missing something from Theodoric's lecture. After all, the history of the Pageant seemed to come towards the last part of his story. The legend of Erdach Kodesh as the birthplace of the first gods seemed too mythical to really be the point.

Ironically the middle of his tale seemed to hold the whole story together, for the early gods and giants had abandoned this world after a nasty little war that warped not only the land, but the native lifeforms and magic itself. These warlike pantheons had even quarantined the planet in some mystical way. If those ancient and savage gods had gone to that much effort, whatever horror they had created here had been dangerous beyond belief.

Theodoric had called it corruption, perhaps something virulent? But not something purely biological for it had affected physical and mystical laws as well. How long could such a force remain viable? Eons have passed since the birth of the cosmos, wouldn't this mutagenic force have long since subsided by now? If not, how was it communicated? If it was through the air we had already been exposed. If it was in the land or water, it could theoretically be avoided, but not for long. If like radiation it was simply present in all things, then all we could hope to do was leave this place quickly.

As we came galloping into the encampment, I could tell the Pageant was almost packed up, but as we dismounted I immediately sensed something was off. The cold dry dusty air reeked of fear and distrust, and it was then that I realized the truth, it was not my emotions that were out of control, no I was feeling all those around me, drowning in their fears, desires and aspirations.

Since my rebirth, I had lost all my vampiric powers and had slowly become unable to even ingest Theodoric's blood. At this point I still did not understand how such a thing could happen, but I had faked my way through most of the Night Minstel's tests. I had all but resigned myself to a mundane life when a few months ago my psychic abilities seemed to return. As a vampire, the bloodline to which I belonged had no special affinity for psychic ability, but I had mastered the discipline of Auspex nearly as easily as the holy art of Obtenebration.

Erdach Kodesh's moons obviously had a strong impact on the pageanteer's emotions, but for me to feel them at such a distance meant my psychic numina were growing faster than I had thought. Or perhaps the moons did enhance my abilities as well, I could not know for sure yet. But time would reveal the truth eventually.

Leaving our horses with the wagons, the three of us made our way to Vulo's gaily painted tent. Several of his men were outside, but this time they were not lounging and while we were still a dozen paces from the entrance to his tent, they confronted us wanting to know what we wanted. Their distrust and hostility hit me like a wave and for a moment I failed to react. Then regaining my composure, I explained that we had ridden quite far out and had a report for Vulo.

One of Vulo's most trusted warriors listened to what I had to say, refused to touch the bones or the obsidian headed spear and politely, for a Bulgarian warrior, told me and my men to be off. Rather than risk a conflict, we backed away and returned to our wagons in time to hear the second call of the ram's horn which signaled our imminent departure.

The Telling of the Bees

The passage of a few hours found the Pageant a semi-broken wagon trail, fragmented by mutual distrust, and stretched out further apart than I would have liked. My men, our wagons and those loyal to me formed our own train of seven. Among those wagons were those of a German merchant and his family, a family of Jewish bookbinders, and a rabbi whose family I had saved in the city of Worms. What the merchant and his family or the Jews thought of Erdach Kodesh, I could not imagine, nor did I care.

I drove Theodoric's wagon along an ancient and nearly unused road that we found a few hours into our journey. The landscape we passed through began to change gradually, patches of rusty brown soil began to appear amidst the granular gray dirt so common within the crater and large protrusions of iron rich stone became more regular as we approached the crater's rim. The air had grown steadily colder and my breath steamed in the moonlight like the exhalation of dragons.

In the brightness of the night, the dry and desolate terrain looked more like the lunar surface than any place that I had visited on Earth. As the road meandered toward the crater's rim, I observed that there were few if any likely places for ambush and turned to study Theodoric's profile.

By the ruddy light of Figylese Hold the vampire's complexion was almost healthy. Theodoric had obviously been in his late sixties or early seventies when he had "fallen beneath the Shadow", a euphemistic term often used by members of Clan Lasombra for the journey into immortality.

His eyes burned an arctic blue in the brighter glare of the smaller silver moon, Keresese Hold. And in the ample light, I could see the faded liver-spots and wrinkles that made up the roadmap of old age. Crisscrossing that stern visage were deeper crevasses, one moved diagonally across his mouth from left to right, another stretched parallel to his nose and a third ran from the outer edge of his left eye to the left corner of his mouth, old mortal scars that told the tale of a warrior's life. His silver-white hair and matching beard, cropped short as a Roman soldier might, granted his harsh face a kind of faded elegance, like a lion grown old, but not weak.

While I had thought my study of Theodoric surreptitious, I was wrong and his voice broke the silence of hours, low and melodic. "You have questions?"

I did not answer immediately as I turned a variety of questions over and over again in my mind. The crux of the problem was that the medieval mindset was vastly different than that of my own era and in some ways, although not all, I had more in common with the Romans and their world view. The medieval mind and the question and answer response was deeply colored by Christianity and the trinity. Serious questions, were almost always offered up in sets of three and who was I to question the way of my new world.

The night lay utterly quiet around us save for the sounds of our wagons and the horses that drew them. And I decided to start at the beginning.

“By what mechanism were we brought to Erdach Kodesh, my lord?”

The Night Minstrel had closed his eyes and seemed to be listening to something I could not detect, my heartbeat perhaps, the conversations of those in the wagons behind us, or to something altogether other. And when he did speak, his words produced no visible vapor in the maroon lit night.

“The Antiramhyras device, an ancient orrery that allows the Pageant to move through gateways to other worlds. It had been given into the care of Rodolph the mess-cook, whose job it is to steer our ship from one world to another and of late, he has been receiving tutelage from Astarte. The night before our arrival here, Rodolph and the device went missing.”

Again my mind turned suspicious, for it was not Theodoric's way to provide information so freely and yet, since our arrival on this desert world he had become uncharacteristically informative. Perhaps it was just that in this place, without all the tools of protection usually afforded to the pageanteers, he felt vulnerable and sought to provide his servants with the best information available in the hopes of quickly finding the Antiramhyras device and escaping this place. But another part of me, that voice that whispered from the darkness, questioned Theodoric's motives and his recitations theatrical nature, for while he had answered the question he had done so rather obliquely.

Of course, none of these things meant anything really. For the Night Minstrel was a performer and reasonably enough his explanation would seem theatrical. As to the nature of his circumspect answer, old vampires were by nature cautious and if he seemed reticent, well I had only recently come into his service. Why should he trust me?

I set all that aside as I prepared my next question.

“Who would have motive to bring the Pageant to Erdach Kodesh?”

Theodoric's still form had slowly grown hazy as shadow began to coalesce along his form, leaving nothing visible save for his seemingly disembodied head. And as he turned to look at me, I felt a touch of uncharacteristic fear, as his crystalline eyes bore into mine and I felt a driving need to look away. As I did so, his voice was like a susurration of bitter smoke blown into my ear.

“So, we have come to the Telling of the Bees. Before you can understand the motives of the various pageanteers, you must first understand what they have become. The Pageant is like unto a hive of bees, there are drones for performing common labors and there are warriors for protection, there are attendant maids who look after the queens of the hive and the queens themselves.”

“Our hive is multi-generational and newcomers like yourself are of the lowest rung, who have yet to discover their place within our community. All too quickly, newcomers discover that the Pageant moves to its own rhythm apart from the world, time passes differently once one becomes a drone and the dance of the daily routine becomes all.”

“The bees of our hive, work ceaselessly to acquire honey for their Keepers. Individual drones gather nectar from countless flowers and bring it back to the hive, where it is slowly transformed into honey. The honey is apportioned to individual bees based on their rank within the hive, most of the honey flows upwards to the queens who take their due and pass the lion's share to the hive's keepers who ensure the hive is protected.”

“Years, decades and sometimes even centuries can pass before the individual bees awaken from their appointed routines. Like any normal hive this can come from some external threat or it can be triggered from within.”

“In times of strife, the hive becomes agitated and if not attacked from without, then they turn their stings upon their fellow bees. This is sometimes called Physis, and during such times certain bees may change their caste if they successfully sting and kill a rival. Even queens are not immune to such struggles and as the queens have the most to lose, they insulate themselves with their most trusted attendants.”

“But these times of violent activity are dangerous for all, because previously stable alliances can crumble without warning and old friends can become new enemies. While our hive is normally static, such violent convulsions can create a new order for us and those with the most ambition rise through their own effort and the misfortune of those immediately above them.”

“The Gordian knot of your question lies in the fact that during times of stasis those with power over others often abuse it, creating resentments or vendettas that slowly metastasize until they explode during a time of physis. Quite literally anyone could have had the motive to bring us to Erdach Kodesh to kill a rival, but very few have the means to achieve this. Those with arcane skill are the most likely culprits and for the last century or so, there has been a growing struggle for power between Sender and Mauritanus.”

The ground beneath the wagon's wooden wheels began to gain significant incline and the labored breathing of the horses belched forth a blood tinted brume in the fuchsia light. Just a mile or two shy of the crater's rim, we could see the rough stone walls, a two hundred feet high, layered in strands of iron rich ore that stood out in bands of coral and crimson, magenta and maroon.

When we finally crested the rim, there lay before us a sere brown plain that stretched at least fifty miles wide to either side of our wagon train. The road visibly straightened as it left the crater behind and seemed to drift due east.

The plain was almost perfectly flat, the soil the color of brown sugar and of a similar consistency, and no life could be seen, neither plant nor animal. When the sun rose as it surely must, there would be no place to hide and in this flat terrain the temperature would rise fast and cook anything caught out in it. To the north and south, lay distant hills of a darker color, but they came nowhere near the road. We would have plenty of time to see the dust trails of raiders or warning of a dust storm.

We rode along the lightly rutted track, through brown emptiness and I tried to choose my next question carefully, all while trying to stay warm. It was deeply cold and the arid air made every breath painful as the small silver moon sank beyond the western horizon, the larger, slower one reached its apex. The shadows of our train began to lengthen before I spoke again.

“If the master of coin and the master of ceremonies are struggling for greater power, does that hurt your position or help it?”

Theodoric laughed, and for the first time, it held a genuine note of humor. In the waning light of the greater moon, he was almost invisible beside me.

“The word you seek Aegon, is Ascension, that is the treasure for which they quest. To reach the pinnacle of power within the Pageant and to become one of only three true masters, the Infernal Trinity.”

“The answer to your question is complicated, but provided they do not attack the Master of Two Worlds their struggles are their own. Concern yourself not, with Mauritanus or Sender, they will only try to drag you into their battles and I have for you a far more important mission. Find the Antiramhyras device, whomsoever holds the device holds us hostage in this place and the longer we tarry here, the more of us will die the final death."

Dalm Eberhard

I awoke with a start. Nothing identifiable had awakened me: the plodding sound of the horse's hooves, the metallic jingling of the harnesses, and the steady rattle of the wooden cart in which I slept were all perfectly ordinary. Still, something had brought me up out of deep slumber without even the hint of half-remembered dreams.

I lay snugly wrapped in old horse blankets at the bottom of the cart. I had no recollection of falling asleep, or of laying downing in the cart, nor even how long I had slept. But, for too long, I had been living a twilight existence, a sleepwalker who never really rested and when I finally ran out of energy, the lights must have just gone out. I had slept so long, that my eyes were crusted shut with sleep and my body stiff from lack of movement. Rubbing at my eyes I found myself looking up into a starless night sky.

Black without relief, an infinity of emptiness, Erdach Kodesh, its sun and two moons were the only inhabitants of this universe. It was as if the abyss had swallowed every distant sun. However, I doubt this likelihood, rather I believe that when the gods left this place and sealed it off, they were ensuring that whatever they were running from, it would have no other place to escape to and no other place to infect.

Stiff from lying on my back for too long and with a strong need to relieve myself, I shed my blankets with regret and heard a high shrill whistle from the front of our cart. Shortly thereafter, a cessation of motion. I leapt from the back of the cart and landed in the middle of the dry and dusty road. From the rear of the cart, I could see each of our other wagons by the feeble glow of their lanterns. I urinated right there in the middle of the road and wasted no further time as I made my way to the front of the cart.

I expected to see Theodoric's indistinct form, but encountered Dalm Eberhard holding the cart reins. Dalm was a fellow soldier whom I had know in the eastern legions, a somewhat younger man who upon retiring had no family to which to return, and had accompanied me into retirement to Alexandria in Egypt. Like Salivius Ludovicus, the man whose life I had appropriated, Dalm was a eastern German and the two of us had bonded during our final campaign for the new Komnenid dynasty under Emperor Alexios I - the Battle of Levounion.

Levounion...That name has such power to conjure my host's memories that I sometimes forget that it was not me who fought there. The battle took place on April 29th, 1091. A horde of Pechenegs (a semi-nomadic Turkic people whose westward migration led them to settle the regions immediately north of the Black Sea) eighty thousand strong had descended into Byzantine territory and plundered much of the northern Balkans on their way to besiege Constantinople.

The Emperor Alexios had gathered what troops he could, twenty thousand in total, after the debacle of the Battle of Manzikert twenty years earlier and then with ingenuity and diplomacy brought the strength of the Cumans (another nomadic Turkic people who were enemies of the Pechenegs) tribes to Constantinople's side in the conflict.

I remember the earth shaking as the united Byzantine-Cuman army marched towards the greatest battle of our generation. The Pechenegs has plundered about one hundred and fifty miles south and west of Constantinople, and were encamped on the fields of Levounion just north of the ancient port city of Ainos. They had eighty thousand men and our combined forces numbered only sixty-five thousand, despite our might many feared that we would not be victorious and that the Queen of Cities, Constantinople would fall to these foreign barbarians.

The battle began at dawn and lasted until the last light of day. When we marched upon the Pecheneg encampment, we found their warriors unprepared for battle and large numbers of their women and children with them. So encumbered, they fought a losing battle from the beginning. Despite their error, the Pechenegs were fearless warriors and fought almost to the last man. But bloodlust once raised is not so easily slaked, and with the collapsed of their defenses, the order was passed to slaughter the Pechenegs, it was a massacre.

At that time, Dalm Eberhard was the second in command of my century and once the formations disintegrated into a melee, we fought back-to-back throughout that savage day. When it was over, the fields of where the Pechenegs had camped were an abattoir, human blood had turned all the nearby streams crimson and the sky was black with carrion birds. The slaughter was so thorough that when it was over there were less that a thousand Pecheneg survivors taken as slaves by the Empire.

My host and Dalm Eberhard had saved each other many times over the course of that battle. The next day, after the prodigious plunder was divided up, there was a jubilant celebration and I treated the survivors of my century to the whores of Port Ainos. We drank a river of Greek wine, swore oaths of brotherhood and fucked all night. After the legions returned to Constantinople, we both resigned from the army and took our spoils south to Egypt and a well earned retirement.

All these things passed through my mind as I came upon Dalm on the wagon seat.

In Alexandria, Salivius Ludovicus and Dalm Eberhard became quite good friends, that is until the arrival of the Pageant and the fateful events at the Inn of the Joyous Harpy and the ill conceived expedition to the Temple of Ereshkigal. Since my mystical assimilation of Salivius, I had put distance between Dalm and myself. He perhaps best of all sensed the difference in my behavior and the fact that he witnessed my resurrection and return to youth lay at the heart of my decision to avoid him. But that is not the entire truth, for my feeling for Dalm although inherited from another man, are quite real and of a character far too intense for me to allow their survival. It is no easy thing being a man with two sets of memories.

At first neither of us spoke, there was much that lay between us and neither of us knew how to begin such a conversation. Then I began to detect a growing illumination that began to paint the wagon, its rider and the horses in greater detail. I looked east, or what I thought of as east, and saw the horizon fast growing bright. Sunrise on Earth was never this fast, for as I watched a faint gray line crossed the horizon, then it shifted to pink and then a unsavory orange.

In that moment, the awkward almost conversation was forgotten as a startling chill ran from my lower spine to my head and my whole body faintly shuddered. My expression must have changed because Dalm showed concern and asked if I was well. I wasted no time in trivialities and told him to carry word to the other wagons that we must feed and water our animals now for once the sun rose they would sicken if fed in the coming heat. He must have thought I was mad to issue such a command in the deep dry cold of the predawn, but I knew better.

By the time Dalm returned, the bronze orb of Boontetese, often called the Punishing Sun by those pageanteers who had survived the last visit to Erdach Kodesh, was a quarter over the horizon and we both felt the need to begin shedding garments. By the time we finished feeding and watering the horses, the punishing-sun was half up and we had both divested ourselves of excess clothing and still the heat increased.

Neither of us lost further time as we took our seats on the cart and Dalm who preferred to be called Eben, handed over the rains to me as in recognition of my superior skill as a wagoner (one who drives a wagon). Reaching into the back of the cart, I grabbed one of my packs for a spare shirt which I wrapped around my head and face the way a Bedouin on Earth would have his turban. As Eben followed suit, I dusted the flesh around my eyes with charcoal dust much as kohl was used by North African travelers, the ancient version of sunglasses for it reduces the the glare of desert light.

"Salivius, our lord Theodoric has tasked me with informing you of what lies ahead."

At the use of my hosts original name, I turned to say something acerbic about using my preferred designation and immediately halted as I noticed a foreign look upon Eben's face, fawning. I did not bother to delve his emotions with my numina, it was as plain as the expression on his face for he was enslaved to Theodoric through the Blood. A part of me that should have felt nothing surged with anger and jealousy, Theodoric had stolen my only possible friend and there was nothing I could do about it. Plans that I had hidden even from myself were crushed and only then did I realize the depth of my isolation; I worked, slept and ate with members of the pageant, but none of them knew me, not the real me and I was alone.

"Look there, beneath the sun, that long straight line of hills are a great wall, called the Fenevad Fal or Beast Wall, created ages ago by forgotten wizards to protect the people of this place from creatures called Dearc Magra. Theodoric says they are a kind of giant lizard like the Green Lizard of the Balkans, but a fast moving pack predator that moves only by day and hunts by eye-sight."

I merely nodded and signaled the wagon-train to begin moving. The next hour saw the rising of Erdach Kodesh's second sun, Megolte a Naapot, or the "killing sun." I had no questions as to why the people of this place called the second sun a killer, it rose white-hot over the horizon in just minutes and overtook Boontetese within the hour. My guess is in that in the two hours since the suns began their rise the temperature has risen from near zero to well over a hundred degrees. I no longer had any doubts that the heat was going to kill both dray animals and the weaker pageanteers, nothing we did could change it and the longer we tarried the greater the heat.

Time and the two suns were are truest enemies, so I nudged our horses gait up to a trot knowing that the carts and wagons behind us would follow suit. Eben reiterated more of what he had been told by Theodoric while we both watched for the Dearc Magra from our respective sides of the cart.

"Last night, after you fell asleep, Theodoric told me that before we reach the Beast Wall, we will pass through lightly rolling hills that were once upon a time covered by a forest. The remnants of the giant trees that once covered the region are now bleached pillars of petrified wood, a region the locals referred to as the Blijeda šuma or Pale Forest, and it is there that the Dearc Magra tend to congregate. Its only about ten miles through the hill country and then there is a flat open stretch between the hills and the wall."

"The Fenevad Fal itself is two hundred miles long with a set of iron gates in the center for controlling trade. The wall's main fort is at the gate, as is a small settlement that serves the needs of the defenders called: Kurva Város. Theodoric also said that we would be met at the gate by a small contingent of defenders to negotiate our passage through the wall, if we fail to pay upfront then we will be left to fight the beasts in the flat-lands before the wall."

I had to smile to myself, the defenders had cornered the market on trade, much like the nobility of Europe charging exorbitant fees to merchants traveling through their ancestral lands. I arranged for regular stops to water the horses, some of the less intelligent in our train complained that the horses were consuming too much water and there was little or none left for their owners. I quickly pointed out that it was their decision and that if they did not water the horses regularly those animals would die in this heat and we would leave them behind. There were many foul looks and some quietly voiced epithets, but no one, individually or as a group looked ready to challenge my decision, which was wise.

As the day stretched on hour by merciless hour, the heat shimmered upon the arrow straight road, causing it to slither hither and yon like a desert born sidewinder. Every breath was filled with pain, burned the back of the throat and the nostrils even as the hot air brought with it acrid dust. Equally, beasts of burden and men struggled beneath the unforgiving heavens in a day that seemed without end. The only mercy that could be found in this unforgiving world came when the second smaller sun, Megolte a Naapot, settled in the faux-western horizon. The heat dropped measurably from roughly one hundred and forty degrees to around a hundred. It was not called the Killing Sun without reason and gave opportunity for optimism however brief in that the second sun would only remain down for six hours and then rise again like a wicked phoenix returned to slay us all.

Heat and dust were not the only things to be found upon the road, from the corner of the eye one might glimpse a shimmer that resolved itself into an emerald oasis that held the promise of shade trees, cool water and sweet fruits. Sometimes we were obliged to stop our wagon-train when members of the pageant who were overcome with thirst or maddened by the heat would take-off running into the open desert. Most were retrieved by loved-ones, but some few vanished into the shimmering heat, never to be seen again.

Those who were brought back, often showed signs of sunstroke, and were confined to the shaded interiors of our few covered wagons. Our group had no physician, but some of the Jews who had made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, like Rhebarku the Younger spoke of the illness in hushed whispers and shook their heads.

These events became more common as the day passed, and I set Constance Garçon, a Frankish woman who had come into my service in Paris to looking after the afflicted. Constance was a somewhat dowdy woman in her early thirties, a spinster maid from the royal court of Paris, and plain to a fault. However she possessed two qualities that I held in high regard, loyalty and obedience, and she could be trusted to do whatever was asked of her without question.

To aid her a difficult task I gave her both water and salt. And although the giving of fluids containing the essential salts and minerals to victims of dehydration and sunstroke would not become a recognized treatment until the Twentieth Century, it was I believe, a necessary breach of history to ensure that the Pageant would survive this wasteland to return to Earth.

Ever the road wore on in the oven-hot bronze-white sunlight. Eben and I tried to keep a perennial lookout for the predatory beasts of this harsh world. But there are limits to what the mortal form could handle and by my reckoning it had been well over thirty hours since either of us slept.

Briefly, I handed over the reins to Eben, as I dug about in my pack for a bottle carved from horn and stoppered with Portuguese cork; my most prized possession. Inside said bottle were white pills the size of a man's little fingernail and formed from a mixture of dragon-bone dust and Gum arabic, the former was a kind of mystical amphetamine that boosts the perceptions and reflexes of the user, while the latter served as a binding agent and slowed the bodies rate of absorption through the gut.

I quickly pulled forth two tablets, sealed the jar and re-wrapped it in my pack. I proffered one of the tablet to Eben, who seemed dubious, but accepted the tablet with mild curiosity. Wisely he waited until I took my pill and washed it down with steaming water in a wooden cup.

Even as I handed him the cup and took the reins, I could feel the dragon-bone dust beginning to affect me. It began at the edges of my vision, seeming to widen my field of view and brightening colors, from there it seemed to magnify the distances I could see and added greater focus and contrast to what I saw. The bright glare of the two suns was diminished and a pleasant coolness spread across my skin numbing the standard aches and pains of travel as well as my sunburns. In minutes my fatigue was washed away and a newfound restless energy took its place as my sense of time seemed to contract and a uncontrollable grin spread across my face. The final effects were an alien euphoria and the inflaming of all the animal instincts and passions.

As I glanced at Eben, I could see all the hairs of his face, the fine pores of his skin, the sun darkened pigmentation dappled with saline sweat and the burgundy of his blood as it rose to cool his flesh. But it was not my sense of sight alone that benefited from the dragon-bone dust, for I could smell the sour man-sweat that clung to him - the dust - and the rotting odor of the blood Theodoric had most recently fed him. With little concentration I could hear his heart beating faster, the raw rasp of his lung tissues stretching and then a strange rumble that I first took to be his stomach, but came up through the frame of the cart from the wheels and from the ground beneath them. The Dearc Magra had found us.

The Dearc Magra

The reins were forgotten and slipped from my hand as I stood up upon the driver's seat, so that I could look backwards to see the hundreds of desert dwelling and day hunting beasts. Their approach was like the oncoming storm, hundreds of greenish-brown bodies running at a gallop, a quarter mile behind our last wagon. Their stampede threw up a cloud of dust two hundred feet wide, that hung in the stingingly hot air like brass smoke. My newly enhanced sight revealed the situation with frightening clarity, while the euphoria separated me from the experience as if I were merely a spectator at a gladiatorial bout rather than the potential prey of a Triassic age pack predator.

A hundred yards behind our last wagon came the first of the Truckle Tent carts and riders, the riffraff followers of the Pageant, those poor souls who had abandoned their old lives with only the hope of entering our eldritch tribe. And behind them, the baggage carts trundled along under the weight of rolls of canvas, coils of rope, spare wagon-wheels and every variety of extraneous item that the wandering performers might need.

In the blisteringly still air, I could see the faces of the people in the two trains behind us, their screams were like the cheers of the crowd at the Roman Colosseum, and the listless flailing of their bodies as the baggage carts were over-taken thrilled my now predator hungers with the satisfaction of slaughter.

Then a matching thunder rose in counterpoint to the hoggish screams of the Dearc Magra. As I turned to face forward, Eben shouted at me to get down, but I stood with animal poise as our cart was drawn towards another cloud of dust from the east. For only a moment I thought, the Dearc Magra have carried out a pincer maneuver and then I saw the riders of the Brotherhood of Blades racing towards us in a double column formation that split around us with an earth-born thunder.

It did not matter that Eben whipped the horses into a gallop, or that our large two-wheeled cart bucked and jumped over every imperfection in the road, I stood upon the driver's seat as if I were an Olympic surfer riding the break absent fear and full of my own certain immortality. The elation of imperiousness led me to demand my bow and quiver and Eben complied. Under normal circumstances firing a bow from a wildly bucking cart would be impossible, but with the dust coursing through my veins, nothing was impossible and like the Samurai, I pulled a arrow from the quiver, nocked it, sighted my target and loosed the missile with the perfection of Apollo.

I took a creature in the eye and then the Brotherhood of Blades crashed into the herd of Dearc Magra with leveled lances. In the spray of dust, I could not separate the riders from the beasts or their victims, save for the fallen horses which were quickly pulled away by small packs to be devoured alive.

I never learned the fate of my prey, but an arrow seemed a poor way to slay when the ripping of flesh with talons and fangs would bring such joy. But then I saw the Brotherhood wheel about and abandon the baggage carts and their drivers to the herd of savage lizards, it was simply triage from a strategic point of view.

Our cavalry reformed on either side of the wagons of the camp followers, and as ambitious alphas of the Dearc Magra made solo attempts on the hindmost cart the Brotherhood quickly wounded them with long lances and let the blood-frenzied packs savage their own.

Blijeda šuma (The Pale Forest)

Sensing a change in the air, I dropped into sitting position next to Eben in time to behold the Blijeda šuma rise before us. A wind from the south blew a curtain of dun colored sand and hot air across the road as we drove the horses up the hill to what lay beyond. It was like someone opened one of the gates of hell, unleashing a wind so hot it seemed to turn my face to leather. I could barely see, until something slide down over my eyes, sealing them against the heat and sand. A nictitating membrane? A third eyelid? The pain from the sand and heat were still present, but they did not prevent me from seeing what lay around us.

Halfway up the road on the left-hand side, a wagon lay turned over, less than fifty feet away the still living remnants of the wagon's owners were being torn apart in a cruel game of tug-of-war by a young pack of Dearc Magra. The man was a cobbler named Berinhard and I think his wife's name was Hilditrut, and they had originally been from Trier. Berinhard had found the games of chance in the Shrine of Kairos quite thrilling and had lost his family's nest-egg along with his shop, however Sender the Jew had found a place for him and his family among the shrine's wagons. It was most generous of Sender to allow the cobbler to make shoes for himself and his guests at no extra cost and to reduce the man's faithful wife to a domestic servant, most generous indeed. Perhaps if the story had ended there, their tragedy would have been ugly but bearable, the horror was that they had brought their two children with them to the pageant.

I had never bothered to learn the names of the boy and girl, but the screams of the young are so very hard to ignore, they can follow you a lifetime. It must have been so with Eben, with little warning he launched himself off the cart and was running at full speed towards the doomed family and the waiting pack of Dearc Magra. The truth is that with my Dust enhanced reflexes I could have stopped him, but I did not and if I did not now intervene, Eben too would die. But if I did aid Eben in his ill conceived heroism, I would have to abandon the cart which would roll back down the hill and be lost to us and we would never make it to the Beast Wall on foot.

Searching for an alternative my eyes came to rest upon the overturned wagon. That was it! With the reins I urged the horses to draw the cart just past the wagon and then let them come to a stop, immediately the cart began to roll backward on the steep hill of sand. Haaa, I issued the command to back up and jerked back hard on the reins to the right, and the cart turned just enough to rest against the cobbler's wagon. Pulling the sword from my sheath, I leapt a good twenty feet and landed on my feet like a cat. I was halfway to Eben as he reached the children. He stood above the girl and boy, who were already bloodied, and swung about himself with his battle axe. The younger beasts were hungry and inexperienced as they rushed him the first time, but they learned quickly when the moon-shaped axe bite into their stinking hides.

Theodoric had given Eben considerable strength and speed through the blood, but it would not be enough to save him from a pack of four Dearc Magra. In one of my past lives I had gained considerable skill in battlefield tactics and put that lore to good use when I stayed downwind from the beasts and let Eben keep their attention.

The predator brought forth in me by the Dust thickened the nearby shadows enough to permit me a small shift, that covered my left arm in midnight dark scales and turned my left-hand into a four fingered claw with inches long talons. As I circled counterclockwise around the beasts and their prey, they made another attack on my friend. He killed one of his attackers, but was savagely bitten by another of the Dearc Magra in the right flank, and he was running out of time.

As the beasts withdrew beyond the reach of Eben's battle-axe, I attacked two at once, and from the rear. On my left side, my claws scored long juicy ribbons of flesh from a beast not yet mature and its porcine screams filled me with a heady desire to toy with it. The beast on my right side reacted to its packmate's warning, but could not side away quickly enough to avoid the heavy edge of my saber as it sheared through its leathery hide and cut deep between the bones of its neck severing its spine, it was crippled but not dead. The third young beast made a hungry grab for the boy and received a battle-axe buried to the handle in its head. The battle was over and the injured survivor fled into the dusty wind and was gone.

While my shift had only exposed my hand to the hazy light that filtered through the wind and sand, it was still enough to scorch my left hand badly and I immediately shifted it back to human. Bright hot pain lanced up my arm from my now blistered left hand and this time the Dust could not cut the pain. I gritted my teeth and strode over to Eben, shouting to gain his attention and to forestall the attack of a friend. He was kneeling on the ground with both children in his arms and crimson stained the right side of his coat. The boy had been bitten nearly in two and although he seemed aware, he would not last long. The girl was no better, she had received numerous bites all over her body and had lost an arm along the way, mercifully she was unconscious.

I knelt next to Eben, aware that he suffered not only in his flesh, but in his mind as well. I felt rather than listened to his heartbeat, its pulse traveled up my uninjured arm, it was pumping a little too hard trying to spread his diminishing blood around to all the necessary places.

"Eben, if the children are to live, you need to get up and carry one of them back to the cart. Their parents are depending on you to get them out of here. Eben, get up!"

A part of me knew that I was missing something important, Eben was a hard man who had killed many times and ravaged his share of women, such a man does not just suddenly decide to become a hero. Rather such a man seeks to absolve or redeem himself of past sins, undoubtedly the secret of his motivation lay in his past and possibly in that of Silivius, but delving for those memories would take time and time was a luxury I could not afford. The pack of Dearc Magra we had decimated were but juveniles of their species and it would not be long before their mother returned from foraging. The adolescent pups had each weighed three to four hundred pounds and neither Eben, nor I were prepared for a two-thousand pound plus matriarch mad as hell and looking for blood.

"Eben can you feel any of our master's blood still within you?"

He looked up then. His sweaty blond hair hung down into his blue eyes and when he looked up, I could see the pain in them. I repeated my question.

Every time he breathed, he faintly winced in pain and his reply was more painful still. "Yes"

"Eben, you are losing too much blood through the wound in your side. You must concentrate on the blood of Theodoric and will it to the site of your wound. Imagine his blood knitting your flesh back together and easing your pain. I know you are strong my friend, now show me that you can do this thing so that all of us can leave this place alive."

Kneeling there in the brown rank smelling sands, I watched him close his eyes tightly in concentration, then I heard his flesh knitting itself back together. A brief inspection revealed a puckered and gore covered scar that Eben would bear for the rest of his life and possibly beyond. With my help he got to his feet and I handed him the girl's dying body. Without another word, he turned away and made his way to the cart carrying the girl as if she were his messiah returned.

As I stood up, I turned to the boy and as gently as possible, I picked up his two halves and fitted them together in my arms. He weighed next to nothing, but he was stronger than he looked when he put out his arms and clung to me. I could smell his death approaching and over his shoulder I could see what remained of his parents.

"Close your eyes lad, rest if you can, we have a long way to go."

Like all children he had questions that needed answering. "Are my mom and dad ok?"

And I did what I did best. I lied. "Your parents have gone to heaven and will be waiting for you when you are ready. They are in a bright and shining place next to Jesus."

They had died on Erdach Kodesh, a world were no god would tread and a place quite possibly beyond the reach of Heaven. I had no idea what would become of his parent's souls and likely no one else alive on this planet knew either. Like Eben, the boy's heart was working overtime to move blood from his lungs to his heart and then to his brain and back again, but there was too little left and still he managed tears.

The wind blown sand scoured my burnt hand sending ever new eddies of fire up my left arm as I walked back to the cart. Over the sound of the wind, I heard a noise like cicadas and as I lay the boy's body down in the back of the wagon, I turned to look back the way I had come. There at the site of our recent battle, clouds of almost-sand were rising to consume the bodies of the children's parents and the Dearc Magra we had slain. Even the paralyzed beast I had left to die was being slowly consumed by a cloud of I know not what. A kind of insect, the size of a gnat and colored like the desert, that in large numbers could consume a human sized body in minutes. Not all the predators of Erdach Kodesh were large or obvious, here every creature is potential prey, and nothing goes to waste.

Eben sat in the back of the cart with the dying girl in his lap, where he stroked her hair and picked it clean of gore and sand. I propped the boy against him and made my way to the driver's seat and over the next hour or so, drove us through the Pale Forest.

As the wind and sand scoured us and the suns rained heat and burning light down upon our heads, we traveled through the Blijeda šuma. In my imaginings, I had erroneously assumed that the region which stretched fifty miles from north to south and through whose middle we traveled, had once truly been a forest. I had imagined a vast forest slowly petrified by the desertification of Erdach Kodesh, the truth was something else entirely. The underlying terrain of the region was that of a slowly drying lake-bed, although similar to the East African Rift Valley of Earth, the waters of this place were heavily alkaline and utterly poisonous to most mammals.

Once upon a time, a vast alkaline lake or inland sea had existed in this very place, but millennia of desertification had dried up all but a tiny portion of that ancient water-source. As it slowly dried up, it left behind Tufa (a variety of limestone formed when carbonate minerals precipitate out of ambient temperature water) of great size, sometimes several stories tall. But these limestone pillars were not why the region was called the Pale Forest, rather it was the endless piles of sun-bleached bone that littered the tea-colored sands for miles in every direction.

Clearly the Blijeda šuma had been the ancient aquatic habitat of the Dearc Magra during the amphibian stage of their evolution. Rather than die out or move away, the creatures had evolved to live in their new environment without ever leaving home. Now the Pale Forest was their mating-ground and spawning place and we humans were alien intruders threatening their ancient breeding grounds.

Our presence here was a recipe for disaster and someone had dropped us all into a boiling pot with the intent of making a bloody stew.

Over the next few hours, as Megolte a Naapot fell below the western horizon and Boontetese began its long descent, our shadows grew longer. I stopped the cart in the shade of one of the great Tufa towers where I gave the half-dead horses the last of our water. Whether due to his injures, general exhaustion or the heat, Eben slept deeply with the girl's body nestled against him. As I prepared to spread a tarp over the back of the wagon for shade, a pungent odor of decay wafted into my face. Both the children had died over the last couple hours, despite our connection to the supernatural, neither Eben nor I could have saved either of them. Oh so gently I removed both bodies so as not to waken my friend and walked them a hundred yards or so into the Pale Forest. From a distance I watched closely as the sand-mites (my name for them) devoured the remains of the children, right down to the bone. There would be no need for burials here and we were lucky the odor of decay hadn't attracted any other predators.

Our cart had barely returned to the road when the other wagons of our train came over a low hill behind us and after a brief meeting, we continued our journey eastward together. An hour or so later, we came to the top of a high plateau and looked down into a soda plain perhaps five miles wide which paralleled the Blijeda šuma. Upon the far side of the plain lay the gray bulk of the Fenevad Fal (Beast Wall) which blocked our route to the east as it stretch twenty-five miles to the north and south where it seemed to butt up against the shadowed masses of the native foothills.

Fenevad Fal (The Beast Wall)

The floor of the soda plain was slowly being consumed by the steadily advancing shadows cast by the high ridges of the Pale Forest as the greater of the two suns slowly sank towards the west. Like all of the Blijeda šuma the plain was bleached white with alkali, but all along its length it was dotted with shallow lakes of steaming soda water and the greatest accumulation of them lay directly between the great gates of the Beast Wall and where our wagons stood.

The string of steaming soda lakes was not all that stood between our wagon-train and the gates of the Fenevad Fal, several herds of Dearc Magra numbering in the thousands loitered in and around the chain of lakes, older, larger specimens lounged within the lakes, while younger groups of males battled each other to gain the attention of eligible females in estrus.

In order to reach the gates of the Beast Wall, the wagons would have to cut through the heart of the Dearc Magra's mating territory or go tens of miles out of our way, an impossibility due to our critical water shortage and the weakness of our dray animals. There was no doubt that some of our company would die in the crossing of this narrow plain, but then more would die if we did not cross now, it was no choice at all.

Once again we were all reassembled in preparation for the crossing, and I could hear Vulo Vadach yelling orders as he rode past on his young stallion, and all the riders of the Brotherhood of the Blade followed him towards the first set of wagons. I could already see that they intended to form a wedge of cavalry and open a hole in the massing herds. The riders hope was a simple one, that the Dearc Magra as predators would be startled by a sudden and aggressive attack in the heart of their territory where no other predator on this planet would consider hunting them.

Eben and I secured everything we could in preparation for the crossing, it would be a mad rush and we would drive the horses to a gallop across the plain in as short a time as possible. Even if the Dearc Magra were startled, their fear would no last long when they scented prey and some of our animals were near death which would add to the spice.

While Eben tied everything down in the back of the cart, I made a cursory inspection of the wagon wheels, the animal's tack and their horse shoes. And I also gave each of the horses one of my Dragon-bone dust tablets to bolster their energy, it was an experiment and a dangerous one, but now was the time for such risk taking if we were to survive.

We were barely in our seats when the long mournful call of the ram's horn drove us into motion. And then everywhere was the sound of cracking whips, screaming horses and the roar of our wagon-train as we collectively raced down the gentle slope of the hill and towards likely death.

The riders of the Brotherhood were first to reach the leading edge of the massed Dearc Magra, as they charged they dropped their lances and the burnt orange light of Boontetese played off their armor and the tips of their spears seeming to set them aflame.

The first of the Dearc Magra acted as any herd animal might, catching sight of an oncoming attack they scattered and opened a small hole in their masses for the wedge of riders who struck the next layer of beasts at a full gallop. The sound that followed reminded me of a car accident, the thunder of collision, the screams of dying horses mixed with the porcine squealing of the younger Dearc Magra.

I had only a second to observe the individual warriors as they displayed their combat prowess, but I was impressed for the number of scaled beasts dead and dying. There were loses on our side, two riders had gone down, one was already up on his feet, while the other was trapped beneath his dying horse. Then my sight of both men was lost as we rode past at a full speed and the bucking of the cart would have thrown both Eben and I into the milling herd if we had not tied ourselves to the wagon seat.

Once again we were near the middle of the wagon-train, but the careful arrangement of wagons was dissolving in the chaotic flight towards the gates of Fenevad Fal, and our horses suddenly started to pull faster than the other teams ahead of us and slowly we began gaining ground.

There was considerable danger here, and not all of it came from the Dearc Magra who were only now beginning to chase our individual wagons, the risk of a wagon collision and or a broken wheel were also potential death sentences for those who were unlucky. As if conjured by the fearful thought, one of the wagons paralleling us shattered a wheel on an unseen rock and the whole wagon went over on its left side spewing its contents of men, women, children and household goods into a nearby soda lake. Those steaming waters were toxic, caustically so, but those camp-followers were spared an ugly death of chemical burns by the hunger of a dozen Dearc Magra.

I had no time to process the fate of one family, my job was to drive the wagon, and it occupied the majority of my attention. Eben on the other hand, launched numerous arrows into the milling herd as if killing these creatures would somehow resurrect the dead children we had fought for in the Pale Forest, or perhaps to make up for a lifetime of thoughtless cruelties meted out on the battlefields of the Byzantine Empire's eastern provinces.

I measured the passage of time and the distance covered by the four-beat gait of our horses gallop and by the steady thrump of Eben's bow. When I could no longer hear the whir of Eben's bowstring, I risked a glance upward to see that the Beast Wall was no more than a mile distant. With my Dust enhanced sight I could pick out the ballista mounted regularly atop the wall and the dozens of men who marched at double time with military precision towards them. We were still too far away for me to make out the faces of those warriors or any real details about them, which was just as well for I needed to focus on guiding the horses and watching for minute protrusion or depressions on the surface of the dusty plain that could wreck our fast flying cart and its precious cargo of lives.

It was then that it occurred to me that our cart could be host to Theodoric's torpid body and that if we did not make it to the gates, centuries of life and experience would end here on an ugly soda plain upon an alien world where no one would care or mourn. But was my concern for Theodoric, a vampire and the only being on this godforsaken world for which I felt loyalty or kinship, or for myself? There was no time to consider these things, only time enough to apply the whip and drive the mad horses faster as we raced at a breakneck pace across a time hardened plain that shimmered with heat distortions and the haze of soda dust that seemed to burn bronze in the light of Boontetese.

Then, even over the clamor the Dearc Magra herds and the din of our galloping wagons, I could hears the tinny screams of bronze gates opening, followed by the thunder of horse riders – the cavalry had arrived. The men of Erdach Kodesh were riding towards us while ballista stones rained down on the herds from above. The Kodeshi horses were smaller than our own, faster and more maneuverable, like the mounts of the Mongols who would one day threaten all of Europe. And similarly their riders wore light armor and struck the Dearc Magra with curved blades like the Indian tulwar or the Turkic kilij, often in teams of two who struck in unison from opposing sides.

The skirmishing techniques of the Kodeshi cavalry kept the predatory herds confused and bloody, a tactic that often turned one Dearc Magra into a meal for its frenzied siblings. Between the efforts of our Brotherhood and the Kodeshi light-horsemen the majority of our wagons made it to the other side of the plain. But there was no time to count those lost or even to celebrate our survival, for towering above us was the monolithic mass of the Beast Wall.

Ahead of us all, the gaily painted long-wagon of Mauritanus Vedastus sat motionless at the bottom of a ramp of ancient construction, and the Master of Ceremonies stood seemingly composed and at ease in his silken finery conversing with what I took to be the leader of the wall's defenders. As the rumble of the wagons subsided, we came within hearing range of the conversants, and I was startled as I realized I could comprehend nothing of what was being spoken. The gift of tongues, a blessing granted to all who traveled with the Pageant was currently inactive, and its absence made me realize how much we the pageanteers relied upon that single gift for our survival.

It surprised me not that Mauritanus could speak the local language, for while he often gave the air of the dandy and showman, there was without doubt an iron fist within his velvet glove. It made me wonder what other secrets and hidden abilities the Master of Ceremonies might be concealing up his voluminous sleeves. But just then, the discussion, a negotiation by the body language of Mauritanus came to an end with the handing of a small bag to the Kodeshi war-leader. The man's face, tanned to the color of old saddle leather and equally wrinkled by the sun, broke into a saw-toothed grin at a glance of what lay within the modest bag. And he let out a high ululating hoop and in a single motion mounted his small horse.

Above us, at the top of the ramp, the ancient green bronze gates of the Fenevad Fal opened to us, offering salvation from alien beasts, the sweltering sun and most of all, thirst. The word was passed around that we would be permitted to pass the wall and we would be given shelter at Kurva Város, a way station of sorts for those brave or stupid enough to travel these lands for trade. The name meant nothing to me, but I got the sense that like most ports of call and caravansary everywhere that there would be gambling, wine and women. But it was not until much later that the translation of Kurva Város was made clear to me by a smiling Mauritanus, we had come to Whore Town.

Kurva Város (Whore Town)

Whore Town and slumber. The darkness around me felt weighed down, heavy, thick like stone and it smelled of sand and strange spices and a thousand whispered endearments turned spoiled with lies and avarice.

I lay in the womb of darkness resting and healing, the pain from my burnt hand dragged me into senseless torpor rather than preventing it. For a time my mind floated unaware.

And then I found myself drifting through alternating shadows and dim dusty light cast by spinning fans set in the ceiling high above me. The whirring reminded me of industrial spaces, but the smell that came to me was one of animal muskiness, the greasy smell of frying food and spilt alcohol and a faint cloying scent reminiscent of gangrene.

Gray granite walls rose up fifty feet or more in places and I realized that I was wandering through a cathedral like space with successive floors, criss-crossed by bridges and balconies, on each floor I could see individual doorways and everywhere there were signs marked with a kind of hieroglyphic script and highlighted by silk-lanterns filled with flittering illumination. And every few hundred feet along the ground floor were bays that led deep into underground warehouses.

I began to notice a flickering of motion as I drifted along. I could never see it directly, only from my peripheral vision and in the beginning it was just of people's shadows. Then as my attention would shift it would become the outline of humanoid forms and eventually in the fashion of spinning images they would resolve into three-dimensions.

The apparitions were blurred and insubstantial, but recognizable if one studied them for a time. Soon the apparitions were everywhere crowding each other on successive floors of the underground complex and an insectival bombination intensified as their numbers grew. Each humanoid form seemed to blend into its fellows organically, giving the impression of a vast quasi-human hive, compressed and insensate.

And then I saw them, Mordblund and Rambert, the one following the other and neither seemed to notice me. Mordblund was perhaps a hundred feet ahead of me and as he moved he seemed to be looking everywhere for something. His body-language betrayed an urgency of purpose that bordered on obsession. Behind him, Rambert watched his fellow sorcerer with great interest, but made no move to speak to him or interfere.

Then I heard the rattle of bone-dice, the jingle of coins, the hoarse scream of a man in pain and the clatter of metal on stone. Immediately thereafter, the sluggish humanoid forms mobilized at a frenetic pace and their collective insectival voices rose to a violent hum and the dream shattered like spun glass.

I woke sluggishly, as if I had been asleep a long time.

As I opened my eyes, I could see that I lay in the back of the cart we had brought to Kurva Város, the top had been covered by canvas and I lay curled up in a nest of baggage and I was in draconic-form. Terrified of discovery, I shifted back to human-form and rooted around for my clothes, once dressed I emerged from the cart and looked around.

The wagons and carts of the pageant were arrayed neatly alongside each other in a dimly lit underground space too regular to be a cave, but certainly large enough to serve as one. A sense of déjà vu briefly overcame me. Had I been here before? Impossible. And yet.

My momentary abstraction was broken when Theodoric's form coalesced from a nearby shadow. For a moment only, we regarded each other without formality or banter. Then I dropped to one knee and offered my obeisance. I did not look up until he bid me and then I looked straight ahead at the fine embroidery of Theodoric's tunic that formed intricate floral patterns of black and silver. There was a danger in looking my lord in the face, I suspected I had already fallen victim to that mistake more than once, but not that I could recall.

After only a moment he bid me rise and follow him out into Kurva Város. As I followed him from the Pageant's dim underground caravanserai and into the brighter corridor beyond I was struck with a powerful wave of déjà vu. Five stories ascended from where we stood upon the ground floor, it was at least fifty feet wide from vertical wall to vertical wall and it ran both to my right and left for as far as I could see.

Besides the ground floor, there were five more levels above us where pale phosphorescent illumination highlighted numerous doorways in the dusty gloom above. The ground floor was by far the most active level where every few feet the bronze doors of various businesses lay open for our perusal. And beside every open doorway lay a bronze plate inscribed with foreign looking hieroglyphics which according to Theodoric described the services available within.

Everywhere I looked there were strangely dressed people, most were swathed head to foot in what looked like linen or silk and some fabrics I simply could not identify. The warriors were the easiest to spot as they bared the most flesh and often traveled alone or in small groups. Women on the other hand wore costumes that coved them from head to toes and traveled in fairly large groups. Of the Kodeshi children, I saw none.

For a short time we just watched the people, looked through doorways and took in the atmosphere which was one of energetic commerce. In my past life, I had visited the covered marketplaces of the most ancient countries and the entirety of Kurva Város had the feel of a vast indoor mall.

As we passed by each doorway it was illuminated from above by a silken lantern, the pattern of each lantern was different, as was the fluttering florescence that came from within. Clearly it was not a flammable light source and as I stopped to examine a low-hanging specimen I could hear the flutter of multiple insectile wings, the silken lamps were bio-luminescent. It made perfect sense actually, a desert world would be short on burnable fuel and insects, being among the most adaptive species would be numerous even on Erdach Kodesh.

Around us hundreds of people went about their business as if we did not exist. I knew that Theodoric often moved unseen in foreign places, I just did not know until now that he could cloak others as well as himself. I absorbed that piece of information and added it to the growing list of things I did know about my lord.

He gestured gracefully towards what I would call a food court. There were several outdoor cafés and Theodoric selected one from the many with a sense of purpose. A number of strangely dressed men and women were seated upon a carpeted area before something like a kitchen counter. The area while lit, was dimly so and gave a sense of privacy and anonymity.

The moment we entered the café we not only became visible to our fellow patrons, Theodoric put on a little recitation for our fellow diners. His melodious voice carried to all those within the café and beyond. I could not understand a word he spoke to his audience, but they clearly understood and appreciated his performance, for soon the carpet before him bore a small pile of coins and even a few semi-precious gems. Ever the dutiful servant, I quickly and efficiently collected the loot and we took seats upon a pile of cushions halfway between the kitchen counter and the pedestrian way.

With our backs to a wall we counted Theodoric's money, he took the gems and the few coins of gold, but generously gave me the rest with which to order food. He quietly instructed me in a handful of useful words and phrases of the Kodeshi dialect, including what I should order for our meal and what the meal should cost.

As we waited for the food, he made polite conversation as if I were other than his lowly servant and I for my part worked to impress my master with my etiquette and conversational skill without giving away things about which I should know nothing.

In a matter of minutes, I had worked my way through most of my meal, for as Theodoric had originally observed, I was ravenous. While we conversed, Theodoric skillfully shifted his full meal bowls for my empty ones and made a believable show of eating. While many of our fellow diners watched us with curiosity, more often Theodoric than myself, there were those within the crowd who made eyes at me as I ate. My master used the time to good effect instructing me in local customs, the basic history of Whore Town and something of the Pageant's first visit here.

As Theodoric began to speak, his gaze once again lost its focus, to peer back through the long dark years to another time. A thousand years ago the Lunar Circus as the Pageant was called back then, had been brought to Erdach Kodesh as some sort of test by the then Master of Ceremonies. The circus had wandered the wasteland for a year, and as a result many of its members had died before finding Kurva Város for the first time.

Then as now, Whore Town had acted as a way-station between the wasteland and the Tarringan Castinate. The Lunar Circus had chosen to remain in Kurva Város for an extended time as it provided both food and shelter, for none of the original circus members really wanted to brave the road to Dlo Siskirit, an oasis a few days to the east. In Theodoric's recitation, the people of Whore Town had been welcoming and it was Mauritanus who first found a meaningful way to communicate with them when he invented a device that translated for the circus performers.

A thousand years ago, when the lunar circus had first arrived, the Beast Wall was already tens of thousands of years old. Through Mauritanus' translation device the leaders of the circus came to understand that an ancient civilization had created the wall not to stop the Dearc Magra, but as a dam to hold back the poisonous waters of an inland sea. The great gate of Kurva Város had originally served as a flood gate and much of the bronze machinery within the town had served to regulate the ancient poisonous sea.

At some time in the distant past, that inland sea had begun drying up, so much so that the wall came to serve its present purpose and the descendants of the original crews who managed the dam turned their efforts to trimming the population of Dearc Magra and regulating trade between the wastelands and whatever kingdom had preceded the Castinate. With the slow desertification of the planet, much of Whore Town's population had retreated within the hollow framework of the Beast Wall like snails climbing into a long unused shell.

At the time of the Lunar Circus' arrival, Kurva Város had been been led by a council of merchants who were advised by a lone sorcerer who called himself Azharil Zaman. Both the council of Kurva Város and their advisor had welcomed the newcomers to the town and for a time all had been well. But the Azharil Zaman had seen in the Circus a vessel for his ambitions and likewise, member of the circus who were dissatisfied with their Master of Ceremonies had colluded with the Azharil Zaman in the hopes of replacing their insane leader.

Apparently, this plot had not worked out for the conspirators within the circus, but Azharil Zaman had broken the council and assumed supreme authority. In the process, the newly minted sorcerer-king had planed to steal the treasures of the Lunar Circus, but in the chaos of his coup the circus escaped into the eastern desert.

The focal point of this otherworldly history lesson was this, when the circus had been here last, the peoples of Whore Town had been made up of diverse ethnic groups as different from each other as from the peoples of Midgard.

In the hours that I had slept since the Pageant's second visit began, Theodoric had been prowling unseen about the city, observing its people and studying the changes in their language. The thing he found most profound was that the descendants of those peoples he had previously met no longer resembled their ancestors even remotely. Not only were their basic racial features completely different, but they also showed signs of abnormal physiology, mutations of skeletal structure, strange skin growths, vestigial limbs and wholly new organs completely different from anything he had ever seen on our world.

It took a few moments for all that Theodoric had said to sink in, and when it did, I started to see the purpose behind the ancient history lesson. Whatever ancient mutagen that had been created during the prehistoric gods-war, it was mutating the local population to a significant degree. On Midgard (Earth), most mutation occurred over hundreds of thousands of years, if the scientists of the Modern Era were to be believed. And why not? There was good reason to think that without selective breeding or genetic manipulation, that nature moved much more slowly.

But on Erdach Kodesh, whatever leftover byproduct of the gods-war was changing Homo-sapiens or Homo-sapiens-Kodeshi into something else. According to Theodoric, a thousand years ago the circus members and the Kodeshi could interbreed, but the things he had seen tonight made him question that possibility.

His final point was this, all brothels are breeding grounds for venereal diseases as well as other contagions, and if the primary trade by which Kurva Város profited was sex and sex spread normal venereal diseases, what kind of mutated venereal diseases might the more lusty pageanteers become infected? The temperature in the room had not changed, but I felt chilled nonetheless, and venereal diseases while horrific and disgusting, were only the beginning. The mutagenic factor could pass through contact as in sex, or the sharing of drug paraphernalia, or in the food and water, or even the air.

I had contemplated some of these things when Theodoric had originally told us his tale, but it was different now that immediate survival was not at issue. The food I had just eaten could begin altering my own already unstable genetics. The process behind what was happening to me was still a mystery to me and the idea that another completely unstable mutating effect could be introduced into my system made me very concerned.

This must have been the effect Theodoric was looking for because he immediately stood up and was already turning away and starting to fade from my perceptions when I called out to him. No longer easily seen and barely noticeable, he paused to listen to my next question. In his spectral form, I could not be certain of his facial expressions, though I thought I saw a faint smile. A whisper came to me, more felt than heard, like the murmur of something remembered from long ago.

As the sounds of the café reasserted themselves, I studied my surroundings, me fellow patrons, and even the passing pedestrians. And when I was satisfied that no immediate threat was present, I leaned my back to the wall and closed my eyes to think.

The supply crew and Eben, not to mention an unknown number of other pageanteers were out there somewhere in Kurva Város, blissfully unaware of the horror that lurked right in front of them. And Theodoric had told me to scout out the city, learn what I could and watch out for the other pageanteers, although I doubted he had any selfless motivations regarding those instructions, that did not mean that I could not choose to protect those pageanteers I could find. And I knew exactly where to start looking for the supply crew and Eben, the brothels of Kurva Város.

After paying the bill, I departed the café for the ground level caravanserai where the Pageant's wagons were grouped. My purpose was acquire appropriate weapons, specifically my studded club for according to Theodoric the carrying of blades within Kurva Város was forbidden by ancient tradition. Only magistrates, who were judge, jury and executioner could carry blades within the city. The punishment was severe for even being caught with one, let alone using it or killing someone.

As I made my way towards the exit of the caravanserai, I noticed two people standing before the entry to the grand corridor. One was Gentius, an Albanian but not a Slav, who had apparently been given guard duty. An unwelcome task under most circumstances, primarily for the boredom of the work, and in Kurva Város it would be doubly so for no warrior wishes to see his fellows free to explore a city as licentious as Whore Town when he cannot partake of those pleasures himself.

Gentius was an unpleasant fellow to start with, churlish and belligerent by nature, we had exchanged harsh words many time in the mess tent and there was little love lost between us. Normally, I would just have ignored him entirely, but it occurred to me he might know where Divan the Finder and the supply crew were headed. But it seemed someone else was questioning him as I approached.

I was only fifty feet from Gentius and his questioner, a woman by her hourglass shape and his suggestive body-language, when a pale hand caught my sleeve. I turned to my left and looked down to see the wizened face of Fedelmid. In the dim pastel light cast by the bioluminescent lanterns hanging from the unfinished rock ceiling above, her white hair took on shades of emerald, lemon, and rose and lent the illusion of youth long past.

Placing a finger like a winter's bare branch to her waxen lips, she drew me deeper into the spaces between the wagons of the pageant. She was unsteady on her feet and one her clawed arthritic hands clung to me for support while balancing herself with a bleached tree limb which she used as a cane. The walking-stick was unusual in that it still had living moss growing from it and a glass lantern hung from one of its remaining branches, but cast only a feeble light, guttering from moment to moment perhaps from lack of fuel.

The old abortionist was dressed in unfamiliar finery, a silver necklace and diadem of ancient design, a dress of purple velvet and a shawl of hand knitted black wool rounded out her apparel and as always, wherever she went, she was barefoot.

Reaching up, she pulled my face down so she could whisper into my ear and told me a most curious tale of a stolen magical stone taken from her in Strasbourg. The woman's Middle English was tinted with the smoky burr of Caledonia and I struggled to understand everything she told me.

But it seemed, in the months since the magic-stone had been stolen, Fedelmid had been looking for it both physically and mystically. Only since our arrival in Erdach Kodesh had she found success and had discovered through unknown means that Ilaria the novice-whore from the House of the Profligate to be the thief.

According to Fedelmid, the girl knew she was suspected and had fled the caravansary for the city without and took the stolen goods with her only a short time ago. The old woman was offering me a job, recover the stolen mystical stone and in return, she would offer me further information about my condition. While I had consulted the ancient herbalist in the early stages of me transformation, I had no idea she knew the full scope of it.

Fedelmid whispered with urgency, because Polyphonte had discovered the girl to be missing and was on her way into Kurva Város this very minute to find Ilaria and bring her back. But the wizened granny was concerned that if Polyphonte found the girl and discovered the missing stone, she would keep it for herself.

In the end, I took the job. But I demanded the old woman's silence on the matter of my transformation and that after the stone's recovery she tell me everything she knew. The negotiation ended when the old woman and I spit in our hands and shook to seal the deal. I wasted no further time and hastily made my way for the caravansary exit.

I found Gentius lying asleep on the sandy floor, his knickers hanging around his ankles and the air redolent of coitus and ambergris, the story of his seduction by Polyphonte told itself in Gentius' embarrassingly compromised position as camp guard. I wasted no further time on the Albanian. If he was found in this position by the relief shift, Vulo Vadach would not go light with the lash and if not, Polyphonte would have him as her plaything for a time.

The transition from the Caravansary to the grand corridor was a short one, from relative constant dimness to alternating regions of flickering multicolored illumination and dimly illuminated shade. As I emerged, I noticed an uptick foot-traffic, everywhere large numbers of people dressed in bizarre fashions move with purpose and energy. Theodoric had mentioned that the Kodeshi night was made up of periods of sleep and wakefulness that mimicked the siesta hours of southern Spain. Where before there had been relatively few sojourners in the grand corridor, now there were many and Polyphonte was no where to be seen.

If I was to keep up my part of the bargain with Fedelmid then I must find Polyphonte before she found Ilaria. At this crowded market hour, the Grand Corridor was thick with Kodeshi of various castes, and awash in a veritable tidal-wave of new scents. In one of those shadowed spaces, I stopped hoping against hope to catch a glimpse of Polyphonte's voluptuous form, but with no luck.

Glancing up, I could see the upper levels of Kurva Város, had come to life. The two sides of the floors above were connected by regularly spaced bronze bridges turned green with Millennia of corrosion. In between the bridges, on both sides were bronze balconies emerging from the gray granite walls in a haphazard fashion. The bridges were alight with more bioluminescent lanterns and more of the same were hung between the balconies in a chaotic tangle that cast a firefly glow in every direction like a drunken legion of St. Nicolas' elves had strung Yuletide lights in all the colors of the rainbow wherever they could climb.

Thickening the shadows around me, I took a hit of the dragon-bone dust and made my way for one of the occasional stairwells cut into the gray walls. I doubt many of the Kodeshi saw me as I made my way up to the fifth floor and tried again from the heights to spot Polyphante. With the Dust rushing through my veins, the Grand Corridor took on the brilliance luster of a twenty-first century shopping mall. From my perch upon one of the less used bridges of the fifth floor I looked down on the masses of teeming Kodeshi and reflected once more upon how hive-like they seemed as they moved with ordered purpose from one place to another, as if driven by some unseen force.

Then almost without trying my eyes arrested upon the sinuous swaying of Polyphonte's feminine form. I turned and raced along the bridge and the upper courts of the Grand Corridor, slowly closing the distance between myself and Polyphante. While the fifth floor was busy with foot-traffic, it was light by comparison to the ground-floor so crowed with pedestrians that at times Polyphante simply had to stop or get caught up in another cross current of the crowd. That region was so thick with merchants, shops, cafés and brothels that I came to think of it as the core of Kurva Város.

This disparity allowed me to close the horizontal distance between Polyphante and myself. Before she entered a ground floor establishment I noticed her studying the crowds around her, perhaps looking for someone following her, or was she searching for something else? I did not have time to determine which might be true as I descended the nearest stairwell to the ground floor. Unlike Polyphante I cut a swath through the evening bound crowds between the stair and Polyphante's destination.

As I approached the entrance to the establishment, I noticed a large bronze plaque above the door and polished almost to a mirror's sheen. It was flanked from above and on both sides by particularly large bioluminescent lanterns which wreathed the open doorway in a pool of eldritch light. The deeply etched hieroglyphs meant nothing to me as I compared them to their Egyptian and Aztec counterparts and the frustration of my illiterate state accompanied me into the dim interior like a cloud of biting flies.

Nothing could have prepared me for what I found within.

The dimness was clouded with what at first I took for smoke. I descended a ramp into what I perceived to be a cave, the entry was similar to the caravansary that housed the pageant. But thereafter the similarities ended. Rather than a low ceilinged warehouse, this chamber or what I could see of it was lower than the ground-floor, a subterranean level.

At the bottom of the ramp the tunnel widened out into a sort of onion shaped vestibule, the stone here was white marble and the bioluminescent insects here clung to the ceiling free of their silken cages. The buzzing and fluttering of their wings produced a strange and faintly hallucinatory effect upon me. The chamber was bathed in their pulsing illumination alternating between chartreuse and gold, and the sound that accompanied this phenomenon was like the breathing of many people in unison.

The floor of the onion room was likewise marble and waiting for me in the center was a squat creature, like a hairless dwarf of a centaur wrapped in a ruby silk shawl. Its eyes changed color from aquamarine to goldenrod in the shifting light. Its only ornamentation was a bronze collar linked to a chain bound to the wall. From its expression alone I could tell it was in pain, but not from its collar, rather it could not sit entirely still due to its malformed back. Involuntary tears flowed from the corners of its eyes and its face had elements of classical dwarfism.

As it began to speak my limited Kodeshi vocabulary failed me and two behemoths stepped from shadowed doorways on either side of me. They were vaguely humanoid in form, but a good twelve feet tall and monstrous with muscle that did not seem to fully fit their physiology. Matching masks of bronze were welded to their heads and I could not see what lay beneath them save the the glitter of misplaced eyes. Chains of bronze marked them as slaves and bound them to opposing walls where they were attached to the masks. Each carried a bone club spiked with bronze studs and their dual roar almost triggered an involuntary transformation from me.

When the room was silent again save for the hive breathing and fluttering above us, the dwarf-centaur tried again to speak with me. When that failed, we played the age old game of pantomime and without spoken words came to an understanding. The low-formed speaker was the doorman and his purpose was to collect a cover charge for entry into a nightclub or brothel, and the monstrous humanoids were the security staff. Even in the effects of the queer insectival vibrations, we were able to work out a price for my entry, and it was not cheap as it took the majority of Theodoric's coin from earlier this evening.

During our conversation, the hulking guards broodingly watched my every move, and there was a palpable menace in their stares. The creatures were not for show alone, and the clotted gore that clung to the bone clubs in their mutual grasp was a mute testimony to that fact. I think I would have been unnerved save for the anesthetic chorale of the luminous arthropods.

Our negotiations complete, the malformed centaur collected the coins and then chuffed out an unknown command, which was followed by the grinding vibration of a large metallic clockwork device. The floor trembled as a thick bronze door began to rise into the ceiling of the far wall. A long forgotten but atavistic drumming drifted into the vestibule from the larger room beyond. It called to the primitive side, a pulse-like thrumming that worked its way into my skull and down my spine directly to my groin.

I could see nothing of the room beyond, but the reverberation made it sound cavernous. The doorway was filled with steam or smoke and luminous with a multitude of colors shifting through the spectrum from neon to pastel.

The moment I stepped through I could feel the vibration of the door mechanism as it closed behind me. Ahead of me shapes and shadows began to emerge from the vapor and light that drifted around me and combined with a new and heady intoxication that reminded me of the effects of alcohol without the need to drink.

The floor beneath me boots was level and solid, but wet with unseen fluids and I found my sense of direction and balance to be untrustworthy as I tried to get my bearings. The vapor was thickest closer to the walls and thinned as I penetrated the chamber. Further in I beheld a cave-like gallery carefully sculpted by human hands into a amphitheater that was wider than it was deep and punctuated by columns of fused stone.

Multicolored light rained down upon the arena from above, alternating through countless hues of florescence from numerous hives of Ignus fatuus insects that crawled and bred across the stone surface above. Here the insectival song served as a counter-point to the thunder of rhythmic drumming and made thinking almost impossible as it vibrated through my skull and throughout my nervous system releasing the most primal instincts.

And I was not alone.

As the vapor thinned just before me, I beheld a vibrating sweaty mass of Kodeshi that stretched from one side of the cavern to the other, easily two hundred feet wide. Those closest to the center cavorted and frolicked, a wild animalistic dance where mostly naked bodies shimmied and gamboled against one another irrespective of relationship or gender. The collective smell of so many sweating bodies carried an untold quantity of pheromones, the essence of animal excitement and the spice of prospective sex.

The stone columns that held up the roof of the cave had been carved over countless generations with symbols of lust and reproduction. In some cases the columns themselves had been carved into massive phalluses and pudenda. At the base of each column a stage had been carved from the native stone and arrayed around the shaft were the musicians, mostly drummers, but there were woodwinds similar to the didgeridoo and something like a tambourine.

I stood at the locus point, the liminal zone between the mass of gyrating bodies and those who had migrated to the periphery, seeking satiation for their reproductive instincts. All along the wall where the vapors were thickest, Kodeshi copulated in a sticky orgy of uninhibited desires. Arms and legs protruded randomly, orifices gaped open and were filled, the sweaty mass resembled nothing human and this impression drew my eye to the dancers as well.

And there too I could see it for the first time, relieved of their complicated clothing, the Kodeshi and their mutations were revealed at last.

Both men and women bore the obvious signs of mutation: elongated skulls, overly tall and thin bodies, extra digits on the hands and feet, and there were tumors. The tumors were so commonplace that they had become body ornaments subject to piercings, tattoos and scarification.

The more I studied the Kodeshi, the more mutations I saw. The most severe cases had extra limbs, additional eyes or ears, multiple sex organs often in unusual places. And then the room began to spin around.

Everyone has a breaking point. And I was quickly reaching mine. There was something in the air, every time I drew in a breath, I felt my animal-side trying to take over. I could see the results in the Kodeshi population, their mass orgy was not a thing of simple reproductive need or sensuality, it was something literally in the air around us.

The hive-songs of the Ignus Fatuus insects clearly had a psychotropic effect and the locals were acting as if they were exposed to some sort of biological or chemical agent. As I averted my eyes from the frenzied orgy of mutated flesh, I looked up. There among the the lesser stalactites lay the hive structures of the Ignus Fatuss. The hives themselves looked like someone had laid down and then melted numerous layers of rigid thermoplastic. The effect of the whole was distinctly organic and with a ram's horn central mass attached to the largest of the Ignus Fatuus that I had yet seen, a queen.

The queen hung suspended upside-down a mere twenty-five feet above me. A swarm of attendants worked around her, providing food, cleaning her form, but also continually building the obscene cornucopia around her, a process which would eventually entomb her forever.

Orbiting the queen and attached to her by shiny tubules were swollen utricle about the size and shape of large eggplants. As I watched one began to twitch and spasm, erupting in a vulgar sneeze that released pale spores as fine as dust that rained down in a cloud where I had stood only seconds before.

The two halves of my being felt like they were tearing me apart. My human DNA demanded that I join the Kodeshi orgy or burst from sexual frustration. Alternately, the siren-song of the Ignus Fatuus and the dust-like pheromones released by their queen unleashed within my draconid genetics the most primal of blood-lusts.

It was time to leave.

As I turned to go, my eye came to rest upon one of the dancers, long dark hair whirling around her like midnight satin touched by traceries of pale spider-silk. Polyphonte. Her tan shoulders, back and breasts glowed with a sheen of sweat as she swayed to the primitive drumbeat. And her hips undulated in a wild and lascivious fashion, promising unimaginable pleasures and unspeakable acts.

For a handful of breaths, I hesitated. She was beautiful, wild and unfettered by any inhibition and she was powerful. I knew nothing of the details, but she had many within the Pageant wrapped around her fingers and that made her a valuable potential ally. But in my barely controlled state, if I were to enter the crowd of dancers I might never escape or worse, I might go on some predatory killing spree.

Choices...choices.

I drew the darkness to me, the Alpha and Omega of my power, and I reached out. A tendril of shadow formed in the hazy rainbow light, like a serpent of black smoke it crawled between the feet of the dancers who shimmied and swayed to the primeval drumming until it coiled around Polyphante's feet.

And then I touched her with my tendril of night, ever so lightly, like the whisper of silk across bare skin.

In that moment it seemed as though all the breath in the room was drawn towards her and all the sounds seemed to fade away. The light did not dim, but the colors bleached from everything and my vision contracted until only Polyphonte remained visible, shining like a dying star.

And then she screamed! A shock-wave of unseen power blasted outwards from her. Those closest to her were thrown to the ground, but they were not the target her mystical countermeasure, I was. As the invisible wave picked me up and hurled me fifty feet into the cavern wall behind me, I was already changing form.

It was fear that allowed me to change so fast, an atavistic survival response, more muscle memory than anything else. The impact drove the breath from my lungs and I lay upon my side trying to breath. The entire cavern was hushed in dread expectation. The Kodeshi had finally stopped dancing, the musicians had put down their instruments, and all within the chamber were like a herd of deer before an oncoming avalanche.

I could neither speak nor act. I could only watch as the first dozen men close to Polyphante were wracked with spasms. Their bodies became rigid and they vibrated in place as their muscle grew ever so taut. I could hear their teeth cracking with the final spasm that broke their backs and I watched in impotent horror as they spate up their internal organs in fountains of crimson gore.

Death had come to Whore Town.

The odor of salt and iron permeated the chamber, followed by the sickly-sweet smell of offal and the ripe putrescence of excrement. The Kodeshi looked on in horror, frozen in place like deer during a hunter's moon.

Then Polyphante began to sing. The Greek was old, archaic and I understood very little of it, perhaps it was a dark paean or spell. It had the feel of a dirge, or an a-Capella of rage, a dread song of ancient pain about to reborn as all forms of human abuse were passed on from one generation to the next.

Her voice cut through the silence and her words took form as pale vapor as the temperature in the chamber began to plummet. Angry male voices were raised as the women closest to the dying men began a ululating lament. Perhaps they had lost lovers, friends, fathers or brothers and it did not matter for I could feel that riptide pulse that had seemed to draw an ineffable something towards Polyphante during her original outburst. And another something horrible was about to happen again.

But this time I was paying attention and I could feel it down in my bones the way old gaffers said they could feel the ache of age when the weather is about to change.

As her song built to a crescendo a group of men, naked and without weapons, began to rush her with the intent of violence. She was oblivious to their oncoming rush, as she seemed to enter a sort of trance as she danced solo through a wild set of motions and gestures. Her eyes were wild and unfocused as her head thrashed from side to side and her hair whirled around her chaotically like the serpents of Medusa.

Just as they reached her she collapsed of a sudden into a motionless pile at their feet and a viridian incandescence emanated outwards from her prone body like a virulent discharge of corposant. The small group of Kodeshi men could not move fast enough to evade the eldritch glow and as soon as it touched them they seemed to light up from within as if all of them had become larger versions of the Ignus Fatuus lanterns so common to Kurva Város.

The Kodeshi men stumbled away beating at their own flesh, their screams raw and hoarse as smoke began to emerge from their nostrils, ears and gaping mouths. They ran blindly through the crowded cavern, their eyes having already burst from the internal heat, and the remnants oozed down their burning faces.

Each man acted as a vector as he stumbled into other men, passing on the the fulminating curse, like torches they ignited others of their own sex without either knowledge of this fact or the power to stop it. This curse of being burned from within was biblical like something unleashed at Sodom and Gomorrah and the Kodeshi within the chamber sought to escape it through flight. And as terrible as this affliction was to behold, men alone were its victims, the Kodeshi women it spared.

Numb and paralyzed from Polyphante's initial attack, I could only watch the horror unfold. It was beautiful and terrifying by equal measure to see a man's bones ignite in such a way as to illuminate the the musculature and viscera within. An unasked for study in just how much pain the human body could suffer before death overtook it.

And collapse each man did as soon as the bones within were fully combusted, they would simply fold in on themselves like puppets of flesh, and Polyphante's fire would spread to their muscles, viscera and finally consume the epidermis unleashing greasy black smoke.

The chamber had become a oven and an orgy of holocaust, the smoke made the air hard to breath, but I lay slumped over on the ground close to the floor where the air was a bit cooler and cleaner. Slowly sensation returned to my body and with it came pain. As soon as I could stand I was on my feet and moving towards where Polyphante had been. But the smoke was so thick and acrid, that I was reduced to crawling on all fours just to breath. Fear and Dust coursed through my veins as I tried to evade the piles of burning flesh, and in their blind rush to escape the chamber many women stumbled over my unseen form. The fear was palpable and even over the charnel stink of burning human flesh I could taste their terror and it provoked a monstrous hunger. But when a predator hunts in a burning forest, that way lies death and in that terrible moment instinct guided me as much as intellect.

In draconid form I crawled as a beast crawls. My arms and legs were splayed out holding my body evenly two feet above the sandy floor of the chamber and my serpentine tail slashed back in forth in agitation and providing extra balance as I scuttled to within a couple yards of Polyphante's unmoving form. Through the greasy smoke and the hazy salmon colored light of burning human flesh, I could see the rise and fall of her chest.

She yet lived.

But around us, I could feel a stirring of unseen eddies, like ripples on a dirty oil covered lake. The power Polyphante had unleashed was not yet done, it had rolled outwards igniting spontaneous human combustion in every man touched by it, and now in a way I could not explain it came ricocheting back through the the cavern towards us. In that moment I stood above the Bestialite, she looked vulnerable lying on her back where she had fallen after her dance macabre, her limbs akimbo.

She was nearly naked, either from the wild celebration or the athletic rite that began this slaughter, her long fur cloak was gone and so were her sandals. The thin chemise that was her customary attire was tattered and ripped, allowing the twin jewels of her bosom free. The aureoles of her breasts jutted forth demanding a suckling and her thighs were parted just enough for her ripe pudenda to protrude from a mass of pubic hair.

I was no mere boy, and yet I felt the unquenchable lusts of an adolescent washing away my ability to think, all I could take in was so much flesh and my need for her. But we were not alone, as the smoke and ash began to settle in the dimming light, I could see three more women only a few feet away. In the gloom I doubt they could see me, for in this form the darkness veritably clings to me and even being so large, in a dim or darkened room I am all but invisible.

As I studied them each in turn, I realized I was not entirely correct, one was a mature female while the other two were mere girls. They were clustered around a fallen male whose corpse they clung to even as they tried to smother the flames that licked at his body with sand. The woman was unnaturally tall and thin, she too was naked, and her body was a road-map of scarification and pierced tumors that dangled from her face, breasts and vulva like overly ripe fruit. Her man must have adored her, for her throat, wrists and ankles were richly adorned with gold jewelry. The grief of the trio was borne out in their mourning wails and the tears that tracked their ash covered faces.

Kneeling in the ash darkened sands, I hesitated only a moment, before scooping Polyphante into my arms. I braced myself for another mystical attack, but none was forthcoming, merely a faint aurora that surrounded and highlighted us to the three Kodeshi females and the ghost of their man. What it was I cannot say, but I felt the scales all over my body tighten and a shiver passed through me as if my death had passed close. But I had been wrong, the aurora clung only to me and did not seem to touch the sensuous form of the Bestialite.

From out of the darkness came an unseen ripple of power, it neither disturbed Polyphante's hair or her ragged clothing. But I could feel it beating upon my face and form like a billion particles of glass all seeking entrance to my body. In that moment the aurora grew into a conflagration that swirled around me and the unconscious sorceress. What those three women saw I cannot imagine, but in the days to come I would try to blind the inner eye of my memory with expensive drink, fine food and willing women.

The gyre of St. Elmo's fire reflected in the women's eyes and illuminated their forms in hues of flicking cyan and chartreuse. Momentarily their mourning ululations stilled and they stared in shock or fascination. As the returning wave swirled about us all, each was wracked with sudden agony, their faces twisted in unimaginable pain. But as I watch, unable to release my burden or to go to them in the blind hope of offering them any surcease from their suffering, they collapsed upon the sandy floor of the cavern in spasms of convulsion. As the seizures passed, for a moment all was still, and then their screams sounded like those of beasts as buboes rose upon their coffee-Au-lat skin. These lesions turned black as they formed, swelling to the size of a hazel-nut, and lay just beneath the skin.

All thoughts of selflessness and concern for these unfortunate Kodeshi women withered on the vine as fear and revulsion locked my muscles, immobilizing me. I wanted to flee and take Polyphante with me cradled in my arms to somewhere, anywhere else. But the terror was too great and like all animals, in response to prehistoric instinct, I froze like the lamb before the lion.

Despite my deepest desire to look away, I watched in dumbfound fascination, as the buboes formed all over the Kodeshi trio. No portion of their bodies was spared the livid pustules, and their thrashing seemed to speed the growth of the carbuncles.

Anticipation and horror thickened my blood and I could hear my own raspy breathing. Around the swellings, the natural swarthiness of their skin deepened to the color of soot, and took on a leathery texture in the infernal light. Shortly thereafter, the ulcers began to erupt wetly, like watery blisters filled with blood.

I expected the women to scream, and they tried, but nothing but garbled coughing came out with copious blood and tissues as they chewed upon their tongues. From the bloody seepage of their ulcerating flesh emerged larval Ignus Fatuus. Their pale bodies were no more than an inch long, even covered in blackened blood they glowed with an inner fire. They crawled forth on a multitude of hair-fine legs, their as yet unformed wings scintillating in the hellish light.

The larva emerged from the dying Kodeshi women by the hundreds and at considerable speed. Some were strong enough from their parasitic birth to take to the air in search of new hosts, while the remainder began to crawl away from the blackened wreckage that had only moments before been living, thinking, grieving women.

But the Kodeshi women were not yet dead. In the final throws of erupting florescent parasites, their flesh darkened further, and as their bodies arched in the spasms of death, their flesh sloughed off in chunks. As it did so, it dissolved further into a black viscous fluid, leaving behind pale bones as shiny as polished ivory, and a smell of utter putrescence spread through the chamber.

As the flicking light of the eldritch fire that surrounded Polyphante and I started to diminish, it began to snow pale florescent bodies as the Ignus Fatuus fell around us. These were not the larva, but fully grown insects, the largest of which were the size of Earth-born cuttlefish. For a moment I feared the swarm was attacking, but those that struck us were dying or already dead. That unseen force which had killed the Kodeshi women had also attacked the Ignus Fatuus hive above us, we were the only living things still in this chamber of horrors.

As dying alien parasites rained down around us, I felt my muscles freed of paralysis and with Polyphante still in my arms I fled toward the farther depths of the chamber in search of any exit.

Distantly against the angry hiss of the dying hive, I heard a stone door in motion and far behind us, a bar of dim gold light spread into the first few meters of the Breeding Chamber turned mass tomb. Within seconds, those tasked with looking after the breeding chamber's clients would realize the full scope of what had happened here and whatever or whoever ruled Kurva Város would want answers and a payment in blood from whoever was responsible.

I ran as only a creature of night can, through utter darkness. And in the farthest corner of the Breeding Chamber, I found a tunnel that slanted gently downwards. Here to my night-blessed eyes the dark seemed thicker, a bit older, and less touched by the light. I took this as a good sign and as Polyphante slept the sleep of total exhaustion in my scaly arms. I moved as swiftly as I could without waking her and I did not dare to stop and examine her, in part for fear that we were being followed and partially that I might lose myself in the contemplations of her flesh.

The tunnel ran beneath Kurva Város, how deep I could not have said, but deep enough that here the darkness was old, thick and sometimes whispered of unintelligible things. The currents of night flowed before me, showing me that this tunnel was the correct one, that it led somewhere worth going. Hundreds of paces from the Breeding Chamber the tunnel floor evened out, but I had lost all sense of what direction in which we were headed and my fear kept me moving. There were many side tunnels and cross corridors this far down and I saw no sign of living men, but there was life of a sort, vermin, although nothing similar to the species of Midgard.

The unbroken black of the tunnel acted as a balm to my injuries and an anesthesia to my lacerated mind. For a time there was peace and the thoughtless repetition of placing one clawed foot before the other, until I noticed the darkness thinning as we came upon a place touch by light. And from further down the tunnel came a breath of moist air and the sound of water falling from a significant height.

And then we emerged into a cistern, for that is what it was, an octagonal chamber where the broken and corroded ends of bronze pipes emptied gallons of fresh water into a stone pool. This was more water than I had yet seen anywhere on Erdach Kodesh save for the poisonous sodium pools of the Blijeda šuma.

For a moment, I just stood and took in the sights of the cistern. The stone of the walls, floor and ceiling were of a pale granite flecked with shining pyrite and clear crystal quartz. The chamber was fashioned all of one piece without jointing or mortar or any sign of tooling whatsoever. The eight walls of the cistern rose straight and true to a domed ceiling hidden by a mass of roots that had broken through cracked stone to hang down in a mass like an old man's beard. Through the roots slithered glowing worms in a rainbow of hues and collectively they gave of a radiance not unlike the glow of a Christmas tree.

If you listen to priests and old wise women, they will tell you that creatures of darkness hate the light, but that is not true, we love it. Just as the moth is drawn to the flame and its death, the shadows long for the brilliance of light even as it wounds them. I lay Polyphante down on a bed of soft lichen, and cautiously approached the pool's edge, where the water was still and flat. Squatting upon my haunches and using my tail for balance I looked down into the dark water's surface, but all that greeted me was a view of the roots and their glowing inhabitants, of my reflection there was not even a hint.

I lay Polyphante down on a bed of soft lichen, and cautiously approached the pool's edge, where the water was still and flat. Squatting upon my haunches and using my tail for balance I looked down into the dark water's surface, but all that greeted me was a view of the roots and their glowing inhabitants, of my reflection there was not even a hint.

What had happened to my new reacquired reflection? Along with many other more pressing questions about my new state of existence would have to wait for the more pressing social nicety of bathing. My flesh stank of burnt human flesh and reeked of the rank decay that gave birth to the Ignus Fatuus before they also died. The truth of existential questions can easily be ignored by following the routine of day to day self-maintenance, a technique of which I had long ago become a master.

Stepping beneath the closest outflow pipe, tepid water rushed down my midnight form in rivulets, washing away the physical evidence of the Breeding Chamber massacre. Reaching down into the nearby pool I pulled forth two claws full of sediment and used it like an abrasive soap, it smelled of algae and reminded me of home. Quickly and efficiently I scoured my scaled-hide of human ashes, dried and splattered blood and the curious stink of alien death. I luxuriated in my shower, and in doing so I wasted valuable time, possibly risking my life and that of Polyphante as well. But what is life without the little things?

Thereafter, I crouched near to Polyphante's sleeping form and just watched her breath. She lay on her side, her head pillowed on a folded arm, her sable tresses were spread out over her well muscled shoulders and the shapely curve of a well rounded hip. I remembered that dark glossy hair hanging to her hips in the Pageant, sometimes pleated or worn in numerous pigtails, but I had never seen it loose like dirty gossamer full of sand and flecked with ash. At her temples, white wings spread equally on both sides of her face, making her look both old and young.

Sometime during our flight the silken shift she wore must have finally given up the ghost, for her full breasts rose and fell with every sleeping breath, further down her flat muscular belly, her bellybutton was pierced by a single animal claw, polished and translucent, it could have belonged to a great cat save for its otherworldly nacre. Sometime while I washed, Polyphante must have moved in her sleep because her long muscular legs were now tucked up close to her buttocks, like a child in the womb. And as she slept, with razor sharp claws, I groomed her hair removing snarls and knots, grains of sand and flakes of ash, until every hair hung loose and perfect.

Here in this subterranean cistern, beneath a foreign city, on a alien world, Polyphante and I had become the cliché of Beauty and the Beast.

My preening had not gone unnoticed, for her eyelashes fluttered like a raven's wings and I was captivated by onyx eyes that regarded me without startlement or fear. It was I who withdrew to a comfortable distance. This beautiful woman was a mass-murderer with a power I could not fathom and whose actions I could not predict. I did not mistake that it was I who was in danger here, of the two of us, she was by far the more powerful and I would need to tread carefully if I did not wish to die horrifically.

Reaching into the nearby water, I retrieved the calcareous exoskeleton of an indigenous mollusk the size of a serving bowl, a giant snail shell. I carefully filled it with water and set it directly between Polyphante and I. Then I retreated a few more feet and waited for her to make the next move.

For uncounted minutes, we regarded each other over the intervening ground, neither of us moved or spoke. And then Polyphante crawled to the water and drank deeply. When the water was gone, she set the empty shell down and rose unsteadily to her feet. She said nothing, but shed her remaining clothing like a snake sheds its skin. During those moments, she never looked away, and then she stepped beneath the miniature waterfall and as I did before her, washed away the evidence of her sins.

As she bathed, I watched with a hunger and fascination, that I had never known. The water made a black curtain of her hair that reached to the back of her knees. All the grit and grime seemed to vanish, leaving behind a woman of remarkable beauty, and then when the washing was done she touched her self in so many intimate ways as I watched unable to look away. When her hand reached out from the water beckoning me to come to her, I could no longer remain where I was and as I stepped into the water with her.

I did not as yet touch her, rather she explored my mutant body with her hands, running her fingers over my snout and the bony ridge of spines that ran between my nostrils and divided my skull in half. I closed my eyes as she explored further up to touch my elongated ears and the long thick ebony horns that protruded backwards from my head like the horns of the Oryx. As her hands worked their way down the back of my neck, she moved closer, and I could smell that she scented her hair with poppies. More forcefully, she explored the shifting mottle of indigo and obsidian scales that covered my muscular shoulders and measured the thickness of my biceps with both of her hands. Laying her head against my chest, she listened to my heart beat as her arms snaked around me to explore my back and the leathery wings folded there.

Her wet body felt hot against my reptilian flesh, her breasts seemed to swell as she rubbed her hardened aureoles against me, and her hands guided my claws to rest on her water slick flesh. Her hot human breath warmed the scales of my throat when she said in barely a whisper:

“Show me the face you show mankind!”

And so, I summoned the darkness. It swirled around us as my flesh rippled, shrinking in upon itself, accompanied by the sounds of joints popping and bones remolding themselves. My body contracted and like a master yogi assuming an impossible pose, my form took on human features and the proportions of a man. Where moments before a monster had stood, in its place there was a youth of two and a half decades with ginger hair and a scruff of beard.

Polyphante's body was slippery in my hands, soft, but strong. Her mouth was hot as she explored my man's body, her tongue was like a serpent seeking a home in every crevice of flesh and no part of me did she leave clean of her spit. For my part, I gave in to the animal side of my nature, grasping her wherever I want as if I owned her and when I craved the smell of her most intimate flesh, I pressed her down to the stone and did some tasting of my own. There was no tenderness in our lovemaking, if anything it had the quality of animals rutting, and when I thrust myself inside her body she screamed for me to become the beast again.

This time the metamorphosis came faster, more fluidly and with less pain. And Polyphante screamed as I transformed insider her, her womanly flesh stretching to accommodate a mating never intended by nature. We climaxed together, our bodies entangled and lay panting as the tepid waters of Kurva Város washed over us. But as any man knows, a woman has no limits and Polyphante was far from done when we were so rudely interrupted.

At least eight dark robed figures emerged from the cistern's rosette of access tunnels and each bore a unique weapon, some were so commonplace as to be immediately recognizable, while others were alien and incomprehensible. They fanned out around us and their intentions could not be mistaken as the worm-light played along the polished edges of their motley weapons.

The Magistrates of Kurva Város had found us.

The Justice of the Magistrates

[[]]

As the magistrates closed in upon us, the Bestialite and I rose from the shallow subterranean pool to face our pursuers. Each was dressed in black robes that bore the sheen of silk and a matching cloak layered in dark iridescent insect scales that scintillated in the poly-chromatic light. All were more or less of the same height, which is to say like most Kodeshi they were tall and thin almost to the point of emaciation, and the only thing that distinguished them one from the other besides their weapons were the obviously hand-made insect masks they wore.

In unison they chanted rhythmically and at each refrain culminated in a crescendo which was repeated with their advance, but which diminished in length with each repetition. If Polyphonte understood what they were saying she gave not sign of it and as they closed in upon us we stood back to back.

As members of the Pageant, Polyphonte and I were caught off guard, in every other realm the circus granted to us an innate ability to not only understand the speech and customs of each new world we traveled through, but the ability to speak and communicate as if the local language were native to us. At least that had been true until our arrival upon Erdach Kodesh. Without the ability to speak to our pursuers a violent confrontation was inevitable.

In the gossamer glow of the worm-light the swiftly closing ring of dark clad magistrates reminded me of a murder of crows. But the Kodeshi law-givers would find us no easy meat. At my back I could hear Polyphonte's husky voice in guttural chant perhaps unleashing something like the death curse that had killed everyone and everything in the Breeding Chamber. For my part, I called out to the shadows of our enemies to aid us.

As the murder of magistrates came against us they split their force, five to handle Polyphonte and three to subdue me. Suddenly I understood both their tactics and their strategy. In a rush I hissed what I had intuited to the Bestialite.

"ssss...Their recitation is a countdown and they have mistaken me for a mere beast...ssss...be ready!"

If Polyphonte had heard me, she made no reply and continued her spell, if indeed that is what it was. As for the magistrates I could well understand their tactic, to them I appeared like so many of the monstrous creatures of Erdach Kodesh, a large and hostile looking beast, but just a dumb and feral creature to be pacified. Equally, their choice to devote the majority of their forces to confront a deadly sorceress reflected their mistaken impressions, and as it would turn out the magistrates were not alone in their miscalculations.

Until the law-givers closed with us everything seemed to move in slow motion, then like a detonation everything happened at once. The magistrates' recitation suddenly stopped, Polyphonte's murmurings concluded with a vile exclamation, five of the Kodeshi were abruptly pulled from their feet by tentacles of darkness and the other three magistrates attacked the Bestialite bodily.

So many things happened all at once.

Terra Prime - Constantinople - 1453

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Constantinople

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