A Tailor's Son (Valadfar) (8 page)

The images of the bodies in his dream made Paul struggle in
bed, battling with the quilt. He wondered in a brief moment of clear
mindedness when he had lost himself to this shadow, but at that
moment his dream flickered onwards. Hours of real time passed in
moments. It was during morning confession while Paul was alone in
the booth that they had come to him. The slut that had escaped had
been one of that Drow mob’s whores.

“
Morning Vicar.”
A Drow’s accent rasped through the carved
wooden grill in Pauls dream. Paul went to flee the confession room
realising his mistake instantly, but a strong arm was holding the door
firm from outside. It was much stronger than his was. “
Please sit down
Vicar. My friend seems to be blocking the door and will be until they’ve had a little
chat.”
The same voice said. Defeated, Paul reluctantly sat down. The
shutter slid open and Paul could see the shadow of a man sitting in the
next room through the grill. The stranger continued to speak, his Drow
accent prominent. “
A little birdie tells us that you got a little over excited with
some of our girls last night. Muriel is still stuck at the Queens and O'Brien is not all
too happy that she cannot go to work. Ruby-May is still missing. What do you
suppose happened to her?”
The Drow asked in a blatantly patronizing voice
from inside the dream. To Paul it felt real. He actually felt like he had
slipped back in time and was no longer in his freezing bed but trapped
again in fear inside the confession box. That damnable hussy, thought
Paul, she should have died too.
“Also-”
The voice continued. “
We seem
to have misplaced quite a few other girls recently, and we happen to wonder if that is
to do with you Vicar? Now, Mr O’Brien is not too worried about the girls themselves.
They are just stock and trade and another boat will be over soon enough no doubt, and
he would not, after all, hurt a man of the cloth. It is just the money side of things. You
see we need that back. So, you stay in your little box there and forget we ever came here
and we’ll just collect what is owed from the church, right?”
Ernest had said and
the anger boiled inside Paul, he would make these pigs pay. At that
moment Paul started to wake and he faded from the dream world to
thought. He reached for the parchments from the floor by his bed and
as he had taken to doing scribbled down the events from his dream.

His experiments may have failed but the body he had used
from the morgue seemed to have worked. The banker had been
stabbed in a side alley and left to die. The guard had put his picture in
the papers in the hope they could find the killer, but Paul could not care
less if they did or not. The body had taken on the toxin perfectly.
Everything had been a success. The man was even controllable for a
short time, his own mind as dead as his body was. Paul was so sure of
this at the time, but he would soon see he was wrong. Whatever it was
that the leech transferred and used to bring William back from the dead
had taken over and William went rogue. Paul had sent him to get
revenge on the O’Brien’s for leaving the church in such a state and he
had burnt the Queens down as ordered, but then he had disappeared.
His blood hunger would start growing soon, one of the downsides to
the so-called cure that becoming a Rakta Ishvara promised. He knew
that the victim would have to start feeding. Paul had to cure the hunger
before he used it on himself, he didn’t want to go around killing people.
He just didn’t want to die, but had to find a way to get the leech to
attach correctly in the colder climate first before he could worry about
that anyway. He wanted the toxin to cure his own suffering, stop the
pains and weakness his age had begun to bring. He had learnt in the
Dark Gulf that the temple held the infected one who had lived for
millennia. Pauls experiment, this so called William the banker, would
be the same, his strength would be unparallel to anything anyone had
seen before in Neeska and he would be brutal and deranged. He had to
feed off fresh blood often to satisfy his cravings. The people of
Chhottaa-Ghar had taught Paul that the leeches offered long life and
strength for a price, but it was against their laws to use them and the
Rakta would kill anyone who tried.

The gods, as they called them, were very territorial and wars
had plagued the Green Stone Isles for centauries even as the Titans
walked Valadfar. It was for this reason the village had hidden in the
jungle away from the rest of the world. A sudden thought crossed his
waking mind. The image of the Rakta Ishvara ripping a living child
apart burned like smiths’ fire in his frontal lobe. The sound of the
demon god’s screams as it fed on the child echoed through Paul’s
mind. The image was so vivid that it shook him to his core. His pores
leaked a cold sweat. Morning had arrived and with it the burden Paul
carried.

As Harold lay in hospital he knew little of the bloodsucking
William except seeing him blow up the pub, but their paths would cross
more than once in the days that would follow. The second time Harold
would come across the recently deceased body of William, started the
moment the flames claimed their last victim at the Queens. William had
fled the scene of arson leaving Harold unconscious on the floor and he
had headed for the sewers. The fire had burnt away the herbs that Paul
had placed around his neck and had allowed the parasite to extend its
tendrils up into William’s brain. He had been a mindless zombie similar
to those raised by necromancers but with the herb gone the Rakta
Ishvara had been free from Paul’s control. It spread quickly and its first
instinct was to flee to safety. William had raised a sewer grate not far
from the burning building. He was driven by the urge to supply the
parasite with the moisture it needed to survive.

The
sound of water running overhead had become familiar to
William in the days that passed. The darkness of the sewers was no
longer a problem for him as it would have been had he still been alive,
his eyes seemed keener. Now, much like the vicar who brought him
back from the grave, gloom was comforting to him. The only source of
light was a series of small dust flecked rays that fell in through small
slits high above in the city street. It was so dark that even a cat with
their shining eyes would have had trouble seeing but William could see
every crack in the slime-coated wall of the sewers under Neeskmouth.
The sewers were a new construction to the city and many broke off
into people’s cellars or led to unfinished tunnels that had been
abandoned after the funding was withdrawn for the ‘frivolous expense’
as Malcolm Benedict had called it. This almost total abandonment of
the tunnels had given William the perfect place to hide. In the days that
followed the fire William had rarely left the sewers and spent most of
his time in the dark. It had given him time to think and control the
urges. He felt strange in his own body, so much of his mind felt as if it
was missing. Memories and emotions had gone and in their place was
another consciousness, one whose hunger seemed to be getting worse.
William had to keep himself there in the filth that the rest of
Neeskmouth ignored so that he could fight what was inside him. The
strength the parasite had given him made it impossible for anyone or
anything to stop him, not even the fire in the cellar had killed him. The
parasite inside had begun to heal him before the flames even blistered
the skin. By the time he hid away with the rodents, his wounds had
vanished.

He had wanted to go to his family to tell them what happened
and that he was still alive somehow, wanting more than anything to
hold his baby in his arms once more, but he dared not. William knew he
was only a passenger in his body now. Something in him had changed
and it was unsafe to go to them. His mind was fighting the control of
the creature inside him but he could feel he was already losing.
William’s teeth dripped red with the life fluid of one of his fellow
residents, as they pressed deeper sinking into the soft and quickly
cooling body. The rat’s head hung limply between his jaws like the prey
of the great jungle lion.

In the silence, William watched as a raindrop slid down a
stalactite and fell to the floor with a splash. It sickened him that he was
feasting on rats, but the hunger in him never ended. It was worse at
night, William sat and dropped the rat’s carcass to the floor where it
bounced off the stone and fell from the upper steps motionlessly into
the small brown stream below. It floated along with the putrid waste of
the living city as it slowly sunk into the filth, the rats struggle for life
faded as its corpse disappeared into the darkness towards the canals.
Satisfied for now, William rested back against the wall but he knew it
would not last for long.

A lot of Williams’ memories had been taken when he passed
into the spirit realm, but he could remember his family. He could
remember the smell of his newborns head. He could also remember
the fear as the mugger beat him to death. William hated that he had
died and left his family but he wished he had stayed dead. It had been
dark and peaceful, so very restful. Then without welcome or invite, the
intrusion came into his body. This soul had come like blinding light and
confused matters, the Rakta Ishvara becoming one with him. It had
begun as a faint whisper, the words of a priest strongest in his mind.
Something had kept the Rakta Ishvara at bay, its demand little more
than a whisper but eventually the priest’s words had fallen away like a
discarded item of clothing in the void that remained. His mind now
echoed of a past that William had never lived. The being inside his soul
seemed to have a voice of its own, but not one that William could
understand. It took over at times and then faded again and left William
confused and alone in the dank sewers. The smell down there was
terrible, choking William’s senses. His thoughts flickered back to the
world of filth that surrounded him. He could not risk going to the
surface as there were too many people to feed on and he knew the
hunger would return. He could already feel it ebbing just below his
consciousness.

Beneath whatever he was becoming he was still human, at
least for now. Deep inside, he still felt guilt for the fire at the Queens.
He had heard the screams and seen the death, but he had not been in
control of his actions, he was not fully in control now but Paul had
worked him like a puppet. The thing inside him taking over had a voice
and personality of its own, one that seemed pure evil and filled with
hatred, but at least he seemed able to fight it.

It was ever since the sting of the herbs had fallen away.
William’s body had changed so much since he had come back from
whatever death was. He had been an averagely built man before.
Nothing special but when he came around as he was wrenched from
the spirit realm he found his body had grown stronger, each muscle
pushing hard against the skin, growing with renewed purpose like the
barbarian chiefs of old. His chest heaved and contorted as it forced
outwards with the growth of this new parasite, a hardened shell
replacing his broken ribs. There had been a change to his throat as well,
his tongue splitting, his pipes opening and twisting and his teeth
growing and sharpening to look more like the mouth of a wild cat than
a man. With his newfound strength and speed came more than just one
burden, the hunger and company within his own mind was not the only
thing to plague William. He had pains in his chest that came fast and
were suddenly very painful.

Even though he had never read the research Paul had carried
out, and couldn’t even point to where the Green Stone Isles were on a
map before his death, William now knew where this pain came from.
The knowledge came from the memories from a past he had never
lived. It came from the parasite. They were becoming one. The
knowledge that had been crammed into his skull like a complete
collection of encyclopaedias explained why it was that his chest hurt so
much. It was the being inside him, weaving its way into him more each
day. His own heart had stopped beating long ago and where it had been
something new lived. The pulsating parasite moved stale blood around
his body, it lived in a hard shell and its tendrils ran through the body
like roots through soil. It was keeping William alive but at the forsaking
of others. It needed fresh blood to keep its host body alive. The
memories that appeared in his mind were the shared hive mind of the
parasitic Rakta Ishvara.

A light from a sewer worker came into the tunnel drawing
William from his thoughts. William could hear the man’s heart beating
and the fainter sound of a canary before they even entered the same
tunnel as he called home. They had come to fix the bulwark of dead
rats that William’s hunger must have caused. The piles of decaying
corpses had blocked the tunnel and had forced rainwater and sewerage
to breach into the wine cellar of a noble. It did not matter to William
what the reason was that a person had come into his domain, for now it
was time to feed. Within seconds and without a sound, the sewer
worker’s lantern fell into the water. There was a spray of feathers and
the clanking of the empty cage as the bird escaped in the commotion. A
red colour mixed with the others floating in a place no one would see.

The journey through the sewers below Neeskmouth had been
largely uneventful for Dante as he made his way back towards the
harbour and hopefully the Cassandra if it hadn’t already set sail. The
flagship Cassandra had many a tale to tell of its own. It had started life
as a cargo ship for the Dean family before it was commandeered by
William as the prize of Neeskmouth when he took office at the end of
the Pole invasion. The irony that the ship Dante so desperately sought
had once belonged to the Dean estate was missed by Dante as he sat
watching the young girl and old woman who were talking at the other
end of the damp corridor he now hid in. Dante had left the Queens and
made his way through one sludge lined path after another in the
darkness below the city before the smell had hit him like many a
thrown shoe. It was the stench of death. Hundreds of his kind had
come to their end close by. There was something in the dark feeding on
them and even with his rodent sized brain Dante could see it was a safe
bet it was that same walking corpse that had evicted him in a bath of
flame from his easy pickings at the tavern. Dante had already sworn to
himself he would never cross paths with that twisted soul again and so
he had doubled back, headed away from the harbour and started to
make his way up to the city streets. He knew once he was up there he’d
have to avoid the stray dogs, cats and rat catchers and just about any
human with a shoe or shovel that took a dislike to anything with four
legs a tail and a taste for cheese. But something deep inside him said it
was safer than facing the shadows of the sewers with death waiting just
around the corner. Shuffling up between two rotten floorboards Dante
had found himself in a small, and just as putridly damp, corridor as the
sewers below. He was somewhere along what the humans called
Monks Walk. It was there with his nose just peeking out from the
shadows that Dante watched and listened.