The Geomancer (30 page)

Adele gasped loudly, like breaking from the surface of the sea. She blinked as she returned to the normal world. Gareth crowded in front of her, holding the phurba. Yidak observed with interest.

“What happened?” Gareth asked.

“Nothing.” Adele's gaze swept over the unassuming facets of the phurba, which seemed to hide the void. She stared up at Gareth. The cold blue of his eyes warmed her.

He asked, “Then it is powerful?”

“I don't know.” Adele felt tears that she didn't understand. They dribbled down her cheeks. Something deep and empty pulled at her. “I don't know . . . I don't know,” was all she could say.

Adele stared into the crackling fire pit. “I don't understand. I've never felt anything like it.”

Gareth dropped more fuel on the fire to keep the shivering Adele warm. “I'm glad we left it behind.”

“I don't want it near me.” Adele pulled her thick fur collar tight. “But I need to understand it, if I even can. What did Mamoru teach me? I'm not sure I know anything.”

Gareth joined her on the edge of the fire pit. “He taught you enough to be a weapon. That's all. You've told me that he actually kept knowledge from you so it didn't conflict with the purpose he had planned. Any true knowledge you have came from your own studies, not Mamoru.”

Adele put a hand to her forehead as if feverish. “I can't fathom what Goronwy must know that I don't. How could he use it? How powerful is he?”

“Does it matter?” General Anhalt handed her a cup of her Edinburgh whiskey. “You have the weapon now, so he is powerless. What good is his knowledge to him?”

“It matters. I have no idea what that thing is, or what it does.” She slammed her hand on the bricks. “My knowledge only extends to what I can touch.”

Gareth said, “You can touch the entire Earth.”

Adele seemed to ignore him as she tore into her rucksack, pulling out her mother's notebook. She dropped to the floor and bent over the book with a furious expression. “I need to think. I need to think.”

Gareth stepped away because he sensed she wasn't asking for comfort. She wanted room to flail mentally, and perhaps physically. He tapped Anhalt and motioned toward the door. The general looked concerned for Adele, but Gareth wordlessly assured him. The two men shoved the heavy yak hide aside and went out into the cold.

C
HAPTER 29

Gareth strode across the courtyard. Vampires hurried all around him. Others crouched motionless on walls and rooftops, watching the swarming horde outside the walls. Wincing with pain, General Anhalt struggled to follow up the steps as Gareth flew for the central temple.

Inside, Yidak sat at his machine, arms and legs moving in concert. The rows of copper cylinders spun, filling the room with a multitude of jumbled memories. Gareth took Yidak's arm, interrupting his manipulation of the knobs and wheels. The old vampire sat back and looked up at Gareth expectantly while the cylinders spun down into gibberish.

“What are you doing?” Gareth demanded.

“I was listening.” Yidak nodded a congenial greeting to Anhalt, who finally hobbled in. “Why do you ask?”

“Why aren't you doing something?” Gareth leaned on the machine. “We're under siege. We have to do
something
.”

The old vampire stood. “You want to slip away to find the enemy's leader and kill him. That would fix Adele's problems, wouldn't it?”

Gareth had considered that very thing. He hadn't expected to have it thrown back at him with a sense of mockery. “What's wrong with that plan?”

Yidak smiled and went to the door. “I suspected as much. It's simple and quick and proper work for a lonely hero.”

They all went back out into the cold, with Anhalt exhaling in dismay while rebuttoning his coat and lifting his collar around his throat. Yidak paused on the cracked steps piled with snow.

“Look out there, son,” he said. “There is hardly a rock without eyes. The air is full. You could not slip away without being swarmed.”

“He does make a good point,” muttered Anhalt, glancing at the crawling vampires on the surrounding mountains.

“I'm very good,” Gareth stated flatly.

“I have no doubt,” Yidak replied. “You may be the best I've ever seen. And I can't stop you from trying, but you would die.”

“What else then?”

“Nothing.” The old vampire went slowly down the steps and across the square, with crunching steps on the icy dirt. Each vampire he passed bowed or reached out a kind hand to him. “We will wait.”

“Wait for what?” Gareth cried. “For the enemy to charge in here and crush us?”

“You think like a human,” Yidak said. “There is time.”

“No, there's not. Adele and General Anhalt and your pilgrims need food, and there isn't much. What about your own monks? How long before your meager herd is drained?”

Yidak refused to be shaken by Gareth's use of
herd
. “That could be a problem, but it is not one yet. Give me your hand.”

“Why?”

“Don't ask why to everything. Give me your hand.”

Gareth raised his hand, swathed in a dark leather glove. Yidak pressed his gnarled talon into Gareth's palm. Yellowed claws barely reached the tips of Gareth's long fingers.

Gareth stood quietly with their hands together. Finally, he said, “What is the point of this?”

“You don't see it?”

Gareth stared at their hands more intently, waiting for inspiration. There was an obvious size difference, but that seemed unimportant. And clearly Yidak's claws were always extended while Gareth's were retracted into sharp fingernails. Or it would've been clear if he hadn't been wearing gloves.

He was wearing gloves.

Gareth hadn't been Greyfriar for days, perhaps weeks; it was difficult to follow time here. Yet, he still wore gloves out of habit. The cold didn't bother him, he simply felt comfortable wearing them around Adele.

Gareth feigned ignorance, preferring to believe that couldn't be Yidak's point. “I don't see it.”

The old vampire grinned with kindness. “You've been human for a long time now, haven't you? With your gloves and mask and firearms. You're good at it. You write and read. You watch clocks and count hours.”

Gareth pulled his hand away angrily. “You do the same with robes and chanting and your idiotic library.” His stomach clenched as he instantly recalled the first night he had shown Adele his own library in Edinburgh Castle. He had pulled her to the room with giddy pride, knowing he could appeal to her human love of knowledge. He showed her the trunk containing the pitiful few books he had gathered from vampire-wrecked northern Europe and stepped aside for her approval. The look on her face had nearly killed him. Her eyes betrayed a stunned disbelief that this measly collection was what he had been lauding as a
library
. He realized later that he had misread her expression. However, in that moment he stood exposed, having granted her alone access to the grandest of his secrets, the most prideful aspect of his hidden life, and her unintentional shock showed how false it was. It only served to drive home just what he was, despite the masks and swords and great library consisting of seven thin volumes.

Yidak showed no such embarrassment at Gareth's insult. Rather, he was confused by the pain that washed over Gareth's face.

The old vampire said, “You hate our kind, don't you?”

Gareth started to refute the question as ignorant and simplistic. Yidak had no way of knowing his heart, his life. There was no way the old vampire, hiding away on his mountain, could understand what Gareth had gone through. Instead, he merely said, “Yes.”

“Why, Gareth? What did we do to you to make you hate all of us?”

The wind howled around him. “We killed my father.”

Anhalt shouted against the gale, “But Cesare killed King Dmitri.”

Gareth stared into the distance at the swarm of countless vampires. “Cesare just put an end to his dying. I murdered him when I joined the Great Killing. I knew he was right about it, but I did nothing.

“That night, one hundred and fifty years ago, when the packs first struck, I saw the fear in his eyes. I ignored it. For years, I thought he had been frightened because I was going off to war, as any father would be. Only later did I realize the truth. He knew the path we were embarking on; he knew it was a disaster, and there he was, casting his beloved son out into the terrible world he couldn't prevent. My father never recovered from the shame. The more territory we took, the more humans we slaughtered, the more my father retreated into the howling wildness of his own mind.” Gareth ran his gloved hands over his arms. He could still feel his father's strong fingers clutching him. He could hear the cracking voice bidding him goodbye on that starry winter night and see his reflection in those frozen blue eyes. “That was the last time my father truly saw me.”

Yidak quietly interlaced his claws over his red and yellow-robed stomach. “What are you doing
now
to save him?”

Gareth barely heard the nonsensical question. He was still trying to recapture the memory of that last night with his father.

Yidak lifted into the air and hooked onto the decorated eaves of a temple. “That is why you're lost. He may be dead, but his memory is not.”

Gareth watched Yidak crawl up the roof and vanish. He gave Anhalt a quick glance to excuse himself from the general's company. The man nodded with understanding and limped back toward their quarters. Gareth strode off across the crowded monastery grounds. He felt leather stretch tight across his hands as he clenched his fists.

Adele stood in the center of the frightful room of the Tear of Death. Her glimmering khukri sent long shadows of stone arms and torsos writhing around her. The black stone dagger lay at her feet. It looked so simple. It didn't glow or quiver or throw off waves of powerful energies. It didn't call seductively to her nor whisper threats. It merely sat in the dirt as it had for centuries.

She had contemplated the thing for the last twenty-four hours, wrestling with her uncertainties as well as the worries about Goronwy's army scuttling just outside the walls. There was something horrible about the phurba. It couldn't be understood or controlled. There was nothing inside it.

Utter emptiness.

Adele knelt beside the phurba and set her glowing khukri on the ground. She dug into her pockets and brought out two objects. One was the sharp metal tool that Yidak used to inscribe the copper cylinders. The other was a heavy mallet she had acquired from the pilgrims. She slowly placed the awl over the center of the stone artifact. She waited for some reaction, half expecting the phurba would suddenly spring to occult life to defend itself. It did nothing.

Adele touched the tip of the tool to the stone with an audible click. She took a deep breath and raised the hammer high over her head.

“Adele,” came a soft voice from behind.

She spun around, instinctively raising the sharp tool as a weapon. Gareth stood in the doorway. Adele lowered the awl with a twinge of embarrassment. Under Gareth's steady gaze, she felt suddenly childish. Perhaps it was worse than childish. It made her wonder if she was acting out of pure fear. Or perhaps jealousy. She was down here alone in the dark without anyone else's knowledge.

Adele said, “I am going to destroy the Tear of Death.”

Gareth glanced over his shoulder and stepped inside. “Does Yidak know you're here?”

“No.” She gripped the awl tighter. “I assumed he would try to stop me.”

Gareth knelt next to her in the dirt. “Here, give those to me. I'm far stronger.”

Adele hesitated, then handed the instruments to him. He placed the sharp point of the tool in the center of the stone dagger. Then he raised the hammer and brought it crashing down on the butt of the awl, snapping the steel shaft in half with a sharp crack. There was no mark on the phurba.

Adele cursed. Gareth immediately pressed the jagged tip of the awl against the stone and pounded it again. The steel pick caromed off to the side. The black dagger remained unaffected.