Vaughn Heppner - Assassin of the Damned

“Knowledge is power,” Lorelei said, with her back to me. “You seek to strip me of my accumulated wisdom.”

“Madam is clever and seeks to change the topic. I’ve merely said that I refuse to be your dupe. Yet you’re suggesting an interesting thing. Knowledge is power. The sword is power. The will to act is power.”

“What if the sword is swung at the wrong person?” she asked.

“I see your point,” I said. “But I still desire-”

“What do you offer me in return for this knowledge?”

I considered that. “What do you want?”

Lorelei turned around, although she wouldn’t look at my burns. Slowly, she sat at the table, on the edge of her chair.

“I want to know what happened on the doomed Earth.” There was eagerness in her voice. “Tell me every word the Lord of Night spoke there. Describe it all.”

“You seek to strip me of my unique knowledge.”

“Quid pro quo,” she said.

I wasn’t a lawyer, but I assumed she meant an equal trade.

So I told her what I remembered. She sat absorbed, this dainty Immortal, idly fingering her cards as I spoke. When I finished, she began to speak about the deathblade. It was a fantastic tale. The Moon Lady had once sought out a monstrous smith named Mulciber, and in the dawn of time, he’d forged a dagger with dreadful spells. The Moon Lady paid the price and from it conceived a misshapen brat. In later times, the brat designed the castle that grew. The deathblade had the power to give lycanthropes and other hard-to-kill creatures wounds. The blade’s bite corrupted the flesh of normal folk, its poisoned metal needing only the slightest touch to be lethal. Lycanthropes healed from other kinds of cuts, although silver blades could also mortally wound them.

“What are the lycanthropes?”

“Creatures from another place,” she said.

“A place like the dead Earth?”

“You’ve paid for some knowledge,” she said, “not all my accumulated wisdom.”

“What I would like to know is who you are and why you’re helping me.”

She became thoughtful until she dared peer into my good eye. It was artfully done. Then she concentrated upon her cards.

“I was born a mortal, just as you were. But that was in the days when the Old Ones walked in power, before the curse put them to sleep. I was born in the lands now called Greece, near Athens. It was a handful of stone dwellings then.” Lorelei shook her head. “It will be light soon and you’ll sink into deathlike oblivion. So I’ll shorten the tale to this. I sought out the Moon Lady and became one of her maenads. I remember your ancestor. He was a reckless man, handsome and bold. He, too, sought out the Moon Lady, and he won her love. He was also vain, and refused to pay the price for her embrace.”

Lorelei pursed her dainty lips. “There is a spider called the black widow. It kills her lover. The Moon Lady practiced a similar rite. The first Baglioni must have known about that. He was handsome and bold, and after his night with the Moon Lady, he sought out a maenad and taught her forbidden delights. That was a terrible crime. For the maenads had to foreswear intimate relations with men in order to gain acceptance by the Moon Lady. This maenad fell from grace, knew the man and fled with him. He lived out his mortal span, and he received the Moon Lady’s child, which he raised. As unbelievable as it sounds, the Moon Lady refrained from killing him. And she favored the Baglioni line ever since. I think…I think he wooed her beyond the believable. I think the Moon Lady loved him, although she loved herself and her ways more.”

“You were that maenad,” I said.

Lorelei laughed sadly and shook her head. “The maenad was my birth sister. The Moon Lady sent me to kill her, which I did. In those days, I ruthlessly sought power. No. I killed my sister, but that planted a seed that sprouted hundreds of years later. I rebelled only when it became safe to do so, after the Old Ones had entered their eon-long slumber.”

Lorelei turned over a card, a nine of spades, and after a thoughtful pause, she placed it over the ten of spades.

“You’re helping me in order to pay back an old debt to your sister?”

A flicker of what might have been pain appeared on her face. It vanished as she shook her head. “I’m not a fair maiden in one of your Italian poems,” she said. “I’m an Immortal, which is to say, a survivor. You’re suspicious of me because I happened to be in the castle when you wandered in the warrens. I was there partly because the Moon Lady’s Darkling had taken too long in arriving. There were other reasons, but since those don’t concern you, I’ll keep them to myself. Why do I help you? The answer is simple. I fear Erasmo. He is a true acolyte of Old Father Night. That grim one loves death. Look at the destruction his servant plans. Although…I think Old Father Night may have miscalculated with your friend.”

“Meaning what?” I asked.

“That I believe Erasmo plans to supplant the Old Ones. I think he strives for power over them. Others have tried that in the past, those with unbridled ambition and deep cunning. That’s another reason I’m helping you. These upheavals are always dangerous to Immortals.”

“That doesn’t explain why you’re trying to thwart the Moon Lady,” I said.

“But it does. Erasmo and his master are worse. Yet she’s bad enough, if given half a chance. If we’re not careful, she’ll supplant them once they’re gone, and she’ll raise a dark kingdom devoted to her worship. She might forgive my past rebellion, but she might not. I don’t care to give her the chance to decide.”

“Why would the moon priestess allow you in the castle then?”

“Are you sure you were a Perugian prince?” she asked. “You Italians are noted for your deceit and backstabbing, for making an alliance one day and selling out to someone stronger the next. The Moon Lady accepts my aid because she hates Old Father Night more than she hates me.”

With a fingernail, I pried at the rough table edge. “Then you seek to return our world to what it was before the plague.”

“No. That’s impossible, although it would be ideal. I think your Italian cities were about to enter a golden age, say, in another hundred years. All the elements were in place.” She shrugged. “As I’ve said before, I think some of the Old Ones may have become insane. The plague and now this trumpet…mass death unleashes terrible forces. The world is awash in sorcery as I suspect it might have been in the beginning. There is the possibility that this chaos might unravel everything.”

I thought about the dead world, the comets that blazed across the heavens and hit with shattering force. Erasmo took us on that road so he could forge…whatever his ambitions had conceived. He was like a man who whipped a team of horses, with his wagon careening along the edge of a cliff. He could plunge over the cliff at any moment, but he could also arrive at his destination. In this instance, his wagon was our world.

“Did you cause me to sleep longer in the swamp than the Moon Lady had planned?” I asked.

Lorelei laid down another card. “I wish I knew how to do that. It would take great cleverness.”

I noticed she didn’t say no or yes. But I left it at that, deciding she would lie about it if she had.

***

The nights passed and my hurts healed. The eye took the longest. Without Lorelei and in my impatience, I would have lain in the moon’s rays all night. I began to wonder if Lorelei told the truth about that. Maybe she wanted me to linger here for reasons of her own.

To test my suspicion, I remained under the moon longer that night, long enough that I felt the Moon Lady’s tug. I hurried indoors and refused to take out my coin, much as a siren urge tickled my curiosity.