Scott Mariani - Uprising

Then he noticed the old church. It overlooked the houses from the end of the street, standing at the top of a gently sloping rise. Sections of roof were still in decent order, enough to provide a bit of shelter. Joel left the bike where it stood — he didn’t think anyone was going to steal it.

There wasn’t much left inside the church except for its bare stone walls. Joel found a spot away from the icy wind that whistled through the broken stained glass windows, laid down the case and grimly started rooting around in his rucksack for his little Primus stove, a box of matches and a can of soup. As he struck a match with trembling fingers, he glanced out of the smashed window. From this slightly higher ground, he had a better view of the craggy mountain peaks rising out of the pine forests, like rows of jagged white teeth stretching from horizon to horizon under the pale moon.

Then he stopped, did a double take and stared. The match burned back and singed his fingers; he dropped it without taking his eyes off what he’d just seen.

Perched on the summit of a nearby mountain, bathed in a shaft of moonlight, was a castle.

The craggy battlements loomed high against the night sky. As Joel got closer, every rise of the Dnepr’s engine note as it lurched over the bumps made him cringe in case the noise reached listening ears. He didn’t dare use the headlight, and only the deep moon-shadows sloping away down the steep rocky banks either side of the road kept him from riding off course and tumbling a thousand feet down to the black depths of the valley below.

Fear had its icy fingers around Joel’s guts and was wringing them tight. A kind of madness was rising up inside him that almost made him want to laugh with terror. All that prevented his mind from cracking completely was the thought of the cross of Ardaich, nestling on the sidecar seat just a few inches from his right knee. He’d left the case behind in Vâlcanul. He no longer had any use for it. He was riding into war now –

and whatever fate was lying in wait for him up there, there wasn’t a force on the planet that could have persuaded him to turn back.

Up ahead, the snowy road snaked all the way up to the castle gates. If he’d had any notions of storming right up to them like a conquering knight on his charger, they melted quickly away at the memory of the attack in Venice. Stone had humans working for him as well as vampires, and until the fangs came out, the only way to tell one enemy from another was to get close to them with the cross. One would shrivel up and die, but the other might easily just put a bullet in his head. He needed to approach by stealth.

He was still a quarter of a mile from the castle walls when he decided that the bike’s engine noise was too big a risk, and turned off the ignition. The machine coasted a few yards, and he jumped out of the saddle and used its momentum to roll it off the road and hide it behind a large rock on the verge.

Here we go, Solomon. This is it.

By the light of the moon he studied the lie of the land. The castle had been built to withstand sieges and wars, and its architects had known what they were doing.

Except for where the raised roadway wound up to the gates, the base of the massive walls dropped away down a sheer cliff face. No ancient army could have scaled it successfully, weighed down as they would have been by shields and armour and weapons. Even if a few had made it to the top, archers in the battlements would have mown them down in the open killing field between the cliff edge and the foot of the wall.

But a single, skilled climber, armed with just a small stone cross, had a chance to get up there unseen. It had been a while since he’d done any rock climbing but, tracing his eye up the cliff face, Joel reckoned he could make it. It was a hell of a challenge, and he was mad even to think of attempting it, on his own, in the dark, without ropes or crampons or any kind of proper equipment.

But then, he reflected, he was mad. Had to be, to be here at all.

He zipped open his rucksack and shook all the contents — spare clothes, his stove and food supply, documents and passport, anything that was surplus weight — out into the footwell of the sidecar. He put the cross inside in their place and carefully closed the zippers and Velcro fastenings, before taking off his jacket and looping the rucksack straps around his shoulders and waist over the sweatshirt underneath. It cheered him immensely to think he was a walking anti-vampire weapon now, lethal just by his presence. The adrenalin was rushing through his veins so fast, he didn’t even feel the cold any more as he went scrambling down the snowy bank and traced a zigzagging path through the trees to the base of the cliff.

Exactly two hours after Gabriel Stone had left her alone to wander about the great hall, Alex was summoned again and Lonsdale escorted her through the winding passageways of the castle, the vampire guards close behind.

She could see the heaviness in Lonsdale’s step, the dullness in his eyes and the way his head hung low as he walked. The ancient practice of enslaving humans as ghouls had been one of the first things the Federation had abolished when it had seized power, and Alex had been there at the reading of the proclamation. Trust Gabriel Stone to have flouted the law with such audacity. Lonsdale gave off an air of complete pathos

— she couldn’t help but feel just a little sorry for him.

The pale ghoul showed her through a tall doorway into a brightly lit room filled with state-of-the-art equipment. A large and expensive-looking digital film camera was mounted on a tripod, pointing at an empty carved oak throne. A rack-mounted DVD

recorder was connected to a large screen.

Stone looked breezy and relaxed in an open-necked white shirt and silk necktie.

Lillith had draped herself over a divan in the corner, while Zachary and the other two of his inner circle were watching over the prisoners. Rumble and the seven Federation Supremos were huddled together, surrounded by the sword-wielding guards. Olympia Angelopolis had completely lost her famous composure, but she still managed to look proud next to Gaston Lerouge. Hassan, Goldmund, Korentayer, Mushkavanhu and Borowczyk stood gazing down at their feet, refusing to make eye contact with anyone.

‘Alexandra,’ Stone called with a bright smile, looking genuinely pleased to see her. Alex noticed the hot glower that Lillith shot at his back as he walked across to greet her. ‘Thank you, Jeremy,’ he said to Lonsdale. ‘That will be all for now. You may return to your hole until I call for you again.’ He took Alex’s elbow. ‘Let me show you what your friends and I have been up to for the last couple of hours,’ he said warmly. ‘I must say it’s all been going marvellously.’ He turned to Olympia. ‘We’ve been having rather a lot of fun down here, have we not?’

The Vampress let out a humiliated sob.

‘Perhaps I really should go into film-making after all,’ Stone went on. ‘Let’s take a look at the fruit of our labours.’ He aimed a remote control at the DVD player. The screen lit up and, framed there in high definition, sitting slumped and defeated on the oak throne under the bright lights, was Olympia.

‘In her final and most spectacular public appearance,’ Stone smiled.

On screen, the Supremo confessed openly to a host of injustices, and pleaded guilty to charges of corruption and the murder of innocent vampires whose only crime was to honour their ancient heritage. The creation of Solazal and Vambloc had not, she admitted, been done with the interests of vampires at heart, but right from the very beginning had been conceived as a deliberate scheme to enrich her and her colleagues at the expense of their fellows. She told the camera that the burden of her sins had become too heavy to bear, and she now planned to go into seclusion and hide her face away from the vampire community in everlasting shame.