Chapter 20
The Lid of the Barrel
Lina silently ate away at meat and vampire wares in the dark of the crypt. She was interrupted by the sound of a person opening the door to the crypt. Some faint light was visible down the stairs, and Lina automatically recoiled from it, grabbing a cloak to cover herself.
Several pairs of feet came stomping down the stairs. In the lead was Andrei who bore a bronze candleholder with a single candle, which he shielded with his hand.
“Lina, good to see you. Hope I’m not interrupting anything,” he said to her. She nodded back to him.
Behind him, Vasile and Flaviu followed. They waved their greetings and proceeded to sit in a circle on the ground amongst the coffins and around the candle that Andrei had set down.
“We’re planning our attack,” Flaviu began, addressing Lina, “We need you to tell us what you can about the layout of the caves. How many rooms and halls? How are they oriented? Especially, what’s the entrance like? How would we get in?”
“The entrance is surrounded by shrubbery and covered by a large rock, which I can lift but not you,” Lina explained, “Behind the rock is a wooden door. After the wooden door is a down-sloping tunnel, which leads to the Great Hall, a huge open room. From there, you have another cave leading into a long hall, down which all the bedrooms are located and the pen.”
Flaviu had to interrupt at this point, “Alright, so to invade, we’d have to lift a rock, then we’d have to use a battering ram to pummel open the door? And we’d face no countermeasures here (no archers raining down on us from the wall or hot oil being poured on us); so that’d be pretty easy. Then we’d simply be facing some forty odd unarmed vampires in hand-to-hand combat in the caves?”
“There’s nothing simple about that last step,” Andrei said, “In hand-to-hand combat the vampires would tear you to shreds. This is nothing like traditional siege warfare. These vampires are vicious, they’re fast, and they’re strong. It’d be a bloodbath if you tried to enter that way.”
“It’s true. I am not the strongest among them, but I believe I could kill all three of you right now before you could escape this room,” Lina said, speaking with a chilling frankness, “It is out of courtesy that I do not.”
There was a long pause before Vasile continued, “I just wanted to add that I’ve been hunting vampires my whole life. No hunter ever gets close to them if he wants to live. We use arrows and crossbows from a distance, and we thoroughly disable them before we approach, both because they’re dangerous and we have to worry about infection.”
“Within those confined space, projectiles are almost worthless. There’s no space for us to put distance between us and the vampires. We start firing on them, and they storm our archers and kill them in a matter of moments,” Flaviu objected.
“Exactly. And you’re not even mentioning that this will all be in the dark,” Andrei said, raising his hand to draw their attention to their current surroundings, “These are underground caves. And the vampires can see vastly better than you and I in the dark.”
“It’s not completely dark,” Lina interjected, “There’re torches and candles everywhere, and if it’s during the day, there’re some small holes in the ceiling of the Great Hall and elsewhere.” She added, “They permit some light in through the ceiling and give us fresh air.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Vasile said, dismissing her comment, “In dim light or complete blackness they have the advantage.”
“Wait a minute, though,” Andrei said, “Did you say there’s light coming in through the ceiling?” Lina looked at Andrei confused, but she nodded. “So those light holes presumable extend to the surface, right?” Andrei asked. Lina again nodded, and Andrei continued, “Do you know how many of these holes there are and where we could find them from the surface?”
“There’s two of them over the Great Hall, maybe a dozen more, several over the pen,” Lina said, “I don’t know where they come out on the surface, but the two over the Great Hall I could find. Nonetheless, I don’t know why you would be interested. They’re far too small to enter through. They’re only maybe a hand’s breadth in diameter.”
“No, but maybe we could expand them. We could dig through the ceiling. That’s where we should be entering from. If we can bore an opening through the ceiling, then we can snipe from there,” Andrei suggested.
“But how are we going to open the roof without being detected? It’d take the hand of God to lift so much earth quickly enough to surprise them. It’s not like just popping open the lid of a barrel to peak at what’s inside,” Vasile objected.
“Ahh, but we don’t need to lift off the lid of the barrel,” Flaviu said, with a burst of laughter rising in his stomach, “We just need to blow it to splinters.”
“What do you mean?” Andrei asked Flaviu.
“I’ve got a few barrels of my own in storage,” Flaviu said, “Of gunpowder, that is. It shouldn’t be too hard to get a few more. There’s been a bit of a lapse in the war recently. We might be able to acquire some from one of the armies. You say the Great Hall is a big open room? All we need to do is set a light to those barrels and it’ll pop the top off of that room like a wine flask,” Flaviu said.
“And then we bring our guns, our cannons and our archers to the edge of that crater and we shoot down every vampire still moving,” Andrei added.
“But the cave system extends deeper beyond that main room. Long hallways of personal rooms. Many vampires will be in their own room, no matter when you attack,” Lina said, “You will still have to descend and face them hand to hand.”
“No, what we’ll have to do is bring more explosives and dump them down in there to open up the place more. I trust Vasile and Andrei know what they’re talking about, when they say that these vampires are too dangerous for hand to hand combat.”
“We can’t go too far with the explosions,” Andrei added, “We have to worry about the humans, the ones were there to supposedly save. How far are they in there?”
“The pen begins maybe two hundred paces from the Great Hall,” Lina said.
“We can’t go very far. Even with the gunpowder over the Great Hall, there’s a genuine risk we might still cause a cave-in over the humans,” Flaviu noted.
“Then we have to get as many vampires as possible in the Great Hall when it blows. Is there a way to do that?” Andrei asked Lina.
Lina said, shrugging her shoulders, “The only time I ever saw them all gathered there was when I first arrived. They gathered to see me infected.”
“That’s what we need to think about, how to get them underneath that explosion,” Andrei declared, “Because I think this is the plan we’re stuck with.”
They all nodded. After some more discussion, the three men stood up, and Lina stood with them. They said their goodbyes and turned around, carrying their candle and the last bit of the dim light with them.
As they exited the church, they failed to notice Lucian kneeling in the front of the nave, ostensibly in prayer. With his hands clasped in front of him, he turned his head just enough to catch the faces of the three men that left. He pulled out a piece of paper and wrote out the substance of what he had seen, noting that he’d seen Flaviu, Andrei and Vasile apparently meeting with Lina, who was now staying in the crypt of the church. He stood up and exited the church with the folded paper in hand and followed Flaviu around the wall.
Lucian trailed a good distance behind Flaviu on foot, watching him as he entered in through the Terem gates, walked through the main square and turned off down a side street towards the guard station.
There, Flaviu found Cezar standing guard, and he ordered, “I want an inventory of the gunpowder we have in storage.”
Cezar responded with an emphatic “Yes, sir,” and ran off to another building nearby, while Flaviu sat down and relaxed.
Lucian took out his paper and wrote down a few more notes, before Flaviu started to turn in his direction, and he had to hastily hide behind the nearest
building. Lucian didn’t bother to check and see whether he’d been spotted, and instead, simply ran off, leaving the city.
He continued walking at a brisk pace directly into the woods. Within only a few hundred paces he heard a hissing from the trees, which sounded distinctly like a vampire trying to get his attention. A tree swayed with a creaking sound above him, as the vampire bent the tree and leapt to another. A moment later Eta dropped from above directly in front of Lucian, so close to him that he leapt backwards away from her.
“No need to be frightened,” Eta reprimanded him. She always partially leaned forward when she stood, leading with her nose, which seemed to smell the emotions of those she interacted with. “Do you have anything for me?” Eta asked.
“I took some notes,” Lucian said, extending the piece of paper that he’d been writing on.
“Asha’s not much of a reader,” Eta said, looking at the piece of paper, which Eta hadn’t the capacity to read either, and tossing it back to Lucian, “Just tell me what it says. I’ll remember.”
Lucian briefly recounted what he’d seen, checking his notes to make sure he didn’t miss anything. In response, Eta asked, “What did Andrei, Flaviu and Vasile talk about at this meeting?” She was clearly displeased with the thinness of the intelligence Lucian had provided.
“I don’t know,” Lucian admitted.
“What did Flaviu want with the gunpowder?”
“I don’t know,” Lucian admitted, “For guns I assume. They must be planning an attack.”
“This is not enough,” Eta told him, “We need more information. Most especially we need to know when this attack is and how they’re going to attack. Now, get back to Terem and find out what you can, and if not there, go to Vallaya.”
Eta, at these words, turned around and ran away as fast as her legs could carry her in the direction of the coven.
When Eta arrived at the coven, she relayed the information to Asha, who was at the time in her room standing in a tub of warm water while two male vampires scrubbed her body with soap. She smelled fresh, with a hint of frankincense to cover up the normally pungent vampire odor.
Asha turned to look at Eta while she relayed the information. After hearing all that Eta had to provide, in a moment of angry caprice, she slapped Eta across the cheek.
By way of apology she admitted, “You don’t deserve that. It’s not your fault. It would be better if you passed that slap on to Lucian. I’m afraid you’ll have to help him. Go to Vallaya. Spy on Andrei. Tell me everything you see, and if you can find Vasile, see what he’s doing as well.” Asha turned her head downwards and looked at her naked body and added, “I think I’ll visit Beniamin, see if I can ply my wiles on him.”
“You have a most beautiful physique,” Eta concurred with a nod.
“Might as well put my beauty to use, since we vampires have no use for it,” Asha commented.
After Eta left, Asha asked to be dried off and brought her daylight clothes.