Abby looked shocked, and she had her chain writhe and dart over to me, and drop the rosary with the heavy crucifix into my hands. The yard-long circle of beads clattered as I caught it. I guess Abby was unnerved by how powerful this thing was. I suppose if you’d never seen a vampire movie before, it would come as a complete surprise.
Strange thing: The moment the crucifix was in my hand, I no longer felt the Arctic vacuum of hunger issuing from the body of the Cold One.
I had sort of been assuming that Abby was a wise choice to hold the vampire-mugging cross, because of her innocence or something. I thought that, as an Undying, I would be more vulnerable to the life-eating power, and that the Cross of Christ would shield me only partly or not at all. “O me of little faith,” I muttered to myself. “Thou art a moron.”
Louder, I said, “Foster! Let him see me.”
And, with sword sheathed, and with nothing but a crucifix for a shield, I walked forward to confront the vampire-alchemist creature who, unlike all his kind, had the living heart of an Undying One blazing in his guts like a star, granting him endless life, infinite power. His eyes fixed on me with a look of lust and delight, like a greedy child offered a second helping of his favorite dessert.
His eyes, his terrible eyes, swelled up in my vision, and I felt as dizzied as a seasick tightrope walker with a drop steeper than Niagara Falls yawning and roaring below. My arm suddenly felt like lead, but I raised it up, and when the little crux of wood and ivory was before me, the eyes of Vorvolac were suddenly very small and filled with fear.
I stepped forward, and it was like walking against a strong wind, or a chain around my neck, forcing me back.
“Do not meet his eyes!” cried Penny, her voice hitting a high note, albeit shrill with fear that rang like crystal.
“Re-laaax!” I scoffed, swaying, forcing one foot forward, then the other. “I am freaking Peter Cushing in this scene, and he is Christopher Lee!”
Foster said, “Grand Moff Tarkin and Count Dooku were never in the same scene together.”
“Fos, you are so shallow! Don’t you watch the classics?” I said. The wind was now a gale, but then, suddenly, whatever power Vorvolac was exerting against my will to drive me back broke like a snapped chain. The gale was a breeze, then a breath, then gone. I stumbled forward, surprised.
Penny said, “I thought you never watched old movies.”
“Horror movies, I do,” I said, grinning down at Vorvolac, who cowered. “They are highly educational.”
7. Word of Honor
I kicked Vorvolac to the ground, and then I stepped on his neck, “I will make a deal with you, Count Chocula. You do one little thing for me, and I’ll spare your filthy life and let you go unharmed. Not harmed further.”
“You lie…” he gasped.
I leaned on his throat a little. “You have my word on it, and I don’t break my word! Do what I say, and you walk out of here. Or, hop. I am going to step off your neck now, and the next words out of your face-hole will be ‘Yes, sir!’”
I released the pressure on his neck. “Yessss… sssir!” He gasped, “But you must swear!”
That seemed like a reasonable request. I lifted up the crucifix. “By Saint George and the Holy Rood, I will spare you and free you unharmed to go your way, if you help me free these prisoners, harming none and playing no tricks. In the name of the Father, and Son, and Holy Ghost, I swear it. Do you agree?”
His eyes were glaring at the crucifix with purest hate. “Ah! Your vow is in that puny talisman, which burns me! Whatever are these names by which you swear, I curse them! Put aside that bit of wooden rubbish, so that I may ravish and devour your life and soul!”
“Wrong answer,” I said, and punched him in the face, making sure I hit his broken nose.
The Twilight Gate Opens
1. Unclenched Collar
It took longer than I expected, but when I was done beating him, and he had agreed to my terms, he was weeping, so that tears of silvery poison dripped down his cheeks. Yes, my arms were tired and my knuckles were skinned raw, and I enjoyed every minute.
Foster was keeping a wreath of unseen influence around Vorvolac’s head, to prevent us from making eye contact and getting mesmerized.
Foster also was beginning to have a strained look to his features, like a student who concentrates too long on one same math problem, or a fencer who holds his blade on his fingertips minute after minute, keeping both arms straight. Evidently the inviso-power could not be kept up forever. It used up Foster’s mojo or mana or endurance points or whatever.
We blindfolded Vorvolac with a strip from a silk pillowcase, so that Foster could relax. Nakasu hauled Vorvolac upright on his one good leg, and took him, one by one by one, to each girl in the room.
Some of the girls were so afraid we had to hold them in place. Foster and I, motivated by a testosterone-fueled sense of civic responsibility, both eagerly volunteered for the job of wrestling the wiggling yet curvaceous half-naked girls to hold them still, but Penny held them in place instead, merely by singing a soft song in any frightened girl’s ear.
The Cold One touched each girl’s black metal collar. Nakasu kept his huge hand, strong as an iron clamp, around Vorvolac’s wrist and guided his hand, so that he would not brush against any flesh.
Immediately upon his touch, the living metal was no longer alive, no longer strong enough to maintain a circular shape, and most of the girls could pull the limp bands of metal from their throats without Nakasu’s help.
You should have seen their faces light up. Girls look really pretty when their faces are glowing with a joy so great it is almost like awe.
Penny insisted on going last. Her fingers were not strong enough to pull the metal loop open, so I stepped up, put my arms around her neck, and with her scented hair tickling my fingers, I found the seam where the two ends met. I flexed my arm muscles, grunted, and yanked the thing into a straight bar with a clang of noise.
I presented it to her with a slight bow and a little smile.
I wanted to tell her 'I told you so'. But there must be some cosmic law of nature that prevents heroes from saying that to the damsels they rescue, because just at that moment, to my surprise, Penny started crying.
Her shoulders hunched, her chest heaved, and tears began leaking from her enormous, glittering eyes, and her lower lip was trembling.
I have never actually had occasion to whack a jackass over the skull with a two-by-four, but I understand they are given to have an expression that combines stubbornness and dullness of wit at such moments. I suspect I may have had the same expression on my face at that moment.
Nakasu, who held the crucifix, yanked Vorvolac away from Penny and tucked him under one arm. Nakasu must have seen the look of all-consuming bewilderment on my face, because he reached out with a hand the size of a waffle iron and shoved me into Penny’s arms. Or rather, her into mine.
This was something new and beyond me. What the heck do you do when you have both arms full of a crying girl?
2. Clinched Comfort
I tried to comfort her and pat her shoulder, which was not quite possible at this angle, and I said, “There, there. It's all right.”
Apparently that was the wrong thing to say.
“All right!” Penny yanked her head back from where it rested at slightly below armpit level. She had to crane her neck back to look at me. “All right? I was afraid! I was terrified! My mother calls dragons out of the sea! She is NEVER afraid! All right? Nothing will ever be all right again!”
“No one is brave all the time. You did fine.”
“But I had to be rescued! By a boy!”
“Man, actually,” I protested, apparently to no avail.
“A boy who works for me!”
“Pretty damn huge boy—let’s be fair—unkillable boy…with a kickass magic samurai sword and highly trained super death-fu kill-mad skillz, I should add!”
“A minimum-wage employee who doesn’t even know how to wax the f
loors!”
“Um…now, hold on! I explained about that grade of wax…the drying time–
“You're just a h-high school dropout!”
“Homeschooled!” I said through gritted teeth.
She arched her back more, trying to crane back further so she could look me in the face. This pushed her tightly against my body, and I found myself regretting the chain hauberk I was wearing.
“You understand nothing, Ilya Muromets! I was helpless! Helpless!”
“That's not necessarily a bad thing. Look at, uh, Lois Lane, for example.”
“I am not a cartoon! I am one of the Daughters of Tiamath! But all my arts and lore failed me! What will they say when the Daughterhood finds out that I failed! That I was afraid! That I was saved by a hairy troglodyte! What will my mother say?”
I tightened my grip and she gasped and could not breathe for a moment, and could not talk.
I leaned over her and put my nose against her nose. “She had darn well better say Thank you for saving my beautiful daughter. And then she will say: Did she give you that kiss she promised?”
I relaxed my grip and let her re-inflate.
And she lifted her face to mine and parted her lips and closed her eyes.
So, yes, I finally got that kiss. Either that, or my spine turned into a lightning bolt and shot several zillion volts directly into the pleasure center of my brain.
And yes, it was my first kiss, ever. I was a lip-virgin until that moment.
She kind of rubbed tears and snot on my cheeks, because her nose had started running while she was crying, but I did not complain. I wish I knew the date and time of day. Everything in my life is measured before and after that kiss. B.K. and A.S.: Before Kiss and Anno Smooch.
I wish I could tell you that this moment was the end of the story. It would have been such a good moment to roll the credits just then, you know?
But then reality interrupted.
3. Kill the Screech Owl
While I was still in mid-kiss, Nakasu tapped me on the shoulder, and pointed to the vampire under his armpit, and grunted.
“Mm … Mm,” I said, parting for air, “Busy. Leave message at the beep.”
But now Penny turned her head, so all I got during my next lip-assault was a lipful of soft, rounded cheek. Cheeked, blast it!
“Get serious! Do you never know the right time to pay attention?” She wriggled out of my arms with an impatient sigh, just as if she had not been enthusiastically sharing one lungful of breath with me a half-second earlier. “He wants to know the fate of the Nosferatu. I say kill it now.”
My suddenly-empty arms felt an almost physical ache at their girlishlessness.
So I crossed them with a clang of mail on my armored chest, and turned toward Nakasu with a scowl. “The Cold One. We let him out. He goes his merry way, free of us and free of the Dark Tower and free of this world. That was our deal. Abby, if you would …?”
Abby, who had been watching Penny and me with rapt attention, shook herself and translated for me.
Nakasu dropped the Cold One on the floor. Vorvolac was still blindfolded, and Nakasu had found an iron chain from somewhere in the slave quarters and wrapped it several times around Vorvolac, pinning his arms to his sides. Evidently there was plenty of chain in the slave quarters. With but one leg and tattered wings and about thirty pounds of cast-iron chain around him, Vorvolac was not going anywhere.
Ossifrage said something in Hebrew that I did not catch, and, seeing the look of confusion on my face, spoke more slowly and loudly, using simpler words. “Kill him. He will be a thorn in your eye. You understand? Poke your eye.” Ossifrage pantomimed sticking a finger into one’s own eye. “Kill the screech owl.” (Or maybe the word I thought was screech owl was night monster. I am not sure.)
Foster said, “Ilya, seriously. He’s right.”
I said, “But I gave my word.”
Foster said, “Think about this. If we let this monster loose, he has so much life-force inside him, an inexhaustible supply, he will be like a superman-vampire. Wherever we drop him, he will devour innocent women, children, old men, traveling salesmen, everyone. Their blood will be on our hands. You want that?”
I turned to Nakasu. “Big guy, you said you had three settings for the twilight gates you can open from the flail? Why not stick him through one, and the rest of us go through another?”
Abby translated his reply. Nakasu said, “We will still be within the shadow of the Darkest Tower, still within the Empire of Ur. Every slave-land which has a working Moebius coil is trampled and conquered, made part of the One Folk.”
Since Ossifrage could hear her side of the conversation, he said something in Hebrew. Then, looking at me, he spoke more slowly, using smaller words: “Through gate? Screech Owl return to rabboni —” the word meant master or teacher “— and come back. We will see him again. Thorn in the eye.”
I saw his point. If we just shoved Vorvolac through a twilight gate, he would be rescued by the nearest servants of the Dark Tower, and returned to active duty.
Penny said, “His hunger for the life and blood of living men cannot be quenched. He is an enemy to all living things.”
“What if he promises to just drink cow blood?”
She said, “The souls of irrational animals dissolve at death.”
I said, “What does that mean?”
She said, “Do you have a conscience?”
I said, “I hope so.”
“What does it do?”
“Gee, teacher, I was not expecting a quiz. The conscience convicts us of sin. It lets us struggle against our darker natures.”
She nodded. “They don’t have one. The Nosferatu excise it when they join their host and become Nosferatu. It is like a lobotomy. It is not something an oath or an effort of will can change. They cannot change their nature, and their nature is to drink the life of men. They are beasts.”
“But he talks!”
“Do not be deceived by the fact that they speak. The linguistic part of their soul can be intact after the human part is destroyed.”
I gritted my teeth. “But I gave my word. And we don’t know where the gate will open. Maybe one of them opens into a place where there are no people.”
Abby translated the comment for Nakasu and Ossifrage. Nakasu snorted a rude noise though his blowhole and growled something short and sharp from his mouth, which Abby repeated as, “He says he will try.”
With this, Nakasu threw the rosary beads of the crucifix neatly over my head, and kicked the vampire toward me. Nakasu pointed and grunted. The blood-quaffer was now my responsibility. I nodded, which was a gesture Nakasu seemed to find amusing.
With no more ado, Nakasu shifted the golden flail into its flexible shape, placed it on the marble floor, and plugged one of the three tails into the socket at the butt of the now-semicircular haft.
Then he looked up, pointed, and said something.
Abby said, “The wood dust in the air is lampwood, and it will shed ylemaramu the moment the gate builds up twilight.”
I said, “What? Does opening a gate set off a detector of some sort? An alarm?”
Abby said, “The Magicians do not use alarms. It is a point of pride with them. The lampwood is treated so it sweeps up stray twilight, which otherwise would accumulate, bending the laws and habits of nature, or making small holes in the wall of reality. Everywhere throughout the Dark Tower, all the lampwood, or almost all, acts this way.”
I looked around. “Then gather everyone out on the balcony. No lampwood there. If Foster can keep us unseen with his Invisible Girl powers, maybe we can open the gate there.”
“Invisible Man!” said Foster.
“Drag Vorvolac along,” I continued, grinning. “We cannot just let him loose inside the Tower, because he’d tell the pursuit where we went. For our own safety, we have to drop him off some place far from the Astrologers or their servants.”
“Let’s drop him off the balcony edge?” said Foster, br
ightly.
I scowled. “Foster, I made a deal with him.”
“Ilya, he’s a monster. Looks sort of human, talks like a man, but he is still a monster. Like a man-eating lion. He is not really rational, not something you can make deals with,” Foster said. “You are the one who says horror movies are educational! Name one where the vampire is a nice guy.”
“Love at First Bite starring George Hamilton,” I said.
Penny rolled her eyes. “Interview with a Vampire,” she said, “Angel, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Blade, Dark Shadows, Underworld, Ultraviolet, Forever Knight, Being Human… and in Twilight the vampires are even nicer. They sparkle.”
Foster sighed. “Great! We are all going to die, because idiots in Hollywood don’t know how to make a proper vampire movie any more.”
Penny said, “They are in the pay of the blood-quaffers. I told you they were.”
4. Overlooking the Immensity of the Abscission
None of the young ladies had any possessions to take, and there was very little to loot. Abby had made a careful search of the chambers lest anyone be left behind. At Abby’s suggestion, all the girls had rolled up a silk sheet or two and slung them over the shoulder. Others were carrying jars and vases which they washed and filled at one of the pools not clogged with dead guards, since we did not know, any of us, where our next drink of water might come from. Some took some of the instruments from the music room, just on the theory that they might come in handy for some unexpected reason, as fire kindling, if nothing else: but it was more out of a desperation that there was nothing else to take.
The girls, slowly at first, fearfully, clutching their naked necks as if they expected to choke, stepped through the gates of glass that Foster opened for them with the cylinder seal. Their naked footsteps made no noise as they inched forward, eyes wide. Then they started walking faster. Then they were skipping, jostling, giggling, weeping tears of joy, and their footsteps turned to dance. Holding hands, round and round in couples and shrieking triplets and laughing circles, the freed girls spun. The serpent maiden reared high, and, lifting her well-shaped arms, sang a paean.