Thalya forced her eyes from Bellimar and let them rove over the others, disembodied faces floating in the gloom above the banked fire. She had to admit, these were not the dark, soulless men with which she had expected the fiend to surround himself. They seemed stricken by her words and awaiting an explanation, but she reminded herself that evil came in many packages, often wrapped in layer upon layer of deception.
Syth, one of her rescuers, turned to gaze up at her. He was a strange, scruffy fellow somehow wrapped in his own perpetual gust of wind, and unless she had lost her skill at reading such things, there was desire in his eyes when he looked upon her.
“Lass, are you certain you will not join us?” he called. “I can give you a hand down the slope, if you are still unsteady on your feet from your earlier ordeal.”
“I have a fine view from here,” she returned. She held up the hunting knife. “And I will be removing any hand-or other appendage-directed my way.”
Syth let out a guffaw and settled back with a broad grin of admiration.
“Will you not at least reconsider the offer of our skilled friend Halthak here to heal your injuries, then?” he asked, indicating the quiet Half-Ork at his side.
Halthak raised his eyes to meet hers, their wide, childlike innocence incongruous amid a countenance that was so ugly as to be nearly deformed. In truth, she ached and stung all over from the earlier scuffle, but there was no way she would permit a cohort of the Black One to work his magic on her. No, she was in this cave against her better judgment and only long enough to hear what lies the fiend would spin; if these men knew not whom they harbored, perhaps they could be swayed to join her against the monster. She gave a sharp shake of her head, and the Half-Ork dropped his gaze.
Amric, the tall, powerfully built warrior with the storm-grey eyes who had been the other of her rescuers, cleared his throat and the others grew still. This one had a hard look about him, and yet his voice carried at once both the ring of command and a steady underlying current of compassion. It was clear he was the leader of this motley group, but she had yet to puzzle out why a creature such as the Vampire King would pretend to defer to him, even for a time.
“Bellimar,” the warrior said. “As you urged, we have withheld all questions while we took shelter from the hazards of the open night. There can be little doubt that you have proven an invaluable companion on this dangerous road, but it is no longer possible to look past the lurking ghosts of your secrets. The time has come to have answers.”
Bellimar said nothing for long moments, still staring into the meager campfire. Thalya fidgeted. She was eager to hear the monster’s admission of guilt, but she refused to be the one to break the silence, and so she clenched her fist over the hilt of her knife and waited. When at last the old man spoke, it was in a whisper that somehow carried throughout the cave with startling clarity, like a chill breeze through a darkened crypt.
“I will save you the trouble of asking outright,” he said. “The lady named me truly. I am indeed Bellimar the Destroyer, the man whose rise and fall I recounted to you a mere handful of nights ago in this very cave. I am the conqueror whose vile deeds were scrawled in the blood of innocents on the dim-shrouded pages of history now long lost to this world, and I am guilty of countless more offenses than were ever chronicled.”
His eyes rose from the fire, but drank its flame. Gone was the old man, weary and resigned, shed and discarded like a dried husk. In his place was a man of fierce, primal intensity, his lean face set in ruthless lines and his eyes burning with blood-red power. His voice crowded out the other sounds of the night until even the echo of his words from the stark ribcage of the cave retreated in dread. Thalya felt a chill along her spine. It was as if he were whispering at her very shoulder, his bloodless lips at her ear.
“Know, friends, that in my time I have crushed entire nations under my heel. I turned mortal men, good men as well as bad, into unfeeling killing machines. I raised armies of the dead when there were not enough mortal men at hand to corrupt, and I commanded things of deepest shadow. The world, a more primitive place so many centuries ago, trembled at my very tread. I grasped for power, eternally more power, and dark forces granted my every excess. There was a terrible price to be paid, but I paid it then with nary a second thought. I suspect I have been further over that black precipice than any man in the history of this world, and it embraced me as its own. I became the Lord of Night, the Vampire King, and not even the combined might of nations could stop what I had built, what I had become. I had cheated mortality, abandoned my humanity. Time no longer held sway over me, and nothing remained with the power to stop my undying reign.”
He paused, glancing around at their pale faces. “Nothing in this world, at least.”
“And yet you were struck down, by some force,” interjected the Sil’ath, Valkarr. Thalya suppressed a start. Until his words, spoken in a coarse, guttural tone that lingered on the sibilant sounds, she had all but forgotten the presence of the reptilian warrior.
“So I was,” Bellimar admitted. “I was struck down at the height of my power, even as I was on the verge of plunging the world into an age of shadow such as it had never before seen. I was struck down by a gathering of forces from beyond that dwarfed even my own strength.”
“So the tales were true?” Amric asked, incredulous. “The gods themselves intervened in the mortal arena?”
The old man barked a bitter laugh. “First, tell me your definition of a god. What are the gods, anyway, except beings above us in power, capable of demanding obeisance and inflicting their will upon lesser creatures such as ourselves? By that standard, yes, it was most certainly the gods who struck me down. Whatever you call these beings, they appeared to me as men and women of great power, and were not content to defeat or even destroy me. Instead, they changed me in ways I still do not understand, and then cast me out into the world, even as they dispersed the dark forces I had assembled around me.”
“I do not understand,” Halthak said. “What did you become after your fall? What are you now?”
Bellimar swung his gaze to the Half-Ork. “In many ways, I am what I was before, an affront to nature by my very existence,” he said. “I am an ancient vampire.”
Halthak started back from the man as if struck.
“Whatever is the matter, healer?” Bellimar asked, baring his teeth in a blood-chilling smile. “Are you thinking, perhaps, of all those nights I feigned sleep whilst listening to the languid pulse within your senseless, slumbering form only a few tantalizing feet away? Ah, but listen to your heart race now!”
In what Thalya would have deemed a physical impossibility, the Half-Ork whitened even further.
“Enough, Bellimar!” Amric said, slicing his hand through the air in a curt motion. “Leave him be.”
Bellimar swung his gaze over to the man.
“And you, warrior,” he hissed. “Your pulse remains strong and steady, scarcely rising under threat of violence even though I can smell your fear. A testament to the steel of your nerves, no doubt, but is your composure misplaced? Aura or no, I suspect your blood carries hidden power.”
Amric met the vampire’s fevered stare, unmoving, unrelenting. “If you were merely some blood-mad fiend,” he said, “you have had ample opportunity to strike. Instead you saved us in Stronghold, and you gave me your word you were our ally.”
Thalya snorted, but Amric ignored her and pressed on. “What game are you playing at, Bellimar?”