“He was a renowned professor of the academy,” Thalya gritted, “and a gifted alchemist.”
“He had an unusual aura,” Bellimar said, continuing as if she had not spoken. “Erratic, unsteady, somehow incomplete. Having learned of the recent loss of his beloved wife, I had a clinical curiosity as to whether profound grief and depression might be the cause of his flawed essence. My studies were hampered, of course, by my not having had the chance to observe him before the loss.”
“How dare you speak of my father thus?” Thalya demanded, rising to her feet. Behind her, Shien shifted and gave a nervous whicker. “He was a good man, not some specimen in a jar!”
The old man favored her with a look of mild reproach. “I have already admitted that he was a good man, Thalya, but these are my memories, given forth unembellished. It may not be flattering to you or to me, but these were my initial motivations for making your father’s acquaintance. Now, please sit down and lower your voice, as the countryside out there is veritably crawling with things that would like nothing more than to find so many beating hearts trapped in this small cavern.”
Thalya paled, throwing a glance over her shoulder and out into the darkness. She knew his words to be true, for in the days of lying in wait for the return of her prey she had witnessed a multitude of things skulking through the night, misshapen things that turned her flesh to ice. Always she had been able to give them a wide berth, at least until earlier that night when she stumbled across the strange black man-creatures on the trail outside. No, it would be foolhardy in the extreme to remain out in the open night, or to draw its denizens to them now. And since she refused to allow her target from her sight now that she had tracked him down, she was forced to share this cave with him until she determined how he could be slain.
It was some small consolation, she had to admit, that she found herself hungering for every new word of her father, even if the vampire’s words stirred as much rage as recollection. She patted Shien’s neck and sank to her haunches with a scathing glare at her nemesis.
“Drothis and I became friends,” Bellimar continued. “We shared some common interests in the field of arcane studies, and I presented myself as a traveling scholar, though I was always careful to mask the true extent of the knowledge I had gained over many centuries as well as through my, shall we say, former preoccupation with certain subject matters.”
He paused, staring into the fire. “I stayed too long,” he said. “I had made the same mistake in the past, and so I knew better, but I had come to value his company. For Drothis, I seemed to fill some of the companionship void that his wife, a highly intelligent scholar herself and a shrewd foil for his theories, had left behind. As the years passed, I knew I should move on, for the peculiarities of my nature cannot be concealed forever. But I hesitated to leave him alone and bereft again. I had become convinced that his broken nature would never fully mend after the loss of his bosom companion, and somehow my presence soothed his pain for a time.
“I grew too comfortable, or perhaps the buried part of me that knew I had overstayed was trying to force my hand. Whatever the reason, I began to make mistakes. I let slip references to things from the distant past, and glimpses of my dark side peeked through cracks in my carefully constructed facade. Mayhap I meant to scare him away, but my actions seemed to have no effect. I should have known better. Drothis was hardly a fool, and his intellectual curiosity was ever more ravenous than one would know from his affable outward manner.”
Bellimar lapsed into silence then, and as the seconds slid by it seemed he had entirely forgotten his audience. At last, Thalya spoke into the stillness.
“The night of the attack,” she prodded.
The old man glanced up from his reverie, meeting her narrowed gaze and flashing a wan smile in return. “Indeed so,” he said. “Thank you, dear girl. Everything changed that night. We were returning home from the academy, having stayed long past nightfall debating some dusty topic or another in its great library. Drothis was fretting about how the family hosting young Thalya here would be angry at the late hour, when we both knew this to be false, since she was all but a member of their family by that point. A band of brigands set upon us, emboldened by the late hour and the richness of our attire. They did not even demand the handful of coins in our purses, for they made clear their intent to leave no wagging tongues behind that might betray them to the city authorities. Corpses seldom make objections to parting with their possessions, after all.”
Bellimar sighed, shaking his head. “Even these murderous cutpurses, more akin to rats than true men, I could not bring myself to harm. Of course, they did not know that. It was an easy thing indeed to part for a few moments the mortal veil I maintain about myself, to bring forth the shade of my former self, to give these cutthroats a glimpse of the fearsome sorcerous warlord who had scattered legions of terror-stricken foes before him on one bloody battlefield after another. For a fleeting few seconds, my dark presence expanded to fill that deserted street in Hyaxus, sucking the very light from the torches in their quavering sconces, and I was once again Bellimar the Black, the Vampire King of old. The brigands screamed and scattered as if a host of demons were nipping at their heels, and though I quickly shrank back into myself, I knew I had gone too far. I had tried to shield Drothis from it, to direct it only toward our attackers, but I had failed; he had seen my past, my other side, and he stared at me, open-mouthed and dumbstruck.
“I tried to explain it away, offering up feeble stories of possessing a modest talent at spinning illusions even though I had never displayed such ability to him before. He believed none of it. He confronted me right then and there in the street with an astonishing amount of evidence he had collected against me over time, and though he had been astute enough to piece together much of the truth about me, he had not wished to credit the possibility that his friend could be such a monster. He even deduced my real name, as I had labeled myself with a derivative form of it, in my boundless arrogance. Unwilling to insult him with further lies, I admitted to it all.
“He became furious, no doubt due in large part to my deceit, but also because his reasoning had already taken him in directions I had not foreseen. He accused me of befriending him to gain unfettered access to the academy and its resources, which was, of course, initially quite true. He further believed that I had arranged that access for some nefarious purpose, that I was planning some new effort to shroud the world in darkness as I had come so close to doing before. He was incensed and no longer heard my protestations. He flung himself at me, soft and kind at heart though he was, and I vanished into the night rather than see him injured. I was gone from Hyaxus by the morn, and have never returned.”
Bellimar fell silent once more, and his last words hung quivering in the air like strained notes. The campfire sputtered, casting a strobing, fitful glow across the faces of the men seated around it. Thalya sat frozen, stunned and lost in her thoughts. Damn the fiend, but he sounded so bloody sincere! She still managed a venomous glare at him, but inwardly it felt as if he had stolen the very breath from her chest.
“Thalya,” Bellimar prompted gently. “I would hear the rest of your father’s tale now.”
The huntress took a steadying breath and began speaking, her voice thin at first but gaining heat as the words tumbled out, one atop the other.
“My father would brook no discussion of that night. He would only say that you were gone, and that we were well rid of you. He became obsessed with new research, neglecting his obligations at the academy and locking himself away for days on end. Sometimes he was away for months at a time as well, traveling to some remote corner of the lands to meet with obscure experts. About what, he would not say at first. Only when the heads of the academy threatened to cast him out for dereliction of duty did he reveal what he had discovered.