"Rest some more," she whispered.
"What's happening over there?"
"Some shooting before—a lot of it."
With a groan, Glenn tried to sit up. Magda pushed him back easily. He was still very weak.
"Got to get to the keep ... stop Rasalom."
"Who's Rasalom?"
"The one you and your father call Molasar. He reversed the letters of his name for you ... real name is Rasalom... got to stop him!"
He tried to rise again and again Magda pushed him back.
"It's almost dawn. A vampire can't go anywhere after sunrise, so just—"
"He's no more afraid of sunlight than you are!"
"But a vampire—"
"He's not a vampire! Never was! If he were," Glenn said, a note of despair creeping into his voice, "I wouldn't bother trying to stop him."
Dread caressed her, a cold hand against the middle of her back. "Not a vampire?"
"He's the source of the vampire legends, but what he craves is nothing so simple as blood. That notion crept into the folk tales because people can see blood, and touch it. What Rasalom feeds on no one can see or touch."
"You mean what you were trying to tell me last night before the soldiers ... came?" She did not want to remember last night.
"Yes. He draws strength from human pain, misery, and madness. He can feed on the agony of those who die by his hand but gains far more from man's inhumanity to other men."
"That's ridiculous! Nothing could live on such things. They're too ... too insubstantial!"
"Is sunlight 'too insubstantial' for a flower to need for growth? Believe me: Rasalom feeds on things that cannot be seen or touched—all of them bad."
"You make him sound like the Serpent himself!"
"You mean Satan? The Devil?" Glenn smiled weakly. "Put aside every religion you've ever heard of. They mean nothing here. Rasalom predates them all."
"I can't believe—"
"He is a survivor of the First Age. He pretended to be a five-hundred-year-old vampire because that fit the history of the keep and the region. And because it generated fear so easily—another one of his delights. But he's much, much older. Everything he told your father—everything—was a lie ... except for the part about being weak and having to build his strength."
"Everything? But what about saving me? What about curing Papa? And what about those villagers the major took hostage? They would have been executed if he had not saved them!"
"He saved no one. You told me he killed the two soldiers guarding the villagers. But did he set the villagers free? No! He added insult to injury by marching the dead soldiers up to the major's quarters and making a fool out of him. Rasalom was trying to provoke the major into executing all the villagers on the spot. That's the sort of atrocity that swells his strength. And after half a millennium of imprisonment, he needed much strengthening. Fortunately, events conspired against him and the villagers survived."
"Imprisonment? But he told Papa..." Her voice trailed off. "Another lie?"
Glenn nodded. "Rasalom did not build the keep as he said. Nor was he hiding in it. The keep was built to trap and hold him... forever. Who could have foretold that it or anything else in the Dinu Pass might someday be considered of military value? Or that some fool would break the seal on his cell? Now, if he ever gets loose in the world—"
"But he's loose now."
"No. Not yet. That's another one of his lies. He wanted your father to believe he was free, but he's still confined to the keep by the other piece of this." He pulled the blanket down and showed her the butt end of the sword blade. "The hilt to this blade is the only thing on earth Rasalom fears. It's the only thing that has power over him. It can bind him. The hilt is the key. It locks him within the keep. The blade is useless without it, but the two joined together can destroy him."
Magda shook her head in an attempt to clear it. This was becoming more incredible every minute!
"But the hilt—where is it? What does it look like?"
"You've seen its image thousands of times in the walls of the keep."
"The crosses!" Magda's mind whirled. Then they weren't crosses after all! They were modeled on the hilt of a sword—no wonder the crosspiece was set so high! She had been looking at them for years and had never even come close to guessing. And if Molasar—or should she start thinking of him as Rasalom now?—were truly the source of the vampire legends, she could see how his fear of the sword hilt might have been transmuted into a fear of the cross in the folk tales. "But where—"
"Buried deep in the subcellar. As long as the hilt remains within the walls of the keep, Rasalom is bound by them."
"But all he has to do is dig it up and dispose of it."
"He can't touch it, or even get too close to it."
"Then he's trapped forever!"
"No," Glenn said in a very low voice as he looked into Magda's eyes. "He has your father."
Magda wanted to be sick, to shout No! at the top of her lungs, but she could not. She had been turned to stone by Glenn's quiet words ... words which for the life of her she could not deny.
"Let me tell you what I think has happened," he said into the lengthening silence. "Rasalom was released the first night the Germans moved into the keep. He had strength enough then to kill only one. After that he rested and took stock. His initial strategy, I think, was to kill them one at a time, to feed on that daily agony and on the fear that increased among the living each time he claimed one of them. He was careful not to kill too many at once, especially not the officers, for that might drive them all away. He probably hoped for one of three things to occur: The Germans would become so frustrated that they would blow up the keep, thereby freeing him; or they would bring in more and more reinforcements, affording him more lives to take, more fear to grow strong on; or that he might find among the men a corruptible innocent."
Magda could barely hear her own voice. "Papa."
"Or you. From what you told me, Rasalom's attention seemed to be centered on you when he first revealed himself. But the captain put you over here, out of reach. Therefore Rasalom had to concentrate on your father."
"But he could have used one of the soldiers!"
"He gains his greatest strength from the destruction of everything that is good in a person. The corruption of the values of a single decent human being enriches him more than a thousand murders. It's a feast for Rasalom! The soldiers were useless to him. Veterans of Poland and other campaigns, they had killed proudly for their Führer. Little of value in them for Rasalom. And their reinforcements—death camp troopers! Nothing left in those creatures to debase! So the only real use he's had for the Germans, besides the fear and death-agony gleaned from them, is as digging tools."
Magda couldn't imagine... "Digging?"
"To unearth the hilt. I suspect that the 'thing' you heard shuffling around in the subcellar after your father sent you away was a group of the dead soldiers returning to their shrouds."
Walking corpses ... the thought was grotesque, too fantastic even to consider, and yet she remembered that story the major had told about the two dead soldiers who had walked from the place of their dying to his room.
"But if he has the power to make the dead walk, why can't he have one of them dispose of the hilt?"
"Impossible. The hilt negates his power. A corpse under his control would return to its inanimate state the instant it touched the hilt." He paused. "Your father will be the one to carry the hilt from the keep."