Burdens of the Dead Read online

  Mario laughed bitterly. “They’re food for the fishes, brother. We were attacked and they sank our ship. Tomaso and I were the only ones who got away. Those who attacked us were harpooning men in the water like porgies in a fish-trap. We’d come to bear the news and then this happened.”

  They stopped in a little stone-walled room next to the chapel, a room that smelled of herbs and other things Mario couldn’t identify. There were lots of bottles and jars, a good, bright lantern, a basin and a pitcher. Mario remembered that the Hypatians were healers too. It looked as if this room was in use often. The Hypatian washed the cut with some spirits of wine. It burned like cleansing fire. “And who did you tell this news to, brother?”

  Mario felt all at sea. “Well, I told the gate-guards, but no one else yet. Tomaso and I were trying to work out who to tell. We’re just sailors. I thought Milor’ Callaro…”

  “It should be told to the Venetian Podesta. He will send word of it to the sultan.” The sibling paused delicately. “Who was it that attacked your vessel?”

  Mario shrugged. “We saw no insignia. No flag. Pirates, I suppose.”

  The sibling looked at him. “But did you not sail in convoy?”

  Mario nodded. “But three ships were no match for fifteen, Brother.” He looked nervously around. “Are there other doors? I am scared they will come for me here.”

  “I doubt it,” said the Hypatian Sibling calmly. “The only other entrance leads by a passageway to our cloister. I think I will take you there, so you can tell this to our abbot.”

  Mario nodded eagerly. “I want to be with many people around me, please. Not that that will stop them. But…I am not a good man, Brother. I, I am scared to die unshriven, like Tomaso. I am scared to die. I prayed while I hid. Will you hear my confession?”

  The sibling looked up at the ceiling; then, looked around. “Indeed. But inside the cloister, I think. There is someone on the roof. Follow me.”

  * * *

  The Hypatian abbot was a wizened old man with bright eyes and a scar across one cheek. He listened carefully. For a saintly looking old man he had a shrewd grasp of naval matters. He also had objection to people on his roof without his permission. He sent two of the siblings up to have look.

  “But…they’re dangerous,” protested Mario fearfully.

  The abbot nodded. “Yes, roofs are dangerous. Those pan-tiles can be especially treacherous. And difficult to replace.”

  “No, I mean the Baitini. They…”

  “Shouldn’t wander about on roofs,” said the abbot, with what might almost have been a wink. “It’s the kind of thing best left to roofers or thieves. The Hypatians draw all kinds to their ranks, friend. We will warn them. It is the right thing to do.”

  “But they’re good people…the siblings, I mean,” said Mario, thinking an un-armed sibling would merely be killed, but not wishing to say so.

  “And if those who walk about on the roof are good people, they will heed the warning and be told of the safe way off.” The abbot stood up.

  “Come,” he said, leading the sailor to a spiral stair which went up into the steeple. This entire building was of stone, more like a fortress than a cloister, but this was not a place where the Hypatians were common. Nor Christians, really. There were narrow slit windows looking out from the parapet below the bells, and Mario could see the moonlit roof below and the people on it. Three of them were attempting to climb up onto a cistern. Well, two men had lifted the third up.

  Mario watched as a little attic door under the roof-tree opened, and two siblings came out.

  “Our abbot has sent us to tell you that the roof is dangerous and to guide you to a safe way off it, if you choose to follow the instructions we will give you,” said one of the two siblings, a woman.

  The three Baitini turned from their climbing.

  “Kill them,” said the one to his companions.

  “The roof is dangerous, you really should go back,” said the sibling, as the Baitini stalked toward them. “Your lives and souls are at peril if you do not go back now.”

  “Be still, woman,” said one, raising a knife to throw, stepping forward as he did so. Then, with a scream, he slipped and fell, sliding down the steep roof, the knife in his hand skittered off the tiles, before he lost it, fighting for a hold. There was nothing there to stop him sliding, though, and he flew clear over the edge. It was a long way down to the cobbled street below.

  His companion, after a look of horror, advanced more slowly.

  The sibling spoke again. “I tell you again, it is not safe. If you do not retrace your steps precisely, all I can do is pray for you.”

  “I need no woman’s prayers,” said the assassin disdainfully. “Your infidel god will not protect you.”

  The woman-sibling was not at all disturbed by his threats. “We believe that God has many forms and that tolerance is all-important. Thus far, you have not harmed anyone here. Therefore, I will pray that you go back carefully, now.” She bowed her had over clasped hands.

  The killer didn’t listen. Suddenly he too lost his footing. He clawed at the roof, dropping his knife and somehow managed to cling despairingly to the very edge.

  “Abdul, help!” he panted desperately. His surviving companion looked up from where he had levered the lid off the cistern. Hastily, he poured something into it, before turning to go to his companion’s aid.

  “Poison. I suspected as much,” said the old abbot. “It won’t do any harm in that cistern. Unless he falls into it, of course.”

  Which was exactly what happened, a moment later.

  “What happened?” Mario asked, dazed by how suddenly the situation had reversed itself.

  “There are weak and strong slats. We’ll have to go and fish him out. I do not think we can get to the man hanging on the edge in time,” said the abbot, sadly. “We did warn them.”

  Mario looked at the abbot, his eyes big. Had he been the witness to a miracle?

  The abbot smiled at him. “The original abbot—this cloister was built in early days when times were even more uncertain—had been a knight, before he got the call, and he felt the roof was our weak point. The tiles pivot. Those men came onto the roof via the Chapel, which was built later.” A moment later, the man still clinging to the roof lost his grip, and fell to the cobbles.

  “How will you get the last one out of the cistern?” asked Mario, despite his horror…and relief.

  “A long pole. We’ll leave him to climb out by himself.” The abbot chuckled dryly. “It seems a dire price to have paid for poisoning a cistern which is kept for fire-fighting. The drinking ones are kept safe within the roof, and are much harder to get to.”

  “I hope he doesn’t get out of there too fast and still angry,” said Mario worriedly.

  “It’s a fair climb,” said the abbot, with no sign of worry.

  But in the end they had to send one of the siblings down to the harbour to borrow a long gaff, of the kind used for large sturgeon.

  The Baitini shouldn’t have swallowed some of the water he’d fallen into.

  The abbot just sighed and said that God moved according to His plan.

  The Baitini would have agreed. They also believed they were guided by God, but that he had words and gifts for them and them alone. They were also quite mad enough to have believed that God had chosen to give them martyrdom, though dying unheralded because of a trick roof seemed a poor sort of martyrdom to Mario.

  The bodies were given a respectful burial, although the Baitini probably wouldn’t have agreed that it was respectful, or that they should be buried on the grounds of the house of another faith. But the sailor Mario saw it as a message, and applied to the abbot for a novitiate on the spot. Even the wise and kind Siblings of Saint Hypatia of Alexandria could use a pair of strong hands and a faithful heart.

  And word was passed via a devout merchant to some of those who could get word to the Podesta.

  Chapter 3

  Vilna

  In Vilna, t
he capital of Lithuania, the Black Brain, Chernobog, continued with his plots. Many of these took the geographical power of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania far past the Bosphorus. There was some focus of his attention on Constantinople. Chernobog was aware of the watcher there, the dark one, three faced, of the moon and the sea and the earth. Such powers, lost gods and goddesses, had their own imprint on the non-material world. But the watcher had never made any attempt to resist Chernobog in any way. He paid her as little attention as she gave to the walls and towers of Constantinople. They were no barrier to her, and she was no barrier to him.

  After all, what did she have left? An old bone harpoon and a pair of dogs. He wondered what still sustained her, why she had not gone the way of so many other old powers? But she never did anything. Just watched and wept.

  The world was full of old gods, old goddesses and old powers. Most of them were so faded, so drained, that he could overpower them easily. Still, in the spiritual realm it was hard to measure the depth of their power, so he did not challenge and devour her. Someone or something still sustained her. Why waste his strength? He had better, more immediate uses for it.

  * * *

  Once, the huge man sprawled on the throne had been Prince Jagiellon of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In his quest for power, the prince had delved too deep and gone too far. The man who had done so had been a brutal murderer, who had taken sadistic pleasure in his victims’ slow deaths. What Jagiellon had become took no pleasure from such things, although he still dealt in them, as and when they were necessary. Chernobog had no real grasp of mortal emotions or of things like sexual urges. He understood they existed, but concepts like love were to him as the color purple is to a man blind from birth.

  The Black Brain was a far greater monster than Jagiellon had ever been or could ever have been. But the demon possessed none of the prince’s vicious desires, nor did he take any “enjoyment” from what had been Jagiellon’s pleasures. Chernobog did understand that such pleasures drove the humans he worked with even more effectively than fear, but that was as far as his understanding went.

  Still, Jagiellon had had a powerful mind and a strong will. The Black Brain had eaten into that, to some degree, but it was also a part of him now. It was the first time that the great demon of the northern forests, the fear-creature of the Slavs, had allowed a human to be this much part of him. That had advantages, but it had brought other things too.

  Dreams. Or what might be called dreams.

  Demons did not sleep. Maybe they were fragments of memories surfacing. Only Chernobog did not think he forgot, either. He worked with multiple deep and complex plots and plans, as he had done for millennia. He knew, of course, at least in theory, what dreams were. He provided illusions like them for some deluded humans. Well, maybe they were fragments of what the Prince had been, surfacing like bits of scale knocked off the bottom of a black pool, rising to the surface only to sink back down into the depths again.

  He planned, as always, to extend his physical dominion, as well as his dominion in other planes. It was what he was and always had been; among his kind one either grew, or died. But sometimes in the midst of it all of his planning, all of his knowledge, there were these—interruptions; odd, disturbing visions of a beautiful woman in tears.

  Tears were not something that had ever worried him before.

  He sought information from the brain he had subsumed.

  Jagiellon could not recall the face. But Chernobog was aware that the vision made his human part uncomfortable, as if that gaze and those tears were something he did not wish to look upon. Chernobog too felt as if he had met her, somewhere. Perhaps in other planes. Things took on other appearances there even if their essences remained the same.

  Since the death of his last shaman, and the treachery and flight of Count Mindaug to the shelter of Elizabeth Bartholdy, the Jagiellon part of him had been awaiting a new shaman. Meanwhile, he’d been forced to do some of the more risky tasks of magic himself. He had other servants, of course, but he feared letting them know too much or being too strong.

  Human mages were a danger to the body of Jagiellon, and could enlist and marshal threats against Chernobog—as he had discovered when he pressed westward too hastily. But the West still drew him, called to him. There was something there he had have…But he didn’t quite know what it was. He would conquer it in time and find out.

  In the meanwhile he had deployed servants—lesser ones—to search and to spy. When it suited him, when he was sure there were no traps, he would take their bodies and see and touch and hear through them. Sometimes they lived afterwards.

  From one of those he had sent out he had heard something which caused him to adjust his plans. He would not go too close to either Venice or Corfu. The ancient winged lion defended Venice, and Corfu had its goddess—she was awake and revitalized and the place drank magic. But he spied on the traffic between them. And thus he learned of the passage of Benito Valdosta, his wife Maria, and their baby daughter, north-bound for Venice. If rumor was to be believed, Benito would be heading south again soon, with a fleet to punish Constantinople.

  Chernobog understood revenge. He also understood levers, even if he did not understand love.

  “Bring me the blond slave,” he ordered.

  The servant left at a run and, along with two others, returned a little later, faithfully obeying his master’s order, carrying Caesare Aldanto. He was blond still. He was also dead, long dead, and the passage of time had not improved him. The hair was possibly the only part that had not gone the way of all flesh. Briefly, Chernobog considered re-animating the slave; it was never a very successful process, though, and he discarded the idea. The spirit of the treacherous Montagnard sell-sword had long gone; there was no retrieving that part of him, either. Chernobog-Jagiellon hissed in irritation. The servants quailed.

  But he merely said “Dispose of it. And find me someone from northern Italy. There are mercenaries from all over in my armies.”

  * * *

  Poulo Bourgo had been at the sack of several cities, and on the wrong side in a few of them. He’d known fear and terror from both sides. If he’d known that the huge slab of a man with the masked face interviewing him was none other than Grand Duke Jagiellon himself, he would have would have been deathly afraid. But since he assumed that his interrogator was just another underwashed Lithuanian noble, he was quite relaxed about it. He was a foot soldier, why would anything higher in the hierarchy than some minor functionary acting as a glorified clerk even acknowledge that he was alive?

  It was a strange room, opulent, yet filthy in some way he couldn’t articulate. As if a film of something vile coated everything. The luxurious trappings, the draperies and cushions, the ornate furnishings, had an air of neglect, giving the impression that the owner cared nothing for them. Poulo couldn’t understand that. How could you have such wealth and not care about it.

  “Milan originally, Milord,” he said, when asked where he hailed from.

  “Did you ever go to Venice?”

  “I was a bodyguard there for a while, for the Casa Dandelo. I was lucky to get out of there with my life, Milord.” A suspicion entered Poulo’s not very fast moving mind. “I can’t go back there, Milord,” he added nervously. “They’ll recognize me.”

  That was the moment he realized how afraid he should have been. When that face looked up at him, and he saw the eyes gleaming dull and dead though the holes in the mask. “When I have done with you, no one will recognize you. You will not know yourself in a mirror.”

  Poulo might have tried to run, but he could not move. Somehow, the huge man facing him had stabbed him with a long, peculiar-looking knife. How had he moved so fast?

  Poulo stared down at the blade piercing his chest, his mouth agape. From its position, the blade had to have penetrated his heart. Yet although he was paralyzed, he still lived.

  The masked man lifted a small flask from a side table next to his stool. Bourgo had noticed the flask but had thought not
hing of it. Liquor of some sort, he’d assumed, albeit of an unpleasant greenish-brown color.

  Whatever was in that flask, however, it certainly wasn’t liquor. The masked man poured the substance onto the blade and it formed into a glutinous blob, like jelly. Then the blob began hunching its way up the blade toward Poulo. He could only stare in horror as the jelly oozed its way toward the stab wound in his chest.

  When the blob was an inch or two from his chest, the masked man suddenly twisted the knife-blade. The heart wound was twisted open and Bourgo’s blood gushed out. Much of it, however, was absorbed by the jelly, whose color shifted toward red.

  Then, suddenly, with a horrid sucking sound, the blob lunged through the wound into Poulo. Within three seconds, it had vanished completely.

  The masked man jerked out the blade. Poulo collapsed to the floor. Finally, he could scream. And scream he did, for a very, very long time.

  * * *

  The Black Brain gazed upon him, satisfied. The preparation of the new slave had just begun, of course. Screaming and pain would continue for some time.

  But there would be very little blood spilled as the parasite spread throughout its new host. The creature was a demon itself, of sorts. It would heal the wounds and consume and change the blood. In time it would kill the host, but that was no concern of Jagiellon’s. It could also be forced to obey, if he needed it to. But that would be too visible, and was no part of his plan. Instead Jagiellon conditioned the new slave to obey, until obedience was invisible. Pain and magic would be brought to bear. There would be keloid scarring caused by the parasite’s healing of its host; that didn’t matter either. The scarring, internal and external, was necessary. It didn’t matter if the slave was personable; he wasn’t going to be required to seduce anyone.

  When the power that had been brought to work on him had finished, the Milanese thief and bravo would not have recognized himself in a mirror—if his new master had made him look into one. His memories and physical ability were still accessible to his new controller—who would not pull his strings like a puppet, but rather had set deep compulsions, far harder to detect magically.