THE VAMPIRE HUNTERS

by Robert Earl

THE WIND CAME fleeing down from the dark wastes of the north. It clamored outside the tavern with a thousand phantom voices, each of them begging for admittance. The men within could feel its hunger as they sat, hungry themselves, around the smoldering fire.

At first they had tried to ignore the storm's plaintive wailing. When that had proved impossible they had tried to talk over it and drown it out with forced good humour. But winter had soon frozen their conversation just as surely as it had frozen the village well. So now they just sat, and listened, and tried not to think of the things that waited outside.

It was difficult. When the wind clawed at the rough-hewn pine of the walls, how could they not be reminded of other, stronger fingers? And when it tore at the reeds of the roof, burrowing its way down like a wolf into a hare's nest, who amongst them could help wondering what might be coming with it? And when it screamed… Well, when it screamed then it was time for more vodka, and to hell with making it last the winter.

Yet still, despite their fear, they remained calm and resolved. They were, after all, Kislevites, and generations of hardship had forged them into a race not easily broken. Even when the first blow was struck upon the oak door, hard enough to ring the icy wood like a bell, they didn't panic. They merely unsheathed their long skinning knives and waited, eyes glinting warily in the firelight.

One long, breathless moment stretched into the next.

The wind howled.

As if in sympathy, the fire flared up, the light of the dancing flames gleaming on the knives of the waiting men. Grigori, the tavern keeper, watched the door and chewed the white whiskered tip of his drooping moustache. Although his comrades mocked him because of the mannerism, it was a habit he'd never been able to break, even after forty years of trying.

'Perhaps,' Danovich ventured, his voice little more than a whisper, 'it was just a stray branch.'

'Perhaps,' Piotre agreed, doubtfully. Grigori, still chewing, said nothing.

Another knock, harder this time, beat against the door, and the men jumped like three puppets on a single string.

'Anybody in there?' a voice yelled, struggling to rise above the wind.

Danovich and Piotre looked at Grigori. He shrugged before rising and walked over to the door; his two friends huddled close behind.

He took a deep breath and pulled out the loose rivet that served him as a spy hole.

Outside there was nothing but the swirling snow, gray beneath the light of a dying sun and a tall figure, standing with his back to the door, shivering beneath his cloak.

'Who's that?' Grigori demanded, squinting out into the half-light.

'Calixte Lesec,' the figure replied, turning back to the door, 'and my man-servant, Viento.'

'Man-servant, my arse!' a voice grumbled from somewhere out of sight.

'Can we come in?'

Grigori hesitated.

'This is the village of Novograd, isn't it?' the stranger persisted.

'It is,' Grigori allowed.

'Then we have business. We met a young man called Petrokov on the road, and he…'

Grigori slammed back the bolts and dragged the door open.

'Come in, come in,' he cried, beckoning the two travellers into the tavern. The wind surged in gleefully behind them as they bundled inside, red faced and glowing with the icy chill of winter. Grigori shouldered the door shut before turning to greet his guests.

'Grigori Calinescu,' he said, offering his hand.

'Calixte Lesec,' the stranger said, shaking it. His cold fingers were thin and smooth, almost effeminate, but there was nothing effeminate about his face. True, it was smooth and fine-boned, from temples to cheekbones to cleanly shaved chin. But there was a hardness apparent in every line that spoke of strength, not fragility. Grigori wondered how old the newcomer was.

'Viento,' the second man said, thrusting out his hand.

'Pleased to meet you.' The tavern keeper nodded, surprised at how similar the two men were. Perhaps they were brothers. 'Come, give me your coats and take a seat by the fire. These are my friends, Piotre and Danovich. Piotre, will you get our guests a drink and some stew while I see to their horses?'

'We have no horses, I'm afraid.' Calixte said, waving his hand in airy dismissal. There was arrogance in the gesture that the tavern keeper didn't care for. After all, he was a free man, not a serf. Still, this was no time to be taking slights. There were more pressing issues.

'And you need not worry about food,' Viento added, patting his belly and winking at his host 'That's where our last horse went little more than an hour ago. A shame, if we'd known we were so near… Well, no matter.'

'Well then,' Grigori said, 'you'll take a drink with us at least.'

'Glad to.' Calixte smiled, baring a set of perfect white teeth.

Grigori went to the counter and filled two cups. He managed to hold back the question that had been burning within him until they had clinked the pottery together and drunk a toast to the Tsarina.

'How long ago did you meet my son?' he asked, even as the fiery spirit burned its way down his throat.

'Petrokov was your son?' Calixte asked. 'I see now why you were so keen to welcome us in. Not that you wouldn't have been anyway, of course.'

Again, that tone of condescension. Grigori ignored it and waited for an answer. Calixte took another drink before obliging him.

'We met him two days ago, on the road to Kislev. It was dusk, so we shared a fire and a meal. That's when he told us of your, ah, problem.'

'So you know? Good, good. But where is Petrokov, now?'

'Don't sound so worried, old man.' Viento chipped in with a patronizing grin. 'He's quite safe. He went on to Kislev.'

'Yes. You see, when he told us of your problem we weren't really interested. No offence, obviously, but we like to be paid in gold, not food and lodging.'

'After all, we're warriors, not plough horses!' Viento exclaimed, and laughed loudly at his own witticism. Piotre and Danovich smiled weakly. Grigori ignored him.

Calixte shook his head and looked apologetically at the tavern keeper before continuing.

'Anyway, the day after we had bid your son farewell, this weather started. We come from the south, you see, and didn't expect it. So we thought that, as we're not going to be able to make it to anywhere civilized until the snows let up, we might as well take up Petrokov's offer. If it still stands, of course.'

'Oh, it still stands,' Grigori said. He realized that he was sucking the tip of his moustache again and hastily spat it out. 'A season's food and board if you kill that… that thing.'

'Thing? You mean the vampire?'

Piotre and Danovich glanced nervously at the door, as if the very mention of the deamon would summon him like a rabbit from a conjuror's hat. Grigori restrained himself, focusing instead of his guest. The young man seemed to be genuinely sanguine about the idea of taking on such a foe. Relaxed, even. It occurred to Grigori that if this was no more than arrogance, then sending the young fool out might do more harm than good.

'Tell me, Lesec…'

'Please, call me Calixte.'

'Calixte, then. Have you ever fought against a… a vampire before?'

'Yes. On occasion. They are terrible to behold, I know. Wonderful and terrible. They are like life. Or rather, life magnified until it becomes unbearable.' Grigori was surprised at the sadness in his guests tone. 'But their weaknesses are as great as their strengths. Even a flame which burns as brightly as the sun can be extinguished.'

'You sound as though you sympathize with them,' the tavern keeper said. Calixte shrugged unapologetically.

'I hunt them. Don't you love the deer your arrows find?'

'Yes.'

'Well then.'

'I meant no offence.'

'Of course not. Don't trouble yourself.' Calixte smiled, his teeth white in the gloom of the tavern. 'Now, what of this vampire? Which of the blood lines is it of?'

'Blood lines?'

'Yes. Which, ah, family?'

Grigori exchanged a puzzled look with his friends.

'I don't know about its family,' the tavern keeper admitted 'Or even that a vampire could have such a thing. Do you think that their might be more than one, then?'

'No, I meant… it doesn't matter. Can you tell me what it looks like?'

Grigori nodded, shifting uncomfortably.

'It is bigger than a man, maybe as big as an ogre. And strong. It tore the door to the Bodoyen's cabin off steel hinges then flung it twenty yards. By the Tsarina, I hope they didn't suffer,' Grigori muttered, the vision of that massacre rising like some dead thing from the pool of his memory. There had been eight of them packed into their cabin, three generations of the same family. Yet when he had called around with the grandfather's monthly jar of vodka, the hovel had been empty, as hollow as a bone with the marrow sucked out.

'And it's cunning, too.' The tavern keeper dragged his mind away from the image. 'It took Ilyich and Radan, and they were nobody's fools. Even when they were drunk they moved through the forest like ghosts, letting it whisper its secrets to them like an old friend. We lost them in the first week of winter. Nothing left of them but blood on the snow. Gods, but I've never seen a brighter red.'

'Yes,' Calixte said thoughtfully. 'And when did it start hunting here?'

'Autumn,' Grigori said, tonelessly. 'That's when it killed the peddler. We found him floating in the shallows of the river, drained. That's how we knew that it was a… vampire.'

'And have you seen it?' Calixte prompted gently, his arrogance gone now, replaced by a sort of breathless eagerness.

'Not me, but my friend, Ivan. He was checking his snares up by the Bear's Teeth when he saw the thing. Big, like I said. Naked, with muscles like knotted rope. Almost like a man, except for the head.'

'The head?'

'Yes. He said it was like a bat's, a giant bat's but without the fur.'

'Let me talk to this man Ivan.'

'You can't. He's gone.'

'Gone?'

'Dead. Suicide.'

The crackling of the fire grew loud in the silence that followed. Grigori stared numbly into its depths. You bastard Ivan, he thought. Why didn't you come and talk to me?

'Why?'

'What?' Startled from his reverie Grigori looked up, seeing the eagerness in Calixte's face.

'Why did he kill himself?'

'The vampire was carrying a child when he saw it. A little girl. She was screaming, he said. And even after the vampire had passed his hiding place and taken her down into the labyrinth he could hear her screaming still. Even when he got home. Even at night. So…' The tavern keeper waved his hand helplessly.

Calixte and Viento exchanged a hungry glance.

'Excellent,' said Calixte, rubbing his hands together with glee. He might have been a small child looking forward to a treat. 'Then we know where the strigoi lives. A hole in the ground. How typical!'

Once more Viento laughed, loudly and alone.

'Tomorrow morning you will take us to this place.' Calixte decided. 'Until then we will sleep. Where are our beds?'

'This way,' Grigori said, rising to his feet. It was no longer in him to resent the mercenary's arrogance. His thoughts were too full of Ivan's hanging body and his son's lonely ride to Kislev.

THE NIGHT WAS long. Although he tried to sleep, Grigori found himself staring blindly at the smoke stained rafters above his cot. It was partly the cold of the draughty loft that stole his rest, partly the sweaty heat of his horrible and nebulous nightmares. Most of all, it was the thought of what he must do tomorrow: what he must face.

Yet when the grey light of dawn did finally come he felt relief more than anything, relief that the waiting was over.

Calixte and Viento were up before him.

'Ah, there you are.' Calixte nodded to him as he made his way down to the tavern room. 'I was about to wake you. Well, come along then. Let's be off.'

Grigori tried to restrain his usual early morning temper.

'We'll go when I've eaten,' he growled, pushing past the two would-be vampire hunters to breathe fresh life back into the fire. That done, he put on water for his porridge and measured out a spoon of dried tea leaves into a mug; after a moment's thought he added another, and then a lump of precious honey. It had come all the way from distant Lustria, according to the peddler who had sold it to him. He had been saving it for a special occasion, but somehow he couldn't shake off the feeling that if he didn't use it now he never would.

'How long will it take you to get ready?' Calixte snapped. Grigori sipped his tea and tried not to smile at the young man's show of nerves. How often had he seen it before, this transformation from fearless warrior to hapless soldier as tavern nights gave way to cold mornings?

'Let an old man finish his porridge and we'll be gone. Have no fear, we'll be there soon enough.'

Grigori was scraping his bowl clean when Piotre and Danovich arrived. With one look at their faces the tavern keeper knew why they had come. He was proud of them.

'Good morning,' Piotre said, swallowing nervously and trying to smile.

'Morning,' Grigori replied. Calixte and Viento grunted.

'Have some porridge?' Grigori offered.

'No, I… no,' Danovich muttered, looking a little queasy.

Conversation stopped so that the only sounds were Grigori's slurping, the hiss of the fire and the tap of Viento's boots as he paced nervously up and down the room.

'Right,' Grigori said, pushing his bowl away. 'If you gentlemen will just give me five minutes for a pipe, then we can begin.'

Calixte sighed theatrically and rolled his eyes.

'I'm ready when you are,' Piotre said, miserably.

'You two are going nowhere,' Grigori told him.

'We want to come with you,' Danovich muttered, unconvincingly.

'Rubbish. Why hire a dog when you can bark yourself?' Grigori inhaled a lungful of smoke and watched Calixte. But if he had heard the insult he gave no sign; he merely beat his fingertips against the well-tooled leather of his scabbard.

'It's—' Piotre began, but Grigori cut him off.

'You're not going,' he said, taking another pull on his pipe. He waited until the bowl was empty before pulling himself to his feet. He handed Piotre the key to the tavern and headed out into the snow.

His two friends watched him go as he led the mercenaries away into the distance. Between the vast grey slabs of sky and snow, the three dark figures looked tiny. Hopeless.

'Good old Grigori,' Danovich said with a sigh of relief.

THE WINDS OF the night before had dwindled and died. Now the air lay still and sullen, as thick as oil beneath the towering weight of the snow clouds above.

Despite the oppressive weather, Grigori felt strangely light-hearted. As he swished through the snow, plodding along on his favorite snowshoes, he caught himself humming. At one point he even began to whistle, the tuneless note drawing stares of disapproval from Calixte and Viento.

And quite right, too, Grigori thought. In this silent wilderness, such shrill noises could bring only disaster.

He looked back at his two companions. They were making heavy going across the snow, stomping and backsliding and kicking up great drifts. More than once he had suggested a rest stop, but the two mercenaries were intent on pushing on.

The tavern keeper was a little surprised by their perseverance, and a new respect for them began to grow. They must be fit indeed to be able to keep up with him whilst stumbling along like that.

Midday came. The sun glowered low and unseen beyond the snow fogged horizon, and they reached the outer tendrils of the Staslav forest. An ocean of black pine stretched, as far as Grigori knew, right up to the edge of the world.

'We'll stop here,' he told his companions, halting on the top of a ridge.

'No, let's press on,' Calixte said, with hardly a trace of the breathlessness Grigori expected. 'We want to take this strigoi during the day. They're weaker then.'

'So I've heard,' Grigori nodded. 'Five minutes won't matter, though. I want to rest and eat something before the last leg.'

For a moment he thought that Calixte was going to argue, but the young man just grunted with barely disguised ill grace and turned to Viento.

'Won't this animal be surprised to see us?' he said, gloating as if their prey was already dead.

'Yes indeed,' his partner agreed with a strange little giggle.

Grigori, chewing on a strip of dried venison, watched the two of them. For the hundredth time he found himself wondering at their confidence. They were hard men, yes: strong and well armed. Yet their eagerness to meet this monster, in its own lair, too, seemed strange.

'Are you ready yet, old man?' Calixte suddenly asked, shifting his weight from one leg to the other in a dance of impatience.

'Yes,' Grigori said, finishing his lunch with a swig of vodka. 'No more speaking, now. We're barely half a mile away.'

'Fine, fine. Off we go then.'

The tavern keeper stood, stretched, and led them into the deepening gloom of the forest.

They went slowly. Even beneath the triumphant sun of high summer the twisting paths that linked one pine pillared cavern to the next remained dim and shadow haunted. Now, roofed with snow, Grigori found that he could hardly see. Had he not hunted within this realm for the last half a century he would have found it impossible to find the way.

As it was, he merely found it difficult. It took little more than an hour for them to reach the jagged grey walls of the Bear's Teeth; granite towers thrown up to loom menacingly over the threesome.

Cupping his hands, the tavern keeper leant forward to whisper into Calixte's ear.

'This is the place. Look there, between the first two teeth. Do you see it? The entrance to the caves.'

Calixte nodded, eyes shining in the gloom as he studied the cave.

'Well done, old man,' he hissed, baring sharp, white teeth in a hungry grin.

'Wait for us here.'

'I'll come with you, I reckon,' Grigori replied.

'No need.'

'You'll be hard pressed to find your way out without me.'

The two vampire hunters exchanged a glance. With a fine boned hand, Viento smoothed a mocking smile off his perfect face. Calixte rolled his eyes.

'Very well. But stay well back.'

'Agreed.'

Cautiously now, hardly making a sound as they picked their way across the snow, the three men closed in on the cave. As they reached the mouth, Grigori reached out to stop Calixte.

'Torches,' he mouthed, unslinging his bundle. Again Calixte and Viento exchanged a glance, the wordless communication of men who have hunted long together, and Calixte shrugged his assent. With a strike of steel on flint Grigori lit his torch, the smell of burning pitch sharp in the cold air. He then followed the two mercenaries as they descended into the blackness beyond.

They moved quickly into the depths, their feet finding silent purchase as they glided forward. Grigori stumbled behind them. He began to sweat with the effort of keeping up.

The torch he held flickered and flared in the drafts that followed them into the fastness of the labyrinth. It painted sudden, looming shadows onto the crumbling walls that sent the tavern keeper's heart galloping into many a false alarm.

Somehow, the vampire hunters ahead of him seemed to have little need of this treacherous light. They bounded forward into the darkness with all the eagerness of unleashed hunting dogs, their supposed guide forgotten as he struggled along in their wake. And even now, as the rain-smoothed stone of the upper reaches began to give way to crumbling shale, the rush of the two men remained as silent and effortless as that of a cat's across a deep carpet.

Grigori, wincing every time he kicked a stone or sent an alarm of shifting shingles echoing around the labyrinth, began to wish he hadn't come. The realization of how badly he had underestimated these two mercenaries was followed by the knowledge that he was becoming a hindrance rather than a help.

Ahead of him, black and orange in the uncertain light of his torch, Grigori saw that a fall of stone had all but blocked the passage. Calixte and Viento hardly broke their pace as they ascended the barrier. Floating upwards like two dark clouds, they disappeared into the blackness beyond.

Grigori, biting back a curse, wiped the sweat from his brow and followed them up the scree. Moving as cautiously as he could, testing each jagged handhold before resting his weight upon it, he crawled laboriously upwards. Even so, by the time he had crested the top of the mound he had sent the echoes of at least a dozen falling stones chasing each other into the labyrinth beyond.

Still struggling' to remain quiet, he worked his way down to the other side of the barrier. At last, with a sense of blessed relief, he felt himself once more on solid ground. After spending a moment tending to his torch he looked up and around in the renewed light. He was completely alone.

'BE CALM,' HE told himself nervously, trapping the tip of his moustache between his incisors and biting down. 'Be calm.'

Trying to ignore the accelerating beat of his heart, Grigori fought the temptation to turn and run. Instead he put one foot in front of the other and lurched reluctantly onwards. As he did so, a mad urge to call out to his companions seized him. It was as attractive and horrifying as the urge he sometimes felt to throw himself off the high precipices of the spring pastures.

'Gods give me strength,' he muttered, blinking a stinging drop of cold sweat out of one eye. 'They can't be far off.'

Yet in the absolute silence of this deep cavern, the only sound was the pumping of his own blood in his ears, the only sight that of shadow and stone. Pressing on, Grigori fought the impression that he was totally alone.

'They can't be far,' he told himself. Repeating the phrase over and over like a mantra, he marched miserably onwards.

After a few hours, or perhaps it was minutes, he felt himself becoming calmer. After all, he had been down here before, many times. He and his father had used these caves as a food cache, just as he had with Petrokov. And as a boy he'd often come down here with his friends, using the claustrophobic depths to test each others' courage. The wind-burnt leather of his face wrinkled into a smile as he remembered jumping out to frighten Piotre, almost a lifetime ago. How the boy had screamed!

Lost in a fog of long forgotten reminiscences the old man trudged on. He remembered hunts and feasts and fights, won and lost. He remembered his wife, dead these eight years past. He remembered Petrokov's birth.

Then the first rumour of his enemy's approach reached him and he remembered why he was here.

It was not footstep or challenge that warned him of the monster's approach. Instead, it was a whispering out of the darkness: a rapid, scuttling rush that was as staccato and insistent as a crone's knitting needles. It echoed around the labyrinth, stroking cold sweat out of Grigori's skin even as it clenched his stomach into a tight fist of nausea.

With a start, the tavern keeper realized that the sound was coming from behind him, blocking any chance of retreat.

'It must be Calixte,' he lied to himself, spinning clurrisily around to face his pursuer.

His torch flared defiantly as it swept it through the air. For a moment its guttering light chased the shadows all the way back to the fall of rocks, the barrier over which Grigori had lost the two vampire hunters. He was beginning to suspect that he'd lost them for good.

The scuttling grew louder, scratching the inside of Grigori's skull.

Reaching for his belt the old man drew his knife. No great sword, this, no weapon for a hero. But it was sharp. Over the years he had honed it down to a sliver of blade that fit snugly beneath his forearm, stretching from Grigori's wrist to his elbow just as neatly as if it were cousin to the bone beneath. Even in the darkness of these depths it gleamed with a dull menace.

Now the patter of claws upon stone seemed closer than the rockslide. Much closer.

Grigori narrowed his eyes, squinting into every shadowed corner, but there was no movement other than that caused by the flickering of his torch.

The old man curled the fist that held the knife backwards, trying to hide the blade behind his sleeve. If he could manage just one slash at this monster… well, who knew?

Now the clatter of claws was so loud that it couldn't be coming from more than a dozen feet away.

'Invisible, are you?' Grigori whispered, teeth bared defiantly.

It drew closer. Faster.

'Where are you?' the old man whispered, eyes flitting nervously from side to side, hunting through the shadows.

Then he looked up.

It was almost upon him, the twisted bulk of its form hanging like rotten fruit from the jagged ceiling of the cave. Even though it was twisting and swinging from one handhold to another, it was terrifyingly quick, filled with all the twitching eagerness of a cockroach.

There was nothing remotely human about it. It had two arms and two legs, true, and the muscles which writhed beneath its leprous skin had their own counterparts on Grigori's own frame, but crawling forward on taloned feet and hands, torchlight gleaming blackly on its carapace of a hide, it looked like nothing so much as a massive insect.

A massive and hungry insect, Grigori thought, stumbling backwards away from it. As he did so, the torch flared and the vampire's head, which had so far been hidden in the shadows, emerged into the light.

Grigori, for the first time since childhood, screamed.

Ivan had described its head as bat-like. It was as good a comparison as any sane man might make: the sharp, ragged ears, the vicious little wrinkle of a snout, sneering over a splintered mouthful of razor-sharp teeth, the tiny, sunken eyes, they all had something of the rodent about them.

There was something more, though, something about the things face that spoke of a horror beyond the power of any natural creature to inspire. Perhaps it was something to do with the intelligence that leered out of the blood red pits of its eyes, an intelligence that was both more and less than human.

Grigori stared stupidly at the thing as it closed the last few feet that separated them. Its mad, insect rush slowed now, as if the beast was gloating as it closed in. Still hanging upside down from the ceiling, it pushed its head slowly forward until its eyes were only inches away from Grigori's own.

He didn't want to meet the thing's gaze. He wanted to close his eyes and hide them in his hands.

To tear them out if need be.

The vampire opened its maw, revealing shards of glistening teeth, and it lolled the arrow point of its slimy tongue out towards Grigori. It switched spasmodically back and forth, rippling as it savored the aura of terror that had wrapped Grigori in its iron embrace.

The tavern keeper felt the acid rush of his gorge rising as the stench of the thing's breath hit him. As sweet and ripe as rotten fish, it hung greasily on the air: the smell of ancient corruption.

With a distant, unrecognized clink, Grigori's knife fell from his nerveless fingers.

In the back of its throat, the vampire made a gargling noise that could almost have been a laugh. Then it drew back a little, rolled its head to one side, and struck.

Grigori's mind remained frozen, mesmerized, a hare in the snake's spell.

His hand didn't.

Even as the vampire's head whipped forward, eyes blinking shut as its tangle of fangs snapped towards the old man's neck, some deep, forgotten instinct sent Grigori ducking backwards, and thrust out with the torch.

So it was that instead of tasting the warm rush of pulsing blood, the vampire tasted fire: clean, bright fire.

It screamed as it fell, but even through its pain it managed to turn, twisting to land on all fours. The slap of its feet punctuated its cry of pain, its sudden leap ended it. One great taloned hand swiped the torch out of its prey's hand and, as the flame crashed against a far wall, Grigori saw it leap.

Darkness, as pure as blindness, rushed in on him.

But before it did the dying flames granted him one last sight. It was of the vampire hunters' return.

They came together, their separate attacks timed with the perfect harmony of a boxer's fists. Viento was the first to emerge from the gloom, appearing like an apparition from the darkness behind Grigori's tormenter. He raced along the roof of the passageway, his fingers obviously as skilled in finding purchase as the strigoi's. Inverted above the trailing volume of his cloak the pale moon of his face shone, its fine features contorted into a mask of unholy joy.

Calixte came from behind the tavern keeper. His porcelain cold fingers pushed down on Grigori's head as he vaulted over him, a rush of displaced air marking his passage. The confusion of his attack - a blur of speed and savagery - was burnt onto the tavern keeper's retinas as his torch died.

Cowering in the darkness, he listened to the sound of the battle, and prayed.

IT LASTED FOR no more than seconds, yet in that time Grigori felt years pass. The screams that echoed from mouths to walls to the inside of his head had a madness in them that made no distinction between joy and pain, terror and lust. Tearing flesh, splintering bone, the splatter and sliver of dismemberment rang out in hellish counterpoint to the unmistakable high pitched squeal of Viento's giggle, his laughter interrupted only by sudden grunts of exertion.

Calixte remained silent.

The worse was the warm, wet rain that began to fall, sticky to the touch and iron to the tongue.

It was too much.

Grigori collapsed helplessly on the cold floor, wracked with spasms of nausea. For a while he remained lost in the world of fear and disgust. Then, slowly, he became aware that the sounds of battle had gone. Once more, silence reigned, broken by neither breath nor movement.

For all of that, though, Grigori was passed falling into any illusion that he might be alone. Bent double he groped forward in the darkness, fingers slipping across newly dampened stones as he searched for his torch.

Still trying not to think about what its rekindled light might reveal, he took out flint and steel and scraped a shower of sparks onto the pitch. The torch took the flame, sputtering out an uneven light. With an effort of will the tavern keeper forced himself to look up.

The vampire hunters stood on either side of their foe's ruined body, bookend statues of tranquility. Neither of them seemed harmed, or even shaken. Blood drooled in thick black slicks from their perfectly carved lips and glistened on their delicate hands, but Grigori didn't think that it was theirs.

'A good fight,' Calixte said with the sigh of a man who has just enjoyed a fine meal. He turned to Grigori and bared his pink stained teeth in a smile.

The tavern keeper tried to return the gesture, pulling his lips back even as he realized that Calixtes eyes now gleamed with the same blood red he had seen in the vampire's.

The other vampire's.

'No…' Grigori said, slumping back into the cold embrace of the wall.

'Now, now,' Calixte said, his smile growing wider as he winked at Viento. 'No need to worry. The deal remains the same. All you owe us is a season's food and board. I'm sure that we won't eat you all out of house and home.'

Calixte glanced at Viento, but his companion was beyond appreciation of any wit. He had the dazed, happy look of a satiated drunkard.

A sudden fear seized Grigori, sharper than any other in this nightmare his life had become.

'Petrokov…' he began, 'my son?'

'Don't worry about him,' Calixte advised, looming up as he approached the tavern keeper. 'You have more pressing concerns.'

One wet, darkly stained hand dropped upon the old man's shoulder. Squeezing as tightly as a vulture's claw, it bruised flesh and ground bones together. Slowly, without any sign of effort, Calixte lifted his host clean off the floor and held him there, the better to gaze into his eyes.

'Now you will take us home,' the vampire told him with all the confidence of a man who has seen the future. And perhaps he had. Perhaps the twice-stolen blood that squirmed and flowed beneath the transparent lenses of his eyeballs granted him that power.

'But, my son…'

'Gone. Now, let us go.'

As gently as a cat with her kitten, he lowered Grigori back to the floor. The old man slumped, his jaw dropping foolishly. Suddenly he looked a lot more than his sixty years.

'Lead on,' Calixte said, with a theatrical bow. 'I'm hungry!'

One step followed the next as Grigori, with the aimless shamble of a broken man, led them back out of the labyrinth and into the world beyond.

THEY EMERGED INTO the icy blast of an enraged wind. It snapped and whipped around them, sending great sheets of blinding snow swooping across the entrance to the cave. Even the two vampire hunters hesitated before venturing out to brave its full fury. Only Grigori seemed unconcerned. He barely broke his step as he trudged out into its embrace, not even stopping for his snowshoes.

'This way,' he said, his voice as flat as ice and as weak as broken straw.

Calixte savoured his guide's despair as he led them out into the storm. He studied the stoop of the old man's shoulders as, stumbling like an octogenarian, he trudged back into the relative shelter of the forest. The vampire was content to let him pick his way hesitantly forward along trails blanketed with thick falls of driven snow, his hood forgotten, his head low.

Calixte smiled, and in that moment decided to let the tavern keeper live. He could be a sort of breathing trophy. Sometimes the subtle pleasures were the best. After all, any animal could destroy a body. It took a master to break a soul.

Here and there, sheltered by overhanging boughs or cleared by strange eddies of the blizzard's energy, dark patches of frost rimed earth glistened black and silver in the gloom. For the most part, though, the ground was a rippling ocean of grey snow, stretching out endlessly in every direction.

'This way,' Grigori repeated, the wind leaping up to snatch the words from his mouth.

The three dark figures tracked through a deep, stone-walled crevasse, the ribbon of water that had cut it hidden beneath deep drifts. Then they began to climb, one crest following the next in a confused jumble of hillocks.

'Grigori!' Calixte called, his voice almost inaudible beneath the gathering storm. 'I don't recognize this place. Are we lost?'

'I'm hungry,' Viento complained, his gaze fastening on the thin strip of flesh visible between Grigori's beard and cloak. Calixte scowled at him.

'Lost?' Grigori repeated apathetically. 'No, this is a short cut. Do you want to go back and start again?'

'No, no,' Calixte grumbled, watching his companion warily. It wouldn't do to kill their guide, especially whilst they still had use for him. 'Just be quicker.'

'Yes,' the tavern keeper mumbled, 'quicker.'

So they marched on. Grigori pushed himself until his clothes became as damp from sweat as from melted snow, so that they clung to his skin in a constant freezing embrace. Soon his legs began to burn with the agony of wading through drifts and over ridges. The pain was unbearable. He bore it anyway.

Night, as tight as a strangler's fingers, closed in around them.

'Are we almost there?' Calixte asked, his tone as light and pleasant as a man enjoying a summer's stroll. He seemed not to feel the frost that covered his forehead, nor the tiny icicle daggers that hung from his frozen hair.

'Not long now,' Grigori assured him, calling back over his shoulder as he led them upwards. He stopped.

Suddenly, with the violence of an axe stroke, the forest ended at a straight-edged cliff. Grigori looked over the edge and, even in this dim light, could make out the forest far, far below. The black-spired pines that clung to the foot of the cliff looked as small and thin as the hairs on his arm.

'How can you see in this light?'

'I can see enough.'

'Liar.'

'No, it's just over—'

Calixte's grasp cut off the old man's word. He had somehow blinked into existence directly in front of Grigori, his silhouette as black as a hole cut out of the snow choked sky beyond. Pressing frozen palms against Grigori's cheeks he held his head and stooped to examine him, rolling the old man's skull back and forth like a strigani with a crystal ball as he peered into its depths.

'Look at me,' he commanded, peering into Grigori's eyes. Calixte grunted. There was something there, hiding behind broken veins and despair. Something…

With a piercing scream he recoiled, flinging the old man to one side as if he were no more than a straw doll. Staggering backwards, his mouth and eyes wide with shock, Calixte's fingers fluttered down to rest, pale as moths, upon the knife hilt which now sprouted from his stomach.

'Liar!' he hissed, plucking the knife from his midriff with a wet, sucking sound. He glanced down at the blade and pursed his lips.

'What's going on?' asked Viento, warily advancing through a curtain of quickening snow. For a moment his master ignored him, turning his attention instead to the vanishing track of their fading footprints. The blizzard, he realized, had been filling them almost as quickly as they had been made.

'Our guide has been trying to get us lost,' he said, absentmindedly brushing the torn cloth of his waistcoat back down.

'You should have tested his obedience before following him out here!' Viento whined. 'I'm hungry!'

'Oh, don't worry. This old fool will lead us back Won't you?' Calixte's grin was invisible in the darkness. Grigori, ignoring the bright flare of pain in his broken shoulder, dragged himself to his feet. A blast of wind crested the edge of the precipice behind him, ruffling his hair.

'Yes, you'll lead us. Take my word for it, you will. I am something of an expert in these things. What will it be, old man? Pain? Terror? The blood kiss? Somehow I don't think it will be gold.'

Grigori took a step backwards. Then another. With the rattle of falling earth the ground beneath his foot began to slip.

He stopped.

'No escape that way,' Calixte gloated, enjoying himself.

'Let's kill him!' Viento suggested, starting forward.

'Not yet.'

'Why not?' Grigori asked in a voice as warm as honey. There was nothing left in it of fear, or of pain. And if there was a despair, well then, it was despair that had collapsed under its own weight into something else, something infinitely more dangerous. 'Why not kill me? Or are you too much the coward?'

For the first time in a century Calixte Lesec found himself at a loss for words.

'No…' the old man continued, with a sneer, 'no courage.'

Viento hissed.

'Ah,' Grigori mused, 'so your monkey has something to say after all.'

'Monkey?'

'Yes, that grovelling thing which follows you.'

The blizzard chuckled appreciatively.

'That's hardly pol… No! Wait!'

Calixte snatched at his companion, but it was too late.

As swiftly as a serpent, as silently as an owl, Viento struck. The impact shattered Grigori's bones like frost-rimed boughs, the snapping of them loud even above the growing cacophony of the storm. And yet, even as the splintered bone bit into his lungs, the old man was screaming out a cry of terrible victory.

'Wait!' Calixte howled at his unheeding companion. He lunged forward, the white claws of his frozen hands crunching as they tore at the ice hard folds of Viento's cloak. With a savage tug the vampire hunter felt himself pulled forward into a sudden slush of blinding snow.

It covered his face, thick and unmelting upon the cold orbs of his eyeballs.

'Viento, stop,' he hissed, blinking furiously.

But Viento was deaf to everything now, the world outside eclipsed by a hunger so intense that it verged on insanity. With a sigh he bit down into Grigori's exposed jugular, battening on to his victim like a leech as the hot blood began to spurt.

Calixte, his foothold crumbling away to nothing beneath Viento's steady advance, tried to release his grip on his companion, tried to push him away.

Tried and failed.

He stared disbelievingly at his hands, his fingers lost in the crackling depths of his companion's cloak. Somehow, beneath the silver gloves of ice that had enveloped his fingers, his fists seemed to have fused into a dead iron grip.

'Viento!' he screamed, ignoring the snap of his own finger bones as he pulled backwards.

But Viento was feeding. With a last, gurgling snarl he hoisted his stricken companion close, oblivious to their peril even as the world began to turn around him.

The ruins of Grigori's vocal chords hissed as he tried to curse and added his own small weight to Viento's maneuvre. With the last of his energy he wrapped his arms around his tormentor and, locked together in an embrace tighter than any lovers, he pulled the three of them backwards and down, down into the void beyond.

Of the three falling figures only Calixte screamed.

FOR A TIME there was nothing left in the world but the roar of the quickening blizzard, and the agonized groans of the forest upon which it vented its fury. The darkness was complete now, the falling snow thicker than pyre smoke as it choked the air between the huddled trees.

And yet, eventually, something crawled back into this terrible world. Something huddled and dark, its form hunched as, hand by trembling hand, it dragged itself up and over the lip of the crevasse.

The wind whined jealously and tried to push the emerging figure back into the abyss from whence it had come. It tore at his clothes, plucked at his hair, pushed against his chest.

Its efforts were all in vain. Slowly, weakened by a dozen terrible injuries and anemic from blood loss, Grigori fought the wind and scrambled to his feet.

He staggered towards the forest, fumbling for his fire tin as he did so. Through the numbness he felt the lump of it, safe in a pocket, and grunted. The expression ignited a flare of red, jagged pain in his throat.

The Kislevite ignored it, just as he ignored the numbness and the small, insistent voice that begged him to lay down in the comforting embrace of the snow and sleep.

He wasn't dead, and he wasn't going to give up.

Not now.

Not ever.

As if to mock him, his left leg chose that moment to give out, sending him sprawling into the snow. The soft, warm snow. How nice it would be to rest here for a while, to sleep safely in the knowledge that when he next opened his eyes it would be to see his wife and son.

Grigori swore, welcoming the pain that the curse brought. It helped him to bully himself back up to his feet and to renew his struggle onwards. The snowstorm followed him close, burying the bloody trail he left as swiftly as a guilty secret.

No. He would never give up. He'd hole up until the storm passed, build a fire and pull together a shelter. When the numbness abated there would be pain, he knew, terrible pain. So be it. He'd endure, as he always had, and find his way back to the village. His way back to Piotre and…

He stopped suddenly, eyes widening in horror. One hand fluttered up to his throat. It flitted over the torn flesh at his throat and stroked the two jagged holes that burned beneath the crusting of snow that clung to his beard.

Beneath the frozen tips of his fingers Grigori felt blood weeping from the torn flesh, the drops sliding sluggishly down into his collar: blood from the vampire's bite! Gradually, even as he probed the wound, the trickle of blood ceased.

Another man might have been relieved. Grigori wasn't such a fool. With a wound this deep the blood didn't stop until the pulse did.

It occurred to the tavern keeper that there was now nothing that could stop him from returning to his village. There was nothing that could stop him from returning to his friends, and their wives and children. Nothing that could stop him from returning to their open arms and unsuspecting hearts.

Had he still been breathing the old man might have sighed. As it was he just turned his face back into the onslaught of the blizzard and stumbled back towards the crevasse.

A burst of driving snow scoured his face as he reached the edge and stood for a moment, peering into the void beyond. Sudden drafts snatched dangerously at his heels, and driving snowflakes brushed into the dead chill of his mouth. They collected there to lay, still and unmelting, upon the icy blade of his tongue.

As the angry shroud of the blizzard wrapped itself around him, Grigori closed his eyes and thought back to a summer long ago when, bathed in the green light of a forest glade, he had taught Petrokov how to dive into a pool.

'It's easy,' he mouthed silently through frost-blackened lips. 'You just stand up straight, throw forward your arms… and dive!'

He hurtled downward, his body slicing through the wild eddies of the blizzard as he fell. And as he plunged towards the jagged rocks that waited below Grigori was smiling, for he heard not the storm's triumphant howl, but the ring of his son's delighted laughter.