2-7
“Aim for the heart,” said Gilead. “That is the only way for a vampire.”
The knight strode forward, every step smooth and sure, his sword forward and the burning brand at his side, prayers bubbling at his lips like froth at a dog’s mouth. Everyone else in the room, Northbury and Sara and Zahra, parted before him, though the latter only did so because Sara’s hand was on her wrist and pulling fiercely; the girl didn’t want to let whatever was about to happen, happen.
“Gilead!” Sara yelled. “Gilead, stop! What happened to wanting to help these people, what happened to chivalry?”
But Gilead couldn’t hear her; he could barely hear anyone, what with the blood rushing in his ears and Dindrane’s last words echoing in his mind again and again and again. The burning brand pushed back the darkness centimeter by painful centimeter, more and more revealing the twisted and shriveled bodies of the accursed creatures that inhabited Pearwood manor. Northbury, too, was begging for mercy, howling and sobbing, but the blubbering apologies of an admitted bloodsucker were of no importance to a true knight. The maiden in the tower had apologized too, and it hadn’t meant anything to him. Cure was cure; she was innocent of wrongdoing whether she cried tears of remorse or cackled with hatred.
“Gilead, stop and talk to me. What’s going on, why do you think this is the only way?” Sara had drawn her gun, but it was held low, pointed at the floor.
“Cadent a latere tuo mille, et decem millia a dextris tuis—stop me or permit me, but stint thy impotent gesturing—ad te autem non appropinquabit.”
One of the corrupted had had enough. It knew, like Gilead, when not to turn aside. Instead it lunged, reaching out with bony fingers to grasp Gilead’s neck, the speed of its leap demonstrating the superhuman vitality of its kind; but Gilead was faster. He swung with the burning brand, batting the creature out of the air, then followed up by pressing it to the floor with the brand’s tip.
The flame of a single piece of burning wood was not enough to set even the dry body of a pseudo-vampire on fire, but the flame put it in such agony that it could only writhe and shriek as Gilead, with two powerful strokes, severed its head. At that, all pandemonium broke loose. Northbury screamed, collapsing into the fetal position, and his relatives split into two groups. One group ran, fleeing through the sitting-room doorways and out into the dark, while the other group turned as one and went into a desperate frenzy of battle.
The pseudo-vampires fell upon Gilead on all sides, but their movements were instinctual, and hence predictable. He turned and spun, blade and brand working in perfect concert.
“Quoniam tu es, Domine, spes mea; Altissimum posuisti refugium tuum…”
A few of Northbury’s relatives had other ideas, assuming that the companions of the slayer must, too, be slayers, and thus went for Sara and Zahra. Zahra, in a panic, threw up a hand, and from her palm emitted a brilliant starburst of golden light. Instantly, the two closest pseudo-vampires were turned to dust and char by the concentrated power of the sun, even as the little girl’s skin grew paler and more unwholesome.
Gilead fought on, though the sharp nails of the pseudo-vampires left rivulets of blood down his arms, and did even more to mangle and rip his wool jacket. Three of the beasts lay dead at his feet, decapitated or impaled through the heart, and the others were caught in the balance, frozen by the need to fight on one hand and the need to escape the burning brand on the other.
“Quoniam angelis suis mandavit de te, ut custodiant te in omnibus…”
Sara shrank back, gun at the ready but reliant primarily on Zahra’s solar power as she backpedaled towards the door. In the shadows of the chamber, Gilead scarcely would have noted her movements even if he had had all his wits about him. As it was, Sara could have vanished into the dark and Gilead would not have noticed until dawn.
But she did not. In the doorway of that sitting room, with the orange glow of Gilead’s burning brand in her eyes and Zahra’s hand clasped in hers, Sara scowled. She shoved her sister back and dashed headlong into the heart of the battle.
Gilead’s muscles sang with exhaustion, the supernatural strength of the pseudo-vampires driving him to the very limits of his capability. But he did not slow, nor did he waver, and as the force of his fury and wrath became apparent, the tide against him broke. The spawn of Pearwood Hall screeched, retreating into the dark. A rictus stretched itself across Gilead’s formerly-handsome features until the scar on his face ached at the tugging. He raised his sword, advancing to continue the hunt.
“Super aspidem et basiliscum ambulabis, et conculcabis leonem et draco… what?”
Sara was in front of him, gun held in both hands and pointed at the ground a meter before his feet. “Gilead, stop this. They didn’t do anything to us.”
He advanced. “They are vampires. Their existence is hurt.”
“Just a few hours ago you were saying that you were going to do everything you could to help these people, even if you didn’t have a plan. What happened to that, huh? So much for mercy just because they look different?”
“He lied to us, Sara. Hid his true nature.”
The words echoed in Gilead’s ears as if coming from a distant source. He wasn’t looking at Sara, but past her, into the darkness, watching out for signs of his foe.
“Gilead, stop! I don’t want to have to fight you!”
All that Gilead heard was that Sara was ready to fight him in defense of the beasts of Pearwood Hall. If that was the ground upon which she was going to plant her flag, then so be it. She might have had that gun out, but it was still lowered, and Gilead was only three meters away and closing. He could cut her hand off before she even put her finger on the trigger.
And that thought, the imaginary pre-echo of Gilead’s saber vibrating in his grip as he cut through the bones in Sara’s wrist, finally shocked him out of his fugue. The sword clattered to the ground. Gilead truly had fallen far if he was even considering such reckless violence. A knight was merciful; a knight held to his loyalties. A wracking sob of torment burst from Gilead’s lips and he fell to his knees.
“I am sorry, I am passing sorry, I am the least and meanest and most miserable of all God’s creatures…” Gilead mumbled.
Sara didn’t hear him. Though she’d barely had to do anything, she was panting, the tendons in her hands standing out as she gripped onto the pistol. Before she could say anything, Zahra saw what was happening and sprinted across the room.
“Gilead, what’s wrong, what happened?!”
Gilead, already unstable, was knocked onto his side by the sudden arrival of twenty-three kilograms of high-velocity girl child, forced to catch himself on one suddenly-sore hand as Zahra hugged him tightly. “Why did you do that,” she babbled in Arabic, “why did you do that?”
“Because they were vampires,” Gilead said, though the words felt worthless leaving his mouth.
“Vampires who hadn’t lifted a finger against us,” Sara hissed. “Vampires who had begged us for help! I thought you helped those in need!”
“Not blood-drinkers! Not them…”
He pushed Zahra off of him as gently as he could, though not without giving her an affectionate pat on the shoulder. That Sara would extend such concepts as “mercy” and “aid to those in need” to vampiric stock felt alien, unimaginable. The urge to tell her off, to excoriate her for her naïveté and explain exactly why giving kindness to parasites was so foolish, came in waves. But each wave broke against the fact that Gilead had promised Sara his protection.
“That’s not nearly enough of an explanation, Gilead. What the fuck just happened to you? You weren’t… it was like you were a different person.”
“I nist to what thou referest,” Gilead said, too quickly.
“You were all creepy and stuff, and you were saying magic words like you were casting a spell.”
“I think that was just Latin, Zahra,” Sara said as she holstered her pistol. “The fact remains: how do I know you’re not going to do that again and start attacking someone I actually know next time?”
“I have my morals,” said Gilead. “And I stand by them. I know right from wrong, and innocent from threat.”
The words were automatic, but the certainty that usually lay behind them had become cracked and faded with the passage of fourteen centuries. Had the world changed? Where there innocents in this new place who appeared guilty, miscreants who appeared innocent? Or had the passage of time merely cataracts Gilead’s ability to sense right from wrong?
“If thou wishest to part ways with me…” Gilead said slowly, his eyes locked on the sword lying on the floor, “then I shall not begrudge thee thy choice.”
Zahra made her biggest, wettest eyes at her sister. “We’re not gonna, right? I like Gilead. I like that he picks me up and carries me around places.”
Sara didn’t let her mouth smile, but her eyes did whether she wanted them to or not. They watched Gilead for a moment, looking for something undefinable, before Sara relented.
“We’re not leaving him behind. He gave me a second chance, after all; I’d say he deserves one of his own. Let’s get out of here.”
The trio departed Pearwood hall in mixed feelings. Despite everything, the fact that this was a den of pseudo-vampires could not help but leave the whole region sticky with the residue of the unhallowed. Though it was an exceedingly late hour, they refused to make camp until the old manor house was well over the horizon.
They moved quickly the next day, the path to Carbennic taking them out of the well-settled lowlands and into the wild rocky expanse of the north Pennines. Woods, already scarce in England, faded from existence, until the idea of making a fire were they to camp at night became an obvious impossibility. The high hills were shepherd country, shepherds and rock-quarriers and an ineffable hostility to all outsiders. The countryside steepened and hardened until the three of them were making a direct uphill assault, rushing up the winding cobbled switchbacks in an attempt to make it somewhere, anywhere, before night fell.
It was during that final leg of the journey that it truly set in how close Gilead was to coming home at long last. It had been over a decade from his perspective: one thousand, four hundred years from everyone else’s. Gilead remembered copses of trees that had vanished, way-markers torn down, shepherds in the fields that had long since ceased to show themselves. He remembered the road that he had taken on his first long journey to Camelot, and could see how it had been deconstructed and then rebuilt maybe a hundred yards to the west.
What he did not remember was the village. As the trio rounded yet another hillock, they found themselves looking down at a small collection of brick and stone structures squatting around a bend in a stream, struggling fields trailing off in either direction. It was twilight, then, but the sun had not sunk quite so low that the three of them could not run down the hillside, past the various houses, and onto the village street.
There was a sign a little distance away. Sara shined a flashlight on it, revealing the village’s name: Carbennic. But as for inhabitants? None could be seen. The street was empty.
“Hello?” shouted Sara, cupping her hands to her mouth. The words echoed off the moorland, but there was no reply.
“I am Sir Gilead,” he announced to the cold twilight air. “A knight of good honor. By Iesu do I swear that I list for no harm to come to you!”
Again, no response.
Zahra, exhausted from a full day’s marching, piped up, her voice the barest squeak of a sound. “That’s bad, right? Nobody around is bad.”
“Yeah,” Sara murmured. “Probably. Could something have happened to them?”
“Wolves have been known to ravage entire villages until the villagers are forced to flee in terror,” Gilead affirmed. “And ghouls are far worse.”
Sara nodded. “Then in that case, we start moving. Do you know which way the castle is from here?”
Gilead nodded. “If this stream is the one I think it is, then Carbennic is four miles upstream from here.”
“Fuck,” Sara muttered. “More fucking walking.”
Gilead nodded solemnly. “Indeed. But the journey is almost at its end. Once we are held within Carbennic’s bosom, then we can rest happy, for within Carbennic, no man or woman need fear.”
Sara frowned at Gilead. She didn’t think he knew what that look meant, but he did, more than he understood many of the things that she said. The look meant, “poor stupid Gilead, he doesn’t realize how much of a fool he’s being.” Gilead didn’t care for that look, but he understood why she made it.
He turned in the direction of home, but before he could make another step, one of the doors of the nearby houses flew open, and a man dashed out into the road. He was a young man, but of the kind of young man whose youth was marred by a life spent in hardship and labor.
“Get inside, damn you,” he hissed. “Get inside!”
“What? What’s going on, who are you?” Even though she had no idea what was happening, Sara still mirrored him, lowering her voice to a loud whisper.
“The Black Knight will run you through if he sees you. I’m putting my life at risk just coming out here.”
Gilead steeled himself, placing a hand on the hilt of his sword. “The Black Knight? He who is escorted by a host of bones? He is near?”
“Aye, that’s the one. He’s always here, more nights than not. Comes out when the sun sets and comes back when it rises.”
Gilead nodded. “Then go back to the safety of your homestead, gentle villein. I am hight Sir Gilead du Ceincture, Knight of Camelot, and I come here for to make battle upon the Black Knight, ending his reign of terror evermore.”
Too many times, Gilead had stated his purpose with his whole chest and been met with disbelief or guffaws. But not this time. Perhaps it was that rural men still believe in the unreal, or the conviction with which Gilead spoke; or perhaps the man just needed something to cling to. But his eyes went wide with awe, and he nodded as he retreated back toward the door he had come out from.
“Before you go, a question: is there a castle north of here, around which the Black Knight is often seen?”
The local man nodded as he retreated, and said, “Aye, Castle Carbennic. Seems as good a place as any if you’re looking to fight the ghost.”
He fully turned his back on Gilead then, breaking out into a sprint. A woman—presumably his wife—met him at the doorway, and the two shut themselves away inside of his home.
There was just one more thing to be taken care of before the final leg of the journey. “Sara, I understand that thou hast chosen to accompany me in want of my protection; but I prithee now, turn back, make thy safekeeping here in this village. Where I go now is unto the very heart of danger, for sake of my own reasons and desires. You will only be at risk if you continue to follow me.”
“Did you forget that I can handle myself? I’d rather you not die, if it comes down to it.”
Gilead forced himself to smile. It was not very becoming of a knight to go to battle with a gun aiding him; but then, neither was it becoming of a knight to refuse the aid of a lady. “Very well then. Allons-y!”
It was a short walk from the new village of Carbennic to the castle itself, though rendered much, much longer by both exhaustion and by the growing darkness. The path was still going steadily uphill, though not quite as steeply as before. Above, the golden runes of Scrapyard glowed steadily, granting just enough light to see by. The terrain continued to grow more and more familiar to Gilead, even things as unimportant as individual bends in the stream and boulders in the grass.
But this land had once been tilled countryside, full of fields of barley and pastures for cattle and pigs. Something dire had taken place, that all of that work had been left behind for the wilds.
As Gilead walked, he became abruptly unsettled for reasons he couldn’t quite put to words. For the better part of a mile he searched his own feelings for the root of it. He didn’t feel as though he were walking into an ambush, and this was not the unreality invoked by the presence of evil magic. Only after nearly half an hour did he realize it: by this point along the path, he should have been able to see the ramparts of Carbennic castle. But they were nowhere in sight.