Delusions

Vampire.The word hung in Rufo’s thoughts, a dead weight on his undead shoulders. He crawled back to the stone slab and flopped down on his back, covering his eyes with his skinny, pale hands.

“Bene tellemara” Druzil muttered many times as the minutes passed uneventfully. “Would you have them come out and find you?” Rufo did not look up.

“The priests are dead,” the imp rasped. “Torn. Will those who come in search of them be caught so unaware?” Rufo moved his arm from in front of his face and looked over at the imp, but did not seem to care.

“You think you can beat them,” Druzil reasoned, misunderstanding Rufo’s calmness. “Fool! You think you can beat them all!”

Rufo’s response caught the imp oft guard, made Druzil understand that despair, not confidence, was the source of the undead man’s lethargy. “I do not care to try,” Rufo said sincerely.

“You can beat them,” the imp quickly improvised, changing his emphasis so that the statement suddenly did not seem so ridiculous. “You can beat them all!”

“I am already dead,” Rufo said dryly. “I am already defeated.”

“Of course, of course!” Druzil rasped happily, clapping his hands and flapping his wings to perch on the end of Rufo’s slab. “Dead, yes, but that is your strength, not your weakness. You can beat them all, I say. And the library will be yours.”

The last words seemed to pique Rufo’s interest. He cocked his head at an angle so that he could better view the untrustworthy imp.

“You are immortal,” Druzil said solemnly.

Rufo continued to stare for a long, uneasy moment. “At what price?” he asked.

“Price?” Druzil echoed.

“I am not alive!” Rufo roared at him, and Druzil spread his wings, ready to launch away if the vampire made a sudden move.

“You are more alive than you have ever been!” Druzil snapped back. “Now you have power. Now your will shall be done!”

“To what end?” Rufo wanted, needed, to know. “I am dead. My flesh is dead. What pleasures might I know? What dreams worth fancying?”

“Pleasures?” the imp asked. “Did not the priest’s blood taste sweet? And did you not feel power as you approached the pitiful man? You could taste his fear,

vampire, and the taste was as sweet as the blood that was to come.”

Rufo continued to stare, but had no more complaints to offer. Druzil spoke the truth, it seemed. Rufo had tasted the man’s fear, and that sensation of power, of inspiring such terror, felt wonderfully sweet to the man who had been so impotent in life.

Druzil waited a little while, until he was certain that Rufo was convinced to at least explore this vampiric existence. “You must be gone from this place,” the imp explained, looking to the corpses.

Rufo glanced at the closed door, then nodded and swung about, dangling his legs over the side of the slab. “The catacombs,” he remarked.

“You cannot cross,” Druzil said as the vampire began stiffly walking toward the door. Rufo turned on him suspiciously, as if he thought the imp’s words a threat.

“The sun is bright,” Druzil explained. “It will burn you like fire.”

Rufo’s expression turned from curious to dour to sheer horror.

“You are a creature of the night now,” Druzil went on firmly. “The light of day is not your ally.”

It was a bitter pill for Rufo to swallow, but in light of all that had happened, the man accepted the news stoically and forced himself to straighten once more. “How am I to get out of here?” he asked, his tone filled with anger and sarcasm.

Druzil led Rufo’s gaze to rows of marked stones lining the mausoleum’s far wall. These were the crypts of the library’s former headmasters, including those of Avery Schell and Pertelope, and not all of the stones were marked.

At first the thought of crawling into a crypt revolted Rufo, but as he let go of those prejudices remaining from when he had been a living, breathing man, as he allowed himself to view the world as an undead thing, a creature of the night, he found the notion of cool, dark stone strangely appealing.

Rufo met Druzil by the wall, in front of an unmarked slab set waist-high. Not knowing what the imp expected, the vampire reached out with his stiff arms and clasped at the edge of the stone.

“Not like that!” Druzil scolded, and Rufo stood straight, eyeing the imp dangerously, obviously growing tired of Druzil’s superior attitude.

“If you tear it away, the priests will find you,” the imp explained, and under his breath he added the expected, “Bene tellemara.”

Rufo did not reply, but stood staring from the imp to the wall. How was he to get inside the crypt if he did not remove the stone? These were not doors that could be opened and closed; they were sealed marker blocks, removed for burials, then mortared back into place.

“There is a crack along the bottom,” Druzil remarked, and when Rufo bent low, he did see a line running along the mortar at the bottom of the slab.

The vampire shrugged his shoulders, but before he could ask Druzil how that crack might help, a strange sensation, a lightness, came over him, as though he was something less than substantial. Rufo looked to Druzil, who was smiling widely, then back to the crack, which suddenly loomed much larger. The vampire, black robes and all, melted away into a cloud of green vapor and swirled through the crack in the slab.

He came back to his corporeal form inside the tight confines of the stone crypt, hemmed in by unbroken walls. For an instant, a wave of panic, a feeling of being

trapped, swept over the man. How long would his air last? he wondered. He shut his mouth, fearful that he was gulping in too much of the precious commodity.

A moment later, his mouth opened once more and from it issued a howl of laughter. “Air?” Rufo asked aloud. Rufo needed no air, and he was certainly not trapped. He would slip out through that crack as easily as he had come in, or else he could simply slide down and kick the slab free of its perch. He was strong enough to do that he knew he was.

Suddenly the limitations of a weak and living body seemed clear to the vampire. He thought of all the times when he had been persecuted—unfairly, by his reckoning—and he thought of the two Oghman priests he had so easily dispatched.

Oghman priests! Wrestlers, warriors, yet he had tossed them about without effort!

Rufo felt as though he had been freed of those living limitations, free to fly and grab at the power that was rightfully his. He would teach his persecutors. He would...

The vampire stopped fantasizing and reached up to feel the brand on his forehead. An image of Cadderly, of his greatest oppressor, came clear to him.

Yes, Rufo would teach them all.

But now, here in the cool, dark confines of his chosen bed, the vampire would rest. The sun, an ally of the living—an ally of the weak—was bright outside.

Rufo would wait for the dark.

The highest-ranking priests of the Deneirian order gathered that afternoon at Dean Thobicus’s bidding.

They met in a little-used room on the library’s fourth and highest floor, an obscure setting that would guarantee them their privacy.

Seclusion seemed important to the withered dean, the others realized, a point made quite clear when Thobicus shut tight the room’s single door and closed the shutters over the two tiny windows.

Thobicus solemnly turned about and surveyed this most important gathering. The room was not formally set up for an audience. Some of the priests sat in chairs of various sizes; others simply stood leaning against a bare wall, or sat on the weathered carpet covering the floor. Thobicus moved near the middle of the group, near the center of the floor, and turned slowly, eyeing each of the thirty gathered priests to let them fully appreciate the gravity of this meeting. The various conversations dissipated under that scrutiny, replaced by intrigue and trepidation.

“Castle Trinity is eradicated,” Thobicus said to them after more than a minute of silence.

The priests looked around at each other, stunned by the suddenness of the announcement. Then a cheer went up, quietly at first, but gaining momentum until all the gathered priests, except the dean himself, were clapping each other on the back and shaking their fists in victory.

More than one called out Cadderly’s name, and Thobicus winced each time he heard it, and knew that he must proceed with caution.

As the cheering lost its momentum, Thobicus held up his hand, calling for quiet. Again the dean’s intense stare fell over the priests, silencing them, filling them with curiosity.

“The word is good,” remarked Fester Rumpol, the second-ranking priest of the Deneirian order. “Yet I read no cheer in your features, my dean.”

“Do you know how I learned of our enemy’s fall?” Thobicus asked him.

“Cadderty?” answered one voice.

“You have spoken with a higher power, an agent of Deneir?” offered another.

Dean Thobicus shook his head to both assumptions, his gaze never leaving Rumpol’s. “I could not collect the information,” he explained to them all. “My attempts at communion with Deneir have been blocked. I had to go to Bron Turman of Oghma to find my answers. At my bidding, he inquired of agents of his god and learned of our enemy’s defeat.”

That information was easily as astonishing as the report of Castle Trinity’s fall. Thobicus was the dean of the Edificant Library, the father of this sect. How could he be blocked from communion with Deneir’s agents? All of these priests had survived the Time of Troubles, that most awful period for persons of faith, and all of them feared that the dean was speaking of a second advent of that terrible time.

Fester Rumpol’s expression shifted from fear to suspicion. “I prayed this morning,” he said, commanding the attention of all. “I asked for guidance in my search for an old parchment—and my call was answered.”

Whispers began all about the room.

“That is because ...” Thobicus said loudly, sharply, stealing back the audience. He paused to make sure they were all listening. ‘That is because Cadderly has not yet targeted you!”

“Cadderly?” Rumpol, and several others, said together. Throughout the Edificant Library, particularly in the Deneirian order, feelings for the young priest were

strong, many positive and many negative. More than a few of the older priests thought Cadderly impetuous and irreverent, lackadaisical in the routine, necessary duties of his station. And many of the younger priests viewed Cadderly as a rival that they could not compete against. Of the thirty in this room, every man was at least five years older than Cadderly, yet Cadderly had already come to outrank more than half by the library’s stated hierarchy. And the persistent rumors hinted that Cadderly was already among the very strongest of the order, in Deneir’s eyes.

Dean Thobicus had apparently confirmed this theory. If Cadderly could block the dean’s communion with agents of Deneir, and from all the way across the Snow-flake Mountains ...!

Conversations erupted from every corner, the priests confused as to what all of this might mean. Fester Rumpol and Dean Thobicus continued to stare at each other, with Rumpol having no answers to the dean’s incredible claim.

“Cadderly has overstepped his rank,” Thobicus explained. “He deems the hierarchy of the Edificant Library unfit, and thus, he desires to change it.”

“Preposterous!” one priest called out.

“So thought I,” Dean Thobicus replied calmly. He had prepared himself well for this meeting, with answers to every question or claim. “But now I have come to know the truth. With Avery Schell and Pertelope dead, our young Cadderly has, it would seem, run a bit out of control. He deceived me in order to go to Castle Trinity.” That claim was not exactly true, but Thobicus did not want to admit that Cadderly had dominated him, had bent his mind like a willow in a strong wind. “And now he blocks my attempts at communion with our god.”

As far as Thobicus knew, that second statement was correct. For him to believe otherwise would indicate that he had fallen far from Deneir’s favor, and that the old dean was not ready to believe.

“What would you have us do?” Fester Rumpol asked, his tone showing more suspicion than loyalty.

“Nothing,” Thobicus replied quickly, recognizing the man’s doubts. “I only wish to warn you all, that we will not be taken by surprise when our young friend returns.”

That answer seemed to satisfy Rumpol and many others. Thobicus abruptly adjourned the meeting then and retired to his private quarters. He had planted the seeds of doubt. His honesty would be viewed favorably when Cadderly returned and the dean and the upstart young priest faced off against each other.

And they would indeed, Thobicus knew. He had neither forgotten nor forgiven the young priest for his actions. He was the dean of the library, the head of his order, and he would not be treated like a puppet by any man.

That was Dean Thobicus’s greatest shortcoming. He still could not accept that Cadderly’s domination had been granted by Deneir, by the true tenets of their faith. Thobicus had been tied up in the bureaucracy of the library for so long that he had forgotten the higher purpose of the library and the order. Too many procedures had dulled the goals. The dean viewed his upcoming battle with Cadderly as a political struggle, a fight that would be decided by back room alliances and gratuitous promises.

Deep in his heart, of course, Thobicus knew the truth, knew that his struggle with Cadderly would be decided by the tenets of Deneir. But that truth, like the truth of the order itself, was so buried by false information that Thobicus dared to believe otherwise, and fooled himself into thinking that others would follow his lead.

Kierkan Rufo’s dreams were no longer those of a victim. He saw Cadderly, but this time it was the young Deneirian, not the branded Rufo, who cowered. This time, in this dream, Rufo, the conqueror, calmly reached down and tore Cadderly’s throat out.

The vampire awoke in absolute darkness. He could see the stone walls pressing in on him, and he welcomed their sanctuary, basking in the blackness as the minutes turned into an hour.

Then another call compelled Rufo; a great hunger swept over him. He tried to ignore it, consciously wanted nothing more than to lie in the cool black emptiness. Soon his fingers clawed at the stone and he thrashed about, overwhelmed by urges he did not understand. A low, feral growl, the call of an animal, escaped his lips.

Rufo squirmed and twisted, turning his body completely about in the crypt. At first the thrashing vampire thought to tear the blocking stone away, to shatter this barrier into a million pieces, but he kept his senses enough to realize that he might need this sanctuary again. Concentrating on the minute crack at the base of the slab, Rufo melted away into greenish vapor—it wasn’t difficult—and filtered out into the mausoleum’s main area.

Druzil, perched on the nearest slab, doglike chin in clawed fingers, waited for him.

Rufo hardly noticed the imp, though. When he assumed corporeal form, he felt different, less stiff and awkward. He smelled the night air—his air—about him and felt strong. Faint moonlight leaked in through the dirty window, but unlike the light of the sun, it was cool, comfortable. Rufo stretched his arms into the air, kicked off with one foot, and twirled around on the other, tasting the night and his freedom.

“They did not come,” Druzil said to him.

Rufo started to ask what the imp might be talking about, but, as soon as he noticed the two corpses, he understood. “I am not surprised,” the vampire answered. “The library is full of duties. Always duties. The dead priests may not be missed for several days.”

“Then gather them up,” Druzil ordered. “Drag them from this place.”

Rufo concentrated more on the imp’s tone than on the actual words.

“Do it now,” Druzil went on, oblivious to the fast-mounting danger. “If we are careful...” Only then did Druzil look up from the nearest corpse to see Rufo’s face, and the vampire’s icy glare sent a shiver along the normally unshakable imp’s spine.

Druzil didn’t even try to continue with his reasoning, didn’t even try to get words past the lump that filled his throat.

“Come to me,” Rufo said quietly, calmly.

Druzil had no intention of following that command. He started to shake his head, large ears flapping noisily; he even tried to utter a derogatory comment. Those thoughts were lost in the imp’s sudden realization that he was indeed moving toward Rufo, that his feet and wings were heeding the vampire’s command. He was at the end of the slab, then he hopped off, flapping his bat wings to remain in the air, to continue his steady progress.

Rufo’s cold hand shot out and caught the imp by the throat, breaking the trance. Druzil let out a shriek and instinctively brought his tail about, waving it menacingly in Rufo’s face.

Rufo laughed and began to squeeze.

Druzil’s tail snapped into Rufo’s face, its barbed tip boring a small hole.

Rufo continued to laugh wickedly and squeezed tighter with his horribly powerful grasp. “Who is the master?” the confident vampire asked.

Druzil thought his head would be popped off! He couldn’t begin to squirm. And that gaze! Druzil had faced some of the most powerful lords of the lower planes, but at that moment, it seemed to the imp that none was more imposing.

“Who is the master?” Rufo asked again.

Druzil’s tail fell limp, and he stopped struggling. “Please, master,” he whined breathlessly.

“I am hungry,” the vampire announced, casually tossing Druzil aside. Rufo strode for the mausoleum door with a graceful and confident gait. As he neared the door, he reached out with his will and it swung open. As he crossed through the portal, it banged closed once more, leaving Druzil alone in the mausoleum, muttering to himself.

Bachtolen Mossgarden, the library’s cook since Ivan Bouldershoulder had gone away, was also muttering to himself that night. Bachy, as the priests called him, was fed up with his new duties. He had been hired as a groundskeeper—that was what Bachy did best—but with winter thick about the grounds, and with the dwarf gallivanting in the mountains, the priests had changed the rules.

“Slop, slop, and more stinkin’ slop!” the dirty man grumbled, overturning a bucket of leftover cabbage down a slope behind the squat library. He moved to pick his nose, but changed his mind as the finger, reeking of old cabbage, neared the nostril.

“I’m even starting to smell like the stinkin’ slop!” he whined, and he banged on the metal bucket, spilling the last of its remains onto the slick, stained snow, and spun about to leave.

Bachy noticed that it had suddenly grown much colder. And quieter, he realized a moment later. It wasn’t the cold that had given him pause, but the stillness. Even the wind was no more.

The hairs on the back of Bachy’s neck tingled and stood on end. Something was wrong, out of place.

“Who is it?” he asked straightforwardly, for that had always been his way. He didn’t wash much, he didn’t shave much, and he justified it by saying that people should like him for more than appearance.

Bachy liked to think of himself as profound.

“Who is it?” he asked again, more clearly, gaining courage in the fact that no one had answered the first time. He had almost convinced himself that he was letting his imagination get the best of him, had even taken his first step back toward the Edificant Library, the back door of the kitchen only twenty yards away, when a tall, angular figure stepped in front of him, standing perfectly still and quiet.

Bachy stuttered through a series of beginnings of questions, never completing a one. Most prominent among them was Bachy’s pure wonderment at where this guy had come from. It seemed to the poor, dirty cook that the man had stepped out of thin air, or out of shadows that were not deep enough to hide him!

The figure advanced a step. Overhead, the moonlight broke through a cloud, revealing Rufo’s pallid face.

Bachy wavered, seemed as if he would fall over. He wanted to cry out but found no voice. He wanted to run, but his tegs would barely support him while standing still.

Rufo tasted the fear, and his eyes lit up, horrid red flames dancing where his pupils should have been. The vampire grinned evilly, his mouth gradually opening wide, baring long fangs. Bachy mumbled something that sounded like, “By the gods,” then he was kneeling in the snow, his legs having buckled underneath him.

The sensation of fear, of sweet, sweet fear, multiplied tenfold, washed over Rufo. It was the purest feeling of ecstacy the wretch had ever known. He understood and appreciated his power at that moment. This pitiful slob, this man he did not even know, couldn’t begin to resist him!

Rufo moved slowly, determinedly, knowing that his victim was helpless before the spectacle of the vampire.

And then he tasted blood, like the nectar he had drawn from the foolish Oghman priest inside the mausoleum before Druzil’s poison had tainted it. This blood was not tainted. Bachy was a dirty thing, but his blood was pure, warm, and sweet.

The minutes slipped past, and Rufo fed. He understood then that he should stop. Somehow he knew that if he didn’t kill this wretch, the man would rise up in undeath, a lesser creature, to serve him. Instinctively the vampire realized that this one would be his slave—at least until Bachy, too, had fully followed the path to becoming a vampire.

Rufo continued to feed. He meant to stop, but no level of thought could overrule the pleasure the vampire knew. Sometime later, Bachy’s husk of a corpse tumbled

down the slope behind the other discarded garbage.

By the time the night began to wane, Kierkan Rufo had become comfortable with his new existence. He wandered about like a wolf scouting its domain, thinking always of the kill, of the taste of the dirty man’s blood. Dried brown remnants of the macabre feast stained the vampire’s face and cloak as he stood before the side wall of the Edificant Library, looking up to the gargoyles that lined its gutter system, and past the roof, to the stars of his domain.

A voice in his head (he knew it was Druzil’s) told him he should return to the mausoleum, to the cool, dark crypt where he might hide from the infernal heat of the coming sun. Yet there was a danger in that plan, Rufo realized. He had taken tilings too far now. The revealing light of day might put the priests on their guard, and they would be formidable opponents.

They would know where to start looking.

Death had given Kierkan Rufo new insights and powers beyond anything the order of Deneir had ever promised. He could feel the chaos curse swirling within his body, which he inhabited like a partner, an adviser. Rufo could go and find a place to be safe, but Tuanta Quiro Miancay wanted more than safety.

Rufo was barely conscious that he had changed form, but the next thing he knew, his bat claws had found a perch on the edge of the library’s roof. Bones crackled and stretched as the vampire resumed his human form, leaving Rufo sitting on the roof’s edge, looking down on a window that he knew well.

He climbed headfirst down the wall, his strong undead fingers finding secure holds where in life he would have seen only smooth stone, past the third floor, to the second. To Rufo’s surprise, an iron grate had been placed over this window. He reached through the bars and pushed in the glass, then thought of becoming vaporous and simply wafting into the room. For some reason, some instinctive, animalistic urge, as though it occurred to him that the grate had been put there only to hinder his progress, he grabbed an iron bar and, with one hand, tore the grate free and sent it spinning into the night.

The entire library was open to him, he believed, and the vampire had no intention of leaving.