Children of The Night

Chapter Thirty-eight

1T took Kate an hour to walk to the lights, and the lights were only another village, not the citadel itself. She stayed in the trees, looked across the river at the tiny village busy with military traffic, police, and spotlighted roadblocks, and thought: Lucian mentioned this place . . . Capalineni. The citadel should be less than a mile north. But the river twisted under a bridge beyond the village, the highway ran along the west side of the river beyond that point, and the surrounding bluffs hid the citadel from sight. Kate could see an orange glow against the low clouds, but it seemed impossibly distant, impossibly high.

She glanced at her watch: 11:34. She would never travel that mile and climb that mountain in time. Lucian had said that there were steps switchbacking up the mountain crag to the citadel1400 steps. Kate tried to convert that to feet and height. A thousand feet above the river? At least. Exhausted, she leaned against a tree and concentrated on not weeping.

There was a shuffling, snorting sound to her left and Kate froze, then crouched with her fists clenched. She had no weapon, only the old binoculars strung around her neck. The sound came again and Kate slipped forward through the trees.

In a meadow between the river and the forested hillside, a single Gypsy wagon sat alone. A small campfire had burned down to embers. Beyond the wagon, a white horse cropped the dry grass. It was a huge horse with hooves as big as Kate's head. It lifted its head, made a whoofing noise like a sneeze, and began grazing again. The sound of its massive teeth crunching grass was very clear in the cold night air. There was no other sound.

Yes, thought Kate.

She circled around through the trees, staying low and setting her feet with care. Occasionally bullhorn sounds or the sound of shouts would drift across the river from the village. Once Kate froze into immobility as a black helicopter roared down the canyon just above the river, going from south to north. Then the machine was out of sight around the bluff and Kate began stalking the horse again. Her heart pounded as she moved out of the shelter of the trees and slid through the high grass.

The white horse raised its head and watched her with curious eyes.

“Shhh,” Kate whispered uselessly as she came up next to the horse, keeping it between the quiet Gypsy wagon and herself. “Shhh.” She patted its neck and noticed that its rope halter was tied to a longer rope staked down eight or ten feet closer to the wagon. “Shit,” she breathed to herself.

The stake had been driven deep. Kate crouched, could not free it, shifted her position, put her back into it, and pulled the long peg free. The horse moved away slightly, eyes wide at her exertions. Kate coiled the rope and hurried to the animal, patting its neck and whispering reassurances.

A hand fell on Kate's shoulder while a knife blade came around to her throat. A cracked voice whispered something in a language neither Romanian nor English. Kate blinked as the blade moved away. She turned.

The Gypsy woman may have been Kate's age but she looked twenty years older. Even in the dim light, Kate could see the wrinkles, the sagging cheeks, and the missing teeth. She and the woman were dressed alike in black skirt and dark sweater. The knife the woman held was barely larger than a dagger, but it had felt very sharp against Kate's neck.

“You. . . American woman?” said the Gypsy. Her voice seemed far too loud to Kate. Trucks moved toward the highway bridge behind her. “You come in Romania with Voivoda Cioaba?”

Kate felt her knees go weak. “Yes,” she whispered back.

“Come with preot? Priest?”

Kate nodded.

The woman grabbed Kate's sweater, bunched it in her strong fist, shoved Kate backward in the grass, and brought the knife up to Kate's face. “You mother of strigoi.” The last word was a hiss.

Kate moved her head slowly back and forth an inch from the tip of the knife. “I hate the strigoi. I came to destroy them. “

The woman squinted at her.

“They took my baby,” whispered Kate.

The Gypsy blinked. The knife did not move. “Strigoi take many Gypsy babies. Many hundreds of ani . . . years. They take Gypsy babies to drink. Now they take Gypsy babies to sell to Americans.”

Kate had nothing to say to that.

The woman moved the knife away and knelt in the grass. The horse continued to graze nearby, ignoring them. “I come here because entire families of Romany brought here this week. Soldiers have . . . in soldier place near dam. My husband and daughter are there. I with sister in Hungary. Soldiers will not let people up road here. I think strigoi will be using Romany tonight. Yes?”

Kate thought about the ceremony. She and O'Rourke were to provide what Radu Fortuna had called the Sacrament, their blood, for Joshua and the strigoi VIPs. What was to feed the hundreds of strigoi guests?

“Yes,” said Kate. “I think the strigoi will kill them tonight. “

The Gypsy woman clenched her fists. “You do something?”

Kate took a breath. “Yes.”

“You kill them somehow? American smart bomb, like with Saddam Hussein?”

Kate did not smile. “Yes.”

The Gypsy woman looked skeptical but got to her feet and helped Kate up. “Good. You want horse?”

Kate chewed her lip and looked at the highway. Military trucks and police vehicles moved back and forth in regular patrols. The hillside on this side of the river was wooded, but too steep to ride a horse on. On the other side of the road, the river stretched to the shale cliffs on the opposite shore.

“I have to try to get up there to the citadel . . .”

The Gypsy woman shook her head. “Not road.” She pointed to the forest behind her. “Old trail there. Almost gone. Go back to days of Vlad Tepes . . .” The woman stopped, spat, and warded off the evil eye with two fingers raised toward the glow to the north. She walked over to the horse, said something sharp to it, set the dagger in the belt of her skirt, and cupped her hands in what Kate realized was an invitation to mount the animal.

Kate did so, although not gracefully. She rode sometimes in Colorado, but never on a horse, this large. Her bruised thighs ached just straddling its back.

“Come,” said the woman and lifted the coiled rope to lead the horse toward the forest.

Kate looked at her watch. It was 11:46.

There seemed to be no trail, but the woman led the horse through the trees and the horse seemed to know where he was going. Kate had to hunker over and cling to the animal's neck at times to avoid being swept off by branches.

The road, if the vaguest hint of trail between the trees could be called a road, cut behind the bluff and rose steeply above the valley floor. Kate realized that the highway below wound a mile or so along the river to the citadel, but this way would shorten that distance by at least half.

Twothirds of the way up the mountain, the woman took out her dagger, cut the rope, handed the short end to Kate, and said, “I go down now. Go to dam near Bilea Lac. If my man and daughter not freed, I join them.” She hesitated a second and handed Kate the short knife. Kate stuck it in her belt, feeling the absurdity of her little dagger against several hundred strigoi and their armies.

The Gypsy woman paused and lifted a weathered hand. Kate clasped it in a palmoverpalm handshake, and then the Gypsy woman was gone with only the slightest rustle of her black skirt.

Kate gripped the short rope in one hand, wound some mane around her other hand, bent low over the horse's neck, dug her heels in the animal's side, and whispered, “Go . . . please go.

The huge beast continued lumbering up a trail that Kate could not even see.

It was one minute before midnight when they came out of the forest along the high ridge and Kate could look down and across at Castle Dracula on its crag.

It was more impressive and fantastic than she could have imagined: two of the five tall towers had been completely rebuilt, the fortified crag was connected to the rest of the mountain only by a long bridgepossibly a drawbridge over a deep fissure, the center hall and the battlement terraces were ablaze with torchlight, people in black and red robes milled along the hundred yards of rocky crag, along the battlements, and filled the terrace at the farthest end of the citadel. Torches wound down along the steep stairway which zigzagged through the bare trees, south into the forest, then down to the meadows more than a thousand feet below. Kate could see a veritable parking lot of dark limousines down there, as well as strigoi guards pacing in the torchlight. A grassy area on a lower crag a couple of hundred yards along the stairway below the citadel obviously had been cleared of trees and Kate could see Radu Fortuna's helicopter at rest there, a single pilot or guard lounging by its skids. “Slick, slick,” Kate whispered to herself. All along the upper path, into the citadel, and along the north edge of the rebuilt structure, sharpened stakes six feet high gleamed in the torchlight.

She slid off the horse, tied it to a branch behind a boulder, and crawled forward to peer at the castle through her binoculars.

One of the lens tubes had cracked and filled with water, but the other amplified the scene. From her vantage point on the hill above and a little northwest of the citadel, Kate could see the guards on the drawbridge, the guards near the busy entrance to the citadel, the guards around the north edge of the battlements, and the scene on the terrace farthest from the entrance.

Torchlights flickered there on hundreds of faces and silk robes. A space had been cleared on the highest area of the terrace, right where the battlements and south walls dropped a sheer thousand feet to the river and boulders below. In that lighted space, Kate could see Vernor Deacon Trent on a small throne near the battlement edge. The old man was dressed in an elaborate red and black robe and looked like a wizened mummy propped up for display. There were two tall metal stakes set into the stone in that cleared area: one was empty; Mike O'Rourke was tied to the other.

Kate's heart froze when she saw him. They had dressed Mike in a parody of his priest outfitblack clothes, tall white collar, a crucifix made of thorns hung upside down from a vine necklaceand he had a black blindfold on. His hands were tied behind the stake.

Radu Fortuna stood in front of the crowd, resplendent in a pure red silk robe that outshone the old man's. Kate had eyes only for the silkwrapped bundle in Fortuna's arms.

The binoculars were shaking and she had to steady them on a branch. Joshua's face was quite clear, pale and feverish looking in the torchlight. On the table between Fortuna and O'Rourke, four golden chalices sat on white linen. The group was chanting softly. Fortuna was saying something.

Kate lowered the binoculars and looked at her watch. 12:05. Lucian said the timers were set to go off at 12:25. She was less than a hundred yards from her child and lover, but she might as well have been a lightyear away. Strigoi guards in black watched the approach, lounged on the bridge, stood at the citadel entrance, and were lined around the rear of the crowd on the broad terrace. The crowd itself would keep her away from the ceremony. Her watch shifted to 12:06.

Kate flung the binoculars from her, clambered over the boulder, and began lowering herself into the fissure that separated her ridge from the citadel crag. The rocks were slippery. Slick, she thought. Fifty feet down and the fissure narrowed to a rocky crevasse that dropped another eighty or a hundred feet like the inside of a ragged chimney. It was only five feet across here and from the reflected lights from the torches above, Kate could see a fairly flat rock.

She did not think. She jumped.

Her cheap Romanian shoes scrabbled on stone and she realized that she was missing part of a heel. Shot off when we ran the roadblock. She was sliding back toward the narrow abyss.

In a technique that Tom had taught her during one of their few joint rockclimbing exercises, she spreadeagled herself on the steep rock face, bringing her entire body to a friction point.

She quit sliding.

A hundred feet to her right, the bridge rose above the fissure, connecting the stairway and path to the citadel. Guards paced back and forth on the echoing timbers.

Kate began edging right, finding handholds and footholds more by faith than by vision or feel. Once a rock came loose and she held her breath while pebbles rattled down into the fissure that was at least thirty feet wide here. The sound of sliding rock seemed terribly loud to her, but none of the shadows on the walkway above stopped or shouted.

Kate moved under the bridge, clambering over lashed timbers the size of trees. She could climb up here, but that would avail her nothing. She could hear the footsteps of the guards twenty feet above her, listen to the chanting of the hundreds of strigoi.

Kate kept clambering right, always keeping three points in contact with the rock the way Tom had taught her, until suddenly the rough rocks ended and she was staring out at the river canyon itself.

Under Kate's right foot now, the cliff fell away for a thousand feet into darkness. Torchlight illuminated only snatches of the stone wall ahead of her, but she realized that the south wall of the citadel along this face rose directly from the stone of the mountain.

This end of the castle was not broad, a hundred and twenty feet at most, but the wall was sheer, seeming to overhang at places, and torches crackled on the battlements above. The stones here were part of the original structure, chipped and eroded in places, cracked by ice, and overgrown by weeds and even small shrubs in places. Vegetable holds, Tom had called such plant growth on a cliff face. Don't use them.

Kate saw immediately that if she started sliding at any point along this traverse, she would not stop until she slid off the wall into the void above the canyon. She looked at her watch.

12:14.

Just time enough to get to the terrace in time for the end.

She shook her head. Without looking down, without looking back, Kate edged her way out onto the vertical wall of Castle Dracula and began the traverse in a steady crablike motion.