Uprising

Chapter Seventy-Eight

The craggy battlements loomed high against the night sky. As Joel got closer, every rise of the Dnepr’s engine note as it lurched over the bumps made him cringe in case the noise reached listening ears. He didn’t dare use the headlight, and only the deep moon-shadows sloping away down the steep rocky banks either side of the road kept him from riding off course and tumbling a thousand feet down to the black depths of the valley below.

Fear had its icy fingers around Joel’s guts and was wringing them tight. A kind of madness was rising up inside him that almost made him want to laugh with terror. All that prevented his mind from cracking completely was the thought of the cross of Ardaich, nestling on the sidecar seat just a few inches from his right knee. He’d left the case behind in Vâlcanul. He no longer had any use for it. He was riding into war now –

and whatever fate was lying in wait for him up there, there wasn’t a force on the planet that could have persuaded him to turn back.

Up ahead, the snowy road snaked all the way up to the castle gates. If he’d had any notions of storming right up to them like a conquering knight on his charger, they melted quickly away at the memory of the attack in Venice. Stone had humans working for him as well as vampires, and until the fangs came out, the only way to tell one enemy from another was to get close to them with the cross. One would shrivel up and die, but the other might easily just put a bullet in his head. He needed to approach by stealth.

He was still a quarter of a mile from the castle walls when he decided that the bike’s engine noise was too big a risk, and turned off the ignition. The machine coasted a few yards, and he jumped out of the saddle and used its momentum to roll it off the road and hide it behind a large rock on the verge.

Here we go, Solomon. This is it.

By the light of the moon he studied the lie of the land. The castle had been built to withstand sieges and wars, and its architects had known what they were doing.

Except for where the raised roadway wound up to the gates, the base of the massive walls dropped away down a sheer cliff face. No ancient army could have scaled it successfully, weighed down as they would have been by shields and armour and weapons. Even if a few had made it to the top, archers in the battlements would have mown them down in the open killing field between the cliff edge and the foot of the wall.

But a single, skilled climber, armed with just a small stone cross, had a chance to get up there unseen. It had been a while since he’d done any rock climbing but, tracing his eye up the cliff face, Joel reckoned he could make it. It was a hell of a challenge, and he was mad even to think of attempting it, on his own, in the dark, without ropes or crampons or any kind of proper equipment.

But then, he reflected, he was mad. Had to be, to be here at all.

He zipped open his rucksack and shook all the contents — spare clothes, his stove and food supply, documents and passport, anything that was surplus weight — out into the footwell of the sidecar. He put the cross inside in their place and carefully closed the zippers and Velcro fastenings, before taking off his jacket and looping the rucksack straps around his shoulders and waist over the sweatshirt underneath. It cheered him immensely to think he was a walking anti-vampire weapon now, lethal just by his presence. The adrenalin was rushing through his veins so fast, he didn’t even feel the cold any more as he went scrambling down the snowy bank and traced a zigzagging path through the trees to the base of the cliff.