There was no sense of the preordained in the meeting.
“Can you help me, miss? I think they’re trying to kill me again.”
The pleading voice she could’ve ignored. It was one of the first things she had picked up while living in this side of the world to ignore the beggar, the homeless, the fellow man in need - man, or often enough, as was the case here, child. She’d see any number of them on the streets and the underground on her daily commute during her stay in London, back when she still had it in her to play the game of matching physiological similarities to speculate relation or muse about a potential solution to her shortage of specimens. Nowadays, she imagined, she would just get vaguely annoyed.
No, it was the words it spoke that drew her attention. Not enough to divert her eyes from the road, a curving highway whose corner she dearly wished a taxi would soon emerge from, but outlandish enough to merit recognition. She reckoned she could use any opportunity to dust off her French anyway. What would it be, paying a warrant in the next thirty minutes or the kid bites it?
“Shouldn’t you be with your parents then?”
“Um, well. That wouldn’t help. They hired them, you see.”
That got her to turn around.
The child before her couldn’t be more than ten years old.
At first glance she couldn’t call it anything other than an exemplary specimen of a well-to-do and well-cared-for young boy well on his way to grooming bright blue eyes, roguish blonde hair and balanced facial features into a visage of effortless superiority with which to greet the valet in a few years’ time as he left his car keys and headed off for a night’s entertainment. Definitely not the begging type; a native? Almost by reflex her mind leapt to the task, and it was then that the trail of thought halted.
The boy was smiling. It wasn’t all there, that she would never miss, but the apologetically hopeful expression directed at her drained all levity from her thoughts. Was that what people called a disarming smile? Yet she knew that what gave her pause was not the earnestness of a child towards a stranger but the unnerve she felt at that moment from a child who could speak those words with an expression like that on its face.
“Listen, I can’t help you. But that man over there,” and here she pointed at the uniformed policeman who had fled the early afternoon sunlight and found a shaded perch a ways off to pass the time, although she couldn’t be sure he hadn’t dozed off, “will protect you even if it kills him. It’s his job, so go talk to him.”
Experience had taught her the wisdom of walking away from trouble before finding out if there was any at all, and the short visit that she had intended had no room for murder, her own or anyone else’s. Whether the strange boy was being pursued by assassins set on him by greedy parents eyeing his inherited fortune or merely had discovered the amusement to be found in telling outrageous lies to strangers that compelled them to take them seriously was something she would rather have a policeman find out.
Never mind that, with how tiresome waiting under the summer sun for a taxi that might never come was she would probably need to talk to him herself for directions. Playing the lost tourist was a horrid but unavoidable prospect, and if the boy insisted she could always drag him there with her. That this lost child might not want to return to its parents - that this boy’s parents might want him dead - was truly no concern of hers.
When she was young, one of her first lessons was on the topic of human life. The point of it was to instill in her a certain understanding of its value, in a sense more pragmatic than moral. Although this episode in what she later came to think of as her ideological sublimation was in itself irrelevant, an anecdote spoken in passing had stuck with her persistently into adulthood, which she supposed spoke of the effectiveness of its intended message.
In every minute, humans die all over the world. There is no way to know the exact numbers, nor can anyone know all their identities. Some die in obscurity, remembered by no one, some die in secret, to be found by no one. Some deaths had been a long time coming, some were sudden, incidental. Some caused by human hand, some not. The fact remains that in every minute humans die in great numbers, and nothing we do or not do changes that.
It was an aphorism that several important lessons derived from. “A man’s life is the work he leaves behind”, “the common good is a waste of effort”, and “don’t sympathise with test subjects” would be a few. She had chosen to distill from it a puerile determinism that did not survive its first impact with an appreciable social environment. It was rather shameful to look back to, but then again she had lived like a monk long enough to excuse her own social maladjustment. Indifference towards the fate of people she did not care about, she found, made her all too human. Having no people to care about was another story entirely.
That was all to say that she didn’t believe in fate. Here, too, she would reiterate that there was no sense of the preordained - some machination of destiny at work. Any choice of hers would not affect the outcome, as the outcome in its starkest terms would not be determined by it. A perfect chance meeting that had come from nothing and would lead nowhere.
And yet.
With a shake of his head, the boy refuted the banality of both fate and chance.
“He can’t help like you can, miss Magus.”
Ah, bugger. When did she stop thinking like one?
Death Parade
A Day at the Races | The Court of the Crimson King | Spanish Train | Ace of Wands
“Okay kid, I’m listening.”
While the boy did the talking, her mind, among other things, was racing. All the while replaying the previous minute in her head, the woman looked him up, down, and through and the findings were annoyingly consistent.
No discernible magic circuits. No circulation of magical energy to speak of. So far, not too abnormal. But then was the lack of ambient footprint, which indicated either some kind of containment or the absence of discharge altogether. It was no wonder that she didn’t see him coming. He was indistinguishable from any other mundane passerby. Despite the fact that he could somehow identify her as a magus despite her circuits being inactive - without magical means - she couldn’t even discount the chance that he was actually just a completely normal person with an uncanny ability to track down the supernatural. Stranger things had happened, eh?
“I’m a magus too, but I’m not very good at it. I think my parents are very upset about that, so, uhm…”
Well, that was that, then.
“You can’t be that bad. I wasn’t trying to be found but you saw right through me.” She employed her most encouraging tone as bait for a child’s boasting even as magical energy ran through her eyes into the liquid crystal lenses in an attempt to do exactly the same thing. For a single disorienting moment the world exploded in a kaleidoscope of synesthetic perception, the flow of magical energy magnified thousandfold, and then the neural partitioning allowed her visual cortex to process the information without getting cooked.
Nothing. Not a single trace. It could be due to circuit composition, or perhaps some kind of ESP, but she would have to dig out any answers to my postulations with forceps and scalpel, and as much as the urge reared its inquiring head from time to time she tried to not make a habit of stuffing people in my suitcase to satisfy idle curiosity.
Though that didn’t mean less intrusive enquiries weren’t on the table.
“That’s not magecraft. It’s...just something I can do.”
“Finding other magi?”
“Seeing things other magi can’t see, I guess.”
“Can you tell me about it?”
“...I don’t really understand it. I told you, it’s just something I can do.”
How delightfully vague. It was obvious from the way his face progressively fell with every response that the boy was troubled by this ability, and it reflected in his reticence to talk about it. She had no idea if he had been trained as a magus, but previous experience with ten year old brats that had just been unveiled as heirs to a crest and were already picture-perfect representatives of Barthomeloi snobbery was unlikely to be of help in this case. As might have been apparent, the woman was woefully unequipped to deal with children.
“So, are you going to help me?”
Especially children that expected unreasonable things out of her.
Despite her better judgment, she was interested. Old habits make up the core of a magus and hers were undoubtedly aligned towards examination, elucidation, and acquisition of the rare and unusual. That did not mean she had forgotten about today’s business plans, or the fact that freelance assassins could derail those plans of hers spectacularly should I involve herself in theirs. But if the two just happened to align for the briefest of moments, that wouldn’t be so bad, right?
Hah, and here she’d thought she had grown up.
It must’ve shown on her face, because the boy’s own expression lit up in a joy wholly at odds with the anxiety he must’ve felt being marked for death. Could have been a product of mental conditioning, could just as well have been a mental defect; the two were often interchangeable. However, the excited ranting he broke into before she could slip a word in edgewise may have indicated the latter.
“Thank you! Your eyes are scary and your signature is masked but I knew you were nice! Your “it” is that of a good person! Or, uhm, not of a bad person! And you look very pretty! Black hair suits you! And your shirt is cool! Woah, what’s in that suitcase? Are you a gambler? Is that why you’re in Monaco?”
Where to even begin with that. She was already starting to doubt the boy’s circumstances but the manner in which he casually talked about how he had seen through the precautions she had taken specially for this trip rankled in a visceral way. Much like a magician having her tricks exposed, tricks she could never perform again. It was a feeling every magus hated for very real and justifiable reasons.
More than worrying about the strength of her disguise or the fact that standing at the Gare de Monaco’s entrance made the two of them highly conspicuous targets to any would-be assassins, what she wanted most at that moment was for the boy to shut up.
“Stop. Listen to me. You live here, don’t you? Then here’s the deal: you lead me to the harbour, I make sure you’re safe until we get there. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” he said not a heartbeat later, and she couldn’t keep a grasp on my irritation as she watched him dip his head in contrition. She thought she’d done away with the cuteness instinct during her first forays into physiology, but it seemed she might have to revise.
“So!” Blue eyes met her own as soon as the boy’s head snapped backup. “I’m Flat! Flat Escardos! Nice to meet you!”
A vaguely familiar name. Old. Second Owners of the city for as long as there had been one if memory served. One could only wonder the circumstances under which the family would resort to killing off its own heirs.
“I’m…Alice.”
“Alice what?”
“It’s a secret. You couldn’t pronounce it correctly anyway. By the way, what do the people chasing you look like? Are they close by?”
Nod nod nod.
“Yep! Tattoo baldy and tall snake lady. They’re just around the corner.”
“You, why didn’t you say so?!”
Then again, looking at the boy that she was dragging by the hand into the crowd, she could imagine their reasons.
“Which way is it,” she tried to raise her voice above the din, following the sidewalk downhill. Given how Monaco was essentially built on a slope she could have followed a general sense of direction towards the sea, but she couldn’t be sure about the layout of the streets, which could form a particularly roundabout and complex network to funnel the traffic through the vertical architecture of the city. Incidentally that also made it a huge bother to walk it with heels, as she was being forced to do now.
“Uhm, depends, which port do you mean?”
She threw a measured look his way.
“The one with a casino floating in it.”
“Oh, Fem’s Casa! That’s in Port Hercule. I’ve always wanted to go there. Do you think they’ll let me in if I go with you?”
“I don’t think that’s how it works, young master Escardos.”
The boy - Flat - made a curious face at being addressed as such, his boundless enthusiasm seeming to deflate for a moment, but only just. In the next heartbeat his smile bounced back and with a few quick steps he walked ahead of the woman, leading her by the hand across a pedestrian crossing to the opposite sidewalk. With Flat taking the lead, the woman could let herself be pulled along and focus her attention on spotting any pursuers; or at least that would have been the case if the boy didn’t insist on making small talk all the while.
“Still, you picked a weird time to go there, miss Alice. We’ll have to take the long way.”
“Really? Why is that?”
She muttered distractedly. The only weird thing was having to go there in the first place. She didn’t make a habit of hand-delivering her products, especially in places where she was unwelcome; but sometimes jobs came up when she didn’t expect them to, and sometimes her client was the kind of person she couldn’t exactly mail a package to.
“Well, the roads there are closed. Today’s the race day.”
As if to punctuate that statement, the roar of an engine rose from the lower reaches of the city and the crowd around them cheered in response. It was the simultaneous turning of their heads over the edge of the walkway in hopes of catching a glimpse of a racecar that allowed her to pick out the two that kept their eyes fixed on the pair.
That, and the disturbance of their activated magic circuits, the tinge in the air around them visible to her augmented sight.
And then they were off, the woman’s right hand hand already tracing the first runic array on the back of the boy running in front of her. Among whispered words of magic, the woman couldn’t help sparing a wry thought towards the coincidences that conspired to pass for fate.
Race day indeed.
♠
Four and a half thousand years ago, he received the blood of the moon. Reflecting on that fact, he wondered if he had any cause to celebrate an existence born from chance that had persisted beyond the allotted limit of anything that could be rightly called life.
Fulfilling no purpose, pursuing no end, something that couldn’t even be called a phenomenon but rather a nothingness that resisted its own nature - a blight that insisted on inflicting itself on the world; a parasite that could only carry out its titular function - was how he had viewed himself for a long time. Nothing deserving of celebration, surely. But even as the full weight of eternity imprinted itself on an existence that was for no other purpose but to be, and his consciousness aligned with the dark path that he would henceforth never stray from, he would still believe that what had exhausted the definition of humanity and yet refused to return to the backwater of history that had birthed it were in its current course as remoras and barnacles on the underside of a ship, slowing it down and dragging it to the bottom.
Four and a half thousand years. It was only his estimation, based on what little factual information complemented the lore surrounding the original ones, ancient among ancients. It was ironic that he, the subject of this mythology, had to resort to records and extrapolations, but the truth was that there was no recollection of his own that he could trust as something more than a vague emotion - an impression that evoked recognition or a postulation that was halfway plausible - coagulating into a rough shape that might have been mistaken for a memory.
For all its infinite capacity, the human mind was not resistant to time. It couldn’t be considered a functional limitation to an inherently finite existence. Nature can make no assurances for an existence that persisted beyond its end.
So it was that any vampire professing to the elder title who claimed to remember the years when the breath of the planet was rich and children of the moon held the crown of prime was either a liar, senile, or never human to begin with. The farthest reaches of his own memory had frayed and tattered so that nothing concrete could be gleaned from where his mind had painted over the blank expanses eroded by eternity with echoes of shadows of thoughts and emotions that may or may not have once been his own. And even if it could, it would hold no meaning to the person that he was now.
“Person”, if the word could be allowed. It was a convenience he had stopped debating when he had abandoned that line of thinking altogether. With the erosion of the essential foundations comprising the identifiable self, the core of an endless existence - whether defined as a will, a directive, or a prerogative - was simply a substitute for that which was most indefinable, most precious, and most irrevocably lost to them. Some scholars had posited that the transmissibility of the vampiric condition was a mechanism intended to impose a termination before that point, as child slew sire and brought an end to that which nature could not, but if one did not derive from that an understanding of some manner of species subject to an animalistic order, the cycle of creation and inheritance could be recognised as symptomatic of a single dominant trend. In other words, nothing less than the phantom pain of the human condition.
What vampires bearing the weight of many centuries constructed their identity around could be considered a poor imitation to which they were compelled by a lingering sense of former humanity. Life-in-death of a being-beyond death; a hollow impulse. Reproduced patterns of a simulated self. The life of the endless was the most transparent of simulacra.
It went without saying that he was a paradigm of that. The life lost to him had ceased to be even a topic of philological interest. As it did not matter whether a fire that burned down a forest had started from a tree or a bush, the flesh in which a vampire had been born could very well have belonged to a prince or a peasant. When the human self expired, what took its place was an imprint - perhaps what could be considered the single approximation of a fragment of the original - which would sustain the being-beyond-death as a guidepost for the meaningless to persist in persistence itself.
Still, he mused as he surveyed his domain, he could not claim to understand his own nature completely even now. Even as his kind spent their time mockingly, almost ironically recreating the aspects of human experience that struck their fancy, his relentless fascination with the human subject differed from the predatory fixations one might have expected of a vastly superior predator and its favoured meal. It was an interest that sustained him, a nectar that kept the poison of tedium at bay from a well that never ran dry, yet after thousands of years of drinking from it he still could not say with certainty what primal drive underlay this pattern.
Existing as a part of human society, interfering with its affairs, changing the course of the ship called humanity down the river of history, however slightly, for so long, and Valery Fernand Vandelstam did not yet know whether he was a mockery of life idly toying with the living or an imitation of it seeking transubstantiation by immersing himself in the genuine article. The bright side was that he had stopped worrying about it.
What he did worry about was the tingling sensation in the back of his head, a warning that somewhere on his boat someone was doing something they weren’t supposed to.
Said boat being a casino, he had a likely guess as to what had tripped the bounded field. While mundane surveillance system still found their uses in the game and table rooms that entertained thousands of visitors every week, Fem’s Casa was above all his court - his rendition of the royal charade that the Ancestors had perfected. A moment’s synchronisation with wards that were effectively extensions of his body, like a spider and its web, was enough to pinpoint the exact location of the disturbance: the slots.
Nothing unusual there. If not for the downtime that followed the mass relocation of the patrons to the boat’s decks, watching the ongoing race with binoculars in one hand and a glass in the other, he wouldn’t have bothered going himself, but as it were it could provide a distraction from thoughts he’d long done away with. It just wouldn’t do for some two-bit spellcaster with a glorified party trick to get themselves fried by the wards just because they thought they could peddle the projected coins they playtested in Monte-Carlo here. Deaths were bad luck and worse publicity.
What was decidedly unusual was the empty hall that he found when he got there.
A false alarm? Out of the question. The bounded fields were calibrated to detect any kind of magical energy discharge or interference above that produced passively by a magus’ circuits, a margin calculated over a very long period of trial and error.
If someone attempted to activate their mystic eyes, he would know. If someone tried to tamper with the bounded field, he would feel it. If someone were to, say, bring a millennium-rank materialised soul on the boat, he’d get a headache the moment it stepped its foot on it. His unflinching confidence in the reliability of his creations was the product of constant refinement, such that once all explanations were exhausted he would sooner assume that someone had managed to outwit or work around them than entertain the possibility that they had malfunctioned.
As the owner of a world-renowned casino, Van-Fem absolutely did not believe in chance.
Scanning his eyes over the slots room, he thought exactly that. And even while his examination turned up no suspects, something unusual did come under his notice.
The room was empty. While most of the visitors had perched themselves on the Casa’s outer railings, the few indifferent to motorsports and pack mentality alike still milled about the game halls, seemingly disoriented by the strange perception of spaces that were almost always brimming with people now appearing vast in their emptiness. The tables weren’t the same without a crowd, that he could understand, but there wasn’t a single casino in Monaco, or indeed the entire world, where one wouldn’t find at least one person haunting the slot machines, the simplest and most accessible of mechanised thrills, at all time.
Just as he decided to have a look at the security cameras, the slot next to him sprang to life. Fifteen seconds later his shoes were buried under an onrushing pile of coins.
Most unusual.
The vampire stepped out of the pile under a symphony of clinking nickel, smoothed his black hair with a sweep his hand, adjusted the lapel of his red suit, and addressed the empty room.
“Won’t you collect your earnings?
Silence met him, and he filled it with a sigh.
“I promise that if you reveal yourself now you won’t get into any trouble.”
“Do you promise not to eat me?”
The room itself asked him from nowhere and everywhere at once, taking a conscious effort on the man’s part to not let his surprise show on his face. Whatever manner of sorcery it was that could elude him in his domain, he hadn’t been prepared to associate the infiltrator with the hesitant voice of a young boy.
“I promise I will do no such thing. Do I really have that kind of reputation?”
“I don’t know, mister. Your “it” is just steeped in blood.”
Like a changeling returning from the land of fantasy, as if pulling back a curtain separating this side of the world from an unfathomable yonder, a fair-haired boy entered his perception, appearing in the empty space between a moment and the next so it seemed he might’ve been there all along, sloughing off his unreality, the world rushing in to fill the void left behind him. Seamlessly, but not fast enough to deceive the vampire lord’s eyes.
“My “it”?”
“Your...nature, but that’s not exactly it. It’s hard to explain, but I can tell these things just by looking.”
Making such an extraordinary claim, the boy scuffed his shoes against the ornately patterned crimson carpet, as though it, and not sneaking into a casino and being caught tampering with magecraft, was something to be apologetic for.
“Is that so? That is a valuable skill to enter priesthood with; that is, if you weren’t already a magus. Being one, you’d understand what it means when I tell you that I’m a vampire, yes?”
The dead apostle spoke casually, but his crimson eyes were as daggers into the boy’s own blue. Any person with a sense of self-preservation would surely feel the pressure exerted by the man as it resonated with their primal understanding of danger, the dread of impending predation - any, but not that boy.
“Ooh, you’re a real vampire? I wasn’t sure but that makes sense with how old you are! I’ve always wanted to meet one! These wards are yours, right? Do you own the casino? What’s your name? Is it Fem?”
In what he would personally rank as one of the strangest moments of his very, very long unlife, the vampire known in notorious circles as the dark lord of the business world, kingmaker, le grand marionnettiste, keeper of the seven keys, peer of the elder title and moonblooded Ancestor weathered a deluge of questions from the excitedly chattering boy who, caring for none of those titles, had wandered into his castle - through the walls and the defences - for no other reason that curiosity.
How confounding. How novel. There truly was no end to his entertainment.
“Young man, it is rude to ask so much without offering something in return. You know you’re not supposed to even be here, right?”
“Right! Er, I mean, I know that. But I just wanted to take a look, and the lady agreed to help me sneak in.”
“Lady?”
“Uhm. I’m not supposed to tell you, I think. But she made me this.”
The boy twirled on the spot, nearly losing his balance and sprawling on the floor in the process. Inscribed on the back of his velvet vest in fine silver filigree, runic arrays of illusion and protection from prying eyes caught the vampire’s keen eye under the gleaming lights of the game hall. Immediately two thoughts sprung to the forefront of the man’s mind.
One was the simple fact that this historically well-attested combination known as the journeyman’s boon was not nearly enough to fool the detection systems of the automata posted as bouncers in the casino’s ramp, never mind slip under the notice of the network operating in the interior of the Casa. If that was all there was to the boy’s trick, he would have to radically revise just about every magically operated measure to allay his concerns - that, however, he did not yet consider a serious possibility.
The other was that this scant information had already turned up a hit in the black book of unwelcome visitors that occupied a special place in the man’s memory.
“Did this lady make you keep secret about her?” With nothing but a single thought, the man summoned his head of security without even waiting for the answer.
“She said that it would be better for me if I forgot about her. She didn’t make me promise or anything but I got her in trouble with those assassins, and she did so much for me with the runes and the body double and that thing she did with her eyes that froze the crowd and made the cars crash, so…”
The boy shrugged his shoulders. It’s the right thing to do, his gesture seemed to say, and that childish confidentiality was something the vampire lord didn’t feel like forcing the boy to break.
“Sounds like a long story, then. Alright, I won’t ask about her,” he conceded. “I would, however, like to know your name.”
As though the mere act of introducing himself to a stranger was a great pleasure, the young boy took the blood-soaked fiend’s proffered hand and shook it with as much vigor as his tiny frame allowed.
“Of course, mister vampire, sir! I’m Flat Escardos, a magus from right here, Monaco!”
For a single moment, something like surprise registered on Valery Fernand Vandelstam’s ageless face.
Then, as if he was regarding the boy with a new light, it was replaced with a genial smile.
“Well met, monsieur Escardos. I am indeed the proud proprietor of the Casa, Van-Fem. Since, through one way or another, you are here, would you like me to show you around?”
Placing a hand on the boy’s shoulder like an old friend, the dead apostle Ancestor ushered him into the grand hall.
♠
“Then, they’re dealt two cards. The number ranks from one to nine are worth their face value, while the ten and the royals are worth zero. You add their value up, and if two digits you drop the left one. See, that hand is worth four points, so he has to draw a third card. Oho, it’s a four, not bad at all. The highest single digit score wins, so eight is a very good result - we call it a “natural”. Now the banker, who also has four, can draw his own third card...a five! What a draw! That’s the highest possible score, which means the bank wins, and now everyone who bet on that result get it back and win almost as much as what they put in.”
“Woaaah! I don’t really understand it but it looks so fun, mister Fem!”
“Isn’t it? I think watching the game being played is entertaining in itself.”
To the onlookers, the unlikely duo could have been confused for a gentleman entertaining his favourite nephew or grandchild, indulging the boy’s merry chatter about anything that caught his eye - which seemed to be just about everything, judging from the wide-eyed wonder with which he would regard a craps table, a crystal chandelier fetchingly refracting the game floor’s lighting, and a seemingly ordinary potted planet with no decrease in excitement. They roamed from table to table and from corner to corner, the man patiently indulging the boy’s questions, however strange, and in return the boy shared a sliver of his own to satisfy the vampire’s curiosity.
“Now then, Flat. You were going to tell me about the body double.”
“Oh, right! We had lost those two in a stairway at the back entrance of the museum for a moment and miss A—uhm...she was like, “this is getting annoying” and just plucked some hairs from my head without warning. That hurt a bit, but she told me to keep quiet and opened her suitcase - you wouldn’t believe how much bigger it was on the inside! - pulled out some kind of blob, stuck the hair in it and told me to pour magical energy into it. I didn’t think it would do anything because I realised it was an ether clump and those things are pretty useless, but it was like it grew and grew and began to take shape as I put in magical energy, and before I knew it the blob looked exactly like me!”
And then she sent it out as bait and it got eaten by snakes, Flat added with a slightly queasy look. For his part, Van-Fem offered his own commentary on how weird it must’ve been to watch oneself being killed, while internally he rechecked the calibrations he had made to his wards with a specific kind of invader in mind.
The timing was unfortunate, but he was prepared to give that woman a death memorable enough to stay away for a few hundred years at least.
“Your turn, again. What would you like to know?”
Entertaining such dark thoughts he would spare his young friend from knowing, Van-Fem ceded the word to his partner in the little game of secrets.
“I’m not sure,” Flat began, and the vampire did not for a second believe that the indefatigable boy had run out of things to say; more likely was that he couldn’t settle on any one of the topics he was itching to talk about - as proved the case. “How about that bounded field in the other room. When I touched it, it felt familiar. Like the feeling that some spells deep in my crest give...I think.”
“Hmm. That was actually something I wanted to know as well. But firstly, I shall answer your question. You see, your name is not unfamiliar to me. I knew one of your ancestors, long ago, well enough to call him my friend, and he made a few...contributions to the construction of the Casa that I believe may have resonated with the magic crest that you possess.”
Still, that would not result in a harmonic overlap sufficient to fool the ward into believing a foreign intrusion bore the magical signature of its creator. The magus had offered to weave his own spells into the construct but this was fundamentally Van-Fem’s domain - what could be considered an extension of himself. Such a domain was not easily wrested from his control.
“My ancestor? That’s amazing! That makes you a family friend! How long ago was that?”
“I am honoured that you would think of me like that, but I must say I hadn’t spoken with anyone from your family for a very long time before I met you. The time I spent with that dear friend of mine is so distant I cannot think of a way to relate it to you, young man.”
“That’s fine!”
With a determined look the boy sought to dispel the melancholy feeling that the vampire’s words had stirred, imagining that the other man felt very much the same.
“Don’t worry, mister Fem! Just being my friend is enough!”
Completely unguarded, without a shade of doubt, the boy declared the vampire he had only known for half an hour his friend. To this declaration the ancient Ancestor did not laugh. For what was there to mock in that purity of spirit, and on what grounds would he, the shadow of man, deride it?
No, there was more nobility in a child’s selfless friendship than could be found anywhere in humanity’s ceaseless entanglements or the moonlit world where he stood astride.
“My thoughts exactly, Flat.”
The smile the two of them shared would only last a moment, faltering when a streak of pain lanced through the vampire’s head and made him wince, a sign that a spiritual presence of significant magnitude had entered the perimetre of his bounded fields; that was, the boat itself. Hastily he excused himself from Flat, leaving the boy to watch a tense game of blackjack with rapt attention while he crossed the central hall to the stairway the led to the upper level, where the pit manager was stationed to observe the proceedings below. Wasting no time, he took hold of his hand and activated the master terminal of his network.
In an instant, the vampire lord could see through the eyes of every single employee in Fem’s Casa.
For a man who had won renown as the premier puppet master of the Old World, that much was natural. The dealers, the waiters, the floormen, the supervisors, the security, the maids, the crew; all of them bore the semblance of humanity and carried out their designated tasks with individual intellect, yet all of them were puppets crafted by the hand and eye of a celebrated flesh architect - perfect in their likeness, though the man himself would dismiss them as nothing more than a necessity. His true talents, and the creations he truly took pride in, lay elsewhere.
---Report.
---Ongoing investigation first.
---Absence of proof does not negate the weight of evidence.
---Unlikely, maintain alertness.
---Now the primary alarm.
---What? Her?
---There is no discernible causation...yet.
---She is not banned from the grounds.
---Just inform her that she’s paying for everything she breaks.
---Is that all?
---.............................................
---Where is he?
---...court adjourned.
The crimson king opened his eyes and surveyed the pit below from the balcony.
There, the white knight encroaching on his domain caught the stare over his shoulder, inclined his head in a mocking salute, and turned to face the blissfully unaware Flat Escardos once more.
It took considerable effort for Van-Fem to make a restrained approach when the cold and dark emotion pooling in his chest compelled him to run down the flight of stairs across the room and tear the man’s head off with his bare hands. It would not do, however much he wanted it. Unfortunately, the damned leech had seen to that.
“Valery, how nice of you to join us. This young man was just telling me how you’ve become friends. I’ve always thought you could use some human company.”
Under the hand that the man had perched on his head, his spider-like fingers lightly caressing the boy’d blonde locks, Flat was rapidly wilting. Surely he had seen through the man’s nature as easily as he had with Van-Fem, which meant the boy had picked up on his intentions, even if he didn’t understand them. It would almost reassure the vampire lord that Flat did not display unreserved trust towards any random stranger that he met if he wasn’t preoccupied with getting the other man as far away from the boy as possible.
Even if that meant offering a handshake to that disgusting worm, so that he might remove his claws from his prey.
“Vova, I wish I could say it’s always a pleasure to see you, but I respect your perceptiveness too much for that.”
Taking what meagre enjoyment he could from the tightening of the man’s jaw at the casual address repaid twofold, Van-Fem stepped in and placed himself between the white-clad man and Flat without a single care for subtlety.
“Now, if you could relay that message of yours, I will spare you the consequences that I had promised if you ever set foot in my territory again.”
“Tut-tut, how boorish. You wish to make a scene here? What will our young friend here think of that?”
I’m not your friend, was what Flat wanted to say - shout, even - but all he could do under the man’s unpleasant gaze was shrink at Van-Fem’s back. As for the Ancestor…
The clink of chips and rumbling of pills, the cheers of the winners and the groans of the losers, had all of a sudden ceased. In the grand hall of Fem’s Casa, where the interplay of passion and fortune never ceased, not a single thing moved. Roulettes halted while spinning, dice froze mid-roll, cards stopped sliding on felt, and the hall’s occupants, automata and regular patrons alike, had ceased their activities. The game floor had become a garden of statues.
Inert puppets hanging from strings.
Then, the puppeteer’s fingers tugged.
Four hundred heads turned as one.
And pinned under four hundred and two pairs of eyes, Count Svelten’s lips twisted in an unsightly perversion of a smile. He placed a palm over his unbeating heart, and recited the message he had been tasked to deliver.
“Hurry up and finish it, Fem. If you don’t pick a side you will be swept away.”
“If I might add to my lady’s words? Don’t get too caught up in your puppet play with this cattle, Valery. As you recall, there is no castle that can protect you from me.”
The white knight immortalised in legend, ancient mariner and demon of song, conductor of the phantom ensemble and gambler of souls, gave a promise of annihilation to a reluctant conspirator that had tarried for too long undecided.
And yet.
The crimson king would not abide by an envoy’s ultimatum. Not in his own court, and not from a wretch such as that.
“You have delivered your message, whelp. Be mindful of a single word more when you’re inside my castle. Now get out.”
The command seemed to reverberate within and beyond the hall. The entire structure gave a great groan like a beast stirring in the depths, within whose stomach the wicked messenger would be crushed and dissolved for his impudence. In response, wicked fangs were bared under razor-thin lips. A smile like a wound, relishing the words that formed within it and the misery they would inflict on the fellow Ancestor.
“My duty is not yet done. My lady wishes for me to impart not only words, but a lesson to you.”
“I do not care what your lady wishes. Your immunity as a messenger is wearing thin. Begone, or perish.”
“I told her you would say that. I also told her you’d need some incentive. As luck would have it, I found just the thing.”
It was said that a terrible premonition attracted a terrible reality. Valery Fernand Vandelstam did not believe in chance and put little stock in omens, but he knew all too well that it was the nature of coincidences to align in confluence more auspicious than fate itself.
Flat Escardos had met a woman that should never have been there, entered a place he should never have been able to, made an impossible acquaintance, and was now being used as a bargaining chip against him. The law of the supernatural, the attraction of like to like, had conspired to set the stage for a farce. To whom could one credit this script for a jester’s tear?
Van-Fem did not look back to the boy. There was no need to alarm him, and there was nothing he could do in the first place - nothing but to accept the challenge. The mark of the Count on his victims was not something that could be removed in any other way without also exacting a terrible price.
He could resent this vagary. He could curse his own impotence. But his pride was nothing that flimsy: it ran deep, unyielding, a colossus of eons that would slowly but surely grind down to dust those that would toy with it. Sparking a war among the Ancestors at the cusp of their bid for primacy was an acceptable outcome.
The puppet master did not speak. The puppets did not stir. Svelten could force him into the gamble but he couldn’t make him put that to words. Indulgently, as if bemused by the elder’s defiance, Svelten broke the stalemate.
“I take it I was right, then. Good. I’ve always wanted to challenge you at your own game. Will you prove worthy of your title this time, I wonder?”
With that jeer and a turn of his heels, the Count exited the stage to await the climax.
“And bring the boy. I promised I would show him a real ship.”
His parting shot pierced through the grand hall’s reverie, and in his wake it shattered. Roulettes resumed their spinning, dice completed their rolls, cards slid into position, bets were taken and winnings were dispensed, and the din of the crowd washed over the hall like a flood breaking through a dam, the frozen moment promptly resuming with its seams glossed over, unnoticeable to the mind that did not spare a thought to them. In a complete reversal, the only things not in motion in the hall were the proprietor of the casino and his newly acquired charge. Or rather, his responsibility.
“...I believe it is my turn to ask, monsieur Escardos.”
“...what is it, mister Fem?”
Two voices, one timid and the other betraying nothing, broke the stillness.
“How did you circumvent my bounded fields? What did you do that fooled them?”
“I just...touched them. Put my own magical energy in them, I mean. I can do that with all kinds of spells so it was easy. Then I thought I could attune the runes I had on me with the wards and it kind of, worked.”
Flat shrugged his shoulders as if to say that there wasn’t much to it. Van-Fem, having refined that spellwork for thousands of years, knew better. Hearing the boy casually describe such outrageous feats that would make a magus tear their hair out in frustration, a scene dredged itself from the abyss of his recollections in response. Not quite a memory, but memorable nonetheless, a moment of singular quality that could persist untarnished by time even as it resisted the pressure of accumulated experience piled up on itself and crushed the bedrock beneath it to nothingness under its weight.
A magus transcending the confines of foundations.
A mind that bent the world itself around it.
An eye that saw “it” through the illusion of common sense.
Long ago, a man had dreamt of such things.
An incomparable , absolute universal , a path to unmitigated disaster
immeasurable fortune
A skeleton key to truth itself.
A system beyond systems.
A contradiction strong enough to become its own reality.
It was a wish that could only be fulfilled after it had been forgotten. Looking at the young man that embodied a thesis 1800 years in the making, Van-Fem sincerely congratulated his old friend, whose goal even he had almost forgotten.
Saving his descendant from a horrible fate would be a good start for his atonement, he thought.
“Thank you for indulging an old man for so long, Flat. Now, let me return the favour. I’m sure you still have many questions for me, and I dearly wish to show you the Casa’s upper decks.”
“It’s a pleasure, mister Fem! I’m glad you’re not angry that I messed with your boat. So, uhm, who was that creepy man? He was a vampire too, right? But he was all messed up, not at all like you. Do you know him? Who’s that ‘m’lady’ he mentioned?”
Three hours to the Casa’s weekly challenge. He couldn’t be sure, but they felt like the longest three hours of his four and a half thousand year long existence.
♠
There was a room in the floating casino known as Fem’s Casa where it was said that cheating was completely allowed.
A relatively small space that could be considered a private game room, its velvet-lined walls enclosing little more than an elevated pedestal on which a felt-topped mahogany poker table girdled by high-backed chairs with supple plush lining the seats were placed - all fabrics dyed a deep red befitting its owner. Situated away from the hustle and bustle of the great game halls, it would be difficult for one to imagine the purpose of such a room that seemed to ran contrary to the conventional practices of a casino. Perhaps it was a space where the owner and his friends could ensconce themselves and enjoy a friendly game, finding entertainment not in the stakes but in digging into their bags of tricks and deceiving each other while avoiding deception themselves, but that was only a reductive conjecture, projecting a lack of meaning born from eccentricity to that which could not be otherwise understood. Therefore, it came as a surprise to the few men and women that set foot in that room once a week that Monaco’s most infamous gambling challenge took place in that modest chamber.
Surely there was some kind of catch? What level of skill did the proprietor and host of the challenge possess to have maintained a dominant winning record, when by refusing to disqualify or punish the cheaters he was openly daring his opponents to rob him blind? Did he somehow cheat as well? Was that isolated room the source of his luck?
Such rumours came and went in gambling circles. This was by design.
The sensational nature of a room where the gravest offences in gambling were permissible - the paradox of the house putting itself at a clear disadvantage - dominated the thoughts of would-be players. It was a forbidden fruit dangling before their eyes in a garden of sin where they could blaspheme to their hearts’ content. Should they, should they not? Could they? What to even use? Embroiled in thoughts of the impermissible that would, for a single night, be allowed, they failed to realise the simplest, most basic of truths.
There was nothing in a casino that would generate a loss. In order to unravel the mystery of the red room, one would have to tackle the question of what the Casa could possibly stand to gain from the rules of such a game.
Rarely anyone ever did. The ones that had seen through its nature had walked away rich in coin, but having gained an even more valuable friendship with the host. Tonight, three of the four challengers had already walked away in defeat, and the other was very much unlikely to ever win Van-Fem’s friendship.
“Check.”
“I check.”
“Bet. Three hundred thousand.”
“Sir? Your call.”
“Three hundred thousand, call.
“Hear, hear.”
“Very well. Gentlemen, your discards please.”
Detaching his right hand from his brow, the black-haired Apostle picked out two cards from his hand and tossed them at the dealer. Soon they were replaced by another pair, and Flat Escardos craned his head from his seat, dragged from its proper place in the table to sit at the vampire’s right, to peer at them. To his left, a thin young man with sunken cheeks and a crumpled suit that ill-fitted his shoulders received the card slid towards him in replacement of his sole discard, holding it gingerly between his fingers. At the far end of the table, the immaculate Count in his pristine white suit eyed his hand while a spindly finger toyed with the end of his blonde locks.
“Hey, mister Fem, is this a good hand?” Flat’s attempt at a conspiratorial tone easily carried over across the table. The vampire replied at a much more guarded volume, not taking his eyes off his cards.
“Never mind that, Flat. Did you pay attention to what I told you?”
“I saw it,” came the answer in a whisper. “You were right, he’s doing it slowly to minimise the trace.”
“Can you disrupt it?”
A head bobbed in his peripheral vision. Satisfied, Van-Fem tuned out the mumblings from somewhere behind his back and focused his mind on the game.
“We will begin the bets. Sir?”
Tap tap, the opener checked.
“Tsk tsk, do you really have to make me come for you? I’m beginning to think you don’t actually enjoy gambling at all.”
“When you do something for as long as I have, even a passion becomes routine. Your bet?”
“Three hundred thousand. Don’t keep me waiting, Valery.”
“...raise, five hundred thousand.”
“Very nice. I like the spirit of this one. Maybe you should take a hint, hmm?”
“.........”
Giving one last appraising look at his hand, Van-Fem folded it together and flopped it onto the table to the sound of jeers that the other vampire seemed to possess an unlimited capacity for. Rising to any of it would serve no purpose, not even to satisfy his ego - the stakes he played for were too high to stray from his decided course of action.
Once he had eliminated all the other participants of the game, clearing the stage and removing them from danger in the process, he could begin his showdown with Count Svelten in earnest.
If the magus between them had realised that he was the third wheel in an impending train wreck, the strained demeanour he had displayed from the beginning of the game hid it well. After all, he had a very good reason to be tense and concentrated at all times, and he stuck to it admirably throughout the game.
Until now.
“Very well. Reraise, one million.”
“We have a reraise, one million. Sir, your response?”
“I-I, ah, I…”
The man stammered incoherently, holding his cards with both trembling hands and staring at them wildly, as if he expected them to change before his eyes - much as they had done for the entire game up to that point.
“Sir?”
“A-a-ah, f—fo-fold!"
“Fold. The pot goes to monsieur Svelten.”
The cards fell between his fingers and scattered on the table. While the dealer pushed the pile of chips towards Svelten with his rake, Van-Fem took the opportunity to face the architect of the latest hand with words of praise on his tongue.
“Well done. Did you have any trouble with it?”
“Nope, it was really easy. His repositioning of the ink was so slow that I couldn’t miss the timing if I tried.”
Against a magus that ran preset formulas of minute fluid manipulation corresponding to the patterns of the fifty-two cards in the deck, aiming to keep the magical energy residue as small as possible by channeling it in trickles through direct skin contact and transforming suits only to the same colour, it could be said that putting a stopper on the running magic formula was like damming a stream flowing in slow motion: child’s play, so long as one knew the method.
To Flat Escardos, who had never been able to consciously perform a spell in his life and whose magic was a seemingly untameable force responding to his whims with no rhyme, reason, or understanding, his success in following Van-Fem’s instructions and directing his magic as proper magecraft was a miracle of miracles. If not for the tense atmosphere in the oppressive room he would have been jumping and shouting in joy, but he knew that until the plan that the older man had entrusted with him had been carried out there was no time to express his inner joy.
Nevertheless.
In the nine years of his life, it was the first time that his magic had not branded him a failure or a monster.
For the first time in his life, Flat truly felt like a magus. For the sake of mister Fem who had made that possible he would have to take those duties seriously.
Unsurprisingly, the magus bowed out after only a few more hands. Perhaps the reality of his situation, caught between two dead apostles, had set in after his trick has been thwarted, as he almost sprinted out of the room, the door slamming behind him out of sheer momentum.
And then there were two.
““Finally.””
With very different intents, two voices settled on the only thing they would agree on.
“Gentlemen, ante up.”
The dealer’s automated line was met with only half the required clinks of ivory chips.
“Sir, place your ante bet, if you please.”
Ignoring the automaton completely, the Count bridged his hands together and leered the fellow vampire over his small mountain of chips.
“Let us dispense with the trivialities. This is hardly a game that befits the two of us.”
Across the table, Van-Fem mirrored his stance, the grim line of his lips hidden behind gloved hands.
“A game you asked for and a game we play.”
“A game is an idle pastime. No, this is a gamble.”
“So it is. Then why won’t you bet?”
“No, no, no,” the Count shook his head, the first sign of frustration that the vampire had shown in the game. “How can you not understand this? Gambling isn’t about determining a winner and a loser. It’s about the stakes and only the stakes. And this,” he picked up a single chip, “is nothing. It represents nothing.”
“Actually, it represents ten thousand francs.”
“What if I told you…”
With a sharp crack, the chip was broken in half and ground to powder between Svelten’s fingers.
“...that this was actually ten thousand human souls?”
Van-Fem’s dark eyes were inscrutable even as a knot of dread tightened in his gut.
Wiping his hands from the residual dust, the Count opened his arms wide as if to embrace the stack of chips before him - or devour it.
“It changes everything, doesn’t it? Every hand becomes important. If every single one of these ivory pieces represented a soul under your control or mine, I should think you wouldn’t let me amass a hundred million of them, no? And would you still trust your precious scales of balance to swing the odds your way?”
Almost in an afterthought, he unmasked the mechanism of the fabled crimson room as though it was a petty trick beneath his notice that he was being forced to point out; and in a way, that made it all the more insulting. Behind him Flat gave a guilty start, but Van-Fem knew they had even greater concerns at hand.
A terrible premonition beckoned a terrible reality. Being forced into a gamble with the white knight was like betting against the devil himself. Within the limits enforced by the room, the other players, and the nature of the game itself, forcing a confrontation of minimal risk with clear win conditions could have ensnared the devil in a game with no other stakes or collateral damage - a clean win-or-lose scenario for the soul of Flat Escardos with the odds stacked in his favour.
Now, watching Svelten rise from his seat and send his castle of chips flying in all directions with a ten-count at the tip of his tongue and an army of automata waiting on the other side of the door, the vampire lord couldn’t say with certainty the boy would make it out of the room in one piece.
“A probability field? A chance equaliser? Truly you’ve been hiding here for so long you’ve become indistinguishable from your Casa! The house may win, Valery, but you will not!”
“Sir, please return to your seat, or else you will be disqua—”
With a flick of the arm and a silver flash, a head still mouthing the words it no longer had the air to pronounce rolled on the table’s felt, green darkening to black wherever ichor seeped into it. Before the grotesque pinwheel had even stopped its rotation, the door of the room was thrown open and members of the Casa’s personnel from all stations poured into the room in full combat alertness. Maids in picture-perfect outfits balanced on stiletto legs, tall security guards levelled the machine guns that had unfolded from within their arms, and even the cook unravelled his extra appendages, each brandishing a freshly sharpened implement, formed a protective walls between their master with his protégé and the enemy.
Yet, even before that. In the same moment that Svelten’s cutlass cleaved synthetic flesh, bone, and wire, the room itself sprung into action.
In response to the will of its king, the fourth demonic castle activated its automated defences to destroy the invader.
Sublimation in an instant. Within the conceptual space of the belly of the beast
crimson room
Or at least, never getting the chance to. There was, after all, no purging fire that could cleanse his miasma, and a preemptive strike could never hope to extinguish such an existence as a singularity among the Ancestors.
Shedding his unreality, the ghost captain stood tall and terrible against the red backdrop of purgatory. The point of his hoarfrost-cloaked blade never wavered from the straight line to its mark; Van-Fem, in turn, regarded his fellow dead apostle with weary finality.
“Vlad. You have forfeited the gamble to which you had agreed. Lift your mark from the boy, now.”
The shivers that wreaked through Flat’s body could have been any combination of fear at the implications of Van-Fem’s words, revulsion from the otherworldly visage of the Count, and cold from the encroaching frost that had begun to cover the room.
“A lesson I promised and a lesson I will impart. I will show you a true gamble.”
“Come into my world, Valery.”
“Won’t you join the Parade?”
♠
[TO BE CONCLUDED…]
Originally Posted by Dullahan
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