The Vampire & Her Witch

Once the great hall had been cleared of everyone other than Sybyll’s court and their prisoners, Hauke sealed the chamber, covering the empty doorway into the hall with a thick sheet of ice while a similar sheet of ice formed over the servants’ entrance. Even the windows were covered over with a layer of frost that made it impossible to see through them, though there were very few places with a vantage point that would have given anyone a view.

”Thank ye, Hauke,” Sybyll said with a nod of acknowledgement. Now that the townspeople had left, the powerful vampire’s mannerisms had once again become more subtle, though it was clear that a low, simmering anger still burned within her whenever she looked at the bound and shackled prisoners.

”I’ll be brief,” the crimson-haired vampire said as she returned to her seat on the throne. ”Her Dominion has already laid claim ta’ Loman Lothian’s life on tha’ condition tha’ we took him alive in tha’ attack,” she acknowledged. She told Lady Ashlynn at the time that she would make no promises about what would happen in battle, and she would accept no losses to preserve the Lothian Lord’s life, but if they were able to capture him alive, then he would not be killed alongside Ian Hanrahan.

”But t’night, he killed people of Hanrahan ta’ fuel his sorcery, an’ I cannot easily stomach that,” Sybyll continued. ”There is no crime in killin’ tha’ soldiers of yer enemy, an’ I hold no grudge fer what he did, even ta Jalal,” she said, though it wasn’t entirely true. It was more accurate to say that she hated him as a person for wounding her friend, but as the ruler of Hanrahan, if she let herself take vengeance on him for doing what a warrior in battle should, then how was she any different from Ian Hanrahan and his murderous father?

”But tha’ soldiers he killed in tha’ plaza, and tha’ acolytes he sacrificed on tha’ tower, those weren’a enemies but allies an as tha’ ruler of Hanrahan, I cannot pardon him for slaying my people when they fought by his side,” she said firmly.

She could have ranted and railed at him for shooting Jalal while they were in the midst of discussing surrender. She could have lain at his feet all the people who died after he fired that arrow, and blamed him for maiming her best friend in the process. Part of her did.

But in the hours since the battle ended, she remembered her own response to Loman’s sneak attack. Her battle cry of ’no mercy’ had doomed the lives of many, just as much as Loman’s arrow had, and only Heila’s miracle of healing had kept the death toll as small as it had been. Her cry might have been a response to his attack, but it was hardly her only option, and so she took a portion of the guilt for those deaths on her own shoulders.

It was his callous act of using her people as fuel for his sorcery, however, that truly left her furious with the young priest, and more so, his willingness to reap the lives of his own soldiers in order to kill a few more of hers. Those were things that he had to be held accountable for, or she couldn’t claim to be a just and noble ruler to her people.

”Heila,” Sybyll said as she turned to face the Willow Witch. ”Ye said he weren’t in control of tha’ rain of arrows. Were he in control of his sorcery at all t’night? Did he knowingly sacrifice me people ta’ fuel his ritual? An’ were tha’ people he sacrificed willing or were they deceived in ta’ offerin’ their lives?”

”This is ridiculous!” Head Priest Germot protested. ”You don’t put a knight or a lord on trial because his soldiers die when they march into battle! Some men have to be sacrificed to hold off the...”

”I can have ye’ gagged like me cousin,” Sybyll said, interrupting the head priest before he could offer up any excuses for what Loman had done. ”Ye’d best hold yer tongue while tha’ grownups are speaking. Ye’ll have yer turn if it’s needed,” she snapped.

”I... I don’t know,” Heila admitted with a heavy sigh. ”When I fought the Sorcerers of the Cauldron of Flame, they used a ritual of self-sacrifice to pass their power to another.”

After the explosive duel in the arena, she and Ashlynn had spoken at length about the way the sorcerers pooled their power to emulate the strength of a witch. After all, as near as they could tell, the Cauldron of Flame were followers of a long-lost Volcano Witch, and there was a great deal of similarity between their sorcery and witchcraft.

As near as they’d been able to tell, the sorcerers immolated themselves, becoming brief, momentary ’volcanoes’ of power as they burned up their own life to create an explosion of power that their leader could guide and use in their own sorcery. It wasn’t the same as a witch drawing on the power of nature, but it allowed them to wield more power than an ordinary sorcerer could.

”What Loman’s ritual did was different,” Heila said as she recalled the terrified face of the acolyte who wanted nothing more than to escape from the wave of death that was consuming them. ”Loman’s sorcery is derived from the methods of Oracles. It was sorcery designed by a Sovereign of Stars, and once it was put in place, there was no changing it.”

”It wasn’t sophisticated sorcery, but it was complicated,” Heila explained, looking at Hauke and Jalal as she tried to explain what she’d seen. ”It was like your frost on the windows,” she said as she found a point of comparison. ”Your frost does one thing and one thing only. It prevents people from looking through the window. But it can’t stop someone from breaking the window, and even though it does its job well, touch one spot with a hot coal from the fire and watch the frost melt away from that spot.”

”Or shatter,” Hauke said, nodding in understanding. ”If sorcery is delicate, like a snowflake, then it will break apart as soon as something disrupts it. If you create something that is large and powerful, but delicate as a snowflake, then when it breaks, it can be very dangerous,” he said, frowning at the priest in tattered robes.

”Ancestor Ines always warned me when my designs were too brittle to withstand pressures and Ancestor Erarik made sure I knew how to reinforce my spells,” he explained, giving full respect to his teachers despite the way they’d betrayed him at the end. After all, he was still learning and growing from the lessons they’d taught him, and one act of betrayal didn’t wipe out a lifetime of debt for the knowledge he’d gained from them.

”Didn’t your teachers do the same for you?” Hauke asked, frowning at the battered priest. ”Why would you use sorcery that was so dangerous and risky?”

”Our sacred rights aren’t like your heathen witchcraft,” Loman said, speaking for the first time since Dame Sybyll had sent the townsfolk home to their beds. ”We don’t presume to design a sacred right by ourselves. Each ritual is a holy gift from the Great Prophet, the Saints, or the Exemplars. They conform to The Lord of Light’s holy design.”

”You’re the ones who are usurping powers that do not belong to you and using them in disorganized, chaotic, and unholy ways,” Loman insisted. ”You bend the natural order of things to fit your will. We only conform to our Lord’s laws, and we follow the path He blazed in the Heavens.”

”You want to know what my teacher taught me,” Loman said, looking directly into the cold, blue eyes of the demon with the glittering, iridescent horn. ”My teacher is Exemplar Domas Onaitis, the Chosen Emissary of the Ascended Archer, Ceslovas Beksa. I would never profane his teachings by deviating from them.”

There were many things that Loman was willing to endure while he tried to find a path forward from the tragedy that had unfolded tonight. But hearing a demon question the wisdom of Exemplar Domas’s teachings crossed a line he couldn’t accept... because beyond doubts about his teacher lay doubts about the sacred designs of the Holy Lord of Light himself, and Loman could never allow his heart to become fertile ground for doubts about the center of his entire faith!