The Vampire & Her Witch

”... find a way to navigate by the few stars you still have left...”

Aspakos’s words hung heavily over Loman’s head, like an executioner’s axe, ready to fall. The few stars he had left.

He’d lost his left arm, and with it, the power to summon the Bow of Stars. He’d lost his left eye, and without it, the world felt like a darker, more frightening place. He’d lost the natural charm of his features when Dame Sybyll disfigured his face, and now, when people looked at him, he saw only revulsion, fear, and pity on their faces.

But the looks of pity he’d received from ordinary people in the days since Dame Sybyll had scarred him paled in comparison to the looks of pity he received now. Before, the eyes of strangers who looked at him mourned for what he’d lost along with him. They saw him as a tragic figure, a star that had shone once and shone brightly, that was dimmer now. They grieved for that dimming, right along with him, and that made their pity bearable.

But when the people around the table looked at him, they averted their gazes or pursed their lips, as if they couldn’t bear to look at someone who had been dealt such a cruel hand by fate. They didn’t see the glorious halo that had once surrounded him. They saw only a broken, pitiful fool, taken advantage of by the Church that lied to him, cursed to suffer a fate so bleak that even the hopeless sorcerer, Aspakos, wanted to rescue him from it.

”It’s not impossible to walk out from the darkness,” Erkembalt said from his seat across the table. ”You just have to find something that’s worth more than everything you’ll give up by throwing away the fate you thought you had in order to embrace something brighter. I did it. You can too.”

”You did it?” Loman said in disbelief as he stared at the artificer who sat there, dressed in his finely tailored outfit with the tools of a master craftsman stuffed into every available pocket. ”What price did you pay to walk out from your darkness?” Loman asked bitterly.

”You wouldn’t understand,” Erkembalt said, taking his spectacles off and wiping the lenses clean with a square of silk from one of his many pockets. ”You don’t know what it’s like to be one of the Sorcerers of Sundered Earth, so you can’t know what it means to leave them. You can understand, I suppose, that I left nine tenths of my powers behind when I left, along with treasures you cannot imagine.”

”It should have been you, leading us, old friend,” Aspakos said, bowing his head toward Erkembalt. ”You would have found a better way to preserve our order and our secrets. You wouldn’t have made the mistakes I did...”

”Nonsense,” Erkembalt said, placing the spectacles back on his long, slender nose. ”I would have made different ones. Maybe worse ones. Who’s to say? If I have one regret, it’s that I didn’t drag you with me, you old buzzard,” he said gruffly. ”That’s the cruellest fate I’ve suffered for turning my back on our order. I only have one friend, and it’s this dusty sack of feathers,” he said, pointing across the table at Aspakos. ”And I can’t get rid of him, even after moving half a continent away!”

”But it’s true, I haven’t suffered as badly as he has,” Erkembalt said in a more serious tone. ”Aspakos has lost the use of all tools; he can’t even grip a spoon or fork because he sacrificed his ability to create in exchange for greater power to destroy the people who betrayed us, and when he finally dies, it’s bound to be a painful one.”

”I may have given up my ability to use sorcery to benefit myself,” Erkembalt said. ”But at least I can still craft tools and weapons for others. I can’t change my own fate anymore, but I can still free people from the curses that haunt them, and I can give them a chance to fight for a better destiny for themselves.”

”It’s a diminished life, but it’s still a good one,” he said firmly, folding his arms across his chest and giving Loman a challenging look across the table. ”I have my wife and our brats, and they’ll have brats of their own soon enough. I’ll live to see that at least, and that’s more than many people get to say.”

”We can help you,” Aspakos offered generously, looking from Loman to Diarmuid. ”We can help you both. You may not have known the prices you were paying, but you both paid them so that you could help others, and that alone makes you worthy of receiving our help. It may not be easy,” he said, returning his gaze to Loman. ”But it isn’t hopeless.”

”I, I appreciate the offer,” Diarmuid said from the far end of the table. ”I don’t know what to make of it yet, or what I should do after learning all of this,” he admitted with a heavy sigh. ”I need time to think. Time to pray. High Inq-, er, Ignatious,” Diarmuid said, looking at the vampire across the table from him with eyes that were darker than they had been, and a touch lost as well.

”Can I come to you with questions? Right now, I don’t yet know what I should ask, but I’m sure that I’ll have many more questions in the days to come,” Diarmuid said.

”Of course you can come to me,” Ignatious said warmly. ”So long as I’m within the Vale of Mists, my door is always open to you both. I’ve already said more than enough for one night,” he added with an apologetic look at the two men.

”We can pick up again...” he started to say before cutting off abruptly when he saw a look of great surprise on Nyrielle’s face. ”Mistress?” Ignatious prompted gently. ”Is something wrong?”

”Not wrong,” Nyrielle said carefully as she schooled her features into an impassive mask. Slowly, she reached out with one hand, gently tapping the air with the tip of one finger, touching something that only she could see and snatching her hand back as if she’d encountered something icy cold.

”Not wrong, but unexpected,” she said with a heavy sigh as her midnight blue eyes fell on the wounded figure of Loman Lothian. ”Bors Lothian is dead...”