Heroes in Training, page 13
That, surely, was the lure with which the were-beasts’ pack leader had tempted the idle vineyard hand: become like us, and you will find enough to eat for you and your family, no matter how long the blight withers the vines or how many occupying soldiers descend upon our land. Metzger had been passionately devoted to his wife and children. Synge had recognized that even in the brief time he’d spent with the man, before the terrible secret was revealed and the brief battle begun. Such strong emotion was easy to pervert; Grin used to say passion was the gateway through which the devil invaded a man’s flesh.
Synge studied the woman and her son. In time, Metzger would have turned them from the righteous path, too, or devoured them when they resisted. The woman might have fought him. She knew right and wrong, at least. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have insisted they inter what remained of her husband’s soul-bought bounty alongside him. Perhaps that was why they ate so eagerly now; they knew this would be the last food to grace their table for some time.
Frau Metzger noticed the eyes upon her. “Are you not eating, Herr Professor?” she asked, wiping crumbs from her face.
“Water will be enough for me tonight,” he replied.
Synge continued to watch as the woman cleared off the table and ushered Lukas to bed. She discovered a chunk of sausage hidden in his little fist. After chiding him for his greed, she knelt beside him and together they prayed. Though he was not listening closely, the scholar still heard his name among their murmured reverences.
He nodded in satisfaction. Frau Metzger understood what was required of them. She would raise her children to do their duty to God, to reap the proper lesson from her husband’s mistakes. She was the sort of wife Synge might have wished for, had the demands of the Lightbringer’s Path, as Grin had called their work, not precluded such attachments. She was less educated than he would have deserved, of course, but that flaw could be corrected.
The boy reminded Synge of his own nephew. The two shared a gentleness of demeanor and could have been friends, had Christopher not fallen prey to the night things. Had Synge not helped put him in the ground four years past, much as he had buried the hunter that very morning. Only this time there had been no hesitation, no revulsion at the blood on his hands.
If these thoughts troubled the scholar as he sat by the cooling hearth, he hid the disquiet well. His breathing was calm, his sleep, when he let it overtake him, appeared to be untroubled by nightmares. His hand remained steady upon Grin’s old Webley .455 service revolver cradled in his lap.
Only the soft creak of the front door opening disturbed Synge’s rest. At the sound he leapt to his feet and leveled the pistol at the small shape on the threshold, but it slipped outside before he could fire. He hurried to the door, then paused, wary of an ambush. The moon shone brightly, and in its cold white light he could see that the pelt hung quiescent. The locking bar lay next to the door, carefully placed there by someone inside, not shaken from its duty by a would-be intruder. A theory formed in his mind, one confirmed an instant later by the happy barking that rang out behind the cottage.
Synge hurried into the night. He found Lukas, as he had expected to, standing near his father’s grave. The tethered hound eagerly nudged the boy, even as it licked its chops in anticipation of another stolen morsel. Fortunately, neither the child nor the dog had dislodged the sword standing as a marker—a moonlight-touched metal cross—at one end of the fresh-turned earth. No damage had been done.
“Inside,” the scholar said coldly.
“I thought Shutz would guard Papa better if I fed him,” Lukas started to explain, but stammered to a stop when his mother came around the cottage’s corner. She had her infant crushed to her chest with her left hand, a hunting knife clutched in her right. The baby, jarred from sleep and shocked by the chill air, began to wail piteously. The rise and fall of the child’s cry filled the night.
“We need to go back inside,” Synge said. He raked the tree line with his gaze. “The pelt on the door will keep the other night things from invading the house, but we’re unsafe out here.”
The scholar’s concern was borne out a moment later by the hound’s ferocious growl and the appearance of a pair of horrible shapes at the wood’s edge. It was as if they had coalesced from the air, so abrupt was their arrival. They stood still for an instant only—huge, animal-headed things, part man, part wolf. Their razor-clawed hands flexed in anticipation, and they swayed on two massively muscled legs with knees that bent the wrong way. Then they attacked.
Their footfalls were silent, their movements so incredibly quick they were revealed only in their results. One moment the beast-men stood at the clearing’s limit, the next the hound’s tether snapped and the animal tumbled broken-backed through the air. Lukas flew off the ground, trapped in the arms of the larger of the two monsters. The beast threw back its wolf-jawed head and howled.
Synge took aim at that gaping, screaming maw and fired. The bullet did not find its mark, though. In the same instant the scholar pulled the trigger, a blur passed between him and his target. The second were-beast jerked to a stop, its unseen charge halted. The creature’s right arm hung limp at its side, dangling from a shoulder torn open by a silver bullet. The wolf hide was peeled back from the wound like tattered cloth to reveal bloody human flesh beneath. Shock twisted the monster’s face. The expression was almost pathetic.
Before the sound of the pistol’s report had died away, the two creatures were gone, vanished as abruptly as they had appeared. Only Lukas’s cries for help, growing more distant with each passing second, made it clear that the air had not swallowed them up. Soon those cries were gone, and the only sound to be heard was the shrieking of the infant girl still clutched to Frau Metzger’s breast.
“No,” Synge said as the woman started toward the woods. She ignored him and staggered on, uttering her son’s name in a choked gasp every few steps.
The scholar wasn’t surprised by her mad bravery. Some mothers would march into hell itself for their children. Certainly his own sister had done nearly that, in hopes of saving her cursed son, and paid for that impulsiveness still. Her fate—like that of Arkady Grin—was a reminder to Synge that he must count on reason alone to guide his actions against the night things.
He stepped between the young widow and the forest, and leveled the Webley at her face. “No,” he repeated.
Frau Metzger’s eyes grew wide. “You doom him, then! Damn him as his father was damned!”
“I’ll kill him before I allow that to happen,” the scholar said. “But that may not be necessary.” He lowered the pistol. “If the monsters had intended murder, they would have carried out that grim work here. No, they have other uses in mind for your son. That means we have time to act. . . .”
As Frau Metzger sat sobbing in the dirt with her crying infant, Synge weighed his options, laid them out as Professor Grin had taught him—as if they were elements of an experiment, items to be assessed and valued with a passionless eye. “We must be soldiers in this,” he said at last, more to himself than to the weeping woman. “And if we tempt the devil with our flesh, it’s no more than we do every day we walk upon God’s earth.”
He took up the hunting knife from where Frau Metzger had dropped it, studied its edge for a moment to be certain it was sharp enough for the task at hand. Then, satisfied, he methodically set about his work, drawing out the iron nails with which he had fixed the wolf pelt to the cottage door.
His feet did not touch the ground as he ran, and the vines and bushes and trees shrank back from his touch, clearing the way for his pursuit. It was as if his unnatural form repulsed the natural world. Synge took comfort in that, just as he found solace in the clarity of his thoughts and the dispassionate way in which he could regard his new, hideous body.
The transformation had been agonizing, a twisting of sinew and warping of bone that threatened to blot out his consciousness. He had refused to allow the pain to overwhelm his mind, though. To do so would have been as dire a sin as welcoming the newfound power of his limbs or reveling in his heightened senses. Synge did neither. Instead he focused on the undamaged sanctity of his intellect. The wolf pelt had claimed his flesh, left him a hybrid of man and animal, but it had not touched his soul. He felt no more connected to his body now than he felt at one with the passenger car when riding a train. It was a vehicle, a tool for him to wield in his work.
He took in the landscape with his inhuman senses. The tracks left by the monsters—the sights and sounds and smells of their passing—were leading him toward the Rhine. This was as he had expected. Local legends had drawn him here, and all the stories ended with the accused lycanthrope, like the infamous Stubbe Peeter, tossing away the belt or skin that granted him the power to take on a beast’s shape. And the place where the cursed pelt was hidden away on the eve of the sinner’s execution was always near the Rhine.
Why the evil should rear its head now was no mystery to Synge. The Rhine was beset by the same chaos wracking Middle Europe in the aftermath of the Great War. While the downtrodden starved in the countryside and the conquering armies scrambled to claim whatever arms the Kaiser’s defeated troops had abandoned in their retreat, rich industrialists rebuilt shattered castles into palaces overlooking the river, just as Bismarck and his bloody-minded confederates had done fifty years earlier. Then, as now, the warlords preached the need for order but refused to see that their strivings only furrowed the field for the hell-born. They erected their temples to intrigue, wrath, and greed, while the humble houses of God shattered by their wars remained in shambles, to be overtaken by the wild.
Such was the ruin to which the were-beasts’ trail led Synge. Huddled on a ledge high above the Rhine, near the moldering corpse of a barrage balloon escaped from Cologne during an air raid, the holy place was now little more than the unsteady arch of a doorway and four low, tumbled walls. The roof had collapsed long ago and the slate carried off for other buildings or buried beneath the weeds that had claimed the once-hallowed ground. Human bones lay tangled in the undergrowth. Certain bones had been gnawed, others left untouched. Synge recognized the pattern instantly; the right was the arm with which men made the Sign of the Cross, so those bones were left to decay. The skulls, too, were spared the lycanthropes’ hunger, because the Holy Chism of Baptism made them unpalatable. A midden stench hung over all, a rank odor of offal and rotted meat that made Synge, with his wolf’s sense of smell, wrinkle his snout in disgust as he approached.
In the center of the ruin, near where the altar had once stood, crouched one of the monsters. Alert to the newcomer’s scent even over the stink of its surroundings, the guard moved forward. Its right arm still dangled useless at its side, and its wounded shoulder gaped black and blasted in the moonlight. As Synge came through the door arch, the creature growled, though the sound was more question than threat. The guard recognized the markings of its pack mate, saw the confident stride as a sign that the newcomer was at ease. Yet the smell was wrong somehow. The guard growled again. This time fear and alarm edged the angry rumble.
Synge did not hesitate. Capitalizing on the monster’s confusion and alarm, he closed the distance between them until he was near enough for the other to see the cross burned upside-down along his snout. Then, just as the guard opened its jaws to bark a warning, Synge lunged and drove the thumb of his left hand into the beast’s gaping shoulder wound. The cry of alarm became a yelp of pain, one silenced an instant later by razor-clawed fingers. The blow was as precise, as emotionless, as any surgeon’s cut. The were-beast collapsed, its throat torn out, its warning undelivered.
The trail snaked through the fallen church to a rocky slope beyond, where a rift split the stone like a slashed wrist. Synge moved with steady, certain steps to the cave entrance. This had been a hiding place for the priests in other times of trouble. What lurked within the cave now surely had no holiness about it.
For the first time Synge wished he’d brought a weapon. But that simply hadn’t been possible. His fingers could no longer grip a pistol or operate a trigger with any dexterity. He might have been able to wield a sword. He was a skilled duelist, as Metzger had learned that morning, and the blade now planted in the hunter’s grave had been created for just such battles—forged decades past from a cross by a hunch-backed scholar and a former Prussian soldier devoted to the destruction of the devil’s pawns. Yet Synge didn’t dare risk taking the blade with him; its presence was all that was keeping the dead man in the ground until the cursed pelt was destroyed.
No, the only weapons available were his wits and the teeth and claws afforded him by his inhuman guise. He prayed they would be sufficient.
The cave’s ceiling was low enough that Synge had to crawl a short way before the passage opened up to a wide, tall chamber and he could stand again. No sooner had he entered than he was greeted by the low whines and yips of infant wolves, and the deeper, wavering yowl of warning from a hybrid she-wolf. As his eyes adjusted to the faint light bleeding in from the entryway, he saw the three cubs suckling at the engorged breasts of a were-beast. Farther back in the cave, Lukas Metzger crouched in speechless horror.
Synge edged along the perimeter, closer to the boy. The cubs seemed to recognize him, their noises happy greetings for their sire, but the she-beast rolled ponderously to her feet and regarded him with baleful yellow eyes. Positioning herself between Synge and her young, she crouched upon her backward-bending legs and snarled until slather dripped from her black lips.
The scholar understood it all. The pups were hers, the product of her coupling with Metzger in beast form. That was why the young mistook him for their sire; they recognized the pelt’s scent. But they had no trace of humanity in them, or not enough that they appeared as more than simple animals. To give them the ability to take on a more human shape, to resemble their gruesome parents, they needed a human’s skin to wear. As with so many of the blackest rites, the skin of an innocent child would serve the monsters best.
He continued to edge along the cave’s wall, giving the she-beast as wide a berth as possible. If he did not menace the cubs directly, he might be able to get Lukas out of the cave. She would not fight unless absolutely necessary, not when a battle might leave the young unprotected.
Lukas cowered as Synge approached; fear had robbed the boy of any other response. The scholar leaned close, reached down with one clawed hand in hopes of turning the child’s face toward him so that Lukas might see the cross on his face and understand, but he did not get the chance. The pups whimpered in fear, even as Synge caught the scent of the last of the monsters—the pack leader—entering the cave. The creature crawled into the cavern and rose up, a foot taller than Synge and muscled like a circus strong-man. Around this creature’s waist hung a belt braided from the skins of wolves and the faces peeled from thirteen hanged men.
Before he charged into battle, Synge willed himself to speak: “Close your eyes, boy,” he rumbled to Lukas, “and lift your voice to God.”
Spoken by that monstrous, lupine mouth, the words sounded obscene.
“From the age of the belt I recovered from their leader, it might well be the token of Stubbe Peeter himself.” Simon Synge waited for his listener to react. Though she did not, he continued anyway: “I suspect it had been passed from damned soul to damned soul since that infamous man’s death in 1590. My dear Katharine, it’s likely I’ve destroyed the last of their kind—in the Rhine Valley, at least.”
The scholar’s sister seemed not to hear him. Her eyes followed a pair of sparrows flitting among the topiary and statues of the autumn-hued garden. She watched the birds dart and swoop through the gathering English dusk, until they settled on the outstretched wings of a granite angel. “And the boy?” she asked in a sweet voice.
“As I explained, he’s safe. He helped me burn the monsters’ skins after enough time passed for them to be destroyed.”
A frown tugged at the corners of the woman’s small, heart-shaped mouth. “No, Simon, not that boy,” she said, turning her sad eyes upon her brother. “Christopher. My son. Your nephew. Did you save him yet?”
She had posed the same question to him for four years. But Christopher was dead. Katharine had seen the child’s life ended, watched Professor Grin and her brother destroy him as one of the undead. The boy had been beyond Grin’s help, beyond even the help of the experts he’d consulted—Edward Janus, a fellow ex-Army officer and scholar of the supernatural, and a young theologian by the name of Anton Phibes, renowned for his research into curses.
“You know Christopher is gone,” Synge said after an unpleasant pause. “I can’t change that. But I swore to fight the night things in his name, and I have done so.”
“Then you remain dead, too.” She leaned away from him, slid to the far end of the bench, into the shadow of the stone angel. “I can prove it, you know. You’ve no marks on you, Simon. Not even from the fight with the monsters on the Rhine.”
Poisoned with the first hints of hysteria, her voice rose and grew shrill. The other inmates loitering in the garden echoed her excitement, and soon the quiet courtyard rang with the same raucous screams that filled the cells of the massive, gray-walled asylum surrounding them on all sides.
Synge spoke to his sister calmly, but she refused to be comforted. “Living things have scars,” she sneered. Curling her blunt-nailed fingers on one hand into claws, she lunged forward and raked the air before the scholar’s face. He did not blink, did not flinch. “You see,” Katharine screamed, retreating, “you’ve no fear of being hurt.”
