The Cleric Quintet: The Chaos Curse

 

"Maybe he threw up enough blood so this will not take so long," Berdole said with a halfhearted chuckle.

Curt snickered at the grim humor as well, knowing that jokes might be his only defense against his abhorrence of this task.

High in a corner of the mausoleum, on the opposite wall and to the right of the door, Druzil sat and scratched his doglike head, muttering curses under his breath. The imp had tried to get into this place since Rufo's body had been put here, thinking that he might somehow recover at least a portion of the chaos curse from the corpse. Too many priests had been around then, including one of the leading members of the Oghman order, and so Druzil had waited, thinking he would just break in after the others had left. He found the door locked, though, and the window blessed, so that he did not dare enter.

The imp knew enough of the human rituals to understand what the two men now meant to do. They would drain the blood from the body and replace it with a smelly, preserving liquid. Druzil had overheard that Rufo could not be given a proper Deneirian or Oghman burial, and the imp had hoped that the priests wouldn't waste their time with this pointless embalming. Druzil thought of swooping down -and stinging the men with his poison-tipped tail, or of hitting them with magical spells, burning their behinds with little bolts of energy to chase them away. It simply was too risky, so all the imp could do was sit and watch and mutter silent curses.

Every drop of blood that the priests took from Rufo's body would be a little less of Tuanta Quiro Miancay the imp might recover.

Berdole looked at his partner and took a deep breath, holding up the large needle for Curt to see.

"I cannot watch this," Curt admitted, and he turned away and walked past a couple of the slabs, near the other set of columns.

Berdole laughed, gaining confidence from his friend's weakness, and moved beside the slab. He pushed the shroud away just enough so that he could pall out Rufo's left arm, pushing back the black robes that Rufo had been dressed in and turning the arm so that the exposed wrist was up.

"You might feel a small pinch," the muscular priest joked lightly to the corpse, drawing a disgusted groan from Curt.

From the far rafters, Druzil chewed his bottom lip in frustration as he watched the large needle go against Rufo's exposed wrist. He would have to steal the blood, he decided, every drop of it!

Berdole lined the needle's point up with the vein in Rufo's skinny wrist and angled the instrument for a good puncture. He took another deep breath, looked to Curl's back for support, then started to push.

The cold, pallid hand snapped around in a circular motion, catching the needle and Berdole's hand in a crushing grasp.

"What?" the muscular priest stammered.

Curt turned about to see Berdole hunched low at the slab, both his strong hands wrapped around Rufo's thin forearm, with Rufo's clawlike digits clasping tightly to his lower jaw. This was Berdole the Brutal, the strongest of the strong Oghman's. This was Berdole the Brutal, two hundred and fifty pounds of power, a man who could wrestle a black bear to a standstill!

Yet that skinny arm of Kierkan Rufo - of dead Kierkan Rufo! - jerked Berdole down to the slab as though his muscular frame were no more than a wet towel. Then, to Curt's disbelieving eyes, Rufo's hand pushed up and back. The muscles in Berdole's thick arms strained to their limits, but could not halt the push. Up and over went his chin - it sounded to Curt like the cracking of a large tree right before it tumbled to the ground - and suddenly, the surprised Berdole was staring at the world upside down and backwards.

The Oghman's strong hands let go of the skinny, pallid arm and twitched uncontrollably in the empty air. Rufo's fingers loosened, and Berdole fell backward to the floor, quite dead.

Curt hardly remembered to breathe. He looked from Berdole to the shrouded corpse, and his vision blurred with dizziness wrought of horror as Rufo slowly sat up.

The shroud fell away, and the gaunt, pale man turned his eyes, eyes that simmered red with inner fires, toward Curt.

Druzil clapped his clawed hands together and squealed in happiness, then flapped off for the door.

Curt screamed and fled with all speed, five long strides bringing him near the sunlight, near salvation.

Rufo waved a hand, and the heavy stone door swung shut, slamming with a bang that sounded like a drum of doom. The Oghman threw all his weight against the door, but he might as well have tried to move a mountain. He scratched at the stone until his fingers bled. He glanced back over his shoulder and saw that Rufo was up, walking stiffly toward him.

Curt cried out repeatedly and went for the window, but realized that he had no time. He fell beyond it, backing and watching the corpse, crying for mercy and for Oghma to be with him.

Then the side wall was against his back; he had nowhere to run. Curt caught his breath finally, and remembered who he was. He presented his holy symbol, a scroll of silver on a chain about his neck, and called to Oghma.

"Be gone!" Curt cried at Rufo. "In the name of Oghma, evil undead thing, get you back!"

Rufo didn't flinch. He was ten steps away. Nine steps away. He staggered suddenly as he crossed in front of the window, as though he had been burned on the side. But the light was meager, and the monster passed beyond it.

Curt began a frantic chant of a spell. He felt strangely disconnected from his god, though, as if Rufo's mere presence had despoiled this place. Still he chanted, summoning his powers.

He felt a sting in his lower back and jerked suddenly, his spell disrupted. He turned to see the bat-winged imp, snickering wickedly as it flew away,

"What horror is this?" Curt cried. Rufo was there then, and the terrified man swung his lantern out at the monster.

Rufo caught him by the wrist and easily held the makeshift weapon at bay. Curt punched out with his other hand, connecting solidly on Rufo's chin, knocking Rufo's head to the side.

Rufo calmly turned back to him. Curt made to punch again, but Rufo hooked his arm under the man's, brought his skinny fingers around Curt's back, and grabbed the man's hair on the opposite side of his head. With terrifying strength, Rufo pulled Curt's head to the side, pressed Curt's cheek against his own shoulder, laying bare the side of the man's neck.

Curt thought that Rufo would simply snap that neck, as he had done to Berdole, but the Oghman learned better when Rufo opened his mouth, revealing a set of canine fangs, half an inch longer than the rest of his teeth.

With a look of supreme hunger, Rufo bent over and bit down on Curt's neck, opening the jugular. Curt was screaming, but Rufo, feasting on the warm blood, heard none of it

It was ecstacy for the monster, the satiation of a hunger more powerful than anything he had ever known in life. It was impossibly sweet. It was ...

Rufo's mouth began to burn. The sweet blood became acidic.

With a roar of outrage, Rufo spun away and heaved the man away with the arm still hooked behind Curt's back. The poor man flew head over heels, his back striking the nearest column. He slid to the floor and lay very still. He felt nothing in his lower body, but his chest was on fire, burning with poison.

"What have you done?" Kierkan Rufo demanded, looking to the rafters and the perched imp.

A creature of the horrid lower planes, Druzil was not usually afraid of anything this world could present to him. The imp was afraid now, justifiably afraid of this thing that Kierkan Rufo had become. "I wanted to help you," Druzil explained. "He could not be allowed to escape."

"You tainted his blood!" Rufo roared. "His blood," the monster said more quietly, longingly. "I need ... I need."

Rufo looked back to Curt, but the light of life had gone from the man's eyes.

Rufo roared again, a horrible, unearthly sound.

"There are more," Druzil promised. 'There are many more, not far away!"

A strange look came over Rufo then. lie looked to his bare arms, held them up in front of his face, as though he had realized for the first time that something very unusual had happened to him.

"Blood?" he asked more than stated, and he put a plaintive look Druzil's way.

Druzil's bulbous eyes seemed to come farther out of their sockets as the imp recognized the sincere confusion on the dead Rufo's face. "Do you not understand what has happened to you?" Druzil cried excitedly.

Rufo went to take a steadying breath, but then realized that he wasn't breathing at all. Again that plaintive, questioning look fell over Druzil, who seemed to have the answers.

"You drank of Tuanta Quiro Miancay," the imp squealed. "The Most Fatal Horror, the ultimate chaos, and thus you have become the ultimate perversion of humanity!"

Still Rufo did not seem to understand.

"The ultimate perversion!" Druzil said again, as though that should explain everything. "The antithesis of life itself!"

"What are you talking about?" asked a horrified Rufo, Curt's blood spewing from his lips.

Druzil laughed wickedly. "You are immortal," he said, and Rufo, stunned and confused, finally began to catch on. "You are a vampire."

Delusions

Vampire.The word hung in Rufo's thoughts, a dead weight on his undead shoulders. He crawled back to the stone slab and flopped down on his back, covering his eyes with his skinny, pale hands.

"Bene tellemara" Druzil muttered many times as the minutes passed uneventfully. "Would you have them come out and find you?" Rufo did not look up.

"The priests are dead," the imp rasped. "Torn. Will those who come in search of them be caught so unaware?" Rufo moved his arm from in front of his face and looked over at the imp, but did not seem to care.

"You think you can beat them," Druzil reasoned, misunderstanding Rufo's calmness. "Fool! You think you can beat them all!"

Rufo's response caught the imp oft guard, made Druzil understand that despair, not confidence, was the source of the undead man's lethargy. "I do not care to try," Rufo said sincerely.

"You can beat them," the imp quickly improvised, changing his emphasis so that the statement suddenly did not seem so ridiculous. "You can beat them all!"

"I am already dead," Rufo said dryly. "I am already defeated."

"Of course, of course!" Druzil rasped happily, clapping his hands and flapping his wings to perch on the end of Rufo's slab. "Dead, yes, but that is your strength, not your weakness. You can beat them all, I say. and the library will be yours."

The last words seemed to pique Rufo's interest. He cocked his head at an angle so that he could better view the untrustworthy imp.

"You are immortal," Druzil said solemnly.

Rufo continued to stare for a long, uneasy moment. "At what price?" he asked.

"Price?" Druzil echoed.

"I am not alive!" Rufo roared at him, and Druzil spread his wings, ready to launch away if the vampire made a sudden move.

"You are more alive than you have ever been!" Druzil snapped back. "Now you have power. Now your will shall be done!"

"To what end?" Rufo wanted, needed, to know. "I am dead. My flesh is dead. What pleasures might I know? What dreams worth fancying?"

"Pleasures?" the imp asked. "Did not the priest's blood taste sweet? And did you not feel power as^you approached the pitiful man? You could taste his fear, vampire, and the taste was as sweet as the blood that was to come."

Rufo continued to stare, but had no more complaints to offer. Druzil spoke the truth, it seemed. Rufo had tasted the man's fear, and that sensation of power, of inspiring such terror, felt wonderfully sweet to the man who had been so impotent in life.

Druzil waited a little while, until he was certain that Rufo was convinced to at least explore this vampiric existence. "You must be gone from this place," the imp explained, looking to the corpses.

Rufo glanced at the closed door, then nodded and swung about, dangling his legs over the side of the slab. "The catacombs," he remarked.

"You cannot cross," Druzil said as the vampire began stiffly walking toward the door. Rufo turned on him suspiciously, as if he thought the imp's words a threat.

"The sun is bright," Druzil explained. "It will burn you like fire."

Rufo's expression turned from curious to dour to sheer horror.

"You are a creature of the night now," Druzil went on firmly. "The light of day is not your ally."

It was a bitter pill for Rufo to swallow, but in light of all that had happened, the man accepted the news stoically and forced himself to straighten once more. "How am I to get out of here?" he asked, his tone filled with anger and sarcasm.

Druzil led Rufo's gaze to rows of marked stones lining the mausoleum's far wall. These were the crypts of the library's former headmasters, including those of Avery Schell and Pertelope, and not all of the stones were marked.

At first the thought of crawling into a crypt revolted Rulb, but as he let go of those prejudices remaining from when he had been a living, breathing man, as he allowed himself to view the world as an undead thing, a creature of the night, he found the notion of cool, dark stone strangely appealing.

Rufo met Druzil by the wall, in front of an unmarked slab set waist-high. Not knowing what the imp expected, the vampire reached out with his stiff arms and clasped at the edge of the stone.

"Not like that!" Druzil scolded, and Rufo stood straight, eyeing the imp dangerously, obviously growing tired of DruziPs superior attitude.

"If you tear it away, the priests will find you," the imp explained, and under his breath he added the expected, "Bene tellemara."

Rufo did not reply, but stood staring from the imp to the wall. How was he to get inside the crypt if he did not remove the stone? These were not doors that could be opened and closed; they were sealed marker blocks, removed for burials, then mortared back into place.

"There is a crack along the bottom," Druzil remarked, and when Rufo bent iow, he did see a line running along the mortar at the bottom of the slab.

The vampire shrugged his shoulders, but before he could ask Druzil how that crack might help, a strange sensation, a lightness, came over him, as though he was something less than substantial. Rufo looked to Druzil, who was smiling widely, then back to the crack, which suddenly loomed much larger. The vampire, black robes and all, melted away into a cloud of green vapor and swirled through the crack in the slab.

He came back to his corporeal form inside the tight confines of the stone crypt, hemmed in by unbroken walls. For an instant, a wave of panic, a feeling of being

trapped, swept over the man. How long would his air last? he wondered. He shut his mouth, fearful that he was gulping in too much of the precious commodity.

A moment later, his mouth opened once more and from it issued a howl of laughter. "Air?" Rufo asked aloud. Rufo needed no air, and he was certainly not trapped. He would slip out through that crack as easily as he had come in, or else he could simply slide down and kick the slab free of its perch. He was strong enough to do that he knew he was.

Suddenly the limitations of a weak and living body seemed clear to the vampire. He thought of all the times when he had been persecuted - unfairly, by his reckoning - and he thought of the two Oghman priests he had so easily dispatched.

Oghman priests! Wrestlers, warriors, yet he had tossed them about without effort!

Rufo felt as though he had been freed of those living limitations, free to fly and grab at the power that was rightfully his. He would teach his persecutors. He would...

The vampire stopped fantasizing and reached up to feel the brand on his forehead. An image of Cadderly, of his greatest oppressor, came clear to him.

Yes, Rufo would teach them all.

But now, here in the cool, dark confines of his chosen bed, the vampire would rest. The sun, an ally of the living - an ally of the weak - was bright outside.

Rufo would wait for the dark.

The highest-ranking priests of the Deneirian order gathered that afternoon at Dean Thobicus's bidding.

They met in a little-used room on the library's fourth and highest floor, an obscure setting that would guarantee them their privacy.

Seclusion seemed important to the withered dean, the others realized, a point made quite clear when Thobicus shut tight the room's single door and closed the shutters over the two tiny windows.