The One Called Wander

It's pretty much a foregone conclusion that the water here at the hermitage won't show the same signs of contamination as that in town, or else there would be no reason for anyone from here to go into town each night to draw it out.

Still, I am determined to be thorough. If the water here is tainted... well, it might betoken anything for what's become of Father Toma, but it might mean that we have read too much into the signs of the wagon tracks.

I draw water from the well and examine it. It's... water. No feeling of dread, no preternatural clarity.

"The wagon tracks lead into the barn," Bel says.

"That hasn't escaped my attention," I say.

"Are we going to investigate?"

"By and by," I say. "But carefully. The thing is that most sources agree that vampires find sunlight disagreeable, but they differ on whether or not they are completely incapacitated during the day."

"Then you should probably bring that water," Bel says.

"Why? If it was running at one point, it's stopped," I say. "Vampires don't fear ordinary water, otherwise."

"It's a priest's well," she says. "He might have blessed it."

The ground we walk is well-traveled, a path laid less by intention than by habit as the multiplication of hooves, feet, and wheels turned tracks through the woods into a trail, which became a wide-spreading road. It's verging on noon when Bel indicates we must turn from this to a newer and narrower path, albeit one scarred with deep ruts from wagon wheels.

"Does this path lead anywhere beyond Father Toma's dwelling place?" I ask my lovely guide.

"If you kept walking I'm sure it would eventually, but I've never heard it called anything but the way to the hermitage," she says.

"Well, even a hermit likes company, I suppose."

"Determined company, at that," she says. "To drag that heavy wagon... whatever load it may be carrying... without any horses."

As she says this, I see what she sees... there are no hoof prints or other passing evidence of horses on Toma's track.

"Something just struck me," I say. "About what you said earlier, when you were telling me what you know about Father Toma."

"What's that?"

"You said he doesn't drink," I say. "But of course you didn't mean that strictly literally, what you meant was that he doesn't drink wine or beer or whiskey or other drinks with alcoholic spirits in them. All of which is a rather long way of saying..."

"He only drinks water," Bel says.

"If he were already tainted when he attempted the blessing, that might go a long way towards explaining why it didn't work," I say.

"You think he's the one pumping water at night?" Bel asks.

"Well, it would explain the delay between sundown and showtime," I say. "He can doubtlessly cover this ground much faster than we have by himself, but if he's hauling a wagon and barrels... I don't understand why he would be a full vampire now while everyone else is just looking a bit anemic and sun-shy, though. And I don't yet know why he would be stockpiling the tainted water."

"You said vampires don't make evangelists," Bel says. "But what happens if an evangelist became a vampire?"

"I notice you left your pack behind," Bel says once we've left the walls behind us.

"There are things in that pack," I say. "Things I would rather not risk falling into the wrong hands."

"Ah," she says. I think I sounded downright portentous, verging on ominous, but she's a hard one to impress. "I thought they might be useful things."

"Useful... they are," I say. "Terribly useful. But not enough to justify the risk."

"There aren't many bandits on this road."

"I wouldn't worry about bandits," I say. "It would take more than your typical bandit's lifetime to even begin to work out what they had, much less what to do with it... but a vampire, a vampire's got nothing but time, time and hunger."

"I wondered about that."

"What?"

"Hunger," she says. "When I said I was putting together provisions for the road, I half expected you to say 'Oh, don't bother.' You being a traveler, and all. I guess your dangerously useful things don't leave much room for victuals, then?"

"Well, there's an apple in there."

"An apple? One?"

"Yes, but always one," I say. "It's more useful than you might think, if you happen to like apples."

"Do you?"

"Not anymore," I say. "It's a very long story and it might not make any sense."

"If I traveled along with nothing but apples to eat, I wouldn't care for them, either... but you seem better fed than that."

"Generally, the road provides... but I'd gone through a period of extreme and extended privation, and when I speak of extended privation, I mean extended. After that I got in the habit of carrying rations of dried beef and hardtack with me... if you want to talk about useful and dangerous, there you go. You can live on it for months, but you wouldn't want to."

"And after that, I suppose an apple sounded good."

"An apple sounded great," I say. "So... when I happened to have the opportunity to free a very old, very powerful friend of mine from a condition of bondage, I was offered a boon. Anything I wanted, anything that was within their power... and believe me, there were a lot of things within their power."

"And all you wanted was an apple."

"It was all I could think about. Well, I'd asked for it, and there was no taking back or amending it, but I don't know if my friend felt sorry for me or embarrassed to be granting such a poor wish, because I have an apple... and I always have one?"

"Is it the same apple every time?"

"It's similar."

With the business of the night concluded and nothing more to be done until daylight, I find myself in the position of having nothing else to do except sleep.

Which is not the same as saying that I do sleep. You must understand that while I have learned to steal precious moments of restful slumber whenever and wherever they may be found, under even the most dreadful of circumstances... but after having heard the fearful testimony of the baying hounds and knowinng what had been abroad in the night, I did not want to close my eyes.

If I have learned to take my rest as I can, so, too, have I learned to go without it for short periods of time. I pass the long, slow night aimlessly roaming the front of Bel's upstairs apartment while she sleeps soundly in her bed, more accustomed to the state of affairs. "Normal" isn't just relative, it's infinitely flexible. The nightly performance I bore witness to has become normal to her, though with luck it will not remain so.

I know what you are thinking, my treasured reader: a beautiful woman, a restless night spent trapped indoors... but who could think of such a thing at a time like this? Well, I could, in truth. I could hardly not. But as I said, she sleeps soundly while I fidget with the tool of my trade, working mild charms for alertness and against intrusion.

There's very little to worry about. The downstairs is naturally warded against the undead by virtue of those many garlands of garlic, and the smell of the stuff permeates the upstairs as well. But I am an efficient worrier with a lonely night ahead of me, and I make do with what little I have.

"But why?" she continues. "And why all this? It's a public well, anyone can just go up and use it, day or night."

"If this happens every night, it would be a bit obvious, wouldn't it?" I say. "Everyone else is nervous about the water, but here comes someone in the dead of night, night after night, filling up buckets or casks with the stuff?"

"I don't think a creature who can control dogs and summon clouds of fog would have much to fear from the people of Peram," she says.

"Exposure, maybe," I say. "They obviously don't care if everyone knows that something is happening, but they don't want anyone to know what. Or maybe who. It might be that our vampire has a face people would recognize."

"Can you part the fog the way you quieted those dogs?" she says.

"That depends," I say.

"On what?"

"On how you feel about letting the vampire hiding in it know that they've been spotted," I say.

"Well, can you peer through it without giving the game away?"

"Not reliably," I say. "I was able to stop us from hearing the dogs without silencing their barks, but if I try to block the fog from sight it will just look like darkness. There are ways of scrying through it, but it would pit my wits against their will to avoid being noticed back... and if this is a new vampire, it's an unusually strong one. This is lord-of-the-castle level stuff it's pulling down there."

The barking starts soon after, echoes funneling down the narrow streets of Peram from all directions. Like the fog, there is a distinct sense that the animals are funneling towards the square.

There are lampposts in Peram, but I have to imagine it has been some time since any lamplighter plied the trade. I brave the night air enough to thrust a lantern out the window. The fog glows pearlescently, scattering the light, but I glimpse a furry body and a few other hints of movement in places where its perpetual swirling briefly thins it.

The loudest cries in the chorus are those of frustration, of those animals who are chained or penned or otherwise incapable of joining in the noctuurnal revels.

Those are the last cries, as well. Gradually, the rest of the barking subsides as the pack that has assembled in the square. A terrible stillness settles over the square, not so much disrupted by the intermittent eruptions of sound elsewhere as much as punctuated by it.

Then that, too, ceases.

When all is silent, the howling begins. It is not the proud, mournful howl of a wolf, but the baying of dogs of dozens of mixes, with all the variation in vocal instrumentation and lung capacity that implies.

The children of the night, what horrible racket they make. What makes it all the worse... and more obviously unnatural... is the tempo of it. They don't all manage to start or end on exactly the same mark, but there's a clear attempt to all be howling at the same time.

The din is incredible.

"How do people sleep?" I ask.

"It doesn't go on like this all night," she says. "But Wander, you said to take it as given that the fog is concealing something. Doesn't it seem likely that the noise is doing the same?"

"You're right!" I say. "Perk up your ears and listen... just listen. See if you can pick out something behind all that racket."

Well, I shan't bore you overmuch with the details, dear heart, not when there's so much thrilling tale left untold.

In the end I decide to present my delectable hostess with a simple concoction of stewed sausage and vegetables served over wild rice. I reason that most nights she has bread for her starch, and while she obviously must have some love for the stuff, a little variety must be appreciated as well or else she wouldn't have a cache of the grains.

The ingredients available to me are humble in their composition and origins, to the point that I find myself wishing it were safe for me to pop out in search of some fresher fare. But is not, and I can see that the food is humble because it does not need to be anything else, for it is the seasonings that carry the day.

Oh, such a treasure trove of fresh and dried spices Bel has procured for herself. I've made a point of staying away from garlic, warranting that she's probably had enough of that of late. A bit more wouldn't likely be of any measurable benefit to her, anyway. But I am liberal in the application of other flavorings.

When I am finished, I present it to the waiting Bel with a flourish. I do not serve myself yet, I wait to see her reaction.

She collects a bit of broth with her spoon, sucks it into her mouth, then after an appraising moment, spoons up a mouthful. She tastes cautiously.

"Acceptable," she says, and then falls to the task of eating in a more casual way.

"Is there something more I could have done to raise my offering's value in your estimation?" I ask.

She snorts.

"Do you have a lifetime?" she asks.

"I have dozens," I say.

"Well, I have one, and I don't have time to show a traveling clown the way around a kitchen," she says. "But you did alright. About what I expected, verging on better."

"Verging on better," I say, standing up a little straighter. "There are worse places to find oneself, I suppose."

"Find yourself a bowl and eat up, you preening fool. It's likely to be a long night."

I’m expecting to be shown back downstairs, but it transpires that Bel has a separate kitchen in her upstairs quarters.

It’s built over the enormous oven. The stove appears to be custom made. It can be heated either from below, or using its own tinderbox. Her cookware is beaten copper, well-made and well-used. The spice racks were enough to make a dozen apothecaries hang up their pestles in shame.

As for food, her stores are somewhat more modest. There’s bread, of course, but that could probably go without saying. Rolls and loaves too hard to sell, but perfectly edible when you get past the crust. There is some dried wild rice, some hanging sausage and a bit of ham, some dried roots and mushrooms and a few reasonably fresh vegetables. When drying and curing are the primary means of preserving food and glass window panes are a luxury beyond the budget of most, it just doesn’t do to lay up food in huge amounts.

Not terribly surprising, I suppose. Space may be at a premium, but she lives alone, and clearly puts a lot of stake in culinary skills. She earns her metaphorical daily bread in providing the literal thing for others, of course, but I think it goes deeper than that. Food is important to her. There’s a deep connection there.

Her asking me to cook for her is a test, but more than that, it’s a way to get to know me in a hurry. If she were someone like Tyrol, I’d think she were trying to sort me into categories: man or woman, serving class or served… Bel’s mind is not trapped in such dichotomies. This is likely to be a qualitative judgment along multiple axes.

“Is there anything you’re saving for a special occasion?” I ask her.

“Use whatever strikes your fancy,” she says. “If we’re not killed or turned into vampires, we’ll call this a special occasion and I can restock for the next one.”

“And that’s what you call a life?” Bel says. “Just… blowing around like a speck of sand in the wind? No direction? No drive?”

It’s not the response I was expecting, to put it lightly. To be sure, not everyone really gets the appeal of a life on the road, especially if they’ve never seen my road. It’s not just that Bel is being critical, though, so much as it’s the fact that she seems so underwhelmed. It’s the dismissiveness that hurts the most.

“It’s my life,” I say. Wounded or not, I don’t want to quarrel with my only ally in the area. Tyrol doesn’t count because he isn’t on my side — he just wants me on his. “It is what it is. It could be quite tedious or nerve-wracking or full of a lot of moping, but I try to make the best of it all the same.”

“Don’t you have any dreams?” she asks. “Plans? Goals?”

“I have lots of dreams,” I say. “Usually of seeing different stars in a different sky. Best of all, they come true.” I decide to deflect from any further discussion of my long-term future by focusing on the immediate here and now. “I also have a goal, and that’s saving a town from chronic vampirism. As for plans… well, plans are for people who don’t know how to improvise.”

“And improvising is for people who don’t know how to plan,” Bel says. “Seeing where the road takes you is alright, I guess, when you have the leisure to travel and you don’t much care where you end up. But there comes a time when you need to watch your step. I’d think this would be one of them.”

“Have you ever heard of a city of vampires?” I ask her.

“No,” she says. “But then, I wasn’t sure vampires weren’t legends, anyway.”

“Yes, but you never even hear legends about a city of vampires. An extended family at the very most, maybe, but usually they’re loners. Most varieties of vampire aren’t particularly virulent. It takes a deliberate act to infect someone and create a new vampire. They also don’t need to kill everytime they feed, and can go for sometime between victims when they do. It has to be that way, or vampires would overrun everything and then starve back to death.”

Bel nods.

“So a whole town the size of Peram succumbing at once…” she says. “It would get bad.”

“A plague of the undead, ravenous and turned loose across the land,” I say.

“So what do you propose to do about it?”

“Strike at the source,” I say.

“I don’t suppose dropping a load of garlic into the well would accomplish anything?”

“It might increase the torment of whatever’s trapped down there, but garlic by itself cannot destroy a full-fledged vampire. Holy water would be a better option, but apparently the well’s been consecrated without any effect. That worries me.”

“Maybe it isn’t a vampire, then?” Bel says You spoke as if there are varieties of vampirism… maybe this is something that acts like a vampire but isn’t unholy in the way a vampire is?”

“There are many things that are like a vampire but that spring from a different source… still, the lack of reflection in the water seems like a pretty specific sign,” I say. “But it’s a good thought. If I can’t find an anomaly in the priest or blessing, the next step will be to look for one in the vampire. Do you know anything about a Father Toma?”