Not two streets away from the docks, not two minutes after disembarking, Einar and Clover found a body in an alley. From the look of the town, bodies were not unusual things to find in its alleys, but Einar stood watch amongst the filth, mist droplets blurring his braids and bear and the fur of his white bear cloak, while Clover knelt down in the muck itself, cold water and worse staining her robes, and examined the corpse.

“That was fast,” Einar observed in his chest-deep rumble.

“Mmm,” Clover agreed. The corpse had been a young woman, her dress plain but well fitted, her hair neat, her fingernails clean. “Not a prostitute,” she murmured. “A serving girl? Or a shop girl?” But what had killed her? And what was she doing here, so close to the docks? The body lay curled on its side, as though the girl had simply laid down to sleep. The night was cold, but not cold enough to kill. Something caught Clover’s eye, and she pursed her lips and brushed a wisp of the girl’s hair aside, revealing the two black punctures on the neck.

Einar spat to the side. “Vampires,” he said. “I hate vampires.”

“Indeed, brother,” Clover said. “Yet when was the last time the god so quickly revealed his purposes to us?”

It may have been intended as rhetorical, but Einar gave the question due thought. “A dozen stops ago,” he said at last. “That mountain village with the dragon. Pretty obvious, that one.”

Clover snorted through her nose. “Well, yes, with the thatch-roofed cottages all burning.” But she sobered quickly, with the poor dead girl still beneath her hands.

“Better take care of that,” Einar said.

“Yes.” She dropped her hands to her sides, where twin curved blades hung from criss-crossed belts. Stillness gathered around her, and the drops of mist brightened to a silver halo, following the arc of her gestures, her ritually crooked fingers. The light bloomed, pure and lambent and solid, carrying the scent of high mountains topped with snow, a cold breeze that refreshes and invigorates, the lofty freedom of the sky. Clover and the dead girl vanished in the midst of it. Snowflakes gusted outwards; some stuck in Einar’s beard. His lips beneath his braided moustaches twitched upwards.

The light faded, leaving Clover windblown and exalted but an otherwise ordinary young woman in shabby robes once more.

“Done?” Einar asked.

She nodded, god-light still in her eyes. “She’ll not rise again, but go on to her apportioned rest.” As she spoke, the clotted wounds on the girl’s neck swirled and dissipated, leaving the skin smooth and unbroken. Clover brushed her hands against her knees, like a baker dusting off flour or a carpenter sawdust, and pushed herself to her feet. From Einar’s point of view this made little difference; she came to about his sternum when standing on her tippy toes.

“Good,” he said, and jerked his head towards the mouth of the alley. “Because those folks over there look like they want a word.”

While Clover was busy glowing, a moderate crowd had gathered, headed by a fat man in an apron who, when he sighted the dead girl, stumbled forward with a cry. “Melina!” He splashed through slimy puddles and skidded to a halt on his knees before the body, cradling her slack shoulders. “What have you done?” Behind him, other townsfolk jostled for vantage. Some bore lanterns, others torches, their light too ruddy after the now-departed silver radiance.

Clover bridled. “This girl was murdered by a vampire! I cleansed her of the taint of the undead. By the grace of the god I serve, she will rest easy in her grave now and not rise a soulless servant to the fiend who bit her.” She might have gone on in this vein, but Einar’s hand came down upon her shoulder, and she huffed into silence.

The fat man’s eyes were huge and wet. “Melina,” he moaned, hugging the dead girl close. “It is as I feared.”

Einar stepped forward. “Yours?” he rumbled.

“Aye.” Tears made shining tracks down the fat man’s cheeks. “My only daughter. When I saw she had gone, I suspected, but—” He shot a haggard glance at the crowd. Their faces gave nothing back, their eyes failing to reflect their carried firelight. His jowls firmed, and he looked back at the travellers. “My name is Petro,” he said. “I own a tavern nearby. Come and have supper. It’s the least I can give you, after what you did for poor Melina.”

Clover and Einar exchanged glances. Einar shrugged with only his mouth; Clover responded with a hopeful lift of her brows.

“You have mead?” Einar asked.

“Er—” said the tavern keeper. “Beer, ale, apple brandy, cheery wine…?”

“Cherry wine?” Clover asked.

“No, lady. Cheery wine, for it brings good cheer.”

“Doesn’t all wine do that?” Einar said.

The tavern keeper opened his mouth. Clover laid a hand on his arm. “Lead on, Master Petro,” she said. “We accept your kindly offer.”

Einar knelt and lifted the dead girl. The silent crowd rustled out of the way, their faces despite the diversity of their appearance–young or old, shabby or neat, male or female, fat or thin–all the same reserved blank. Clover drew away from them, reluctant even to brush them with her sleeve, and their presence chilled her more deeply than the rain.

“Nobody ever has mead,” Einar observed once they were through.

Clover patted his arm.

***

In the cleanly warmth of Petro’s tavern, lit with a driftwood fire and fish oil lanterns, Einar plowed through seven bowls of rich, spicy stew, thick with vegetables and chunks of fish. Clover matched him bite for bite and bowl for bowl for a while, but as she slowed the tavern keeper’s silence began to weigh upon her. She wished him a glass of his own cheery wine, to ease him—but of course things are never that easy.

Petro brought dense brown bread to sop up the last juices of the fish stew and a brown ale nearly as dense, and when he had divested himself of his burdens, he stood at the foot of the table twisting his apron. Einar paused in tearing the loaf in twain and cocked his eyebrows. Clover swallowed her bite and said, “Is there aught else we can do for you, good Petro?”

The wringing of the poor apron redoubled. “No, lady, many thanks,” he mumbled, and lapsed back into mournful silence. Einar reached across Clover to grasp the remaining half of crusty loaf, engulfing it much as a snake devouring an egg, and with as little evidence of chewing. “Any more?” he asked hopefully, brushing crumbs from his beard.

Petro made to scuttle off, but “Hold,” Clover said. “Tell us, how long have vampires plagued your town, and where do they make their dwelling, if you know? For we believe our gods have sent us to put an end to their deviltry.”

Einar made a concurring growl deep in his chest.

“I—” Petro gasped. “I am sorry, lady, I know not—it is not for such as me to know. Until Melina was taken, I had never—” His trembling cheeks glistened with nervous sweat. “Forgive me. I bring more bread for you, warrior.” He fled.

Einar quaffed the remnants of the pitcher. “Odd.”

“Indeed, brother.” Clover tapped a crust of bread against the table. “Yet the poor man, but this night, lost his only child.”

“Hmm,” Einar said.

“Not everyone can be a phlegmatic follower of Thor, to whom death is merely the gateway to a greater battle yet.”

“Maybe they should try it.”

She shook her head fondly, the silver amulet she wore thumping against her breastbone. “If Petro cannot answer our questions, we will need other sources of intelligence.” Decisively, she ate her crust.

Einar’s beard split in a fierce grin, and he reached down and loosened one of his swords in its scabbard. “We eat,” he said. “Then we hunt.”

When Petro returned with more bread, more ale, and more stew, Clover reached down for her belt-purse. “How much do we owe you for the meal, good Petro?”

“Oh no, no, lady!” Petro waved his hands. “No charge, for what you did for my poor Melina.”

She blinked. “Well then, do me the good honor of tendering these as a thanks-offering to the god you hold dearest.” She jingled a handful of coins into his open palm.

The tavern keeper stared from the money to Clover and back again, eyes huge in his glabrous face. “Lady,” he began. Then he blinked. “I have never seen such coin. Where do you come from?”

“Ah!” said Clover. “That is a tale! Our ship, you see, sails not the seas of mortal realms but the mists between…”

Petro’s expression was growing increasingly panicked. Before his eyeballs could explode, Einar tilted his head towards the smoke-darkened ceiling and asked, “Hear that?”

Clover frowned. She heard the popping of the salt-soaked driftwood in the fireplace, the damp clink of the coins in the keeper’s sweaty grasp. “No…” But there, a faint tangle of noise drifting in from the misty night: a low drone, and a clashing of metal, and a rhythmic clacking. “What is that?”

Petro’s face had paled to the color of an uncooked pudding, his mouth an O of dismay. Einar, with a shrug, shoved off from the table and went to the door, and Clover followed.

The clammy mist drifted in through the open door, that first, and then the odd medley of noises, growing louder, coming nearer.

“A battle?” Clover breathed, reaching for her hilts

Einar’s arm dropped down like a bar across the doorway. “No. Listen.”

Louder still, and louder, and now the listeners could discern voices: not the shouts of battle, but some kind of chant, low voices and high blending in a mournful not-quite dissonance that spoke of supplication and woe. The first lights rounded the corner of the little narrow street where Petro’s tavern sat, and Einar jerked his head in satisfaction.

“Procession.”

Petro moaned.

First came the lights, orange lanterns held aloft on tall poles, burnishing the bearers’ faces and turning their robes the color of springing blood. Then a stout man bearing a heavy book, its gold-leafed color studded with gems bright and huge as cherries. Behind him, more lanterns, and an old man swinging what looked like a brass morningstar, from which perfumed smoke poured in heavy clouds, and then two boys wielding wooden paddles with clappers, and everyone singing in doleful disharmony, the young boys’ pipes quavering over the thick basso of the book-bearer.

The culmination of this cortege was a man as tall and narrow as a candle, a tall narrow hat on his head, his gorgeous robes of velvet and satin and cloth-of-gold pooling about his feet like melting wax. He clutched a painted icon in his long, thin hands, and his mouth yawped open and shut as he added his sonor to the general cacophony.

Behind the chief priest, as surely he must be, followed an assortment of townsfolk, young and old alike, not robed but clad in, Clover presumed, their best, carrying lamps or cymbals or bells and singing with the intensity of despair.

“What are they doing?” Einar asked.

“They are entreating our Queen, Idreia, to save us from the plague.” Petro’s nervous twitching had dropped away like a useless cloak, and he joined the travellers at the door with a kind of still resignation.

“Oh!” said Clover. A thousand questions crowded her tongue. She took what one might call a professional interest in local religious customs, especially as she had yet to meet anyone who worshiped her particular god. Given the look of the clergy, she still hadn’t.

But Einar’s brows shot up. “Plague, too?”

Clover caught his look. “Indeed, this town suffers a surfeit of miseries.” More than enough for two warriors to solve. Well, against plagues she had no power, but between Einar and herself they had more than enough blades to destroy a legion of vampires. She squinted—her eyes were better suited to up-close work—and said, “The image they bear: is that your Queen?” She glanced at Petro, but the tavern keeper had frozen into a pillar of wax, only his eyes rolling in glassy fear.

The procession clanked nearer, brandishing their lamps, enveloped in a cloud of their own making. The heavy scent of the incense drifted to the open tavern door. Clover sneezed, and Einar’s moustache twitched.

“Surely they are not coming here?” Clover whispered.

Einar growled.

Petro whimpered between his teeth.

But though the marchers slowed, the procession carried on, singing and clacking with extra vigor as they passed Petro’s door. Clover fixed her gaze on the chief priest, hoping for a better look at the picture he held—and found him staring back at her, his eyes flat black and expressionless as a serpent’s, with red points where they reflected the lanterns. The shock of it went through her like a bolt of ice, freezing the air in her lungs.

She rocked backwards, stumbling into the tavern keeper—and she could not breathe, and she could not command her body, and most of all she could not tear her gaze from that of the chief priest. It seemed to last forever, that exchange of glances, and her mind reeled forward into those two black wells, the red points of them growing to the size of suns.

“Clover!” Einar grabbed her shoulder, hard. She gasped back into herself, the link severed.

“I’m here.”

The procession was still passing the open door, townspeople with bells and lights and bare branches held aloft, singing raggedly but at volume. Einar’s eyes were still on her face, not bottomless pits into hell but warm and blue and full of human concern: her friend’s. She reached up and grasped his forearm. “I’m fine.”

His mouth remained downturned. “What was that?”

“I don’t know.” Even the memory of the sensation was receding. “That priest, he has power, a true connection to his god. Or goddess,” she added, for behind the red suns in the chief priest’s eyes she had glimpsed—perhaps—a female figure tall and straight and blazing with bleak radiance. “Whatever it is, it is no friend to us. We must take care.”

“When do we not?” He patted her hair.

She snorted and batted his hand away. “When we’re charging into battle against, oh, zombies, wraiths, revenants … that dragon?”

Einar laughed out loud with pleasure. “Aye, by Thor—” he began.

But behind them came a faint moan and a slithering thump. Petro the tavern keeper, at last overwhelmed by his evening’s experiences, had fainted.

***

They laid him on one of his own benches near the fire. Clover found a heavy blanket, woven in cheerful colored patterns, and tucked it around him. Then she and Einar stood once more by the door. The draggle-end of the procession had passed by, and the draggle-end of the night was passing too. The scent of incense lingered, improbably, in the air.

“Idreia, the Queen,” Clover murmured. Hung beside the door was a little icon, perhaps a miniature of the one the priest had carried: a beautiful woman with long dark hair and heavy eyes, clad in rich red robes bordered in gold. Her painted gaze, the gleams in her pupils picked out with the tiniest daubs of paint, reminded Clover of the priest’s, black and empty and bottomless. She shuddered in her soul and reached for the defending presence of her own god.

“Woolgathering won’t catch us any vampires,” Einar observed.

She laid her hands on her sword hilts. “Then what are we waiting for?”

He cocked one eyebrow. “You.”

“Oh shush.” She bashed his shoulder with her own—or as close to his shoulder as she could reach. So, his elbow. “You know what I meant.”

***

Seven more times that night they encountered the procession snaking through the winding narrow streets of the town, once by the docks themselves, where the ship that had brought them lay alone at anchor, no other ships at rest in the bay, no merchant tubs stuffed with trade goods, no passenger vessels, not so much as a single-masted pleasure boat. Einar grabbed Clover by the scruff of her robes before she stumbled into the midst of it. They crouched at the mouth of a redolent alley and watched the singers and the clackers and the incense-shaker halt alongside the ship and brandish their implements with extra emphasis. High above them, on the maindeck, the silhouette of the captain appeared, stark against the mist and the glow of the ship’s lanterns.

“Ought we help him?” Clover breathed against Einar’s ear.

“Are they hurting him?”

Possibly annoying him, although it was difficult to say. At length the worshippers finished their responsorial and took themselves off from the docks, a shorter parade now, in the smallest hours of the night, than had hymned so fervently outside Petro’s door. The shadowed figure on the ship turned and disappeared from sight.

Equally unseen were any signs of the vampire menace afflicting the town. Clover would have liked best to catch one of the fiends in the act of feeding on an innocent (“innocent” here meaning “anyone;” no one deserves to be vampire-food), whereupon she and Einar could subdue it and force it to lead them back to its lair. In the light of dawn, cleansing the lair should have been a simple enough, if gruesome, task.

But the vampires failed to cooperate, and the night mist was paling to lavender, and Clover’s yawns were splitting her face in two, when, lacking anywhere else to go, Einar led them back to Petro’s tavern. The keeper was awake, straightening tables, and he regarded his perhaps unwelcome guests with sorrow but no surprise.

Einar laid a hand on the smaller man’s shoulder. “If our staying brings trouble–”

Petro shook his head and straightened his back. “Nay, warrior.” His jaw firmed beneath its layer of flesh. “You are welcome.” He sighed. “After Melina, what more can I lose?”

The answer of course was everything, but Einar clapped Petro on the shoulder hard enough to make him stagger. Clover stumbled sleepily forward and put her arms around him. “Blessings upon you, keeper,” she murmured, and a gust of the god’s clean, bright refreshment swirled around them, leaving a lingering clarity in his face.

Their rooms, above the main room, where simple and small but clean, and Clover lay herself down without ceremony, only pausing to unbuckle her swords and take off her boots. “Oughtn’t we set a watch?” she mumbled, face in the pillows.

Einar straightened the quilt around her shoulders. “Rest,” he said. “Don’t fret.”

She was already asleep.

He crossed the hall to his own room, and spread his white bear cloak on the floor and then sat for a time and listened, but the tavern and the town were quiet, and soon enough he too slept.

Later would come the wails and cries that shook the city to its rafters.

***

The town of Queensport had once held a different name–not so long ago, either, that the eldest of the town could not remember, though they never spoke it to their children. It was not large, not a significant port along that stony coastline; it had filled an indentation in the rough hills by the sea like water filling a footprint, and subsisted on fishery and modest trade. Above the town, brooding like a black-winged bird, the Queen’s castle hunched, its many towers and battlements, its archways and buttresses and staring windows breaking the irregular lines of the hills with aggressive artifice, and not even the eldest could remember a time it had not drawn the eye whenever one raised one’s gaze above the town’s rooftops to the hills in the northwest.

The people of Queensport learned not to look.

The rising sun swept back the night mists with bright brooms. The people awoke, one by one and then a few, then more and more, as a growing cry of anguish rose with the sun and bounded off the cobbled streets and the little stone houses and shook the very sky. One voice alone at first, a wail of loss that sent all the little birds of morning rattling from their perches, briefly blacking the sky with their wings. One alone, but not for long, as the folk still sleeping staggered from their beds and opened their doors and saw what had been left for them in the night.

The red plague had returned.

Petro had the tale from a baker, who heard it from his apprentice, who lived across the street from one of the stricken homes.

Bodies. Seven in all, seven struck down in the night, their bodies left on doorsteps like morning deliveries. One was a child, Petro reported. Too stunned to weep, he sat at one of his long tables and twisted his apron in his hands, over and over, his eyes fixed on nothing at all. “A child,” he murmured. “A child.” His own child had also died in the night.

“Tell us more of this plague, friend Petro.” Clover alighted on the bench across from him and rescued the tortured apron from his grasp, curling her fingers around his. She strove to smooth the urgency from her voice, but her god had not chosen her for her calm and soothing demeanor. “Please. We can perhaps prevent more such deaths, but not if we remain in ignorance!”

“Clover,” said Einar. That only, a mild rumble.

“Yes.” She released the keeper’s hand. “Forgive me.”

Petro’s cheeks were greasy with fear, but he swallowed hard, rubbed his face, and said, “No, lady, forgive me, for Melina’s sake.” He hesitated, and Clover opened her mouth, but Einar put a hand on her shoulder, and she stilled.

Of the plague itself Petro knew only that it struck without warning and killed at once. The Queen in her great mercy shielded the town, but last night in her displeasure at–he averted his eyes–certain events–she had opened her hand just a little, and a waft of the plague had slipped through. Seven dead. Their bodies would be taken to the sanctuary, where the priests would circle them with prayers and chants and incense, entreating the Queen to send her protection once more, lest the plague engulf the town as it had done in the days of their grandfathers.

Questions crammed Clover’s mouth, rendering her speechless. Einar said, “The sanctuary?”

Courage and apron in both hands, Petro gave them directions and then breakfast: bread and grilled fish and pickled fruits, fantastically sour.

“Prevent more deaths?” Einar said, raising a shaggy brow.

Clover flopped her head down on her crossed arms. “I know!” she cried, muffled. Raising her head, “Yet what was I to say? The god has given me no power against disease, yet my heart hurts for these people! If the plague were a fleshly foe, I would stab it in the heart and cut off its head!” She huffed ferociously.

Einar sipped his foamy beer, his eyes keen and thoughtful. “Bit of a coincidence,” he suggested. “Plague and vampires both.”

Her lips tightened to a hard line. “Mayhap in the Queen’s sanctuary we will find answers to more than one question.”

***

“When the red plague came in our grandfathers’ day, our people died by the dozens. The dead lay in the streets with no one to tend them, and at night folk huddled in their houses too frightened to stir. The town might have died away then, buried in the dust of ages, its harbor welcoming nothing but ghosts.

“But Idreia came in her glory and power, and she held up her hand and halted the plague, and those who still lived felt their strength return to them, and in their gratitude they laid their hearts at her feet and gave her all due reverence and honor.

“Thus did our Queen Idreia save our people. Worship her power, fear her wrath.”

The speaker, a young acolyte named Jorie, dressed in a simplified version of the priesthood’s bloodred robes, folded her hands and smiled at the strangers. Einar stared back. Clover craned her neck up at the painted wall of the sanctuary. It showed a woman, beautiful and pale, gowned in crimson, her long black hair blowing back behind her as in a high wind. Her arms were outspread, and from her open palms a white light streamed. At her feet lay people in various attitudes: some clearly dead, others perhaps only ailing, while those her light touched were arising, looks of rapture on their faces. Behind the figures, the artist had painted the staggered rooftops of the town, and behind that the grey, wave-torn sea.

Worship her power, fear her wrath? Clover gnawed on her lower lip and regarded the towering Queen. The Queen’s black eyes did not deign to regard back. They flickered like the banks of candles below her, and though she was but paint, the candles and the red-tinted chandeliers depending from the high ceiling raised red sparks in those eyes. Clover found herself saying, “Where is Idreia? Where does she dwell? May we meet her?”

Silence, shocked and echoing in the great dim expanse of the sanctuary.

Young Jorie’s face was white, though she wrested it back into composure quickly enough, pasting on a smile and clasping her trembling hands.

“Our glorious Queen dwells in the castle on the hill,” she said. “She does not … receive guests.” She moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue. “If she desires … if she requires speech of one of the faithful, she … she summons that one to her.”

“Truly?” Clover said, professional curiosity thoroughly roused. “What form does the summons take? Is it a voice in one’s mind, or a feeling, or—or a compulsion, a need to respond?” With an effort, she dammed the flow of questions. Einar had wrapped his hand around her shoulder, given a light squeeze. Jorie this time was unable to mask her unhappiness.

“Lady,” she whispered. “I do not know. I am only an acolyte.” She peered into Clover’s face. “Does your god—does he speak to you?”

“How do you know of him?”

“Lady, all the town knows what you did.”

“Careful,” Einar rumbled.

But Clover beamed. “Only once has he spoken to me, on the day he called me. He spoke my name and bade me take up my blades and serve him. I have done my best to follow his commands since that day, and he blesses me with the power to combat evil.”

The hand on her shoulder grew heavier. Clover, on the verge of offering to show the girl her holy swords, shut her mouth.

Elsewhere in the sanctuary, red-robed priests were leading townsfolk in chants and prayers. Clouds of incense rose to the shadowed ceiling. Jorie contemplated the patterned floor between her shoes. Folk moved about, flickering from light to shadow as they passed between rows of candles. Some knelt near the painted wall, bowing to the image, murmuring prayers into their folded hands.

Jorie’s throat worked. She pulled her arms into the voluminous sleeves of her robe. The chancy light made dark hollows beneath her eyes. She glanced at the kneeling faithful, at her fellow priests gliding through the great dim sanctuary. With visible effort, then, she smiled. “Would you like to see the memorial to the plague victims?” she asked. “It is just this way.”

***

The memorial they saw, with its grand statue and offerings heaped at its feet: small things mostly, trinkets of jewelry, jars of honey or preserves or salted fish, loaves of bread, a drawing, a carved ivory ship no longer than Clover’s pinky, a dagger in a plain sheath. Einar perked at this last, his eyebrows going up; in his philosophy, one could never have too many sharp and pointy implements about one’s person. And this was a nice big one. He reached for it, just to have a look.

Clover bapped him across the back of the hand. “No looting the plague goddess’s shrine!” she hissed.

He gave her a hurt look. Old habits died hard, certainly, but he knew better than to steal offerings from a living deity. Now, one whose temple had been razed, whose clerics rounded up like sheep, then twas right and proper, even if one did have to offer the finest plunder to the gods. That too was right and proper. He mentioned none of this, only, “Think she’s using it?”

“That is not the point, and you know it.”

He sighed inwardly.

The child-acolyte in red appeared to have noticed nothing of this exchange; she was, in fact, gazing up at the statue’s carven face as though required to draw it from memory. The statue, as terrible in its beauty as the picture on the wall, appeared to welcome its servant’s regard no more than it cared for the jumble of gifts at its base or any of the doings of its insignificant worshippers. Not a kindly goddess, or one who bothered herself over the daily woes of the humans in her charge.

Somewhere in the dim reaches of the windowless sanctuary, a single voice began to sing, high and keen, cutting through the low babble of many people like a knife of glass. Einar looked about for the source, but the sanctuary was too cluttered with benches and tables and candelabra and curtained niches and side-altars and bric-a-brac to get a clear light of sight on anything or anyone.

He did, however, espy something else of interest.

“Clover.” He tapped her shoulder. “Door.”

Clover’s eyes brightened. She glanced towards their guide, who stood with her small hands clasped before her, eyes fixed on the face of the goddess in an attitude not of hope or supplication, but flat despair. Her mouth began to move as here and there other voices joined the song of the first, dipping and weaving in joyless counterpoint, and the tears rolled down her face.

Einar’s eyes met Clover’s. They gave each other small nods.

With a surreptitious sweep of his foot, Einar toppled a rack of candles in red jars; with his height and length of leg, he could do it from such a distance that not even the most suspicious-minded could believably accuse him. But no one was watching, and wrought iron and glass met tiled floor with a tremendous crash and smash and clatter, jars and chant alike shattering as heads all through the sanctuary whipped around.

Einar and Clover were already making for the little low door.

“Quickly, brother,” Clover breathed. Einar gave the handle a twist. Rather to his disappointment, the door opened at once, spilling out a low reddish light and a dank, rich, spicy odor. Incense, secrets. Death.

“Worth a look?”

“Oh, I should think so! But cautiously!” She pointed sternly at his nose.

The corners of Einar’s mouth turned up beneath his braided moustache.

“Do you remember,” she chuckled as he opened the door wider, glancing about to make sure no one had noticed their transgression. No one had, in the flurry of cleaning up the mess and ensuring nothing caught fire, “that city—what was its name? Morgravia? Where they mistook us for grave-robbers and set half the militia on us?” She bumped her shoulder into his elbow. “You wanted to fight them all.”

His moustache twitched. “You did. Had to collar you and drag you away.”

“Is that how it happened?” she wondered, and followed as he ducked beneath the lintel and into the red light beyond.

***

There was no sense in creeping; the long corridor beyond the small door went in only one direction, and anyone who spotted the two warriors would know at once that they didn’t belong. The ceiling arched overhead, just high enough that Einar did not have to crouch. Candles in red sconces gleamed at intervals along the painted, panelled walls. A carpet ran down the center of the tiled floor, also red, worked with a pattern that shimmered and flickered at the edges of one’s vision, twining like a pit full of vipers, or some worse, unnamed thing that dwelled in the deeps. Clover, caught by the pattern’s involutions, felt something inside her begin to slip sideways and averted her eyes.

Without looking anything like a tunnel, the endless hallway felt like one: too close, too warm, the air too still and full of odd wafts of smell. On and on it went, unchanging, the red sconces the same number of paces apart, the unwavering candles all the same height, the sly writhe of the carpet always hiding from direct view. On and on.

Time passed, an unknown length. Clover hitched her sword belts around on her hips. Einar’s stomach grumbled.

As one, they stopped. Clover looked up. Einar looked down.

“This is wrong,” Clover said.

They turned.

“Huh,” said Einar.

The door through which they had entered was still right there behind them. As they stared, it seemed to tilt and recede as though sliding slowly down a gradual slope, though the hallway remained level. And yet it was still right there.

“If we walk towards it,” said Clover, “will it let us out, do you think?”

Einar pondered. “Doubt it.”

“Let us try.”

They marched towards the door. It was not like walking in place; their feet pushed off the floor and propelled them forward—Einar considerably farther than Clover, who needed three steps for every one of his—and when the back foot had become the front foot again, the process repeated. Walking. They had each been doing it since they were very small. Even Einar had been small once.

They got nowhere.

They stopped. The door was no nearer and no farther than it had been before.

“Neat trick,” Einar rumbled.

Clover huffed through her nose and grasped her silver amulet, rubbing her thumb over its well-polished surface. She said, at length, “If we cannot go forward, and we cannot go back, there must be some other direction we can go.”

Releasing the amulet, she drew her swords.

Einar’s eyebrows went up.

Clearing their sheaths, the slim, curved blades drew arcs of brightness in the dim air, and the red light, as though a tangible thing, shivered back. Surrounded by an aurora of clear silver light and revitalizing coolness, Clover turned this way and that, examining the floor, the ceiling, the sconces, the walls. Without moving at all, the fittings and appurtenances of the elegantly-appointed corridor seemed to shrink from her glow. The candle-flames flared, a sudden stinging blaze. Mouth set, Clover braced. The air around her boiled and seethed. The ground turned to water.

Einar took a prudent step closer to her, covering her back. He did not yet draw a weapon. What sword, besides hers, could fight air and mist and fume? Within the holy geometry of her blades, the clean air smelled of mountain snows and wide alpine meadows. Einar felt a brief, intense, unaccustomed pang of nostalgia for his own long-lost (long-left-behind, long-abandoned) homeland.

Somewhere, a door opened with a sound like flesh tearing.

Through a gap in the air between two of the flaring sconces, three figures stepped. The first was tall and narrow, the next two taller and broad, though neither as tall or as broad as Einar, but with some subtle distortion about the shape of their shoulders, the set of their heads. They advanced into the corridor. Clover stood steadfast before them, back straight, chin raised. Einar reached for the shorter of his long knives, in deference to the narrowness of the corridor.

The candles gave one last crimson blare. Clover rocked back on her heels. Her swords rang as though struck, but did not waver.

Then the central figure gestured, and the light and the hallway lapsed back into ordinariness—though reality fit ill now, a thin tarp dragged over a midden-heap. Clover lowered but did not sheathe her swords, and the god-glow around her receded to a faint shining.

Einar recognized the leader of the newcomers from the noisy procession of their first night in the town. Close to the gorgeous robes of heavy velvet and cloth-of-gold had a dusty, funereal appearance, like rich fabrics looted from a tomb. Einar half expected to see black beetles scuttling from their folds. The flanking figures wore similar garments, if plainer, the hems of their crimson robes stopping at mid-calf, their feet in sturdy sandals. Plenty of room in those loose clothes to hide a weapon or three.

The leader tilted a supercilious brow. “Lost, wayfarers?”

Clover bridled. Whatever came out of her mouth would be hot and proud and confrontational. Einar set his free hand down on her shoulder, and she gave a little jump and twisted round to look at him. He raised his brows. Glowering, reluctant, she stilled.

“Wrong door?” Einar offered.

The priest’s mouth curled in a red, wet smirk. “Ah,” he purred, “indeed, how easy it is for visitors to our glorious sanctuary to become overwhelmed by its wonders and open doors not meant for them. And then, why, how easy to become trapped!”

“Yep,” Einar said, “exactly.”

The priest chuckled and cast a look back at his … acolytes? Bodyguards? They bristled and shifted, their robes straining across their massive shoulders. Again Einar got the impression of wrongness, a waft of inhuman smell, embalming spices and bitter herbs. “How happy for you that our Queen Idreia is merciful, and rewards richly those who desire to look upon her. For,” he said, and in his eyes was something worse than inhuman, an emptiness that nevertheless lived and gazed back and hungered. Einar had faced monsters without number, but as the priest’s eyes met his own, he shuddered, “that is why you have come, is it not? To see our Queen?”

Those twin pits yawned open, and the darkness in them went down and down, a black, inimical eternity, and though his feet remained anchor on solid ground (if any ground, in the face of that hungry void, could truly be called solid), nevertheless he felt himself falling, the abyss rushing up to consume him. He was aware of the red priest grinning, showing white, sharp teeth. “Aye,” Einar heard himself saying, “show me the Queen.”

“She longs to see you, warrior. Look upon her…”

A bloody light arose in the darkness, bringing neither hope nor illumination. It stalked near, and Einar saw shapes in the light, a squirming writhe, and before his fascinated gaze it swelled until almost, almost, he could tell what he saw. His mind flinched and quailed. The crimson light gaped wide, the moving figures coalescing into one, racing towards him with awful speed.

Then came a flash of silver and a keen cry, and he was staggering backwards, his free hand clutching his forehead.

“She will see you soon, warrior!” The high priest laughed, and somewhere a door opened, an ordinary sound, but his mind was still full of that terrible gaze, that scarlet light. Something touched him, cool and reviving. His vision cleared. Clover had her hand on his forearm, her sword dangling from its martingale around her wrist, and her eyes were huge and troubled, her lips moving in rapid prayer.

“Clover?”

They were alone. The door through which they had come was open, the sanctuary visible beyond it.

She was trembling. “That—viper—that snake in human skin! I thought—” She shook her head. “Are you all right?”

“I’m all right.”

Was he though? His mind, or his spirit, felt sore, inflamed.

She squinted earnestly into his face. Then she sighed through her nose. “Very well. No more hunting today. Let us return to our lodgings and consider our next move.”

Certain insects there are, wasps who lay their eggs inside the bodies of other insects. The eggs lie dormant inside the unsuspecting host; then, when the eggs have hatched and the larvae are ready, they eat their way out. Clover watched her friend uneasily: the unsteadiness of his gait, the lingering dismay in his eyes, and most of all the dim red flicker that surrounded him, like the nauseous scintillation that presages a migraine, that pulsed in time with his heart.

***

She continued to watch him as he plowed through another of Petro’s enormous meals, quaffing ale by the pitcher. Her own appetite was small; she nibbled a slice of warm barley bread crumb by crumb, sipped clear water, and watched, and watched, and thought. The red pulse was growing. Several times she opened her mouth, not to eat more bread but to speak, and then closed it again. After the fourth or fifth time, she caught Einar smirking at her.

“You look like a frog,” he said.

She sat up straighter. “I don’t!”

He chuckled and wagged a ham bone at her. “Just say it.”

Her lips pursed. Nothing like a frog, unless it were a cheerful frog now made grumpy with concern. “Are you well, Einar?”

To his credit, he did not smile. “Well enough.”

“Not… weird or strange or different or bizarre or—”

“Clover.” Now he did smile, but kindly. The red aura roiled around him. “All’s well.”

Their eyes met. Clover raised her brows. Einar nodded, just slightly, the barest tightness perceptible about his mouth.

They understood each other perfectly.

“Rest, you,” she said, pushing herself to her feet. “I shall investigate further before nightfall. Surely there exists someone in this benighted town who will give a straight answer.”

“All right on your own?” he asked.

She grinned and patted her swords. “I am never alone.”

Yet despite her boundless optimism, she found no answers, only market stalls shuttered, doors closed in her face, and those townsfolk who couldn’t escape her questions twitchy, nervous, reticent, some aggressively unwelcoming, others merely distressed, none forthcoming. It might have been a city of clams. She spiralled through the narrow streets, peeking into deserted workshops, wandering the docks, viewing the barren bay, empty save for the ship that had carried Einar and herself to many strange harbors, the ship itself apparently as empty as the bay. Whatever the captain did with himself when the ship was in port, he did it in solitude, and he did it unseen.

At last, as the early twilight came drawing down, she found the road that led to the castle.

Angular, black, nonsensical, towers and bridges and colonnades and battlements and arches and buttresses and other things Clover had no name for all jumbled together as though a mad child had drawn them out of a sack and stuck them on any whichway, it hunkered at the top of a winding pass, bristling wings outspread across the hills, its many windows throwing back the glow of the setting sun. As she watched, a black mist poured out of one of the crazily peaked towers. Clover recoiled, sliding back on the paving stones, reaching for her swords. Then she laughed shakily.

“Bats,” she said.

The road zigged up a steep hill to the castle gate, sheer drops on either side. The gate itself grinned a challenge; the windows blazed with furious light. Come, she imagined it saying. Come fight.

She stepped towards it—one step only. Her swords yearned to fly from their sheaths.

The castle laughed at her. Yessss. Throw yourself to me.

Clover froze, the lead foot still extended. What would Einar say?

“Very little,” she murmured. “But all of it to the point.”

Oh but it was hard to remember to stop and wait and plan when evil was right there, huge and looming and out in the open, just begging to be smited. Smitten? Smote? She looked down at the leather grips of her swords, worn from many battles. Plunging headfirst into lone combat would be no kindness to her friend, no help to the unhappy people of the town.

Resolutely, Clover withdrew, watching the castle the whole while. “I will return,” she told it, and pointed sternly at its mocking face. “And then, you will see.”

I can hardly wait, the castle seemed to say, and it laughed and laughed.

***

Einar lay on his white bear cloak and tossed in the grip of red dreams. Faces, distorted, recognizable as faces only by the possession of eyes and mouths and teeth—too many eyes, far too many teeth—seethed up out of shadow, leering, vomiting black foam and clotted gouts of blood, impossible quantities, enough to wash him away. The tide swept him out to sea, a lightless ocean of infinite depth, swarming with impossible, unspeakable things.

Once when he was a boy, the men of his village returned from a raid bearing … a monster, all rills and tentacles and ridged fronds and too-thick, glassy skin over a too-soft, boneless body. It had flipped up onto their ship during a storm, and they had kept it. Everyone from the village had clustered round, more awed at the monstrosity than all the pelf the raiders had heaped upon the strand. A few of the braver had nudged it with a toe. Einar had stared with the rest, fascinated and repulsed. The creature had flopped, ripples of color crossing its hide like cloud shadows over the sea.

The things in this black ocean were worse, much worse. Even that dying monster had been part of the gods’ earth, made and planned. These… they brushed his bare skin with their slick twisted limbs, tasting his flesh with round mouths ringed with teeth, with bristled tongues. They murmured, they chuckled, they sang. They spoke his name.

“Einar. Einar, Einar! EINAR!”

He woke, and it was Clover leaning over him, her hands on his shoulders, her face close to his, frantic. “O praise be!” she said, while he gasped and struggled upright. “Are you well?”

“Clover?” His voice came out thin and frightened.

“Yes of course,” she said, a hint of impatience in her voice. Then she pressed one little hand into the center of his chest, pushing him back down onto his fur cloak, and climbed up onto him, spreading her legs wide to straddle his middle. “Who else would it be?”

“Clover—” he protested. “Sister—”

“Come, Einar,” she said, “I am not truly your sister, and you know it.” She leaned in. Her soft hair tumbled out of its tail, brushing his chest.

“Clover—” Then he saw her eyes.

Black wells lit with red flames, opening onto a lightless infinity, and even as he shouted and recoiled, he mourned for his sister–for sister she was, sister of countless battles, of the misty sea-roads, the winding path the gods had set for them. He cried out, but her other hand was gripping the back of his neck and her feverish mouth was fixing itself over his, fearsomely strong, and though she was a slight little thing he could not throw her off nor wrench away. “No,” he tried to say, against her firm, strong, eager mouth, “stop—” He did not want to hurt her.

Hot pain pierced him. Wet warmth trickled from the corners of his mouth. He grabbed for her, arm, shoulders, anywhere to give him purchase, but she was eel-quick and clung like a lamprey. Blood, his own blood, ran down his throat.

At last she pulled away and tossed back her long hair, and his heart sobbed relief, for she was not Clover at all but some creature he did not know, woman-shaped and tall and full-figured, her hair a black cloud, her red mouth grinning. Only the eyes were the same: those black endless wells, sparked with red.

“Warrior,” she said, drawing a long-nailed finger through the dribs of blood around her mouth, “you taste of other worlds.”

Even blood-smirched she was beautiful, but her eyes were not anything human. He had never desired anyone less. But one of her hands lashed out and grabbed him by the chin, tangling her fingers in his beard. Her long nails jabbed him. “You will come to me,” she whispered. “You will tell me everything.”

The holy Hel I will, he wanted to say, but the words his mouth shaped were, “I will, lady, I will come to you,” and he could not even groan at the violation.

“Good,” she purred, and in the transitionless manner of dreams all at once she was standing by the window. Her long robes fell from her shoulders in shining rivers of scarlet. They swirled about her bare feet like living things. “Come.”

He woke up. The sun was setting. He was standing halfway to the window of his little room, and the bloody light poured in.

***

Clover rounded the corner just in time to see Einar squeeze, impossibly, out of the tiny upper storey window, and step out onto empty air—as empty as the expression in his wide-open eyes. Even at this distance, even she could see it. A red mist surrounded him and bore him away.

Forgetting hunger, weariness, caution, she turned and sprinted back towards the Queen’s sanctuary.

***

Under the dying streaks of a crimson sun, Clover charged up the marble steps, clearing her left sword from its sheath. The young acolyte Jorie was waiting at the top for her. “Lady—” she said, and let out a noise half-cousin to a sob, sagged sideways, and slid limply down the door jamb to the ground.

Clover froze with her foot on the top step.

The tall melting-candle priest, revealed at the acolyte’s fall, stood in the open doorway, the light of many candles and red-shaded lamps a painful aurora about him. He bared his teeth at Clover, and they were white and sharp and much too numerous. “What the child meant to say,” he purred, distorted by all those teeth, “is, Welcome, warrior. The Queen summons you.” He turned towards the sanctuary’s interior. “Come.”

Ignoring him—he would keep—Clover dropped to her knees beside the fallen acolyte, putting her ear to the girl’s chest to listen for her heart. There was nothing, only the silence of empty clay. She raised her face to the priest. Her eyes were hot, her ribs tight. “What have you done?”

“Not I, but my Queen,” he replied. “It is her hand that holds the plague at bay… or allows it to slip through.”

Clover stood. “Take me to her.”

“She is waiting for you.”

***

No folk wandered between the racks of candles, no singers chanted their doleful hymn, no worshippers entreated the images of the Queen. Clover followed the chief priest down the center of the nave, her quick footsteps the only sound, between rows and rows of fallen townspeople: slumped forward against their kneelers, draped over bookstands, crumpled at the feet of statues and side-altars, sagged sideways against benches. None were sleeping; none looked at peace.

Clover squeezed the grips of her swords, choking down hot words. If she had known her god’s name, she would have screamed it aloud.

The priest turned and gave her a sly look, but said nothing.

He led her to the little doorway Einar had found, already standing open. The painful light slunk out, the heavy smells of funeral perfumes. The priest stood aside, gesturing her forward. A fallen woman sprawled just outside the doorway, a poesy of white flowers in her hands, their petals scattered.

Clover rounded on the tall priest, snarling, “Monster. I will end you and your Queen, by my god I swear it!”

His eyes were flat black, his smile a mockery. “Your god has no power here.”

“You know nothing!” she retorted. She could feel it in her spine, the strength of the god, bright as silver-steel, the cleansing cold of his wind stirring her blood, filling her bones with light.

“Perhaps, perhaps,” the priest murmured. “Or perhaps soon you will learn how little you know.” Again he gestured her towards the open door.

She held his repellant gaze. “I am not done with you.”

He flashed his many sharp teeth. “No indeed. We shall have all eternity to strive with each other.”

His mocking laughter followed her into the carpeted tunnel.

***

In all the diverse lands she and Einar had visited on their long strange voyage, no matter the habits and customs of the people, whether the land itself were sunny or gloomy, hot or cold, whether there was one moon in the sky, or five, or none, no matter the constellations or the prevailing winds, one fact remained constant:

Vampires were the worst.

The skittering echoes of the high priest’s laughter had not yet faded when the first vampires came literally out of the walls, manifesting in between the sconces as though the walls were some permeable membrane, not wood or plaster or stone but unholy flesh, the veins of a vast unnatural body.

Clover neither blinked nor hesitated. The twin curved swords cleared their sheaths in a flash of silver light, and in their wake two vampire heads thumped to the floor, already dissolving into ash. The corridor rocked with the concussion of the dark spirits’ destruction, leaving white scorch marks on the walls.

Six more were already seeping through, pulling free of the wall with faint suctioning sounds, but Clover did not pause to wait or watch, but surged forward, feet skimming the threadbare carpet, bright swords sweeping before her, and six more clouds of ash thickened the air, six more souls exploding free of dire captivity. A fine grit coated her hair, her face, her hands.

After that, fighting the vampire became work.

Fortunately it was work Clover understood, as the woodcutter understands chopping trees or the carver shaping stone. Fleet and untiring, she hewed her way through the crowded corridor, more and more vampires oozing between the walls and lurching up before her, baring their teeth, waving their claws, lunging for her with the unnatural swiftness of the undead. Her swords never stilled, drawing arcs of pure brightness in the humid air, parting vampire limbs from vampire bodies, vampire heads from vampire necks. This one may have been someone’s grandfather, and when the red light snuffed from his eyes she may have seen a look of relief cross his old seamed face before he exploded into ash, but she had no time to linger, for twelve more were already arising to take his place.

How long she fought down the corridor-tunnel, step by step and swing by swing, she could not have told, for in the unthinking unreflecting pure physical realm of battle minutes may be seconds or seconds may be hours. Her tireless blades remained unstained silver-white, but her robes were smirched and spattered, for a wounded vampire will still bleed, and her boots made sticky tearing noises when she lifted her feet, her soles caked with a mud made of blood and vampire ash.

Once or twice in the midst of battle she looked back, remembering the trick the false corridor had played, but it seemed this time she was allowed to pass, for the open door was no longer in sight, the hall hazed with the dust of vanquished vampires. The air grew colder and danker and heavier, not just with the reek of death and old blood, but a murk of sea-salt and stone.

And still, vampires.

A vampire does not age as mortals do, nor does its body decay, but nevertheless it seemed to Clover as she won her way down the passage that her foes increased not just in number but in oldness—keenness, cleverness, strength, guile. No longer did they charge with the frenzy of animals, nor destruct at the first touch of her blades, but sniffed and circled and watched and organized, and her strikes must needs be precise to end them cleanly. On the one hand (her left sword flicked out and slashed through an extended vampire claw) the decrease in tempo gave her time to catch her breath. On the other (her right sword swept through the place where a vampire was about to be, and its open mouth made an O of surprise as its head tumbled free) having time to catch her breath gave her time to notice how tired she was, how the grazes and scrapes and bruises she had gained itched and ached, and how many vampires she still had before her.

On the third hand (there was no third hand, that was nonsense, but her two swords scythed another vampire through the middle, and as it reeled, gouting thick black blood, she reversed the arcs and took off its head, and it fell in a welter of dust), as she fought step by step and foe by foe, the god’s amulet at her breast, bumping with the rhythm of battle, began to burn with a fierce, clear cold light. From that light the vampires flinched away, even the oldest, and their skin crackled to frail vellum and their bones withered to rotten sticks, and the tips of Clover’s swords needed barely to brush them for them to explode in great gasps of dusts. The light filled her, invigorating as a blazing winter morning, the sky pale blue and infinite, the sun striking white fire from every snowdrift and icicle. When she blew out her breath, side-stepping a vampire’s attack as casually as dancing, she exhaled a cloud of steam. The vampire faltered, and she had time to mark the raddled robes it wore, the little velvet cap on its wizened head, before her swords blazed up and ended it.

She stepped through cascades of dust under a tall archway, into a stone room like a vast pillared cave. Around her a halo of steam twinkled with crystals of ice.

On a round dais at the center of the room, surrounded by tall red candles in black iron frames, the Queen Vampire lifted her face from her prey. Blood smeared her chin and her wide red mouth. Her crimson eyes, hurtful with malice, found Clover beneath the archway and flared like the explosions of distant stars. She smiled, rich and welcoming. The arctic mist around Clover flashed silver-white, as sparks might fly when a knight’s shield interdicts an enemy’s blow.

“Idreia!” Clover’s voice rang like a trumpet call on a morning hillside. “Your time has come!”

The Queen chuckled and rose, letting some large limp shaggy thing drop from her grasp and thump back onto the dais. Blood dripped down her long, smooth, lush body, blood her only garment, the jewels at her throat, the bracelets around her shapely wrists, the rings on her long fingers. Her black hair tumbled about her, and it too was clotted and tangled with blood.

“Little priest,” she said, and if Clover’s voice had been a trumpet call hers was the legion of monsters waiting in the shadows, low and rustling with menace. “Others have said so. And yet I remain. Come, parlay with me.”

Even at this distance Clover recognized the motionless heap on the dais. She could not tell if he still breathed. One of the Queen’s slender, blood-daubed feet was planted in the center of his chest.

Raising her chin, she slid her blades back into their sheaths. “Speak.”

“Come closer,” said the Queen, smiling.

***

On a crimson cloud Idreia bore Einar away. At the top of a ruined tower, open to the stormy sky; in a bottomless sea-cave, surrounded by watchers with glowing eyes and needle teeth; on a tall round stone in the center of a forest of bare clutching trees, she twined herself around him, whispering words he could not understand, her hands drawing shudders from his skin, her busy mouth leaving scarlet blooms behind, running with thin trickles of blood. He groaned and batted at her, but she surrounded him like a horde, and as he weakened she grew stronger, her eyes flaring, her hair streaming like storm clouds.

“Give yourself over,” she commanded softly, in a mountain cave, beneath the blizzard’s howl. “Submit to me.” In a curtained alcove lit with many candles. “Tell me your secrets. Show me the other worlds.” Everywhere she took him, a red haze obscured the horizon, a suffocating fog. He thrashed, unable to speak, unable to escape her relentless hands.

“Tell me!” she demanded, her mouth at his throat.

Tell me! Tell me!

Red mists closed in. Her voice lost meaning, drifting away. No, he told her, holding to this last thought.

You will, he heard, and he floated out to sea.

***

Clover entered the vampire’s den alone, in silence. Around the huge round room’s perimeter, shadowed archways hid rustling shapes. Rows of iron candelabra cast a ruddy light at once too piercing and too dim. As she passed between them, the nimbus of arctic brightness surrounding her sparked and flared as though she walked through her own personal meteor shower. The Queen watched, her predator’s teeth hidden behind a wide scarlet smile.

The room was wide enough that the huge circular dais, curtained in dusty black velvet, seemed neither too large nor out of place. Clover crossed the expanse of interlocking stone flags, a hard tightness in her chest, her soft-soled boots making no sound. She kept her hands loose at her sides; clutching her swords would send the wrong message, and she would not begin hewing through the crowd of vampires surely watching until she had freed Einar.

The tall vampress waited motionless, her stormy hair stirring in a breeze of its own. Her lovely face was set in an expression of faint amusement, and blood ran in slow rivulets down her lush curves, concealing almost nothing of a body calculated to make men (and many women) cast aside reason for the promise of that pale beauty. Yet to Clover’s eye it was repulsive, an overripe loveliness, the perfect peach whose skin is about to burst, revealing the writhe of maggots at its core.

At the base of the dais Clover stopped, far enough that she did not have to crane her neck, near enough that two good lunges would bring her blades within range. She prayed that she saw Einar’s chest moving.

“So,” the vampress said. “You enter my domain, you threaten my authority, and now I suppose you have demands. Let me guess: Give me back my friend!” She reached down and grasped the front of Einar’s tunic—what remained of it—and without apparent effort hoisted him into the air. He dangled from her grip, eyes closed, skin transparent, marred all over with round red wounds. The Queen shook him, and he flopped like a drowned kitten of unusual size.

The god’s bracing presence remained with Clover, and although her fingers flexed towards her hilts she only bridled a little. Inhaling, she felt the bright coldness behind her eyes. “Wrong,” she said. “Though you have taken my brother whom I love, he is but the latest of your victims. I am here to free not just him but all of them, and put an end to your plague for ever.”

Idreia stared, her eyes black and shiny as a beetle’s wing. “Oh, child,” she said, smiling. “I am the plague. Would you see what happens when vampires are unleashed on an unsuspecting town? Disease is kinder, little priest.” She laughed, merrily.

The Queen’s laughter plunged Clover into suffocating darkness, a pitch-black oubliette full of rustling things with many legs and pin-prick eyes, not just a noise but a nightmare. The answering laughter of the surrounding vampires compounded the horror, a bucket of cockroaches dumped on the head of the already suffering prisoner. It filled up her mind with scrabbling shapes, blotting out the light of the god within her. Unaware, she dropped to her knees, hands clutching the sides of her head.

Idreia laughed and laughed.

The oubliette went down forever, not a mere cavity but a vast rotten hole in reality, and Clover tumbled through it, throwing her hands to the sides in the hopes of catching something to hold, but there was nothing, nothing forever, hope and grace and love mere childish fables assembled against the void, weak and guttering candles that one by one went out.

Abruptly she was back on the battlefield under a thunderous sky, kneeling on a hard grey hilltop, the fallen all around her, the hilt of her sword sticky and black with blood, blood gluing her hands in place, staining her armor, its taste in her mouth. Her first memory. Here is where the god called me, she thought, but there was no god, only the endless field of corpses. Death, and death, and death, forever and ever and ever.

Emptily she observed movement at the far edges of the killing field. The enemy was regrouping, and she was alone.

She bowed her head and waited for the next wave to come.

***

Voices shivered the stifling silence, and Einar struggled to bring his drifting mind to bear. The voice of the Queen he knew, her dire laughter; it was tangled with his veins, his nerves, the very synapses of his brain. His heart beat in time with its pulse.

Another voice impinged on his awareness, faint but clear, rising out of the mist like the thinnest silver thread. He reached for it, but it was already sliding away.

Come back! he thought at it

Fainter he heard it, a cry not aimed at him, but from a heart he knew almost as well as his own. Its hope fading, nearly extinguished.

It sank back into the fog as though yanked by a hundred hands.

Now more of him began to regroup, his mind and will no longer a scattered pack but a unity, rallied around one thought: find that well-known voice, save it from this nightmare nothingness. Save her.

One last trace reached him, and this time he was ready. He grabbed it with both hands, letting it draw him. The mist fell away; he flew towards the fading light like a comet, smoking trails behind him.

CLOVER! he thought. Hold on!

Roaring, Einar burst his chains.

***

Grey the sky above, grey the ground below. Grey the hacked-up armor of the dead, their staring faces, empty eyes. No light, no color. The end.

Yet a little thing caught her eye. On the ground below her, nearly crushed beneath her knees, a cluster of flowers grew: small and white, like little stars, bursts of yellow at their centers. She did not know their names. Her life had never admitted the leisure for flowers, learning their names, caring that they had names. Now she bent lower, the better to admire them, the little creases in the petals like ruffles in a lady’s skirt, the dusting of yellow—what was that stuff called? she could not recall the word—anyway, the pale powdery yellow stuff, like a constellation of gold dust on that same fine lady’s skirt. In that grey empty world, it glowed like a sun.

Perhaps, she thought, bending near enough she almost touched a flower with her nose, it is not so bad to die today.

Her hands were tired, the bloody sword heavy in her arms.

The flower yelled at her.

“CLOVER!” it bellowed, a name she could have sworn she didn’t know. “Snap out of it!”

She leaped to her feet. “Einar?” She turned in circles, trying to find him. “Where are you?”

“Here.”

Here he was, twice her height, blond braids so pale as to be white, blue eyes twinkling though his mouth remained solemn. “Ready to kill some vampires?”

He held out his hand.

“How did you find me?” she said.

Around them the battlefield was dissolving into mist.

Now he grinned. “You’re small but noisy. It wasn’t that hard.”

“Rude,” she said, grinning back.

She took his hand.

***

Idreia was still laughing when Einar surged to his feet, pulled an ash-wood pin from the remains of his clothing, and drove it with all his considerable strength straight into her heart.

The malicious mirth cut off with a glurk. For a moment there was utter silence. Einar fell back, already pulling out another pin.

Idreia looked down. The end of the pin was so small, it could hardly be seen. She raised her eyes to his. The red light in them flickered like a hanging lamp accidentally struck by someone slightly too tall.

“You carry tiny stakes?”

He shrugged with his face. “Vampires.” They really were the worst. The ash-wood stake wasn’t enough to destroy a vampire outright, but it was usually enough to give them pause, make them think about their life choices. Undeath choices. Whatever.

Clover hopped up onto the dais beside him, glimmering swords in her hands. He smiled down at her with his eyes. “You look terrible.”

She raised her chin. “I do not wish to pain you, brother, but I have fought my way through several hundred dozen vampires. They have besmirched my garments somewhat.”

He chuckled. “Leave me any?”

“Never fear,” she replied. “Our foes are numerous and literally hungry for blood.”

“Just the way I like ’em.”

Idreia meanwhile was still scrabbling with her long nails to grasp the tiny stake. Ripples like groundquakes radiated through her skin, the wooden pin their locus. She gnashed her teeth, and a terrible sound issued from her throat.

With a scream she yanked the pin free and flung it out into the wide room. An arc of black blood followed its flight. It landed with a small clatter, somewhere out amidst the candle stands.

Panting, she straightened, her hair wild about her. Einar fingered the second stake, watching for an opening, but she did not attack. Instead she grinned, showing her forest of bloody teeth. “You are resourceful, warrior,” she said, somewhat mangled. “I shall make you a general in my legions.”

“Rot in Hel, monster.” Einar wished for any of his other weapons, his holy rune-inscribed axe by preference, rather than this bitty twig, but all his gear was back at Petro’s inn.

The vampress giggled, the flirtatious laughter of a girl. “Only if you come with me.”

“Thanks, but you’re not my type.”

“Pity.” Something was happening to Idreia as she spoke, her flesh twitching, swelling, expanding beyond her normal height. “We might have wrought such glorious destruction.” Runnels of thick, clear-red liquid, not tears, oozed from her eyes and ran down her face.

And her skin—! Starting from that point on her breast where the ash-wood stake had pierced, her skin began to pull and tear, revealing a deep-red glistening liquescent something that seethed and pulsed and grew. She gasped, a sound not of pain but delight. “Perhaps—” she said, “you will like me better—”

Something went crunch, and through the shredded curtain of her skin gaped briefly the pale damp shattered gravestones of her ribs, buttressed cartilage cracking under tremendous force, red ichor spurting. From out of the wreckage thick red tendrils strained, and it was not until they crooked and grasped the edges of the ruined chasm of Idreia’s chest that Einar realized: they were fingers.

Red, dripping, bony hands thrust out of the vampress’s chest cavity, shoving bone and meat aside, gouts of red fluid squirting between the gaps. Repulsed, Einar fell back, tearing his gaze from the spindly arms now groping out of the vampress’s body, to her ecstatic face (not an improvement), down to Clover beside him.

Her eyes were wide and gleaming, her hands easy on the grips of her swords, and those too gleamed. Sensing his regard, she tilted her head his way. With a lift of her brows, she proffered her right-hand sword.

Einar considered. Any weapon would be better than the toothpick he grasped between forefinger and thumb, but. Clover’s swords were fitted to her tiny hands, and who was to say the god-blades would work for anyone else anyway? No—he glanced around the huge round room—he would trust in his own god to send him a suitable weapon.

Meaty tearing, crackling sounds continued from the center of the dais, and a liquid spattering. Idreia let out a throaty cry.

With a final heave, her fleshly cocoon burst open. Out of a rain of bone shards and gobbets of meat and viscera, in a spray of glossy fluid, a crimson nightmare emerged, dripping.

Idreia’s discarded skin slithered to the floor.

With shocking delicacy, the thing that remained shook its long, hooked feet free from the last scraps and unfolded to its full height, stretching its pendulous arms as languorously as any fine lady. Now would be a fine time to attack! Einar’s brain urged him, as the monster uncurled fingers as long as its prominent ribs, showing razor claws, and then eased those knife-edged hands down its skinny sides, slicking through the slime of its … birth?

Last of all it raised its hairless head, ridged horns sprouting from its brow, and showed all its spiny teeth. Its huge, bottomless black eyes, glossy and flat as tar, the long lashes like a tangle of spider legs, gleamed with crimson fire.

“Welp,” said Einar, raising his twig. “That’s a new one.”

Clover fell back a pace, her swords and her grin bright as winter sunshine, static crackling the ends of her hair. “Thanks be to the god, who brings us infinite blessings,” she murmured, and blue-white fire flared along the lengths of her blades.

Einar stared at her. “Did you just…” He loved a good battle, Odin knew, but actively praising one’s deity for the existence of this abomination struck him as theologically dubious. Maybe she was just extolling the chance to fight it. That was a very Clover thing to do.

Clover herself had no time to respond. The monster that was Idreia cast back its head and—

The sound it made defied not just description but reality itself. It struck Einar’s ears like hammers, it blacked out his vision, jolted his limbs like a levinbolt. Idreia’s scream shucked him out of his body like a mollusk from his shell, and for a length he saw nothing, heard nothing, was nothing.

Then a small hand gripped his arm, and he flopped back into himself.

“Stay with me, brother,” Clover said.

“Always.”

Hard on the echoes of Idreia’s hellish battle cry came an answering roar from a thousand (roughly) vampire throats, the rush and hiss of curtains cast aside, the click and patter of vampire feet on the stone flags. A small thought niggled the back of his mind, but in the rising awareness of battle incoming, he couldn’t winkle it free. “Clover, wait,” he might have said, if the words Clover, wait had ever produced the desired effect.

Clover did not wait.

Like a comet loosed from a heavenly bow, she attacked, The arc of her passage left a shining trail in the dim red air.

The scarlet vampress giggled, a monstrous sound from that bristling maw. She arched her back and flexed her ribs, and from between her shoulders sprang two huge, hooked, flaring wings.

Clover did not wait, or pause, falter, or hesitate. Her attack was pure and true, even when the vampress shook out her wings and took to the air. Her twin swords blazed with arctic light.

Einar had no more time to worry or watch. While Clover was busy about the Queen, the rest of the hive attacked. He turned and raised his tiny stake.

#

Idreia the vampress, patient in evil, over the course of decades (a blink of time to an undying monster) had infected many of Queensport’s best people, enchaining their brightness to her corrupting dark. They had been bankers, bakers, weavers, fishers, tax collectors, but now they were the Queen’s Elite. With no thought for self-preservation, they swarmed to protect her. Clover’s several hundred dozen was a mere foretaste.

If he had been given time, Einar might have remembered the thing he needed to remember before it was too late for himself, for Clover, and for the town of Queensport.

The vampires came in a ragged wave, claws and teeth and fetid grave-stench. The first to lunge into range he grabbed and pulled onto his tiny stake, hurling its body into the ranks of its fellows even as it exploded into dust. After that it was all close-work until he could get his hands on a weapon.

He hated close-work. Close-work meant you’d already failed. Give him a nice axe or a sword or an Odin-blessed spear any day.

His initial plan, to disarm a minion and turn its weapon on its fellows, was thwarted by Idreia’s minions bearing no weapons. Animal-like, they slashed with their claws and hissed and pounced with bared fangs. He briefly considered, and discarded, the idea of removing a vampire’s hand, but there were practical as well as aesthetic difficulties with that plan. Instead he plunged off the dais and into the tide, using his superior size and weight to knock vampires about, staking them when he could, chucking them into each other when he could not, until he reached one of the tall iron candelabra. The way things were going he expected it to be bolted to the floor, but it came up easily, and now he had a nice long weapon that was also fire.

Bashing one vampire in the face with the stand-end, he reversed it and thrust the candles into the garments of another. The vampire shrieked and went up like a pyre—and more blessed still, as it flailed in its death agonies, it spread the fire to the vampires around it, until Einar was surrounded by a small yet ever-growing conflagration of panicked vampires. They burst into dust in a widening circle like a firework, the cries of freed souls inaudible beneath the general cacophony. Einar spared a small grin of satisfaction before he got back to work.

Meanwhile, Clover.

Incandescent with joy, she leaped and slashed and stabbed, matching the flying monstrous vampire queen dodge for dodge and blow for blow. The swift flicker of her blades surrounded the combatants with a halo of light.

To throw herself whole-heartedly into battle with unequivocal evil, with no time or space for question or hesitation or pesky thought, after the fruitless worrisome days in this claustrophobic cursed town, brought unspeakable relief. She laughed as she parried a blow of the queen’s claws, immediately responding with her second sword, but the queen was faster than any foe she had ever fought, and Clover missed by a hair.

She was aware of Einar the way, if she spared the attention, she was aware of her left foot or her right elbow, a part of herself working smoothly and doing just what it ought. She was no more worried about him in a fray than she was worried about her earlobe. A part of her consciousness set aside for external awareness noted the vampire conflagration and approved, but the rest was unreservedly devoted to her own battle.

And was the scarlet monster slowing? For now Clover’s cuts met resistance, now spurts of glossy ichor followed the path of her blades. Could an immortal bloodsucker tire? Clover, her god’s amulet thumping against her breast, did not feel tired at all.

The vampress’s mouth gaped, showing her spiny teeth, her tongue like a live eel. “Well fought, little priest,” she panted, black eyes alive with glee. “You exceed my expectations.”

“Exceed yourself back to hell, demon!” Clover retorted. Which was stupid, but in her defense she was very busy.

“Not yet,” said Idreia, “and not alone.”

Whatever that meant. Clover did not spare the thought to parse it—barely noticed it—took it, if anything, as typical villainous vaunting—as the vampress loosed a hellish screech and launched herself at Clover, claws first.

(Did a little voice in her head, Einar’s or her god’s or even her own, whisper, Clover, wait? And would she have waited if she’d heard? But who could have waited when the perfect opening came literally flying at her face? Not Clover.) Huge wings flaring, the gruesome monster attacked. Ready, ever ready, buoyantly unafraid, Clover stepped in, meeting the vampress’s charge like a glad lover. Her twin swords blazed. She saw the fearsome claws reach, slash, as though underwater, and evading them nimbly she scissored forward with the two holy blades and struck off the vampress’s head.

“Ha!” she cried, or “Yes!” or some other inarticulate shout of triumph.

But the vampress’s mouth was open too, and from it issued a terrible sound.

Even slain, Idreia was laughing.

The headless body crumpled to the floor, wings askew, slack limbs twitching. The head flew out into the chaos of the huge room, spanging into a candle-stand and scattering candles like ninepins. Vampire minions scrambled to avoid the flames.

There were a lot of flames. Some blazing vampire must have fallen into the drapes, and the brittle old fabric caught like tinder, rising now in roaring columns to the coffered ceiling—no longer lost in shadow, but crackling sheets of red and gold.

Idreia’s head was cackling. “Thank you, little priest!” she shrieked. “I couldn’t have done this without you!”

Standing alone next to the collapsed body, Clover let her left sword dangle by its strap and clutched the god’s medallion at her breast. It remained cold to touch, even through her glove. She looked for Einar in the seethe of vampires and flames—taller than everyone, you’d think he’d be easy to find—but saw him not, and had no time to worry, for a new thing caught her attention.

The vampress’s corpse was hissing, a shrill whistle audible even over the growing roar of the inferno. Clover turned.

A dense fog was boiling out of the open neck, red and solid as a cloud in a painting of a sunset. The vampress’s body shrivelled as the fog poured out, the skin wrinkling, the sprawled limbs shrinking inwards, cracking at odd angles, the broken wings sagging and crumbling like long-rotted canvas. And the red fog kept coming, mingling with the smoke that rose to the ceiling, the dusty clouds of vanquished vampires.

“Hodr’s spear!”

Einar landed on the dais with a thump and the smell of singed hair. “Clover,” he said. “What did you do?”

“I … defeated the demon?” True, roiling clouds of crimson fog were not a usual defeated demon behavior. And was the severed head still laughing? In the din it was hard to be sure, but she thought so.

And then she was sure, for the peal of the Queen’s terrible mirth rang from every stone of the huge round room, every joist in the high ceiling, every knocked-down candle-stand, every grain of vampire dust.

“I think,” Clover admitted in a teeny voice, “I may have erred.”

“We need to get out of here.”

“But—” Clover gestured, the weight of her sword pulling down her wrist.

With a whuff and a faint crackling, the last of the red fog ejected from Idreia’s headless corpse. The body fell into itself like the burnt-out logs of a dead fire.

Einar took her elbow. “Time to go.”

“But the demon—” Clover objected.

“I’ll carry you if I have to.” He could do it too, and had before on one notable occasion, and very damaging to her dignity it had been. “Unless you want to get buried under tons of smoldering rubble and leave the monster to rampage through the town unopposed.”

Well, when he put it like that. Clover scowled. But how did one fight fog? Swing harder?

Regardless, one was not going to be fighting fog in this space any longer. The symphony of destruction was reaching a crescendo: not just the bellowing conflagration and the Idreia’s heads raucous laughter, the percussive pops of combusting minions, but now too the heavy creak and groan and stone and mortar expanded in the heat, and timbers began to scorch and shake.

The smoke was too thick now, the dance of flame and shadow too wild, for Clover to be sure, but she thought she saw less of the vampress’s fog, as though somehow it were escaping to elsewhere. “Einar!” she cried. “Are there chimneys up there? Or…” She couldn’t remember the word. Holes, or grates, or … those air-flow embrasure things. There was a word!

“Once we’re out,” he said, hauling her not gently off the dais and towards the exit, “we can look for it. Can’t look if you’re on fire, Clover!”

“YES, RUN!” screamed Idreia’s head, as they dodged heat and flame and a few stubborn remaining vampires. “Run, fools! Wallow in despair, knowing you will be too late!”

“You’ll eat those words, hell-fiend!” Clover shouted, sucked in smoke, and began to cough.

“Run now, vaunt later,” Einar gasped, and grabbed her by the collar and put on a burst of speed.

***

When they stumbled out of the tunnels and into the open, Einar barely dressed in smoke-and-blood-stained rags, hauling an exhausted and equally smirched Clover, tears of weariness and desperation and smoke-sting dripping down her dirty face, they found the cathedral in flames, a white inferno shot through with sparks of yellow, orange and blue, smoke fountaining skywards in huge billows, the noise incredible, as though the stones themselves cried aloud. A line of townsfolk had formed, toting buckets: a desperate, useless measure. The water hissed into steam and did nothing to assuage the flames. Yet the people labored on, sweating, weeping, marred with smoke and ash, the flow of buckets and kettles and cookpots never slowing.

Above the flame-lit, smoke-shadowed hellscape, as distinct from the smoke as blood from oil, hovered the great crimson cloud of Idreia’s power unleashed, coruscating like an open heart.

“O God,” Clover whispered. “What have we done?”

“Bravo, warriors!” The chief priest in his moldy robes arose as if out of the earth itself, flanked by his hulking minions, his bared teeth metallic. “You have freed my Queen! Well do—urk!”

For Einar, without any giveaway sound or movement, had sprung forward, picked him up bodily (and he was light as a bundle of sticks), glanced about briefly, and chucked him onto the nearest pile of flaming rubble. The priest squawked, and then his clothes took fire and he screamed. He did not scream very long, and the concussion of his spirit ejecting from his dead flesh blew Einar’s hair back from his brow.

Einar grunted and gave a sharp nod, dusting his palms.

One would not have thought the two misshapen minions intelligent enough to draw an inference, but they looked at the fire, looked at Einar, looked at each other—and then broke and ran off into the night.

“Should we…?” said Clover.

“Won’t matter.” Einar’s gaze travelled up the flaming bulk of the cathedral, tall black upright lines silhouetted against crimson and gold, smoke pouring into a turbulent deep-blue sky torn at the horizon with reddening fingers of cloud. “Sunrise coming.”

“But is it coming soon enough?” Clover too looked skyward, above the flickering roofs and the peaked billows of violet and grey and red-stained white, to the pulsing cloud of Idreia.

How did one fight a fog? Why become a fog, when she was already a noctivagant Queen? What did the dusted priest mean, Freed? O God, she thought, why send me to kill a monster if I wasn’t supposed to kill the monster?

The red cloud must have escaped through the air vents (that was the word!) and into the open air. But why? If Clover climbed up there, could she stab it?

“Clover,” said Einar.

At first she thought he was going to scold her for woolgathering about stabbing smoke, but instead he pointed. “Look.”

Unmoved by any breeze or outside impulse, the red fog had begun to clump and swirl, abandoning its position above the burning roofs, slinking down against the current of smoke, down into the square. Thick tendrils of fog shot out of the main body of the cloud, six, ten, a dozen, and suctioned onto the faces of the laboring villagers.

“Look out!” Clover screamed, but it was already far too late. The tentacles pulsed, thickened, growing a deeper and bloodier red. The villagers shuddered and swayed and jigged and turned grey. The tentacles snapped back, and like emptied wineskins the villagers fell.

The crimson cloud hummed and throbbed. And grew. More tentacles lashed out. More villagers fell.

It grew and grew.

Clover and Einar stared at each other, aghast. Anguished, they babbled, overlappingly, “What do we do? It’ll destroy the whole village at this rate. The village! It won’t stop there! But how do we stop it?”

“I’ve never seen a demon like this before,” Einar said. “Daylight?”

An ordinary vampire cannot abide even the faintest touch of sunlight. An overcast sky will not save it. But a monster of smoke and fume? Who could say?

Clover glanced skyward. Between the flushed amber smoke and the pulsing cloud it was impossible to say how soon was the dawn. Sparks flew in flurries; it was a miracle the fire hadn’t spread to the whole town. And still the violent cloud attacked, and villagers fell in droves. Some tried to flee, but the red life-sucking cords struck faster than even the swiftest could run.

“O God,” Clover breathed. Her left sword still dangled useless from her wrist. Inhaling slowly, scents of acrid smoke and flame stinging, she sheathed it, and empty-handed stepped neared the inferno.

Einar followed.

She did not look back, but she reached back her hand, and he took it, wrapping his huge fingers around her small ones.

“I had forgotten,” she remarked, “because I love to fight, that fighting is not why the god called me.”

The cathedral steps loomed near, the black portal wreathed in red-gold flame.

Einar did not ask her why, or what she was doing, and she loved him for it. He gripped her hand as she mounted the steps.

“I am a conduit,” she explained, tilting her head up at the apex of the doors. “A portal for his might and his goodness to enter the worlds.”

“Clover,” Einar said.

“I am not afraid.”

“You’re never afraid.” Even above the anguished roar of the fire, the cathedral’s groan, the cries of the townsfolk, she could hear the affection in his voice. It warmed her as the chill of the god descended.

“I’m not now,” she said, and opened the door.

***

Wind, icy and full of voices, dense with flurries of snow. Here, wherever she was, the fire had words in it, the cathedral spoke. The dead gave up their secrets, their dreams and fears, cut off in youth’s flower or mid-life or old age. They buffeted her but did not rock her back. The god held her, a mighty pillar of stone and ice and steel, and each soul that passed through her passed through his hands and into his pale blue, boundless sky. Clover felt them go, each one a pulse of loss but also freedom, each one a wound.

Hold fast, my dear one, murmured the wind. These are but the first.

Ah, but it hurt, each freed spirit scraping the lintels of her own. They rushed her in their eagerness for release, a stampede of color, sound and pain. She cried aloud.

Unseen fingers tightened around hers, anchoring her.

The cathedral screamed, its ancient bones warping under the pressure of flame, its stone skin cracking, tormented buttresses giving way. She took it in, the smoke and ash, the wild flying sparks, the heat and the tang of melting metal, the fire’s own fury. The tears on her cheeks seared, dissolving into steam as she herself was dissolving, the boundaries of herself fraying under the assault.

And the cloud, the red cloud, turned its dire attention on her as piece by piece she spun out into the void.

Oh child, foolish child, it chuckled, did you think thus to unmake me. I am older by far than your upstart god.

This too, whispered the small voice within, the softly vibrating bonds that held the fragments of herself together, this too you must encompass.

Give me a sword! she cried rebelliously. Let me fight!

The ancient weight of the red cloud, its vast evil, crushed her, and the harder she fought, the greater, the more irresistible it grew. You will fail, it rasped, and its voice scoured the roots of her soul. You will fail, and all this will be mine forever, all worlds open before me!

No, she said, and firmed her spirit against the magnitude of the red cloud’s will … and found she could not. Too much of her had already emptied into the void. O god! she cried, with the frantic fear of the drowning, and she flung out her hands.

“I have you,” said a voice, one she knew, one she heard with her real ears. “It’s working. Keep going.”

The flames consumed her. The smoke blew apart her bones. The immense affliction of the demon forced her wider still, pressed her like grapes under a stone, and great drops of her burst free and flew through the doorway the god had made.

YES! the monster screamed, burrowing deeper.

Yes, Clover said, her last thought, white with agony. The red cloud howled triumph, and she gave over, and knew no more.

***

Clover’s hand tore out of Einar’s grasp as a furious wind flung her backwards, shrieking like all of Hel’s demons unleashed. He scrambled to catch her before she smashed into something, and then, hoisting her limply over his shoulder, he scrambled back out through the burning portal and into the dawn-lit cathedral square, gaining as much distance as he could. A few villagers remained upright; they gawked at him as he passed. “RUN!” he shouted, waving his free arm. “Get back! The building’s coming down!”

The building came down.

With slow majesty, then faster and faster as its supports gave way, in great gouts of stone dust and ash, the cathedral crumpled.

Einar did not stop to watch. He did not wait for the villagers to follow. The tremendous crashing, smashing, bashing sounds followed him halfway down to the sea.

***

Clover began to wake before they reached the shelter of Petro’s inn, but she did not fuss and did not insist that she could walk, dammit. Not that Clover said dammit. When Einar laid her down on a bench near the fire, under the tavern keeper’s anxious eye, she accepted the care of a warm blanket without protest. Her face was pinched and wan, her skin grey even in the firelight. Although that might have been rock dust.

Petro drew his arm through Einar’s, leading him away. He glanced back at Clover. “Will she live?”

Of all the questions he could have asked, after such a night of calamity. Einar laid his hand on the innkeeper’s shoulder. “Rest will cure her,” he said.

Emotions struggled across Petro’s face.

“And you?” Einar asked.

The struggle threatened to become a collapse. The shoulder beneath Einar’s hand shuddered. “For Melina,” Petro said at last, “I will help the rebuilding.” He breathed in. “Now that the Queen is gone, perhaps we can be Gullhame again.”

How did you know? Einar did not ask, not when he and Clover had arrived on the man’s doorstep in such a state, after such a ruckus as must have been heard from here to the top of the mountain. His eye caught the little icon beside the door, the image of the Queen.

It had burned from the inside, a huge scorch mark blotting out the figure, leaving the wall untouched.

Einar tightened his lips in satisfaction. Patting the keeper’s shoulder one more time, he said, “We’ll gather our things and be on our way. We’ll bring you no trouble in return for your goodness.”

“No trouble, warrior, no trouble.” But Petro seemed on the verge of tears.

“Not if we’re gone before it arrives,” Einar said, and saw the reluctant agreement on the innkeep’s face.

***

From the deck of the ship he watched the city fall away astern. The morning sun shone clear over the piled-up houses, the wandering narrow streets, the angled roofs. A pall of dust still hung over the rubble of the cathedral–and another, where it seemed the Queen’s castle had not outlasted its mistress. Einar allowed himself a small nod. Though the operation had been costly, far more costly than he could wish, vampires were best rooted out entirely, like a bad tooth, not a single scrap remaining to cause later mischief. He regretted the damage to the village, the people lost, but he could not regret the vampires destroyed.

Fingering the hilt of his favorite short sword, he watched the town recede a moment longer, savoring the cleanly sea breeze in his hair, and then went below to check on Clover.

He found her sitting up in her cot, pensively rubbing the silver medallion of her god. Hooking a three-legged stool with his ankle, he dragged it to her bedside and settled down.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

She didn’t look up. Her hair fell in loose, soft waves about her shoulders, concealing all but the tip of her nose.

“We won, I suppose,” she said. “But why does victory feel like failure?”

She turned the medallion over and over between her fingers, silver gleaming and hiding, gleaming and hiding.

Einar waited.

Abruptly she raised her head, her eyes as huge as a child’s after a nightmare. “The god was with me,” she said. “I felt him. But you–you saved me. Twice. I don’t even know his name. Is he really real? Or–”

She held up the medallion, showing him its mellow silver surface.

It was blank.

“Clover.” Gently he closed his fingers around it. “Does it matter?”

She bridled. “Of course it matters! If he isn’t, if I’ve been fooling myself this whole time–”

He squeezed her hand. “Delusions don’t slay demons.”

“Yes, but–”

He laid his hand firmly on the top of her head, like a father cat telling a fractious kitten to Stop It.

She stopped it.

Einar licked his lips. Some things were easy to understand but hard to put into words. “Just because you don’t understand,” he said, “doesn’t mean it wasn’t real. Would a real god be something you could understand completely?”

“I don’t know.” She looked down. “I never had a god before.”

“Well there you go.” He gave her head one last pat and rose. “Rest more. Odin knows how long until we make port again.”

“Einar.” She snatched at his hand, squeezing it hard. “Thank you for saving me.”

He snorted into his moustache. “Sleep,” he said. “Tonight we’ll eat on deck and see if we recognize any stars.”

She made herself smile, but her fingers still clutched her silver medallion.

Her blank silver medallion.

Shaking his head, he ascended the ladder back into daylight and fresh salt air. The town had vanished astern, the mountains a blue haze above the horizon. The captain stood at the helm with his usual loose, easy stance–and if you didn’t believe in gods, how did you explain one man–one man whose features were veiled in perpetual shadow, even at midday–crewing an entire ship? Einar gave him a nod and took up a spot at the rail, watching the white wake creaming against the wine-dark sea.

They sailed on.

FINIS.

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Kat Laurange is an animator, fencer, committed coffee drinker, and mother, who lives near Dallas, Tx. She is the author of The Voyage to Ruin (as HL Trombley) and currently querying her fantasy novel, Steel Butterfly.

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