Chapter One:
Concerning Brethren, Whether Lost or All Too Present
(CONTINUED)
Il Naviglio Grande, VIII Id. Apr.
(April 6)
Antonio glanced up from his map and took the measure of the stars.
"Sunrise in less than three hours," he noted. "We'll
have to stop soon."
"I'd hoped to get a little further along," said Etienne.
"Had you? We're drawing rather near the Tzimisce's border.
Don't tell me you want to sleep inside it."
"Are we really that close? What does the map say?"
"It says we're close," Antonio retorted.
Etienne sat back in his saddle. Antonio had been jealous of the
map from the night they had set out. No doubt he hoped to divine
the secret of its manufacture; and well he might, for it was
a marvelous creation indeed, on loan from Gilbert's own collection.
It laid out in nearly true scale all the country between Florence
and Milan, and every so often words in brown ink would appear
and disappear on it: warnings and comments that showed themselves
only to Tremere eyes.
Of these magical markings, the most useful were directions to
the houses of various mortals whom the clan had cultivated in
one way or another. In Bivigliano they had stayed with an alchemist,
who suspected the truth and had hinted broadly about immortality
potions; in Scarperia an astrologer had turned his pregnant wife
out of bed to accommodate them; in Bologna there was an actual
chantry, headed by Antonio's own sire; in Reggio a kindly doctor
had welcomed Antonio as the "cousin of his old University
friend" and delightedly traded books with Etienne.
But after Reggio the vampires were all Ercole's vassals; no more
obliging mortals awaited the Tremere at their stops. In Parma,
Piacenza, and Lodi, the prince's letter of safe-conduct had gained
them little more than curt permission to take a room at an inn
and be on their way the next sunset. From Lodi, their route had
cut west across the countryside, and now, they stood at last
on the bank of the Naviglio Grande, the great canal that
led toward Abbiategrasso and the Ticino river...toward Taliesin's
villa and the Tzimisce's lands.
"You could at least tell me where we are," Etienne
prodded.
"Trezzano-sul-Naviglio."
"Trezzano-sul-Naviglio, and what does that mean to us? What
about the villa?"
"What about it?" Antonio was bent over the parchment
again.
"When will we get there?"
"Assuming no mishaps, tomorrow night."
"I see." The Frenchman pulled off one glove so he could
run his fingers through his thick auburn hair, which, because
it was too short to be bound like Antonio's, kept getting disheveled
as they rode. "Well. At least there shouldn't be any trouble
finding an inn along the canal."
Antonio folded up the map and thrust it in his belt, then spurred
his horse to a brisk walking pace. "We're not stopping at
an inn."
"We're not?" Etienne urged his own mount on as well,
waving absently back toward the wagon to rouse the servants from
whatever silly debate they'd been having all night. The reliability
of Albertus Magnus or some such nonsense.
"No. We'll ride on a little longer, then pull off into the
trees and make camp."
"Oh, for the love of heaven."
"The less notice we attract in these parts, brother, the
better," Antonio reminded him. "Besides, the wagon
will hold us well enough. It's got wards on it even you can set."
Etienne dismissed any thought of a sharp reply to this. It was
good to know he had not been imagining all that odor of magic,
anyway.
"I don't understand why the clan took an estate so near
Ruthven's, if he's that dangerous," he said at last. "Surely
there are other places along the ley-line that would have done
just as well."
"There are other places, but that was the only such land
Prince Ercole was willing to grant us. I guess he didn't like
it very much. Or else he thought we'd refuse it for the obvious
reason, and then he'd have the excuse of our ingratitude to banish
us."
"Still, if the villa is meant to be a waystation –"
"It was a good one for Taliesin," Antonio interrupted.
"Or it should have been. Once he was on the High Road, he
should have whisked right past the Tzimisce's Domain with no
trouble."
"In that case, he must not have made it to the High Road."
"Oh, you don't think it's possible?"
Etienne shrugged. Here was the game again, that tiresome Tremere
game of alluding teasingly to some spell or other. All Etienne
really knew about the Rite of the High Road was that he did not
possess it himself, and neither did Antonio in all likelihood.
And that it could only be cast at a ley-line. The one they rode
alongside now must not be strong enough for such a purpose, but
it was certainly strong enough for a junior apprentice to sense:
if he let his eyes defocus, he could even see it. This was not
the great conduit that supposedly flowed through and under and
over the Ticino itself, but some nephew tributary, which became
ever swifter as it drew near the confluence. Its energy dipped
and swirled, pulled off-course by various things along the way;
but it followed essentially the same path as the two Tremere,
bending like a lodestone to the influence of man's hand –
the canal and the road that paralleled it. Or had the ley-line
guided the diggers on their course, all unbeknownst? Now there
was a question for a Conclave debate.
"I think anything's possible," he mused.
The two vampires fell silent for a moment. Their horses were
oddly quiet as well, as though the blood-draughts that had given
them better night vision and gentled them for monstrous riders
had also removed their hooves to some little way above the ground.
Behind them, the mortal mishmash of Tuscan, Swabisch and Latin
continued to wash out in murmuring ripples, by now as much a
part of the landscape as the dark smooth planes of the Lombardy
farmsteads.
"Taliesin would have stopped at the villa on the way back,
I assume."
"What?" Antonio was casting his keen gaze up and down
the banks of the canal; he frowned irritably at his brother's
words, but did not turn his head.
"On the way back. If all had gone well, he would have stopped
at the villa again, no?"
"Of course, but all didn't go well, so what does that matter?"
"I'm just curious as to whether this Signor Domenici has
started to miss Taliesin yet. Nobody's written him, as far as
I know."
"I wrote him. That was the letter I sent in Bologna. But
I didn't speak of our mission, naturally."
The corner of Etienne's mouth crooked ironically. "Naturally."
Now Antonio looked at him. "What are you getting at?"
"I'm not getting at anything, only wondering," he protested.
Then he paused. If he had only half of his brother's attention,
or less than that, as he now suspected, there was little use
in going on.
"Well, then, what are you wondering?" Antonio
amended.
Etienne felt encouraged despite the sour tone. "It does
occur to me that it would have been much more prudent to waylay
Taliesin on the return trip," he said. "As it is, we
missed him right away, but if the killer had waited till after
he left Florence..."
"Then Alexander would have reported him missing."
"Would he? Who dares question his superior's comings and
goings? Would you so blithely cast the Farspeech Rite on the
most wise Lord Councillor, if Gilbert were late in returning
from somewhere?"
"That's different. Anyway, eventually he would have worked
up the courage."
"Eventually," Etienne agreed immediately, "to
be sure. But perhaps not for weeks. In any case, Alexander's
only an apprentice."
"You are trying to get at something. I wish you would
just spit it out."
"Honestly, I'm only trying to think what I'd do if I wanted
Taliesin dead."
"Hmph."
"And you're right, I know the Tremere would have to miss
him eventually...so I've got to figure out what to do about them."
"About us, you mean. By the Seven, Etienne, there's
no way to know how it happened yet," Antonio snapped. "Perhaps
it was planned, perhaps it wasn't, maybe the killer knew about
the Conclave, maybe he didn't. You amaze me. Here we are a stone's
throw away from enemy lands, and your head is in the debating
hall at the University of Paris."
The three words were bitterer to Etienne than Antonio knew, or
indeed deserved to know. "I never went to university,"
he answered coolly.
"It certainly doesn't show." The Florentine was searching
again, his expression clouded.
"Is something wrong?"
"No. I've got to keep watching for landmarks, is all."
"Which landmarks?"
"There are a number of them. – You back there!"
Antonio called to the wagon, which was trailing further behind
than usual. "Can't you keep it down and mind your task?
Your mules are stumbling."
Hans, the driver, looked up. His round face puckered as he squinted
ahead at his masters.
"I'm sorry, m'lord," he called back. "It's getting
too dark to see the bumps in the road...we only know it's there
when we hit it."
"We could let them have a light," suggested Etienne.
Antonio shook his head. "The moon will have to do. I don't
want to carry a torch through the Tzimisce's country tomorrow,
either. It's all towpaths from here on out."
Etienne bent his horse's neck with a tug of the reins, bringing
it up alongside his superior's.
"We do have a special safe-conduct from the prince,"
he murmured, "and Ruthven's got to know that."
"As if that made any difference," Antonio muttered
back.
"But it does. Assuming he doesn't wish to make enemies of
Lucia and Ercole both."
"I wouldn't assume."
"Are you truly so certain he's to blame?" Etienne inquired
soberly.
"You absolutely insist on being tiresome tonight."
"Well, if something is wrong, by all means –"
"Nothing is wrong."
"Is it time to pull off the road?"
Antonio said nothing for a moment.
"You know I'm only eager for the truth," he began at
last, "but isn't he the likely culprit? History would suggest
it."
"Certainly."
"And he does dwell hereabouts."
"Yes, but hereabouts would be the ideal place for anyone
to attack our brothers, not just for Ruthven," Etienne pointed
out. "After all, I doubt they left the chantry much, except
to make these trips – or did they?"
"I suppose not." Antonio dug a heel in his mount's
side to put the distance back between them. "Still, even
if someone else killed them, he'd need the Tzimisce's complicity,
wouldn't he? I've heard stories about that clan, how they burrow
their poison tendrils into the soil itself. They know everything
that goes on in their domains, everything."
"The road isn't Ruthven's, nor is the river, or the canal."
"Don't split hairs. Do you really think a great magus could
be killed out here without his knowing it?" Antonio
cast his arm about in true Italian fashion to show exactly where
'here' was, then stopped himself a moment later, glancing up
warily as though Ruthven might be flying right over their heads
(which, for all they knew, he was; legends of the Tzimisce tended
to be fanciful on such points).
"I don't know. When we get to Milan, we'll need to keep
our ears open. Try to divine whether they had any other enemies."
"We will, will we? What I'd like to divine
is why you want to exonerate the fiend."
"I don't, brother," replied Etienne in the most unchallenging
tone he could muster. "I simply think it's prudent to consider
every possibility, before we set anything irrevocable in motion.
Ruthven –"
"Will you stop blathering on about Ruthven!"
Antonio rounded on him now, dark eyes hard enough to strike sparks
from, vampire teeth erupting. "What in hell do you mean
anyway, set anything in motion? We're not supposed to be setting
things in motion, we're supposed to be investigating. I, I
am rather. You're only supposed to be helping!"
This time there were no mortal voices filling the gap after Antonio's
outburst, only a jarring, dread-laden silence. The magus clucked
in exasperation and switched to French, which neither Hans nor
Vittorio understood.
"Or have you forgotten that?"
"I haven't forgotten," said Etienne.
The trees pressed close against the road on either side of the
canal now, encouraged by the dampening soil of the river basin;
it had been a gradual thickening, but it seemed sudden to the
two Tremere, as they roused themselves to look around.
"There's a mist on the water up ahead," remarked Etienne,
quite unnecessarily.
"Yes. It's the right temperature for it. Damn." Antonio
brought out his map again and spread it open it across his mount's
neck.
"How close are we now?"
"Well, if I can't see anything, I can't very well tell,
can I? When we come upon the bridge..." He leaned over,
peering at the cramped notations.
"Then we'll be at Ruthven's border?"
"No, then we'll be past it."
"...Ah."
"There's a crossroads with a big tree and a path winding
north; that's the border. It says it's the third crossroads before
the bridge."
"It doesn't say anything else?"
"It doesn't yet. God's teeth. Perhaps that was Vermezzo
instead...the custom-house...but how did we end up so far west?"
"Weren't you saying something the other night about Tzimisce
being weather-witches?" Etienne broke in.
"Don't start any nonsense now, Etienne. It's ill-timed."
"I mean it as a serious question." The haze began to
swallow them. Etienne turned his head and watched the mules and
wagon fade: the beasts surged forward to catch up, but their
blurry silhouette seemed to retreat regardless. His brother,
too, had become a storm-grey ghost at his side.
"Well, it hardly matters, does it?" An angry scuffling
accompanied Antonio's words as the map was put away a final time.
"If he knows we're here, he knows. Stop talking. Keep your
ears pricked and look for that crossroads."
I'd better do more than that, thought Etienne. His horse
had slowed of its own accord. The forest beside him showed itself
mainly as a darker area within the overall cloud; he could see
nothing further away than his own foot with any clarity of detail.
It was an ideal backdrop against which to observe the play of
the phantasmal.
He began by looking at nothing, deliberately refusing to let
his gaze linger upon or identify anything it might touch. Immediately,
the glow of the ley-line resurfaced – stronger than ever
now, and far more alluring to the eye. He put up a hand to block
the whirling stream of radiance from view while he deepened his
focus by several more degrees. The effort touched off a spark
in his dormant blood; warmth, like the barely-remembered fire
from a swallow of brandy, spread outward from his heart and through
the tracery of his veins. That quickening of sorcerous energy
would cost his next meal dearer than usual, but at least it had
result. Shapes began to coalesce. Wood, water, and air all teemed
with moving things.
He let out a tiny, reflexive gasp. The reins of Antonio's horse
jingled as he pulled up short.
"What?" came the tense whisper.
"We are being watched," Etienne whispered back.
"Across the canal..."
"Where?"
"You won't see it."
"Ah." A creak of leather; Antonio was leaning in his
saddle to look anyway. "Indulging in your hedge-magic? What's
watching us? Is it a servant of his?"
"I can't get a good look at it, it shifts too much. But
when you spoke, it stopped to listen...there!"
"Where?"
"No, it's gone, that was something else. – There's
too many of them. And they get thicker up ahead."
"Brother...you're not making a great deal of sense. Are
we heading into an ambush? Talk straight."
"I have no idea." Etienne tried to follow the cavalcade's
progress, but it was difficult. Some of the creatures defied
his admittedly limited taxonomy. Packed close together as they
were, they resembled nothing so much as the great twisting neck
of an enormous cockatrice, a dingy mottling of hide, scale, fur
and feathers tunneling chaotically through the bramble of tree-spirits.
And now he and Antonio had entered into the very thick of the
procession themselves. He became unpleasantly aware of vaporous
forms sliding along his body, a contact unhampered by velvet
or leather; they trailed under his arms, over his thighs, along
the bare skin of his neck, leaving a damp chill akin to that
of a blood-sweat after a bad dream.
"Something's near, Antonio," he said, as evenly as
he could manage. "Something that's drawing all these other
spirits...it can't be anything we want to meet. Let's turn aside
now."
"Perhaps." For the first time, there was more uncertainty
than irritation in the other vampire's voice. The hoofbeats stamped
and circled.
"Would you happen to have any idea what this terrible something
could be?" Antonio asked after a moment.
"How should I know?" Etienne returned. "It could
be the fiend, I suppose, or some dweomer of his. It could be
anything."
"I see."
Etienne bristled in vain at his brother's unspoken doubt. As
far as any of the Florentine Tremere had ever been concerned,
he stared at nothing and talked to thin air. Gilbert, perhaps,
put a little more trust in Etienne's well-populated visions,
but even he could not share them.
"These spirits, I know their like," he added, to justify
himself. "They're carrion-kites. They flock to evil, or
to places where evil has transpired..."
"Where evil has transpired..."
The same thought occurred to Etienne a moment too late. "No,
now wait...there's the mist."
"It's thinning. If we're right on top of the scene itself,
Etienne, if we can settle this tonight –!"
"If he's right on top of us!" Etienne
objected, trying to call up the specter Antonio did believe
in.
"We keep going." The iron in this order was of questionable
temper, but it held nonetheless. Antonio repeated it in loud
Tuscan for the wagon.
As Etienne forced his balking mount onward with a stab of spurs,
the vast spirit-host faded from his sight. He made no effort
to bring it back. It seemed foolish to try to hold onto the chimerical
when quite material threats might lie ahead. The mist was
thinning. Antonio was not merely being hopeful on that score.
But it had not thinned enough to reveal the source of the sounds
that greeted them from the further darkness: something dropping
into the canal, perhaps a falling branch, perhaps not; water
lapping, perhaps against a dock-piling, perhaps not; leaves stirring,
perhaps from foraging animals, perhaps not.
Don't exercise yourself so, he berated himself. Think
of the place as it must be in daylight, merchants' wagons ambling,
the shouts of bargemen and cart-drivers, and dairy cows lowing,
for the love of Francis! This is not the wilds of Hungary, or
even the Schwarzwald.
At least his superior had reappeared beside him, cloak wrapped
close around his slim shoulders now, his posture rigidly coiled
and watchful. And that was a genuine comfort. While Antonio neither
noticed nor cared to notice the ghostly traffic all around him,
Gilbert's training had honed his other senses to a keenness Etienne
could only dream of.
Thus Etienne saw the Antonio's head cock in silent alert several
seconds before he himself could tell the cause. A faint creaking
noise, wood groaning in complaint – and then a scent that
Etienne knew too well from far too many settings, the same gangrenous
stink that lingered even after a plague-house was cleared of
its dead.
He exchanged glances with his clan-brother, who nodded minutely
and grimaced. Etienne took this as a sign of hesitation and pulled
up on the reins; but Antonio did just the opposite – nudged
his horse into a canter and rode forward. Antonio! Etienne
nearly blurted. Antonio vanished into the mist once more, leaving
nothing but a muffled pounding to follow. Etienne hastened after
him. Losing his brother was a far greater worry than losing the
wagon.
He heard an indeterminate "Huh!" of expelled breath
somewhere up ahead, and the whinny of Antonio's horse as it stopped
short. The last few layers of mist sifted away.
"Is this your great looming evil, Etienne?" Antonio
asked, his tone a perfect blend of relief and sly satisfaction.
"A common gibbet?"
Etienne stared up at the tree, a white poplar bloated to prodigious
height and girth on the fertile earth of the crossroads. Six
men dangled from its branches, all a week dead or less. One had
been hung up in an iron cage, still wearing his brigandine –
condemned to die from starvation and exposure rather than the
hangman's noose. That was the weight that caused the tree to
creak so. Yet it seemed to bear up under its burdens handsomely
enough.
He schooled himself to an expression of stony patience. "I
shouldn't think a common gibbet would attract this much
malignity."
"Well, are we still awash in ghosts and devils?"
"I've told you, I don't see ghosts."
"All the same, you should doubtless have another look,"
Antonio returned comfortably.
Etienne took the suggestion more honestly than it was meant,
and obeyed. The luminosity of spirit-things was even greater
here, so near were they to the Ticino's magical deluge; most
of the creatures in this place were visible only as crescents
of reflected light, bright partial outlines that swooped and
plucked like a swarm of raptors. One thing alone, the genius
of the tree itself, stood obdurate against the blinding brilliance.
More than that, it had outgrown its own worldly counterpart.
Long prickling branches extended over Etienne's head in a treacherous
canopy, and the trunk itself swelled and waned in a cycle uncomfortably
reminiscent of breathing – the labored breathing of a glutton
at feast's end. Whether that feast had come from its roots, bathed
in the ley-line's power, or from the agony of those tied to its
wreathing limbs, or both...
He averted his eyes quickly and crossed himself.
"Well?"
"The tree's asleep. I don't want to stare at it. That might
wake it up, and its eye would fall on me."
"You're worse than some fork-fingered peasant. The evil
eye from a tree?" Antonio reined in his shying mount.
"I don't meet a spirit's gaze unless I'm ready to challenge
it. If you could see the infamous thing, brother, you'd understand."
And yet even the tree isn't reason enough, he continued
to himself. Not reason enough for all these imps. There must
be something more. But trying to pick out anything from more
than a middle distance was impossible in the glare.
"Nonsense. I've never seen such a monster of a poplar, I'll
grant you that much." The other Tremere snorted. "Look,
never mind the greenery. These men aren't common thieves, they're
soldiers. Condotierri perhaps. See their shoes? Good leather,
good spurs, and no one's stolen them either."
"Yes. We're meant to know what sort of men they are. A warning
to other freebooters to take their raiding elsewhere."
"Mm. No empty ropes, though." Antonio took his ritual
dagger, a serviceable thing of weathered steel and silver winding
with several varieties of precious stone encrusted in the pommel,
out of his robes. He pricked the palm of his left hand and held
it in a tight fist; the blood trickling from it popped and spitted
as he chanted out loud. In the wagon, Hans and Vittorio peered
out from the back where they had been huddling, and Etienne thought
he sensed the tree stirring dangerously in its slumber, its tangled
underground portion contracting under the road beneath them.
"And no sense of Tremere blood or flesh hereabouts, that
I can tell," the magus finished.
"Good. Then wherever they are, they're not here. Let's turn
back and find a place to make camp."
"Hyah!" Hans snapped the reins of his mules.
Evidently he had caught the words turn back, or the sentiment
thereof; that was cue enough for him.
"Stop, damn you! All of you." Antonio cut off the retreat
with a gesture. Then he coaxed his horse closer to the road's
edge, till its foremost hoof rested, uneasily, a few scant inches
from Tzimisce soil.
When he spoke again a moment later, it was in a deceptively casual
voice. "Now, you want to worry about silent watchers, Etienne?
I've got my sights on one right now."
Etienne said nothing, merely looked unobtrusively in the same
direction. Yes, he could just make out a tiny patch of something
pale deep within the copse. The breast of a perching bird, maybe
– he could not begin to tell what kind.
"An owl, of foreign coloring," Antonio supplied. "Vittorio
has a crossbow. Get it for me, quickly."
"That would be a breach of Tradition," Etienne said
immediately. "If we set foot on his Domain–"
"I am not proposing that," Antonio interrupted. Then
he continued in a sardonic tone: "I certainly wouldn't propose
you set foot, hand, or anything else on it."
The Frenchman's face went slack for an instant, then began to
change shape, the lines of fury finding their unaccustomed places
with startling speed.
"Or that I should either," Antonio added hastily. "As
I've said, the Tzimisce have a sense about these things. He'd
probably know right away if we did bodily cross the border. But
I can at least scare it off. Anyway, if he's going to send his
beasts to spy on us, we're certainly within our rights to shoot
at them."
Etienne, who had recently made a substantial if rather hasty
study of such niceties, was still too incensed to reply at first.
He dragged his straining temper back to heel. "Provided...said
beast were on Ercole's soil, perhaps," he said, as soon
as he could trust himself to do so. "But under the circumstances,
if you did hit it –"
"God's bones. Do you want me to fetch the weapon myself,
so you can't be held responsible under law? Is that it?"
"That is not it." Etienne felt a tightness in
the roof of his mouth now, fangs aching instinctively to bare
themselves and terrify the enemy. He set his lips into a thin,
hard line and rode over to the wagon to fetch the requested item.
Vittorio blanched, but loaded and handed it over without asking
explanation; Etienne gave it in turn to his brother, who brought
it up and sighted his target in one smooth motion –
"Hold, worms!"
The words were rough, Lombardic – and they rang out over
the thud of approaching hoofbeats from somewhere just ahead of
the two vampires.
"Back! Next to the wagon!" Antonio hardly needed to
say it; Etienne was already wheeling his mount to set his back
against the protection the wagon offered. As he did, he fumbled
in his saddlebag for something that he had thankfully packed
near the top: a dry willow branch. Once he had it, he snapped
it. A lightning-bug glow bled from the crack and then coalesced
into a ball of fog about the size of a man's head.
Actually the thing was perfectly harmless, an apprentice's trick,
all color and no venom, but few besides another Tremere would
know that; and in a pinch, Etienne supposed, he could blind someone
by sending it into his eyes.
Nor was Antonio idle. With the flick of a Hermetic finger-sign
from his free hand, green balefire sprang into being and hovered
in the well of his palm–cool and obedient while it waited
there, but ready to become true flame if he should command it
to spit out. Hans and Vittorio both drew their squat broadswords
and made ready to leap clear of the wagon if need be.
Tensed and crowded together, rank forgotten for the moment, they
watched as curls of inky smoke snaked out from between the trees,
rapidly forming a huge blotch over the road before them from
which a black-clad rider on a massive black destrier emerged.
The dark tendrils grasped at the rider's shoulders and the edges
of his cloak, only disengaging enough to reveal his overall shape
and the gleam of the bared sword in his hand. His warhorse pawed
and pulled against its reins, eager, it seemed, for the order
to charge.
Those instincts which had been nudging at the base of Etienne's
mind for the past hour, concerned, anxious that danger lurked,
now screamed confirmation and sent a bolt of pure animal terror
through bone and muscle alike to prime it for flight. Only the
fact that he was mounted and his mount backed up against a barrier
kept them both from doing immediately as instinct bid. Even the
wagon behind them bucked and rocked as the mules battled Hans'
control.
Desperate, Etienne looked to Antonio for a lead to follow–he
had no idea what this being could be, vampire, foul conjured
familiar or something else entirely; but alas, his brother's
face, wide-eyed and frozen in a defiant grimace, showed no better
comprehension.
"Cursed sorcerers," came the rider's voice again,
and though he was standing right before them, the miasma around
him made it seem distant, as though the forest itself had chosen
to speak through the veil that separated worlds. Or perhaps he
had a helm on; there was a metallic ring in the sound as well.
"Usurpers of the Blood."
The rider's gloved hand, the one that did not grasp a hilt, lifted
and pointed at the corpses swaying from the poplar's gnarled
crown.
"You see what becomes of those that violate the Lord's
realm. I trust you are prepared to join them."
| The Dragon's Masque | Cainites of Milan, 1490 | The Chronicle |