Mortality: The Story of Mortanius

Chapter Thirty-Two

“So, what do you think?” Moebius asked Mortanius later, when they were alone in Mortanius’s private quarters. A servant brought them a bottle of wine and Moebius poured their glasses.

“About what? The plan to kill Janos, or the fact that you’re giving up your staff?”

“Temporarily,” Moebius added, sitting down. “Once their mission is complete, the staff will be returned to me, of course. Admittedly, Raziel is not the person I would trust most with my staff, but he’s smart and fanatically loyal, so I’m confident that it’s in good hands.”

“That raises the question, who would you trust most with the staff? Malek?”

Moebius winced. “No, not him. Malek is a brute, as you well know. I’d be afraid that he’d shatter it over his knee in one of his fits of rage.”

“Who, then?”

“Well, you, of course,” Moebius said, taking a sip of wine. “You’re the only person other than me who really appreciates how powerful it is. Do you remember when I first showed it to you?”

Mortanius nodded, recalling the wet, dripping cave underneath the waterfall, where the original Sarafan Cult held its meetings. He wondered if that cave was still there, or if the river had finally eaten through the rock and flooded it.

“Yes, I remember. It was a turning point in my life, you might say.”

A smile flashed across Moebius’s face. “Indeed. And now, the plan to kill Janos. What do you think of that?”

He could only shrug. “I have no idea. How many times have the Sarafan tried to breach the walls of Janos’s citadel? A hundred times? I highly doubt that Janos will be foolish enough to simply let the Sarafan Knights sneak in unnoticed. And this nonsense about a secret entrance? What’s all that about?”

“It’s a hidden doorway high up on the walls of the fortress. Very hard to reach. I’ve always suspected such an entrance existed, but we could never find it before now.”

“How did you find it, then?”

“We have agents in Uschtenheim watching the fortress at all hours of the night,” Moebius explained. “Watching to see when Janos comes and goes. He must feed regularly, after all. A few months ago, they built a new residence in town that’s three stories tall, and it offers a fresh vantage point where our agent spotted Janos emerging from the doorway. That was two nights ago.”

“What if it’s locked from the outside?” Mortanius asked.

“It isn’t. Trust me.”

“How can you possibly be sure?”

Moebius gave him another sneaky grin and sipped his wine again. Mortanius had known him a long time – more than seven hundred years – and he knew Moebius’s fondness for mystery and deception. He enjoyed keeping people guessing and holding his information close at hand; it was an old habit from his youth spent under the watchful eyes of the vampires.

“You gave them your staff,” Mortanius said slowly. “What if Raziel drops it while they’re climbing up the walls of the citadel? What if the interior is trapped and they’re killed before they even reach him? You’d never risk losing the staff unless you were absolutely convinced that the mission would be successful. So how can you be sure?”

“I’ve seen it,” Moebius said.

There was a long silence as Mortanius absorbed those three small words, and tried to make sense of the ten thousand other words left unspoken in between. He lifted his glass to his lips and drank.

“You’ve seen it,” he said, setting the empty glass down.

“Yes.”

“In the future.”

“Yes. In my visions. Janos dies by Raziel’s hand.”

“Tomorrow.”

“Yes.”

“When did you see this in your visions?”

Moebius paused for a moment, and then said softly, “More than eighty years ago.”

Mortanius almost knocked the glass from the side of his chair. “What?” he blurted. “Eighty years? You saw Janos die that long ago? Why didn’t you ...”

“Tell you?” Moebius suggested. “What exactly would I have told you? That I saw a vision of a man I didn’t recognize killing Janos at some unknown point in an unknown possible future? Raziel hadn’t even been born yet. I only realized that he was the one from my vision in the past couple of years, when he started wearing that red and gold armor.”

“Visions of an unknown future,” Mortanius muttered to himself, rubbing his forehead.

“Seeing the future is complicated in ways you can’t even imagine,” Moebius said with a trace of bitterness. “I catch glimpses and fragments, here and there, sometimes contradictory ones. I’ve been constructing a magical artifact for over a century, which I hope will help me better control and clarify some of my visions, but it’s still incomplete.”

“I remember, you told me about it once.”

Moebius leaned forward in his chair, steepling his fingers. “You see, when I experience one of my visions, I have no way to know when it takes place. A year from now? A hundred years from now? I have to rely on subtle clues to determine if the vision is even part of our own timeline, or just some discarded fragment of a history that never was. Some of my visions make no sense at all, but some of them seem very clear, and those are the ones that I try to focus on.”

“What other visions have you had?” Mortanius asked, unable to stop himself.

“Oh, many different ones. I’ll tell you one, just to explain what I’m talking about. I’ve seen a King of Nosgoth. A handsome man with blond hair, wielding a massive curved sword, sitting on a throne in a huge castle. But I have no idea who he is. The castle doesn’t exist yet, so it must be decades in the future at the very least, but I suspect it’s much farther in the future than that.”

“A King of Nosgoth,” Mortanius whispered. “I can hardly believe it.”

“Neither can I, and there lies the difficulty. Is this vision true? Because I’ve had other visions, Mortanius, that I know for a fact are from alternate timelines. I’ve seen things that can never happen, but may have happened in some other world.”

“Like what?”

“I saw the Circle of Nine mourning you at your own funeral, old friend. And standing beside me and Ellendra was none other than Galhonen.”

“Galhonen?” Mortanius choked out.

“Yes, Galhonen, who died centuries ago. I saw a vision of a history where you died and he lived.”

Mortanius sank into the seat cushions, feeling dizzy and breathless. He felt like he was going to faint or vomit, or maybe both. “I don’t know … I don’t know how you can live with such visions. It would drive a common man insane to have knowledge like that. Seeing things and not even knowing if they’re real or not.” Hands shaking, he reached for the bottle of wine. Moebius picked it up for him and poured another glass.

“I’ve lived with it my entire life,” he said. “Just as you have lived with your visions of the dead and their souls in the spirit world.”

“I can’t understand all of this. You saw Raziel killing Janos eighty years ago ...”

“And now I’ve come to the conclusion that my vision was true. So I gave Malek and Raziel all the information they needed to complete this mission.”

“Did you tell them about your vision?”

“No, I left that part out,” Moebius said, shaking his head. “Perhaps I’ll tell them after Janos is dead, but I think it would be better not to tell them at all.”

“I agree,” Mortanius said. “I almost wish you hadn’t told me.”

Moebius shrugged and leaned back in his chair. “You wanted to know how I could be so certain about their mission. You must have suspected what I was going to tell you.”

“Yes, I suppose I did,” Mortanius admitted.

Moebius looked out the window. It was starting to get dark outside. “Finally, after all these centuries, we’ll have killed the last of them. I remember right after the rebellion, I thought it might only take a few decades to hunt them all down. I was wrong about that.”

“I suppose it’s fitting that he’s the last,” Mortanius said quietly after a few moments. “Out of all the vampires, he was the only one that might have been a friend to the human race. Or if he wasn’t a friend, at least he wasn’t an enemy. I think he wanted humans and vampires to live together in peace.”

“He was a fool, then,” Moebius said.

Mortanius nodded. “Yes, he was.”

“He would have died long ago, if the people of Uschtenheim hadn’t protected him for so long,” Moebius added bitterly. “And even after that, they refused to leave. We should have evacuated that whole damned town. Shackled the residents and marched them out at sword point if necessary.”

“You recommended it at the time, if memory serves.”

The unwillingness of the population of Uschtenheim to abandon their homes, even with the knowledge that a vampire lived within sight of the town, was a sore spot for the Sarafan. They had advocated for centuries for the forceful relocation of the entire town, but the Circle had always been reluctant to make such an order. The people of Uschtenheim had a right to live where they wanted, after all, and if they chose to live near to a vampire’s lair, then so be it. But the nearby proximity of so many people allowed Janos to feed regularly without having to travel far from his lair, frustrating the efforts of the Sarafan to ambush him or trap him. In the end, the Sarafan abandoned any hope of convincing the populace to leave the area, and instead focused their efforts on breaching the citadel’s walls, which failed time and time again.

“I still think some of the people in Uschtenheim secretly supported Janos,” Moebius muttered. “He gave their town notoriety, like he was some kind of attraction for travelers for gawk at. They liked having the last vampire in Nosgoth living nearby.”

“Perhaps,” Mortanius said noncommittally.

“Well, they won’t have their attraction much longer. By this time tomorrow, Janos will be dead and we’ll tear that entire fortress down to its foundation, like we did with the others.”

Mortanius looked at the bottle of wine, but it was empty. “There’s something I’ve always wondered,” he mused. “Once he’s gone, do you think we’ll find a new Guardian to take his place? We don’t even know the nature of Janos’s relation with the Pillars. I know he mentioned to me once that he was a special kind of Guardian, but I can’t remember the details. If we have to educate a new Guardian to replace Janos, what are we going to tell them?”

“I suspect we’ll learn a great deal of information about what kind of Guardian he was when we search the fortress. We’ll find records or something, I’m sure. To be honest, I don’t think it matters that much. He may have been a Guardian, but he wasn’t one with the Pillars, and the Pillars are what’s important.”

Mortanius sighed. “It’s still hard for me to believe that you saw a vision of his death. Tomorrow, the last vampire on Nosgoth will die. We should mark the calendar.”

“Yes,” Moebius agreed. “Tomorrow will be a very important date in our history.”

<--Previous Chapter|Next Chapter-->