A Sharpness On The Neck (Saberhagen's Dracula Book 9) Fred Saberhagen (free ebook reader for iphone txt) 📖

      In whatever time and place a nosferatu lives, the willing help of at least one intelligent and understanding breather can be of tremendous benefit. I foresaw that I would seek such aid from someone soon—if I lived long enough. I was not without friends, in France or elsewhere. But calling for help was usually the last alternative I considered when in trouble. Earlier I had vaguely reassured myself with the thought that I had friends—but it was my own fault now that they were none of them on hand.

      Swaying with weakness, and temporarily prohibited by my injuries from changing shape, I made what plans I could.

      My appearance at this time must have been truly ghastly. Never had I less regretted my inability to use a mirror. I had a great lump on my forehead, not to mention a torn flap of skin hanging over one eye. With trembling hand I held the flap in place, until it began, very delicately and tentatively, to heal there.

      Listening, sniffing the breeze, even though I was denied the keener senses of the wolf, I thought I detected certain evidence that more of my enemies, though still miles distant, were gathering, swarming, on my trail.

      Of course it would have been mad, suicidal, for me to go back to sleep in the same earth. If one band of my enemies had found it, the others could do so also. And now the whole area around was trampled, strewn with the debris of combat, flesh and blood, bits of wood and cloth and bone and metal.

* * *

      Our struggle had been a prolonged one, and not much of the night was left. I had no choice but to retreat at once, and in man-form—never mind that I was still oozing, dripping blood, leaving a trail that would be child’s play to follow. I would have to cover as much ground as I could before the dawn, then take whatever chance Fate offered. I tried to bind up my most heavily dripping wound, where someone’s spear had gone skewering deep into my side, but soon I abandoned the attempt as hopeless. One arm was almost useless, and my usable hand was shaking uncontrollably.

      I could certainly be thankful now, with my berserker combat frenzy ebbing, that I had not been foolish enough to attempt a pursuit of my surviving attacker.

      Similarly I had to abandon the idea of improvising some kind of sunshade to protect my head and face when dawn, overtook me, as it seemed it inevitably must. My eyes in particular would be at risk, but there was nothing to be done about that now.

      Slowly I called up a mental map of the entire province, trying to decide which was my nearest earth, which the least likely for the enemy to have discovered.

      The mental image of the map as it took shape was scarcely reassuring. There was only one real possibility of survival, a sanctuary in the cellar of an antique farmhouse, which unfortunately lay more than a few miles from my present location. To reach it before dawn in my present condition would to say the least present a considerable challenge.

      Doggedly I let go my hold upon the branch and began to walk; and only as I did so, provoking in myself gray tendencies to faint, did I begin seriously to doubt whether I would make it as far as my sanctuary.

      Feeling as clumsy and vulnerable as any breather, I trudged on. I was possessed of one tiny advantage, in that I was heading west, the dawn at my back and still perhaps two hours behind me.

* * *

      Fortunately the sense of being still pursued grew no stronger, no more immediate. I knew in my bones that I was too weak to stand and fight again, even if next time I should not be so badly outnumbered. The slow draining of blood and vitality inexorably took its toll. A single determined breather with a wooden club or spear could probably have finished me when I began to flee the dawn. But of course I would make an effort, if it came to that.

      More than once on that terrible trek I heard a howl in the distance, the sound carrying from miles away, and wondered if my enemies were using hounds to hunt me down. Ordinarily I might have been able to turn the hunters’ own dogs against them, even at a distance.

      I had managed to slow my blood loss to a trickle, then to stop it almost completely. Alas, that “almost” was likely to prove fatal. My increasing weakness was binding all my powers ever more closely to me, diminishing their range.

      Dragging myself from the support of one tree or fence-post to the next, I at one point considered trying to rest in some cave where a group of vagrants had taken shelter. But I quickly rejected the idea. If I could enter the cave without an invitation, the more dangerous of my pursuers would be able to do the same.

      Hunted through the darkness before dawn, aware to the minute, almost to the second, of the approaching sunrise that was almost certain to prove fatal, I considered taking shelter in someone’s mausoleum. But again I would be helpless if any of Radu’s people overtook me there.

* * *

      When in ordinary health, I might easily enough have passed a day and night and a second day above ground, given reasonable shelter from direct sun. But in my wounded condition, the healing power of my native earth had become a grim necessity. At last, with dawn relentlessly about to break and only one possibility of help within a hundred miles, I limped, wounded and bleeding, toward the dwelling which, cold calculation informed me, represented my last chance.

      It would not have surprised me in the least to find this last hope denied me, my earth defiled, or rendered useless by being kept under watch.

      The last quarter of a