Our Beast is unlike a true animal, Qarakh had once said. An animal follows its instincts, lives by certain patterns of behavior. Not so the Beast. The only boundaries on its hunger and rage are those that an individual Cainite can impose. But the tribe—and the rules we live by—provide a tether for the Beast: one long enough to permit freedom, but not so long as to allow it to run completely wild. Mongols value a principle called yostoi—balance. Within my tribe, balance between Cainite and Beast is possible.
Alessandro wanted to believe in Qarakh’s dream of a feral tribe living in yostoi, and most nights he did. But this night, watching his khan lope away in the form of a wolf hungry for the kill, he wasn’t so certain.
“Damn him,” Arnulf growled. “Why should he have all the fun?”
Alessandro turned to the Goth, intending to explain why it was necessary for the khan to go after the Christian knight alone, but before he could speak, Arnulf’s form wavered and then a second wolf, this one black and significantly larger than the one Qarakh had become, stood in the warrior’s place.
With a yip at Alessandro, Arnulf took off in the direction the knight and Qarakh had gone. The Iberian turned to Deverra and Grandfather. The Telyav priestess seemed worried, but the lore-keeper just shrugged. Wilhelmina watched Arnulf speed away, looking as if she wished she could join the hunt too.
Alessandro sighed. So much for yostoi.
Rikard watched as the four remaining members of Qarakh’s inner circle went their separate ways. The decrepit lore-keeper shuffled off toward his ger, moving as if he felt as old as he looked, and the Telyav witch walked away from the camp in the direction opposite that which Qarakh and the Goth barbarian had taken, shaking her head and muttering to herself. The Hound of Iberia (and what exactly was that sobriquet supposed to mean, anyway?) stood where he was a moment longer before heading over to speak with one of the Cainites standing guard at the edge of the camp. The Norsewoman summoned a ghoul to tend to her horse and then moved into the crowd of villagers to feed. Rikard wasn’t quite sure what had just transpired between them—though he was certain it had something to do with the knight Wilhelmina had taken prisoner—and he didn’t really care. It just showed that Qarakh’s all-important tribal rules applied to everyone but the great khan himself. Alessandro—who did the actual work of running the tribe while Qarakh was off roving the devil only knew where—was forever drumming the Tartar’s precious rules into the recruits’ heads.
Feed when you hunger, but kill only when necessary.
Show your enemies no mercy, but do not torment others needlessly.
He touched his throat. The blood of the girl he’d drained had healed him (and by Caine, hadn’t it been sweet as sin?), but he could still feel the wound. At least he could speak above a whisper now.
After Qarakh had cut his throat and shoved him out of the tree, he’d lain insensate for a time. But he’d managed to wake up and stagger back to the camp and into the ger he shared with several other recent recruits just as the first rays of dawn painted the eastern sky.
Do not torment others needlessly… kill only when necessary. What rubbish! Qarakh had definitely tormented him last night, and he’d nearly killed him as well. And for what? To teach him a lesson? How necessary was that? And what about hunting this Sir Marques? Was that torment necessary? His companions and he had only been feeding. That’s what mortals were for!
Being a night creature wasn’t about rules. It was about freedom—the freedom to do whatever one wanted whenever one wanted… and to whomever one wanted.
Rikard considered leaving the tribe that night. With everything going on—the feast, Wilhelmina’s return, Qarakh and Arnulf both off hunting the Frenchman—he could slip away without anyone noticing. And even if they did notice, he could always claim that he’d come down with a case of wanderlust. Half the tribe wandered off like filthy nomads at the drop of a hat anyway.
He had just about made up his mind to go (after draining one more child, perhaps a boy this time) when he noticed one of Qarakh’s ghouls walking toward the khan’s ger. (What was the man’s name? Sasha. That was it.) The ghoul heading to the tent wasn’t unusual—the Tartar actually allowed his ghouls to share his sleeping space, a practice that Rikard found not only distasteful but somewhat on the deviant side. What was unusual was the way the ghoul moved. Normally Sasha carried himself with a dignity that, in the ghoul’s mind at least, befitted his station. But now he barely lifted his feet off the ground as he walked, and he kept his head hung low, almost as if he were in mourning.
As he watched the ghoul step into the tent, Rikard was at a loss to explain the man’s demeanor, but when Sasha came back out of the tent carrying the body of Qarakh’s other ghoul—a woman whose name Rikard couldn’t remember—the Cainite grinned. The khan had once again broken the rule about killing without necessity. Sasha carried the woman away from the camp, and Rikard, intrigued, decided to postpone his leavetaking long enough to discover how the ghoul intended to dispose of the evidence of his khan’s hypocrisy.
And perhaps, Rikard thought as he began to follow, stepping as silently as a stalking cat, I might be able to pay back my almighty chieftain for giving me this little present. He rubbed the nonexistent wound on his throat and thought black thoughts as he continued after Sasha.
“How can he be so foolish?”
He only follows his nature.
It was dark here—so dark that even with her night-born eyes Deverra
