9
EVERYTHING FELT... WRONG.

Nick was suffocatingly warm. His limbs seemed weighed down by some enormous force. His head ached, and his normally slow-beating heart raced faster than it had in eight centuries. It hadn’t pounded like this since he was...

Mortal.

He sat up abruptly, gasping for air that he would not have needed moments ago.

“It’s all right.  Just breathe – slowly.” That was Natalie, he realized, holding onto his arm with a surprisingly strong grip. Nick blinked, struggling to bring her into focus. Had it been this dim inside the church before?

“Nat...” he tried to say, but he couldn’t quite force the word out. Breathing at all was still proving difficult.

“Slowly,” Nat repeated, and dabbed at his forehead with a blood-stained handkerchief that he recognized as his own. “You took a wallop from the pew when you fell,” she explained. “It’s still bleeding a little.”

Nick took over the handkerchief duty with a small nod of thanks. “What happened?” He managed to get the words out this time, though his own voice sounded strange to him.

“Don’t you know?” The softly-accented voice asking that question belonged to Henri LeFebre. Nick looked up to see the faith healer standing over them. He appeared tired and more drawn than Nick remembered, but he also looked positively jubilant. “The darkness has left you,” he said.

Nick held onto Nat with one hand and the nearby pew with the other as he pulled himself upright. The sanctuary tilted, lost focus for a moment, and then straightened itself out again. “How?” he asked hoarsely.

“You might just as well ask how the sun rises.” LeFebre shook his head. “When He so chooses, God answers our prayers.”

“But it can’t...” Nick stared at his own hand, flexing the fingers repeatedly. “It can’t possibly be that simple!”

“For the asking,” the healer repeated. “Your faith has freed you. It is as simple a miracle as that.”

A dazed Nick found that he had to sit down again on the same pew he’d just used to pull himself upright. “It’s gone,” he said incredulously. “It’s gone, Nat. The vampire, the hunger, the guilt. All of it.”

Natalie muttered something that he didn’t quite catch. She was preoccupied at the moment with capturing his left wrist and checking his now-human pulse against her wristwatch. Nick was suddenly aware that he couldn’t hear her heartbeat any more; couldn’t sense any trace of the blood that flowed through her arteries, her veins. Nothing from her, nothing from LeFebre. He couldn’t even hear his own heart. Were all mortals so deaf to the life thriving everywhere around them?

“Anything.” He looked up at the faith healer. “Anything you ask. Name it and I’ll see that it’s yours.”

LeFebre shook his head again. “No.” He’d retreated to stand beside one of the prayer benches, looking nearly as exhausted as Nick felt. “God’s work is its own reward. I do not require any other.”

Natalie had finally released Nick’s wrist. “Well, I saw it,” she said, “but I’m still not sure I believe it.” When Nick found his feet again and approached LeFebre, she came alongside. “There was some sort of pinkish glow, and a bright flash of light. You’ll excuse the expression, I hope, but what the hell was that?”

LeFebre looked away to the cross on the wall. “Only the One True Light,” he replied, and while Nat looked perplexed at that answer, he extended a hand toward Nick. “Go with God,” he said.

Nick shook the proffered hand. “I’ll find some way to repay you.  I promise you that.”

With all of his newly-recovered mortal soul, it was a promise Nick fully intended to keep.

*    *    *

His infirmary had been abandoned and stripped of all its furnishings sometime during the day. Nicholas found his aides and patients gone, all of his instruments removed. Even the ashes on the hearth were cold. An oppressive silence hung over the empty house – over all the streets, in fact, from the Blachernae Gate to the Imperial Palace. Though lamplight flickered in a few of  the  palace windows,  no movement  could  be seen within. The soldiers on the walls had ceased their prayers and supplications.

In the two months he had spent here, Nicholas had never known the holy city to fall under such a pall of silence. Where had everyone gone?

He’d been standing before the dormant hearth, lost in thought, when a footfall sounded from behind him. “Master Nicholas?”

He wheeled to find Leander in the doorway.

“It is you!” The boy rushed forward, his eyes wide with astonishment. “They said that a demon rent the door asunder and dragged you and the Janissary from the prison! They said it was a thing black and terrible, with huge bat’s wings and flaming eyes!”

“No.” Nicholas tried to smile, but didn’t quite succeed. “There was no demon.”

“But the door was splintered into kindling. I saw it with my own eyes! How are you come here? How did you...?”

“Never mind, Leander. It is better that you do not know. Why is it so quiet here? Has the emperor fled the city?”

The shoemaker’s son continued to stare at him for a time, perhaps convinced that this sorcerer-physician had escaped the clutches of Satan himself. Perhaps, Nicholas mused, not so wild an assumption at that, considering with whom he’d spent the day.

“Fled?” the boy echoed his question. “No. He has sworn to remain, even to die with us if the walls should fall. But our forces may soon be stronger. It is said that a fleet is coming from Venice, another from Genoa.”
 
“And what of today’s siege? It did not breach the wall?”

Leander laughed, which was hardly the response Nicholas had expected. “Today there was no siege,” he said. “No cannon, no culverin, not even a drum and fife. He is a sly warlord, this Mehmet. Two months of daily battles, and now, for the first time, he does nothing. He waits.”

“And our patients?” Nicholas queried, sweeping a hand toward the empty room in which they stood.

“Giustiniani had them taken to St. Mary’s in Blachernae for safekeeping. The priests are caring for them.”

“And where has everyone else gone? Why are the streets so deserted? I have never seen the city so quiet as this.” Even as Nicholas asked the question, a distant bell began tolling, a lonely, dolorous sound in the stillness.

“Come,” Leander said, and turned for the door. “I will show you.”

Nicholas followed the boy east in the direction of the tolling bell, down winding paths that would lead, if one followed them all the way, to the sea walls. They passed most of the city’s many churches along the way, each and every one as dark and lifeless as the infirmary had been.

“Have the priests given up hope as well?” Nicholas wondered. They had already left behind the domes and towering crosses of St. Savior of the Chora, St. John in Petra, St. Mary Pammacaristos, and St. John in Trullo. Though he had never set foot inside, Nicholas had come to know them all.
 
“No,” Leander answered, but said nothing more to alleviate Nicholas’ fears.

They walked on, past St. Theodosia, Christ Pantepoptes, Christ Pantocrator, and the Church of the Holy Apostles. They came to the Mese Street then, and at last there were voices, lit torches, and others in the roadway, all of them heading toward the ringing bell. Nicholas knew, then, from whence it had to come. At the Mese Street’s end lay the Hagia Sophia – the Church of the Holy Wisdom – whose dome and cross stood taller than any other. It was there that the omen had  descended, there that people had always gathered in times of despair, and there that the pealing bell summoned them now.

Alarmed, Nicholas stopped Leander midway through the marble-paved forum, at the base of Constantine’s pillar. “Why St. Sophia?” he demanded. “Do they expect defeat this night? Is that the reason for this knelling funeral dirge?”

Again Leander laughed. “You mistake us, Master Nicholas. Tonight Sophia’s fathers have called a service like no other. A service open to all the city’s priests, and to all of her people.”

“What?” For a moment, Nicholas was certain he had missed Leander’s meaning. Holy or not, this was a city divided by many sects and factions, and none of them had ever worshiped hand-in-hand with the others. “All of them?”

“All who will. Come and see.” Leander surged ahead and was at once swallowed by the sea of mortals streaming through the forum’s eastern archway.

Nicholas pressed forward to follow him, only to be swept into the wave of humanity himself. At once, he found himself overwhelmed by their pounding heartbeats, their blood scent, and most telling of all, the mute undercurrent of fear they exuded. He was forced to break away, freeing himself from the throng once they had cleared the arch and finding his way to a wall abutting the street. There, he pressed himself to the chill clay bricks and waited until the vampire’s dark urges had abated. Only when they subsided did he dare move into the crowd once again.

By the time he came within sight of the cathedral, its bell had ceased tolling and a hush had fallen over the swelling multitude that spilled by the hundreds out its open doors into the street. The lights of a thousand lamps and candles shone from those doors, turning night into day as far as the hippodrome’s east wall.

Drawing nearer the doors, Nicholas strained to see what was going on inside, but saw only the mass of humanity gathering in the nave. He did glimpse a few of the magnificent mosaics that graced Sophia’s walls and inner domes, artistry he had heard lovingly described by many, but until now had never come near enough to view. A ceiling-high Christ, its hand raised in blessing, gazed down upon the worshipers with compassionate eyes. At intervals, bathed in the brilliant, shifting light, its benevolent mouth appeared to smile.

Nicholas started when a mortal hand clasped his shoulder. He spun, half-expecting to find one of Giustiniani’s guards behind him. But it was only Leander, who had somehow found him again in the throng. “Come inside with me,” the boy implored him. “We will find a place to stand.”

The yearning to do precisely as Leander asked was almost more than Nicholas could bear. But even now, the Beast raged at him for having come this near. He pulled away from the young Greek’s leading grasp. “You go,” he said. “I will watch from here.”

Something in Leander’s eyes seemed to make him grow older in that moment. “You cannot go inside, can you?” he ventured.

Nicholas looked into those suddenly too-discerning eyes and told him the truth. “No,” he confessed.

For the first time in their brief acquaintance, Leander did not proceed to press him with endless questions. Instead, the shoemaker’s son took him by both hands and pressed them in a reassuring grasp. “Have faith, Master Nicholas. I will say a prayer for you.”

Shamed by Leander’s sincerity, he lowered his gaze to the ground and nodded mutely. In another moment, the boy had gone.

Nicholas retreated a short distance, blending into a cluster of Venetians outside the door. From there, he could see that hundreds of Greeks, Italians and Catalans, whether tradesmen or noblemen, Byzantine or Papist, were massing together in answer to St. Sophia’s bell. Why, on this particular night, had all of their divisions so mysteriously vanished?

From inside the great church, the voices of many priests began chanting the Greek liturgy of the Blessing of the Kingdom of God. Fragrant  smoke  from their censers soon wafted out into the street, and their petitions echoed after, entreating the Heavenly Father for peace. A chorus of voices within and without responded with a resounding cry of “Kyrie eleison.” Lord have mercy.

Nicholas saw them then. Several of the richly-robed, bearded priests moved amongst the people inside and chanted the petitions, their fuming censers swinging in small, tight circles. Again, the crowd responded as one. “Kyrie eleison.”

Behind the Greek priests, then, came several of their Roman church brethren, praying as well. Bitter rivals for centuries, their two sects had never before, to Nicholas’ knowledge, united in worship. The sight seemed so bizarre as to conjure the specter of an ill omen – assuming one believed in ill omens. Still more troubling was the aura of fear that he could sense from the onlookers. It emanated so strongly from so many that the vampire’s predatory instincts began to respond, arousing the Hunger.

Angrily, Nicholas strove to suppress it. Not here. Please, not here.

New voices now rose from inside the cathedral. “Jesu dominum nostrum, miserere nobis,” they recited. Jesus our Lord, have mercy on us. It was the first time in two centuries that Latin prayers had echoed off St. Sophia’s walls.

The crowd responded this time in a smattering of tongues, but all of them translated into a single, eternal plea for deliverance.

“Lord, have mercy.”

“Kyrie eleison.”

“Jesu dominum...”

“Lord, have mercy!”

The supplications rose in volume, filling the night until they must have been audible from the city’s land walls. At length, however, the stark terror underlying them all drove the vampire to flee, lest he be forced to reveal himself in their midst.

While the priests began reciting antiphons in both Latin and Greek, Nicholas escaped into the shadows of the hippodrome’s gate. He found an alcove in the wall, folded himself into its comforting darkness, and waited for the blood lust to dissipate once again.

Before the Hunger had entirely abated, a tall figure in black monk’s robes seated itself, uninvited, beside him. For a time, they silently watched the liturgy proceed through the singing of hymns, the Trisagion and readings. Then again, the Kyrie eleison resounded throughout the assembly.

“How touching,” LaCroix’s acerbic voice said from beneath the concealing monk’s hood. “And how altogether miserably futile.”

Nicholas indignantly contradicted him. “Faith is never futile,” he said, and yet he wondered if these worshipers believed it to be true. "Still, they behave as though certain doom awaits them, as though they expect the walls to crumble. How can they know?”

Long fingers reached to pull back the cowl, revealing LaCroix’s frost blue eyes and stony visage. “How can they not?”

Nicholas bristled at that. “God will not allow the walls to fall. I know it.”

“God...” On LaCroix’s lips, the word became an imprecation.  “Your God cares not a whit for this petty squabble between emperors and sultans. And neither should you.”

“So you say.”

LaCroix scoffed. “Pay homage,” he said, “to no god – nor to any demon – greater than yourself. Heed that advice, my errant child, and that remnant of a soul to which you cling might at long last find peace.”

Nicholas said nothing. Throughout the mortal gathering, now, the Lord’s Prayer was echoing in many languages. Priests in vestments Greek and Roman carried chalices, the sacred Species mixed within them, out into the streets. Some ministered to the worshipers there while others carried the communion on to the sea walls and the guards who kept vigil from atop them.

Nicholas rose, intending to go back into the crowd and again approach the door to look for Leander. He’d scarcely stepped from the alcove, however, when from the west, a lone church bell started to chime. The booming report of a cannon sounded from the same direction. Then, one upon the other, all the bells between the land walls and St. Sophia began tolling the alarm. Sophia’s own bell soon added to the tumult.

Chaos erupted. The mortals dispersed at a mad run to reach their weapons and their posts in time to counter the assault. The priests retreated back into the sanctuary’s blazing light, scores of women and children at their heels.

While the courtyard emptied of its human throngs, Nicholas recognized one green cloak in the press of bodies and straightaway plucked Leander from their midst.

“Where are you going?” he demanded.
 
“To the walls!” The boy pointed eagerly to the west, shouting over the clamoring bells. “Do you not hear? The Turks are...”

“No!” Nicholas held him fast. “You are too young to fight. Stay here, Leander, in the church, where it is safe.”

“I cannot. I am sworn to defend God’s city, as any other Greek is sworn!”

Nicholas shook him. “Not tonight. Go inside.”

“I am not afraid...” Leander started to argue, but Nicholas had taken him gently but firmly by the hair,  forcing the pale green eyes to look deeply into his. “You will remain here,” he commanded.

Leander blinked, momentarily bewildered, but his strong will shortly surrendered itself to Nicholas’ urging. He nodded, then without further words, turned and walked back to the open church doors, shortly vanishing into the light.

Nicholas felt his sire’s approach as another barrage of cannon fire thundered from the west. He pivoted to meet his maker’s glacial scrutiny.

“And so...” Even over the din, LaCroix’s whisper was perfectly audible to his creation. “...it begins.”