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“No!” Larten yelped. When Mika looked at him strangely, Larten forced a weak chuckle. “I have faith in Gavner Purl. This will be a good test for him. If I think that he is struggling, I will send him back to Vampire Mountain. But I believe he will prove himself.”
“Very well,” Mika said and covered his face with his right hand, placing the tip of his middle finger to his forehead and spreading the adjoining fingers. “Even in death may you be triumphant.”
Mika departed. Arra followed, but paused at the door and glanced back with a veiled smile. “This isn’t over,” she purred. “We’ll discuss our relationship in more depth later.”
Before Larten could protest, she slipped out, leaving him alone in the large, ornate suite, to marvel at the fact that he was more worried by Arra than he was by the army of Nazis which would soon be hot on his and Gavner’s trail.
Larten was ready to strangle Gavner. He had endured more than three months of his assistant’s snoring and it was driving him mad. He’d tried herbal medicines, pegs on Gavner’s nose, even a gag, but nothing worked. He rarely got more than a couple of hours’ sleep most days. He was tired and irritated, and he blamed it all on Gavner Purl.
“What’s wrong with you?” Gavner yawned, sitting up and stretching. They had spent another day in a coffin in a crypt. Gavner had enjoyed a perfect day’s sleep, but Larten had been up for the past hour and looked as sour as a pinched baby.
“Three guesses,” Larten snapped, shooting Gavner a dark look.
Gavner laughed. “Don’t tell me I was snoring again.”
“I think you do it just to annoy me,” Larten growled.
“You should move to another coffin if it’s that bad.”
Larten’s expression darkened and he muttered foul curses beneath his breath. It had been his idea to share a coffin. They holed up in graveyards most days, although sometimes they slept in barns or old ruins. They could easily have slept apart, but Larten thought it would be safer if they stayed together. He worried that the Nazis might divide and capture one of them otherwise.
The Germans had been pursuing them for the past three months, ever since Franz realised Mika wasn’t returning. Negotiations had broken down and the officer was replaced by one who never smiled and who demanded Larten agree to his terms immediately — or else. Sensing that he had pushed them as far as he could, Larten stole away that night and he and Gavner had been on the run since.
Larten was enjoying the game of cat and mouse. He and Gavner kept one step ahead of the Nazis, moving swiftly every night, but never so fast that they couldn’t be tracked. The Nazis had almost trapped them a few times, surrounded graveyards where they were sleeping and moved in for the kill. If Larten had been human, he and Gavner would have been caught, but his sharp sense of hearing had alerted him to the threat each time and they’d managed to break free.
On one occasion the Nazis outsmarted them and sent their forces ahead of the vampires to stake out a number of graveyards in advance. That had almost been the end — they’d faced a desperate dash at dawn to find somewhere safe to rest, ending up beneath the roots of an ancient tree. Ants and other insects had made it a long, uncomfortable day. Since then Larten had varied their route, following no set pattern, deciding each day at dusk which direction to take.
Larten wasn’t sure how long the Nazis would dog their trail. Mika thought they would hound him for years. Larten doubted they were patient enough to follow him for that long, but so far they’d shown no sign of quitting. They had doubled their numbers, then doubled them again, even following the pair when they crossed the border into lands where Germans were far from welcome. Larten could have revealed the Nazis’ presence to the local authorities, but his task was to lead them on, not have them locked up.
The only real downside was Gavner’s snoring. It truly was as bad as Larten claimed. Some days he made more noise than one of the polar bears which Larten had wrestled with years earlier during their trek across the plains of Greenland.
“Perhaps if I cut off your nose…” Larten muttered, only half-joking.
“You go anywhere near my nose and I’ll slice off your ears,” Gavner retorted.
“You were not this bad when you were a child.”
“How do you know? You never checked on me when I was asleep.”
“Yes I did,” Larten protested.
“Don’t lie,” Gavner tutted. “Alicia always tucked me in and looked after me if I stirred in the night. She told me I was a terrible snorer from the start.”
“Then you admit it!” Larten pounced.
“Maybe I snore a little,” Gavner grinned.
The younger vampire moved to the mouth of the crypt and stared at the rows of headstones and crosses. It was almost dusk, but the light still hurt his eyes and he had to shield them with a hand.
“How come you don’t mind the sun so much?” he asked Larten.
“Your eyes adjust after fifty or sixty years,” Larten told him.
Gavner grimaced. “I hate the way you make the decades sound so casual. Fifty years is a long time.”
“I thought so too once,” Larten said, although honestly he couldn’t remember when fifty years had seemed like an age. Like most vampires who had been around for more than a century, he had the impression that he’d always been off-hand about the passage of time. He had forgotten the impatience of his youth, the way years had dragged. He no longer regarded the future with unease, wondering how he’d fill so many long nights. As a General of good standing, he had more things to worry about than killing time.
“You must get bored,” Gavner said. “There must be nights when you feel like you’ve been alive forever, and the thought of enduring more drives you insane.”
Larten cocked an eyebrow at Gavner. “You sound like a Cub. Perhaps you need to spend some time with vampires your own age.”
“That lot of losers?” Gavner snorted. “No chance!”
They had run into a pack of Cubs several years earlier. There weren’t as many as there had been in Larten’s youth. Vampires only rarely blooded children now, and new recruits were given more time to adjust to the ways of the clan before being asked to commit themselves. As a result, few felt as restless as Larten once had. Most were not inclined to break away from the clan for a decade or two.
But some young vampires still gathered in different parts of the globe every so often, to mix with humans and lead a free and easy life before giving themselves over completely to the vampire cause. When Gavner had been introduced to a pack, he reacted with scorn. The high-living, dandyish members reminded him of Tanish Eul and he felt nothing but contempt for them. His response delighted Larten, although he did feel a pang of shame when he considered how low an opinion Gavner would have had of him if they had met back when he went by the name of Quicksilver.
“Are there any exercises I can do to make my eyes stronger?” Gavner asked.
“Try focusing on far-off objects,” Larten said. “Fix on something in the distance and hold on it with your eyes almost shut. Slowly widen them. When the pain goes away, take a break, then focus on something else and repeat.”
“That will help?” Gavner asked dubiously.
“You will start to notice a difference fairly soon,” Larten said.
“How soon exactly?”
“Ten or fifteen years,” Larten said with a straight face.
Gavner glared, not sure if the older vampire was joking or not. Muttering to himself – much as Larten had moments earlier – he settled against the wall of the crypt near the door and commenced the exercise. Hiding a smile, Larten set about preparing their first meal of the night. He cooked a couple of rabbits which Gavner had caught earlier, using collapsible pans which Evanna had given him.
“Any rumblings from the Nazis during the day?” Gavner asked after a while.
“How could I hear anything over the sound of your snoring?” Larten replied.
“Stuffy old bat,” Gavner grunted. “You should loosen up and pull your head out of your…” He stopped. Larten thought it was because he didn’t want to complete the insult, but seconds later Gavner said, “Someone’s there.”
“Where?” Larten darted to Gavner’s side.
Gavner pointed. “On the outskirts of the graveyard. Under that tree. I can’t see anyone now, but there was a man a moment ago.”
“A Nazi?” Larten asked.
“I don’t think so. He was small, white hair, dressed in yellow.”
“With green boots?” Larten said quickly.
“Yes. You know him?”
“Aye.” Larten’s face was dark.
“Is he a vampire?”
Larten shook his head. “If your eyes were sharper, you would have seen a heart-shaped watch sticking out of his breast pocket.”
Gavner drew a sharp breath. “Mr Tiny?”
“I suspect so.”
Larten had told Gavner much about the mysterious meddler, the man of ancient years who claimed to be an agent of destiny. For a long time he had said nothing of their meeting in Greenland, when Desmond Tiny pulled him back from the brink of a deadly fall, sparing both their lives for dark, unknowable reasons of his own. But finally, since Gavner kept asking, he told the full story even though it troubled the young vampire.
“Why is he here?” Gavner asked, searching with his gaze for the strange, short man. “Doesn’t he only turn up when terrible things are about to happen?”
“He is never far from disaster,” Larten said, “but he sometimes pays visits for other reasons.” He hesitated, then decided this was as good an occasion as any to tell Gavner another of his secrets. “This is not the first time he has trailed us.”
Gavner looked around, his eyes narrowing, but not from the sunlight.
“I have caught glimpses of him several times over the decades,” Larten said. “He circles us occasionally, keeping his distance, watching.”
“Why?” Gavner snapped.
Larten shrugged.
“Maybe we should go after him,” Gavner suggested. “Face up to him. Make him explain why he follows us.”
“There is no point,” Larten sighed. “He never comes close enough to catch. The nearest he came to me was when I visited my old home last year.”
Larten had been back to the city of his birth a few times with Gavner. He liked to keep an eye on the place. Relatives of his still lived there, and although he had not tracked down any of them, he felt connected. Whenever he was within easy travelling distance, he made time to swing by and make sure that all was well with the people who had been his before he was accepted into the clan.
“I was on the roof of the house where my parents used to live,” Larten went on. “You were asleep — snoring, it goes without saying. Mr Tiny appeared on the roof next to mine. I thought he was going to say something – he stood there for ages, looking at me directly – but then he turned and left.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Gavner asked.
“I saw no reason to trouble you.”
Gavner scowled. “I’m not a child. I don’t need to be protected.”
“It had nothing to do with protection,” Larten said. “I simply did not wish to burden you with information which would have been of no use to you.”
“How do you know it wouldn’t have been useful?” Gavner grumbled. “I could have watched out for him. I might have been able to trap him.”
“No one can trap Desmond Tiny,” Larten said. “When he does not want to be approached, it is impossible to get close to him. While he obviously finds the pair of us fascinating for some reason, it is equally clear that he has no interest in speaking with us. We would only waste our time if we–”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” somebody said brightly, and both vampires reeled away from the entrance to the crypt.
As they recovered, they saw someone squatting outside the mouth of their den. He was blocking most of the light, but as he ducked forward, their eyes focused on a chubby, rosy, beaming face.
“Well,” Mr Tiny chuckled, rocking back and forth on his heels, shattering a small bone underfoot as he did so, “isn’t anyone going to invite me in?”
Larten offered Mr Tiny one of the rabbits, but he turned it down. “I prefer my meat raw,” he said scoldingly. “Where’s the pleasure in eating if you can’t feel the juices streaming down your chin as you bite in?”
The short man was perched on one of the coffins. He had kicked off his left boot and was scratching the flesh of his foot with a bone he’d picked up from the ground. Larten was intrigued to see that Mr Tiny’s toes were webbed.
“You’ve grown a lot since our paths first crossed,” Mr Tiny said to Gavner.
“That was a long time ago,” Gavner said softly.
“Hardly,” Mr Tiny snorted, then eyed Gavner critically. “You were an ugly baby. At least that much hasn’t changed.”
Gavner bristled, but Mr Tiny only laughed and turned his attention to Larten. “I assume you’re aware of the dozens of stout-hearted Germans dogging your every move?”
“Yes,” Larten said.
Mr Tiny flicked the bone he’d been scratching his foot with up into the air. He let it spin a couple of times, then caught it and proceeded to pick his teeth with it. Larten raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. There was a long silence. Gavner felt uneasy, but Larten and Mr Tiny both looked at ease.
Mr Tiny broke the silence. “You’ve matured since I saved you in that palace of ice. You remind me of Seba Nile now, serious and boring.”
“I am not a jester,” Larten said calmly. “It is not my job to amuse you.”
Mr Tiny scowled. “I preferred you when you were suicidal.” He cast a cat-like glance at Gavner. “Has he told you about the time he nearly leapt to his death?”
“Yes,” Gavner said.
Mr Tiny rolled his eyes. “You two are about as much fun as…” He grumbled his way into silence again.
Larten cleared his throat. “Have you travelled far?”
“I’m always travelling,” Mr Tiny replied. “I never stop in one place for long. There’s always some new tragedy to enjoy, a fresh disaster which merits an audience. I don’t get home often.”
“You have a home?” Gavner asked.
“Of course,” Mr Tiny said. “Every man needs a place to put his feet up and call his castle. I might take you there one day, Master Purl. You could tell me tall tales and admire my collection.”
“What do you collect?” Gavner asked, but Mr Tiny waved the question away and cocked his head. “Ah. Here they come. Better late than never.”
Larten and Gavner shared an uncertain look. They couldn’t hear anything. Then, out of nowhere, Larten heard the footsteps of several heavy people, close to the entrance to the crypt. He couldn’t understand how they had got so near without alerting him before this. It was as if they had dropped to the earth or appeared out of thin air.
As Larten tensed and Gavner rose to his feet, eight strange figures entered the crypt and fanned out around Mr Tiny’s coffin. They were even shorter than the meddler in yellow, and all were dressed in blue robes with hoods drawn over their heads to hide their faces.
“The Little People,” Larten sighed, having heard the legends.
“I must come up with a better name for them one day,” Mr Tiny purred, leaning across to adjust the hood of the Little Person closest him. Larten caught a glimpse of grey skin which had been stitched together, and a flash of green which might have been the creature’s eyes. Its mouth was covered with some sort of mask. Before he could probe further, the hood fell back into place and he saw nothing more of the Little Person’s face.
“I’m taking them to the Cirque Du Freak,” Mr Tiny said, and Larten’s eyes lit up.
“The Cirque is nearby?” he gasped, surprising Gavner with his enthusiasm.
Mr Tiny nodded. “Just a few hours from here. That’s why I’m in the area. You didn’t think I dropped by just to pass the time with you and your pup, did you?”
