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then faint concern, exactly what had been the probable fate of the vampire and
the girl when the blowup happened. Serve the old blood-drinking bastard right,
he told himself, feeling his sore head. And then the innocent girl& he sighed.
Nimue had at last tired of her game of silent waiting. "By what name shall I
call you now?" she asked. It was certainly a banal way for one adept to begin
a conversation with another. And a pointed reminder of his own discourteous
bluntness in using her own true name at the start. Well, some people deserved
courtesy, and some&
Nimue had addressed him in one of the language from old Brittany; he couldn't
recall the name of the damned tongue now, if it even had a name, but as soon
as he heard it again the sound and meaning of it flowed smoothly once more in
his antique brain cells.
He spoke the tongue of Brittany, for the first time in a thousand years "I'm
leaving. You need not worry about what you ought to call me."
"I should prefer to be able to use some name." Nimue's voice was smoothly
unrevealing. "For reasons of courtesy."
"All right. Hawk is a good name." Then, switching to modern English: "Mr.
Hawk, to you." And then, after a pause: "I don't get it, what you're trying to
do here. I mean, why me? And tied down on a rack. I
mean, what the bloody hell, woman? Did you just want to see the expression on
my face when I woke up?"
Nimue only smiled faintly, and shook her head. They both knew that she didn't
have to explain anything at all to him. Because& because& the reason escaped
Hawk just now, but he knew it was a damned good one.
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Saberhagen, Fred - [Dracula 05] Dominion
"Just fate, I suppose," he meditated aloud. "That's why I'm here. Or
somebody's plan?"
Still the enigmatic smile. Nimue raised an open hand, and made a small gesture
with two fingers, and two of the things--in the old days he would probably
have called them familiars--from two of the top corners of the room went
flickering away upon some errand. They were pre-instructed, evidently, or
maybe pre-
programmed was the modern word.
Nimue said: "No plan of mine, Mr. Hawk. You can leave here any time you want
to, for all of me. All we wanted was some human who would not be missed, so it
will be easy enough to obtain a replacement. The rack was just a handy place
to keep you, nothing more. By the way, would you like a good bottle of wine to
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take along? I understand that wine had been your chief interest ever since we
last spoke."
She couldn't resist a chance for petty cruelty. Hawk shuddered. The emotion
that made him do so was not quite recognizable. "Just 'some human', hey? And
you got me. How about that man who picked me up on the street? Some private
plan of his, maybe?"
Nimue looked as if she would like to remind Mr. Hawk of his expressed wish to
leave, but was at the same time afraid that any word from her might have an
opposite effect. Was all this some subtle ploy intended to influence him to
stay? Hawk didn't think so.
He could see that some enterprise of consequence was in the process of
organization here.
Besides the squat-toads, relatively easy to visualize when you knew how, a
veritable crowd of other presences were waiting in the wings. The dim
dungeon--as moderns would call this place, he'd rather simply call it a
hole--crawled with powers, his own, Nimue's, who-knew-whose. All these were
edging each other ominously, maneuvering for position, elbowing like
basketball players under some evil backboard. Were such as these in fact
spirits? Were they alive at all, or like the winds only the artifacts of some
invisible force? He still didn't know, despite the long centuries of service
he had received from some of them. The older he grew the less he knew with
certainty. But when the ball flew at the backboard, things were going to
happen. Of that he could be sure.
Anyway something of his own willed purpose must have been worked out amid the
jockeying. A recent unspoken, almost unconscious wish of his was granted:
another look at the coffee-colored man who had picked up Feathers on the
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