.
Jurmat looked at Brigitte, then me, then calmly sheathed his sword and held his empty hands out. Then he dematerialized his wings and turned 360, which I suppose was intended to show he wasn’t hiding anything.
For this encounter, he had dressed in fairly typical adventurer’s gear, jack and leather kilt, with heavy socks similar to what I had seen Arelian troops wearing. The style was more like what one might acquire back in Atianus, though. In fact, I suspected it to be retired Orestanian military gear, which often shows up in Atian equipment shops.
It was ticking me off a little that his jack was not modified for wings. He could materialize his wings through the armor, like mature fairies.
He had a sort of messenger bag or oversized version of my belt-wallet, that hung at the hip opposite his sword from a harness that resembled the ‘Sam Browne belt’ that you see Mounties and British officers wearing in old movies. Two straps, one around his waist and one running diagonal over the opposite shoulder.
It reinforced the probability that his outfit came from old Orestanian military gear. Several units in the royal army use that harness.
“Jurmat,” I finally stated, giving voice to the obvious.
He winced. “That was the mangled form of my name which that vile woman used, yes.”
After glancing pointedly at my sword, still in middle guard position in my hands, he sighed and then bowed. “My Lady, I am Diurhimath, a man of the X’n’e. You may call me Diur. I believe I have the honor of addressing one Lady Tiana Pendor?”
Without waiting for me to confirm it, he turned and walked over to the nearest wraith corpse, drawing his sword. Brigitte and I both prepared for an attack, but he ignored us as he lifted the corpse and struck through the demon’s neck, using a Wind technique on his blade similar to mine.
He glanced at the two tense women still on guard against him and grew a mild smile. “I hope you can bear with me for a bit. These creatures are skilled at faking death as they wait for opportunities.”
My mind was reeling, struggling with the strangely civil mannerisms that were completely at odds with our previous encounters. And at what had faintly registered in my memory upon hearing the oddly pronounced term, X’n’e.
Jurmat, or I suppose I should call him ‘Diur’, heaved the corpse with his free hand into the woods, and followed it with its head.
“My Lady, this is the guy that attacked us in Carael!” Brigitte hissed to me.
“I know,” I nodded, while continuing to stare at him. “We ran into him, as well. I also witnessed him in Copen, sucking the blood from a nude, non-consenting victim. One victim of many, I might add.”
He winced again as he followed the same procedure with the next wraith. His shoulders dropped slightly and his relaxed smile turned into a straight line. “I hope she was okay? I made sure to watch over the others, but you interrupted me, that time.”
“I was able to heal the damage,” I stated. “Are you pretending to care about your victims now? I have no doubt you took plenty of time pawing their bodies up after you made them strip. Outdoors, in broad daylight, I might add.”
Diur dropped his eyebrows a bit, then noted, “You should be familiar with the steps required to prepare oneself physiologically, since you are clearly of the same race.”
“I am also quite familiar with the very strict rules vampires have concerning only feeding on consenting donors!”
He tightened his lips and said nothing at first as he reached a third wraith corpse. As I had already decapitated one wraith and sent a hag flying into oblivion, he had only the two in the alraune’s clutches left, plus the hag archer laying near my feet. He pointed at the latter and said, “My Lady, may I ask you to take care of that one, please?”
It felt a little barbaric, since I was very sure she was dead, but I went ahead and hacked her head away.
Diur disappeared suddenly, then the alraune began squalling unintelligibly while wrestling with an invisible thief over possession of one of the wraiths. He appeared again, now with wings regrown, hovering while beating the tendril gripping the demon with the flat of his sword.
“Don’t eat that,” he chided the pretty monster as he tore it from her grasp. “It’s bad for you.”
He flew out of her range and decapitated it, dropping the headless corpse into the forest. After he disappeared, the scene repeated itself with the other wraith corpse.
Glancing over at me, he said, “This child will suffer and possibly die if we let her eat these. Toss that out of her reach, please.”
Overall, I probably should have suggested we let her eat them. I mean, as an adventurer and as a knight, I should have been considering eliminating her. But I had so many questions, top of which was What are you doing here? and had to maintain a truce with him to get them answered.
Once I had done it, he told me, “You are not one of the vampire children, My Lady. You are very clearly a fellow X’n’e.”
“That word again.” I frowned, then asked, “Are you possibly saying ‘Ha-ne’?”
“Ha… ” he echoed, puzzled, then smiled. “Of course. You only know child language. You’re many decades too young to manage adult speech.”
He then bowed his head and nodded. “You are correct, My Lady. You and I are both of the Xa-ne.“
The sound he was using was like the ‘X’ sound in the Spanish pronunciation of “Mexico”. There’s no sound like that in the Ancient Fairy I knew. A change over time, I guess.
“In this world today, what you call ‘child language’ is known as Ancient Fairy,” I informed him. “And Ha-ne translates into the language we are speaking as the word ‘Elder’. From what you said, are you implying that vampire rules don’t apply to Elders?”
He twisted his lips, then sighed. “No, I am not. After all, those rules are what the vampire children remember of our own rules covering the same subject.”
“So you admit that you were committing a crime,” I submitted.
His eyebrows lowered as he scowled at me. “The X’n’e rules on the subject have considerations built into them for emergencies, and I was very much in the middle of an emergency at the time.”
“The proper way to handle that particular emergency is at a brothel,” I told him. “We do not tolerate feeding on non-consenting mortals.”
The scowl deepened. “There weren’t even remotely enough prostitutes in that small town to provide the blood necessary to handle the emergency at hand. A full-scale magic attack was underway on the only female of my kind that I had encountered in ten thousand years. To my knowledge, the only living female X’n’e in existence. Nobody else could even detect the attack, much less defend against it, thanks to the primitive state of knowledge in this era. Only I, who was at that moment suffering severe handicaps, had any chance of protecting her. My only means to counter my handicaps in order to protect her was to completely rebuild the blood core I had lost while under the yoke of that vile demoness, so that I could regain the use of my blood magic.”
Throughout his speech, I had stared at him, unable to quite find a place to start unpacking the incredible things he was saying. Once he finished, the retorts started forming in my mind.
What were you doing in that town in the first place?
What are you doing here?
Do you have any idea how much trouble you caused me?
When you say ‘a full-scale magic attack’, are you talking about Fate magic?
Are you claiming you can detect Wizardry?
And the biggest on of all…
Do you expect me to believe you actually attacked all those women for my sake?
I spoke none of them aloud, largely because they were firing off in my head faster than my mouth could move, leaving me to continue staring at him in stunned silence. So Brigitte actually responded before I could.
“I don’t get most of what you just said, but I get that you’re the jerk that framed My Lady for all those attacks I heard about, and that’s just one more reason to hate you.”
She said it with a lot more vinegar than I would have expected from her. You might have noticed that Brigitte and I don’t get along very well.
Rather than protesting, he nodded. “You have every reason to hate me. I have no right to protest, given that I fully recognized the probability that something like what happened to her would occur, before I began.”
I was about to finally retort when he held up a hand and stated, “We have company on their way. You don’t trust me, but I would like you to cloak and fly to another location while you can still slip away unseen. We should finish this conversation in more secure surroundings.”
“What sort of company?” I asked, distrusting him.
“The demon general operating in this region… or rather, I believe the modern era would call him an archfiend. And a retinue of higher demon underlings that your era calls fiends and imps. I know you carried this child before, so I ask you to pick her up now and fly south, immediately. Turn east at the end of the cavern and find a safe landing spot. Wait there, staying in cloak if you can. I’ll find you.”
“What will you be doing?” I demanded.
“Convincing them to turn back, as forcefully as I can,” he replied, with a grim smile. “You can trust that I wish to continue this conversation, My Lady. I am absolutely desperate to know how a X’n’e child has appeared in this world, ten thousand years after the death of the last X’n’e woman capable of giving birth to one. I will not fail to reunite with you.”
Then, he added, “Go now. There’s no time to argue.”
The biggest question I had at that moment was, Do I have even one reason to trust him?
I tapped Durandal’s pommel as I asked, “What do you think?”
Thinking I was asking her– well, I was also asking her, so she wasn’t wrong– Brigitte shot the man a glance, then answered, “Let’s get away from him and then decide what to do without him listening.”
Realizing why I tapped his pommel, Durandal replied, I suggest flying into the area he asks, to take a look, My Lady. What we see will tell us whether to trust him or not.
I hadn’t thought of that. I turned to Brigitte and prepared to resume the princess carry. Sighing, she cooperated as I scooped her up. I grew my wings and cloaked as I took off.
