COIN OF ANGELS

Chapter 2

Monastery Ruins, Comana, Romania, Near the Bulgarian Border

The victim was lying there in a pool of his own sweat and blood. He heard a high, keening noise, as pure as the note of an angel's voice. It stretched on and on, as long as forever, floating among the high arched rafters above. Then it stretched deeper and deeper, getting lower in pitch all the time until it was a roar that filled his poor head. He realized that the noise came from him. He gazed about blearily. He stretched half heartedly toward the tumbler of cool water standing on the nightstand. A voice full of patience and purpose spoke to him from the shadows. It was a sibilant purr, burry around the edges with a German accent. "That's right." It went on quietly, "Take it, it's right there. So cool, so wet. It can wash away all of your thirst, all of your hurts."

The victim's hand stopped reaching on the beat of that purring word "hurts". The prize had been snatched away repeatedly when he had thought there was relief. He had been beaten repeatedly and half-drowned in his own blood. More dried blood caked the front of his shirt which was ripped in places and soiled all over. There were ligature marks on his throat that were beginning to turn a purplish color. Chains were attached to his wrists with manacles, running up to a rope in the pulley and brake on the ceiling beam above. They were slack at the moment, allowing his hands to collapse to his sides. The blood flowing back into his hands and arms burned like fire. He could feel the blood and gore of whip tracks staining the shreds left of his shirt in back. His bladder had given way long ago. The victim's bloody head turned slowly, tortuously, his inflamed gaze resting on the figure in the shadows. "You're quite enjoying this aren't you?" he croaked. He had led them a merry chase, through railways and byways and strange ways to here. Wherever here was.

His pursuers had caught up to him at the Bulgarian border, where the train changed locomotives. He caught a whiff of them as it sat in the siding and ditched the train, stealing a horse and striking out cross country.

The figure in the shadows resumed it's slow beat on the floor, the whip lifting and falling with a little flip in between, the glint of metal shards twinkling in the leather thong. A head in the darkness lifted and looked in a direction that could have been at the victim. A voice from a different corner spoke, "I neither enjoy nor abhor. Only do what is necessary. When you have been beaten, starved, dessicated and deprived enough we shall talk again." The whip stopped tapping and the first figure leaned further back into the shadows silently. One hand emerged from the darkness and grasped the whip in the middle, milking the blood and gore down to the end. The voice in the shadows went on, "We know about your French messenger. I want to know all about the information you gave to Ridley." With that both shadows left the bare stone room.

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Novice sister Eugenia Lazu closed the gate behind her and took up the first knot in her prayer rope as she recited the Synodal Our Father. Fully armed and prepared now, she walked down the flagstone path to the Old Chapel on short sturdy legs. It was outside the monastery walls where she lived and near the farthest edge of the surrounding property. She kneaded the knots of her worry rope as she walked, smelling the mint and honeysuckle fragrance of coltsfoot and creeping jenny nudging the path. There was a bog behind the chapel, she knew, where belladona and wolfsbane grew.

It was silly to be frightened here. It was just an old humble chapel that the sister in charge of the two nuns and two novice sisters sent here from the convent at Varatec had delegated her to clean and care for. Her other duties in the school and the infirmary took most of her time, but once a week she must visit the chapel. She gripped the broom held in her other hand tighter. Old tales were just old tales but she knew this one to be true. The chapel was the first structure built here, centuries ago, by Vlad Tepes. Or Vlad the Impaler. Her fear was ridiculous. The man had been dead for centuries.