THE VIPER AND THE FARMER

A Morganville Vampires short story by

Rachel Caine

© 2015 Rachel Caine LLC

I killed my master, you know. The one who turned me to vampire. The one who taught me about alchemy and craft and the intoxicating lure of science. I killed him for good reasons, true, but still. Righteous murder is still murder, and if I'd been caught for it, I'd have hanged. That would have been a comedy of errors, since vampires don't respond well to that, but of course they would have fallen back on the old stand-by of beheading. Generally effective.

I wasn't caught, of course. Well, no, I was ... But I've gotten ahead of myself, as always. My brain is not linear. It loops and swirls and folds in on itself, as brains do. I've never understood the concept of straight line thinking. How can anything as complex and byzantine as a brain possibly follow such limits?

I digress.

I was, by my estimate, twenty-five years old when my master turned me vampire. He did it for entirely practical reasons, as in, it was winter, we were locked into a snow-covered castle far from any town, and the food preserves had been attacked by vermin. While I could eat rat meat, they were not good for me as a steady diet. He made the entirely scientific decision that I would survive the long, lean winter far better if I only required blood, and not much of it. He could go months without drinking. I required at least one or two mouthfuls of liquid rat a day, but those were easily come by and a great deal more convenient than killing, skinning, filleting and cooking the poor creatures, and once the shock of finding myself beyond death's reach had passed, I found the changes quite restful. I wasn't cold anymore, though the castle's broken halls were icy and slick, and I'd been constantly chilled as a human. I found the sky blazing with light at night, a dazzling show of ghostly stars that I'd never seen with mortal eyes.

I learned to avoid the daylight after my first thoughtless attempts resulted in painful burns. My master never bothered to tell me the rules. In his view, I would learn by trial and error, a practice that was scientifically sound even if science was, at the time, in its brutal infancy.

We were in Scotland, surviving but hardly thriving, and now that I was made a vampire, things were very different.

"Myrnin," my master said to me one evening as we prepared a new mixture of elements--he was ever in search of the Philosopher's Stone, to transform one thing to another. "I will need you to leave me tomorrow and go into town."

"Alone?" I asked him. I felt a thrill, and then it was chased away by a swarm of worry. "Why?"

"I have sent for someone to come here and assist us," he said. "She's a gifted alchemist. You'll pay her and bring her here."

"Where will she stay?" I looked around. The lab was no place for a lady to make her bed; it was filthy, and full of toxic fumes.

"Upstairs," he told me vaguely. He was completely occupied with the slow, precise stirring of the mixture he was preparing. It had turned a faintly luminescent silver. "I shall need you to go immediately."

"What is the lady's name, sir?"

"Sorcha Ó Loinsigh." I hardly understood the name, it glided by so fast. Irish, I took it to mean. "She will be waiting at the stables tonight. Bring her here."

I had been with my master for many years by this time; I'd been apprenticed to him as little more than a child by a mother too desperate to keep me close, with two other children to feed that my apprentice fee--or, not to put too bright a shine on it, purchase price--had made much easier to manage. Sisters. I barely remembered them. I remembered my mother better, though she'd never shown me much love.