The Tavern

In this storied community, the impetuous youth flaunt or ignore the Old Ways at their own peril. And it had started as such a nice, quiet night... (3.5k wds)

The Old Ways can rub some people wrong -- especially those coming into the supernatural world fresh from this modern era of excess, privilege, and internet anonymity. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen societal changes and cultural shifts in every direction you could plot an axis for; live for nearly 3500 years as I have, and you too will come to understand that Change is the one and only constant in this world. But what our more, shall I say, exuberant (indignant, entitled, take your pick) newcomers tend to misunderstand is that Old Ways -- and those of us who uphold them -- don’t stand in opposition to change; we’ve just already seen all their ‘new’ ideas brought forward before, been accepted, gone stale, and get discarded for the next.

The Old Ways aren’t rules, they’re just how you come to behave once you’ve lived through a few revolutions of the cycle. They’re also not written or codified in any way, but if I had to articulate the particular tenet that seems most abhorrent to our most recent newcomers, it would be this: Respect is owed to your elders, because they’ve already damn-well earned it in the past.

The recent upheaval in the supernatural underworld wasn’t particularly upsetting, or even that surprising: some newly-minted vamp shaking things up, gathering a following, killing off a few of the established vampire lords. I don’t overlap much with the neck-biter scene, so it wasn’t very concerning to me. But as ill-luck would have it, he kept growing more famous, and thus harder to avoid hearing about. 

He was turned fairly late for a vampire, in his 40s, having already led a deeply troubling life steeped in conspiracy theory, hoax, and rabbit holes into the occult. So rather than take the traditional path toward amassing strength for a vamp -- which is basically just to feed regularly and get older -- he instead continued his dive into the occult. To his credit, this did score him the power he needed to oppose (and depose) many of the vampire lords of London; to his detriment, it also placed him rather firmly on a collision course with me.

I’d put a handful of wards and contingencies in place out of habit, but I wasn’t particularly concerned. Vampires are about as dangerous to me as… eh… now that I think of it, I don’t have a great analogy on hand for this. There isn’t much that’s truly all that dangerous to me at all, anymore -- about as dangerous as a mosquito, I guess? In that I’d be annoyed if one bit me?

Still, he did manage to surprise me, if only because I never thought he’d be stupid enough to come for me there, in the Tavern. But like I said: in this storied community, the impetuous youth flaunt or ignore the Old Ways at their own peril. And it had started as such a nice, quiet night, with me seated at my usual booth in its dimly lit, secluded corner of the restaurant.

* * * * *

“Here you are, darling, you just let me know if you need anything else, okay?” 

The head server of the Tavern is a lovely woman, seemingly 30 to 40 years of age, who despite the many years she’s spent in England, still speaks with an accent from the American south. Her ethnic heritage is clearly from a region further south-west in Africa than my own.

“Of course, thank you Catherine,” I replied as she placed an impeccably plated salad on the table before me. It was one of my favorites at the Tavern, a delightful little number with tender bamboo shoots, and some kind of sweet and spicy mustard vinaigrette. Catherine smiled and whisked off toward another table. I folded a piece of baby spinach over an arugula leaf and pinned them to a bamboo shoot with my fork, and had just lifted them to my lips when the doors to the Tavern slammed open into the walls of the entryway. The small, decorative windows in the doors shattered on impact, showering the hostess’ podium with shards of glass.

Most groups of vampires want to be called ‘covens.’ Some of the weirder, extra culty groups prefer the term ‘hive.’ Judging by the collection of washed out, middle-aged vampire bros who sauntered in through the broken doors, I can only assume this group called themselves something extra stupid, like ‘the posse.’

He was immediately evident. His four goons looked like your average jocks who’d had neither the skill to go pro, nor the sense to plan for anything else in life, and had spent their subsequent years in disappointment of themselves and others. 

“Barkeep! A round of your finest libations for the entourage of…” the f****r actually paused, as though for dramatic effect, “the Dread Prince Lestat!”

An audible groan of disgust rose from a table of Lesser Devils in the next alcove down from mine. Abyssal-speech is difficult to decipher even when there isn’t a group of demons all talking over one another, but I did manage to make out from one of them, a trickster muse by the name of Mamenoche, <It’s too insulting. If I stay, I’d have to kill him> just before he dissolved into a cloud of flies and dispersed. The remaining devils grumbled in disappointment, but still turned with eager smiles to watch the drama unfold.

The keeper of the tavern, for his part, simply raised an eyebrow while he wiped down a freshly washed stein with a drying rag. He nodded to an empty table. “Take a seat, we’ll be right with you,” he said, and then turned away to shelve the clean glass.

The keeper is a slight man, of average height, perhaps in his early to mid 50s. He wears the same costume every day: dark brown slacks and a burgundy tweed vest over a crisp white shirt with the sleeves rolled back to his elbows. His voice is rich and resonant, and though soft-spoken, he is never difficult to hear. Beyond that, I can only say that the tavern keeper looks exactly as you think he would, and do understand that I mean that literally. His features, his hair, the color of his skin: they all exist only in the eyes of the beholder. It’s part of the Glamour.

The four underlings slid chairs out from the table and plopped down with what some of my younger students have recently informed me is known as the ‘Riker maneuver.’ Lestat remained standing and circled the table while he addressed the patrons.

“Well, well, well. So this is the storied Tavern. Drinking hole for the Greats of the underworld, the movers and shakers, the true titans of the occult.” He smirked and paused for effect again. “At least now it is. Bit of a slow day before I got here, eh barkeep?”

The keeper responded with silence as he filled five elaborately crafted snifters from a small, gold-banded barrel behind the bar.

“No matter, we’ll liven things up here real soon. I’m looking for a woman -- no, not you love, some other time maybe.” He gestured across the bar to a woman of simply indescribable beauty, whom he utterly failed to recognize as Titania. Lounging beside her, Oberon narrowed his eyes, but remained otherwise still.

It had been at least 150 years since the last time a patron had stepped out of line in the Tavern, and the mood of the crowd was positively electric with anticipation. The vampire, bless his shriveled little heart, clearly interpreted this as deference to his prowess.

“The woman I’m looking for is… Egyptian. An Empress. Her very name and image carved off the face of history by her own son. Probably on the masculine side, considering how she managed to pass herself off as a Pharaoh and usurp his reign for 20 years. Just a guess, but probably a 2 or 3 out of 10.”

“I’ve had kings put to death for far less impetuous horse s**t than that, young man,” I said. How rude -- I looked positively fabulous with a false goatee.

He turned to me with a broad smile and threw his arms wide open. “And here she is, The Empress Undying. The ‘last word’ in all things occult and arcane, so they tell me.” He approached, squinting into the gloom surrounding my dining table. “And wow, I take it all back, for a 3,000 year old mummy, you are surprisingly bang-able. You know I love a girl who plays hard to get, and let’s face it -- erased from history, all that jazz -- you were difficult to track down, Hatshepsut!”

“Really? I have a page on Wikipedia.”

“That’s not-- I mean I prefer-- that is, well, primary sources are--”

“Which, if you’d bothered reading, would have told you that Thutmose the Second was not my son, but my step son, and that at 2 years old he was not in the best position to rule when my husband passed. Not to mention it was actually his bratty son Amenhotep who ordered the whole defacing of my icons thing.” Which is also untrue. I ate my own name as part of my Ascension. But he doesn’t need to know the details of my life.

“Here’s your drinks boys,” Catherine said behind him with her typically cheerful demeanor as she set the tray of snifters down between Lestat’s posse. “Seeing as how it’s your first round at the Tavern, darlings, this one’s on the house.”

The vampires grabbed their drinks without so much as a thank you. Lestat wisely took the interruption as a reprieve from this sudden hiccup in whatever grand plan it was he had in mind for me, and retreated to the support of his minions. One of them sniffed at the drink suspiciously, while the others simply threw them back like shots and immediately grimaced. One got it down before sputtering and coughing uproariously, the other two spit it out back into their snifters.

“What is this s**t?”

“That’s Ambrosia, darling,” Catherine said as she gently patted the coughing vamp on his back. “Nectar of the gods. It’s a bit of an acquired taste for sure, and most people do prefer to sip it. They say it’s ‘too much sensation’ for us lesser beings.”

“They don’t want Ambrosia, you wench,” Lestat howled, “they want blood!”

“Well I’m sorry darling, but we don’t serve blood here. You asked for a round of our ‘finest libations,’ and there’s no drink finer than Ambrosia in the Tavern, nor outside of it as I’ve ever heard. That barrel over there was handed off by Hermes himself.”

One of the vampires dashed his drink on the floor and pointed at Catherine.

“You’ve got blood, don’t you lass?”

“That will be enough.” The tavern keeper’s soft, mellifluous voice draped over the exchange like a weighted blanket. “I’ve served you drinks, and in return you have been exceedingly impolite to my establishment, my staff, and my patrons. Learn the meaning of deference before you visit next, for you will not be well-received without it. Now, leave.”

Lestat’s four hulking minions might have succumbed to the spell of the keeper’s voice had not their ring-leader, to his detriment, managed to shake out of it.

“Leave? No, we just got here,” he turned back to me, “and I’m not finished with her.”

“But I am finished with you,” I said.

“Ten,” the keeper said, leaning forward to rest his elbows on the bar.

“The only reason I haven’t ended your miserable existence thus far,” I continued, “is out of deference to my elders. It is not my right to take your life inside the walls of this Tavern. I suppose I’ll soon be forced to do it outside, but do understand, I’ll approach that no differently than I would stepping on a scarab.”

“Nine.”

“The truth of it is, Prince Lestat, that you are not worth the breath spent uttering your ridiculous name.”

“Not worth your time, am I? I’ll show you what your time is worth, you decrepit b***h!”

“Eight,” the tavern keeper said, and Lestat flung an outstretched claw in his direction while hissing out a spell in medieval Latin. 

Generously translated, it came out to roughly <fly your body to these fingers which are mine.> As though caught on a hook, the keeper tumbled over his bar and forward through the air. Lestat caught him by the neck and wrenched sideways, spinning the keeper’s head fully around with a loud crunching sound. Then, with the inhuman speed inherent to vampires, he hoisted the keeper’s body over his head, darted across the Tavern, and slammed him down through a table surrounded by a flock of naiads.

He turned and caught Catherine in the hypnotic gaze his kind uses to trap their prey, and strolled leisurely back over to his group. I crossed my arms.

“Sorry ‘darling,’ but I like my meals a little toasty.” 

He hissed in his awful Latin again, along the lines of <your life fluids are hot like fire.> Catherine convulsed and shrieked, unable to move while locked in his gaze. He yanked her head to the side and made a show of sinking his fangs into her neck with a ripping motion, splattering droplets of blood across the tavern that sizzled and steamed where they landed. Her lifeless body rolled under the table as he turned his bloody face back to me.

“How do you like me now?”

I pushed my untouched salad, now flecked with Catherine’s blood, away from me on the table and let out a deep sigh.

“First, your grasp of Latin is elementary at best, you really should have practiced more before coming to see me. No, <QUIET> now, this is the part where you listen.”

I pinched my forefinger to the thumb to seal the air inside his lungs. He stumbled back and clutched at his neck in surprise -- he wasn’t going to suffocate of course, but it’s an unpleasant feeling for sure if you haven’t yet come to the realization that you don’t actually need to breathe in undeath.

“Of course it is the intent that matters somewhat more-so than the language used -- but, and I cannot stress this enough, good syntax simply never hurts. The age of your language also should not be overlooked. The older the language, the truer it is to the One Tongue of Magic, before it was fractured and the tower fell. You came with a form of Ecclesiastical Latin from around the 12th century, taught to Catholic priests. Underwhelming at best. You should have at least brought Classical Latin from the time of the Caesars, that would have shown me you were trying.

“Second, you demonstrate a lack of finesse that is simply appalling. I will commend your creativity in bringing your own spells to demonstrate. It is a key craft that many young students of the occult struggle with terribly for many years. You are also clearly capable of drawing significant power to bear, which is always a good start. However, the path to enduring success in the arcane arts isn’t power, it’s efficiency. What you did worked, but it took far more power than it needed to. I can think of a dozen ways to boil someone’s blood off the top of my head, and none of them require much more focus or power than this.”

I released my fingers, letting the air out of his lungs in an involuntary wheeze.

“Since you were turned, I suspect you’ve never met a door you couldn’t break down with brute force. But that’s only because until today, you never really went looking for one. 

“Third, and most damning of the indictments against you is this: you absolutely and utterly failed to read the room, nor did you accept the un-earned grace that was offered to you. Thus ends our impromptu lesson, prince. Good luck.”

I leaned back and draped my arms across the cushions of my booth, while Lestat yanked one of his minions to their feet and stood behind him, tensing for a fight.

“Mother… f****r…” came a mutter from under Lestat’s table, as Catherine stirred and rolled over onto her side. The newly-minted vampire lord paused and looked down at her with a furrowed brow.

“Wait, was she not a human? That normally kills humans.” He looked to his cronies, who gave him an array of shrugs and uncertain mumblings.

<Of course she’s a human you imbecile,> I said in Classical Latin, <But she works for him.>

The vampire cocked his head, clearly trying and failing to work through the declensions and figure out exactly what I had said. I pointed across the room to the tavern keeper, standing up out of the wreckage of his table. Loud crunches of grinding bone sounded from his neck as he rolled his head from side to side, reforming the shattered vertebrae inside it. He spat out a mouthful of blood, then plucked a wrinkled pocket square from his vest and dabbed the corners of his lips.

“Zero,” the keeper said once his larynx had reformed enough for speech. “It’s the medical benefits of her employment package: immunity to death, disease, etc. Cuts the insurance middle-men right out of the picture, I find it’s very efficient.”

“Ah.” Lestat eyed the keeper, far too late showing the slightest hint of caution or concern. “So she’s human, but you’re not. Well then, what are you?”

“Immortal,” the Keeper replied simply, as he plucked a shard of glass out of his skull and tossed it aside. It landed with a loud tinkle in the otherwise silent room.

“That means nothing,” Prince Lestat waved his hand dismissively. “I’m immortal. Half your bloody patrons are--”

“No,” the keeper cut him off as he straightened out his vest and stepped out of the wreckage of the table. “You are ageless, thanks to the curse of undeath upon you. That is a very different thing than being immortal. Numerous vampire lords you’ve killed in the last few months would attest to this, were they not dead, no? They may not like to acknowledge it, but this is a simple fact that every entity in this establishment is keenly aware of, save for you.”

Lestat said nothing, but his body language spoke volumes for him, as he shrunk half a step backward toward the support of his underlings.

“My patrons from the Fey realms, or the Abyss? They experience death on this plane of existence as a banishment back to their own. But once there, they age and die the same as all other creatures in existence, if perhaps at a different rate than a human does. My dear employee Catherine, whom you’ve treated with such brazen disrespect, will live as long as she wishes to. But some day, be it centuries or millennia from now, she will grow tired of life, and request I terminate her contract.” 

He gestured to me, seated in my quiet, dark corner, and a chill ran down my spine. 

“Even the Empress Undying, whom you unwisely came looking for tonight, will only survive so long as she maintains the numerous spells and failsafes she has crafted to preserve and extend her unnatural life.”

My thoughts flickered in succession through my 5 phylacteries, painstakingly secreted away in sealed and warded caches both near and far-flung -- and I watched in horror as the keeper’s eyes lifted briefly to the keystone of the stone arch over his doorway, then settled on me, and he winked.

By the gods, my cold heart would have skipped a beat were it able. How did he find it out? Or, more likely: has he simply always known?

“One day, when she has grown tired of this endless upkeep, she too will come to me for release. You see, Edwin, everything dies eventually.” 

He held his hand calmly out to his side, and wisps of shadow materialized and snaked through the air into his grasp. The Dread Prince Lestat -- Edwin -- first shivered, then spasmed, and finally, as his entourage withdrew from him in horror, collapsed in a fit of convulsions. The shadows continued to flow into the keeper’s outstretched hand, gaining solidity and texture, until he was left holding his implement: a bowed farmer’s scythe, worn and battered, but with a keen edge that felt dizzying and somehow wrong to look upon. The keeper stepped forward.

“Everything dies, except for me.”