"Ohh." "My name is Lisa." "I am from the Village of Lupu." "I want to be a doctor." "You bang on my front door because you want to daub chicken blood on peasants." "Don't mistake me for a witch." "Everybody out there already does that." "I believe in science, but I need to know more." "I've exhausted my other options, and all the stories say the man who lives here has secret knowledge." "I am Vlad Dracula Tepes, and I do not get many visitors." "What have you to trade for my knowledge," "Lisa from Lupu?" "Perhaps I could help you relearn some manners." "I've crossed the threshold of your home, and you haven't offered me a drink or even to take my coat." "What if I took a drink from you?" "Or have you loaded yourself with silver, crosses, and garlic in superstitious fear?" "I might have eaten some roasted garlic earlier." "Was that rude?" "I-it was all I had left." "I'm really not interested in superstition, or being some muttering wise woman cheating people with boiled nettles and entrails." "I want to heal people." "I want to learn." "Will you help me?" "You are definitely different to most humans I have met in recent times." "Maybe I can teach you to like people again, or at least tolerate them, or stop putting them on sticks." "I gave that up a long time ago." "Where is Lupu Village?" "You don't travel much." "I can travel." "This entire structure is a traveling machine." "But... you don't." "Do you?" "Maybe you should." "The world is changing." "Travel, like people do." "You might like it." "I've known you two minutes, and you offer for me to walk the earth like an ordinary peasant while I give you the knowledge of immortals, the true science." "Ohh." "My." "They won't be peasants anymore if you teach them." "They won't live such short, scared lives if they have real medicine." "They won't be superstitious if they learn how the world really works." "Why should I do that?" "To make the world better." "Start with me, and I'll start with you." "I think I might like you." "So there were devil engines in her house, Bishop?" "I saw them with my own eyes." "And glass in shapes you've never seen, thin as paper." "Lightning." "Strange weeds and tools." "Witch's things." "Of all the witches I've rooted out, none had such a collection." "And it had to come to this?" "She called it all science, Mayor." "Lisa Tepes of Lupu was so far gone that she just couldn't see that it was all given to her by Satan." "I've made some small study of the chemical sciences myself, you know." "J-just a study, of course." "I-I'd never think to practice such things." "The Archbishop would prefer that life in Wallachia be kept simple, Mayor." "Simple." "Pure." "Good." "Don't hurt them!" "They don't understand!" "Who's she talking to?" "I believe she's exhorting Satan not to take revenge on us, which I suppose is almost commendable, for a witch." "Perhaps I'll say a prayer for her." "A small one." "I know it's not your fault, but... if you can hear... they don't know what they're doing." "Be better than them." "Please!" "Are you Mr. Tepes?" "She talked about you." "What happened?" "Where is my wife?" "Ohh." "The Bishop took her." "Witchcraft, he said." "They're burning her at the stake." "She was good to me, your wife." "A good doctor." "It's not right what happened." "Where are they holding her?" "The cathedral?" "Oh." "Oh, no, sir." "Sh-she'll be dead by now." "What?" "I couldn't be there." "I don't care what they say." "I won't take joy in that woman being killed by the Church." "I'm here remembering her instead." "She said to me, if you would love me as a man, then live as a man." "Travel as a man." "She said you were traveling." "I was." "The way men do." "Slowly." "No more." "I do this last kindness in her name, she who loved you humans and cared for your ills." "Take your family and leave Wallachia tonight." "Pack and go, and do not look back for no more do I travel as a man." "Ohh!" "Ah." "There." "Quite a show." "Drinks?" "I should minister to the Archbishop." "I fear he's not long for this world, to be honest." "Off to heaven with him, eh?" "I suppose that's the ultimate goal for you priests, serving God in His true house and all that." "It holds little appeal for me, to be honest." "Really?" "There's so much left to be done on earth." "Wallachia could be God's own country had I but time to burn out all the evil that hides here." "What have you done?" "Satan!" "What have you done to my wife?" "In nomine Patris et Filii..." "I am Vlad Dracula Tepes, and you will tell me why this thing has happened to my wife." "Oh, no!" "Oh, God!" "Dracula!" "He was supposed to be myth, a story made up by heretics!" "She... she's a witch." "Lisa Tepes was a woman of science, and the one thing that justified humanity's stench upon this planet." "You are not real." "You are a fiction that justified the practice of black magic!" "A fiction!" "You take my wife and deny I even exist!" "I give you one year, Wallachians." "You have one year to make your peace and remove any marks you have made upon the land." "One year, and then I'll wipe all human life from the land of Wallachia." "You took that which I love, so I will take from you everything you have and everything you have ever been." "One year." "One year!" "It will take me one year to summon an army from the guts of Hell itself!" "No." "What do you mean, no?" "That woman was the only reason on earth for me to tolerate human life!" "Then find the one who did the deed." "If you loose an army of the night on Wallachia, you cannot undo it, and many thousands of people just as innocent as her will suffer and die." "There are no innocents!" "Not anymore!" "Any one of them could have stood up and said," ""No, we won't behave like animals anymore."" "I won't let you do it." "I grieve with you, but I won't let you commit genocide." "Ahh." "For twenty years have I served you and God as the Archbishop to Targoviste Cathedral." "Yet never before have I felt the love of God shine so upon this great city." "A little more than one year ago, many of us suffered a vision during the God-willed punishment of a witch in our midst." "The devil himself came to us and threatened us with doom in one year." "And yet, here we are." "The devil lied." "Why should we be surprised?" "Do we not know the devil for a liar?" "Do we not know his works to be illusion?" "Of course we do." "Illusions and falsehoods hold no fear for us, for we are the righteous of Targoviste, living as if cradled in the love of God." "One year." "I gave you one year to make your peace with your God." "And what do you do?" "Celebrate the day you killed my wife." "One year I gave you, while I assembled my armies." "And now I bring your death." "You had your chance." "Kill everything you see." "Kill them all." "And once Targoviste has been made into a graveyard for my love, go forth into the country." "Go now." "Go to all the cities of Wallachia:" "Arges!" "Severin!" "Gresit!" "Chilia!" "Enisara!" "Go now and kill." "Kill for my love!" "Kill for the only true love I ever knew." "Kill for the endless lifetime of hate before me." "So I says to him, "It's my goat." "I been tending goats since I was four years old."" "Right, right." ""And I'd know if my goat was in love with you."" "For God's sake." "He says to me, "I know your goat's in love with me."" "So you said how, Bosha?" "So I says how!" "And he says, "Well, she fucks me, don't she?"" "And that's when you hit him." "Right across the eyes with a shovel." "And now the headman says I have to pay the bastard money because he went blind." "Not fair." "So I says to him, "You didn't think he was gonna go blind fucking a goat with mange?"" "That would have been your fault, too." "I would have gotten blamed for that, too." "But what am I supposed to do when I find my goat laying on its side in the field, fucked within an inch of its life and a naked man with blood and straw all over his peck?" "Hit him with a shovel!" "Fucking right I hit him with a shovel!" "More ale for me and my cousin Kob!" "Brother." "Look, we might have had the same father, but you came out of my aunt." "Don't make me get my shovel." "Anyone else while I'm pouring?" "One over here." "Ale!" "For Christ's sake!" "Piter!" "We was just wondering if you'd spotted any attractive sheep on your ride out." "What's the word, mate?" "The horde's been seen, sweeping west!" "Shit!" "You think they'll reach us?" "I think they might pass us by." "I don't know." "I hope." "I'm told they're closing on Gresit." "Serves 'em right." "Stuck-up bastards." "Ah, come on." "No." "No, it all comes down to the families and the houses, doesn't it?" "The great houses of Gresit." "Vlad Dracula?" "An old family." "The capital?" "All run by the great houses." "And they're not even the worst." "The Belmonts?" "We should have killed all the Belmonts." "Shit." "Frederator!"