The Chaos Curse by R. A. Salvatore

emphasis so that the statement suddenly did not seem so ridiculous. “You can beat them all!”
    “I am already dead,” Rufo said dryly. “I am already defeated.”
    “Of course, of course!” Druzil rasped happily, clapping his hands and flapping his wings to perch on the end of Rufo’s slab. “Dead, yes, but that is your strength, not your weakness. You can beat them all, I say. And the library will be yours.”
    The last words seemed to pique Rufo’s interest. He cocked his head at an angle so that he could better view the untrustworthy imp.
    “You are immortal,” Druzil said solemnly.
    Rufo continued to stare for a long, uneasy moment. “At what price?” he asked.
    “Price?” Druzil echoed.
    “I am not alive!” Rufo roared at him, and Druzil spread his wings, ready to launch away if the vampire made a sudden move.
    “You are more alive than you have ever been!” Druzil snapped back. “Now you have power. Now your will shall be done!”
    “To what end?” Rufo wanted, needed, to know. “I am dead. My flesh is dead. What pleasures might I know? What dreams worth fancying?”
    “Pleasures?” the imp asked. “Did not the priest’s blood taste sweet? And did you not feel power as you approached the pitiful man? You could taste his fear, vampire, and the taste was as sweet as the blood that was to come.”
    Rufo continued to stare, but had no more complaints to offer. Druzil spoke the truth, it seemed. Rufo had tasted the man’s fear, and that sensation of power, of inspiring such terror, felt wonderfully sweet to the man who had been so impotent in life.
    Druzil waited a little while, until he was certain that Rufo was convinced to at least explore this vampiric existence. “You must be gone from this place,” the imp explained, looking to the corpses.
    Rufo glanced at the closed door, then nodded and swung about, dangling his legs over the side of the slab. “The catacombs,” he remarked.
    “You cannot cross,” Druzil said as the vampire began stiffly walking toward the door. Rufo turned on him suspiciously, as if he thought the imp’s words a threat.
    “The sun is bright,” Druzil explained. “It will burn you like fire.”
    Rufo’s expression turned from curious to dour to sheer horror.
    “You are a creature of the night now,” Druzil went on firmly. “The light of day is not your ally.”
    It was a bitter pill for Rufo to swallow, but in light of all that had happened, the man accepted the news stoically and forced himself to straighten once more. “How am I to get out of here?” he asked, his tone filled with anger and sarcasm.
    Druzil led Rufo’s gaze to rows of marked stones lining the mausoleum’s far wall. These were the crypts of the library’s former headmasters, including those of Avery Schell and Pertelope, and not all of the stones were marked.
    At first the thought of crawling into a crypt revolted Rufo, but as he let go of those prejudices remaining from when he had been a living, breathing man, as he allowed himself to view the world as an undead thing, a creature of the night, he found the notion of cool, dark stone strangely appealing.
    Rufo met Druzil by the wall, in front of an unmarked slab set waist-high. Not knowing what the imp expected, the vampire reached out with his stiff arms and clasped at the edge of the stone.
    “Not like that!” Druzil scolded, and Rufo stood straight, eyeing the imp dangerously, obviously growing tired of Druzil’s superior attitude.
    “If you tear it away, the priests will find you,” the imp explained, and under his breath he added the expected, “Bene tellemara.”
    Rufo did not reply, but stood staring from the imp to the wall. How was he to get inside the crypt if he did not remove the stone? These were not doors that could be opened and closed; they were sealed marker blocks, removed for burials, then mortared back into place.
    “There is a crack along the bottom,” Druzil remarked, and when Rufo bent low, he did see a