The Shadow of Ultimate Fear: The Sword of Saint Georgas Book 8

By Robert Davis

In a remote village, a malignant force is turning people into homicidal maniacs when the sun goes down. Vampire-hunter Anders Draculescu investigates, hoping to find a clue that will help him expose the vampiric conspiracy that threatens the whole of Eastern Europe.

The evidence points him toward a castle riddled with secret passageways, and the noble family who reside there, but who among them is in league with the vampires, and who an innocent pawn?

As ancient stone circles charge with supernatural power, the new moon approaches... and heralds the arrival of a terrible goddess.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert Davis
• Release date: Oct 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005933791

Robert Davis

Robert lives in Hermiston Oregon with his wife and two dogs. While driving truck for a local farming company many thoughts would stream through his mind until he decided to write them down. Using his cell phone he texted hundreds of poems with sunrise and local scenery pictures to his wife and friends. The practice continued until it was suggested he put them into a book. The cell phone camera proved unreliable to reproduction but the poems became a lifeline to many as he was impressed to write the simply events of daily living in a small farming community.

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The Shadow of Ultimate Fear

The Sword of St Georgas: Book 8

by Robert Davis

This Smashwords edition: Copyright © Robert Davis 2022.

All rights reserved.

Originally published in Vampires of Carpathia by Swordworks. Copyright © Robert Davis 2012.

The right of Robert Davis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, countries, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual entities, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Chapter 1 – The Killing Madness

Three-hundred years had passed since the armies of Eastern Europe had overthrown the vampire-kings in the long series of battles that had come to be known as the Thousand Nights War. Since then, it had long been supposed that the undead threat had been eliminated and that only a few vampires had survived, hiding in the remotest parts of the country from which they occasionally ventured forth to prey upon the living. But Anders Draculescu had recently learned otherwise.

Draculescu was a vampire-hunter – one of only a handful still employed by the Church to safeguard people from the evils of the night – and his investigations had lately revealed that not only were there far more vampires at large than most people suspected, but that a considerable number of them were involved in a conspiracy whose far-reaching intention was to conquer the lands of Eastern Europe and reduce mankind into slavery.

So, when news reached him that a remote village in the north had fallen under a strange and terrible curse, he at once associated it with the evil plot and set out with his apprentice, Stefan Balaneanu, to investigate.

The village, called Trianu, stood at the edge of the vast wilderness that separated Carpathia from the Ukraine. It was a desolate place where the steppe had only recently been cultivated for farmland and the people still dressed in traditional garb.

According to the rumors that Draculescu had heard, a terrifying madness had begun to afflict the people there, manifesting whenever the sun went down and driving people to commit brutal acts of murder. No reason for the insanity could be discerned and it was whispered by superstitious folk that it was the Devil himself that was to blame. If that was true, then Draculescu was the right man to confront him. He was a towering brute with broad shoulders, like those of an ox, and massive arms that were as thick as tree trunks. His scalp was closely-shaven, his chin lost beneath a scraggy black beard, and he bore a tattoo of the cruciform Sword of Saint Georgas upon his forehead, making him look like a savage warrior from the ancient past.

He carried about his person a veritable arsenal of weaponry: knives and wooden stakes hung from bandoleers across his chest; he wore a sawn-off shotgun in a holster upon his thigh; and a crossbow was slung across his back.

His apprentice, Stefan, was ten years his junior and scarcely out of his teens. He was a handsome man: square-shouldered and heavy-looking, though considerably smaller in stature that his mentor. He had only recently recovered from a close brush with death and the experience had left him gaunt in the face and pale of complexion.

Like Draculescu, he too was armed with a fearsome array of weaponry. He wore a saber on his left hip and a heavy revolver on his right. A brace of knives was strapped to his back, and, in his hands, he carried a lengthy vampire-hunter’s spear.

The two men approached Trianu along a dusty road that had been baked hard by the heat of the sun. The village lay like an island in the center of a sea of fields, in which bright yellow sunflowers grew alongside wheat and potatoes. Draculescu observed a small circle of standing stones at the boundary line, where the land grew wild again. It had an ancient and sinister look about it, as if angry prehistoric gods had thrown darts at the village and missed.

In the distance, the manor of the local boyar reared against the skyline like a sentinel standing guard over the village, and it was to this building that Draculescu travelled. It had been fashioned in the Gothic style, but with its appearance drawing heavy influences from local traditions, and it had a high, tented roof and arched windows with elaborately decorative stonework. After introducing himself to the servants, Draculescu was shown inside and taken into the library, where he and Stefan were asked to wait while the boyar was summoned.

The house was clearly the property of a man who had a passion for militaria. The walls were decorated with an assortment of antique weapons and the bookshelves were dominated by military treatises and fighting manuals.

Stefan whistled softly through his teeth. ‘This is the sort of collection I want to have one day,’ he said as he admired the weapons on the wall. ‘Take a look at this one.’

The piece he was looking at was an unusual-looking double-handed sword. It had a long, narrow blade that flared into a wide leaf-shaped spear point at the tip and was clearly designed for thrusting, rather than cutting.

‘I’ve never