Gravescum: The Sword of Saint Georgas Book 9

By Robert Davis

For centuries, the graveyard at Solesti has been cursed by a powerful evil buried at the end of the Thousand Nights’ War.

Now, as heavy rainfall floods the surrounding countryside, a monster so terrible that none dare speak its name is released from its grave and sets forth to quench its unending thirst for human blood.

The only thing standing in its way is Anders Draculescu – the last Sword of Saint Georgas – and his young apprentice, Stefan. But, this time, have the two vampire-hunters met their match?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert Davis
• Release date: Oct 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005385019

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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Gravescum

The Sword of Saint Georgas: Book 9

by Robert Davis

This Smashwords edition: Copyright © Robert Davis 2022.

All rights reserved.

Originally published in The Shadow of Ultimate Fear and Other Tales of Dread. Copyright © Robert Davis 2019.

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 – Out of the Pit

It had been raining ceaselessly for two days straight and the leaden grey skies gave no hope that an end was in sight. The wide Bolboti River, swollen with the runoff from the jagged Carpathian Mountains, had burst its banks and the surrounding floodplains were submerged as far as the eye could see.

Heedless of the bad conditions, two men waded slowly through the ankle-deep floodwaters, leading their horses by the reins. Both wore rain-soaked leather slicks, with hoods that all-but concealed their faces.

One was a hulking giant of a man with shoulders that were almost half as broad as he was tall. His muscular arms were as wide as a woman’s waist, his face was as worn and scarred as a pugilist’s callused knuckles, and the eyes that peered into the rainswept gloom had the feral clarity of a wild beast.

His companion was a younger man, scarcely out of his teens: muscular and firm of build, more civilised-looking, with a handsome face and a keen, sensitive gaze.

Each man carried an arsenal of weapons and they might easily have been mistaken for a couple of mercenaries were it not for the spear the younger man carried. It was a vampire-hunter’s spear; a weapon seldom seen in the twilight years of the nineteenth century, when vampires were rare, and vampire-hunters even rarer.

Anders Draculescu and his apprentice, Stefan, were two of the last of their kind in an age when science and reason had driven superstition from the minds of even the most backward rural village, and few men believed in the vampires their ancestors had once fought a bloody war to defeat.

But though the horrors of the Thousand Nights War had been mostly forgotten by history, the land still bore its scars, and it was to the scene of one such scar that Draculescu and his companion journeyed in spite of the foul weather.

In the hills beyond the village of Solesti lay an infamous graveyard, flooded now as the rest of the surrounding countryside had been inundated. Water gurgled through its arched lych-gate, and beyond the high stone wall that marked its boundary only the tops