The Priest of Blood (25 page)

Then this stream-vision of Pythia, which had flooded me when she offered me her open mouth and blood and breath, at the moments between life and death, vanished like smoke.

Shadows arose around the altar. Greedy shadows that tried to grab at the headdress and the robe, and I felt as if they turned to me, watching them from some distant time and place. The whispers of these shades became like flies at my ear—“Nahhashim, Maz-Sherah, we know you.”

3

And then the vision of that place exploded into brilliant light.

I was again with Ewen, my lungs burning, my body cold and empty.

He sat up, a curious grin on his face, wiping his hand lazily across his mouth. His face was suffused with a radiant glow that I had never before seen.

I felt weak, and fell back. I looked up to see the other vampyres over me, watching.

They had looks on their faces as if I had frightened them.

One among them crouched beside me. He had a canine look to his face—his jaw was long and stretched with the thorny cusps of teeth that had grown too long. He had thick, dark hair that fell below his shoulders, some of it swinging around his face. Tattoos of disks and strange symbols encircled his throat and his muscled arms. His clothes were of a type that I had seen on soldiers from Byzantium, but perhaps he had stolen these from one of his victims.

He grasped my wrist. “What have you done?” he asked. I felt his yellowed, twisted nails going into my skin. “What is this?”

“He is my friend,” I said.

“This is impossible,” he said, looking with wonder at Ewen, whose eyes rolled back into his head, showing only the whites. “Only the Pythoness can bring us into the fold.”
 

“I did to him what she did to me.”

“No,” gasped another, the dark woman who wore the turban. “She is the only one.”

“He will die,” another said, watching Ewen’s eyes close slowly, and the last shudder of life move through him. “He will die, and rot like all the others.”

“We should drink the last of him,” the tattooed vampyre said. “He should not die with blood in his body.” As he crawled forward, his slithering reminded me of a snake. I felt repulsion, because I knew I would become more like him and less like Ewen as the nights unfolded. I had become some dark vermin, a plague on the world.

Yet, there was a great fluid beauty in his movements. As he approached Ewen’s torn throat, he sniffed, his nostrils flaring, and he turned back to me. Then, looking at the turbaned female, said, “This cannot be.”

The female stepped over to Ewen. Straddling his chest, she bent down to bring her mouth near his. She sniffed all around his face and throat.

She shot me a suspicious glance. “Who taught you this?”

“The one you called the Pythoness,” I said.

“How?” the tattooed vampyre asked.

The female leapt up from Ewen and came to me, pushing me back down to the ground. “Did you see anything? Did you see the city?”

Remembering the altar and the priest, I nodded. “I saw a man and an altar.”

The female looked up at the others, who came closer to me as I lay beneath her weight. “You learned of this...the Sacred Kiss...from her?”

Before I could answer, another female vampyre stepped forward. She was lean and pale, and had a look of disgust upon her face. “We should never have taken him from the tower.”

“Rat ash,” the tattooed one muttered as if it were a terrible oath. “She abandoned us.”

The turbaned female atop me touched my forehead, then leaned into me, sniffing again. She whispered, “You would be dead if not for us, newborn. Your Pythoness abandoned you so that you would not feed if you rose from the first death. We knew of you and found you in the tower.”

The other female spat. “The Pythoness was right to leave him there. He brings evil upon us.”

Others began murmuring above—I watched their faces and saw anger and confusion.

The one pressing her knees against my shoulders to pin me to the ground let out a shrill cry, which silenced the others. Then, her face coming close to mine, she said, “What do they call you?”

“Aleric,” I said. “The Falconer.”

An enigmatic smile crossed her lips, and she showed her teeth. “Well, Falcon, tell me what the Pythoness showed you.”

“She drank of me until I had nearly lost all my blood, and had little breath left in my mouth and no vision in me. And then she pressed her mouth to me and breathed both death and life into me. And as she brought this warm stream into my throat, I saw a vision of a great city of an ancient time. I saw a woman of ripe beauty wearing a terrible mask of gold, and, beside her, a holy man with the wings of a dragon, and in his hand was a staff that seemed entwined with serpents. And behind them both, an altar of lapis stone, and upon it Pythia herself, like a prisoner waiting for sacrifice.”

“Alkemara,” the turbaned female gasped, glancing at the others.

I nodded. “The City of the Alkemars is what he told me. The priest. And there were terrible shadows that whispered to me. I saw them just now when I sent my breath into my friend’s mouth.”

One of the others nearby said, “The Myrrydanai. They come.”
 

“No,” said the tattooed one. “We would feel them in the stream.”
 

“Other strange words I do not understand,” I said. “Nahhashim. Maz-Sherah. I do not know the meaning of the vision, but Pythia drew back from me suddenly. I felt she had not known how I shared her sight of that place and those people. She shrieked at my knowing of them, and I watched great wings grow from her shoulders. She flew up into the night, crying out as if I had not been meant to see these things.”

“She gave you eternal life,” the turbaned female said. “The Pythoness created all of us to watch us extinguish.”

“But what of the vision? The great city?”

“It is no more,” the tattooed vampyre said. “It is a memory of the ancient world, a moment from another age. We have heard of it. But none...none has had the vision of it. Or of these things.”

“He lies,” the other female above me said. “She sent him to destroy us. She left him there. She knew we would feel his stream and find him. He is a trap for us.”

“But the Sacred Kiss,” the turbaned woman said. “None of us can manifest it.”

“We have all tried,” another vampyre said, a handsome man who stood holding Ewen’s sword. “We have longed to bring our lovers to be with us. Instead, we send them beyond the Threshold.”

“He is the One,” the turbaned woman said, as she looked to the others.

Another said, “How can it be?”

“Bloody Turks! There is no ‘one,’” the tattooed vampyre growled. “Nothing but a lie.”

“All lies,” the standing female said. “There is no Maz-Sherah. Alkemara is a fable. It is like the gods. They do not exist, but we create them so as to not fear the Extinguishing.”

“You have heard the voice of the dark mother,” the female atop me said. “The one who seeks to destroy us since she first gave us life.” Others mumbled assent to her words. The tattooed one spat out, “It is our damnation that speaks to us.”

“She has a voice of thunder, and we feel her lightning in the stream itself,” another said.

“She sends us to the Extinguishing,” the female said. “I tell you, he is the One. It is as Balaam told us.” She commanded one of the vampyres to go find more to drink, for I was weak. She held me in her arms, but I kept my eyes on Ewen as she raised me.

“You must feed again before dawn,” she said.

“The Maz-Sherah,” one of the vampyres said, a sense of awe in his voice. “Balaam muttered about the Maz-Sherah too often. But I thought it was a dream.”

“If he is the one,” said the tattooed one, “why doesn’t he bring the knowledge? Why is he weak? Why don’t we recognize him?”

“The dream is not yet flesh. He has not yet become,” the turbaned vampyre said. “The priest breathes through him. Our dark mother who wishes the end of days fears him.”

“He will bring destruction to us,” one of the others said. “He will bring her wrath upon all who drink blood.”

4

The snarling female above me was named Yset; the longhaired one with the tattoos at his neck was Yarilo; the youth with the sword, Vali. The turbaned vampyre’s name was Kiya, she told me, after naming the others around us. She had once been the wife of a merchant who traveled the seas. But she had been transformed nearly a hundred years previous, by the Pythoness. The city of Hedammu had been overtaken with plague, then, but there was no disease. It was simply the Pythoness’s hunger. The oldest of the vampyres in Hedammu was named Balaam, “But his time is near,” Kiya told me. “He has weakened, and we bring him blood, for he can no longer hunt. But I will tell you more of that another time,” Kiya said. “You must feed and rest.”

After a while, they brought a woman to me. She shivered as they held her tight and drew her clothes from her slowly, presenting her to me.

“Drink of her,” Kiya said. “Drink long draughts, and don’t hesitate to finish her. She will bring you strength and blessings.”

I took to her throat. The prey clutched me as I did this, for as I knew, it was not unpleasant for our victims—as the leech clings to the legs that wade the marsh, so I clung to her throat and caused her little pain, though I made a mess of her. Drunk, sated, I fell back into Kiya’s arms and felt the antidote to my torment course through me again.

Hours before dawn, I was strong enough to stand, and I lifted Ewen into my arms. Like a wolf pack, we raced back across the barren land, to our home, Hedammu, the poisoned citadel that had been uninhabitable for nearly a century by all but those who had become legend in this region—the jackals of the Devil.

5

I laid Ewen down in the ditch that was my grave and went to Kiya who called to me in the stream, which invisible flowed through and held all vampyric beings of the tribe. “I want you to meet the oldest of our tribe,” she said. She led me down to where a large stone circle sealed a low-ceilinged chamber. We drew off the stone and crouched down to enter.

“He was a great king once,” she whispered.

There, on a bed of clay, lay a corpse, its leathery skin torn at the curves of his elbows, while the thinnest skin along his scalp blistered and peeled.

She knelt beside the dead man. When she touched him, his jaw seemed to drop, and his lips curled back slightly. I saw the long fangs of our tribal brother. Kiya glanced up at me. “He was beautiful not long ago. He had long golden hair, and a strong body—like yours.” As she said this, she touched my chest, and her hand went to my throat. “Do you feel his stream?”

I closed my eyes, her fingers lingering at my shoulder. I felt the heat of Kiya’s stream, but nothing more.

Then a gentle, nearly imperceptible feeling, as of some small insect crawling along the back of my hand.

“He cared for me, as I care for you,” she said. “A king of a tribe of men who are no more—slaughtered, as so many men will be. Like you, he had come, an enemy to this land. And as she did with you and I, the Pythoness drank of him and brought her life into him. And as you and I shall one day, he lies in the dust, never again to rise.”

“We are immortal,” I said. “How...” But I could not form the words to ask the question I dreaded.

“While we are young and strong, we are no better than wolves and jackals. When the strength fades, and the years pass, our hell is within this flesh. For us there is no death. It has been denied us at the Threshold. This...” she said, turning again to wipe the drops of red sweat that had accumulated at his tattered brow, “this is our destiny, if we are not destroyed by men. It is the Extinguishing. We live forever, whether or not our minds continue. We grow weak and feeble. To some it comes fast, and they are dust soon. To others, like Balaam, it is slow.”

“Has he lived many lifetimes?”

“Not so many,” she said. “We live longer than men. But we do not live as we are now, forever.”

Her eyes shone as she watched him. She crouched beside him and pressed her hand into his. “Here, hold me,” she said, offering me her free hand. I took it in mine, and immediately experienced a sensation of horror. I felt as if my hand in hers were liquid, and flowed into Balaam as he laid there, barely a breath coming from him. I felt a shivering cold and the feeling of movement as if I’d touched the sloughing skin of a sleeping serpent.

More than anything I’d experienced in immortality, this struck to my heart in a way that no human experience had. Though I had wept for my mother, for my brother, for my grandfather, and for loss of Alienora, when I felt what Kiya passed from this vampyre as she tightened her grip on his hand and on mine, it was not the terror of the Extinguishing of a vampyre’s existence but the sorrow of an enormous diminishing of light. It was as if the stream between the three of us, in weakening, had drawn something from within me that had been dormant in my previous existence. I understood sadness in a way that was not destructive, not self-loathing, not vain, as had been my mortal feeling.

We were one in the stream. His loss, the loss of this creature’s facilities, his power, his memory, all of it was my loss, as well. Kiya’s, too, and though I did not then understand why monsters such as ourselves should be pitied, still, I felt it, a great pity at the loss of this immortal, at the terror he faced, for, without hearing it from Kiya’s lips, I knew. I knew.

The Extinguishing was worse than the pain of a thousand deaths.

It was existing into eternity, locked in a cage of all that would fall away and turn to dust.

“Mortals journey, when their flesh fails them,” she said, softly. “Their skin is their cloak, and when they shed it, their souls travel across the Threshold. We cannot abandon our flesh, once we have resurrected. The flesh and the bone and the blood—the body—is our heaven and our hell.”

I felt his youth and his childhood, his years as a vampyre, both the darkness and the light of his existence, the tearing of the fabric of memory as much as the tearing of muscle.

This is the vampyre’s curse: the atrophy of the body, which comes, eventually, when cut off from the source of the tribe. Cut off as we, in that graveyard city, were cut from the womb of our being.