The Priest of Blood (30 page)

The sight of us must have been extraordinary—six vampyres, heads toward Earth, arms and legs outstretched but bent, crawling down the well, clinging to juttings and holes within the structure, following the trace of indentations and narrow shelves that formed the steps down.

Near the bottom, there was the lip of a cavern, and a drop to the ground of perhaps twenty feet. I landed like a cat and remained crouching at the bottom, looking out at the wonder before me. Above, the cavern of many-colored rock, lit with luminous blue ore.

Directly ahead of me, the shore of a lake. Shingles and shells lay beneath my hands and feet. Other more substantial forms made of some kind of plaster also were underfoot. I lifted a flat disk, and, turning it over, saw that it was a fragment of a white mask of some kind. Its eyes and lips were shell. As I glanced near where the water met the sand, I saw other broken masks also and proceeded to glance at each of them. Had they once adorned sculpture? Had they been worn? Were they of some heathen religion or of a theater’s repertoire? I didn’t know—something about them bothered me, for they seemed alien to me, and to anything human I had seen. Yet they were simply masks, most of them reduced to shards.

In the distance, more cavernous space and natural bridges of rock built so perfectly that they might’ve once been the outer walls of the kingdom. Before me, the water lapped gently at the sands—but it was milk-white water, fairly glowing with minute particles of life, as if thousands of tiny white insects or prawns moved in the liquid. When I cupped my hands into it and brought the water up, it was as clear as any lake’s. So it was these tiny creatures—harmless—that made the color so white. When we had all arrived along the shore, we explored its edge, and, presently, Vali found a barge docked at some distance, as if it had been set there for us to find.

“See?” I told Kiya. “We don’t need to swim.”

It was little more than a large raft made of wood, but was large enough to accommodate four of us. Vali and Yset remained behind, for we could not risk them walking within the water, as it would drain them of any energy they had left. Yset touched the edge of my stream with her hand, and told me without words that she and Vali would guard the exit to this world at the center of the mountain.

We boarded the wooden vessel and pushed off from the shore. Yarilo and Ewen handled the oar and pike, pushing away from the rock walls or digging into the sucking earth at the bottom of the water to propel us forward. The smells that came up from the water were of sulfur and a strange musty smell; from the caverns through which we navigated, an icy chill grew as we moved farther and farther from the shore. Just as we crossed beneath a spiked ceiling of glassy stone, Ewen caught my attention with a slight wave of his hand. I went over to him, at the back of the barge, and looked across the surface of the white water. “Something’s there.”

“I can’t sense it,” I said.

“The water interrupts the stream,” Yarilo said. Then, slightly startled, he pointed off to the other side of the barge. “Over there.”

We watched the surface of the water as it rippled, then went still. Kiya got down on her hands and knees and looked into the water. “I see...someone.”

“Someone?”

“It’s one of the Alkemars,” she said, keeping watch on the milky water.

Chapter 14

________________

T
HE
A
LKEMARS

1

Within a few minutes, we all saw them—at least four creatures beneath the water’s surface, lying as if on their backs, floating beneath the water. I had heard tales of mermaids, but had never expected them to have such monstrous forms. While the faces of these nymphs were fair and lovely and their shoulders and breasts were as fresh and ripe as any young maiden’s, gradually their pale flesh gave way to scales and fins, and barbs as catfish might have, while small barnacles clung to their sides and flat bellies. What would be their thighs melted together into one long tail like that of a crocodile. “They watch us,” Kiya said.

“They’re beautiful,” Ewen added.

“They’re like us,” I said. “See? They have the teeth.” And indeed, their smiles were sharp, and the barbs of their teeth were like sharks’. “These are our ancestors, perhaps.”

“They seem dumb,” Yarilo said. “Fish. Monstrous fish. I wonder if their blood tastes of the sea?”

“Fish?” Kiya asked. “Or serpents? See their tails. They are like eels. Or crocodiles. These are the sisters who guard the entry. They are not to be disturbed.”

But Yarilo could not resist reaching into the water to touch the breast of one. Yarilo enjoyed his predatory touching—I had seen him do it with a maiden on the hunt. He had wanted to seduce her with his touch, and, truthfully, he had drunk much blood from women who were enchanted by his handsome, rugged face and eyes that lit up like a cat’s in the dark.

The Alkemar that he fondled grinned with the teeth of a shark. She rose up to meet his touch, and brought her face above the water. Her eyes were milky white with a yellow center almost like an egg yolk. Her skin seemed darker than it had beneath the water and was translucent in parts, so that beneath the skin, blood pumped, and streaks of nerves ran up and down just behind the glowing of the flesh.

She spoke in a voice that was nasal and nearly a shriek. A language like none we had ever heard came from her, and our senses could not at first decipher it. Kiya told Yarilo to pull back his hand from her—for he was cupping her face.

“She won’t bite me,” he said. “We’re cousins, aren’t we? You and I.” He leaned over and pressed his lips to her eyelids, kissing her on each.

Then her sisters rose up from the water, their heads above the surface, and as the white water spilled from them, I saw that they each had a green-gray color to them, like crocodiles of muddy rivers. Their tails, too, which whipped lightly a white froth at the surface. They had scales and prongs of gray-green flesh that were reptilian. These were not mermaids at all—they were as much serpents as the snakes in the outer caves.

As they chattered and shrieked among themselves, I realized that they’d surrounded our barge on all sides. There were nine of them, all told, and I began to distinguish some of the ancient tongue they spoke so that words like “Alkemarizshtan” began to mean something to me.

“They are barbaric,” I said. “Can you not feel it? They are not like us.”

“They are just like us,” Yarilo said. “Neither dead nor alive. Neither human nor quite monster. Aren’t you? My sweet?”

I detected in him his intention. He had seen the blood and smelled its vigor. These creatures had blood that we could drink, and his thirst had returned. Kiya must’ve felt it, too, for I saw her nostrils flare. But I didn’t trust their appeal, and these creatures were not human and might have been undead just as we were. Death could not feed from death without bringing death.

And yet, I sensed their life force. My nerve endings tingled with the desire to drink from them.

One of them crawled onto a smooth, flat rock that jutted up from the water. She pressed her hands against the rock, swinging her tail lazily into the water. She cried out something, and I caught a few words that my mind was able to understand, something about “Damitra.” At the sound of this name, another of the sisters looked over at her, then she glanced at the one nearest Yarilo. I didn’t like this communication, nor the fact that Yarilo had abandoned the pike and Ewen had dug the oar against some rocks to keep the barge still. The stillness was bad. We were in their territory, and this was a dangerous world that had been buried centuries ago and was not meant to be found.

And then I knew who had built the barge and left it. Left it for any who came. The Alkemars themselves. They were not simply dumb creatures of some ancient curse. They had an intelligence as a spider might in spinning her web, or a crocodile might, lying deep in the mud in order to fool prey.

“Her name is Damitra,” Yarilo said, turning back to me, grinning. “She has told me. She controls the stream here.”

I hadn’t felt the stream at all among them. Had he? Was this monstrous creature really communicating with him through some form of the stream unknown to us? Or was it simply bewitchment?

I looked at Yarilo fiercely. “Let her go,” I whispered with a harsh tone. “She is unclean.”

He grinned more broadly, keeping his eyes on her face. “She is very clean.” He laughed. “Look at how lovely she is.”

I tried to reach over and pull Yarilo back, but it was too late. The liquid wriggling in the water swirled and spiraled in waves, like the beginning of a frenzy among sharks taking down a sea lion. The other Alkemars surrounded their sister Damitra, the one that fascinated Yarilo, who leaned against her throat, sniffing for her blood.

And then the Alkemars leapt from the surface, grabbing Yarilo by the waist and shoulders as he leaned forward, pulling him beneath the water with barely a splash.

2

The water’s surface went still as glass.

Kiya swore, her voice echoing in the caverns. Ewen moved back toward me, clutching my arm. I knelt and stared into the water, trying to see them, trying to see what happened to our companion.

“I can’t even feel him in the stream,” Kiya said, her senses exploding, as were mine, as we tried to reach him using the only method we knew.

We could not go into the water, both because it would, itself, drain our strength, and also because none of us knew what these creatures might do.

I could not stand it anymore. Seconds had passed, and there was no sound. I dove over the edge, breaking the water’s surface. When I felt the liquid pour over me, I felt ice both within and without. It was bone-chilling and did not just end my sense of the stream to my vampyre clan, but exhausted me as I swam within it.

As it was, I had no strength beyond ordinary mortal power, and even that was sapped. I swam through the milky sea, which was less murky beneath than above, and I saw them swimming away, each clutching him with their teeth, shaking at Yarilo’s flesh as if they meant to tear him limb from limb.

They no longer resembled maidens in the least, but creatures called lampreys, which I have only seen once before in my life, as a boy when my stepfather had brought one home from the sea. The leechlike mouth with its rows upon rows of teeth, and that otherworldly look to them, as if they could not possibly be created from the Earth or Heaven or even Hell itself.

We all felt it at once: these were not merely daughters of the city of Alkemara.

They were infused with the spirit of the dark mother herself.

One of them had already sucked the flesh from his left hand, leaving shattered bone, and another had attached herself to his groin.

I swam to them and tried to pull one of the miserable beasts from him, but she had him locked in an obscene embrace as if she were not a separate entity at all but part of his own flesh.

I could not breathe. I rose to the surface and gasped for air. I had traveled several feet from the barge.

Ewen moved the pike swiftly through the water while Kiya rowed with the enormous oar. Ewen jabbed at the Alkemars as he went, thrusting the pike into them, then drawing it up to jab again. When I reached the barge, Kiya and Ewen drew me, gasping for air, up into it.

3

Suddenly, Yarilo’s face came up, breaking the surface—at some distance. He laughed, although his face had been torn to the bone.

“It is wonderful!” he shouted. “They are beautiful. There are more than you’d think. Oh, they’ve shown me all of it. All of the glory of it. It was a kingdom like no other.”

Quickly, I grabbed the pike and guided the barge over to where he floated. I felt a faint stream again, among us. The binding of our kind. He had not yet been extinguished. He might survive, I thought, if I could draw him from the water soon enough. As I approached, something bumped the barge. Then another thump against it. We could not move the barge toward him. In fact, we had begun to move away from him, as if on a cushion of air.

Ewen cried out, pointing to the water by the edge of our craft. The sisters were there, beneath it, drawing the barge away. No matter how I paddled or pushed off, their strength was greater.

There were not just several Alkemars beneath us, there were hundreds of them.

Perhaps the feeding on Yarilo had called them up, but suddenly the water bubbled with movement, and we saw these strange serpent-women swimming beneath the water, some drawing us away, others swimming in schools beneath the whiteness, all toward the place where the dark blood of our friend rose to the surface and drifted in a wake behind him.

“Yarilo!” I cried.

He looked over at us, not even aware that these monsters existed to keep all from the ancient fallen city. There was a bright pleasure in his eyes despite the tears at his scalp and along his cheek. Two of the reptilian maidens rose up, kissing his face all over. I could not bring myself to watch as one of them leapt above the water, her jaws unhinging like a snake’s, her gray teeth slicing deep into his flesh. They were not like us, after all. They were not blood-drinkers. They ate flesh, and the flesh of the undead or the flesh of the living satisfied their needs.

To watch one of our tribe die was terrible. But to feel the stream—and the Extinguishing in the stream—was a thousand times worse. We felt the pain ourselves, within us, scraping at us as the Alkemar’s teeth scraped across his skin until there was nothing but bone. Still, we knew his life existed in that bone and flesh and would never again be one being. Never have the essence of Yarilo.

Their faces were covered with his blood, finally, and the creatures no longer resembled in any way the beautiful maidens we had first seen. Their true forms had returned with their feeding.

They were soulless monsters with eyes that were empty and red and their jaws elongated.