Queen's Gambit

by Karen Chance

  “You are mourning for your assistant,” he said. “It is understandable, but in these difficult times, the best we can do for those who look to us for leadership is to show them that nothing has changed. That we are proceeding as normal.”

  “But things are not normal,” I said, struggling to hold onto my temper. “And Ray wasn’t my assistant, he was—is—my Second! Now, I will need some information, everything you have on what happened last night—”

  “But that is not technically true, is it?” Hassani broke in, scratching his beard.

  I stopped mid-sentence. “What isn’t?”

  “A dhampir, if you will forgive me, has no Second. And Senator Dorina was captured, as I understand?”

  I stared at him, a strange feeling starting in my belly. “What’s your point?”

  “That you are welcome here at court despite your . . . disability . . . due to your father’s position. And your own as envoy from the North American Vampire Senate. But as for the rest . . .”

  “What about the rest?”

  “Well, if you will forgive me, the details of last night’s events are senatorial business. I cannot release that information to one of your status.”

  I felt my blood pressure rise, to the point that Hassani could probably hear it pounding against my veins. But although he had a curved dagger at his waistband—a beautiful thing in carved steel, the only ornamentation he wore—he didn’t twitch so much as a finger toward it. Of course, he didn’t.

  Dhampirs were a problem for lesser vampires, and the revenants that used to provide most of my income. But for someone like him? We were gutter scum. I was probably expected to be grateful that he wasn’t chucking me into a ditch.

  But then, he couldn’t, could he? Because I might not be a senator anymore, by his reckoning, but I was still married to one. And Louis-Cesare could get all the information he wanted.

  “Then tell Louis-Cesare,” I said tightly. “The point is—”

  “But I am afraid I cannot do that, either,” Hassani said, looking remorseful.

  “Cannot do what?”

  “Give any assistance to your lover—”

  “My husband! And why the hell not?”

  A sly smile, the first real emotion I’d seen from him, flickered across his face for a second, before being replaced with more faux concern. “My apologies. I thought you knew.”

  “Knew what, damn it!”

  “Why, that he left this morning.”

  I stared at him for a moment, then tore across the corridor and down to our old suite of rooms, where I found the door open and half a dozen servants cleaning up and repairing the damage. But no Louis-Cesare. And no luggage.

  I stood there for a moment, vibrating.

  Louis-Cesare had deserted me once, to run after Christine, despite the fact that she was a complete psycho. He’d received word that she had escaped from Alejandro, so he hadn’t really had a choice, but the fact that he’d gone without so much as a word had almost ended us before we began. The one, absolute, unbreakable rule of our relationship was that we communicated. If one or the other had to leave unexpectedly, fine, but at the very least we left a note.

  I did not see a note.

  I did not see anything, except for people mopping up what could be water from last night. Or what could be signs of another fight, one that I’d slept through. And that meant—

  Fear clutched at my heart, sharp and dizzying, and a cold hand stopped my breathing. I whirled on Hassani as he followed me inside, as unhurried as if we were having a stroll through a garden. He didn’t so much as blink when I snatched his own knife and held it to his throat.

  He did look faintly surprised, however.

  “If you’ve killed him—” I growled.

  “Killed him?” he blinked at me.

  “Louis-Cesare! If he’s dead—”

  “Oh, I sincerely hope not.” A finger pushed the knife away. “That would be . . . difficult to explain.”

  I saw red. And this time, it wasn’t from Dorina, who wasn’t here to help me. But then, she hadn’t been for most of the last five hundred years. She’d intervened on some occasions, when she happened to be in residence and judged me to be out of my depth. But the rest of the time I’d been on my own, and fighting creatures far more powerful than me.

  And I didn’t fight fair.

  I grabbed a small tab from my jacket, slapped it to the front of his clothes, and sprang away. I didn’t want to be caught in an inverse shield, one that contracted upon contact, trapping the subject. Usually trapping the subject, I revised, as Hassani broke out of it pretty much immediately.

  Okay, upgrade, I decided, and threw a golden spider instead.

  My arsenal used to be limited to what I could beg, borrow or steal, unless I’d actually lucked out and gotten paid. And even then, magical weapons—particularly the unlicensed, not exactly legal variety—are expensive. I’d had to be judicious about what I used.

  But while senators don’t get a salary, I’d discovered that they do get one very big perk of the job: access to the senate’s extensive arsenal. Which was not only well equipped, but also contained all the fun little toys they’d confiscated from the bad guys. And the bad guys knew how to party.

  Which was why the tiny spider had babies immediately upon contact, who went scurrying all over those snowy white robes. Hassani watched them with distaste. “It doesn’t matter what you throw at me, dhampir. It isn’t going to—”

  He stopped talking abruptly, probably because the big spider had just webbed up his mouth. The babies quickly did the same to his body, wrapping him in layers of fine, white silk, like the mummy he wasn’t. And then contracting the web, causing him to topple over onto his back.

  He hit the floor with a thud, one of the servants screamed, and another jumped for me—and got slapped with one of my little tabs for his trouble. He didn’t seem to find it as easy to break out of as his master, who was thrashing about on the floor, having managed to halfway free himself already. But that was the beauty of Spider’s Bite, as the golden spell was called: the more you fought, the stronger it got, pulling power from its victim.

  And Hassani had it to burn.

  In another moment, he actually did look like a mummy. The thick, white strands, maybe a foot deep at this point, had covered his eyes and muffled the rich tones of his voice. And then cut them off altogether.

  That appeared to be the last straw for the servants.

  They ran, stampeding over themselves to get out of the door, except for the one now frozen in what looked like plastic wrap. He stared out at me, perfectly fine since vamps don’t need to breathe, like a vintage Ken doll still inside his box. But he wouldn’t stay that way for long.

  Others were coming.

  I closed and locked the door, which activated the ramped-up shields. But that wouldn’t stop Hassani’s children, who would rip it apart with their bare hands if necessary, to reach their master. Teacher, I corrected myself, pulling a knife and cutting away the webbing from over his face.

  Pretentious twat.

  But the pretentious twat wasn’t stupid, and had finally stopped struggling.

  I didn’t have much time, and he knew it. He also knew something else. “You won’t kill a consul,” he told me, the rich voice untroubled. “It would destroy the alliance.”

  “But you would kill a senator?”

  Hassani looked aggrieved. “Right sleeve.”

  “What?”

  “Check my right sleeve, you annoying woman!”

  I checked his right sleeve. That required cutting away more of the webbing, which I doubted my tiny allies had the strength to replace. Not that it mattered; the door to the suite was already starting to shake.

  I pulled out a folded letter, and knew immediately who it was from. My name was on the front, and that perfect, copperplate handwriting belonged to only one person. I unfolded it and—

  Don’t kill Hassani.

  Motherfucker.

  “Y
ou could have just given this to me,” I pointed out, to the smarmy bastard on the floor.

  “I always heard dhampirs were mad,” he countered, staring prayerfully at the ceiling. “I did not think it actually true.”

  I ignored that and went back to reading.

  Dearest, I expect that this will not please you. What would not please me is your death. We do not know the effect that halving a soul might have, but it would be inadvisable for you to enter combat at the moment.

  “Ironic,” Hassani offered, because he was reading over my shoulder.

  I jerked the letter away.

  Please do me the honor of fulfilling our mission in Egypt. In return, I will fulfill the vow I made to you last night. Those who have hurt you will pay, I promise you that. And if possible, I will also retrieve those we have lost. I will be in touch.

  Louis-Cesare

  I just knelt there for a moment, rereading the letter. Then I read it a third time, before it really sank in. And I felt my face burn.

  I guessed I knew what that look of peace had been about last night, huh? He’d suddenly been calm, but not because he was with me. Not because we’d comforted each other, and were about to chase down our enemies together. But because he’d decided what he was going to do. Which involved leaving the little woman behind while he ran after Jonathan.

  Alone.

  He was chasing the one man who’d ever beaten him, but he didn’t want backup? Bet if Dorina was still here he’d have wanted some damned backup. But plain old Dory? Nah. What the hell could I do for him?

  I heard the letter crumple in my fist.

  Hassani sat up, having freed himself as far as the waist. “You see,” he said, watching me. “You could go to the queen’s mausoleum, after all.”

  I shot him a look of pure fury. “Is that what you’d do?”

  “No. But I am not a dhampir.”

  The look didn’t change.

  The door burst open, and at least a dozen master vampires tore into the room, blades out and faces set on hate. Hassani held up a hand and they stopped, so suddenly that some of them ran into each other. One toppled Ken, who fell onto his face, still unmoving.

  Hassani regarded them calmly. “Children, a teachable moment. As it is written, ‘Repel evil with what is better; then you will see that one who was once your enemy has become your dearest friend.’”

  One of the vampire’s hissed, and another bared fangs.

  “So, I’m evil?” I demanded.

  Hassani brushed it aside. “Exaggerated for effect.”

  “Do they know that?”

  He freed himself the rest of the way and took his time standing up and shaking out his perfect clothes. A number of tiny golden bugs fell out and rattled against the floor. He sighed.

  Then he looked at me, and the dark eyes were somehow different than before. “Come. There is something I want to show you.”

  Chapter Nine

  Dory, Cairo

  We headed to a part of the complex I hadn’t seen before, with sets of rock cut stairs going down into limestone caverns well below city level. Going down also meant going back in time, apparently, as layers of the current city peeled back like an onion to show earlier habitations. And then to reveal another city altogether, as we came to several stories of medieval brickwork.

  It featured the curved archways and pierced stone of Fustat, the original city built here by the first Arab conquerors, which predated Cairo by centuries. I remembered one of our guides telling me that Old Town overlapped its borders somewhat, or what was left of it. But we didn’t stop there.

  Maybe seven levels down we branched off the main stairs and cut through some rock hewn, sepia-colored rooms. They had traces of age-old pigments on the walls, and cartouches containing hieroglyphs I couldn’t read. Hassani paused like a good host whose guest has seen something that interested her, and the lantern boy he’d brought along stopped, too.

  The kid was a vamp but just barely, with big dark eyes and a nervous disposition. He had on a simple djellaba—the local robe that reminded me of a long nightshirt—with pale blue and white stripes. With the simple leather sandals he wore, and the old-fashioned lantern he carried, he looked like he’d stepped out of another time.

  As did everything else. The abrupt halt set the light swaying and the carvings flickering like an old news reel. I expected to see Howard Carter show up, any time now.

  “Heliopolis,” Hassani said, looking approving of my interest. “You are standing in the remains of the first city ever built on this spot. The City of the Sun, as the ancient Greeks called it.”

  “I thought Fustat was the first on this site.”

  “Oh, no. In fact, the temples and other buildings of Heliopolis were scavenged for materials to build Fustat and then medieval Cairo, just as the pyramids were.”

  “The pyramids?”

  Hassani nodded. “The monuments used to be faced with pure white limestone in ancient times, so highly polished that it was said to be blinding under the sun. But taking their facing stones was easier than quarrying new material, so.” He shrugged. “You can see the stones of temples like this one in the walls around Old Cairo.”

  “This was a temple?” I glanced around. I supposed I should have figured that out. The paintings were faded almost to indecipherability, but there were a lot of them, covering even the ceiling, which was so high that the light barely touched it. And while the stone pillars guarding the doorways were bare of pigment, their surfaces were beautifully carved, with the tops looking like lotus flowers opening under the sun.

  That sort of thing was expensive in the ancient world, where everything was done by hand. Palaces and temples were virtually the only spots that received such treatment. Well, and tombs.

  For some reason, I felt a shiver go across my skin.

  Hassani did not appear to notice, maybe because he was busy tracing another carving on the wall. “Oh, yes. Heliopolis was full of temples, to the point that the Greeks named it after the god they associated with the deity worshipped here. In ancient Egypt it was known as the House of Ra. You see? This is his cartouche.”

  “Ra? He was the sun god, wasn’t he?”

  Hassani wasn’t called Teacher for nothing. I’d thought it was more of a religious title, but he seemed genuinely pleased that his strange visitor knew something, at least. I was grateful for the guide to Aswan, who had basically never shut up. “Yes, indeed. Heliopolis was the center of his cult, going back as far as history does. It predated the dynastic period, you see.”

  “Dynastic?”

  “The era of the pharaohs.”

  “And what was before that?”

  He shot me a look. “Why, the time of the gods, of course.”

  We went on.

  There were more stairs, and more descent into darkness. The underground temple was vast enough for me to wonder why a good chunk of Old Cairo hadn’t collapsed into a massive sinkhole. I assumed that something had been done, magical or otherwise, to shore it up, although there were no signs of anything. No magic glistened anywhere, and the only scent I could detect was dust.

  Well, and an odd, skin ruffling odor that tickled my nose occasionally, from different directions, as if born on a breeze that didn’t exist down here. It was acid-sharp and bitter, and disturbing because it was impossible to identify. It didn’t help that the rooms we’d transitioned into were smaller and interconnected, and as dark as pitch before our completely inadequate light source lit them up. I was starting to wonder what had possessed me to accompany Hassani down here in the first place.

  He had promised to take me to the morgue where they were keeping the attackers’ corpses from last night. Louis-Cesare had already seen them, and probably gotten a clue as to where to start his search. It was something he hadn’t bothered to share with me, forcing me to retrace his steps in the hope that I’d notice whatever he had—which had sounded like a perfectly reasonable plan upstairs.

  Here . . . was a different story.
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br />   This place was seriously creeping me out, and my overly suspicious brain was taking full advantage. It was busy pointing out that this was a damned long trip to the morgue, wasn’t it? One with no witnesses to anything that might happen along the way except for Lantern Boy, who was Hassani’s creature. The consul hadn’t hurt Louis-Cesare because that would have been tantamount to declaring war on our senate, but a filthy dhampir who had just attacked him? And who he probably blamed for the assault last night?

  Shit.

  My mood wasn’t improved when we entered yet another area of the temple. I still couldn’t see squat—even less than before, in fact, since the lamplight was no longer able to reach the ceiling. But whatever we were walking through suddenly felt bigger and airier, with our footsteps echoing loudly in absolute silence.

  Well, almost absolute. The vamps weren’t bothering to breathe since they didn’t need it, but my own breaths sounded loud and ragged in my ears. Calm the hell down! I told myself sternly.

  My adrenal glands told me to get fucked and pumped out some more energy I didn’t need and couldn’t use right now. It buzzed around in my veins, threatening to make me clumsy, although the crappy lighting and uneven floor were already doing that. The tiny puddle of lantern light seemed vanishingly small, leaving me feeling like I was walking through a big, black, echoing void, with the only thing keeping me from falling on my face the small area of rough-cut stone I could see directly in front of me.

  And, eventually, that wasn’t enough.

  I tripped on the crack between two huge stones and went down to one knee, and then almost jumped out of my skin when a hand cupped my elbow.

  “My apologies,” Hassani said, his voice repeating eerily from all directions. The handsome, bearded face bent down into the puddle of light. “Our people see so well in the dark that I sometimes forget that others do not. But you should experience this.”

  “Experience what?” I asked hoarsely, and heard my own voice echo.

  I was pretty sure that I didn’t want to experience shit down here.

  But it wasn’t up to me. Suddenly, a series of light flashes all but blinded me, to the point that I threw an arm over my eyes. And when I lowered it, blinking in a dazzling flood of illumination, I saw . . . something incredible.