Clan Novel Assamite - Book 7 of The Clan Novel Saga

by Gherbod Fleming

  “The black portal,” the first Assamite said to Ibrahim. “What is beyond it?”

  “There is one last area we are convinced he knows more of,” the partner with the glass explained to Thetmes and Fatima.

  “The portal,” the first said again. “The portcullis. What is on the other side?” He signaled to his partner, who dripped a few more drops of blood on Ibrahim’s face.

  Ibrahim began a labored wheezing in his effort to reach the blood with his tongue. He licked frantically at his lips, which were little more than thin, drawn husks of skin.

  “The portal…”

  “Never been beyond…” Ibrahim rasped. “Uh…uh…uh…”

  Fatima had seen greater men than this humbled by torture. She felt neither pity nor joy at the unfortunate necessity, at the passing of this proud, Old World Lasombra.

  “But you know what is beyond.” The first Assamite, the chief examiner, dipped his finger into the glass, then held his hand over Ibrahim’s face. A single drop of blood hung tantalizingly from his finger. Ibrahim strained at it, but he could not hold his head aloft for more than a few seconds. He made noises that could have been growling, or desperate sobbing. “You know.”

  “Never been…beyond.”

  “You know!” The examiner lowered his finger, then yanked it back up as Ibrahim lunged but didn’t come close. The single drop of blood quivered, seemed to pulse from the beat of some secret heart.

  “Portal is sealed…always sealed,” Ibrahim cried softly. His eyes rolled up, but his eyelids were shriveled away to nothing, so the sagging orbs rolled against the bony ridge of his brow.

  “You approached the gate from within,” the examiner said in calm, soothing tones. “You could not pass it. I understand. What was beyond the gate? What was on the other side?”

  A piteous whimper escaped Ibrahim’s gaunt frame. His hobbling eyes cast about, though he could not see. “Tunnel…” he said. “Dark tunnel.”

  “A tunnel,” the examiner coaxed.

  “Two,” Ibrahim said weakly.

  The examiner wiped the drop of blood from his finger onto Ibrahim’s face, making sure to pull back his hand quickly. Instantly, Ibrahim’s body contorted violently. Fatima thought he might break his own neck trying to get the single drop of blood. His throat was choked with guttural panting. Finally, his tongue found the object of his desire, but elation gave way quickly to despair once the drop of blood was gone.

  “Two tunnels,” said the examiner. “Where do they lead?” His partner was dragging a large box from the bathroom. The box’s contents clanked one against another. Fatima could see spikes, thumbscrews, flaying knives…. The examiner waved his partner away. The second Assamite was obviously younger, less experienced, overly eager. For a Cainite in Ibrahim’s condition, physical torture would be nothing next to starvation, to the smell of denied blood, to the maddening nearness of sustenance just beyond reach. “Where do they lead?”

  “Never been…”

  “Where?”

  Ibrahim could not go on for several minutes. His body was racked with sobs. Eventually, the examiner fed him another drop of blood, and when Ibrahim lay panting asked again: “Where do they lead?” Ibrahim let out a deep sigh, like a mortal drawing and expelling his final breath. “Out…one leads out. Don’t know where.”

  The examiner, having grown familiar with when Ibrahim was or was not withholding information, seemed satisfied with this. He made sure his assistant took down the proper notes. “And the second tunnel? Where does the second tunnel lead?”

  "Leviathan,” Ibrahim whispered. “Leviathan…darkness…” Ibrahim’s mutterings quickly lost any coherence. His mind withdrew from his torturers to that place where they could not touch him—to torpor or to madness. The examiner gave him several more drops of blood, and though Ibrahim lapped greedily at the droplets, he did not respond to questions or even to a thin spike through his wrist.

  “Time will bring him back to us,” the examiner said. “Tomorrow night.”

  Shortly thereafter, Fatima and Thetmes left the room of torture, Fatima with the notes that had been taken thus far. They walked silently for some time through the modern parts of the city, through what could be the underbelly of any modern city.

  “I understand the hoods,” Fatima said eventually. “I am about to venture into the lair of one of the most powerful of the Sabbat, and if I fail, I will not be able to give them away specifically. But why let me know of them at all? Now if I fail, the regent might learn that her loyal shock troops are both more and less than she thought. You could have brought these notes to me. I would have trusted you without knowing the source.”

  “You cannot give us away,” Thetmes said. “If the regent discovers that some among the Black Hand serve two masters, it will merely confirm the suspicions she already holds. If she persecutes the Hand, she’ll drive more of them to us.”

  “So you benefit whether I succeed or fail.”

  “We benefit,” Thetmes corrected her. “Yes, whether you succeed or fail. Distrust among the kafir serves our purposes. Regardless, Don Ibrahim will be missed before long. Fingers will be pointed.”

  It all fit so well. If Fatima succeeded in destroying Monçada, much of the Sabbat would be thrown into chaos—more so than usual. If she failed, was captured and tortured, they might learn of the duplicity within the Black Hand, and a different sort of chaos would ensue. In the worst case, if Fatima failed and was destroyed, escaping torture, Ibrahim’s disappearance would lead to the Hand, according to Thetmes.

  “There is another reason,” Thetmes said. “Another reason that you have seen what you have seen, that I have told you what I have.” He stopped there in the street and took hold of Fatima’s arm. “We have risked the wrath of ur-Shulgi.”

  “Then why?” Fatima didn’t feel that she’d been done any favors. She didn’t expect to be. She had long served without question, but now it was her faithfulness that was being called into question—and she was supposed to be grateful?

  “Because we feel that your destruction would be a great loss to the clan,” Thetmes said. “The fida’i, even the rafiq, among them your deeds are legend. For you to fail this way—”

  “You mean it would be an embarrassment to you if your childe proves unworthy,” she snarled.

  “I am not alone in this,” Thetmes said, restraining agitation. “Al-Ashrad shares my feelings. There are others.”

  “Perhaps Monçada will save them the trouble—"

  "Monçada is nothing compared to the herald!” Thetmes nearly crushed her arm in his grip again but let her pull away. “Ur-Shulgi will know your heart. To perish serving the clan is honorable, but to be struck down by the herald…”

  “I have betrayed neither Allah nor Haqim!"

  "The herald will not see it so.”

  “Then the herald is wrong!”

  Thetmes took a step back. He looked at Fatima for a long moment, his own eyes showing the confusion that she had felt earlier. But then all agitation left him. He stood relaxed, blank-faced. He turned and continued walking. Fatima joined him.

  “You know Lucita is in the city,” Thetmes said, as if the conversation up to that point had not occurred.

  “Yes.”

  “She might know more than Ibrahim. She also is on the Black Hand’s list.”

  “I will find out what she knows,” Fatima said. Nothing more. She wanted to yell at her sire, to tell him to keep his butchers away from Lucita. But Fatima was just as much a butcher, a killer.

  “As you will,” Thetmes said. “I will inform you of whatever else we learn from Ibrahim. When this is over, I will return to Alamut and again be caliph. Prove yourself.”

  With that, Fatima’s sire was gone—as completely as if he had never returned, as if he really were in torpor, gone for years upon years. But he had not succumbed to the sleep. He served the Eldest yet, though secretly for a short while still. Then he was to join al-Ashrad in Alamut.

  Prove yourself.


  All they had done, all the torment, was so that she might prove herself, as she thought she had done for hundreds of years.

  Prove yourself.

  Fatima only wished that she could.

  Thursday, 30 September 1999, 3:22 AM

  Calle Luis Garcia

  Madrid, Spain

  Four hundred fifty-eight, four hundred fifty-nine, four hundred sixty…

  Lucita had found a sort of rhythmic oblivion by surrendering herself to the luxurious sensation of the brush pulled through her hair. And Consuela had nothing better to do. What task could be more useful than pleasing her master’s daughter?

  Childe. Not daughter.

  From full repose to fury in but a second, Lucita snatched the brush from the ghoul and began pounding her with the silver back. Consuela flung herself from the bed and cowered in a ball on the floor. Lucita’s upraised hand paused. The villa was entirely quiet except for Consuela’s whimpering.

  Lucita dropped the brush onto the bed, leaving a small, bloody smudge on the white spread. How frustrating that tranquility could be stolen from her so easily, and by a slip of her own thoughts, no less.

  Consuela dared not look up from where she lay on the floor. The woman, Cristobal’s daughter, appeared to be forty or fifty years old, though she had served Monçada for centuries.

  “Go away!” Lucita told her. “You sicken me.”

  Consuela scampered on hands and knees to the door and crawled from the room. Lucita shuffled a few steps, then sighed and let herself drop onto the large armchair in the corner. The exquisite fabric disturbed her. It was from a different world than the leather pants and tight, sleeveless sweater she’d had Consuela purchase for her. Lucita dug her fingernails deeply into the offending fabric and rent long gashes along the chair’s arms. That made her feel a little better. But only a little.

  The villa was too luxurious. Lucita was accustomed to nights on the run, to bedding down in a bathtub with duct tape and towels blocking the cracks around the door. Not that she didn’t treat herself to stays at fine resorts and inns when a job was completed, but that was luxury resultant from the sweat of her brow, not the largesse of her fat sire.

  Sire. Not father. No matter what the bloated bastard had in mind.

  Lucita reached for her boots, allowed herself a certain violence in pulling them on, pretending with each foot that she was crushing the face of a certain cardinal. She continued indulging herself as she left the room and ripped the door from its hinges. She listened for the sounds of crying from Consuela’s room, but the ghoul, wisely, was silent. Wouldn’t that have annoyed Monçada, Lucita thought, if she’d kicked to death one of his favorite elder ghouls.

  Lucita stomped down the stairs, rebelling against the silence of the villa itself. She threw open the front door and strode purposefully across the tiled courtyard. At the front gate, however, she stopped. She stared at the latch, visualized her hand unhooking it. In her mind’s eye, she saw herself fleeing into the night, running frantically from the city, from the country. And the only thing more galling than the thought of flight was the knowledge that she could not bring herself to it.

  She knew with dead certainty that if she lifted that latch, if she left that courtyard, she would go back to her sire. She grasped the iron bars of the gate in her hands. The villa was both her fortress and her prison. She’d told her sire that she would remain in the city. He wanted her to come to him often. She could defy him only so far. She could hide in this house, wear her leather, spurn his gifts, abuse his ghoul…but she could not leave the city. The call of the blood was too strong. She could not break it.

  The damnable blood. Blood of the damned. If only she could take its gifts on her own terms. She could turn her back on the sun; she could eschew a mirror and a pleasing brush through her hair. But the blood held her to her sire. She could not be rid of him. Not really.

  But neither would she give in.

  She turned from the gate, the marker of her weakness, and began back to the house but stopped again. She could feel their eyes. She knew that they watched her. Servants of her sire, no doubt, keeping tabs on her.

  How might she shock them? she wondered. What juicy reports could she let them take back to her perverted yet laughably prudish sire? She could take a young man from the city, take him as a lover right here in the courtyard, then feast on him and leave his bloodless corpse in the street.

  Monçada would take care of the mess. The body would disappear. The local constabulary would look the other way. All would go on as it had before. But her sire would know. He would know how much she loathed him, how much she wished it was his rotting carcass in the street.

  Lucita fantasized her sire’s destruction, and in doing so, her thoughts turned a familiar corner. They stumbled upon the other individual who drove reason from Lucita’s mind as if with a bloody scourge.

  I wanted to see you.

  Why? You supposed to kill me…again?

  Not you. Yet. Your sire.

  Fucking bitch. Like Lucita was going to let someone else do him in. But Fatima wasn’t one to bluff. Hell, she barely ever spoke. She didn’t toss around words without reason. Sooner or later, the Assamite—a practiced assassin even back when Lucita was still playing court diplomat—was going to show up gunning for the cardinal. Lucita would just have to find the strength to do it herself first. She would destroy Monçada. That’s all there was to it.

  But not tonight. Soon, though.

  Lucita reversed herself again, turned back toward the gate and scanned the darkness for her hidden observer. For tonight, let them watch.

  Saturday, 2 October 1999, 2:30 AM

  The Presidential Hotel

  Washington, D.C.

  Parmenides retrieved his three blades and replaced them in their hidden sheaths. He had increasingly taken to sharpening his skills at the expense of the hotel’s decor, and now that he took a step back and examined it, the sixth-floor penthouse suite was showing signs of wear. Lamps had been early casualties, as ceramic fragments of all sizes tidied into various corners attested. A few units of out-of-the-way track lights still managed to illuminate portions of the rooms. The furniture—stabbed, sliced, and in one case set on fire—had seen better nights. Most of the pictures that had graced the walls lay along the baseboard amidst piles of glass and fragments of what had been frames.

  It was the sound of the elevator rising that had jarred him from his training mindset and prompted him to take stock of the rooms as someone else might see them. Parmenides had been practically alone for the past week—not that long for an immortal—since the night he’d spoken with Courier and Fatima. Vykos had not been back, and though Parmenides knew that she had established other havens across her new city, he couldn’t help resenting her avoidance of him. Instead of seeing him, she had ordered him to await further instructions. He wasn’t even accorded the distracting tedium of the Tremere chantry siege.

  The elevator rose past the fourth floor, past the fifth.

  The lights of Washington were no longer visible from the penthouse suite. Vykos had had large shutters installed to cover the tall windows. The black shutters were hinged, but only for show. Neither sun nor moon graced the interior of the suite. Only the remaining track lights and the glowing numbers above the elevator.

  The door opened with a gentle bing, and Vykos entered. Lady Sascha Vykos, Archbishop of Washington. She wore long, flowing fur. Her blouse, constrictive skirt, and heels accentuated the fragile verticality of her body. Parmenides had often felt that he could merely reach out and snap her in two.

  She took three steps into the foyer, stopped, surveyed the tattered, ramshackle decor. “Have we been bored?”

  “You instructed me to wait,” Parmenides said. “I waited.”

  Vykos shrugged noncommittally and walked past him, handing him her coat. Parmenides felt at once that the silky fur was not mink or rabbit or even synthetic. It was human hair, and the adjoining fabric was as supple as a second skin. Incr
edibly so.

  Unaffected by the garment but loath to play valet, Parmenides tossed the coat over the nearest collection of chair pieces. Vykos found a love seat that was fairly intact and let herself fall languidly onto it.

  “I trust our little friend has received her final payment?” she asked.

  Parmenides nodded. Lucita, despite what he considered a lack of professionalism, had done her job. Borges was destroyed. Parmenides had seen that the contract was completed from Vykos’s end as well.

  “Good,” said Vykos. “Bring me a snack. Warm it.”

  Parmenides stayed put, but Vykos seemed unaware of his recalcitrance. She appeared distracted, weary. Often she would add a mocking, playful “please” to her instructions, as if to remind Parmenides that she could do anything she wanted to him. Not tonight. Parmenides moved toward the kitchenette, hating himself for every step but not willing to defy Vykos. He shouldn’t rouse her suspicions, he told himself. There were secrets he must learn from her. And then…

  Then destroy her.

  He opened the refrigerator, took one of the forearms with hand and a few fingers still attached, and placed it in the microwave.

  “Do Cainites of your clan underestimate women so, my philosophe?” Vykos called to him across the room. Cainite was not a moniker the children of Haqim applied to themselves, but Parmenides did not have a chance to address that, as Vykos continued from her apparently rhetorical question. “The keepers certainly do, and even my own Tzimisce. I must admit to that prejudice myself, I’m afraid. Not now, of course,” she added, suddenly remembering that Parmenides was in the room. “No, this form has been…enlightening.”