Clan Novel Assamite - Book 7 of The Clan Novel Saga

by Gherbod Fleming

  Parmenides took the hand from the microwave and brought it to her. She sniffed half-heartedly at it for a moment but seemed unable to kindle any true desire.

  “Did you know,” she asked, “that some of the newly Embraced have supposedly given birth? Actual birth.”

  “I am aware of the rumors.”

  “Fascinating.” Vykos held finger to chin, realized the finger was not her own, and set the hand aside. “This politicking grows so tiresome,” she sighed. “Monçada promised me that I could remake the city as I wished, but it’s not like that at all. So many details, and even with Borges retired and his followers carving the spoils into bite-size morsels…” She tossed up her hands in frustration. “And Polonia is growing very tiresome. It’s always, ‘Baltimore’ this, or ‘New York’ that. There’s so little time for my studies. I’m afraid that I’m just not a people person.”

  Vykos, suddenly concerned, looked up at Parmenides as if she might have offended him. “Oh, but you don’t have to worry about that.” She reached for his hand and had him sit next to her.

  Parmenides felt adrift, as he nearly always did in her presence. He didn’t want to fetch her snacks. He didn’t want to sit beside her. Yet here he was.

  “Actual birth,” she said to herself. “Fascinating.” The room was closing in around Parmenides. Had the track lighting given out? Did the glow from the elevator numbers really fill the entire suite with a strange, translucent fog? The great shutters were barred. Parmenides grew dizzy as a storm raged around him. The love seat was suddenly incredibly long. Vykos was miles away, but her voice was in his ear, in his mind.

  “It brings out that maternal instinct in me….” Parmenides could not tear his gaze from Vykos’s impossibly long and slender fingers as she worked the buttons of her blouse. Then her chest was bared, two rounded breasts, firm and perfect…except the nipples, Despite her light skin, they were unnaturally dark, the color of moist dung.

  “Come…”

  Parmenides watched his body move closer. He could not see Vykos’s face but heard her voice.

  “My young romantic.”

  The storm was a tempest in his ears but could not drown out her voice. Now, instead of two firm breasts, there was one large teat with a rough, hardened nipple. Parmenides put his mouth to it, suckled the obscenity that was Vykos. His mouth was flooded with liquid—not milk, not blood, though there was blood mixed with it. A black substance, thick and vile.

  “Fascinating,” said the voice.

  Parmenides could not pull away, though his mouth and eyes burned. He drank greedily, gnawed at the leathery nipple, and felt the black ichor run down his face. The smell of corruption was all about him; it filled his nostrils.

  “I must have one of those thin-bloods,” the voice said. “I must have one and discover… Ah, but that is for another time. That is my passion. Fascinating.”

  The voice held Parmenides, else he would have been thrown about by the raging, dizzying storm. A wave of nausea rose up within him, but still he drank, though his body was ready to explode from the fiend’s searing, bloody emulsion.

  “You have tasted my passion, my hungry childe,” said the voice. “What, tell me, is your passion?” Parmenides was lost. Adrift upon a churning, black ocean. So far beyond any familiar shore. “What is your passion?”

  He felt the urge then to kill. To destroy. But his hands, his artist’s hands, were not his own. He could not feel them. They were beneath the surface of the hungry, black ocean.

  Then destroy… then destroy…

  The blackness took over, covered his face, pulled him under. Pain replaced time as he floated, immersed in hunger.

  “Who would you destroy?” asked the voice. How much later—minutes, hours, years?

  Then destroy…

  “Monçada,” said the voice—no; it was his voice that spoke. “Monçada.”

  “Hmm. You’re an ambitious young one,” said the voice. Said Vykos. Parmenides connected her to the voice again, but it was different, less feminine.

  And then he remembered the large, sagging breast, the hardened nipple, the black ocean. Not an ocean—a pool; he was on his hands and knees vomiting it forth. Convulsive hacking wracked his body. He felt that he’d said more than he should have, but Vykos’s assumptions seemed wrong to him somehow.

  “Ah, but Monçada is clever,” she said. “If you were to destroy him, you would have to start in the right place, wouldn’t you? At the beginning. With the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.”

  “The tree…” Parmenides heard and felt his lips form the words. But he was so weak, so confused, and the bile and blood still drained from his mouth.

  “Oh, yes. Very typical of him, no? And the sun never sets over the tree. Another bane for our kind. Not that we need knowledge of good and evil. I like to think we’re not so subjective anymore, but it keeps the cardinal happy. So where’s the harm?”

  Parmenides was helpless to respond. His strength was failing him, and he was too busy trying to make sense of her words. Fruit and tree… His arms could hold him no longer. He was sinking lower, closer to the black pool beneath him. His face struck the wet floor.

  “And then there’s the Leviathan.” Vykos shuddered; Parmenides could hear it in her voice. “It knows the blood.” And then she said it again, quietly, almost in awe. “It knows the blood.”

  Parmenides wondered if he had heard her properly. Her voice was so far away now. The acrid burning of the blackness was filling his senses again, crowding out all else.

  “Are you still there, my young philosophe…?”

  Tuesday, 5 October 1999, 12:19 AM

  Calle de Paja

  Madrid, Spain

  “Just ahead.”

  As soon as he spoke, Anwar knew he needn’t have. When he and Fatima had first left Pilar’s shop, he had looked around every few blocks to make sure that his elder was still with him. Invariably, she had been a step and a half behind him. No more, no less. Anwar quit looking. He couldn’t have lost Fatima if he’d wanted to do so. He had always seen her as focused, whatever task was at hand, but never had she seemed so totally driven. Events were moving quickly since the arrival of the message earlier.

  In the basement room of the rug shop, Fatima had held the note and studied it with furrowed brow. “The Leviathan.” She nodded gravely. That seemed to fit with other information that she had discovered earlier in the week—how she had secured the notes and rough maps Anwar had no idea, nor what if any plan she had to deal with the rumored “Leviathan,” but then he had no need to know. The rest of this latest message’s meaning had been less clear to her. She had stared at the note for some time before handing it to Mahmud.

  “Fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil,” he read. The Biblical reference was obvious, but of little help. “Is there an orchard near the city?” He tried to remember, as he handed the paper to Anwar. “Or fruit trees in the city? There are bound to be. I’ll have Pilar’s people compile a list of—”

  “I know.” Anwar said. The words had practically jumped off the page at him: “The sun never sets over the tree.” Anwar, unable quite to conceal the surprise in his voice, looked at the other two assassins, his elders. “I know this place.”

  “Show me,” was all that Fatima had said.

  And so they had made their way through the ancient streets that were reborn for each era. Madrid for Anwar was an old city wearing a young mask. Beneath rough pavement were cobbles; beneath the facade of mortal youths who frequented the night was an ecclesiastical beast that truly ruled the shadows. Anwar led Fatima along the steep, twisting lanes. The two did not take extraordinary measures to hide themselves from the eyes of midnight strollers, but brushed past little-noticed nonetheless.

  A great sense of pride was rising within Anwar. He refused to entertain the thought that he could be mistaken. He had spent his nights studying this city, learning its streets and plazas. Now his diligence would be rewarded. Fatima’s glory would
be his glory.

  The sun never sets over the tree.

  Anwar led her along the Arab Wall to Mayrit, once the water source for the original Arab fortress. Tiny huts and wooden stalls were erected haphazardly throughout this area, as doubtless had been the similar structures of the first inhabitants long ago. Anwar halted. Fatima stopped one and a half steps behind.

  “There,” he said.

  She regarded the decrepit stall he pointed out. A vegetable-and-fruit stand, the plank door chained for the night. On the pediment above the door, a scene was carved into the woodwork: a man and a woman, both naked, standing before a tree; among the branches was twined a snake; in the woman’s hand rested an apple; and behind all the figures was a large, radiant sun. A carved sun that never set.

  Fatima placed a hand on Anwar’s shoulder. In the slight pressure of her fingers, he senses approval and expectancy. His pride swelled in the face of his elder’s display.

  “Return to Pilar’s shop,” Fatima said in a low, calm voice. “Tell Mahmud to have everything prepared for tomorrow nightfall.”

  “Should we be prepared to move against Lucita as well?” Anwar asked. He was convinced that the brotherhood would be served by the destruction of this assassin-pretender. She had seemed to have abandoned her flamboyant ways since arriving in Madrid—at least she had until a few nights ago. Anwar had questioned Pilar’s surveillance team personally, so strange and disturbing was their report. The cardinal’s daughter had summoned a mortal, a common male prostitute, to her villa. There, in the open-air courtyard, she had fornicated with him, fed on him, and finally left his gutted body in the street.

  Anwar understood that some of the get of Khayyin still indulged carnal desires—though he could not understand why—but to leave a dead mortal so close to one’s resting place seemed folly without reason. Of course, the cardinal’s followers had taken care of matters, disposing of the body quickly and making sure the policia did not take an interest. Still, this woman, through her transgressions, seemed to beg that the blood be reclaimed from her body.

  At Anwar’s question, Fatima’s grip tightened slightly on his shoulder.

  “I will see to the cardinal’s childe,” she said.

  He nodded sharply, and without question left to complete the task assigned him.

  Tuesday, 5 October 1999, 12:58 AM

  Calle Luis Garcia

  Madrid, Spain

  Climbing the stairs to the second floor, Fatima was not surprised that the interior of the villa was scarred. Ragged claw marks ascended the walls beside her. Practically each piece of furniture downstairs, though in perfect array, was marred by deep gouges—as if a very fastidious, and very angry, animal were being kept here. From what she knew of Lucita’s relationship with her sire—and of Lucita herself—something along those lines was quite likely the case.

  Fatima, having sent away Pilar’s watchers and entered the house, treaded silently along the upstairs hall toward the interior room. The gracefulness of her body was too ingrained to require her attention. She thought instead of that which she had tried to ignore for so many nights. She hadn’t expected Lucita to come to Madrid, hadn’t thought she would need to face her again so soon.

  As Fatima reached for the doorknob with her left hand, she took her jambia in the right. Fatima’s presence absorbed the sound of the knob and the catch turning, of the recently repaired hinge that would have creaked ever so slightly.

  Lucita lay half on the bed, her feet hanging off and resting on the floor. Despite her lackadaisical pose, she held a sword aloft, pointed at Fatima.

  “I guess it’s a good thing I had this out,” Lucita said.

  Fatima stepped into the room.

  “You’d better close that.” Lucita used the tip of the sword to indicate the open door. “We wouldn’t want to disturb Consuela.”

  “Nothing will disturb the old woman,” Fatima said matter-of-factly.

  Lucita shrugged, as much as she could while lying down. “Do 1 need this?” she asked, waving the sword a bit.

  “Do you?” Fatima asked. She sheathed her jambia.

  That seemed to satisfy Lucita, and she propped her own blade next to the bed. Fatima had no illusions that Lucita needed the blade to be deadly; surely Lucita knew the same of her.

  “You know,” Lucita said, “after a few hundred years, I can tell when a door opens even if I can’t hear it.”

  “If I’d wanted to surprise you, I wouldn’t have used the door, knowing you were waiting on the other side.”

  Lucita seemed listless, despite the fact that she was in the same room with one of the few assassins in the world who could give her a run for her money. She struggled to sit up, but Fatima knew that the lethargy would vanish in an instant if need be. “Monçada’s going to be upset about Consuela,” Lucita said.

  “Her blood is put to better use now,” said Fatima. Not boast but fact.

  “You came all this way to ‘reclaim’ the blood of a little old lady ghoul?”

  “No.” Fatima was not completely decided why she was there. She should have been there to find a way through Monçada’s defenses, or to destroy Lucita outright. Fatima tried to concentrate on the hard realities of the instant instead of those murkier questions. She ticked off a quick mental list of her concealed blades, looked for clues as to where Lucita was undoubtedly hiding her own.

  Fatima’s near-silence infuriated Lucita—as it always did. The Dark Rose balled up handfuls of bedspread. She kept the anger pent up, fueling her more surely than blood. Watching Lucita’s hands, Fatima saw a small bloodstain on the spread. Having seen it, she could not help notice the faint scent. The scent of Consuela’s blood.

  “You said you were after both me and my sire,” Lucita snarled contemptuously. Whether the contempt was for her or Monçada, Fatima could not tell. “So, is it my turn yet?”

  Fatima was acutely aware of Lucita’s hands, visible but within reach of numerous potential weapons—vase, pointed finial, chair that could quickly be broken—and those just the ones Fatima had spotted offhand. She remained perfectly still, arms and hands relaxed—as Thetmes had been five nights earlier—and did nothing that might set Lucita off. Except doing nothing might very well set Lucita off.

  “No.”

  “Not yet?” Lucita asked. “That’s what you said before.”

  Fatima started to take a calm step forward, but Lucita was on her feet at once, prepared to meet violence in kind. Very slowly, Fatima raised her hands until she held them, palm open, before her. She knew there was nothing she could hope to do that would ease Lucita’s mind; the best possible tactic was to avoid the triggers.

  “I have come to Madrid for your sire,” Fatima said. “I did not know you would be here.”

  Lucita laughed scornfully. “That’s not why you told me in Hartford? So I’d come, and you could take us both—try to take us both?”

  Fatima shook her head. “No.” Her hands were still raised before her.

  “You expect me to believe you? You’d lie about anything to serve your clan.” The contempt again. Fatima could read the confusion beneath it. Lucita did not understand her, could not understand her, her loyalty. But Fatima understood Lucita only too well. That was what the prostitute was all about. Open rebellion. Raw defiance. All that Fatima had never been able to be, that she’d never had reason to be. Her own transgressions were subtle, insidious, but would be just as real in the eyes of ur-Shulgi, herald of Haqim, and more harshly punished than Lucita’s most flagrant sin.

  “I do not lie to you,” Fatima said. Now she did take a step closer, hands raised. Lucita did not stop her, but there were still a few feet separating them. Fatima could be within Lucita’s guard too quickly for the sword to be of any use, but the other weapons…and Fatima’s raised hands would be a split second slowed.

  “I do not lie to you,” Fatima said again. But neither did she dare tell the full truth.

  Lucita hesitated. The two hovered, the feet between them a vast gul
f.

  “You think I’ll just let you destroy him, even if you are able?” Lucita asked. “You don’t think I’ll stop you?”

  Fatima heard the challenge, held her ground, spoke in an even tone: “Do you want to stop me?”

  “I could.”

  “Perhaps.”

  Lucita bristled at that but did not attack. Her hands quivered the slightest bit but did not streak toward a hidden blade.

  Fatima took another step. Calm. “Do you want to stop me?” There was so much more she wanted to say, so much that she could not bring herself to utter. Perhaps Monçada would destroy her, and Lucita would be safe…until another assassin came, and then another. Or perhaps Fatima would destroy the cardinal, and Lucita would be free. Free to go into hiding from Fatima. But Lucita would never do that. There was no good answer.

  “Do you want to stop me?” Fatima said a third time, but now her words were hard, full of challenge. Her voice struck Lucita like a blow.

  Their eyes met, each sure that the other was not so much stronger in the blood that she could take control with her gaze. They hovered on the brink. Two killers.

  Now it was Lucita who stepped forward. Inches apart. Slowly, she raised her hands, palms out, and placed them against Fatima’s.

  “I do not lie to you,” Fatima whispered.

  And then their lips met. Droplets of Consuela’s blood, still fresh in Fatima’s mouth, passed as their tongues mingled. Slowly, ever so slowly, Fatima raised a hand to Lucita’s cheek. Lucita’s palm, free of its opposite, pressed forward against Fatima’s breast. Every movement was gradual, intended to arouse no suspicion—for desire did not easily translate to trust.

  Fatima tried to keep her wits about her. She could not afford to surrender to the kiss of this woman she must kill. But freedom so long denied was difficult to resist. Her left hand still pressed against Lucita’s right. Their fingers interlocked, shared the strength and awkward tenderness of hands untrained in the gentle caress. Fatima could not escape the danger of abandonment, but how much worse could destruction in a lover’s arms be than that which awaited her at the hand of her elders? If the herald would destroy Fatima for her faith, then let him add lust and love to the offenses.