Nightingale n-1

by David Farland

  "No!" her father sobbed, as if afraid that Lucius might expose his secrets.

  "You owe me your life, Cassius, and I shall have it," Lucius said. "If you will not serve me, then perhaps your wife or your daughter...."

  Lucius snapped his fingers, and the guard that held Ramira's father—a man named Adel Todesfall—made a quick cut.

  Her mother had been standing by, restrained by a guard, but as her husband fell, she screamed and launched herself at Lucius, fingers splayed wide, as if she might gouge out his eyes.

  But it was not his eyes that she was after. They fought, Ramira's mother struggling to get her fingers beneath his helm, but Lucius butted her forehead, and she staggered. Lucius grasped her by the skull with his sizraels, then began draining her vigor away. An amazing thing happened—sheets of red fire seemed to leap from her, streaming into him, so that she was wrapped in flame. One moment she was whole and healthy, and the next she wailed in pain, a wail that echoed in Ramira's memory down through the years, and Ramira's mother struggled and began to age beneath a sheen of fire, crow's feet forming at the corners of her eyes, age spots blossoming purple on her pale skin. Ramira's mother often sang so sweetly that her neighbors called her "the nightingale," but now her beautiful voice turned into the croaking sobs of an old hag.

  She fell to the floor when Lucius was done with her, like a rag doll that had been cast away. She was creased with wrinkles.

  Lucius's face had changed, softened. The lines of care had been erased.

  He turned to Ramira, a frightened eight-year-old girl, and said. "Your father owed a debt. You may pay it, or your sister may."

  Ramira's sister was still lying in her cradle by the hearth, sound asleep. Ramira knew that if she did not pay her father's debt, Lucius would take her sister, force her into some loathsome sort of slavery, while Ramira herself would be discarded, just as her parents had been.

  "Serve me well," Lucius said, drawing close so that he loomed over her, "and I shall give you more life from time to time. You need never grow old, never die, unless you are slain."

  Ramira had tried to answer then, but her voice failed her. So she merely nodded in acquiescence.

  "Run then and get your spare clothes," Lucius said. "You shall never forget this night, that I can promise you, for this bargain shall define you, now and for all of your days."

  Lucius was right. Ramira never forgot that moment.

  Everything else from her childhood was ripped away by Lucius's servants, his memory thieves—every kind word that might have been spoken by a loving mother, every joyful moment, her memories of holidays on the farm.

  All that Ramira had left was vague glimpses from her childhood home—a place at once lovely and indistinct, like water lilies painted by Monet.

  Chapter 30

  Elation

  "It never ceases to amaze me how cheap a price some men set upon their souls."

  — Lucius Chenzhenko

  The Learjet's engines whined softly as Lucius sat in a padded Italian calf-leather seat, peering into a large touch-screen. The Asian markets were about to open, and he wanted to get a feel for the mood of the world's investors today, not that he expected any surprises.

  Adel Todesfall approached and whispered. "We've got a problem. We've lost contact with our retrieval squad. It appears that the boy is a dream assassin and a leech." Adel waited half a moment for the information to sink in, and then asked, "Shall we abort the mission?"

  "All of our operatives have gone silent?" Lucius demanded. He couldn't quite believe it. The team was headed by a dread knight, nearly a thousand years in the making. Sure, she'd reported that they were suffering the effects of leeching, but had there ever been a leech so powerful?

  Not in the six millennia that Lucius had lived. And this one was a dream assassin, as well.

  Lucius's heart raced. It was too much to hope for. On impulse he said. "No, we shall not abort. I want to visit the kill site, investigate our operatives' remains. I want to see them with my own eyes."

  Adel gave him a long look. "Are you sure, my lord? The swamp is a dangerous place...."

  "I'm more dangerous," Lucius said.

  Chapter 31

  The Legacy

  "History shows us that humans are incapable of becoming civilized. The fall of Persia, Greece, Rome, and China shows us that even their most dominant civilizations are considered disposable. Time and again, they invent a society, and with the next generation, the culture is cast aside.

  Since mankind cannot maintain a long-standing society, we shall put them to work maintaining ours."

  — Lucius Chenzhenko

  Sommer appeared at the door to the back room of the cabin, doing her best to drag a man across the floor, one of the Draghouls. He was lying on his back, and there were bullet holes in the fabric of his body armor, but no sign of blood. He'd taken Sommer's shotgun blast, and though the bullets had knocked him off the porch, they'd failed to penetrate his flesh.

  "This one's a techie," she said. "He might be able to answer some questions for us."

  Bron glanced at a cell phone that he'd taken from one of the Draghouls. He'd been garnering memories from Ramira for twenty minutes, and he worried about the time. Lucius was coming.

  Olivia glanced down at the techie. "Bron, do you want to get to know your father? We can pull memories for you."

  Bron was surprised by how passionately he felt about it. His only memory of his father came from Ramira, and it was a thousand years old. Back then, his father had looked to be only thirty. His hair was receding, yet dark. He was a handsome man, the spitting image of how Bron imagined he himself might look in a few years. "Yes," he said. "I want to see more."

  Olivia helped pull the ailing Draghoul over to Bron, and this time, Bron's own mother reached into the man's mind, and then placed her free hand on Bron, grasping his skull, even as Olivia did the same with Ramira.

  Memories began to pop into his mind, snippets of information, collages. Bron felt Ramira's long hours spent in her youth, fighting with the epee and dueling dagger until her calves ached and her arms felt as if they'd drop.

  Dark muses had come to her, sent at Lucius's bidding, and trained her in various styles of butchery, until she also excelled at the bow, and more arcane weapons—the sap, the garrote.

  From the Technician: In 1762, in a small counting house, the technician, a man named Stalzi, was examining some account ledgers, when Lucius came in. The bank accounts were bursting. Lucius had bankrupted a small nation and created a false trail of evidence that implicated a tyrannical duke.

  "I'm not sure I can keep up with all of this work," Stalzi said. "The money is rolling in faster than I can count it. This was all... so easy."

  Lucius smiled. "Humans cannot imagine something like me. Their minds recoil at the thought. And since they cannot imagine me, they cannot be forewarned. In the old days, their forefathers knew us, and gave us names from legend. Now, they disavow that knowledge, even as we harvest their wealth."

  From Ramira: As she won Lucius's trust, Lucius assigned her an apprenticeship—as a torturer. He did not need to torture men for information, and could have reserved it only for punishment, but he delighted in torment, and when the opportunity arose to join the crusade, they went gladly, if only to feed his appetite for war.

  The skills that she learned there were sickening. As Olivia probed deeper into the woman's mind, the scent of roasting human flesh seemed to fill the room in her memory. Ramira had once been forced to slowly burn an Arab that she loved in order to prove her loyalty.

  After that, her life became a horror. How many people she had killed, even she had forgotten. She'd manned a guillotine in the French Revolution, taking a thousand heads a day for over a month. She'd set underwater mines in the Crimean War, sinking English ships. She'd mastered the use of firearms from the flintlock musket, to the privateer's hand-cannon, to the Israeli Uzi, to modern sniper gear that used heat-detecting sights and could shoot titanium bull
ets through the wall of a concrete bunker that was three-feet thick.

  She'd been involved in a hundred wars—training Mongol cavalrymen under the Great Kahn, propping up the regimes of petty dictators in the Middle East, and selling guns and machetes to tribal warriors bent on genocide in the Congo.

  Had Bron imagined how dangerous she was, he would have wet himself upon seeing her.

  From Stalzi: It was during the opium wars in China. Lucius provided drugs for an English Captain to sell, until one day the Captain had become too powerful to control.

  Lucius had ordered Stalzi, "Send an assassin. It will be your job to empty the man's accounts, liquidate his holdings."

  "I don't understand," Stalzi had said. "Why didn't we do that years ago?"

  Lucius had laughed and said, "Never slit a man's throat over imaginary wealth. Wait until he's got the gold in his purse."

  From Ramira: Lucius had ordered her to head security guarding blood diamond mines in Africa, and she had trained members of the Taliban in the making of IEDs. She helped run a kidnapping ring in Thailand, selling children into slavery in Malaysia, and provided security training for some of Latin America's most powerful drug lords.

  From Stalzi: In an economic "battle-planning session" in a chateau in the Swiss Alps, Lucius had once remarked, "Our goal here is to keep world finances destabilized. With destabilization comes uncertainty, and with uncertainty in the markets comes opportunities. When we control the destabilization, our opportunities grow exponentially."

  "For years the world has been borrowing, growing fat on imaginary wealth. So we will plan a recession, move our assets to safety before it starts, and then reenter the market at the proper moment in order to capture entire industries."

  This had been said in 2006. At the time, Bron's father was preparing to create a fiscal crisis, one that bankrupted millions of elderly investors, threw the poor out of work, and left tent cities springing up across the US as people were evicted from their homes.

  Bron had never imagined a situation like this, one where greedy men raped and destroyed the world out of unbridled rapaciousness, but he saw that his father wasn't the only player.

  There were billionaires and tyrants in every country, in every part of the world, competing with Lucius.

  From Ramira: He learned that her dark muses could teach a child to speak at three months, to walk at six. They could download information at an incredible rate, train a man to be a doctor in a day, an assassin in two.

  Bron felt stunned. He'd never imagined this—the first thirty years of life, the part when he was healthiest and most energetic, was all a waste, by Draghoul standards. With their powers, there was no need for schooling, not the way that humans did it.

  He wondered why, and remembered a thought handed down from Ramira. In ancient times, the Ael had sought to educate men, to loan them their wisdom, but Lucius had realized that human insight and discoveries were nothing more than "a crop," something to be harvested. "There is no theory that can be conjured by the human imagination, no insight so vast, that we cannot own it!" he'd said. So it began, the harvesting. Draghouls had gone throughout all of Europe and Asia, pulling wisdom and learning from the minds of men, stripping away their insights and discoveries, leaving the brightest of their enemies empty.

  That is how the Dark Ages began, Ramira's memories told him.

  Half of Bron's life was to be wasted in a vain search for information on how to live. That is how Lucius kept people ignorant.

  And soon, Ramira's memories told him, the Dark Ages will come again.

  The Final Harvest is about to begin.

  Bron found himself gagging in horror. He fought free of the women's touches. "Enough," Bron said. "I've seen enough."

  Olivia shook her head. "You haven't even scratched the surface. You know what they plan. They want to plunge the world into another Dark Ages. They want to harvest its knowledge of physics, of medicine, of technology, of warfare. They've already established advanced research facilities for space exploration, medicine, cloning, spying. They'll make themselves gods, and the humans will be forced to worship their sadistic masters, or die." Bron got up from his chair, paced the room, thinking furiously. He had never imagined such things, an assassin who was a thousand years old, with the blood of millions of people on her hands.

  Yet she was just a minor player in Lucius's organization. She wasn't a ringleader. Her title was an ancient one among the Draghouls. She was a dread knight, a rare and vaunted title, but she was not Lucius's best.

  The technician was much younger, only a little over two hundred years old. He'd been trained in many arts—as a forger and a counterfeiter in his youth.

  But it was the advent of technology that thrilled him. With his knowledge of counterfeiting, it didn't take much to leap into various forms of wire fraud and racketeering.

  With memory thieves, it had always been easy to breach the human mind. One well-trained Draghoul could sneak into a home, touch a dictator or financier on the temple, and siphon vital secrets from him.

  But with the rise of technology, stealing information had become even easier. Voices could be recorded, and files transmitted to servers. Pictures could be taken from spy satellites in space.

  Foolish people around the world spoke freely over the internet, not realizing that with the right resources, it was no large feat to create ghost servers that simply recorded every transmission made.

  And Lucius's plans for the world were so vast and horrifying. Bron realized now why Monique didn't trust him, why she was so afraid. The Draghouls were fierce, powerful. Who would want to fight them? And for what, to save mankind?

  Did Bron care about any human enough to risk his neck for them?

  If he joined the Draghouls, he would be treated like a god. He'd join Lucius, become his right hand.

  Or would I? Bron wondered. They'd wipe out my thoughts, my memories. Lucius would want to control me. He'd make sure that I was him. He'd wipe my memory, my personality, and put his own in its place.

  Bron went downstairs to the boat dock, but even as he did, flashes of memory kept coming to him, like errant dreams that had escaped their bounds. The tech that they'd just "interrogated" had a surprising store of information.

  Lucius controlled a wide number of financial institutions—investment groups. He supplied loans to many of the world's largest governments, bought land on the sly, and had oil drilling rigs all across the planet. He was wealthy beyond imagination.

  He'd been into currency exchange before the Medicis, and had insured risky shipping transactions long before the Rothschilds.

  He used his money to finance strange enterprises. He had hundreds of forensic accountants hired just to monitor how much various world dignitaries required for bribes.

  Yet what fascinated Bron most was not the breadth of Lucius's organization, but how he put the money to use.

  He leveraged his wealth to great benefit, controlling the prices of commodities. When oil prices spiked, sending the world into global recession, he was there to purchase the failing corporations. He toppled entire countries in South America so that he could buy up land, and then put it to good use in mining and oil exploration.

  To Bron's astonishment, Lucius had his own technologies division, where scientists across the globe were working on bizarre new propulsion systems for extraterrestrial flight. The sightings of "flying saucers" since the 1940s had been his experimental aircraft.

  With Draghoul training techniques, Lucius's scientists had leap-frogged well ahead of mankind in some fields. He remembered an astrophysicist saying, "We're at least seventy-five years in front of them, but keeping an edge grows harder every day."

  There was a method to Lucius's madness, some plan that had been thousands of years in the making, and the technician knew that Lucius's plans were about to come to fruition.

  But what could they be? Even the tech did not know all of the details. He only held parts to a greater puzzle.

  Once L
ucius had jested, "People imagine that they are wise when they think in terms of global economies. A hundred years ago, only a few men thought on such a grand scale. They were so busy trying to figure out what was happening in their own small countries. And so in the future, one will need to think in terms of interstellar economies. Mere humans do not plan on such a magnificent scope, and so..." Lucius said with deep satisfaction, "I am far ahead of the game."

  Bron stood on the dock, tried to clear his head. He looked out into the waters. His grandfather's body was gone, apparently dragged off by a gator. Sommer and Olivia came down with him.

  "Don't you want to learn more?" Olivia asked.

  "I've seen enough," Bron argued. He rubbed his temple. "This house..."

  Sommer said, "Is bugged...." She'd seen the same memories. "Lucius's people let me go. They've been following me for years.... They've heard every word we've said. We'd better take care of it before we make any plans."

  Together, they took one of the flashlights from a downed Draghoul, and went beneath the house. The house stood on stilts, in case the bayou flooded, and for years there had been wasps and swallows building nests of mud under the floor. The nests were wedged up where the support beams joined the floorboards.

  Sommer held the light while Bron went to a couple of small nests and knocked them down.

  They were fakes, mere covers to hide the listening devices that the Draghoul had attached to the house.

  Bron ripped off the powerful microphones, with their batteries and transmitters, and hurled them out into the water.

  When they splashed beneath the waves, Bron sighed in relief.

  "Well, now we know for sure how they found us," Sommer said. "They've been hoping that you'd come to me. They're more patient than I'd ever dreamed."