Rian found herself a seat. "I don't find that aspect particularly horrifying," she said. "Medicine has been teaching us that a great many things live inside us, after all. Evelyn certainly seems to have taken no harm from it."
"Even so, I'm right to believe you would not choose this life for yourself, am I not?"
"I wouldn't be here if not for my brother's death, no. And there's some parts I expect to find challenging. But this is a measured choice, not one of desperation." Rian paused, then added: "My mother shared some of your discomfort. She didn't visit a Thoth-den her entire life, because the idea of vampire blood inside her—even if it was healing her—turned her stomach. We always went to the nearest Daughter of Lakshmi if we were ill. That advantages me now, because I'm one of the increasingly small number of Prytennians harbouring no trace of any of the symbiont lines, but mother died before she was forty, of something a Thoth-den could easily have corrected.
"I've never been sick enough to need blood treatment, but I wouldn't hesitate if it meant my life, so the symbiont itself isn't enough to turn me away from blood service. The danger, the Bond, and the...accompanying sensations are larger hurdles, but I'm satisfied with Lord Msrah's reputation. I think the hardest thing for me will be staying in the one place, and the length of the contract. I'm used to a lot more freedom. Though, pragmatically speaking, three children have already changed that."
"They'll be everywhere soon," Lyle murmured. "Rome is considering officially allowing vampires within the New Republic's borders, instead of simply turning a blind eye to those already there. Sweden allows their phials and potions. Even Alba!"
Rian glanced at Lyle's left wrist. He wasn't wearing long, cross-laced Prytennian cuffs, but instead sported thistle-stamped cufflinks. He grimaced in response and shifted his hand so she could see the image of a bird's wing hovering below the surface of the skin.
"Yes, how two-faced can I be, to eat at a vampire's table, use the vampires' protections, but want to rescue you and Evelyn?"
The wing was a visual indication that Lyle had taken a Dose, temporarily preventing himself from fathering children. Like Rome, Sweden still did not allow vampires within its borders, but vampiric medical knowledge and, lately, their vaccinations, cures, and particularly the Dose, had been permitted and widely taken up. Many months of hot debate had been spent on the fine hypocrisy of forbidding vampires, but using a derivative of their blood.
"In a hundred years there won't be a village on this planet that doesn't have its own parasite," Lyle continued miserably. "Keeping the herd healthy."
"And all of us carrying a tiny trace of monster?" Rian contemplated the possibility that she could live to see that future, if she chose to stay in Msrah's service. "Given I can name at least three countries where vampires literally cannot set foot, you can be sure some of the herd will remain, ah, undomesticated. And while I appreciate the gesture, Lyle, I'm not looking to be rescued."
He shook his head, then summoned a smile. "Of course not. Forgive my departure into melodrama. My sister tells me it's my greatest weakness: always seeing the worst in the things that make me uncomfortable."
"Listening to your instincts isn't such a bad thing," Rian said, standing. "Goodnight, Lyle."
Leaving him with a nod, Rian traced her way back to her room. It did not matter that the Alban had apparently detected a level of reluctance in her. It was true enough that she wouldn't choose this life, but she needed to be pragmatic about housing and schooling three children.
And it was a small price to pay for Aedric.
Three
Something was wrong.
Rian shifted in her new bed. The room was stuffy, but she didn't think the summer heat had woken her. Had it perhaps been the absence of noise? The muted rush and roar of wind no longer rattled winged shutters. Or could it be—? Rian fumbled for the switch of the bedside lamp, and looked quickly at the dresser. But the automaton hadn't moved.
A distant thump and crash brought her to her feet. While she expected some noise at night in a vampire's house, that had had the distinct air of large things breaking. Reaching for a light robe to cover her nightgown, Rian surveyed the room for a suitable weapon. Not even a fire iron.
More noise followed, an enormous scrabbling as if a rat the size of an auroch had found its way into the roof cavity. It approached so rapidly Rian had no chance to do more than jump backward as the ceiling collapsed, depositing a veritable monster into the room.
It had a distinctly human face mounted on a catlike body apparently fashioned from pale marble. A dozen whip like limbs tipped with blades of blue enamel were attached to its back, arranged to form tentacular wings. Perhaps most disconcerting of all were a pair of fine breasts, bare and gleaming with a high polish that had not been lavished upon the rest of the creature's body.
It shook itself, made a low, rumbling sound, then noticed Rian trapped in the corner between the bed and the shuttered windows. The wings stirred, and the floor groaned as the thing shifted its weight, but Rian was already scrambling across the bed to the dressing table. This simply trapped her in a different corner, but it gave her a larger selection of inadequate weapons, ranging from a spindly chair to a collection of toiletries and cosmetics.
Cursing her decision to put her pistols into storage, Rian opted for a bottle of scent, hoping to at least confuse and distract long enough for a dash for the door. The locked door.
A turn of a key represented only seconds of delay, but nothing in the way the creature prowled forward made delay sound like a good idea. Whatever the thing wanted, she had its attention, and the head-lowering, ready-to-pounce stance didn't suggest a midnight conversation.
With few other options Rian tossed the scent. As the bottle left her hand, a figure dropped from the gaping hole in the ceiling, landing by the creature's chest in time to receive a shower of crystal shards.
The newcomer swore, a hand going to his eyes, and, as Rian recognised the young man from the library, two of the whip like limbs slashed down at him. One of the enamelled tips ploughed deep into his shoulder and chest, while the other severed his raised hand at the wrist, sending it arcing through the air to land, palm up, in the centre of the bed.
It was not quite true to say vampires were blood. Vampires were a conjunction of a god-touched creature too small for the eye to see, and a larger, living vessel. The symbiont permeated all the flesh and tissues, even the bones of its vessel, but it was doubtless true that blood was the focus and central factor of vampiric existence. Rian recognised the library photographer as a vampire when the spurt of blood trailing the severed hand stopped mid-air, and then returned to its source. The wrist of the severed hand lay without even oozing, keeping its blood safely contained.
He'd been knocked to the floor by the force of the creature's blow, and his other arm hung useless from the wreckage of his shoulder, flopping like a newly-landed trout as he tried to shift it. Distant shouting intruded on the scene, but Rian had no hope of outside help, and hurled her heavy silver hairbrush before snatching for another missile, hoping to buy the wounded vampire a few seconds for recovery.
The winged creature ignored the object bouncing off its face, and again the dagger tips arced down. In response, the vampire raised his head, the whole of his damaged body straining as if lifting some enormous weight. And the monster halted.
The freeze wasn't total. Bladed wings still crept down, at a glacial pace that the vampire had no difficulty avoiding as he staggered to his feet. Rian let her breath out, then headed for the door. Time to retreat, before the thing broke loose.
The vampire turned, the movement sharp, barely restrained, and she hadn't even enough time to recognise her danger before he slammed her into the wall and opened her throat.
A great gash, torn rather than neatly punctured, blood spurting extravagantly into his mouth. Rian barely felt the pain of it, drowned as it was by a sudden sense of being torn in two. Vampires fed on the blood of others to maintain their bodies, but the
y sustained their beyond-human existence with ka, life-force, and this vampire was draining hers.
Carefully-researched expectations were rent, shredded, with nothing of a measured business transaction in the experience, but instead an agony beyond anything she'd ever encountered.
Flailing for any weapon within reach, Rian found nothing, so boxed his ears, but even with one arm useless and the other truncated, the vampire still effortlessly kept her pinned, ignoring her attempts to beat him off. Already it was too hard to move, her legs sagging and her vision fading. She became overwhelmingly aware of cinnamon. Citrus. Sandalwood. The bottle of scent she had thrown. He had been thoroughly doused, and if Rian had had the strength she would have laughed, because the wretched stuff was called Egypt.
Into the rising grey blur came a sensation as sharp as lemon on a cut. Collapsing onto the floor, her own hand clasped weakly over a wound grown fire-hot, Rian could feel the flesh knitting together beneath her fingers. Vampires sealed their bites with a lick of saliva or a few drops of blood. He must have used more than that, but the heat of healing only made the rest of her colder, all but a fraction of her life, the essence of her taken away. He wouldn't even pay for killing her. The Exsanguincy Act, forever controversial, would excuse her death. An unlucky circumstance, practically an accident. Like Aedric's.
Rian could not accept that, not with a shadow still on Eiliff and Aedric's names. It meant too much to their children. And, damn it all, her own pride should not allow her to die so uselessly.
An enormous crash brought a brisk, reviving breeze in its wake. The windows and shielding shutter wings were gone, and bright moonlight outlined the vampire, looking down. His shoulder showed no trace of injury as he turned from the gaping hole to cross to the bed, collecting his severed hand and tucking it by the fingers into his belt.
"...right...about revolting..."
He considered her dispassionately. "I haven't bound you. A binding from me would probably kill you, though that looks to be rapidly becoming a moot point. Before you go over the edge, care to explain why that sphinx was after you?"
It didn't seem wise to admit she had no idea. "What...makes...you think...was?"
"It came in a set of two, apparently trying to reach Leodhild, but this one abruptly diverted directly here."
Rian felt too tired to be surprised. Too weary to answer, and not at all inclined to explain brothers and envelopes and investigations ended before they were begun. Every breath had become a production, an achievement with a distinct beginning and end. Pride never was enough to live on.
"Did its work for it," she observed, as detached as the vampire watching her die.
Her eyes must have closed, because now he was crouched before her, prying one lid open. She realised someone was banging away at the door, but her attention was focused by a renewed wave of scent.
"...reek."
"And whose fault is that?" the vampire said. "Consider it an achievement. Few have ever come so close to getting me killed. Attend me."
Two words become cliché thanks to their appearance in countless plays and stories: the classic words of a vampire imposing his will. Rian could feel it—a sudden muffling, as if a blanket had settled over her mind and contracted—but she slipped beneath, not by any exercise of strength, but thanks to a sucking weariness that stole all her attention. Inhalation. A slow release, and then a pause. The breath after that a distinct and separate thing, a new mountain to consider climbing.
"Tch. Useless." Irritably, he pressed his truncated wrist against her mouth. Warm, wet flesh met her lips, punctuated by a sharp scrape of bone. Blood...crawled.
Rian flinched from the thick liquid moving of its own accord across her tongue. A separate flood of strength accompanied the sharp taste of iron. Ka, expanding her chest as if she was a balloon, the vampire's exasperation and annoyance a distinct presence, hot and sharp and briefly as much a part of her as his blood.
"We'll continue this if you live."
Her mouth filled with bees. Pinpricks of fire as the blood began to work its way into soft tissue rather than flow down her throat. A hive, setting up house. That image fit, suggesting a thing of many parts driven by a common purpose. But the will, the direction, lay outside, standing on the far side of the room.
Her last sight of him was a silhouette gazing out into the night, holding the amputated hand to his wrist. That inevitably brought thoughts of Eluned, though of course her niece could not simply reattach severed flesh. While Rian was becoming a part of this man. Bound, joined by blood and ka, a separate kind of limb.
Belonging to the wrong vampire.
Four
A drum. A smith's hammer. A river that jolted and surged and pounded. The flow of it was so clear, from the tip of her nose to the smallest toe. Each inhalation made it flare, and Rian was light, a glorious blaze, a pillar of strength and power, exultant.
A white-gold flicker stabbed at her eyes and she winced, turning her head to an embracing blue haze. Her awareness shifted from the river inside to more familiar senses. Warmth. A thick stillness. A hint of sun-dried linen. Dull hunger. No pain. Legs and arms and the normal weight of self, comfortably supported by a well-stuffed mattress.
Behind her, a separate river pounded and surged. Something more than hearing told Rian it was there: a torrent of life separate and distinct from her own. Slowly, she turned back, lifting a hand to block any chance of looking directly at the dagger-point of incandescence. A man sitting next to the piercing light turned to place something over it: a ceramic shade that muted the brilliance to almost comfortable levels, except for a vivid rim around a smoke vent. With the glare cut away he became more than a shape.
"Lord Msrah."
"The extreme sensitivity to light will fade in a few hours," he said, voice soft and measured. "But you will struggle with the sun for some days to come."
"That…is that a candle?"
"It is. Dama Seaforth. I owe you my deepest apologies for the inadequate protection of my House."
Everything was blue-tinted, but she could see him quite clearly: a round-cheeked youth of middle height, hair held in a queue, dark skin highlighted by violet notes. The gentle irony he'd displayed during their initial interview in London was entirely absent.
"What was that...sphinx?"
He knew. She could see it, sense it, even as he shook his head.
"An attack aimed at Princess Leodhild, it seems, which fortunately failed to harm her. It does not pay to underestimate any of the Suleviae, even if the Sulevia Leoth is now more associated with Prytennia's industry than her defences."
Wondering why he lied, Rian slid a hand up to explore her throat, searching for damage. Questing fingers found only unbroken skin, but the memory of teeth, of pain and a sharp note of terror, made her shudder. And then start to think through how strange that encounter had been.
"That vampire—I met him in your library," she said. "Not directly in the sun, but it was so bright in there."
"Yes. A behaviour that develops as we age. All of us can tolerate a certain level of exposure to strong light. I could go upstairs now and walk in the garden if I wished. It would feel like death—I would, indeed, be slowly turning to stone, and would not recover fully until I drank. But there is also a...piquancy involved, should one be willing to risk misjudging one's tolerance."
Rian puzzled through this, and concluded that the library vampire had been hurting himself for the fun of it.
"He bound me," she said, the words not quite a question. She knew what had happened, but wanted confirmation, to have disaster put into words.
"His only means of retrieving an exsanguincy," Lord Msrah said. "Though I admit it surprises me that he made the attempt, since the danger of creating a ghul is high. And he is not fond of blood service."
"I had that impression too."
Trying not to picture herself as a ghul—a corpse brought to unlife by the vampiric symbiont—Rian worked herself gingerly into an upright position and wa
s relieved to discover herself clothed, if only in a light sleeping gown.
"I suppose it's an achievement to be bound to someone whose name I don't know. Not even the line—is he Shu?"
"Amon-Re." Lord Msrah pronounced the name as a distinct sentence, as if even speaking it was an event. "And it is an achievement to survive a bonding to that line in any circumstance. As for his identity, he has been calling himself Comfrey Makepeace, which I imagine is an example of his humour. He is better known as Heriath."
It was not often Rian was reduced to gaping, but this was the last thing she had expected.
"The Wind's Dog? That—?"
She almost finished with 'brat', and stopped herself with a deep breath. There was no-one in Prytennia who did not know the name Heriath, even though he hadn't been publicly sighted since the disaster of the Three Sisters' War, and was thought gone to stone. He predated the Suleviae, and had been bound to serve their rule when Brangwen the First had been crowned. For the vast part of the Trifold Age he had been a moving force: assassin, spy, and agent of the Crown as Prytennia had expanded from one to three dragonates. It had been the Suleviae who had beaten back the waves of invasion that so frequently threatened Sulis' domain, but until the Three Sisters, Heriath, the Wind's Dog, had been a shadowy partner in every success.
The vampire she had met bore no resemblance to the Heriath of legend, but Lord Msrah seemed quite certain.
"I...am surprised to be alive," Rian managed. Not only because the Amon-Re line—that of Egypt's rulers—was said to kill almost all who hoped to be raised to it, but the potency of a vampire's blood increased with age. Lord Msrah was entering the ranks of Shu seniority at four hundred years, but the Amon-Re line was altogether a different order of strength. Heriath...at minimum he would have to be twelve centuries.
"Your will to live is clearly far from trivial," Lord Msrah said. "I regret that I can no longer accept your service."
The Pyramids of London Page 3