Dark Ages Clan Novel Tzimisce: Book 13 of the Dark Ages Clan Novel Saga

by Myranda Kalis

  Myca was not entirely certain how much credit he was prepared to give that, and neither was Ilias. The Eldest had not made his presence felt among the clan in centuries—not, in fact, since the terrible year he sent his personal envoy to Constantinople to warn his most-favored childe against the Embrace of the boy called Gesu. That Myca knew for an absolute truth, for his own sire had been Embraced in the aftermath of that diplomatic visit, and a war had raged between the Dracon and his northern kin that had led to his own Embrace. What significance could actually be attached to the Eldest’s long silence, Myca could not even guess, and he wasn’t entirely certain he dared do so. There was an old aphorism among the clans about letting sleeping gods enjoy their rest, and his own in particular took pains not to disturb the sleep of the ancients by even thinking their names too loudly. He wasn’t sure he believed that one could think a being’s name too loudly, but, treading close to the place that might be the Eldest’s own homeland, he found he wasn’t quite daring enough to put it to the test, either.

  They approached Sarmizegetusa on foot, leaving their vehicles and the horses that drew them in the care of a nameless village lower on the mountain, climbing steep and slender trails that led upward through the forest. Tabak Ruthven’s letter had included a map, the route they should travel carefully marked in red ink, which they clung to tenaciously. It took more than one night, as Tabak suggested it might, and they took shelter for the day in the shadow of a partially fallen wall, heavily grown over by winter-bare trees, marked on the map as a remnant of the old Dacian fortress. The next night, they reached the boundary of Damek Ruthven’s domain, marked by two tall wooden plinths bearing aloft a pair of sculpted iron wolf-heads that moaned and whined as the wind passed through them. There, the party stopped for a time, and Ilias went on ahead, unaccompanied, to announce their coming. He was clad in his ritual vestments, his unadorned white tunic and his golden crown of flowers, barefoot and unarmed, carrying only a lamp to light his way and the heavy parchment scroll they had prepared in accordance with the old customs of Damek Ruthven’s court, of their names and their formal lineages, and their request to enter their host’s domain. It had been written on the skin of a virgin girl, whom Ilias had been at great pains to acquire and keep virginal, and who was now among the mortal servants accompanying them on the journey. He had also gone to great pains to keep her alive, a fact which Myca found rather strange and unnecessarily time consuming, until Ilias explained, delicately, that Damek Ruthven evidently had a taste for virgin girls.

  Myca endeavored to cultivate calm and patience while they waited at the gate for Ilias to return, reminding himself that this was merely a ceremonial formality, that the permission they craved had already been granted. He tried, with some difficulty, to remind himself that Damek Ruthven was old and powerful and that his age and potency entitled him to respect. His eccentricities were nothing more or less than a remnant of the oldest and most formal customs of the clan itself, and that yielding to those customs ultimately cost him nothing. He watched the path leading back down the mountain, the paved and terraced path that wound its way among the grassy mounds that covered ruined walls and the copses of trees that had stood since before the fall of the Roman Empire, with all his senses refined, looking for the slightest trace of light or motion. Malachite, he could not help but notice, was affecting an unconcerned posture that ultimately did very little to disguise his intense watchfulness. Not for the first time, Myca wondered precisely when his lover had begun winning the goodwill of the Rock of Constantinople, and how he’d managed to do it.

  A flicker of white moved among the trees, and Myca permitted the tension making an iron rod of his spine to loosen a fraction. Ilias descended the path, carrying his lamp in both hands, accompanied by a handful of dark-robed figures, most of which were an arm-span and more taller than him. Behind him, Myca heard a brief, muffled sound of fear and surprise from one of the servants, quickly hushed. The guards and the two most experienced servants—Teodor and Miklos, he thought their names were—gathered up the baggage and prepared to move again without being ordered. The three remaining servants, all of them girls at the edge of adulthood, huddled close together in wise, fearful silence, waiting to see what happened next.

  Ilias and his companions reached the bottom of the stair and approached, pausing a few paces above the gate.

  “Lord taraboste Damek Ruthven has accepted our request to enter into his presence.” Ilias announced with perfect serenity, his expression as smooth as water on a windless night. For some reason, Myca found that vaguely disturbing. “Come with me. I shall lead the way.”

  Myca and Malachite exchanged a brief glance, then approached, passing through the gate, the servants following a respectful six paces behind. Ilias turned before they reached him and led the way, as he said he would, his hair swaying with the grace of his stride. Watching him move, Myca thought he saw something strange in it. Ilias was, for the most part, startlingly graceful and smooth in all of his motions but, tonight, something in that grace seemed a trifle… off. He could not place precisely what it was that caught his eye, but the more he watched, the more it faded away and the language of Ilias’ body belonged solely to himself again, and the length of his stride slowed accordingly as they approached the entrance into Damek Ruthven’s house.

  Myca was faintly surprised to discover that entrance was little more than a round hut, its walls wooden plinths cemented together with clay, its roof a high cone also of wood. Within the small house, a pair of stone plinths stood, on which candles burned, illuminating a great pit that filled the center of the building, and the shallow steps descending into the mountain on which they stood.

  “He awaits us below.” Again, Ilias’ voice was serenely devoid of expression. “Come.”

  And so they descended.

  Damek Ruthven was almost precisely what Myca imagined him to be. He sat on a throne carved entirely of fused and reshaped bones, draped in thick, dark furs. The skulls of his defeated enemies ringed the dais on which that throne stood, and only a few of them were other than Cainite. The man himself sat tall and did not rise as they entered his presence. Myca guessed that, should he stand, he would be more than seven feet tall, clearly not the size he had been as a mortal man, but otherwise lacking any signs of obvious reshaping for he did not choose to present himself as entirely inhuman, either in beauty or repulsiveness. Damek Ruthven was not Embraced in his youth. His face was high cheeked and his pale eyes deep set, lined with care and toil. The long, brown beard and the curls spilling over his shoulders were both liberally streaked with white and iron gray. His enormous hands were scarred and rough, his limbs knotted with muscle. He wore antique garments of a type Myca had seen only in illustrations in the older books of the Library of the Forgotten, a cap of fur and felt, a long tunic that left his arms bare, baggy trousers and leather sandals, all without the slightest trace of ornamentation. He wore no jewelry or any other obvious signs of his status. The force of his personality filled the throne room with the awareness of his power more completely than any physical symbol could hope.

  Kneeling next to one side of the throne, completely eclipsed in her master’s shadow, was a woman. In truth, she was little more than a girl, her hips slenderly boyish, her breasts barely budded. She was a Cainite, Myca could tell from the glacial hue of her skin and her absence of breath in her lungs, though he could not guess at her age. She was almost entirely naked, but for the length of her own honey-golden hair and the beaten gold jewelry she wore. A queen’s ransom in amber and rubies weighed down her hands and wrists and encrusted the collar at her throat and the rings encircling her erect nipples. She did not look up when they entered, but instead kept her eyes fixed firmly on the floor. The resemblance, in her submission, to his sire’s advisor Eudokhia was somewhat unnerving. Standing on the opposite side of the throne was a second male Cainite, clad also in simple, antique garments, though somewhat more richly colored than those of his patron. His hair was darker, true blac
k, though his eyes were fair. His face was a blandly perfect blend of characteristics that, even looking at him, refused to fix themselves in Myca’s memory.

  Ilias knelt and, setting aside the lamp he still carried, bowed smoothly to the floor, pressing his forehead against the stones. A few seconds later, Myca and Malachite followed suit, and waited for their presence to be acknowledged. It pleased Damek Ruthven to let them wait. His voice, when he spoke, was a low rumble, speaking a tongue none of them knew. An instant later, a second, lighter voice translated this speech into clear and precise Greek. “Rise our guests, and our honored kin. Rise son of the Great Dragon, rise beloved of the gods, rise steadfast servant of the Great Dragon. You are welcome in our house, by the covenant of Earth and Sky, and by the Waters of Life and Death which bind us all.”

  Myca gave Ilias a count of five to rise first, then lifted his own forehead from the stones, leaning back on his legs to kneel, and from there to come to his feet. Ilias already stood, completely composed, and replied, also in Greek, “We give greetings to you, taraboste Damek Ruthven, and gratitude of the gracious hospitality of your house. To thank you for your greatness, we offer you these gifts, to do with as you will.”

  From the hall leading into the throne-room, the three girl-servants they had brought with them were ushered in, in the company of one of their black-robed guides. All three wore the glassy-eyed look of mortals drugged into quiescence as they were herded forward and directed to kneel for their new owner’s delectation. He gave them all a cursory glance, his gaze lingering longest on the tall, fair one in the middle, before directing a curt command to the girl kneeling at his side. She rose, gathered up the gifts, and led them out. Damek Ruthven turned his pale, piercing gaze back upon them, and addressed them all in the tongue of his court, the ancient language of Dacia, which the interpreter again translated for them.

  “You are welcome to reside in our domain for one month, by the reckoning of the moon, and search the library as you will, so long as you remove no volumes from my house. Tonight, we will feast together, and tomorrow you may begin your task.” The interpreter smiled a thin-lipped smile. “I am Tabak Ruthven, childe of Damek, and I will be your assistant.”

  Damek Ruthven’s library-archive was vast, contained in a single, enormous underground hall, and Myca fell instantaneously in lust with the place, lover of the word that he was. Malachite, Ilias saw clearly, was hardly less impressed, astonished by the size and scope of the project. Here, in the warm and well-lit hall beneath the ruins of Sarmizegetusa, lay much of the collected history of the Tzimisce clan, writings dating from its oldest nights, including some—so swore Tabak Ruthven, as he toured the high stone and wooden stacks with them—that his sire said came from the hand of the Eldest himself. Ilias did not doubt it. He felt the echoes of an ancient intellect in this place, a mind far older and even more abstracted from his own than Damek Ruthven, felt it keenly enough that it was nearly disturbing.

  Myca, clearly having to physically resist the urge to dive headfirst into the historical tomes that made up fully half the library, exerted his enormous sense of intellectual self-discipline and turned instead to the genealogical scrolls, with the able assistance of Malachite and Tabak Ruthven. For the first time in months, he dreamed no disturbing dreams, suffered no painful, involuntary convulsions of mind or spirit. Perhaps it was because he was fully mentally engaged in his task, but something in Ilias doubted that was the whole explanation. He had been fully engaged in his tasks during the weeks they had spent at home, as well, and his concentration had not protected him then. A suspicion began to blossom in the back of Ilias’ thoughts and a quiet request to Tabak one evening found him being escorted to the region of the genealogical archive that contained the records pertaining to the Moldavian lines of the clan, the lines to which Velya himself claimed to belong. A thorough search found no mention of the Flayer among those kinlines, a fact that disturbed Ilias more than slightly, and so he widened the scope of his own search accordingly.

  He found Velya at last among the scrolls pertaining to the northern Tzimisce kin, the lines that dwelt still for the most part in the region of Poland surrounding the city of Szcezcin, on the scroll of the koldun-prophet Triglav and his kin. A chill slid from the base of Ilias’ spine and into the back of his thoughts, settling there and laying in roots. Triglav, sire of Velya the Flayer, was dead. Triglav, sire of Velya, had been dead for many, many decades, destroyed by the hand of the Dracon, the sire of Gesu, the sire of Symeon, the sire of Myca Vykos syn Draconov. He cursed himself quietly for never, in all the years of his acquaintance with Velya, asking him of his sire, or of his other existing kin. The conflict between the Draconian Tzimisce and the kin of Triglav had never truly ended, not to his own sure and certain knowledge. Myca, he knew, was Embraced in the midst of it, by Symeon when he had come north to raid the territories of his grandsire’s enemies, to water the earth with their blood in retribution for a crime that had never been proven, and had long since ceased to matter. Eventually, the kin of the Dracon had simply stopped their raids and turned inward as the threat to their city had taken precedence to the pleasures of blood-vengeance. The kin of Triglav, exhausted, heavily thinned, had been forced to suspend their hostilities, as well. On the scroll he held, whole kinlines were black-bordered, wiped out root and branch, with no survivors known to exist. Only Velya, of Triglav’s elder childer, survived.

  What this knowledge truly meant, Ilias was not sure, but the possibilities chilled him to the core. Blood-feud was not a game among the Tzimisce. The murder of sires and childer and blood-kin was not a crime easily forgiven, or forgotten. It had taken an extraordinary political opportunity coupled with years of intensive diplomatic effort by the Obertus to bring Rachlav and Lukasz to a point where they would agree to lay down their hatred of each other. No such effort had been made between the descendants of the Dracon and the descendants of Triglav. That conflict had not ended, it had merely rested for a time. And, Ilias feared, suddenly, sharply, changed its shape. Slowly, he rolled the scroll shut, and replaced it in its leather case.

  A prickle of unease raised the hairs on the back of his neck and, not for the first time in these last weeks and months, he felt himself not alone, and watched. It had troubled him off and on since their arrival in Sredetz, and had not abated since their departure from that city. Whatever it was, it tickled at the edge of his senses, played at the corner of his eyes, vanishing entirely when he tried to focus on it. Tonight, when he turned to face it, it did not wholly evaporate, but neither did it become any clearer. He felt, instead, a silent entreaty, a tug in his blood that urged him to follow, to walk, to leave the underground entirely and seek… something else.

  Ilias picked up his candle-lamp and followed that impulse, his curiosity and his apprehension equally roused now.

  Damek Ruthven’s haven was a labyrinth of narrow corridors and small, boxlike rooms, clearly patterned on the layout of the fortress that had once stood above it. Of all of them, only the halls immediately surrounding the library-archive, easily the largest series of rooms in the entire structure, were actually well lit. Ilias moved carefully through the corridors beyond that space. Tabak had intimated that some of the halls terminated in traps and prisons for unwary invaders, but Ilias suspected that might have simply been an attempt at intimidating guests. Damek Ruthven hadn’t struck Ilias, during any of their infrequent meetings, as the sort of person who appreciated random wandering, particularly in the halls of his haven. Ilias therefore attended his intuition closely as he made his way through the underground, avoiding servants, and coming at last to the base of a narrow stairway. It was not the stair that they had used to enter the haven—that one was wide and obviously constructed. This one almost seemed grown. The “steps” were mostly odd-shaped stones growing out of the side of the hill, packed earth, and the occasional tree root. Ilias climbed it, careful of where he placed his feet. A breath of cold wind stirred his hair and the flame of his lamp before he reached the to
p, nearly blowing out his light. Being careful not to place his hand too near the flame itself, he did his best to shield it, and continued on. The “stair” emerged at a large, triangular aperture formed by the space between two huge, heavy boulders. It might have even once been a shallow cave, Ilias thought. Outside the sky was clear, and the moon almost perfectly half-full, shedding enough light to see by.

  A temple.

  A long colonnade of stone and wooden columns led down from the threshold, widening into an enormous circle at its far end. Standing in the middle of that circle was a tree—a massive, wide-spreading tree, a true grandfather of the forest, still in leaf despite the winter, the wind hissing softly through its branches with a sound like distant whispers. Ilias almost thought he heard a voice in it. He felt the age and power of this place hanging in the air, rooted deep in the earth, before he even stepped foot on the path. Once he did so, that power rose up to seize him, to fill him, making his mind reel with the vast, incomprehensible age of it, stirring his blood as few other things ever had. He had felt it before, when he had climbed the path to present their petition. He had felt it walk with him and within him, and had known no fear or pain then, either. His lamp fell from his hand, and the candle extinguished itself in its own wax.

  A god dwelt here, or a being close enough to divinity that the differences hardly mattered. Ilias was not aware, precisely, of walking down the path to the tree. He experienced the sensation of motion distantly, nearly outside of himself. He knelt among the roots of the tree, the ground beneath it scattered with fallen leaves, their scent sweet like dried blood. He was not surprised to find the bark of the tree, untouched by axe or flame or lightning-strike, to be warm beneath his hands, or that it felt like skin. He laid himself against its bole, large enough around that ten men standing hand-to-hand might not have been able to encircle it completely, and rested his cheek against it. The god welled up within it—welled up within him—like sap rising with the spring. He felt it touching him from within, moving in his blood and soul, running its fingers through his thoughts. Then, it spoke, softly, urgently, the same voice he had heard that night in his own sanctuary, as he dreamed a dream that filled him with fear, for no reason that he could understand. The same voice, and the same unfathomable tongue, the same sense of insistence, of an urgency so strong it was nearly fear. He begged it, silently, to make what it needed of him clearer. But it did not seem to know how.