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

by Myranda Kalis

  Its withdrawal was as sudden as its rise. It pulled away from his spirit so swiftly he nearly followed it, drawn down by the wake of its motion. He became reacquainted with his body so swiftly and so hard his whole being reeled, and he fell hard away from the bole of the tree, weakened and shuddering. He felt as though he had been fasting for weeks, his hunger sudden, sharp and fierce, and his limbs too weak to pick himself up.

  Cold hands caught at his shoulders, and he realized he was no longer alone. He exerted a Herculean effort and forced his head to lift, and his eyes to focus. Kneeling above him, Damek Ruthven did not look entirely pleased with him, but he supposed that was only just, all things being equal. Then he found himself being gathered into his host’s massive arms and he let his head fall against the wool-clad chest, too tired to hold it up any longer.

  “What did you see?” In Greek, directly beneath his ear, and Ilias smiled slightly to see that Damek was willing to bend on the use of languages, were his curiosity great enough.

  “Nothing,” Ilias replied, too weary to bother with embellishments. “I heard… his voice. Is that—?”

  “Yes.” Damek’s voice, under his ear, was uncharacteristically tender. “You will need to eat. He has forgotten how to be gentle… and even I cannot say if he understands, or remembers, how fragile we are any longer.”

  Somehow, Ilias did not find that comforting.

  “There is nothing here,” Myca finally admitted, three weeks and a hundred scrolls of southern Tzimisce lineage trees later, as he and Malachite sat together in the library.

  Malachite, very much to Myca’s irritation, chose not to offer any permutation of ‘I told you so,’ and instead nodded gravely. “Perhaps we should take a different approach.”

  “You think we should check the lineage scrolls of the Eldest’s childer.” Myca replied, bluntly, thoroughly displeased. They had had this argument before.

  “My opinion on that matter has not changed, Lord Vykos.” Malachite did not stoop to obsequiousness but he often retreated into formality in the face of resistance. “And our time dwindles.”

  Myca was silent for a moment as he considered and struggled to control his irritation with the situation. Malachite, damn his eyes, was correct—their extensive search of the regional archives had yielded nothing at all. Assuredly, there were Tzimisce named ‘Nikita’ in the scrolls they had researched but none of them were the Nikita of Sredetz, the Archbishop of Nod, whose deeds would have been recorded like any of the others. And Malachite had not wavered at all in his belief that they would find the truth of Nikita’s lineage elsewhere in the archive.

  “Very well,” Myca said softly, and summoned a servant to lead them to the appropriate section of the library.

  The scrolls pertaining to the immediate lineages of the Eldest’s childer were stored in their own room, along with the volumes of clan histories and tales that pertained to them particularly. Some of these collections were larger than others; some of the Eldest’s childer were nearly as enigmatic as he himself. The Dracon was not precisely one of them, no matter how little Myca himself knew of his great-grandsire, but neither was his existence entirely transparent. There were more myths of him than there were solid pieces of history, before or after his involvement in the Dream of Constantinople. Myca was entirely aware of this, based on the fear of the Dracon that persisted among the clan, a fear that often compelled cooperation where none might otherwise be offered.

  The servant came, small and brown-robed, and led them through the halls to the room of the elder princes of the blood, then lit the lamps. It did not take Myca and Malachite long to realize that something was amiss. The folios pertaining to the Dracon’s history were still present, neatly arranged in what appeared to be chronological order. Beneath those books, which were somewhat fewer than Myca expected, sat the leather cases in which the lineage scrolls were stored. The leather cases, however, were empty. All of them.

  “Impossible,” Myca whispered, genuinely shocked.

  Malachite was equally stunned, and swiftly moved around the room, opening other cases and examining their contents. Quickly, Myca joined him, seeing what he was trying to do. The rest of the lineage scrolls were intact. They were also correctly attributed.

  “It seems, Lord Vykos,” Malachite murmured as they stood together, a dozen lineage scrolls belonging to everyone except the Dracon spread across the table between them, “that someone has gone to a very great effort at obfuscation on behalf of Nikita of Sredetz.”

  Myca was forced to agree.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Damek Ruthven was, predictably, more than slightly wroth when Myca and Malachite informed him of the theft that had taken place beneath his very nose, in his own library. They departed four nights later, subdued and very much under a cloud. Damek Ruthven made it clear through Tabak that he did not consider them responsible, but they had succeeded in wearing out their welcome. As they passed back over the mountains, the weather finally began to grow damp, and by the time they reached the monastery outside Brasov, snow was beginning to fall for the first time that winter.

  Myca withdrew almost completely, assailed again by dreams and by doubts that gnawed at his confidence. He had refused to even contemplate the possibility that Malachite might be correct—that some true connection existed between his ancestor and the Archbishop of Nod. It seemed beyond credit, given the level of contempt the Cainites of Constantinople had always showered on the adherents of the Cainite Heresy, and the depths of personal antipathy that had lain between the founders of the Dream and the late, unlamented Narses of Venice. Now, it seemed, all the evidence—or, more precisely, the lack of evidence and the careful eradication of any that might exist—bolstered the Rock of Constantinople’s claims in ways that troubled Myca deeply. It defied logic. It defied everything Myca knew about his great-grandsire. And it was beginning to appear correct.

  It irritated him like a hair shirt against his skin, but he could find no means to refute the possibility that satisfied even himself. He was almost ready to unstake Nikita and twist the answers he now fiercely desired out of the oily little bastard. His Beast counseled violence and the distribution of a considerable amount of pain to quench his frustration. The only thing that stayed his hand, beyond the arguments by Ilias and Malachite against it, was the fear of what he would learn if he did so.

  Several times after they returned to the monastery, he sat in his study as the snow piled up against the walls outside, and wrote to his sire, begging his help, his wise counsel, a word of comfort. Each of those letters he burned before the ink finished drying. Pride moved his hand in that, and an insidious fear that had had been growing in his breast since his visit to Velya’s house, since the dream he had there, since those dreams continued, almost without cease. The bond between himself and his sire was strong, deep, untainted by the compulsion of the blood, a mark of respect that Myca had cherished all his unlife after the contortions of will he had seen imposed on his contemporaries. Now, he feared, feared with a deepening horror, that that respect was ephemeral, that he had been subjected to a violation as terrible as the blood oath itself, at the hands of the man he trusted nearly as much as he trusted himself.

  Malachite returned to the monastery and tried with all his will not to sink into the same morass of pain and doubt that he sensed consuming Symeon’s childe. He did not entirely succeed, despite the efforts of Ilias cel Frumos to draw them both out of themselves. Too much doubt had lived too close to him, for too long. Too many years of fruitless searching had passed, since the fall of Constantinople, since the destruction of nearly all the symbols of the Dream itself. He wished to have hope, but he could not find it within himself.

  For good or for ill, he sensed the end of his long quest approaching, and as it did, he found himself increasingly reluctant to continue its pursuit. A terrible fear of where this road was leading him had begun to form, and moved him to argue against it when Myca Vykos, in an uncharacteristic display of open impatienc
e, suggested that they release Nikita when they returned home and pry answers out of him. He feared that Nikita held the key to finding the Dracon, and he feared what would happen when he and the Dracon met again. He feared what the Dracon would say to him this time.

  He feared that those words would be, “The Dream is dead. Let it die.”

  And so he held his peace, and offered no suggestions, as he and Symeon’s childe wrestled with their fears alone.

  Ilias cel Frumos knew fear, and his fear was not for himself. He watched, helplessly, as Myca and Malachite withdrew into themselves, wrestling with their own demons, their own worries of what would come next, their own doubts.

  Myca was dreaming again. He refused to speak of it, of the misery they caused him, and his temper was too uncertain to confront him about it. More often than not, he did not linger in their bed longer than he had to, rising and bathing and dressing with less than a dozen words passing between them. It struck him one night, as he sat alone in their chamber, that Myca was taking no comfort any longer from his touch, from the bond between them, and that filled him with a pain sharper than any he had thought possible. He had had consorts before this. He had left lovers, and been left by them, before this. He felt himself losing this lover and, for the first time, the thought of it paralyzed him with anguish.

  Myca was not the only one who dreamed, or whose dreams disturbed him at a deep and primal level. He did not dream every night but, when he did, it was the same dream. The god-tree at the heart of Damek Ruthven’s fortress, and the voice that spoke to him in his mind, in his blood, and his soul. Sometimes, in the dream, he was not alone. Sometimes, Nikita was present as well, bespeaking the god, in a conversation to which he was not privy. On those nights he woke utterly exhausted, drained almost to the edges of his strength. He killed while feeding more than once when he did not intend to, simply to maintain his flagging strength. The lack of control aggravated him. It was one thing to kill because he desired the pleasure of doing so, and quite another because he could not prevent himself from doing otherwise. No amount of effort on his part allowed him to extract more meaning from the words that filled his mind, and nothing he did prevented the dream from returning.

  A malaise, spiritual and physical, settled on the monastery and persisted through the winter. It did not help that the mood of the three vampires bled over into their blood-bound servants, or that the weather in no way cooperated to lessen the gloom. After spending most of the summer and autumn bone dry, the snows came on with a vengeance, piling high against the monastery’s stout walls and drifting even higher. Father Aron was forced to ration food among his charges, as the harvests had been less than expected. Fortunately, the reserves held until spring cleared the roads enough for the monks to descend into Brasov to barter for supplies.

  Of the monastery’s three Cainite residents, Ilias shook off the winter and the dark uncertainties it witnessed with the greatest ease. The spring was, after all, his season, and he descended into the woods and fields to tend to his own flock of adherents as soon as it was practical to do so. It was not in his nature to brood overlong and he felt that more than a month of poor humor and nagging anxiety was entirely too self-indulgent, even for a priest of indulgence. After a while, he even managed to coax Myca out of his study, if not wholly out of his mood, dragging him almost bodily out of the monastery and into the forest sanctuary of the god. There they walked among the greening trees and Ilias worked a subtle magic of his own on his lover.

  Myca’s heart was not so hardened against him as he feared. Myca’s body, properly invited, quickened beneath his touch. They made love with a desperate ferocity of passion that neither had truly felt in months, beneath the stars in the circle sanctuary. Something inside Myca finally cracked open as they lay twined together afterwards, half-covered in someone’s discarded mantle. Ilias cradled his lover gently as he wept freely, his pride at last giving way to the need for true comfort. Ilias held him, and let him cry, and when his lover was done, kissed away the tears.

  “I have been a fool,” Myca whispered against his neck, some small time after that, “to turn away from you for so long. I have missed you more than I can say.”

  “We have both been foolish.” Ilias stroked the still-trembling muscles of his lover’s back, soothing them gently. “But if neither of us were ever fools, think of how bored we would both be.”

  Myca laughed weakly. “You are too kind. I…”

  “Hush. Do not judge yourself too harshly.” Softly. “I am here, my flower. Speak to me, please.”

  “Not yet. I cannot speak of it yet. But I will soon. I promise you.”

  “As you wish.”

  “We have all been… distracted this winter,” Myca said, two weeks later, as the three vampires sat together in the oriel room. “But now that the spring has come, we must decide what to do next.”

  Malachite nodded slowly from where he sat on the opposite side of the gaming table, the remnants of a game of backgammon spread across it. The Rock of Constantinople was not susceptible to Ilias’ finest charms but, after half a season spent in the solitary contemplation of his own fears and failings, he could be lured out of hiding by well-timed pleas for both company and sanity. “Are we agreed then, Lord Vykos, that there is little more that we might learn from the resources currently at our disposal?”

  Myca had joined them halfway through the game and watched, with faint amusement, as Malachite chased Ilias around the board until the end. “We are agreed. Which leaves us, ultimately, with only a few legitimate options.”

  Malachite nodded again, picking up a game counter and rubbing it between his fingers, the first sign of a nervous gesture he had ever shown. “Nikita himself.”

  “Yes.” Myca accepted that without hesitation. “I think it deeply unwise to attempt awakening him ourselves. If he is, in truth, a childe or even a grandchilde of the Dracon, he will be more than a match for any of us individually or together when he wakes. He is substantially weakened and restrained, yes, but he is not powerless, and I doubt that he will wake in a good humor.”

  If Malachite felt any triumph in hearing those words from Myca, it did not show in his expression or his voice. “What do you propose?”

  “I will write my sire, with a detailed report of our conclusions to date, and ask his permission to move Nikita’s body from Brasov to Oradea.” Beneath the table, Ilias watched his lover’s hand curl into a fist, and laid his own atop it silently. “If there is any who might assist us, it would be my sire, and he has the force of will and blood necessary should Nikita require more restraint that we alone could provide.”

  “Have you received any word from your colleague?” Malachite, it seemed, had an almost superstitious dislike of using Velya’s name, and employed alternatives whenever possible. Ilias marked it, and thought it not unwise.

  “Not yet. I am forced to assume that he has not made significant progress, or else he would have reported it to us by now. It would not help to rush him. Velya does things in his own time, though I believe he understood my urgency in this issue.” Beneath Ilias’ hand, Myca’s own fingers straightened out, some of the tension in his frame bleeding away.

  Malachite laid the little wooden counter back on the table. “I received a letter with the last courier from Oradea. All of our options might not yet be exhausted.”

  Myca inclined a questioning brow, and gestured for him to continue.

  “The letter was from Markus Musa Giovanni.” Malachite informed them, his tone bland. Beneath it, Ilias sensed a certain hint of distaste. “You know of him, Lord Vykos?”

  “Of him, yes. We did not mingle in the same circles in Constantinople but there were, of course, rumors. I seem to recall that he and Alexia Theusa did not exactly embrace each other as brother and sister.” Myca’s tone was faintly wry, a little smile twitching at the corner of his mouth. “Other than that, I know very little of him.”

  “Be glad.” The distaste no longer lurked. “He is quite—persistent
in the pursuit of those things he desires. He has been pursuing me, almost without pause, since we both left Constantinople, possibly at the behest of the Oracle of Bones.” Ilias sat up straighter. The fame of Constancia was such that even he had heard of her, the enigmatic priestess of holy Mount Erciyes. “I have done my best to avoid him, for I am not convinced that further enmeshing myself in Constancia’s plots or Markus’ will aid me in my goals… but in this case, there may be something to be gained from letting him catch me.”

  “A necromancer.” Myca murmured. “I had not considered that. Few among my blood practice those arts, for all the veneration of the Waters of Death, as well as Life.”

  “You see my thoughts on the matter.” Malachite replied quietly. “Most of those who knew Nikita best—his colleagues and confederates among the Cainite Heresy—are dead now. Perhaps, the answers we require lie beyond the grave.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Myca sent his invitation south as soon as the roads cleared enough for his messengers to travel. By the early summer, the matter was settled. Rather than putting themselves to the arduous task of traveling to Venice, an excursion that Myca had looked forward to with approximately the same enthusiasm as having his limbs chewed off by a feral vozhd, the necromancer would come to them. In preparation, Myca moved his household to Alba Iulia, the better to facilitate communication between all parties. Letters were exchanged and permissions requested. Symeon granted his leave to host Markus Musa Giovanni at the Obertus Order’s “mother-house” in Oradea, and to personally guarantee the peace of the meeting. Unhurried preparations for the trip to Oradea were subsequently made, as no one expected the necromancer to reach the city before later summer or early autumn.