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

by Myranda Kalis

  Myca very much wanted to leap to his feet but found his muscles too weak to manage it, and settled for scrambling an arm’s length or two away from Ilias-who-was-not-Ilias. “What is going on here?”

  His question went unanswered. Ilias-who-was-not-Ilias rose from his place among the bed-furs and crossed the room to kneel at the side of the Archbishop of Nod. He made no move to reach out to the Archbishop, who returned the favor. They sat together in a silence that none dared to break for a long, long moment. Then, Nikita-who-was-not-Nikita slumped over his knees, his spine bending, the mask of his face crumbling, and Ilias-who-was-not-Ilias took him in his arms.

  Myca leaned back, found a wall, and pushed himself up it, leaning hard against the stone to support his watery legs. He wanted to shout a number of things, not the least of which was, Who are you and what have you done with my lover?, but could not quite find the depth of foolishness necessary to do so. Instead, he made his way laboriously around the edge of the room, until he came to the side of the necromancer, Markus Musa Giovanni.

  “What is this,” Myca hissed between clenched teeth, not quite giving it enough inflection to make an actual question.

  The necromancer shot him a wild-eyed look. He extended a shaking hand towards Nikita-who-was-not-Nikita’s bent back. “When I woke he was here. I do not know how he came to be here… or where the guards might be.”

  Myca somehow suspected that the absence of guards was the least of their worries. “He is… that is… Nikita…”

  “He is the Dracon.” Malachite’s voice, clear and strong, filled the oriel room. “I know that face better than I know my own. I have carried it with me since I left Constantinople.”

  “Faithful Malachite.” A soft, hoarse whisper. “You should have listened to me the last time, Rock of Constantinople. Truth has no one shape, no one symbol. All eyes see it differently. All tongues speak it differently. Nothing—nothing—exists unchanged forever. Not even we.” Nikita-who-was-not-Nikita straightened himself, though he did not rise. “Do you see it now, faithful Malachite? Do you understand it now? The Dream—”

  “The Dream is not dead,” Malachite answered, quietly. “The Dream has only changed its shape. It cannot die, even if all of its symbols crumble and fall to dust. The Dream is a thing with its own life. Do you give it so little credit, hidden one?”

  “I give it all the credit it deserves,” the Dracon whispered tiredly. “The Dream will survive all who first saw it blossom, and helped give it its first form. My time as its custodian is at an end. The last task I set myself is done. Michael is avenged. Those who sought to diminish and sully what he created are dead or undone. Narses is destroyed, and the Heresy destroyed with him.” He bowed his head again, a curtain of dark hair falling across his face. “And I am so tired.”

  Somewhere, Myca found his voice. “You did this… you murdered Nikita of Sredetz and stole his form… You went to an effort that I cannot even imagine… to destroy the Cainite Heresy?”

  “Yes.” The Dracon’s head came up again and he half-turned, the expression on his face somewhere short of pleasant. “Would you not do the same to avenge your lover, Myca Vykos, born of my blood?”

  Myca took a ragged breath, cast a glance at Ilias-who-was-not-Ilias, and decided not to answer that question. “Why did you let us hold you? Why did you let Jürgen hold you? Why did you let him take you in the first place?”

  A rise and fall of slender shoulders. “Jürgen disappointed me. I hoped he would destroy me. He did not. He sent me to you.”

  “Destroy…” Myca began, absolutely appalled, only to be interrupted by an unlikely source.

  “Destroyed?” Markus Musa Giovanni asked, softly, his eyes gleaming with an unpleasant light.

  Across the room, Malachite stiffened with visible alarm.

  “This is outside of your purview, Lord Giovanni,” Myca ground out through bared fangs. “And outside of your commission.”

  “Outside of the commission I hold from you, Lord Vykos,” the necromancer replied, coolly. “But in this matter I do not serve you. I serve my Lady Constancia of Erciyes, whose prophecies have never failed in their guidance. The Rock of Constantinople knows of what I speak.”

  Myca flicked a glance in his direction. “Malachite?”

  “Constancia of Erciyes,” Malachite murmured, his gaze fixed unwaveringly on the necromancer, “has prophesied that the Dream must die. It cannot, for the Dream is more than the sum of its symbols, as she, wise as she is, must realize.”

  “Perhaps,” the necromancer countered, his fingers knotted in the lengths of chain about his throat. “But those symbols may be undone, and the Dream itself forgotten for an age and more if needs be, bound away and kept hidden from all eyes and all minds.”

  “Do not be a greater fool than you have to be, Giovanni—” Myca snapped—and recoiled, quickly, to avoid be splattered by the blood.

  He had not even seen Ilias-who-was-not-Ilias move. One moment, he was kneeling at the side of the Dracon. The next, he was standing before Markus Musa Giovanni with his hand buried to the wrist in the necromancer’s chest.

  “Constancia of Erciyes,” He said, he biting off each word clearly, “has the unhealthy habit in meddling in matters which do not concern her, and sending others to die for her.” The hand twisted, and wrenched itself free.

  Markus Musa Giovanni crumbled to dust without even a scream, his empty clothing and many chains falling to the floor in a heap. Myca retreated another handful of steps, too shocked to speak, and stopped only when he bumped into the far wall. Ilias-who-was-not-Ilias licked his fingers clean, and casually crushed bone fragments and braided locks of hair underfoot, rending the necromancer’s chains and fetishes he used to bind and command his ghost-slaves.

  “Constancia,” the Dracon whispered into the ringing silence that followed, “knows me well. She knows what I desired.”

  “You desire death,” Myca said softly.

  “I desire an ending.” There was endless, depthless weariness in that admission. “You cannot imagine it, childe of my blood, and I hope you never have cause to. I hope that you do not see the night when you have outlasted everything and everyone that you have ever loved, and watched everything that you tried to preserve crumble around you.”

  “Everything?” Ilias-who-was-not-Ilias asked softly.

  Silence. Ilias-who-was-not-Ilias crossed the room and knelt again at the Dracon’s side. Within himself, Myca felt his blood stir and pulse in his veins, a sharp contracting pain filling his chest, reaching up to pound at his temples. Shock—for it was shock that had kept him from any other reaction—gave way to fear, and fear to a sudden, painful anguish. They were speaking to one another, he realized with dizzying suddenness, speaking to each other in a speech that required no clumsy words, that offered no barriers to perfect comprehension. He understood, then, what Ilias had been trying to tell him about his visions, about the agony that dwelt in the spirit of Nikita-who-was-not-Nikita, in Nikita-who-was-the-Dracon, the soul-devouring pain and loss that consumed him, even deep in the sleep of ages. He understood how one could be eternal, as old as the mountains, and still long for the peace and silence of death, how one could be touched by divinity and find divinity wanting.

  Ilias-who-was-not-Ilias held out a hand to him and, almost against his will, he stepped forward, and took it. In that moment, he was lost, and knew it to the core of his soul.

  “Bear witness, Rock of Constantinople.” Ilias-who-was-not-Ilias whispered, and drew Myca down.

  It was pleasure. The hands that touched him, that remade him to suit its need, saw no need for the deliberate infliction of agony. Myca felt that, had nothing of Ilias existed within them, simple indifference would have caused him mind-shattering pain and thought nothing of it. But Ilias was in those hands, at least in part, and so he felt only pleasure as his body was reshaped, opened and made ready to receive.

  He watched from a vast mental distance, every nerve singing with resonant joy, as Ilias-who
-was-not-Ilias turned from him to his ancestor, who waited, silent, face bowed. He watched the perfect flesh distort and malform, discoloring, rippling. Liquid. He was becoming liquid, Myca realized, distantly, and could not bring himself to care, or fear what would happen next. Ilias-who-was-not-Ilias gathered the ball of liquid into his hands, held together by the thinnest layer of skin, and swallowed it, taking it into himself, transforming it, solidifying its essence. Myca knew—he felt the knowledge of what was happening within the flesh and blood of his lover filling him wordlessly.

  He parted his legs, and cried aloud in pleasure as their bodies joined together again, at last.

  His lover moved inside the reshaped passages of his body and, if he thought he had known pleasure before, it was nothing compared to what he felt now. It overwhelmed him in less than a heartbeat, drawing him down into a sweet, blood-colored, blood-scented whirlpool of ecstatic sensation, rapture so vast it consumed all his senses. Distantly, he knew that this was not an act of love, but of violation, a rape committed against his body and his soul, to save the existence of one who wished only for death. He could not bring himself to care. In the terrible rapture cleaving his soul and his flesh, he felt Ilias, he felt his lover striving to spare him pain, felt his lover’s soul wrap about his own and endure the pain of this defilement for his sake, and his alone. He knew that, in some way, love touched him and protected him, even now, and died for him as the pleasure peaked.

  He felt the seed spill into him, hard and thick, anchoring itself inextricably into his being, into his soul, blood, and flesh. He felt the last of Ilias’ soul gutter and die within him, consumed at the last, and the searing agony of violation as his body sealed itself around the intruder, the dragon-seed of his ancestor, the container of its essence, polluting his own being with its alien presence. He felt the fine ash of his lover’s dissolving body fall across his own blood-sticky flesh, scorched to destruction from within by the force of the being that had spoken and acted through him. Myca Vykos threw back his head and screamed.

  Interlude

  I cannot adequately or accurately define the full meaning of the bonds between my sire and myself. Not even to myself, for my own satisfaction, can I pull the threads of the tie between us apart, examine and analyze them, describe them in words that are safe and painless. The strength of that bond is such that it transcends the descriptive capacity of language; words alone cannot convey it.

  But because I am who I am, I must try.

  Does it matter how we first met, who I was, and who he was, at that long-ago time? Does it matter where we were, and the words we said to one another, and the language that we spoke? I do not think it does. That place no longer exists in any way that matters. Its villages are buried rubble, its people scattered and lost in the greater sea of humanity, its language forgotten before it could be written.

  What were we, what are we, to each other?

  Perhaps the more important question.

  He was not, was never, my lover, though I know that many of the ancients took their childer for the sake of pure lust, out of a desire borne in blood. That was not the way between he and I. Our bond is deeper than any tie that arises from transient desire, infatuation with a pretty face or a sweet voice. In fact, I do not know all the reasons why he first chose me, and I do not think that I want to know them. Some things, even between oneself and one’s sire, are better left unexplored. I know that he made the decision for the first time when I was little more than a child, and that he held to it as I grew to manhood. Unlike many of his childer, he offered me a true choice when the time came—not the dead-water or death, as so many of our kin do in these degenerate nights, but the gift of his blood or the right to live and die as a mortal, a life in which he would not interfere.

  Why did I choose as I did? I could offer a thousand facile rationalizations of my choice, but all of them would be just that—rationalizations, self-justification coated in layers of pride and regret. I will say, instead, only this: when I made my choice, of my own free will and knowing what I would both gain and lose by so doing, I believed that it was the right choice to make, the right way, the path that I had been born to follow. Was I wrong about that choice, or was I right? Even I do not know any longer. I am not entirely certain that I care any longer. It has been too long since I made that choice. The reasons no longer matter, and the consequences are ceasing to matter, as well.

  There are those who say that I am my sire’s first-chosen and favorite. They are only partially correct. The pride of place for the first-chosen rightfully belongs an elder brother whose name is now all but forgotten and whose line has so dwindled that if it contains a dozen childer, I would be surprised, indeed. But favorite? Yes, I was that. I say it, and claim the truth of it, without pride and without pleasure. My sire loves me, not as a man loves his lover, but as a father loves his son. You cannot imagine how terrifying that is, how heavy a weight it hangs upon my shoulders, to know that in me resides the sum of my sire’s remaining humanity, the remnants of his ability to feel and comprehend human emotion, the womb of his rebirth as a thing only barely human any longer.

  It is almost true, that he cannot die. So long as one of his blood exists, he exists. So long as the world does not fall to ash, he may make himself whole again. It happened once. His flesh perished, but his essence lived on, lived on and found purchase within me to remake itself. I felt both things, almost at once—the shock of his death, rippling through the blood in my veins, and the second, greater shock of his life, quickening within the blood that he had given me, within my very flesh. I felt him reshape me to host himself, building a nest within me of blood and soft tissue, to cradle a tiny seed of recovering consciousness. I felt him grow, slowly, as he drew the scattered pieces of himself, the fragments of his identity, back together again, growing stronger and more coherent as the weeks stretched into months. Nine months, of course, nine the number it takes to create miracles of new life. My belly swelled with him and within myself, I felt him move, I felt him caress me from within, lovingly, trusting me in his vulnerability as he trusted no one and nothing else, even his bogatyr witch-warriors. I knew how a woman must feel as her babe grew beneath her heart, and it nearly drove me mad to discover that same depth of love within myself for my sire, whose soul I carried within me, whose blood and flesh were as much my own as his.

  He birthed himself on a moonless night, as my body contorted with the demands he made on it, yielding flesh and blood as he required. I know there was pain, but the pain is not the most intense memory I have of that night. Rather, it was laying there afterwards, panting and as exhausted as any woman who had birthed her first child, with him laying on my hollowed-out belly, small and red and wrinkled. He mewled, hungrily, as any infant would, and I took him in my arms, gave him suck from my own throat—and when I looked into his eyes, I saw that his effort to recreate himself had failed.

  There was nothing human in his eyes. I had birthed a monster, whom I could not even strangle in the cradle, whom I could not even expose for the sun to burn to ash and the wind to scatter. Blood has passed between us for months—nine months, the time needed to make miracles—and the bond between us was tight. I loved the monstrous thing I had birthed as much as I loved the scholar who had fed my mind, the seer who had advised me with wise counsel, the sire who had let me find my own way, as he had found his. The horror of it choked me, and I could not even flee it. Instead, I took him back to the place that he had claimed as his own, and gave him to the care of those who could care for him, and then I ran from the sight of him and the knowledge of what had become of him, and built myself a home across the deep salt sea where I hoped to escape the pull of him, the desire to return to him. I threw myself into esoteric studies and, then, into the arms of my lovers, in hopes of building something better than I had first given birth to. In all of these things, I failed.

  Epilogue

  Madrid, 1235

  The messenger arrived in Madrid by night and made his way unerr
ingly to the house of Bishop Ambrosio Luis Monçada. The bishop’s servants admitted the messenger, eventually, for they did not like the look of him—weary and travel-worn and clearly not of gentle birth, or else he would not have been traveling like a common vagabond. The messenger paid the superciliousness of the bishop’s servants no heed and delivered his message to the bishop’s secretary, pausing to accept no refreshment, nor to meet with the bishop himself, who was engaged in business that night.

  When the bishop received the message, he was considerably irritated with his servants for not taking the messenger’s name or detaining him for further questioning. He did not, however, punish them as harshly as he could have. He suspected that attempting to detain this particular messenger against his will might have cost him a number of well-trained functionaries. The letter came from the east, from the domains of the Obertus Order, and was, the bishop thought, characteristically short and to the point, consisting of only one line in an elegant hand.

  The matter that we discussed has been accomplished.—M.

  He might have doubted the veracity of that claim, given that he had no way to confirm it otherwise, had it not been for one thing. Pressed into the wax medallion at the bottom of the message was not the imprint of a seal, but the seal itself, a heavy golden signet, its image deeply incised into the metal. A brief perusal among his own records showed the bishop that the signet had left its stamp on a half-dozen pieces of ecclesiastical correspondence over the years, most of which were more than two hundred years old.

  Bishop Ambrosio Luis Monçada was uncertain whether he should be personally pleased by this development or not. Instead of dwelling on the matter, however, he instead wrote several letters of his own, and began putting plans long held in reserve into motion.

  The visitor came to the house of Velya the Flayer in the spring, traveling simply and alone, unaccompanied by servants or bodyguards. He arrived early in the evening and was received with all due ceremony, offered viands and all the comforts of an honored guest, which he accepted graciously. The letter he presented upon his arrival was carried to the master of the house and, in due course, the Flayer roused himself sufficiently to attend his visitor as a guest of his eminence and rank deserved.