Forbidden

by Ted Dekker

  He veered onto a side street, barely avoiding a young woman carrying a grocery bag. Her arms flew up. He heard her bag crash to the pavement behind him. He sprinted to the first intersection and tore down a street to his right: Entura Street, five blocks from home.

  He had just watched a man’s life spurt out of his throat. The look in the man’s eyes hadn’t been madness, but extreme fear. And now that same fear consumed Rom in a way he had never experienced.

  Your father was killed.

  His mother had never said anything of the sort. Surely she would have known.

  At the end of the block he veered left onto a slender cobbled street. It had no streetlamp. He sprinted its empty length, lungs burning.

  At the end of the lane was an abandoned print shop, its windows long boarded over, its decorative crenels broken or crumbled away. He knew this place, had poked around it before, even shown it to Avra once, wondering if it would make a second workshop before he gave up the idea as too expensive.

  Rom slowed, panting, and looked around. No one present that he could see. He jogged a few paces, searched along the first floor of the building. There—the boards of a ground-floor window, still missing where he had once broken them away to climb inside.

  He shoved his way through, grunting as a splintered board ripped the shoulder of his jacket down to the skin. He hesitated just a moment inside as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. The uncanny still of the stale air filled his nostrils.

  He staggered past the front room to the larger one in back and fell against the wall just inside the open doorway. He listened for long moments, straining to hear shouts or the prying of window boards. Only his own labored breathing and the skittering of rodents along the far wall broke the silence.

  Rom exhaled an uneven breath and slid down onto his rear, ignoring the plaster that dusted his shoulders. Hands trembling, he rubbed the rain from his eyes. But it wasn’t all rain. His fingers came away red. Blood was on the dirty muslin of the parcel, too.

  He set the parcel down. But the sight of it, the blood-smeared price of a life—more than one, according to the old man—seemed obscene.

  What have I done?

  He had run in panic and would surely pay a terrible price. But why had the old man run? And why had the guard killed him?

  He was killed, I tell you! As all the other keepers were killed. For this.

  What could be worth the price of a life?

  He listened one more moment for any sound of pursuit, then, satisfied that he was alone with the rats, he gripped the package and pushed himself up. Rom stepped toward a patch of gray light between the boards of one of the old windows.

  His fingers curled in the damp muslin and pulled it apart with a pop of threads along the seam where it had been sewn to the old man’s coat. He got it open. Pulled out a box.

  It was a small wooden box, no bigger than the little jewelry box he had once made for his mother. It was dark and damp, as though it perspired on its own. And it was ancient.

  The box wasn’t locked, but the iron latch refused to budge when he pried at it with a fingernail.

  Even as he tried again, he knew he should turn it over to the authorities, unopened, explain everything. But in running he had broken the law. There was no mercy for those who broke the laws of Order. If what the old man said was true, had the same thing happened to his father?

  He crouched, set the latch against the stone edge of the windowsill, and pried it open.

  A small bundle nestled inside. Something wrapped in a thin piece of—what? Parchment? No, leather. A section of vellum, folded and rolled, surprisingly supple. He lifted the bundle out and set the box aside. Unwrapping the vellum, he eased out the thing rolled inside it.

  A glass vial. It was the length of his palm, narrow at the top and swelling to the width of two fingers at the base, sealed with a stainless cap.

  He lifted it up to what little light came in through the window. Shook it. Inside, dark, thick, viscous liquid coated the glass.

  Now he could see four marker lines on the vial. Five measures.

  For this, a man had lost his life?

  Power and life…life as it was, the old man had called it.

  Grave danger…

  That, it had been. As good as a vial of death.

  He started to rewrap it but then noticed several faded markings on the vellum. Holding the vial between the fingers of one hand, he stretched the ancient leather open. On one side was a list of what looked to be names—names with dates, each of them struck through. The other was covered with line after line of letters that spelled out nothing he could decipher except for a single, plainly written paragraph wedged into the margin at the top, as though added at a later date. He tilted the vellum toward the dusky light and made out the words:

  The Order of Keepers has sworn to guard

  These contents for the Day of Rebirth

  Beware, any who drink—

  Blood destroys or grants the power to live

  He read it again. And then once more. But it made no more sense to him the third time than it had the first. The Order of Keepers? The only order he knew was the Order itself. And a Day of Rebirth happened every forty years at the new Sovereign’s inauguration, as it would in five days.

  He had never heard his father speak of anything like this. Had never seen anything like it in his father’s possession. Surely the man would have said something? But Rom had been a boy when his father died.

  Rom knew only one thing: If what the old man said was true, his father had died for this vial and this message. And if what the message said was true, his father had been a keeper, presumably of this very vial.

  Now it was in his possession, and he was as good as dead himself. Running from authority was a capital offense.

  His mother. His mother would know what to do and if there was truth to anything the old man had said.

  Rom wrapped the vial in the vellum, set the bundle back into the box, and pushed it back into the muslin casing. And then a horrible thought seized him.

  He’d left his bag behind and with it, his wallet and identification. The guard would know who he was soon enough. They would come for him at home. And his mother was home.

  His pulse lurched into a new, frenetic pace. He had to talk to her before the guard got there, if only to learn the truth.

  He snatched up the box and hurried to the opening in the window. Silence. He crawled outside and glanced down the darkening street.

  No one.

  Rom tucked the box under his arm, lowered his head, and ran for home.

  Chapter Three

  The Citadel at the heart of Byzantium contained more power behind its thirty-foot-high walls than in all the world’s continents put together. Within her three square miles lay the marble and limestone apartments of the Sovereign, the supreme court, the senate, and the world’s highest administrative offices.

  The secrets of Chaos roamed her ancient tunnels and haunted her archives. The whispers of a passion-filled age flitted through her crypts. The Citadel might be the compass by which the world navigated, but it was to those who dwelled within it foremost a house of secrets.

  Saric, son of Vorrin, paced inside a small chamber beneath the center of the great walled capitol. Few of those buzzing about their business above would ever guess the extent of the sprawling subterranean maze beneath them. And few knew these underground chambers as intimately as Saric did. Especially this chamber tucked two floors beneath the assembly hall of the senate.

  Here, Megas had drawn together the council that canonized the Book of Orders. Here, he had given the command to destroy all works of Chaos: the mechanized weapons of war, the networks, the technology, the religion, the art, all the reminders of a time when unchained passion ruled—and ruined—the hearts of man.

  Here, Sirin, the founder of the Order before Megas, had been assassinated.

  Feyn, Saric’s half sister, called the room morbid. Until recently, Saric had agreed with her.
Seven days recently, to be exact. Now he found the chamber filled with strange energy and with the specters of a history he had only begun to appreciate.

  The room hosted a variety of items in similar states of disuse or decay, each of them an illicit survivor of Megas’s decree: ancient books, some of them frivolously written for nothing but entertainment and the heightening of emotion, their crumbling pages barely legible; a pewter goblet from a time when basilicas housed worshippers of a different god; a collection of curved knives, one of them with a jewel-crusted sheath from the ancient region of India; several swords and a long spear, the head of which had deteriorated to a metal nub; and an automatic weapon that had long ago ceased to function properly. Saric had never learned its origins.

  The hexagonal chamber itself had once been nearly destroyed by fire. Ever since, the blackened stone walls had a propensity for retaining moisture. Anything hung on them tended to molder, including the chamber’s focal point: a tapestry of Saric’s father, the Sovereign Vorrin, defaced for a decade now by the lichen living upon its threads.

  Saric ran a ringed hand over his hair and down to his nape, smoothed the V-shaped patch of hair beneath his lower lip. Like the chamber walls, he was sweating.

  “You will tell me again what is happening to me,” he said, very quietly.

  The alchemist standing near the center of the chamber was not a young man. Corban was one of the High Peers of Alchemy, those advanced members of the alchemists’ secretive inner sect.

  “I have already explained, my lord.”

  “Fragments!” Saric said, turning on him. The word ricocheted off the stone. He lowered his voice. “I am not one of your mice to collect pellets when you drop a few in my direction. I want to know everything that is happening to me. Now.” A tremor ran through his bones.

  So much had happened in seven days. In the space of so many scant hours, a new world had lifted the hem of her skirts before him. A world of seething pleasures and sweaty rage.

  Rage in particular was its own form of pleasure, he had learned, one of a few truly pleasurable releases for the new beast that grasped at the world from the cage of his chest.

  Corban inclined his head. “Then I will start at the beginning.”

  When the alchemist tilted his head, his neck looked exceedingly fragile. He was a slight man, though the long robes of his office disguised the fact well.

  “Within a generation of Null Year, our alchemist forefathers began to apply analysis of the human genome to systematically curing the diseases that ail humanity. The cancers, the blindness, the epidemic viruses—”

  “Save me the propaganda.”

  “You ask for answers. You must be patient—”

  “You school me on patience?” Sweat snaked down Saric’s spine. “I don’t have another five hundred years. My sister is preparing her inaugural address at this moment. I have days. Which means you have minutes.”

  He willed the tightness around his lungs to relax. Right now, he felt that he could kill a boar with his hands. That he could leap, unharmed, from the turret of the Citadel’s watchtower.

  That he might tear out his own eyes.

  He dragged his sleeve across his forehead, half expecting to see it come away red. His entire body hurt. His entire being burned.

  The alchemist folded his hands. “As we learned to correct the inherited mistakes of our DNA, we decoded the emotional ills of humanity as well. You must understand that the limbic system of the brain—a circuit comprising the amygdalae, the hippocampus, and the hypothalamus, among others—”

  “Too much!”

  Corban blinked. “When we identified the coding of these emotions, we also discovered a way to eliminate them, all but that one required for our survival—”

  “Fear. Yes. Yes, I know all about the evils of emotion as preached by Sirin. Tell me what has happened to me.”

  “As you say, Sirin preached against the volatility of emotion and denounced the passions. To that end, Megas offered a solution: a pathogen with the genetic code to alter the DNA of any host. Airborne, highly contagious. They called it Legion.”

  Legion. The name hung in the room.

  “Sirin wanted nothing to do with Legion,” Corban said. “Even though his philosophies were already failing, he would not embrace the solution. And so he was removed—not by emotion-crazed zealots, as history teaches, but by Megas.”

  Saric drew a slow breath. “You are telling me Sirin was assassinated by Megas himself.” The whole world believed that Sirin had been assassinated by radicals. It was the inciting event of the world’s new Order.

  “Yes. And those few who know it guard this secret with their lives.”

  Saric looked around the chamber with new eyes. “So. In that moment the Order gained both its martyr and its proof against every zeal Sirin condemned.”

  “Indeed. And Megas had the means to ensure the world’s eternal loyalty.”

  “So it’s true, after all, that Sirin was killed by zealots. Just not the ones we thought.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “This pathogen, this Legion that stripped humanity of all but fear—you’re saying it worked.”

  “The virus did its work within the space of a few years.”

  “And so the nonemotional state of the world is not the selective preference of evolution as we have all been taught, but an act of oppression.”

  Corban hesitated. “I would call it an act of liberation.”

  Saric drew a slow breath. The knowing filled him with strange satisfaction. It also unsettled. He moved to the console and lifted the jewel-crusted knife, thoughtfully dragging his thumb over the twisted prongs of the settings. “You’re saying everyone—including me—is infected with a virus.”

  “No. It’s no longer a viral infection. Nearly half our genetic code is derived from viruses. Think of it…as a new volume added to the library of our genetic code.”

  “So in the face of all our talk of living as evolved humans, you’re saying we��ve selectively devolved?”

  The alchemist pursed his lips. “I would say we have customized our emotional makeup in the same way that we selected the translucence of the skin that you Brahmin seem to favor, the paleness of your eyes that you consider beautiful.”

  “By simply turning off the switches to those emotions that no longer serve us.”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes.”

  Whatever this virus had done to humanity, the alchemists had found a way to undo it in him. The chaos of emotions had come roiling back into veins and neurons too tepid to house their fire, and Saric wasn’t sure if he wanted to kill the alchemists or thank them for it.

  Emotion. So long forgotten, even the words for emotions had become nothing but a wisp, a feckless currency without backing. Hope. Envy. Disgust. Love.

  Love. The archaic emotion in the Age of Chaos was now simply understood as a duty based on honor and respect, stripped of emotion. But what had it felt like? He tossed the jeweled knife atop the console.

  “So that’s it. The world has been castrated.”

  “Despite our vast knowledge, emotion retained her mysteries. The most complex workings of Legion were not completely understood by us.”

  Saric glanced at him.

  “The alchemists continued to study emotion’s underpinnings. Through the process, we learned to restore some of the emotions we once turned off with Legion.”

  “The serum.”

  “Yes, the atraviridae. We call it Chaos, for obvious reasons.”

  “The dark virus,” Saric said softly.

  Corban continued. “And so I came to you seven days ago and the rest you know. You are looking on the world as a new creature. I say new because although we have reanimated the emotion centers of your brain, it is not exactly the same as it would be had you been born that way. It is, I like to think, an improvement. Pravus chose well.”

  Pravus the Elder, foremost among the Peers. He, too, had taken the serum quite a while before order
ing Corban to administer it to Saric.

  “You are his right-hand man,” Saric said. “I wonder why he didn’t choose you for this…honor.”

  Corban’s gaze slowly lifted. It was flat but guileless.

  Saric said, barely above a whisper, “You would have done it, wouldn’t you?”

  Corban was silent.

  “But you don’t have the royal blood that Pravus needs. Ah. Pity.”

  But Corban could not comprehend pity. Even for himself.

  Saric felt a sudden stab of something like loneliness. He wondered where Feyn was, if she had finished writing her inaugural address, and in what posture she sat now, at this moment. He wondered what she had chosen to wear today and what supper her breath smelled of and the directional cant of those ice-cloud eyes.

  Corban must have seen the tremble in Saric’s hands or the sweat on his brow, because he pressed with a question of his own.

  “You are confused about what you’re feeling?”

  Saric stepped away and took a deep breath. “I have…strange sensations that I don’t know how to describe. I can barely contain them. The effort of it is like pain. I crave things I never wanted to possess. The women—”

  The man whispered. “Desire, my lord. Lust.”

  Saric gave a slow nod. “I crave to take things from others. I think of killing someone just to push the life out of their lungs with my hands, especially if they would stop me.”

  “Anger. Perhaps jealousy.”

  Anger. Jealousy. They might as well have been the names of colors to the blind.

  “Anything else?” the alchemist asked.

  “I want things. The robe of my father, which is fine velvet embroidered with gold. But more, I want the office that goes with that robe. I am jealous for it.” There, he had said it, given voice to the two-headed asp that struck even now with great pleasure and fury at his insides.

  “Ambition, my lord. And clearly, that is the whole point. Pravus would return power to the house of alchemy through you, who is half alchemist by blood.”