by Ted Dekker
“Because I am your son. And you would do it as a gift to me. You have had forty years. Feyn will have forty. Let me have five days. A pittance! Days to taste what my father has shouldered and what my sister will as well, so that I will know the true extent of her burden and her privilege. And so much greater will my loyalty be.”
“But I…” The old man was too shocked to respond. Too weak to understand.
“The law is clear,” Saric continued. “If any Sovereign should step down, his eldest child will finish the term. And I should tell you, Father, that I am concerned by the frailness of your hand, and by the thinness of your skin.” He squeezed the old man’s hand even tighter, idly wondering if at any moment he might feel one of the bones within it pop.
“I see it, you grow feeble. No one else sees it. They don’t want to. They see what they’ve been told to see: their Sovereign. But I, I see truly.”
Saric finally let go. The old man staggered backward.
“What you ask is impossible! Utterly outside the Order. Outside the book.”
“Damnation to the book!” Saric exploded.
Vorrin stared at him.
“What I’m saying, Father,” Saric said, more levelly, “is that it’s my duty to report the feebleness in you. That I can smell the decay in your cells. Of your own volition, you must step down. The Honor Code demands you turn yourself—”
A gust passed through the chamber, seeming to pull the air from the balcony where they stood. Inside, the heavy doors had opened.
They turned as one, father and son. And Saric saw then that the newcomer entering the room had drawn the very wind to herself. She had this effect, galvanizing the air so that all things must go to her like a magnet.
His sister, soon to be Sovereign.
Feyn.
She walked to the center of the room. The dark hair falling down her back curled in the breeze of the open balcony as though it were a living thing. Her long hands were folded before her, pale against the deep blue of her robe. Her pale eyes, so very like ice, scanned the room, lighting at last on the balcony’s open doors, her father…
And him.
Although she went to her knee, there was no mistaking it: She commanded the room.
Feyn dipped her head. “Father.”
Saric did not remember stepping inside.
“Ah, my daughter.” Vorrin went to her and laid a hand against her cheek. Feyn took it, seeming not to notice his weakness. She turned it and kissed his palm.
What Saric wouldn’t do to have that show of esteem from her. No, to give it to her. His father had it right: The world would call itself blessed to bow before such a creature. Did she have any idea the raw power she wielded? The whole Citadel would be a shrine to her.
Saric drew in a ragged breath, lost to jealousy, yet feeling wholly unworthy at once. His new self felt nonplussed, undone in her presence.
Especially when she turned from her father to him.
“Feyn,” he said, his voice too unsteady for his own liking.
She crossed to him. “Brother.” She kissed him.
He closed his eyes and endured it before saying, “If you’ll excuse me, I have some business I must attend to.”
He backed three steps from the dispassionate eyes of his sister before he turned, pushed open the heavy bronze door, and strode quickly out. He stormed from the grand foyer to his personal chambers, heavy with desire, barely able to think straight. The poison slid through his veins like a snake, straining to be fed or be set free.
Breathing hard, outraged by his weakness in the face of his own sister, he crashed into his dining room, lit only by two candelabras, each with half a dozen candles. He had taken only two steps toward his bedchamber when he saw a form on the floor to his right.
Portia. She stared up at the ceiling, panting, eyes bloodshot and wide.
She’d managed to escape the bed restraints he’d used after injecting her with the serum not an hour earlier.
The servants were all gone. No one to hear her cries or see her pain.
Saric walked past the table and looked down at his tortured wife. Her back arched, her breath came in the feral bursts of an animal. She had never looked so beautiful to him, ever.
He lowered himself to one knee, then leaned over and kissed her mouth, tasting the blood where she had bitten her own tongue.
Her turning, if she survived it, would take some time. Several hours at least. Perhaps all night.
Far too long for him to sit idly by.
Chapter Seven
For several horrifying minutes Avra tried to shake and prod Rom back to consciousness. He had gone still as one dead, but he was still breathing. As long as he did, she could keep herself together.
But he could not die. He must not die. For years now she had dreaded the void that would swallow her when Rom finally married Lydia, to whom he had been promised years ago. But that fear paled beside the prospect of seeing Rom die now.
If he did, the probability of her own death would become a stark and unbearable reality. She was no match for the Citadel Guard that were probably surrounding the basilica even now. She had nowhere to go. And while Rom had been diligent to the Order all his life—until just recently, at least—the very fact that she breathed marked her disobedience and coming condemnation. Though she would never be ready to submit to that fate, she was definitely not ready now.
“Rom!” She shook him again.
He had convulsed before blacking out, but now he lay limp and she wasn’t sure which was worse, the convulsions or this terrible stillness. His mouth was open and his breathing was fast and ragged, as though he was captive to a nightmare.
But the true nightmare was hers. This morning, her greatest concern had been completing the massive volume of laundry at her father’s business. Tonight she faced Hades.
In the face of such horror, she redoubled her efforts. Jaw fixed with fear, she slapped his cheek.
“Don’t you leave me, Rom!” She shook him by the shoulders again, not caring that his head banged on the floor. She had to wake him so that he could throw this poison up and out of his stomach.
“Rom, wake up!”
But no effort had the slightest effect on him. He was beyond her help. And that meant she was beyond his.
Avra got up and began to pace, nibbling the corner of her index finger nail. Trying to think.
She could leave him here and go back home.
No, the guard might already be there, waiting for her return.
She could try to find a better hiding place for them both, away from anyplace associated with either of them, on the outskirts of town, perhaps, or in one of the city drains. But that was an absurd thought. How was she supposed to lug his weight out of this place? And what were they supposed to live on, rats?
Water. She should find some water and pour it on him. Maybe if it was cold enough…But if he wasn’t waking at her slapping and shaking him, what good would water do?
The minutes ran into an hour, and Rom still did not budge.
Exhaustion edged into her consciousness, and she slumped to her seat in the corner, but she had no inclination to sleep. She had to keep an ear out for approaching guardsmen. Then again, if the guard did find them in this storeroom, neither she nor Rom would stand a chance of survival. The guard had knives, Rom had said. They’d cut Anna’s throat.
And if they had done that to Anna, what might they do to her? She imagined them rushing in, finding her helpless, tearing off her tunic and exposing her scars. Falling on her with their knives. Cutting her. Carving out that entire imperfection until she begged them to kill her.
She covered her face with her hands.
And Rom would be unconscious through it all. How she wished she were the one sleeping while he stood guard! He had always somehow played her protector. Yet there he lay, lost to whatever visions played behind his closed eyes.
She dropped her hands, gazed at his prone and helpless body. At least he wasn’t dead!
She had no clue what it did, but it apparently wasn’t killing him.
She glanced at the vial of blood, then at the door. She should go now, out of this hated basilica, out of this room, away from this madness. They would come for him and she might never see him again, but it would be the right thing to do. If they were satisfied in finding the vial with him, maybe it would even save her life.
Perhaps doing the right thing would also atone in some small way for her absence in basilica all these years. For the defect of her scarring. For her very presence among the living.
And what is death? the priests had asked in the liturgy of the last assembly she ever attended. Death is the gateway to eternal fear or the path to Bliss.
But the only order she knew was the rhythm of her life and Rom’s calming role in it. She wasn’t sure she could exist without Rom. Truly, to turn Rom over to the guards was to invite a new kind of death.
The stalemate drained her to the bone.
She let her head fall back against the wall. Her gaze fell on the open box cradling that fearful vial, and the vellum lying next to it.
Chapter Eight
Shadows and voyeuristic specters played among the folds of the bed curtains, peering through the fine Abyssinian linen, untouched by the dawn. A torch flickered on the wall nearby. Its shadows writhed all the way to the corner.
All night, demons had chased her, each of them wearing the face of her husband, following her with the eyes of a killer.
Portia, faithful wife of Saric, lay in their bed feeling acutely ill. She turned onto her side and for a moment thought she might vomit.
Her skin was sticky, the sheets still damp with her sweat. They smelled rank to her.
All around her, the chamber appeared as it did every morning. But something was wrong. Something that sent a shaft of fear shooting down her spine.
She jerked up onto her elbow, shoved the sheet off her bare torso, and looked around the room. Beyond the bed, heavy silks lined the great stone walls. The bedchamber was richly appointed in every way—from the cedar wardrobe against the far wall, to the floor-length velvet curtains and soft silk carpet. It was also filthy with the smoke of the torches, with the smell of fire and the remains of an undercooked dinner brought in from the adjacent dining room sometime during the night.
She could smell the meat and blood, acrid in her nostrils.
There was something else filthy in here, too.
Portia glanced to her left. There, at her side, sprawled Saric, the finely threaded sheets pushed away from the muscled panes of his chest. Fresh nail marks scored his shoulder.
Beyond the bed, a woman, whoever she was, lay on the floor with her back to them. Her skin, once no doubt beautifully smooth, was marred now with bruises, black beneath the otherwise pallid skin of her arms and legs.
Saric and his latest concubine. Saric and his of-late voracious appetites.
And she—she had writhed in violent throes of her own, screaming for wholly different reasons. Her face hurt. Her entire body hurt. Her heart pounded against her chest and her mind felt as though it might be on fire.
She reached up and traced the line of a welt against her face. There was blood under her nails.
She slid from the bed. Neither Saric nor the concubine stirred. She moved across the carpet. Somewhere beyond the heavy velvet curtains—no one had troubled to draw them last night—morning had the audacity to approach the window and peer in at the evidence of a life she no longer recognized.
She paused before the great mirror in the corner and surveyed her body—the bruises, the welts, the scratches. Confusion racked her mind, fogged her memories. She wasn’t sure what Saric had done to her, but she knew this much: He’d given her something virulent and poisonous, and it was consuming her.
She examined the mottled darkness of a bruise along her thigh, then vaguely remembered running into something after leaping from the bed, screaming for help. Saric had laughed at her.
Portia lifted a finger to her chin, following the line of a scratch that would bear the seam of a scab by evening. A new kind of fear more blistering than any sentiment she’d ever felt flushed her face.
She lashed out at the mirror. The glass yielded to her fist with a shattering crash.
From behind her: “Good morning, dear.”
She cried out and spun, startled. Saric slid from the sheets without a glance at the form on the floor. He was lean-hipped and well muscled, built like a bronze statue draped in a loose, black robe. The image of him immediately pulled at her.
Had he ever been so alluring? Strange warmth flooded her belly. Was this, too, the work of the poison?
Blood dripped from her fingers onto the carpet. But the pain from the gashes along her knuckles paled next to the wonder of this new desire that rose up within her.
Saric crossed to her, lifted her wounded hand, and studied it for an instant before bringing her knuckles to his lips.
She tried to jerk her hand away but he would not let it go. He pulled her against him.
“I said, Good morning.” He kissed her mouth long and hard, smearing her lips with blood.
She was nearly out of breath when she managed to pull away. “I want to know what you did to me!”
“You don’t like it?”
“I spent a whole night screaming in pain!”
“That will pass.”
“You will tell me what it is.”
He pushed her away from him. “Don’t be tiresome.”
“Tell me!” she railed, reveling in the sound of her raised voice. The woman on the floor stirred and whimpered.
The sound struck her as deeply offensive. Sickening. Portia strode across the room, grabbed the drugged woman by the hair, and dragged her toward Saric.
“Portia,” Saric said in warning.
She abruptly released the woman’s hair and let her head bang onto the floor. The concubine’s nose was covered with crusted blood, and one of her eyes was blackened. The mere sight of her filled Portia with rage.
“How dare you bring another woman into our room!”
“This is unbecoming.” Saric settled onto one of the sofas. He lifted one of the leftover goblets and took a sip from it.
The crumpled heap of the woman moaned and grasped at Portia’s foot. She kicked the concubine away.
“Tell me what you did to me.”
Saric contemplated the goblet. “You, along with all of humanity, have been subject to a pathogen named Legion, which altered your genetic code. It dulled you to all emotions but fear. I have now remedied that.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Are you deaf? I’ve fixed you. Show some appreciation.”
“Legion? Remedy?” She stormed across the room. “You know what I think? That you’re killing me.”
“At least you feel.” Saric drew a slow, steely breath. “I couldn’t stand another day of watching you waft around like a ghost, though I think I may come to regret that decision.”
“Look at me—I’m dying!”
“You’ll die a whole woman, at least.”
“Where did you get it? Where did it come from?”
“From the alchemists. At Pravus’s bidding.”
She blinked. “Pravus?”
He set down the goblet. “There’s a serum rumored to be even more powerful—a blood remnant from Chaos kept all these centuries by a clandestine group called the Order of Keepers. Soon I will have it, too.”
Her head hurt. It throbbed. Her blood pounded in every part of her body—in her ears, in her temples, in her fingers.
“To what end?”
“To possess power, of course. Can you not think of these things for yourself?”
“Power over what?”
&nb
sp; A smile nudged his lips. “Over everything.”
The same mad desire now coursing through her veins, she realized, had taken her husband’s mind as well.
“Everything? Have you lost your mind? Your sister will be the one ruling the world in a short number of days. You will bow the knee to her.”
In one swift movement he stood and struck Portia with enough force to snap her head to the side and send her staggering.
He was shaking, his eyes glassy and fixed. “She will give me charge of the senate by the time she takes the oath.”
Portia lifted a hand to her cheek. “The senate? And you suppose that will give you the power you need?”
“No. We’ll need an army to do that.”
An army? It took her a moment to dredge the meaning of the word from the murk of history. She shuddered. Courting the very notion was treason and cause for a swift execution. The world hadn’t seen an army for centuries. It was unfathomable.
“How do you propose to raise an army?”
“Put on some clothes.” He plucked up a silk robe and tossed it at her. It wasn’t even hers. “Get control of yourself.”
She slipped her arms through the wide sleeves of the silk. It smelled like sweat, like everything in this rotting chamber did.
“I’ll get control of myself when you remove that filth from here.” She glanced across the room to the bed, where the woman, her blond hair a tangled mess, had crawled.
“What do you care about a concubine?” Saric demanded.
She went to him then and pressed up against him. “Get rid of her.”
He tilted his head. “What do you suggest?”
She slid behind him. “I suggest you slit her throat,” she whispered against his ear, her gaze sliding to the bed. “Feed her to the dogs. To please me.”
He turned slowly, took her chin firmly between his thumb and forefinger, and lifted her face, kissing her deeply.
Suddenly he released her, reached for the steak knife on the table, strode across the room to the bed, and unceremoniously grabbed the woman by the hair.
“Take note,” he said, eyes on his wife. “That I kill whom I wish, when I wish. And that I do it to please myself.” He sliced open the girl’s neck.