“All who hold the Nameless blade will suffer,” she said.
“The Nameless,” I said, looking at the blade. “Asmodh.”
“Asmodh! The Nameless!” they shouted. “Eclipsis! The Staff of the Nahhashim! These are the signs of the Maz-Sherah!” They called out other names—those vampyres lost to history, those battles remembered from their kingdoms, the wives and children, the heroes and the fallen.
Amidst the throng, the tall, gaunt vampyre king called Athanat trudged along, pushing the other vampyres out of his path. When he came to me, he gave me a look of disdain. “There is among the missing, a mask. A sacred golden mask. It holds great power within it. Drawn from many immortals. If he is the anointed, where is the mask?”
“The mask of Datbathani,” I said. “The Lady of Serpents.”
“If you are Maz-Sherah, then you possess it,” he said. “Why do you not have it?”
“It rests upon the face of a vampyre called Pythia,” I said.
“Pythia, daughter of Namtaryn?” Athanat spat on the floor at my feet. “She sent me to my Extinguishing, Maz-Sherah. She is no better than the Myrrydanai. She should not wear the mask.”
Namtaryn came rushing forward, drawing the twin-bladed dagger from her hair. She held this at eye level with Athanat. “Do not speak of my daughter this way, coward, unless you are willing to tell how you stole her from her rest and bound her and laid her out upon a desert that the sun might immolate her at dawn!”
“She did not burn, Light of Namtar,” Athanat snarled as he drew the sword from his side, ready for a fight. I heard the clank and squeal of swords and other weapons being drawn by the others surrounding us.
I reached out, grabbing Namtaryn’s wrist, and drew her blade-wielding hand downward. “What I have brought from the dust, I can return to dust.”
She shot me a feral glance, and I saw where Pythia had gotten her fury. If Pythia was a tiger, her mother was a dragon. She glared at Athanat, and when she returned her attention to me, muttered nearly under her breath, “You are a fool.”
“Sheathe your sword,” I said to Athanat. Then, looking out at the gathering, “All of you. There will be no battles between us, not while Medhya threatens to destroy us all.”
Nekhbet glanced at me as if about to warn me of something, but thought better of it and disappeared into the crowd, her servants trailing her.
Namtaryn set her blade back among the tresses of her hair and reached over to touch my throat. “Are you my daughter’s lover?”
Her fingers created an intense heat as they stroked my neck, then went to my left ear, touching it lightly.
“You have great sorcery in your touch,” I said.
“She has kissed this throat, and whispered in these ears.” She smiled, and combed her fingers through my hair. “She had a fondness for the young. It was she who brought the Sacred Kiss to you? Ah, she must have enjoyed your dying.”
I reached up and grabbed her hand, pulling it away from my scalp. She drew it back from my grasp. “I thought you would be concerned for her.”
“She does not need her mother’s concern,” Namtaryn said. Her eyes narrowed as if she were trying to understand what I meant. “You have been told to distrust me. That liar—Nekhbet—oh, but you must know about the jealousy of women, for I am sure many fought for your attention, pretty one.”
“Nekhbet spoke true,” I said. “I know of your deeds, Namtaryn. I want your solemn oath that you will not betray any here. For with the Nameless, I will slice off that beautiful head of yours and hang it upon the highest mountain that you may watch the eternity of this world in your second Extinguishing.”
Her mood changed quickly, and a flood of radiance burst across her face. It was as if she had shapeshifted from a haughty queen to a young maiden who knew nothing of the world. For an instant, she looked exactly like Pythia. “Believe as you will, Maz-Sherah, but I am so filled with the joy of movement and freedom from my cage that I would do nothing to threaten you or bring your wrath upon me. So I give you my oath, solemn or not, as I did when you asked it of all of us in our tombs. Now, tell me, how is my daughter?”
“Across the sea, traveling with an army of vampyres toward the castle where the Myrrydanai rule.”
“And the mask? Has it yet...has it ...” She could not bring herself to say the words.
“Yes,” I said, wishing I could tell her otherwise. “It has leached the eternal from her.”
She shook her head as if dismissing some minor grief. “She deserves this. She is wickedness. Filthy.” She waved her hands as if sweeping a thought aside. “Those who do wicked deeds deserve their punishment.”
I grabbed her by the throat and felt a growl in my voice as I whispered at her ear. “You are not worth one ounce of her blood, Namtaryn. If it weren’t for your daughter, you would still be in your tomb, rotting through eternity.”
Her warriors—oiled youths of muscle and too much beauty—leapt upon me, but I shook them off too easily. I felt astounded by my strength, but also inspired by it. I let go of their queen and grabbed one of her servants, holding him with his face to her. I took the Nameless from its sheath, and thrust it into his heart, all the while watching her face. I felt a fire go up my arm, and a painful vibration at the grip of the sword. Then it was as if a great gust of wind—from the vampyre’s own flesh—burst outward. His eyes sank into his face, and his jaw slackened. Within mere seconds, the last of him fell in a pile of dust and bone at my feet.
I stared at the sword in my hand. I did not feel cursed by it, but invigorated. Something within the Nameless made me want to use it again. A surge of power shot through me, and I looked at Namtaryn, wondering what it would feel like to thrust it into her throat.
“You cannot be brought back twice!” I said in warning to her, raising the shattered blade close to her face. She flinched as she felt its warmth. “You will honor your daughter Pythia, for she has saved me from the destruction you see before you on the floor. If I hear one word from you—from any of you here—against Pythia, daughter of Merod, daughter of Namtaryn, I will do the same to you without a moment’s hesitation!”
I felt nausea and revulsion from my words and the thoughts that inspired them, and quickly sheathed the shattered blade. It is like the mask. The mask seeks a face. The Nameless seeks the grip of flesh. The sorcery of these things corrupts. They are not to be played with, not to be used lightly, for with each use, they prey upon the mind.
Namtaryn snarled at me and reached down to brush the dust of the extinguished youth from her feet. As she crouched there, she looked up at me as if wounded.
“Do not look at me with false pain,” I said. “For you have done such things to many. You would do them again if you thought you could steal this blade from me and use it against those who would grant you your freedom.”
“You have extinguished one of our tribe,” she said with bitter fury. “If you cannot control the Nameless, do not wield it. It is not meant for demonstrations of your power.”
I turned and walked away from her. Athanat joined me, and whispered at my ear, “Show no mercy to the vampyre queen. She should not have been raised from damnation at all.”
“I did not want to kill the servant,” I said. “I wanted to threaten Namtaryn. I wanted to show her—”
“The Nameless knows your thoughts,” Athanat said. “In the nights of my five hundred years, I tried more than once to take it. I crossed the sewer lake, and stood atop the roof of the temple. But when my hand drew close to the hilt, I began to hunger for it as we thirst for blood. But it was a hunger of one who would destroy others just to hold the Nameless once. Oh, of such great things I might do if I held it. If I wielded it. Of becoming the Maz-Sherah—a king, and a savior. But even touching it, I felt its sting. Many dawns I went to my rest with terrible thoughts of it, as if just wanting it had cursed me.” He reached over and touched my shoulder lightly. “It will be a burden to you. There will be those among us who wish to steal it. It will call t
o you—to do terrible things. But what is within you will also temper it. Fear it, respect it—but know that it is meant for you alone.”
“I do fear it,” I said. “I will use it, when necessary. I will bring Hell itself to Ghorien and all the shadow priests—and to the defenders of Taranis-Hir. And to any mortal or vampyre who betrays the Serpent.”
“As it should be,” he said, then suggested we search for a vessel for renewal. “The shattered sword has exhausted you—it is in your eyes, this weariness.”
After we had drunk from a mortal—and allowed her to scurry off to her lair—he told me of the others, and some of his tales differed from Nekhbet’s recounting, and others supported what she had told me. Both of these rulers had warned me of Namtaryn, but Athanat added, “But she is not as terrible as she seems. For she loved Merod in both mortal life and during her rule. Perhaps I am the only one to understand this, for I also loved Namtaryn in my young nights. Her daughters also, she loved until they turned against her. Her Extinguishing was not at the hands of Ghorien or a usurper of her throne. It was that daughter you know of—Pythia—who betrayed her mother to mortal armies. Pythia set a trap, and her mother was easily caught as she went to her morning’s rest. They bound Namtaryn, and set her out in the blazing sun. Those who witnessed it later wrote on stone tablets that she did not cry out when the fires of the heavens burst across her flesh. Even mortals wept when they heard the news of her passing. I was a mortal general of her army then, not yet vampyre, and it was centuries before I would be king. But I remember her justice—fierce, and swift, yet not unjust. She was a great queen, and did not deserve what her daughter did to her. You must be careful of the Pythoness. She has brought disaster to many. I would extinguish her before any of the others of our tribe—if it were up to me.”
I did not wish to argue against him, for I knew Pythia well enough. My first knowledge of her was that she had bled a child—the boy named Thibaud, whom I had felt close to in the mortal wars. She had deceived me, and had destroyed her father’s kingdom, and cursed her sisters. She had brought Artephius the Medhyic scrolls, and had further heaped destruction on our tribe.
I knew her now as a mortal. I knew her now as the woman within whom my third child grew. I knew her for her tenderness and fears.
Yet I could not completely ignore the centuries of her existence that told a different story.
7
Ophion accompanied me to the throne of Medhya, with dawn but an hour away. In fury, I went to the golden statues and hit them with the staff, cracking them open, the bones of the dead falling in fragments to the marble floor.
I broke apart into a swarm of rats and raced up to the throne itself, re-forming upon it. I sat there, looking out at the fallen statues, at Ophion, who stood at the center of the room. “On this throne, Ophion, Medhya began a destruction that has not yet ended.”
“You are here to end it, my lord,” he said.
“Is it worth stopping her? For you see them—they are not kings and queens. They are as brutal as she. I, too, am like her. Her breath is in me. Her blood, my bloodline.”
“Do not say that, my lord,” Ophion said. “I have seen the works of Medhya, and she does not have the Serpent within her. You possess it. You are no son of mortals, nor are you a son of Medhya. You are the progeny of the Great Serpent, and none other. They fear you in that hall of the dead, and they will follow you in battle. In the stream, you are known to them, and the stream is their guiding star.”
I rapped my hands upon the gold serpent of the throne’s arm. “Why should I risk myself—and my unborn child—for these creatures? They would destroy me if I did not have the awakening power of these objects. If they could wield the Nameless, they would—and do to me what I did to that poor servant.”
Ophion drew his hands together, and would not look at me.
“What is it? Ophion?”
“I cannot say, my lord, out of fear.”
“Fear of me? You have nothing to fear from me. Come forward. Come, now. Tell me what is on your mind?”
He glanced up, but would not move. “It is Medhya, Maz-Sherah. She is here. In some way, she is here. It is not like you to have sent that servant back to damnation. Not like you at all. The only law I know of our tribe is not to send a vampyre to Extinguishing. You are now the law, and yet you have broken it. Here, you sit upon her throne. The Asyrr also have sat upon it. All knew her voice, whether they admit it or not. Her power is seductive, Falconer. It traps many. When I was imprisoned here, the king was Setyr, called the Conqueror, and Medhya influenced him. The Myrrydanai had grown corrupt, but it was Setyr who signed my fate—my imprisonment here. My torments. He was a good king when he first ascended this throne. Like you, who would be a good king. But she whispers in power and the draw of the Asmodh sorcery is strong when it is in your blood to have it. This is why none may wield the Nameless but you. None wish to, for she always exists in the sorcery of our tribe.”
“I will rid myself of the blade,” I said.
“It is the only weapon against her. Will you leave it for someone else to hold? Some thousand years from now? After she has cut you down to your grave, and held you there in chains? No, you must wield it, and the staff, and the Eclipsis, though the grasping of them will destroy you. Medhya and her hounds do not destroy from wounds and fights, but from this—from the want of power. Your appetite for it will grow, as I have seen it grow in mere hours this night. You are now the source of all this, Maz-Sherah. The fires of the city have gone out, for you have this energy within you. You must use it.”
I pushed myself away from the throne and drew him into the corridor beyond it. “I will fight such influence. We must leave when night comes. The waning crescent comes, and within two nights the sky turns dark, and the solstice will have begun. I would leave now, even as the sun rose, but for those who I must lead back. Yet, I have wasted much time.”
“In you, the Serpent lives,” Ophion said. “And all I suffered has been cleansed. The solstice will not come before we return. Your staff, your sword, bring us the power of Myrryd itself.”
“How do you know this?” I asked.
“Because it is before me, in you, my brother,” he said as solemnly as I had ever heard him speak. “No one will destroy us, so long as you lead the tribe. The Asyrr have bowed before you. The Great Serpent is within your blood, yes, my brother, within you—and the door to the Veil as well. I feel now as if you were with me in those years of my captivity, for you were my hope though I did not know your face. You were my sustenance, though I did not taste your blood. Into the deepest prison of the Asmodh I would follow you now. The Asyrr and their warriors, also, would take this plunge if you asked it of them.”
I went to him and clapped him upon the shoulder, and embraced him. When we separated, I said, “Let us go sleep among the tombs and rise at dusk to begin this war.”
* * *
When the sun fell like blood beyond the cliffs of the red city, with the thousands of stars in the darkening sky, I led the kings and queens of Myrryd upward, and brought blessings of the staff to each of them, and to their men and women who would fight, and their servants who would guard.
“Our way is written upon the wind!” I shouted to the host gathered there. “To the cliffs beyond Taranis-Hir we fly—and if we go with the winds, it will be two nights’ journey, I am sure of it. But none must lag behind, nor must you stop to gaze upon the earth for long. We will not drink blood until we are at the Akkadite Cliffs, for we would waste precious time otherwise! Now, with the blessing of the Nahhashim staff—fresh-cut from the bone of the priests who were cursed by the Queen of Wolves and full of the power of their ritual—let us follow the path of stars that point north and to the west!”
To the north we flew, swiftly, and from below, we might have looked like a great flock of giant falcons moving toward the lands of bitter cold, more than three hundred strong, toward the birthplace of the plagues of the Veil.
Beside me, Ophion,
who knew the markings of the stars, for it was an old magick learned in his travels.
I told him our destination, he led us across the heavens.
The stream grew strong and thick that night, and dark angels within it, we soared.
Chapter 13
________________
THE AKKADITE CLIFFS
1
Frozen was the great sea along the straits of Iberia, with leviathans dead along the frosted shore, come up from the deeps of the western sea, unable to survive its chill. The fires of men burned below, and the smoke of many wars rose to greet us. Towns had grown dark beyond the fortress walls of cities, and cities themselves had hundred of guards, and in those hills, the pitch fires smoked to ward off the breath of ice. Famine stretched its fingers to many lands, and the wars between town and fort, between neighbor and kinsman, were signs of this lack.
The plagues brought by the Myrrydanai had done their job too well over the years, and the Disk dream had silenced the cry of human need. Within the stream I felt the fury of the warriors who trailed me, for they knew the power of the Dark Mother and saw her handiwork in this sorcery. Many spoke with their minds, yet I ignored them, for I had no answers for their complaints and their anger. They saw the handiwork of Medhya in the ruins of once-great citadels, and in the strange silence of the night in those places where once fires had been lit for warmth rather than war.
Snowcapped mountains passed beneath us, and we were nearly thrown off course by a storm that raged from every direction with rain like spears of ice. The wind howled like the wolves of the north as our company came to high mountain caverns for rest—though we did not see the coming sun for the tempest that had descended, we felt its heat in our bones.
But I needed no rest, and the sun would not harm me with the serpent skin beneath my flesh. I drew Ophion out to the morning sky and asked him if he knew the constellation to my home. He looked up to the fading stars and told me that there were several that headed north and west, but he would not know these cliffs if passing over them. He pointed out one of them. “See it? The great coiling cluster,” he said. “In my youth, the seers called it the Uriz—the gyre of Ur—for it turns over and over upon itself, like the ancient creature of the mists. There, do you see? Oh, but it is hard to find in this lightening sky. I know this ancient forest you speak of, and its third cluster ends not far from it, my brother.”
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