Hours before dawn, I was strong enough to stand, and I lifted Ewen into my arms. Like a wolf pack, we raced back across the barren land, to our home, Hedammu, the poisoned citadel that had been uninhabitable for nearly a century by all but those who had become legend in this region—the jackals of the Devil.
5
I laid Ewen down in the ditch that was my grave and went to Kiya who called to me in the stream, which invisible flowed through and held all vampyric beings of the tribe. “I want you to meet the oldest of our tribe,” she said. She led me down to where a large stone circle sealed a low-ceilinged chamber. We drew off the stone and crouched down to enter.
“He was a great king once,” she whispered.
There, on a bed of clay, lay a corpse, its leathery skin torn at the curves of his elbows, while the thinnest skin along his scalp blistered and peeled.
She knelt beside the dead man. When she touched him, his jaw seemed to drop, and his lips curled back slightly. I saw the long fangs of our tribal brother. Kiya glanced up at me. “He was beautiful not long ago. He had long golden hair, and a strong body—like yours.” As she said this, she touched my chest, and her hand went to my throat. “Do you feel his stream?”
I closed my eyes, her fingers lingering at my shoulder. I felt the heat of Kiya’s stream, but nothing more.
Then a gentle, nearly imperceptible feeling, as of some small insect crawling along the back of my hand.
“He cared for me, as I care for you,” she said. “A king of a tribe of men who are no more—slaughtered, as so many men will be. Like you, he had come, an enemy to this land. And as she did with you and I, the Pythoness drank of him and brought her life into him. And as you and I shall one day, he lies in the dust, never again to rise.”
“We are immortal,” I said. “How...” But I could not form the words to ask the question I dreaded.
“While we are young and strong, we are no better than wolves and jackals. When the strength fades, and the years pass, our hell is within this flesh. For us there is no death. It has been denied us at the Threshold. This...” she said, turning again to wipe the drops of red sweat that had accumulated at his tattered brow, “this is our destiny, if we are not destroyed by men. It is the Extinguishing. We live forever, whether or not our minds continue. We grow weak and feeble. To some it comes fast, and they are dust soon. To others, like Balaam, it is slow.”
“Has he lived many lifetimes?”
“Not so many,” she said. “We live longer than men. But we do not live as we are now, forever.”
Her eyes shone as she watched him. She crouched beside him and pressed her hand into his. “Here, hold me,” she said, offering me her free hand. I took it in mine, and immediately experienced a sensation of horror. I felt as if my hand in hers were liquid, and flowed into Balaam as he laid there, barely a breath coming from him. I felt a shivering cold and the feeling of movement as if I’d touched the sloughing skin of a sleeping serpent.
More than anything I’d experienced in immortality, this struck to my heart in a way that no human experience had. Though I had wept for my mother, for my brother, for my grandfather, and for loss of Alienora, when I felt what Kiya passed from this vampyre as she tightened her grip on his hand and on mine, it was not the terror of the Extinguishing of a vampyre’s existence but the sorrow of an enormous diminishing of light. It was as if the stream between the three of us, in weakening, had drawn something from within me that had been dormant in my previous existence. I understood sadness in a way that was not destructive, not self-loathing, not vain, as had been my mortal feeling.
We were one in the stream. His loss, the loss of this creature’s facilities, his power, his memory, all of it was my loss, as well. Kiya’s, too, and though I did not then understand why monsters such as ourselves should be pitied, still, I felt it, a great pity at the loss of this immortal, at the terror he faced, for, without hearing it from Kiya’s lips, I knew. I knew.
The Extinguishing was worse than the pain of a thousand deaths.
It was existing into eternity, locked in a cage of all that would fall away and turn to dust.
“Mortals journey, when their flesh fails them,” she said, softly. “Their skin is their cloak, and when they shed it, their souls travel across the Threshold. We cannot abandon our flesh, once we have resurrected. The flesh and the bone and the blood—the body—is our heaven and our hell.”
I felt his youth and his childhood, his years as a vampyre, both the darkness and the light of his existence, the tearing of the fabric of memory as much as the tearing of muscle.
This is the vampyre’s curse: the atrophy of the body, which comes, eventually, when cut off from the source of the tribe. Cut off as we, in that graveyard city, were cut from the womb of our being.
“He told me of the Maz-Sherah,” Kiya whispered. “When I was young to the night. He told me of vampyres that live thousands of years. Thousands upon thousands. He knew of the legends from others who had turned to dust before my resurrection. I did not believe him, nor did I care. But I have been many years beyond age itself. I have seen others, like Balaam. I have watched them fall from youth and beauty, to this corpselike death-in-life. And then I have watched their bones crumble. Their eyes dry to raisins. Their throats become gnarled and twisted so that they cannot drink, even if blood is poured down their gullets.”
“We are monsters,” I said. “We live as demons, and deserve Hell.” I remembered the winged demon brought from the well of the Great Forest. A vampyre, far from its tribe, in its Extinguishing, at the bottom of a dark well. I remembered the men as they cut off its head and burned the creature. I thought of the dark ash as it rose into the sky, when I had been a boy and not known of this other existence. I wondered if even that creature had continued to exist within the thousands of motes of ash that had spread in the fire that day. “We are monsters,” I said.
“You would not say that if you had lived as long as he,” she said, tightening her grip about my hand. As she did so, I felt how he diminished, moment by moment, even as I knelt before him. “Do you not feel it?” Tears streamed down her face.
The emotions flooded through me as I felt his loneliness—like a sparrow caught in a thorny bush—wings beating against the pain, and a mind racing with fear and the inability to escape—until I was overpowered by it, and I felt my heart open within me. Open in a way it never had as a mortal.
I saw the three of us as one again. As one being, separated only by flesh. I felt a union, and an understanding, and still, fear and torment. Something within me grew—a seed had been planted, just by the simple act of holding Kiya’s hand, of feeling what she felt through the vampyre as he slowly extinguished.
The terror was as nothing.
I felt brotherhood. Absolute brotherhood. A bond, a tie, and I could look at the bones of the vampyre and see my other half, just as surely as I could with Kiya. Not even a half—I could see my whole self within them. The stream had brought me their pain, their fears, their loves, their losses, their monstrosity, their humanity.
I had become a vampyre, more than I had ever been as a man.
I felt a burden, yet one I was willing to shoulder.
Providence had brought me there. Brought me into the realm of the damned.
Brought me into the court of the Devil himself.
And yet, I knew that even there, even among the creatures of darkness and blood, there was light. I did not understand the light, nor did I then believe it was a light of some holy or unholy flame. All I knew then was that it existed, and it wavered in the stream itself. The stream overwhelmed, it brought a mystical sense of purpose and communion to our tribe. I was powerless to resist its pull, and it opened me, opened my conscious mind, opened the deeper caverns of my being so that I began to feel as if I had the perspective of a god, cursed to feel all suffering, to understand all pain, and to be called to it, drawn to it, a mystery of existence itself.
My eyes closed, I was in the stream, and a
vision came to me.
I saw, briefly, a great serpent, in my mind, a great, turning creature, encircling the tree of life itself.
And it was not a thing of evil, nor was it purely good, but it was All.
I opened my eyes, feeling panic and the shiver of recognition all at once.
Kiya held me. She told me that all who were vampyre passed into the Extinguishing after a century or so. “You are the Maz-Sherah,” she whispered against my ear. “I know it. You could not give the Sacred Kiss if you were not. You are the messiah of our tribe. You must be.”
I held her, and felt the erosion of the flesh of the vampyre called Balaam.
* * *
Later, we returned to our resting places. I helped unwrap her turban, her dark braids of hair falling to her shoulders. I lay down beside her in the earth.
Before the sun rose beyond our columned tomb, I asked, “What is this city from my vision?”
“Alkemara is a legend only,” she said. “It was swallowed by the earth, cursed by the gods of every nation for it was the place where the priest ruled.”
“Who is the priest?”
She smiled, an enigmatic curve of her lips. “These are all things that we do not understand. Legends passed from the old vampyres to the younger, before the eldest go into the Extinguishing. The priest is a king of some kind. The Priest of Blood, he is called. Alkemara was a land of beautiful maidens and strong warriors. The Alkemars were the daughters of the priest. The Pythoness was one of his daughters and a priestess of that lost city.”
“You say I am the One,” I whispered, smelling the copper of her hair and the fragrant oil upon her skin.
“Yes, the Anointed One—the Maz-Sherah, in the language of the Kamrs. All we know of this Maz-Sherah is that it will come as a great bird to devour the Serpent and return dominion to our kind.”
“How?”
“No one knows. Perhaps the Pythoness knows, but she won’t tell us. She has the power to change her shape, and to move through the night sky like a column of smoke or a dragon. It is a power that none of us possess. She has abandoned us because of you, I think. When she felt what you had in you. You are the great bird. You are the falcon itself. She must have felt it in your stream. She must want to destroy you, even now. You are in danger, for your presence will surely mean the end of her existence. She is more than a thousand years old. None of us exists so long. The eldest among us does not reach much past one hundred years, and there are times when men hunt us, and kill us easily in our graves. And the Extinguishing...”
“What is it?”
“It is a journey none of us wishes to take,” she said, a sadness in her voice.
“But it is not death? And yet,” I said, remembering Balaam, “it is not life.”
“The Pythoness lives eternally. But we were born from her without the power of the source of our tribe. We live young, powerful, for a time. But the Extinguishing always comes. We become as nothing, for our bodies rot, and yet we cannot lose life. Even as our skins fall, as our bones break and crack, still we exist. And we remain imprisoned even as the dust overtakes our remains. We are...extinguished...but without thought or control or mind. And yet our life, in the dust, continues, as a living death that cannot resurrect.”
“The source is this priest,” I said. “I was told that I was born from a line of priests.”
“We are dying out, all of us. Men grow stronger. I grow weak. Even I cannot outrun some horses, and if dawn is near, we are at our weakest. They hunt us as we hunt them. So we fear the sound of men and the bull roar of the battles that come closer to our home. If you are the One, then you can bring us the power and knowledge that have been lost. That is the meaning of the dream. The Priest of Blood, of our bloodline, sleeps in Alkemara, but it is a necropolis of dread, and none of us dare leave our resting place to go find out if the legend is true.”
“In the stream-vision,” I said, “I knew the priest’s name. It was Merod. He held a staff of great power, and I knew its name. It was encircled with snakes and was called the Nahhashim.”
“Nahhashim,” she said, her eyes dimming. “The gates. The gates.” Even as she spoke, I felt the night’s death coming on, and the birth of morning. I closed my eyes, listening to the last of her words, and remembered those terrible shades that whispered of my destruction. Nahhashim, they whispered, Maz-Sherah, we know you now. Their figures spun before me in dreams, and the day grew long as I slept.
When I awoke, I was alone.
6
Kiya had already left on the night’s hunt.
I sat up, sensing someone nearby. I went to look at my earthen bed, and there lay Ewen. I felt the edge of his cheek, but life-in-death had not yet come to him. I covered him with a cloak and went off to hunt. After the blood-feast, I sat with Yarilo and asked him more about all that I had seen in my visions.
“Prophecies of ancient times that cannot leave us any more than the races of men can forget their ancestors’ time in the caves of the world,” he said. “It is all rat ash.” He laughed when he saw my confusion at this term. “You’ve never seen a rat burn?” he asked. “These legends are all rat ash. They are meaningless. Our kind sleep among the dead and drink from the living and the dead for survival. Men hunt us, for we are their enemy. It is our damnation. There is no more.”
“You believe we are damned?”
“My friend,” he said, a vulpine grimace on his face, “we cannot bear the sunlight. Men may cut off our heads as we sleep in the day and thus end our lives. Or stake our hearts that we might not leave our graves. Or they may bring us out into the rays of the noonday sun to turn us to ashes in the blink of an eye. Even their silver destroys us. We feel powerful, for we hunt them, but they hold the power. We cannot run far from them if they are great in number. I have sat upon the hills, watching our kind run from the sunrise while men on horseback attack from the north. I have watched the Extinguishing of many. There are fewer than twenty of us left, yet, decades ago, there were nearly seventy among our tribe. From those I learned that hundreds existed before me. All have gone to the Extinguishing, but before they did, they were tormented and tortured by the very men who would call us demons.
“When extinguished, the torment does not end. This is why I am happy to drink from their children. To take a baby up and sup before its mother, then take her to my bed for a drink, and feel her terror and the suffering of her thoughts before the last of her blood is drained. I am the demon, and the monster. Though we have no great dominion, nor can we survive well without a deep grave or a hidden tomb, they fear us. We, who take only when the thirst is strong. I have seen a thousand men die at the hands of a thousand others. And yet they do not feed on what they kill—they simply slaughter without purpose.”
“Yet you were once like them.”
“Indeed.” He nodded, his long, thick hair falling along his shoulders so that he looked every inch the barbarian. “I was perhaps the worst of them. I slaughtered my own family in order to take what was rightfully mine. This citadel itself. Yes”—he laughed—“this was my father’s city, taken by him when his army came from distant lands. It became mine when I assassinated him. I was the last king here, and now, I am the servant of its tomb.”
“Why does Kiya think I am this Maz-Sherah?” I asked.
He gave me a look that held much contempt. “She is old. She will enter her last days soon enough. Perhaps I, too, will have great faith in the Maz-Sherah when I face my Extinguishing. Perhaps we all believe in ancient legends when we have nowhere else to find comfort.”
7
After the night’s hunt, I sat with Ewen, as he lay lifeless against me. I remembered our homeland as I combed his dark thick hair with my fingers—my first sight of him in the baron’s house, with his ill-fitting tunic and his ready smile. The days of labor near him, and seeing him as someone in need of my protection. Our growing friendship, as I watched him turn from boy to man on the battlefield. I worried, too, that he would not return from th
e Threshold, but would continue the journey onward. I felt helpless there with his corpse and selfish for not wanting to be left alone with these vampyres. I wanted one of my friends, one of my countrymen. Someone who understood when I glanced at him. Someone who reminded me of all I had loved and lost in my years of life and death.
In the early hours before the sun rose, Kiya came and sat beside me, touching Ewen along his throat and shoulder, as if sensing a return to life. But there was nothing.
“We lose much of that,” she said, her dark eyes flickering with wisdom as she watched me.
“Of what?”
“The love. The caring for mortal life.” She smiled. “How you hold him like he is your brother. I had a child when I first died, and I didn’t want her to be one of our tribe. But I still cared for her, and held her close to me. But soon enough, you forget. Perhaps years pass. It has been so long that I do not understand the passage of time in the way I once did. You begin to see the past as someone else’s dream. I thought at first that I could not be a monster who drank the blood of the innocent. But I soon found that instinct was more powerful than resistance.”
“And your daughter?”
“I had forgotten who she was, and could not recognize her by the time she was sixteen. She had grown lovely, and lived in the desert with her uncles. But when we descended upon them, I took her first, and drank the rich blood that I’d given her at birth. I fought with another over the last cupful of her juice, and it was only when I had the last of it that I saw that child’s face again in the dead girl in my arms. Even now, telling you, it does not offend my conscience to have done this. She had been my daughter, but I sent her to the Threshold intact. Though I tasted her fear, it wasn’t more than an hour or two before she crossed over—and it’s in that other country, from which no one can return without the Sacred Kiss, where she will find joy that could not be had in this place.”
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