The sensations leftover from the stream were like the shameful afterglow of sexual union.
I felt myself opening to others in the stream, whether these were vampyre or mortal—it didn’t matter. My taking of blood allowed me to stream into humans. Just the nearness of another vampyre brought us into each other’s streams, the invisible connection of our tribe, one to the other. A touch between vampyres was filled with sensations that surpassed all sensual delight and warmed the blood in our bodies while barriers broke down.
All love was taken and devoured and brought forth again within the stream itself. I could smell the blood of the fresh kill within Ewen, my laughing youth in my arms, and we wrapped ourselves together in the grave and let morning take us into oblivion.
I would write more here about Ewen’s first night, but even then my mind drifted back to the vision of this Priest of Blood.
Time was short. When I watched Kiya in the night’s hunt, I sensed her fears of the Extinguishing. I felt it as if it were the brush of a raven’s wings against my shoulder.
But what pushed me further toward seeking out Alkemara and its secrets were humans themselves.
6
Mortal raiding parties had been coming to our home city for more than a hundred years. Although the land had been sown with salt, and the wells poisoned, and the legends of the blood-drinking corpses, as many called us, of the Devils, as the religious named us, were always among the ignorant people of the villages and cities even several hundreds of miles away, still humankind wanted to capture this fortress. I had seen the treasury when I had been mortal, though I could not visit again once I became vampyre, for the silver of it was a great danger.
In the stream itself, when I drank of a mortal, I had begun to sense something else, as well. Something that had begun to infect those of the area. I could not know then precisely what this new plague within mortals might be, but some strange drive had led them to seek us out. I suppose there was vengeance as well, although I did not then have the conscience for this (for in vampyrism, conscience is for your own kind, not for the vessels from which you drink). But Yarilo had taken a thickly armored knight from a distant camp and brought him back to us half-dead.
“What do you know?” Kiya asked.
“He was the leader. Their commander. They are coming to burn us,” Yarilo said. Lifting the man’s head to his face, he said, “Tell her. Tell her what you’ve told me.”
Still, the man wouldn’t speak.
“I will enter his stream,” she said and bent over his body, taking his forearm to her mouth. She parted her lips, showing her gleaming teeth. She pressed her incisors down into his wrist. A burst of blood, like the juice of a pomegranate, met her lips and face. He gasped and opened his mouth. A groan of pleasure came from between his lips. Kiya kept watch on his face, modulating her drinking of him as his groans grew, then subsided, until they were moans and whimpers as if she were taking his seed from him. Finally, she emptied him as he cried out in a terrible howl that echoed through our tomb.
She dropped his arm to the earth. She came to me, her mouth still full of his blood, and leaned forward to press her mouth to mine in a kiss. His blood rushed into my mouth then back to hers, and in his stream and her stream I saw what the man had known.
I saw the others who were coming to destroy us, with crosses and fire and sword. In this stream-vision, I saw those shadows that whispered, spiraling in clouds of dust around the coming army.
Afterward, she said, “Whether you are the One or not, it doesn’t matter. You have the power of the Sacred Kiss. You stole the vision from Pythia’s stream. You are called Falconer, and will be the great bird that will devour the snake and bring us our deliverer—the dragon. The snake is Nahhash, the name of the staff you witnessed and knew by name. And it is a desolate wasteland of serpents. Our tribe does not need to extinguish beneath the weapons of mortals. Those shadows of darkness are coming with the men. They know you are here. You are in danger. We cannot waste a moment more. We must follow your vision. Let us go to the Gates of Nahhash.”
7
Before we left, Kiya and I went to bid farewell to Balaam. We knelt beside his body and touched his throat, feeling the vibrations in the stream of his immortal being. His bones had fallen from gristle, and his skin was by then nearly insubstantial.
Within moments, I felt a crackle of sparks at my hand where I touched him. I heard a strange voice travel the stream from my fingers to my arm and finally into my mind, where I understood the language.
You. You are he, the man said within me.
It was enough for me to understand.
Kiya looked at me, her face lighting up as if she had heard the words as well.
I felt a surge of power within me.
“I will be what you need of me,” I told her, and it felt like a sacred vow.
8
Not all of the vampyres made the journey.
Truthfully, I did not want any of them, for though they were my kind, and though I felt them in the stream, I feared that the coming journey would be arduous, and I preferred to go alone.
Still, Kiya told me she had to go, and would show me the Gates of Nahhash themselves. Ewen, who I knew loved me as no one since Alienora had cared for me, likewise demanded my companionship for the journey. “I am your sworn servant,” he said. “You are my sun now. My light. I will never leave your side.”
Of the males, Yarilo and Vali came. Yset was the only other female to come. But the others did not share this vision or hope. They accepted their lot as blood-drinkers who could move as swiftly as lions, with strength greater than any one man, but did not hope for more and did not think about the Extinguishing to come.
I may have painted a picture of our tribe being of one mind, for the stream gave that illusion. But the currents that ran in the stream often revealed a certain mutinous regard for Kiya’s leadership, or suspicion of my designation as the Maz-Sherah, which several had given up believing in decades before. And yet, we were a pack, and felt the stream between us grow. It is what I believe allows vampyres to survive at all—for if we did not form a tribe among our kind, the mortal world could easily wipe each of us from the Earth, one by one.
The six of us set off at the setting of the sun. We stopped at an encamped caravan along the mountain pass beyond our home and took provisions. First, we drank our fill of many of the boys who tended the horses and camels. Then we took two men who seemed to be merchants of some kind—Turks, Kiya insisted, from the north—and bound them together. Vali carried them like slain deer on his back, and growled like a wolf if they began to struggle. We stuffed their mouths with rags to silence their cries. When we slept—finding temporary shelter within caves—we kept the men tied to and between us so that if they attempted escape, one of us would awaken and stop them. We rationed their blood, drinking as little as possible each night. Additionally, we had to find food for them so that they might recover each day and create more blood for us.
This gave me the idea of how my tribe would need to live. We did not have to kill everyone that we drank from—we could keep them as vessels, then have blood to drink each night.
Kiya laughed at me when I suggested this—she had just lapped at an open wound on one of the men’s forearms. Her mouth was smeared with his juice, and she told me that the thrill of the hunt would be gone if we did that.
“It would not be sporting,” she said, “and most of what I enjoy about drinking is the hunt for it.”
“You are like a cat,” I told her. “Playing with the mouse before taking its life.”
“It is a game where both cat and mouse play a part, not just one or the other. Victim and victor are two sides of one game. Without either, where is the pleasure?” she said, then lifted the forearm for me to sip.
* * *
Before dawn, when we had a moment alone before our cavernous darkness would take us to sleep, she whispered, “He is devoted to you.”
I glanced over at Ewen, who alrea
dy lay down near some rocks, making ready my own bed in the ground. “We shared a homeland and a war.”
“It is good to have memory,” she said.
Ewen smelled of a fresh kill and of poppies. I cradled his head under my arm. Kiya lay against my back, her face pressed into my neck. She was in my stream now, and I smelled her scent, mingled with my own, mingled with Ewen’s. We were like a wolf pack, I suppose, held together by the thought that any one of us needed to feel the stream of the other to feel secure and safe in our tribe.
I closed my eyes, and visions of Alienora came to me, fast and constant, and it was as if I watched her from beneath a dark pool of water. She stood there looking down at her own reflection, not seeing me. I cried out in the beginnings of this dream to her, called for her to touch the water with her hand so that I might reach up and grasp her and draw her into the darkness with me.
The sleep came with the birth of light at the shadowy entrance to our day’s newfound cave.
9
I awoke, screaming, in the night.
Kiya knelt beside me, pressing her hands to my forehead as if reading my thoughts. The other vampyres were gathered around me.
“I saw...” I began to say, and then tried to put in words the horror from my dream. There were shadows against shadows, writhing toward me, and among them, a blackness beyond any absence of light—a form of a creature, snarling, but shining in the darkness as a beacon from Hell.
“Medhya,” Kiya said. “You have seen her.”
“The dark mother,” Yarilo whispered.
“She speaks to you in dreams,” Kiya said.
I felt a madness like no other overtake me. “We must not continue this journey,” I gasped. “What I saw, what I know...”
“A dream,” Kiya said.
“A warning,” Vali grumbled.
“I felt it not like a dream,” I said, shaking my head. “I felt as if she held me, and these shadows, like pools of water about my ankles, like shackles. Making me look upon her.”
“She is the darkness itself,” Kiya whispered.
“Eyes like burning embers within the dark,” I said. “Her hair moved as if a thousand snakes writhed along her scalp. And yet she had no form beyond shadow.”
“She lives in dreams,” Kiya said. “Balaam told me that some saw her, but none remembered.”
“We hear her,” Yset told me. “Sometimes, like distant thunder, we hear her, and know she seeks our destruction.”
“We must turn back,” I said. “She is here. Somewhere. With us. Hunting us.”
“No,” Kiya said, bringing her hand to my heart. Her stream was warm against me. “She fears you.”
“We will all be extinguished at the Gates of Nahhash,” I said, feeling as if it were true. “That is what she showed me.” I could not tell them all, the visions of our tribe, skin ripped from the bodies, blood flowing, bones twisted and turned outward, while life, unending immortality, continued even in that suffering.
“She would not come to you in dreams if she did not believe you were the Maz-Sherah,” Kiya said. “Her only power is in dreams. If she were able to destroy us now, we would not even be on this journey.”
But I was uneasy, for the dream of Medhya had seemed too real. Seeing Ewen flayed, his eyes torn as if pecked by birds, with shadows sucking at the marrow of his bones—the vision did not leave me as we proceeded onward.
Yet something of the dream gave me hope, for Kiya believed that the dream itself was a sign that my fate was there, with this tribe, and my destiny was surely within the place called Alkemara.
10
We traveled nearly a week, running swiftly through the night, grabbing mortals as we found them, drinking greedily. We stole food from new kills and gave it to our captives, who had become addicted to our nightly feedings.
The pleasure of having a vampyre feed is rarely spoken of among mortals, but it is a delight to their senses. It awakens the life instinct for them, and this, in some way, makes them feel a pleasant sense of well-being and purpose.
When one of the captive vessels looked at me after I had drunk from a new cut made along his shoulder, I could tell that he saw me as some kind of god who bestowed upon him a feeling of elation and meaning. Though we continued to keep them bound and gagged, the captives had begun to look forward to the nightly feedings and seemed angered if we found other throats to slash. Keeping them alive was easier than I’d expected, for though we might tear at throats and wrists, our saliva has a healing balm within it that is like a leech pressed to a wound. The wounds heal rapidly, and our pleasure at puncturing the old wound to taste blood was matched only by the heady drunkenness of the mortal vessel that gives him or herself to our ministrations. Kiya was right—we were the cats, they were the mice, but it was a game that required both victim and victor, predator and prey. I gained on this journey an enormous respect for our prey, for these two men who began to see us as their messiahs, who only asked a bit of blood in the night in return for the thrill within their blood and the awakening of some lost connection to the divine.
We had to elude camps of men, also. Soldiers, knights, armies—we saw them along the plains. I wondered how many of my old compatriots were there, preparing for battle, as we watched them from a bluff or the mouth of a cave. We were no match for groups of men, particularly ones with weapons and armor. The legends of our kind were exaggerated, surely, for although we could take a family down fairly quickly, if there were several people in a camp who stuck close together, it was not a certainty that we could take on all of them and expect to see another sunset.
Finally, nearly a new moon into our journey, Kiya raced up the side of a boulder and looked to the east. “There!” she cried out. “There! The Gates of Nahhash! If the city of your visions exists, it will be between those great cliffs, Falconer!”
11
The Gates of Nahhash were two sheer cliffs rising up like giant castles on either side of a narrow path. “It grows narrower still as it continues,” Yarilo said. “Many times my father’s army ventured here. There were legends of gold and ivory deep within its caves.”
“Even then, Alkemara was known,” Vali said, “though none knew it by name.”
“There are places where the rock traps mortals,” Yarilo said, pointing to the cliff’s edge many leagues above us. “They say the old gods sit up and push boulders over to murder all who seek entrance through the gates.”
“Is that where we go?” I asked Kiya.
“There is no ‘where’ in that place,” Yarilo said. “The far side of this road leads to a terrible desert many days’ journey.”
“If this is where Alkemara exists,” Kiya said, looking at the sheer rock wall of the cliff, “it is beneath this Earth, not beyond it.”
“If this is sacred to the Nahhash”—Yset ran forward to the base of the mountain—“then it is in the nests of serpents here, and if we follow their pathways, we will find the kingdom.”
12
“It is a snake’s nest,” Yarilo said, reaching into one of the many crevices along the ridge of the hill. When he drew his arm out, strings of small, thin asps had unhinged their jaws, biting their fangs deep into the flesh of his forearm. He shook them off—all were dead. The venom of vampyric blood was greater than that of any snake’s milk. Yarilo grinned, his sharp teeth gleaming in the dark light. “It’s narrow. Too narrow.”
“We can dig,” Kiya said. “It’s down there. Below us.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Do you feel the stream?”
I closed my eyes and flared my nostrils, trying to get a feel for vibrations of life. I sensed the others with me, and even the wriggling and coiling of snakes within the ground and among the rifts of the caves. But no other stream came to me.
I was about to open my eyes when I felt it. A gentle tugging. As of a heaviness—a pull to the Earth. It was unlike the stream around us. It drew me to squat down and press my hands against the dirt. I opened my eyes, looki
ng up at the others. “It’s more than the stream. It sucks at the Earth. It’s an emptiness.”
“Beneath here?” Ewen asked.
Yarilo got down on his belly and placed his ear to the ground. “I feel nothing. No underground kingdom. No life.”
“Not life,” I said. I glanced up at Kiya. “You feel it.”
She nodded. “It’s slight. But it’s like the sucking mud of a swamp. It wants us to find it.”
Yarilo glanced warily between us, his brow furrowing. “We can’t dig through the snake pit to get there.”
I looked across to the Gates of Nahhash—the great, tall, sheer cliffs on either side of us. Pockmarks in the mountain wall—snake holes and hairline entrances to caverns all along it. “Somewhere here, there must be entry.”
I glanced back at our captives—the two Turks, bound together. Our wineskins for the voyage. “Where the snakes are large and plentiful, there we will find the doorway to the kingdom. Bring me drink.” Ewen went and grabbed the men, dragging them to me. I sipped from the neck of one while Yarilo took a taste from the wrist of the other. Replenished, I withdrew from the throat and felt the strength return. The pull of the Earth had taken something from me.
Whatever Alkemara was, wherever it was, it was a vacuum that would steal our strength and what energy we had. We had already begun to recognize this. It filled me with a nameless dread, for we would need power to awaken the sleeping priest if we found him.
“Drink your fill now,” I said to the others who stood watching. “Drain them. You’ll need strength.”
“Shouldn’t we take them with us?” Vali asked. “What if we are trapped there? Shouldn’t we have them?”
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