The Priest of Blood

by Douglas Clegg

  They no longer resembled maidens in the least, but creatures called lampreys, which I have only seen once before in my life, as a boy when my stepfather had brought one home from the sea. The leechlike mouth with its rows upon rows of teeth, and that otherworldly look to them, as if they could not possibly be created from the Earth or Heaven or even Hell itself.

  We all felt it at once: these were not merely daughters of the city of Alkemara.

  They were infused with the spirit of the dark mother herself.

  One of them had already sucked the flesh from his left hand, leaving shattered bone, and another had attached herself to his groin.

  I swam to them and tried to pull one of the miserable beasts from him, but she had him locked in an obscene embrace as if she were not a separate entity at all but part of his own flesh.

  I could not breathe. I rose to the surface and gasped for air. I had traveled several feet from the barge.

  Ewen moved the pike swiftly through the water while Kiya rowed with the enormous oar. Ewen jabbed at the Alkemars as he went, thrusting the pike into them, then drawing it up to jab again. When I reached the barge, Kiya and Ewen drew me, gasping for air, up into it.

  3

  Suddenly, Yarilo’s face came up, breaking the surface—at some distance. He laughed, although his face had been torn to the bone.

  “It is wonderful!” he shouted. “They are beautiful. There are more than you’d think. Oh, they’ve shown me all of it. All of the glory of it. It was a kingdom like no other.”

  Quickly, I grabbed the pike and guided the barge over to where he floated. I felt a faint stream again, among us. The binding of our kind. He had not yet been extinguished. He might survive, I thought, if I could draw him from the water soon enough. As I approached, something bumped the barge. Then another thump against it. We could not move the barge toward him. In fact, we had begun to move away from him, as if on a cushion of air.

  Ewen cried out, pointing to the water by the edge of our craft. The sisters were there, beneath it, drawing the barge away. No matter how I paddled or pushed off, their strength was greater.

  There were not just several Alkemars beneath us, there were hundreds of them.

  Perhaps the feeding on Yarilo had called them up, but suddenly the water bubbled with movement, and we saw these strange serpent-women swimming beneath the water, some drawing us away, others swimming in schools beneath the whiteness, all toward the place where the dark blood of our friend rose to the surface and drifted in a wake behind him.

  “Yarilo!” I cried.

  He looked over at us, not even aware that these monsters existed to keep all from the ancient fallen city. There was a bright pleasure in his eyes despite the tears at his scalp and along his cheek. Two of the reptilian maidens rose up, kissing his face all over. I could not bring myself to watch as one of them leapt above the water, her jaws unhinging like a snake’s, her gray teeth slicing deep into his flesh. They were not like us, after all. They were not blood-drinkers. They ate flesh, and the flesh of the undead or the flesh of the living satisfied their needs.

  To watch one of our tribe die was terrible. But to feel the stream—and the Extinguishing in the stream—was a thousand times worse. We felt the pain ourselves, within us, scraping at us as the Alkemar’s teeth scraped across his skin until there was nothing but bone. Still, we knew his life existed in that bone and flesh and would never again be one being. Never have the essence of Yarilo.

  Their faces were covered with his blood, finally, and the creatures no longer resembled in any way the beautiful maidens we had first seen. Their true forms had returned with their feeding.

  They were soulless monsters with eyes that were empty and red and their jaws elongated.

  These were the accursed of Alkemara, the daughters of the Priest of Blood himself, princesses to a kingdom that was now no more than a buried Necropolis, the female descendants of this subterranean world. Hundreds of sea serpents within this sea.

  Hundreds of them, and none with the vampyre consciousness.

  4

  We three sat together on the barge.

  I held Ewen close to my breast, and Kiya pressed her lips against my throat for comfort. We felt the end of our fellow, and knew that Yset and Vali, at the shore in a distant cavern, also felt the pain and searing of Yarilo’s Extinguishing. The knowledge of the end came—not the mortal end, which meant a movement toward the Threshold and the world beyond. For us, there was no beyond. When we went, we died out, and there was no god or goddess to relight the flame. Our souls would extinguish.

  We felt all this with Yarilo’s passing.

  Kiya began to chant the tribal song she had learned from one of the ancients who had passed when she was young. Although it was in a language of the Chaldeans, it translated as this:

  “When Medhya arose

  And found her skin torn

  Her children wept and gathered their own flesh

  To offer their mother

  So that she might hide her shame,

  And when they took her blood

  Which held the power of eternal life,

  Her children wept and set their hearts

  On the underworld where the blood of the Earth flowed

  That their mother might find sustenance.

  But when they stole her children,

  Medhya wept,

  The Threshold denied them passage.

  She begged the gods for flesh and blood

  To avenge her children and her kingdom,

  She lay at the Threshold, weeping,

  For they could not cross into the land of the dead.

  When she returned from the Threshold,

  She gave her Sacred Kiss and her Curse

  And we are now her children,

  Fallen ones,

  We cannot cross the Threshold again

  Once we have returned from it.

  Blessed is Medhya for cursing us!

  Blessed is Medhya for her death-in-life!

  Blessed is Medhya for our tribe of the Blood!

  Blessed are our brothers and sisters whose light fades

  Into the Extinguishing!

  Medhya, our mother and creator,

  Lemesharra, Datbathani,

  Who drinks from us as we have drunk from her

  When the twilight is upon us.”

  5

  I felt more bound to my tribe now that I heard the words, and I understood why Kiya had remembered them. She had watched many vampyres go to the eternal nothing and knew that her time approached more quickly than she would have liked. The song-chant was a way of reconciling all of us to the fate of our kind.

  At the end of this, the last of Kiya’s voice echoed along the cavernous chamber. Ewen gently laid his hand across Kiya’s throat, feeling the source of her stream. Because he was so young—not yet nineteen—and she was so old—her body was in its twenties, but she herself was passing a century—it was like mother and son, together, in empathy.

  Then, with the Alkemars deep beneath the water, we turned our attentions back to the journey.

  We pressed on, moving through the waters undisturbed. The Alkemars had done their feeding. We had lost one of our own to creatures of greater strength and power than our own kind.

  What more would we face along the far shore?

  6

  Outside, it would be dawn. The rhythm of night and day had stopped for us deep within that mountain, beneath layers of rock and earth. Time had seemed to change altogether. As we floated onward, we kept watch for signs of the Alkemars again. Perhaps they drifted beneath the white water, waiting for a chance to come up again for more.

  Ewen tried to sleep by lying flat on the barge, but found he could not—the motion of the very slight waves kept him from rest. As we rounded one passage, we were met with a strange sight: thrust in the water, and towering above us, statues that were as tall as any man.

  Statues of four bulls stood spaced apart as if they were at the entryway to some
palace. They were made of what seemed to be basalt, and a wedge-shaped writing decorated their bodies. Kiya reached out to touch one of them, and her fingers came away with a fine dust. I noticed on the bulls’ legs and haunches there were small white crabs that looked nearly like spiders, for their legs and claws were long and slender. Their carapace resembled a mask of a human face. On the last of the bulls that we passed, we saw the legs of some rider attached—a child—where the top of the sculpture had been cut off.

  We followed the water through chamber after chamber of cavern and low-ceilinged cave until finally we came upon the end of the waterway. There was no shore, but instead a brown stone stairway rose from the water. It was long and built in terraced rows. We stepped off the craft and went onto the first step above the water.

  A stone procession of men stood along the edges of the steps. These were no doubt slaves of some kind, carved into the rock. They held garlands of flowers and sheaves of grain, and beside each man stood an urn of some kind with figures upon it that must have been language. Serpents rested at their feet, coiling about their ankles.

  It was the stairs of a ziggurat—and the wide tiers gave way to more narrow ones, until we were climbing the steps of some unfinished pyramid. Small lizards scurried about the recesses of the steps—lizards with shiny black skin and eyes that seemed too small for their diamond-shaped heads. My heart began to beat swiftly in my chest—I felt as if we were closer to our goal than I had expected. As long as we had survived the Alkemars, we would be safe.

  As we reached the main landing of the steps, perhaps forty or so steps up, the cavern gave way to a larger space. It was not a pyramid at all, but a vast desert plain beneath a wider, greater canopy of mountain. Surprisingly the sun came through from a narrow gap in the mountaintop high above us. It was like the center of a great cathedral, more gigantic than any mankind could devise. The mountain was completely hollow at this point. The crevice above that admitted the sunlight cut it into a straight line.

  A thin shaft of light formed a perfect wall before us, each end of it touching the rock face.

  We would not be able to pass it until nightfall.

  And yet, beyond it, we could see the blur of the city itself.

  My vision failed me somewhat. I was still recovering strength from the underground waters, and the sunlight, which blinded us, didn’t improve the situation for me. Ewen acted as my eyes as best he could.

  “It is a vast city,” he said. “I have never seen a fortress like it. It shines like gold and has darkness in the form of giant stone figures all around it, at every gate. There are others there. Dead. Bones in a field. Like the brambles of the Great Forest—a Forest of Bones is ahead of us. In them something moves, although I cannot see it clearly.” Beyond that, he could not see more, for his eyes burned from the sunlight. Kiya’s eyes were worse when seeing the sun’s light, no matter how diminished that light might be, because of her age.

  We chose to return to the edge of the steps, well above the water, to sleep until night came. As we lay down on the damp, slick stone, I felt leeches of some kind pushing against the flesh of my calves and along my feet. I glanced down—as soon as they tasted of my blood, they died. Ewen slept in Kiya’s arms and I kept watch for a bit, brushing off the dying leeches from each of them before finally succumbing to the little death of the day.

  7

  I dreamed that day of Pythia herself, who had made me and brought a third being into my soul—the vampyric self. I saw her face in its glory and power as she pressed my mouth to her nipple. As I drew strength from her red milk, she whispered to me that I should not trust the vision, nor the legends, for the source of all power and of the prophecies were not as they seemed. A baby again, held by her, I looked up at her face. She was no longer that vampyress, but was the Queen of Heaven herself who held me, but not in the flesh, but of the statue that had been in the baron’s chapel.

  And then I saw another, behind the Pythoness.

  The dark mother of all.

  Medhya.

  Her burning eyes.

  “You will see your friends tormented until the end of days,” she whispered.

  I awoke to the night.

  The sun had just set beyond the thin line of sky between the cavern opening above us.

  As the darkness deepened, my eyesight improved, and I saw the Necropolis for myself.

  PART 2: ALKEMARA

  Chapter 15

  ________________

  THE NECROPOLIS

  1

  As the moonlight from the chasm above us sent a glow of dark light along the distant citadel, I gasped—and I was not alone in my awe. I heard shocked sounds from Ewen and Kiya as they saw this new underworld.

  Alkemara itself had once truly been a great city, for it towered into the enormity of the cavern, greater than any fortress I’ve ever seen. And yet, even so, it was in ruins, for its great marble columns had fallen, and the statues of its gods, the height of the walls itself, were in enormous broken pieces at its gates. The head of a jackal god, as large as any ship, lay beside its own eagle foot. The stone that had been shaped for these gods was like a dark onyx, only it had the properties of reflecting light from within the stone itself. On the path that my companions and I walked, more rubble had drifted and eroded from the great city.

  The road itself was made of human bone—ribcages piled up to the left and right of us, and human skull fragments crushed into powder beneath our feet.

  Thousands had died there, once, and perhaps hundreds more had come to discover the secrets of the place.

  Between the bone a strange vine grew, and blossoming from the vine, as if it were a flower of midnight, tiny perfect petals that were bluish purple to my sight.

  Even more strangely, as we walked by this vine, I detected that it moved slightly—just a quiver—as any of us neared it or the bones. My curiosity got the better of me, and I crouched down, lifting a vine.

  Even as I did so, one of the blossoms—as small as a beetle—opened up in full bloom. At its center, a dark red spot that grew veins like spider legs out into the inner petals. I could not resist its beauty or charm. I touched the center of the petal to feel the velvet of it. It was moist and of a fleshy texture, and emanated a slight scent of musk.

  Too suddenly, the petals closed around my finger, and I felt a sharp sting. I withdrew my finger quickly. I did not feel a great deal of pain, but it was as if I’d pricked the end of my finger on a tiny thorn. A drop of my blood welled up, and the thinnest layer of my own flesh had come off and remained, a ragged particle of skin within the blossom.

  “These flowers are vampyres,” I said to Kiya, who had begun to walk ahead of me. I showed it to both of them. “It wants to drink from me.”

  Again, I remembered from the vision when Pythia exhaled into my lungs, the voice of the Priest of Blood as he said, “You must bring the vine and the flower that I might know you.”

  I tore the vine from the Earth, winding it around itself until it was a small bundle. This, I tucked into my pouch. I glanced at the bones nearby and lifted a fragment of one, also. It was sharp and rounded, and felt icy in my hand.

  We were in a land of blood-drinkers; even the flowers drank it.

  I could not fathom what god or devil had created such a place.

  As we walked farther, we came upon mounds of skulls and low walls made up of human ribcages. More of the vines grew among the bone. The flowers were closed for the most part, but as we neared them, they began to open their petals. I sensed Ewen’s fear. Perhaps among mankind, we would not be as afraid of destruction, but this Necropolis was more powerful than we ourselves. It felt as if we were at the Threshold itself, and that if we went the wrong way or took the path to any other than the great entry gate, something more terrible than even the Alkemars and their progeny might await us with open jaws and scimitar talons.

  Kiya grasped my wrist to stop me before I stepped into a recently rotted corpse. I looked down at the man—a thief of this
ancient tomb, no doubt. The leech-creatures had sucked him dry, for he had their small, childlike imprints along his chest and belly, and his skin was tight against his organs and bones. His eyes were missing, and lips had been ripped from his mouth. “No one has come here and returned,” she said.

  “Mortal men,” I said. “Nothing more. Our tribe has not been here.” But I thought of Yarilo, taken by the Alkemars into the white foam, their pincers tearing his skin from him. The Alkemars and their kind had power over us. If they were a thousand years old, or a hundred thousand, they had magick beyond our own meager abilities. Whatever existed within this mountain was more than mere vampyrism. This was the world of gods, not of the living and the undead.

  And then I saw a sight that filled me with a greater dread.

  On poles, there were the skeletons of our brethren, hanging upside down. The fangs from their broken jaws jutted upward. Buried in their ribcages, crude stakes made of silver. The left leg of each of them had been cut off and thrust between their jaws, a barbaric way to keep vampyres from returning from the Threshold. The strange vine had entwined through their eye sockets and moved up along their bones, the flower in full bloom as it twisted about the pelvis and bones of the right legs.

  Extinguished. Tortured even in that nothing of the Extinguishing.

  Carved across their skulls, the word, “Maz-Sherah.”

  2

  “Others have come before us,” I said. “To fulfill the prophecy.”