Lord Zruvan did not appreciate being laughed at. He grabbed the staff and stamped its heel on the floor, like a furious wizard.
“No. I am greater than any god. I came before. I am space and time itself. I am the void from which all gods proceed.”
His words sounded ridiculous, but the deadly serious timbre of his voice and his overwhelming presence chilled her to the marrow. Even in the kiln-heat, she convulsed with a fever-chill. What lay under his costume? Black nothingness, an abyss for which there were no words, not even “god”?
“That is how I know who you are,” he said quietly. “I came before the beginning. That’s why I endure this existence of pain so that my beloved friends may live in peace. I know the order of the universe: I, then the gods, then the dominion of the sun over the moon, then vampires over mortals, then male over female, and mankind over the beasts. Any other way is chaos. Lilith is the female beast, the very embodiment of disorder and turmoil. If I allow you to continue, chaos will tear the Crystal Ring apart. But if you cease to exist, order will return. Those who stood against you in the past were not strong enough, but I am.”
Violette felt her strength draining away, her own blood dripping out of her pores to water the bones of the dead. She looked up into the dwindling chimney high above. She smiled.
“I never expected my life to end like this. However, we did make a bargain. As long as Emil is safe, I am in your hands. But do you know there is a saying among the wise?”
“What saying?”
“That the suppression of Lilith brings destruction? Slay me, and I’ll take you and everything around you with me. Heed this folk tale. Once upon a time, a terrible she-demon took the shape of an owl and made her nest in a barn. Nothing, nothing would evict the owl from its lair until they burned down the very barn itself. The owl was gone, but not until their livestock and grain and everything they needed to survive lay in ashes.”
“Empty threats.”
“It’s not a threat. It’s the way things are. You can ignore the female beast, but she’s always there in the shadows. Lash her, and she lashes back with tenfold fury.”
The terrible, skeletal creature loomed over her – not Kastchei the Immortal, not a vampire, not even a god or a devil but a being so far beyond her understanding that his judgement was worse than death itself. He would not simply kill Violette, but destroy Lilith, destroy all that she had ever been, even the memories and myths. Annihilate her completely.
And because he feared her, destroying her was his only choice.
She knew, yet she still couldn’t bring herself to escape.
Zruvan raised his staff and set the heel against her chest. He pushed her, gently but firmly, back against the wall and held her there. Its painful electric energy made her limbs twitch and turn to string. She felt the bones in the wall digging painfully into her back. First her dress then her skin itself was burning, blistering.
She endured this with patience. She wondered why she wasn’t afraid any more, then realised that she was, but the fear was far away, drowned by the horrific sensation of burning and melting, healing, blistering again.
How long would this cycle last before the fire overwhelmed her self-healing ability?
Not long.
Tears and blood-sweat streamed down her. She was drowned by a strange ecstatic relief that it was almost over.
“Keep still,” he said. “You will soon fade. This is not suppression but cleansing.”
“Lord Zruvan?” she said, looking straight into the eye-holes of his mask. “Would you take off your mask and robes for me?”
“No, I will not. Why?”
“I would like to see your face before I die. Your skin. Is anything human left under there, or only the void that came before the universe?”
No answer, but the pressure on her breastbone increased. Her vision went black for a moment. She thought about Robyn, her lost love, and wondered if there was an afterlife where kind faces waited…
“Lord Zruvan, I know what’s happened to you,” she said, surprised at the steadiness of her voice. “The same thing happened to me. I am not really Lilith. You are not really Zruvan.”
“Your words make no sense. Be still now, and silent.”
“No. As long as I can speak, I have to tell you the truth. There are thousands of thought-forms floating in Raqia, and sometimes they’re so strong that they attach themselves to us. Perhaps we attract them. I always felt like an outcast, so when I became a vampire, my natural inclinations made me become Lilith. And you: you are not primordial. You were human once.”
“The human shell is long gone. I stretch infinitely back and forward in time, I transcend time.”
“No, it’s an illusion. When you transformed, an archetype from the Crystal Ring fused with you and made you believe you are Zruvan. It’s real, but only as an idea. It’s not all you are. Think about it. If you were not Zruvan, who would you be?”
That brought a growl of rage, echoing horribly inside the skull. He thrust the staff so hard she felt her breastbone crack. The greedy thirst of a hundred thousand dead humans began sucking out her life. She was molten hot and freezing cold, her very cells coming apart, yet her consciousness persisted.
She had a flashback to a time when Karl’s friend Pierre had done this to her. His spear, seized from a fortress wall, had no occult power, but it had pierced her to the spine.
Things had not ended well for him, either.
“This isn’t working,” she said. “I’m still not dead. And you are not really Zruvan. What was your name in life? Where were you born? Algeria, Egypt, Persia? You were a little boy once, before the vampires came…”
He snatched back the staff and aimed it straight at her mouth.
That might have worked. Severed her brain stem, silenced her forever. But she dodged and fell to the floor. The surface was red hot, searing her palms.
From her position – crouching on all fours like a wounded wolf – she looked up at Zruvan.
He was struggling to pull the staff free from the wall. It must have lodged deep. Bones and sand crumbled from the hole and pattered down like rain. No longer statuesque and forbidding, he was agitated now, desperate to retrieve the weapon so he could attack her again. If anything, the wall seemed to pull the staff deeper into itself.
His sleeves rode up as he struggled and she saw, in the gap between robe and gloved hands, the bare dark skin of his forearms.
Not nothingness, not bones, but flesh.
Violette gathered herself to spring. She aimed for his lower legs, leapt like a pouncing cat, felt his knees buckle as she struck in exactly the right place. His legs folded and he lost his balance, lost hold of the staff, collapsed on top of her like a felled tree.
Then the world was pure chaos. The inferno heat roared. Voices muttered and screamed. She could barely think for the noise, let alone fight, and the hot red light dazzled her. Her fingers found the edge of the skull-helmet and she began to work at it, trying with the little energy she had left to push it off his head. Irrational but deep instinct told her, Take off his mask and you take away his power.
He resisted, but their twisted position meant his hands could not gain a purchase on hers.
The Bone Well began to tremble. She didn’t know what started the quake – his staff piercing the wall, their struggle, her challenge to what he believed himself to be… all of it, perhaps. The chamber shuddered violently, the floor bucked beneath them. They lay entangled and powerless against the onslaught.
Bones rained down from the chimney. A few at first, delicate finger-bones and toes. Then more. Femurs and skulls, shoulder-blades. Whole skeletons.
The entire structure of the Bone Well was collapsing.
The tremor released a massive landslide from the walls. The deluge of dry hail became an avalanche of bone and stone that swiftly covered the bottom of the well and began to rise up the sides, burying them both. The crushing weight increased by the moment as the whole chamber above them f
illed up with the rubble of centuries, of a hundred thousand deaths and ancient bones.
Zruvan’s exquisitely constructed vessel of hell was no more.
* * *
With the mares dozing, Emil, Charlotte and Fadiya sat in the cavern, waiting. No one stated the obvious, that without a human in tow they could have been back in Algiers by now, or even back in Europe… Charlotte thought of cool, rainy streets by night, and imagined a victim wilting in her arms, with all the passion of a human dying of thirst in the desert.
At least Fadiya was not a grumbler. She could think of one or two vampires who would have made this journey insufferable.
“Charlotte?” said Fadiya, interrupting her reverie. “Make a little cut near your wrist.”
She looked down in dismay to see that Fadiya was offering her an Istilqa knife. The patterns carved on the handle seemed to move and whisper.
“What for?”
“It will make you sleep.”
“Like a human?”
“Yes. Isn’t it the worst thing about our lives, that we never sleep? This will help you.”
“When someone used one of those blades on me, I went mad for several hours. I haven’t been the same since. They’re evil. Worse than poison, they cut right into our souls and there’s no telling what damage they do.”
“Only if you’ve never used one before, or if the wound goes too deep. You need to build a tolerance. That’s why I suggest a small cut.”
But Charlotte stared at the blade, hesitating. Tempted. Just a nick, and she would sink into a beautiful deep sleep… Almost the only human pleasure she missed. What bliss, to escape the pain of thirst and anxiety, to stop thinking, just to rest in the lovely soft blackness for a while.
And only once? she thought. If it’s as blissful as I imagine, shall I want to do the same every day?
Charlotte gently pushed away Fadiya’s hand.
“No. Thank you. I prefer to stay awake.”
“As you will.”
Fadiya drew back the sleeve of her own robe and brought the sikin towards her skin.
“Wait,” said Charlotte. “You’re not going to sleep now, are you, while we’re in the middle of nowhere? Shouldn’t we stay alert, at least for Emil’s sake?”
Fadiya shrugged, rearranged her sleeve and put the knife away in a pouch in the folds of her robe. “I suppose you’re right, although this cave is well hidden and there’s no one for miles around us.” She held Charlotte’s gaze and added, “You look at me as if I’m nothing, or an object of pity, but what do you know about me?”
“That’s not fair.” She frowned, but knew Fadiya had a point. “You kidnapped Emil. And I don’t know you at all. But if you think I’m judging you, I apologise.”
“Think what you like,” Fadiya said coolly, looking away.
One thing was clear: the nervous Fadiya who’d fled from her and Violette on the night of Stefan’s party was not the real Fadiya.
“I don’t understand why you would damage yourself with such dangerous weapons.”
“But they’re not dangerous unless they’re misused. They bring pleasant oblivion, that’s all. They’re made from the ivory of the Bone Well, where Zruvan lives. You won’t understand. You come from a different civilisation, where all the old mysteries have been lost.”
“Not all of them.” Charlotte lowered her voice, as Emil seemed to be asleep. “In England, I once found a place – a subterranean lair – where a vampire had hoarded his victims. The very walls were soaked with their agony. The emptiness they left, the bitter cold, was so intense that it almost killed us. The bone-knives are the same, aren’t they? I do understand. Too much exposure brings us the suffering we’ve dealt to humans, madness, weakness, even death. But a tiny dose makes you unconscious for a while. Am I right?”
“I had not seen it like that, but yes.”
“I think each sikin holds the power of all the bones,” said Charlotte. “The macrocosm within the microcosm. That was one of my father’s favourite sayings.”
“What?” Fadiya frowned.
“Does your Lord Zruvan make the knives?”
“He invented them. He is older than time. Before him there was no one and nothing.”
Charlotte mouthed a silent Oh of surprise. She wondered how to respond. “So you are married to a god? Does he mind you taking human lovers?”
“No one can explain or describe Zruvan,” said Fadiya. She rose on her haunches and whispered, “Come with me.”
Bent nearly double, they went to a narrow, odd-shaped cavern behind the main one. The light here was dim red, the floor a churned-up mess of rock and sand, the air thick and hot. On a smooth curve of wall, at eye-level as they crouched, Charlotte saw handprints on the rock. No, not prints, but negatives: shapes outlined by a blackish mist, as if several folk had placed their hands on the rock like stencils and blown pigment over them.
There were drawings of animals, too, depicted in simple rust-red brushstrokes, crude but full of life and movement.
“People lived here,” she murmured, knowing with a flash of insight that these marks were ancient.
“Who knows how many thousands of years ago?” said Fadiya. “Zruvan says the desert was a green plain, long ago. I didn’t believe him, but how else could such animals have lived here? Look…” she bent to the floor and swirled her hand through the loose stones. “This is where I buried a sack of Istilqa knives, four hundred years ago. I’ve buried others in many places, for safekeeping. They are for vampires who are travelling, or stranded. I even wrote an explanation, for those who did not understand. And if anything happened to our supply, or to Zruvan, we would always have these in reserve.”
Like someone hiding weapons, or treasure… or opium, thought Charlotte.
“You really can’t live without them?”
“We could, but it’s our way,” said Fadiya. “Your disapproval won’t change our traditions.”
“I’m not trying to. I’m curious, that’s all.”
“One day, nearly forty years ago, I came here to find the ground dug up and the sakakin gone. Some cursed archaeologist from Europe! He didn’t even know what he’d found.”
“Is that why you went to Godric Reiniger, to get them back?”
Fadiya sat back on her heels and gave a chilling smile. “No. I was in Lucerne looking for Violette. I happened to discover that Herr Reiniger had the knives. We argued a little, but I let him keep them in the end because, by using them, he was honouring Zruvan without even realising it. Rather, I tried to tell him, even knowing he didn’t care or understand. I want them back, of course, but I didn’t make too great an issue of it because Violette was my priority.”
“Zruvan sent you to find her?”
“Yes. I’m his agent in the world. I do what he cannot.”
“But you dared not approach her directly,” said Charlotte.
“Of course not. It would have been impossibly dangerous. I’m not a fool.”
“No, you aren’t. To take Emil instead was a master-stroke.”
Fadiya sat back against the cave wall with a sigh. Her eyes were brown again, not the jade green of danger. “I never meant him any harm. I was entirely focused upon what Zruvan commanded, because… you can’t understand.”
“He’s your master, so you do what he says?”
“No.” She spoke with fervour. “Because he sacrifices every moment of his existence to keep me safe, to keep all our loved ones safe. To keep safe every single vampire who comes to us. That’s why.”
“You say he’s your husband?” Charlotte said after a few moments. “It can’t be easy, being married to a god who never shows his face.”
Fadiya said nothing.
“What happened to your other husband?”
“My…?”
“I heard you were a widow. You were married to a French soldier who died.”
“Oh.” Fadiya laughed. “I made that up. The tale elicits sympathy, and it is a reason for me to be in Europe, all alone.
”
“I see. And are you going to explain that to Emil?”
“As if it matters. You’re so human, Charlotte.”
“You must be too, a little, or you wouldn’t have agreed to help him escape.”
She thought Fadiya was ignoring the remark, but after a while she said very softly, “It was nice to be with him. To see his face and touch his skin… I have only once seen Zruvan’s face – to be truthful, I didn’t see it clearly, but I did feel his mouth… I cannot talk about him.”
“Never mind him. I’m more interested in you. What is your story, Fadiya?”
Charlotte expected more stubborn silence, but Fadiya began to speak, her voice tranquil and languid, like honey.
Six hundred years before, her father and brothers dead in a tribal battle, Fadiya and her mother had taken precarious refuge in a cave, hiding from enemy tribes and foreign invaders. But her mother was ill and someone had to fetch water so Fadiya went alone, barefoot across the sand, walking tall and straight so that the jug would not spill its contents. The wind made her robes flutter around her ankles and perhaps that was why the bandit decided to attack – to throw her down, to violate and strangle her before she knew what was happening. The jar fell, the water surged out in a dark stain, wasted. She only saw a silhouette as he rose and staggered backwards, gasping. His clothing was alien; he was a warrior from a hostile tribe. Some brute who didn’t care that she was ruined, her honour destroyed.
She lay and stared up at the new moon. The white sliver kept fading to blackness with her vision and she knew she was dying… but that was for the best. Then the stink of his body would be gone, along with the inner contamination that would never wash away. The only balm for dishonour was death. She thought of her mother, and wondered who would fetch the water instead and who would warn them of the danger before…
But someone else was there. A shadow – silent and odourless, unlike the sweating, heavy-breathing stranger. This shadow seized her attacker from behind and snapped his neck between hands and mouth. He fell like a rock. Then the demon bent over her and she felt two sharp pains pierce her throbbing, bruised throat. Her last impression was of blood everywhere, blood flowing from the dead rapist to pool around him… her own blood on the demon’s mouth as it raised its head. She could see no detail, only its eyes in the darkness and her blood shining on its lips, dripping on to her face.
The Dark Arts of Blood Page 44