The Dark Arts of Blood

by Freda Warrington

  She reached out for Raqia but the two realms were already entwined. She had nowhere else to go. There was a dot of light above and she saw heads in silhouette staring down into the well. Zruvan’s guards.

  At last Violette reached the top of the pile. The entrance to the well was still far above her head. The Bone Well’s heat rushed upwards around her like a hot wind escaping through the narrow flue.

  She and Zruvan both lay sprawled on top of the heap, exhausted, spreadeagled as if on quicksand. His staff was lost, robes torn, skull helmet askew. She saw glimpses of smooth brown flesh.

  Looking up, she thought that if she could reach the narrower part of the chimney, she could brace herself with hands and feet and climb to the top…

  Zruvan groaned.

  “May I?” she asked. When he didn’t object, she began to work again at the gigantic skull-faced helmet. This time it slid easily off his head.

  The face beneath was astonishingly young. She’d been prepared for monstrosity, and instead saw a boy of no more than eighteen. His face was all straight lines, a neat oblong with a flat mouth, long straight nose, elongated black eyes. Almost feminine. His hair, raven silk, fell to his shoulders. The body beneath the torn robes was brown and as slender as that of any of her ballet students.

  He was barely six feet in height. No giant. Perhaps he’d worn built-up shoes beneath his garments. After all, he was a creature fabricated of illusions.

  “Why did you drag me out?” he asked in a raw voice. “You could have left me there.”

  “Because I want to talk to you. And I’m not entirely heartless.”

  “I too wanted to talk.” He looked and sounded dazed.

  “But only on your terms. And you did not like what I was saying, so you tried to silence me, but…”

  “How did this happen?”

  “I warned you: you can’t destroy Lilith without destroying everything around her. I’m going to climb out now. Once I reach the top, I’ll drop a rope, or knotted robes, and haul you up after me.”

  “No.” He scrubbed his forehead with dusty fingers. “I die here. I should have perished with the Bone Well. I cannot let those above see me… exposed.”

  “Then I’ll send them away. Don’t argue with me. You are not dying.”

  “I thought you spared no one.”

  “You know nothing about me,” she retorted.

  Violette began to climb, finding precarious hand and footholds in the steep, inward-curved wall and clinging to them like an insect. When she reached the place where the chimney narrowed, she gained a firm purchase across its width. Slowly she edged upwards, one hand, one foot at a time. Blood-red sweat oozed from her.

  At the top, the round ingress was tiny, barely the width of her body. The edges crumbled under her fingers.

  Fresh desert air hit her skin like an icy stream. Three vampires in dark robes stood there, staring. One of them was Nabil. She expected them to seize her in rage, but they seemed too shocked to do anything.

  “Help me get your master to safety,” she snapped. “Avert your eyes! Give me a robe for him. And as soon as he’s above ground, leave us!”

  Her demeanour was intimidating enough to command their obedience. She wondered how she looked to them: white as the moon with witch-black hair, as terrifying as a hunting owl appeared to a shrew?

  That was all the power she needed.

  Presently Zruvan lay like a corpse on the rocks beside her. He’d almost become wedged in the narrow gullet of the well, and the effort to haul him out tore the last scraps of clothing from him. Now he lay naked, face down, as silky-brown as a nut. No monster at all beneath the costume.

  She draped the garment they’d brought over him. It was the djellaba she’d discarded when she had entered the underworld.

  Two of the vampires left quickly, as she’d asked, but Nabil hung back, glaring at her. She expected violent rage. Instead he looked confused. His eyes – all she could see of his face – shone with pain.

  “We always wanted to release him,” Nabil whispered. “Not like this – I didn’t expect this. He was the one who insisted on remaining in the Bone Well. Only an entity of equal power could prise him out… but now what? I did not think he would lose all his strength like this. What has happened? What will become of him?”

  “I can’t answer your questions,” she said.

  “Please do not harm him.”

  “I won’t.” She put one hand between Zruvan’s shoulder-blades, unconsciously protective. “Even though he tried to kill me down there, I won’t. It was because he attacked me that this happened. Let me talk to him. Later, he may need you to look after him.”

  “I will be waiting,” said Nabil. He walked away into the night, but his expression of shock and stoical patience stayed with her.

  “Zruvan?” she said softly. “I sent your guards away. I think they were more frightened than you and me. What’s your real name?”

  “Zruvan is my real name.”

  “Your birth name, then.”

  “Don’t.” His breath chattered. “It’s freezing out here!”

  “Yes. It will be, if you’re used to living inside an oven. Welcome to the cold world of reality.”

  He pushed himself up and sat with his thin arms wrapped around his chest, knees bent up, the djellaba loose on his shoulders. How young he looked, only just on the edge of adulthood. More like some elf that had crawled up from the roots of a tree than a fiery god of death.

  “What have you done?” he said.

  “I don’t know.” Violette spoke gently. “I did tell you that the violent suppression of Lilith always brings disaster. Didn’t I warn you?”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “I destroy something else, too: self-delusion.”

  Zruvan rested his forehead on his knees, ebony hair draping over him. He remained like that for a long time.

  She saw – with a strange witch-sight that went directly into her mind – his slow mental and physical collapse. She felt it. For centuries he’d believed himself to be a primordial entity. Now those beliefs dissolved and streamed away, as if he’d woken from a dream.

  The experience was not painful, but horribly strange, indefinable. Yes, very like waking from a nightmare, struggling to accept the reality you’d forgotten…

  She let him sit in silence for an hour, while the stars turned above them and the wind snaked across the sand. Eventually she spoke.

  “So you are still alive, but you are not what you believed yourself to be. Won’t you talk to me?”

  “I have nothing to say.”

  “I’ve met others like you. So afraid of God’s wrath that they live in a well of misery and guilt until it destroys them. Or they convince themselves they’re doing God’s work by punishing the sins of mankind. Is that who you are?”

  “There are no others like me,” he retorted, raising his head. “I told you, I don’t fear any god. I came before all gods. I am the black void of space and time that existed before creation…”

  “But you know that’s not true.”

  She saw his face freeze into a stricken expression, felt his waves of denial as he tried to reweave the strands of himself. It was too late. “Zruvan” was gone, the wisps melting between his fingers.

  “No one is that,” she went on. “Or perhaps you were for a time, and will be again, but you’re also a human: rather, a creature that used to be, and knows perfectly well what it is to be mortal. That’s why you were so angry with me. The truth does tend to upset people. Like me, you’re a victim of the Crystal Ring, an unwilling avatar. We’re not enemies. You can still feel Zruvan within you, as long as you understand that he is an idea, not objective reality.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Yes, you do. I am the same, a paradox. I know I’m not really Lilith, but in spite of that, sometimes I am her. And for as long as I feel I’m her, it’s real. The difference is, I never lost my true identity. Well… I did for a time, but I found it again. And
so can you.”

  “What makes you think I want to? I knew you were a force for chaos.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have brought me here.”

  “I did so to protect…” His fierce voice trailed to nothing. His head dropped on to his knees again.

  “Your loved ones, I know.”

  “More than that. Our very survival.”

  “Do you still want to destroy me?” No answer. “I believe your motives were noble. But vampires who wallow in a mass grave of their own victims will have their own life force stolen back. They perish. Many would say that’s a well-deserved punishment. And you did so consciously, trying to take on the guilt of all your followers, didn’t you? You even made the Istilqa knives to help them. That is impressive alchemy. But the weapons are toxic. They’re part of the Bone Well, full of anger, grief, madness. They try to steal back what they’ve lost, like a vampiric force in their own right.”

  “I know. I have endured it for centuries.”

  Violette looked more carefully at him. He might have alien ideas, but that did not make him wrong. He was intelligent. If he’d set himself in the Bone Well to protect other vampires from their victims’ revenge… He might be misguided, she thought, but without question, he was exceptionally brave.

  “I suppose you know that a mortal has some of your knives.”

  “Fadiya told me.”

  “Did you never think that mortals might use your sakakin to create occult powers of their own?”

  He looked up. She could just see his eyes shining through skeins of hair.

  “Never. I rarely think of humans. Fadiya will bring them back, but it was more important that she brought you to me first.”

  “You think I’m more dangerous than a human experimenting with your sacred daggers?”

  “That was my judgement, yes.”

  “You were wrong. I am no threat to your followers, but the Istilqa knives are lethal. No one wants their weapons falling into the wrong hands, do they? Yet it always happens.”

  “They are not weapons.” His voice was weak with exhaustion. “I made them to protect my flock, not to cause harm. To bring sleep, so we needn’t enter the Crystal Ring unless it’s essential. And to strengthen us against the very dangers you were talking about! Like… I don’t know the word.”

  “I think you mean inoculation,” said Violette. “I see why it seemed a good idea, but vampires don’t need such help. Will the knives lose their power without the Bone Well?”

  After a long pause, Zruvan answered, “I don’t think so. All the victims are still there. New Bone Wells can be built.”

  “That wouldn’t be a good idea. Let it end now.”

  “But it is our way. My flock will always want the Istilqa knives. I’ve no wish to stop them.”

  “Nor have I.” Violette was suddenly weary from the hours of heat and struggle. “I don’t think your traditions are necessary, but I don’t seek to change them. Your flock will live as they please.”

  “How, without Zruvan’s protection?”

  “They’ll survive, believe me. Now you’ve tasted fresh air and seen the stars again, you don’t want to go back to” – she pointed at the tiny hole in the rock – “to that, surely?”

  He closed his eyes and shook his head in pain. “No. Even if I wanted to, I cannot. You have stripped my vital nature from me.”

  “And I’m sorry, but I think you’re better without it. I am not your enemy. You could have talked to me as yourself, without the death-mask, instead of sending Fadiya.”

  “I had no choice. And I don’t believe you would have listened.”

  “That’s true,” she sighed. “I have little patience with most other vampires. The only way to catch my attention was to do exactly what you did, but that hasn’t turned out well for anyone. Or has it?”

  Zruvan went quiet, looking up at the stars: a snowstorm, lighting the heavens.

  “It’s so long since I saw the sky!” he said. “How magnificent. I feel as if the creature I was, who immersed himself in the Bone Well and was hell-bent on confronting Lilith, was someone else. It wasn’t me. And yet it was.”

  “We need not be enemies,” she said again. “Those who fight me always regret it. But let me alone, and we’ll live in peace. If you open your mind, you’ll see something in the darkness you’ve never seen before. The wisdom of the crone. The Black Madonna. Cybele. Sophia, goddess of wisdom.”

  “I know nothing of this.”

  “So learn!” Violette paused, scolding herself. Exasperation, she thought, is not much of a divine quality. “I know how it feels to be several different beings at once. It’s horrifying. It takes a long while to understand. I don’t have time to hold your hand through it, but Nabil is waiting, and Fadiya. They’ll help you.”

  “Fadiya is with your friend, taking Emil home,” he said, his voice very low.

  “But she’ll come back, won’t she?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t go to Bayt-al-Zuhur. If I’m not Zruvan, they won’t accept me. I belong nowhere now.”

  “Then why does Fadiya work for you? Is it because you’re a dreadful tyrant, or because she’s devoted to you? Tell me. I don’t know.”

  He only sighed, pushed back his hair, and lay down on the rock with one knee raised. “Soon it will be dawn. I have not seen the sun rise for so many years.”

  “The dawns and sunsets here are beautiful. I’ll wait with you. It’s all right, Zruvan.”

  She saw tears spill out of his eyes, making a track down each temple.

  “Kurgara,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Kurgara. That was what they called me. I know I was human once. But I…”

  “Go on.” Violette waited, willing him to tell the truth.

  “I was born neither male nor female. Or both. That’s what kurgara means: man-woman. I don’t know if they thought me a god or a demon, but they were afraid. My mother tried to keep me, but I was cast into the desert to die.”

  “How long ago?” Again Violette’s view of him changed. Her impatience softened to curiosity.

  “A thousand years? I don’t know. A group of vampires took me in – I didn’t know what they were at first. When I reached adulthood, they transformed me. It was then I became Zruvan. A revelation.”

  “Yes,” said Violette, clasping his right hand. “You were an empty vessel. The Crystal Ring filled you with the archetype that best fitted you, for good or ill.”

  “I forgot my human life entirely… but it’s still there in my mind, after all.”

  Kurgara put his left forearm over his eyes briefly, let his raised knee fall to the side, long enough for Violette to see an unusual set of genitals: a small phallus, protruding from a hood of skin that folded down into a swollen vulva, as if testicles had partly transmuted from female labia majora. She saw purplish folded flesh, curly black hair. Different, intriguing.

  She felt unexpected warmth pooling inside her. A sensation she hadn’t felt for a long time. She moistened her lips, caught a quick deep breath.

  He needed to feed. So did she.

  “This is why I had to hide, and change,” he said. “I am neither and both. Outcast.”

  Violette was more than startled. She couldn’t gather words to express her reaction; mainly a sense of wonder, fascination. In the surface world, such anomalies were never discussed, except between doctors. Then her deeper wisdom kicked in, running a score of ancient tales through her mind.

  “Both male and female,” she said at last. “Why not? Do not tell me you are nothing.”

  “What am I, then? What does your black crone goddess say about this?”

  “She tells me that people are always terrified of anything unusual. They blame it on devils or gods. However, nature knows better. Just because something is rare, that does not make it unnatural. Don’t you have the best of both worlds?”

  “I hardly think so.”

  “But you could. You’re a vampire, not bound by human conventions. I see
how the archetype of Zruvan would fit you – the primordial void that came before male and female?”

  “Yes. No place for gender at all.”

  “But ancient myths are full of androgynes. Adam and Eve, Lilith and Samael… there are stories of androgynous creatures being split into male and female by the gods, or of male and female fusing back into one, perfect being. Long ago, hermaphrodites, or those who changed their sex or had no clear gender at all, were treated as sacred. They were priests. Magical beings.”

  “Then I was born too late.”

  “Perhaps you were. But you didn’t come into the world without precedent.”

  Now she saw Zruvan-Kurgara differently; not a young male, but man and woman in perfect balance. The moment imprinted on her mind, transcendent: the vast dome of the Milky Way and billions of stars above them, the wind moaning across the sculpted infinity of the desert, and this exquisite, slender boy-girl lying before her, head tilted back as he-she revealed mysteries.

  “So I’m not unique? Not the first?”

  “And far from the last. It’s a quality of the angels, to be both female and male. Rare, but no cause for shame. And think: as a vampire, an immortal, you can be anything you wish. Human prejudice has no power over you.”

  “Humans don’t concern me. But my followers do. If I am no longer their protector, but a being they don’t even recognise… What am I? Even Fadiya will spurn me. She was my dearest companion, but I could never be a true husband to her. She even chose your dancer above me, and I do not blame her.”

  “I can’t fault her devotion to you.” Violette was bemused to think of Kurgara and Fadiya as husband and wife. How could they be, while he secluded himself in that terrible pit? Little wonder that Fadiya might turn to Emil in sheer sorrow and loneliness.

  “I kissed her once, when I found her near death in the desert. After, she only ever saw the death-headed monster. She loved me anyway… because she never saw what lay beneath.”

  “Exchange blood with me,” said Violette. “Only a sip. Everything will be clearer then.”