Sovereign

by Ted Dekker

  He only looked at her.

  “You’ll never make it! Even if you do, she’ll kill you.”

  “It’s a chance I am forced to take. I hope I’m right in saying that you underestimate her. She hosts the ancient blood somewhere beneath her death.”

  “You’re going to just turn yourself in?”

  His gaze was quiet.

  “It’s madness!”

  “I beg you, Jordin, never vacate your love for Jonathan or your vow to follow him. Tell the others that I’ve gone to Feyn to barter a way for our survival. Tell them Feyn will attempt to turn me into one of her Dark Bloods. If she succeeds, Mattius’s virus will kill me as well. Tell it to every Sovereign—not just the council. Promise me that much.”

  “This can’t be the way.”

  “It’s the only way!” He turned and strode toward the curtain as if to leave. “If Mattius is willing to kill me, so be it. But the others will think twice. If it’s true that we’re all doomed, then I have nothing to lose. And neither do you.”

  She stood rooted in the dim light, feeling shame in the face of his commitment.

  Rom turned back at the entrance. “You remember what we discussed about Roland? If there were no other options?”

  How could she forget? “That, too, is insanity,” she said.

  “They said that about Jonathan before his death.”

  She stared after him long after he had left, the waistband of her pants still clutched in her hand.

  “INSANITY!” Mattius’s voice rang out in the chamber. The man’s stoic face had gone red beneath his whitening beard. “How dare he attempt to take hostage our salvation by putting himself up as a martyr!” He paced, his robe sweeping the stone floor at his heels. He turned on Jordin, green eyes glaring. “No one must know of this. Not a word beyond this hall.”

  “They already know,” Jordin said.

  “Who knows?” the alchemist demanded, glaring at Gamil then Adah.

  “All of them,” Jordin said.

  “Insanity!”

  “So you’ve said.”

  The moment Rom left, she had fallen onto her bed and wept with frustration until, frantic, she’d tried to chase him down, planning to restrain him if she must. But when she reached the tunnel to the surface, Stephan, the elderly man on third watch, informed her Rom had left ten minutes earlier.

  It had been an hour and a half to sunrise. Three hours to the customary rising hour. She’d spent half the time pacing in her room, wrestling with madness. Only in an extended moment of clarity, with the image of Triphon slain before her in a manner so similar to Jonathan, did her course of action become plain.

  She would do as Rom asked. For Jonathan. For Sovereigns. For Rom. For herself.

  Peace had come like a flood, and on its heels, absolute surety. She’d quickly dressed and made her rounds of the chambers still occupied by the living. With so few left, it took only moments to spread the message that Rom had gone to win favor with Feyn. She understood the widening of their eyes, the haunting look of fear: if Rom were taken, death would follow fast for them all.

  “Trust him,” Jordin had assured each of them. “Trust Rom to know Jonathan’s heart. Even if Rom becomes a Dark Blood, he’ll find a way.”

  In the space of an hour their whispers carried through the caverns with hallowed awe. Rom has gone to save us. Jonathan will come again; Rom will make a way.

  Standing before Mattius now, she understood his rage because she had felt it herself—along with a grim respect for Rom’s genius; in one move, he had outmaneuvered the alchemist.

  And where did it leave her? With Rom or with Mattius? Both of them had made their play.

  It was time to make hers.

  Gamil strode to the high-backed chair at the end of the long table they reserved for the monthly feast and sat heavily. They celebrated Jonathan’s passing at the new moon each month by eating the finest foods they could marshal for the occasion. Ancient wines from a makeshift cellar they’d found below the main chamber, meats and cheeses when they were available. It had been rice and beef stock as of late, though the previous month Jordin had brought a clutch of rabbits she’d borrowed from a small farm south of the city.

  “So be it,” Mattius snapped. “He’s thrown his life away.”

  “Thrown his life away?” Jordin said. “Feyn won’t kill him. Will you prove worse than her?”

  His face hardened. “His fate is in his hands, not mine.”

  “We must assume Feyn will turn him,” Adah said.

  “His Sovereign blood won’t have it,” Gamil said.

  “Do we know that?”

  “No. But the virus will kill him,” Jordin said, her stare fixed on Mattius.

  “His decision.”

  “So you don’t deny that the virus—this Reaper of yours—may kill Rom if he’s forced to Dark Blood?”

  His silence was answer enough.

  “Then all Sovereigns will know that Mattius the alchemist—no, Mattius the traitor—killed the holiest among us. Rom Sebastian, the very man who found Jonathan when he was a boy and saved him from certain death so he could give us the blood that now flows in our veins. They will know, and I will make sure of it.”

  Mattius showed no sign her words had affected him. “Far better to bring death to one if it means the salvation of Jonathan’s blood.”

  “Far better to trust the leaders Jonathan put over you,” Jordin said.

  He leaned in toward her. “Rom brought him to maturity, you let him die, but I will see his legacy live forever.”

  Jordin trembled with the effort not to shove him against the wall by the neck.

  Adah, too wise by far, stepped between them. “What does a resurrected Corpse know of Jonathan’s legacy? I was caring for Jonathan’s scraped knees when you were still dead. I will not see his blood defiled, and I won’t stand by while you kill Rom.”

  Mattius said with deadly calm, “Seven days—six now. It’s already done, with or without me. Rom knew the stakes. I have done what I must, not to defile Jonathan’s blood but to preserve it.”

  “So you hope,” Gamil said from the end of the table, shaking his head. “You said we might lose some of our emotions. Your plan to preserve Jonathan’s blood may in fact only reenact the very event that made it necessary!”

  “Better muted emotion than the annihilation of our kind.”

  “As the alchemists no doubt said then!”

  “And if you remember, I said that we may suffer no effects at all.”

  “Then take it yourself and show us,” Adah said.

  “We don’t have time for the madness of old women or the antics of children! Call me a traitor if you must, but I will stand by what is right.”

  He strode to the door.

  “I have another way,” Jordin said.

  Mattius grasped the door handle. “There is no other way.” He swung the door wide.

  “I will kill Feyn. Without her, the Dark Bloods are a serpent with no head.”

  Mattius hesitated and then cast a condescending look over his shoulder. “Don’t be absurd.”

  “I tell you another way, and you won’t even hear me out?”

  The alchemist shut the door and turned back. He spoke as one does to a very dull child. “You follow Rom to folly. There is no other way.”

  “Your calculations have failed you. There is.”

  “You can’t even reach Feyn, much less kill her. The old tunnels into the Citadel are far too heavily guarded for any Sovereign to pass.” He paused. “Even if you could get in—even if you could kill Feyn—you would only be paving the way for the Immortals.”

  “Not if Roland is dead.”

  He gave a short laugh. “Kill Feyn and Roland both?” He looked around with theatrical incredulity. “Have you hit your head?”

  “If it were possible, Rom would have thought of it already,” Gamil said with audible reluctance.

  “He has.”

  “He would never approve of your killing R
oland, much less Feyn,” Adah said.

  “He wouldn’t approve. But Rom is no longer your leader, I am. If I say I can deliver Roland’s head, then clearly,” she said, looking meaningfully at Mattius, “I have a way.”

  “How?”

  She lowered her arms and walked to a bottle of wine on the table. She poured some into a goblet and set the cork back into the bottle. “That’s my concern.” She took a sip, set the goblet down, and turned to face Mattius.

  “But I need more than six days. Give me ten.”

  “You have six.”

  “Give me nine days.”

  “You have six.”

  Jordin stalked toward the alchemist. “I would throw myself into the jaws of death to save us all, and you refuse to give even a day?”

  “How can I, when you won’t share your plan?”

  “I plan to cut off Roland’s head and bring it to you in a bag with Feyn’s. That’s all you need to know. But what I need is time!”

  A long measure of silence filled the chamber before he spoke. “So you’ll fly into the Immortal lair, pluck off Roland’s head, fly to the Citadel, and do the same to Feyn. Do we look like fools?”

  “Do you want me to answer that? Because history will. What foolishness is found in attempting one last desperate option before throwing the world back into Chaos with alchemy? Before throwing away all that Jonathan came to bring!”

  “They’ll smell you coming and spill your blood on the sand before you lay eyes on them. It’s not reasonable. It’s not even sane.”

  The echo of Rom’s parting words sounded in Jordin’s head. Insanity. She gave a slight quirk to her lips. “It’s a pity you never knew Jonathan. They said the same of him.”

  Gamil stood up from the table. “Jordin, please. In one thing I agree with Mattius. There’s no way to get to Roland alive. How many lives must we lose? Take time to think.”

  “I have. And I know what I must do.”

  “Do you even know where the Immortals are?” Adah asked.

  “No.”

  “Have you ever seen one unmasked?”

  “No.”

  “How can you kill an enemy you can’t see?”

  “That’s my problem. I just need more time.” She fixed Mattius with a hard gaze. “Give me eight days. If I don’t deliver both Feyn’s and Roland’s heads, assume that I am dead and the fate of all Sovereigns will be on yours.”

  Mattius flicked a glance from Adah to Gamil, who both appeared at a loss for words.

  “First Rom walks to his death, and now the fearless Jordin,” Mattius said. “Suicide abounds.”

  “Better than genocide. Eight days.”

  He spun and strode for the door. “Seven. If at that time either Feyn or Roland is still alive, Reaper will be loosed.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  FEYN’S FATHER, Vorrin, had sat in this very chamber. At this dining table not ten strides from the claw-footed desk that dominated the far end of the room. In her father’s day as Sovereign, it had been covered with documents, newspapers, reports. But today it was meticulously clean, leaving bare a stone surface that reminded her at every glance of a sarcophagus lid or altar.

  She was intimately familiar with both. For nine years she had lingered in stasis in a sarcophagus, until the day Saric brought her painfully back to life on an altar.

  She held a plate of warm venison on her lap, leaned back in the wing-backed chair. Her bare foot rested atop the head of the lion still attached to the hide that sprawled beneath the table, the hem of her dark shift pooling on the floor. The curtains were thrown wide to the rare, late-morning sun—in fact, they had never closed. No one had seen her glide down the Citadel hall to her chamber in the hour just before dawn or return through the back passage a scant three hours later.

  She rarely slept—her physical needs had changed since the day of her resurrection.

  There had been another raid, late in the night, just south of the Citadel. Eight of her warriors had gone missing. Their bodies had turned up early this morning, on pikes just beyond the city. The sight incited a panic in the first morning commute. Seth, her new captain, had begged to reinforce the city perimeter. He was chiseled and handsome as a god, having been personally designed by and for her. And so she had named him after the ancient god of Chaos. He was devoted as a lover and feral as a wolf—one that would die to protect her…. or slit his own throat if she but asked it. He had no choice; it was in his chemistry.

  She had calmly pointed out that to bolster perimeter defenses would lessen the concentric ranks of Dark Bloods around the Citadel itself. The very thing, no doubt, that Roland wanted.

  The Immortal was either preparing for a major offensive or frustrated by his inability to reach the Citadel. Feyn could have commanded twenty thousand men to sweep into the hills, but she would only be throwing her Dark Bloods like so many stones into a ravine. The day would come when a new harvest of Dark Bloods would emerge from her labs. No matter how many Corpses Roland turned Immortal, he could not train them quickly enough to outman her unending supply of warriors. His fighters might seem nearly supernatural, but sheer numbers would win this war.

  Still, he fascinated her as much for his aggression as for the rumors of his brood’s eerie ways. She would shed a tear, perhaps, on the day his head adorned the great Citadel gate, if only because there would be no more foe of interest. No foe at all.

  She lifted the fork from the plate, toyed with the edge of meat so tender it required no knife. She’d once taken great pleasure in the rite of every meal. Life itself had fascinated her by its very process. Her craving for food, for the sun that fell through the window onto her skin, for water falling over her thighs in the bath and dripping from her hair—it had all intoxicated her once, just as the fealty of nations and the stripping of their power had intoxicated her the day she’d dismantled the senate.

  But only for a while.

  She bit into the meat, a portion larger than what might be considered couth, and then tossed the plate onto the table, watching the fork scatter across its surface.

  She heard a knock at the side door.

  She took her time chewing and swallowing the venison, neatly wiping the juice from her chin. Then she rose from the chair and paced toward the window, where the dull light of day shone through her dressing gown like a scrim.

  “What is it?” she said.

  Corban’s voice sounded through the door. “My liege, we have a prisoner of interest.”

  “Come.”

  The door opened and the master alchemist entered, dropping to his knee. His hair hung past his shoulders toward the floor, nearly touching it. His strange and silent Corpse acolyte, Ammon, knelt two paces behind.

  “What kind of interest?” She folded her arms, studying the master alchemist. It strained him to kneel. She could see it in the tension on his forehead.

  “A live Sovereign, my liege.” He lifted his head slightly, his gaze crawling out to the rug just beneath her bare feet. “Rom Sebastian, leader of the infidels.”

  She went very still. Was it possible? Rom, who had tricked her into consuming the Keeper’s ancient blood, though there had not been enough for her to know its effects for long. And if there had been? So much might have been different. She herself might be living in hiding, serving a dead boy’s memory, and Saric might be standing here now.

  “How and where was he taken?”

  “My liege,” Corban said with a raised brow, “he came to us.”

  Came here? Willingly?

  He was a trickster still. A fanatic whose zeal knew no end. And now his foolishness had delivered him to her once again.

  She walked to the settee and retrieved her heavy velvet robe, fastening the hooks up the front with slender fingers. She stepped into the low-heeled brocade shoes waiting nearby and said only, “Come,” as she brushed by the kneeling alchemist.

  Rowan, Sovereign regent during her stasis when the usurper Jonathan had laid claim to the throne, had long sealed the
old door to the subterranean chambers of the Citadel. Corban, at her command, had unsealed it. As they passed through the abandoned senate chamber to the ancient door, a strange sensation prickled her nape.

  In the first two decades of her life she’d only visited these chambers a handful of times, having found them morbid for their history of captivity, murder, and secrecy. Now, she didn’t need to wait for Corban to fumble with a switch to light the way; she knew the passageway well.

  But as they arrived at the heavy steel door of the ancient dungeons, she slowed. The last time she’d seen Rom, he’d been a headstrong lover who could plead passionately and persuasively. A fighter after the Nomad way. A protector—the leader of a cause and a people. And yet he was a slave to his convictions; leader only to an impotent and dying group of vagabonds.

  Corban caught up to her, breathing slightly more heavily than before, Ammon’s step light behind him. Her master alchemist was aging quickly. The day would come when he could no longer kneel before her. On such a day, she would force Corban to turn Ammon Dark Blood to her service. For now, she allowed him his illusion of mastery over another.

  He pulled the heavy steel door open, and she stepped inside. At first she didn’t smell the sterile odors of the vast laboratory that had taken up residence in this space, nor see the heavy glass sarcophagi of her newest prototypes lining the far wall. For a moment, she was back in the dungeons of fifteen years ago, where she had stolen in secret to meet a different prisoner: the old Keeper.

  But that moment quickly passed.

  She strode down the aisle of stainless laboratory tables, hardly noting the startled expressions of the alchemists who abruptly dropped to their knees. One of them fumbled with a glass vial that shattered on the ancient stone floor. Overhead, electrical fixtures gave off cold, brilliant light. For the first time in years, she did not drift toward the sarcophagi to admire the Dark Bloods within them.

  Instead, she walked directly to the back, where the smooth walls of the great lab gave way to the old hewn corridor. Here, the ancient cells remained untouched by time or history. Only the locks on the iron bars were new—as were the living samples kept behind them.

  “The one on the end, my liege,” Corban said, waving Ammon away.