Sovereign

by Ted Dekker

  Again no response. Perhaps Corban’s words were getting through.

  The alchemist retrieved a small plastic bag and placed the finger inside it. “I’ve injected you with a clotting agent. It should help with the bleeding, if not with the pain.”

  Feyn had thought it an anesthetic of some sort. And yet in all this time he had not screamed or cried out. The drizzle of blood slowed to a trickle, the stump of the finger angry and red despite the clean cut.

  Rom’s gaze traveled to the glass through which Feyn looked. A vein had started to throb in his temple.

  “Can you defy your master?” he said quietly.

  “To what end?” Corban said, his back still turned.

  “If only to know that you can.”

  “I will never.”

  “Because you can’t. You, better than anyone, know it. You have no choice. It was bred into you with the blood that made you.”

  “A mercy by my Sovereign maker. I will never have the opportunity to defy her new Order.”

  “Only the dead make no choice.”

  The alchemist paused.

  “Have you loved her by choice? But no, you can’t, can you? The dead cannot love. Your master commands obedience but goes without love. You wonder why we would do as we have. The answer is love. You tell yourself in your mind that I am mad. But do you see a madman before you?”

  “The deceived are always mad.” Corban was looking curiously at him.

  “And yet even your master knows I’m not mad. She knows that I have never proven wrong. Rash? Yes. Fanatical? Perhaps. But mad…. never.”

  He paused, taking several breaths through his nostrils. When he spoke again, his eyes were fixed on the window.

  “From the day I brought you out of your chamber and took you outside the city, you knew I carried the truth. The day I came for you after you awoke from stasis, you said you needed no saving, but the day you met Jonathan, you knew it was true. All of it. And what I say is true now.”

  A cold shiver raced along Feyn’s arms. Could he see her? But no, he only hoped she was watching.

  “And now I’ve come because the truth remains. You will die. I’ve come one last time to save you. For the truth. For love.”

  Something about him…. He was fervent. Magnificent, even in his haggard state. He had won her with his conviction before. With fevered and persuasive arguments. She knew then that he would weather any experiment, any pain visited upon him by an entire team of alchemists. One thing was true: he believed. A conviction without evidence—without even a living leader. It amazed her. It disconcerted her.

  The dark vein itched beneath the surface of her hand, and she scratched it, one of her nails drawing blood.

  He’d been right about many things, that was true. But how many lives had he spent in the chasing of this thing—of this faith in something to give his life a purpose greater than the dream even of Bliss or the fear of Hades? It would be a mercy to kill him now.

  “Love, you say,” Corban was saying. “And does love give you less pain? Less anger? More peace? I would think your kind must be a bundle of nerves living as you do now. Filled with misery.”

  Rom didn’t respond. There could be no doubt that his kind knew misery.

  Corban pushed Rom’s head up by the chin, and fixed it to the back of the chair with a leather strap across his forehead. Another, beneath his chin.

  His faith would kill him, and he would let it.

  The alchemist retrieved a small metal spreader from the table and returned to the chair. He pulled open Rom’s left eye and fixed the edges of the device to his upper and lower lid until the green of his eyeball fairly bulged from his skull.

  Rom might die in a pool of his own faith. For what? To prove something? To supposedly save her? No. Because he believed, however misguided that belief was.

  As such, he was many times the threat they had thought him. The Sovereigns had laid down their lives to the Immortals. To her Dark Bloods. Not because they’d been overpowered, but because they were willing to die for belief. Pain or threat of death would prove insufficient to bring them into submission. Reason could not dissuade them.

  And that made them deadly foes. Even if Rom and his band of holdouts didn’t present an immediate challenge to her rule, they would make more of their kind, all who possessed the capacity for rebellion. She could not tolerate any such threat to her Sovereignty.

  Rom was the key to his kind.

  If he would respond to neither pain nor reason, she would earn his trust. Hadn’t he done the same to her once?

  Corban had returned to the chair with a uniquely crafted instrument that resembled a rounded claw with a long handle. Its edges glinted in the torchlight as he carefully guided the blade toward Rom’s left eye.

  Feyn stepped forward and flicked a switch. The electrical fixture overhead stuttered to industrial life and flooded the chamber with light.

  The alchemist paused as she pushed a button next to the switch.

  “Leave the eye,” she said. “He’s already blind.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE IMMORTALS led Jordin and Kaya northeast into the canyon lands once known only to the earliest Nomads centuries before they’d escaped north to greater Europa, there to live free of Order’s statutes. Jordin had heard the campfire tales of deep, twisting gorges and towering cliffs. It was said that unless one knew the maze of the canyon lands like the lines of one’s own palm, one could get lost within them, never to be found.

  The air cooled as darkness settled around the four horses and their riders. The Immortals had kept the council of their own thoughts, characterized by silence as much as the Mortals had been by frivolity. Perhaps it was only because they were dressed for engagement and wary of exposure, but Jordin sensed that it was something more. They didn’t waste words or movement. Even their breathing seemed exceptionally controlled, as though it were not an unconscious act at all.

  This, she understood. Her own breath had lengthened, each long pull into her lungs laden with sensory meaning.

  Riding behind Rislon, she found herself at first put off by the impossibly close proximity to the powerful Immortal and the pallid skin she imagined beneath the black shroud covering his face and head. She wondered how many Sovereigns he had killed—if his was the sword that had cut down any one of those she’d called friend. But as they wound their way through the canyons, their faces, once so clear to her, were shadows before her mind’s eye; their memories distant against the texture of the canyon stone and the powerful muscles of the stallion beneath her. Even as a second rider, she felt one with the powerful animal and the deafening pound of its massive heart. Even with Rislon himself.

  Kaya rode with her arms wrapped around Sephan, cheek pressed against his back, watching Jordin with round eyes. She appeared neither frightened nor uncomfortable, but lost in wonder.

  It occurred to Jordin that she wouldn’t recognize any of their host captors among a throng of other Immortals—their clothing was darkly uniform, their faces wrapped in black muslin. One of the unnamed other two might be Roland himself and she would never know it.

  No, that she would know.

  Still, their proclivity to remain covered even so far from civilization was a mystery.

  They’d traveled three hours and entered a deep canyon by the time Rislon slowed his mount to a walk, angling it toward a fissure no more than five paces wide in the cliff face. She followed the line of the sheer rock up—there, where the cliff met the sky. Sentries, seven to a side, silhouetted against the pulsing stars. As imperceptible as shadows, she would never have seen them without keen Immortal sense.

  As they drew closer to the breach, a dozen mounted Immortals joined the sentries on either side. Then a hundred more. They looked down in perfect silence. Surely they wouldn’t express such interest in the approach of any random Immortal delivered from the wastelands. Word must have traveled from posts unseen by her.

  For the last hour, Jordin had all but forgotten h
er mission. Now memory of it filled her with morbid dread. She’d come in a bid to collect the heads of her two greatest enemies: Feyn. Roland. But now, at the sight of the Immortals lining the cliff, she knew that any attempt to collect Roland’s head would result in nothing short of certain death—hers. Kaya’s. Even if she managed to convince the prince to join forces in her mission to kill Feyn, thousands of loyal Immortals stood between her and Roland himself.

  One of the stallions snorted. The sound reverberated in the narrow passage. Above, a dozen riders had matched their plodding pace along each rim of the cliff. One errant move, one suspicious motion, and she knew she would find her heart pinned to her spine by a dozen arrows. She would hear the twang of the bowstring, see each arrow’s lazy approach, shift in the saddle to avoid the projectile. But she couldn’t avoid them all.

  The sheer rock walls on either side widened, yielding to a massive natural bowl carved into the cliffs. A hundred meters across, it was lit by a ring of evenly spaced torches. From the sky, the narrow fissure leading into the large bowl might look like a key. What secrets lay locked in the high cliffs of this Immortal lair?

  Only one that mattered: the Immortal Prince himself, the heart of the blood that now pumped through her own veins.

  To her left, stairs like the ringed seats of an amphitheater hewn in the rock stepped down to a low pool fed by a small nearby fall. Water, in the middle of the wastelands! Three deciduous trees rose from the sand near the water’s edge. Above, one grew directly out of the rock itself.

  Toward the right: two gaping entrances in the rock face. Torchlight glimmered from within, giving the appearance of two glowing eyes. A long, open stable was situated in between.

  By her count, there were only a few dozen horses. Surely there were more nearby. The Sovereigns had estimated Roland’s local force to be in the thousands—and who knew how many Immortals might live beyond the reach of Byzantium, spread out like dark fingers to grasp at the rest of Europa. Could the caves in these cliffs house so many? Surely not.

  So here, then, were his most deadly guerilla warriors and any others deemed necessary to their mission. And yet, the sight before her was not that of a standard war camp.

  Smoke escaped in gray tendrils from two pits on the canyon floor. The smell of roasting meat wafted across the enclave, reminding her she’d gone two days without a proper meal.

  A shade of a figure appeared on the edge of the amphitheater, having emerged from a darkened entrance in the rock near the top of the stair. White fingers clasped the front of a cloak that trailed like an inky spill down the carved stone. A woman, by her movements—confirmed the moment she slid back the hood of the cloak and then dropped the cloak to the stair altogether. Moonlight struck her full in the face, and Jordin barely resisted the urge to gasp; it was the first time she had seen an Immortal’s face, much less a body without its covering. The woman was strikingly beautiful. Even from here she could see the dark stain of her lips, the colorless cheeks that reflected the very stars more than the warm glow of the nearest torch. The long raven’s wing of hair that fell nearly to her waist.

  Beside her, she felt rather than saw Kaya’s rapt attention. The Immortal woman paused and glanced up toward the line of sentries along the cliff, as one takes note of a new scent in the air, before giving a barely perceptible nod. And now Jordin saw that these were not the lithe legs of most women, but they were carved lean. Her shoulders were corded with muscle that comes only from swinging steel.

  She descended down the steps into the pool and then into the water itself until only her shoulders remained above its surface, her hair a black oil spill on the water. The surface rippled, reflecting the firelight of the torches, and Jordin almost shuddered: for a moment, the water seemed as red as blood.

  The woman made no sound but slipped, eyes open, beneath the water for an impossibly long moment before emerging on the other side. She did this twice more, and it occurred to Jordin that she was not bathing for the sake of hygiene, but as though for ritual purity.

  Beyond the pool, the thin waterfall cascaded down a cleft in the rock, freefalling twenty feet to a stone platform, there to slip into the rock before no doubt feeding the pool. A man might stand beneath that fall as the water sluiced over him. For an odd moment Jordin had the image of Roland doing just that, naked, chest thrown out and arms wide, as the Immortals descended to the pool in communion below.

  Was it a vestige of the Sovereign cognition or her mind running away with her?

  “Hold your tongue unless spoken to,” Rislon said, leading them toward the stables where the nameless other two were already dismounting.

  “You need not tell me how to conduct myself among my own,” Jordin replied as they entered the row.

  “The Rippers are not your own, or I would know you. I don’t know what mission you claim to have been sent on by the prince without my knowledge. Until told otherwise, consider yourself a prisoner. Dismount.”

  She slipped off the stallion’s back and landed lightly on the sand. Her thighs were sore from the ride, but she welcomed the discomfort. She’d been born to ride, a Nomad to the bone. It had been too long.

  Kaya, on the other hand, had been born Corpse and only spent days among the Nomad Mortals before Rom and Roland had split ways. Sephan seemed only too willing to help her down before deftly shedding his black head wrap to reveal a black shock of long hair and a goatee against pale flesh. He winked when Kaya stared at him.

  “That goes for you as well, pretty,” Rislon said to Kaya. It was then, with both men’s attention on Kaya and as the stallion shook its head with a jingle of tack, that Jordin dropped her canteen into a nearby pile of hay. She gave it a soft, rubber-soled kick. It slid at an angle inside the nearest stall, behind the front wall. It was the best she could do for now; she dare not take it with her into any closed space filled with keen Immortal noses. Here, at least, the smell of manure might camouflage the canteen’s contents.

  Rislon turned toward the cave entrance farthest to the right. “Follow.”

  The hewn cave walls formed a short tunnel that ended at a large wooden door with three heavy bolts that could be opened from either side but only locked from one: within. Rislon slid the bolts, top to bottom, and then pulled the heavy door open with the handle of the last. It opened outward toward approaching visitors rather than inward on one who might be manning the other side, Jordin noted, a testament to its history as an ancient holdout.

  She had to will her heart to a steady beat as she followed Rislon into the widening inner passage. She knew that he was here somewhere.

  But there was something else. As they passed into the broadening corridor—no more roughly hewn rock but a series of carved arches worthy of any ancient basilica—she had the strange sense that she had come to a place where she belonged.

  Although she’d never been to this place, the blood within her had come home. The jolt within her was exhilaration and panic both. Again, she willed her pulse to calm, to quiet beyond the hearing of Immortal ears.

  Torchlight ahead. And then the arches fell away as the corridor opened into a soaring cavern three stories tall.

  Kaya, beside her, sucked in her breath.

  The space was lit by a massive iron chandelier. At least ten feet in diameter, it was laden with dozens of candles, burned low onto their wicks at the late hour. A broad staircase curled up along the far wall and became a landing large enough for fifty people before descending down the other side, the last step ending just before another small corridor. On the landing, which was supported by giant wooden struts, two Immortals lounged against the balustrade, lazily tracking the small party’s entrance. The candlelight of the chandelier, practically on a level with them, cast its glow in their pale faces. Now Jordin saw that the rail was composed not of iron balusters but a staggering collection of swords, tip down, some with jewel-encrusted hilts.

  Below the landing the floor was covered with thick and exotic rugs and set about with velvet settees, lov
e seats, and wingback chairs, several of which were occupied by men and women in various stages of romantic pursuit or languid intoxication. A man lay sideways over the arms of a heavy chair, eyes following the sinuous movements of a woman dancing to music heard only by her.

  In the middle of the most spacious part of the chamber sprawled an impossibly large wooden table laden with three great candelabras, their tapers burned low, several jugs of wine—she could smell the tannins—and seven Immortals. They lounged against the carved chairs, some of them dangling heavy goblets off wooden armrests.

  Beyond the table, which was surrounded by at least thirty chairs, heavy silk curtains partially obscured the entrance to at least three more corridors on the lower level and one on the upper landing. More silks and tapestries spanned the walls no longer roughly hewn but carved high up with reliefs of serpents amid a star-filled night and, closer to the floor, into windowless seats adorned with cushions below the stone-cold moon.

  The entire chamber was occupied by nearly thirty Immortals, most of their gazes turned to the new arrivals.

  Beside her, Kaya stared as one mesmerized.

  Jordin’s pulse spiked as she took a quick, sweeping inventory of those present. But no, she didn’t recognize any of these faces as those she’d known before, Mortals from the Nomad camp where she’d been raised since a child. Was it possible that Roland had expanded his coven so much? Or had those she’d known before—warriors all—been killed and replaced?

  Jordin became aware of her thickening breath, made worse by her realization that any Immortal familiar with Roland’s new ways would never react with as much apparent wonder as she and Kaya were. She glanced at Rislon, who seemed as aware of her visceral response as she.

  He didn’t need to speak; his deadpan stare said enough.

  “Wait here,” he said, turning to Sephan and adding, “Don’t let the others hurt them.” He strode for the stairs on their right. The eyes of the others were fixed upon them.

  She told herself it didn’t matter what any of them thought of her presence. Roland would know her the moment he saw her and either summarily cut her down or hear her out, if only out of curiosity. If she could get him to listen, she stood a chance.