Sovereign

by Ted Dekker

She nudged her stallion with her heels and trotted toward the far right where Marten waited.

  “Lead us,” Roland said to Jordin, “but I will take point. I won’t allow anyone to put us in danger for lack of sight. Direct me from behind.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Without a word, twenty horses to her right broke from the line and plunged down the steep slope, riders leaned back in the saddle, singularly focused on their mission. Hooves pounded, but the black-cloaked Rippers seemed to float like phantoms down the hill.

  Jordin felt her pulse surge as the warriors blended into the night. How many times had the Immortals entered the city in this way? How often had they cursed Feyn’s new Order of death by dealing their own? She was witnessing a wonder—nothing short of magic, however dark.

  Could a race so deathly beautiful—birthed to life by Jonathan himself—be so wrong?

  The sound of thundering hooves grew distant, leaving the night to silence once again. Not another word was spoken as they awaited Roland’s command. A hundred thoughts began to race through Jordin’s mind.

  None of them good.

  Roland’s command came by silent action. He stepped his stallion forward five paces and stopped. He turned, locked gazes with Jordin, and then he was off, spurring his mount down the slope at a full run.

  As one, Michael, Cain, and the Rippers under his command broke on his heels, leaving Jordin alone for a moment. And then she dug her heels into her mount and gave the horse its head.

  The stallion knew its place among the others well and took her after them at a full gallop. The still night came to life—dust in her nostrils, wind in her face—carrying away thoughts of what awaited.

  Roland didn’t seem to care that she’d fallen behind, his mission was set and his focus was clear. Sovereign or not, she would catch him—hadn’t she always? And so she did, thundering through the pack to ride just behind and to his right.

  She expected him to slow before reaching the barriers, but he didn’t. He leaned low in the saddle and sped—directly toward the concrete wall the height of a horse’s shoulders.

  His stallion left the ground gracefully, as if to mock its crushing weight. Needing no guidance from her, Jordin’s mount followed, lifting her to the sky in a powerful leap that took her breath away.

  They landed with a bone-crushing jar and galloped on without breaking stride.

  Only when Roland reached the middle of the empty street did he slow to a trot, head forward, attention fixed.

  They were in Dark Blood territory. She pulled up beside him, comforted by his strong presence on such dangerous ground. There was no breeze—if any Dark Blood came within half a mile, he would know by their scent alone.

  “Direction is yours,” he said as the others fell in directly behind.

  “Left at the next intersection,” she said.

  “And then?”

  She hesitated. “And then I will tell you.”

  Roland glanced at her. He alone was hoodless, as if to make plain that his place as leader was meant to be seen by all.

  “Then you’d better keep up, my little Sovereign. We take to these streets like the wind.”

  “We’ll be heard.”

  He didn’t bother responding but kicked his mount to a full gallop, leaning into the night.

  Jordin followed hard, twenty Rippers behind her. The thunder of hooves echoed off the buildings, announced the coming storm.

  She pushed her horse to catch him. Taking the turn, the prince made no move to slow for direction but took them straight down the middle of the road.

  Lead him, Jordin.

  “Left at the end!” she cried.

  Instead he veered into an alleyway and cut behind the street she’d indicated. Naturally, the Immortals knew their hunting grounds as well as the ones who’d built the city. Likely better than Feyn herself.

  He followed the alley the length of two blocks before cutting right and rejoining the street Jordin had first indicated. She assumed he’d simply avoided possible contact, alerted by his senses. Tonight he wasn’t hunting Feyn’s minions.

  Though countless Corpses had surely heard the approaching ruckus and peered out of their windows to see dark Rippers flying by, they encountered only one Corpse in the half hour it took them to reach the edge of the ruins. They’d left the older man gawking beneath a streetlamp. On they rushed, loudly enough to summon the dead.

  And then they were only a hundred meters from the edge of the ruins.

  Roland knew before she told him—how, she had no idea. He suddenly jerked back on his reins and lifted a hand. Her horse pulled up hard, nearly pitching her off its back.

  “What is it?”

  He stared down the vacant street. The fence surrounding the abandoned ruins was in sight…. she’d told him nothing of the place. Could he smell the Sovereign scent beneath the ruins?

  His face was drawn tight; eyes wide with unmistakable concern.

  “What is it?”

  He gestured, and half of the Immortals swept to his right flank as he urged his horse into a swift trot. Jordin kept pace, her mind spinning with questions. Dark Bloods?

  They reached the edge of the compound, and Roland studied the ruins, riding parallel to the fence. No sign of movement or Dark Bloods. A quick glance—every Immortal was keenly fixed on the compound.

  Only when she saw that a ten-foot section of the perimeter fence had been cut away did Jordin know something was wrong. She rode on, heart lodged in her throat, hoping that her fears were misguided. There could be many reasons for the breach in the fence. It meant nothing.

  But Roland seemed to know more.

  He guided his mount through the opening, followed by the others who fanned out wide once past it, angling for the hedge that hid the Sanctuary entrance.

  But there too was a problem, one far more telling: the hedge before the entrance had been torn away.

  Jordin kicked her horse into a run, bounding over heaps of rubble and large stone blocks.

  The entrance was gone. Stone had been piled up in its stead. Perhaps Mattius had ordered the opening closed for protection. But that didn’t explain the trampled hedge.

  She slid from her horse and ran ten paces to the stone pile, frantic. Most of them were the size of a human head, none larger than a horse’s, and they came away easily in her panic.

  “Help me!”

  Roland sat upright in his saddle, scanning the perimeter warily. “Do it,” he ordered.

  Three of Cain’s men dropped to the ground and quickly cleared enough of the rocks to reveal the darkness beyond. Jordin stood back, panting, fear lodged in her throat.

  Roland dropped to the ground and walked to her, eyes on the gap in the wall. “Michael and Cain, with me.” He stepped past her. “The rest stay here. You know what to do.”

  “No, you can’t go in,” Jordin whispered harshly. “If Mattius—”

  “We’re beyond that, my dear.”

  He ducked into the tunnel, followed by Michael and Cain, neither of whom gave her more than a passing glance.

  She looked over her shoulder and saw that the others were forming into a wide arc, horses facing away from the entrance, sentries of the prince.

  Jordin edged into the unlit opening, aware of the deep darkness beyond. Roland had already vanished below with Michael and Cain. She took the flight of stone steps by memory.

  She reached the bottom landing and was about to call out in the darkness when dim light flooded the cavern. Roland stood at a wall-torch he’d apparently lit for her benefit, and was looking back to see that she’d made it.

  “Where’s the virus?” he asked.

  Unable to form words, she rushed to the torch, snatched it from him, and ran past Roland, her mind lost. Down the tunnel that fed into the main chamber.

  The moment she spun into the massive cavern where they normally congregated, she saw that they were gone. They would have put up a fight here. Both Dark Bloods and Sovereigns would have fallen here. Bu
t there was no one and no sign of blood that she could see.

  Taken captive then?

  She hurried through, searching the corners for any missed sign in the dim light.

  “Check every door!” Roland’s order echoed through the cavern.

  Jordin pushed herself into a run again, thinking now only of one room: the council chamber. She reached the large door, twisted the handle, and shoved the door open.

  Coils of smoke wafted past her, flooding her nostrils with an odor as offensive and putrid as any she could remember. Two oil lamps were burning, one on each wall. But the smoke didn’t come from them….

  But from the charred bodies on the floor.

  She staggered back. Her heart refused to pump blood; her lungs ceased drawing breath.

  More than ten bodies. More than twenty.

  All of them!

  “Here, Roland!” Michael called. “The laboratory!”

  She blinked at the sight, fighting to understand, knowing that there was nothing to comprehend beyond what her eyes told her already. She didn’t know what to do—her mind was no longer processing thought properly.

  “Jordin!”

  Roland. His voice urgent.

  She reeled back out of the chamber, staggered. Roland was standing in the doorway to the laboratory thirty paces down the hall.

  “Come.”

  Her feet refused to move.

  “Come!” he thundered.

  Jordin stumbled over something on the floor, caught herself with one hand, and lurched toward him, hardly aware of her feet.

  And then he was there, grabbing her arm to steady her, pulling her down and into the lab.

  A thin veil of smoke partially obscured the instruments and broken vials of alchemy strewn across the work benches. But Jordin’s eyes were immediately drawn to what she saw on the ground.

  She could not mistake Mattius’s partially burned body, dead eyes staring wide at the ceiling, his blistered mouth twisted in its final cry of horror.

  His bloody fingers clung to a single vial sealed by a cork and resin.

  The virus, surely. Mattius would go for no other vial in such dire straits. The thing for which they had gone to such desperate measures. For which all the others had lost their lives.

  Roland strode past her, crouched by the burned body, and pried the stiff fingers from the vial stuck against the palm. The Immortals had what they’d come for. If Rom was Dark Blood, she was now the only living Sovereign. And then Roland would make her Immortal, leaving no trace of Sovereign blood on the earth.

  Jonathan’s legacy had met a gruesome end.

  He slowly stood and stepped back, eyes fixed on the vial stuck in Mattius’s hand. Bloodied. The alchemist’s palm was cut. Not by a Dark Blood’s sword, but by glass.

  The vial lay in two pieces, snapped at its center. He’d broken it in his own hand. There was an “R” marked on the upper half of the broken vial. Reaper.

  Jordin looked up at Roland. His eyes bore a hole through her very soul. He knew as well as she: the Prince of Immortals, glowing with life now as he stood tall, was already a dead man. Along with all of those under his rule who boasted Immortality.

  Mattius had released the virus.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  FEYN STOOD before the great desk of the Sovereign office, staring at the lone object sitting on its surface but not really seeing it. Her mind was in a coil, the events of the last twenty-four hours spinning like a tempest around her.

  The ten thousand Dark Bloods had split among three sectors of the city. South, Rom had said. They had gone southwest, south central, and southeast and combed every block, storming apartments, homes, and commercial buildings, offices and basilicas. Left fleeing Corpses and screams in their wake as they searched back rooms, closets, stairwells, attics, rooftops. Even the old crypt of one of the basilicas. At least eight deaths had been reported, many more beatings. None of this was uncommon where Dark Bloods were concerned, and was of no concern to her.

  All that had mattered was finding the Sovereigns.

  It had taken seven hours for word to return that the Sovereigns had been found and summarily slain.

  Her minions had come back with no bodies, under orders to kill and burn. But they’d brought racks of vials…. three of them marked with an ominous “R.” Reaper.

  Corban had immediately sequestered himself in his laboratory, feverishly working to unlock the secrets of the viral code. An hour ago, Ammon had come to report: It was indeed a virus. It appeared lethal.

  Feyn stepped around the side of the desk, sagged for a moment against its edge before slowly sitting down in the great chair behind it. She clasped the chair by the arms until her knuckles went white.

  The Sovereigns were dead, their heretical coven purified by fire. She would have been deeply satisfied except for one thing: the unsettling report that they had struck down a Sovereign alchemist in the underground lab.

  The look on Corban’s face as they received the news had echoed her own dread—her own rage that even the Sovereign of the world could not know what events had transpired in the moments before they’d found him.

  Had he released the virus at first alarm? Or had her Dark Bloods killed him before he could consign them all to a death sentence?

  She remained utterly still, as one does in the eye of a storm. But that storm was nothing compared to the squall within her heart—one made worse by the knowledge that she, the most powerful being on earth, could do nothing but wait as Corban tried to unravel the virus and create an antivirus before it was too late. Every passing minute was one fewer that she might have left in this life. One fewer that Corban might have to create an antidote. One fewer before she learned the truth, for herself, of Bliss or Hades.

  Strange…. she hadn’t believed in either when she’d emerged from stasis. Hadn’t contemplated death even once since the moment before she’d been cut down fifteen years ago. But now she wondered for the first time in years about those who had gone on to the next life, assuming there was one.

  Her gaze lifted to the heart in the glass jar standing on her desk again. It had belonged to the living once. Where was its owner now?

  A knock sounded on the side door. Adrenaline spiked in her veins, disconcerting her cultivated stillness. She bowed her head, touched her fingertips together, elbows on the arms of her chair, and drew a slow breath through her nostrils. She might have prayed in that posture, but the only Maker she recognized was herself.

  When she felt the steadying of her pulse, she lifted her head and said at last, “Come.”

  She pushed up from the desk as the man entered and walked toward his kneeling form. A Dark Blood, young, his hair like a dark waterfall about his shoulders.

  So Corban was still working.

  “Yes?”

  “My liege,” the man said, lifting his head only enough to stare at the toes of her leather boots.

  “Well?”

  “A citizen unknown to us has come with an urgent message. He waits for you in the Senate Hall.”

  Annoyance flared up her neck. “What do you mean he waits for me in the Senate Hall? A Corpse?”

  “Yes, my liege.”

  “And does this Corpse have a name?”

  “No, my liege.”

  “Nameless Corpses don’t just walk into the Citadel, let alone the Senate Hall.”

  “No, my liege.”

  She stared at him.

  “My Dark Bloods return from routing the south of the city, and you come to say a stranger expects me to meet with him?” She reached down, seized him by his beautiful hair, and lifted him up onto—and then off of—his knees. “Whom do you obey? Me or him?”

  “You, my liege! He said to tell you that he’s come to see the white dove.”

  The meaning of the phrase fell into her mind. White dove?

  She set the man down and stepped back, stunned by the implications of those two words.

  For a moment, she stood unmoving. The room seemed to rota
te around her of its own accord, as if rewinding time. She couldn’t put thought to the words.

  A Corpse.

  It couldn’t be.

  “Fetch Seth,” she said at last, barely hearing the words over the thunder of her heart.

  “My liege?”

  “Seth!” she cried. “Get him immediately!”

  “Seth…. but Seth is dead, my liege.”

  Dead. At her hand.

  “Come.”

  She stepped past the man and willed herself down the passageway, followed quickly by the Blood. They went out through a side door before it descended toward the laboratories and ancient subterranean chambers—into the public corridor.

  White dove. How long had it been since she’d heard the words?

  She gestured to one of the guards lining the corridor, one of perhaps thirty spaced at even stations. Officials and their assistants, administrators and visiting royals, stopped at the sight of her, instinctively drew back beneath the arched and gilded ceiling, dropping to their knees, eyes averted. She strode past them, her pace picking up speed, not bothering with the pretense of decorum. The guard fell in behind her.

  She pulled open the great door of the senate antechamber and crossed the room in quick strides as the younger Dark Blood rushed ahead to haul open the great door of the chamber itself.

  It was lit within. The electric lights of the unseen panel had been switched on.

  She entered, walking slowly along the back row of the political theater, her pulse a drum against her temples.

  Then she saw him—a lone figure sitting behind the stone table on the dais. In the Sovereign’s seat.

  His head was bowed beneath a cowl, face obscured in shadow.

  She forced her step to an even stride as she walked down the great aisle, remembering the stride of the Sovereign—the true Sovereign—ruler of the world. She could all but feel the gold beading of her bodice glinting beneath the artificial light, the heavy gold of the ring hurting her fingers, which were clenched into a fist.

  She made her way up the stairs, stepped onto the edge of the dais, her eyes not once leaving the figure. She crossed to the stone table and stopped, facing him squarely.

  The man’s hands were folded before him. Dry, cracked, and rugged. The robe he wore was coarse and threadbare in places along the sleeve. A grizzled, dirty-gray beard fell just to the neckline of the robe. The man’s mouth was parched, lips peeling.