by Ted Dekker
Michael released her, leaping over toppled blocks, knives in hand already. She rushed after the Rippers, suddenly eager for protection regardless of what awaited them. She barely sidestepped a two-foot boulder and spilled out of the passage.
The assembly grounds lay at the center of an open-air arena carved from the limestone, with thirty or forty rows of tiered bench seating around the circumference. But it was the scene that greeted her, lit by a hundred torches, that pushed her heart into her throat.
No fewer than five hundred Dark Bloods lined the tiers, their black-and-gold eyes fixed on the Rippers spread out to Jordin’s left, ready for their prince’s order, hands poised to snatch at weapons.
Jordin’s lungs were devoid of breath. How had they known?
The grounds lay in perfect silence. She scanned the tiers. She was wrong—the Bloods numbered closer to a thousand. They were utterly still, waiting for some command, showing not a hint of concern for the elusive Rippers trapped before them at last.
They had to turn back!
The thought screamed through Jordin’s mind and then was gone, replaced by the certainty that Roland would never show such weakness. And neither would she. A Nomad would have run once, but they were no longer Nomads; they were Mortal, however divided by blood type now. Defiance lived in their blood. In the face of death, it sprang to fiery life.
Five Dark Bloods stood abreast on a platform that served as a stage, hands folded and at ease. She couldn’t see their faces—only by the red markings on their breastplates did she note that they were commanders. On either side of the stage, dark banners—the ancient compass of Sirin without its markings, a single golden circle on a black background—lifted silently with the gusting air.
No sign of Feyn.
Roland stood, feet planted at the ready and arms loosely at his sides, hood thrown back from his face. His warriors appeared no more concerned than their prince, though their minds were surely sifting through options unapparent to Jordin. Angles of attack, splitting the enemy, a means through the sea of Bloods.
One last, deadly stand.
Deadly, because they had nothing to lose.
“Too many,” Michael muttered in a hushed tone. Roland’s keen hearing would have easily picked up the words.
“Hold.” Roland responded, barely above a whisper, his voice calm.
“There’s a better way,” Michael said.
Roland ignored her and began to walk forward, hand on the sword at his waist, eyes on the five commanders on the stage. He walked thirty paces before stopping and turning to slowly scan the horde.
His voice thundered through the arena with uncompromised power. “I am Roland, Prince of the Immortals, slayer of thousands. My enemy is Dark Blood. You, who have yet to strike down even one of my Rippers.”
He paced, scanning the Bloods with defiant eyes. Without fear…. Jordin knew he felt none. As though in answer, her own heart swelled with the kind of boldness familiar only to those who have faced insurmountable odds and surrendered to fate.
Then she remembered that she was the only living Sovereign.
Boldness melted away.
“You see only twenty before you,” Roland said, sweeping his arm toward his warriors. “Send down fifty, and I alone will show you how a single Immortal earns his rank.”
“Careful!” Michael whispered.
He was stalling. Jordin knew it, Michael knew it. Even now, in the face of a thousand, the mind of the prince was searching out any strategy that might see them past these Bloods and into the palace. But there was no way for twenty Rippers to prevail against a storm of Dark Bloods. No number of arrows and knives could fend off such a swarm, the moment they chose to attack.
But why hadn’t they?
The answer presented itself in that moment. It wasn’t the Immortals they were after.
It was her. They wanted her blood. If they knew Sovereign blood wouldn’t succumb to Reaper, any hope of an antidote would come from her veins.
Would they take her alive?
“And so you stand there considering your fate,” Roland called out, “knowing that you must obey your maker when she calls you to die.”
The commanders made no move.
“There’s a better way,” Michael said again, defying Roland’s command for her to hold her tongue. Silence ensued, but for all Jordin knew they were communicating in tones too low for her to hear.
But the fact that Michael expressed as much concern as she did, sister to Roland or not, was deeply disconcerting. This was all a bluff. There was no way through the horde before them. So then why stall?
The commander at center stage suddenly stepped forward and faced them under the light of two tall torches on either side, arms strangely limp at his side. His voice was strong but strained.
“Give us the Sovereign, and we will spare the rest.” She knew the voice, despite its throaty depth. “Give us Jordin.”
Something about him…. his face was slightly heavier and his skin pale, etched with dark veins. But it was the way he held himself, as though his limbs were animated not by his own will, but that of another. The set of that jaw, the absolute war within those eyes….
Rom. Rom turned Dark Blood.
Rom, standing with Feyn’s minions, under her authority.
Jordin moved before she knew what she hoped to accomplish, walking toward Roland with quick steps.
“Back!” Michael snapped.
She had no intention of going back.
Roland hadn’t turned despite being aware of her approach.
She stopped three paces to the prince’s right and stared at Rom, whose dark eyes looked at her, black as ravens trapped in a cage.
“You play a dangerous game,” Roland said in a low voice.
“So do you,” she replied, eyes fixed forward.
To Rom she said, so all could hear, “The virus has been released. Mattius released it before they killed him. Every Dark Blood and Immortal on earth will be dead in days. Hours, perhaps. Roland will never allow the Dark Bloods to take me alive. You and I will be his first kills. Surely you can see that.”
His response came slow, heavy with emotion and conviction at once. “I am my Maker’s, and I have my orders. If you come willingly you will live—”
“No, Rom. Feyn will use me and kill me, the same way she will kill you.” She’d meant her words about Roland’s intent to kill her as a bluff, but knew she’d spoken the truth. Allowing Feyn to take her hostage so he could run and hide would only add insult to injury. And Roland would never allow that.
She had to offer them whatever misinformation she could conjure up to buy more time.
“I spoke to Mattius before finding Roland. Sovereign blood must be of the purest kind if any hope of an antivirus would come from it. I am the world’s only living Sovereign. If I die, so does Feyn. Allow us to pass, if only to save Feyn!”
He stood in silence.
“He’s lost, Jordin,” Roland murmured. “He can’t save you.”
“And you can?” she said, her lips barely moving.
“Give us Jordin and the rest of you can leave this arena alive,” Rom said. “These are the only orders that matter.”
She felt both outrage and empathy for Rom, so gripped by a power beyond his will. And grief; there was no way she could reach him before the virus ravaged his body.
“There’s only one way out,” Roland said under his breath. “Only one.”
“Which way?”
“Through the darkness.”
The only way out was through her blood and that was no true way out either, she thought. Had Jonathan meant for her to die surrounded by Dark Bloods, as he had? Was death life’s legacy? Was this the salvation his blood offered the living? Better to not have been born at all than suffer as they had since his death!
Roland was walking toward her.
“Your maker wants Sovereign blood to create an antivirus?” He reached Jordin and ran his fingers across her back as he crossed behind her. “This one
soul for the lives of my Rippers, allowing me the freedom to return with my army and crush you all or die in battle?” He stopped and faced Rom, his hand on Jordin’s shoulder. “This is what you require, Rom?”
He didn’t answer.
“Then you will have your Sovereign. On my terms.”
He gripped her arm and pulled her around, walking back toward Michael. The twenty Rippers stood poised.
“The moment the first one moves, Michael,” he said under his breath, “come to me quickly. Alive.”
For the space of six full strides nothing happened behind them. What Roland had in mind, she couldn’t know. But neither could the Bloods.
Dull thumps sounded behind her and she twisted to see that not one but dozens of Bloods were dropping to the ground, like black stones falling on hard earth.
But these stones had powerful legs and were already sprinting, faster than any Immortal could move. They emptied the tiers and flooded the assembly grounds, a swarm of minions intent on their prey.
“They—”
Before Jordin could finish her warning, Roland swept her into his arms and was walking with sure steps, ignoring the commotion behind him, following the other Rippers as they began streaming back into the tunnel like a line of bats flying into a cave.
All except Michael and Cain, who streaked toward the rush of Dark Bloods, a swiftly formed rear guard, ready to thwart the enemy long enough to ensure safe exit of their comrades.
The Bloods were coming too quickly! Hundreds were now on the ground, swarming.
Roland threw her over his shoulder as he might a mere gunnysack. She twisted in time to catch a clear view of the dervish that was Michael and Cain, tearing into the leading edge of Dark Bloods as they flooded the sand around them.
She heard the swift sing of steel—distinct, even to Jordin’s ear—against the heavy crash of Dark Blood armor. A head went sailing into the sky, the pale face agape in shock. Michael dropped her sword in a deadly arc, and three more went crashing to the ground without the benefit of legs. Cain’s hands flashed from his hip. The impact of his knives sent two Bloods sprawling back into those behind them. He swung, relieving one of sword and arm, and sliced through the armor and ribs of another.
As the darkness of the passage narrowed like an iris behind them, Jordin saw the Bloods descend by the hundreds. A battle cry she knew to be Michael’s pierced the air. They backpedaled in a flurry of steel and blood, slowing the leading edge of Bloods. A sea of black folded around the two Rippers.
Michael and Cain had been overtaken.
Roland stopped short. He spun around and gazed down the tunnel as Dark Bloods surged past the point where Michael and Cain had fallen.
His body trembled beneath her. A ferocious grunt made his rage clear.
Without another moment to mourn his sister’s death, he rushed deeper into the darkness and turned down the first tunnel, sprinting behind the others. Complete darkness enveloped Jordin as the clash of melee faded in the distance.
Roland remained silent, his breath a deep and deadly rhythm. Michael and Cain had bought precious seconds with their lives. The maze and its darkness would buy them more. Enough.
But Jordin knew that a new darkness had entered Roland’s mind.
A darkness that would be the death of them all.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
FEYN STALKED the length of the Sovereign office. Stopped once to stare out the great window at the changeling night. Paced again. Gone were the long velvets, replaced by leather leggings and boots latched over the knee. Gone, the amber earrings, only the gilt of her cuff reflecting the gold blazing behind her eyes. A short sword with jeweled hilt rode her hip. Deadly, almost, as its owner.
Roland and his Rippers had escaped. Not only with their lives, but the Sovereign girl in tow.
She stopped at the window and stared out. The clouds over Byzantium shifted high against elusive stars.
A thousand Dark Bloods. Twenty Immortals.
Escaped. Even grossly outnumbered, they had eluded the sheer force of numbers.
The two Immortal bodies had proven useless—fascinating, perhaps, to her team of alchemists on another day, but as prone to Reaper as the Dark Bloods.
As she was herself.
Fury swept through her at the ineptness of her army, the geriatric speed of her so-called master alchemist, the fate dealt her by an unnamed Sovereign. Fury at the very blood of Jonathan himself.
But there was something far worse within her, spreading up through her heart and into her mind like acid: fear. As base as any creature, as common as the Corpse. She hadn’t felt its fingers—not like this—for more than a decade.
In all of this, her thoughts had turned to one unlikely target. Saric.
He had come to her as a Corpse. The realization had only hit her after his departure that when Reaper claimed its last victims, Saric would be left standing.
And that was the bitterest pill of all.
She had wracked her brain, pushed Corban to his limits. But the alchemist who had perfected the dark serum claimed he knew of no way to reverse it. And yet there was a way. Saric. And even he had left unchallenged, taking the secret in his blood with him.
Hades knew where he might be now. But he was out there somewhere. And though she’d sent trackers in search of him, somehow she knew he would not be found. Saric always found a way to live.
Hate twisted in her mind like a corkscrew.
She heard a soft shuffle behind her. She glanced up through a break in the clouds at the cold brilliance of the moon, drew a slow breath, willed her heart to slow.
And then pivoted on her heel.
Five Dark Blood commanders stood before her—those who’d stood on the platform of the assembly arena only an hour earlier. No, four commanders and Rom. And though he was dressed the same as the commanders beside him, he stood as though he were bound, still resisting what could not be defied.
Near her desk stood Corban, the stent and tubing that had become the trademark of his work in his hands, the bags under his eyes so dark they looked like bruises against his white skin.
She appraised the line of Dark Bloods before her—the great girth of their shoulders, the cast of their eyes toward the floor, the broad knuckles and thickly muscled thighs. Each of them hers. Hers to walk the streets and cut down her enemies, each of them driven by one will—hers—like fingers of her own hand.
Saric. Roland. Jordin. All had slipped through a thousand of her fingers. Not only that, but each of them had spirited away keys to her own salvation.
“We have one day to prepare!” she said, her voice ringing out as she walked slowly down the line of commanders. “Roland is on a suicide mission. He knows he cannot live. He will not limp off into the waste to die on the sand, but he will return to take as many with him as he can. Rom has identified one of the bodies left behind as that of Roland’s sister.” Her lips curled. “How poetic.”
She paused before the last of the commanders and lifted his chin with a finger. His gaze remained fixed to the floor past her.
She dropped her hand.
“We will give him the battle he wants. A battle the likes of which he has never seen! Here, in Byzantium. Our birthright. Our land. Our terms.”
She strode to the other end of the line, past Rom, to stand a hand’s breadth in front of the first commander. “You will clear a mile swath around the Citadel.”
“My liege—the Rippers will avoid the battlefield for darker streets,” the man before her said. “There are a thousand homes in the sectors south and east of here.”
In an instant, her hand was on her hilt. With a hiss, steel slid free of the scabbard as she shoved the blade up under the edge of the man’s breastplate. The man’s face registered silent shock as a thin rivulet of blood trickled from the corner of his open mouth.
“Roland sees only blood, you fool! He will throw himself against our army.”
She yanked the sword free and turned away as the Dark Blood thu
dded to his knees behind her.
“We will give Roland as many Dark Bloods as he can imagine on a battlefield he cannot resist. The people in those homes will have one hour to evacuate or they will die. I want every structure leveled by morning!” She turned and shot Corban a pointed glare. Even harried and sleepless, he nodded, having gone even paler than before.
“You will bring me the master engineer at once. All the power on the city grid will be redirected to the Citadel for our defenses. We will light the battlefield like the sun.” She hefted the sword in her hand, rolled the hilt along her palm. “I want two thousand pitch torches illuminating every shadow within a mile. Shut down the rest of the city. Call in the guards from the posts beyond the perimeter. All eighty thousand will be here, placed as directed.”
She strode to the commander who lay toppled, unmoving within an inky pool of blood, and walked to the second commander in line. Looked him directly in the face. He made the mistake of looking back.
“You dare look in my eyes after such a failure?”
“No, my liege. I—”
His eyes went wide as she sheathed her sword in his middle.
The next one did not make the same mistake.
“Arcane,” she said. His breath was serrated. She could smell the sweat rolling down his neck.
“My liege?” he whispered.
“Carry out these orders without compromise.”
“I will, my liege.”
She lowered the sword, tip to the floor. Twirled it once. Blood splattered the marble, speckled the black of her boots. She lifted it, walked another two steps to the next man, set the tip down lightly again. A twirl of metal. His throat visibly worked as he swallowed. The cords in his neck stood out; he was clearly prepared for the swing of her blade. She lifted her fingers from the hilt, let the weapon clatter to the ground.
She turned on her heel. “Kill him, Arcane,” she whispered.
By the time she had crossed to Corban, the man’s grunt had filled the chamber behind her. She turned back in time to see the two men remaining: Arcane, his short sword dark and naked in his hand, and Rom, stiff yet, an arm’s reach away.
She stopped before the alchemist. His hair, normally so neatly groomed, was held back from his face in a tangled mess. His rumpled robe hung on thin and aging shoulders; he had lost weight in the last two days. But most telling of all was the shadow of resignation lurking about his eyes.