by Ted Dekker
“What news?”
The alchemist shook his head. “The Immortals are useless. The sample we took from Rom before his conversion is no better. Our efforts to unravel the virus and create an antidote…. useless.”
“There must be something,” Feyn said through gritted teeth.
The alchemist was silent.
She spun back, fixed Rom with a glare.
“What more can be done?”
He turned his head, looked her in the eye, and spoke as though the air were forced from his lungs to form the words. “There is no cure, my lady.”
“I will not accept it!”
Beside her, Corban said, “We are grasping at slivers. We’ve tried everything. The only thing left is Sovereign blood.”
“You had that with him,” she said, jerking her head in Rom’s direction.
“The sample we retained from before his conversion proved…. inconclusive. Perhaps if it were living, taken from the vein…. but even then.” Again, he shook his head.
For a moment, the room spun.
Two days. Two days before the world slipped from her fingers along with her life.
She dropped her gaze to the stent and tubing in his hands.
“You tapped him today?”
“Yes. We will try again.” But his voice told her plainly that he already knew it would yield nothing.
She grabbed the stent and tubing from his thin fingers and strode closer to the candelabra burning on her desk. Jerking up her sleeve by the embroidered cuff, she shoved it back. Without preamble, she stabbed the stent directly into the dark vein running along the crook of her elbow, gestured to Corban, already rushing to her side to quickly connect the vial to the other end of the tube.
“My liege—”
“He claimed for years my blood knew life once. Well, we shall see if he’s right.” Fifteen years ago, it had been enough to send her to her knees on the platform of her own inauguration. To spread her arms to the Keeper’s sword, and to die. The barest hint of remembrance even after the Corpse-death had claimed her senses again. Just enough.
Enough to cheat death and rise again.
She glanced toward Rom as she turned the knob on the tube.
But as she watched the black ichor of her own blood fill the tubing, she knew that it remembered that life no more.
The vial filled. She yanked the stent out. Shoved Corban away when he tried to staunch the wound.
“Take it and make me an antivirus! Your life depends on it. And take him.” She shoved her finger in Rom’s direction. “Drain him dry if you have to. As for you….” she turned, strode to Arcane, leveled him with a stare. “Make ready. Roland wants battle? We will slaughter him and his Rippers in the streets. Do you hear me? We will kill them all!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THE BETHELIM VALLEY lay in silence, its forbidding slopes and hard-baked earth stark beneath an unforgiving sky. The sun rested on the eastern hill—a lone orange eye tracking the thirty-eight black-clad Rippers and the sole Sovereign who’d ventured into the desolate place.
Roland stood on the rise to the south, facing away from Jordin and the rest, hands on hips, staring out at the long rolling stretch of barren desert that ran all the way to the distant sea.
He hadn’t spoken a word since the arena, seemingly oblivious to the load on his shoulder as they raced through the tunnels, despite Jordin’s insistence that he set her down. Only upon reaching the cellar had he unceremoniously dumped her to the ground before ascending to the main floor.
He was mounted and already spurring his horse into a gallop by the time she’d stumbled out of the basilica. It had taken her a full minute to catch the others speeding north through Byzantium after their leader. Roland had ridden like a man possessed. Even when they’d put the city safely behind them, he hadn’t slowed his stallion to a trot for several more miles.
Michael, dead. She could barely comprehend it. Even the unflappable Cain. The first Immortals slain in battle.
Her fault.
They’d ridden through the night without words, Roland refusing to even glance at her. And so she’d let him alone, the cadence of their horses pounding the ground beneath her.
Roland’s grief was obvious. But tonight she knew he had been dealt an additional blow: Roland, the invincible Prince of the Immortals, had been proven fallible.
Jordin had fought growing despair as the night passed, searching in vain for any thread of hope—of absolution. They had no hope of recovering or saving Rom. Feyn was alive. The Immortals were soon to die. And where would that leave her? Jonathan, Triphon, the Keeper, every Sovereign she had lived and fought with, the Immortals she had known as a Nomad…. And soon Rom, Kaya, and Roland—all of those she had known in this life—would be dead within a day. Two at most.
The one mercy in all of it was that soon she would be void of emotion.
Jordin glanced at Rislon and the other Rippers. They rode tall in their saddles, pointedly ignoring her, eyes on their leader. None of them seemed to notice that she was even present until she nudged her horse up the hill toward Roland.
“Back!” Rislon snapped.
Ignoring him, Jordin dug her heels into her mount’s flanks and took it to a gallop up the rise.
Roland didn’t move as she pulled up behind him. She stopped a pace off to his right and stared at him for a moment. His brow was beaded with sweat, his hair damp and tangled, matted against his neck. He’d shed his cloak and outer shirt, leaving him in only a sleeveless black undershirt that covered little of his brawn. The tattoos on his arms looked darker than she remembered in the daylight.
Tears had dried on his face, leaving trails of grief on his cheeks and chin. She realized she had been wrong to think he knew nothing of anguish—including the sharpness of her own loss at Jonathan’s death and the guilt she bore now, over Michael’s and Cain’s.
She followed his line of sight to the sun rising above the horizon.
Jonathan was supposed to have risen to power like that sun—light to a world lost in darkness. But here in the Bethelim Valley, the indifferent orb seemed only a reminder that it would outlast them all.
“You blame me,” she said. “I swear to you, I don’t know how they knew we were coming.”
He stared into the sun, as if daring it to burn away his sight.
“Are you going to shun me forever?”
“Who can a dead man shun?” he asked bitterly.
“I’m so sorry about Michael.”
“Don’t speak her name.”
She fell silent.
“She and Cain weren’t the only ones to die—they’re only the first. Isn’t that your argument? That all Immortals die at the hand of a virus created by Sovereigns?”
“By a rogue alchemist! One who saw Immortals butcher those he loved! Rather than stand here burning your eyes to a crisp, why not help me think of a way out of this?”
“Dismount.”
She hesitated for a moment, then swung down from her saddle, only vaguely aware of the sore muscles along her back and thighs.
He said, too quietly for human ears, “Call him, Rislon.” And at that moment she remembered that every word she had uttered could be heard by them all.
A whistle from the valley floor. The horse turned and ambled down the hill.
“You want to know my thoughts,” he said, facing her. “Fine. Listen carefully.”
She nodded, miserable. She should be more courageous than any of them. She was going to live, after all. They all faced imminent death. And yet here she was, mired in self-pity, unable to see any advantage.
“Of course I’ll listen,” she said.
“Carefully,” he reiterated. “A person facing the undoing of all he’s lived for isn’t necessarily reasonable, so you’ll forgive me, but it turns out that I am that man. The fact that Feyn wanted you alive only means she believes the virus poses the threat you claim. She would take you and drain your blood in hope of finding an antivirus in short ord
er—clearly she’s as unreasonable as me.”
He took a deep breath and went on, otherwise unchecked.
“If I’d listened to you when you first came, perhaps I would’ve been able to save my people, a fact that only makes my reason seem less stable. Even so, stable or not, the past is done.”
Plain words from a prince. She could not fault his honesty.
“Yes. It is done.”
“And yet, I must say this: it was one of your kind who released this virus. If you feel it was wrong of him to do so, you should have found a way to stop him.”
“What do you think I was trying to do? I came to you!”
“I didn’t say find someone else to stop him. You should have killed him yourself, long ago.”
“He claimed that doing so would only ensure the release of Reaper.”
“Then you should have ensured the loyalty of your subjects long before they could turn on you. I hold you personally responsible for your failure to foresee and stop this event.”
“And I hold you personally responsible for pushing him to the point of creating the virus,” she said. “You should have thought of that before butchering my people!”
“I am life!” His face shook as he pushed the words out, betraying the full rage seething behind his eyes. “And now I will die for that life, as did Jonathan.”
“Jonathan?” She was instantly shaking. “You dare speak his name? You rejected his blood!”
“I took his blood while he still lived! I can no more accept your arguments for the life you claim in his dead blood than I could accept a rumor that this parched desert”—he jabbed a finger at the valley floor—“is a lake surrounded by trees. Your life is no more vibrant than this ruined earth!”
“And yours is?”
He lowered his arm. “Ask Kaya. No. Ask yourself. You were Immortal just two days ago.”
Even seething, righteously irate, she couldn’t argue. She was unable to point out his own deep-seated unhappiness for the blaring accusation of her own. How many times had she envied the Immortals their semblance of life—real life?
“In your very being, you fail to live,” he said.
She set her jaw, willed back the tears. If they came now, they would not ever stop.
He gave a slight nod, sighed. “If there’s anything you haven’t told me, say it now. Short of that, I have only one course left before me.”
“There’s always more than one course. You taught me that.”
“Then speak it now. Quickly…. time is no longer my friend.”
She swallowed, trying to imagine the right words delivered with the appropriate conviction. What came out surprised even her.
“I love you,” she said.
He blinked. Stalled.
She glanced away before the tears could threaten again. “I mean, you terrify me, but I’ve also seen who you really are, and it’s not this. I need you.”
Saying it, she knew she was overreacting in a moment of terrible desperation, but she also knew there was more truth behind the words than she cared to admit.
“Maybe I’m only saying that because I know that soon I’ll be alone in the world. I’ll be…. alone.” Her lips were quivering and refused to stop no matter how hard she tried. “But at least I’ll be alive.”
She reached out, took his arms. “I need you. To live. Live for me, Roland. Please. And we will have time to figure this all out.”
His eyes darkened. “By becoming Sovereign?”
“It’s the only way. I—”
“Never! In another time I might have made you my queen. Now I can offer you only my death” He looked as though he might spit at her. She knew she was a fool for voicing what she knew would be soundly rejected. But she was without options. Utterly desperate.
“We could still go back for Rom.”
“Go back? Even now Feyn is gathering her army. She knows full well what I will do. She’s a leader with a leader’s mind, and no fool! There is no trick to play now; no tunnel that isn’t already collapsed. No. I will go for Feyn on my terms.”
“And die on hers.”
His gaze bore into hers. When he spoke again, his voice was even.
“On mine. I have twelve hundred warriors waiting. We will carve out death in Byzantium to honor Michael. We will not leave a soul alive in our wake. It’s no longer who we kill, but how many.”
In another life, she would have been galvanized by his words. But hearing them now, his life so fleeting before her, they only terrified. “You won’t reach the Citadel!”
“You’re wrong. I was never willing to risk the life of my own. Now there’s nothing to lose. I will spend them all to the last soul. We are dead already. No one has yet seen the full fury of Immortals unleashed.” He leaned in, his lips curled back from his teeth. “But I tell you, it will be a fine, fine day to die.”
“They don’t need to be dead already! As the last Sovereign, I can offer you life.”
He spit to one side in disgust.
“Please, Roland, I beg you! Your way won’t gain you anything.”
“It will gain me honor, one of the many worthy traits you have sacrificed by drinking the blood of a dead man. Without it, there is no life. It is I who live, Jordin, not you.”
He strode past her, toward the way she had come. She turned and called after him, “You know I can’t come with you.”
“You’ll remain here,” he said. “On foot.”
Jordin hurried after him, panicked. “You can’t just leave me here to die!”
He ignored her, plunging down the side of the hill in an easy gait that made his intentions clear. She pulled up halfway down, realizing he would never back down after making such a statement in front of his Rippers, who had heard every word.
He swung into his saddle, reins in hand. Uttering a command she couldn’t make out, he kneed his mount and headed east at a quick trot before breaking into a gallop.
Rislon dropped two canteens on the ground, cast her one last look, and took the company after Roland. In less than a minute the sound of pounding hooves faded, leaving her staring after them in a silence so complete it seemed to ring through her ears.
For a long time, she didn’t move. Her mind didn’t seem capable of finishing fully formed thoughts.
And then one thought rose, clear and devastating at once. Jonathan had abandoned her. As had Rom. And now Roland as well. She was alone.
She scanned the horizon slowly, looking for any sign of life. Heat was rising off the white hills as though portending the hell to come. Jordin slowly fell back onto the ground.
The end had finally come.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
THE MIDDAY sun stared stark-eyed at the shallow rises of the desert northeast of Byzantium. Cut by the occasional canyon, the Bethelim Valley existed on no map of the Order, having been so named by the Nomads. A mile long, the stretch of inhospitable ground ran north to a wide, rocky canyon hemmed in by a short cliff on either side.
Three alien objects lay on the bleached ground at the valley’s mouth. Small and insignificant from atop the cliff face, even the vultures took little interest in what appeared to be two dull-brown rocks. The third object, larger, lay as unmoving as a boulder.
A human eye might have recognized the forms of two canteens…. and the third as a woman lying on her side curled tightly into a ball, forehead nearly touching knees.
The faint markings of a trail stretching from the unmoving human to the east suggested that others had left the scene, leaving one of their own to be parched by the sun and scattered to the elements.
But there was no human eye peering down from the sky. Even in her near-catatonic state, Jordin knew this. Nor from the hills. Or from the valley. She was alone, utterly and completely, as was the heart expanding and contracting within her as it mocked her true state of being.
She was, after all, already dead. If not in body, then in spirit and mind. Her flesh would soon catch up to the realization. Her breath would join the
air for the last time; her heart would offer up one last pathetic throb; her blood would cease flowing through emaciated veins; and one day her carcass would dry to dust and blow away with the wind.
She’d sat on the slope for an hour after Roland’s departure, sinking slowly into despair that hollowed her chest and left her mind numb—she could remember that much.
Or had that been a dream?
She’d finally risen, plodded toward the canteens, and stood there, staring at them, before settling down to her side, wrapping her arms around her knees, and coiling inward. As if by hugging her body she might offer her heart some comfort.
But her suffering had only deepened.
Her memory of why she suffered abandoned her, replaced by an unrelenting awareness of torment. By the inexhaustible need to suffer, if only for the comfort of penance. She deserved nothing less.
She was just alive enough to wish for death.
The sun was high, glaring down with enough heat to inflame her exposed skin. She looked at the canteens. It occurred to her that she should drink some water.
But she didn’t. She should move, but the thought dissipated before reaching her arms and legs along with any memory of why living might be important.
Did Bliss await? Then why live? To extend suffering?
The thoughts slogged through her mind like new Rippers to keep her company—twice as stealthy and three times as dark.
An hour later, she was staring at the dark fold of her tunic sleeve. A tangled mop of hair covered her face, a dark net filtering the sun. A strand caught in her lashes moved slightly with a gentle, hot breeze.
And then she remembered. Rom was Dark Blood and would soon be dead. The Sovereigns…. all dead. Roland, on a mission of death.
Jonathan….
Dead.
And here she lay on hell’s barren ground, clinging to a life she had no right to possess. A life she would renounce because it had shown her no power, no grace, no peace, no love—nothing but suffering and shame. Lying on the valley floor, she cursed the day she took Jonathan’s blood into her veins.