Sovereign

by Ted Dekker

  Feyn’s face knotted in confusion. She slowly lowered her arms and took another step back. She was visibly shaking. “You have no right….” Her voice was thin and desperate. “You….” She seemed to lose track of her intention, so taken off guard by the one crushing word hurled in her face.

  “No, Feyn,” Jordin repeated more quietly. “The time for death is done.” She stepped closer. “I’ve come to give you the power you were born to possess. As Sovereign.”

  “I….” Feyn looked around her, lost.

  “You were born Sovereign, the seventh chosen by time in the Cycle of Rebirth. You are to reign over the world, not as Dark Blood or Corpse, but as Sovereign.” Jordin watched the truth of her words flow out to Feyn.

  “Hear me. Jonathan came to be Sovereign, but not in this realm. He came to bring a new realm to a world lost in death. And he died so you could bring Sovereign light to them all.”

  “I…. I’m going to die,” she said softly.

  “No. You aren’t. Saric knows this now. I know it. You, too, must know it.”

  “I am the world’s maker.”

  “Maker only of your own pathetic dream. A dream that leads to misery and death. But that’s not what you were chosen to do from the beginning.”

  Her lips spread wide in a silent, desperate plea.

  Jordin moved toward her, reached out for that trembling hand. She took it gently in her own. Lifted it, eyes piercing the veil of confusion thick in the Sovereign’s eyes.

  She spoke in a low, sure tone. “You must allow Jonathan’s blood to bring you life. The ancient blood that Rom gave you made a way. Only then can you awaken to the Sovereign Realm where Jonathan rules, alive.”

  She reached into her pocket and withdrew the object inside it, given her by Saric. Two simple stents connected by an arm’s length of tubing and a rubber bladder pump. Feyn went rigid.

  Jordin held her hand firmly.

  “Everything has happened as it was meant to, Feyn.” Still grasping Feyn’s hand in her left, she slid her right hand to one of the stents and lifted it to her own arm.

  “Everything.”

  She slid the sharp metal tube into the vein on her arm, welcoming the prick of pain.

  Feyn began to whimper. Her body shook from head to foot as the dark blood in her screamed with revulsion. Tears streamed down her cheeks to drop from her chin.

  Across the Senate Hall, Saric stood, unmoving…. tears glimmering on his cheeks.

  The darkness in her mind will resist, Jonathan had said. But Feyn is far stronger than even she knows. Bring her to life, Jordin. You have my blood. Bring her to life!

  “Surrender,” Jordin said, gazing into Feyn’s bloodshot eyes. The agony in them broke her heart, and she briefly wondered if she would have the strength it took to climb out of such a deep well of despair.

  “Surrender.”

  Feyn closed her eyes and began to whimper as the tears streamed down her face. Then a wail—a piercing keen that pushed her Dark Bloods back in terror.

  Her trembling legs lost their strength; she dropped to her knees before Jordin. Mouth open in an anguished cry, she opened her eyelids to slits. Her body was rebelling, but her dark eyes were begging for life. For a spark of light. For rescue from the torment that racked her soul.

  “Take Jonathan’s blood. Find life,” Jordin said, pushing the velvet sleeve of her gown up her arm. And then she shoved the stent deep into the inky black vein in its crook.

  She wrapped her fingers around the bulb halfway down the tube and pumped. Saw her own blood, crimson red, flow into the tube, through the pump itself, then down the tube and into Feyn’s arm.

  Feyn’s wail swelled to a piercing shriek. She jerked back in recoil, but Jordin held her arm with a firm hand.

  “Find life, my Sovereign. Find life.”

  The words streamed as white light, flowing over Feyn’s face and chest, even as she screamed as one being flayed alive.

  Because she was.

  “Life,” Jordin whispered gently.

  But the wave of light from her last word was not gentle. It slammed into Feyn and smothered her cries of pain.

  The Sovereign’s body shut down, and she crumpled to the floor as one dead.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  FEYN’S PULSE exploded in her ears, unbearably loud and growing impossibly louder by the second. Fire seared her veins, ignited her nerves. Somewhere in the distance, someone screamed.

  I die, she thought.

  At least it would be for the last time.

  She gave herself to the blackness when it enveloped her, to the excruciating pain that dragged her from that oblivion. To the terror.

  It came on her like a black wave, filled her lungs and darkened her eyes. Fear, guilt, shame, pride, anger—all at once. She sucked for breath, found there was none. In the drone behind the drumming of her heart, a distant chuckle, slow and ominous. The screaming again, rising up over the laughter, too loud to be human.

  Let me die. Let it end.

  The accusation of her every failure. Of the blood on her hands. The deaths added to her conscience. Their faces were before her—Seth, Dominic, countless thousands. The Corpses in Byzantium, fleeing, begging, pleading for their lives. The women ruined by her Dark Bloods. The Corpses condemned by her domination. She could never repay it. The burden of pride, of eclipsing the Maker, of aspiring to a seat she could never fill with even her greatest hate, ambition, or desires. Futile. Empty. Black.

  She couldn’t bear it.

  Screams again, unending screams. Her own.

  Maker, take my life!

  Hades could be no worse than this.

  But then it was worse. Her body was on fire. She clawed but found nothing, not even air, blind in a sea of tar.

  And utterly alone.

  There was only this—an endless space populated by her own grief over what could not be undone. A price that could never be repaid.

  The drums began to fade. The laughter had already rumbled to nothing.

  Silence and darkness settled over her like a blanket.

  Even her thoughts, her pleas to die, were gone.

  Silence. Darkness—for how long, she did not know.

  Only when a bare drone edged into the silence did she become aware of anything. It began as a vibration somewhere in the distance, flat and as unending as a line, stretching in either direction, never meeting east or west. Never ending. A hum, growing in undulation until it was not one note but two. A broadening ribbon of sound in a space otherwise empty—no, not empty at all but filled with a spectrum of sound.

  Bands of light. Color. Filling the void, impossibly full, doubling on itself. East. West—never ending.

  And now, an explosion of light! It blinded her, though she knew she did not see with her eyes. Impossibly bright.

  Drums in the distance. They came, faint as a pattering step, thrumming as a pulse. As a heart pounding to rapid and dizzying life.

  She was waiting for the laughter. It didn’t come. It would never come. The guilt, the shame…. where were they? The wish for death, the pain of it. Where was the sting?

  She sucked in a breath, felt it rush into her lungs, felt it enter her very cells, the minute workings within them vibrating with it.

  Time to wake.

  No.

  I will be with you.

  Never leave me.

  She blinked her eyes open. An electric fixture, glowing overhead. Something remembered and distant. The hum was fading, and she closed her eyes.

  Don’t let me go.

  I will never let you go.

  As though in answer, fingers clasped her arm.

  “Feyn.”

  No….

  Hard flooring beneath her back, sweat trapped within the heavy velvet of her gown, plastering her hair to her neck, a web of it over her face.

  A face obscured her vision.

  Jordin.

  She started to push up, fell back, rolled to her shoulder along the floor. Her sleeve
was pushed up, a wound bleeding from her arm. The blood was still wet, and she realized that somehow an eternity of terror had passed in the space of moments.

  She was still staring at the wound when she realized the veins beneath her skin were fading. There, before her eyes, as though retreating behind a scrim. Her skin—hadn’t it been white? But now color flooded it. She grabbed her sleeve, pulled it higher. The golden hue darkened her flesh before her very eyes. Not as pale as it had been in her life as a royal—genetically engineered by the virus to breed bloodless beauty in its royals—but the color of skin as it had been before.

  She lifted her gaze with wonder. There was Jordin, standing at arms’ reach. And behind her….

  Roland, on a knee, face wet with tears.

  Had either of them ever been so lovely to her? Even bloodied and blackened from the fire of battle, had she ever seen a soul so tortured and beautifully broken? Roland, whom she had hated. But her heart rent at the sight of him now.

  She looked at Jordin. At this woman with wisdom she could not even now comprehend. This woman endowed with more power than Feyn could have ever claimed.

  “I’m….” Her voice faltered. She looked around at the Dark Bloods staring at her in confusion. They were hers once…. no more. For a brief moment she pitied them.

  Back to Jordin. “I’m alive?”

  “Alive.” Jordin smiled. “Very alive.”

  “Like you?”

  Jordin took her hand. “Yes. And not quite. It may take some time.”

  Roland, five feet away, lifted his head, lashes wet, his cheeks smeared with tears and blood. “Jordin. I’m ready.”

  “Yes. You are, my prince. You are.”

  He rose and moved toward her, glancing at Feyn and then staring into Jordin’s eyes. There was a tenderness to his look that Feyn had never seen before—a lion bowing to a power greater than its own.

  “Forgive me—”

  “Shh, shh….” Jordin put a finger to his lips.

  “Give me this,” he said.

  “I will.” Jordin appeared luminous, not with light but with the same life that flowed through her own veins. A small smile touched her lips. “I will.”

  Feyn twisted and looked at the senate doors where he’d stood. Saric. He was gone. She glanced around the chamber, but there was no sign of him.

  “Where’s my brother? He has to know!”

  “He does, Feyn. He knows.” Jordin’s voice was soft, as if her words held great meaning to her. “You’ll see him soon enough. There are more urgent concerns on his mind right now.”

  Memory of the battle suddenly came storming back, shoving aside the surreal scene before her.

  “The battle! We have to stop it.”

  Roland glanced toward the entrance, as though only now remembering the war waging outside himself.

  Feyn pushed up onto her knees, turned to the Dark Bloods.

  “Stop the battle. Send word to the commanders. Pull back. The battle is won. I need the remaining Immortals alive!”

  They glanced around as though lost. Had she not just spoken, given a command?

  “They were loyal to you, bound by blood,” Jordin said quietly.

  Bound by blood no more.

  Feyn rose unsteadily to her feet, tugged at the clasp of her cloak, which had twisted around her neck, let it fall to the floor. She straightened and addressed the Bloods still shifting on their feet.

  “You will go to the field and stop the war,” she ordered pointedly, shoving her finger at the door.

  Some made as if to go, but others stood dumbstruck.

  “Go!” Feyn shouted.

  Casting glances over their shoulders, they began to file out, gaining momentum in their strides as they went. She watched until the last of them had gone and then glanced at Roland.

  “You have no assurance they’ll obey,” Roland said, springing for his knife. He quickly sheathed it. “I don’t know how many of my men are still alive, but there’s still time. They, too, will take the blood.”

  “My Bloods won’t follow your orders. I have to go.”

  “Then go. I go for my men.”

  Her eyes lit on the knife Roland had knocked from her hand. She moved toward it and slipped it into the sheath slung against her hip, praying she wouldn’t need it.

  “The other Dark Bloods will all be dead within twenty-four hours,” Jordin said. “After that, you won’t need to worry about anything other than burning the bodies.”

  Dead. Every Dark Blood engineered or converted. She drew a slow breath of unexpected relief until—

  “Rom!” she cried.

  Jordin spun. “What of him?”

  “I have to save him. I condemned him.”

  Jordin took a moment. As she did, calm seemed to settle over her—the same serenity she’d shown earlier.

  “Then you must save him.” To Roland: “I’m with you. Too many Immortals have given their lives today. No more.”

  Roland took her hand by the fingertips, his gaze level as he lifted it to his lips. “Thank you,” he said and kissed her hand. “Thank you.”

  And then he was turning on his heel, flying down the stairs, and striding up the aisle, Jordin close behind.

  They would stop the battle, but Feyn’s mind was no longer on thousands of men. Only one.

  Rom. The man who had first shown her life so many years ago…. the man whom she had sentenced to die a bare hour ago. Her heart was pounding. The memory of those bleak faces, that utter condemnation, returned to her.

  But where had Corban taken him?

  Maker, let me not be too late!

  Feyn ran for the door, her mind spinning.

  THE ENTRANCE to the laboratories had been left guarded by a single Dark Blood. He gave her a strange glance as she reached him, and for a moment she wondered if he would stand aside.

  She brushed past him without a word, and he didn’t move to challenge her.

  Only inside the great laboratory, lit by low work lights, did she realize she’d been holding her breath. She strode past the first row of workstations before grabbing her skirts and breaking into a run.

  Maker, let me not be too late. She’d found new life. But she didn’t know how she could live with herself if she found Rom dead.

  When she reached the dungeon cells, she found no sign of him. Her heart went cold. She grabbed the bars of the last cell and glanced at the lock. No, they wouldn’t have brought him here. Not to kill him.

  She hurried back out to the great chamber, ran through the maze of tables and then back to the chamber that held the glass sarcophagi filled with Bloods in the making. The sight of those bodies had once filled her with pride. She’d once thought them a thing of beauty. Seeing their lifeless forms now, she was filled with revulsion. This was a place of horrors.

  She turned, looked around, momentarily lost. And then she was moving with long, swift strides toward Corban’s private laboratory.

  She slipped inside. The tables were full of dark vials, discarded trash, stents and tubing, crumpled notes, some strewn on the floor. She passed by the main lab toward the observation suite.

  Even from outside, she could see light shining beneath the door. Her heart surged, daring hope. She opened the door to the outer room and stepped inside, breath quick.

  There—movement through the window to the inner room: Corban, in a dark tunic without his lab coat, standing over the bench with his back toward her. His acolyte stood in the corner of the chamber, scribbling notes. And strapped to the chair….

  Rom.

  His head had fallen back, and he appeared to be bleeding from a fresh gash in his face. His sleeves were rolled up, a stent buried in his arm, tube dangling toward the floor and dripping blood.

  As she watched, he lifted his head and opened his left eye. His other was nearly swollen shut. Feyn gasped, rushed to the inner door, and threw it open.

  Corban spun from his worktable, startled.

  “My liege! I was just….” He paused, cock
ed his head.

  “Release him!” Feyn ordered. She would have done it herself, but the sight of Corban arrested her attention.

  His skin, pale as hers had once been, had begun to peel from his face. It lay open and ragged around sores that oozed pus. His hands, normally gloved, were bare, blackened in spots. The flesh was peeling from them as well.

  He was squinting at her strangely, stepping toward her.

  “Your face,” she said.

  “Yes. My face. And my back. And my hands.” He held them up, backs to her, for her to see. “They’re rotting away even as I live. The result of prolonged exposure to the virus as I’ve slaved to find an antidote to save you. My gift is an early death.”

  So he’d seen the difference in her. Felt the loss of connection between them, had already turned against her—she could see it in his eyes. And now she saw that he’d been in the throes of madness—working frantically to extract answers from Rom before killing him.

  “Cut him free,” she said.

  “Your lover? You care more for this thing than for me, the one who’s toiled at the cost of his skin to save your life! Never mind the cost to myself, I did it for loyalty. Because I must—we were bound by blood. But now I sense that you, my liege, are much changed.”

  He crossed the distance between them in two long steps. Now she could smell the rot in his flesh. Could see that when he opened his mouth to speak, his teeth were edged in black.

  His nose wrinkled in disgust. She realized for the first time that he could smell her—that the same offensive odor she’d associated with Rom and any Sovereign before came from her own skin.

  “Your skin has lost its Brahmin pallor. And your eyes….” He reached toward her, as though to turn her cheek this way or that, but she slapped his hand away.

  “Stay back!”

  He made no show of hearing, much less obeying, her. “How did you do it? How did you manage it when I have found no solution?” He stepped closer, his breath foul in her face. “How is it possible that you find salvation and leave me to die?”

  She gazed at him in silence. Hatred filled his eyes as the full truth settled into his rotting mind.

  “Then it’s true. He said you knew the pollution of that ancient vial once.”