Light flared ahead. I planted my boots into the bottom of the tunnel, but the slick, algae-coated stone offered no resistance. If this had been a movie, this would be the part where I was supposed to yank a knife out and dig it into the stone to slow myself down. Except I’d break my nonexistent knife, hurt my arm, and still end up as a wet human pancake.
The tunnel ended. I went airborne for two terrifying seconds and plunged down into warm water. Yay, survival. I kicked up to the surface and swam away from the hole in the ceiling.
A huge room spread before me. Above, an ornate yellow ceiling, beautiful and gilded, soared in elegant arches, as if someone had opened a portal in time and Renaissance glamour spilled out. The golden swirls glowed, bright enough to bathe the entire chamber in soothing light. An enormous dusty chandelier hung from the circular recess in the ceiling, like a collection of crystals suspended from the roof of a cave. The remnants of red curtains sagged on both sides of me. Beyond them the room widened, its bottom flooded with emerald-green water. Plants covered the water’s surface. Cream and ivory lotuses, the tips of their petals touched with pink, floated next to larger bright yellow lotus blossoms. Star-shaped lilies bloomed among wide leaves, some lavender, some scarlet, some with petals of light orange darkening to copper-red near the center. Ten feet above the water a balcony, cushioned in greenery, dripped vermilion and moss-green vines.
What the hell?
Curran swam up next to me.
“Are you seeing this?” I asked.
“Yep.”
“So I’m not hallucinating?”
“Nope.”
“Think if we crawl on that balcony, those plants will eat us?”
“If they try, I’ll eat them first.”
Naeemah climbed up the side wall and jumped onto the balcony, disappearing behind the plant growth. Thomas and Robert followed.
“We’re in the Orpheum Theater,” Ghastek said behind me.
“You’ve been here?” I asked.
“No, but I’ve seen the photographs, when I studied for my trip to Mishmar. This is Slosburg Hall, one of Omaha’s historic buildings. It was among the structures Roland had bought.”
I swam through the water. It was so warm and I was so tired.
“Are you okay?” Curran asked.
“If I pass out face down in this water, will you fish me out?”
“Will you promise to call me Your Majesty?”
“Hell no.”
“Then I’ll have to think about it.”
Ghastek and his trio of vampires swam past us. This water would never end. The place was getting hazy, and I knew I’d run myself dry. My body had nothing left.
My fingers touched the wall. I gripped the gouge in the stone, trying to pull myself up, and then Curran put his hand under my foot and lifted me up, out of the water. I climbed the wall, grabbed Robert’s hand, and made it onto the ledge. The balcony rose in terraces, each terrace filled with soil. Here and there, the tops of red chairs poked through the moist ground. Flowers filled the terraces: roses, tulips, poppies, daisies, and odd but strikingly beautiful blossoms that looked like a cluster of inverted tulips hanging in an umbrella arrangement from a single purplish stem. Breathtaking . . . A strange serenity came over me.
“Safe here,” Naeemah said. “Vampires do not come here.”
I sank to the ground and closed my eyes, and the world disappeared.
• • •
“WHAT THE FUCK were you thinking?” Curran growled.
I rolled to my feet. Slayer felt wrong in my hand. The weight was off.
Reality hit me like a brick in the face. Oh. That’s right. It wasn’t Slayer. Damn it.
A sour smell hit my nostrils. To the side Andrea bent over and vomited into the grass. She wiped her mouth and straightened. “I was thinking that my best friend was stuck in Mishmar and she would need my help getting out.”
“I meant to talk to you about that,” I said.
“I’m all ears,” Andrea said.
“This is a suicide mission and you’re pregnant. What the fuck were you thinking?”
“He already said that. You guys are no fun. How about ‘I’m happy for you’ or ‘How far along are you’ instead?”
“You’re a moron,” I told her.
“They needed a shooter and someone who knows something about Roland and Mishmar besides Christopher.”
“You’re pregnant,” I told her.
“You’d do it for me,” she said. “Now excuse me, I’m going to go pee and puke some more.” She wandered off and disappeared behind the greenery.
Curran shook his head and held out a container of Doolittle’s wonder food for me. I took it and began eating. “How long was I out?”
“Two hours.”
“No vampires?”
“No.”
I looked around. Curran, Christopher, Nasrin, Jim, Andrea, and Ghastek, bleary-eyed. That’s right. He had to stay awake. If he fell asleep now, his vampires would rip into us. “Where is everyone else?”
“The rats and Naeemah went ahead to scout the way,” Curran said.
I reached out with my magic. Constellations of vampires surrounded us. Some above, some to the sides . . . Their numbers had swelled while I slept. Fifty . . . Sixty? If they jumped us now, even with my help, we might not survive. I asked Curran for Slayer’s pieces and tucked them away into my clothes. It was broken, but it made me feel better. I’d crushed vampire minds before, when trapped in Hugh’s castle. I could kill some off, but making their heads blow up took a big chunk of magic out of me.
Ten minutes later, I was about halfway through eating the food when Thomas, Robert, and Naeemah came through the door in the back of the garden.
“Do you want bad news or bad news?” Thomas said.
Curran sighed. “Give me the bad news.”
“There’s only one way out of here,” Robert said. “Directly behind that door is a huge round room, extremely deep. There’s a metal bridge that controls the only access to the other side.”
“Is it broken?” I guessed.
“No, it’s retracted. From the other side.”
“If it’s retracted, there must be a mechanism to extend it,” Ghastek said.
Thomas grimaced. “That’s the other bad news.”
• • •
WHEN IT CAME to size, huge could be an understatement. I stood on a narrow ledge. A cavernous chamber lay open in front of me, molded together from the walls and stones of a hundred different buildings. Shaped like an egg set on its wide end, it stretched up and down for at least a hundred feet. A narrow spire of concrete blocks, chunks of brickwork, and steel beams, cemented together by hardened soil, sprouted from the center of the chamber. An identical but inverted spire stretched from the ceiling. They met in the center, clamping between them a rectangular box of solid rock about the size of a large two-story house. A narrow doorway allowed a glimpse inside the room. Whatever was in there glowed with pale purple, as if the room were a geode containing a treasure within.
A metal breezeway circled the rectangular box. A metal bridge led from the ledge where I stood to the breezeway. I could see a large door in the opposite wall, slightly to the left. Another bridge led from that door to the breezeway. But it fell short, the last two-thirds of it retracted.
“Too far to jump,” Robert assessed.
“What about down?” Andrea asked.
I looked down. Steam slunk along the bottom of the chamber. Odd shapes protruded from it. I looked closer. Vampire bones, half sunken in the reddish goo. As I watched, a bloodsucker moved slowly through the goo, oblivious to us.
“That would be a very bad idea,” Ghastek said.
No shit.
“There’s a wheel inside the room,” Naeemah said. “If we turn the wheel, the far bridge will extend and we can cross.”
“So what’s the problem?” Curran asked. “We go in and turn the wheel.”
“Try it,” Thomas told him.
Curran s
tarted down the bridge. A third of the way down, he stopped and gripped the rails. The muscles on his arms bulged. His face changed, reshaping itself into a leonine muzzle. His hair stood on end. He snarled, like a pissed-off cat.
“Honey?” I called out.
“Well, he got farther than I did,” Thomas said.
Curran’s body shook. He was straining but making no progress.
“Curran!” I called.
He turned around and shook himself. His face reshaped itself back into a human. He spat a single word out. “Magic.”
“Alright,” Ghastek said. “My turn.”
The ancient vampire with the scar scuttled forward onto the bridge. Curran leaned to one side, letting the bloodsucker pass. The vampire made it about six feet past Curran and stopped. Ghastek planted his feet, his eyes fixed on the room, and slowly extended his right arm forward. The vampire shivered and hugged the bridge. A vein on the side of Ghastek’s face pulsed. The vampire didn’t move an inch.
“If your head explodes, can I have your stuff?” I asked.
“My head won’t explode,” Ghastek said, his voice dry, and strode toward the bridge. “May I pass, please?”
“Knock yourself out.” Curran came back and stepped off the bridge onto the ledge.
Ghastek began walking across the bridge.
“This will be interesting,” Robert said.
Ghastek slowed, then stopped a few feet behind the vampire. He stared at the glowing room in the heart of the chamber for a long second, his spine rigid, and spoke, his voice too muffled to make out the words.
“What is he saying?” I asked.
“I can’t,” Curran said. “Power. Darkness . . . I think he’s losing it.”
Ghastek sank to his knees.
“You might want to go and get him,” I murmured to Curran.
“Can’t we just leave him there?”
“No, we can’t.”
Curran walked along the bridge, touched Ghastek’s shoulder, and pulled him to his feet. The Master of the Dead turned around. His eyes were wide under furrowed eyebrows, his mouth slack. I knew this emotion very well. Something had terrified Ghastek out of his wits. He returned to the ledge, his vampire and Curran following him.
“What was it?” Andrea asked.
Ghastek took a deep breath.
“I think he needs a minute,” I said.
Slowly Ghastek’s face relaxed. “Power,” he said finally. “Incomprehensible power. We’re in the very center of Mishmar, and that room is its heart. Everything you saw, all of the magic you felt, that room is the source of it all. I can’t enter. I tried. I just can’t.”
“We could wait until the tech hits,” Andrea said.
Naeemah shook her head. “Magic never goes away here.”
Curran looked at me, his gray eyes calm. “Baby?”
“Don’t,” Ghastek warned me. “You have no idea what it’s like to feel the weight of it on your mind. It will burn you. It’s darkness in the primordial sense of the word.”
It probably was darkness, but it was my kind of darkness. It spawned me and its magic ran in my blood. I stepped onto the bridge. Magic brushed against me, thin like gossamer but saturated with power. Wow.
“At least tie a rope to her so she doesn’t fall,” Ghastek called out.
I took another step. The gossamer magic thickened, sliding against me, guiding me, its touch soft against my skin but not against my mind. There the magic surged, overwhelming, terrifying, and potent. It offered no resistance. It just watched me, waiting, aware and alive, so strong that if I made one misstep it would choke the life out of me.
“That’s not a bad idea,” Curran said. “Kate?”
The gossamer veils pierced my mind, sliding through me in a flash of blinding pain.
“Kate?”
The magic moved around me, unimaginably ancient. I could see it now. It swirled with blue and gold, flowing into silver and then into deep red, a diaphanous light, its own aurora borealis spilling out in front of me, and beyond it an ancient heartless power that watched me.
“Get her off that bridge!” Ghastek yelled.
The magic beckoned me. To refuse was to die. I strode across the bridge and walked into the stone room.
Plain walls greeted me, devoid of any ornament or decoration. The room was just a hollow box of stone with a simple stone platform at the far end. But on the floor, in the center of the room, something magic waited. It started as a long pale mass rooted to the floor, and like a coral spreading from a common root and splitting into dozens of branches, it too spread out, growing out into a forest of pale protrusions. They glowed pale blue and purple, some as tall as me, some short, the size of my hand, but all sharp and dripping magic that swirled like tendrils of smoke. This looked so familiar . . .
The magic pulled me forward. I followed it, circling the mass, toward a platform at the far wall. I walked up five stone stairs, each a foot tall, and turned. The odd magic coral lay below me on the floor. In my head, I cleaned the main mass of protrusions, trying to see the form beneath.
Magic swirled at the other end of the coral.
The contours of what lay on the floor suddenly made sense.
A skeleton.
An enormous skeleton, at least nine feet tall. Its ribs curved up, its bones stretched, distorted, each bearing branching antlers of pale metal, but it was a human skeleton.
The magic snapped and shone like a length of silver silk suddenly stretched taut. A woman appeared above the skeleton, a translucent shape hovering above the bones level with me. She had dusky skin and big brown eyes. Gold colored her full lips and dusted her eyelashes. Blue-black hair cascaded down her back in soft curls. She wore a diadem of thin gold, so light and intricate, it looked spun rather than forged. Two golden winged serpents, crafted with meticulous detail wound around her arms, their spiderweb-thin wings cradling her wrists.
She looked like me.
No, wait. That was wrong. I looked like her.
Pressure ground on me. The magic of Mishmar waited like a colossal hammer poised above my head. If it fell on me, it would crush every bone in my body.
The magic drove me down. I sank to my knees.
I reached into my clothes and pulled out pieces of broken Slayer wrapped in a cloth. They matched the skeleton below perfectly. Same pale substance, neither metal nor bone, but both. A pale purple radiance emanated from Slayer’s blade, matching the bones below.
The magic ground against my mind and I heard the same word whispered over and over in my head.
“Z’emir-amit. Z’emir-amit. Z’emir-amit.”
Oh my God. I knew that name. I read about her. I studied her legends, but I never thought I would come across anything of hers because she had been dead for thousands of years. Dead and buried in distant Iraq, somewhere on the east bank of the Tigris River. That name belonged to the bones in front of me. I could feel it. I knew this magic.
I was looking at the corpse of my grandmother.
She wanted me to say her name. She wanted to know that I understood.
I opened my mouth and said it out loud. “Semiramis.”
Her magic drenched me, not the blow of a hammer, but a cascade of power, pouring onto me as if I stood under a waterfall.
Z’emir-amit. The Branch Bearer. The Shield of Assyria. The Great Queen Semiramis. A line from Sarchedon floated up from my memory. When she turns her eyes on you, it is like the golden lustre of noon-day; and her smile is brighter and more glorious than sunset in the desert . . . To look on her face unveiled is to be the Great Queen’s slave for ever more.
She had ruled ancient Mesopotamia. The gates of Babylon bore her name, but through the centuries she had returned to her beloved Assyria again and again. She built the walls of its cities, she led its armies, and she breathed life into its first hanging gardens.
I had carried a piece of her with me all these years and never knew it. Did Voron even know where Slayer came from, when he gave it to me? If h
e knew, then he must’ve wanted me to murder Roland with a blade made of his mother’s bones. How poetic.
The image of Semiramis floated forward. The magic clamped me in its jaws and lifted me into the air. I rose above the platform, held so tight I couldn’t even breathe.
Semiramis reached me. Her dark eyes looked into mine. I stared into the depth of her brown irises and saw the abyss. Time disappeared. Power battered me, crashing against my mind again and again. The first wave cracked my defenses, the second shattered it, and the third set my mind on fire. All of my secrets, fears, and worries lay before her and she drank them in like a starved vampire. It was like being thrown into the heart of the sun and feeling its raging fire consume you.
Her fury saturated me. My father had taken the bones of my grandmother from her resting place in Iraq and brought them here. She hated it. Her magic, her anger, and her grief permeated every inch of Mishmar and twisted it into hell on earth.
Hot tears bathed my cheeks. I was weeping.
She recognized me. She knew who I was. It was as if I were the grandchild of a devastating hurricane or an insane monster that had crushed and destroyed for so long, it no longer remembered how to nurture its young, but it still recognized its own blood and it tried to be gentle and to keep its own wrath from destroying me.
The magic released me. I floated down to the floor, landing on my feet, the translucent image of Semiramis looming before me. A single bone blade slid off the skeleton and landed before my feet.
A gift.
Slayer clattered on the floor before me. The hilt fell apart, releasing the broken blade. I slid the new blade into it, and the hilt sealed itself, binding to the new sword as if forged together. I picked it up. It wasn’t Slayer. It was a quarter of an inch longer and slightly heavier, but it felt right. I knew exactly what I would call it.
I raised my head. My grandmother was gone, her magic withdrawn. It hadn’t disappeared. It had just pulled back, waiting. She would let our party pass as long as they didn’t disturb her.
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