The Priest of Blood (29 page)

10

We traveled nearly a week, running swiftly through the night, grabbing mortals as we found them, drinking greedily. We stole food from new kills and gave it to our captives, who had become addicted to our nightly feedings.

The pleasure of having a vampyre feed is rarely spoken of among mortals, but it is a delight to their senses. It awakens the life instinct for them, and this, in some way, makes them feel a pleasant sense of well-being and purpose.

When one of the captive vessels looked at me after I had drunk from a new cut made along his shoulder, I could tell that he saw me as some kind of god who bestowed upon him a feeling of elation and meaning. Though we continued to keep them bound and gagged, the captives had begun to look forward to the nightly feedings and seemed angered if we found other throats to slash. Keeping them alive was easier than I’d expected, for though we might tear at throats and wrists, our saliva has a healing balm within it that is like a leech pressed to a wound. The wounds heal rapidly, and our pleasure at puncturing the old wound to taste blood was matched only by the heady drunkenness of the mortal vessel that gives him or herself to our ministrations. Kiya was right—we were the cats, they were the mice, but it was a game that required both victim and victor, predator and prey. I gained on this journey an enormous respect for our prey, for these two men who began to see us as their messiahs, who only asked a bit of blood in the night in return for the thrill within their blood and the awakening of some lost connection to the divine.

We had to elude camps of men, also. Soldiers, knights, armies—we saw them along the plains. I wondered how many of my old compatriots were there, preparing for battle, as we watched them from a bluff or the mouth of a cave. We were no match for groups of men, particularly ones with weapons and armor. The legends of our kind were exaggerated, surely, for although we could take a family down fairly quickly, if there were several people in a camp who stuck close together, it was not a certainty that we could take on all of them and expect to see another sunset.

Finally, nearly a new moon into our journey, Kiya raced up the side of a boulder and looked to the east. “There!” she cried out. “There! The Gates of Nahhash! If the city of your visions exists, it will be between those great cliffs, Falconer!”

11

The Gates of Nahhash were two sheer cliffs rising up like giant castles on either side of a narrow path. “It grows narrower still as it continues,” Yarilo said. “Many times my father’s army ventured here. There were legends of gold and ivory deep within its caves.”

“Even then, Alkemara was known,” Vali said, “though none knew it by name.”

“There are places where the rock traps mortals,” Yarilo said, pointing to the cliff’s edge many leagues above us. “They say the old gods sit up and push boulders over to murder all who seek entrance through the gates.”

“Is that where we go?” I asked Kiya.

“There is no ‘where’ in that place,” Yarilo said. “The far side of this road leads to a terrible desert many days’ journey.”

“If this is where Alkemara exists,” Kiya said, looking at the sheer rock wall of the cliff, “it is beneath this Earth, not beyond it.”

“If this is sacred to the Nahhash”—Yset ran forward to the base of the mountain—“then it is in the nests of serpents here, and if we follow their pathways, we will find the kingdom.”

12

“It is a snake’s nest,” Yarilo said, reaching into one of the many crevices along the ridge of the hill. When he drew his arm out, strings of small, thin asps had unhinged their jaws, biting their fangs deep into the flesh of his forearm. He shook them off—all were dead. The venom of vampyric blood was greater than that of any snake’s milk. Yarilo grinned, his sharp teeth gleaming in the dark light. “It’s narrow. Too narrow.”

“We can dig,” Kiya said. “It’s down there. Below us.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Do you feel the stream?”

I closed my eyes and flared my nostrils, trying to get a feel for vibrations of life. I sensed the others with me, and even the wriggling and coiling of snakes within the ground and among the rifts of the caves. But no other stream came to me.

I was about to open my eyes when I felt it. A gentle tugging. As of a heaviness—a pull to the Earth. It was unlike the stream around us. It drew me to squat down and press my hands against the dirt. I opened my eyes, looking up at the others. “It’s more than the stream. It sucks at the Earth. It’s an emptiness.”

“Beneath here?” Ewen asked.

Yarilo got down on his belly and placed his ear to the ground. “I feel nothing. No underground kingdom. No life.”

“Not life,” I said. I glanced up at Kiya. “You feel it.”

She nodded. “It’s slight. But it’s like the sucking mud of a swamp. It wants us to find it.”

Yarilo glanced warily between us, his brow furrowing. “We can’t dig through the snake pit to get there.”

I looked across to the Gates of Nahhash—the great, tall, sheer cliffs on either side of us. Pockmarks in the mountain wall—snake holes and hairline entrances to caverns all along it. “Somewhere here, there must be entry.”

I glanced back at our captives—the two Turks, bound together. Our wineskins for the voyage. “Where the snakes are large and plentiful, there we will find the doorway to the kingdom. Bring me drink.” Ewen went and grabbed the men, dragging them to me. I sipped from the neck of one while Yarilo took a taste from the wrist of the other. Replenished, I withdrew from the throat and felt the strength return. The pull of the Earth had taken something from me.

Whatever Alkemara was, wherever it was, it was a vacuum that would steal our strength and what energy we had. We had already begun to recognize this. It filled me with a nameless dread, for we would need power to awaken the sleeping priest if we found him.

“Drink your fill now,” I said to the others who stood watching. “Drain them. You’ll need strength.”

“Shouldn’t we take them with us?” Vali asked. “What if we are trapped there? Shouldn’t we have them?”

“Whatever roams the fallen kingdom, it will not let mortals through,” I said. “Drink now, and hope it lasts us the journey.”

The others gathered around the two mortals, each taking a place near the source of blood, whether neck or heart or shoulder or wrist or thigh. After the drinking was done, we sought out the place of the greatest of the serpents. The whole time, I felt as if we were being watched by someone—someone who followed us yet didn’t interrupt the stream enough for any of us to completely sense this stalking form. I saw it in Kiya’s face—she glanced upward along the cliff as if expecting something to be seen there. Ewen reached for me as I climbed up the sheer wall, feeling as if I had the powers of a spider. He touched my ankle. I turned to him, and he said, “I feel something. Something is near.”

I nodded, but had no idea what threat lurked nearby. When I had scaled perhaps a hundred feet up the cliff, using the myriad snake holes to grip as I went and the energy from the newly drunk blood to move swiftly, a crevasse opened up, with a shelf of rock. As I studied this, I saw that it was truly a doorway—an ancient one, for it had carvings of strange figures along its edges, figures of women with wings and lions with the heads of children and the tails of crocodiles. Words, written above the doorway, carved into the rock, in some language long dead. Were they words of warning? Of welcome? I could not know.

I called to the others to follow after me. They did not move as swiftly as had I, and Vali fell twice. His agony on his second fall could be felt in the stream between us, and my head ached with his pain. Kiya clutched the sides of her scalp, closing her eyes. This was only the second time I had experienced the stream’s negative aspect—that we were tied together in this afterlife, that our tribe was within one stream, held like clasped hands, one to the other.

Yarilo scuttled down the rock face as agile as a crab, and took Vali’s arm, wrenching him up with him so that he might not fall again.

“I feel it,” Kiya said mysteriously.

I glanced over to her just as she brought herself up onto the rock door’s threshold.

Tension clenched at her face. “Something,” she said. “Something’s coming.”

Suddenly, I knew what she meant.

What had been watching us from a distance descended along the wall of rock above me, pouring from the openings with clicks and a strange
shhh
sound. I glanced up the cliff and first saw a blurred motion of bone whiteness moving down toward us in a wave. It became more distinct as it approached.

Scorpions.

As large as my hand. Pure white, and with twin stingers hovering over their backs. Thousands of them coming toward us. I glanced down at Ewen, who struggled up the rock face, barely moving fast enough to make it to the doorway. He would be overwhelmed. The scorpions had already covered the threshold and begun crawling on Kiya, who madly shook them off. I went to try and help her. I heard Ewen crying out, and Vali, as well.

When I looked over the edge, I saw that the creatures had covered them and were beginning to weigh them down. A stinger struck my foot, then a pincer. More stingers jabbed at my flesh. I felt the intense pain of both my own feelings and the others of my tribe as pain shot through our stream. The poison of these creatures worked into me, and I felt nausea as my blood fought against this strange venom that was unlike any other. It made my blood warm, then seem to boil. I pulled at the creatures, flinging them against the rocks, tearing at their twin overhangs of spears, then I went to free Kiya from them. After I left her, I crawled downward on the rock, reaching first Yarilo, who, once I pulled a massive scorpion from his face, had the strength to help Vali with his small demons. And then Ewen, whom I took up in one arm and shook hard so that the monsters would drop to the Earth far below.

He was in the worst shape, and when I finally drew him up into the doorway he rested in my arms while I plucked a stinger that had gone deep into the side of his neck.

“Why didn’t we sense them?” Kiya asked, when we had all gathered at the mouth of the entrance.

“Perhaps,” I said, “they’re like us. Perhaps they are not alive.”
 

“Who could create such a creature?”

“Who could create us?” I asked.

13

I watched the night sky with its pinprick stars above and the cliff opposite us. “These creatures are a warning. If we were human, their venom would have killed us. Whoever put them here did not think that those who have already been to the Threshold would exist to come here.”

“The Pythoness?” Vali asked. His face had been restored to its alabaster splendor from the welts and scratches that had existed there just moments before.

“It must be another,” Kiya said. “She would know we might find this doorway.”

“Do you think she follows us?” Yarilo asked. He came to me, and sat beside me, gently stroking Ewen’s hair. Ewen glanced up at him, then at me. I still felt pain within him, but his blood had stopped its raging within his flesh.

“She follows no one,” I said. “If you had felt what I had when she offered the Sacred Kiss, you would know that she is far away from us now.”

“Because she fears you,” Kiya said, nodding.

“But the other one,” I said. “Medhya. It feels as if she watches me, even now.”

14

When at last we crawled on our bellies through the darkness, we saw nests of vipers along rock shelves and among the deep pits along the way. They crawled across our backs and legs as we pushed through. I felt fangs going into my skin, and with each bite and injection of venom, one of the serpents died, drinking the poison of our blood. Holes crisscrossed the tunnel through which we moved, and eventually we came to a dip in the rock that opened into a larger space.

It was like a giant well within the mountain. When I looked up, there was no exit to the sky above. I sensed water far below us.

“We crawl down,” Kiya said.

“Or jump.”

She then sensed the water, also. “A sea,” she gasped. “How, within the mountain, can there be this?”

“An underground passage of water,” I said. “If the city was swallowed by the Earth, might not its waterway be also? And yet have you seen rivers that run beneath the Earth, as well? Perhaps this is like that.”

She shook her head. “We’ve come all this way. But...water.”

“We can go back,” Vali said, crouching at the edge, peering down into the vast abyss below us.

“I am continuing on,” I said.

“Water,” she said.

I raised my eyebrows. “Perhaps.”

Kiya said nothing then, but Vali called out, “We grow weak in water.”

I nearly laughed. “Silver. Water. What good are we? Have we no strength in us?”

Kiya, angered by my outburst, spat back, “Do not laugh at what you do not understand, Falconer. Water does not harm us. We simply lose the stream within it. It takes much from us.”

I took a breath, closing my eyes. Part of me wished to take Ewen and just escape this world, as I had wished to escape the world of mortals through death. Instead, I opened my eyes upon Kiya and said, “Do not fear the water, then. I will be your strength.” To the others, I shouted, “I will be the strength for all of you, if I must carry you each on my back across a raging river.”

Yarilo roared with laughter, but Kiya remained angry. I tried to take her wrist in mine to communicate through the stream my respect for her, but she drew her hand back.

I leaned over the edge and tested my hand against the well’s curves. “There’s enough to hold. We can crawl down. Look.” I pointed down the circular wall, and there, carved into the sides, was a steep series of steps, barely more than a slight raised shelf of rock. I felt that some engineer had planned this entrance—that it was not haphazard, not part of being swallowed by the Earth in a cataclysm, but of a plan. As if this mountain had been hollowed out by some great civilization then into which it buried itself alive.

15