The Queen of Wolves (17 page)

Ophion told me more of this as we soared up into the night, heading for the coast of a country that had been conquered many times, but there was an area of it that remained wild and untamed—and unknown by outsiders for centuries.

He told me of the creatures that Ghorien had called up from the Veil—of the Lamiades, which were like lizards, but as large as horses, and of creatures called Akhnetur; and in their sorceries, Ghorien and his minions forgot that Medhya’s prison was in the Veil. She was using these priests to free her, though they did not know this. When she was nearly free, she reached though the Veil itself and tore at their skin, and in trying to escape the Veil, she failed. Instead, her breath drew their souls—within shadow-clouds—into that otherworld.

But by then, Ophion had gone into hiding. “In the old caves, I hid. I did not show myself. With my glamour gone, I was but a monster to mortals and to the vampyre tribes. The earth changed its course, and mortals flourished when the kings of Myrryd were extinguished. Men hunted the Priests of Blood. Mortal hunters who had grown in their knowledge of weapons and warfare. It seemed but a night to me but the world changed over thousands of years. I did not recognize it when I returned to it. Medhya still visited me in my dreams—as a whispering darkness she came to me.”

I could not help my next question, for it vexed me to even wonder. “Have you seen the Serpent?”

Ophion went silent for a moment. In that silence, I eagerly asked, “Is it real? Or is it in visions only?”

“The Great Serpent exists,” Ophion said. “He manifests in...flesh...in fire...in many things. Though I have only heard the legend of this father of our tribe. As you have. It is the mortals of Myrryd who have seen his fire.”

“Mortals? In a vampyre city?”

Ophion nodded. “Human rats in Myrryd—mortals, stupid and like vermin—living off eels and spiders and drinking foul water. They scramble to the depths to seek their vermin, but not all come back up to the red city. Many remain there...and die in the beneath. Some are caught by even larger rats in the deep damp below. As I spent years in prisons living like a rat myself, I understand them, though they disgust me.”

“Human rats? Mortal men? Women?”

“Barely human. They were vessels bred in captivity for the population of the kingdom. Their descendants could not escape the fallen kingdom, not from its heights or its deep places. Trapped there, unable to leave, breeding for generations, yet with short life spans. They have felt the Great Serpent, too, though they fear him. We all should fear him. It was to Medhya he offered the secrets of immortality and sorcery, and from him the priests learned of the sorceries to undo Medhya when she had grown too corrupt. It was he who showed secrets to the priests that they might destroy Medhya, who had ruled for a thousand years in that red city. She was feared in all kingdoms. It was the Serpent’s magick that brought her to her knees. It is a sorcery of the earth, and of fire. But she had broken many laws, and had murdered her sisters that she might gain their power.”

“Datbathani—and Lemesharra?”

Ophion nodded, grinning like Death herself. “These are our histories told to us by the ancients. These are stories lost. I dream of her sisters, and of the Great Serpent. I dream of Medhya, a storm of darkness upon a throne of gold and bone, with the pelts of wolves and jackals across her shoulders, and a necklace of the teeth of vampyres about her throat. Her raiment is the thinnest skins of flesh, and at her right, the vulture, and at her left, the raven, and entwined about her legs like the cords of sandals, asps, and lizards. The Lamiades stand in wait beside her, and upon the back of each one, the dark mist of the Myrrydanai shadow priests. I dream of her, though she seeks our destruction, and I am drawn to her...as you, too, brother, are drawn.”

I nodded. I could not deny our brotherhood, for Ophion—though crude in his speaking and stammering—expressed what I felt. That Medhya followed me, always, and that my fate and hers would be tied, as my destiny had been bound with Pythia.

I, like Ophion, dreamed of Medhya.

That night, we approached the shores of Myrryd.

BOOK TWO

________________

THE QUEEN OF WOLVES

PART 1: THE RED CITY

Chapter 7

________________

T
HE
K
INGDOM

1

Myrryd had once encompassed land to the east, to what had once been the great city Carthage, and far to the west, where the sea poured out into the vast oceans of the world. Ophion’s words returned to me as I beheld it from the sky: “Mortals are blinded at the fire-colored sea, but those who have been clever enough to shade their eyes have found the inverted ziggurats that seem to spiral into visions of Hell, and though it is not that infernal place, still it is the origins of the legends of such an underworld.”

The sea was indeed a flaming red and yellow, a reflection of the structures that had fallen beneath the waters in some cataclysm.

But the heart of Myrryd was in its namesake city, hidden from the children of the earth by the final sorceries of the Nahhashim: for most mortals were blind to it, and vampyres did not dare enter it, fearing its terrible history and the threat that something slept within its labyrinthine avenues, some power of a dark magick that would overtake even the undead.

From land, Myrryd was invisible, for a fortress of rock encompassed it on three sides. A series of enormous, jagged cliffs rose above the sea below, which entered it in a kind of great bay, but a bay that was too perfect—as if it had been carved out by men over the millennia rather than by the sea itself.

From the water, the city of Myrryd was too enormous to contemplate, and a sailor might not make out the more manicured curves and angles of its steps. I knew why it was called the fire-colored sea, for the ancient structures would catch the sun’s light in such a way that it would seem the waters themselves burned.

In the clouded moonlight, the jagged and spiral shapes seemed like ghostly giants guarding a frozen wasteland in the night.

I clearly saw the great red-rust color of fallen structures, bright copper in the dark light of my vision; waterfalls of a league or more in extent fell from the high cliffs above like streams of white silver to an inlet from the sea far below. An enormous harbor had once been here, and fallen pillars and long stone slabs lay in heaps. Among its sunken monoliths just beneath the dark waves were the remnants of enormous statues of kings and heroes of ancient days, though the denizens of the sea had scrubbed their faces.

The air above the sea-swept ruins was windless and bland in some way; but once we cleared the tops of the trees, the wind began to roar as it whipped along the beginnings of a deep forest.

Suddenly, I felt a searing blast of heat, as if there were some boiling springs nearby, and a strange tugging at my wings and my legs, drawing me downward. I fought against it, but quickly enough it was like fighting against the gale force of the sea. Ophion had already dropped down into the forest below, just beyond the place where the ruins of towers had once arisen from the red rock of the cliff.

I followed him downward, as my wings felt as if they were breaking under the pressure that pulled me down. I felt a strange burning along the bony outcroppings of my wings. Some unseen force tore at them.

I retracted them, and they receded and vanished at my shoulder blades. I leapt down to the grassy clearing below.

For the first time in several nights, I felt no stream here between Ophion and myself. It suddenly went silent, and I had the overwhelming sense of the place as some lonesome wood, not meant for man or beast.

Ophion had tumbled across an overgrown path, rolling over several times until he stopped.

“What caused us to fall?” I shouted to him.

He clambered to his feet and pressed his fingers to his mouth to beg my silence. Even as he limped over to me—for he had turned his wayward foot farther inward in his fall—he whispered, “Myrryd eats our power. A great force within it, my brother. Sucks at our minds to feed it.”

He pointed to the grasses, and there among them, I saw dead birds, and the skulls and bones of small animals, and as he pointed, I saw many more in the areas around us. “Mortal life is at greatest risk, for there is a
magnes
that
draws out energy like a jackal sucks marrow from the bone.”

“It feeds...on energy?”

“On life. On death, too. As we drink blood, so it drinks the life energy,” he whispered, all the while his eyes wide as he looked tree to tree, bush to branch, as if expecting visitors. “Myrryd feeds on the force of the soul, for it must light its temple fires, though no priest attends them.”

“From
us,
as well as mortals?”

“Do you not feel it, brother?” Ophion shivered. “Your wings will not exist here. Your strength is weakened. You are as a mortal man, and perhaps even weaker than that. It knows we’re here. It has tasted our soul.”

“What is
it?
”

“The dead and immortal city of Myrryd awaits us. It has tasted our energy and taken from us the sorcery that allows us to fly.”

“Forever?”

“Only within its field. The ancient kings called it a
magnes
—a place that draws power from life.”

“But—” I began, and meant to ask what he meant about the temple fires and how far the citadel itself was from these woods.

Swiftly, he reached over to put his hand against my mouth, lest I speak again in a loud voice. His voice grew even softer, smaller, and I had to strain to hear him, for the rasp of his voice had come like a light death rattle.

“We must be quiet as the dead,” he said.

2

The trees around us were like giants, and thick around as houses; the violent wind rushed along their swaying branches; leaves scattered in brief whirls along the path and among the overgrowth of brambles. Ophion released his hold on my mouth and crouched, grasping me about the knees as if he might be blown away like a dried weed.

“Long ago I was here, and know of its treachery,” he said. “I trust nothing here.”

I grinned and squatted, patting his back. “Don’t be afraid,” I said, trying to comfort him as if he were a child. “What harm can we meet in the woods? The wind? Perhaps some thunder?”

“Tasmal, so it is called,” he said. “Many spirits hunt the woods.”

“Spirits of the
wood?
”

“These are not elementals, my brother.
Tasmal
means ‘the Laughing Ones.’ They are disincarnate, they are the cursed dead—spirits of evil men who brought war to Myrryd, and were torn apart, living, their bones and flesh scattered beneath this ground, where the forest has overgrown. They wander these woods, but cannot leave them unless within the body of another. They seek flesh. When they possess a man, they can travel great distances before they’ve devoured the skin—if the host has not gone mad from them. But always, when the flesh is gone, they are drawn back here as if by the wind itself. They are called the Laughing Ones, for they make a noise that is like a madman’s cackle.”

“I hear no laughter among these trees.”

“Perhaps they have truly left, but...oh, oh, my brother, oh, look, look.” He leapt from the ground to the trunk of a tree, glancing about as if expecting some forest beast to spring out at him. He pointed first to a twist of brambles that ran—a forest hedge—through the groves of bent and gnarled trees. Among the brambles, I saw the bones of men. “The thorns of this heavy vine are like daggers, and sharp as any knight’s blade. The mortals run against the thorns and die from madness rather than face the Laughing Ones.” He grimaced. “But up there, look.”

I glanced upward into the swaying branches above us.

“This is their handiwork,” he said. “
Tasmal
.”

On several branches of this old tree, as big around as a castle tower, dead men had been hanged—nearly rotted, some preserved as if they’d been pickled, and others wrapped in dried leaves like mummies. The nooses about their necks varied from thick-corded ropes to chains to leather straps torn, no doubt, from their clothes.

Still, more trees carried these hanging corpses, high up, far beyond where an ordinary mortal might climb—and if not a corpse, then the remnant of bones—a skull and spinal cord, an arm bone through a noose, a series of skulls strung together by a length of cord.

Ophion shivered. “Some of these dead men sought to enter Myrryd. Others were the mortal rats, trying to escape the red city. See the pale ones? When they are possessed, they seek their death after a time. Their flesh has been skinned, or has rotted. The Laughing Ones are done with the flesh, and have no use for it. They kill their hosts from within the body as a worm wriggles through the flesh of a fish. The mortals who are their victims are alive until the end. The spirits invade the flesh. Men go mad from it, and pain is their doorway, and death, their release.”

I looked among the many enormous trees and saw many bones and many bodies swaying.

“I do not fear them,” I said. “For it is true that spirits may harm mortals, but among the immortal dead, as we are, what mischief may they do? I have known that necromancers speak to the dead to learn of future events. I would like to speak with these Laughing Ones, for if they see the future, I would learn it from them.”

“Do not even say this thing,” Ophion gasped. “It is blasphemy. The Laughing Ones are not merely spirits. They come in vibration, and the pain of their entry is as the worst tortures devised by men.”