The White City (15 page)

“Out with your revolutionary friends?” he asked. “You know they are hanging that boy Ilya tomorrow.”

Jack nodded. “I was with Irina.”

“I see,” said Sebastien. He was a slender, darker shape against the darkness, something fragile and as real as a knife blade. He took a breath, deep enough that Jack heard the rare inhalation, and continued: “They fight against the government, they fight for rights and wages, they fight as if it mattered. And for what? In a hundred years, it will not matter. This will all dry up and blow away.”

He is old
, Jack told himself.
He is old and in pain.

“It matters,” Jack said, “now.”

Sebastien stopped like a clockwork run out to the end. It was a long time before he spoke, and when he did his tones were low and bitter. “He was a boy, and he’ll hang.”

“That’s the world.”

“Facile,” Sebastien said. “Your cynicism.”

Jack crossed the kitchen. He put a hand on the wampyr’s arm. He snaked fingers through Sebastien’s black hair and tried to tug him down to press his face into the crook of Jack’s shoulder, but it was like bending iron.

“Come to bed, Sebastien.”

“You will only leave me.”

Jack smiled, though Sebastien’s tone of resignation made him feel as though the space around his heart had been sewed up.

“Probably,” he said. “Unless you leave me first. But despite all that, sweetheart. I love you.”

He kissed the wampyr, and the wampyr did not push him away.

Moscow

Bely Gorod

May 1903

Starkad’s lair, by rights, should have been hard to find. It should have been well-concealed, near-impossible to track.

Sebastien simply followed him.

He stayed in an old loft over a warehouse, where—as no one lived there but a wampyr—Sebastien could enter without invitation.

Enter, but not go unnoticed. And what he pursued was unto him as he was unto any merely human member of his court.

In a human heartbeat, Sebastien found himself pinned against the wall beside the door. Starkad bent over him, the chill of his flesh emanating, his smile so close by Sebastien’s skin that Sebastien could feel the way the air moved between them. When he spoke, his words stirred the fine hairs on Sebastien’s throat. The language was old and softly spoken, full of hushed shirring sounds, as dear and half-forgotten as a cradle song.

Were Sebastien mortal, he would have clenched his fists to still wracking shivers. Undead, he merely stood still—so still—and waited, while Starkad murmured the words of a medieval poem against his ear.

“Your mother tongue,” Starkad whispered when he was done—still in the old Galician, a few hundred years newer than the words Sebastien had been raised on, but close, so close—so much closer than anything he had heard in all the centuries since. “How long has it been since you heard it, Lopo?”

Sebastien had to go down a long way, and come a long way back, to find the words to answer. “Whose name is that, Starkardr?”

It was a mundane, a common name. The name of a laborer. So familiar.

“Yours,” the wampyr answered. His cold hand stroked Sebastien’s cold cheek, the flesh so very thin between their bones. “How have you come to have forgotten it, child of Eudaline, when it is so easy for me to recall?”

“I have forgotten a great deal,” Sebastien said. “What did not die with the years died with my maker.”

“Mmm.” Starkad’s dry lips brushed his skin. Reflexively, Sebastien turned his head, baring his throat to one so much elder and more powerful. The blood were at their very heart the most hierarchical of creatures. Desire was a cramp inside him, hard enough to arch his body to a painful comma. He fought it; all his strength bent on standing straight. On not humiliating himself before the elder.

The elder who said, “But I know it, and I will give it back to you. Your name is Lopo.”

Most wampyrs smelled faintly sweetish in death, an attar of sugar, salt, and the metal of the blood by which they lived. Starkad smelled of—nothing, or almost nothing. Salt mud crazed in cold weather. Round stones sheened by the ice of a winter river. Sebastien breathed it deep, dragging a dead scent across dead senses. It was a relief not to be the old one, for a change. Not to set the tone of every encounter. It would have been even more of a relief to surrender—

“I cannot return the gift,” Sebastien said. “The language of your mortal years was lost long before I could have learned it.”

“I take no offense,” Starkad said. “You cannot be held accountable for what faded before you were born. I am eldest; knowledge is my burden. But your tongue, I can give you. Your tongue, and your name. Here, child, have it of me. You are Lopo of no father, Lopo the Moor’s bastard. In the blood, you are the child of Eudaline.”

The pause was so portentous, Sebastien knew almost to a certainty what would follow.

Until Starkad said, “And I am the Norseman, child of Gaius.”

The surprise was so much that at first he thought he heard what he expected, and he jerked back against the cup of Starkad’s hand that had somehow come to rest against his skull. “
Gaius?
”

“You thought I would say another name.”

“If you were Evie’s blood brother—it would explain how you knew of me, when I should be nothing of significance to you.” The knowledge came with a pang of loss.

Starkad’s breath was cold against Sebastien’s lips. Sebastien fought the urge to lick them with a dry cold tongue, as if licking up the elder’s scent. He failed.

“I am not your grandsire Aethelwyn’s child. I was born before even he. But you lived longer than most of the young ones, and so did your dam. I made it my business to learn.”

Sebastien found himself relaxing into the embrace of long fingers cradling his skull. Starkad’s body pressed his own; the elder felt light and hard and unimaginably strong. Sebastien knew what he would be like under his clothes, a shape of twisted silk cable and dry cold supple leather like calfskin.

“Like the art,” Sebastien said. Starkad’s nostrils flared on
his
breath, in return. The tension between them was sublimating, turning to vapor, saturating the air all around. It was becoming inevitable, what would happen, and that inevitability brought a kind of peace.

Sebastien already knew that he would not deny Starkad what the elder so patently desired. He desired it too, this thing he had not had since Eudaline burned. Surrender. To not be the one who was accountable.

“Like the art,” Starkad admitted. “You—” he laughed, dry and soft, his breath moving the ruddy strands of his beard “—you might outlast me.”

“Is that why you want me?”

“You need a better court,” Starkad said. “Two is too few. A dozen, that would be better. The police detective likes you, and he likes your sorceress. You should prey upon him.”

“Are you my tutor?”

Starkad smiled. “You seem to need one, though you are old for the schoolhouse.”

“Answer the question, then. Why is it that you want me, who could have anyone?”

“You persist. I need such things, such anchors, if I am to endure.” He pressed a finger to Sebastien’s lips.

Sebastien, without averting his eyes from Starkad’s transparent ones, let his tongue drift out to taste the soft, dead flesh that barely cloaked the bone. He watched those water-sapphire eyes drift closed and thought
He will leave me too. He wishes to be the one who leaves this time. After a while, it is more than we can bear to be left, again and again and again, by lovers. By the world. By history. He will leave me. Like Eudaline.

He took a breath for speaking with. “What is your name, then, old one?”

“Starkardr,” he said. “When I stopped playing the human game, I stopped having reasons to lie.” Gently, he let his lips brush Sebastien’s.

Because it seemed a statement out of experience rather than an oblique insult—Starkad was out of any doubt beyond obliqueness—Sebastien, lightly, kissed him back.

—h—

It had been a long time since Sebastien surrendered to something more powerful than he.

It was surprisingly easy, in the end.

—h—

“Starkardr?”

“I am listening.”

“And what was the name of Aethelwyn-sire-of-Eudaline’s sire?”

The silence was answer enough.
Old, yes. Old beyond imagining.

After it had persisted a while, Sebastien brought in air to speak again. “I can do you the service you desire.”

Silence again, and no denial. But a pause before Starkad answered, “What service is that, my darling Lopo?”

If Sebastien had a heart that beat, it would have been straining the bonds of his chest just then. “You can be the one who leaves. This time. With me. I will wait as long as you need me.”

“You cannot promise that.”

“Oh,” Sebastien said. “I do.”

Silence.

When Sebastien turned his head, the other side of the bed was empty and cold. He had never felt the wampyr rise.

Sebastien rose too, and smoothed his hair without benefit of the mirror. Enough brief night remained to return to the hotel in safety, if he was quick about it.

Dyachenko and his meager court would be awaiting him. And Starkad was right; It was a shortfall in need of addressing.

“I’ll see you again,” Sebastien said through the crack to the empty room, before he shut the door.

Intently though he listened, there came no answer.