"I met a
traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . ."
"Ozymandias"
Percy Bysshe Shelley
CHAPTER 1
1
When
the war exploded within a few hundred miles of the buried city, I knew
that a hunter would come to that sacred place called Alkemara. Cities
to the east and west were afire. Great plumes of smoke rose from
distant lands. The mortal realm had begun finding the buried kingdoms
at last, those remnants of the Ages of the Serpent and the
Veil. Wars of the past century had exposed the tombs of lost kings
and queens and priests of the three faces of the goddess, the bones of
those years of my youth, and the ashes of the thousand or more years
before even my birth. Bombs and satellites and all the weapons of
warfare had unearthed the most sacred places of the Kamr priesthood.
I was born during the years of the Crusades, and now witness the
wonders and terrors of the twenty-first century. I found Alkemara
during those wars of my youth. Now, others find it during the current
wars. I see omens of a New Dark Age descending again, and I see the
medieval world rising up as if it, too, had only been sleeping. I
sense a tearing at the Veil that separates this world from the
otherworld.
It has happened before.
War
and its destruction drive those who seek me out. Though I have come
and gone in the mortal world for centuries -- and learned from travels
and from a very late education -- my tombs are many, beneath great
cities and fallen kingdoms. Those who are left of my tribe sleep in
the deepest places. I retired to one of the ancient sacred homes of
the vampyre when I felt the world turning dark again. I was sure no
mortal would find us, as had happened in Prague or Berlin, but it is
always bombs and fires and destruction that expose our nests. We move
on. We inhabit caverns and catacombs and those tomb-like kingdoms that
have yet to be found, keeping to the fringes of human awareness until
the Serpent calls us. Until the spirit of the Serpent guides someone
to us.
When
the bombing erupted, in those cities distant to my tomb, armies and
spies and supplies in jets roared over the empty lands. Several pilots
noticed strange pathways along the desert, as if a trade route had
once existed there. The pathways, covered during even my existence,
had a serpentine shape. Along the mountain cliffs, beneath centuries
of erosion, there were indications of two great monuments, faces
carved upon them.
Some mortals, through religious fanaticism, decided to destroy these
enormous monuments, for they seemed to represent pagan gods. Whenever
fanatics find ancient knowledge or art or the hint of history that
does not involve them, they seek to obliterate it. An international
cry went up to save these newfound treasures. The monuments were of a
god and a goddess, both nameless, both unknown to any books of
mythology or history. The first archeologists and historians at the
site ascribed the artistry to Hurrian and other lost peoples who
traveled these desolate desert paths thousands of years before.
I had not seen these monuments when I first came to this place, for so
much was buried then beneath a cataclysm's touch. Yet, I knew them,
for they represented the bringers of eternal life to my own race. They
are of the Great Serpent and the three-faced goddess who is called
Medhya, Datbathani, and Lemesharra. The face of Medhya would be set
in a grimace, for she is the Dark Mother who brings terror in the
night; Datbathani would wear a gold mask of the Queen of Serpents; and
Lemesharra, who had protected the city of Alkemara until its fall, was
the magnificent giver of life to the dead. The Great Serpent has no
face, but all vampyres may see their faces in his. He is the serpent
of the earth, the guardian of buried places, and the protector of
secrets that separate this world from the world beyond the Veil.
When a British team of historians announced that they believed the
ancient city of Nahhash once existed in this dusty place, it was only
a matter of time before the trucks and tents and shovels and students
and government supervisors would arrive and begin plundering.
An ancient manuscript by a mad monk of France resurfaced.
In it, the city of Nahhash had another name -- Al-Kamr-Amon -- and was
called by this monk, "The Lair of Dragons."
This manuscript came into the possession of a wealthy archaeologist
and professor of antiquities who had been traveling the desert for the
past few years. She led a team of experts pouring over ancient maps.
She funded an extensive archaeological dig deep into the deserts of
the Middle Eastern world. She was one of many who sought the origins
of this place, and of these statues that seemed like a giant gateway
into the valley between mountains. She believed they indicated a site
"greater than the city of Petra," as she told the International
Herald-Tribune in the one interview she granted. "And the ruins
found in France, at the Taranis-Hir dig."
But I knew she hunted more than ancient ruins.
She hunted me, though she did not understand why.
2
I had fled the great city I had become comfortable within, and
returned to the buried kingdom.
Surrounded by a nest of my tribe, we gathered to protect it from the
exploration. Others hunted the temporary settlements to scare away
teams of engineers and archaeologists who had camped a mere hundred
miles from the entry to our buried, broken city of Alkemara. We had
seen so many lost kingdoms fished from the sea or from beneath
volcanic ash to be dissected and put on display in foreign museums,
while all the sacred energies of these places were destroyed.
These had been our hiding places in troubled times. They were
vanishing as the modern world dredged them up from mud and ash.
We positioned ourselves to slaughter any who found their ways through
the serpent-holes along the cliffs that gave entry into the valley
that existed within the mountain, with its milky waters and city of
the dead.
But I could not slaughter the woman who led a small expedition through
the narrow caverns and twisting drops.
When this archaeologist opened my tomb in the walls of Alkemara, I
knew her by her eyes and by her hair and the shape of her face.
When she spoke, I heard the voice of someone I had once known in my
first century of life. It is amazing how the human voice passes
through the bloodline -- how codes of life continue from one
generation to the next, for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years.
I saw in her eyes, also, a longing for me, as if for some youth she
once loved and lost. I had been a dream to her, until now. A face seen
at a window, years before. She combed her fingers through my hair and
brought her lips near mine as if desiring all that I was, and all that
I knew.
"Natalia," I whispered, and wished I had not said her name.
I had just reminded her of a night, long ago, when she had been a girl
of seventeen, sobbing in her room, looking up at the rain-spattered
window.
Yes, I whispered as if in her mind, I knew you would find me
here.
3
The nest of vampyres in the surrounding tombs descended upon her
assistants, their wings blocking escape as they took the mortals and
drank deeply from them.
I soon had her in my arms and would have drunk her dry as well, had I
not heard her speak -- had I not noticed the face of this woman, so
familiar, as if she had come from a past century.
"You will stay here with me," I said.
"Will you kill me?" she asked as she lay beside me in my coffin at
dawn. I embraced her as if we were lovers. She did not struggle
against me, though I smelled her fear. My wings spread, folded around
her body and mine, forming a cloak to warm us in that cold place.
An embrace of darkness.
4
A young vampyre, Daniel -- whom I brought into immortality six years
earlier when he had begged for death along an alleyway of Prague --
sealed my tomb each morning and opened it at sunset. The tomb was a
generous size, and had many scrolls and oil lamps by which Natalia
might read. Food was brought for her, and fresh water as well as wine,
when she desired it. This was the place in which the Priest of Blood
himself had once been entombed. I slept in his crystal bier, and
frequently thought of him as I closed my eyes each day.
I told her if she tried to harm me or to escape, she herself would die
in the bargain when Daniel came to release me from the crystal coffin
at night. "He will tear you open and pour your blood into the throats
of a nest of vampyres," I said. "And you have no defense against them.
So do not try to harm me, for you only destroy yourself by doing so."
I trusted she would not raise a hand against me, despite her fears.
Perhaps this is the arrogance of the vampyre, but centuries of
immortality bring out a sensual quality to our eyes and our lips, and
our visage is sweet to the mortal eye -- though a less glamorous
slickness covers our skin during the day. We retain the vitality of
each life we drink, for fertility and the erotic essence are in the
blood more than in flesh and bone. Few mortals who still feel the
charge of life within them can resist us. We do not need to build
spider webs or traps, for the men and women from whom we drink seek us
out, though we remain hidden from others.
Likewise, I told her I would drink some of her blood, just a cupful
each night, in exchange for what she sought from me. When I leaned
into her to press my lips at her throat, or raised her wrist to my
mouth, I felt her submission to me. She was here for the same reason I
had come to this place. It was her destiny to find me.
In the small tastes of blood I took from her, I tasted my mortal
memories again -- for the blood of the living brought back my own
mortality. I felt her desire for me. She longed for a forgotten
ancestor -- a lost bloodline.
I glanced up at her face as I sucked gently from the wound. A flush of
pink came into her cheeks, and the rims of her ears darkened with a
rush of blood. The distant look in her eyes told me she had gone into
a place of pleasure and even shame. Her lips parted slightly, as she
gasped, and gasped, and gasped, until she groaned beneath my
ministrations at her throat.
Her arms wrapped about my waist, and I felt her animal heat as her
hips ground instinctively against me. She whispered as her half-lidded
eyes took me in, "You are so beautiful, so beautiful." Yet it was not
me she saw, but the flesh of an ancient vampyre, which blinds the
mortal eye.
Beauty traps many mortals, just as I had once been trapped by the
vampyre Pythia, whose unconscionable beauty haunts me, still, after
centuries. I was taken as a vampyre just past my nineteenth year. I
still seem a strong, muscular youth of that age. Mortal men and women
often could be drawn to my youth -- the essence of life at its peak.
It is the illusion of the vampyric flesh itself.
Natalia burned as I held her, a fever in her blood that I could taste.
I felt something deeper there than the lust of the flesh.
She wept against my neck as I healed her wound with kisses along the
soft pale flesh where I had moments before torn my entry. She held
fast to me. She whispered, "I saw you when I was young and in love
with a man. You took him away from me. It was you. You at my window. I
have hunted you since then."
"I have watched you since you were a child," I said. "As I watched
your mother. I wondered who of your line would find Alkemara again."
5
It was true -- I had been at her window one night, in the rain,
several stories above the ground several years before though it barely
seemed like several nights to me.
She was not yet eighteen, and the man she loved was a mortal predator
who would have destroyed her.
And I had watched Natalia Waterhouse since her childhood, as I had
watched the generations of her family before.
The man named Vieri Montealegro pursued Natalia only for her wealth
and family connections; the Waterhouse fortune was vast and crossed
continents.
When I grabbed Monteleagre up in my embrace, I drank from him until
dawn, until the silk sheets of his bed were flooded in his life's
essence.
After I departed his bedroom, my curiosity about the girl of seventeen
overwhelmed me. I rose upward to her bedroom window to see her. I
wished to see her, just once, as I had seen her mother and her
grandmother before her.
For a moment, I suppose, she saw me there, outside her window, my
great wings spread out like a dragon angel in the rain, my cloak drawn
over my form, yet my face visible.
I knew it was a risk to be there, but I had protected this bloodline
as no other among the mortal realm. I could smell the blood of its
descendants, and this one, Natalia, was special.
I was curious about her, this descendant of that line, looking so much
like one I had once known in that ancient century barely remembered
even by the hidden ones of the earth. It was as if the one I had
known in my early century had lived in the blood, to emerge in
Natalia's face, the reincarnation of a woman I had once loved.
What I saw tore at my heart, but she lay upon her bed sobbing as if
the world had ended for her when her false lover had been killed.
When Montealegre's body was found, she must have known that her
grandmother's stories of the vampyres were true.
Perhaps this, more than anything, had set her on her course of
studies, crossing between the occult and mythology, and the histories
of buried places.
6
One twilight in our shared tomb, I awoke to see her standing over me.
As my eyes focused, I saw she held a scroll in her hand, half of it
drawn down, the parchment torn.
"This tells of explorations by the ancients," she said. "Of traveling
the world, the entire world, thousands of years before the
discovery of the Americas. This could rewrite all known history."
"History is a half-truth, written by conquerors," I said. I rose,
pointing to other scrolls. "Those are tales of the other races of
beings who shared the earth with mortals, though the originals of
these scrolls were destroyed in the fires of Alexandria's libraries.
Once, there were many species of what you would call humans, not just
the ones who blanket the earth these past several thousand years.
There were technologies before my birth that rival those in existence
in this century. Histories are burned and buried and revised.
Conquerors turn the gods of the vanquished into demons. Do you think
legends you have studied were born from lies? For you see me here now
as you saw me at your window when you were seventeen." I allowed my
wings to unfold from my shoulder blades. "I, too, am legend, as all
the tribes of Alkemara are legend, though you see us now as true."
After I had drunk from her, just before dawn, I passed her that
manuscript of my first years upon the earth. This tale ended in my
capture, and the capture of my companion, Ewen, by the whispering
shadows of the Myrrydanai, and of our imprisonment in an ancient Roman
well, cast there by the power of the Myrrydanai, sealed with lead and
silver to keep us from escaping what would seem a tomb for many years.
That night, after she had spent the day reading what I had written of
my youth, and my first journey to Alkemara, she begged me to drink
from her as if her offering was a way of thanking me for this newfound
knowledge.
7
During those nights together, I took her up in my arms into the curved
cavern that held the magnificent fallen city.
Ever-upward we flew, into a sky full of jeweled stars beyond the
slender opening of the mountain that covered Alkemara like a shell.
She held tight to me, overcoming fears of falling, of dying.
By the eighth night we spent together, I brought her into the
experience of the Stream itself, that current that runs among the
immortals of the world.
I told her that she was the first living mortal to feel it course
about her, to feel the connections between those of my species and
hers.
She whispered that I had given her the greatest gift in her entire
life.
"I will give you more than this," I promised. "For there is a secret
of Alkemara that has been meant for you. It has been held here for
centuries until one of your bloodline returns."
8
We sat
up along the steps at the entrance to the Temple of Lemesharra. She
gasped in wonder at monuments and the fallen cityscape, the walls, the
houses and chambers, the carvings of glyphs along columns. But most of
all, she was shocked by the beauty of our tribe, many of whom flew
above us, out into the night for their hunt. "I knew you existed," she
said. "But I didn't fully believe it. But now, there is a race. Not
merely a few of your tribe -- but a population."
"Perhaps a million or more of us, for even I do not know of all of my
kind. Some of us are...different from others. Some come from the
west,and their history is another path that was not known to my tribe
for many thousands of years. In some centuries, there are fewer of us,
but we flourish when the Veil is thin."
"Is it thin now?" she asked.
"Yes. I can feel its fabric stretching. There are shadows that seek to
return to the earth. There is much still hidden from the world of
mortals," I said. "Much that is unseen or unnoticed. I have lived
among your cities for centuries, as have others of this nest. We
return here in times of trouble, or in times of omens of the
descending dark. This is a sacred place to us, and will remain so."
When she first arrived, Natalia had several boxes and satchels, as
well as supplies brought in by her workers. These now lay strewn about
the entryway to Alkemara. She asked that I find a particular satchel
that had been among her belongings when she and her assistants entered
Alkemara's realm. I called to Daniel to find it and retrieve it for
us. He returned with several boxes, as did other vampyres, bringing
them to the steps of the temple.
Sifting through these, Natalia lifted up the brown satchel, unbuckling
its stay. "I want to show you something passed down for many years,"
she said. From within the satchel, she brought out a small pouch. From
it, she drew a dried purple flower. She set this on the step between
us.
"The
graveyard flower," I said. I pointed over the crumbling walls, many
miles from where we sat. "It still grows there, among the bones. It is
native to the ancient city, Myrryd, which lies in ruins not yet found
by mortals. Merod grew the flower here, again, having rescued it
before the city of his birth was destroyed. An alchemist once stole it
and carried it to distant shores. It was not meant for mortal use."
She reached into the pouch and withdrew what looked like a wolf's
tooth. A tiny hole had been drilled through it, as if it had been worn
as a charm. She held a small rounded talisman in her hand. On the back
of it, strange symbols as of some ancient prayer. On the front of it,
a cracked mirror.
I
looked these over, turning them in my fingers, remembering the battles
I had once seen, remembering the shapeshifting Chymer women, speaking
with the dead, calling up spirits to aid them, and running as wolves
in the night.
"This." I held up the wolf's tooth. "Wolves were plentiful in those
days. The dead and dying covered the battlefields of the world. Wolves
and wildcats developed a taste for human flesh, for it rotted at the
edge of the forest. They were a terror. This tooth is from someone
who shifts, and becomes wolf through sorcery. There were women who had
once been nuns -- anchoresses -- who had...changed when plagues came
to the land. When the Veil tears, "
"This
'graveyard flower'? Is it merely a memento, or does it have
properties?"
"You're a scholar and a scientist," I said. "You have tested this?"
She
nodded. "It seems to be some ethrowback of the poppy, but with
properties of a carnivorous plant. A fly-trap, perhaps."
"These
are a bit of poison, really. When in the ground, it will curl about
the finger and prick the skin to draw a bit of blood. For the vampyre,
it's nectar is a powerful drug that gives us second sight, or draws us
beyond the Veil itself." I picked up the dried purple blossom and
pressed it to my lips, inhaling its slightly bitter rose odor. "This
has no nectar left in it. It was called the Sang-Fleur by the French
-- the blood flower."
"And
to immortals, it brought visions?"
"What
does not kill us opens our eyes." I picked up the small, rounded
mirror with its spider web cracks. It was only a bit larger than my
thumb. "A highborn of a certain kingdom would wear this about the
neck, an amulet. It is the Disk. In Taranis-Hir, it protected one from
the winged devil. Do you see the writing? It is a prayer that simply
says, 'Virgin of Shadows, Mother of Darkness, Keep Us Safe.'"
She
looked at the statue of Lemesharra. The two vipers that entwined about
the statue's sandals, each with a different goddess face, all aspects
of Medhya herself. "Why would a people pray to a mother of darkness?"
I
thought a moment and said, "Because they are frightened by the terror
that comes by night, and the shadow by day. Because plagues killed
many, and winged devils blanketed the skies. Terror makes captives of
many." I picked over the objects she laid out upon the crumbling
steps. "I imagine with these things, you also found maps. Passed from
your great-grandmother. Passed from her great-grandfather. Passed down
so far back in the centuries that no one knows the name of the person
who held these things in her hands."
"Her?"
I
nodded. "I knew the original owners of these objects, Natalia."
After
a minute of silence, she said, "Yes. One of the maps is of this place.
Of this temple."
"Which
is why you found it so quickly, when for centuries men have sought it
in vain," I said. "Why now, Natalia? Why are you here?"
She
reached down to the satchel, and drew out papers wrapped in plastic.
The first was a map to Alkemara -- it had once belonged to the
alchemist, Artephius. She turned the map over. On the back was
written, "The tomb of the Maz-Sherah," with a legend-key to the map.
I
turned the map over again. A rounded star had been drawn at the place
where my tomb rested. The ancient language of the alchemists had been
scrawled about the parchment, and designs for machines and devices had
been sketched upon it. The mapmaker had known exactly where I would be
in a future century. Artephius had done this so that one of the
descendants would find me. "He had known I would come," I said. "Long
before I was born, I was meant to come here. And Artephius had
known."
"It is
this map," Natalia said, "that drew me to the study of the ancient
world. When I was a little girl of eight, I found it among my mother's
papers, locked and hidden away as if it were a treasure map. I had
stolen the key from her small silver purse that she kept deep in her
middle dresser drawer. I tried every strongbox and trunk I could find
in our house, but the key fit nothing. One afternoon when my parents
were in their studies, I knew I had a few hours to hunt. At the back
of a wardrobe in the false attic of our house, beneath piles of
carefully wrapped clothes and stacks of paintings from my mother's
youth as an artist, I found a wide mahogany box with filigree inlaid
upon it.
"When I looked at the silver clasp of the box, I saw it was in the
shape of a wolf's head. I opened it to find documents and titles,
money from other countries that had no doubt been collected as some
ancestor traveled the world and came, eventually, to London at the
start of the twentieth century. I found these things, and they
captured my imagination. I often looked at these objects and this map
in particular. One night, my mother caught me as I poured over these
things. She was furious that I had gone through her things. She told
me she kept them, as she did those amateur paintings of her early
years as a struggling artist, purely for sentimental reasons but they
were private. I asked her why they were locked away. She told me that
children break and destroy things. She didn't want to bring these out
until we were older and less likely to damage them. She made me swear
that I would never again go to this wardrobe or this box. I took that
oath, but broke the promise almost immediately. She had hidden the
key again, and I could not find it, but I went to the wardrobe.
Sifting through those paintings of her girlhood, I saw one of a
beautiful man. I could not tell if he was seventeen or twenty, but he
looked as if he had been cut from sinew and muscle. His lips were
thick, his eyes narrow, and his hair covered his forehead and fell
down nearly to his shoulders. I had never seen such a young man as
this before. My mother had captured something from memory, and had
painted it -- this young man who looked dangerous and alluring, and
became my dream as a girl, for all girls dream of the man they will
one day meet. It was you. I knew the moment I saw you, at the window.
Do you remember? It was your portrait. She also had seen you in her
life. You had...guarded her?"
I kept my eyes steady, for I did not wish to speak of her mother to
her. Her mother had seen me by accident -- I had not wished to reveal
myself to her. I meant only to watch the bloodline and protect it from
harm until the one would come to find Alkemara, when the Veil had
grown thin again.
She continued, "I imagined the map from memory, and tried to draw it
several times. I begged my parents for a world globe for Christmas.
When it arrived that year, I searched it for this city, this country,
but could not find it. I became obsessed as a teenager with history.
When I entered college, I quizzed my professors and signed on for any
digs in the Middle East, in hopes of finding this place. I spoke of
this map, and generally received the smirks of colleagues and
professors, as if I had a map of El Dorado in my back pocket. As my
studies grew more serious, I begged my mother for the box and the map.
She told me I had imagined the map, or that it had been a child's
drawing. I was able to fund my doctoral work working for rich men who
sought out treasures from the lost kingdoms of the ancient world. I
went on hundreds of digs, and studied pieces of ancient documents, and
worked with translators on what seemed long-dead languages unknown to
many. I eventually found a manuscript in which you are mentioned by
name. It was within the urns of the Taranis-Hir dig. Aleric Atthefeld.
Aleric, Falconer. The monk who wrote this -- Brother Micahel --
mentions a 'lost century.'"
"That
is what it was called by those who remembered," I said. "But it was
not entirely a century, though it seemed it. Please, continue. This
monk fascinates me."
"Micahel's
papers were considered fraudulent and heretical. He was later brought
before an ecclesiastical council and tried on charges of witchcraft
and murder and sodomy."
"He was sentenced to burn," I said, nodding. "But somehow, this never
came to pass."
"Brother Micahel had written an account of this lost century. Within
it, he spoke of several plagues of nearly Biblical proportions -- of a
stinging pestilence, of fire from the sky, of what sounds like
earthquakes and tidal waves. He writes of a changing climate as well
-- taking place over a mere two years. He drew creatures with
tentacles as long and thick as oaks, and of something called the
plague maiden, though I am not sure if this is a creature or merely
the mood of his age. Much of his manuscript rotted or was destroyed,
but these pieces are intact. He mentions the city of Taranis-Hir,
and a Lady White-Horse who practiced what he called 'bog sorcery.' He
claimed that this age of mankind was in chaos, and was neither of the
Devil nor of God. He brings up the heresies of spirit-possession by
'shadows'. And this." She picked up the cracked mirror amulet. "The
disk, and upon it, a small curved looking glass. Yet the pieces of
this puzzle are missing. You have the answers, don't you?"
I
touched the objects on the steps again, as if they brought me some
comfort. "How did your mother come to pass you these things?"
"She
died. I...could not be there...but my cousins sent me some things she
had set aside for me. I received the box and its key after her death,
along with a letter from her. She knew I would protect it."
"Will
you?"
She
nodded. "But I must know of this time. This lost century. You are the
Maz-Sherah. The meaning of the word is ancient, but it roughly means
'messiah'. Your kind is mentioned in the old myths of this area.
There are both Arab and European accounts during the Crusades of the
'winged demons of Hedammu'."
"Hedammu was buried beneath a new and shining city," I said. "A
tourist city."
"I know," she said. "It was there -- when I worked with Professor
Clarendon -- that I found this."
She drew a small jewel box from within the satchel. Opening it, she
withdrew a flat yet slightly curved piece of gold, as if a shard from
a plate. She placed it in the palm of my hand. I did not even need
to look at it, for I felt its power.
She said, "It's not from the area of Hedammu. It's from thousands of
miles away. Within another tomb of your kind. We found hundred of bone
fragments of the dead, but no ordinary bones. We found the skeleton of
a female. In her mouth: teeth like a saber-tooth tiger's fangs.
Outstretched, connected at her shoulder blades, wings like...a
pterodactyl."
"Or a dragon's," I said. I let the small gold piece drop onto her lap
and rested my hand at her throat. I felt the warmth of her pulse. The
thought of her blood comforted me. She drew my hand from her throat,
brought it to her lips. "It is an ancient resting place for our kind,
and the one from whom this gold came, had asked to be taken there, to
rest with her tribe." I glanced up into her warm eyes. "You know more
of this than you say."
"In her letter to me, my mother wrote of an ancestor," she said. "And
in Micahel's manuscript, her name appears on a list of the damned,
along with the name Aleric, Falconer, the Maz-Sherah of the vampyres.
You. Alkemara. Merod Al-Kamr. White Robes. So many others."
"And
you wish to hear of these times that have not been spoken of in
hundreds of years? The Age that shrouded history from the eyes of
those who came after -- when the unmaking of the world had begun. You,
Natalia, were guided to Micahel's manuscript as you have been guided
here. It is important you hear of those times, particularly in this
world now, for the Veil grows thin again. Somewhere, someone seeks to
tear it." I reached over to her, clasping my hand over hers.
"I am
not afraid of you," she whispered. "And I am not afraid of death. But
I want to know all you know of this time, and this place."
I
opened my shirt, to expose the mark branded upon my flesh.
I
brought her hand to it, so that she could feel the ridges of it.
"It
was engraved with a branding iron upon all of us in the prisons," I
said. "And would not heal. Do you see?" She seemed to recognize the
same markings on the rounded scar that she had seen on the back of the
mirror disk. "It is a talisman of an ancient age. You were drawn here,
Natalia, by something more than war and artifact. You were drawn here
because the blood of an ancient race flows within your body." I
brought her hand to my lips. "I can smell your past within you. The
blood of one family is distinct from other blood. The blood that
courses through you still holds the vibrations of that Age of the
Serpent and the Veil. And this," I lifted the broken mirror up to the
emerging moonlight that shone through the crack that ran along the
cavernous mountain peak above us, "was the sixth plague of that age,
for a dream of a disk that shone like a moon's corona appeared to many
over several nights. Dreams get into our blood, Natalia, and do not
leave. This dream infected all who slept and all who existed in that
time."
I
began the story of those years of my captivity, and of those who came
after.
Each
successive dawn, before the sun found me, I drank from her as payment
for the tale of my existence, as Scheherazade was once paid for her
tales with the promise of survival until the following night.
I
write this from the telling of it. I write what I know, and what I
learned from others in that century, hundreds of years in the past.
9
I awoke from the Plague Dream as if an enormous explosion had occurred
in the world, though it was a whisper sent through many of us.
The
sounds of the dying on the surface of the earth, and the cries of war
and of terror; the earth itself trembling and changing; the climatic
burning and freezing; the Veil ripping further, as any fabric will
tear and tear and continue tearing once a small thread has been
pulled; while I, and my companion Ewen, drank from each other's
throats that we might not go into the most dreaded of deaths, that
hell within the particles of flesh, that vampyres call the
Extinguishing.
It was
the Age of the Serpent and the Veil.
We
believed in our gods and the Otherworld, then.
We
feared them, as well.
10
Even
among the undead, the vampyres of the Medhyic line, there is
disagreement over our beliefs and our gods. Silver, they said,
destroys us. Mirrors do not reflect us -- for having no soul, we
cannot have a reflection. Drinking from other vampyres was believed to
destroy our race.
Yet, I
have sustained silver daggers to my body.
I have seen more than my reflection in a mirror -- I have seen another
world.
I have known of a mirror forged from gold and glass and silver and
shadows caught between the Veil that separates the worlds. Broken, its
shards passed into this world, taken by the priests of blood and flesh
and shadow, hidden within the artifacts of ritual. When the Priest of
Blood took me into the visions of the Veil, it was through the Glass
itself -- that shard of the Medhya's mirror that remained embedded in
the Veil, showing what is and what is to come.
Yet all of this was mere legend to me, in captivity, once the
Nahhashim staff had been stolen from me. Once the shadow priests had
taken over the mind of my beloved, Alienora.
Once the earth itself trembled and the lost age began.
I
spent years in a prison beneath the earth, and shared my blood --
tainted with the graveyard flower's nectar, called by some the
Serpent's Venom, by others the Flesh of Medhya -- with another vampyre,
that we might survive our captivity.
Even
the legends and prophecies of our kind may be interpreted many ways.
Merod Al-Kamr had said to me in his tomb at Alkemara, "There is a
final prophecy you do not know, Maz-Sherah. It must be broken. It is
of the end of all mortal life and the destruction of the Veil and the
Glass, a time of monsters and madness. The only hope is to raise the
Nahhashim. Only the possessor of the staff may do so. Sacrifices will
be made. Sorceries will burn the skies. Many will extinguish. Many
will fail. The staff is the source. You cannot let any other take it
from you. You cannot give it. Keep it close at all times, for within
it is something more powerful than even the Veil, though I do not know
what it may be...Medhya is gathering skins of humans, and her
Myrrydanai swallow souls. They create an army of the spirit, using
the Veil itself to bring the shades and banished demons into a
monstrous existence. Even now, they whisper in the minds of men, and
seek to destroy those who have touched the Maz-Sherah. They are
unleashing the Old Gods as well, the giants and the beasts held back
by the Veil for thousands of years. One day, the war will begin, and
you must lead our tribe, and protect the flock of humanity both for
their sakes, and for your own. You must protect those from whom you
drink life, or life will be no more."
This is the only truth I know of my existence -- these words of
prophecy from the Priest of Blood, Merod Al-Kamr, spoken to me in a
lost century, in the buried city of Alkemara.
But it was through visions when I first became vampyre that I learned
of those other sacred objects that I would need to possess to fulfill
my destiny.
The mask, from which the piece of gold still exists, was only one of
them.
11
You
have heard of my early life, until late in my 19th year, when a
vampyre called Pythia, a Pythoness of ancient days, brought me into
immortality.
You have read my first testament of how my companions and I followed
the Serpentine Path to the buried kingdom of Alkemara.
You have heard of Merod, the Priest of Blood, whose very existence
lives within me, though I had yet to unlock the secret of it. I
returned to my home in Brittany, to Alienora, my beloved, who had
given herself to the whispering Myrrydanai shadows. The shadow priests
threw me, along with my beloved friend Ewen, into a deep and ancient
dry well where once I myself, as a boy, found a vampyre of many years,
sealed in a prison of silver and lead.
Though I tell this story of the Serpentine Path within the Vampyricon,
I am but one vessel among many that holds its essence. I sleep in our
current Age in a tomb beneath a great city. In those days, in what is
now called the Medieval Age but was for me the Age of the Serpent and
the Veil, I slept in a well of demons. I had been trapped by the
maiden I once loved. She had turned to sorcery and to the shadow
priests who had come with the great whisper of plague. Above me, the
earth itself trembled, and the shadows of the Myrrydanai possessed
much of the mortal realm.
We
existed in a time of legend.
In that age, new monsters would be born. I saw them, in a dream.
In the dream, the virgin of shadows came to me. She was but a halo of
a maiden in darkness.
The virgin of shadows spoke of tidings from the Dark Madonna. She told
of the White Robes, who would come as shadows from the holy night.
"These are angels who will guard and guide you," she said. "Do not
fear them, you who are pure in your offerings and who honor your king
and queen. The White Robes see what is within your soul and you shall
have no fear. But those of you who harbor secrets and transgression,
who break the laws of this world and the next, you will live in horror
of their retribution."
She spoke of the great cataclysms of the earth, and of the plagues
released from the hand of the eternal against the transgressions of
mankind.
The virgin of shadows spoke of heresy, and traitors, and those Old
Ways that needed the torch of purification. She spoke of the
apocalypse visited upon earth for a thousand years. "You see the signs
of this End of Days," she said. "For, have not winged devils crossed
the skies? Is Hell not unleashed from below? The Great Crossing comes.
The White Robes bring sanctity to your lands. Turn to the Disk for
your soul's protection." Above her, as she spoke, the golden disk
shone with an aurora about its ring. "Hear ye all nations of mortal
life: the House of White Horse shall be the earthly home of the
spirit. It shall rise up, a new and shining kingdom, from the ashes of
the plagues. It shall arise at the edge of a humble forest, in
Brittany, from the ruins of a Roman city and a queen's barrow. All
honor the Lady White Horse, and the White Robes who stand with her."
I was not alone in having this dream.
It was visited upon every man, woman, and child alive in those years,
for a thousand leagues in each direction from where I lay in
captivity. Perhaps it had even been dreamed of across the seas, in
those forgotten continents, unknown to those of my country.
Inquisitions to root out this new heresy had begun, but the plagues
themselves wiped out the inquisitors; Rome denied the divinity of the
dream, but many ignored the Pope's decree, for they felt truth in the
dream of the Disk and the virgin of shadows. They saw the cataclysms
-- the fires across the sky, the frozen seas, the fertile orchards
turned to wastelands in a season, the hand of winter that held the
earth in its grip for many months beyond the season. Medhya, the Dark
Madonna, had cast her shadow across all of mankind.
She had come in plagues through the Veil itself.
The dream of the virgin came to all who were vampyres, descendants of
the bloodline of Medhya, and of the father who guarded the Veil
between worlds who was called the Great Serpent.
Within that dream, the Disk itself. It was round and silver some would
say when they saw it in a dream; no, round and gold like a mask,
others would say; like a halo of a saint; like a rounded pit of an
ancient well, others would guess.
To just a handful of us who saw the Disk in our dreams, it was made of
a fiery gold, with the face of a Gorgon at the center.
A mask within a corona of light.
It was the second face of that terrible goddess from whom the Priests
of Blood stole power. The first face was called Medhya, the Dark
Madonna.
This second face was Datbathani.
The Lady of Serpents.
During the plagues that rode with the whispering shadows, thousands in
Europe died within the space of a year. The first plague was of
insects; the next of ice; a fever brought fire beneath the skin that
ate flesh from the inside out; the death cry, which sounded over all
the earth; the fifth plague was the great shattering that attacked
bones beneath the flesh and broke them; and the sixth, the dream
itself, which infected and brought fever to many. It was prophesied by
the shadow priests that a seventh plague was yet to be released, but
the White Robes held it back with their rituals of purification.
Thousands more turned to the Disk and its dream to protect them.
Many men opposed this new sect of worship, and saw in it a true
heresy. And there were those in the world, as well, who sought to end
the rule of the White Robes and the baroness who had arisen, as if
queen of an unknown country, from the dust of my homeland, a place now
considered sacred to the virgin of shadows, the mother of
purification.
Wars began. England fought, and Normandy invaded the barony. The
Anjou sent a battalion with the blessings of the Pope as a special
crusade. These armies were driven out by devils and plagues and would
not return to oppose the White Robes again.
A reign of terror began to spread to other lands and other kingdoms.
It moved with the plagues, and created fear and panic among many. Of
your age, you know the inquisitions and the burnings that came into
being a hundred years after my first Age -- but in these years lost to
history, there were threefold more.
Along the roads, men were crucified; women were burned in special
festival nights. Any outsider was suspect, and many were arrested as
traitors.
Drawing from princes and children of barons and dukes, none of whom
were first sons of their own kingdoms, the baroness and her nobles
brought them into the new city as Knights of the Disk. With them, many
soldiers of other lands were conscripted, promised both freedom from
the plagues and blessings in the hereafter as rewards for service. A
monastery arose where the abbey had fallen, and these monks were
little more than a death cult, with their blue smoke incense and
flagellations and sacred skulls and bones drawn from the ashes of
purified heretics.
It was a tumultuous time, and few could escape the influence of the
White Robes. These creatures of shadows, the Myrrydanai, had drawn
human skin across their faces. They wore the radiant cloaks of priests
so none would know their true nature, yet all felt the shadows of
these creatures when they brushed by.
My dear, Natalia, I was not alone in these times, for others gathered
at this crossroads of the mortal and immortal, vampyre and human, just
as I bring you into the Stream now. Even those who were my sworn
enemies told me of their meetings at the crossroads. I bring you news
of these events as they experienced them, as I knew them. As no mortal
before you has heard the tale.
First, I will tell you of a creature of rags and ash who disturbed the
Stream itself and caused it to rise up that I might feel it in my
prison beneath the earth.
In my visions I first saw this creature. The Sight is is like a
theater of the mind -- the film plays, but in three dimensions, and
you enter it, you observe it and move around the people who inhabit
the vision, yet you cannot touch or interact with them.
But behind your eyes, in your mind, it burns its images and sounds
into your memory. I had thousands of visions that drove me mad, of
what the hounds of Medhya had done to the earth.
I saw, in such endless visions, the new city rise above the earth with
its many white towers.
I saw the magnificence and terror of it.
I saw the new Dark Age come, brought on the whispers of the shadows as
they tore the Veil and ripped the skin of the world.
BOOK ONE
OUR LADY
OF CROSSROADS
"That orbed maiden with white fire laden,
Whom mortals call the moon."
--"The Cloud"Percy Bysshe Shelley
I
AFTER
THE PLAGUES
CHAPTER 2
1
Though I was captive, still I had
visions of what lay above me. These were like waking dreams, and would
come to me at twilight or before dawn. Sometimes it was as if I flew
across the sky and looked downward at the earth and its people. I
watched the shadows bring darkness from the other side. I saw with
their eyes as they rode the mists, spreading pestilence in their wake.
Though I speak of this now, I saw much in the visions, and learned
more from others later, but I shall tell you of these sights and
wonders as they existed.
The forest of my birth had been drawn
back against rock and cliff, a skin pulled back to expose the skull of
the earth, torn by fire and by cataclysm. An age of early winter
descended, casting ice across lakes and frost that would not let loose
the tree-root until brief summer's arrival.
The earth had been carved out; mines
plundered. Where a modest castle of a distinguished baron once covered
a low hillside surrounded by other hills and fields and village and
abbey, now a walled city and seven white towers arose like the
upturned fangs of a giant wolf. Taranis-Hir, it was called,
though I would not learn of this until later -- an ancient name for
the slopes upon which the city was built. The hill had been a burial
mound of along-dead queen of
the land, her reputation all but lost to history by the time of my
birth. The barrow of her grave and its attendant chambers encompassed
three low hills. They had been dug by the quarriers, cutters, and
hewers, their treasures plundered from the many chambers of the
necropolis beneath the old castle. To the south, the quarries became
mines. To the north they dipped below the Akkadite Cliffs. The caves
beneath -- much of the land had caverns underground, carved by buried
waterways within that ring of what had once been my village -- were
opened and made useful for this new citadel. White caelum stone had
been brought up from the barrow passages and chipped at by artisans
and craftsman until it seemed as shiny as a milky crystal -- some said
it looked like ice itself. Silver and iron had been mined in the area,
creating desolation where woods had previously grown wild. These
metals became a major trade, while the foundries attracted laborers
from the fields and forests who had lost all during the plagues.
Taranis-Hir resembled no other
fortress or city in all of Christendom. Its high walls gleamed with
the native caelum stone and its pinnacled towers dominated the horizon
from all vantage points of the forest and surrounding cliffs. The
smoke from its foundry and furnaces blackened the air with great
plumes. It was a city of pilgrims and vagrants, merchants and
soldiers, alchemists and priests; and the foundrymen who worked on the
transmutive metals of the alchemist from the East, with his sciences
and calculations, the architect of this city; and the scarred beggars
who cleaned the furnaces and foundry, called ashlings for their
appearance.
Some believed the furnaces that burned
eternally in the white towers were Hell-Gate itself -- but these were
the Akkadites on the far cliffs of the lands. Few of them ever entered
the walled city that had arisen after the six plagues, for many had
already been put to the sword and the pyre for such a journey. Those
Akkadites -- or any traitor or heretic or foreign enemy -- who did
enter the walled city, could be found -- if alive -- in the
Barrow-Depths awaiting the block or the Illumination Nights; or in the
hanging cages that were strung along the outside walls, over the
canals, slowly starving to death as winter came.
These visions came to me, for I had
been once touched by the Veil, and through it, I saw more than I
desired as I lay with my companion in our rounded subterranean prison.
I saw the stranger who would come to
us, though I could not see her face.
I did not know if she meant to destroy
us, or to free us.
2
It was eleven years into my captivity.
In my visions, I saw daylight for the first time in years. Even in my
mind's eye this brilliant light nearly blinded me, yet was tempered by
shadows that existed in that land.
Captivity had sharpened my ability for
the Sight. It had become stronger the more years that passed, though
sometimes it reduced to a glimmer rather than a fullblown vision. Yet
this one vision, of a strange maiden of rags and ashes, and her
seeking of the necromantic sisterhood stood out was overwhelming to
me, and had the quality more of physical reality than simply a vision.
I saw the great belching black smoke
from the furnaces that towered over the walls of the city as if half
the kingdom were on fire. A dark plume eclipsed the seven towers and
rose into the air where, it was believed, the ashes of the dead
sought heaven. Ash fell like snowflakes upon the streets. Some of the
motes of gray ash blew out toward the abandoned lands, and some may
have reached the Akkadite Cliffs that rose far to the north of the
kingdom.
Far below the smoke, within the outer
walls where common folk plied their trades down alleyways within the
maze of low streets of the citadel, a creature wrapped in rags strode
with purpose through those places of whores and beggars and the
merchants of disease and death.
"This murderer's head! This abomination
to the New Kingdom!" a one-handed swordsman shouted as if to the dead
man's head thrust upon the pike. He pointed with the end of his
forearm, which had been fitted with a small hand-sized trident. "This
man betrayed his own son! He betrayed our Lord and Lady! He betrayed
the White Robes! He has defiled the Disk! He betrayed the people of
our land and defiled the memory of those who died in the seven
plagues! Many nights did he spend in the cages, and you saw him and
heard his blasphemy if you walked along St. Taranis bridge, did you
not? Before I cut off this head, I cut off his hands! And his feet!
And still he cried out his heresies! To suffer such a fate, surely his
crimes were of the worst, the darkest, the most devilish of crimes
against our city!"
The swordsman crouched down to gather
up the coins and rings tossed to him, and to wrap up the salted cod
and loaf of bread. He muttered mostly to himself, "They don't come out
so much after the frost."
Why? I asked the Priest of Blood
who dwelt within me, Why do I see this now? Why do I hear the
voices? Let me see others, those I care for, let me see what has
happened to the Forest women, to Alienora, and show me the grave of my
child that I might mourn. Do not show me this dirty place with its
blackguards and knaves.
Yet I received nothing but silence, and
the vision of this swordsman and alley continued as I lay, eyes
closed, in an ancient well.
Behind my eyes:
When the narrow, crooked street
emptied, the swordsman sat on an upturned barrel as if hoping for
something more. A beggar-woman played her sorrowful songs down the end
of the street, right where it turned off onto the next lane.
By twilight, the lone creature in rags
came, offering the swordsman several good coins -- the just tribute
for the relics of the dead, he told her solemnly, pointing his trident
hand at her. Echoing through the chill, the beggar-woman at the
street's end sang of some lost love and of the times before the
Akkadites and before the seas turned to ice and before the White Robes
themselves.
The ragged creature glanced back at the
singer at the entry to the backstreet. "You are Thomas Cutter," she
said.
The swordsman nodded. "Executioner,
pig-butcher, and merchant-soldier. And..." He glanced at the executed
man's head. "Merchant of other items."
A maiden in rags, I thought, as
he watched her. A whore, perhaps. Why must I see this vision? Merod?
Do you show me what I must see, or does my mind's eye wander aimlessly
because of the torn Veil itself?
"A beautiful voice," the ragged
one said when the singer had stopped her beautiful song. "But she
sings of such sad things."
"Her voice may be pretty," Thomas
Cutter said, "but she is a blight. Sorrow needs no singer, they say. I
miss the trouveres who once wandered here. When I was a boy,
the language of love was in the songs. Now, it's sorrow and bitter
snow." Thomas Cutter drew the head from the pike, thrusting the
trident-hand into the thick of the neck. He glanced this way and that
to ensure he would not be observed. "I want more than coin for this
head, miss," he muttered. "It's my own head should anyone squeal about
it."
"What you wish, I will pay," she said,
her voice as soft as rabbit fur.
He grinned. "Let me see your face,
pretty one."
When the stranger drew the cloth from
about her visage, I still could not see her. I watched as if as if
floating in the air just above them.
Cutter gasped. "Eh, you," he said, his
lips curling as if he'd bitten into a sour apple. "Enough, enough. You
could have warned me. I've seen you in the barrow-depths, my dear.
Dancing for rings and trinkets. I did not think you would leave the
foundry in daylight. I don't deal in ashlings much."
Ashling. The word was unfamiliar
to me, though I knew that girls who worked the hearths in castles were
called ash-maids. This intrigued me further, for there seemed
something familiar about this ragged woman. Her voice, too, tickled a
memory, though I could not quite place its origin. Had I met her
before?
"I am called many names," she said. "Ashling
is merely one of them."
"You furnace wenches all have the mark
upon you. Do you look for scraps here, ashling? You a Deathmonger?"
"No."
"Good thing," he said. "I'd not sell
you a head for a day and a night if you were." He said this in such a
way that it sounded precisely as if he would sell to any Deathmonger
who came along. He glanced about to make sure no guard stood by, nor
the overlookers who reported such blackmarket selling as this.
He looked up along the rooftops,
gasping, as if he'd seen a shadow cross the sky.
For the barest moment, I was sure he
somehow could see me -- though how could this be? I lay in the bottom
of a sealed well, deep in the earth. My mind traveled through visions,
but my body could not exist in his view.
Do you see me Thomas Cutter? I
was sure he could not, but was there a ghost image of me there, in the
air, just above them? He looked right through me.
"The Morns like day's-end. Chilly. In
the summer, they're scarce, but with the frost...Morns love the cold,
the quarriers say. They should know, down in the barrow-ways with them
at dawn." He shivered. "Couldn't do that kind of work, myself. No, no,
no."
"The day passes too swiftly," the
ashling said, also glancing upward, staring right into me yet not
seeing me. What did they watch for in the skies? I wondered.
What are these "Morns?"
She glanced back down at him. "Still,
it's early yet, and I imagine your hook would give a Morn a scrape it
would not soon forget."
He removed the small trident from the
lifeless neck. "A trident, ashling. Not a hook. I can't stand hooks. I
look at it sometimes and almost feel like these are fingers now. Look,
you see? Are these three prongs not like fingers?" He waved the
trident around, near her face.
"Was it a plague or a transgression?"
He shrugged. "A hand in the wrong place
means a hand on the block, don't it? Had to hack off my own hand,
ashling, that I did. It were law, and the White Robes stood about to
make sure I did it good and proper. Everything's a risk, though, ain't
it?
She held out two more coins. "Is this
enough?"
"To have so much," Thomas Cutter said,
"you must be grasping at pockets somewheres."
"I am favored by the more fortunate who
see my...condition...as reason enough to give me tokens of their
pity," she said, passing him the money.
"Whoring pays well," he muttered as he
looked at the bracelets that jangled at her wrist, and the twelve
rings upon her left hand. He flicked his tongue at his lower lip as
if he could eat the bracelets. She let the cloth fall across her
wrists, covering them.
Thomas Cutter lifted the dead man's
head by the scalp. Eyes shut, mouth open, tongue hanging.
I could not recognize the man's face,
for it had rotted enough to obscure the more telling features.
Cutter chuckled to himself, shaking his
head slightly as if remembering an old joke. "Once knew this poor
bastard, I did. He were good with sword and horse, quite kind to some,
rough to others. You would never believe it, ashling, but I once rode
alongside him in the hunt, when I was barely more than a lad. Did not
think he'd have turned against us."
The ashling drew a rough sack from the
many folds of her cloak.
Thomas Cutter put the convict's head in
the sack, tying its end-strings carefully. "For some foul ritual, no
doubt. Are you an Akkadite? I don't serve no Akkadites here."
"I am but an ashling," she said,
"burdened with scars of the fevers."
"If it's witchcraft, I can't know. You
understand? If it's some foul magick, I still expect the head back as
is. As is. No carvings, no tattoos, no bits of flesh missing. And
don't let them that flies find you with it. They may not be so
forgiving as Thomas Cutter, swordsman of Taranis-Hir. I expect
to see you back here soon, ashling. Yes?"
"You shall see me again, Thomas Cutter,
as surely as the sun rises across the western wood," she said. The
ashling took the sack from him, and tied its strings about the corded
belt beneath her outer cloak.
Before she had walked far down the
alley, Thomas Cutter whispered, "Return it to me before dawn, or it
will be your head on the North Gate pikes next."
3
In the Sight, I followed the ashling as
she went down the lane. As the ashling passed by the beggar-singer,
she drew a ring from her finger. She tossed it into the singer's lap.
"It is sweet to remember the past," the ashling said.
The singer nodded, and thanked her by
singing of the time before the trembling land and the burning rocks,
when the countryside of the Bretons flourished in springtime; and of
the reigns of the Duke, and the kings of France and England and the
legendary queens who brought courtly love to the kingdoms; when the
wars were distant and fought for holiness and honor; when winter was
but a short season, and the harvest a long one full of dancing and
joy; when the ships sailed the seas and returned with treasures; and
of those legends from many years past of King Arthur and his knights
and his unfaithful queen, of Prince Tristan and Isolde, in the days
before the Disk, before the White Robes, before the plagues; in the
days when the marshes were thick, the Great Forest was endless, and
before the winged devils came from the sky.
4
The ashling wandered the alleyways
until she came to the road beyond the wall, paid her tribute for
passage, gave her destination as "the fields." The guards scrutinized
her, but when she showed her face, they let her pass as if she had
offered them death itself. She waited at the edge of the western
canal for a boatman.
"How far?" the boatman asked as he drew
his boat to the shore. He was an elder man wrapped in the thinnest of
cloths, shivering from the cold.
"As far as can be gone," she said. She
passed some coins to the old man, and boarded his boat. The man sighed
as he nestled down between the oars. A near-tropical steam came from
the waters. All around the edge of the canal, black pots filled with
the caelum stone and dry wood burned. I could only guess this kept the
canals from freezing over.
I tried to look about, to see others,
to see more of the city around this -- but my vision only allowed me
to watch the ashling below.
"Few of your age survived the early
plagues. Do you remember the old times?" she asked.
The man looked at her, as if trying to
guess the intent of her question. "Before the plagues. And the dream."
"These were marshes," she said. "And
thick woods."
"Before the storms and floods," he
nodded. "Before the earth shook beneath us, and the cliffs thrust into
the sky. Before the sky rained burning stones. Before the barrows were
quarried and...before the towers grew." He grinned, his teeth worn
down to nubs, and the light in his small eyes seemed clouded with
sorrow. "Before canals. I was a herdsman by trade. I buried my
children and my grandchildren. Three sisters I buried as well, and a
