She threw her weight back, arching her back. The Immortal’s blade hummed past her face, narrowly missing her nose, and thudded harmlessly into the sand behind her. Then she was over on her back in a roll and immediately on her feet again.
The apple lay on the ground ten feet away, cut in two.
The Immortals did not move.
Jordin calmly pulled the circular blade from the sand and tossed it to the one who’d thrown it.
“I think you misplaced this,” she said.
He deftly plucked the steel orb from the air.
“So you have some skill,” the leader said. “My name is Rislon. I need yours.”
“Mine is known only to Roland. As you can see, we’re still in
street clothes from our mission in the city. We made it out on a transport but don’t have horses. Either give us one of yours or take us back to the coven with you now. We’ve wasted too much time already.”
Rislon stared, but she knew she’d won him over already.
“You’ll be rewarded, Rislon. I can promise you that the news I bring Roland will be celebrated by all Immortals.”
He dipped his head. “You’re with me.”
Kaya glanced at the others, tentative.
“You, pretty Kaya….” He jutted his chin toward the first one to call her that. “Ride with Sephan.”
F
EYN STOOD before the one-way window of the observation room, a misleading name for a chamber that was not truly a room at all, but a cell set apart from the ancient dungeon deep beneath the Citadel. Neither was it often used for observation. Few had the stomach to peer at Corban’s most intimate investigations. Ammon, she noted, was conspicuously absent.
A lone electrical fixture hung dormant from the dungeon’s pocked stone ceiling. Torches were far more effective in moments like these. Two of them illuminated opposite ends of the ten-foot cell, hissing at the occasional drop of sweat from the ceiling. The iron bars of the cell had been replaced by a wall with the single one-way window. The heavy door, adjacent to the window, served as the chamber’s sole entry. One entry. One exit. Usually by means of a wheeled cart for the one seated in the chair.
The chair was high-backed and heavy, with sturdy ironwood arms and legs. Its hard seat and broad arms were accustomed to struggle and indifferent to it. But the figure seated on its unforgiving seat had not yet struggled once.
Rom.
Inside the cell, Corban stepped away from a short, steel table situated just below the torch on the right, long syringe in hand. He paused thoughtfully before the chair, momentarily blocking her view.
“How many of your kind still live?” the alchemist asked.
“Enough.”
“Enough to what? Make more?”
To this Rom said nothing.
“Where are they hiding?”
Silence from the chair.
“We have the means to make you tell us everything, you know. You must realize that.”
If Rom did, he gave no indication.
“Did your old alchemist, the one you called ‘the Keeper,’ track the changes in your blood from week to week, or once a month?” he said. His voice through the concealed speaker sounded thin to her ear, nasal and unappealing.
Silence from the chair.
“It would help me a great deal to know what changes he found in your blood and at what specific intervals he studied it. I assume he accumulated quite a body of research with as many conversions as you claim to have undergone.” He turned, syringe in hand, and paused, unbothered by Rom’s silence.
He stepped closer, leaned over the arm strapped to the chair, and inserted the needle into Rom’s vein. The leather restraints around the arms and legs of its occupant had long been reinforced with heavy steel bands. Even Seth had been unable to break free of them when he’d been brought down to have his loyalty tested.
For the first time since she had come to stand before the window fifteen minutes ago, Rom lifted his head, his gaze drifting just to the bottom of the wall below the window.
His face was smudged, as much by the grimness in the cell they’d kept him in as by the sport the guards had made of him. His hair had come loose from its binding to hang in his face; several peppered strands plastered against his neck. A recent cut had dried above his eye. A darkening bruise swelled his right cheek.
“I admit to my own puzzlement,” Corban said as the syringe in
his hand filled with blood. “I haven’t seen any astounding differences in your blood to explain the color of your eyes. Perhaps a draw taken from a living specimen will reveal something more. In the meantime, I’m curious. If you will indulge me—why do you call yourselves ‘Sovereign’?”
Another moment of silence passed before Rom spoke for the first time. “Because ours is a new kingdom.” His voice rasped with thirst but was void of defiance and strangely calm.
The alchemist lifted his head from his task and considered him. “But there is only one kingdom.”
“How would you, a dead man, know this?”
“There is only one world and one world government. One Maker of my life, one new Order under that Maker.”
“Only one that you can see.”
“Do you live in a different kingdom then?” the master alchemist asked. He said it lightly, in the way one indulges the slightly unhinged. “Have your followers seceded from the government of this one?”
Corban had glanced down at the syringe and didn’t see the quirk of Rom’s mouth. But Feyn did. “In a manner of speaking.”
“And you consider your leader, the dead boy Jonathan, your true Sovereign?”
“He was, and is.”
“It doesn’t seem so, given that he’s dead and that our liege lady is Sovereign.”
“My Sovereign lives.”
Corban’s right brow arched. “Does he?”
“You think him dead. But then you also think you’re alive.”
“I am very alive, as you can see. Your so-called Sovereign, on the other hand, is quite dead. And yet you say you live and I do not, and that a dead boy is Sovereign and our liege lady is not. Clearly you see the madness of your twisted logic.”
“Jonathan came to bring a new kingdom. Not of political
power—I know that now—but a kingdom of life. I’m a part of that kingdom. In truth, I’m more Sovereign than your ‘liege lady.’ ”
“Black is white with you, and white is black.”
“How do you know what black is, what white is?”
“Because I see truly.”
“Do you?”
“The evidence certainly points in my favor. There’s nothing to suggest superior life in your blood at all.” Corban withdrew the needle and paused. “And yet you believe yourself superior, don’t you?”
“I consider myself alive,” Rom said, eyes on the alchemist, the green of them vivid even in the chamber’s shadows. “Alive in a way that you can never be. Feyn, on the other hand, can and will taste true life.”
Corban moved toward the table, not once showing any sign he was bothered by Rom’s claims. “What evidence do you have of this so-called life?” he asked. “There’s the color of your eyes, certainly, though alchemists have engineered such variations for centuries. There’s your stench. There’s a slight variation in your blood, but nothing else. Do you have any abilities I’m unaware of?”
Rom sat still for a few beats, then spoke quietly.
“Only life itself.”
The alchemist went on as though he hadn’t heard him, and Feyn wondered if indeed he had not. “The Immortals have a highly evolved sense of perception, we’ve observed. You, I recall, have experienced that. But we haven’t noted any such attributes in those of your so-called Sovereigns.”
No answer.
“You don’t have the strength or speed of a Dark Blood, nor the supergenetics of one. I would even say that you’ve aged significantly since I saw you last.” He withdrew the vial from the body of the syringe and lifted a pen to label it. “Do you have the long life expectancy of the rogue Immortals?”
“No.”
He set the vial in a wire rack. “Then what does this…. ‘life’…. offer you, exactly?”
“Hope.”
“Hope. In the next life?”
Rom hesitated. “Bliss is a mystery, understood by none.”
“I see. So then hope for this life.” He lifted a small pair of scissors and returned to the chair. “And yet in the midst of this life you’ve gone underground to escape the systematic extermination of your cult.” He bent to one of Rom’s fingers and cut off a portion of a fingernail. “You’ve all but been wiped out, I understand. Your life doesn’t seem like much of a life at all.”
There was unmistakable satisfaction in the alchemist’s voice as he straightened. He turned. “You’ve given up so much, and for what? What have you gained?”
“All that you have lost.”
“And yet I’ve lost nothing.” He returned to the table and dropped the clipping into a small vial in the rack. He retrieved another syringe—a smaller one—and stuck the needle through the rubber stopper of a vial. Filled it. He returned to Rom and slid the needle into his shoulder through his shirt without preamble.
Rom showed no sign that he felt the pain, though it had to be excruciating.
“I can find no marked advantage over a common Corpse other than simple emotions.” He tossed the syringe quietly into a bin and then withdrew a silver instrument from the pocket of his lab coat. “You have no evidence to show me that you have this new life you claim to possess?”
Silence. But Rom’s eyes were clear, his expression unflinching…. even as Corban leaned over with the instrument, which resembled a cigar cutter, and cut off his smallest finger with a hard
snick
.
Now Rom’s face trembled and his breathing thickened.
“One piece of evidence only,” Corban said. “It’s all I ask.”
“I can’t,” Rom said through a tight jaw. Blood drizzled from the
stump of the finger to the floor. Visible beads of sweat appeared on his forehead. “I simply know.”
“And what is knowledge but belief that it is knowledge?” the alchemist said, carrying Rom’s finger to the table. “No one who’s deceived ever believes he is wrong.”
Again no response. Perhaps Corban’s words were getting through.
The alchemist retrieved a small plastic bag and placed the finger inside it. “I’ve injected you with a clotting agent. It should help with the bleeding, if not with the pain.”
Feyn had thought it an anesthetic of some sort. And yet in all this time he had not screamed or cried out. The drizzle of blood slowed to a trickle, the stump of the finger angry and red despite the clean cut.
Rom’s gaze traveled to the glass through which Feyn looked. A vein had started to throb in his temple.
“Can you defy your master?” he said quietly.
“To what end?” Corban said, his back still turned.
“If only to know that you can.”
“I will never.”
“Because you can’t. You, better than anyone, know it. You have no choice. It was bred into you with the blood that made you.”
“A mercy by my Sovereign maker. I will never have the opportunity to defy her new Order.”
“Only the dead make no choice.”
The alchemist paused.
“Have you loved her by choice? But no, you can’t, can you? The dead cannot love. Your master commands obedience but goes without love. You wonder why we would do as we have. The answer is love. You tell yourself in your mind that I am mad. But do you see a madman before you?”
“The deceived are always mad.” Corban was looking curiously at him.
“And yet even your master knows I’m not mad. She knows that I
have never proven wrong. Rash? Yes. Fanatical? Perhaps. But mad…. never.”
He paused, taking several breaths through his nostrils. When he spoke again, his eyes were fixed on the window.
“From the day I brought you out of your chamber and took you outside the city, you knew I carried the truth. The day I came for you after you awoke from stasis, you said you needed no saving, but the day you met Jonathan, you knew it was true. All of it. And what I say is true now.”
A cold shiver raced along Feyn’s arms. Could he see her? But no, he only hoped she was watching.
“And now I’ve come because the truth remains. You will die. I’ve come one last time to save you. For the truth. For love.”
Something about him…. He was fervent. Magnificent, even in his haggard state. He had won her with his conviction before. With fevered and persuasive arguments. She knew then that he would weather any experiment, any pain visited upon him by an entire team of alchemists. One thing was true: he believed. A conviction without evidence—without even a living leader. It amazed her. It disconcerted her.
The dark vein itched beneath the surface of her hand, and she scratched it, one of her nails drawing blood.
He’d been right about many things, that was true. But how many lives had he spent in the chasing of this thing—of this faith in something to give his life a purpose greater than the dream even of Bliss or the fear of Hades? It would be a mercy to kill him now.
“Love, you say,” Corban was saying. “And does love give you less pain? Less anger? More peace? I would think your kind must be a bundle of nerves living as you do now. Filled with misery.”
Rom didn’t respond. There could be no doubt that his kind knew misery.
Corban pushed Rom’s head up by the chin, and fixed it to the
back of the chair with a leather strap across his forehead. Another, beneath his chin.
His faith would kill him, and he would let it.
The alchemist retrieved a small metal spreader from the table and returned to the chair. He pulled open Rom’s left eye and fixed the edges of the device to his upper and lower lid until the green of his eyeball fairly bulged from his skull.
Rom might die in a pool of his own faith. For what? To prove something? To supposedly save her? No. Because he believed, however misguided that belief was.
As such, he was many times the threat they had thought him. The Sovereigns had laid down their lives to the Immortals. To her Dark Bloods. Not because they’d been overpowered, but because they were willing to die for belief. Pain or threat of death would prove insufficient to bring them into submission. Reason could not dissuade them.
And that made them deadly foes. Even if Rom and his band of holdouts didn’t present an immediate challenge to her rule, they would make more of their kind, all who possessed the capacity for rebellion. She could not tolerate any such threat to her Sovereignty.