Lightning flashed on the horizon, to the east. For an instant, a jagged finger of light illuminated the capital of the world. Her world. A dominion of state religion and new Order. Of loyalty fearfully given because it was demanded by an all-seeing Maker who would, without qualm, send those who did not obey to Hades. For the common Corpse, that Maker was the source of life they believed they had.
But to her Dark Blood minions, she was that Maker.
Feyn Cerelia, the Sovereign of the world. Destined to it by birthright, she had once laid it down along with her life for the sake of a boy. Nine years later she had been forced to the throne by her
brother’s ambition. Today, the brother was gone and the boy was dead. Each had been the other’s undoing—she had seen to that. Now she ruled by one will alone: her own.
Eighty thousand Dark Bloods patrolled the capital city, guarded her borders, and controlled her transport ways. They were not “children,” as they had been to Saric, but minions. Lethal, rabid, loyal…. and expendable. After all, Dark Bloods might be made anytime, at will.
Hers.
She instinctively touched the ring of office on her finger, straightening the heavy gold sigil, which had a habit of twisting. She found herself in this posture often at night, looking out at her realm from the palace tower, trying to understand what, if anything, she was missing. What did she search for through those windows that she didn’t already have?
Saric?
No. She seldom thought of him since the day he’d staggered off into the wilderness, broken, defeated, abandoning his army and his power, either driven by madness or in a bid to find his own life. Somehow he had escaped with it. No matter. He couldn’t have survived long in the wilderness, pampered as he had been all his years. They’d both been royal children once. In some ways, Saric had never become more than that. He’d grasped at the world as though a toy—and at her, as well. But he’d never been meant to rule. He didn’t have the fortitude for it, despite his raging ambition.
She crossed her arms and paced along the curve of the window, looking past the walls of the Citadel and the spires of the great basilica beyond it, toward the west where the city met the wastelands.
Home of Immortals.
Irritation rose in her mind at the thought of the wastelands. The Immortals had become the bane of her rule and were too often on her mind. A pack of wolves that hunted her city, evading her traps and hunters. It both fascinated and infuriated her that her Dark
Bloods had failed to take a single Immortal—had not even been able to recover one body so her alchemists might distill the secret to their lethal ways. The prince, Roland, had grown increasingly aggressive with each raid on the city—something she admired greatly.
But her admiration only strengthened her resolve to see her enemy and all of his followers dead. Any ruler who thwarted her rule would have to die.
She searched the darkness beyond the window, following the current of the shifting clouds by the moonlight, and then shifted her focus to the glass of the window itself.
A pale face stared back. Now she could see the fine black branching of veins creeping beneath the skin over her jaw. The dark vein, there, just above her temple. Her skin was perfect, paler even than the prized translucence of the royals, without the fine lines that might have belied her age.
Nine years in stasis would do that.
But there was one change in her. A brilliant color that had crept in along the edges of her irises, which had turned black from the dark blood Saric had injected into her veins. The color was so slight at first that she hadn’t noticed it for months, but one day she’d seen it in her mirror: a thin ring of gold around the edges, so her eyes no longer looked like giant pupils but twin suns eclipsed by a dark moon.
She had commanded that amber seeds be sewn among the glittering beads of her bodice, along the sleeves that hung, full, nearly to her knee. Black and gold, they blinked over her hips and scattered toward the hem, a thousand eyes turned toward the world.
A thousand eyes looking for something as she stood by the window each night. Because that was the heart of it, the thing Saric had never fathomed and would never have the chance to grasp: that when one rules the world, one finds that it’s not enough. An ancient ruler—arcane even by the Age of Chaos—had bemoaned once that there were no more lands left to conquer. Today, she understood the
barbarian king of that age in a way that connected them through the millennia.
She’d heard the knock at the tower door some time ago. She had chosen to let whoever it was—and it could only be Dominic or Corban at this hour—stand and wait.
Now she turned from the window, hands still folded, and said, “Come.”
The door opened immediately, and Dominic’s slender form stepped into the dim light, admitted by the guard outside.
“My liege,” he said, sinking to one knee, eyes on the floor before him.
Her gaze fell with dispassion on the former leader of the senate—a senate she had disbanded three years earlier under the strictures of her new Order. It had sent the world prelates spinning, leaving the cattle of the world population caught between loyalty to the Sovereign, who was the living agent of the Maker on earth, and the statutes of the old Order. A tension that kept them perpetually off balance and served her well.
“What is it, Dominic?”
His hair had grayed in the years since she had disbanded the senate and renounced many of Megas’s statutes. He was a Dark Blood now, one of her own, genetically compelled to obey. But he’d been the staunchest guardian of Order before that. How many nights since his remaking had he tossed on his bed, prematurely sweating in the fires of Hades?
In the last year, his expression had grown more haunted. The furrows around his eyes had deepened into the pall of the damned—one who could do nothing to avert his eternal destiny. It had been interesting to watch at first. Now she found him a wasting vestige of an obsolete office.
“There was an engagement near a warehouse on the eastern end. Fifteen of your men were killed.” In all this while he’d never once lifted his gaze. He knew better.
“Immortals, I assume.” Sovereigns lacked the luster of their former selves. It seemed they had a talent only for dying these days.
“Yes. Though this incident was different.”
“How?”
“We recovered a body.”
Her pulse surged. Was it possible? One of the wasteland horde—perhaps even Roland himself? Strange, the pang she felt at the thought.
“Yes? Well?”
“A Sovereign.”
She gave a snort of disgust.
He gestured, and a Dark Blood stepped in and sank to his knee a stride behind Dominic, the mouth of a burlap sack gathered in one hand that was visibly trembling in her presence.
“This is nothing new.”
“No, my liege. But we believe we may have recovered one of the leaders.”
Rom’s face flashed before her mind’s eye. Not the Rom of today as she imagined him. He was here in the city somewhere, she knew. He must be nearly forty by now. No, not him, but the Rom of a former life. A naïve boy she’d met once when she had been a naïve young woman.
A boy who had thrown his life away for a dream. Soon his body would be presented to her, dead as well. And for what?
“Show me.”
The warrior opened the bag and lifted the head by the hair.
She gazed at the gaping mouth of that head for a long moment. It was spread wide, as though surprised by some great, cosmic joke. She knew the face.
Triphon. Rom’s right-hand man, one of the first to sample the original vial of blood that had sent Rom on his holy quest.
“I want no more Sovereign heads brought before me.”
“As you wish, my liege,” Dominic said.
“Bring me a living Sovereign or a dead Immortal…. or nothing at all.”
“As you wish. What would you have us do with this one?”
“Burn it, along with the others.”
“Yes, my liege.”
“Dominic, you may go.”
The aging former senate leader rose, backed out of the door, and closed it behind him. When only the Dark Blood warrior remained, she said, “Burn Dominic along with the body.”
She waited until the Dark Blood had taken his leave before crossing the room and snuffing out the candle with her fingers.
A moment later, she stood before the window again, this time in utter darkness.
If there were no more worlds to conquer, then she had no choice but to subdue this one thoroughly and utterly, wringing from every living soul an obedience unseen and unfathomed by any ruler before.
J
ORDIN STOOD in the stone chamber beneath the city, bathed in torchlight, smattered with blood. Drenched in grief. Before her, Rom Sebastian paced in the pool of wan light. Shadows played in the hollows beneath his eyes, made more pronounced by hardship, lack of sleep, and loss.
He paused before the altar carved into the limestone wall. Neither one of them spoke. There was no need; the chamber told the story plainly: the Book of Mortals, propped on its wooden stand, somehow seemed more haggard with each passing day. A simple box containing the ancient vellum in which the first vial of blood had been wrapped the day it had come into Rom’s possession, fifteen years—a lifetime—ago. Upon the box rested the amulet of the Keeper, dead now nearly a month. Jordin lifted her gaze to the cavern walls. The amulets of every Sovereign lost to date, hundreds in all, hung on the uneven surface, reflecting the light of the torch like so many fading stars.
And then there was the newest addition to their number laid upon the altar by Jordin herself: Triphon’s amulet. The carving of Avra’s heart was stained red not with dye but with true blood, as was the tree that grew out of the heart—the symbol of the Sovereigns. The chain hung limply over the altar’s edge, coated in grime. Lifeless.
She turned away.
Beyond the ill-fitted door at the narrow chamber opening, the passage widened into a series of rooms that led eventually to the great chamber itself. There, Rom, the Keeper, and Jordin herself had often recited the teachings of Jonathan and the history of the blood, speaking in impassioned tones and sometimes with tears until the forms of those sitting in the subterranean theater’s stone seats blurred before them. They did it for the sake of the surviving seroconverts—those who had taken the Sovereign blood and joined them—with increasing urgency as their numbers had dwindled. But they also did it to remember and cling to hope.
They called the labyrinth of these caverns that had become their home in the last year the Sanctuary. A place of refuge and relative safety. Little of the electrical wiring had survived the centuries, though many of its heavy tapestries and a few relics, including the random weapon and a small collection of books, had. It had been a crypt in ancient times—one expanded and fortified into a hideout during the Zealot Wars that had nearly decimated the world’s population five hundred years earlier—a history attested to when the Keeper found a cache of ancient records in one of the smaller chambers. In similar fashion, the remaining Sovereigns had come here to protect and reaffirm the life within them, in these ancient arched passages. And yet, Jordin could not help but remember that it had once been a house of the dead. Could not help but notice the abandoned personal effects of the newly deceased—a cloak, a pair of shoes, the wall of amulets. Or the fact that the shelves they were relegated to, like the altar Rom paced before now, had once been the final bed of a true corpse.
But if the thought wore on her, it wore more on Rom.
Though only thirty-nine years of age, the stress of living under oppression these last six years had reduced Rom to a shadow of his former self. He was haggard, with unshaven stubble on his cheeks and chin, graying hair swept back into a ponytail at the nape of his neck. He wore moccasins and soft leather breeches that rarely
required cleaning—water was too precious to waste on such niceties. His stained tan tunic hung on a frame more wiry and less broad than it had once been. As the elder between them, Rom had assumed the position of primary spiritual leader, leaving Jordin to contend with the Herculean task of keeping their dwindling race alive beneath the city.
An undertaking that would now prove nearly impossible.
Triphon had played an invaluable role—other than Jordin and Rom, he was the last of twenty trained fighters who had served the Sovereigns over the last six years. All the others had been pedestrian Corpses seroconverted through the injection of Sovereign blood. Enlightened, yes. But not fighters.
Watching Rom now, Jordin held her tongue, but her mind was not silent. She knew that bitterness gnawed at the edge of her heart, but she couldn’t afford to demonstrate any emotion raging in it. How Rom could be so stoic in such desperate times, she didn’t know. His passivity would end in death. It was only a matter of time.
Rom stopped before the altar, reached out, and touched Triphon’s amulet.
“He made a way for you,” Rom said. “It’s a sign.”
“He’s dead,” Jordin corrected him. “As I would be if not for dumb chance.” She moved toward the altar, her eyes misted as much in frustration as grief. “And the Dark Bloods wouldn’t have killed me without ripping me to shreds first. Or worse.”
“I’m not speaking about Triphon.”
“Then who? The Immortals?” Jordin spat to the side. “They’re as much our enemies as Feyn’s monsters.”
“Jonathan,” Rom said.
A year ago, when the Sovereigns still numbered three hundred, Jordin would have readily agreed. She too had once attributed every turn of fortune to Jonathan’s ever-watchful eye from beyond the grave.
But surety had evaporated with the passing of each Sovereign
life—and all but abandoned her a month ago with the passing of the old Keeper whom they had called “the Book.”
“This wasn’t the Maker’s hand,” she said. “We were on the edge of the city—the Immortals could
smell
a kill and came in for it. If not for the Dark Bloods, they would have slaughtered me as well.”
Rom drew the tips of his fingers along the altar’s edge and lifted his eyes to meet hers. “And yet here you stand. Alive.”