“They don’t need to be dead already! As the last Sovereign, I can offer you life.”
He spit to one side in disgust.
“Please, Roland, I beg you! Your way won’t gain you anything.”
“It will gain me honor, one of the many worthy traits you have sacrificed by drinking the blood of a dead man. Without it, there is no life. It is I who live, Jordin, not you.”
He strode past her, toward the way she had come. She turned and called after him, “You know I can’t come with you.”
“You’ll remain here,” he said. “On foot.”
Jordin hurried after him, panicked. “You can’t just leave me here to die!”
He ignored her, plunging down the side of the hill in an easy gait that made his intentions clear. She pulled up halfway down, realizing he would never back down after making such a statement in front of his Rippers, who had heard every word.
He swung into his saddle, reins in hand. Uttering a command she couldn’t make out, he kneed his mount and headed east at a quick trot before breaking into a gallop.
Rislon dropped two canteens on the ground, cast her one last look, and took the company after Roland. In less than a minute the sound of pounding hooves faded, leaving her staring after them in a silence so complete it seemed to ring through her ears.
For a long time, she didn’t move. Her mind didn’t seem capable of finishing fully formed thoughts.
And then one thought rose, clear and devastating at once. Jonathan had abandoned her. As had Rom. And now Roland as well. She was alone.
She scanned the horizon slowly, looking for any sign of life. Heat was rising off the white hills as though portending the hell to come. Jordin slowly fell back onto the ground.
The end had finally come.
T
HE MIDDAY sun stared stark-eyed at the shallow rises of the desert northeast of Byzantium. Cut by the occasional canyon, the Bethelim Valley existed on no map of the Order, having been so named by the Nomads. A mile long, the stretch of inhospitable ground ran north to a wide, rocky canyon hemmed in by a short cliff on either side.
Three alien objects lay on the bleached ground at the valley’s mouth. Small and insignificant from atop the cliff face, even the vultures took little interest in what appeared to be two dull-brown rocks. The third object, larger, lay as unmoving as a boulder.
A human eye might have recognized the forms of two canteens…. and the third as a woman lying on her side curled tightly into a ball, forehead nearly touching knees.
The faint markings of a trail stretching from the unmoving human to the east suggested that others had left the scene, leaving one of their own to be parched by the sun and scattered to the elements.
But there was no human eye peering down from the sky. Even in her near-catatonic state, Jordin knew this. Nor from the hills. Or from the valley. She was alone, utterly and completely, as was the heart expanding and contracting within her as it mocked her true state of being.
She was, after all, already dead. If not in body, then in spirit and mind. Her flesh would soon catch up to the realization. Her breath would join the air for the last time; her heart would offer up one last pathetic throb; her blood would cease flowing through emaciated veins; and one day her carcass would dry to dust and blow away with the wind.
She’d sat on the slope for an hour after Roland’s departure, sinking slowly into despair that hollowed her chest and left her mind numb—she could remember that much.
Or had that been a dream?
She’d finally risen, plodded toward the canteens, and stood there, staring at them, before settling down to her side, wrapping her arms around her knees, and coiling inward. As if by hugging her body she might offer her heart some comfort.
But her suffering had only deepened.
Her memory of why she suffered abandoned her, replaced by an unrelenting awareness of torment. By the inexhaustible
need
to suffer, if only for the comfort of penance. She deserved nothing less.
She was just alive enough to wish for death.
The sun was high, glaring down with enough heat to inflame her exposed skin. She looked at the canteens. It occurred to her that she should drink some water.
But she didn’t. She should move, but the thought dissipated before reaching her arms and legs along with any memory of why living might be important.
Did Bliss await? Then why live? To extend suffering?
The thoughts slogged through her mind like new Rippers to keep her company—twice as stealthy and three times as dark.
An hour later, she was staring at the dark fold of her tunic sleeve. A tangled mop of hair covered her face, a dark net filtering the sun. A strand caught in her lashes moved slightly with a gentle, hot breeze.
And then she remembered. Rom was Dark Blood and would soon be dead. The Sovereigns…. all dead. Roland, on a mission of death.
Jonathan….
Dead.
And here she lay on hell’s barren ground, clinging to a life she had no right to possess. A life she would renounce because it had shown her no power, no grace, no peace, no love—nothing but suffering and shame. Lying on the valley floor, she cursed the day she took Jonathan’s blood into her veins.
For how many years since had she played the fool, speaking of a power that failed to prove itself no matter how persistently she confessed it?
Too many.
She closed her eyes. Felt tears swell behind her lids and snake down her temple. Her mouth curled into a silent cry of self-pity. A single sob choked her throat. Then another, and another, until her body jerked like a sputtering motor, void of thought, fueled only by shame.
“Jonathan…. Please, I beg you….”
They were her first words in hours, a whimper carried away with the breeze.
“Please….” But she’d called to him so many times, only to be rewarded with silence. “Please. Come to me.”
Save me.
And then the mantra faded from whisper to memory and was gone.
There was no Jonathan to save her.
The heat of the valley floor rose up at her back, a gentle dervish lifting the hair not matted to her face. Memory of faded dreams murmured through her mind. A time not so long ago when she’d dreamt of raw energy coursing through her body, borne on the pure tones of a child’s song, calling to her.
Absurd, that memory. Distant, vacant. Mocking.
She blinked, drew a slow breath through her nose, and arthritically pushed herself up to her elbow. A wave of warm nausea washed over her as she pushed up farther so her palms pressed into the hard earth.
She peered at the valley’s wide mouth, open to the south like a
funnel, the ground sloping up on both sides of an expansive floor. The air shimmered with rising heat, distorting her view.
She reached toward one of the canteens, her hand hovering just above its brown-cloth covering. A single leather tie had been strung through the top and tied off on the neck to keep the cork from falling to the ground when unplugged. The end of the leather tie stuck an inch into the air beyond the hole in the cork.
At first she thought its movement was another distortion of fatigue, dehydration. Her mind wasn’t working properly. It seemed to quiver.
As did the ground beneath her palm.
So this was what it was to die.
But then a slight vibration rose up her arm. The kind one might feel at the approach of an army, pounding earth underfoot in the distance. Had the Rippers returned? She turned her face toward the sun, still mid-climb into the sky. No.
She glanced at the horizon again and, seeing nothing, lowered her ear to the ground. The hum she heard was faint enough to be mistaken for the rattle of her own breath. But it was there, beyond her held breath, the cumbersome pulse of her heart.
Jordin sat up and twisted around and looked north, deeper into the valley.
But she did not see the valley. Her sight was arrested by a vision not twenty paces from where she sat. A hooded man, arms at his sides in a tattered garment. She blinked, squinted again to find him staring at her with pale blue eyes from a deeply tanned face.
She tried to scramble to her feet but fell back. She pushed slowly up again, hands held to the unsteady earth. Her head was pounding.
“Hello, Jordin,” the man said.
He reached for his hood and lowered it to reveal long, tousled gray hair. He was walking toward her.
Her mind scrambled for recognition. She saw only a ghost from another life before her but something in her knew him.
“Don’t be afraid, child. I’m not here to harm but to help you.”
He stopped three paces away. His smile was gentle.
“It hurts, doesn’t it?” he said.
She wanted to ask him who he was. What he meant. But her tongue, too dry, refused to form the words.
“My own journey was as painful, I can assure you.”
“Who are you?” she croaked. She cleared her throat. “What journey?”
“The journey from Dark Blood to true Sovereign.”
“Dark Blood?”
He walked toward her, and she instinctively backed away. Hands lifted to assure her, palm out as he stepped around her. And then he bent for one of the canteens, plucked out the cork, and took a long drink. Satisfied, he sighed and offered her the flask.
“You look like you could use this.”
She took the canteen with an unsteady hand but didn’t lift it to her lips.
“Who are you?”
“I realize I don’t look the same. You never knew me before I turned dark.”
Only then did his name come to her like a whisper through the canyon.
Saric.
Her lungs tightened, and she backed up a step.
Saric, who had slain Jonathan, severing him nearly in two with flashing blade. Saric, the one man she despised more than any other. The epitome of evil materialized like a mirage in the desert.
“So you see me now,” he said. “Not as who I once was, but the one to whom Jonathan granted a life not even you yet know.”
She was hallucinating. She had to be. His eyes weren’t green but light blue. He was no Sovereign but a Corpse once more.
She opened her mouth to laugh at him. The sound was dry and filled with scorn.
“You lie,” she said. “Dark Bloods cannot be brought to life!”
“And yet here I stand. In the flesh.” He held out his hands, baring his forearms. His fingers were worn, his nails filled with dirt. His veins, blue beneath sun-darkened flesh without the telltale ink of the poison within them.
“I spent years in the desert, living among outcasts, mind lost to my misery, knowing that the blood in my veins bound me to death. Then he came to me and opened my eyes in a way I had never thought possible. You see?” He took a step closer. “He made a way for me before his death and for you in his death.”
Her eyes darted to his face. “You have the eyes of a Corpse.”
“They were green like yours when I first became Sovereign. Then I was transformed.”
“You could never become Sovereign.”
“For a year after killing Jonathan I wandered the wilderness, fleeing Feyn’s Dark Bloods, destitute, scraping survival from whatever I could find. I lost all hope; even ambition abandoned me. And then the will to live. I climbed to the top of a cliff, and it was there that Jonathan came to me. Soon after, I entered the Sovereign Realm. There, I was transformed. I’ve been living among Corpses, refugees from the city, ever since, waiting for this day and the final task before me. So you see, it is I, not you, who have found salvation.”
“You lie! There is no salvation for one like you!”
“No? Were you saved a moment ago, as you wept on the ground? Show me your love, your joy. Your peace. These are the fruits of Jonathan’s kingdom.” His smile was gentle. “Not green eyes.”
There was a deeply settling tone in his voice, one she couldn’t comprehend. But she knew Saric as a man who knew no end of trickery and manipulation.
“He calls for you,” he said, holding his hand out to her. “Have you heard him?”
Memory of her dreams flooded her mind.
She narrowed her eyes.
“It was I who warned Feyn,” he said.
She stood perfectly still, drawing breath evenly now, managing to swallow though her throat was dry and her mind rejected the notion that Saric might stand before her now, like this. She’d sworn to kill this man if she ever laid eyes on him again.
And yet here she was, weak and at his mercy, devoid of the peace that seemed to flow from him with his very breath.
His last words belatedly bloomed in her mind.
He’d betrayed them to Feyn?
“What?”
“You had to be turned back for your own sake,” he said. “For you to come here and meet me in this hour. Even the deaths of Michael and the other have worked for your good. You will see, as Jonathan helped me see. I have waited and prepared for this time.”
For a moment she held the familiar grip of her anger, her hatred, but the weight of her suffering was too great to hold for long, and she felt herself slipping even as she stared into his eyes.
The instant she let go, the air seemed to spark. The ground beneath her feet felt alive with unseen power. She grappled for understanding, to comprehend. This was Saric—the killer of Jonathan, speaking of life to her, Jonathan’s lover! What divine joke, what great injustice was this?
And yet he stood here more drastically changed than any Sovereign she had ever seen. Not in his eyes or his skin, but in something that radiated from him that she had never seen in any one of the Sovereigns before.
He smiled and tilted his head down, spread his arms in invitation. “Do you want to see, Jordin?”
See?
Her mind began to fall away, unable any longer to sustain even her desire for understanding.
Yes.
Let me see
. She tried to speak it. Tears brimmed in her eyes.
“Do you want to see the kingdom within you where true peace and love call to be joined?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“Say it and mean it, dear Jordin. Many are called, few choose.”
“Yes!” she cried as her own wretchedness erupted within her. All the pain, the disappointment and sorrow, the anger, rushing into her mind at once. “Yes,” she sobbed. “I want…. to see.”