She had calmly pointed out that to bolster perimeter defenses would lessen the concentric ranks of Dark Bloods around the Citadel itself. The very thing, no doubt, that Roland wanted.
The Immortal was either preparing for a major offensive or frustrated by his inability to reach the Citadel. Feyn could have commanded twenty thousand men to sweep into the hills, but she would only be throwing her Dark Bloods like so many stones into a ravine. The day would come when a new harvest of Dark Bloods would emerge from her labs. No matter how many Corpses Roland turned Immortal, he could not train them quickly enough to outman her unending supply of warriors. His fighters might seem nearly supernatural, but sheer numbers would win this war.
Still, he fascinated her as much for his aggression as for the rumors of his brood’s eerie ways. She would shed a tear, perhaps, on the day his head adorned the great Citadel gate, if only because there would be no more foe of interest. No foe at all.
She lifted the fork from the plate, toyed with the edge of meat so tender it required no knife. She’d once taken great pleasure in the rite of every meal. Life itself had fascinated her by its very process. Her craving for food, for the sun that fell through the window onto her skin, for water falling over her thighs in the bath and dripping from her hair—it had all intoxicated her once, just as the fealty of nations and the stripping of their power had intoxicated her the day she’d dismantled the senate.
But only for a while.
She bit into the meat, a portion larger than what might be
considered couth, and then tossed the plate onto the table, watching the fork scatter across its surface.
She heard a knock at the side door.
She took her time chewing and swallowing the venison, neatly wiping the juice from her chin. Then she rose from the chair and paced toward the window, where the dull light of day shone through her dressing gown like a scrim.
“What is it?” she said.
Corban’s voice sounded through the door. “My liege, we have a prisoner of interest.”
“Come.”
The door opened and the master alchemist entered, dropping to his knee. His hair hung past his shoulders toward the floor, nearly touching it. His strange and silent Corpse acolyte, Ammon, knelt two paces behind.
“What kind of interest?” She folded her arms, studying the master alchemist. It strained him to kneel. She could see it in the tension on his forehead.
“A live Sovereign, my liege.” He lifted his head slightly, his gaze crawling out to the rug just beneath her bare feet. “Rom Sebastian, leader of the infidels.”
She went very still. Was it possible? Rom, who had tricked her into consuming the Keeper’s ancient blood, though there had not been enough for her to know its effects for long. And if there had been? So much might have been different. She herself might be living in hiding, serving a dead boy’s memory, and Saric might be standing here now.
“How and where was he taken?”
“My liege,” Corban said with a raised brow, “he came to us.”
Came here? Willingly?
He was a trickster still. A fanatic whose zeal knew no end. And now his foolishness had delivered him to her once again.
She walked to the settee and retrieved her heavy velvet robe,
fastening the hooks up the front with slender fingers. She stepped into the low-heeled brocade shoes waiting nearby and said only, “Come,” as she brushed by the kneeling alchemist.
Rowan, Sovereign regent during her stasis when the usurper Jonathan had laid claim to the throne, had long sealed the old door to the subterranean chambers of the Citadel. Corban, at her command, had unsealed it. As they passed through the abandoned senate chamber to the ancient door, a strange sensation prickled her nape.
In the first two decades of her life she’d only visited these chambers a handful of times, having found them morbid for their history of captivity, murder, and secrecy. Now, she didn’t need to wait for Corban to fumble with a switch to light the way; she knew the passageway well.
But as they arrived at the heavy steel door of the ancient dungeons, she slowed. The last time she’d seen Rom, he’d been a headstrong lover who could plead passionately and persuasively. A fighter after the Nomad way. A protector—the leader of a cause and a people. And yet he was a slave to his convictions; leader only to an impotent and dying group of vagabonds.
Corban caught up to her, breathing slightly more heavily than before, Ammon’s step light behind him. Her master alchemist was aging quickly. The day would come when he could no longer kneel before her. On such a day, she would force Corban to turn Ammon Dark Blood to her service. For now, she allowed him his illusion of mastery over another.
He pulled the heavy steel door open, and she stepped inside. At first she didn’t smell the sterile odors of the vast laboratory that had taken up residence in this space, nor see the heavy glass sarcophagi of her newest prototypes lining the far wall. For a moment, she was back in the dungeons of fifteen years ago, where she had stolen in secret to meet a different prisoner: the old Keeper.
But that moment quickly passed.
She strode down the aisle of stainless laboratory tables, hardly noting the startled expressions of the alchemists who abruptly dropped to their knees. One of them fumbled with a glass vial that shattered on the ancient stone floor. Overhead, electrical fixtures gave off cold, brilliant light. For the first time in years, she did not drift toward the sarcophagi to admire the Dark Bloods within them.
Instead, she walked directly to the back, where the smooth walls of the great lab gave way to the old hewn corridor. Here, the ancient cells remained untouched by time or history. Only the locks on the iron bars were new—as were the living samples kept behind them.
“The one on the end, my liege,” Corban said, waving Ammon away.
She slowed her step as she came to the last cell and then stopped.
The man inside stood in the shadows at the back wall, arms folded at his waist. By the faint glow of the lone corridor light she could see enough to know it was him.
Rom.
But how he had changed. His hair was shot through with gray. He was thinner, his shoulders not as broad. He’d aged, far more than she. Even through the stubble on his face she could see evidence of scars, of the deepening furrows of time, of worry and hardship. The leader might remain, but the impetuous poet of their first meeting was gone.
The last time she’d seen him, he had been sun-dark. The man before her was pale, pallid. So it was true, then, that they had hidden themselves belowground.
“Still unpredictable, after so many years,” she said.
He stood still, his eyes fixed unwaveringly on hers. “You feel it still, don’t you? Faintly, perhaps, but it’s there, running in your veins.”
She arched an eyebrow. “Perhaps not so unpredictable.” He had been beating this drum for fifteen years.
“Why have you come here?”
He was quiet.
“His eyes, my liege,” Corban said, speaking of the brilliant green of Rom’s irises. “This is the first one we have taken alive—the dead ones don’t have such eyes. My alchemists would study his blood and his flesh to better know our enemy.”
A strange scent wafted through the cell. The telltale stink of Rom’s kind. Where was it coming from, his clothing or his skin? Did the Sovereigns occupy themselves with the burning of incense at all hours, or was he slathered in it for some purpose?
Rom lifted a hand and coughed into it. The scent became more acute. He was not wearing the scent, it came
from
him.
She tilted her head. What strangeness was this?
“Indeed you must. Study him.”
“We would like to take one of his eyes.”
“Of course you would.”
“With this sample in custody, we may not only better understand the changes in his blood but glean information about the Nomads.”
“They call themselves the Immortals,” Rom said quietly.
Corban didn’t seem to have heard him. He was brimming with more life than he had in months at the excitement of this find. She stepped closer to the iron bars, cutting him off.
“It was foolish of you to come here,” she said.
“Only as foolish as saving your life.”
She gave a crystalline laugh. “
My
life?”
Silence.
“I see.” She sighed, laced her fingers together. “We’ve played at these conversations too many times through the years. What is it you can possibly hope to accomplish in coming here? I have no interest in sparing those who subvert my Sovereignty by daring to call themselves by that same name. I will mercifully allow them to keep their delusions to the death. But death is inevitable—by my hand or by Roland’s. He seems to bear you no more love than I for whatever divided you. My alchemist is all but biting through his leash
to dissect you. And I can assure you that my Dark Bloods will only benefit from anything we learn and find useful. So you see, you’ve come here in vain.”
“In fact, my lady, I have accomplished half of my objective in coming here already.”
She had not been called “my lady” in years—the words made her bristle. “And what objective is that? Ah, I forgot. To save my life.”
“Yes.”
“Indeed?”
“And the sanctity of Jonathan’s legacy. But there’s another reason.”
“There always is. And what might that reason be?”
“The truth.”
“And which truth is this?”
“That I’ve come to make you Sovereign.”
She gazed at him for a long moment. Beside her, even Corban’s breath had stilled to silence.
“I
am
Sovereign.”
“Are you?”
She pursed her lips. Perhaps the strain of mere survival these last years had been too much. Was it possible his mind had broken at last? The thought disappointed her.
“How many of your kind are left, Rom? We retrieved Triphon’s head. A pity for you, that loss.”
“Few.”
“And now you have foolishly left your remaining number leaderless.”
“Jonathan is their leader.”
“Then a dead man leads them. Tell me, is this the ‘salvation’ you sought? Having ranged so far and wide, only to end up here?”
“I am not alone.”
She flicked a glance at Corban.
“No one else was found, my liege.”
She looked at Rom. “Of course not. I forgot. You come with Jonathan. The man my brother killed.”
“He didn’t die.”
She’d left the scene of the battle before it had happened. Now, for the first time, doubt crept into her mind. But these were only words from a crafty man. There had been too many witnesses to Jonathan’s death, all of them loyal. No Dark Blood would—or could—lie to her. The boy had been cut in two. And she didn’t mourn him. She’d been put into stasis for the boy once, and that death had put a bitter taste in her mouth.
“You’ve gone mad, Rom. I daresay I’m disappointed.”
He pushed away from the wall and moved toward the bars and into the light. Now she could see the story of scars along his cheek and temple. The hair, tied back, strands hanging against his face. He did indeed look haggard. But his eyes—a brilliant emerald she had never seen—were not those of one unhinged.
“Take my blood into your veins.” His was the first direct gaze to meet hers in years.
“Will you ever tire of this game?”
“Your very life depends on it.”
“Have you forgotten? Your blood kills our kind.”
“But not you.”
“No? Because I am special?” she said with a sardonic smile. “Because I took some of your ancient blood once? Clearly, you’ve come to such an impasse that your only hope is to convince me that there’s something more than what I already possess. That you can offer me more, even, than the world.”
“I can’t. But Jonathan does.”
That name again.
She shook her head and turned to Corban. “Do what you will. Learn what you can from him. Keep him alive, if not comfortable.” She stepped past him but turned at the end of the corridor. “And leave at least one of his eyes.”
T
HIS JORDIN KNEW: Immortals only came out in darkness. With their vastly expanded sight, they could see at night like a preying hawk by day. In that same darkness, she would be blind by comparison. Venturing into the wastelands at night would be a death sentence.
This Jordin also knew: Dark Bloods roamed the streets of Byzantium like packs of rabid dogs both day and night, ready to cut them down. Like the city’s two million Corpses, they could smell the rich scent of Jordin’s kind and moved to immediately eradicate it, oblivious that the very scent they reviled was life itself.
Still, between the threat of Immortals or Dark Bloods, she would choose the Bloods.
She made quick preparations for the task before her in the dimly lit privacy of her chamber. No one could know what she was about to do. She would go alone and immediately; seven days was far too short a time to attempt what she was unsure could be accomplished.
It was also far too long a time to attempt survival in the wastelands.
Ignoring waves of doubt and fear, she stuffed her most rugged wear—heavy trousers, a beige tunic, a head scarf—into a canvas backpack, along with five good throwing blades, enough bread and nuts to sustain her for two days, and a canteen of water. She had
already appropriated a short shovel from one of the back caverns as well as several other supplies she would need if she succeeded.
Mattius had been right on one thing: what she meant to do was virtually impossible.
The Book once speculated that Roland and his Immortals had evolved these last years in a way similar to the Dark Bloods; that Jonathan’s first Mortal blood had changed in them in ways his postmortem blood had not. The thought that Jonathan’s truest followers should decline while his enemies strengthened was just one more bitter pill to swallow.
Of course, the continued evolution of Immortals was an unproven theory. No one had actually seen an uncloaked Immortal. But the speed and efficiency with which they attacked was undeniable. Had she ever been so deadly in her Mortal days?