The Dark Arts of Blood (57 page)

“Tell me your thoughts,” he said, sounding a touch anxious.

“Can’t you read my mind?”

“I wish that I could, but no.”

“Very well. I was thinking that using the
Istilqa
knives is not wise. The Crystal Ring is there for us to rest and replenish our powers. We are not human. We need to be alert and we’re designed to stay awake always: it’s part of our nature. Vampires should not be stabbing their veins with the equivalent of… opium or morphine.”

Zruvan exhaled. His breath reverberated within the mask like the sigh of a bear.

“You seem to be suggesting that it’s a weakness,” he said.

“Exactly so. A very human weakness.”

She wanted to ask if they could leave this terrible furnace of death and talk elsewhere. She was almost ready to beg, but – no. She wouldn’t let him see she was struggling. She detached herself from her physical discomfort and concentrated on what he was saying.

“We are not weak,” Zruvan retorted. “However, there is a problem. We have used the knives in a sparing manner for hundreds of years. But because the Crystal Ring is so wild these days, my beloved friends are resorting more and more to the
sakakin
. And the more they use them, the less effect the blades have. For that reason, we need Raqia’s storms to cease. We need the vampire realm under our command. You are no ordinary vampire, Lilith. I still believe that
you
are the stone thrown into the pond. Some ripples flow outwards, becoming tidal waves.”

“Perhaps once, but not now,” she said sharply. “No one commands Raqia! It’s a law unto itself, and you can’t change that. I am no threat to your circle of followers. I’m only dangerous to those who threaten me and my loved ones. It sounds as if you and I are not so different.”

“We are entirely different,” said Zruvan.

With that cool, dismissive remark she knew he’d made up his mind to kill her. Better safe than sorry.

Besides, it was beneath her dignity to justify her existence to him. She thought with horrible certainty,
Even if we sit debating for a thousand years he will not change his mind.

“I don’t care about your
Istilqa
knives. Leave me alone, and I’ll leave you in peace. I came to you of my own free will for one reason only – to release Emil. What must I do to make you fulfil the bargain?”

Zruvan did not reply. He went as still as a statue again, making her wonder if he’d left his body and drifted into Raqia again. Heat shimmered around his motionless red form as if he were on fire. The air scorched her throat.

Violette looked around warily, wondering if there was any possible escape. Flight up the narrow throat of the chimney, or back the way she’d come, or even through the walls of stone and bone? But it was no good. This couldn’t end until she understood
what
Zruvan was.

The skull turned to face the burning white staff. He touched it with his gloved fingers, then looked up at the spot of sky far above.

Then, very slowly, he turned the death-mask to face her. Bone-rimmed black pits for eyes, teeth clenched in a malevolent grin. She felt a shudder of dread building in the pit of her stomach, rising into her throat. Regardless of the fierce heat, her skin became a tingling sheet of ice.

“Emil has gone,” he whispered.
Now
he sounded angry.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Fadiya and your friend have taken him, against my command.”

“Thank goodness.” Her relief was immediately swamped by anxiety. His tone was ominous, a loud whisper echoing from inside the unmoving jaw.

“This means you have broken our agreement.”

“Does it matter?” She couldn’t keep her feelings out of her voice. “I’m here, am I not? I came in exchange for him. You have what you want, so let him go!”

Zruvan unfolded from his seated position, towering over her. For a second she was like a tiny child staring up at him. Then she sprang to her feet and backed away. No longer the quiet-voiced guru, he transformed back into the terrifying figure who’d first menaced her onboard ship.

Fire scorched her. Stinging liquid ran into her eyes and she realised she was perspiring. She felt her dress clinging to her clammy body, looked down and saw that she was sweating her own blood. Her clothing and her whole body was slicked in pink fluid. The Bone Well trembled.

“My decision whether or not to let you go was in the balance,” he said. “But the facts remain. I have been here since before the beginning of time. I gave birth to space and time. Everything in the universe proceeded from me.”

“What?” Violette laughed from shock. “You
gave birth to space and time
?”

“Don’t mock me.”

“I’m not mocking, just… Are you claiming to be a god? Now I’ve heard everything. Angels, sorcerers, gods – the Crystal Ring sends us all mad!”

Lord Zruvan did not appreciate being laughed at. He grabbed the staff and stamped its heel on the floor, like a furious wizard.

“No. I am greater than any god. I came
before
. I am space and time itself. I am the void from which all gods proceed.”

His words sounded ridiculous, but the deadly serious timbre of his voice and his overwhelming presence chilled her to the marrow. Even in the kiln-heat, she convulsed with a fever-chill. What lay under his costume? Black nothingness, an abyss for which there were no words, not even “god”?

“That is how I know who you are,” he said quietly. “I came before the beginning. That’s why I endure this existence of pain so that my beloved friends may live in peace. I know the order of the universe: I, then the gods, then the dominion of the sun over the moon, then vampires over mortals, then male over female, and mankind over the beasts. Any other way is chaos. Lilith is the female beast, the very embodiment of disorder and turmoil. If I allow you to continue, chaos will tear the Crystal Ring apart. But if you cease to exist, order will return. Those who stood against you in the past were not strong enough, but I am.”

Violette felt her strength draining away, her own blood dripping out of her pores to water the bones of the dead. She looked up into the dwindling chimney high above. She smiled.

“I never expected my life to end like this. However, we did make a bargain. As long as Emil is safe, I am in your hands. But do you know there is a saying among the wise?”

“What saying?”

“That the suppression of Lilith brings destruction? Slay me, and I’ll take you and everything around you with me. Heed this folk tale. Once upon a time, a terrible she-demon took the shape of an owl and made her nest in a barn. Nothing, nothing would evict the owl from its lair until they burned down the very barn itself. The owl was gone, but not until their livestock and grain and everything they needed to survive lay in ashes.”

“Empty threats.”

“It’s not a threat. It’s the way things are. You can ignore the female beast, but she’s always there in the shadows. Lash her, and she lashes back with tenfold fury.”

The terrible, skeletal creature loomed over her – not Kastchei the Immortal, not a vampire, not even a god or a devil but a being so far beyond her understanding that his judgement was worse than death itself. He would not simply kill Violette, but destroy Lilith, destroy all that she had ever been, even the memories and myths. Annihilate her completely.

And because he feared her, destroying her was his only choice.

She knew, yet she still couldn’t bring herself to escape.

Zruvan raised his staff and set the heel against her chest. He pushed her, gently but firmly, back against the wall and held her there. Its painful electric energy made her limbs twitch and turn to string. She felt the bones in the wall digging painfully into her back. First her dress then her skin itself was burning, blistering.

She endured this with patience. She wondered why she wasn’t afraid any more, then realised that she was, but the fear was far away, drowned by the horrific sensation of burning and melting, healing, blistering again.

How long would this cycle last before the fire overwhelmed her self-healing ability?

Not long.

Tears and blood-sweat streamed down her. She was drowned by a strange ecstatic relief that it was almost over.

“Keep still,” he said. “You will soon fade. This is not suppression but cleansing.”

“Lord Zruvan?” she said, looking straight into the eye-holes of his mask. “Would you take off your mask and robes for me?”

“No, I will not. Why?”

“I would like to see your face before I die. Your skin. Is anything human left under there, or only the void that came before the universe?”

No answer, but the pressure on her breastbone increased. Her vision went black for a moment. She thought about Robyn, her lost love, and wondered if there was an afterlife where kind faces waited…

“Lord Zruvan, I know what’s happened to you,” she said, surprised at the steadiness of her voice. “The same thing happened to me. I am not really Lilith.
You are not really Zruvan
.”

“Your words make no sense. Be still now, and silent.”

“No. As long as I can speak, I have to tell you the truth. There are thousands of thought-forms floating in Raqia, and sometimes they’re so strong that they attach themselves to us. Perhaps we attract them. I always felt like an outcast, so when I became a vampire, my natural inclinations made me become Lilith. And you: you are not primordial. You were human once.”

“The human shell is long gone. I stretch infinitely back and forward in time, I transcend time.”

“No, it’s an illusion. When you transformed, an archetype from the Crystal Ring fused with you and made you believe you are Zruvan. It’s real, but only as an idea. It’s not all you are. Think about it. If you were not Zruvan, who
would
you be?”

That brought a growl of rage, echoing horribly inside the skull. He thrust the staff so hard she felt her breastbone crack. The greedy thirst of a hundred thousand dead humans began sucking out her life. She was molten hot and freezing cold, her very cells coming apart, yet her consciousness persisted.

She had a flashback to a time when Karl’s friend Pierre had done this to her. His spear, seized from a fortress wall, had no occult power, but it had pierced her to the spine.

Things had not ended well for him, either.

“This isn’t working,” she said. “I’m still not dead. And you are not really Zruvan. What was your name in life? Where were you born? Algeria, Egypt, Persia? You were a little boy once, before the vampires came…”

He snatched back the staff and aimed it straight at her mouth.

That might have worked. Severed her brain stem, silenced her forever. But she dodged and fell to the floor. The surface was red hot, searing her palms.

From her position – crouching on all fours like a wounded wolf – she looked up at Zruvan.

He was struggling to pull the staff free from the wall. It must have lodged deep. Bones and sand crumbled from the hole and pattered down like rain. No longer statuesque and forbidding, he was agitated now, desperate to retrieve the weapon so he could attack her again. If anything, the wall seemed to pull the staff deeper into itself.

His sleeves rode up as he struggled and she saw, in the gap between robe and gloved hands, the bare dark skin of his forearms.

Not nothingness, not bones, but flesh.

Violette gathered herself to spring. She aimed for his lower legs, leapt like a pouncing cat, felt his knees buckle as she struck in exactly the right place. His legs folded and he lost his balance, lost hold of the staff, collapsed on top of her like a felled tree.

Then the world was pure chaos. The inferno heat roared. Voices muttered and screamed. She could barely think for the noise, let alone fight, and the hot red light dazzled her. Her fingers found the edge of the skull-helmet and she began to work at it, trying with the little energy she had left to push it off his head. Irrational but deep instinct told her,
Take off his mask and you take away his power.

He resisted, but their twisted position meant his hands could not gain a purchase on hers.

The Bone Well began to tremble. She didn’t know what started the quake – his staff piercing the wall, their struggle, her challenge to what he believed himself to be… all of it, perhaps. The chamber shuddered violently, the floor bucked beneath them. They lay entangled and powerless against the onslaught.

Bones rained down from the chimney. A few at first, delicate finger-bones and toes. Then more. Femurs and skulls, shoulder-blades. Whole skeletons.

The entire structure of the Bone Well was collapsing.

The tremor released a massive landslide from the walls. The deluge of dry hail became an avalanche of bone and stone that swiftly covered the bottom of the well and began to rise up the sides, burying them both. The crushing weight increased by the moment as the whole chamber above them filled up with the rubble of centuries, of a hundred thousand deaths and ancient bones.

Zruvan’s exquisitely constructed vessel of hell was no more.

* * *

With the mares dozing, Emil, Charlotte and Fadiya sat in the cavern, waiting. No one stated the obvious, that without a human in tow they could have been back in Algiers by now, or even back in Europe… Charlotte thought of cool, rainy streets by night, and imagined a victim wilting in her arms, with all the passion of a human dying of thirst in the desert.

At least Fadiya was not a grumbler. She could think of one or two vampires who would have made this journey insufferable.

“Charlotte?” said Fadiya, interrupting her reverie. “Make a little cut near your wrist.”

She looked down in dismay to see that Fadiya was offering her an
Istilqa
knife. The patterns carved on the handle seemed to move and whisper.

“What for?”

“It will make you sleep.”

“Like a human?”

“Yes. Isn’t it the worst thing about our lives, that we never sleep? This will help you.”

“When someone used one of those blades on me, I went mad for several hours. I haven’t been the same since. They’re evil. Worse than poison, they cut right into our souls and there’s no telling what damage they do.”