Mortal

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

FOR TWO DAYS, the Seyala Valley lay under the gloom of shattered hope and mangled dreams. Under Rom’s orders the ruin’s stone courtyard had been washed clean of blood and the inner sanctum left vacant. Some of the yurts had been erected, but many slept in temporary shelters made of canvas flaps. Night fires burned, but the songs and dancing that had once filled the valley were not to be seen or heard except on the north end, where some of the Nomads raged about their exploits in war and spoke of coming days of glory.

Triphon’s dead body served as a constant and macabre reminder of defeat. Rom resisted questions as to the sanity of leaving a dead body exposed and defied mounting pressure to give Triphon a proper burial. Instead, he agreed to move the post with Triphon’s body to the side of the ruins where it was not so flagrantly visible.

The greater question confronting them all was far more urgent: what about those who still lived?

There was no Mortal Sovereign to take the seat of power. No new kingdom to waken the world to life. No miraculous and fanatical boy to inspire hope. No promise of life beyond that which already ran, rampant but aimless, in their own veins.

Only a broken valley with ruins bathed in the memory of blood.

Nothing made sense.

The council had met twice in an attempt to find consensus, but no clear path could be agreed upon. Rom and the Keepers were too distraught with the inequity of Jonathan’s death to even consider direction, let alone the future. How could the one who’d promised them a new kingdom have removed that possibility by offering up his own life? In his slaughter of the Dark Bloods, he’d displayed more skill and strength than any Mortal might have expected of him. Why, then, had he bared his chest and given up the sword to Saric? Why?

The sky might have cleared, but the valley was shrouded in the thick fog of confusion and grief.

Even Roland, so steadfast in his resolve to see their new race of Nomads rise in power, offered few particulars as to how they should proceed.

North, yes. With full life, yes. But what of the expectation for freedom and autonomy embraced by his people during Jonathan’s life? What now?

Jordin was rarely seen in the valley, preferring instead the company of Jonathan’s grave. Rom had gone to the plateau on the eve of the second night to meditate and found her curled up next to the freshly disturbed earth, asleep. He’d sat down and watched the steady rise and fall of her breathing, trying for the hundredth time to make sense of the questions that flooded his mind.

He had never known Jonathan to speak untruth or to mislead. Then what had he meant in saying on the day of his death that he was bringing a new realm of Sovereignty? And how could he, when his blood had lost its potency?

Was it possible Jonathan had simply succumbed to the pressure of expectation that he would deliver them all? To the years of being bled, viewed less and less as a boy and more as a vessel of power?

Was it their own fault that they had pushed a fragile boy to grow into a leader that he had not owned the strength to become?

What could it mean to follow him as he’d urged in his last days? How did one follow the dead?

What of the storm and earthquake? Some called it the Maker’s Hand. Others said it was nothing more than a terrible storm.

For that matter, did the Maker even exist? Some said no-how could He, given all that had happened? What had happened in Jonathan’s blood was a matter of genetics, of science, and not mystery. Two days earlier, Rom would have derided them as blind and ungrateful, but how could he today? Why would a Maker allow the one source of true life to die?

Everything he’d believed had been thrown into doubt.

And Feyn… what of her? What had they agreed to at their summit? Why had she fled after delivering him to Saric, never once looking back?

As for Saric… His slaying of Jonathan was clearly a victory, but what of his apparent breakdown before Jonathan? And where had he gone?

The questions refused to abate as he returned to camp, leaving Jordin to her exhausted sleep as day turned to night, and night to day.

The evening before, Roland announced that he and twenty Immortals were journeying north the next day. They would find a new valley in which to rebuild. There was no longer a reason to remain close to the city. He had no more clear direction than that, only that it was time for his people to embrace their new life and to consider the centuries before them.

It would mean a split between those Keepers and Nomads who wished to remain close to Byzantium with Rom and those forsaking any further notion of bringing life to the world’s capital city.

That night, sleep came hard, and then only in confused snatches. Rom tossed, writhing with the same questions, reliving again and again every encounter with Jonathan the last days of his life until his dreams became a jumbled collage.

“Jonathan?” he whispered once, into the darkness. Feeling foolish, he closed his eyes. Finally, he slept.

Rom.

A whisper from the ether of sleep.

Rom.

I know the way.

But there was no way. He’d known it once with the surety of his every conviction, and it had failed him.

Rom.

Something nudged him.

No, not something, but someone.

“Rom. Rom!”

His eyes snapped wide and he stared up into a face in the darkness. Round eyes peered at him from a smudged, tearstained face. Her hair was a knotted mess.

Rom sat up. “Jordin?”

She stood with her arms limp at her side, looking half crazed.

So it was catching.

“Jordin. What is it?”

Had Saric returned? Feyn? Was Roland leaving under cover of the night?

“I know what he meant,” she whispered. “I know what we need to do.”

“What who meant, Jordin?”

“Jonathan told us to follow him. He told me. He made me promise. I know what he meant.”

The poor girl was breaking, undone by grief and her refusal to eat.

He sighed and ran his fingers through his tangled hair. “Please, Jordin… You have to get some rest.”

“I know how to follow him,” she said.

“He’s dead, Jordin! You have to accept that.”

She merely stared at him.

He sighed, closed his eyes and opened them again, willing himself to patience.

“All right. Tell me,” he said. “Tell me how to follow a dead man.”

“We have to take his blood.”

He returned her stare, not sure whether to be horrified or laugh at her.

“We already have his blood.”

“We have his old blood.”

“We have the blood he gave us when he was alive!”

“It’s in his blood.”

She said it all as if were obvious, so simple.

“Jordin. He’s in the earth. His blood is that of a corpse-literally.”

“It’s in the blood. There are three vessels of blood in his grave.”

“What are you saying? That we dig him up and drink a corpse’s blood?” The thought curdled his stomach.

“No, we inject it into our veins, as we did before.”

“Jordin, he’s dead! The blood is probably congealed by now.”

“Then we die, too, with his blood in our veins. He said to follow him. He said it to me, he said it to you, he said it to all of us. We have to dig his body up and take his blood. We have to follow him.”

He fell back down onto an elbow. “You can’t be serious.”

“Will you help me?”

The words Jonathan had shouted to Corpse and Mortal alike from the temple steps whispered through his mind. Find life and know that the realm of Sovereigns is upon you.

The demand had haunted him. What could find mean? Not you have found, but find.

In any case, Jonathan surely hadn’t meant for them to dig up his grave.

“Jordin, please… The Keeper tested Jonathan’s blood and found no properties of-”

“He said to follow him.”

“Yes, but not by dying!”

“He said his blood was being spilled for the world.”

Spill my blood and drain it for this world. He’d taken the words to be the desperate cry of one about to die.

“Yes. He said that. But if he wanted us to dig up his body and take his blood, he would’ve made it clear.”

“Jonathan always hid the truth for those who would find it,” she said. “I’m going, whether you help me or not.”

She actually meant to do this.

What if she’s right?

He got to his feet and paced, suddenly seized by the notion, however unlikely. Why had they assumed that Jonathan’s blood would mature by becoming a stronger version of what it had been rather than something new altogether? And yet, assuming the boy knew, why hadn’t he said anything to that effect?

Or had he?

“I’m getting a shovel,” Jordin said, spinning around to leave.

“Wait!”

She turned back.

“Hold on. We can’t just desecrate his grave by digging up his body! It’s revered by a thousand Mortals!”

“By me more than any of them,” she said. “I’m getting a shovel.”

“And then what?”

“Then I follow him in his death. I take the blood he spilled when he died. That’s what he meant. That’s what I’ll do.”

“We should ask the Keeper.”

“No. If you won’t help me, I’ll go alone.”

He thought a moment longer, then grabbed his boots and tugged them on. “We leave his body in the ground.”

“Of course. Do I look like a savage?”

Yes.

He grabbed his jacket. “Get the shovel.”

It took Rom and Jordin twenty minutes to find a shovel and ride up to Jonathan’s grave. The night was still, long past the hour of insect song-a good two hours before the first birds came to life. Before them, the slightly rounded mound of dirt looked as dormant and lifeless as the body they’d buried beneath it.

To Rom’s right lay the long burial mound of those other Keepers, a raised scar on the surface of the earth. It still smelled of earth, fresh as upturned grass and rain over the flesh decaying beneath. A sacred monument of death for those who lived to remember life.

And now they were about to desecrate the monument cherished most of all. For a moment he gave in to misgiving.

“We’re doing this based on pure conjecture,” he said.

“We’re doing this because I saw it in his eyes.”

“The eyes are easily misread, Jordin.”

“His eyes promised me love. Does love kill hope?”

Rom looked up at the round moon, a bright beacon in the star-speckled heavens. They had remained cloudless in the days since Jonathan’s death-rare, though not unheard of. The storm that had accompanied his death, on the other hand, had been singular.

The Maker’s Hand. If it was true-if it was possible-that it had bent toward earth in that moment, did its touch linger still?

Rom considered Jordin, looking so expectantly at him, her last question lingering in the air. And then he picked up the shovel and pressed it into the earth. A few seconds later, he tossed the first heap of soil aside.

They took turns at the shovel, heaping the dirt carefully to one side so it could be easily replaced as the grave slowly yawned opened beneath them.

There. The first glimpse of a dirty shroud.

Sweating from the work, hands raw as his emotions, Rom dropped the shovel behind him. He dropped into the grave and carefully scooped the remaining earth away from the top of the body, unable to staunch the image of that sword impossibly flashing beneath the darkened sky. Twice, he turned his face into his arm, seemingly at the smell of the corpse, already decomposing, but mostly against the memory of Jonathan falling forward on the temple steps.

And then he carefully continued clearing the dirt away from the three ceramic vessels set around his head. Red. The color of ochre and earth and blood.

He glanced up at Jordin, who looked as pale as a ghost in the moonlight, her eyes struck wide, fixed on the body. Tears shone in her eyes, broke down her cheek. But she did not turn away.

She dropped to her knees, reached down for each container as he handed it to her, handling it as gingerly as though it were made of eggshell.

“Cover him,” she said. It sounded almost like a plea.

Rom hauled himself up out of the grave, grabbed the shovel, and began filling it back in. Twenty minutes later they had returned the grave to a semblance of its original shape and strewn field flowers over the dirt. But even a Corpse would know that the earth had been freshly disturbed. And any Mortal with their keen perceptive sense would know immediately without doubt.

He could hear the outrage already.

It no longer mattered. Jordin’s reasoning had grown in him as he’d dug, pushing him to steely resolve. If she was right… Maker. The whole world would change.

Jonathan’s other statements, cried like a madman at the Gathering, mushroomed in his mind. I will bring a new, Sovereign realm… Death brings life… You won’t know true life until you taste blood. He had said all of it as Avra’s heart had dripped with blood in his hands.

But he could just as easily have been speaking of his own.

Jordin bundled the vessels in her coat, carefully placed them in her saddled bag, and threw herself on her horse.

They rode down from the plateau side by side, speaking only as they approached the camp.

“Take the blood to the inner sanctum,” Rom said. They’d already agreed that they would perform the ritual with the Keeper’s instrument, and for this they had little choice but to involve him. “I’ll wake Book.”

The inner sanctum was lit by three candles hastily gathered by the Keeper. In less than half an hour, morning light would filter into the valley, and Roland and his band would rise early to prepare for their journey north. They had to hurry; Rom had no desire to explain himself to any Mortal who might find their actions outrageous in the least and profane at worst.

Rom had pulled the old Keeper from sleep, insisting they’d discovered something that could prove all of his predictions true. Not until the old man had rushed into the ruins and stopped cold, eyes on the three ceramic jars, had they told him just what.

“What have you done?” the Keeper had cried. “He’s dead!”

“And we mean to follow him in his death,” Rom said, hearing the absurdity in the echo of his own words.

The old man spun to stare at him. “You mean to die?”

“No, I mean to follow. The blood in those containers. Will it kill me?”

The Keeper hesitated. “It depends.”

“On what?”

“On what’s in the blood.”

“Can you tell?”

“I don’t know what I’m looking for…”

Rom saw the wheels begin their slow turn in the man’s head.

Within minutes, he had laid the stent on a simple white cloth and announced that the seal on all the jars was intact; the blood hadn’t congealed. But then he seemed to hesitate.

“This could be blasphemy,” the Keeper said, pushing his white hair back from his head in a way that only made it seem more disheveled than before. “Centuries of guarding the secret of this blood, and now to open the sacred vessels…”

Rom had already rolled up his sleeve. “Then you owe it to the centuries and to those who came before you to learn the truth.”

“You’re quite sure you’re willing to risk this?” the Keeper said.

“When did following Jonathan not involve risk?”

Jordin’s hand came to rest on his forearm. “No. I go first.”

“It was I who was destined to find Jonathan as a boy,” Rom said.

She frowned. “Yes, but-”

“Who brought Jonathan to this valley?”

“You did.”

“And who did Jonathan embrace as leader of the Keepers?”

“Fine. But know that whether you live or die, I will take the blood.”

There was something wild in her eyes and he knew with certainty she would sooner be dead than without Jonathan, that the prospect of death to her now was, in itself, a gain. He couldn’t blame her.

He nodded. And then he pulled his sleeve up over the crook of his right arm, perched on the edge of the altar, and lay back.

“You’re sure about this?” the Keeper asked, picking up the steel stent.

“Would you do this?”

The old Keeper considered the question for only a moment, then dipped his head. “I would.”

“Then do.”

“How much?”

“As much as it takes.”

Rom closed his eyes and waited for the swab of cool disinfectant on his skin. The sting of the needle. A chill passed down his neck when it came, like the bite of a scorpion, cold in his veins. His heart rate surged, expectant.

Then nothing but the steady draw and push of his own breath.

He didn’t know what he had anticipated-perhaps a bolt of energy or gut-wrenching cramps similar to the first time he’d taken the ancient blood so many years ago.

“Anything?” Jordin whispered.

He kept his eyes shut and shook his head.

“Stay still,” the old Keeper said.

Rom lay unmoving, waiting for some unexpected sign that the blood flowing into his veins held power.

Nothing.

“Enough,” the Keeper said, withdrawing the stent and pressing a swab to the puncture wound. “Any more and-”

“I need more.”

“I’ve already given you twice the amount Jonathan gave to bring Corpses to life.”

“Give me more.”

“Rom, we don’t know what effect-”

“More! Do it!”

The old man finally shook his head and then reinserted the stent. A moment later cold flooded his veins once more.

Rom gripped his hand to a fist and closed his eyes again. His mind drifted behind the darkness of his closed eyes, a sea of darkness studded with pinpricks of light. The memory of stars in the sky as they had exhumed the grave. But nothing else. He felt no surge of power, no swell of emotion, no pain, no wonder, not even the slightest tingle beyond the cooler temperature of the blood itself.

Nothing.

A great sorrow settled over him like a suffocating blanket. Jordin was wrong. Jonathan’s blood was powerless. His sovereign realm didn’t exist any more than he himself did now. No hope lived beyond the grave in a world still imprisoned by death.

All that Rom had lived to protect was gone.

The tiny dots of light floated through the darkness, falling to a black horizon like falling stars, winking out.

He was being fed the blood of a corpse. What if that blood undid the power of Jonathan’s living blood within him? What if, in his desperate quest for the dream of a Mortal Sovereign, he had given up the very life in his veins and converted from Mortal to Corpse as surely as Jonathan had?

A sudden panic swept through his body, pushed sweat from his pores. Stop! Rip the stent out before it’s too late!

He wanted to. In his mind’s eye he was already reaching across his body, clawing at the stent, tearing it out with a cry of outrage.

His body began to tremble.

Images of Jonathan dancing with the children skipped through his mind. Of the little girl he’d rescued from the Authority of Passing-Kaya-grinning as she had lifted her arms to him. Of a thousand Mortals leaping up and down as their roar washed over their Sovereign to-be, standing with arms spread wide on the ruin steps.

Images of Jonathan’s blade effortlessly slashing through the line of Dark Bloods, of his finger pointed at the Mortals as he hurled words of accusation. Of blood splashing over his naked body as though to cleanse him.

The last winks of light faded. Darkness, deeper than any he’d known, edged into his psyche like a heavy black fog. He felt his breathing thicken, his pulse slow, his body cool.

You’re dying, Rom.

When the realization hit him, it was already too late. He tried to open his mouth and cry out, but his muscles didn’t respond. His arms remained at his side, quivering with the last vestiges of life.

Voices sounded urgently from the far reaches of his consciousness. Voices, but he couldn’t make out their words.

Another image crawled into his waning thoughts, of the Dark Blood they’d injected with Jonathan’s blood, foaming at the mouth before slumping without pulse. Rom had desecrated Jonathan’s grave, taken his blood, and now he would pay the same price.

He felt the stent being torn free. Hands on his body, shaking him. Words of horror rasped by the old man.

And then he felt nothing.

Only perfect peace.

Darkness.

Silence.

Death.

Jordin stood over Rom’s dormant body, filled with icy dread. The sweat on his face and arms glistened in the candlelight-a baptism of death. His eyes, twittering beneath his eyelids only a moment earlier, had stopped moving. His nostrils had pulled in a last, long breath and then his chest settled, stilled.

Maker. Was it possible?

Jonathan’s blood had taken Rom’s life.

For a long moment she stared at his waxen face. It was pale as though drained of blood. The old Keeper was frantically searching for Rom’s pulse.

“He’s dead!” the old man whispered, eyes darting up.

No! He couldn’t be dead.

“Blessed Maker. We’ve killed him!” the Keeper said, clapping his hands to his head.

Jordin’s breath quickened, her pulse a heavy thud, as though the life-robbing power that had spread through Rom in his dying moments had leaked in through her pores.

Jonathan had abandoned her. He’d loved her and chosen her, only to be washed away by madness, by a belief that by his death he could save them all. For two days she’d clung to that dying love, refusing to believe that Jonathan could invite his own death and leave her bereft, never to know love again. Because there would be no other after Jonathan. He’d taken her heart with him to the grave.

And now Rom had joined him.

She stumbled back a step, mind numb, breathing in quick, frantic pants that echoed throughout the inner chamber. Panic overtook her like an arctic wind, cutting her to the bone.

What Jordin did next did not come from any place of sound reasoning, but from the intuitive despair of a woman summarily thrown into darkness to die without a parting word from her master.

She leapt forward with a grunt and slammed her fist down on Rom’s lifeless chest.

“No!”

Like a beast clawing to escape the pit, she dug her fingers into his clothing and jerked him back and forth.

“No! Don’t you dare leave! Don’t you dare!”

The Keeper was at her side, hand on her arm, gently pulling her back. “Please, Jordin-”

“Wake up!” she screamed, beating at his chest. “Wake up!”

“Jordin-”

She slapped Rom’s face, hard enough to make it snap to the side. His head lolled to the side.

She slapped him again. “Wake up!”

His face was cold. He did not wake up.

The finality of Rom’s passing fell over Jordin like a crashing wave from the deep. And with it, absolute resignation to the smothering sickness of lost hope. Her legs buckled. She fell over Rom’s lifeless body with her head on his chest and her arms draped over the far side of the altar.

Her sobs came slowly at first, seeping up as though from her very bowels. And then it boiled over with ragged breaths and finally with a keening wail.

She was vaguely aware of the Keeper’s hand on her shoulder. That he was whispering something, trying to help her up.

She clung to Rom’s body, the body filled with Jonathan’s blood.

“Please, Jordin, daylight is coming. We’re going to have to explain ourselves to the others.”

His words cut her like a knife in the back. She could not explain herself to the others because even in this last act she had failed Jonathan. She, not Rom or the Keeper, would accept full blame. The woman Jonathan had loved while he lived, who had made a mockery of him in his death.

She slowly released her grip and sank to the floor, curled up in a heap, and sobbed.

The soft thump of her own heart mocked her, the palpitating rhythm of a heart pushed beyond the brink. And why not? Death had swallowed hope and abandoned her in a Hades. She no longer had reason to live. It thudded too hard, growing in intensity like a horse speeding into full gallop as though desperate to escape death itself.

The beat increased to a fast and heavy pounding. But it wasn’t coming from her.

She heard the Keeper’s sudden inhalation. Snapped her eyes wide. Jerked her head from the floor.

The sound came from the altar above her.

Jordin scrambled to her knees and spun to Rom. His body was improbably arched, shaking with violent tremors like a leaf in a storm.

She threw herself back against the Keeper, who flung a protective arm out in front of her.

What is darkness? What is light when there is only darkness? How does the mind process life when there is only death?

These were the underpinnings of Rom’s impossible quandary when light came out of the vacant darkness that was his nonexistence as he lay dead and unaware.

The light did not seep into his consciousness or grow from a first spark; it exploded with a hot white flash. It didn’t change his world; it created a new one. Let there be life. There was nothing and then there was everything.

Every fiber of his being was suddenly screaming with life, flooded with warmth, smothered by mind-bending love, shaking with more pleasure than his mind could contain.

He was only vaguely aware that he had a body that was reacting to the eruption within him, distorted beyond what occurred naturally, because in the moment nothing was natural. All was new.

The very air was raw pleasure, and he was breathing it like a drug that strained his synapses to the breaking point. A sensation exhilarating and beautiful, too powerful to resist.

“Do you feel my life, Rom?”

Jonathan’s whisper echoed through his new world, soft but laden with as much power as the light.

“Do you see now how great my love is?”

And with those whispered words a distant scream. His own, without words but with singular meaning.

Yes… Yes!

“Crush the darkness with my life, Rom. Live…”

He was shaking violently, weeping unrestrained with mouth spread wide, mind erupting with bliss. He wanted to say, I will. I will crush the darkness. I will live. But he could only scream.

He didn’t know how long that first explosion lasted-a moment. An hour. A lifetime-of weeping with gratitude. Begging for forgiveness for doubt. Vowing unending love.

And then the light faded into his mind’s horizon, leaving him fully alive. Released, he felt his body drop heavily to the stone surface beneath him.

He was new.

Alive.

Rom opened his eyes.

Jordin watched Rom’s body remain impossibly bent for several long beats before it dropped back to the altar’s stone surface and go limp. His scream had shattered the chamber’s silence, but it barely occurred to her that those in the camp might hear. Now his mouth snapped shut and he lay with tears running down past his temples.

Breathe, she had to remind herself, as utter quiet settled into the sanctuary. Far away, a rooster crowed.

Rom’s eyelids suddenly sprang open. He jerked upright and sucked in a long, desperate gasp that reverberated through the chamber.

She watched in stunned silence as he stared around, lost for a moment, as though acquainting himself to the world for the first time. He lifted his hands to look at them, laid a palm against his chest to feel his own breath, blinked to clear his vision.

She watched all this with trembling desire, desperate envy.

Rom turned his head and stared at them-first the Keeper, then Jordin. His eyes lingered on her.

“Jordin,” he rasped.

“You… you’re alive.”

“I died?” he asked. Then answered his own question. “I died…”

“You’re alive!” she cried.

“Alive,” he said, as she threw herself forward, flinging her arms around his body, weeping.

“You’re alive,” she sobbed.

“More alive than you can imagine,” he said.