Seven Kings

8

Her first sensation was the sound of rain pelting stone. A chorus of thunder moaned somewhere in the distance. The cool night wind caressed her face and arms. She opened her eyes to discover the apex of a vaulted ceiling. She lay on a soft bed, her body wrapped in dark silk with hems of black lace about the neck and sleeves. The flickering of a single flame cast dancing light across the walls. About the chamber seven leaf-shaped windows stood open to the storm, revealing only darkness and silvery rain.

She could not raise her heavy head from the pillow. Trying to do so only brought pain… a raw sensation of torn flesh beneath the line of her jaw. Her fingers twitched on the brocaded blanket, but her arms would not obey. The muscles in her legs flexed, but she could not move them. She lay helpless in the silver gloom as damp mists wafted in through the windows. She tried to cry out, but only produced a gurgling moan. A twinge of fire burned inside her gashed throat.

Something dark and glittering lurked in the far corner of the chamber. It moved slowly from an open window toward the bed. Her eyeballs shifted inside their sockets. The bed itself lay at the very center of the room, and she could not see the floor. Nor could she see the face of the dark figure that strode closer. Yet this she did not need to see. She knew it was her half-brother who stood over the bed now. She reached past his looming presence into the storm itself, called upon the lightning to strike this chamber, reduce it to rubble. Another knell of distant thunder was her only answer.

A low chuckle reached her ears as she fought to change her shape. As owl or eagle she would flee into the storm and take her chances. Yet her stubborn body lay where it was, heavy as lead and helpless as an infant. A pair of yellow eyes gleamed above her. A white smile framed by thin lips red as blood. His hair was long and black, combed smooth as the silken bedsheets, his robe a starry mantle of darkness set with constellations of tiny jewels.

“Sister, at last you awake.” His voice was deep and calm. There was none of the wolf in it. He could obviously hold that side of himself completely at bay. A pale hand reached out to caress her cheek. His flesh was cold against hers. A rash rose across her skin. Her tongue, like her body, would not move. The predator’s eyes stared into her own. “It pleases me greatly that you have come. You are most welcome here.”

A coughing in her throat. “You wish to speak?” he asked, smiling. “Only promise that you will treat with me gently. I could not bear harsh words from you.”

Suddenly her tongue broke free of its bondage. “Fangodrel-”

He cut her off with a raised finger. His nails were long and black. Talons.

“No,” he said. “Never call me that again. That name was given to me by a false father. My name, as I have told you, is Gammir. If you wish to speak, you must remember this.”

“Gammir.” The word fell from her mouth like a profanity.

He nodded, stroking his pointed chin, where a narrow beard was plaited with silver thread. He had removed the black crown, exposing his alabaster forehead.

“Yes.” He grinned. “Now you have it.”

“I knew it was you,” she said.

He sat down on the bed beside her. She could move her mouth, but her body still lay immobile. The coppery smell of blood lingered about him. “Of course you did,” he said. “You were always such a smart girl. You and your books… such a curious child. See where it has brought you?”

“You… you killed Tadarus,” she said. “Why?” Tears might have welled in her eyes, but she did not even have his permission to weep. His mastery of her was total.

“Tadarus was a blustering fool,” he said. “He always hated me because he sensed that I was different. I needed his blood to awaken my sorcery. The Blood of Vod is powerful. That same gifted blood fills your own veins.”

“Will you…” she could not say it. She tried again. “Will you feed on me as well?”

How was he forbidding her magic? Even when Elhathym had turned her to stone, she had been able to reach out with her mind, to call upon an ally. Now her consciousness lay trapped within her mortal shell, and her mortal shell was trapped within this storm-racked tower.

He laughed. “I already have,” he said. His fingers brushed the open wound in her throat. She bristled with agony. “And your blood is far sweeter than your poor brother’s.”

Now she understood. His fangs had opened her neck. He drank her blood. This was how he gained control of her entire body.

The Part is the Whole. While my blood is in his belly, he is the master of my physical form. What have I done?

“You begin to understand,” he said. “You are mine, as long as I wish it. This mortal flesh of yours is only so much clay for me to mold. However, I enjoy its natural shape.” He ran a hand along her arm. She gritted her teeth. “So I will be gentle with you.”

“You rend my flesh, drink my blood-hold me prisoner-and call this ‘gentle’?”

Gammir rose from the bed and turned to stare at the glimmering sheets of rain outside the windows. “Very well,” he said. “You may rise.”

A sudden warmth rushed into her arms and legs. She raised herself from the pillows, groaning at the pain of her neck wound. She lifted a hand to explore its severity. Gingerly she probed the split flesh. Upper and lower incisors had raked her throat to create parallel lacerations. The mark of a rabid hound. The twin gashes were puckered and swollen now. Bloodless. Were they healing already?

She moved her legs off the edge of the bed and sat leaning on her right elbow. A great weariness lay still upon her. How much of her blood had he drained so far?

The gown she wore was antique in style and craftsmanship, yet stunningly beautiful. Her feet were bare on the cold stone. She shivered in the damp air. Now she saw the source of the flame, a single brazier hanging from a rafter chain. Beyond the windows lay only rain and rushing stormclouds thick enough to blot out moon and stars. Somewhere far below the seven windows slept the black city. This chamber must sit high atop one of the palace’s barbed towers.

Gammir turned from the window to face her. “You like the gown? It suits you.”

She ignored this. “Fa-Gammir,” she said. “Why not simply kill me? Do you keep me alive only for the pleasure of mocking me? Or would you make me your slave?”

“That is entirely up to you,” he said. He stepped closer, black robe glistening. She flinched. “Tell me, has the Royal Court of Yaskatha lost its appeal? Have you grown weary of that foolish boy who wed you?”

The face of D’zan sprang into her mind. It was not King D’zan with his crown and golden corselet. It was the D’zan she knew in the quiet hours, the tawny-haired lad that she fell in love with so many years ago. Where had that lad gone? Kinghood had devoured him.

“Your silence tells me everything I need to know,” said Gammir. His eyes flashed golden. Thunder cracked the sky outside the tower. The storm renewed its fury, beating at the black stone walls. Across the chamber she spied a door of heavy wood bound with iron. The room’s only exit. She might run, but he would not allow it. She might leap from one of the windows to either die or escape his control and become a bird of the night. This, too, he might prohibit.

“Your Lord Husband has disappointed you,” said Gammir. “Love is not the grand spell you thought it to be. Now you see the truth of the world. Love, like all things, is merely an illusion. Did not Iardu teach you this?”

She dared a glance at his wolfen eyes. “Iardu taught me many things,” she said. She tried again to send her mind forth into the storm. Gammir raised a hand to forbid it. Her thoughts quaked, rattling like frozen pebbles inside her skull.

“He taught you some truth, I see,” said Gammir, smirking. He walked closer. “And many lies.”

“What do you want with me?” she asked. Why had she come here? To find the truth of Gammir’s existence. But had she been ready to kill him? Was that even within her power?

“I should ask you that same question,” he said. “But I already know. You came to me, dear Sister. I did not summon you. Your false lover in the Kingdom of Orchards is not worthy of you. Meanwhile, Vireon dotes on that bitch Alua and has no time for you. You came to me because you need me.”

“Why would I need you?”

“I am your family,” he said. “Your eldest brother. The closest thing you have to a father.”

“We share the same mother, that much is true. But you are not the Son of Vod.”

“Of course not. I am so much more. I am the inheritor of this ancient empire. Khyrei belongs to me. My kingdom grows stronger than ever. You knew this… just as you knew that I alone would truly understand you.”

Sharadza blinked. “What do you mean?”

He leaped forward, faster than she could see, and grabbed her hands in his own. Cold.

“You still care for me,” he said.

Sharadza had no words for that. She remembered days with Fangodrel in the gardens of Udurum. She was a tiny girl when he was in his teens. He would run and hide from her in the hedges, daring her to find him. She almost always did, for he would jump out and scare her, lifting her in his arms and spinning her madly. They rolled laughing through the leaves and moss. Yet when Tadarus and Vireon were about, Fangodrel hid his affection for her.

Later he was the cloistered poet, working on verses in self-imposed isolation. Once in a while his servant would bring Sharadza a ballad or ode he had written for her. He had never spoken publicly of these sentimental works. Perhaps he feared that showing love for his sister would be seen as weakness. Or his hatred for Vod’s “true sons” had spoiled his love for her. Yet there had been good times between brother and sister.

Now this arcane being in the dark robes… could it really be the same person who had run alongside her in the leafy courtyards of Udurum? Who had composed sad rhymes for her? Or had he changed so much through the arts of murder and blood magic that he could no longer be counted any relation to her?

“I fear you,” she said. “I fear what you’ve done to Udurum… what you’ve done to Khyrei… to yourself… and what you will do to us all.”

He smiled. “What I will do…”

He released her hands and turned to face the storm again.

“Even now my enemies plot against me,” he said. “So I do what I must. I will destroy them. All of them. I will wade through a sea of blood and bones until I am master of this world. This is what conquerors do, Sharadza. It is why I was born. And reborn.”

“You could change” she whispered. “Embrace the humanity you have cast aside. Remember the verses you wrote. Remember love…”

He laughed into the mist of rain. “You and I… and all those like us… we are far beyond love and humanity. Surely you know this. We are descendants of the Old Breed, who ruled the world before mankind was born. Power is our birthright.”

“Ianthe has poisoned your mind,” she said.

He turned to glare at her. His smile was close-mouthed, black eyes twinkling. Thunder boomed above the city. “Ianthe opened my mind,” he said. “She bequeathed to me the full depth of my father’s legacy. She taught me the Power of the Blood. The Strength of the Shadow. She will return again someday, and I will lay this world at her feet.”

“You will fight a war against overwhelming forces,” she said. “Udurum, Uurz, Yaskatha, even Mumbaza will rise against you. They rise even now.”

“Ha! They squabble and bicker among themselves, unable to choose a single course of action. This is their weakness. There is no unity, no one to bring them all together against me. So I let them squabble while Khyrei grows stronger every day. And on that day when they finally march to meet me on the field of battle it will be too late. They will fall like ripe wheat before the scythe.”

“There are… others,” she said. “Sorcerers who will oppose you. You may rule a dark kingdom, but you rule it alone.”

“You have no idea what is coming,” he said. “The depth of your world is so very shallow. You see no farther than the deep waters that surround us. Yet there is so much more out there…” He looked into the roiling stormclouds as if viewing some glorious secret vision. There was something he was not telling her.

Gammir waved a hand and she stood. She walked to him. Once again she was helpless in his invisible grip. His will alone forced her feet to shuffle across the floor, forced her arms to wrap like pale vines around his neck. Beyond his lupine head she saw the city below: a concentric accumulation of fiery pinpoints and innumerable chimneys belching columns of soot into the rain. Beyond the bastions of the city’s southern wall steamed the jungle, black as pitch beneath the moonless sky.

Sharadza shivered as a chilling fog drifted through the casements. His bony chest against her bosom offered no warmth. His skin was cold as the mist itself. Together they stared into the seething sheets of rain. She could not look away, even if she wanted to.

“You speak more truly than you know,” he said. “I am lonely.”

“Let me go,” she asked.

Instead he turned to face her. Their faces lingered close in the manner of two lovers.

“You will be my Queen now,” he said. His eyes were amber jewels, sparkling with hidden depths. “You have the blood, you have the beauty.”

“I am your sister.”

He breathed upon her cheek. The charnel odor of a beast’s mouth, reeking of raw meat.

“Half-sister,” he corrected her. “Vod was not my father.”

“Even so,” she said. “Shaira carried us both in her womb. We have her blood as well. The blood of Shar Dni.”

He sneered at her. She could not turn her eyes away from his fangs. “Ah, what delicious blood the Sharrians had,” he said. “I drained the entire royal family, you know. Well, most of them. This was before we left their city crumbling into ruins. I have savored a bit of that Sharrian flavor in your own blood this night.”

She felt the onset of panic. Her mind shuddered between her temples. Her arms and legs trembled, but would not bend or meld or change as she willed them. He placed his chill lips upon hers. She endured the kiss because there was no other choice.

“No!” she screamed, pulling free of his arms. She realized that he must have allowed her this privilege. A brief illusion of freedom to sweeten her agony. “You are my brother and I am the wife of D’zan!”

“Listen to me!” he said. She sat upon the edge of the bed again, for she could do nothing else. “My mortal bones were charred and crushed beneath Vireon’s boot. The body that Shaira birthed is long dead. What you see now, this flesh that I wear… it is a sculpture of blood and shadows. No more related to you than the darkness outside this tower. As a mortal, I was your half-brother. But I am mortal no longer. I will show you… teach you… how to rid yourself of this weak body that hinders your true power. You will be reborn as I have been, a conquering spirit in a new housing. No one will be able to control your flesh then… not even me. The death of this physical form,” he jabbed a finger at her stomach, “will set you free. You have learned much these past years. You know I speak truth.”

Sharadza considered D’zan, whose body she and Iardu had sculpted from hair, earth, and raw sorcery. She recalled her readings: The Lifting of the Veil, The Gateway Beyond Flesh, and the Grimoire of Sanctorus, all ancient texts that spoke of sorcerers using death as a doorway to ultimate power. She remembered Elhathym re-forming his body from smoke and shadow upon the Yaskathan throne, even after D’zan murdered him on the field of battle. Had Iardu himself shed his physical form ages ago? Perhaps this explained his fondness for taking so many different shapes. It seemed he had a new alias for every kingdom he traveled. She had first known him as Fellow the Storyteller, then as a grizzled crone who taught her the rudiments of sorcery in a musty cave. Her own form was fluid when she wished it, but she always knew who she was… and what she was. Sharadza, daughter of Vod and Shaira, was her fulcrum, the one reality that she could not change… the immovable pillar at the center of a mercurial universe.

Death itself was the passage through which she must pass if she were to embrace the fullness of her power. Yet she did not trust Gammir’s knowledge of this process. It could easily be a trick to provide for her some fate worse than death.

“Will you… kill me?” she asked.

Gammir chuckled, walking near to her again. “No,” he said. “I will free you.”

“What if… what if I rise up more powerful than you? What if I destroy you?”

He reached for her cheek, but she grabbed his wrist. “You love me, Sharadza,” he whispered. “I was once your brother… now I will be your Emperor… your lover… your husband. You will not kill me because I have seen the depths of your love. It is why you came to me, why you are here right now.”

“You are mad,” she said, turning away from his eyes to stare at the flaming brazier.

“Love makes us all mad,” he said. “This is a mad world.”

“So I have no choice?” she asked. “You will force me to your side?”

Gammir shook his lean head. Thunder punctuated the movement. “No,” he said. “I will simply free you of this mortal shell. Once I take the last of your blood you will enter the sleep that Men call death. You see these runes?” He gestured to the circle of sigils and wards encircling the bed. She had not noticed it before now. The marks were intricate, swirling, graven into the basalt flagstones of the floor. “I have already prepared the way for your rebirth. Don’t worry; I will help you. I will bring blood and shadows for you. The raw materials of your new existence.”

He is going to do this, she realized. There is no choice for me here.

He wants my blood and he will have it. He has enslaved me as his own father enslaved my poor mother before I was born. But he will never have my love.

Now, in a flash, she saw the way out of his trap. A ray of light seeping into the dark prison where he had her chained. He would take her life, destroy her mortal body. She could not prevent that. Yet her own power could create a new shell for her living spirit, just as the Shaper and she had created one for D’zan.

In her new body she would be free of Gammir’s power. Free to bring his black towers thundering down, free to end his realm of brutal slavery. To wipe him from the face of the earth. Let him think he is reinventing her. He would sow his own doom without even realizing it.

She knew now that this was the only way.

Eight years ago she had determined to learn sorcery against Iardu’s warnings. She had opened many gateways to great and dreadful knowledge. Now it was time to continue that journey to its ultimate end. Time to embrace death, and so overcome it.

Let it come.

“Very well,” she said. “What has this life to offer me but loneliness and sorrow?”

Gammir nodded, taking her hand in his. He bent to kiss her knuckles.

“My Queen,” he said.

She lay back on the bed, exposing her neck for him. The twin lesions throbbed. Her pulse raced as Gammir bent his head. His ivory fangs elongated, his mouth opened obscenely wide. A red tongue licked at her wound as fangs sank deep. She grimaced as the terrible suction began.

She prayed without sound.

Father, give me strength.

Gammir did not drain her completely on that first night. Yet he drank enough to leave her weak and helpless on the grand bed. He even lay there with her until pink sunlight began to creep in through the casements. He arose, waking her from a dreamless slumber, and pulled thick tapestries down before each of the windows. The bulk of the storm had passed, but the light rain went on, a whisper against the tower walls. Gammir kissed her lips as she lay drowsy and pale. He slipped through the single door and was gone. She could not keep her eyes open.

The next night he came again to drink from her throat. He muttered sweet words and kind promises to her, as if she were truly his lover. Yet he did not touch her in any intimate way, save for the penetration of fangs and questing tongue. He drew the life from her slowly. She could not move at all now. She could barely think. Her thoughts were lost in a fog of confusion. His yellow eyes hung before her always.

On the third night he finished her. The shimmering of his black robe was the last thing she remembered before ultimate sleep fell upon her. She called D’zan’s name a final time, a single tear escaping her left eye to run along her cheek.

Then darkness, deeper than any sea, older than any world.

She floated in the endless dark, a spark of sentience in a bottomless void. Only her memories of the Living World saved her from utter annihilation. That world was precious to her, with all its pain and suffering, all its glories and triumphs. Here there was only a Great Nothingness, but the world she had left was a feast of possibilities. Sunlight on her skin, wine on her tongue, the wind in her hair… these memories persisted. The smiling face of her mother, the salty breezes of the Cryptic Sea. The exhilaration of flight, the warmth of tender flesh against her own. D’zan… the boy she had loved, who had loved her. The pain of that love, and the sweetness of it. She clung to these memories as a drowning girl might cling to shards of flotsam.

All of these things-feelings, thoughts, sensations, concepts, words, birth, death, transformation, love, hate-only Patterns. In the World of Spirit there were no Patterns… which was itself a Pattern. The Living World, composed of earth, air, fire, and water, was an illusion, but so was the World of the Dead. She hung suspended between the two Great Lies now, a mote transversing two infinite Patterns composed of endless sub-Patterns, an endless succession of them. Yet there were no distinctions. All Is One.

She reached out, weaving patterns with the darkness, searching for the light that lay beyond. They were the same, Dark and Light, Being and Non-Being. The Will was the only constant. She willed herself toward the world she loved and entered its Pattern once more.

She had done this before, when Shaira forced her infant self out of the womb. A squealing, helpless thing, she had emerged. Now she emerged once more, drawn to that which awaited her. The circle of runes took precedence above all other Patterns. Like a whirlpool it pulled her toward its epicenter. She knew pain then, and joy, and a thousand other emotions at once. A grand and nameless euphoria.

She lay upon the bed at the center of the runes, a mass of congealing shadows. She could not yet see, but she sensed the presence of Gammir hovering nearby. She felt the ancient words he spoke. She was not manifesting here entirely of her own volition. He was drawing her from the void. It might have consumed her if he had not. Despite her consent, she had not been fully prepared for this resurrection. She fought his influence, writhing and squirming on the bedsheets.

A vision came: her mortal body, drained of life, withered and corpse-white. Soldiers in demonic masks carried it toward a blazing furnace. They cast her dead body into the flames, where it caught like dry kindling. The flames consumed flesh and bone.

The bed lay empty in the highest room of the tower. Empty but for the rushing shadows that filled the room and sank into the whirlpool of her emergence. They converged on the downy coverlets as Gammir sang his ancient incantation.

The vision passed and she opened her newly formed eyes. Gammir wailed and waved his jeweled fingers about the rune circle. Two female slaves sat naked on their knees, one at either side of the bed. She raised her head and saw the shadow-substance of her body bubbling and forming, warping and bending, flashing through myriad colors. Would she be reborn in some deformed, distended body?

She worked the Patterns to weave the rushing shadows into her former shape. She willed her new shell to resemble the body that was so healthy and alive before it was drained like a wineskin and devoured by flames.

Gammir approached the first of the slaves and raised a gleaming dagger. The slave looked at Sharadza writhing on the bed, shadow struggling to become flesh. The girl’s eyes were dead, empty of hope. She neither wept nor begged as Gammir raised her chin and slid the dagger’s edge across her throat. The pale flesh opened and red blood squirted forth. Instead of spilling across the girl’s quivering breasts, it flowed upward, into the swirling mass of shadows. It joined the black mass and swirled downward, adding substance to Sharadza’s new form.

No, she tried to scream. You didn’t tell me this…

Her mouth was only a jagged whole in the oval of her half-formed head.

The slave girl dropped to the floor as the last of her lifeblood flowed into the black cloud and then sank into Sharadza. Now Gammir walked about the bed and opened the second slave’s throat. The blood of the first victim had given Sharadza substance, and now she screamed from her properly formed mouth. But it was too late. The second blood offering joined with the first, swirling into her new physical presence. She soaked it up, drinking it in through her newly formed pores. It flooded into her mouth, down her throat, hot as fire.

“Yes!” breathed Gammir. “You are almost there. Take the final step. The power of blood and shadow is yours.”

With a final thrust of willpower, Sharadza completed her new form. A perfect copy of the body she had abandoned to Gammir’s bloodlust. She lay naked on the bed now, exposed to his hungry eyes in the most explicit way imaginable. She breathed deeply of the blood-scented air. It filled her new lungs and sent wellness coursing through her limbs.

She rose from the bed like a floating spirit, spreading her arms and glorying in the newness of her flesh. A pale Goddess, she hung above the dark Emperor. She gazed upon him and knew that her fresh eyes were the color of the dead slaves’ blood. Her hair, black as shadow, flowed about her in dancing winds. Outside the windows a new storm raged. Lightning slashed the sky and the roaring of thunder shook the tower stones.

The power of that storm surged in her veins, and the lightning responded to her call. A blue-white thunderbolt shot in through the window and bathed her in its radiance. Its flame sank into her pale skin.

Gammir twisted and jerked, transfixed by the same bolt as it fed her.

“So beautiful!” he shouted through his pain.

The lightning had set the bed aflame. It burned now like a pyre for the two dead slaves. Ignoring the blaze, Sharadza called shadows in from the storm and wove them into a robe to clothe her new body. Her flesh and Gammir’s steamed in the wake of the thunderbolt. Her feet touched down on the stone floor, but its coldness no longer bothered her. She was beyond such discomforts as coolness and heat now. She was reborn.

She stood tall before Gammir, unafraid and unhindered. He reached a hand timidly toward her. She took it in her own and he pulled her near. Their lips met in a lingering kiss. They were no longer brother and sister. Those were terms to describe bodies that had faded from the world. They were indomitable spirits now, masters of the material world and all its Patterns.

No.

She tasted the blood on his lips, bittersweet and delicious.

No, this is wrong.

“I thirst,” she told him.

Gammir smiled and hissed through his fangs like a proud viper.

“My Queen,” he said, “taste now the wine of your kingdom.”

The heavy door opened and an armored sentinel hauled in a boy, quivering and weeping. Another slave. He could be no more than twelve. Young blood was sweet blood.

He lied to me. He’s changed me…

She felt the beating pulse of the boy from across the room. Blood ran hot in his veins.

But I am not like him. I have free will now.

She leaped like a cat and took the boy in her arms as if to embrace him. Her head reared back and her fangs grew large.

No!

She sank them into the soft flesh of the boy’s throat, drinking deep of ecstasy.

The wailing voice in the back of her head faded as she guzzled the slave’s blood. Hot and vinegary on her tongue. Sweet and filling in the depths of her belly.

Gammir urged her on with obscene whispers, caressing her new skin, watching the boy twitch and die. She dropped the brittle carcass to the floor, wiped her red-smeared lips with the back of her hand.

“More.” She demanded it.

He smiled and kissed her bloody mouth.

“As you wish.”

Hand in hand they descended the steps of the black tower.

Thunder shook the world outside.