Forbidden (12 page)

“Come back to me.”

“I will.”

He let her go and then followed Neah out her bedroom window into the night.

F
eyn made
her way into the Senate Hall. The chamber was vacant, the cushioned seats of the senate and the high platform of the senate leader occupied by nothing but ghosts. It was no secret that the doorway on the side of the platform led belowground to tunnels that eventually reached the dungeons a hundred yards to the west. But the passage was sealed under lock and key and was used only by a few alchemists—Saric among them.

On the surface, she had acquiesced to Saric. But his logic was strange, filled with turns uncharacteristic of him. And there was something not quite right about him, not least of which was his talk of a so-called keeper in the dungeons.

She had taken the only other key she knew of: Father’s. No Citadel lock could bar a Sovereign.

Or, in this case, a Sovereign-to-be.

A lone torch burned above the senate dais. Its flame was constantly fed by a supply of gas—the flame of the Order, never extinguished. She reached the door and let herself through.

It was a good twenty steps down into a bell-shaped atrium. She kept left along a passage that led to a small hexagonal chamber rumored to be the room in which Sirin himself had been martyred. The interior of the room was black, the walls adorned by ancient weapons and ruined tapestries. It had an eerie warmth, this room, as if it had never forgotten the fire that nearly destroyed it, or perhaps it had been recently occupied by a number of bodies, sweating as Saric had been in her chamber.

No, she was imagining things. She had simply never understood Saric’s affinity for these lower levels with their reek of Chaos and torch smoke. That was all.

She approached a heavy door, fit the key into the lock, and opened the sealed passageway, closing it again behind her. The tunnel beyond was wide enough for only one person to pass. Electric wires ran along the wall, the fixtures they fueled illuminating the tunnel in disconnected patches of wan light. In some places, the top of the tunnel dipped so low that she had to stoop not to scrape her head against the stone crudely carved out of the rock millennia ago.

It was no wonder she hadn’t descended this way in so long: She feared being this far beneath the surface, where it seemed the weight of all the earth would crush her. She had felt the same as a girl but forgotten it until this minute.

It seemed a long way before the tunnel broadened into a wider corridor and abruptly dead-ended at a bronze door set deep into the bedrock. A single electric torch was set in a bracket along one wall, casting shadows like ghouls crawling on the crudely carved ceiling. Two guards sat on either side of the door in lazy conversation. They stood abruptly at the sight of her, and then straighter yet upon recognizing her face.

“Let me pass.”

“Lady.” One of the guards bowed and moved to unbolt the door for her.

The space inside was surprisingly large. After the claustrophobic corridors, she could
feel
its size. The room, which was practically a warehouse, was lit along the walls by electric lights in iron grids.

She could make out several square shapes like giant cages—at least ten of them on either side of a makeshift aisle. Beyond them the sprawling works of an open laboratory appeared abandoned in rest-day repose, their stainless surfaces and surgical lamps at odds with the ancient walls.

A groan sounded, perhaps twenty feet ahead, startling her, not just with its proximity, but its raw quality.

“What is this place?” she demanded, turning back to the guard.

“The dungeons, my lady.”

She looked out at the laboratory equipment, frowning.

“Where in this dungeon is kept the one called the keeper?”

“At the end,” the guard said, “through a passage to the left, in the old dungeon proper.”

Feyn stared ahead without need for light. Her eyes were more than the product of a world’s obligation to evolutionary vanity. She had the ability to see farther and more sharply than others, even on the dimmest days.

Truly the product of alchemy, as they all were to some extent.

A moan—a distinctly female sound—issued from somewhere down the line of cages. A trilling laugh, musical and dark, ended in a choking sound like a sob.

What were these women doing here? Were they sick?

And then she remembered Saric’s concubines.

She drew up her hood and walked swiftly past several steel worktables, one of them covered with a dirty sheet. It was draped over a thin form. A body.

Now she could see that this dungeon was in fact also one great lab.

A lab complete with human subjects.

Feyn hurried past the cages to the passage at the end. She turned into it, eager to leave the room and its cages behind. A tunnel opened up before her, where, at the end, a single torch cast light on an ancient cell refitted with modern steel bars.

As she approached, she could make out a hunched form inside, someone seated on a small cot and bent forward so that his beard seemed to drag against his knees. His sibilant words drifted in the darkness.

Was he praying?

She moved to within an arm’s breadth of the bars, the soft leather of her shoes silent against the stones. He was old. His white hair, unkempt, formed an unruly halo around his head. Indeed, he appeared to be praying, but the words he murmured were none that she recognized.

“��the keepers for the Day of Rebirth. Keep the keepers for the Day of Rebirth. Bring the blood and keep it safe…”

She took hold of one of the cell bars. “Excuse me.”

The man’s head snapped up. She stared at his old eyes, round with fear. He shuffled to the front of the cage. She did not pull back.

“What are you doing out of your cage?” he asked in a phlegmy whisper.

“I don’t have one.” Her gaze roamed the wrinkles of his face, the furrows above his brows, the clawed grooves around his eyes. How old could he possibly be?

“Are you sure?”

She nodded.

“Why haven’t I seen you here?”

“I’m not an alchemist.” She found herself speaking balder truth than she had planned.

“Then what are you?”

“I am Feyn.”

“Ah.” His face registered something she could not identify. Was he mad then? “The mathematician. The Sovereign-to-be. Born October twenty-fourth, nearly twenty-five years ago. Surely not that Feyn.”

“Yes. That one.”

“Dear me! Have I missed the Day of Rebirth?”

So strange, so very strange.

“No. It’s four days away.”

“Ah, lady,” the man said, reaching toward her hand with both of his. “May I?”

She let him take her hand, and oddly, she was not afraid of him. “If it eases your fear.”

“It does! Because I’m dead, you know?”

“You don’t look dead to me. And if I can help it, I’ll keep you alive. Unless, of course, you deserve death.”

“Don’t we all?”

“No,” she said.

“You might be surprised.”

He seemed lucid enough and yet he spoke so cryptically.

“Are you the one they call the Book? The keeper?” She felt young just then, almost child-like. Of course. Compared with him she was practically a child.

“Can a book be a man?” he said.

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

“I carry the truth—it is in me. And so, yes, they call me the Book.”

She felt her brow wrinkle. “I don’t understand. Are you a little mad?”

“The whole world is mad, lady. Tell me, are you?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“Ah, you don’t
think
,” he said, tapping his temple. “But what if what you think is wrong? What if you’re ill and don’t know it? Or a fool and think yourself wise?”

She’d never heard anyone quite like this old man before. What was it about his inflections, his laughter? He had mastered the mannerism as well as she, except that his timing was so odd and dotted with erratic exclamations. He truly did seem a little mad.

But not unpleasant.

He dropped her hand and leaned forward, grasping the bars of his cell to peer more closely at her. “Tell me something, Feyn who would be Sovereign. If you were to learn something that was true, though it went against all you knew, would you follow it?”

All she knew? Perhaps she had been naive about this place, but she could not believe that all she knew was built upon an untruth.

“I…I suppose so.”

“Ah. Because there might lie madness for sure—to know the whole world had been led astray, and worse, with the greatest intention, and for the greatest good.”

“Perhaps,” she said. “But that’s a ridiculous question at any rate.” Unfathomable.

“Is it?”

“Of course. Now it’s my turn to ask you a question. Who are the keepers?”

“Ah, lady, I would be breaking an oath in telling you that. And yet, you seem to carry a light in your eyes. You have a loyal heart. Still, how can I trust one who, though Sovereign, is not to be Sovereign?”

What was he saying?

“Please. Speak plainly.”

“I am the keeper. The last, I fear.”

“Why would you say I’m not to be Sovereign?”

“Did I say that? If so, I shouldn’t have. I’ve taken an oath.”

“Answer me most carefully,” she said. “My brother spoke to me of an anti-Order. Is this what you are?”

“The only anti-Order, lady, is the Order itself. As for me, I am proudly out of Order.” He grinned.

Clearly, he was mad. But she had to know more.

“He spoke also of life. Strange new life. Brought by alchemy.”

“That alchemy brings only death. Then again, the dead rest in peace. And peace reigns on earth, doesn’t it, dear Sovereign-to-be or -not-to-be? Life, on the other hand, comes from the blood and is full of terrible danger.”

“What blood?”

“The blood. Do you have it?”

“I don’t know what you’re speaking about.”

“No, of course you don’t. If you had it, you would know what blood.”

It was foolishness, utter foolishness, trying to speak to the insane. Nothing he said made sense. Everything he said was inverted. Truth to untruth, untruth to truth.

But she had found him, this Book that Saric had spoken of. What did that mean, then?

The man leaned close to the bars, eyes round and pleading. “You could set me free, lady. You have that power! I beg you, have mercy on an old man.”

“I dare not free you, and if you have any wit, don’t say you saw me.”

The man blinked and pulled back, put off. “Then the least you can do is help us find the blood.”

“Is that what my brother took, the reason he has these bizarre new ways?”

“Your brother?”

“Saric.”

The man went perfectly still. “His ways are death.”

A sound near the entrance, the scraping of the bolt. Feyn’s heart jolted in her chest.

“Quickly,” the old man whispered, grabbing the bars and leaning into them. “Find the blood, find the boy. Save them both, save us all!”

“What?” She glanced over her shoulder down the passage and then back at him. Boot heels clipped against the floor. Somewhere between the rows of cages, the occupants of which had started now to moan and rail more loudly, someone turned on a light in one of the lab areas.

“Find the blood! Save the dead!”

Sounds from the other end of the chamber reached her: something heavy being thrown down on a table, and then the distinct
thwack
of a hammer. No, not a hammer—a cleaver. The sounds of butchering. Excited calls issued from the row of cages.

Feeding time?

She had to get out now, before she was forced to speak to anyone. She had to think.

As though reading her mind, the old man said: “Along the back wall, there—it’s where
he
comes down.”

She assumed he meant Saric and nodded brusquely.

“I won’t let them kill you, Keeper,” she said, and turned hastily.

“It’s too late for that,” he said.

“We will see.”

But she knew even then, as she hurried from the subterranean levels, that the ancient man who called himself the Book was probably right.

S
aric sat
on his horse and looked past the twisted scrub trees in the valley below him. The leafless pines reached up like so many claws, gnarled hands from the grave of Chaos.

Beyond the valley, Byzantium’s ancient hills were indistinguishable in the darkness, her spires and towers specters of a way of life that no longer applied to this new day.

This new night.

The sky was one churning, effusive sea, reflecting the pallid light of streetlamps, the glow of homes where families huddled around their candles and lanterns.

Saric had nearly forgotten how he used to escape the Citadel to ride on fair evenings. The darkness had seemed less fearful, somehow, than the shadows in his chamber. The wind, on quieter nights, had even soothed him. But tonight he found the darkness not so much soothing as intoxicating, the air itself charged with strange and electric potential.

He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply.

The stallion shifted, pawed at the ground. Saric owned several horses within the Citadel stables, as was customary for royals, but he favored this one in particular for its dark coat, unusual height, and sheer power.

Was it possible that even before his transformation, he had valued power?

The horse, always a little wild, was more nervous around him than usual, a testament to its equine intelligence. Horses were well attuned to the moods of their masters.

The sole guard who accompanied him sat on his horse thirty paces away, under a tree. They’d reached the rise outside of Pravus’s country estate minutes ago after an hour’s ride. It was the third time Saric had come here but the first time at his own insistence.

He could feel the impending shift of power like a storm marching in from the desert.

The clip of a hoof on a rock reached him from over his right shoulder. A hooded figure astride a pale stallion came to a stop beside him.

For several moments, the two looked out at the city in silence. Overhead, the clouds scurried to the northeast. A storm was indeed coming.

“Your father rejected you.” The voice was low and gritty and did not need to be raised above the capricious wind.

“Yes. I anticipated as much.” He had no idea how the master alchemist could know it, however.

“And Feyn as well.” It rankled, the implication in those simple words.

“She’ll soon regret her decision.”

“She is beyond seduction.”

“
I
am beyond seduction.”

The brief silence that followed was unsettling. If he wanted to, Saric reminded himself, he could haul the other man from his horse and kill him with his bare hands. He was stronger by far. But there was a latent strength about the presence beside him that came not from any physical dominance but from a deep-seated power beyond any earthly throne, greater than any Sovereign’s crown.

Below them, more than five hundred thousand souls huddled beneath their Maker, whispering to heaven, seeding the clouds with their prayers to him. Fools.

“She will be Sovereign in four days. Our time is running short,” Pravus said.

Saric’s jaw tightened. “Our time’s been short since the beginning. You animated me a mere eight days ago and yet somehow you expect me to seize power swiftly and with only my bare hands.”

“Are you saying you can’t?”

“On the contrary, I’m the only person who
can
. We both know that you, who took the serum long ago, would not have done it otherwise. No. I am the key to your plans. And now I hold the keeper. Your path to power runs through me.”

They were bold words to speak to one such as Pravus. Dangerous words.

When the alchemist spoke his voice was softer, yet it crackled with the absolute assurance of one who had forgotten what it was to fear.

“It’s a mistake to think you are singular, my friend. The world will be ruled by a vast army of others just like you.”

The army. Thoughts of it both galvanized Saric and sent his heart pounding with anticipation.

“That army won’t be raised unless I’m in power,” Saric said.

“Then I suggest you do what we’ve discussed,” Pravus said. “As I said, our time is short.”

Pravus still had not looked at him. “There is one more thing,” Pravus said.

“What is that?”

“Your wife.”

Saric’s skin prickled.

“Giving the serum to her was a mistake.”

Heat crept along Saric’s neck. Bringing Portia to her dark senses had been, at the time, a concession to his new appetites. A flex of his power for the simple pleasure of it. But now he felt schooled by the derision in the alchemist’s gravelly voice. He clamped down on his anger.

“Portia is my business,” he said tightly.

“On the contrary. You can’t afford these kinds of mistakes.”

“I’ll deal with her.”

“I already have.”

“Have what?”

“Taken her.”

Saric turned to look directly at him.

The face within the hood was pale, the eyes nearly white. But it was his skin, raised in lumps on his face, that disturbed Saric the most. That always disturbed him.

Would he himself come to look like that?

“She will be dead by morning.”

Saric’s fingers clenched into fists. The thought of Pravus having Portia, or even killing her, did not disturb him. She might indeed become a capricious liability.

What bothered him was that Pravus had seen the need to interfere.

He would be more careful. He would not leave these choices to fall into the hands of anyone else. He would never be blindsided again.

Not even by Pravus.

Saric lifted his gaze past the city to the black horizon beyond.

“Next time, you will leave it to my hands.”

Pravus pulled on the reins and turned his mount. “There won’t be a next time. You know what you must do.”

Then Pravus was gone, the sound of his mount swallowed by the darkness. Alone, Saric waited several moments for the pounding of his heart to subside. He did know
precisely
what he must do.

Tomorrow, before the evening assembly bells tolled, the whole world would change.