The Dark Arts of Blood (54 page)

Finally she lost them.

Panic rose, but she controlled her anxiety.
Karl would not panic
, she scolded herself.
Violette most definitely would not. Stay on course. Observe.

Minutes later she sensed specks of warmth, far below her on the veiled surface of the Sahara where mountains gave way to the desert. Human? Certainly not vampire. Animal, perhaps.

She dropped lower in her flight. The Crystal Ring’s glow above her faded. She was dangerously close to the ground now. Huge cliffs thrust out of the land, tiered around what appeared to be an oblong ruin. The heat-motes grew stronger. Just as she made to step from the firmament into the solid world, she saw Violette and Nabil together on the sand.

Charlotte veered away, willing herself invisible. High up on a wall of rock, concealed by sandstone outcrops, she re-entered reality and crouched there to watch.

The last of sunset turned the world to a flood of red and bronze. The two robed figures talked for a while – even her acute ears couldn’t discern their words – then they walked away, vanishing inside the ruins.

Dread washed over her. Where was Nabil taking Violette? She might as well be walking into the underworld, like Demeter trying to rescue Persephone. The dancer was the toughest, most wilful woman Charlotte had ever met – yet she meekly gave herself up to unknown danger in the narrow hope of saving Emil? Charlotte thought,
Does she know something I don’t?

What if I never see her again?

Utter silence lay across the wilderness. Darkness came swiftly, and the stars blazed as thickly as falling snow. Charlotte began to make her way down the rugged slope, focusing hard on the dust-motes of warmth she could feel. They grew more vivid, like fingertips pressing her forehead.

The rock wall was full of caves. She imagined people living here, in aeons past. Now there was only emptiness… with three specks of life. A familiar, animal scent emanated from a cave mouth at ground level. Horses?

And from another cave, a few yards away, came the rank scent of human sweat, dehydration, illness. From her vantage point, directly above the entrance, she leaned out and saw two heavily robed figures standing guard. They might have been rock pillars: shapeless, motionless, emitting no blood-warmth.

Vampires.

The last thing she wanted was to reveal her presence and start a fight. Her only way into the cave was to go back into the Crystal Ring and force her way through the rock.

She hated doing this. When she’d feigned her own “death”, some perverse impulse had made her endure the entire funeral: being sealed in the coffin, the burial, then clawing her way up through clay soil to escape afterwards. It was a kind of self-punishment for her family’s grief. Even when she could avoid such horrors, she would make herself go straight through the heart of them instead.

But the feeling of being trapped, suffocating, swimming through rock or earth as if it were quicksand, always brought dread. Now she floundered through viscous slabs of stone, breath held even though she didn’t need oxygen, praying she had the energy to stay in Raqia. If she slipped back into the real world now – she would be entombed in rock forever.

Thin air. She fell a few feet, then let herself back into reality, drawing deep breaths as if she’d nearly drowned. Darkness lay around her, but she could see well enough. Starglow filtered in to illuminate the rough walls of a cave. A cell, in effect.

Emil lay on a bed of palm leaves. It looked uncomfortable, but he was in a deep sleep of total exhaustion. They’d put him into a djellaba, but she saw his trouser hems and plain black shoes jutting below the hem of the garment. He looked dirty, his hair an unwashed mess, sand stuck to his face and hands. Tragic, to see his muscular dancer’s body limp and helpless.

Charlotte looked down at him with mixed emotions.
Thank goodness, he really is here!
Then,
Poor lad, he doesn’t deserve this. His misfortune was to fall for one vampire, and then to be seduced by another. This could have been me – in fact it
was
me, until Ilona rescued me from Kristian. Humans tangle with vampires and this is the result: ruin.

She wondered how to get him out of the cave. She couldn’t escape the way she’d arrived, since it was impossible to take a human through the Crystal Ring. Even if she confronted the guards, there would be a hellish fight, and they were bound to have comrades. And even if she won – how to take Emil across hundreds of miles of desert and mountain? He’d never survive.

If she tried, the repercussion for Violette, too, might be instant death.

Charlotte sat beside Emil, her arms wrapped around her bent knees. She watched him, aware that, if he woke, her priority was to stop him crying out. Would he realise she was here as a friend?

He’d already run from her in terror. More than once, she’d seen him recoil from her. He knew she was a vampire. Such knowledge could unhinge human minds.

Something moved in the gloom. Charlotte jumped to her feet and found herself looking straight into Fadiya’s dark, gleaming eyes.

* * *

Violette followed Nabil into a narrow fissure and down through a winding fault in the rock structure; tight passages, with twists and drops that no human could have negotiated. She’d thrown off her robes and djellaba at the entrance, realising they would be a hindrance. All she kept on was the grey silk dress that she’d travelled in from home. Now she was glad of her dancer’s training, as well as her vampiric sinuosity.

At first there was no light. Even her sensitive sight perceived nothing in the pitch blackness. She followed Nabil by touch and sound as well as the higher senses that helped her locate him in the convolutions of the tunnel. Presently a dim glow appeared, gleaming sand-red on the narrow rock walls. The temperature grew warmer.

She’d expected chilliness down here, and instead felt she was walking towards a fire.

They entered a larger tunnel that seemed to be floored with cobblestones and sand brushed into the seams. Here there was room to stand up straight. The passageway stretched for an indefinable length – at least three hundred yards – straight and purposeful like the entrance to a tomb. At the far end she saw the red glow. A furnace mouth?

Then Violette went hot and cold with dread. Had these unknown vampires lured her here to burn her to ashes?

What is this place?
she asked silently.
If extreme cold can finish us, why not extreme heat? I understand why they might want to kill me, and they’re not the first, but who are they?

“Would you answer some questions?” she asked. It was the first time either of them had spoken since entering the warren.

“It’s not my place to do so,” said Nabil. “My duty was to bring you here, that’s all.”

The walls vibrated with unpleasant energy, a prickling static that numbed her hand whenever she touched them. Her feet hurt as if she were walking on knives. Something of Raqia penetrated the space: a clamour of dream-energies, the massed thoughts of humanity. Or nightmares, she guessed from the hostile atmosphere. Voices whispered. Thousands of voices.

Then she knew that this was an in-between place, lying both in the Earth and the Crystal Ring at the same time. The further they went, the more fiercely the unseen energies assaulted her, an invisible sandstorm. She tasted the bitter acridity of the bone-knives, and of Lord Zruvan’s staff.

“How do you bear this place?” she asked.

“We learn to endure,” said Nabil.

“Do you mean that you
have
to, as a form of penance?”

“You could say so.”

“Self-punishment – for being a vampire?”

“No more questions, my lady goddess.”

“That’s unfair. I’ve been forced to come here, I have done everything you asked, but you will explain nothing in return.”

He stopped and turned to her. “I apologise, my lady, but you are about to meet Zruvan, Lord of Immortals. He will choose whether or not to answer your questions.”

“Very well.” She kept her expression calm, but the growing heat was uncomfortable. She envisioned the goddess part of her psyche, Lilith, a desert dweller, writhing in a mad dance of ecstasy and pain as she died in flames. She tried not to wonder how agonising it would be. Nor would she think about escape, because she was not a prisoner. She’d come here voluntarily… not that she’d had much choice, since she could not leave Emil to perish. “I won’t ask any more,” she said. “I know you are only a servant.”

Nabil glowered at her.

“A servant who is honoured to serve Zruvan, and who thanks you for your cooperation. You may go on alone from here. Lord Zruvan waits for you in the Bone Well. Follow the light.”

Is Zruvan even real?
She caught a dry, hot breath.
Perhaps he perished in the inferno and they worship his ghost? And if I’m to be a sacrifice to him, that makes some kind of perverse sense.

If only they’d tell me
who
they are before it ends.

As a human, and as a vampire, Violette had endured fear, oppression, even persecution simply for being what she was: gifted, beautiful, powerful, disobedient and female.
But every time
, she thought, now walking steadily towards the hell-mouth,
every damned time, instead of walking away I throw myself into danger. Lilith’s rage helped me in the past, but her anger has mellowed now. Too much. Perhaps fighting her, instead of accepting her, was what made me strong. I may have no defence at all against what waits for me in the fire.

The hall grew broader as she walked steadily along its length. Here it had obviously been carved out by hand, the last stretch forming a grand, intimidating antechamber to Zruvan’s lair. There were patterns in the walls. She recognised the sigil from the knife handle: a labyrinth enclosing a crude skull with its impossible closed eyes. The whole underground kingdom was the same dull ochre colour of sand and ancient bones, oppressive with sullen, fiery power.

The patterns were made of femurs, tibias and ribs inlaid into the rock. She realised that the “cobblestones” beneath her feet were also bones: ball joints from the hips and shoulders of countless individuals.

Human, of course. They were the source of the prickling, hostile energy. She saw, like a film projected across her imagination, tribal wars raging on the deserts above. People dying of natural causes. People dying from the bite of hidden vampires.

Vampires emerging from the sand at night, like camel spiders, to take their prey and vanish again…

Any human venturing down here would suffocate in the heat. Most vampires would collapse, all their strength sucked out by the mass hunger of endless dead souls. What madman would create such a terrible place? Violette pulled her own aura close for protection. She looked all around her as she went, at thousands of yellow bones forming the walls and curving up into the domed roof, far above her head. Even the sand infilling the floor, she realised, was crushed bone.

Violette reached the entrance to the chamber Nabil had called the Bone Well: a plain arch, eight feet high. She stopped on the threshold. The glow from the interior was dazzling. She looked inside and saw a circular space, forty feet across, rising to a great height and narrowing as it rose, like the inside of an enormous curved bottle. A kiln.

She could make out only the edges through the glare that came from the heart of the space. Not an actual fire, but an oval of painfully brilliant light. The heat pounded in from outside, as if this were an oven suspended within a volcano.

Walls and floor were layered with human bones in a crude mosaic. Leg and arm bones, spines and pelvises, spindly hands protruding as if in supplication. And skulls. They’d been placed in a pattern: a grid, one skull every few feet, row upon row until they dwindled from sight into the narrow chimney above.

Violette took this in as her eyes adjusted to the red-orange blaze.

The light emanated from the figure that stood waiting for her at the centre of the chamber.

Gradually the glare dimmed to a bearable level, and there he stood: her self-appointed nemesis, towering over her, attired like Kastchei the Immortal in heavy robes the brown-red of dried blood. He held a staff, ten feet high, that shone with its own sickly light and – she knew – would paralyse her with pain if she touched it. A huge skull-face stared down at her.

Zruvan, Lord of Immortals, Soul of the Universe.

* * *

Karl watched attentively as Amy threaded the film into the projector, using one wall of the living room as a screen. He’d also watched as she went through the stages of processing the film: hand-dipping the negative – wrapped around a frame – through different baths, constantly checking the time and temperature, hanging the fifty-foot long ribbon to dry, then making the print and going through it all again.

He’d sensed her shaking with nerves when they were in the dark laboratory together, so he kept a careful distance and asked questions only about the chemistry. Charlotte had been like this with him, a long time ago. However diligently he maintained a courteous human mask, it was as if all humans
knew
, at a deep primordial level, what he was.

The sensitive ones, at least.

He couldn’t force her to relax without deliberately hypnotising her. Instead he let her calm down in her own time as she worked. Let her trust him.

He wasn’t especially comfortable at being alone with any human. However good his self-control, the temptation of blood was always under the surface. So he kept as far as possible from her, addressed her as Miss Temple, and was careful never to catch her gaze. In response she was equally polite and impersonal. By the time the film was ready, night had fallen again and they were as comfortable as they could hope to be, like work colleagues.

Now she asked him to switch off all the living-room lights, and set the projector in motion. As she did so, Karl saw Stefan watching from the bedroom. The door was barely cracked open and the interior was dark: Stefan was no more than a glistening pair of eyes. Amy, concentrating on her task, did not notice him.