The Journal of Vincent Du Maurier Trilogy (Books 1, 2, 3) (56 page)

“Sit,” I said. “There is no need for such
formality.”

I wanted to spare her the humiliation of collapsing
on the deck. She used the ledge on the bulkhead to balance herself and walked
like an old woman to the chair beside the berth. Once she sat, she dismissed
the Empress.

“I want to stay,” Cixi said.

“I do not wish the same,” Xing Fu said, rebuking her
with a look.

The Empress shrunk beneath her maker’s glower and
left abruptly, licking her wounds, no doubt, as she went.

I studied my progeny, recalling Byron’s passing. She
had the same lines down her neck, marks of desiccation, drying out from the
inside.

“I am not willing to surrender,” she said. “Muriel
feeds me regularly, though her blood is difficult to digest.”

“Tell me what this is,” I said. “How can you suffer
from a lack of blood?”

“I am not sure I know where to begin,” she said.
“One thing is tied to another and everything has become so entwined that I no
longer know which is the end and which the beginning.”

“Start with the donors,” I said. “Tell me why they
are drugged.”

I trusted my progeny and would not suspect her of
lying, even as her scion did nothing but tell untruths.

“They are not drugged,” she said. “Their blood,
their circulatory systems are purified synthetically.”

“Synthetically?”

“The situation is far stranger than you think, I am
afraid.”

“I do not understand.”

She choked with the same aching cough that had
plagued Byron at the end. I could not know if this wasting disease only
affected those made with unadulterated toxin—my venom.

“There are two kinds of donors onboard,” she said.
“Authentic and inauthentic, though I did not know the difference in the
beginning, and once I suspected the truth, I kept the secret from
everyone—even the Empress is ignorant of my discovery. She thinks my
illness is caused by something else.”

I expected more clarity and told her so.

“Both blood nourishes,” she said. “But the
inauthentic donors ingest a cleansing cocktail—something they must be
given—which alters their blood. It is impure, I suspect.”

The word rang with familiarity, as I recalled it
scrawled across Byron’s notes. “Inauthentic how?” I asked

She got up from the berth and reached for me. I gave
her my hand and let her use me to cross the small compartment. She pointed to a
strongbox underneath the stand that held a candelabrum with lit wicks dripping
wax on the deck. She told me to pick up the box and give it to her. I obeyed
and passed her the coffer, remarking the W-O-M-B etched on the lid. She
clutched the box when I gave it to her and brought it close to her chest.

“The correspondence inside reveals everything,” she
said. “Secrets, master. They are haunting acts of betrayal from a past we
cannot undo and a future we must face. Do not make me confess such darkness
aloud here in your presence. They may be the last words I pronounce, and I
cannot face my end uttering such shameful truths. I trust the letters will
detail more than I could explain anyhow, and offer you enough evidence to draw
your own conclusions. But you must know, master, I was fooled.”

“Tell me what you know, Shenmé?” I used the name she
was given at birth, the one she told me when I found her weeping on the east
bank of the Feng River some centuries after I was awakened. To me, she would
always be Shenmé, though I had empowered her to become the last great ruler of
the Zhou dynasty.

“I do not have proof, unless my illness can attest
to the treachery,” she said.

“What treachery?” Her evasion frustrated me, though
her weakened frame softened my anger. “Speak now, for we cannot know how long
we have together.”

She knew I referred to her depleted state, her
poisoned body. Her situation was more evident with each passing moment and I
imagined her turning to ash before my very eyes.

“It is true, my beloved master,” she said. “I do not
know how much longer we have, but I have seen you again and that is the comfort
I will carry with me into the unknown. You will save us all, if our race is to
be salvaged.”

I stood before the Great Xing Fu and suffered the
anguish of witnessing another of my descendants—a vampire I had made with
my own venom—robbed of the immortal promise to outlive every human empire
and walk the earth for eternity.

I am shocked to find my progeny on the ship, ill as
she is, but I will confess, since opening her strongbox, I have uncovered
something that stupefies me greatly. Can you tell me, Byron, why it is your
hand I see, your signature, your seal, scrawled on the pages and letters
bundled in Shenmé’s coffer? I have delayed the reveal, stalling to avoid facing
the treachery that lies within, but now I must confront these dark acts and
learn of the scheme set to bring about my extinction.

THE END

BOOK THREE

Translator’s Note

This is not so much a translation as a narrative sewed together with
the fragments Vincent Du Maurier has left me. I suppose it is a beginning and
an end, a story as well as a history. Time is irrelevant since it fluctuates
drastically, though it is important to note we are living in a new common era,
counting seasons rather than years. From section to section, I have given the
narrative a heading to suit the speaker, as a story’s perspective may change
depending on who narrates and how far back he wants his reader to travel. As
preface to this account, I feel compelled to attach a few lines of poetry, dug
up from an ancient text whose translation I received as a gift. Sung in another
age about the one for whom this narrative is written, a character who, like all
characters, lived but for a moment in time, his legend continues to breathe
life into those whose lives his passion sparked.

“O my son, my sorrow, why
did I ever bear you?

All I bore was doom.

Would to god you could
linger by your ships

without a grief in the
world, without a torment!

Doomed to a short life, you
have so little time.

And not only short, now, but
filled with heartbreak too,

more than all other men
alive—doomed twice over.

Ah to a cruel fate I bore
you in our halls!”

(Homer,
The Iliad
)

Dagur Bijarnarson

The
Break of Day

The sun’s encampment drew a tangerine halo across
the horizon, as the nimrod drifted into the colony. He crept up the main
street, uninhibited, advancing to stake his claim before daylight. Any target
would do, so he waited and watched from the cover of a lean-to for the first settler
to rise. When Björg came out, shaking off his sleep, making his way to the water
barrel a stone’s throw from the lean-to, the nimrod whimpered. He watched in
anticipation as his target cupped his hands and dipped them in the basin,
splashing icy water on his face and neck with a quick shake of his hair. Björg
tossed his head back, his mane making a tail down his spine. The nimrod
shuddered at the sight of his steady form. His target was bigger than the other
settlers, with broad shoulders that evinced his bloodline.

The nimrod touched the pile of wood beside him, knocking
several logs to the ground.

“Who’s there,” Björg called, the early morning frost
clouding about his nose. He squinted to better see in the dim light, searching
the darkened lean-to for the source of the sound. When no one came forward, Björg
shrugged and made a note to re-stack the fallen logs beneath the canvas in the
daylight.

The nimrod studied the settler, remarking the sound
of his voice, the cut of his chin, the edge of his profile, taking him all in.

Björg stood still in the darkness, looking up to the
sky, addressing the heavens with words the nimrod couldn’t hear.

The nimrod picked up a log and cracked it against
another, knocking a few more from the stack.

“Who’s there?” Björg stepped toward the lean-to and
dropped his head to the side, aligning his ear with the opening of the covered
space. “Is somebody there?”

He tiptoed unguarded, unwilling to be scared off by
a fox.

Once in the lean-to, Björg’s eyes adjusted to the
darkness and he saw a shadowy figure cowered in the corner next to the fallen
logs of wood. “Come out,” he said. “Do not be afraid.”

The nimrod hesitated and then smiled inwardly,
standing up to show his physique, his size comparable to the settler’s.

“Who are you?” Björg said.

The nimrod stepped forward, placing himself in the
single streak of early light breaking through a crack in the lean-to. Björg
stepped back at the sight of his own image, a twin appearing before him as
though a wraith.

“How can it be?” He froze at the opening of the
lean-to and stared at the replica in front of him. “Who are you?”

The nimrod dropped his head to the side with a quizzical
look. “I am you,” he said in a voice that matched Björg’s.

“No,” the settler said. “You can’t be.”

“Come,” the nimrod said. “Here.” He opened his arms
and gestured for Björg to step forward.

“I’m dreaming,” Björg said. “This is a dream.”

“Gen H do not dream,” the nimrod said.

Björg knew that to be true of settlers. They didn’t
dream, though they’d learned what it was to have nightmares.

“Come,” the nimrod said again, dragging Björg toward
him, having bewitched the particles in the space between them.

“No,” the settler said, digging in his heels.

The nimrod redoubled his effort, seizing him more
quickly still. “It will not hurt,” the nimrod said. “I promise you will not
feel a thing.”

“No.” His body disobeyed his mind, dragging him to
his twin, unwillingly.

“I have you now,” the nimrod said, wrapping his arms
around Björg as though embracing him. The settler squirmed to free himself but
soon collapsed with fatigue, as the nimrod drained him of his energy. The last
thing the settler saw was a great phallic stinger with a four-pronged tip
rising up from the nimrod’s tailbone and over his shoulder. Björg’s body seized
up with a terrific crunch and then dropped to the ground, prone and lifeless.

The nimrod stepped out of the moonlight, and
slithered back between the shadows, disappearing before the sun had gained an
inch on the horizon.

The Second
Colony of the Resurrected

Björg hadn’t time to alert the other settlers, and
they woke to find their neighbor dead. They burned his remains on the bier, and
the smoke from his body perfumed the air, masking the stench his death had left
behind.

“The bones are not safe,” a settler said. “We must
send them up river.”

“To contaminate the water supply?” A second settler asked,
his voice timid.

“His bones shall be pulverized,” Gerenios said. As the
head of the colony, his word was final. “And we shall not speak of this again.”

“This makes three.”

“So it has begun,” Gerenios lowered his head and
took in a breath. “Get Dagur.”

“Is it safe for him,” said one of them, brave enough
to question Gerenios.

“He must see this,” Gerenios said. “As it lies.”

That’s when I was called to the bier, though I’d already
heard all that had transpired. They couldn’t keep me from any of the goings on
despite their effort. Most of the settlers had no idea their voices carried
through the colony as though on wings. I perceived everything from my spot in
the clouds. From as early as I could remember, I’d been banished to the studio
at the top of the tower in the second colony of the resurrected. “You’re the
most treasured member of our colony,” Gerenios had said to me long ago. “And
the smartest, too.”

When I came to see Björg’s remains, I was flanked by
two settlers.

“Have you seen anything like this in the records?”
Gerenios’s voice was more gruff up close, and when he spoke it was as though he
engaged a crowd on a hilltop.

“It was the same as the other two?” I asked. “The
four punctures at the top of the spine.”

Gerenios nodded and looked away. “Well?”

“It’s nothing like the Red Death from what I can
tell,” I said.

Gerenios exclaimed his dissatisfaction with a
“Humph,” and led me to the lean-to where Björg’s body had been found prostrate
and drained like fruit for the winter.

“If I could’ve seen the markings before you lit him
on the pyre,” I said, “I may have learned more.”

Gerenios shot up a hand and said, “Impossible.”

“I can’t tell you anything without seeing the actual
punctures.”

“There was nothing to see,” he said. “They were
basically scars, already healed up.”

“Did you examine any other parts?”

Gerenios rolled his eyes and said, “Only bones are
left.”

“May I see the bones?”

He blew out a gust of air that smelled of fish.
“Come,” he said, flanking me.

He showed me the bones, but wouldn’t allow me to
pick them up. They were once as white as the bones beneath the skin of an
animal, but I knew better than to let their outer shell fool me.

“Can we slice one open?” I asked.

“Impossible,” Gerenios said. The expression was a
favorite of his and I’d grown used to it. The limitations under which I lived
were ever-present.

“It can’t hurt,” Freyit said. An expert huntsman, he
pulled out his blade and stuck it in the bone without actually touching it. He
used the mallet at his side to hammer the point into Björg’s femur, cracking it
open like an oyster. The bone, once split, revealed what I expected, though I
didn’t tell Gerenios.

“It’s purple,” one of the settlers said.

“Electric purple,” another said.

“The fox’s collagen is milky white,” Freyit said. “Unlike
his coal eyes.” The other members laughed, recalling Freyit’s boast of an
Arctic fox that had attacked him several seasons ago. Every comparison he’d
made since had been to the fox, and his brush with death. He had beaten the fox,
skinned him, dismembered him, ate him, and come back from his hunt with his
pelt over his shoulders. No one doubted Freyit when he said the liquid inside
the fox’s bones was milky.

“And Björg’s?” Gerenios said. “Why is his purple?”

“The poison,” Freyit said, “rots them from the
inside. This is the seat of contamination. Don’t touch it.”

They all stepped back, suspicious and wide-eyed.

I let Freyit’s explanation stand since it seemed to convince
them all. I couldn’t confirm the real reason Björg’s body was filled with
ossein the color of a flower blooming on the ridge of Mývatn, but I had
my suspicions. This was the third death in a single wind cycle, and I’ll admit
it became a preoccupation of sorts, interrupting my efforts with other matters,
even as my subconscious worked to solve all puzzles simultaneously.

“There isn’t much time,” Gerenios said, escorting me
back to my studio in the tower. “You must have some sense of it,” he urged, “if
it is upon us again.”

I assured him I wasn’t convinced this was the same plague,
but he remained unsatisfied.

He looked up to the sky, saffron now with the arrival
of the mid-morning sun. “Your guardian wouldn’t approve of the liberties I’ve
given you,” he said. “Especially now, with this.” He pointed back to the
direction from which we’d come. “Three now. I think we should pack up.”

“Change is coming,” I said. “But this is not it.”

“You talk like a prophet sometimes and it makes my
head swell, you know that?”

“I do,” I said. “It’s a gift.”

He chuckled with a fierce roar and I blushed.
Gerenios had been like a father to me, especially for the circumstances under
which I had come into his care.

“Keep at it,” he said before we parted. “And bolt
the door.”

I returned to my drafting table at the top of the
tower and tried to pick up where I’d left off. I’d been given the duty of not
only translating texts, but also discovering the cause of the Red Death. I had
piles of data to sort through, an enormous knot of information from which to
cull my findings and decipher some sort of logical reason. The project had
nearly driven me mad, the correspondence staggering, and I’d cursed the settlers
who brought me new findings. Every now and then an expedition would head out,
and return with artifacts that had washed up on shore.

The world had once been a small place, a global
network unaffected by distance. Now its lands are vast and separate, as water has
stretched the earth to epic proportions, making it a sphere with very little
connection between its corners.

But the world shrank the day Björg was killed, when
several hours later the safety of my tower was breached and my long awaited
visitor arrived.