The Queen of Wolves (12 page)

I saw some small speck of darkness moving along the mountaintop. Though it might have been a beast of some kind, I suspected it was the vampyre I had seen on the
Illuyanka.
I did not like this creature following without speaking, without showing what threat he presented. I was sure that if I flew out to that distant mountain, he would have already flown many miles from me.

I could not spend my nights chasing a flying corpse. So I ignored the distant threat and instead focused on what we would need to do next before returning to Taranis-Hir. “Both you and I have the breath of the Sacred Kiss within us. There may still be battles waged in the cities along the shores of this land. We need warriors—and we shall gather them from these Crusader wars. If you are not with me, you are against me. Choose now, Pythoness. We have loved, and we have despised each other. You murdered me, and you resurrected me. We bring a child to this world. But you and I both know the vision of the end of this. It may be our doom. I cannot predict the future, nor can you, despite visions and omens. There is more at stake than the forest of my childhood or the friends I have left in their prisons. You know of these things—for you fear Medhya and her Myrrydanai dogs as well. You have helped me escape, you have brought me here. But it is not enough. We must raise the dead now. We must bring warriors to the war. Will you help me?”

When I did not hear an answer, I turned to her, expecting her rage or disdain. I could not help but wonder at the vast depths within her form—the fury, the unbroken will, the torrents of passion, the steel, the heat, and the fierce mind. Pythia was a magnificent vampyre, and if she had decided those centuries ago not to follow her own passions, she might have become a great priestess of her tribe—or a queen of the world.

“Yes,” she said, resignation in her voice, and smoldering fury in the mask upon her face. “I will help you raise the dead.”

3

I spent the last hours of the night hunting the fortresses to the north and the south looking for signs of war, and did not have to fly far or fast to find them. The men of my country and of many others had increased their attacks on the Saracens and those armies of the east in those years since I last fought as a mortal. No doubt the Veil plagues had fanned the flames of religious ardor and the hunger for blood sport among fighting men. I found three cities under siege, and one fallen; still others had captured the invaders. Within the walls of these garrisons, fights broke out like small battles among the market stalls and courtyards. But the closest siege raged several miles to the south, just over the next mountain range.

A hundred ships were in the port, and Crusaders had taken over the towns of the harbor, all bearing the banners of those lands and provinces near my homeland. I saw both the Knights of the Temple and Knights of the Hospital among the garden of tents and mean shelters built in that fervor of war that still held my countrymen in its grip. Miles inland, across a scorched plain made empty by war and drought, a fortress loomed, as imposing as any of the Saracen strongholds.

Siege towers stood like mute giants, tall as the city walls, great ugly beasts of construction, to be dragged toward the fortress come dawn, with the battle beginning before the afternoon. Some of these machines lay in ruins, destroyed by rock and flame in a previous day’s fight. There were piles of the dead from a recent battle just outside the tall citadel of the Saracens.

When I returned to Pythia, she had already gone to her day’s rest. Before sunrise, I lay down with her, wrapping my arms about her.

I touched the black orb in its pouch at her waist and felt that slight pulse of life within it. In touching it, I wanted it, though I did not yet understand its hidden secrets. I watched her gentle breaths as she slept, her eyes fluttering lightly in a mortal’s dream. The gold mask rippled slightly. For just a moment I felt I was not looking at Pythia at all, but at that Dark Madonna’s face on the gold mask itself, a third eye painted at her forehead, scorn upon her brow.

I fought sleep, but finally gave in as my mind turned to the darkness of oblivion.

4

A
vision of Medhya came in my sleep:

The Dark Mother crouched, her weight pressing upon my chest, making my breath slow and laborious. The skin of her face was like an opal darkness. Through it, I saw the strange ghostly orbs that somehow carried her life force through her body. Her face was hideous—not the noble face of statues, not the beautiful Queen of Myrryd—she was monstrous in her deformity. Every part of her skin from her throat to her brow wriggled with life as if thousands of small shiny maggots moved, in a rapid mass, over and around each other—a city of tenebrous larvae, constantly moving, creating the impression of facial features—a gaping mouth, two holes for nostrils, and her eyes, empty and dark as if all light had been sucked from them, with a third eye painted across the wriggling mass at the center of her brow.

Her hair was wild and seemed a nest of vipers and brambles. Her wings were her outer cloak, which drew back to reveal the rose-flesh robe of human faces as if sewn into cloth, covering much of her body. What was revealed from her waist to her breasts seemed to be a series of teeth, strung as an undergarment.

“Maz-Sherah,” she whispered, her voice a burned whisper. She sniffed at my face. “I smell Merod inside you. You are good to bring him to me.”

Her mouth was empty of teeth, and the teeming maggots dropped from her ragged lips as she spoke. She reached down, and with the curved blades of her fingernails, gently felt between my lips for my own teeth, reaching for my incisors.

“Oh.” She seemed to shiver with pleasure. “You were born to tear the Veil. I have loved you, Maz-Sherah, and felt your presence. My breath is in you and gives you great power. You are not like the traitor priests, my child, my boy. You are to be my lord and master, and I will come to you in the flesh of love that you may know me.” Her fingers pushed further into my mouth. The larvae and beetles that crawled along her face began to drop down onto my tomb’s bed, and as they did, I saw the emptiness behind their wriggling mass—she was a hollow darkness, clothed in the creatures of the grave. “It is nearly the solstice, my love, and you are far away from me. Mortals from the cliffs seek to destroy Myrrydanai and their earthly queen who rules the wastelands since the burning of the forest—but you are not there to help them, Maz-Sherah. Why are you not there? Has Pythia misguided you? I hear the cries of your lovers and your children, even now, even here within the Veil. The ashling calls to the elementals for news of your destruction or return. A vampyre of great beauty cries out to you from his torment. Your son wails for mercy, and your daughter weeps, but they shall be my little mortal rats soon.”

A shadow of three dimensions, she pushed her hand farther into my mouth, to the back of my throat. I no longer felt a woman’s hand there, but the slick moist skin of a fish of some kind—an eel or a pike—choking me as she pushed her forearm further down my throat.

“My breath and my blood are in you,” she said. “But so is a traitor.
Merod of the Kamr
.”
She spoke his name as if it were a curse. “Stealer of sorceries, betrayer—priest of mud, and he will forever be in mud and muck when I come to you, my love.”

I could not breathe. It felt as if wriggling parasites swam in my blood and encircled my heart as the hollow darkness watched me and whispered. “I will find the priest in you, my sweet youth, my liberator. I will burn his soul from your blood. You have come to bring me to flesh. I desire this mask stolen from my priests, and this fire sword. You will bring them to me, for I will reward you greatly.” I felt a tearing at my heart, a white-hot pain that shot through my very being.

5

I came out of the vision, gasping for air. My heart pounded rapidly, and my throat was dry.

Fire sword.
Merod had told me, in the silver mirrors at Taranis-Hir, of such a weapon.
A sword made of fire.
A weapon against Medhya.

Pythia stared down at me. “You went into the Veil,” she said. “Its venom is in your blood.” She said this as if she had not fully understood it before. “You are opening the Veil, Falconer, even as you exist, as you breathe. You are allowing it to tear.”

“No,” I said, catching my breath as if I had come up for air from deep water. “I am going to close it. The war of the vampyres will be brought down upon the Myrrydanai.”

“If it is too late...”

I refused to consider this. “In the forest—on the cliffs called the Akkadites—elemental spirits told me that the solstice was the time when Medhya would come through. We are still several nights from it. We must return.”

“Do not believe such things,” Pythia said. “Medhya cannot come into this world without you. I lived many lifetimes before you came to me, Falconer. I once believed in heroes. In what could be done. But I have met heroes greater than you. Though I feared you once, I no longer have fear
of
you. I fear
for
you. We cannot stop a force as great as Medhya from breaking through the Veil. She will have her vengeance. Her Myrrydanai are more powerful than the Kamr priests. The Great Serpent once walked the Earth, but now hides from his children. I know where the sorceries of Medhya were born, for I have heard the legends. They are from the nameless depths beneath Myrryd itself, from a sorcery older than the magick of our tribe. This mask—the rituals—were not created by the priests of Myrryd, but by an ancient race of those depths. These things cannot be fought, cannot be changed. But you and I have created a child between us. I am mortal. My child is mortal. We could return to Alkemara and rest there until my child is born. If you avoid the fate set for you, Medhya may not gain in power—for her power is linked to yours. She would not have this mask. You know this. The Myrrydanai would fade in some distant year. The plagues would end. The Veil would heal on its own.”

“When? Next year?” I asked.

“Many years. But a short time in...in your existence.”

“When you are dead, will it heal on its own? Will the plagues that have ravaged this world also fade? Will the frozen seas thaw?”

She closed her eyes. “Our son would see life. Does that mean nothing to you?”

“What of my other children? My friends? Our tribe? We would hide for years and let them suffer? What of the darkness that will come to the earth if you are wrong? Your child will be enslaved to such priests as the Myrrydanai.”

“You do not understand her power. She needs you there, for she draws power from you. Do you not understand? She draws her own breath from yours. If we fight her—we are lost.”

I touched her shoulder gently and looked into her eyes, as if trying to find the Pythoness who had once shown no fear.

“You will extinguish,” she said.

I turned away from her.

“We need to raise an army,” I said. “Tonight. Soon, for they will not resurrect fully for three nights. I need at least a hundred warriors with us. I will not abandon those I have promised to rescue.”

6

We reached the mountain ledge that overlooked the battlefield. The roar of the warriors was like the howling of jackals on the hunt. I saw the trails marked by the rising dust where they had retreated, and another line of men had advanced. Siege engines burned along the dusky plain. Huge gouges had been taken out of the fortress’s heavy walls from the trebuchet’s onslaught. Fires were lit among the tents and town at the shore. The Saracens sent showers of burning arrows down into the Crusaders’ midst, while the soldiers of my country rattled their shields and threw spears at the enemy who had come on horseback from towns beyond the fortress to slice sword and ax into the invaders’ flesh.

“Do not take great risks,” I told Pythia. “Be cautious. Only approach those who have fallen. If a man draws his weapon, leave him. But find as many strong men as you can, and make them vow to serve us before you give the Sacred Kiss. Not all will take the oath, but many will. These men love war.”

7

The constant sounds of horn and hew and the endless battle cries arose like calls from Death herself. The dust rose along the darkling plain as a thousand men or more raced toward the walls of the battered citadel.

Thirteen horsemen led the most recent charge—knights of England—and behind them, those servant-soldiers who had dedicated their lives to the recapture of Jerusalem, to the hands of Heaven itself, and to the spoils of war promised by their masters. A storm of arrows flew from their outer flanks, many of them breaching the sand-colored walls, while the sky seemed to rain with fire as their enemy—the Saracens, as my people had called them—poured oil and lobbed burning bundles over the towers upon the aggressor below. Their allies had drawn off the invaders at the north and south, and were driving them back to the sea, a journey of many miles.

The spears raised, the battering ram held high as shielded men ran with it to the chaste gates of the Saracen stronghold. Horses keened terrible sounds as they were struck down, and many knights fell as arrows and great stones from the walls themselves rained down on them. The fury of the soldiers quickened, and I could sense the white-hot fire in their hearts as the swords clashed and horns blew.

A new Saracen army of thirty or more came around from the north on horseback to attack those who laid siege to their city. Mortal courage was great that night, and the slaughter seemed equal to both sides. A standard-bearer led the charge to the city gates, and the remaining siege machines were run by dozens of men pushing them hard into position, even while their enemies shot arrows into their midst and hacked at those who guarded them.

Fires brightened the city walls, and from these heights, burning logs dropped down upon the soldiers below who had begun ramming the gate to the city. A man caught fire and ran through the midst of the others, his final cries fading as he fell to the earth.

The siege engines groaned as they released their cargo—great fallen slabs and burning bundles, some of them clearing the high wall, others slamming into the stone and falling down upon the soldiers whose army had sent the missives.