The Queen of Wolves (25 page)

I felt something at my foot, a slimy heaviness moved against my ankle. I looked down but saw nothing. As I stepped forward, something thick and long wound around my knee and then swam off.

I watched the water, and as my eyes grew focused, I saw hundreds of eel-like creatures, swarming around each other, and me, great masses of their shiny bodies. As they moved over and around each other, I saw small white sparks come from them, leaving trails of light.

This was the luminescence I saw along the island’s shoreline. These eel-creatures. They rubbed against each other, creating the light. Did they live off the meat of the dead mortals? Each other? They were Ophion’s rumor of crawling lamps.

Yet, they did not attack, nor did they impede my journey. I reached down and grabbed at one. It slipped from my fingers. Again I reached with both hands, and caught a wriggling eel in my hands, and brought it to the surface. Its open maw was filled with a ridge of tiny gray teeth, sharpened to perfect points.

I felt a surge of energy go through me as I held it, examining its smooth and slick form—no ordinary eel, this. It had spines along its back that raised and lowered as it breathed through its swampy gills. I could not find an eye anywhere on its head, but its teeth were small, perfect razors as it tried snapping at my hand.

I dropped the creature, and it dived beneath the surface again, joining its swarm within the brackish water.

As I began moving forward, the water barely reaching my navel, I drew out my razien, prepared for an attack from the eels. Yet, though they moved around my legs and waist, never breaking the water’s surface, they did not bite me or hinder my progress.

As I drew closer to the island, the eels here grew more numerous and larger, until some of them, in swarming, rose into the air, their great tubular forms crossing over other swarms. I felt no fear from them, nor threat, yet these were of a size that, if they chose to attack, they might easily disable me.

I had to rest upon the rocks as I reached the shore. After I had recovered strength, I went to the statue at the center of the island.

I touched its words, but it was written in a language I did not understand. Yet, I saw the coiled symbol of the Great Serpent.

I looked around the lake. I tried to call Merod within me, yet all was silent. No vision came; no insight.

I spoke the words of the statue aloud, and my voice echoed:

In its depths, the burning sword

Makes hostage of the winding stair

But he who comes to heal the Veil

Must break the stone and find the lair.

Him for whom these words were writ

Will take the Nameless to his sheath:

The conquering Queen commands above,

The vanquished lies in wait, beneath.

I had not yet seen a winding stair, nor a sword of fire. All that remained before me here was a stone statue.

Was it what I must break?

This statue, worn by time and water and with features barely visible upon her face, only the rudiments of breasts and hair, and a rounded belly that indicated a child within her womb.

The form of a woman, and yet no woman at all.

Who was this woman?

The statue was ancient, and looked as if someone had spent time chipping at it. When I touched it, it wobbled slightly, although it seemed rooted to the spot by some anchor at its base.

I glanced over at the rubble of rock beside me. It was comprised of chips and bits of the stones that had been used to build here—at the base of the lake itself and the ceiling above and the ledge whence I had come. Someone had built this place in some faraway time. I lifted a few of these greenish gray stones from around the statue’s footing. As I did this, I saw what seemed a glimmer of colors in stone beneath my feet.

I picked up more rocks, tossing them aside. As I did so, I began to make out the island itself beneath the rubble that lay upon it.

The carefully constructed mosaic tile had been laid out in blue and turquoise and jade and yellow and white, the surface of this curved upward, until the peak of the upturned bowl was the statue. It was no island.

A flooded place.

I glanced at the statue again. As I looked at the timeworn surface of the face, I saw the third eye engraved in her forehead.
Medhya.
It was she, I was certain. And in her belly, her children, born from union with the Great Serpent.

She had placed this statue here, a monument to her conquest of the Serpent and theft of his powers.

I spoke the lines, “‘The conquering queen commands above, the vanquished lies in wait, beneath.’”

Just as beneath the New Kingdom of Myrryd, there had been the Old, but beneath the Old Kingdom, whose domain was this? The Asmodh? The Nameless? As I wondered at this, the answer nearly coiled at my feet.

What great king of a world before Myrryd had once built a vast kingdom that now lay in ruin beneath the red city above?

It came in an insight that was nearly like a sharp pain.

I looked across the lake to the stone shore, and up to the curved ceiling, and then back down to the island upon which I stood.

An island that was no island.

I stood on the rooftop of the original temple of the Great Serpent.

4

Medhya had stolen immortality from him, and had put her throne and kingdom above the place of his worship. She had buried the temple beneath stone and water, but had not buried the Great Serpent.

She could not destroy it, for it was the energy that built her kingdom. The same energy that created my tribe.

Medhya was the Queen of Wolves—she did not create her power, but stole it as Pythia had stolen the mask of Datbathani. But the mask was older than Datbathani. Older than Medhya. Older, perhaps, than Ixtar. I knew it now—the Asmodh were the people of the Great Serpent, before even the Serpent had come to them. They had forged the mask and the sword in these depths, and their sorcery was greater than even Medhya’s. But they had been vanquished—as the Serpent had been vanquished—by trickery and stolen ritual.

I stood upon not an island, but the basilica of a sacred structure. Medhya had buried the Serpent, but had not truly conquered.

And the Serpent’s only defense was what was in his blood.

But he who comes to heal the Veil must break the stone and find the lair.

I slammed more rock at the statue until I had chipped it to nothing, and then began clearing the debris. At its base, it was joined to the rounded rooftop by an ornate bronze plug of some kind.

I used my hands to sweep away the last of the rock debris from the broken statue. On my knees, I leaned close to it, for I felt a strange vibration from it. It was little more than a few inches above the roof, jutting upward, a perfect center to the circle of the dome.

On it, there was ancient script and scrollwork. When I touched it, I heard a strange hum from it, as if it stood above a nest of Akhnetur. The scrollwork was in the same language as I had seen written in Alkemara itself. The words I read from this, I had seen in a vision of a statue of the Serpent:

Also, I am here.

I realized this protuberance was a sword’s grip, and I tugged at it, though it was well lodged in its place. I felt a sting as I touched it, and let go quickly. My curiosity was intense enough to have another go, but this time the sword felt like ice, and I released it without it budging one inch. In frustration, I kicked at it with my boot and nearly went sprawling.

“You
will
come
out of there,” I said, as if it could hear me. I squatted again and wrapped my hands about it, feeling the strange stinging sensations along my fingers. But I was unwilling to let go. I knew the old stories of kings who had drawn swords from ancient pagan mounds, and I did not intend to let this moment pass.

I held on tight, and tugged at it, trying to saw it out of its resting place.

I spoke the words from the rhyme, “‘In Asmodh’s depths, the burning sword makes hostage of the winding stair. But he who comes to heal the Veil must break the stone and find the lair.’”

I gripped the sword ever more tightly, and still it would not give.

“Damn you, come out of there,” I muttered in frustration.

The sword slid upward slightly, rising in my hand, its hilt emitting a squeal as it scraped against stone.

Chapter 11

________________

T
HE
S
WORD
 

1

I drew the Asmodh blade out completely. The sword did not burn, nor did it seem to hold any great threat as a blade. There was nothing beyond its hilt, for it was shattered and jagged as glass less than a hand’s length down from the cross-guard. I held it up to try to read the ornate writing engraved upon the hilt.

In frustration, I shouted at it as if it could hear me. Surely if it had whispered my name to Ophion, it would speak to me. It was just a damaged weapon—perhaps its centuries in this place had dulled it. Perhaps this wasn’t the sword I sought. I stood up, furious that I had come all this way—and had lost the Eclipsis in the process. I raised my arm and was about to toss the sword into the lake, when I felt a tingling at my fingers as I had when holding the Eclipsis for the first time.

A strange blue flame emerged from the broken edge of the blade and grew outward into the air, outlining the sword itself. It was as if the igniting of the fire had re-created the broken and missing blade. The fire-ghost of the blade extended out, curving slightly. The fire died out quickly, leaving the gleaming metal of a full sword.

It was long and curved, sharp at both sides of the blade. It was closest to being a scimitar in its shape but with inset curved teeth cut by some fine machine along its outer surface. Designs of serpents covered its length, and it held a reflection of blue fire in the shine of its metal, as if the fire still existed within the blade.

“Do you make hostage of the winding stair?” I asked the blade, as if it could answer. It did not, of course, and I felt foolish—but with such sorcery, anything was possible.

I turned it over in my hand, and on each side of the sword, I saw markings that seemed to move as liquid on metal, as if the broken sword itself had life—like the life I had felt in the Eclipsis. Something pulsed in the grip, and I began to feel as if the sword had taken root in the palm of my hand. I felt a burning beneath my own skin, and the fire shot up my forearm.

At my shoulder, a shock of pain, and then a general warmth simmered beneath my flesh. I felt as if I were mortal for that moment, and had, again, stepped out into the sunlight.

Beneath my feet, the roof of an ancient temple.

All this time—millennia—the Serpent’s temple had been under Myrryd, in the Asmodh depths—the nameless places of dark and mystery.

The sword of fire had been thrust into the roof, as if it held the Great Serpent in his lair and cut off the source of the Serpent’s greatest powers. The kingdom overgrown above it, a subterranean sewer flowing over what had once been the sacred home of the Serpent, and destroying the last of the Asmodh civilization that had once existed in these depths. The spirit of this nameless place could not be held, nor imprisoned. Its power was a great threat to Medhya—and the priests of the Kamr and the Nahhashim had learned the old rituals of the Asmodh. It was in this deep place where the true sorceries—the source of all energy—of our tribe had originated.

Beneath even the secret places of the earth, there was another world.

All conquerors must bury the vanquished,
I thought.
And yet, the conqueror will one night fall when the vanquished rise up again.

I looked down at the mosaic tile with the slender crack in it where the sword had rested. A strange vapor of smoke drifted up from the crack at my feet, and as it moved past my face, I smelled a scent like bitter incense.

The mosaic showed the image of the Great Serpent himself, not a snake at all, nor a dragon—but the figure of a man. A sword gripped in his hand, and its blade entwined with serpents. His face resembled my own, though he wore a suit of scaled armor with what appeared to be talons thrust out at his ankles and along his shoulders.

“‘Also, I am here,’” I said aloud, glancing back up at the sword and seeing my reflection in it—not the reflection of a corpse but of another me—a youth, a vampyre, looking at me as if he knew me too well, a stranger.

His eyes were translucent black but with liquid red within them—like a thin layer of obsidian with the red of blood pulsing beneath. His lips parted, his fangs long and curved, ready to strike.

“I am here,” the Serpent said as I watched my reflection. My eyes had darkened as the eyes of Merod had been. I had passed some test, though I did not understand it yet.

I felt heat at the grip, and I nearly dropped the sword, but the blistering at my hand only made me clutch it more tightly.

A sword of fire,
Merod had told me.

Yes,
a voice whispered—the reflection in the blade.
Medhya and Datbathani and Lemesharra turned these gifts against me. A sword of fire. A mask of gold. A staff of power. Meant only for one. Throw the sword and see who is its rightful owner.

I did not wish to throw the sword, but it burned at my hand, creating a fever up my forearm.

Throw the sword, Falconer,
the thought came to me again in a whisper.

I flung the sword out across the water, expecting to lose it with a splash several feet away. Instead, the sword shot out from my hand as if taking flight. When it reached the point where I believed it would stop, it changed direction and flew back at me, as if thrown by some invisible swordsman. In an instant, it was in my grasp again.