Queen's Gambit

by Karen Chance

  “Prisoners?” I glanced at the bodies again. I thought that was a strange word to use for dead men.

  “At one time. In our court, as in most, serious offenders are left out for the sun or staked, at the consul’s pleasure. But my predecessor . . . preferred a different solution.”

  “Your predecessor? You mean—”

  He nodded. “He wanted anyone who moved against him to know what they risked. That there would be no swift end for them, no easy death. Indeed, no death at all.”

  “No death? Then what . . .”

  I trailed off, taking a closer look at the nearest “prisoner.”

  He was just inside the rock cut door, propped against the wall, but not in the way that a human would stand. He was as rigid as a block of wood and pretty much the same color. Old, leather like skin had desiccated and the flesh underneath withered to the point that it looked like a thick coating on a bunch of old bones. As if a skeleton had been dipped into a vat of brownish-yellow lacquer that had adhered to the frame, covering but not hiding it.

  I could see every rib, every bone. Even the skull, with a few, dusty strands of hair still clinging to the surface, looked more like a leather mask. Only the dim, flickering lamplight gave the body any semblance of life at all.

  And yet, there was something there. I couldn’t put my finger on it, and it was certainly nothing like the flood of power coming off the consul. It wasn’t something I would normally have noticed at all, like the faint, background hum of a lightbulb, which in a crowded room can be almost inaudible. But on a basement staircase at night, with your heart thrumming in your ears because something is down there—

  It’s as loud as a dropped cymbal.

  And I was suddenly hearing crashes everywhere.

  Eyelashes still visible on a corpse in a corner quivered slightly, although there was no breeze to move them; a few tiny scratches on another’s thigh, from long, overgrown nails, looked fresh; the tell-tale throb of a vein in a third’s temple was almost invisible, but still moving something along . . .

  “Vampires do not die of starvation, you see?” Hassani told me quietly, his hand catching my arm again, before I even realized that I’d stepped back. “They go mad, if deprivation continues long enough, then wither as these have done. After a very long time, they become inert, incapable of movement, of feeding themselves—of anything.”

  “How,” I felt my tongue flicker out to wet my lips. “How long?”

  “Over seven hundred years, in this case They tried a rebellion. It did not succeed.”

  No shit. And then what he’d said registered. “Seven hundred?”

  I gazed at the closest prisoner again. There were eyes in those deeply pitted sockets, small, pebble-like and dark, like two of the dried figs they sold in the marketplace. There was no sheen to them after so long, and no movement. I couldn’t tell if he could see me.

  God, I hoped not. I hoped that he, whoever he’d been, was in a deep, restful sleep. Not staring at the backside of a door for centuries. Just the thought . . .

  I dug my nails into my palm to stop a full body shudder.

  “We believe that that may have been where the mummy’s curse foolishness began,” Hassani said. “Some humans stumbled across a desiccated vampire who had a little mobility left. And who then pursued them, driven mad by hunger, but failed to catch them due to the rigidity of the muscles.”

  “And they mistook him for a mummy due to—” I waved a hand at the withered forms.

  “Just so. It is one reason we left these down here, to avoid any . . . unfortunate encounters.”

  I stared at the face of the still living creature. I couldn’t seem to look away, although my lips felt numb. I’d seen plenty of bodies in my time, but this . . .

  “Why keep them at all?” I asked roughly. “Is it just to torture them?”

  Hassani looked surprised at the question. “Torture them? No. They are quite mad, and know nothing of what is happening to them. Indeed, they are not even conscious unless fed.”

  Uh huh, I thought, staring at that vein again. That’s what people used to think about coma patients, too. Turned out, plenty of them heard every word.

  “Then why not just end this?” I asked harshly.

  His eyes became distant. “They were warriors once. Good men; brave men. Some were my friends. What was done to them was shameful, but giving them a coward’s death, the same one reserved for lawbreakers and evildoers . . .” he shook his head. “I could never countenance it. I keep them here as I found them, for they are beyond pain at this point, hoping that Allah will someday show me a way to end their days with dignity. Although that day has yet to come.”

  I had a sudden, vivid recall of the first time I’d seen Hassani, at a party given by the North American consul. She’d had anti-glamourie charms layered all over her court, in case any fey tried to gate crash, I supposed. Therefore, my first look at him had been more than a little disturbing.

  I’d had no idea what was wrong with him at the time. But based on what I’d just been told, I assumed that he and his elder Children had been given the prisoner treatment at some point. Maybe by his predecessor, after a failed coup? Not that they had looked this bad. But they had been gaunt and haggard, with sunken, leathery cheeks and hollow eyes. It was bad enough for me to guess that they’d been well on their way to starvation when they . . . fought their way out? Were released after having learned their lesson? Were rescued?

  I didn’t know, and it seemed impossible to ask. But it gave me a new respect for the African consul, which was only heightened after we passed through another room that must have once held the prisoners, or ones like them. There were deep scratches on the walls, ceiling, and floor, thousands of them. As if, in their madness, they had tried to claw their way through solid rock.

  Even more disturbing was the fact that they hadn’t managed it.

  Limestone was fairly soft as rocks went, and the prisoners were vamps. The only scenario I could come up with for why they hadn’t been able to literally move a mountain was that they had already largely atrophied by the time they were entombed here, and were so weak that their best efforts only made scratches. To be so desperate, and yet be unable to get out, knowing the fate that awaited them . . .

  I did shudder then.

  Ray, I thought suddenly, Ray would have been cussing up a storm right about now and dragging me out of here. Ray was a smart man. I guessed I was less so, because after a brief pause, I followed Hassani into the burial chamber.

  It turned out to be a huge room with a gorgeous sarcophagus carved out of the same yellow limestone as everything else, but long as a yacht and taller than my head. It would have fit a giant—or the actual statue of Ra outside, had they folded it up a little. But I didn’t think that was what was in there.

  No, I didn’t think that at all.

  I guessed Lantern Boy didn’t, either, because he was shaking enough that golden light shimmered around the room like water. It splashed the walls and made the hideous thing festooned above the sarcophagus and draped around the room to also seem to move—and thus making him shake even more. It got bad enough that Hassani took the lantern away and held it up himself, which . . . yeah.

  Could have done without that.

  “He ruled over the vampires of this land for time out of mind,” Hassani said, his voice hushed. “Before the pyramids were built, he ruled. Before there was an Egypt, he ruled. Before civilization itself, he was here, and he ruled.”

  I didn’t say anything. Diplomacy required an answer, but fuck diplomacy. I stared upward and hoped like hell that the cracked and dusty thing up there didn’t fall on me. Or I was gonna do a Ray, I swore to God.

  Hassani glanced at me, and a small smile flirted with his lips. “It is a bit much, all at once.”

  Yeah, but at least I finally knew what that smell was. It permeated the air, thick and old and musty and horrible. I’d been in some bad places, and smelled some pretty terrible things. But nothing that s
tuck in my throat, feeling like it was clogging and burning it at the same time, quite like that.

  I really envied the vamps their ability to just not breathe.

  But worse than the smell was what it was coming from. Papery thin pieces of scale covered skin draped the room like evil bunting. In some cases, there was coil after coil of it, what looked like a hundred layers all rolled up together. In others, those layers had burst apart, like the most God-awful Christmas cracker ever, leaving fluttery ends waving about in the air in abstract shapes yards long, and a foot-deep confetti of smaller pieces on the floor that crunched and crackled horribly underfoot.

  I shuddered visibly, and didn’t give a shit.

  “After his death, he was brought here, to the seat of his power, to possibly regenerate,” Hassani said. “He had been able to do it before, and his supporters thought that, despite the damage, their god might yet return. But not this time.”

  There was a certain vicious satisfaction in the consul’s voice that I didn’t understand, and he didn’t give me a chance to ask.

  “The bones put out flesh and skin, more than once,” he continued. “But the final push back to health, to life, eluded him. In the end, even his most fervent supporters had to admit that he was gone.”

  “He was a snake?” I croaked, finally managing to get my head around the image of a shed snakeskin at least twenty times bigger than I was.

  “It was his master power, the ability to transform,” Hassani said. “Or one of them, I should say, as he had several. As Apollo’s son, he grew more powerful in the sun, for instance, instead of being consumed by it—”

  “What? Wait.”

  Hassani did smile then. “I know how it sounds. But he was the first of us, the very first vampire ever made, and thus a . . . prototype, if you will. He was enormously strong, able to redirect the sun’s rays to consume his enemies, among other things. It was the reason we entombed him down here. To deny him his greatest weapon, should he ever return.”

  I wasn’t listening. I’d made the mistake of looking closer, and—shit. It wasn’t just a snakeskin. Cracks in the shed epidermis showed that there were bones in there, including a spine as long as a train and three-foot fangs. I wondered what the hell they’d buried, and then remembered what Hassani had said: this thing regenerated. I shuddered again, and stepped back, really glad not to have met this bastard in person.

  Really, really glad.

  “The ancient Greeks named this city Heliopolis, after Helios, their original sun god,” Hassani continued. “But they were wrong to do so. They saw the suns portrayed everywhere, and naturally thought of Helios, who was the personification of the sun disk itself. But Apollo was the god who used the sun’s power, and thus aligned more accurately with Ra, while our friend here—”

  “Was the cobra,” I whispered, remembering the tiny snake on the statue outside.

  “Exactly so. The statue shows the god, the source of his power, and his defender. The ancients understood, even if modern man has forgotten.”

  “What happened to him?” I asked, after a pause, because clearly something had.

  Hassani glanced at me. “You father never told you the tale?”

  “My father?” I frowned. “What would he know about this? Didn’t that thing die . . . well, a long damned time ago?” This whole place reeked of age and long, dusty centuries forgotten by time. The man—the vampire—must have died thousands of years ago.

  But Hassani was shaking his head. “He lived until the year 853 in our calendar, which would be . . . 1449 in yours. And even then, it was not so simple. After his bones were brought back here—”

  “Wait. Wait.” Hassani obligingly waited. “You’re telling me that that . . . thing . . . died less than six hundred years ago?”

  “Yes.” Hassani regarded me mildly. “In Venice.”

  “In Venice. He died in Venice in 1449.” I did some mental math, and didn’t like what it was telling me. I scowled. “What didn’t Mircea tell me?”

  “Anything, apparently. My apologies; I assumed you knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  “That it took three of them to take him down. Your consul, the European consul Antony, and your father.”

  “My father . . . killed that?”

  “Helped to kill that. You see, your consul and Antony were Changed by . . . well, we called him Pa-neck, meaning the serpent, although not to his face.”

  “Yeah.” I stared up at the huge, fanged skin above me.

  “His parents named him Sokkwi, ‘Little Fool’, but he took the reign title of Setep-en-Ra, ‘Chosen by Ra.’ He was quite capable, by all accounts, when young, and a fierce defender of his adoptive father’s interests. Some have even surmised that the serpent above Ra in the early portraits wasn’t Wadjet at all, but Ra’s chosen defender, emblematic of the army he was building for himself.”

  “The army.”

  This was starting to sound eerily familiar.

  “Yes, the gods were constantly at each other’s throats in those days, some five thousand years ago—”

  “This thing is—was—five thousand years old?”

  Hassani blinked. “Well, I did say he was the first of us.”

  I shut up.

  “In any case,” he continued. “The old gods were a quarrelsome lot, and a selfish one, with each wanting to rule over all. But they were too well matched to be able to win a decisive victory. They therefore decided to change humans, or whatever creatures came to hand, improving them and forging them—”

  “Into armies to fight their wars for them.”

  The dark eyes narrowed. “This is not the first time you have heard this.”

  “No.” I thought back to a strange creature I had met several times recently, the last in Hong Kong during the desperate fight for the city. He had died there, but not before telling me a strange story that didn’t seem all that relevant at the time. But then, his kind were basically the secret service of hell: fallen angels with a network specializing in information who frequently seemed to know more than they should have about what was coming.

  I stared up at what remained of an ancient demigod, and wondered what he’d known about this.

  “An Irin told me,” I said.

  “Ah. Fascinating creatures.”

  That was one way of putting it.

  “Well, the Irin was absolutely right,” Hassani said. “The gods made themselves armies, but they did it so well that they began to worry. The creatures were made to battle other gods, after all. What if they decided to turn on their makers? That is why later generations had limitations added deliberately—vulnerability to sunlight, weak points at the heart and neck, helpless early years—”

  “I wouldn’t say helpless,” I muttered.

  “—but Setep-en-Ra had none of these. He was virtually indestructible physically.”

  “And mentally?”

  Hassani shook his head. “He grew progressively more paranoid and detached from a world he no longer recognized. After the gods were banished, he began to think of himself as a god himself, and his delusions grew. As his strongest Children, your consul and Antony plotted to take him down, although in the end, they were not enough. Your father had to assist—”

  “At two years old?” Because that was what father had been, at least in vampire terms in 1449. He should have had trouble defending himself, much less . . .

  I looked up again, and shuddered.

  Hassani smiled. “He was always very clever, your father, and sometimes, that is more useful than power.”

  I crossed my arms. “Is there a reason you’re telling me all this?”

  “Yes, in fact. I—”

  Hassani stopped suddenly, and cocked his head, as if listening to someone. Which he probably was. Vamps’ ability to communicate mentally with members of their family, or in the case of someone as powerful as Hassani, with virtually any vampire, was one thing that made them so deadly.

  I waited it out, my arms wrapped aroun
d myself, and that horrible, decaying stench in my nose. I didn’t understand why we couldn’t have had this conversation upstairs. I didn’t understand why we had to have it at all. Old vamps liked to be mysterious, and centuries of having people kowtow to them hadn’t helped encourage them to get to the damned point already. But I really wished he’d hurry up.

  I’d been in some creepy ass places before, but this one was really starting to get to me. And I wasn’t alone. I glanced back at Lantern Boy to find him looking miserable, his mouth turned down and his eyes darting here and there, as if anticipating an attack.

  And then widening in apparent horror, as if witnessing one.

  I looked quickly back at Hassani, expecting I don’t know what.

  But there was nothing happening. The consul still looked a little zoned out, but perfectly fine. Until he suddenly reached out and touched the shed skin.

  Lantern Boy made a sound and I sucked in a breath, even though it didn’t make sense. Whatever this thing had been, it was long dead now. But I still didn’t like him touching it.

  Hassani, however, seemed to like it fine. He rubbed a bit of the brittle skin between his fingers for a moment, then crushed it in his fist. Lantern Boy gave a bleat of terror and fled, while I just stood there, frozen in place. But Hassani wasn’t done. He suddenly jerked at it, not a piece but the whole thing, and he put a master’s strength behind it. He pulled not once or twice, but over and over and over, until the entire, carefully displayed snakeskin was on the floor and broken into pieces.

  I joined Lantern Boy in the creepy, scratched up antechamber, mainly because I couldn’t breathe in the burial chamber anymore. Pieces of ancient god fluttered through the air and dusted my lungs, even out here. While inside . . .

  I didn’t know what the hell was going on inside.

  There was a noise, which I thought was a cough. But it kept going and going, and gaining in strength until it echoed loudly around the chamber. And even then, it took me a moment to identify it, because it was so strange under the circumstances.

  But yes, I realized.