Mortal

by Ted Dekker

  “You smile, sister,” he said. “For love, yes? For me. For your master.”

  “Yes,” she said. And her confession brought her more comfort.

  The door to her suite opened. Several of Saric’s servants came in, the ones he called Children and sometimes Dark Bloods. They were setting the table there in the dining room.

  “Do you think you can eat? You must make yourself take normal food, not only what I feed you.”

  “Why do I feel this way?” she said, looking up into his eyes.

  “What way, my love?”

  “I… I don’t feel myself. Something has changed.”

  He tilted his head. “How do you feel?”

  “I don’t feel the same fear I once did.”

  “Tell me more.”

  “I… feel pleasure. At the way you look at me now. At the way you smile. Seeing it. I want very much to see you pleased.”

  “The thought of my pleasure pleases you, then.”

  “Very much,” she said with some wonder. “And there’s more. I feel…” She couldn’t fully express the emotions flooding her mind and heart. She wasn’t sure where they lived in her, only that they had somehow come from Saric.

  “Joy?” he said. “Love? Peace?”

  She nodded. “Yes. Yes, I think so.”

  She’d felt this way once before. One beautiful day in a meadow where she had learned a truth that had changed the course of her dead life…

  And brought her, ultimately, here.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Because. You are alive.”

  “Alive.” Her heart tripped once in her chest. So he’d found the serum and come to the life she herself had once known? Had the Keeper fulfilled his promise?

  She felt herself weaken at the beauty of the thought. Saric’s hand was instantly under her elbow.

  “Yes. Alive.” He turned her toward him. “Full life. My life.”

  Her heart stuttered. “Yours?”

  Why did that set her instantly on edge, as though she had bitten down on metal?

  “Not like I had before. Forgive me for my former indiscretions, my love.” He took her hands. “I was weak then. A lost soul desperate to find truth. I have realized it is my destiny to know and experience the purest kind of life—and now, at last, I have found it. There is no life greater than that which now flows through my veins. Now I truly love as I could not before. And now you serve me as you’ve wanted to, often without knowing it yourself. I have liberated you from the Order of death and all of its rules.”

  She tilted her head. “You have?”

  One of the Dark Bloods appeared in the doorway and Saric glanced up. “Ah, good. Come, my dear. You will eat now.”

  He slid her arm through his and led her into the front room. She studied the Dark Blood as he held out a chair for her at the table. He was broad and well-muscled like the two exquisite creatures she’d seen earlier in the senate. His eyes were black, his skin like marble veined with ink—like hers—but a warrior like the others.

  “Janus, how is your mate?”

  The Dark Blood glanced up as he came to the side of the table to pour wine into the goblets before them.

  “She’s very well, my Lord. Thank you.”

  The table was filled with an entire array of food so delicately and painstakingly prepared that Feyn couldn’t remember seeing a meal quite as inviting. Fish. Roast. Quivering eggs, poached across the top of the filet. Color everywhere—from the vegetables to the flowers on the sides of the plates. And in the middle of their two settings, a bowl of pale rock salt. She glanced at Saric. His eating habits had changed.

  He took his place, adjacent to her at the table, reaching over to shake out Feyn’s napkin and drop it into her lap before doing the same with his. “I envy you, Janus. She’s lovely.”

  Janus hesitated, the pitcher of wine in hand.

  “She could be yours if you so desired, my Lord.”

  Saric glanced up at him. “No, no,” he said with a slight smile. “I only want to see you happy.”

  “Thank you, my Lord,” Janus said.

  Saric touched the knife with a forefinger before lifting it from the table. He looked at Feyn deliberately, seeing into her in a way that unnerved her, if only every so slightly.

  “If she ever displeases you, Janus, you’ll be certain to tell me,” he said, eyes fixed on Feyn.

  “Of course, my Lord.”

  “On that day I wouldn’t hesitate to have her killed.”

  Feyn glanced up.

  Janus paused. “Thank you, my Lord.”

  “Leave us now.”

  The Dark Blood dipped his head and left the room.

  Feyn studied Saric as he cut into a piece of meat, laid it onto the center of her plate. The smell of it briefly threatened to turn her stomach, unaccustomed to food for nearly a decade as it was.

  “You would kill his mate?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is she also one of your children?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you say you love your children.”

  Saric glanced at her sidelong, thoughtfully licked off the edge of the knife, and then delicately, precisely, set it down parallel to the fork on the edge of his plate.

  “I would kill Janus, too, if he failed to serve me,” he said simply.

  “You would kill your children? Those you call your own?” she said very carefully.

  She could not tear her gaze from his face. The simple tilt of his head. His lips, without tension. The cast of his gaze, as quiet and as heavy upon her as a vise.

  “You don’t understand the power of the Maker? Does he not torture and send to Hades even those he once loved because they failed to love him the way he wished? Is that not the way of the highest power?”

  She blinked.

  Bliss. Hades. The two destinies of the deceased. Eternal freedom from fear. Eternal fear, bound in wailing and the gnashing of teeth. It was taught from birth. It was the way.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Should she tell him that in her death, she had seen nothing of Bliss or Hades? That it had been filled only with nothingness?

  Again, she was aware of her strange desire to please him.

  Was this love, then, as she had known it once?

  Perhaps.

  Loyalty?

  Yes.

  Freely given?

  Given.

  “And so you see,” he said with a slight smile, “I, too, am like that one. That Maker.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “I am. And you will serve me, my love, as my Sovereign.”

  “As your Sovereign,” she said.

  “You will rule the world as I say.”

  She dipped her head. “As you say.”

  He held out his hand.

  “You will obey me as your Maker.”

  She lifted the napkin from her lap and laid it on the table. Slipped from her chair, to a knee between them. Lifted his hand, turned it over.

  “As my Maker,” she said, laying a kiss against his palm.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THEY RODE ALL AFTERNOON. Rom, Roland, Jordin, and Jonathan. South from the limestone canyon lands of the Seyala, through rough terrain, sweeping three miles east of the most direct route, far from the train tracks and the primary road into the city.

  South, to Byzantium.

  Two miles outside the city they paused to water and rest their horses. Jonathan and Jordin ate a simple meal of cheese and dried meat in silence. Neither spoke much in the company of others—Roland had wondered aloud once whether they actually communicated with each other some other way. Did the boy see beyond normal Mortal perception? Could he, with a glance, discern another’s thoughts?

  They were both uncanny, even for Mortals. Jordin, with her undemonstrative nature among a class of warriors from whom a certain amount of swagger was expected. Jonathan, with the burden of the world on his shoulders.

  And then there was this new threat of Saric and his Dark
Bloods.

  The prisoner’s death confirmed one thing in Roland’s understanding: Dark Bloods were an abomination. A defiled race.

  And yet, somehow, the Dark Blood’s death had disturbed the boy greatly.

  “The boy.” It was funny how they all still thought of Jonathan that way despite all of the evidence to the contrary. He was as strong as most warriors his age and faster than all but a few among all Mortals.

  Roland glanced at Rom, offered him a piece of dried jerky, and ate it himself when the man refused it. He knew there was only one thing other than Jonathan on their leader’s mind.

  Feyn.

  Rom had spoken less of her as the time for her waking had neared—clear indication that there was far more weltering beneath the surface. He spoke even less now.

  Roland admitted his own concern about her potential ascension, but only insofar as it affected their mission to see Jonathan into power. To protect the Mortal bloodline. To see their superior race thrive. This was Jonathan’s true purpose—nothing else mattered. For the sake of the Nomads, he would die to serve that cause.

  The sun was just nodding toward the horizon when they started the last miles into the city. Rom, riding in the front. Jordin, always at Jonathan’s side. Roland, flanking them all.

  Within a half hour the muted lights of Byzantium appeared—not the bright orange Nomadic fires they were accustomed to, but a glow dimly reflected by the opaque sky. He watched Jonathan lean forward in his saddle as the spires of the city came into view.

  That’s when it came to him, faint as smoke on the wind, but far less pleasant.

  Corpse scent.

  Rom stopped, hand up. It was coming from just west of them, too near to be the population of the city itself—not yet, at least. Too near, and too weak to be so many.

  Roland nudged his mount forward, past Jordin and Jonathan.

  “There,” Rom said, lifting his chin toward a copse of trees that hid a small lean-to, about a hundred and fifty yards off. It was barely more than a piece of siding propped against the gnarled trunks of two trees.

  Scavengers, escapees of Order. Two, from the look of it—a woman, her arm bound in a heavy bandage, and a teenage girl, black-haired, perhaps fifteen, with a noticeable limp. Victims of an accident, then, fleeing the city and the wellness center with it, and with good cause. Many who went in as victims of sickness or accidents often did not return. The Order did not permit reminders of Mortality, of the thing all Corpses feared most: death.

  It was said that those who left did so in secretive fear, knowing that spouses and family members were obligated under Order to report them to the authorities. Which they did, because there was only duty to the laws of Order.

  These two didn’t stand a chance. They’d be found by the authorities that regularly roamed the city outskirts for just their kind within days.

  Jonathan pulled up between Roland and Rom, rapt, staring from the saddle. Why the keen interest? A Corpse was a Corpse. Dead. Diseased. Worthy of Mortality only through council approval.

  “They’ve fled the city,” Rom said to Jonathan. “In an effort to live.”

  Roland glanced west. The sun was dropping below the horizon.

  “We need to go.”

  He threw one last look toward the lean-to and moved on. Jordin waited for Jonathan who, after a long moment, finally turned around.

  Bringing him had been an unnecessary risk in Roland’s judgment. It was true, his blood was much more potent than their own and could not survive more than an hour outside his body. But their blood might just as easily be given to Feyn to turn her Mortal. Still, Jonathan was Sovereign.

  Ignoring the Corpses completely, Roland rode after the three of them.

  The Mortals had long ceased to enter Byzantium by conventional means. Nine years ago, Rowan had undertaken a new project in Jonathan’s name to fortify portions of Byzantium’s sewer system, beginning beneath the Citadel itself and extending to the northern edge of the city. The ancient sewers that had weathered millennia would have easily weathered a thousand years more, but thanks to Rowan, a portion of them had been conveniently connected to form an underground route into the city.

  It was by this route that the Keeper would meet with Rowan regarding Feyn’s care. The same way that Rom’s spies had come and gone unseen from the capital.

  They reached a hill just outside the city. There, a metal culvert the height of a man opened into a stony bed that had once been a shallow drainage river.

  They dismounted in a sparse grove of trees, tying their horses, retrieving torches from saddles in the dark.

  “Jordin,” Rom said. “You’ll bring yours and Roland’s horses to the back of the northeast basilica—the Basilica of Spires. Leave the other two here.”

  Jordin gave him a sharp look and then glanced at Jonathan. Her skin appeared dusky in twilight, emanating its own kind of glow.

  “We take no chances with Jonathan,” Rom said, seeing her reluctance. “We need two escape routes. Wait behind the basilica with the horses. If we’re not there in three hours, return and meet us here.”

  Her gaze flicked from Jonathan to Rom. She nodded.

  It was the right choice. She was the most likely to find her way out as swiftly and inconspicuously as possible.

  Rom pulled up his hood. Roland had his up already and was tying a dark scarf over his nose and mouth. It wasn’t to mask the smell of the sewer, but something far more offensive: the reek of five hundred thousand Corpses walking, breathing, and dwelling in fear.

  Jonathan glanced back at Jordin once without speaking, and then pulled his hood up over his head.

  And then they crossed the rocky drainage bed to the culvert, lit the torches, and went in as darkness settled over the city.

  Rom hadn’t entered these tunnels in six months—since the last time he’d met Rowan in Feyn’s stasis chamber as he had twice a year for nearly a decade.

  He moved quickly through the culvert, pushing back the smell of rat feces, the refuse of the city, the rot and mildew seeping through the thick weave of the scarf over his mouth and nose. The image of Feyn’s body hung in his mind.

  Still. Pale. Her lashes so distinctive in the fluid-filled tank that he expected her to open them. Her hand with nails so meticulously trimmed. The finger with the moonstone ring.

  She’d been in stasis so long that the few days he’d once known her seemed less like a memory than some vestige of a dream.

  A dream that had brought them to this moment, here. Now.

  He picked up the pace, boots splashing through the sediment that had settled at the bottom of the culvert. He glanced back at Jonathan, who moved with all the stealth of the Nomads, head down, Roland a shadow behind him.

  Just ahead, the culvert opened into the brick sewer tunnel. The opening was new, reinforced with rebar, but the brick was ancient. They stepped into the tunnel, which was slightly lower than the edge of the culvert and filled with half a foot of water.

  The tunnels belled out beneath the edge of the city, near the northern underground terminus. A grate in the side of the tunnel emitted soft light—and then a distant squeal of brakes on wheels.

  “Hold,” Rom said. “It’s just the underground. The public transport.”

  A gust of air came through the grate after another distant squeal.

  Stink of Corpse.

  Rom heard the boy stop behind him. “Keep moving.”

  Past the terminus, the squeal of wheel brakes faded as they made their way deeper into the city. After another ten minutes the tunnel opened into a vast chamber with thick columns that rose nearly two stories to a vaulted ceiling. An electrical box took up half the wall, wires running from it in all directions. It was covered with a padlocked metal cage and emitted a faint hum. Metal stairs led to a second-story transom that hugged the circumference of the upper level; four arched passageways opened out of it in the brick, each in a different direction.

  “We go up,” Rom said, nodding to the stair spira
ling up the side of the wall. The three of them ascended, boots ringing on metal steps, then moved across the transom above to the arch of the northern passage.

  Rom could hear the breath of the boy behind him, the skitter of a rodent, the crumble of mortar, here, where the bricks were the most ancient of all. He tasted the stagnant air.

  Place of secrets.

  They emerged from the tunnel and approached a door, the stone frame of which looked as old as the history of the city itself except for the obvious new addition of electrical wires running along its edge. The lock in the door was also modern.

  Only three people had a key to this door: Rowan, the Keeper, and the Corpse who tended to Feyn. Rom had retrieved the key before leaving camp, but now he saw that it would be entirely unnecessary—the door was not only unlocked, but slightly ajar.

  Rom pushed past it and stepped inside, torch held aloft.

  Dark niches, the size to cradle a body, were hollowed out in the walls like the eye sockets of a skull.

  He strode through the first chamber to the bell-shaped crypt beyond. To the great sarcophagus in the middle of the room, with its ancient carvings and metal tubes worming through holes drilled straight through the stone.

  The heavy lid had been pushed aside and onto its edge on the stone floor between the sarcophagus and the crypt wall.

  Rom hurried forward, his torch throwing light into the glass lining.

  Empty. Severed tubes dangled motionless in the fluid-filled chamber. So it was true. He’d held out a bare hope that the spy’s story had been wrong.

  He turned to find Jonathan staring around the chamber with wide eyes.

  “As expected,” Roland said.

  Rom took a slow breath. “We’ll find her.”

  “You’re sure you know the way? The Citadel is three square miles.”

  He nodded. “Let’s hope so.”

  He led them out of the room and down the underground passage. It had been nine years since he’d passed through these halls of death and prison cages. The majority of them had been sealed off immediately after the commencement of Rowan’s regency. Up, near the service entrance, with its back corridor…