The Queen of Wolves

by Douglas Clegg

  “I fear I have failed them. I have lost what Merod offered me. I no longer hear him in my sleep, or feel him in my blood.”

  “All we can do is survive,” she said. “Until our doom finds us.”

  8

  In the redwood wardrobes and trunks of the spacious cabin, Pythia discovered the ladies’ gowns and the jewelry that the ship’s captain had no doubt gathered as gifts on his journey.

  She stood before me in a beautiful pure white tunic that seemed made of the thinnest of material, trimmed with blue and gold bands. Though I considered her beauty as athletic and wild, the garment softened her and brought out the pink glow of mortality on her skin. About her waist, a corded belt, and her feet were bare, as she had only just begun picking through the elegant slippers.

  She glanced over at me. “I feel like a lady in some nobleman’s court.” She laughed and spun as if she were a young maiden discovering a gown for the first time. She drew up the long, draping white sleeves, nearly transparent in the candlelight. “Like angel wings.”

  “In my home country, the great ladies all wear such things,” I said.

  “It must take hours for such ladies to dress. This is only the first garment. There are sleevings and wrappings and coverlets. Look, look at all of this.”

  She threw other clothes she’d found about the room. “Here,” she said, reaching her arms out for me. “Take my hands. Come here.”

  “What is this madness? Has that mask made you a fool?”

  “It is mortality.” She laughed. “It makes one...frivolous. Come on, even an Anointed One can dance.”

  “Not when I remember why I am here. Why I need to return.”

  “Tonight it is impossible. You may suffer, or you may...dance.”

  I bounded up out of bed and stood before her.

  “Draw your trousers back on.” She laughed, and when I returned to her, dressed from head to toe, she took my hands, and said, “Look at you. Let me be the mirror of your beauty.”

  I felt happily embarrassed. “Men do not have beauty as women have.”

  “Men have beauty. You know this more than most. Your friend Ewen is beautiful. I doubt I am the first to notice it,” she said. “In you, I see a beautiful youth who is a prince of the Earth. You have the muscles of the youth I took in Hedammu and made my own. You have the glow of skin of one who has not yet touched loss or lack. Your glamour is strong, Falconer.”

  “In you, I see a queen being born.”

  “A mortal queen,” she said. “You will still be young a thousand years from now.” She reached up and touched the edge of my face. “Your warmth will exist when many other fires have gone cold. I see you as you are, Falconer. Perhaps this is the only good of the mask—it allows me to see beyond my own desires. Look in my eyes and see yourself. Do you see? Hair long and tangled from the day’s sleep. Leather trousers, tight about him, and a captain’s boots upon his feet. His eyes, bright with life—the lie of our tribe. You remind me too much of my earliest life. In my first life, before the Sacred Kiss, we had beautiful festivals where the youths and maidens would dance until the world spun and all fell to the earth from the need for sleep.”

  “But we have no tune,” I said, offering her my hand for a dance. How could I feel so light and free? A vampyre had followed us, my friends suffered halfway around the earth, and I did not know when my own doom might strike. Despite all this, Pythia had reawakened some youthful energy in me that I had nearly forgotten. What was there to do, stuck on a ship in the middle of the greatest of seas—but dance?

  “I know a dancing song. It was a shepherd’s tune I heard once. Sad, but lovely. It makes me think of one shepherd boy who made me laugh.”

  “One of your seductions,” I said.

  She began humming a slow, haunting melody. It reminded me too much of the kinds of old songs my mother would lull me to sleep with when I was too young to know words or meanings. It was not the same tune, but had the same peaceful quality.

  I took her in my arms and we moved about the bedroom, clumsily and without a sense of rhythm. The room spun slowly about us, as if it were unwinding, and I felt as if we stood still in an embrace while the Earth circled us.

  Then she drew back from me, breaking off the tune, and turned away.

  “What is it?”

  “I have not thought of that melody since I was a child,” she said.

  “In your first mortal life,” I whispered.

  “In all these centuries, I had not remembered such music. Simple music, the kind the shepherd boys would play, and we would...we would dance.” She clutched her head as if trying to tear the mask from her face. “This abomination has brought this to me. This terrible cursed thing!”

  I embraced her from behind and grasped her wrists in my hand. “You will only hurt yourself.”

  “I had several years of freedom as a child. I would have become a priestess of the great Python of Pergamos one day. I would have remained a virgin until such a time as the oracles ceased speaking through my tongue. I would have then bound myself to a man, and had a life...a short life, with a husband and children. I loved a boy who tended the flocks. His name was Micahel. He had promised we would bind our lives together when he no longer worked for others but had his own goats and sheep. But then...before my twentieth year, after serving the Serpent as a guide for those men and women who wished the blessings of the gods, my father heard strange words of prophecy as the grasses turned in the wind. His journey took him and my mother and sisters to those cities that even I have not seen, though I have dreamed of them.”

  “Myrryd?” I asked.

  She nodded, as I released her hands.

  I stepped back from her, but she remained facing away from me. “You know Myrryd?”

  “I was not long there.” Her voice trembled as she spoke. “A terrible place, a vast labyrinth of crimson towers, dug deep into the chasms of the land, and then emerging from it, titans of a lost earth, as mountains rise from beneath the sea. Mortals call it the place of the fire-colored sea. It is a red place, and a nest for creatures that never know the sun or moon. It is a place of doom and despair. A fitting grave for the vampyre kings and their priests. It is a city of bones and empty streets, and no mortal who has entered has left, and no vampyre dares pass its gates, for it takes their magick and power, and none return from it since the fall of the priests.”

  “When did you go there?” I asked.

  “When my mother passed me the Sacred Kiss,” she whispered. “She, a queen of many lands, wife of Merod, pressed her mouth over mine as she slit my throat. I fled the city as soon as I could, for in its depths...a terrible ancient sorcery burned beneath it. It was to Pergamos and Alkemara I went to live, and rule as Pythoness in the temples of Datbathani, Our Lady of Serpents. But Myrryd is in my nightmares. Artephius has been there, for he sought its magick. He has told me of the riches and lore found in its deepest vaults, in those places where even vampyres do not go. Yet, Myrryd stole much from him, and he barely escaped. It is where he stole the grimoire, with secrets of Medhya within it. The words of blood on pages of human skin. My father had once read these as well. Artephius bound the scrolls of Medhya’s blood and flesh, and the sinew of the gray priests of the Nahhash bind it—and it is from this grimoire that he learned much of his art.”

  “He would destroy us both, given the chance. You should never have allied yourself with that alchemist.”

  “Your father?” When she saw the blank stare I offered at her words, she shook her head. “But you know it is true. He loved me. He loved you, though he might sacrifice us both. I cannot blame him for what he seeks—all wish for immortality on this Earth.”

  “It is for his own vanity he seeks it. He would destroy all vampyres...and mortals, as well...” I began, but did not continue the thought.

  “Yes,” she said. “But if he found the essence of immortality itself, he would bring Death to her knees. I have seen Death herself when I was a priestess—she is a child, blinded
by the storm ravens, who wanders where there is suffering, attended by her handmaidens, who guide her to those who suffer most. I do not wish to see her. I do not wish to know the taste of mortal death again.”

  “I do not believe the alchemist would serve the good of the mortal world with this knowledge,” I said. “I believe he would create gods and terrors to enslave the kingdoms of men.”

  “As we have done?” she asked, without expecting an answer. “Sometimes, when I go into the day’s sleep, I think I deserve a terrible death. Mortality has put me in mind of the crimes I have committed. As an immortal, they were no crimes for me to grieve. But as a mortal woman, I have done such things as monsters dream of. My instinct is to murder, to drain the mortal of blood, and to love the act.”

  I wished to take her mind from such troubling thoughts. “The tune you hummed moments ago, that your shepherd boy taught you—are there words?”

  She nodded, and began singing:

  Upon a hill, beyond the fields,

  A maiden lives with sorrow gray

  And I shall go and catch her tears

  For greater than gold are they.

  And I shall make of them a crown

  To rest upon her lovely head

  And it will shine above her brow

  Even after she is dead—

  And when she dies I, too, shall go

  To fields where the dead remain

  To make a crown of sorrow

  That she might wear it once again.

  She broke off suddenly. “It is a song of mortality. You will make a crown of sorrow one day. I have not thought of death for thousands of years. It has not concerned me. I did not think a mortal vampyre could exist. I will begin to grow old, as well, for I can feel the pull of the Earth upon me.”

  She drew the drape from the small window at the door.

  Looking out, she said, “I have not felt mortal concerns before. Even in my mortal life, I did not think of death. Even when the Sacred Kiss was bestowed upon me, I had no fear, though my body grew cold in the grave for three nights. My mother brought me to this existence, but with my father looking on. My sisters, too. We were more than his children. We were his slaves. Do you understand what that means? Yes, I believe you do. We were slaves to his will and his whim and his ambition. He was not just a Priest of Blood, of the Kamr priests. He was a king of Pergamos and of Alkemara and of what remained of Myrryd itself, though other rulers sat upon the thrones of their palaces. I ruled my people in my provinces. Yet, I hated him for how he had cursed us with the Sacred Kiss. And yet...to be immortal again...”

  She turned back to face me and clutched her belly. “A child grows here, where none should. You—the only vampyre who could plant a seed within a mortal woman—have done this to me. I see my death, Maz-Sherah. I see it in your love. I have no love in my heart, but you...you are close to your youth, even now. You are but a short time from the end of your mortal life. Love still lives within you. I own a mortal heartbeat now, but I have no heart within me. I have done terrible things in my long existence. I cannot undo them, nor do I believe they were against my nature. When I first brought you the Sacred Kiss, and the breath of immortality, the terror I felt...of knowing I had awakened a new Maz-Sherah. That all the terrible visions I had of my own destruction would come to me through you—and I was the instrument of your becoming vampyre. If I had but killed you...”

  “You must not look at the past in this way,” I said. “What is done is done. We cannot grieve those footsteps in the mud behind us, for to retrace them is not to wipe them clean but to set ourselves deep in the clay and be unable to move forward.”

  “Your words bring no comfort,” she said. She touched the edge of her upper lip, at the border of the mask and her flesh. “This has stolen my immortality. This, too,” she said, again pressing her hands into her belly. “This child will steal my mortality. I have felt it. My body is not made for this birth.” Her eyes glistened with tears. “I am weak from mortality. I am heavy from it. I grow sick when I awaken, and it is the illness of the lowliest maid whose child grows within her.”

  “It is life, within you,” I said.

  “Or death. This is the fulfillment of all the prophecies I know,” she said. She approached me and put her hands against my face. The gold mask shimmered as she approached me. “It is you who breached the Veil, and brought the Myrrydanai through—by your presence alone, and by your taking of the Veil’s juice into your blood. You burned the stream, nearly destroying it, when you allowed another vampyre to drink of your Veil-tainted blood. I felt this even across the sea. Within you, my father lives—for you fulfilled a prophecy when you devoured him. It is not his body that is within you, but his soul. He seeks a way out from you, as well. But you polluted my body with the creation of this child. I do not know if this child is monster or mortal, vampyre or goddess, but it is a door for the Dark Madonna who wishes our destruction—and the enslavement of the mortal realm. But even against all this, I have that terrible mortal instinct to protect this child, though it is a passageway for Medhya and the end of our kind—and the destruction of much that exists on this Earth.”

  “I have learned in these years that all that is prophesied by the ancient ones does not come to pass.”

  “I have lived longer, and I have seen too many prophecies made flesh.” Saying this, she reached up and sliced a fingernail against my cheek, drawing blood. She held her bloodstained hand to her face. “If I were to kill myself, the child would die with me. If I bled, I would pass away as any mortal.”

  I grabbed her wrist, drawing it from her face. “What if our child is the reason we are both here? What if there is another prophecy, unknown to you? What if all that was once written is dead, and all that we write, here, today, lives for the future? What if I prophesy that our child will grow in daylight, and will become a great mortal, and will be part of a world that Medhya cannot touch?”

  She tried to strike me with her hands, but I held them tight. “When you have lived as I,” she spat at me, “then you will understand. When you see a thousand times a thousand mortal lifetimes pass, then you may begin to know how these prophecies come to light. For you, I waited through the ages, and when you came, I knew you, for I had studied such things and found scrolls you could not hope to decipher. I worshipped gods that were like you, Falconer. But I watched those gods break like fragile stone against the trembling of time itself. You learn through visions, Maz-Sherah. You have seen many. But have you seen the vision of the priestess who wears the gold mask?”

  As she spoke, I felt something clutch at my throat. I did not want to remember such visions.

  “On a bleak plain,” she said, her voice growing soft as she spoke, cold and soft, and lulling me into a memory I did not want to recall. “Wearing ceremonial robes. Holding a curved knife, meant to be used for sacrifice. Do you remember such a thing? Yes, I see the light in your soul as it flickers with the memory. My father showed you that moment. He revealed the objects necessary for such a sacrifice upon a great altar stone. He is there in that vision, is he not? With his tattoos coming alive upon his body? The Nahhashim staff. The curved blade. The mask of Datbathani upon the maiden’s face. But did you notice the swelling of that maiden’s belly? Did you notice the sky on fire all around? The beasts of the Veil beginning to come through? Did you hear the whispering of the Myrrydanai at their great moment of becoming? This was not some dream you have had, nor some idle unspoken prophecy.

  “Shall I tell you what will happen? I have shared this vision, too, and read of it in the ancient scrolls. I saw it when I brought the Sacred Kiss to you. It is the last day of light in the world, Maz-Sherah. It is the day when the Veil tears, and those beasts of Hell draw Medhya into the world upon their backs. The plagues sent from the Veil are but harbingers of this terrible night to come. The Earth slowly turns to an age of winter, and even now, famine reaches across the seas. Soon ice will cover more than the sea beyond Taranis-Hir. Plagues have come from the Myrrydana
i and the bog sorcery, and spread on the winds. Mortals grow weak, and the dream of the Disk has persuaded them to accept the words of the whispering shadows. What my father called the Myrr—that invisible boundary—a glass that fueled the city of Myrryd, brought from the Veil by the first priests—will cover the world in darkness. We are the instruments of this. My father held the gate closed to Medhya within his own body, and he could not be destroyed by ordinary means. Only the Maz-Sherah could take him into his flesh, and only you—only you, Falconer—contain that locked door, behind which Medhya may come through. I tell you, I know this will destroy you, and you will break like those statues of heroes and gods that are broken along the walls of Alkemara. We have both had the vision of the altar. Altars exist for sacrifice. You and I are there, and I am shackled as the victim of this ritual.”

  We both went silent.

  “We have both failed,” I said, after several minutes. “The vision I saw of the maiden at the altar was not fulfilled in sacrifice, though it seemed it. Nor did I see terror in her face. It was a mystery put before me—and before you. It is something that cannot be spoken of in words, but must be lived, I think, for in visions, all is not as it seems. If this is you, in this vision, perhaps it may yet be undone. We will not know if we do not continue our journey. I believe our child may grow into a great leader, and should we fail in this quest to destroy the Myrrydanai, and to mend the Veil that Medhya and the leviathans and behemoths of this other world do not cross into the world of mortal men and women, perhaps our child will have the strength to be more than a daughter of Alkemara, and a Maz-Sherah. For I have heard that many Maz-Sherah have failed over the centuries, and if I join them, I believe what you and I create in this child may overcome our failings.”

  At first I thought she intended to attack me, for she rushed to me swiftly, and embraced me as if to choke me into my Extinguishing. She did not weep, nor did she speak, but she held me for a long moment, and only released me when we heard the shouts of sailors on the decks.