The Queen of Wolves

by Douglas Clegg

  “You will not have a moment’s breath here,” I whispered to her as I dropped beside her.

  “Freedom,” came the raspy voice from within the dead woman’s lips, though they did not move. I felt something clutch at my heart as I drew the Nameless out.

  I fell upon the corpse as it reanimated, holding the broken body down to the earth with my knees. I looked into those dark eyes and saw the terrible beauty of that ancient queen as she sought to escape her prison. Breath that reminded me of the stench of the canals that ran beneath Myrryd came from her lips as she said, “Maz-Sherah, you will be my prince,” and these words were her last.

  “For the Great Serpent, I do this,” I told her. I brought the fire of the blade into her heart, and tore a path through those broken bones up to her throat. As I held the hilt inside the body, I felt as if I were hanging on to the pommel of some wild stallion, struggling to grasp the blade from within the burning body. Finally, there was stillness. The Veil was not mended, but it had closed, and had drawn back its prisoner.

  I thrust the blade deep into her, and left it there until the Asmodh fires tore through the body.

  “It is done,” I said when I sheathed the blade.

  All grew quiet, and the fire died down.

  I turned to face the throng who had watched the ritual, and the burning of the corpse of their queen.

  Calyx had risen, staunching the flow of her bleeding with strips of torn cloth; several of the Akkadites had gone to her to tend this wound.

  My daughter stood, bound and blindfolded upon the scaffolding, and it was Pythia who undid the bindings and drew off the blindfold that she might see.

  9

  Several fires were set throughout the city before dawn, and many who still clung to the Disk and its dreams escaped the fall of Taranis-Hir and fled to other kingdoms and lands for shelter and sanctuary. With less than an hour until dawn, the tower of White-Horse was the first to burn like a great torch against the purple sky.

  Ophion had not been able to find the grimoire, and I guessed that Artephius had fled the city long before the battle had begun. Where had he gone? That night I could wonder this, but in years to come, the mystery grew—for I did not trust the alchemist, nor his book of Medhyic art.

  There I stood, before the light of the world came again from its dark edge. Surrounding me, the dead and wounded, and the last of the tribe. “Go rest, and those who are healers, seek out those in need of care. Tomorrow night, the city walls come down, and all the towers of white caelum will burn. Those who live here must find other shelter, for the accursed city is fallen and no one—whether in tower or Barrow-Depths—shall ever find rest in Taranis-Hir. And in a hundred years, the Great Forest will overtake the ruins, and in a thousand years, few will remember this place or the Disk and its plagues!”

  10

  When the night came, I rose late, exhausted from the long battle. I smelled the smoke of the fires in the city above. Pythia and I had gone to the Barrow-Depths, and into the study of the alchemist himself to seek our quiet rest. Upon waking, she had already left me, and I rose through the foundries, now in ruins, and up to the streets. Above me, many vampyres flew in the night, hunting those mortals foolish enough to have remained within the city walls.

  When I found Pythia, she brought a covered box, and when she drew back the leather cloth, I saw that it was made of silver.

  I knew what it was, and I drew open its lid, despite the stinging I felt from that metal that is so abhorrent to us.

  I could not help myself, I dropped to the earth and began weeping with joy, for within the box was ash and skull and blackened fragments of bone, broken and crumbled.

  I raised the broken staff, and held the Eclipsis toward the ashes. I spoke the words silently, for I was almost afraid that I could not do this after all that had transpired.

  A wind came up from within the box, and soon the ash whirled about and the bone grew as a tree might, and from the bone, sinew and muscle erupted, veins and organs and flesh blossomed as my beloved friend re-formed before my eyes, the vampyre youth he had been before his imprisonment, as if his flesh and spirit and blood had never burned in the sun.

  “Ewen,” I said, and went to embrace my friend.

  Epilogue

  1

  In Alkemara, with Natalia

  Here I end this tale of my early years as a vampyre—the Maz-Sherah, they said, the “One,” to guide, to lead, to guard this world from the world beyond the Veil, where the demons wander, and where Medhya, in chains, sits upon her twisted throne.

  Natalia turned to me as I told this tale to her, for the meaning went deeper than a mere lost century of plagues and vampyres, a history wiped clean by those who protected the demons themselves.

  She was descended from vampyre blood.

  “Lyan was raised by Calyx—for my daughter never overcame her terror at the vampyres and her belief we were devils. I could guard her, but I could not do more than watch from a distance. Yet, the prophecy of my daughter’s life would come true one day. Calyx lived many years, teaching my daughter old ways within the deep wood. From her line arose great soldiers and scholars and explorers, as well.”

  “And Pythia died?” Natalia asked.

  I nodded. “In our son’s fourteenth year. I held her as a fever took her, a common enough way to die for mortals, but I had not expected such a slight thing to fell this daughter of Alkemara. She squeezed my hand as I saw the yellow-brown spice appear upon her lips, and I knew the child of Death had begun drawing her soul.

  “Ewen remained with me for—oh, that is another history, I think, and should wait for another tale some night. The new tribe—the remaining kings of the Asyrr and Ophion and I—built new kingdoms of our tribe, based on the principles of guardianship of the mortal realm, as it was intended by the first priests before the corruption of Medhya and the loss of Merod and Alkemara. We spent many centuries together, but I am sad to report that all vampyres go to either oblivion or Extinguishing. The Eclipsis and the staff did not resurrect a vampyre from the Extinguishing more than once—it was impossible, even for the Asmodh sorcery. Even I will one day find the darkness of oblivion, Natalia, as those surviving kings of Myrryd met theirs in the centuries that followed the fall of Taranis-Hir. I am not ashamed to say that I sent one or two of them there myself, for some of them became renegades, unwilling to guard mortals. They sought absolute power over them, instead, and so Ewen and I, and others who were loyal to us, had to hunt our own kind—or enlist mortal protectors to do this.

  “When the guardianship is not needed, our numbers will dwindle. Many of those who survived from those past centuries, sleep long in their tombs, awaiting the call. When the Serpent tightens his grip upon us and the Veil grows thin, and the need among the children of the earth is great, that’s the time to gather an army of our kind. We are meant to be shepherds, not wolves, though mortals believe we wear the mask of the wolf upon our faces. And within us, the bloodthirst, our curse.

  “I had followed each descendant in their lives. Micahel spent his life in adventure and scholarship, living with monks when the Inquisition of Vampyres began in Toulouse twenty years after the Taranis-Hir destruction. He saved many of them, and many witches, too, and helped others escape, as he could—though he was one man against many. I had to rescue him more than once from the clutches of the ignorant and suspicious.

  “He was a good man. Better than either of his parents. He wrote histories of our kind, and histories of the lost century that had vanished from other more-established history. He retained his youth for an unnaturally long period though he was not a vampyre. He had only one child, a bastard daughter, and at my son’s death in his one hundred-fiftieth year—when he looked a mere thirty years old—I promised that I would guard his child, and the offspring of all his children.

  “And so I did, through the centuries, when the lies of history and the kings and monks covered the Dark Age that had fallen across the world in that Age of the Serpent an
d the Veil.

  “I brought vampyrism to those who would protect the secrets of Alkemara, and of Myrryd, and as the hunters often did, we searched through the rubble of cities, through the ancient Roman ruins and the temples that lay beneath the cathedrals that grew over the next few hundred years.”

  “But you never revealed yourself to any of my ancestors?” Natalia asked me, as we sat beside the crystal tomb at Alkemara.

  “Some saw me. Your mother—your great-grandfather when he was a boy, as well. From those whom I inspired fear, I drew away, for I did not dare risk their lives—or my existence—by showing them their lineage. But you...you, Natalia. Your curiosity. When I saw you at your bedroom window when you were grieving, and you looked up at me, I knew you were not frightened. Your studies—your scholarship—would find me eventually. Soon enough. You sought me, and it was only then that I felt I could reveal myself to you. I am sworn to protect you. I do not break an oath. But here, in Alkemara, there is something more for you to see. Something more than my early life.”

  “The wolf key,” she said, her eyes showing a hint of excitement. “After all this, what does it unlock?”

  I guided her along the steps to that domed room where once my companions and I had entered—a room turned upside down, with six paths leading off from it. Each arched doorway, marked with an aspect of the Serpent in its dragon form.

  As I led her down the first, we entered a great low-ceilinged room carved from white stone.

  Hundreds of urns stood there, and with each a lid sealed with wax.

  Drawing off the lid of one, I showed her what lay within, protected for centuries there.

  She gasped when she saw the old book, re-bound with a proper leather binding.

  “You found Artephius again?” she asked, as she lifted the Medhyic grimoire.

  “Let us say, he found me,” I said, but I chose not to speak of my later encounters with the alchemist.

  Then I led her into the narrow passages that ran below even the depths of Alkemara, where the streams of black water flow.

  Even there, a secret chamber had been cut from rock, and after I unlocked it, I drew the torch into it that she might see better.

  All that was within the chamber was an old table, one I had bought in the sixteenth century, when Namtaryn’s war had raged across two continents.

  Upon the table, a strongbox that resembled the box in which Natalia’s mother had kept the souvenirs passed down through the generations of her family, but this was of an older wood, a mahogany that had once been polished to a shine. Upon its clasp, a bronze wolf’s head. At its jaw, I had her try the key made of the Chymer wolf tooth and bone.

  Natalia held her breath and inserted the key, and turned the lock of it.

  “Before you open this”—I stayed her hand—”you must know that what I am offering you is both dreadful and wonderful. But I have learned the rituals, and I know the power of this, after so many centuries of study.”

  When she lifted the lid of the box, I heard a long and strange sigh come from her throat.

  “If you wish it, I would bring the breath of eternity into your flesh,” I told her. “For you remind me most of the children I once held and loved. And you remind me of Pythia herself, for your face is like hers, and this is what I saw in you when I first found you. I believe you have a spirit like hers, when she had learned of the sorrows of mortality itself.”

  “But...I could not drink blood,” she insisted.

  “It is not vampyric life I offer,” I said. “It is a gift I have held these many centuries, for the one who might best use it. I have lived as a vampyre for nearly a thousand years. The Veil is never shut for long, for it rips, and those who are exiled there seek to escape to this world. Even the Asyrr were not immune to drawing sorcery from those in the Veil. The present world turns dark again—I feel it in the coming wars. My kind will not last forever, for even the hidden places are drawn into the light. Many of my tribe have fallen to hunters, and many more shall, and I am not sure it is wise for me to bring the Sacred Kiss to more of the dying. Had I given this to my son, Micahel, he might still be here with me. But he refused it. A very few others to whom I offered this, through the years, have also turned it down. But you are different. I sense Pythia’s spirit in you. You have a love for the ancient studies, and a keen mind, and a good heart. I ask that you accept this gift, for it will bring you immortality, but not the decay of death.”

  I drew the golden mask from beneath its silk coverlet.

  Natalia gasped when she saw it.

  “It drank immortality from Pythia. And it holds this power within its metal.”

  “But it...it will never come off. Once I wear it ...”

  “It will own you, yes,” I said. “It is like skin upon the face. You will never grow older than you are now. You will never die. Nor will you extinguish. You will be here to know of all this, until the world’s end. And after, perhaps. You will be a goddess, and know eternal youth. Your children shall be immortal. And when this world grows cold and dark, as it will soon enough, for the Veil tears again—I have felt it—you will rise up against those forces that enter this world. The best a vampyre may be is a guardian of mortal life, for as you feed on cattle, so we feed upon your kind. But the worst of what a vampyre may be is a terror—a corpse of unending thirst, a wolf within the guise of a beautiful youth or maiden. But you will escape this fate. You must keep the mortal world safe, even after all the vampyres are extinguished, and all the mortal protectors vanquished. And when the world begins anew, they will follow you and your children, and create a new world, out of darkness, out of despair. And into hope.”

  I held the mask up. “It is a terrible responsibility I offer you. I do not ordain this. Only you may choose it. But if you accept this mask, and wear it, you will know the secrets of all.”

  Natalia looked at me as if I were mad, then at the mask. “All of human history,” she whispered. “A thousand years in the future.”

  “As long as immortality exists,” I said. “No vampyre or mortal may harm you.”

  Swiftly, she grabbed the golden mask, and before I could warn her against its abuse, she slipped it across her brow.

  With the mask secured to her face, I took her hand. I brought it to my lips, kissing her warm flesh.

  For a flickering moment, as I looked at her eyes and the curve of her lips, I hoped that Pythia had been resurrected within Natalia.

  The breath of eternity was inside her, without death, without suffering, without the thirst for blood.

  Within her, a new Age of the Serpent was born.

  2

  This is the testament of Aleric, Falconer, Maz-Sherah of the tribe of Fallen Ones of Medhya, who unleashed the power of the Nahhashim upon the earth, and raised the old priest-kings of Myrryd to the fight.

  My tombs rest about the earth, and they are called Alkemara, Hedammu, Taranis-Hir, Aztlanteum, Pergamos, and Myrryd, and yet my soul is held in the Asmodh, those depths beneath the earth itself. I am neither a king nor a nobleman, for I was born in the mud of fields and through my talents rose to work in the household of a local baron. My father, the alchemist Artephius, and my mother, Armaela of the Fields, a woman burned for witchcraft and murder. The Serpent once lived within me, for I was the Anointed of my tribe.

  There are other tales of the Lost Century, and of Ages of the Serpent and the Veil, the Namtaryn Wars, and Nezahual’s vengeance upon Pythia for stealing the orb from Ixtar’s lair, but this is the end of my first tale of The Vampyricon.

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