The Last Immortal : Book One of Seeds of a Fallen Empire

by Anne Spackman

  * * * * *

  Two long months had passed without word from Eiron.

  Alessia was watching Kesney and Klimyata pruning the fruit trees in the botanical garden; Kesney turned to bestow a smile on the sad-eyed, single woman sitting gracefully by the lane despite her condition.

  Alessia was clearly carrying a child. Kesney continued to register that fact daily with no small sense of awe. She seemed unburdened by the weight of it, unlike any woman he had known, possibly because she was no real woman; her physical strength alone set her apart from everyone.

  Was she really a human? he sometimes still wondered. Even though she claimed to be of the same people as the Tiasennians and Orians, he still wondered. Alessia had changed, seemed more human since she became attached to Eiron—but was that merely an illusion? And was there some secret ghost face lurking beneath the many illusions she chose to wear?

  He didn’t know, but he surprised himself that he didn’t care. If she had been a ghost, why should she bother to help them all? She didn’t need anyone, or anything from anyone in return, or so he thought.

  “Kesney!” Alessia called suddenly, a note of panic in her voice. He heard a scrambling sound as she dropped a metallic instrument to the ground.

  “What is it?” Kesney turned to her, but something instinctive in him read the signs as Alessia struggled to her feet in the middle of the lane, clutching herself where the baby hung low.

  “What is it?” Klimyata echoed, coming closer, but she stopped, nodding understanding. “I’ll call Doctor Nara,” she said.

  Dinia Nara, the woman who had become the ship’s unofficial child delivery specialist joined Alessia, Kesney, and Klimyata a few minutes later in the ship’s delivery room where Alessia had been taken, and Kesney and Klimyata left to send word to their friends.

  The labor of Alessia’s child was short and the delivery uncannily quick; Doctor Nara soon noticed that many things about this birth were entirely wrong, but she kept her face studiously blank. How could it be that none of the drugs she used seemed to have any affect on Alessia’s body? What made it worse was that Alessia herself had warned Nara that this might happen. Alessia had told Nara a few tendays ago that none of the original Seynorynaelian explorer crew had ever been able to have children after they had been given an experimental serum, and that none of them had been able to feel physical pain longer than a moment. That left Nara little to go on.

  Alessia began screaming obscenities some time later. That went on for a while, then suddenly it seemed the pain was gone. Nara shook her head a moment in confusion, then stared in shock at something outside Alessia’s vision.

  Impossible, Nara protested. There had been no blood, no amniotic fluid—nothing resembling human birth when Alessia’s child came into the world. The baby emerged impossibly quickly, surrounded in a cocoon of bright light that made the doctor flinch. To Nara, it almost appeared as though the tiny creature had not been born of living matter but from energy itself.

  Was she, Nara, the only one who had witnessed this? Would anyone else believe her if she told them what she had seen?

  Nara reached forward to extract the infant. To all appearances, the baby was normal now—almost normal, anyway. It was a girl, Nara noticed, though that seemed trivial after what she’d already seen. She slapped the baby to make her cry, but the child only let out a plaintive whine in protest.

  There was nothing to cut, no umbilical cord. Had the energy dissolved it? Nara wondered. It was too much to think about.

  The baby was uncannily warm. Was the child even human? Nara couldn’t help but wonder.

  Nara wrapped the girl in a blanket and hurriedly passed the infant to Alessia, who was insisting on holding her child.

  Alessia took notice of nothing unusual and regarded her baby with a mother’s adoration, blind to imperfections and abnormalities. Alessia marveled at the tiny hands and features. The undersized girl was premature, as much as half of a Tiasennian month, a long time considering that there were 134 days in each of the six months.

  The baby stared into her mother’s face with wide, wondering eyes like a dark sea.

  “She has your eyes,” Doctor Nara remarked, trying to find something pleasant to say. The child was beautiful, but the eyes were unsettling.

  How much truth was in Nara’s assessment, though, Alessia couldn’t be sure. It was still too early to distinguish features, but her daughter seemed pure Seynorynaelian.

  Alessia held her breath as the child stared serenely into her mother’s eyes.

  “What’s wrong?” Nara asked, trying to read the strange expression on Alessia’s face.

  “It’s nothing.” Alessia smiled down at the baby. “She just reminded me of someone I haven’t thought about in a long time.”

  The memories came back so easily now! As a child, Alessia had met the woman Selerael one day in the forest around Lake Firien. Alessia had thought she saw someone in the shadow of a large tree watching her, and had turned her head to stare at the intruder. Whoever it was hid among the trees at first but returned soon after. Alessia remembered calling out to her, asking if the stranger wanted to share her sherin fruit.

  The woman had agreed to share it and sat down beside her on the fallen tree-trunk. For more than five years, Selerael had been her friend until Alessia met Hinev and was taken by force away to be his assistant in Ariyalsynai.

  “What are you going to name her?” Nara asked.

  “You know what, I was going to call her Nerena, after my mother.”

  “But?”

  “Now I think I’ll name her Selerael.” Alessia said.

  “Suh-lair-ay-ehl? That’s an unusual name.” Nara glanced down at the little girl and began to speak pretty but incoherent words to her. “But you know,” she said after a moment, “it’s not bad. I think it suits her. Erael—doesn’t that mean ‘angel’ in ancient Orian?”

  Alessia nodded. “What do you think, Selerael?” Alessia asked.

  Selerael just stared at her mother with eyes that suddenly seemed far too old to belong in the face of an infant.

  They were just like Alessia’s eyes, and not human at all.

  Turning away a moment and breathing hard, Alessia blinked several times, denying what she thought she had seen and grasping her baby tighter with a surge of fiercely protective, unconditional love. When, seconds later and with her pulse racing, she dared to look again at Selerael, she only saw an ordinary but not unremarkable infant. With a sense of elated relief, Alessia grudgingly surrendered Selerael to Nara, who took the child away to be weighed.