by Chris Howard
Oh, this is exquisite! I am the only Wreath-wearer with two bleeds and that is because my father was pure Telkhines. No other has had two, and I know of no other among the Seaborn with more than two. Did not know this was even possible.
Kassandra clawed at her desk, the blood loss catching up to her. Her face was bone white. Her fingers loosened, and the plate with half a sandwich crashed to the floor. Zypheria jumped to her side, grabbing her by the arm to stop her from falling off the bed.
Kassandra's eyes went unfocused. Her lips, nearly the same color as the skin around them, drew back, baring her teeth. “Eupheron! Proktos! Tell me now!"
Kassandra, you dear girl, you are also bleeding off your Dosianax grandfather, King Tharsaleos. Oh, I wish I could see his face. What would I not give to see that? He knows it's slipping from him, and there's nothing he can do about it.
He can kill you, muttered Andromache.
Oh, Kassandra, you have made me the happiest man in the sea! Eupheron's cheering voice swam numbingly through Kassandra's head, and she gave Zypheria one pleading look. “Make it stop.” Her voice was barely audible.
She fell into a tight curl on her bed, her body shaking feverishly. She squeezed her eyes shut and shoved her hands against her ears.
Zypheria hesitated over the decision to tell Lord Gregor that his daughter needed a doctor, and then threw her arms around her, shuddering with her own inner pain, tears streaming down her face onto Kassandra's bare back. Her lips trembled with soft words, the salt of her tears on her tongue.
"Sleep, Kassandra. Everything will be fine, my baby girl. I am here.” She forced her eyes open, blinking through the tears, struggling to focus on something in the outside world, because when she closed them, the same memory haunted her, the stifled cry of a little girl with big dark eyes staring up at her, begging her governess to stop hurting her.
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Chapter Ten
The Night Wanderers
Slash the gullet of the neck, and let the blood of this sacrificial victim flow into the murky depths of the reeds as a drink for the lifeless. Call upon primeval Earth and chthonic Hermes, escort of the dead, and ask chthonic Zeus to send up the swarm of night-wanderers from the mouths of the river, from which this melancholy off-flow water, unfit for washing hands, is sent up by Stygian springs.
—Aeschylus, Psychagogoi, F273a
* * * *
Aleximor floated a foot above the ocean's floor, staring down at a flat stretch of dark gray sand. The gloomy water closed in around him, but he didn't notice. He whispered something to himself. Corina didn't catch all of it, but it sounded like he had said the words, “broken bones."
He raised his left hand, palm up, and spread his fingers until the webbing went tight between them. Without turning his eyes away, he reached down and pulled out the dive knife.
He gripped the handle with his thumb against the back of the blade, and cut into Corina's hand, carving deep from the meaty bulge below the thumb, diagonally across his palm to the first knuckle of the little finger.
Blood gushed in the wake of the knife blade, dark thick and red. Corina felt the pain, but the brightness of her blood startled her. When she'd cut her right hand on the cave's rocky walls, her eyes weren't capable of seeing color at that depth. It had looked like strips of black ribbon in the water.
Aleximor let his eyes stray to the horizon of sand. There was something reddish brown crawling across the floor close to him, but it was blurry, and he didn't appear to notice it. Corina urged his neck to swivel. Nothing happened. He appeared to know exactly what he was doing, and so Corina followed him in ignoring it. It's probably a crab.
Aleximor spun in the opposite direction, away from the reddish shape, and his eyes dropped to a soft swirling movement at his feet. He kicked and circled a small depression that had formed. The gray fluid sand eroded under clawing fingers.
Something was digging out.
"Gather to me,” he said in a clear commanding voice. “To each of you, apneumeones, I say I bind your psyche, your tongue, your thumos, your hands, your nous in obedience to me. I call any who have not tasted Lethe."
He curled into something close to a sitting position while he floated a few meters off the sandy floor.
Aleximor drew a series of deep breaths to calm himself, and closed his eyes, singing softly, “a door into the pit of Erebos where dark fears darkness” and how he “possessed the secret that keeps defiled Persephone under the world."
Corina couldn't imagine that these words contained anything but some ritual meaning for him. Perhaps they calmed him down in preparation for some further step. He had already cut open her hand, spilling her blood into the currents.
His meditative state caused a flood of strange thoughts and knowledge to wash over Corina's mind, words in his language, nekuomanteion meant a place for necromancy, a doorway to death, a place for raising or communicating with the dead. Another word, katabasion, was the path a go?s—a sorcerer—followed down into death. Corina imagined a long dimly lit stone stairway and the steps crumbled to sand behind her feet. The dead were brought toward life, pulling the living sorcerer closer to death. Only the go?s who achieved something like living-death could hope to draw the dead entirely into the living world without losing his footing and falling into death.
Then he called on the Erratic One, Akast?—she who owned the souls of the drowned.
Aleximor did something with her knife, brought it above her head, but with her eyes closed, she couldn't tell what it was. He went still for a moment and then sang, “I break the wall of the Moiriai, and make my offer to the hater of life, lady without mercy, Akast?. Bitter blood untasted. Let not this nor my challenge go unheeded. The wall thins, pass to me the psychai of the five whose flesh and bone are buried in the ocean floor, clinging to the worm-eaten ribs of the ship that bore them courageously from Iberia."
A bright light flared in front of him, orange and red like roaring flames. It radiated through his eyelids, dying after a moment to an ember's glow. He opened his eyes and slid Corina's knife into its sheath.
A rippling line of fire burned in the dark water, running from the sand to forty feet above Aleximor, as if someone had cut a long thin line in this reality and into another at a volcano's heart.
A voice as cold as the depths of the sea rumbled through the opening, a woman's low voice. “No introduction, young demander? What do you call yourself? Come closer."
Aleximor stiffened in fear. He kicked, an uncontrollable spasm. He released a breath, drew another one, and answered in a commanding tone, “Give me the names of the five, and I will close this door. Erratic One, I know you and your tricks,” he added as if that added weight to his demands. “That is enough."
Corina's thought tumbled down a treacherous slope carved out by fear. They stopped on this last point. He knew the thing behind the line of fire, but he didn't want the speaker to know his name.
Aleximor! Corina screamed it without another thought. If the thing behind the door could hear her, maybe it could take him and leave her behind.
Please, help me. His name's Aleximor.
Corina felt Aleximor tighten his jaw, as if he feared that her shouting thoughts would reach his lips.
So, he can hear me clearly.
His eyes unfocused. He concentrated inward on her, and she felt him searching. Corina didn't know how to flee inside her own head, but the fear of him catching her was tempered by the feeling of rocks digging into her bare feet. There was something familiar about the pain of hard sea-rounded boulders, firm ground under her, even though Aleximor had not set her feet down on the floor. She felt him looking at her, but across some gulf that he could not cross. Then his eyes shot to the glowing line in the water.
Corina's focus snapped back to her surroundings. She heard the same deep woman's voice. “Swept from the deck of their ship by a storm, which soon broke against the waves and these five clung to its pieces all the way to the bottom. The
y are Porfirio, Cordareo, Damas and Alois. The fifth, Macario, is beyond. He has sworn his oath, and will never rise to your command. You may have their life's power as you have complied with the forms laid down by the Lord of the Sea."
"Surnames,” Aleximor demanded.
"I offer you enough. You must...” Her voice broke off.
Corina felt Aleximor go cold under the wetsuit.
Akast? said, “Another's blood I taste. I have no memory of it. Your voice has changed, but I know it, though I have not heard it recently. Come inside, I would speak with you."
Aleximor's hands went to claws, some kind of defensive position. He screamed a long string of words, something about sealing and darkness.
Corina's sense of translation failed her when he spoke rapidly, and it was distracting to hear her own shrieking voice.
The line of fire, the doorway, burned bright then went black with a hiss, like water thrown on a campfire.
The voice of the one beyond it crackled angrily through the closing seam. “You are the nekuomantis, Alexim—"
The doorway closed, and Aleximor drifted in the dark, stunned into silence. He slumped forward, breathing like an enraged ox—which was also strange since he managed to do it with Corina's body. He was moving facial muscles she didn't know she had.
He flipped both his hands in front of him. The deep gouge in the left was already closing up, a bloodless pale lip of skin running from the lower edge of the palm to the top right corner. He focused on the shreds of roughly torn skin in his right hand. His fingers trembled, and Corina sensed both fear and anger.
He had given himself the name, Aleximor, but it wasn't the first time he had taken a name.
While Aleximor drifted in weariness, staring at his hands, Corina's feeling of despair returned stronger. She knew his real name. What could she do with it? It gained her nothing. What would that thing beyond the line of fire have done with him?
Corina played with one of the new words she had learned, nekuomantis, which meant something like “prophet of the dead."
The feelings, the knowledge, the new words affected her in a strange way. A whole world opened up inside her soul. Her first attempt at identifying the feeling began with the assertion: There are mountains in my mind. This didn't sound right, but that's what she felt, a force wrenching her thoughts, as if they all rode along in a car and could lean back against gravity and inertia when rolling down a steep slope. There is terrain in my soul. Thoughts have momentum. There was something right about this, but she couldn't pin it down or confirm it.
Aleximor tilted his head back, let out a long breath and blinked forcefully as if he had trouble staying awake. He looked over at the four dead men who had dug their way out of their tombs beneath the ocean's floor.
They were nothing but rot-streaked bones and a few threads of tendon. Some kind of life force, given to each by the thing behind the door, burned in them and kept them together. One wore armor, a corroded shell of blackened metal that hung from his shoulder bones on broken strips of rust. It looked like something the Spanish had worn in the 1500s. He was a conquistador. He'd lost his helmet, but he still had what was left of a long skinny sword.
The four of them stood shoulder to shoulder, facing outward, on bones that shouldn't have been able to hold them up. Aleximor circled them in the water.
They didn't move, but the one in armor tilted his skull to follow Aleximor. The pale glow of yellow fire beamed from empty sockets of bone.
"Release me,” he begged with a thin ragged voice. “And I will serve you on death's bor—” His voice cracked and faded. “—der."
A weary smile stretched along Aleximor's lips. His right hand slid down Corina's leg to the knife. He fumbled with the snaps and tugged the blade free.
The faces of the skulls turned to him, no means of expressing feelings remained in the threads of tissue and tendon. Aleximor kicked to position himself above the four. He started with the one named Porfirio, grabbing the Spaniard by the forehead, working the tip of the knife into the back of the skull. The blade punched through old bone. Aleximor twisted the blade and in one smooth motion, brought out a thumbnail-sized chunk of sea-rotted skull. He slid the blade back in its sheath and jammed the piece of Porfirio into Corina's water-tight pouch.
Without a word he performed the same bone-taking ritual on the others. Finished, he circled them like a predator. The hollows of their eyes followed him.
"You four, bound to me through the grudge-holding one's consent. I command you to find and guard my old stronghold. You will wait for me there."
The dead did not answer. Each one shuffled in the sand so that they faced each other, expecting further instruction.
Aleximor sang softly about the dark oceans. His new voice sounded less like her old one. Corina could hold a note, and sing well, but Aleximor created things with his voice. The sound swirled around him, a current of light spiraling in the heavy dark fluid. His voice went higher, and more currents joined the first. They came together between the four dead Spaniards. A dark glistening globe expanded in the middle of the group with the currents feeding it like umbilical cords.
A mountainous scene formed in the globe, dark and jagged against a black night. There were no stars, and Corina realized she must be looking at the bottom of the ocean somewhere else.
The view inside the globe moved closer to the underwater mountain range, like a camera mounted on a submarine. The speed increased. The mountains drew nearer. The moving scene tilted left a little and passed between a spine of crumbling black hills and sheer cliffs.
Aleximor's voice rose above the currents, directing the path they followed in the globe. He spoke of returning along the route taken by Magellan around the cape at the southern tip of South America.
Corina watched without thinking, wondering where this was leading. They moved into the Atlantic Ocean and headed directly north. She passed massifs and deepwater vents that belched boiling clouds of chemical blackness; she skirted sheer drops into the abyss, and crossed endless flats of miles-deep desert.
Aleximor's whispering told them to pass the Great City of the Seaborn, the Nine-cities. A pale blue glow on the seafloor's horizon was an entire city ... of others like him?
Corina's thoughts begged for a better look, but the scene passed by.
The path led further north then turned west into a range of serrated rock that rose thousands of feet above the plain. These were just the foothills to distant mountains that cut through the dark in steep zigzags.
She felt Aleximor tense up. They were nearly there. The scene stopped high in the mountains, along a ledge that jutted from a cliff's vertical face. Aleximor whispered a long string of noise. She couldn't understand it. It could have been one long word, or a bunch of them run together.
A key.
The rock wall before them dissolved into a cave mouth wide enough to drive a truck through. The glow of fire or molten rock flickered against the cut and polished walls.
The movie ended, and jarred Corina's thoughts back to the Pacific and inside the body she now shared with a four-hundred year old sorcerer.
Aleximor turned his eyes to the four dead he had raised, pointed south with his arm stretched out. She could just see her metallic blue fingernail polish on the index finger.
"Go."
He had spent every ounce of energy opening the door, summoning the powers behind it, animating four of the dead, and feeding them their directions.
This body was so foreign and he was so tired, he could barely focus his eyes, but he managed to push the lids up and keep them on the four dead Spaniards as they passed out of sight.
"Which one is your favorite, Corina Lairsey? You choose, and that will be the one in which I bind your soul."
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Chapter Eleven
Displeased
Without approaching the nature of the power (magic) possessed by the Seaborn, let me discuss my meager understanding of the process by which the
power “bleeds” from parent to child or grandchild. I will also put aside the apparent differences in the bleeds of power possessed by the nearly extinct House Telkhines, which contained the old royal line, some of whom could multiply their bleeds, passing it to all their children at once.
—Michael Henderson, notes
* * * *
King Tharsaleos, Lord Dosianax, ruler of all the Seaborn, kicked to the arched ceiling of the city's pan-assembly arena, making Stratolaos, his favorite cousin, swim the tall space to him.
The hall was wide enough for an army of a thousand to stand shoulder to shoulder in a single row. Tall men could stand, sole to shoulder, in a vertical line of two hundred, without reaching the arched ceiling. The kings and queens of the Seaborn had been crowned in the hall for thousands of years.
When Stratolaos reached the king, he back-kicked and curled into a bow. “Lord."
Tharsaleos tilted his head back, glaring at the old soldier through narrowed lids. The glow from a hundred lights, set in an even row halfway up the walls, lit them from below and cast monstrous shadows over the painted ceiling. The lights glinted off the king's crown, a gold circlet with a single tine in the middle and two segmented horns that spiraled back through his white hair on each side.
The glow of the lights slanted off the king's armor of gold plates so thin and flexible they appeared to dissolve into one smooth sheet.
"I am saddened, Stratolaos.” He said the words with the appropriate amount of sympathy in his expression, then went back to glaring. One corner of his mouth twisted into a sly smile that disarmed those who'd never met him. Those who had, understood the king had never been sly in his life. Cruelly deceptive and secretive, yes, but sly was for amateurs and children. Tharsaleos appeared to have never been either.
On the rare occasion when smiling was required, he assented. He smiled, for instance, when he married his first wife—Queen Pythias of Alkimides, the Wreath-wearer—and again, years later, after commanding a trusted assassin to return with her pretty head.
