The Dark Blood of Poppies

by Freda Warrington

  “I lied. I used you.”

  “No,” she said fervently. “Your grief will pass. This is a new beginning, not –”

  Sebastian spun round and drove the poker, red-hot and smoking, into Rasmila’s breastbone. She uttered a shriek, the most hideous he’d ever heard, but he bore down with such force that the poker went through her ribcage and into the floorboards beneath. She lay there, pinned, shrieking.

  Sebastian grabbed a firescreen, a heavy sheet of brass with embossed patterns and thick, blunt edges. Fyodor flung himself at Sebastian, clawing wildly and screaming curses in Russian. Ignoring him, Sebastian slammed the metal screen down on Rasmila’s throat and saw her head roll aside in a gout of crimson.

  Her eyes gleamed up at him. Comets and blue stars, dying. She had meant… something to him.

  Sebastian uttered a single sob. And then he saw Fyodor fleeing through the doorway.

  Racing after him, Sebastian caught him within six paces. They ran two steps in the Crystal Ring, then Sebastian hauled him back into the real world.

  As Fyodor twisted around to fight, Sebastian shoved him backwards into one of the big windows. Glass shattered and rained on the courtyard below. The angel’s thin back caught hard across the window ledge. Sebastian heard and felt the dull crunch as the spine broke. Curses became screams. Crazed, Sebastian shook the screaming vampire. He broke his neck against the window frame, slit his throat on broken glass, dropped him head first so that his skull smashed onto the cobblestones thirty feet below.

  Blood oozed, like yolk from a diseased egg, red into the silver hair.

  Sebastian stared down at the angel’s corpse, shaken. I have killed my own gods, he thought. So much energy and rage… and none of it has brought Robyn back to life.

  Calmer now, he returned to the bedroom, lifted Robyn’s body onto the bed and sat beside her for a long time, stroking her face and talking to her.

  “Well, if you weren’t dead, I’d murder you. Look what you’ve done to me. I wanted no company but my own, until I met you. Then you worked on me and turned me against my own nature until I couldn’t exist without you – and then you go and leave me. That is cruelty, Robyn. I thought I was the master, but you’ve surpassed me on every count. I see you’re smiling a little there in your sleep. And you never once told me you loved me. You never surrendered. I admire you for that. So you won after all, and I concede defeat for the first time in my life – but I’m a bad loser, beautiful child. A very bad loser.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  HIEROS GAMOS

  As Simon bore Karl to the floor and sank hooked fangs into his neck for a second time, their minds touched.

  To Karl, Simon seemed a red-gold entity, a lion-god of ancient power who believed himself omniscient and yet did not fully know himself. Always seeking wholeness through others, never finding it. Forever feeding, discarding the drained husks – Fyodor and Rasmila, Cesare sometime in the future, Karl and Charlotte if he could – but afterwards, always, still hungry.

  Clamped in the red embrace, Karl felt Simon’s emptiness but could find no sympathy for such ravening self-obsession. Even to be “chosen” by God was not enough for Simon.

  “I thank God,” Karl whispered into the blond hair, “that I am not like you.”

  The words fell like drops of acid into milk, curdling passion to hatred. Simon raised his head, fangs slicked with Karl’s blood, his eyes wheels of metal, sparking.

  “You had your chance; you are nothing to me now.”

  Karl waited, rigid, for him to feed again. Instead, Simon stood up. As he did so he wrenched Karl’s arm and flung him aside.

  The pain, as muscles tore and immediately began to heal, was so searing that Karl couldn’t move. Struggling, he turned his head to see Violette being held down by Cesare and John – and Simon poising himself above her in the ultimate arrogant expression of conquest.

  Her head was back as she strained to avoid Simon’s mouth, her own mouth open and her fangs extended. Karl willed her to strike, but she appeared defenceless, as if Raqia had withdrawn its fickle strength and poured it all into Cesare’s triumvirate. Her naked grief burned into Karl’s soul. This obscene behaviour is for humans, for brutes, he thought. We should be above it.

  With a surge of will, Karl got to his feet. He looked for a weapon against Simon, anything, even a lit torch – too late. Violette vanished into Raqia, and the brutish trinity dived after her.

  Simon had taken only a few mouthfuls from Karl, not enough to weaken him. Ignoring the explosions of fire running from shoulder to wrist, Karl plunged into the Crystal Ring.

  He saw streaks of darkness against the firmament: Violette was a ragged arrow, with the others nearly close enough to catch her. Yet they did not. They let her flee, as the soot-black fortress above them drew her like a whirlpool.

  Karl saw Violette and her pursuers swallowed by a strange forest. Seconds behind them, he plunged between the weird obsidian trees. The surface beneath him was slick yet rock solid, sheened with ruby redness. Glacial air enveloped him. The silence sang.

  What is this place, he thought, and what’s happening to Raqia?

  He lost all sense of time. The pursuit seemed eternal, mythical, taking place on a mountainscape in a dream.

  He saw Cesare, Simon and John – three demons, grey, dull orange, crimson – catching Violette at the base of the coal-black wall. She pressed against the wall like a pinned moth, or a crucified figure. They were talking, but he couldn’t hear the words until he almost reached them.

  Then he heard Violette say, “Exile,” and Cesare’s cold words, “Go inside.”

  Karl made a desperate effort to catch up. But when he reached them, moments later, Violette had gone.

  Cesare and his comrades turned to look at him. They appeared dangerous and grimly self-satisfied, triumphant knights who’d taken the first victory in a holy war.

  They wanted me to follow them, Karl thought. That’s why Simon didn’t disable me completely.

  “Always the hero,” Simon said, laughing. “Why are you so frantic to protect the witch? She treats you with nothing but scorn. She would have brought death to all if we hadn’t contained her.”

  Karl ignored his taunts. “Where is she?”

  “In the darkness, where she belongs.” Simon waved a radiant hand at the wall. “Will you go after her?”

  “What is this place?”

  Simon only smiled. “Her prison. She brought a tomb into the immortal realm. Now she’s trapped inside. Fitting, isn’t it?”

  “You can’t carry out your plan.” Karl spoke quietly, gazing straight at Cesare. “You cannot overrun the world with vampires. Mankind can’t support us. We’re meant to be solitary, unseen predators, not a brazen army. We are Lilith’s children – not yours.”

  “Sentimentality traps you in the decadent past,” Cesare replied. “The world is changing, and you can’t stop it. You owe us your life – for murdering Kristian, for defying both Simon and me – but you’re not worth executing. You are pernicious, but weak. The Crystal Ring, the mind of God, favours its chosen ones. Who are you to argue? We have brought vampires back to God and defeated Lilith! We’re going home to Schloss Holdenstein now. You have a choice: come back as our prisoner, or go freely after Lilith.”

  Karl knew Cesare was right. He couldn’t defeat them, nor could he leave Violette to face the darkness alone.

  “Go,” Simon said with venom. “Then I can have Charlotte to myself.” Karl looked stonily at him and Simon added, “What should I do – send her to you instead?”

  Karl thought of Charlotte, coming back to find the dancers gone and no sign of him or Violette, searching, never finding them… But he knew she wouldn’t want him to desert Violette. She would do the same herself, he thought in despair.

  “Go on, then.” Simon flourished a hand. “Follow her. I said you’d go to hell with Lilith; am I not a prophet?”

  Not bothering to answer, Karl touched the wall. Although granite-hard a
t first, it liquefied under his fingers. Dread chilled him, froze his heart. Whatever lay beyond, he knew he could never go back…

  Karl stepped forward into sable nothingness.

  For several long moments, the wall held him like a fly in molasses. Then the substance relinquished him. He was inside a space, in darkness so intense that not even vampire sight could penetrate it.

  He walked slowly forward, blind. His arm throbbed, but the injury was healing. Pain was nothing compared to his concern for Violette. That, and fascinated terror.

  Then he saw faint white flames ahead – Violette’s face and hands. She must have been standing with her back to him, then turned to see who was following.

  “Violette!”

  Relieved, Karl hurried to her. The surface beneath his feet felt hard but yielding, like wood. Odd illusion. As he faced Violette, her eyes were huge, swimming with light and fear.

  Realisation hit them both at once.

  “My God,” she exclaimed. “We’re back in human form! But we’re in the Crystal Ring, aren’t we?”

  “We were,” said Karl. “Now I don’t know where we are.”

  She frowned. “Why did you follow me? I didn’t expect or want you to do so.”

  “My choice was between this, or going back as Cesare’s prisoner,” he said patiently. “If I were you, I would rather not be here alone. Are you all right?”

  “I don’t know,” she said briskly. “I’m cold, exhausted, furious and frightened. Other than that, yes, I’m perfectly all right.”

  Karl thought, I should have learned by now that it’s hopeless showing any concern for her. “Then we’d better try to find a way out.”

  “There isn’t one.” A tremor came into her voice. “That’s the point, there is no way out for me. Nothingness forever. Exile, starvation, but never death. That’s why I’m scared, Karl. I don’t know why you had to walk in after me. That must have delighted Cesare! Why is it I can hurt someone like Pierre, who is nothing to me, yet I can’t touch tyrants like Cesare or Simon? Still, it’s too late to rage about them now.”

  Karl looked around. Blackness, in every direction. Terror plucked at him with insistent fingers, whispering inside his skull. He perceived their prison as an infinite construction, groaning under its own weight and age. An oubliette of all human malice and nightmares.

  “I suppose this is what I wanted,” she murmured, “to be out of harm’s way… but where did all this hatred come from – mine, and theirs?”

  “I wish I had an answer,” said Karl.

  “If Josef’s right and Lilith exists only in my own mind – why do others see me as Lilith too? They believe I am Death. The Black Goddess. So now they think they’ve banished Death… but that is impossible. It’s a ludicrous notion, but they need to believe it because they hate me simply for existing… and I don’t know why.”

  Her words sent a chill through him. Irrational, but nothing here held logic.

  “Nevertheless, we can’t give up yet,” he said firmly. “Let’s search for a way out.”

  He moved away from her, seeking the outside wall, but Violette remained where she was. Karl looked back. “We should stay together. It’s too easy to lose each other in this darkness.”

  “No, wait,” she said. Her face floated like an opal on a dark mirror. “Not that way. We must go further in.”

  Turning, she walked directly away from him. Karl had to follow, or lose sight of her. In doing so, he felt a subtle shift as if he’d surrendered his fate to hers: as if he’d willingly become the servant of the dark goddess who possessed Violette.

  * * *

  Although Karl couldn’t see the walls around them, he sensed them by the subtle movement of the air. He felt they were in a cold, haunted room, with a high ceiling and corridors leading from every corner. Then his outstretched hand made contact with an object at waist height. An edge, a flat surface, rough and dusty under his fingertips. A table, an altar?

  Violette moved ahead of him, and he almost lost sight of her. Hurrying after her – relieved to see the glimmer of her arms again – he felt the walls closing in. They were in a tunnel. The air stank of damp stone and mildew, like a deserted house.

  He touched a wall. How strange it felt, rubbery and gelid yet brick-solid, all at once. He searched for a door, found none.

  The tunnel gave way to a square void in which a cold draught sank from above. Violette began very slowly to climb unseen stairs.

  Karl groped for a handrail in the blackness, and found one. The treads felt solid beneath his feet.

  “Whenever anyone tries to pin Lilith down,” Violette said, “she flees. Gilgamesh drove her out of the willow tree. Adam drove her out of the garden and she fled to a desolate place… This is desolate enough, isn’t it? But it isn’t the desert.”

  “What desert?” Karl asked.

  “When Charlotte transformed me, I found myself in the most beautiful wilderness. Sand like dried blood, rocks like rubies. I imagined the place, I suppose, but I belonged there. It was as pure as fire. That is Lilith’s home, a wasteland among wolves and owls…”

  The stairs bent at a right angle and ran up to a landing. There Violette stopped, touching something in the darkness. Karl went to her side and felt panelling under his hands.

  “A door,” she said. She found the handle, and the door swung open without a sound.

  A huge chamber lay beyond. The blackness was no longer absolute; Karl made out faint shapes sketched in dust. Chairs and sofas, the hint of a fireplace at the far end, framed paintings on the walls.

  Violette caught her breath.

  “I’ve been here before,” she said.

  They walked onward. The darkness weighed on Karl like fear. There were strange objects everywhere, tauntingly hard to see. Angular silhouettes: furniture, cabinets? Demon heads, with curling animal horns?

  In this surreal place, he became convinced that the unseen faces in the portraits were those of all his victims, staring at him in blank accusation. And he was trapped with them, for eternity.

  You’ll go to hell with Lilith.

  In rising panic, Karl went to the wall on his right. He found an alcove, felt some cobwebbed fabric like a curtain. Behind was a smooth surface. A window?

  He struck the surface with his fist as if to break the glass and touch the outside world. The blow jarred his arm, re-igniting pain. No glass, no window. Only the nightmare stuff of their prison.

  “What are you doing?” Violette sounded anxious.

  “Just exploring.” Swallowing dread, he went back to her.

  “I know this place,” she repeated. “I’ve made this journey before.”

  “So, where are we?”

  She led him across the chamber to another door. Beyond was a further cavernous room, more strange shadows on the inky air. He touched carved chair backs, traced the shapes of candlesticks on a sideboard. Everything he touched seemed to radiate sighing evil… like the ancient tunnel where Kristian had met his death.

  “It’s where Robyn…” Her voice faltered. “It’s like the house where I found Robyn.”

  “But it isn’t,” said Karl. “It can’t be, can it?”

  More rooms. Doors everywhere, but none to the outside. A long, bare corridor. He could see Violette’s face and arms, her hair a raven shadow against the white flesh, but their surroundings remained obscure.

  More stairs. Violette ascended like a sleepwalker, slow but sure of her purpose. Karl said, “You seem to know where you’re going.”

  She stopped and glanced back at him. “This is my journey, Karl. You don’t have to come.”

  “But I will, if you’ve no objection.”

  “Only you could sound sardonic in this place.”

  “But where is this journey leading you?”

  “I’ve no idea,” Violette said with a shiver.

  Night lay all around them. The house was labyrinthine, infinite. We can never escape, Karl realised, because we are walking through Lilith’s mind.<
br />
  At the top of the stairs were more corridors, endless bare rooms. They opened a door and saw a rocking horse formed of dust in the darkness, glaring at them from black wooden orbs. Doll’s houses, toys, prams, the debris of a hundred lost childhoods lay heaped like ashes.

  The nursery, for no clear reason, filled Karl with terror. Violette’s face mirrored his fear. Her hand hovered near his arm, as if she were on the point of seeking physical reassurance.

  She caught a sharp breath; he thought she was going to weep. Such grief hung in this room. Ghosts crying soundlessly for lost children.

  But she only said, “We must go on. This is the way through.”

  Another door led from the nursery to a narrow passageway. Violette guided him like a candle-flame until they reached a small lobby. The air seemed warmer here, but it was the warmth of airlessness, suffocation.

  Over Violette’s shoulder Karl saw an arched doorway leading to a room so immense he could sense neither walls nor ceiling. But there was a hint of light. A pewter glow sifted down from above as if through a high cupola, like dusty blades of moonlight illuminating nothing.

  Another mystery. He felt they were moving towards the heart of the maze, where some fearful revelation waited to unleash itself.

  Violette stopped in the archway.

  “Karl,” she said, “I have to go on.”

  Was she asking him to stay behind? Her eyes were black with fear, the pupils huge in rings of lapis. “Alone?”

  “It’s your choice. But if you come with me… you can’t go back.” Her breath quickened, as if a tiny lightning fork had stabbed her. “I want you to come with me.”

  “As you wish.” He spoke impersonally, but the midnight air echoed with warnings. This threshold was a point of no return, like a cliff-edge. If he crossed the boundary, something would happen that could never be undone.

  Violette took his hand. The act was out of character, a voluntary touch of reassurance, not conflict. Karl was so startled, so transfixed by this web of mystery, that he went with her.

  They walked to the centre of the chamber, into the pool of coppery phantom light. The doorway vanished in darkness behind them. Facing each other in the heart of nothingness, Karl and Violette were the only creatures who existed in the universe.