The Priest of Blood

by Douglas Clegg

  I gave her a moment’s reflection, but her tales made me want to know more about the mysteries I had begun to manifest in visions and dreams. “Tell me more of the city of the Alkemars.”

  Kiya’s faced was shadowed. “It is our lost homeland, where the legend of our kind was of our power. It holds the great temple of Lemesharra, the aspect of Medhya as goddess of the hunt and of bounty, where the Priest of Blood ruled.”

  “Tell me about Lemesharra. About Medhya.”

  “She is the great mother of Myrryd, a country that is no more but that existed for thousands of years. Its history has been wiped from the history of the Earth. Three kingdoms of priests and kings bowed to her. Their descendants envied her, and stole her flesh and her blood, and the wealth and treasures of her mines, which made her powerful among other lands. In revenge, she cursed all that had been taken—including the Serpent, her beloved. Those who took the flesh were cursed to be shadow as she had become. Those who stole her blood became our tribe. And she cursed the Serpent above all others, for infidelity to her. The priests of the Serpent suffered the worst fate. They were the first beings to enter the Extinguishing. But Medhya has three faces. There’s also Lemesharra and her sister Datbathani. Three in one, she is, and only as Medhya will she destroy us. But these are fragments of legend and dream. Even those who have already extinguished could not tell me more.”

  “Why would the Pythoness not wish to tell of these stories?”

  “She is under the influence of Medhya. She is a being turned against herself. Perhaps she suffers an ancient hurt. For she resurrects us to this life, then watches as we perish many years later, as if delighting in the ends of her own children. Just as Medhya does.”

  “But we can find Pythia. We can reach for her in the stream.”

  “Pythia has left us. That is what I feel of her in the stream. She has left for some distant country. She is terrified of you, Maz-Sherah. Falconer.”

  “In the morning, before we slept,” I said, “when I told you of the Staff of Nahhashim, from the vision. You said, ‘gates.’ What did you mean?”

  “Nahhash is the old tongue for snake, and there is a rift between two great mountains, beyond the Plains of Vazg. It is uninhabitable by man or vampyre at this pass. It is called the Gates of Nahhash, for it is merely a snake pit and nothing more. Although there is a well for drinking there, it is surrounded by vipers and even the caravans do not take that route.” Then she felt for the tender indentation at the base of my throat, which was affection among this new race of beings I now called my own. Her hand felt like fever upon my skin. “You stole her stream and saw the city. You have the power of the Sacred Kiss. That would not have happened if you were just like the rest of us.”

  “But there’s nothing wrong with the rest of you. I am the same.”

  “Eventually, even the blood does not give us strength. I am the next oldest, after Balaam. How much longer will I last?” To look at her while she spoke, I was amazed. She looked as if she were a woman of twenty-five. “I’ve watched others reach this, and pass it, until they can only drink from the dead, and that blood offers no strength. Before you came, there was one named Paolo, a monk whom the Pythoness had taken and brought here seventy years before I received the Sacred Kiss. I knew him when he still could recall the past, but I watched him lose his vigor and his will to live. I watched him become truly like a jackal, sucking at the marrow of a bone, drinking from rats and street dogs just to survive another night. Eventually, his memory gone, his words choked in his throat, he slowly began to fall apart. His skin sloughed, and his eyes sank into their holes. I watched as his jaw, which had become long and thick, dropped into his lap as he took his fill from blood I had brought him. They say we live, even in motes of dust. Think of the terror of that. Of a life that is no life, splintered and broken like shards of pottery, unable to move, unable to feed, to have thirst but nothing to slake it. To have being without form or control.”

  “It is like death,” I said, and thought of Balaam in his tomb.

  “I will show you what it’s like,” she said.

  8

  She took me deeper into the chambers beneath the Earth, until we were in a tunnel low and filthy. As I followed her, we came at last to a chamber that was like a tomb.

  Bones and the dust of the dead lay in heaps. One corpse had only recently begun decomposing. Another was just turning to dust from crumbling bone.

  “We bring them here when we can,” she said. “When their ashes haven’t blown across the sand. When the mortals haven’t taken their bodies to burn. We do it that they may lie together and remain untouched. Even Medhya cannot find them here. One day, Falconer, I will lie here in this garden of ash, among our ancestors of Hedammu. If we do not go to the Gates of Nahhashim to try and awaken the Priest of Blood, you may one day lay your friend’s body here and you will know of all that you might have done.”

  I felt a pang of guilt, for I did not think I was the Anointed One the tribe had awaited. I knew myself to be a poor boy grown into a dark world, murdered, and brought to vampyrism. I had no royal blood in me. Nor did I have a legend attached to my history. I simply could be nothing more than a creature of the dark, as was she. My eyes welled with tears as I contemplated the enormity of this place—of the vampyric brethren who had fallen in this chamber. Who lay with some degree of consciousness but without movement or power or ability.

  It was the worst kind of hell I could imagine. Unending life, but a life that had no hope, no vitality.

  She crouched down among the dust, touching it lightly with her fingers. “I can feel my own waning, in the stream. I have less than a full moon left before it begins. When my time comes, I will lie down among them and take my place. I will not fight it then.”

  “A full moon,” I said. “How can that be?”

  She turned to gaze up at me. “Balaam ran with the hunt just nights before we found you and brought you to your grave. It is fast, when it comes. The body falls suddenly. It is not a horizon in the distance for me. A hundred years goes by in a heartbeat. I have seen much, drunk much, but I do not want to face this. I know what I will become.” I felt such heaviness in my flesh—as if the stream had changed between us. As if a great weight were upon me, simply from her sorrowful glance. She touched the underside of my throat. I felt her heat, her pain. “You are the Maz-Sherah that has been prophesied for many lifetimes. You are the only hope I have. The only hope for our tribe. We must find Alkemara, Falconer.”

  “Is it enough to survive?” I asked. “If we are all meant for this living dust?”

  She put her face against my hands. Then, she turned away. “You had the vision. You bestowed the Sacred Kiss upon your friend. You cannot deny these things. Nor can you pretend they mean nothing. Balaam told me more before he lost his voice completely. He told me that the darkness of our tribe held a sacred light within it, though none could see it.”

  “And the light?”

  “It is the Maz-Sherah,” she said. “It is the one who is burdened with the vision who burns brightest. But more than this, Falconer, there is a darkness deeper than the night. She is our mother. Not the Pythoness herself, but the one who created her. She is darkness itself, and her wolves move as shadows. She seeks to destroy us, to take us into the Extinguishing. As her children turn to dust, she grows in power.”

  Chapter 13

  ________________

  THE LEGEND OF THE LOST CITY

  1

  I sat up that night to hear the stories of my tribe. Kiya brought me the full force of my vision of Alkemara, the lost city, and told me of the Gates of Nahhash, the rift between towering mountains in a land that seemed to be at the ends of the Earth. The others gathered around after feeding and sat in a circle with us.

  “You must be careful of silver,” Vali said.

  “Silver?” I asked.

  “It does not reflect us. Silver will destroy us if it enters our blood by way of sword. In its presence, we are helpless,” Kiya s
aid. “The legend...”

  Yarilo interrupted her. “Legends, fables, folktales. It does not matter its origins. It is enough that it is the one precious metal that can be used against us easily.”

  “It is cursed for us,” Vali said. He glanced to Yarilo as if expecting a challenge, but got none. “It is part of Medhya’s curse of us.”

  “The mines,” I said, remembering Medhya and the wealth of her land.

  Kiya nodded, ignoring Yarilo’s gruff manner. “Her priests stole her wealth, and she laid her fury within silver itself that it might forever pain us.”

  “As superstitious as fortune-tellers,” Yarilo said. “There are those who claim it is the curse of Judas in the silver. Or that the silver is of the sunlight that burns us. It is simply a poison to us. Curses or no, I say it is the light thrown by the silver. We are pained by intense light.”

  “It is the curse,” Vali said.

  “You believe in the Great Forbidden,” Yset said to Yarilo, who grunted in assent. She glanced back at me, slyly. “It is the drinking of another vampyre’s blood, for it would not merely destroy the drinker and the one who gives the blood. We are connected through the stream. Our blood is also of one line. To drink of another of our kind brings disease to all of us. It burns through the stream and sends many to the Extinguishing.” I learned more of Yset. In her mortal life, Yset had been a slave of a great empire, but soon enough drank of those who had kept her in bondage.

  Vali, the beautiful male, with a sleek, catlike quality to him and the muscles of a lion, had come down with horsemen from the East, to raid Hedammu. Instead, he had been plundered by the Pythoness, who kept him to herself for many nights. “She bled me slowly. Small cuts all along my body,” he said. “We pleasured each other for nearly two moons before she took my life and brought me the Sacred Kiss.”

  “It was your strong thighs she wished for,” Yset said, laughing, reaching over to scruff his hair. “She did not let pretty men pass without tasting of them first.”

  “Beauty is her downfall,” Vali said.

  “Beauty is treachery,” Kiya said, rising up. “We must hunt.”

  I sat there, holding Ewen’s lifeless body, praying to the darkness that he would return to me.

  2

  We had passed the fifth night after I brought my breath and blood into Ewen. I wondered if indeed I had passed the Sacred Kiss to him. I did not feed at that time, for I had drunk much in the previous two nights. I waited, and listened, and tried to understand this new existence and these vampyres, my tribe now that I had left the world of men and women.

  I felt the urgency of their mission: they had been waiting for the “One” and had had their dreams answered. Was this my destiny?

  Maz-Sherah, voices whispered in my dreams.

  I had seen clearly the Priest of Blood when Pythia had bestowed her Sacred Kiss upon me. In her breath I had taken a sip of that stream she had held, and I knew her fear of me then was that she, also, knew whom I might be.

  Then, the sixth night after the Sacred Kiss, Ewen looked up at me, his rich warm eyes glazed with the passage back from the Threshold. I leaned over to whisper to him of what he had become, and how he must drink.

  The sixth night, I knew what must be done.

  3

  But first, I had to bring Ewen into our world. He awoke with that languid thrill that was common to us. He did not rise up with the same fears and awkward confusion as I had. His body glowed with the life-in-death, and I held him a while as he began to breathe slowly, catching his breath now and then as if he expected it to stop. I told him of who we were, and what it meant, at least to the extent of my knowledge. I didn’t know, I told him, about Medhya other than that she was our mother, but that a creature called Pythia, or the Pythoness, had brought me to this. Then I told him of the others.

  I brought him a youth from a distant village, tied hand to foot so that Ewen might easily take him and drink deep. After he’d drained that vessel, Kiya brought him a short, rough-looking thief who had been caught trying to enter Hedammu to steal its legendary treasure. Ewen, feeling strength, wrestled with the man, rolling about on the floor, nearly laughing. He took too easily to this new existence, and it surprised me, for I had to wrestle with my mortal memories before the instinct took hold. Ewen was a natural vampyre. He pinned the thief down and pressed his teeth to the man’s collarbone, ripping into his flesh. When he had drunk enough, he leaned back, arching his back and letting out a great whoop as if this were a victory in battle. He had a look of delirium upon his face and giggled when he saw me nearby.

  He rose and began doing one of the old dances that the soldiers would sometimes do when together at the night’s fire, after drunkenness and joy had taken them. His body shone with the glimmering blood. The others of our tribe gathered around him, licking it from his flesh the way a bitch might lick her puppy when born. All the while, his face clenched in pleasure. He seemed to have more spirit in him than I had seen in his mortal life.

  Again, I remembered Pythia’s words to me, of how by bestowing the Sacred Kiss, a third being would be reborn from the stream between the two of us: the vampyre was the child of the ancient breath and the new body.

  A wholly new incarnation.

  Watching him embracing the others, taking to this new world and way of being so swiftly, I envied him, and loved him more. When he saw me watch him with this beaming pride, he drew away from the others and nearly ran over to me, his arms around my neck. He laid his cheek against my throat and whispered, “I thought I had lost you forever. Do not ever leave me now.”

  4

  We spoke more of all that we knew. Kiya and Yarilo spoke more of the Maz-Sherah, and Vali and some of the others engaged Ewen in games of swiftness and tests of his new skills. He had much of the vampyric energy in him. He crawled quickly up the walls to the ceiling above then dropped down, landing like a cat in front of me.

  “I love this new world you have brought me to,” he said. “I love the thrill of my lips against a stranger’s throat and the shooting of the first blood on my tongue.”

  “Do you not think we are demons?” I asked.

  “Better to be a demon up from Hell than to be dragged to Hell by one,” he said. “I was not desired by the Church, nor would I have entered Heaven. I was bound for Hell as it was, my friend, my only friend. I have done things and been done to so that I believed in my mortal life I should never find redemption. But now—now, I have the world. I have the night. I have all.”

  “Then you forgive me.”

  “I bless you, Falconer,” he said. “I breathe with your breath. I am your servant. Your will is also mine. You are this Maz-Sherah.”

  “Ah, don’t talk to me of that,” I said. “I am not the savior of these creatures.”

  “You are,” he said. “You are the light in the darkness. Can you not see it yourself? Your destiny brought you here, to vampyrism, just as mine was to follow you, to serve and protect you as you cared for me in our mortality.”

  “What if it is all a lie?” I asked.

  A shadow crossed his face, as if I had hurt him in some way and yet he did not want me to see the hurt. “We are newly born here. We are brothers, and these creatures are our tribe. I can feel it in the stream, even if you cannot. Mortality was the lie. This is truth.”

  “No,” I said at last. “I feel it, as well. I feel something more terrible than the Extinguishing that comes for our kind. I feel a sense of some terror beyond the stream that connects us, my friend, though I do not know the origin of this fear.” I did not speak with him more that night about the dread I had begun to feel in my heart. I had a heavy darkness within my mind, a blind spot of some kind, and in it, as dawn came, I would see Pythia pressing down upon my chest, her talons about my throat as if to stop up my breath completely. I saw shadows where there were none, and felt the presence of spirits just as the sun began to take the day—of shades that were not ghosts, nor were they devils, yet these seemed to be nearby at
dawn and at twilight. Yet no others sensed these beings in the stream, nor did any speak of them when I asked if they had noticed unusual shadows.

  What I did not then know was that they were agents of yet another darkness, another world of nightmares.

  5

  I should write here of other manifestations of the changes that occur after rising from the sleep of death. All the strictures and confinements of the world of men are gone: one may laugh and yelp and take and have what one wishes. All property of mankind are the toys of my race. All flesh is beautiful, and even as my friend held me and I laughed against his scalp, I felt the love we had for each other grow stronger—and it reminded me of my love for Alienora. All love was the same love, just as all drink was the same drink. This awoke desire, although it was not the desire of man, but the desire for the stream itself.

  To go into the stream, to wade into it and explore its depths, is the greatest union of flesh that can be known. Greater than the act of physical love, and with greater pleasure. It knows no boundaries, no senses, yet it is smaller than a sparrow, this stream, and when you move into it with another, the union is unbreakable. The act of sex is a mere shadow of the stream itself—it is the distant, trickling echo of it—and when Ewen and I went there together, in the stream of each other’s existence, I knew that the bond we had forged could not be broken. I drew back from him, breaking from him, from that feeling.