The Priest of Blood

by Douglas Clegg

  “He will not,” Kiya said. “This is the Priest of Blood. He can give us breath or take our breath from us. If he meant to destroy us, he would have as soon as he was free of the sphere.”

  The priest went to her and leaned again over her shoulder as if to bite her. Instead he spat upon the wound, and it quickly began to reform into healed flesh. Where the flesh smoothed, a tattoo formed, a strange red curved shape.

  “We have come for the ancient sorcery,” she said. “We cannot transform shape, nor can we run as wolves or fly as dragons. Yet all these things were of your kingdom.”

  “How have you heard of me?” he asked her.

  “I heard from an old vampyre who went into the Extinguishing. Before he did, he told me that he had heard the legend of your imprisonment and of the kingdom of Alkemara from another of our tribe upon her passing, and so perhaps it has gone for a thousand years.”

  “More even than that,” the priest said.

  “I saw you in a vision,” I said. “Of an altar, and of Pythia lying upon it to be sacrificed. And of a dark woman with a mask of gold.”

  He studied my face briefly, then glanced at Ewen who seethed with anger, and held an ax in his fist as if he might spring at Merod if given the chance. “Boy, do you mean to attack me with your weapons? Is this not your lord and master?” He waved his hand toward me. “Is this not your sovereign to whom you’ve pledged allegiance?”

  Ewen glanced at me fearfully, nodding.

  “I could snap your neck and feed on your skull and brains, as I have with other vampyres, and though my powers are at their lowest ebb, they are greater than yours,” the priest said. “I would dig your entrails out.” He lifted his hands, their yellow, curved nails long and ragged. “I would spread them out then stuff them down your gullet while you choked until the Extinguishing came to you. You are a weak boy. Are you eighteen, even? Do you shave?”

  “When I died, I was nearly nineteen,” Ewen said.

  To Kiya, the priest said, “You bring me novices. Young tribesmen. Are there no others of your age?”

  “There are,” she said. “But this one, called Falconer, is the only one to have the vision.”

  “When the vampyre named Pythia passed the breath through the Sacred Kiss,” I said, “I saw all this and more. I saw your youth. I saw your temple. I saw your beautiful daughters as they once were. And Pythia felt terror at my seeing into her soul, into her knowledge.”

  “Yes, she would, that one.” The priest nodded, a grave look upon his face. “But how am I to believe that you are the One?”

  “Is there no test?” Kiya asked suddenly.

  “Oh,” he said. “A test. There is one such test. But its consequence is dire. It is baptism by fire, and the furnace entered is not so pleasurable as the rivers of Hell. If this Falconer is not the One, then he will burn as soon as he enters that realm. If he is not the One, all of you will be destroyed here. If he is the One, I will be destroyed. That is the prophecy itself. Already I doubt that you are the One, for six supplicants were prophesied.”

  “One has died by the hands of your daughters,” I said. “And two wait for us beyond the white sea. All in all, six came to this kingdom, and whether dead or alive now, six have passed into the underworld of the Gates of Nahhash.”

  “Baz-ihiya-naai-lyat-nahh-ash,” the priest said, his hands going to his face, covering it with shame. He wiped at his eyes, as if wiping a memory back. He pointed to drawings upon his body. “The story of our kind is written upon me. I am the living scroll.” Then, suddenly, he added, “My time is short. You are the possessor of the staff of the Nahhashim,” he said. “They were the priests of Datbathani, a face of Medhya, Queen of Serpents and the secrets of the Earth.”

  “And what is the power of this staff?” I hefted it.

  “The Nahhashim holds many powers of the Serpent, and the Serpent protects its possessor.”

  “You were not protected,” Ewen said.

  “Had I not been protected, I would have extinguished. I was kept in the dreaming by the Nahhashim.”

  “What is the Serpent?” I asked. “I hear of the Serpent, but I know nothing of it.”

  “The Serpent is the father of our tribe, as Medhya is our mother. The Serpent gave us immortality and moves now through us. The wake of the Serpent as it moves its tail is the stream.”

  “Is the Serpent a god?”

  “There are many gods. Some false, some true. The Serpent, when shedding skin, gives life to the gods themselves. And yet the Serpent is not a god. The Serpent is beyond the meaning of god. The Serpent encircles the world and yet is not of the world we know. I feel the Serpent close, now that my hour has come.”

  “Why is your time short?”

  “If you are the One, you are the reason. You were called in the prophecies the Maz-Sherah. This is, from an old language, the word for the Anointed One and the ritual feast. You are that Maz-Sherah. Many thousands of years ago, the One was prophesied by Medhya’s blood upon the skin of her priests. I heard of these prophecies and carried them with me on my body, for the words of Medhya are made flesh.” Then he turned, and beneath his shrunken wings I saw, from his spine to his hind parts, the tattoos. Each bled into the next with scenes of distant kingdoms and people. “Look for the vampyre with the head of the bird.”

  I saw a primitive drawing upon him of a youth with a great sword and a mask as of an eagle. Opposite him, the priest himself, his wings spread, his staff raised. In the next drawing, the youth had cut off the priest’s head and drunk of his blood. In the next, the youth had grown wings, and his mask had taken on the visage of a serpent-dragon. In his fist, the Nahhashim.

  “I cannot drink from you, for your blood would be the destruction of our tribe,” I said. “No vampyres can.”

  “I can, as the priest,” he said. “And one other may. The Maz-Sherah. But first, you must pass the test of the Veil. But we must hurry. I do not like that the alchemist may be near. May be watching.”

  4

  “The magick is from the Serpent to us,” Merod Al-Kamr said. “The salvation of our tribe from the curse of Medhya. To know it, to bring it, you must part the Veil. Do you understand?”

  “I have heard once, from Forest witches, of the Veil.”

  “It is the billowing tapestry, more slender than spider’s silk, that is beyond the stream and hides the world of the gods.”

  “How do I part the Veil?”

  “If the wrong one were to part it, he would be immediately torn apart by the gods of many hungry mouths or would burn with a thousand suns upon him. But you may enter, Maz-Sherah, using the Flesh of Medhya.”

  “The blossom?”

  “Its sting is death to mortals and sends the soul into the hungry gods’ realm. But its juice allows us to see beyond this world. And from it you will know if you are the Anointed, or the most damned of all creatures.”

  “It is the juice that brought your eyesight,” I said.

  “I have no eyesight,” the priest told me. “All I see, I see within my mind, or within the shapes of the stream. My time will be gone soon. When you return from parting the Veil, you will know what to do. You must leave behind all fear if you do this. You must follow where the Glass within it takes you, to see what cannot be seen, or else the devouring monsters of that otherworld will find you.”

  He reached over to me, embracing me. I held fast to the staff, for though I had faith in our priest, I did not want him to seize the Nahhashim for fear that he would destroy us.

  “Let go of fear,” he said. “All fear. Let it pass from you like water.” Then he whispered words of ritual that meant nothing to me, nor did their meanings translate within my head, for they seemed the mere guttural sounds of an animal.

  He drew back, telling me to lift the blossom to my tongue and bite upon it. I did so, and a thick, bitter liquid shot to the back of my throat from the flower. Then he took it from my mouth as if this were the reverse of taking the wafer at communion Mass.

 
; “You will first go find what your heart’s desire is, through the Sight. Do not resist. The Veil, when it parts, takes you where your heart leads first. Do not be afraid. Do not speak to the visions you see. And if something terrible exists, some horror surrounding any you love, you must remain silent and keep from trying to shape the vision, for it will have consequence in the world that will not be as you will it.”

  “This will sting,” he said, holding the small flower near my eyes.

  Chapter 18

  ________________

  THE VEIL AND THE GLASS

  1

  I braced myself for pain, but when he squeezed the juice of the blossom onto my left eye, I felt only minor irritation. Then he applied the drop of liquid to my right eye. I waited for pain. The world went to mottled colors and shapes.

  The burning shot along the edges of my eyelids as if red-hot pokers had touched just under the rim of skin there. I reached up to wipe my eyes clean of this awful feeling, but I felt as if my eyelids had sealed shut and no matter how I tore at them, I could not pry them open. Then I felt the Earth give out below me, and a bolt of light exploded within my vision. All the world went to white, and I was no longer in the temple itself, although I saw shadows of its statues and pillars all around me. In the air, rat-sized creatures that were of a rippling flesh moved as if climbing over invisible rocks. The halls of the temple—which were now defined by a glassy outline that shimmered like a stream’s flow—spread farther out, a long road.

  Merod’s voice accompanied me, and I felt his hand on my elbow although I could not see him. “You have parted the Veil, my child. You are in the Myrr itself, which is both Paradise and Hell. Do not be afraid, though you will see visions of creatures with many mouths and many limbs. You will see gods and demigods, all of who are in twilight from the world. You may see spirits and Earth-children who have hidden behind the Veil when their times had come. Or you may see nothing but a vast desert of white. It is the realm beyond the Serpent, and its gate must be protected by you in all that you do.

  “To part the Veil is to rip it, and each entry to it breeds monsters in the world. Just by bringing you here there is a cost elsewhere. A beast emerges at some distant place, or a plague, for you cannot rend the Veil without something escaping that was meant to be imprisoned or made powerless. When our kind was created, the Veil was ripped, and our race came into being. Even now, your entry here has passed the hand of death to many in the world, although I could not tell you of what kind or nature it has gone. But I have done this for you so that you might see what you desire and learn of your destiny.”

  I saw the pale shadows of forms—like white doves swimming through the white air. I remembered the milky waters of the Alkemars, and its tiny, barely visible insects, and wondered if these now crawled the air all around me. The Alkemars themselves must have been born here, for how did creatures such as that exist? I was of this unseen world, as well, my blood, my vampyre blood, was of it. Above me, in the endless sky, a screeching sound, as of some great flying beast descending, a hawk dropping to catch prey. But I saw nothing.

  Merod’s voice at my ear, a circling gnat: “Do not fight the Glass itself, or it will break.”

  “The Glass?”

  “It is of the world that was once here and died. It is now cracked and thick, but it shows much,” he said. “It is not clear at all. You may trust what you see, or not.”

  Suddenly, I saw a flash of darkness. A black smoke blew across the white fog.

  I saw a woman with flowing hair.

  Alienora. My mortal beloved.

  I watched Alienora while Merod spoke to me. She seemed to be speaking, as well, though I could not hear her voice. She wore a plain shift, and a beautiful gown had been dropped beside her in straw. I watched as two dark figures came up beside her. Then I recognized their habit and wimple—these were the anchoresses of the grotto, the Sisters of Magdalen. One brought a long, dark robe to Alienora, and the other brought a small wooden cross attached to a rosary. Alienora, I realized, was looking into some bowl of water as she took both tunic and cross. Her hair fell down as if she had leaned farther over to look into the bowl.

  Alienora donned the robe of the sisterhood. She had taken her vows! Through the Glass, I saw what she had done with herself. But it had been more than a year since I’d last seen her. She intended to join the Magdalens soon after I’d left, so this must be an older vision. This was the past.

  I reached out as if to touch her, but instead I felt a thickness in the air, and her image rippled. “Careful not to break the Glass itself,” Merod’s voice warned.

  “I want to touch her,” I said. “I want to hear her.”

  “You may yet, but you must be cautious, for harm may come to both you and her if even a ripple passes along the surface of the Glass.”

  “How much time has passed? Is this vision of hours long past, or seasons?”

  “I am not a keeper of time, Falconer. But smell her. Inhale her.”

  I inhaled as deeply as I could. I did not anticipate what came after—it nearly moved me to tears, the scent of her perfumed skin, of her hair, of the delicate spice that she pressed behind her ears, as well as the murky scent of musk and oil that was her body.

  “What do you smell?”

  “All I remember of her,” I said. “All I know of her.”

  “Then she is near the time when you left. Perhaps a few months after,” his voice said, then guided me to rise and move forward through this vision, into the Glass. “Follow the vision to its end,” he said. “But you must beware of breaking the vision. It is as thin as the wings of butterflies, but as ever-tightening as a spider’s web. Even while you move through it, it is enshrouding you with its strands. You cannot return through it. The last of it, when you are ready to leave, must be torn through, or you will be lost in the vision itself.”

  I moved into the rectangle of my sight, in which I now felt a stream unlike any other. It was smothering and heavy, and yet liquid in its consistency. I heard Alienora’s voice, and other voices I recognized. I will write here what I saw and heard, and move with it as I moved through it then, for I cannot describe the sensations of it further. What I remember of it was how I saw and heard a series of events in Alienora’s life that must have spanned a year or more, and yet, in my vision, lasted less than an hour.

  “Something terrible has happened,” Alienora said, awakening sharply from a dream.

  2

  She sat up in a bed made of straw with a single thin coverlet over it. Candlelight flickered along the rock recesses of the cave of the Magdalens. I had never been inside it before, so was amazed at how well it had been carved over the years. It resembled an austere house of some kind, or a very clean catacombs, for I could see through the doorway to Alienora’s small chamber that there were other rooms along a narrow hallway. The air grew heavy with incense, which seemed smothering to me as I witnessed this. The smell was, in some ways, more overwhelming than the vision.

  One of the other Magdalens crouched down, squatting upon a low stool by Alienora’s bed, bringing morning water in a bowl.

  “He is dead,” Alienora said. “The man I told you of. The boy I loved. He is gone.”

  “You must ignore these dreams, Sister. They are not sent from God or His angels. They bring you fevers, I fear,” the Sister said, her eyes ever-widening, and from her visage I could surmise that dreams in this order of women had great significance.

  “My sins have been great.” Alienora nodded. “The devils send me these dreams of damnation. But they are real. I cannot ignore them. Not when they are of the one I have sworn my heart to.”

  “You may not speak of such things,” the nun said. “Turn your eyes to Our Lady. Leave off these blasphemies of your maidenhood. Have you not cursed your soul enough on his account? If he is dead, let the Devil take him. He has brought you nothing but sorrow.” The Sister put her hand out, clasping Alienora’s hand in hers. “You are in a new life here. Leave the old one,
and the one who ruined you, to the angels. Your life as the baron’s daughter is of the flesh. Your life as a Magdalen is of the spirit.”

  “I fear for his soul,” Alienora whispered, drawing her hand back from the nun’s. “Shadows whisper to me of demons. Since I came, I have heard them. They tell me that his soul is hostage to deviltry.”

  “Dreams may bring prophecy,” the Sister said. “But we may pray together here. Pray for all the souls lost to the Devil.”

  “He has been at war now for four months,” Alienora said. Her complexion turned ashen, and she clutched the small cross around her neck, then kissed it. “The shadows show me things.”

  “Do you see?” Merod said within me. “The shadows know her. They taunt her. They sniff at her to find you.”

  The liquid air swirled, then settled. The Glass became clear again. Alienora knelt before a great dark statue at the very back of the Magdalen cave. It was of Mary Magdalen, I suppose, but her face did not seem blessed. Instead, the statue, which was black stone, was of a Dark Madonna. I had heard of this heresy, although it was not thought ill by many. Yet it was not what Alienora’s Church would smile upon—the veneration not of Mary, Mother of God, but of her mirror twin. The image could not precisely be called Mary Magdalen, for the woman who had posed for the statue looked as if she were a queen of some country, and not of the humble sinner, the female apostle of Christ. Yet Alienora whispered the Ave Maria to this statue, and kissed her feet. Then I heard her prayer. She whispered in my mind, “Dear Lady, our Mother in the Dark and of the Deepest Places, let me understand the dream you sent to me. Let me understand what it meant. You know how I have sinned against the Almighty and the angels, and how I blasphemed the chapel of Our Lady in my father’s house. You, Lady, know of darkness and of despair. You have knowledge of my sins. You understand the visions of angels and devils. Please guide me now. And bless Aleric. Bless the father of my child,” she said, touching her stomach.