The Priest of Blood

by Douglas Clegg

  5

  The baron’s castle was afire in the night—again, I sensed the work of the Myrrydanai. Despite lashing rain, the fire raged, and lightning ripped at the black clouds rumbling across the sky. I closed my eyes as we flew over familiar ground, clutching the Nahhashim to draw its powers of seeking. I felt Alienora, and my heart beat fast. Human memory flooded my senses, and I wanted her more than I had ever wanted her before. All the feelings of youthful love had returned, and I began to scent her presence within the castle walls.

  A strange voice came into my head, then, a voice I had heard but briefly in the Veil and the vision of the Glass—that strange veiled maiden known as Calyx.

  “Falconer, you are too late,” she said.

  I ignored this voice—it could have been a trick of the Myrrydanai.

  I followed a pathway of scent down into the castle, along the chambers, leading Ewen in flight. As we passed down the corridor with which I had once been so familiar, a place of desolation greeted us.

  I ignored any other instinct I had, even a feeling of ice that had clutched at my chest. Alienora was there, somewhere trapped, caught, imprisoned in her own home. My son. I had seen him in the Glass. He might yet live. The vision might not yet have come to pass.

  In the chapel. The very chapel in which we had made our child.

  I landed, crouching, with Ewen beside me.

  Alienora stood there, before the altar, naked as if she were the virgin sacrifice of some barbaric religion.

  Blood on her breasts.

  On the altar, her own younger brother.

  His heart torn from him, still beating in her hand.

  Alienora turned to me, with an inscrutable look upon her face. She had an unconscionable beauty—the radiance of a goddess of slaughter.

  I knew in that second.

  The Myrrydanai held dominion over her.

  She was with them.

  The shadows along the wall grew long, and I could not bring wings from my shoulders again. Nor did I feel my source of power within. It was as if ropes had been thrown over me.

  I raised the Nahhashim, but as I did so I felt a tugging at my fingers—and dark fingers grasped at it. The Nahhashim flew from my hand, carried by one of the shades to Alienora.

  “The power of Medhya’s blood imprisons the Nahhashim,” she said, and brought the heart of her brother to her lips and drank from it as if it were a cup.

  And then the shadows of the Myrrydanai surrounded us. This is some unknown sorcery, I told Ewen through the stream. She has been given great power. She has forgotten her love. Forgotten her soul.

  The shadows surrounding us whispered a language that could not be understood, although it sounded like a chant—a ritual—a rite of binding, for the darkness began to smother me.

  I felt the priests take me into their arms, covering every inch of me with their shadows.

  All power had fled from my being. It was as if the Myrrydanai drank it the way the tribe drank blood.

  I began to fade into blackness, terrified that I might be heading toward the Extinguishing.

  A terrible shrieking erupted in the stream, then the dark enveloped me.

  Chapter 20

  ________________

  IN THE WELL OF THIRST

  1

  I awoke when the shadows had dissipated. I looked up, for my eyes opened skyward. But there was no sky. We were in a well of some kind. Torches had been lit near the top of it, a crown of fire high above us.

  Muddy ground beneath us.

  I lay against Ewen, feeling the despair, fearing the hunger that wracked my being. Many nights must have passed in that place, for my throat was a desert. I whispered to Ewen, who seemed as one tortured, “You must be strong. We must both be. We will escape from this. I know we will.”

  He had little strength to speak, but when he did, he told me that it did not matter to him anymore whether or not he went to the Extinguishing. “May I die again soon, never to be raised from the dead.”

  “You must not think it,” I said. “I did not raise the Priest of Blood from his captivity, nor did I devour his holy body to lie in this womb of hell. I saw, as a boy, another vampyre, also a victim of some supernatural treachery. I helped raise the creature into the light of day, where our former master, Kenan Sensterre, and his huntsmen cut off its head and burned its body. This is not meant to be our tomb, Ewen. We will not extinguish here, I promise you.” Yet I was not sure if I could believe my own words. My eyes blurred with tears as I held him, feeling his shivering. We were as weak as fevered mortals. The Myrrydanai had taken much from us, and they now had the Nahhashim staff. I did not know how to use its magick, but I could be certain that they knew of its secrets.

  I had handed it to them by stepping into the trap that had been set.

  Within my mind, I raced through my blood memory of the priest, and of his words that were sacred to the Serpent. All, One. All, One. What did this mean to me?

  My hunger drove me to madness, and while I embraced my companion, I thought of his blood, and how refreshing it might taste to me. The Serpent may drink its own venom. And yet, if I drank of him, he would extinguish. I could not do that. I have no doubt that he thought of mine as well, and I saw in the shadows of his face how he accepted the despair of this entombment.

  All, One. The One in the All.

  The priest’s voice, in my blood, came up through my worst fever, smelling Ewen’s sweet throat, knowing that less than a quarter inch beneath the skin, my tongue might taste the dark pure venom of the Serpent, the blood that had coursed through the veins of our kind for thousands of years since the first creation, when the priest himself, and yes, even Pythia, came into being, from the drops of blood of Medhya mingled with the venom of the beloved of Datbathani.

  All in One. One in All.

  All of us are One. The One is in the all.

  Who is the One?

  It is the blood of the Serpent.

  It is our strength, from the Serpent.

  The venom is the strength. The venom overcomes the blood.

  I am.

  I am, I knew. I am the One in All. The Maz-Sherah.

  The All in One.

  The one thing that had not been stolen from me, because the Myrrydanai did not know I possessed it.

  The blossom. Crushed in the pouch at my side.

  Called by some the Serpent’s Venom.

  I reached into the pouch, bringing it out. I forced Ewen’s lips apart and bade him crush the dried blossom between his teeth. I had already tasted of it. He needed its juice.

  After he had done so, I embraced him with a weary happiness. “I am the All. I am the One. When the One is the All, the All is the One,” I whispered to him. “Drink from me.”

  He looked at me, gasping, his lips parched. When he spoke, his throat was so dry that his words were incoherent. “No. I will not. I would...I would...die.”

  “Drink from me,” I commanded, and drew back from him. I brought my hand behind his head, and pressed his head toward my throat. “You have the venom in you. Mingled with the blood. I have it, as well. You and I may drink of each other, for the Serpent’s Venom protects the blood. The Serpent may drink its own venom. You will feel the Veil, but you will not see it. Do not be afraid. Drink of me.”

  He resisted, but only slightly. I felt as if I were a mother bringing a baby to suck my teat. I brought his lips to my throat, keeping a gentle pressure upon the back of his scalp. I felt the graze of his teeth against my skin.

  “Do it,” I said. “Do it now, as I tell you. Do not hesitate.” I forced his mouth so close to my neck that I knew he could smell the scent of blood beneath the skin, and the pulse of it. “I do not carry within me the blood of the dead, but the venom of eternal life. I am here, as the priest prophesied, to raise our kind to its previous glory, before the ancient wars of the gods, before the alchemist and the Pythoness betrayed the ancient of the tribe, when we kept the world of man safe from the devouring gods in return f
or drinking from the vessel of his flesh. Drink from me and live. And grow in strength. And my blood in you, I shall also drink.”

  “Our brethren... the others...” he whispered to my throat. “They shall burn if I drink. We, too, shall burn.”

  “When you drink of me, not a thousand men or a thousand suns shall burn us,” I said. “I have walked into a furnace and returned whole. I have fulfilled the ancient prophecy. I am the Maz-Sherah. I am the One. Drink now, Ewen, or you will be no more.”

  My palm grew hot as I pressed the back of his head, at the nape of his neck, hard against me, his lips to my throat. I felt his throbbing need. His lips parted. I felt his teeth grow to dagger points in anticipation of the rape of my skin.

  He plunged himself into me. I felt the barbarous pain that my flesh had not experienced in many years, the pain of opening to another. My blood spat against his tongue. So thirsty was he that he made sucking noises as he drained the goblet.

  I endured the pain. As it shot through me, it turned into a pleasure I had never before experienced. I lay down on my back, and he, crouching over me, kept his lips against the wound. I felt his thighs around my waist, and smelled the tender scent of him as I had not before. I grew weak through this, but my pleasure grew.

  Finally he groaned as I pulled him back by his luxuriant hair. His body shuddered against mine. I felt the excitement of flesh as he fell against my chest with his full weight. He gnashed his fangs, trying to get back to the pool at my throat that had ripped to my breast, but I pushed him away with the last of my strength. I saw a penumbra brighten around him, a halo of purplish light, as the life of our kind had come into him.

  I had faith that this would not be the end of us, for I felt the prophecy live inside me.

  All, One.

  In thirst, I sought out Ewen’s throat, and lapped my own blood from his chin and lips, then returned to the nape of his neck and plunged my incisors into him. I felt the bond between us that we would never lose, as we mingled together.

  We were One. We were All.

  All, One, I heard the priest’s voice in my head, my grandfather of grandfathers, the mage of our kind, the ancient Priest-King of the Tribe of the Resurrected.

  All, One.

  The Source is within the venom you have drunk from the Serpent. Medhya’s blood is a curse within us, but the Serpent’s venom is our blessing. You are the Maz-Sherah, sacred of the Serpent and the Nahhashim and the Kamr who serve the venom.

  I gasped, choking on Ewen’s blood, and released him. I gazed up at the ring of torch-fire at the top of the well.

  I felt power, a brief flicker of it as of the spark from a stone before fire erupts.

  2

  I am the child of the Great Serpent. I and my vampyre kin are the new priests of this blood. And the blood is a bloodline back to our Mother, the Dark Madonna, Medhya. We create from our taking in of blood a new race of beings. We are not the damned, we are the gods of the world of mankind.

  I am the One. I am the All. I am the Serpent incarnate.

  I felt my mind shoot off into another direction, as if my consciousness were an arrow shot from a taut bow toward some unknown destination.

  The first face I saw in this new world within my mind was a woman, a creature with a terrible visage, a mask of utter depravity, and along her shoulders slender asps curled and twisted. As she reached up to remove the golden mask that hid her true face from me, lost in this trance within my mind, Ewen grabbed me, returning to my throat to tear through its newly healed wound, to drink of me.

  In my mind’s vision, the golden mask fell, and there she was, the Mother of Darkness, the Bride of Shadows.

  The moonless night of her face stared at me as if she wished to destroy me.

  Our Lady of Crossroads became the darkness of my mind. Not Medhya in her warrior aspect, but the Lady of Serpents, Datbathani Medh-Nahhashim, who was of the venom of the Serpent itself.

  I lay back in that sealed well that was meant to be our eternal tomb, and felt blood course from my veins to Ewen’s lips and throat.

  In the swoon of Ewen’s leeching of my blood, I heard the voice of a man from somewhere above, beyond the seal of the well itself.

  It was Merod Al-Kamr, speaking within the blood itself.

  “Artephius is near,” he said. “You must not rest long.”

  This is the testament of Aleric, son of the accused and executed witch, Armaela of the Fields; the Maz-Sherah prophesied among the Kamr, the Myrrydanai, and the Nahhashim, who stole the cloak of flesh and drank the blood of the Great Medhya.

  I, Falconer, the Eater of Merod Al-Kamr, who was called the Priest of Blood and was King of Alkemara; the rightful owner of the Staff of the Nahhashim and of the secrets of the rare flower called by the priest, the Flesh of Medhya, which contains the Serpent’s Venom; I, the One and the All, the Anointed of the descendants of the stolen blood of Medhya, whose blood and breath is the soul of the vampyre race, who brings life to the dead, and death to the living.

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Douglas Clegg is the New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of Neverland, The Priest of Blood, Afterlife, and The Hour Before Dark, among many other novels, novellas and stories. His short story collection, The Machinery of Night, won a Shocker Award, and his first collection, The Nightmare Chronicles, won both the Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Guild Award. His work has been published by Simon & Schuster, Penguin/Berkley, Signet, Dorchester, Bantam Dell Doubleday, Cemetery Dance Publications, Subterranean Press, Alkemara Press and others.

  A pioneer in the ebook world, his novel Naomi made international news when it was launched as the world’s first ebook serial in early 1999 and was called “the first major work of fiction to originate in cyberspace” by Publisher’s Weekly, covered in Time magazine, Business Week, Business 2.0, BBC Radio, NPR, USA Today and more; his book Purity was the first to go onto a mobile phone in the
U.S. in early 2001.

  He is married, and lives and writes in New England in a house called Villa Diodati.

  DISCLAIMER

  The Priest of Blood is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual locales, events, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  PUBLICATION CREDITS

  Copyright 2004, 2014 Douglas Clegg

  Published by Alkemara Press in the United States.

  Editorial services for this edition provided by:

  Ashley Davis

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