The Prophet

by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

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

  Text copyright © 2016 by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

  Cover art copyright © 2016 Sammy Yuen

  Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

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  eBook ISBN 9780399559143

  First Delacorte Press Ebook Edition 2016

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  The Prophet

  About the Author

  “Nevertheless, not to extinguish our free will, I hold it to be true that Fortune is the arbiter of one-half of our actions, but that she still leaves us to direct the other half, or perhaps a little less.” —Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

  Ghosts howled through the edges of the boy’s awareness, lamenting not just their deaths, but their lives. They cried of the pain they had endured at birth, and all the wasted years they had spent without the taste of freedom. Some had been born free, and had been stripped of all vestiges of will before they were forced into this small gray cage. Others had taken their first wailing breaths right here, inside the walls of Midnight.

  It wasn’t long before a child born in Midnight learned never to cry.

  Malachi didn’t cry. Wrapped in the terror and despair of those who had gone before him, he hadn’t cried since his first infant exhalation. Nor did he reach for his mother, who had also been born here. She had nursed him and given him sustenance, but she did not know how to give comfort because she had never known any herself.

  He squeezed his eyes shut as Fate walked by the door, in the form of a man who moved in a sphere of destiny that called out to Malachi. There were many people in this place who dragged with them pasts so heavy that they were suffocating, but this man was surrounded by sparks and swirls of “what if?”

  Keep going, keep going, the child thought. Go away.

  The man paused. Malachi’s breath slowed. His chest tightened. The visions were indistinct so far, but he knew they could get so much worse, until they became painfully overwhelming. The man peered through the open doorway and asked, “Who are you?”

  Malachi tried to look up, but his gaze did not focus on the man at the cell’s door; rather, it trained itself on another time and place, long ago and far away.

  The sun was hot, merciless as it beat down on the people and crops gathered at the holy place, a ring of stone set in the desert.

  Those who followed Ahnmik stood in the shade of a doum palm tree, sheltered. The white falcon was god of the darkness, of power and coolness and deepest rest. His worship seemed to draw the color from his priests and priestesses, leaving them especially vulnerable to the harshness of the daytime desert. Those who followed Anhamirak, on the other hand, had their arms and faces lifted to the midday sun, which made their golden skin sparkle. Their goddess, the black serpent who represented freedom and passion, had made them vivacious and as brilliantly colored as gemstones. They drank in the heat as raw power.

  Between them stood Maeve, she who maintained the precarious balance between Anhamirak and Ahnmik, light and dark, freedom and control. At her cry, the ritual began. The priest and priestess of Kain and Kaya, avatars of thunder and lightning, began their courtship dance, which was as violent as a battle and cared nothing for the mortals beneath them.

  Keisha, priestess of Anhamirak, used her power to grant the lovers abandon and joy. Cjarsa, high priestess of Ahnmik, used the white falcon’s reins to hold the storm in check. They needed water for people and plants, not a typhoon to drown them all.

  Maeve, who bowed to no one but the eternal balance, lifted her face to the rain.

  When Farrell Obsidian glanced inside the cell and saw the woman and child, his throat constricted with shock and horror. This was impossible.

  He had already passed a half-dozen cells, each occupied by three to five humans of various ages. The cheerless gray rooms held nothing more than slim beds and simple tables where a candle or an oil lamp could be set down when necessary. They needed no doors or locks, because their occupants had long ago given up any dreams of escape. Some had been born in the outside world, then brought here to be broken. The vampiric trainers used a combination of guile, magic, and brutality to strip the free will from their victims, who then became perfectly obedient slaves. Others were born here, products of Jeshickah’s breeding program, which she approached the same way with humans and horses alike.

  Most of the sprawling estate that served as the heart of Midnight was overwhelmingly ostentatious, a declaration of wealth, power, and luxury—but not this hall, where privileged guests never walked. Jeshickah, Mistress of Midnight, had instructed Farrell to come this way so he would see the savaged souls who were a warning to anyone who might stand against Midnight. Had she meant for him to see this, too? Did she have any idea what it would mean to him?

  The woman had hair like diamonds, perfectly white, and she looked at Farrell with pale eyes whose tint was hard to distinguish in the flickering light of the oil lamps that lined the dim hallway. She stared at him attentively but without expectation. He should have been able to feel the heat from both her body and her emotions, but she lacked both, which told Farrell two things: she was serpiente, like himself, and she was broken.

  The boy, on the other hand…

  He had his mother’s coloration, as far as Farrell could tell, though his eyes were closed. He hunched in a corner as Farrell approached, wrapping his arms around his knees and rocking. Farrell could sense the boy’s terror. He tried to go closer, to get a better sense of him, but the child flinched as if he were trying to press himself into the wall. Farrell stepped back, his heart going out to the poor thing, who still owned enough of his mind to feel fear.

  The mother and the boy were obviously white vipers. How? Maeve’s kin was extinct. Though Farrell had taken the name once used by Maeve’s people when he started his own tribe, it had been hundreds of years since anyone had actually seen a white viper. They were a myth, an ancient symbol of freedom that had no real presence in the modern day—except that they should not be kept in a cage.

  ***

  Generations stretched before Malachi’s eyes, from the priestess Maeve to the man now standing at the door to his cell, staring at him. Against all reason, the man stepped forward. Why would any fool willingly walk into this blood-soaked room?

  The boy pressed his hands to his face, trying to draw his vision back so as not to get even a glimpse of the stranger.

  The man knelt in front of him. “My name is Farrell,” he said. “What’s yours?”

  Farrell. That wasn’t his real name. The man didn’t mean to lie, but he didn’t understand that Farrell wasn’t the name that mattered.

  “The boy doesn’t speak, sir,” the woman, Malachi’s mother by blood, said.

  “Why not?” not-Farrell asked.

  Words were too heavy, too full of import. Speaking just made the world louder.

  “I do not know, sir,” the mother answered.

  Malachi knew the stranger understood the danger of voice, because it had only taken a few sounds to make him shudder. Farrell
had forced his question past that invisible wall once, but now he needed to protest.

  “Please don’t call me sir. I’m not your master. You shouldn’t have a—” His voice broke. There was too much power in words. “You are a white viper, aren’t you?” he asked.

  “Yes,” the woman answered simply. She was deaf to the echoes that floated through time in that moment. The past called out “Remember.” The future demanded “Decide.”

  “And he is your son?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who is his father?”

  “His father was shm’Ahnmik. I do not know his name.”

  Shm’Ahnmik. Farrell whispered the word and put a hand on the boy’s chin, lifting his face to meet his gaze.

  No—too much want, and will. Too many questions. Malachi couldn’t look into the strange serpent’s brilliant blue eyes a moment longer. He jerked his head to the side.

  —

  The balance was broken. The magic was wild, untamable, and devastating.

  The followers of Anhamirak blamed the black magic of those who worshipped Ahnmik. Those loyal to Ahnmik blamed the unbridled chaos of Anhamirak. And they all looked to Maeve, who had been dedicated to balance above all, as the root of their loss.

  She had been tasked with holding the world together, but she had fallen. She and her kin, the white vipers, had been driven out of the clan. Without them, the madness and death only increased, but logic held no sway when the panicked needed to lay blame.

  Next, the shm’Ahnmik fled. The falcon shapeshifters—those who had survived the war—formed an empire, well removed from the conflict and heat of their once-kin. The followers of Anhamirak, the serpiente, remained behind and raised their own kingdom. Both sides would forever remember Maeve’s disgrace and look on her descendants with fear and mistrust.

  Maeve named her clan Obsidian, after the black glass that can only be created when the earth itself belches forth fire and ash. Formed in destruction, the stone can be smooth as a teardrop or as sharp as an arrowhead. And just as no man or woman can control the volcano that forms the obsidian glass, so too does the guild named after it disavow any ruler, emperor, king, or master who tries to claim dominion over it.

  —

  Half white viper, half falcon. No wonder the boy was dumb. It was well known that falcons were prone to insanity.

  “Who were your parents?” Farrell asked the woman. She had obviously been broken as a slave, but maybe she still knew where she came from.

  “I’m sorry,” the woman answered. “I do not know.”

  You cannot save them, he told himself. The woman was broken. The boy was mad, and would certainly die of that malady; falcons did not live long away from the rest of their kind, and half falcons rarely survived childhood.

  How had Jeshickah gotten them?

  “You seem to have been waylaid.”

  As if summoned by his thoughts, Jeshickah, the so-called Mistress of Midnight, appeared in the doorway. Farrell’s spine crawled at the sound of her voice, and every fiber of his being writhed when he saw the woman and the boy both go to their knees. Maeve’s kin were without masters! Yet here they were, bowing to this vampire, this dead body that did not know to lie down and begin its path to the next world.

  Farrell turned slowly, trying to rein in his fury. Jeshickah would see it, and guess that she could use the woman and boy against him. Worse, if he dared to lash out, she could claim him and all those who chose to follow him as her property. They would end up as destroyed as this poor white viper woman.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, trying to force the proper respect into his voice. “I was distracted. I thought white vipers were extinct.”

  He tried to betray nothing beyond idle curiosity. He could not let her know how valuable this information was to him.

  “Are they?” she replied, sounding bored. Like the empire she ran, Mistress Jeshickah had a magnificent exterior that wrapped a frigid, calculating essence. Milk-pale skin and dark walnut tresses meant nothing. The void that was her soul was visible in her jet-black eyes, which flicked to the mother briefly. “That one was born in these cells, several years ago, to two other serpents. A fluke of breeding, I suppose.”

  Impossible. The children of a white viper were white vipers, always, just as the child of a cobra was always a cobra. White vipers were not born to other serpents, like some strange, frustrating trait that might spring up once every several generations when one tried to breed horses or dogs. If Jeshickah was lying, though, there was no way for him to force the truth from her.

  You cannot save them, he told himself again. There is nothing you can do.

  He glanced back at the boy, who was still on his knees, with his head down and his shoulders hunched as if against a blow. Did he even know where he was, or why he was kneeling?

  ***

  Malachi fought to stay focused, but while Farrell had been full of potential, of destiny shouting commands at the future, Mistress Jeshickah screamed out thousands of years of history and memory and ambition sufficient to make Fate itself ache and cry in agony.

  He knelt because he had been taught to kneel in her presence, but doing so meant overlapping with every other soul who had done the same in the past four centuries.

  “I brought you here to discuss the current position of your guild in my empire, not the practice of breeding serpiente,” Mistress Jeshickah said to Farrell, “but I suppose these two can serve as a lesson. What do you consider the Obsidian guild’s role in Midnight?”

  “Pardon?” The blunt question had caught the newcomer off guard, just as his discovery of the woman and child had. Knowing that Mistress Jeshickah had probably engineered the situation precisely for that purpose did not make Farrell immune to the manipulation.

  “Your guild,” Mistress Jeshickah repeated. “Most of you are serpiente by blood, but you do not answer to the serpiente king. If you are nothing but outlaws, a thorn in the side of Diente Julian Cobriana, then you might as well be mine. Can you give me a good reason to respect your sovereignty?”

  Malachi could feel the battle in the man, between what he knew a child of Obsidian should say, and his fear of the consequences. In the end, Fate stepped in. Even in this place, Farrell could not betray the beliefs of his people within sight of Maeve’s kin.

  “Children of Obsidian have no master, no mistress, no king,” he said. “We bow to no one. Whether you respect that or not does not change who we are.”

  “Bold words for a man who is still standing due only to the grace of our laws,” Mistress Jeshickah replied. “Or would you consider yourself free of those, as well?”

  “You wrote Midnight’s laws,” Farrell replied, his voice trembling at the start, then strengthening. “You consider yourself and your kind bound by them. They do not order me to bow to you, or to mouth false platitudes.” Farrell’s heart was pounding so hard that Malachi could feel the vibrations hit his own skin. “It would make me powerful indeed if my refusal to speak words we would both know as lies could force you to violate your own mandates.”

  —

  The three ladies of Liadan, who had ruled the land since it was a single manor house supported by a few dozen serfs, were away when the Inquisition reached their town. People who had flourished, who never had been subjected to famine or plague, nevertheless rallied around the cry of heresy and witchcraft.

  They pointed the first fingers at the shapeshifter bailiffs—and then their vampiric masters.

  Inquisition had raged through the area on and off for two centuries, but this time, a wrinkle in fate caused the church’s fire to catch where it had always died before. One of the lion shapeshifters broke under torture. Not only did he admit to the existence of witches, shapeshifters, and worse, living in Liadan, he gave them detailed instructions for how they could effectively capture the others of his kind.

  After they rounded up and interrogated the rest of the lions, the Inquisitorial soldiers learned how to kill a vampire. They had methods. And tools.
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  The ladies of Liadan could have salvaged the land, but it would have involved slaughtering every man, woman, and child on it. What was the point?

  They followed the wolves, who knew of another land where the humans were few and the church lacked the power to drive its Inquisition. The vampires provided resources, so the witches and shapeshifters who likewise fled the fire could find a new place to settle, conveniently within the shadow of a new realm. One that was stronger and harsher, and would never be betrayed.

  By the time the displaced kingdoms realized how far in debt they were, there was no way for them to make another choice. They would follow new laws dictated to them, or pay the price for disobedience.

  By the time two Dominican monks published their Malleus Maleficarum, a guide to identifying and interrogating witches that fanned the Inquisition to ever fiercer flames, almost every creature of nonhuman blood had already fled. Far from the ashes of Europe, a new empire rose. The monks declared in their book that, at midnight, the king of the vampires would come out to do his work. On this side of the world, it was always midnight.

  Jeshickah, the first lady of Liadan, would never again see all her work undone.

  —

  Jeshickah watched Farrell Obsidian squirm. He tried to hide all signs of discomfort and near-panic, but she had spent centuries reading the subtle signs of emotion and learning how to respond to them.

  Though he had tried to feign disinterest, he was obviously fascinated by the white viper and its boy-child. Jeshickah had told the truth as she knew it about the white’s origins, but it was clear from Farrell’s reaction that there was more to the story.

  The boy was scrawny, pale, and vacant. Most of the time, his eyes just stared into the distance. Occasionally his lips moved, but she had never heard him speak except in disjointed, incoherent syllables. His hair hung past his shoulders, utterly colorless against the gray walls. Even his eyes were grayish, the iris barely darker than the whites, making his pupils appear wide and alien whenever he dared look at her.