Kitty in the Underworld kn-12 Page 14

  “Why?” I asked finally. “Why did you need to turn Gaius Albinus, to make him invincible? For what purpose?”

  The vampire sighed, an affectation. An expression of resignation. “It seemed … necessary at the time. It was so long ago. So much has happened since then, I hardly remember why.”

  Now may we kill him?

  Wolf was mocking me. Such a kidder.

  I curled my lips, baring my teeth. Wolf expressing her opinion. Kumarbis didn’t even flinch. He said, “I remember one thing—as soon as it was done, my certainty left me. I took care of Gaius Albinus, watched over him as had not been done for me. I still … he was like my son, a son I could never have. But he was so angry. What else could I do but take care of him and hope for the best?”

  Gaius Albinus, Dux Bellorum, was the general. Caesar was the true emperor, pulling the general’s strings. I hadn’t thought that Kumarbis might actually be that Caesar. No, he was something else. A pawn, maybe. The same strings had yanked on them both. Those were the strings I had to follow. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be happy with whom I found at the end of them.

  I waited, and Kumarbis continued. “We had a falling-out, years later. Of course we did. You could have guessed that.”

  The pendant around his neck indicated that at one point he’d signed on with Roman. Been one of his allies in the Long Game, linked to him, commanded by him. Without his mystical voice guiding him, the Long Game must have seemed full of purpose, and Roman’s drive inspiring. At one time, he’d been willing to follow.

  Something had made him leave, obviously. I could imagine a number of scenarios. I put myself in Roman’s place, regarding this man, the vampire who’d made him, who must have seemed weak and purposeless to his regimented, ambitious mind. He would have punished Kumarbis, maybe indirectly. Kumarbis, who felt so much loyalty, however misguided, would have put up with it until … My imagination failed me. To be a fly on that wall, all those hundreds of years ago.

  Kumarbis saw himself as a father, even now, to this ragged little band he’d collected. He probably slotted me easily into the role of rebellious teenager. The trickster whose chaos balanced order, who would find the solution, accidentally or otherwise, to all their problems. Like Coyote in the stories. He wouldn’t listen to me, he’d only pay attention to the role he’d constructed for me in his own dusty brain.

  The one thing he was right about: he might very well know Roman better than anyone in the world. Now, what did I do with that information?

  “Now you fight against him,” I said. “You did more than leave Gaius Albinus, you changed your mind about the whole mission, about the Long Game. Why did you stop believing in uniting the vampires?”

  “I could not convince the Masters of the cities to unite, but he did. At first I admired him. I thought I had inspired him. He was carrying out my plan. But he … he went to places I could not follow. He found lore I had no knowledge of, he brought the beasts under his influence—”

  “Beasts,” I said. “Werewolves? Lycanthropes?”

  “And more, creatures that even in centuries of wandering I hadn’t known existed. I never asked so many questions as Gaius did. He knew, I think he understood, that if he could become this monster, this creature that we were, then all the other stories must be true. All the magic in the world must be real. He wants to be master of it all, so that he can destroy it all.”

  Not rule, but destroy. It didn’t even surprise me. In the washed-out lantern light, in the depths of this cave, where the air smelled cold and the shadows seemed alive, anything was possible, anything at all. All the stories came to life.

  Kumarbis gripped the coin around his neck. “When he made this, the first of the coins, I saw what he would become. Where his ambitions lay. I followed him still, I wore the coin because I had nowhere else to go. I had been alone for so very long, you see. You cannot understand how long I was alone.”

  No, I couldn’t. My sympathies swung wildly, from one to the other, to both. They’d both been wronged, they’d both made mistakes. I couldn’t feel anything anymore.

  “But you left,” I said. “You left, but you didn’t stop him, back when he wasn’t so powerful—”

  “I wore his coin,” Kumarbis said simply. “I could not harm him. Leaving was difficult enough. Breaking the bond, marring the coin, nearly destroyed me. I don’t know of anyone who’s done it since.”

  Anastasia had done it. She’d been called Li Hua when she lived in China at the time of Kublai Khan, and Roman had bought her as a slave from the conquering army. He’d turned her, she’d served him—and then she’d escaped. She was the one who’d explained the coins to me. And Kumarbis had never had a clue about her, or anything else that had happened after he left Roman, I was betting.

  “How? How’s he going to do it? Destroy everything?” I said. Only one of many obvious questions. But the one I really had to know, if I wanted to stop the man. That artifact, the one Roman was looking for—the Hand of Hercules—did Kumarbis know about that?

  “Does it matter? If we stop him, it won’t matter—”

  “Yes, dammit, it matters!”

  His body seemed to creak with the deep breath he took. “We will stop him, and the point will be moot.”

  He didn’t know. Chuckling, I scratched my itchy, unwashed hair. The vampire didn’t move. Didn’t stand up to announce that he was finished, that he’d carried out his part of the deal and we were done now. This was still story time, and he was still waiting for my questions. Maybe I had some journalistic interview chops after all.

  I said, “You could have had power. You could have gathered followers, like Roman has. But you never settled, never founded a Family of your own—why is that?”

  “I was not meant to stay in one city, to rule over mundane matters. I was not meant for power. I learned that then. If I could have been Master of my own Family, I would have succeeded all those years ago.”

  He’d tried to be a Master and failed. Or rather, stopped trying when he realized continuing would probably get him killed. Failed Masters were destroyed, they didn’t escape with their undead half-lives. He’d succeeded in surviving. Might have been the only thing he’d ever succeeded at. Finally, in the end, I did feel sorry for him.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “For everything you went through.”

  He bowed his head in acknowledgment. “And now, there is nothing else to tell. It is time. Zora, we must prepare.”

  When he climbed to his feet, he looked like a figure of bone, wood, and leather unfolding, stretching and groaning, a carving come to life, but it was only my imagination, building on stories. I didn’t actually hear his dry skin creak, or see puffs of ancient dust rise from his joints as he straightened. His movement only seemed like it should be accompanied by such effects. Even after drinking my blood, which should have made him flush, he seemed faded.

  Zora came to his side, took his arm, and he leaned on her as they made their way to the ritual chamber.

  “Come,” he said over his shoulder to the rest of us.

  I had to remind myself this wasn’t a story. I was here physically, and this was real. I was still processing what he’d told me. It all made such weird sense. I would love to hear the story from Roman’s point of view. I probably never would, and that made me a little sad.

  Enkidu and Sakhmet waited for me to pull myself off the floor. She was at my shoulder, as she had been since the vampire had fed.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah,” I said, sighing. I looked at her. “Had you heard any of that before?”

  “It’s more than he’s ever told the rest of us,” Sakhmet said. “It—it happened so long ago, it’s hard to think that those events still impact us. Are still driving this.”

  “That’s all of history,” I said, gathering the motivation to haul myself to my feet. “Vampires just put a face on it.”

  Chapter 17

  THE RITUAL chamber had been transformed. Zora must have been busy in th
e day or so since I’d last been in here. While I’d been asleep, she’d been preparing.

  She moved clockwise around the rough-hewn walls of the room, using a candle to light torches set in sconces drilled into the stone. Five torches, for the five points of the star painted on the floor. The flames produced more light, orange and churning, than I’d yet seen in this underground world. I looked up—and up, and up. What I hadn’t noticed before in the darkness: the mine extended upward, a vertical shaft that must have followed the vein of ore. A tower of open space, outcrops of rough granite wavering in the light. Boards lay across the space at irregular intervals, and a couple of ancient, desiccated wooden ladders were propped against the stretches of stone, as far up as the light allowed me to see. Miners had worked here, once upon a time, climbing ever upward in search of wealth. The surface of the wood glittered with that ever-present patina of precipitated minerals.

  I gazed in awe, as if I stared up from the nave of a cathedral. The lofty space of a holy site, carved out of what people called living rock. The air seemed to pulse with the rhythm of my breathing. Black smoke trailed upward, to infinity. There must have been some unseen cracks or fissures to the surface, providing ventilation. The chamber smelled of pitch and incense, sandalwood and sage. Oily, hot, pungent. I blinked, my eyes stinging from the smoke, squinting to try to adjust to the changing light. I put out my hands, afraid I was going to get dizzy. I was still hungry, dehydrated. Nothing I could do about it but hang on.

  Arriving at the top point of the star, Kumarbis wore a serene smile on his face, hands folded regally before him. He might have been a statue, or a figure from an ancient frieze. He might very well have been the model for one of those stone kings, with his broad face and determined gaze. He had on the same pale, loose shirt and pants he’d been wearing. Only Zora was dressed as some kind of otherworldly priestess. Thank goodness she wasn’t making us all wear white robes.

  Kumarbis nodded at me and said, “Regina Luporum, will you join us and take your place in our circle?”

  Zora pointed at a spot, one of the branches of the star. I didn’t recognize any of the markings there, nothing that particularly meant “Regina Luporum” or anything else. It could have been scribbling, random symbols copied from a Wikipedia article. If I asked Zora what the symbols meant, would she know? Or would she tell me I couldn’t possibly understand? I wanted to remember this, the symbols and patterns, everything, so I could ask Cormac and Amelia about it later.

  I’d wanted to know what all this was about. Fine. This was it.

  “We won’t hurt you,” Sakhmet whispered as she moved past me to her own place on the circle. Her smile was meant to be reassuring, and in spite of myself, I was reassured. I liked her. If only we could have coffee together in my favorite diner and have a normal conversation. This setting was damaging my judgment.

  When Zora finished lighting torches, she joined us in the circle. Five points to the star, a place for each of us to stand. Kumarbis, then me, then Zora, then Enkidu and Sakhmet. I could see their faces, watch their expressions. They all showed calm, but their bodies were tense with anticipation. I scented their sweat, which gave the air a ripe, musty odor. We are the sacrifice. The sudden thought might not have been wrong, either. I was well into the cave, away from the tunnel. I’d have to get past Kumarbis to escape. That was probably intentional. Or was it critical that Regina Luporum stand in this spot and no other?

  I was supposed to be concentrating on the ritual. I was supposed to be cooperating. I was feeling dizzy, slipping out of my own body.

  A B-grade horror flick featuring an ancient magical ritual might have done something similar to what Zora cooked up. She brought her toolkit with her and worked industriously, scooping dried herbs out of a wooden box, putting them in a brazier, pulling crystals out of a velvet sack, along with sticks and wands and carved symbols, little sphinxes and Eyes of Horus and Ganeshas and Chinese symbols that I felt like I should have recognized.

  I wanted to say something, to poke at her and the obvious theatricality of what she was doing. Like she wasn’t sure exactly what worked so she was going to try it all. But I kept quiet. My jaw hurt, I clamped it shut so tightly in my effort to keep quiet.

  Then things took a turn. The next item she drew from her kit was a dead bird—an all-white dove, stiffened, eyes missing. It smelled musty rather than corpselike. Mummified. Next, a sheet of yellowed paper, or maybe parchment, that appeared to be blank. And a jar, containing a very much alive mouse, peach size and gray, skittering up the sides of the glass. There appeared to be holes punched into the lid. These three items she placed in the center of her ritual space, on top of a spiraling shape that must have had some specific meaning.

  She moved around the circle, placing crystals and totems, little piles of herbs and salt, sprinkling us all with water from a copper bowl. I blinked and winced when the water hit my face, suppressing a growl. I hoped the others understood the heroic efforts I was making here to be good and quiet. I entertained myself by imagining what Cormac might say about all this, and I decided he wouldn’t say anything. He wouldn’t have to; the smirk on his face would be epic. And what would Amelia say? I didn’t know her as well as I knew Cormac, but I imagined she’d be smirking just as hard. The two of them got along for a reason.

  I needed to stop thinking about Cormac and Amelia, and how they could help me if they were here. But I also needed to remember as many details as I could about all this, so I could tell them, so they could help me ferret out the meaning of this. I had to have faith that I would be able to talk to them about this later. So I tried to pay attention to the details they would want to know. The dove, the mouse, the torches, the symbols. My vision was swimming from the smoke.

  Zora was saying prayers under her breath. A consecration, I realized. A cleansing, a blessing.

  She went to Kumarbis last, leaving talismans for his place on the circle, saying her prayer. Last, she held out her hand, and he pulled the coin on its cord over his head and gave it to her. Like giving the bloodhound something to scent.

  Was it crazy that this was starting to make sense?

  She placed the coin in the center circle, with the dead dove, the sheet of paper, and the live mouse. Finally, she returned to her place on the star and circle, raised her arms, and began to chant. “Munde Deus virtuti tuae, confirm thy power in us, oh spirit of the world, confirm thy power against our enemy, may his paths be uncertain, let the spirit of the world persecute him, El, Elohim, Elohe, Zebatth, Elion, Escerchie, Adonay, Jah, Tetragrammaton, Saday…”

  And so on. She moved from English to Latin to languages I didn’t recognize. Probably Hebrew and Arabic, and a few others besides. Whatever language, whatever she was saying, she spoke like she meant it, and her conviction brought a strange weight to the room, as if the air grew thicker, and breathing grew more difficult. Enkidu’s and Sakhment’s chests moved visbly; they, too, were taking deeper, more purposeful breaths. Enkidu’s expression was set, frowning, determined. He watched Zora as if he could make her succeed by force of will alone. Sakhmet, also determined, full of faith, was watching Enkidu.

  Kumarbis wasn’t breathing at all, because he didn’t need to. Of all of us, he was relaxed, arms loose at his sides. His head was tilted back, and he smiled. It was a look of triumph. He had been planning this for centuries, and finally, finally, his great scheme was coming to fruition. Of course he looked triumphant. So, what would he do if nothing happened?

  Because apart from her chanting, the wavering light of the torches, and the psychological influences that prompted us to think we’d entered another world, nothing was happening. Movement kept catching my gaze—a spark of reflected light in the thumb-size crystal she’d put on the ground in front of me. The pale yellow stone was catching the flickering light of the torches and throwing it back at me. Swirling patterns in the air were only smoke, writhing, thickening. The burning incense drifted, gathered, growing dense. The light from the torches played against it.
I could almost imagine I saw shapes in the light and shadow, the haze in the air. Claws and legs, fangs and black eyes.

  Zora’s voice became ecstatic, as if she really was getting off on this. “The window opens, spirit of the world, give us the strength to tread on serpents, to smash the power of our enemy, that none may hurt us. The window opens, spirit of the world, show us our enemy!”

  So help me, I saw something in the smoke, with eyes, looking back. Something male and wicked. I could almost smell it—cold, like stone. Vampirically cold, weighted with age and purpose. It seemed to look around the circle, studying each of us. Marking us, for future reference.

  Wolf braced as if cornered. We wouldn’t scream, we wouldn’t run, because it wouldn’t do any good. We would face it and fight.

  This was the power of suggestion at work, nothing else. This was Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, and we were trying to draw meaning from half-perceived images, building worlds out of shadows. But Wolf’s hackles were rising, a shivering down the back of my spine that told me something was watching us. The urge to run grew. Yes, let’s, please. I ought to listen to Wolf more often.

  Kumarbis’s eyes were closed, his arms spread, basking in the radiance of the ritual. Enkidu’s jaw was taut, and he held himself in the rigid stance of a cornered wolf. He was feeling much like I was, then. I gathered he didn’t know what to expect out of this ritual any more than I did. He had committed to all this without knowing details. Did that make him loyal, foolish, or both? Sakhmet also watched the patterns in the smoke, but every now and then she glanced at Enkidu, and her fingers clenched as if she wanted to reach out to him and take his hand.

  Zora moved to the center of the circle. In one hand she had a dagger, a clearly ceremonial piece with a slender, shining blade and a carved bone handle. Kneeling before the collection of items she’d placed there, she opened the jar and grabbed the flailing mouse. She held up the mouse in one hand and dagger in the other, beseeching the smoke rising into the expanse above us.