Beneath the Sands
One Year Ago
The King of Thorns rose from his chair and loomed above Hugo Vox. In the dense shadows pale figures crept closer, surrounding Vox with burning red eyes and hungry mouths.
Vox turned in a slow circle, looking at the twisted figures. Some were vastly old, with crooked bodies and crippled limbs; some had the blank moon faces of deeply inbred retardation; but seeded throughout the crowd were creatures like Grigor. Taller, whole, and powerful, their skin the color of milk, their eyes blazing with intelligence and an unnatural vitality that seemed to burn into Vox, threatening to steal away his life and breath.
Vox held up the detonator. “Careful now,” he murmured in a ghost of a voice. “Let’s all be very, very careful.”
“I am not afraid of your bomb,” sneered Grigor. “The Upierczi do not fear death.”
That annoyed Vox and he snapped, “Don’t lie to me, Grigor. Not to me. Everyone fears death. Even monsters like you. And… monsters like me. I’m not here to bring death and you damn well know it. I brought the bomb because I need to speak openly with you. No coy bullshit. We don’t know each other enough for trust, so shared fear is a good platform. Tell me I’m wrong.”
Grigor ran his tongue over the serrated ridge of his teeth.
“Talk,” he said.
Vox took another step, which brought him to within reach of Grigor, but the pale man remained motionless, his eyes glittering.
“The Scriptor and the Red Order don’t give a shit about you unless they need you to do their dirty work,” said Vox. “To do the work they are too weak and too afraid to do themselves. Isn’t it time to stop being their dog?”
Grigor’s eyes seemed to blaze with real heat. “Yes.” He hissed the word, filling it with endless hatred and cold fire.
“Yes,” agreed Vox.
“I know what happened to you. I know that eight hundred years ago Sir Guy LaRoque, the first Scriptor, sought out the Upierczi because the Order had a need for killers. Not any killers, but the best. Better than the Hashashin the Tariqa were using for their part of the so-called Holy Agreement. Nicodemus told LaRoque where to look, and he found an Upier in England, in Newburgh. He found another in France, and more in Italy, Poland, Russia… all through Europe. Not a community of you. Individuals. Hunted, wretched, hungry. Persecuted by the church. Condemned as monsters, as demons, as the unholy. LaRoque brought the Upier back to Nicodemus, and the priest created the Order of the Red Knights. Must have sounded pretty great at the time. To those poor, miserable fucks who had been hiding out in crypts and forests and ruins-to them it must have felt like they were people. Like they mattered. And, I guess they did matter; but only in the way a bullet matters if you want to shoot a gun. That’s what the Upierczi were, no matter what fancy-ass labels the Red Order hand out. Tools, weapons, slaves. For you guys, all three words mean the same thing.”
Grigor gave a single, slow nod.
“But the Order hit a snag with you. Something Sir Guy and Nicodemus didn’t foresee. You guys can’t breed worth shit. There are no female Upierczi, which screws things up from the jump. You guys are genetic freaks, a sideline of human evolution that didn’t pan out. The genes that make you what you are rarely present in females, and when they are the females look human and they sure as hell don’t want to breed with you. Not by choice. That meant that the Red Order had to start a forced breeding program. How many women did they take over all those years? Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? More? And every one of them had to be forced. Eight hundred years of rape isn’t a legacy to be proud of.”
Grigor sneered. “They are women. Who cares?”
Vox smiled. “Yeah, I’m the last person to throw stones. Anyway, the breeding program hit some of its own snags. Turns out only one in fifty or a hundred women was able to give birth to a healthy Upier. Most of the babies were-how should I put it? Less than successful? Stillbirths, freaks. Once in a while one of the breeding slaves popped out a half-breed. Always female, though, right? Whaddya call ’em? Dhampyr?”
“Abominations!” The word rippled through the darkness, spoken by a hundred mouths.
“Glass houses, stones. Any of that ring a bell?” asked Vox, amused. To Grigor he said, “The real bitch of it all was that the Red Order focused their breeding program on those few women who could produce Upierczi. They bred them and their children, over and over again, which left a pretty shallow fucking gene pool.” He gestured to one of the Upierczi who had mongoloid features and a vacuous expression in his eyes. “Inbreeding didn’t work for the Hapsburgs, and it sure as hell didn’t work for you.”
“That is the past,” growled Grigor.
“I know,” said Vox, smiling broadly. “I know that really goddamn well, which is why I’m here. Charlie LaRoque’s dad, who was probably one of the better Scriptors, as far as that goes, decided to try something different. Genetics. Gene therapy, gene splicing. Not rebreeding but a careful and deliberate remodeling of the Upier DNA. Very smart, very expensive, and very illegal. Which is how I found out about it, because if it involves science and it’s against the law, I’m always involved, I’m always making a buck on it, and I always find out about it.”
“What is it to you? What is any of this to you? You have the Seven Kings. You are their King of Fear. You are more powerful than most of the governments in the world above.”
Vox reached up, threaded his fingers through his hair, and revealed a bald pate that was blotched and unhealthy.
“I’m a walking dead man,” he said. “Cancer. I’m done. Best-case scenario gives me eighteen months.”
Grigor’s eyes glittered like rubies.
“Nobody knows. Not the Kings, not my mother. Not the Scriptor. Nobody.”
“Why come to me? Do you want a quicker death?”
“No… I want to live. You see, the other thing that I know about is what the scientists discovered while they were engineering the new generation of Upierczi. They cracked your DNA. They found out why you never get sick, why you lucky pricks live for so damn long. They know what makes you as close to immortal as living flesh and bone is ever going to get.”
Vox took a last step closer to Grigor, well within reach.
“I know about the treatment. I know about Upier 531,” he said fiercely. “And I fucking want it.”
“It isn’t for your kind. It would kill you.”
“It might kill me,” corrected Vox. “Or it might make me live forever.”
Grigor laughed. Low and soft. If a wolf could laugh, Vox thought, it would sound like that.
“Why should I give it to you? What could you possibly give me in return?”
“I can give you the whole fucking world, Grigor. I can make sure that no one and nothing can put you in chains again. I can guarantee it.”
“Prove it,” demanded Grigor.
He and Vox stared at each other for a long minute, their faces less than a yard apart.
Vox raised the detonator between them. He turned it over and slid back a small panel on the bottom, revealing a nine-digit touch pad. Vox showed this to Grigor and then slowly and deliberately punched in a complex code. The LED light glowing under his thumb faded to black. Hugo Vox raised his hand, palm out, offering the inert detonator to Grigor.
“All hail the King of Thorns,” he said.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Golden Oasis Hotel
Tehran, Iran
June 15, 9:01 a.m.
Knowing that Church was working on finding the nukes was a tremendous relief. Even I don’t have a sense of all the forces he can bring to bear at need. His connections and his political clout are considerable, and he doesn’t allow red tape to slow him down. With Vox in the mix? Well, let’s just say that I pity anyone who got in his way today.
Having handed off the ball, I switched my focus to the second part of Rasouli’s message. The Book of Shadows and the Saladin Codex. I had no idea what they were and I did not believe for a moment that they were entirely tangential to the nuclear issue. Rasouli had been a little too casual about mentioning them.