"No!" her father sobbed, as if afraid that Lucius might expose his secrets.
"You owe me your life, Cassius, and I shall have it," Lucius said. "If you will not serve me, then perhaps your wife or your daughter...."
Lucius snapped his fingers, and the guard that held Ramira's father—a man named Adel Todesfall—made a quick cut.
Her mother had been standing by, restrained by a guard, but as her husband fell, she screamed and launched herself at Lucius, fingers splayed wide, as if she might gouge out his eyes.
But it was not his eyes that she was after. They fought, Ramira's mother struggling to get her fingers beneath his helm, but Lucius butted her forehead, and she staggered. Lucius grasped her by the skull with his sizraels, then began draining her vigor away. An amazing thing happened—sheets of red fire seemed to leap from her, streaming into him, so that she was wrapped in flame. One moment she was whole and healthy, and the next she wailed in pain, a wail that echoed in Ramira's memory down through the years, and Ramira's mother struggled and began to age beneath a sheen of fire, crow's feet forming at the corners of her eyes, age spots blossoming purple on her pale skin. Ramira's mother often sang so sweetly that her neighbors called her "the nightingale," but now her beautiful voice turned into the croaking sobs of an old hag.
She fell to the floor when Lucius was done with her, like a rag doll that had been cast away. She was creased with wrinkles.
Lucius's face had changed, softened. The lines of care had been erased.
He turned to Ramira, a frightened eight-year-old girl, and said. "Your father owed a debt. You may pay it, or your sister may."
Ramira's sister was still lying in her cradle by the hearth, sound asleep. Ramira knew that if she did not pay her father's debt, Lucius would take her sister, force her into some loathsome sort of slavery, while Ramira herself would be discarded, just as her parents had been.
"Serve me well," Lucius said, drawing close so that he loomed over her, "and I shall give you more life from time to time. You need never grow old, never die, unless you are slain."
Ramira had tried to answer then, but her voice failed her. So she merely nodded in acquiescence.
"Run then and get your spare clothes," Lucius said. "You shall never forget this night, that I can promise you, for this bargain shall define you, now and for all of your days."
Lucius was right. Ramira never forgot that moment.
Everything else from her childhood was ripped away by Lucius's servants, his memory thieves—every kind word that might have been spoken by a loving mother, every joyful moment, her memories of holidays on the farm.
All that Ramira had left was vague glimpses from her childhood home—a place at once lovely and indistinct, like water lilies painted by Monet.
Chapter 30
Elation
"It never ceases to amaze me how cheap a price some men set upon their souls."
The Learjet's engines whined softly as Lucius sat in a padded Italian calf-leather seat, peering into a large touch-screen. The Asian markets were about to open, and he wanted to get a feel for the mood of the world's investors today, not that he expected any surprises.
Adel Todesfall approached and whispered. "We've got a problem. We've lost contact with our retrieval squad. It appears that the boy is a dream assassin and a leech." Adel waited half a moment for the information to sink in, and then asked, "Shall we abort the mission?"
"All of our operatives have gone silent?" Lucius demanded. He couldn't quite believe it. The team was headed by a dread knight, nearly a thousand years in the making. Sure, she'd reported that they were suffering the effects of leeching, but had there ever been a leech so powerful?
Not in the six millennia that Lucius had lived. And this one was a dream assassin, as well.
Lucius's heart raced. It was too much to hope for. On impulse he said. "No, we shall not abort. I want to visit the kill site, investigate our operatives' remains. I want to see them with my own eyes."
Adel gave him a long look. "Are you sure, my lord? The swamp is a dangerous place...."
"I'm more dangerous," Lucius said.
Chapter 31
The Legacy
"History shows us that humans are incapable of becoming civilized. The fall of Persia, Greece, Rome, and China shows us that even their most dominant civilizations are considered disposable. Time and again, they invent a society, and with the next generation, the culture is cast aside.
Since mankind cannot maintain a long-standing society, we shall put them to work maintaining ours."
Sommer appeared at the door to the back room of the cabin, doing her best to drag a man across the floor, one of the Draghouls. He was lying on his back, and there were bullet holes in the fabric of his body armor, but no sign of blood. He'd taken Sommer's shotgun blast, and though the bullets had knocked him off the porch, they'd failed to penetrate his flesh.
"This one's a techie," she said. "He might be able to answer some questions for us."
Bron glanced at a cell phone that he'd taken from one of the Draghouls. He'd been garnering memories from Ramira for twenty minutes, and he worried about the time. Lucius was coming.
Olivia glanced down at the techie. "Bron, do you want to get to know your father? We can pull memories for you."
Bron was surprised by how passionately he felt about it. His only memory of his father came from Ramira, and it was a thousand years old. Back then, his father had looked to be only thirty. His hair was receding, yet dark. He was a handsome man, the spitting image of how Bron imagined he himself might look in a few years. "Yes," he said. "I want to see more."
Olivia helped pull the ailing Draghoul over to Bron, and this time, Bron's own mother reached into the man's mind, and then placed her free hand on Bron, grasping his skull, even as Olivia did the same with Ramira.
Memories began to pop into his mind, snippets of information, collages. Bron felt Ramira's long hours spent in her youth, fighting with the epee and dueling dagger until her calves ached and her arms felt as if they'd drop.
Dark muses had come to her, sent at Lucius's bidding, and trained her in various styles of butchery, until she also excelled at the bow, and more arcane weapons—the sap, the garrote.
From the Technician: In 1762, in a small counting house, the technician, a man named Stalzi, was examining some account ledgers, when Lucius came in. The bank accounts were bursting. Lucius had bankrupted a small nation and created a false trail of evidence that implicated a tyrannical duke.
"I'm not sure I can keep up with all of this work," Stalzi said. "The money is rolling in faster than I can count it. This was all... so easy."
Lucius smiled. "Humans cannot imagine something like me. Their minds recoil at the thought. And since they cannot imagine me, they cannot be forewarned. In the old days, their forefathers knew us, and gave us names from legend. Now, they disavow that knowledge, even as we harvest their wealth."
From Ramira: As she won Lucius's trust, Lucius assigned her an apprenticeship—as a torturer. He did not need to torture men for information, and could have reserved it only for punishment, but he delighted in torment, and when the opportunity arose to join the crusade, they went gladly, if only to feed his appetite for war.