“Tch. Useless.” Irritably, he pressed his truncated wrist against her mouth. Warm, wet flesh met her lips, punctuated by a sharp scrape of bone. Blood…crawled.
Rian flinched from the thick liquid moving of its own accord across her tongue. A separate flood of strength accompanied the sharp taste of iron. Ka, expanding her chest as if she was a balloon, the vampire’s exasperation and annoyance a distinct presence, hot and sharp and briefly as much a part of her as his blood.
“We’ll continue this if you live.”
Her mouth filled with bees. Pinpricks of fire as the blood began to work its way into soft tissue rather than flow down her throat. A hive, setting up house. That image fit, suggesting a thing of many parts driven by a common purpose. But the will, the direction, lay outside, standing on the far side of the room.
Her last sight of him was a silhouette gazing out into the night, holding the amputated hand to his wrist. That inevitably brought thoughts of Eluned, though of course her niece could not simply reattach severed flesh. While Rian was becoming a part of this man. Bound, joined by blood and ka, a separate kind of limb.
Belonging to the wrong vampire.
FOUR
A drum. A smith’s hammer. A river that jolted and surged and pounded. The flow of it was so clear, from the tip of her nose to the smallest toe. Each inhalation made it flare, and Rian was light, a glorious blaze, a pillar of strength and power, exultant.
A white-gold flicker stabbed at her eyes and she winced, turning her head to an embracing blue haze. Her awareness shifted from the river inside to more familiar senses. Warmth. A thick stillness. A hint of sun-dried linen. Dull hunger. No pain. Legs and arms and the normal weight of self, comfortably supported by a well-stuffed mattress.
Behind her, a separate river pounded and surged. Something more than hearing told Rian it was there: a torrent of life separate and distinct from her own. Slowly, she turned back, lifting a hand to block any chance of looking directly at the dagger-point of incandescence. A man sitting next to the piercing light turned to place something over it: a ceramic shade that muted the brilliance to almost comfortable levels, except for a vivid rim around a smoke vent. With the glare cut away he became more than a shape.
“Lord Msrah.”
“The extreme sensitivity to light will fade in a few hours,” he said, voice soft and measured. “But you will struggle with the sun for some days to come.”
“That…is that a candle?”
“It is. Dama Seaforth. I owe you my deepest apologies for the inadequate protection of my House.”
Everything was blue-tinted, but she could see him quite clearly: a round-cheeked youth of middle height, hair held in a queue, dark skin highlighted by violet notes. The gentle irony he’d displayed during their initial interview in London was entirely absent.
“What was that…sphinx?”
He knew. She could see it, sense it, even as he shook his head.
“An attack aimed at Princess Leodhild, it seems, which fortunately failed to harm her. It does not pay to underestimate any of the Suleviae, even if the Sulevia Leoth is now more associated with Prytennia’s industry than her defences.”
Wondering why he lied, Rian slid a hand up to explore her throat, searching for damage. Questing fingers found only unbroken skin, but the memory of teeth, of pain and a sharp note of terror, made her shudder. And then start to think through how strange that encounter had been.
“That vampire—I met him in your library,” she said. “Not directly in the sun, but it was so bright in there.”
“Yes. A behaviour that develops as we age. All of us can tolerate a certain level of exposure to strong light. I could go upstairs now and walk in the garden if I wished. It would feel like death—I would, indeed, be slowly turning to stone, and would not recover fully until I drank. But there is also a…piquancy involved, should one be willing to risk misjudging one’s tolerance.”
Rian puzzled through this, and concluded that the library vampire had been hurting himself for the fun of it.
“He bound me,” she said, the words not quite a question. She knew what had happened, but wanted confirmation, to have disaster put into words.
“His only means of retrieving an exsanguincy,” Lord Msrah said. “Though I admit it surprises me that he made the attempt, since the danger of creating a ghul is high. And he is not fond of blood service.”
“I had that impression too.”
Trying not to picture herself as a ghul—a corpse brought to unlife by the vampiric symbiont—Rian worked herself gingerly into an upright position and was relieved to discover herself clothed, if only in a light sleeping gown.
“I suppose it’s an achievement to be bound to someone whose name I don’t know. Not even the line—is he Shu?”
“Amon-Re.” Lord Msrah pronounced the name as a distinct sentence, as if even speaking it was an event. “And it is an achievement to survive a bonding to that line in any circumstance. As for his identity, he has been calling himself Comfrey Makepeace, which I imagine is an example of his humour. He is better known as Heriath.”
It was not often Rian was reduced to gaping, but this was the last thing she had expected.
“The Wind’s Dog? That—?”
She almost finished with ‘brat’, and stopped herself with a deep breath. There was no-one in Prytennia who did not know the name Heriath, even though he hadn’t been publicly sighted since the disaster of the Three Sisters‘ War, and was thought gone to stone. He predated the Suleviae, and had been bound to serve their rule when Brangwen the First had been crowned. For the vast part of the Trifold Age he had been a moving force: assassin, spy, and agent of the Crown as Prytennia had expanded from one to three dragonates. It had been the Suleviae who had beaten back the waves of invasion that so frequently threatened Sulis’ domain, but until the Three Sisters, Heriath, the Wind’s Dog, had been a shadowy partner in every success.
The vampire she had met bore no resemblance to the Heriath of legend, but Lord Msrah seemed quite certain.
“I…am surprised to be alive,” Rian managed. Not only because the Amon-Re line—that of Egypt’s rulers—was said to kill almost all who hoped to be raised to it, but the potency of a vampire’s blood increased with age. Lord Msrah was entering the ranks of Shu seniority at four hundred years, but the Amon-Re line was altogether a different order of strength. Heriath…at minimum he would have to be twelve centuries.
“Your will to live is clearly far from trivial,” Lord Msrah said. “I regret that I can no longer accept your service.”
He took an envelope from the table, handing it to her. Heavy with some object, it was addressed in a loose, looping scrawl. It took Rian several blinks to decipher the word ‘Wednesday’.
Tugging the flap open, she tipped out a key: heavy, tarnished, and as large as her hand. A faded paper tag was tied to it with fine cotton thread, the writing tiny and exact. An address in London. There was nothing else in the envelope, no note or explanation.
“I don’t feel any particular compulsion,” she remarked. “I could simply not go to this place, couldn’t I?”