The Last Volari, page 4
Many times.
I opened my hands, collected myself and tried to organise a response, but there was a stirring near the door – Arvan, nodding respectfully to Jirrini and Durrano as he carefully slid his bulk past them. He was a tall, powerful man, his shoulders and arms heavy with muscle. He still wore his hair like a nomad’s, bare on the sides with a wide strip of locks going from forehead to neck, all done up in a tangle of braids. The blood hadn’t changed the light brown of his skin or the darker brown of his hair, but it had changed his eyes, made them blank and black as a night without stars.
Those dark eyes were on me as he approached. Arvan acted as though he were oblivious to the tension that filled the courtyard, but I knew that was a lie. He looked like a brute, but the mind behind those black eyes was sharp as obsidian.
‘Lady Volari,’ he said. ‘The king will be happy to see you.’ He straightened, and breathed, almost silently, pitched for my keen ears alone, ‘They don’t know.’
‘I thought King Corsovo was unavailable,’ Magdalena said, an edge of anger in her voice.
‘He’s never unavailable to family,’ I said, then turned my back on them all and stalked away.
Corsovo’s apartment was dark.
My boots clicked loudly against the tile, echoing in the silent chamber. No light, no other sound except the sighing of the breeze outside the wide windows. I looked over the room, keen eyes searching, and finally found him – one pale hand resting on the padded arm of a heavy chair that stood with its back to me. A hand that was as thin and still as a corpse’s.
‘King Corsovo,’ I said. ‘Father!’ I came around the chair, facing him, and stopped.
Blessed Nagash. What’s happened to him?
That was the question echoing in my head. When I’d left a few weeks ago, Father had looked the same as always, tall and broad, handsome with his long black hair and pale skin ruddy with fresh blood, dangerous with his purple-black eyes and the long, elegantly sharpened claws that tipped each finger. Now… Corsovo, king of the Broken Plains, sat crumpled in the chair. He’d gone thin, hollow and desiccated, his skin pulled tight over his bones, and his mane of dark hair was mostly gone, the few strands still clinging to his scalp now white. His skin had gone waxy and his claws were ragged, half of them broken, their lustre dulled and ugly.
‘Father!’ I said again, crouching before him, my hand on his shoulder. I wanted to shake him, desperate to make sure he was still alive, but I was afraid that if I did he’d crumble into dust, so I touched him gently. His head lolled on his neck as he stirred, his hands curling like dying spiders, his wrinkled eyelids twitching. They opened, and his eyes, eyes that had once seemed like thunderstorms, were the colour of bruises and rot. But they focused on me, and his lips moved.
‘Nyssa,’ he said, his once powerful voice a whispered croak. ‘My child, you’ve come. Good.’ He blinked, lids slipping over the ulcers that were eating away his eyes, and I wondered how much he could see. ‘I need you. But where…?’ He trailed off, confused. Like a mortal querulous with infirmity. Like a mortal, old and dying. ‘Where’s your mother? Have you been arguing again? Where is Vasara?’
CHAPTER FOUR
‘What happened to him?’ The question was all that had been running through my mind since seeing my father sitting broken in that chair. I hadn’t asked then, not while I listened to him ramble through his delusions. Whatever had happened, it’d broken Corsovo’s mind as much as his body. Sometimes he thought we were still in the Crimson Keep, sometimes he acted as if we were freshly arrived on the Broken Plains, and sometimes he seemed to be remembering something from his first life as a mortal. He wandered through those thoughts, telling stories that had no beginnings and no ends, a disconnected clutter of centuries of memories. Always, though, he returned to Vasara, the woman he’d met in the Crimson Keep, the woman who’d come to share her second life with his. His plaintive demands for her stabbed me like daggers made of ice. It was worse though, when he confused me for her.
‘I don’t know,’ Arvan said sadly, and I wanted to strike him.
Arvan came to us shortly before my mother died. A warrior from one of the nomad bands, a powerful, brutish-looking man with intelligence and ambition. Sick of the endless ride, the constant skirmishes with the other nomads, he’d sworn his spear arm to us. Corsovo had accepted, and just before the Sun Seekers had come he’d given Arvan the gift of his blood. Since then Arvan had become more than a warrior. He was my father’s secretary and assistant, using his control over vermin to discover all kinds of useful information.
I’d never decided if I liked him or not.
‘You don’t know?’ I rounded on him, both hands resting on my sword hilts. During that awful time I’d spent trying to speak with my father, Temero had stopped filling the sky with smoke. Now day had come, and the light struggled through the thinning cloud to fall harsh and red across my apartment. Arvan had taken one chair, while Rill sat cross-legged on my writing desk and Erant sprawled across a low leather couch. Rill was fletching arrows, and Erant was carving a cat out of a twisted piece of wood, but I knew they were watching me.
‘I left four weeks ago.’ I was pacing, feet moving along the path I’d worn across my parlour. ‘The king was fine then. Now’ – I stopped walking and slashed a hand towards the royal chambers – ‘this! What happened, Arvan?’
‘I’ve been working to find that out since it began, shortly after you left.’ Arvan shook his shaggy head. ‘It started with hunger. King Corsovo would feed, but the blood didn’t satisfy him any more. That went on for two weeks, and then he stopped wanting it. His majesty will take blood now only if I force it on him. When his hunger ended, that’s when the physical changes began.’
‘Two weeks?’ I said, unbelieving. ‘He’s changed that much in two weeks?’ Arvan nodded and I spun away. I had to move, and I stalked the length of my parlour and back, trying to think. ‘Did the mortals somehow poison him?’
‘Your father’s necromancer has examined him extensively. Shadas hasn’t found any sign of poison. Or hostile magic.’
I growled. That scrawny necromancer had never impressed me, but Father trusted in him. If it wasn’t an attack, though, what could be happening to him? The only thing I’d ever seen like this was the curse that had taken some of the Kastelai in the days after we lost the Crimson Keep. But that had happened a century ago, right after our abandonment. The same thing couldn’t be happening to Father now. Could it?
‘What else?’ I asked. Arvan looked at me, unsure, and I barely checked my lunge at him, settling my hands on the arms of his chair instead of his throat. ‘What else has been happening to him, besides this wasting?’
‘Oh,’ he said. He hadn’t flinched. Arvan was a fighter, whatever else. ‘You saw his confusion. Half the time he calls me by the names of vampires long dead or gone. He also sees things that aren’t there, and misses things that are.’ Arvan shook his head. ‘At first it was just hearing voices. Vasara’s, mostly.’
Vasara’s. I jerked away from him, straightening up. Beyond Arvan, neither Rill nor Erant looked at me.
You’re not going mad.
‘You’re not helping,’ I hissed silently. ‘Why didn’t you send for me sooner?’ I said out loud. Anger flickered through my words, and I welcomed it. Anger was better than the hungry dread I felt gathering in the dark corners of my mind, waiting for a chance to rush in.
‘Your father forbade me,’ Arvan said. ‘He didn’t want to distract you from your hunt.’
‘He knew about that.’ It wasn’t a question. I’d always figured he knew about my raids, the way I baited the Sun Seekers. He approved, but didn’t acknowledge them because they didn’t fit Magdalena’s more cautious battle plans.
Arvan nodded. ‘Yes. So he told me no, and I respected his wishes. Until he finally got so bad, and the others came. Magdalena three nights ago, the others right after.’
‘How did they know?’ I asked.
‘Magdalena is the official spymaster of the king, in addition to being his chief general.’ Arvan’s stress on the word ‘official’ conveyed his opinion of that title. He had respect for the Kastelai as a fighter, but he claimed his bats and rats were better than her network of informants with questionable loyalties. ‘She’s focused on Gowyn, but she has ears in the Grey Palace.’ He drummed his heavy fingers on the arm of his chair, each tap popping like a bone cracking, then looked up at me. ‘I think it’s time for you to consider taking power, Lady Volari.’
‘No,’ I said, shaking my head.
‘My lady,’ Arvan said carefully, ‘you’d not be usurping the king’s power. Just the opposite. You’d be preserving it.’
‘No,’ I said again.
Arvan stayed deferential, but he didn’t stop. ‘Magdalena knows something’s wrong. She’s gathered the others as witnesses and demands an interview with the king. I’ve put her off for as long as I can, but I must cede to her soon. I may be the king’s right hand, but she’s his general, and she’s Kastelai. She’ll dismiss me soon, and what can I do? I’ve no power here. But you do. You’re Kastelai, and you’re his daughter.’
‘My father rules,’ I said.
Your father’s gone.
I bit back my response, barely, and focused on Arvan. ‘I know he’s sick, but he’s still king. I’ll talk to Magdalena. She can wait until he’s better, or until all light fades and Nagash takes us all, whichever comes first.’
‘And if Magdalena calls challenge? Or Jirrini? Or Salvera?’ Arvan asked. He saw my face and nodded. ‘Yes, the Mad Dog is here too. How do you think your father will fare now against Salvera’s scythe? How do you think any of us will fare if the Mad Dog becomes king?’
‘That won’t happen,’ I snarled. ‘If Salvera, Magdalena or one of the gods themselves challenges my father, I’ll cut them to ribbons.’
‘I think you would,’ Arvan said. ‘But when you did, you’d become queen.’
If you take his challenge, you take his power.
‘No,’ I said again, as if denial were a blade that could block. But my mother’s voice would not be silenced.
You’ve killed for Corsovo, risked your life for him, but will you bind yourself to responsibility for the first time in your life for him?
Her words dug into my blood. Will you bind yourself… I shoved them out of my head. ‘Corsovo is king. We will cure him.’
‘How?’ Arvan said, his voice soft.
I glared at him, and Rill and Erant shifted uneasily, clearly wondering what to do if I attacked. I wanted to. I wanted an enemy, someone I could cut and kill to solve this. I could feel my blood stir, on the edge of beating, and the temptation to draw my blades was strong.
Nyssa. Do you have control? Are you Kastelai?
Her words cut through me, and my heart stilled. I stared at Arvan, who waited calm in the face of my rage, certain in his correctness.
‘Damn you,’ I cursed uselessly. ‘Damn this. Damn everything.’ I turned and stalked out of my rooms, going out, going anywhere, going away.
Deep beneath the Grey Palace, tunnels had been carved into the roots of Temero, long halls that sweltered with the heat of the volcano’s distant heart. We didn’t know their purpose – the ancient rulers of the Broken Plains were legend when we took their ash-buried home, and they’d left almost nothing behind. So we’d given the tunnels our own purpose, and in a chamber at the heart of their twisting labyrinth my father had built my mother’s tomb.
You can’t run from this.
I sat on the polished floor, my back against the great white marble cube. The tomb’s walls were smooth, blank except for the single door. A heavy slab, recessed slightly into the rest of the marble cube. In its centre a likeness of Vasara’s face had been carved, perfect, still, beautiful. I could never look at it for long. The memory of finding her skull, scorched black by flames, always intruded.
‘It’s what I do, isn’t it?’ I said the words quietly, but they filled the hall and sent echoes whispering around me. They were the only sound here, except for the subliminal sigh of air through the tunnels, a vague current of warmth that barely stirred the flame of my candle. ‘That’s what you told me right before you died. That I spent my time running from battle to battle like a child, thinking only about blades and blood, and that I was going to get someone killed. Then I did, and you died and I swear to Nagash I sometimes think you did it just to prove your point.’
Everything isn’t about you. Even the things that hurt you the most.
She always did this. I’d bring up her death, my guilt, and Vasara would take the blade I’d given her to stab me and slap me with it instead and tell me to work harder. Gods, it was annoying.
I’d never got along with her. Not after Father had made me, when she ignored me with icy determination. Not after she’d finally accepted me, and began training me to be a true Kastelai.
We’d fought. Not with blades, but with arguments and etiquette, complicated battles I didn’t understand and hated. A long war of education, so much more painful than the thousand cuts I’d taken learning the art of blades from my father. But she never let me go, never let me retreat. Of course she kept it up after death.
Forty years ago, ten before we’d met the Sun Seekers for the first time at the disastrous Battle of Ire Crossing, we’d been expanding across the Broken Plains, taking all the holdings between Temero and the sea. Folding in the bands of nomads who ranged across the rolling hills that spread out from the volcano, moving towards the wide, flat lands that surrounded Gowyn. There’d been a nomad named Celas, who united five of the bands together to oppose us. He was a thorn in my father’s side, his forces always moving, hitting from unexpected directions, forever setting ambushes and traps. Magdalena had said he fought without honour, and she was right; Celas was not Kastelai, and I learned a lot from him that I later used against the Sun Seekers. But we didn’t know how dishonourable he really was.
Celas set up a meeting, a plea for peace, to swear himself to my father, but it was a lie. Celas didn’t want to serve us, he wanted to be us, to claim our power, our blood. When Vasara went to treat with him he set a trap, lured me away with a false attack and then went for my mother, trying to steal the blood gift for himself. She fought him and all the warriors he’d arrayed against her, but by the time I realised the trick and went back, the tent where they’d been was an inferno. She’d killed dozens before the flames got her.
She’d died because I wasn’t there, but Father had never blamed me and did that make it better or worse?
Stop pitying yourself, Nyssa, and focus on Corsovo. He needs your help.
‘I am helping!’ I snapped, and the echoes mocked me from the darkness. Helping. Sitting beside a tomb, arguing with a ghost while my father fell apart in his rooms, surrounded by our dangerous little family. I was helping him as much as I’d helped Mother.
The past is the past. The present is happening right now, no matter how much you ignore it. What are you going to do about it?
‘Do about it? I’m down here because I have no idea what to do about it!’ I twisted around to face the carving of her face. It was gorgeous, but not lifelike. She’d never looked that serene, at least not near me. ‘What do I do to save him?’ I waited, but she stayed as silent as her tomb.
‘Now you go quiet,’ I muttered, and leaned my head back against the door. I’d used to hate setting foot in here. My father had to almost drag me when he came down on the anniversary of her death, to open her tomb and spill the blood of some mortal killer onto her blackened bones. Praying to Nagash that she would take the blood in and heal, be born again. Some vampires had come back from burning. The blessed blood was strong. But her bones never twitched, her flesh never regrew, she stayed silent and dead – except for the voice that had started to speak to me, quiet at first, a whisper in my head, then slowly louder, until Vasara was reborn not in the flesh but in my thoughts.
It was a problematic resurrection.
I was comfortable with coming down here now, though, to argue with her or to just sit in the silence and the dark. The dark that was fading. I stood, looking across the room at the faint light that was growing in one of the doorways, a soft purple glow. Rill or Erant, looking for me? Or Arvan come to sadly ask me to depose my father again? Instead I saw a thin young man at the door, wrapped in wrinkled black robes dusted with grey ash. A little cluster of purple flames drifted through the air around his head, lighting his way.
‘Shadas,’ I said, and my father’s necromancer dipped his head, a gesture that looked like a scarecrow shifting in the wind.
‘My Lady Volari.’ His voice was better than it had any right to be, rising from his timorous frame, rich and deep. ‘I am sorry to disturb you. I didn’t know you were back.’ He trailed off, uncertain. Shadas had been saved from his frightened family when he was a boy. They’d been farmers, terrified by a child who could make the dead move. Corsovo had appointed him necromancer to the court, and provided what training he could. Not that any of us understood how mortal magic worked. I’d mostly ignored him, often forgetting he existed, but seeing him now I rose to my feet.
‘I don’t care about being disturbed. I care about what’s happening to my father.’ I took another step, closing on him. ‘Arvan said you examined him, Shadas. What’s wrong?’
He looked at the polished floor, not meeting my eyes. ‘I don’t know.’
I was on him then, one hand gripping his thin arm tight, shaking him until he looked at me, eyes wide. ‘What do you mean you don’t know? You study death magic. What’s happening to him? Vampires – we don’t get sick. What is this? Did the Sun Seekers do this somehow? Is this an attack?’ The words came out in a rush, a demand for answers, a demand for an enemy, something I could attack. But the necromancer just kept shaking his head.
