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?”