Kitty in the Underworld

Chapter 16

“I AM VERY old. I’m not sure how old. I have spent stretches of time when I was not as … aware as I should have been. Always, I managed to survive. But … I was not old, once.” Kumarbis spoke with something like wonder in his voice, as if he could not believe that he had ever been young. Though when he said “not old,” why did I think he meant a century or two? A span of time that would have been forever to the rest of us. “I don’t remember what it was to be mortal. My life then, who I was then, has not been important for a very long time. I feel myself a creature who came to being out of nothing.

“I was made what I am now in the mountains of Anatolia. I was made, but not claimed. Attacked and abandoned. I could have been destroyed as a demon. Perhaps I should have been, times being what they were. But Fate took me in hand. I had a destiny. I must have had a destiny.”

The others, even Zora, settled on the stone floor, gathering around the vampire in a semicircle, watching him with intense focus. Something about the warm light of the candles, the ancient scent of the granite, made me feel as if we had traveled back in time to those ancient mountains. Kumarbis’s voice itself had altered the flow of time, and we were in the ancient world.

“When the Roman Empire rose and spread, it seemed new to me. I traveled, studying it. The Romans—they had very good roads. I traveled, looking for … purpose. I had so much power—I could have set myself up as a god in some small village. Others of our kind did so. But that seemed too obvious, too easy. If one of our kind was a god alone, how powerful would two of us be? Or all of us? A pantheon of the supreme undead. That is how we were meant to be. An empire of our own, like others that had come before, but this one would last, ours would be eternal, as we were. What Rome dreamed of but could not achieve. I traveled, spoke to others, tried to show them my vision. But I could not sway them. They were satisfied with their tiny, inconsequential kingdoms. I—I was not meant to be an emperor. But there was another.

“Something … something guided me to Palestine and the Roman occupation there. Like a voice in the wilderness. That’s how the story goes, I think. A voice in the wilderness calling me. There were so many in those days putting themselves forward as prophets, as preachers, promising a better world to their followers. I thought one of them might be my worthy partner. But no, one by one they failed, they fell. Then I found this man, this centurion. He was one of hundreds, thousands of soldiers I had seen. I shouldn’t have been able to pick him out of a crowd. But I did. I saw him and knew he could be powerful. That feeling I had, that voice, had steered me true.”

He smiled, triumphant at the memory. He had entranced himself into returning to that distant past. To distant glory.

I had a million questions. What had those other vampires been like? The ones with the tiny kingdoms? How had he survived all those years, without a Family or a place of his own? Did he have rivals, with the same thought of gathering allies? Was this the start of the Long Game? What about this feeling, this instinct? I kept my mouth shut, because I didn’t want to distract him. I didn’t want him to decide not to finish.

“I avoided the Master of Jerusalem, made my way through the city on my own. I met the man known as Gaius Albinus. Befriended him, even. He was a serious young man, ambitious. His career was everything to him, and he was destined for high rank, for accolades. The Empire was built on the shoulders of thousands of men like him, who worked for the good of the whole because it meant success for themselves.”

So far, Kumarbis hadn’t said anything I didn’t already know about Roman. He was still serious and ambitious. But I did have a hard time thinking of him as young. Maybe all old vampires gave off that impression.

“I knew, somehow, he was destined for more. He was greater. Everything in my being said so. I could make him immortal, and he would be invincible, unstoppable. Together, we could do … do anything.”

The story had taken on the tone of a confession. He wasn’t just explaining, he was apologizing.

“He … needed time. He required persuading. But he saw my vision, in time. Eventually, I convinced him.”

“You attacked him,” I said. “He didn’t choose.”

There was a long pause, made heavy by the silent weight of stone.

“Yes,” he said finally, facing the ground. His head was bent, his shoulders slumped. He wouldn’t look at any of us.

I could almost feel sorry for Roman, in spite of myself. A minute ago I would have said the guy didn’t deserve any pity at all. But this, imagining him as much a victim as any of us … No, I didn’t pity him, but maybe I understood him a little better. Him and his war.

My friend Rick also had been turned against his will. Rick and Roman were nothing alike. Or maybe they were two sides of the same coin. Rick was still out there, fighting his crusade against Roman with the Order of Saint Lazarus of the Shadows, the Vatican’s order of vampire priests. I wondered if the order knew about Kumarbis. I had a feeling they didn’t. Everyone else had been tracking Roman himself, but I’d found the other end of the thread, and was following it forward to the beginning. Maybe the key to defeating Roman lay in his origin. This had been worth the blood the vampire had taken from me. Worth returning to the mine. But there was more.

I wanted to shout at Kumarbis that this was his fault. The Long Game, Dux Bellorum, the man Roman had become. All his scheming, all the people he’d hurt, the vampires he’d made, the conspiracy he’d gathered to himself. It had all started here, and I had only one question.

“Why?” I asked finally. “Why did you need to turn Gaius Albinus, to make him invincible? For what purpose?”

The vampire sighed, an affectation. An expression of resignation. “It seemed … necessary at the time. It was so long ago. So much has happened since then, I hardly remember why.”

Now may we kill him?

Wolf was mocking me. Such a kidder.

I curled my lips, baring my teeth. Wolf expressing her opinion. Kumarbis didn’t even flinch. He said, “I remember one thing—as soon as it was done, my certainty left me. I took care of Gaius Albinus, watched over him as had not been done for me. I still … he was like my son, a son I could never have. But he was so angry. What else could I do but take care of him and hope for the best?”

Gaius Albinus, Dux Bellorum, was the general. Caesar was the true emperor, pulling the general’s strings. I hadn’t thought that Kumarbis might actually be that Caesar. No, he was something else. A pawn, maybe. The same strings had yanked on them both. Those were the strings I had to follow. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be happy with whom I found at the end of them.

I waited, and Kumarbis continued. “We had a falling-out, years later. Of course we did. You could have guessed that.”

The pendant around his neck indicated that at one point he’d signed on with Roman. Been one of his allies in the Long Game, linked to him, commanded by him. Without his mystical voice guiding him, the Long Game must have seemed full of purpose, and Roman’s drive inspiring. At one time, he’d been willing to follow.

Something had made him leave, obviously. I could imagine a number of scenarios. I put myself in Roman’s place, regarding this man, the vampire who’d made him, who must have seemed weak and purposeless to his regimented, ambitious mind. He would have punished Kumarbis, maybe indirectly. Kumarbis, who felt so much loyalty, however misguided, would have put up with it until … My imagination failed me. To be a fly on that wall, all those hundreds of years ago.

Kumarbis saw himself as a father, even now, to this ragged little band he’d collected. He probably slotted me easily into the role of rebellious teenager. The trickster whose chaos balanced order, who would find the solution, accidentally or otherwise, to all their problems. Like Coyote in the stories. He wouldn’t listen to me, he’d only pay attention to the role he’d constructed for me in his own dusty brain.

The one thing he was right about: he might very well know Roman better than anyone in the world. Now, what did I do with that information?

“Now you fight against him,” I said. “You did more than leave Gaius Albinus, you changed your mind about the whole mission, about the Long Game. Why did you stop believing in uniting the vampires?”

“I could not convince the Masters of the cities to unite, but he did. At first I admired him. I thought I had inspired him. He was carrying out my plan. But he … he went to places I could not follow. He found lore I had no knowledge of, he brought the beasts under his influence—”

“Beasts,” I said. “Werewolves? Lycanthropes?”

“And more, creatures that even in centuries of wandering I hadn’t known existed. I never asked so many questions as Gaius did. He knew, I think he understood, that if he could become this monster, this creature that we were, then all the other stories must be true. All the magic in the world must be real. He wants to be master of it all, so that he can destroy it all.”

Not rule, but destroy. It didn’t even surprise me. In the washed-out lantern light, in the depths of this cave, where the air smelled cold and the shadows seemed alive, anything was possible, anything at all. All the stories came to life.

Kumarbis gripped the coin around his neck. “When he made this, the first of the coins, I saw what he would become. Where his ambitions lay. I followed him still, I wore the coin because I had nowhere else to go. I had been alone for so very long, you see. You cannot understand how long I was alone.”

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.”