Nightingale

Chapter 29 The Memory Merchants

Olivia and Sommer had Bron sit in the same chair that he'd been strapped to, and then together they dragged the Draghoul's leader close. She was taped hand and foot, completely bound, and posed little threat, yet she could have struggled if there were any fight left in her.

Instead, she was like a bloated fish pulled from the bottom of the sea, too worn to resist.

Olivia unstrapped the woman's helmet, and told Bron, "They like to wear these. If they get in a fight with another masaak, it gives them a little protection. Most of us can't use our powers very well unless we make contact."

Squatting on the floor, facing Bron, Olivia reached down and took hold of the prisoner, placing a thumb over one of the woman's eyes, then placing each finger carefully over the right hemisphere of the brain.

Bron hadn't noticed before just how precisely Olivia's fingers sought out their mark, but he realized now that he knew what she was doing. By some animal instinct, he also knew just where to touch.

"Close your eyes, and hold onto your seat," Olivia said, peering up into his face. "This can be disorienting."

With her left hand, she reached up and took the right half of his skull. Immediately Bron entered the woman's mind. He found himself lying upon the floor, struggling to breathe. His stomach churned as he struggled to remember what had happened here, as he wondered at the incapacitating lethargy he felt.

Bron was two people at once. He looked about, and saw the world through both his own eyes and through the slits of the Draghoul's eyes. It was disorienting, nauseating. He clenched his eyes shut.

With one hand Olivia was reading the woman's mind, with the other she channeled the memories to Bron.

The Draghoul prisoner's name was Ramira, and she growled in anger at being violated, invaded.

Yet she was no stranger to being violated. It had happened so often before.

Lucius required it of her—weekly interrogations, so that his police force might detect whether she had had a disloyal thought. After nine hundred years in his service, Ramira was proud that she no longer had any disloyal thoughts.

Bron groaned. Nine hundred years? Instantly, he was transported to a tiny cottage in the Principality of Galicia, and Bron saw it as their prisoner had—a wealthy farm built of stone, with a fine roof of new thatch. The family had geese and sheep on their farm, and two white milch cows. The Draghoul remembered lying awake at night as a child, while mice scurried about in the thatch overhead, squeaking, and she would pretend that they were fairy princes, telling her tales.

The skies back then were so much bluer than now, and summer rains seemed to wash the daisies clean on the wooded hill behind their home.

Then Lucius came one night, his troops of Draghouls creeping into the house, and taking it as if it were theirs, while all the family was at the dinner table.

The house was filled with the scents of a feast—roast venison covered in a gravy of wine and mushrooms, fresh-baked brown bread, baked apples with cream. Father had just bent his head to pray for a blessing on the food, and Ramira sneaked her eyes open, admiring the feast laid out on the table before her.

The Draghouls rushed in, throwing the door open, one man bowling in through a window. They had their swords drawn. They all wore tunics and breeches of black, with helms of blackened armor and leather cuirasses.

Before her father could even rise from the dinner table, a Draghoul grabbed him from behind, with a gleaming sword bared to his throat, so that he could not move.

Lucius wore armor, a princely breastplate with the emblem of a dragon emblazoned upon it in lacquer, red and black. He wore a fine helm, too, with a leather neck guard hanging off the back, and he strode into the room with supreme confidence, as if he were more than a general, more than a king.

Her father stood tall, proud. He wore only a landowner's robes the color of red wine, with a fine cloth belt at his waist, but he dared look Lucius in the eye.

"Why do you seek to live here among the humans, old friend?" Lucius demanded of her father. Ramira had never seen Lucius before. He had dark hair and brooding eyes, a severe face, worn with lines of care. He looked to be forty or fifty, but there was a gleam in his eyes, a look of fierceness and cunning, that she had never seen before in another man.

He was older than fifty, she thought, understanding the situation on some instinctive level. He was many times older than fifty.

"Please," her father said. "I served you long enough."

"Mayor of this town?" Lucius mocked, pulling the chain of office from her father's neck. He laughed. "Is that all you've made of yourself?"

"It's a good town," her father argued.

"And you want to be its mayor," Lucius derided. "You alone could slaughter every man in here with half a thought. You could ride their women like horses, and butcher their children for food. Why would you... lower yourself to consorting with these... animals?"

Her father stiffened. "They are our equals in the eyes of God!"

"Oh," Lucius lamented, as if he had heard this before, "not you, too. You offered your life in my service. You cannot now give it to some imaginary god, not when I'm so much more deserving."

"I gave you more than a lifetime of service," her father growled.

"And each time that you did," Lucius replied, "I gave you more life as a reward."

Bron gasped and pulled away from Olivia's hand. "They can steal life?" he asked. She had not told him that before.

"Yes," she said. "That is what Lucius does. There's something in the body, something on the cellular level that he can tap into—the power to rejuvenate. As we age, our old cells forget what they are supposed to do. Pancreas cells stop producing insulin. Liver cells seem to 'forget' how to synthesize proteins. Lucius and his kind can take a healthy young person, and somehow re-teach his own cells, rejuvenate them.

"If Lucius drains enough vitality from someone, he can grow young, while his victim expires."

Bron opened his mouth to speak, but said nothing. Olivia touched him again, transported him into Ramira's memory....

"A thousand years should be enough for any king," her father retorted.

Lucius studied him regretfully, as if her father was deserving of pity. "Tell me, when you scourged Jesus, drove him through the streets of Jerusalem dragging a cross on his back, did you see anything in him that made you want to worship him? When you pounded the spikes into his wrists and palms, and lifted him up on the cross, did he not cry out like any other man? You did not think him to be a god then. I mean, really, after all of these years, what has changed?"

Ramira's father peered down at the floor, his jaw shaking, as if he might break down and blubber. Guilt smote him. Until that moment, Ramira had not known that her father was one of the Christ killers.

"You are running with the humans now," Lucius said, shaking his head in pity. "If they had any idea of what you were, they would roast you and your family in this fine house as if it were an oven. If they had any inkling of the things you've done...."

"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.