Revenant

NINETEEN

I watched his power reassemble around him, changed and yet the same: dark as night, but no longer blood streaked.

He seemed surprised. “I cannot fathom what has happened. I feel. This blood moving within my veins, pumped by a heart that has not beaten thus in centuries, demands breath like a babe howling newborn from the womb. I feel all this, and memory of how precious it is brings me shame that for even a second I thought of killing you. Thought of consuming you and drawing this from you for my own selfishness.”

“For the sake of a heartbeat, for breath?” I asked. I was afraid, but it wouldn’t do me any good to give in to it. “For a mortal thing that can stop like an unwound watch?”

He turned his head toward me. “You do not appreciate what it is to feel this after so long.”

“No,” I agreed. “But to feel my heart stop, to die, I know that. And the surge of my heart beating again, my lungs hungering for air, my body wanting to live, however broken it is, I know that, too. I die and I wake changed, and hope it won’t happen again, over and over. How many times have you died, Carlos?”

“In my own body, but once, and very nearly a dozen times more. But every life I take, I feel as if it were my own death and rebirth. Like you. But you live—truly alive—from heartbeat to heartbeat, and I exist in the bitterness of death,” he said. “But I had forgotten life’s tang, how sweet and sharp, like the taste of your blood on my tongue.”

His gaze on me burned with conflicting desires that sent chill and sorrow through me. I turned my head away and let it fall forward, tired and weak and unable to fight if it came to it. “If you’re going to . . . at least make sure I’m really dead this time. I don’t want to know what happens after this. After we fail.”

The small sound that came from him was not a laugh. “Oh, Blaine, you mistake me. I forfeited my soul for power, my life for knowledge and existence beyond my due years. Tonight I reached again into the abyss of that power, but I miscalculated and should have died. Because of you, I have survived. No, I live! Every fiber of my being cries to cleave to this sensation and I know it is nothing more than a fleeting semblance that will fall away, but that does not cheapen the gift, nor change my gratitude to you. For now, I feel the phantom of your heat in my body, my heart beating, my lungs striving for breath, and I know to whom I owe this. If what you see in my eyes is an unholy desire, it is only because I am an unholy creature.”

“That does still leave desire,” I said, still feeling weak and small and uncertain.

“I’ve never made a secret of my interest in you.”

“Yes, but your interest never looked like lust before.”

“I am too hungry to disguise all my appetites, at the moment, but where you are concerned, I promise, they are not of the flesh. Mostly.”

I laughed, but it was strained, and I looked at him again. “Oh, you wouldn’t. . . .”

“Wouldn’t I?

“Not with me, you wouldn’t.”

He sighed and leaned his head against the white marble wall. “Alas, true. Though not, perhaps, for the reasons you imagine.”

“I imagine that you forgo forcing yourself on me because our friendship precludes any action that . . . transgressive. And you are the one who has several times pointed out I’m married, even if not in the eyes of the law, and bound to others as well as the Guardian Beast.”

He grunted. “And now how shall we go on?”

“You mean as friends, or ‘how do we get out of here’?”

“The latter. I don’t think I’ve laid waste to our rapport by acknowledging that I have no interest in raping you.”

“Goody. Because I have no idea how to get out of here. I had to walk through the earthquake to get to you. I’d prefer not to return by the same route. Also, I don’t know if I can stand up on my own yet.”

“Perhaps we should wait a while longer.”

“Fine with me.” I paused a moment, dizzy and weak just from talking. After a minute or more I asked, “Are you still breathing?”

Carlos seemed to have to test it before he replied, “Remarkably, yes. And my heartbeat seems to grow stronger, rather than fading away.”

“Maybe you’ve discovered a cure for vampirism.”

“No. I do not believe that aspect of my nature has changed, only the state in which it continues.”

“So . . . are you going to stay up and watch the sunrise?”

“I’m not persuaded that such a course would be wise.” Even in the dim light of the stars, I could see him scowl and raise his hand to his throat. “The knife . . . Where is it?”

“I threw it into the grass. I could barely stand to touch it long enough to pull it out.”

“Ah.” He crawled forward and ran his hands over the grass until he found the blade. He cursed as it nicked his fingers. Still, he picked it up and put it into his shirt, then sat in the grass and leaned back against the nearest column, facing me across the distance of what had been the south aisle, long ago. He looked wan and weary, but not dead, at least. I hoped I looked that good, because I felt awful.

“We can’t rest for too long, but I owe you a tale, since I can’t show you the window from here,” he said. “In the days of this church’s glory, I was a student at the University of Coimbra, in the north. Several years earlier, my father had decided, after much vacillating, to acknowledge me and provide an education and establishment befitting a younger son of an influential family. As I had begun late on my formal education, I was several years older than many of the students I studied with, but already arrogant in my power, which had come at a young age. I had discovered a tutor in the necromantic arts quickly and, with my mother’s help, I had thrived and learned to hide what I was.

“At university, I offended a certain gentleman of a wealthy family—not noble, merely rich—but he was a very distant cousin of mine and we were often thrown together. We were like sparks and gunpowder—always one setting the other off. Of me he knew two things: I was a bastard and I was a practitioner of dark arts, but of the latter he had no proof. The other was a well-known fact, but since Nuno Pereira himself—the great general who saved Portugal from Castile and built this convent—was born on the wrong side of the blanket and still became Condestável do Reino and a greatly honored man, it didn’t seem much of a bar. And one didn’t argue about the rights of an acknowledged son with my father. That my mother was Moorish and I dark in looks and dark in soul seemed to offend my cousin to a far greater degree.

“He was brilliant, an intellectual, but also a prig, a bigot, a hypocrite, and ambitious, with a hidden fear of the ancient nobility of which he was not a member. I hated him, as boys do, with a great misplaced passion, and he felt the same for me. We played at cat and mouse for years, he hoping to lure me into an act or admission that could send me to the Inquisition, and I hoping to shame and discredit him. And so it went. . . .” He closed his eyes and the light from the dim moon seemed to tremble on his skin as the black strands of magic wove around him. His voice drew me into the scenes of his tale, wrapping me in the moving shadows and fog of his recollection, his language and cadence becoming subtly more formal and archaic, as if he passed backward in time.

“When I removed to Lisbon with Amélia,” he continued, “my family name allowed me access to the thousands of books then kept here and I far preferred their company to hers. I was not merely callow, but thoughtlessly cruel in my self-absorption. I was still striving toward a goal of power that was ill-defined—and foolish for that—and I was obsessed with it. The city was also rife with the pitiful deaths few pay heed to, which suited all my plans.

“My antagonist had gone into politics and had family in the church as well, so it was no surprise that he, also, was in Lisbon frequently. When I came to read, I often saw him here. I baited the gentleman at every opportunity and in a fit of rage one afternoon, he attempted to stab me with the knife you drew from my throat. When he was unsuccessful, he threw me from a window in the library of the chapter house. That building is now obliterated but for the rear wall, in which my window still stands as part of the new building that rises like an ungainly phoenix from the ruins.” He paused, opening his eyes for a moment to stare at the wall above my head as if he were studying the tombstone mounted there. Then he shook his head and continued.

“I fell and should have died, stabbed to the gut and nearly all my bones broken, but death and I had already a fond acquaintance and though I had to be carried home, I lived. There was debate whether this confirmed my demonic associations or just the opposite. My adversary’s brother was a favored son of the church and through him, I was nearly brought down, but I escaped that fate as well. The excesses of the Inquisition were long over, but what remained were still terrible enough, however useless in the actual discovery of those like me. I learned caution. I began keeping to myself, showing myself less frequently and avoiding the men I’d known in college in particular. I also avoided Amélia, and when she would not let me to my own devices, I was brutal to her—in every way you can imagine and some I pray that you can’t. She left me for a year or so, but came back—for what reason I never knew—and found me more changed than she could have anticipated.

“During her absence, I discovered what I had been searching for—another master who could unveil a greater mystery of death, a higher state. I worked—lived—for that ‘Becoming’ with all my energy and passion. I searched for artifacts of power—one of which you know, the Lâmina que Consome as Almas—and destroyed what stood between me and them. I did murder in the dark and took the tribute of death for my own ends, spending all the hours of my mortal life in that pursuit. I had no time or desire for anything else, spared no thought for those that I harmed, and only a little more on those I killed. I did not even know Amélia was ill until she died and the whimpering release of her exhausted spirit passed through me. And I cared nothing but for the modicum of power it gave me. She died of fever I could have cured, wasting to nothing below my tower and I neither knew nor cared, such was my obsession.

“I attended the funeral and Mass, as I had to, and there I saw again my adversary, who was awaiting an influential political post. His brother had risen to bishop, and I had remained as I was—the wastrel younger son of a powerful man by his half-Arab mistress. It should have been a moment of rejoicing for him to see me no further advanced in the usual ambitions of society. But there was only silence when I appeared. My first thought was that they knew what I was and believed that I had killed Amélia, but it was far simpler than that. I was nearly fifty years old, yet I had barely aged past twenty-five. While they were men in their thirties, men of consequence with estates and children, I was as I am now. This was not only a prick to their vanity, but a proof that I was, if not actually in league with the Devil, at least uncanny.

“I knew they would come for me, confirmed in their own minds, even if they had not convinced anyone else, that I was in league with demons. I went then to my master, Lenoir, as I came again tonight, to ask for knowledge that would aid me against my enemies. Then, as now, a double-edged sword that cut deeper than I had expected.”

“That’s why you were here? To ask for help?”

“To discover what the Kostní Mágové are making from their bones. I may know now, but I’ll need more information about which bones they possess to be certain. Did you uncover that information?”

“Quinton did and I have some other information. We don’t know which bones, though—the news articles mostly recorded vandalism without specifics. And a robbery, a death, and a possible connection between one of these vandalisms and the bone mages . . .”

Carlos murmured to himself. “I shall have to ask him for the details.”

We fell into silence for a minute or more as we each tried to rally whatever reserves of energy we had. After a few more minutes, I asked, “So, this old master of yours—Lenoir—helped you tonight but he also tried to kill you?”

“No. He no longer has the power of life and death. He is a shade, but his knowledge of his old brothers in the art has not faded. Nor has his treachery. A young friend of his discovered our meeting and crashed the party. I suspect he would not cavil at telling the place if he were asked, and would have cared not at all whether I lived or died as a result. Our association was a study in betrayal and power. As I spoke to him, he eked his knowledge out by small degrees, teasing me with it, and I told him what had become of his creations, of the one I destroyed for you in particular. It infuriated him, but there was nothing he could do to harm me here. I had not counted on the reappearance of Maggie Griffin.”

I wasn’t surprised. The web of bone-white magic that held him down had been too much like the spell that I’d torn off Quinton the night before to be coincidence. “Griffin. How?”

“She is of the Kostní Mágové and she asked the right question of the right ghost. She was not unprepared or overtaxed this time, but she did come alone—which was my only piece of luck. Lenoir chose not to warn me when she moved to strike.” Carlos shrugged as if it hadn’t nearly killed him. “As I said, I miscalculated.”

“But she didn’t stay to finish you off. That wasn’t wise.”

“She had no choice. Rui may still be incapacitated, but he is her master and would demand her attendance, even if he were the one to send her. And her powers are limited here, for there are few bones left in this place. The tombs contain only dust now and even the bones of dead monks are scattered like straws in the wind. But there is the shadow of death in plenty here—my element and strength. Her only chance was to silence me and cast what spells she had already prepared. She did her work well, though she had little time to craft it and could not stay to see the end. Her art would have destroyed me without your intervention.”

“Your old master is a hard case to stand by and let his star pupil die for pissing him off.”

“What makes you think I was ever a star pupil?”

“You said you pursued the knowledge he offered with all your passion.”

“Ah. I did. And when I had what I wanted from him, I slaughtered him. A peculiar kind of stardom. The irony was that he killed me first and should have known I would repay him in kind. He did not warn me that the ascension I desired would be a journey through hell from which I would emerge a vampire and the only way to reach that state—the Becoming—was to be murdered, torn open while alive and bled like a butchered animal. Not merely to die, or to sink into the Bliss and change painlessly in the addiction of blood. For that alone, I enjoyed destroying his creation when you brought me to it.”

“His creation . . . ?”

“The organ. The object of your first client’s desire. Sergeyev’s prison. Just like the small boxes assembled in the temple last night.”

He’d mentioned it before and it had been on my mind, too. A ghost had come to me in my first days as a Greywalker and asked me to find “an heirloom,” which proved to be quite a bit more than that. I hadn’t known what I was into, that my client was dead for centuries and that the solution of the case would require me to leap into the occupation I hadn’t wanted. “Oh gods . . . You wanted it. Mara and I believed it was because it was a dark artifact—a thing of power you could use for your own ends.”

“That was true. But even greater was the satisfaction in undoing what he had done.”

“I nearly got you killed then, too.”

He looked amused. “It was a close thing.” He pressed his back against the column and pushed slowly to his feet. “Which of us can stand well enough to carry the other this time?”

“I think that’s you.”

“This may also be a close thing. . . .”

I found it harder to get to my feet than he had, but though I flinch from the touch of vampires in most cases, this time his hand on my arm didn’t send a bolt of nausea or pain through my body or shake my mind with unimagined horrors. It was a cool touch—unnaturally cool—but not grave-cold, and though it raised the hairs on my arm and the back of my neck, it didn’t make me ill. “I think I’m getting used to you,” I panted through weakness and the persistent cold of the Grey.

“I may find that inconvenient.”

“I said ‘used to,’ not ‘fond of.’”

He laughed and leaned back to counterbalance my awkward struggle to regain the upright. When I’d attained it, he put his arm around my shoulder and I put mine around his waist. It felt very strange to be half hugging someone who spoke casually of slaughtering others and ripping souls into shreds as if we were boon companions—though in our horrifying way, we were. Between us, we reeled like a pair of drunks.

“Where’s the exit?” I asked.

“Griffin went through the doors to the north chapel. There should be stairs to the crypt from the ambulatory or the transept.”

“I was never a good churchgoer. I have a rough idea of what the nave, aisles, and altar are and beyond that, I’m a heretic.”

“I never imagined I’d be pleased to have been a Catholic in life.”

We made our unsteady way out of the ruins through a door that deposited us on a bare roof.

“The apse . . . is gone,” Carlos said, and stopped, looking out at the city.

“You didn’t notice that when you arrived?”

“No. I came another way.” He stared into the distance over the Baixa and toward the castle of São Jorge. “The streets were never so straight when I lived here.”

“Quinton told me it was all rebuilt after the earthquake by some nobleman called the Marquis of Pombal.”

Carlos jerked as if I’d electrocuted him and turned to stare at me, nearly letting me fall.

“Pombal . . . didn’t rebuild anything. He was no nobleman. He was secretary of state—what would be the prime minister now. He ordered it done, the same way he ordered an end to the Inquisition and to the purity of blood laws—which was well-done—but in the same autocratic way he decided who would die after the Tavora affair. He was only Carvalho e Melo then, but by his hand he would have wiped out every member of the Tavora, Lencastre, and Ataíde families if he could have. He hated and distrusted them and it was a fair excuse. He was made Count of Oeiras for his duplicity and Marquis of Pombal ten years later. It was the end of the old families—all but Bragança and Periero de Melo. He took the rest down like hares in the field.”

“Your name is Ataíde.”

“Only a bastard son.”

“How do you know what became of them after you left? You said you never came back.”

“I was neither blind nor deaf. News always comes. I did not know at the time that this would be the result of what I went to do on All Hallows’ Eve. When I survived another betrayal, when I found out what had happened, I knew it would be the seal on my doom. He was the secretary of state—the voice of the king—and he hated me. His brother was the patriarch of Lisbon by then. Had I, a man who would not die, nor age, reappeared in the ashes, alive and whole when all the city was still in flames and ruins, that would surely have been taken as sorcery—he threw me from the window of this holy place and I lived, but it fell! Even without the Inquisition, little would have stopped them from having me burned at the stake.”

“Wait, wait . . .” I begged him, not sure I’d caught the implication that was circling the back of my brain like a shark. “The Marquis of Pombal . . . was your cousin? The one who threw you—”

“Out that window,” he confirmed, pointing with his free hand to the back wall of the old chapter house that still stood on the sheer side of the building next to the church. “Yes. So, you see why I did not return. After a time, I closed my eyes and ears to Lisbon. I forgot what I did not wish to know. This was my city and these are my ruins.”

“It rose again, like your clumsy phoenix.”

“Under the hand of the Marquês de Pombal.” He spat the name. “Is it any wonder that my plans are frustrated in this place as if his very ghost opposed me?”

I found his almost superstitious reaction strange and disquieting. “We can leave Lisbon as soon as we know what the bone mages are up to.”

“We’ll have to leave soon, regardless.”

I frowned at him, but he said no more and led me across the bare roof to a set of unattractive iron railings that secured a short flight of steps to the edge of the curtain wall. More steps led us down by stages until we stumbled past a gate, into the Rua do Carmo and into the path of a policeman strolling along the road.

The cop called out to us, sounding suspicious but not yet alarmed. Carlos drew in a breath to reply, but I cut him off.

“Oh thank God!” I said, playing the dizzy tourist. “We got lost by the church and we don’t know how to get back to our hotel.” I even giggled like the inebriate I appeared to be. I felt a bit light-headed from blood loss, so it wasn’t a stretch.

The policeman peered at us, his English not quite up to my chattering speed.

“Nós estamos perdidos,” Carlos said, in Portuguese that made mine sound fluid and dulcet. “Nosso hotel . . . Rossio.”

I wouldn’t have believed he could sound so befuddled and foreign. The cop seemed to buy it, however, and pointed north, down the road toward a bright smudge of light one long block away. “Ah! You have luck. Rossio is there.”

We thanked him as if we really were drunken tourists and we staggered onward. A few feet from the intersection, Carlos winced and swayed and I nearly fell into him. He caught me without grace or sign of affection and we leaned against the edge of a doorway. I felt unsteady and ill from the heaving and rolling of the Grey’s constant replay of tragic history—a history the creature beside me had helped cause.

“You don’t do well,” Carlos observed, sounding rough himself.

“No,” I replied. “History is too persistent here and I’m too weak to push it back. A cab might be a good idea,” I said, swallowing bile and breathing too hard.

“That is why I chose the Rossio. If there are taxis to be found, they will be here.”

“Is that because some things never change?”

“Yes. And no.”

The driver who pulled over at our hail gave us a sideways glare that measured up the likely origins of our bloodied and rumpled appearance and found us questionable, but not bad enough to blow off. He was English and became much happier to brave the narrow twisty streets of Alfama once we started speaking English also.

“Right,” he said, “top of the hill. Hang on.”

A better piece of advice he could not have given, for he took off into the late-night traffic with a jerk and a jink that slipped us between a bus and a limousine in a cacophony of horns.