In a prison seventy leagues from Kreshelan, under the operation of the state of Unitas, there was a grate atop a narrow channel fifteen feet deep. No light entered through the tight bars. No light emanated from within. The carcass was pinned in the bottom of that crevice, stuffed in like meat in a can. A senselessly long period of time had shaped it after the suggestion of the hollow, which was squared and tight and impossible to climb. The carcass was stuck. It had a broad chest and two shoulders and one arm between them, but the arm was wedged and potentially fused to the belly. The arm had eaten its own muscles to fortify the skin and the bone, and the rest of it had rotten. Neither could it turn, or shimmy itself free of its pinning. It belonged to an immortal thing. A thing which was powered by blood and starlight, like the machines of the old Empire. It was an imitation of what could be called a vampire.
Hunger returned as it always did. It was not a new hunger, it was old and clawing. The kind which returned fortified after giving up, lucid to the truth of imminent starvation. After disappearing and leaving in its place a nauseating emptiness. It came again like fire. Imagine a fire which starts, smokeless and airless, in the little atrophied hollows of the abdomen and burns outward. Imagine rot burning through the body. Imagine that burn slowing, and finally, feebly crawling through every empty and branching vein. Sometimes when it came it came easy, and the thing that persisted inside the stuck lug of meat could pretend that there was, in truth, no being at all. The carcass did not know how long it had been since it last beat its heart, but it could feel even the hindbrain beginning to go. Its head was beginning to die. In the dry cavity of its heart, black and hypoxic, there remained a small slickening of blood. Sick blood. Rats’ blood. The effluence of rot.
The hindbrain startled. It felt an oncoming nothingness start to overtake it, and it flooded signals, climbing up and down the protruding spine. The heart squeezed, weak, submitting dregs to the pinprick of starlight at its center. Something else screamed into existence. The carcass beheld some untold agony, with something, something capable of beholding, something which had come piteously lurching up again. A weak, sick fire coursed through its head. Sight was gone. Smell was gone. All that remained with any use was hearing. There was hearing, and perhaps, with the flab of meat in the cave in its head, speech. The fire– livening fire– was filthy. It was bilious. It washed over the brain, and it sickened. Nausea clawed up from a stomach which had rotted. And then there was so little left in the heart, but there was vigor there.
Four close walls kept its head forever turned to the right. The carcass’s legs were twisted inwards. It did not feel them. One of two ears– it had once had two ears– was pressed against the stone. The ear could hear, but it had been a long time since there had last been anything behind it to listen. It heard a din of tiny thumps. It separated– and this came easy– it into nearly a score, a dull roar of twenty-some heartbeats. They were rapid. It picked out the churn of blood through tiny pinhole veins, and the scrape of claws through tunnels scarcely larger. Memory came with the screaming thing which beheld and listened. It did not remember a time without rats or the heartbeats of rats. The slosh of their blood in their gravid veins could not be ignored, instead, it drew a focus nearing on infatuation.
Without a voice it begged one to come closer, to plunge its head through a crack in the wall near its teeth. Its teeth ached from disuse. It trembled with anticipation as one of the score grew louder, clearer through the rock. The thudding of a rat’s heart crescendoed; the carcass began to perceive the scratching of tiny paws over the gaps in the stones by its ear. It was tunneling. The carcass’s jaw skidded on rough stone as it opened, leaving behind ghosts of skin. It was raw but there was no blood to issue from its now-exposed veins. Figments roared into its mind, imagined scenarios of the rat’s head in its fangs. The heart was the enemy of the bleeding creature. When opened, the heart pushes the blood out. When shut, when trapped within the thing, blood merely flooded against the winds of the veins. The carcass heard it thunder. As though it was trying to leave the rat. As though it was trying to get to the carcass.
Soon, though, the heart of this rat grew no louder. Desperation kept the carcass from accepting that it was quieting, that the rat was starting to move away again. The rat was not coming closer. Anguish replaced hope, an unconscious hope that had come alive in the mind of the carcass. If it had fluid with which to sob, if it had the vigor to crane its neck, tears would rinse down its shapeless face. One socket was empty and sunken. It was covered in the dried jelly of a ruined eye, which would then drip down to pool where the legs were sunken under the rot and the filth. Another rat’s heartbeat drove to the forefront if its awareness. It could not ignore it. The sound of the blood tantalized it, promising an end to starvation. It promised the return of a clarity it could not see past. There was no hope of a certain thought within the carcass’s head, but perhaps the rats had tormented it forever.
Once, it had eaten one. That was why the dregs of blood in the crevice-like folds of its heart were putrid. It had left a hole by its mouth, a rat-hole. Perhaps the rats could smell the rot in the wall, a scent the carcass could not discern. It had a ruin of a nose, and it did not need to smell. Perhaps the tormenting rats, the thousand little beating hearts in the wall, evil and hateful things which would not come near enough, were hungry. Perhaps this would mean one would eventually seek the source of the rot and draw near enough. Perhaps– now that it could listen, and now that it could imagine– the ground was thick and covered with rats. Perhaps there were thousands and it was they its legs buried down into. It scarcely felt the difference between flesh and stone. The carcass began and ended with the tight close of stone around it.
It hoped for so long for one to climb up, or to protrude from the wall. It prayed, though it did not know to what, or indeed what existed to be prayed to. Mostly, wordlessly, thoughtlessly, it begged. It begged, without so much as a voice to croon with, and more rats seemed to arrive, but none drew closer. Their hearts beat, one over another, until it could not discern between the sound of one heart beating and another. There were so many of them. One cascade of blood that flooded over itself and swelled the veins and the body into a distended and throbbing shape. It was a malignant sound. It had always been. The carcass had always known it to be, but it had forgotten. It roared and disappeared. Its presence could not be relied upon to remind it of the treachery of the rats. Soon, the mind had gone again, except for a stirring, which crescendoed with every sound. It took and it brought untidy thoughts.
After a long time, though not so long that its hindbrain had clenched its heart and flooded the carcass again with the horrors of awareness, a clawing came sharp and clear. Beneath the hot rancor of starvation, its ear pricked with the thumping of something near, not covered by rock or by distance. A rat had drawn near to the hole. The carcass fell silent. Its jaw was leaden, the muscles which might have actuated the bite were half missing, and otherwise weak. The stirring mind in the carcass brought with it a fact, a hardly conscious fact, which crept up to the surface. It loved this rat. It was infatuated with the steady thrum, moving so near that the sound might have been felt rather than heard. The carcass waited.
Pattering to the end of the tunnel came the rat. The carcass remained perfectly still, its tongue-tip faintly raised, until the snout of the creature floated a hair’s-breadth from it. It could taste its breath. It could feel the warm shudder of its issuance on the tip of its tongue. Fitfully, the hindbrain sought to bring its jaw shut. Muscles protested, other ghostings of skin left scraped onto the rocks. It was near enough to kiss the rat, its heartbeat a thunder unlike any other in its ear. So the carcass loved it. The jaw closed like a steel trap, pinning the creature by a fang beside its spine. It scurried. With its forepaws it flayed the lips half-off the carcass, but it was stuck fast. The fang had gone by the bone. Blood burgeoned in the arteries by the tooth, blood the carcass could smell, but not reach, which the fang had missed. It desired it with a heady sharpness that blinded the carcass to all else, but instinct overtook it. It could not allow the thing to escape.
The warm thing fought between its lips. This most beloved creature fought to pry itself out and could not. The carcass was bemused. Then, it clamped its jaw tighter until the head fell inert into the cavity of its mouth and the creature’s blood reciprocated. It sunk the tongue in its filth. Filth that would douse its hunger. Filth that proved the rat loved it, and it dried, and, far thinner, slid from the crevice in the wall past the carcass’s chin and down to the rot where its legs were buried.
–
The fleet address would have to come once the suns sank beneath the horizon. Right now, Kalivan was admiral of the Black Fleet of Polocarija, and he had spread his gift of blood and starlight to every seaman in his fleet. None were without his blessing. None were without the favor of Isabella Petrovich, for whom he sailed to gold and slaughter. He had made his base on the dull rock of Zlacinica, the gate to the East. The rock was glut on the prizes of the treasure fleets of Temeryon and Unitas. Twenty-two ships sat moored in the cove at Pais-du-Selen. No fewer than seventy men, now fed by starving stars, crewed each ship.
He wallowed in a blood-drunk mind. Kalivan mused over what the men would learn, when the suns fell again. Formerly brave navymen of Zedarja, all. Bosom-clingers to the Haruta. Bedfellows to the den of vipers they propped up. Zedarja would have to fall, and with it, the decadent Ronodors. The suns began to rise, beyond the threshold, but he could not sleep yet. Merely thinking of it incensed him, the Ronodors who could not pacify Doleri. The Ronodors who could much less bring the world to heel again. If it had been him on the throne, with the crown on his head, he would have smashed the impudent Mežižan and Nodjiewac both. Kalivan knew precious little of the Axtadum, less that which was not taught to any supplicant to the faith, but now he wagered he knew a little something no Three-fearing scholar dared to venture. The Axtadum was weak, too, when it died. It should’ve just kept all those damn slaves down.
Kalivan wound his way down into the great caches underneath the rock. A treacherous tangle of sea cavelets and tunnels wound down to the strand, and the red of the suns ran across the water beneath the arch, almost reaching the edge of the water. He let it approach until the foam around his boots was in the color of frothy blood, and then stalked back to the long rows of coffers and trunks, piled to meet the stalactites in some places, or traded for exquisite gemstones in miniscule chests kept just beside the path. Still restless, he found himself in front of a high pile of crowns, stolen from antiquities cargo bound from Temeryon and the Makrisakt. Without needing to think, he plucked one from the stack and turned it over in his hands.
A star of five points wrought in decadent gold rose above a horizon of glittering spikes, encrusted with rubies and pearls. It shone in conspiracy, like a buttercup, the gleam of truest gold against his skin. He imagined it sitting on Isabella’s hair, imagined how it would shine in his hands as he crowned her. They wouldn’t have need for the Euclija’s crown. There would be no reminders of a reign before. An insipid and languid reign. He ground his teeth at the thought, then inspected the crown a little closer. Something would have to be done about the star. Then again, something could be done. With a thumb he pinched one point and bent it until it snapped. He did the same with the one immediately opposite, and left it a slightly distorted triangle. A shape with three points. It would suit until he abducted a goldsmith.
Gingerly, he returned the crown to the top of the stack. Soon, his banners would fly above Polocarija, set in place by the vast political engine of the Secret Fire, when Isabella’s persuasions paid off. He produced a letter from the pocket within his jerkin, nearest his chest, and read it over once. Her words, the words of his beloved.
"...And the fleet shall join you where you say you are docked, my sweeting. We shall couple when I join you, after their banners have sat beside yours."
Beyond the paper, he eyed the amended crown at the top, with satisfaction. Isabella would denounce the ignominious Markov, merely required for the begetting of her whelps. A convenience for the law of true birth. He would place the crown upon her head. He would restore respectability to Zedarja and the station of the Euclija. His wife’s Zedarja. He went through the chests for regalia, and for necklaces to layer on overtop. As he shifted the piles, yellow gleamings danced across the roof, like the burgeoning blue reflections on the roof over the waters in a sea cave. His grin was wolfish in his estimate, in the reflection of a puddle of drip-water.
He caught his face in the gleam of a ruby, toothy, manicured, when the first cannon shot rang out. At first, he feared that fire had caught in the magazines. But it was far too rhythmic. It wasn’t a chain. The order rose in his mind, “rolling fire”. It stung his tongue with a bitter taste, a order he had given and heard carried out, as the gun crews fired in asynchronous sections with a battering, constant pace. It was regular. In a stupor, he counted the batteries, the sounds of a drilled militia. It was bemusing. He hadn’t given any order.
Then came the bells. Down in the caches, it was clamorous, the tolling of all calamity. The caves were stuffed with daylight sentries, the denizens of the bare rock and the seamen too insignificant to receive his gift. They ought to clang their bell sooner, or rather not at all, because no muster need be called when, near as he could tell, his own fleet was wasting munitions to the sea. It was fifteen seconds, stock-still and standing in his caches when the thought arose, independent of anything but the unceasing sound of rolling fire, and now the hushed breaking of timbers, that his fleet was not the one firing. The very notion extended his stupor, until one of the daylight sentries broke, full-sprint, past the door to the caches.
Spluttering, the boy spilled before him, raving nonsenses about the colors of the Haruta and a blockade. A few words in each blabbering rush made any sense at all– the loss of the Darling Conquest, the Red Morning, the Opportune Delight. The flagship, near to timbers. He squeezed his eyes shut, then he fixed the boy in a gaze honed so hard the boy froze in place.
“What good is a mustering clamor after the battle has begun?!” The boy recoiled as though struck, but that was hardly a satisfactory response. No, a black wroth poured down every nerve, and he pulled back and struck. His nails sliced clean through the boy’s torso, and he fell into two shapeless lumps. Again, Kalivan shouted, “Useless idiots! Useless beyond livestock!” He stamped down on the piece he thought must have been the boy’s head, though he scarcely looked. Fitfully, he roved for the regalia and the crown, then plucked it up.
Still, the question of who maintained his state of confusion, even as he passed a chest of trade gems and took it up, in case of a raid. A chest which held a quarter of the wealth of the entire cache. The cannons sounded almost indistinct from his own. The Haruta banner. Their banners have sat beside yours. A blockade. Realization rose, and with it, the stupor ebbed. It was replaced by another rage. This one yawned deeper and darker than the last, and he nearly ran his hands bloody on the crown before remembering the weakness of the gold. It would press. So he put it on his head. The Dolerani had betrayed him!
He stormed to the mouth of the cave to look out under the lip of the cave. Though eastward, the suns had climbed high enough so that their light, which had become hateful to him, did not immolate him. Kalivan watched his flagship sink beneath the waves, and a Dolerani galley trawl up beside it. But another confusion remained. Zedarja had found his cove, hidden in a desolate rock. His fleet was coming apart, and the bay was blockaded. Kalivan’s mind raced, then turned to the tunnels, where a sloop waited, a failsafe in case of an attack, and a system that ought to have given warning.
That thought turned to ice in his mind. They hadn’t known to give warning, of course they hadn’t; on sighting the banner of the Haruta they had been told to hail, but expose no cannons. The Zedari who would join his cause would be welcomed and allowed to moor. But now, Kalivan had been betrayed. He hustled through the corridors within the rock, a natural fortress. The mountains served as a wall. The tunnels were too treacherous and winding to be navigated by an invading force. They would protect him and his marines from the suns, and an invading force would lack even dim light to see by.
It ought to have worked that way, the thought rose, but as he raced towards the western mouth, the cries of sentries and his newly-wakened spawn echoed through the halls. They’re stoppering the entrances, a voice cried. It’s all collapsed, forty feet deep! To the northern mouth!
Incredulousness gave way to a worse realization. A worse betrayal. The thought that Isabella might have forsaken him. It was a horror more hateful than the dawn, and he plunged deeper through the passages of Zlacinica, of his impregnable rock. But they didn’t need to. The marines and their sappers didn’t need to, they were going to bring the rock down. Would he have been crushed, already, if not for his restlessness? He steeled himself, drawing on every ounce of revulsion to banish the thought as he scurried over the rough-hewn bowels of the tunnel system. An immortal had no need of a tomb.
When he reached the mouth, it hadn’t yet been sealed. It opened into a pockmarked cave with a basin deep enough to house a single sloop, his freedom. Kalivan slung a sailcloth around himself like a shroud to keep the sun at bay, over the crown on his head, until he reached the ship. There was a day crew, one which lived, though fifteen were his spawn. Only when he pulled aboard did he stop, and the incredulous rage of the tirade started to ebb. Mercifully, there were no questions when he demanded cast-off and fled into a black stupor, and he embraced his anger and his bafflement like bosom-friends.
He barely felt the ship slip away into the day. They did not wake him until the rendezvous.
–
In the crevice in the wall, the carcass remembered. First, it remembered another burning, a burning worse than the fire of hunger chewing through empty veins. It remembered hate, a thing which flared to life in its dead gut and made it shiver, a waste of blood, but it was alive in the carcass. The carcass remembered its name. It was Kalivan Rakulvaya. The star in his chest flared, gleaming with vigor. His heart– still empty and dry, still starving, still full of putrid dregs that sickened his mind when it beat– was filled with a vigor he no longer had the strength to find pitiful. The satiation did not drive away the sounds of rats, nor the agonized wanting which gripped his chest at every beat of every tiny heart, a thousand times a minute. Kalivan could not shut it out. Then Kalivan disappeared for a long time.
He stirred when a scrape reached the carcass’s ear. There was only one ear which really remained, the other was a smoothed-over ruin. The sound came down through the grate at the top of the pit. The ear twitched. It had, scarcely, the room to twitch. It was like a metal-footed chair being pushed along the stonework. A voice came, formless and muted, without hope for understanding, in the language of Unitas. Kalivan could only assume there had been a response, for then, the sound of a mortal thing, footsteps on tiles in a room big enough to echo, retreated. He was left with the rats.
Then came the fear. Kalivan had known the fear by another name before. It was black and complex and it pulled the mote of starlight cradling his heart up into his throat, like gravity, like its little light spluttered out all at once. The nerves in the carcass grew sharp, glands without sweat pricked. His head went hot. In its darkness was a blind, black, dread. He wished he could see. He wished he could escape and crawl out of that hole, but he was pinned. Stuck meat, rot squeezed and sinking under stone. The fear came slowly. It agonized as it crept closer, still coming, but impossibly slow now. When it stopped and at last came no closer, he could still feel the fear seeping through the bars above him. It wafted down, through thick, dead air. The same voice came again. An honorific followed; the only part he actually heard.
The wait grew long, until his nerves went quiet. He had no endurance which had withstood the oubliette and the tight press of the stone. Without the nerves singing, buried in the carcass, Kalivan could only feel the ache of what joints remained. The fear would wait, he knew, until he was ready to beg for a word from above. To gift him with its regard. Horror became another dear friend to him, rancor, sealed in the close as he was. A rancor strong enough so that, if he could move but a half-inch, he thought he might tear the cell to dust and rubble. Too tight to flail. Too close to climb. Too solid to force himself against the stones and shove them out. He’d heard the rats. The walls were thick and fast. He was seething when it came to him, in its dooming simplicity. The fear, she had graced him with an opportunity to taste her cruelty.
Kalivan would be expected to say the first word. He had been given an eternity to burgeon with cruel barbs to spit up from the hole if he ever so much as got the chance. To wound the fear. They all fought for supremacy. He could not, for the fear which crushed him down into the very depths of the channel, speak. He tried to summon his rage, but instead fell silent. Long stints of silence did not have a meaning to Kalivan anymore. He heard the fear sit down. Its intensity did not diminish.
Instead, the fear flared. It was oppressive, omnipresent, pouring down from above. Isabella Petrovich was about to speak. The carcass’s ear was pointed and well-attenuated. Kalivan could hear the draw of breath. It prickled at the back of his neck. Her voice trickled down through the grate, it poured over him like ice. It forced the thing that hid inside the carcass away, down into the hollow of his chest. “Once, you came to me on the eastward winds with the treasures of the whole Elan over in your hold, my love. You said you would elude the vastness of eternity. You would win me and make me your wife. Now you flinch at my coming,” she said. Her voice was a slow, dreadful draw. It was like a talon of ice, piercing through the carcass. Wounded, and wounding. “My love. I can hear you like a rat in the wall. I can hear your heart.”
The awful thing, the heart, It spat acrid blood through atrophied tubes. Kalivan tilted his head up, and the wall scored the skin from his cheek as his cheekbone juddered along the bricks. “Faithless bitch,” he spat, like a door creaking. When it echoed back, again and again, he wished he could eat it. He wished that the anger he sunk into the words could feed him. His face was torn open from the texture of the stones.
Her response was a strange, choked snort. It sounded like laughter. Hateful mockery. He heard her eyes roll in her head, turn down. Look, perhaps, through the grate. “Faithless…? How could I ever forget you, my Kalivan? I see that they’ve ruined it all, misconstrued the purpose of my designs. You’ve grown hungry, when you should have simply slumbered. It ought to have been as a dream, a dream I could one day hope to wake you from, and you’d sweetly beg me to take you back. How could I have said no?”
The carcass lowed. It squalled like livestock in the abattoir rail, wheezing like a squeezebox in horrible rage that he could not contain. His whole body shook, it wanted to thrash itself against the walls and either break them down or break itself, until at last Kalivan reasserted his control. No, there was something distinctly wrong. Something had to have changed, he was wise to it. She had changed.
Kalivan clawed his disparate mind together. He could not beg, he could scarcely dream of begging her to take him back. The rage rose in one hideous and certain squall. He would not leave with her. He would sooner remain in the close with the rats and come to pieces, or rather claw his way out and tear her apart. He rubbed the carcass’s face against the wall until he felt it and sneered, “How young is his new whore?”
“Inhospitable, Kalivan,” Isabella said. No, the wrongness he sensed was stronger, even as she shook off the barb. She sounded mournful. “They slaughtered Markov. My only husband, father to my children and the laughing man stuck him like livestock. The laughing man killed him.”
Kalivan laughed. It rose through the grate.
“I’ve come to give you the opportunity to thank me, to forgive me,” Isabella said, with a nerve Kalivan scarcely thought could be possible. “Someday soon, when my children have failed me, I will take them to learn your lesson. You will help me teach them. My children grasp. They lie. But when you have done this, they could not be able to stop me from bringing you out again. Markov has served his purpose,” she drawled. “Now, you. Beg, and I’ll take you back, when the time comes. Give me Doleri. Be my king.”
The carcass raged and Kalivan sank in it. He went somewhere beyond words, beyond love, and then he emerged. In a terrible howl, he said, “Then I would eat them, and grow back my wits bit by bit. I would bleed them both, your whelps with Markov, and then you’d love me. You’d beg. You’d wander back to your betrayal. You’d feel it in your heart, knowing you’ve been left alone, you cunt, and then I’d eat you. Arms, legs, all the way up to the middle of the back and I’d bury you in a hole. Can you kill me? For every itch unscratched, can you kill me? I spit on your children. I spit on the grate you put over me.”
He could hear her lips curl into a bitter smile. She said, “My perfect brute. You don’t get it, yet. You will, when I pull you out, when you play your part. Things will be right. It wasn’t time for you to do what you tried. I’ve only given you more time. But I need you. I needed Markov,” she spat, “And they killed him. If only you can love me, I can give it to you, what you wanted. The Euclija is weak, and Markov is gone. Come, forgive me.” When she said that– forgive me– Kalivan almost heard a whinge in her voice.
Kalivan laughed, inconsolable. “It’s too late for that, you fucking whore. Go fuck his stuck corpse and pretend he was ever as good as me alive. You could have had it,” he screamed, his dead heart pounding, churning inside the carcass. It screamed for blood it didn’t have and the tiny star made sang chorus to those awful, empty pangs. He ripped his tongue open on his teeth and shrilled, a cacophony inside the close, until, panting, the storm abated. “But you fucked it. The Gods shall bless he who bathes the world in blood and starlight, in love and war. With my teeth I opened armadas in your name, in your love, feeding your star in my heart. Fear—” he shouted the syllable, and frenzy overtook him again. “—You never wanted power, you feared it! You weren’t big enough for the bounty won by your love! You never were! First among squanderers, inventor of a power you could never alone see the worth of. I pity you in your smallness, in your insignificance. You needed me to show you what you’d made! Whore! Do not deign to ask me for it! There is no love in me for you! Rather, kill me! Dig me up and kill me!”
Slow, measured, the fear spoke. “I disagree,” she said. It drew closer, and he heard a slow sound, a sticking sound, the quiet little mangling of skin. The scent of blood flooded the air, even detectable by the ruin of his nose. He heard the first few drops hit the grate and felt it. Terror. For a horrible wince of a moment, he knew what came next. The betrayal. The betrayal of the carcass, which would be given what it demanded. It would demean him for it. In a handful of moments, he would be lost to hunger. He would be at her command. “Now, drink,” she commanded.
The carcass drank. It came in a slow, narrow curtain, running down the walls. It slithered in the cracks of the grout and the carcass lapped it up, forcing itself into new and terrible positions in the bind, licking what slithered over the putrid stones of the channel. No thoughts could surface. The rancor was quelled, his heart slowed, as the awful organ filled with Isabella’s blood. Hunger diminished. Gratitude rose in him, an awful and betraying gratitude. There was no fiber of the carcass that remained under his command. Isabella Petrovich’s treachery was complete.
There was another squishing sound and the draw of fabric. He could hear a knot come together, and the seeping of blood, which blended with rot and putrescence, the droppings of rats, and centuries of dust on his tongue, slowly stopped. He wallowed, moaning in his impotence. Again he heard her lips creak and draw, becoming what he knew must be the picture of satisfaction. “If I never wanted the power you ‘deigned!’ to grant me, they would have known what you were and what you’d done. I made them spare you, my love. You just needed to learn restraint. It’s not too late, my beloved Kalivan. The time is nigh. Do not choose to suffer down here longer. It is not how I wish to reward your initiative. I have loved you ceaselessly; come. I wish to repair my family, even as my children wallow in their victory, in their killing of my darling Markov.”
The blood twisted inside him, churning, his hunger sated, and the horrible rancor it brought becoming foreign to him. His hatred remained, but estranged. It was sated. Curling his neck, he angled his head down, until his forehead touched the near wall and pressed it into the corner. Briefly, he blinked back the horror of what he was about to do. Betraying himself, Kalivan permitted himself a moment to enjoy this, this satiation, the first in an eternity.
The organs in the carcass had nearly atrophied. He clenched those which remained. The blood ebbed back up his throat and down his chin, beyond his reach, to the floor, to the rats. He retched again, choking off horrible sounds which echoed and flooded his ears, as the hunger returned. The star excoriated him for his betrayal, but still he regurgitated the blood, liquefying every tract he still had. Rejecting Isabella’s false favor. He prepared himself to die, but, cruelly, the star did not take him. It continued as it had. It continued to eat him. When he was done, he lowed again.
He panted and said, shudderingly, “The fear we would have inspired, my Isabella, you at my side. I would have ground the whole of the Haruta and the thousand tribal pretenders beneath my feet for you. I would have made you the Axtadum anew for the fervor of my love, my—” he bit his lips, what lips remained, to shreds– “love, my Isabella.” He choked out a horrible laugh. “When I drink of your blood again, it shall be with my teeth. Mercifully, this forgetting-hole has not dulled them. I give you this,” he said, forceful, but whining, “This opportunity to prevent it. Kill me, you faithless, stupid cunt. Vindicate me, show me the truth of your love. Kill me before I slaughter your children. I think… I shall make a bludgeon of the boy’s head, and see whether his little bones will crack before I’ve beaten your head in,” he said, and that was one of the last coherent words he could manage.
High above, he heard Isabella Petrovich sigh with finality. Kalivan heard her breath draw. He knew the ice would come again. She said, with a chord of pity that tasted far too saccharine to his tongue, and scorn sweetened to taste, “Oh, my darling, I’m not confident that there is anything left to kill. I admit I thought you’d be more resilient. Your… talk. Your ravings about delivering me the empire I deserved, the Hidden Fire brought to a glory it had never before had. It seduced me in a way Markov was never quite the man to. It exhilarated me.”
Kalivan screamed in rage, a scream that tore at his insides, leaving ribbons. One eye, the one that remained at least somewhat intact, twitched as if to bulge, and he quailed, “Do it! Burn me, let me die!”
But his words came to no avail. The fear was gone.
–
Into the second night, they had been joined by only a second ship, a ship-of-the-line which had been on patrol and caught the signal in time. It had been called the Joyful Regard when it moored at the rendezvous point. When he awoke, he ordered the ships brought together, and crossed the gangway to stand on the ship, now his flagship. He named it as his prior one had been called, White Tip.
When the fourth night came and no further ships had arrived, beyond the loping half-wreck of his new flagship, Kalivan struggled not to give over to despair. His mood worsened like overripe fruit on the vine, before the schooner returned with tidings that the Haruta’s armada had been sighted over the horizon to the southeast. He was still bereft of any lucid sense, even though he was well-sated on blood and retained a third of his treasury. No word from Isabella, no inkling had applied anything less than support for his endeavor, an endeavor which would plant her on the throne of Doleri. He raged at the ungrateful seed which had poisoned her heart against him. The seed which had chosen Markov, unlovable Markov!
Then the armadas began to brim on the horizon and the crew quailed, restless for want of a sensible order. That was mercifully easy: he would give them chase and find another desolate rock. The game would continue. Isabella would return when she realized it was possible, that the trap had failed. Whether he would grant the crown to the bitch, though, was questionable. In the depth of his anger, laid clear before him as the armada kept pace behind, he thought likely not.
They scavenged on the way to Kreshalan, where they moored by the leeward side until a prize came into view. The White Tip II had been repaired and her guns refitted. He scowled all the way to the command deck, where the unworthy few survivors had assembled. Most of them had lived because they were the sailors of the escape sloop– no hardened sailors, but a swift, cowardly lot. While the livery was being changed, Kalivan turned ten of the fifteen daylight sentinels to his spawn. It embittered him to gift the unworthy so.
It was in service of something greater– the reoutfitting of his immortal navy. It meant the White Tip could be crewed as befitted his force. The prize was sighted by one of the new mates, a name not worthy of memory, so he called the mortal thing Spyglass. An Unitas ship, undoubtedly rich, though undoubtedly staffed by the merchant navy. Spyglass limbered down from the crow’s nest and claimed merely that the tip had been right. She was large enough to carry the treasure wares described, a bounty which could buy them enough livery to outfit one of the coves south of Kreshalan, a rock scarce worth mentioning on any map.
His fury meant the rock might suffice in the interim. It would have to suffice in the interim. Kalivan, admiral of the Black Fleet, had survived the first and most likely attempt on his reign. The treachery of Isabella Petrovich had been wasted, for he still sailed free. A weakness she had been thoughtful enough to free him of. His blood, stolen and pillaged, ran hot when his mind drifted to her. He smiled, wolvish, dancing between hatred and adoration, wallowing in an infatuation her betrayal could not have broken. Rather, his desire for Isabella Petrovich, to lay a crown of gold on her burnished hair, had waxed. She had lain unto him the first blow of many, which he would answer, until at her feet he had made a corpse-hoard of all Doleri, and made of it her bridal-bed...
The wind lifted his hair, his men clung to, more bolstering the sails and the rigging lines as the sun dipped beneath the water and he could come onto the prow in proper. He relished in it, in the scant remnants of light which seared his skin though not enough to wound. This was to be the character of her love. Nothing remained save for that pale certainty, one which bolstered his desire to return to her side with a thousand ships. Every enemy raised against him he would turn back and grind beneath the heel. Love would be war and love again, and suddenly, Kalivan was elated. It sang in his veins. Through her treachery, he had been given the chance to demonstrate beyond any shadow his worthiness.
The prize rose on the horizon, a treasure galleon and its escort. The banners flew a medallion coin, struck with the sigil of a lord of Unitas. The White Tip II rode the waves, and at each crest Kalivan felt predatory glee mount. With wonder, Kalivan lavished himself in fantasy, in visions of the gold and firepower alike he would return with. The Euclija would kneel, Isabella would be brought low, as a dog, worthless before her, and he would return her to glory by his side. He would show her the flat of his sabre, but hold it away, and instead of striking her, lay her a crown, a new crown. It would be grander than the antique he held. It was a cheap thing. Suddenly, its cheapness disgusted him.
The ship rolled forward and he quit the prow, returning swiftly to the command. He ordered the gunports opened. Kalivan bore down on the treasure galleon with a complement of one ship extra, the sloop that had flown him from Zlacinica. At least one worthy man remained to him– a quartermaster who bore the name Feodor– whom he sent to keep the gunners to. As he came near to range of fire, he showed the black, and with a thrill, the treasure galleon began to turn in response. A critical moment approached, one Kalivan relished in above any other. The moment when a prize chooses whether to surrender or give fight.
On the rail, peering out into the night, to the treasure ship and its escort where they sat, dimly illuminated by lamps, Kalivan felt a joyful madness swell within him. He leaned forward, as though he could reach across the space between the ships– and his answer came. Like one hundred lidded eyes, the gunports opened. Kalivan laughed a black laugh and whirled around on the stair, the crew assembled and to. Across the evening wind, he shouted, “Give them rolling fire!” and his words were lost under the thunder of cannonshot. A huge curtain of smoke rose over the sea.
As the cannonade rolled, the White Tip II’s port shroud was turned to shivers. A sole sight pierced through his roaring mania– interlocking sigils, the makings of a paling– and he turned about, wildly, to see the sloop complement brought down by the prize’s guns. He couldn’t see the escort, a smaller ship, a corvette, perhaps, which had joined the prize. The stolen blood ran cold, he searched for Spyglass, and found him clinging to the mast. Kalivan charged across the deck. “The corvette?” Kalivan demanded.
Spyglass shook his head, and Kalivan didn’t stay for the answer. He withdrew, bidding his mind to think, to strategize. He resolved. “Arcane shot,” he shouted, though without certainty any had heard. “Bring the paling down!”
Any response was drowned out under the explosive reemergence of the corvette, pinning the White Tip II with a barrage of raking fire. The prize joined salvo and the whole of the ship was thrown across a swell. When she recovered, Kalivan redoubled his order, but many of the gun crews had quit posts to patch the hull. The ship would not survive another barrage. As the deck heaved, Kalivan took one of the bow chasers, fiddling with the match as horror dawned. He lit the fuse. The cannon flew back, but it never caught against the chains. The deck disappeared from beneath Kalivan’s feet and there could be no ascertaining where he was, whether flying or falling or dead. He began to see planks scattering across the black, and determined he had been thrown from the ship. He looked; the White Tip II was scuttled. Kalivan bit his lip hard and swam for Kreshalan. He did not reach it.
–
It began as it always did, with the rattle of chains overtaking all other sounds and the creak of bars falling into place. When his ear was away from the wall, he could hear the thing’s heart, slow and deliberate. It was not, as he had for a moment hoped, Isabella returned. The thing was merely mortal. The sound of its blood was deeper than the heartbeats of the rats in the walls. Hunger nearly destroyed him again at the thought. It nearly rose to join chorus with his fury, it almost persuaded him to beat his heart, to flood those last dregs of blood into the pyre she had put in him and scuttle up and get through the grate and feast. The Axtadum did not feed rats to its great stars.
This is what the pangs of roaring hunger sang to him, renewed and renewed again in ensemble. The carcass quaked in its sickness. As that headless rage began to realize it would not be answered by action, by the animation of his limbs and the supplying of livening fire to seize something that wouldn’t be choked down but savored and taken of its nourishment, it howled, and the pang renewed. It was ever hard to think for the burning inside the carcass. But as the carcass roared, wailing its death throes and its starvation, there was, for a time, no Kalivan. Not until it quieted.
If Kalivan had done so, it would have killed him. A stronger body had clawed to the throat of the four sided shaft by pinning itself, inch by inch across days, as the rats flayed his fingers and toes with their teeth, before most of the rats knew to stay away. He had raised his arm to the grate and pulled until the muscles in his arm tore apart and could not repair themselves and he slid, slow, back to the ground. That the arm had become pinned beside him had been a fluke. The carcass that Kalivan was could not feel fingers. It could hardly feel an elbow, but it was possible that it still had any of these things.
Then he spoke a long and mournful lowing which was answered by a rattle above. They had filled in the cell which had his shaft as a drain, blocked by a grate of iron. He imagined he could smell the man’s sweat, imagined that it might prick, and tinge with the scent of agitation, anxiety, fear. But his nose was dead. Dead like his eyes, so he smelled nothing. Of the organs which felt any of the energy which remained to him, he fed it, slow, to his tongue, his lungs, and to his ears. The response was slow, but the sound of frightened rats grew cacophonous in his ears as his hearing strained further and further from his cell.
He had been right. The beating in the cell above had quickened and sharpened. He imagined what whispers might flow through the walls in the dark, forcing his mind to conceive once again of language, and not heartbeats. To speak to an animal which could be coerced nearer, not merely hoped for. Once, he could command mens’ hearts. He had tried it before, in this shaft. Memory of this fact trickled in, but details would have been far too costly. There was no consciousness to this fact. Kalivan merely shut the channels which might have fed the mind what it required. He feared allowing it to take all the fire it desired.
This one, the one in the cell above him, might free him where the others did not. Or otherwise Kalivan would cease to be. It did not ring significant to him that he had thought this before attempting this, each time he had attempted this in the past. What he attempted to say resolved into another mournful groan, which met another rustle of chains. The quickening of a heart, eliciting excitement in the hungry star which was eating him. He tried again, and he spoke.
“Who’s there? Who’s above me, in the cell? Who rattles those chains? You have no need to fear me,” said Kalivan. His voice horrified him, but then, so did his words. Pliant and weak in scratching tones. Dirge to his slow rot.
The heart quickened. It resonated through a body above, a wet body, full to bursting with blood spurting against the walls of its veins and surging over and through each organ. Subtler than the blood, there was a breathing, a breathing which caught and unlatched, as though bemoaning its worry. Then there came a rattle, a slow quieting of the blood, as something pulled away from the grate.
“Please,” said Kalivan. “Don’t you know how hard it has gotten to speak?”
“Be silent, dread spirit,” a voice quailed from above. It said a prayer, a frightened plea, but the prayer was familiar to Kalivan. Kalivan echoed it in his heart. Begged it to bear truth. The one who had done this to him would know love which was war. A love he no longer possessed. It had all given over to hatred and anger. That she had dared to return, and speak to him.
While he carefully fed his ear from the blood in his heart and the star, he could ick out the changes in the heartbeat of the man above, and name them day and night. Kalivan was silent for ten days, to hear the fear working out of the thing’s mind like a sieve as his sole interaction would be the pushing of food beneath his door, which Kalivan heard twice daily as a dry scrape on stone. The carcass had stopped demanding anything at all.
It was silent when Kalivan spoke again. “Let’s have words,” he said.
“You will haunt me here forever, then?”
“Yes,” Kalivan said. “I am a prisoner, too, no wraith. But I very much fear I will be here forever.”
The voice was silent for a long time. When it came again, sinking through the grate in the ceiling, it was fearful. “They’ll keep us here that long?”
There was truth to his fear. Kalivan heard it in the speed of his heartbeats, and so close to the grate, the sound of sweat beading and dropping against the metal. So near to his tongue, some of his lip yet lived, and pulled into a slow draw of wonderment. Perhaps this one would listen. It tempered his hunger, became a brief indulgence of hope. There was nothing left of the carcass to revel in it. Kalivan let this indulgence briefly abate, and said, “Oh yes, yes, on and to forever.”
Kalivan could not have known how long it had been when the voice above first spoke of time. It did so in aching tones and with a distinct hollowness. Its blood churned louder, as though the heartbeats had grown pitched.
“Nineteen years they’ve taken. Six here, thirteen before,” it said.
“Meaningless,” Kalivan drawled. “There is no time here. You will see that soon.”
There was a quiver from above, a sad shudder, and the voice returned. “No, it does. She would be twenty, now.”
“She?”
“Maybe he, I don’t know,” came the reply. “But I always picture a little girl. There was a whore, in Polocarija. I shouldn’t call her a whore,” it said, tinged with remorse. “The mother. I had leave, we… coupled, seven days. I saw her once since, before they took me in. She said she was keeping it.”
The rats had grown merciful. Their hearts were quiet. The inside of the carcass’s head had grown quiet enough for Kalivan to eke out thought. Disgust roiled in him, an emotion he had no use for in this crevice, but it burgeoned all the same. The prisoner above was pathetic. His very blood protested against the idea of the offer he now tried to prepare, but his hunger cowed him. His all-consuming thirst for revenge wheedled him down until he shrank, scraping once again on the stones of the chute. “Yes,” he quailed. “They’ve taken so very much. Time… lost forever, with only fractions of a life left to exact on it.”
The voice agreed and then was quiet for a long time. A long time had passed, perhaps several days, or longer, when Kalivan replied.
“I could help you.”
“To escape?” The voice replied, weaker now. It was thin, near to breaking.
“No. You are in a better position to escape than I, I’m afraid,” Kalivan said. “Help me. Help me escape, and I can give you the time you need.”
There was a cracking laugh from above, a mournful sound. The sound of something breaking. The inmate above said, “Turn back the flow of time? Who am I above, a miracle man? You must expect me to marvel at my good fortune. No. No man can do that.”
Kalivan sensed something then, in this one. A weakness. A desire to believe. A hunger, too. “But I can,” he said. “I do not know how long I have been here, but I have witnessed three men like you, live out their pointless, sad, lives above the grate you see there. Each of them heard my offer. All of them chose insignificance and death in captivity. And each of them did, while I yet live. I was sealed down here at the convenience of Isabella Petrovich.”
There was a shifting above him.
“Ye-e-es,” he drawled, though uncertain whether the shift was due to some disquiet or mere restlessness. “A name you recognize? She has lived far longer in the gentle embrace of youth than any, elf or otherwise, can be afforded any right. And she made me her blood. I am more of her being than either one of those dreadful whelps. I am more than mortal. I sought to build an empire. Ruins, now, but its riches must remain.”
His voice met only silence.
“I am the blood of Isabella Petrovich. Not… oh, what were their names? Sorin, Viktoria?” They’d feel it too, his beloved war. Kalivan laughed. “Help me escape, and I will take you beyond fear of time. Help me reach my wealth, and I will make it yours.”
When he had finished speaking, Kalivan felt the strength begin to ebb again from the carcass. Were it not for how thoroughly it was pinned in the shaft, he might have slumped over and sunk to the floor. He revoked the fire to his tongue and to vast parts of his mind, to his memories. He let his mind become an echoing chamber for his anger, and let that sustain him.
“And I could pass it to her?” The voice said, after agonizing hours during which the rats had grown loud again, and beyond that he heard the slow and deliberate thrum of the inmate above’s blood. He heard his little mind trying to think.
“Yes, of course,” Kalivan said. He could not drink the satisfaction of that moment. It fizzled in the atrophied hollow of his mind. He despised the inmate’s small-mindedness, but instead, he continued, “What is your name?”
“Lovro,” the man replied, growing weak. “I was a captain– Captain Vratikov. I sailed for Le Compte. It’s a life sentence, piracy.”
Kalivan hummed and did not commit the name to memory. “Charming. This ‘Le Compte’ must be a novelty,” he said.
“I was a privateer for the Haruta. They pressed me into it,” Lovro said. “I didn’t deserve this.”
Feebly, Kalivan clawed to bring his temper back under his control. The carcass’s head swam madly, filled with a howling anger that this pathetic thing was to be relied upon, for his salvation and for his vengeance. Kalivan lulled himself, and slowly, the carcass quieted. “Oh, they will have what they earned, Captain Vratikov. There is no justice in this world save for that which we can bring about. This I have learned well,” he said, and said nothing more.
The scraping which had, slowly, deliberately, proceeded since the last Kalivan’s brain could conjure, began to grow frighteningly near. He feared the thought of light touching the hideousness of the carcass, even the light of a torch. He feared sight. He feared sensation. Still, the inmate’s heart was terribly near, on the other side of the wall and half a man’s height above. Were it not for the walls and the pinning of his arm, Kalivan felt he might be able to touch him, at this range. His heart was thunderous. With each beat, Kalivan could hear the blood splashing across the walls of his veins, though he felt, lately, that perhaps he would like to keep his promise.
He felt it first, a singing feeling on the surface of the carcass, not the interior. Astoundingly, one eye remained to him, though its vision was much constrained by the near-sealing of his eyelids. There was a horrifying pinprick of the dimmest light, but the first light he had seen in a lifetime nonetheless. It was followed by the falling of a rope, which thumped on the rough-hewn sides of a chute.
A small connective passage had been dug out between the cell above, his oubliette, and a small room somewhere horizontal to Kalivan’s confines in which he had sometimes heard the scampering of rats. The voice issued from that room, in which Kalivan could hear the hastened thumping of his heart.
“Are you strong enough to come through on your own?” The inmate’s voice came.
“Nearly,” Kalivan replied, and began to wedge himself bodily through the passage. After a horrific pause, during which he contemplated the death which awaited him should he fail, he flushed the dregs of blood from his heart into the star. Every sensation sang alive, vision, which muscles he still had access to, pain, the desperate reminders of hunger. He began to slide further through the passage, stripping skin from his limbs. He was still to weak and too muted to feel it, but his arm was ahead of him, and miraculously, when he clawed, it had fingers which grasped and roved and at last plunged out into moving air.
He followed it forward, an agonizing process. Partway through, the inmate began to pull on the rope and with a terrible pop Kalivan’s legs slipped free from the passage and the carcass fell to the floor. His face thumped against the ground. Where his eyesight could reach, between the battered lids, he could see the carcass in reflections on damp stones. His iris glittered in its socket, nearly sealed over. His limbs were atrophied, sticklike. His trunk was naked, clad in hanging flaps of ripped and dead flesh. Gangrene and scaly muscle was visible where skin should have covered, torn and tatty. His face…
Kalivan’s face was a sallow ruin. One eye had come apart and run down his face like a tear. The tip of his nose had rotted away. His hair was patchy, with vast blotches of his scalp torn bare and missing any hair at all. Only a few scraps of lip remained at all, with vicious white teeth nestled behind. One ear remained, and it was ragged. His throat was so horrifically papery he wondered how it could channel the sound of a voice. Totteringly, he picked himself up on those sticklike legs, balancing on flayed and bony toes, picked clean by rats. His one remaining hand was about as picked out, with his terminal phalanges visible and a baleful white.
The inmate turned back, and his face fell into a senseless horror. Kalivan didn’t have the strength to close the distance. For a moment, he nearly thought to repay the man’s good favor, rather than merely to feign it, difficult as it would be in this state. As his one remaining eye fell upon the inmate, however, the star in his chest sang a furious hunger, at the sound of the blood surging through the inmate’s veins. Still. There wasn’t enough in Kalivan’s body to rush him. He would fall to the ground first.
The inmate began to back away. Kalivan approached.
Then Kalivan spoke. “Don’t you want your reward?”
The inmate stopped dumb. “Is that what it looks like?”
The truth was, not typically. But Kalivan’s mind could not manage nuance, not in this state. Not here. He stumbled, but made a bow of it, sweeping out his arm. “Immortality,” he managed to say, in the tones of wonderment.
The inmate began to nod. “I believe no mortal could survive what you must have,” he said. “But–”
His reply did not matter. The inmate had hesitated. Kalivan had staggered close enough to lunge, and the pinhole of livening flame at his core surged out enough might and enough speed to close and reach him. Kalivan seized him with his one hand and pulled him near. Kalivan squeezed his own heart and flooded the last of his blood into the star, forcing the inmate’s head against the tile, lengthening the arc of his neck. There was an awful crack. He came down over his neck, spread the skin out with the points of his fangs and the tips of his incisors and clamped down. First he punctured the carotid, and warm, new blood sprayed into the ruins of his mouth and he gulped greedily. In the same motion he had pierced through his jugular, and a weaker ebb began to fill, but not nearly fast enough.
All of it flooded down into his core, into the greedy, burning pinhole, and he flooded his might into his tongue, ripping out the flesh between vein and artery, beating it down into the hollow of the neck with his tongue until blood spilled into the trough he had dug. He swallowed mouthfuls of it until, frenzied, he found himself sucking on the dry tissue left behind.