Chapter Twenty-Six
Roman was sitting on the bottom step of Garrett’s trailer. He didn’t get up. Instead he looked up at Nial, annoyed. “An imperial summons? When did I get to be your flunky?”
Garrett grabbed him and slammed him up against the metal wall.
Sebastian winced. “Shh!” he murmured. He was carrying Winter in his arms. She was still completely asleep and utterly relaxed against his chest. Either her trust in Sebastian was absolute, or she was simply that exhausted.
Garrett turned to Roman, letting the anger he had been holding at bay since Cyneric had first mentioned the Blood Stone rise to the surface and spill over. “You fucking hypocrite,” he breathed, keeping his voice low for Winter’s sake and for the sake of any sleeping humans who may be within earshot. “All the time Kate was roasting my gonads over glowing embers for my ‘agenda,’ you were snuggling up to her because you thought she had the Blood Stone.”
Roman’s face shifted almost comically with surprise. “That’s what this is about?” He looked at Nial, then Sebastian. “Who tipped you off?”
Sebastian rolled his eyes. “I think Cyneric is rubbing off on me. I don’t have patience for stupid right now. I’m tired. Winter is a dead weight. I’m going to bed before someone sees me as not-Terry.”
He walked off, heading for their shared trailer.
Garrett let Roman go with a frustrated exhalation. “He’s right. Play the idiot, Roman. It’s your funeral.”
Roman straightened his shoulders and righted his tee-shirt.
“Tell us what you know about the Blood Stone,” Nial said. “The real one.”
“Cyneric the Slayer is here? In L.A.?” Roman asked.
“What of it?” Garrett replied.
“You want information about the Stone, you should have started with him,” Roman said. “We all have natural eidetic memories, but he takes it a step further. He’s a natural computer. He pours all the facts into that skull of his. Endlessly, day after day. He’s a collector of data. Every conversation, he sifts for innuendo. Inference. Then he’ll sit, like he’s in a trance. Two hours. Two days. A week. He’ll find the answer he wants out of all the facts and inferences he’s figured out.” Roman’s mouth curled into a sneer. “He’s done more to uncover the real Blood Stone than anyone else put together. He’s a master at putting together the most unlikely pieces of data and coming up with a new clue. It’s why Menes made sure Cyneric was shackled to him, long ago.”
“Menes?” Garrett repeated.
Nial gave a dry laugh. “Menes Heru. It’s ancient Egyptian. He’s the Deadly Moon. Cyneric is working two sides. We’ve been played.”
Garrett swore. “Son of a bitch. I was starting to like the guy.”
Nial just looked at him.
“A bit,” Garrett amended.
* * * * *
“If Khurshid is here, too, then something is going on. She doesn’t move off her estate for anything less than a dire emergency,” Roman said, settling back into the deep corner of Garrett’s leather sofa. “Menes coming down his mountain and flying to the States would do it.”
“Menes would come here only for the Stone?” Garrett asked, pulling up the executive chair from behind the antique desk.
“That’s about the only thing that would beckon him, yes.”
“Why would that bring Khurshid?” Garrett asked.
Roman shrugged. “Fear. She knows what the Stone is capable of.”
“Why does she know so much?” Garrett insisted. “If Menes is the pro and you’re our resident expert, why does Khurshid go pale and trot off to the Philistine-like United States as soon as Menes sways in our direction?”
“She’s an unspoken one,” Nial answered. He had settled in the one armchair. “They handed down this information from maker to child, back then. Later, the information was lost as the world expanded and generational lines were broken.”
Roman was watching Nial with an odd look on his face. “Is that why you never took on the title of unspoken one officially?”
Garrett switched his gaze to Nial, shoving aside his surprise in order to listen properly.
Nial’s mouth turned up at the corners. “I’m not that old,” he objected.
Roman grinned. “Not what I heard. Everyone thinks you’re around the thousand mark, but I once spent a week on Euphrasia’s private island in the Aegean, in 1932.”
“Ah.” Nial’s smile faded. “She didn’t make it through the war. The Germans took her as a prisoner and used the island as a lookout point.”
It was Roman’s turn to smile. “They paid for disturbing her.”
“They did? Good.” He nodded, looking pleased. “I’m glad. I didn’t find out until sometime after the war was over.”
“Who was Euphrasia?” Garrett asked, reigning in his patience.
“A child of the one who made me,” Nial replied.
“And she was an unspoken one? How old was she? How old are you?” Garrett held up his hand. “I retract that. My apologies. But you can see why I’m confused.”
Nial laughed. “Apology accepted. I was born in the year five hundred and fifty-nine in what is now called northern Italy. I’ll save you some mental gymnastics. That was one thousand, four hundred and fifty-three years ago. But I think of myself as…” He shrugged. “In my thirties.”
Roman was scowling again and Garret recognized the expression as the one he used when he was thinking hard and disagreeing with the stated opinion.
“Euphrasia didn’t think of herself as thirty,” Garrett guessed.
Roman just scowled harder.
“The unspoken ones aren’t some sort of exclusive club to which you get invited by brown-nosing and paying membership dues,” Nial told them. “There isn’t an arbitrary age cut-off that says ‘at this point you become an unspoken one.’ Euphrasia simply didn’t want to be a part of modern life. She hated it. You spent a week on her island, Roman, so you tell me – what did it make you think of?”
Roman shrugged, still glowering. “Constantinople, like when I was a child. But simpler. Peaceful.”
“That was her version of ancient Athens,” Nial told him. “A far more comfortable and insulated one. She arranged it so she didn’t have to adapt anymore. She could just go on as she was, unchanging and uninterrupted.”
“But you didn’t choose that way,” Roman pointed out. “When every other vampire as old or older than you did choose it…or died. As far as I know you’re the oldest of the blood who still actively passes. Why didn’t you retire to coddle your worn psyche like the others?”
Nial shrugged. “I don’t know. Because I’m stubborn? Because something interesting came along just at the right time? Because I’ve been terribly lucky, all my long, long life. Who does know? I don’t look back, Roman. Well, not that often and I try not to linger on the unpleasantness, of which there’s been far too much. But I can tell you that I did think about chopping myself off from the world more than once. There is definite appeal to not having to go through the tiresome routine of change, over and over. But change is what makes life so damned interesting, too. And I can tell you when I stopped considering the idea altogether, when it became an absolute impossibility for me.”
“When you made Sebastian,” Garrett answered.
Nial glanced at him and smiled. “Of course, you would have that figured.”
Roman sat back in the sofa again. He almost threw himself back, as if he was frustrated, or made angry by the answer, but didn’t dare show it. “Is that why you defied the edicts and kept Sebastian with you all those years?”
Nial’s smile didn’t fade. “I didn’t keep Sebastian with me. He stayed because he wanted to. He still does. But in the way you mean, he kept me alive, yes.”
“And now you’ve added a human to the mix,” Roman shot back. “Variety, Nial?”
“What, are you deliberately baiting him? Just because he called you here tonight?” Garrett asked, uneasy. “When did you learn to be such an asshole?”
Nial shook his head. “I answered the first direct question, Garrett. I can’t get offended over the next direct question. And Roman isn’t baiting, although he wants you to think he is.”
Roman’s gaze fell away from Nial’s face. He pushed both hands through his hair. “Fuck,” he muttered, looking anywhere but at Nial and Garrett.
Garrett caught Nial’s glance at him and his raised brow. There was humour there, and understanding. Then he looked at Roman once more. “You forgot who you were verbally sparring with even while you were discussing how old I was. So now I’ve paid you back for trying to slap me around. It’s my turn. Tell me what you know about Khurshid. I don’t know her personally. Just her names.”
Roman nodded. “She’s one of the oldest surviving ones, except for Menes, but he has his passion for the Stone to sustain him. Khurshid was born in Tabriz – that’s in modern Iran — about two hundred years before Christ was born. She is powerful. I’ve heard stories about telekinesis, levitation, more. And she knows everyone. All the unspoken ones. All the older vampires – like you, Nial. She could reach out and touch every vampire, given enough time.”
“And the drinking?” Garrett asked, for that one still astonished him.
Roman laughed. “I think she was a tosspot in her human life and never did want to give up the booze. Well, she found a way. It’s part magician’s razzamatazz and part sheer cussedness – mind over matter. She had a by-pass pouch surgically inserted into her stomach.”
Nial snorted in disgust and disbelief. “There’s a perfect example of denial, if ever I saw one. And you ask why I never became one of them, Roman? I have too much self-respect.”
“And the physiological reaction? Digestive juices, the human response?” Garrett asked. The conversation was reminding him sharply of his own brush with alcohol and the pain that had followed.
“She learned to supress it all with training. Of course that means she can only take liquids in, because they can slide down her throat without saliva to lubricate the way. But that was all she was interested in, I think. She possibly drinks the entire annual profits of a small vermouth company all by herself. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her without a cocktail glass close to her elbow.”
“Why do you know so much about the unspoken ones?” Garrett asked. “You’ve talked about three of them and you know all about Cyneric, who is theirs, while the rest of us know only that they exist and may know the odd name or two and that is all.”
Roman glanced at Nial. Nial shrugged.
Roman sighed. “The time I was on Malta, with the Templars?” he reminded Garrett.
Garrett shook his head. “Let me guess. You weren’t there at all. That was the lie you gave me to cover up where you really were, which was…?”
Roman grimaced. “Working for the unspoken ones.”
“I guess that matches the rest of your life since the 1830’s. One big fucking mystery to me.” Garrett looked Roman in the eye, daring him to glance away in guilt, or even look uncomfortable.
Roman stared right back. “I wanted to hop off the planet, just like them. But I don’t have their resources or their powers. The only way I would get to dive down a bolt hole would be to use one of theirs. So I signed up as one of their familiars.”
Sick horror washed through Garrett as Roman’s meaning slammed home. After the debacle in Greece, after Roman had sent him away, he had tried a permanent escape.
“What stopped you?” Garrett asked. His lips felt rubbery. Numb.
“Them. The unspoken ones. They’re walking corpses, most of them. Mummies without the decomposition. You think Khurshid with her drinking thing is weird but she interfaces quite normally with the outside world. She didn’t dive down the hole too far. The others need familiars to operate on a day to day basis. Some of them speak languages that the rest of the world has forgotten, while they have lost all their modern tongues. I worked for three of them, over seventy years. The first two died, eventually. The third one I could see was on his way out, but I didn’t wait. I couldn’t stand it anymore.” Roman shook his head. “I got a new identity, started a new life – in Australia. And I got married within a year. Lived in a cabin in Albany and worked for the whaling company there. Western Australian was just starting up and it was raw and earthy and vital. It was one hundred and eighty degrees opposite and it was bliss for twenty years.”
Garrett drew in a slow breath. His pulse was frantic. All these revelations about Roman were hard to absorb and he needed time.
“It was around then I started looking for the Stone,” Roman added. “It gave me something to do. Something to focus on.”
“So what do you know about it?” Nial asked. “Not the mythical nonsense. What is the real Stone capable of, if it’s found?”
Roman scratched at his hair. “We’re running out of night hours and it took me years to put together what I know, so I’ll make this as quick as I can. I just played around with finding the Stone. It was a joke – something to spend time on. Don Quixote tilted at windmills. I thought I’d track down something even more elusive. Of course I’d heard of Menes and I knew about his obsession – that was what gave me the idea — but I thought he was as cracked as the rest of them. I didn’t think for a moment the thing was real, or if it was real, that it might still be around. I just thought the idea was cute. A cure for vampirism.”
He shrugged. “Then I found out it wasn’t so cute and it was very real. It doesn’t cure vampirism, exactly. It just ends the world as we know it. I guess that’s a cure of a sort.”
“How does it end the world?” Nial pressed.
“By bringing back the old world. Sort of.” Roman scrubbed at his hair again. “No one is entirely sure how it works because there’s no written records and the verbal stuff has passed through fifteen different languages. You know yourself how just one interpretation can skew a meaning. Look—” He sat forward and rearranged the drink coasters on the coffee table, lining three of them up in a row and placing the rest in an unsorted pile beneath.
“Before the stone was made – and don’t ask me when, because I don’t know – somewhere back in antiquity, before humans figured out agriculture, before the pharaohs were ascendant and just before Menes came to be – there were four other species besides pitiful humans that also walked the earth. These guys were the top dogs in all ways.”
He pushed the first of the three coasters up out of the line a little with his finger. “The iela. They were an army of winged creatures and their name means ‘from the sky’. If early man was used to watching the iela in their skies, it’s probably where the idea of angels came from. The iela were led by An.”
“That’s Sumerian,” Nial said. “The god of the heavens. It fits.”
“Yep,” Roman agreed shortly. “An was immortal, but he had a weakness — he couldn’t be away from the sun for too long.”
He pushed the coaster back into line and nudged the second one up a fraction. “The Elah. Roughly translates as ‘mighty tree’. Think wood elves. They were probably the inspiration for the original elves in Norse lore. But they’re not as user friendly as the mythology paints them.”
“I bet,” Garrett murmured.
“They were led by the Emperor Daichi.” Roman spelled it out.
“But it’s pronounced ‘dye-chee’?” Nial questioned. “I would say it has Japanese roots, except man simply hadn’t spread that far back then.”
“And maybe that’s not his name, but it’s how he’s referred to now,” Roman said. “Maybe he was remembered by the Japanese that way and that is how the information came down to us. That’s the problem with verbal histories. There’s no lineage trace. Anyway, Daichi was immortal, but he wasn’t a god, like An, the god of the iela. The emperor held sway over dozens of kingdoms and minor holdings and they were all earth oriented. Daichi had his work cut out for him, too, trying to hold that much territory. A lot of civil strife and petty wars within his own borders and people.”
He pushed the second coaster back and raised the third. “The real bad boys of the bunch.”
“I like ‘em already,” Garrett joked.
Roman shot him a look. “Funny you should say that.” He tapped the coaster. “The Summanus. Also called the blood shifters. They were an older power and older creatures than the other two, the iela and the Elah. And they’re considered the predecessors of vampires. They were instinctive creatures. Nocturnal and very powerful.” Roman looked at them both with a smile that was a grimace. “They were shifters, too. They could imitate humans.”
Nial blew out his breath. “Wow.”
“Yes, wow,” Roman agreed. “But there was a kicker. They could only imitate humans who were asleep and only for the length of their REM cycle.” Roman rubbed his hands furiously through his hair. “It took me nearly three years to figure this out because the ancient ones didn’t know about REM cycles, so the language they used was almost mystic. But that’s what it boils down to. A human REM cycle grows gradually longer as their nights’ sleep lengthens. We’ve all watched at least one human sleep through the night, so you know the pattern as well as I do. REM lasts anywhere from ten minutes, to about an hour as you get close to morning.”
“Are humans the only ones they can imitate?” Nial asked.
“The iela and the Elah don’t sleep. And we vampires weren’t around then.”
“We don’t sleep either,” Garrett pointed out.
Roman pursed his lips. Then he appeared to change his mind. “No, but we can be knocked out.”
Nial let out a breath. “You have thought about this.”
“Since I figured out what the Stone does? You bet.” Roman lined up the three coasters again. “The Summanus were led by Abiram. It’s probably no surprise, given the iela hunted the skies and the Elah liked their trees that the Summanus tended to stay underground, or near the ground. They were the underworld and they were not immortal. They were considered the weakest and most despised race among the Others. They were despised by humans, too, because they used human conscripts for their armies.”
“Armies?” Garrett questioned. “They were at war?”
“The three races were fighting amongst themselves for supremacy, I imagine,” Nial said quietly.
Roman nodded. “It lasted for generations. The Summanus were the only race that needed to renew itself and its energy — by drinking blood. They would use humans for this because humans were weak and easily overcome. And in the final battle they used humans as their vanguard and that is how the humans finally rid themselves of all of the Others.”
Roman pulled a coaster from the pile beneath the row of three and placed it above the line. “The Serena. Also known as the serene ones.”
“And they are?”
“No one knows,” Roman said. “You both know the Norse mythology, how the Einherjar and the Valkyrie are mortals lifted up to Valhalla to sit around until Odin says ‘go protect humans against the end of the world’?”
Garrett and Nial nodded.
“As far as I can tell, the Serena are like the Einherjar. They’re not gods, but they’re servants of higher powers. They could take human form and when they did they were ethereal and beautiful...and frightening. It was difficult dealing with a Serena because they could be very literal. They mete justice with no regard for the human equation, so if you made a bargain with the Serena you had to be very careful what you asked for.”
“Wait,” Nial said, leaning forward. “You call on them for favours?”
“No.” Roman shook his head. “They didn’t keep debts. They mete justice. Someone had to break the rules first. Then you could call on them for settlement for the damages you had suffered.”
“What rules?” Garrett asked.
“They weren’t written down. It wasn’t codified, Garrett. Don’t give me that look. We’re talking about five hundred thousand BC or something. Writing hadn’t been invented, let alone solicitors. When a major rule was broken and punishment was handed out, the injured party could ask for a favour, or retribution, amendment or healing.” Roman grinned.
“A favour?” Nial clarified.
“You could ask for anything you desire,” Roman said, with a grin. “But Serena blessings could twist. If your intentions were humble and good, then they usually worked okay. But if you got greedy or selfish, the gift tended to backfire.”
“I imagine people didn’t bother the Serena with petty concerns, then,” Nial said.
“They didn’t like to be pissed off. That was a major rule.” Roman tapped the coaster again. “You could ask a straight-out favour of them — if you were lucky enough to find a Serene one wandering around with a moment to spare and the patience to listen. If they were in the mood to bestow the gift, then you could bargain for the price. Serena gifts could exact a heavy toll. So I guess they did keep debit tabs running in that respect.”
“And humans asked the Serena to get rid of the Summanus?” Garrett asked.
Roman shook his head. “The Summanus won the war, first. They defeated the iela and the Elah and it was a hard, dirty fight. The humans they ‘recruited’ took the brunt of the punishment. They were slaughtered by the thousands. The humans didn’t much appreciate that. Apparently, neither did Serena, for they appeared at the end of the war and executed Abiram on the spot for his cruelty. The wording I was given was ‘his insides were turn to the light.’ It sounds like they gutted him in broad daylight. As the Summanus were nocturnal that would have been a nasty way to go.”
Garrett shuddered.
“Then the humans stepped up to the plate and demanded satisfaction, too. They cited a long list of grievances against the three races and their generations of war-mongering. Mostly, the Summanus were the target, but the humans made sure they included the iela and the Elah as well. The Serena agreed that humans had made their case.”
Roman reached over and picked up the wooden base that held all the coasters. It had four brass stakes driven into it, standing upright, to keep the coasters lined up neatly in a stack.
“The humans said they wanted to be rid of the three races. So the Serena created the Blood Stone.” He picked up the three coasters and placed them one by one into the holder. “And into it they poured the three most powerful races the world has ever seen.” He placed his hand over the top of the holder. “Then they sealed the stone with inscriptions that locked them away. Some say forever. And for their impertinence, the Serena left behind for humans a trace of the Summanus as a reminder.”
“Us,” Nial concluded.
Garrett couldn’t take his eyes off Roman’s hand sitting on top of the holder. “What happens if the stone is broken?” he asked, and wasn’t surprised his voice emerged hoarse.
“It can’t be broken,” Roman told him. “Not simply by raising it and dropping it. But it can be cleaved in two if the inscription upon it is spoken and when that happens—” He lifted the holder up and tipped it upside down. The three coasters spilled out upon the coffee table.
“The end of the world as we know it,” Nial concluded.