Sovereign (26 page)

Strange…. she hadn’t believed in either when she’d emerged from stasis. Hadn’t contemplated death even once since the moment before she’d been cut down fifteen years ago. But now she wondered for the first time in years about those who had gone on to the next life, assuming there was one.

Her gaze lifted to the heart in the glass jar standing on her desk again. It had belonged to the living once. Where was its owner now?

A knock sounded on the side door. Adrenaline spiked in her veins, disconcerting her cultivated stillness. She bowed her head, touched her fingertips together, elbows on the arms of her chair, and drew a
slow breath through her nostrils. She might have prayed in that posture, but the only Maker she recognized was herself.

When she felt the steadying of her pulse, she lifted her head and said at last, “Come.”

She pushed up from the desk as the man entered and walked toward his kneeling form. A Dark Blood, young, his hair like a dark waterfall about his shoulders.

So Corban was still working.

“Yes?”

“My liege,” the man said, lifting his head only enough to stare at the toes of her leather boots.

“Well?”

“A citizen unknown to us has come with an urgent message. He waits for you in the Senate Hall.”

Annoyance flared up her neck. “What do you mean he waits for me in the Senate Hall? A Corpse?”

“Yes, my liege.”

“And does this Corpse have a name?”

“No, my liege.”

“Nameless Corpses don’t just walk into the Citadel, let alone the Senate Hall.”

“No, my liege.”

She stared at him.

“My Dark Bloods return from routing the south of the city, and you come to say a stranger expects me to meet with him?” She reached down, seized him by his beautiful hair, and lifted him up onto—and then off of—his knees. “Whom do you obey? Me or him?”

“You, my liege! He said to tell you that he’s come to see the white dove.”

The meaning of the phrase fell into her mind. White dove?

She set the man down and stepped back, stunned by the implications of those two words.

For a moment, she stood unmoving. The room seemed to rotate around her of its own accord, as if rewinding time. She couldn’t put thought to the words.

A Corpse.

It couldn’t be.

“Fetch Seth,” she said at last, barely hearing the words over the thunder of her heart.

“My liege?”

“Seth!” she cried. “Get him immediately!”

“Seth…. but Seth is dead, my liege.”

Dead. At her hand.

“Come.”

She stepped past the man and willed herself down the passageway, followed quickly by the Blood. They went out through a side door before it descended toward the laboratories and ancient subterranean chambers—into the public corridor.

White dove.
How long had it been since she’d heard the words?

She gestured to one of the guards lining the corridor, one of perhaps thirty spaced at even stations. Officials and their assistants, administrators and visiting royals, stopped at the sight of her, instinctively drew back beneath the arched and gilded ceiling, dropping to their knees, eyes averted. She strode past them, her pace picking up speed, not bothering with the pretense of decorum. The guard fell in behind her.

She pulled open the great door of the senate antechamber and crossed the room in quick strides as the younger Dark Blood rushed ahead to haul open the great door of the chamber itself.

It was lit within. The electric lights of the unseen panel had been switched on.

She entered, walking slowly along the back row of the political theater, her pulse a drum against her temples.

Then she saw him—a lone figure sitting behind the stone table on the dais. In the Sovereign’s seat.

His head was bowed beneath a cowl, face obscured in shadow.

She forced her step to an even stride as she walked down the great aisle, remembering the stride of the Sovereign—the true Sovereign—ruler of the world. She could all but feel the gold beading of her bodice glinting beneath the artificial light, the heavy gold of the ring hurting her fingers, which were clenched into a fist.

She made her way up the stairs, stepped onto the edge of the dais, her eyes not once leaving the figure. She crossed to the stone table and stopped, facing him squarely.

The man’s hands were folded before him. Dry, cracked, and rugged. The robe he wore was coarse and threadbare in places along the sleeve. A grizzled, dirty-gray beard fell just to the neckline of the robe. The man’s mouth was parched, lips peeling.

“There’s only one man alive who knows what my father used to call me,” she said with dangerous quiet. Her Bloods had ascended the dais, ready to strike the man down at a word. To halt him forever if he moved too quickly.

“The white dove,” he said, his voice graveled but gentle. “Though now her feathers appear to be black.”

“Reveal yourself,” she said, very softly.

For a moment the man didn’t move. And then one of the hands slowly lifted to his head and pushed back the hood of the cowl to reveal a head of long, tangled gray hair. A face darkened to leather by the sun. A face she knew all too well.

“Hello, sister.”

Saric.

She stared, her ribs straining for breath against the bodice of her gown.

The last time she’d seen him, his skin had been alabaster. His veins as dark as hers, his eyes so black as to have no pupils. But now…. here sat a Corpse.

How was it possible? But there—the tan of his skin, once so pale, peeling in places from the sun. His eyes, the pale blue of Brahmin
royalty—as pale, almost, as her own had been once. No trace at all of the dark veins anywhere—not even the blue shadow of them that the royals so prized beneath their pallid skin.

He was utterly himself as he had been long ago. And utterly unremarkable.

“How did you survive?” she demanded.

He offered no answer.

“You’re a fool if you think you can claim that throne.”

“I have no interest in thrones.”

She laughed, the sound brittle as shards, echoing up to the domed ceiling.

“Then you’re an imposter. The brother I knew cares for nothing but power.”

“The man you knew is dead.”

“And yet far too alive.” She was shaking with the rage of the past. Of his blood within her. The dominance he had exercised over her. The ways he had both ruined and made her.

“But perhaps you are right. I don’t see a dead man—I see something far more pathetic.” She planted her hands on the table and leaned over it toward him.
“I see a Corpse.”

His eyes met hers.

“Do you?” His expression was devoid of emotion.

“I don’t know by what alchemy you renounced the Dark Blood, but it suits you. You always were a fool.”

He offered no explanation. All these years, she had assumed him dead. And yet here he sat.

“How did you get in here?”

“You forget, I know the Citadel as well as I know you.”

“You know nothing of me!” She felt nonplussed. “What do you want this time? Your years of seducing and bending me to your will are behind you. Did you come to beg? Have you seen my army?” She swept her arm out. “Have you seen the glory of them flooding
the city streets? I am ten times the Sovereign you ever would have been.”

He remained unmoving, showing no emotion, pale blue eyes steady on her. She could understand his lack of ambition as a Corpse, but there was no fear in his eyes either. Perhaps the wasteland had baked his brain.

“You can’t help but play the role of the pathetic fool, can you? Always wanting what was mine.”

She started to turn away but then wheeled back and spat in his face.

He blinked once but otherwise showed no reaction, even as saliva ran down his cheek.

“Take him away to the dungeons he so loved,” she said to the younger Dark Blood.

“Sister.”

The Dark Blood started forward.

“I have news that will save your life,” Saric said.

“Seize him!”

The guard hesitated. Blinked once, as though confused.

“Sister,” Saric said.

She might have flown into a rage at the guard’s hesitation but for Saric’s use of the word a second time:
sister
. Hatred swelled in her veins.

She snatched up her hand to stop the Blood.

“No. The dungeon is too good for you. If you would be a Corpse, I should do you the mercy of killing you here.”

“If you refuse to hear me, you will soon be dead.”

Ice flooded her. He knew about the virus? How could he?

“They’re coming for you now. You’ll be dead before dawn. How can you be Sovereign if you’re dead?”

“Don’t be absurd.”

“They’re coming for you now.”

He stared at her, unyielding.

“Who?” she demanded. “Tens of thousands stand in guard.”

“They’ve found a way. If you would live through the night, you must stop them before they breach the Citadel.”

Them.
The Sovereigns were annihilated. He could only mean the Immortals.

Roland.

“You’re mad.” She gave a brittle laugh. “You speak the impossible. How would anyone make it past my defenses?”

“The same way I did.”

His claim stalled her. Indeed, the Dark Blood had said he’d simply shown up. No one knew the subterranean tunnels of the Citadel like Saric.

“Where? How?”

“Through the ancient maze.”

“I know of no maze.”

Saric slowly pushed back. The Dark Blood beside him stepped back, clearly at a loss for protocol in the presence of a former Sovereign, her father’s successor. “You will find it in the Book of Sovereigns locked in the back vault of the archive.”

“What Book of Sovereigns?”

“Had you succeeded our father as decreed, he would have given it to you, in secret, on the evening of your inauguration.”

“No one has ever spoken of such a book!”

“When I murdered Father and became Sovereign, I took his key.” He slid a simple, ancient-looking key out of a pocket in his cloak and set it on the table. “My gift to you, so you may indeed be Sovereign. Consider my debt paid.”

But of course. When he resurrected her to dark life, he had never meant for her to rule. He had retained the secrets of the office for himself.

She reached across the table and took it as he pushed up from the Sovereign seat.

“Hurry. They will come.”

Saric quietly walked toward the door behind the dais. And then he was gone.

It took her a moment to recover her wits. It occurred to her then that Saric had found a way to become Corpse through some kind of alchemy. As such his blood might hold another key, one that could offer an antidote to the virus.

“After him! Bring him to me alive!”

SWIFTLY, TO the dungeons. She had found the book. Within, a map of the ancient maze. She’d dispatched a thousand Dark Bloods to the assembly grounds within the hour. Death would not claim her so easily a second time.

Now as she descended, the glass object curled in the crook of her arm, she found the storm of her anxiety gone, replaced by cold rage for Saric’s undeterred appearance.

And disappearance.

The first two Bloods had given chase down to the archive, all the way to the laboratory and ancient dungeons, but had come up empty-handed. She’d sent others to hunt him down.

How had he known Roland was coming?

Why had her guard hesitated?

She told herself it was shock. That the Dark Blood standing beside him hadn’t known who to defer to—the seated Sovereign or the former one.

Her own hesitance bothered her even more. That even now Saric had that effect on her, though his blood—now in her veins—no longer flowed through his own. That by the smallest token of a key, she had learned that her Sovereignty had not been complete.

Once more, Saric had disappeared without consequence.

Why had he warned her? To worm his way into her confidence again, no doubt. He would have further surprises in store for her—he always did. This time she would be ready.

Assuming, of course, that she lived.

No word from Corban in all this time. Ammon reported only that he worked feverishly by the hour, thus far without success. He’d taken up work on samples of Rom’s blood taken before his seroconversion, but she was afraid it was too old already. A living Sovereign’s blood might offer a key to an antidote. But there were none.

She passed the guard to the ancient laboratory and was tempted to step inside Corban’s private chamber, but her presence would only prove a distraction. He needed no further goading; his own life was on the line.

Instead, she strode to the back of the cavernous chamber, toward the ancient cells, directly to Rom’s chamber.

He was sitting along the back of the wall, a shadow beyond reach of the torchlight.

“I have a gift for you.”

Rom raised his head.

She lifted the glass jar that had sat on her desk for hours, morbid and repugnant at once. She saw the whites of his eyes go wide as she threw it to the ground. It shattered with a resounding crash of splintering glass, the heart tumbling to the dirty floor.

Avra’s heart.

Rom leaped to his feet. She kicked it through the bars into the cell. He stared, his face white, knowing very well the implication.

“We found your Sanctuary. The Sovereigns are no more.”

He slowly raised his gaze to her.

“Tell me I’m right,” she demanded. “That there are no more living Sovereigns.”

His eyes twittered, fighting back emotion.

“Speak.”

“Not all of them,” he said.

She paused, felt her veins chill. Was he lying? No, not possible.

“What do you mean?” she said, her tone dangerously quiet.

“There is one more.”

“Ah yes, of course,” she said. “Your precious Jonathan, whom you refuse to call dead.”

“No. Another.”

She stepped toward the bars, grasped them with white hands. Peered directly into the darkness at him.

“Who?”

“The one coming for you.”

“Who is coming for me?”

“Jordin.”

M
AKE THIS plain to me!” Roland paced before Jordin in the Sanctuary’s great chamber like a lion in a cage. “Tell me everything!”