The Lady of Serpents by Douglas Clegg

Author:Douglas Clegg [Clegg, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Fantasy, Horror, Vampires
ISBN: 0441015298
Amazon: B00OKIURVU
Goodreads: 23838
Publisher: Ace
Published: 2006-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

• 6 •

AS I awoke that night, I said the words in my mind over and over again, “Also, I am here.” I did not want to forget them, nor even the words above the doorway. “Within, Death. Without, Terror.” I felt as if this were a riddle that I could not understand.

Artephius, his helmet-mask gleaming in candlelight, held a sphere in his hand. “Are you up yet, Falconer?”

I recognized the sphere—it was the same one that had kept Merod Al Kamr within an inch of the Extinguishing as he lay in his crystal tomb. It contained a bit of quicksilver in a glass tube. The tube had tiny barbs on its side, barely more than slight raisings of glass, but these were to ensure that it would hook into the flesh and the heart and remain there, keeping the vampyre still, unable to fight. The end of the tube was a blade, more slender than any mortals had made, like a needle, but the kind that had not been seen in that age. Within the tube and the needle, just enough quicksilver would be there to slow my heart until it nearly stopped completely.

“Why do you do this?” I asked, my voice barely loud enough to hear.

He leaned in close to me, and whispered in my ear, “There is a greater field of war than the ones you fight, little falcon. You are important to me, but my battle is with another who rises to meet me in the West. Merod Al Kamr is still within you. In your blood, in your flesh—as he once was in a sepulcher of crystal beneath the Temple of Lemesharra. You see him there, when the Serpent’s Venom from the Sang-Fleur presses you through the Veil. You are tearing the Veil yourself, with each breath you take.”

With every ounce of my being, I snarled and snapped at his visor, imagining I could tear through it as a dog gnaws through bone to get to the marrow. I tried to rise, for I wished to draw back the visor that I might at last see the face of the man who had stolen immortality and destroyed Alkemara. I managed to push myself up from the table, and my hands w ent to his helmet. I whispered, “Show yourself to me, Alchemist.”

He pressed the sphere down at my chest, positioning it in such a way that I knew he had done many surgeries and knew the precise location of the heart.

“Accept your fate,” he said. “You were once mortal, Falconer. But you have become—what? A messiah of the damned? Is that what you dreamed of as a boy as you grew up in the hovel in the fields? Is that what you desired when you trained the Baron’s falcons, or... made love to his daughter? You need no longer hope. You are a devil to this world. The Age of Man reaches its end. The Age of the Veil is upon us. Your children will grow under the shadows of Medhya.

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