The Kingdom of Shadows
Beneath the Sands
One Year Ago
They walked through the shadows, two incongruous figures that did not look like they belonged in the same century let alone the same reality. Vox found it very amusing even while it was frightening. He admitted to himself that Grigor scared him. In Vox’s estimation, Grigor-with his pale skin, black clothes, and otherworldly demeanor-would scare anyone. He wondered how much of it was window dressing to sell the idea of immortal monsters, and how much of it was the real deal. Not knowing the difference is what made the fear sweat run icy lines down Vox’s back.
After all, Grigor was in many ways the real deal. He was one of Upierczi, the reigning king of his kind. Ancient by any ordinary standard and, if the stories the Scriptor’s father had told him were true, faster and more powerful than any of his followers-and they were faster and stronger than…
Than what? He asked himself. Than humans?
As they walked, Vox pondered that question and his fear grew and grew.
Grigor led him through a maze of tunnels, some of which looked to be centuries old. Some of the tunnels opened into well-organized living quarters, with proper lights, rooms like dormitories, niches for worship, mess halls, and many rooms for training. There were cells down there, too, and as they walked past, Vox could hear the wretched whimpering of female voices.
He paused. “What’s that?”
Grigor turned and regarded the line of cells with heavy-lidded eyes. “Breeding pens.”
“Who are those women?”
“They are not women,” sneered Grigor. “They are cows. If they are lucky, if God favors them, they will bear a Upierczi son.”
“If they don’t?”
“Then they are less than useless to us.”
He spat on the floor and turned to continue down the long corridor.
Vox lingered for a moment. One voice, a very young voice, suddenly screamed with the absolute and immediate horror of someone who was being brutally used and who knew, with absolute certainty, that no one would ever come to rescue her. It made Vox feel sick. He tried to tell himself that it was the chemo upsetting his stomach. If it accomplished nothing else, the lie at least kept him from vomiting.
He hurried to catch up to Grigor.
After another quarter mile, Vox stopped again, this time to peer at a piece of broken mosaic on a cracked wall. When Grigor saw him staring at it, the pale man said, “That is Darius the Great being crowned. It was placed there on the first anniversary of the Persian king’s death. This wall was made four hundred and eighty-five years before the birth of Jesus Christ.”
Vox turned and looked at the open mouths of tunnels and side corridors. “These tunnels are that old?”
“Some are,” agreed Grigor. “Some are older still; and we have tunnels like these in many cities.”
“You dug these holes?’
“The Upierczi did much of it, but your kind made many of them,” murmured Grigor, still caressing the stonework. His eyelids drifted shut. “Do you know how the Upierczi came to be the slaves of the Ordo Ruber?”
“I… know the version I was told by the Scriptor’s grandfather. About Sir Guy going looking for… your kind.”
Grigor leaned his cheek against the stone wall. “Father Nicodemus sent Sir Guy out to find Upierczi anywhere he could. In Turkey and Russia, England and Romania. Many places. There were rumors of us, of course, and most rumors were false. They said that we were the corpses of the dead risen from graves to haunt and prey upon the living.” He laughed and then shook his head. “We were not a race then. We were an aberration, an abomination. Freaks who were born to live in shadows, always hungry, always on the point of starvation, driven to mad acts of violence merely to survive. It is no different with any creature God has made-in the direst moment need overwhelms control.”
“That hasn’t changed,” said Vox.
Grigor nodded. “Your people feared us, and that is to be understood. The Church, however, denounced us as demons, as children of Satan. Knights and warrior priests and anyone who could raise a sword on behalf of the Church were empowered to kill us, to hunt us to extinction.” He sighed. “Think of that life. To be alone, and to believe that there is no one like you. No one who shares your nature, no one who understands your hungers. No one who loves you.”
“Love?” said Vox quietly. “They make a lot about that in movies. Dracula and Twilight and all that shit. I don’t suppose you get to the multiplex very often, but that’s a kind of a theme out there. They think you are all about eternal love and romance. But I heard those women in the cells. Didn’t sound like love songs to me.”
Grigor turned away and looked deep into the shadows, and Vox wondered how much the man could see that he could not. Without immediately commenting on Vox’s statement, Grigor continued his story.
“When Sir Guy died, his son and successor, along with Father Nicodemus, created the Red Knights. A new order of chivalry, of knights errant given authority by the Church to prosecute a campaign against faithlessness. But that was in name only. They called us knights, and we call ourselves knights, but that is not who and what we are.”
“Then what are you?”
“Assassins. We were created to be the Order’s answer to the Tariqa’s fida’i. We were chess pieces. We were a sword, a knife, a gun. No different. Tools of war.”
“You’re more than that,” said Vox.
“Yes,” said Grigor and it was the first word he’d spoken that had real passion. “We made true knights of ourselves. We became in fact what they said we were in name only. We became a true order of chivalry. We became a society. A people.”
“You still live in tunnels, Grigor.”
“Because we choose to. It is our world, within but apart from the world above. We have thousands of miles of tunnels. We come and go and no one knows we are here. Archaeologists and miners sometimes find the tunnels, but we collapse connecting tunnels, and we are experts at disguising our private tunnels. We are not found unless we choose to be found.”
“That’s pretty fucking impressive.”
Grigor gave a half smile. “It’s necessary. We know that we could never integrate into the world above. We can play dress up and ‘pass’ for one of you, but not on close inspection. And we are still hunted up there. The Inquisition was created by a papal bull to hunt us down. Us and other things that move in the dark, most of who are only fantasies concocted by fools. Father Nicodemus was able to use some aspects of the Inquisition so that he and the sitting Scriptor could find true Upierczi. Find and recruit us; but to the Church at large we were monsters and therefore evil; and they still hunt us. We do not fear any man in single combat, or any two or three men. But the Inquisitors did not come at us in small numbers. They sent armies against us. They sent special teams-the Sabbatarians, the Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulcher, and many others over the years. Some-most-of those groups are long gone. Died out or killed by us or disbanded by changes in Church policies. Only the Inquisitors remain, and after a long silence they’ve become active again.”
“Yeah,” said Vox, “I know about one of them. The Sabbatarians. The Seven Kings ran into them a couple of times. I even used them once in a while for some wetworks stuff, but I broke off my ties with them. Idealistic trash. They’re still around, though, and they’re formidable in numbers.”
“In the same way locusts are.”
“There are a lot of them,” said Vox, and Grigor nodded.
“Over the years we-with the help of Father Nicodemus-have managed to weaken their effectiveness by feeding them lies about who and what we are. About our strengths and weaknesses.”
“Disinformation,” Vox supplied. “Stakes, crosses, sunlight, that sort of shit?”
“Yes.”
“Nicodemus is a tricky bastard. What about garlic?”
Grigor did not answer.
Vox said, “I heard a rumor that some other group is gunning for you too. Arklight?”
Grigor hissed like a snake. “Whores and daughters of whores.”
“Maybe,” said Vox grudgingly. “Whores with high-powered sniper rifles, though.
With a black-nailed finger, Grigor pointed into the darkness in the direction of the wretched weeping. “They were our whores once. There is not one of them who has not screamed for us.”
“Charming,” murmured Vox. A wave of nausea swept through him and he stopped to steady himself on a wall. “When do we start the treatments? I’m losing a lot of ground here.”
The King of Thorns smiled.
“The treatment will make you scream,” he murmured.
“Then I’ll fucking scream,” snarled Vox.
The word “scream” echoed through the endless darkness.
A challenge. A promise.