She looked like me.
No, wait. That was wrong. I looked like her.
Pressure ground on me. The magic of Mishmar waited like a colossal hammer poised above my head. If it fell on me, it would crush every bone in my body.
The magic drove me down. I sank to my knees.
I reached into my clothes and pulled out pieces of broken Slayer wrapped in a cloth. They matched the skeleton below perfectly. Same pale substance, neither metal nor bone, but both. A pale purple radiance emanated from Slayer’s blade, matching the bones below.
The magic ground against my mind and I heard the same word whispered over and over in my head.
“Z’emir-amit. Z’emir-amit. Z’emir-amit.”
Oh my God. I knew that name. I read about her. I studied her legends, but I never thought I would come across anything of hers because she had been dead for thousands of years. Dead and buried in distant Iraq, somewhere on the east bank of the Tigris River. That name belonged to the bones in front of me. I could feel it. I knew this magic.
I was looking at the corpse of my grandmother.
She wanted me to say her name. She wanted to know that I understood.
I opened my mouth and said it out loud. “Semiramis.”
Her magic drenched me, not the blow of a hammer, but a cascade of power, pouring onto me as if I stood under a waterfall.
Z’emir-amit. The Branch Bearer. The Shield of Assyria. The Great Queen Semiramis. A line from Sarchedon floated up from my memory. When she turns her eyes on you, it is like the golden lustre of noon-day; and her smile is brighter and more glorious than sunset in the desert . . . To look on her face unveiled is to be the Great Queen’s slave for ever more.
She had ruled ancient Mesopotamia. The gates of Babylon bore her name, but through the centuries she had returned to her beloved Assyria again and again. She built the walls of its cities, she led its armies, and she breathed life into its first hanging gardens.
I had carried a piece of her with me all these years and never knew it. Did Voron even know where Slayer came from, when he gave it to me? If he knew, then he must’ve wanted me to murder Roland with a blade made of his mother’s bones. How poetic.
The image of Semiramis floated forward. The magic clamped me in its jaws and lifted me into the air. I rose above the platform, held so tight I couldn’t even breathe.
Semiramis reached me. Her dark eyes looked into mine. I stared into the depth of her brown irises and saw the abyss. Time disappeared. Power battered me, crashing against my mind again and again. The first wave cracked my defenses, the second shattered it, and the third set my mind on fire. All of my secrets, fears, and worries lay before her and she drank them in like a starved vampire. It was like being thrown into the heart of the sun and feeling its raging fire consume you.
Her fury saturated me. My father had taken the bones of my grandmother from her resting place in Iraq and brought them here. She hated it. Her magic, her anger, and her grief permeated every inch of Mishmar and twisted it into hell on earth.
Hot tears bathed my cheeks. I was weeping.
She recognized me. She knew who I was. It was as if I were the grandchild of a devastating hurricane or an insane monster that had crushed and destroyed for so long, it no longer remembered how to nurture its young, but it still recognized its own blood and it tried to be gentle and to keep its own wrath from destroying me.
The magic released me. I floated down to the floor, landing on my feet, the translucent image of Semiramis looming before me. A single bone blade slid off the skeleton and landed before my feet.
A gift.
Slayer clattered on the floor before me. The hilt fell apart, releasing the broken blade. I slid the new blade into it, and the hilt sealed itself, binding to the new sword as if forged together. I picked it up. It wasn’t Slayer. It was a quarter of an inch longer and slightly heavier, but it felt right. I knew exactly what I would call it.
I raised my head. My grandmother was gone, her magic withdrawn. It hadn’t disappeared. It had just pulled back, waiting. She would let our party pass as long as they didn’t disturb her.
I walked back to the doorway. A metal wheel thrust from the wall by the exit. I turned it and heard the clang of a metal bridge sliding into place. I stepped onto the breezeway and saw Curran running up the bridge. The rest of our people waited on the ledge, looking at us. “You okay?”
I swallowed and nodded. “Don’t go into the room. She’ll kill you. As long as nobody enters, we can pass to the other side.”
“She who? What the hell was in there?” Curran asked.
“The bones of my grandmother.”
Curran opened his mouth, closed it, and finally said, “Your grandmother is the magic of Mishmar?”
“She wants to go back to the Tigris. She hates it here.” I slid Sarrat a little out of its sheath. “Look, she gave me a new sword.”
Curran peered at it. “It looks like Slayer.”
“That’s because they’re both made of her bones.”
“Your sword is made out of your grandmother’s bones?”
“Okay, I see how it sounds weird when you say it in that tone of voice . . .”
Curran grabbed my hand. “I’m not even going to say anything else. Let’s just get out of here.”
16
I HAD STOOD in the doorway of my grandmother’s tomb, blocking access to the inside, until the last of our party made it across. She let us go. When I got to the other side, nobody spoke. They just looked at me, their faces freaked out.
“Keep moving,” Curran growled.
We ran through the twisted hallways of Mishmar. We’d been going for the better part of an hour now. I was so damn tired.
“Break,” Curran called.
I almost ran into him, but at the last moment, I twisted away and sagged against the wall. Kate Daniels, the picture of grace.
Ghastek paused in front of me, still in the arms of his vampire. “I demand an explanation.”
Bite me. How about that for an explanation?
“Let me know how that goes for you,” Robert told him. “I’ve been demanding explanations for the last two weeks.”
“You’re not in a position to demand anything,” Jim said.
“Me?” Robert turned to Jim.
“No, him.” Jim nodded at Ghastek.
“Clearly, I haven’t been made aware of certain things, and considering that I’m an innocent bystander to this entire sordid affair, I deserve to know what’s going on,” Ghastek said.
Curran turned. His voice dropped into the flat tone that usually meant he was half a second from erupting into violence. “You and your undead brood came to my house and threatened my people and my mate. I have a strong urge to crush your neck between my teeth. Now, so far I’ve been resisting this urge because Kate is fond of you—why, I can’t understand. But my patience is wearing thin.”
“You wouldn’t dare,” Ghastek told him.
Curran glanced at Jim. “Would I dare?”
Jim chuckled. “You would. In fact, I can’t understand why you haven’t dared yet. Mulradin is already dead. If Ghastek doesn’t make it out, the People will experience a power vacuum. Either they’ll fight it out or they’ll get a new boss from above who doesn’t know anything about Atlanta. Either way it’s a win for us.”
“We don’t really have to kill you,” Thomas said. “It can be a happy accident. You could step into a dark hole and break your neck. Or you and Jim could linger behind for a moment or two, and then you’ll slip and fall.”
“On my claws,” Jim added. “Very unfortunate.”
“Or I could accidentally shoot you,” Andrea offered from behind. “It was dark, I saw something move. Everybody knows I’m a terrible shot.”
“Ha-ha,” I told her.
“We’d get back,” Robert said. “And the People would ask us ‘Where is Ghastek?’ and we’d say ‘Terribly sorry, couldn’t find him. Mishmar is a big place, you know.’”
“I feel like I’ve been captured by a horde of savages,” Ghastek said dryly.
“You are a man who pilots monsters,” Nasrin said. “We are monsters. We look after our own. You are not one of our own.”
“I would like to go on record now: we should kill him,” Jim said. “We’ll be kicking ourselves in the ass if we don’t.”
“Yes, Curran,” Andrea said. “After all, how mad would Kate really be? She loves you. She’ll kick you a couple of times and then she’ll forgive you.”
“You guys are a riot,” I said. I didn’t hold Ghastek’s head above the water for hours so they could bump him off. “I promised him he would get out of here. You’re not killing him.”
A flood of undead magic rushed at us, as hundreds of bloodsuckers surged toward us somewhere above. The vampires must have found a way around Semiramis’s chamber.
“Run!” Ghastek screamed.
We sprinted through the hallway. Turn, another turn . . . The hallway opened into what must’ve been at one point a lobby. Giant double doors blocked our way and in between the doors, a narrow, hair-thin gap glowed weakly. Sunlight. We’d found the exit. I almost couldn’t believe it.
Robert slammed into the door. “Locked from the outside. I can see the bar.”
“Stand back.” Curran took a running start and rammed the door. It shuddered. He rammed it again. Wood splintered, the doors burst open, and we shot out into blinding daylight. The fresh air tasted so good. I stumbled, blinking, trying to get used to the glare.
A bridge melded together from sections of a concrete overpass stretched before us, covered with snow and chunks of ice. It spanned a gap at least two hundred yards deep and about a hundred yards wide. An enormous sheer wall encircled the gap. The bridge ran directly into the wall and in the place where they met, a large steel door marked the exit.
In the middle of the bridge stood Hugh d’Ambray.
Adrenaline surged through me. My heart hammered. The world slid into sharp focus. I saw it all at the same time in half a second: the six people in the familiar black tactical gear of the Iron Dogs behind Hugh; the E-50, an enhanced heavy machine gun that spat bullets so fast, they cut through steel like a can opener, mounted on a swivel platform to the left; the two gunners half-hidden behind the gun’s blast shield; Hugh himself, huge, wearing dark armor; and the door behind him. He stood between us and freedom. Hugh in front of us, the undead horde behind us. We had to go through him or die.
“Bar the door, please,” Ghastek said. “Also, just in case you’re wondering, I have no idea how to open that outer gate.”
“We’ll deal with it when we get there,” Jim snarled.
Thomas picked up the broken wooden bar and slid it back into the rungs. It wouldn’t hold for long, but anything was better than nothing.
Hugh’s face was grim. His cloak was black. His armor was black, too. Clearly he had a theme going. The armor didn’t look like either modern tactical gear or medieval plate. It looked woven, as if tiny metal threads had been somehow made pliant, painstakingly crafted together into a fabric, and molded to Hugh’s muscular frame. The fabric thickened into dense plates, mimicking the large muscles on his chest, stomach, and arms, and flowing over limbs and midway up Hugh’s thick neck. Part of my aunt’s blood armor looked like that, except hers was red. It looked like something my father would make, which meant claws, fangs, and blades wouldn’t cut through it.
I unsheathed Sarrat. It fit perfectly into my hands.
Where to strike? Back of the arm, covered. Inner thigh, covered. Midsection, covered. His face was about the only thing not protected, but he wasn’t going to just stand there and let me take a shot at it. I wasn’t at a hundred percent either. I had a hard time standing.
Hugh’s eyes promised death, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking to the right of me. At Curran.