Radiance (Wraith Kings Book 1)(76)
She made him strong; she made him weak, and in that moment, she nearly put him on his knees. Brishen gathered her into his embrace, the recolligere clutched in his hand. He kissed her cheeks, her temples, the corners of her eyes wet with tears. When he reached her mouth, he paused. “Not a paler light,” he said. “A radiant one, from a woman in whose presence I will never be blind.”
“Love me,” she whispered against his lips.
“Always.”
EPILOGUE
In chambers far below the public rooms of the royal palace, Queen Secmis cut the heart out of her latest lover’s dead body and dropped it into a pewter basin
Blood still pumped in sluggish streams from the severed arteries to half submerge the heart in a crimson pool. Secmis dipped her fingers into the bowl and sketched arcane symbols on the body stretched across the gore-soaked bed. She spoke words, neither bast-Kai nor Common, but ones that lacerated her tongue with every syllable uttered. The flavors of iron and salt filled her mouth and she spat between sentences so as not to choke on her own blood.
The Kai’s butchered body twitched and began to flail while the exposed lungs did the impossible and bloated with air.
It was working. Her incantation was working! So many years, so many failed consecratives. Finally! She laughed, a gleeful sound as sweet as a child’s, as mad as a demon’s.
No longer would she just be queen of a fading race. She would rule all kingdoms, all people—Kai and human. And she would do so for thousands of years. Undying, never aging, all-powerful. A Night Queen instead of the weaker Shadow one.
The power she invoked had slept for longer than even the memories of the oldest mortem lights in Emlek. The spell to awaken it had killed more than its share of mages. It required blood and fear, memory and innocence. Secmis thought she held the final ingredient when she’d birthed a daughter—a child born, not made, deformed and pushed from her womb.
She growled even as she drew more bloody symbols on the thrashing body. Secmis never discovered who had taken the infant she’d marked for this ceremony, but she suspected.
Brishen had been a cheerful, congenial child. He did as he was told, never rebelled or shown any ambition to replace his brother as heir. Secmis had noted his character and promptly forgotten him. Only when he’d grown older had she caught hints of a hidden strength, an implacable will and a cold, reptilian hatred that flickered in his eyes any time she met his gaze.
His response to his new sister’s unexpected death had been a shrug before he resumed his mock battle with Anhuset through the palace corridors. He’d given Secmis a wide, frightened stare when she’d raged about the infant’s disappearance and yawned through the memorial they held for her.
Still, Secmis always wondered. Her younger son was far more layered, far more complex than she gave him credit for, and far more intelligent than the pliable heir apparent. He had cheerfully married that repulsive Gauri girl and gone about the business of settling her at Saggara without complaint. He hadn’t confronted Secmis about the scarpatine in his wife’s bedroom, preferring instead to pack up and leave. He’d outmaneuvered her by obtaining Djedor’s permission first.
His was a quiet rebellion of strategy, manipulation and an unruffled demeanor. Only that glimmer of loathing in his gaze every time he looked at Secmis gave him away. When a Beladine messenger carrying demands for negotiation of his release handed her proof of his capture, she’d stared into that mangled eye and seen the expression stamped there in the flat, yellow gaze.
His torture had not broken him. She’d seen it herself. Scarred and half blind, Brishen still ruled Saggara with a firm hand and commanded both the respect and fierce loyalty of his followers. Secmis hadn’t lied when she told him he would have made a magnificent consort. But only if they shared power, and Secmis was through with sharing power.
She completed the last of the spell. The dead Kai, a lesser ambassador of the royal court, stilled beneath her hands. His mouth was still warm as she pressed her lips to his and exhaled. Oily black smoke poured from her mouth into his before swirling out through his nostrils. His lungs expanded, contracted and repeated the process.
Secmis stepped away as the dead sat up. “Speak the words,” she commanded.
The speech uttered was none ever spoken by the living and desecrated the dead who did. A wet coldness settled in the chamber as the dead man recited unintelligible words that tore jagged wounds into his skin and wrenched cracks in the walls and ceiling.
One crack widened to a gaping splice of darkness even thicker than what already existed in the chamber. It spilled out of the crack, thick as lamp oil and reeking of a charnel house. Secmis laughed and clapped her hands as the viscous black oozed up the walls and across the floor, spawning writhing silhouettes with crimson gazes. She’d done it! Rent the veil between worlds and brought forth an unconquerable legion bound to her commands.
“To me,” she ordered, spreading her arms wide.
They came to her as she commanded but not as she hoped. One slippery shadow twined around her and struck with a gaping maw. Secmis yelped, suffocating in the thick sludge as the entity forced its way down her throat. She clawed the air and tried to scream. More of the sinuous shapes wrapped around her, seeking gaps in her clothing, every entrance to her body until she was nothing more than a choking, dancing puppet slammed one way and then another as the shadows shrieked and laughed and cavorted.