Читаем The Night Eternal полностью

The first killing took place on a green marble pedestal at the center of the chamber, with sculptural relief depicting a mass of writhing, pleading bodies, raising their supplicant eyes and arms toward the heavens. Twin canals at the base redirected the flowing slave blood into gold cups encrusted with rubies and garnets.

Thrax emerged out of a passage, wearing only his subligar, and quietly ordered the slave to climb upon the pedestal. There he drank her in full view of the seven bronze mirrors hanging from the chamber walls, biting her fiercely as he punctured her throat with his stinger. The suction was so sudden, so swift, that one could actually see the veins collapsing beneath the slave’s skin as the color drained from her flesh within seconds. Thrax’s wiry arms restrained the slave’s torso with great strength and expert control.

When the entertainment of the ensuing panic faded, a second slave was swiftly attacked, feasted on, and brutally killed. There followed a third and a fourth and so on, until one terrorized slave remained. Thrax savored the final kill the most. Satiating.

But one night late in winter, Thrax slowed before finishing the final slave, having detected an extra pulse in the slave’s blood. He felt her belly through her tunic and found it firm and swollen. Confirming her pregnancy, Thrax brutally slapped her down, her blood trailing from his mouth. He went for a gold dagger, kept next to a cornucopia of fresh fruit. He sliced at her, going for the neck—only to have his expert blow deflected by her bare forearm, severing her outer muscles and missing the tendons by mere millimeters. Thrax lunged again but was stopped by the girl. Despite his speed and skill, he remained at a disadvantage due to his underdeveloped, adolescent body. So weak in spite of his time-honed technique.

The Master thereby resolved never again to occupy any vehicle younger than thirteen years of age. The slave girl wept and begged the Master to spare her life and that of her unborn child—all the while bleeding deliciously. She invoked the names of her gods. But her pleas meant nothing to the Master—except as part of the feeding process: the sizzling sound of bacon in the frying pan.

At that moment, palace guards came pounding at his door. Their orders were to never interrupt his weekly ceremony, but, because they knew his penchant for cruelty, the Master knew that their reason for disturbing him must be one of importance. Accordingly, the Master unbarred the door and admitted them to the gory scene. Months of palace duty had inured the guards to the sight of such desecration and perversion. They informed Thrax that Caligula had survived an assassination attempt and summoned him to the emperor’s side.

The slave needed to be dispatched and her pregnancy terminated. The rules dictated as much. But the Master did not want to be cheated of his weekly sport, and so Thrax ordered that the doors be guarded until his return.

It turned out that the supposed assassination plot was simply a bout of imperial hysteria, resulting in the slaying of seven innocent orgy guests. Thrax returned to his chamber not much later to discover that while he was away assuaging the sun god, the centurions had cleared the palace grounds, including the temple, in order to quell the phantom coup. The pregnant slave—infected, wounded—was gone.

As dawn approached, Thrax persuaded Caligula to dispatch soldiers into all the surrounding cities to find the slave and return her to the temple. Despite a near-sacking of their own land, the soldiers failed to find her. When nightfall finally returned, Thrax went out in search of the slave, but his imprint upon her mind was weak due to her pregnancy. The Master was only a few hundred years old at the time and still apt to make mistakes.

This particular omission would dog the Master for centuries to come. For within the first month of the new year, Caligula was indeed assassinated, and his successor, Claudius, after a brief period of exile, came into power by procuring the support of the Praetorian guard—and the evil slave Thrax found himself purged and on the run.

The pregnant slave girl kept moving south, back to the land of her Dear Ones. She gave birth to a pale, nearly translucent baby boy, its skin the color of marble in moonlight. He was born in a cave amid an olive field near Sicily and in that dry land they hunted for years. The slave and the baby shared a weak psychic bond, and although they both survived on the blood of humans, the boy lacked the infecting pathogen necessary to turn his victims.

Rumors of a demon spread throughout the Mediterranean as the Born grew—and grew quickly. The half boy could sustain limited exposure to the sun without perishing. But otherwise, tainted by the curse of the Master, he possessed all of the vampiric attributes, with the exception of the enslaving link to his creator.

But if the Master was ever destroyed, so he would be too.