I had a million questions. What had those other vampires been like? The ones with the tiny kingdoms? How had he survived all those years, without a Family or a place of his own? Did he have rivals, with the same thought of gathering allies? Was this the start of the Long Game? What about this feeling, this instinct? I kept my mouth shut, because I didn’t want to distract him. I didn’t want him to decide not to finish.
“I avoided the Master of Jerusalem, made my way through the city on my own. I met the man known as Gaius Albinus. Befriended him, even. He was a serious young man, ambitious. His career was everything to him, and he was destined for high rank, for accolades. The Empire was built on the shoulders of thousands of men like him, who worked for the good of the whole because it meant success for the
mselves.”
So far, Kumarbis hadn’t said anything I didn’t already know about Roman. He was still serious and ambitious. But I did have a hard time thinking of him as young. Maybe all old vampires gave off that impression.
“I knew, somehow, he was destined for more. He was greater. Everything in my being said so. I could make him immortal, and he would be invincible, unstoppable. Together, we could do … do anything.”
The story had taken on the tone of a confession. He wasn’t just explaining, he was apologizing.
“He … needed time. He required persuading. But he saw my vision, in time. Eventually, I convinced him.”
“You attacked him,” I said. “He didn’t choose.”
There was a long pause, made heavy by the silent weight of stone.
“Yes,” he said finally, facing the ground. His head was bent, his shoulders slumped. He wouldn’t look at any of us.
I could almost feel sorry for Roman, in spite of myself. A minute ago I would have said the guy didn’t deserve any pity at all. But this, imagining him as much a victim as any of us … No, I didn’t pity him, but maybe I understood him a little better. Him and his war.
My friend Rick also had been turned against his will. Rick and Roman were nothing alike. Or maybe they were two sides of the same coin. Rick was still out there, fighting his crusade against Roman with the Order of Saint Lazarus of the Shadows, the Vatican’s order of vampire priests. I wondered if the order knew about Kumarbis. I had a feeling they didn’t. Everyone else had been tracking Roman himself, but I’d found the other end of the thread, and was following it forward to the beginning. Maybe the key to defeating Roman lay in his origin. This had been worth the blood the vampire had taken from me. Worth returning to the mine. But there was more.
I wanted to shout at Kumarbis that this was his fault. The Long Game, Dux Bellorum, the man Roman had become. All his scheming, all the people he’d hurt, the vampires he’d made, the conspiracy he’d gathered to himself. It had all started here, and I had only one question.
“Why?” I asked finally. “Why did you need to turn Gaius Albinus, to make him invincible? For what purpose?”
The vampire sighed, an affectation. An expression of resignation. “It seemed … necessary at the time. It was so long ago. So much has happened since then, I hardly remember why.”
Now may we kill him?
Wolf was mocking me. Such a kidder.
I curled my lips, baring my teeth. Wolf expressing her opinion. Kumarbis didn’t even flinch. He said, “I remember one thing—as soon as it was done, my certainty left me. I took care of Gaius Albinus, watched over him as had not been done for me. I still … he was like my son, a son I could never have. But he was so angry. What else could I do but take care of him and hope for the best?”
Gaius Albinus, Dux Bellorum, was the general. Caesar was the true emperor, pulling the general’s strings. I hadn’t thought that Kumarbis might actually be that Caesar. No, he was something else. A pawn, maybe. The same strings had yanked on them both. Those were the strings I had to follow. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be happy with whom I found at the end of them.
I waited, and Kumarbis continued. “We had a falling-out, years later. Of course we did. You could have guessed that.”
The pendant around his neck indicated that at one point he’d signed on with Roman. Been one of his allies in the Long Game, linked to him, commanded by him. Without his mystical voice guiding him, the Long Game must have seemed full of purpose, and Roman’s drive inspiring. At one time, he’d been willing to follow.
Something had made him leave, obviously. I could imagine a number of scenarios. I put myself in Roman’s place, regarding this man, the vampire who’d made him, who must have seemed weak and purposeless to his regimented, ambitious mind. He would have punished Kumarbis, maybe indirectly. Kumarbis, who felt so much loyalty, however misguided, would have put up with it until … My imagination failed me. To be a fly on that wall, all those hundreds of years ago.
Kumarbis saw himself as a father, even now, to this ragged little band he’d collected. He probably slotted me easily into the role of rebellious teenager. The trickster whose chaos balanced order, who would find the solution, accidentally or otherwise, to all their problems. Like Coyote in the stories. He wouldn’t listen to me, he’d only pay attention to the role he’d constructed for me in his own dusty brain.
The one thing he was right about: he might very well know Roman better than anyone in the world. Now, what did I do with that information?
“Now you fight against him,” I said. “You did more than leave Gaius Albinus, you changed your mind about the whole mission, about the Long Game. Why did you stop believing in uniting the vampires?”
“I could not convince the Masters of the cities to unite, but he did. At first I admired him. I thought I had inspired him. He was carrying out my plan. But he … he went to places I could not follow. He found lore I had no knowledge of, he brought the beasts under his influence—”
“Beasts,” I said. “Werewolves? Lycanthropes?”
“And more, creatures that even in centuries of wandering I hadn’t known existed. I never asked so many questions as Gaius did. He knew, I think he understood, that if he could become this monster, this creature that we were, then all the other stories must be true. All the magic in the world must be real. He wants to be master of it all, so that he can destroy it all.”
Not rule, but destroy. It didn’t even surprise me. In the washed-out lantern light, in the depths of this cave, where the air smelled cold and the shadows seemed alive, anything was possible, anything at all. All the stories came to life.
Kumarbis gripped the coin around his neck. “When he made this, the first of the coins, I saw what he would become. Where his ambitions lay. I followed him still, I wore the coin because I had nowhere else to go. I had been alone for so very long, you see. You cannot understand how long I was alone.”