The Ouroboros Cycle, Book Three: A Long-Awaited Treachery Read online

  Contents

  Copyright Information

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Copyright Information

  Copyright © 2015 by G.D. Falksen.

  Illustrations copyright © 2015 by Lawrence Gullo

  and Fyodor Pavlov.

  *

  Published by Wildside Press LLC.

  www.wildsidebooks.com

  *

  Ebooks available at wildsidepress.com

  Dedication

  To Jay Lake.

  Chapter One

  •

  Mid-Summer, 1893

  Svaneti, Georgia

  Summer had come to the Shashavani valley, casting away the winter snows and supplanting them with golden sunlight that warmed the fields, the forests, the running river, and the countless flocks of sheep. The villagers had taken to the fields once more, some tending farms and flocks, others cutting timber from the deep forests or sifting gold from the rivers. It was a quiet ritual of awakening that had been carried out year after year, generation upon generation, for as long as anyone could remember.

  At the castle of the Shashavani, situated in the heart of the valley, life continued almost undisturbed by the passage of the seasons. Only the lengthening of daylight brought any real change to the habits of the Shashavani scholars who walked the castle’s halls, seeking refuge in the candle-lit libraries and avoiding windows that had been left open for stargazing that the servants had forgotten to close before daybreak. For just as the sun brought vigor to the villagers who languished in the Shadow of Death, its light brought pain to those blessed with eternal life.

  And so it was that noontime found Doctor Varanus Shashavani huddled in the corner of her study, hiding in the shadows as sunlight slowly crept across the chamber, let in through a pair of windows she had forgotten to shutter until the onset of day made it impossible for her to close the curtains. But Varanus thought little about the light, only noticing it when it drew close enough that she began to feel the pain; and even then, she merely drew back a little further into the corner, amid the nest of books and scrolls and her own rapidly growing pile of handwritten notes.

  “Eventually, liebchen, there will be no more room for your papers.”

  Varanus smiled a little and looked up to see Korbinian, her long-departed lover, lounging in one of the armchairs across the room. He grinned at her, a lock of dark hair falling across his eyes in a most charming manner. Death had been kind to him: even after thirty years, he was still the same beautiful youth he had been the night of his murder.

  “I will place them into stacks,” Varanus replied, returning to her work.

  “But the sunlight is spreading, liebchen,” Korbinian said. “Look, it has already consumed Aisha of Damascus.”

  “What?”

  Alarmed, Varanus reached for a large, leather-bound manuscript that sat just beyond the creeping edge of sunlight. She grabbed it with one hand and pulled it back into the shadows with ease despite its considerable weight. Her skin prickled where it had been touched by the light, but the exposure had been little enough that there was no harm.

  Setting the manuscript down amid her other books, Varanus smiled at Korbinian and said:

  “It would seem your concern was unnecessary.”

  “And Soslan the Alan’s Third Treatise...” Korbinian answered.

  Varanus swore and reached into the sunlight again, grabbing for a collection of scrolls bound together in a roll of leather. Again her flesh tingled at the touch of the sun; and as she was forced to crawl forward a few paces to reach the treatise, this time the exposure was long enough to make a dull ache form in her bones, which lingered for a few minutes as she withdrew into the shadows again.

  “No harm done,” she said.

  Korbinian grinned with delight and clapped his hands.

  “Marvelous, liebchen! Marvelous! But eventually you will have no more space left in the shadows. Perhaps it would be better if you closed the curtains.”

  “And subject myself to a faceful of morning sunlight?” Varanus asked, returning to her books. “My skin is one thing, but I have need of my eyes. And besides, I would have to stop reading, and I am in no mood for that sort of nonsense.”

  She pulled the manuscript of Aisha’s Compendium onto her lap and began comparing certain passages to her pile of handwritten notes.

  “If you are so concerned, perhaps you should close them for me,” she added.

  “You know I cannot do that, liebchen,” Korbinian replied, approaching her. “Besides which, I have much more important things to do.”

  “Such as...?”

  Korbinian knelt before Varanus and gently pressed his lips to her cheek. “Such as kissing you, my darling.”

  Varanus smiled softly and looked at him out of the corner of her eye. Such an incorrigible fellow. He knew she had work to do, but always he insisted upon interrupting her.

  “You’re something of a distraction,” she said, as she gave Korbinian a gentle kiss in return.

  “I have been told that it is one of my finer qualities,” Korbinian answered.

  Varanus looked into his eyes in silence, gently stroking his cheek with her fingertips. His skin was smooth and warm beneath her touch, just as when he had been alive.

  “Liebchen,” Korbinian said.

  “Yes?” Varanus asked.

  “Your friend has returned.”

  “What?”

  Across the room, the door to the hallway opened with a click and an almost imperceptible creak. Startled, Varanus’s eyes darted toward the door. When she looked back at Korbinian, he had vanished.

  “I have returned!” announced Varanus’s dear friend Ekaterine, as she swept into the room and removed her shawl. “The family is doing wonderfully and—” Taking in the sunlight from the open window, she gasped in alarm and cried, “Oh good God!”

  Ekaterine ran to the window and pulled the shutters closed before frantically yanking the heavy curtains into place. She turned to Varanus and gave her a stern smile, her dark eyes still wide with alarm.

  “I know, I know,” Varanus said, looking up from her reading and sighing.

  “Doctor, the sun!”

  “I know!” Varanus repeated. With the threat of the sun now removed, she stood and shook the wrinkles out of her skirt. “I was reading last night by moonlight and lost all sense of time. The first I noticed the sun, it had already boxed me into the corner.”

  Ekaterine smiled and took Vara
nus by the hand. “Well no harm done. But you must be more careful, Doctor. Even with Lord Iosef’s regimen, you won’t be able to withstand the sunlight for many years to come.”

  “Yes,” Varanus agreed, “about three hundred to be precise.”

  She allowed Ekaterine to lead her to the sofa, where they sat.

  “Ah, so your research has made progress while I have been away,” Ekaterine said.

  “Some,” Varanus said. “Not as much as I would like, but some.” She motioned to a tea service that sat on a nearby table. “Something to drink?”

  “Tea? I would love some.” Ekaterine reached for the pot. “Allow me.”

  Varanus smiled slightly at the sight of her friend behaving so domestically. The tea would be old and rather cold—it had been brewed the afternoon before—but it was still better than nothing and much better than waiting for a fresh pot.

  “And what have you discovered during my absence?” Ekaterine asked as she poured. “I see a copy of Aisha of Damascus’s Compendium over there.... Do I take it that you’ve finished with the Konstantine?”

  Aisha of Damascus had been one of the Shashavani’s foremost scholars of medicine. By the time Konstantine Shashavani had departed on his great sojourn after the Mongol Invasion, Aisha had already taken over as the resident expert on the Shashavani condition, before she herself had departed into the wilderness sometime in the sixteenth century.

  “More or less,” Varanus answered, sipping her tea. Even hours old, it was rather refreshing. “I have examined all that the librarians could find...and would allow me to depart with.”

  She frowned at this. It was a damned nuisance not being allowed to remove original texts from the Shashavani libraries. She understood the principle of preservation so dear to the archivists, but she much preferred to conduct her studies in her own rooms or in her workshop. And a copy, no matter how well transcribed, was still a copy. It could be fallible.

  “You could read in the library,” Ekaterine ventured, though her mirthful tone made it clear she knew what Varanus’s answer to that would be.

  “Rubbish,” Varanus said. “The library is far too loud. All those people...reading.”

  “A cacophony of books,” Ekaterine agreed. She took a sip of her tea and said, “Three hundred years? I suppose I’ve never asked.”

  “Between three and five hundred years, depending on the amount of exposure to sunlight during that time,” Varanus said. “Konstantine, Aisha, and Soslan all agree on that point. The ranges differ depending on the accounts, but I have extrapolated.”

  Ekaterine grinned. “How delightfully clever of you. And to think, my dearest friend will be the next Konstantine. It’s quite exciting.”

  “I think perhaps Brother Magnus will have something to say about that,” Varanus remarked.

  Magnus the Dane was another scholar of the Shashavani condition, although his work was far too esoteric for Varanus’s taste. Magnus was a natural philosopher rather than a proper scientist. However brilliant, he was a man of mysticism, not medicine. But alas, their work overlapped enough to make him a constant nuisance where the availability of texts was concerned.

  “Oh pish,” Ekaterine scoffed. “Magnus can keep to his alchemy. You’ll see: by the twenty-first century, they’ll be calling you the ‘foremost scholar of medicine among the Shashavani.’ ”

  Varanus laughed at this and said, “The twenty-first century? I am having enough difficulty thinking about the twentieth as it hurtles rapidly toward us. I can scarcely comprehend a hundred years from now.”

  “One becomes accustomed to it,” Ekaterine assured her.

  The way she said it made Varanus shiver a little.

  “I’m not certain if I wish to become accustomed to it,” she said. Changing the subject, she asked, “Now then, how is your family?”

  “They’re well,” Ekaterine replied. “Everyone hale and healthy. Although,” she added, smirking at the thought of gossip, “it seems my granddaughter has fallen for a Circassian boy. It’s caused something of a scandal in the village.”

  “So I would imagine,” Varanus said.

  Some thirty years ago, fleeing massacre at the hands of the Russians, several Circassian families had been granted leave to settle in the valley and form their own communities along the river. By the laws of the Shashavani, the Muslim Circassians were free to practice their customs and faith, but from time to time tensions arose between them and the Christians of the valley.

  “By all accounts he’s a very charming boy,” Ekaterine said, sounding proud of her granddaughter’s selection. “And more than a little bit handsome.”

  Varanus smiled. “So the Circassian beauties are not only the womenfolk?”

  “Not according to my granddaughter,” Ekaterine replied. “And she seems very happy, so I wish both of them the best good fortune.”

  Varanus raised her teacup. “Good fortune to them.” She took a drink and looked at Ekaterine, shaking her head. “I can scarcely believe that you have children, Ekaterine, much less grown grandchildren.”

  Ekaterine smiled and stroked her cheeks with her fingertips. Though several decades Varanus’s senior, she looked only a few years older, not even into her thirties. Like all those Shashavani who still walked in the Shadow of Death, Ekaterine’s aging had slowed tremendously. But unlike the Living, it had not stopped, and that was something that troubled Varanus. Being immortal, she knew that one day she would outlive Ekaterine, and that was a loneliness she dearly wished to avoid.

  “I take great pains to preserve my youthful appearance,” Ekaterine said, pretending to be haughty but unable to hide a giggle at the nonsense of it. “I milk bathe.”

  Varanus shuddered, suddenly remembering certain horrors from their visit to London five years ago.

  “No talk of wellness, Ekaterine,” she said. “Wellness reminds me of London, and London reminds me of my son.”

  “And he never writes,” Ekaterine said.

  “And he never writes,” Varanus agreed. “Though I wish he would. I am becoming rather concerned about him. I fear his aunt’s death might weigh upon him.”

  Ekaterine looked skeptical. “From what I remember of her, I would think his aunt’s death would do the opposite.” She shrugged. “But no matter. I have returned and I am eager to get back to work!”

  Suddenly, a sharp clattering noise sounded from outside the window. It was faint, muffled by distance and the curtains, but it was loud enough to make Ekaterine jump.

  “My goodness, what is that?” she asked, looking toward the window.

  “Luka is demonstrating the new Maxim guns I bought him,” Varanus answered mulling over her tea. “He’s been doing it all morning. It’s quite annoying, to be honest.”

  “As annoying as the library’s cacophony of books?” Ekaterine asked.

  “Almost,” Varanus said, eyeing her nest of papers and scrolls. “Almost, but not quite.”

  Chapter Two

  •

  Luka sat beneath the shade of an overhanging canopy, smoking a pipe and watching silently as his newest acquisition—the Maxim gun—filled the air with the clatter of automatic gunfire and the lawn with shell casings.

  The Maxim gun had been set up in one of the outer courtyards, away from the main library in the hope that the noise would not disturb the scholars at their studies. Bales of hay had been placed as targets to demonstrate accuracy at various distances, and now a Shashavani soldier—a young Circassian woman named Seteney—sat at the machine gun, firing round after round into one of them. Other soldiers stood around watching the display, the older ones with amusement, the younger ones with astonishment. Most of them had never seen such a weapon before: it was a dramatic improvement on the volley guns and hand-cranked revolving cannon in the armory.

  Luka turned slightly and looked at the woman who sat beside him, smoking her own pipe a
nd watching Seteney’s demonstration. She was Lady Zawditu, the Marshal and Strategos of the Shashavani. Like Luka and the other soldiers under her command, she wore a chokha coat and trousers and a sword and a brace of pistols on her belt. Though of advancing years, she was still robust and strong. Her graying hair was long and tightly braided, woven through with golden thread. She had lived hundreds of years, but though her dark skin showed lines of age, she gave no indication of weariness.

  “A most impressive display, Luka,” Zawditu said. “Most impressive indeed.”

  “Thank you, Strategos,” Luka replied, bowing his head. “I endeavor to give satisfaction.”

  Zawditu chuckled softly. “And this time you have succeeded. This new machine of yours shows great promise. Much better than the mitrailleuse.”

  “Much better than the mitrailleuse,” agreed Mata Kaur, Zawditu’s aide-de-camp, who sat on the other side of her, watching the demonstration through a pair of field glasses.

  A Sikh of the Punjab, Mata Kaur had spent her early life as a warlord defending her people against the persecution of the Mughals. Now she was Zawditu’s closest officer, and Luka suspected that Zawditu was grooming her for command in a few centuries’ time.

  “However,” Mata Kaur continued, “I have misgivings regarding the use of water to cool the weapon. I do not like the prospect of the added weight. Surely this ‘Maxim gun’ is already too heavy.”

  “The weapon heats very quickly, My Lady,” Luka answered. “Water—or perhaps some heat-absorbent chemical—is the only solution known at present.”

  Zawditu exhaled a long plume of smoke before she said:

  “Surely this weapon is to be used for defense. We shall have them mounted over the passes of the valley and the gates of the castle. Let the enemy come to us and be destroyed.”

  “It is the conventional wisdom,” Luka noted. “And it has proven very effective.”

  “Perhaps,” Mata Kaur said, “but it is my habit to mistrust any weapon that cannot be used on the offense. It would seem to be only half effective.”

  She smirked a little as she said this and Zawditu and Luka both laughed.