Ramses the Damned Read online

  He saw the ship on which his mother had been held captive sailing out onto the vast, dark sea.

  Elliott, dearest Earl of Rutherford. May you be a mystery strong enough to hold back the dark force I had no choice but to unleash upon you.

  9

  The Mediterranean Sea

  They sailed through the night.

  Their destination was a craggy pile of rocks, several hours from the coast of Greece.

  Few would dare call it an island. Fewer still even knew of its existence.

  But deep inside its central cavern, their maker slept, walled off from the sun.

  Throughout their journey, they argued over the implications of what they had been told.

  When their brothers and sisters in London had cabled them weeks before about a mysterious Egyptologist in London—a man who had appeared out of nowhere, it seemed, only to suddenly stand at the center of a great scandal surrounding a recently unearthed sarcophagus from Egypt—they had accused their dear siblings of nurturing desperate, childish fantasies.

  A particular shade of blue eyes and an uncertain past were not enough to brand someone an immortal. The pure elixir could not be found in time. Inventing phantom immortals who might possibly lead them to it, this would be an intolerable way to spend their final days, they’d insisted.

  Undeterred, their siblings had sent news clippings to their next port of call, clippings they had now spread across the dining table in the yacht’s central cabin. MUMMY’S CURSE KILLS STRATFORD SHIPPING MAGNATE, “RAMSES THE DAMNED” STRIKES DOWN THOSE WHO DISTURB HIS REST, and then HEIRESS DEFIES MUMMY’S CURSE, “RAMSES THE DAMNED” TO VISIT LONDON.

  But when they had first read these articles, they had remained unconvinced.

  Their master had granted them two centuries of life. No more. And he had never hidden this fact from them. He had even nicknamed them accordingly, his fracti, the final fracti. For when they perished, there would be no one left who knew of his island tomb. No one left to expose his withered form to the sun. And so their death would ensure a kind of death for him.

  This had been the plan for two centuries. And they should continue to honor the pact they had all made; they should resign themselves to their fate. Within months, their bodies would begin to crumble and disintegrate, a process that would take only a few days. If only their brothers and sisters hadn’t remained in London, if only they had also taken to the seas to enjoy as much of the world as they could before they decayed, they would not have fallen prey to such hopeful fantasies.

  With such assurance they had said these things, by letter, by cable, and even by telephone, when the cables about this Reginald Ramsey and his strange connection to Ramses the Damned did not stop.

  And of course, they had balked, their brothers and sisters, insisted that they were going to place the house in Mayfair where this Egyptian allegedly resided under constant surveillance. So be it, they had said to them.

  Spend your final days in vain hope if you wish.

  And then, they too had spotted a man they believed to be an immortal, an immortal they didn’t recognize. An aristocrat, a skilled gambler. The Earl of Rutherford. So skilled, he seemed to possess senses heightened by the elixir. The purest version of it, or the corrupted form that had granted them two centuries of additional life? This they did not know, and now, in the wake of the young prostitute’s account, they were desperate to find out.

  But had they too now fallen prey to the same trap? They spent the hours at sea debating this and had come no closer to an answer by the time they reached their destination.

  As they approached the island where their maker slept, they moved out onto the deck so they could watch the pile of rocks appear out of the dawn.

  A special bond knitted them together, and always had. They had often lived separately from the other fracti. They were not surprised when their siblings declined to join them on their journey around the world by sea. The three of them, Jeneva, Callum, and the giant Matthias, had all been made on the same night over two hundred years before, plucked from their deathbeds in the same London slum. Provided with wealth and a new life by their maker.

  And so if he was to be awakened, it should be the three of them to do it. And yet…

  “His command was clear,” Jeneva said. “We were to wake him only if the pure elixir was found. Not for the mere hope of it.”

  “Perhaps after two centuries of sleep, he will thirst for life,” Callum offered.

  “You believe he wishes to be awakened just in time to watch us perish?” Matthias said. Even when quiet, his voice seemed like a rumble from the depths of his giant body. But he did not speak of his eventual death as a mortal would, for he had lived two centuries and more.

  “We wake him because there is a chance we will not,” Callum said. “Not now, not ever.”

  “A slim chance,” Jeneva said. “A ghost of a chance, really.”

  “Nevertheless,” Callum said, “it is enough.”

  Matthias was apparently convinced as well. He went to help as their skiff was lowered into the water.

  The island had no beaches and nothing resembling a dock, so they would be forced to row to its rock-strewn coast.

  They maintained the smallest crew they could, a captain and a single deckhand, both paid small fortunes to turn a blind eye to all of their peculiarities. These men had assisted with the kidnapping of Michel Malveaux’s mother as if it were one of the transfers aboard of prepared foods they made in every port.

  It was a short and quiet journey to the tomb.

  The oars dipped gently into the still waters. Their boots made scraping sounds here and there as they walked with balance and precision over the giant rocks.

  Matthias, their patient giant, climbed to the top of the island by himself, removed the three boulders that had sealed light from the cavern below. Then he returned to the closest thing the island had to a shore, and the three of them rolled back the great stones blocking the tomb’s side passage.

  By the time they entered the central cavern, sunlight was pouring down onto their father’s remains.

  The regeneration had begun.

  Strands of their master’s great, leonine mane sprouted from a head that had been withered flesh only moments before. There was a fullness now to the face that rendered it something between pure skeleton and animate man.

  The tomb in which he’d slept, however, was as empty as when they’d left him here a century before. It was perched above the highest tide, so only the faintest dappling of seaweed was visible along the bottoms of the rock walls. He had granted all his earthly possessions to them, his children. His final fracti. But now, Jeneva saw this desolate tomb for what it was. A temple to his despair, and all that he had lost.

  For millennia he had tried to discover the formula for the pure elixir. Each attempt had been met with failure. As a result, every two centuries, he was forced to grieve for another generation of his children. This ceaseless loss had broken his immortal spirit, he claimed. He had once described it as being tormented by the gods themselves. To be able to extend the lives of those he had made, but for what was only a mercilessly short period in the life of an immortal.

  And his regrets had followed him throughout the centuries with the persistence of angry spirits.

  Why had he given all the elixir to his soldiers within moments of having stolen it? Why had he not predicted that their allegiance to him would crumble once they were gifted with eternal life? Why had he been so confident he would find the formula in the quarters of the queen from whom he had so brutally stolen it?

  His insurrection. His uprising. A grotesque mistake. He should have tried diplomacy. Or, at least, subterfuge.

  Would those regrets still plague him now?

  Or would the story they brought him give him a true life, and a true resurrection?

  “Rise, Saqnos,” Jeneva whispered over his body. “Your children bring you hope.”

  * * *

  His robes had decayed, so
they brought him clothes from the ship. But he had not yet dressed. In the nude he chewed great mouthfuls of the fruit and bread they’d brought him. It would have been easier to tend to him on the yacht, of course. But they dared not ask him to board. Not yet. That would be presumptuous.

  He had not yet decided to leave this island and this tomb.

  For all they knew, he would listen to their tale and ask to be sealed away again.

  They had prepared themselves for his anger as well. So far he had shown none.

  He listened to the tale of the immortal gambler in Monte Carlo attentively, his eyes bright.

  Jeneva marveled at his restored skin, his lustrous tumble of curly ink-black hair. In this modern age, his coloring would be described as Middle Eastern, but in the kingdom to which he had been born, he had served a black-skinned queen.

  This ancient, fallen empire, he had told them, existed in a time before the sun had suddenly and mercilessly scorched the northern end of Africa, creating a desert out of his ancestral lands, driving the survivors of the great plague that felled his kingdom south and east. Starved and in dread of disease, these survivors of Shaktanu had aligned themselves into fearful tribes, united by the most primitive of reasons: the shared color of their skin or scattered bits of history, most of it myth, suggesting a common ancestry. And all of this had resulted in ceaseless tribal warfare. All of it, this legacy of scarcity, fear, and misperception, had formed the ancestral basis of the tribes and kingdoms that would rise in later years on the borders of a new desert created by a cruel sun.

  But before that terrible time, his had been a truly global civilization, and in it, the concerns of race that afflicted this modern age simply did not exist, and Shaktanu, in what was now the vast Sahara Desert, had been the center of its power.

  Shaktanu. Jeneva could count on one hand the number of times her father had been able to say the name without weeping.

  He did not weep now.

  He listened and he ate, and he allowed them to marvel at the sight of his beautifully restored naked body, bathed in the shafts of sunlight still pouring down from above.

  Jeneva had never witnessed the awakening of a pure immortal before.

  His confusion was slight and passed quickly. His consciousness returned fully before his strength did. Throughout, his hunger and thirst were enormous.

  By the time they had finished their tale, he had eaten all the food they’d brought him. And so, they all realized with a heavy silence, a moment of decision had arrived.

  There was more food aboard the boat. Would he join them?

  “I did not make these immortals, if that is truly what they are,” Saqnos finally said. “Is this why you have awakened me? To learn this?”

  “In part, yes,” Jeneva answered. “We fear the queen, as you always taught us to. If this Earl of Rutherford is one of her associates, or a child of hers, then we were right not to—”

  “Bektaten sleeps,” Saqnos said, too gruffly, with too much authority. But they allowed him this certainty. What other choice did they have? They had never meet this queen, the one with the power to destroy them all. He rarely shared details of her beyond the most frightening one. “She seeks to guard the pure elixir, not spread it. She would not make immortals like this. And so what you rouse me for, my children, is the hope of a quest. A quest none of you may have the time to complete.”

  “You will have the time, Master,” Jeneva said. “That is why we awaken you.”

  “And so there is a choice before us,” Callum said, “one we cannot answer alone, given that our numbers are limited.”

  “What is this choice?” Saqnos asked.

  “Do we follow this gambling aristocrat on his travels, or do we assemble in London and seek to learn everything we can of this Mr. Reginald Ramsey of Egypt?”

  A long silence followed. For Jeneva, it was torturous.

  Saqnos gazed past them; at what exactly, she did not know. They could hear the gentle lapping of the sea beyond the cavern’s rock walls. The sunlight penetrating the cavern had begun to dim.

  Dusk would soon fall upon this island, and with it, their father might choose to begin another sleep.

  “We travel to London,” Saqnos finally said. “We travel to London so that we can learn all we can from this Mr. Ramsey.”

  Part 2

  10

  SS Orsova

  The ship was infinitely more powerful than the one that had carried her to Rome thousands of years before.

  Outside of a sandstorm, she’d never felt winds this strong.

  Before she was willing to venture out onto the decks, she’d forced Teddy to assure her that she would not be swept away.

  “This is how fast things move now, and their movement creates this great, sustained wind,” he had explained. “If there had been no roof on the train to Alexandria, we would have felt much the same thing, my beautiful queen.”

  That had been on the first day of their voyage, and now, a few days later, she’d found the courage to release the rail and drink in the pleasurable sensation of the wind lifting her hair from the back of her neck.

  Absurd, these thoughts. Absurd to believe the strength provided her by the elixir would not be enough to keep her feet rooted in place.

  And look at the other passengers! They weren’t being whisked off into the sea air like grains of sand. But this is why she needed the handsome young doctor with her: to illuminate the sudden and unexpected mysteries of this modern world with its flying machines and roaring trains.

  If only Teddy could also reveal to her the mysteries of the elixir.

  But for that she needed Ramses. Again this fact aroused great bitterness in her, threatened to make this modern journey across the seas towards London into a kind of death march of the spirit.

  How was it that her thirst for revenge had faded so quickly?

  Weeks before, she would have delighted at the prospect of torturing answers out of her old lover, her old counselor, her immortal king. Now she dreaded it. And there was no putting his life in peril, of this she was sure. Of course, there were the lives of those he now loved, those with whom he had toured Egypt. And so if he refused to offer some explanation for the strange visions that had begun to plague her, she could threaten one of them with ease.

  And this marriage to Julie Stratford—did it mean he’d given her the elixir as well? She doubted it. A pale-skinned little weakling, Julie had been. Far too cowardly to embrace the challenge of eternal life.

  But she doubted Ramses would have offered Julie the elixir in the first place. He craved only the illusion of attachments to mortals. At the end of the day, he wished to be free so he might move on to the next long slumber, the next new age. Why else would he have denied her request for the elixir all those years ago and brought about Egypt’s utter ruin in the process?

  He didn’t deny your request for the elixir. Maddening to have the voice of her rational mind sound so much like his voice, Ramses’ voice. He denied Marc Antony’s request for an immortal army. To you, he offered it, and you refused because you believed you would reign as queen until your body gave out.

  Such confusion still.

  She pulled the cable Teddy had brought her from the pocket of her dress, and tensed her fingers to keep it from flying off into the wind.

  FATHER ARE YOU WELL STOP ENGAGEMENT PARTY FOR JULIE AND RAMSEY EIGHTEEN APRIL OUR ESTATE YORKSHIRE STOP MOTHER THRILLED PLEASE COME OR WRITE YOUR SON ALEX

  “We’ll make it in time,” he said now. “Don’t worry.”

  He’d approached silently.

  “With you, I have no fear, Doctor,” she answered.

  “Nor should you.” He kissed her earlobe gently, lips nuzzling against the nape of her neck. “Bella Regina Cleopatra.”

  But his words only served to bring to mind the last man who had called her by this beautiful name.

  Alex Savarell, youthful and handsome and eager. Even amidst the mad disorientation of her resurrection, his gentlemanly atte
mpts to control himself in her presence had seemed like a kind of worship. In turn, his desire for her had made him seem as new to this modern world as she was. How she longed to see that eagerness again, to feel it, to taste it. To feel and taste him.

  And her thoughts of Alex only reminded her of how much more collected she was now than in those first fumbling and terrifying days after her resurrection. Days in which her sense of awareness of the world around her had been a fractured, jagged thing, its sharp edges waiting for her whenever she reached out and tried to grasp for her name, her memories, her very being.

  She felt a terrible revulsion when she thought of the lives she’d taken, almost as terrible as the visions that had started to plague her.

  “Come,” she said. “Let’s return to our stateroom. I’ll tell you more tales of my royal past and you will pleasure me as you always do.”

  “You are troubled by thoughts, my queen.”

  “Thoughts in and of themselves are never a trouble, Teddy. Only the actions they might inspire.”

  She took his arm.

  There was a brief, contented moment of seeing the empty, windswept deck before them; the miracle of such a solid, massive structure moving effortlessly across the open seas beneath a night sky teeming with stars. Then the stars seemed to vanish, and suddenly the sky seemed to be bearing down on her like the lid of a sarcophagus.

  Her knees buckled. She heard her frightened cry as if from a distance. The sound of it enraged her, but her rage was impotent before the power of this vision.

  A train. She could hear it.

  Barreling towards her?

  A memory of the accident that had almost killed her a second time?

  No. These sounds were different; they were coming not towards her, but from all around her.