Page 123 of Blood Stone
“She learned to supress it all with training. Of course that means she can only take liquids in, because they can slide down her throat without saliva to lubricate the way. But that was all she was interested in, I think. She possibly drinks the entire annual profits of a small vermouth company all by herself. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her without a cocktail glass close to her elbow.”
“Why do you know so much about the unspoken ones?” Garrett asked. “You’ve talked about three of them and you know all about Cyneric, who is theirs, while the rest of us know only that they exist and may know the odd name or two and that is all.”
Roman glanced at Nial. Nial shrugged.
Roman sighed. “The time I was on Malta, with the Templars?” he reminded Garrett.
Garrett shook his head. “Let me guess. You weren’t there at all. That was the lie you gave me to cover up where you really were, which was…?”
Roman grimaced. “Working for the unspoken ones.”
“I guess that matches the rest of your life since the 1830’s. One big fucking mystery to me.” Garrett looked Roman in the eye, daring him to glance away in guilt, or even look uncomfortable.
Roman stared right back. “I wanted to hop off the planet, just like them. But I don’t have their resources or their powers. The only way I would get to dive down a bolt hole would be to use one of theirs. So I signed up as one of their familiars.”
Sick horror washed through Garrett as Roman’s meaning slammed home. After the debacle in Greece, after Roman had sent him away, he had tried a permanent escape.
“What stopped you?” Garrett asked. His lips felt rubbery. Numb.
“Them. The unspoken ones. They’re walking corpses, most of them. Mummies without the decomposition. You think Khurshid with her drinking thing is weird but she interfaces quite normally with the outside world. She didn’t dive down the hole too far. The others need familiars to operate on a day to day basis. Some of them speak languages that the rest of the world has forgotten, while they have lost all their modern tongues. I worked for three of them, over seventy years. The first two died, eventually. The third one I could see was on his way out, but I didn’t wait. I couldn’t stand it anymore.” Roman shook his head. “I got a new identity, started a new life – in Australia. And I got married within a year. Lived in a cabin in Albany and worked for the whaling company there. Western Australian was just starting up and it was raw and earthy and vital. It was one hundred and eighty degrees opposite and it was bliss for twenty years.”
Garrett drew in a slow breath. His pulse was frantic. All these revelations about Roman were hard to absorb and he needed time.
“It was around then I started looking for the Stone,” Roman added. “It gave me something to do. Something to focus on.”
“So what do you know about it?” Nial asked. “Not the mythical nonsense. What is the real Stone capable of, if it’s found?”
Roman scratched at his hair. “We’re running out of night hours and it took me years to put together what I know, so I’ll make this as quick as I can. I just played around with finding the Stone. It was a joke – something to spend time on. Don Quixote tilted at windmills. I thought I’d track down something even more elusive. Of course I’d heard of Menes and I knew about his obsession – that was what gave me the idea — but I thought he was as cracked as the rest of them. I didn’t think for a moment the thing was real, or if it was real, that it might still be around. I just thought the idea was cute. A cure for vampirism.”
He shrugged. “Then I found out it wasn’t so cute and it was very real. It doesn’t cure vampirism, exactly. It just ends the world as we know it. I guess that’s a cure of a sort.”
“Howdoes it end the world?” Nial pressed.
“By bringing back the old world. Sort of.” Roman scrubbed at his hair again. “No one is entirely sure how it works because there’s no written records and the verbal stuff has passed through fifteen different languages. You know yourself how just one interpretation can skew a meaning. Look—” He sat forward and rearranged the drink coasters on the coffee table, lining three of them up in a row and placing the rest in an unsorted pile beneath.
“Before the stone was made – and don’t ask me when, because I don’t know – somewhere back in antiquity, before humans figured out agriculture, before the pharaohs were ascendant andjustbefore Menes came to be – there were four other species besides pitiful humans that also walked the earth. These guys were the top dogs in all ways.”
He pushed the first of the three coasters up out of the line a little with his finger. “The iela. They were an army of winged creatures and their name means ‘from the sky’. If early man was used to watching the iela in their skies, it’s probably where the idea of angels came from. The iela were led by An.”
“That’s Sumerian,” Nial said. “The god of the heavens. It fits.”
“Yep,” Roman agreed shortly. “An was immortal, but he had a weakness — he couldn’t be away from the sun for too long.”
He pushed the coaster back into line and nudged the second one up a fraction. “The Elah. Roughly translates as ‘mighty tree’. Think wood elves. They were probably the inspiration for the original elves in Norse lore. But they’re not as user friendly as the mythology paints them.”
“I bet,” Garrett murmured.
“They were led by the Emperor Daichi.” Roman spelled it out.
“But it’s pronounced ‘dye-chee’?” Nial questioned. “I would say it has Japanese roots, except man simply hadn’t spread that far back then.”
“And maybe that’s not his name, but it’s how he’s referred to now,” Roman said. “Maybe he was remembered by the Japanese that way and that is how the information came down to us. That’s the problem with verbal histories. There’s no lineage trace. Anyway, Daichiwasimmortal, but he wasn’t a god, like An, the god of the iela. The emperor held sway over dozens of kingdoms and minor holdings and they were all earth oriented. Daichi had his work cut out for him, too, trying to hold that much territory. A lot of civil strife and petty wars within his own borders and people.”
He pushed the second coaster back and raised the third. “The real bad boys of the bunch.”
“I like ‘em already,” Garrett joked.
Roman shot him a look. “Funny you should say that.” He tapped the coaster. “The Summanus. Also called the blood shifters. They were an older power and older creatures than the other two, the iela and the Elah. And they’re considered the predecessors of vampires. They were instinctive creatures. Nocturnal and very powerful.” Roman looked at them both with a smile that was a grimace. “They were shifters, too. They could imitate humans.”
