Khayman returned weary and listless, windblown and sad, and came into the room like a laborer so tired from his work that he couldn’t even seek a chair to rest. For a long moment, he stood there breathing slowly and evenly with his hands at his sides.

Then he saw the dark greasy bloodstains all over the mud floor. He saw the soot, the ashes.

He saw the earth churned up where she had been hastily buried.

He looked up and then he spun around, but he had no chance.

With the two machetes, they hacked at his powerful neck from both sides, almost instantly decapitating him.

No words came from him, and when his head fell, his black eyes were wide with astonishment.

Rhosh picked up the head and drank from the neck.

He held it with both hands as he drank, and though his vision misted and his heart beat in his eyes and in his ears, he could see the headless body dying as he pulled the blood from the brain—this powerful, thick blood, this viscid delicious ancient blood.

Never could he have drunk a drop from Maharet. Never. The mere thought of it revolted him. And indeed he did not think of it. But now he thought only, This is a warrior as I was a warrior, this is the leader of the First Brood who fought Queens Blood, and he is in my hands now, Khayman, the defeated leader—and Rhosh drank and drank the blood, and the images poured forth into him, the portal between First Brood and Queens Blood opened, images of this being when he had been young, vital, and human. No. Rhosh dropped the head. He didn’t want those images. He didn’t want to know Khayman. He didn’t want those images inside his brain.

He burnt the body and the head.

There was a fountain in the garden outside, a Grecian fountain. When it was all finished and the body was buried, he went there and washed his hands, and his face, and rinsed out his mouth and spit the water down on the earth.

Benedict did the same.

“And what will you do now?” asked the Voice. “This thing in which I am entombed will seek shelter from the sun soon, for that is absolutely all that she knows, the sum total of all her discernment and all her millennia.”

The Voice laughed. He laughed and laughed like a mortal on the verge of madness. He laughed a high-pitched and genuine laugh as if he simply couldn’t help himself.

The jungle around them was waking. The morning air had come, that air that all blood drinkers know when the hour of dawn is approaching, when the morning birds sing, when the sun is nearing the horizon.

Mekare moved slowly as a great reptile across the garden and into the room and across the mud floor and through a doorway to an inner chamber.