The Queen's Viper Page 2

  Death was hollow-cheeked and hungry. Malachite green swirls permeated the blackness of her eyes. The immortal clung to the building on the other side of the glass. Stucco crumbled beneath her elongated nails. The boy yelped and backed away, falling over a hastily unpacked suitcase. His chaotic, fear-filled thoughts broke the immortal’s link to him. She no longer cared.

  “William Harry Kingsley, really!” his mother scolded over her shoulder. “Stop fooling around!”

  “But Mum, she’s there! There, at the window,” he said, pointing, “and she’s naked, and she has black and green eyes, and she’s not really a lady, and I think she’s very, very bad.”

  Mum slapped her hand on the bed. “We’re on the third floor. There couldn’t possibly be a woman with a black eye outside the window!” A large flag slipped from her lap when she rose and stomped towards him.

  “Not a black eye, Mum. Two eyes. Black and green. She didn’t even have any white part.” The boy stayed on the floor, knees tight to his chest, eyes wide. He averted the nightmare at the window.

  The immortal burst into the room at his mother. Shards of glass slashed at their bodies. The boy dashed to the bathroom. He pounded on the door for his father. The immortal paid no heed to the boy and began feeding from his mother.

  Desperation made the immortal devour Mum’s life-magic with such speed that, for a moment, it blinded her. When her vision cleared, Dad had emerged, struggling with his trousers. The immortal summoned enough strength to charge into him. He bashed his head into the wall mirror as she bowled him over. The boy ran into the hall, shrieking for help.

  When the immortal knelt over the father’s semi-conscious torso, she saw two words on the TV screen in the fragmented mirror.

  Queen Elizabeth.

  Multiple black and white images of Queen Elizabeth II in her Coronation robes loomed over the immortal. Stunned, the immortal stared at the screen. How was it possible that the queen she had left behind bore offspring, offspring so long-lived? The immortal felt like she had been slapped across the face.

  Her vengeance found its target.

  She heard the stirring of groggy, bewildered people in the hallway. In moments, their curiosity would bring them into the boy’s room and she would be discovered. The immortal escaped through the window and up the exterior of the building to the safety of the roof.

  She noticed seven vertical, red beacons reaching high into the sky. Not seen by humans, they marked the prison in the River Thames created for the hateful creature who had captured her.

  The immortal wrung her bony hands together with eager anticipation. “You named me Viper,” she said to a long-dead Queen Elizabeth, “so shall the descendants of your loins know my venom.” If Viper’s immortal enemy had been captured at those red beacons, then Viper could kill her and bring an end to the Tudor bloodline on the same day. “Dual success. A fortuitous start to my new life.”

  The immortal traversed the rooftops, eastwards to the Thames and central London, the Union Flag of Britain wrapped around her rejuvenating body.

  2: Cammerwelle, Past

  April 29th, 1548.

  Village of Cammerwelle, south-east of London.

  The principal trade in Cammerwelle was death. No one spoke of the village’s commerce in such bleak terms, yet the immortal who had lived there for as long as she could remember knew the truth behind Cammerwelle’s prosperity.

  To escape the noxious miasmas of London, humaines flocked to the village after the winter floods of the River Thamys receded. Early spring mud sucked at the boots of travelers on the thoroughfare that was once a Roman road from Kent to Westminster. The fertile hills of Cammerwelle parish supplied London’s markets with much of its fruits and vegetables. In exchange, London sent Cammerwelle the people who fled from disease, some tainted beyond saving.

  Viper wasn’t the only predator whose emptiness targeted those who escaped London’s contagion. Merchants in the mis-matched black and white buildings that hugged the high street emptied pilgrims’ purses in trade for impotent salves and pastes. St. Giles, the church not far from the village square, consumed the offerings of the rich and impoverished alike. Thieves picked clean the shallow graves of humaines who had perished.

  The purple-skinned immortal perched on her favourite spot, the thatched roof of the oldest medieval building at the farthest end of the village. Two stories high, the earthy smell of its wattle and daub walls stirred her recollection of the ancient, low round houses with peaked conical roofs of hazel that centuries of humanity had buried beneath the town.

  Along the street behind her, people closed their windows against the oncoming chill of night. Viper’s hunger burned so deeply, she didn’t feel the cold. Her waist-length, white hair gleamed like shafts of moonlight in the dark, and a bleached linen smock swished over her shins. A thick, gold chain wound around her waist, its tail dangling between her legs. Her full sleeves billowed as the wind kissed the clouds goodnight. The demon of Cammerwelle was an angel in white.

  To the humaines, Viper was no longer a seelie wicht, a Blessed One. They spoke of the invisible immortal who haunted their homes in hushed tones, afraid to invoke her wrath. Perhaps they would still worship her if she ventured from Cammerwelle for food, but she had little reason to give up what had become her complacent lifestyle. The increasing population of the village, and the constant influx of dying pilgrims, ensured Viper a steady food supply. She fed upon humaine aeir, a life-magic within mortals they didn’t know existed. Viper intentionally selected victims with such poor health, they couldn’t fight her off. Death of the sickly didn’t generate unwanted attention.

  In the distance, she caught sight of another poor soul coming to Cammerwelle, craving its healing springs. A woman and her son rushed towards the village, like ghosts on the road under the full moon. With supernatural senses, Viper heard the strain in the woman’s speech, the sound of imminent death.

  “Quickly now,” the mother said between bouts of coughing. “If we dally our steps, the Daoine Tor will be upon us.” With her London dialect, she pronounced the old Celtic name Dhee-nè Tor. The woman wiped her mouth with a linen handkerchief as if removing the unspeakable name from her face. She tucked the cloth into the sleeve of her wool dress before her son saw the blood upon the fabric. She wrapped her cloak around him to protect him from the dangers her words might awaken in the shadows. “We must reach the springs tonight.”

  Humaines had called Viper one of the Daoine Tor since before the Kings of the Western Isle fought amongst themselves for control. The archaic words meant “the people from the rocky hills,” but Viper had never seen another immortal like herself. Long ago, she learned to bear her loneliness in abject silence. In any case, Viper preferred this old world sobriquet over the modern Tudor label of “demon.”

  As the woman and child neared the village, the boy protested with fatigued whining. He dragged his leather boots along the ground. His youth deafened him to the desperation in his mother’s voice when she begged him to carry on. The mother lost her footing. She clung to her son to stop herself from falling over. If Viper didn’t intervene, the woman would die in the streets and leave her boy an orphan of the mud.

  The Daoine Tor opened her palm and blew a wisp of her magic at the mother. The hazy purple elldyr creft wrapped around the mortal’s head. Viper instilled the image of Cammerwelle’s largest inn, The Deep Well, into the woman’s mind. The immortal often chose this spot as her hunting ground, a place frequented by those who sought the springs. If the innkeeper noticed the higher frequency of his clients’ deaths compared to that of the rest of the village, he never complained.

  “The dead pay better than the living,” he would mutter as he stole what he wanted from the bodies before he paid his dues to the Churchwarden.

  The immortal hated that she guided the woman and her son to this particular lair. When Viper claimed the life of his customers, she nourished the innkeeper’s depravity. Although she despised the man’s ethics, her fierce a
ppetite demanded her action.

  From the rooftops, Viper matched the pace of the suffering woman and her son. The Deep Well squatted at the end of the merchants’ row. The curving, exposed cruck timbers, painted with tar, formed a black letter A in the white plaster of the outer wall. The inn’s sign, a waving hand that invited exhausted travellers, dangled from the overhanging second storey. Beyond the inn, the small merchants’ square waited for the activity of the morning market.

  Viper reclined on the wall of the taller building adjacent to the inn while her prey had a final meal. Death would not let the woman leave on the morrow. The smell of mutton stewed with spring greens and leeks didn’t make the immortal’s mouth water. She hungered for the woman’s aeir.

  The bell at St. Giles signaled the end of night prayers. Viper moved aside the straw yelms of thatching she maintained as a secret access to the inn. Few humaines knew how to repair roofing. Viper made sure her alteration never needed their attention.

  She lowered herself soundlessly into the narrow hallway of the upper storey. Viper infused her elldyr creft through the crack between the door and its frame and lifted the wooden latch to each room as she searched for the mother and her child. Other people slumbered at the inn. Luckily for them, none were dying.

  Viper found her victim on a short bed with a woven reed mattress, head propped against the wall. The boy slept, steadfast in the crook of his mother’s arm.

  The woman’s mouth hung open, cheeks sallow from the starvation caused by a tumor eating her up from inside. Her breathing alternated between deep, rapid gasps and long pauses. The mortal’s aeir waned to a feeble flicker. Viper knelt at the bedside, head tilted away from the slanted roof. She lifted the woman’s arm from her son. The last traces of the mother’s aeir dissolved into the ether before Viper could satisfy her hunger.

  Cammerwelle’s immortal forced back a scream. She was too late. Frustration crawled on her spine like the itch of a thousand insects. She pressed her palms to the ridges on her face that rose from her neck in silver-tipped flames to her temples. She dug her fingertips into her hairline. Her nails left indentations in skin that now darkened to a deep plum as she considered the fate of the boy.

  His effervescent aeir tormented her. She wondered if she dared risk an attack upon him.

  Wind sliced between the wood shutters with a high pitched sound. Viper’s hand trembled as she reached for the boy. He stirred when the cool waves of her elldyr creft kissed his half-closed eyelids. She squeezed her eyes tight and hoped that she could overcome the distress consuming his aeir would cause.

  “Mother,” he asked, the dimples in his cheeks painfully full of innocence, “is dawn a-risen? Shall we go to the springs?”

  “The moon still dances,” Viper whispered, casting a healthy image of his mother into his drowsy mind. “Sleep.” He wouldn’t see the pain churning in the immortal’s deep set malachite eyes. She smoothed his stubborn curls. The eternal void of her hunger still demanded satisfaction. The boy was a burden she wasn’t strong enough to carry and a prey too harsh to attack.

  A coin purse lay secreted between the woman’s skirts. The immortal removed a scuffed gold ring adorned with a small pearl from a finger-braided string around the woman’s neck. Viper hid both it and the pouch in the waistband of the boy’s breeches, away from the innkeeper’s probing, grubby fingers.

  Viper returned to the hall and her entryway. Rain cried through the hole above, and between the gaps in the wide floor boards to the empty tavern below. The immortal brushed the Earth’s tears from her cheek. With swift movements, she scaled the walls back to the roof. She sealed the yelms behind herself, shoving aside the thought of killing everyone else at the inn, an action which could expose her.

  Instead, she sought her sustenance among the dying at St. Giles. Viper leapt across the rooftops, lined up like a roadway in the sky, until she reached the stone tower of the church. Taller than any structure in the village, the Anglo-Saxon tower of St. Giles had been fortified in the 12th Century. Viper settled herself atop the slate roof of the west narthex, an extension added to hold the sickest of Cammerwelle’s patrons. Their murmuring never ceased. A wide oak door opened beneath her perch on the entry portico and two men emerged. Viper peeked over the lip with curiosity.

  She had seen the religious man, Fulke, before. His plain, dark brown, wool robes frayed at the hems. The other man wore a long coat embroidered with silk, puffed out on the upper arms. His lantern exposed clean, white stockings on his legs.

  The newcomer’s aeir captivated Viper. Usually, aeir presented itself to her as ephemeral fragments hovering over a mortal. This man’s olive green life-magic revealed every detail of his body, from ragged nails to blistered toes. She wanted to wrap herself in the sinewy aeir of his arms.

  “Keep these shillings, from my master.” The man seemed as if he would just as soon part with his rich clothes as the money-laden pouch he handed to the clergyman.

  “Thank you, John.” The clatter of the coins in Fulke’s hand promised a bountiful donation. “Baron Seymour is most kind to remember us so far from Chelsey.”

  “Not so far,” John snapped. “The Baron ordered me to attend to his errand here and then retrieve him at Bankesyde in the same evening.” To Fulke he offered a consolatory smile. “I am pleased to see you after so many years.”

  “And I you, brother.” Fulke patted John’s arm.

  John faced the road leading to the river, unaware of the immortal who watched him. He turned back and said, “Fulke, ruminate upon my offer. When I think of you among these…” John gestured towards the church’s sick room.

  Viper leaned so far out to observe his aeir that she almost lost her balance. She climbed down the stone wall without making a sound and positioned herself behind John. Her feet barely made a dent in the soft grass in front of the church. Although John couldn’t see through her enchantment, he gathered his coat around his shoulders and frowned when she reached for a wisp of his aeir.

  “I am content at St. Giles, where I am truly needed.” The eyes of the clergyman’s less cohesive aeir shone with pride.

  “At Chelsey you would be safe from the sicknesses brought here, and my Lord Seymour’s pay is of good coin.”

  “Eight pennies a day is solid employ, I grant you, but we measure value by different scales.” Fulke crossed his arms over his chest, anchoring himself to Cammerwelle. “Indeed, my belly would be full at Chelsey Place, yet my soul would starve for St. Giles.”

  Viper fought the urge to drain John’s life-magic. If she did, Fulke would be able to see her when she lost herself in the rapture of the feed. As a pacifist, Fulke couldn’t strike a mortal man. She couldn’t risk that he’d spare an immortal who was killing his brother. Moreover, she wanted to find out why John’s aeir materialized so completely.

  “I must away to my master. I thank you for this blessed spring water, and for your prayers for the Baron’s soul,” said John, holding a leather flask. Fine, pleated lace flashed at his wrist.

  “And you, John. Always for you, with never a price,” Fulke responded as his brother headed into the night, an unseen predator on his heels.

  The Daoine Tor stalked her prey to Baron Seymour’s cutter, moored at the Thamys, the river that led to London. Ahead, the men who manned the boat also sported aeir better than the residents and pilgrims of Cammerwelle.

  Viper’s throat closed in apprehension when she beheld the wide, fast-moving waters of the River Thamys, capable of swallowing fields with the change of seasons. Behind her lay the unquestionable security of the life she knew in the village. The temptation of the men’s aeir overcame her caution. She snuck onto the vessel and mounted the wooden canopy above John. The cutter progressed upriver towards the recently re-legitimized stew houses of London’s Bankesyde. Cammerwelle Parish disappeared into the darkness behind her.

  3: Elizabeth of the Second Throne

  The River Thames, London.

  June 3, 2012: late afternoon.

&n
bsp; Viper balanced at the midpoint on the arms of the twin sentinels of Tower Bridge, high above the River Thames. People crammed along the bankside railing like stockyard cattle. They had huddled for hours under chilly, damp skies as they waited for the same queen the Daoine Tor wanted to kill.

  The immortal disliked the symmetry of this new bridge. Her London Bridge had long since fallen down. This modern structure, with its pointed, boxy towers, conveyed life without hosting life. Businesses and homes had rested upon the wide berth of the bridge Viper remembered. In her time, it was a convenient hunting ground, especially for dispatching her prey.

  She outlined the silvery keloid scars in the revitalized purple skin of her forearms with a long fingernail. Each raised, rune-shaped marking belonged to a bygone place, as strange to Viper as modern London. An updraft caressed her thick, white tresses, restored as full as the moon. Angular lines fleshed out her face, as before. Nevertheless, her insides felt hollow. The immortal ignored the boundless feast laid out before her. She zeroed in on the approaching flotilla, yearning to quench her revenge, a more pressing appetite.

  The royal cutter Gloriana led the one-thousand boat flotilla downriver towards Tower Bridge. The grand naval processional reminded Viper of the only Coronation parade and ceremony she had attended. After the first wave of manually powered boats came the largest royal barge the immortal had ever seen. The prow of the Spirit of Chartwell, sculpted with red velvet swags and gold gilding, didn’t impress her. The barge carried Viper’s intended victim, Queen Elizabeth II, the Diamond Queen.

  Seven beams of sparkling energy pierced the surface of the water, forming a circle near the base of Tower Bridge. The beacons’ red glow bathed the grey sky and the people below. They couldn’t see Viper, nor the magical energy. Coincidentally, trumpets saluted the queen’s arrival as the elaborate prow of the barge crossed into the enchantment. Viper vaulted from her post and landed soundlessly on the fore deck of the Spirit of Chartwell. A floral arrangement and a golden handrail lay between her and a pair of red velvet thrones adorned with royal heraldry.