It was, all of it, a curiosity. The thrum of their blood enclosed him like a cocoon and it woke something in him, an almost-memory. But memory danced in the mists, taunting him, and never drew close enough to grasp.
He kept on because there was nothing else to do. He learned to leave his body and hunt over distances as an invisible animus searching for a host, so that his inert body might wait somewhere safe until he returned to claim it. He tried on warlords and priests and serving girls. He smelled the Black Death and nudged bodies out of his way with his boot. He fired an arquebus in the Battle of Pavia and shot the French king's horse out from under him. He started a mutiny on a slave ship. He mixed pigments for a Florentine master and tasted the carmine of crushed beetles on the tip of a sable brush.
He learned what quickens human hearts, how the touch of lips could make two lovers slip into a niche between moments so time rushes past them. He learned that a kiss could bring his almost-memories closer than anything else, but still not close enough to catch. It was sweet and bitter and maddening.
He broke the Druj taboos, all but one. He never destroyed a human soul, even in those days before he understood what they were, and now he was sick with relief for it. He ignored the taboo about entering children, though he used them lightly, and he entered an old woman once too, but only once, and learned there was a good reason for the taboo against the old. Her soul didn't slip aside for him; it filled her firmly and fully and left little room for his animus and for a startled, struggling moment he didn't know if he would escape. The old woman spit on the ground after he tore himself out of her, and he left the old alone after that.
He even braved fire -- the only thing Druj truly feared -- and was burned as a witch in a young woman's body. He wrapped her mind in a memory of flying as the flames took her and she felt no pain but smiled and spread her arms like wings. He felt it all, every flame, but it only burned her human shell and his animus surged out through her eyes with the departure of her soul. After that, haunted by the smell of her burning flesh, he lived in the Inquisitor for weeks and drove him mad, until finally his own lieutenants turned on him and clamped him in manacles still crusted with the blood of his victims. Mihai didn't undergo that bonfire. He let the Inquisitor suffer the flames all for himself.
Children, the old, fire -- all the taboos broken but one. It was the final one that taught him what no other Druj knew, what he would later name hathra, and which would change his life forever.
When he'd seen a pair of bright black eyes peering from the shade of a chinar tree in high Kashmir, he had gone to the woman at once, drawn by something he couldn't divine, some mystery that suffused her like a light. Once he was inside of her, he knew at once what the mystery was. In the throb of her blood there was a second heartbeat, very fast -- a life within, like a pearl enclosed. He had felt it before when trespassing into other women and he'd always obeyed the taboo. He had never touched an unborn life. But this time, without thought, he sank down into it with a kind of sigh.
To his surprise, he felt a calming darkness take him. And then there was nothing.
For years.
In the small dim chamber in Tajbel the beasts were still battering at the door, but Esme seemed to have forgotten them. She was staring at her hands, turning them over, waving her fingers slowly like underwater weeds. She looked up anxiously at Mihai. "I don't think these are my hands," she whispered to him with a ragged intake of breath, holding them up to show him.
And as he looked at her, the brown iris of Esme's right eye shimmered and began to fade, glinting in the gloom as it paled to Druj blue, just like her other eye. Mihai exhaled slowly and realized his own hands were shaking. "My Queen," he said, staring at Esme, his voice heavy with emotion. "I've been waiting for you."
Esme slowly blinked her twin blue eyes and stared back. "Mihai ..." she purred in a voice that did not belong to her. Then she gasped as she caught sight of the Queen on her throne behind him. She stared at her, then down at her own hands, then at the Queen again. "What have you done to me?" she asked.
With a quaver in his voice he said, "Fourteen years ago I told you you would understand everything, and you will. There are secrets, Sraeshta, about the Druj, so many things we've forgotten. We were not always thus, my Queen." He paused, reached out, and grasped Esme's fingers in his. "I remember now. Once, a long, long time ago, we were human?
TWELVE Hatchling
Human. But that was long ago, in the years that humans now counted backward from the birth of the Nazarene. Then, Mihai had not been a demon; he had not always been. In that other time, there was a beginning. Mihai had been born human.
He only knew this because in 1564 he became human again for a short time.
He was a boy in Srinagar who poled boats in the shallows of Dal Lake and could skip stones better than any of the other boys. He worked in the orchards, tugging ropes tied to the peaks of the trees to dislodge any greedy birds that tried to steal the prince's cherries. If he pulled just right and released quickly, he could launch a thieving crow skyward like a stone from a slingshot. He was master of the wheeling bird shadows, little brown raja of the orchard. His name was Yazad and he prayed to an elephant-headed god and ate bread with poppy seeds and sesame. The sun warmed his skin, the breeze stirred his hair, and the soul within him felt as real as his heartbeat.
He didn't know anything else but being Yazad. Until the day his eye turned blue he didn't remember what he had been before, but the sight of that pale eye brought it all back, not at once, but in quickening surges. Memories battered him like ugly moths. He was besieged by them, and after a terrible struggle, days of madness and priests, his animus was shunted out into the air and his brief humanity came to an end.
He remembered the horror of finding himself unskinned, ripped from Yazad's soul and looking down from above at the boy whom he had thought was himself, seeing agony on that familiar face and trying to fathom that he was not Yazad, but only something that had been growing inside the boy like a parasite.
Bitterly, he knew himself again: Mihai, Druj, Naxturu. Demon.
He was just an invisible animus, adrift far from its abandoned body, bereft of the soul he had believed was his.
He had felt souls before within the bodies he had worn, but they were poor quivering things, thrust askew by his animus with as little care as robes hanging from a hook. This had been something else. Yazad's soul had been his, and he had been inside of it and it had been inside of him. Fear and pride and shame and fury and woe and love had moved through it and him like the shivers of harp strings. Every day had been a dazzle of sensation.