Petra

  Table of Contents

  Petra

  The Prima Vita

  PART I

  I. The Birth

  II. The Master

  III. The First Death

  IV. The Draw

  V. The Grove

  The Prima Sanguis

  VI. The Mortanine

  VII. The Bargain

  VIII. The Escape

  IX. The Vellessentia

  The Wounds

  PART II

  I. The Letters

  II. The Physician

  III. The Girl

  IV. The Choice

  V. The Novitiates

  VI. The Aeternitescentia

  VII. The Leave-taking

  The Veil of Time

  PART III

  I. The Search

  II. The Stone

  III. The Horde

  IV. The Immortal

  V. The Mongols

  VI. The Wall

  VII. The Flight

  VIII. The Veroncia

  IX. The Vindicatio

  The First Codex

  About the Author

  Glossary

  ALSO BY CHERI LASOTA

  Immortal Codex Series

  Petra, Book 1

  Leander, Book 2

  Standalone Novels

  Artemis Rising

  Echoes in the Glass

  Paradisi Exodus Series

  Paradisi Chronicles Sci-Fi Universe

  Sideris Gate, Book 1

  Janua Mutiny, Book 2

  PETRA

  IMMORTAL CODEX

  BOOK I

  CHERI LASOTA

  Copyright

  PETRA. © Copyright 2017 by Cheri Lasota.

  All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Warning: the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.

  To book the author for engagements or gain permission for reprints and excerpts contact:

  Cheri Lasota

  www.CheriLasota.com

  Cheri@CheriLasota.com

  Table of Contents

  The Prima Vita

  Part I

  The Birth

  The Master

  The First Death

  The Draw

  The Grove

  The Prima Sanguis

  The Mortanine

  The Bargain

  The Escape

  The Vellessentia

  The Wounds

  Part II

  The Letters

  The Physician

  The Girl

  The Choice

  The Novitiates

  The Aeternitescentia

  The Leave-taking

  The Veil of Time

  Part III

  The Search

  The Stone

  The Horde

  The Immortal

  The Mongols

  The Wall

  The Flight

  The Veroncia

  The Vindicatio

  The First Codex

  Author’s Note

  You’ll find a glossary of words in the back of the novel. Just click on the hyperlink of the foreign words, and it will take you back to the glossary. Just hit the back button on your device to go back to the page you were on.

  The Prima Vita

  Sicily

  February 21, 1723

  “Madame Petra, please forgive my boldness, but may I ask…?” Aurelia bit her lip, hesitating, but Lady Petra Valerii was waiting, one eyebrow arched. “How many times have you died since the turn of the first millennium?” She immediately regretted asking. It was not like her to question Petra about her past—a past she had long concealed.

  “Contemplating your own immortality tonight, Aurelia?” Petra asked, laughing softly as she glanced up from the pianoforte Lucius had given her last year. The lady hadn’t the natural skill or interest in music that he had, but she still loved to stumble through Pietro Scarlatti’s toccatas to while away the rainy Sicilian winter nights.

  Tonight Aurelia had been hard at work on her encryption for hours in the Essentiae enclave’s massive library, as she was most nights after transcribing Petra’s dictation for the Immortal Codex, a secret history spanning millennia. But now her quill stood motionless in the inkwell as she gazed at her maker. Petra wore a wide contouche gown in the French style, the folds of gold shimmering in the flickering firelight as the luxuriant fabric spilled to the floor. Cobalt-blue ribbons adorned the embroidered flower design at her breast and wove deep into the strands of her half-updo and the loose plait falling down her flawless neck.

  Though she looked no older than eighteen, Petra had always possessed the bearing of a queen, and age had only deepened her unearthly beauty. Time had smoothed her skin as a river polishes rock. Aurelia found it impossible to look away from her stunning eyes tonight. They glowed an icy grey rimmed with black, as stones shot through with silver.

  That same piercing gaze made Aurelia mute as she tried to formulate her fear into words. The Lady Petra had only been a year older than Aurelia when she first became an immortal, yet her understanding of the world, her fearlessness, her grace, far surpassed Aurelia’s own meager strengths. If she hadn’t spent the last few centuries writing Petra’s histories of the Essentiae, she would have believed the woman a goddess sent from the heavens to save them all. In fact, the year she first met her back in Avignon, France in 1345, she had believed it.

  “What makes you ask?” Petra prompted, her faded Roman accent a sharp contrast to Aurelia’s own soft French tones. Even here at their estate in Sicily, long after their ancient beginnings, they could not escape the trappings of their pasts.

  “Forgive me, Madame,” she finally said, “I was remembering the last time I died. How I feared it. How much it hurt. I worry death will soon come for me again.”

  Petra pressed her lips together, her expression tinged with a knowing look, her gaze softening. “You know I will always bring you back.”

  “Yes, Madame. I know.”

  The lady waited a moment longer, undoubtedly wishing to ascertain if Aurelia truly believed her promise. Aurelia smiled back as she swirled the quill nervously in the inkwell.

  “You still seek an answer, yes? Well, I may be cursed with near-perfect memory, but even I can’t remember how many times. Though I suppose I must be nearing two thousand by now.”

  “The only true immortal,” Aurelia murmured. Horror and awe battled for dominance in her mind. “I have often wondered what death is like for you… why you do not fear it.”

  “I carry the instrument of my death on a chain around my neck, Aurelia.” Petra smoothed her fingers over the ankh amulet, an ancient Egyptian symbol of immortality, and a phial of mortanine poison. “Talk to me of fear, and I will tell you no one on Earth has ever feared death more. But there will likely never be another who fears it less. Death is both my curse and my gift.”

  “And life?”

  “It is the same.”

  “If you did truly die someday—?”

  “That cannot happen. All of you would die with me.”

  “Would you welcome a permanent death if it
were offered? If you didn’t have so many of us under your care?”

  “Never.”

  Aurelia’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “You have not once tired of life, Madame?”

  “Of course, but you and Lucius anchor me here as certainly as the mountains remain standing after millennia of war and destruction.”

  “I am grateful, Prima Vita.” Aurelia dipped her head in reverence. She hadn’t called Petra by the name First Life in many long years, but it seemed fitting tonight given the dark turn her thoughts had taken.

  A faint smile touched Petra’s lips. “And I am honored to count you among my Essentiae, Aurelia.”

  “I do not mean to pry into a past you have long told me you wished never to remember again… but I have always wondered about your first Vellessentia.”

  Petra rose from the pianoforte and walked toward Aurelia’s desk. “Surely you remember it is already written in the Immortal Codex. You encrypted it yourself.” She swept a hand across the vast library filled with thousands of books, many of which were the codex itself. Row upon row filled the farthest section of the library, a comprehensive history of their memories, their tragedies, their triumphs, their deaths.

  “I meant the first Vellessentia, when you and Lucius and Clarius were created. Should not the origin story of our bloodline take prominence in the codex?”

  Aurelia’s words were innocent, but they made Petra shudder and turn away.

  “I’m sorry, Madame. I did not mean…” Aurelia’s voice trailed into nothing as Petra paced beside a long row of codex books, lost in memory. They had all seen so many horrors throughout their lives together. That Petra would be so hesitant to tell this story made Aurelia realize how abhorrent it must be.

  When a soft knock sounded on the door, Petra had wandered into the section of the library housing the Year 1 AD Codex. There were no other Essentiae histories before this first ancient book.

  “Come in,” Petra called, her fingers sliding down the spine of a book.

  A pair of vivid brown eyes appeared as the door cracked open and Lucius entered.

  “Coming to bed, my love?” he called to her after giving Aurelia a warm smile.

  At first Petra did not speak. Lucius gazed at her without a word, his patience infinite. He knew her well enough to know she was lost in one of her memories.

  “Aurelia has asked me for our origin story,” Petra finally said, glancing at her and pointedly avoiding his penetrating gaze.

  After a moment, he raised his eyebrows at Aurelia. “You ask much, Mademoiselle.”

  His words were not unkind, but Aurelia immediately rose and went to Petra, taking up her hands with a gentle squeeze.

  “I beg forgiveness, Madame. I didn’t—I should have known not to ask. I only know it is a story that has never been recorded.”

  Lucius’s gaze shifted from all the bookshelves around the room to Petra herself. “Aurelia is right. You should tell her.” He looked to Aurelia. “And you should make her. We have held onto our past long enough. To speak it out loud would relinquish its power over us.”

  “It’s late, Aurelia,” Petra said, releasing herself from the girl’s grasp.

  Lucius would brook no refusal. He pulled Petra to him, his arms loosely encircling her waist. “Beauty still walked alongside our horrors in those ancient days, my love,” he whispered to her.

  “I remember it all,” Petra said, her voice lowering to match his. “It is the reason I fear to go back there.”

  His wide and encouraging smile was disarming even to Aurelia. He had always had this way about him. Effortless confidence, a desire to please, but a tinge of dark jealousy lingering beneath the surface—a jealousy stemming from that secret past they had hidden from Aurelia for so long.

  “I’ll tell you what I remember most from those days…” Lucius said, his voice playful as his fingers delicately smoothed a stray strand of hair from Petra’s forehead.

  “Come to me now and loosen me

  from blunt agony. Labor

  and fill my heart with fire. Stand by me

  and be my ally.”

  Petra’s growing smile turned into a kiss as Aurelia politely backed away from them.

  “Leave it to you to quote Sappho to tempt me back to Tivoli,” Petra whispered, kissing Lucius once more.

  “I am not tired, Madame,” Aurelia said, risking the Prima Vita’s ire—out of curiosity or foolishness, she did not know. “I would be happy to transcribe any stories you might wish to share tonight.”

  Lucius smiled once more, and Petra finally gave an imperceptible nod.

  “Thank you, Madame.” Aurelia rushed to her desk, flipped to a new page in the codex she was working in, and held her quill poised for a long night ahead.

  “Shouldn’t you start a new book?” Lucius asked.

  Aurelia shook her head. “I can add it to a new book later. Is the story that long?”

  Lucius let out a laugh and grinned as Petra suppressed a smile of her own.

  “Yes. As you may have noticed”—he brought Petra’s hand up to his lips and kissed it—“immortality takes a fair amount of time.”

  PART I

  2 BC

  The Villa di Avidus

  I. The Birth

  Tivoli

  July 13, 2 BC

  Rough hands shook Petra’s shoulders hard, but her tear-caked eyelids wouldn’t open.

  “Wake up, girl, or you won’t live through the night.”

  Rubbing last night’s dust and sorrow from her eyes, Petra made out the hulking shape of Silvipor, the favorite house slave of her Master Clarius Valerius Avidus, in the room she shared with all the other slave women.

  The way the long shadows crossed Silvipor’s weary, pock-marked face brought it all back to her. No. She must not let the images come. They fought her, as she had fought with her master before all was lost yesterday. Petra concentrated on the flash of Silvipor’s eyes in the moonlight, willing the memories away.

  “The master’s baby has nearly come,” Silvipor whispered.

  “I don’t care.”

  The whites of his eyes shone as he glanced at the other sleeping slaves around them. “You must not say such things.”

  She drew away from him and pressed her lips into a hard line. The heat of her rage battled with a wave of shivers from the cool night air pouring in from the open window.

  “The mistress was screaming when I left the villa. She thinks the baby is turned inside her. The master says you must come. You have to deliver the child now your mother has been taken by the gods.”

  “No!” Petra shouted, ignoring the other slaves waking around them. “Even the gods wouldn’t make me do that.”

  Silvipor shook his head. “The gods would see you dead if you do not.”

  “Then I will die.”

  The visions hit Petra again, so rich with detail she tasted last night’s dust in her mouth, smelled the fear in her mother Diantha’s cracking voice. Petra had followed them out into the villa’s inner courtyard as her mother stumbled behind the master, his grip on the chain around Diantha’s neck as hard as the iron it was made from. The master heeded no pleas for mercy. With a flick of his wrist, he cut Diantha’s throat, her soundless scream deafening as Petra collapsed before her mother’s prone body. Blood splashed onto the mosaics as the dagger flashed in the fading light of the setting sun. Diantha gasped for one last breath that would never come again.

  All this butchery because her mother refused to allow him to harm his wife with the witless folk cures advised by the neighboring village midwife: a bloodied, rotten hyena’s foot pressed to the abdomen and a potion of goose semen. What foolish nonsense! It was not the Greek way. Not her mother’s way. She had had more sense in one hand than these rural midwives had in their whole bodies.

  A palm covered Petra’s mouth, but it wasn’t Silvipor. It was her Lucipor.

  “Be still.” The fear lacing Lucipor’s whisper made her realize she was shaking again. He had never once stepped
foot in the women’s slave quarters. The punishment would be severe if Master Clarius found out. She glanced at Silvipor, but now he stood waiting outside the door on the path leading up to the master’s house.

  “Lucipor,” she breathed into his mouth, when his palm was replaced by his lips against hers. As he pulled back, she looked into his shadowed eyes, wishing she could see their true color: a deep brown as fine as the richest soil in all of Italy. But the faded colors of night hid the details of his beautiful face from her. “The master is asking for me. What should I do?”

  “You must go. You must do what the master asks of you.” His fingers touched the bronze slave collar at her neck to remind her of her place.

  “You forget I was not always a slave, Lucipor,” she whispered, drawing attention to his name, a combination of slave boy and their master’s praenomen. “I remember what it felt like to be free back in Greece before the Roman army stole us from our homes.”

  “You are not free now.”

  “I can be again.”

  “Not that way. Any way but that, Petra.”

  “I cannot do what you ask—”

  Lucipor stopped her words with a kiss, but she pushed him away, glaring at him, willing him to understand.

  “I will kill him if I see him again.”

  Lucipor shook his head. “I know you have a will of iron, Petra, but please listen to me. Your mother was like a mother to me too. Losing you both would…” He let his words fade into another kiss, and this time she did not fight him. This time she kissed him back, knowing it would likely be the last time she would feel the touch of him. They had had so little time. Merely a few months of stolen moments, of shy looks, of hands touching in the shadows when the master’s back was turned.

  Lucipor pulled away and held her head in his hands. “Your kiss was a farewell, Petra.” His voice broke as he said the words.

  “If you are ever freed, find out where Master Clarius sold my father. Take care of him? He will need you.”

  “Don’t be foolish. Your father needs you. Live for him.” His thumb slid down her cheek. “Live for me.”