Empire of Fear

by Brian Stableford

  The torch-bearers came closer, until they had come right to the edge of the camp, where they gathered to stand in a semicircle, peering at the invaders. They stood silently, and Noell wondered whether any language he knew would be adequate to offer a greeting to the strange figures who faced him. Leilah came from the tent, knowing that something was happening, and hurried to his side. Though she clung to him in fear, she did not cry out, and he was proud of her fortitude.

  ‘They will not hurt us,’ he whispered to her. ‘They mean us no harm.’ But he turned to Ntikima, and said: ‘Tell me what to do, I beg of you. You must be our guide, now, for we have neither the elemi nor Msuri to act on our behalf.’

  Ntikima reached out, and took Noell by the wrist. ‘The woman must stay back,’ murmured the boy. ‘This is not woman’s business.’

  Leilah understood. She released her hold upon Noell, and let Ntikima take him forward, towards the company of the living dead. The boy looked round and beckoned urgently to Quintus, so that the monk fell into step with them. The three together, with Ntikima in the middle, went into the focal point of the semicircle which the Egungun had formed.

  Ntikima raised his arms, and greeted the vampires in the Uruba tongue, bidding them welcome and asking, in ritual fashion, what they had come to say.

  When one of them made reply, he did so in words which Noell did not know, though he presumed they must be Uruba. It was impossible to judge to which of them this spokesman addressed himself, but Noell could only wait in silence.

  Ntikima spoke again, bowing his head and gesticulating. Noell heard him use the word ‘Ogbone’ several times, and ‘elemi’, and ‘Oniolorun’, and some others that he knew, but he was unable to follow the precise details of the explanation which the boy was giving for their presence. When Ntikima pointed to the place where Ghendwa lay, the Egungun were perturbed. Only six were carrying torches; three of these were also carrying short spears; the three who had no torches carried ceremonial drums. Some also carried feathered wands of a kind which Noell had seen in temples, which he knew to be associated with Elegba and Olori-merin, and hence with the most powerful kinds of necromantic magic. When Ntikima pointed to Ghendwa, spears and wands alike were raised as if in threat or accusation, and Noell did not know which of them he should fear the more.

  One of the Egungun separated himself from the group, and went to Ghendwa, to bend over him and see what his condition was. When he stood again, and turned his awful painted face towards the torchlight, he cried out in anger, and levelled the wand which he carried, seemingly aiming at Ntikima’s heart.

  Ntikima screamed some kind of denial, but recoiled from the staff as if he had been struck.

  Noell had no doubt at all that the boy was in mortal danger, no matter how harmless the gesture seemed, for these were the risen dead, come to face the living with the burden of their guilt. Whatever the real properties of that wand – however feeble it might be as a mere physical object – it could destroy Ntikima more surely and more absolutely than any spear or cannon.

  Almost without thinking, Noell stepped in front of Ntikima, to shield him. He thrust the boy behind him, and took a single pace forward, towards the accusing wand.

  ‘The boy did nothing,’ he said, in Uruba. ‘He is not to blame. He has served the elemi and the Ogbone as loyally as he could.’

  ‘Be careful!’ hissed Quintus.

  Noell did not need the warning. He knew well enough that the tribesmen did not recognise Gaulish ideas of blame and responsibility. When things went wrong, they looked for scapegoats, who would bear the burden of guilt for their tribe, even though they might by reasonable reckoning be innocent of any wrong action or idea.

  ‘It was one of us who struck the elemi,’ said Noell, speaking very slowly because his command of Uruba was not adequate to let him speak fluently, it was one made mad by the silver death. Shigidi came to him!’ He struck the side of his head with the heel of his hand, to emphasise his words with a sign.

  ‘Shigidi!’ replied the Egungun, and took a step toward Noell, still holding the wand parallel to the ground, pointing it now at Noell’s racing heart.

  When Noell said nothing else, the lone Egungun took another step, and now it was Ntikima who whispered, urgently, in English: ‘If it touches you, you will die.’

  ‘We have come to Adamawara,’ said Noell, in Uruba, ‘because we are summoned by Ekeji Orisha. We are not to be destroyed. We are not to be accused. You must take us … every one ... to Iletigu. Olorun commands it.’

  The Egungun took another step, still pointing his staff of death.

  ‘Olorun commands it,’ repeated Noell.

  He did not dare to turn his eyes away from the grotesquely-exaggerated stare of the huge mask. Absurdly, he began to feel, in his chest, the pressure of the wand upon his beating heart, as though his life had been caught in a deathly trap, which would squeeze him until the blood burst from his body and his soul shrivelled like a moth in a candle-flame.

  He knew that what he faced was a man in a mask, and that the thing which pointed at his heart was not a weapon, but only a symbol which had no meaning in the context of his own beliefs. Even so, he felt that if the wand touched him then he would surely die, as Ntikima said. One way or another, the Egungun would ensure it.

  All of a sudden, as he faced the wand, Noell found himself uncomfortably aware of a fever brewing in his body. Neither the place on his hand nor the place on his shoulder, where the black blight had begun to grow, was painful – indeed, both places seemed numb – but he was nevertheless nauseous and dizzy. The effort of this strange conflict threatened to leave him without resource, and he knew without a shadow of a doubt that if the wand touched him, he would fall.

  Though he could not see Quintus, he could see the others of his party, behind and to either side of the solitary Egungun. Leilah was rigid with the tension, unable to understand what was happening, but terrified by the knowledge that something vital to their survival was taking place. Ngadze was equally afraid, the whites of his staring eyes catching the torchlight. The Ibau had as much reason to fear Egungun as any Uruba, for Egungun was one of the devices by which the Ogbone exerted their hegemony over their subject tribes.

  And then, with a slight cold shock, Noell saw Langoisse.

  The pirate had come to the maw of the tent in which he had been placed, sick and very tired, to sleep away the worst effects of the morning’s exertions. He had slept, to be sure, but he did not now seem in any way refreshed. His face was gaunt, his dark hair and ill-cut beard in dusty tangles, his eyes by some trick of the torchlight shining as if enflamed by the fever burning in his flesh. He was kneeling, and on his left thigh he was resting an elbow which supported the musket along whose barrel he was carefully sighting.

  To Noell, there seemed curiously little difference between the chimerical masked man, levelling his wand of doom in which was concentrated the wrath of all his dark and heathen gods, and the maddened pirate, stranger in this vile and mortified land, aiming his lead-spitting firearm.

  ‘Langoisse!’ he shouted. ‘For the love of heaven, mo!’

  Perhaps the love of heaven was the wrong appeal to make. Perhaps he should not have exclaimed at all in a language which the magician inside the death-mask could not understand.

  The Egungun cried out, wordlessly, and thrust himself forward, stabbing with the wand, striking at Noell’s breast.

  Langoisse fired.

  The Egungun was suddenly snatched aside. The path of the bullet was angled some thirty degrees to the line of the masked man’s thrust. The wand missed Noell’s breast by a matter of inches, and struck no one as the Egungun fell to the ground upon it.

  There was no sound at all from the eight figures who still stood in their semicircle. They stood and watched, paralysed by surprise.

  The stricken figure lay still for a moment, and then moved, jerkily, thrusting upwards and coming apart. The great false face cracked and splintered, rent asunder by the urgent movements of
the head which had been inside it. Noell realised, as the tattooed face of a Mkumkwe priest was raised from the wreckage, that Langoisse’s shot had smashed the mask but had missed the skull of the man who wore it. He was shocked and frightened, but otherwise unhurt. He rose to his feet – a living man, born out of the carcase of the risen dead, in remarkable inversion of the natural and supernatural orders of things.

  ‘We are summoned by Olorun,’ said Noell, now looking into the real eyes of a living man. ‘We are not to be harmed.’

  The magician did not attempt to pick up the wand. He was not Egungun now. He met Noell’s gaze for the briefest of moments, then looked beyond him, at the arc of risen dead men, whose task it still was to accuse or to denounce, to judge on behalf of all the generations of ancestors whose lives had traced the lineage of the black tribes from their own dark Adam.

  Those who had wands did not raise their instruments of judgement. Those who had spears made no motion with their weapons. There was to be no execution, now. One spoke, in rapid Uruba which Noell could not follow, save that the name of Shango, god of storms, was spoken.

  ‘Shango protects you,’ whispered Ntikima, by his side. ‘You have brought us safe to Adamawara.’

  ‘They would have killed us,’ whispered Noell. ‘Ghendwa brought us across half a continent, and yet they would have killed us all.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Ntikima. ‘They would not have hurt the babalawo. One life, or perhaps a handful, is all they would have required. They would not have hurt you, except that you put yourself in my place. It is a man’s right to choose, to offer himself in such a fashion, though I do not know how you knew it. I owe you debt of life now, Noell Cordery, and the time will come when I shall pay.’

  Noell felt his legs go suddenly weak, and Quintus had to take his arm to prop him up. it should have been me,’ said the monk, in a low tone, as intense as any which Noell had ever heard him use.

  ‘Nay,’ said Noell, weakly, as he put his blackened palm to his head, wondering why the dizziness was now increasing, though the danger was entirely past. ‘Yours is the mind and mine the strength … .mine the strength … ’

  He knew even as he said it that the strength had at last run out.

  The last image which his eyes took in was the face of his mentor, the man of God, who tried his best to hold him up, though the burden was too heavy for the old man’s weakened arms. The bright eyes seemed to be staring at him, beckoning him, like pools of godless darkness.

  As he lost his hold on consciousness, he felt quite apart from the aches and pains of his body, as though his soul was floating free; and for the first time in his life he felt that the idea of that providence in which Quintus had asked him to trust was not entirely absurd.

  PART FOUR

  The Season of Blood

  ‘The empire of fear hath the greatest of all despots set at its head, whose name is Death, and his consort is named Pain; this emperor sends warlords against the hosts of mankind, whose names are War, and Plague, and Famine; and bids them worship the eidola which hide from them true knowledge of the divine and mundane worlds.

  ‘Common men are deluded if they believe that the vampires are their enemies; for the true enemies of mankind belong to that greater empire, which is the empire of fear and ignorance, and not to the petty empires of Attila and his kin, which must one day fall after the fashion of their kind.

  ‘It will not save mankind from grief to fell the petty empire while the greater still remains, and I beg you to remember that it is those other eidola which must in the end be broken, if right is truly to be done.’

  (Francis Bacon, in a letter to Edmund Cordery, May 1622)

  PROLOGUE

  The followers of Gregory the Great say that before vampires go to their Sabbat they anoint themselves upon their bodies with an unguent made from filthy ingredients, chiefly from murdered children. At their meeting-place they light a foul and horrid fire. Satan presides over their assembly, in the shape of a goat with batlike wings, sitting upon a throne of black stone. The vampires approach him to offer their adoration, as suppliants on bended knee. They offer him gifts, of black candles or infants’ navel cords; and they kiss him upon his hairy hand in sign of homage. Then they give him account of what cruel deeds they have performed since last they stood before him; of the tortures which they have afflicted on common men, and of the misery they have spread about the world.

  The devil provides his worshippers with food, which is vile and wormridden, but which is to the vampires no more evil to the taste than bread and sugar, for there is much in it of human blood and the flesh of children, which they love to consume. The devil gives them also a black wine served in a great drinking-horn, which is compounded of urine, spices and blood, and which the vampires drink with much relish.

  It is then the custom of the vampires to dance to the sound of pipes and tabors, which they do wildly, whirling about in a way to make their senses reel. In this dance they are frequently joined by the imps of hell, who love to dance upon the land that was made for men, polluting it with the trampling of their clawed feet, and spoiling it with their excretions.

  Only at the last are the vampires allowed to approach their master, to receive his dreadful communion, and then they must go on all fours, moving backwards to his throne, offering their hindquarters to his pleasure. His member, which is like the member of a horse, and cold as ice, is thrust into their bowels, and there ejaculates a semen black as night, which feeds the demon spirits imprisoned in their flesh. Then the vampires rend their own flesh, and offer their dripping blood to the monstrous tongue of their master, who drinks it most greedily, for it is the pure spirit of evil.

  These wounds which the vampires inflict upon themselves heal quickly, and whether or no their master drains them dry, and gnaws upon their bones, which he sometimes does in the grip of his insatiable hungers, they rise again at cockcrow, whole and hearty, to visit more evil upon the world, which God made for man, and not for their kind.

  These things have been seen, by those sent to bear witness for the race of men, to know what a horror is come among them. The risk in this is great, for when a man is detected in such spying, he is brought to the place before the throne, and a pointed stake thrust into him, in place of the devil’s member, and the stake is set into the ground, and made a maypole for the vampires’ dance, and the ground where the imps and their minions cavort is oft soaked with the blood of martyrs.

  The vampires have set themselves up over common men to be their masters, by means of the powers given to them by Satan. They have done this in order to obliterate that path to salvation which God laid down for common men. While the vampires rule the earth, the souls of men remain in dire peril, and many who succumb to the temptations of temporal power will sacrifice the Kingdom of Heaven for the pleasure of long life and freedom from pain. But it is promised to men that Christ will come again, to judge the living and the dead, and they who have not departed His path shall live forever in the Kingdom of Heaven. Attila is the Anti-Christ whose advent was prophesied by St. John of the Apocalypse; and the false pope, Alexander, is his minion. Christ will one day cast them down, and all Hell’s legion with them, to purify the earth. They who would not suffer on earth will burn eternally; while they who bow to the will of God, accepting the pain and death which he gave to the fallen sons of Adam, will see God and know the truth of his mercy.

  (From the Compendium Malèficarum of Francesco Guazzo, 1608)

  ONE

  He awoke from a dream whose memory vanished within an instant, though it left him with the vague knowledge that it had been remarkably unpleasant, and that he had been desperately glad to leave it. Before he opened his eyes he struggled to remember where he had gone to sleep, and where he might be now, but he could not guess.

  He blinked, but could not bear the light, and shut his eyes.

  For a moment, he could not quite remember his own name, and when he struggled for recall the first syllables which came to his p
arched lips were not his name, but were instead: Shigidi.

  Then, with a flood of relief, he knew that he was Noell Cordery, saved from the wrath of the risen dead by providence … or by a bolt from heaven, hurled by the Uruba god Shango … or by a bullet fired from a musket by the pirate Langoisse.

  There was a red glow upon his closed eyelids which told him that the sun was up, and that its rays were shining directly upon his face. He knew, therefore, that he must shade his eyes with his hand before opening them again, and this he tried to do. He found, on trying to raise his right arm that he could not do it, and that no feeling was discernible in that limb. He quickly clenched the fingers of his left hand, and used it to shade his eyes when he opened them.

  The sun was shining through a wide rectangular window, perhaps ten feet across and four deep, sharply cut from a wall of rock. He tried to sit up, but found difficulty in doing so. He had to turn his head away from the glare and use his left hand to propel himself upwards. A blanket, which had covered him, slid from his upper body and he was able to look down at himself, exclaiming in horror as he saw that his right arm and shoulder, and the right side of his body from armpit to hip, was mottled with black and ashen grey, as though his flesh was rotting beneath the skin.

  The effort of sitting up made his senses reel, and he felt as though drugged with opium or strong liquor. He was very thirsty, his mouth and throat burning with an angry dryness.