2
So we ran-- no, we flew! Up into the forest canopy, we flew. As fast as we could, we flew from Uroboros, four powerful blood gods, racing through the woods like frightened hares. Vehnfear kept pace, pelting along the forest floor beneath us, as we leapt from tree to tree, shot like arrows across clearings and chasms, wherever there was a break in the forest.
So desperate were we in our retreat that it seemed that we were swimming through the wilderness, scooping the tree limbs in our hands and sweeping them behind us. We were slashed and stabbed a hundred times in our reckless flight. I blundered into a jagged limb, putting out my right eye. Zenzele caught me as I fell and propelled me forward, screaming, “Go! Go!” Half-blind, I obeyed without thought, trying to push the agony out of my mind. I clawed my way through the forest, my eye socket burning, then itching, as the Strix healed my injury. And then I could see again, the pain diminishing to a dull throb, then even that was gone.
We fled until the mountain had fallen away beneath the distant curve of the earth, and then we stopped and dared turn back.
“Are they still there?” I asked. “Are they still in pursuit?”
Zenzele threw back her head and closed her eyes, reaching out with those invisible tentacles. I felt the air around her stir. It was a feeling that was almost hearing, almost touch, but not quite either one. It was her Eye, sweeping out before her like a gust of wind, but one that made no sound, that did not disturb the swirling snow. I felt it pass into the distance, stretching, growing thin, and then it came rushing back to her.
“Yes!” she said. “They are still coming!”
“How many?” Bhorg asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Many. And there are Masters among them. One, I think, is Edron.”
“Masters?” I asked. I had Shared with Zenzele, but Shared memories do not leap to the forefront of your thoughts like your own memories do. You must dive for them.
“Clan Masters,” Zenzele explained. “They are true blood gods. Ones who cannot die. They are like us, Gon. Eternals.”
Goro did not linger. His eyes bugged out and he raced away at once.
“So how do we fight them?” I asked.
“We don’t,” Zenzele answered. “We run. We run until they lose our scent. That is the only choice we have. We cannot stand and fight. There are too many of them. They will tear us to pieces, and bring the pieces, still living, back to Uroboros.”
You have heard the term “a fate worse than death”? I imagined being ripped apart, brought back to Khronos like some grisly trophy, to be mocked, tortured-- ancestors knew what he’d do to us!—and I had to stamp down on the fear that threatened to overwhelm me. A living, thinking head, helpless, without a body-- and at the God King’s mercy! No, I could not bear the thought!
So we ran.
We ran for twenty years.
3
Now when I say we ran for twenty years, I do not mean that literally. I don’t think any creature can run for twenty years, not without rest, not even the most powerful Eternals. But Khronos’s hordes did pursue us, off and on, for a little over two decades, until we had gathered an army powerful enough to challenge him, until we had made our own fortress city, Asharoth, in the Ural Mountains. Sometimes they lost our trail, and we could stop for a time, rest and try to plan our next step, but they unerringly found us out, and we were forced to flee again. Khronos would not relent, and when one group of warriors returned to Uroboros empty-handed, he sent three more to hunt us in their stead.
We ran east, to the shores of the Caspian Sea, and from there we turned north, continuing on through what is now Kazakhstan. In the arid plains of central Kazakhstan, which was not much different than it is today-- which is to say, in the kindest terms possible, “unremarkable”-- we enjoyed a brief respite. We took shelter in a large cave, more of a sinkhole really, near Shoyyndykol Lake, which was also not much different than it is today. There we rested, too exhausted to do anything but sleep. We didn’t even feed, though a small tribe of fishermen lived not too far away.
The smell of their blood drifted into our cave from across the lake, tantalizingly near, but we were just too tired to go out and hunt them. We lay in the dark, still and cold as reptiles, as the sun rolled past the maw of the cave again and again.
I slept and dreamed about my experiences in Uroboros. Sometimes I dreamed the life I had Shared with the God King. They were terrible dreams, filled with violence and despair. Sometimes I forgot myself, and it was I who was forced to eat my father’s heart, still warm and dripping. It was I who went out to destroy Death and instead became a slave to it. It was I who reigned over the city of the vampires, my will absolute, my heart pitiless and cruel. And running through all of those dreams, like veins of poisoned blood in stinking flesh: the inscrutable thoughts of the Strix, the formless thing from beyond our universe, which had made us what we are.
I could hear its thoughts inside my mind. They were like the whispers of a demon in a deep and lightless shaft. I plunged into the cold currents of its consciousness and saw the universe it came from. It was a dark and ever shifting realm, a dreamworld where nothing was solid and all was hunger and pain.
Just a glimpse of it and I woke screaming.
Zenzele was there when those images drove me from my rest. She would shush me, pressing her cold lips to my mouth and neck and chest. “Ssssshhhh,” she comforted me. “It is only dreams,” she would say. Sometimes she slid atop me and took me inside of herself. She did not do it to give me pleasure, but lay there on top of me, her nearness, her cool flesh, calming me, driving away the terrors.
Vehnfear was the only one of our number who seemed to have any vitality. The immortal wolf slept with us during the day, usually at Zenzele’s side, but he rose at night and loped outside as soon as the sun had set. He would return just before dawn, reeking of mortal blood, his snout tacky and red with it, and lay back down beside us. Sometimes he would make a quizzical huffing sound, his golden eyes glinting anxiously. Zenzele might rouse for a moment to stroke him, but more often she did not. She just lay asleep on top of me, or on her side beside me, childlike in repose.
Bhorg didn’t move a centimeter from where he first fell. Not the whole time. And he snored. He was the only immortal I’d ever heard snore.
Goro went out once. He went looking for his people, I think. Vehnfear accompanied him. He did not find them. He returned, made fire a few times. Mostly he just slept. He slept at the far side of the pit, his back turned to the rest of us. He was not a very sociable blood drinker.
Finally, after a week of this, sleeping all day and all night, Zenzele lurched upright, the muscles beneath her dark flesh standing out. “They have found us again!” she gasped.
We all leapt to our feet. It was as if we’d been waiting for her signal.
“How close?” I asked.
She turned in a circle, her head cocked to one side. “I can’t tell,” she said. “Let’s go outside. Perhaps I’ll be able to see more clearly.”
Outside, under the moon and stars, I looked toward the mortal village on the lakeshore while Zenzele sent out her Eye. Their campfires, like orange embers, winked along the edge of the water. I could smell the smoke of their fires, the meat they cooked for their suppers (mostly fish) and, of course, their blood. Hot, salty, tantalizing mortal blood. My nostrils flared as I breathed them in, devouring them with my nose.
“They’re close,” Zenzele finally said. “Not as close as they were that first night, but we have to go now. We can’t wait.” She smiled at me knowingly. “If you intend to feed on those mortals, we’ll have to grab them on the run.”
I started to protest. Could we not feed on animals? I was going to say.
“We must!” Zenzele said before I could speak. “I know we can live on the blood of animals, but we need to be strong, and human blood will give us strength. We won’t be able to run much further on the blood of squirrels and pigs, my love.”
I took in her gauntne
ss. Her glossy skin was stretched taut across her skull. Her teeth seemed much too large for her mouth. Her small breasts dangled from the scaffold of her ribcage.
“Yes, all right,” I said. I glanced in the direction of our pursuers. I could not see them, but I was beginning to sense them. I could feel their malice like a storm on the horizon. “We feed tonight as we go. But kill them quickly,” I said, speaking more to Bhorg and Goro than to my beloved. “Don’t make them suffer. There’s no need for it.”
We ran north, following the shore of the lake, and whipped through the little village of fishermen like a deadly wind. All four of us snatched a mortal victim from their home as we rushed by. Goro and Bhorg took young men, but Zenzele and I took an elderly couple, an old man and his mate, gray-headed and bent. She knew that I would be less troubled if we were only hurrying death a little, rather than devouring a youth who had a great span of life ahead.
As we pelted away from Shoyyndykol Lake, I seized the old man by the top of the head and snapped his neck with one quick jerk. I don’t think he even knew what was happening to him, he was too stunned by the rapidity of our assault.
I fed from him hungrily, biting into the wattled flesh of his neck even as I ran. His blood was sluggish and thick, with the bitter taste of some intoxicating herb, but I was too hungry to care. I’d like to say I didn’t enjoy it, but I did.
I always do.
From Shoyyndykol Lake we continued in a northeasterly direction, losing our pursuers once more in the rugged mountains of central Russia. This time our flight lasted nearly three weeks.
For three weeks we ran, with only brief stops to rest. Even during the daylight hours, cheeks streaked with blood, we ran. We ran until the flesh of our feet fractured and bled, pausing only long enough for the Strix to mend the wear before continuing on. We ran until we were mad from exhaustion. We slept and dreamed on our feet.
In the Urals, a gray and brooding mountain range, we finally lost our pursuers. The Urals are one of the oldest mountain ranges in the world, with strangely shaped outcroppings of rock, vast caverns and underground streams. It is the dividing line between Europe and Asia in the modern world. 23,000 years ago, it marked the far edge of Khronos’s Eastern Dominions. We entered at the southern tail of the mountains and went north, winding our way through its river valleys and passes, caves and subterranean waterways, ever on the move, always looking back.
I’m not sure when our pursuers finally gave up the chase. I estimate we ran about 1,200 kilometers, halfway to the Arctic Sea, before we stopped. By then I was little more than an automaton. I ran without thinking, my body moving without conscious thought. I ran until Zenzele grasped my shoulder, her flesh shriveled to the bone.
“We can stop now, my love,” she said, her voice a hideous rasp. “They have turned back. We have defeated them!” There were tears in her eyes. Tacky black tears. Her face was a leering skull beneath a thin veneer of leathery skin. I don’t know how she could speak without her skin tearing open, it looked so thin and stiff.
I don’t think I even heard her words, or if I did, I did not understand them. I was beyond thinking. I was a wraith, dreaming in one world, running in another.
“Don’t you hear me, my love?” Zenzele cried. “We can finally stop!”
And then she collapsed into my arms.
I caught her, moving without conscious volition. I held her as we sank slowly to our knees.
The Urals, those ancient grey sentries of stone, watched us subside, unmoved by our triumph. In the river beside us, chunks of melting ice dashed down the burbling cataracts. The stars wheeled overhead, or maybe it was just me, falling on my side.
It didn’t matter.
4
I was only faintly aware when Bhorg lifted me from beside the river. I know I roused myself enough to protest, “Take… Zenzele first.” The giant laughed gently and said that he already had, and I allowed myself to lapse back into unconsciousness like a stone dropped into a black pit. I remember the big man lying me down beside Zenzele, treating me gently, as if I were a child. He had carried the two of us into a cave, a nice dry cave with a floor of powdery sand. I rolled over and put my arm protectively around my love, and then the darkness swallowed me again.
When I awoke next, it was to the smell of blood. Fresh, warm blood, right in front of my nose.
My hands snatched instinctively for the source of the smell, and I opened my eyes to the lifeless carcass of a mountain goat. It had been killed recently, head crushed, body still warm. Unthinking in my hunger, I yanked the animal to my mouth, biting into its furry neck. I fed, eyes rolling back in their sockets, feeling the warm liquid coursing immediately through my veins. The desiccated cells of my body let out a collective sigh of pleasure. I don’t think blood ever tasted so good. Certainly not goat blood.
When my reason returned, I took my lips from the animal’s neck and gasped, “Zenzele?”
“Eat, my love,” Zenzele said from a little distance. She had already fed, I saw. Her flesh was plump with blood. She was sitting hunched before a small fire, her eyes reflecting its light like two orange coals.
Bhorg laughed, pushed the goat back toward me. “Drink your fill, little man. You look like a bundle of dry sticks. We’ve already fed.”
I peered at my hands. He was right. They did look like bundles of dry sticks. Three weeks of relentless pursuit had shriveled my flesh to the bones.
“Go on,” Bhorg said with a nod.
I bent back to its neck.
5
I haven’t really told you much about the blood drinker named Bhorg. That’s a terrible oversight on my part, and one that shames me.
I shall rectify that immediately.
Bhorg was fiercely loyal to my beloved Zenzele, and, by extension, to myself. He was our constant companion through our long exile in the Eastern Dominions and beyond. Though he would not live to see the end of our war with the God King, he did more to advance our struggle with Khronos than any other immortal. He guarded Zenzele jealously. I think he loved her. And in the end, he died for her. Such sacrifice deserves better than what little space I can devote to him here. Certainly more than minor character status in these rambling memoirs. Unfortunately, I cannot spare him the space that he deserves. My time in this world grows shorter by the hour, and there is still so much I have to tell you. So very, very much.
Just know that he was a noble creature, and though he could be quite brutal at times, and had a great love for combat, he was also good-natured and gentle when he was at peace.
He was a frightful giant, nearly seven feet tall, with a thickly muscled body, gold-hued flesh and coarse hair shorn close to his scalp. He had full lips with broad, square teeth and great fearsome fangs. A large nose and heavy brow jutted out over a broad, bearded face. It was a warrior’s face, furrowed by the harsh circumstances of his life, but kindness nested there too, from time to time. In his eyes, his generous smile.
He was, he told me once, from a land at the edge of the God King’s Eastern Dominions. I would say modern Turkey or Syria, if I had to venture a guess. He was abducted in his twenty-second year of life by a band of T’sukuru raiders, taken wounded from a battlefield following a skirmish with a neighboring tribe. They marched him to Uroboros, put him to work in the stone quarries at the foot of the Fen’Dagher, where he was to labor for more than a decade. Eventually, a House Mother named Tiss, a grand dame of a vampire who commanded a vast family of powerful blood drinkers, took notice of the giant. Impressed by his size and strength, and by his indefatigable spirit, she took him as a lover. Not long after, she made him an immortal.
But love wanes, especially for creatures like us. It is one of the ironies of our race: that our feelings are so mercurial while our forms are never-changing. Ultimately, he had a falling out with the blood goddess, and took to raiding in the west at the side of my ruthless Zenzele.
He was a great rhinoceros of a man, with reserves of strength I would never know. He alone had the v
igor to continue when Zenzele and I collapsed in the Urals. He located a comfortable cave for us to rest in, then returned to the stony shore of the river where we had fallen and carried us to the shelter. He hunted. Made sure that we had fed. He tended to us like we were children. And I felt like a child in his presence, he was so large. His gruffness reminded me of my father.
He was the first of us to make a new blood drinker.
I had sworn, at the foot of Fen’Dagher, to raise an army of vampires to battle Khronos. As Zenzele and I rested from our long flight, Bhorg ranged out looking for food and stumbled upon a small band of mortal nomads.
There were only six of them, these hunters, wandering the steppes just to the west of the Urals. They were lean, hard, desperate men. Their clan had been mammoth hunters in the not so distant past, but the mammoths were all but extinct by then, and their way of life with them. They had neither mates nor offspring. Their children had all starved to death, and the women who hadn’t starved had stolen away in the night. Or died of hopelessness.
Bhorg, remembering my words, watched the nomads from a distance. They looked to him to be strong, dauntless men, and so he decided to make them into blood drinkers. He loved Zenzele, and since she loved me, he thought that it would please her if he helped me with my designs.
Once he had decided what to do—feed on the mortals or make them gods like us-- he marched out to the steppes to confront the weary hunters.
Those nomads were people of the Eastern Dominions, and so he reasoned they probably had firsthand experience with the T’sukuru, or had at least heard of the terrible blood gods. Rather than confront the men directly and frighten them away, Bhorg placed himself in their path and waited for them to come to him. He also (he told me later) smeared dirt on his glinting flesh, to conceal his true nature from them as long as possible. They’d definitely run if they knew what he was.
The Oldest Living Vampire Betrayed (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 4) Page 11
