I squatted down to take the sand into my fist, and watched with a pensive expression as it poured between my fingers. I won’t bore you with the trite clichés that passed through my mind. I was exhausted, and I was missing my mortal Tanti descendants, and my immortal child Ilio. I loved them, and I wondered where they were, and how they had fared in my absence. I worried for their safety. Had Ilio convinced them to flee their settlement by the lake, as I had instructed him when Zenzele took me captive? I prayed he had, and that the Tanti had removed themselves to safety. Time, like the sands of the Gobi, was passing so quickly through my grasp. I could not hold onto it. I could not stop its movement.
And I said I would not bore you with trite clichés!
Vehnfear went loping away across a dune, tongue flapping from the side of his snout. The dune collapsed beneath the beast, slithering down to the foot of the mound with a dry shirring sound. He floundered a little in the sliding sand, then rounded the top and vanished, barking excitedly.
“There are people here in this dry land,” Zenzele said. “I can feel them in my mind. Small groups of nomads. Men, women and children, sleeping in tents.”
“What do they eat and drink?” I asked, scowling across the dunes. I watched Vehnfear climb the next hump of sand and vanish again.
“There are pools of water, and green vegetation, but only small patches here and there.” She blinked her eyes and glanced at me. “Shall we feed on these mortals? There is a small band of them not too far away. We should be able to make it back to the cave before daylight.”
I was reluctant to say yes, but I had scanned the environs for any native creatures we might feed upon, and had sensed nothing of any appreciable size. Snakes. Rabbits. Mice. Birds. Nothing large enough to revivify our withered bodies. And I was so hungry! The bloodthirst was a sizzling fire in my guts. It had gone dormant when we were fleeing from Khronos’s hunters, but now that we were safe, the hunger had come over me with a vengeance. I was in torment, and my companions were no better off. I could see it in their eyes. Their desperate misery.
“I suppose,” I said. “But only the sick and elderly.”
I know it seems cruel, but we were in agony, and it is our nature. The predator must thin the herd. Our prey would actually benefit from it as a group—or so I tried to convince myself—though really, among humans, even the sick and elderly can contribute to the welfare of the whole. We are not wildebeest.
Still, it was enough, along with the sizzling hunger, to silence the voice of my conscience for a little while.
We set off across the dunes in search of those mortal nomads.
3
We passed Vehnfear. The wolf had taken a hare and stood over the motionless animal, lapping the blood from its torn body. He looked up as we trekked past and wagged his tail, a canine grin on his bloody muzzle, and then he returned to his meal, licking its wounds.
We found that we had to keep mostly to the ground to cross this sandy terrain. We could not travel by leaping into the air, as we normally would have done. It was a lesson we learned quickly. We set off as we were wont to do, launching into the air in the usual manner, like silent missiles into the night sky, but when we returned to the earth—as the modern saying goes, what goes up must come down-- the dunes gave way beneath our feet and we quickly found ourselves enveloped, buried in drifts of cold sand like children in a snow bank. We were all quite startled, until we had dug ourselves out, and then we couldn’t help but laugh. “I suppose we will have to walk,” I said, brushing sand from my hair, and so we walked. Here and there, the ground was firm, or we could leap from stone to stone, but the dunes were impossible to fly across. In the desert, we had to travel as mortal men must travel.
Because we could not fly, it was nearly dawn when we took our sleeping prey. The nomads had camped for the night in an oasis, a pool of fresh water surrounded by verdant vegetation. It was a paradise fenced by hell, its greenery a shocking incongruity amid the rolling dunes, but we did not have time to wonder at it, or at the hump-backed creatures the nomads kept as slaves beasts.
We converged upon our victims—the smell of age and infirmity is very conspicuous to vampires—and jerked them from their oddly shaped tents. An old woman. A man whose internal organs were diseased. Eris took the burly man who was unlucky enough to be standing guard that night. He was neither old nor sick, but we had no choice in the matter. The moon was too bright, and the guard too attentive. Besides, Eris acted before I could stop him, wrestling the man down with a palm clapped over his mouth. We made away with our victims as quickly as we could, and fed on them in a rocky outcrop halfway between their camp and our new cave dwelling.
I fed from the old woman, who did not fight me but seemed to think I was some merciful divinity. She smiled and called me abuella. The word came out of her pruned lips on a little puff of condensed moisture—the nights are very cold in the Gobi—and she held the back of my head as I suckled at her throat.
“Abuella,” she sighed, a throaty laugh. “Ahhhh… abuella.”
I drained her until the fragile membranes of her eyelids fell to her cheeks and did not stir again, and then I laid her gently aside.
I would find out later that abuella meant “medicine maker”. It was her people’s word for doctor.
Death, I suppose, is the universal cure.
The old man was not so eager to pass into the Ghost World. He fought against Zenzele until she was forced to break his neck.
He was very strong for a sick man.
She rose up after she had fed, and I watched the mortal blood thread its way through her body. First her veins swelled, pulsating like worms beneath her shriveled skin, and then her flesh plumped and took on their normal supple contours. She licked her lips, sighing sensuously, head craned back so that she could peer up at the heavens, and then she used her fingers to scoop the blood that had spilled down her chin and breasts and brought it to her mouth.
As she sucked her fingers with an ecstatic expression on her face, I felt the mortal blood in me shift its flow. My organ stiffened and rose up, throbbing. I was helpless to prevent it.
“I had forgotten how good human blood tastes,” Zenzele whispered. She came to me as I stood there staring at her and threw her arms upon my shoulders. “Did the old woman taste good?” she breathed, gazing into my eyes. Her breath smelled of fresh blood. Her teeth were slick and pink.
Before I could reply, she put her lips on mine and sought the answer on my tongue. Our fangs scraped lightly together and she bit down on my lower lip, tasting the old woman’s blood mixed with mine. I gasped in pain and pleasure, and didn’t notice that she’d untied my loincloth until my rigid member pressed between her cool thighs, bare skin to bare skin.
“What are you doing?” I asked as she pushed me toward the ground.
“Quiet!” she hissed.
Eris and Bhorg watched, their eyes gleaming in the predawn light, as Zenzele pressed me onto my back and then mounted me.
“I had nearly forgotten how good your cock feels inside me, too,” she said. “It has been too long.”
I arched my back in ecstasy as Zenzele rode me, and found myself staring into the old woman’s lifeless eyes. I jerked my gaze away, though shame did not deflate my ardor to any great degree. One becomes inured to death rather quickly as a vampire.
Bhorg and Eris finished their meal and joined us. I thought for a moment that I might be too jealous to allow it, but I felt no urge to turn them away.
Just like the old days, I thought, and a tingle of excitement wriggled in my belly.
My people had celebrated the summer and winter solstices with wild and drug-fueled orgies when I was a mortal man. It was something I’d always looked forward to when I was alive. That night, we celebrated as the River People celebrated. We celebrated our continued survival. We had outrun Khronos’s hunters yet again, we had eluded him once more, and so we rejoiced. I even mated with Eris briefly-- at Zenzele’s insistence.
She pressed m
e upon the hermaphrodite, urging me on, saying go on, do it, my love, put it inside him with an intense expression on her face. Eris opened his legs to me, his strange organ moist and welcoming. His clitoris, ensconced in folds of pale flesh, jutted out like a small and misshapen penis. I slid myself into the cold sleeve of his sex, and then Zenzele bit into my neck and Shared the experience with me.
I imagined I could feel her mind in mine, her eyes peering from the inside of my skull, and for some reason it enflamed me; it spurred me to greater passion. I performed for her-- her surrogate cock-- while Bhorg took Zenzele from behind, a privilege she had denied him until then.
And then we switched up, and Bhorg lay down upon Eris while I mounted Zenzele beside them.
Don’t worry. I shan’t bore you with all the grisly details. I know how squeamish some of you modern mortals can be about sex. Personally, I’ve never understood such squeamishness. I don’t think I’ll ever understand it, but believe me when I tell you, I’ve received enough scolding emails from outraged readers to know when to fast forward a scene. Suffice it to say, it was an invigorating interlude. Lovemaking can be a great balm to nerves worn raw by adversity, even for immortals, and when we were spent, we felt much more at ease, and much closer to one another. Call it a bonding experience.
We returned to our shelter, trudging across the dunes in the morning light, shading our eyes from the glaring sun as best we could. Goro and the Orda were already asleep. I could tell by the plumpness of their features—and their satisfied expressions—that they had fed.
Smelled like goat.
They had made a fire before retiring. It burned low now, coals popping intermittently. I lay down beside it, and Zenzele next to me. Vehnfear rose and trotted over to us. The wolf lapped our faces in greeting, then settled down at our heads. I shifted so that I could rest my head upon the animal’s flank, and he gave me an amenable lick, as if to say, All right, my friend, but just this once. A moment later, Eris joined us.
He grinned at me sheepishly as he slipped next to Zenzele. I sighed, but it was good sigh. Zenzele put her cheek upon my chest, and Vehnfear harumphed, and then I closed my eyes.
4
I do not dream often. Sleep, for me, is like Poe’s little slices of death, an insensate darkness into which I plummet, like a stone into a lightless shaft, the very moment I close my eyes, and it has been that way since the night I was made into an immortal, with very few exceptions.
But I dreamed that day.
They were not my dreams. They were the dreams of the god king of the vampires. I had stolen a taste of Khronos’s blood during our battle in Fen’Dagher, and so a little of his soul had taken up residence in my mind, like a rat in a cellar.
When I slip into my deathlike slumbers, that little piece of his soul is free to roam the chambers of my mind, a disembodied spirit drifting through the winding halls of some forsaken castle. He is there now, along with all the others I have Shared with throughout the millennia, a little more contentious than the rest certainly, but nothing to worry too much about. He is an impotent revenant, a figment of my imagination, unable to cause even the tiniest twitch of a finger when I am asleep, much to his frustration.
But I was speaking of my dream—or perhaps I should say his dream.
It is hard to describe the dream, mainly because his mind is so hard to describe. He was not fully human, the God King of the blood drinkers. Not even very much like us, his immortal descendants.
When the Strix, that terrible alien ovum, merged with the mortal Khronos, they became one being, but they were not perfectly joined. They were not a smoothly blended whole. The God King’s mind was like a violent whirlpool, a swirling vortex of red and black currents. The reds were the remnants of his human personality. The blacks were the remainders of its alien intellect. Those two disparate fragments orbited the insatiable void that was the heart of their fused minds, and that rapacious maelstrom was the Hunger, which howled unceasingly and without thought at the center of their conjoined souls.
I dreamed that I was trapped in an alien world, an ugly disjointed universe where everything was unnaturally separate and discrete. This world did not blend smoothly from one thing to another, as was the natural way, and everything was maddeningly solid. The ground did not yield beneath my feet. The mountains did not bleed into the heavens. Even the water, the lifeblood of this world, the thing most like the universe from which I’d been ripped, flowed around my body when I plunged into it, rather than passing though it. When it wept down from the heavens, it did so in a million distinct globules, tiny rondures that raced down the flesh of my host, touching but never joining with it.
This alien world was a desolate prison, a place with air so poisonous I had to hide within the body of the native creature I had taken as my host. If exposed for very long, the chemistry of its atmosphere would take me apart, particle by agonized particle. Only in the hollowed out body of my host was I safe from the corrosive nature of this world, and the blood of the creatures who roamed this strange realm was the only substance that was safe for me to eat. The only substance that could actually nourish me.
I had a name once, an identity, and a place in the collective mind of my world, but I had lost all of those things when I was torn from heaven and cast down to this hell. Name, self, soul, all had been stripped away from me when the universe ruptured and sucked me from my home. All that remained was instinct and hunger, the drive to consume and reproduce, to devour and be devoured. It was the natural order of things, the way the world was supposed to be, mirrored only faintly by the lifecycle of this alien world.
Running concurrently with the Strix’s wordless presence was the God King’s mortal thoughts. They were more familiar, yet somehow just as alien, bereft of any kindness or human compassion. Khronos’s mind was like stone, broken to jagged shards by the circumstances of his life. He was driven by ambition and greed, sought only to conquer and possess. The domination of others was the only thing that gave him pleasure, whether it be the domination of his enemies, or the domination of the women he claimed from time to time as his mates.
The conditions of his mortal life had made him this way, as coal is made into diamond, by millennia of unceasing pressure. But excuse is not expiation, and even as I dreamed their ravenous dreams, I knew that I must destroy them.
Their chance encounter, and the terrible thing they had become because of their joining, threatened to consume the whole world, and all that I loved with it: Zenzele, Ilio, and my mortal descendants, the Tanti. To save them I would have to depose the king, destroy our unholy father, and bring his rule to an end.
But how?
That was the question pulsing in my brain when I awoke.
How do I kill that which is unkillable?
5
I confess I am no military genius. To put it in the modern vernacular, I am a lover, not a fighter. I had only the vaguest notion of how I might raise an army to fight the God King, and I was clueless when it came to things like battle tactics and strategy. I had spent the bulk of my mortal life in the pursuit of comfort and earthly pleasures. Food, sex, my mates, my children, those were the things that concerned me when I was a living man. I had fought, as all men must do at some point in their lives, but never without provocation, and I’d never derived any satisfaction from it. My experiences with warfare consisted of chasing the Foul Ones through our territory in the valley, trooping to the Cave of the Grey Stone People to do battle with my maker (and you know how that turned out), and my fight with the Oombai.
Luckily, I had Zenzele.
Zenzele had served as Khronos’s chief slaver in the Western Dominions for hundreds of years. Perhaps so much as a thousand. I was not too certain of her exact age, only that she was slightly less ancient than I. In many ways, my beloved was timeless, much like the continent that gave birth to her, and she had sharpened her battle skills on the whetstone of those countless years. More importantly, she had a warrior’s spirit. Combat made her eyes blaze,
her blood sing, where conflict had only ever left me cold and full of regrets. She enjoyed testing her mind and her might against the strength of her opponents, where I would rather everybody get along. If not for her, I would have had no chance of defeating the God King. Even with her at my side, the odds of our success did not look favorable, but I had to try. I couldn’t just turn my back and let Khronos devour the world.
We stayed there in Mongolia for many months, in that cave at the edge of the Gobi. I initially thought to recruit some of the desert tribes in the region to our cause, or at least ally ourselves with them. Perhaps increase our numbers by making some of them immortal, if any of their warriors were inclined to throw their lot in with us. My plans were nebulous at best. As I said, I am no tactician. But even that tentative first step presented several unexpected challenges.
Our first roadblock was language. We were far beyond the eastern boundaries of the God King’s dominions. The language of these desert folk was a complete enigma to us. The Orda called it bird-talk, and that was indeed how it sounded to me, gabbling and nonsensical. We observed one band of desert folk for nearly a week, listening to their conversations, trying to make sense of what they were saying. It was not easy to conceal ourselves from them because there was nothing to conceal ourselves in—no trees, no bushes, just sand and rocks, and wherever we went we left marks in the grit. It was not long before the nomads we were observing began to suspect they were being watched and became very quiet and watchful themselves. Their watchfulness stymied our efforts to learn their tongue, and without language, there was no way we could make ourselves, and our cause, known to them.
There were many challenges: finding enough prey to keep our blood hunger satisfied, moving in the desert undetected, the extremes of the climate-- roasting heat in the day, freezing cold at night—but language was the rock that blocked our path.
The Oldest Living Vampire Betrayed (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 4) Page 22
