The chieftains of the Gobi, those who did not take the blood, swore to aid us in our war with the God King, should his forces ever come so far east. They called Zenzele and I the Mother and the Father. They bowed down to us. Let their veins in sacrifice to us, and I allowed it, for our troops needed the nourishment, and it was the only way we could convince them to fight for their world, to fight the God King.
It was just as Zenzele had said. We had to become gods. We had to trick mankind into saving itself.
At last the time came to journey west. With our numbers, we need no longer run from the hunters the God King sent for us. After one final conclave between my army of the undead and the mortal tribes of the Gobi, we set off from the big desert, marching toward the Ural Mountains, which we had decided to make our new headquarters. Several groups of mortal warriors trailed after us, accompanied by their women and children. Those men had refused the living blood but still wanted to fight with us, and we allowed that, too, but for their safety we kept them at a distance.
Zenzele sensed that another band of warriors had been dispatched from Uroboros to engage us, and we marched forward to meet them, determined at long last to fight back.
“Their number is greater than Khronos has ever sent before,” Zenzele said, “but we outnumber them almost two to one. We should have no trouble defeating them.”
And she was right. We laid an ambush for them in a dense forest in Eastern Russia, concealing our true numbers from them until it was too late, until they had fallen into our trap and there was no hope for them. At my cry, my army descended on the Uroborans, and though our enemy was well trained, it was over for them in moments.
Walking amidst the broken bodies of my enemies, I said to Zenzele, “How many of our own did we lose?”
Zenzele smiled. “Only one.”
“Just one?” I asked, surprised.
“We have trained them well,” she said.
“And so it begins,” I murmured, nudging the head of a fallen enemy with my toe. The man had died with an expression of great surprise on his face, mouth agape, eyes bulging like a fish. Already the flesh of his head was decomposing as the living blood devoured him from within. I watched his skin shrivel to the bone, his eyes sink into darkness. A sound come from his skull that reminded me of the sound of sand sliding down the side of a dune. A low hissing sound.
“Khronos will send twice as many when these men do not return to Uroboros,” Zenzele said.
“So we recruit more,” I replied. “And quickly.”
How easy it was to kill once it had begun. How easy it was to put aside my moral code.
We seduced the tribes of Eastern Russia as we had the people of the Gobi, doubling our forces, and then doubling that. We forged an alliance with several bands of blood drinkers, too, some who were expatriates of Uroboros, blood drinkers like me who had rejected the God King and the parasitic society he had created at Fen’Dagher.
One of these was an immensely powerful Eternal who called himself Drago. He was a tall, muscular man with long raven black hair and icy gray eyes. He had once been a clan master, until Khronos became desirous of his mate and sought to take her for himself. When Drago and his woman objected to their master’s overtures, Khronos sent his personal guard for them, intending to quarter the Eternal and force the woman to his side. The woman, Hannan, was destroyed in the melee. Drago barely escaped, and swore vengeance on his former king.
It all transpired many hundreds of years before Zenzele arrived at the city of the blood gods, so she did not know this Drago, but he was willing enough to Share with us. After that, our bond was forged by blood.
Drago was impressed by the army I had gathered, and eager to join our cause. “At long last, I will have vengeance on that leech,” he crowed, his eerie eyes sparking. “I will see him laid low, and avenge my beloved Hannan!” There were half a dozen blood drinkers in his coven. A couple of them departed, wanting no part of our dispute with the God King, but the others, loyal to their leader, joined with him.
“Now we are four Eternals,” Zenzele said. “That is a good thing. That increases the odds in our favor just a little more.”
12
Superstitious beliefs have a viral nature. They spread like a living organism, infecting all who come into contact with them. Do not ask me why this is so for superstition and not for kindness or reason. I cannot give you an answer to that other than the theory I’ve put forth already in these memoirs: that men are irrational creatures who seek to distract themselves with comforting lies from the harsh truths of their existence. I do not say this to judge, for I do not judge. How can I? I, who am as immune to natural death as I am to disease and the ravages of old age. I have no right to judge anyone. Death is a frightening thing for sentient beings who have no way of knowing if this life is all there is or not. It is no wonder mortal men and women find the promise of eternal life so irresistible.
We knew this. We knew the yearnings of mortal man. How they sought to ease their existential pain. So we gave to them ourselves, the Mother and the Father, we gave them gods, we gave them answers, we gave them comfort, and we used them. We used them to spread the legend of the Mother and the Father. We used them to grow our army.
We needed soldiers, and we needed mortals to support us in our crusade against the God King. We needed their belief, and we needed their blood, and so I tolerated my deification. In fact, I encouraged it.
There is no man more willing to die than one who believes his cause to be holy. It was a truth Zenzele had tried to make me see time and time again, and one that I was very reluctant to accept, but accept it I did… at the end. I had to, and I justified my duplicity by convincing myself that the ends justified the means, that I was doing it for the greater good, and I was, I really was, but the sin (if you believe in such a thing) is the same either way, and the smell of it no sweeter.
So I became a god for them. Again, I became a god.
The River People had made a god of me. They had called me Thest-U’un-Mann, the Ghost Who is a Man. The Tanti had made a god of me as well. Thest, the god of the winds. Both times I had resisted. “I am no god!” I asserted, over and over again, but I finally accepted the mantle of godhood. I knew I had to embrace it if I ever hoped to defeat Khronos.
If I meant to win this war, if I meant to save mankind, I would have to wield my godhood like a weapon.
Together, Zenzele and I gave birth to an army of vampires, and those vampires needed blood. What better way to provide them with their nourishment than to convince our mortal followers that the gods demanded sacrifice-- that their menial offenses could be washed away with an offering of blood? It was a good scam, one that provided plenty of blood for our t’sukuru troops. In fact, I was surprised how well the deceit worked. Our mortal allies were all too eager to cut open their veins and drain their blood for us. They did it to assuage their guilt. Mortals, I have found, are quite vulnerable to guilt. They feel shame at the smallest of imagined infractions, and it causes them an inordinate amount of stress until they are able to release it.
Well, we provided them a very useful way to relieve themselves of guilt.
It was so very easy to delude them!
Mortals are also quite impressed by the healing of sickness. Infirmity and death are terribly frightening to creatures beholden to mortality, so I made a practice of healing our living allies of their injuries. In return for their fealty, they were allowed each evening to bring their sick and injured into my presence-- an audience, if you will-- whereupon I would embrace their suffering brethren, place my mouth upon theirs, and then, with all the accouterments of ritual, heal them of their ailments.
Our mortal followers never failed to be impressed. They did not know that I was merely biting my tongue and transferring a tiny portion of the ebu potashu into the sick ones’ mouths. Not enough to change them. Just enough to heal their injuries. And when the number of the sick and injured became too great for me to see to personally, I created a “prie
sthood” of vampires to minister to them in my stead. I called them my abuellas, and Neolas took the position of High Priest, a job for which he was uniquely well suited.
By then we had inhabited the Urals once again. We had made a fortress city of it. The mountain range had come to be called the Holy Mountains by the mortal pilgrims who came to worship us there, or to be healed or join our armies of mortal and immortal warriors. The God King sent his fighters again and again to assail us, but we destroyed them every time, or sent them fleeing back to their master. We created there a counterpart to Fen’Dagher, only in our mountain-city we revered life and the living, and the mortals were our equals.
Just as in the God King’s city, the mortals settled in the valley at the foot of the mountain in which Zenzele and I dwelled. They called our mountain peak Asharoth, and their mortal settlement below Penthos, which meant, respectively, “god-mount” and “feet”.
Yes, I declared myself a god! Throughout your mortal history, vampires have often posed as gods. Why else would the sacrifice of blood be such a recurring theme?
Ah, that old swindle-- the expiation of sin by blood sacrifice!
And do not forget the promise, always the same promise: immortality in exchange for devotion. Only in those days it was a promise we could make good on, quite literally, and not just some vague promise of a continuing existence in the afterlife, which you’re probably going to have regardless of what deities you bow down to in this life. I’ve seen ghosts. This corporeal existence is not all there is.
Your race has been huckstered by vampires for thousands of years, and not just by me. Your history is replete with emperors and messiahs, conquerors and kings who were, in fact, vampires.
In my defense, I did it for your own good. I did not want to do it. I do not like to lie, or pretend to be something that I am not, and I am definitely no god. I am just a mortal man who, by chance, was infected by an alien parasite, a thing not born of this world. I am not even truly immortal, for all things have their season in our universe. Worlds freeze over. Stars explode. Whole galaxies collapse into the grinding maw of the singularity at their core.
The ruse wore on me. I’m sure it would have driven me mad were it not for the presence of my beloved Zenzele. Zenzele had a stabilizing effect on my psyche. She is so practical, and has not a whit of patience for self-pity or doubt. And, of course, I was obsessed with destroying Khronos. That single-mindedness shielded me, I think, from some of the guilt I would have felt at what I was being forced to do to preserve the human race.
I hope I have not, for the sake of brevity, made you think that all of this happened quickly. Decades had passed since the night that Zenzele took me captive in the Tanti forest. It took us a little over five years to make the journey from the Gobi Desert to the Urals, for we were constantly recruiting for our cause. Forging alliances. Making more vampires. Training our troops for battle. It took nearly a decade, once we arrived in the Urals, to fortify our mountain settlement, and for a handful of mortal communities to coalesce at the foot of Asharoth.
It did not happen quickly, not as I’ve described it perhaps, but once Usus and his fellows joined us, and we began to make some progress with the people of the Gobi, our cause gathered momentum, and that momentum continued to build until finally it seemed we were all just flotsam caught in the wake of some great and powerful craft, helpless to do more than point it roughly in the direction we wanted it to go.
Bhorg had taken control of my armies, acting as a sort of prehistoric general. He saw to their training and made sure they were fed and housed. He did this under the supervision of Zenzele, whom he never questioned, and with the assistance of Goro and the Eternal Drago, not to mention Hammon and Morgruss and Usus. Neolas, as I said before, had taken the position of high priest of my Abuellas, and saw to the wellbeing of the mortals who had allied themselves with us. He also carefully fostered the religious movement we had spawned. Every day more pilgrims arrived at the foot of our mountain. They came to escape the God King’s predations. They came to see the Mother and the Father. They came to be healed. Neolas, who Shared with any mortal he fed from, developed a keen understanding of the human mind. He became a master of manipulation, and kept the fire of our mortal worshippers’ zeal burning hot and bright.
And what did I do?
I was the heart of the beast, I suppose. I was its conscience. More importantly, I was the only one of us who had Shared with the God King. I knew his thoughts. I knew them because a part of his soul dwelled within mine. Not even Zenzele knew him as I knew him-- of his depravity, of the lengths he would go to to have a thing he wanted. She thought she knew his mind, but she was a pragmatic woman, and though she could be ruthless and single-minded when she had to be, she would pursue a thing only so far as it was worthwhile, and so long as it didn’t compromise her essential being. Khronos was like a dog. He would eat until he vomited, then eat his own vomit so that no other dogs could partake of what was his. He would sacrifice anything and everything so that his every want was satisfied. That was not a thing that Zenzele would ever understand, nor expect of him. Such excess. Such destructive self-indulgence. And that was why I was important to our cause-- my insight into the God King’s personality, and what I knew he would become if left to his own devices.
And lest you think that I had forsaken the Tanti completely, know that this was not so. As soon as I had the power to do so, I sent scouts to find my mortal descendants. I sent spies to Fen’Dagher to see if the God King had taken them captive. There were days I was driven to distraction worrying about my immortal child Ilio and my mortal offspring, the Tanti. If I could have abandoned my place in Asharoth, I would have went in search of them myself.
I will hear news of them soon, I told myself. They will come to Asharoth, as so many others have come, seeking refuge from the God King.
But there was no news. They did not come. Ilio and the Tanti had vanished, as if they had fallen off the edge of the world. They had abandoned the village, as I had told him they must do. They had gone south. But that is all that our scouts, the best trackers we had, were ever able to report.
And the spies I sent to Fen’Dagher never returned.
13
I do not like to ponder just how much Khronos and I were alike, or perhaps I was more influenced by our Sharing than I gave it credit, but it was probably no coincidence that we both planned a full assault on our respective enemies at nearly the same time. Only the God King was a little hungrier for the battle than I. He attacked first.
I had summoned my closest advisors to my mountaintop dwelling, a large cave near the summit of Asharoth: Zenzele, Goro, Bhorg, and the Eternal Drago. Hammon and Eris, Neolas and Usus, and several other competent blood drinkers who had more recently come into my service, were also in attendance. They sat in a rough circle around my hearth, its flames low and crackling that night. We met to discuss the practicality of launching an assault on Uroboros. More specifically: the likelihood that such an assault would be successful. It was early spring in the twenty-first year following my flight from Uroboros.
Bhorg believed we should attack, and the sooner the better. The giant was confident his forces would triumph over the God King’s minions.
Neolas agreed, saying that if Khronos were only half as depraved as we knew him to be, a significant number of his subjects would turn upon him the moment the outcome of the assault seemed in doubt.
“Especially his mortal slaves,” Neolas said. “I have Shared with a few who have managed to escape Fen’Dagher. They live there in abject misery and terror. Their hatred for Khronos knows no bounds. They will rise against him the moment we attack.”
Drago, as always, was eager for revenge on Khronos, and volunteered to lead the assault himself.
Zenzele was not so certain.
“I believe an attack now would be premature,” she said. “We should bide our time a little longer, increase our numbers, insure that we have trained our warriors as thoroughly as possible b
efore we move against the God King. If we attack now, we will have to throw all of our forces at the God King’s troops if we are to have any hope of succeeding. And if they fail, we will be vulnerable to a counter attack.”
“I agree with Zenzele,” Goro said. He turned to look up at me as I paced around their circle, stroking my beard. “We have waited this long. What is another season?”
“Three times Khronos has thrown his armies against us this past winter,” I said, “and three times we have defeated them or turned them back. The part of his soul that resides within me is mad with frustration. He will attack in full force soon. He will not be able to help himself.”
“So we wait,” Zenzele said vehemently, glaring around at her fellow counselors. “Allow him to make the mistake you are all too willing to make. Let him spend his forces on a futile attack, then he will be the one vulnerable to a counterattack!”
“The question is,” Hammon said thoughtfully, “is it wiser to wait and allow him to come to us, or is it wiser to attack him first, and hope his people rise up against him? It is difficult to defend our mortal allies against his hordes. They always target the mortal settlements when they attack. They know it is our weakness.”
As it turned out, the question was moot.
Even as they sat in circle around my hearth, debating the matter, a startled expression came upon Zenzele’s face. She leapt suddenly to her feet, too surprised at first to voice her alarm. Her lips moved, but no sound issued from her mouth.
“Beloved,” I said, “what is the matter?”
She blinked at me, her eyes wide, and then she sputtered, “It is too late, my love! He has already sent them!”
“What?” I said, walking swiftly toward her. “What do you mean?”
The Oldest Living Vampire Betrayed (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 4) Page 25
