“And what of your abandonment?” Ilio demanded. “You could have come looking for us after you fled from Uroboros, but you didn’t. You deserted us!”
“I had no choice,” I said to him. “I did not wish to lead them to the Tanti. Or to you. I wanted to seek you out, find you and rejoin you, but--”
“It is your fault the Tanti were endangered in the first place,” Ilio interrupted. “There would be no war if you hadn’t betrayed the God King. He would have accepted us. He would have protected the Tanti in return for your fealty, but that wasn’t good enough for you, was it? You wanted to usurp his throne. You wanted to remake Uroboros in your image.”
“That is not true!”
“I have seen it!” Ilio shouted. “Khronos Shared with me! I saw the memories that he took from you! You attacked him without provocation! You tried to tear off his head!”
“Because I saw what would become of his empire—“
“We should rule this world,” Ilio said. “We are gods!”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. It was all I could say. Over and over again. “No, no, no…”
“Priss got sick after you abandoned us.” The heat of his hatred had exhausted him. He spoke softer now, unable to meet my gaze. “She was dying. I gave her the living blood to save her. I thought it had worked. She was strong again for a while. She was a blood drinker like me. We raised our mortal daughters as if we were a living couple. But she began weaken again after just a few cycles of the seasons. The blood began to devour her from within, as it does to mortals who are feeble when they are made. We decided to journey to Uroboros. We thought that some blood drinker here might know what had become of you, or how we might cure her. She was dying when we arrived in Uroboros. Dying again. The God King gave her his own blood. He tried to save her, but it was not enough.”
He looked up, his cheeks bloody with tears.
“If a powerful blood god had given her the potashu when she was a living woman, she would not have died,” he said. “My blood was too weak to change her well. It is because of you she died. Because you deserted us.”
“He lies!” I cried, pointing my finger at Khronos.
Khronos’s guards stepped forward, lowering their bladed staffs at me, fearful I would attack their liege in my anger. The God King’s court erupted into outrage. They shouted for my destruction. “Tear him apart! Rip out his blasphemous tongue!”
Ilio rose. He snatched one of the bladed weapons from a guard’s hands. “It is you who lie, Gon!” he hissed through his teeth, and then he swept back the bladed staff and swung it forward with all his might.
7
If Ilio had been a more powerful blood drinker, he probably would have cleaved me in two. But he was not. The blade sliced into my shoulder diagonally and caught against my spine. Still, it was enough to drive me to my knees, or perhaps it was really shock that stole the strength from my legs, shock that Ilio had attacked me. No parent can ever quite believe it when a child strikes them in anger. And make no mistake, Ilio was my son. He might not have been the fruit of my loins, but I loved him as much as I loved any of my children, and his betrayal shattered my spirit. It was not Khronos who defeated me that night, it was my son.
I tried to tell him I was sorry, but I choked on the blood that gushed up into my throat. I fell forward onto my hands and knees, and more blood pattered onto the stones beneath me. Ilio wrenched the blade from my upper torso and a great gout of it splashed the floor. I would heal, but it was a grave injury. It would take a moment or two.
But Khronos did not intend to give me that moment.
He leapt up in triumph and roared, “Tear him apart!”
I lashed out as dozens of brutal hands seized me, but I was lifted from the ground before I could do any damage to my attackers. I writhed as they bore me up, hissing and kicking and trying to twist out of their grip. All around me were contorted white faces, glaring eyes and sharp champing fangs.
My right arm made a horrid crunching sound and my hisses turned to howls of agony as the bone came out of the socket. I could feel my enemies pulling me in several different directions at once. A snarling Eternal had seized my broken right arm and he twisted it completely around and yanked. With a sound like a melon being ripped in half, the entire limb came free of my torso. The Eternal fell back with my flopping right arm and then held it up like a prize and went dancing across the chamber, laughing and swinging it around.
They tore off my left arm and then I was thrown down on my back and they seized ahold of my upper body and ripped my legs off, too. Maddened by the pain, I tried to bite the ankles dancing around my crippled body. I saw Ilio for an instant between my capering enemies. He had withdrawn and was watching them tear me apart with a hand clamped over his mouth.
“Bring me his head!” the God King commanded, and my head was ripped away from my neck.
Please, ancestors, let this be the end of me, I prayed. Let me die!
The throne room of the God King swayed like a ship in a storm as my head was passed to the hands of my enemy. He held me up and grinned at me, his fangs curled over his bottom lip, his eyes ablaze with savage glee.
“Oh, the fun we are going to have with you, Gon of the River People!” he crowed. “But my victory is not quite complete. Not yet. Witness, Gon, my crowning triumph!”
The room spun around, and there stood Ilio, gaping at me in abject horror. I could see the remorse on his face, and the fear. It was the expression of a boy who has awakened to find a serpent in his bedding.
“Kill the boy!” the God King commanded. “Kill the usurper’s son!”
I couldn’t speak, but I could mouth the words. I’m sorry, Ilio, I said to him silently. Be brave.
My beautiful, headstrong boy. I had loved him and I had wronged him, and now I would watch him perish.
The fear passed from his countenance. His shoulders fell and he nodded and closed his eyes.
I tried to close my own eyes, but Khronos used his fingers to hold them open.
“Oh, no you don’t! You will watch your boy die!” he snarled.
They seized him. They took my son in their hands and began to tear him apart. My son! He fell in one direction and then another as they tugged him to and fro. At the last second, Ilio opened his eyes. He reached out to me and cried, “Father!” and then some brutal Master ripped his head from his shoulders.
A moment later, his body fell to dust.
8
I do not have the time, nor the inclination, to tell you all the awful things the God King did to me, the terrible games he played with me, the torments I endured. Eventually he tired of his sport, and he commanded the pieces of my body taken to the remotest corners of his kingdom and hidden, all save my head, which he intended to keep for a trophy.
“Cast the pieces into the darkest pits you can find,” he commanded his Clan Masters. “Bury them in the most remote jungles. The deepest rivers. Let no one see where you have hidden them, and tell no one—not even I—the countries you have crossed to carry out my order.”
Shortly after they departed, he took my head and carried it to the great wall that surrounded the city. They made a parade of it, a festival. Mortal women cast flower petals on the ground before his feet. There was singing and dancing. Even the inhabitants of the Shol were given a respite from their miseries that day.
Holding my head aloft, Khronos strode through the city. He marched to the great wall and climbed onto the wall walk. He held me high so that all could see what had become of his foe.
“I place you here, above the gates of Uroboros, not because I esteem you as an adversary, Gon of the River People,” the God King purred, holding my head in his hands. “I do this so that you can watch as your precious Tanti are dragged here in captivity. I will find them. I will not rest until I have hunted down every single one of them. They will die here, Gon, in degradation and pain, and you will watch it. You will watch them all die. Only then will my victory be complete.”
And then he stabbed my head upon a pike.
He pumped his fists into the air and the crowd roared.
“This is the fate of all who dare oppose me!” he shouted. “Witness now, mortal and immortal alike, the fate of any who names me enemy! Challenge me and share the fate of Gon, the Divided God!”
Homecoming
When I concluded my tale for the night, the sun was just winking over the wooded peaks of the mountains of my homeland. The Swabian Alb stretched out before us, white and frozen beneath a blue porcelain sky. It didn’t look much like the land of my mortal days. Time and the elements had rounded off its rugged peaks, making them appear from a distance to be very large hills rather than mountains, and the valley was cluttered with the steep brown roofs of mortal dwellings, but it was my home, the place of my birth, and so I loved it.
“You can’t just stop there,” Lukas said beside me, shifting anxiously from foot to foot. “You have to tell me the rest of the story. What happened after Khronos ripped off your head? How did they restore your body? Did Khronos hunt down the Tanti, like he said he was going to do? Come on, man, don’t leave me hanging!”
I laughed a little, forgetting for a moment the anger I had been nursing since his betrayal of my trust. I remembered what he had done to poor Agnes then, and my amusement wilted. I should destroy him for what he’d done to her, but who then would destroy me? And I wanted to die so very, very badly.
“I’ll tell you tonight after we rise,” I said. I nodded thoughtfully. “We’ll finish it tonight. But it’s almost daylight now, and we need to find a hotel. If this is to be my last day on earth, I’d like to start it with a refreshing nap in a warm and comfortable bed.”
Lukas nodded toward the village. “Down there?”
“Where else?”
We started forward, the snow crunching under our boots. The town below was still aslumber, though here and there a pair of headlights navigated the narrow streets. White smoke puffed from every chimney. It was one of those picturesque German villages you see so often in postcards. The river in which I’d once helped our Neanderthal neighbors fish, the river in which I’d spent so many of my childhood days splashing happily about, had dried up long ago. There were a few meandering streams running through the outskirts of the village, but mostly it was pavement and parking lots.
It is not true, you know. That old adage. You can always go home. Just don’t expect it to be the same as when you left it. You’ll be very disappointed.
We walked down into that picturesque village, and we rented a room at a nice hotel. I got us a room with a double bed so that I could keep an eye on my impulsive traveling companion. I wasn’t giving him a chance to destroy another poor woman’s life.
No, that is a lie, too, and I swore to myself I would strive to be as truthful as possible in my memoirs.
I had come too far, sacrificed too much, compromised my own moral code too many times, to allow Lukas to jeopardize my plans. I would be dead soon, and Lukas free to run amok, so I cannot say that I was too much concerned about the misery of others. Not anymore. I just didn’t want him to endanger my plans.
He is sleeping now, lying on his side facing the wall, knees drawn up very nearly to his chest. The posture of his slumber is very illuminating. It is perhaps my greatest sin that I have chosen to use him and his madness rather than do what is right and simply destroy him, put him out of his misery like the rabid dog he is.
But I cannot.
I am ready to join my loved ones in the afterlife. I am ready to meet my Maker. I am lonely. I am disillusioned. I am very simply tired.
So very, very tired.
In just a moment I will finish the last chapter of my memoirs, I will send the entire document to my mortal editor in America, and then I will go and lie down in the big comfortable bed I have rented for the day. Tonight, after I rise, I will tell Lukas the rest of my story, and then I will climb up into the mountains, find a spot with a good view of the land where I was born, and bid my companion to destroy me.
I hope I can sleep today. I hope I have pleasant dreams. Most of all, I hope, tonight, to die.
All my love,
Gon
The Oldest Living Vampire
To be concluded in volume five
The Oldest Living Vampire Unleashed
About the Author
Joseph Duncan lives in Metropolis, Illinois with his wife, his kids, and all the voices in his head. If you’d like to contact Mr. Duncan, you may do so at [email protected]. You can also friend him on Facebook, or visit his blog Red Ramblings.
The Oldest Living Vampire Betrayed (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 4) Page 29
