“There are already so many dead,” she sobbed. “My daughter!”
Even running at top speed, we were two weeks journey from Asharoth. Then we would have to consolidate our forces. They were spread across half of Eastern Europe, protecting our kingdom. That would take another fortnight, and then we must cross the vast steppes that girdled the stronghold of our enemy-- fighting the God King’s forces the entire way, no doubt. The Tanti were at the God King’s mercy, and Khronos, we all knew, was a merciless being.
My people are lost, I thought.
I held Aioa, trying to encourage her as best I could, but everything I said tasted of lies. The whole time I was trying to comfort her, I was thinking, My people are lost. My people are lost. Trying to accept it. Trying to overcome my own feelings of loss. There was no time for this. No time for mourning or regret. I had duties to perform, people to lead, and I had to do it with as clear a head as possible.
It was hard. I wanted to beat my breast, rage and weep. But I could not. I could not give in as I had done so many times before, as I had done when they took the life of my headstrong Ilio. I could not allow this to break me. There were too many lives at stake. A world to be lost… or saved.
Could the Tanti be saved?
I cannot save them all, I said to myself. But perhaps I can save some of them.
Even one would be a miracle.
“Listen to me, granddaughter,” I said to Aioa. “Your daughter lives, and where there is life, there is hope. But we must be strong. You must be strong. For your daughter. For Meegan. Do you hear me?”
She pulled away from me, looked at me with hopeless eyes. Finally, hesitantly, she nodded. She wiped the blood tears from her cheeks, drew herself up.
“You are right, grandfather,” she said with a sniff. “I am sorry.”
“Never apologize,” I said, helping her to her feet. “Not for love. I will do everything in my power to save the Tanti. To save your daughter. But we do not have the luxury of tears. Not anymore. If we are to save them, even just one, we must harden our hearts. We must put aside our gentler concerns. Our mortal concerns. We must become gods of war. For only a god can defeat a god.”
The others had gathered around while I consoled my granddaughter. Sunni and Eris, Drago, Rayna... They had encircled us protectively, their faces somber. Even Drago, who lived only for battle, partook of our grief.
Sunni, the immortal child, stepped forward to stroke Aioa’s arm. The little Eternal smiled up at my grandchild, face dirty as always, hair all a-tangle. “I will help you save your daughter,” she said.
“And I,” Eris said.
“I, as well,” said Rayna.
The others echoed the sentiment after their own fashions. Vehnfear wagged his tail and barked.
Aioa nodded to them gratefully, each in their turn. Returning at last to me, she threw back her shoulders with a sniff, the arctic wind whipping through her dark curls. Her eyes blazed green fire. “Well?” she said, with as much bravado as she could muster. “What are we waiting for, old man?”
2
We started across the vast ice sheet, moving as quickly as we could. Because of the treacherous winds and deadly, hidden ice bridges, we could not take to the air as we might normally have done. We had to run, which slowed us tremendously. We were also held up by Chaumas.
Ancient when he took the Blood, and infirm by our vampire standards, the blind blood drinker could not keep up with us and fell further and further behind as we went, even with the assistance of his diminutive maker. Sunni tried to hurry him along, but the old blood drinker was quite thoroughly mad and balked at her rough handling of him. He did not understand why we needed to hurry and laughed nervously and swiped at her with his walking stick as she whipped him on.
Finally, exasperated, I held up my hand, and doubled back to see if there was anything I could do with the cantankerous old blood drinker.
“Chaumas!” I called sternly. “Stop that right now!”
“I’m sorry, Father, I’m doing the best I can!” Sunni said as I approached. She ducked another blow and glared at the blind man. She looked like she wanted to take that walking stick and shove it somewhere unmentionable.
“It’s all right,” I said. “Let me see if I can make him understand. Chaumas? It is I, Gon.”
The old man responded by bonking me on the head with his stick.
“You took my friend away!” he cried petulantly.
He was speaking, of course, of the Eternal Yul. More specifically, Yul’s head. He had made something of a pet of it while we were seeking out the remaining pieces of my body. I had disposed of the old man’s luckless hostage before we started back to Asharoth. Chaumas was reluctant to give it up, but it was such a gruesome thing, and a strategic risk should it fall into the wrong hands. Finally, I just yanked it from his arms, and flung it out across the glacier as far as I could. What I did for the Eternal was probably a kindness. Chaumas, however, was still resentful.
“I am sorry you could not keep the Uroboran, Chaumas,” I said, speaking as if to a child. “But he was our enemy, and if his people ever managed to reclaim his head, his knowledge could be used against us.”
Plus, it was bloody revolting, but I did not say that aloud.
“I miss him,” the old man said. “He was my friend.”
“I understand, and I feel really bad about that, but we must move quickly. The God King’s slavers have captured our friends. We must hurry back to Asharoth if we hope to go and rescue them.”
Chaumas crossed his arms and turned his head away, bottom lip thrust out.
I looked to the others for help, but they weren’t sure what to do with the old man either. And Sunni, his maker, had stomped away to sulk. I did not wish to leave him behind. Blind as he was he might never make it back to Asharoth, and I felt responsible for him. I was responsible for him. I was responsible for them all! They were like my children—and then it struck me! The old man had become child-like in his dotage, even before he was given the Blood. That childishness had carried through the transformation and into his immortal state, along with his blindness. Even if we could convince him to hurry, he would never be able to keep up with the rest of us. But perhaps…
“Maybe I can do something to make up for taking your friend away,” I suggested.
“Oh?” the old man said, cocking his head toward me. “And what is that? A new friend for Chaumas to talk to? He would like that, hee hee!”
“We don’t have any more heads for you to talk to,” I said, “but how would you like to ride on my back?”
I could tell by the way his face lit up that he liked the idea. He liked it very much. My children had loved riding on my back when I was a mortal man. All children do.
“No more heads?” he said, thinking about it, and then he blew through his lips in a dismissive manner. “Who needs heads?” he said. “Chaumas will ride!” The grin that broke across his craggy face was toothless but for his fangs.
He immediately began to fumble at my shoulders, trying to climb onto me.
“Hold on!” I said. “Let me turn so you can ride on my back!”
The old man climbed on as the rest of the group watched with amusement. “Just a moment,” I said, as he kneed me in the kidneys. “Let me—ow!” I tried to steady him, but he was wriggly and awkward, pawing at my face and yanking my hair. In the end, we used the material in which we had wrapped my limbs to construct a kind of cradle carrier. Or a saddle, if you’d like to call it that. It was not very dignified, and everyone seemed quite amused by the solution, but carrying him was the only thing I could think of.
“Are we ready?” I asked the others, when we had the old man strapped securely to my back.
“Ready!” Chaumas exclaimed, legs thrust out to my sides. He cinched a bony arm around my neck, squeezing on my windpipe. Luckily, we vampires do not need to breathe.
“We are ready, grandfather,” Aioa said, smiling at me sympathetically.
“Then let
’s go!” I croaked.
I took off at a run, the old man bouncing on my back.
“Wheeeeeeeeeeeee!” Chaumas cried.
3
We crossed the remainder of the ice sheet without incident, running beneath the wavering green lights of the aurora borealis. I had no difficulty carrying the old man on my back. Unless we have recently fed, we vampires are remarkably light, having no fluid in our bodies but the symbiont that animates our flesh. We also do not tire, not as living men tire, but we do feel hunger, and the more energy we expend the hungrier we get. By the time we came to the leading edge of the ice sheet, its terminus, the hunger was a raging fire within my guts. All I could think about was finding something hot and wet and alive and sinking my fangs into its neck.
In fact, I was ravening for blood. We all were. We had not fed since climbing onto the glacier and we were all looking horrifically malnourished. Skin shriveled to the bones. Eyes bulging from their sockets. Fangs jutting. We had become monstrous scarecrows, mummies with canid grins and fearsome, lambent eyes.
Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on whose perspective you take), there was a small band of seal hunters camped near the base of the glacier, their igloo-like shelters staggered along the seashore. It was dusk, and they were butchering their catch by the last light of day, sweaty, tired, their bodies covered in seal blood. The hides of all the seals they had taken were staked outside the camp. The offal of the butchered animals lay in steaming mounds upon the snow. The coppery aroma of all that blood quite literally pushed us over the edge.
With an inarticulate snarl, I launched myself over the edge of the ice sheet, arms outspread to steer my fall.
I bound from one ice ledge to the next until I landed on the ground, spilling the old man from my back, and then I flew into the camp of the seal hunters with a snarl, tackling the first poor mortal I lay my hands upon.
He didn’t see me coming, had time for just one astonished yelp before I took him to the ground.
I sank my teeth into the dense muscle of his neck, grunting and gnawing in a frenzy of need. I wrenched my head back, nearly decapitating the man, and hot blood exploded in my face. A great fount of blood gushed from his mutilated neck, and I opened my mouth, tongue thrust out, to devour it. Lost in a vermillion haze of ecstasy, I was only dimly aware of the chaos around me.
The rest of our party had descended on the hunters, racing through the camp like a pack of hungry wolves. The air resounded with the snarls of my blood-starved compatriots, the screams of dying men and the gruesome sounds of our feeding. The tearing of flesh. The crackle of breaking bones. Moist slurping and sighs of satisfaction.
I fed from the seal hunter until his heart stopped, and then I crushed his body in my arms, squeezing out every last drop. Stomach sloshing, I rolled on my back and stared dreamily at the darkening sky.
So much for saving mankind.
Eventually, after the blood ecstasy had passed, I rose gingerly to my feet and surveyed the camp.
There were dead bodies strewn everywhere, most with their throats ripped out. A couple of the men had been completely decapitated. Not a single mortal had survived our assault. Even some of their shelters had been knocked over. We had made a fine mess of it. The blood gods of Uroboros couldn’t have done worse.
I walked across the bloody snow to Sunni, who had been run through with a spear. It was a terrific looking wound but posed no real danger to the pintsize Eternal. I bent to remove the weapon before it became fixed in her flesh. The Living Blood will do that if you don’t remove a foreign object quickly enough-- fuse it to your body. If it stayed in there any longer we would have to tear it out.
The shaft of the spear had broken about halfway down its length with the tip of the weapon protruding from her back, but she was so addled by the blood ecstasy she was oblivious to the injury. Eyes glazed, tongue swirling languorously around her crimson smeared lips, she sat beside her victim, scooping up his blood with her fingertips and bringing it to her mouth.
“Hold still,” I said, placing a hand on her shoulder, and then I pulled the spear from her ribs.
The injury healed immediately once I had removed the spear. Her eyes rolled back at me. “Thank you, Father,” she gurgled, and then she returned to her feeding.
The others were similarly preoccupied. So I waited. I sat, crossed my legs, placed my palms upon my knees.
The sun continued its slow, steady descent to the horizon. The sky was as red as the snow I sat upon. I was impatient to continue, but my cohorts needed to feed. They needed the nourishment. They needed to regain their strength. Asharoth was still many days away, and I intended to drive our party just as hard as I could.
I remembered Chaumas then, and went to see if he’d been injured. He had fallen from my back when I flew down from the glacier. I was too crazed for blood at the time to care.
The old blood drinker was fine. He was on his hands and knees at the outskirts of the camp, sucking the blood from the carcass of a seal. He craned his head as I approached, eyes as featureless as pearls in the crenelated flesh of his face. He recognized me by sound and grinned a moony, guileless grin before returning to his meal, grunting and slurping at the animal’s ragged neck.
Everyone was busy, happy, filling their bellies with blood.
I returned to my vigil, contemplating the problem of the Tanti’s captivity. I turned the matter over and over in my mind, examining it from every angle. How do I free my people from the God King, I asked myself. How do I liberate them from Uroboros? Khronos knew who they were, of course. He possessed all of my memories through the Sharing of Blood, as I possessed all of his. He would not kill them immediately. Not all of them. They were far too valuable alive, a powerful bargaining chip he could leverage against me. Their capture was a huge tactical advantage for my enemy, one he had pursued for twenty years, and as cruel as he was, as arrogant and proud, he would not throw such a powerful advantage away, not even in a fit of pique. He would torture them, yes, probably even kill a good number of them, but he would not slaughter the Tanti outright. For now, they were safe—well, as safe as could be expected-- but try as I might I could think of no way to free them. Not without offering myself in their stead, and that wasn’t going to happen again. Once bitten, twice shy, as they say, and never was the adage more appropriate. We vampires coined that phrase, you know.
Vehnfear was the first to come to me. The vampire wolf loped up, muzzle red and tacky with mortal blood, and lapped at my face. I scratched his shaggy neck. “Hello, old man,” I said. “You ready to hit the trail again?” He wagged his tail and sat beside me. He was much more at ease with me now that I had been restored to my true form. As was I. Sitting companionably together, we waited for the others.
Sunni came next, rubbing at her breastbone. Though her injury had healed without a trace, it still hurt. They always do. My own body still ached terribly. At the shoulders, the hips, where my limbs had been rejoined. And it felt like I had a terrible crick in my neck. Though such injuries cannot kill a true immortal, they still hurt, and that pain often lingers for months or even years afterwards. The blood had helped to lessen the pain, but I still felt like an arthritic old man.
“Sunni,” I greeted her.
“Father.”
She wanted to sit beside me but Vehnfear snarled warningly and the little Eternal shied away.
Eris joined us then, and Drago shortly after. Soon we had regrouped, all looking plump and fresh again, like predatory angels, blood-smeared and beautiful. We disposed of the bodies of the seal hunters we’d killed, placing them in their own boats and setting them adrift on the icy Kara Sea. And then we headed south, away from the towering glacier, away from the bloody hunting camp, away from the sky that burned green at night and the ugly, gray, ice-choked sea.
We raced towards home.
We raced to war.
4
The distance from the Kara Sea to Asharoth was some two thousand kilometers. A week’s journey for
us. We did occasionally stop for rest, and we did hunt, though we took no human prey after our feeding frenzy in the camp of the seal hunters—poor souls! It was during our first stop for rest that I asked Aioa if she’d had any more visions of our captive Tanti brethren. I could not stop imagining all the horrible things the God King was doing to them. I knew firsthand what Khronos was capable of.
Aioa shook her head, looking just as miserable as I. “There have been stirrings,” she said. “Twice now I have felt Irema’s presence in my mind, as if she were calling out to me, but I have had no visions.”
I sighed. I had feared as much.
“Before she went to Uroboros, I asked your sister to reach out to you, to practice this talent the two of you share,” I said. “It would be a great advantage if you could master this power. I ask you now to do the same thing. Seek her out with your thoughts. Try to make contact with her. Perhaps, with practice, you can unlock this skill.”
“We tried for many years to strengthen our mind gift after we took the Blood,” Aioa said, looking westward, toward Uroboros. “I know she is out there. I can feel that she is there. But it is as if her power to conceal herself cancels out my power to find hidden things. I know she is there, but I cannot find her.”
I could hear the frustration in her voice. She was very close to tears.
“Just keep trying,” I said gently, taking her hand in mine. “I know you fear for your daughter. I fear for her, too. I fear for all of our people. So set your will upon the task. Let nothing distract you from it. We must do everything in our power to win the Tanti’s freedom.”
She nodded, and then she brought my palm to her lips and kissed it.
“I will, grandfather,” she said. “I promise.”
I nodded. I was not happy, but I was satisfied. At least we were doing something.
I rose and looked around the clearing. “Now… where has Chaumas gone?” I said. “I tell you, Aioa, I will be glad to have that mad fool off my back!”
The Oldest Living Vampire Unleashed Page 13