by J. C. Diem
Light beckoned below after trudging downward in a tight spiral for what seemed like an hour but was probably only a few minutes. At the bottom of the stairs, a single corridor had been hewn into the rock at a height of seven feet. The low ceiling made me feel like ducking even though there was plenty of room. Ishida’s headdress brushed against the ceiling, screeching lightly in protest with each step he took. The weight of the mountain seemed to press down on me.
As we neared the end of the corridor the light grew brighter. Ishida exited then moved aside so the full effect of the cavern wouldn’t be lost on me. Stepping out into the large space, I goggled at the carvings that covered the walls. I had no doubt they were thousands of years old. The style was ancient, almost primitive and the story they told was chilling.
Just like the prophet’s journal and the book I’d stolen from Alexander, the walls told the tale of our beginning. Starting at the right, I studied the carvings. The first was of a gigantic grey skinned being offering its blood to a puny human. The human writhed on the ground for three nights then stood tall and proud. His teeth had turned long and pointy. He shunned the sun, turning from the brightness and favouring the dark. Humans died to feed him as he tore them apart in his blood hunger. Countless women died when his flesh hunger woke next. He created ten of our kind, using his own blood to turn them into monsters like him.
Time passed and he began to gain control of himself. His followers, fated to obey his every command, ceased their indiscriminate killing and began to exercise caution at his order. They formed an archaic type of government with the First as the leader. There was some kind of falling out between him and his followers and they appeared to have been banished.
Then the First began to withdraw from his role as leader. He turned from a straight, proud vampire into a bent, twisted and secretive creature. His shadow began to change, moving independently. The second last carving of the First showed him engulfed by his shadow, mad eyes staring out of the darkness that consumed him. In the next, he had become a smaller copy of the alien demi-god, tall, grey skinned, bat faced and inhuman.
The rest of the carvings were progressively more modern, the last was only several thousand years old. Without their leader, vampires began to squabble. The Japanese broke off and formed their own ruling class. The Europeans turned frivolous, seeking entertainment that was enough to almost make my stomach churn. A carving of a white haired female vampire had to be the Comtesse. She stood over a circle of dozens of supine vampires. I wasn’t the least bit surprised to see her shadow looming over her commandingly.
By contrast, the Japanese sought out great fighters and turned them, eventually creating a vampire nation of warriors. Their nation remained small and controllable.
The only detail missing from the carvings was me. Not a single picture showed anyone wearing the holy marks. If my arrival hadn’t been prophesized by the seer, how had I come to be here?
“I believed it wasn’t wise to note your coming, child,” a female voice said in response to my unspoken question.
Spinning around, I finally saw the seer sitting right in plain sight. The centre of the room was dedicated to a comfortable set of couches. Just like on the surface, a metal brazier sat in the middle of the room. The vampire looking at me with a hint of amusement sat as close as she could to the coals without catching on fire. Instead of being pure black, her pupils and irises were completely white. It was kind of freaky really. “Yes,” she again answered my unspoken question, “I am blind.”
I hid my shudder at her ability to read my mind. Ishida had taken a seat on the couch opposite from the prophet. His expression was faintly disturbed. “Kokoro, are you saying you foresaw Natalie’s arrival?”
She inclined her head and reached inside the pristine white kimono she was wearing. Her hair was long and midnight black but had been carefully twisted into a large bun. Sticks stuck out of it, somehow holding it all in place. Kokoro handed over a book to the emperor.
Ishida took the book with a disturbed glance in my direction and opened it to the back page. Here were the pictures she hadn’t dared to carve on the walls. A female that greatly resembled me stood with her palms facing outwards. On them were the twin holy marks. I glanced at the drawing as I moved to take a seat on the couch sitting between them. I had no doubt that I’d get my chance to read the book.
I only hoped this one held better news for me than the last two books of prophecy had.
Chapter Seventeen
Ishida flicked through the book, reading rapidly and frowning heavily. Answering his unspoken question, Kokoro bowed her head and explained. “You have been Emperor for ten thousand years, Ishida, but I was already ancient long before you were born.”
Ten thousand years? This kid has been in charge for ten thousand years? My eyes bulged at the information. I just couldn’t get past it.
“Our first emperor was a cruel, harsh man,” Kokoro explained. She was talking to me but I believed she was trying to explain herself to her emperor as well. “He brought us to this remote island once we split from the Europeans, ruling us with an iron fist. He captured humans and kept them as slaves, caring not if they lived in their own filth and died of disease.”
I could picture that quite easily. I’d seen something very like it beneath the prophet’s domain in Romania as well as in my dreams of the cavern of doom. That sort of behaviour alone was enough reason for me to wipe out the damned.
“I was once one of those humans, chosen to be a bed mate for the Emperor. Taken with my beauty, he turned me himself before age could ravage me.” She was delicately lovely, if you could overlook her creepy white eyes. “Waking as a vampire, I was instantly stricken blind and beheld a vision of our beginning. I raved of what I saw and what was to come. I saw that our Emperor was tainted and he would eventually enslave his own kind just like he did the humans.” Her shoulders shuddered delicately at the ancient memory. Ishida had clearly never heard this story before and was watching the seer intently.
“A guard who had been left to watch me when I woke told a few of his trusted friends about what I’d foreseen,” Kokoro went on to say. “He saw my white eyes and believed my vision would one day come to pass. Our ruler was already evil and the guard couldn’t bear to think that our people could end up as mere chattel. He and his trusted few fought their way into the Emperor’s bedchamber. The Emperor fought like a man possessed and perhaps he was, by our Father’s blood inside him.” She looked up at Ishida with her blind eyes, seeing past his physical body and directly into his dead heart. “They assassinated him by cutting his head off then were overrun by his loyal guards.”
“I was told the Europeans were behind the assassination,” Ishida said with the stirrings of anger. “Why was I lied to?”
“Not only you were lied to, Ishida. Our entire nation was lied to, to protect them. I could not afford for the truth to be told for fear it would destroy us as a people.”
“You decided?” The kid’s anger was coming out now. “Who are you to make decisions for our people?”
“I am the one who chose the next four Emperors,” she said proudly and Ishida looked stunned. “A secret circle of elders heard about my visions and consulted me. I told them what I had seen and what the future held. I told them that if they did not listen to me then all vampires would be turned into slaves. I advised them who the next Emperor should be and they made sure he was chosen. Then I was given guardianship of this temple and I began to record our history and our future.”
“Why did you not advise the last Emperor of our fate?”
“There would have been no point. He, unlike you, had a closed mind. He would have been unable to see the benefits of befriending Mortis if he had lived long enough for her to rise. You reached this decision without needing to consult me.” She gave him a proud smile that he ignored completely. His ego was well developed and he didn’t require anyone’s approval.
“Do you think our lives are driven by fate?” I asked Kokoro.
“Of course,” she said, inclining her head. “We have very few choices in life and our paths almost always end up the same despite the choices we make.”
Wow, that’s comforting, I thought snidely but I reluctantly agreed with her. I’d tried to run from my fate and had ended up as a science experiment. On the bright side of that experiment, I was now invincible, or pretty close to it.
“What is it you would have me do?” Ishida asked. For him it was almost humble but a hint of childish petulance remained. He was used to being the boss and making all the decisions. Finding out that he might not have ultimate power would be a blow to the ego. Especially for a guy. Girls really didn’t care about that sort of thing as much.
“I ask that you provide Natalie with the means she will need to fight the First’s spawn. She is our only hope of survival,” Kokoro said.
Stated starkly like that, it was chilling. I was still pretty new and they were all depending on me to save them from a fate worse than death. “No pressure,” I muttered and sank back into the couch cushions.
Ishida thought over her request then nodded stiffly. He stood and tossed the book to me. “You might want to read through that. It appears you have an interesting future ahead of you.” With a short bow at the seer, he headed towards the exit.
His footsteps grew fainter then disappeared up the stairs. Kokoro waited for some signal that only she could sense then pressed a button on the floor with her foot. I assumed this was the elevator button. The distant sound of rock scraping against rock proved me to be correct.
“Read,” she instructed and I flipped open the last page, starting at the back as Ishida had.
It was weird reading a book about myself that had to have been written thousands of years ago. Instead of being made of paper, the book was made of bone. Dozens of thin bones were tied together to form each page with words carved painstakingly into them. The pictures were drawn on fabric that might have been an ancient form of linen.
Seeing myself pictured there with crosses on the palms gave me goose bumps. The face wasn’t quite right, my hair was black and I was wearing a kimono, but it was definitely me. I read through the book quickly. The seer had all the details correct. She predicted me killing my maker and surviving. She also foresaw me consulting her rival prophet and finding his journal. Alexander was in there, too, making me stronger and faster with his crazy experiments. I particularly liked the picture she’d drawn of me disintegrating Alexander’s head.
I found the picture of Luc beheading me to be far less pleasant. On the next page after that one was an overhead view of my hacked up body parts buried in a cemetery. Then my great trek across Europe and Asia was foretold before ending up on this small and interesting island. Even the attack that had happened only a few hours ago was depicted. In the picture, my face was a mask of disgust at the taste of the acidic blood that I’d been forced to ingest.
Then the book changed from what was my past to what my future would be. If I was translating this correctly, I was going to learn how to fight in their Japanese style. I would become just as deadly as the imposter me had been. I couldn’t help but note that my imposter wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the book.
“I believe Ishida would be very upset if he knew you killed her,” Kokoro said. “He was particularly proud of his idea to manufacture the European’s fabled Mortis and to send her to the Court to assassinate the Councillors.”
“It took guts for you to keep me a secret all these years.”
She bowed her head in humble agreement. “I am responsible for the lives of our people,” she said simply.
“I doubt the Emperor sees it that way.”
“He governs their welfare but I govern their spiritual wellbeing.” Spiritual wellbeing? We’re the living dead. Surely, once we’re the dead dead, we just cease to be. If we couldn’t even say ‘God’ out loud then I doubted we’d have much chance of ending up in heaven. Of course, there was always the possibility we’d end up somewhere much hotter and far less pleasant instead.
I went back to reading the book but there wasn’t much information left now. Once I learned how to kill efficiently, I would go forth and begin the long awaited decimation of the damned.
Kokoro had drawn a very realistic picture of me surrounded by four shadows. I couldn’t see who the shadows belonged to, they weren’t depicted. What interested me was that I’d torn one of the shadows completely free of its master and had my hands clamped around its ankles.
Looking at the dangling silhouette, my eyebrows rose to their maximum height. You mean I’ll actually be able to detach the shadows completely? Great, I couldn’t wait for that ability to rise within me.
The last couple of pages scared me badly and I knew my dreams of the vast cavern weren’t just my imagination at work. The First, gigantic, ashy-skinned and red-eyed, sat on a throne made of human bones. Behind him was an army of grey monsters, the offspring that had somehow evolved from their sentient shadows.
“So, it’s true,” I said softly.
“Yes. Your dreams did not lie. The First is very real and his army will rise.”
“He’d have to be tens of thousands of years old.”
“Our Father who created us was not from our world. He crashed on our planet with no means to return home when our world was still young. For millions of years, he was alone, growing more and more insane. Then the ancestors of Homo sapiens came into being. He waited for many millennia for them to evolve to the point where we could be of use to him. He needed an intelligent host to plant his seed within. The First was from a small tribe in what is now known as Africa. The tribe had learned to communicate with each other effectively. Our Father chose the First to bestow his gift upon.”
I found the history lesson to be interesting but I wished she would get to the point.
“Getting to the point,” the seer said with a hint of pique, “this happened fifty or so thousand years ago.”
“Fifty. Thousand. Years. Ago,” I said slowly, trying to wrap my brain around it. “How can anyone live that long and not go crazy?”
“I assure you, it is very difficult at times.”
“You mean you’re fifty thousand years old as well?” She didn’t look a day over thirty thousand to me but I wasn’t an expert.
Kokoro gave me a small smile. “Not quite. My maker was what you might call a third generation vampire. The First made his ten followers and they quickly made many more.” She paused briefly and shuddered. “I am glad I was not made during this period of our history.”
“Why not?”
“Our forebears were far less civilized than we are today. They made no effort to control themselves at first and the fledgling human race was at risk of being destroyed. The First and his followers had a falling out and they were banished. He forbade them to make any more servants. My maker was one of the few who survived a harsh culling period.
“For ten thousand years, he and the few remaining vampires were ruled by the First. Then their leader withdrew and his minions were left to fend for themselves. Their makers had been ordered not to create more of our kin but they themselves had no such restrictions. Consequently, they made servants of their own. But they’d learned it was wiser to remain small in number or risk thinning their food source down.”
“So your maker ended up here, in Japan?” She nodded in response. “And when were you made?” It was probably rude to ask but my curiosity was too strong to resist asking the question.
“I was one of the first servants he made after breaking with his brothers. That was nearly forty thousand years ago,” Kokoro said with quiet dignity.
“Holy shit, you’re old!” I’d have blushed in embarrassment if my blood hadn’t been dead inside my veins. I almost felt like I’d sworn in church. “Sorry.” She waved aside my apology. Reading the last few words, I gently closed the book and handed it back to the seer. “You say in there that I battle the First but you don’t say if I win or lose.”
Shru
gging her narrow shoulders, Kokoro placed the book inside her kimono again. “That is as far as my vision extends.”
I sensed this wasn’t the complete truth but didn’t press her. Mainly because I didn’t really want to know. I’d only been reborn as the undead a few weeks ago and I was already tired of being destiny’s bitch. Why couldn’t I have stayed as a normal human being? Why had I been chosen for this horrible unlife? Death had embraced me then dragged me into this quasi-life instead of pulling me down into oblivion. “Why are any of us chosen, Mortis?” she said in response to my unspoken question.
I had no answer for her so asked another question instead. “Can you tell me why Ishida was turned when he was still a kid? It seems a bit…cruel.”
“Do not fear,” the seer said, responding to my unspoken thoughts. “The Emperor might be young but he is fully capable of the pleasures of the flesh.” She smiled gently at my discomfort and embarrassment at the idea of the kid having sex with anyone when he looked so young. “I was forced to turn him into our kind when he was stricken with a fever. He would surely have died without my intervention.”
“You turned him?” If she did, then she was his master and that meant she was the true ruler of the Japanese empire.
“He does not know,” she said serenely. “His origins are a mystery and will remain so.” There was no hint of a threat in her voice. She was psychic and knew I wasn’t going to spill the beans. She’d kept many secrets for the sake of her people. It must get lonely being unable to tell a soul about all the things she knew.
“At times it can be, but I also have my pleasures of the flesh,” she said and smiled knowingly when a picture of Luc flickered into my head. He was naked and ready, all too willing to share my flesh hunger. A pang hit me directly in the heart at the thought that I might never see him again.