The Oldest Living Vampire Betrayed (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 4)

by Joseph Duncan

  “Among their spirits…” Zenzele mused. “You may never die, beautiful one.”

  “I do not believe that,” I said. “All things perish. It is merely a more difficult thing for us.”

  We came to the river, stood on the rocky shore of it, listening to it gurgle along contentedly, watching white cataracts jump and surge around the smooth gray stones. The sky had begun to lighten, the stars to wink more faintly. The clouds were tinged with hues of pink and lavender. Soon we would have to go underground, hide our sensitive eyes from the blazing heavens.

  Gods! I thought scornfully. We are not gods. We are more like reptiles. Terrible, cold-blooded reptiles.

  “I was a mortal man once,” I said, staring pensively across the river.

  I did not know how to finish the thought.

  After a moment, Zenzele nodded.

  9

  We began skinning our prey after feeding. We took the brains, too, so that we could use the oils to preserve the hides. By some strange coincidence, the brain of every animal renders up enough oil to treat the entire skin, but before you can oil the skins, they must be dried and all the fat and hair scraped off them. We had soaked the skins in a mixture of wood ash and water, then stretched them upon a wooden frame I erected at the mouth of the cave, but the skins have to dry for several days before you can process them any further, so we were quite naked when Bhorg returned to our cave in the Urals with his new friends.

  We smelled the mortals long before they arrived, of course, but did not go out to meet them. We had decided to allow Bhorg to bring them to us, still not certain what it was that he intended to do with them. We did not think he had tricked them into following him just so we could devour them. There was plenty of animal life in the mountains to satisfy our bloodthirst.

  “He must mean for us to make blood drinkers of them,” Zenzele surmised. “Or perhaps they want to ally themselves with us.”

  “We shall see,” I replied, but I was terribly curious, and more than a little apprehensive.

  They arrived shortly after nightfall.

  We heard their voices ring out in the forest, drawing slowly nearer, and then they were just outside, and Bhorg told them to enter, that his mistress awaited them.

  Zenzele and I rose as the nomads stepped into our shelter. We met them side-by-side, our eyes shining in the firelight, our naked flesh gleaming like polished stone. The jaws of all six men dropped to their chests. Almost as one, they fell to their knees. Had I not Shared with Zenzele, I would not have known their words, but their language was familiar to her, and so it was familiar to me.

  “It is the Mother and the Father!” the one named Hammon gasped.

  His companions echoed the sentiment, their voices high with awe and fear.

  “Bhorg spoke the truth!”

  “It is the Mother of Heaven!”

  I had to access my Shared memories to familiarize myself with the mythological deities they had confused us with. The Mother and the Father were the gods of the nomadic mammoth hunters of the Eastern Dominions, a people called the Orda, which in their tongue meant “walkers” or “wanderers”. Like Ilio’s people, the Denghoi, the Orda had nearly gone extinct along with the giants they once hunted.

  Zenzele appeared amused, but I scowled. Walking toward them, I said, “Get off your knees! We are not your Mother and Father!”

  Their leader, Hammon, glanced toward Zenzele, fearful and confused. “But… your woman…”

  I knew why they’d reacted as they had. Their pictorial representations of the Mother and Father featured a female figure drawn in black and a male figure drawn in white. Their Mother was the goddess of the heavens, the starry night sky, and their Father was the god of the earth, a being of white stone.

  It passed through my mind that I could use their religious ecstasy to my own ends, but I rejected the thought. I could not abide being called a god. I did not know then that in order to defeat Khronos I would have to accept the mantle of godhood. Not just accept it, but embrace it.

  “We are blood gods, yes, but not the Creators you’ve mistaken us for,” I explained, trying to be a little more civil to the frightened mortals.

  As Hammon and his men rose uncertainly, I turned my attention to Bhorg.

  “Why did you bring these men here?” I asked.

  Bhorg leaned against the wall of the cave and crossed his arms. “I have brought men to help us make war on the God King. Why else do you think I brought them here? You cannot expect the four of us to defeat Khronos and all of his warriors. You said so yourself the night we escaped from Fen’Dagher. We must raise an army to fight him. Well—“ and he gestured to the Orda, “—I have brought you your first recruits! I promised to make them immortal in exchange for their service.”

  Zenzele glanced at me expectantly. We had discussed just such a thing when Zenzele sensed Bhorg returning with the mortals. It would have to be done. In order to defeat Khronos, we would need many immortal warriors. But now that the time had come to embark on our war with the God King, to start raising my army to challenge him, I was hesitant. I did not wish to curse these foolish mortals as I had been cursed.

  I addressed the men. “You know what such a thing entails?”

  Hammon’s throat pulsed as he swallowed. “Yes. As we journeyed through the mountains, Bhorg told us how you will make us into gods.”

  “You will thirst for blood. You will crave it every moment of your waking lives. It will drive you mad at times.”

  “We will have your strength, your speed. The giant one told us so,” Hammon countered. “We will skip across the clouds as if they were stones in a pond, see in complete darkness like the great cats, hear the flapping of a fly’s wings. And we will be immortal. We will never grow old, never get sick, and we will never die.”

  “Your lifespan will be greatly increased,” I said. “If you are lucky, you may become an Eternal like Zenzele and I. It will be impossible to destroy your body if the ebu potashu makes you thus. But the price is high, and you may be killed when we wage our war on Khronos. He is powerful, and he has many warriors at his command.”

  Hammon glanced back at his men, then shrugged. “Grasp for immortality, or starve slowly on the flatlands? It is not much of a choice. So far as I know, we are the last of the Orda. Our children are dead, and our women have all run away. But if we become gods, we can preserve the memory of our people until the end of time. Perhaps that is why the Mother and Father led us to you. Perhaps the fates are not as cruel as we believed.”

  I grinned bitterly. “Be not deceived, mortal. The Fates are cruel. The Fates are nothing if not cruel.”

  10

  So we made them into blood drinkers.

  In Uroboros, the act of making a new blood god is entrenched in ritual. Initiates are given a symbolic last meal, whatever food he or she desires. The men are given to spend one last night with the sexual partner of their choice, so that their mortal seed, if the gods favor them, may be preserved. They are bathed, their hair and nails trimmed and shaped so that they have a comely appearance, as hair and nails do not grow after the transformation. They are encouraged to severe ties with any mortals they might love, and only then, once they have sworn their fealty to the God King, may the initiates be given the living blood.

  First they make an offering of blood to the T’sukuru who transforms them. They are given a sacred blade, one made by the hands of the God King Himself, and with that blade they slice into the main artery of their forearm. The blood that gushes forth is collected into a bowl, which is passed to the initiate’s maker. After the maker drinks, he or she moves over the prone body of the initiate, and brings forth the living blood, vomiting into the open mouth of the mortal, as a mother bird gives nourishment to her hatchlings.

  After that, the fate of the mortal is in the hands of the gods, or perhaps I should say the Strix. No one knows how or why the living blood makes one mortal into a god, while it consumes another, and renders the third into a mindless, raven
ing ghoul. That, perhaps, was why the children of the living blood had not already consumed the world. It’s propensity to kill those who dare grasp for immortality.

  The Uroborans have a saying: T’ando ebu ne alba estu? Roughly translated, it means,“Will it be the black stone or the white?” It is based on a game in which one player holds his fists behind his back, switching two differently colored stones from hand to hand. He brings his fists forward when he has decided which stone shall go in which hand, and then the other player must pick a fist. If it is the black stone, the first player wins. If it is a white stone, the second player wins. It is a game, but it is also used to make decisions when two parties are unable to come to a compromise on some matter. Both men have a hand in the game, both have their choice to make, but neither knows what the outcome of their decision may be. It is a rather apt metaphor for the human—and inhuman-- condition, I think. And for the making of blood gods.

  Will it be the black stone or the white?

  Will it be death or immortality?

  Will my fledgling be a good child, or a treacherous one?

  We spent that first night getting to know the men who wanted to join our group. They were a brooding, suspicious lot, and who can blame them? Life had given them little reason to be jolly, and all mortals are instinctively fearful in the company of a vampire. We can pass for mortals for a little while, when we choose to move among you, but look too closely, abide in our presence too long, and anxiety will begin to gnaw at your guts. You will become jumpy and paranoid, leaping at every little sound, every flitting shadow. You will start to wonder just what it is about the fellow sitting next to you that makes your heart rattle in your chest, that makes your breath quicken, and your skin crawl. Lay a lamb beside a lion, and watch it tremble.

  They perked up a little after they ate the meat of the animals we had preyed upon earlier. Zenzele had taken the flesh as well as the fur that night, knowing that Bhorg was bringing the mortals. She cooked for them, turning the meat slowly on a spit over our hearth until the fat dripped and sizzled and the skin was brown and crisp. The nourishment invigorated them. They’d had little luck hunting in recent months. They ate every scrap of meat we prepared for them. But they were still a solemn lot.

  Of the six, I found Hammon and Eris to be the most intriguing.

  Hammon was a natural born leader, intelligent, confident, and resourceful. He had managed to keep his small clan alive despite hardship and the caprices of fate. He was the least uncomfortable in our presence, the most talkative, and I found him to be a rather entertaining fellow. He regaled us with hunting stories, tales of their battles with the other nomadic tribes of the Eastern Dominions, and fables based on their mythology.

  Eris was an enigmatic creature. He was obviously male, with a thin beard and a lean, muscular body, but there was something feminine in his character. He had finely-boned features, full lips and large eyes with long, curling eyelashes. He also had a female scent, and a quiet, watchful nature.

  It was explained to us during the course of the evening that Eris was what the Orda called a “two-natured” being-- what we would call, in modern parlance, a hermaphrodite, a creature born with both male and female genitalia. It is not an unusual thing, though in contemporary western cultures, such people are often surgically altered at birth to conform to some repressive notion of “normality”, usually to their detriment, and a lifetime of mental agony if the wrong choice is made for them. But in those ancient times, such births were considered either good luck, and the rare creature was revered, or bad luck, and the child was put to death. We didn’t try to sculpt their flesh, make them into something they were not.

  Fortunately for Eris, the Orda regarded the birth of two-natured creatures a good omen, and believed the unusual beings were more spiritually enlightened than their single-sexed contemporaries, embodying the sacred natures of both the Mother and the Father. Eris was both shaman and medicine woman, fellow warrior and gentle caregiver. When they fought, he fought at their sides, as ruthless and unyielding as any of his more masculine tribesmen. When the men were in need of sexual release, she submitted to their needs.

  That was the theory, anyway.

  I sensed some contempt for the hermaphrodite from the others, and a bit of resentment on Eris’s part, but it was mild.

  The births of two-natured beings were common enough among the peoples of the Eastern Dominions that they had a third pronoun for their kind, the word ers, which was a conjoining of sem and fer for male and female. For simplicity’s sake, I shall henceforth refer to Eris by the masculine forms, for he seemed to me to be slightly more masculine than feminine, but he was much more complex a being than that, and I found him to be quite fascinating, even after the novelty of his dual nature wore off.

  As for the rest…

  Neolas was much like his brother. So much so that his existence seemed almost gratuitous. He was just a slightly smaller, somewhat less confident version of his older sibling. Had they told me they were womb-mates, I would have believed them. Petra was a skinny and anxious young man, quite unattractive, with overlarge features set in a narrow, angular face. Stine was the oldest of their group, a paunchy, gray-bearded, morose fellow. And Morgruss, Stine’s cousin, was a hard, suspicious man, with blunt features, a perpetual scowl and rheumy, joyless eyes.

  They stayed with us most of the night. Zenzele and Bhorg were easy with them, accustomed to being around mortals. From time to time I would catch one of them staring at Hammon’s jugular, or the necks of one of his companions, their eyes sharp with the predatory urge, but they did not move to harm our acolytes, nor did they seem overly distressed by their proximity. I was a little more uneasy. I had lived among my mortal descendants long enough to tame my murderous impulses, but not so long that I could put them out of my thoughts completely. I have never been able to do that. I am still tormented endlessly by my bloodthirst. It rattles at the back of my mind like a drug addiction whenever I am with mortals. It is why I live as a recluse. I can never quite trust myself around the living.

  After Hammon had told us his tales, we shared our lives with him.

  Zenzele, they had heard of. Who in the Dominions hadn’t heard the legends? Zenzele, the dark-skinned goddess of death, as ruthless as she was beautiful. Even a small band of nomadic hunters at the eastern fringe of the God King’s territories knew the name Zenzele.

  I could tell it pleased her, and it pleased me as well. All men should know her name! They should love her as I loved her. Fear her as I feared her. The Orda were fascinated by her story: how she became a blood drinker, her journey to Uroboros, and how the God King destroyed her maker, the leonine Bujune, freeing her at long last from her maker’s possessive love.

  Bhorg’s story was also an entertainment to them. His was a warrior’s tale, the story of a cocky young fighter brought low on the whim of the gods, enslaved, forced to labor in the lowest chambers of their hell, but never submitting, never falling to his knees, only continuing stubbornly on, day after day, until he chanced to win the favor of one of heaven’s princesses.

  “Made into a god by merit of cock alone?” Hammon laughed. “Let us see this princely cock, giant! Let us see if it is worthy of godhood!”

  Grinning, Bhorg leapt to his feet and pulled aside his loincloth, pumping his pelvis so that prick and balls swooped in a broad circle. Zenzele laughed and the Orda roared their approval. It was an impressive cock. I was a little jealous.

  My sad story, of course, brought everyone down. I told them of my happy mortal life in the north, in a land far beyond the God King’s Dominions. I told them of my two wives and my six beautiful children. I told them of the rogue blood god who preyed upon my first wife’s people, and how, in ignorance of its true nature, we went to make war on him. I told them how we were defeated and how I was made a blood god against my will, raped by the cold and callous creature, raped with immortality. I told them how I killed my own maker, how I guarded my mortal descendants, never able to come to
o near to them because of my appetite for blood, and how, after ages of loneliness, I sought out my death in the maw of a great floe of ice. I told them of my rebirth, how I was reunited with my mortal descendants, and how I met and was defeated by Zenzele.

  “Beaten by a woman?” Stine exclaimed, his expression judgmental.

  “If I remember correctly,” Hammon said, “you did well to handle that woman of yours.”

  “Rea?” Stine said. “Rea was a big woman, as strong as any man.”

  “And Gon was defeated by Zenzele.”

  “I did not defeat my lover,” Zenzele said. “He surrendered to me to preserve the life of his blood child. What father would not die in his son’s stead?”

  She looked at me lovingly, but I was not shamed by her conquering of me. “Zenzele defeats me every time I put my cock inside her,” I said, grinning at her mischievously.

  Surprised, Stine erupted into laughter. He nodded his head, as did the rest of the men, all but Eris. “Yes! Yes! In like manner are we all defeated! As often as we can be!”

  Eris looked to Zenzele, and they shared some secret amusement.

  I told them then of our battle with the God King in the bowels of the great mountain, Fen’Dagher. I told them how we Share our memories through the exchange of our living blood, and how I stole a drop of his blood in the midst of that battle, and the terrible visions I saw when his memories came flooding into my mind.

  The whole world overrun by our kind, consumed, and mortal man kept as animals for the slaughter.