We were speaking of the war party that Khronos had sent after us. Zenzele sensed them crossing the steppes, and we were debating what we should do now. Should we flee from them once again, or stand and meet them in battle? Bhorg, Hammon and his brother thought we should stand and fight, and I leaned in that direction myself. There were eight of us now, and nearly half that number were Eternals. There would be nine if Goro returned.
“And what if they have more true immortals in their party?” Zenzele asked. “You are powerful, my love. More powerful than you know, but there are blood drinkers in Khronos’s command who are more powerful. Many of them. We should flee again, and enlist more mortals to our cause.”
Her logic was unassailable.
Still, we were men, and so we discussed how we might fight them if we did decide to make a stand here in the mountains. We debated strategies, and the trickeries we might employ against our enemies, until Hammon curled forward, clutching his belly, and said that he could not bear the gnawing in his belly any longer.
“It is just as you said. The hunger is tormenting.”
Petra was returning from the river. I rose and said that we should hunt. “It will be day soon,” I said, squinting into the lightening sky. “We should feed before the sun drives us underground.”
We fed, and then we sought the darkness.
14
Later, in private, Zenzele counseled me. “I know you are impatient to engage the God King in battle, my love,” she said. “But if we are to have any hope of defeating him, we must survive long enough to raise an army to challenge him. We are ten now, but thousands of blood drinkers reside in Uroboros. There are not so many Eternals. Even in Uroboros, true immortals are rare. But there are enough trained in war to overwhelm us, and then they will drag us back to Fen’Dagher, and Khronos will tear us apart.”
“I know you speak the truth,” I said.
“He might not be able to destroy us, but he will have us quartered. We will live out the rest of our eternal lives in pieces.” Her face twisted. “His playthings!”
“I know.”
“We must flee again. But we will train these Orda in the art of war as we run. The ways of war are different for blood gods and mortal men. You should train as well. I know you have my memories, but it is not the same. Your body will not perform the techniques instinctively, and that will be your downfall.”
“As you defeated me not so long ago,” I said.
Zenzele laughed huskily. “You might be old, but you still fight as a mortal man fights.”
“Do you think we can defeat him?” I asked.
“In time, perhaps, if we have the numbers and weapons to do so. There are ways to disable even the most powerful blood drinker.”
“You truly believe that?”
Zenzele nodded. “Most of the blood drinkers who reside in Uroboros are craven things,” she said. “They do not care whom they bow to, so long as the blood flows. We need not defeat them all.”
“Where should we flee?” I asked.
I was thinking west. Perhaps we could search for the Tanti as we ran from the God King’s minions. Many of them would join our cause if I asked them to, and we could protect the rest.
“Toward rising sun, I should think,” Zenzele said. “They will not have so much of an advantage in the lands beyond these mountains. They will be as ignorant of the terrain as us.” She glanced to the east, where the sun was just peeking over the saw-toothed crags. “There are several small clans of blood drinkers in the east, too. We might convince them to join us. Their enmity with Khronos is all that has kept him from extending his domains beyond these mountains. They might support us if we convince them of our resolve.”
“Then we are decided,” I said.
Last Rites
1
“We go east.”
I paused to survey our environs. We had crossed the border into Germany the previous evening and were trekking through the Hambach Forest in the North Rhine-Westphalian District of Duren. It was a large forest, nearly 6,000 hectares, densely wooded with oak, hornbeam and fir. Once this forest had stretched unbroken for hundreds of miles, but most of it had been cleared in the last forty years to expand the nearby coalmines. Though the forest looked like the primeval wilderness I remembered from my mortal life, I could hear the insect whine of traffic zooming east and west on the E40, and the distant rumble of the mines, a sound I felt in my preternatural flesh more than I heard with my ears.
Lukas stopped at my side, shifted his backpack on his shoulders. A light snow was drifting down around us, the flakes tiny and delicate. Lukas’s eyelashes and eyebrows were coated with the fragile flakes, like a dusting of confectioner’s sugar. They did not melt because our bodies do not generate heat. I probably looked like a hoary old man, my hair and beard white.
“Are we resting?” he said, pushing back the hood of his parka.
“Are you tired?” I asked.
He shook his head, dislodging a few snowflakes from his face. “No. I feel like I could jump over the moon.”
He glanced up, lips pulled back from his teeth—a habit he would have to break if he meant to move among mortals (although, now that it was fashionable among “goths” to don prosthetic fangs and fluorescent contact lenses, his outré appearance might actually go unremarked).
“If there was a moon tonight,” he added.
The sky was low and gray and oddly bulgy, like wet sacks suspended from rafters. The snow smelled of carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxide and all manner of foul industrial pollutants, but I had chosen not to notice such things. Better to pretend. Pretend that the world was pure and fresh, unspoiled by the relentless progress of mankind. By its rapacious consumerism. Could there be a finer metaphor for mortal consumerism than the vampire?
“So what are we waiting for?” Lukas pressed, impatient as always. He was unimpressed by the glory of nature, the Douglas firs standing tall and proud all around us, their limbs weighed down with snow. The great still of the forest (minus the traffic and the throb of heavy machinery). The gently drifting snow. “Are you lost?”
I sighed, exasperated. “I merely pause to absorb the beauty of the forest,” I said. “I have not walked the earth of my native land in a very long time. This will be the last time I tread upon it. Let me have my moment.”
Lukas laughed at my peevish tone. The image flashed through my thoughts of striking his head from his shoulders. If I did not need him, I would have been tempted. Sorely tempted. But I did need him, so I restrained the hand itching to strike him.
“Not far from here, just on the other side of a small city named Kerpen, is an abandoned monastery,” I said. “Its name is Engel Abbey. It sits at the edge of the Rhineland nature preserve, near the Schwarz Maar. It is a low, swampy, altogether unpleasant place.”
“Uh-huh,” Lukas said, tramping about restlessly. “So why are we going there?”
“My vampire child Justus resides there. Or did the last time I heard from him. I wish to see him before I perish.”
“To say your fond farewells?”
“Something like that.”
Lukas nodded. He looked around, said, “Maybe we can find something here to feed on. I’m starving.” He walked away a few paces, boots crunching in the snow, scanned the dark forest for prey. After a few moments, he called out to me, “So tell me about Justus. How old is he? When did you make him a vampire?”
I could see that Lukas would not grant me the peace I longed for. He was too much a child of his times, accustomed to the constant stimulation of electronic media. Silence filled him with disquiet. Thoughtful contemplation was a foreign concept to him. He was a consumer: of information, entertainment, pleasure and plastic encased commercial goods, of innocence and the lives of his fellow human beings. I had only made him a literal blood drinker.
“Don’t you want me to finish telling you of my war against the God King?” I asked.
“Not right now,” he said. “I want to know about Justus.
”
“As you wish,” I said, and since I could see that he would not let me enjoy the amity of Hambach, I started forward again, headed east.
“Justus was a Benedictine monk and a member of the Order of Light, dispatched to a small village in the Kingdom of Croatia by Pius the Fourth in the year 1564…”
2
He was sent at the request of Duke Ferdinand Zrinski, whose father had been granted a small fiefdom for opposing a peasant uprising in the early 1550’s.
I say it was the Kingdom of Croatia, but there really wasn’t much of a kingdom by that time. After the war with the Turks, and with the ongoing peasant revolts, Croatia had become a sparsely populated and war-ravaged land. In fact, people at the time called it the remnants of the remnants of the once great Croatian Kingdom.
Getvar was the name of the village the young man was sent to. He had been ordered to investigate reports of vampirism, and, if those reports were confirmed to be factual-- and not just the fearsome tales of superstitious country folk—to notify his superiors so the Church could intervene.
The Ordo Lucis, the Order of Light, was the precursor to the Venatori, who would hunt our kind nearly to extinction in the 16th and 17th centuries. The Church knew of our existence, had known of us for hundreds of years, but had not yet decided we were a threat. Pius the Fifth was the pontiff who finally ordered our extermination. He developed a rather paranoid hatred of our kind when one of our brethren attacked and killed his cousin, a bishop, who had been a close boyhood friend. Before Pius, we were considered by the Church to be much like any other predatory species, a part of God’s plan, albeit a mysterious one. Let the peasants believe what they pleased—and they had some pretty wild superstitions about us-- the Church had an empire to run, and a Pagan world to proselytize.
Justus was only thirty years old at the time, but he had already garnered a respectable reputation as a scholar and an author. He wrote A Commentary on the Books of the Old and New Testament, The History of the Sacred and Profane and a two-volume study History of the Ghosts and Vampires of Europe. It was that last which brought him to the attention of the Order of Light, and his irrepressible curiosity that compelled him to join their secret cabal.
He was a shockingly handsome young man, with bright green eyes and auburn hair shaved into the monastic tonsure typical of that period, the “cleric’s crown”. He maintained a light, finely trimmed beard, his one vanity, which his superiors tolerated because of his brilliance and piety. And he was pious. His devotion to his savior was rivaled only by his thirst for knowledge. If he had one failing, it was his weakness for the sins of the flesh, but I suppose we’re all entitled to one vice in this world.
Now ordinarily, when there were reports of vampirism in those days, the Church dispatched more than one member of the clergy to investigate the claims. Usually they sent at least three monks, sometimes as many as half a dozen, escorted by a small retinue of soldiers, but Getvar was a village of little political or economic importance. It was small and poor, and the people in the region were known to be especially superstitious. So Justus was sent alone, probably as a gesture of respect to Duke Zrinski, and a grudging one at that.
“And if it turned out a vampire really was at large in Getvar?” I asked him later. “What were your orders if the claims were, in fact, true?”
“I was ordered to return to Rome if my investigation revealed a real vampire,” he answered. “I was told I must have no direct contact with the creature, but to report it to my superiors, who would dispatch a company of the Knights Lucis to intercede. The Lucis would make contact with the blood drinker, and warn him off or put him to death.”
I had also been dispatched to investigate these vampire reports, but for a very different reason.
I was a member of the Court of the Night’s Watch at that time, which was a sect of real vampires who reigned over a small fiefdom in Hungary. Its membership was comprised of idealistic aristocrats and scholars from all over Europe. The leader of our little coven was Duke Anton Bokor. He was a young vampire, only one hundred years dead, but very wise and very powerful. His consort, the Duchess Beata, a beautiful and highly intelligent immortal, ruled at his side. There were, all told, nearly thirty of us living in a great castle in the Matra Mountains northeast of Budapest, attended by a staff of some sixty mortal thralls, all of whom knew our true nature and had sworn to protect us and our secret with their lives.
I went by the name Gyozo Vastag at the time, and acted as one of Anton’s advisers. None knew that I was the oldest living vampire -- though they could, of course, sense that I was very old and very powerful.
I had joined this Court of the Night’s Watch because they held to the same philosophies I did: that our duty, as immortals, was to protect and advance the lives of our mortal brethren. They did not know that I had originally planned to destroy them, that I had gone to Hungary, fearing a would-be God King. What I found was a coven of gentle, intelligent and principled young blood drinkers, vampires who wanted to Do Good. I was instantly seduced by them, and petitioned to join their cabal.
I would tell you more of this Court of the Night’s Watch, but their involvement in this tale is incidental. They were also among the first to be targeted and destroyed by the Church during the Internecion, and were all dead by the middle of the 1600’s-- a terrible tragedy, if you ask me. I only tell you of them now because it was Duke Bokor who asked me to travel to Getvar and investigate these vampire rumors.
Sometime during the Black Plague, a breed of degenerate vampires had begun to appear in Europe, a foul offshoot that possessed little reason or restraint, and we had taken it upon ourselves to root them out and destroy them wherever they were found. It is why the Duke called his coven the Court of the Night’s Watch. We were the watchmen who guarded the world of mortal men from this scourge. The fiends preyed upon the innocent and wicked without discernment, and reproduced with alarming rapidity. They were, in fact, the basis for the famous “Vampire Hysteria of the Middle Ages”. We called them ghouls, and worked tirelessly to eradicate the pestilence.
I agreed to investigate the stories coming from Getvar, and rode immediately for Croatia.
And what of the rumors?
It had been reported that a young man named Kadija Damilan, an experienced woodsman, had gone out to hunt in the forest one day, and did not return at dusk, as he normally would have done. The following morning, the young man was found lying dead beside the road, his horse grazing in a pasture just outside of town. It was believed that the lad had been thrown from his horse and killed while riding home from the hunt. The only injuries evident on his body were some bruises on his right wrist and the left side of his neck and head. It was also noted that the boy’s flesh was unusually pale, as if he had recently been bled. But his death was declared an accident, he was buried in the local cemetery, and that was the end of it-- or so everyone believed.
Two nights later, the young man returned to his father’s home.
The only thing Kadija said to his father, standing on the threshold, was, “I’m hungry!” He looked gaunt and very pale, and was holding his winding sheet around his body as if he were cold.
His father hurried the boy inside. He gave his son food and drink, weeping in happiness that his child lived. It was his belief that Kadija had not died but instead had fallen into a death-like trance from injuries to his head. It was not uncommon in those days for people to be erroneously pronounced dead. He attributed his son’s unusual behavior to shock and exhaustion. Shock from waking to find himself buried alive, and exhaustion from digging his way out of the earth.
The boy’s mother roused at her husband’s cries and hurried down the stairs into the kitchen. There she found husband and son sitting together at the table. Her son, she said, was attired in the clothing that he had been buried in, and was dirty and smeared with mud. She said her son seemed confused and did not answer her husband’s questions, but was stuffing food into his mouth as if he hadn’t eaten in
days.
Before she could move to embrace the lad, Kadija shoved himself back from the table, clutching his stomach as if stricken with a terrible cramp, his face contorted with pain. “Kadija, what is it? What is wrong?” his father demanded, putting a hand on the boy’s shoulder. Kadija did not answer his father, but instead let loose a most terrible scream, one so loud and piercing that his parents were forced to cover their ears in agony, and then the lad vomited up the food that he had just consumed. The undigested food, Madame Damilan said, was mixed with a profuse amount of blood and some unknown tarry substance that immediately began to oxidize.
Before husband and wife could react to their son’s frightful spasms, Kadija leapt across the table and seized his father by the shoulders and plunged his teeth into the old man’s neck. Kadija’s mother raced down the stairs and tried to wrest her husband from her son’s dreadful grip, but “it was as if his hands were made of iron.” She could not pull her husband free.
Kadija sucked the blood from his father’s neck until the man swooned, and then their son threw the old man to the floor, and, wiping his mouth upon his sleeve, fled from the house.
The local physician was summoned to the Damilan household, but Kadija’s father died shortly after from loss of blood. He had, the doctor reported, been bled white.
The local constabulary exhumed Kadija’s grave the following afternoon, only to find the coffin full of earth. The top of the casket was broken through from the inside out.
The Oldest Living Vampire Betrayed (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 4) Page 15