Chapter 202 - Uroboros part 3

When we had passed through the Carpathian Mountains, our party turned south, and we journeyed through the country that is now named the Ukraine. We continued on in a southeasterly direction until we came to the land the Greeks called Tauris, which you know as the Republic of Crimea, and from there, not far inland from the northern shores of the Black Sea, to the city of Uroboros.

Uroboros was built upon the flank of a dormant volcano. The T'sukuru called this volcano Fen'Dagher, which meant "Heaven Spear". I cannot point to any modern map and tell you, "Here is the place once called Uroboros." Fen'Dagher awakened after the war of the blood gods and destroyed itself in one titanic eruption. Later, as the world warmed, the entire region was subsumed by rising sea levels. It is gone, like most of the coastal settlements of the prehistoric world, and the world of man is better for it. This, I assure you.

But in its prime, Uroboros was a fantastical sight.

Though I had seen the city through Zenzele's memories, my first view of its splendors still had the power to dazzle me… even as its horrors outraged my sensibilities.

In an age when most humans still huddled in caves or crude wooden domiciles, Uroboros was a marvel. It was a three-tiered metropolis, a towering conurbation, each district stacked upon the next, running up the side of the mountain and connected by a complex network of ramps and staircases and ladders and bridges.

At the foot of the sleeping volcano was the Shol. This was the residence of the slave caste. Here, the blood gods maintained a vast population of mortals, keeping them penned like animals behind high stone walls. Emaciated, more dead than alive, the mortals labored for their masters without rest. I knew from Zenzele's experiences that a denizen of the Shol, the lowest of the low, could expect only abuse and exploitation at the hands of his immortal overseers, but to see it for myself--! It was unendurable! For a slave of the Shol, death, whether from disease or deprivation-- or the fangs of his ravenous masters—was the only hope for release, and a quick demise the best end one dare pray for.

Hovering over the pits of the Shol, sheltered beneath a great outcrop of stone, was the Arth, the dwelling place of Uroboros's high caste mortal slaves. These mortals had found favor with the blood gods of Uroboros. They served as overseers and skilled laborers, functionaries and valets. Here, in stone structures reminiscent of the Anasazi cliff dwellings, the mortal elite resided in relative luxury. There were hanging gardens and temples of worship, markets and bathhouses. For these traitors, life was good. They were spoiled, corrupt, and spoke only in disdain of the inhabitants of the slave district below. They were no less slaves, but they at least had the prospect of advancement.

When a new blood god was made in Uroboros, the mortal who was elevated was usually from the Arth, a favored servant or a cherished lover, a functionary who had impressed his vampire master with his loyalty or cleverness. When one of their number was exalted, there were great festivals in the district of Arth. The temples ran red with blood tribute. There were games, feasts, orgies. The blood drinkers of Uroboros dangled the prospect of immortality like a worm from a hook, and the selfish, the vain, the amoral and the cruel, competed fiercely for the chance of being made into a god.

At the apex of the three-tiered city dwelled the masters of Fen'Dagher. It was from this level, called the Fen, that the city's undying rulers reined over all.

The society of the vampires was hierarchal in nature. Their population was organized into Clans, each Clan ruled by an Eternal—vampires, like Zenzele and I, who were truly immortal. The Clans were further divided into Houses, which were governed by the oldest and most powerful of the lesser immortals. Their god king Khronos held absolute power, but the Clan Masters, and, to a lesser extent, the House Mothers and Fathers, acted as a kind of unofficial senate. They were the god king's advisors, and served as administrators of the city.

Fen'Dagher was a honeycomb of subterranean chambers, and it was there, in that sunless realm, that the Potashu T'sukuru made their home.

I could see the cold creatures who ruled this realm moving up and down from their vaunted aerie as we approached the city. Some of them glided upon the zigzagging stairways that bridged their abode with the mortal districts below. Others scaled the sheer rock face like insects.

How easy it would be to think of them as gods if I were still a mortal man, I thought. And yet they had fashioned their kingdom into a kind of hell. Had I thought the Oombai wicked? The depravity of the Ground Scratchers paled in comparison to these immortal monsters!

Even from a distance, I could smell the rot and corruption of the hellish city. We approached from the west, at the foot of the mountain, in full view of the endlessly toiling mortals. Though it was night, the slaves worked by the light of greasy fire pits and countless crackling torches. From a distance, it looked like the stars themselves had been plucked down from the heavens. If not for the omnipresent stench, if not for the unending horrors, it would have been a wondrous sight.

As we drew nearer, our captives cried out at the spectacle of indignities that were soon to be enjoined on them: the starved bodies of the laborers, the brutality of the overseers, the great nadirs of rotting human corpses, mass graves where those who could no longer work were bled dry and disposed of. Even the fires, so beautiful from a distance, were fueled by human misery. The smell of sizzling human fat caused my gorge to rise. For a moment I feared my sanity would revolt. Picture in your mind Hieronymus Bosch's surreal depictions of the Inferno. That was the Shol, with its cowl of black smoke, its decay, its suffering.

I cannot bear this horror! I thought.

But I must.

For Ilio.

For the Tanti.

I knew this hell. I knew it from Zenzele's memories. What I could not fathom was how she could set her soul apart from these outrages, how she could take part in such cruelty.

As if sensing my thoughts, she looked down at me from her mount, but her eyes were hooded, her countenance impenetrable.

I knew from our Sharing that she believed there was no alternative, that Khronos's power was supreme, but I could not believe it was true, that there was no escape.

There must be a way out! 

Our mortal captives balked at each new atrocity. They had to be flogged mercilessly before they would continue. They prayed to their various divinities for deliverance, for absolution, for vengeance, but their continuous rebellion only served to slow our passage through the Shol.

After gaining admittance through the outer barricades, we wound our way around the charnel pits. On the far side of the mortuary, mortal men fought to the death in a crude amphitheater, their audience, mortal and immortal alike, cheering them on lustily. We passed through areas that were being excavated, winning annoyed glances from the mortal overseers as our procession interrupted the labors of their charges. Further on, an open-air brothel, and beyond that, a district of squalid slave quarters.

There, gaunt faces peered at us from dark doorways. The smell of human waste was overpowering. In a lightless alley, a pair of immortals fed, their cheeks and chins smeared with fresh blood, their victim hanging limp and naked between them. I turned my eyes away as the blood drinkers worried the neck of the corpse, grunting and making soft wet sucking sounds. Somewhere in the maze of tenements a woman was sobbing, and in another quarter, maniacal laughter.

Mortal children appeared from some of the hovels as we marched past, racing in pursuit of our caravan. I feared the wolf Vehnfear might attack them, but the animal merely glowered at them, a low growl emanating from his breast. Keeping their distance from the ill-tempered beast, the children held their hands out in pitiful supplication, calling "Zele! Zele!" until Zenzele slipped some food discretely from her hip pack and cast it to the ground beside her mount.

The sight of the children, grubbing naked in the dirt for the nuts and roots that Zenzele had brought back for them, won black tears from my eyes. It was, for me, the most terrible sight of all.

The temperature dropped precipitously as we ascended. There were no trees to shield us from the wind when we left the Shol, not on the narrow road that snaked up the side of the mountain. The rock the winding passage was carved into was mostly columnar basalt, which looks a lot like the pipes of a steam organ, and the wind whistled in all its tiny crevices, slicing into our procession from the south, so cold and fierce that even I became uncomfortable after a while, but by then we were passing through the ramparts of the upper district, and our long journey was nearly at its end.