Chapter 293 - Army of the Undead part 5

I confess I am no military genius. To put it in the modern vernacular, I am a lover, not a fighter. I had only the vaguest notion of how I might raise an army to fight the God King, and I was clueless when it came to things like battle tactics and strategy. I had spent the bulk of my mortal life in the pursuit of comfort and earthly pleasures. Food, sex, my mates, my children, those were the things that concerned me when I was a living man. I had fought, as all men must do at some point in their lives, but never without provocation, and I'd never derived any satisfaction from it. My experiences with warfare consisted of chasing the Foul Ones through our territory in the valley, trooping to the Cave of the Grey Stone People to do battle with my maker (and you know how that turned out), and my fight with the Oombai.

Luckily, I had Zenzele.

Zenzele had served as Khronos's chief slaver in the Western Dominions for hundreds of years. Perhaps so much as a thousand. I was not too certain of her exact age, only that she was slightly less ancient than I. In many ways, my beloved was timeless, much like the continent that gave birth to her, and she had sharpened her battle skills on the whetstone of those countless years. More importantly, she had a warrior's spirit. Combat made her eyes blaze, her blood sing, where conflict had only ever left me cold and full of regrets. She enjoyed testing her mind and her might against the strength of her opponents, where I would rather everybody get along. If not for her, I would have had no chance of defeating the God King. Even with her at my side, the odds of our success did not look favorable, but I had to try. I couldn't just turn my back and let Khronos devour the world.

We stayed there in Mongolia for many months, in that cave at the edge of the Gobi. I initially thought to recruit some of the desert tribes in the region to our cause, or at least ally ourselves with them. Perhaps increase our numbers by making some of them immortal, if any of their warriors were inclined to throw their lot in with us. My plans were nebulous at best. As I said, I am no tactician. But even that tentative first step presented several unexpected challenges.

Our first roadblock was language. We were far beyond the eastern boundaries of the God King's dominions. The language of these desert folk was a complete enigma to us. The Orda called it bird-talk, and that was indeed how it sounded to me, gabbling and nonsensical. We observed one band of desert folk for nearly a week, listening to their conversations, trying to make sense of what they were saying. It was not easy to conceal ourselves from them because there was nothing to conceal ourselves in—no trees, no bushes, just sand and rocks, and wherever we went we left marks in the grit. It was not long before the nomads we were observing began to suspect they were being watched and became very quiet and watchful themselves. Their watchfulness stymied our efforts to learn their tongue, and without language, there was no way we could make ourselves, and our cause, known to them.

There were many challenges: finding enough prey to keep our blood hunger satisfied, moving in the desert undetected, the extremes of the climate-- roasting heat in the day, freezing cold at night—but language was the rock that blocked our path.

"If Ilio were here, he could learn their tongue easily enough," I said one morning as we prepared to sleep for the day. I went on to explain how the boy, my first vampire child, could absorb the memories of the mortals he fed from, including the languages they spoke.

"It is a kind of Sharing," Zenzele nodded. "It is a rare gift, to hear the thoughts of your mortal victims. Some say it is a curse. Blood gods who possess this gift often go mad."

"Perhaps one of us has this gift," Eris spoke up. "I have fed from a mortal, but my tribesmen have not. One of them may have this power."

So far, the rest of the Orda had only fed from animals. Hares. Goats. The odd predator.

"We should feed from one of the mortals tonight, see if one of us has this gift of Sharing," Hammon said.

I was glad Hammon had suggested it. It was what I had been thinking, but I did not want to put it forward myself. Zenzele flashed a look at me as I nodded, stewing in my own shame. Her look said, You will have to rid yourself of this reluctance to kill if you ever hope to defeat the God King. And then I was ashamed of my squeamishness. She was right, of course, but it didn't make me feel any better.

The following evening, just after moonrise, we took one of the nomads, an adult male standing the night's watch. We dragged him away from his camp, out into the deep desert where his cries could not be heard, and then the Orda fed on him.

The Orda circled the struggling man like hyenas around a kill, tearing at his clothing, biting into his flesh. They even sounded like hyenas, laughing, giddy with his blood, their chins and teeth red and dripping. The mortal fought until the end, his eyes wide and bright with terror, but it was over quickly.

Our gambit was a success.

Neolas had the gift.

Moments after he fed, Hammon's younger brother rocked back on his knees, eyes closed, and exclaimed, "I can feel his thoughts inside my mind! His whole life!"

He swayed there on his knees, blood still dripping down his chin and chest, eyes closed in the orgasmic pleasure of feeding on human blood. Black tears, streaked with red, coursed down his cheeks. The Sharing always engenders a powerful simpatico—even the lesser Sharing that occurs from drinking a mortal's blood.

Neolas looked down at the dead man, and his body began to quake. "Te-Han!" he said gutturally, and then he put his forehead on the dead man's chest and began to cry hoarsely. His tribesmen stared at him as if he had sprouted wings.

Zenzele was right again, I thought. It is a curse.

I thanked my ancestors I did not have to Share the thoughts and feelings of my victims. I did not think I could bear it.

"Do you have it?" Zenzele asked, after he had mourned for a while. "Can you speak his tongue?"

Neolas nodded shakily, struggling to maintain his composure. He gazed at the dead mortal as if the man had been his brother. He wiped the blood-streaked tears from his cheeks and licked them from the side of his hand. "I have it," he said with a hitch in his chest. "I have all of him. Here. In my mind." And he touched his temple with a finger.

"Then you must Share him with us," Zenzele said. There was no pity in her voice, no compassion, but her tone was not cruel either. It had to be done and that was all.

He nodded and held out his wrist.

He passed his wrist to all who were present: Zenzele and I, Hammon and the rest of the Orda. Bhorg and Goro had not come with us. They had gone into the mountains to hunt. They would Share with him later.

When Neolas held his arm out to me, I hesitated, dreading the rush of foreign memories that came with the Sharing, the momentary loss of identity, then I gashed the delicate veins running through his inner wrist. His flesh had healed over while I wavered.

I sucked the living blood from the gash I had made in his flesh, shuddering as the Orda's memories fell through my mind like a shower of silver raindrops. And there, mirrored in the Orda's memories, were the life experiences of the mortal he had drunk from. They were dimmer, an image reflected on the surface of rushing water, and I had to strain to catch them, for Neolas' memories were much brighter and more intense. But at last I had the mortal's thoughts, and I absorbed the language and customs and unique mythology of the desert dwellers he was born of.

They called themselves the Han, which was also what they called the desert mouse here in this unforgiving land. They were a clever and resourceful people. They had no gods, but they did believe in spirits, good and bad, and a thing they called Ken, which was a sort of spiritual accounting system. If a man was kind and generous and brave, his spirit grew bright and strong, and he became a protector of the tribe after he died. If a man was wicked and petty and cowardly, his spirit shriveled and grew dark, and he become a demon, a source of bad luck and sickness. The Han knew of the blood gods, whom they called shiang-tzeh, which meant Bad Ghosts of the Night, but they had no knowledge of the God King, or anything of the world beyond their barren desert.

The Han were a family. All of the members of the tribe were related to one another in some manner, and they considered the other wandering desert dwellers a part of this extended family. In that, Han was more of a surname than a title. The tribes of the desert met from time to time for trade and for marriage, but mostly they kept to themselves.

And, of course, I lived the mortal's life. His childhood, his adolescence. When he had his manhood rite, and the elders of the tribe sliced away his foreskin, it was my flesh that was rent, my blood that gushed upon the sand. I shared his righteous anger when he took part, at the age of thirteen, in his first real battle. This was with the Lo, a clan of thieves who had raided their camp and stolen several of their children. I shared his excitement when he took beautiful Wei-Tzau as his bride, and his horror when the fragile young woman died while giving birth. It was all there, in Neolas's blood, the man's overpowering love for his second wife, Be-Hui. His joy when she gave birth to their first child, a boy, and every child after that. They were strong, bright, beautiful children, all of them, and he was so proud of them, though he did not dare to show it. The Han would consider such an exhibition appallingly crass. And foolish. Such displays of unseemly pride were known to tempt the evil spirits who prowled the darkened ways, so jealous were they of the living.

The mortal's thoughts were dimmer than what I had experienced Sharing with Zenzele, for these were secondhand memories, taken by Neolas and then passed on to me, but I was thankful for that. It was hard enough to Share these faded memories, his lifeless body lying at my feet. I felt like I had murdered my brother.

It took me several days to fully absorb all that I had Shared, but I learned his tongue, and the various dialects Te-Han spoke. Each tribe who lived in this vast desert had a slightly different vernacular, though they shared a common base language, a necessity for trade and marriage.

Through sheer good luck, we had overcome the language barrier… but we were about to encounter a second obstacle.

Human nature.