Chapter 294 - Army of the Undead part 6

Humans are, at their core, an irrational species. The human mind has the capacity for rational thought, but (and I assure you of this from long and bitter experience) little inclination to exercise it. And who can blame you? There is very little joy in stark reality, and little motivation to live in full awareness of life's bleak truths. To do so leads unerringly to despair… or madness.

You all die.

So you distract yourself with trivialities, insulate your minds from the terrible truth of your existence. I can give you a thousand examples to show you this is true. A million. You need only turn on your evening news to know that I speak the truth.

You make war when you could have peace. Pollute the world when you have the technology to make a paradise of it. You squat here on this ball of mud and rock and squander your lives bickering on internet social networks and masturbating to pornography when your race could be colonizing the heavens.

And why?

To distract yourselves from the horrifying truth of your existence. You all die. And when you are at peace, you remember it.

Even then, over twenty thousand years ago, I knew that this was so. I knew that men were irrational creatures. I knew they reacted to even a whiff of honesty with violence and hatred. It should not have surprised me how the first desert dwellers we tried to recruit reacted to our entreaty.

But it did.

I was completely flabbergasted by it.

We did not approach the Han. They would have deduced what had happened to Te-Han the moment we walked out of the desert. They would have known that we had killed him.

Instead we approached one of the other desert tribes.

They were called the Hui.

It was my decision to approach them directly, to be truthful with them, and trust that reason would compel them to join us in our war against Khronos. Yes, they were far removed from the God King's influence—for now, I would tell them-- but Khronos's empire was steadily expanding, and the day would come when their children, or their children's children, would kneel in submission to the insatiable blood god if we did not move to stop him. We must take up arms now, I would say to them, before he was too powerful to be challenged.

Zenzele was doubtful it would work.

"Men do not want truth," she said. "They want comforting lies. They do not react well when you rob them of their conceits."

"They will recognize the truth of my words," I assured her. "They will see the necessity of our cause."

Oh, how deluded I was!

I knew the heart of man. I've just always had trouble accepting it.

We walked in from the desert, our eyes gleaming, our flesh glowing softly in the moonlight. The Hui scrambled from their tents when the night watch cried out the alarm, brandishing their spears and knives and bows. I held up my hands for peace, and in their native tongue I pled my case. The God King of the west must be defeated, I told them. He will not be satisfied until he has conquered the world and enslaved all mortal men, including the Hui. The Hui must join us, help us to fight this God King before the whole world must bow in submission to the fiend.

The elders of the Hui conferred at a short distance, eying us with great suspicion. Then their chief, a tall, brawny man with long hair and a thick, black, curling beard, returned to address me—or so I thought. He grinned at me, his teeth as white and shining as my flesh, and then he ran me through with his spear.

"No!" Zenzele shouted.

I could have-- should have-- dodged the chieftain's attack, but the man caught me off guard. I could not believe that he had attacked me. The spear pierced me through the chest and punched out through the back of me, skewering my heart and left lung. It would have killed me if I was a mortal man, but I was not. I didn't need either organ to live. Still, it hurt. In truth, the pain was stunning. In such instances, our amplified senses can be a detriment, for we feel pain as finely as we can smell and see and hear and taste. For a moment all I could do was blink stupidly into the chieftain's fiercely glaring eyes, holding the shaft of the spear between us.

Talk about killing the messenger!

"You lie, demon!" the chieftain hissed. "Die, trickster of the desert!"

He jerked the spear out and stabbed it through me again.

The Orda rushed forward as I yanked the spear from the chieftain's hands. I stumbled back, trying to pull the weapon from my chest. Zenzele came to assist me while the Orda and the Hui engaged in battle.

"Hold still," Zenzele said as I tried to pull the spear out. I couldn't do it on my own. My arms were too short, and I hadn't yet thought to pull it out by degrees. She grasped the shaft and put her foot against my hip and yanked. My flesh had already healed around the shaft, healed to it, and she had to rip it loose to get it out.

I couldn't make speech for a moment, not with my lungs punctured. I gaped like a fish drowning in air as the living blood flowed into the injuries and began to knit me back together again.

The Orda were tearing the Hui apart. Already, half of their adult males were dead. My people fed upon them in a frenzy of blood lust. Women and children were fleeing into the desert, screaming. The younger Hui men came running and the Orda leapt upon them.

"Stop them!" I finally managed to gasp.

"It is already too late," Zenzele said grimly, holding the spear.

I stumbled forward, shouting at the Orda, or trying to shout. My lungs had not yet healed and my words were garbled with blood. I stepped across the body of the chieftain, who was missing his head. I grabbed Hammon by the shoulders and pulled him off a Hui warrior. Hammon hissed at me, chin bloody. The Hui warrior bucked, his tattered neck spurting blood.

"Stop this, Hammon," I choked. "Come to your senses!"

An arrow thunked into my shoulder and I blinked up at the Hui bowman who had just shot me. It was a lad barely older than Ilio had been when I met him. The bowman, hands shaking, nocked another arrow, his tilted eyes glittering with fear.

Hammon saw the arrow protruding from my shoulder and leapt at the bowman, snarling. The boy screamed once, and then the leader of the Orda knocked him down and began to pummel him. Two blows and the lad was dead, his neck broken.

Zenzele walked to me, her lips pressed thinly together. One of the Hui pelted toward her from the rear, having circled around behind. She turned and seized the man's spear and knocked him flat to the ground with it, then continued on, barely breaking her stride.

"Will you take my counsel now?" she asked.

I nodded.

"I'm sorry this happened," she said. "I know it was not your intent." She pushed the arrow the rest of the way through my body, snapped off the tip, then pulled the shaft from my flesh and threw it aside.

I looked across the camp. There were dead men lying everywhere. Bloody. Dismembered. In just moments, the Orda had massacred half the tribe. Only the Hui who had fled into the desert still lived.

"What hope have mortal men?" I said despairingly to Zenzele. "What hope in the face of our savagery?"

Following my gaze with her eyes, Zenzele replied, "There has always been little hope for our cause, my love. You know that as well as I. But it is not completely hopeless. Men can be trained to battle our kind. They can be convinced to join us. But it will take time. We must be patient. And much more subtle than this."

"Subtle? But how?" I asked,

Her eyes narrowed. "We're going to have to trick them into saving themselves," she said.