Chapter 300 - Army of the Undead part 12

Superstitious beliefs have a viral nature. They spread like a living organism, infecting all who come into contact with them. Do not ask me why this is so for superstition and not for kindness or reason. I cannot give you an answer to that other than the theory I've put forth already in these memoirs: that men are irrational creatures who seek to distract themselves with comforting lies from the harsh truths of their existence. I do not say this to judge, for I do not judge. How can I? I, who am as immune to natural death as I am to disease and the ravages of old age. I have no right to judge anyone. Death is a frightening thing for sentient beings who have no way of knowing if this life is all there is or not. It is no wonder mortal men and women find the promise of eternal life so irresistible.

We knew this. We knew the yearnings of mortal man. How they sought to ease their existential pain. So we gave to them ourselves, the Mother and the Father, we gave them gods, we gave them answers, we gave them comfort, and we used them. We used them to spread the legend of the Mother and the Father. We used them to grow our army.

We needed soldiers, and we needed mortals to support us in our crusade against the God King. We needed their belief, and we needed their blood, and so I tolerated my deification. In fact, I encouraged it.

There is no man more willing to die than one who believes his cause to be holy. It was a truth Zenzele had tried to make me see time and time again, and one that I was very reluctant to accept, but accept it I did… at the end. I had to, and I justified my duplicity by convincing myself that the ends justified the means, that I was doing it for the greater good, and I was, I really was, but the sin (if you believe in such a thing) is the same either way, and the smell of it no sweeter.

So I became a god for them. Again, I became a god.

The River People had made a god of me. They had called me Thest-U'un-Mann, the Ghost Who is a Man. The Tanti had made a god of me as well. Thest, the god of the winds. Both times I had resisted. "I am no god!" I asserted, over and over again, but I finally accepted the mantle of godhood. I knew I had to embrace it if I ever hoped to defeat Khronos.

If I meant to win this war, if I meant to save mankind, I would have to wield my godhood like a weapon.

Together, Zenzele and I gave birth to an army of vampires, and those vampires needed blood. What better way to provide them with their nourishment than to convince our mortal followers that the gods demanded sacrifice-- that their menial offenses could be washed away with an offering of blood? It was a good scam, one that provided plenty of blood for our t'sukuru troops. In fact, I was surprised how well the deceit worked. Our mortal allies were all too eager to cut open their veins and drain their blood for us. They did it to assuage their guilt. Mortals, I have found, are quite vulnerable to guilt. They feel shame at the smallest of imagined infractions, and it causes them an inordinate amount of stress until they are able to release it.

Well, we provided them a very useful way to relieve themselves of guilt.

It was so very easy to delude them!

Mortals are also quite impressed by the healing of sickness. Infirmity and death are terribly frightening to creatures beholden to mortality, so I made a practice of healing our living allies of their injuries. In return for their fealty, they were allowed each evening to bring their sick and injured into my presence-- an audience, if you will-- whereupon I would embrace their suffering brethren, place my mouth upon theirs, and then, with all the accouterments of ritual, heal them of their ailments.

Our mortal followers never failed to be impressed. They did not know that I was merely biting my tongue and transferring a tiny portion of the ebu potashu into the sick ones' mouths. Not enough to change them. Just enough to heal their injuries. And when the number of the sick and injured became too great for me to see to personally, I created a "priesthood" of vampires to minister to them in my stead. I called them my abuellas, and Neolas took the position of High Priest, a job for which he was uniquely well suited.

By then we had inhabited the Urals once again. We had made a fortress city of it. The mountain range had come to be called the Holy Mountains by the mortal pilgrims who came to worship us there, or to be healed or join our armies of mortal and immortal warriors. The God King sent his fighters again and again to assail us, but we destroyed them every time, or sent them fleeing back to their master. We created there a counterpart to Fen'Dagher, only in our mountain-city we revered life and the living, and the mortals were our equals.

Just as in the God King's city, the mortals settled in the valley at the foot of the mountain in which Zenzele and I dwelled. They called our mountain peak Asharoth, and their mortal settlement below Penthos, which meant, respectively, "god-mount" and "feet".

Yes, I declared myself a god! Throughout your mortal history, vampires have often posed as gods. Why else would the sacrifice of blood be such a recurring theme?

Ah, that old swindle-- the expiation of sin by blood sacrifice!

And do not forget the promise, always the same promise: immortality in exchange for devotion. Only in those days it was a promise we could make good on, quite literally, and not just some vague promise of a continuing existence in the afterlife, which you're probably going to have regardless of what deities you bow down to in this life. I've seen ghosts. This corporeal existence is not all there is.

Your race has been huckstered by vampires for thousands of years, and not just by me. Your history is replete with emperors and messiahs, conquerors and kings who were, in fact, vampires.

In my defense, I did it for your own good. I did not want to do it. I do not like to lie, or pretend to be something that I am not, and I am definitely no god. I am just a mortal man who, by chance, was infected by an alien parasite, a thing not born of this world. I am not even truly immortal, for all things have their season in our universe. Worlds freeze over. Stars explode. Whole galaxies collapse into the grinding maw of the singularity at their core.

The ruse wore on me. I'm sure it would have driven me mad were it not for the presence of my beloved Zenzele. Zenzele had a stabilizing effect on my psyche. She is so practical, and has not a whit of patience for self-pity or doubt. And, of course, I was obsessed with destroying Khronos. That single-mindedness shielded me, I think, from some of the guilt I would have felt at what I was being forced to do to preserve the human race.

I hope I have not, for the sake of brevity, made you think that all of this happened quickly. Decades had passed since the night that Zenzele took me captive in the Tanti forest. It took us a little over five years to make the journey from the Gobi Desert to the Urals, for we were constantly recruiting for our cause. Forging alliances. Making more vampires. Training our troops for battle. It took nearly a decade, once we arrived in the Urals, to fortify our mountain settlement, and for a handful of mortal communities to coalesce at the foot of Asharoth.

It did not happen quickly, not as I've described it perhaps, but once Usus and his fellows joined us, and we began to make some progress with the people of the Gobi, our cause gathered momentum, and that momentum continued to build until finally it seemed we were all just flotsam caught in the wake of some great and powerful craft, helpless to do more than point it roughly in the direction we wanted it to go.

Bhorg had taken control of my armies, acting as a sort of prehistoric general. He saw to their training and made sure they were fed and housed. He did this under the supervision of Zenzele, whom he never questioned, and with the assistance of Goro and the Eternal Drago, not to mention Hammon and Morgruss and Usus. Neolas, as I said before, had taken the position of high priest of my Abuellas, and saw to the wellbeing of the mortals who had allied themselves with us. He also carefully fostered the religious movement we had spawned. Every day more pilgrims arrived at the foot of our mountain. They came to escape the God King's predations. They came to see the Mother and the Father. They came to be healed. Neolas, who Shared with any mortal he fed from, developed a keen understanding of the human mind. He became a master of manipulation, and kept the fire of our mortal worshippers' zeal burning hot and bright.

And what did I do?

I was the heart of the beast, I suppose. I was its conscience. More importantly, I was the only one of us who had Shared with the God King. I knew his thoughts. I knew them because a part of his soul dwelled within mine. Not even Zenzele knew him as I knew him-- of his depravity, of the lengths he would go to to have a thing he wanted. She thought she knew his mind, but she was a pragmatic woman, and though she could be ruthless and single-minded when she had to be, she would pursue a thing only so far as it was worthwhile, and so long as it didn't compromise her essential being. Khronos was like a dog. He would eat until he vomited, then eat his own vomit so that no other dogs could partake of what was his. He would sacrifice anything and everything so that his every want was satisfied. That was not a thing that Zenzele would ever understand, nor expect of him. Such excess. Such destructive self-indulgence. And that was why I was important to our cause-- my insight into the God King's personality, and what I knew he would become if left to his own devices.

And lest you think that I had forsaken the Tanti completely, know that this was not so. As soon as I had the power to do so, I sent scouts to find my mortal descendants. I sent spies to Fen'Dagher to see if the God King had taken them captive. There were days I was driven to distraction worrying about my immortal child Ilio and my mortal offspring, the Tanti. If I could have abandoned my place in Asharoth, I would have went in search of them myself.

I will hear news of them soon, I told myself. They will come to Asharoth, as so many others have come, seeking refuge from the God King.

But there was no news. They did not come. Ilio and the Tanti had vanished, as if they had fallen off the edge of the world. They had abandoned the village, as I had told him they must do. They had gone south. But that is all that our scouts, the best trackers we had, were ever able to report.

And the spies I sent to Fen'Dagher never returned.