Chapter 310 - The Divided God part 4

The city of Uroboros had grown exponentially in the twenty years since our escape from the God King. The upper tier of the city, the Fen, home of Khronos and his depraved blood gods, had not much changed. But the lower two levels, the sections occupied by the city's mortal population, had expanded greatly. Arth, the abode of the city's freemen and high caste mortal slaves, had spread horizontally across the mountain's sheer face. It was a city of multi-story stone dwellings and verdant hanging gardens, sweeping rope bridges and sprawling walled villas. The Shol, the slum district that housed the city's slave caste, was four times the size it had once been, and was surrounded by numerous low dwellings made of stone and mud and wood and a great stone wall, a new one that rose twice as high as the walls that once kept the God King's sorry mortal captives penned. In modern parlance, you might call the Shol a ghetto, but it was so much worse than that. It was a hell, a blight, a spot of cancer on the face of the earth. Picture in your mind the painting Hell by the brilliant mortal artist Hieronymus Bosch, and you hold in your mind the spirit of Khronos's kingdom.

The t'sukuru had named this mountain Fen'Dagher, which roughly translated as "Heaven Spear", and I thought it was an apt name, for if there really were a heaven, this place would be an affront to it, a lance hurled at the heart of God.

I remembered my first sight of the city, how its splendors had dazzled my eyes even as its horrors outraged my sensibilities. In a time when fire and cave drawings were the pinnacle of man's technology, Uroboros looked every bit the city of the gods it claimed to be. A heaven and a hell, and the stink of it dizzied me, even from a distance.

Several roads wound away from the gates of the high new wall that surrounded the Shol. I set along one of these roads after exiting the forest, striding purposefully toward the city.

A continuous stream of mortal wayfarers shared the thoroughfare with me, traveling to and from the city gates. Some were on horseback, high caste overseers or freemen of the Arth. Others traveled by foot, half-starved slaves dressed in rags. Or naked. Naked and shivering like animals. All of them bowed deferentially to me, or cowered in fear. They did not know who I was, only what I was. My hard white skin declared my social standing, which was enough to cow every mortal I passed.

In Uroboros, all living men bowed to the blood gods.

Torches flickered along the battlements of the defensive wall. Mortal guards patrolled the city from its heights, marching along the elevated wall walk with bows and spears. The gate was a narrow throat guarded by low caste blood drinkers, easy to defend. It suddenly occurred to me that Khronos had constructed the wall for fear of attack, for fear of me and my army, and I smiled in satisfaction. It pleased me that he should know fear. That I, in some small way, had made him suffer. It made me feel somewhat better about the pains I was soon to endure.

I knew pain. I have lived with pain from the moment I was made a vampire. The hunger for blood is a constant, gnawing ache, relieved only momentarily by its satisfaction. And thanks to Zenzele's training, I knew what it was to have my limbs torn from my body. I have thrown myself from great heights. I have been crushed to pulp in the crevasse of a glacier. I should not be frightened at the prospect of confronting the God King, and yet I was, and that fear troubled me.

I think I was afraid he would break me. That I would not be able to endure the torments he had planned for me. That I would go mad. Or surrender to him utterly. My body could not be destroyed, but what of my mind? What of my soul? Was my spirit as resilient as my flesh?

Please, ancestors, give me strength, I prayed. Help me to win the freedom of those I love, of Ilio, and of our mortal descendants. And help me to endure the pain that's coming. Allow me that victory, even in defeat. The God King must not break my spirit!

One of the blood drinkers guarding the passage through the wall stepped forward to challenge me. He was short and thin with a wild bird's nest of hair on his head and ugly, misshapen features. He gripped one of the strange weapons I had seen during the God King's assault on Asharoth, a staff with a long blade on the end. The blade was crudely shaped, but of a material I had never seen before. It glinted like a fluid, but it was firm, and had a very keen edge.

"I don't know you!" the guard snarled. "Who are you? And what business have you in Uroboros?"

He bared his fangs when he spoke. I think he meant to intimidate me. Behind him, about halfway down the passage, two of his fellow guards were molesting a female slave. One was raping her as the other fed noisily from her wrist. She moaned as the two blood drinkers had their way with her. She seemed hardly more than a skeleton, her eyes and cheeks sunken, her flesh stretched taut across the bone.

"I am here at the bidding of your God King," I said. "I am the blood drinker called Gon."

"Gon?" he repeated with a frown, and then his jaw dropped. "Gon!"

The gatekeeper's shock was almost comical. I had to restrain a chuckle as the ugly little man simultaneously yelled for assistance and brought his weapon to bear on me. Its pointy tip trembled an inch or two before my nose.

I examined the strange material of the blade as his fellow guards forsook their entertainment and scurried to his aid. I reached out to touch the glinting material, ran my thumb across its edge. It was as sharp as the finest knapped flint, slicing easily through the pad of my thumb.

It was some type of metal, of course, though I did not know it at the time. The Uroborans had recently discovered metallurgy, though they were only crudely able to shape the novel material. I suppose they had discovered the art while investigating a magmatic flow deep in the belly of the volcano. This, in a time when mortal man had not yet invented the wheel, but Uroboros was highly advanced, a byproduct of their extremely long lives. Knowledge was not lost nearly so often among near-immortals as it was in the mortal world. Before the written word, mortality was the limiting factor of human advancement.

The gatekeeper saw me examining his weapon and poked it at me threateningly. "Mind your hands!" he glowered, and I showed him my palms.

I waited as he communicated my identity to his fellow gatekeepers. One bladed staff became three as they tried to decide what to do with me. All at once they wanted to know what my intentions were, how did they know I was really the wild blood god called Gon, and did I know what the God King was going to do to me when he got his hands on me?

"I need not prove myself to the likes of you," I said. "I have come to surrender myself to your master. Now step aside. I am sure your God King would not want his triumph impeded."

My haughty reply—and precedent reputation—was enough to make the gatekeepers give way, but they followed close behind as I traversed the wall, as I finished my journey and entered the city of the blood gods.

I only faltered once. I stopped, just inside the God King's great wall, as if I had collided with an invisible door.

It was the smell, the indescribable stench of the Shol. It rocked me back on my heels, and I had to push down the nausea and revulsion that constricted my throat, that made my thoughts swim dizzily in my skull. The smell of human waste and blood, rotting and burning and diseased mortal flesh, was almost more than I could bear. I almost asked my anxious new escort how they could stand, with their amplified senses, to live in the midst of such sickening odors. Could they not smell it? But I suppose they were used to it.

I held my tongue. I did not want them to mistake my revulsion for weakness, but I wondered to what horrors man could become accustomed before his spirit said, No more! This is unendurable!

I closed my eyes, battened down my senses, and continued on.

Just within the wall was a district of low, crude lodgings. It was a dark labyrinth through which the lowest of the low scurried like human vermin. The ground beneath my feet was sticky and wet. I could hear mortals keeping pace with me in the shadows, moving furtively just out of sight. I could feel their eyes on me, hot with hate and desperation. My immortal escort edged closer to me, and to one another, as I navigated the confusing maze of lightless hovels. They were obviously wary of the mortals pacing alongside us-- which bode well for Zenzele, I thought, should she ever attack the city.

They will turn on their masters, I thought. Their misery has become so great that they no longer fear death.

As if to support my observation, a trio of mortals rushed at my guards from the darkness. They were armed with crude blades and the valor of utter hopelessness. The roared as they charged, their bulging eyes empty of reason. The blood drinkers who had been following me spun in their direction, hissing like cats.

The skirmish was short-lived. The mortals were dead within moments, cut down by the blood drinkers' strange new weapons. Several more guards came running, drawn by the screams of the dying men, the smell of freshly spilled mortal blood.

One of the gatekeepers who had accompanied me from the wall lost control of his bloodthirst and dropped down to his knees to feed from his twitching opponent.

I turned away in disgust and continued on my way.

Past the labyrinth of mortal dwellings was an open area studded with crucified and impaled human bodies—insurgents and troublemakers, I am sure. There were hundreds of them, dying or dead and in various states of decomposition, hanging from frames of wooden timbers or skewered upon pikes.

I passed a group of blood drinkers hard at work in this forest of death. Two blood drinkers had taken a man's legs up by the ankles and were dragging him upon a sharpened pole that had been laid flat on the ground. The mortal thrashed and screamed as the spike slid into his bowels while his executioners laughed and made mock of him. They did it slow so that he would suffer, and then they stood the pole up and slid the base of it into a posthole that had been dug into the ground. The dying mortal screamed unceasingly as he sagged down the pike. His shrill cries stopped only when the sharp end of the pole burst out through the crook of his shoulder.

A huddle of condemned men pleaded for their lives nearby. There was a pile of sharpened poles lying at their feet, and little hope of reprieve. If I thought I could have done anything to help the doomed men I would have tried, but there was an ever-increasing number of t'sukuru guards close at my back, and I knew they would attack me if I dared to interfere. They were content to follow so long as I behaved myself, and that was what I meant to do.

For Ilio, and for the Tanti.

Where are the Tanti? I wondered.

I hardened my heart and let down the shutters I had placed upon my senses, letting into my mind the full scope of my heightened perceptions. I am sure I wavered for a moment as I strode past the charnel pits. It was all I could do to stay on my feet as I searched for the scent of my mortal descendants. The smell of all those dead bodies, congealed into a solid mass of rotting flesh, was nearly overwhelming, but I persevered. It had been twenty years since I lived among the descendants of my own mortal offspring, but I was certain I would recognize their scent—if they were truly captives here in Uroboros, as the God King had claimed.

Not here, I thought. Not here!

He had Ilio. I had seen it in Palifver's memories. But he had lied about my mortal descendants. I was fairly certain of it.

It gave me no hope, offered no prospect of escaping the fate I had chosen for myself, but it was a great relief. My legs felt weak.

The Tanti still eluded him!

One of the blood drinkers who followed me—the gatekeeper I'd confronted on my arrival—prodded my back with his weapon. "That way!" he barked, and nodded toward a wooden bridge that angled up to the Arth, the district of the high caste Uroboran mortals.

My entourage was growing at an impressive rate. Blood drinkers had formed around me like iron shavings around a magnet. Perhaps they thought to curry favor with the God King. Perhaps they hoped to make it appear as if they had captured me themselves. I would make it known that I had surrendered of my own free will. None would benefit from my capitulation.

I circled around a blood-soaked arena, ignoring the howling crowds, the combatants fighting to the death in the leaping torchlight, and went to meet my fate.