Chapter 332 - Whom Gods Destroy, Uroboros, 23,000 Years Ago part 5

Rebellion fomented.

I heard it whispered in dark alleys. I heard it discussed in clandestine meeting places. They shouted their defiance as they were crucified, as they crumpled in the fighting rings, as they fell beneath the overseer's whip. The gesture they once made to me, fingers to the brow, they now made to one another as they passed in the alleys. It was their sigil, a furtive acknowledgement of their solidarity. They called themselves the Fist of the Divided God. Each member of their organization was called a Finger, though in their language it sounded a little more impressive: bendhai. A bendhai was a finger, but it was also their word for dagger.

At first there were only whispers, but their movement flourished in the months that followed until those first faint whispers had coalesced into a vital humming, quiet but passionately conveyed. I listened from my pike as the whispering grew louder day after day, wondering that the God King's minions were still ignorant of the revolution budding beneath their nose. Did they not see the signs the people made as they scurried past one another in the alleys? Did they not notice the impudence flashing in the eyes of the oppressed, hear the defiance grating in their voices? Could the Blood Gods be so arrogant? So decadent and blind?

Yes, of course; the answer was yes!

And then a very curious thing took place.

One evening, as winter slush was melting from the roofs of the tenements, an immortal paused beneath the wall where my head was hanging… and very quickly made the sign!

There was nothing unusual about the blood drinker. He was just a common foot soldier, one of the God King's spear-carriers, no different from any other low ranking vampire cast down from the lofty heights. I do not know what petty offense he had committed to be exiled to the Shol, or even his name. He had never patrolled the Shol before, or perhaps I'd merely overlooked him until then, though I did not think that very likely. He was short but finely built, with handsome features, shoulder-length chestnut brown hair and a wooly beard. He was attired in the uniform of the Lower Guard: shoulder mantle, a vest of plated armor, kilt and knee-high boots. He passed below me in the company of two other blood drinkers, fellow guardsmen, as the sun was sinking behind the Western Wall in all its bloody glory. The two men he was marching beside did not so much as glance up at me, but this fellow did. He peered up briefly, his eyes catching the last vermillion light of day with an incandescent flash, and then he put two fingers to his brow—the salute of the rebels!

I responded the only way I could, the same way I responded to all the mortals who paid homage to me in that manner. Looking directly at the guard, I closed my eyes slowly and then opened them again.

His compatriots, who were complaining about some new policy their superiors planned to implement, took no notice of our interaction. The chestnut-haired blood drinker followed them down the alley and rounded the corner out of sight.

I never saw that dark haired immortal again, but other blood drinkers saluted me in the months that followed. Usually it was the God King's soldiers, but every now and then some pariah slinking through the darkened alleys would pause and make the sign. It did not happen often, and was always a little surprise to me, but it happened with enough regularity, toward the end, to stir me to new hope.

The infection of discontent, it seemed, had begun to spread up the mountain!

In late spring, it became known to me that a citizen of the Arth would soon be given the Blood. I learned of it by way of eavesdropped gossip. It was a tale of romance, one even the denizens of hell could not help but repeat among themselves. The story was a refreshing break from the unrelenting misery that usually dominated the babble of the Shol.

It seemed that a beautiful immortal named Selenestria, a House Mother of Clan Ghanima, had fallen in love with a mortal stonecutter from the middle city and had petitioned the God King to grant her paramour the Living Blood. Her lover was dying of some malady of the lungs, and she could not bear the thought of being parted from him. Khronos, it was said, was touched by their love and had given his blessing, a rare thing these days as it was generally agreed upon by most Uroborans, mortal and immortal alike, that there were already far too many blood drinkers in the city. But the God King had given his consent. The stonecutter, whose name was Alman, was to be made an immortal. The ceremony would be held in one month's time.

For the next month, the city of Uroboros celebrated the forthcoming ritual. Long red banners were unfurled from the terraces of the Arth. They rippled in the wind, snapping and undulating so that it looked like flows of mortal blood were pouring from the balustrades. Flower petals drifted in pastel-colored blizzards from the hanging gardens. Parades wended through the streets of the middle district, the jubilation of its citizens broadcast through the city on the jangling, discordant music. Even the denizens of the Shol knew some small respite. As their overseers celebrated the exaltation of one of their own, excited by the prospect that they too might be given eternal life someday-- any one of them might!—work fell off a little and there were not nearly so many crucifixions as there normally were. On the flip side, the fighting rings were busy day and night, and slaves were being raped in record numbers. Even the elderly were nervous of their virtue.

But so that I do not paint too rosy a picture of that festive interlude, it was still hell on earth in the Shol. The work in the quarries was still backbreaking. Men were still being crucified for the pettiest offenses. A woman could not fetch water for her household without being molested at least once along the way. The soldiers that patrolled the streets brutalized the populace at their whim. It was just a little less awful for a brief span of time.

As the stonecutter's apotheosis drew near, a Great Feast Day was declared. When news of the pronouncement made its way down the mountain, a terrible convulsion of dismay hove through the district, spreading through the populace like ripples on the surface of a pool of water. On the day of the celebration (I learned) five young men would be culled from the population of the Shol, paid for by the stonecutter's wealthy family. Like sacrificial lambs, they must be beautiful and without blemish, and virgins if possible, although that was not very likely in the Shol, even for young male children. Once they had been stolen away to the Arth, they would be bathed and dressed in finery and then presented to the Eternal Ghanima, mistress of Selenetria's Clan. Selenestria, alongside her mortal lover, would pay tribute to her Clan Master by cutting the boys' throats herself. The first of the blood would be drained into a ritual vessel, which Alman would place at the feet of his new mistress. After Ghanima had drunk, the rest of the Clan Masters would fall upon the dying boys, sucking them dry like the loathsome spiders they were. Only then, when the Masters had glutted themselves on the blood of the innocents, would Ghanima open the veins of her wrist and give the stonecutter her ancient, immortal blood.

All this I gathered from the frightened conversations that careered through the slave district as the fateful day approached.

Day by day, the tension in the slave district swelled, their collective outrage growing louder and louder, until it reached a fever pitch, and then the day of the Great Feast dawned, and the soldiers teemed down from the mountain to find those five perfect boys. Mothers and fathers tried to hide their boy-children as the militia scoured the city for their tributes. But there was really no place to hide their children, not in the crowded, one-room tenements. Those who fled were quickly cornered, their screaming children ripped from their arms. Those who stood in their way were cut down. Resistance was met with the most terrific violence. The children who were taken were dragged before the God King's priests to be judged. If found wanting, they were allowed to return to their homes, bruised and shaken but alive. But the unlucky five, the most beautiful, the most perfect, were borne swiftly up the mountain to bath and to blade. If I could have done anything to stop the atrocity, I would have, but I, being only a head on a pike, could do nothing as the poor denizens of the Shol were assaulted once again.

But that is not exactly true.

When one hysterical mother came shrieking down the alley to the wall where I was hung, dropped to her knees and begged for intercession—"Please, Gon! I beg of you! Help my boy! They've taken him for the Feast! Please, Divided One, he is only a baby!"—I found that I could do one thing.

I could weep.

The celebration in the middle city started at sunrise and continued all through the day. The actual ceremony wouldn't take place until dusk, when the blood gods of Uroboros arose from their slumber, but in the district of the freemen the stonecutter's exaltation was celebrated from sunup to sundown. Banners flapped and petals skirled down in pink and white flurries and you could hear the cheering and singing of the Arthians (and their terrible, jangling music) throughout the entire kingdom. Yet even as the Arthian's celebrated their brother's ascendance, the leaders of the rebels cried out for revolt. The children who would be sacrificed to the Masters had become a cause, symbols of the oppression the people of the Shol could no longer tolerate. Their names were made a mantra: Yen, Polh, Oldham, Han and Treg. The lyrics of their warsong.

From my vantage on the wall, I watched the insurrectionists scurry through the alleys of the Shol. I watched them make their final, desperate preparations, listened as they exhorted their fellows to rise up, rise up and fight for the children—for their freedom! At noon, while their vampire masters slept in their lightless warrens, the people of the Shol turned their tools to mayhem. Within an hour, the low district had been taken by its own downtrodden inhabitants. Shortly after, the insurrections stormed up the ramps and zigzagging stairways to the Arth, meaning to slaughter every last one of their mortal oppressors, to cast them down from their terraces before moving on to destroy their slumbering masters.

Their revolution ended there.

The Arthian militia met them on the stairways. A rain of spears and arrows arrested the momentum of the revolutionaries. I watched as the rebels were turned back, watched them fall beneath their oppressors' deadly missiles, plummeting from the heights in horrifying numbers. Moments later, the God King's warriors boiled out of their underground lair.

In their passion, in their desperation to be free, the leaders of the rebellion had made a fatal miscalculation. They had presumed the blood gods incapable of retaliating during the day. They had believed that because the vampires did not move about during the day that they were incapable of moving about during the day.

Not so, of course.

The God King's soldiers flew out from the Fen like angry hornets. They poured down the side of the mountain in overwhelming numbers, annihilating the last of the rebels before continuing on into the Shol, where they raged and rampaged until a full half of the district's population lay dead or dying, their bodies drained white or rent gruesomely limb from limb. I would have said the streets ran red with their blood but the T'Sukuru drank most of it before ripping their victims apart.

I was not optimistic of the rebels' chances, watching them storm up the mountain, but what followed their aborted revolt was horrible beyond even my own imaginings.

After the uprising had been put down and half the Shol's population lay in bloody tatters in the streets, the God King declared that the surviving slaves must wear the rotting bowels of their fallen comrades about their necks. That would be their punishment. They were to wear the entrails of their fellow citizens until a month's time had passed. The diseases that accompanied this punishment would kill another quarter of the survivors. When the God King's sanction was finally lifted, the Shol was a haunted place, half-empty and silent but for the moans of the traumatized survivors. The people of the slave district were thoroughly and irrevocably beaten, their faces slack, their eyes vacant but for madness or desolation. There was no more whispering of insurrection, and not even the hardest of rains could wash the smell of rotting flesh from the city.

And what of Selenestria and her mortal beloved?

The stonecutter was given the Blood. The ceremony was held at the appointed time as if nothing of consequence had happened that day. The five boys were slain, and Ghanima opened her veins to make a god of the dying artisan. I saw the stonecutter sometime later, when the Blood had done its work and made him an immortal. He came down to the Shol to feed one night, as the gods of Uroboros were known to do from time to time. (Going down below, they called it. "Slumming it" would be the English vernacular.) The Living Blood had made him a powerful immortal. Not an Eternal, which was for the best as Selenestria was not a true immortal either, but he was very finely made, a perfect mate for the beautiful House Mother.

Very few Arthians fell to the insurrectionists. The only deaths, aside from the rebels, were the handful of mortal guards who patrolled the Shol during the daylight hours. Two overseers who had gone down that morning to the stone pits were killed, and a couple soldiers, who fell by accident from the stairs during the battle to take the Arth. Not a single vampire was killed during the uprising. None, I believe, were even injured.

The Shol sat all but empty for a half moon cycle or so, the silence unnerving, and then more slaves were brought in, a great haul of some fifty or sixty new captives. The next band of slavers brought in nearly one hundred. The leader of that crew, an immortal named Aztuhl, was promoted to the rank of House Father. Just good timing, really. The next catch numbered thirty, and the one after that nearly fifty.

None, thank the ancestors, were Tanti.

Pretty soon it was business as usual in the city of the blood gods.

Except for one thing.