Chapter 403 - The War of the Vampires part 26

We plunged into the belly of Fen'Dagher.

At first the passage was relatively straight, the walls and floors smoothly planed and polished to a high gloss so that they reflected the light of the torches set along the way. The corridor here, near the opening of the passage, let onto a series of finely appointed chambers. The God King's living quarters. There was also a temple with a long stone trough in the center of the room, the walls and floors stained red with mortal blood, and what looked to be a large dining hall, as well as various other smaller compartments-- the living spaces of the God King's attendants and advisors, I presumed. Every room we saw appeared deserted. Were it not for Aioa's guidance we would have had to inspect each cell, make sure he wasn't hiding somewhere, but thanks to her strange talent it was not necessary to investigate every nook and cranny we encountered, and we were able to hurry on in pursuit of our foe.

Indeed, it was like being swallowed by a beast. Once we had passed the private chambers of the God King and his staff, the tunnel descended steeply and began to dogleg wildly back and forth. Darkness enveloped us, as there were no torches this far down, and the walls of the passage became coarse and uneven. As we continued to descend into the belly of the volcano, the air took on the bitter odor of the gases welling up from the depths: carbon dioxide and sulfur mainly. A smell like rotten eggs. The odor was so overpowering it would have driven a mortal back, but we were not mortal, and could hold our breath indefinitely. The hissing of the gases, and a subtle throbbing in the walls around us, furthered the impression that we had been devoured by a living creature.

"Can you still sense him? Are we going the right way?" I asked Aioa.

"Yes, grandfather," she answered. "But he is fleeing as quickly as we follow in pursuit."

"He cannot run forever," I said, but the truth was he could. He could run forever.

But so could I, and if I had to chase him to the ends of the earth, I would.

I must!

When I first battled Khronos, here in this den of corruption, I had wounded him, tasted his alien blood. Through the Blood had passed his memories, and a faint echo of his personality. But it was more than just a Sharing. I had seen a vision of the future, and that future, if the God King was not destroyed, was the doom of all mankind. I saw the whole world under the dominion of our kind, and mortal man kept like cattle to feed our endless hunger. I saw a never-ending cycle of parasitism and war, a world become so miserable and corrupt that no sane creature could hope to endure it.

I held that vision in my mind as we pursued our foe into the mountain. I would not let it go until the God King was destroyed. Only then, when he was dust beneath my heel, would I be satisfied that we had averted the calamity I'd foreseen.

Then, perhaps, I could rest.

Then, perhaps, I could set aside this false mantel of godhood and go in search of the man I was before. Not the Father. Not Thest, God of the Wind. Not the Divided God.

Just Gon.

We continued down, and as we raced deeper and deeper into the earth, the air grew even more intolerable. It was hot and humid now, like a sauna, and there was the briny tang of seawater mixed in with the eggy smell of sulfur and carbon dioxide. The darkness had given way to a ruddy light the color of hot coals, and fine ash swarmed in the air like tiny flying insects. We began to see little pools of molten rock, a phenomenon none of us had encountered before. Here and there, thin rivulets of the glowing orange fluid wept from fissures in the walls. It hissed and flamed when it encountered anything flammable.

"Stay away from those pools of fire," I warned the others, after dipping a finger experimentally into one of them. The pain was exquisite.

We had come into a great open chamber with cones of rock depending from the ceiling and jagged outcrops staggered up the walls. Columns of grainy granite stood like pillars holding up the roof. Distributed around this vast cavern were pools of magma that bubbled and puffed out little clouds of vapor. I could feel the vermillion light tightening the flesh of my face. When I drew breath to speak, my lungs convulsed in pain. At least a dozen passages branched off from this bubbling caldron, running in all directions. Khronos could have fled down any one of them.

"Which way now?" I said to Aioa.

She shook her head, eyes slitted. "I'm not certain," she answered. "I feel that he is near. I think perhaps he doubled back."

"Do you hear that?" I cried out. "Be on your guard! The time to fight has finally come!"

Zenzele reached out to me, and I took her hand and squeezed her fingers.

"Show yourself, coward!" Drago shouted.

Vehnfear had ventured a little ahead of us. As the echoes of Drago's challenge died away, the immortal wolf jerked suddenly in surprise. Hackles raised, the beast crouched and began to snarl ferociously at some unseen foe.

I started immediately in his direction, Zenzele right behind me. A column of igneous rock stood in the way so that I could not see what the wolf was growling at, but he had definitely encountered something (or someone) he did not like. "What is it, old man?" I called.

Without warning, a tarry black tendril speared the animal through the breast.

The glistening black cord was about half the thickness of a man's wrist. Vaguely organic and coiling, it looked like some hideous alien vine, or perhaps the stinger of some mysterious sea creature.

It impaled the wolf with horrific violence, striking him hard enough to drive him several feet across the floor.

For a moment, I stood paralyzed, too shocked by the bizarre attack to react.

Vehnfear yelped in surprise, and then let out a piercing howl. The black tendril began to throb then, and I realized it was draining the wolf of his Living Blood.

Zenzele and I shouted "No!" in unison and raced forward to help the stricken beast.

Vehnfear lurched away, flopping onto his side, but the tendril held on, pulsating feverishly. Several smaller tendrils split away from the main branch and plunged into his flesh. He tried to bite the offending coils but they twisted away from his snapping teeth. They jerked him forward savagely, flung him into a granite column, then raised him bodily into the air and slammed him back down.

All this happened in a matter of seconds.

The animal was shriveling inside his pelt. His fur churned like it was full of maggots. He shrieked and tossed his head, eyes blanching and falling back into their sockets, skin contracting around the bones.

We came around the column and saw our enemy crouched there in the shadows: Khronos, the God King of the vampires! The black tendril was extruding from his mouth. Behind him was a narrow passage, like the burrow of an animal. He must have come through there, crawling on his hands and knees.

Before we could intervene, the God King wrenched back his head and the tendril lifted Vehnfear into the air and slammed him back down one more time.

The wolf flew to dust.

For a moment, I was blinded by a swirling cloud of dust and animal hair. A few stray bones, flung away by the impact, skittered against my ankles. They rattled like dice across the ground before they, too, crumbled to dust.

Just as Aioa had said, the God King had doubled back on us. Or perhaps he had merely waited for us here, in this dark alcove, crouching in the shadows like some hungry spider. And he had lashed out at the first member of our company to venture too far from the group.

I do not know why he chose that place to make his final stand, as we outnumbered him so greatly. Perhaps he had gone into the bowels of the mountain, seeking some route of escape, and failing that had turned back out of desperation, like a cornered animal. Or perhaps, in his arrogance, he truly believed he could destroy us all. I suppose it doesn't matter what the God King's motives were. The end, when it came, was terrible and swift.

Enraged at Vehnfear's destruction, Zenzele launched herself at Khronos with an inarticulate howl.

Faster than even my beloved could move, Khronos withdrew the repulsive tentacle and turned to meet her. His jaw unhinged, like a snake preparing to devour a meal, and a bouquet of writhing pseudopods poured forth from his gullet.

They writhed out with a coughing sound and enveloped Zenzele's upper body as she flew at him, arresting her momentum. It was the Living Blood, come up out of the God King's throat like a tangle of wriggling snakes. I had never seen its like before (nor ever would again) and I faltered, unsure how to respond to this attack. But then my love let out a strangled cry and I leapt forward to her aid.

I clawed at the writhing tentacles, attempting to tear them away from her face, but the black tendrils liquefied at my touch, melting away and reforming so that my fingers could find no purchase. It was like trying to catch ahold of water.

Zenzele batted at the air in her panic, further hindering my efforts.

"Ancestors!" I grunted. "Hold still!"

But it was no good. She was too frightened, and struck me a blow to the side of the head hard enough to make my ears ring.

With mounting horror, I saw the black fluid slithering up her nostrils. She opened her mouth to scream, and it surged between her lips. Khronos stooped forward just a couple meters away, stomach strangely sunken, ribcage and facial bones grotesquely protruding, as if he had partially deflated. He was grinning around that mouthful of whipping tendrils, a hideous, distorted, inhuman grin.

I gave up trying to free Zenzele, and attacked the man instead.

I leapt upon him, wrapped my hands around his throat.

"Release her!" I snarled.

I tried to tear his head off, but he caught my wrists in his hands. Several strands of those glistening black tendrils withdrew from Zenzele and coiled around my arms and neck. They slithered towards my face as more of the tendrils sprouted from Khronos's nostrils. They wavered in the air like the shoots of some alien vegetable, bending towards my mouth and nose. I tried to turn my head away, but it did no good, and I could not twist my arms free. The God King's grip was iron.

The tendrils slid moistly up my cheek.

Just as I felt the first cold liana sliding up my nose, our confederates joined the battle.

Rayna came flying through the air and slammed into Khronos with both feet. The blow sent him reeling backwards, tearing us free of those awful tentacles. Zenzele fell onto her back. I went stumbling forward onto my knees. The severed tentacles still clinging to my neck and arms began to quiver spasmodically. They quickly returned to a liquid state and began to oxidize, boiling to black vapor with a sound like grease on hot coals.

Rayna scrambled to help Zenzele, scraping the melting feelers from her face. She pressed her fingers into Zenzele's mouth, scooped out a twitching tentacle and flung it away with a snarl of disgust.

Khronos swooped to his feet, body unnaturally stiff, arms out to his sides as if he meant to take flight. There was nothing human in that distorted face, in those blank black eyes and chimp-like grin. His head fell back and his jaw dropped to his chest and the Blood came surging up out of his throat again. It rose three, four, five meters above his head, a shiny black protean mass.

I watched, entranced, as that horrible stew convulsed in the air, folding restively upon itself, the living embodiment of chaos. It collapsed down a little, as if gathering strength, and then surged up even higher, unfurling two ragged looking wings to either side.

From the core of the churning totem, a powerful stinger shot out, impaling Rayna from behind, right between the shoulder blades. It was a lethal blow. She fell silently upon Zenzele. Dying. Dead already. Her flesh already beginning to flake away.

"NO!" I roared, and leapt upon the God King again.

I went for his head, meaning to tear it from his neck. Laying my hands on his cheeks, I began to twist his skull back and forth.

"Die!" I snarled.

I heard vertebrae crunch. The pale flesh of his neck began to fissure.

All at once, the bat-like wings that had stretched out from the seething mass snapped down around me, enfolding my upper body like a black cloak. The God King's Living Blood surged up my nostrils, rushed between my lips and poured down my throat. The taste was foul beyond description, the essence of hatred. Before, when I had Shared with Khronos, the God King's personality was dominant. I had absorbed his human memories, felt his human presence in my mind. This time, there was just the Other, the ancient, parasitic thing that animated his flesh, that animated us all: the ebu potashu, the Living Blood.

The invader.

The transformer.

Its awareness flooded my mind like foul sewage, alien and incomprehensible. It was a crude intellect, soulless and savage. There was no sense of time or self, no beginning or end. There was not even a concept of separateness-- between me and it, or the two of us and the world we inhabited. It was just a pitiless, churning, empty maw, relentless hunger, the desire to eat and grow and nothing else.

I tried to scream but the darkness was filling me up. It was inside and outside of me, enveloping me, invading me, its cold black grasping tentacles driving deeper and deeper into my being. I wanted to pull away but I could not find the strength. I could not, in truth, even perceive what was Me and what was the Other anymore.

I realized then that it was devouring me, that it was transferring itself into my body, and that both of those concepts were one and the same for the symbiont. I think it sensed, in some instinctive way, that the God King's time had come and gone, that his behavior patterns were no longer advantageous to its survival, and it was shedding Khronos as a snake sheds its skin, molting the God King like an insect casting off its old carapace in favor of the new.

That was why Khronos had doubled back, why he returned to confront us when he could so easily have made good his escape!

He wanted me-- or rather the thing that inhabited him wanted me!

The Living Blood resides within us all. It dwells within every blood drinker, like a mollusk in its calcareous shell. It animates our transmogrified flesh. It uses us to hunt, to feed, to breed. But this… this was the primal seed, the sacred core, the very heart of darkness.

And it wanted me for its new host!

But the thought of sharing my body, sharing my mind, with that alien thing filled me with horror. The Living Blood is in us all, that is true, but only the sacred core possessed that awful awareness, that hungry alien consciousness, and the memories--! Oh, ancestors! The images were too terrible to bear. I was cast adrift in a cold and starless universe through which vast god-like creatures glided like cosmic protozoa, gathering up entire worlds in their grasping limbs and devouring them like grapes, and on those little worlds more of the protean creatures resided, and they grazed in the same manner as their greater brethren, and their prey fed upon creatures slightly smaller than themselves, and those on even smaller things, and so on and so on, and it never ceased because nothing ever died there. It was simply devoured, transmuted. There was hunger, and there was pain, and there was fear and satisfaction. But never happiness. Never joy. Never hope or love or laughter.

Ancestors, save me! I could not live knowing of such a place. The awareness of it would drive me insane!

It was horror that moved me to push back against the sacred core, to reject it. I began to struggle in the womb-like darkness that had engulfed me, to lash out at it. Again and again, I battered at the protean creature that surrounded me, swinging my arms wildly. I felt my fist burst through the thin membrane that enfolded me, saw a flash of red light. Desperately, I seized the ragged edges of the rift and tore it wider, clawing my way free.

The Living Blood flowed and reformed, trying again to engulf me, but my accomplices joined the affray. Drago pressed into the narrow alcove and slashed at the God King with his bladed staff. The blade struck Khronos in the middle of his shoulder and severed his left arm. Tapas climbed over me to seize the God King by the head while his wives grabbed my arms and pulled me free of the Living Blood. Zenzele had risen by then and launched herself at Khronos with a cry. She tackled the God King at the waist, driving him back against the wall.

The great black wings that had tried to consume me suddenly withdrew. They spread in the air in a fearsome threat display, like the neck membrane of a frilled lizard, then split into a hundred whipping tendrils.

Poor Tapas, who was nearest—who, in fact, still had his fingers wrapped around the God King's neck—bore the brunt of the tendrils' wrath. He was stung a dozen times in the space of a heartbeat. Had he been a lesser blood drinker, I'm certain it would have been his doom, but he was a giant of a man and all but Eternal. He grunted, contorting his body at each wounding, trying to dodge the vicious stingers, and then he was seized up by half a dozen more and pitched clear across the cavern.

The God King drew himself up, tendrils still whipping in the air, but some instinct told me that he was weakening, that his great strength was failing. It is the Living Blood that gives us our powers, and his symbiont had expended a great deal of its strength in its efforts to take possession of my body. Our atmosphere is toxic to the Strix. That is why it shelters in the bodies of the dead. It is why some vampires perish when they are significantly wounded. And the longer it remained exposed to our caustic atmosphere, the weaker it would become.

The others had fallen back a little, startled by its fearsome display.

"What are you doing?" I shouted at them. "Can't you see his strength is failing? Now is not the time to lose heart! Fight! Fight him!"

There were, by then, twenty-six remaining immortals, of which half a dozen were Eternals, and six more near-Eternals. They rallied at my battle cry, closing on the God King's frantic form.

I pressed forward ahead of the group, laying hands upon the God King's throat. His flesh felt curiously fragile beneath my fingers, like parchment paper, as if the slightest pressure might cause it to crumple. Those tendrils, however, were not so insubstantial. They continued to lash in the air, tearing grooves in my face and shoulders. Slashing. Stabbing. His face was lax, eyes blankly staring, as if all that was human had fled him at last.

For an instant, the merest fraction of a second, I felt pity for him, for the mortal man that he had been, and then I tightened my fingers around his throat and removed his head from his neck.

The deadly tendrils withdrew into the God King's torso as I stumbled back with my prize. Drago pushed past me and tore off the God King's remaining arm. It flopped to the ground, fingers flexing frenetically. Zenzele lifted the God King off his feet and slammed his body down. The rest crowded around him then, punching, kicking, tearing him apart.

"We must devour the Blood," I said. "All of us! Every last drop of it!"

And then I turned the God King's head in my hands so that the ragged stump of his neck was angled up at me, like a drinking gourd. I hesitated, eyeing the mangled tissue with distaste, the grisly vertebrae and open throbbing larynx, and then I brought it to my lips and drank.

At the last, just before the life fled his flesh, I had a fleeting impression of the mortal he had been, what little remained of the human part of him.

It was a memory.

It was a single memory from when he was a boy. His father, Minos, had just died. Gored by a boar during a hunting expedition, the humorless man had perished after a short and terrible fever. As was the way of the God King's mortal tribe, the Anaki, a ceremonial bier was prepared, and Minos was laid upon it to be roasted and devoured by his people. After Khronos cut him open, Old Zambi placed his father's heart in the young man's hands, still warm from the fire. Young Khronos never forgot the taste of his father's heart-blood, how it had burst into his mouth when he rent the fibrous tissue with his teeth, how good it was, how satisfying.

We are one now, he had thought, chewing the tough muscle of his father's heart, swallowing the masticated flesh and thick, rich, hot heart's blood.

And when they brought me the God King's heart, as Zenzele held it out to me, cold and black and inert in her palms, that final remnant of the mortal Khronos had been, that last human part of his soul, looked out through my vampire eyes… and was satisfied.

I took his heart and drank from it.

The God King's blood was very bitter.

When it was finished, his heart shriveled with a crackling sound and fell to dust in my hands.

"It is finished," I said.