I watched as the God King's soldiers cut the throats of my last mortal descendants.
I was close enough that I could have rushed forward, saved one or two of them perhaps. Very few immortals can match my speed or strength. And I was tempted to try. Oh, how sorely I was tempted! All that stayed my hand was the very real possibility that I might fall into my enemy's hands. And if the God King took me captive, if his soldiers brought me down, everything we had fought for, all the sacrifices we had made, would be for naught. I could not allow that to happen. I had to stay back.
For the good of the whole.
So I watched the Tanti die. I watched the knives slide across their necks. Watched as they fell to their knees, clutching at the spurting wounds. Watched them fall, twitching, to the ground like slaughtered lambs. I could smell their blood as it spilled onto the earth. I could feel their pain, their fear, as the final darkness enveloped their souls.
Trembling in rage, I screamed: "Attack!"
The army at my back roared in solidarity. They took to the air, leaping in their vast numbers toward our Uroboran foes. Others raced past me, rushing toward our enemy on foot. The sound of their passage was crashing thunder. My cold dead heart began to thump, a rapid drumbeat of rage and thirst for vengeance.
"Attack! Attack!" Zenzele shrieked, waving our troops forward. "Destroy them all!"
Drago shot past me like an arrow, an expression of savage joy on his face. At last, the time had come! At last, he would have his revenge! I heard him cry, "Hannan!" and then he launched himself into the air and I lost sight of him. Gone into the dark heavens. Gone into the stream of immortals soaring overhead.
Snarling, Vehnfear loped toward the city.
Laughing, Bhorg lumbered by, swinging his mighty hammer.
"Irema!" Aioa shouted. She looked at me with dawning wonder. "She's done it! The slaves are rising up!"
All across the Shol, new-blooded immortals sprang up from their hiding places. After the slaughter of the Tanti, Irema and her Uroboran collaborators had gone down into the lower city. Moving stealthily through the squalid tenements and narrow, winding streets, they had circulated the Living Blood among the rebel slaves. While Khronos readied his defenses and moved his troops into position, the insurgents had passed through the agonizing transformation in their bolt holes and secret meeting places, then went out to spread the Blood among their fellow conspirators. By the time our army arrived, there were some two hundred vampire rebels hiding in the Shol, waiting for the signal to rise up against their masters.
That signal came when we launched our final assault.
Irema, who was watching from the shadows of the eastern gate, saw our forces take to the air. She ran through the lower city, shouting, "Rise up! Rise up! The time to fight has come!"
Her shout was taken up by the rebels.
"Rise up! Rise up!" as they wriggled from their hidey-holes.
"Rise up! Rise up!" as they scrambled from their huts.
Khronos heard her cry and wheeled around, surprise and consternation knuckling his brow. He caught a glimpse of a waifish blood drinker racing through the alleys of the slave district, a dark-haired woman-child he had never seen before. A moment later, he lost sight of her and could not seem to find her again, though he could still hear her shouting, "Rise up! Rise up!"
But he did see the new-blooded rebels.
They poured into the squalid alleys in alarming numbers, their faces white, their eyes flashing in defiance. He watched them fall upon the soldiers that were stationed in the city, watched them attack their former oppressors with terrible ferocity.
But the God King had a surprise for us as well.
"The slaves are rising up!" Aioa said, and I looked at Zenzele with a self-satisfied grin. Everything was going just as I'd planned. It seemed almost too good to be true.
"Fight with me," Zenzele said. She spoke with the same heat she entreated me for sex.
"Khronos," I agreed. "We take him together."
She nodded, and together we leapt into the air, aiming ourselves at the wallwalk.
But even as we bound into the air, Khronos turned his back to the disturbance in the Shol. He gave out a great shout. I could not understand what it was he cried over the rush of the wind in my ears, but a moment later, all of his troops extinguished their torches. Instantly, the God King's army—with their black armor and black painted faces—melted into the darkness. Immediately after that, a maelstrom of arrows came flying in our direction, whining like angry hornets.
The arrows were also painted black, and nearly impossible to see. I was struck three, four, five times in half as many seconds, and saw dozens of my airborne warriors wounded in a similar manner. It all happened in an instant. The darkness. The storm of missiles. There was no time to react, no time to defend myself. One moment, I was sailing towards the God King, my woman at my side. The next moment I was flying blind and shot through like Saint Sebastian.
I landed badly on the east wall, bounced off the walkway and spilled over the side into the Shol. I landed face down in the muck and the impact drove several of the arrows straight through my body.
The pain was stultifying. It was a moment before I could shake it off and tend to my injuries. And then I thought: Zenzele! Where is she?
I rose to my knees and searched the ground for her, tugging at the arrows protruding from my body. The heads of the missiles were wickedly barbed and would not easily slide free. I had to rip my own flesh to get them out.
"Zenzele!" I shouted.
I saw her on the wallwalk then, grappling with the God King. One of his guards attacked her from behind, distracting her for a moment, and Khronos delivered a brutal kick to her midsection. Zenzele went flying from the wall and crashed through the roof of a nearby tenement.
"Zenzele!" I shouted, scrambling after her. I slipped in the mud and fell on my face again.
Khronos spotted me stumbling through the alley and held out his hand. One of his guards slapped a spear in his palm and he lobbed it at me. The missile whooshed through the air and impaled me through the back, driving me to my knees. "Ancestors!" I groaned, spitting up blood. I tried to rise but I was pinned to the ground. I tugged at the lance but it was stuck fast in the earth.
I fumbled at the spear, hands made clumsy by my injuries. My muddy palms slid ineffectually up and down its length. Biting back my panic, I tried to snap it in the middle, but the shaft was composed of some flexible wood and bent instead of breaking. The only way I was going to get free was to launch my body into the air and hope the spear slid out of me.
Above, Khronos ordered his personal guard after me: "Destroy the heretic!"
That might have been the end of me, but at that very moment a group of rebel slaves went running past me towards the God King. None came to my aid, but they kept Khronos and his guards occupied long enough to free myself.
Positioning my legs beneath me, I shoved myself upwards. I could feel the shaft of the weapon sliding through my internal organs, scraping between my broken ribs. I flew up, came clear of the spear, and landed face down in the mud again.
Pushing myself to my hands and knees, I wiped the slimy muck from my eyes. The Living Blood was repairing my injuries as quickly as it could, but the pain was bad, and there was enough tissue damage to slow my movements. I crawled in search of Zenzele, slipping once or twice in my own dripping bodily fluids.
"Zele?" I croaked.
On the wall above, the rebel slaves were still wrestling with the God King's guards. I saw Khronos fling one of the insurgents to his soldiers on the other side of the wall, then turn to another and smash his head to a pulp. No one was paying attention to me. That was good. That was very good!
The dwelling Zenzele had crashed into had partially collapsed. I crawled into the leaning shack and saw Zenzele on her back. A jagged piece of timber was protruding from her abdomen. She was conscious, clawing at the piece of wood that had impaled her, but she was too weak to extricate herself.
"Zele!"
I rose and tottered toward her.
She looked at me, eyes glazed with pain. "It's severed my spine," she groaned. "I can't move my legs."
"Let me lift you free," I said. "Quit struggling."
I slid my arms beneath her body and she relaxed into my embrace, arms falling limp, head dropping back.
"This will hurt," I said.
"Just do it!" she gasped.
I lifted her up and off the impaling timber. She did not cry out, but her lips peeled back from her teeth at the pain. I collapsed with her in my arms, trembling from the exertion. My own injuries were grievous.
"Just give it a moment," I whispered, stroking her hair, her cheek, smearing mud all over her, but what did it matter? I had her! And in just a few minutes she would be whole again. "Let the Blood heal your injuries."
She moaned as the Strix repaired her spine. I could hear the shattered bones crackling inside of her. It sounded like a mortal popping his knuckles.
"All right," she said, pushing away from me. "All right, I'm better. I can move my legs again. How are you?"
"Still in one piece."
"Khronos?"
"Occupied."
"We must rejoin the battle!"
"A moment longer, my love. Let the Blood heal you completely."
But we didn't have a moment longer. As we knelt there in filth, waiting impatiently for our injuries to mend, one of the God King's guards flung aside the door of the tenement. He was armed with very large and very sharp looking halberd. Grinning at us, he swung the bladed staff up and back over his shoulder, the muscles in his arms rippling impressively. I shielded Zenzele and braced for the blow, squeezing my eyes shut.
An instant later, the man's head exploded, driven violently into his torso by a colossal stone hammer.
Bhorg wrenched his hammer from the guard's chest cavity. Blood and tattered flesh dripped from the granite block. The guard collapsed at his feet and began to rapidly decompose.
"What are you two doing in here?" Bhorg asked. "Making whoopee or something? In case you hadn't noticed, there's a war going on!" He toed aside the guard's remains, wrinkling his nose in disgust.
I clambered up with a smirk, drawing breath for a smartass retort.
And that was when Bhorg's head sprang-- quite unexpectedly-- from his neck.
One minute it was there, creased by a lopsided grin, and then it was gone. Bhorg's five-hundred-pound hammer dropped to the ground with a titanic thud, nearly crushing my foot. A second later, his five-hundred-pound form toppled forward onto me, flying to dust as it fell.
"No-ooooo!" Zenzele howled.
I fumbled for his body instinctively, trying to catch him in my arms, but the injury was a lethal one, and Bhorg was a very, very old blood drinker. The Living Blood consumed him instantly. All I caught was a jumble of bones wrapped in a loose leather jerkin.
I stared in disbelief at the knobby bundle in my arms, feeling one of my oldest and dearest friends slithering like sand through my fingers. Even the bones were falling to dust, crumbling away in tiny white granules.
Gone… just like that! It didn't seem possible. It didn't seem real.
And then the vampire who had just killed my friend dived into the shack with us, swinging his bladed staff like a maniac.