One leg lifted, razor-sharp tip pointed at Nosferatu, while another was directed at Tian Dao Lin. For several minutes everything was absolutely still in the foyer. Then the sound of boots echoed up the main corridor. Nosferatu took an involuntary step back as two Airlia appeared in the entranceway to the main corridor, long spears in their hands. They wore black, one-piece suits and looked none too pleased, their fierce red eyes glaring at the intruders.
“My lords—” Tian Dao Lin began, hands held up in supplication. His entreaty was cut short by a bolt of gold from the tip of one of the spears hitting him in the chest and knocking him backward.
Nosferatu finally reacted, reaching for the dagger in his belt when a bolt took him in the chest and his world went black.
Vampyr came awake to darkness. He lay still for several minutes, slowly breathing, trying to regain his orientation. Coming out of the deep sleep was always a disconcerting experience. He reached up to open the tube. When the stump of his arm hit the top of the tube, it all came rushing back to him: what the Spartans had done to him; the years of making his way here, forced to live like an animal, feeding on the weak and the young.
Vampyr pressed the lid open. Faint starlight and moonlight seeped into the chamber from slight cracks caused by the earthquake so many years before. He sat up and fumbled with the leads to his arms and legs, using his stumps and a stick between his teeth. It took hours to remove them, then he exited the tube.
Vampyr held up his arms, staring at the stumps. Something was different. The flesh on the stumps of his forearms had healed and skin covered the wounds — but after over five years of deep sleep he could swear that the forearm was ever so slightly longer. Were his arms growing back? Was the Airlia virus in his blood allowing him to regenerate?
Vampyr left the chamber to hunt for someone to feed on as he considered the possibility. He went to the closest village and reached in a window, taking a sleeping child into what remained of his arms and running off into the forest before the alarm could be raised. He drained the child and buried the corpse in a shallow grave before returning to his ruined palace just before dawn. He searched for a piece of stone that matched the length of his forearms. He finally found one and took it with him into his tube, where he set the controls for ten years and reattached the leads. Then he closed the lid.
When Vampyr awoke ten years later, the first thing he did was open the lid to let the meager light of the chamber in. The second was check his stumps against the stone marker.
They were indeed a fraction of an inch longer. He felt hope for the first time since Acton had swung the axe. His hands would be back. Judging by how little had grown in ten years it would take a very long time, but that was the one asset he had plenty of. Without exiting to feed, he edged toward the top of the tube and with the stick reset the controls for a much, much longer deep sleep. Then he shut the lid and passed again into darkness.
CHAPTER 9
The bronze doors leading into Qian-Ling swung open and a young woman staggered out, a boy-child less than a week old in her arms. The doors swung shut behind her and she wandered into the dark terrain around the mountain. She made it little more than a mile before she was surrounded by a group of four men who were not quite completely human.
They were the descendants of Tian Dao Lin’s Quarters, who had stolen local women and intermarried, mixing their blood and genes over and over again through the centuries until what was left were these creatures who prowled the night, attacking unwary travelers, eating their flesh and drinking their blood like animals, with little intelligence left in their twisted minds.
They took the girl down in a swift charge, her screams cut off as one sliced her throat open with a stone knife. Three of the four vied for position at the spurting arteries, drinking her blood. The fourth spotted the small bundle she had carried and picked it up. He felt something move inside the blanket and, knowing the others would want this prize too, he made off into the darkness.
A short distance away he put the bundle down and unwrapped the blanket. He looked down at the baby boy’s face. He frowned, a memory and faint emotion that he couldn’t quite grasp whispering in his mind. He did not, however, feed. He rewrapped the child in the blanket and headed back toward the decrepit village his kind inhabited.
He went into the mud hut where he lived with his mate, a woman who had lost her own child in birth from a genetic defect caused by too much inbreeding. He held out the bundle to her and she took it.
He was smarter than the others. He’d known that for as long as he could remember. He was also faster, an attribute that had saved his life several times as men in the village, in their burning desire for flesh and blood during particularly lean times, came after him.
He’d also accepted that he must leave. This was not a place for him, among degenerate survivors in a squalid village. But he did not go until his twelfth year, the day after the woman he had grown to call mother died.
He left in the night, as even more so than the others in the village, he could not abide sunlight. He went north and west, away from Qian-Ling. With natural cunning he sought out a weak tribe of humans, one that had suffered many defeats and was living in inhospitable land they had been forced to, slowly dwindling and starving. He entered the first night with a deer he had run down slung over his shoulders. He gave the food to the famished people.
Despite his youth and the oddness of his ways, only being about at night, his ability to hunt and share what he brought down gained him quick acceptance. Within two years he led the tribe, and already he was wrapped in legend, The old woman who was the tribe’s healer and seer claimed he was descended from the union of a gray wolf and white doe and that he was destined for great things.
He learned that these people were known as the Mongols and lived a precarious existence between the empires of China and Russia. He took the name Temujin, after a former local chief who had died bravely fighting the Chinese. He encouraged the myths that surrounded him. He began to conquer one tribe after another. His fledgling rule grew by force of arms, bribery, or expedient alliances.
After ten years, in his early twenties, he had accrued so much power that the Mongol leaders declared their loyalty to him and acclaimed him Universal Monarch— Genghis Khan.
In the year 1202 he led his people against the Tatars and annihilated that tribe, becoming master of eastern and central Mongolia. In 1206 he completed the conquest of Mongolia and was proclaimed the Great Khan. With all the tribes behind he turned his attention in the direction he had always yearned to attack: to the south and east, into China. He invaded in 1211 and overran most of northern China within a year.
Military necessities forced him to attack toward the capital city of Beijing rather than Xian, which was in the vicinity of his true goal of Qian-Ling. The Chinese Emperor sued for peace and sent a princess with an immense dowry as an inducement.
Satisfied that his flank was secure, the Khan turned his mighty army toward Xian and conquered that city easily. Then he rode at the head of his column of troops toward the mountain known as Qian-Ling. On the last day of March 1214, he reached the wide dirt road leading to the mountain.
And there he was halted and could go no farther. An invisible wall that nothing could penetrate extended around the mountain in all directions.
The Khan spent four months encamped just outside of the barrier, probing it nightly, and each time he was stopped. He had bows, spears, even the explosive Chinese powder used against the strange barrier all to no avail. Finally, the demands of keeping his empire intact forced the Great Khan to return to the east and sack Beijing to put down a revolt.