The Hermetic Millennia (28 page)

I was modified to become a dweller in the sea, and I traveled afar on the business of the Leeches who created me, slaying whom it was given me to slay, capsizing the coracles of mariners, but I was for a short space free from endless, smothering canopy of leaves, and I floated at night beneath the stars, and wondered at them.

Alas for the Leeches that I was given gills! For in the salt sea I breathed the wind of liberty, and it was wine to me. I grew curious about hither shores, and distant lands where other parts of the world-forest grew. And I saw the migrations of the great seabirds in an empty, leafless sky.

Often I would wound the vessels of mariners, leaving them adrift or aground, toying with their crew most slowly, murdering them one by one across a space of days or weeks while they thirsted and starved. I did this because I was curious, and they would tell me tales of things afar or long ago, that I might spare them for last, or eat their legs before I ate their head. And so I learned that there was a larger world and a deeper time.

Here I heard of the father of our race, the Red Hermeticist, Reyes y Pastor, for whom we are named, and whose code we follow.

I heard tales of great and ancient things, of ships who sailed the stars, men of old who did grand deeds, legends of one man who stole power from heaven and put all of Earth beneath his heel, or legends of another man who dared to love a swan-princess who fled beyond the river of stars called Milky Way. The tales told of a time, days of Eden, before men feasted upon one another’s glands and organs, or knew the art of Hormagauntery.

And these tales tormented me, and I knew I must find the truth of them.

A night came when I saw the world-forest for miles along the coasts of Olissipona aflame, and I knew war had come: for the Surgeon-General of Iberia had for months been gathering Hermeneutic Gargantuans and Clade-levies and war-beasts and disease-bearing flies from Telamon to Tarraco, lured by the rumor of our slave-wealth.

I left Moord and my other masters to their fate, and left my patrimony behind. I was no more Soorm scion Moord. Woe befall him! His name shall live forever, but not through me. I shed his name like a snake sheds a skin. It grew too small.

North I swam by daylight and starlight, and came at last to the isles of the Cassiterides, so called for their tin mines, the last place metal could be dug from the earth, and long since exhausted. Here ancient men older than Giants reared a circle of stones to measure the stars, which, even in those days, they feared.

I heard the rumor of Asvid of Nettles, who lived alone nigh that ring of stones, and him I sought, seeking the truth of older things. Rumor named him the Old Man,
As-Vid,
who was the first of all my race, preserved alive by Hermeneutic forces in order to demonstrate to the world that we could live forever, and unaging, if only we killed and consumed without remorse and without satiation, each day to be stronger and more cunning and more deadly than the last.

I knew I had come ashore near the lands of a master of the Iatric Art when I foolishly stooped to pet a rabbit, and took up a palm of porcupine barbs, for even the hairs of bunnies were bred for ferocity. The trees of the world-forest that hung atop the White Cliffs of Dover were grown strange, and hated Man. They deterred me from seeking an overland route by the venom of their lianas, the thorny armor of their bark, their orchid-blooms with gripping mouths that seek out the breath of sleepers unwise enough to snore beneath the cursed leaf-shade to strangle them. Scalded by poison sap, I flung me back into the Channel. I circled the island by sea and traveled up the riverways, better able to fend off the cold-water piranhas, giant leeches, and stinging eels.

Up the river Avon I made my way, living off the venomous flesh-eating swans for whom the stream is famous. In my pouch I kept homunculi adjusted to my immune system and genetic structure, and so what fruit or fish they could eat and survive, I could so. They were big-eyed creatures, miniature versions of me, and they would dance by the campfire and mimic my antics during the northern nights. I am sorry they died so quickly, but it was a dangerous land.

The river wound beneath the hanging moss of the canopy, and a strange white swamp of chalky waters, leavened with limestone, spread beneath the roots of the eternal, hundred-foot-high trees.

I found Asvid. His house was thorns woven with poison ivy and oak and sumac, and in the mud he bred his worms and snakes and stinging things, and on the branches he hung skulls of visitors who discontented him. Once and twice I tried to approach his miserable vile hut, and once and twice I returned to the mud of the river, tossing and screaming as I slept in the waves, with boils on my flesh, and my tongue was swollen like a smoldering log with heat.

But I was not unpracticed in the arts of the Leeches, including arts of mine own devising, and on the third trial I waded his bog with a hide as heavy as a hippopotamus’s, and I laughed amid scorpions and trod them underfoot, and I crushed his snakes and worms between my tusks and ate them raw.

Asvid rose from the muck at my feet and blew a weft of spores from an arm-sac that set me to puking. I begged him for my life, and that astounded him, for none of my kind esteem life, or ask for it, much less beg. He croaked with a voice that had not spoke in centuries, asking me if I disdained the First Law of the Old True Way, which was to feed off others or be fed to them, that the weak might fall and the survivors grow strong.

I said I did wish to feed from him, but I swore that I wanted none of his flesh or organs. Instead I wished to consume his knowledge, and I could feed off him in this way with no loss to himself. I wished to know of the old things only he knew.

He laughed, and said that I had eaten Ormvermin, his favorite pet, and his guardian and watch-worm. Who now would guard his hut while he traveled?

I took my crotch in my paw and swore by my sexual organs, where the genetic material rests that will one day bring forth the posthuman Enemies of the Star-Monsters, and we Phastorlings swear by nothing else, for that is all we hold sacred. I said I would serve him as well as the beastie I had killed, and better, and if I failed, he need not return my testicular sacs to me.

His hut was not the hovel of misery it seemed, for each and every thorn was a library needle containing another archive of life-code information, and all the secrets the Iatrocrats over many bloody generations had accumulated and hid away, for, immortal and hating their children, what discoveries did any share?

My first task was to grow in myself a chemical coder-decoder organ, so that I could read what was written in the messenger acids. I drove the needle into my brain according to the most ancient ritual the first augmented man, called Montrose, by his suffering and madness so long ago inaugurated.

Asvid infected me with madness, and filial love and piety, and other chemicals even the disciplines of the Wintermind could not efface. And thus I became ensnared, and thus became the apprentice of the Old Man, who was first of our kind.

8. Soorm and Asvid

How many years passed by, I will not say, lest you think I boast, but Asvid was both the most accomplished and least demonstrative of all the Phastorlings, and he slew without mercy, and those he spared served him, for he knew the art of instilling pack-loyalty instincts and altruism-codes into those he defeated, and the Wintermind could not quell the instinct.

That, little lordlings, was the great secret of his longevity: He, the most ancient example of our race routinely and blithely betrayed the bedrock principles of the Old True Way.

When I recited the First Law,
Eat or be eaten, fight or die,
he smiled and said there was Law higher than the number one law, a Law of Zero:
Let others fight or die for you, and eat the survivors while they are wounded and weary.

He called this his Law of Laws: The rule was that Laws were meant for others to obey, and you to exploit. He said that is why laws were made at all. His law was as old as the handprint on the Moon.

Asvid was not my patron only, but my father, the only father I would ever know. My brain chemistry had been altered to allow me to have the emotion proper between father and sons. I do not have a word for it in my language, and the Nymph word implies incestuous intergenerational sodomy, which is not the proper idea.

Knowing this nameless emotion, my disgust and hatred of the world in which I lived grew great, and then greater. Why were the Hormagaunts born not of woman, but in growth-pods? Why did I have no brothers, no cousins, no mate? Why so much death and pain and disease? Why had Earth once boasted starships, but now we did not even have Clipper Ships, but swam the seas in coracles and canoes and longboats pulled by sea serpents? Why was our world so
wrong
?

9. Hemoclysm

Then the time of bloodshed came, the Hemoclysm, when the configurations, nations, and factions attempted utterly to exterminate all rival DNA molecular compositions. First one worldwide war and then many burned the eternal forest, and in the times between the wars came the gene-cleansings and genocides and mass starvations.

Because of the wars, Asvid and I were growing allergic to each other. Our immune defenses, as they grew more complex, were harder to harmonize chemically. When we could no longer stand each other, he declared me his apprentice no longer, but a journeyman.

Not long after I departed from him, and founded for myself a stronghold at the mouth of the Avon, a summons arrived that midnight by long-range night-swallow. I ate the bird to ingest the chemical codes, which only mechanisms from my DNA could unlock and read.

It was a summons, not from Asvid, but from his master. After so many years of surviving the deadly world-wood and the deadlier children of his kindred, Asvid was being called by the one man with the right to call him: his patron and maker and master, Pastor, from whom all Phastorlings take their name.

And, in calling Asvid, he called all the Asvidlings, who were a very great number, more than I had imagined.

Pastor had called a Phastormoot, a gathering of those loyal to him, and we were summoned to Millennium Island on the opposite side of the globe.

I met with Asvid on the day the great migration was set to depart. Such a gathering of such hosts had never been seen, for he was eldest, and there were many indeed beholden to him. Rank after rank of the Asvidlings, names out of legend, rumors from history, Hormagaunts as vicious and deadly and cunning as anything our race had ever produced paraded before us and descended into the moaning vessels of the sea, a forest of horns and crests, a cacophony of screams and trumpets, a thunder of claws and hooves, until only we two, Asvid and I, remained.

I remember it well. We stood upon at the river mouth on a bluff overlooking the sea, and the land behind us, as far as eyes could reach, was dark with ash, and there were many trunks, hundreds of feet high, cracked and burnt and dead, huge like half-fallen towers, with no canopy overhead to hide the agoraphobic sky. Upon the battle plain, I saw blackened skulls piled in pyramids or rolling in the ash, and corpses of dogs and crows foolish enough to eat the slain, and so be poisoned by what slew them. Across this roofless world of smoldering death the river currents ran black with cinders and bark. The world-forest was dying.

Even I, who lived and rejoiced in death and murder, was appalled, for the chemical codes inspiring filial piety in me had weakened my nature. I asked of my master why all these dread events were necessary? What was wrong with the world?

He told me all history is nothing but a play of marionettes, and all events were played out by the puppeteer who pulled the secret strings, the Red Hermeticist Father Reyes y Pastor.

These were his words: “All our lives and all the lives of our ancestors have been bound up in a web of mathematical codes and conclusions, a march of numbers like an army of deadly ants, as invisible as bacteria, and history has never escaped from the meshes of the web. Father Reyes, through us, his scholars and scions and servants, establishes the contours, and history follows when we let the webwork out, or pull it back in. No matter where the individual fish may dart, the school is where the net defines. Pastor is one of the Enlightened, an Illuminatus—many times I have killed or caused disasters, founded schools or spread rumors, to thrust the forces of history one way or another, according to his commands.”

I told him that the Witches thought the motions of stars and planets defined destiny; that Chimerae said blood and genetic mechanisms defined it; that Nymphs taught that destiny was a figment of brain elements which could be altered by a vapor or a wine. Had not he himself taught me of all these dead ages?

Even behind the scales and bristles and fangs of his battle modifications, I saw then for the first time his human eyes, and human sorrow. “I will impart the greatest of secrets to you. Not stars, not blood, not brains define the destiny of men. My master does. It is given to him, the Red Hermeticist, to determine the fate of lesser men. The enlightened guide the benighted; the sighted lead the blind.” He spoke as one who speaks and believes, but hates, a hard truth.

He continued, “It is said there were other Hermeticists who defined and ruled the history of other ages. Our age is his. He is the Master of the Fate of the Hormagaunts.”

I saw then that I was a fish in a bucket, who, leaping out of the wooden wall, found myself still confined in a well, hemmed by a wall of stone. I had escaped the close slavery of Artabria only to find the larger slavery of the Red Hermeticist. “Are these wars
his
doing? For his pleasure, hell rules earth, and many fine things pass away, never again to be seen? It there none who can oppose and overthrow the ruler of this age and its present darkness?”

Asvid spoke with wry and weary humor. “The Nymphs, long ago, believed that there was a Judge of Ages, who would arise from sleep in the roots of his mountain, and condemn any age which offended his law. But what that law is, I never paused to inquire, and now the Nymphs are extinct, as dead as their belief.”