As he spun back to the awful real world, he reached up, but some kind of restraint frustrated his first instinct to touch his face. In fact, he couldn't even turn his body. The whole left side of his face throbbed in pain, and he felt a tired empty nausea. There was cold dampness between his legs, as well as a warm, sticky, solid presence in his undergarments. His left leg was missing its pantleg, though the rest of his clothes were still on. The pain was too much to deal with, so he sank back into a groggy sleep.

He did not sleep deeply enough. A woman eventually cut away the rest of his clothes and cleaned him up, a surprisingly agonizing process, though she handled him as gently as if he were a baby. When they changed the dressing on his face, under the care of a man not nearly so gentle, it hurt like the bullet cutting through his flesh a second time, and he passed out again, unfortunately for only a minute. He came round while they were applying more searing iodine and another dressing.

The hours ticked by, and he tried playing games with the pain, offering the pain thirty minutes of agony for just five minutes of relief, but pain would not agree to his terms.

He dropped into a fitful doze and came out of it a little further at a shake of his shoulder.

"Would you like some water?" a man in a lab coat asked.

"Yes, please," he croaked. There were more sensations now. The pain, always the pain, but he could also taste the air, and something about it told him he was underground.

The man brought the cup lower, and Valentine sucked cool water down through a surgical tubing straw.

"He can talk, that's good enough. Bring him."

Through the mists, he felt himself being lifted, carried down a hall to another room. They sat him up in a tube-steel chair with a hard wooden seat, the kind of chair that's been sitting in a neat row with five others just like it in some assistant principal's office since the school was built. They handcuffed his hands behind his back, which amused him. He was too weak to crawl, let alone fight. When they moved his leg to handcuff his ankle to one of the chair legs, the pain became so bad that warm urine flooded his pants. It felt like he was pissing nitric acid.

"Aw, Christ," one of the guards said, seeing the seat get wet and smelling the urine. "He pissed himself."

"So what."

Valentine's head lolled, and he looked at the pale green tiles on the floor. He tried to remember if he had ever seen such small tiles, so evenly laid out, when he again slipped into unconsciousness.

Later he had to wait. It felt like days, but perhaps it was only hours. His consciousness strengthened, and the haze began to fade. He realized that he desperately wanted to live, even if it was only for a few more hours. He wondered if they were just going to shoot him or if they had a more elaborate end in store.

They gave him more water. He was able to drink it, though it hurt his face to do so. The room was uninteresting, not even a desk or another chair decorated it. The little green tiles went from the floor about one third of the way up the wall. From there on up, it was unrelieved and undecorated concrete, marked only by a swirl or two of the mason's smoother. He smelled chalk somewhere and tried to remember if there was a chalkboard in the room from when he was brought in. The lone door to the room was also behind it, and he heard people passing in the hall at intervals.

When he heard a set of heavy steps in the hall, something inside him told him This is it. He tried to steel his mind, even if his body felt like worn-out rubber. But his mind was a slave to his body; intellect prostrated itself before the pain and fatigue just when he needed his wits most.

The door opened, and he was able to turn his head enough despite the pain in his cheek to see two tall Grogs enter. They were Golden Ones, dressed in black leather robes cut like a double-breasted trench coat of the Old World and shiny as a beetle's back. One stood to his right, the other to his left. Their fawn-colored hair was shorn down to stubble.

A dried-up husk of a man walked around in front of him. His skin had the waxy look of a cancer patient in the last stages of the disease; his lips chapped. Vigorous dark hair grew out from a widow's peak on his forehead and was brushed straight back across his head. His eyes could have been pale blue or pale green, depending on the opinion of the person looking into them. He wore a simple rust-colored uniform, and a Sam Browne belt very similar to Valentine's own. Red tabs with golden reverse-swastikas marked his collar. He wore no tunic, sidearm, or decorations.

"One of the best things about living so long," he said, in a vaguely European accent that Valentine was not experienced enough to place, "is that you get to see all the mistakes historians make, talking about something they don't really know.

"For example, the only history widely read since 2022 is that wretched pamphlet called Fallen Gods by that would-be Margaret Bourke-White named Kostos. She says the first of the new doors to Kur were opened in Haiti in the eighteenth century. She only missed by about a thousand years. How do I know? I was there. My eyes have looked on Charlemagne, young man. Kur had a door open in the Dark Ages, but they were not dark times for me-oh, no. During the Inquisition, we managed to get another open in Spain."

The General walked around behind Valentine and wheeled a cart into view. On it was his sword, his fighting claws, his little glow bulb, and a few other personal effects.

"So you joined long ago?" Valentine asked. "What did they offer for betraying a whole world?"

"What no price, no wisdom can buy. Time."

"So you feed."

"Yes. Long, long ago, I was given a gift, a revelation of biblical proportions, you might say. For my service, the scientists taught me how to achieve immortality."

"An immortality others pay the price for," Valentine said tightly.

"Don't cows, hogs, chickens pay the price for your life?"

"Not the same thing."

"That's where you and so many others are wrong. Cows and so on are eaten because they are tasty, certainly, but more important, because they aren't developed enough to keep themselves from being eaten. Mankind took a great leap forward when it learned to keep livestock, putting it ahead of all other creatures on the earth with a few bizarre exceptions like those honeypot ants that keep aphids. We were once no better than the cows, but we developed and the cows didn't. The cows pay the price, and we are better for it."

"Why are we talking about this?" Valentine asked.

"When you get to be my age, when you've seen people come and go over not just generations or centuries, but millennia, you become a good judge of men. In my days as a monk, before my awakening, I didn't think much of the human herd. No spark, no imagination, and misunderstanding even the simple concepts we tried to teach.

Tags: E.E. Knight Vampire Earth Fantasy
Source: readsnovelonline.net