Burdens of the Dead: Chapter Three

Vilna

    In Vilna, the capital of Lithuania, the Black Brain, Chernobog, continued with his plots. Many of these took the geographical power of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania far past the Bosphorus. There was some focus of his attention on Constantinople. Chernobog was aware of the watcher there, the dark one, three faced, of the moon and the sea and the earth. Such powers, lost gods and goddesses, had their own imprint on the non-material world. But the watcher had never made any attempt to resist Chernobog in any way. He paid her as little attention as she gave to the walls and towers of Constantinople. They were no barrier to her, and she was no barrier to him.

    After all, what did she have left? An old bone harpoon and a pair of dogs. He wondered what still sustained her, why she had not gone the way of so many other old powers? But she never did anything. Just watched and wept.

    The world was full of old gods, old goddesses and old powers. Most of them were so faded, so drained, that he could overpower them easily. Still, in the spiritual realm it was hard to measure the depth of their power, so he did not challenge and devour her. Someone or something still sustained her. Why waste his strength? He had better, more immediate uses for it.

    Once, the huge man sprawled on the throne had been Prince Jagiellon of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In his quest for power, the prince had delved too deep and gone too far. The man who had done so had been a brutal murderer, who had taken sadistic pleasure in his victims’ slow deaths. What Jagiellon had become took no pleasure from such things, although he still dealt in them, as and when they were necessary. Chernobog had no real grasp of mortal emotions or of things like sexual urges. He understood they existed, but concepts like love were to him as the color purple is to a man blind from birth.

    The Black Brain was a far greater monster than Jagiellon had ever been or could ever have been. But the demon possessed none of the prince’s vicious desires, nor did he take any “enjoyment” from what had been Jagiellon’s pleasures. Chernobog did understand that such pleasures drove the humans he worked with even more effectively than fear, but that was as far as his understanding went.

    Still, Jagiellon had had a powerful mind and a strong will. The Black Brain had eaten into that, to some degree, but it was also a part of him now. It was the first time that the great demon of the northern forests, the fear-creature of the Slavs, had allowed a human to be this much part of him. That had advantages, but it had brought other things too.

    Dreams. Or what might be called dreams.

    Demons did not sleep. Maybe they were fragments of memories surfacing. Only Chernobog did not think he forgot, either. He worked with multiple deep and complex plots and plans, as he had done for millennia. He knew, of course, at least in theory, what dreams were. He provided illusions like them for some deluded humans. Well, maybe they were fragments of what the Prince had been, surfacing like bits of scale knocked off the bottom of a black pool, rising to the surface only to sink back down into the depths again.

    He planned, as always, to extend his physical dominion, as well as his dominion in other planes. It was what he was and always had been; among his kind one either grew, or died. But sometimes in the midst of it all of his planning, all of his knowledge, there were these — interruptions; odd, disturbing visions of a beautiful woman in tears.

    Tears were not something that had ever worried him before.

    He sought information from the brain he had subsumed.

    Jagiellon could not recall the face. But Chernobog was aware that the vision made his human part uncomfortable, as if that gaze and those tears were something he did not wish to look upon. Chernobog too felt as if he had met her, somewhere. Perhaps in other planes. Things took on other appearances there even if their essences remained the same.

    Since the death of his last shaman, and the treachery and flight of Count Mindaug to the shelter of Elizabeth Bartholdy, the Jagiellon part of him had been awaiting a new shaman. Meanwhile, he’d been forced to do some of the more risky tasks of magic himself. He had other servants, of course, but he feared letting them know too much or being too strong.

    Human mages were a danger to the body of Jagiellon, and could enlist and marshal threats against Chernobog — as he had discovered when he pressed westward too hastily. But the West still drew him, called to him. There was something there he had have…But he didn’t quite know what it was. He would conquer it in time and find out.

    In the meanwhile he had deployed servants — lesser ones — to search and to spy. When it suited him, when he was sure there were no traps, he would take their bodies and see and touch and hear through them. Sometimes they lived afterwards.

    From one of those he had sent out he had heard something which caused him to adjust his plans. He would not go too close to either Venice or Corfu. The ancient winged lion defended Venice, and Corfu had its goddess — she was awake and revitalized and the place drank magic. But he spied on the traffic between them. And thus he learned of the passage of Benito Valdosta, his wife Maria, and their baby daughter, north-bound for Venice. If rumor was to be believed, Benito would be heading south again soon, with a fleet to punish Constantinople.

    Chernobog understood revenge. He also understood levers, even if he did not understand love.

    “Bring me the blond slave,” he ordered.

    The servant left at a run and, along with two others, returned a little later, faithfully obeying his master’s order, carrying Caesare Aldanto. He was blond still. He was also dead, long dead, and the passage of time had not improved him. The hair was possibly the only part that had not gone the way of all flesh. Briefly, Chernobog considered re-animating the slave; it was never a very successful process, though, and he discarded the idea. The spirit of the treacherous Montagnard sell-sword had long gone; there was no retrieving that part of him, either. Chernobog-Jagiellon hissed in irritation. The servants quailed.

    But he merely said “Dispose of it. And find me someone from northern Italy. There are mercenaries from all over in my armies.”

    Poulo Bourgo had been at the sack of several cities, and on the wrong side in a few of them. He’d known fear and terror from both sides. If he’d known that the huge slab of a man with the masked face interviewing him was none other than Grand Duke Jagiellon himself, he would have would have been deathly afraid. But since he assumed that his interrogator was just another underwashed Lithuanian noble, he was quite relaxed about it. He was a foot soldier, why would anything higher in the hierarchy than some minor functionary acting as a glorified clerk even acknowledge that he was alive?

    It was a strange room, opulent, yet filthy in some way he couldn’t articulate. As if a film of something vile coated everything. The luxurious trappings, the draperies and cushions, the ornate furnishings, had an air of neglect, giving the impression that the owner cared nothing for them. Poulo couldn’t understand that. How could you have such wealth and not care about it.

    “Milan originally, Milord,” he said, when asked where he hailed from.

    “Did you ever go to Venice?”

    “I was a bodyguard there for a while, for the Casa Dandelo. I was lucky to get out of there with my life, Milord.” A suspicion entered Poulo’s not very fast moving mind. “I can’t go back there, Milord,” he added nervously. “They’ll recognize me.”

    That was the moment he realized how afraid he should have been. When that face looked up at him, and he saw the eyes gleaming dull and dead though the holes in the mask. “When I have done with you, no one will recognize you. You will not know yourself in a mirror.”

    Poulo might have tried to run, but he could not move. Somehow, the huge man facing him had stabbed him with a long, peculiar-looking knife. How had he moved so fast?

    Poulo stared down at the blade piercing his chest, his mouth agape. From its position, the blade had to have penetrated his heart. Yet although he was paralyzed, he still lived.

    The masked man lifted a small flask from a side table next to his stool. Bourgo had noticed the flask but had thought nothing of it. Liquor of some sort, he’d assumed, albeit of an unpleasant greenish-brown color.

    Whatever was in that flask, however, it certainly wasn’t liquor. The masked man poured the substance onto the blade and it formed into a glutinous blob, like jelly. Then the blob began hunching its way up the blade toward Poulo. He could only stare in horror as the jelly oozed its way toward the stab wound in his chest.

    When the blob was an inch or two from his chest, the masked man suddenly twisted the knife-blade. The heart wound was twisted open and Bourgo’s blood gushed out. Much of it, however, was absorbed by the jelly, whose color shifted toward red.

    Then, suddenly, with a horrid sucking sound, the blob lunged through the wound into Poulo. Within three seconds, it had vanished completely.

    The masked man jerked out the blade. Poulo collapsed to the floor. Finally, he could scream. And scream he did, for a very, very long time.

    The Black Brain gazed upon him, satisfied. The preparation of the new slave had just begun, of course. Screaming and pain would continue for some time.

    But there would be very little blood spilled as the parasite spread throughout its new host. The creature was a demon itself, of sorts. It would heal the wounds and consume and change the blood. In time it would kill the host, but that was no concern of Jagiellon’s. It could also be forced to obey, if he needed it to. But that would be too visible, and was no part of his plan. Instead Jagiellon conditioned the new slave to obey, until obedience was invisible. Pain and magic would be brought to bear. There would be keloid scarring caused by the parasite’s healing of its host; that didn’t matter either. The scarring, internal and external, was necessary. It didn’t matter if the slave was personable; he wasn’t going to be required to seduce anyone.

    When the power that had been brought to work on him had finished, the Milanese thief and bravo would not have recognized himself in a mirror — if his new master had made him look into one. His memories and physical ability were still accessible to his new controller — who would not pull his strings like a puppet, but rather had set deep compulsions, far harder to detect magically.

    Poulo Bourgo began the long journey west, to Venice. He knew people there still, even if they would no longer know him. They could be compelled to assist him.

    The Black Brain plied the paths of elsewhere, avoiding the woman, her old bone harpoon and her dogs. He went further south to where he had taken control of those who sought holy inspiration and visions to guide them. The Baitini were unskilled in plying the worlds beyond and unskilled in magic, which they considered it evil and unclean — much to the benefit of the demon who had become their unknown master, by wielding such magics.

    The Baitini prayed for guidance, and for help with the Mongol yoke, whose broad tolerance they found perverted. There was only One True Way for the Baitini; their way. They instead would force all into their narrow path, and kill those who they could not force.

    The Baitini had not ruled by an open show of power, but by the hidden hand before the coming of the Mongol and the destruction of Baghdad. They’d tried those same tactics on Hulagu when the Mongols first came — and he’d almost destroyed their stronghold at Alamut in response.

    Many of those who survived had fled to Damascus — also called Dishmaq, by some Mongols and Arabs — and now the two centers struggled quietly for dominance. The Old Man of the Mountain at Alamut was still formally their leader, but there were those in Damascus who tacitly challenged his position.

    The Supreme Master of the Hidden Hand was one such. He now lived in the incense-reeking halls of their secret place in Damascus, far from the stark isolation of the mountains. He pulled the threads of death and fear across the lands of the Ilkhan and their vassal states, carefully avoiding open conflict with the Mongol. Instead, his Baitini undermined the Mongols by working for them, making themselves indispensable and penetrating government and serving as their functionaries — all the while seeking divine power and guidance.

    The Black Brain was not the God they sought. But it was willing to take them and subvert them to its design. They were a sharp if small tool, right in the heart of the Ilkhan. They wanted visions of paradise? Nothing could be easier for Chernobog. Their paradise would be exactly as they imagined it to be.

    The old man who was the Supreme Master of the Hidden Hand staggered out of the scented garden. His eyes were wild and his white robe soiled and disordered.

    He could barely stand, but his words were clear enough. “At last! Our time is at hand. Paradise is ours, and so is power.”

    The Supreme Master of Poisons looked doubtfully at his him. He knew what they smoked in the hidden, scented garden, to reach upward. He’d seen how new Hands believed fervently that they had seen paradise already. He knew what they’d experienced. He organized it, down to the houris. The current Supreme Master was an old man, and anything he said should probably be subject to suspicion. They went like that sometimes, believing too much, believing even in their own deceptions.

    The Supreme Master of Poisons decided he had better send word to the Old Man of the Mountain. The Master of the Chalabis, the final arbiter in matters of religion, and thus politics and the power of the Hidden Hand, had long ago returned to holy Alamut. The Poison-master wondered who would be elevated next.

    The Supreme Master of the Hidden Hand grabbed his arm with a scrawny but fanatically strong hand. “Come!” he ordered.

    The Supreme Master of Poison took his own life that night. After what he had seen and experienced in the scented garden he was too consumed with shame — and lust — to go on. But not before he quietly sent a message to Alamut.

    Others came to the garden at the insistence of the Supreme Master of the Hidden Hand; others proved stronger in resolution and obedience to him, to the message. New masters went out, full of religious zeal, and new orders. They remained in the same business, but with a renewed holy vigor, and rather a different direction.