The skills that she learned there were sickening. As Olivia probed deeper into the woman's mind, the scent of roasting human flesh seemed to fill the room in her memory. Ramira had once been forced to slowly burn an Arab that she loved in order to prove her loyalty.
After that, her life became a horror. How many people she had killed, even she had forgotten. She'd manned a guillotine in the French Revolution, taking a thousand heads a day for over a month. She'd set underwater mines in the Crimean War, sinking English ships. She'd mastered the use of firearms from the flintlock musket, to the privateer's hand-cannon, to the Israeli Uzi, to modern sniper gear that used heat-detecting sights and could shoot titanium bullets through the wall of a concrete bunker that was three-feet thick.
She'd been involved in a hundred wars—training Mongol cavalrymen under the Great Kahn, propping up the regimes of petty dictators in the Middle East, and selling guns and machetes to tribal warriors bent on genocide in the Congo.
Had Bron imagined how dangerous she was, he would have wet himself upon seeing her.
From Stalzi: It was during the opium wars in China. Lucius provided drugs for an English Captain to sell, until one day the Captain had become too powerful to control.
Lucius had ordered Stalzi, "Send an assassin. It will be your job to empty the man's accounts, liquidate his holdings."
"I don't understand," Stalzi had said. "Why didn't we do that years ago?"
Lucius had laughed and said, "Never slit a man's throat over imaginary wealth. Wait until he's got the gold in his purse."
From Ramira: Lucius had ordered her to head security guarding blood diamond mines in Africa, and she had trained members of the Taliban in the making of IEDs. She helped run a kidnapping ring in Thailand, selling children into slavery in Malaysia, and provided security training for some of Latin America's most powerful drug lords.
From Stalzi: In an economic "battle-planning session" in a chateau in the Swiss Alps, Lucius had once remarked, "Our goal here is to keep world finances destabilized. With destabilization comes uncertainty, and with uncertainty in the markets comes opportunities. When we control the destabilization, our opportunities grow exponentially."
"For years the world has been borrowing, growing fat on imaginary wealth. So we will plan a recession, move our assets to safety before it starts, and then reenter the market at the proper moment in order to capture entire industries."
This had been said in 2006. At the time, Bron's father was preparing to create a fiscal crisis, one that bankrupted millions of elderly investors, threw the poor out of work, and left tent cities springing up across the US as people were evicted from their homes.
Bron had never imagined a situation like this, one where greedy men raped and destroyed the world out of unbridled rapaciousness, but he saw that his father wasn't the only player.
There were billionaires and tyrants in every country, in every part of the world, competing with Lucius.
From Ramira: He learned that her dark muses could teach a child to speak at three months, to walk at six. They could download information at an incredible rate, train a man to be a doctor in a day, an assassin in two.
Bron felt stunned. He'd never imagined this—the first thirty years of life, the part when he was healthiest and most energetic, was all a waste, by Draghoul standards. With their powers, there was no need for schooling, not the way that humans did it.
He wondered why, and remembered a thought handed down from Ramira. In ancient times, the Ael had sought to educate men, to loan them their wisdom, but Lucius had realized that human insight and discoveries were nothing more than "a crop," something to be harvested. "There is no theory that can be conjured by the human imagination, no insight so vast, that we cannot own it!" he'd said. So it began, the harvesting. Draghouls had gone throughout all of Europe and Asia, pulling wisdom and learning from the minds of men, stripping away their insights and discoveries, leaving the brightest of their enemies empty.
That is how the Dark Ages began, Ramira's memories told him.
Half of Bron's life was to be wasted in a vain search for information on how to live. That is how Lucius kept people ignorant.
And soon, Ramira's memories told him, the Dark Ages will come again.
The Final Harvest is about to begin.
Bron found himself gagging in horror. He fought free of the women's touches. "Enough," Bron said. "I've seen enough."
Olivia shook her head. "You haven't even scratched the surface. You know what they plan. They want to plunge the world into another Dark Ages. They want to harvest its knowledge of physics, of medicine, of technology, of warfare. They've already established advanced research facilities for space exploration, medicine, cloning, spying. They'll make themselves gods, and the humans will be forced to worship their sadistic masters, or die." Bron got up from his chair, paced the room, thinking furiously. He had never imagined such things, an assassin who was a thousand years old, with the blood of millions of people on her hands.
Yet she was just a minor player in Lucius's organization. She wasn't a ringleader. Her title was an ancient one among the Draghouls. She was a dread knight, a rare and vaunted title, but she was not Lucius's best.
The technician was much younger, only a little over two hundred years old. He'd been trained in many arts—as a forger and a counterfeiter in his youth.
But it was the advent of technology that thrilled him. With his knowledge of counterfeiting, it didn't take much to leap into various forms of wire fraud and racketeering.
With memory thieves, it had always been easy to breach the human mind. One well-trained Draghoul could sneak into a home, touch a dictator or financier on the temple, and siphon vital secrets from him.
But with the rise of technology, stealing information had become even easier. Voices could be recorded, and files transmitted to servers. Pictures could be taken from spy satellites in space.
Foolish people around the world spoke freely over the internet, not realizing that with the right resources, it was no large feat to create ghost servers that simply recorded every transmission made.
And Lucius's plans for the world were so vast and horrifying. Bron realized now why Monique didn't trust him, why she was so afraid. The Draghouls were fierce, powerful. Who would want to fight them? And for what, to save mankind?
Did Bron care about any human enough to risk his neck for them?
If he joined the Draghouls, he would be treated like a god. He'd join Lucius, become his right hand.
Or would I? Bron wondered. They'd wipe out my thoughts, my memories. Lucius would want to control me. He'd make sure that I was him. He'd wipe my memory, my personality, and put his own in its place.
Bron went downstairs to the boat dock, but even as he did, flashes of memory kept coming to him, like errant dreams that had escaped their bounds. The tech that they'd just "interrogated" had a surprising store of information.
Lucius controlled a wide number of financial institutions—investment groups. He supplied loans to many of the world's largest governments, bought land on the sly, and had oil drilling rigs all across the planet. He was wealthy beyond imagination.
He'd been into currency exchange before the Medicis, and had insured risky shipping transactions long before the Rothschilds.