by Brian Lumley
“Damn you—no!” Shaitan had shouted then. “I dreamed it; I know it for the truth; but I cannot understand it! I’ve told it to you so that you also may attempt to fathom it—and likewise fail to fathom it, even as I have failed!”
With which and in a fury, he had rushed off and disappeared into the volcano’s labyrinth.
For a long time after that Shaithis had not seen the other at all; he had merely been aware of his ancestor’s shadowy presence. But a time had come when, going again to the vats, he’d found the ancient gloomily examining his various adaptations where they squirmed and hardened in their liquids; and there, following customary greetings but in answer to no specific remark or query, Shaitan had listlessly mumbled:
“I have been banished out of many spheres and thrown down from many worlds. Aye, and others like me, throughout all the myriad cone-shaped dimensions of light.” That had been all.
Mad creature! (Shaithis had kept this thought, and others he was thinking, very much to himself). But it’s as well you rush around crazed while I’m about my work. The last thing I would want is for you to become interested in what I’m doing now. For in fact he was there at that time in order to inject brain matter into his new construct, so stimulating and even directing the fetal ganglion’s growth. Except … these were cells obtained from a rather special source, and by means of Shaitan’s ice-boring ingurgitor …
Putting all such business aside for the nonce, however, and pandering to Shaitan’s insanity, if that is what it was, he had answered: “In which case, when we go against Starside with these warriors I’m fashioning, your revenge will be so much sweeter. Nothing will stand before us; and if there are higher worlds to conquer, they too shall finally fall, even as you fell to earth.”
His words had seemed to suffice to draw the other up from whatever morbid depths claimed him, even so far as to correct his temporary imbalance. And: “Indeed, these appear to be good warriors, my son!” he’d at once remarked. A rare compliment; at once relegated by: “Which they should be, for in Starside you had a sufficiency of superb clay with which to practice.”
And after that the ancient rambled no more …
Later still:
The two had constructed a slender, streamlined powerful flyer, equipped it with a sucking snout and given it the stripped-to-basic brain of one of Menor Maimbite’s otherwise defunct lieutenants. Fueling the beast on quality plasma, they’d sent it on a reconnaissance flight to Starside. After that and over the space of a good many auroral displays, they’d waited on its return but in vain. Eventually, when almost all hope had faded, the flyer had returned, bringing back with it a scrawny shivering waif of a Traveller child.
The flyer had snatched him, a boy of eight or nine years, at sundown from a party of Travellers where they camped in the hills over Sunside. It appeared that the Travellers no longer went to earth when the sun sank down into night. Why should they, when the Wamphyri were no more? But the return journey from Starside had been long, and the child almost dead from exposure.
Shaitan had carried him away to his private chambers for “questioning”; shortly thereafter, the ancient’s mind-call had summoned Shaithis from where he worked at the vats:
Come!
A single word, yes, but its author’s excitement had spoken volumes …
5
SUNDOWN—EXORCETS—THE GODMIND
Shaithis stood tall and severe in the black, gapped caldera wall and looked south towards Starside. Overhead, the aurora wove in a sky which was otherwise black, but he knew that on Starside it would be sunup. The mountain peaks would be burning gold, and in Karen’s aerie thick curtains and tapestries woven with her sigil would guard the uppermost windows, where lances of sunfire might otherwise strike through.
He looked south, narrowing his scarlet eyes to focus upon a far faint line of fire all along the horizon, a narrow golden haze which separated the distant curve of the world first from blue then black space, where all the stars of night hung glittering and hypnotic, seeming to beckon him. Which was a call he would answer. Soon.
Indeed he must, for when the aurora died to a flicker and the sky in the south darkened to jet, then it would be sundown; in advance of which, Shaithis and his devolved, depraved ancestor would muster their warriors, mount their flyers, and launch a small but monstrous army from the volcano’s steep lava slopes. For them the realization of a dream, and for Starside the advent of a nightmare, was finally in the offing. Shaitan’s dream for so many hundreds of years, now looming into being, brought into sharp relief by a lone flyer’s recent return out of Starside with its burden of a stolen Traveller waif.
Shaithis remembered the event in minute detail: the way his gloating ancestor had carried off the exhausted, half-dead boy into the gloom of his sulphur-floored chambers; following which (eventually), his mental summons:
Come!
In his mind’s eye Shaithis saw it all again: the Fallen One, jubilant where he paced or flowed to and fro across the black, grainy floor of his apartments in his excitement. And before Shaithis had been able to frame a question:
“This Dweller of whom you’ve spoken.” Shaitan had turned to him. “This alien youth who used the power of the sun itself to bring down the mighty Wamphyri.”
“Yes, what of him?”
“What of him?” Shaitan had gurgled darkly, delightedly, in his fashion. “Devolved, that’s what! Even as I myself am devolved—but to his far greater cost. So he bathed you all in blazing sunlight, eh? By which reducing Wamphyri flesh to steam and stench? Well, and he seared himself, too! His vampire must have been injured; it could not repair itself; his metamorphic man flesh sloughed away even as a leper’s. Then … his desperate vampire returned him to an earlier form: that of its original host and manifestation. Less bulk in that, making the wastage easier to contain, d’you see? And so your Dweller is now … a wolf!”
“A wolf?” Astonished, Shaithis had remembered his dream.
“A beast, aye, going on all fours. A Grey One, the leader of the pack, with nothing of powers except those of the wild. The Travellers hold him in awe, whose forepaws are human hands. A little of his mind must be human, too, at least in its memories. And of course his vampire has survived, in however small part, for that was what saved him. But the rest is wolf.”
“A wolf!” Shaithis had breathed it again. Well, it wasn’t the first time he’d experienced oneiromantic dreams. It was an art of the Wamphyri, that’s all. “And his father, the Hell-lander Harry Keogh?”
“He is back in Starside, aye.”
“Back?”
“Indeed, for following the battle at The Dweller’s garden he returned to his own place. Something which you could hardly be expected to know, for by then you were in exile.”
“His own place? The Hell-lands?”
“Hell-lands! Hell-lands! They are not Hell-lands! How often must I tell you: this place is hell, with its sulphur stenches, vampire swamps, and sun-blasted furnace lands beyond the mountains! Ah, but Harry Keogh’s world … to the likes of us it would be a paradise!”
“How can you know that?”
“I can’t—but I can suspect it.”
“This Harry Keogh,” Shaithis had mused: “he had powers, to be sure, but he was not Wamphyri.”
“Well, now he is,” Shaitan at once contradicted him, “but as yet untried. For who is there to test him, in devious argument or in battle? What’s more, the Travellers don’t much fear him, for he will not take the blood of men.”
“What?!”
“According to the boy,” Shaitan had said, “The Dweller’s father eats only beast flesh. Compared to your vampire, my son, it seems his is a puling, unsophisticated infant of a thing.”
“And the so-called Lady Karen?”
“Ah, yes,” Shaitan had said. “The Lady Karen: last of Starside’s Wamphyri. You have designs on that one, don’t you? I remember you remarked on her treachery, and even now her name falls like acid from your forked tongue. Wel
l, Karen and Harry Keogh are together. So at least he’s that much of a man. They share her aerie; if she’s the beauty you say she is, doubtless he’s in her to the hilt and beyond, even as we speak.”
It was a deliberate jibe and Shaithis knew it, but still he could not resist rising to the other’s bait. “Then they should enjoy each other while they can,” he had answered darkly. And finally, he had looked around for the Traveller child.
“Gone,” Shaitan told him. “Man flesh, pure and simple. I’ve had my share of metamorphic mush these thousands of years. The boy was a tidbit, but welcome for all that.”
“The entire child?”
“In Sunside there are entire tribes,” Shaitan had answered, his voice a clotted gurgle. “And beyond that entire worlds!”
With which they’d commenced to ready themselves for their resurgence …
Now Shaithis waited on the emergence of his latest warrior creature, and his ancestor Shaitan the Fallen waited with him. When the beast’s scales, grapples, and various fighting appendages had stiffened into chitin hard as iron, a matter of hours now, finally it would be time to venture forth against Starside.
As for any future “battle”: would it even last long enough to qualify as such? Shaithis doubted it. For he firmly believed that on his own—single-handedly controlling a mere fistful of warriors from the back of a flyer, and without his ancestor’s help—still he would have the measure of Karen and her lover, and whatever allies they might muster. And therefore the measure of Starside, too.
What, a mere female? A pack of wolves? And a vampire “Lord” who shied from man blood? No army that but a rabble! Let Keogh call up the dead if he would; fine for scaring trogs and Travellers, but Shaithis had no fear of the crumbling dead. And as for that other facet of Keogh’s magic—that clever trick of his, of coming and going at will, invisibly—that wouldn’t help him. Not this time. If he went, good riddance! And if he came let it be to his death!
But on the other hand …
Shaithis could scarcely deny his own troublesome dreams, whose patterns were strange as the auroral energies which even now wove in the sky high overhead. Perhaps he should examine those dreams yet again, as so often before, except—
—No time, not now; for he felt a familiar encroachment and knew that Shaitan was near, in mind if not in body. And:
What is it? he inquired.
How clever you are, the other purred telepathically. And oh so sensitive! There’s no sneaking up on you, my son.
Then why do you persist in trying? Shaithis was cold.
Shaitan ignored his testiness and said: You should come now. Our creatures are mewling in their vats and would be up and about. They must be tested. We have things to do, preparations to make.
Indeed, it was true enough. And:
I shall be there immediately. Shaithis answered, commencing the treacherous climb down from the cone. Yes, for his ancestor wasn’t alone in his eagerness to be free of this place. Except there’s freedom and there’s freedom, and the concept is never the same to any two creatures.
Shaitan would merely free himself from the Icelands, while his descendant … he had something else to be free of.
Some little time earlier, and several thousands of miles to the south:
The Necroscope had been out to inspect Karen’s advance guard: her early-warning system of specialized warrior creatures (or rogue troops, as they seemed to have become) where she’d stationed them at the rim of the frozen sea against any incursion from the Icelands. He had gone there via the Möbius Continuum, in a series of hundred-mile jumps which had taken him far across consecutive northern horizons into aurora-litten wastes where the snow lay in great white drifts on the shores of a sullenly heaving, ice-crusted ocean.
Karen’s creatures had been there sure enough, and Harry was soon to discover how well they’d adapted. Metamorphic, a single generation had sufficed to accelerate their evolution: they’d grown thick white fur both for protection against the cold and as a natural camouflage. When Harry had thought to detect some slight movement in a humped snowfield, and after he’d carefully moved a little closer, then he’d seen just how effective the latter device was. His first real awareness of the beasts had been when three of them reared up and charged him: in combination, a quarter acre of murder running rampant!
Then, removing himself some small distance, he’d thought: I’d be little more than a minnow to be divided between three great cats. They’d get no more than a taste apiece.
But note their instinctive tendency to secrecy, Karen had commented from her aerie some three thousand miles south. Their minds may be feeble, but still they were able to hide their thoughts, and thus themselves, away from you. What’s more, you are Wamphyri—a Lord, a master—but that didn’t stop them, either !
The Necroscope had detected a degree of pride in Karen’s thoughts; these were her creations, and she’d made a good job of them. Alas, but then she’d allowed them to slip the leash. Still focusing on him, she had detected that thought, too.
The distance was too great, she’d said with a shrug. I see that now. Telepathy is a special talent which we share. Our mainly human minds are large, and we focus them well, wherefore contact between us is simple. But their minds are small and mainly concerned with survival. Again her shrug. Quite simply, they’ve forgotten me.
Time they remembered, then, Harry had answered. And as she amplified and reinforced her original orders and instructions, so he’d relayed them directly and forcefully into the group’s dull minds. Following which, and when he went among them a second time, they’d behaved with more respect.
Brave of you! she’d commented, however nervously. To examine them at such close quarters. And perhaps a little foolish, too. Come out of there, Harry, please? Come home now?
Home … Did she mean back to the aerie? he wondered. And was that really his home now? Perhaps it was in keeping: that monstrous menhir rising over Starside’s boulder plains, whose furnishings were fashioned from the hair and fur, gristle and bones of once-men and -monsters. What better home for a man whose lifelong friend had been the Grim Reaper himself?
Bitter thoughts. But on the other hand it had seemed to Harry that Karen pleaded with him, and that she was concerned for him. And any home was better than none.
Anyway, his job was finished here now and he was cold. But he knew that Karen would warm him …
A universe away, in the Urals:
Major Alexei Byzarnov was present in the Perchorsk core for the latest computer-simulated test firing of the Tokarevs. His 2 I/C, Captain Igor Klepko, was in charge of the test. Klepko was short, sharp-featured, with the dark eyes and weatherworn complexion of his steppemen ancestors. Throughout his preparations, the officer had kept up a running commentary for the benefit of the half dozen junior officers in attendance. Also in attendance and keeping a close eye on the proceedings from where he stood apart on the perimeter walkway under the inward-curving arch of the granite wall, Projekt Direktor Viktor Luchov was quietly intense, totally absorbed in Klepko’s instructive monologue as it approached its climax.
“Two missiles, yes,” Klepko continued. “A dual system. In the field their launching would constitute either a preemptive strike in a hitherto nonnuclear battle zone, or retaliation against an enemy’s use of similar weapons. The first Tokarev would seek out enemy HQ somewhere beyond the forward edge of the battle area, and the second would home in on heavy enemy troop concentration in the battle zone.
“For our purposes, however, here in Perchorsk—” Klepko shrugged. “While our targets are somewhat more specific, they remain paradoxically conjectural. We aim to detonate the first missile in a world beyond this, er, Gate” (with a cursory wave of his hand, he indicated the glaring white sphere behind him), “and the second Tokarev while it is still inside the ‘passage’ between universes. The mechanics of the thing are very simple. On-board computers are linked by radio; as the first Tokarev clears the Gate into the far world, contact will
be broken; one fifth of a second later both devices will detonate.”
Captain Klepko sighed and nodded. “As for the purpose of this system: if and when used, it will be entirely defensive. You’ve all been shown films of creatures from the other side breaking through into this world. I’m sure I don’t have to stress how important it is that in future, no further emergence be allowed.
“Lastly, and before the simulation, there remain the questions of command and personal security. Command:
“These weapons will only be used on the instructions of the Projekt Direktor, as qualified by the Officer Commanding, Major Byzarnov or, in the unlikely event of his absence, by me. Except under circumstances where a chain-of-command situation has been initiated, no other person will have that authority.
“Personal security:
“From the moment the button is pressed the warheads are armed; there will be a delay of five minutes before firing; anyone who remains in Perchorsk at that time will be alerted by continuous claxons. The claxons have only one meaning: GET OUT! Exhaust from the Tokarevs is toxic. As a safety measure against the unlikely failure of the Projekt’s ventilation systems, any stragglers will need to employ breathing apparatus until they’ve exited the complex. It takes about four minutes for a fit man to make it out of here from the core into the ravine.
“These Tokarevs are weapons; their use will not be experimental but for effect; there is no fail-safe. After firing, the system cannot be aborted and we cannot rely on more than sixty seconds before detonation. Which makes a total of six minutes after initiation. The explosion of the device on the far side should have no effect here, but the one in the passage … may be different. It could be that the sheer power of the detonation will drive radioactive gases and debris back through into Perchorsk. Hopefully, all such poisons will be contained down here in the vicinity of the core, by which time the place will have been vacated and the exits sealed.”
