by Brian Lumley
“You … bastard!” Nico spat in his face. And on the table, his mother sighed and struggled into a seated position!
A ring of blood oozed from the rim of the stake between her breasts, also from her mouth where she’d bitten through her bottom lip. But her eyes were open now, and they saw Nico. She sighed again, bloodily, and held out her arms towards him. “My son! Nico!” and as Lardis turned the youth’s face away a second time, so Andrei took her head off with one clean sweep of a bright-gleaming sickle.
Nico had passed out in Lardis’s arms. He was carried away by Kirk Lisescu, taken to people who would look after him. The parts of Alizia Gito were carried in their blanket to another fire on the other side of the open space, and there disposed of.
Lardis hung his head and Andrei went to him. “Steel yourself,” he said. “We’re only half-way through.”
Lardis looked at him from a face made haggard by sorrow. “These people were mine, and I’m killing them.”
The other shook his head. “We’re killing Them,” he said. “Or should we let them live, run off into the forest and hide, and come back at the next sundown to kill us?”
Lardis half-turned away, then nodded, and looked at the next one on the table. And saw that it was Nathan Kiklu. They had already stripped him and thrown a blanket over him. Lardis went to him, saying, “Nathan! Ah, no … this is the worst! I had hopes for him. There was something different in him, something better.”
He threw back the blanket, searched Nathan’s body. There were bruises galore, but no cuts. Neither had he been violated, and the lining of his mouth was clean. As Lardis examined him, he coughed and groaned, began to stir.
Lardis was excited. “Do you know—” he said, more to himself than to anyone else, “do you know—I think he’s clear!” In the next moment his excitement turned to despondency. “But his brother, Nestor: we saw him taken by that flyer.”
“A goner,” Andrei nodded, “like so many others.”
“We don’t know that for sure,” Lardis propped up Nathan’s head and gave his face a sharp slap. “We put our bolt in that beast good and deep!”
Andrei nodded again, and said, “Aye, and Kirk’s shotgun blew its rider right out of the saddle!” He looked up and a little apart, to where a Wamphyri lieutenant was nailed with silver spikes to a heavy wooden cross. He hung there like a bloody rag, apparently dead and certainly unconscious—for the moment. “But the flyer made off, so what hope for Nestor now? If the wounded creature dropped him, then he’s dead from the fall; likewise if it crashed. But worst of all if it made it home.”
Nathan coughed again and rolled his head a little in the crook of Lardis’s arm. Lardis glanced at Andrei, said: “Where, home? Aye, Karenstack, I know—but where before that? These bastards might be new here, but they weren’t new to their hellish game. They were full-fledged! They had flyers, warriors; they wore gauntlets! So where did they come from?”
Andrei looked again at the lieutenant on his cross. “When this one comes to, maybe we’ll find out. But let’s face it, he hasn’t much of a choice one way or the other. If he talks he’s for the fire, and if he doesn’t … he’s for the fire. Personally, I think we should burn him now. What if they come back for him?”
Lardis shook his head. “They won’t. They have other business to occupy them now.” For a moment he thought of Lissa and Jason, then shut them out of his mind. If he wanted to carry on here, then he must shut them out.
“But,” he continued, “if they suspect it wasn’t just an accident and we actually brought this one down and killed him … they’ll certainly wonder about it. Strangers here, they’re not yet sure of our capabilities. This was their first raid on us, and they had the advantage of total surprise. Even so, it’s possible we killed a lieutenant, which means we might also be able to kill one of them. That in turn guarantees their eventual return—not just out of curiosity—probably at the next sundown. So catching this one is a point in our favour, especially if we can make him talk. He must talk, for I want to know who they are! … For later, if for nothing else.”
This was no idle threat and Andrei knew it; he also knew that Lardis must die one day at the hands of the Wamphyri. He must, for it was them or him now, to the end. And he was just a man and mortal, while they apparently went on forever.
Nathan woke up. Lardis knew it at once, for suddenly the youth’s neck in the crook of his arm had stiffened, and Nathan had stopped breathing. He was holding his breath. He lay still, rigid, petrified by knowledge of what had gone before, and by ignorance of what was going on now. Then he opened his eyes a crack at first, then wider, saw Lardis—relaxed again and breathed out.
But Lardis hardened himself and narrowed his eyes a little. He wasn’t yet satisfied that the youth was in the clear. “Nathan,” he said, “can you hear me?”
Nathan nodded and Lardis helped him to struggle into a seated position. He saw where he was, that he was naked, and clutched his blanket to him. Then, with Lardis still supporting him, he looked along the table: at one end, prone figures lying side by side, and at the other a great wet patch, gleaming red. Finally he saw the Wamphyri lieutenant on his cross and gasped his terror, his lips drawing back from his teeth in an involuntary snarl.
Lardis could well understand that; neither Nathan nor anyone else would require the benefit of previous experience to recognize such as this when they saw it; not with the beast in a state of metamorphosis, as this one had been when the silver shot from Kirk Lisescu’s twin barrels ripped him out of his saddle. He had been laughing or shouting, filled with blood and frenzied elation as his creature swooped to claim one last victim. And for all that his eyes were closed now, his passion was still plainly visible, written in every line of his terrible face:
The distended jaws, hanging open, their serrated incisors at least an inch longer than his lesser teeth, which were themselves as jagged as the peaks of the barrier range. The bunched muscles of his face, frozen, drawing back grey flesh from his gaping jaws in a mad laugh, or perhaps in a rictus of instant unbearable agony as he was hit. The flaring nostrils in a squat, flattened nose, whose bridge showed the first signs of convolution, a symptom of his condition: that he was a vampire of long standing. He wasn’t yet Wamphyri, but given time he would be. Or would have been.
Nathan took all of this in and more. He took note of the jet-black lacquered gleam of the lieutenant’s forelock, where a silver spike had been driven through its knot, holding back his head to the upright. What he could not know was that the forelock’s sheen came from the human fat used to grease it. He saw the man’s heavily muscular arms pinned horizontally to the crossbar through the wrists and elbows, with huge hands dangling loose; hands whose fingers were half as long and thick again as his own, and tipped with broad, two-inch nails filed to a chisel edge. What he did not know was that the power of this creature was such that he could drive those hands into a man’s body to crush his heart or tear through the vertebrae of his spine.
“Ugly bastard, eh?” Lardis’s voice was full of hate.
Nathan tore his eyes from the figure on the cross and nodded. Then, glancing at the sky, the position of the stars against the mountains, he gave a start and made to get down from the table. All of the Szgany were expert in gauging the time from the stars, but none so good as Nathan. He knew how long he had been unconscious. And meanwhile … what of his mother? And Misha?
Lardis grabbed his shoulder. “Hold on, lad,” he growled. “First tell me about the bruises on your back. In fact your back is a bruise, one big one!”
Nathan nodded. “A … a creature—a wolf, man, fox, I don’t know what—threw me against the stockade.”
Lardis’s eyes were still narrow, suspicious. But in fact he had heard reports of a hybrid thing among the Wamphyri raiders. Hideous reports. “Threw you? He didn’t bite you?”
Nathan clutched his arm. “He t-t-took … took Misha from me!” His eyes were wide again, brimming with the horror of it. Then, shaking Lard
is off, he got down from the table, staggering as soon as his legs took his weight. His back was a column of molten agony from nape of neck to base of spine, so that he might have fallen if Lardis hadn’t caught him under the arm.
“Don’t try to go rushing off, lad. You’re in no fit state for it. Anyway, what can be done is being done.”
“B-but my m-mother, and Misha!” He looked dazedly around. “W-Where are my clothes? And what about N-N-Nestor?”
Lardis opened his mouth … but he could only say, “Ah!” and look away.
“Nestor?” And now Nathan’s voice was steady. Very steady.
Lardis looked at him again, frowning. In other circumstances it might even be funny, for this was the most anyone had ever had out of Nathan in as long as he could remember! Was it just the shock, or what? What had got into him? Had something got into him? “Are you sure you’re all right?”
“What about Nestor?” Nathan looked straight at him with those weird, bottomless blue eyes of his.
There was nothing for it but the truth. Lardis had too much to do; he’d not had sufficient time to give rein to his own sorrow yet, so mustn’t concern himself with the tears of others. Straight out with it then: “Taken!” he said. “We saw it: a flyer got him and carried him off. That one on the cross was its rider. Kirk knocked him out of the saddle; Andrei and myself, we put a bolt in his mount’s belly. But we didn’t stop it. It made off and took Nestor with it. I’m sorry, lad.”
Nathan made to stumble away. Like Lardis, he would save what grief was left for later. But right now: “My mother was in our house,” he said. “She’s buried!”
Again Lardis stopped him. “Nathan, wait. We’ve been digging in all the fallen houses.” He called forward a woman with a simple map of the town scrawled in charcoal on a piece of cloth, and said, “What of Nana Kiklu?”
The woman didn’t need to look at her map and its smudged symbols; she’d known Nana well; she said nothing, simply shook her head inside her black shawl.
“Speak!” Nathan cried out, and Lardis stepped back a pace, astonished. “What?” Nathan shouted. “A shake of your head? What does that mean? Did you find my mother? Is she dead? Speak!”
Grief-stricken herself, with losses of her own, finally the woman found her voice and sobbed, “Your mother isn’t there, Nathan. They didn’t find her. Neither your mother, nor the Zanesti girl, Misha, who was at your house. Her father was here to see if she’d been found. He was mad, tearing his hair! He lost not only Misha but also a son this night.”
Misha, lost! Finally the truth of it hit Nathan. He sat down in the dust and cradled his head in his hands. There were no tears, just a vast weariness. For he knew now that he must wake up—really wake up—and become part of this world he had spurned. Before … it hadn’t mattered. Nothing had mattered very much. This world hadn’t been his, hadn’t even been real, because he’d thought it held nothing for him. With only a few exceptions, its peoples had seemed like aliens. But the loss of Misha was real, and he couldn’t deny it; the one warm spot in his heart was empty now and cold.
No, there was one other warm place there, occupied till now by his dear mother. And was she, too, lost? In which case his heart must freeze entirely. He turned to Lardis. “Did anyone see my m-m-mother taken?”
Lardis sighed. “Nathan, I’ve many things to do. Too many things, and too little time. But when all’s done be sure I’ll ask around. You’re not the only one with questions. By sunup we’ll all know who was taken, murdered, raped, changed. And by then, too, we’ll have … dealt with all this. Right now, however, there’s nothing to be done. Not by you, at least.”
“And what am I supposed to do?”
Lardis shrugged, sighed. “Find a warm place. Get some sleep.”
“And you? Don’t you need your sleep?” Amazingly, Nathan was almost defiant. Lardis might expect such as this from his brother, Nestor, but from Nathan?
“I’ll sleep later,” he answered roughly, turning away. “But for now … I’ve work to do. So be off, I’m busy!”
Nathan shook his short-cropped yellow head. “If you can be strong, then so can I. Anyway, how could I sleep? Lardis, I… I don’t have anyone!”
Lardis heard the emptiness in his voice, like an echo of his own emptiness, and thought: Neither do I have anyone, not any longer. Except maybe you.
But out loud he said, “Then be strong somewhere else, for the moment at least. This is a bloody place, Nathan, and what we’re doing here is bloody work …”
After that there was no more time for talk, for Andrei had lifted the blanket off the next one and was beckoning urgently. Lardis went to him and looked where his finger pointed. The man under the blanket had been bitten in the neck, and wide-spaced punctures had formed scabs over heavy blue arteries. There was no breath in him, no pulse, and he lay utterly still.
Nathan backed off a few paces and stood there watching. He had to learn what he could of this sort of thing now, for it was no longer a game which he, Nestor, and Misha played in the woods. The Wamphyri were real, and so was the horror they brought with them.
Lardis yanked a bauble from its stitches in the cuff of his jacket, opened the cold grey fingers of the corpse’s left hand and folded them around a small silver bell which he forced into the palm. Then he stepped back and waited. And in a little while …
… The “dead” man (whom Lardis had been fairly sure was undead, but must test anyway), moaned and gave a shudder that shook his entire body. His eyelids fluttered but remained mercifully shut. He wasn’t ready to wake up, but even unconscious the poison in his blood was protecting its changeling. His hand vibrated on the table’s boards, unclenched, and in its agitation tossed aside the silver bauble. Finally he sighed and lay still again. And Lardis nodded, sharply.
The gaunt-faced, strong-willed executioners came forward, and Nathan saw what Lardis had meant by “bloody work”. He forced himself to watch this one, just one, and was sickened. All the rattling, grimacing skeletons of whispered campfire stories took on rotting flesh now, and every bad dream of his childhood was realized at one and the same time.
Against this surreal background of smoky, ruddy firelight and terrifying burnt-pork stenches—where gaunt figures came and went through the night, carrying their burdens of blanketed bodies, and Lardis Lidesci was the Ultimate Authority, who determined life or death—finally Nathan was set free from his deep-rooted mental shackles, became a man of Sunside, Szgany, and left the shucked-off chrysalis of his weird other-worldliness behind him.
The shell was left behind, at least.
But a man is more than flesh and blood. When he is conscious a man can control his body and even, in large measure, his thoughts. But when he’s asleep …? Are his thoughts entirely his own?
When he was very small, Nathan had sometimes asked his mother: “Why do the wolves talk to me in my pillow? Why do I hear all of the dead people whispering?” Then she would seem to close up on herself like the flowers at sundown; an uneasy look would come into her eyes; she would shush him and beg him not to ask things like that, for such questions were strange and people wouldn’t like or understand them.
These were only a few of the strange questions Nathan had learned not to ask, until he’d rarely asked anything at all but remained silent. Even in his dreams, he’d learned how to stay mainly silent.
But that had been then, in his childhood.
And this was now, and he was a man …
Lardis had told Nathan to go away, find himself a warm place, sleep. But he could not. Indeed, it would not surprise Nathan if he never slept again. Instead he turned his back on Lardis’s and Andrei’s “bloody work”—what was happening on the great table, the monstrous but necessary examination of the dead and the undead by those who still lived, while they still lived—and went to sit cross-legged close to the foot of the cross, where the Wamphyri lieutenant hung on his silver spikes.
Someone brought Nathan his clothes and he dressed himself automaticall
y, almost without conscious volition, then sat shivering under his blanket and waited for the lieutenant to regain consciousness. For Lardis intended to question this creature, this man or once-man, and whatever the old Lidesci’s methods would be—however cruel—Nathan intended to hear for himself whatever answers they might elicit. He was Szgany now and had made himself a vow; it was unpublicized but a vow for all that, and it would be a hard thing to accomplish. In order to destroy his enemies he must first understand them.
There was a lesser fire close by, which slowly warmed him through until he began to nod. And despite that he had thought it impossible, in a little while he curled up on his side and went to sleep. It was the beginning of a healing process, but only partly physical. For mainly it was an opportunity for his mind to consolidate the undeniable fact of his existence, at the same time assimilating something of the monstrous facts which had focused that reality.
That was partly why he slept: to heal himself in body and spirit, and let the subconscious Nathan create some kind of order out of the chaos of the physical Nathan’s new reality. But his mind was not like those of other men; complex as the genetics which had built it as a reflection of another’s mind, it was living proof of that universal axiom, “like father, like son”. The only difference between him and his Necroscope father was this: that Harry Keogh, in his own world, had had the benefit of a mathematical science, and of a million dead people who cared for him and were not afraid. While in this world … now the Great Majority had plenty to fear, and felt that they could only trust each other. And so they continued to avoid Nathan when his dreams impinged too closely upon theirs. Like now …
… He felt them shut him out, withdrawing into the silence of their tombs! More quickly than ever before, the teeming dead had sensed and rejected him. And so he must dream of the living.
Misha was at the forefront of his mind: naturally he would dream of her. Not as he had last seen her, in the clutches of a beast-man (his mind shied from that), but briefly, in snatches out of time. As a child, as a girl, and then as a young woman.
