Bloodwars

by Brian Lumley

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  like the fools they are, our living descendants accepted him back among them! Four: his brother is a vampire Lord and his nephews are werewolves. Five: his Wamphyri masters have followed him out of the east, and now ravage on Sunside among our children! And is that last a coincidence? I think not! This Nathan is the harbinger of doom!

  Silence from Jasef, but a thoughtful one.

  And now the tremulous one again: We can’t take the risk. We daren’t chance talking to him. He will know us: our whereabouts, graves, caskets and urns. His brother is a necromancer! We’ll have to leave it at that, for now. Later, perhaps, if it is seen that -

  And so it’s decided, the spokesman cut in, with something of satisfaction. Jasef, you will not talk to this Nathan Kiklu, on penalty of —

  - On penalty of nothing! Jasef spat. For now, at last - I know you!

  You … know me? But the spokesman for the Great Majority didn’t sound nearly so sure of himself now. Yet still he blustered: What can you mean? In what way do you know me?

  And a sharp edge in Jasef Karis’s voice as he answered, I know you! Aye, for I recognize your voice, even as I knew it in life all those years ago — Arlek Nunescu!*

  But I… I…

  A coward and a traitor in life, and the same in death, or so it seems. Where’ve you been hiding, Arlek? You, Arlek Nunescu, who would have sold his leader to Shaithis of the Wamphyri!

  A lie! The other’s deadspeak shout of denial. The old fool lies!

  Old fool, possibly. So a good many folk believed, anyway. But a liar? Never! And you’re the one who would have sold Lardis Lidesci himself to Shaithis. I cannot be mistaken, for

  * The Source by Brian Lumley, RoC Books 1989.

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  I was there! Cowardly, wrong-headed, power-mad Arlek Nunescu. I remember now: you wanted Lardis out of the way so you could lead the tribe and be a Wamphyri supplicant! What’s more, I saw how the Lidesci dealt with your treachery. But at least he put you out of your misery before tossing you on to the cleansing fire!

  It’s .. . not true! Arlek choked, sobbed.

  But it is! And as you were a coward in life, so you’re a coward in death. And would you still be a Wamphyri supplicant, Arlek? Do you still give in so easily? Or is it that you’d pay Lardis back, even after all this time? Would you see him destroyed, and all the Szgany with him, because you were destroyed - for your treachery?

  And as Arlek continued to sob, so the tremulous one -but not so tremulous now - wanted to know: How, pay him back?

  By keeping from us the only man who can save our children! Jasef thundered, despite that he was less than a sigh. By denying us access to the Necroscope Nathan!

  Nathan could hold himself back no longer. ‘Jasef. I thank you,’ he spoke up, and felt shockwaves ripple through the ranks of the dead. ‘I don’t know you but I feel that I should. Just as soon as I get a chance, I’ll come and introduce myself properly. Whatever it is you would tell me can keep till then, by which time the dead may have learned to trust me.’

  Some of us trust you now, son! A hitherto unheard voice spoke up, but uncertain of itself, unused to its circumstances. Those of us who were … who were killed in the fighting. It’s just that it’s taken a while to sink in, that’s all - our situation, I mean. But we know that if you’d been on hand a little earlier, a few more of us might still be alive. These others - these - what, old timers? - they’ve forgotten what they had in life and have come to accept what they have in death. That’s why they’re scared: in case they lose that too! But us recent ones, we feel we’ve nothing left to lose. Well, except contact with what’s been left behind. We

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  certainly don’t want to Jose that. And that . .. why, that’s you, Nathan/

  And from some little distance away, but strong in the deadspeak aether as they’d always been in life: Aye, and there are others, Nathan, men who amounted to something, who’ll put their faith in you. If you’re good enough for wily old Lardis Lidesci, then you’re good enough for us! For without you, why, who would there be to keep us up to date on the doings of Andrei, eh? We don’t know about these others, but give us a chance to stay in touch with the living, we’ll take it whatever the cost!

  It was the dead Romani brothers, Ion and Franci, speaking to Nathan from their cave-tomb near Settlement. We’d have spoken up earlier, except what we heard made us sick! But since you’ve now seen fit to talk to this rabble and make your presence known - and answer their so-called ‘charges’ — well, it seems only right that we should get a word in, too. We’re the Romanis, or we were, and we’re with you!

  By now the dead were in a tumult, split into two camps by the various pressures within them. Even the ghosts of Starside trogs joined in, who in certain ways were more akin to men than the desert-dwelling Thyre. A phlegmy grunt, and:

  A thousand sunups gone, (came the dull deadspeak thoughts of one such Neanderthal), this Nathan’s father and his brother The Dweller called us up out of our cavern niches to fight for them. Our joints were made supple again, and pur skin caused to bend without cracking. But still there was a pain in it unlike the pain of living, and a horror worse than the blackest nightmare! I for one don’t wish to know this Nathan; for to know his father was to love him … and to love the Necroscope was to do his bidding. Now I’m done with walking, breathing and all such. Now I’m satisfied to cling to the earth and stiffen to a stone, and dream my fading dreams.

  But another trog voice had it: That tells only the least of it. A great many of us answered the Necroscope’s call - and

  willingly! What? But we’d been slaves to the Wamphyri from teat to tomb, and they had treated us cruelly! They sent us against The Dweller in his garden, who could have punished us severely. But he said, ‘Stay with me, and earn my protection.’ Then, when the Wamphyri came and we were dead, when Harry Dwellersire and his changeling son said, ‘Come - up out of the earth and fight them that killed you,’ - you could not have held us back! Not only for the love of the Necroscope and his son, but for our pride, our souls. Then there was pain, aye. But myself, I say the pain was as nothing. I would do it again, today, now! The Szgany call us unmen, but when the Necroscope called us up out of the earth to fight the Wamphyri… then we were men!

  You trogs are men, sure enough! (Ion and Franci Romani, so united that their voice was one.) Certainly, you fought like men that time. We had a common enemy - the Wamphyri - and leaders in common, too: Harry Keogh and his changeling son. Now there’s Nathan, another son of the Necroscope, whose enemy is the same as before.

  ‘Well,’ said Nathan, still dreaming, ‘that’s true as far as it goes, but this time it’s not just the Wamphyri. Men have come out of a strange land into Sunside/Starside, some of whom are monsters no less than the vampire Lords! No, not in their shape or form, but in their minds! I’ve been to that world of theirs, and returned with some of their weapons, though hardly sufficient to give me the upper hand. And so my task is doubly difficult: to clear our world of the Wamphyri once and for all, and to right certain wrongs done in another world, and so make both places safer for our children. Now, if there’s that in my motives which you find questionable, by all means continue to deny me access to the knowledge gone down into the earth with you. But if you find justice in my actions, then be my friends. Except I promise you this: that whatever my father or The Dweller did in the past, and whatever my brother does now, I shall never call you up out of the earth! If ever you come to me, it will be …” (He almost said, ‘of your own free will’, but then thought better of it)’… because you want to.’

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  Again a tumult of incorporeal voices — most of them thin as air and far less substantial - crowded into the void which Nathan’s deadspeak had left behind; but rising above the rest, and filled with a new authority, the tremulous one, some chief or elder of forgotten times, made himself heard:

  Nathan, you have touched us. It is one of the reasons we would have nothing to do wit
h you: because we knew we would be touched. For you never knew the Necroscope Harry Keogh, despite that he sired you. But we knew him, and I can tell you this: in the end, he wasn’t all warmth and light. But you … are warm! And you . .. are light! A blanket on a cold night, a candle in the darkness. Now leave us be, for we’ve much to consider.

  Nathan, like his father before him, would never be one to defy the dead. Obediently, he withdrew, and the void behind him filled with fading deadspeak whispers …

  Time passed and Nathan fell into a deep, dreamless sleep. This wasn’t unusual; he rarely dreamed in the true sense of the word but rather used the time (albeit subconsciously, and frequently without remembering the details) to explore the problems of his waking hours, and to ‘listen’ to the whispers of the dead. But not on this occasion, for this was a sleep of exhaustion.

  His numbers vortex shield was down, a mere wisp or curl of ciphers, as opposed to the accustomed whirlwind of esoteric formulae (which, paradoxically, left him wide open to some, yet mainly invisible to one at least: his vampire brother Nestor); his mind was empty of deliberate thoughts and therefore receptive as a sponge; he slept in the arms of his love ‘like a dead man’, drawing strength from what food he’d had at his mother’s table, and from the loving warmth of Misha’s body and being.

  But along with the warmth was a cold, too, and while the former was an entirely natural thing, the latter was … something other. A metaphysical cold, a chill not only of the

  mind but of the soul. Or of soullessness? Telepathy of a sort, yes, and yet different; not deadspeak, which is the art of the Necroscope, but … something in between? A horror certainly, but as much horrified as horrifying. A creeping cold oozing in Nathan’s subconscious ‘awareness’ as pus in a running sore, as if to cleanse itself by contact with the pure. A malignancy which yet recognized its own nature and knew Nathan’s as its opposite, but remembered however vaguely, remotely, inaccurately, a time or phase or circumstance other than the nightmare of now - a place in the unknown past — when things had been different.

  And remembering, it knew his mind! So that, however empty, the feel of his mind galvanized activity in the all but erased, echoing caverns of its own. Until, yearning to fill the emptiness, finally it - she - must know …

  Nathaaan?

  A whisper at first, a question, uncertainty.

  And again Nathan’s attitude of listening, of subconscious concentration, rapt attention.

  Nathaaan!

  He felt her probe, knew her identity, recognized the mutation that had occurred, the nightmare metamorphosis; knew too that he should not answer her, should indeed shun her, deny her the right to invade his thoughts. But at the same time he knew the complications of her condition; above and beyond which, he of all people was aware of the curse of ostracism, the desperate loneliness of the outsider. Of course, because for a large part of his life Nathan had been just such an outsider.

  ‘Siggi? Siggi Dam?’

  Nathaaan! (Her sigh, like the exhalation of some poisonous cloud - by which he knew that he could not be mistaken: Siggi was a vampire.)

  Ah, no! She snatched at him, clung to him at once with a fierce energy. Not merely a vampire, Nathaaan . .. Wamphyyyri! The cold was there — the terrible burning cold of her condition - which was in fact an alien heat; for out in

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  the spaces between the stars even a ‘dead’ sun is hot, and in the aching cold of undeath the heat of the blood is a roaring furnace!

  ‘Siggi,’ he said. ‘Siggi… I’m sorry.’

  Why?

  Innocence, in a vampire! No, not innocence, but the lack of knowledge. For her mind was as empty as his had been just a few moments ago. Except his had been the emptiness of exhaustion, while hers was that of deprivation. She had been deprived of her past.*

  Fiercely eager, she grasped upon that at once. Nathan -do you know?

  Like deadspeak, telepathy often conveys more than is said. And yes, Nathan knew. But how to explain it? There are different kinds of vampire, Siggi,’ he finally told her. ‘And I don’t know which is the worst. The one that got you

  - the first one that got you, in a place called Perchorsk —

  was a machine. But without the men who built and used it,

  the machine itself would be nothing.’

  I — don’t — understaaand! (The wail of a lost child.)

  ‘Your … your mind was sucked dry.’ (He could only tell it

  the way it was.) ‘And you were thrown out of your own

  world into this one. You survived, except you survived in

  the worst possible way: you are Wamphyri!’

  Perhaps something of it had come back to her. Partial

  recognition at least - of the crawling horror of her existence

  - washed over him, and Nathan felt Siggi’s shudders, of loathing and of ecstasy both, racking him, filling him with their freezing fire. Until: A machine, aye, she finally said. A ‘ vampire — but the men who used it were worse!

  Then-

  Another thrill of horror, as she added. They stiJI are!

  Nathan knew what she meant. They’re here, yes.’

  They have come for meeeee!

  ‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘I should think the last person or

  - The Last Aerie, by Brian Lumley, RoC Books, 1991.

  thing Turkur Tzonov desires to see is you, Siggi. You have no reason to fear him now. He is only .. . only a man.’

  And now she was the one to see his meaning. And I … am Wamphyri?

  ‘Yes.’

  Canker will protect me, when he is done with serenading the moon. But until then I’m alone. I am alone, Nathaaan, for this place is not my place. Except.. . with you out there, I am not alone.

  ‘Wrong.’ (Again he shook his head.) ‘You should fear me, Siggi, as I must learn to fear you.’

  But we were . .. friends?

  ‘You don’t remember any of it?’

  No … yes … no … perhaps. Did you love me?

  In his sleep, Nathan smiled a sad smile. ‘No … yes … no .. . perhaps!’ He remembered something Zek Foener had once told him, ‘about his mother and Harry Keogh. And like an echo out of the past: ‘Forces beyond our control threw us together. But yes, we were friends, however briefly.’

  Then we still are. For in this place I have no friends. Only food. And there’s no pleasure in food that screams!

  With which the ice was back on Nathan’s spine - cold ice this time — as he was reminded of who or what he was talking to; and he knew who or what he should not be talking to.

  ‘Friends, then,’ he answered, even though it was a lie. ‘For as long as it lasts.’

  And finally:

  Now I rememmmbenr! she said with some animation, some excitement. You . .. escaped? And I helped you.

  ‘Yes.’ He could only agree.

  Now, I would escape.

  ‘From Canker?’ (If so, then Nathan could well understand it! The dog-Lord was his sworn enemy, and he would kill him if he could.)

  Run from Canker? Ah, no, for he loves me! Not from Canker, no, but from this place, this world which is not my

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  world, back to my memories. Anyway, you can’t kill him. No man may kill the dog-Lord! No, for he’s the strong one, Nathaaan. He adores me, but I fear his strength, I /ear . .. his ways. And I must flee him, out of here, back to my memories. Confused, she contradicted herself.

  Nathan was sad for her, mad at himself, hateful of Turkur Tzonov. But he must try to make her understand. ‘Siggi, all of that is beyond you now. There’s no returning; you are what you are. Men will not accept you.’

  You accepted me, upon a time.

  ‘You were a beautiful woman. I was a man.’

  You were innocent. And afterwards … your thoughts were warm. You did not think of me as a sucking thing. But now … I am a sucking thing!

  With which he knew that she was mad, that
the mazy corridors of Siggi’s mind weren’t merely empty but bereft. Fear was the cause, and fear the spur which prompted her to seek an out now. But of what was she afraid? He sensed nothing of fear for Canker. And as for her present circumstances, they were all she had of memory. She saw the question in his mind and answered:

  He - he - has come for meeeee!

  ‘Turkur?’ And he saw from the way she cringed that he was right. ‘But you’ve nothing to fear from him, not now, not when Canker is your protector.’

  Canker! Nathan’s words had been like an invocation, spawning an image and more than an image in her mind. The moon music fades .. . The dog-Lord returns … He must not find me speaking to another! . .. You shall be my secret … And we shall be . ..?

  ‘Friends, yes - if there’s a way.’ (He knew there wasn’t, but hid it from her for pity’s sake.)

  Take care, Nathaaan.

  ‘You, too, Siggi.’

  And she was gone …

  How very odd, how very peculiar, how very talented you

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  are, Nathan! said a deep, dark, gurgling deadspeak voice from the depths of his sleeping mind, bubbling and festering there like a sucking swamp. Don’t you find it odd, my son? That while I am able to eavesdrop on your conversations with things dead as I am dead, your conversations with the Jiving are quite beyond my range? Oh, I hear what you have to say to them, for despite that they are alive, the thoughts that accompany your words are deadspeak; you’re the Necro-scope, after all! But I cannot hear their answers! No, for they exist in a different world now - or rather, I do. Peculiar, aye…

  And painful, too: that I who was once so very much a part of your world - alive! Alive! Or undead, at worst -should now find myself excluded entirely from that oh so agreeable estate. But death comes to all of us, I suppose. Given time, even a man such as I must stiffen to a stone, and undeath turn to the true death. Except - as you and I well know - death is not always the end. Or it doesn’t have to be, eh, Nathan? And when there are wrongs to be put to rights, what then? Are we so different, my son? You, who would avenge the deaths of so many Szgany, and I, who would avenge my own? You, who would rid your world of all of the Wamphyri forever (why, it seems almost greedy of you!) and I, who desire to destroy just two of them?