Bloodwars

by Brian Lumley

  ‘Asleep,’ his 2I/C answered. ‘But do you blame him, Corporal Zorin? Why, secure in that high tower, who can possibly threaten him?’

  The other answered with an irritable grunt, switched off his torch. ‘I shall charge him anyway. He wasn’t put up there for his security nor even ours, but for the safety of the whole keep. From such a vantage point, Bykov can see everything: the pass in both directions, the approaches to the keep, the courtyard and the movements of the prowler-guard .. . everything. Or he would see it if he wasn’t asleep!’

  As if to punctuate Zorin’s words, a pebble and some mortar or fine grit fell from on high, clattered against a ledge, went plummeting into the deeps. But while the corporal gave a start, his subordinate merely chuckled and said, ‘So, he’s not sleeping after all, but merely distracted.’

  ‘Eh?’ The corporal frowned. ‘Distracted?’

  ‘Vasily Bykov carves stone with that army knife of his,’ the other explained. ‘It’s his hobby. I would guess that he’s just this minute brushed a handful of chips from that window-ledge up there.’

  Zorin’s frown deepened. ‘He should at least have seen my torch-beam, and answered it.’

  A half-seen shrug from the darkness of the turret. ‘Perhaps his batteries are faulty. I’ve had to change mine twice!’ There came a click and the turret was lit from within. Zorin glanced back from the balcony to where his subordinate aimed his beam into his own face, making it look devilish.

  But overhead, where the beam played on ancient wooden beams and badly gapped heavy slate tiles … just darkness, no stars.

  Clouds? Zorin wondered. But a moment ago … he was sure he’d seen stars through the gaps in those tiles. And over the pass, the sky seemed clear.

  The sloping roof projected almost to the full extent of the balcony. Zorin leaned backwards, stood on booted tiptoes, aimed his torch-beam upwards along the slope of the roof … and saw something stir!

  It was as if the roof was furry, inches deep in moss or lichen, mobile as Zorin moved his beam across it — until he realized that it was mobile! Then he gave a gasp and reached for his machine-pistol, but far too late.

  Inverted on the roof - head-down, spreadeagled, inching forward like some sentient slug on a rock - Lord Wamus of the Wamphyri formed a deadly living blanket. But feeling the light of the corporal’s torch on him, he lifted his head, opened his scarlet eyes, and hissed right into Zorin’s face! No more than fifteen inches separated them, eye from eye.

  Zorin’s 2I/C had heard his corporal’s gasp and seen his hand snatch at the machine-gun’s strap across his shoulder. Now he saw something else - something unbelievable - that caused him to snarl his terror and grab with jelly fingers for his own gun: a pair of huge, flat, webbed hands with long, bony fingers and nails like fish hooks! Hands that reached out over the scalloped rim of the roof, grasped Zorin’s head and lifted him bodily from the turret! His wildly kicking legs slid from view; his choked-off cry came burbling from above … followed at once by his hurtling body, tossed into the gorge! And Corporal Zorin’s scream went on and on, ‘Oh-ah-aaaaah!’ all the way down, until he hit the bottom.

  Panting his terror, alone now in the turret, the private soldier used his gun to prod at a loose tile immediately overhead; it shifted and went sliding into space. And mercifully, the stars were visible again in the gap it left - or perhaps not so mercifully, for the darkness was closing in even now.

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  The light from the starlit gorge was being shut out as if someone slowly drew a curtain; the soldier held his breath and lowered his gaze towards the balcony . .. where Lord Wamus had come into view head-first, arms reaching, slithering like some rubbery jellyfish, flowing over the rim of the roof into the turret! Upside down, he gripped the scalloped rim with his great bat’s hands and unfurled himself to the floor. And for a single moment, a vampire Lord crouched there with his hunched, black-veined, bat-canopied back to the terrified soldier, who finally pointed his gun and made to squeeze the trigger.

  But a ragged, leathery arm and hand reached down through the hole left by the slate to snatch the weapon from his palsied hands. And up there, another face like Wamus’s was glaring down. Meanwhile, the vampire Lord himself had turned inwards.

  The soldier gazed into the nightmare’s furnace eyes, felt the steamy copper-tasting breath from its convoluted, flattened bat-snout and yawning red-ribbed cavern jaws, and tried to will his nerveless legs to turn him around and run … back into the core of the keep, down through its endless stone stairwells to the courtyard, out into the company of other men … or better still into another world, his own, where he knew he would wake up at last, for things like this only happened in bad dreams. Except, and exactly like a bad dream, his legs wouldn’t move, but felt nailed to the hewn rock floor.

  Wamus, however, suffered no such constraints. He moved — so swiftly and efficiently that the soldier never even saw the movement or knew what it signified . ..

  Down in the courtyard, booted feet were running; hoarse voices shouted; torch-beams swept the bed of the pass, north and south, and reached up to scour the canyon face, the looming facade of the keep, the sky itself. Automatic weapons made their definitive and very threatening ch-ching! sounds as they were readied for action.

  But against what? Where was the target? Where the enemy?

  All movement ceased; breathing stilled; silence reigned. A man lay dead, crushed to the courtyard’s bedrock, his blood and brains spattered outwards like a sticky halo round his head, or a painted peacock’s-tail design without its beauty, without its life. And in the higher watchtowers no slightest sign of movement or recognition of tragedy, and in the courtyard no one so much as noticing the lichen-like patterning on the sheer walls, or the sentient creep of certain surfaces.

  Then:

  Hurried movement in the interior of the keep; the clattering of more booted feet; Bruno Krasin and a handful of men appearing from the dark yawn of the entrance cavern, like ants from the jaws of a picked skull, pausing briefly to look about, then hurrying down the exterior steps. And a host of wide-eyed faces peering from the lower balconies and windows.

  ‘What?’ Krasin shouted as he pushed the prowler-guard out of his way and looked down on the corpse of Corporal Zorin. And again: ‘What?’

  ‘He fell,’ someone mumbled.

  ‘Or he was thrown!’ someone else choked out. ‘He screamed, but it was — I don’t know — the way he screamed! He was terrified, I guess, but not just of falling …’

  ‘Shut up!’ Staff-Sergeant Krasin rounded threateningly on the speaker, although he suspected he was right. And a moment later, turning his gaunt face up to the night, the platoon commander let loose with his bull voice: ‘Now hear me: we’re on intruder alert for the rest of the night, right through till dawn. If you want to live, do exactly as I tell you. If something moves and doesn’t answer your challenge, shoot it! No second warnings. Any doubt whatsoever, you shoot the bastard dead!’

  He aimed a powerful torch up the face of the keep. ‘You up there, in the upper towers and turrets: what the hell happened? You, Raikin.’ (Zorin’s 2I/C.) ‘How did the corporal fall?’ But there was no answer, and somehow Krasin hadn’t expected one.

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  The third vantage point from the top was simply a natural cave fronted by a rough stone wall. Access was via a precarious exterior staircase carved from the rock. Inside, at the back of the cave, there was also a steep, dark stairwell which in some other time must have connected up various parts of the keep; it was choked now and impassable. But pale in the glare of several torch-beams, a pair of anxious faces could be seen peering down at Krasin from behind the wall: a flame-thrower team, positioned there so as to offer maximum protection from aerial attack.

  ‘Well?’ Krasin yelled, adding his beam to the criss-cross pattern of moving light. ‘Did you see anything?’ Except, even as he shouted, Krasin himself saw something!

  Krasin’s eyes w
ere as keen as his memory. A true soldier, only show him a battle-zone and his mind would instantly, instinctively lock-on, every detail recorded. Earlier, he had committed the face of the keep to memory without even knowing he’d done it. But a moment ago, as his beam swept the naked rock to light on those faces behind the balcony, it had picked out, however briefly, a detail previously unseen. Ergo, a new detail: a large, raised, ragged patch of something that looked like moss or lichen, close to the observation cave with the balcony. And when he swept the beam back the other way to double-check —

  — Then he gasped and narrowed his eyes, hunched down and grabbed a rifle from one of his men. And: ‘All torch-beams on the area around that cave!’ he snapped. For he’d seen that the patch was closer still - and closing!

  Bruno Krasin was a marksman. On a count of three he got off three shots, all of them finding their target. The first bullet hit Wamus in the airfoil webbing between his left arm and side; passing through the soft membrane of the webbing, it splayed to a hot, rag-edged disc of metal against the rock. On the rebound it did more damage, tearing out a fist-sized chunk of furry but mainly unfeeling flesh. The second bullet slammed into Wamus’s thigh, splintering and lodging its fragments deep in alveolar bone. The third missed

  his spine by inches, punctured his right lung and passed right through him. It too ricocheted, and Wamus felt its burn against his right breast.

  What result Krasin had expected would be difficult to say; he couldn’t be sure what he was firing at, might even be making a fool of himself. It didn’t matter; he wasn’t about to take a chance on losing any more of his men. The bottom line was that their lives were his life. In any case, the result he got was astonishing.

  Wamus let out an ear-piercing screech that took over from the echoes of Krasin’s fusillade. His nightmare shape detached itself from the sheer rock face, kicked outwards, formed arched wings and glided for the balcony. His lashing tail acted like a rudder and seemed almost to propel him to his target; a taloned ‘hand’ closed over the head of one of the keep’s defenders; the man was dragged shrieking out across the balcony and dropped.

  Wamus sped out of the sweeping beams of light and was lost to sight; the dropped soldier crashed down sickeningly and his screaming ceased. Krasin was shouting: ‘Light up the keep, the entire face of the fucking place! We need to see what else is there! Anything that isn’t right, shoot the fucking thing!’

  And fifty yards away on the other side of the gorge, where it bottlenecked, Devetaki and Vormulac looked on, watching the action from behind fallen rocks at the top of a scree jumble. In the darkness with their Wamphyri eyes, they saw what Krasin and his men could not hope to see: the injured, enraged Wamus turning in a tight circle - then speeding back to avenge himself! And not only Lord Wamus, but one of his bloodsons, launching from a dark crevice, stooping like some weird bird of prey to the cave where his father had suffered hurt and indignity!

  But he was seen. Converging torch-beams picked him out as his wings arched and he hovered over the cave’s wall; automatic gunfire sounded; the surviving defender of the cave finally got his act together and lashed out with a

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  gouting, searing, thirty-foot blade of white and yellow fire which caught the bat-thing squarely and hurled it screaming out over the pass in a ball of scorched, frantically lashing limbs and blazing membrane.

  The volatile liquid stuck, burned, ate like acid into fur, skin and metamorphic flesh. The great bat uttered shriek after alien shriek as it flopped down the face of the cliff, leaving a trail of fluid fire wherever it made contact and driving back the shadows to the corners of the courtyard as it crashed down. But Krasin and his men weren’t about to leave it at that; forming a semicircle, they pumped round after round into the roasting, shrilling vampire, and only stopped when it stopped jerking and twitching. By which time Wamus was back.

  But bleeding copiously, made erratic by his pain and fury, Lord Wamus’s return was ill-conceived in the face of odds and weapons such as these. He appeared from the south, out of the darkness of the pass, and at once targeted a man on top of the courtyard wall, where he watched the spectacle of Wamus’s burning bloodson. The soldier sensed Wamus’s presence a moment too late. Horror fell out of the sky and folded him in, and before he could cry out, Wamus’s elongated jaws closed on the back of his neck and severed his spine. But even as the vampire Lord dropped his victim and relaunched, he was seen!

  Alert, a soldier in the courtyard cried a warning, elevated his automatic weapon, fired from the hip and loosed a stream of hot lead. Shuddering from a score of hits, Wamus was astonished to suddenly find himself weak, drained of energy! Defiant, intent upon scathing among his tormentors, he swooped towards them and was literally hurled back by the weight of lead they poured into him … which at once dragged him down! And with his membranous webbing collapsing to rags, he fell in a tangle.

  A flame-thrower team was now on hand; they stepped forward, one carrying a tank and the other operating the hose, and Wamus became an inferno! But he was a Lord, and the thing inside wasn’t going to capitulate that easily.

  Out of the fire and smoke, tapering skyward, a pale, pulsing tentacle of leprous flesh quivered and shuddered where it formed; another shot out sideways, knocked a man from his feet and dragged him screaming towards the blazing mass. But he was lucky; even as his combat-suit trousers smoked and licked into blue flames, the tentacle released him and his colleagues were able to haul him out of danger. By then, an entire nest of blue-grey appendages was lashing frantically in the roiling heat as the flame-thrower team continued to hose searing death on the melting thing that had been Wamus of the Wamphyri.

  Finally the hideous commotion stopped; the gouting chemical fire died to a flicker; black, stinking smoke, sparks and sooty scraps gushed up into the night, and the shadows began to creep again in the courtyard under the keep.

  But from within the keep:

  Muffled automatic fire .. . then screams … and a flash of hot white light behind a window-space, preceding the coughing detonation of a grenade that shattered part of the keep’s facade outwards in a shower of stone and rotten mortar!

  ‘Let’s have some light!’ Krasin roared, and his men again turned their electric torch-beams on the face of the keep.

  Up there, framed for a split-second in the eye-socket hole of a window, the awesome silhouette of Wamus’s second bloodson! The thing launched, plummeted like a stone, then released something that flailed and went ‘Ah-aah-aaah.” as it fell: a third soldier sent plunging to his doom.

  Krasin’s men crouched low, hurled lead into the sky, tried to anticipate the flight-path of the bat-thing where it swooped only inches overhead, then gained altitude as it headed for the wall of the keep close to the gates. They saw its red, swivelling eyes and heard its chittering laughter -its vaguely human, yet utterly inhuman laughter - as it sped for the darkness of the pass and safety …

  … And didn’t quite make it!

  Two figures - two entirely human figures - had entered through the keep gates. Down on one knee, one of them

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  aimed a rocket-launcher and, at point-blank range, squeezed the trigger. A lance of yellow light and a ball of white fire … the chittering laughter was drowned out in a deafening blast of sound greater than any gone before. Chunks of smoking meat and blazing membrane sprayed outwards, and all around a warm red rain spattered black on the ancient stone.

  After that:

  … It took a while for Bruno Krasin and his men to realize that it was over, but it would take the rest of the night for their nerves to stop jumping.

  As for their nightmares: they’d retain those for however long they had left…

  On the other side of the pass, unseen, a Lord and a Lady made flitting shadows among the darker shadows, where they returned to their flyers. The great grey, vacantly nodding beasts were waiting under an overhang, where a compacted scree-slope made an ideal
launch-site. But before going to her flyer, Devetaki searched for a moment among a scattering of loose stones near a jutting, weathered outcrop.

  What is it? Vormulac enquired. What are you looking for?

  In the moment before my captive was taken, he dropped his weapon here, she informed him. Then, stooping to pick something up: Ah! Good fortune at Jast! It’s still here! And quickly joining Vormulac - observing him through hooded eyes as he checked his flyer’s trappings — she gingerly hooked the machine-pistol to her flyer’s saddle. If only she were practised in the use of the thing … but that was a thought she dared not even think! Glancing again at Vormulac, she saw that she need not concern herself; the warrior-Lord was lost in thoughts of his own.

  As they mounted up and launched, he gloomily sent: Again, I am depleted. Three good men gone the way of all flesh, or most flesh, at least. His telepathic voice sounded very grim, a low mental rumble.

  Darkly, Devetaki returned: Did you say ‘good’? And ‘men’?

  But they weren’t that good, my Lord, as we’ve seen. And as for men … (He sensed her mental shrug.) Freaks, at best. But useful freaks: they tested those weapons for you, and you’ve seen with your own eyes the utter devastation they wreak.

  Huh.’ he grunted. And am I supposed to be reassured? Devastating? Is that how you describe that flame-hurler? Awesome is the only word for it! And if it were used on us?

  To which she slyly replied, Ah, but if it were used by us -against Wrathstack?

  Narrow-eyed, he glanced at her sideways where they lifted up out of the pass. Another of your schemes, Devetaki? Perhaps 1 rely too heavily upon your advice.