Bloodwars

by Brian Lumley

  Disappointed (and aware that he was exposed on the naked face of Wrathstack), the Necroscope crouched down and hurried along the ledge, which was precarious in places where it narrowed or sloped towards the sighing gulf of air. Forty paces took him to a second gas vent, likewise innocent of sounds or smells. Here the ledge tapered out, and he must clamber down onto a flexible walkway of cartilage.

  Vertigo did not concern him; he knew that even if he fell, it would be through a door into the Mobius Continuum. But still he proceeded cautiously to the third circular shaft … where the night air shimmered with expelled methane, and the reek of a gas-beast was all too evident! From within, soft sighing sounds.

  Nathan fingered the grenades in his pockets and was tempted, but knew now that his original plan wouldn’t work. He had wanted to emulate his father, Harry Keogh, and cause a devastating simultaneous or chain-reactive explosion that would bring down the stack in its entirety. But Wrathstack wasn’t right for it. Even if all the gas-beast chambers had been occupied, still the sheer girth of the stack would have protected it. The outer caverns would be blown away, most certainly, but ninety per cent of the stem would be left intact. For it had been more than any merely explosive force that the original Necroscope had used; it had been the almost nuclear power of the furnace sun itself, which had instantly eaten into the rock of the many fallen aeries, like some vengeful, cleansing acid! And so … it seemed a lesser plan was now in order. Any action was better than none.

  Beyond the occupied gas-beast chamber, the cartilage catwalk spanned the mouth of a landing-bay camouflaged with hanging nets of woven rope. Nathan felt sure that even this close to sunup there were bound to be watchers just inside. He made a Mobius-jump across the gap, which set the catwalk swaying a little on the other side as it took his sudden weight. Balancing himself, without further pause he went on to the next vent. This chamber was also occupied, which decided Nathan upon his course of action:

  Grenades into each of the two ‘loaded’ chambers, and two more into the landing-bay itself. Anyone within the bay would see him in the moment that he tossed his grenades … and then they wouldn’t see him. If there were survivors, let them worry about that! If there were none, so much the better; still, the rest of Wrathstack’s monstrous inhabitants

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  would be inconvenienced, and more than a little concerned over what had happened here. The unfortunate but mainly insensitive gas-beasts would surely be destroyed and their chambers reduced to rubble. With a bit of luck, the landing-bay itself would suffer damage and even destruction.

  Nathan knew the co-ordinates of the first occupied chamber and the landing-bay, and he had been here long enough. But first:

  A quick probe in Zek’s direction … Is all well?

  Yes. And almost immediately, with a thrill of horror: No! Look!

  He read it in her mind, knew where to look - then saw it for himself:

  Coming out from behind Wrathstack - at his own level but some three-quarters of a kilometre away - a fantastic sight! A gas-beast, swollen with its own gases, puffed up and grotesque. A living balloon in tow behind a pair of lieutenants mounted on straining flyers, their necks outstretched with effort! While in the Necroscope’s mind Zek shouted: And behind you! He looked the other way, to where a second beast was now hauled into view from behind the eastern flank of the stack.

  For an anxious moment, Nathan thought that the appearance of these creatures must have to do with his presence here, but in the next moment he knew it wasn’t so. It was just a coincidence. And as his nerves settled down again, he shrank back into a crevice in the aerie’s wall and remembered those mysterious explosions he’d heard out on the boulder plains. Now he knew, or strongly suspected, what they had been.

  He had likened the floating gas-beasts to weird balloons; in fact they were bombs! And his mind went back to the stories Lardis used to tell: of the battle at The Dweller’s garden when the Wamphyri had used just such tactics against Harry and The Dweller. Now, peering from his hiding place, Nathan could see the payloads at the end of long taut lines, where they hung from the flyers’ saddles:

  bundles of hooks weighted with large stones. Flintstones, the Necroscope was sure. And pictured on the screen of his mind, the rest of it was clear:

  The beast would be towed to its target, then cut free to drift lower. As it descended, the flyer would sweep overhead, raking the living bomb with razor-sharp hooks! The clatter and clash of metal and flints against metamorphic flesh; a tearing of bloated leather and simultaneous striking of sparks; the sudden hiss of pressured gases! Then, the deafening, searing blast and outrageous rush of heat and stench!

  The picture faded in Nathan’s mind, but not before it had reminded him of why he was here. The flyers, riders and their grotesque cargoes were heading south; one a little to the west of south, the other a little to the east. Their target destination: Vormulac’s (now Devetaki’s) observation posts, of course. It explained why so many methane chambers were empty. And soon two more would be empty, if they existed at all!

  He took a grenade, twisted the fins, listened to the ominous ticking start and without pause hurled the deadly egg right into the vent. Then, without waiting, a Mobius-jump … back to the first occupied vent. And the second grenade was on its way into the stack. Another jump … to a spot central on the cartilage catwalk in front of the camouflaged landing-bay; two more grenades armed and lobbed, one after the other, through the mesh of the hanging nets just inside the mouth of the bay.

  There was movement in there, and Nathan opened his mind to let in the startled thoughts of those who guarded the way. Astonishment! Shock! Outrage! BJoodJust! - Fear? Yes, because, for all these thralls knew, Nathan might be only the first of a huge invading task-force, which had somehow managed to creep up on them unseen. But of course he couldn’t stay here.

  He backflipped from the catwalk into empty air, flattened his body, conjured a door and hurtled through it … found his co-ordinates and stepped back into normal space, where

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  Zek and Trask were waiting. And: ‘Watch!’ he breathed. Which was about as much as he had time for.

  Four bright flashes lit the south-facing wall of the last aerie, a third of the way up. From the explosions on the flanks came stabbing gouts of fire, secondary flashes, hurtling chunks of rock and clouds of smoke and rubble. Centrally, twin bursts of light and fire shook down an avalanche of loose debris from above and both sides of the landing-bay; fragile walkways went plummeting; fractured slabs of rock teetered outwards, falling in a deceptive, distance-wrought slow-motion into space.

  Then came the cracks! of the detonations, sharp as knives in the silence, echoing out over Starside to the barrier mountains and back again. And the rubble blasted out or shaken free of the stack was still falling, bringing down a tangle of flying buttresses from lower levels, more walkways, various ramps and man-made staging areas, all going down in a mighty roiling of dust and a rumble like thunder onto the scree slopes at the foot of the stack.

  It went on for a long time . ..

  When it was over, the landing-bay was a gaping hole twice what it had been; the ruptured vents on both sides were black, and issued twin columns of smoke; one-sixth part of the south-facing wall had been wiped clean of all artificiality. Natural rock remained, showing a uniform grey among a variety of dull ochres, greens, blacks and yellows. It served to show how the outer sheath of that great fang had been changed and festooned by its vampire tenants over the long centuries of their habitation. Likewise its interior: carved, hollowed and whittled out like an old branch full of earwigs. A rotten old branch, yes. And Nathan found himself thinking yet again: If old Dimi Petrescu’s powder - common gunpowder, in copious amounts — could sink Sanctuary Rock, and if I knew exactly where to locate it in Wrathstack for maximum effect.. .

  But his thoughts were suddenly interrupted as Trask said, ‘Maybe we can capitalize on the situation.’ He was
>
  armed with a self-loading rifle and sniperscope, which he aimed into the sky at some twenty degrees. Without looking, Nathan knew what Trask’s target would be. Reaching up, he pulled the barrel of the gun out of alignment.

  ‘No,’ he said, glancing at the triangle of flyers and gas-beast maybe a mile away, and drawing closer by the moment. ‘Let them go. It suits our purpose to let them reach their destination. They’re on their way to bomb Devetaki’s observers, probably a suicide mission. I’m not against these monsters killing each other, and anyway it saves ammunition!’

  Trask nodded, however reluctantly, and said, ‘As you will. So what’s next?’

  ‘I’m … tired,’ said Nathan, and Trask saw it in his face. It was going to take a long time for the Necroscope’s system to catch up on all the energy he’d expended; one or two days, even Sunside days, wouldn’t do it. ‘I want to get some sleep,’ Nathan went on. ‘Normal undisturbed sleep, with my wife in my arms and nothing to think about or worry over. I need — oh, I don’t know - eight hours at least. After that, sunup will be so close that we can guarantee the vampires will be at their lowest ebb. That’s when we’ll hit them again.’

  And with that they returned to the camp of the Lidescis …

  Apart from the night watch, the camp at the edge of the savanna slept. But in the last aerie - despite that a perhaps imagined stain of light was already washing the southern horizon, lying like a luminous mist between the peaks -Wratha and the vampire Lords were still awake. Time enough for sleeping when the peaks themselves turned from wolf-grey to gold, but for now there was much to occupy them … or to occupy their evil minds at least.

  Wratha was on the roof of Wrathspire. Attended by a small, personal warrior - a bodyguard which kept itself mainly to the shadows — she paced to and fro, wandering aimlessly in and out of the battlements, towers and turrets, pausing now and then to gaze south and wonder what the

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  army out of Turgosheim was up to now, and what its next move would be. But quite apart from the constant nagging worry of the bloodwar - the fact that Wrathstack was under siege, and not only that but actually coming under a form of attack, if the inexplicable explosions in Madmanse were anything to go by - there were other, more personal matters to concern her. For her vampire instinct told her that all was not well with Wratha herself. Except .. . she knew that it was more than mere instinct.

  Beside a semicircular stone structure on the south-facing rim of the sloping plateau, where an ironwood gantry and hoist stood to one side, its dangling chains clanking in a breeze off the Icelands, she paused at a door to peer inside. In there, a grim reminder of the history of this place:

  A massive cage of deadly silver, all tarnished and dark-stained. Its bars were an inch thick, welded, reinforced with iron; the effort of some Szgany metalworker long gone into air or earth … or the belly of a beast, or the vats of its Wamphyri master. How many enemies or victims, Wratha wondered, had some ages-forgotten Lord locked in that cage, hoisted on high, and swung out over the rim of the stack to await the dawn? It had been Vormulac Taintspore’s wont in the past to do much the same thing. And in the future?

  But she must not dwell on such things, and so put it aside … for now. What had been had been, and no man -or woman - knew the future. The present had surprises enough! And terrors, too. Terror, in the black heart of a vampire. It seemed strange to Wratha, wrong somehow, that she should feel afraid. But not of men, not of the army out of Turgosheim, not of anything outside her own body. Afraid of something within it…

  Wratha bathed frequently. And recently, ever-increas-ingly. It wasn’t that she was unclean, (how could she be when she was so scrupulous?) but that she felt unclean. And all because of a blemish or two … or three. Persistent blemishes that her vampire leech couldn’t shift, that her

  metamorphic flesh couldn’t deal with. Let her will the … the marks away, and they would be back in a matter of hours. Let her scrub the silvery scales from her forearms and calves until her flesh was red under the clean pink of a young girl, and they would return just as soon as Wratha’s leech repaired her skin. Yes, she could scrub till her flesh was numb .. . except it was growing hard to tell when it wasn’t numb, in those certain areas. Under her left breast, the fingers of her right hand, her right thigh where it curved into a once-smooth buttock . ..

  And all of this dating from a time, the start of it all, just four sunups ago. But her forearms . .. the Lady Wratha had prided herself on her young girl’s arms! And now she wore pale cream gloves to her elbows: thin leather trogskin, peeled from living arms, softened and bleached in urine, and scented with oil of roses. It was infuriating, and it was worrying. So that on occasion Wratha had wondered if … but that was impossible. She’d had no contact with … there had been no sign of infection in … in all Wrathstack.

  Nestor.

  She put the thought aside like so many others. A niggling doubt, that was all. If only he wouldn’t wrap himself up so. It was his art, she knew. Nestor talked to the dead, and imitated their cerements . ..

  But the original thought would not stay put aside:

  He, too, hid his flesh.

  But she had seen his body … his beautiful body. She had even loved it, frequently. She had rubbed his liquids into her skin, sipped them from his jerking shaft. But ‘love’ had died, as all things (except vampire things) must; finally she’d stopped seeing him, shortly after his brief ‘sojourn’ in Sunside …

  No, he had stopped seeing her! But why had he stopped seeing her, when his Just had been such a fire in him?

  He had sensed her dwindling desire for him, that was it.

  Except it had not dwindled, until recently.

  The bloodwar had intervened.

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  That, too, was a recent thing.

  It was the nature of vampires, to love and leave!

  And was it also the dog-Lord’s ‘nature’, to build a wall of stone between himself and his once-great ‘friend’? Never a word of explanation out of Canker, who now went about his business with such a hangdog expression. And in Suck-scar, all of Nestor’s thralls creeping like ghouls, the general air of infirmity about the place, the sense of descending doom…

  ‘My Lady!’ Wratha gave a massive start, and spun, cursing, on her heel. It was a thrall come up out of Wrathspire to find her. His eyes were full of some strange terror, but not of his mistress.

  And he brought a message from Gorvi the Guile.

  Following which, Wratha’s eyes were filled with the same dark dread .. .

  The Lords and Lady flew down into Guilesump. All were there except Nestor who (according to his man Zahar) had retired to bed early, leaving instructions that he was not to be disturbed. The Lady Siggi was likewise missing, but her absence was excusable. Siggi had not as yet ascended in the fullest sense of the word; as the dog-Lord’s mistress, her role was in any case secondary; her conversation was limited and not entirely . .. well, sensible. Also, she was grown very beautiful - no, extremely beautiful - so that Wratha didn’t want her there anyway.

  Wratha, the dog-Lord, Wran the Rage and Spiro Killglance were met by one of Gorvi’s lieutenants just inside a landing-bay in Guilesump’s central level, a hundred and fifty feet over the sloping scree jumbles. Debris from the Madmanse explosions was still being cleared from the entrance; flanking platforms and stanchions were no longer in evidence; other external fixtures sagged and looked ready to tumble into space at any moment.

  As yellow-eyed thralls manoeuvred their flyers aside and tethered them, Gorvi’s man took the four callers to his

  master in an open-roofed annexe to one side of the landing-bay, where the Guile stood well back and watched others of his men burning corpses. The stinking black smoke went up, roiling under a domed ceiling, until it was sucked out around a tangle of wreckage into the night.

  ‘Huh!’ said the gaunt-visaged Gorvi as he turned and saw his visitors. ‘This is wher
e I boil up lead, water, piss and fats with which to repel invaders.’ He waved a skeletal hand at a row of fire-blackened cauldrons lining a wall, then indicated the roof. ‘Once there was a crack in the ceiling, a natural chimney … now a gash, and dangerous! Why, all that scrap scaffolding up there could fall in at any time!’ The poisonous glance he cast at the Killglance brothers said it all: that in his opinion, they should bear the blame for what had happened to the methane chambers. It was the Guile’s way of distracting from his own possible negligence.

  ‘Not only an oily bastard but a cheeky one!’ Wran snapped. And Spiro glared through eyes which were now thoroughly dissimilar. Canker seemed subdued, however, and Wratha even more so, when she said: Those burning bodies. Your message said there was a dead leper in the wells: one dead leper. But I see three corpses.’

  Gorvi shrugged. ‘Just the one leper, aye .. . but it took a pair of clean thralls to carry him up here. Or should I say once-clean? What? Should I let them infect the entire stack?’

  ‘Idiot!’ Wran shouted. ‘What difference does it make how many thralls you burn now? The stack’s water is infected, and that means the whole damned aerie! Wrathstack in its entirety is infected!’

  To hell with Wrathstack! Wratha thought numbly, but kept the thought well-guarded. Wratha herself is infected! Nestor, too. Indeed, Nestor was the first. Yet … how can it be? And out loud, frowningly;

  ‘Gorvi, how frequently do you inspect the wells?’

  ‘A prowler-guard looks in on the wells every two to three hours,’ he answered breathlessly. ‘Normally, I’d have a man

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