by Brian Lumley
What’s more, these were the folk that Lardis Lidesci and Kirk Lisescu were helping, and Lardis’s reputation in respect
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of vampires had been hard-earned. Still, it was a credit to the Old Lidesci’s powers of observation that in those weird moments as the stars commenced their march across the sky, and the horizon was suddenly aglow with a dawn all of six hours early, he had noticed something strange about one lone, lovely woman.
Then, as she’d made ‘casually’ away (for she too had seen what was happening, and knew that survival depended upon finding a deep, dark place to hide from a sun gone mad), Lardis had asked the young leader of the group: ‘Who is she?’ And his tone of voice had been such that the other had forgotten for a moment the miracle that was taking place, to blurt:
‘A stranger, a survivor. What does it matter? She’s a girl who’ll breed children to replace the many we’ve lost or given away … Aye, and a curse on our cowardly leaders for that!’
‘And she came to you as you see her now? Unmarked, clean, and in good clothes?’
‘Aye. What of it?’
At which Lardis’s eyes had narrowed, and he’d signalled to Kirk Lisescu. ‘Her bells make no sound!’
‘Bells? Decorations that make pretty noises? Man, we were supplicants; we wore no silver!’
‘But she does - except her bells don’t ring. Because they aren’t silver - they’re lead! Kirk!’ That last loudly, explosively, so that Ursula would hear him. She did, and knew that it was all up. The sun was rising in the night, and she was in the camp of the enemy. Then: the dark of Ursula’s eyes turning red! And a spontaneous eruption of dagger teeth, as the gape of her jaws yawned open to house them!
Kirk Lisescu had put three shots into her as she turned to run, but still she’d made it halfway up a hillside before the sun caught up with her. Aye, and a hell of an uproar then! For she had been a vampire for … oh, for a long time.
When most of the din was over, they’d tossed branches over what was left and torched the lot…
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It was much the same for Paxton, caught in the sun’s golden net halfway back to Starside, in a broad section of the great pass where sunlight never penetrated before. The same, but it could have been worse. For Paxton was a very recent convert, and it might have taken a lot longer.
At first he had felt the furnace heat on his back: the way his hair grew hot, the stretching and splitting of skin already torn from digging his way out of the collapsed cave, the sudden and rapid blistering of his ears and neck. Then, without thinking what he was doing - as if the seething golden stain crawling through the bed of the pass wasn’t evidence enough - he’d turned to see what was wrong.
A moment later … he’d been blind, and all the skin peeling from his eyeballs! Then his screaming and tottering to and fro, the heat of his body turning the space inside his clothes to a furnace, his flesh beginning to broil. But moving blindly in and out of shadowed areas, it might easily have lasted for hours … if he hadn’t got his ankle trapped between boulders and broken it, so that he flopped there in full sunlight. And that way it had been easy on him.
His unbearable agony put an end to him; by the time the sun moved on a little, the shadows found his clothing stuck to the rocks with black tar. Gluey hands, with some bones showing through, protruded from the frayed cuffs of his combat-suit…
In Wrathstack, Wratha had seen the sun come up so swift she’d known she was insane; which of course she was. Her crazed cackling was now at an end, however; her cage swung on high, almost empty, its silver-lattice floor dribbling a reeking oily substance into the abyss.
On the south face of the stack, scorch marks and a few puffs of smoke were all that remained of the Mangemanse siege, while the last scrap or two of bubbling, smouldering, devolving matter went spiralling down to the blood-soaked scree and rubble slopes. And yet - while still the sun rose up and its light cut deeper yet, searing all down the length
of the last aerie - the bone-song from Wrathstack’s dark side continued. For the dog-Lord Canker had witnessed a wonder, and knew that he, Canker Canison, was its author! The moon-priests were so afraid of him that the lunar orb itself had turned pale!
Canker’s throat was raw but his song was at an end; now he could fly to the moon to claim her for his own! Deaf and bleeding from his ears, Canker went stumbling to find the Lady Siggi and say a fond farewell, and tell her that soon he would return with all her silver sisters. And he knew where to find her. She was bringing on the hatchlings in the cave of spiders.
Normally Turkur Tzonov’s screams would have led Canker to Siggi at play, but he no longer heard them; stumbling and moaning, he heard’nothing but his bone-song, despite that he was not playing! And Siggi, poor Siggi .. . would she even know him? It seemed unlikely, for she had bathed in his light too long, and was no longer sensitive to mundane things. While Canker … he was too sensitive by far! And his head hurt, and his ears. And the singing, the singing! It seemed the stack itself was swaying, as if his playing had shaken the foundations or the great fang itself danced to the tune in Canker’s head.
And now the sun was fully up, standing higher in the sky than ever before, and its rays lit on all Starside. But Canker in the dark of his manse couldn’t know it, or that golden rays were even now eating into the very heart of rock that had known the horror of ages, the works and working of vampire Lords, the harrowing and hollowing of unhallowed hands. All the shocks the stack had taken: the centuries of tunnelling and endless whittling of Wamphyri inhabitants, explosive heat of fires and blast of alien bombs. And last, but by no means least, the thunder of the dog-Lord’s songs.
All it had needed was a push, albeit the push of a giant. The shifting of the earth, causing the stack to rock, and the Great Destroyer sun, burning out every last trace of evil vampire influence until the rock itself was calcined. And
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now the pull of a moon in a strange new orbit. It was all too much.
Wrathstack went down in rubble, rot and ruin, crumbling as it toppled, its various levels splitting apart and crashing down onto the the shuddering boulder plains, adding its terrible tonnage to all the tumuli of olden stacks gone before.
At last, there was no last aerie . ..
Earlier, in Turgosheim:
Spiro Killglance had left his second mount spreadeagled on the rim of the gorge, utterly exhausted from its flight, while he descended first into promontory Runemanse, looking for Maglore, then into Madmanse. But the aeries were empty; the gorge itself seemed devoid of life and even undeath; nothing stirred in that haunted old place.
Haunted, aye, by Spiro’s demented father, Eygor. Oh, how Spiro had feared that old devil upon a time, but no more. Now, indeed, he felt grateful! What? But he had inherited the cruel old bastard’s evil eye, and even the Seer-Lord Maglore was in hiding from him. Laughing, and hearing the echoes reverberate away and back (which changed the tone somehow, until the laughter hardly sounded like his at all), he went to the choked refuse pit where he and Wran had trapped their father after they had blinded him. He went there - and found the pit dug out!
And the silence of the place unnatural - breathless? -and nothing exactly the way Spiro remembered it, as suddenly what little light there had been began to dim. But how? There were no curtains at the windows in the perimeter rooms, and no one to draw them if there had been. And the stone floors rubbery under Spiro’s feet … and the walls and dripstone columns feeling damp, slimy, even sweaty to his touch. Like raw meat. But stone doesn’t beat like a great heart, or pulse and shudder when you touch it!
The light continued to dim. Spiro ran on trembling legs from room to unremembered room, breathing stale air that tasted … already breathed? Looking for the source of the
darkness, to discover who it was that slowly shut out the light, and how. He found a room with windows -
Which closed themselves one by one as he arrived! And yet no drapes had been drawn for
there were none. The holes in the solid rock walls had simply sealed themselves … because the walls weren’t of rock! And:
WELCOME HOME, BLOODSON, said Eygor, from all around him. FLESH OF MY FLESH - RETURNED AT LAST TO MY FLESH!
In answer to which: ‘No!’ said Spiro, drooling spittle on the floor, in the moment before the room which wasn’t a room in a manse that was only a manse on the outside closed on him to make him one with it…
And shortly:
Six hours of night left -and Eygor quicker, more fluid, elastic, than any creature before him. And hungry!
He was dead, undead, alive; he was an animal, an amalgam, an all-consuming organism. He was an animalgamism, and hungry! But Sunside meant blood, and the blood is the life!
A thing whose tendril extensions and frothing extrusions reached down into every crevice, spire and manse in Turgosheim, Eygor pulsed up through Runemanse on the rim and gushed like a lake of living lava onto the plateau that sloped to Sunside - where he flowed headlong into the searing gaze and golden rays of the sun. And where evil eyes were concerned, to Eygor Killglance especially, nothing could be more lethal than the burning yellow eye of that ultimate orb!
What happened then was lightning-fast - a total, instant katabolism, the dispersal of the Eygor-Thing into vile gases that mushroomed up in a cloud as if some mighty explosion had occurred, though that was not the case — a chain reaction of dissolution, going down into Turgosheim wherever Eygor’s tendrils reached, transforming them to slime, dust, finally the very elements of their constitution.
And Eygor, and indeed Turgosheim, were no more; just a
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barren gorge remained, where the shadows were driven back as the sun rose higher still…
At that same instant, but several thousands of miles away, as the rumble of Wrathstack’s fall subsided, the Necroscope and his party stood in an awesome silence at the Gate, where all around the landscape was dotted with smoking ashes. But after a while, the precog lan Goodly said, ‘Nathan. I… I’m sorry, I mean, I -‘
‘I know,’ Nathan nodded. ‘It’s soon now, right? “The end of my tether.’”
Goodly looked away, but Nathan only smiled. And his smile and his eyes were his own, for the awful Power within had gone with Eygor’s going, dissolved with the monster’s dissolution.
They carried the precog a safe distance from the Gate and Nathan conjured a door, and took them back to Settlement. There he called for Grinner and, as the wolf came loping, spoke to his friends. ‘If this fails,’ he said, ‘you know where the Gate is. And you still have time. But I won’t say goodbye, and don’t you say good luck! The first is premature and the last just doesn’t count. The future has it all worked out for me, one way or the other.’
Smiling again, at Goodly, he conjured another door .. .
Epilogue
In the Mobius Continuum, Grinner said:
Why, Uncle? Since we’ve done this before, is there any point?
I hope so, Nathan told him. You see, back there on Starside, at the Gate, I discovered something I really should have known before, except this time I had the ‘intuition’ to recognize it: the fact that there are many different types of doors. Thikkoul of the Thyre knew it a Jong time ago but without knowing that he knew it! He told me: ‘I see doors … but liquid, drawn on water, formed of ripples. And behind each one of them, a piece of your future . ..’ My doors are commonplace compared to others that exist, or that can be caused to exist.
Other doors exist? Grinner seemed surprised. Without that you make them?
That’s the whole point, Nathan answered. Some that exist, and others that are made. Of course, I’ve known for some time now that there were future- and past-time doors, and doors that I could conjure to get me into and out of the Mobius Continuum. But I’d never thought to make a door here, within the Continuum itself! You see, the Continuum is like a large manse, with many rooms I’ve never visited. Perhaps I’m not supposed to, for I’ve only been shown one of those rooms - two, if you include Sunside/Starside.
I… don’t understand, said Grinner.
But you will. Your father knew those doors, and so do you; you sniff them out. Except you don’t understand them! You’re a wolf of the wild, who understands trails and tracks and spoor. You understand … directions!
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Ahh! said Grinner. My father’s world - and yours, Uncle.
Exactly. Nathan nodded. You showed me the way before, but there was no trail /or you to follow. I had not made one! Now, if you show me it again, I’ll remember it always as one of my co-ordinates.
But it’s there. It’s right there! Grinner told him, pointing the way.
Without pause Nathan made his door, and as it opened felt a warm sweet wind rush out of it to ruffle his hair . .. one of the many winds of Earth! Then, as he stepped through the door with Grinner, he thought: ‘The end of my tether - in the parallel dimension of Sunside/Starside at least. But if lan Goodly and I had gone on awhile, then we would have come to where it starts again!’
And on the other side of the door:
He knew where he was at once; a place he’d found magical, which now he had found again, but in a magical manner: a sunlit hillside overlooking Zek’s house at Porto Zoro on the island of Zante in the Mediterranean. Standing in the shade of a gnarled old pine, the Necroscope breathed deeply of resin-laden air and gazed out across the incredibly blue Ionian. But as for Grinner … he sat down abruptly on his rump and whined. For all of his directions were gone now, and he was the stranger in a strange far land.
‘It’s all right,’ Nathan told him, stroking a flattened, trembling ear. ‘We won’t be here long.’
Just long enough to talk to Gustav Turchin …
And six months later, Earth-time:
It was night-time, and again they stood by the Starside Gate, except now they must find a new name for the land north of the barrier mountains, and perhaps even a new name for the barrier mountains! Now they were only a barrier in the sense that they obstructed eager Travellers, holding them back from a rapidly developing territory and a land free of vampires.
In the far east and west (at least as far as men had yet to
journey) the vampire swamps were drying out, cracking open in their beds, cleansed by the sun. And in all the length and breadth of the vampire world, no vampires existed - at least, so far as men knew. But that was not to say that men wouldn’t keep watching. Not while Lardis Lidesci lived, anyway!
Nor was the transformation confined to the swamps; water released from the Icelands, drifting in clouds on high, bringing great rains to the scrubland savannas and lesser precipitation even to the deserts, had already turned the land green as far as most of the Thyre colonies. All of which processes of an altered Nature, and others, would go on for a long time yet.
So things were very different, not least at the place where the adventurers were gathered together: the Hell-lands Gate, on Starside. Scarcely a gate to hell now, and no longer a Gate in any sense; or a one-way Gate at best, of sorts, and utterly impassable to man or beast … or vampire! No longer a Gate, no, but a lake; and all the stars of night mirrored in its shining, whirling surface, whose waters formed small whirlpools that went down through the magmass wormholes to the subterranean Gate, and on into another world. As the Necroscope had pointed out: an unending cycle, protecting the privacy and integrity of two worlds, but depriving neither. A closed circuit, much like the Mobius strip itself. For the waters would return, of course, from the great dam in Perchorsk, whose torrent had been diverted into the now abandoned Projekt by Premier Gustav Turchin!
A fountain of light, reaching up a hundred feet into the Starside night, illuminated by the Gate at its core, and raining its soft white waters on the land and into the lake! Of all the wonders in the vampire world, surely this was the greatest of all?
Nathan thought so, certainly, where he crushed his Misha so tightly she held her breath; and Lardis, Trask, Zek, Goodly
, Chung, Kirk, Grinner and Blaze. And especially Andrei. but the greatest wonder to Andrei was not the lake
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itself but the firm-bodied woman who laughed and danced and pirouetted, there where wavelets lapped a once-dust-bowl shore —
- A woman far younger than her years, whose name was Anna Marie!
Table of Contents
PART ONE
PART FOUR
PART FIVE
PART SIX
PART EIGHT
