by Brian Lumley
It was a fact, all too hideously reinforced by the alien stench of warrior exhaust gases, the rubble in which he lay sprawled, the distant screams of the dead and the dying, and other sounds which could only translate as inhuman.. laughter? Unless all of these elements were figments of his imagination, and Nathan himself a raving madman, it could only add up to one thing: the Wamphyri were back! And they were here even now, in Settlement!
Which prompted other questions: how long had he been unconscious? Minutes, he suspected, a handful at most. And what of Misha, and his mother… and Nestor?
Nathan dragged himself upright, clambered shakily out of the debris of the barn — and back into it at once! For out there, maybe fifty yards towards the town centre, he'd seen the incredible bulk of a warrior hurl itself against a barter house and reduce it to so much rubble. And overhead, a huge, kite-shaped flying thing had arched its wings as it came down like some weird leaf into the main street.
Someone moaned in the litter of timber and straw at Nathan's feet: Misha!
He tore at the rubbish, hurling it aside, and stared down at Nestor's face, all bruised and bloodied. He was stretched our flat, unconscious, three-quarters buried; but it was his moan Nathan had heard, not Misha's. And even as he looked at him, so Nestor moaned again. But there in the rubble beside him… a slender white arm. And this time it must be Misha!
Trying not to bury Nestor deeper yet, Nathan dug her out. He slapped her face, gathered her up in his arms, whispered her name urgently in her ear. She was wan, dusty, pale in the starlight falling through wispy smoke and gut-wrenching stench. He couldn't tell if she was breathing or not.
In the near-distance, the Wamphyri warrior roared as it moved inwards towards the town centre. Nathan looked around. The stockade fence was buckled outwards behind what had been his mother's house. There was a gap there, where the great wooden uprights had been wrenched apart. And beyond the gap, the dark forest. The darkness had never seemed so welcoming.
Nathan saw how it must be, what he must do: first carry Misha to safety, then search for his mother, who was probably buried in the ruins of the house, finally come back one last time for Nestor.
He picked Misha up and staggered from the ruins towards the break in the stockade fence. But half-way there he heard a panting and a patter of feet and looked back. A great wolf-shape — obviously one of Settlement's trained animals — had come from the direction of the main street and seemed to be making straight for him, seeking human company. All very well, but Nathan would have problems enough saving the girl he loved and his family, without having to worry about…
Nathan's eyes went wide, wider. The 'wolf seemed to be enveloped in a drifting cloud of mist, and one of its forepaws was bulky with something that made a dull glitter. More biped than quadruped — loping towards him at an aggressive, forward-leaning angle — it only went to all fours in order to sniff the earth and turn its great ears this way and that, listening. Worse: its eyes were scarlet and glowed like lamps in the dark, and to cover its hindquarters it wore belted leather trousers!
And now Nathan saw that it wasn't coming through the mist, but that the mist was issuing from it!
He had heard all the campfire stories of the old Wamphyri — their powers, hybridisms, animalisms — and knew what he was facing. And of course knew that he was a dead man.
Canker Canison came loping, reared up snarling, as tall and taller than Nathan…!
Nathan tried one last time to stand Misha on her own two feet and shake her awake, to no avail. He held up a hand, uselessly, to ward the dog-, fox-, wolf-thing off. Canker came to a halt and leaned forward. He sniffed at Nathan, then at the girl in his arms, and cocked his head on one side, questioningly. And: 'Yours?' he growled.
Nathan held Misha back from the monster; Canker laughed, caught him by the scruff of the neck and hurled him brutally aside, against the stockade wall. Unsupported, Misha crumpled to her knees. Canker caught her up, sniffed at her again, and snatched her rags of clothing from her in a moment.
And as Nathan slumped to a heap in the long grasses at the base of the damaged wall — even as his eyes glazed over and he passed out — he was aware of Canker's eyes on him and his writhing muzzle, and the spray of foam coughing from his jaws as he laughed again and said: 'No, not yours — mine!'
What he did not see or hear, because he was already unconscious, was the scream of a terrified woman running through the streets: the way Canker let Misha fall to go chasing after her, and his grunted philosophy:
'Better a live one than one half-dead.' And his half-bark, half-shout — 'Wait my pretty, for Canker's coming!'
— as he plunged after his doomed, demented victim…
The pain and the anger…
And not only inside, but outside, too.
It was an hour later and Nestor's turn to come awake
— slowly at first, then with a sickening rush! And like Nathan before him, he too woke up from a dream to a nightmare. Except where Nathan had remembered everything, Nestor remembered very little: a handful of scattered, uncertain fragments of what had gone before. Mainly he remembered the pain and the anger, both of which were still present, though whether they sprang from dream or reality or both, he was unable to say.
Three-quarters buried in rubble, dust, straw, his body was one huge ache. His face was a mess and some of his teeth were loose; at the back of his head, above his right ear, an area of his skull felt soft, crushed. When he put up a tentative, trembling exploratory hand through the debris to touch it, agonizing lances of white light shot off into his brain. Something shifted and grated under his probing: the fractured bone of his skull, indenting a little from the pressure of his fingers.
He asked himself the same question that his brother had asked: what had happened? But unlike Nathan, he had no answer. Not yet.
He pushed at wooden boards pressing down on him, shoved them aside, choked as dust and stench fell on him from above. But framed in the gap he could see the stars up there, drifting smoke, and strange dark diamond shapes that soared in the sky. And he could hear a throbbing, sputtering rumble, fading into the distance.
Yes, and other sounds: faint, far cries… moaning… sobbing… someone shouting a name over and over again, desperately and yet without hope.
Nestor kicked at the rubble, extricated his arms, dragged himself into a seated position and shoved the clutter from his legs. He looked around, at first without seeing or recognizing anything; there was nothing here that his glazed eyes and stunned mind were prepared to take in. No, there was something: the tall stockade fence, which for a moment focused his attention. But even that was different, gapped in places and leaning outwards a little.
He stood up, staggered, stepped from the debris. Whatever had happened here, his clothing seemed to have been ripped half from him! Automatically, fumblingly — like a man flicking dust from his cuffs after a hard fall — he made adjustments to his trousers, his leather shirt. And slowly, reeling a little, he headed for the town centre, away from the rubble of his mother's house.
His mother's house?
Now where had that thought come from? And turning to look back at the freshly made chaos — at the black, jutting, splintered timbers and smoking mounds of debris, under a dark shroud of still settling dust — he slowly shook his head. No, for his mother's house had been a warm and welcoming place. Hadn't it?
Along the way, voices continued to cry out from shattered buildings; people stumbled like ghosts here and there, calling for help, or for lost families; flames gouted up where hearth fires turned ruined homes to funeral pyres. There was nothing Nestor could do about any of this, for there were far too many people in need of help. And anyway he needed help himself.
He began to remember names and fractured, jumbled fragments of conversation: Jason, Misha, Nathan, Lardis, Andrei… Nestor?
Jason: 'What will you do?'
Nestor, growling: 'It's Misha's choice. With or without her, I'll go. But be sure I'll be
back one day.'
Misha, afraid: 'Because… because he needed someone! And I was the only one who cared. But Nestor… why are you doing this?'
Nestor, determinedly: 'When your father and brothers learn what's happened, then they'll kill me!'
Misha, astonished: 'No, they may not, for you are the Lord Nestor!'
Nestor: 'Of course! And I fear no man, for I am Wamphyri!'
Nathan: (But here there was nothing, no words at all but a cataract of numbers foaming down the falls of Nestor's mind and forming endless, meaningless patterns there, one of which was a weird figure-of-eight symbol like a discarded apple rind or wood-shaving lying on its side. And rising over the rush and swirl of numbers, a distant, dismal howling of wolves. And superimposed over all these things a haunted, haunting face, all sad and lonely and… accusing?)
Lardis: This is where the powers of the hell-lands and those of the Wamphyri clashed and cancelled each other out.'
Andrei: 'But they're gone now, reduced to dust and ghosts, and we should let them lie.'
Nestor, in anger: 'What, ghosts? The Wamphyri? Never.' For I am the Lord Nestor!'
The voices came and went in Nestor's head: voices out of the past, the present, the imagination. Voices from child-reality, adult-reality, and unreality alike, all seeking the stability of a central focus, revolving together in the grand free-for-all of his trauma. True memories merged into pseudo-memories as his past life faded away and devolved to a single, self-repeating phrase, I am Nestor of the Wamphyri! Until it seemed certain that the present, surreal and incoherent as a dream, could only be a dream, given substance by the subconscious will of its creator. And Nestor felt relieved to know that he was only dreaming.
In the near-distance, amid smoky, flame-shot ruins close to Settlement's east wall, a last lone flyer flopped up hugely on to a pile of rubble and craned its swaying head towards the sky. Pausing to watch, Nestor was vaguely aware of a rider in the saddle where the creature's neck widened into its back. But in another moment the flyer had thrust itself forward and aloft on powerful coiled-spring launching members, and rising up from the ruins it banked in a wide circle over the town and rapidly gained height. Feeling its shadow on him as it passed overhead, Nestor gaped at its massive diamond shape flowing black against the stars, and wondered at its meaning.
Then, slack-jawed, with his head tilted back at an angle and his half-vacant eyes still fixed on the alien shape in the sky, he continued his shambling walk through the reeking smoke and scattered rubble; until his path was obstructed and he felt something splash wet and warm against his torn trousers.
Sprawled at his feet, he saw the shattered body of a man whose face had been flensed from the bone. A dark red fountain was spurting in bursts from his savaged throat; but even as Nestor considered the meaning of this, so the crimson fountain grew spasmodic, lost height and gurgled out of existence. And with it the man's life.
But it had been only one life, and this was only one body among many. Looking around, Nestor could see plenty of others, almost all of them lying very still.
And so he came to the old meeting place, that great open space which stood off-centre in Settlement, a little closer to the east wall than the west, and there discovered life in the midst of all this death. But not immediately.
First: The East Gate was burning. Yellow and orange flames were leaping high over the stockade wall, where the gate seemed to have been set on fire deliberately. The wide path from the gate to the gathering place was strewn with bodies; Nestor dimly recalled, however, that there had been a crowd here. Well, while the corpses were a great many, still they would not have made a crowd. So some had escaped, anyway. But from what?
Wamphyri! said a voice in the back of his mind.
But another said: Impossible, for they are no more!
And a third, his own, insisted: But I am the Lord Nestor!
The smoke was clearing now and the vampire-spawned mist evaporating, sinking into the earth. People were starting to come out of hiding, stumbling among the dead, crying out and tearing their hair as they discovered dead friends, lovers, relatives. Central in the open space, where tables lay overturned and the ground was strewn with the spoiled makings of a feast, a young man, Nestor's senior by five or six years, stood over the body of his girl and tore his shirt open, beat his breast, screamed his agony. She had been stripped naked, torn, ravaged, brutalized.
Stepping closer, Nestor stared at the man and believed he knew him… from somewhere. And a frown creased his forehead as he wondered how it was he knew so much yet understood so little. Then he saw the rise and fall of the girl's bruised breasts and noticed a slight movement of her hand. And as her head lolled in Nestor's direction, he saw a strange wan smile upon her sleeping or unconscious face.
He moved closer still, touched the sobbing man on the arm and said, 'She isn't dead."
Wild-eyed, the other turned on him, grabbed him up with a furious strength, shook him like a rag doll. 'Of course she's not dead, you fool — you bloody fool! She's worse than dead!' He thrust Nestor away and fell to his knees beside the girl.
Nestor stood there — still frowning, still mazed — and repeated the other's words: 'Worse than dead?'
The man looked up, peered at him through red-rimmed eyes, and finally nodded. 'Ah, I know you now, Nestor Kiklu, covered in dirt. But you're one of the lucky ones, born at the end of it. You're too young to know; you don't remember how it was, and so can't see how it must be again. But I do remember, and only too well! I was only six years old when the Wamphyri raided on Sanctuary Rock. Afterwards, I saw my father drive a stake through my mother's heart, watched him cut off her head, and burn her on a fire. That's how it was then and… and how it must be now.' He hung his head and fell sobbing on the girl, covering her nakedness.
There were more men in the open space now, a handful, but these were different, older, harder men. They had grown hard in their young days, spent in the shadow of the Wamphyri, and were now filled with some grim purpose. Nestor seemed instinctively to know these things, and felt he should know the men, too, but their names wouldn't come. They were hurrying towards the east wall, where colleagues on the high wooden catwalk beckoned to them, urging them on.
Nestor followed in their wake, but more slowly, and tried to understand what one of the men on the catwalk was shouting to them. In the still night air — with only the dazed, bewildered, trembling voices of other survivors, and the whoosh and crackle of the fires to compete with — his words carried over the open area loud and clear. And for all that they were hard words, still there was a catch and even a sob in his familiar voice:
'Too late now, you dullards!' he cried. 'Didn't I try to warn you? You know I did. What? And you took me for a madman! And now… now I think I am a madman! But all those years of building, of being prepared, gone up in smoke, gone for nothing. And all this good Szgany blood, spilled and wasted, and unavenged…'
And at last Nestor remembered him: Lardis Lidesci, whom even the Wamphyri had respected, upon a time. And beside him on the catwalk, Andrei Romani; between them they'd wound back the loading gear of a giant crossbow, and manhandled a great ironwood bolt with a barbed, silver-tipped harpoon into its groove on the massive tiller. Men's work for sure, but they were men.
So were the others on the ground, whose names now sprang into Nestor's mind: They were Andrei Romani's brothers, Ion and Franci, and the small wiry one was the hunter of wild boars, called Kirk Lisescu. Together with Lardis, these men had been legendary fighters in the days when the Wamphyri came a-hunting on Sunside and the Szgany dwelled in terror; even now Kirk Lisescu carried a weapon from those times, a 'shotgun' out of another world. But Nestor knew that except in dreams all such things were over and done with long ago.
Weren't they?
While he puzzled at it, the men had moved on towards the east wall. But up on the catwalk Lardis was shouting again and pointing at the sky — over Nestor! And now, shutting out the stars, a shadow fell on h
im.
He looked up, at the lone flyer where it sideslipped to and fro, deliberately stalling itself and losing height. For a moment it seemed poised there, like a hawk on the wing, before lowering its head, arching its membrane wings and sliding into a swooping dive. It was heading directly for the bereft young man where he sobbed over his ravaged love. And its rider was lying far forward in his saddle, reaching out along the creature's neck, directing its actions with voice and mind both.
Suddenly something snapped into place in Nestor's befuddled mind. For if this was a dream it had gone badly wrong. And if it was his dream, then he should have at least a measure of control over it. He started lurchingly back towards the ragged figure crouching over the girl in the centre of the open area, and as he ran he shouted a warning: 'Look out! You there, look out!'
The man looked up, saw Nestor running towards him, and beyond him the others bringing their weapons to bear, apparently on him! Then he glanced over his shoulder at the thing swooping out of the sky, gasped some inarticulate denial, and made a dive for the shallow gouge of an empty fire-pit. As he disappeared from view the flyer veered left and right indecisively, then stretched out its neck and came straight on — for Nestor!
Coming to a skidding halt, suddenly Nestor sensed that this was more than a nightmare. It was real, and the reality gathering impetus, rushing closer with every thudding heartbeat. He glanced all about, saw open space on every side and nowhere to take cover. From behind him someone yelled, 'Get down!' And a crossbow bolt zipped overhead. Then…
….he flyer was almost upon him, and the underside of its neck where it widened into the flat corrugated belly was splitting open into a great mouth or pouch lined with cartilage barbs! Nestor turned, began to run, felt a rush of foul air as the flyer closed with the earth to float inches over its surface. And in another moment the fleshy scoop of its pouch had lifted him off his feet and folded him inside.
