by Brian Lumley
As Harry dropped off his astonished charges and prepared to return to the garden, so his keen eyes spotted something approaching in the sky. As yet it was two or three miles east of the garden, but even at that distance its size and shape made it unmistakable. A flyer, like Shaithis's mount!
The Travellers had seen it too. 'Shall we try to burn it?' they cried, springing to their mirror-weapons.
'One flyer?' Harry frowned. Instinct cautioned him against abrupt action. 'Not unless it makes an attack on the garden.'
He went back there, looked for Harry Jnr. Instead he found Zek Foener, her eyes closed where she stood facing east and slightly north, one trembling hand to her brow. 'Is something wrong, Zek?' Harry asked.
'No, Harry,' she answered, without opening her eyes. 'something's right! The Lady Karen is coming to join us.
She wants to fight on our side. She has four fine warriors, but they're holding back until she calls to them. Now… she wants to know if it's safe for her to land.' 'She's not attacking us?'
'She's joining us!' Zek repeated. 'You don't know her like I do, Harry. She's different.'
Karen was closer now, a mile at the outside but still wary, still holding off. Everyone in the garden had seen her. Jazz Simmons came hurrying, a shining brass belt dangling from the ammo-housing of his gun. 'What is it?' he said.
At the same moment The Dweller had materialized. Zek spoke to both men, told them what she'd told Harry Snr. 'Harry,' The Dweller turned to his father. 'Go and tell the Travellers to hold their fire. Let's see if she's genuine.'
Before anything else, Harry detoured straight to the peak where the Travellers manned their mirror-weapons. He passed on Harry Jnr's message, then spread the word right through the garden and its defenders. Meanwhile, Zek had told the Lady Karen: land in front of the wall, between the wall and the cliffs.
Karen's flyer swept closer, swooped lower, swiftly grew larger in the sky. Far behind it, four dark shapes made spurting motions across the star-sprinkled indigo of the heavens. Tiny at this distance, still everyone knew how big they really were, knew what they really were. 'Here she comes,' Zek breathed.
The flyer, turning face-on to a low night wind that moaned from the west, dropped lower. It seemed to hover for a moment, like a kite, then dipped down and uncoiled its nest of springy worm 'legs' to the earth. It bumped gently down, lowered its wings for stability. The thing parked there, swaying and nodding hugely, gazing with vacuous disinterest first at the garden, then down the sweeping ramps of the mountains to the plain, then back to the garden. Karen dismounted, came to the wall. She was dressed — or undressed — to cause consternation, as was her wont.
The two Harrys, Jazz and Zek met her there. It was Zek's impulse to hug her, but she held back. She saw that Jazz was immediately shaken, stricken by Karen's looks. Harry Snr, too: awed by Karen's beauty. It was an unearthly beauty, of course, for it was the work of her vampire. But what it had given her in looks, shape and desirability, it had taken from her in the bloody fire of her eyes. She was unmistakably Wamphyri.
Only The Dweller seemed unmoved. 'You've come to join us in the coming battle?' His voice was unemotional.
'I've come to die with you,' she answered.
'Oh? And is it that certain?'
'Certain?' she repeated him. 'If you believe in miracles, pray for one! For myself, I don't care.' And she told them her dilemma, reinforcing what Zek Foener had already made known, how whichever way she jumped the Wamphyri meant to be rid of her. This way… at least I'll take a few of them with me!'
'What of your trogs, your lieutenants?' The Dweller pressed her.
'I activated my trogs, turned them loose,' she answered. 'My "lieutenants", as you call them, are faint-hearted dogs! Them I sent away. Maybe the Lords have taken them on. I neither know nor care.'
'Your aerie stands empty?'
'Aye.'
'You've sacrificed a lot.'
'No,' she tossed her head, 'I have been sacrificed. And now you'd better make your final preparations. You can't hear them but I can, and they're on their way.'
'She's right,' Zek confirmed it. 'Their minds are lusting for war, open to read like reading a monstrous book. They're coming!'
The Dweller nodded, pointed to the four dark shapes squirting down through the darkening sky. 'Your warriors. Karen — are they trustworthy?'
They answer only my commands,' she answered.
Then station two of them at the back of the saddle, over the rise there,' and again he pointed, 'and the other pair down there, at the foot of the cliffs where the first trees grow. There they'll form our protection — some protection, at least — and they'll be well-positioned for launching, if the need should arise. And how will you fight?'
'In the thick of it!' She swept back her diaphanous cloak from her right side, took her gauntlet from her belt and thrust her right hand into it. Blades, hooks and scythes gleamed silver in the bright starlight where she flexed the deadly thing, adjusting its fit.
'Look!' Jazz snapped. 'I see them.'
It was impossible not to see them. The sky to the east was dark with dots large and small, like the approach of a small swarm of locusts. Except, while they were just as ravenous, they were not small and they were not locusts.
'Everyone to his station!' The Dweller cried. 'Are those lamps in order?' For answer, all along the wall, Travellers turned on their batteries of ultraviolet lamps, aiming them down into darkness. They cut the night with their hot, smoking beams. The light wouldn't kill vampire flesh, but they would hurt it greatly and blind Wamphyri eyes, however temporarily.
The Dweller caught the elbow of a passing Traveller. 'What of your women and children?' he asked. 'And my mother?'
'Gone, Dweller,' the man answered. 'Down toward Sunside, where they'll stay until they know the outcome.'
Harry Jnr turned to his father and the others. He nodded grimly. Then we're ready,' he said.
'Just as well,' Jazz Simmons answered, 'for it's already started.' He inclined his head down toward Starside. 'Listen — '
Hoarse trog cries and the clamour of battle drifted up out of the shadows. The roar and blast of gunfire, too, from a handful of trogs whose learning skills had been able to accommodate weapons.
Harry Jnr said: 'Well, this was to be expected. The Lords have been massing their trogs along the fringes of these mountains for a long time now. There'll be many hundreds of them… but I may have their measure.' He turned to his father. 'Harry, I could use some expert help.'
'Just name it.'
'When did you last call up the dead?'
Harry took a pace back from the other, his face falling. But then he slowly nodded. 'Whatever's in your mind, I'm ready when you are, son,' he said.
They rode the Mobius Continuum down to the plain of boulders, materializing clear of the mountains and their shadows. Up in the gloomy foothills where they met the mountains proper, there they saw dust-clouds boiling up from what could only be furious fighting. Also, amidst the rumble and roil, the occasional flash and crack! of a discharged weapon. The two Harrys moved closer, taking a short jump that brought them to the very fringe of the fighting. And already it was clear that The Dweller's trog troops were on the retreat. A thin brave line of shuffling Neanderthals, they fell back under the massive assault of others just like them, driven ever higher into the sullen foothills. But in fact the Wamphyri trogs were not like them, because they were slaves and The Dweller's trogs were free. Which was why they fought.
When Harry Jnr saw how it was going he groaned. 'I'd like to save some of them if I can,' he said.
Harry Keogh, Necroscope, closed his eyes and talked to the teeming dead of this strange world. 'We need your help,' he begged of them. 'You down there, in the earth, under the soil and down where the roots twine. We need your help against a great injustice.'
Things stirred in the ground, heard the desperate voice of a friend and tried to answer him. Who? What? Help you? But how can we help?
'Trogs!' said Harr
y Jnr. 'Before the Wamphyri, they roved over Starside at will. Thousands of them lived and died here. They were their own masters then, and this was their land.'
'How about it?' Harry spoke to them as he always spoke to the dead, as his friends, his equals. Even as his peers. 'If you're dust then you're beyond helping us, but if you can still hear me, if you can understand, then listen.' He told them what was required. Harry Jnr, too, answering the stumbling questions of the dead.
The Wamphyri, you say? Some of us served them in life. Many of us, many hundreds, died in their wars. False gods! Vile, terrible masters! But fight them? How? They'll destroy us again, a second time.
'You can't die twice,' Harry and The Dweller were desperate. 'Only your brothers can die; and they're doing it right now, dying, to hold back the troops of the Wamphyri.'
Troops? You mean trogs like us?
'Trogs, yes,' said The Dweller, 'but slaves of the Wamphyri. Death holds no terrors for such as them. It is preferable to what they have now!'
The Dweller speaks truth, some of Harry Jnr's own trogs, recently dead in the fighting, joined in. We at least know you. Dweller, and we gladly rise up again!
'What of the rest of you?' Harry Snr cried. 'Will you not also rise up? Wake up now, before it's too late. You have sons and grandsons and great-grandsons who are fighting even now. Join us in this last great battle against your immemorial vampire oppressors!'
In the cliffs backing these foothills, in ancient cavern burial grounds, the preserved, mummified bodies of a thousand trogs stirred, groped upward, tore free of the clinging soil. Under the trees, lone graves gave up their dead. Behind the massed Wamphyri trogs where they drove back the defenders, freshly dead cadavers sat up, forced their riven bodies to move, shuffled or crawled toward their vampire-controlled enemies. The stench of the pit filled the air. They came from the shadows, from mildewed graves and niches, from all their many resting places beyond life.
The Dweller's trog forces, when they saw what now battled on their side — even though they were on their side, hemming the invaders in all about — broke in terror and fled for their secret places. No matter, the grim army of the dead would do their work for them. And they would win, for as the Necroscopes had pointed out, they couldn't die twice.
Shrieks of terror split the night, wrenched from hundreds of Wamphyri-trog throats when they saw and understood what they were fighting. Sickened, the two Harrys turned away from the carnage. But -
'Son,' said Harry Snr, grasping the other's arm. 'Look!'
The sky was dark with Wamphyri flyers and warriors. They circled the garden, descending toward it. And some of the warriors were truly gigantic; any five of them, falling on the garden in unison, would totally obscure and obliterate it. Up there in the mountains, even now, a greater battle was about to be waged…
They took their own special route back to the garden.
Warriors had already landed below the cliffs fronting the wall, where the Lady Karen's creatures were now locked in hellish combat with them. Their shrieking and bellowing alone was deafening. Other warriors circled, looking for an opening in the ultraviolet searchlight beams which swept the sky and seared their hides.
Up on a certain peak, mirror-weapons blinked out as Lesk the Glut deliberately crashed his flyer down on the Travellers who sweated and swore and died there. But they'd seen him coming; before his flyer struck they had turned their shotguns on it, pumping shot after shot at both beast and rider right to the end. Lesk, wounded and more dangerous than ever, goaded his half-crippled beast to slither free of the peak, directed it in an insane suicide dive on the heart of the garden.
He was seen; smoking ray-beams converged blindingly on him; his flyer felt artificial sunlight eating at its hide, burning in its many eyes. It reared back from its headlong dive, pulled up, swooped low over the garden. Then someone threw a grenade, which exploded directly in front of the beast. With its spatulate head blazing, screaming like a safety-valve under high pressure, it swooped to earth, struck the wall and carried a great section of it away, and with it several defenders. The creature's huge manta body tore up the earth, somersaulted like a derailed train, hurled Lesk out of the saddle.
Other flyers swept down out of the darkness on the periphery. They crashed among the greenhouses and allotments, floundered in the pools. Down from their backs sprang lieutenants of Shaithis, Belath and Volse, to create carnage within the garden itself. Jazz Simmons saw them; he tracked them with tracers and streams of exploding shells. Two at least ducked away into the shadows and smoke, to commence their task of cold butchery on whichever Travellers or trogs they should come across.
Jazz saw Harry and his son on the balcony of the latter's house. They watched the battle. He breathlessly called up: 'How's it going?'
In the glare and sweep of hot beams, the booming of automatic weapons, howling of monsters and cries of men, it was hard to say. 'We should be in this!' Harry said to his son.
'No,' the other shook his head. 'We're the last resort.'
Harry didn't understand, but he trusted.
Zek came running, caught Jazz's arm where he stood by The Dweller's house. 'Look!' she cried.
High overhead a warrior dragged some bloated, puffing, incredible thing through the sky. A second warrior, higher, was similarly burdened. Scything searchlight beams cut across them and Zek gasped: 'Gas-beasts!'
'What?' Jazz gaped. He saw the bloated thing cut loose, begin drifting like some obscene balloon down toward the garden. The thing drifted a little northward, over the wall, where the battery of searchlights was concentrated. The beams picked it out, centered upon it, and it began to smoke. Puffing black evaporation and clouds of steam, it settled faster toward earth.
Jazz saw the strategy. 'AW he cried. Then he grabbed Zek, threw her down and hurled himself on top of her.
The gas-beast — a living creature, once a man — issued a hissing, high-pitched scream as its skin blackened and ruptured — and then it blew itself to bits with all the force of a thousand-pound bomb! The ray-gunners directly underneath it died instantly in the blast, their bodies and equipment flattened. At a stroke, one-third of The Dweller's defences had been wiped out.
A foul, stinking hot wind blew across the garden, and when it cleared Jazz helped Zek to her feet. The Dweller's house was still standing, but all of its windows had been blown in and half of its roof was missing. Harry and his son had ducked inside the space under the eaves in the moment before the blast; now they came out, white and shaken.
More warriors had landed at the back of the saddle. There they fought with Karen's creatures, overwhelming and quickly silencing them. But there were Travellers back there and they were armed with grenades; lobbing their deadly eggs, they gave the warriors blow for blow.
Lieutenants of the Wamphyri seemed to be ravaging in every quarter of the garden, their war-gauntlets drenched in Traveller blood. The night was covered with smoke and stench, split by shotgun blasts, made still more hellish in the surreal slash of searing light and long moments of total blindness…
Down by the shattered wall, the Lady Karen saw something coming up out of the smoke-filled depression. It crawled, but as it reached level ground reared up and charged! It was the mad Lord Lesk, bloodiest of all the Wamphyri, almost fully recovered and little the worse for his wounds and the tumble he'd taken. He saw Karen, rushed upon her full of nightmare intent.
She thrust aside a dazed Traveller and turned his lamp's beam full in Lesk's hideous face, blinding his eye. He cursed, clapped a hand to his face, came on and kicked the lamp from her grasp. Half-blind, he turned his left side toward her, glared his fury from the lidless eye in his shoulder. But as he swung his gauntlet, so his body turned with the swing and he again lost sight of her. She ducked under Lesk's arcing blow, tore away the flesh and ribs from his left side with one raking, razor-sharp swipe of her own gauntlet.
He cried out, staggered, gasped his amazement. He felt fumblingly with his free hand at the terr
ible damage to his body. His heart pounded like a great yellow bellows, plainly visible against the dark, pulsing sac of his exposed left lung. Travellers leaped on him, tried to trip him and drag him down. While he roared and raged, Karen stepped in and grasped his naked heart with her awesome weapon-hand. She cut the heart's pipes and tore it out of his body. He coughed blood, puffed himself up… and toppled like a felled tree! The Travellers fell on him like wolves, beheaded him, poured oil on his body and set fire to it. Lesk went up in flames.
Meanwhile:
A second gas-beast had come drifting directly toward The Dweller's house. The two Harrys fled the place, encountered a pair of Wamphyri lieutenants in their way. Their strategy in dealing with them proved their kinship: they let the grinning, gauntleted vampires close with them and charge, then ducked through Mobius doors. As their pursuers plunged into that unknown realm directly on their heels, so they closed the doors and exited through others. The lieutenants had simply disappeared; perhaps faint echoes of their screams came back, to be quickly drowned in the row and confusion of battle.
The mewling gas-beast over The Dweller's house was hit by a stray burst of gunfire. It exploded with a devastating roar, demolishing the place and sending out a great rush of vile stench.
Warriors were coming over the saddle behind the settlement. Another crashed down on the low structure housing Harry Jnr's generators. The remaining ultraviolet lamps blinked out, leaving only a handful of lanterns and starlight to light the reeling night. The bellowing voices of the Lords Belath and Menor Maimbite sounded inside the garden! From overhead, the Lord Shaithis shouted down instructions.
Still reeling from the gas-beast blast, Harry clutched his son's arm. 'You said we were a last resort,' he breathlessly reminded him. 'Whatever you meant by that — whatever's on your mind — you'd better say it now.'
'Father,' the other answered, 'in the Mobius Continuum even thought has weight. And you and I, we're linked. Wherever we are in the Mobius Continuum, we know each other.'
Harry nodded. 'Of course.'
'I've done things with and to the Continuum that you've never dreamed of,' The Dweller continued, but innocently, without boasting. 'I can send more than mere thoughts through it — as long as there's someone to receive what I send. In this instance, however, what I must send is dangerous. Not to you, but to me.'
