And another voice said, I’m Gunner Golovin, or I was. Those Katushev cannons were my babies…I maintained them. You want to know how to fire ’em, I’m your man.
Excellent! said Jake with feeling. But it’s only right that I should warn you: we could experience a little interference—a little deadspeak static, maybe—from the Great Majority.
Fuck ’em! said the other. Way down here—out of sight and almost out of our minds—we take care of our own. And what the hell, the teeming dead never much bothered with us anyway. They warned us off? So what? If there’s a way out of this, we should take it. And if there isn’t, what have we got to lose?
And finally another voice, but one which Jake recognized at once. It was Zek Föener, who knew this place only too well. And she said, Jake, the Great Majority are aware of what you’re trying to do—the only thing you can do—and this time you have their blessing.
But deadspeak often conveys more than is actually said, and Jake was adept at reading between the lines. There are vampires in the world, he said, and the teeming dead want them gone. But they do mean all of them—all of us—right?
He sensed Zek’s nod. And sadly, It’s the way things have to be, Necroscope, she said. And then, as she began to drift away, There’s just one thing, just one more little thing that you can do for me, Jake, if you will. And I’d be obliged if you’d do it before…before anything else happens.
You’ve been my friend, said Jake. So name it.
And she did, and was gone.
And then Jake and Gunner Golovin showed Millie how to operate the Katushev cannon.
But just as they were finishing:
“Ahhh!” said Millie, her eyes opening wide.
“What is it?” said Jake, who believed he already knew.
She looked at him and her face was pale and drawn. But pale from what she was or from what she knew, he couldn’t say. Until suddenly she projected a thought directly into his mind. Telepathy, for the first time with a person other than Liz; Millie’s vampire-enhanced talent coming into play. And: Malinari and the others, she said. They’re coming!
“What do you see?” Jake asked out loud. “Is there any opposition? Have any of those ex-cons survived?”
Human minds? said Millie. Minds free of mindsmog? Only two. And strangely, they know all about these Katushev! Synchronicity, I suppose. They’re creeping like a pair of terrified mice. They know that something’s very wrong. The silence…the stagnating air…the lights that don’t work…the fact that no one bothers to answer their calls. So that now they’ve stopped calling. Just the two of them, Jake. They’re all that’s left.
“I know who they are,” said Jake. “They were up here when I was installing Turchin’s bomb. When the place came under attack they got called away.”
“Called to their deaths,” Millie now whispered, concentrating her talent on listening. “The mindsmog…is closing in on them. The Wamphyri know they’re there. They can smell them!”
“Maybe you’d better get out of there,” said the Necroscope, thoroughly alarmed now. “Once those men are finished, we’ll be the only ones left…our minds. If Malinari catches you probing like that—”
“—He’ll know we’re here?” She looked at him and cocked her head on one side. “Do you really think he doesn’t already know? I wish I could believe that, Jake. But he has Liz, and he knows that sooner or later you’ll try to get her back.”
Before he could answer: “Ahhhh!” Millie said again. And yet again, “Ahhhh! Two minds, snuffed out.” She breathed deeply and lay back in the Katushev’s seat. “Those poor men…they never knew what hit them. But you’re right and I’m out of there now.”
“How far away were they?” said Jake.
“Close,” said Millie. “And by now they’re closer still, for there’s no longer anything to delay them. And there’s one other thing you should know—I think Liz could be waking up. Just as I got out of there I sensed another mind. It was very familiar, female, afraid, and it was groping for consciousness.”
“Liz? Unharmed?” He could scarcely believe it.
“She’s a survivor,” said Millie.
“The moment she wakes up—the moment she calls for me—I have to go to her!” said Jake.
“But only if you’re sick of living,” said Millie. “And only if you want Liz to die, too. Best to play it according to plan, Necroscope. She’s their lure, for you. And the moment they take you, she dies—or worse.”
“Damn it all to hell!” said Jake under his breath. “If only I didn’t feel so bloody useless!”
“You want something to do?” said Millie. “Then why not take that lamp to the precog and Paul Garvey? They’ll need it a lot more than we do. And if they don’t already know about the Wamphyri, tell them. Say that they’re coming and fast. And on your way back you can warn Ben and Lardis, too.”
Jake had to admire her. Necroscope though he was, she sometimes made him feel like a schoolboy. “Millie Cleary,” he said, “you’re one cool lady.”
“But not yet a Lady,” she answered, with a wry smile. “And as long as I’m just cool and not cold, well, I’ll be alright.”
Taking up the lamp he did as she had suggested, but before leaving Trask in the magmass wasteland he remembered a message he’d promised to pass on. And, “Ben,” he said, “Zek was here.”
“Zek?” Trask started a little, then scowled and said, “What do you mean, Zek was…?” But there he paused, for it had dawned on him what the Necroscope meant…or at least he thought so. And finally, “That was a very long time ago,” he said.
“No, I mean now, a few seconds ago,” said Jake. “She wanted you to know something. She said if things work out, don’t waste any more of your life in remorse. And she said what you had was great but it’s gone now. The living are for the living, and the dead are for the dead. She has Jazz now, her first love. She’ll go to him now in Zákinthos, where she was born. And you have to go wherever your heart takes you.”
Trask nodded, smiled a less than grim smile, and said, “Now she tells me, at a time and in a place such as this! But that’s Zek: always the optimist.” And with another nod, but gratefully now, he said, “Thanks, Necroscope.”
With no time at all to spare—even at this eleventh hour—still Jake decided to make a little time. But that was make it, not waste it, for time stands still in the Möbius Continuum. He had an itch that couldn’t wait any longer; it needed scratching, and since his course was set absolutely, what difference could it make now? It was something that the others had deterred him from doing (for his own benefit, true), but none of that mattered too much anymore, not when his future as foretold by Ian Goodly was almost upon him.
And so on his way back to the core he took the time—yet wasted none of it—to do what must be done. Then, having done it, he returned to Millie. And just one or two heartbeats after he’d stepped from the Möbius Continuum…then everything moved up a gear…
The future wouldn’t be probed so Goodly had stopped trying. All he could do now was point his 9 mm Browning Special at the hole in the sheer rock wall where the catwalk emerged from the darkness and began bridging the magmass, and pray.
His bullets were silver-plated, and if he could land one of them in the right place—in Vavara’s heart or one of her eyes—it should certainly stop her. Stop Vavara, if not the driving force within her. For she had been Wamphyri for unknown centuries, and her leech and vampire flesh would be unwilling to give in so easily. There would be a merry display before she succumbed. But if he could bring her down, pull the pin of a grenade, and ram it in the great gape of her jaws…that should do the trick, for sure!
The precog had calculated that he might be able to get off just two or three shots, switch on the lamp that the Necroscope had given him, use his garlic aerosol spray (mainly on himself, as protection) before the Wamphyri got it together and reacted to his presence. But by then they’d be in a cross fire, for Paul Garvey would be shooting, too.
Hopefully, with Vavara down, the other two would run for it along the catwalk. And the precog and Garvey would target their legs, try to soften them up for Trask and Lardis waiting at the shaft to the core. But if Liz was still with them—still their captive—that would be all that the E-Branch agents could do. And even then they’d be risking hurting Liz.
That had been the plan, anyway.
But that wasn’t the way it happened.
“Jesus!” the telepath suddenly hissed from forty feet away, causing Goodly’s flesh to prickle and the short hairs to spring erect at the nape of his neck. “Mindsmog! They’re so close that they can’t any longer shield it. It’s here—and so are they!”
Leprous white mist—a vampire mist as dense as smoke from damp leaves in a garden fire in autumn—uncoiled itself like a living thing from the shaft in the shiny-black rock face. Expanding and putting out sentient-seeming tendrils, it rolled along the catwalk, lapped over the sides, came groping among the magmass mouldings.
Garvey’s halogen lamp blazed into life, and as dense as the wall of mist was, still that powerful beam cut through it. Seen in outline, two male figures stood upright, side by side in the narrow shaft, and in the next moment moved stiffly forward. But that was as much target as Garvey and the precog needed, and as close as they wanted to get.
Their weapons came clamouring alive; their gunfire and its echoes were senses-stunning in the confines of the magmass cavern; and the two figures where they had barely emerged from the mouth of the shaft jerked and danced like puppets…but oddly, they didn’t fall, and stranger far, their feet weren’t touching the walkway’s planking.
And now the precog thought, My God! They are puppets!
He had used a full clip, and so had Garvey. As they went to reload, Lords Malinari and Szwart emerged from the shaft. Following close behind, the hag Vavara came wafting, with Liz lying limp in her arms. Moving with eye-blurring speed, the first two hoisted high their human shields—the shattered corpses of the men who had manned the Katushevs—and threw them effortlessly out and down into the magmass.
Their aim was excellent. Garvey’s lamp went clattering into the darkness, and the precog saw a wet, flailing, faceless mass bounce once directly in front of him, before it came slithering and flopping into his arms.
The dead man was heavy; Goodly’s hands slipped in blood as he tried to throw him off; he was aware of Garvey’s shuddering, gasping, inarticulate mouthings from the other side of the catwalk, where the telepath faced unthinkable problems of his own. And finally, as Goodly managed to free himself from a tangle of loose, flopping limbs…Malinari was there!
Malinari, no longer handsome or even remotely human, rising from a magmass matrix immediately adjacent to Goodly’s own. The precog’s fingers were numb, wet with a dead man’s blood as they fumbled to fit a fresh clip into the grip of his gun; and Malinari crouched there, watching with scarlet eyes, perhaps amused at his antics. But then, when at last the full magazine slipped up into its housing:
“Ah, no, little seer,” said the Great Vampire, taking Goodly’s weapon from him and throwing it away, “I’m afraid we can’t allow that. For look, look here—one of your bullets actually found its target, coming right through my poor dead friend here to strike at me! Ah, but it merely grazed me in passing. I felt its sting, its silver burn, but nothing more. And I shall heal, while this faceless thing—and you—won’t. Oh, ha-ha-haaaaa!”
A hugely taloned hand wiped at the lobe of his fleshy right ear, and came away dripping blood. “My blood,” Malinari nodded, “which is oh-so-scarce, so very precious. What a terrible shame to waste it, eh?” And squeezing Goodly’s cheeks until his mouth popped open, Malinari slopped blood into his forced gape, gently closed it, and wiped his hand clean on the precog’s lips and the rims of his flaring nostrils. Then, clamping Goodly’s mouth shut, he forced him to breathe through his nose. Blood from the precog’s upper lip was sucked in, and Goodly realized the worst of it: that even if he lived he was dead…or undead.
He tried to close his eyes, to shut everything out, but the monster’s burning gaze held him mesmerized. And Malinari’s jaws cracked open in a drooling lunatic grin as he said, “But there, fair’s fair, little scryer, and Lord Nephran Malinari—Malinari the Mind—has been hospitable. I have given of my wine of life, and you have supped. Now I shall sup of yours. But what a great pity, and such bitter irony, eh? That for all your alleged talent, you didn’t see this coming!”
His jaws opened wide, wider, and came down towards Goodly’s face. But then, thinking better of it, holding back on his bite for a moment, he clamped the precog’s head in his icy hands and stared at him. Perhaps there was room in his mind yet, and what a bonus that would be: to be able to see into the future! Then, as his index fingers writhed like worms, lengthened, and sought his victim’s ears—
—Vavara called from the walkway, “Have done, Nephran! And you, too, Szwart! Come, take this stupid girl off my hands, and let’s go while the going’s good. We’ve come a very long way but we’re not done yet. Those other E-Branch people will have heard the shooting. Let’s not give them time to work out what’s happened to the first of their ambush parties and regroup. I’m sure there’ll be hazards enough to negotiate.”
Malinari looked up, flowed to his feet, growled deep in his throat. But he saw that Vavara was right. And meanwhile the precog’s flopping hand had struck something hard and metallic: the handle of the halogen lamp! Malinari bent to strike a murderous backhand blow, but Goodly struck first.
Blinding white light—painful light—went streaming into the vampire’s eyes in a shaft that felt solid as a bar of iron. Malinari’s blow found the side of Goodly’s head, but instead of crushing his skull it glanced off; enough to hurl him aside and render him unconscious, but nothing worse.
And momentarily blinded, staggering, tripping, and flailing his arms, Nephran Malinari went mewling back across the magmass to the walkway…
Meanwhile, Paul Garvey’s problem was indeed unthinkable; it was the unthinkable Lord Szwart! Szwart, too, heard Vavara calling, but he didn’t answer. Instead, through eyes that seemed to drip sulphur, he stared in alien astonishment at the telepath.
It was Garvey’s face that fascinated him, that reconstructed face which looked normal enough when it was emotionless, but which now was anything but emotionless. Even a smile looked bad on Garvey, a frown frightening, and a scowl monstrous. But when the telepath showed fear….
Szwart had been about to kill him. (Garvey deserved to die, if only for the halogen lamp, whose fragments lay in a magmass mould nearby.) But now, looking at him—his hideously twisted features, muscles pulling in all the wrong directions, tendons jerking under unresponsive flesh—Szwart wasn’t so sure that death was the worst possible punishment. Indeed, it might even be preferable. For it was almost as if Garvey formed some kind of living link with the magmass!
Szwart fashioned his vocal chords for speech, and said, “My son, my son…and indeed you could be my son! For this world has played you foul, that you should look like this. And ah, I know your torment, for I was ever ugly…ugliness itself, as you see! However, I have learned to live with it, and so shall you. But without my mist your beam would have revealed me, and it hurts me that I am as I am. You would have caused me pain—pain in these night-seeing eyes of mine, unused as they are to loathsome dazzle, but much more pain in my mind, which cringes from bright lights—wherefore I shall cause you pain, but not in your mind. Physical pain, aye. A little now, and a lot more later when your own kind come to kill you. Now watch.”
With his head held tight in the grip of a great pincerlike hand, Garvey could scarcely refuse. And then Szwart showed him his other hand: a crab claw crusted with chitin, that reshaped itself even as Garvey watched. The claws flattened, fused, and elongated; they formed a pneumatic needle that slid to and fro in a bony sheath, while a pearl of greyish moisture gleamed at its tip.
“My essence,” said Szwart. “Not my blood but
that which is in my blood. When this takes hold you’ll know the real meaning of the word ‘ugliness’! And when they come to kill you, then, too, you’ll remember how you tried to kill me.”
And he slid the needle into the pounding carotid artery on the right side of Garvey’s neck, injecting him there.
It wasn’t the transfusion of a vampire egg—which of its own right causes unbearable agonies—but it was the next best, or worst, thing. And the stuff ran through the telepath’s blood like quicksilver, like electricity down wires in his arteries.
As Szwart released him, Garvey tried to scream. But already he was jerking like a flatfish left stranded by the tide, paralysed by pain. And a moment later he was unconscious.
The first ambush team’s gunfire—its echoes bouncing from wall to wall, floor to ceiling; its sound changing with every deflection, itself moulded by the magmass matrices—had been almost as deafening in Trask’s and Lardis’s ears as it had in Goodly’s and Garvey’s.
But when the shooting had stopped abruptly…
And after its echoes had subsided…
Then the second team had also heard the precog’s involuntary cry of horror as a faceless cadaver had come flopping from the magmass, and something of the telepath’s terrified gibbering when he had come face-to-face with Lord Szwart.
And now they heard only the silence…
Trask was armed. As well as grenades, and a machine-pistol that was loaded, cocked, and set on automatic fire, he also had a third weapon in a sausage bag at his side. As for the latter: his hopes were fading as to its use…but that was a personal thing, and in any case he knew that even a vampire’s flesh must eventually give way to a fusillade of silver bullets.