Malinari made no answer but instead began to drag Liz—who was suddenly wide awake and struggling, however weakly—across the fish-scale steel plates towards the Gate. If the Necroscope was after all a great coward and failed to attempt a rescue, at least Malinari would not be leaving this world empty-handed.
But meanwhile Trask had recognized Szwart’s difficulty. And risking his life—which probably wasn’t worth anything anyway—he half-turned and reached up a hand to wrench the sunglasses from the monster’s face.
Twin jets of goo spurted from the holes in that nightmarish countenance, and Szwart let out a whistling cry like steam from a kettle. He shrank down into himself and slapped both hands to his face, covering his streaming eyes, which left Trask free to make a flying tackle on Malinari. And sliding on his belly over the plates, he grabbed at that one’s ankles.
Hampered by Liz’s struggling, and tripping where Trask held him, Malinari cursed and managed a fumbling back-heel kick. His heel glanced off the side of Trask’s head, sending him tumbling sideways. Which was fortunate for him; for Vavara was up on her feet again, hissing like a snake where she advanced on Malinari with spiderlike hands and fish-hook fingers extended.
By now Millie had seen her opportunity. The Katushev’s battery-driven motor hummed into life, its turret turning smoothly as she sought to target Szwart where he stood isolated from the rest by some two or three paces. And Millie wasn’t the only one in action.
The Necroscope had commenced his run, hurling himself diagonally across the steel-plated disk toward the Gate. Level with Malinari and Liz, he went to intercept them at the Gate’s event horizon. But out of the corner of his eye Malinari had seen him and deliberately slowed down. For with the exception of the hag Vavara’s interference, it was all working out almost exactly as planned.
Three of E-Branch’s avengers—Millie, Trask, and the Necroscope—were now involved in the action, but there was still a fourth to come. For Malinari’s telepathic probes had not been in error back there in the magmass cavern when momentarily they had seemed to detect a presence other than Trask’s. They had in fact detected just such a presence, only to be tricked, deflected from their quarry by a Traveller survival technique. And of course, Lardis Lidesci was one of the greatest survivors of all time.
Out from the shaft he stepped, with his razor-edged machete in his clenched fist, the strap of Trask’s sausage bag over his shoulder, and disposable sunglasses protecting his eyes. And no more than twenty feet ahead of him, there stood Szwart with his ropy hands held up in front of his grotesque face, his gasping, whistling voice cursing the light from the Gate.
Lardis didn’t think twice—and to hell with his rheumatic joints!—as he drew back his throwing arm and let fly with all the deadly accuracy of a Szgany marksman. Coated with silver at its tip, the machete made a whup-whup-whupping sound as it spun end over end once, twice, three times and slammed into Szwart’s back point first. But already in the process of alien, automatic metamorphosis, Szwart’s being was something less than solid, and the Old Lidesci’s weapon passed three-quarters through him, so that the first six inches stuck out in front.
Szwart drew it out point first, gazed at it through eyes in flood, then turned and glared his astonishment—then his fury—at Lardis, and took one menacing step towards him. Which was when Millie thumbed the Katushev’s firing studs.
The Lord of Darkness was swatted, holed, mangled like a rag doll, snatched from his feet and thrown down, with blobs of his blood and chunks of his protoflesh flying. And under the Katushev’s canopy Millie laughed and cried, bouncing in her seat like a lunatic as she eased her thumbs off the studs and the obscene cacophony of cannon fire ceased. And there on the steel plates, beginning at the spot where Szwart had been standing, lay a trail like a scarlet skid mark, leading to a steaming, immobile mound of weird flesh twenty or more feet away. And:
“Take me down under London, would you, you bastard thing?” Millie cried. “Vampirize me with your bloody spores, would you? You’re done for, Szwart, but you’re not going to hell alone!”
The Katushev’s motor hummed again, but Millie was too late. The action had moved on, and friends and enemies alike were now too close together…
Malinari was almost at the Gate. Its glaring white surface, the event horizon, seemed to beckon him. But the hag Vavara was hot on his heels, her face a mask of loathing, and her chomping bottom jaw dripping blood. And not only Vavara but Jake Cutter, too.
The Necroscope was coming fast; he would arrive at the same time; and he wore a harness slung loosely over his shoulders, a bottle of incendiary chemicals on his back, and such a scowl of determination on his face that Malinari felt a sudden twinge of self-doubt. But it wasn’t only Jake’s look that did it—it was the squat-bodied flamethrower in his white-knuckled hands!
He had found the weapon hanging from its hook in the sentry box, and it had seemed to make a lot more sense than a machine-pistol. For no matter how lethal the latter might be against an ordinary man, it wasn’t likely to unnerve Nephran Malinari, not while he was holding Liz. But the sight—the very notion—of a flamethrower just might. And in fact it had.
“Let her go, Malinari,” Jake yelled. “I’m the one you want, not the girl.” And pointing the flamethrowers’s nozzle, he took up first pressure on the trigger and ignited the pilot light.
“I haven’t harmed your lover,” Malinari snarled. “Not yet. So don’t worry about me, worry about that one!” And he pointed at Vavara.
For she had seen the danger, too, and came bearing down on Jake with her long arms reaching and her face a mask of blood.
“Jake, look out!” Liz cried, writhing in Malinari’s arms.
She needn’t have worried; the Necroscope was already swinging the flamethrower in Vavara’s direction, and now he squeezed the trigger all the way home. A roaring, white-hot jet of flame—a demon’s tongue of fire—licked out, striking Vavara full in the face and stopping her just as surely as if she’d slammed head-on into a brick wall.
Vavara shrieked to match the hissing shriek of Jake’s lance—danced a mad dance while he hosed her down—finally slumped to the fish-scale plates in a spreading pool of her own fluids. Her smoke, steam, and stench rose up…
But Malinari had turned Liz to face Jake, and held her like a shield between himself and Jake’s weapon. And:
“You’re right,” he said. “It’s you I want and not the girl. But listen, do you see this face of mine? Do you see these jaws and teeth?” And he showed Jake what he meant. “One bite and the girl is gone. I can ruin her face, suck out her tongue, push my fingers in through her eyes to addle her brain. Or perhaps I’ll simply drive my hand right through her and crush her heart. But on the other hand—”
“—You want me,” said Jake. “And the moment you do anything to Liz you’re a dead man. You know it, and I know it.” He moved a step closer—and Malinari backed off until he was only a few feet from the Gate’s event horizon.
“But I could do it and still leap into the Gate,” the monster said.
“And if you did I’d follow you,” said Jake. “All the way to hell if I had to. So tell me, can you leap faster than my fire? Even if you got to Starside I would find you there. And believe me, Malinari, no one moves faster than me. One morning as you lay down to sleep, I’d be there. With fire in my hands.”
“Oh, I know, I know,” Malinari gurgled. “So quite obviously this has to end here. A duel, Necroscope? Fair and aboveboard, your powers against mine? Now hear my proposal. You’ll put down your weapon and kick it away beyond reach, and I’ll release the girl into the hands of your good friend, Mr. Trask.”
Meanwhile, Lardis Lidesci had come closer, and now he said, “Don’t do it, Jake. Never make a deal with a vampire, and certainly not a Lord of the Wamphyri!” It seemed the old Gypsy king had forgotten—perhaps conveniently—that the Necroscope had become a vampire in his own right.
Jake had heard just such a warning before, but this ti
me he had no choice. And anyway, he actually wanted it. For his vampire blood was up! “Release the girl,” he growled.
“Drop the flamethrower,” said Malinari.
And together, slowly, carefully, each followed the other’s instructions. Jake shrugged out of his harness, let the bottle fall clanging to the floor. Malinari held Liz at arm’s length, but kept hold of one wrist. The Necroscope stooped a little to let the flamethrower fall, and went to kick it away. And finally Malinari let go of Liz…for she was no longer of any use to him!
And in that split second—that single moment of time, as Jake sent the flamethrower and its tank skidding towards Trask—Malinari moved. He moved like quicksilver, grabbing at Jake before he could even think to avoid him. And his hands clasped Jake’s head in their icy, brain-draining grip.
Lardis had a gun but couldn’t use it; Liz and Trask were in the line of fire, and the Old Lidesci was by no means expert in the weapons of Earth. And in the Katushev’s bucket seat, Millie was similarly hampered: if she fired at Malinari, Jake would go with him. And where Liz had been the monster’s shield, now Jake took her place.
“Ahhh! Yesss!” Malinari hissed, as his senses-numbing hands formed themselves into great webs, and his fingers quivered and lengthened. “All of your secrets, Necroscope—everything that you know, the keys to all of your powers—soon to be mine! But what was that you said? Nothing moves faster than you? Perhaps nothing travels faster, place to place, but where the reflexes of muscles and mind are concerned, I think you are mistaken.”
Jake slumped. The chill of Malinari’s hands wasn’t physical but mental: the bitter cold of ignorance leeching on knowledge; the negative pole of a powerful magnet, applied to the positive pole of the Necroscope’s intelligence, his psyche. For Malinari the Mind was a creature apart, who lived not alone on blood but on the memories and deep-seated secrets of his victims, leaving nothing behind.
And already his index fingers were vibrating as they probed Jake’s ears.
“All here,” Malinari gurgled. “It’s all right here. But ah! What’s this I feel? A secret place? A special place, perhaps? A locked room here in the manse of your mind. Your treasure vault of powers, eh, Necroscope? But see, the key is in the lock, and now I turn it. Your secrets are mine…”
His fingers sought knowledge…and found something else. They sought magic, and found madness. Nothing—nothing at all of intelligence—transferred to Malinari, but something, someone, who he had long forgotten and thought never to know again. And such was his eagerness that he got it all…all of Korath-once-Mindsthrall, bereft in his loneliness, sucked from Jake’s mind in an instant, like a speck of blood through a mosquito’s siphon! But unlike Jake, Malinari had no special room in which to contain him. His rooms were full to brimming, and this latest acquisition was one too many.
“Ahhhh-argh!” he choked, snatching back his hands from the Necroscope’s head—releasing him as if he were ablaze—to go staggering this way and that. And his crimson eyes flying open and bugging, and his great jaw dropping, gaping, as he slapped palsied hands to his head. And again. And yet again…
For inside his head—in Malinari the Mind’s mind—Korath ran like the lunatic he was down every corridor, crushing every sentient thing, destroying all memories, erasing all knowledge, and leaving nothing but chaos in his wake. He was an instantaneous disease, an all-consuming virus; and Malinari the perfect host, whose brain had been teetering on the rim of lunacy long before this fatal infection.
Liz ran to Jake where he had gone to his knees, but already he was recovering, shaking his head, “awakening,” as from a bad dream. “What did you do to him?” she asked then. “What happened to him?”
“I…I don’t know,” he answered, hugging her close. “But I feel—somehow I feel—free…?”
“It’s something we can consider later,” Trask grated as he advanced on the drooling, gibbering Malinari where he sat slapping his head, cross-legged on the fish-scale floor. “But right now there’s something I need to do—something that I’ve wanted to do for a very long time—before we go looking for the precog and Paul Garvey and get the hell out of here.”
And handing Trask his sausage bag, Lardis went with him.
A moment later, Trask thrust his hand into the idiot Malinari’s battle gauntlet and flexed it, and as the cutting edges sprang erect, he raised the gauntlet high and brought it slicing down on the mad thing’s neck. Again and again Trask struck home with all his strength, until the ex-monster’s head leaped free and his body toppled. Then Trask shook the gauntlet loose and let it fall.
And picking up the flamethrower, Liz said, “So you finally got your revenge, Ben, and Millie got hers—but mine is still to come.”
Then, as they backed off, turning away from the one grisly scene—
—Millie shouted a warning as she clambered down from the Katushev. “Behind you! Look behind you!” And for all that they had been through, still they were shocked anew at what was taking place where Millie pointed.
First: the steaming mass that had been Vavara was no longer quiet—indeed it was unquiet. The slumped hag’s fire-blackened mouth hung open, and out onto the slimy floor poured the myriad eggs of a mother of vampires! Translucent pearly spheres like a small boy’s spilled marbles, and propelled by flickering cilia, they skittered and shimmered all across the steel-plated floor, seeking blindly for brand-new hosts. Liz didn’t think twice but torched them all, then turned her fire on the steaming remains of Vavara.
Yet even now it wasn’t finished.
“What the hell…?” said the Old Lidesci, his mouth falling open as he watched something black, lumpish, and ragged dragging itself to the perimeter and into a wormhole that angled acutely into the wall.
“It’s Szwart!” said Jake disbelievingly. “What does it take to kill these bloody things?” Taking the flamethrower from Liz, who was done with it now, he ran towards the wormhole.
That was a mistake, for there in the darkness beyond a bend in the energy channel, Lord Szwart had quickly refashioned himself. And as Jake approached the hole—
—It might easily have been some giant octopus that sensed his presence and reached out with a nest of lashing tentacles! Jake squeezed the flamethrower’s trigger, and nothing happened. The pilot light died with a noise like a damp squib. And Szwart dragged Jake headfirst into the hole.
A moment later and the Necroscope found himself inside Lord Szwart, enveloped by him! And Szwart formed eyes—several eyes—on the inside, to look at him.
“Darkness!” the vampire thing gasped and wheezed, his vestigial lungs pulsating, breathing their poison into Jake’s face. “The darkness was ever my friend. It was my beginning and shall be my continuance. Where darkness lives, there goes Szwart. And you—ah, I know you—destroyer of my fortress under London! You come and go at will. But this time I go with you.”
“Jesus!” Jake gasped.
“No,” said the other. “Only Szwart, but be sure I have godlike power over you! The power of life and death, aye. And now, Jake Cutter—the one Malinari called Necroscope—you’ll take me out of here to a place of darkness.”
In that same moment Jake felt a stab through his trousers; not anything of Szwart’s doing, but a splinter of old hardwood in his pocket. Then, shielding his mind to conceal an involuntary thrill of anticipation, suddenly he knew how to kill this mutant thing!
“I can’t move,” he said. “Not while you surround me.”
“Then I shall extrude you,” said Szwart. “But heed my warning, Necroscope: don’t take me where there’s sunlight. It would kill me, certainly, but you would die, too—and just as painfully.” With which he squirted a few drops of specially altered internal fluids onto Jake’s neck. Hissing where it ate into his flesh, the stuff burned like hell, causing him to gasp in pain.
And Szwart said, “There. If you fail me, that shall be your lot: to be sucked dry of all your juices, shrivelled and burned to nothing. Do we have an understanding?”<
br />
“Yes,” Jake gasped. “Yes, we have an understanding.”
Szwart reshaped himself, extruded Jake inside the wormhole, but continued to hold him in a nest of whipcord pseudopods. And while Jake gulped gratefully at reasonably clean air again, the Lord of Darkness said, “So then, where shall we go?”
“I know a place of ultimate darkness,” said Jake, beginning to breathe a little more easily as the agony of his seared neck gradually subsided.
“Where I may live?”
“For as long as you live,” the Necroscope answered.
“Take me there now,” said Szwart, driving Jake before him, out of the wormhole onto the perimeter walkway, and in through a Möbius door…
The storm over the Atlantic had blown itself out as rapidly as it had blown up, but the helicopter was running on fumes. David Chung had found the rogue Russian ship; now his scientist colleagues were taking infrared snapshots of the vessel, reporting its location by radio, and likewise the fact that their instruments were recording lethal radiation. It was all they could do in what little time remained to them.
Down below, stricken by the storm and hampered by its submarine burden, the towship was wallowing in the heaving swell, listing badly to starboard, and in danger of capsizing. But the locator was intent upon only one thing: contact with the Necroscope.
And Jake came…but not alone.
And not into the chopper.
On his way through the Möbius Continuum, while Szwart assumed a man-shape, but continued to hold him as tightly as ever, the Necroscope had chosen an indirect route—moving first in one direction, then another—in order to think things through before arriving at his destination. And he’d kept his thoughts shielded in case Szwart was less of a dullard than he seemed.
As for Jake’s plan: it had been somewhat complicated.
He had understood from Chung’s contact—the vibrations of the hairbrush shard—that the locator was in trouble; if not Chung himself, then certainly the helicopter in which he was a passenger. If they were ditching, then it was possible that in the confusion Jake could free himself from Szwart, grab a hold of Chung, and make an exit. By now the locator and his colleagues would be wearing life belts at least, and inflatables were standard on such aircraft. Maybe they were already down in the water, while the helicopter filled up and started to sink.