“She has‘nae the power,” Auld John answered. “Oh, she has the blood all right, inherited. She’s a true-blooded throwback, aye. But inherited frae him! He knows it a’, while B.J. has it a’ tae learn. But she has’nae the time, not wi’ a’ they Ferenczys and Drakuls bent on destruction. The dog-Lord … he sends his very thoughts—ye ken it’s so, for ye’ve heard him!—but she does‘nae have that, no yet. And anyway, he has proved himsel’, has he no? He’s back! He’s up there the noo, in the high places. And he’s waitin’ on us!”
“So then,” Alan nodded, “that’s one question answered, but one other remains: when do we climb? And don’t go worrying yourself that we can’t make it. If you can, we can. Let me tell you, John, there are crags on the moors so steep and high you wouldn’t believe. Also, we’ve got you to show us the way.”
“First light,” John answered. “Crack o’ dawn. Ah have gear enough for a’ three o’ us in mah car. As for when we start out: is the noo soon enough?”
“Now?” (From both of the others.)
“Aye, so’s tae be at the start o’ the easy route by daybreak. We camp out the nicht, under the glorious moon. And oh, she’ll inspire us, be sure.”
“But why camp out?” (From Garth.)
“Because our enemies will have men on the roads, and more by daylight. So the nicht we drive up by Tromie Bridge, on the Badenoch side o’ the river, maybe as far as Insh. Yere vehicle is hired, so we take mine. Then after we ditch it, if it’s discovered—so what? Ah’m a local gillie after a’. It’ll be just me, out in the wild. But you two … they’d think ye were lost and send out a search party. We dinnae want that.”
“And is Insh where we start to climb?” (Garth again.)
“Ah no, laddie,” John told him. “Frae Insh it’s a wee trek in the woods, some five or six miles or so—just in case some damn fool is following—to where we camp the nicht. That will be our starting point tomorrow morning.”
“And if some damn fool or fools is following us?” Alan-on-the-Moor inquired.
And John narrowed his eyes grimly. “Ah’ve a‘ready had some dealings wi’ the like,” he said. “They’re no so hard. One thing for sure: they’re no moors-and woodsmen like us. It’ll mean one or two less o’ they for Radu tae worry over, that’s a’.”
And that had been that …
And now, first light it was—crack o’ dawn, or even pre-dawn—but it felt like the middle of the night to Alan-on-the-Moor and Garth. Shaken awake, half-dragged from their sleeping-bags by John, they were cautioned to silence by his narrowed yellow eyes, his finger to his lips and hoarsely whispered, “Some damn fool, aye! Up and away, lads. Up and away …”
Then deeper into the woods where the snow hadn’t reached, and the grey light filtered itself through an evergreen canopy of branches. All three men treading lightly, never a twig snapped or bird disturbed; and whoever followed just as quiet, even eerily so, so that Auld John had to admit: “They’re tike—ah dinnae ken—ghosts, these yins! It was Ferenczys called on me, modern types. But these yins have tae be Drakuls! Probably patrollin’ the roads and found mah car.”
And he was right, but they wouldn’t know for certain for a while yet.
After less than a mile, where the ground rose steeply into the first craggy ramparts of the Cairngorms, the trails petered out. But the way was as familiar as his own handwriting to Auld John, and soon the three came to a sheer cliff rearing some two hundred feet or more to a green-clad rim.
“Up there, a broad ledge like a wee false plateau,” John whispered. “Some mile and a half long by a quarter-mile broad. There’s bonnie fat deer runnin’ wild, and no man alive today who ever saw them except mahsel’ … And one woman. Now quiet as ye go. There’s a chimney just along here.”
At which Alan-on-the-Moor paused, held up a finger, sniffed the air. And: “Something …” he grunted.
Auld John’s nod. “Ye’re pretty guid, Alan. It’s that same damn something—or someone—who has been on our trail since first light. But man, yere senses are alive! And we both know why. It’s the full moon, Alan! Yere blood answers tae it, and yere senses, too.”
Moments later found them at the chimney, a vertical fault in the face that climbed through creeper, hanging foliage and dusty cavelets into the heights. “Easy as pie,” Alan-on-the-Moor grunted, squinting upwards, while young Garth nodded his agreement.
“The first half, for sure,” John told them. “After that, there are pitons where the face tends tae overhang a mite. As yere fingers feel the cold, so yere grip weakens. We’re lucky the weather has let up some. We’ll rope-up on a ledge Ah ken frae a dozen climbs. Then Ah hope tae show ye a wee trick.”
“They’re close now,” Alan glanced sharp-eyed back through the undergrowth. “If they have guns, they could pick us off.”
“But if they’re wanting tae find the dog-Lord,” Auld John reminded him, “they will’nae want tae pick us off. Anyway, we have nae choice. So the faster we go the better.”
They climbed to his ledge, one hundred and thirty feet up the cliff face, where they quickly roped-up. Looking down, the foot of the cliff was lost below dangling creepers, crevice-grown shrubs and the canopy of the forest. “So, they’ll no be shooting at us after a’,” John commented. “And now, hush!”
He took a coil of rope from his shoulder, let out a good length, lobbed a smaller coil out into the dim light and down into the woods. And: “There,” he said. “It’ll fall a’most tae the bottom.” And he tied it off on a rusty piton.
The two newcomers glanced at each other with puzzled expressions but said nothing. And then they waited, until Alan tried to whisper: “They’re closing in!” But John stopped him with a grip of steel from fingers that dug deep in the flesh of his shoulder.
“Still now,” he muttered. “Dinnae shake the rope. They’ll think we were in such a hurry we left it a-dangle. Nice o’ us, eh?” (His wolfish grin. And a minute or so later): “See! What did ah tell ye?” The rope went taut, vibrating very slightly as someone tested its strength.
Down below, under the forest’s canopy, three men dressed in ex-Army, camouflage-green combat suits examined disturbed undergrowth in the wake of Auld John’s party. And Singra Singh Drakesh looked up into the tangle, narrowed his eyes, frowned and hauled on the rope.
Flanking Singh, the two remaining Tibetan thralls seemed eager to climb; containing themselves, they waited on his word. Drakesh’s lieutenant out of India was cautious, however. He had been taught something of a lesson by this Bonnie Jean Mirlu and her people, and he was still stinging from it. But up there in the heights, three of them were making for the lair of the dog-Lord Radu even now, and this could be his chance for revenge—and his chance to discover Radu, still weak from his centuries of sleep.
He sent his greedy, avidly writhing thoughts up into the gloom. The telepathic aether was heavy with woif-taint—from which his probes recoiled! Probably just their stinking trail. But no thoughts at all to mention, or at best only the fading echoes of thoughts.
Which was correct, for John and the others weren’t thinking at all, just holding their breath and waiting. And:
“Go, then!” Singra Singh Drakesh hissed, watching his men slide upwards out of sight, one after the other. Vampires—or vampire thralls at least—they seemed to flow up the rope; the chimney’s vegetation was barely stirred by their passing. Below them, Singh followed their progress for a moment or two; then, as they disappeared, he sent out another probe.
Was there … something there? A feeling of … anticipation? At his place in India Singh kept Venus Flytraps. Their unconscious voraciousness—their subsistence on lesser lives—had always fascinated him. Plants, they had no thoughts as such, but there was this same aura about them. Like the trapdoor spider, lying in wait.
Lying in wait … ?
At which Singh sprang alert, calling out to his men where they’d reached Auld John’s ledge. And his trap!
The three men on the ledge heard Singh?
??s cry of warning simultaneous with the emergence of arms and a shaved head rising into sight at the rim of the ledge. Then Auld John stepped forward, grunting: “And it’s good morning to ye—ye slit-eyed yellow bastard!”—as he drove the toe of a climbing boot deep into the Drakul’s gaping, sharp-toothed maw. Teeth splintered, blood spurted, in the moment before the Drakul fell; and below him the second Tibetan clung tight to the crack in the rock as his colleague’s body hurtled by.
Then the second man was frantically wedging his foot in a crevice, and trapping the rope under one arm as he tried to unsling an automatic weapon from his shoulder. And he had somehow managed it, had even started to bring the muzzle of the machine pistol to bear on the trio of faces looking down on him—when Auld John casually drew his razor-sharp clasp knife across the taut rope.
Wedged in a crevice, the Drakul’s ankle snapped before his foot came loose. One sharp and weirdly alien cry, as he fell in a tangle of rope and leafy debris; and one short burst of machine-gun fire that buzzed harmlessly off into empty air and only served to accelerate his fall. And Auld John nodded his approval, wagged the sliced end of the rope at his friends, and said: “So then. A wee trick. And now let’s get on …”
Down below, spreadeagled to the cliff face, wide-eyed and trembling in rage and disbelief, Singra Singh cursed under his breath as the last of his thralls smashed down into rocks long since fallen from on high, and was broken by them. Even Singh himself would have been broken by such a fall; if not fatally, then most sorely. But these Tibetans were mere thralls; their bones were splintered and their flesh pulped. And Singh was on his own.
Orders were orders, however, and at the Drakesh Monastery the last true Drakul would expect them to be carried out—to the last. Singra Singh was the last, of this group anyway. And he was not a man to be confounded or ridiculed by mere thralls … and dog-thralls at that!
And there and then he vowed it: that his Master would be proud of him yet. He would have to be, if Singh was ever again to meet him face to face. But for now—there were other ways up this cliff, he was sure. A lieutenant for long and long, he would find one. For him the climb would be as easy as taking a walk through the woods.
After that, well, the rest might not be so easy—but it was definitely preferable to explaining to his Master the many fine details of his several failures …
PART 5
Revivals and Devolutions
I
RADU: RESURGENT. THE SIEGE AT AULD JOHN’S.
ATOP THE CLIFF, ON THE FALSE PLATEAU BEFORE THE MIGHTY BULK OF THE Cairngorms commenced their true assault on the sky, John’s party jog-trotted through woods mainly undisturbed for centuries. They headed north-west to the foot of a higher, much more difficult climb. But again John knew a route up the apparently sheer face, following which they would make easy going across a gradually climbing terrain of weathered rock, crevice-clinging heathers, crusted, snow-filled depressions, and rare, slanting, wind-blasted pines.
It was ten-thirty in the morning before they reached that higher elevation, the severe, undulating, boulder-littered but mainly open dome of the rock—the Cairngorm “stone rising in or from the woods”—but they’d covered the ground in half the time it would take the best of ordinary men.
“Six miles, now,” said John, getting his second wind as he paused to adjust the small pack on his back. “Rough ground and uphill a’ the way, but no more than an hour and a bit tae such as we three. Last time Ah was here, the place was a’ under the snow; white over, and cold tae freeze yere bones! A hell o’ a climb, and going down even worse. Ah had … injured mahsel—a wee cut, ye ken?—Ah’d lost a little blood. Anyway, this is much easier. But avoid the iced-over snow in they hollows, and watch for cracks in this auld rock. Where we’re going the rock gets more rotten the farther we go, and some o’ they crevasses go down forever!”
He led the way, and the stony ground—and as often naked rock—flew under their booted feet. There was no recognizable track that John’s companions could see, but he was the tracker, not them. And to Auld John’s eyes there was a track as clear as day. Made by a light, fleet foot it headed north-east, and John knew that in following it he’d find the best possible route. Of course he would; the trail had been tried and tested times without number.
Aye, fleet o’ foot and fair o’ face—but a cheat for a’ that, who would even cheat on the greatest o’ them a’! Bonnie by name, but no by design. Oh, it was a great shame. Ah, well. Move over, wee lassie, for there’s a man here the noo, and the wolf’s no much longer in his lair …
One minute the air was clear and clean, only the whistle of the wind through leaning crags and the scratch of blown heather … and the next—
—The helicopter seemed to come out of nowhere, rising up over the rim of rock only a half-mile away, and the whup, whup, whup of its rotors reached out to them on a rising scale. “Hell and damnation!” Auld John cursed, as he flung himself down in a scoop of rock. And: “To me, ye fucking eejits!” he yelled. “Eh? Dinnae just stand there gawping!”
Alan-on-the-Moor and young Garth joined him, as John ripped a great swath of heather from its roots to cover and camouflage his body. They quickly followed suit, huddled together, lay still. And the helicopter buzzed closer across the roof of the mountain, and seemed to descend directly towards them.
“Ah might o’ known,” John moaned. “A bleddy whirlybird, o’ course! How else were such as they tae get up here, eh?”
“Do you think they saw us?” Alan gasped.
“Ah dinnae ken. We’d be like ants to they, for sure. Aye, but the only ants tae be seen! We’d stick out like sore thumbs if they were looking in the right direction. But we were down pretty damn quick. Ah simply dinnae ken …” And:
“Here they come!” said Garth.
They came … and went. The helicopter passed almost directly overhead, flew on uninterrupted in the direction of Montrose. Auld John sighed his relief—then cursed again, “Bleddy hell!”—as he stood, tossed heather aside and brushed himself down. His companions followed suit.
“But a helicopter, here?” Alan looked angry, suspicious, afraid.
“Aye,” said John. “Mah thoughts exactly—at first sight. But now: it looks like she was frae Aviemore: some poor sod who could’nae ski straight. On his way tae have his bones fixed in Montrose or Aberdeen. But man, mah heart was in mah mouth!”
While in the helicopter:
Disgusted, Frank Potenza stuffed binoculars into a padded container in the cabin wall, picked up and lovingly fingered a high-velocity rifle with a sniperscope, and whispered in Italian, “What an opportunity! Hey, Luigi. Did you see them lying there? I could have taken them out before they even knew I was firing on them. And you know something? I’m probably going to hate myself forever that I didn’t, if only for Vincent’s sake.” Tall, gaunt, vicious, yet paradoxically feminine in his mannerisms and movements, Potenza spoke to the pilot, Luigi Manoza.
“I saw them,” Manoza answered. “But you know as well as I do what Francesco told us to do if we sighted anyone. Unless it was the woman, let it be. Let them go where they’re going. Sure it’s important that we saw them, but their direction of travel is more important yet. Francesco thinks he knows where the dog-Lord is, approximately. You saw them, fine … but I saw where they were heading before they got down. And it looks like Francesco’s right. It’s the same area, some four, five miles northeast of here. That’s where he picked up Radu’s scent the first time we were out.”
“So,” Potenza whispered, “if we’re sure we know the location of this dog-bastard’s lair, why can’t we knock his people over? I mean, why wait? Vincent is dead—I mean, he’s really dead! If it was up to me, I’d take these fuckers out here and now. It would be like swatting flies.”
“You worry too much over Vincent Ragusa,” Manoza told him. “And I don’t think Francesco worries about him at all! Vincent was your boss, OK—your immediate superior—but he was also a pain in the ass. That’s why he
’s dead. He didn’t listen. The moral of my story is, stop being a pain in the ass. The Francezci is pretty good at swatting flies, too. Know what I mean?”
“Huh!” said the other, as Manoza lost altitude, swung the helicopter over and headed north. “Now what?”
“Now we’re going where I think they’re going,” the stubby Manoza grunted. “I’ll stay low, you’ll see if you can spot any suspicious or identifying features or landmarks, anything that looks like an entrance. Wolves hole up in caves, you know? And you can also try to spot a decent, level landing place.”
“We’re going down?”
Manoza sighed, shook his head in mock despair. “No, we’re not going down! Not yet, anyway. When we do it’ll be in force. I just want to know where I’m going to land at that time.”
“Huh!” Potenza said again. “Why all this muscle? Against these people? I mean, they’re just people! Not even thralls!”
“They’re thralls of a sort,” Manoza answered. “Francesco calls them ‘moon-children,’ dedicated to Radu, and their blood has the wolf-taint. Also, they’re not ‘just’ people. Certainly not the woman. We can’t push them around like it’s a big night out in Palermo. They push back—hard! They sure pushed Vincent, anyway.”
There was no answer to that, so Potenza kept quiet.
Skirting higher ground, putting it between his machine and the dog-Lord’s people, Manoza followed the crack of a ravine in the area where Francesco had sensed … something. And: “OK,” he told Potenza. “Keep your eyes peeled. This is it—or close enough it makes no difference.”
As Manoza laid the chopper over on its side and circled the ravine with its ribbon of water foaming at the bottom, Potenza looked down. “Crevasses,” he whispered in that way of his. “And potholes, too. On the roof, some hollows full of water; others that look bottomless. In the ravine, the face of that cliff is riddled. The whole place looks rotten, ready to cave in.”