The helicopter rolled a little, and Moreen’s arm flopped across Harry’s face. He felt it there, and knew it for what it was. Then the icy blast hit him again, and not only in his soul but physically. A blast from the open door, and the whup, whup, whup! of the chopper’s rotors finally getting through to him.
Harry gave a single spastic kick, yelled out loud, jerked awake! He scrambled half-way to his feet, fell to his knees as whip-crack lightning flashes from the back of his head threatened to engulf him again.
McGowan and Dancer flanked him, grabbed his arms, yanked him moaning upright. In the red glow of the cabin lights, hanging onto a ceiling strap, Francesco Francezci grinned directly into his face and said, “Hallo, whoever you fucking are—and goodbye!” Hejerked his head to indicate the open door and the end of Harry’s life.
Disoriented, the Necroscope let himself be dragged to the door. Then, seeing what had been planned for him, he might have fought, but it was too late. As they catapulted him into space, McGowan leaned his devil’s face out after him a little way and grinned from ear to ear—for a moment.
Then he stopped grinning, gave a wild shriek—and came tumbling after!
While in the aircraft, Francesco took the safety off the machine-pistol slung over his shoulder, cursed and brought the weapon up into the firing position, and let fly point-blank with a spray of bullets … directly into the naked back of an entirely dead Moreen! Dead, with her tongue and heart ripped out, her blood stolen, and her body ravaged, but “alive” enough to have clawed herself up off the floor and to have pushed Angus McGowan out into thin air! And Harry hadn’t even asked.
Devastated by the spray of bullets—almost cut in half, hurled forward, projected out of the door—she was only a rag doll again fluttering in the down-blast. And her last words to the Necroscope were:
It seems I left it too long. Sorry, Harry …
But: Don’t be, he told her, falling. And don’t worry, you won’t be alone. The dead may take their time, but they’ll talk to you eventually. And so will I when I get the chance.
His first thought was to conjure a Möbius door, but then he saw McGowan angling towards him. The little man was falling like a genuine sky-diver, with arms and legs forming something of an aerofoil. And Harry remembered from what Ianson had told him that this one had been a lieutenant for a long time. Even as he watched, McGowan’s body was flattening, more surely gliding. And his arms were stretching, reaching. Extending towards Harry!
And his face! His mad eyes blazing, triumphant! His jaws gaping, wider and wider! And his teeth elongating, curving up out of riven, bleeding gums. His hands were hooked into claws, and they were only inches away …
… When Harry mouthed, “So you’re the devil himself, are you? Well then, welcome to hell, Watcher!”
And opening a door directly beneath his falling body, the Necroscope plunged through it. But only McGowan’s arms, sliced through above the elbows, went with him. Hot blood sprayed and Harry held up an arm to deflect its red jet. Then it was over, and he was hanging there as limp as a rag, cold, damp, motionless, but safe now in the nothingness of the Möbius Continuum.
While in the universe he’d just left, McGowan howled his agony and his helplessness, waved his scarlet stumps, and went plummeting into a rocky gorge a thousand feet below.
If someone were cruel enough to hurl a garden snail onto a concrete slab, he would get much the same result.
George Ianson could rest easier now, Moreen, too, and many another with them …
And in the helicopter:
Shocked rigid, astonished, Guy Tanziano stood frozen beside the open door. And even more ashen than usual, Francesco slumped back into his seat and said, “Shut the fucking thing!” And: “Did you see that? Or am I going mad? That girl …”
“What happened?” At the controls, Luigi Manoza had caught very little of the action.
“She was alive,” Dancer mumbled stupidly, sliding the cabin door shut and turning the locking handle.
“No,” Francesco got a grip on himself, snarled low in his throat. “She was dead meat. But … I don’t know. He—they?—had seemed to be talking to each other!” And to himself: Didn’t Angelo tell us that he talks to dead people?
“Maybe …” said Dancer. “Er, maybe …”
“Maybe what?” The Francezci spoke as if to himself; he was scarcely able to believe what had happened.
“Maybe she’d been a thrall, even a lieutenant, longer than we thought.”
“What?” But suddenly Francesco was seeing Dancer in a new light. For “maybe” he was right at that! No maybe about it; he had to be right. The girl had been a fully-fledged vampire, and this had been her last shot at metamorphism. Nothing to do with life or intelligence, just the vampire stuff inside her hanging on to dear life. But no longer. By now she’d be so much slop.
“What? I mean, what?” Luigi Manoza’s chubby white face was still staring back into the passenger cabin.
The Francezci looked at him and said, “McGowan’s gone. An accident. Now there are just the three of us …”
It had been the fastest climb of B.J.’s life, as if everything else she had done, every moment of practice on a hundred cliff faces, but especially on this one, had been trial runs for the one big effort. Like an athlete who holds himself in reserve for the big race, B.J. had held herself back for this one.
Even handicapped by climbing with Sandra—to whom, for the last thirteen years, B.J. had been teaching everything she knew—still she had outdone herself. For the last hour or so, however, Sandra had been flagging; B.J. had more or less dragged her through the final stages of the ascent. But where she had been Sandra’s life-support system on the inhospitable, often vertical granite faces, Sandra would be hers when at last she stood face to face with her terrible Master—or her ex-Master, as she kept reminding herself.
For where B.J. was expert with her naked hands—as well as with the despised ropes and pitons of the climber—Sandra was a crack shot. And in her small pack she carried a pistol loaded with very special ammunition: silver bullets that B.J. had never believed she would use except against her mortal or near-immortal enemies. But what the hell … the dog-Lord was her enemy now, else he would surely have contacted her before this! But here the full moon lit their way and Radu’s redoubt no more than a slight overhang and a narrow rocky ledge away, and still the psychic aether was as empty of living thoughts as a crumbling ruin.
Or perhaps not. For every now and then—briefly, as a ripple on water, or a riffle through the pages of her mind—B.J. would feel an observer where there could not possibly be one. But it wasn’t Radu, no. For she would know his mind, his feral feel, his mental musk, anywhere.
If Radu was up—if Auld John and the others had had any success in raising him from the resin—then the dog-Lord was keeping very quiet about it. And so B.J. must be mistaken. It had to be the proximity of the redoubt, preying on her mind.
She took a small grapple from her belt, sprang its tines and swung it up into the riven rock some twelve feet overhead. It caught at once, and she tried her weight on it while still clinging tight to the cliff face. No problem; she’d done this a hundred times before. She braced her feet, climbed hand over hand to the overhang, reached across it and drew herself up on to the ledge. Eight feet overhead, the grapple was still firmly wedged. And:
“Sandra,” she called down softly. “You climb, I’ll pull.”
The girl at once obeyed. And she was on the rope, bracing her legs, leaning back into space and looking up at B.J. when it happened.
Sandra’s eyes went wide; she saw beyond B.J., and uttered a small gasp that had nothing at all to do with her exertions. B.J. rolled on her side and looked up. Above her ledge, a hole or cave in the honeycombed rock—it, too, must penetrate into the mountain, but on a slightly higher level. And looking down on her out of the mouth of the cave, over the rim of the rock, the vicious visage of an Asiatic—a Drakul! And:
Revenge! Singra S
ingh Drakesh thought, directly into B.J.’s mind, as he sliced through the rope. Revenge for mine that your people broke on the rocks of this selfsame mountain!
B.J. had the rope in her hands, but Sandra had panicked. Now she dangled there, with all of her weight on the rope that slid ever faster through B.J.’s fingers. And she couldn’t trap it! Blood spurted where the rope cut, lubricating its passage, until the sliced end whipped between her fingers and was gone. And Sandra gone with it, a small frightened figure twirling in darkness, down to the black river where it frothed at the bottom of the gorge. As quick as that …
B.J. stuck her legs deep into the narrow slit of the rubble-littered natural “window” at the back of her ledge, looked up again, and panted: “You, you bastard—you’ re a dead man!”
On his belly, Singra Singh looked down on her, and said, “I think not.” His knife had been put away but now he dragged something else into view.
Seeing the blued-steel muzzle of an ugly machine-pistol, B.J. scrambled to turn her body out of the line of fire, draw herself under the lip of rock into the labyrinthine system of caves that she knew lay within. But her gear snagged on something, trapping her, and Singh’s thin lips formed a grinning gash in his face where they drew back from needle teeth. Taking his time, he lined up his sights …
… And a growling voice in both of their minds, that yet spoke to Singra Singh, said: You are by far the lesser of two evils, true, but you are closer to hand. And by preference, I would kill a Drakul every time before a Lykan. Even a treacherous bitch like that one!
Then … something crunched. It crunched so loud and clear that B.J. could almost feel it: the snapping of bones. And the agonized, tortured look on Singra Singh’s face said it all, as he dropped his weapon and flopped like a beached fish … then began to slide backwards, dragged effortlessly into his cave!
B.J. knew what had him, but had to see it for herself:
That monstrous paw that reached out over his head to catch it in the raking hooks of three-inch talons, and snatch it out of view. And the Drakul’s death-cry rising up and up, “Ah! Ah! Ahhh!” before it shuddered into an awful silence.
Then, galvanized by her terror, B.J. struggled free of the opening and into the redoubt. And slipping into the darkness of mazy caverns and corridors that no other person had ever known so well, she took her crossbow from her belt, opened its wings and nocked it, slid a bolt into place on the tiller. With Sandra gone, the crossbow was her only weapon against all the pent-up horror and lust of six centuries.
And her single advantage, for what it was worth, was that now she had only herself to worry about …
III
IN RADU’S REDOUBT. HARRY AND THE DOG-LORD.
THAT WAS OUR BIGGEST FEAR, SIR KEENAN TOLD HARRY, SHORTLY AFTER THE Necroscope emerged from the Möbius Continuum at Auld John’s place. That the interface would cause a complete and final mental breakdown. Thank God we were wrong!
But Harry had never been too sure about God, and so answered, “I prefer to thank Nostradamus, and maybe Mesmer. I’m not sure what Mesmer did, but I think he eased the way for me. Nostradamus took a chance—and again I’m not too sure about a lot of the stuff he told me—but in making me work some of it out for myself he provided the cure. The way I see it, it’s easy to be scared of the unknown. But once you begin to understand what you are dealing with, then it gets easier.”
Your mother said as much, Sir Keenan told him.
And Harry nodded. “If I had been hit with the whole thing, all at one time, I’m pretty sure I would have lost it, totally. But bit by bit I could take it. And not only that, but I’m mad as hell! I mean, angry mad.”
And this time it was me who said as much, Sir Keenan said, worriedly. But not so mad that you’ll start taking chances?
“I’ll do what I have to,” Harry answered. “And now I have to make myself useful. Please excuse me …”
He found his belt and munitions where B.J. had tossed them under a bush close to the house, and re-equipped himself. Also, he looked for and pocketed the cigarette lighter dropped by the Ferenczy thrall when he had shot him. After that there was only one thing left to do, one place to go, and he believed he knew the exact location. For when B.J. had told him—or re-told him—about the Wamphyri, she had awakened certain memories, too.
One of them was about a dream he’d had, or a premonition; or, since it had been a long time, even years ago, when the Necroscope had been new to Alec Kyle’s body, maybe it had been one of Kyle’s glimpses out of the future. Whichever, he had visited Radu’s redoubt and stood by the dog-Lord’s sarcophagus. And now he need only recall that specific scene to mind and the co-ordinates were there, rock solid in his renewed, repaired and even refreshed memory.
Climb to the lair? He had no doubt that he could, but that was for people who knew no other way. Harry’s way was simply to go there.
And taking a deep breath, he prepared to do just that …
Francesco Francezci, Guy Tanziano and Luigi Manoza found Auld John’s rope still dangling into the pothole where he had left it, and clambered down into darkness. Vampires, they found no great difficulty in the climb; the lack of daylight was hardly problematic; the light of the full moon and the coldly enigmatic stars lit their way through the first stage, and when they were down into the labyrinth their eyes quickly adjusted. The Francezci’s eyes flared red, and those of the others were the sulphur yellow of vampire thralls.
They went carefully, soundlessly at first. Radu’s redoubt wasn’t what they had expected. It seemed rough, uninhabitable, deserted—it seemed deserted, at least. Its many levels were hollow and echoing; the deeper they penetrated, the more constant and life-sustaining the temperature, which was typical of cavern complexes world-wide. Overall, the silence, both physical and psychic, was utter.
“The three we saw,” Tanziano whispered hoarsely, “the old tracker and his friends: they were definitely headed this way. And then there’s that rope. Somebody came down here.”
“Obviously,” said Francesco. “But that was hours ago, and they could just as easily have left. On the other hand … perhaps something stopped them from leaving. Radu has been down a long time, with little or no sustenance to see him through the centuries. Personally, I shall be interested to see how he did it. But now, waking, he would have his needs—immediate needs, I mean. And while you may not smell it, to me this place stinks of wolf! So, it could be that he’s resting—after taking food? Anyway, let’s keep it quiet. Sound will travel a long way down here, and thoughts go further and faster yet. So as of now you would be wise to guard your thoughts, and if you feel or sense anything at all …” He looked at his thralls, nodded meaningfully, and left the rest unspoken.
They followed footprints, occasionally mere scuff marks in places where the dust of centuries lay thin on the naked stone. After a while, descending a steep passage to a floor of broken flags laid in a rough crazy-paving fashion, Tanziano pointed a blunt finger, grunted, “Two sets of tracks, going in both directions.”
Francesco nodded, and whispered, “But the majority go this way.” He eased back the cocking handle on his machine-pistol so that the distinctive ch-ching as it engaged was kept to a minimum of noise. And the others followed suit.
They were down now onto the floor of the main cavern, into the lair itself, and every one of Francesco’s vampire instincts told him it was so. But he still couldn’t detect the dog-Lord himself. He was here, certainly—wolf-musk lay thick in Francesco’s mind, almost as if he felt it on his skin—but Radu’s actual location remained unknown.
Anthony Francezci (had he been here) would not have found this surprising. Through greater contact with his father, Anthony had learned far more of Wamphyri history than his brother; he knew that two thousand years ago in Starside, the dog-Lord was already a powerful telepath. He could control his thoughts—disappear from the mental aether—as surely as Angelo Ferenczy himself. But Tony Francezci wasn’t here … and this was the last place he w
ould want to be despite that he had assured his brother of his coming triumph …
Following the major trail of prints and scuffs, eventually the trio came to Radu’s sarcophagus atop its dais of piled debris. Here the wolf-taint was thick, if only to Francesco. But something of the eeriness of the place—its pregnant silence perhaps, or distant, monotonous, almost musical drip of water—had got through to Guy Tanziano.
Tugging on Francesco’s sleeve where the Francezci looked up at the great stone coffin, he whispered, “This place makes the pit back at Le Manse Madonie feel downright friendly!”
Francesco shrugged him off, scowled at his obvious reluctance. “Stay here then, and watch our backs,” he said. And with a twitch of his head he indicated that Manoza should accompany him up to the sarcophagus. Leaving Tanziano at the foot of the pile, the two climbed to the dais’s platform and lit the stubs of several torches in their sconces. Then, stepping across the pooled resin, they carried on up to the rim of Radu’s coffin.
“Shit!” said Manoza then, gazing down on what the bath of gluey yellow fluids contained. But Francesco only grinned, and used the folded butt of his weapon to prod the pair of corpses where they lay half-submerged in the resin.
“I was right,” he said. “He’s not only awake but he’s up, and he’s hungry. He was hungry, anyway …”
One of the corpses was that of a young man; nothing extraordinary about him, except the wolf-taint. “Moon-child,” Francesco commented. “Drained to the last drop, and drowned in the resin just to be sure that Radu’s bite wouldn’t take. The dog-Lord isn’t making lieutenants—not just yet, anyway. And this other one—a Drakul, definitely. Asiatic, a full-fledged lieutenant and leader of his group. Which tells me that his group is probably no more. He would be the last to go.”
And Manoza murmured, in something of awe, “His back’s like a ‘Z.’ And those knife marks go right through to his skull. And he’s missing his heart! It’s like he went through the cogs of a big machine!”