“Not knife marks,” Francesco shook his head. “Claw marks.”
While down at the foot of the stack Tanziano gave a start and turned in a jerky circle, his eyes swivelling this way and that as they tried to follow a shadow that seemed to leap from wall to wall and surface to surface in the flickering light of the torches. Until finally his gaze rested on a vertical crack in the cavern’s wall, where for a moment the torchlight seemed reflected by twin points of red.
And gritting his teeth, nodding his bullet head and unnoticed by his companions, Dancer pointed his weapon ahead of him, moved in that direction …
… While the Francezci said to Manoza: “It’s like I told you it would be: the bloodwar is on and they’ve already engaged each other. Somewhere in this maze, we’ll find the rest of them—those you observed on their way here, the woman and the last of her girls, and of course the dog-Lord Radu—if they haven’t killed each other off already! We can always hope, eh?” He turned, glanced down to the foot of the pile, and started to say: “Guy, now we’re going to follow that other set of—
“—Tracks? Guy? Dancer?” His voice came echoing back, but that was all. Tanziano wasn’t there.
The Francezci and Manoza scrambled down to the floor, and Francesco called: “Dancer? Where the hell … ?” And it was as if the cavern had been waiting for just such a question.
“Where the hell … ? Where the … ? Where … ?” it echoed.
And then something that wasn’t an echo, but a hoarse whisper—yet sharp and clear as a shout to their enhanced hearing. And not only in Francesco’s ears, but in his mind: “Oh, indeed! Where the hell. But the hell is here, Ferenczy scum!”
“Wolf!” Francesco snarled, as that cough, bark, rumble of sound faded in his head. He and Manoza stood back to back and stared into shadows left and right. Nothing moved—for a moment. Until suddenly something was lobbed out from behind a massive, natural column of rock. It spun lazily in the smoky air, landed soggily on the rough-hewn flags, slid a little way, and left a red trail. It was an arm, torn off at the shoulder like a chicken joint, with all of the ligaments, the flesh and tendons of the right shoulder and breast attached. And it was still clad in the sleeves of Guy “Dancer” Tanziano’s parka, jacket, and shirt!
The howling, when it came, was an anticlimax. But more than howling, Francesco knew it was also laughter. And reverberating in his mind as well as through the maze of caverns, it bounced from wall to wall and nerve-ending to nerve-ending like an out-of-kilter dervish.
“Howling!” Manoza said, unnecessarily.
“And laughter!” Francesco snarled. “The bastard’s laughing at us!”
“I only heard the howling,” said Manoza, visibly shaken. He looked at the Francezci wide- and wild-eyed. “Francesco, are we nuts or something? What the fuck are we doing here?”
Francesco indicated the massive column of rock. “I’ll take this side, you take the other. Circle the column, stay close to the rock, and fire at anything that moves.”
But as they came together on the other side without seeing anything: Far too late, too slow, came that deep dark rumble of a voice in Francesco’s mind. Three of you came down here—came of your own free will—but now there are only two. Soon, only you and I, Ferenczy. Are you afraid?
For a moment it was as if Francesco had been slapped in the face. Then he snarled out loud, “What, afraid of a halfling? Of a dog-thing? If you’re such a menace, such a threat, Radu, then why not do it here, now, face to face?” It was part-bravado and part something else. For he had sensed—what, frustration? Or desperation?—something, in the dog-Lord’s bluster. Something behind it that he was trying to cover up.
And Radu knew that he had sensed it. The telepathic contact he’d established had conveyed far more than he had wanted Francesco to know. And the dog-Lord’s growl became a furious whine as he withdrew his probe.
Francesco turned to Manoza, who was looking at him as if he were mad. “Oh? What now?” the Francezci scowled.
“You were … you were talking to him!” Manoza said. “You were challenging him. But he’s not here.”
Francesco grinned his humourless grin. “Of course he has moved on, Luigi—gone from here because he’s afraid—but he heard me well enough. And I challenged him because he is weak. Radu is ill! He’s sick from his hibernation, from the waking, from disease, and from time itself. This is one sick old wolf, and his only advantage is his familiarity with this damn labyrinth. But his thoughts give him away. They’re like a beacon to me. Come on, follow the trail …”
It was a trail of blood: Dancer’s blood—which after a handful of paces came to an abrupt end at his body, where his legs stuck out from behind a slab of rock. His fat tongue had been ripped half from its roots, dragged forward to block his mouth and stop him crying out. His back was broken; his heart had been torn out through a gaping hole in his chest and shattered ribs.
“Holy … !” said Luigi Manoza, his throat bobbing with the effort of gathering saliva to get the one word out.
“Holy?” Francesco glared at him. “Holy?”
“Holy shit!” Manoza finally gasped. He was a vampire, but he was only a thrall. And this was the work of something else. Wamphyri, but different again from Francesco.
Ahead, an interior rock wall was split into twin tunnels. Tracks went into both of them. “You can see in the dark,” the Francezci reminded the badly shaken Manoza. “You have a superior weapon. You can pump twenty-five rounds a second into this bastard! Get into that tunnel. If the trail peters out, come back to this point. And I shall do likewise. Now move!”
Manoza moved. But only a few stumbling paces into the tunnel he saw an irregular patch of light far overhead, and to one side blocks of stone piled into steps, with more steps cut into the wall leading to what looked like the arch of a natural rock causeway. Everything led upwards and out of here, which seemed to Manoza a very good place to be.
The Francezci would kill him, if he didn’t get killed himself. But right now, not knowing what Francesco knew or thought he knew, Manoza considered that a distinct possibility. And the chopper was up there. And light, and air, and freedom. And down here: the true death, in the shape of a terror out of time. Not much of a choice—especially with that growling voice in his mind, urging him: Run, little man, run! Save yourself, for your master is as good as dead!
And with a hammering heart Manoza ran, or rather climbed, and a gibbering horror seemed right behind him all the way . .
In the Continuum, Harry had thought twice about it. And in the end he hadn’t taken the Möbius route directly into Radu’s lair. For one thing his olden dream or preview forbade it. More than a dream, that had been a nightmare! And for another, he wanted to see what was going on up there on the mountain. With Drakul and Ferenczy involvement it could and most probably would be a minefield. And so he had gone in stages, from false plateau to ledge to rocky butte, and finally to the dome of the mountain.
There he had found the helicopter deserted on flat ground close to a huge fissure in the pitted rock. A rope dangled into another, smaller pothole close by, and he rightly supposed that this had been the Ferenczy gang’s route into the lair. But knowing they were equipped with high-powered weapons, and likewise their advantage in the dark, he hadn’t followed them or tried jumping ahead of them. And despite that the Necroscope’s heart was in his mouth for Bonnie Jean—though in truth he couldn’t say why—still he’d sat it out for more than half an hour to see what would happen.
Now he was more cold and anxious than ever, and the moonlit scene was as still as when he’d first arrived here. Still, and quiet—or maybe unquiet—except for the low moaning of a steady breeze that swept across the mountain’s dome. Quiet, yes … Or perhaps not.
He was close to the pothole entrance when he saw the rope go taut and heard a distant panting. Then the vibration of the rope as someone climbed into view. By then Harry had moved back into the cover of a clump of rocks, but when the stubby man who
climbed out of the pothole headed for the helicopter he stepped into view. The man was in a hurry and failed to see him. Reaching the airplane, he yanked open a door in the machine’s side.
Harry couldn’t see him too well, didn’t recognize him and wanted to be sure of who he was and what was going on here. So he called out: “Hey, you!”
Luigi Manoza’s answer might easily have cut him in pieces. Whirling, the thug opened up with his machine-pistol, and lead—and a little silver—buzzed like a cloud of angry wasps all around. Most of the rounds were wasted, trapped by the Möbius door that Harry erected as Manoza spun and went into a crouch. The ones that went wide of the door were the ones that buzzed. And now Harry could be sure of what he was dealing with.
But Manoza couldn’t. He had fired on someone, had used up half a magazine on him from a distance of some forty or forty-five feet away—and that someone, or thing, was still on its feet and hadn’t even moved! That was more than enough for Manoza. Scrambling aboard the airplane, he slammed the door shut after him and threw himself into the pilot’s chair. The flick of a handful of switches, the pressure of the thug’s thumb on the starter button, and the engine coughed into life. Then the vanes began their whup … whuup … whuuup air-slicing revolutions, quickly blurring into a shining fan whose draught bounced the machine on its pontoons.
Taking out a transmitter from one of his pouches, extending the aerial, Harry waited for the helicopter to drift just an inch or two off the ground, then pressed the button. At the chopper’s tail-end just below the lateral fan, a magnetic mine consisting of a detonator and four ounces of plastic exploded, blew the fan off, and sent the airplane crazy. She keeled over and snapped a pontoon, rolled the other way and forwards until the vanes hit the deck and snapped off in razor-sharp sections. One such section shot in through the windscreen and pinned Manoza to his seat, holding him there while the chopper skittered like a singed moth to the edge of the fissure. It tilted for a moment, stood in a ballet-dancer pose on one pontoon, and fell. A count of four and the fuel tanks blew, and seventy gallons of avgas made a blast that shook the rock under the Necroscope’s feet, and a smoke-ring that went up and up, following a tongue of fire that licked fifty feet into the night sky.
Harry nodded grimly to himself. Another Ferenczy down and just two to go, of this mob anyway. Moreover, he had destroyed their escape route. Maybe now it was time he had a look inside Radu’s lair.
As he conjured a Möbius door, another explosion shook the mountain from deep within. And the great fissure vented streamers of black smoke.
Now more than ever the Necroscope was conscious of his error—the fact that he didn’t have a sidearm. His bombs, devastating as they were, and even his grenades weren’t designed for close-quarter combat. On the other hand, what good was a conventional handgun against the Wamphyri? Instead, he palmed a heavy little fragmentation grenade before making his jump.
In his dream, remembered as clearly now as if he’d experienced it just last night, he had seen ragged natural “windows” in the crumbling outer wall of the lair, located at a seemingly “safe” distance from Radu’s sarcophagus. The co-ordinates were clear in his mind as he conjured a door …
… And his dream came to life as he stepped from the Möbius Continuum at one of those precise co-ordinates—barely in time to witness an astonishing occurrence, and one that he had set in motion.
The place was reverberating with distant and not-so-distant echoes, creakings, and groanings; dust settled in rivulets from a ceiling lost in height and darkness, also from various ledges and levels. Even a handful of stony splinters and one or two geometrically shaped slabs of granite came hurtling from on high. But all of this mainly in the unsupported central section of the cavern, not on the perimeter where Harry stood.
Nor was this disturbance finished. There was a continuous metallic grinding, a nerve-shattering screech of tortured metal, which seemed if anything to be getting louder; and, from a huge borehole-like aperture or cave where the dim ceiling curved out of the heights to form an inner wall, an intermittent stream of stony rubble and smoke. But when fire gushed from the hole like a giant’s blowtorch, Harry believed he knew what he was seeing.
Through unknown caverns, stony chutes and rock-slides, the wrecked helicopter had found its way down to this level. And as the blowtorch blaze turned to black smoke and a twisted mass of hot, blistered metal erupted from the hole and smashed down in the cavern’s debris, Harry saw that he was right.
But the glare of the fireball had lit up the whole cavern, and the Necroscope had taken the opportunity to note his position, the best route to Radu’s dais and sarcophagus, and especially the fact that the place seemed void of life. But certainly life had been here. For just a few short paces ahead of him, he had also seen B.J.’s crossbow, still loaded, lying on the floor where she had tossed it—or where it had fallen. Stepping forward he put away his grenade, retrieved the crossbow, refused to dwell on what its discovery meant.
The guttering torches at the base of Radu’s coffin served as his guide, and in a little while he was there. A few moments more, and he would know if the dog-Lord was up and about in the world. But if he wasn’t, then he never would be.
And holding the crossbow waist-high, aiming it ahead, determined to see this thing through to the end, Harry climbed the jumble to its level dais, avoided the slopped resin, and resolutely continued on up to the rim of the great sarcophagus …
The dog-Lord Radu Lykan was finished. He knew it, and had known it even before rising from the resin. It was only since rising that he had come to accept it: that in his current shape he was finished. In his current shape and form, aye. Which was why he had sent Auld John to bring the Mysterious One—his Man-With-Two-Faces—to him in his lair. For the man called Harry Keogh was his one way out of a fix that had stayed with him, stalking him through six long centuries.
But to think of it at any length, to even consider it, was simply too much. That one of the greatest predators of all time, a Lord of the Wamphyri out of Olden Starside—indeed a primal werewolf—should have been brought low by one of the very smallest predators: by the bite of a flea, carried on the back of a rat out of Asia! The Black Death, which had defied even his vampire leech to combat the poison in his otherwise all-conquering system.
He had known it from the moment he crawled from the resin and loped to groom himself in the waterfall near the great vat that contained his warrior creature. Oh, he could still run—especially after feeding (and oh so deliciously) on the blood of a strong man, and the heart and vampire leech of a Drakul!—but even then he had felt the poison coursing in his veins, and had suspected that it was more than just the ache of centuries that gnawed at his bones.
And at the waterfall … he had proved it. The black pustules in his armpits and groin, the texture of his flesh, which no longer answered when he called for metamorphosis but seemed stuck in his wolf shape, and the fire inside called lust—the lust for life, a life that could last forever—which he felt burning low to match the flow of energy.
Energy: he had none. Oh, sufficient to enter the mind of a mere moon-child, and beguile him to suicide, certainly. And then, bolstered by that one’s blood, to pluck the life of some piddling Drakul lieutenant, and tear loose the arm of a trembling Ferenczy thrall. But how much energy did that take? None at all, not to the Wamphyri! Not to a vampire Lord in all the strength of his youth!
Except, where was his youth now? Left behind in a different world, a different time. And his strength? All eaten up by a flea. And his lust for life? But how may one lust with great black lumps in his groin, poison in his piss, and a sure knowledge of his bones crumbling under the ancient leather of his hide?
Yet even now it seemed a scurrilous accusation, to blame all this on a poor flea. For while black-rat fleas had carried the plague, it was a different “bite” entirely that had transferred it into Radu’s system. Until now it seemed there was no way of getting it out. For the resin hadn’t worked ??
? it had merely preserved him, to die later, to die now. And his leech hadn’t worked, for it was dying, too.
For a little while Radu had felt a surge of power as his system converted Garth Trevalin’s life-blood, but every action since then had only served to drain him like a leaking bucket: six drops spilled for every five put in. It couldn’t go on. He was dying, and the rate of his decline was accelerating. Moreover, along with his physical strength, his mental powers were likewise diminished. That was how the Ferenczy, this weak, so-called “sophisticated” modern version of a Lord of the Wamphyri, had seen through his bluster.
But wouldn’t it be the irony of all time—or of six hundred years of time, at least—if Radu were to be destroyed by a Ferenczy? For it was doubtless an ancestor of this Francesco who, all those years ago, first stabbed a plague-ridden corpse, then plunged his sword into Radu. In which case it were better he had died then, than to let a member of the same cursed clan kill him now!
His one chance: Harry Keogh. Metempsychosis into the body and mind of a new or newer man. And then Keogh’s physical conversion into Radu.
And thus Auld John Guiney, sent out upon his most important mission: to bring Keogh here, for Bonnie Jean would not—
—Could not, not in her present condition, position …
But Auld John:
Radu had found him with a weak probe, discovered him nursing an arm broken in a fall in the final stage of his descent. Which had made it appear that that avenue, too, was now closed. Yet during all the years of Radu’s oneiromantic dreaming he had frequently scried this selfsame Harry Keogh and had known that his Mysterious One would be here to sustain him, in one way or another, at the time of his resurgence.
Ah, but how often in his waking years had it been proved to the dog-Lord that the future is a devious thing? Oh, the future will always be; of course, for what force can ever stop it? But it will seldom be as foreseen.