by Brian Lumley
True, a voice came startlingly from nowhere, entering the minds of both of them. Shaithis is devious. But his ancestor, Shaitan the Fallen, is worse far.
The Dweller!’ Karen gasped, as she recognized their telepathic visitor. And then, incredulously, ‘But did you say… Shaitan?’
The Fallen One, aye, the wolf-voice rasped in their minds. He lives, he comes, and he, not Shaithis, is the terror.
Harry and Karen reached out with their own telepathy, tried to strengthen the mind-bridge between themselves and their visitor. And for a moment the aerie was filled with flowing mental pictures: of mountain slopes where domed boulders projected through sliding scree; of a full moon lending the crags a soft yellow mantle; of great firs standing tall. And in the shadow of the trees, silver triangle eyes blinking — a good many — where the pack rested before the hunt. Then the pictures faded and were gone, and likewise the one who lived with them and moved among them.
But his warning remained with Karen and the Necroscope. How he could know what he had told them… who could say? But he was, or had been, The Dweller. And that was enough.
Time passed.
Sometimes they talked and at others they simply waited. There was nothing else to do. This time, seated before a fire in the aerie’s massive Great Hall, they talked. ‘Shaitan is part of my world’s legends, too,’ said Harry. ‘There they call him Satan, the Devil, whose place is in hell.’
‘In Starside’s histories your world was hell!’ Karen answered. ‘And all of its dwellers were devils. Dramal Doombody believed it firmly.’
Harry shook his head. ‘That the Wamphyri — monstrous as they were, and still are — should hold with beliefs in demons, devils and such,’ (again the shake of his head), ‘is hard to understand.’
She shrugged. ‘How so? Isn’t Hell simply the Unknown, any terrible place or region of which nothing is understood? To the Traveller tribes it lay across the mountains in Starside, while to the Wamphyri it waited on the other side of the sphere Gate. Certainly it must be horrible and lethal beyond that Gate, for no one had ever returned to tell of it. That was how the Wamphyri saw it. I saw it that way, too, in the days before Zek and Jazz, you and your son. And don’t forget, Harry, even the Wamphyri were once men. However monstrous a man may grow, still he’ll remember the night fears of his childhood.’
‘Shaitan,’ Harry mused. ‘A mystery spanning two worlds. The legend was taken into my world by banished Wamphyri Lords and occasionally their Traveller retainers when they were sent through Starside’s Gate.’ But in his own mind: Oh, really? Or is the so-called ‘legend’ more properly universal? The Great Evil, the Lord of Lies, of all wickedness? What of the similarity in the names…?
Satan, Shaitan? Are there devils in all the universes of light? And what of angels?
‘Better stop thinking of him as a legend,’ Karen warned, as if she’d been listening to his thoughts, which she had not. ‘The Dweller says he’s real and coming here, which means that in order to live we have to kill him. Except, if Shaitan has already lived for — how long? Two, three thousand years? — is it even reasonable to believe that we can kill him?’
Harry had scarcely heard her. He was still working things out. ‘How many of them?’ he finally asked. ‘Shaitan will be their leader, and Shaithis with him. But who else?’
‘Survivors from the battle at the garden,’ Karen answered. ‘If they also survived the Icelands.’
‘I remember.’ Harry nodded. ‘We’ve considered them before: Fess Ferenc, Volse Pinescu, Arkis Leperson and their thralls. No more than a handful. Or, if others of the Old Lords survived the ordeal of exile, a large handful.’ He drew himself up. ‘But I’m still the Necroscope. And again I say: can they come and go through the Möbius Continuum? Can they call up the dead out of their graves?’ (And once more, to himself: Can you, Harry? Can you?)
‘Shaitan may have the art,’ she answered. ‘For after all, he was the first of the Wamphyri. Since when, he’s had time enough for studying. It’s possible he can torment the dead for their secrets.’
‘But will they answer him?’ Harry growled, his eyes glowing like rubies in the firelight. ‘No, no, I didn’t mean necromancy but Necroscopy! A necromancer may “examine” a corpse or even a long-dead mummy, but I talk to the very spirits of the dead. And they love me; indeed, they’ll rise up from their dust for me…’ A lie. You even lie to yourself now. You are Wamphyri, Harry Keogh! Call up the dead? Ah, you used to, you used to.
He started to his feet: ‘I have to try,’ and went down to Starside’s foothills under the garden, where long ago he called up an army of mummied trogs to do battle with Wamphyri trogs. He talked to their spirits in his fashion, but only the wind out of the north answered him. He sensed that they were there and heard him, but they kept silent. They were at peace now; why should they join the Necroscope in his turmoil?
He went up into the garden. There were graves — far too many of them — but untended now: Travellers who died in the great battle, trogs laid to rest in niches under the crags. They heard him, too, and remembered him well. But they felt something different in him which wasn’t to their liking. Ah, Wamphyri! Necromancer! This man, or monster, had words which could call them to a horrid semblance of life even against their will.
‘And I might!’ he threatened, sensing their refusal, their terror. But from within: What, like Janos Ferenczy? What price now your ‘humanity’, Harry?
He went back to the aerie, to Karen, and told her bleakly, ‘Once… I could have commanded an army of the dead. Now there are just the two of us.’
Three, The Dweller’s growl was in their minds, but clear as if he stood beside them. You fought for me once. Both of you, for my cause. My turn, now.
That seemed to decide it, to state their case, set their course. Even though it was the only course they’d ever had.
Karen fetched her gauntlet and dipped it in a cleansing acid solution, then set to oiling its joints. ‘Me,’ she said, ‘I tore the living heart out of Lesk the Glut! Aye, and there was a lot more to fear in those days. And it dawns on me: I’m not afraid for myself but for the loss of what we have. Except that when you look at it, well, what do we have, after all?’
Harry jumped up, strode to and fro shaking his fists and raging inside and out. And then grew deadly calm. It was his vampire, of course, still seeking ascendancy. He nodded knowingly, and grunted, ‘Well, and maybe I’ve kept you down long enough. Perhaps it’s time I let you out.’
‘What?’ Karen looked up from working on her gauntlet.
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing?’ She arched her eyebrows.
‘I only asked… where shall it be?’
The garden, said The Dweller, far away in the mountains.
They heard him, and Karen agreed, ‘Aye, the garden has its merits. We know it well, anyway.’
Finally, with a furious nod, the Necroscope surrendered to his vampire. In part, at least. ‘Very well,’ he snarled, ‘the garden. So be it!’
And so it would be.
In Starside…
It was the hour when all that remains of the furnace sun is a smudgy grey luminosity in a sky gnawed by jutting fangs of mountain, and the nameless stars are chunks of alien ice freezing in weird orbits. The deepest, darkest hour of sundown, and the last of the Wamphyri — Shaithis and Shaitan, Harry Keogh and Karen — were coming together to do battle in an empty place once called the garden. All four of them, the last of their race, and The Dweller, too; except he was no longer Wamphyri as such, or if he was even his vampire scarcely knew it.
Karen had known for some time now that the invaders were close and closing on Starside, ever since her creatures out on the rim of the rimy ocean called to her one last time to pass on that information — before they died. And as they died, so Karen had asked them: How many are the enemy, and what are their shapes? It was easier far to gauge strength and substance that way than from complicated descriptions; the distance was great, and the b
rains of warriors are never too large (unwise to invest such masses of menace with other than the most rudimentary intelligence). Nevertheless, vague pictures of flyers, warriors, and controlling beings had come back pain-etched out of the north, showing Karen how small was the army of Shaitan.
It consisted only of a pair of controlling Lords, who rode upon massive flyers with scale-plated heads and underbellies, and a half-dozen warriors of generally unorthodox construction. Unorthodox, aye… to say the least. For the invaders (who could only be Shaithis and Shaitan the Fallen, though Karen held back from any kind of direct contact with their minds) had apparently seen fit to break all the olden rules of the Wamphyri in the fashioning of these beasts. For one they had organs of generation, much like Karen’s constructs, and for another they seemed to act much of their own accord, without the guidance of their supposed controllers. Lastly, one of them was a monster even among monsters! So much so that Karen didn’t even care to dwell upon it.
At first (she was informed) there had been an extra pair of flyers, weary beasts whose riders landed them in deep drifts close to the edge of the ocean. Alighting, the Wamphyri Lords had then called down their warriors and fresh flyers out of the sky, allowing them to fuel themselves on the exhausted bodies of these first mounts. And while they were busy with their food, that was when Karen’s guardian creatures had attacked… only to discover the overwhelming ferocity and superiority of Shaitan’s warriors. That was the message which the last of Karen’s beasts conveyed to her, before its feeble mind-sendings were swamped by dull pain and quickly extinguished.
Harry had been asleep at that time, wracked by nightmares. Karen had watched him tossing and turning, and listened to him mouthing of ‘the cone-shaped universes of light’, and of Möbius, a wizard he’d known in the helllands: ‘a mathematician who got religion; a madman who believes God is an equation… which is more or less what Pythagoras believed, but centuries before him!’ And of the Möbius Continuum, that fabulous, fathomless place where he’d made metamorphic love to her, and which he now considered ‘an infinite brain controlling the bodies of universes, in which simple beings such as myself are mere synapses conveying thoughts and intentions, and perhaps carrying out… some One’s will?’
By then the Necroscope’s dream had been a feverish thing, full of thoughts, conversations and associations out of his past, even past dreams, all tangled in a kaleidoscope of the real and surreal, where his life from its onset was observed to have been metamorphic as his flesh in the way it had burst open to sprout weird discoveries and concepts. The dream contained — even as a dying man’s last breath is said to contain — crucial elements of that entire life, but concertinaed into a single vision of mere moments.
When the cold sweat started out on his grey brow, Karen might have gentled him awake; except his words fascinated her; and anyway he needed to sleep, in order to be strong for the coming battle. Perhaps he would settle down again when the nightmare was past. And so she sat by him while he sweated and raved of things quite beyond her conception.
About time’s relativity and all history, that of the future as well as the past, being contemporary but occurring in some strange ‘elsewhere’; and about the dead — the real dead, not the undead — waiting patiently in their graves for a new beginning, their second coming; and about a great light, the Primal Light, ‘which is the ongoing, unending Bigger Bang as all the universes expand for ever out of darkness!’ He mumbled about numbers with the power to separate space and time, and of a metaphysical equation, ‘whose only justification is to extend Mind beyond the span of the merely physical’.
On one level, it was the subconscious whirlpool of Harry’s instinctive mathematical genius enhanced by his now ascendant vampire; while on a higher plane it was a violent confrontation between two entirely elemental powers: Darkness and Light, Good and Evil, Knowledge for its own sake (which is sin), and the total absence of knowledge, which is innocence. It was the Necroscope’s subconscious battle with himself, within himself, which must be fought and won lest the final darkness fall; for Harry himself would be the bright guardian of worlds still to come, or their utter destruction before they were even born.
But Karen didn’t know any of that, only that she mustn’t wake him just yet. And Harry fevered on. ‘I could give you formulae you haven’t even dreamed of…‘he sneered out of some all but forgotten past time, while the lights of his eyes burned scarlet through lowered, frantically fluttering lids. ‘An eye for an eye, Dragosani, and a tooth for a tooth! I was Harry Keogh… became my own son’s sixth sense, before Alec Kyle’s emptied head sucked me in and made his body mine… The great liar Faéthor would have lived in there with me, but where’s Faéthor now, eh? And where’s Thibor? And what of the Bodescu brat? And Janos?’ Suddenly he sobbed and great tears squeezed themselves out from under his luminous eyelids.
‘And Brenda? Sandra? Penny? Am I cursed or blessed…?
‘I had a million friends, which would be fine except they were all dead! They “lived” in a dimension beyond life, where I could still talk to them and they could still remember what it was to have been alive.
‘There are many dimensions, planes of existence without number, worlds without end. The myriad cone-shaped universes of light. And I know how they came about. And Möbius knew it before me. Pythagoras might have guessed something of it, but Möbius and I know
‘Let there be…’ (He screwed up his tightly closed eyes.) ‘Let there be…’ (Great slugs of sweat oozed out of his shuddering lead-grey body.) ‘Let there be….’
Until Karen could stand his pain — for this could only be pain — no longer. And clutching him where he writhed upon her bed, she begged him: ‘Let there be what, Harry?’
‘Light!’ he growled, and his furious eyes shot open, aglow with their own heat.
‘Light?’ she repeated him, her voice full of wonder.
He struggled to sit up, gave in and let himself sink down into her arms. And he looked at her, nodded and said, ‘Yes, the Primal Light, which shone out of His mind.’
Harry’s eyes had always been weird, even before his vampire stained them with blood, but now they were changing from moment to moment. Karen saw the fury go out of them, then the fear, and watched fascinated as all alien vitality — even the very passion of the Wamphyri — died in them. For with only one exception the Necroscope was the first of his sort to know and believe.
‘His mind?’ Karen repeated him at last, wondering at the softness of his face, which was that of a child.
‘The mind of… God?’ Even now Harry couldn’t be absolutely certain. But near enough. ‘Of a God, anyway,’ he finally told her, smiling. ‘A creator!’
And inside him, instinctively aware of looming defeat, his vampire shrank down and was small, and perhaps bemoaned its fate: to be one with a man who desired only to be… a man.
6 Sky Fight!
From then on the Necroscope had been different; his parasite’s ascendancy had been reversed; once again his humanity had the upper hand. Karen to the contrary: she tried to insist that he accompany her on raids into Sunside to ‘blood’ himself. Naturally he would hear nothing of it, and she would be furious.
‘But you’re not blooded!’ she’d growl at him as they made love. ‘There’s a frenzy in the Wamphyri which only blood will release, for the blood is the life! Unless you take, you may not partake in your fullness. You must fuel yourself for the fight, can’t you see that? How may I explain?’
But in fact there was no need for explanations; Harry knew well enough what she meant. He’d seen it in his own world. In boxers, the moment they draw blood: how the first sight and smell of it inspires them to greater effort, so that they go at their opponents with even more determination, and always hammering away at the same wet, red-gleaming spot. He’d seen it in cats large and small: the first splash of mouse-blood which turns a kitten to a hunter, or drives the hunter to a frenzy. And as for sharks: nothing else in all the unexplored span of their l
ives has half so much meaning for them!
But: ‘I’ve eaten well,’ he would answer.
And: Hah! he would hear her mental snort of derision. Of what? The flesh of pigs, and roasted? What’s that for fuel?’
‘It fuels me well enough.’ ‘And your vampire not at all!’
‘Then let the bastard starve!’ But he would never allow himself the luxury of greater anger than that.
Sometimes, he would try to explain:
‘What’s coming is coming,’ he told her. ‘Didn’t we see it in the Möbius Continuum, in future time? Of all the lessons of my life, Karen, this is the one I’ve learned the best: never try to change or avoid what’s written in the future, for it is written. All we can hope for is a better understanding of the writing, that’s all.’
Again her snort: Hah! And bitterly, ‘And now who is beaten, even before the fight?’
‘Do you think I don’t feel tempted?’ he said then. ‘Oh, I do, believe me! But I’ve fought this thing inside me for such a long time now that I can’t just let it win, no matter the cost. If I succumbed to rage and lust — went out and took the life of a man, and drained his blood — what then? Would it give me the strength I need to destroy Shaithis and Shaitan? Perhaps, but who would be next after them? How long before I started the Wamphyri cycle all over again, but strong this time as never before, with all the powers of a Necroscope to play with? And with my vampire’s bloodlust raging, what then? Do you think I wouldn’t begin to look for a way back into my own world, to return there as the greatest plague-bearer of all time?’
‘Perhaps you’d be a king there,’ she answered. ‘With me to share your bone-throne.’
He nodded, but wryly. ‘The Red King, aye, and eventually Emperor of a scarlet dynasty. And all of our undead lieutenants — our bloodsons, and those who got our vampire eggs, and their sons and daughters — all of them pouring their pus on a crumbling Mankind, building their aeries and carving kingdoms of their own; as Janos would have done from his Mediterranean island, and Thibor the warlord after he’d turned Wallachia red, or Faéthor on his blood-crazed crusades. And all of our progeny Necroscopes in their own right, with neither the living nor the dead safe from them. Helllands? Now you’re talking, Karen!’