by Brian Lumley
‘Okay, I know that’s not good enough, but more later…
‘Anyway, Nathan probably had his own reasons for breaking contact with us, but it wasn’t as if we felt let down; indeed, without him we’d have been in a hell of a mess, “we” being our entire world. It’s bad enough that we have three of these monsters here, but without Nathan we’d have had an army. Come to think of it, lan and I wouldn’t even be here right now to talk about these things, and none of you would be here to hear what I’m saying.
Oh, you would probably still be here — somewhere in the world — but not the way you are now. And damn few other people, not as you know them.
‘Very well, Nathan’s reasons for breaking contact: ‘In turning his world and working out a means of preserving its integrity — for it had been Nathan’s idea to flood Perchorsk, not the Russian Premier’s; Turchin was acting mainly on Nathan’s suggestion — he’d also secured a measure of isolation for Sunside/Starside. Maybe he thought that if he left us alone we would leave him and his alone. He knew how far ahead we were technologically speaking… I don’t know, perhaps he preferred to keep his people out of the rat-race? Also, he wouldn’t have forgotten that there were some people who would continue to see his world as a threat despite all precautions, and he knew they had the means to destroy it. And finally… there was all that gold, useless to the Travellers except as a malleable metal, but valuable beyond measure on Earth. An irresistible lure for the Hell-landers? — meaning you, me, us — probably.
‘Well, enough of that… he simply didn’t contact us for whatever reasons. And during that same period of time Nathan’s world was swinging back again, the shadows lengthening on Starside, and the sun settling back into its old, accustomed orbit. And far beyond the boulder plains, under the flutter and weave of strange auroras, a lot of the northern ice had melted.
‘Enter Szwart, Vavara, and Nephran Malinari. The only possible explanation is that they had been locked in the ice — or they had locked themselves in the ice, preserving themselves in suspended animation — when they’d been thrown out of Starside. Wamphyri, they could do it; they must have done it, deep-frozen themselves, a handful of thralls, and however many flying creatures they’d required to bear them into the Icelands when they were banished from the aeries of the Wamphyri. The natural, or unnatural, tenacity of the vampire.
‘And meanwhile, here on this world, our world, we weren’t even aware that Mikhail Suvorov and a party of scientists,
geologists, and prospectors — not to mention a platoon of heavily armed Russian soldiers — had entered Starside through the Gate in Perchorsk. Perhaps Turchin had been warned not to inform us; I like to think so. Or maybe he didn’t want to, for that would have been to admit his own impotence in the matter. And he must have been just as ignorant as we were of the return of the Wamphyri. No way he could have known they were back in Starside.
‘Nathan knew, though, and so did Lardis Lidesci. They knew because of the new spate of raids on Sunside. Ah, but this time the Wamphyri didn’t have it all their own way, not by any means. Nathan had equipped his people with some devastating Earth-type weaponry, and because of his knowledge of our technology, Traveller “science” was likewise leaping ahead. So that as quickly as Vavara and Lords Szwart and Malinari were recruiting, building up their vampire forces in the hollow stumps of the fallen aeries of the Wamphyri, Nathan and his Traveller fighting men were cutting them down to size again. But while this resulted in some kind of stalemate, still Szgany lives were being lost, especially in the farthest corners of Sunside, in tribal territories that lay far beyond the Lidesci sphere of influence.
‘Despite Nathan’s ESP, those amazing powers that he’d inherited from his father, he couldn’t possibly be everywhere at once. And even in Sunside/Starside, charity begins at home. Of course his main concern was for the Szgany Lidesci, and he had his work cut out protecting them. Part of that work, which was of the utmost importance to Nathan, was to get the Old Lidesci and his wife, Lissa, safely out of there. For it’s a fact that Lardis is an old man now — older than his years — as a direct result of living most of his life in the shadow of the Wamphyri. In his youth, life on Sunside was no bowl of cherries. Now Nathan would take over from him… just as soon as he’d taken him out of harm’s way.
‘So let Lardis complain all he wanted — and I’m told he complained quite a bit — Nathan gave him no choice but simply brought him and his wife to the supposed safety of our world. That’s how he got here, and why Lissa is in the care of our people in London. Nathan would have protected his own wife, Misha, in the same way, but Misha wasn’t having it. She’d lost him twice before; if Nathan was going to be fighting the Wamphyri yet again, she was going to be at his side. It’s the same story for our own Anna-Marie English: Anna had married a Traveller called Andrei Romani, and made a life for herself caring for orphans of the bloodwars. She wasn’t going to leave Andrei or the children behind without one hell of a fight. And so she stayed.
‘Very well, but just weeks before Nathan, er, transported Lardis and Lissa to Earth, there was a curious lull in vampire attacks on Sunside. When they started up again, the three principal survivors of four or five hundred years of frozen banishment were no longer in command of their lieutenants, thralls, and warrior creatures — or rather, they no longer accompanied them in their raids on Sunside. In order to find out what was happening, Nathan and his Szgany fighting men trapped a lieutenant, bound him to a cross with silver wire, and offered him the usual choice: he could talk and die a clean death with a crossbow bolt in his heart, or he could say nothing and be lowered face down, undead and kicking, into a fire pit. He talked, died quickly, and then burned. There is no other way for a vampire.
‘As for what he said:
‘Vavara and the others had intercepted strangers entering Starside from the Gate on the boulder plains. There was a short, unequal battle — very short, for Suvorov’s troops weren’t prepared for this; but then, who would have been? — and Lord Malinari was now “questioning” the handful of survivors before they were sent to the provisioning… that is, before they were used and drained by lieutenants and thralls, and their corpses turned to fodder for the beasts. For of course, following Malinari’s kind of interrogation, they wouldn’t be very much good for anything else…’
Apparently stalled by something in his story, Trask had paused. His face was drawn and grey now, his eyes sunken; he looked
far ‘older than his years,’ much as he’d described the Old Lidesci.
The precog lan Goodly knew what was wrong, and said, ‘Ben, I’ll take it from here if you like.’
‘No,’ Trask husked. ‘When Jake was under pressure, he told his own story. So it’s only right I tell mine. Hell, I’ve lived with it for almost three years now…’ But still he took a few seconds to straighten out his thoughts. Then:
‘Call it coincidence,’ he continued, ‘or maybe synchronicity, but Nathan arrived at E-Branch, in Harry’s room, yes, just a little too late. He had Lardis and Lissa with him, and a list of stuff he wanted to take back with him. But it was the middle of the night and there was only a skeleton staff; and I… was already on my way in, driving like hell through the empty, cold night streets. God only knows how many red lights I’d crashed.
‘Why was I in such a hurry? Because of a dream — a bloody nightmare — a feeling that something was wrong. No, it was much more than just a feeling: the sure knowledge that something was definitely wrong. My espers: how often had I heard it from them that their talents were a curse? Mine, too, I supposed, when I had to sit and listen to rapists, paedophiles and murderers trying to talk their way out of jail, sit there reading their lies and knowing that in fact they were cold-blooded killers, molesters and defilers. But not once, until that night, had I really considered my talent a curse. And I can well understand how you felt, lan, seeing the future in a dream, but not knowing it was more than a dream!
‘For that’s how it had been with me: just a
dream, but oh-so-much more than a dream. And I… it had been “a hard day at the office”… I’d just lain there, tossing and turning, reading the truth of the damned thing but unable to wake up, until she told me to. God…!’ And again he paused.
But this time, before Goodly could speak up again: ‘It was Zek, my wife!’ Trask blurted it out. ‘She was at the Refuge in Romania, where for a fortnight the outflow from the underground river had been almost at a standstill. The regular crew at Radujevac couldn’t understand it, but since it coincided with low winter rainfall patterns right across Europe, that’s what they put it down to.
‘Anyway, that’s not why she was there. Zek is — she was — a telepath of the highest order. But she was more than that. No one who ever met her could fail to be impressed by my beautiful Zek. Harry Keogh himself, Jazz Simmons, Lardis Lidesci… even the Lady Karen, they’d all been won over by Zek. And those poor Romanian kids at the Refuge, some grown into men now, but still suffering from deep psychological traumas dating back to Ceau§escu’s time; of course she must try to help them. She could get inside their minds, track down their problems, even try to cancel them out. Sometimes it worked, other times she cried.
‘And she was crying in my dream, crying out to me, to her husband, who knew he was only nightmaring yet at the same time knew he wasn’t, but in any case couldn’t do a damn’ thing about it. And despite what was happening to her, or about to happen, Zek was getting through to me in the only way left to her.
‘It wasn’t the first time. Once before she’d contacted me telepathically. That was in May 2006, when she was with Nathan in the Mediterranean, more specifically the Ionian. They’d gone to Zante — or Zakynthos, the island of Zek’s birth, from which she’d taken her name — so that she could, well, pay her respects to Jazz Simmons who was buried there. Jazz had been Zek’s first husband… he was dead of natural causes. But Turkur Tzonov’s people were tracking Nathan to kill him. And since Zek was with him they’d kill her, too. It was while they were trying to kill her that she’d contacted me, and for a moment I had experienced all that she was feeling. I had known what it was like to die. But she hadn’t died, because that’s when Nathan discovered the Mobius Continuum and used it to bring her back to E-Branch.
‘In my nightmare, it was the same again, Zek in her — God, her extreme of terror! — knowing it was over, yet trying to get through to me, to let me know what was happening. In one way it was a cry for help, which she must have known I couldn’t possibly answer, and in another it was this
incredibly brave woman, passing on everything she knew about, about…
‘It came thick and fast; telepathy is like that, conveying a lot more than mere words. What’s that old saw about a picture being worth a thousand words? Well, it’s true enough; I saw half of it in pictures and half in thoughts, mind to mind. All of it while I tossed and turned and — damn my dreams forever — while I slept on!
‘One of the Refuge’s maintenance men, a New Zealander called Bruce Trennier, was down in the sump — the subterranean river’s exit or resurgence — examining the system of hydroelectric barriers and the turbine that powered the Refuge during the Romanian rainy season. His being down there was partly in connection with the fall-off in the outflow, and partly because his instrumentation indicated that something wasn’t right down there. The system hadn’t been entirely reliable since the time when CMI–Combined Military Intelligence, disbanded now, thank goodness — made their biggest-ever mistake and blew it up!
‘Anyway, Trennier was in contact by landline with the Refuge’s night staff, and he’d told them he was opening a dry inspection duct to go into the actual cave of the resurgence. He’d thought that perhaps something was clogging the works in there. And something was — a dead vampire lieutenant, his body rammed into the pipe that monitored the flow!
‘Obviously Vavara, Szwart and Malinari had been trying to get someone’s attention, and they’d succeeded. And Trennier had provided them with a way out.
‘Well, the rest is sheer conjecture. I’m trying to remember all of this from a dream, after all, and it’s a dream I’ve tried so hard to forget! And even at the time it was fragmentary, as dreams usually are; and Zek, my Zek… she wasn’t at her best. But who would be in her… in her situation?’
Once again Trask fell silent, choking on his own emotions. In a little while, when Liz quietly inquired if she should make coffee, he simply nodded. Then for a time no one said anything, not even Jake…
CHAPTER FOURTEEN Zek’s Passing
It was several minutes before Trask could continue, but eventually: ‘Let me try to tell it the way I saw or received it/ he said. ‘It was night at the Refuge, two hours ahead of our time in London. Zek had been awakened by her pager, a call from one of the two-man night-nursing staff. Bruce Trennier was already down in the sump; whatever the trouble was, he’d said it couldn’t wait. The forecast said heavy rain, and the resurgence was prone to flash-flooding. If there was a blockage, the pressure could create all kinds of fresh problems down there.
‘Which was why he had gone down at night, with a tool box, a powerful torch, and an ancient, battery-powered landline telephone that was probably on the blink, because contact was weak and intermittent. But even before Zek got to the duty room, she sensed that something was wrong. Not with Trennier, you understand — for she didn’t even know about him — but just generally wrong. Zek was a very strong telepath, as I’ve said, and there was… what? A presence? A probing in the psychic aether? Some kind of interference? Whatever, something wasn’t right with the “static” — the term used by telepaths to define the background hiss and babble of thoughts emitted by the people around them — and it was something she’d never experienced before.
‘Now, in E-Branch we have rules: we don’t use our talents on each other, never. Myself, I have an excuse: my thing’s automatic,
as was Darcy Clarke’s before me. Darcy wasn’t in charge of what he did — in fact, he didn’t do anything — his thing simply took care of him. He was a deflector, the opposite of accident-prone, as if some kind of guardian angel was constantly on duty looking after him. Darcy could have crossed a minefield in snowshoes without getting hurt, except his talent wouldn’t have let him. But don’t think it made him careless. On the contrary, he used to switch off the power before he’d even change a light bulb! Or maybe that was just another form of his talent in action.
‘My thing is the same: if someone lies to me I can’t help but know it. It’s not that I want to, not every time, it’s just something that happens. But a telepath has a choice: to tune in on the thoughts of others or simply to ignore them. And most telepaths can turn the static down or even switch it off. Which is just as well, or they’d never get any sleep.
‘So in E-Branch we don’t mess with each other. Let’s face it, it has to be the easiest way to lose friends. If your partner is in a bad mood, you really don’t want to know that you’re pissing him off just by being in the same room!
‘But Zek… she was the same with everyone. At work — in the foreign embassies, or working criminal cases — she was the best. Outside of work, she switched off; she wasn’t interested in the many perverse little thoughts that are flying around out there. And it was the same at the Refuge. She had enough on her plate just working with those poor sick kids, let alone probing the minds of her colleagues. And incidentally, she was the only esper out there. It’s quite some time since E-Branch maintained any real presence in Radujevac.
‘I mention these things so you’ll see why she didn’t immediately switch on to the truth of what was going on. Zek didn’t use her talent as a matter of course, only where it was needed. And as for Trennier being down in the sump: she didn’t find out about that until she’d reached the duty room. And even then she wasn’t much bothered. Not at first.
‘For that wasn’t the reason she’d been woken up; no, that was because, being E-Branch, she was the Senior Officer in situ at that time. And any problem with the
kids, the Senior Officer had to be informed. That’s what it was, the kids. And as far as Zek was concerned — half-awake and all — that’s all it was. But they were really going to town. Or rather, they weren’t. That’s what was wrong with the static: not that its flow had been interrupted, but that it just wasn’t there. It was as if… as if the kids had all come awake at the same time and were listening to something. But listening intently, to the exclusion of everything else. And whatever it was they could hear… they didn’t much like it.
‘That was why they were using their pagers, every last one of them; also why the duty room’s switchboard was lit up like a Christmas tree, and why Zek had been woken up and called in for her opinion.
‘But she didn’t get to voice that opinion, for as she entered the duty room and saw the switchboard, two things happened simultaneously. One: she reached out with her mind — to one of the kids, a case she’d been working with and knew intimately — and two, the old-fashioned landline telephone jangled and went on jangling. Of course it was Trennier, but a damned insistent Trennier.
‘First the kid, a Romanian orphan of maybe eighteen years. Zek broke into his mind…
‘… And someone was there! Not just the kid, but someone, something, else. Something incredibly intelligent, that crawled and observed and was thirsty for knowledge, something that felt like cold slime, and left a cold, cold void behind it! And when Zek’s talent touched it, she “felt” a recoil, and then a question — “Who?” — as whatever it was tried to fasten on her, too.
‘Then she was out of there, snatching her thoughts back as if they’d contacted a live wire, closing them down and erecting her mental barriers as things began to make sense.
‘By which time one of the duty nurses was answering Trennier’s call. This was a male nurse, one who Zek knew to be solid as a rock; but as he listened to Trennier’s hysterical