by Brian Lumley
All of which - uneasy? - conversation had taken place some hundred or so hours ago, in Lord Nestor Lichloathe’s room of repose in Suckscar.
But now Zahar must drag his mind back to the present, the here and now, the fact that just a moment ago he’d ‘heard’ his master issue a mind-warning to Wratha the Risen:
Wratha! Back off! Don’t Jand! There’s someone there! An enemy - even a Great Enemy! Aye, and he’s dangerous!
Danger! And the first duty of a lieutenant is to protect his Lord and master! Zahar urged his flyer forward, alongside Nestor. And he looked where Nestor was looking.
Front and left, the Lady Wratha’s huge, ornately saddled manta flyer was descending towards the flat, plateau-like dome of that great boulder or massively rounded outcrop called Sanctuary Rock. Directly in front of her, her first-lieutenant’s creature was about to touch down. More yet to the left - paralleling Nestor but slightly higher, so forming an awkward ‘V behind Wratha - Canker Canison stood in his saddle, hauled on his reins, and barked a string of vivid curses. Eager as ever, deliberately stalling his flyer so that it would lose height more quickly, the dog-Lord was anxious to be down. And following on behind these three, Wran the Rage Killglance in Nestor’s slipstream, his brother Spiro in Canker’s and their chief-lieutenants, of course, forming the trailing legs of the ‘V.
But suddenly visible in a patch of crevice-grown gorse, directly in the flight- or landing-path of the foremost flyer, a
man had appeared as if from nowhere. He wore a strange mask with protruding, reflective eyes, and carried upon his shoulder a device like a long box .. . which he seemed to be aiming at the lead flyer! Heeding Nestor’s warning, however, Wratha was already in contact with that creature’s rider:
Whoever he is, gather him up in your beast’s pouch, she commanded. Spill him into space over the rim of the rock!
Moving to obey - jockeying his mount forward on arched air-trap wings - the lead rider closed with his victim. But in the next instant…
. .. madness! And mayhem!
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PART THREE
Wamphyri.’
I
Canker and Siggi
Only minutes ago, the Wamphyri had circled high over Sanctuary Rock before commencing their spiralling descent. And mirrored in the dog-Lord Canker Canison’s feral yellow, crimson-cored, night-sighted eyes as he looked down, the great weathered dome had appeared as the skull of a fallen colossus: the scant patches of gorse and bramble were all that remained of the ancient giant’s hair. But apart from this coarse vegetation in the suture-like cracks and crevices, the flat pate had seemed as bald and as empty of life - and of death - as it was of thoughts; a safe high vantage point from which to observe the fighting.
That was how it had looked, certainly: all calm and serene on the plateau of the Rock, though there’d been no lack of war and death below. Except that had been minutes ago, while this was now.
And now … madness and mayhem!
Even if the dog-Lord had dreamed it in advance, if he’d forecast it through his oneiromancy - which this time he had not - still Canker would scarcely have credited its reality. But standing tall in his saddle, cajoling his stalled flyer as it formed air-traps of its manta wings and let down its coiled thrusters to reduce the shock of a forced landing, he had seen it with his own eyes and so must believe it:
A man, standing there in the night-dark gorse on the plateau of the Rock, with a long box or tube-thing balanced on his shoulder, and wearing a bulge-eyed mask over his head and face … standing square in the path of Wratha’s man Goban, at that; and Goban all set to make a landing.
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Then .. . Lord Nestor Lichloathe pointing and gesticulating, while the man in the gorse aimed his long box at Goban’s mount.
It had been gloamy in the starlight on the dome of the Rock; it might even have been dark, if not for the intermittent flaring of Lidesci missiles skittering wild in the sky, and the glow of firelight reflected from a handful of clouds. But what is the night to Wamphyri eyes? Nothing, and the twilight even less. Canker had been able to see well enough.
Also, he had ‘heard’ Nestor’s warning, and Wratha’s instructions to her man: that he should brush this fool from the rim of the rock. Goban had at once spurred his flyer forward in a swoop. But then:
A burst of light like a miniature sun, issuing from the box on the man’s shoulder; a spear of light reaching out, but swift as a snake’s kiss and tipped with bright metal. It left a vapour trail and hissed like a warrior, and its bite was yet more deadly! Goban’s mount’s pouch was open, to grasp this madman and sweep him before it over the rim. But flyer and rider, they never reached him.
The ‘spear’ took the flyer in its pouch, situated where the long, tapering neck widened into the body, directly under the saddle. It sped deep into the cartilage-hooked, mouth-like pouch and was deflected upwards, penetrating the flesh of the flyer between pouch and saddle — where it detonated.
Armour-piercing and packed with ultra-high-explosive, the rocket would have stopped a half-track. By comparison, the alveolate bones and membranous flesh of the flyer were like tissue paper; they would absorb bullets easily enough, and a good many bullets at that, before enough liquid was let out that the creature was seriously hurt. But a 30mm rocket is something else. Nathan had seen the results of explosive crossbow bolts in the flesh of flyers, but he’d seen nothing like this.
The blast was star-shaped and struck out in all directions. Downwards, it unhinged the beast’s pouch as easily as a
man might pick off a small scab, and hurled it to earth. Sideways, it ripped through the base of the flyer’s neck, shearing flesh and saddle trappings alike and stripping meat, membrane and cartilage from the leading edges of the wings. Upwards, it sliced through the saddle like a knife .. . and sliced through Goban, too! Rider, saddle and all were hurled upwards in two parts, literally torn asunder!
A two- to three-foot section had been chopped out of the flyer’s spine. All control was gone and apart from the undead nature of its blood the thing was quite literally dead in the air. The eyes in the almost-human head at the end of its long, slowly slumping neck glazed over; its pink worm thrusters convulsed spastically, then coiled themselves up, back into their body cavities; it swerved this way and that as its wing-arches began to collapse . .. but still it came gliding forward.
Nathan ducked down, scrambled to avoid a drenching rain of fluids as the flyer’s rubbery bulk and nests of twitching thrusters scraped by barely overhead. And with its tapering tail vibrating like a crippled snake, tearing up the gorse as it went, the thing headed for the rim and the shattering fall beyond it.
But Nathan’s headgear - the rocket-launcher’s nite-site targeting set - had been knocked askew on his head. Down on his knees in the gorse, elated by his success, he worked frantically to get it realigned. Finally he was striking back … at the Wamphyri! There was another rocket waiting in its tube. All it required was his finger on the button.
However momentarily, the Lords and Lady were in disarray. Following on in line of descent behind Goban’s mount, Wratha’s creature had instinctively reared back from the flash of light and its concussion. Jolted, she clung to the twin pommels. On her left and drawing level with her, Canker’s flyer was skittish, afraid. Its thrusters groped nervously for a hold on the Rock; an arched wing-tip touched down, and Canker felt himself tilted in his saddle. Cursing, lashing out with a booted foot at his mount’s flank, the dog-
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Lord leaped free, swung from the bony leading edge of a wing, let himself fall sprawling in the gorse. In another moment his flyer touched down and Canker was on his feet-
- And Nathan saw him!
They saw, and knew, each other!
The dog-Lord knew him, but not from where or when. Nathan, on the other hand, remembered only too well where and when. It was a nightmare he would never forget:
That night in Settlement … the first
time Wratha and her renegades raided there … Nona Kiklu’s house had been levelled by a warrior, and Nathan knocked out. Later, coming to his senses, he had found his girl, Misha Zanesti, lying unconscious in the rubble. Half-carrying Misha, staggering towards a break in the stockade fence, he’d heard a panting and a patter of padded feet from behind him. And looking back - It had been this one, Canker Canison!
Canker: only to look at him was to know that there’d been a dog, fox, or wolf in his ancestry. Or possibly a combination. He was loup-garou — a werewolf! And the first time Nathan had seen him, his error in this respect had been wholly understandable; for he had thought that this was one of Settlement’s domesticated animals:
This great wolf-shape, coming out of the destruction of Settlement’s main street and making straight for him … seeking human company in order to escape the invasion of the Wamphyri. But then he’d noticed that this ‘wolf seemed enveloped in a drifting cloud of mist, and that it was more biped than quadruped!
The thing loped towards him with an aggressive, forward-leaning eagerness … it only paused to cock its head and turn its great ears this way and that, listening . .. or when it went on all fours in order to sniff the earth. The cores of its eyes were scarlet and glowed like lamps in the dark. And then Nathan saw that the mist wasn’t surrounding this creature but issuing from it!
The Wamphyri .. . Nathan had heard campfire stories
about them . .. their powers, hybridisms, animalisms. In that moment, he knew what he was facing … and that he was a dead man!
Canker came loping, reared up snarling, tall and taller than a man. Nathan tried to shake Misha awake … no use. He tried to ward the dog-, fox-, wolf-thing off. Canker sniffed at him, cocked his head on one side, dripped saliva from his jaws and looked at the girl in Nathan’s arms. And: Tours?’ he growled.
Nathan put Misha behind him, but the dog-Lord grabbed him and tossed him aside, as easily as that. And: ‘No, not yours — mine!’ he said.
After that, Nathan had known no more - until he had woken up to find Misha gone. And if Canker had her? It was a horror he nightmared still: the sight of Misha in this beast’s arms, and Canker stripping her rags of clothing from her.
A nightmare he would never forget, flashing once again in a series of vivid, kaleidoscopic pictures across the screen of his mind. Neither would he forget the vow he’d made that night: that he wouldn’t rest until the dog-Lord was nothing but a puff of black smoke and a foul stench drifting on the sullied air.
And now they were here - he and Canker were here -face to face in the gorse not fifteen paces apart…
The telemetry was right; Nathan centred Canker’s chest, his heart, in the luminous cross-hairs of his nite-site lenses … and squeezed the trigger.
Canker saw it coming. It was as if he dreamed while still awake! A flash of waking oneiromancy. A glimpse into his immediate future: nothingness! An empty blackness. Death?
Nestor Lichloathe witnessed the whole thing. He saw the burst of brilliant white light from the devastating box-like weapon on his Great Enemy’s (his brother’s) shoulder, and the gleaming warhead extending itself at magical speed on a smoking stem of white hot fire towards Canker. He saw the dog-Lord dive for cover as the missile hissed between
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him and his skittering mount to slam into his first-lieutenant (one of Canker’s ‘pups’, as he called them) upon his flyer, still airborne but about to touch down behind him.
Well, and that one touched down, all right, but in several crimson pieces! Nestor didn’t know exactly where the spear had driven home, but the lieutenant’s lesser flyer was driven downwards like a swatted moth by the force of the blast, its back broken. And its rider … he literally rained to earth!
Then:
Fully in command again, and furious, Wratha sent her beast surging forward towards the man in the gorse. Its pouch clamped shut on his shoulder, weapon and all, and he was dragged kicking and fighting like the madman he must be towards the rim.
For a brief moment Nestor felt pride: this was his brother, Nathan, and he was the great and powerful enemy that Nestor had named him. No shame in being wary of this one! Nor any point in hating him now, for at last he was gone. How he’d come back … it no longer mattered. For he certainly wouldn’t be coming back from this.
Gone, yes. Gone over the cliff as Wratha’s creature opened its pouch and let him fall. For a moment he hung there, suspended against the far faint glimmer of the distant horizon, and then he was no more: a stone sent hurtling into the abyss.
But … Canker lay where he’d fallen in the gorse. The dog-Lord hadn’t stirred! Nestor gentled his beast to earth; he dismounted, ran to his friend. There was blood on Canker’s leather tunic, also in the coarse wolf’s hair of his head. He’d cracked his skull hard against one of the dome’s jagged suture-like fissures. Even a vampire’s brain can be shaken insensible.
Nestor cradled Canker’s head and looked into eyes even now glazing over, closing. Canker didn’t see him; only a picture in the eye of his own mind, which Nestor clearly read there. And:
‘Siggi!’ Canker sighed, as he fell unconscious. ‘My silver
… silver mistress out of the moon. Who will care . .. care for you now?’
After that:
Only the nothingness which Canker had foreseen. The empty blackness. But it was not the emptiness or the blackness of the true death. Then, as Canker’s leech commenced to work its metamorphism and heal his broken skull, so the darkness formed into a dream. And his dream was to remember how She had come to him, and the memory was of all that had occurred in the four months passed between …
It had happened after Nestor was lost on Sunside, when he made his way back across the barrier mountains on foot, and called for his man Zahar to meet him in the peaks with a spare flyer. Canker, too, had been waiting for and had received that call, and flew out with Zahar to greet the necromancer and congratulate him on his safe return.
But flying back to the last aerie, as they’d passed low over the hell-lands Gate:
A diversion! A female figure had stepped down from the crater rim of the Gate, to go stumbling and fumbling out on to the boulder plain. But … an entirely human woman, here?
Landing, the three had approached her, Nestor and Zahar curiously, but Canker in total amazement, awe, wonder! Transfixed, the dog-Lord, as his eyes soaked up the beauty of this utterly astonishing creature. And she was beautiful, her colours alien, her clothes (if clothes they were and not a weave of mist and sheerest cobweb) light and lighter than moonbeams. At which Canker had known what she was, what she must be.
Szgany? No, never! Some freakish albino Traveller woman, whose colours had been absent from birth? Impossible -why, her eyes were bluer then the vault of the sky on a clear day! And as for her design, and the rest of her colours:
She was a statuesque, unheard of silvery blonde, and her
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skin was pale, unblemished, perfect; likewise her features. Long-limbed, her flesh was firm beneath undergarments of sheer silk, which were clearly visible under the swirl and waft of a gown wispy as butterfly wings and far less than opaque. Those looks, colours, garments! Oh, yes, Canker had known what she was, all right.
Long and long now he had dreamed his oneiromantic dreams of her, his silver mistress in the moon! For the dog-Lord (no less than his grey wolf cousins running wild in the mountains) worshipped the moon on high and serenaded her in her tumbling orbit. And on a balcony in Mangemanse, in Wrathstack the last aerie, he had even constructed a mighty organ of hollow bones, whose music accompanied him when he sang to her. And all this because he had dreamed of her: that one day she would answer his call and, lured by his music, step down from on high to be with him in Mangemanse …
… Which now she had!
There had been no question of arguing the point with him. Canker knew what he knew: that beyond any slightest shadow of a doubt, this was his silve
r mistress from the moon. And if Nestor or Zahar had disputed Canker’s authority in this matter - especially if they had disputed his proprietary right - then there would have been trouble.
But no, they had recognized his right of ownership - or if not that, they’d been too astonished (perhaps fortunately) to deny him either his dreams or his rights — and Canker had carried her off to Mangemanse. Carried her off literally, for when he had first approached her near the Starside Gate, she had taken one look at him and fainted away in his arms. Obviously (he had thought), she was overwhelmed to have found him so soon, the one who’d lured her down from her temple on high . .. and him so handsome and all.
But in Mangemanse she had soon recovered from her swoon, and in a little while Canker had known that indeed he was not mistaken. For plainly she had no knowledge of things here in the world of men and the Wamphyri. What?
But she’d seemed innocent of knowledge itself! Not ignorant, no - not with her astonishing grace and beauty; for a clod of earth is ignorant, while silver shining Luna has knowledge to light the world! - but innocent of the ways of the world! And yet, well, not entirely innocent. Certainly she had known how to charm Canker … But that had come later.
First he must instruct her in - oh, almost everything!
In the ways of the stack, the aerie as a whole; and then in the ways of Mangemanse, wherein she was now Mistress, second only to Canker himself. Mistress, aye, and only a woman, not even Wamphyri!
Hah! - ‘only’ a woman, indeed! But never before a woman such as this one.
And so he had set about to teach her. Except . .. how to instruct someone he could not even speak to, who had no knowledge of the Szgany/Wamphyri tongue? Which had been something to give him pause. Until, for knowledge, Canker had substituted use. His moon mistress had no use of the tongue - yet understood every word!
A thought-thief, aye. A mentalist. The moon beings had no spoken language as such, because they conversed mind to mind - when they so desired. And when they did not, then they obscured their thoughts in impenetrable mental mists. It was so; Canker couldn’t get into her mind for the great banks of fog that she conjured there! But only natural, after all. No maiden of worth would let her beau see what was on her mind, surely? For women have their lustful thoughts just as surely as men. Canker knew that for a fact: his vampire women were whores from one set of lips to the other, and kissed and sucked with both!