by Brian Lumley
But her eyes were the worst. For while Spiro had the killing eye, the Lady Wratha’s were pure poison. And beneath the visor upon her brow, they had become as blobs of hellfire, as if they’d been peeled to bleeding and drawn half out of their sockets!
Even among the Wamphyri - whose mutations were many and whose metamorphism allowed transmutation into endless varieties of form - few manifestations were as ghastly as Wratha the Risen’s change when she was threatened and her leech took the upper hand. And:
Aye, when she’s wrathful . .. Wran said again, musingly. As for me, I merely rage. But Wratha - (he could only shrug helplessly) - is monstrous!
Spiro agreed. That says it all — especially coming from such as us, her peers, as it were.
But on the other hand this Siggi, Wran returned from his reflections, whether she hails from the moon or not, is mainly woman — albeit a lot of woman! Oh, she’ll be Wamphyri eventually, aye, but a-ways to go yet before she has the measure of such as Wratha. Then . .. she’ll be some Lady, Spiro. And will you be able to handle her, d’you think?
Spiro had never been quick on the uptake, but now he was. Bastard! You don’t fool me! I don’t have her yet, and already you’re drooling over her! His thoughts were vehement, almost ‘shouted’.
And: Be careful! Wran’s mental voice was a hiss of warning. Guard your thoughts!
They are guarded, damn you! Best guard yourown-from me!
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Calm down, calm down, Wran chuckled darkly (though in all truth he felt a good deal less than merry, even darkly merry). Don’t you know when your own brother is having a joke with you? As for Mangemanse and Siggi: they are yours if the opportunity should dawn. But until then .. .
And suddenly Wran’s mood, as he fell silent, seemed far more ominous, so that Spiro felt obliged to prompt him: Well?
… Brother, the more I consider it, Wran continued after a while, the more certain I am we’ve made a big mistake: joining up with Wratha and the others again, I mean. With the Guile .. . well, that’s different. We know where we stand with him: we don’t give him an inch, ever! But these others … He pulled a wry face.
How d’you mean?
Well, just look at the mess they’ve dropped us in tonight! Frankly, the reason I was having a joke with you was to take my mind off our losses. Why, there’s almost half as much dead meat back there about the foot of that rock as there is undead stuff in Wrathstack!
Huh! Spiro grunted. D’you think I don’t know it? What use to build armies, just to send them into that sort of hell? The Lidescis won’t break, we should have learned that by now. They won’t break for Wratha or for anyone else. We should leave Lardis and his lot till last, convert the rest, then bury the Lidescis under such a mass of vampire flesh that even they can’t resist!
Wran had to agree, and admitted: We lost some good lieutenants, some good meat, down there in the smoke and the stink. And damn it, I still haven’t worked out what happened!
Aye, it was quick, Spiro gave a mental nod. That mayhem atop the rock, before Wratha pushed that lunatic off the edge of the cliff - him and his lightning-box! And then all hell breaking loose below. Until then, it seemed our forces on the ground were doing well.
But their weapons! Wran shook his head. I saw warriors
destroyed like clumps of rag! I mean, we know they can work metals, these people .. . but miracles?
Spiro was silent for a moment, then said, The necromancer knew he was there.
Eh?
The madman on the dome of the rock. Lichloathe cried out to Wratha in the moment before she would have landed, warning her off. He knew that this - what? A ‘Great Enemy’, he called him - was there.
Perhaps he saw him!
But no one else saw him. How so? Huh! If I had seen him first, and if I’d been quicker thinking, I might have used my killing eye on him. But things were happening so fast. ..
Wran thought about it a moment, then said, There’s more to the young Lord Lichloathe than meets the eye. Another mistake: that I ever introduced him into Wrathstack in the first place. What? In the last three-month he’s gone as weird, reclusive and silent as Vasagi the Suck in his time! Well, we all know what happened to Vasagi. He should take care, this necromancer, lest he go the same way.
But not yet?
Wran’s shrug. You can find fault with him, challenge him if you want. After all, it’s you who needs a manse of his own, not I. Also, we’re supposed to be allies, remember? And what if Wratha and the dog-Lord’s premonitions about Vormulac Unsleep are correct? It might be as well to remain unified under Wratha … for the time being, at least. But when things are resolved, however they’re resolved —
- That will be time enough, Spiro finished it for him.
None of which was overheard by the rest, for, like Canker Canison, they were all concentrating on their own problems . ..
It had been Nathan’s plan to get off a shot at Canker, conjure a Mobius door and get out of there on the instant. But several things had conspired to stop him. His consuming hatred of the dog-Lord had demanded that he at least make
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an attempt on his life, but the knowledge that his brother was among these Wamphyri Lords had probably served to distract him and deflect his aim. Also, he found it difficult as yet to concentrate on physical action while exercising mental control over the metaphysical Mobius Continuum. It would come with time, but he wasn’t yet the master which his father had been.
And with both rockets fired, then the Necroscope had been in trouble. There were grenades in his pockets, but the launcher’s shoulder-clasp had caught on his jacket and he was unable to rid himself of the thing. And then that monstrous woman had been there (a ‘Lady’, he supposed, and therefore the Lady Wratha), and there had been no time left to do anything. A moment more and he’d felt himself gripped by the shoulder, driven forward, released into free-fall, and then into full-fall!
In one respect, however, Nathan was like his father, and - exactly like him - when his life was threatened, then he was at his best. Knowing about death - what it was, and what it was not - Nathan had the utmost regard for life, especially his own. So that he’d found it less than astonishing how the proximity of death mobilized him for life.
Freeing himself at last of the rocket-launcher’s tube, kicking it away from him, Nathan had tumbled head over heels in mid-air while plunging towards the base of the Rock. Then, instinctively curving himself like a leaf, and after a moment of rocking from side to side, he’d found himself falling face-down, and that the stony, scree-littered slope at f the foot of the Rock was rushing towards him at a fearful velocity!
But no hesitation this time: he’d forced mutating Mobius equations onto the screen of his mind, conjured a door directly in his hurtling path and fell straight through it … into the merciful darkness of the Mobius Continuum. And none too soon, for in the next second he would have smashed down to stain the scree black with his blood in the blue starlight. And knowing how close he had come, the
Necroscope was angry. With himself, yes, but mainly with the Wamphyri.
In the Mobius Continuum he controlled his still hurtling body, headed for well-known co-ordinates, emerged in the main entrance cavern to Sanctuary Rock, perhaps four hundred feet from where he’d been dropped from the rim .. .
… Into an echoing, babbling blast of noise and ruddy, torch-cast light, a smoke-wreathed turmoil of frenzied activity and a combined sulphur, kneblasch and sweat-stench like standing at the brink of hell!
Men were at work, organized by a gangling, simian central figure who stood on a flat-topped, dais-like boulder and shouted commands at teams of cursing, sweating Szgany. Lardis Lidesci, there could be no mistaking him. And as for the men he commanded:
They were his people, and they were Nathan’s people. Here in the main cavern entrance, maybe sixty of them; the rest were out there in the night, doing battle with vampire thralls and warriors, riski
ng and giving up their lives in the unequal red-raging contest between good and evil, the bloodwar between humanity and the Wamphyri. But those of them here in the cavern: they hauled small carts carrying makeshift bamboo rockets that trickled coarse black gunpowder propel-lant from dangerously short fuses. Or they formed a sweating, grimy chain-gang, passing buckets of kneblasch-laced oil hand-to-hand out into the fearful, lurid, hoarse-voiced night; while others on ladders rammed dangling, rope-like chains of fuse into the dark ominous recesses of high ledges, or heaped small squat barrels in trenches along the walls. Taken as a group, these men formed a support and supply team for the front-line troops, but they were also the rearguard in the event that the action spilled back into Sanctuary Rock itself.
‘Keep it moving!’ Lardis’s bull-voice roared out … and in the next moment, as his dark eyes swept across the panorama of frantic activity, so they settled on Nathan. Then his mouth fell open and his eyes bugged, and he pointed a shaking, astonished, disbelieving hand.
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The Necroscope had no time to spare; he broke through the garlic-reeking chain-gang, ran forward, caught Lardis’s arm as the other jumped down from his dais. ‘Lardis .. .’
‘You!’ the Old Lidesci gasped, his bloodshot eyes still huge and round. He scarcely believed it, but had to. ‘Nathan Kiklu! But .. . where from this time?’ Instinctively, suspiciously, he narrowed his eyes. ‘And how?’
‘No time to explain.’ Nathan shook his head. ‘But I have men with weapons: fantastic weapons, Lardis! Except … they are strangers; I mean, they look and sound strange, these men. And if I bring them here now, your own men might mistake them for enemies. There’d be no time for questions, and my friends could be killed.’
‘Not while I’m here.’ Lardis shook his head.
Then stay here, and I’ll be back,’ Nathan told him.
‘Eh? Back?’ Lardis gaped -
- And gaped even wider, actually staggering a little, as Nathan took a step to one side and half-disappeared, then stepped back and was whole again! Because in that moment, as he had been about to depart, so Nathan had heard a sputtering blast of propulsors, and there’d sounded a rumbling and roaring from immediately outside the yawning cavern entrance.
A small Wamphyri warrior had breached all of Lardis’s defences and was out there even now, about to break in. Brave men came running, stumbling, retreating into the temporary safety of the cave; even the bravest of them knew that it meant unavoidable, nightmarish death to go up against something like the Thing outside. And:
‘Back!’ Lardis yelled, as a monstrously evil shape bulked huge against the glaring night, beyond the mouth of the cavern. ‘Everybody back into the escape tunnels.’ Recovering from what he had just seen - not the threat outside but Nathan’s almost-disappearing act - he was quickly in charge again. For in any case this wasn’t the first time that he’d seen it, and now that Nathan was back he suspected it wouldn’t be the last. Also, he knew that what he had
believed for quite some time now was proven beyond a doubt: that Nathan Kiklu was in fact a son of the long dead Harry Hell-lander, called Dwellersire. For there had only ever been two who could come and go like that: Harry and his changeling son, The Dweller, both of whom were dead. But what is in the blood is in the blood, and quite obviously it had come out in Nathan, too.
The riddle was at last solved, and the solution indisputable. Which in turn meant. .. that there was hope yet!
… If Sanctuary Rock could survive the night! Lardis gave himself a shake, snatched a torch from the hand of a retreating man, looked for the dangling end of a rope fuse where it snaked down from explosive charges in the high, inward-curving walls.
But: ‘No,’ Nathan told him, taking the torch from him and jamming it in a crack in the dais boulder. ‘I said we had weapons.’
He took grenades from his pockets, handed one to Lardis, ran towards the entrance whose walls flared red from the fires outside and reverberated to the sounds of battle. Lardis looked at the deadly egg in his hand and remembered the last time he’d held one: when the hell-lander Jazz Simmons had been here, oh, twenty-one years ago! Lardis hadn’t much cared for the things then, and still didn’t, but he knew what they could do. Gritting his teeth, he ran after Nathan … to where the Necroscope had skidded to a halt in the very entrance.
Just outside, turning its great savage head this way and that, a metallic-gleaming machine of death - yet a creature of flesh and blood, a vampire construct -coughed and snarled as its small but incredibly vicious brain considered the possibilities for additional mayhem. Even as it did so, Nathan ‘heard’ a mental order from its lieutenant commander out there in the night:
Enter the cave.’ In the name of your maker Wran the Rage, you are ordered to kill, ravage, destroy/ Be about your work!
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And as the horror bunched its thrusters beneath its bulk and prepared to propel itself forward into the cavern, Nathan held up his grenade where Lardis could see it, twisted its cap and yanked on its fuse-pin to prime it. They were small, these hand-hurled bombs: only two and a half inches long, like large eggs. Small, heavy, deadly! Effective far beyond anything that was available in Jazz Simmons’s time. But Lardis couldn’t know that as he imitated Nathan’s actions, and together they tossed their grenades right down the warrior’s throat.
Then Nathan grabbed Lardis’s arm and dragged him behind a stalagmite stump. And two seconds later:
Crump! Crump! Two muffled, shuddering detonations as the grenades exploded. One of them went off on its way to the creature’s stomach, ruining many of its vital organs; the other in the back of its throat, letting out a blast of hot white light, a lick of fire and spurts of steaming plasma through a blackened hole where its thyroid cartilage had been. It also shattered the beast’s spine and shocked its tiny brain to a standstill.
The warrior’s gaping mouth and nostrils issued thick yellow smoke; its head was thrown up by the blast; the propulsors flanking its anus fired one last time in nervous reflex reaction, to send it in a clatter of chitin scales halfway up the external face of the Rock, where finally the thing shut down. And as its grotesque, lifeless body came cartwheeling back to earth some small distance away, so Nathan and Lardis felt the ground shudder under their feet.. .
But there was still no time to spare.
Nathan dug two more ‘eggs’ out of his pocket and handed them to Lardis, said, Til be back,’ left the other standing there as he conjured a Mobius door and passed through it -
- To the sentinel bluff where it stood close to the mouth of the great pass and looked out over the foothills to the boulder plains of Starside; also to Anna Marie English, Ben Trask and David Chung, all of whom gasped and started in unison as he appeared.
‘How long was I?’ he asked. It had seemed like ages.
‘Ten minutes at most,’ Trask answered him. ‘It’s grown a little darker down there on the plains, but the stars have compensated; they seem that much brighter, bigger. Our friend down there hasn’t moved much, not that we’ve noticed.’ He meant the wounded warrior. There again, we’ve not been doing much moving either. Nor are we feeling any warmer.’ Inactivity had chilled their blood.
‘I’m moving you -‘ Nathan told them, - ‘into battle! But first we need arms. Three-fifths of our arsenal is temporarily beyond reach. So first we have to pick up what’s left. Hold onto each other, and if you think it’ll help you might try closing your eyes.’ He conjured a door and guided them through it one after the other, then stepped through after them —
— And took them to the Cavern of the Ancients.
The trio of cavers were still there; also Atwei, and several Thyre males from Place-Under-the-Yellow-Cliffs. When Nathan and the others appeared as if from thin air (indeed, from thin air), all of the Thyre with the exception of Atwei were startled. One of them even cried out. But as Atwei stepped forward and said, ‘Nathan,’ so he was recognized by all of them, including a Th
yre elder. But:
‘No time.’ He wearily shook his head. ‘Not for explanations or for anything else. Later, maybe. Until then .. . Atwei, will you continue to care for my friends? These three men and this woman?’
She nodded. Of course we will, brother.
Nathan turned to Trask and Chung where they stood, staring all about in open astonishment. ‘Ben, David - are you both familiar with the rest of these weapons?’ As the cavers handed over the two remaining bundles of arms and ammunition, the espers nodded their confirmation.
‘Very well,’ Nathan said. ‘But since we can’t afford to lose anything else, let’s do it here.’
They broke open the bundles on the sandy floor and made their choice of weapons: grenades, ammunition for
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their machine-pistols and three crossbows, one of which was for Nathan himself. In all the coming and going, he seemed to have lost his original weapon.
But quickly scanning what was left, the Necroscope felt a sinking sensation as he realized how little there actually was. And how much time it would take to teach the Szgany how to use flame-throwers, self-loading rifles, rocket-launchers. In fact, he never would be able to teach them to fire the latter; there were only half a dozen rockets, and none to waste in practice. No time to worry over that now, however. A second or two more to pick up a carton of a dozen exploding bolts, and they were ready. And:
‘Let’s go,’ said Nathan, and took Trask and Chung to Sanctuary Rock -
- Where Lardis Lidesci and one other old friend of the Necroscope’s were waiting for them …
Ill
The Battle at the Rock