by Brian Lumley
Lardis was jubilant - albeit quietly. Tonight’s toll of vampires was far and away the best that the Szgany Lidesci had ever achieved. The cost, however had been great. The lives of five good men and true was too much to pay, even for a victory such as this. But the discovery of the Rock by Wratha and the vampire Lords … that was the worst blow of all. It took the edge off the Old Lidesci’s triumph.
On the other hand, Nathan’s return - and these fighting hell-landers he’d brought with him (for such they must surely be), and the incredible weapons they had brought with them - these were wonderful things! Indeed, there was nothing in the world Lardis would enjoy more than to sit down right here and now with Nathan and the newcomers and hear their story. Except … there was business he must see to first. The sort of business that wouldn’t wait.
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There had been men hurt in the hand-to-hand. Crossbows, rockets and shotguns (when there’d been shells for the guns) were fine at a distance, but in any melee a Wamphyri gauntlet was superior. An ironwood bolt through the eye or heart may be a clean way for a vampire to go, but for a man to have his face ripped off, or to be disembowelled, or to lose a limb and bleed to death, is something else. That was how Lardis’s five brave ones had died: trying to hold their minced guts in. And it was also why they’d been first into the fire: so that their women wouldn’t see them like that. A man has his dignity.
As for questioning and examining the surviving defenders: that was another precautionary measure. It was always important to ensure that the men had not been injured in any way, especially by being bitten. For the poisonous bite of the Wamphyri is often quick-acting, and even the bravest man might find himself suddenly reluctant to admit of … well, a slight neck injury, say . ..
The captured thralls were tied to crosses bedded in the earth, not for the sake of cruelty but because it was the best way of keeping watch over them. Even tied up, they could slip away like snakes into the thinnest ground mist. Their interrogation didn’t take long; they hissed and spat and writhed, but answered no questions at all. Why should they, when they knew what was their lot? Perhaps if Lardis had the time he would be much more persuasive, but since the location of Sanctuary Rock was no longer a secret .. . the Old Lidesci had other plans for tonight. Well, and hadn’t he always been a Traveller at heart?
Unemotionally — having been through all of this before, and knowing there was no alternative - he ordered the grimacing, squirming thralls put down as cleanly and painlessly as possible. Shot through their hearts point-blank and by marksmen, they never knew what hit them, nor ever felt the furnace heat of the fire-pit.
Finally it was the turn of the injured lieutenant, except ‘injury’ was scarcely the word for the monstrous damage he
had suffered. And unlike those who had gone to the fire before him, this one was no fledgling recruit. No, not by any means. A much older man - a changeling to the point that he might almost be Wamphyri - there was no question but that he had come out of Turgosheim along with Wratha and the others.
Lardis, Andrei and Nathan looked up at him on his cross, waiting for him to recover consciousness. But to Trask, Chung and the others, where they stood back among a crowd of silent, watchful Szgany, it seemed unlikely that he ever would. Perhaps at that Trask should have known better, for he at least had known his fair share of horrors such as this, albeit in another world.
In the pulsating glow of the fire-pit, the crucified man was as gory a sight as could be imagined. He had been brought down by Andrei Romani, stopped by an explosive bolt shot into the muscle of his right shoulder. Either the bolt was faulty or the blast went awry, else he were surely a dead thing; but in any case the detonation had cost him his right arm and all the flesh of his right breast. His upper ribs were all sprung on that side and stuck out red and black, and above the empty socket and shattered shoulder, his face and neck were a blistered black fusion of scorched flesh.
But as the men on the ground waited, so finally the left eye opened, and the merest crack in the roasted meat where the right eye should be. And there was an eye in there: a blob of sulphur flecked with red, just like the left. Not quite Wamphyri, no, but he might have been if he’d lived. Except he knew he would not live, for Lardis Lidesci intended otherwise. And as he slowly became aware and lifted his head:
‘Who are you?’ Lardis wasted no time.
‘Go fuck a shad!’ the other wheezed, coughing blood and mucus. Unlike the thralls, he wasn’t merely tied to the cross but was nailed there, truly crucified. Since his right arm was missing, silver wire had been looped under his chin to
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support his head. But it also constricted his throat and made it hard for him to speak. No ordinary man would even have tried.
Lardis shook his head. ‘I’m a man, not a thrall. I don’t fuck shads.’
‘And I’m a lieutenant!’ the other spat. ‘I have pride!’
‘Very well, then - Lieutenant,’ Lardis nodded. Til ask you again: who are you?’
‘Since I’m doomed anyway, it can’t hurt to tell you,’ the other answered. ‘I’m Turgis Gorvisman, last lieutenant out of Turgosheim.’
‘What, Gorvi the Guile’s man?’
‘What of it?’ Turgis struggled a little on his cross, then gasped and hung still. While full-fledged Wamphyri have ways of stilling their pain, their lieutenants are not so fortunate.
Lardis shook his head. ‘Just a pity you’re not him, that’s all,’ he said. ‘For I would dearly love to have Gorvi himself up there in your place!’
The other narrowed his one good eye, stared down on Lardis and said: ‘You’ll be the Lidesci, then. Lardis the Chief.’
‘Aye,’ (again Lardis’s nod) ‘and I fancy it was Gorvi who took my son.’
‘You didn’t know for sure, then?’ Turgis writhed a little, then coughed up more blood. ‘Well, now you do. The first time we raided on Settlement, aye. Gorvi took your son; I remember it well. He sent me down into the town with the ( others, while he attacked the house on the knoll. He likes to keep to himself, does Gorvi. Likes to keep out of trouble, too.’
‘And Jason - my son - is still there, in Wrathstack?’ The Old Lidesci tried to keep the anxiety, the eagerness, the need to know out of his voice, but failed.
Turgis gagged, turned his head this way and that, and vibrated for a moment like a crippled snake against the upright of his cross. Urine smoked where it dribbled from
under his clout. This con .. . conversation is all very - ah! Ah! - very well. But it gains me nothing. I desire to be dead. Will you make it clean?’
Lardis, Andrei, even Nathan, all of them had heard much the same plea before. But this was important to Lardis. Tell me the truth, and I’ll make it clean.’
‘Your … your boy was a brave one, but he’s dead.’
Lardis closed his eyes and breathed a sigh - of agony, relief, who can say? ‘And … and was his death clean, too?’
‘Clean, aye,’ The one on the cross nodded. ‘He tried to escape, failed, climbed Wrathstack to a high place, jumped. He killed himself. He was your son, Lardis.’
Perhaps he knew more, even a lot more, but Lardis was satisfied. Truth be known, he was even grateful. ‘And now you can die,’ he said. ‘Except.. . will you die cleanly?’
Turgis looked down on him. ‘For myself, I say yes: indeed I welcome it. But I have been with Gorvi for long and long. My blood is changed, even as I am changed.’
Lardis, Andrei, Nathan, all three stepped back; and more yet, well away from the foot of the cross. Lardis nodded to men on the flanks. They lassoed both ends of the horizontal bar with good ropes, and waited. Others with crossbows came forward … but when Turgis saw them he commenced to writhe and spit again. He was tormented in two directions, tortured by pain and terror both. He wanted to die, but his blood didn’t!
And: ‘Now!’ said Lardis.
Three bolts flew home - straight to Turgis Gorvisman’s heart. He cried
out once, then flopped down on his nails and hung still. ..
.. . For a moment!
Then his belly and chest burst open, and a nest of white worms lashed and squirmed amidst the crimson of his innards! A thing of white siphon arms, like some grotesque aquatic anemone, it tossed the rags of his flesh aside, drew blood from faltering veins, sprayed scarlet all about as if pissing on unseen foes! Indeed it tried to - but they were out of harm’s way.
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The men on the ropes waited no longer but hauled on the cross until it toppled lengthwise into the fire-pit. And, very shortly, a protracted hissing and a plume of black smoke were all that remained of Turgis Gorvisman …
In Runemanse, Maglore the Mage slowly withdrew his hands from the Mobius sigil, his mind from Nathan’s, his seer’s probe back across those thousands of miles to its home in his vampire mentality. And for a long while, he simply sat there with the pictures of what he has seen gradually fading in his inner eye . .. but not in his memory.
Of the things he’d seen: he might easily have guessed some of them in advance, certainly with regard to Vormu-lac’s crusade. But others would have been quite impossible to imagine; impossible to believe, if he hadn’t seen them with his own eyes. Well, through the eyes of another, at least. Nathan’s mind might well be obscured, but his eyes were crystal clear. Maglore didn’t have to know what he was thinking to see what he was seeing.
In Olden Sunside/Starside, the Szgany fought back. What’s more, they sometimes won! Now that Nathan was back (from wherever he had been these months), perhaps they would win that much more frequently. Maglore had feared the return of a great army one night, out of the west. Maybe he would be wiser to fear the return of just one man. Maybe he should never have let that man go in the first place.
But what had Nathan been except a strange Szgany youth, a weird, blond-haired, blue-eyed pet, a freakish familiar? So it had seemed. And now … a mistake?
There again, Maglore comforted himself, the man who never made a mistake never made anything. On the other hand, neither had he lived to regret it…
PART FOUR
Further Incursions - Factions -Skirmishes - Counting Coup - Nathan
I
E-Branch - Turchin - Tzonov
Fifteen hours after the battle at the Rock - in a parallel world beyond the Starside Gate, a world where it was 10 p.m. in London and midnight in Moscow - three Heads of Department had a meeting of sorts at the London headquarters of E-Branch. The three were the Minister Responsible, whose name was known to a small handful but never used, lan Goodly, temporary Head of E-Branch, and Gustav Turchin, Premier of the loosely named and very loosely connected Soviet Alliance, also known as the USS or Union of Soviet States. A fourth person was present — not in any official capacity but because she was the only person now living on Earth who had ever been to Sunside/Starside, which was in the main the subject of the meeting.
lan Goodly had asked Zek Foener to be there, but she had already decided to fly in on the first plane out of Zante. The others had made no objection. Perhaps they might have if they had known what was on Goodly’s mind. Or perhaps, on the other hand, they’d made no objection because they did know what was on his mind, for something of the sort was on theirs, too.
Introductions had been brief to the point of perfunctory; communications were secure; Premier Turchin’s larger than life image was on the big screen of the Ops room’s central console. The other three were seated in padded swivel-chairs within the console’s operational perimeter. Sixteen hundred miles away in Moscow, Turchin was looking at them on just such a screen.
The Russian Premier was short, blocky, and looked
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unshakable as a Sumo wrestler. It was his image, and not only on the screen but also in real life. Considering all the problems of the massive territory he presided over, he had to look that way. What with escalating food riots in Kasakh-stan, terrorism in the Ukraine, Mafia-style gang-wars in Moscow itself, territorial disputes far and wide, and the accelerating decay of law and order just about everywhere, he must at least give the impression of toughness. His lips were thin and compressed under an angular nose; his dark eyes were restless under bushy black eyebrows that crushed together in a frown; the corners of his mouth were turned down — because he hated being in the wrong. But then, so did they all. And not a man of them had had anything good to report. Indeed, they each of them felt a certain relief if not downright satisfaction at the discomfort of the others.
Zek Foener knew this, of course, and thought: The Germans have a word /or it: ‘Schadenfreude’.
Each of the men had stated his position — or in effect, made his confession, if not of guilt, then of incompetence in one degree or another - but also knew that the others were at least equally to blame. Laying blame wasn’t the purpose of the exercise, however, but to untangle the very complicated skein of things back into something of order. It was imperative that they unravel that skein, and quickly, for a frightful pattern was beginning to emerge.
‘Briefly, then,’ said Turchin, after a silence that had already lasted for several long seconds. ‘Clearly, I was right to take my softly, softly approach with Turkur Tzonov. For, as I’ve stated previously, I was already on to him and it was only a matter of time. As it now works out, it was your pushing me that speeded up the process. In moving my own men into Perchorsk, I alerted Tzonov and made him jump the gun. In one way a bad thing, perhaps, but in another …?’ He shrugged and looked to the others for their opinions.
‘Meaning he’s out of it now, lost in another world?’ This was Goodly. But the precog’s face was sour as a lemon. ‘Sir,
I hate to remind you, but that is a nightmare scenario: that Tzonov or someone like him should pass through the Perchorsk Gate into Starside. Wonderful, if we could be sure he or they would stay there, but terrifying to think they might come back … and what they might come back as!’
‘Premier,’ the Minister cut in. ‘I know you’ve heard much the same thing before, but do you take our meaning? Mr Goodly and I - everyone at E-Branch - we have had to deal with this sort of thing before; we know what we’re talking about. You’ve come in on this a lot later, whereas we have been with it from the beginning, for a great many years. And you must never forget that while there are two routes into this parallel world, there are also two ways out. Now you’ve let Tzonov go in there with a platoon of trained men, and —’
‘— As you have “let” your Mr Paxton go in!’ It was Turchin’s turn to cut in. ‘And with just as many trained men, if not more! What’s more, it appears Paxton has brought down the roof of that underground river behind him, however temporarily! Also, I didn’t “let” Turkur Tzonov do anything. Why, the way you have it, anyone would think he had my authority!’
‘I’m not accusing.’ The Minister held up his hands placat-ingly. ‘Just stating facts. But now we have Ben Trask, David Chung, Anna Marie English and a bunch of pot-holers, and a half-company of paramilitaries, lost between two worlds. And that’s too many. Too many of them who can and just might come back as vampires! And if it’s Tzonov? What, with his powers and ambitions?’
‘And if it’s Trask, Chung, or English, with theirs?’ Turchin countered. ‘Or this Nathan, this … this Necroscope?’
Zek Foener said, ‘This is getting us nowhere. Surely the point is that good men and bad ones have crossed over, and its the bad ones we don’t want to come back. Or if they do, we want to know that we can stop them when they get here. Have I got it right? And isn’t it also that we’d like to get our friends, the good ones, out of there if that’s at all possible? I mean, get them out unchanged? Get them out as men?’
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‘Zek has said it all,’ Goodly’s high-pitched voice fluted out. ‘We know what’s on your mind, Sir, and we agree with you: those Gates must be closed, and this time permanently. But not before we’ve got our friends back. What happens to Tzonov, Paxton and their men… w
e couldn’t care less. But we do care about our friends.’
Turchin nodded. ‘So, despite that you’ve just this minute told me that too many of our people have gone through already, now you’re contemplating sending even more. Is that it?’
‘Yes.’ The Minister nodded. ‘But a joint effort, our best shot. And if it doesn’t work … time enough then to close the Gates permanently.’
‘Huh!’ Turchin’s mouth turned down more yet. ‘Oh, yes -a joint effort - but only because I have the Gate, eh? Because this Mr Paxton of yours has blocked the way to the one in Romania?’ He looked pointedly, searchingly at the Minister. ‘Now tell me, don’t you think it is time I knew a little more about this man? Oh yes, I know: CMI - for your eyes only — and definitely not for mine! But aren’t we in a little too deep for all that cloak and dagger stuff now? There’s no more cold war, and certainly not between we four.’
The Minister was suddenly looking uncomfortable - very. ‘But I still can’t talk about —’
‘Oh, yes, you can,’ Goodly told him. The Premier is right. The stakes are too high for cover-ups. E-Branch was less than diplomatic in its eagerness to get a hold of Nathan, and Premier Turchin was less than effective at stopping Turkur Tzonov dead in his tracks. We’ve owned up to our errors, so now it’s your turn. Because I have to admit, I’m interested in Paxton, too. I thought he’d stopped being a thorn in our side a long time ago, when Harry left us. And now this. But, let’s face it, in your official capacity you have to be “responsible” for a lot more things than just E-Branch. So let’s have it all out in the open, and then maybe we can move on.’
The Minister took a deep breath, said, ‘Very well.’ And after a moment’s thought: