This was no idle threat and Andrei knew it; he also knew that Lardis must die one day at the hands of the Wamphyri. He must, for it was them or him now, to the end. And he was just a man and mortal, while they apparently went on forever.
Nathan woke up. Lardis knew it at once, for suddenly the youth's neck in the crook of his arm had stiffened, and Nathan had stopped breathing. He was holding his breath. He lay still, rigid, petrified by knowledge of what had gone before, and by ignorance of what was going on now. Then he opened his eyes a crack at first, then wider, saw Lardis - relaxed again and breathed out.
But Lardis hardened himself and narrowed his eyes a little. He wasn't yet satisfied that the youth was in the clear. 'Nathan,' he said, 'can you hear me?'
Nathan nodded and Lardis helped him to struggle into a seated position. He saw where he was, that he was naked, and clutched his blanket to him. Then, with Lardis still supporting him, he looked along the table: at one end, prone figures lying side by side, and at the other a great wet patch, gleaming red. Finally he saw the Wamphyri lieutenant on his cross and gasped his terror, his lips drawing back from his teeth in an involuntary snarl.
Lardis could well understand that; neither Nathan nor anyone else would require the benefit of previous experience to recognize such as this when they saw it; not with the beast in a state of metamorphosis, as this one had been when the silver shot from Kirk Lisescu's twin barrels ripped him out of his saddle. He had been laughing or shouting, filled with blood and frenzied elation as his creature swooped to claim one last victim. And for all that his eyes were closed now, his passion was still plainly visible, written in every line of his terrible face: The distended jaws, hanging open, their serrated incisors at least an inch longer than his lesser teeth, which were themselves as jagged as the peaks of the barrier range. The bunched muscles of his face, frozen, drawing back grey flesh from his gaping jaws in a mad laugh, or perhaps in a rictus of instant unbearable agony as he was hit. The flaring nostrils in a squat, flattened nose, whose bridge showed the first signs of convolution, a symptom of his condition: that he was a vampire of long standing. He wasn't yet Wamphyri, but given time he would be. Or would have been.
"Vampire World 1 - Blood Brothers"
Nathan took all of this in and more. He took note of the jet-black lacquered gleam of the lieutenant's forelock, where a silver spike had been driven through its knot, holding back his head to the upright. What he could not know was that the forelock's sheen came from the human fat used to grease it. He saw the man's heavily muscular arms pinned horizontally to the crossbar through the wrists and elbows, with huge hands dangling loose; hands whose fingers were half as long and thick again as his own, and tipped with broad, two-inch nails filed to a chisel edge. What he did not know was that the power of this creature was such that he could drive those hands into a man's body to crush his heart or tear through the vertebrae of his spine.
'Ugly bastard, eh?' Lardis's voice was full of hate.
Nathan tore his eyes from the figure on the cross and nodded. Then, glancing at the sky, the position of the stars against the mountains, he gave a start and made to get down from the table. All of the Szgany were expert in gauging the time from the stars, but none so good as Nathan. He knew how long he had been unconscious. And meanwhile ... what of his mother? And Misha?
Lardis grabbed his shoulder. 'Hold on, lad,' he growled. 'First tell me about the bruises on your back. In fact your back is a bruise, one big one!'
Nathan nodded. 'A ... a creature - a wolf, man, fox, I don't know what - threw me against the stockade.'
Lardis's eyes were still narrow, suspicious. But in fact he had heard reports of a hybrid thing among the Wamphyri raiders. Hideous reports. 'Threw you? He didn't bite you?'
Nathan clutched his arm. 'He t-t-took ... took Misha from me!' His eyes were wide again, brimming with the horror of it. Then, shaking Lardis off, he got down from the table, staggering as soon as his legs took his weight. His back was a column of molten agony from nape of neck to base of spine, so that he might have fallen if Lardis hadn't caught him under the arm.
'Don't try to go rushing off, lad. You're in no fit state for it. Anyway, what can be done is being done.'
'B-but my m-mother, and Misha!' He looked dazedly around. 'W-Where are my clothes? And what about N-N-Nestor?'
Lardis opened his mouth ... but he could only say, 'Ah!' and look away.
'Nestor?' And now Nathan's voice was steady. Very steady.
Lardis looked at him again, frowning. In other circumstances it might even be funny, for this was the most anyone had ever had out of Nathan in as long as he could remember! Was it just the shock, or what? What had got into him? Had something got into him? 'Are you sure you're all right?'
'What about Nestor?' Nathan looked straight at him with those weird, bottomless blue eyes of his.
There was nothing for it but the truth. Lardis had too much to do; he'd not had sufficient time to give rein to his own sorrow yet, so mustn't concern himself with the tears of others. Straight out with it then: Taken!' he said. 'We saw it: a flyer got him and carried him off. That one on the cross was its rider. Kirk knocked him out of the saddle; Andrei and myself, we put a bolt in his mount's belly. But we didn't stop it. It made off and took Nestor with it. I'm sorry, lad.'
Nathan made to stumble away. Like Lardis, he would save what grief was left for later. But right now: 'My mother was in our house,' he said. 'She's buried!'
Again Lardis stopped him. 'Nathan, wait. We've been digging in all the fallen houses.' He called forward a woman with a simple map of the town scrawled in charcoal on a piece of cloth, and said, 'What of Nana Kiklu?'
The woman didn't need to look at her map and its smudged symbols; she'd known Nana well; she said nothing, simply shook her head inside her black shawl.
'Speak!' Nathan cried out, and Lardis stepped back a pace, astonished. 'What?' Nathan shouted. 'A shake of your head? What does that mean? Did you find my mother? Is she dead? Speak!'
Grief-stricken herself, with losses of her own, finally the woman found her voice and sobbed, 'Your mother isn't there, Nathan. They didn't find her. Neither your mother, nor the Zanesti girl, Misha, who was at your house. Her father was here to see if she'd been found. He was mad, tearing his hair! He lost not only Misha but also a son this night.'
Misha, lost! Finally the truth of it hit Nathan. He sat down in the dust and cradled his head in his hands. There were no tears, just a vast weariness. For he knew now that he must wake up - really wake up - and become part of this world he had spurned. Before ... it hadn't mattered. Nothing had mattered very much. This world hadn't been his, hadn't even been real, because he'd thought it held nothing for him. With only a few exceptions, its peoples had seemed like aliens. But the loss of Misha was real, and he couldn't deny it; the one warm spot in his heart was empty now and cold.
No, there was one other warm place there, occupied till now by his dear mother. And was she, too, lost? In which case his heart must freeze entirely. He turned to Lardis. 'Did anyone see my m-m-mother taken?'
"Vampire World 1 - Blood Brothers"
Lardis sighed. 'Nathan, I've many things to do. Too many things, and too little time. But when all's done be sure I'll ask around. You're not the only one with questions. By sunup we'll all know who was taken, murdered, raped, changed. And by then, too, we'll have ... dealt with all this. Right now, however, there's nothing to be done. Not by you, at least.'
'And what am I supposed to do?'
Lardis shrugged, sighed. 'Find a warm place. Get some sleep.'
'And you? Don't you need your sleep?' Amazingly, Nathan was almost defiant. Lardis might expect such as this from his brother, Nestor, but from Nathan?
'I'll sleep later,' he answered roughly, turning away. 'But for now... I've work to do. So be off, I'm busy!'
Nathan shook his short-cropped yellow head. 'If you can be strong, then so can I. Anyway, how could I sleep? Lardis, I... I don't have anyone!'
Lardis heard the emptiness in his voice, like an echo of his own emptiness, and thought: Neither do I have anyone, not any longer. Except maybe you.
But out loud h^ said, Then be strong somewhere else, for the moment at least. This is a bloody place, Nathan, and what we're doing here is bloody work . ..'
After that there was no more time for talk, for Andrei had lifted the blanket off the next one and was beckoning urgently. Lardis went to him and looked where his finger pointed. The man under the blanket had been bitten in the neck, and wide-spaced punctures had formed scabs over heavy blue arteries. There was no breath in him, no pulse, and he lay utterly still.
Nathan backed off a few paces and stood there watching. He had to learn what he could of this sort of thing now, for it was no longer a game which he, Nestor, and Misha played in the woods. The Wamphyri were real, and so was the horror they brought with them.
Lardis yanked a bauble from its stitches in the cuff of his jacket, opened the cold grey fingers of the corpse's left hand and folded them around a small silver bell which he forced into the palm. Then he stepped back and waited. And in a little while ...
... The 'dead' man (whom Lardis had been fairly sure was undead, but must test anyway), moaned and gave a shudder that shook his entire body. His eyelids fluttered but remained mercifully shut. He wasn't ready to wake up, but even unconscious the poison in his blood was protecting its changeling. His hand vibrated on the table's boards, unclenched, and in its agitation tossed aside the silver bauble. Finally he sighed and lay still again. And Lardis nodded, sharply.
The gaunt-faced, strong-willed executioners came forward, and Nathan saw what Lardis had meant by 'bloody work'. He forced himself to watch this one, just one, and was sickened. All the rattling, grimacing skeletons of whispered campfire stories took on rotting flesh now, and every bad dream of his childhood was realized at one and the same time.
Against this surreal background of smoky, ruddy firelight and terrifying burnt-pork stenches - where gaunt figures came and went through the night, carrying their burdens of blanketed bodies, and Lardis Lidesci was the Ultimate Authority, who determined life or death - finally Nathan was set free from his deep-rooted mental shackles, became a man of Sunside, Szgany, and left the shucked-off chrysalis of his weird other-worldliness behind him.
The shell was left behind, at least.
But a man is more than flesh and blood. When he is conscious a man can control his body and even, in large measure, his thoughts. But when he's asleep ...? Are his thoughts entirely his own?
When he was very small, Nathan had sometimes asked his mother: 'Why do the wolves talk to me in my pillow? Why do I hear all of the dead people whispering?' Then she would seem to close up on herself like the flowers at sundown; an uneasy look would come into her eyes; she would shush him and beg him not to ask things like that, for such questions were strange and people wouldn't like or understand them.
These were only a few of the strange questions Nathan had learned not to ask, until he'd rarely asked anything at all but remained silent. Even in his dreams, he'd learned how to stay mainly silent.
But that had been then, in his childhood.
And this was now, and he was a man...
Lardis had told Nathan to go away, find himself a warm place, sleep. But he could not. Indeed, it would not surprise Nathan if he never slept again. Instead he turned his back on Lardis's and Andrei's 'bloody work' - what was happening on the great table, the monstrous but necessary examination of the dead and the undead by those who still lived, while they still lived - and went to sit cross-legged close to the foot of the cross, where the Wamphyri lieutenant hung on his silver spikes.
Someone brought Nathan his clothes and he dressed himself automatically, almost without conscious volition, then sat shivering under his blanket and waited for the lieutenant to regain consciousness. For Lardis intended to question this creature, this man or once-man, and whatever the old Lidesci's methods would be - however cruel - Nathan intended to hear for himself whatever answers they might elicit. He was Szgany now and had made himself a vow; it was unpublicized but a vow for all that, and it would be a hard thing to accomplish. In order to destroy his enemies he must first understand them.
"Vampire World 1 - Blood Brothers"
There was a lesser fire close by, which slowly warmed him through until he began to nod. And despite that he had thought it impossible, in a little while he curled up on his side and went to sleep. It was the beginning of a healing process, but only partly physical. For mainly it was an opportunity for his mind to consolidate the undeniable fact of his existence, at the same time assimilating something of the monstrous facts which had focused that reality.
That was partly why he slept: to heal himself in body and spirit, and let the subconscious Nathan create some kind of order out of the chaos of the physical Nathan's new reality. But his mind was not like those of other men; complex as the genetics which had built it as a reflection of another's mind, it was living proof of that universal axiom, 'like father, like son'. The only difference between him and his Necroscope father was this: that Harry Keogh, in his own world, had had the benefit of a mathematical science, and of a million dead people who cared for him and were not afraid. While in this world... now the Great Majority had plenty to fear, and felt that they could only trust each other. And so they continued to avoid Nathan when his dreams impinged too closely upon theirs. Like now .. .
... He felt them shut him out, withdrawing into the silence of their tombs! More quickly than ever before, the teeming dead had sensed and rejected him. And so he must dream of the living.
Misha was at the forefront of his mind: naturally he would dream of her. Not as he had last seen her, in the clutches of a beast-man (his mind shied from that), but briefly, in snatches out of time. As a child, as a girl, and then as a young woman.
First as a child: Misha as he'd seen her that first time: all naked, sleek, shining, and agile as a fish in the water, swimming in the sun-dappled shallows and beckoning him to join her there. Strangely her innocence had deprived him of his own! And despite that he had been a child, his thoughts had been a man's thoughts. After that there had been other times, but always he kept his sensual self from her; they had played as children, sexless at first, until the passing years had brought changes.
One time, when they had been swimming together and after they'd scrambled back into their clothes - as they laughed and rough-and-tumbled each other on the riverbank - finally they'd fallen into each other's arms and she had felt him hard against her. At once, he'd sensed her catching her breath and drawing just a little apart. But then, as curiosity got the better of her, she had let her arm fall 'casually' across Nathan's lower half, to test the response of the small rod where it throbbed in his trousers.
Misha had older brothers; she wasn't blind; she knew about such things.
One day as they wandered in the forest, when he was fifteen and she something less than a year younger, they'd come across a plum tree. It was late in the season and the fruits were very ripe. Lifting her up until she could reach the shining, purple plums, Nathan had been more than ever aware of her thighs swelling into firm, rounded, still boyish buttocks, and conscious of the buds of her breasts where she strained her arms upwards. So that after she had picked several of the fruits, and he relaxed his grip to let her slide down between his hands -
- He'd marvelled at the sight of her brown legs, revealed where her dress rode up about her waist. She had seen his eyes on her and felt him against her where she stretched her toes for the forest's floor; and she'd told him, however breathlessly, impulsively:
'Ah, see! Your little man is jumping again .. .'
And when he'd turned away, embarrassed and reddening:
'Nathan, wait!' she had taken his elbow. 'It's all right. I understand. There's no harm in him. He jumps for joy -for the joy of me!'
For her brothers had girlfriends, too, and Misha knew how they dealt with their frustrations, how they gained relief from the overabundance of their emotions. 'You should let him out,' she told Nathan then, still clinging to him, 'before he bursts!'
And in the secrecy of the long grass under the plum tree, she had whisperingly, wonderingly compared the purple of his swollen glans to the tightly stretched skins of ripe plums, and stroked him to orgasm. Since when and for three long years, she had satisfied him in this way, and allowed him to return this most tender compliment. But wise beyond her years, she had not once let him into her.
'Ah, no!' she would say when his flesh seemed most insistent. 'For when my children come along I must be able to teach them, which I can't do while I've still so much to learn. Also, I have not made up my mind. I may love you, Nathan, but I can't be sure. What if I discover someone else to love, but too late? If I let your flesh into mine now, this very minute, it might decide me against my will.'
And finally, just a year ago, walking in the twilight before the night, when they paused to fondle a while on a grassy bank and she'd held him throbbing in her hand, and Nathan had told her:
"Vampire World 1 - Blood Brothers"
'H-h-he wants to k-kiss you, too. Where only my f-fingers have kissed you.'
And again on impulse she'd taken him deep into her mouth to draw his sting, and afterwards told him:
'There. Flesh is flesh, Nathan, but this way makes no new flesh.' And putting her finger to his lips, she'd added, 'Shh! Say nothing, make no protest! We are grown up now. Give me just another year, and then - I shall make up my mind. But it won't be easy. My father and brothers see many men in Settlement, and they see you. Oh, I know - I know you are more different than even they suspect - but harder far to convince them of that. And anyway, there could be someone else.'
The only 'someone else' there could be was Nestor and Nathan knew it, but he'd said nothing. Except ... he had wondered. For there had also been times when Nestor and Misha were alone together, too, and who could say but that - ?
- But no, for Nestor chased after the other girls of the village, while Nathan had no one but Misha. Surely that must make a difference?
Now that his brother had entered his dream, Nathan moved on, moved forward, to the present. And now Misha was no longer a slip of a girl but a young woman, sitting there in his mother's house, like some warm wild flower in the light of lamps and the glow of the fire.
Small but long-legged - elfish as the creatures of Szgany myth, which were said to inhabit the deep forests - Misha Zanesti was the focus of Nathan's fascination; indeed, she was his only fascination in the world! So that it was hard to concentrate on what they were saying, she and his mother, when all he really wanted to do was look at Misha. Even now, dreaming, he couldn't remember what had been said, but he certainly remembered the way Misha had looked: Her hair dark as the night, velvet, the darkest Nathan had ever seen, which in the light of the sun shone black as a raven's wing. Her eyes - so huge and deeply brown under black, expressive, arching eyebrows that they, too, looked black - all moist and attentive where she listened to Nana Kiklu's warm low voice, and now and then nodded her understanding and agreement. Her mouth: small, straight and sweet under a tip-tilted nose which, for all that it flared occasionally in true Gypsy fashion (indeed, a great deal like her father's) had nothing hawkish or severe about it. Her ears, a little pointed, pale against the velvet of her hair where it fell in ringlets to her shoulders.
She might be less wild, voluble, deliberately voluptuous - less enticing and far more retiring - than certain of Settlement's Szgany girls, but she was in no way less than them. Misha lacked nothing of fire, Nathan knew, but kept it subdued and burning within. So that he alone (and perhaps Nestor, too?) saw its light blazing out from her in all directions, like the white of her perfectly formed teeth when they smiled into the sun. Ah, but he'd also seen those teeth snarl and knew of several village youths who'd felt the lash of her tongue when they sought to be too familiar! Well, they'd been lucky, those lads, for they might have felt a lot more than that if he ... if Nathan... but that wasn't his way. Or it hadn't been, not then.
In any case, Misha could look after herself and had her own philosophy. He remembered her words: 'If a girl flaunts herself and acts the slut, she can only expect to be treated as such. I do not and will not!' But with Nathan she'd always acted as the mood took her. For which he was glad ...
His mother and Misha faded from Nathan's dream and were replaced by Nestor. Nestor striding in the streets of Settlement, admired by the girls and adored by his friends even as the stuttering Nathan was shunned. Nestor proud, strong - arrogant? - but never the bully. Not until that night, last night, when he would have used his physical strength to bend another to his will. Nestor who had cared for and protected Nathan through all the years of their childhood, and cared for Misha, too, until he'd seen how closely she and Nathan were drawn together.
Nestor gone, taken, stolen by a Wamphyri flyer into Starside.
No.' said a voice in Nathan's dream, one which he recognized at once. For it was a mind-voice, and telepathic voices - even the whispers of the dead - are not unlike their more physical counterparts; they 'sound' the same as if spoken. But this was no dead person speaking, not even a 'person', though Nathan had always considered him as such. And: No, the mental voice came again, like a snarl, a cough, a bark in Nathan's dreaming mind. Your brother - our uncle - has not been stolen away into Starside. The flying creature which took him crashed to earth in the east, on Sunside.
Nathan pictured the speaker. He had his own name for him: Blaze, after the diagonal white stripe across his flat forehead, from his left eyebrow to his right ear, as if the fur there was marked with frost. Blaze, whose eyes were the brown of dark wild honey in the twilight, and feral yellow at night. Lean but not skinny, all muscle, sure-footed as a mountain goat and fleeter far. And intelligent? - oh, far beyond the average intelligence of the pack! He admired and respected him, and knew that it was mutual. Why else should the wild wolves of the barrier mountains call Nathan their 'uncle', and come to him in his dreams as they sometimes came to him in his waking hours?
"Vampire World 1 - Blood Brothers"
The grey brother read Nathan's thoughts, which were focused now beyond the scope of casual dreaming. Because you are our uncle! he insisted. Mine, and likewise the ones you call 'Dock' and 'Grinner', my brothers from the same litter. And because you and we are of one blood and mind, we are curious about you and consider your welfare. Our father would have wished it, we think ... (A mental shrug, the twitch of a grey-furred ear.) You are not of our kind, but you are of our kin, after all. You are our uncle, as is Nestor. But you are the one who understands us. You, Nathan, of all the Szgany, translate our thoughts and answer them.
Nathan had never understood the way they included him in their wolf family-tree; it could only be a compliment; he considered it as such, and was satisfied to be their friend. But now it seemed his friendship with the wolves was bearing fruit.
'What of Nestor,' he was eager. 'Does he live?'
Our grey brothers in Settlement saw him taken into the creature's mouth, the other's snarling answer came at once. He was snatched up, whirled aloft, carried east and towards the barrier peaks. But in the hills and all along the spine of the mountains, we observed the creature's clumsy flight. Wounded where a great bolt was lodged in its flesh, it could not clear the mountains. With fluids raining from its wound, it fell to earth, came down in the pines and expired on the slopes above a Szgany township. And so your brother, who is our uncle Nestor, is not in Starside but Sunside. But .... cannot say if he lives. Members of the pack were close to hand, but not that close. And the men of the town are fearful now of creatures other than men. Aye, and even of strange men! The grey brotherhood must stay well clear.
'Which town?' Nathan could scarcely contain his excitement, which threatened to wake him up. 'Where did the flyer crash? If Nestor is still alive, I have to find him. He's all I have left.'
You have us.
'Among men, he's all I have.'
You have the Lidesci, who was our father's friend even before we were littered.
'But Lardis Lidesci... is not of my blood.'
(A nod of that wise wolf head.) The town is the next one to the east, between the rivers.
Twin Fords?'
That is its name, we think. But Nathan, you have your mother, and a young female of the Szgany. We have seen you together, and she is always in your mind.
'Misha? I don't know if she lives. And if she lives, I don't know where or for how long. She was taken by a ... by a human dog! By a beast-thing, Wamphyri!'
The Dweller, our father, was a wolf-human, a werewolf.
Nathan shook his head. 'Your father could not have been like this one. You are animals, not-humans. But this one was a ... a beast! He was inhuman.'
We know of him. (That nod of a wise head again.) In the east, beyond the pass, the grey brothers have heard him singing to the moon in Karenstack. For he worships our silver mistress much as we do. But you are right: he is not like us. We are... animals, and he is a man-beast.
'Wamphyri,' said Nathan, 'aye And your mother? What of her?
'I don't know. Perhaps she was taken; I pray by my star that she was not; perhaps she ran off into the woods. But if she did, then why has she not returned? Do you know anything of her?'
No. It is only by chance that we know of Nestor. We wish you luck in your search for him.
'Do you leave me now?' Nathan was reluctant to let them go.
New things have come to pass. (In Nathan's mind, Blaze's golden eyes seemed to burn on him. But their yellow fire was fading, and the wolf's telepathic voice was faint now, retreating.) Strange and monstrous creatures are come into Starside, from where they raid on Sunside. The woods and mountains are no longer safe, neither for wolves nor men. These are problems for which we have no answers, but there is one at least who might know. Now we go to find out about these things.
Desperately, Nathan tried to retain him, hold on to this one familiar thread - however weird, tenuous, unbelievable - in a world which in the space of a few short hours had become a nightmare. 'Answers? But there is no answer to the Wamphyri.'
You may be right. You may be wrong. (The voice was fading out and starting to lose all sense and meaning. How else could Nathan translate the next and last words he heard, except that he misunderstood them?) But our mother speaks to our father, who is your brother. And if anyone would know, he is that one. And so we go to speak to the one who suckled us.
'Your mother, a wolf?'
Aye, where her bones lie bleached in a secret place...
It seemed that a cold wind keened upon Nathan then, as the wolf-voice went out of his dreams -
- But the wind was only the night air where someone had uncovered his head. Squinting his eyes in the firelight he saw Lardis kneeling beside him, turning back his blanket. 'Nathan,' the old Lidesci growled. 'Be up, lad, and away from here. This one you've guarded so well, he wakes up - and I have business with him.'
"Vampire World 1 - Blood Brothers"
As dreams are wont to do in the light of reality, Nathan's was quickly disintegrating, breaking up. Those parts concerning impossible relationships were quickly forgotten; his wolves had always called him uncle, so that he saw nothing strange or new in it. It wasn't worth retaining. But as for the one important item of information, about Nestor: he clung to that, repeating it to himself: The flyer that carried Nestor away has crashed to earth in the east, close to Twin Fords.
Strange to think that just yesterday, in the late afternoon, Nathan and the rest of Lardis's party had passed through Twin Fords on their way home. Since then, it was as if a new age had dawned. An age of darkness.
Perhaps he had spoken out loud before he was fully awake. For Lardis at once demanded: 'Eh? Twin Fords? What of it?'
'I ... I was dreaming,' Nathan answered. 'Of Twin Fords, I think.' He'd long ago learned not to talk about his dreams. Especially the stranger ones.
But Lardis was shaking his weary, hag-ridden head. 'No, it was no dream. Twin Fords was hit last night, as prelude to what happened here. A handful of refugees came in while you lay sleeping, and you must have overheard us talking. Twin Fords is no more; its people won't go back there; the tribes are sundered, Nathan, and we're all to be Travellers again. The days will be ours, and the golden sun our one sure friend, but all the long dark nights will belong to them, the Wamphyri!'
The Wamphyri lieutenant was groaning, stirring on his cross. Nathan stood up, eased his cramped bones and felt fire in his bruises. He glanced at the stars over the black barrier range, saw that the hour was well past midnight. He had never slept so long in one place, at one time. His bladder was full of water, which he must be rid of.
Stumbling away into the shadows, he found a place to relieve himself. The ground all around was already desecrated, steeped in vampire mist, warrior stench, and unavenged Szgany blood. A little urine couldn't hurt. Already Nathan's thoughts had turned as sour and cynical as the bitter brown taste in his mouth . ..
When he got back to the cross the lieutenant was fully awake, turning his head this way and that, as far as the spike through his topknot would allow, glaring at the handful of men who were gathered there to question him. For a moment the vampire's scarlet eyes lit on Nathan, burned into his soul, drove him back a pace before they moved on. Nathan was no threat; he was a mere youth, of no importance. But the men were something else. Especially the apish, hollow-eyed leader of this Szgany rabble.
Vratza Wransthrall brought his scarlet gaze to rest upon Lardis and scowled at him. 'Man,' he croaked, 'you are doomed. For what you have done and will do to me -' his eyeballs swivelled left and right, observing the silver spikes which pinned him to the cross, '- my master, the Lord Wran, will stuff your throat with your own tripes, rip out your living heart and eat it smoking, and feed your tatters to his warriors. Whoever you were, you are no more.'
Lardis looked up at him, tilted his head a little on one side, sniffed at the air suspiciously, disdainfully. He glanced at the men around him: Kirk Lisescu, Andrei Romani and his brothers, and one or two others, inquiring: 'Do the words rise or fall from his lips? I think they fall; or is it the stench of warriors lingering on the night air? No, for that is sweet by comparison. And so it seems we've erred and should have nailed him higher. But what the hell... a stench is only a stench.'
The vampire's muscles bunched as he flexed grey arms on silver spikes; he gave a shudder that wracked his entire body, then groaned and hung still. But in another moment, lifting his head to glower at Lardis as before, he said: 'Aye, make your jokes while you may. For all of this -' he snorted and tossed his head derisively in a small, sneering gesture which dismissed Settlement in its entirety, '- is finished. And all of your people are as dust. Let every man, woman and child of them that are yours count each breath he takes from this time forward, enjoying it individually as if it were his last. For the lucky ones have very little of breathing left to do. As for them that are unlucky: they shall be heir to the dubious delights of the great stack on Star-side; from the mills where their bones will be ground down for meal, to the pens of the warriors and the reeking methane pits. They shall be fuel for my master's lusts, flesh for his fashioning, fodder for his beasts. So be it.'
Someone had brought Lardis a stool where he sat with a hiked knee supporting his elbow, and his square chin resting on the knuckles of a calloused hand. His attitude towards his captive seemed almost casual, but anyone in his acquaintance would recognize how doomful was his calm, quiet voice as he answered, 'Long-winded bastard, aren't you?' And then, more businesslike:
'Do you have a name, vampire, or are you satisfied to be remembered as a stench and a puff of black smoke rising from our fire?'
"Vampire World 1 - Blood Brothers"
The creature gave a start, and glared harder than ever; but he also trembled a little where he hung suspended on the cross. Poisoned by the silver shot which had ripped into his great chest - also by the long silver spikes which pinned his wrists, elbows, and the twitching muscles of his calves to timbers hard as iron - he was weak by a vampire's standards, but still strong by a man's. Even now, if only he could get down from this cross, he'd wreak havoc among his tormentors before someone put a bolt through his heart. That was how he would prefer to go: fighting bloodily the one minute, with a bolt through his chest the next, and finally his head flying free in a crimson welter! After that, they could burn him all they wanted. But ... not while he was still alive.
It was as if Lardis read his mind. 'Oh?' he said. 'And is it that the fire worries you?' He knew it was, for a vampire burns slowly, and the thing inside him fights it all the way.
Meanwhile, Kirk Lisescu had slipped away and returned with a spade. Whistling tunelessly, he bent his lean, muscular back at the foot of the cross and commenced digging in the loose soil there. Whenever his spade struck the upright, it shivered a little. Looking at the lieutenant, Lardis nodded to indicate Kirk's activity, and said:
'He digs here at the front, so that eventually the cross will be weakened and topple towards the fire there.' Standing up, he jerked his thumb negligently to his rear where a long, deep pit of glowing embers lay behind him. And: 'Phew!' Lardis wiped his brow, 'but it's hot!' Then, walking to and fro - with his great head jutting a little, though not aggressively, and his hands clasped behind his back - he continued conversationally:
'Of course, if you were to loosen up a bit and talk -why, my good friend here might stop digging in order to hear what you were saying!' He gave a shrug. 'And really it's as simple as that: while you talk you live, at least as long as you make interesting conversation. And when you stop talking you burn. Meanwhile, you still haven't told us your name, or where you come from, or how many there are of you ... or anything at all which we might find remotely interesting!'
Snarling the last few words, finally Lardis gritted his teeth, sprang forward and snatched Kirk Lisescu's spade, and began shovelling himself with a vengeance; until the cross gave a lurch and an ominous creak, and tilted forward a fraction towards the fire in the trench.
But a fraction was enough, and now at last the vampire started to talk ...
II
'My name?' the undead creature on the cross gabbled, his red eyes starting out, staring at the fire-pit into which he would topple slowly, face down, unless he chose to speak first. 'Is that all you want to know? My name and a little useless information? Well then, and for all the good it will do you, they call me Vratza Wransthrall. There, and what else can I tell you?'
Lardis tossed the spade aside, stepped back a little and filled his labouring lungs. Then he looked up at the other, nodded, and smiled albeit humourlessly. 'So you've taken your master's name, eh? And was it also your plan to step into his shoes one day?'
Beneath lowered eyebrows, the vampire's slitted eyes shot scarlet loathing at him. 'In Turgosheim,' he grunted, 'the Lord Wran the Rage had several lieutenants. Here and for the moment, he has just the one - myself! Yes, I would be Wamphyri. Or I would have been.'
Again Lardis nodded. 'Turgosheim, eh? And where, pray, is Turgosheim?'
The other glared at him, flared his nostrils, remained silent ... until Kirk Lisescu took up his spade again. Then:
'East!' Vratza cried, straining on the silver spikes until the blue veins jerked and writhed in his arms, but straining uselessly. He might tear his flesh but he wouldn't tear those nails loose. And: 'East,' he croaked again, relaxing as best he could and hanging there shivering, panting. 'Beyond the Great Red Waste. There are mountains there, a lesser range - Starside to the north and Sunside in the south, much the same as here - but smaller. Turgosheim lies hidden from the sun in a gorge. It was our home but Wratha brought us away, to this.1
'Wratha?' Lardis cocked his head on one side. 'A girl's name? A Lady, your leader?'
'Wratha the Risen, a Lady, aye. She led us out of Turgosheim.' Vratza's floodgates were fully open now; Lardis need only question him.
'Why did she bring you here?'
'Because Turgosheim was used up. Too many vampires, too few Sunsiders.'
'Ah!' Lardis craned his neck, narrowed his eyes. 'And how many Lords were there, in Turgosheim?'
'More than forty, less than fifty. Including the Ladies.'
'And how many here, now?'
'Six. Wratha and her five.'
'And lieutenants?'
'Myself, and one other.'
Lardis drew in his chin. 'What? Six of them and only two of you?'
'Four of us died last night,' Vratza scowled, 'when we came out of Starside to raid on a town standing east of here.'
"Vampire World 1 - Blood Brothers"
