Necroscope 4: Deadspeak (37 page)

Difficult enough, aye,
the dead vampire’s voice sounded tired.
What had been done to you was the work of an expert! All night I laboured to rid your house of his infestation, Harry. You may now gauge for yourself the measure of my success.

Harry stood up again. With his heart in his mouth, he attempted to conjure a Möbius door … to no avail. The equations evolving, mutating and multiplying with awesome acceleration on the computer screens of his mind were completely alien to him; he couldn’t fathom them individually, let alone as a total concept or entity. He sighed and said: “Well, I’m grateful to you—indeed, you’ll never know just how grateful I am—but you weren’t entirely successful.”

Faethor’s answer, with his bodiless shrug sensed superimposed upon it, was half-apologetic:
I
warned you it might be so. Oh, I found the region of the trouble, be sure, and even managed to unlock several of its doors. But beyond them—

“Yes?”

—
There was nothing! No time, no space, nothing at all. Very frightening places, Harry, and strange to think that they exist right there in your mind—in your entirely
human
mind! I felt that to take one single step over those thresholds would mean being sucked in and lost forever beyond the boundaries of the universe. Needless to say, I took no such step. And in any case, no sooner had I opened these doors than they slammed themselves shut in my face. For which I was not ungrateful.

Harry nodded. “You looked in on the Möbius Continuum,” he said. And: “When I’ve finished here, I must try to find him. Möbius, I mean. For just as you’re the expert in your field, so he’s the one true authority in his. Useless to seek him out until now, for without deadspeak I couldn’t talk to him.”

Will you do it now, at once?
Faethor was fascinated.
I am interested in genius. There is a kinship in all true geniuses, Harry. For however far removed their various talents, into whichever spheres, still the
obsession
remains the same. They seek to eliminate all imperfections. Where this Möbius has approached the very limits of pure numbers, I myself have searched for purest pure evil. We stand on the opposite sides of a great gulf, but still we are brothers of a sort. Yes, and it would be fascinating to meet such a one.

“No,” Harry automatically shook his head, and knew that Faethor would sense it, “I won’t look for him now.

Eventually, but not now. After I’ve practised a while and when I’ve convinced myself that my deadspeak is as good as it used to be, maybe then.”

As you wish. And for the moment? Do you go now to seek out Janos?

Harry rolled up his sleeping-bag and stuffed it into his holdall. “That too, eventually,” he answered. “But first I’ll return to my friends in Rhodes and see how they’re faring. And before any of that there are still things you must tell me. I still want to know all about Janos; the better a man knows his enemy, the easier it is to defeat him. Also, I need to know how to defend myself against him.”

Of course!
said Faethor.
Indeed! I had forgotten there was work still to be done. But only see how eager I am that you should be on your way. Ah, but I go too fast! And certainly you are right: you must have every possible weapon at your disposal, if you’re to defeat him. As to how you may best defend yourself, that’s not easy. This sort of thing is inherent in the Wamphyri, but difficult to teach. Even the keenest instinct would not suffice, for this is something borne in the blood. If we had an entire week together …

“No,” again Harry shook his head, “out of the question. Can’t you break it down into its simplest terms for me? If I’m not too stupid I might just catch on.”

I
can but try,
said Faethor.

Harry lit a cigarette, sat down on his stuffed holdall and said, “Go ahead.”

Again Faethor’s shrug, and he at once commenced:
Janos is without doubt the finest telepath—which is to say beguiler, enchanter, fascinator—I have ever known. Wherefore he will first attempt an invasion of your mind. Now as I’ve hinted, and as is surely self-evident, your mind is extraordinary, Harry. Well, of course it is: for you are the Necroscope! But where you have practised only good, Janos, like myself in my time, has practised only evil. And because you
know
he is evil, so you fear him and what he may do to you. Do you understand?

“Of course. None of this is new to me.”

To anyone less well versed in the ways of the Wamphyri, such is the awe—the sheer terror—Janos would inspire, that his victim would be paralysed. But you are not ignorant of our ways; indeed you are an expert in your own right. Do you know the saying, that the best form of defence is attack?

“I’ve heard it, yes.”

I
suspect that in this instance it would be true.

“I should attack him? With my mind?”

Instead of shrinking back from him when you sense him near, seek him out! He would enter your mind? Enter his! He will expect you to be afraid; be bold! He will threaten; brush all such threats aside and strike! But above all else, do not let his evil weaken you. When he yawns his great jaws at you, go
in
through them, for he’s softer on the inside!

“Is that all?”

“If I say more, I fear it would only confuse you. And who knows? You may learn more about Janos from his story than from any measures of mine to forearm you. Moreover, I’m weary from a long night’s work. Ask me what has been, by all means, but not what is yet to be. True, I have been an observer of times, but as my current situation is surely witness, I was far too often in error.

Harry thought about what he’d learned: Faethor’s “advice” about how to deal with a mind-attack from Janos. Some might consider it suicidal to act in accordance with such instructions; the Necroscope wasn’t so sure. In any case, it seemed very little to go on. But patently it was all he was going to get. Dawning daylight had apparently dampened the vampire’s enthusiasm.

Harry stood up, stretched and looked all around.

The mist had thinned to nothing; a handful of gaunt houses stood beyond a hedge half a mile away; in the other direction, the silhouettes of diggers and bulldozers were like dinosaurs frozen on a grey horizon. Another hour and they’d roar into destructive mechanical life, as if the sun had warmed their joints to clanking motion.

Harry looked at the ground where he stood, the spot where Faethor had died on the night Ladislau Giresci cut off his head in the ruins of a bomb-blasted, burning house. He saw the now liquescent mushrooms there, their spores like red stains on the grass and soil; and in the eye of his mind he saw Faethor, too, the skeletal, shrouded thing he’d been in his dream. “Are you up to telling me Janos’s story?” he asked, apparently of no one.

That will be no effort at all but a pleasure,
the other answered at once.
It was my pleasure to spawn him, and it gave me the most
exquisite
pleasure to put him down again!

But first… do you remember the story of Thibor in his early days? How he robbed me of my castle in the Khorvaty? And how I, most sorely injured, fled westwards? Let me remind you, then.

This was how it was …

X: Bloodson

T
HIBOR THE
W
ALLACH, THAT CURSED INGRATE—TO WHOM
I had given my egg, name and banner, and into whose hands I had bequeathed my castle, lands and Wamphyri powers—had injured me sorely.

Thrown down burning from the walls of my castle, I experienced the ultimate agonies. A myriad minion bats fluttered to me as I fell, were scorched and died for their troubles, but dampened my flames not at all. I crashed through trees and shrubs, and pinwheeled aflame down the sides of the gorge to the very bottom. But my fall had been broken in part by the foliage, and I came to rest in a shallow pool which alone saved my melting Wamphyri flesh.

As close to true death as a vampire might come and remain undead, I put out a desperate call to my faithful Gypsies where they camped in the valley. They came, lifted my body from the still, salving water and cared for it, and carried me west over the mountains into Hungary. Protecting me from jars and jolts, hiding me from potential enemies, keeping me safe from the sun’s searing rays, at last they brought me to a place of rest. Aye, and it was a long rest: a time of enforced retirement, for recuperation, for the reshaping of my broken body; a long,
long
rest indeed!

For
how
Thibor had hurt me! All bones broken, back and neck, skull and limbs; chest caved in, heart and lungs amangle; skin flayed by boulders and sharp branches, and seared with fire … even the vampire in me was burned, bruised and battered. A month in the healing? A year? Nay, an
hundred
years!

My long convalescence was spent in an inaccessible mountain retreat, and all the while my Szgany tended me, and their sons, and
their
sons. Aye, and their sweet, firm-breasted daughters, too. Slowly the vampire in me healed itself, and then healed me. Wamphyri, I walked again, practised my arts, made myself wiser, stronger, more awesome than ever before. And eventually I went abroad from my aerie and made plans for my life’s adventure.

Ah, but it was a terrible world in which I emerged, with wars everywhere, great suffering, famines, pestilence! Terrible, aye, but the stuff of life to me—for I was Wamphyri!

I found myself the ruins of a keep in the border with Wallachia and used the tumbled stones to build a small castle there. Almost impregnable within its walls, I set myself up as a Boyar of some means. I led a mixed body of Szgany, Hungarians and local Wallachs, housed them and paid them good wages, was soon accepted as a landowner and leader. And so I became a small power in the land.

As for Wallachia: I avoided venturing there, mainly. For there was one in Wallachia whose strength and cruelties were already renowned: a mercenary Voevod named Thibor, who fought for the Wallach princelings. I did not wish to meet this one (who should by rights be keeping guard over my lands and properties in the Khorvaty even now!), not yet; for in the event of my seeing him I might not be able to contain myself. Which could well prove fatal, for he was now grown to a far greater power than I myself. No, my revenge must wait… what is time to the Wamphyri, eh?

Time in the tumult of its passing, where an entire day is like the single tick of a great clock—it is nothing. But when each vastly extended tick is precisely the same as the one gone before, and when they begin to fall like thunderclaps upon the ear …ah, but then one discovers time’s restrictions, from which only boredom and uttermost ennui may ensue. And
that
is everything! I was restless, confined, pent up. There was I, lusty, strong, something of a power, and nowhere to channel my energies. The time was coming when I must go further abroad in the roiling world.

But then, in the year 1178, a diversion.

Over a period of some few years I’d been hearing tales of a Szgany woman who was a true observer of times; which is to say, she had the power of precognition. Eventually my curiosity was piqued and I determined to see her. She was not of my own band of Gypsies, and so I must wait for her to venture into those mountainous regions within my control.

Meanwhile, I sent out messengers to direct her wanderings aright, describing how when she and her band came within my spheres they would be offered every hospitality, treated with utmost respect, and paid in gold for whichever services they might render unto me. And in the interim, while I waited on the advent of this alleged oracle, I determined to practise what small talent I possessed in casting a few weirds of my own.

I mixed certain herbs and burned them, fell asleep breathing their incense, and sought by oneiromancy to divine the way it would be between myself and this doubtless fraudulent witch, this “Marilena” (for such was her name). Aye, for in those days I had good reason to be interested in talented folk, and to seek them out whenever the opportunity arose. My son Thibor had been abroad for several human lifetimes now, and might have spawned all manner of curiosities in the land!

And so I sought out all such anomalies, and in so doing prided myself with the discovery of charlatans. But… if I should come across a genuine talent (and if Wamphyri blood should course in the veins of such a one) then he or she was a goner! For while to a creature such as I the blood is—or was—the life, the sweetest nectar of all may only be sipped from the undead font of another vampire! A font, aye, for such a sip is surely holy—to one such as I am, at least.

But … only picture my astonishment when finally my oneiromancy produced results, and I dreamed of this dark angel where I had thought to discover a hag!

What? She was a child! I saw her in my dreams: a lovely child, aye, and innocent I thought (but wrongly, for she was knowing as a whore!). She came to me naked—all curves, creamy and brown, unblemished; dark in her eyes and in her shining hair; the lips of her face red as cherries, and those of her oyster when I opened it the hue of freshly slaughtered meat—to stand before me unashamed. Two centuries gone by, since Thibor destroyed my castle in the Khorvaty, and raped my vampire women and put them down; between then and now I had tasted my share of soft Szgany flesh, spilling myself into such Gypsy odalisques as pleased me. Nothing of “love” in it, mind you; that word was only applicable to others, never to myself. But now …?

It was the human side of me, of course, which from time to time held sway in my dreams. I gazed upon this sweet, sensuous Princess of the Travelling Folk through eyes fogged by human weakness. The shuddering of my loins was the love (call it that if you will) of a man, but never the raging lust of the Wamphyri. And to my shame my dreams were wet, and I came in my blankets like a trembling lad stroking the teats of his first girl!