Dweller's vampire was reshaping what untainted flesh remained. But into what?
'Myself?'
Lardis nodded. 'If we Travellers — we Szgany, since it appears we'll journey no more — if we leave the garden, then what of you, your trogs, your people? What of those Travellers who were here before me and mine? What of your mother… aye, and your father? What of Harry Hell-lander? This is the second sundown he's tossed and babbled in his strange fever. Who knows how long before he'll recover? Last but not least, what of the garden?'
The Dweller nodded. 'We'll deal with all of these things in their turn. My mother… is failing. I have watched her grow old while in fact she's still young. In the world where she was born, women of her age are still in their prime, but that was never her destiny.' Now his rasping voice turned a little sour. 'From the day she met my father the shape of her life was preordained, with never a chance that it might run a straight course. She wasn't weak, but neither was she strong… enough. She was ordinary, and Harry is — he was — extraordinary. And yet her life has not been miserable; indeed she has been happy, here in the garden. The nature of her affliction is that it shuts out all manner of horrid things from her mind, until almost everything has been shut out. And now she dwells alone, within.'
'Not alone, Dweller!' Lardis protested.
The Dweller held up a slender hand. 'I know, I know: my people look after her well, and are rewarded with her smiles. But such responses are automatic; she merely obeys her instincts; she is mainly alone — but not for long. Soon she'll join that throng who went before, going on from this place like a vine growing over the wall. Well, and it's true there are worlds beyond and I mustn't be greedy. So let it be: let her simple smile brighten some other's garden awhile. Until then I'll stay with her, along with a few others of my people who won't leave her…' He paused a moment. And in a little while:
'As for you and your people, Lardis: you'll prosper on Sunside, I'm sure. And myself? Well, I looked after myself, my mother, the garden, long before the first of you Szgany joined me here; and now… I have friends other than trogs and Travellers. What's more, I no longer have any enemies.' He stood up, seeming to flow to his feet in the weird way of the Wamphyri, and paced the floor to the window that looked out on the garden. Lardis followed him, watching as he opened the window, leaned out a little way, and inclined his head upwards to the misted mountain peaks. The ghost of a howl came ululating down, thin and eerie, echoing in flooding moonlight. And behind his golden mask The Dweller smiled.
'No harm will come to me or mine,' he eventually continued, when the howling stopped. 'Shortly, even my most faithful will leave me; I shall ask them to leave, by which time they'll be ready.'
'But… why do you isolate yourself?' Lardis was at pains to understand his motives. 'Will you stay on here, alone?'
'Stay here? Ah, no. But I shall return from time to time, to talk to her, in my way…'
'To your mother? When she is — '
'When she's dead, yes.'
For a moment Lardis believed he saw red fires reflected on the rims of the eye sockets in the golden mask, and he was hard put to contain a sudden shudder. Wamphyri, The Dweller, aye — and much more than that. For like his father before him he had… ah, powers!
The Dweller looked at Lardis, clasped his broad shoulders in pale thin hands, and thought: He's brave, this man. Brave and loyal. He should fear me, even run from me, but he stands his ground. Whatever comes to pass — however it shall be — I'll not hurt him or his. Never!
It was as if Lardis heard him. All of the fear went out of him; a great deal of fear which, until the moment it left him, he'd scarcely realized was there at all. At least he'd never admitted it, not even to himself. Finally he straightened up and nodded. Then it seems we have no more to talk about,' he said. 'Ah — except your father, of course.'
The Dweller's answering nod was thoughtful, deliberate. 'How goes it with him?'
Now Lardis gave a grunt and offered a frustrated shrug. 'We care for him, feed him, watch over him in his fever,' he answered. 'Everything as you instructed — but we've no knowledge of his sickness. You say that both of you were burned by your own weapons, those brilliant beams of sunlight with which you destroyed the Wamphyri. Well, and your burns were plainly visible, Dweller, their effect immediate — it's a miracle you survived! But Harry Hell-lander was not burned, not that I ever saw.'
The Dweller had his answer ready. 'I was burned on the outside,' he said. 'My flesh was physically scorched by the sun's fire. But my father's sickness is in his blood, a slow poison, like silver or kneblasch to the Wamphyri. It causes this fever in him. But when the fever has burned itself out, he will be cured. Then I'll take him back to his own place. And then at last I'll be alone here.'
'And that's what you want?'
'It's how it has to be.' The Dweller's voice was now a low growl. He began to turn away — then swiftly turned back, face to face with the Gypsy. And urgently, perhaps pleadingly, he said: 'Lardis, listen. I am Wamphyri! When I fought for this place, the fighting roused something up in me, in my blood. You trust me, I know. Likewise your people, and mine. But I don't know how long I may trust myself! Now do you understand?'
Lardis believed he did, and a little of his escaped fear crept back in. 'But how… how will you survive?' Unintentionally, he placed some small emphasis on the word 'will'.
Before the other could answer, an echoing chorus of howls floated down out of the hills. With long, loping strides, The Dweller took himself back to the window, again inclining his head to the heights. And to Lardis he said, 'How do they survive, the grey brotherhood?'
'They are hunters,' the Gypsy answered, quietly. 'And will you also… hunt?'
'I know what you are thinking,' The Dweller said. 'And I don't blame you. Your times have been hard. The Wamphyri have made them so. But this I vow: I shall never hunt men.'
Lardis shivered again, but he believed The Dweller's words. 'You are… a changeling creature,' he said. 'I can't pretend to understand you.'
'A changeling, it's true,' The Dweller agreed. 'I had two fathers, only one of which was a man! My human flesh is dying now, but I can feel my vampire at work in me. He remembers his former host, and has other clay to mould.'
There was that in his voice… Lardis was not afraid… but there was weirdness in the air… the moon had turned the garden yellow, with black mountains beyond, split by the deep blue V of the pass. 'I should be going,' the Gypsy said, his normal rumble of a voice little more than a whisper.
'See my hands,' said The Dweller, 'how thin they are, like paws?' He stretched out his arms, until his hands and wrists stood free of the wide cuffs. These I shall retain, as best I can — the hands of a man — to remind me of what I was.' And cocking his head curiously on one side, he glanced at Lardis. 'Also that you and your people shall know me, when I am… other than I am now.'
Lardis looked; The Dweller's hands were pale and slim as a girl's; but his wrists and forearms, what could be seen of them, were grey-furred! Backing towards the door, the Gypsy hissed, 'You, Dweller? A grey one?'
'When they call down from the peaks under the moon like that,' the other sighed, 'ah! — I hear them! And I know they call for me.' He opened the door for Lardis, and the Gypsy tremblingly stepped out into the night.
'I… I knew they were your friends, of course,' he told The Dweller, where now that one stood framed in the doorway. 'But — '
'My friends?' Again that quick tilt of The Dweller's head; his eyes, gleaming now in the eye-holes of his mask, no longer red but feral in moonlight. That and more than that. My kin!'
'Yes,' Lardis gulped, nodded, backed away. 'I understand.'
And as he turned more fully into the garden: 'Lardis,' The Dweller called after him. 'Remember — we shall not hunt you. Be sure that you never hunt me or mine…'
Harry Keogh tossed and turned in tortured dreams. He had been tortured, a little. What his son, The Dweller, had done to him could not have been accomplished by any other means: the Necroscope's metaphysical mind had been entered like a house in the night, its innermost vaults penetrated, its owner deprived of his treasures. The intruder had been none other than Harry Jr himself, called The Dweller, soon to be Harry Wolfson. Except he had stolen nothing, merely changed the combinations on certain locks and booby-trapped certain passageways. During the course of work such as this, inevitably there had been some 'structural' damage which, while he had kept it to a minimum, was the real cause of his father's 'fever'. It was not so much that Harry Keogh's blood was poisoned,
