A weak sun was poised, preparing itself for setting over the grey peaks. The mountains brought an early twilight here, where already the birds were singing their evening songs. 'We are in time,' the old man nodded. 'And now we must hope that we are seen.'
He pointed steeply upwards at the looming mountains, to where a high, jagged black crest etched itself against the grey of the ultimate peaks. 'You see there, where the darkness is deepest?'
Thibor nodded.
That's the castle. Now watch.' He polished the bottom of the pan on his sleeve, then turned it towards the sun. Catching the weak rays, he threw them back into the mountains and traced a line of gold up the crags. Fainter and fainter the disc of light flickered with distance, jumping from scree to flat rock face, from fangs to fir clump, from trees back to crumbling shale as it climbed ever higher. And finally it seemed to Thibor that the ray was answered; for when at last the gypsy held the pan stiffly in his gnarled hands, suddenly that dark, angular outcrop he'd pointed out seemed to burst into golden fire! The lance of light was so sudden, so blinding, that the Wallach threw up his hands before his eyes and peered through the bars of his fingers.
'Is that him?' he gasped. 'Is it the Boyar himself who answers?'
'The old Ferengi?' The gypsy laughed uproariously. Carefully he propped up the pan on a flat rock, and still the beam of light glanced down from on high. 'No, not him. The sun's no friend of his. Nor any mirror, for that matter!' He laughed again, and then explained. 'It's a mirror, burnished bright, one of several which sit above the rear wall of the keep where it meets the cliff. Now, if our signal is seen, someone will cover the mirror — which merely shoots back our beam — and the light will be snuffed out. Not gradually, as by the sun's slow descent, but all at once — like that!'
Like a candle snuffed, the beam blinked out, leaving Thibor almost staggering in what seemed a preternatural gloom. He steadied himself. 'So, it would seem you've established contact,' he said. 'Plainly the Boyar has seen that you have something to convey, but how will he know what it is?'
'He will know,' said the gypsy. He grasped Thibor's arm, stared up into the high passes. A glaze came suddenly over the old man's eyes and he swayed. Thibor held him up. And:
'There, now he knows,' the old man whispered. The film went from his wide eyes.
'What?' Thibor was puzzled; he felt troubled. The Szgany were queer folk with little-understood powers. 'What do you mean when you say — '
'And now he will answer 'yes' — or 'no',' the gypsy cut him off. Even as he finished speaking there came a single, searing beam of light from the high castle, which in the next moment died away.
'Ah!' the old gypsy sighed. 'And his answer is 'yes', he will see you.'
'When?' Thibor accepted the strangeness of it, fought down the eagerness in his voice.
'Now. We set off at once. The mountains are dangerous at night, but he'll have it no other way. Are you still game?'
'I'll not disappoint him, now that he's invited me,' said Thibor.
'Very well. But wrap yourself well, Wallach. It gets cold up there.' The old man fixed him with a brief, bright, penetrating stare. 'Aye, cold as death…'
Thibor chose a pair of burly Wallachs to accompany him. Most of his men were out of his old homeland, but he'd personally stood alongside these two in his war with the Pechenegi, and he knew they were fierce fighters. He wanted real men at his back when he went up against this Ferenczy. And it could well be that he'd need them. Arvos, the old gypsy, had said the Boyar had no retainers; who, then, had answered the mirror signal? No, Thibor couldn't see a rich man living up there all alone with a mere woman or two, fetching and carrying for himself. Old Arvos lied.
In the event that there was only a handful of men up in the mountains with their master… But it was no good speculating, Thibor would have to wait and see what were the odds. If there were many men, however, then he would say that he came as an envoy of Vladimir, to invite the Boyar to the palace in Kiev. It would be in connection with the war against the Pechenegi. Either way, his course was now set: he had a mountain to climb, and at the top a man to kill, depending on conditions.
In those days Thibor had been in a way naive; it had not once crossed his mind that the Vlad had sent him on a suicide mission, from which he was not expected to return to Kiev.
As for the climb: at first the going had been easy, and this despite the fact that the way was unmarked. The track (there was no real track, merely a route which the old gypsy knew by heart) climbed a saddle between foothills to the base of an unscalable cliff, then followed a rising apron of sliding scree to a wide crevice or chimney in the cliff, which elevated steeply through a fissure on to a false plateau beneath a second line of even steeper hills. These hills were wild and wooded, their trees massive and ancient, but by now Thibor had seen that indeed there was a path of sorts. It was as if some giant had taken a scythe and cut a straight line through the trees; their wood had doubtless provided much of the village's timber, and perhaps some of it had been hauled up into the mountains for use in the construction of the castle. That might possibly have been hundreds of years ago, and yet no new trees had grown up to bar the way. Or if they had, then someone had uprooted them to keep the path free.
Whichever, the climb along the track through the rising woods was fairly easy going, and as twilight grew towards night a full moon rose to lend the way its silvery light. Spying their breath for the climbing, the three men and heir guide spoke not at all and Thibor was able to turn his mind to what little he'd heard of the Boyar Ferenczy from his foppish court contact.
The Greeks fear him more than Vladimir does,' that loose-tongue had informed. 'In Greek-land they've long sought all such out and put them down. They call such as the Ferenczy 'vrykolax', which is the same as the Bulgar- ian 'obour' or 'mouphour' — or 'wampir'!'
'I've heard of the wampir,' Thibor had answered. They have the same myth, and the same name for it, in my old country. A peasant supersition. And I'll tell you something: the men I've killed rot in their graves, if indeed they have graves. They certainly don't bloat there! Or if they do it's from rotten gasses, not the blood of the living!'
'Nevertheless this Ferenczy is said to be just such a creature,' Thibor's informant had insisted. 'I've heard the Greek priests talking: saying how there's no room in any Christian land for such as that. In Greek-land they put stakes through their hearts and cut off their heads. Or better still, they break them up entirely and burn all the pieces. They believe that even a small part of a wampir can grown whole again in the body of an unwary man. The thing is like a leech, but on the inside! Hence the saying that a wampir has two hearts and two souls — and that the creature may not die until both facets are destroyed.'
Thibor had smiled, humourlessly, scornfully. He'd thanked the man, saying, 'Well, wizard or witch or whatever, he's lived long enough. Vladimir the Prince wants this Ferenczy dead, and I've been given the job.'
'Lived long enough!' the other had repeated, throwing up his hands. 'Aye, and you don't know how true that is. Why, there's been a Ferenczy up in those mountains as long as men remember. And the legends have it that it's the same Ferenczy! Now you tell me, Wallach, what sort of man is it who watches years pass like hours, eh?'
Thibor had laughed at that, too; but now, thinking back on it — several things connected, it seemed.
The 'Moupho' in the name of the village, for instance — which sounded a lot like 'mouphour', or wampir. 'Village of the Old Ferenczy Vampire'? And what was it Arvos the Szgany had said? 'The sun's no friend of his. Nor any mirror, for that matter!' Weren't vampires things of the night; afraid of mirrors because they showed no reflection, or perhaps a reflection more nearly the reality? Then the Wallach gave a snort of derision at his own imaginings. It was this old place, that was all, working on his imagina-tion. These centuried woods and ageless mountains…
At which point his party came out of the trees and on to the crest of domed hills where the soil was thin as a whisper and only the lichens grew; beyond which, in a shallow depression, a jumbled plain of stony rubble and brittle scree reached perhaps half a mile to the inky shadows of dark cliffs. To the north it reached up high, that black boundary, forming horns; and to these horns in the light of the moon, old Arvos now pointed a crooked finger.
There!' He chuckled as at some joke. There broods the house of the old Ferengi.'
Thibor looked — and sure enough he saw distant windows lit like eyes in the darkness under the horns. And it was for all the world as if some monstrous bat squatted there in the heights, or maybe the lord of all great wolves.
'Like eyes in a face of stone,' growled one of Thibor's Wallachs, a man all chest and arms, with short stumpy legs.
