would certainly have died. It could be that I consciously tried to kill him; I can't say about that, either, for the episode is no longer clear in my mind. I only know that when I was done with him he no longer felt my blows, and that I myself was completely exhausted. But he healed, of course, and so did I. And I conceived a new strategy.
After that…here were times of sleeping, of waking, of eating. Outwardly, life consisted of little more. But for me these were also times of waiting, and of patient, silent scheming. As for the Ferenczy: he tried to train me like a wild dog.
It started like this: he would come silently to the door and listen. Strangely, I knew when he was there. I would feel fear! And when I became afraid, then he would be there. At times I could feel him groping at the edges of my mind, slyly attempting to insinuate himself into my very thoughts. I remembered how he had communicated with old Arvos over a distance and did what I could to close my mind to him. I think I succeeded greatly, for after that I could sense a frustration other than my own.
He used a system of rewards: if I was ‘good' and obeyed him, there would be food. He would call through the door: ‘Thibor, I have a pair of fine piglets here!'
If I answered: ‘Aha! Your parents have come visiting!' he would simply take the food away. But if I said:
‘Faethor, my father, I am starving! Feed me, pray, for if not then I shall be obliged to eat this dog you've locked in with me down here. And who will serve me then, when you are out in the world and I am left in charge of your lands and castle?' Then he would open the door a crack and place the food inside. But only let me stand too close to the door and I would see neither Faethor nor food for three or four days.
And so I ‘weakened'; I grew less and less abusive; I began to plead. For food, for the freedom of the castle, for fresh air and light, and water to bathe myself — but most of all for separation, however brief, from Ehrig whom I now detested as a man detests his own wastes. Moreover, I made out that I was growing physically weaker. I spent more time ‘asleep', and came less readily awake.
Finally came the time when Ehrig could not wake me, and how the dog battered on the door and screamed for his true master then! Faethor came; they carried me up, up to the battlements above the covered hail where it spanned the gorge. There they laid me down in the clean air under the first stars of night, pale spectres in a sky I had not seen for far too long. The sun was a dull blister on the hills, casting its last rays over the spires of rock behind the castle's towers.
‘He is likely starved for air,' said Faethor, ‘and maybe simply starved a little, too! But you are right, Ehrig — he seems weaker than he should be. I desired only to break his will a little, not the man himself. I have powders and salts that sting, which should stir him up. Wait here and I'll fetch them. And watch him!'
He descended through a trapdoor out of sight, leaving Ehrig to hunch down to his vigil. All of this I saw through eyes three-quarters shuttered. But the moment Ehrig allowed his attention to wander I was on him in a trice! Closing off his windpipe with one hand, I snatched from my pocket a leather thong which I'd earlier removed from my boot. I had intended it for the Ferenczy's neck, but no matter. Wrapping my legs round Ehrig to stop him kicking, I looped the thong round his neck and yanked it tight, then made a second loop and tied it off. Choking, he tried to lurch to his feet, but I slammed his head so hard against the stone parapet that I felt his skull shatter. He went limp and I lowered him to the timbered floor.
At that moment my back was to the trapdoor, and of course that was when the Ferenczy chose to return. Hissing his fury, he came leaping up light as a youth — but his hands were iron on me where he took hold of my hair and grasped the flesh between my neck and shoulder. Ah, but strong though he was, old Faethor was out of practice! And my own fighting skills were as fresh in my mind as my last battle with the Pechenegi.
I kneed him in the groin and drove my head up under his great jaw so hard that I heard his teeth crunching. He released me, fell to the planking where I leaped astride him; but as his fury waxed, so waxed his strength. Calling on the vampire within, he tossed me aside as easily as a bale of straw! And in a moment he was on his feet, spitting shattered teeth, blood and curses as he came gliding after me.
I knew then that I couldn't beat him, not unarmed, and I cast all about in the eerie twilight for a weapon. And found several.
Suspended from the high rear battlements, a row of circular bronze mirrors hung at different angles, two or three of them just catching the last faint rays of sunlight and reflecting them away down the valley. The Ferenczy's signalling devices. Arvos the gypsy had said that the old Ferengi didn't have much use for mirrors, or for sunlight. I wasn't exactly sure what he'd meant, but I seemed to remember something of the sort from old campfire legends. In any case I didn't have a lot of choice. If Faethor was vulnerable, then there was only one sure way to find out.
Before he could close with me, and avoiding places where the timbers seemed suspect, I ran across the roof. He came after me like a great loping wolf, but pulled up short when I tore down a mirror from its fastenings and turned to face him. His yellow eyes went very wide and he bared bloodied teeth at me like rows of shattered spires. He hissed and his forked tongue flickered like crimson lightning between his jaws.
I held the ‘mirror' in my hands and knew at once what it was: a sturdy bronze shield, possibly old Varyagi. It had a grip at the back for my hand. Aye, and I knew how to use it — but if only it were spiked in the centre of its face! Then, unwitting, the burnished bronze caught a stray ray from the scythe of sun setting on the hills — caught it and hurled it straight into Faethor's snarling visage. And now I knew old Arvos's meaning.
The vampire cringed before that blaze of sunlight. He shrank down into himself, threw up spider hands before his face, backed off a pace. I was never one to waste an opportunity. I pursued, drove the buckler clanging into his face, kicked at his loins again and again as I forced him back. And whenever he'd make to advance on me, then I'd catch the sun and throw it in his teeth, so that he had no chance to gather his reserves.
In this way I beat him back across the roof, with kicks and blows and blinding rays of sunlight. Once his leg went through the rotten roof, but he dragged it out and continued to retreat before me, frothing and cursing his fury. And so at last he came up against the parapet wall. Beyond that parapet was eighty feet of thin air, then the rim of the gorge and three hundred feet of almost sheer slope clad in close-packed, spiky pines. Down at the bottom was the bed of a rivulet. In short, a nightmare of vertigo.
He looked over the rim, glanced at me with eyes of fire — eyes of fear? At which precise moment the sun dipped down out of sight.
The change in Faethor was instantaneous. The twilight deepened, and the Ferenczy swelled up like some great bloating toadstool! His face split open in the most soul-wrenching smile of triumph — which I at once crushed under one last battering blow of my buckler.
And over he went.
I couldn't believe that I'd got him. It seemed a fantasy. But even as he toppled so I clung to the parapet wall and peered after him. Then… the strangest thing! I saw him like a dark blot falling towards the greater darkness. But in another moment the shape of the blot changed. I thought I heard a sound like a vast stretching, like giant knuckles cracking, and the shape hurtling towards the trees and the gorge seemed to unfurl like a huge blanket. It no longer fell so swiftly, nor even vertically. Instead it seemed to glide like a leaf, away from the castle's walls, out a little way over the gorge.
It dawned on me then that in the fullness of his powers Faethor might indeed have flown, in a fashion, from these battlements. But I had taken him by surprise, and in the shock of falling he had lost precious moments. Too late, he'd wrought a great change in himself, flattening himself like a sail to trap the rushing air. Too late, because even as I stared in fascination, so he struck a high branch. Then, in a dark whirling and a snapping of branches, the blot was gone. There followed from below a series of crashes, a shriek, a final, distant thud. And silence.
I listened for long moments in the rapidly deepening gloom. Nothing.
And then I laughed. Oh, how I laughed! I stamped my feet and thumped the top of the parapet wall. I'd got the old bastard, the old devil. I'd really got him!
I stopped laughing. True, I had thrown him down from the wall. But… was he dead?
Panic gripped me. Of all men, I knew how difficult it was to kill a vampire. Proof of that was right here on the roof with me, in the shape of the gurgling, fitfully twitching Ehrig. I hurried to him. His face was blue and the thong had buried itself in the flesh of his neck. His skull, which had been soft at the back where I'd crashed it against the wall, was already hard. How long before he awakened? In any case, I couldn't trust him. Not to do what must now be done. No, I was on my own.
Quickly I carried Ehrig back down into the bowels of the castle, to our cell in the roots of one of the towers. There I dumped him and barred the door. Perhaps the vampire filth under the earth would find him and devour him
