Necroscope IV: Deadspeak

him with my eyes. And trembling, he let the knife fall, saying, 'I… I have betrayed your trust! Banish me also, lord, and let me go with the Zirras.'

I showed him my teeth in torn and bleeding gums, and yawned to let him see the gape of my jaws. He knew that I could close those jaws on his face and tear it off! But I merely drew him towards the high window. 'Banish you?' I repeated him. 'And is there a place of your liking?'

'Anywhere!' he gasped. 'Anywhere at all, lord, out there.'

'Out there?' I said, glancing out the window. 'So be it!' And before he could speak again I gathered him up and hurled him out and down. He screamed once before his bones were broken on the rocks, and then no more.

By then the lesser chiefs might have flown but I cautioned them against it. 'Only flee and I shall seek you out one by one, and eat your hearts.' And when they were still: 'Go now, and find my son. Find him and take me to him, where I may deal with him. And after that gather to me, for I would speak with you of important things. We shall make a great crusade, you and I together. Faethor Ferenczy will rise up and be a power in the world again, and all of you shall earn your fortunes. Aye, but it will be man's work and you shall earn them…!'

11. Harry's Friends, and Others

A distant clanking momentarily distracted Harry from the extinct vampire's story. Excusing himself from listening, he scanned across the wasteland of churned, boggy earth and decaying, partly demolished houses to a gaunt horizon. Even the sun, falling warmly on his neck and drawing up vapour wraiths from the stagnant pools, could not dispel the cheerlessness of the scene: a handful of metal dinosaurs on the move, strange silhouettes obscuring themselves in clouds of dust and blue exhaust smoke. Unlikely that the bulldozers would head this way, but the sight of them working brought home to Harry something of the hour. It would be about nine o'clock; he still had to get back to Bucharest; his return flight to Athens was booked for 12:45.

Harry? said Faethor, his mental voice faint as a sigh. / can feel the sun on the earth and it weakens me. Should I continue, or shall we postpone it until another time?

Harry thought about it. He'd already learned quite a lot about Janos, a vampire with enormous mental powers. And yet according to Faethor his son had not been a vampire in the fullest sense of the word, not at that time almost eight hundred years ago. So this wasn't simply an opportunity to learn more about him, but also about vampires in general. Harry knew that he was already an authority, but he felt there could never be a surfeit of knowledge about creatures such as these. Not when his life, and the lives of others, might very well depend upon it.

Quite right, said Faethor. Very well, let me continue. I shall be brief as possible…

My Szgany found the dog shivering in a cave high in the crags. I went up to him and called him out. He came to the entrance, which opened onto a ledge in the face of a sheer cliff.

Janos, though young, was big and very strong. As big as Thibor in his youth, even as big as myself. He was afraid but not craven. He had cut himself a branch and sharpened it to a stake. 'Come no closer, father,' he warned, 'or I'll pierce your vampire heart!'

'Ah, my son,' I told him, with nothing of animosity, 'but you have already done that. What? I thought you loved me! Indeed, I knew it. And I knew you loved your mother, too — though not how well you loved her. And yet what in fact do I know about you, except that you are my son? Very little, it now appears.' And I moved a single pace forward into the cave.

'At least you know I will kill you,' he gasped, backing off, 'if you should try to punish me!'

'Punish you?' I let my shoulders slump, shook my head in a sad fashion. 'No, I seek only an explanation. You are of my flesh, Janos. What? And shall I punish my own son, now of all times, when of all creatures I am surely the most lonely? Oh, I was angry, be sure, but is that so hard to understand? And what did my rage get me, eh? Your mother is dead now and gone from us, and we are both without her whom we loved so dearly. And now there is no more anger left in me.'

'You don't… hate me?' he said.

'Hate you? My own son?' Again I shook my head. 'It is simply that I do not understand. I desire to understand you, Janos. Explain this thing you have done, so that I may know you better.' And I stepped a little deeper inside the cave.

He backed off more yet, but held his spear steady on me. And now, as if a dam had been broken, the words flooded out of him. 'I have hated you!' he said. 'For you were cruel to me, cold, often indifferent, and always… different. I was like you, and yet unlike you. I wanted so much to be like you in my entirety, but could not. Often I've watched you become a blanket of flesh to soar like a curling leaf on the air, but when I tried I always fell. I wanted to inspire your fear in the hearts of men, with a glance, a word, a thought; but I was not a vampire and knew that if I tried they would only kill me like any common enemy. So instead I must befriend them whom I despised, get into their minds, make them love me in order to gain their obedience. In myself I looked a little like you, but I could never be you, and so I have hated you.'

'You desired to be me?' I repeated him.

'Yes, because you have the power!'

'You have powers enough of your own!' I said. 'Great powers! Fantastic powers! For which you must thank me. And yet you hid them from me all these years.'

'I did not hide them,' he said, scornfully. 'I demonstrated them! I used them to keep you out of my mind and will. And even full-blown they remained secret. You thought my mind was inferior, incapable of knowing your talents and therefore unassailable by them; that I was such a blank — indeed a void — no stylus could ever impress me! So that when you discovered that you couldn't force yourself upon my mind, you did not say, 'Ho, he is strong!' but, 'Hah! He is weak!' That was your ego, father, which is vast but not infallible.'

'Aye,' I nodded thoughtfully when he was done, 'much more to you than I suspected, Janos. You do have certain powers.'

'But not your power!' he said. 'You are… a changing thing, mysterious, always different. And I am always the same.'

'Well, and there you have it,' I told him, with a shrug. 'I am Wamphyri!'

'And I desired to be,' he said, 'but was only a strange man. A halfling…'

'But does this excuse you?' I asked him. 'Is this reason enough that you should use your own mother as a whore? To hate me for your own deficiencies was one error, but to compound it by cleaving unto — '

'Yes!' he cut me short. 'It was my reason. I wanted to be like you and could not, and so hated you. Wherefore I would defile or suborn all that you most treasured. First the Szgany, whom I would cause to love me if not above you then at least as your equal; and then your woman, who knew you better than anyone else in the world — and in ways which only a lover could know you!'

Now (quite deliberately) I backed away from him, and he followed after, towards the mouth of the cave. 'In your desire to be like me,' I said, 'you determined to do the things I did, and to know the things I knew. Even to the extent of knowing your own mother — carnally?'

'I thought she might… teach me things.'

'What?' I almost laughed, but not quite. 'The ways of the flesh, Janos? A father's task, that, surely?'

'I wanted nothing of you, except to be you.'

'Could you not try to be more affectionate towards me, and so engender my affection?'

His turn to laugh, almost. 'What? As well seek sweetness in a lump of salt!'

'You are hard,' I told him, low-voiced. 'Perhaps we are not so far apart after all. And so you'd be Wamphyri, eh? Ah, but you've much to learn before that day dawns.'

'What?' he said, a look of incredulity crossing his face like a shadow. And again, in a whisper: 'What? Are you saying that — ?'