Necroscope V: Deadspawn

'Wherever we go — ' she shrugged' — and however many times we escape, we'll always have to return. We can't stay in that place for ever.' Her logic was unassailable. Before Harry could find words to answer — perhaps to comfort her, or himself — she continued, 'And Shaithis is a terrible foe. How devious — ' she shook her head ' — you could scarcely imagine.'

True, a voice came startlingly from nowhere, entering the minds of both of them. Shaithis is devious. But his ancestor, Shaitan the Fallen, is worse far.

The Dweller!' Karen gasped, as she recognized their telepathic visitor. And then, incredulously, 'But did you say… Shaitan?'

The Fallen One, aye, the wolf-voice rasped in their minds. He lives, he comes, and he, not Shaithis, is the terror.

Harry and Karen reached out with their own telepathy, tried to strengthen the mind-bridge between themselves and their visitor. And for a moment the aerie was filled with flowing mental pictures: of mountain slopes where domed boulders projected through sliding scree; of a full moon lending the crags a soft yellow mantle; of great firs standing tall. And in the shadow of the trees, silver triangle eyes blinking — a good many — where the pack rested before the hunt. Then the pictures faded and were gone, and likewise the one who lived with them and moved among them.

But his warning remained with Karen and the Necroscope. How he could know what he had told them… who could say? But he was, or had been, The Dweller. And that was enough.

Time passed.

Sometimes they talked and at others they simply waited. There was nothing else to do. This time, seated before a fire in the aerie's massive Great Hall, they talked. 'Shaitan is part of my world's legends, too,' said Harry. 'There they call him Satan, the Devil, whose place is in hell.'

'In Starside's histories your world was hell!' Karen answered. 'And all of its dwellers were devils. Dramal Doombody believed it firmly.'

Harry shook his head. 'That the Wamphyri — monstrous as they were, and still are — should hold with beliefs in demons, devils and such,' (again the shake of his head), 'is hard to understand.'

She shrugged. 'How so? Isn't Hell simply the Unknown, any terrible place or region of which nothing is understood? To the Traveller tribes it lay across the mountains in Starside, while to the Wamphyri it waited on the other side of the sphere Gate. Certainly it must be horrible and lethal beyond that Gate, for no one had ever returned to tell of it. That was how the Wamphyri saw it. I saw it that way, too, in the days before Zek and Jazz, you and your son. And don't forget, Harry, even the Wamphyri were once men. However monstrous a man may grow, still he'll remember the night fears of his childhood.'

'Shaitan,' Harry mused. 'A mystery spanning two worlds. The legend was taken into my world by banished Wamphyri Lords and occasionally their Traveller retainers when they were sent through Starside's Gate.' But in his own mind: Oh, really? Or is the so-called 'legend' more properly universal? The Great Evil, the Lord of Lies, of all wickedness? What of the similarity in the names…?

Satan, Shaitan? Are there devils in all the universes of light? And what of angels?

'Better stop thinking of him as a legend,' Karen warned, as if she'd been listening to his thoughts, which she had not. 'The Dweller says he's real and coming here, which means that in order to live we have to kill him. Except, if Shaitan has already lived for — how long? Two, three thousand years? — is it even reasonable to believe that we can kill him?'

Harry had scarcely heard her. He was still working things out. 'How many of them?' he finally asked. 'Shaitan will be their leader, and Shaithis with him. But who else?'

'Survivors from the battle at the garden,' Karen answered. 'If they also survived the Icelands.'

'I remember.' Harry nodded. 'We've considered them before: Fess Ferenc, Volse Pinescu, Arkis Leperson and their thralls. No more than a handful. Or, if others of the Old Lords survived the ordeal of exile, a large handful.' He drew himself up. 'But I'm still the Necroscope. And again I say: can they come and go through the Mobius Continuum? Can they call up the dead out of their graves?' (And once more, to himself: Can you, Harry? Can you?)

'Shaitan may have the art,' she answered. 'For after all, he was the first of the Wamphyri. Since when, he's had time enough for studying. It's possible he can torment the dead for their secrets.'

'But will they answer him?' Harry growled, his eyes glowing like rubies in the firelight. 'No, no, I didn't mean necromancy but Necroscopy! A necromancer may 'examine' a corpse or even a long-dead mummy, but I talk to the very spirits of the dead. And they love me; indeed, they'll rise up from their dust for me…' A lie. You even lie to yourself now. You are Wamphyri, Harry Keogh! Call up the dead? Ah, you used to, you used to.

He started to his feet: 'I have to try,' and went down to Starside's foothills under the garden, where long ago he called up an army of mummied trogs to do battle with Wamphyri trogs. He talked to their spirits in his fashion, but only the wind out of the north answered him. He sensed that they were there and heard him, but they kept silent. They were at peace now; why should they join the Necroscope in his turmoil?

He went up into the garden. There were graves — far too many of them — but untended now: Travellers who died in the great battle, trogs laid to rest in niches under the crags. They heard him, too, and remembered him well. But they felt something different in him which wasn't to their liking. Ah, Wamphyri! Necromancer! This man, or monster, had words which could call them to a horrid semblance of life even against their will.

'And I might!' he threatened, sensing their refusal, their terror. But from within: What, like Janos Ferenczy? What price now your 'humanity', Harry?

He went back to the aerie, to Karen, and told her bleakly, 'Once… I could have commanded an army of the dead. Now there are just the two of us.'

Three, The Dweller's growl was in their minds, but clear as if he stood beside them. You fought for me once. Both of you, for my cause. My turn, now.

That seemed to decide it, to state their case, set their course. Even though it was the only course they'd ever had.

Karen fetched her gauntlet and dipped it in a cleansing acid solution, then set to oiling its joints. 'Me,' she said, 'I tore the living heart out of Lesk the Glut! Aye, and there was a lot more to fear in those days. And it dawns on me: I'm not afraid for myself but for the loss of what we have. Except that when you look at it, well, what do we have, after all?'

Harry jumped up, strode to and fro shaking his fists and raging inside and out. And then grew deadly calm. It was his vampire, of course, still seeking ascendancy. He nodded knowingly, and grunted, 'Well, and maybe I've kept you down long enough. Perhaps it's time I let you out.'

'What?' Karen looked up from working on her gauntlet.

'Nothing.'

'Nothing?' She arched her eyebrows.

'I only asked… where shall it be?'

The garden, said The Dweller, far away in the mountains.

They heard him, and Karen agreed, 'Aye, the garden has its merits. We know it well, anyway.'

Finally, with a furious nod, the Necroscope surrendered to his vampire. In part, at least. 'Very well,' he snarled, 'the garden. So be it!'

And so it would be.

In Starside…

It was the hour when all that remains of the furnace sun is a smudgy grey luminosity in a sky gnawed by jutting fangs of mountain, and the nameless stars are chunks of alien ice freezing in weird orbits. The deepest, darkest hour of sundown, and the last of the Wamphyri — Shaithis and Shaitan, Harry Keogh and Karen — were coming together to do battle in an empty place once called the garden. All four of them, the last of their race, and The Dweller, too; except he was no longer Wamphyri as such, or if he was even his vampire scarcely knew it.

Karen had known for some time now that the invaders were close and closing on Starside, ever since her creatures out on the rim of the rimy ocean called to her one last time to pass on that information — before they died. And as they died, so Karen had asked them: How many are the enemy, and what are their shapes? It was easier far to gauge strength and substance that way than from