Necroscope V: Deadspawn

(but who?) had robbed him of all such memories.

The Necroscope's fellow men had cast him out (even as Shaitan was cast out in that time before the Wamphyri exiled him), causing him to flee here for his differences. So that in a way the father of vampires even felt a weird kinship with the Necroscope.

And when Harry's mind was repaired a little, Shaitan entered it again to ask him: Do I know you? Where have I seen you before? Are you of their order, who expelled me from my rightful place?

Harry's mind was frequently coherent in its limbo; he knew he was addressed; even knew something of the one who addressed him, and the meaning of his questions. And: No, he answered to all three.

Shaitan tried again. I have heard your thoughts. In them, you wonder about strange worlds beyond common ken. Not in the spaces between the stars, but in the spaces between the spaces! Indeed, you have access to just such an invisible space, where you move more surely and speedily than a fish in water. I, too, would move there, in the darkness which is not of the world. Show me how.

It had been the Necroscope's best-kept secret, but damaged in mind and body, he could no longer keep it. And if he should try, the Fallen One's mental hypnosis would unlock the mystery anyway. And so he showed Shaitan the computer screen of his mind, where Mobius equations at once commenced mounting in a crescendo. Shaitan saw, felt warned, was afraid.

Stop! he commanded, when the faintest pulse of a tortured Mobius door began to form out of nothing in his mind. And as the screen was wiped clean and the unformed door imploded into itself, so the great leech sighed his relief and was pleased to remove himself from Harry. For having felt the energies emanating from those equations and surrounding that door, he suspected that indeed he had known them before in a world beyond, where they'd been part and parcel of his downfall.

But now… Shaitan knew that Harry's secret place was forever beyond him, and the knowledge angered him. What, kinship? With this puling babe, this infant in dark arts, this bruised and bloodied, unblooded innocent? He must be mad even to have dreamed of it. Anyway, what did it matter that there were forbidden, invisible places? The visible ones would do for starters, and one at a time would suffice. Now that Starside had fallen, the world beyond the Gate — the Necroscope's own world — would be next. And entry into that place would be soon, before sunup.

Between times…

Shaitan knew all he needed to know from the Necroscope. Shaithis could have him now; let the so-called 'hell-lander' suffer a vampire's agonies and death, and him and all of his mystery go up in fire and smoke and so be at an end.

Such were the Fallen One's thoughts, which he allowed to go out from himself. But inside him there were deeper currents. Fit and well, this Harry Keogh had been a force. If he should live he could well become a force again — even a Power! Which was why Shaithis, if he had any vision at all, would be wise to deal with him with dispatch.

Aye, before Shaitan dealt with him in his turn.

From the Necroscope's point of view — or rather, to his traumatized perceptions — events revolved in an endless round of nausea and drifting confusion, semi-conscious agony, and a waking hell of blurred vision, haunting flashes of incomplete memories, and vivid but all too frequently meaningless bursts of input. Sometimes, while his metamorphic flesh worked hard to heal both body and brain, his mind seemed part of a morbid merry-go-round, turning on its own axis and reviewing the same scenes over and over. At others it was trapped in the mirrors of a kaleidoscope, where each scrap of coloured tinsel was a disjointed fragment of his past life or current existence.

In his more lucid moments, Harry knew that given even the best of conditions his injuries would take time in the healing; he had neither the conditions nor the time. After Shaitan gave him to Shaithis, the latter had had him crucified close to the Gate. Silver nails held him to the green timbers, and a silver spike passed through him, through his vampire and the trunk of the cross, and out the back where it was bent to one side. As fast as his Wamphyri flesh worked to repair him, so the silver poisoned him. And he guessed — no, he knew — that he wouldn't come down off this cross alive. At his feet, a bonfire of dry, broken branches confirmed it.

A second cross had been erected for Karen. Sometimes she hung there, which impaired her healing processes and kept her servile, and at others she was absent. Harry felt for her most when her cross was empty, for that was when Shaithis used and abused her. If he had the strength, the Necroscope would talk to her telepathically; except he suspected she would not let him in. No, for she would keep her torments to herself and not add to his despair. But from time to time, when Karen's cross was empty, Harry would look down on Shaithis's tent of skins and the hatred would burn in him like a fire. And then — but far too late — he would wish he'd given his vampire free rein. Perhaps mercifully, such moments of mental clarity, understanding and remorse were few and far between.

He didn't remember the arrival of the Travellers, called through the pass by Shaithis. 'Loyal' in their way to the Wamphyri, they were of a fearful, much-despised supplicant tribe of gauntlet-makers. En route here from Sunside and obedient to Shaithis's commands, they'd stolen away the women and younger men from a party of less subjugated Travellers. Also, they had been employed to build the shelters of the vampire Lords, and to cut and gather the wood for fires and crosses. Little good any of this did them; Shaithis and his monstrous ancestor served all of them alike: they brutalized and impregnated the women, vampirized the pick of the men to be their thralls and lieutenants, and fed the rest to the warriors preparatory to the invasion of the Gate.

That last was something which the Necroscope did remember: the butchery as the last of the Travellers tried to flee, and the gluttony of the warriors. Especially he remembered how Shaithis, for his amusement, had given a Traveller woman to a warrior with the parts of a man. When it was over (and apparently aroused), Shaithis had taken Karen down from her cross and into his tent. And when that was over and she was nailed up again, then he had come to gloat at the foot of Harry's cross.

'I've had my fill of your bitch, wizard,' he said with a shrug, as if in casual conversation. 'It was even my thought to lie with her in the open and let you watch, except as you've seen these beasts of mine are frisky. I had no desire to give them ideas. But the next time she comes down off her cross…ah, that will be the last time. And while you are burning — or at least until the skin of your eyes turns black and peels away — you shall see it all. Only a shame that your own agonies must detract from your enjoyment of hers!'

Then… Harry's hatred had been a greater torture than the nails and the spike together, so great that he was driven back into the darkness of oblivion. But not before he had heard the Fallen One's mind-warning to his descendant.

'Ware, Shaithis! Be advised not to drive this one too far. I fancy there's that in him which even he fails to appreciate. Something beyond his control — some weird instinctive mechanism — which works through him. Don't trigger it, my son. Even the Travellers, when they hunt and kill wild pigs, are wise enough not to taunt their prey.

But in Shaithis's secret mind was nothing but scorn. He'd lived through too many auroras just dreaming of these moments of triumph. Taunt this tame pig of a Necroscope? Oh, yes! Right to the bitter end…

7 Fusion — Fission — Finale

The Wamphyri Lords stole more women out of Sunside; with their lust and their bellies satisfied, they slept; likewise their beasts and thralls. Sunup gradually approached and the sky began to lighten over Sunside. When the first soft rains awakened them, before the sun's first deadly rays could shoot between the peaks into Starside and the north, then they would pass in through the Gate to invade the world beyond. But while they slept:

Harry Wolfson — once Harry Jr, then The Dweller, and now the leader of the grey brotherhood — padded down from the mountains and through the foothills, and stood off in the shadows to gaze upon the forces of evil where they lay in the Gate's glare.