Necroscope V: Deadspawn

walls and shuddered to its gush. Your come is cold as a waterfall.

No, it's hot. But cool against your insides, which are a volcano.

It only feels that way, she moaned. For in truth we're both cold, Harry. Both of us.

We're Wamphyri, he answered, but we aren't undead. We've never been dead, not in the way some vampirized people 'die' and sleep a while before their rebirth from the grave. I had expected to be cold, certainly — expected to feel the lust of the Wamphyri, their raw, roaring appetite for life and for all dark carnal experience — but with nothing of enduring emotion. But this is much more than that, other than that.

For you, perhaps, she answered, for you're not long a vampire. And yet… maybe you're right. This isn't as I imagined it. The Old Wamphyri were liars, as anyone knows; could it be that they lied about this, too? Incapable of love, they said. But were they? Or merely incapable of owning up to it? Is it weak to love someone, Harry? And is it strong to be cold and without love?

He welded himself to her, all of his parts melting into hers. Cold? he growled. Well, if we're that cold, then why is our blood so hot? And if we're that weak, then why do I feel so strong? No, I think you've got it in one. The last and most blatant lie of the Wamphyri: that they were without love. They weren't, they were merely afraid to admit it.

And the Necroscope knew that at last the truth of the matter was exposed. The Wamphyri had always been capable of dark passions, desires and deeds beyond the human range; but now, on the same far side of the spectrum, he and Karen had discovered in themselves genuine, equally powerful bonding emotions. And letting those emotions rule could only properly be described as an ecstasy. However sudden, weird and alien their love, they were true lovers. There was lust in it, of course, but was there ever a love affair between man and woman without lust?

As a single fused mass — the first half-human couple ever to 'cleave' to one another in the fullest sense of the word — they sped down the future time-stream. Until out of nowhere, suddenly:

A new light… golden fire… incredible… bursting… all-consuming! At first Harry thought it was some strange and wonderful effect of their sex, their love, but it was more than that. The great, throbbing, one-note Ahhhhhh chorus of the future — which was not sound at all as such but the mind's reaction to a three-dimensional display of ever-expanding time — changed in the space of a single moment to a fiery hissssss! And the Necroscope brought their headlong rush to an abrupt, tumbling halt. Partly extricating themselves but still mainly fused, they spun on an axis of their own while time rushed on. And Karen, temporarily blind, sank needle claws into Harry's shoulders to gasp, What was that?

But the Necroscope, even Harry Keogh, had no answer. As his own eyes adjusted to the golden brilliance, and his mind to the sear and the sizzle, so he glanced back at what had been: like looking into the heart of an exploding blue star, where chemical imbalances caused red and green imperfections. Back there, all was as before. But up ahead, in future time -

— Harry's and Karen's threads of life were no longer red but bright gold where they rushed out of their bodies into the future. And the future itself was a blaze of gold tinged with the leaping orange flares of fire!

Slowly the brazen yellow glare diminished and faded away, smoking into darkness like embers drenched in rain. And the life-lines of the two vanished with it. Beyond this point there was no future for them, not on Starside. But there was a future for some. For the dazed blue life-lines raced on; likewise the greens, though there were fewer of them now. But as for the reds: nowhere a sign of them. And the darkness seemed greater than the light.

A disaster! Harry thought, and Karen heard him.

But what happened — what will happen — here?

Baffled, he could only shake his head and shrug. The greens seem sickly. They are dying.

It was so: a good many trog life-lines grew dim, flickered low and blinked out even as they watched. But the Necroscope's heart picked up again as he noted that others seemed to gain strength and brightness to speed on. And he breathed a mental sigh of relief as new lines commenced to spark into existence, signifying new births and beginnings.

Then: he gathered his startled wits, conjured a door and drew Karen through it into the more nearly 'normal' flux of metaphysical being.

But what happened? She clung to him even tighter.

I don't know. He shook his head and guided her through a final door, emerging from the Mobius Continuum onto the roof of her aerie. And facing into a cold wind off Starside, he added, 'But whatever it was, it will happen, be sure.'

Feeling her shivering where she huddled in his arms, and sensing her despair, he stared inquiringly into her crimson eyes.

'Perhaps I know,' she told him then. 'For we've sensed their resurgence a while now.'

'We?' He allowed her to lead him below, out of the starlight and into the aerie's topmost rooms.

'Your son and I.' She nodded. 'While he was still himself.'

And: 'Their resurgence? Them?' But even asking, so Harry worked out the answer for himself. And now, too, he understood Lardis Lidesci's anxiety and animosity in The Dweller's garden.

The Wamphyri.' She nodded. The Old Lords. Condemned to the Icelands, but not content with the Icelands.'

They passed through massive, fiercely frescoed halls of fretted bone and carved stone, descended cartilage stairs to her chambers where they collapsed into great chairs. And in a while: Tell me all,' Harry grunted.

It had started (on Harry's time scale) two years earlier, which was to say two years after the battle for The Dweller's garden, whose outcome had been the defeat and rout of the Old Wamphyri Lords.

'Sensing a threat from the Icelands,' (Karen went on), 'I requested an audience with The Dweller, during which I confided in him the substance of my fears. By that time he knew well enow that I had survived your 'cure', but in any case there was a truce between us. After all, I'd fought alongside you and your son against the Wamphyri; he could not doubt but that I was his ally. Occasionally I would visit him in the mountains, and there were times when he even came to see me here. We were friends, you understand, nothing more.

'But they were strange times: the change was on him; he was losing human flesh and putting on the shape and ways of a wolf. Still and all, and while he retained the mind of a man, we became true allies a second time. For he, too, in his way, had felt the Icelands threat: a weird foreboding that waxed and waned with the auroras, a DOOM which crouched there like a beast on the frozen frontier, all hunched down into itself and tensed ready to spring.

'I have said he sensed it 'in his way'. Your son is a wolf now, Necroscope, with a wolf's senses and instincts. Across all the leagues he could smell them on the winds out of the north, see them riding in the auroras, hear them whispering and plotting. Plotting their return and their revenge, aye!

'Their revenge, Harry: on The Dweller and his people, on me, on any and all who had helped defeat them, destroy their aeries and banish them into the great cold. Which is to say, on you, too. Except, of course, you were not here at that time. There was only The Dweller and myself. And going the way he was… it would not be long before I was alone.

'I asked him what must be done.

''We must set guards,' he told me, 'out there in the cold waste, to look north and report back on any curious incursions from the Icelands.'

''Guards?'

''You must make them,' he said. 'Are you not Wamphyri and Dramal Doombody's rightful heir? Didn't he show you how?'

''Indeed, I know how to make creatures,' I told him.

''Then do it!' he barked. 'Make warriors, but make them male and female. Make them so they can make themselves!'

''Self-reproducing?' The very idea made me gasp. 'But that is forbidden! Even the worst of the old