So let’s go! Pete was eager to ride. Just climb aboard the old Screamin’ Eagle and start ‘er up, man.
But the Necroscope shook his head. ‘I don’t need the bike, Pete. Not any more.’
The ex-Angel was cast down. Hey, that’s right. You got your own form of transport. But what about me?
Harry thought about it a while, then gave a wan smile. And it was a measure of his strength that he still had it in him to smile. Pete the biker read his deadspeak thoughts, of course, and whooped wildly. Necroscope, do you mean it? He was breathless with excitement.
‘Sure,’ said Harry. ‘Why not?’ And they got aboard the big bike.
They turned her around, found a good straight stretch of hard-packed, boulder-free earth, and took her up to a ton. And it was as if a primal beast bellowed in the starlit silence of Starside. Then, still howling a hundred and waving a tail of dust half a mile long, Harry conjured a Möbius door and they shot through, followed by a future-time door which they likewise crashed. And now they rode into the future with a great many blue and green and (Harry noted) even a few red life-lines. The blues were Travellers, the greens would be trogs, and the reds . . .
. . . Vampires? Pete picked the thought out of his mind.
Looks like it, said Harry, sighing.
But Pete only laughed like a crazy man. My kind of people! he yelled.
And on they rode, for a little while.
Until Harry said, Pete, here’s where I get off.
You mean . . . she’s all mine?
For ever and ever. And you needn’t ever stop.
Pete didn’t know how to thank him, so didn’t try. Harry opened a past-time door, then paused a while before crossing the threshold and watched the big Harley rocketing away from him into the future. Eventually he heard the Angel’s whooping cry come echoing back: Heee-haaaaaaaaaa! Well, at least Pete was happy now.
And then Harry went back to Starside and the garden . . .
The Necroscope stood at the forward edge of the garden, his hands resting on the low stone wall there, and looked down on Starside. Somewhere between here and the old territories of the Wamphyri, where the broken remains of their aeries now lay in shattered disarray, the sphere Gate – this end of the space-time ‘handle’, the dimensional warp, whose alternate extension lay in Perchorsk – would be lighting up the stony plain in its painful white glare. Harry fancied he could see something of its light even from here, a ghostly shimmer way down there in the far grey foothills.
He and the incorporeal Pete had come out of the Starside Gate on the big bike – come through the aching dazzle of the ‘grey hole’ from Perchorsk and out of it on to the boulder plain – but Harry remembered very little of that. He did remember the last time he was here, however, which strangely felt more real to him than all that had gone between. Probably because he now desired to forget all that had gone between.
He turned his head more directly northwards and gazed out across all the leagues of Starside’s vast unknown to the curve of the horizon lying dark-blue and emerald-green under fleeting moon, glittering stars and the writhing allure of aurora borealis. That way lay the Icelands where the sun never shone and into which the doomed, forsaken and forgotten of the Wamphyri had been banished since time immemorial. Shaithis, too, after the defeat of the Wamphyri and the destruction of their aeries in the battle for The Dweller’s garden. And he remembered how Shaithis had sped north aboard a huge manta flyer in the peace and the silence of the aftermath.
Harry and the Lady Karen had spoken to Shaithis before he exiled himself; unrepentant even then, the vampire Lord had openly lusted after Karen’s body, and even more so after The Dweller’s and his father’s hearts. But he’d lusted in vain. At that time, anyway.
As for the Necroscope: he’d had his own use for the Lady Karen. For just like his son, she had a vampire in her. If he could exorcize Karen’s nightmare creature, perhaps he could also cure The Dweller.