‘Where is The Dweller now?’ Harry demanded. He glanced sharply at Lardis. ‘Wolfson, did you call him? And where’s his mother?’
‘His mother?’ Lardis raised his slanted eyebrows, quickly lowered them again. ‘Ah, his mother! Your wife, the most gentle lady Brenda.’
‘She was my wife, once.’ Harry nodded.
‘Come this way,’ said Lardis.
He led the Necroscope across the garden, and Harry saw for himself how great were the changes. For it was plain now that the place had been left untended. The pools were stagnating; the greenhouses were empty and cold; a bitter wind blew, bouncing wiry balls of tumble-weed across the flat, once fertile saddle. And to one side, where the level ground began to climb again like foothills to the higher peaks, there lay Brenda’s simple cairn.
Harry felt the poignancy of the moment and reached out with his deadspeak. It was instinct . . . like the beat of his heart . . . like breathing . . . but in another moment, remembering how she’d been, he withdrew. She wouldn’t know him, and even if she did remember it would only disturb her. To Lardis he said, ‘She died peacefully?’
‘Aye,’ the Gypsy answered. ‘Sunup and gentle rains, and all the flowers in bloom. A good time to go.’
‘She wasn’t ill?’
Lardis shook his head. ‘Merely frail. It was her time.’
Harry turned away. ‘But alone, here . . .’
‘She wasn’t alone!’ Lardis protested. ‘The trogs loved her. My Travellers, too. And her son. He stayed with her to the end. It helped keep his own trouble at bay.’
‘His trouble?’ Harry repeated him. ‘You mean when he’s not himself, not lucid? And you’ve called him Harry Wolfson. I ask you one more time: where is The Dweller, Lardis Lidesci?’
The Gypsy stared at him a moment, then glanced at the full moon riding the peaks and shivered. ‘Up there,’ he said, ‘where else? Wild as his brothers, aye, and like a king among them where they lope in the trees along the ridges. Or snug in a cave with his bitch on Sunside when the sun is up, or hunting foxes in the far west. Men see him from time to time with the pack . . . they know him from the hands he wears where the rest have paws, and from his crimson eyes, of course.’
Harry need ask no more, for now he knew. It was something he’d wondered about often enough. Almost to himself, softly, he said, ‘With The Dweller . . . changed, and the Wamphyri defeated, no longer a threat, there was nothing to keep his people here, nothing to hold them together. Perhaps you even feared him. And so you Travellers have drifted back to Sunside, the trogs have returned to their caves, and the garden . . . will soon come to an end. Unless I put it to rights again.’
‘You?’
‘Why not? I fought for it, upon a time.’
Lardis’s voice was sour, gruff now. ‘And will you also hunt on Sunside – hunt men, women and children – when the nights are dark?’
‘Does my son hunt the travelling folk? Did he ever?’
Lardis turned abruptly away. ‘I have to go. At the back of the saddle there’s a track, a cleft, a pass. My route back through the mountains to Sunside.’
Harry followed close behind. ‘Do you go alone? Why did you come here, anyway?’
To remember what was upon a time, and to see what has become. Just this one last time.’
‘And now that the Wamphyri are no more: how goes it on Sunside? Have you settled, or do you journey as before?’
Lardis looked back and gave a snort. ‘What? The Wamphyri, no more? Well, perhaps – for now! But the swamps boil with their spawn. All is as it was in the long ago, and what has been will be again. Vampires today, Wamphyri tomorrow!’
Harry came to a halt, let the other stride away into a rising mist. ‘Lardis,’ he called after him, ‘remember this: don’t bother me and I won’t bother you and yours. That’s a promise. And if you’re in need, seek me out. Except . . . seek carefully.’