‘I did not recover. What started as a healing process soon stopped, indeed reversed itself. My metamorphic vampire flesh could not replenish itself and the flesh of my human body, and the vampire must come first. That which was human in me gradually sloughed away, eaten out as by leprosy or some monstrous cancer. Even my mind was erased and in large part replaced, and what was instinct in my vampire gradually became instinct, inherent, in me. For the vampire must have a host, active and strong, to house its egg until it could be passed on, and it “remembered” the shape and nature of its first host. As you know, Father, my “other” father – the source of my egg – was a wolf!
‘I knew that my body was going, my mind too, and saw that I was reverting. But still there was someone who knew my story – all of it, from the day I was conceived -and to whom I could talk in my hour of need. My mother, of course. And in practising my deadspeak so I kept at least that one last talent alive. But as for the rest: they are gone, forgotten. Ironic: I destroyed your talents and lost my own! And now, when I … forget things, I talk to the Gentle One Under the Stones, who reminds me of what has been; who even reminded me of you, when I might so easily have forgotten.’
Harry’s emotions – the gigantic emotions of the Wamphyri – had filled him to overflowing. He couldn’t find words to speak, could scarcely think. In a few short hours, a small fraction of his life, his entire life had been changed for ever. But that meant nothing. His pain was nothing. For others had really suffered and were suffering even now. And he could trace all of it back to himself.
‘Son . . .!’
‘I’ll come here no more,’ The Dweller said. ‘Now that I’ve seen you. And now that you’ve . . . forgiven me? . . . I can forget what I was and be what I am. Which is something you might try for yourself, Father.’ He reached out a hand to touch Harry’s trembling hand, and his forearm was grey-furred where it slid from the sleeve of his robe.
Harry turned his face away. Tears are unseemly in scarlet, Wamphyri eyes. But a moment later, when he looked again . . .
. . . The Dweller’s robe was still fluttering to the floor, while a shape, grey-blurred, launched itself from the window. Harry leaped to see. There in the vampire mist his son sprang away, then paused, turned and looked back. He blinked triangular eyes, lifted his muzzle, sniffed at the cold air. His ears were pointed, alert; he tilted his head this way and that; he was . . . listening? But to what?
‘Someone comes!’ he barked, warningly. And before the Necroscope could question his meaning: ‘Ah, yes! That one. Forgotten until now, like so many other things I’ve forgotten. It seems I’m not the only one who marked your return, Father. No, for she too knows you’re back.’
‘She?’ The Necroscope repeated his werewolf son, as that one turned and loped for the higher peaks; and all the grey brotherhood with him, vanishing into the mist.
Then:
A shadow fell on The Dweller’s house and Harry turned his startled eyes skyward, where even now a weird diamond shape fell towards the garden. And: ‘She?’ he said again, his query a whisper.
He means me, hell-lander, her telepathic voice – hardly severe, nevertheless exploding in Harry’s mind like a bomb – reached down to him. Telepathy, yes, and not deadspeak. But how could this be? It whirled him like a top.
You! he finally answered in her own medium, as her flyer swooped to earth.
The long dead – the no longer dead – the undead Lady Karen!
3
Harry and Karen – The Threat of the Icelands
Karen glided her flyer to earth at the north-facing front of the garden, just beyond the low wall there, where the ground sloped steeply away towards Starside. It was a good relaunch site and well known to her, for this was where she’d blinded the crazed Lesk the Glut, cut out his heart, and given his grotesque body to the garden’s defenders for burning.