Leaving The Dweller’s old house and making his way towards her through the dispersing mist, the Necroscope sent a dazed thought ahead of him: Is it really you, Karen, or am I seeing and hearing things? I mean, how can this be real? I saw you dead and broken on the scree where you’d thrown yourself down from the roof of your aerie.
Hah! she answered. And without malice: But that was when you were seeing things, Harry Keogh! She had stepped through a break in the wall and stood poised there, waiting for him, silhouetted against wall and flyer both. The latter, a nightmare dragon thing but harmless for all its prehistoric design, nodded, salivated, and blinked huge, owlish eyes. It swayed its flat, spatulate head this way and that; its damp, gleaming manta wings were of fine, flexible alveolate bone thinly sheathed in metamorphic flesh; worm legs or thrusters bunched beneath the doughy bulge of its body.
Harry looked at it and wondered why he felt no horror and very little pity. For he knew that the thing had been fashioned from the flesh of trogs or Travellers. Perhaps there was no more horror left in him. Or perhaps there was no more human. Except, drawing closer to Karen, he knew that some of his emotions at least were still human.
She was breathtaking. In the world beyond the sphere Gate – the world of men, now an entire universe away – her like had been quite unknown. Even her crimson eyes seemed beautiful. . . now. Harry was awed by her beauty, struck by it no less than when he’d first seen her, that time when she came here to join the garden’s defenders in defiance of the Wamphyri. She had enthralled him then and did so again now. He couldn’t take his eyes off her.
He drank her in:
From the burnished copper of her hair, down through every gorgeous curve of her body (which, whether half-hidden or half-exposed, was always given emphasis by her sheath of soft white leather), to the pale leather sandals on her feet, open at the toes to show her toenails painted gold, she was ravishing. Over her shoulders she wore a cloak of black fur, and about her waist a wide black belt whose grey-metal buckle was shaped into a snarling wolf’s head. The sigil’s significance was lost in the past; Dramal Doombody’s ancestors had passed it down to him, and he in his turn had passed it to Karen. And not only his crest, but Dramal had given Karen his egg, too.
Riveted for long moments by her weirdness, her unearthly beauty and contrasting colours, Harry had paused; now he moved closer. Face to face, Karen was even more beautiful, more desirable. Countering his approach – shifting her body to mirror his every move -she displayed the sinuous motion of a Gypsy dancer which he remembered so well. But of course, for upon a time she’d been a Traveller. Why, only listen and he might hear the chime and jingle of her movements . . . yes, even when there was none to hear!
He heard these things now, and then her telepathic voice, chiming in his mind: You very nearly killed me once, Harry. And I should warn you: my first reason for coming here was to return the favour! She brought forward her right hand, until now hidden behind her back. Her battle gauntlet was in position; when she flexed her hand, a torturer’s delight of blades, hooks and small scythes gleamed silver in the starlight.
Harry conjured a Möbius door on his immediate right and fixed it there. Invisible, it was the perfect bolthole if such were needed. Let Karen take a swing at him, he’d merely feint right and disappear. But these were thoughts he must keep to himself, while out loud: ‘Are you saying you’re here to kill me?’
To which, in a voice that trembled at the very edge of her control, she answered in kind: ‘And are you saying you don’t deserve it?’
Still keeping his own mind guarded, Harry looked into hers and saw the furious passions brewing there, saw anger bordering on rage, but nothing of hatred. Also, and very importantly, he saw the Lady Karen’s loneliness. They were two of a kind now. ‘I didn’t understand what it was like to be . . .’he began, and paused; and tried again: ‘I mean, I thought I was helping you, curing you, as of some vile disease. But I admit it, I did it for my son as much as for you. For if I could cure you . . .’