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 Möbius 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.