Again her snort: Hah! And bitterly, ‘And now who is beaten, even before the fight?’
‘Do you think I don’t feel tempted?’ he said then. ‘Oh, I do, believe me! But I’ve fought this thing inside me for such a long time now that I can’t just let it win, no matter the cost. If I succumbed to rage and lust – went out and took the life of a man, and drained his blood – what then? Would it give me the strength I need to destroy Shaithis and Shaitan? Perhaps, but who would be next after them? How long before I started the Wamphyri cycle all over again, but strong this time as never before, with all the powers of a Necroscope to play with? And with my vampire’s bloodlust raging, what then? Do you think I wouldn’t begin to look for a way back into my own world, to return there as the greatest plague-bearer of all time?’
‘Perhaps you’d be a king there,’ she answered. ‘With me to share your bone-throne.’
He nodded, but wryly. ‘The Red King, aye, and eventually Emperor of a scarlet dynasty. And all of our undead lieutenants – our bloodsons, and those who got our vampire eggs, and their sons and daughters – all of them pouring their pus on a crumbling Mankind, building their aeries and carving kingdoms of their own; as Janos would have done from his Mediterranean island, and Thibor the warlord after he’d turned Wallachia red, or Faéthor on his blood-crazed crusades. And all of our progeny Necroscopes in their own right, with neither the living nor the dead safe from them. Hell-lands? Now you’re talking, Karen!’
Following which he wouldn’t even listen to her. But even if he had it would have been too late.
For that was when Karen’s other watchers, great Desmodus bats from the aerie’s colony, brought news of the arrival on Starside’s far northern borders of Shaitan and his small but deadly aerial forces. Inaudible except to Karen and to others of their own genus, the cries of the great vampires relayed the message back across seven hundred miles of barren boulder plains: the fact that after four and a half years of peace, the Old Wamphyri were finally returning to Starside.
She was bringing mewling warriors out of their vats when the warning arrived, and went straight to Harry where he stood wrapped in his thoughts on a balcony facing north. ‘Stand there long enough, Necroscope,’ she told him, ‘and you’ll be able to wave them a welcome! Nor will you have to wait too long.’
He barely glanced at her, acknowledged her presence with a nod. ‘I know they’re here,’ he said. ‘I’ve felt them coming like maggots chewing on the ends of my nerves. They’re not so many, but they shake the ether like an army shakes the earth. It’s time we went to the garden.’
‘You go,’ she told him, touching his arm as some of the sting went out of her voice. ‘See if you can call down your son out of the hills. Maybe he’ll bring his grey brotherhood with him, though what good they’ll be is hard to say. But me, I’ve a trio of warriors to wean and instruct. They’re built of fine, fierce stuff, right enough – good stuff, left behind by Menor Maimbite and Lesk the Glut, which I found intact under the ruins of their stacks – but when it comes to the fashioning . . . well, it’s true I’m a novice compared to them.’
‘Just make sure they’ll own me as their master as well as yourself,’ was Harry’s reply. ‘That way, even if they haven’t the measure of Shaitan’s creatures, still I might be able to come up with a trick or two.’
Then he turned and caught her up so swiftly in his arms that she gasped aloud. And: ‘Karen,’ he said, ‘we’ve seen our futures: the red threads of our lives melting into golden fire, then fading to nothing. It didn’t look too good for us, but at the same time it could mean anything. We simply don’t understand it. And in any case, whatever it means, it has to be better than what we saw of our enemies’ futures; for they didn’t have any! No scarlet threads in Starside’s tomorrows, Karen.’