He starved Karen in her aerie, used the blood of a piglet to lure her vampire out of her, then burned the thing before it could escape back into her body. But after that, things had not gone according to plan. And the rest of it was still seared on the screen of his memory:
She came to him in a dream, stood over him in her most revealing white gown, and turned his triumph to ashes. ‘Can’t you see what you’ve done to me?’ she said. ‘I who was Wamphyri am now a shell! For when one has known the power, the freedom, the magnified emotions of the vampire. . . what is there after that? I pity you, for I know why you did what you’ve done, and also that you’ve failed!’ And then she was gone.
He woke up and searched for her in all the rooms on all the many levels of the aerie, and could not find her.
Eventually he went out on to a high bone balcony and looked down, and saw Karen’s white dress lying crumpled on the scree more than a kilometre below, no longer entirely white but red too. And Karen had been inside it.
Harry shook himself, came out of his reverie, deliberately turned his back on Starside and the scars it had given him, and looked at the garden – which now he saw was not entirely as he remembered it. A garden? Well, yes, but not the well-tended garden he had known. And the greenhouses? The hillside dwelling places of the Travellers? The hot springs and speckled trout pools?
There was green algae on the pools; the transparent panels in many of the greenhouses were torn and flapping in cold air eddies out of Starside; the dwelling houses, especially Harry Jr’s, showed signs of disrepair where tiles were missing from the roofs, windows were broken, and central-heating pipes from the thermal pools had cracked, spilling their contents out upon the open ground so that the radiators went without.
‘Not the same, Harry Hell-lander, is it?’ said a deep, sad, growling voice from close at hand, if not in those words exactly. But the Necroscope’s telepathy had filled in the bits which his ears had failed to recognize: it’s easy to be a linguist when you’re also a telepath. Harry turned to face the man approaching him jinglingly along the lee of the wall; as he did so the other noted his gaunt grey flesh and crimson eyes, and paused.
‘Hello there, Lardis.’ The Necroscope nodded, his own voice as deep and deeper than the other’s. ‘I hope that shotgun’s not for me!’ He wasn’t joking; if anything, he might have been threatening.
‘For The Dweller’s father?’ Lardis looked at the weapon in his hands as if seeing it for the first time, in something of surprise. He shuffled a little, awkwardly, like a boy caught in contemplation of some small crime, and said, ‘Hardly that! But – ‘ and again the Traveller chief looked at Harry’s eyes, and this time narrowed his own, ‘ -wherever you’ve been and whatever you’ve done since last you were here, Harry Hell-lander, I see you’ve known hard times.’ Finally he averted his gaze, glancing here and there all about the garden, then down onto Starside. ‘Aye, and hard times here, too. And more still to come, I fear.’
Harry studied the man, and asked, ‘Hard times? Won’t you explain?’
Lardis Lidesci was Romany; in this world, on Earth, anywhere, there would be no mistaking the Gypsy in him. He was maybe five-eight tall, built like a crag, and looked of one age with the Necroscope. (In fact he was a lot younger, but Starside and the Wamphyri had taken their toll.) In contrast to his squat build he was very agile, and not in body alone; his intelligence was patent in every brown wrinkle of his expressive face. Open and frank, Lardis’s round face was framed in dark flowing hair in which streaks of grey were now plainly visible; he had slanted, bushy eyebrows, a flattened nose and a wide mouth full of strong if uneven teeth. His brown eyes held nothing of malice but were careful, thoughtful, penetrating.