He went up into the garden. There were graves – far too many of them – but untended now: Travellers who died in the great battle, trogs laid to rest in niches under the crags. They heard him, too, and remembered him well. But they felt something different in him which wasn’t to their liking. Ah, Wamphyri! Necromancer! This man, or monster, had words which could call them to a horrid semblance of life even against their will.
‘And I might!’ he threatened, sensing their refusal, their terror. But from within: What, like Janos Ferenczy? What price now your ‘humanity’, Harry?
He went back to the aerie, to Karen, and told her bleakly, ‘Once … I could have commanded an army of the dead. Now there are just the two of us.’
Three, The Dweller’s growl was in their minds, but clear as if he stood beside them. You fought for me once. Both of you, for my cause. My turn, now.
That seemed to decide it, to state their case, set their course. Even though it was the only course they’d ever had.
Karen fetched her gauntlet and dipped it in a cleansing acid solution, then set to oiling its joints. ‘Me,’ she said, ‘I tore the living heart out of Lesk the Glut! Aye, and there was a lot more to fear in those days. And it dawns on me: I’m not afraid for myself but for the loss of what we have. Except that when you look at it, well, what do we have, after all?’
Harry jumped up, strode to and fro shaking his fists and raging inside and out. And then grew deadly calm. It was his vampire, of course, still seeking ascendancy. He nodded knowingly, and grunted, ‘Well, and maybe I’ve kept you down long enough. Perhaps it’s time I let you out.’
‘What?’ Karen looked up from working on her gauntlet.
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing?’ She arched her eyebrows.
‘I only asked . . . where shall it be?’
The garden, said The Dweller, far away in the mountains.
They heard him, and Karen agreed, ‘Aye, the garden has its merits. We know it well, anyway.’
Finally, with a furious nod, the Necroscope surrendered to his vampire. In part, at least. ‘Very well,’ he snarled, ‘the garden. So be it!’
And so it would be.
In Starside …
It was the hour when all that remains of the furnace sun is a smudgy grey luminosity in a sky gnawed by jutting fangs of mountain, and the nameless stars are chunks of alien ice freezing in weird orbits. The deepest, darkest hour of sundown, and the last of the Wamphyri – Shaithis and Shaitan, Harry Keogh and Karen – were coming together to do battle in an empty place once called the garden. All four of them, the last of their race, and The Dweller, too; except he was no longer Wamphyri as such, or if he was even his vampire scarcely knew it.
Karen had known for some time now that the invaders were close and closing on Starside, ever since her creatures out on the rim of the rimy ocean called to her one last time to pass on that information – before they died. And as they died, so Karen had asked them: How many are the enemy, and what are their shapes? It was easier far to gauge strength and substance that way than from complicated descriptions; the distance was great, and the brains of warriors are never too large (unwise to invest such masses of menace with other than the most rudimentary intelligence). Nevertheless, vague pictures of flyers, warriors, and controlling beings had come back pain-etched out of the north, showing Karen how small was the army of Shaitan.
It consisted only of a pair of controlling Lords, who rode upon massive flyers with scale-plated heads and underbellies, and a half-dozen warriors of generally unorthodox construction. Unorthodox, aye … to say the least. For the invaders (who could only be Shaithis and Shaitan the Fallen, though Karen held back from any kind of direct contact with their minds) had apparently seen fit to break all the olden rules of the Wamphyri in the fashioning of these beasts. For one they had organs of generation, much like Karen’s constructs, and for another they seemed to act much of their own accord, without the guidance of their supposed controllers. Lastly, one of them was a monster even among monsters! So much so that Karen didn’t even care to dwell upon it.