He did, and: I’m sorry. But his memories were sharper now and coming faster. My father should have known better: to read the future is a devious thing.
Aye, she agreed. I thought the golden fire might be that of the sun. But no, it was only . . . fire. They both burn, it’s true, but Shaithis’s will burn the worst, because it is his. I hate the black bastard!
He saw the logs and branches heaped beneath her. Shaithis will burn you?
What’s left, when his warriors are through with me. And even in a wolf’s mind, she read horror.
Is there anything I can do? Harry Wolfson came closer, on his belly, creeping between thralls where they lay in an open circle around the two central black tents.
Go away, she answered. Back into the mountains. Save yourself. Become a wolf entire. Eat what you kill and never bite a man or woman, lest they suffer your fate!
But. . . we were together at the garden, he said. And in his mind she saw again the fire and death and destruction.
Yes, but you were a power then. You and your weapons. But no sooner that last thought than suddenly there was another in her head. One of revenge. Does anything remain of your armoury?
His mind was wandering again; he looked this way and that and wondered what he was doing here; his recently pregnant bitch would be hungry where she waited for him. Armoury?
He couldn’t remember, so she showed him a picture. Can you bring me one of these?
Some two hundred yards away out on the boulder plain, a sated warrior snorted in its sleep. Harry Wolfson snaked back into the shadows, loped for the foothills to rejoin the pack. A single thought came back to Karen before the connection was broken. Farewell!
And hanging there in her pain, in the night and the chill of Starside, she thought: He won’t remember. But she was wrong.
He came again, but barely in time; came with the clouds from the south, with the first warm rain, with the grey light glowing in the sky beyond the mountains. He came with the false dawn, before the true dawn of sunup, and braved the circle of thralls where now they scratched and muttered in their sleep. And climbing the logs and branches of Karen’s pyre, he stood upon his hind legs, face to face, as if to kiss her. But her mouth gaped like a gash in her metamorphic face, and what passed between the two was not a kiss.
Wizard, Necroscope, wake up!
Harry gave a start as Shaithis’s thoughts lashed him like a whip; his thoughts, and then his spoken words: ‘Your torment will soon be over, Necroscope. So open your eyes and say goodbye to all of this. To your Lady, your life … to everything.’
Harry’s thoughts had something of form and order; his mind was almost healed; his body, not nearly so. Silver was present in his vampire blood like grains of arsenic, so that his broken flesh and bones couldn’t mend. But he heard Shaithis taunting him and felt a splash of rain, and opened his soulful eyes in the dark grey predawn light. Then, he almost wished he was blind.
Lieutenants of Shaithis were up on ladders, bringing Karen down from her cross. Her head rolled this way and that and her limbs flopped loosely as they tossed her down on a blanket upon the stony ground. Shaithis turned from Harry’s cross, went to his tent and slashed through its ropes, collapsing it like a deflated balloon.
‘And so you see, Necroscope,’ he crowed, ‘how I intend to honour my promise. For perceiving that you now see, hear and understand all, this time – for the last time – I shall take her in the open. No thrill in it for me, not any more; this time my labours are all for you. And when I’m done, then you shall witness how my warriors deal with her! As well to keep one’s creatures happy, eh? For after all, they too were men, upon a time.’
The rain came on harder and Shaithis issued commands. His thralls ripped the collapsed tent into two halves, then used its torn skins to cover the faggots of the torture pyres. It would not do for them to get too wet. Shaithis had meanwhile returned to the foot of the cross; Shaitan, too, from his own tent. More leech than man, the Fallen One’s eyes were glowing embers in the shadow of a black, corrugated cowl of flesh.