Shaithis’s face was twisted in its madness; he was first and foremost Wamphyri, and now allowed his vampire full sway. A beast, his hands were transformed into talons. Blood slopped from his great jaws where his teeth elongated into fangs and tore the flesh of his mouth. With Karen’s once crowning, now lustreless hair bunched in his fist, he looked up at Shaitan and beyond him to the man on the cross. And his eyes blazed scarlet as he answered: ‘I should feel something? Some weird, mystical thing? All I desire to feel is the Necroscope’s agony, and the flight of his and his vampire’s spirit as he dies. But if I can hurt him a little more before he dies, so be it!’
‘Fool!’ And a heavy, grey-mottled appendage of Shaitan’s – a thing half-hand, half-claw – fell on Shaithis’s shoulder. He shrugged it off and came easily to his feet.
And: ‘Ancestor mine.’ He ground the words out. ‘You have pushed me too far. And I sense that I shall never be free of your interference in my affairs. We’ll talk more about that – shortly. But until then . . .’ With a mind-call, he brought forward his warrior out of the shadows, placing the creature between himself and Shaitan the Fallen.
Shaitan backed off and gloomed on the warrior – which, in the Icelands, had been Shaithis’s most recent construct prior to their departure – and inquired of his descendant, ‘Are you threatening my life?’
Shaithis knew that sunup was nigh and time of the essence; he had none of the latter to waste right now; he would confront his ancestor later, possibly after the fortress beyond the Gate had been taken. And so: ‘Threatening your life?’ he answered. ‘Of course not. We are allies, the last of the Wamphyri! But we are also individuals, with our individual needs.’
For which reason Shaitan in his turn let Shaithis live. For the moment.
And as the fire smoked and blazed up brighter, despite a renewed downpour, and as Harry Keogh felt the first breath of heat where flames closed in towards his lower limbs, Shaithis again turned his attentions to the Lady Karen.
While in another world . . .
… It was midnight in the Urals. Deep under the Perchorsk ravine, in the confines of his small room, Viktor Luchov snatched himself awake from a monstrous nightmare. Panting and trembling, still only half-awake, he stood up on jelly legs and gazed all about at the grey metal walls, and leaned on one for its support. His dream had been so real – it had impressed him so badly – that his first thought had been to press his alarm button and call out to the men he kept stationed in the corridor outside. Even now he would do so, except (and as he’d learned only too well the last time), such an action could well be fraught with a terror of its own. Especially in the claustrophobic, nerve-racking confines of the Perchorsk Projekt. He had no desire to have anyone come bursting in here with the smoking, red-glowing muzzle of a flamethrower at the ready.
As his heartbeat slowed a little and while he fumblingly dressed, he examined his nightmare: a strange, even ominous thing. In it, he had heard an awful, tortured cry go out from the Gate at Perchorsk’s core, and he’d known its author: Harry Keogh! The Necroscope had cried out his telepathic anguish to any and all who could hear him, but mainly to the teeming dead in their myriad resting places across the world. And in their turn they had answered him as best they could – with a massed moaning and groaning, even with their soft and crumbling movements – from the airless environs of their innumerable graves. For the dead knew how they had misjudged the Necroscope, how they’d denied and finally forsaken him, and it was as if they were grief-stricken and preparing for a new Golgotha.
And the departed spirit of Paul Savinkov – a man who had worked for KGB Major Chingiz Khuv right here at Perchorsk, worked and died here, horribly – had materialized and spoken to the Projekt Direktor in his dream, telling him about the warning which Harry Keogh’s son had sent out through the Gate. For in life Savinkov had been a telepath, and his talent had stayed with him, continuing into the afterlife.