The awful head sprang aloft, fell, bounced. And even rolling it cried, ‘FOOL! DAMNED FOOL!’ before lying still. Then the scarlet eyes closed. The mouth opened one last time and a gob of red-tinged filth shot out – and a final word, the merest whisper: ‘Fool!’
Dragosani’s answer was to swing the sickle a second time, splitting the head in two parts like some great grey overripe melon. Inside the skull, the brain was a mush with a writhing core: in effect two brains, one human and shrivelled and the other – alien! The brain of the vampire. Without pause, without fear, knowing for once exactly what he did, Dragosani stuck his hands deep into the two halves of the skull cavity and let his trembling fingers feel the reeking fluids and pulp. All the secrets and the lore of the Wamphyri were here, here, just waiting for him to search them out.
Yes! Yes!
Even now the brains were rotting, falling into the natural decay and corruption of centuries . . . but Dragosani’s necromantic talent was already tracking the undead (now utterly dead) monster’s secrets through the very juices of its crumbling brain. Grey as stone, his eyes standing out obscenely in his head, he lifted up the mess to his face – but too late!
Before his frantic eyes everything rotted away, boiled into smoke, trickled in streams of dust through his twitching fingers. Even the misshapen skull, dust in his hands.
With a cry almost of anguish, wildly swinging his arms like a windmill run amok, Dragosani spun and made a headlong dive for the vampire’s headless body where it still sat upright in its grave. The severed neck was beginning to steam away, settling into the scaled chest which itself slumped down into the unseen trunk below. And even as the necromancer plunged his hand and arm down into that hole, into the rot and the stench, so the earth belched up a great mushrooming cloud of poisonous vapour and collapsed in upon the now almost liquid corpse.
Dragosani howled like a banshee and drew out his arm from the quag, then crawled away from the shuddering, belching hole as the ground quickly settled into quiescence. At the edge of the circle he paused, head hanging limply, shoulders slumped, and sobbed his frustration long and rackingly.
Breathless, shaken to his roots by all he had seen, Max Batu watched the necromancer a little while longer then slowly came forward. He got down on one knee beside Dragosani and gripped his shoulder. ‘Comrade Dragosani,’ Batu’s voice was hushed, little more than a dry, croaking whisper. ‘Is it over?’
Dragosani stopped sobbing. He let his head continue to hang down while he considered Batu’s question: was it all over? It was all over for Thibor Ferenczy, yes, but only just beginning for the new vampire, the as yet immature creature which even now shared Dragosani’s body with him. They would supply each other’s needs,(however grudgingly,) learn from each other, become as one being. The question still remained as to whose will would eventually achieve dominance.
Against any ordinary man the vampire must, of course, be the winner. Every time. But Dragosani was not ordinary. He had the power in him to accumulate his own lore, his own talents. And why not? Perhaps somewhere in his learning, in his gathering of secrets and strange new powers, he might yet find a way to be rid of the parasite. But until then . . .
‘No, Max Batu,’ he said, ‘it’s not over yet. Not for a while yet.’
“Then what must I do now?’ the squat little Mongol was anxious to be of assistance. ‘How can I help? What are your needs?’
Dragosani continued to stare at the dark earth. How could Batu help? What were the necromancer’s needs? Interesting questions.
Pain and frustration died in Dragosani. There was much to do and time was wasting. He had come here to gather new powers to himself in the face of whatever threat was posed by Harry Keogh and the British E-Branch, and that was a job he still must do. Thibor’s secrets were beyond him now, dead and gone forever like the vampire himself, but that must not be the end of the matter. However weak and battered he felt right now, still he knew that he had not been permanently dam aged. The pain may well have scarred his mind and soul (if he still had a soul), but those were scars which would heal. No, he had suffered no real or lasting injury. He had merely been – depleted.