Eventually the vampire left Karen (how, by what route, Harry neither knew nor wanted to know) and began to follow the bloody trail. Swaying its head this way and that, it entered the hall, inched forward towards the bowl. It was a long leech, corrugated, cobra-headed, blind, with many hooks. And it had pointed udders, a great many of them, along its grey, pulsating underbelly.
It sensed the blood, came on faster – then sensed Harry! It began a hasty retreat, curled back on itself and wriggled like a blindworm. Harry stepped into the Mobius Continuum, stepped out again at the door of Karen’s room. The vampire came crawling, saw him, but too late. He aimed his flame-thrower and burned it. Dying, it issued eggs, a great many of them, which rolled and skittered, vibrating across the floor toward him. Sweating, but cold inside, Harry burned them all. Until all that was left was the awful smell, and the screaming.
Karen’s screaming …
Exhausted, Harry slept. He slept in the aerie, because there was no longer anything there to fear. He dreamed that Karen stood over him in her white gown – that gown she had worn so revealingly for the Wamphyri Lords -and explained why he was the most miserable of all men. His victory was ashes. She had been Wamphyri, and now she was a shell. He thought he had won, but he had lost. When one has known the power, the freedom, the magnified emotions of the vampire . . . what is there after that? She told him she pitied him, for she knew why he had done what he had done – and he had failed. And then she said goodbye. He woke up, looked for her. No longer Wamphyri, she had taken the chains from her door, escaped. He searched the stack top to bottom, came and went through the Mobius Continuum until he was dizzy, but he couldn’t find her. Eventually he went out onto her high balcony and looked down. Karen’s white dress lay crumpled on the scree more than a kilometer below, no longer entirely white but red, too.
And Karen was inside it …
Epilogue
In the garden, the damage done in the fighting had been very nearly put to rights. Travellers worked at it during sunups, and trogs through the dark sundowns. And meanwhile the message had gone out: the Wamphyri are no more! Streams of Travellers, entire tribes, were en route even now, coming to celebrate and worship at the feet of their saviour. Jazz and Zek, and Wolf, too, had gone home, conveyed to that distant place by The Dweller, who had then returned.
And all in all, The Dweller was well satisfied with his work.
But… feeling a burning on his neck, Harry Jnr turned from where he supervised the rebuilding of the wall, turned to glance at a rising hummock of ground a little way apart. Someone stood there, someone who watched him intently, silently. Someone whose mind was sealed tight as a limpet to its rock. Harry Jnr frowned, peered for a moment through the holes in his golden mask, then smiled. It was only his father.
He waved and went back to work . . .