If I answered: ‘Aha! Your parents have come visiting!’ he would simply take the food away. But if I said:
‘Faethor, my father, I am starving! Feed me, pray, for if not then I shall be obliged to eat this dog you’ve locked in with me down here. And who will serve me then, when you are out in the world and I am left in charge of your lands and castle?’ Then he would open the door a crack and place the food inside. But only let me stand too close to the door and I would see neither Faethor nor food for three or four days.
And so I ‘weakened’; I grew less and less abusive; I began to plead. For food, for the freedom of the castle, for fresh air and light, and water to bathe myself — but most of all for separation, however brief, from Ehrig whom I now detested as a man detests his own wastes. Moreover, I made out that I was growing physically weaker. I spent more time ‘asleep’, and came less readily awake.
Finally came the time when Ehrig could not wake me, and how the dog battered on the door and screamed for his true master then! Faethor came; they carried me up, up to the battlements above the covered hail where it spanned the gorge. There they laid me down in the clean air under the first stars of night, pale spectres in a sky I had not seen for far too long. The sun was a dull blister on the hills, casting its last rays over the spires of rock behind the castle’s towers.
‘He is likely starved for air,’ said Faethor, ‘and maybe simply starved a little, too! But you are right, Ehrig — he seems weaker than he should be. I desired only to break his will a little, not the man himself. I have powders and salts that sting, which should stir him up. Wait here and I’ll fetch them. And watch him!’
He descended through a trapdoor out of sight, leaving Ehrig to hunch down to his vigil. All of this I saw through eyes three-quarters shuttered. But the moment Ehrig allowed his attention to wander I was on him in a trice! Closing off his windpipe with one hand, I snatched from my pocket a leather thong which I’d earlier removed from my boot. I had intended it for the Ferenczy’s neck, but no matter. Wrapping my legs round Ehrig to stop him kicking, I looped the thong round his neck and yanked it tight, then made a second loop and tied it off. Choking, he tried to lurch to his feet, but I slammed his head so hard against the stone parapet that I felt his skull shatter. He went limp and I lowered him to the timbered floor.
At that moment my back was to the trapdoor, and of course that was when the Ferenczy chose to return. Hissing his fury, he came leaping up light as a youth — but his hands were iron on me where he took hold of my hair and grasped the flesh between my neck and shoulder. Ah, but strong though he was, old Faethor was out of practice! And my own fighting skills were as fresh in my mind as my last battle with the Pechenegi.
I kneed him in the groin and drove my head up under his great jaw so hard that I heard his teeth crunching. He released me, fell to the planking where I leaped astride him; but as his fury waxed, so waxed his strength. Calling on the vampire within, he tossed me aside as easily as a bale of straw! And in a moment he was on his feet, spitting shattered teeth, blood and curses as he came gliding after me.
I knew then that I couldn’t beat him, not unarmed, and I cast all about in the eerie twilight for a weapon. And found several.
Suspended from the high rear battlements, a row of circular bronze mirrors hung at different angles, two or three of them just catching the last faint rays of sunlight and reflecting them away down the valley. The Ferenczy’s signalling devices. Arvos the gypsy had said that the old Ferengi didn’t have much use for mirrors, or for sunlight. I wasn’t exactly sure what he’d meant, but I seemed to remember something of the sort from old campfire legends. In any case I didn’t have a lot of choice. If Faethor was vulnerable, then there was only one sure way to find out.