Before he could close with me, and avoiding places where the timbers seemed suspect, I ran across the roof. He came after me like a great loping wolf, but pulled up short when I tore down a mirror from its fastenings and turned to face him. His yellow eyes went very wide and he bared bloodied teeth at me like rows of shattered spires. He hissed and his forked tongue flickered like crimson lightning between his jaws.
I held the ‘mirror’ in my hands and knew at once what it was: a sturdy bronze shield, possibly old Varyagi. It had a grip at the back for my hand. Aye, and I knew how to use it — but if only it were spiked in the centre of its face! Then, unwitting, the burnished bronze caught a stray ray from the scythe of sun setting on the hills — caught it and hurled it straight into Faethor’s snarling visage. And now I knew old Arvos’s meaning.
The vampire cringed before that blaze of sunlight. He shrank down into himself, threw up spider hands before his face, backed off a pace. I was never one to waste an opportunity. I pursued, drove the buckler clanging into his face, kicked at his loins again and again as I forced him back. And whenever he’d make to advance on me, then I’d catch the sun and throw it in his teeth, so that he had no chance to gather his reserves.
In this way I beat him back across the roof, with kicks and blows and blinding rays of sunlight. Once his leg went through the rotten roof, but he dragged it out and continued to retreat before me, frothing and cursing his fury. And so at last he came up against the parapet wall. Beyond that parapet was eighty feet of thin air, then the rim of the gorge and three hundred feet of almost sheer slope clad in close-packed, spiky pines. Down at the bottom was the bed of a rivulet. In short, a nightmare of vertigo.
He looked over the rim, glanced at me with eyes of fire — eyes of fear? At which precise moment the sun dipped down out of sight.
The change in Faethor was instantaneous. The twilight deepened, and the Ferenczy swelled up like some great bloating toadstool! His face split open in the most soul-wrenching smile of triumph — which I at once crushed under one last battering blow of my buckler.
And over he went.
I couldn’t believe that I’d got him. It seemed a fantasy. But even as he toppled so I clung to the parapet wall and peered after him. Then . . . the strangest thing! I saw him like a dark blot falling towards the greater darkness. But in another moment the shape of the blot changed. I thought I heard a sound like a vast stretching, like giant knuckles cracking, and the shape hurtling towards the trees and the gorge seemed to unfurl like a huge blanket. It no longer fell so swiftly, nor even vertically. Instead it seemed to glide like a leaf, away from the castle’s walls, out a little way over the gorge.
It dawned on me then that in the fullness of his powers Faethor might indeed have flown, in a fashion, from these battlements. But I had taken him by surprise, and in the shock of falling he had lost precious moments. Too late, he’d wrought a great change in himself, flattening himself like a sail to trap the rushing air. Too late, because even as I stared in fascination, so he struck a high branch. Then, in a dark whirling and a snapping of branches, the blot was gone. There followed from below a series of crashes, a shriek, a final, distant thud. And silence .
I listened for long moments in the rapidly deepening gloom. Nothing.
And then I laughed. Oh, how I laughed! I stamped my feet and thumped the top of the parapet wall. I’d got the old bastard, the old devil. I’d really got him!
I stopped laughing. True, I had thrown him down from the wall. But. . . was he dead?