Necroscope III: The Source

Chapter 22

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The Dweller's Secret - Karen Defects -War!

The sun's declining rays were starting to fade where they turned the highest peaks gold when The Dweller, Harry Jnr, called his meeting. He wanted to speak to everyone who lived in or was supported by the garden, and he must do it now, while there was still time. He stood on a balcony under the hollow eaves of his house and addressed guests, Travellers, trogs, making no distinction. His mother was there, too, for a little while, before she went indoors. Smiling, sweet, grey-haired and quite bereft of mind, but happy too in her ignorance. Harry Snr couldn't bear to look at her, forgetting that in his Alec Kyle body she wouldn't recognize him. He was glad when she went inside. And anyway, to her it had all been so long, long ago.

'Friends, it's time for truths,' Harry Jnr held up his arms and the low hubbub of voices was stilled. 'It's time for you to make up your minds about certain things. I haven't deliberately misled you, but neither have I told you everything. Well, now I want to put that right. There are some of you here who have nothing to fight for. This just isn't your fight at all. You came or were sent here by the will of others. And I can just as easily take you out of it. Zek, Jazz, Harry, I'm talking to you.

'As for you Travellers, you can return to your travelling. The way is open to you: go now, down the saddle and through the passes to Sunside. And you trogs: you can be down on the plain on Starside and hidden away in your caves - or in other, safer places - long before the Wamphyri strike. But you should all be aware that they will strike, and soon.'

A low, massed moaning went up from his shuffling, bewildered trogs; Harry, Zek and Jazz looked at each other in dismay; a young male Traveller cried: 'But why, Dweller? You are powerful. You have given us weapons. We can kill the Wamphyri! Why do you send us away?'

Harry Jnr looked down on him. 'Are the Wamphyri your enemies?'

'Yes!' they all cried. And: 'They always have been,' shouted the same young man.

'And do you desire to kill them?'

'Yes!' again the massed shout. 'All of them!'

He nodded. 'Aye, all of them. And you trogs. There was a time when you served a Wamphyri Lord. Would you now turn against them?'

There came a brief, grunted discussion. 'For you, Dweller, aye,' answered their spokesman. 'We know good from evil, and you are good.'

'And you, Harry - father? You've been a scourge on vampires in your own world. Do you hate them still?'

'I know what they would do to my world,' Harry answered. 'Yes, I would hate them in this and any world.'

Harry Jnr looked at them all, his eyes behind his golden mask flitting over them where they stood in a body. Finally his gaze fell on Zek and Jazz. 'And you two,' he said. 'I can take you out of here, back where you came from. Do you know that? Any place in your world where you want to go. Do you understand?'

They looked at each other, then Jazz said, 'If you can do it now, then you can do it later. You saved us once, not so long ago. And we've faced the Wamphyri before. How can you think we'll run out on you?'

Again Harry Jnr's nod. 'Let me tell you how it is,' he said. 'Before most of you came here, at a time when I was beginning to build something here and had only my trogs to help me, I found a wolf on the hillside. His pack had turned on him, attacked him. He was badly torn, dying -I thought. I didn't know or understand the things I know now. I took the wolf in, healed him, made him well. Soon he was up on his feet again. Too soon, and I thought I had saved his life. But in fact he'd been saved by the creature within him!'

No one spoke. A hushed silence had fallen over the gathering. Harry Keogh found himself taking a step forward under the balcony, gazing fearfully up at his son.

'Father,' Harry Jnr continued, 'I told you there were reasons why I couldn't come back. Reasons why I must stand and defend my place. But all of you have told me how you hate and would destroy the Wamphyri. All the Wamphyri! So how can I ask you to fight for me?'

'Harry - ' his father began, only to be cut short.

This is how the wolf repaid me,' said The Dweller. And he took off his golden mask.

Beneath it was the face of a young Harry Keogh; Harry knew now beyond any doubt that he gazed upon his own true son. But the eyes in his face were scarlet in the twilight!

A long, low sigh went up from the crowd. For long moments they stood and stared, began to mutter, to talk in breathless whispers. Finally the crowd began to break up, drift away in small groups. In a little while only Harry Snr, Jazz and Zek remained. And The Dweller thought: they're here because without me they have nowhere to go.

'I'll take you out of here now,' he said.

'Like hell you will!' his father growled. 'Come the hell down from there and explain. You might be The Dweller but you're also my flesh. You, a vampire? What kind of vampire that so many people have loved you? I don't believe it!'

Harry Jnr came down. 'Believe it or not,' he said. 'It's the truth. Oh, I'm different, all right. My mind and will are too strong for it. I have mastery over it, I have it tamed. It takes me on now and then, but I'm always ready and I always win. Or have so far, anyway. So the vampire works for me, and not the other way around. I get its strength, its powers, its tenacity. It gets a host, and that's all. But there are disadvantages, too. For one, I have to stay here on Starside, or close to Starside. The sunlight -real sunlight - would hurt me. But the main reason I stay here is because this has become my place. My place, my territory. No other shall have it!'

He looked at them with his scarlet eyes, smiled mirthlessly. 'So there you have it. And now, if you're ready...?'

'Not me,' Harry shook his head. 'I'm staying, until this is over, anyway. I didn't look for you for eight years just to leave you now.'

Harry Jnr looked at Jazz and Zek. Jazz said: 'You already have our answer.'

Trogs came shuffling out of the twilight. Their spokesman said: 'We were Lesk's creatures, and we didn't like it. We liked working for you. Without you we have nothing. We stay and fight.'

Harry Jnr's face showed his despair. The trogs may be fast learners, but they weren't much good with his weapons. Then lanterns came bobbing, together with a familiar jingling, from the direction of the Traveller dwellings.

Jazz and Zek tried to count heads; pointless, there were as many as before. Maybe eighty of them. Not a man, woman or child had run out.

'So,' said Harry Snr, looking at them all where they regrouped themselves, 'it looks like we stand and fight!'

His son could only throw up his hands in amazement. And gladness, Harry thought...

An hour later at The Dweller's armoury, Jazz Simmons had finished handing out German-made pump-action shotguns and shells to the Travellers. The armoury was well-stocked and there were weapons for everyone. There were half-a-dozen flame-throwers, too, and Travellers who had been trained in their use. Harry Jnr was there to point out that the shells for the shotguns were probably the most expensive ammunition ever made; their shot was pure silver. Though most of the equipment had been stolen (Harry Jnr made no bones about it; he believed the manufacturers were well able to stand the loss), he'd been obliged to order and buy these shells. Jazz, ever practical, had asked how they'd been paid for. With Traveller gold, he'd been told, of which this world had an abundance. The Travellers considered it pretty, and of course it was very malleable; on the other hand it was much too heavy to carry around in large amounts, and far too soft for serious metalworking. It made nice baubles, which was about as much as could be said for it!

For himself, Jazz had chosen a heavy caliber machine-gun, a Russian job firing a mix of tracer and explosive shells. The weapon could be used with a tripod or carried in both arms; it took a strong man to handle it. Jazz knew the gun and had trained with it; it was capable of laying down a deadly and shattering barrage of fire.

'But still,' he told The Dweller, 'from what I've seen of Wamphyri warriors, I'd say these things are toys.'

Harry Jnr nodded, but: The flame-throwers are not toys,' he said. 'And I assure you the Wamphyri won't like this silver shot! Still, I take your meaning. One warrior - even a dozen - but forty? Ah, but you haven't seen all my weapons!' He showed Jazz a grenade.

Jazz weighed the thing in his hand. It was as large as an orange and very heavy. He shook his head. 'I don't know this one.'

'It's American,' The Dweller told him. 'For clearing pill-boxes and foxholes. A very grim weapon: it shivers into fragments of blazing metallic phosphorus!'

Meanwhile, Harry Snr had used the Mobius Continuum (for the first time in this world) to convey two very important Travellers to a nearby peak rearing high over most of the others. They knew their job and had practiced it on many previous occasions. In a hollowed-out depression at the peak's crest, literally an 'aerie' in its own right, great mirrors had been rigged on swivels to catch the dying sun's rays and hurl them down - or up - at any attackers. The Travellers also had shotguns and bandoliers of vampire-lethal shells.

As Harry dropped off his astonished charges and prepared to return to the garden, so his keen eyes spotted something approaching in the sky. As yet it was two or three miles east of the garden, but even at that distance its size and shape made it unmistakable. A flyer, like Shaithis's mount!

The Travellers had seen it too. 'Shall we try to burn it?' they cried, springing to their mirror-weapons.

'One flyer?' Harry frowned. Instinct cautioned him against abrupt action. 'Not unless it makes an attack on the garden.'

He went back there, looked for Harry Jnr. Instead he found Zek Foener, her eyes closed where she stood facing east and slightly north, one trembling hand to her brow. 'Is something wrong, Zek?' Harry asked.

'No, Harry,' she answered, without opening her eyes. 'something's right! The Lady Karen is coming to join us.

She wants to fight on our side. She has four fine warriors, but they're holding back until she calls to them. Now... she wants to know if it's safe for her to land.' 'She's not attacking us?'

'She's joining us!' Zek repeated. 'You don't know her like I do, Harry. She's different.'

Karen was closer now, a mile at the outside but still wary, still holding off. Everyone in the garden had seen her. Jazz Simmons came hurrying, a shining brass belt dangling from the ammo-housing of his gun. 'What is it?' he said.

At the same moment The Dweller had materialized. Zek spoke to both men, told them what she'd told Harry Snr. 'Harry,' The Dweller turned to his father. 'Go and tell the Travellers to hold their fire. Let's see if she's genuine.'

Before anything else, Harry detoured straight to the peak where the Travellers manned their mirror-weapons. He passed on Harry Jnr's message, then spread the word right through the garden and its defenders. Meanwhile, Zek had told the Lady Karen: land in front of the wall, between the wall and the cliffs.

Karen's flyer swept closer, swooped lower, swiftly grew larger in the sky. Far behind it, four dark shapes made spurting motions across the star-sprinkled indigo of the heavens. Tiny at this distance, still everyone knew how big they really were, knew what they really were. 'Here she comes,' Zek breathed.

The flyer, turning face-on to a low night wind that moaned from the west, dropped lower. It seemed to hover for a moment, like a kite, then dipped down and uncoiled its nest of springy worm 'legs' to the earth. It bumped gently down, lowered its wings for stability. The thing parked there, swaying and nodding hugely, gazing with vacuous disinterest first at the garden, then down the sweeping ramps of the mountains to the plain, then back to the garden. Karen dismounted, came to the wall. She was dressed - or undressed - to cause consternation, as was her wont.

The two Harrys, Jazz and Zek met her there. It was Zek's impulse to hug her, but she held back. She saw that Jazz was immediately shaken, stricken by Karen's looks. Harry Snr, too: awed by Karen's beauty. It was an unearthly beauty, of course, for it was the work of her vampire. But what it had given her in looks, shape and desirability, it had taken from her in the bloody fire of her eyes. She was unmistakably Wamphyri.

Only The Dweller seemed unmoved. 'You've come to join us in the coming battle?' His voice was unemotional.

'I've come to die with you,' she answered.

'Oh? And is it that certain?'

'Certain?' she repeated him. 'If you believe in miracles, pray for one! For myself, I don't care.' And she told them her dilemma, reinforcing what Zek Foener had already made known, how whichever way she jumped the Wamphyri meant to be rid of her. This way ... at least I'll take a few of them with me!'

'What of your trogs, your lieutenants?' The Dweller pressed her.

'I activated my trogs, turned them loose,' she answered. 'My "lieutenants", as you call them, are faint-hearted dogs! Them I sent away. Maybe the Lords have taken them on. I neither know nor care.'

'Your aerie stands empty?'

'Aye.'

'You've sacrificed a lot.'

'No,' she tossed her head, 'I have been sacrificed. And now you'd better make your final preparations. You can't hear them but I can, and they're on their way.'

'She's right,' Zek confirmed it. 'Their minds are lusting for war, open to read like reading a monstrous book. They're coming!'

The Dweller nodded, pointed to the four dark shapes squirting down through the darkening sky. 'Your warriors. Karen - are they trustworthy?'

They answer only my commands,' she answered.

Then station two of them at the back of the saddle, over the rise there,' and again he pointed, 'and the other pair down there, at the foot of the cliffs where the first trees grow. There they'll form our protection - some protection, at least - and they'll be well-positioned for launching, if the need should arise. And how will you fight?'

'In the thick of it!' She swept back her diaphanous cloak from her right side, took her gauntlet from her belt and thrust her right hand into it. Blades, hooks and scythes gleamed silver in the bright starlight where she flexed the deadly thing, adjusting its fit.

'Look!' Jazz snapped. 'I see them.'

It was impossible not to see them. The sky to the east was dark with dots large and small, like the approach of a small swarm of locusts. Except, while they were just as ravenous, they were not small and they were not locusts.

'Everyone to his station!' The Dweller cried. 'Are those lamps in order?' For answer, all along the wall, Travellers turned on their batteries of ultraviolet lamps, aiming them down into darkness. They cut the night with their hot, smoking beams. The light wouldn't kill vampire flesh, but they would hurt it greatly and blind Wamphyri eyes, however temporarily.

The Dweller caught the elbow of a passing Traveller. 'What of your women and children?' he asked. 'And my mother?'

'Gone, Dweller,' the man answered. 'Down toward Sunside, where they'll stay until they know the outcome.'

Harry Jnr turned to his father and the others. He nodded grimly. Then we're ready,' he said.

'Just as well,' Jazz Simmons answered, 'for it's already started.' He inclined his head down toward Starside. 'Listen -'

Hoarse trog cries and the clamour of battle drifted up out of the shadows. The roar and blast of gunfire, too, from a handful of trogs whose learning skills had been able to accommodate weapons.

Harry Jnr said: 'Well, this was to be expected. The Lords have been massing their trogs along the fringes of these mountains for a long time now. There'll be many hundreds of them... but I may have their measure.' He turned to his father. 'Harry, I could use some expert help.'

'Just name it.'

'When did you last call up the dead?'

Harry took a pace back from the other, his face falling. But then he slowly nodded. 'Whatever's in your mind, I'm ready when you are, son,' he said.