Bloodwars Read online

  It was Maglore’s sigil, by which every other Lord and Lady of the Wamphyri knew him. But it was also the sigil of another, gone from Maglore’s ken for some seventeen sunups now. And now … returned? Was it possible? The Seer-Lord’s window on Olden Sunside/Starside returned to life, or undeath?

  But now that Vormulac Unsleep and his aerial vampire army were flown west on their crusade against Wratha the Risen, and Maglore left to his own devices in the mighty gorge of Turgosheim, this was just the stroke of good fortune he’d been seeking! Indeed, for if that oh so crafty Nathan was back in Olden Sunside, why, then Vormulac’s progress might yet be spied upon, and Maglore heir to all the lore of a hitherto unknown land!

  ‘Nathan!’ Maglore had stood up straight and sniffed at the air, gazing all about in the gloom of deserted Madmanse. ‘Why, it is as if I can even smell you!’

  ‘Nathan Paleblood?’ The hulking Karpath’s eyes had narrowed as Maglore rubbed claw-like hands together, chuckled and headed for an upwards-leading stairwell. ‘What of him, master?’

  At which Maglore had paused and looked back, his crimson eyes flaring up in the dark. ‘Paleblood? Nathan Paleblood? But you mean Nathan Seersthrall, surely?’

  And Karpath had backed off a pace. ‘I … I used to think of him as Paleblood, master - because he was so pale, and his blood so weak.’

  ‘Oh?’ Maglore’s voice was deep, dark, clotted. ‘But this … this urge to apportion names worries me somewhat, Karpath. For it’s outside your jurisdiction. In Runemanse, only Mag-lore names the creatures which are his. In all such matters the Wamphyri are jealous to a fault, which I’m sure you know. So … is it perhaps that you anticipate your ascension? Do you lust after my egg, Karpath?’

  ‘Master,’ the other trembled. ‘Master, I —’

  ‘— This much I promise: when I decide that the time is ripe to invest another with my powers, you shall be the first to know.’

  Following which, without pause, the Seer-Lord Maglore had proceeded alone to his room of meditation …

  … And in that room:

  Maglore’s shewstone stood upon a slender onyx base to

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  one side of a work bench. Seated at the bench, he might simply turn and place his hands upon the instrument of his scrying or far-seeing talent. Except the device was of no stone or crystal as such, but a metal precious in the world beyond the Starside Gate, yet common in the vampire world. Shaped in gold, it was in fact a weighty model of Maglore’s sigil: a twisted loop, ten inches long and five wide, compact yet massy - and potent! This was the medium through which Maglore concentrated enhanced Wamphyri powers to contact and ‘speak’ to his various spies in Sunside, and with which he had hoped to follow the adventures of Nathan in Olden Sunside/Starside.

  To that end, when Nathan had lived here a while in Runemanse - not as the Seer-Lord’s thrall or familiar, but more nearly as his ‘friend’ - Maglore had made him a gift of a golden earring in the same design, but only an inch long; not only a practical but also an appropriate gift, for the Mobius loop was Nathan’s symbol, too. Indeed, when first he had come here, the youth had worn a twisted leather strap upon his wrist.

  And some four months ago, when the Seer-Lord had arranged Nathan’s ‘escape’ from Turgosheim on an aberrant, ill-tempered flyer, then the earring had gone with him: Maglore’s ‘window’ on a far-off land of legend. And the youth all unsuspecting of the Seer-Lord’s motive. At least, that was how it was supposed to have been. But scarcely had Nathan arrived in Olden Sunside in the west than contact had been broken. And now Maglore remembered how it had been:

  How then as now he had sensed … something, rushed to his room of meditation and pJaced trembling fingers upon the golden sigil. How he had let his mind drift out from Turgosheim, then hurtle west at the unthinkable speed of thought/ A flight which he had terminated when he’d seen how lifeless was the sigil, a strangely twisted mass of heavy metal and nothing more … for the moment, and as far as Nathan was concerned, anyway.

  So the Seer-Lord’s ‘window on an unknown world’ had been closed. But it was a weird thing, because despite that Nathan’s aura was gone, the feeling had persisted that he was not dead. And Maglore had wondered: What, then? Undead? Is he locked in that metamorphic sleep which ever precedes the vampire condition? Has he at last succumbed to the seduction of vampirism? Does Wratha or one of hers have him?

  He had not known the answer then, but now:

  ‘Ahhh!’ For as his hands touched the sigil and his mind sped west, there surely burned Nathan’s flame! The youth was alive, he was — back? - from wherever he had been. And Maglore’s lodestone earring still secure in his ear, mere inches from the centre of his brain.

  Maglore closed his burning eyes and concentrated, concentrated - and in a moment looked out through Nathan’s eyes .. . and looked upon the boulder plains of far Starside, and in the distance that looming menhir which was the last great aerie of the Wamphyri. He looked and knew it as the home of Wratha and her renegades, even as Nathan knew it. More than this, he knew what was uppermost in Nathan’s mind: the utter destruction of Wratha and all like her, and everything they stood for. And:

  ‘Strong,’ Maglore sighed. ‘Ah, strong! What, Nathan “Pale-blood”? No, not this one.’ Then . ..

  … The picture of the mighty stack faded, and in its place … an ephemeral portal formed of golden shimmering smoke! That was how Maglore saw Nathan’s Mobius door. And as Nathan stepped forward and entered that door, so the Seer-Lord felt something of its power:

  A whirlpool of symbols, which Maglore had known before. The esoteric guardian of Nathan’s secret mind: the incredible numbers vortex. But not quite the same, no, for now those symbols were ordered; they had intelligence and flowed with a will of their own. Or perhaps with Nathan’s will? Yes, for Nathan was their master!

  But as Nathan had stepped through that metaphysical

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  door, so he’d been snatched from Maglore’s mind, had disappeared out of this universe. Yet, however tenuously, their minds were still linked, so that Maglore felt himself moving with Nathan … but at such an astonishing speed! Indeed, even as fast as Maglore’s thoughts themselves. And as before, Nathan was in control…

  Maglore gasped, snatched his stiffened fingers from the loop and staggered back a pace or two. Shocked, his eyes stood out from their orbits in vast amaze. For he knew that Nathan had moved himself - or had physically removed himself - from the plain of boulders to some other place. And he had been in complete command; he’d known what he was about.

  Then, much like a child whispering in the dark, Maglore reassured himself: ‘But didn’t I once say he had powers, this one?’ And recognizing, if not understanding, his fear - gazing all about his room of meditation, to make sure no one had seen — he quickly regained control of himself.

  But as his mind cleared and his breathing grew less ragged, suddenly he felt weak . .. made weak, perhaps, by Nathan’s strength? Or by abstinence? Well, at least there was a remedy for that.

  He reached out for Karpath where he went about his duties elsewhere in Runemanse, and asked him, Karpath, are there fresh ones?

  Indeed, master, the other answered at once. Men and women both.

  Then send me a strong man. Later, seek out Orlea and tell her … I am young again, and I have my needs.

  And Karpath answered. So be it, master. But when Mag-lore withdrew his probe the lieutenant grinned in his morbid fashion, for he knew what were the Seer-Lord’s needs. As for the first, the blood is the life. And as for the second …

  … To live is to lust…

  While down in Madmanse, in an airless, diseased, disused refuse pit, sealed up for more than fifty years:

  That which upon a time had been Eygor Killglance sat or slumped against a nitre-streaked wall. But while up above in Runemanse the Seer-Lord Maglore’s appearance was more or less human, that of Eygor in his pit was nothing less than a nightmar
e.

  For the long exanimate ex-Lord of Madmanse was a vast and monstrous anomaly, an amalgam, a welding together of everything unwholesome into one being, one creature. Anthropomorphic, yes; manlike, in outline at least; but with that any past or present connection with humanity must surely be at an end. For Eygor’s metamorphism had long since ‘absolved’ or removed him from the frailties of form and aspect of mundane mankind.

  Much like the beings in the Romanian cavern of the Gate, Eygor Killglance might at first be mistaken for a strange stalagmite formation, a fantastic dripstone creation of Nature. But on closer examination (if any person were morbid enough that he might actually desire to examine such a thing), one would soon discover feverish differences. For example, the petrified creatures in the cavern of the Gate were not eighteen feet tall and composed of fused bone, black mummied flesh, knobs of gristly cartilage and plates of gleaming-blue chitin. Nor had they additional mouths in their dripstone bodies and limbs, to complement the ones in their faces. But there in that gloomy Madmanse pit — a cobwebbed cathedral of a place, vast and high-vaulted, whose walls dripped slime and nitre - such were Eygor’s form and aspect.

  The floor around him was a clutter of anomalous debris, humped, fibrous, boggy. Spongy bones and white-shining cartilage remains gleamed everywhere, like a boneyard of extinct monsters; of which the ex-Lord of Madmanse had been one, of course. And because he had been intelligent, Wamphyri, he had also been the worst of them.

  The shape and delirious design of this thing slumped in a

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  kneeling position and half-welded to the wall were terrible in themselves: its horny fossil feet, shrivelled, leathery thighs, arched back and shoulders, and misshapen, screaming skull. The huge head was thrown back, jaws frozen in some unending rictus; a withered arm lay upon a ledge, ending in a talon that drooped from a wrist thick as a man’s thigh; blackened bones protruded from dusty, fretted flesh.

  This was Eygor the once-Lord, and once feared more than any other creature in all Turgosheim. Eygor, whose contemporaries had named him ‘Killglance’ because of that mordant talent which enabled him to murder men with the sheer poison of his looks alone; whose own bloodsons Wran and Spiro had so feared him, that in the end they’d murdered him in this pit. Except there is murder and murder, and Eygor’s had lasted long and long.

  That he’d deserved it was undeniable, for Eygor was the cruellest of creatures. He had desired that his sons should be powerful, feared in Turgosheim even as he himself was feared. But in order to make them strong he had been ruthless and his brutalities unbearable. Wran and Spiro had feared their Lord and father, aye, but more than the man, they’d feared his evil eye.

  For they had seen him use it against the Szgany, and had watched his human victims shrivel and die in the withering furnace of his gaze. And for all that they were Wamphyri in their own right, they too had tasted the bile of Eygor’s glance, and knew that his power was exponential; the more he used it, the stronger it grew. Today he killed only men, but tomorrow .. .?

  And so for him there was no tomorrow. His bloodsons had deadened his senses with strong drink, poisoned his food with silver; and while he lay in his stupor they blinded him! When he leapt shrieking awake, then they’d taunted him and led him blundering through Madmanse right to the rim of this very pit … and over it! And at the last, when he lay broken at the bottom, they had choked the pit with boulders and sealed it.

  But Eygor was Wamphyri and did not die. Well, not immediately. For a six-month he lived on muck and bones and, while his metamorphic flesh remained pliable, gathered to himself the remnants of dead constructs: the armour of warriors, debris of cartilage creatures, marrow of monsters. Planning to break out, he made a giant of himself. But the refuse pit was as deep as his sustenance was bad, and Eygor’s strength waned even as his size increased. And of course he was blind.

  He fashioned eyes for himself, but they were poor things and lacking in power; all of their special evil had been burned out of them. Finally, starved and stiffening, Eygor had slumped against the wall and moved no more. But while the evil and hatred were gone from his eyes, still they burned bright in his undying mind. For just like the minds of common men, those of vampires, too, go on beyond death. And just as the evil power of his mind had been vast during life and undeath, so it continued in the true death. Which perhaps explained the morbid atmosphere of Madmanse; for, if only in mind and spirit, Eygor Killglance dwelled there still. ..

  When for a while the Necroscope Nathan Kiklu lived in Maglore’s Runemanse, Eygor had spoken to him in his dreams, lured him down into deserted Madmanse, even attempted to bargain with him. For the thing in the pit had eavesdropped on the deadspeak conversations of dreaming Thyre ancients in their cavern mausoleums under the drifted sands of Sunside’s deserts, and he understood Nathan’s power over the dead: that they would even leave their graves at his command. And his proposition was this:

  If Nathan should see fit to bring him back to life — if only long enough to take revenge upon his sons - then the Necroscope could ask what he would of him, and be heir to Eygor’s greatest mystery: the secret of his killing eye! That had been Eygor’s Wamphyri vow, his promise for the future, which Nathan had spurned.

  But … Eygor knew that the future was a long and

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  devious thing, and that what stands today often falls tomorrow, or most certainly the day after that. At the moment Nathan did not need an extra talent; he had sufficient of his own. But tomorrow and tomorrow …?

  Then what had been Eygor’s killing eye in life became his seeing eye in death, so that he followed the youth’s adventures from that time forward; even up to the time when Nathan fled to his old home in the west. But after that…

  .. . Nathan’s passing, or what Eygor had taken for his passing, had been like a cold wind blowing in the pit-thing’s mind. And like the guttering of a distant candle in the dark night of death, Eygor had seen Nathan’s light go out. Which could mean only one thing: that the Necroscope was no more.

  Except (and as Eygor himself had once pointed out): the future is a long and devious thing, and history often repeats itself. And in that selfsame moment during Maglore’s inspection of Madmanse, when he had paused and lifted his head, sniffed and sensed Nathan’s return … so too had Eygor sensed it! But where Maglore had breathed Nathan’s name, Eygor in the bowels of the place could only deadspeak it: Nathaaan! Like the soughing of the wind in an aerie’s battlements, or the sighing of a ghost in its refuse pits.

  For Nathan was there in Eygor’s mind; far away, true, but shining with his unique light as before, so that Eygor knew him at once. And the pit-thing’s all but forgotten desire to be up and about in the world of the living returned immediately, for the Necroscope Nathan was his one hope of revenge against his bloodsons, Wran and Spiro.

  And as if the thought of his sons had galvanized Eygor’s dead flesh, albeit momentarily, there had sounded in the pit a creaking as of rusted hinges; and before all fell still and eerily silent again, a single streamer of dust had come drifting down from the high, cobwebbed ceiling . ..

  The Wamphyri Lord Maglore of Runemanse and the ex-Lord Eygor Killglance were not the only ones who knew

  that the Necroscope Nathan was back. All the dead of Starside knew it, too. And as his aura washed out from him, as it was felt and his light was seen in the otherwise uttermost darkness, so would the dead of Sunside know it.

  But there were others yet more special who had known of Nathan’s return from the moment he moved away from the influence of the Gate onto the plain of boulders. His nephew wolves knew it: Blaze, Dock and Grinner. He had named the first and wisest of these for the white, diagonal stripe across his grey forehead, as if the fur there was marked with frost. Dock was the one with a stump of a tail, where an angry vixen had found cause to chastise him when he was a cub. While Grinner was the one with an uneven temper, whose black-gleaming upper lip was wo
nt to draw back from his teeth, so that it might seem he was grinning. All three of them, they knew he was back for sure.

  And waking in their barrier mountains den - blinking triangular yellow eyes and yawning, knowing in their way that it was twilight, and their mistress moon would soon be sailing on high - they simply acknowledged his return and were glad, or as glad as wolves may be. Nor were they the last of Nathan’s ‘relatives’ to know …

  But perhaps most special of all, dreaming in their cavern mausoleums, the revered and mummied Ancients of the Thyre knew that he was back; for among the dead of the desert folk he was as great a legend as his father had been to the Great Majority of mundane mankind, in an alien world an entire dimension away. Nathan, who had brought light into their darkness, translated their works and appraised their living descendants of a continuity of sorts in a place beyond death.

  If there was a single place in Sunside more safe than any other, it must be with the Thyre. For dwelling so close to the sun, they had never known the terror of the Wamphyri except in the lore and lives of the Szgany, with whom they occasionally traded. Being telepathic - albeit secretly, so that men had never suspected their talent — the Thyre and

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  their dead had more readily accepted Nathan’s deadspeak, thus enabling him to become their spokesman among the living.

  Which was how he knew exactly where to take the cavers for safety, and who would welcome him in that place.

  So that even as Maglore the Mage recoiled from the Power of the now purposeful numbers vortex, drew back claw-like hands from his golden sigil, and wondered at Nathan’s velocity as he sped - where? And through what weird medium? - the Necroscope had already used the Mobius Continuum to reach his destination. And guiding his charges out through a Mobius door, and holding on to them as they staggered this way and that, gasping their amazement, he sighed his relief that the co-ordinates had not misled him. Except, of course, he knew that it was more than mathematics which had guided him safely here. Then, as if to confirm it: