Bloodwars Read online

  … He was brought rudely back from his musing by his man’s urgent mind-call: Master, what now?

  And: Attack’ Gorvi ordered at once. Send in my familiar bats to flush them out and your flyer to crush them. What, do you call yourself a lieutenant? Use your head, man — or lose it! For all their weapons, these people are only human -/odder! So be about your work and never fear. For I, Gorvi, am coming.

  And to his warrior: Down! he sent. Down onto the plains. Deflate your bladders and descend. Prepare to create your most powerful exhaust stenches, with which to sicken them

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  Ill

  Violent Homecoming

  who oppose me and mine. And think on this: when all is done, there wiJJ be a reward. Aye, for I shall feed you the very best of tidbits - the ones that scream when you crunch them!

  Riderless, using rocky outcrops and hillocks of stony debris to shield its bulk, the flyer came skimming across the boulder plain. It had only one purpose; its vampire master, dismounted now, had sent only one telepathic command from where he went afoot among the scattered rocks: Fall on them!

  A command that Nathan had heard. But Trask and Chung had taken refuge in a cluster of boulders close by; it would be no easy thing to prise them out of there, or to fall on them, and their ability to fire out was unaffected. Their location was a natural vantage point.

  Nathan and Anna Marie, however, remained out in the open and so were an easy target. And the flyer was headed for them. Anna Marie saw the brute coming, forming its wings into vast scoops, deliberately stalling itself. Its intention could not be clearer. Panicked, she made to hobble away; Nathan caught her arm and said, ‘No, not that way.’

  He conjured a door, pulled her in after him, took her to a place he knew. It was a flat-topped bluff to one side of the mouth of the great pass, with an easy scramble down to safety. Lardis Lidesci had brought him here once to watch the sun rising on the last aerie. And steadying her, he said, ‘You should be safe here. If all goes well, I’ll come back for you. If not … well, Sunside lies beyond the pass.’ It was as much as he had time for.

  And then he went back for Trask and Chung.

  Frustrated, the flyer was making a low, hovering pass over the cluster of boulders where Nathan’s colleagues were

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  sheltering. They cradled their weapons but were saving ammunition and waiting for further developments. Emerging from the Mobius Continuum close to the nest of boulders, Nathan yelled, ‘Hold your fire!’ But as he sprinted towards them, he saw the two vampire lieutenants creeping up on their flank.

  Skidding to a halt and pointing, Nathan shouted, ‘On your right! Down in that hollow!’ Which was a moment before the lieutenants sprang into view and came loping, zigzagging towards the clump of boulders. Then:

  A shadow passed over Nathan where he stood undecided … and a second shadow; and at the same time he heard a sound to fill his veins with ice water: the sputtering throb of a Wamphyri warrior’s bio-propulsive vents! And oh how he knew what that meant; so that his mind and blood froze as he felt himself carried back, back in time - back to that night in Settlement, when Wratha’s raiders had left the town in ruins.

  The night his brother Nestor had been taken by the Wamphyri, when Nathan had seen Misha with Canker Canison and thought that she, too, had been stolen away into Starside. The night a warrior reduced Nona Kiklu’s house to rubble, leaving her son to believe that his mother was …

  ‘Nathan - for Christ’s sake!’ Trask’s shouted warning snatched him out of it - or back into it; Trask’s shout, and the obscene snarling of automatic weapons. Nathan’s eyes focused. He saw the vampire lieutenants closing with the boulder clump, saw them hurl themselves headlong in superhuman dives up over the protective rock barrier … and saw them slam to a halt in mid-air, even thrown backwards by the twin streams of smoking steel that slammed into them!

  The two vampire lieutenants were out of it, incapacitated, if only for the moment, but Gorvi’s lesser familiars were not. They came shrilling from the west, no longer as mere trackers but more nearly as hounds: harriers! Not in the least clumsy for their size, the giant Desmodus bats seemed like a

  horde as they wove this way and that, while in fact there were only six of them at most. Yet such was their speed and erratic patterns of flight, as individuals they presented near-impossible targets.

  Nathan had reached the jumble of rocks where Trask and Chung had taken cover. If he squeezed his way in with them, it might well prove difficult to conjure a Mobius door within the confines of their sanctuary. No, he must first get them out of there.

  ‘Ben, David!’ he called to them. ‘Out here, to me. Out in the open.’ And he worked frantically to reload his crossbow.

  Then, as a pair of the bats swooped chattering on him, he ducked down and glanced skywards . .. and glimpsed what he had known must be up there. Just a glimpse, for the thing was still high overhead, and there was already more than enough happening on the ground to keep Nathan occupied. But the throb of propulsors was louder now, and the first faint reminder of that nightmare stench from the past was falling like some vile rotting rain all about.

  Momentarily distracted, at last Nathan finished reloading. Then, scanning the boulder-strewn landscape all around, he saw:

  A flyer, coming in low; the biggest so far and armoured. And its rider, vulture-like, hunched forward in the saddle; a weird scarecrow figure with eyes so deeply sunken under jutting black brows they were little more than a crimson glimmer. Angular and deathly corpse-like in his figure and riding posture - yet radiating power, a devious strength - it was perfectly obvious that this one was no mere lieutenant. No indeed, for he was a Lord of vampires. Wamphyri!

  It was the first time Nathan had laid eyes on Gorvi the Guile, one of the renegade Lords who had fled Turgosheim with Wratha the Risen; nevertheless, he knew him from a description he’d had from Maglore in Runemanse:

  The dome of his head, kept shaven save for a single central lock, with a knot hanging to the rear. His sallow,

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  parchment features (again Nathan was reminded of a leprous vulture) and shifty sunken eyes; and hands Jike skinny claws, but full of a true Lord’s strength. And dressed in black, head to toe, always, with his black cloak flapping like tattered wings .. .

  Oh yes, Gorvi the Guile. Definitely.

  Braver now that their vampire master was here, the great bats formed a cloud, came shrilling in a flurry of thrumming wings. Nathan’s crossbow would be worse than useless, wasted against them. Doubly frustrating, their buffeting made it impossible to set his sights on the larger, higher targets.

  But the riderless flyer was also back, appearing as from nowhere, hovering into view over the tops of nearby boulders. Nathan kneeled, took aim … and the great bats at once struck against him, knocking him off-balance. As he sprawled, so the rest of the flock fell towards him -

  - And Ben Trask, seeing his chance as the bats crowded together, opened up with his machine-pistol. Three of the six literally exploded in mid-air, torn into bloody fragments by the ferocity of Trask’s firepower. And the rest of them scattered in disarray, shrilling their alarm as they swerved left and right, and made off into the maze of leaning rocks.

  Why do you wait? Nathan heard Gorvi’s furious mind-shout, which the vampire Lord directed at the riderless flyer. Finish it! Settle on them! Smother them with your bulk and drive your thrusters down between the rocks to crush them!

  The thing came, arching its wings, gentling to earth. And between the segments of its underbelly, rubbery landing appendages uncoiling like quivering nests of sentient worms! Nathan knew he couldn’t miss; he simply raised his gun-hand, aimed at the juncture of neck and body above the slit of the pouch, and squeezed the trigger. And as the flyer came drifting towards the clump of boulders, so the bolt flew home.

  Nathan turned his face away; it seemed a long time;

  perhaps the detonator was faulty,
the bolt a dud? But then a dull crump! As if a boulder had toppled and fallen to earth. Nathan looked:

  Not six feet away, the flyer’s huge but patently human face at the end of its ten-foot neck gazed at him in vast amaze - a sort of vacant astonishment - in the moment before it twisted into an agonized mask, threshed left and right, opened its jaws and emitted an ear-piercing shriek! Then…

  … The creature’s membranous air-scoop wings pounded at the air as if to bear it up, up away from its pain, which was inescapable. The thing skewed wildly to the left, tilted, allowed Nathan to see close up the damage his explosive bolt had done: the gaping hole that rained pink fluids, where the flyer’s head and neck had been half-severed from the body. There was scarcely enough muscle left to hold the head erect, and nothing at all of strength or will.

  The beating of the wings slowed to a quiver as the beast commenced a staggering, stalling glide. A tilting wing-tip got snagged between tall boulders, turning the flyer like a pivot. Its grotesque head sank down, touched crumbling earth, dug in and ploughed a furrow. The long neck concer-tinaed, buckled at the point of injury, and snapped with a soft cartilage crack! Dust rose in a cloud as the manta wings flopped uselessly and the carcass slewed to a shuddering halt.

  Nathan looked at the weapon in his hand and felt awesomely powerful; he tightened his grip on it, shook it in the air, and shouted his triumph through bared teeth. His elation was shortlived, however; warrior stench thickened in a moment, and again a monstrously pulsing shadow blotted out the stars in its passing.

  Trask and Chung emerged from their nest of boulders. Nathan saw the looks on their faces as they crouched down, shrank back, stared slack-jawed above and behind him. He spun on his heel and saw … his worst nightmare. Throbbing obscenely in mid-air, a Wamphyri warrior!

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  With its air-trap mantle fluttering and its gas-bladders fully inflated, the warrior’s sputtering bio-propulsors emitted clouds of stench-vapour as it turned and came pulsing and rumbling over the barren boulder plains. Like the two downed flyers this monster was ‘small’ of its kind; but despite that it flew, it was not a ‘flyer’ as such. In its delirious design it was not dissimilar to Sunside’s small, lake-dwelling, harmless fresh-water octopuses: its body sack was rather more elongated, and its tentacles more properly launching thrusters than appendages for walking or groping for shrimp prey in the pebbles of a pool. But its principal dissimilarity lay in the eyes . .. their shrieking madness … their malign intent… their number!

  And in its size. For even a small warrior is not small.

  Nathan recognized his error: one of comparison. Distance had fooled him, causing him to compare this Thing with a creature of Nature; distance and perspective. For the warrior was all of a hundred and fifty yards away, at which distance (and quite apart from its multitude of saucer eyes) the idea of it was still acceptable - barely. And given that the safety margin was narrowing even now, for a little while at least a man might retain sufficient composure to think of such a thing in terms of other animals. But as it pulsed closer … there was no real comparison.

  That a thing like this could lift its massive bulk even an inch from the earth, let alone fly, seemed patently impossible; yet here it spurted against the star-spattered horizon like an alien, aerial slug. Just looking at it, details were branded on Nathan’s feverish mind:

  Of grey-mottled flesh, with fish-scale armour gleaming metallic-blue in starshine … of gas-bladder clusters bulging like strange wattles or nests of morbid tumors from both sides of the segmented, flexible spine, constantly shrinking and expanding, regulating the monster’s balance … of cartilage hooks and sawing appendages, and chitin grapples in the shape of crab claws. But over and above everything else, the evil pseudo-intelligence of its swivelling, searching

  saucer eyes, and their placement: in the sloping prow of the skull, the softer membrane of the undermantle, and flanking the propulsors in the anal region, where a spiked tail flailed like a mace and acted as a rudder …

  … It was only fifty yards away now, and it had spotted the three men. Propulsors blasting, the warrior lowered its head and zeroed in on them!

  Crush them! Let their pulp stain those boulders crimson! Gorvi’s mind-cry galvanized Nathan to activity. Jerking to his feet, he glanced at his crossbow, knew there was no time to reload. Then Ben Trask grabbed his elbow and Nathan jumped six inches in the air.

  ‘For Christ’s sake!’ Trask yelled over the rumble of the warrior’s propulsors. ‘Nathan — get us out of here!’

  And to one side, David Chung gasped, ‘God! I just don’t believe it!’ Gorvi’s lieutenants — their leather-clad bodies holed and both of them leaking red from a dozen wounds — had appeared from behind the clump of boulders, staggering but yet advancing on the three. Trask, on the other hand, had seen vampires close-up before, and he believed it well enough.

  While overhead, leaning forward in the ornate saddle of his flyer, Gorvi himself stabbed a trembling, outraged claw of a hand at the three and commanded his warrior: Now! Crush them now! Aye, and those idiot, weakhng thraJJs of mine with them!

  Chung was quick to get a grip of himself. Even as Nathan conjured a Mobius door, the Chinaman turned his machine-pistol on Gorvi’s lieutenants; at point-blank range he literally tore them apart. His spray of bullets punched crimson lace-holes in their leather armour, across and back, up and down. They were swatted like flies, knocked flat on their backs on the stony ground.

  And Trask opened up on the warrior. Less than twenty-five yards away, the thing had opened its jaws. Inside … it wasn’t so much a mouth as a cave of daggers! Trask was shaken but held his aim directly into that gaping maw. And

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  slime-dripping teeth flew in shards as steel met bone in shattering collision, none of which deflected the warrior from its course by an inch.

  Nathan had his door. Holding it steady, he grabbed Trask’s arm, Chung’s too.

  But the warrior was almost upon them. Grunting its challenge and intent on ramming them against the clump of boulders, it came head on. Trask snarled his fear, aimed at the foremost cluster of gas-bladders, let fly with a final spray of bullets. And as bladders exploded like grenades and the thing screamed, swerved, and turned the armoured mass of its flank to the fore, so Nathan yanked on his colleagues’ arms and dragged them off-balance into the Mobius Continuum.

  In the void of the Continuum, Trask panted his relief as he fingered his torn jacket and knew that the sleeve had been ripped off on one of the warrior’s scales . ..

  Gorvi’s warrior sprawled, for the moment winded, in the lee of the boulders. Scales had been wrenched loose, several eyes and launching limbs crushed, and more bladders burst in the collision with the rocks. The nightmare beast’s air-trap mantle was holed in several places along its left flank, but not so badly it wouldn’t mend. First, however, it must rest, feed, fashion fresh bladders from its metamorphic flesh; that is, if its master desired it should ever fly again.

  Gorvi had landed. Furious, the vampire Lord approached and examined the space between his construct and the boulders where he hoped to find the crushed remains of his dead foes - whatever they had been! And yet, that space was empty.

  Well, not quite empty, for the bodies of his thralls were there at least, all crumpled, broken and dead … or undead. For even now they were not completely beyond repair, if Gorvi so desired it. Except he did not desire it, not for this pair of unworthy dogs! As well that he’d sent the best and longest lasting of his lieutenants ahead of him into Sunside,

  to fight alongside Wratha and the others, else it might just as easily be Turgis Gorvisman lying here all full of holes and his blood leaked out!

  On the other hand . .. well, he was a one to look out for, that Turgis. Gorvi couJd have left him in charge of Guilesump, except by now he’d probably have been at it with one or another of Gorvi’s females - or several of them! Huh.’ A man couldn’t trust anyone these
days.

  But the strange and sudden absence of these alien interlopers - or their corpses at least - was a puzzle. Gorvi had seen them here; he was sure he had seen his warrior crash into them. As for their awesome weapons, why, for all he knew they could be trained on him even now …

  … He at once crouched down, sent a cautious vampire probe into the maze of boulders. Their aura - their scent -would soon give these humans away, if they’d somehow managed to wriggle back in there: the warm salty scent of untainted blood. But no, they weren’t there; only an oily smell now, and a trace of their human breath hanging sweet on the still air … and lingering smells of cloth and hot steel, too, from their clothing and their weapons. Alien smells all, but nothing of the flesh and blood people who had made them.

  Gorvi snarled his frustration, cursed his misfortune: to have lost two flyers, a pair of lieutenants, a warrior damaged and depleted. Well, at least the last might still be salvaged. And so: Feed! he commanded the beast.

  The monster’s permanent prow eyes (permanent as opposed to the rudimentary metamorphic sensors in its underbelly and other parts of its anatomy) immediately swivelled in Gorvi’s direction. Blank black disks which should scarcely be capable of reasoning intelligence as such - more properly receptors for the tiny brute mind within -they yet displayed all the evil of a warped mutant sentience, a deviousness whose source lay in Gorvi himself. The warrior was after all his construct, and therefore imbued with the Guile’s essence.