Blood Brothers Page 22

  What?. Again the outrage, the astonishment, hurled out from their massed mind. But before it could be given voice:

  “Warriors, aye!” Vormulac raged, at last giving vent to previously suppressed fury. “And for what, I ask, if not for war? Enough! Now I accuse!”

  Sidling away from their vacated chairs, Gorvi the Guile, the twins of Madmanse, and Vasagi the Suck joined Canker Canison where he edged towards Wratha. Vormulac pointed them out, and all heads and eyes swivelled to follow his trembling, stabbing finger. “There they go,” he spat the words out as if they were poison. “Full of guilt, as witness their stealth. Canker, with his tail between his legs: a mangy cur indeed! And Vasagi the Suck, who alienates himself even further from his fellows. Also Gorvi the Guile, never so deceitful as now. And Wran and Spiro of Madmanse, whose madness finally overflows!”

  Wratha was free of her chair; the others joined her; they backed off towards the arched exit.

  “See them go,” Vormulac shouted, “who by their own actions betray themselves! For I ask you, would innocents react in such a fashion? See, they join their leader, the very author of this treachery, of whom I say again: she has risen too far! But why is everyone astir? Be calm all of you, and sit down. They shall not escape.”

  Many of the outraged Lords and Ladies were throwing back their chairs, springing to their feet, some reaching instinctively for gauntlets which were no longer there, relinquished in Vormspire’s landing-bay antechambers. Others had commenced to surge menacingly along both sides of the great table towards Wratha and her five, but came to an abrupt halt as Vormulac put fingers to his lips and whistled.

  It was a short, shrill, even ear-piercing blast … and it was a summons. He could have called his creature just as easily with his mind, indeed more easily, but did it this way, openly, so that all of them would know what he was about. And now to a man they saw how Wratha was trapped.

  All except Maglore, who wondered: Why has she not undergone her monstrous transformation? Why is she so cool? And at once answered himself: Because now is no time for raging but for thinking, and even now she calculates!

  “Now hold!” Wratha hissed, as if to prove Maglore’s point, and produced from beneath the bat-fur ropes of her robe a curious instrument formed of some small creature’s bladder attached to a slender silver rod or wand. She held the bulb in her hand, pointing the wand into the hall. And: “Oil of kneblasch,” she informed, squeezing the bulb however slightly. A fine spray issued out from perforations in the end of the rod, hanging in the air like a mist.

  The aerosol’s effect was immediate. As a thin garlic waft permeated the hall, the furious Lords and Ladies groaned and began to retreat towards Vormulac where he stood at the head of the table. Their faces had turned pale, even sickly; they shouldered each other aside in their anxiety to put distance between themselves and Wratha’s illegal weapon.

  Then, as a frantic clattering of chitin and a series of querying animal grunts sounded from the stairwell beyond the arch, Wratha warned them: “Enough poison in this bladder to drive all of you to your sickbeds for a sunup, and some of you permanently! Call off your creature, Vormulac, or suffer the consequences. If your guardian warrior so much as glares at me, believe me … I’ll crush this bulb flat!”

  Vormulac’s warrior, his personal bodyguard, came through the archway. It was a small one of its sort, no more than a ton or two in weight but very ugly: a thing of hooks and pincers, grapnel arms and stabbers. Slategrey and chitin-blue, with its scales rattling where it scurried like a scorpion towards the six accused, the creature’s intentions seemed murderous.

  “Vormulac!” Wratha bared her fangs, prepared to squeeze her bulb.

  “Wait!” the Lord of Vormspire snarled at his warrior, and brought it clattering to a halt. And to Wratha: “Lady, why do you delay matters? My warrior’s not here to harm you, but to ensure that you do no more harm! He is your escort out of this place, into the shame and seclusion which you all deserve so well.”

  Amazingly, she laughed. “What? And do you banish us like wayward children, back to our spires and manses? No, I think not. For Olden Starside waits, and we would be the first to claim its aeries, and all the sprawling treasures of legendary Sunside.”

  ” ‘Would be’, aye,” Vormulac answered her, grin for grin. “Oh, I know your ambitions well enough. But your plans lie in ruins, Wratha, and that’s the penalty you pay. For while we’ve kept you busy here, our most trusted lieutenants have commandeered your aerial warriors, or destroyed them in their vats. By now your forbidden creatures, and those of these dogs who run with you, are either dead or redirected. So, you would be first in Olden Starside, eh? Well, we say you’ll be last!”

  Again she laughed … then crouched down snarling, and pointed her wand at Maglore. At that range there was no way she could squirt him, but still he cringed inside. And: “You, mentalist,” she hissed. “Thought-thief. Why, I’ve sensed your snooping for all of a ten-year. But you could only hear such thoughts as we chose to think! Aye, and so you’ve followed a false trail, Maglore of Runemanse.”

  Now she pointed at Zindevar, saying: “And you, blood-hag. Ah, I remember you! You were ever the jealous one, even from the first. Why, if not for Devetaki, who overruled you, you would have vetoed my ascension, then tried to take me for … for your companion! How dared you ever imagine that I, Wratha, would make my bed with such as you? What? When there’s ripe raw muck in the methane pits? And did you think I couldn’t buy your spies, or offer them what you could not possibly give? Ah, but you’ve sent some pretty boys into Wrathspire, my Lady Cronesap! I thank you, for I had them all before sending them back again, but without the information you required. Or at best, with the wrong information!”

  Now, while Zindevar fumed and sputtered, Wratha looked at Devetaki Skullguise, and saw that in her anger she wore no mask but had exposed the damaged half of her face down to the flensed bone. “And you, Devetaki, who was my good friend,” she said, her voice low now and less spiteful. “Indeed, I admired you greatly. But you’ve listened to my enemies, and so become one of them …”

  She threw back her shoulders. “Well, and you are all fools … but none so great as you, Vormulac! What? Warriors waxing even now in secret caverns? But I tell you—they are waxed!”

  And as for the third time she laughed, so Canker Canison lifted his muzzle and howled like a wolf. It was an eerie ululation, which passed out through the high windows and into the gulf of Turgosheim. And no less than Vormulac’s whistle, it was also a call—which in a moment was answered!

  But between times: “Rush them!” Grigor the Lech shouted. “What? And are we afraid of a stench? If the bitch uses her weapon, she and her pack are vulnerable no less than the rest of us! Vormulac, use your warrior to crush them!”

  The Lords and Ladies took heart and surged forward again. Vormulac’s creature, waiting for his command, sensed the tension and the fact that the six had been alienated; it clattered this way and that, watching them, undecided, with its stabbers and pincers at the ready. Wratha aimed her spray: at the skittering warrior—then at the Lords and Ladies—then back to the warrior. She was no longer in control, and her girl-shape was gradually giving way to monstrous metamorphism.

  Finally …

  … Canker Canison laughed! He threw back his head and shook like a fox shedding fleas, and a weird new sound—in fact a very old sound, out of times immemorial—sounded in Vormspire. The throb and sputter of an aerial warrior’s propulsive orifices!

  There came a wind from the great window, which blew the heavy curtains inwards; but in the next moment they were torn from their hangings by a nightmare shape whose armoured bulk barely cleared the gap as it slammed through the parapet wall, tore up the flags of the floor and skidded to a halt within the great hall! A warrior, but what a warrior!

  If the dimensions of Vormulac’s poor creature were six times as great, still it would not equal this one. Moreover, since Vormspire’s upper levels were all of two tho
usand feet above Turgosheim’s bottoms, this monster was not only equipped for but had already proved itself in flight.

  “There!” Wratha howled in savage glee, as masonry and cartilage from the shattered balcony went flying, and dust from the rubble billowed up in a suffocating cloud. And as the monster’s acid breath burned through the torn shreds of curtains draping its incredible head, she cried: “Well, Vormulac, and will you also ‘commandeer’ this one?”

  Like all Wamphyri warriors, the thing was a hybrid atrocity—a blasphemy against all the laws of creation—but in this case more so. In Olden Starside worse, bigger, yet more hideous creatures had been made from men and metamorphic vampire stuff, but this was Turgosheim, where nothing like this was ever seen before.

  Red-mottled in its softer underbelly and silver-scaled on top, with an electric sheen which reflected the glare and splash of the hall’s gas jets, the thing was like a flexible machine, an instrument of madness, mayhem, murder. And it was Canker Canison’s construct beyond a doubt, for its huge “face” was that of a monstrously mutated fox! Scarlet eyes were set about the forehead in a semicircle, with others in rows along its armoured sides; but its jaws …

  … The head carried three sets of jaws, one facing front and the others to the flanks, all equipped with the teeth of a primal carnivore. Behind those lethal blades, each throat was a cavern which could swallow a man whole. Shaggy, the thing had Canker’s red hair, making its looks foxier yet. Tufts of hair sprouted from between its scales, pushed back by their overlap, and patches of stiff red bristles protected the underbelly.

  Along its lower flanks pectoral to ventral, the warrior’s scales were hinged to house its retracted mantle and gas bladders. Angling down from its serrated spine, a ferocious array of claspers, pincers, slabbers, clubs, and saws of chitin plate festooned its sides. A dozen “launchers”, like fleshy springs, were coiled in depressions in the segmented belly. At its rear and flanking the anus, propulsor tubes like the siphons of an octopus vented their hideous vapours. Tip to tail, the thing measured forty feet; through its middle it was nine.

  Now that the dust had settled, its many eyes were staring, taking in the total scene. And its tiny brain was waiting for a command—any command—from its maker and master.

  There were exits from the great hall other than through the archway, boltholes in its rear wall, behind Vormulac where he stood as if transfixed at the head of the table. Even if he had felt capable of answering Wratha’s derisory question with regard to “commandeering” this monster, he could not have done so; for in the moment that he blinked his astonished eyes and recovered from his paralysis of shock, so the vast invader commenced to roar!

  That was enough for the Lords and Ladies; they fled, all except a pair of lesser lights who had been bowled over by the creature’s destructive arrival. Young Lords, as they dragged their broken bodies free of the debris, so they came within range of the warrior.

  Kill! Canker Canison issued a mental command. The warrior fell on the crippled Lords and worried them like a wolf worrying rabbits; it tossed one out screaming through the shattered gash of the window, trampled the other flat, then rose up and fell on the great table, whose pieces flew in all directions.

  And that was enough for Vormulac!

  Making for a bolthole exit in the wake of his fleeing guests, he sent similar instructions stabbing towards the bewildered mind of his own small guardian: Kill them—all six of them!

  The creature at once hurled itself at Wratha and her five. She held out her weapon at arm’s length, squeezed the bulb and vaporized its contents directly into the charging beast’s face. It breathed every last drop of moisture into its vampire lungs, into its system … reared back, all of its appendages clashing in unison … came on with yet more determination, but gagging and frenziedly shaking its great head.

  And meanwhile, Canker had called to his warrior.

  In a short-lived, stomach-churning sputter of propulsors, with a thrust of powerful launching limbs, the horror skidded and flopped twice its own length down the hall. Overwhelmed by its sheer bulk, Vormulac’s beast was made impotent, forced back from Wratha and her group. And without pause Canker’s warrior grasped the lesser creature in its left-flank claspers and commenced to dismember it.

  It was the grisly work of moments, seconds, nothing so great as a minute. Stabbers slammed in and out like pistons, damaging and loosening joints; pincers went into the wounds, grasping and tearing; saws were a blur of chitin. Vormulac’s creature screamed—high-pitched, throbbing, a piercing agonized whistle—but briefly. There were grunts of satisfaction from the greater warrior, and thuds as various detached appendages and other portions were tossed aside. Fluids splashed: grey, yellow, red, and a reeking pink mist rose up.

  Then the screaming stopped …

  Canker’s monster grunted again (in disgust, even disappointment?), thrust aside a shuddering mound of steaming meat, turned its triple-jawed head a little to glare down the ruined hall at pallid faces gawping from the bolthole exits.

  Canker Canison laughed and danced, cavorting in a gleeful frenzy … then stopped abruptly and fell to all fours, saliva dripping from his muzzle. And after the briefest pause: Kill! he commanded a second time, his scarlet eyes ablaze.

  His creature ploughed debris where it went roaring down the hall.

  “No, hold!” cried Wratha, taking Canker’s elbow, assisting him to his feet. “No beast could reach them in there; that wall is solid rock, with a warren of escape tunnels. Best save your creature’s energy.”

  The six ran down the hall to where the warrior had come to a halt. And from there Wratha called, “Vormulac, Maglore, Zindevar, Devetaki and all you others. Remember: it was you who turned on me, not out of fear but jealousy! We posed no great threat, me and my five. What, against all of Turgosheim in a body? No, not even if we had made a dozen creatures like this one. But all we have is four … for the moment.

  “Four of them, all tested and airworthy, and made of good strong vampire stuff; not to mention other good stuff, even the very best stuff, out of Sunside. Aye, and to hell with your tithe-system! By now they’re en route to a peak in the western reaches of the range, where we’ve hidden away a cache of food to replenish us—flyers, warriors and all—before we leap the Great Red Waste. This was always our plan; not to war with you but to fly west, to the aeries of Olden Starside and make new lives there. Except you were greedy and jealous and would be first, and you envied those of us with spirit enough to try it.

  “Well, Vormulac, I’m sorry to disappoint you and your lieutenants; your men will find nothing in our houses but a handful of thralls and empty vats. Whatever else we’re obliged to leave behind, you are welcome to it. Take our spires and manses and keep them. We’ve no longer any use for them.

  “And so we fly west—let him follow who dares! For you have set yourselves against me and mine, and so are become our enemies. We shall know how to deal with you, when at last you have the nerve for it. So be it…”

  She and her five headed for the stairwell to the landing bays. But before passing under the archway, she paused, looked back and shouted.

  “Vormulac, Maglore: send no mind-message ahead of us. For if in leaving gloomy Vormspire we should suffer any hindrance, then Canker’s warrior will fire its propulsors directly into your hidey-holes. And if in the past you’ve found kneblasch a trifle bothersome, why, you don’t know the half of it!”

  With which she and her renegades were gone.

  In the tunnel escape routes, Vormulac and the others were torn two ways. These man-made passages led down into the rock, eventually emerging onto exterior walkways which descended to the lower levels. But to go that way would take time and in the end expose them to whatever other dangers waited in the gloom of Turgosheim’s canyon. For shortly, Wratha and her gang would mount and launch their flyers; likewise their lieutenants out of Wrathspire and Madmanse, and the other houses of treachery. Indeed, the latter would be out there even now, spi
ralling on thermals out of Turgosheim, waiting in the night for Wratha and the others, ready to join with them like a swarm and thrust westwards.

  Ah! But what if they’d left a rearguard to watch their backs? Only Wratha’s word for it that all their warriors except this one were already fled. An unthinkable fate: to be caught on a flimsy exterior staircase of cartilage and bone, by some cousin of the monster which snarled and sputtered in the great hall!

  Crowding there in the low, narrow tunnels, these were some of the more mentionable thoughts of the Wamphyri Lords and Ladies where they huddled and cursed. Until Maglore clapped a hand to his forehead and cried: “Canker has called for his monster to attend him! Our siege is ended!”

  The mentalist was right. Sputtering and snarling, Canker’s warrior spat acid towards the bolt-hole tunnels, then propelled itself in its ungainly fashion to the shattered window. For a moment it perched there, its hideous head projecting outwards, before launching itself into the night. The rest of the balcony went with it, while a cloud of noxious fumes from its propulsive vents remained behind.

  Braving these loathsome vapours, Vormulac, Maglore, and half-a-dozen others left their refuge and rushed to the window. Outside, Wratha and her renegades, and their lieutenants, rode the night in a spiral round Vormspire’s ramparts. Behind them, climbing—with its gas-bladders bulging, mantle extended and propulsors blasting—Canker’s creature headed west. The Lady was off and running, and nothing anyone could do to stop her.

  Her laughter came back to them, and a simple warning:

  “Vormulac … send flyers and lieutenants after us if you will, to our refuelling station in the western heights. We can spare a warrior, I think, to swat them from the skies. And so for now, farewell!”