Blood Brothers Read online

“Whatever awaits you in Olden Starside, Lady,” he shouted after her, “be sure not to return! You know the penalty if you do!”

  Her fading laughter was the only answer …

  Later: there was unaccustomed, even hurried activity in all of the great spires and manses of Turgosheim; new workshops with extensive vats were designed, and others long fallen into disrepair put back to rights. Before sunup the word was out: the ban on the making of warriors was lifted!

  Wrathspire, Madmanse, Gorvistack, Suckspire, Mange-manse: all of these were put to the sack and their spoils, both human and material, were divided as fairly as possible; likewise the possessions of the two Lordsmurdered by Canker’s creature in Vormspire’s great hall. And so a rapid re-shuffling commenced, which saw lesser Lords arguing their individual merits as they vied for ascension to these redesignated, soon to be renamed, cavern mansions and crag aeries.

  While in Runemanse:

  … In the hour before sunup, the Seer Lord Maglore called for his thrall Karz Biteri to attend him in the topmost apartment, a cavelet with a dual purpose: on the one hand to act as a lookout, and on the other to house the manse’s siphoneer. It was a place Karz avoided, except to feed its grotesque inhabitant which reclined flaccid, mindless and motionless behind drawn curtains. For even the Wamphyri held certain things as unseemly, and knew when to hide them away.

  There Karz found his master, lost in weird reverie, gazing gravely out through the horizontal slit of a window, across the gulf of Turgosheim towards melancholy Vormspire in the canyon’s south-eastern bight. And after he had stood before him for some little while, finally Maglore blinked his strange eyes and focused them, and turned them on Karz.

  “Being an intelligent man and curious,” he said, his voice rustling as ever, “by now you will know what has happened.”

  Karz could only nod. “Something of it, Lord.”

  “Well, and we shall discuss it at length,” Maglore took him by the shoulder and turned him about face. “And you shall write it down in the glyphs of Mendula Farscry, as part of the modern history of Turgosheim. But before that …” (he guided the Historian toward the room’s curtained area), “I would remind you of my warning about Wratha, and the pleasures and pains of knowing her too well. Indeed, of the perils in knowing any of my contemporaries.”

  “But … I have not forgotten, Lord!” Karz protested.

  “Be still and listen,” Maglore told him as they arrived before the curtains, where he turned Karz so that they stood face to face. “For you see, despite all of her crimes, no harm has befallen the Lady Wratha; the witch and her coven are fled into Olden Starside. But what of their thralls, their manses, and spires, their dupes? I will tell you: all tossed aside to fend for themselves, disassembled, apportioned and scattered. They are left to count the cost, not Wratha. But I also mentioned her dupes …”

  “Dupes, master?”

  “Indeed,” Maglore nodded. “Indeed.” And in a moment:

  “How long since you opened these curtains, Karz?” His hand was on the rope.

  “A while,” the other gulped a little, his throat suddenly dry as he wondered what Maglore was about. “Not long. I wash the creature and turn him thus and so, and fill his trough. I search his flesh for sores, and if and when I find them apply your ointments. I know that he is old, and so look for signs of decay. And—”

  “I know,” Maglore stopped him. “All of these tasks which you perform. I know. For you are faithful, Karz, and observe your duties well. But I know of a one—we both know of him—who was unfaithful, who did not fulfil his trust, who was suborned and bought … by Wratha!” Suddenly Maglore’s voice was hard, cruel. “Well, and he also counts the cost.”

  “Huh—huh—he?” And now Karz was terrified, without as yet knowing why.

  “My siphoneer is old, Karz,” Maglore cried at last, yanking on the rope. “And despite that you tend him so well, soon he will die. Where there is no will, there is precious little will to live, eh? For which reason, among others, I have got myself a new siphoneer. Behold!”

  The curtains swished open, and behind them—

  —Two siphoneers: one wrinkled, mottled, old but still functional, for the moment at least; the other pink and new, and not yet fully … formed. The Historian saw the bulk of them, in this topmost room of Runemanse, but not all of them. What he did see lay on a platform over the vast bowl of water whose outlets supplied the manse’s needs; the mouth of the older one dribbling water into the bowl, like the drool of an infant or an idiot, except the falling droplets were sweet and clear. Their bodies were trembling like jelly from the pounding of hugely enlarged hearts; their limbs, cleverly boned and amputated at knees and elbows, were filmed in vampire slime; their living veins, similarly sheathed and elongated by metamorphism, extended from the butchered nubs and disappeared into conduits of dead bone which descended through the floor.

  What Karz Biteri could not see (and what he had trained himself not to think about) were the many hundreds of feet of these living capillaries, all dangling down inside their bone pipes through Runemanse above and Madmanse below, to the wells in the floor of Turgosheim from which they drew up the water! But for all his training, Karz could imagine them well enough.

  He looked at the new siphoneer—at its head, all shaven, with dark sutures and blue bruises betraying some recent surgery: an extraction of brain, of most of the brain, he knew—and at its vacant, grin-grimacing face, which Karz recognized only too well. For this was the face, and what was left of the form, of Giorge Nanosi, called Fatesayer, whose veins were even now extruding from his stumps, and inching down the pipes to the wells!

  Unable to restrain himself, the Historian reeled away from the curtained area to the window, and there stuck his head out to draw long and hard on the dark air.

  Maglore, reading his mind, came to stand beside him. “And so you see what is become of the Fatesayer,” he said, “who was less impartial than we thought. Aye, for when Wratha stuck her hooks in him, she said his fate loud and clear. So be it!”

  Karz’s shoulders jerked. Maglore pulled him away from the window, saying: “What? And would you foul Runemanse with your vomit? I’ll not have it, neither within nor without! Go tend your duties, make clean my workshops. For soon I’ll be practising my arts.”

  Karz staggered away, out of the room, and made unsteadily for the lower levels.

  Maglore followed him a little way, but beyond the arched entrance paused and looked back. His eyes went to the blazon carved in bas-relief over the doorway, as it was carved over all of Runemanse’s doors:

  This was that sigil of which he’d dreamed at the time of the Light-in-the-West, from which time forward he’d taken it as his own. As for its meaning (if it meant anything at all), that was anybody’s guess. Maglore’s guess was that it must be potent; else why would he, a mage, have dreamed it?

  And what other potent things would Wratha find, he wondered, in Olden Starside?

  PART FOUR:

  The Brothers—The Raids

  I

  Predawn twilight on Starside, sunup a few hours away, and the peaks of the barrier range already changing from one massively homogeneous black-fanged silhouette to gaunt, grey-featured sentinels in their own right, each taking on its own unique shape. Soon the sun’s rays, glancing through the high passes, would colour them gold. The change from dark to light was always inspiring, even gladdening.

  So thought Lardis, head man of the Szgany Lidesci.

  But to have spent the best part of a night here—on Starside! at sundown!—under the silver light of the moon and the blue glitter of the stars … and to have slept here! It was a thought which invariably set Lardis’s scalp to tingling, brought gooseflesh creeping, and a sense of awe, wonder and heart-pounding horror bursting out afresh from every inch of his body and soul…

  Every fifty sunups or thereabouts, Lardis would make this … this what, pilgrimage?—this passage of exorcism, anyway—into Starside, and across the barren boulde
r plains to the tumbled stacks of the Wamphyri; to Karenstack, the last aerie, and back again through the great pass to Sunside. But he knew he would never make it alone, that the ghosts of all that had been would journey with him, touching their cold fingers now and then to the knobs of his spine.

  A rite of exorcism, aye: to drive out the demons from his dreams and the olden nightmares even from his waking hours. A renewal of his faith, his belief—that the Wamphyri were no more, and would never return—in the shape of one more trek across their ancient territories, through all the long lonely hours of sundown, which had been their time. That was why Lardis came, why he continued to come and always would, as long as his legs could carry him: to convince himself of the marvellous truth, that they were no more.

  “Dead and gone forever,” he muttered, mainly to himself, pausing to look back on Starside from a vantage point in the foothills, not far from the mouth of the pass. “Wiped out in a body and cleansed from the world in what they thought was the hour of their triumph, when they toyed with their victims and glutted themselves at the shining sphere Gate. All of them that were left: Lord Shaithis, and even Shaitan the Unborn himself, who was their father, destroyed with their creatures. Likewise the Lady Karen, burned up in a single breath of hell, in the searing fire of something more hateful than all of them together! All gone, those creatures of evil. And possibly … possibly some that were good, too, even if they did bear the seeds of evil within them.”

  “Some that were … what, ‘good’, did you say?” An old and trusted friend and companion of Lardis’s, Andrei Romani, stood there with him. “Oh, really? The Wamphyri, d’you mean? Then perhaps you’ll be so kind as to refresh my memory, for I’m damned if I can remember any that were good!”

  Lardis glanced at him and nodded knowingly. “Yes, you can. You’re being contentious, that’s all. What about Harry Hell-lander, called Dwellersire, who came from a world beyond the Gate to stand side by side with his son in the battle for the garden? And what of The Dweller himself, who with his father toppled all the stacks of the Wamphyri down on to the plain? Aye, and even the Lady Karen, who stood with them and fought against her own kind.”

  Andrei looked astonished. “Her own kind? Their own kind, you mean! She and the others, they were all Wamphyri! Harry Hell-lander, who could come and go in a twinkling, and call up the dead: he was Wamphyri, as well you know. Likewise his son, called The Dweller, who became a wolf … and how was that for a hell-spawning menace? As for Karen: you forget, Lardis, that I was there in the garden that time, when she tore the living heart out of Lesk the Glut, and stood there laughing, drenched in his blood! Now she was Wamphyri! Aye, but the plague was in all of them, so don’t tell me what’s evil and what isn’t! Me, I say that somewhere there’s a God, and that finally He’d had enough of them. So that night He took ‘em all, every last one, which left us to act as custodians of the peace.”

  Lardis and Andrei: they were older now and their joints stiffening just a little, their hair mostly turned grey, and their eyes not quite so bright. But their memories were still sharp. And after all, fourteen years isn’t such a very long time, not for memories such as theirs. So for all that they argued, each knew that the other was right in part, and so a balance was maintained.

  “You’re right,” Lardis grunted at last, “and it’s best that they’re gone, all of them. But still I often wonder: if not for Harry, The Dweller, Karen … what would have become of us? Where would we be now?”

  “Dust, most likely,” Andrei answered, “and nothing would matter any more.”

  “And our children?”

  There was no answer to that. Instead of searching for one, Andrei shivered and stamped his feet, then changed the subject. “What the hell are we waiting for, anyway?” he wanted to know, raising his voice. And: “Where the hell is that misfit son of Nana Kiklu?”

  “What, me, a misfit?” came a loud, laughing inquiry from the shadows in the mouth of the pass. In the next moment there was movement there, where Nestor Kiklu and Lardis’s son, Jason, had gone on ahead. They came out of the shadows into full view, and again Nestor inquired: “Is someone taking my name in vain?”

  “No, not you, but your dumbstruck brother Nathan,” Andrei shouted back. “It’s him who’s keeping all of us waiting!”

  Their shouting echoed reverberatingly through the pass, rolled up into the mountains and bounced down again, rang out across the plains of Starside. Lardis didn’t much like it; it caused the small hairs to stir to life at the back of his neck, and made his breath plume that much faster in the cold air. Nor did he care for people calling Nathan Kiklu names, not even in misconceived jest, and not even Andrei. Oh, Nathan was a dummy, true enough, but there was a lot more than that to the lad. And: “Quiet!” Lardis warned. “For all that Star-side’s empty now, still it’s no place for shouting …”

  But someone had heard them, at least.

  Down on the rim of the low crater which housed the Gate, Nestor Kiklu’s twin brother Nathan came back to life where he stood gazing into the white hypnotic glare of the half-buried sphere of alien light. He mustn’t touch that shining surface, he knew, on penalty of being drawn into it and vanishing forever. Out of this world, anyway. But still he was tempted.

  Tempted … but not entirely stupid. For there were times when life seemed very good to Nathan right here, or rather, on Sunside. Sometimes life was good, anyway …

  It was just that the Gate was such a weird, inexplicable thing. If it were really a doorway into some other place, for instance—a place where there were people—then why didn’t they come through it and make themselves known? Lardis Lidesci said that in the old days they had come through now and then, and that the Wamphyri had prized them for their strange powers. Maybe that’s why they’d stopped coming. On the other hand, Lardis had been known to say many things about the Gate, the old days, the hell-landers … everything.

  Why, Nathan had even heard it rumoured that there’d once been a hell-lander woman Lardis had fancied! Except she already had a man, also a hell-lander. Her name had been Zek, short for Zekintha, and she could pick a man’s thoughts right out of his head! Well, and so could Nathan, sometimes; Nestor’s thoughts, anyway. But this Zek: she’d been pale and blonde, blue-eyed and … beautiful? Now how could anyone with colours like those be beautiful? None of the Szgany had them—with the exception of Nathan himself, of course.

  Anyway, most of these events Lardis spoke of had taken place before the Kiklu brothers were even born, and as Nathan had noted, with the passage of time Lardis found a great deal to say about almost everything of yesteryear. It wasn’t so much that he was very old (though certainly his youth, as the leader of a wandering Szgany tribe in the shadow of the Wamphyri, must have taken its toll of him), but that there was little now to occupy his mind, so that he was wont to dwell too much in the past. Which was something Nathan understood well enough, for on occasion he was himself given to dwelling in other worlds, and adventuring in lands of fantasy. It helped shut the real world out: the sounds of Settlement and its scathing voices, with all the taunts and questions which in the main Nathan no longer bothered to answer, or answered with his stumbling stutter. For ever since the night of the red clouds and the thunder in the hills, he had spent his time withdrawing from this world…into others.

  Other worlds, yes, and lands of fantasy …

  … The twilight mountainsides, for instance, when he was alone and his wolves would come whining out of the hills to be with him. That was a secret, however, something he kept to himself, lest Settlement’s Szgany youths call him a liar. For as everyone knew, wolves must be caught as pups and trained, or else they can’t be trusted.

  … And in his daydreams, which he knew were morbid things, however much they fascinated him.

  … But especially when he slept and dreamed of … oh, of all manner and shape of things! Of the crumbling dead in their graves, who could talk to him if they wanted to but would not, though he frequently overheard the
m talking to each other; of meaningless yet maddeningly familiar numbers, cluttering his reeling brain until he thought his head must fill and burst from their constantly mutating rush and whirl; and of a different world of men which was weird and unknown as the spaces between the stars.

  … Perhaps like the world beyond the Gate?

  Again the shouting of the others reached out to him from the foothills and the pass; until at last Nathan backed away from the coldly glaring source of his fascination, and jumped down from the low crater wall. But as he picked his way very carefully between the gaping mouths of giant, perfectly circular wormholes where they pierced the ground and angled down into otherwise solid, compacted earth and rock all around the perimeter of the Gate, still he sensed the lure of the silent, shining sphere, and felt it like a magnet in his mind.

  “Nathan!” Andrei Romani’s call came yet again, distantly, followed in a while by the echoes of his bull voice rolling down from the hills: “Nathaaan!”… “Nath-aaan!… Nathaaan!”

  Nathan had moved away from the Gate now, but still was unable to tear his eyes or his thoughts from it. The Gate to the hell-lands, another world, and possibly a world that was terrifying.

  When Lardis talked of what had happened that night fourteen years ago, he usually spoke of “a breath of hell”, which came roaring out of the Gate to burn the Wamphyri in its fire. But at other times and less romantically, he had admitted that it might have been some kind of unthinkable weapon, whose power was such that the hell-landers themselves had little or no control over it. “Whatever their world was like before,” (he would say), “it really must be hell now, if that was merely the backdraught of one of their wars! Zekintha told me all about that: how their weapons were devastating.”

  Measuring his pace, Nathan started to run. He had kept the others waiting too long and they’d be impatient. He was right: almost a mile away, Andrei Romani was complaining again. “Is he deaf as well as dumb?”