Blood Brothers Read online

  Wratha and her five were in the streets, blocking every exit as best they could. Human yet inhuman, they were simply figures in the stinking, slimy mist … until the people who fled into their arms saw their eyes, their melting, changing faces, and the metamorphic poisons which dripped from their fangs!

  Wran raged, of course, but he also remembered Wratha’s words and his fury was controlled. Having left his gauntlet tied to his saddle, instead he drove fingers like talons into the chests of his victims, nipping their hearts a little until they fell twitching to the ground. And kneeling, he would fasten his teeth in their necks to taste their blood, which served to transfuse his own blood’s monstrous fever into them. So he dealt death and undeath to a score of victims in as many moments.

  And “dying”, they all sensed the instructions of Wran’s hideous vampire mind, which spoke to them as one body although they were many: When you rise up and come to me in my manse in Starside, bring me your goods and chattels, which are now mine. Only remember: come before the sun is risen! For your Szgany flesh is as a soft metal beside the fire of the sun, and what has been forged may be melted. Aye, and what I have made can be unmade forever.

  Within the hour he killed sixty like this, men, women and youths, of which less than one third would make it to Starside. For before they could escape from the sun, first they must escape from the raid’s survivors; and of course, there would be some who woke up too late, or not at all, but slept on with stakes in their hearts until they were burned. In its way, it was not unlike a process of natural—or unnatural—selection.

  Spiro’s way was simpler than his brother’s: he snatched up people where they fled through his mist and bit their faces, then struck them down with hands like hammers. Pain and shock did the rest. They would not die but wake up with sore heads and strange cravings, and hear the message which he’d left in their changeling minds.

  As for Canker: to the terrified people streaming out of the stricken town, he must seem like a tame wolf who fled with them. But he was not a wolf and he was not tame. Loping among them on all fours, he chose only the fleetest, and for every male he chose a female. He was tempted … there were plump young beauties here… but like Wran the Rage, Canker, too, remembered Wratha’s words. Why waste his energies now in the cold comfort of the streets, when he’d be using all these women later in whichever way he chose and to his heart’s content? -those of them who made it, anyway. His brand would be unmistakable when he saw it: they would be limping where he’d savaged their legs to bring them down, and chewed a little in the junction of neck and shoulder.

  Gorvi the Guile crouched in the arch of a mist-wreathed doorway, from where he called out softly, urgently to people rushing by: “Quickly, there’s safety within!” Upon entering, they stumbled over the sprawled heap formed of previous victims, saw the smoking blobs of sulphur which were his sunken eyes, and at the last felt the needles of his gleaming teeth.

  Vasagi the Suck waited around a corner, grabbed up any who passed too close, and stabbed them deep in their ears—even to their brains—with his darting, spurting proboscis. For Vasagi, all was accomplished in this one, simple, flowing action; if he desired it, his toll might be huge. But he did not. And his message to the undead was likewise simple:

  It was Vasagi the Suck who tasted your brains and bent them to his will. Report to me on Starside. You will know me by my face, which is unique.

  So the six and their shadowing lieutenants advanced into the town, leaving death and undeath in their wake. And each of them was like a plague in his own right, except Wratha.

  She wore her gauntlet, but only for protection. And killing no one, her method was the simplest of all. Stepping close on the heels of the others where they went, flitting from one to the next as they advanced, she would go to certain of their male victims and touch them, saying:

  I am Wratha. He who killed you is to me what you were to him: nothing! Wherefore you are mine. When you come into Starside, be sure you come unto me.

  So she recruited her thralls, all of them men or youths. But still she did not see herself as a thief. No, for as the leader of the pack, in order to ensure that all went well for the rest of them, she needed her wits about her. Personally, she could not afford the additional distraction of the kill. Thus Wratha excused herself.

  And indeed all went very well, for a while …

  … Until the six and their lieutenants came together in an open space where the fires burned in the town’s centre. And face to face, with the warrior stench fading and only their own mist draping them, victory shone from their redly luminous eyes. It had been almost too easy. It had been too easy!

  For suddenly, a voice from behind snarled: “Murdering—bastard—things!” And human, Szgany, the voice itself was a threat. Whirling as one, falling to defensive half-crouches, the twelve turned outwards. Behind them in a ring, a dozen or more men of the village hemmed them in. But these were mature, experienced men: men of the old days. Their faces were filled with horror, hatred, and resolution; they carried crossbows, loaded and aimed.

  Wratha had half-expected it. Szgany herself upon a time, she knew there were always some who retaliated, who could not be crushed utterly: these people, for instance. In the old days this band—these wanderers, always on the move from place to place in their avoidance of Wamphyri raids—had not been supplicant; they’d not surrendered easily to Wamphyri oppression but fought back. And these men … they remembered how! Their bolts would be silver-tipped, steeped in kneblasch, deadly. There were long knives in their belts, and wooden stakes!

  And: Come! Wratha called to her warrior. But in that same moment, the men began firing.

  Wratha’s lieutenant, a young man and very bloody, with a gauntlet which was clogged with red flesh (her restrictions had not applied to thrall watchdogs such as him), hurled himself in front of her—and took a bolt in his throat! He gagged, threw up his arms, was hurled back against her—to be grasped and held there by Wratha, as a shield.

  The other lieutenants had acted in a like fashion, three covering their masters, the others leaping head-on to confront the threat. Bolts took one of them in mid-flight, skewered him and stretched him out, but the other got in among the would-be avengers. He struck left and right, his gauntlet spraying red, until silver-edged swords hissed to cut him down.

  Vasagi the Suck’s mental screech sawed at his colleagues’ nerve-endings; he had been struck in the side, where his vampire flesh was now poisoned. A master of metamorphism, he would quickly shed the infected flesh and cure himself; but his cry served to galvanize his five Wamphyri colleagues to action.

  Until then they had been stunned and immobilized by the attack, even Wratha, for in Turgosheim’s Sunside it would have been impossible. But now:

  “Wran,” Wratha cried, “now you may rage all you will!”

  Gorvi cursed where he issued a screening mist for all he was worth; Vasagi reeled and tore out the bolt from his side, hurling it down; the rest sprang to join their lieutenants in the fray.

  The men of the village were reloading. One of them got off a frantic, lucky shot which took Canker’s lieutenant in the heart. In the next moment Canker was on the crossbowman, tearing out his throat …

  Wratha came face to face with a man just finished reloading who elevated his weapon point-blank against her breast. Even as he squeezed the trigger, her hand closed on the projecting head of the bolt. Ignoring the “pain” of kneblasch and silver (she was partly immune, anyway), her fist clenched the bolt more tightly yet and her awesome vampire strength held it back. But the crossbow itself answered the laws of physics. Flying backwards, its thrumming wire sliced the man’s windpipe like a razor, even as Wratha’s gauntlet disembowelled him.

  Gorvi’s mist settled over everything, and Gorvi himself was central in it. His gauntlet turned one man’s face to ruin, sheared through the rib-cage of another as if the bones were twigs. And the screams of the dead and dying were like music in the ears of the Wamphyri.
<
br />   Through all of this Wran raged, and likewise his brother Spiro. So that they were still raging as Gorvi’s mist cleared and it became apparent that nothing more threatened. Distantly, briefly, there sounded the patter of flying feet, but that was all. The dead lay where they had fallen.

  As Wran and Spiro grew calm, so there sounded the stuttering throb of propulsors and Wratha’s warrior, followed in short order by the others, began circling overhead. Gorvi the Guile looked from the warriors to the smoking red ruins of men where he stood among them, and said, wonderingly:

  “So they did fight, after all …”

  And with a nod, Wratha answered, “A handful of them, who remembered the Old Wamphyri. But we must never tolerate resistance.”

  “They should pay for it!” Canker declared. “Let’s follow them, hunt them down!”

  Wratha looked at Vasagi and her face framed a question. His eyes were wide with fury where he stood holding his side, but he shook his head and glanced at his warrior spurting over the rooftops. He sent a message, and the beast at once crashed down on a huddle of dwellings, shattering them outwards!

  And: “The Suck is right,” Wratha declared. “Let the fools run and hide and think it over, and when they return discover the retribution of the Wamphyri!”

  Her creature likewise crashed down, with more sod and timber buildings disappearing into rubble, and Wran and Spiro’s warrior followed suit.

  And leaving all of the monsters wallowing together in the town’s debris, Wratha, her renegades, and their two remaining lieutenants returned to their flyers. Now the warriors would fuel themselves on the victims of the brief battle, human defenders and vampire lieutenants both. It should not occupy them for too long …

  Later, airborne, Wratha said: All accomplished, except we’ve lost four lieutenants and failed to recruit more. So, we have a choice. We can wait and make new lieutenants from our thralls when they come over into Starside, or…

  The others waited, and in a moment:

  Do you remember, she continued, I said that if all went well there might be a treat for you? They did, and she went on: Vasagi, are you up to it?

  With telepathic perceptions sharper than the others, the Suck knew her mind. And: Yes, he answered, as brief as ever.

  They rose up level with the peaks and Wratha pointed west. The night’s still young, she said, and we have lieutenants to recruit. So let’s see what else this marvellous Sunside has to offer, eh?

  No one disagreed.

  At about which time, and twenty miles away:

  The three more youthful members of Lardis Lidesci’s party, returning home from their Starside trek, had gone on ahead into Settlement. But Lardis and Andrei Romani still had the better part of an hour to go before they in turn would enter through the town’s East Gate …

  III

  Something less than an hour later, in Settlement:

  Attracted by a sudden commotion and surge in the crowd, Nestor Kiklu made his way through the milling people to discover what was going on. And he saw that he’d been right: it was Lardis Lidesci’s voice making all the fuss. As for what it was all about: that remained to be discovered.

  At the forward edge of the crowd, where the people who had come out to welcome Lardis home now held themselves back, shocked by their leader’s outburst, Nestor felt himself swaying with an unaccustomed dizziness. Complementing the natural excitement of the night—that and his passion of a minute or two earlier, when he’d talked to Jason about Nathan and Misha—the Szgany wine was quickly going to his head. Reeling, he paused to lean against a cart, and became just one more slack-jawed witness in a sea of astonished faces.

  For there at one of the old decoys Lardis stomped about in the tired, broken-down framework of torn, weathered skins and rotting wooden ribs—and raved! Ever faithful, Andrei Romani followed on behind his leader, trying to calm him down and imploring the crowd to hold back and not concern themselves; the old Lidesci was just worn out from the trek. But to Nestor and the rest, Lardis looked far less tired than …

  “… Crazy!” some woman muttered, close by. “He must have been drinking on the way in, and had a skinful. Why, listen to the man! Playing at being the Big Leader again, after so many years of doing nothing! What? But if his Lissa knew the state he was in, she’d be down here boxing his ears by now! But no, they have their fine cabin up on the knoll, well away from us common folk.”

  Old bag! Nestor thought. He didn’t think much of Lardis, but old sows like that were worse far. All the same, what on earth was Lardis up to?

  “Lardis!” someone shouted from the crowd. “Now what’s all this about? Why, you sound like you’ve lost fifteen years out of your life, and gone back to the bad old days! As for these lures and all such rubbish: we abandoned their upkeep a lifetime ago. They should be stripped down for firewood. So what’s all the fuss?”

  Now Nestor began to understand, and to believe that maybe Lardis really was crazy; certainly he’d been acting strangely since they came back through the pass. In order to get a better idea of what was going on, he pushed himself upright and moved closer still.

  Fuming and sputtering, with Andrei Romani still in tow, now Lardis stalked around the perimeter of the decoy. “What?” he snarled. “But look at the state of these lures! The skins are tattered and the timbers rotten. What could you impale on stakes as wormy as these? Nothing! They’d crumble at a touch. As for a warrior impaling himself, ridiculous! What creature would ever feel challenged by … by this mess?”

  “Lardis,” Andrei tried to keep pace with him, catching at his arm to slow him down. He kept his voice low but still Nestor heard what he was saying. “Lardis, you’ll only excite the people, worry them, frighten them silly. Can’t this keep, at least until you’ve rested? You have no proof, after all. I mean, you’re not sure, now are you?”

  Nestor’s head felt light, even giddy. He wondered: proof of what? Not sure about what? Perhaps Lardis was tired after all—or sick, maybe? Even now he was looking at Andrei with burning eyes, turning his gaze on the muttering crowd, finally holding up a trembling hand to his sweating brow. But no, he wasn’t sick, for in the next moment he was raving again.

  “The stockade fence!” he shouted, heading in that direction. “You’ve cut doors in it, gates on all four sides. Except they’ve stood open for so long that they’re warped and won’t close any more. And just look at the great crossbows and the catapults!”

  He went at a stumbling run, up the rickety wooden steps where they climbed the fence, to tug at the lashings of a catapult whose huge spoon of a head stood taller than his own. In a moment, rotten leather had fallen to mould in his powerful hands. Disgusted, Lardis let the dust trickle through his fingers and looked around. And his fevered eyes went at once to frayed hauling ropes where they dangled from the pivoting hurling-arm. Then, risking life and limb, he used these self-same ropes to slide back to earth.

  “Oh, they take my weight, all right,” he panted, landing. “But how do you think they’d stand the strain of hauling that bucket down against its counterweight, eh? Well, I can tell you that for nothing: they wouldn’t!”

  “Lardis!” Now Andrei had stopped trying to reason with him, and his voice was suddenly harsher, angrier—sorrier? “Man, I don’t think you … I mean, it seems to me that you’re not … that you’re no longer responsible!”

  Lardis had meanwhile turned away to head for the South Gate. Still following him, Andrei cried out: “Lardis, do you insist on being right? But man, you can’t be! You mustn’t be!” Sensing a drama, the crowd moved as one man to shadow the pair. But finally it seemed that something of Andrei’s words had got through to Lardis. What? What was that he’d said? That Lardis Lidesci was no longer responsible? Or did he simply mean sane? His footsteps faltered, stopped, and he turned.

  And as Andrei caught up and went to him, pleadingly now, so Lardis hit him once and stretched him out. Then he turned and went more quickly yet—but crookedly, brokenly—towards the South G
ate and the forest beyond. And this time the crowd let him go.

  Nestor shook his head, partly in amazement and partly to clear it. The wine lay like a blanket in his brain and on his tongue. Alcohol: even as it deadened the senses and killed off common sense utterly, still it generated passion and excitement. Drunk, Nestor was excited about what had happened, which must surely signal the beginning of the end for Lardis Lidesci, his decline and fall—and the rise of his weakling son, Jason? And he was passionate about…

  “… Misha!” He spoke her name out loud, and turning bumped into someone. The other, a youth he knew, whose face was now a frowning blur, steadied him and said:

  “Misha? I saw her earlier, heading for your mother’s house, I think. But what do you reckon about—”

  But Nestor had no more time to waste here. Not waiting to hear the youth out, he thrust him aside and went stumbling in the direction of the houses huddled in the western quarter of the stockade, in the lee of the fence and the watchtower. One of those houses had been “home” to him for as long as he could remember, but perhaps no more.

  And the strong wine churning in his stomach, and likewise the thoughts in his fuddled head:

  Misha at his mother’s house … And who else would be there? … Why, none other than Nathan! … The two of them together, like lovers reunited after a long absence.

  Well, Nestor knew what he must do about that!

  With the murmur of the crowd fading behind him, he walked unsteadily through the empty streets of low cabins, store and barter-houses, stables, beehive granaries; and with every thudding beat of his heart his resolve grew stronger and his course seemed more clearly defined. If what he planned was a crime, at least it would be justified. To Nestor, at least.

  The west wall loomed, and there was Nana Kiklu’s house, one of several built close to the fence: a long sloping roof of wooden shingles at the front, and a short one at the back, covering the stable and barn. Hanging open, the louvre-covers at the windows let out lamplight and the low murmur of voices. His mother’s voice, Misha’s tinkling laugh, and Nathan’s stumbling stutter. Inside, all would be light and warmth.