Blood Brothers Read online

  The one incontestable “fact”—the one answer which surfaced time and time again whenever he considered the question of identity and being—was the repetitive phrase: “I am the Lord Nestor.” So that in a little while he knew who he was at least. But what sort of a Lord was he?

  Physically: his skull still felt soft at the back, where plates of fractured bone were agonizingly mobile under an area of rough, puffy skin and subcutaneous fluids; but at least he could touch himself there without feeling sick. Apart from a slight blurriness of vision, his eyesight seemed sound in the pre-dawn light. Other than his lumpy, tender face—his nose which was definitely hooked now and still sore where the bone was knitting, split lips, and several loose teeth—no bones appeared broken in his limbs or body. In short, he knew that whatever he had survived, he would probably continue to survive it. Certainly he was hungry and thirsty for two men, and a good appetite is usually indicative of good health.

  With this in mind he looked down on the fires in Twin Fords and the black smoke hanging like a pall over the town, and wondered if he’d find breakfast there. Probably, because after all he was a Lord. Also, he wondered if he would find some answers, clues as to his and the world’s circumstances in general.

  As for the three-quarters dead flyer: Nestor had seen its grotesque carcass as a hugely anomalous lump in the darkness of the trees: a sprawling blanket or tent of skins, or more likely a tangled platform of fallen branches. He had considered it no further than that.

  Its true nature—the fact that it had transported him to this place, and that he had emerged from it - these things were entirely forgotten. But as twilight brightened into dawn and the rising sun lit up the peaks, and its golden light fell like a slowly descending curtain towards the tree-line, so he had cause to regard the creature anew. For now the thing in the trees was most definitely alive!

  It tried to arch its broken wings, craned a prehistoric neck for the sky, and cried out in a hissing, clacking voice. But the shattered pines had pierced its membranous wings and crushed their fragile alveolate bones, and all its energy had drained away along with its fluids. Pinned down, grounded and broken, the creature could only despair its fate, for the vampire stuff in it sensed the sunrise as surely as a lodestone senses north, except the flyer wasn’t attracted but repulsed. Or would be, if it still had the power of flight.

  Walking unsteadily, gingerly around the perimeter of the triangular stand of pines at the rim of the bluff where the flyer had crashed down, Nestor observed the slate-grey, leathery skin of the thing; its long neck and spatulate head, and dull, near-vacant eyes. Despite that its head was huge, blunt and acromegalic, still there was something vaguely, disturbingly human about it; but nothing remotely human about the tentacular thrusters which it drove into the pine-needle floor each time it arched its torn manta wings, as if to assist in launching itself into flight. These reminded Nestor of nothing so much as a nest of giant maggots erupting from the belly of some dead thing.

  And at the base of its neck, where its back widened out into swept-back wings … was that some kind of saddle?

  He might have climbed back under the canopy of the trees to make a closer inspection, but such were the thing’s struggles that he feared it might flop down on top of him; and so he held back. At which point the jagged rim of sunlight creeping down across the tree-line fell squarely upon the creature—to devour it!

  So it seemed to Nestor.

  For the pines filled with stench and steam at once, as the doomed flyer’s skin shrivelled and turned from slate-grey to the unwholesome blue of corruption and the texture of crumbling pumice. Its flesh quaked, bloated, split open in a dozen places, out of which its smoking fats ran like water! Then the thing screamed—a sound so thin, high and penetrating that it sliced like a sharp edge of ice on Nestor’s nerves—and commenced a shuddering vibration which only ceased when several of the shattered pines were displaced and the flyer slumped down between them to the forest’s floor.

  And there the sun continued its cleansing work, blazing through the trees to reduce the monster to so much glue and blackly smouldering gristle. But in a little while it became obvious that this would take hours, and what with the poisonous odour and disgusting mess, Nestor didn’t wait for the end.

  But in his mind’s eye, now more visions were waking; and as he began to climb down the wooded slope towards the near-distant town—and as a waft of foulness reached down to him from the dissolving flyer—he “remembered” a previous rush of reeking air …

  …Wind in his hair, yes, and dark diamond shapes adrift on the updrafts under glittering ice-chip stars—flyers just like that one back there, with riders proud and terrifying in saddles upon their backs—and a distant cry of horror faint on the morning air, but fading now as the scene itself faded back into vaults of memory. “Wamphyri!”

  Wamphyri? The cry had been real, carrying to him from the town in the “V” of the rivers; but the Lord Nestor ignored it in deference to its evocation.

  He paused, looked back and up the slope to where smoke and steam continued to pour from the pines, spilling out of them like a slow-motion waterfall over the rim of the bluff. Had that been his flyer back there? But that couldn’t possibly be, for here he stood in sunlight and felt no harm.

  But at the same time … did he still feel comfortable in the sun’s warm rays? Had he ever?

  Lord Nestor of the Wamphyri …

  It seemed like a dream, some game which he’d played as a child, but he remembered now how he had hunted his human prey in the deep forests, sniffing them out, searching for them with all of his vampire senses alert! Except… where were his vampire senses now?

  A vampire—indeed, Wamphyri—was he? He shrank down a little from the sun, which paid him no heed but burned, as ever, benevolently on the southern horizon.

  Had he been a vampire, then? But if that were so, how may one of the undead return to human life? And why would he want to? And what of the people in the town down there, Twin Fords? How would they receive him if he went among them?

  He frowned, sat down in the long grasses of the slope and considered his position. He must be cautious; he must know himself, before he dared show himself to others. But where was his past? What had it been? If people asked him, what could he tell them? That he was the Lord Nestor of the Wamphyri? Hardly!

  Then, close by, a distraction:

  A rabbit, emerging from its hole, blinked pink eyes and turned twitching ears this way and that before hopping tentatively forward—and uttered a short shrill scream as a wire snare tightened around its neck! Then, triggered by the animal’s sudden frenzy, the weighted branch of a sapling slipped its anchor, sprang erect and hauled the poor creature aloft to hang it.

  Now here at last was something that Nestor remembered and understood well enough: hunting and trapping. So what did it matter that the trap wasn’t his; surely it would make good sense to satisfy his hunger here rather than in Twin Fords, whose people might well be suspicious of him?

  Just a few short paces away, Nestor had already noted the reflective glitter of a flinty outcrop weathering up out of the shallow soil. Using a fist-sized rock to knock a pair of good firestones free of the mass, now he gathered together the rabbit and the makings for a fire. And in a nest of tall boulders which provided him with shade and cover both, he set about to prepare his meal. If the smoke of his fire was seen from below, then he’d probably be reckoned for just another lonely hunter having his breakfast up in the hills.

  But for some reason as yet unfathomed (perhaps it had to do with the many fires burning down there, the black smoke roiling, and a too-familiar stench carried up in the heat and the smoke?), Nestor fancied that the people of the town would have problems enough this morning, without worrying too much about him …

  Unknown to Nestor and fourteen miles due west of him where he cooked and ate his breakfast, his brother Nathan was striding out for Twin Fords. And in Settlement-

  —Nathan had been gone for we
ll over an hour when Misha Zanesti came through the forest from the south and slipped into town through the South Gate. She was seen, recognized by a girl who had been posted to keep her eye on the gate, and her presence reported to Lardis Lidesci. Misha, too, would report to Lardis, but not until she’d been home.

  And in her father’s house ten seconds after she entered:

  Astonishment! Rejoicing! A great flood of laughter, questions, tears! The joyful madness (for Misha) of being whirled about, crushed, lifted off her feet, gazed upon! And for them the joy of whirling, crushing, gazing.

  Finally, they demanded to know what, how, where—everything.

  But she only wanted to know about her brother, and about Nathan. And then the sadness all over again—for her brother, Eugen, taken by the Wamphyri. As for Nathan: he had been here, yes. And her surviving brother, Nicolae, remembering Nathan’s visit and how he’d felt then, said: “Misha, you should marry that one as soon as possible—even today!” And her father saying nothing, which meant that he agreed.

  By which time Lardis and Andrei Romani had come knocking at the door, and Varna Zanesti knew why; but so did Misha. For Nana Kiklu—who remembered what it had been like in the time of the Wamphyri, and how it must be again—had warned her it would be this way. So that Misha knew exactly how to handle it even if her father, the huge and tempestuous Varna, didn’t. Neither him nor her brother Nicolae, who was the model of his father but on a younger, only slightly smaller scale. They let Lardis and Andrei in, but as soon as the door was closed:

  “Lardis,” Varna rumbled, “I’m reunited with my daughter, as you see. But my emotions are in turmoil, and so I warn you: do nothing to further disturb them. As for Misha: you need only look at her to see that she is whole and well.” He stood like a rock—glowering, towering over Lardis—with his huge hands knotted at his sides.

  Varna was massive. But while he dwarfed most other men of the Szgany Lidesci, his size had its disadvantages: it left him slow-moving, lumbering. Black-browed, bearded, and barrel-chested: by virtue of his aspect and dimensions alone he might appear brutal. And he could be, if he or his were threatened. A very determined man, Varna (some might say pig-headed, but not to his face), whose remaining son was scarcely less massive, and no less resolute.

  And Nicolae, casually fitting a bolt to the groove in the tiller of his crossbow, said: “Andrei Romani, you’re my elder and I respect you. But if you’re hunting for vampires, best go do it somewhere else. The girl is my sister.”

  Before the others could so much as speak, Misha placed herself in the middle of the four men. And: “Lardis, Andrei,” she said, “you’ve nothing to fear from me. And if I’m to be examined, then do it here, now, in my own home, and be sure I’ll understand. For just this morning both Nana Kiklu—” she paused briefly, looked at Lardis and smiled, “—and your own wife, Lissa, have told me the way of it. And so I’m ready.”

  Suddenly Lardis felt weak at the knees; his mouth fell open and his dark eyes opened huge as saucers; ignoring Varna and Nicolae, he stumbled forward a pace and took the girl by the arms—as much to steady himself as to confine her. And scarcely breathing the words, he said, “You … you had this from Lissa? This morning?”

  “Yes, oh yes!” she answered. “Where we waited for sunup near the place of the lepers!”

  Lardis staggered again, clapped a hand to his forehead and cried: “Ah! The leper colony! Of course—I remember—yes!”

  For upon a time, some ten years ago, Lissa had accompanied him when he was out beating the bounds of his territory. They’d camped a mile from the colony, and it had been then that he’d told Lissa: “In the old days, if we were in this vicinity when the night came down, we would always camp as close as possible to the place of the lepers. For there was one thing you could be sure of: that no Starside Lord would ever come a-hunting here! No, for leprosy strikes terror in their black hearts, and it’s as much a plague to them as they are to us!”

  And Lissa, by the mercy of her star, had remembered his words …

  III

  “Lardis,” Misha said, while still he sputtered and gaped, and before he could explode with all of his many questions, “first look at this.” She split off a small piece of garlic, the Szgany kneblasch, from one of several cloves on a shelf over the fireplace. And popping it into her mouth, she began to chew. Then she pulled a wry face—but one which was normally wry—and swallowed. “There,” she said, still grimacing. “Now I won’t be able to breathe on anyone for the rest of the day! But it’s worth it. Now then, give me one of your silver bells.” He fumbled one out of his pocket and handed it over. Misha rubbed it between her palms, hung it for a moment from the golden ring in her left ear, pressed it to her cheek and finally kissed it.

  And giving him back his bell, she went to the door and threw it open. Daylight flooded in, turning her hair a shiny raven black as she stepped out into glaring morning sunlight. And whirling the skirts which Nana Kiklu had repaired for her during the long night, she said: “Under all of this grime my colour is my own, Lardis, not the lifeless grey of a vampire. When I’ve bathed myself—and how I need to!—then you’ll see. But tell me: what do you think of this blouse I’m wearing?”

  He looked, and saw that it was one of Lissa’s blouses; his own wife’s design and stitching couldn’t be mistaken. And finally he was convinced, which in any case he’d wanted to be. “Yes, yes,” he drew her back inside the house. “You had that from Lissa too, I know. But now … now tell me about Jason!”

  Misha looked at him. Lardis’s face was alight with high expectations, but a shadow had moved across hers. Her father and brother knew that look; they made sure Lardis was seated, with Andrei close at hand, then went to stand quietly in a cool, shadowy corner. And:

  “Lissa was hoping—” Misha began, stumblingly, “—she was hoping that you—that you could tell her something.”

  Lardis groaned and hung his head, but in another moment he lifted it and said: “An hour ago I had no hope for either one of them, and now you tell me my wife is alive and well.” He glanced at her sharply. “She … she is well, isn’t she?”

  Misha nodded and answered, “A few bumps and bruises, but that’s all. She had a narrow squeak—so did we all—which I’ll tell you about in a moment.”

  Lardis sighed, and continued: “And so there must be hope for my son, too. Yes, I’m sure there is. But now tell the rest of it your way and in your own time, so that I may take it in. But tell all of it, and so make an end of my foolish, fumbling questions.”

  She nodded, and began:

  “Your place on the knoll was hit first. But Lissa had seen a mist on the hillsides. Dousing the lamps, she’d gone out into the garden. It was a flyer which wrecked your cabin, Lardis. It came from the east, following the contours of the foothills, and settled on your house which collapsed under its weight. And riding the creature’s back—a man!”

  “Wamphyri, aye,” Lardis growled. “Or one of their lieutenants. I had thought that perhaps it was a warrior; but now, thinking back on it, the stench was not so great.” He nodded his head, indicating that Misha should go on.

  “This man—this vampire—was tall and slender, with eyes tiny as jewels, deep-sunken in his face,” the girl continued. “He was dressed all in black, with a black cape and boots. His skull was shaven, except for a topknot. He looked like a corpse, and yet was lively, sinuous as a snake. But for all that he was Wamphyri and powerful, he also seemed nervous, cautious, furtive. At least, this is how Lissa describes him.”

  Lardis said nothing but thought: Gorvi the Guile? Possibly.

  “Lissa had hidden herself in the trees behind the house,” Misha went on, “from where she could watch what happened. That was a mistake, for the vampire sensed her there! And satisfied that there was no danger, he stood in the garden with his hands on his hips and sniffed Lissa out! She felt his hypnotic power in her mind, and knew that she’d been discovered.

  “She tried to make a run for it, pas
t the vampire Lord to the steps cut in the steep side of the knoll. But he got in her way and showed her the killing gauntlet on his hand. And closing with her, he said: “Where is your man? Where are your sons? Show me your daughters!” He caught her up by the hair—” (Lardis almost started to his feet)”—and then Jason was there!”

  “Jason!” the word burst from Lardis’s lips.

  “He had come up from Settlement,” Misha was breathless, “to discover this creature threatening his mother. Crying out his rage, without pause he hurled himself at the vampire. Distracted, the monster released Lissa, turned on Jason and struck at him with his gauntlet. Ducking the blow, Jason stabbed the other with his knife, whose silver blade glanced off the vampire’s ribs, tore along his forearm and caught in his gauntlet, which Jason wrenched from his hand. And Jason’s knife was red with the vampire’s blood!”

  “What then?” Lardis couldn’t contain himself.

  “Lissa saw your hatchet in a tree stump …”

  “My axe?” Lardis cut in again. “No other axe like it in the world—and I left it in the garden? To the rain and the rust? Just see how lax I had become! Jazz Simmons gave me that axe; he brought it with him from the hell-lands, and for nine hundred sunups it kept its edge! But go on.”

  “She worked the hatchet out of the stump,” Misha continued, “and went to leap on the vampire Lord where he clutched his side and arm. He saw how keen was the weapon’s edge, and knew that even in a woman’s hands it could take his head. And both Lissa and Jason together, they were intent upon killing him! Well, perhaps he’s a coward, this one—”