Trask nodded. “Now tell me about it,” he said. “Because I really do ‘need to know.’ I need to be reassured that I’m working for the right side. Or at least the best side!”
Clarke sat up straighter and sighed. “All right Ben, I’ll tell you. But since you expect straight answers from me, first let me ask you something. Do you really think that if you or I or any one of us should decide to leave the Branch it would be as easy as that? I mean, like snapping your fingers? What, you should be allowed to walk out of here—knowing all we’ve done, something of what we still might do, and everything we’re capable of doing; with all the weird stuff you have seen and still got stuck in your head—and no questions asked?”
Trask saw it at once. “We ‘fixed’ him,” he said, and his jaw jutted a very little. “How was it done?”
“Ben,” Darcy said, “Think it over, will you? Without getting too excited? We’re not just talking about an ordinary man or talent here. There are no ordinary talents, not in E-Branch. But we are talking about the most extraordinary talent of all—the Necroscope, Harry Keogh. He can go … anywhere, instantly! He talks to … to dead people, for God’s sake! Of which there are a Great Majority who’ll do just about anything for him. And we could just let him walk? Well, maybe we could, but there are others higher up the ladder who couldn’t.”
“How was it done?”
“Ben,” Darcy was reaching the end of his tether. “I’m the one who’s had to live with it. Why can’t you leave it at that? Put it this way: this was the soft option …”
For a long moment there was silence, until Trask exploded, “I don’t believe it!” But the trouble was he did, because he of all men knew it was the truth.
“We recruited him, remember? Keenan Gormley recruited him. And if he could do it nicely, then someone else might try to do it nasty. And anyway, it’s no big deal,” Darcy felt like he was lying, but had no choice. “Harry’s lost nothing, except he just can’t talk about it anymore. He can still do his thing, but no one else is ever going to get to know about it.”
And now Trask understood. “Hypnotism!” he said.
And Darcy nodded. “The soft option. But still, and as you yourself pointed out, I’ve worried about it ever since.”
And Trask saw the truth of that, too. “It’s been on your shoulders like a tangible weight.”
“An extra weight,” Darcy answered. “A few extra ounces on top of the ton or so that’s already there.”
“You knew it was wrong—or that it wasn’t right—and I sensed it in you. You felt that you’d lied to Harry …”
“ … No,” Darcy said. “But that I hadn’t told him the whole truth? Yes.”
“The reason I felt it was because it wasn’t you. The moment Harry’s name entered a conversation, you didn’t read quite right.”
“All right, so I’m guilty!” Darcy snapped. “And what about you, if or when it’s your turn to run the show? Do you think it will be any easier for you? With your talent? Well it won’t be. It’ll be hell, Ben!”
The other thought about it, and said, “And there’s nothing we can do about it? We can’t put it right?”
“No … yes! Not for Harry, no. But for me? You’ve already done it, Ben. A load shared is a burden halved. Now you’ll have to carry it, too. But you’ll get used to it. And at least we’ll be able to tell ourselves that Harry’s still alive!”
For a moment they glared at each other, then gradually relaxed … and Darcy’s intercom came cracklingly alive. “Sir?”
Darcy thumbed the Duty Officer’s button. “Yes?”
“Minister Responsible. Urgent. Do you want it on screen?”
“Yes. Thanks.”
A moment later his desk screen came alive, flickered for a second or two, got angry with itself in a crackle of static, then snapped into sharp focus. It displayed this legend:
Origination: MinRes.
Destination: Director INTESP.
Duty Officier INTESP
FOR YOUR EYES ONLY! Message follows …
Trask had come round to Darcy’s side of the desk. “I better not look, right?” The way he said it, Darcy felt the edge of sarcasm in his voice. And:
“Oh, don’t be fucking silly!” he snapped.
The message followed:
For public consumption (Press, BBC, ITV, etc.) “A treasure-seeker with a metal-detector has found a World War II bomb in Hyde Park. The area has been secured and all buildings in the immediate vicinity are being vacated …”
Mr. Clarke: this isn’t as it’s made out to be. A man from my office has been fully briefed. He and other experts are on the scene right now. Take some of your best men and get down to Hyde Park. I shall need your first impressions and best opinions.
Good luck—
MinRes
“Good luck?” Trask murmured. And: “What the hell … ?” as a PS printed itself under the message:
Mr. Clarke, in the event that I or any other Minister should be required, the usual Whitehall telephone numbers will not suffice. You may contact me on:
Followed by a number. But there was something about the number that Darcy Clarke didn’t like. Or if not him, his talent.
He waited until the screen cleared, punched in the number and queried it. The computer asked him for his security clearance, the first time that had ever happened!
He punched that in, too, and finally got his answer:
An allegedly “decommissioned” nuclear bunker in Uxbridge, fifteen miles out of the city.
“Christ!” Darcy gasped, as he felt the short hairs rising on the back of his neck. “It’s clean underpants time again!”
“That bad?” Trask’s query—his tone of voice—said it all: the other stuff was over and done with and he was Darcy’s strong right arm again.
“Worse,” Darcy answered. “A hell of a lot worse, Ben!”
But they had to wait until they got down to Hyde Park to find out just how bad it really was. Or how bad it might have been …
IV
RADU: HE DREAMS ON
RADU DREAMED HIS OLDEN, RECURRENT BUT FREQUENTLY FADING DREAMS OF blood. As ever, he strove to restructure and reinstate them in the eye of a memory occasionally filmed over by six centuries of sleep, his undead hibernation. He dreamed of ages past and the life he’d known then, and of the many lives he’d consumed since then. Crimson dreams of his beginnings in a vampire world; of his conversion to something other than a man; of his eventual banishment into a new, entirely different world, and his everlasting and soon to be on-going bloodwar against those who had dared to rape and ruin what little he had loved.
Less than vivid, his dreams, unless they were recounted, reinforced, revisited over and over to bring them into nightmare definition in Radu’s yet more nightmarish mind. For these were things that he desired to remember forever. They were his one recourse, his only means of keeping his hatred alive while he waited out his time in a resin tomb, sleeping but not dead.
He recalled names from the swirling mists of a far-distant past: Giorga, Ion, and Lexandru Zirescu; and the Ferenczys, Lagula and Rakhi. In another time and world, the Zirescus had been his direst enemies, and the Ferenczys were Olden Lords of Starside. Now they were all long dead, and Radu relished fond memories of how he had dealt with them … and thoughts of how he would next deal with any survivor or descendant when once more he was up and abroad in a changed and ever-changing world. For the dog-Lord knew that there were such descendants, definitely …
… Abroad in the world, aye. And indeed, upon a time, he and his various packs, his pups, had been “abroad.” Sufficient to start, or certainly to reinforce, legends as old as mankind itself: of the werewolf and the vampire—or of both. For Radu Lykan was both—Wamphyri!
His dreaming mind went back, back, back … to how it had been in those earliest days of his coming here …
In Starside he had been found guilty of treason. As punishment, Shaitan the Unborn, self-styled High Magistrate of all the Wamph
yri, had had Radu and a handful of his retainers—a lieutenant or two and a few thralls—thrown into the so-called Hell-lands Gate, from which no one ever returned.
It had been like a long, slow fall into some weird white hell, and for a time Radu and the others had thought that this was all there was to it: to drift downward (or sideways, or up? … the Gate was a strange place!) forever, or until starvation put paid to them and they shrivelled to husks. But that wasn’t to be the way of it.
The real hell began where the Gate opened into this world, in a subterranean cavern carved by an underground river. Lit by the glare of the Gate, the cavern’s narrow ledges were cold and damp; the river was in flood and rushed through its borehole in a frenzy of black water. Along the course of the river where it left the cave, the walls bottlenecked and there was scarcely a gap between the water and the ceiling.
Black, rushing water: the Wamphyri feared it! Not for any superstitious reason (for contrary to certain myths, they swam as well as any creature); but deprived of air, buffetted against stone walls, and crushed by unfathomed depths, how long may a man or even a vampire survive? Flesh softens, fails, and is sloughed away. And when body and brains fall apart, all that remains is naked bone, to be broken up and rounded to pebbles. Perhaps this was the nature of these hell-lands.
Radu had a choice, but not much of one: brave the rushing waters, or stay safe on a ledge or crammed in some crevice till he had no strength to move but got cemented in place by layers of dripstone. And:
“Do as you see fit,” he had told the others with him. “This river may run downhill forever … in which case it’s goodbye Radu! But somewhere out there is moonlight, which I would feel silvering my neck again—or my ruff if the moon is full!” And with that he had jumped from the ledge and been borne under.
The other Lords and their men had followed suit, likewise Radu’s lieutenants and a few thralls; some of whom survived to surface in Dacia near a Roman barter camp on the Danuvius. The year was AD 371, and the moon was indeed full. From which time forward the place would always be known as Radujevac …
That had been a time! (Radu’s dreams sped fleet before the eye of his mind.) Night-skirmishes with legionnaires along the Danube and in the Dacian hamlets; piracy on the merchant shipping; blood-feasts by the light of the full moon. And as for the men of that era: they’d been naive as children when first Radu and the others came among them. Their sciences were young, superstitions many, and their blood sweet as any in Sunside in the far vampire world of Radu’s origin. But as compared with the Szgany of Sunside: their numbers were vast, their races diverse, their courage unbelievable and their skills in battle phenomenal!
Still, in the first hundred to two hundred years the werewolf had flourished … and the true vampire! For the dog-Lord Radu was not the only Lord of the Wamphyri banished by Shaitan. Indeed, several great rivals had come through the Gate with him, at or about the same time. Such as Nonari “the Gross” Ferenczy, and the Drakul brothers, Karl and Egon. In Starside the Drakuls had been Radu’s allies against Shaitan; here, they were simply rivals. And as for Nonari:
Nonari had made a blood-oath: to wipe out the dog-Lord and every last trace of him for the alleged “murders” of his father Lagula and his uncle Rakhi. But in Radu Lykan’s eyes these were never murders but the putting right of a great wrong; for Rakhi and Lagula had been members of a foul Szgany gang who had raped his sister Magda of innocence and life. Hah! The Ferenczys were survivors no more—except in Lagula’s son, Nonari. But savage as that one’s blood vow had been, it was equalled and even surpassed by Radu’s. For him there’d be neither peace nor respite until the very name Ferenczy was forgotten as if it never existed.
Their blood-feud came with them into Earth; it might have been settled there and then, in Dacia on the banks of the Danube. But this was a new world and strange, and survival was ever the first rule of the Wamphyri. So the Drakuls went up into the stony mountains (later the Carpathians) , to find or build their aeries; Nonari fled east from Radu’s wrath and took a new name; the dog-Lord crossed the river with his small pack, spread out into the lands around, and eventually became an adventurer and mercenary in a war-torn world.
But while that Classical World was vast beyond the dreams of any vampire Lord who had ever been, still it could never be big enough …
Radu’s life (and with it the history of a world) passed in pageant over the buffed and slippery boards of his memory.
The history of a world. Of wars. And of men.
The Romans. But the Empire was on the wane, at least where the dog-Lord and the others came forth. Aye, for the Goths were coming, who were the merest harbingers of what else was coming! Such wars, such battles, such blood!
But … hell-lands? Ah no! It had been more like some Wamphyri heaven … for a time. But already Radu had noted how men reacted to the presence of the Wamphyri: fearfully at first, in a world rife with superstition—but then they fought back! For while men may suffer their lands to be stolen, their wives seduced away and their children eaten, when finally there is nothing left then there’s nothing to lose. Unlike Sunside’s Szgany, not all of these men of Earth were farmers or hunter-gatherers. Great armies of warrior tribesmen were sweeping the world, and sweeping all before them. And as for fear of the Wamphyri:
Frequently these eastern invaders had not even known they went up against vampires; they were merely murdering rich Dacian landowners in their gloomy castles, or hairy halfling creatures in foothill keeps, caverns and lairs. Also, these warrior hordes knew how to destroy their enemies: how a lance or arrow through the heart would kill a man, and how his head on a lance would guarantee that he was dead! Then how to reduce his castle and its contents to ashes, until nothing remained. Such was the way of the barbarian warrior, by no means reserved for the Wamphyri. But did these methods work against the Wamphyri? Be sure they did. Indeed they were the only ones that could! The stake, the sword, the fire …
And because of the times—times of change, tumult and crisis—the legend and fact of the Wamphyri, of the blood-crazed vampire and werewolf, was almost eradicated. What need for monstrous myths in a world that was in reality a bloodbath? Forty years after Radu’s advent the Visigoths had sacked Rome itself! And forty-five years later it had fallen again, to the Vandals; except then Radu had been with the Vandals. For like every vampire Lord before him he was unable to resist blood—certainly not in such copious amounts.
War, to which Radu was drawn like a moth to the flame, and which singed him much the same. Or if not the wars, the commanders he fought under, who were treacherous to a fault. But such wars to be warred as nothing conceived by even the mightiest of the old Starside Lords! And down all the decades and centuries, the dog-Lord was a bloody mercenary washed hither and to by the red tides of conquest.
Gifted to some degree in oneiromancy, Radu used his dreams to scry on future battles. By this means he would often know in advance which side to join. Likewise, he stayed alert for portents and signs of those olden enemies who came through the Hell-lands Gate with him. And time and again he cursed himself that he’d not dealt with them then, when they were at their weakest. But then, he had been at his weakest, too.
And naive? Aye, he’d been that. To have sold his services to warlords, and think he would actually get paid and accepted as their equal.
Gaeseric of the Vandals had been the first to use and misuse him. After the sack of Rome, Radu had made his camp in the Colli Albani twelve miles out of the fallen city. Of course it was necessary to keep his “men” from the common soldiery; they were not only mercenaries and guerrillas but moon-children; he knew that fraternization could only lead to discovery, and one of the prime tenets of the vampire was that longevity was synonymous with anonymity. If men should guess what Radu was they would do away with him and his at once! And because of the dog-Lord’s preference for night-fighting by the light of the moon, Gaeseric had already dubbed him “Radu, Hound of Night.” And so it were best that the full e
xtent of his wolfishness remained a secret.
Be that as it may, still Gaeseric had tricked him, turned on him. For what was he after all but a scurvy, hairy mercenary with a handful of howling berserks, like wolves of war? But the city had fallen now and Radu and his lot had been paid off. And having paid him in gold—having let him take women, wine, and other booty out of the city—
… By now he’d be drunk up in the hills, and all that gold gone to waste.
Or perhaps not.
By means of a lie—an alleged counterattack by a fleet of the Eastern Empire—the dog-Lord’s forces were split into two contingents and dispatched to “defensive positions,” where Vandal ambushes reduced his men to ten out of a hundred and fifty. His women were ravished and slain, his gold stolen, his den in the Colli Albani destroyed. But Radu and his handful had survived to head north for the Appenino heights that stretched the full length of Italia. In a land awash in Vandals, the rugged mountains would be the safest route out.
As for the treacherous Gaeseric: the dog-Lord must add a second blood-oath to his list. And where the Vandals as a race were concerned … from that time forward Radu would always be on the lookout for a way to take his revenge …
Fleeing Italy, Radu took his time; took his much-reduced band back to the Danube, then east through the woods and mountains, and eventually down into familiar Dacian territories. This was barbarian country now, but south of the river the people were mainly Christian. Radu had only one religion: blood! The various faiths and superstitions of locals and invaders alike made little or no difference to him, except it was safer to journey among the Christians.
Finally he headed north again, into the mountains of what would much later become Wallachia. For as in Italy, he believed that in taking the high ground he’d be secure from the tides of war washing all around. He needed some time to think and formulate his plans.