… Misha, swimming naked in sun-dappled shallows, sleek and agile as a fish, and just as innocent. Misha, all silver and gold from the sunlight shimmering on her brown pixy body, laughing as she taunted Nathan, daring him to join her in the water. And seeing Misha through Nathan’s eyes—seeing her exactly as Nathan saw her—it was as if Nestor saw her for the first time, from a different viewpoint or through a different soul … which of course was precisely the case.
Then Nathan knew he was there and Nestor felt his shock, which caused him to start and bang his head against the tree. In that same moment, the scene on his mind’s eye blurred and blinked out. But not before he recognized their location: the sandy shallows at the river’s bend, where the speckled trout played in the pebbles and eels wriggled in the long grasses.
Nestor knew all the shortcuts; he could be there in four or five minutes, before Nathan accepted Misha’s dare and got into the water, and certainly before they were out again, dry and into their clothes. He could be there as quickly as that… but he wouldn’t.
It wasn’t so much what Nestor had seen through Nathan’s eyes that stopped him, for if anything that would have goaded him on; it was what he’d felt in the other’s inner being. The tumult of emotions there in his unguarded, for once unsuspecting mind. The young man trapped in a little boy’s skin, stretching to break free of it, but held back by the knowledge that he’d be a stranger here alone in a strange land. A fear, then, of growing up, when at last he’d be obliged to accept that he was a part of this world and forced to live in it. The lonely depths of his feelings; the awareness of his own outsideness; the sure knowledge that he was without purpose here and could never belong, except to Nana, and to Nestor … and to Misha, of course.
All of this concentrated in Nathan’s rapt mind, given focus there and highlighted by this crystal clear vision of innocence: a little girl, naked, swimming, laughing and real—undeniably real!—as if she were a mainstay, a prop, one of the precious few reliable factors in Nathan’s entire world of unreality; which made him fear to reach out and touch her, in case she too was just a mirage.
At the time—the real time, the waking moment of the actuality eight years ago, before the dream—Nestor hadn’t understood what he felt. It was hard enough to fathom “love”, without trying to understand something so far beyond it. And much too hard to understand the jealousy which held him back, to walk slowly home on his own; that cold void opening between him and his brother, which made him wish that Nathan really did belong in some other world, and that he would go there, soon.
One thing he had known, however, and that was the pain and the anger inside, which Nathan had caused. Yes, and Misha, too. So that if Nestor really were Wamphyri—
—Then—then.
But he wasn’t, and Nathan and Misha weren’t his thralls. They were just children playing a game. One which they’d used to play, anyway. For from that time forward they would never play it again …
Nestor’s dream was fading, slowly giving way to crushing darkness and the return of physical sensations, most of which were feelings of pain. Pain and anger, a monstrous claustrophobia, and a nameless stench.
The dream gradually receding, yes, but in its wake the pain lingering on.
And the anger …
Nathan drifted in a darkness shot with brief, brilliant bursts of violent illumination, scenes from the recent past:
Misha smiling where she held his arm tightly against her body … Nestor attempting to rape her against the wall of the barn, his voice husky with lust and fury, his hands hurting her with their fierce fondling … the ironwood bar from the door in Nathan’s hand, feeling good and hard and solid there.
Then he had hit Nestor, hard! Following which something a great deal bigger had hit him, and harder! And now this claustrophobic darkness as his memories tried to piece themselves together and become whole again.
Nathan knew he wasn’t dreaming; he was sure of that; his dreams were very special to him, and this wasn’t one of them. No, it was the period between sleeping (or lying unconscious) and waking; the interval when the real world starts to impinge again, and the mind prepares the body for a more physical existence. It was him trying to remember exactly what had happened before the world caved in, so that he would know how to act or react when it all came together again.
And occasionally in such moments, those gradually waking moments as the mind drifts up from the fathomless deeps of subconsciousness, it was also a time for communication. Sometimes Nathan would hear the dead talking in their graves, and wonder at the things they said, until they sensed him there and fell silent.
It wasn’t so much that they feared Nathan; rather they were uncertain of his nature, and so held themselves reserved and aloof. This was understandable enough, for in their terms it wasn’t so long ago that there had been things in this world other than men, more evil than men, which had preyed upon the living and the dead alike; the former for the blood which is the life, and the latter for all the knowledge gone down into their graves with them. Things whose alien nature, whose condition, was neither life nor death but lay somewhere in between the two, in a seething, sunless no-man’s-land called undeath! They had been the Wamphyri, who were known to spawn the occasional necromancer: one of the very few things that the dead fear. Which was why the Great Majority were wary of Nathan.
He knew none of this, only that he sometimes overheard them talking in their graves, and that where he was concerned they were secretive. He was like an eavesdropper, who had no control over his vice.
But in fact, and despite that he could hear them talking and might even have conversed with them (if they had let him), Nathan was no eavesdropper in the true sense of the word, and no necromancer. He did come close to the latter, however; very close—perhaps too close—though he wasn’t aware of it yet. But the dead were, and they daren’t take any chances with him. They’d trusted his father upon a time, and at the end even he had turned out to be something of a two-edged sword.
And so Nathan lay very still and listened neither maliciously nor negligently, but out of a natural curiosity, and in a little while began to hear the thoughts of the teeming dead in their graves: the merest whispers or the echoes of whispers at first—and then a great confusion of whispers—going out through the earth like sentient, invisibly connecting rootlets, and tying the Great Majority together in the otherwise eternal silence of their lonely places.
It didn’t feel at all strange to Nathan—he’d listened to the dead like this, between dreams and waking, for as long as he could remember—but this time it was different. Their whispered conversations were hushed as never before, anxious, questioning, even … horrified?
For on this occasion there were newcomers among them—too many newcomers, and others who came even now—bringing tales of an ancient terror risen anew. Nathan caught only the general drift of it. But it was as if, along with a background hiss and shiver of mental static, he also heard the rustling of a thousand pairs of mummied hands all being wrung together. And so in the moment before they sensed him, he became aware that their fear was no nebulous thing but in fact very tangible.
This much he learned, and no more. For as soon as they knew he was there …
… Their thoughts shrank back at once, were withdrawn, cut off, and there was only a shocked, reverberating silence in the otherwise empty mental ether. It was as sudden as that, giving Nathan no time to probe any deeper into the problem; but at least he thought he knew how they had sensed him so quickly: because they had been alert as never before, almost as if they were expecting some … intrusion? The only thing that worried him about it, was how in the end he’d sensed that they identified him with the source of their terror!
And finally, before their withdrawal, there had been the name of that terror, which at the last was whispered from the tips of a thousand shrivelled tongues, or tongues long turned to dust: Wamphyri!
But why should that be—how could it be—that these long defunct
legions of the teeming dead feared the Wamphyri, who were themselves dead and gone forever?
Nathan knew he would find no answer to that here, not yet, not now that the dead had fallen silent. And so he left them to return to their whispered conversations, and rose up from his dreams to seek the answer elsewhere …
… Rose up from dreams, to nightmare! To a memory complete with every detail of what had gone before, except the answer to the question: what had happened here? But in his first few waking moments Nathan knew he had that, too, for the dead had already supplied it.
It was a fact, all too hideously reinforced by the alien stench of warrior exhaust gases, the rubble in which he lay sprawled, the distant screams of the dead and the dying, and other sounds which could only translate as inhuman … laughter? Unless all of these elements were figments of his imagination, and Nathan himself a raving madman, it could only add up to one thing: the Wamphyri were back! And they were here even now, in Settlement!
Which prompted other questions: how long had he been unconscious? Minutes, he suspected, a handful at most. And what of Misha, and his mother … and Nestor?
Nathan dragged himself upright, clambered shakily out of the debris of the barn—and back into it at once! For out there, maybe fifty yards towards the town centre, he’d seen the incredible bulk of a warrior hurl itself against a barter house and reduce it to so much rubble. And overhead, a huge, kite-shaped flying thing had arched its wings as it came down like some weird leaf into the main street.
Someone moaned in the litter of timber and straw at Nathan’s feet: Misha!
He tore at the rubbish, hurling it aside, and stared down at Nestor’s face, all bruised and bloodied. He was stretched our flat, unconscious, three-quarters buried; but it was his moan Nathan had heard, not Misha’s. And even as he looked at him, so Nestor moaned again. But there in the rubble beside him … a slender white arm. And this time it must be Misha!
Trying not to bury Nestor deeper yet, Nathan dug her out. He slapped her face, gathered her up in his arms, whispered her name urgently in her ear. She was wan, dusty, pale in the starlight falling through wispy smoke and gut-wrenching stench. He couldn’t tell if she was breathing or not.
In the near-distance, the Wamphyri warrior roared as it moved inwards towards the town centre. Nathan looked around. The stockade fence was buckled outwards behind what had been his mother’s house. There was a gap there, where the great wooden uprights had been wrenched apart. And beyond the gap, the dark forest. The darkness had never seemed so welcoming.
Nathan saw how it must be, what he must do: first carry Misha to safety, then search for his mother, who was probably buried in the ruins of the house, finally come back one last time for Nestor.
He picked Misha up and staggered from the ruins towards the break in the stockade fence. But half-way there he heard a panting and a patter of feet and looked back. A great wolf-shape—obviously one of Settlement’s trained animals—had come from the direction of the main street and seemed to be making straight for him, seeking human company. All very well, but Nathan would have problems enough saving the girl he loved and his family, without having to worry about …
Nathan’s eyes went wide, wider. The wolf seemed to be enveloped in a drifting cloud of mist, and one of its forepaws was bulky with something that made a dull glitter. More biped than quadruped—loping towards him at an aggressive, forward-leaning angle—it only went to all fours in order to sniff the earth and turn its great ears this way and that, listening. Worse: its eyes were scarlet and glowed like lamps in the dark, and to cover its hindquarters it wore belted leather trousers!
And now Nathan saw that it wasn’t coming through the mist, but that the mist was issuing from it!
He had heard all the campfire stories of the old Wamphyri—their powers, hybridisms, animalisms—and knew what he was facing. And of course knew that he was a dead man.
Canker Canison came loping, reared up snarling, as tall and taller than Nathan …!
Nathan tried one last time to stand Misha on her own two feet and shake her awake, to no avail. He held up a hand, uselessly, to ward the dog-, fox-, wolf-thing off. Canker came to a halt and leaned forward. He sniffed at Nathan, then at the girl in his arms, and cocked his head on one side, questioningly. And: “Yours?” he growled.
Nathan held Misha back from the monster; Canker laughed, caught him by the scruff of the neck and hurled him brutally aside, against the stockade wall. Unsupported, Misha crumpled to her knees. Canker caught her up, sniffed at her again, and snatched her rags of clothing from her in a moment.
And as Nathan slumped to a heap in the long grasses at the base of the damaged wall—even as his eyes glazed over and he passed out—he was aware of Canker’s eyes on him and his writhing muzzle, and the spray of foam coughing from his jaws as he laughed again and said: “No, not yours—mine!”
What he did not see or hear, because he was already unconscious, was the scream of a terrified woman running through the streets: the way Canker let Misha fall to go chasing after her, and his grunted philosophy:
“Better a live one than one half-dead.” And his half-bark, half-shout—“Wait my pretty, for Canker’s coming!”
—as he plunged after his doomed, demented victim …
The pain and the anger …
And not only inside, but outside, too.
It was an hour later and Nestor’s turn to come awake—slowly at first, then with a sickening rush! And like Nathan before him, he too woke up from a dream to a nightmare. Except where Nathan had remembered everything, Nestor remembered very little: a handful of scattered, uncertain fragments of what had gone before. Mainly he remembered the pain and the anger, both of which were still present, though whether they sprang from dream or reality or both, he was unable to say.
Three-quarters buried in rubble, dust, straw, his body was one huge ache. His face was a mess and some of his teeth were loose; at the back of his head, above his right ear, an area of his skull felt soft, crushed. When he put up a tentative, trembling exploratory hand through the debris to touch it, agonizing lances of white light shot off into his brain. Something shifted and grated under his probing: the fractured bone of his skull, indenting a little from the pressure of his fingers.
He asked himself the same question that his brother had asked: what had happened? But unlike Nathan, he had no answer. Not yet.
He pushed at wooden boards pressing down on him, shoved them aside, choked as dust and stench fell on him from above. But framed in the gap he could see the stars up there, drifting smoke, and strange dark diamond shapes that soared in the sky. And he could hear a throbbing, sputtering rumble, fading into the distance.
Yes, and other sounds: faint, far cries … moaning … sobbing … someone shouting a name over and over again, desperately and yet without hope.
Nestor kicked at the rubble, extricated his arms, dragged himself into a seated position and shoved the clutter from his legs. He looked around, at first without seeing or recognizing anything; there was nothing here that his glazed eyes and stunned mind were prepared to take in. No, there was something: the tall stockade fence, which for a moment focused his attention. But even that was different, gapped in places and leaning outwards a little.
He stood up, staggered, stepped from the debris. Whatever had happened here, his clothing seemed to have been ripped half from him! Automatically, fumblingly—like a man flicking dust from his cuffs after a hard fall—he made adjustments to his trousers, his leather shirt. And slowly, reeling a little, he headed for the town centre, away from the rubble of his mother’s house.
His mother’s house?
Now where had that thought come from? And turning to look back at the freshly made chaos—at the black, jutting, splintered timbers and smoking mounds of debris, under a dark shroud of still settling dust—he slowly shook his head. No, for his mother’s house had been a warm and welcoming place. Hadn’t it?
Along the way, voices continued to cry
out from shattered buildings; people stumbled like ghosts here and there, calling for help, or for lost families; flames gouted up where hearth fires turned ruined homes to funeral pyres. There was nothing Nestor could do about any of this, for there were far too many people in need of help. And anyway he needed help himself.
He began to remember names and fractured, jumbled fragments of conversation:
Jason, Misha, Nathan, Lardis, Andrei … Nestor?
Jason: “What will you do?”
Nestor, growling: “It’s Misha’s choice. With or without her, I’ll go. But be sure I’ll be back one day.”
Misha, afraid: “Because … because he needed someone! And I was the only one who cared. But Nestor … why are you doing this?”
Nestor, determinedly: “When your father and brothers learn what’s happened, then they’ll kill me!”
Misha, astonished: “No, they may not, for you are the Lord Nestor!”
Nestor: “Of course! And I fear no man, for I am Wamphyri!”
Nathan: (But here there was nothing, no words at all but a cataract of numbers foaming down the falls of Nestor’s mind and forming endless, meaningless patterns there, one of which was a weird figure-of-eight symbol like a discarded apple rind or wood-shaving lying on its side. And rising over the rush and swirl of numbers, a distant, dismal howling of wolves. And superimposed over all these things a haunted, haunting face, all sad and lonely and … accusing?)
Lardis: “This is where the powers of the hell-lands and those of the Wamphyri clashed and cancelled each other out.”
Andrei: “But they’re gone now, reduced to dust and ghosts, and we should let them lie.”
Nestor, in anger: “What, ghosts? The Wamphyri? Never. For I am the Lord Nestor!”
The voices came and went in Nestor’s head: voices out of the past, the present, the imagination. Voices from child-reality, adult-reality, and unreality alike, all seeking the stability of a central focus, revolving together in the grand free-for-all of his trauma. True memories merged into pseudo-memories as his past life faded away and devolved to a single, self-repeating phrase, I am Nestor of the Wamphyri! Until it seemed certain that the present, surreal and incoherent as a dream, could only be a dream, given substance by the subconscious will of its creator. And Nestor felt relieved to know that he was only dreaming.