Blood Brothers

  He got down from the bed, looked towards the door. “You had better go.” His voice was shaky.

  “Or what?” Hers was sultry, hot, teasing. “How will you punish me, if I don’t?” She lay back, lifted her dress, showed Nathan how she was naked underneath, and everything displayed. Then, spreading her legs wantonly, she ran her fingers through her bush. Her dark flesh quaked and opened like a small mouth, moist and pouting, so that from where Nathan stood two paces away, still he could feel its sweet suction—and its venom.

  “Go now,” he said, hardening his voice, “at once, or risk Maglore’s wrath!”

  “Hah!” she was up on her feet in a moment. “But we thought you were fresh from Sunside, a young lad bursting with seed. We did not know that Maglore had bought you from Zindevar, who has doubtless kept you as a gelding in Cronespire, where your sole duty has been to oil the creaking leather of her flaccid teats! And did she steal your dark Gypsy colours, too, as well as your manhood, you pale trembling whelp?”

  “Out!” Nathan went to the door, held it open.

  “What?” She was furious now: her nostrils flaring, eyes blazing crimson, mouth a writhing, hissing, cursing gash. “Do you really spurn me? Do you dare? I see that you do! Fuck you then, you pallid, sapless freak!” She swept by him and out of the room.

  It had been the first of Nathan’s several encounters with Maglore’s women; in respect of which, it seemed that both Nicolae and the Seer Lord were perfectly correct …

  Nathan was mentally and physically exhausted. Fully clothed, with all three of his blankets covering him, he did eventually sleep but it was a long time coming. In the end he only succeeded after reminding himself that awake or asleep Runemanse was a place fraught with terrors, and that like it or not and for as long as he stayed here he must sleep and replenish himself at frequent intervals. Then, as he felt himself slipping from eerie awareness into the darkness of equally weird dreams, he remembered to cloak his telepathic mind with the vast and incomprehensible swirl of the numbers vortex, hopefully to protect it from the incursions of other minds with similar abilities.

  In this way he shrouded his secret mind at least, which in any case would be cluttered with the debris of his waking hours and hard to decipher. But where telepathy is communication between living, physical minds, deadspeak is something else entirely. Only the minds of the dead were tuned to it, and Nathan’s mind, of course…

  Nathaaan! The dead voice was only a whisper at first, a sigh in the dark, uneasy drift of subconscious wandering. But as Nathan heard it, focused upon it, and drew closer to its source, so all other memories, pseudo-memories and dream-clutter were brushed aside; and the voice grew stronger. Nathaaan? It was a clotted gurgle, a dead and rotten thing, and despite its incorporeality, it was still the very “embodiment” of evil. So that Nathan was instinctively aware that this was a voice from the pit.

  “Who are you?” he asked it breathlessly, as his sleeping body grew cold and the short hairs stood erect on the back of his neck. “What… are you?”

  Ask what I was, the thing answered, its voice mournful now and racked with a sob. For that is something I can tell you, aye, and perhaps even show you. But as for what I am … why, I am no longer anything! Or if anything at all, an old dead thing in his lightless grave, blind and shrivelled and leathery as the mummified Thyre in their cavern mausoleums. That is what I am.

  “The Thyre? What do you know of them?” Nathan remembered his vow: he would never reveal his knowledge of the desert folk to the outside world. But it seemed that this one already knew of them. Something of them, at least.

  Do I know of them? Ah, better than you think! Why, for fifty long years I have lain here in my solitude and listened to them through the long blind night: the echoes of their dead thoughts, drifting in from their dusty tombs, over Sunside and the barrier mountains, and down into Turgosheim. They are dead things no less than I myself, and so in my solitude I am privy to their thoughts. Except they are unkind and will not speak to me, and I no longer try to speak to them. But you … are different. You are alive, Nathan! Your works have definition in the land of the living. You can make change, can bring things into being! Whereas I myself and all the dreaming Thyre, because we are only dead things, can change nothing.

  Nathan was wary of the thing, whose evil was a miasma in his mind. “You know my name, knew that I was here. How could you know these things, without that we’ve met before?”

  How could I know? But I feel your trembling footsteps in the rock, which reverberate down to me like thunder! By comparison, Maglore’s comings and goings are a patter of raindrops, and his thralls a slither of leaves. Also, I hear your dreaming thoughts, called deadspeak, which are solid as spoken words to me, while the living hear nothing at all. Ah, you can build your barrier of numbers against the living, Nathan, but you may not shield your mind from the dead! We know you, Necroscope!

  The thing seemed to know altogether too much. “We?” Nathan answered. “But the Thyre shun you, you’ve admitted as much. And you talk about your ‘solitude’, which would seem to imply that all of the dead shun you. You can only be Wamphyri!”

  Wamphyri, of course! said the other. It’s no big secret. I am what I am. But I’m also dead, and you are the Necroscope. Or does your pity exclude such as me, as I have been excluded from light and life and existence itself, except as an old and crumbling thing in the rock?

  Despite his instinctive caution, still Nathan was curious. “Where are you—exactly?”

  Where I dwelled for an hundred years; where I was blinded by treacherous sons and buried; where even now I stiffen to a stone, to become one with all the stones of Turgosheim. Upon a time my home was Mad-manse. Now it is only my tomb …

  Madmanse? Nathan didn’t know about Madmanse.

  Ah, no! The thing at once explained. Despite that Maglore and I were neighbours, you won’t see Madmanse from his windows. For he was above and I was below.

  “In Turgosheim’s lower reaches?”

  Look you, said the other. You know that Runemanse is like a turret, a hollow promontory of rock jutting from the rim of the gorge? Well, its column goes down into the roots of Turgosheim itself. The upper levels are Maglore’s, but down below … is Madmanse! You must visit me one day. Maglore knows the way: an old stairwell, winding down, down. We shared the same wells, upon a time … The other’s voice had sunk to a ghastly gurgle, suggestive, insinuating, inveigling. It was overpowering, very nearly hypnotic …

  But even dreaming, still Nathan sensed his danger. “Very well,” he said, pushing back the reek of mental contagion. “So now I know where you are. But I still don’t know who you were. Did you have a name?”

  A name? Oh, indeed! The other’s oozing, poisonous voice was more ghastly yet, like an evocation of immemorial horror, shuddering into life from beyond the grave. My name was much feared in its time, even among the Wamphyri. I was Eygor Killglance, whose very eyes were instruments of death—which was the reason my twin bastard bloodsons blinded and destroyed me! Also why they fled in the end; for they knew that I was still here, and they feared the dreams I sent them, to plague them all their days. Well, now the dogs are gone, even beyond the reach of my dreams. But they’ll be back one day, and I shall still be here, waiting …

  A little of Eygor’s loneliness, his helplessness—but a great deal more of his bitterness, hatred, and frustration—touched Nathan’s metaphysical mind, clinging there and burning like hot tears, or perhaps like acid. In the moment of its passion, the old thing in its long-forgotten vault had become more than just a disembodied mind; now it was more truly a Being in its own right, and Nathan took the opportunity to look deeper at what the once-master of Madmanse had been like towards the end of his time.

  The other sensed the extension of Nathan’s mind and knew that he had drawn closer. Aye, seek me out, he said. First in dreams and then in life. Here I am, here—in the dark and the dank and the drear of my prison, where I died in the mire of Madmanse …
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  Nathan could see, but dimly. He stood in a gloomy cathedral of a cave, vast and high-ceilinged, whose walls dripped slime and nitre. The floor was a clutter of anomalous debris, humped, fibrous, boggy. Spongy bones and white-shining cartilage gleamed everywhere, like a boneyard of monsters. The place was a vampire refuse pit, diseased, disused, and sealed up forever. But not everything here was refuse. Or perhaps it was—now.

  Something leaned or slumped against the wall. At first Nathan took it for some strange stalagmite formation: a fantastic dripstone creation of nature. But he saw that its shape was much too irregular, and its texture darker than the salty, nitre-streaked stone. Lured by a morbid fascination, he willed his dream-self into motion and approached until the thing towered over him, clinging to the curve of the cavern’s wall. And as Nathan’s perspective changed so details stood out clearer, and the true nature of the thing was known.

  It was … a monstrous amalgam, a welding together of everything unwholesome! Like Maglore’s guardian creature in its curtained niche under the central staircase in Runemanse’s great hall, this thing’s general outline was manlike. But the Seer Lord’s creature was not eighteen feet tall and composed of fused bone, black mummied flesh, knobs of gristly cartilage, and plates of gleaming-blue chitin. Nor did Maglore’s guardian have additional mouths in its bloated body and rubbery limbs, as well as the one in its face!

  Nathan’s dream-self drew back a pace. His fevered eyes scanned the size, the shape and diseased design of this thing slumped in a kneeling position against the wall. Its horny fossil feet and shrivelled, leathery thighs; its arched back and shoulders, and misshapen, screaming skull. Fused to the wall by nitre, the great head was thrown back, jaws frozen in some everlasting rictus. A withered arm lay along a ledge of rock, terminating in a talon that drooped from a wrist almost as thick as Nathan’s thigh, where blackened bones protruded from dusty, fretted, crumbling flesh. Or at least, from the desiccated stuff which once had been flesh.

  And: Welcome to Madmanse, the awful voice said, and Nathan knew that it was this gargoyle who spoke to him. You entered of your own free will, and I shall make you heir to all of my mysteries—if you so desire. For I had powers in my time, Necroscope, just as you have powers now. And who knows but that one day we might trade something for something, and so benefit mutually from our … transaction?

  Nathan knew he should leave, and now. But this was a new experience. This dead creature—this otherwise extinct mind—was no innocent Thyre ancient dreaming incorporeal dreams of the past, but a Lord of the Wamphyri still hoping against hope and scheming for some highly improbable future! Indeed an entirely impossible future, without Nathan. Eygor’s tenacity was that of the vampire, and Nathan was his one thread of contact, his one chance of continuity.

  “There’s nothing I want from you,” he said, backing off farther yet. “All you knew in life was horror, of which I’ve had more than enough, and probably a great deal more to come. All thanks to the Wamphyri.”

  But can’t you see the irony in it? The other was insistent. That I could be the instrument to right all of the wrongs you’ve suffered?

  Was it possible, Nathan wondered? To fight the Wamphyri with their own evil? Was that the way to go? But what power did this creature have? And how, now that Eygor was dead, might Nathan become “heir to all of (his) mysteries”?

  Ah, there. The other sighed in Nathan’s mind. Now see how I have sparked your interest, Necroscope. Aye, and I fancy we shall speak again, and soon. But for now—ware! For I know the patter of Maglore’s sly, slippered feet. And the Mage of Runemanse approaches even now. Until the next time, then …

  Abruptly, the cavern and its occupant disappeared; the numbers vortex sprang up in its place; Nathan felt the familiar, furious tugging of alien formulae, and also Maglore’s mind-probes recoiling from the whorl and suck of his mental barrier.

  “Nathaaan! Nathan!” The transition from one evil voice in his metaphysical mind to another in his entirely physical ears was confusing … until a claw-like hand grasped his shoulder and shook him, rocking him in his bed.

  “Who? What…?” He came gasping awake.

  “Who indeed?” Maglore’s face was hideous—and accusing?—in the yellow-flaring light of the gas jets, where he leaned over him. “Who is it comes to visit you in your sleep, Nathan? Who do you talk to, secretly, in your dreams?”

  “My dreams?” Nathan’s guard was firmly in place. Quickly awake, he tried to sit up and Maglore withdrew a little to let him. “Was I dreaming?” His brow was feverish and he was trembling. “Yes, yes I was! But not a dream, a nightmare, which now has gone.”

  “Ah, a nightmare!” Maglore nodded curtly, his red eyes swivelling this way and that, as if seeking out some vestige of the unknown visitant. “That which comes in the darkness to terrify the sleeping mind. The memory of some fearful event out of the past, perhaps, or the prescience of that which is yet to befall.” He cocked his head in a listening attitude, sniffing at the air like a hound before seating himself on the edge of Nathan’s bed. “The result of gluttonous overeating, or merely a case of conscience. But … guilty conscience, perhaps?”

  Nathan kept his mind shielded and played the innocent. It wasn’t difficult, for after all he was innocent. “Did I eat too much, Master?” He ignored the implied accusation.

  Maglore narrowed his eyes, but still Nathan saw right into them. The master of Runemanse was thinking, Does he continue to play word games with me? One thing for sure: he’s no fool, this Nathan.

  But as Maglore stood up, so he made inquiry; “And are you hungry?”

  Nathan threw back his blankets, thrust his feet over the edge of the bed and joined the Seer Lord on his feet. “I think I am,” he said. He glanced out of the high window and noted the orientation of the stars. And so he should be hungry, for he’d slept half-way through sundown!

  “Then you did not eat too much,” Maglore told him. “And so we’re left with a case of conscience; or perhaps some real however intangible thing, which came to you in your sleep. Do you believe in ghosts?”

  “Yes,” said Nathan at once, relieved that he could speak the truth. Of course he believed in ghosts, for he of all men knew that they were real, even though they were not always the dark phantoms of myth which men supposed. But Maglore, for all that he was a mage, didn’t know that.

  The Seer Lord nodded. “And so you should believe in them, and especially here. Let me advise you, Nathan, that Turgosheim has known a variety of terrible men and creatures. Though they themselves are gone, their auras dwell here still. And in Runemanse, you are not the only one who dreams dark dreams.”

  He looked Nathan up and down. “But tell me, why are you dressed? You did not simply fall asleep on top of the bed, for I saw you under the covers. Is there something here which you fear? Has someone … bothered you?” His frown brought his eyebrows crushing inwards under a warp of wrinkled forehead. And once again he glanced this way and that, and sniffed the air. Until, in a moment: “A woman!” he said.

  “She did me no harm,” Nathan shook his head. “She showed me the way here, that’s all.”

  Maglore glared at him furiously. “What? She showed you the way? Oh, she would do that, all right! Any one of them would do that!” He grasped Nathan’s arm. “Who was she? Did she touch you, kiss you, offer you her body? Speak, fool! Did you take her?” But even as Nathan began to shake his head: “What? Do you lie to me? Why, there’s not a horny red-blooded man born of woman who could deny those whores of mine, except maybe a whelp who doesn’t know what a woman is!”

  Nathan felt his ears burning red …

  Astonished, the Seer Lord gazed deep into his eyes, and saw the truth written there. “What?” he said. “A strapping man, Szgany, almost twenty years old and never bedded a woman? Hah!” He slapped his thigh. “Little wonder they’re prettied up and on the prowl! I’ve never seen them so agitated! But … can it be true? You’re a virgin?”

  “I … I had a … g-
g-girl, Szgany,” Nathan answered. It was the first time he’d stumbled and stuttered in a long time. And now he resolved never to do it again. “She was stolen away by Canker Canison, into Starside,” his voice hardened. “Perhaps she would have been mine, if things had been different. Anyway, we kept apart from taking lovers, and waited for each other.”

  “Ah, true love!” Maglore fluttered long, almost furry eyelashes and sighed sarcastically. “The dog Canker got her, yes?” He shook his head, made sympathetic clucking noises. “I trust you have forgotten her? If not, you may safely do so.”

  Nathan was not required to reply.

  “Now, try to understand my concern, my anger,” Maglore’s tone was conciliatory. “If you are seduced by some creature of mine, you will no longer be your own creature, and therefore of no earthly use to me. It is my desire to keep your blood, body, and very mind clean and free of other influences—except my own. For I have enough of vampires, and at times the fawning of thralls becomes an annoyance. This is no unique situation, however; you will not be the first entirely human being who ever stayed in Runemanse …” He paused, and in a little while continued:

  “Well, and no doubt you are wondering why I’m here. Since I was passing this way I thought to look in on you, and if you were awake bring you to table. You shall take all of your meals with me, for sometimes I crave the company of common men. Also, it seems I must keep you safe—for the time being, anyway—until I can make other arrangements.” He spoke musingly, almost to himself. But then:

  “Come,” he made for the door. “You can wash in my apartments, and while we eat we shall continue our conversation. I desire to know you better, my son. For after all, your welfare is in my hands …” Maglore glanced at Nathan sideways where he hurried to keep up, but the Seer Lord’s thoughts were now as inscrutable as his expression …