'Nothing.'
'Nothing?' She arched her eyebrows.
'I only asked... where shall it be?'
The garden, said The Dweller, far away in the mountains.
They heard him, and Karen agreed, 'Aye, the garden has its merits. We know it well, anyway.'
Finally, with a furious nod, the Necroscope surrendered to his vampire. In part, at least. 'Very well,' he snarled, 'the garden. So be it!'
And so it would be.
In Starside ...
It was the hour when all that remains of the furnace sun is a smudgy grey luminosity in a sky gnawed by jutting fangs of mountain, and the nameless stars are chunks of alien ice freezing in weird orbits. The deepest, darkest hour of sundown, and the last of the Wamphyri - Shaithis and Shaitan, Harry Keogh and Karen - were coming together to do battle in an empty place once called the garden. All four of them, the last of their race, and The Dweller, too; except he was no longer Wamphyri as such, or if he was even his vampire scarcely knew it.
Karen had known for some time now that the invaders were close and closing on Starside, ever since her creatures out on the rim of the rimy ocean called to her one last time to pass on that information - before they died. And as they died, so Karen had asked them: How many are the enemy, and what are their shapes? It was easier far to gauge strength and substance that way than from complicated descriptions; the distance was great, and the brains of warriors are never too large (unwise to invest such masses of menace with other than the most rudimentary intelligence). Nevertheless, vague pictures of flyers, warriors, and controlling beings had come back pain-etched out of the north, showing Karen how small was the army of Shaitan.
It consisted only of a pair of controlling Lords, who rode upon massive flyers with scale-plated heads and underbellies, and a half-dozen warriors of generally unorthodox construction. Unorthodox, aye ... to say the least. For the invaders (who could only be Shaithis and Shaitan the Fallen, though Karen held back from any kind of direct contact with their minds) had apparently seen fit to break all the olden rules of the Wamphyri in the fashioning of these beasts. For one they had organs of generation, much like Karen's constructs, and for another they seemed to act much of their own accord, without the guidance of their supposed controllers. Lastly, one of them was a monster even among monsters! So much so that Karen didn't even care to dwell upon it.
At first (she was informed) there had been an extra pair of flyers, weary beasts whose riders landed them in deep drifts close to the edge of the ocean. Alighting, the Wamphyri Lords had then called down their warriors and fresh flyers out of the sky, allowing them to fuel themselves on the exhausted bodies of these first mounts. And while they were busy with their food, that was when Karen's guardian creatures had attacked... only to discover the overwhelming ferocity and superiority of Shaitan's warriors. That was the message which the last of Karen's beasts conveyed to her, before its feeble mind-sendings were swamped by dull pain and quickly extinguished.
Harry had been asleep at that time, wracked by nightmares. Karen had watched him tossing and turning, and listened to him mouthing of 'the cone-shaped universes of light', and of Möbius, a wizard he'd known in the hell-lands: 'a mathematician who got religion; a madman who believes God is an equation... which is more or less what Pythagoras believed, but centuries before him!' And of the Möbius Continuum, that fabulous, fathomless place where he'd made metamorphic love to her, and which he now considered 'an infinite brain controlling the bodies of universes, in which simple beings such as myself are mere synapses conveying thoughts and intentions, and perhaps carrying out... some One's will?'
By then the Necroscope's dream had been a feverish thing, full of thoughts, conversations and associations out of his past, even past dreams, all tangled in a kaleidoscope of the real and surreal, where his life from its onset was observed to have been metamorphic as his flesh in the way it had burst open to sprout weird discoveries and concepts. The dream contained - even as a dying man's last breath is said to contain - crucial elements of that entire life, but concertinaed into a single vision of mere moments.
When the cold sweat started out on his grey brow, Karen might have gentled him awake; except his words fascinated her; and anyway he needed to sleep, in order to be strong for the coming battle. Perhaps he would settle down again when the nightmare was past. And so she sat by him while he sweated and raved of things quite beyond her conception.
About time's relativity and all history, that of the future as well as the past, being contemporary but occurring in some strange 'elsewhere'; and about the dead - the real dead, not the undead - waiting patiently in their graves for a new beginning, their second coming; and about a great light, the Primal Light, 'which is the ongoing, unending Bigger Bang as all the universes expand for ever out of darkness!' He mumbled about numbers with the power to separate space and time, and of a metaphysical equation, 'whose only justification is to extend Mind beyond the span of the merely physical'.
On one level, it was the subconscious whirlpool of Harry's instinctive mathematical genius enhanced by his now ascendant vampire; while on a higher plane it was a violent confrontation between two entirely elemental powers: Darkness and Light, Good and Evil, Knowledge for its own sake (which is sin), and the total absence of knowledge, which is innocence. It was the Necroscope's subconscious battle with himself, within himself, which must be fought and won lest the final darkness fall; for Harry himself would be the bright guardian of worlds still to come, or their utter destruction before they were even born.
But Karen didn't know any of that, only that she mustn't wake him just yet. And Harry fevered on. 'I could give you formulae you haven't even dreamed of...'he sneered out of some all but forgotten past time, while the lights of his eyes burned scarlet through lowered, frantically fluttering lids. 'An eye for an eye, Dragosani, and a tooth for a tooth! I was Harry Keogh... became my own son's sixth sense, before Alec Kyle's emptied head sucked me in and made his body mine... The great liar Faéthor would have lived in there with me, but where's Faéthor now, eh? And where's Thibor? And what of the Bodescu brat? And Janos?' Suddenly he sobbed and great tears squeezed themselves out from under his luminous eyelids.
'And Brenda? Sandra? Penny? Am I cursed or blessed...?
'I had a million friends, which would be fine except they were all dead! They "lived" in a dimension beyond life, where I could still talk to them and they could still remember what it was to have been alive.
'There are many dimensions, planes of existence without number, worlds without end. The myriad cone-shaped universes of light. And I know how they came about. And Möbius knew it before me. Pythagoras might have guessed something of it, but Möbius and I know\
'Let there be...' (He screwed up his tightly closed eyes.) 'Let there be...' (Great slugs of sweat oozed out of his shuddering lead-grey body.) 'Let there be....'
Until Karen could stand his pain - for this could only be pain - no longer. And clutching him where he writhed upon her bed, she begged him: 'Let there be what, Harry?'
'Light!' he growled, and his furious eyes shot open, aglow with their own heat.
'Light?' she repeated him, her voice full of wonder.
He struggled to sit up, gave in and let himself sink down into her arms. And he looked at her, nodded and said, 'Yes, the Primal Light, which shone out of His mind.'
Harry's eyes had always been weird, even before his vampire stained them with blood, but now they were changing from moment to moment. Karen saw the fury go out of them, then the fear, and watched fascinated as all alien vitality - even the very passion of the Wamphyri -died in them. For with only one exception the Necroscope was the first of his sort to know and believe.