Deadspawn

The Minister nodded. 'That was the idea.' He dabbed at his face with a handkerchief. 'But a bad one, it now seems.'

It was Paxton's turn. 'He's a telepath,' he said, his voice hard-edged, defiant.

'Harry?' Ben Trask stared at him.

Paxton nodded. 'He was into my mind like a ferret down a rat-hole! He warned me off and told me he wouldn't be warning me again. Also, his eyes were feraclass="underline" they shone behind those dark glasses he wears. And he doesn't much care for the sunlight.'

'You've really been hard at work, haven't you?' Trask growled. But this time he couldn't accuse him of lying.

'Look,' said the other, 'I was given a job to do. Like the Minister said, after Wellesley he couldn't take any chances. So when Clarke came back from the Greek islands I hooked into him. And I learned about his suspicion that maybe Keogh was a vampire. Another thing: Keogh told me to tell the Minister that his "worst nightmare" had come true. Ergo: Keogh's a vampire!'

The Minister was quick to add: 'That last isn't proven yet. But it is starting to look that way. The thing is, Keogh has had a lot of contact with these creatures. Close contact. Maybe this last time there was a little too much contact.'

Paxton again: 'Look, I know I'm a relative newcomer, and you don't much like me, and in the past you've all had reason to be grateful for Harry Keogh. But have these things blinded you to the facts? OK, so you don't want to believe me - don't even want to believe yourselves - but just think what we're up against if we're right.

'He can talk to the dead, who apparently know a hell of a lot. He uses the Möbius Continuum to go anywhere he wants to, instantly, like we take a step into another room. He's a telepath. And now he not only speaks to the dead but calls them back, too!'

'He could do that before,' said Ben Trask, not without a shudder.

'But now he calls them back to what looks like life.' Paxton was relentless. 'From their ashes! Life? Or undeath?'

At which David Chung gave a mighty start, reeled like someone had hit him, and choked something out in Cantonese. Most of the espers were on their feet by now, but Chung gropingly found a chair and flopped down again. Frowning, the Minister Responsible said, 'Mister Chung?'

Chung's pallor gave his face a sickly lemon tint. He wiped his shining brow and licked his lips, and again mumbled something to himself in Chinese. Then he looked up and his eyes were wide. 'You all know what I do,' he said, his words a little sibilant and clipped in his fashion. 'I'm a locator, sympathetic. I take a model or a piece of something and use it to find the real thing. It's Branch policy that I take and keep safe from each one of you a small item of your personal belongings. This is for your own safety: if you go missing, I can find you.

'Well, I also have several items belonging to Harry Keogh, stuff he's left here from time to time...

'I was out in the Mediterranean with the others. I knew Zek Föener had been worried about something, and so I too have been keeping tabs on Harry. I told myself it was for his own good. But I knew what I was doing and what I was looking for.

'At first when I scried on him it was just him; there was nothing different; it felt right. I got a picture of him, you know? Not doing anything, just a picture of him as I knew him, up there at his home in Edinburgh or wherever he was. But recently the picture has been dim, misty, and last night and this morning there wasn't much of Harry there at all; just a mist, a fog. I was going to submit a report on it tomorrow.'

'In the old days,' Trask said, 'we used to call that mind-smog. It's what you get when you try to scan a vampire.'

'I know,' Chung nodded. He was more nearly recovered now. 'It was partly that which hit me, and partly something else. Paxton said that Harry could call dead people up from their ashes. That's what hit me the most.'

'What?' the Minister was frowning again.

Chung looked at him. 'I also have things which used to belong to Trevor Jordan,' he said. 'And this morning, just by accident, I happened to touch one of them. It was like Trevor was right here, right next door or down the street. And I thought it was something out of my memory. It was there and then it was gone. But it just struck me that he very well could have been here, just down the street!'

The Minister still hadn't taken it in, but Trask soon took care of that. Pale as a ghost, he whispered: 'My God! Jordan was cremated out in Rhodes, burned to ashes in case he'd been infected with vampirism. But Jesus, now that I think of it, I remember how it was Harry Keogh who insisted on it!'

Part Two

(Four Years Earlier)

1

The Icelands

The Great Wamphyri Lords Belath, Lesk the Glut, Menor Maimbite, Lascula Longtooth and Tor Tornbody were no more. All of these and many lesser Wamphyri lights, their lieutenants and warrior-creatures, all wiped out by The Dweller and his father in the battle for The Dweller's garden. That battle was lost, the kilometre-high aeries of the Wamphyri (all except the Lady Karen's) reduced to so much stone and bone and cartilage rubble by the massed explosions of methane-belching gas-beasts, and the Wamphyri masters of Starside themselves brought low in the aftermath of their humiliating defeat.

Now Shaithis, once-leader of the vampire army, turned his hybrid flyer's head into a wind whistling out of the bitter north, and rising on its waft set course for the Icelands. He was not the first of the Wamphyri to venture that way. Over the centuries others had gone before him, exiled or fled there, and after the battle at the garden certain survivors of his army had headed that way, too. Better the Icelands, whatever they held in store, than the awesome weapons of The Dweller and his father. Aye, those two, father and son: mere men. But men with talents; men come out of the hell-lands beyond the sphere-Gate; who used the power of the sun itself to blow away the protoplasmic, metamorphic flesh of the Wamphyri into superheated gas and stinking evaporation!

Harry Keogh and his son, called The Dweller: they had destroyed Shaithis's army, ruined his plans, reduced him almost to nothing. But almost nothing is still something, and in all creation there does not exist anything more tenacious than a vampire. Shaithis, if it were at all possible and given even the smallest opportunity, would build on the vestigial power which he still was to become something again. And if and when that day should come, then the hell-landers would pay. Yes, and all who had stood alongside them in the battle for the garden.

The Lady Karen had stood with them, treacherous Wamphyri bitch! Shaithis jerked hard on the leather reins, yanking the gold bit in his flyer's mouth until it tore the flesh there. The creature - once a man, a Traveller, but hideously changed now through Shaithis's mutative art -uttered a complaining grunt through pluming nostrils and flapped its manta wings more rapidly, lifting higher still in the frosty air as if to reach for the cold diamond stars.

Behind Shaithis, suddenly the mountains were split by a golden bomb-burst of searing light; a sliver of sunlight struck like a spear at him from beyond the barrier mountains, from Sunside. He felt it glance against his robe of black bat fur and cringed, and knew that he'd flown too high. Sunup! The sun's slow creep was bringing its molten yellow rim into view. Cold as he was, Shaithis could feel it burning on his back.

Mind-linked to a flying beast made in large part from a man, now Shaithis instructed his weird mount: Glide! A waste of mental effort, however small, for the flyer too had felt the sun's menacing rays. Its enormous manta wings tilted upwards at their tips and stilled their pulsing; its head went down as it slid into a shallow glide; Shaithis sighed his relief and returned to his black brooding.