'Be quiet!' he threatened the very elements. 'Be still!' And as the winds subsided, there where the clouds scudded like things afraid across the face of the moon, so the enraged vampire turned on his thralls.
'You.' He drew Layard close, gathered up the skin at the back of his neck like a mother cat holds its kitten, thrust him towards the edge of the sheer drop. 'I have broken your bones once. And must I do it again? Now tell me: where is he? Where - is - Harry - Keogh?'
Layard wriggled in his grasp, pointed to the north-west. 'He was there, I swear it! Less than a hundred miles, less than an hour ago. I sensed him there. He was... strong, even a beacon! But now there is nothing.'
'Nothing?' Janos hissed, turning Layard's face towards his own. 'And am I a fool? You were a talented man, a locator, but as a vampire your powers are immeasurably improved. If it can be found, then you can find it. So how can you tell me you've lost him? How can he be there, and then no longer there? Does he come on, even through the night? Is he somewhere between? Speak? And he gave the other a bone-jarring shake.
'He was there!' Layard shrieked. 'I felt him there, alone, in one place, probably settled in for the night. I know he was there. I found him, swept over him and back, but I didn't dare linger on him for fear he'd follow me back to you. Only ask the girl. She'll tell you it's true!'
'You - are - in - leagued Janos hurled him to his knees, then snatched at Sandra's gauzy shift and tore it from her. She cringed naked under the moon and tried to cover herself, her eyes yellow in the pale oval of her skull. But in another moment she drew herself upright. Janos had already done his worst; against horror that numbs, flesh has no feeling.
'He's speaking the truth,' she said. 'I couldn't enter the Necroscope's mind in case he entered mine, and through me yours. But when I sensed him asleep, then I thought I might risk a glimpse. I tried and ... he was no longer there. Or if he was, then his mind was closed.'
Janos looked at her for long moments, let his scarlet gaze burn on her and penetrate, until he was sure she'd spoken only the truth. Then -
'And so he is coming,' he growled. 'Well, and that was what I wanted.'
'Wanted?' Sandra smiled at him, perhaps a little too knowingly. 'Past tense? But no longer, eh, Janos?'
He scowled at her, caught her shoulder, forced her down beside Layard. Then he turned his face to the northwest and held his arms out to the night. 'I lay me down a mist in the valleys,' he intoned. 'I invoke the lungs of the earth to breathe for me, and send up their reek into the air, to make his path obscure. I call on my familiars to seek him out and make his labours known to me, and to the very rocks of the mountains that they shall defy him.'
'And these things will stop him?' Sandra tried desperately hard to control her vampire scorn.
Janos turned his crimson gaze on her and she saw that his nose had flattened down and become convoluted, like the snout of a bat, and that his skull and jaws had lengthened wolfishly. 'I don't know,' he finally answered her, his awful voice vibrating on her nerve-endings. 'But if they don't, then be sure I know what will!'
With three vampire thralls (caretakers, who looked after his pile for him in his absence and guarded its secrets) Janos went down into forgotten bowels of earth and nightmare, to an all but abandoned place. There he used his necromantic skills to call up a Thracian lady from her ashes. He chained her naked to a wall and called up her husband, a warrior chief of massive proportions, who was a giant even now and must have been considered a Goliath in his day. Both of these Janos had had up before, for various reasons, but now his purpose was entirely different. He had given up tomb-looting some five hundred years ago, and his appetite for torture and necrophilia had grown jaded in that same distant era. While still the Thracian warrior stumbled about dazed and disorientated, crying out in the reek and the purple smoke of his reanimation, Janos had him chained and dragged before his lady. At sight of her he became calm in a moment; tears formed in his eyes and trickled down the leathery, bearded, pockmarked jowls of his face.
'Bodrogk,' Janos spoke to him in an approximation of his own tongue, 'and so you recognize this wife of yours, eh? But do you see how I've cared for her salts? She comes up as perfectly fleshed as in life - not like yourself, all scarred and burned, and pocked from the loss of your materials. Perhaps I should be more careful how I gather up your ashes, as I am with hers, when once more I send you down into your jar. Ah, but as you must know, she has been of more use to me than you. For where you could only give me gold, she gave me -'
' - You are a dog!' the other shut him off, his voice cracking like boulders breaking. Leaning forward in his chains, he strained to reach his tormentor.
Janos laughed as his thralls fought hard to keep Bodrogk from breaking loose. But then he stopped laughing and held out a glass jug for the other to see. And: 'Now be still and listen to me,' he commanded, harsh-voiced. 'As you see, this favourite wife of yours is near-perfect. How long she remains so is entirely up to you. She is unchanged from a time two thousand years ago, and will go on the same for as long as I will it - and not a moment longer.'
While he talked his creatures made fast Bodrogk's chains to staples in the wall. Now they stood back from him. 'Observe,' said Janos. He took a glass stem and dipped it in the liquid in the jug, then quickly splashed droplets across the huge Thracian's chest.
Bodrogk looked down at himself; his mouth fell open and his eyes started out as smoke curled up from the matted hair of his chest where the acid had touched him; he cried out and shook himself in his chains, then crumpled to his knees in the agony of his torture. And the acid ate into him until his flesh melted and ran in thin rivulets, red and yellow, all down his quivering thighs.
His wife, the last of the six wives he'd had in life, cried out to Janos that he spare Bodrogk this torture. And weeping, she too collapsed in her chains. At last her husband struggled to his feet, the orbits of his eyes red with agony and hatred where he gazed at Janos. 'I know that she is dead,' he said, 'even as I am dead, and that you are a ghoul and a necromancer. But it seems that even in death there is shame, torment and pain. Therefore, to spare her any more of that, ask what you will of me. If I know the answer I will tell it to you. If I can perform the deed, it shall be done.'
'Good!' Janos grunted. 'I have six of your men in their burial urns, where they lie as salts, ashes, dust. Now I shall spill them out of their lekythoi and have them up. They will be my guard, and you their Captain.'
'More flesh to torture?' Bodrogk's growl was a rumble.
'What?' Janos put on a pained expression. 'But you should be grateful! These were your warrior comrades in an age when you battled side by side. Aye, and perhaps you shall again. For when my enemy comes against me, I can't be sure that he'll come alone. Why, I even have your armour, with which you decked yourself all those years agone, and which was buried with you. So you see, you shall be the warrior again. And again I say to you, you should be grateful. Now I call these others up, and I call upon you, Bodrogk, to control them. Your wife stays here. Only let one treacherous Thracian hand rise against me ... and she suffers.'
'Janos,' Bodrogk continued to gaze at him, 'I will do all you ask of me. But for all that I was a warrior in life, I was a fair man, too. It is that fairness which prompts me to advise you now: keep well the upper hand. Oh, I know you are a vampire and strong, but I also know my own strength, which is great. If you did not have Sofia there, in chains, then for all your acid I would break you into many pieces. She alone stays my hand.'