When the section of wall shelving had swung aside and a lamp had been positioned properly, Milo hissed between his teeth at sight of what lay revealed within the secret recess. But he kept a blank face nonetheless and asked Tomos calmly, “What made you suppose that these artifacts would be of interest to me, in particular?”
“Because, Lord Milo,” was the reply, “they so resemble those somewhat larger and more ornate ones that were in the compartment of High King Zastros’ great mobile yurt, using which, you spoke to the king of the Witchmen.”
Milo smiled. “Yes, I had clean forgotten, you were there that day up on the Lumbuh, weren’t you, Tomos? All right, who lived in this suite besides the now-dead Grand Strahteegos? Never mind, just see that every one of them on whom you can lay hands is put under lock and key until I can get around to examining and questioning them. For now, let’s see if this devilish device is working.”
When he had connected the male plugs of a thick insulated cable to the matching female receptacles on the two metal boxes, he raised the lid of the smaller of them, then searched vainly for something, before noticing that on this particular model, something was built into one front corner. Slowly, various things in the metal chest started to glow and a humming sound— first very low-pitched, but gradually getting louder— emanated from it.
After he had fingered a switch to a different position from that in which he had found it, he located a large silvery knob and began to turn it slowly and carefully, at the same time saying what sounded to Tomos vaguely like Merikan words, but in an incomprehensible dialect of that tongue that he only had heard once before—up on the Lumbuh River in southern Karaleenos, years ago, when this same lord had used that larger but similar device to talk with the Witch King, who had spoken that same obscure dialect, too.
“Is anyone receiving my transmission?” asked Milo yet again, hoping that he was, after so long, speaking a twentieth-century brand of English. Move the dial another tiny incremental distance. “Is anyone receiving my transmission?”
When he was just about to pack it in for that day, had decided to try later, a distant voice replied, “… is the … dy Center Base Communications. Who is calling, please?”
“Where’s Sternheimer?” demanded Milo coldly.
“I say again,” said the voice, “who is calling? I cannot summon Dr. Sternheimer without telling him who is calling.”
“All right, boyo, tell him it’s Milo Moray. Tell him I’ve fallen heir to another of his infernal transceivers, and with any luck, I’ll shortly have the vampire that goes with it, too.”
Placing the flat of his palm over the face of the condenser microphone, he said in current Merikan,
“Tomos, be a good lad and fetch our wine in here. This may take a while, and talking is often dry work.”
But by the time he had the goblet in his hand, the same voice came back on, saying, “Mr. Moray? Mr. Moray, are you still on the air?”
“I’m here,” growled Milo. “Where’s Sternheimer?”
“Dr. Sternheimer is at … another location, just now, but he will be back within the week. Dr. von Sandlandt, his deputy, is on hand here, however; would you speak with her?”
Milo shrugged. “Why not? Put the lady on.”
Dr. Ingebord von Sandlandt proved, once Milo had shrewdly brought her to a sufficient pitch of anger, a virtual gold mine of information. Hundreds of years of dealing with men and woman had imparted to him the skills necessary to play her like a game fish and extract nugget after precious nugget before he was done. After refusing her offer of “hospitality” as flatly and profanely as he had refused Sternheimer’s similar offer years before, he had promised imminent destruction of the transceiver and power unit, then had abruptly broken off the connection, turned off the radio and disconnected the power cable for fear that the Center might be still in possession of arcane equipment capable of tracking back along the beam and locating his position, about which he had been both nebulous and misleading.
“Tomos,” he said to his companion, “please send a rider into the city to summon Grahvos and Mahvros … oh, and Sitheeros, too. And send for Portos, as well. I have learned some things from that woman down in the so-called Witch Kingdom that I think you all should hear.”
“Gentlemen,” said Milo to the assembled thoheeksee he had had summoned, “that which the folk of this land and others call the Witch Kingdom is no such thing. It is, rather, an unnatural survival of a group of men and women from the world of more than seven centuries ago. Men and women who, just prior to the death of that elder world, had learned how to transfer their minds from their own, aging bodies to younger, vibrant, healthy bodies and thus prolong their minds’ lives through what is, in essence, human sacrifice. In a very real sense, they are an aggregation of vampires.
“Armed with devices and knowledge of that older, much more sophisticated civilization, they have for long centuries preyed upon the descendants of true survivors of the long-ago holocausts and plagues that so nearly wiped the races of mankind from off the face of this earth, but there is nothing of the occult or of true magic in their bags of tricks, only mechanical devices and knowledge of how to make use of those devices and use some of them to help in making more of them.
“It is their aspiration to own and strictly rule all of the continent of which their swamps and this land are parts, and they are aware that in order to fulfill this aspiration, they must somehow, in some manner, keep the land divided into tiny, weak, warring states. What you have done in your homeland and what I am doing frustrates their sinister plans. Therefore, something over two years ago, one of these creatures forced her ancient, evil mind into the body of a very attractive young Ehleen and, using the name of Ilios, formed an attachment with your Grand Strahteegos Thoheeks Pahvlos, who then, as you know, was one of the most powerful men in all of your Consolidated Thoheekseeahnee, both in a civil and a military sense.
“Being fully aware that, was she to destroy the adhesion of the thoheekseeahnee and thus the state, she first must wreck the strong army, she set to work with her centuries of wiles upon an aged man in the beginning of his dotage. And you all know far better than could I just what horrors she used him to accomplish. It was a truly devilish scheme, and had he not died when he did, she might well have gained a complete success. Also, she might just have managed to latch on to some other relatively powerful man and tried to continue her dangerous mischief, had she not chanced to be so injured as to feel that she must abruptly leave Mehseepolis and hurriedly seek out things like herself, lest the body she inhabited die and she with it.”
That had not been exactly how Dr. Inge von Sandlandt had said it to Milo, of course. “That damned motherfucker of a Greek bastard, that one called Portos, he’s a monster, an animal—big as a frigging house, strong as an ox and hairy as a goddam ape! Mr. Moray, that boy was fourteen when I took over, and though the body was nearly seventeen when all this happened, I doubt that it weighed more than fifty-five kilos. There was absolutely no reason for that pig to beat that little body so badly that he knocked loose teeth, cracked the left ramus, broke three ribs and penetrated a lung, and lashed it so ferociously with a fucking sword-belt that it could hardly walk.
“Had it not been for my radio, that body would have been dead with me still trapped within it long before I could have reached our most northerly permanent outpost. Even as it was, with one of the copters waiting for me at a rendezvous point at the limit of its round-trip range, it was a very near thing. Bare seconds after I had transferred into a new body, that of that boy was dead of peritonitis resulting from a ruptured rectum.