Harry came awake on the instant, slid from Karen's bed, went swift and sinuous to the window embrasure where he drew aside the drapes. He was wary, kept himself well to one side, was ready to snatch back his hand in a moment if that should be necessary. But it wasn't, for it was sundown. Shadows crept on the mountain divide, usurping the gold from the peaks. Stars at first scarcely visible, came more glowingly alive moment by moment. The darkness was here, and more darkness was coming.
Karen cried out in her sleep, came awake and jerked bolt upright in the tumbled bed. 'Harry!' Her face was ghostly pale — a torn sheet, with a triangle of holes for eyes and mouth — where she gazed all about the room. But then she saw the Necroscope at the window and the holes of her eyes came burning alive. 'They're coming!'
Their scarlet glances met and joined, forming a two-way channel for thoughts which moments ago were sleeping. Harry saw through Karen's eyes into her mind, but he answered her out loud anyway. 'I know,' he said.
She came off the bed naked and flew to him, buried herself in his arms. 'But they're coming!' she sobbed.
'Yes, and we'll fight them,' he growled, his body reacting of its own accord to the feel and smell of her flesh, which was soft, silky, pliable, ripe, musty and wet where his member grew into her.
She trapped him there with muscles that held him fast, and groaned, 'Let's make this the very best one, Harry.'
'Because it might be the last?'
'Just in case,' she grunted, forming barbs within herself to draw him further in. After that -
— It was like never before, leaving them too exhausted to be afraid…
Later, he said: 'What if we lose?'
'Lose?' Karen stood beside him; they leaned together and gazed out through a window in a room facing north, towards the Icelands. As yet there was nothing to be seen and they hadn't expected there would be. But they could feel… something. It radiated from the north like ripples on a lake of pitch: slow, shuddery and black with its evil.
Harry nodded, slowly. 'If we lose, they can only kill me,' he said. And he thought of Johnny Found and the things he had done to his victims. Terrible things. But compared to Shaithis and any other survivors of the old Wamphyri, Johnny Found had been a child, and his imagination sadly lacking.
Karen knew why the Necroscope closed his mind to her: for her own protection. But it was a wasted effort; she knew the Wamphyri much better than he did; nothing Harry was capable of imagining could ever plumb the true depths of Wamphyri cruelty. That was Karen's opinion; which was why she promised him, 'If you die, I die.'
'Oh? And they'll let you die, will they? So easily?'
They can't stop me. On this side of the mountains it is sundown, but beyond Sunside… true death waits there for any vampire. It burns like molten gold in the sky. That's where I'd flee, far across the mountains into the sun. Let them follow me there if they dared, but I wouldn't be afraid. I remember when I was a child and the sun felt good on my skin. I'm sure that in the end, before I died, I could make it feel that way again. I would will it to feel good!'
'Morbid.' Harry stood up straighter, gave himself a shake. 'All of this, morbid. Keep it up and we're defeated before we even begin. There must be at least a chance we'll win. Indeed, there's more than a chance. Can they disappear at will as we can, like ghosts into the Möbius Continuum?'
'No, but…'
'But?'
'Wherever we go — ' she shrugged' — and however many times we escape, we'll always have to return. We can't stay in that place for ever.' Her logic was unassailable. Before Harry could find words to answer — perhaps to comfort her, or himself — she continued, 'And Shaithis is a terrible foe. How devious — ' she shook her head ' — you could scarcely imagine.'
True, a voice came startlingly from nowhere, entering the minds of both of them. Shaithis is devious. But his ancestor, Shaitan the Fallen, is worse far.
The Dweller!' Karen gasped, as she recognized their telepathic visitor. And then, incredulously, 'But did you say… Shaitan?'
The Fallen One, aye, the wolf-voice rasped in their minds. He lives, he comes, and he, not Shaithis, is the terror.
Harry and Karen reached out with their own telepathy, tried to strengthen the mind-bridge between themselves and their visitor. And for a moment the aerie was filled with flowing mental pictures: of mountain slopes where domed boulders projected through sliding scree; of a full moon lending the crags a soft yellow mantle; of great firs standing tall. And in the shadow of the trees, silver triangle eyes blinking — a good many — where the pack rested before the hunt. Then the pictures faded and were gone, and likewise the one who lived with them and moved among them.
But his warning remained with Karen and the Necroscope. How he could know what he had told them… who could say? But he was, or had been, The Dweller. And that was enough.
Time passed.
Sometimes they talked and at others they simply waited. There was nothing else to do. This time, seated before a fire in the aerie's massive Great Hall, they talked. 'Shaitan is part of my world's legends, too,' said Harry. 'There they call him Satan, the Devil, whose place is in hell.'
'In Starside's histories your world was hell!' Karen answered. 'And all of its dwellers were devils. Dramal Doombody believed it firmly.'
Harry shook his head. 'That the Wamphyri — monstrous as they were, and still are — should hold with beliefs in demons, devils and such,' (again the shake of his head), 'is hard to understand.'
She shrugged. 'How so? Isn't Hell simply the Unknown, any terrible place or region of which nothing is understood? To the Traveller tribes it lay across the mountains in Starside, while to the Wamphyri it waited on the other side of the sphere Gate. Certainly it must be horrible and lethal beyond that Gate, for no one had ever returned to tell of it. That was how the Wamphyri saw it. I saw it that way, too, in the days before Zek and Jazz, you and your son. And don't forget, Harry, even the Wamphyri were once men. However monstrous a man may grow, still he'll remember the night fears of his childhood.'
'Shaitan,' Harry mused. 'A mystery spanning two worlds. The legend was taken into my world by banished Wamphyri Lords and occasionally their Traveller retainers when they were sent through Starside's Gate.' But in his own mind: Oh, really? Or is the so-called 'legend' more properly universal? The Great Evil, the Lord of Lies, of all wickedness? What of the similarity in the names…?
Satan, Shaitan? Are there devils in all the universes of light? And what of angels?
'Better stop thinking of him as a legend,' Karen warned, as if she'd been listening to his thoughts, which she had not. 'The Dweller says he's real and coming here, which means that in order to live we have to kill him. Except, if Shaitan has already lived for — how long? Two, three thousand years? — is it even reasonable to believe that we can kill him?'
Harry had scarcely heard her. He was still working things out. 'How many of them?' he finally asked. 'Shaitan will be their leader, and Shaithis with him. But who else?'
'Survivors from the battle at the garden,' Karen answered. 'If they also survived the Icelands.'
'I remember.' Harry nodded. 'We've considered them before: Fess Ferenc, Volse Pinescu, Arkis Leperson and their thralls. No more than a handful. Or, if others of the Old Lords survived the ordeal of exile, a large handful.' He drew himself up. 'But I'm still the Necroscope. And again I say: can they come and go through the Möbius Continuum? Can they call up the dead out of their graves?' (And once more, to himself: Can you, Harry? Can you?)