Harry Keogh, Necroscope, closed his eyes and talked to the teeming dead of this strange world. 'We need your help,' he begged of them. 'You down there, in the earth, under the soil and down where the roots twine. We need your help against a great injustice.'
Things stirred in the ground, heard the desperate voice of a friend and tried to answer him. Who? What? Help you? But how can we help?
'Trogs!' said Harry Jnr. 'Before the Wamphyri, they roved over Starside at will. Thousands of them lived and died here. They were their own masters then, and this was their land.'
'How about it?' Harry spoke to them as he always spoke to the dead, as his friends, his equals. Even as his peers. 'If you're dust then you're beyond helping us, but if you can still hear me, if you can understand, then listen.' He told them what was required. Harry Jnr, too, answering the stumbling questions of the dead.
The Wamphyri, you say? Some of us served them in life. Many of us, many hundreds, died in their wars. False gods! Vile, terrible masters! But fight them? How? They'll destroy us again, a second time.
'You can't die twice,' Harry and The Dweller were desperate. 'Only your brothers can die; and they're doing it right now, dying, to hold back the troops of the Wamphyri.'
Troops? You mean trogs like us?
'Trogs, yes,' said The Dweller, 'but slaves of the Wamphyri. Death holds no terrors for such as them. It is preferable to what they have now!'
The Dweller speaks truth, some of Harry Jnr's own trogs, recently dead in the fighting, joined in. We at least know you. Dweller, and we gladly rise up again!
'What of the rest of you?' Harry Snr cried. 'Will you not also rise up? Wake up now, before it's too late. You have sons and grandsons and great-grandsons who are fighting even now. Join us in this last great battle against your immemorial vampire oppressors!'
In the cliffs backing these foothills, in ancient cavern burial grounds, the preserved, mummified bodies of a thousand trogs stirred, groped upward, tore free of the clinging soil. Under the trees, lone graves gave up their dead. Behind the massed Wamphyri trogs where they drove back the defenders, freshly dead cadavers sat up, forced their riven bodies to move, shuffled or crawled toward their vampire-controlled enemies. The stench of the pit filled the air. They came from the shadows, from mildewed graves and niches, from all their many resting places beyond life.
The Dweller's trog forces, when they saw what now battled on their side — even though they were on their side, hemming the invaders in all about — broke in terror and fled for their secret places. No matter, the grim army of the dead would do their work for them. And they would win, for as the Necroscopes had pointed out, they couldn't die twice.
Shrieks of terror split the night, wrenched from hundreds of Wamphyri-trog throats when they saw and understood what they were fighting. Sickened, the two Harrys turned away from the carnage. But -
'Son,' said Harry Snr, grasping the other's arm. 'Look!'
The sky was dark with Wamphyri flyers and warriors. They circled the garden, descending toward it. And some of the warriors were truly gigantic; any five of them, falling on the garden in unison, would totally obscure and obliterate it. Up there in the mountains, even now, a greater battle was about to be waged…
They took their own special route back to the garden.
Warriors had already landed below the cliffs fronting the wall, where the Lady Karen's creatures were now locked in hellish combat with them. Their shrieking and bellowing alone was deafening. Other warriors circled, looking for an opening in the ultraviolet searchlight beams which swept the sky and seared their hides.
Up on a certain peak, mirror-weapons blinked out as Lesk the Glut deliberately crashed his flyer down on the Travellers who sweated and swore and died there. But they'd seen him coming; before his flyer struck they had turned their shotguns on it, pumping shot after shot at both beast and rider right to the end. Lesk, wounded and more dangerous than ever, goaded his half-crippled beast to slither free of the peak, directed it in an insane suicide dive on the heart of the garden.
He was seen; smoking ray-beams converged blindingly on him; his flyer felt artificial sunlight eating at its hide, burning in its many eyes. It reared back from its headlong dive, pulled up, swooped low over the garden. Then someone threw a grenade, which exploded directly in front of the beast. With its spatulate head blazing, screaming like a safety-valve under high pressure, it swooped to earth, struck the wall and carried a great section of it away, and with it several defenders. The creature's huge manta body tore up the earth, somersaulted like a derailed train, hurled Lesk out of the saddle.
Other flyers swept down out of the darkness on the periphery. They crashed among the greenhouses and allotments, floundered in the pools. Down from their backs sprang lieutenants of Shaithis, Belath and Volse, to create carnage within the garden itself. Jazz Simmons saw them; he tracked them with tracers and streams of exploding shells. Two at least ducked away into the shadows and smoke, to commence their task of cold butchery on whichever Travellers or trogs they should come across.
Jazz saw Harry and his son on the balcony of the latter's house. They watched the battle. He breathlessly called up: 'How's it going?'
In the glare and sweep of hot beams, the booming of automatic weapons, howling of monsters and cries of men, it was hard to say. 'We should be in this!' Harry said to his son.
'No,' the other shook his head. 'We're the last resort.'
Harry didn't understand, but he trusted.
Zek came running, caught Jazz's arm where he stood by The Dweller's house. 'Look!' she cried.
High overhead a warrior dragged some bloated, puffing, incredible thing through the sky. A second warrior, higher, was similarly burdened. Scything searchlight beams cut across them and Zek gasped: 'Gas-beasts!'
'What?' Jazz gaped. He saw the bloated thing cut loose, begin drifting like some obscene balloon down toward the garden. The thing drifted a little northward, over the wall, where the battery of searchlights was concentrated. The beams picked it out, centered upon it, and it began to smoke. Puffing black evaporation and clouds of steam, it settled faster toward earth.
Jazz saw the strategy. 'AW he cried. Then he grabbed Zek, threw her down and hurled himself on top of her.
The gas-beast — a living creature, once a man — issued a hissing, high-pitched scream as its skin blackened and ruptured — and then it blew itself to bits with all the force of a thousand-pound bomb! The ray-gunners directly underneath it died instantly in the blast, their bodies and equipment flattened. At a stroke, one-third of The Dweller's defences had been wiped out.
A foul, stinking hot wind blew across the garden, and when it cleared Jazz helped Zek to her feet. The Dweller's house was still standing, but all of its windows had been blown in and half of its roof was missing. Harry and his son had ducked inside the space under the eaves in the moment before the blast; now they came out, white and shaken.
More warriors had landed at the back of the saddle. There they fought with Karen's creatures, overwhelming and quickly silencing them. But there were Travellers back there and they were armed with grenades; lobbing their deadly eggs, they gave the warriors blow for blow.
Lieutenants of the Wamphyri seemed to be ravaging in every quarter of the garden, their war-gauntlets drenched in Traveller blood. The night was covered with smoke and stench, split by shotgun blasts, made still more hellish in the surreal slash of searing light and long moments of total blindness…
Down by the shattered wall, the Lady Karen saw something coming up out of the smoke-filled depression. It crawled, but as it reached level ground reared up and charged! It was the mad Lord Lesk, bloodiest of all the Wamphyri, almost fully recovered and little the worse for his wounds and the tumble he'd taken. He saw Karen, rushed upon her full of nightmare intent.