'You are warning me?' he said.
She looked away, gave an impatient toss of her head, looked back. 'I am telling you it were better if you went. The Dweller's father you may be, but you are innocent, Harry Keogh. And this is no place for innocence.'
Me, innocent? 'When I fell asleep in my room,' he said, ' — when I sat by my window and watched the gold fading on the distant peaks, before the last sundown — and woke up with a start, I dreamed you were standing over me.'
'I was, or had been,' she sighed. 'Harry, I have lusted after you.'
After me? Or after my blood? 'How?' 'In every way. My host is a woman, with a woman's needs. But I am Wamphyri, with the needs of a vampire.' 'You don't have to draw blood.' 'Wrong. The blood is the life.'
'Then by now you must be starved of life, for you haven't eaten. Not while I have been here.' He had taken his meals in the garden, travelling to and fro via the Mobius Continuum. But they'd been more snacks than meals proper, for he had not wanted to leave her alone too long, had not wanted to miss… anything.
When she spoke again her voice was cold. 'Harry, if you insist on staying… I cannot be held responsible.' Before he could answer she stood up, swept out of the great hall, disappeared from view in that regal way of hers. Harry had not followed her before, had not spied on her in any depth. But the time had come and he knew it.
'Where is she going?' he asked the long-dead cartilage creatures where their corpses fashioned the stack's decor. A carved bone handrail following stairs between the upper levels answered him:
She descends, Harry, to her larder. Her hand falls on me even now.
'Her larder?'
Where like Drama! Doombody before her, she keeps a number of trogs in store, hibernating.
'She told me she had set her trogs free, sent them home.'
But not these, the handrail, once a trog itself, answered. These are for fashioning, and in times of siege for eating!
Harry went there, two levels down, saw Karen flow in through a dark niche doorway and followed her. A trog had been activated, brought out of its cocoon. Harry stayed in the shadows, guarded his thoughts. He watched Karen lead the trog to the table. The creature, shambling, only half-awake, enthralled, lay down, bent back its ugly prehistoric head for her.
Her mouth opened, opened — gaped! Blood dripped from her gums where scythe-teeth sprouted to poise over the creature's sluggishly pulsing jugular. Her nose wrinkled, flattened back on itself, and her eyes were crimson jewels in the twilight room.
"Karen.r Harry shouted.
She snapped upright, hissed at him, cursed him long and loud — then swept by him in a fury and was gone. There was no putting it off any longer; knowing what he must do, Harry went again to the garden…
He trapped her at sunup while she slept in her windowless room. He put silver chains on her door, which he left open no more than four or five inches, and arranged potted kneblasch plants whose stink sickened even him. Their smell woke her up and she cried: 'Harry, what have you done?'
'Be calm,' he told her from outside, 'for there's nothing you can do about it.'
'Oh?' she raged, rushing all about her room. 'Is it so?'
She sent commands to her warrior: Come, free me! But there was no answer.
'Burned,' Harry told her. 'And the trogs in your larder activated, all fled. And your siphoneer — that pitiful, monstrous thing — dead from the water which I poisoned in your wells. Your gas-beasts, too, themselves poisoned with unbreathable gasses. Now there's just you.'
She wept and pleaded with him then. 'What will you do with me? Will you burn me, too?'
He made no answer but went away…
He checked on her, every three or four hours returning to test the chains on her door, or water the kneblasch plants, but never letting her see him. Sometimes she was asleep, moaning in her red dreams, and at others she was awake, raving and cursing. Harry slept in the aerie only once at that time — and on that occasion woke up to find himself at her door, called there by Karen! It strengthened his resolve.
Another time: she was quite naked, telling him how she loved him, wanted him, needed him. But he knew what she needed. He ignored her lustful, luscious writhings and went away.
Five more sunups came and went, and Karen sank into delirium. And when it was sundown again she slept and could not be brought awake. It was time.
Harry cleared away the kneblasch but kept the chains on the door; as before, he left only a small gap. Then he went to the garden and fetched a piglet, which he slaughtered into a golden bowl. He made a thin trail of blood from the door of Karen's room, into the great hall, where he laid the bowl on the floor in the centre of the room. The poor creature lay there, stiff in an inch of its own blood.
And then Harry waited, sitting in the shadows, quiet as never before and guarding his thoughts. And it was just like his dream, but worse. For this time he was there, and he was the one with the cleaver. Except it wasn't a cleaver.
Eventually the vampire left Karen (how, by what route, Harry neither knew nor wanted to know) and began to follow the bloody trail. Swaying its head this way and that, it entered the hall, inched forward towards the bowl. It was a long leech, corrugated, cobra-headed, blind, with many hooks. And it had pointed udders, a great many of them, along its grey, pulsating underbelly.
It sensed the blood, came on faster — then sensed Harry! It began a hasty retreat, curled back on itself and wriggled like a blindworm. Harry stepped into the Mobius Continuum, stepped out again at the door of Karen's room. The vampire came crawling, saw him, but too late. He aimed his flamethrower and burned it. Dying, it issued eggs, a great many of them, which rolled and skittered, vibrating across the floor toward him. Sweating, but cold inside, Harry burned them all. Until all that was left was the awful smell, and the screaming.
Karen's screaming…
Exhausted, Harry slept. He slept in the aerie, because there was no longer anything there to fear. He dreamed that Karen stood over him in her white gown — that gown she had worn so revealingly for the Wamphyri Lords — and explained why he was the most miserable of all men. His victory was ashes. She had been Wamphyri, and now she was a shell. He thought he had won, but he had lost. When one has known the power, the freedom, the magnified emotions of the vampire… what is there after that? She told him she pitied him, for she knew why he had done what he had done — and he had failed. And then she said goodbye. He woke up, looked for her. No longer Wamphyri, she had taken the chains from her door, escaped. He searched the stack top to bottom, came and went through the Mobius Continuum until he was dizzy, but he couldn't find her. Eventually he went out onto her high balcony and looked down. Karen's white dress lay crumpled on the scree more than a kilometer below, no longer entirely white but red, too.
And Karen was inside it…
Epilogue
In the garden, the damage done in the fighting had been very nearly put to rights. Travellers worked at it during sunups, and trogs through the dark sundowns. And meanwhile the message had gone out: the Wamphyri are no more! Streams of Travellers, entire tribes, were en route even now, coming to celebrate and worship at the feet of their saviour. Jazz and Zek, and Wolf, too, had gone home, conveyed to that distant place by The Dweller, who had then returned.
And all in all, The Dweller was well satisfied with his work.