Necroscope 4: Deadspeak (66 page)

But Harry at once closed him down again. And:
George,
he said,
thanks for your help. I don’t see what good it will do me, but thanks anyway.

The only answer was a sigh, rapidly fading to nothing …

Harry strove to rise up from unconsciousness, to revive himself, to wake up. And was on the verge of succeeding, then Möbius came.

Harry!
Möbius cried.
We have it! We believe we have it!
He entered the Necroscope’s mind, and in another moment:
Yes, yes—this must be right! But … are you ready?

I’ve never been so ready,
Harry answered.

That’s not what I meant,
said Möbius.
Imean, are you prepared mentally?

Prepared mentally? August, what is this?

The Möbius Continuum, Harry. I can open those doors, but not if you’re not ready for it. There’s a different universe in there, doors opening on places undreamed. Harry, I wouldn’t want you to get sucked into your own mind!

Sucked into—?
Harry shook his head.
Idon’t follow.

Look … did you solve my problem?

Problem?
Suddenly Harry felt rage and frustration boiling up in him.
Your fucking problem? What time do you think I’ve had for solving fucking problems?

Did you even think about it?

No … Yes!… yes, I thought about it.

And?

Nothing.

Harry, I’m going to open one of those doors … now!

The Necroscope felt nothing.
Did it work?

It worked, yes,
Möbius breathed.
And if you have the equations, you should be able to do the rest yourself.

But I don’t feel any different.

Did you ever? Before, I mean?

No, but-

I’ll open another door. There!

But this time Harry did feel it. A sharp white lance of agony, setting off fireworks in his head. It was something like the pain Harry Jr. had arranged for him if ever he should be tempted to use his deadspeak, but since he was already unconscious its effect was greatly reduced. And it served an entirely different purpose.

Instead of blacking him out, it jabbed him awake—

—He came awake, into a waking nightmare!

Cold liquid burned his face, got into his throat and stung him, caused him to cough. It was—alcohol? Certainly it was volatile. It smoked, shimmering into vapour all around. And Harry was lying in it. He struggled to his hands and knees, tried not to breathe the fumes, which were rising up into some sort of flue directly overhead … A blackened flue … Fire-blackened!

Harry kneeled in a basin or depression cut from solid rock, kneeled there in this pool of volatile liquid. Impressions came very quickly. He must be in the very bowels of the castle, down in the bedrock itself … a huge cave … and against the opposite wall where rough-hewn steps led up to the higher levels … there stood Janos watching him! He held a burning brand aloft, his scarlet eyes reflecting its fire.

Their eyes met, locked, and Janos’s lips drew back from his monstrous teeth in a hideous grin. “And so you are awake, Necroscope,” he said. “Good, for I desired that you should feel the fire which will make you mine forever!” He looked at the torch in his hand, then at the floor. Harry looked, too. At a shallow trough or channel where it had been cut in the rock. It ran from Janos’s feet, across the floor, to the lip of the basin.

Jesus!
Harry lurched for the rim of the shallow pool, and his hands shot out from under him. He wallowed in the liquid, put one hand on the rim and drew himself up, heard Janos’s mad laughter and saw him slowly lowering the brand to the floor!

My problem, Harry!
Möbius was hysterical in his horror.

Harry fought back terror to picture the thing, instinctively translating Möbius’s circumferences into diameters:

And his intuitive mathematical talent, returned to him at last, did the rest.

What am I?
Möbius howled, as the fire of Janos’s torch descended to the liquid fuse.

“Light!” Harry cried aloud. “What else can you be? Only light expands at
twice
the speed of light—from nothing to a diameter of 744,000 miles in two seconds!”

Fire whooshed, came racing across the floor of the cave in a blue-glaring blaze.

Which light?
Möbius was frantic.

“You were nothing until you came into existence,” Harry yelled. “Therefore … you are the Primal Light!”

Yes!!!
Möbius danced in Harry’s mind.
And my source was the Möbius Continuum! Welcome back, Harry!

Computer screens opened in Harry’s mind even as the bowl became an inferno. Searing heat roared up in a tongue of blue fire that belched into the chimney overhead. Liquid fire singed the hair from his head and face and set his clothes blazing. It lasted perhaps one tenth of a second—until Harry conjured a Möbius door and toppled through it!

He knew where to go, conjured a second door and fell out of the Möbius Continuum into a deep drift of snow at the roof of the world. He was scorched, yes, but alive. Alive as never before. Elation filled him, and more than elation. His laughter—hysterical as Möbius’s own—quickly died down, went out of him, became a growl that rumbled menacingly in his throat…

Janos had seen him disappear, and in that moment had known that Harry Keogh was invincible. The Necroscope had gone … where? And he’d be back … when? And what awesome Powers would he bring with him? Janos dared not wait to find out.

He bounded up the stairs through the lower limits of the castle’s labyrinth bowels, eventually emerging in the area of massively vaulted rooms which housed his urns and jars and lekythoi. And discovered Harry there ahead of him! Harry, Bodrogk and the remaining Thracians.

Janos fell back to crouch against a wall, hissing, then straightened up to come forward again. “You are dust!” he snarled at Bodrogk, and pointed his finger.

The huge Thracian chief and two of his captains ducked through an arched door into another room, but the third was caught in the blast of Janos’s devocation:

“OGTHROD AI’F, GEB’L—EE’H,

YOG-SOTHOTH,
‘NGAH’NG AI’Y,

ZHRO!”

The devolved man threw up his arms and sighed his last … and fell in a cloud of grey-green chemicals.

Janos roared his mad laughter, leaped to take up the fallen warrior’s sword. He advanced on Harry, sword raised high—and the Necroscope knew exactly what to do. For Harry was a mage, a master in his own right; and in his mind right now, crying out from all of their prisoning urns, a thousand deadspeak voices instructed him in the Words of Power!

He pointed at the jars scattered all about, and turning in a circle uttered the rune of invocation:

“Y’AI ‘NG’NGAH,
YOG-SOTHOTH,

H’EE—L’GEB, F’AI THRODOG,

UAAAH
!”

The vaulted room filled with stench and purple smoke in a moment, obscuring Harry, Janos and all. And out of the rush and reek came the cries of the tortured. There had been no time for the mixing of chemicals; these resurrected Thracians, Persians, Scythians and Greeks would all be imperfect. But their lust for vengeance would be entirely in keeping.

Janos knew it, too. He careened through their stumbling, groaning ranks as they shattered their jars and grew up like mushrooms out of nothing; but as fast as he could target a group and put them down again, so the Necroscope called them up! There was no way the vampire could win. He couldn’t bellow his words fast enough, and the ranks of resurrected warriors were rapidly closing on him.

Blasting a path of dust before him, he fled to the steps winding up to ruined regions above and passed from sight. The hideously
incomplete
army would follow after, but Harry cautioned them:

“Stay here. Your part is played. But this time when you go down, you know that you may rest in peace.” And they blessed him as he returned them all to their
materia.
All except the warrior king Bodrogk.

And taking Bodrogk with him, he stepped through a Möbius door … and out again into the ruins of Castle Ferenczy.

They waited, and in a little while Janos came, grunting, whining and panting into the night. He saw them, choked on his terror, gagged and reeled as he stumbled away from them out of the ruins. He was spent; he had no breath; he tottered to the cliff behind the castle and climbed it along a path … and half-way up found Harry and Bodrogk waiting for him. The huge Thracian carried a battleaxe.

There was nowhere left to run. Janos looked outwards to the night and his crimson eyes gazed on empty space. In all his life there’d been only one Wamphyri art he never mastered or counterfeited, and now he must. He held up his arms and willed the change, and his clothing tore as his body wrenched itself into a great blanket, an aerofoil of flesh. And like a bat in the night, he launched himself from the cliffside path.

He succeeded!—he flew!—with the tatters of his ripped clothing fluttering about him like strange wings. He flew … until Bodrogk’s hurled battleaxe buried itself in his spine.

Harry and Bodrogk returned to the ruins and found the monster writhing there where he’d crashed down in the rubble. He choked and coughed up blood, but already he’d worked the axe loose and his vampire flesh was healing him. The Necroscope kneeled beside him and looked him in the eye. Man to … man? Face to terrifying, terrified face.

“Bastard Necroscope!” Janos’s eyes bled where they bulged.

“You have a man’s body,” Harry answered, without emotion, “but your mind and the vampire within you were raised from ashes in an urn.” He pointed a steady hand and finger. “Ashes to ashes, Janos, and dust to dust! OGTHROD AI”F, GEB”L—EE”H.”

The vampire gave a shriek, wriggled frantically, choked, gagged and regained his man-shape.

And the Necroscope continued:
“YOG-SOTHOTH,
“NGAH”NGAI”Y.”

“No!” Janos howled.
“N-n-noooooooo!”

As Harry uttered the final word,
“Zhror,
so Janos’s entire body convulsed in instant, unbearable agony. He writhed frantically, vibrated, then grew still. Finally his head flopped back and his awful mouth flew open, and the lights went out in his eyes. Then—

—His massive chest slowly deflated as he sighed his last, long sigh. No air escaped him but a cloud of red dust, drifting on the air. The rest of his body, even his head, must be full of the stuff. And as the dust of that devolved vampire leech settled, it reminded the Necroscope of nothing so much as the spores of those weird mushrooms at Faethor’s place on the outskirts of Ploiesti.

Which in turn served to remind him of something else as yet unfinished …

Bodrogk’s lady Sofia came up out of the ruins, and Sandra came with her.

She came ghosting in the way of vampire thralls, her yellow eyes alive in the night, but Harry knew that she was less than Sandra now. Or more. Briefly, he remembered his precognitive glimpse back at the start of this whole thing: of an alien creature that came to him in the night and lusted after him, but only for his blood. Sandra was now an alien creature, who would lust after men for their blood.

She flew into his arms and sobbed into his neck, and holding her tightly—as much to steady himself as to steady her—he looked over her sallow shoulder to where Bodrogk gathered up his wife. And he heard Sofia say:

“She saved me! The vampire girl found me where Janos had hidden me and set me free!”

And Harry wondered: her last free-will act, before the monstrous fever in her blood claims her for its own?

Sandra’s beautiful, near-naked body was cold as clay where it pressed against the Necroscope, and Harry knew there was no way he could ever warm it. A telepath, she “heard” the thought as surely as if it had been spoken, and drew back a little. But not far enough.

His thin sharp stake, a splinter of old oak, drove up under her breast and into her heart; she took one last breath, one staggering step away from him, and fell.

Bodrogk, seeing Harry’s anguish, did the rest …