Necroscope 9: The Lost Years (52 page)

And slowly but surely they had come to a mutual understanding: that in this bloody and war-torn world, they would use to best advantage such cover as the wars established for them. And indeed a cover had been required.

For already it was seen how men reacted to the Wamphyri presence: fearfully at first, in a world rife with superstition

- but then, like the Szgany of Sunside, they fought back! For while men may suffer their lands to be stolen, their children to be eaten and their wives seduced away, when finally they have nothing left, then there’s nothing left to lose! And then
any
man wil fight!

That was how it had been: the alien invaders of Earth had thought to rule by terror, as they had in Sunside/Starside.

But even there they had not had it all their own way. Through seemingly endless days the sun had forbidden entry into Sunside; in the dark of misty nights the Szgany had hidden themselves away, or if they could not hide had taken up arms. Likewise in this world, except here it was worse. Here the nights were fleeting things and allowed so little time for the vampire Lords to establish themselves; and the days … were terrible! The furnace sun passed directly overhead, and there were no barrier mountains to contain its searing rays, or the rage of vengeful men.

Oh, there were mountains, to be sure - and
such
mountains: the vast horseshoe of the Carpatii in the east, and the mighty Alps in the west -but unlike the barrier mountains of Sunside/Starside, the solar orb was not restricted by them, and at its zenith burned down on all and everything indiscriminately. As for the great armies of nomad tribesmen that were sweeping the world at that time: where mountains could not be climbed, they could always be circumvented .

. . and they were. By warriors!

By men who had known how to destroy their enemies, even the Wamphyri, and destroy them utterly; known how a bolt or a lance through the heart would kill a man, and how his
head
on a lance would
guarantee
he was dead … then how to reduce his castle and its contents to ashes, until nothing of him or his survived. Such methods were simply the way of the warrior, and by no means reserved for the Wamphyri and their followers. For in a majority of cases the invaders who used them - first the Goths, later the Visigoths and Avars - did not even know they went up against the Wamphyri! No, for they were merely murdering rich Dacian landowners in their gloomy castles, or strange, savage grey halflings in their foothill keeps and caverns.

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And because of the times, times of change, tumult, and crisis -indeed the crisis of an entire Classical World - the as yet young legend of the Wamphyri, of the blood-crazed vampire and werewolf, was
almost
eradicated. What need for monstrous myths in a world that was
in reality
a bloodbath? Forty years after Radu’s coming the Visigoths had sacked Rome itself, and forty-five years later it had fallen again, to the Vandals; except on that occasion Radu had been part of it. For like most of the Wamphyri exiled from Starside by Shaitan, he was unable to resist blood, certainly not in such copious amounts.

War, to which he was drawn as a lodestone is drawn north. And such wars to be warred as nothing conceived in Starside by even the mightiest of the Old Lords. And down all the years and decades, Radu was a great mercenary washed hither and to by the tides of war and blood. He used his gift of oneiromancy - not uncommon among dog-Lords - to scry on future times and know in advance which side to join in the great wars to come. And likewise he remained alert for word of those olden enemies who came through the Hell-lands Gate with him. And time and again Radu cursed himself that he’d not dealt with them then, on the very threshold of this new world, when they were at their weakest.

But then, he had been at his weakest, too, for a time.

Rumours found their way to Radu. Employed as a mercenary warlord by the Vandal Gaeseric (who dubbed him ‘Radu, Hound of the Night,’ because he preferred guerilla warfare by the light of a full moon), he learned of the alleged death of one

‘Onarius Ferengus,’ a provincial senator (what, Roman?) murdered by pirates in his villa at Odessus on the Black Sea ten years earlier. This he had from a Numidian slave-girl, Ulutu, set free when Gaeseric’s forces sacked Rome. Upon a time she’d belonged to Onarius, but she had fled from the fire and the fighting on the night he was killed. And from Ulutu’s descriptions of her ex-master …

… Radu had little doubt but that he had been none other than Nonari the Gross Ferenczy!

And in Radu’s keeping, where he and his pack spent their days in a den under the
Colli Albani
twelve miles out of Rome, Ulutu fell under her new master’s spell (and Radu, to a lesser degree, under hers); and they were lovers. But because he had enough of ‘pups’ up in the mountains of Dacia, now Goth territory, and because he had learned that anonymity and insularity were synonymous with longevity, he made sure that Ulutu stayed entirely human; which is to say that for all that he was into her, nothing
of him
got into her. And at times, lying spent on their bed of cured furs, at Radu’s request she would tell him various things about her former master.

Just how Nonari the Gross had gained elevation to the rank of a Roman
Senator in absentia
during the eighty-odd years sped by since the coming of the Wamphyri into Dacia - that was anybody’s guess. But

the way the girl described his castle, backed up to a great cliff, with his private chambers facing away from the sun and always in the shade; and his servants, ‘like mists over a bubbling swamp, drifting, pale and ghastly, yet smiling with strong white teeth …

all wafting and weaving, hastening to Onarius’s beck and call, yet shuddering to his touch so cold and menacing; and his right hand like a club, with its fingers all welded into one …’

He had called her ‘his little trog,’ and had told her that he’d known trogs before, in the dank caverns of a far forbidden world.

Except they had been shambling leathery creatures, while Ulutu was graceful and her skin so soft. It had never ceased to amaze him: that she’d been browned by the sun, ‘but yet was not burned up!’ But Onarius’s odalisques were white - Arabs, Britons, and Syrians - and he had no time for dalliance with trogs, even if they were as beautiful as Ulutu. And so she had carried water, cleaned Onarius’s chambers, and been grateful. For she knew how he dealt with them with whom he ‘dallied.’ Or rather, she did
not
know, for he was wary of prying eyes.

But she had seen the evidence of his passion, apparent in the feral yellow eyes of his male and female thralls alike, and in their

‘wafting and weaving’ after only a very short space of time spent in his service; even in certain of the villa’s children, which were gross. She had seen how rapidly his odalisques aged and his thralls were worn down - ‘sucked dry, until they were no more,’ - and how when they died he buried them deep in the earth where the rocky land sloped down to the sea, with the rush and roar of breakers to deaden …
other
sounds.

Onarius had a son in the mountains far to the north, in a place called the Khorvaty in Moldavia. (Here Radu had paid more attention. What, another
living
Ferenczy?) He was called Belos Pheropzis (not Ferengus? No, of course not, not if one desired to hide one’s true kith and kin away!) and kept a great castle in the heights, on the very borders of the Empire’s territory. All secret from Romans and nomad invaders alike, the place was to be Onarius’s bolthole, in the event he should need one.

As to how Onarius’s ‘little trog’ had known these things: she had feared this Belos mightily when he visited his father, because of the way he looked at her - the way he looked at all females, even his father’s thrall mistresses! Yet at the same time she had been fascinated by him: his dark good looks, hawkish features, massive yet proportionate stature. Keeping well out of sight, she’d listened to their conversations, mainly to ensure that Belos did not ask for her. For if he had, then she would have run away.

But when Radu had queried her one time, about this attraction that she’d felt towards Belos:

‘No, my Lord,’ Ulutu had told him, lying sprawled between his legs and fondling his now flaccid rod, squeezing its glans between her dark

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breasts, and kissing its tiny lips, ‘perhaps I have given you the wrong impression. It was not so much fascination as terror that I felt. For this Belos was like one of the great warhorses that draw the Roman chariots … and what was I but a tiny black mare? I was a slave, and if this son of Onarius had wanted me … I scarcely believed I could contain him in my small body!’ (At which she had seen her mistake at once, for Radu was fiercely prideful). ‘—
But,
since it seems I contain
you
well enough, my Lord, obviously I was mistaken! Whichever, this Belos frightened me, seeming more creature than man, more animal than human.’

‘What, even as I am more creature than man, more animal than human?’ Radu had reached down to fondle her soft breasts and draw Ulutu effortlessly up onto his belly, where he could squeeze her dark and rounded buttocks.

‘You are a wolfling, as I’ve seen,’ she had told him then. ‘But Belos … was other!’ And Radu had felt her small shudder.

Aye, and Ulutu was right: Belos
was
‘other.’ No slightest shadow of a doubt, he was this Onarius’s (or Nonari’s) egg-son. Wamphyri! Which perhaps explained his looks and appetites, and the reason why he and his damned father were so close. Or maybe that last was as a result of the wars, the shaken, perhaps even crumbling Roman Empire, the unstable skein of things in general. For even the best Wamphyri relationship could scarcely be described as ‘close,’

not in normal circumstances. But that apart, quite obviously this … this
scum
of Starside had bred one of its own here in this world! An egg-son for Nonari! A Ferenczy!

Well, so be it. It simply meant there’d be one more Ferenczy for Radu to hunt down when all wars were won and times were right, and the world was quiet again. And as for this so-called ‘Onarius Ferengus’ … dead, was he? Radu didn’t think so. More likely it was some grand contrivance, the entire scenario, some scheme of Nonari’s to vanish a while, and come back later under a new name and in a different guise. The idea was interesting, something Radu could even try for himself in some future time, when it might seem to some that he had lived too long …

Radu’s dreams had set his juices working however sluggishly. Dreams of his undying hatred for the Ferenczys, his charnel love of the battlefield, but especially his carnal memories of Ulutu.

Ah, Ulutu! She had loved his horn, and it had been hard to will his spunk lifeless when he spurted in her. But if she had fallen pregnant … then she had also fallen dead, be sure! For Radu was not like Nonari, making vampires left, right and centre, to plague him in a later age, His pups were enough for him. They had known his bite and bore his curse - that of the moonchild, the changeling, the werewolf - but not liis seed. There would be time for bloodsons, and eventually an

egg-son, later, when he could afford the time to train, control, and bend them to his wil. But in that savage world of fifteen hundred years ago, Radu Lykan had control over nothing! Even kings and emperors had controled nothing! Only the restless forces of Nature, Change, and Chaos had any control at al…

But Ulutu: Radu had biten her during intercourse, a love bite, but much too deep. She would never be Wamphyri - wel, not for a long, long time at least, if she lived that long - but she would be a wolfling, bound to Radu as his thral. Very wel, she could run with the pack and be his mate, for as long as it lasted. Alas, but that hadn’t been long. Gaeseric’s advisers, who earlier in the campaign had welcomed Radu’s pack as ‘mercenary warriors without peer - men who fight like dogs of the wild!’ now gave their lord different advice. Oh, it had seemed a grand irony at first, a marvelous jest, that a great city founded by wolf-suckled brothers should be brought to its knees in part by a wolfish man, this so-caled Hound of Night, with his band of howling berserks. But the city had falen now and Radu and his lot had been paid off. And who could say, perhaps they had even been paid … too wel?

For what were they after al but mercenaries? And only a handful by comparison with the true Vandal army. No match for Gaeseric, if he should decide to take back what tribute he had paid them. Aye, and these wolves of war kept many comely women plundered out of Rome, and measures of good red wine likewise sacked from the city, which they held in their cavern lair in the mountains with the rest of their loot…

A man of Gaeseric’s had come to Radu in the early evening with news of a legion mustering in the north, and Roman galeys from the Eastern Empire puting men and ordnances ashore south of the Tiberis. And these were Gaeseric’s orders:

Radu was to send one-third of his men to spy out the land to the north, and he and the rest were to harass the sea-borne invasion at the mouth of the river; which in the same night he set out to do … only to discover that there were no such reinforcements for the ravaged city! Nor had there been. Then he remembered how he’d dreamed dreams of treachery, and saw when he rushed back to his lair under the mountains how his dreams were true: smoke and fire issuing from the great cavern’s outlets, and the ravished bodies of the pack’s women strewn among the coarse grasses at the mouth of the cave! Even Ulutu, with blood under her nails from the fight she’d put up.

At which it was as much as Radu could do to keep himself from screaming aloud. It was not that she was dead - he might even have kiled her himself, had circumstances required it - but more the
way
of her death. For it brought back to him memories of his own sister’s rape and murder at the hands of Zirescu and Ferenczy scum, in Sunside in a different world.