Necroscope 9: The Lost Years (51 page)

As for the place of Radu’s resurgence, the barter-camp of the Romans and Dacians, it would have many names down the centuries. But to the superstitious people of that region, who had long memories, it would always be known as Radujevac:

‘Where Radu came forth,’ of course …

Necroscope: The Lost Years - Vol. I

265

V

DREAMS IN RESIN

Radu dreamed his olden, less than vivid dreams, and strove to reinstate, restructure them, in the eye of memory. He dreamed of ages past and of the life he’d known then, and of the many lives he’d consumed since then. Crimson dreams of his genesis as a man in a far vampire world; of his monstrous conversion into something other than a man during his time of banishment; of his everlasting (and soon to be ongoing) revenge on those who had dared to rape and ruin what little he had loved.

Less than vivid, these dreams of his, aye - unless they were recounted, reinforced, revisited time and again to bring them into nightmare definition in a yet more nightmarish mind. For time has the power to blur and even erase, and these were things that Radu desired to remember forever. During his sleep of centuries they had been his one recourse, his only means of keeping his hatred alive while he waited out his time undead.

He recalled names out of the fading past, names that were cursed for all time to come. Such as the Zirescus: Giorga, Ion, and Lexandru - and the Ferenczys, Lagula and Rakhi, once Lords in Olden Starside. Except all were dead in another time, even another world. Dead by his hand, aye! And Radu relished resurgent memories of how he had dealt with them who had borne those names, and how he would
next
deal with any survivor, any descendant, when once more he was up and abroad in this new world where his dreams would become the new reality.

True, the resolution of ancient bloodfeuds was but a very small part of the overall schemes he’d schemed in his immemorial sleep … but a delicious part! And it would be for any survivors just as it had been for their ancestors, or worse.

His ‘immemorial’ sleep …

Well, immemorial to those he’d left behind - Szgany supplicants,

thralls to remember and restore him when his time was nigh - but not to him. For despite the fact that Radu’s dreams and memories required constant restoration, still they remained his one true anchor on the dimly echoing past, his one guide to an ever-expanding future … and
still
they were red! He saw it even now in the eye of memory: how it had been in another time, another world. And how it was yet to be in this one:

Giorga, that cruel old bastard!
Bah!
For his death had been too easy …
Flopping about in his own blood, awash in a crimson
flood that pulsed from his gaping throat and punctured gut. Air whistling in and out of his sliced windpipe, forming bright red bubbles into a
livid froth that stained his beard and speckled his madly puffing face. But the spurting of his life-blood and all his jerking and twitching
quickly slowing down as life ebbed. Much
too
quickly!

And Giorga’s son, Lexandru:
who had raped Radu’s sister, sharing Magda’s body - even when life had fled it - with his brother Ion and the
Ferenczys. He too had died far too quickly, with a bolt from Radu’s crossbow buried in his black heart and Radu’s name
spraying in red from his disbelieving lips.

And Ion, last and most loathsome of a brutish line:

Ion, with one bolt through his right arm, and another in his shoulder pinning him to a tree. But Radu had promised himself that this time the payment would be cruel as the crime -
even
so cruel,
just
so cruel! Magda had been raped, deflowered even unto death, her innocence crushed and ravaged from her as if torn out. So be it…

Ion, hanging there helpless from a crossbow bolt, while Radu’s taloned hands caressed him in his body’s most delicate parts. Then
… a//
of
Radu’s rage and Wamphyri passion flowing in a single moment into his arms and hands!

In that same moment Ion Zirescu had lost everything, even the lower pipes of his body: dislocated, wrenched out of place, and left dangling
like lumpy red rags! Not surprisingly, he had lost consciousness, too, and would have gone on losing enough blood that he. would never
wake up -except Radu would not let it go to waste, not all of it. And while there was yet a pulse in his victim’s jugular, he had
buried a wolfs fangs in it to draw of the remainder of Ion’s life.

Ah, how he had slaked his awful thirst, giving nothing of himself but draining all from the other, even to the dregs …

Blood! It was what Radu had needed, what his parasite vampire leech needed. It was the nectar of life
—

—It had
been
the life, and would be again, when he was up, up,
up
from his gluey grave! No, not a grave but a refuge, a sanctuary. From men, and from ancient enemies who were other than men, and from time itself. But especially a sanctuary from that Greatest of all Destroyers, which had finally determined his fate. Black it had been, Brian Lumley

Necroscope: The Lost Years - Vol. I

266

267

and Black its name. Black as the swarming rats that brought it out of the east …

As for men: they’d been naive as children when first Radu and the others out of Starside came among them. Their sciences were young, their superstitions many, and their blood sweet as any to be found on Sunside in that far vampire world of Radu’s youth. Even so, their weapons had been deadly, and their courage unbelievable. In the first hundred, two hundred years, the vampire and werewolf had flourished; aeries and lairs had been erected or excavated in the mountains, and men had shunned the wooded foothills of the Carpati Meridional! and lands around.

In the beginning, ranging far and wide, Radu and his various packs had ravaged among the colonial setlements north of the Danube - even to the point of harassing a Roman garrison’s three cohorts, which were permanently stationed there to man forts strung out between the river and foothills, protection for the trade and supply routes. A fairly easy target, the garrison was residual of a much earlier XIHth Legion; its soldiers had mainly setled the land around; they were as much ‘locals’ as the Dacians themselves.

But despite that they were only three cohorts of the original legion, the title ‘the 13th’ stuck, and the troubles Radu brought them quickly earned them a prefix: the ‘Unlucky’ 13th. From which time forward that number had been known as a symbol of il-fortune among the Romans and others, and eventualy the entire world, even as it had been in Sunside/Starside.

Night-skirmishing with legionnaires along the river and in the Dacian hamlets: ah, but
that
had been a grand and dangerous game! One time, Radu had been taken in an animal trap.

… Given a knock on the head that near-brained him, he’d come to on a Roman ship on the Danube, on course for the Black Sea and eventualy Rome itself, and doubtless the Games! Several of his pack were with him, taken with common wolves in nets or pitfalls. Perhaps their captors considered them a new species!

Wel, so they were, in a way. There were also caged bears, and wild boars from the woods of eastern Pannonia, chests of local gold in thumb-sized ingots, barrels of spices, and wines galore in racks of amphorae. A varied cargo.

But the wolf is a wily beast, and the werewolf even more so; while the sheer physical
strength
of a Lord of the Wamphyri… is awesome! The oak-staved cages were like so much kindling in Radu’s hands. And above decks a ful moon rode high in the Dacian sides, and the night was by no means done …

The ship had beached itself near Zimnicea; its crew, and a handful of legionnaires retiring out of the army and returning to their homelands, were found hanging by their heels from the rigging, naked, pale and bloodless. But despite that their bodies had been ripped apart and their throats torn out, there was litle of actual blood to be discovered. Later, local Dacians had paid for this atrocity; a hamlet in the foothills, wel known for the rebellious nature of its citizens, was put to the sword and razed to the ground.

It stil amused Radu to think of it: how he had freed the wild creatures to swim ashore, stolen much of the wine and destroyed what couldn’t be carried away. As for the gold … wel, in his way Lord Radu, too, had been naive in those early times. And gold had been common in Starside.

He’d seen no use for the heavy stuff; his thralls had thrown a fortune overboard! There it had stayed (for al he knew) in the silt of a shallow reach of the river for over fifteen hundred years. If ever he revisited those parts, he would know where to find it again.

But there had been two other items of cargo that Radu had found much more interesting, which years later he had cause to remember and utilize: several amphorae filed with a glutinous golden liquid, at first mistaken for honey; and … a chest of yellow stones? The first was resin, used throughout the Mediterranean as a preservative in wine, and the second
was
fossilized
resin, turned hard as rock and rounded by the Baltic into polished amber pebbles. And Lord Radu - originally an untutored nomad, litle more than a savage from the woods of a paralel world, then a mutated Lord on the dark side of that world, now finaly a werewolf in
this
world -had seen the connection between the two, and might wel have been one of the first men ever to see it.

For on Starside it had been the practice of certain Lords of the Wamphyri to bury defeated enemies alive (or undead) out on the boulder plains, to ‘stiffen to stones’ and fuse with the earth in their deep and inescapable graves. But in this case it was different - here the preserving resin
itself had
stiffened, keeping
intact
whatever was caught within. For the translucent, softly glowing pebbles had contained flies and beetles trapped in the exuded life-fluids of coniferous forests dead and gone for countless years.

Radu had no idea of the span of time, of the aeons it had taken to turn resin to amber, but the principle had astonished him all the same. Especially when he examined some of the specimens locked in the amber: such as a perfectly preserved dragonfly, or an ant with a fragment of leaf still clearly visible in its mandibles. These creatures were dead, of course, and in the terms of men might well have been dead ‘forever.’ But what if a Lord of the Wamphyri should choose to preserve himself in this fashion? What, a metamorphic vampire, with self-regenerating flesh? And from that time forward Radu had worn an amber bauble, with its captive insect intact, on a slender chain of gold around his neck …

Amber: the ultimate end product of resin.

Resin: the blood of great pines … which fifteen hundred years ago, and indeed in far more recent times, had covered the mountain slopes Brian Lumley

268

Necroscope: The Lost Years - Vol. I

269

like winter fur on a beast’s hide; not only the granite mountains of inhospitable Scottish regions but those of far, foreign parts as well. No shortage of resin, no! Two centuries after Radu’s coming, all the Greeks in the Mediterranean had been using countless tons of the stuff just to cure their wines! And if Radu’s ‘contemporaries’ - the Drakuls, for instance - had thought to bring native earth from their aeries in Starside for their beds here in
this
world, then why not a bed of amber for a sleep of centuries?

For long and long, years without number, the idea had lain dormant in Radu’s head without his even suspecting it was there. But when he’d needed it…

Resin: a preservative with medicinal properties. A shield against the ravages of time. Perhaps even a cure for a terrible curse that in this world was as devastating as leprosy in Starside. Well, that last wasn’t proven as yet, but—

—What was that…?

Radu’s ‘dreams’ were more nearly conscious thoughts now, so that the very slightest of tremors which he’d felt through the walls of his sarcophagus and the near-solid matrix of his resin cocoon had seemed like a presence entering the room of a man on the verge of waking. He had sensed - something! Or someone? Or perhaps it was merely the mountains settling onto their foundations, as they had been doing for all of the six hundred years he’d lain here. He hadn’t called, had he? It wasn’t time yet, was it? Soon, but not yet. So … could it have been his creature, stirring with hideous life where it waxed in its own great vat? Possibly. He would ‘feel’ such motions, certainly, for its mind and flesh were of his making. And so:

Gently, little one, gently,
Radu sleepily sent.
Your time is soon, be sure … but not before mine. So have no fear,
for your master shall be there to bring you forth …

There was no answer, and Radu hadn’t expected one. It was simply a tremor in these old and fractured rocks, that was al. He could go back to his dreaming: of men and monsters, time and the plague, and of his eventual flight from al these things.

Men …

The Romans. But the Empire had been on the wane, at least in the parts where Radu and the others came forth. Aye, for the Goths were coming, and they were only a very smal part of what
else
was coming! Such wars, such batles, such blood! The blood was the life! And the
diversity
of blood, in this new world! No wonder that at first these hel-lands had seemed like some sort of Wamphyri heaven or paradise. Oh really…?

Men, and their wars … (Radu gradually settled back into his sleep of centuries).

During long years of upheaval, the Wamphyri had moved into the

mountain heights and spread out into the lands around, even into other lands across the sea; indeed, into all the shores of the Mediterranean and its islands. For they had seen the folly of their ways when first they came here; they had been too bold and had become legends which would not fade quickly in the memories of men. But if they desired long lives here, they must be (or at least appear to be) as one with the world and its people and not apart from them.