Necroscope 9: The Lost Years (73 page)

Abruptly, a torch was lit; the shadows were at once thrown back, and flickering fight ilumined the face and form of Daham Drakesh.

Chang Lun had met him before but the physical appearance, the
presence
of Drakesh, never failed to impress him. At sixty-eight inches in height, the Major himself was taller than average for his race, but he felt dwarfed in the presence of Daham Drakesh. The man must be all of six and a half feet in height! But thin to the point of emaciation, he looked almost skeletal where the light of his torch showed through his shift and silhouetted his pipestem body. His hands were freakishly long and tapering, their pointed fingers tipped with thick yellow nails hooked into claws; his shaven skull was thin at the front and lantern-jawed, long at the back and bulbous as the head of an insect on a scrawny neck.

But for all that Daham Drakesh seemed fragile as porcelain, his eyes - eyes luminous and yelow as molten sulphur - gazed on Chang Lun and the Corporal, and seemed to gaze through them, as if
they
were the ephemeral ones, not he. They felt paralysed by that gaze, until finally

Drakesh’s lips cracked in a ghastly smile and he said:

‘Come. I have prepared a room for your man in the left eye of the carven face. There he may enjoy the daylight, forbidden to me and mine, sip tea, break bread, take his rest - and wait for you, of course. We require no underlings to attend our discourse.’ He smiled a mirthless sideways smile down on the Major and moved silently, flowingly ahead of his guests, leading them through the labyrinth of rock-hewn halls, galleries and tunnels which was the monastery.

‘Alas, you and I may not rest, Major,’ (again his loathsome smile, directed at Chang Lun). The wicked are not permitted to rest, ever - by which I mean that we have matters to discuss, of course.’

‘Indeed we have,’ the Major snapped, feeling (as he always felt) intimidated by this creature in this place and determined to regain the upper hand. ‘Grave matters, which have brought me here on the orders of my superiors!’

‘Aye, and your timing - or the timing of your masters in Peking - is faultless,’ Daham Drakesh answered, as he rushed his visitors along gloomy stone corridors, with his torch held high in front. ‘For just as you have your orders, so I have my … shall we say, requirements? Who can say, perhaps there are higher powers at work? Certainly it seems that your coming at this time was inevitable. For if you had not requested an audience, I most certainly would have summoned you.’

‘Summoned?’ Chang Lun gasped. ‘Why, you …!’ But there he paused with his mouth agape, his slanted eyes opening wide.

In the last few moments, a massed moaning had become apparent; the Major had thought it might be some acoustic effect of the wind on the outer shell of the monastery. But now, in addition to the moaning, he could discern a regular whistling or slicing sound, like the
crack
of a lash splitting the air, or of several lashes in unison. And he had seen its source.

They had reached a central gallery deep in the mountainside. Lit by flambeaux, still the light failed to illumine the high ceiling or reach into every corner. The place was an amphitheatre, with stone steps descending to a level central area. But while the rest of the hall, cave or excavation was poorly lit, that central area was all too clearly illumined.

Burning braziers suspended on chains from the ceiling cast their flaring light on a scene that Bosch might easily have omitted from some hellish triptych. Emerging onto a perimeter walkway, the Major had come to an abrupt halt. Drakesh immediately gripped his elbow in a surprisingly powerful hand. ‘Ah, no!’ he whispered. ‘Be silent, I beg you. Do not disturb them. They are at worship …’

They’ were the monastery’s priests, the sect’s devotees, the acolytes of the faith. They were naked; their red robes of priesthood lay folded on the lower tiers of the amphitheatre’s encircling steps; their pale, cringing bodies thronged around the central dais - no,
the long

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stone trough,
as Chang Lun now saw - but those who stood upon or in the trough were clad in red nevertheless. The red of their own blood!

Heads down, in single-file, they trudged in their shuffling flip-flop fashion from one end of the trough to the other, while the ‘brothers’ al around flailed away at them with long black - and red - metal-tipped whips. The blood streaked them; it rained from them; their feet were stained crimson where they slopped through an inch of plasma like men treading grapes! Yet never a cry of pain from a single ‘brother’ but that low, concerted moaning, not least from the ones with the whips …

who knew it was their turn next.

And the blood in the trough: it drained away through boreholes to a sluice, and went steaming down a chute into unknown darkness. Those who had offered up their blood stepped from the trough at its far end, and went stumbling, reeling down an exit tunnel, presumably to a place of rest and healing. While at the other end untried brothers took their places, stepped into the trough and commenced the ordeal of blood. And in the outer circle, the last of the priests were even now disrobing, accepting whips from flayers who chose their own places in the shuffling, moaning line.

‘Worship?’ The Major was aghast, and his driver trembling, where Daham Drakesh hurried them around the perimeter and under an archway marked with an ankh: a symbol of long life, as Chang Lun was aware. But long life, in a place like this?

‘But what of the blood?’ The Corporal’s face was now a far paler shade of yelow. ‘Where does it al go? Al of that blood, al of that… life?’ For some time there was no answer, just the flaring of Drakesh’s torch as he forged ahead. Then finaly his voice came echoing back to the pair hurrying after him: The blood returns to the earth … eventualy. Surely it is beter to offer it fresh than roting in corpses? Men take from the soil and the rivers, giving nothing back but piss and shit until the end. But here we observe our duty to Nature.’

‘Huh!’
the Major couldn’t suppress a derisory snort. ‘And do you bleed with them, Daham Drakesh?’

Drakesh rounded on him in the doorway to his quarters and for a moment seemed to rear taler still. Then the fire dimmed a little in his eyes as he answered,

‘With them? No, Chang Lun, I bleed
for
them, for they are sinners al! In the night, they have sinned. Even their dreams have been foul, and ful of the vices which are in men. They have dreamed of women, and some of men. They have plied their own flesh, making it despicable. But in this place we are of the spirit, not the body. Which is why, periodicaly, we suffer their vile bodies to be purged; not by the release of base fluids but the essence of life itself. And so you see, your driver was right: the blood
is
the life …’

At which a red-robed priest stepped forward from the shadows, and

Drakesh turned to the shivering Corporal. ‘Go with the brother here, who wil see that you are comfortable.’ When they were gone, he stood aside and ushered the Major into his chambers …

Daham Drakesh had been here a hundred years. At the time, this had seemed the only place in the world that no one wanted. But now men wanted everything, everywhere, even a wasteland as barren as this plateau.

When first he came here there was the waled city and its people, nothing else. But in twenty-odd years the city was forbidden and its people in thral, and in another twenty most of them had died in the excavation of the ‘monastery.’ It pleased Drakesh to cal it a monastery, which was in fact an aerie. As for the survivors of the great task: their children were still in thral to Drakesh in his aerie, in one of the highest, most remote places on Earth. But it had not been remote enough.

Even that mighty fang
Qomolangma,
Everest itself, one hundred and thirty miles away, would not be remote enough. Men had conquered its topmost peak; they had come out of foreign lands to plant their sigils there. Usualy they hailed from the west, but in older times they had come from the east, too. Except those earlier conquerors had had scant interest in Everest.

History repeats. Those same slant-eyed warriors were back again. Not the Hsiung-nu or Avars nor even the Huns, but their descendants certainly, and with the same fierce blood in them. But where before they had skirted the Great Plateau, this time they had taken it. Wel, and Daham Drakesh, last of his line, was of an alien blood, too - of a
truly
alien blood, aye! This would not be the first time his kind had been swayed, usurped, even decimated by human invaders. But never exterminated. Nor would it happen now.

It had been the same in Dacia, Eflak, Walachia, Transylvania (the same in ‘the source-place,’ under whatever name the pages of history ascribed to it), in those earlier times. Daham had heard it from his egg-sire, Egon, who had lived through al of those long centuries of war to become the survivor of survivors, oldest of al the Wamphyri … Wel, save one:

How nomadic invaders from the east had driven the vampire Lords from their ancient territories time and again, not least when they had considered themselves secure. And now? Was it to be the same again? Not if Daham Drakesh had his way.

He had come here those hundred years ago to remove himself from the actions of his father. Bored by isolation in his Transylvanian keep, and aware that an ancient enemy lay asleep in a secret place in the west, the ‘Count’ had determined to venture out and broaden his interests in the world; he had lain low for far too long. Daham Drakul (now Drakesh), Egon’s ‘son’ by transfusion of his egg, had been left to care

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for the keep: ‘in command,’ as it were, of a handful of itinerant Szekely serfs and thralls. Huh! What was that for power?

But treachery was ever the way of the vampire, and no one hates a Master Vampire, a Lord of the Wamphyri, more than his own flesh and blood, his own egg-son. By virtue of Egon’s egg, the burgeoning leech within him, Daham
was
Wamphyri; he would be a Lord in his own right. But not here in Transylvania, not in another Lord’s castle. Wherefore he must remove himself to some far place and find or build an aerie of his own. A handful of soil out of Starside (his ‘birthright’) and six Szgany thralls vampirized into lieutenants, were all Daham took with him. Oh, and some monies in ancient golden ingots stolen from his father’s treasury.

And so to the Roof of the World, and to this place—

—Where eight years later he’d learned of Egon’s death at the hands of some merely human adversary. But by then a return to the Transylvanian keep had been out of the question, for it had been recognized as a source of great evil; the local administration would never allow another Drakul to take up residence there. It were best that the legend die again, only to rise up in other parts when the time was ripe.

And so the decades had flown, but what is time to a Lord of the Wamphyri? Time is nothing … but ennui is. And just as Egon had become bored, so was his ‘son’ bored by his existence in this place. Except he must wait out his time; or rather, he must wait out the time of Another, until He was up again.

Daham knew about Radu; knew
who,
if not
where
he was. At least he knew as much as Egon had known, before his ill-fated sojourn in England. He also knew about the ‘Francezcis’ (more properly the Ferenczys), and had watched from afar while they grew powerful in the world. For just as they had their sources, so Daham had his. Indeed they were often the same sources! But more than this, he had his eyes and ears out in the world, his red-robed thralls and ‘Emissaries of the Message,’ ostensibly a message of love and peace …

In reality they were his spies pure and simple, and their message a sham. Or rather, they were his «crf-so-simple and far
less
than pure agents. But as well as information, they sought out vampires, too-common vampires like themselves

- to learn from them …

… And then to destroy them!

It was part of the ages-old scheme of things, a rule as valid as it had been fifteen hundred years ago: that obscurity and anonymity are synonymous with longevity. A simple code of existence that Egon Drakul had forgotten or put aside once too often. But his son Daham would not make the same mistake. For he knew that if man discovered vampires in the world - and if man believed in them - he would not rest until they were destroyed, every last one, including Daham. Which was

why he sought out and killed these lesser creatures first.

As to who they were:

Spawn of Ferenczy, Lykan,
and
Drakul errors from a time lost in history. The sons of the sons and daughters of daughters of supplicant Szgany come into this world with Radu Lykan, Nonari the Gross Ferenczy … yes, and with Karl and Egon Drakul, too, out of a far strange place. They were not Wamphyri, no, but they were of the blood. And their source had been Sunside/Starside in a vampire world. Daham had learned something of that place from his father, and of bloodfeuds so terrible that they would outlast time! Moreover, he knew it was only a
matter
of time before just such a feud erupted here.

He knew, because down the years his ‘disciples’ had come across descendants of Radu’s thralls - lycanthropes with eyes full of moonlight - who told of a legend sleeping in a mountain far in the west. This was the same rumour Egon had heard a hundred years ago, that sent him plunging headlong into England … to his eventual death. And who could say that Egon’s death had not been wrought by Radu, or those he’d left behind to tend him through his long sleep?

Radu Lykan, and the Ferenczys, and the Drakuls. But
that
had been a feud - and would be again, when Radu was up! As to the when of it: soon, if Daham could believe his sources. And he did believe them. The Ferenczys had had thralls in England for long and long; for what good reason, if not to track Radu to his lair? And just as Daham’s people had researched the so-called ‘Ferenczinis,’ and later the ‘Francezcis,’ so had some other agency
out
of England! Daham knew it; his eyes and ears were out there, not always in the guise of red-robed priests! Radu’s thralls protected and looked after their sleeping master even now, and in their turn sought out his olden enemies until the time of his return.