Necroscope 4: Deadspeak (58 page)

“Nothing?” Janos hissed, turning Layard’s face towards his own. “And am I a fool? You were a talented man, a locator, but as a vampire your powers are immeasurably improved. If it can be found, then you can find it. So how can you tell me you’ve lost him? How
can
he be there, and then no longer there? Does he come on, even through the night? Is he somewhere between?
Speak?
And he gave the other a bone-jarring shake.

“He was there!” Layard shrieked. “I felt him there, alone, in one place, probably settled in for the night. I
know
he was there. I found him, swept over him and back, but I didn’t dare linger on him for fear he’d follow me back to you. Only ask the girl. She’ll tell you it’s true!”

“You—are—in—
league
!” Janos hurled him to his knees, then snatched at Sandra’s gauzy shift and tore it from her. She cringed naked under the moon and tried to cover herself, her eyes yellow in the pale oval of her skull. But in another moment she drew herself upright. Janos had already done his worst; against horror that numbs, flesh has no feeling.

“He’s speaking the truth,” she said. “I couldn’t enter the Necroscope’s mind in case he entered mine, and through me yours. But when I sensed him asleep, then I thought I might risk a glimpse. I tried and … he was no longer there. Or if he was, then his mind was closed.”

Janos looked at her for long moments, let his scarlet gaze burn on her and penetrate, until he was sure she’d spoken only the truth. Then—

“And so he is coming,” he growled. “Well, and that was what I wanted.”

“Wanted?” Sandra smiled at him, perhaps a little too knowingly. “Past tense? But no longer, eh, Janos?”

He scowled at her, caught her shoulder, forced her down beside Layard. Then he turned his face to the northwest and held his arms out to the night. “I lay me down a mist in the valleys,” he intoned. “I invoke the lungs of the earth to breathe for me, and send up their reek into the air, to make his path obscure. I call on my familiars to seek him out and make his labours known to me, and to the very rocks of the mountains that they shall defy him.”

“And these things will stop him?” Sandra tried desperately hard to control her vampire scorn.

Janos turned his crimson gaze on her and she saw that his nose had flattened down and become convoluted, like the snout of a bat, and that his skull and jaws had lengthened wolfishly. “I don’t know,” he finally answered her, his awful voice vibrating on her nerve-endings. “But if they don’t, then be sure I know what will!”

With three vampire thralls (caretakers, who looked after his pile for him in his absence and guarded its secrets) Janos went down into forgotten bowels of earth and nightmare, to an all but abandoned place. There he used his necromantic skills to call up a Thracian lady from her ashes. He chained her naked to a wall and called up her husband, a warrior chief of massive proportions, who was a giant even now and must have been considered a Goliath in his day. Both of these Janos had had up before, for various reasons, but now his purpose was entirely different. He had given up tomb-looting some five hundred years ago, and his appetite for torture and necrophilia had grown jaded in that same distant era. While still the Thracian warrior stumbled about dazed and disorientated, crying out in the reek and the purple smoke of his reanimation, Janos had him chained and dragged before his lady. At sight of her he became calm in a moment; tears formed in his eyes and trickled down the leathery, bearded, pockmarked jowls of his face.

“Bodrogk,” Janos spoke to him in an approximation of his own tongue, “and so you recognize this wife of yours, eh? But do you see how I’ve cared for her salts? She comes up as perfectly fleshed as in life—not like yourself, all scarred and burned, and pocked from the loss of your materials. Perhaps I should be more careful how I gather up your ashes, as I am with hers, when once more I send you down into your jar. Ah, but as you must know, she has been of more use to me than you. For where you could only give me gold, she gave me —”

“—You are a dog!” the other shut him off, his voice cracking like boulders breaking. Leaning forward in his chains, he strained to reach his tormentor.

Janos laughed as his thralls fought hard to keep Bodrogk from breaking loose. But then he stopped laughing and held out a glass jug for the other to see. And: “Now be still and listen to me,” he commanded, harsh-voiced. “As you see, this favourite wife of yours is near-perfect. How long she remains so is entirely up to you. She is unchanged from a time two thousand years ago, and will go on the same for as long as I will it—and not a moment longer.”

While he talked his creatures made fast Bodrogk’s chains to staples in the wall. Now they stood back from him. “Observe,” said Janos. He took a glass stem and dipped it in the liquid in the jug, then quickly splashed droplets across the huge Thracian’s chest.

Bodrogk looked down at himself; his mouth fell open and his eyes started out as smoke curled up from the matted hair of his chest where the acid had touched him; he cried out and shook himself in his chains, then crumpled to his knees in the agony of his torture. And the acid ate into him until his flesh melted and ran in thin rivulets, red and yellow, all down his quivering thighs.

His wife, the last of the six wives he’d had in life, cried out to Janos that he spare Bodrogk this torture. And weeping, she too collapsed in her chains. At last her husband struggled to his feet, the orbits of his eyes red with agony and hatred where he gazed at Janos. “I know that she is dead,” he said, “even as I am dead, and that you are a ghoul and a necromancer. But it seems that even in death there is shame, torment and pain. Therefore, to spare her any more of that, ask what you will of me. If I know the answer I will tell it to you. If I can perform the deed, it shall be done.”

“Good!” Janos grunted. “I have six of your men in their burial urns, where they lie as salts, ashes, dust. Now I shall spill them out of their lekythoi and have them up. They will be my guard, and you their Captain.”

“More flesh to torture?” Bodrogk’s growl was a rumble.

“What?” Janos put on a pained expression. “But you should be grateful! These were your warrior comrades in an age when you battled side by side. Aye, and perhaps you shall again. For when my enemy comes against me, I can’t be sure that he’ll come alone. Why, I even have your armour, with which you decked yourself all those years agone, and which was buried with you. So you see, you shall be the warrior again. And again I say to you, you should be grateful. Now I call these others up, and I call upon you, Bodrogk, to control them. Your wife stays here. Only let one treacherous Thracian hand rise against me … and she suffers.”

“Janos,” Bodrogk continued to gaze at him, “I will do all you ask of me. But for all that I was a warrior in life, I was a fair man, too. It is that fairness which prompts me to advise you now: keep well the upper hand. Oh, I know you are a vampire and strong, but I also know my own strength, which is great. If you did not have Sofia there, in chains, then for all your acid I would break you into many pieces. She alone stays my hand.”

Janos laughed like a great baying hound. “That time shall never come,” he said. “But I too shall be fair: when this is done, and done to my liking, then I shall put you both down, and mingle your dust, and scatter it to the winds forever.”

“Then that must suffice,” said the other.

“So be it!” said Janos …

As the sun painted a crack of gold on the eastern horizon, Harry Keogh slept on. But in the Aegean Sea off Rhodes Darcy Clarke and his team were aboard a slightly larger, faster boat than last time, and already passing Tilos to port where they forged west for Sirna. Watching the sea slip by like blue silk sliced by the scissors prow, Darcy again went over the plans they’d made last night and looked for loopholes in their logic.

He remembered how David Chung had sat at a table in their hotel rooms, while the rest ringed him about and watched his performance. Chung’s parents had been cocaine addicts; the drug had rotted their minds and bodies, killing both of them while he was still little more than a child. So that ever since joining the Branch he’d aimed his talent in that one specific direction: the destruction of everyone who trafficked in human misery. They had given the locator other tasks from time to time, but everyone in E-Branch knew that this was his forte.

Last night he’d employed a little of the very substance he loathed, crouching over the smallest amount of snow white cocaine. Upon the table a large map of the Dodecanese, and upon the map the merest trickle of poisonous dust, lying on a flimsy brown cigarette paper to give it definition.

Chung had called for silence, and for several minutes had sat there breathing deeply, occasionally wetting a finger to take up the white grains and touch them to his tongue. Then—

—With a single sharp puff of air from his mouth he’d blown the cigarette paper and its poison away, and in the next moment stabbed the map with his forefinger. “There!” he’d said. “And an awful lot of it!”

Manolis Papastamos and Jazz Simmons had applauded, but Zek, Darcy and Ben Trask had not seemed much surprised. They
were
impressed, of course, but ESP had been their business for many years. It wasn’t so strange to them.

Then Manolis had looked more closely at the map, the place where Chung was pointing, and nodded. “Lazarides’s island,” he said. “So now we know where the
Lazarus
is hiding. And aboard her, all the shit that the Vrykoulakas stole from the old
Samothraki.”

After that, planning had been basic to minimal. Their aim: simply to get to the island in the hour after dawn, when the white ship’s vampire crew should be less inclined to activity, and to destroy the
Lazarus,
vampires and all, right there where she was anchored.

David Chung was out of it now; his part had been played and the remainder of his time in the sun was his own; he wouldn’t see the rest of the team until the job was finished. And now indeed they were on their way to finish it.

Manolis brought Darcy’s mind back to the present: “Another half-hour and we’re there. Do you want to go over it again?”

Darcy shook his head. “No, you all know your jobs. As for me: this time I’m just a passenger—at least until we get onto the island and into Janos’s place.” He looked at his team.

Zek was unzipping herself from her lightweight one-piece suit. Underneath she wore a yellow bathing costume consisting of very little and leaving nothing at all to the imagination. She scarcely looked her age but was sleek, tanned and stunning. With her blue eyes, her blonde hair flashing gold, and a smile like a white blaze, there wouldn’t be a man alive or undead who could keep his eyes off her!

Her husband looked at her and grinned. “What’s so amusing?” she asked him, tossing her head.

“I was thinking,” Jazz answered, “that we’d like to sink these blokes along with their ship. The idea isn’t that they should go diving in the water after you!”

“This is something I learned from the Lady Karen on Starside,” she told him. “If I can distract them, then the rest of you will be able to do your jobs more safely and easily. Karen was an expert at distraction.”

“Oh, they’ll be distracted, all right!” Manolis assured her.

Ben Trask had meanwhile opened up a small compartmented suitcase and taken out four of six gleaming metal discs some two inches thick by seven across. The back of each disc was black, magnetic, and the obverse fitted with a safety switch and timer. Manolis looked at the limpet mines where Trask began fitting them to a pair of diving belts in place of the usual lead weights, and shook his head. “I still don’t know how you got them out of England,” he said.

Trask shrugged. “In a diplomatic bag. We may be silent partners, but we’re still part of British Intelligence after all.”

There’s a rock up ahead,” Zek shouted from where she now sat on a rubber mat on the narrow deck on top of the cabin and in front of the windshield. She pointed. “Manolis, is that it?”

He nodded. “That’s it. Darcy, can you take the wheel?”

Darcy took control of the boat and throttled back a little. Manolis and Jazz stripped down to swimsuits, and went into the tiny cabin out of sight. In there, they tested aqualungs and checked their swimfins. Ben Trask took off his jacket and put on sunglasses and a straw hat. In his Hawaiian shirt he was just some rich tourist fool out for a day’s pleasure-boating. Darcy might easily be his brother.

The island had swum up larger and Zek was seen to be right: it was little more than a big rock. There were a few shrubs, patches of thyme and coarse grass, and lots of rocks … and situated centrally, above coastal cliffs, a weathered yellow stack going up sheer for maybe one hundred and eighty feet.

Zek looked at it and put her hand to her brow. “That’s a pigmy of an aerie,” she said, “but it gives me the shudders just the same. And there are men—no, vampires—on it. Two of them at least.”

The boat rounded the point of a promontory and Darcy saw what lay ahead. But even if he hadn’t seen it, his talent had already forewarned him. “Stay down,” he called out to Manolis and Jazz in the cabin. “Draw those curtains. You two aren’t here. There are just the three of us.”

They did as he told them.

Zek stretched herself out luxuriously on the cabin’s roof and put on sunglasses; Trask lay back and hooked one leg idly over the boat’s rail; Darcy headed the boat directly across the mouth of a small bay. And there, anchored in the bay … the white ship, the
Lazarus.

Trask knocked the cap off a bottle of beer and tilted his head back, merely wetting his lips but studying what he could see of the island intently. That was part of his job, while Darcy and Zek, in their various ways, studied the
Lazarus.

The island consisted of a tiny beach inside a pair of bare spurs of rock extending oceanward, and an almost barren slope of rock climbing to the central stack. From this side, the top of the stack was seen to be a ruined fortification or pharos of some sort, with the remains of badly eroded steps still showing where they zig-zagged up to it. But half-way up the stack, a false, flat, extensive plateau seemed carved, as if in ages past the upper section had split down the centre and half had toppled over. With massive walls built around the plateau’s perimeter from one side of the needle rock to the other, the place had obviously been a Crusader stronghold. The old walls had long since fallen away in places, but it was seen that new walls were now under construction, and scaffolding was plainly visible clinging to both the stump and the surviving upper section of the stack.