Necroscope - Deadspeak Part 33

And still the Great Mystic, and still insisting that G.o.d is the ultimate e quation . . . But here Mobius grew very quiet. And the trouble is, I'm not so sure any more that he's wrong.

Still Harry was astonished. Pythagoras, on my case? My mother told me t here were a lot of people willing to help me. But Pythagoras?

Mobius snapped out of his musing. Hmm? Yes, oh yes!

But . . . does he have the time for it? I mean, aren't there more pressing - ?

No, Mobius cut him short, for him this is of the ultimate importance. D on't you realize who Pythagoras was and what he did? Why, in the 6th Centur y b.c. he had already antic.i.p.ated the philosophy of numbers! He was the pri nc.i.p.al advocate of the theory that Number is the essence of all things, the metaphysical principle of rational order in the universe. What's more, his leading theological doctrine was metempsychosis!

Lost, Harry could only shake his head. And that has something to do wit h me?

Again Mobius's sigh. My boy, you're not listening. No, you are, you ar e! It's your d.a.m.ned innumeracy which makes you blind to what I'm saying! I t has everything to do with you. For after two and a half millennia, you a re living proof of everything Pythagoras advocated. You, Harry: the one fl esh and blood man in all the world who ever imposed his metaphysical mind on the physical universe! Harry tried to grasp what Mobius had said but it wouldn't stand still for him. It was his innumeracy getting in the way. So . . . I'm going to be OK, ri ght?

We're going to break down those doors, Harry, yes. Given time, of course .

How much time?

But here Mobius could only shrug. Hours, days, weeks. We have no way of knowing.

Weeks doesn't cut it, Harry told him. Neither does days. Hours sounds go od to me.

Well, we're trying, Harry. We're trying . . .

In the heights over Halmagiu, close to the ruins of his castle, Janos Fe renczy, bloodson of Faethor, ranted and raved. He had brought Sandra and Ken Layard up onto the sloping crest of a wedge of rock that jutted out into sp ace, a thousand feet above the sliding scree and the steep cliffs of the mou ntainside. The night winds themselves were disturbed by Janos's pa.s.sion; the y bl.u.s.tered around the high rock, threatening to tear the three loose and hu rl them down.

'Be quiet!' he threatened the very elements. 'Be still!' And as the winds subsided, there where the clouds scudded like things afraid across the face of the moon, so the enraged vampire turned on his thralls.

'You.' He drew Layard close, gathered up the skin at the back of his nec k like a mother cat holds its kitten, thrust him towards the edge of the she er drop. 'I have broken your bones once. And must I do it again? Now tell me : where is he? Where - is - Harry - Keogh?'

Layard wriggled in his grasp, pointed to the north-west. 'He was there, I swear it! Less than a hundred miles, less than an hour ago. I sensed him there . He was . . . strong, even a beacon! But now there is nothing.'

'Nothing?' Janos hissed, turning Layard's face towards his own. 'And a m I a fool? You were a talented man, a locator, but as a vampire your powe rs 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 lon ger there? Does he come on, even through the night? Is he somewhere betwee n? Speak? And he gave the other a bone-jarring shake.

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

'You - are - in - leagued Janos hurled him to his knees, then s.n.a.t.c.hed 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. Bu t 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 m ind in case he entered mine, and through me yours. But when I sensed him asle ep, then I thought I might risk a glimpse. I tried and ... he was no longer t here. 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 tens e? But no longer, eh, Janos?'

He scowled at her, caught her shoulder, forced her down beside Layard. Th en 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 e arth 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 t o 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 flatte ned down and become convoluted, like the snout of a bat, and that his skull a nd jaws had lengthened wolfishly. 'I don't know,' he finally answered her, hi s awful voice vibrating on her nerve-endings. 'But if they don't, then be sur e I know what will!'

With three vampire thralls (caretakers, who looked after his pile for h im in his absence and guarded its secrets) Janos went down into forgotten b owels 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 chaine d her naked to a wall and called up her husband, a warrior chief of ma.s.sive proportions, who was a giant even now and must have been considered a Goli ath 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 s ome five hundred years ago, and his appet.i.te for torture and necrophilia ha d grown jaded in that same distant era. While still the Thracian warrior st umbled about dazed and disorientated, crying out in the reek and the purple smoke of his reanimation, Janos had him chained and dragged before his lad y. 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, 'a nd so you recognize this wife of yours, eh? But do you see how I've cared f or her salts? She comes up as perfectly fleshed as in life - not like yours elf, all scarred and burned, and pocked from the loss of your materials. Pe rhaps 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 g old, she gave me -'

' - You are a dog!' the other shut him off, his voice cracking like boulde rs breaking. Leaning forward in his chains, he strained to reach his tormentor .

Janos laughed as his thralls fought hard to keep Bodrogk from breaking l oose. But then he stopped laughing and held out a gla.s.s 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 ag o, and will go on the same for as long as I will it - and not a moment longe r.'

While he talked his creatures made fast Bodrogk's chains to staples in th e wall. Now they stood back from him. 'Observe,' said Janos. He took a gla.s.s stem and dipped it in the liquid in the jug, then quickly splashed droplets a cross 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 quiverin g thighs.

His wife, the last of the six wives he'd had in life, cried out to Janos t hat he spare Bodrogk this torture. And weeping, she too collapsed in her chain s. 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 t hat even in death there is shame, torment and pain. Therefore, to spare her an y more of that, ask what you will of me. If I know the answer I will tell it t o 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. A ye, 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 y ou 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 shoul d 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 f airness which prompts me to advise you now: keep well the upper hand. Oh, I k now you are a vampire and strong, but I also know my own strength, which is g reat. If you did not have Sofia there, in chains, then for all your acid I wo uld 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 s lept on. But in the Aegean Sea off Rhodes Darcy Clarke and his team were abo ard a slightly larger, faster boat than last time, and already pa.s.sing Tilos to port where they forged west for Sirna. Watching the sea slip by like blu e silk sliced by the scissors prow, Darcy again went over the plans they'd m ade last night and looked for loopholes in their logic.

He remembered how David Chung had sat at a table in their hotel rooms, w hile the rest ringed him about and watched his performance. Chung's parents had been cocaine addicts; the drug had rotted their minds and bodies, killin g both of them while he was still little more than a child. So that ever sin ce 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 t he 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, crou ching 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 dus t, lying on a flimsy brown cigarette paper to give it definition.

Chung had called for silence, and for several minutes had sat there breat hing deeply, occasionally wetting a finger to take up the white grains and to uch 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 f orefinger. '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 wh ere the Lazarus is hiding. And aboard her, all the s.h.i.t that the Vrykoulaka s 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 shou ld be less inclined to activity, and to destroy the Lazarus, vampires and all , right there where she was anch.o.r.ed.

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

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 pa.s.senger - at least until we get onto the island and into Janos's pl ace.' He looked at his team.

Zek was unzipping herself from her lightweight one-piece suit. Underneat h she wore a yellow bathing costume consisting of very little and leaving no thing 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 coul d keep his eyes off her!

Her husband looked at her and grinned. 'What's so amusing?' she asked hi m, 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 yo u!'

'This is something I learned from the Lady Karen on Starside,' she told hi m. '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 a.s.sured her.

Ben Trask had meanwhile opened up a small compartmented suitcase and ta ken out four of six gleaming metal discs some two inches thick by seven acr oss. 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 wei ghts, and shook his head. 'I still don't know how you got them out of Engla nd,' he said.

Trask shrugged. 'In a diplomatic bag. We may be silent partners, but we're st ill 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. Sh e 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 J azz 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 sungla.s.ses and a straw hat. In his Hawaiian shirt he wa s just some rich tourist fool out for a day's pleasure-boating. Darcy might e asily 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 coa.r.s.e g ra.s.s, 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 d own,' he called out to Manolis and Jazz in the cabin. 'Draw those curtains. Y ou 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 sung la.s.ses; Trask lay back and hooked one leg idly over the boat's rail; Darcy he aded the boat directly across the mouth of a small bay. And there, anch.o.r.ed i n the bay ... the white ship, the Lazarus.

Trask knocked the cap off a bottle of beer and tilted his head back, mere ly wetting his lips but studying what he could see of the island intently. Th at was part of his job, while Darcy and Zek, in their various ways, studied t he 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 cen tral stack. From this side, the top of the stack was seen to be a ruined for tification or pharos of some sort, with the remains of badly eroded steps st ill showing where they zig-zagged up to it. But half-way up the stack, a fal se, flat, extensive plateau seemed carved, as if in ages past the upper sect ion had split down the centre and half had toppled over. With ma.s.sive 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 ha d 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. Darcy meanwhile considered the Lazarus. The white ship stood off from the beach in deep water central in the small bay. Her anchor-chain went do wn shimmering into the blue of the sea. On the deck under the black, scall oped awning, a man sat in one of several chairs. But as the motorboat came powering into view he stood up and took binoculars from around his neck.

He wore a wide-brimmed floppy hat and sungla.s.ses, and he kept fairly well to the shade as he put the binoculars to his eyes and trained them on the motorboat.

Zek propped herself up on one elbow and waved excitedly, but the watcher on the deck ignored her - at first.

Darcy throttled back and turned the boat in a wide circle about the white ship, and joined Zek in her waving. 'Ahoy, there!' he put on an upper-cla.s.s English accent. 'Ahoy aboard the Lazarus!'

The man went to the door of the lounge and leaned half-inside, then came back out. He now aimed his binoculars at Zek where she continued to wave; t his was scarcely necessary for the circling boat was no more than forty or f ifty feet away. She felt his gaze on her and shivered, despite the blazing h eat of the sun. A second man, who might have been the twin of the first, joi ned him and they silently observed the circling boat - but mainly they obser ved Zek.

Darcy throttled back more yet, and a third man came out of the white shi p's lounge. Ben Trask stood up and held up his bottle to them. 'Care for a d rink?' he shouted, imitating Darcy's faked accent. 'Maybe we can come aboard ?'.

Like f.u.c.k! thought Darcy.

Zek scanned the ship, not only above but also below decks. She counted si x all told. Three sleeping. All of them vampires. Then . . .

. . . One of the sleepers stirred, woke up. His mind was alert; it was mo re completely vampire than the others; before Zek could cover her telepathic spying, he had 'seen' her!

She stopped waving and told Darcy: 'Let's go. One of them read me. He di dn't see anything much, only that I'm more than I appear to be. But if they run off now we'll lose them.'

'We'll see you later,' Ben Trask called out as Darcy turned the boat away and sped for the tip of the far promontory.

Pa.s.sing from the view of the watchers on the Lazarus, he throttled right down and allowed the boat to cruise close up to a flat-topped, weed-grown r ock barely sticking up out of the sea. Jazz and Manolis came out of the cabi n, put on their masks and adjusted their demand valves, and as Darcy cut the engine they stepped from the boat to the rock and so into the sea.

'Jazz,' Zek called down, 'be careful!'

He might have heard her and he might not; his head went down and a stream of bubbles came up; the swimmers submerged to fifteen feet and heade d back towards the Lazarus.

'More distraction,' said Darcy, grimly, as he throttled up and turned back o ut to sea.

'Darcy,' Zek called to him, 'keep just a little more distant this time. They'l l be wary, I'm sure.'

As Darcy headed straight out to sea and the Lazarus came back into view , so Ben Trask got down on his knees and took a sterling sub-machine gun ou t of its bag under the seat. He extended the b.u.t.t and slapped a curved maga zine of 9 mm rounds into the housing, then lay the gun between his feet and covered it with the bag.

Half a mile out, Darcy turned to port and came speeding back towards th e white ship. There was activity aboard now, where the three on the deck hu rried round the rail, pausing every few paces to look over into the water.

Jazz and Manolis would be there any time now. Darcy piled on the speed and Zek commenced waving as before. The men on the deck came together at one po int at the rail and again Zek felt binoculars trained on her almost naked b ody. But this time the interest was other than s.e.xual.

Then, as Darcy leaned the boat over on her side and recommenced his circ ling, they heard the rattle of the Lazarus's anchor-chain as it was drawn up , and the throbbing cough of her engines starting into life. And now a fourt h man came ducking out of the lounge onto the deck . . . cradling a stubby, squat-bodied machine-gun in his arms!

'Jesus!' Ben Trask yelled. And it might have been that his shout of warni ng was a signal to let the battle commence.

The man with the machine-gun opened up, standing there on the deck of t he Lazarus with his legs braced, hosing the smaller craft with lead. Zek ha d scrambled down off the cabin roof; as she ducked into the tiny cabin the windshield flew into shards and Darcy felt the whip of hot lead flying all around. Then Trask stood up and returned fire, and the gunner on the Lazaru s was thrown back as if he'd been hit by a pile-driver. He bounced off a st anchion on the deck, came toppling over the rail and splashed down into the water. And another crewman ran to retrieve his gun.

Darcy was round the white ship now and putting distance between them as he forged for the open sea; but as Zek came back out of the cabin, she gra bbed the wheel and yanked it hard over, shouting: 'Look! Oh, look!'

Darcy let her have the wheel and looked. The man with the gun on the de ck of the Lazarus was firing down into the water, shooting at something whi ch drew slowly away from the white ship's flank. It could only be Jazz or M anolis, or both of them.

'You handle her!' Darcy yelled, and he moved to where Trask was still firing and drew out a second bag from under the seating. But as he loaded up the second SMG there came more of the angry wasp-buzzing of sprayed bul lets, and Trask cried out and staggered back, only just managing to preven t himself going over the side. The upper muscle of Trask's left arm had a neat hole punched clean through, which turned scarlet and spilled over wit h blood in the next moment. Then Darcy was up on his feet, returning fire.

But the Lazarus was moving; she reversed out of the bay and began to tur n slowly on her own axis, and the water boiled furiously where her propeller s churned. They couldn't stop her now and so let her go, and Zek went to Tra sk to see if there was anything she could do. He grimaced but told her: 'I'l l be OK. Just wrap it up, that's all.'

Heads broke the surface of the water as Zek tore Trask's shirt from his back to make a bandage and sling. Darcy throttled right back and drew alon gside Jazz where he slipped out of his lung's harness and trod water, then helped him clamber aboard, and Manolis came knifing in in an expert flurry of flippers. In another moment he, too, had been dragged up into the boat - at which point the motor gave a gurgling cough and stopped dead.

'Flooded!' Darcy cried.

But Ben Trask was pointing out to sea and yelling, 'Jesus, Je-sus!'

The Lazarus had turned round and was coming back. The throb of her engi nes was louder, faster as she bore down on the smaller vessel, and her inte ntion was obvious. Manolis, working furiously to get the motor restarted, g lanced at the waterproof watch on his wrist. 'She should have gone up by no w!' he yelled. 'The limpets, they should have -'

And when the Lazarus was something less than fifty yards away, then the mines did go off. Not in one unified explosion, but in four.