Necroscope - The Lost Years, Vol II Part 11

PART TWO:.

THE OTHER PLAYERS.

DAHAMDRAKESH.

It was something after six in that nightmarish cellar in Edinburgh, Scotland. But some seven thousand miles away on Tibet's Tingri Plateau it was well past midnight, and the stars frozen in their orbits seemed so close you could pluck them right out of the firmament So thought Daham Drakesh, Wamphyri, the last Drakul, where he stood tall and skeletally thin on die roof of the so-called 'Drakesh monastery,' in fact his aerie .

He stood on the high-domed skull of a monolithic head and face carved into the rock in the lee of the gaunt mountainside, and with his red robe fluttering behind him in a breeze off the plateau contemplated or more likely adored the night But whi le the yawning - or perhaps shrieking? - face in the rock was huge it was merely a facade, and the gape of its great jaws only the entrance to the cavern complex proper.

As for the warren within: it was a many-layered labyrinth of tunnels, storerooms, accommodations, and...

other, darker, and yet more secretive halls and chambers. These latter places, situated mainly in the lower levels, were forbidden to the majority of the aerie's inhabitants, where only Daham Drakesh himself, the High Priest, as it were, might venture with impunity. Even the most long-lived, most trusted and experienced lieutenants were loath to tread there, and then they trod lightly.

The project - the building of the aerie, by slave labour, by vampire thralls 'recruited' from a nearby walled city - had taken fifteen to twenty years in all. Almost seventy years ago it had been finished, the entire complex excavated by hand from the ancient volcanic rock; or Drakesh had taken advantage of and expanded upon the many natural cysts, cavelets, and fissures in the riddled strata. The last of his line, the last Drakul - and by his lights deserving of an aerie of his own - he had personally supervised the work from beginning to 112.

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end. By which time the once-prosperous walled city from which he'd taken his workforce had been as dead and forbidding as the greater expanse of the plateau itself.

The last Drakul, aye...

The last true Drakul, certainly, now that his chief lieutenant and bloodson, Mahag, was dead in Scotland by Lykan hands. But Daham had a vampire leech, and his parasite would doubtless have its egg; there could be anotiier Drakul - and another, and another - well, given time. That time was not yet, however, nor would it ever be until the Lykans and Ferenczys were eradicated enti rely from the world.

For unlike his forebears, Daham wa s a firm believer in an immemorial Wamphyri maxim - that anonymity is synonymous with longevity. His ancestors, however, had forgotten or chosen to ignore this simple rule; they had made blood- and egg-sons indiscriminately, so spreading their plague abroad... but where were his ancestors now? And where his egg- sire, Egon, last-but-one survivor of an alien parallel world, and brave defender of Wallachia since a time when the horseshoe mountains were known as Dacia? Gone the way of all and even vampire flesh, aye! But not Daham.

And not the Ferenczy Brothers, Anthony and Francesco, now the 'Francezcis,' grown rich and strong in their Sicilian fortress. Nor the dog -Lord, Radu Lykan, the last true survivor out of olden Starside, who six hundred years ago had gone to earth - gone to sleep, hypnotized himself into a state of suspended animation - in some far hyperborean lair.

Which was why Drakesh had sent Mahag and a party of 'disciples' into Europe (and eventually into the British Isles) in the first place: to seek out the lair of the sleeping dog-Lord and destroy him before his planned awakening. It had been part of an even grander scheme; Drakesh had seen his opportunity to play agent provocateur, to set Radu's people and the Ferenczys against one another in an all-out bloodwar. Then, when all was finished, he would step in and pick off any survivors - all as a prelude to his Final Solution: The total conquest, the vampirization, of planet Earth!

This had been Drakesh's burning ambition ever since learning of the death of his egg-sire, the so-called 'Count' Drakul, all of ninety years ago: to make himself the undead, blood-red Emperor of a vampire world...

but not while his ancestors' enemies were still alive in it. And so for half a century he had used his 'emissaries' - the thralls he sent out into the world ostensibly as 'amba.s.sadors' of his sect - as spies to seek out other pockets of Wamphyri infestation. That was how he had discovered the Ferenczy Brothers in their Sicilian manse, and the approximate location of Radu Lykan in his Cairngorms lair. And so his greater plans had been stalled for a time.

As to the detail of those plans: The Drakesh Monastery stood close to a junction of many lands, in a place which one hundred years ago had been mainly inaccessible. But distance and cold and inaccessibility, what are these for obstacles? Nothing, to the Wamphyri! Territorialism, on the other hand, is everything! When finally Daham decided to expand, it would be the very simplest thing to send out a handful of chosen lieutenants north into the heart of mysterious Tibet, China and Mongolia; south, into Nepal, India, Burma and Bhutan. And when they were established... the rest of the world would be waiting. By now, the first of these outposts - all masquerading under Drakesh's 'religious' banner, of course - should be in place. But some twenty-four years ago, even as the last Drakul was making ready his expeditionary forces...

... The Chinese Army had intervened. And Drakesh had seen at first hand how the Wamphyri are not alone in their l.u.s.t for territory, even for a land as desolate as this.

Tibetan cities were swept under; monkish orders were brutally suppressed and temples fell; the Dalai Lama himself fled to safety in the west. But the shunned 'monastery' on the windswept Tingri Plateau survived. For Drakesh had long been aware of the Red Army's feasibility studies in parapsychology - and o f its experimental ESP-Unit, the Sino-equivalent of the Sovie t Union's and England's E-Branches - and had deliberately courted the attention of its controller, Colonel Tsi- Hong, at his headquarters on Kwijiang Avenue, Chungking.

He had been called to Chungking, been 'studied' for over a year, had allowed them to learn what he desired them to know about him: his alleged 'philosophy,' his longevity, immunity to disease, tenacity for life - but no more than that And Colonel Tsi-Hong had even visited him here at the monastery, to see for himself the extent of Drakesh's weird abilities in his own environment Drakesh had let himself be frozen into a block of ice and had melted it from within. He had demonstrated his night-vision -sharper than Tsi-Hong's, even when the Colonel was using his British nitelite binoculars! - and scarcely needed to point out the benefits of a possible military application. He had fasted, and after a month was fit and well enough to walk out ten miles into the snows to medi tate.

Tsi-Hong had brou ght scientists, geneticists and mutationists, with him. They had taken away samples of Drakesh's sperm, frozen for future experimentation. And ten years ago, finally they had experimented with it, to produce, as it later turned out, monsters! All of which was precisely as Drakesh had warned the Colonel it would be - that Tsi-Hong could not hope to grow orchids in a paddy field without they come up pale and twisted. But if they were tended by Brian Lutnley

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caring gardeners, watered by familiar rains, and reared in their natural, their native soil... ?

The Colonel hadn't listened, not then. For how might this man -even with all his weird talents - father the nucleus of an invincible mutant army in such an inhospitable and unyielding wilderness? But Drakesh was more than a man, he was a Lord of the Wamphyri! By sheer force of mil, and the laws of alien genetics, he had pa.s.sed on his instructions to the very sperm that Tsi-Hong's scientists had taken from him.

And in Chungking, his children had bee n born. Fifteen of them had been deformed, destroyed at b irth. But fifteen out of fifty? It scarcely surprised Drakesh; according to Egon Drakul, freak births and grotesque malformations had been common among the Wamphyri of Starside. But as for the others, they had survived - for the time being. And left to his own devices in his aerie, Daham had waited for his prenatal, genetic triggers to trip.

Two years ago they had.

Major Chang Lun, military commander of the army garrison at Xigaze, some ninety minutes away by snow- cat, depending on the weather, had brought him the news. Now he remembered Chang Lun's words, and how the Major (no great admirer of Daham Drakesh) had relished them: The last half-dozen escaped. Only eight years old; apparently perfect except for their accelerated growth-rate, but they murdered their keepers and instructors. They not only bi t the hands that fed them... but fed on them! Drinkers of blood, cannibals, homicidal maniacs! In only eight years they'd grown to men, and s.e.xually voracious women! Finally they were hunted down to the last one, and eradicated. But it wasn't easy...'

Drakesh had known no pain, no parental anguish, for he had known what the outcome would be. Indeed, he'd arranged it Colonel Tsi-Hong's people had tried to teach his blood-brood to be human -albeit human machines, soldiers, warriors. But the next brood would be under their vampire father's instruction, and he would not fail. Nor would his warriors belong to China.

Nor were human beings, men, the only kind of warriors...

Earlier, before coming up by internal causeways and claustrophobic, flue-like chimneys onto the dome of the skull where it sloped back under the overhanging cliff, Drakesh had paid a visit to the other kind of warrior; three of which were waxing, as they'd waxed for five years now, in the vast stone vats of a lower level. For the moment he controlled their growth, delayed their emergence, waited for the right time. But when finally he allowed them to be 'born,' brought up out of their stone wombs, they would be mindless killing machines such as once were bred by the Wamphyri of Starside. And despite that these were other, still they were kin to those anomalies born of his frozen seed in Chungking. For these, too, were his 'children,' the produce of his undying vampire flesh.

He thought back to his visit: Down there in the dark of a reeking cavern, Drakesh kept metamorphic protoplasm - the living or undead material of his warrior creatures, grown of his own flesh, spittle, sperm, and sweat - in a cell apart Human flesh, fluids, teeth, and bone, when they are shed from the human body, die. But vampire flesh lives on until it is destroyed or ossifies. The last Drakul's flesh was especially tenacious; its... extniviae lived on the offal, tripes, skin and bone left over from the aerie's provisioning. But despite that it was mindless, it 'knew' its father and Master. Some residual instinct in the alien DNA played the part of a primitive brain.

Drakesh himself fed the - creature? He must; it would be too dangerous for a lieutenant to even attempt it Entering its cavern cell with a pan of offal, he'd sat down on a flat-topped rocky outcrop in the centre of the dark place, and waited. Dark or light, it was all the same to the vampire Drakesh. His feral eyes turned to blood in the darkness, and lit like lamps in his face. The cave appeared to be empty , but the thing was here, he knew.

At his sandalled feet th e earth was loose, churned up. The Other was a creature of darkness, as Drakesh himself. It burrowed in the earth as if hiding there - or as if lying in wait? And feeling the first tentative tremor beneath his feet Drakesh smiled grimly to himself and kept his thoughts guarded, his ident.i.ty s.h.i.+elded. It was a gr and amus.e.m.e.nt a game he liked to play: to tempt the thing, and then to deny it And with the pan of vile stinking offal in his lap, in the utter darkness, he sat there smiling and feeling his creature's presence. Then- -A soft sound, as soil crumbling, behind him. The thing would sneak up on him. Oh so slowly, Drakesh turned his head on its scrawny neck and looked back and down. A mound of dirt was forming, pus.h.i.+ng up from the loose, lumpy floor. And in a moment a small eruption, as a leprous grey-green tentacle or pseudopod pulsed up into view. It thickened, rising like some weird beanstalk, and formed a watery, rudimentary eye. What the thing saw - if it 'saw' or 'recognized' or 'remembered' anything at all, in the accepted sense of those words - Drakesh could not say. But what it sensed was food! The food in his lap, or perhaps Drakesh himself.

The tentacle thickened more yet and Drakesh felt a shuddering in the earth all around. The eye dissolved, reformed into faceless gaping jaws and twin rows of teeth that elongated into fangs even as he watched.

And as the dry soil at his feet erupted in a dozen places

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and put up writhing pseudopod extensions of the thing, caging him in, as it were, so the main 'body* or limb-like tentacle swayed towards him, its gaping jaws drooling a yellow, seminal bile.

... At which the Master Vampire opened his mind, revealing his ident.i.ty. And: Enough! he said. Thus far, and no further!

It was as if the thing had been electrocuted. The writhing tentacles were withdrawn, s.n.a.t.c.hed back down into the earth; so rapidly indeed that one of them snapped, spurted bile, and left its tip like some weird blindworm snaking on the floor. Drakesh kicked at it and it quickly wriggled down out of sight, to join up with the greater ma.s.s. Behind him, the princ.i.p.al thigh-thick pseudopod slumped, melted down, poured back into its hole, and disappeared with a squelching sound like squashed ripe fruit or a thirsty drain. In a matter of seconds, all that remained was a puff of exhaust stench from the trembling, collapsing mounds, and two or three snaking runs, like panicked mole tracks in the floor. Then all was still again.

And Drakesh still smiling, for he sensed the thing's fear. Which was only right.

Then, upending the pan to slop its vile contents onto the dry earth, he said: Know me. For I am the Drakul, your Master, and I am kind. You have no sense, knowledge or intelligence. I am all the intelligence you will ever need. You have no direction, but I give you purpose. You may not live without the sustenance I bring you, or die without my approval. But you may yet be more than you are now. Your brothers -grown out of you, as you were grown out of me - are stirring even now in my vats ofmetamorphism. I have elevated them, and may yet elevate you... or destroy you. If you remember little else, you would do well to remember these things.

He moved to the exit, paused and looked back. Now feed and be grateful. So be it.

But as that mindless octopus, that living or undead cancer of metamorphic tissue oozed up out of the floor and fell like a mantle on its food: Now hold! Drakesh sent a whiplash thought - and the thing froze at once, as if turned to stone. And remember: this place is yours. But beyond this place, (he used his sandalled foot to draw a line across the mouth of the cave), belongs to me. Thus far, and no further...

And then he visited his vats of metamorphism, great baths excavated from the solid bedrock of a nearby cavern as dark and even darker than the place of the protoplasm. They prospered in darkness, his creatures; especially these creatures, which were or would be the true warriors. Hybrid monsters waxing in their vats, these were to be the first of Drakesh's many Guardians of the Curfew, securing the dark, shattered city bottoms and dustbowl valleys hi the long worldwide winter of nuclear aftermath, so that survivors of the wars and the vampire plague both could not scathe among his network of rearing aeries in the dangerous hours of daylight But in any case, there'd be little enough of daylight in that world. That, too, was part of his plan - it would be the first part - when finally Drakesh was ready to be Lord of All. For what good to set out to conquer a world of light, when the light itee//must conquer in the end? But in a world where the light is weak, filtering through swirling clouds of radiation, and groping blindly in the rubble of man's greatest works...

Drakesh was mad, of course, and knew it But perverse as every Great Vampire before him, he revelled in it For if the Emperor has the last say, and if his word is law, then who is to say that the rest aren't mad and the Emperor sane? And one day, he would be that Emperor!

The vats of metamorphism... Drakesh stood at the rim of one such and looked down into it the gelatinous surface of a liquid womb, surging with long slow ripples. They waxed, his warriors. They could be brought on quickly if need be, or lie here another hundred years just waiting to be born. And as he gazed the ripples quickened to wavelets - as if the inchoate inhabitant of the vat sensed him there - and something churned just beneath the surface. Then the outline of a grotesque head appeared, languidly turning, plated with what was as yet a softly translucent grey- gleaming chitin. And for one brief moment a great vacant eye rolled in the gluey liquid.

'Strong!' Drakesh murmured to himself, nodding his skull head. 'And faithful to the death.' It was true. Bred from his own metamorphic flesh, from the burrowing thing in the other cave, these creatures would have no mind but his, no thoughts but those he gave them...

Then he looked at the trough-like conduits that serviced the vats, rust-coloured runnels carved in the rock, umbilical sluices to feed the freely-given blood of the brethren to the foetal abnormalities being bred here.

Blood-beasts! - and that fool of a Colonel in Chungking, Tsi-Hong, would have him breed human warriors?

Well, so he would - so he was - as witness the pregnant Chinese and Tibetan women who worked the stony fields and tended the farm in the walled city. But as for the monastery's priests, its brotherhood: The Colonel knew nothing of them, that they were Drakesh's children, too. And what of these other warriors waxing in their vats? Why, Tsi-Hong would suffer a stroke and die if he knew of them! He would die, aye...

would have to, even if Drakesh must attend to it himself. For to know of them would be to know that the High Priest of this place was not a man; another reason why he had built his aerie here in the first place: because of its seeming austerity, its isolation.118.

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Because it was less than welcoming. And because in the main (and apart from the prying eyes of Major Chang Lun, that other fool in Xigaze) Drakesh was left much to his own devices here. So that even when the Colonel and his so-called 'scientists' came to visit, which they must eventually, they would only visit the city.

For the monastery was a 'holy' place, where Drakesh might grant them audience, however briefly, but where they could never expect to lodge. But then, who would want to? The place had not been designed for the comfort of strangers...

Turning these and other things over in his pit-deep mind, Drakesh had followed a tortuous route up onto its roof. Now he stood here, face to face with the night under a canopy of b rilliant star s, and felt the fluttering of his red robe blown back against his spindly body. One night - soon, perhaps - he must test his talents to the full, shape his body to an airfoil, and fly out from here. For in their time the Drakuls had been grand flyers, and his father, Egon, a past-master. To ha ve seen that one, circling like a great black bat over the high battlements of his Transylvanian castle ...

it had been awe-inspiring.

'Yours, in time,' the Count had told him. 'All yours. Only be my true son and keep my place in my absence, and you too can be Wamphyri!' And sealing the pact, before leaving for England, he had pa.s.sed on his egg in a fond fatherly kiss. Then, a brief moment of unbearable agony ... and when Daham had regained consciousness his egg-sire had been gone. And in the s.p.a.ce often days, Daham, too: fled out of Romania en route for this place, with a handful of Szgany thralls, a pouch of gold, and a parasite leech - the very seed of greatness -growing within him.

Then for a while he had feared his father's revenge. What would the Great Drakul do when he returned to Romania to discover his egg-son flown from his castle and his trust betrayed?

And it had been a relief - not to mention a delight! - later to learn of Egon's demise, his true death, at the hands of a vengeful Doctor, a student of such 'legends' as vampirism...

Again the wind blew against him; he instinctively lifted up his arms and leaned into it, was tempted to launch himself, and denied the temptation. All in good time.

But for now: The plaintive cry of a yak, thin in the gnawing bite of the plateau's night, was blown to him on the bl.u.s.tery breeze, some three miles from the old walled city. This was what Drakesh had been waiting for. For thoughtful master as he was, he tended the needs of all his creatures and familiars.

And: Up now, you true flyers, he sent Come!

And from various cracks and crannies in the carved dome of the aerie - up from their colony in the darker recesses of the labyrinth of caves - the true flyers, they came...

With regard to Drakesh, Major Chang Lun had his instructions, his orders - such as they were. 'Make periodic visits to the walled city.' Stupid orders, ridiculous orders! Yet that was what he had been told to do, all he had been told to do: make periodic visits.

But how periodic? Frequently, infrequently, or what? And what to do or to look for when he went there?

What, should he fondle the rounded bellies of Drakesh's enforced wh.o.r.es? Compliment them on their successful couplings with that creature? But no, nothing about these things, just that he should visit Hah!

Oh, Chang Lun knew the problem well enough: lack of self-discipline and organization in a largely civilian, self-managing, covert and 'experimental' branch of the military. It was that this... this so-called 'Colonel,' Tsi-Hong, in Chungking - this dreary, dreaming metaphysician - did not himself know what to do with or about Drakesh and his alleged sect But on the other hand, it might also mean that Tsi-Hong didn't trust him, or was himself suspicious. In which case Chang Lun might read his orders very differently. Such as: 'Spy on the walled city. See what you can find out about it But whatever you do, do it carefully, for we've spent time and money here and we don't wish to alienate this foreign charlatan in case he really does have something we can use.' Chang Lun would know exactly how to interpret such orders as these. Much as he was interpreting them now.

He and his driver had come out from Xigaze a little after 10:00 p.m. The weather forecast had been good; bitterly cold, of course, but clear with little or no wind, and no snow forecast Chang Lun's official visits (he had been obliged to devise his own roster) took place once every six weeks. This was not one of those.

The driver he used was his usual man, a Corporal, whose name didn't matter. But he knew every creva.s.se and boulder en route, and that was important. Over terrain as rugged as this, and at night it would be only too easy to make a fatal mistake. Some of the cracks in the earth around here seemed to go down forever! But the snow-cat had given them no trouble, and they had got here safely a few minutes after midnight 'Here' was a spot in the lee of outcropping rocks on the south-facing slope of a hillside to the west of the old walled city. As an observation point the place was ideal A climb of two hundred feet from where they'd secured and camouflaged the cat and snug behind a wall of rocks they'd built during previous visits, Chang Lun and his driver could even brew up army-rations tea on a disposable stove,

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slice canned meat or cheese onto bread, and make a meal of sorts. And from here a man with a good pair of nitesites could keep watch not only on the ancient city, its gates and wall, but even the leering facade of the Drakesh Monastery three miles away across the valley.

The one drawback was the awesome cold. Even the best winter warfare clothing couldn't keep it out. It would find a way into your bones, and chew on them like a bad cramp. The strong tea helped, but not much.

So that time and again Chang Lun had told himself to h.e.l.l with this! This would be the last time he came out here, no matter his hatred for the unnatural, perverted b.a.s.t.a.r.d who ran the monastery.

Hatred: a strong word, and one that Chang Lun didn't use lightly. But he had hated Daham Drakesh from the first time he saw him and all the time since. And being Tsi-Hong's messenger, as it were, he'd had more than enough contact with the man. But to call him a man ... well, as far as Chang Lun was concerned, even that was a matter for conjecture. And he remembered Drakesh as he had seen him on some four or five (but still far too many) previous occasions.

The physical appearance - the very presence of Drakesh - had never failed to impress Chang Lun, but never favourably. It wasn't just his height (six and a half feet, as compared to the Major's sixty-eight inches), but an over-all sense of something alien about him, complemented by grotesque distortions of human shape and proportion. Thin to the point of emaciation, he nevertheless managed to convey the impression that his pipestem body contained an awesome strength. His hands and feet were freakishly long and tapering, their sharply pointed digits 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 his scrawny neck.

But his eyes... ah, his eyes! They were the worst or perhaps strangest of Drakesh's features. In daylight - what little ever filtered through into the monastery - they looked gla.s.sy, even transparent, as if all natural colour had been leeched out of them. But in the dark or semi-dark of the monastery's corridors and caverns, they were as luminous and yellow as molten sulphur. Their gaze was literally penetrating; turned upon a man, they seemed to stare right through him. as if their target were more ephemeral than Drakesh himself. And when they smiled...

... Chang Lun shuddered where he leaned on the low wall of piled stones and gazed through his night-vision binoculars. He was cold outside from the sub-zero temperature, but colder in his soul from letting himself dwell too long on Daham Drakesh. Even the simple mechanical act of focusing his gla.s.ses on the monastery's leering-face facade, to bring it closer, seemed in a way to draw Drakesh closer, too. And Chang Lun knew this sensation - this feeling of dread - that in keeping watch on Drakesh he had given the man power to keep watch on him. Almost as if his binoculars worked in both directions, so that while he looked out, some unseen Other looked in...

That yak,' said Chang Lun's driver, causing the Major to start 'He's noisy all of a sudden.' The Corporal's binoculars were trained on the city.

Chang Lun thought to reprimand the man (mainly because he had been caused to start, not because his driver had forgotten the usual courtesies, the privileges of rank) but let it pa.s.s. And in any case, it was too cold for all that customary bowing and sc.r.a.ping. Back in the barracks they were Major and non-commissioned officer - 'Sir,' and, "You! Get your a.r.s.e over here!' - but out here they were just two men in the cold waste.

The cold,' Chang Lun replied. Tethered out there in the place of bones, fu ll in the face of the wind blowing round the base of the towns.h.i.+p's wall, you would cry out, too!'

'Why have they put him t here?' The Corporal wondered out loud. 'Simply to die in the cold?'

The Major shrugged, kept his gla.s.ses focused on the monastery. Was that some kind of motion on the roof of the place? White smoke or steam going up? And was that a twig-like figure up there, obscured in a swirl of - well, whatever it was? For all the cold, still Chang Lun's skin crawled. Absentmindedly, he answered his driver's question: 'Maybe the animal was diseased, infectious. They've separated it from the herd, that's all. Obviously it's what they do with all suspect beasts: tether them in the boneyard to die.'

*Well, it's true there has been some disease in the local animals,' the Corporal agreed, 'but I was one of the drivers on several of the details when those animals were driven out here. They all seemed healthy enough to me - not that I'm an expert. But they were the best for many miles around. They always are. Only the best for the Drakesh towns.h.i.+p...'

'Sir!' the Major snapped, suddenly irritated. 'Call me "sir" when you speak to me.'

'Yes, sir!'

But what he had said was true, and it had been an inordinately large number of animals at that All for the fifty women in the ancient city? Well, possibly, since half of them were pregnant and well on their way to sp.a.w.ning. When Chang Lun thought of Drakesh siring children - especially out of criminals such as those women he'd been given - 'sp.a.w.ning' was the only word that came readily to mind.

As for the boneyard,' the name that the Major's driver had given Necroscopt: The Lost Yean - Vol. II 123.122.

that place outside the city wall, when they'd first discovered it on a previous visit, it was simply that: a pile of bones littered around a tethering post. There had been one occasion when some of the women were out gathering the grisly remains, to grind them down for fertilizer, Chang Lun suspected. The thin soil of their farm could use the sustenance.

'But he -1 mean the yak - is very noisy now.' the Corporal uneasily, unnecessarily stated. For Chang Lun could hear it well enough for himself: the neighing bleat of an animal in distress. 'He's kicking, jumping, trying to free himself!'

Silently cursing his gloved hands, Chang Lun focused his own binoculars just a fraction more - not on the city but the monastery - and suddenly his view of the domed roof, the carved skull, sprang up in much clearer definition. And there was a figure up there, yes, antlike at this distance but very definitely there. But doing what? The stick-figure's arms seemed raised in ... supplication? Or invocation? Then Chang Lun felt his mouth go dry at the thought that he knew that figure, that he had recognized the skeletal frame of Drakesh himself.

And as for the cloud of 'smoke' (not smoke at all, as the Major now saw, but something else, something a lot more solid): its spiral around the distant figure on the roof of the monastery was rising, widening, behaving far more sentientiy, as its members headed in a certain direction - straight for the ancient city, its walls, possibly this very vantage point!