No, there was one other warm place there, occupied till now by his dear mother. And was she, too, lost? In which case his heart must freeze entirely. He turned to Lardis. 'Did anyone see my m-m-mother taken?'
Lardis sighed. 'Nathan, I've many things to do. Too many things, and too little time. But when all's done be sure I'll ask around. You're not the only one with questions. By sunup we'll all know who was taken, murdered, raped, changed. And by then, too, we'll have… dealt with all this. Right now, however, there's nothing to be done. Not by you, at least.'
'And what am I supposed to do?'
Lardis shrugged, sighed. 'Find a warm place. Get some sleep.'
'And you? Don't you need your sleep?' Amazingly, Nathan was almost defiant. Lardis might expect such as this from his brother, Nestor, but from Nathan?
'I'll sleep later,' he answered roughly, turning away. 'But for now… I've work to do. So be off, I'm busy!'
Nathan shook his short-cropped yellow head. 'If you can be strong, then so can I. Anyway, how could I sleep? Lardis, I… I don't have anyone!'
Lardis heard the emptiness in his voice, like an echo of his own emptiness, and thought: Neither do I have anyone, not any longer. Except maybe you.
But out loud h^ said, Then be strong somewhere else, for the moment at least. This is a bloody place, Nathan, and what we're doing here is bloody work..'
After that there was no more time for talk, for Andrei had lifted the blanket off the next one and was beckoning urgently. Lardis went to him and looked where his finger pointed. The man under the blanket had been bitten in the neck, and wide-spaced punctures had formed scabs over heavy blue arteries. There was no breath in him, no pulse, and he lay utterly still.
Nathan backed off a few paces and stood there watching. He had to learn what he could of this sort of thing now, for it was no longer a game which he, Nestor, and Misha played in the woods. The Wamphyri were real, and so was the horror they brought with them.
Lardis yanked a bauble from its stitches in the cuff of his jacket, opened the cold grey fingers of the corpse's left hand and folded them around a small silver bell which he forced into the palm. Then he stepped back and waited. And in a little while…
… The 'dead' man (whom Lardis had been fairly sure was undead, but must test anyway), moaned and gave a shudder that shook his entire body. His eyelids fluttered but remained mercifully shut. He wasn't ready to wake up, but even unconscious the poison in his blood was protecting its changeling. His hand vibrated on the table's boards, unclenched, and in its agitation tossed aside the silver bauble. Finally he sighed and lay still again. And Lardis nodded, sharply.
The gaunt-faced, strong-willed executioners came forward, and Nathan saw what Lardis had meant by 'bloody work'. He forced himself to watch this one, just one, and was sickened. All the rattling, grimacing skeletons of whispered campfire stories took on rotting flesh now, and every bad dream of his childhood was realized at one and the same time.
Against this surreal background of smoky, ruddy firelight and terrifying burnt-pork stenches — where gaunt figures came and went through the night, carrying their burdens of blanketed bodies, and Lardis Lidesci was the Ultimate Authority, who determined life or death — finally Nathan was set free from his deep-rooted mental shackles, became a man of Sunside, Szgany, and left the shucked-off chrysalis of his weird other-worldliness behind him.
The shell was left behind, at least.
But a man is more than flesh and blood. When he is conscious a man can control his body and even, in large measure, his thoughts. But when he's asleep…? Are his thoughts entirely his own?
When he was very small, Nathan had sometimes asked his mother: 'Why do the wolves talk to me in my pillow? Why do I hear all of the dead people whispering?' Then she would seem to close up on herself like the flowers at sundown; an uneasy look would come into her eyes; she would shush him and beg him not to ask things like that, for such questions were strange and people wouldn't like or understand them.
These were only a few of the strange questions Nathan had learned not to ask, until he'd rarely asked anything at all but remained silent. Even in his dreams, he'd learned how to stay mainly silent.
But that had been then, in his childhood.
And this was now, and he was a man…
Lardis had told Nathan to go away, find himself a warm place, sleep. But he could not. Indeed, it would not surprise Nathan if he never slept again. Instead he turned his back on Lardis's and Andrei's 'bloody work' — what was happening on the great table, the monstrous but necessary examination of the dead and the undead by those who still lived, while they still lived — and went to sit cross-legged close to the foot of the cross, where the Wamphyri lieutenant hung on his silver spikes.
Someone brought Nathan his clothes and he dressed himself automatically, almost without conscious volition, then sat shivering under his blanket and waited for the lieutenant to regain consciousness. For Lardis intended to question this creature, this man or once-man, and whatever the old Lidesci's methods would be — however cruel — Nathan intended to hear for himself whatever answers they might elicit. He was Szgany now and had made himself a vow; it was unpublicized but a vow for all that, and it would be a hard thing to accomplish. In order to destroy his enemies he must first understand them.
There was a lesser fire close by, which slowly warmed him through until he began to nod. And despite that he had thought it impossible, in a little while he curled up on his side and went to sleep. It was the beginning of a healing process, but only partly physical. For mainly it was an opportunity for his mind to consolidate the undeniable fact of his existence, at the same time assimilating something of the monstrous facts which had focused that reality.
That was partly why he slept: to heal himself in body and spirit, and let the subconscious Nathan create some kind of order out of the chaos of the physical Nathan's new reality. But his mind was not like those of other men; complex as the genetics which had built it as a reflection of another's mind, it was living proof of that universal axiom, 'like father, like son'. The only difference between him and his Necroscope father was this: that Harry Keogh, in his own world, had had the benefit of a mathematical science, and of a million dead people who cared for him and were not afraid. While in this world… now the Great Majority had plenty to fear, and felt that they could only trust each other. And so they continued to avoid Nathan when his dreams impinged too closely upon theirs. Like now..
… He felt them shut him out, withdrawing into the silence of their tombs! More quickly than ever before, the teeming dead had sensed and rejected him. And so he must dream of the living.
Misha was at the forefront of his mind: naturally he would dream of her. Not as he had last seen her, in the clutches of a beast-man (his mind shied from that), but briefly, in snatches out of time. As a child, as a girl, and then as a young woman.
First as a child: Misha as he'd seen her that first time: all naked, sleek, shining, and agile as a fish in the water, swimming in the sun-dappled shallows and beckoning him to join her there. Strangely her innocence had deprived him of his own! And despite that he had been a child, his thoughts had been a man's thoughts. After that there had been other times, but always he kept his sensual self from her; they had played as children, sexless at first, until the passing years had brought changes.
One time, when they had been swimming together and after they'd scrambled back into their clothes — as they laughed and rough-and-tumbled each other on the riverbank — finally they'd fallen into each other's arms and she had felt him hard against her. At once, he'd sensed her catching her breath and drawing just a little apart. But then, as curiosity got the better of her, she had let her arm fall 'casually' across Nathan's lower half, to test the response of the small rod where it throbbed in his trousers.