'Vampires?' Kyle thrilled with horror. He remembered only too well that story Keogh had told him some eight months ago. 'You're sure?'
Oh yes. In the Mobius continuum — looking out through the doors of time past and time to come — I've seen their scarlet threads. I wouldn't have known them, might never have come across them, but they cross young Harry's blue life thread. Yes, and they cross yours, too!
Hearing that, it was as if the cold blade of a psychic knife lanced into Kyle's heart. 'Harry,' he said stumblingly, 'you'd… you'd better tell me all you know, and then what I must do.'
'/ tell you as much as I can, and then we'll try to decide what's to be done. As to how I know what I'm about to tell you… The apparition shrugged. I'm a necroscope, remember? I've talked to Thibor Ferenczy himself, as I once promised him I would, and I've talked to one other. A recent victim. More of him later. But mainly the story is Thibor's…
Chapter Two
The old Thing in the ground trembled however minutely, shuddered slightly, strove to return to his immemorial dreaming. Something was intruding, threatening to rouse him up from his dark slumbers, but sleep had become a habit which satisfied his every need… almost. He clung to his loathsome dreams — of madness and mayhem, the hell of living and the horror of dying, and the pleasures of blood, blood, blood — and felt the cold embrace of the clotted earth closing him in, weighing him down, holding him here in his darkling grave. And yet the earth was familiar and no longer held any terrors for him; the darkness was like that of a shuttered room or deep vault, an impenetrable gloom entirely in keeping; the forbidding nature and location of his mausoleum not only set him apart but kept him protected. He was safe here. Damned forever, certainly — doomed for all time, yes, barring some major miracle of intervention — but safe, too, and there was much to be said for safety.
Safe from the men — mere men, most of them — who had put him here. For in his dreaming the wizened Thing had forgotten that those men were long dead. And their sons, dead. And theirs, and theirs…
The old Thing in the ground had lived for five hundred years, and as long again had lain undead in his unhallowed grave. Above him, in the gloom of a glade beneath stirless, snow-laden trees, the tumbled stones and slabs of his tomb told something of his story, but only the Thing himself knew all of it. His name had been… but no, the Wamphyri have no names as such. His host's name, then, had been Thibor Ferenczy, and in the beginning Thibor had been a man. But that had been almost a thousand years ago.
The Thibor part of the Thing in the ground existed still, but changed, mutated, mingled and metamorphosed along with its vampire 'guest'. The two were one now, inseparably fused; but in dreams that spanned a millennium, still Thibor could return to his roots, go back to the immensely cruel past…
In the very beginning he had not been a Ferenczy but an Ungar, though that was of no account now. His forefathers were farmers who came from a Hungarian princedom across the Carpathians to settle on the banks of the Dniester where it flowed down to the Black Sea. But 'settling' was hardly the word for it. They had had to fight Vikings (the dreadful Varyagi) on the river, where they came exploring from the Black Sea, the Khazars and vassal Magyars from the steppes, finally the fierce Pechenegi tribes in their constant expansion west and north-wards. Thibor had been a young man then, when at last the Pechenegi wiped out the rude settlement he called home and he alone survived. After that he'd fled north to Kiev.
Never much of a farmer, indeed, far more suited for war with his massive size — which in those days, when most men were small, made Thibor the Wallach something of a giant — in Kiev he sold himself into the service of Vladimir I. The Vlad made him a small Voevod or warrior chief and gave him a hundred men. 'Go join my Boyars in the south,' he commanded. 'Fend off and kill the Pechenegi, keep 'em from crossing the Ros, and by our new Christian God I'll give you title and banner both, Thibor of Wallachia!' Thibor had gone to him when he was desperate, that much was clear.
In his dream, the Thing in the ground remembered how he'd answered: Title and banner, keep them, my Lord — but only give me one hundred men more and I shall kill you a thousand Pechenegi before returning to Kiev. Aye, and I'll bring you their thumbs to prove it!'
He got his hundred men; also, like it or not, his banner: a golden dragon, one forepaw raised in warning. 'The dragon of the true Christ, brought to us by the Greeks,' Vlad told him. 'Now the dragon watches over Christian Kiev — Russia itself — and it roars from your banner with the voice of the Lord! What mark of your own will you put on it?' On that same morning he had asked this question of half-a-dozen other fledgling defenders, five Boyars with their own followers and one band of mercenaries. All of them had taken a symbol to fly with the dragon. But not Thibor.
'I'm no Boyar, sire,' the Wallach had told him with a shrug. 'That's not to say my father's house was not honourable, for it was, and built by a decent man — but in no way royal. No lord's or prince's blood flows in my veins. When I've earned myself a mark, then I'll set it over your dragon.'
'I'm not sure I like you especially, Wallach.' The Vlad had frowned then, uneasy with this great, grim man before him. 'Your voice sounds out perhaps a trifle loud from a heart as yet untried. But — ' and he, too, had given a shrug, ' — very well, choose a device for yourself when you return in triumph. And Thibor — bring me those thumbs or I'll likely string you up by yours!' And that day at noon seven polyglot companies of men had set out from Kiev, reinforcements for the ensieged defensive positions on the Ros. One year and one month later Thibor returned with nearly all of his men, plus another eighty recruited from peasants hiding in the foothills and valleys of the southern Khorvaty. He made no plea for audience but strode into the Vlad's own church where he was at worship. He left his weary men outside and took in with him only one small sack that rattled, and approached Prince Vladimir Svyatoslavich at his prayers and waited for him to finish. Behind him Kiev's civilian nobles were deathly silent, waiting for their prince to see him.
Finally the Vlad and his Greek monks turned to Thibor. The sight they saw was fearsome. Thibor had soil on him from the fields and forests; dirt was ingrained in him; he bore a freshly healed scar high on his right cheek to the middle of his jaw, which made a pale stripe of scar tissue that cut almost to the bone. Also, he had gone away as a peasant and returned something else entirely. Haughty as a hawk, with his nose slightly hooked under bushy eyebrows that very nearly came together in the middle, he gazed out of yellow, unblinking eyes. He wore mous-taches and a scraggy, twisting black beard; also the armour of some Pechenegi chief, chased in gold and silver, and an earring set with a gemstone in the lobe of his left ear. He had shaved his head with the exception of black forelocks that hung one to each side, in the manner of certain nobles; and in all his mien, there was no sign that he knew he stood in a holy place or even considered his whereabouts.
'I know you now,' the Vlad hissed, 'Thibor the Wallach. Don't you fear the true God? Don't you tremble before the cross of Christ? I was praying for our deliverance, and you-'
'And I have brought it to you.' Thibor's voice was deep, doleful. He tipped out his sack onto the flags. The prince's retinue and the nobles of Kiev where they stood back from him who ruled over them gasped and gaped. Bones clattered white in a heap at the Vlad's feet.
'What?' he choked. 'What?'
'Thumbs,' said Thibor. 'I had the flesh boiled off them,