The floor had a covering of local weave; ancient and wormy tapestries hung on the walls; there were couches and a table. But there were no windows, and no light other than the yellow aura from a silver candelabrum on the table. The room was sparse, but sumptuous by comparison with the rest of the place. Safe, too.
The second woman was sprawled somewhat wantonly on one of the couches. She stared sulphurously upon me but I ignored her. The first drifted closer still. Stirring myself, I held her at bay with the point of my sword. ‘Move not at all, lady, or I'll spit you here and now!'
She turned wild in a moment, glowered at me and hissed between her needle teeth; and now the second woman rose like a cat from her couch. They faced me menacingly, but both were wary of my sword.
Then the first one spoke again, her voice hard and cold as ice: ‘What of Faethor? Where is he?'
‘Your master?' I backed out of the door. They were
vampires, obviously. ‘He's gone. You've a new master now — me!'
Without warning, the first one sprang at me. I let her come, then drove the pommel of my sword against the side of her head. She collapsed in my arms and I threw her aside, then yanked shut the door in the face of the second. I barred it, locked it and pocketed the key. Inside the room, the trapped vampire hissed and raged. I picked up her stunned sister, carried her to the dungeon and tossed her inside.
Ehrig came crawling. He had managed somehow to remove the thong from his neck,-which was white and puffy and looked sliced as if by a knife around its entire circumference. Similarly, his head at the back was strangely lumpy, deformed like a freak's or a cretin's. He could hardly speak and his manner was childlike in the way of simpletons. Perhaps I had damaged his brain, and the vampire in him had not yet corrected it.
‘Thibor!' he husked his amazement. ‘My friend, Thibor! The Ferenczy — did you kill him?'
‘Treacherous dog!' I kicked at him. ‘Here, amuse yourself with this.'
He fell upon the woman where she lay moaning. ‘You've forgiven me!' he cried.
‘Not now, not ever!' I answered. ‘I leave her here because she's one too many. Enjoy yourself while you may.' As I barred the door he had already begun to rip his filthy clothes off, hers too.
Now, climbing the spiralling steps, I heard the wolves again. Their song had a triumphant note to it. What now?
Like a madman I raced through the castle. The massive door in the foot of the tower was secure, and the causeway burned down — where would Faethor attempt his next assault? I went to the battlements — only just in time!
The air over the castle was full of tiny bats. I saw them against the moon, flitting in their myriads, their concerted voices shrill and piercing. Was that how the Ferenczy would come: flitting like a great bat, a stretchy blanket of flesh falling out of the night to smother me? I shrank down, gazed fearfully up into the vault of the night sky. But no, surely not; his fall had injured him and he would not yet be ready to tax himself so greatly; there must be some other route with which I was not familiar.
Ignoring the bats, which came down at me in waves, but not so close as to strike or interfere with me, I went to the perimeter wall and looked over. Why I did this I can't say, for it would take more than any mere man to climb walls as sheer as these. Fool that I was — the Ferenczy was no mere man!
And there he was: flat to the wall, making his way agonisingly slowly, like a great lizard, up the stonework. A lizard, aye, for his hands and feet were huge as banquet platters and sucked where they slapped the walls! Horrified to my roots, I stared harder in the dark. He had not yet seen me. He grunted quietly and his huge disc of a hand made a quagmire sound where it left the wall and groped upward. His fingers were long as daggers and webbed between. Hands like that would pull a man's flesh from his bones as if they were plucking a chicken!
I looked wildly about. The bubbling cauldrons of oil were positioned at the ends of the span, where the great hall joined the towers. Rightly so, for who would suppose that a man could crawl under the flying buttresses and come up that way, with nothing but the gorge and certain death beneath him?
I flew to the closest cauldron, laid my hands on its rim. Agony! The metal was hot as hell.
I took my sword belt and passed it through the metal framework of the tilting engine, then dragged device and cauldron and all back the way I had come. Oil splashed and drenched my boot; one foot of the tilting bench went through a rotten plank and I must pause to free it; the entire contraption jerked and shuddered through friction with the planking, so that I knew Faethor must hear me and guess what I was about. But finally I had the cauldron above the spot where I had seen him.
I glanced fearfully over the parapet — and a great groping sucker hand came up over the rim, missed my face by inches, slapped down and gripped the coping of the wall!
How I gibbered then! I threw myself on to the tilting device, turned the handle furiously, and saw the cauldron bearing over towards the wall. Oil spilled and ran down the cauldron's side. It met the hot brazier and caught fire; my boot went up in flames. The Ferenczy's face came up over the rim of the parapet. His eyes reflected the leaping flames. His teeth, whole again, were gleaming white slivers of bone in his gaping jaws, with that flickering abomination of a tongue slithering over them.
Shrieking, I worked at the handle. The cauldron tilted, slopped a sea of blazing oil towards him.
‘NO!' he croaked, his voice a broken bell. ‘NO — NO —NOOOOOO!'
The blue and yellow fire paid him no heed, ignored his cry of terror. It washed over him, lit him like a torch. He wrenched his hands from the wall and reached for me, but I fell back out of harm's way. Then he screamed again, and launched himself from the wall into space.
I watched the fireball curving down into darkness and turning it day bright, and all the while the Ferenczy's scream echoed back up to me. His myriad minion bats flocked to him mid-flight, dashing their soft bodies against him to quell the flames, but the rush of air thwarted them. A torch, he fell, and his scream was a rusty blade on the ends of my nerves. Even blazing, he tried to form a wing shape, and I heard again that rending and crackling sound. Ah, what sweet agony that must have caused him, with his crisp skin splitting instead of stretching, and the burning oil getting into the cracks!
Even so, he half-succeeded, began to glide as before, and as before struck a tree and so went spinning and crashing through the pines and out of sight.
He left a few sparks and scraps of fire drifting on the air, and a host of scorched bats skittering crippled against the moon, and a lingering odour of roasted flesh. And that was all.
Still I wasn't satisfied that he was dead, but I was satisfied that he wouldn't be back that night. It was now time to celebrate my triumph.
I doused the fire where it had taken hold of dry timbers, shut down the burning braziers, and went wearily to Faethor's living quarters. There was good wine there which I sipped warily, then gulped heartily. I spitted pheasants, sliced an onion, nibbled on dry bread and swilled wine until the birds were done. And then I dined royally. It was a good meal, aye, and my first in a long time, and yet... it lacked something. I couldn't say just what. Fool, I still thought of myself as a man. In other ways, however, I still was a man!
I took a stone jar of proven wine with me and went unsteadily to the lady in the locked room. She did desire to receive me, but I was in no mood for arguments. I took her again and again; in as many ways as entered my head, so I entered her. Only when she was exhausted and slept did I, too, sleep.