Vampire World I: Blood Brothers (Necroscope #6)

Vampire World I: Blood Brothers (Necroscope #6) Page 27

'Nathaaan! Nathan!' The transition from one evil voice in his metaphysical mind to another in his entirely physical ears was confusing ... until a claw-like hand grasped his shoulder and shook him, rocking him in his bed.

'Who? What...?' He came gasping awake.

'Who indeed?' Maglore's face was hideous - and accusing? - in the yellow-flaring light of the gas jets, where he leaned over him. 'Who is it comes to visit you in your sleep, Nathan? Who do you talk to, secretly, in your dreams?'

'My dreams?' Nathan's guard was firmly in place. Quickly awake, he tried to sit up and Maglore withdrew a little to let him. 'Was I dreaming?' His brow was feverish and he was trembling. 'Yes, yes I was! But not a dream, a nightmare, which now has gone.'

'Ah, a nightmare!' Maglore nodded curtly, his red eyes swivelling this way and that, as if seeking out some vestige of the unknown visitant. 'That which comes in the darkness to terrify the sleeping mind. The memory of some fearful event out of the past, perhaps, or the prescience of that which is yet to befall.' He cocked his head in a listening attitude, sniffing at the air like a hound before seating himself on the edge of Nathan's bed. The result of gluttonous overeating, or merely a case of conscience. But ... guilty conscience, perhaps?'

Nathan kept his mind shielded and played the inno- cent. It wasn't difficult, for after all he was innocent. 'Did I eat too much, Master?' He ignored the implied accusation.

Maglore narrowed his eyes, but still Nathan saw right into them. The master of Runemanse was thinking, Does he continue to play word games with me? One thing for sure: he's no fool, this Nathan.

But as Maglore stood up, so he made inquiry; 'And are you hungry?'

Nathan threw back his blankets, thrust his feet over the edge of the bed and joined the Seer Lord on his feet. 'I think I am,' he said. He glanced out of the high window and noted the orientation of the stars. And so he should be hungry, for he'd slept half-way through sundown!

Then you did not eat too much,' Maglore told him. 'And so we're left with a case of conscience; or perhaps some real however intangible thing, which came to you in your sleep. Do you believe in ghosts?'

'Yes,' said Nathan at once, relieved that he could speak the truth. Of course he believed in ghosts, for he of all men knew that they were real, even though they were not always the dark phantoms of myth which men supposed. But Maglore, for all that he was a mage, didn't know that.

The Seer Lord nodded. 'And so you should believe in them, and especially here. Let me advise you, Nathan, that Turgosheim has known a variety of terrible men and creatures. Though they themselves are gone, their auras dwell here still. And in Runemanse, you are not the only one who dreams dark dreams.'

He looked Nathan up and down. 'But tell me, why are you dressed? You did not simply fall asleep on top of the bed, for I saw you under the covers. Is there something here which you fear? Has someone ... bothered you?' His frown brought his eyebrows crushing inwards under a warp of wrinkled forehead. And once again he glanced this way and that, and sniffed the air. Until, in a moment: 'A woman!' he said.

'She did me no harm,' Nathan shook his head. 'She showed me the way here, that's all.'

Maglore glared at him furiously. 'What? She showed you the way? Oh, she would do that, all right! Any one of them would do that!' He grasped Nathan's arm. 'Who was she? Did she touch you, kiss you, offer you her body? Speak, fool! Did you take her?' But even as Nathan began to shake his head: 'What? Do you lie to me? Why, there's not a horny red-blooded man born of woman who could deny those whores of mine, except maybe a whelp who doesn't know what a woman is!'

Nathan felt his ears burning red ...

Astonished, the Seer Lord gazed deep into his eyes, and saw the truth written there. 'What?' he said. 'A strapping man, Szgany, almost twenty years old and never bedded a woman? Hah!' He slapped his thigh. 'Little wonder they're prettied up and on the prowl! I've never seen them so agitated! But ... can it be true? You're a virgin?'

'I... I had a ... g-g-girl, Szgany,' Nathan answered. It was the first time he'd stumbled and stuttered in a long time. And now he resolved never to do it again. 'She was stolen away by Canker Canison, into Starside,' his voice hardened. 'Perhaps she would have been mine, if things had been different. Anyway, we kept apart from taking lovers, and waited for each other.'

'Ah, true love!' Maglore fluttered long, almost furry eyelashes and sighed sarcastically. 'The dog Canker got her, yes?' He shook his head, made sympathetic clucking noises. 'I trust you have forgotten her? If not, you may safely do so.'

Nathan was not required to reply.

'Now, try to understand my concern, my anger,' Mag-lore's tone was conciliatory. 'If you are seduced by some creature of mine, you will no longer be your own creature, and therefore of no earthly use to me. It is my desire to keep your blood, body, and very mind clean and free of other influences - except my own. For I have enough of vampires, and at times the fawning of thralls becomes an annoyance. This is no unique situation, however; you will not be the first entirely human being who ever stayed in Runemanse ..." He paused, and in a little while continued:

'Well, and no doubt you are wondering why I'm here. Since I was passing this way I thought to look in on you, and if you were awake bring you to table. You shall take all of your meals with me, for sometimes I crave the company of common men. Also, it seems I must keep you safe - for the time being, anyway - until I can make other arrangements.' He spoke musingly, almost to himself. But then:

'Come,' he made for the door. 'You can wash in my apartments, and while we eat we shall continue our conversation. I desire to know you better, my son. For after all, your welfare is in my hands ...' Maglore glanced at Nathan sideways where he hurried to keep up, but the Seer Lord's thoughts were now as inscrutable as his expression ...

Entering the great hall from the corridor, Nathan came face to face with the vampire girl who had attempted his seduction. She turned her face away immediately but Maglore had seen. He paused in his striding, nodded grimly, and called her back. She came smiling, eager, but ghosting in the awful flowing fashion of a vampire.

'So,' said Maglore. 'It is Magda. You were the one.'

She glared at Nathan and faced up to Maglore, determined to brazen it out. 'But he's one of yours, master, which you have brought into Runemanse. I thought to have him before the others, that's all, and he gave me the opportunity by asking me the way to his room. But as it happens, he's one of three things: a eunuch, or queer, or a child who still thinks it's for pissing! Me: I like a man with backbone. And so no harm done. Besides which, I had no instructions to the contrary.'

'Perhaps not, at the time,' said Maglore nodding, chucking her under the chin almost affectionately.

She rubbed against him and brushed his shoulder with her cheek. Then I have not offended?'

Maglore had been half-smiling. Now the mask slipped from his face and he called for one of his men. At the sound of his voice, a silence fell on the great hall. Then a lieutenant came striding, and Magda tried to back away. But Maglore held her.

Nathan glanced around the great hall. Nearby, a squad of pallid thralls gouged with heavy flint chisels at a wall of pumice; but work stopped as gaunt, hollow faces turned inwards on the drama. Feral eyes lit with morbid fascination, and perhaps with something of grim anticipation, too. A small group of women, pounding washing at a trickling water sluice, looked up and nudged each other, and grinned. They were drudges, most of them, older than Magda and perhaps jealous of her.

Maglore saw that, too. 'Did you wager for him?' he asked her as his lieutenant approached.

'We drew straws,' she snarled, still struggling. 'And I won.'

'Fool!' Maglore told her. 'You lost! Where orders exist you obey them, and where there are none you do nothing. That is the rule, in Runemanse. The others know that, and so they let you win. They were baiting you, trying Nathan, and testing ... me!'

He tossed her into his man's arms, grew taller and glowered all about the cavern. 'Testing me?' he shouted, his face livid with a fire which seemed to burn through the very bone. 'Well, and let this be a lesson to all of you. I need not say more than this ...' He glanced at his lieutenant, and twitched his head in a negligent gesture: '... Magda is for the provisioning!'

The girl screamed once and clawed for the lieutenant's eyes; he jerked back his head, struck her with a massive fist that broke her jaw and knocked her senseless. And the last Nathan saw of her, she was being carried away.

For a moment the silence seemed to ring ... then Maglore headed for the spiral staircase with Nathan following on. But this time he knew better than to plead for the girl, for the Seer Lord's mind was seething like a cauldron full of poison. And as they climbed the central stairs, slowly the great hall came back to life behind them ...

At Maglore's table, Nathan had no appetite. He picked at his food when the Wamphyri Lord insisted, but his spirit felt so weighted, depressed, that the morsels would not go down. And he wondered about Magda. Perhaps he'd left his mind unguarded; in any case he was jolted and learned a lesson from it, when Maglore said:

'Forget about her. You won't see her again. And anyway, why concern yourself about someone who would have drained you in a trice?'

'Because I feel it was my fault, master.'

'It was no one's fault. It was Nature's fault: the nature of the vampire. But I am glad you refused her. So should you be glad, for your continued existence.'

'Everything in Runemanse appears a threat,' Nathan answered before he could control his thoughts or words. 'There's no innocence here.'

'Well, there is now,' Maglore contradicted him. 'Aye, and there was before. Perhaps not entirely innocent, but certainly human. Didn't I tell you that you weren't the first human being to stay in Runemanse? If I let my ... ladies see you and she together, then perhaps they'll leave you alone. I have sent for her and she will join us in a little while.'

'She, master?'

Maglore waved a dismissive hand. 'Ask no more. Now I have questions for you. For instance: you say you don't know women, yet wore a locket with a curl of pubic hair. And Thyre hair at that! Explain it, if you will.'

Nathan shrugged. 'It's a custom of the Thyre when brother and sister part. Atwei was like a sister to me.'

'And how did you know her so well?'

'I got to know her, in my long wanderings in the desert.'

'Ah, yes, I remember,' Maglore nodded. 'You told me about that on our way here. After Wratha and her renegades fell upon your tribe and destroyed it, you walked out into the desert to die. But the Thyre found you and you joined them, and wandered east with them from oasis to oasis. You skirted the Great Red Waste and lived like the desert trogs themselves, on the flesh of lizards and the juice of cactus plants.' Maglore blinked and shook his head. 'So much sunlight and so little colour. Why did you not burn?'

'I wore a cowled Thyre robe,' Nathan lied, 'and kept to the shade wherever possible. Then, when I came to Turgosheim's Sunside, I lived on the fringe of the forest a while before I heard of lozel and sought him out. In the forest's shade, my skin grew pale ... which in any case had never been dark.'

'Why did you seek lozel out?' Maglore's questions were coming closer to the mark. Nathan must think fast, and guard his thoughts at the same time.

'I heard he was a mystic who understood strange things. Perhaps he could explain the numbers which plague my dreams, and the reason I feel like a stranger in the presence of my own kind.' He tugged at the twisted strap on his wrist. 'He might also know why I wear this, which has become a part of me.'

'Ah!' Maglore was distracted, fascinated at once, just as Nathan had hoped he would be. 'Take it off. Let me see it again.' Nathan did so, and Maglore picked it up and said: 'So, the sigil puzzles you even as it puzzles me. Why did you not say so?'

'I have lived with it,' Nathan answered. 'I wear it like my hair. Yet while it seems nothing special, I know that it is special, for it is also your sigil. It seemed presumptuous of me to claim it for my own.'

And at last Maglore chuckled. 'Not to say dangerous, eh?'

'That, too,' Nathan answered.

'Well, and we learn more about you all the time,' the Seer Lord nodded, tossing the strap onto the table. 'You're not so naive after all. And did lozel know the sigil? Could he tell you anything about it?'

'Oh, he knew it, master,' said Nathan. 'But did he know about it? - no, nothing. He was a fraud! I myself know more.'

'You do? Explain.'

Nathan took up the strap. 'I have ... noticed things. In quieter moments, I have studied this device.'

'A device?' said Maglore, raising a feathery eyebrow. 'Oh, really? Do you think so? Ahhh!'

'How many sides has it?'

'Eh? A question?' Maglore leaned over the table and tested the leather between thumb and forefinger. 'Sides? Why, two, of course.'

'One,' Nathan shook his head. 'For it defies the eye, do you see?' He brought a sliver of charcoal from the fireplace and drew a line on the brown leather, down the centre of its width. As the line lengthened he turned the strap on the table, until the head of the line met up with its tail.

'Ahhh.'' Maglore's great jaw fell open.

And Nathan asked him: 'How many edges has it?'

'Eh? Edges?' Maglore's eyes darted from the strap to Nathan's face and back again. 'Why, two, plainly. What is it but a strip of leather, after all? There must be two edges, if only to separate the space between them!'

'One,' Nathan said again.

'No!' said Maglore, astonished. 'Let me try it!' He blackened the strap's rim with charcoal, until 'each' edge (in fact there was only one, as Nathan had pointed out) was smudged with soot. Then ... the Seer Mage's eyes were very wide as he carefully put the strap down. And:

'For all of sixteen years I have known this thing,' he said, 'even taking it for my sigil. Yet I have never "known" it! But now, through you ..." He gazed at Nathan in something approaching wonder. 'Well, in alerting me to your presence, lozel Kotys has paid his dues at last. For indeed there is this bond between us.'

He might have gone on to say more, except that was when 'she' arrived ...

II She was beautiful in a wan, subdued sort of way, but it was obvious that she was not a vampire. Her eyes were as black as any Szgany eyes Nathan had ever seen, and despite the lack of sunlight - or perhaps because of it - her flesh had taken on a unique creamy texture. No longer the tanned, natural, light golden brown of a Gypsy, still her colour appeared healthier than Nathan's, and it could never be mistaken for the pallor of a thrall or the sickly grey of an undead vampire thing.

Long-legged and dressed in a black sheath split up the sides to mid-thigh, and in a gauzy blouse which scarcely concealed the elastic globes of her breasts, she approached the table and bowed from the waist. Her hair, straight, black as jet, and cut in a fringe over her eyes, was long at the sides and fell forward to frame her oval face. But as she straightened her back and stood tall, waiting for her master's command, her eyes were only for Maglore. So that Nathan supposed she dared not look at him, not in the presence of her Wamphyri Lord.

'Orlea,' Maglore acknowledged her presence with a smile, indicating that she should take a seat at the table. 'Eat with us.' And, as she sat down: This is Nathan, and you shall know him well. He is new here and Runemanse is very strange to him. I shall require you to show him all of its levels, rooms, and functions. Nowhere shall be forbidden. He shall be as you are, a free person - within those limits which I impose.'

While Maglore placed some choice tidbits on a plate and passed it to her, Orlea glanced at Nathan, perhaps curiously. Then, lowering her eyes, she picked at her food.

Nathan thought it might be as well to make conversation. 'Despite my colouring,' he spoke to Orlea, 'I am Szgany. But I came here out of the west, from beyond the Great Red Waste.' Perhaps she, and Maglore too, would take it that there were other anomalies of pigmentation in those distant regions. In any case, it was an opening.

She looked at Maglore for his approval, and he nodded. And turning a little more towards Nathan, she asked: 'How is it now, on Sunside?' Her voice was soft, pleasant, but completely lacking in animation; and never a smile to betray her emotions. In fact she seemed drained of all emotion. Nathan could well understand that.

'My Sunside, in the west, or yours?'

'My own,' she answered.

'Do you miss it?' Maybe he was taking a chance. Perhaps she would also take a chance, and answer him truthfully. But she didn't, or so he believed at that time.

'No,' she said. 'My life was hard there.'

Then why do you ask after it?'

Maglore interrupted. 'Good! And so you'll converse and find things in common. But I suspect my presence inhibits you, and anyway I have things to do. Orlea, first I would speak to you ..." He stood up and moved apart; she went to him and they talked a while in lowered tones; finally Maglore left the two on their own and went about his business.

As they made an end of their meal, Nathan looked at the spread table. 'What about these things?'

'Just as you and I have our duties here, so others have theirs,' Orlea answered him. She indicated the table. 'All of this will be attended to; but for now Mag-lore has tasked me to show you Runemanse, and tasked you to observe closely and remember the things you see. No great difficulty in that; I know you will remember, just as I remembered in my time. Indeed, I cannot forget.'

He followed her to a room with a staircase, which they climbed to Runemanse's highest level. 'The topmost fang of the aerie,' she told him without looking back. 'We'll start there, and work our way down.'

'Why did you ask after Sunside?' Nathan was curious.

'Because you were making conversation,' she answered. 'If I had not answered, Maglore would have made me. He admires that such as you and I are civil towards each other. It pleases him that within the limits he imposes we govern our own bodies and minds, and that we temper ourselves and are matched on an emotional level - unlike vampires, who are commanded by powerful, alien urges to argue and fight at every opportunity, often for the sake of it!'

'Is that the only reason?' They had arrived at the topmost landing.

'No, for it was also my thought to ask ... after the children.' She waited for him to step up beside her.

The children?'

'My life on Sunside was hard,' she said, 'but I remember the little ones. They were sweet, pure, innocent.'

Nathan shrugged. 'All young things are.'

'Ah, no!' she answered with a small shudder. The young of the Wamphyri are not...'

'And are there young ones here?'

'In Runemanse? No. Maglore cannot abide them. But when I asked him once for a child, he showed me the nurseries of the Wamphyri. The children of Sunside take milk from their mothers or wet-nurses, but in Tur-gosheim . .. they take other than milk. If Maglore could be sure he would father other than a vampire, then he might give me my child, but until then he won't spoil me for the sake of "some usurper brat!'"

'You asked Maglore for a child?' Nathan couldn't believe it. 'Do you mean ... you wanted to bear his child?'

'Yes,' she answered, leading the way through a labyrinth of empty rooms to one with a window and, set back in an alcove, a curtained area. There, for the first time, she looked Nathan full in the face. But her chin was raised and her eyes defiant. 'You have not seen Maglore when he's young. You're not a woman. You do not know what it is to be with a vampire Lord. You have no understanding of the word "fulfilment".'

'No,' Nathan replied, drawing back from her. 'But I have seen what remains after women have been ... fulfilled! And if they're not dead, they're doomed!'

She nodded, looked away. 'Yes, you are right. But with me ... Maglore has been careful, and gentle. I am not changed. Or if I am, it is that I hated him and now love him. A woman can be in thrall to a man in more ways than one.'

'You actually love him?' It seemed impossible.

'I love Maglore!' she snapped. 'Not his works or the thing inside him, but him!'

It was beyond understanding. For a moment, lost for words, Nathan shook his head. Then he said: 'But surely, it's his vampire that makes him what he is?'

'And that is the paradox,' she answered, 'which tears me like rotten cloth. I hate that thing inside Maglore as much as I love its host! For where he is my master, it is his master! And I am jealous of it and hate it because it shares him with me. Also, it shares me with him! But when he is with me in the guise of a young man, then I cannot help but love him.'

Nathan had backed up to the curtained alcove; Orlea had followed and was standing close to him, with her hand on the curtain rope, when he said, 'I think ... that I pity you!' He spoke before considering his words, perhaps without even meaning them; for he had no way of knowing what her life had been like before Rune-manse. It was simply an expression of his horror. But whatever else she'd lost, Orlea still had her pride. Her dark eyes blazed as she told him:

'Save your pity for yourself, Nathan, for you've not yet seen Runemanse.' With which she pulled the rope. The curtains swished open, and Nathan saw ... Mag-lore's siphoneer. At first he did not recognize what he was looking at, but then he did, and staggered away grimacing and gasping.

'So you see,' she let the curtains fall and followed him, taking his arm to steady him, 'there are times when it's useful to have someone to love and cling to in a place like this. Aye, even a thing like Maglore.' Looking into her eyes, Nathan saw nothing of the feral yellow of a thrall's evil intelligence, or the scarlet of tumultuous Wamphyri passions. But perhaps he did see something of the vacancy of madness ...

Next on her list, Orlea showed Nathan Maglore's study or 'room of meditation', to which only a few trusted thralls had access. His eyes were drawn at once to a heavy golden model of the Seer Lord's sigil upon a slender onyx base, and he wondered at its use; or perhaps it was merely ornamental. And seated for long hours before a marvellous model of Turgosheim, he absorbed what Orlea told him of the vampire gorge. This was a great deal more than he'd learned from Nicolae Seersthrall, and went a long way towards completing his knowledge of the geography of the place and the history of its inhabitants. More than two-thirds of Sundown had passed by the time they were finished there.

'Are you tired?' she asked him. 'Or do you wish to continue?'

'I don't know if I am tired,' Nathan answered truthfully. There's so much to see, learn. And what I've seen already will keep me awake, I'm sure. Anyway, I need to be fatigued in body as well as mind, to sleep soundly.' But inside he knew that he really should sleep, and do as much of it as possible, at every opportunity. For if he should allow himself to become overtired, sooner or later he would let his guard down. His secret talents must remain secret; his knowledge of the Thyre and their desert places was a trust he could never break; he must see about the fabrication of a false geography and lifestyle for that olden Sunside in the west, which he'd left so far behind. For eventually Maglore would want to know about it, he was sure.

'Now would be a good time for sleeping,' Orlea told him as if reading his thoughts, though in fact she had not, for he kept them guarded and could sense nothing of telepathy in her. 'For the deep sleep which you require, if you'd stay strong in Runemanse. Fear saps your strength here - everyone's strength, except Mag-lore's. One's nerves are stretched to breaking point; breathing and heartbeat fluctuate; will withers to a husk, even as Maglore's grows stronger. For it's not only blood that vampires suck, Nathan. They suck everything.'

He followed her back down to the great hall, where there was little of activity now. Several female thralls were still out and about, however, and a group of them stood in secretive conversation. Seeing Nathan and Orlea together they fell silent, frowning, and apparently frustrated. Then, when he would have made for his room, Orlea took his elbow and guided him in a different direction, down a passageway carved in pumice.

'Where are we going?' Nathan inquired.

'To a place where those women won't bother you,' she told him. 'For they fear me almost as much as they fear Maglore.'

'And where is the Seer Lord now?' He felt uneasy, but was not quite sure why he wanted to know.

'Asleep,' she answered. 'He has his routines. This is one of the times when he sleeps. Sunup will rouse him from his bed, when he'll retreat to his workshops in the lower levels. Unlike the other Lords, most of which work only at night and cower in the dark when the sun stands on high over Sunside, Maglore has regulated his sleeping evenly between day and night.'

They reached the outer wall where a narrow window looked towards the north-east, and stone steps spiralled down around a mortared stone core. At the bottom was a lesser hall like a warren, with passages leading off. She led the way down one of these to a room with a door like Nathan's. It was Orlea's room, but inside ... the door was fitted with a bolt. This wasn't the only difference, for her apartment was very well appointed. She had a bath, furniture, furs on the floor, and tasselled drapes at a tiny window punched through the massive wall; and her bed was curtained with gauzy drapes, which hung to the floor from rails between the posters.

There were several gas jets with low yellow flames. She went about the room plugging them with bone dowels, until the light was reduced to a smoky dusk. And as Nathan's imagination began to run rampant, she said: 'No one will bother you here. Here you may sleep safely.'

'Orlea,' he headed for the door, 'I appreciate your concern for me, but I fear that if Maglore knew I was here...'

'He does,' she cut him short, stopped him in his tracks. 'Do you think I would dare if he did not? He ordered it.'

Mind whirling and senses numb, Nathan faced the door, his hand reaching for the bolt. But hearing the rustle of curtains, he turned and looked back. Her clothes lay where she'd tossed them on a stool beside the bed, and the drapes were still mobile, shivering into stillness.

Tingling with an electric awareness, scarcely daring to breathe, Nathan asked, 'What... did he order?'

'Everything,' her voice came back to him, very small and somehow sad. 'I'm to take your innocence, until there's nothing left for them.'

'His vampire women?'

'Yes.'

He went back to the bed. 'Orlea, I know better now. I know that I'm to avoid them, which in turn makes this unnecessary.'

'Do you spurn me and defy Maglore?'

'No, I don't spurn you,' he said, trying hard to make her understand, without belittling himself. But in the end he knew there was only one way, which was to tell the truth. 'It's just that I have no experience of women,' he finally blurted it out. 'I don't know ... anything!'

'Well,' she answered, 'and weren't we all innocent, upon a time?'

Even as she spoke, Nathan's ringers were trembling as if they were some other's where they removed his clothes. 'I mean it,' he said. 'I really don't know anything at all.' Even now it wasn't the whole truth, but close enough.

'But you will,' she whispered, 'you will. Even as I know, so shall you.'

He was naked. 'Orlea, I..."

'Come to bed and warm me,' she told him. 'At least I'll know that there's only one of you, that your actions are your own and not directed by some other. At least it will be you, and not some slimy-black thing inside that drives you on.'

He passed through the curtains to where her slender hand greeted him. She turned back the covers and he slid in beside her. She covered him with the blankets, then with her strange cold love ...

Later, in the dusk of the curtained bed and the musk of their bodies, Nathan asked: 'How did you come here?'

'I was a child on Sunside,' Orlea told him, 'just fourteen years old, when the headman of my village, Gobor Tulcini, noticed me. He was a brutal man, Gobor, with a frail and much abused wife. But then, he abused everything: his position, his people - phah! - the very air he breathed. Why, wild dogs are better behaved! One tithe time, he engineered a deficiency, and at the last moment chose my father to make up the number. After my father was taken, my poor mother died of grief. Then Gobor took me into his house, so that he might "bring me up as his own". So he said ...

'My duties were to look after the village children, which I loved. For after all, I was only a child myself. But while I looked after them, Gobor ... looked after me. His wife knew but feared him terribly, and so made no complaint. Twice in a year, by his order, she helped me lose the child he had made in me.

'I bided my time, until I could stand it no longer. Then, one night when the tithesmen came out of Tur-gosheim, I crept to the square and offered myself for the taking. Gobor would have snatched me back and beaten me, but a lieutenant, seeing that I was more comely than some of the girls on offer, questioned me. I told him my mother was dead and my father had been taken by the Wamphyri, and Gobor had kept me for himself, out of sight of the tithesmen. Well, the truth was that I was too young for the tithe, but most of what I said was true.

'Also, I said that I vastly preferred Turgosheim to the great brute Gobor, which was the whole truth. Even death was preferable, though that was not the entire reason. But being a child and still nai've - in my thinking, at least - I also thought I might find my father here. And despite that I was young, I was brought into Turgosheim.

'Luckily, a man of Maglore's drew me in the fatesay-ing, and so I came here. I had learned the ways of men from Gobor, and used a woman's wiles on Maglore. He was fascinated to know how I, a child, was such a woman. And when he knew ... then he arranged for men of his to be tithesmen for a spell, going into Sunside to collect the pitiful human tribute of the Szgany. And he instructed his men to choose a new leader for the people of my village, and to bring Gobor back with them. Thus the great brute met his end in the provisioning of the Lord Vormulac's melancholy Vormspire, which I believe was my father's fate before him ...'

As she finished her story Nathan slipped out of bed and began to dress himself. She watched him through the curtains a while, then said, 'You don't have to go.'

'But I do have my own place here,' he told her, 'which I had better get used to.'

'As you wish. And there will be another time, when you will be more at ease. Then I'll show you the things you still don't know.'

'By Maglore's command?' Even as he said it, Nathan knew that it was churlish of him. Especially now that he knew what her life had been. But with the words already out, it was too late to make amends.

And after a moment she answered quietly, 'Maybe ... and maybe not. We all must do as we're told, but the way in which we do it is our own concern ...'

He left and made his way to his room. There were several vampire thralls in the great hall, a handful of women and one or two males. The latter glanced at Nathan, perhaps enviously, but he was pleased to note that the females ignored him. They had learned Mag-lore's lesson. And anyway, he was no longer an innocent. Oh, he was, in many ways, but not in that way. That part of him was gone forever.

In one way he felt more the man, but in another he felt dejected, made small. And he remembered what his mother Nana had used to tell him when he'd been hunting, that good meat is always the tastiest when you've caught it yourself ...

From then on time passed quickly, and as Nathan got to know Runemanse, so its menace receded a little, but never entirely. And Orlea had been right: there were times when he would wake up in the night (even during the long days), with his nerves screaming and his heart pounding in his chest. It was simply the knowledge that terror and morbid works were all around, and that every other creature in Runemanse, and indeed Turgosheim, was a plague-bearing vampire. With the sole exception of Orlea herself.

And as for Orlea: she was as good as her word and showed Nathan those things he still didn't know. She took him to her room a second time, and on a third and final occasion he made his own way there by prior arrangement. And again he saw how she had been right, for he was more at ease and pleased to take the initiative. Being young and potent, he enjoyed her slender body and might easily have fallen in love with her, except she warned him against it.

'I am Maglore's,' she told him, when on that third occasion he proved hard to drive from her room. 'And I have done my duty by him and obeyed his orders.'

'Maybe,' he said, at her door. 'But you've loved me anyway, and you found it pleasant.'