Necroscope 9: The Lost Years (55 page)

Finaly al of Radu’s scouts returned, including the man he’d sent down onto the steppes to see how things stood. And now it was known for a fact: the last of the Huns had either retreated back into the east or settled the plains to the north. For the time being, locally at least, the fighting was over. Wherefore it seemed a good time for expansion. Now Radu’s Wamphyri territorialism could come into play.

Obviously these mountains belonged to no one. They might be temporarily ‘annexed’ now and then, by this or that regime, but no one held physical sway over them. It could be said that they belonged to the Dacians, the Ungars, the Romans, whoever; but who was there here to protect them? No man … except Radu Lykan. And what is a mountain if not an aerie? And these horseshoe mountains, rearing like a buttress against the east?

Inhospitable, were they? What, like the colossal stacks of Starside? Ah, but there’s inhospitable and there’s inhospitable! By comparison, 287

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these mountains were sheerest luxury. And inaccessible? Aye, to an invader - but not to a man already in residence. And Radu was that man.

Very wel. Hamlet by hamlet, vilage by vilage, town by town, these unconquered Dacian mountains would come under his control. At first he’d be the Voevod Radu, then a princeling, finaly a king of his own land -
this
land! It might take al of fifty years, even longer, but what was that to Radu? Wamphyri, he had hundreds of years behind him, and an incalculable number ahead. His original men, those thrals and lieutenants who had come through the Gate with him: where were they? Gone down into the earth, or gone up in smoke and reek on some batlefield, that’s where. Why, even the longest-lasting of them had been dead for twenty years! But Radu - he looked a young thirty; younger, if it so pleased him! Anonymity?
Bah
to anonymity … for now, anyway. But insularity? Ah,
yes!
He would protect the mountains, and the mountains would protect him.

So be it…

Rumours. One of Radu’s scouts had heard it that a Ferenczy was in league with the Vandals.
Hah!
Wel good luck to him, whoever he was, be it Nonari the Gross -if in fact he still lived - or this son of his, this Belos Pheropzis. For if that bastard Gaeseric dealt as badly with al of his mercenaries as he’d dealt with Radu …

wel, that was one Ferenczy he needn’t hunt down!

As for the Drakuls:

They held fortress castles (‘aeries,’ of course) in the western reaches of Dacia: in the Zarundului Mountains and the northern Carpathians. Perhaps they were enemies now; certainly they had put space between them! Al the beter when the time came for Radu to deal with them; he could take them out one at a time. And because they’d brought themselves into prominence and were become ‘legends’ -
viesky
or
vrykoulakas,
who descend like bats in the night, to drink their victim’s blood or steal his wife and children - it shouldn’t prove too hard to recruit an army of locals to go against their castles. Oh, Radu looked forward to it! But al in good time.

And meanwhile he had work to do …

Radu had reckoned on fifty or more years to make himself Lord or ‘king’ of the horseshoe mountains. It took al of that and would have taken more, if ever he’d been able to complete the job. But fate, history, and ancient enmities intervened. Despite earlier vows, he brought himself into prominence, became less than anonymous, set himself up as a target.

Fifty years to spread out into al the mountain hamlets, vilages, towns. A half-century to become Voevod of the horseshoe range - in its eastern reaches, anyway - during a period in history when warlords or

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princelings were the last thing it needed. He had werewolf lieutenants in every town, with dozens of thralls to back them up. He knew every pass, track, route, and shortcut through the eastern heights, and could move his men with incredible speed from place to place. Of course he could, for there was that of the wolf in al of them. And indeed Radu and the pack were fearsome warriors … or would be. But where was the war? Never up here.

And Radu had been wrong, too, in his belief that the Drakuls would be hated. They were, by those they wronged, but they were worshipped by others! Indeed, in a hundred and fifty years they had infiltrated, corrupted and vampirized the populace of their own western mountain areas to such an extent that entire townships were now in thrall to them, including
all
of the hamlets on the approaches to their aeries!

Moreover, the Drakuls had recruited and turned loose many thralls to become their ‘emissaries’ or servants (or more properly their spies) abroad in the world. These had become wanderers, Gypsies, and ‘Travellers’ here no less than in Starside, in another world. And the Drakuls had engineered all of this a hundred years ago, when the Empire held sway over these Dacian parts. Why, men of the Drakuls had even crossed the borders to become true citizens of Rome -‘sleepers,’ as it were, in the so-called ‘civilized’ regions of a barbaric world. Romans, aye … or Romani?

Romany!
The source of yet another legend.

And so the Drakuls had become almost invulnerable, impervious to attack except perhaps in the drone of hot summer days when they slept in the deeps of their castles, in ‘native soil’ brought with them out of Starside.

But Radu knew none of that, not then.

He knew where they were situated, but
not
their situation, how powerful they’d become. He might have guessed something of it when, well past the fifty years of his earlier reckoning, he sent spies to map out the land in the heart of Drakul territory … and they never returned. But Radu had grown powerful in his own right, until he believed that
he
was invulnerable. And perhaps this had made him lax …

Meanwhile, in the outside world beyond the mountains - beyond Dacia, beyond the Danube - history was passing him by. The Western Empire had crumbled away entirely; an Ostrogothic kingdom had been established in Italy; only the Eastern, ‘Byzantine’ Empire, with its capital at Constantinople, survived intact. He knew of these things, for he was not without external inteligence; perhaps he even pined a little, for al the blood spiled on the reeking batlefields of the world.

And al gone to waste, without that he’d been part of it.

And Gaeseric the Vandal king: dead and gone these forty-odd years; and Radu’s Wamphyri vow of vengeance gone with him, for he’d not

been a part of
that
either! Oh, it was maddening! Which was when he realized how bored he’d become. Well, enough of all that! And he promised himself that when finally he was established
throughout
the mountains, and not just in the east, then he’d find time to venture forth and play the warrior again.

But now, in order to bring that time forward - also as an exercise in preparation for it -
now
it was surely time for a grand expansion west, against the Drakuls!

Except… the Drakuls moved first, against him.

There had been warnings. In retrospect, looking back on the far past -still dreaming his unquiet dreams in the semi-solid matrix of his resin ‘tomb,’ - Radu knew it well enough: that there had been unsettling occurrences in his many outposts strung out north and south along the legs of the horseshoe range …

In the northern Carpathians, the Voevod Radu (occasionally ‘the Wolf) held sway in villages as far removed as Rakhov, and in the south as far as Turnu Rosu, where the hurtling waters of the Oltul had long since carved a pass through the mountains on their way to the Danube more than a hundred miles farther south. But many miles
inside
these far boundaries - deep in the Wolfs heartland - even there his outposts had had their problems. And not hard to guess what sort of problems.

He prepared expeditions to lacobani in the north and Ruckar in the south, to see what could be done. Radu himself would lead the southern expedition; it would consist of some forty of his men, and one hundred more to be gathered along the way. Two of his bravest lieutenants -true werewolves or ‘pups’ - would head north for lacobani, and likewise collect a small army en-route. These detachments of Radu’s main mercenary force, whose nucleus was still centred in Wolfscrag and the hamlets around, should suffice to sort out the problem. Which was this:

Villagers and their wives and children in Ruckar, lacobani and neighbouring towns were being picked off by the
viesky,
the
Drakul
who fell upon his prey out of the night sky. People - mainly women, but occasionally children - had vanished without trace; other victims had been found drained of their life’s blood. Mumbled prayers were said over them before they were put down into the ground … but they would not
stay
down! Those of Radu’s lieutenants who were perma nently stationed in the plague towns knew wel enough how to deal with these undead ‘droppings’ of the Drakuls - the stake, the sword, and the fire - but were at a loss as to what to do about the nightly attacks. They were werewolves and ran on the ground, while the Drakuls were flying creatures who struck out of the sky!

And so it was seen how the Drakuls’ methods were the very opposite of Radu’s. For despite that he was no longer

‘anonymous,’ still he kept the facts of his vampirism - the fact that he
was
Wamphyri, and
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especially the fact of his lycanthropy - fairly wel hidden; whereas the Drakuls scathed openly abroad as vampires and revelled in their power.

And where he used his military might and prowess to keep a tight rein on the peoples who came under his control and within his sphere of influence, they used fear pure and simple. Also, where Radu recruited men only in such numbers as were sufficient to resupply or complement the pack, and kiled only strangers, wanderers, outsiders, and beasts of the wild for the provisioning - but
never
people under his

‘protection’; or rarely, when they were rebellious, or openly suspicious of him - the Drakuls not only recruited their thralls in outrageous numbers but were using their vampirism to infiltrate the enemy camp and destroy opposition from within. So that in a way their blunt methods were subtle after al: first convert Radu’s people, and when his power base had been destroyed … then attack him!

These had been the Wolfs thoughts on the mater, and in his mind’s eye he’d seen the gradual eastward creep of the Drakuls -their eating-up of his towns and villages - until at the last, as leaders of two vast vampire hordes, they’d join forces in a mass attack on Wolfscrag itself … and discover Radu and the remnants of his pack trapped in the cavern manse.

Then …

… Perhaps it was only the morbidity of Radu’s old memories (for in their subconscious minds, even creatures who are grown evil and monstrous beyond words may be terrified anew by nightmares out of their past; even the horrific may be horrified) but suddenly he gave an involuntary shudder; a tremor ran through him in the semi-solid resin of his vat.

Or was the tremor in the resin itself?

What? A sound! A reverberation, however faint - or furtive? Now
surely
the Drakuls were upon him …
.’/.’

But no, no, for that was only an old dream out of the distant past, while the sound had been here and now … immediate and
threatening. And this time he could not be mistaken. There
was
someone here!
Or…
someone coming? Well, of
course someone was coming, eventually. A delicious someone who always came. So perhaps that was it: anticipation, or wishful
thinking. Imagination.

Ah, yesss! But it was much too early … she wouldn’t be here yet awhile.

Anticipation, yesss. But not yet… awhile.

No, not yet
… a …
while
…

Slowly Radu relaxed into resurgent dreams, alowing them to foam up again over his anxieties to drown them. And however uncertainly, however reluctantly - having come that much closer to a true awakening this time - his mind returned to its state of hibernation, its contemplation of bygone centuries …

At that time, in the mountains of Moldavia, Radu had scarcely realized the urgency of his situation; he had seen the gradual encroachment of the Drakuls across the Transylvanian mountains into Moldavia as just that: gradual. But in fact their plan had been more immediate, and their campaign not merely one of territorialism but also of destruction.

Radu’s destruction, and now!

Partly, it was the enmity which exists between al great vampires. A hatred which had existed since the building of the first Starside aeries, which had been wrought in al the bloodwars of a paralel world, and which would now continue in this world until the end of time, or until no one was left to carry it on. It was the knowledge in the dark heart of every Lord of the Wamphyri that if he would live he must do to others of his kind before they did to him.

But from the Drakuls’ point of view, it was also the need to clear the way for expansion. For it seemed to them that they had proved a point: that they
could
live as vampires here without hiding themselves away. Anonymity was no longer a requirement, no longer synonymous with longevity - but invincibility was!

They were not visionaries, the Drakuls, no; but planners, certainly. For the time being, for now, these soaring mountains were vast. But in some future time, would there be room for al the Wamphyri yet to come, those as yet unsired out of women, or brought about by transfusion of vampire eggs or poisoned blood?

Which of them were destined to inherit this earth, these gaunt and gloomy mountains? The egg-and bloodsons of noble Drakuls, or the spawn of miserable dog-Lords? And what of the Ferenczys? Wel, for the moment the Ferenczys were not part of the equation, but Radu Lykan most definitely was …