Necroscope IV: Deadspeak

Book 4: Necroscope

by Brian Lumley

Genres: Horror

Synopsis

Brian Lumley's Necroscope novels are one of the horror genre's most towering achievements. They chronicle the adventures of Necroscope, Harry Keogh, his successor, Jake Cutter, and the psychically gifted agents of E-Branch, Britain's super-secret spy organization, and their battles against the malevolent, shape-shifting Wamphyri and their spawn.

Their exploits have spanned two worlds, thirteen novels, and an infinity of time. The Necroscope novels have sold more than two million copies in English alone.

Tor Books is proud to publish Necroscope: Deadspeak in hardcover for the first time. Previously available only as a mass market, paperback Necroscope: Deadspeak is the fourth volume in Lumley's exciting vampire series, and marks the beginning of a new phase in the story of the Necroscope.

Harry Keogh has triumphed over much adversity in his life, from the death of his mother and the discovery of his amazing powers-to talk to the dead and to travel instantaneously to any place via the Möbius Continuum-to the fallout from his war against the vampires. He lost his body, though not his life; his wife and infant son disappeared without a trace; and he had to kill a woman he had come to love. What should have been a joyful reunion with his son was tinged with horror when Harry realized that his boy-now a man-was half-Necroscope and half-vampire, and thus a deadly double threat to all mankind.

Father faced son in a terrible battle, and when it was over, Harry awoke safe in his own bed, at home . . . but his Necroscope powers were gone, locked away in the depths of his mind!

Now, a new evil rears its head in the Balkan Mountains. Janos Ferenczy, master vampire and black magician, has risen from an ages-long sleep. As the first step in his plans of conquest, he conjures dead men and women into a perverse semblance of life and subjects them to fiendish tortures. But the shrieks of the dead barely begin to satisfy Janos's bloodlusts as he prepares an army of undead warriors to conquer the world.

The dead try desperately to attract the Necroscope's attention, but Harry Keogh is deaf to their pleas and their screams. As Harry searches for a cure, he learns that to save mankind he must ally himself with the crafty father of vampires, the infamous Faethor Ferenczy. Centuries dead, Faethor lies in his grave and schemes. He will help Harry defeat Janos-but his price will be very high indeed!

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Release date: November 15, 1992

Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Print pages: 304

Sample

NECROSCOPE IV: DEADSPEAK

One: Necroscope
CHRISTENED HARRY "SNAITH," IN EDINBURGH, 1957, Harry is the son of a psychic-sensitive mother, Mary Keogh (who is herself the daughter of a "gifted" expatriate Russian lady), and Gerald Snaith, a banker. Harry's father dies of a stroke the following year, and in the winter of 1960 his mother marries again, this time choosing for a husband a Russian by the name of Viktor Shukshin. Like Mary's mother before him, Shukshin has fled the USSR, a supposed "dissident," which perhaps accounts for Mary's initial attraction to him in what will soon become an unmitigated mismatch.
Winter of 1963: Harry's mother is murdered by Shukshin at Bonnyrig outside Edinburgh, where he drowns her under the ice of a frozen river. He alleges that, while skating, she crashed through a thin crust and was washed away; there was nothing he could do to save her; he is "distraught, almost out of [his] mind with grief and horror." Mary Keogh's body is never found; Shukshin inherits her isolated Bonnyrig house and the not inconsiderable monies left to her by her first husband.
Within six months the infant Harry (now Harry "Keogh") has gone to live with an uncle and his wife at Harden on the northeast coast of England. The arrangement is more than satisfactory to Shukshin, who could never stand the child.
Harry commences schooling with the roughneck children of the colliery village. A dreamy, introspective sort of child, he is a loner, develops few friendships (with fellow pupils, at any rate), and thus falls easy prey to bullying and the like. And as he grows towards his teens, so his daydreaming spirit, psychic insight, and instincts lead him into further conflict with his teachers. But he is not lacking in grit--on the contrary.
Harry's problem is that he has inherited his maternal forebears' mediumistic talents, and that they are developed (and still developing) in him to an extraordinary degree. He has no requirement for "real" friends as such, because the many friends he already has are more than sufficient and willing to supply his needs. As to who these friends are: they are the myriad dead in their graves!
Up against the school bully, Harry defeats him with the telepathic assistance of an ex-ex-army physical training instructor; a man who, before the fall from sea cliffs which killed him, was expert in many areas of self-defence. Punished with mathematical homework, Harry receives help from an ex-headmaster of the school; but in this he almost gives himself away. His current maths teacher is the son of Harry's coach, where he lies "at rest" in Harden Cemetery, and as such he very nearly recognises his father's hand in Harry's work.
In 1969 Harry passes examinations to gain entry into a technical college at West Hartlepool a few miles down the coast, and in the course of the next five years until the end of his formal (and orthodox) education, does his best to tone down use of his talents and extraordinary skills in an attempt to prove himself a "normal, average student"--except in one field. Knowing that he will soon need to support himself, he has taken to writing; even by the time he finishes school he has seen several short pieces of fiction in print. His tutor isa man once moderately famous for his vivid short stories--who has been dead since 1947. But this is just the beginning; under a pseudonym and before he is nineteen, Harry has already written his first full-length novel, Diary of a Seventeenth-Century Rake. While falling short of the bestseller lists, still the book does very well. It is not so much a sensation for its storyline as for its amazing historical authenticity ... until one considers the qualifications of Harry's co-author and collaborator: namely, a seventeenth-century rake, shot dead by an outraged husband in 1672!
Summer of 1976. In a few months Harry will be nineteen. He has his own unassuming top-floor flat in an old three-story house on the coast road out of Hartlepool towards Sunderland. Perhaps typically, the house stands opposite one of the town's oldest graveyards ... Harry is never short of friends to talk to. What's more, and now that his talent as a Necroscope has developed to its full, he can converse with exanimate persons even over great distances. He needs only to be introduced or to have spoken to one of the teeming dead, and thereafter can always seek him out again. With Harry, however, it's a matter of common decency that he physically go and see them: that is, to attend them at their grave sides. He does not believe in "shouting" at his friends.
In their turn (and in return for his friendship) Harry's dead people love him. He is their pharos, the one shining light in their eternal darkness. He brings hope where none has ever before existed; he is their single window, their observatory on a world they had thought left behind and gone forever. For contrary to the beliefs of the living, death is not The End but a transition to incorporeality, immobility. The flesh may be weak and corruptible, but mind and will go on. Great artists, when they die, continue to visualise magnificent canvases, pictures they can never paint; architects plan fantastic, faultless, continent-spanning cities, which can never be built; scientists follow through the research they commenced in life but never had time to complete or perfect. Except that now, through Harry Keogh, they may contact one another and (perhaps more importantly) even obtain knowledge of thecorporeal world. And so, while they would never deliberately burden him, all the trials and tribulations of Harry's countless dead friends are his, and his troubles are theirs. And Harry does have troubles.
At his flat in Hartlepool, when he is not working, Harry entertains his childhood sweetheart, Brenda, who will shortly fall pregnant and become his wife. But as his worldly scope widens, so a shadow from the past grows into an obsession. Harry dreams and daydreams of his poor murdered mother, and time and again in his darkest nightmares revisits the frozen river where she died before her time. Finally he resolves to take revenge on Viktor Shukshin, his stepfather.
In this, as in all things, he has the blessing of the dead. Murder is a crime they cannot tolerate; knowing the darkness of death, anyone who deliberately takes life is an abhorrence to them!
Winter of 1976 and Harry goes to see Shukshin, confronting him with evidence of his guilt. His stepfather is plainly dangerous, even deranged, and Harry suspects he'll now try to kill him, too. In January of '77 he gives him the opportunity. They skate on the river together, but when Shukshin moves in for the kill, Harry is prepared. His plan goes wrong, however; they both fall through the ice and emerge together by the riverbank. The Russian has the strength of a madman and will surely drown his stepson ... But no, for Harry's mother rises from her watery grave to drag Shukshin down!
And Harry has discovered a new talent; or rather, he now knows how far the dead will go in order to protect him--knows that in fact they will rise from their graves for him!


Harry's talent has not gone unnoticed: a top-secret British intelligence organization, E-Branch ("E" for ESP), and its Soviet counterpart are both aware of his powers. He is no sooner approached to join the British organization than its head is killed, taken out by the Romanian spy and necromancer Boris Dragosani. A ghoul, Dragosani rips open the dead to steal their secrets right out of their blood and guts;by butchering the top man in E-Branch, he now knows all the secrets of the British espers.
Harry vows to track him down and even the score, and the teeming dead offer their assistance. Of course they do, for even they are not safe from a man who violates corpses! What Harry and the dead don't know is that Dragosani has been infected with vampirism: he has the vampire egg of Thibor Ferenczy inside him, growing there, gradually changing him and taking control. More, Dragosani has murdered a colleague, Max Batu the Mongol, in order to steal the secret of his killing eye. He can now kill at a glance!
Time is short and Harry must follow Dragosani back to the USSR--to Soviet E-Branch headquarters at the Chateau Bronnitsy, where the vampire is now Supremo--and there kill him. But how? Harry is no spy.
A British precog (an agent with the ability to scan vague details of the future) has foreseen Harry's involvement not only with vampires but also in connection with the twisted figure-8 sigil of the Möbius strip. To get to Dragosani he must first understand the Möbius connection. Here at least Harry is on familiar ground; for August Ferdinand Möbius has been dead since 1868, and the dead will do anything for Harry Keogh.
In Leipzig Harry visits Möbius's grave and discovers the long-expired mathematician and astronomer at work on his space-time equations. What he did in life he continues, undisturbed, to do in death; and in the course of a century he has reduced the physical universe to a set of mathematical symbols. He knows how to bend space-time and ride his Möbius strip out to the stars! Teleportation: an easy route into the Chateau Bronnitsy--or anywhere else, for that matter. Fine, but all Harry has is an intuitive grasp of maths--and he certainly doesn't have a hundred years! Still, he has to start somewhere.
For days Möbius instructs Harry, until his pupil is sure that the answer lies right here, just an inch beyond his grasp. He only needs a spur, and ...
The East German GREPO (Grenz Polizei) have their eyeon Harry. On the orders of Dragosani they try to arrest him in the Leipzig graveyard--and this is the spur he needs. Suddenly Möbius's equations are no longer meaningless figures and symbols: they are a doorway into the strange immaterial universe of the Möbius Continuum! Harry conjures a Möbius door and escapes from the GREPO trap; by trial and error he learns how to use this weird and until now entirely conjectural parallel universe; eventually he projects himself into the grounds of Soviet E-Branch HQ.
Against the armoured might of the Chateau Bronnitsy, Harry's task seems nigh impossible: he needs allies. And he finds them. The chateau's grounds are waterlogged, peaty, white under the crisp snow of a Russian winter--but not frozen. And down in the peat, preserved through four centuries since a time when Moscow was sacked by a band of Crimean Tartars, the remains of that butchered band stir and begin to rise up!
With his zombie army Harry advances into the chateau, destroys its defences, seeks out and kills Dragosani and his vampire tenant. In the fight he, too, is killed; his body dies; but in the last moment his mind, his will, transfers to the metaphysical Möbius Continuum.
And riding the Möbius strip into future time, Harry's id is absorbed into the unformed infant mentality ... of his own son!
I: Castle Ferenczy
TRANSYLVANIA, THE FIRST WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 1981 ...
Still an hour short of midday, two peasant wives of Halmagiu village wended their way home along well-trodden forest tracks. Their baskets were full of small wild plums and the first ripe berries of the season, all with the dew still glistening on them. Some of the plums were still a little green ... all the better for the making of sharp, tangy brandy! Dark-robed, with coarse rioth headsquares framing their narrow faces, the women cheerfully embroidered tidbits of village gossip to suit their mood, their teeth flashing ivory in weathered leather as they laughed over especially juicy morsels.
In the near distance, blue wood smoke drifted in almost perpendicular spirals from Halmagiu's chimneys; it formed a haze high over the early-autumn canopy of forest. But closer, in the trees themselves were other fires; cooking smells of spiced meats and herbal soups drifted on the still air; small silver bells jingled; a bough creaked where a wild-haired,dark-eyed, silent, staring child dangled from the rope of a makeshift swing.
There were gaudy caravans gathered in a circle under the trees. Outside the circle: tethered ponies cropped the grass, and bright-coloured dresses swirled where bare-armed girls gathered firewood. Inside: black iron cooking pots suspended over licking flames issued puffs of mouth-watering steam; male Travellers tended their own duties or simply looked on, smoking their long, thin-stemmed pipes, as the encampment settled in. Travellers, yes. Wanderers: Gypsies! The Szgany had returned to the region of Halmagiu.
The boy on the rope in the tree had spotted the two village women and now uttered a piercing whistle. All murmur and jingle and movement in the Gypsy encampment ceased upon the instant; dark eyes turned outwards in unison, staring with curiosity at the Romanian peasant women with their baskets. The Gypsy men in their leather jackets looked very strong, somehow fierce, but there was nothing of animosity in their eyes. They had their own codes, the Szgany, and knew which side their bread was greased. For five hundred years the people of Halmagiu had dealt with them fairly, bought their trinkets and knickknacks, and left them in peace. And so in their turn the Gypsies would work no deliberate harm against Halmagiu.
"Good morning, ladies." The Gypsy king (for so the leaders of these roving bands prided themselves, as little kings) stood up on the steps of his wagon and bowed to them. "Please tell our friends in the village we'll be knocking on their doors--pots and pans of the best quality, charms to keep away the night things, cards to read, and keen eyes that know the lie of a line in your palm. Bring out your knives for sharpening and your broken ax handles. All will be put to rights. Why, this year we've even a good pony or two, to replace the nags that pull your carts! We'll not be here long, so make the best of our bargains before we move on."
"Good morning to you," the oldest of the pair at once answered, if in a breathless fashion. "And be sure I'll tellthem in the village." And in a hushed aside to her companion: "Stay close; move along with me; say nothing!"
As they passed by one of the wagons, so this same older woman took a small jar of hazelnuts from her basket and a double handful of plums, placing them on the steps of the wagon as a gift. If the offering was seen, no one said anything, and in any case the activity in the camp had already resumed its normal pace as the women headed once more for home.
But the younger one, who hadn't lived in Halmagiu very long, asked, "Why did you give the nuts and plums away? I've heard the Gypsies give nothing for nothing, do nothing for nothing, and far too often take something for nothing! Won't it encourage them, leaving gifts like that?"
"It does no harm to keep well in with the fey people," the other told her. "When you've lived here as long as I have, you'll know what I mean. And anyway, they're not here to steal or work mischief." She gave a small shudder. "Indeed, I fancy I know well enough why they're here."
"Oh?" said her friend wonderingly.
"Oh, yes. It's the phase of the moon, a calling they've heard, an offering they'll make. They propitiate the earth, replenish the rich soil, appease ... their gods."
"Their gods? Are they heathens, then ... ? What gods?"
"Call it Nature if you like!" the first one snapped. "But ask me no more. I'm a simple woman and don't wish to know. Nor should you wish to know. My grandmother's grandmother remembered a time when the Gypsies came. Aye, and likely her granny before her. Sometimes fifteen months will go by, or eighteen--but never more than twenty-one--before they're back again. Spring, summer, winter: only the Szgany themselves know the season, the month, the time. But when they hear the calling, when the moon is right, when a lone wolf howls high up in the mountains, then they return. Yes, and when they go, they always leave their offering ..."
"What sort of offering?" The younger woman was more curious than ever.
"Don't ask," said the other, hurriedly shaking her head."Don't ask." But it was only her way; the younger woman knew she was dying to tell her; she bided her time and resolved to ask no more.
But in a little while, fancying that they'd strayed too far from the most direct route back to the village, she felt obliged to enquire, "But isn't this a long way round we're taking?"
"Be quiet now!" hushed the older woman. "Look!"
They had arrived at a clearing in the forest at the foot of a gaunt outcrop of grey volcanic rock. Bald and domed, with several humps, this irregular mound stood perhaps fifty feet high, with more forest beyond, then sheer cliffs rising to a fir-clad plateau like a first gigantic step to the misted, grimly forbidding heights of the Zarundului massif. The trees around the base of the outcrop had been felled, all shrubs and undergrowth cleared away; at its summit, a cairn of heavy stones stood like a small tower or chimney, pointing to the mountains.
And up there, seated on the bare rock at the foot of the cairn, working with a knife at a shard of stone which he held in his lap--a young man: Szgany! He was intent upon his work, seeing nothing but the stone in his hands. He gazed down across a distance of little more than one hundred feet--gazed seemingly head-on, so that the women of the village must surely be central to his periphery of vision--but if he saw them he gave no sign. And indeed it was plain that he did not see them, only the stone which he worked. And even at that distance, clearly there was something ... not quite right with him.
"But ... what's he doing up there?" the younger of the two enquired in a hoarse whisper. "He's very handsome, and yet ... strange. And anyway, isn't this a forbidden place? My Hzak tells me that the great stone of the cairn is a very special stone, and that--"
"Shhh!" the other once again cautioned her, a finger to her lips. "Don't disturb him. They don't take kindly to being spied upon, the Szgany. Not that this one will hear us anyway. Still ... best to be careful."
"He won't hear us, you say? Then why are we talking inwhispers? No, I know why we're whispering: because this is a private place, like a shrine. Almost holy."
"Unholy!" the other corrected her. "As to why he won't notice us--why, just look at him up there! His skin's not so much dark as slate grey, sickly, dying. Eyes deep-sunken, burning. Obsessed with that stone he's carving. He's been called, can't you see? He's mazed, hypnotised--doomed!"
Even as the last word left her lips, so the man on the rock stood up, took up his stone, and ground it firmly into position on the rim of the cairn. It sat there side by side with many dozens of others, like a brick in the topmost tier of a wall, and anyone having seen the ritual of the carving would know that each single stone of that cairn was marked in some weird, meaningful way. The younger woman opened her mouth to say something, but her friend at once anticipated her question.
"His name," she said. "He carved his name and his dates, if he knows them. Like all the other names and dates carved up there. Like all the others gone before him. That rude stone is his headstone, which makes the cairn itself a graveyard!"
Now the young Gypsy was craning his neck, looking up, up at the mountains. He stood frozen in that position for long moments, as if waiting for something. And high in the grey-blue sky a small dark blot of cloud drifted across the face of the sun. At that, the elder of the two women gave a start; she herself had become almost hypnotised, stalled there and without the will to move on. But as the sun was eclipsed and shadows fell everywhere, she grabbed the other's elbow and turned her face away. "Come," she gasped, suddenly breathless, "let's be gone from here. Our men will be worried. Especially if they know there are Gypsies about."
They hurried through the shadows of the trees, found the track, soon began to see the first wooden houses on Halmagiu's outskirts, where the forest thinned down to nothing. But even as they stepped out from the trees into a dusty lane and their heartbeats slowed a little, so they heard a sound from behind and above and far, far beyond.
Not quite midday in Halmagiu, the sun coming out frombehind a small, stray cloud; the first days of true winter still some seven or eight weeks away--but every soul who heard that sound took it as a wintry omen anyway. Aye, and some took it for more than that.
It was the mournful voice of a wolf echoing down from the mountains, calling as wolves have called for a thousand, thousand years and more. The two women paused, clutched their baskets, held their breath and listened. But:
"There's no answering cry," said the younger eventually. "He's alone, that old wolf."
"For now." The other nodded. "Aye, alone--but he's been heard all right, take my word for it. And he will be answered, soon enough. Following which ..." She shook her head and hurried on.
The other caught up with her. "Yes, following which?" she pressed.
The older woman peered at her, scowled a little, finally barked, "But you must learn to listen, Anna! There are some things we don't much talk about up here--so if you want to learn, then when they are talked about, you must listen!"
"I was listening," the other answered. "It's just that I didn't understand, that's all. You said the old wolf would be answered, soon enough. And ... and then?"
"Aye, and then," said the older one, turning towards her doorway, where bunches of garlic dangled from the lintel, drying in the sun. And over her shoulder: "And then--the very next morning--why, the Szgany will be gone! No trace of them at all except maybe the ashes in their camp, the ruts in the tracks where their caravans have rolled, moving on. But their numbers will have been shortened by one. One who answered an ancient call and stayed behind."
The younger woman's mouth formed a silent "O."
"That's right," said the first, nodding. "You just saw him--adding his soul to those other poor souls inscribed in the cairn on the rock ..."


That night, in the Szgany camp:
The girls danced, whirling to the skirl of frenzied violinsand the primal thump and jingle of tambourines. A long table stood heavy with food: joints of rabbit and whole hedgehogs, still steaming from the heat of the trenches where they'd baked; wild-boar sausages, sliced thin; cheeses purchased or bartered in Halmagiu village; fruit and nuts; onions simmering in gravy poured from the meats; Gypsy wines and sharp, throat-clutching wild-plum brandy.
There was a festival atmosphere. The flames of a central fire, inspired by the music, leaped high and the dancers were sinuous, sensuous. Alcohol was consumed in large measure; some of the younger Gypsies drank from a sense of relief, others from fear of an uncertain future. For those who had been spared this time around, there would always be other times ...
But they were Szgany and this was the way of things; they were His to the ends of the earth, His to command, His to take. Their pact with the Old One had been signed and sealed more than four hundred years ago. Through Him they had prospered down the centuries, they prospered now, they would prosper in all the years to come. He made the hard times easier--aye, and the easy times hard--but always He achieved a balance. His blood was in them, and theirs in Him. And the blood is the life.
Only two amongst them were alone and private. Even with the girls dancing, the drinking, the feasting, still they were alone. For all of this noise and movement around them was an assumed gaity, wherein they could scarcely participate.
One of them, the young man from the cairn, sat on the steps of an ornately carved and painted wagon, with a whetstone and his long-bladed knife, bringing the cutting edge to a scintillant shimmer of silver in the flicker of near-distant firelight. While in the yellow camplight behind him where the door stood open, his mother sat sobbing, wringing her hands, praying for all she was worth to One who was not a god--indeed, to One who was the very opposite--that He spare her son this night. But praying in vain.
And as one tune ended and bright skirts whispered to a halt, falling about gleaming brown limbs, and mustached menquit their leaping and high-kicking--in that interval when the fiddlers sipped their brandy before starting up again--then the moon showed its rim above the mountains, whose misted crags were brought to a sudden prominence. And as mouths gaped open and all eyes turned upwards to the risen moon, so the mournful howl of a wolf drifted down to them from unseen aeries of rock.
For a single moment the tableau stood frozen ... but the next saw dark eyes turning to gaze at the young man on the caravan steps. He stood up, looked up at the moon and the crags, and sighed. And sheathing his knife, he stepped down to the clearing, crossed it on wooden legs, headed for the darkness beyond the encircling wagons.
His mother broke the silence. Her wail, rising to a shriek of anguish, was that of a banshee as she hurled herself from their caravan home, crashed down the wooden steps, came reeling after her son, her arms outstretched. But she did not go to him; instead she fell to her knees some paces away, her arms still reaching, aching for him. For the chief of this band, their "king," had stepped forward to embrace the young man. He hugged him, kissed him on both cheeks, released him. And without more ado the chosen one went out of the firelight, between the wagons, and was swallowed by darkness.
"Dumitru!" his mother screamed. She got to her feet, made to rush after him--and flew into the arms of her king.
"Peace, woman," he told her gruffly, his throat bobbing. "We've seen it coming a month now, watched the change in him. The Old One has called and Dumitru answers. We knew what to expect. This is always the way of it."
"But he's my son, my son!" she sobbed wrackingly into his chest."
"Aye," he said, his own voice finally breaking, sending tears coursing down his leathery cheeks. "And mine ... mine too ... aye."
He led her stumbling and sobbing back to their caravan, and behind them the music started up again, and the dancing, and the feasting and drinking ...




Dumitru Zirra climbed the ramparts of the Zarundului like a fox born to those heights. The moon lit a path for him, but even without that silver swath he would have known the way. For there was guidance from within: a voice inside his head, which was not his voice, told him where to step, reach, grasp. There were paths up here, if you knew them, but between these hairpin tracks were vertiginous shortcuts. Dumitru chose the latter, or someone made that choice for him.
Dumiitruuu! the dark voice crooned to him, drawing out his name like a cry of torment. Ah, my faithful, my Szgaaany, son of my sons. Step here, and there, and here, Dumiitruuu. And here, where the wolf stepped--see his mark on the rock? The father of your fathers awaits you, Dumiitruuu. The moon is risen up and the hour draws niiigh. Make haste, my son, for I'm old and dry and shrivelled close to death--the true death! But you shall succor me, Dumiitruuu. Aye, and all your youth and strength be miiine!
Almost to the treeline the youth laboured, his breath ragged and his hands bloody from the climbing, to the blackest crags of all, where a vast ruin humped against the final cliff. On the one side a gorge so sheer and black it might descend to hell, and on the other the last of the tall firs shielding the tumbled pile of some ancient keep, set back against sheer-rising walls of rock. Dumitru saw the place and for a moment was brought up short, but then he also saw the flame-eyed wolf standing in the broken gates of the ruin and hesitated no more. He went on, and the great wolf led the way.
Welcome to my house, Dumiitruuu! that glutinous voice oozed like mud in his mind. You are my guest, my son ... enter of your own free will ...
Dumitru Zirra clambered dazedly over the first shattered stones of the place, and mazed as he was, still the queer aspect of these ruins impressed him. It had been a castle, of that he was sure. In olden times a boyar had lived here, a Perenczy--Janos Ferenczy! No question of that, for down all the ages since the time of Grigor Zirra, the first Szgany "king," the Zirras had been sworn in allegiance to the BaronFerenczy and had borne his crest: a bat leaping into flight from the mouth of a black urn, with wings outspread, showing three ribs to each wing. The eyes of the bat were red, likewise the ribs of its wings, made prominent in scarlet, while the vessel from which it soared was in the shape of a burial urn.
Aye, and now the youth's deep-sunken, staring eyes picked out a like design carved on the shattered slab of a huge stone lintel where it lay half-buried in debris; and indeed he knew that he stood upon the threshold of the great and ancient patron of the Zirras and their followers. For it was that same sigil as described which even now was displayed on the sides of Vasile Zirra's caravan (however cleverly obscured in the generally ornate and much-convoluted lacquer and paintwork designs). Similarly old Vasile, Dumitru's father, wore a ring bearing a miniature of this crest, allegedly passed down to him from time immemorial. This would have been Dumitru's one day--had he not heard the calling ...
Some little way ahead of Dumitru the great wolf growled low in its throat, urging him on. He paused, however, uncertain where the shadows of fallen blocks obscured his vision. The front edge of the ruin seemed to have been tossed (tossed, yes, as by some enormous explosion in the guts of the place) out to and beyond the rim of the gorge, where still a jumble of massive stones and slates were spread in dark confusion, so that Dumitru supposed a large part of the castle had gone d