Necroscope 6 Vampire World 1 Blood Brothers.pdf

Blood Brothers – Vampire World 01

Brian Lumley

Wratha threw wide the curtains!

In a moment Karl woke up screaming - and found himself chained to his bed. His cries gonged like great

cracked bells as his skin peeled back and his blood boiled. The sun's rays were in his eyes, which

blackened to craters in his head! His hair became smoke, while his limbs and various parts cracked open

to issue jets of steam and stench! Through all of this Wratha laughed like a madwoman, dancing from one

foot to the other in her excitement and hauling on a rope to drag Karl's bed more surely into the focus of

the sunlight.

His body shrivelled and shrank; his vampire leech deserted him, came writhing from his bursting belly.

Wratha closed the curtains and rushed to his side. Like Karl, his leech was fatally burned. Dying, it

produced its egg - and she had what she wanted! Of her own free will, she opened herself to the thing,

which entered without pause to fuse with her flesh.

Now her agony would seal the contract. But the deed was done, and Wratha was exultant. At last she

was Wamphyri.'

VAMPIRE WORLD I

BLOOD BROTHERS

BRIAN LUMLEY

Page 1

A ROC BOOK

ROC

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Books Ltd,27 Wrights Lane,LondonW8 5TZ,England

Penguin Books USA Inc.,375 Hudson Street,New York,New York10014,USA

Penguin Books Australia Ltd,Ringwood,Victoria,Australia

Penguin Books Canada Ltd,10 Alcorn Avenue,Toronto,Ontario,CanadaM4V 3B2

Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road,Auckland10,New Zealand

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth,Middlesex,England

First published 1992

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Roc is a trademark of Penguin Books Ltd Printed inEnglandby Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

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Except in theUnited States of America, this book is sold subject to

the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's

prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

which it is published and without a similar condition including this

condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

For Nick Austin, my guiding light for many years.

So far we must have got through our weight in Metaxa,

but there's a lot more left where that came from!

CONTENTS

PART ONE Looking Back 1

PART TWO Looking Further Back, and

Scanning Forward 87

PART THREE Now 167

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PART FOUR The Brothers - The Raids 255

PART FIVE Vampires.' - The Sundered

Tribes - The Search 347

PART six Szgany Sintana - Dissension in

the Aerie - The Thyre 433

PART SEVEN Nestor - Titheh'ng -Turgosheim 527

PART EIGHT Runemanse - Flight - In the

Blink of an Eye 625

PART ONE

Looking Back

Morning.Sunrise. Sunup!

The sun had risen up fifteen times since the battle for The Dweller's garden; risen up over the

southwestern horizon, travelled a predestined path according to its cycle, sunk down again into the

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south-east. Fifteen times that low, warm, oh so lazy golden arc across the sky, making for a like number

of sundowns.

Sundown: night, darkness, peril!

Sundown. A time of terror since time immemorial: when the last yellow glints would slip silently from the

high crags of the great barrier range, until its topmost peaks turned a pale ochre, then ashen, finally

wolf-grey and silver under the stars of Starside. A time of terror, yes .. . but no longer. For the battle in

The Dweller's garden had been fought and won, and the near-immortal masters of Starside's aeries, the

Wamphyri, were immortal no longer. Indeed, they were either dead or flown into theIcelands. Of the

latter, only a few had survived to flee.

Sundown, and nothing to fear from it. Not any more. It was strange ...

On the one side of the mountains, that closest to the sun (Sunside, with its forests and rivers, and, to the

south, its pitiless furnace lands), daylight would persist for a further twenty-five hours; but on Starside the

barrier mountains shut out the sun's life-giving warmth, leaving only the stars and the aurora over the

Icelands to light the rugged land. So it had always been, so it would always be.

Except upon a time there had also been the Wamphyri!... But now there was none. Not in Starside,

anyway. No vampires here but one, and he was different. He was The Dweller.

And at the beginning of that new night, that fifteenth sundown in the New Age of Starside, The Dweller

had called for Lardis Lidesci to attend him at his house in the garden high over Starside's boulder plains.

Lardis was a Traveller king, leader of one of Sunside's Szgany tribes. He was short, barrel-bodied,

apelike in the length of his arms; his lank black hair framed a wrinkled, weather-beaten face, with a

flattened nose and a wide mouth full of strong, uneven teeth. Under wild eyebrows, Lardis's brown eyes

glittered his mind's agility, even as he himself was agile despite his stumpy shape. Yes, he was Szgany,

and it showed.

'Szgany': in fact the word had two meanings. Star-side's trogs, cavern-dwelling neanderthals, likewise

called themselves Szgany. To them it meant 'The Obedient Ones' - obedient to the Wamphyri! As for the

genesis of Traveller usage, that was lost in time. Now when the Gypsies used the word to define other

than a trog, it best described themselves, their way of life: tinkers, music-makers, seekers after refuge

(often in deep caverns, like the dwelling places of the trogs), wandering metalworkers, fey people:

Szgany.

Travellers. Ah, but upon a time - an oh so recent time - there had been reasons aplenty for the nomadic

existence of the Gypsies! And each and every one of those reasons monstrous, and all of them inhabiting

the stone- and bone-built aeries of the Wamphyri! But the Wamphyri were no more.

It was strange; Lardis was not yet accustomed to it; the sun was setting for the fifteenth time since the

great battle and still he shivered, longing for the misted valleys, wooded slopes and forests of Sunside.

Across the mountains it was still twilight and true dark many hours away. Plenty of time to find sanctuary

in one or another of the many labyrinthine systems of caverns, there to wait out the night until ... But no,

all of that was yesterday. Yet again Lardis must remind himself: Fool! The yoke is lifted. The Szgany are

free!

Pausing where he made his way through the garden, Lardis looked back and up at the topmost crags.

They were ashen now: charcoal dusted a pale blue-grey from the brightening stars, the colour of a wolf at

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