But alas, his screaming was not borne of this knowledge but of a wrenching, a tearing, a division of being - which I shall explain in a moment.

But oh, to see those clouds of smoke puff up from his dry, dusty remains - a great upheaval of smoke and fumes - from which stumbled Janos, naked and screaming. But ... a miracle! He was not alone. There with him, but entirely apart, was his vampire: my spittle grown to a live thing, but a creature with little or nothing of its own intelligence.

It was leech, snail, serpent, a great blind slug, and all unused to going on its own. It, too, mewled, though I know not how. But I did know the answer to the riddle: in burning Janos I had burned two creatures, and raising him up again I had also revitalized two - but in their separate parts!

Then ... I had me a thought. I brought forward my cowering men and commanded them that they take Janos and hold him down. 'And so you would be Wamphyri, eh?' I said, approaching him with my sword. 'And so you shall be. This creature here is a vampire but has very little of a brain. It shall have yours!' He screamed again, once, before I took his head. And splitting his skull, I took out from it his living, dripping brain.

You can guess the rest, I'm sure. Using Janos's own process and keeping his body apart, I devolved his head and vampire both into one heap of ashes, which I placed in an urn among the others. And then I laughed and laughed till I cried! For if by any fluke he should be brought back now, it would be as ... as what? A clever slug? An intelligent leech? Why, it would amuse me to call him up again and see!

But alas, that was not to be, for in the end he'd thwarted me. The skin upon which he'd written his runes had been resurrected skin, flayed from a victim. I had directed my runes of catabolism through the very skin from which I read them, and so when I'd sent Janos down the skin, too, had crumbled into dust! Well, the Words of Power were tricky and I had not learned them except the single name of an ancient dark god of the outer spheres. However, I still had my bastard son's body.

So I burned that, too - aye, a second time - and sent pinches of it out to the four corners of the earth, and there dispersed them on the winds. That was the end of it. I had done with Janos. And now I have done with my story...

12

First and Second Blood

As Faethor finished, so there came a cabin announcement: the plane was now descending towards Athens. Harry said:

Faethor, in another ten to fifteen minutes I'll be on the ground and into the bustle of the airport. I've noticed that you've been growing weaker - your voice - and put it down to distance and the sun full on the ruins of your house. Soon I'll be on my way to Rhodes which is more distant yet. So this is probably my last chance to say a few things.

You have something to say? (Harry pictured Faethor raising an eyebrow.)

First... I owe you my thanks, Harry told him, but second, I can't help but remind myself that without you in the first place none of this - Thibor, Dragosani, Yulian Bodescu, and now Janos - would ever have happened. OK, so I'm in your debt, but at the same time I know you for the black-hearted thing you have been, and for the monsters you've spawned in my world. And I'd be a liar if I didn't tell you that in my opinion you're the biggest monster of them all!

I consider it a compliment, Faethor answered, without hesitation. Is there anything else you require to know?

A few things, yes, said Harry. If you destroyed Janos so utterly, how come he's back? I mean, what trick did he work - what dark magic did he leave behind him - to bring him back into the world? And why did he wait so long? Why now?

Is it not obvious? Faethor sounded genuinely surprised by Harry's nai'vet6. He had seen the far future and laid his plans accordingly. He had known / would put him down, that time when I returned to the mountains. Yes, and he knew that if he came back in my time I would find a way to do it again! And so he must wait until I was gone from the world. Time is but a small thing to the Wamphyri, Harry. As to how he worked this clever trick:

It was those accursed Zirras! Aye, and I know it was them, for I've had it from my own faithful few, who mutter in their graves much like other men. I'll tell you how it was:

Long after me and mine were gone from the castle on the heights, certain of Janos's own returned and placed his vampire ashes in a secret place which he'd prepared against just such an eventuality. For he'd learned other magicks in my three hundred years' absence, of which this was one. He'd had Zirra women in his time, that bastard of mine, and sown his seed far and wide. The three-fingered son of a son of his would one day feel his allure and go up to the old castle in the mountains... but it would be Janos who came down from it! So he planned it, and so it has come to pass...

And all the treasure he'd looted from ancient tombs, did you never find it? Harry pressed. Didn't you search the place, your own castle?

I searched a little, Faethor answered. But have you not listened? The treasure was elsewhere, buried again or sunken in the sea, until this later time when he could have it up.

Of course, Harry nodded, I'd forgotten.

As for searching the place in its entirety: no, I did not, not every hole the dog had digged. I no longer felt that it was mine but that he had fouled it. I could smell him, even taste him, everywhere. The castle had his mark on it, where his despicable sigil was carved into the very stone: the red-eyed bat, rising from its urn. He had used the place and made it his own, and I wanted no more of it. Shortly, I moved on. As for my own history after that time, that does not concern you.

So the castle still stands, Harry mused in a little while. And in its roots... what? Does anything remain of Janos's 'tomb-loot', his experiments with necromancy? I wonder. For after all, it appears that's where he came from in this most recent resurgence... And Faethor knew that Harry was thinking of another castle in the Carpathians, but on the Russian side, in a region once called the Khorvaty and still called by some Bukovina. For that had been Faethor's home, too, upon a time, and what had been done there and left there to scream and fester in the earth had been monstrous; so that Harry knew there was a grave peril in certain ruins.

I can understand your concern, the vampire told him, but I think it is unfounded. For my place in the heights over old Halmagiu and Virfurilio is no more. It was swept away, all in a magnificent thunder, in the October of the year 1928.

Yes, I remember that, Harry answered. / heard it from Ladislau Giresci. Apparently it was some sort of explosion, possibly of methane gas accumulated in the cellars; which, if they were as extensive as you say, seems feasible. But if Janos's - remains - came through it, who is to say there weren't other survivals?

But as I have explained, said Faethor, Janos had made provision. Whatever else perished when that house went down, he did not. Perhaps his Szgany had taken his ashes from there to some other place, only returning them later when the house lay in ruins, I don't know. Possibly they did it when the castle became the property of another. Again I cannot say.