Darcy nodded. 'We didn't sleep much last night. Manolis spent a lot of time phoning Athens. We pushed the drugs side of this thing just as hard as we could. So now we can use all the force that's necessary to apprehend and search Lazarides and his lot.'

'If we can find them,' Harry echoed Manolis.

'Well, two or three of them we can find, for sure!' said the Greek. 'On Halki, where they're digging in those ruins.'

Again Harry's nod. "That will be as good a place as any to start, yes. I'd like to see this fang of rock in the Dodecanese, too. All right, and now I'll tell you what I've discovered, and you'll see for yourselves how it all fits together. But I warn you now, it's an incredible story.'

He told it all and they sat fascinated to the end. 'And so now I have my deadspeak back,' he finished off, 'which is one step in the right direction, at least.'

'You are the cool one,' Manolis told him. 'I thought so the first time I met you. You talk about steps in the right direction, and all this time Sandra, your lover -'

'Manolis,' Harry stopped him. 'No man has lost more than I have. No, I'm not being a martyr, I'm just stating a fact. It started when I was a kid and it hasn't stopped yet. I've lost just about every person I ever loved. I've even lost my son in another world, to another creed: this same damned creed, vampirism! And the more you lose, the more hardened you get to it. Ask any habitual gambler. They don't play to win but to lose. They used to play to win, but now when they win they just go right on back to the tables.'

'Harry,' Darcy took his arm, 'ease up.'

But Harry shook him off. 'Let me finish.' And he turned back to Manolis. 'Well, I used to play to win, too. But it's a hell of a game where all the cards are stacked against you. You want me to cry over Sandra? Maybe I will, later. You want me to go to pieces, to show that I'm a good guy? But what good will I be in all of this if I go to pieces? I loved Sandra, yes, I think. But already it's too late to do anything about it. She's just one more thing that I've lost. It's the only way I can look at it and still go on. Except now I may be starting to win again. We may be starting to win again. Not Sandra, no, for she's dead. And if she isn't, then she'd be better off. I know this Janos Ferenczy now, and I know what I'm talking about. You call me cold, but you don't know how I'm burning up inside. Now I'll ask you to do me a favour: stop worrying about how you see things. Stop worrying about Sandra. It's too late. This is a war and she was a casualty. What we have to do now is start hitting back, while we still have a chance!'

For long moments Manolis said nothing. Then: 'My friend,' he said, very softly, 'you are wound up very tight. You bear a great weight on your shoulders, and I am a great fool. I cannot hope to know what it is like for you, or even anything about you. You are not the ordinary man, and I had no right to speak the way I did or think the things I have thought.'

Harry sat very still, just looking at the Greek; and slowly Manolis watched the Necroscope's soulful eyes turn to liquid. Before they could spill over, Harry stood up and kicked his chair away, and went unsteadily to the bathroom...

Later:

'What I hate especially about this,' said Harry, 'is that he's laughing at us - at all of us, at Mankind - and perhaps at me in particular. It's his vampire ego. He calls himself Lazarides, after the Biblical Lazarus, raised up from the dead by Christ. Depending on your beliefs that's a blasphemy in itself. But he doesn't stop there. Just to rub it in and make his point he calls his boat by the same name! He dares us to discover him, yells: "Hey, look, I'm back!" He breaks the first rule of vampires and makes himself prominent, in several ways. And I think he does it deliberately.'

'But why?' said Darcy.

'Because he can afford to!' Harry answered. 'Because people no longer believe in vampires. No, I don't mean us but people in general. In this day and age he can afford to be prominent, because to a point he's safe from the masses. But he also does it because he knows that the people who do believe - and they are the ones he's chiefly interested in, the dangerous ones, you, me, E-Branch, and any other friends - will go up against him.'

'You mean he ... he wants a showdown?'

'Oh yes, for he's seen the future! That's the thing he was best at, and it's how he thwarted Faethor. He knows we have to have a showdown, so he's guiding events his way, to give himself every advantage. He'll use my own devices against me, and against anyone who is with me. He has Ken Layard, and so can locate any one of us more or less at will. He crippled Trevor Jordan so that he'd be no use to us; and he's taken Sandra not out of spite or greed or lust but the better to know me, because then he'll not only know my strengths but also my weaknesses. As for last night: he sent his thrall Armstrong to test you and possibly destroy you, so as to deny me the use of one of my last crutches.'

'But if he can see the future, wouldn't he know we'd get Armstrong?' Manolis used his policeman's logic. 'In which case, why simply sacrifice him like that?'

'A test,' Harry answered, 'like I said. He wouldn't see it as a sacrifice. Vampires have no friends, only thralls. And anyway, Armstrong was only one of Janos's players; he has plenty more. Ken Layard, for example, who can do anything Armstrong could do and a lot more. But I understand your question: why provoke a skirmish you can't win, right?'

'Right.'

Harry shook his head. 'The future isn't like that,' he said. 'It isn't easily read, never safely, and there's no way to avoid it. And, it must always be remembered, nothing is certain until it has happened. There was a man, a Russian esper, called Igor Vlady. I met him once in the Möbius Continuum. In life he'd been a prognosticator, he read the future. And when he was dead he kept right on doing it, eventually to become a master of future and past time. Where all space was an open book to Möbius, all time was Vlady's playground. Incorporeal, he wandered the timestream forever. Vlady told me that in life he had always held his own future inviolable: he wouldn't read it, felt that to do so would be to tempt fate. He didn't want to know how or when his time would come, for he knew that he'd only worry about it as it loomed ever closer. Eventually, in a moment of uncertainty and fear, he broke his own rule and forecast his own death. He believed he knew from which quarter it was coming, and fled to avoid it. But he was wrong and fled into it! He was like a man crossing railway tracks, who sees a train coming and jumps to avoid it - into the path of another train.'

Darcy said: 'You mean, Janos can't trust what he reads of the future?'

'He can trust it only to a point. He sees only the wide scheme of things, not the fine details. And whatever he sees, he knows he can't avoid it. For example: he knew Faethor would destroy him, but saw beyond it to a time when he'd be back. He couldn't stop Faethor and didn't really try to, for the inevitable was by definition inescapable, but he could and did make certain of his return.'

Manolis had kept up with all of this as best he could, but now he began to feel something of the hopelessness of it. And he asked: 'But how can you even think to beat this creature? He would seem to me... invincible!'

Harry smiled a strange, grim smile. 'Invincible? I'm not so sure about that. But I'm sure he wants us to think he is! Ask yourself this: if he's invincible, why does he concern himself with us? And why is he so worried about me? No, Igor Vlady was right: the future is never certain, and only time can tell. And anyway, what difference does it make? If I don't seek him out, he'll only come looking for me.' He nodded. 'A showdown, yes, it's coming. And for now Janos is pulling the strings. We can only hope that in his manipulations he'll overstep himself and make the same mistake Igor Vlady made... and step in front of a train.'