'And to you, eventually,' Trask answered. 'I hope.'

Jake shook his head. 'So it's your belief that this Harry Keogh, this Necroscope who sees dead folks, is in my head? Now, I know I've tried asking this before, but what the h.e.l.l is this guy?

Some kind of telepath?'

Trask nodded. 'He was that, too, towards the end.'

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'Was?' Jake frowned. 'Towards the end?' Then he snapped his fingers. 'Oh, yes, and that's the other thing. Lardis mentioned a bomb - a nuke? - that came through the Gate into Starside. And I somehow got the impression that Harry and this, er - this "changeling"

son of his, The Dweller? - that they were there at the time.'

They were approaching the steps at the rear of the big Ops vehicle. Trask paused in his striding to take Jake's arm. 'They were there/ he said, his voice hoa.r.s.e now. 'And before you ask me: no, Harry didn't escape.'

'What?' Jake said.

Trask climbed the steps and made to enter, then turned and looked back. 'Harry Keogh, Necroscope - the original Necroscope - is dead and gone, Jake,' he said. 'In one way an incredible waste, and in another a merciful release, and probably a blessing, too.'

'Dead?' Jake said, and was suddenly cold fn the full glare of the sun. 'Then how can-?'

'-Harry's gone/ Trask cut him short. 'He's just another one of E- Branch's ghosts. But dead and gone or alive and living in you, he has never been more important to us than he is right now .. / Inside the vehicle's Ops section, the Duty Officer and the pre- cog lan Goodly were seated within the central control area.

Liz was standing outside the desk, her elbows on its no-longer- cluttered surface, her chin cupped in her hands. Apart from minimum services-the permanent telephone array, one small radio crackling with static, and a dimly-luminescent wall screen - Ops had been more or less unplugged and decommissioned, however temporarily.

The muted conversation tailed off awkwardly as Trask and Jake entered, but the Head of E-Branch held up a hand and said, 'It's okay, I want all of you to stay. I have to speak to Jake, and I can't see any reason to leave anyone out. lan, if I slip up and forget some important detail, you'll be here to correct me.

And Liz, there may be the odd tidbit of information that's new to you, too.'

He hitched himself up onto the desk, and Jake let down one of the wall seats and sat opposite. Then, without further pause, Trask told his part of the story.

'Jake, Lardis Lidesci has told you something about his world, a parallel world called Sunside/Starside by its inhabitants. He's told you about Vavara, Szwart - and Malinari, too. So by now you know that these aren't just legendary or mythical figures but a very real threat to everyone in our world. They're here, biding their time, hiding ou t somewhere on Earth. Now, please take that for granted and believe that it's so, for last night was a mere lesson - a primer, a single leaf- out of the Great Textbook of the enormous threat posed by the Wamphyri.

'So let's deal with it step by step. How they got here has to be the first question, that's obvious.

'Five years ago the Gate in Perchorsk was closed. That was in large part Gustav Turchin's doing, for which our thanks. But Turchin is only one man, and Russia is a big place; the expansionist element hasn't gone away; there are still plenty of powerful people in the former USSR who hanker after the "good old days", when their satellite subordinates paid tribute to Mother Russia. So while Communism may have been wounded, its scars are quickly healing and the scene is set for a resurgence. The Russians are rather well known for their capacity for the odd revolution now and then, and their armed forces are now political factors in their own right. Well, the fact is they always have been, but never more so than now.

'In E-Branch we all remember how Turkur Tzonov, then head of the Opposition - our term for the USSR's answer to E- Branch - planned to take his partly nationalistic but mainly egomaniac schemes, along with a dedicated crack military unit, into Sunside/Starside to conquer it for Russia. But Turchin had his own ideas about Tzonov's real motives, and so did we.

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Sunside/ Starside is rich in gold, far richer than the Yukon's Klondike in its heyday. And it's not some kind of localized motherlode: gold is common in the vampire world, it can be found literally anywhere. Working with Turchin, we tried to keep that a secret, too, for obvious reasons. Or maybe they're not so obvious, so I 'd better clarify: 'Russia is broke. Her army, navy, and air force are dest.i.tute, or so close it makes no difference. They can't even afford to decommission their clapped-out nuclear submarines and leaking missiles but have to dump them in someone else's backyard!

But Russia's generals, her admirals and air marshals are still very powerful. When that lunatic Turkur Tzonov went into Starside to get himself killed, he left many of his men behind, trapped in Perchorsk by Gustav Turchin's security forces. Tzonov had promised his men gold, and we all know what gold does to men.

Gold is power, power corrupts, and ultimate power... ?

'So then, Sunside/Starside was literally one big goldmine, and the only sure access was through Perchorsk in Russia's Ural Mountains. Oh, it was blocked, flooded, that's true. But if you can turn a tap on, you can also turn it off.

'Okay, the rest of this can't be guaranteed as pure fact, but we're E-Branch and we do what we do, and we're not usually very far wrong. We keep our eyes and our ears - oh, and a lot of other equipment - open, and try to keep up to date. And we also have what Nathan Keogh told us. So it's a patchwork quilt of sorts, but pretty accurate, we think ...

'Where was I? Oh, yes: the Perchorsk Gate was closed, but somebody wanted it open. Enter Russian Internal Security, a militarized, updated KGB lookalike headed by General Mikhail Suvorov. They stepped in and did just that: diverted the Perchorsk dam waters back into the ravine and let the Gate drain the complex dry. Then they had to decide who was going to explore Sunside/Starside, though "exploit" migh t be a better word for it. But in any case, it didn't qui te come to that.

'More than eighteen months had pa.s.sed since Turchin closed the Gate, since when he'd had a hard time fighting off Suvorov, who of course wanted it opened up because he had heard rumours about the gold. And Suvorov eventually won the fight, because Turchin was over a barrel. Russia was in the red and Suvorov - who was very Red - had the answer: a huge goldmine in a primitive world at the other end of an interdimensional tun nel whose only accessible entrance lay deep in the earth and deeper still inside Mother Russia!

'Thus Turchin had very little choice: he could step asi de and let Suvorov get on with what he'd promised would be a "limited" exploration, or Suvorov would tell all the hungry Russian people about the unlimited wealth that their Premier was striving to deny them! Well, we all know what that would have meant ... only think back on the Klondike and you'll see what I mean. Everyone would want a piece of the action. And remember, Gustav Turchin knew something about the horrors of the vampire world-knew as much if not more than we do about what happened at Perchorsk in its early days. Certainly he realized that the fewer people who entered the Gate, the smaller the odds they'd bring something back with them out of Starside. Something other than gold, that is ...

'And in all that time - some eighteen months - we'd had no word from Nathan Keogh, who of course had made his home in Sunside. But how could we have heard from him, since the Gates had been closed? Ah, bu t Nathan had his own route to Earth, through the Mobius Continuum! That's the place where you go, Jake - er, between going places? - it's the darkness between leaving one place and arriving at the next.

'Okay, I know that's not good enough, but more later ...

'Anyway, Nathan probably had his own reasons for breaking contact with us, but it wasn't as if we felt let down; indeed, without him we'd have been in a h.e.l.l of a mess, "we" being our entire world. It's bad enough that we have three of these monsters here, but without Nathan we'd have had an army.

Come to think of it, lan and I wouldn't even be here right now to talk about these things, and none of you would be here to hear what I'm saying.

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Oh, you would probably still be here - somewhere in the world - but not the way you are now. And d.a.m.n few other people, not as you know them.

'Very well, Nathan's reasons for breaking contact: 'In turning his world and working out a means of preserving its integrity - for it had been Nathan's idea to flood Perchorsk, not the Russian Premier's; Turchin was acting mainly on Nathan's suggestion - he'd also secured a measure of isolation for Sunside/Starside. Maybe he thought that if he left us alone we would leave him and his alone. He knew how far ahead we were technologically speaking ... I don't know, perhaps he preferred to keep his people out of the rat-race? Also, he wouldn't have forgotten that there were some people who would continue to see his world as a threat despite all precautions, and he knew they had the means to destroy it. And finally... there was all that gold, useless to the Travellers except as a malleable metal, but valuable beyond measure on Earth. An irresistible lure for the h.e.l.l-landers? - meaning you, me, us - probably.

'Well, enough of that ... he simply didn't contact us for whatever reasons. And during that same period of time Nathan's world was swinging back again, the shadows lengthening on Starside, and the sun settling back into its old, accustomed orbit. And far beyond the boulder plains, under the flutter and weave of strange auroras, a lot of the northern ice had melted.

'Enter Szwart, Vavara, and Nephran Malinari. The only possible explanation is that they had been locked in the ice - or they had locked themselves in the ice, preserving themselves in suspended animation - when they'd been thrown out of Starside. Wamphyri, they could do it; they must have done it, deep-frozen themselves, a handful of thralls, and however many flying creatures they'd required to bear them into the Icelands when they were banished from the aeries of the Wamphyri. The natural, or unnatural, tenacity of the vampire.

'And meanwhile, here on this world, our world, we weren't even aware that Mikhail Suvorov and a party of scientists, geologists, and prospectors - not to mention a platoon of heavily armed Russian soldiers - had entered Starside through the Gate in Perchorsk. Perhaps Turchin had been warned not to inform us; I like to think so. Or maybe he didn't want to, for that would have been to admit his own impotence in the matter. And he must have been just as ignorant as we were of the return of the Wamphyri. No way he could have known they w ere back i n Starside.

'Nathan knew, though, and so did Lardis Lidesci. They knew because of the new spate of raids on Sunside. Ah, but this time the Wamphyri didn't have it all their own way, not by any means. Nathan had equipped his people with some devastating Earth-type weaponry, and because of his knowledge of our technology, Traveller "science" was likewise leaping ahead.

So that as quickly as Vavara and Lords Szwart and Malinari were recruiting, building up their vampire forces in the hollow stumps of the fallen aeries of the Wamphyri, Nathan and his Traveller fighting men were cutting them down to size again.

But while this resulted in some kind of stalemate, still Szgany lives were being lost, especially in the farthest corners of Sunside, in tribal territories that lay far beyond the Lidesci sphere of influence.

'Despite Nathan's ESP, those amazing powers that he'd inherited from his father, he couldn't possibly be everywhere at once. And even in Sunside/Starside, charity begins at home. Of course his main concern was for the Szgany Lidesci, and he had his work cut out protecting them. Part of that work, which was of the utmost importance to Nathan, was to get the Old Lidesci and his wife, Lissa, safely out of there. For it's a fact that Lardis is an old man now - older than his years - as a direct result o f living most of his life in the shadow of the Wamphyri. In his youth, life on Sunside was no bowl of cherries. Now Nathan would take over from him ... just as soon as he'd taken him out of harm's way.

'So let Lardis complain all he wanted - and I'm told he complained quite a bit - Nathan gave him no choice but simply brought him and his wife to the supposed safety of our world. That's how he got here, and why Lissa is in the care of our people 188.

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in London. Nathan would have protected his own wife, Misha, in the same way, but Misha wasn't having it. She'd lost him twice before; if Nathan was going to be fighting the Wamphyri yet again, she was going to be at his side. It's the same story for our own Anna-Marie English: Anna had married a Traveller called Andrei Romani, and made a life for herself caring for orphans of the bloodwars. She wasn't going to leave Andrei or the children behind without one h.e.l.l of a fight. And so she stayed.

'Very well, but just weeks before Nathan, er, transported Lardis and Lissa to Earth, there was a curious lull in vampire attacks on Sunside. When they started up again, the three princ.i.p.al survivors of four or five hundred years of frozen banishment were no longer in command of their lieutenants, thralls, and warrior creatures - or rather, they no longer accompanied them in their raids on Sunside. In order to find out what was happening, Nathan and his Szgany fighting men trapped a lieutenant, bound him to a cross with silver wire, and offered him the usual choice: he could talk and die a clean death with a crossbow bolt in his heart, or he could say nothing and be lowered face down, undead and kicking, into a fire pit.

He talked, died quickly, and then burned. There is no other way for a vampire.

'As for what he said: 'Vavara and the others had intercepted strangers entering Starside from the Gate on the boulder plains. There was a short, unequal battle - very short, for Suvorov's troops weren't prepared for this; but then, who would have been? - and Lord Malinari was now "questioning" the handful of survivors before they were sent to the provisioning... that is, before they were used and drained by lieutenants and thralls, and their corpses turned to fodder for the beasts. For of course, following Malinari's kind of interrogation, they wouldn't be very much good for anything else ...'

Apparently stalled by something in his story, Trask had paused.

His face was drawn and grey now, his eyes sunken; he looked far 'older than his years,' much as he'd described the Old Lidesci.

The precog lan Goodly knew what was wrong, and said, 'Ben, I'll take it from here if you like.'

'No,' Trask husked. 'When Jake was under pressure, he told his own story. So it's only right I tell mine. h.e.l.l, I've lived with it for almost three years now ...' But still he took a few seconds to straighten out his thoughts. Then: 'Call it coincidence,' he continued, 'or maybe synchronicity, but Nathan arrived at E-Branch, in Harry's room, yes, just a little too late. He had Lardis and Lissa with him, and a list of stuff he wanted to take back with him. But it was the middle of the night and there was only a skeleton staff; and I ... was already on my way in, driving like h.e.l.l through the empty, cold night streets. G.o.d only knows how many red lights I'd crashed.

'Why was I in such a hurry? Because of a dream - a b.l.o.o.d.y nightmare - a feeling that something was wrong. No, it was much more than just a feeling: the sure knowledge that something was definitely wrong. My espers: how often had I heard it from them that their talents were a curse? Mine, too, I supposed, when I had to sit and listen to rapists, paedophiles and murderers trying to talk their way out of jail, sit there reading their lies and knowing that in fact they were cold- blooded killers, molesters and defilers. But not once , until that night, had I really considered my talent a curse. And I can well understand how you felt, lan, seeing the future in a dream, but not knowing it was more than a dream!

'For that's how it had been with me: just a dream, but oh-so- much more than a dream. And I ... it had been "a hard day at the office"... I'd just lain there, tossing and turning, reading the truth of the d.a.m.ned thing but unable to wake up, until she told me to. G.o.d...!' And again he paused.

But this time, before Goodly could speak up again: 'It was Zek, my wife!' Trask blurted it out. 'She was at the Refuge in Romania, where for a fortnight the outflow from the underground river had been almost at a standstill. The regular crew at Radujevac couldn't 190.

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understand it, but since it coincided with low winter rainfall pa tterns right across Europe, that's what they put it down to.

'Anyway, that's not why she was there. Zek is - she was - a telepath of the highest order. But she was more than that. No one who ever met her could fail to be impressed by my beautiful Zek. Harry Keogh himself, Jazz Simmons, Lardis Lidesci... even the Lady Karen, they'd all been won over by Zek. And those poor Romanian kids at the Refuge, some grown into men now, but still suffering from deep psychological traumas dating back to Ceau-escu's time; of course she must try to help them. She could get inside their minds, track down their problems, even try to cancel them out. Sometimes it worked, other times she cried.

'And she was crying in my dream, crying out to me, to her husband, who knew he was only nightmaring yet at the same time knew he wasn't, but in any case couldn't do a d.a.m.n' thing about it. And despite what was happening to her, or about to happen, Zek was getting through to me in the only way left to her.

'It wasn't the first time. Once before she'd contacted me telepathically. That was in May 2006, when she was with Nathan in the Mediterranean, more specifically the Ionian.

They'd gone to Zante - or Zakynthos, the island of Zek's birth, from which she'd taken her name - so that she could, well, pay her respects to Jazz Simmons who was buried there.

Jazz had been Zek's first husband... he was dead of natural causes. But Turkur Tzonov's people were tracking Nathan to kill him. And since Zek was with him they'd kill her, too. It was while they were trying to kill her that she'd contacted me, and for a moment I had experienced all that she was feeling. I had known what it was like to die. But she hadn't died, because that's when Nathan discovered the Mobius Continuum and used it to bring her back to E-Branch.

'In my nightmare, it was the same again, Zek in her - G.o.d, her extreme of terror! - knowing it was over, yet trying to get through to me, to let me know what was happening. In one way it was a cry for help, which she must have known I couldn't possibly answer, and in another it was this incredibly brave woman, pa.s.sing on everything she knew about, about...

'It came thick and fast; telepathy is like that, conveying a lot more than mere words. What's that old saw about a picture being wort h a thousand words? Well, it's true enough; I saw half of it in pictures and half in thoughts, mind to mind.

All of it while I tossed and turned and - d.a.m.n my dreams forever - while I slept on!

'One of the Refuge's maintenance men, a New Zealander called Bruce Trennier, was down in the sump - the subterranean river's exit or resurgence - examining the system of hydroelectric barriers and the turbine that powered the Refuge during the Romanian rainy season. His being down there was partly in connection with the fall-off in the outflow, and partly because his instrumentation indicated that something wasn't right down there. The system hadn't been entirely reliable since the time when CMI - Combined Military Intelligence, disbanded now, thank goodness - made their biggest-ever mistake and blew it up!

'Anyway, Trennier was in contact by landline with the Refuge's night staff, and he'd told them he was opening a dry inspection duct to go into the actual cave of the resurgence. He'd thought that perhaps something was clogging the works in there. And something was - a dead vampire lieutenant, his body rammed into the pipe that monitored the flow!

'Obviously Vavara, Szwart and Malinari had been trying to get someone's attention, and they'd succeeded. And Trennier had provided them with a way out.

'Well, the rest is sheer conjecture. I'm trying to remember all of this from a dream, after all, and it's a dream I've tried so hard to forget! And even at the time it was fragmentary, as dreams usually are; and Zek, my Zek ... she wasn't at her best. But who would be in her ... in her situation?'

Once again Trask fell silent, choking on his own emotions. In a little while, when Liz quietly inquired if she should make coffee, he simply nodded. Then for a time no one said anything, not even Jake ...

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

Zek's Pa.s.sing It was several minutes before Trask could continue, but eventually: 'Let me try to tell it the way I saw or received it/ he said. 'It was night at the Refuge, two hours ahead of our time in London. Zek had been awakened by her pager, a call from one of the two-man night-nursing staff. Bruce Trennier was already down in the sump; whatever the trouble was, he'd said it couldn't wait. The forecast said heavy rain, and the resurgence was p.r.o.ne to flash-flooding. If there was a blockage, the pressure could create all kinds of fresh problems down there.

'Which was why he had gone down at night, with a tool box, a powerful torch, and an ancient, battery-powered landline telephone that was probably on the blink, because contact was weak and intermittent. But even before Zek got to the duty room, she sensed that something was wrong. Not with Trennier, you understand - for she didn't even know about him - but just generally wrong. Zek was a very strong telepath, as I've said, and there was ... what? A presence? A probing in the psychic aether? Some kind of interference?

Whatever, something wasn't right with the "static" - the term used by telepaths to define the background hiss and babble of thoughts emitted by the people around them - and it was something she'd never experienced before.

'Now, in E-Branch we have rules: we don't use our talents on each other, never. Myself, I have an excuse: my thing's automatic, as was Darcy Clarke's before me. Darcy wasn't in charge of what he did - in fact, he didn't do anything - his thing simply took care of him. He was a deflector, the opposite of accident-p.r.o.ne, as if some kind of gua rdian angel was constantly on duty looking after him. Darcy could have c rossed a minefield in snowshoes without getting hurt, except his talent wouldn't have let him. But don't think it made him careless. On the contrary, he used to switch off the power before he'd even change a light bulb! Or maybe that was just another form of his talent in action.

'My thing is the same: if someone lies to me I can't help but know it. It's not that I want to, not every time, it's just something that happens. But a telepath has a choice: to tune in on the thoughts of others or simply to ignore them. And most telepaths can turn the static down or even switch it off. Which is just as well, or they'd never get any sleep.

'So in E-Branch we don't mess with each other. Let's face it, it has to be the easiest way to lose friends. If your partner is in a bad mood, you really don't want to know that you're p.i.s.sing him off just by being in the same room!

'But Zek ... she was the same with everyone. At work - in the foreign emba.s.sies, or working criminal cases - she was the best. Outside of work, she switched off; she wasn't interested in the many perverse little thoughts that are flying around out there. And it was the same at the Refuge. She had enough on her plate just working with those poor sick kids, let alone probing the minds of her colleagues. And incidentally, she was the only esper out there. It's quite some time since E-Branch maintained any real presence in Radujevac.

'I mention these things so you'll see why she didn't immediately switch on to the truth of what was going on. Zek didn't use her talent as a matter of course, only where it was needed. And as for Trennier being down in the sump: she didn't find out about that until she'd reached the duty room. And even then she wasn't much bothered. Not at first.

'For that wasn't the reason she'd been woken up; no, that was 194.

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because, being E-Branch, she was the Senior Officer in situ at that time. And any problem with the kids, the Senior Officer had to be informed. That's what it was, the kids. And as far as Zek was concerned - half-awake and all - that's all it was.

But they were really going to town. Or rather, they weren't.

That's what was wrong with the static: not that its flow had been interrupted, but that it just wasn't there. It was as if... as if the kids had all come awake at the same time and were listening to something. But listening intently, to the exclusion of everything else. And whatever it was they could hear ... they didn't much like it.

'That was why they were using their pagers, every last one of them; also why the duty room's switchboard was lit up like a Christmas tree, and why Zek had been woken up and called in for her opinion.

'But she didn't get to voice that opinion, for as she entered the duty room and saw the switchboard, two things happened simultaneously. One: she reached out with her mind - to one of the kids, a case she'd been working with and knew intimately - and two, the old-fashioned landline telephone jangled and went on jangling. Of course it was Trennier, but a d.a.m.ned insistent Trennier.

'First the kid, a Romanian orphan of maybe eighteen years. Zek broke into his mind ...

'... And someone was there! Not just the kid, but someone, something, else. Something incredibly intelligent, that crawled and observed and was thirsty for knowledge, something that felt like cold slime, and left a cold, cold void behind it! And when Zek's talent touched it, she "felt" a recoil, and then a question - "Who?" - as whatever it was tried to fasten on her, too.

'Then she was out of there, s.n.a.t.c.hing her thoughts back as if they'd contacted a live wire, closing them down and erecting her mental barriers as things began to make sense.

'By which time one of the duty nurses was answering Trennier's call. This was a male nurse, one who Zek knew to be solid as a rock; but as he listened to Trennier's hysterical babbling over that tinny old telephone wire, so his eyes widened and his mouth fell open.

'Zek took the phone from him, told him to go and see what was wrong with the kids. The other nurse had already left, and now she was on her own - well, except for the terrified voice of Bruce Tren nier, reac hing up to her from the sump.