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And in a voice that whooshed like a blacksmith's bellows, the cloaked one had
said, 'Old man, nothing is happening here. Nothing that need concern you.'
'But... something wrong!' the old proprietor had insisted, standing straighter, and
turning to face the cloaked one. 'The Tundza, she mine hotel, and something... very...
wrong?!'
Then he'd looked up, up, at the face of the one who steadied him. But inside the
high collar of the cloak, where a head should have been, there'd been only a blob of
inky blackness  as if a piece of the darkest night were lodged there  and the eyes that
looked out of that blackness were a poisonous yellow that seemed to drip sulphur from
their rims!
'Wrong?' That monstrous voice had come again, accompanied by a soul-
wrenching stench. 'Only the light, old fool. There's nothing wrong here but the light.'
And then an arm had gone up  reaching, impossibly reaching  all the way up to
the high, pine-boarded ceiling, where a hand like a claw had grabbed at electrical wiring
and yanked with irresistible force.
The lobby lights had sputtered out, leaving a velvet gloom whose only
illumination was that of Szwart's festering eyes and the vile phosphorescence of his
breath in the yawn of cavernous jaws.
In there, too, surging up from the depths of his throat, a host of suctorial,
anemone-like tendrils had greedily uncoiled themselves, fastening on the old man's
head like some terrible man-eating plant or a loathsome, lethal octopus...
19
TERROR AT THE TUNDZA  THE FUTURE:
WRIT IN FLAMES
Under Vavara's spell, the beneficent aura in which she shrouded herself, and which
extended invisibly outward from her, the men in the Tundza's upstairs room were taken
completely by surprise. Slow-moving and slow to react, they could only gape at what
was happening as Malinari propelled Joe Sparrow into the room ahead of him, and
Vavara came in through the shattering window.
As to the latter:
When Fletcher heard that first dull thump on the window, he couldn't believe what
he saw there: that doughy, leaf-like hand the size of a dinner plate, all covered with
suckers that stuck to the glass. And the face behind the hand, rising up into view as
Vavara crawled like a chameleon up the wall. By no means the mistress of metamorphic
processes, still the climb had required only a very small effort on her part. And she had
had plenty of practice on Krassos, when she'd been obliged to scramble across
precipitous cliff faces to escape the wrath of E-Branch.
But that had been on Krassos, while here and now
Here and now, all had gone according to Lord Nephran Malinari's plan. In order
that no escape route or bolt-holes would be left open to the locators and their armed
watchdog, he and Lord Szwart had agreed to enter the Tundza by the door, while
Vavara would break in through the window with her hypnotic, lying aura preceding her,
befuddling the senses of those within... most of all the locators, Fletcher and Androsov.
And while Szwart dealt with matters downstairs, doubling as a rearguard to ensure that
no one fled the scene, Malinari and Vavara would attend to the coalition of enemy
forces overhead.
Vavara's motive for murder  which was what they were about  was simple:
revenge! Revenge for what E-Branch and its esper membership had done to her
monastery aerie, her sisterhood, and her 'beautiful' garden under Palataki on the island
of Krassos. And similarly the Lord of Darkness, the endlessly mutating Lord Szwart: he
would do anything to strike back at the ones who had destroyed his works under
London. Malinari had assured his Wamphyri peers that this was the best way: to take
out these people one by one, using the ones they took as bait to trap the rest.
But as for Malinari himself: other than revenge, his motive was knowledge.
Knowledge of the one called Jake Cutter, no ordinary man (not even among his
extraordinary E-Branch colleagues) but a Power in the psychic aether whose signature
was an incredible whirligig of ever-evolving symbols, numbers, and algebraic equations.
The secrets in Cutter's metaphysical mind would provide Malinari with everything he
required to combat just such a Power in Sunside: the awesome talents of the one called
Nathan.
For having failed on Earth, that was where Malinari and his Wamphyri colleagues
were now headed: back to the Vampire World, to Sunside/Starside in a parallel universe
beyond the Perchorsk Gate. But not before Malinari had got what he wanted here.
Such were his thoughts as he thrust the now almost mindless minder Joe
Sparrow ahead of him into the upstairs room. Sparrow, his mind drained of what little
knowledge of E-Branch it had ever contained  along with almost everything else  who
moved only by virtue of Malinari's terrible hand inside his back, its hairy, wormlike
fingers extending sensors into the spinal canal while others channelled themselves to
the brain and loaned support to its dying motor areas. Sparrow  a mere puppet now,
and Malinari the puppet-master.
Sparrow had been brought along like this  not as a hostage but as a key  in
case there should be problems. Since no such problems had surfaced, he was no
longer required. And as Malinari withdrew his hand from the gaping, bloody hole in
Sparrow's overcoat, he caused the hairy filament extensions that were his probes to nip
at the Special Branch man's motor areas and slice through the flexible tendon that was [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]