Necroscope II Wamphyri(Vampyri) - By Brian Lumley Page 0,104

was: flat to the wall, making his way agonisingly slowly, like a great lizard, up the stonework. A lizard, aye, for his hands and feet were huge as banquet platters and sucked where they slapped the walls! Horrified to my roots, I stared harder in the dark. He had not yet seen me. He grunted quietly and his huge disc of a hand made a quagmire sound where it left the wall and groped upward. His fingers were long as daggers and webbed between. Hands like that would pull a man's flesh from his bones as if they were plucking a chicken!

I looked wildly about. The bubbling cauldrons of oil were positioned at the ends of the span, where the great hall joined the towers. Rightly so, for who would suppose that a man could crawl under the flying buttresses and come up that way, with nothing but the gorge and certain death beneath him?

I flew to the closest cauldron, laid my hands on its rim. Agony! The metal was hot as hell.

I took my sword belt and passed it through the metal framework of the tilting engine, then dragged device and cauldron and all back the way I had come. Oil splashed and drenched my boot; one foot of the tilting bench went through a rotten plank and I must pause to free it; the entire contraption jerked and shuddered through friction with the planking, so that I knew Faethor must hear me and guess what I was about. But finally I had the cauldron above the spot where I had seen him.

I glanced fearfully over the parapet - and a great groping sucker hand came up over the rim, missed my face by inches, slapped down and gripped the coping of the wall!

How I gibbered then! I threw myself on to the tilting device, turned the handle furiously, and saw the cauldron bearing over towards the wall. Oil spilled and ran down the cauldron's side. It met the hot brazier and caught fire; my boot went up in flames. The Ferenczy's face came up over the rim of the parapet. His eyes reflected the leaping flames. His teeth, whole again, were gleaming white slivers of bone in his gaping jaws, with that flickering abomination of a tongue slithering over them.

Shrieking, I worked at the handle. The cauldron tilted, slopped a sea of blazing oil towards him.

'NO!' he croaked, his voice a broken bell. 'NO - NO - NOOOOOO!'

The blue and yellow fire paid him no heed, ignored his cry of terror. It washed over him, lit him like a torch. He wrenched his hands from the wall and reached for me, but I fell back out of harm's way. Then he screamed again, and launched himself from the wall into space.

I watched the fireball curving down into darkness and turning it day bright, and all the while the Ferenczy's scream echoed back up to me. His myriad minion bats flocked to him mid-flight, dashing their soft bodies against him to quell the flames, but the rush of air thwarted them. A torch, he fell, and his scream was a rusty blade on the ends of my nerves. Even blazing, he tried to form a wing shape, and I heard again that rending and crackling sound. Ah, what sweet agony that must have caused him, with his crisp skin splitting instead of stretching, and the burning oil getting into the cracks!

Even so, he half-succeeded, began to glide as before, and as before struck a tree and so went spinning and crashing through the pines and out of sight.

He left a few sparks and scraps of fire drifting on the air, and a host of scorched bats skittering crippled against the moon, and a lingering odour of roasted flesh. And that was all.

Still I wasn't satisfied that he was dead, but I was satisfied that he wouldn't be back that night. It was now time to celebrate my triumph.

I doused the fire where it had taken hold of dry timbers, shut down the burning braziers, and went wearily to Faethor's living quarters. There was good wine there which I sipped warily, then gulped heartily. I spitted pheasants, sliced an onion, nibbled on dry bread and swilled wine until the birds were done. And then I dined royally. It was a good meal, aye, and my first in a long time, and yet... it lacked something. I couldn't say just what. Fool, I still thought of myself as a man. In