Necroscope II Wamphyri(Vampyri) - By Brian Lumley Page 0,11

young Harry's blue life thread. Yes, and they cross yours, too!

Hearing that, it was as if the cold blade of a psychic knife lanced into Kyle's heart. 'Harry,' he said stumblingly, 'you'd... you'd better tell me all you know, and then what I must do.'

I'll tell you as much as I can, and then we'll try to decide what's to be done. As to how I know what I'm about to tell you... The apparition shrugged. I'm a necroscope, remember? I've talked to Thibor Ferenczy himself, as I once promised him I would, and I've talked to one other. A recent victim. More of him later. But mainly the story is Thibor's...
Chapter Two
The old Thing in the ground trembled however minutely, shuddered slightly, strove to return to his immemorial dreaming. Something was intruding, threatening to rouse him up from his dark slumbers, but sleep had become a habit which satisfied his every need... almost. He clung to his loathsome dreams - of madness and mayhem, the hell of living and the horror of dying, and the pleasures of blood, blood, blood - and felt the cold embrace of the clotted earth closing him in, weighing him down, holding him here in his darkling grave. And yet the earth was familiar and no longer held any terrors for him; the darkness was like that of a shuttered room or deep vault, an impenetrable gloom entirely in keeping; the forbidding nature and location of his mausoleum not only set him apart but kept him protected. He was safe here. Damned forever, certainly - doomed for all time, yes, barring some major miracle of intervention - but safe, too, and there was much to be said for safety.

Safe from the men - mere men, most of them - who had put him here. For in his dreaming the wizened Thing had forgotten that those men were long dead. And their sons, dead. And theirs, and theirs...

The old Thing in the ground had lived for five hundred years, and as long again had lain undead in his unhallowed grave. Above him, in the gloom of a glade beneath stirless, snow-laden trees, the tumbled stones and slabs of his tomb told something of his story, but only the Thing himself knew all of it. His name had been... but no, the Wamphyri have no names as such. His host's name, then, had been Thibor Ferenczy, and in the beginning Thibor had been a man. But that had been almost a thousand years ago.

The Thibor part of the Thing in the ground existed still, but changed, mutated, mingled and metamorphosed along with its vampire 'guest'. The two were one now, inseparably fused; but in dreams that spanned a millennium, still Thibor could return to his roots, go back to the immensely cruel past...

In the very beginning he had not been a Ferenczy but an Ungar, though that was of no account now. His forefathers were farmers who came from a Hungarian princedom across the Carpathians to settle on the banks of the Dniester where it flowed down to the Black Sea. But 'settling' was hardly the word for it. They had had to fight Vikings (the dreadful Varyagi) on the river, where they came exploring from the Black Sea, the Khazars and vassal Magyars from the steppes, finally the fierce Pechenegi tribes in their constant expansion west and north-wards. Thibor had been a young man then, when at last the Pechenegi wiped out the rude settlement he called home and he alone survived. After that he'd fled north to Kiev.

Never much of a farmer, indeed, far more suited for war with his massive size - which in those days, when most men were small, made Thibor the Wallach some-thing of a giant - in Kiev he sold himself into the service of Vladimir I. The Vlad made him a small Voevod or warrior chief and gave him a hundred men. 'Go join my Boyars in the south,' he commanded. 'Fend off and kill the Pechenegi, keep 'em from crossing the Ros, and by our new Christian God I'll give you title and banner both, Thibor of Wallachia!' Thibor had gone to him when he was desperate, that much was clear.

In his dream, the Thing in the ground remembered how he'd answered: Title and banner, keep them, my Lord -but only give me one hundred men more and I shall kill you a thousand Pechenegi before returning to Kiev. Aye, and I'll bring you their thumbs to