things and allowed so little time for the vampire Lords to establish themselves; and the days . . . were terrible! The furnace sun passed directly overhead, and there were no barrier mountains to contain its searing rays, or the rage of vengeful men.
Oh, there were mountains, to be sure - and such mountains: the vast horseshoe of the Carpatii in the east, and the mighty Alps in the west -but unlike the barrier mountains of Sunside/Starside, the solar orb was not restricted by them, and at its zenith burned down on all and everything indiscriminately. As for the great armies of nomad tribesmen that were sweeping the world at that time: where mountains could not be climbed, they could always be circumvented . . . and they were. By warriors!
By men who had known how to destroy their enemies, even the Wamphyri, and destroy them utterly; known how a bolt or a lance through the heart would kill a man, and how his head on a lance would guarantee he was dead ... then how to reduce his castle and its contents to ashes, until nothing of him or his survived. Such methods were simply the way of the warrior, and by no means reserved for the Wamphyri and their followers. For in a majority of cases the invaders who used them - first the Goths, later the Visigoths and Avars - did not even know they went up against the Wamphyri! No, for they were merely murdering rich Dacian landowners in their gloomy castles, or strange, savage grey halflings in their foothill keeps and caverns.
And because of the times, times of change, tumult, and crisis -indeed the crisis of an entire Classical World - the as yet young legend of the Wamphyri, of the blood-crazed vampire and werewolf, was almost eradicated. What need for monstrous myths in a world that was in reality a bloodbath? Forty years after Radu's coming the Visigoths had sacked Rome itself, and forty-five years later it had fallen again, to the Vandals; except on that occasion Radu had been part of it. For like most of the Wamphyri exiled from Starside by Shaitan, he was unable to resist blood, certainly not in such copious amounts.
War, to which he was drawn as a lodestone is drawn north. And such wars to be warred as nothing conceived in Starside by even the mightiest of the Old Lords. And down all the years and decades, Radu was a great mercenary washed hither and to by the tides of war and blood. He used his gift of oneiromancy - not uncommon among dog-Lords - to scry on future times and know in advance which side to join in the great wars to come. And likewise he remained alert for word of those olden enemies who came through the Hell-lands Gate with him. And time and again Radu cursed himself that he'd not dealt with them then, on the very threshold of this new world, when they were at their weakest.
But then, he had been at his weakest, too, for a time.
Rumours found their way to Radu. Employed as a mercenary warlord by the Vandal Gaeseric (who dubbed him 'Radu, Hound of the Night,' because he preferred guerilla warfare by the light of a full moon), he learned of the alleged death of one
'Onarius Ferengus,' a provincial senator (what, Roman?) murdered by pirates in his villa at Odessus on the Black Sea ten years earlier. This he had from a Numidian slave-girl, Ulutu, set free when Gaeseric's forces sacked Rome. Upon a time she'd belonged to Onarius, but she had fled from the fire and the fighting on the night he was killed. And from Ulutu's descriptions of her ex-master ...
... Radu had little doubt but that he had been none other than Nonari the Gross Ferenczy!
And in Radu's keeping, where he and his pack spent their days in a den under the Colli Albani twelve miles out of Rome, Ulutu fell under her new master's spell (and Radu, to a lesser degree, under hers); and they were lovers. But because he had enough of 'pups' up in the mountains of Dacia, now Goth territory, and because he had learned that anonymity and insularity were synonymous with longevity, he made sure that Ulutu stayed entirely human; which is to say that for all that he was into her, nothing of him got into her. And at times, lying spent on their bed of cured furs, at Radu's request