was other!' And Radu had felt her small shudder.
Aye, and Ulutu was right: Belos was 'other.' No slightest shadow of a doubt, he was this Onarius's (or Nonari's) egg-son. Wamphyri! Which perhaps explained his looks and appetites, and the reason why he and his damned father were so close. Or maybe that last was as a result of the wars, the shaken, perhaps even crumbling Roman Empire, the unstable skein of things in general. For even the best Wamphyri relationship could scarcely be described as 'close,' not in normal circumstances. But that apart, quite obviously this ... this scum of Starside had bred one of its own here in this world! An egg-son for Nonari! A Ferenczy!
Well, so be it. It simply meant there'd be one more Ferenczy for Radu to hunt down when all wars were won and times were right, and the world was quiet again. And as for this so-called 'Onarius Feren-gus' ... dead, was he? Radu didn't think so. More likely it was some grand contrivance, the entire scenario, some scheme of Nonari's to vanish a while, and come back later under a new name and in a different guise. The idea was interesting, something Radu could even try for himself in some future time, when it might seem to some that he had lived too long ...
Radu's dreams had set his juices working however sluggishly. Dreams of his undying hatred for the Ferenczys, his charnel love of the battlefield, but especially his carnal memories of Ulutu.
Ah, Ulutu! She had loved his horn, and it had been hard to will his spunk lifeless when he spurted in her. But if she had fallen pregnant ... then she had also fallen dead, be sure! For Radu was not like Nonari, making vampires left, right and centre, to plague him in a later age, His pups were enough for him. They had known his bite and bore his curse - that of the moonchild, the changeling, the werewolf - but not liis seed. There would be time for bloodsons, and eventually an egg-son, later, when he could afford the time to train, control, and bend them to his wil. But in that savage world of fifteen hundred years ago, Radu Lykan had control over nothing! Even kings and emperors had controled nothing! Only the restless forces of Nature, Change, and Chaos had any control at al...
But Ulutu: Radu had biten her during intercourse, a love bite, but much too deep. She would never be Wamphyri - wel, not for a long, long time at least, if she lived that long - but she would be a wolfling, bound to Radu as his thral. Very wel, she could run with the pack and be his mate, for as long as it lasted. Alas, but that hadn't been long. Gaeseric's advisers, who earlier in the campaign had welcomed Radu's pack as 'mercenary warriors without peer - men who fight like dogs of the wild!' now gave their lord different advice. Oh, it had seemed a grand irony at first, a marvelous jest, that a great city founded by wolf-suckled brothers should be brought to its knees in part by a wolfish man, this so-caled Hound of Night, with his band of howling berserks. But the city had falen now and Radu and his lot had been paid off. And who could say, perhaps they had even been paid ... too wel?
For what were they after al but mercenaries? And only a handful by comparison with the true Vandal army. No match for Gaeseric, if he should decide to take back what tribute he had paid them. Aye, and these wolves of war kept many comely women plundered out of Rome, and measures of good red wine likewise sacked from the city, which they held in their cavern lair in the mountains with the rest of their loot...
A man of Gaeseric's had come to Radu in the early evening with news of a legion mustering in the north, and Roman galeys from the Eastern Empire puting men and ordnances ashore south of the Tiberis. And these were Gaeseric's orders:
Radu was to send one-third of his men to spy out the land to the north, and he and the rest were to harass the sea-borne invasion at the mouth of the river; which in the same night he set out to do ... only to discover that there were no such reinforcements for the ravaged city! Nor had there been. Then he