A Coven of Vampires by Brian Lumley Page A

care the Hrossak proceeded, and at last his fingertips went up over the sill of an embrasure. Now, more slow and silent yet, he drew up his body until—
    Seated in the deep embrasure with his back to one wall and his knees against the other, a bearded guardsman grinned down on Tarra’s upturned face and aimed a crossbow direct into the astonished “O” of his gaping mouth!
    Tarra might simply have recoiled, released his grip upon the rim and fallen. He might have (as some men doubtless would) fainted. He might have closed his eyes tight shut and pleaded loud and desperate, promising anything. He did none of these but gulped, grinned and said:
    “Ho! No fool you, friend! Fregg chooses his guards well. He sent me here to catch you asleep—to test the city’s security, d’you see?—but here you are wide awake and watchful, obviously a man who knows his duty. So be it; help me up from here and I’ll go straight to our good king and make report how all’s…well?”
    For now the Hrossak saw that all was indeed well—for him if not for the guard. That smell was back, of fresh blood, and a dark pool of it was forming and sliming the stone where Tarra’s fingers clung. It dripped from beneath the guard’s chin—where his throat was slit from ear to ear!
    Aye, for the gleam in his eyes was merely glaze, and his fixed grin was a rictus of horror! Also, the crossbow’s groove was empty, its bolt shot; and now Tarra remem bered the whirring sound, the cough, the gurgle….
    Adrenaline flooded the Hrossak’s veins as a flash flood fills dry river beds. He was up and into the embrasure and across the sprawling corpse in a trice, his flesh ice as he stared all about, panting in the darkness. He had a friend here for sure, but who or what he dared not think. And now, coming to him across the reek of spilled blood… again that sulphurous musk, that fascinating yet strangely fearful perfume.
    Then, from the deeper shadows of a shattered turret:
    “Have you forgotten me then, Tarra Khash, whose life you saved in the badlands? And is not the debt I owed you repaid?”
    And oh the Hrossak knew that sibilant, whispering voice, knew only too well whose hand—or claw—had kept him safe this night. Aye, and he further knew now that Chlangi’s bats were no bigger than the bats of any other city; knew exactly why those ponies had fled like the wind across the plain; knew, shockingly, how close he must have come last night to death’s sharp edge! The wonder was that he was still alive to know these things, and now he must ensure no rapid deterioration of that happy circumstance.
    “I’ve not forgotten,” he forced the words from throat dry as the desert itself. “Your perfume gives you away, Orbiquita—and your kiss shall burn on my neck and in my memory forever!” He took a step toward the turret.
    “Hold!” she hissed from the shadows, where now a greater darkness moved uncertainly, its agitation accompanied by scraping as of many knives on stone. “Come no closer, Hrossak. It’s no clean-limbed, soft-breasted girl stands here now.”
    “I know that well enow,” Tarra croaked. “What do you want with me?”
    “With you—nothing. But with that pair who put me to such trial in the desert—”
    “They are dead,” Tarra stopped her.
    “What?” (Again the clashing of knives.) “Dead? That were a pleasure I had promised myself!”
    “Then blame your disappointment on some other, Orbiquita,” Tarra spoke into darkness. “Though certainly I would have killed them, if Fregg hadn’t beaten me to it.”
    “Fregg, is it?” she hissed. “Scum murders scum. Well, King Fregg has robbed me, it seems.”
    “Both of us,” Tarra told her. “You of your revenge, me of more worldly pleasures—a good many of them. Right now I’m on my way to take a few back.”
    The blackness in the turret stirred, moved closer to the door. Her voice was harsher now, the words coming more quickly, causing Tarra to draw back from