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Harry and Karen - The Threat of the Icelands

Karen glided her flyer to earth at the north-facing front of the garden, just beyond the loall there, where the ground sloped steeply away towards Starside It was a good relaunch site and well known to her, for this here she’d blinded the crazed Lesk the Glut, cut out his heart, and given his grotesque body to the garden’s defenders for burning

Leaving The Dweller’s old house andht ahead of his? I mean, how can this be real? I saw you dead and broken on the scree where you’d thrown yourself down from the roof of your aerie

Hah! she answered And without h! She had stepped through a break in the wall and stood poised there, waiting for hihtn, nodded, salivated, and blinked huge, owlish eyes It swayed its flat, spatulate head this way and that; its das were of fine, flexible alveolate bone thinly sheathed in s or thrusters bunched beneath the doughy bulge of its body

Harry looked at it and wondered why he felt no horror and very little pity For he knew that the thing had been fashioned fros or Travellers Perhaps there was no more horror left in hi closer to Karen, he knew that some of his e In the world beyond the sphere Gate - the world of men, now an entire universe away - her like had been quite unknown Even her crimson eyes seemed beautiful now Harry ed by her beauty, struck by it no less than when he’d first seen her, that tiarden’s defenders in defiance of the Waain now He couldn’t take his eyes off her

He drank her in:

Froeous curve of her body (which, whether half-hidden or half-exposed, was always given emphasis by her sheath of soft white leather), to the pale leather sandals on her feet, open at the toes to show her toenails painted gold, she was ravishing Over her shoulders she wore a cloak of black fur, and about her waist a wide black belt whose grey- wolf’s head The sigil’s significance was lost in the past; Dramal Doombody’s ancestors had passed it down to him, and he in his turn had passed it to Karen And not only his crest, but Dracolours, Harry had paused; now he moved closer Face to face, Karen was evenhis approach - shifting her body to mirror his every move -she displayed the sinuous motion of a Gypsy dancer which he remembered so well But of course, for upon a tiht hear the chile of her movements yes, even when there was none to hear!

He heard these things now, and then her telepathic voice, chi in his mind: You very nearly killed me once, Harry And I should warn you:here was to return the favour! She brought forward her right hand, until now hidden behind her back Her battle gauntlet was in position; when she flexed her hand, a torturer’s delight of blades, hooks and sht

Harry conjured a M&ouht and fixed it there Invisible, it was the perfect bolthole if such were needed Let Karen take a swing at hiht and disappear But these were thoughts heyou’re here to kill e of her control, she answered in kind: ’And are you saying you don’t deserve it?’

Still keeping his own uarded, Harry looked into hers and saw the furious passions brewing there, saw anger bordering on rage, but nothing of hatred Also, and very importantly, he saw the Lady Karen’s loneliness They were two of a kind now ’I didn’t understand what it was like to be’he began, and paused; and tried again: ’Iyou, as of some vile disease But I admit it, I did it for my son as much as for you For if I could cure you’

’Cure!’ She spat the word out ’Why don’t you try curing yourself! There is no cure, Necroscope! Surely you must know that by now?’

He nodded, took a chance and inched closer yet And: ’Yes, I do know,’ he answered ’But in a way I did cure you You had a vampire in you, the sort the Wamphyri called a "mother" If you had spawned so many vaht?’

’We’ll never knoe?’ she growled

Harry stood directly before her, less than a pace aithin the arc of her gauntlet ’So you came to kill me’ He nodded ’But surely you can see I’ve suffered e? And surely you know in your heart that I was never your enemy, Karen? I was merely innocent In my way’

She stared hard at him for a moment, narrowed her eyes a little, then nodded and smiled But it was more a sneer than a smile proper ’I’ve found you out!’ she said ’I sense your door, Harry! You took arden to my aerie, all in a ht here beside you Would you dare stand so close without it? If so, then do it Show me how "innocent" you are’

He shook his head ’That was then,’ he said ’As for nohatever I ht wish to be, I can only be Wamphyri! Precious little of innocence inwithin advised me to conjure a door, for my protection Or for its protection? But the uard, that it s I want to say to you - a mockery And while I live, the man in me has the upper hand So be it!’

He threw caution to the wind, collapsed the Möbius door and opened his mind wide to her In a few moments she read or scanned all that ritten there, for he kept nothing hidden But in telepathy, to read is often to feel, and reater than her own And his loss - all of his losses - whose total was so much ht her own loneliness and emptiness into proper perspective

But she was a woht hand closed in the curve of her waist at first gently, then possessively, so she bent her elbow at his side until her open gauntlet leaned loosely against his back and upper-left arm And she said, ’Do you recall the time I told you how I’d lusted after you? In how many ways I lusted after you? Like a woman, perhaps - but certainly like a vampire! And do you remember when you trapped , panting, thrusting at you - and you ignored me It was as if your flesh was iron and your blood ice’

’No,’ he husked in her ear, drinking in the naturaldown his head to her ’My body was flesh and my blood was fire But I had set myself a course and must run it Now it’s run’

She felt his need swelling to match, to intensify, her own - so ainst her breast ’You you’re a fool, Harry Keogh!’ she whispered, as he crushed her even tighter And every nerve of her body thrilled as Waauntlet into the flesh and bone of his back and spoon it out, then reach inside and slice his heart to a criain - in astonishment - when she relaxed her hand so that the weapon fell froround!

’Even as great a fool as I a red-painted razor-sharp nails through cloth and skin and shivering flesh into his back and neck, as he in turn wrenched her sheath dress apart, and clutched her bruisingly wherever his hands would reach, and bit her face and mouth until the blood flowed ’Which is to say,’ she panted, when finally they held each other burning at bay, ’a very great fool indeed!’

They flew to her aerie

Mounted behind her in the ornate saddle at the base of the flyer’s neck where itsto Karen or risk falling - in which case he would conjure a door and fall through it into the Möbius Continuu breasts, whose nipples were nuggets under her ruined sheath And he would not fall while his ing there as if to lift her out of her seat

’Wait!’ she had told hiarden, at the wall, where with his new-found Wahed her like a field of yielding flesh And: ’Wait!’ she’d repeated twice during the flight, when he’d moaned louder than the wind in her ear and bitten the back of her neck, and she had felt his ed and flattened as if to touch all of her at once

And yet again, ’Wait! Oh, wait! she had pleaded with hi bay some levels lower than her topmost apartments, and she had ale causeways and up stairways of fretted bone to her rooht her in her bedroo was over, for both of them

Harry had otten and perhaps not surprisingly For if space and time are so linked as to be inextricable (to any ordinary o was it since he had known Penny? A die alap between universes? Time is relative, as the Necroscope knew only too well But in any case, that earlier phase now seemed fuzzy as a dream, while ’now’ was the only reality Penny had been a ht as thistledown, enthralled and drawn into his dream with him, and at last destroyed by it But Karen was Wonet, with gravity of her own great as a sht her flesh and lust after it For Harry she was the ereater than a ht suck him in in his entirety Indeed, Karen was all of this and led, panted, grunted and groaned, and in all truth Harry no longer kneas real and as fantasy He had not previously explored his metamorphism; he didn’t know the extent of fleshly flexibility; he was ’innocent’ in respect of his own passion’s potential And Karen, too, innocent Or very nearly so

’You have kept yourself to yourself?’ the Necroscope gaspingly inquired of his vaers within her to exaans and places, and while she lans and taunted its throbbing with the slither of her forked tongue

’No,’ she groaned truthfully Twice I flew to Sunside at sundown to seek me out a lover But how ht one back here In a little while he overca of his fear and crept into e into which he dropped a pebble! He could not fill me I milked him dry and wanted rind him down, turn him to pulp, murder him within the heart ofhim ButI took him back to Sunside Since when I’ve kept me to myself, yes Just as men and women are for each other, so we Wamphyri may only cleave unto Wamphyri flesh For there’s no pleasure in beasts, and when Wamphyri blood is up huled the Necroscope, feeling her left nipple extend into his throat like a tongue, while his scrotu froony from what I have done to you!’

’Likewise a’But of pleasure, however reat, soft, spidercrab hand fros at the knees and fed them into herself; until finally he was drawn in to his navel, and she experienced the geysering of his cold se innards

’And yet the Old Lords in their time took Traveller women for themselves,’ Harry panted in his deliriu, grotesquely bloated where his ared on him that he looked half-born She coiled herself forward to kiss him, and their teeth clashed as the flesh of their faces melted into one face

A e contraction; but just as quickly he entered her again, head-first this time, so that she must speak to him telepathically to answer his query Those wo, she said I’ve heard it said that following a raid, Lesk the Glut would take ten orthem like bladders with his sex! Ah, that was violation! But the so-called ’Lords’ weren’t all alike; if a girl was beautiful, then she rees, she would be varessed so her satyr Lord would instruct her The Lord Magula fashioned hie mound of a woman, and slept within her when their excesses exhausted him

She expanded herself convulsively to let hirasped at his slick body with exploratory hands of her own The Wa dirty’ had incensed them what orifices could be entered (of each of them) were entered; their kisses fetched blood; their juices drenched the bed and dripped from it on to the floor all around They the in their own liquids Harry’s system endlessly manufactured semen, which was endlessly sucked from him by Karen’s various lips They let their vampires run rampant Scythe teeth nibbled (but never so deep as the bone), and nails like claws of Tyrannosaur pulled and gouged (but only to bruise, never to break)

They reduced the bedclothes to drenched rags, the slate bed itself to rubble, the huge roorew frantic and impossible to follow in its contortions and convolutions Their cries became primal as their bodies shared totally; they knew sex as no reatest climax of many hen Karen entered him

For fifteen hours they spent themselves, vented, tormented and demented themselves So that in the end they didn’t merely sleep but fell unconscious in each other’s coils

When Harry ca hi to push her away ’A waste of tiain, nohile you’re still here’

’Still here?’ She took his member in her hand to cool its bruises ater, and watched it grow there like a club

’It’s a drea her softness ’Like everything gone before Drea dead Yet here, now you live! Unlessis there a necro back froan to pull with some insistence at her once more entirely human breasts And: ’It were best if you listened to me, Harry,’ she said ’I wasn’t dead that ti there, broken in the bony scree’

’Not you? Then who?’

’Do you remember when you starved ly at him ’Do you remember how you lured ’s blood? Ah, but I was Wamphyri and crafty! The mother creature Insidein me The tenacity of the vampire, Harry’

’You you were still Wamphyri?’ His mouth had fallen half-open ’Even after I burned your vas?’

’You burned all but one!’ she insisted, ’which reain, yes But I knew that if you suspected as ain And then that I would die! Oh, and the thought of that terrified me’

’I remember how I slept’ Harry licked dry, almost desiccated lips ’I was even more exhausted than now: by what I’d seen and done’

’Yes’ She nodded ’You fell asleep in a chair, which hen I was saved For while you slept one of mine returned to the aerie’

’One of yours? A creature?’ Harry frowned ’But they were all destroyed or sent away’

’Sent away, yes,’ she answered ’You had set this one free out of the "goodness" of your heart sent her away to die!’

’Her?’

’A trog, a handmaiden, a creature who performed menial tasks within the aerie and in my personal chambers But she had been born here and understood no other existence, and eventually she returned to the only home she’d ever known I knew it the moment she set foot on the bottom step of the nethermost stairwell; she heard my mind-call and came as fast as she could; but she was starved fro in the cold wilderness of Starside, and wearied unto death by her clih all the aerie’s levels Even unto death, aye’

’She died?’ Harry felt Karen’s small sadness, as at the death of a favourite pet

The vampire Lady nodded ’But not before she’d removed the silver chains from my door and disposed of the potted kneblasch plants! Then she collapsed and died, and I saw my chance

’While still you slept, I dressed her corpse in my best white dress and bundled it from the ramparts She fluttered down, down, almost as if she flew! But in the end she rushed to the rocks and was broken This hat you sahen you looked down fro, where I stayed until you were gone from here’

The Necroscope saw it all now ’I went back to The Dweller’s garden,’ he said ’My son knehat I’d done Fearing for his own existence, he took my powers from me, then transported me back to my oorld where for a time I was only a man But I discovered monsters there and they discovered ainst one vampire too s Despite the seriousness of their discussion of past events, Harry’s shaft pounded there like a second heart where her fingers teased the shining ri tip with her snake’s tongue, and to trap its swaying trunk between her breasts And: ’How strong you are, Harry,’ she sighed, perhaps wonderingly ’Indeed, I do believe you’re full again’

’To see your face,’ he answered, ’to smell your body, and feel you wet in your core how could I be other than full again?’ He lifted her up to seat her on his rod, but instead she slipped frorasp and stepped down from the bed

’Not here,’ she panted

’Oh?’

’There!’ she said

’There?’

’In that secret place of yours’

’The Möbius Continuum? To make love there?’

’Why not? Is it a holy place?’