Deadspeak

' - You are a dog!' the other shut him off, his voice cracking like boulders breaking. Leaning forward in his chains, he strained to reach his tormentor.

Janos laughed as his thralls fought hard to keep Bodrogk from breaking loose. But then he stopped laughing and held out a glass jug for the other to see. And: 'Now be still and listen to me,' he commanded, harsh-voiced. 'As you see, this favourite wife of yours is near-perfect. How long she remains so is entirely up to you. She is unchanged from a time two thousand years ago, and will go on the same for as long as I will it - and not a moment longer.'

While he talked his creatures made fast Bodrogk's chains to staples in the wall. Now they stood back from him. 'Observe,' said Janos. He took a glass stem and dipped it in the liquid in the jug, then quickly splashed droplets across the huge Thracian's chest.

Bodrogk looked down at himself; his mouth fell open and his eyes started out as smoke curled up from the matted hair of his chest where the acid had touched him; he cried out and shook himself in his chains, then crumpled to his knees in the agony of his torture. And the acid ate into him until his flesh melted and ran in thin rivulets, red and yellow, all down his quivering thighs.

His wife, the last of the six wives he'd had in life, cried out to Janos that he spare Bodrogk this torture. And weeping, she too collapsed in her chains. At last her husband struggled to his feet, the orbits of his eyes red with agony and hatred where he gazed at Janos. 'I know that she is dead,' he said, 'even as I am dead, and that you are a ghoul and a necromancer. But it seems that even in death there is shame, torment and pain. Therefore, to spare her any more of that, ask what you will of me. If I know the answer I will tell it to you. If I can perform the deed, it shall be done.'

'Good!' Janos grunted. 'I have six of your men in their burial urns, where they lie as salts, ashes, dust. Now I shall spill them out of their lekythoi and have them up. They will be my guard, and you their Captain.'

'More flesh to torture?' Bodrogk's growl was a rumble.

'What?' Janos put on a pained expression. 'But you should be grateful! These were your warrior comrades in an age when you battled side by side. Aye, and perhaps you shall again. For when my enemy comes against me, I can't be sure that he'll come alone. Why, I even have your armour, with which you decked yourself all those years agone, and which was buried with you. So you see, you shall be the warrior again. And again I say to you, you should be grateful. Now I call these others up, and I call upon you, Bodrogk, to control them. Your wife stays here. Only let one treacherous Thracian hand rise against me ... and she suffers.'

'Janos,' Bodrogk continued to gaze at him, 'I will do all you ask of me. But for all that I was a warrior in life, I was a fair man, too. It is that fairness which prompts me to advise you now: keep well the upper hand. Oh, I know you are a vampire and strong, but I also know my own strength, which is great. If you did not have Sofia there, in chains, then for all your acid I would break you into many pieces. She alone stays my hand.'

Janos laughed like a great baying hound. 'That time shall never come,' he said. 'But I too shall be fair: when this is done, and done to my liking, then I shall put you both down, and mingle your dust, and scatter it to the winds forever.'

"Then that must suffice,' said the other.

'So be it!' said Janos...

As the sun painted a crack of gold on the eastern horizon, Harry Keogh slept on. But in the Aegean Sea off Rhodes Darcy Clarke and his team were aboard a slightly larger, faster boat than last time, and already passing Tilos to port where they forged west for Sirna. Watching the sea slip by like blue silk sliced by the scissors prow, Darcy again went over the plans they'd made last night and looked for loopholes in their logic.

He remembered how David Chung had sat at a table in their hotel rooms, while the rest ringed him about and watched his performance. Chung's parents had been cocaine addicts; the drug had rotted their minds and bodies, killing both of them while he was still little more than a child. So that ever since joining the Branch he'd aimed his talent in that one specific direction: the destruction of everyone who trafficked in human misery. They had given the locator other tasks from time to time, but everyone in E-Branch knew that this was his forte.

Last night he'd employed a little of the very substance he loathed, crouching over the smallest amount of snow white cocaine. Upon the table a large map of the Dodecanese, and upon the map the merest trickle of poisonous dust, lying on a flimsy brown cigarette paper to give it definition.

Chung had called for silence, and for several minutes had sat there breathing deeply, occasionally wetting a finger to take up the white grains and touch them to his tongue. Then -

- With a single sharp puff of air from his mouth he'd blown the cigarette paper and its poison away, and in the next moment stabbed the map with his forefinger. 'There!' he'd said. 'And an awful lot of it!'

Manolis Papastamos and Jazz Simmons had applauded, but Zek, Darcy and Ben Trask had not seemed much surprised. They were impressed, of course, but ESP had been their business for many years. It wasn't so strange to them.

Then Manolis had looked more closely at the map, the place where Chung was pointing, and nodded. 'Lazarides's island,' he said. 'So now we know where the Lazarus is hiding. And aboard her, all the shit that the Vrykoulakas stole from the old Samothraki.'

After that, pla

David Chung was out of it now; his part had been played and the remainder of his time in the sun was his own; he wouldn't see the rest of the team until the job was finished. And now indeed they were on their way to finish it.

Manolis brought Darcy's mind back to the present: 'Another half-hour and we're there. Do you want to go over it again?'

Darcy shook his head. 'No, you all know your jobs. As for me: this time I'm just a passenger - at least until we get onto the island and into Janos's place.' He looked at his team.

Zek was unzipping herself from her lightweight one-piece suit. Underneath she wore a yellow bathing costume consisting of very little and leaving nothing at all to the imagination. She scarcely looked her age but was sleek, ta

Her husband looked at her and gri

'I was thinking,' Jazz answered, 'that we'd like to sink these blokes along with their ship. The idea isn't that they should go diving in the water after you!'

'This is something I learned from the Lady Karen on Starside,' she told him. 'If I can distract them, then the rest of you will be able to do your jobs more safely and easily. Karen was an expert at distraction.'

'Oh, they'll be distracted, all right!' Manolis assured her.

Ben Trask had meanwhile opened up a small compartmented suitcase and taken out four of six gleaming metal discs some two inches thick by seven across. The back of each disc was black, magnetic, and the obverse fitted with a safety switch and timer. Manolis looked at the limpet mines where Trask began fitting them to a pair of diving belts in place of the usual lead weights, and shook his head. 'I still don't know how you got them out of England,' he said.