She shook her head, drawing back from him a little where his hands began 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 time. It wasn't me you saw lying there, broken in the bony scree.'

'Not you? Then who?'

'Do you remember when you starved me?' Karen stared hard, earnestly, even accusingly at him. 'Do you remember how you lured my vampire out of my body with a trail of pig's blood? Ah, but I was Wamphyri and crafty! The mother creature Inside me was crafty! More so than any other. She - it - left an egg in me. The tenacity of the vampire, Harry.'

'You... you were still Wamphyri?' His mouth had fallen half-open. 'Even after I burned your vampire and its eggs?'

'You burned all but one!' she insisted, 'which remained in me. The thing would grow again, yes. But I knew that if you suspected as much, then that you'd try again. 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 was when 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 from her wandering in the cold wilderness of Starside, and wearied unto death by her climb through 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 was what you saw when you looked down from that high balcony, Harry. But me: I was in hiding, 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 knew what I'd done. Fearing for his own existence, he took my powers from me, then transported me back to my own world where for a time I was only a man. But I discovered monsters there and they discovered me. Until, as you can see, in the end I set myself against one vampire too many.'

Karen had settled down between his spread legs. Despite the seriousness of their discussion of past events, Harry's shaft pounded there like a second heart where her fingers teased the shining rim of its bell. She paused a while to moisten its pulsing 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 from his grasp 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?'

Harry didn't answer. But ... it could well be. It could well be.

'Will you take me there, Harry? And will you take me, fuck me there?'

'Oh, yes,' he answered, throatily. 'And I'll show you a place you just won't believe, where we can fuck for a second or a century, as you will!'

She flew into his arms and he rolled her out of the sheets and into the Möbius Continuum. 'But... there's no light!' she hissed, opening her legs wide and guiding him into her. 'I need to see you: the way your face quakes when you come, the slackening of your mouth as the throbbing subsides and the aching starts.'

'You shall have light,' he grunted, nodding... and in the next moment felt a deadly fear. For that had been close to blasphemy. But he had not intended it. She would have light, yes: blue light, green, and a little red. And as she clawed at his buttocks and rode his bucking, whipping piston shaft, so he foamed within her and carried her moaning through a future-time door.

And now she saw the future racing away from her, and the scarlet light streaming from her own body, with only the faintest trace of blue. Indeed Karen's light mingled with Harry's, twining even as their bodies twined, and his was only slightly less red than hers.

Our life-lines, he told her. We ride them into our future. And then, quoting Faéthor: We ride there faster than life!

We ride each other into the future, she answered, thrilling to the starburst sensation of it, and to the shock of Harry bursting inside her. And in a little while: 'The blues?'

Travellers, he told her. True human beings.

Then the handful of reds can only be Wamphyri! Survivors in the Icelands. And the greens must be trogs. I... I never saw such colours, such light! Even the brightest auroras over the Icelands were never as bright as this.

Harry plied her breasts like dough in his hands and came yet again, and she felt his seed spraying her inner walls and shuddered to its gush. Your come is cold as a waterfall.

No, it's hot. But cool against your insides, which are a volcano.

It only feels that way, she moaned. For in truth we're both cold, Harry. Both of us.

We're Wamphyri, he answered, but we aren't undead. We've never been dead, not in the way some vampirized people 'die' and sleep a while before their rebirth from the grave. I had expected to be cold, certainly - expected to feel the lust of the Wamphyri, their raw, roaring appetite for life and for all dark carnal experience - but with nothing of enduring emotion. But this is much more than that, other than that.

For you, perhaps, she answered, for you're not long a vampire. And yet... maybe you're right. This isn't as I imagined it. The Old Wamphyri were liars, as anyone knows; could it be that they lied about this, too? Incapable of love, they said. But were they? Or merely incapable of owning up to it? Is it weak to love someone, Harry? And is it strong to be cold and without love?

He welded himself to her, all of his parts melting into hers. Cold? he growled. Well, if we're that cold, then why is our blood so hot? And if we're that weak, then why do I feel so strong? No, I think you've got it in one. The last and most blatant lie of the Wamphyri: that they were without love. They weren't, they were merely afraid to admit it.

And the Necroscope knew that at last the truth of the matter was exposed. The Wamphyri had always been capable of dark passions, desires and deeds beyond the human range; but now, on the same far side of the spectrum, he and Karen had discovered in themselves genuine, equally powerful bonding emotions. And letting those emotions rule could only properly be described as an ecstasy. However sudden, weird and alien their love, they were true lovers. There was lust in it, of course, but was there ever a love affair between man and woman without lust?