"Brian Lumley - Necroscope 2 - Wamphyri!" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

pleasures of blood, blood, blood - and felt the cold embrace of the clotted earth closing him in,
weighing him down, holding him here in his darkling grave. And yet the earth was familiar and no
longer held any terrors for him; the darkness was like that of a shuttered room or deep vault, an
impenetrable gloom entirely in keeping; the forbidding nature and location of his mausoleum not only
set him apart but kept him protected. He was safe here. Damned forever, certainly - doomed for all
time, yes, barring some major miracle of intervention - but safe, too, and there was much to be said
for safety.


Safe from the men - mere men, most of them - who had put him here. For in his dreaming the
wizened Thing had forgotten that those men were long dead. And their sons, dead. And theirs, and
theirs...


The old Thing in the ground had lived for five hundred years, and as long again had lain undead
in his unhallowed grave. Above him, in the gloom of a glade beneath stirless, snow-laden trees, the
tumbled stones and slabs of his tomb told something of his story, but only the Thing himself knew all
of it. His name had been... but no, the Wamphyri have no names as such. His host's name, then, had
been Thibor Ferenczy, and in the beginning Thibor had been a man. But that had been almost a
thousand years ago.
 The Thibor part of the Thing in the ground existed still, but changed, mutated, mingled and
metamorphosed along with its vampire 'guest'. The two were one now, inseparably fused; but in
dreams that spanned a millennium, still Thibor could return to his roots, go back to the immensely
cruel past...


In the very beginning he had not been a Ferenczy but an Ungar, though that was of no account
now. His forefathers were farmers who came from a Hungarian princedom across the Carpathians
to settle on the banks of the Dniester where it flowed down to the Black Sea. But 'settling' was
hardly the word for it. They had had to fight Vikings (the dreadful Varyagi) on the river, where they
came exploring from the Black Sea, the Khazars and vassal Magyars from the steppes, finally the
fierce Pechenegi tribes in their constant expansion west and north-wards. Thibor had been a young
man then, when at last the Pechenegi wiped out the rude settlement he called home and he alone
survived. After that he'd fled north to Kiev.


Never much of a farmer, indeed, far more suited for war with his massive size - which in those
days, when most men were small, made Thibor the Wallach something of a giant - in Kiev he sold
himself into the service of Vladimir I. The Vlad made him a small Voevod or warrior chief and gave
him a hundred men. 'Go join my Boyars in the south,' he commanded. 'Fend off and kill the
Pechenegi, keep 'em from crossing the Ros, and by our new Christian God I'll give you title and
banner both, Thibor of Wallachia!' Thibor had gone to him when he was desperate, that much was
clear.


In his dream, the Thing in the ground remembered how he'd answered: 'Title and banner, keep
them, my Lord - but only give me one hundred men more and I shall kill you a thousand Pechenegi
before returning to Kiev. Aye, and I'll bring you their thumbs to prove it!'