Free Necroscope: Harry and the Pirates: and Other Tales from the Lost Years by Brian Lumley Page A

sorcerers summoned from Avernus Yegg-ha, their gigantic familiar creature, who breached Hadrian’s Wall and despatched with his bare hands, horns and fangs a half-centuria of Rome’s finest, before the last handful of legionnaires were able to cast him down, put him to the sword, and separate and bury his gross, gory remains!”
    But witches and wizards, or sorcerers, in Roman times? Of course, for the Romans were notoriously superstitious, as were most of the peoples of those ages. And an unfounded, unnecessary dreadof these early metaphysicians had persisted not only down the decades but for at least a millennium and a half, and not least in Scotland.
    Living quite close to Edinburgh, Harry had often visited the famous Castle on the Rock, where an iron drinking fountain and basin against the esplanade wall featured two heads—one ugly and the other beatific—and carried the inscription:
. . . Near the site on which many witches were burned at the stake. The wicked head and the serene head signify that some used exceptional knowledge for evil purposes, while others were misunderstood and wished their kind nothing but good . . .
    About this alleged battle, however—the “fabulous” Yegg-ha versus fifty trained Roman soldiers—Henbury believed that Urbicus had learned of the disappearance, and the presumed destruction, of a half-centuria of men who had been sent to defend an area of the Wall under attack by the Picts. Thereafter, Urbicus’ fictionalised version of this ignominious event had been posited as an excuse for an unusual defeat, most probably the result of a Pictish ambush and slaughter carried out one misty night.
    But this episode was not Lollius Urbicus’ only “witchery,” and among several others was the one which had remained as the vaguest of vague memories in the deeps of the Necroscope’s unique mind. Little wonder it had taken so long to resurface; for as with Yegg-ha and others of Urbicus’ “fictions,” Henbury had mentioned it only in passing and it had had nothing to do with Harry’s research:
When Urbicus ran out of ideas for bloody battles around Hadrian’s Wall, and other skirmishes beyond the Wall, on Pictish soil, he sent his “magnificent centurion, one Quintus Britannicus”—obviously a Briton, a hireling of Rome who, in Urbicus’ fantasy, had risen through the ranks from legionnaireto centurion—on various quests and escapades in northern and middle England.
    As he developed the Britannicus character, that of a man torn between loyalty to Rome and the natural love of his own kind, Urbicus provided many opportunities for his hero to assist his often down-trodden fellow countrymen: such as the chapter where evil “forest devils” were regularly stealing away and eating the maidens of a hamlet some two dozen miles or more south of the Wall.
    Having devised this typical heroic quest scenario, Urbicus then sent his somewhat heavy-handed protagonist to avenge these supernatural atrocities by burning down a huge swath of the forest in question!
    We can be fairly certain that Urbicus’ inspiration for this chapter of
Frontier Garrison
was inspired by an actual conflagration, details of which the diligent researcher may discover in contemporary records. According to such accounts as are available, this real forest fire occurred during a very hot summer and consumed many thousand acres of what was then a far greater, denser expanse than many forests which exist today . . .
    And there Harry had it.
    But man- (or girl- eating) “forest devils,” stealing away and eating the young maidens of a hamlet two dozen miles south of Hadrian’s Wall, which would place its location in very close proximity with modern-day Harden and Hazeldene? Surely it could only be a myth or a local legend that Urbicus had exploited. It must certainly seem so to anyone other than Greg Miller . . . and now the Necroscope.
    For if Miller had served his sentence, been declared sane and released, and