Blood Brothers

PART SEVEN:

Nestor — Titheling — Turgosheim Equipped with new clothes, a good leather belt and a polished ironwood knife with a bone handle, Nathan was ready. He would journey east downriver, for west would take him too close to home, or to what had once been his home. Only go that way… it would be very hard to resist returning to Settlement, and he dreaded the thought of what he might find there now.

Atwei accompanied him upon the first leg of his journey; she took the lead, striding out along the stone-carved 'banks' of the Great Dark River.

Ostensibly he went to visit other Thyre colonies, to talk to their elders and their dead; but there was a lot more to it than that. Now that he was possessed of talents (his deadspeak, full-fledged among the Thyre, and his telepathy, as yet inchoate but promising, at least according to Atwei and others of her people), his confidence was that much greater. Where the past must remain a wasteland, anathema, it seemed the future might hold something of fulfilment at least. He had things to learn and people to talk to; whether they were living or dead….hat no longer made any difference.

Nathan's new clothes were quite remarkable. Fashioned in the Szgany style generally but of soft, sand-coloured lizard-skin, the cut was all Thyre, the work of a very high standard, and the fitting exact. In short, the Thyre of Place-Under-the-Yellow-Cliffs had dressed Nathan tip to toe much as they saw him: as a person of very special qualities. His fringed jacket had a high collar and wide lapels; his trousers were flared to fit snug over soft leather boots; his silver belt-buckle was scrolled to match the ornamentation on the sheath housing his knife.

All in all, with his startling blue eyes, and his yellow hair grown shoulder-length (outrageous colours in a man of the Szgany, and impossible among the Thyre), the ensemble gave him a mystical, even alien look in keeping with his standing. The only irony was that having done so much for the Thyre, gained so much in the way of respect, he should remain impotent to do anything for his own people. But they were not forgotten, and perhaps there was time yet.

For the first time in his life, Nathan was a person of substance, albeit in a world remote from his largely insubstantial previous existence. And he could not help but wonder: while his stature was vast among the Thyre, what would it be outside their limited sphere? What would he be now among his own kind, the Szgany Lidesci? Would he still be a freak, a mumbling fool, or were those days gone forever? And what of Sunside's Travellers themselves: all of them, the Szgany as a race? What were they now to the Wamphyri?

Cut off from them in self-imposed exile, he could not know. But two thousand miles away down the Great Dark River, where others of his kind cowered under the tyranny of grotesque Wamphyri masters, he might yet find an answer. For as they were now — stumbling serfs, cattle, scarlet sustenance for hideous vampire Lords — so must his own people inevitably become! Horrific as the thought was, it was also fascinating. And the more Nathan dwelled upon it the more he saw his obligation unwinding before him, much like the black canyon walls of the serpentine river…

Every half-mile or so along the way, Atwei would pause to point out caches of tarry torches wrapped in oiled skins in niches in the damp walls. The torches were long-lasting; she would let two or three of these replenishment points go by before renewing her own and Nathan's brands. Torches came and went like fireflies through the utter dark on both sides of the black river, as other Thyre passed them along the way. Nathan strained to hear the thoughts of these torchbearers in this blackest of black nights but heard nothing, only the far faint whispers of the dead…

Only fifteen miles to the east along a course that wound a little deeper into the desert, Open-to-the-Sky was the next colony. Nathan and Atwei were there in less than five hours. As to the colony's name: the reason for that was immediately apparent. The place was, quite literally, open to the sky.

The first indication that they approached their destination came in a stirring and freshening of the air; the light improved and the sputtering flames of their torches were buffeted; ahead of them, the way seemed shrouded in a misty haze. Soon they were able to extinguish their brands and proceed in the gathering light. As the far bank receded, so the pace of the river slowed to a crawl. Then the swirling waters widened into the neck of a lake, and the scene which gradually opened to Nathan's eyes was such as he could never have anticipated.

For suddenly… it was as if an oasis flourished underground! At first there were only ferns and mosses growing out of cracks in the walls, then small bushes overhanging the high ledges, eventually trees, vines and creepers, all straining for the indirect but beckoning sunlight. And where the river's roof opened at last into a real canyon and the light of day streamed down from overhead, finally there was lush foliage springing up on every hand.

Here the river had shingle beaches and timbered jetties; true banks of red silt rose up to level ground on both sides of the water, where rudimentary stone wharves had been built to defend against flooding. All of which lay in the forefront of patchwork fields and allotments; while at the rear, houses on stilts rose in terraces where the higher ground backed up to the cliffs. Between and beyond the houses, dizzy pathways climbed vine-shrouded scree slopes, faults in the canyon wall, and cliff-hugging ledges, zig-zagging up and across the rising rock from cavern to cavern and ledge to ledge. And the Thyre came and went along these paths and causeways like ants about their daily business. While high overhead -

— A marvellous sight! The canyon walls reared up two hundred feet and more; the light where it came slanting in from the south to burst against the opposite wall was blinding after the Stygian dark of the river; despite that Nathan knew the surface must be mainly desert, still he saw the silhouettes of palms crowding the canyon's rim. And so Open-to-the-Sky was an astonishing place.

Thyre elders met them where the worn-smooth granite of the river path met the rudimentary paving of the access road into the community. Nathan would have preferred to speak for himself from the onset, but by now well-versed in their code of conduct, he let Atwei act on his behalf; it was Thyre custom to open proceedings through an intermediary. His own name had been known in advance but theirs, of course, were secret. No introductions of that sort were necessary.

Nathan found himself greeted by a good deal of gravity, tempered with (he suspected), a small measure of scepticism; while Atwei, acting as his aide and spokeswoman — his dupe? perhaps his colleague in deception and blasphemy? — suffered an initially cool reception indeed.

As they passed through the lower levels of the colony and climbed a walled pathway to the Cavern of Long Dreams, a Thyre mausoleum one quarter of the way up the cliff, something of the stiffness and formality went out of The Five and they conversed with Nathan in cordial if restrained monotones. He continued to sense their hesitancy, however, and suspected there were those among them who thought he had somehow made fools of their colleagues in Place-Under-the-Yellow-Cliffs. Once inside the tomb he felt more at ease, and commenced to verify his credentials in very short order.

The Five had worked out a series of questions for Nathan to ask their dead ancestors, whose answers would permit of no deception or obfuscation. The dead, for their part, had heard faint rumours of the Necroscope's coming from the Ancients of Place-Under-the-Yellow-Cliffs, and immediately recognized the purpose of these opening questions: that they were designed to detect any charlatanry in Nathan. For which reason, once rapport was established and they felt the Necroscope's warmth, the response of the dead was accurate and not without a measure of Thyre sarcasm directed at the elders themselves.

The most 'junior' of The Five, perhaps irritated by Nathan's dry and very un-mystical delivery of answers allegedly from beyond the grave, brought about an early interruption by asking: 'Perhaps you could tell us why our ancestors converse so readily with you but not with their own kind?'

At which Nathan lost patience. This one reminded him of Petais, and he wasn't about to go through all of that again! He might have answered in his own way, without prompting, but a voice in his head cautioned him against it and in a moment supplied the perfect answer:

'Quatias, your father Tolmia begs you to remember a time in your childhood — you were five? — when you lost your way in the desert just a mile from Open-to-the-Sky. All you had to do was climb a dune and you would have seen the oasis clearly, you were that close. But no, you were only a child and afraid; you sat down and cried. Be sure not to lose your way again, in the maze of your own doubts, now that you are even closer to a great truth.'

Quatias opened his mouth, closed it and made a strangled sound in the back of his throat. Finally, in a broken voice, he said: 'Only my father Tolmia could have known….hought… said… that which you just said. Wherefore I no longer doubt. Nathan, please tell him that I love him very much!'

'He knows,' Nathan answered, all anger fled in a moment. 'And he loves you in return, even as he did in life.'

Shortly after that the initial session broke up. Shaken, The Five must now reconsider things, think how best to employ Nathan — if they still had his good will. So they made to go off to their council chambers and discuss his awesome talent. But before he let them go:

'I want you to know,' he told them, 'that the girl Atwei is my dear friend. She was my nurse and brought me to health when I was sick. Now, I understand why you had doubts, about both of us. Of course you did and I don't hold it against you. But that is over now, and you should know: he who dishonours Atwei dishonours me.'

He couldn't know it, but from that time forward she would be part of his expanding legend. Atwei of the Thyre, friend of Nathan…

And so, as in Place-Under-the-Yellow-Cliffs, once again Nathan became a bridge between two worlds: that of the living, and the darkness of those who had continued beyond it. But before that there were certain priorities: for instance, Shaeken's inventions.

In accordance with the Ancient's wishes, he passed on to the artisans of Open-to-the-Sky detailed drawings of his water wheel, ram, and hoist, all of which were of especial relevance here. Once constructed, Shaeken's Hydraulic Hoist should provide effortless irrigation for the oasis high overhead; and so the Thyre would prosper.

Then, as soon as these technical details had been passed on and understood, for five more sunups Nathan channelled all of his energies to the task of communication between the living and the dead. And as in Place-Under-the-Yellow-Cliffs, so now the results of his work were uniformly beneficial; exactly as before, word of the Necroscope spread abroad and emissaries from Thyre colonies further down the river came to see him.

But now that the work was no longer new to him it became… simply work. Despite that it was satisfying in its way and the number of his friends among the dead grew apace, Nathan no longer took pleasure in it. Also, time seemed to pass by ever more swiftly, and he felt he should be elsewhere, doing other things.

It was time to move on.

Atwei sensed it in him. She may even have read it in his supposedly 'inviolate' mind. But seeing how she was saddened, Nathan made no complaint…

One day they went up to the oasis, and there in the living sunlight Nathan saw how pale he had grown. He was pensive and gave voice to an idle thought. 'Why are you so brown,' he asked her, 'when you spend so much time in the deeps and the dark?'

'But before you,' Atwei answered, simply, 'I spent a good deal of my time in the light. The Thyre are desert folk, after all, and most of our work is done on the surface. Also, I was born brown. But why are you so pale, when you were born in the woods and the sunlight?'

He shrugged. 'So, we're different.'

'Are we so different, Nathan?'

He looked at her and wondered, Are we? And almost before he realized it, he knew — he heard — what she was thinking: If I were Szgany, or he were Thyre, we would be lovers. He would lie in my arms and I would feel him pulsing within me. And I would stroke his back, while my thighs squeezed him for his juice.

Telepathy, or… did she do it deliberately? No, never the last, for she was Thyre and it would be unseemly. And now, as Atwei's thoughts continued, she too was pensive. But Nathan is right: we are different. And I must love him as if he were my brother.

Then… his look must be curious, wondering; she noticed it and quickly looked away. In order to save her embarrassment, he immediately acted as if nothing had happened, as if he knew nothing. In any case her mind was covered now; she had drawn a blanket over it, and he must assume that she suspected. But at the same time, suddenly, there came a second flash of inspired understanding as a riddle was solved. From the beginning he'd wondered how the Thyre, the living Thyre, knew and understood his tongue so well. And now he knew the answer: When Nathan talked to the Thyre dead it was in deadspeak, but behind their mental voices and pictures he'd always sensed echoes of their spoken tongue, too. And now he saw how easy it was for a telepath to be a linguist. When thoughts are backed up by the echoes of words, a language is quickly learned. That was how it worked for the living Thyre: they had not stolen the Traveller language from his mind, not directly (they had always traded with the Szgany and so knew something of his tongue from the first). No, they'd not stolen it but read it in his expressions, seen it in his eyes, and — despite certain taboos and 'unspoken rules' — heard it in the echoes of his thoughts!

And he knew, too, why suddenly he understood large parts of the Thyre tongue when he heard it spoken all around him — because he had learned it the same way! And Atwei was right: he would be a telepath, in time.

But all of this coming at once… it was a shock, a revelation to Nathan! Especially Atwei's feelings for him. And it was that more than anything else — the way she felt about him — which served to convince him that indeed the time had come to move on, while yet she thought of him as a brother…

In the Cavern of Long Dreams, alone with the mummied dead and sharing their thoughts, Nathan spoke to Ethloi the Elder, who knew numbers. They were firm friends from the moment he mentioned Shaeken's name, for in life Ethloi and Shaeken had been colleagues.

How may I help you? Ethloi was eager to assist in any way he could.

'I have dreams,' Nathan told him. 'I dream of numbers. I have always thought they had meaning, and so did Shaeken. You are the expert, or so I'm told. Perhaps you can fathom them.'

An expert in maths? Is there such a thing? Ethloi seemed vague on the subject. Shaeken required maths to calculate the numbers of cogs in his wheels, it's true, but his was a practical application. I was able, through trial and error, to help him somewhat. Not a lot. As for me: I only know that like yourself, I too have dreamed of numbers, in death as in life. They are some of the several things I continue to explore, but not in depth. For since all such knowledge is useless fno one may confirm or deny my findings, because no one understands them), how may I determine if the things I know have value? There is no source of reference. And as for helping you… we do not even know that Szgany and Thyre numbers are the same. Explain to me your system.

The Szgany system?'

Yes.

'Do you mean, how do we count? But surely all creatures count the same?'

Not so. A bird has only two numbers: the number One and a number larger than One. If it has an egg in its nest it has an egg. If it has two eggs, three, or four, it has more than one. So how do the Szgany count?

'We count in fives, the number of fingers on a hand,' Nathan told him. 'We make gates,' (he showed the other a picture), 'like so:'

I, II, III, III The Thyre have the same system, Ethloi replied, but as for me, I count in Tens! The picture he displayed to Nathan's mind was of two gates struck through.

Nathan frowned. 'But that is simply a count of the fingers on two hands. Is there a difference?'

Oh, yes, the other answered. The difference is simplicity! Now look:

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20.

The numbers he showed to Nathan were not these but symbols of his own, which had these values. Nathan studied them a while — sufficient that he understood that the last of these numbers was the equivalent of four gates — and shook his head. 'A different shape for every number? Simplicity? But this seems to me a complicated thing.'

Ethloi was frustrated (a great many mathematicians are), and sighed. But in a moment: Now tell me, he said, how do you divide?

'Divide?'

How many of these: I I, are there in this.'J.-H'T + I?

'I I I,' Nathan answered at once.

And how many of these: J-H" T in this: III?

Again Nathan frowned. 'There are only parts,' he shrugged.

And again Ethloi sighed. As I supposed: you cannot divide.

It was Nathan's turn to be frustrated, and: 'I know enough to divide a large orange between friends,' he blurted. 'Because it has segments!'

Yes (the nod of a wise although incorporeal head), and so does my system. Infinitesimally small segments, and infinitely large numbers. Just as I count upwards in tens, so I may count down into the single unit. Into tenths, and tenths of tenths! But listen, about your orange: what if it has eight segments and there are only six friends?

Then two of them are lucky!' Nathan's thoughts were sour now, because it was beyond him. Already he was tired of this.

Ethloi felt it in him and shook his head. Numbers are not easy, Nathan. Oh, I could show you a great many — and a great many tricks to play with them, too — but without an explanation they are only symbols. Such knowledge won't come instantly but must be learned. And somehow I don't think you will make a good pupil.

'Show me some more numbers anyway,' Nathan begged him. 'So that I may at least consider them.'

Ethloi did as Nathan requested and sent his calculations rolling across the screen of the youth's mind. Decimals, fractions; a little basic algebra and trigonometry; calculations to determine the size of the world, the distance to the moon, the sun, and the stars. It was impressive, but it wasn't shocking. Nathan might not understand it, but he knew it for pretty rudimentary stuff compared with some of the things he had seen.

It did have something of an effect upon him, however; for as if conjured by this lesser display, now he felt the numbers vortex churning within his mind like some incredible mathematical dust-devil, just waiting to blast these intruding calculi to infinity. Ethloi detected nothing of the latter through his effort of mental projection, but he did note the Necroscope's unguarded thoughts: his apparent lack of regard for the display. And the images he transmitted to the screen of Nathan's mind were shut off at once.

Very welJ, Ethloi growled then, now Jet's see what numbers you have dreamed.

'Usually they come to me when I'm asleep,' Nathan told him. 'But my time here grows short. And when you produced your numbers for me, I… I felt my own inside of me, almost as if they waited to be summoned.' He closed his eyes. 'Perhaps I can call them up.'

What happened then was… swift as thought! The numbers vortex seethed with power; it sucked mutating calculations into its core as quickly as they formed on the rim; incredible metaphysical equations were fired in bursts from its rotating wall, like shooting stars in a meteorite shower! Until: Shut it off! Ethloi groaned.

Nathan did so, opened his eyes, said: That is what I have dreamed.' He took no pride in it; he only wanted to understand it, desperately. And Ethloi read that in his mind, too.

But how can you have such a thing, without understanding it? His question was in the form of an awed whisper.

'Just as I have feelings,' Nathan answered, 'in my heart and in my head, without understanding them.'

Ethloi nodded slowly, and said, Aye, and perhaps you have answered your own question. For as telepathy is in the Thyre — come down through the bJood of Gutawei the Seer, the First Remembered, and spread by his children, and theirs, throughout all the Thyre — so the numbers vortex is in you. It seems as much a part of you as your blue eyes and yellow hair. And spawned in some awesome ancestor, it came down to you the same way as they did!

'I inherited it?' This was much the same as Rogei had told him. 'But from whom? Not my father for he was an ordinary man.'

Then from that same ancestor who gave you your deadspeak, Ethloi answered.

'But my deadspeak is a talent while this… is a curse!' Nathan shook his head. 'It plagues me! I can't fathom it!'

Ethloi was obliged to agree. Not a/1 inherited things are for the good, it's true. In me it was my father's poor hearing, which turned me deaf in the end, much as he was deaf before me. A small trouble: I had my telepathy.

The numbers vortex baffles you then?' Nathan was disappointed. 'You don't know what it does?'

What it does? Numbers are, Nathan. They don't necessarily do things. And yet… I sensed something behind it, yes. What it was, I can't say. Perhaps the vortex is a key.

'A key? To what?'

To a door, or to many doors. I sensed them there, in your mind. Doors to far, far places — even to far times! — all of which lie in the swirl of the vortex.

'But first I must understand the numbers?'

And control them! Ethloi nodded. When you can bring them to heel, like a hunting dog — show them ordered on the screen of your mind, as I showed you my puny figures — then the key will be yours.

Nathan was silent for long moments. Everything Ethloi had said was much as he'd long suspected. The numbers vortex hid a key which he must find. And then he must find the door in which to turn it. But as yet he was like a babe in arms who wanted to run before he could walk.

Ethloi remained silent, waiting.

And finally Nathan sighed and said, 'Perhaps you should show me some more numbers, and explain to me your system. I'll probably make a poor pupil, as you rightly said, but who knows? Something might sink in. Anyway, I have to start somewhere.'

He stayed for an hour until, head reeling, he could take no more…

Nathan slept one more time, ate a strangely tasteless, silent meal with Atwei, then told the elders he was leaving. They came down to the river route to see him off. Quatias, who was still spry, volunteered to go with him to the next colony just eight miles away. But in a garden of yellow flowers, where hazy sunlight fell dappled through leaf and vine, he begged a moment's privacy with Atwei. She gave him a slender silver chain and a locket, which he opened. Inside, a tight coil of jet black hair. 'It is a custom of the Thyre,' she told him. 'A secret thing which siblings do when they are parted.'

He drew her to him and kissed her forehead. 'And this is how a Szgany brother parts from his sister.' Then he hung the locket round his neck and said, Til never forget you, and I thank you for this lock of hair from your head.'

'My head?' she said, lifting a coarse eyebrow. 'Ah, no, for that would be unseemly!'

He raised his own eyebrows in a frown, looked at Atwei again, then at the locket, finally shook his head and smiled. The Thyre and their strange and 'secret' ways, their 'secret' things! Then, while she remained standing there, he went and said his farewells to the elders…

'You waste your time with that one,' Brad Berea spoke gruffly to his daughter, Glina. 'He can fish, fetch and carry, hit a bird in flight, and eat — oh, he can eat! — but make sense? You ask too much of him. He spoke to me only once, to tell me he was the Lord Nestor: but what sort of a "Lord", I ask you? Since when, nothing.'

To be kind to her, Glina was only very homely. And Nestor, man or Lord or whatever, was a handsome specimen. He was a natural hunter, too, and upon a time had doubtless been a valuable member of a Traveller band, or citizen of some Szgany township. But now: Brad had seen more activity, more urgency, understanding, intelligence, in the geckoes which inhabited the rafters and chased flies when the sun fell hot on the roof. They, too, were hunters, but they didn't need to be told how to do it! It was instinct in them. But this one — hah! — it surprised Brad he knew enough to wake up after sleeping! Beggars can't be choosers, however, and Glina would lure him to her bed if she could. And what then, Brad wondered? Idiots in the camp? Better perhaps if he'd left Nestor in the river to drown.

'What happened to him, do you think?' Glina glanced at her father across the smoky room, where he took a taper from the fire to light the wick of the first lamp of evening. The fire would be allowed to die down now, as night came on. For if not its smoke, going up through the quiet forest into the air, would be like a beacon to… well, to anything which might pass this way, overhead. But the cabin in the trees was warm and a lamp was enough. With blankets at the open windows, to keep the light in and the night air out, the Bereas were safe and snug.

'Happened to him?' Brad grunted. 'If you'll just feel the back of his head, above his right ear, you'll know well enough what happened to him. He received one hell of a clout from something or other, a blow that very nearly caved in his skull! The bone has knitted now but it's left a fat, hard knob just under the skin, and probably on the inside, too. Also, he was shot and lost a deal of blood. The scars are clear enough in his side. Finally, he fell or was tossed into the river, and very nearly drowned. And all of this occurring about the time of the first vampire attacks on Settlement and Twin Fords. I didn't know about those when I dragged him out of the water, else I mightn't have been in such a hurry. What? Why, for all I knew he could have been a victim of the Wamphyri! But if so, well, it would have showed before now. So that's what happened to him. All in all, he's a simpleton with a damaged brain, and only his natural instincts seem in order — some of them, anyway. But even they might be a bit askew, else he'd know for sure you were after his parts!'

'Brad Berea?' His wife's voice came from the curtained platform which was their bed under the rafters. 'Come to bed and leave the young ones be.' After a hard day she'd retired early; but she would be up early, too, in the first hours of true night. It was as well to be awake in those most dangerous of hours, when the sun was down and the stars bright over the barrier range, and the vampires thirsty after their long sleep.

'Huh!' Brad grunted, and thought: Aye, go and do your duty, Brad my son.

But in fact Irma was a good woman and had stood by him uncomplainingly for twenty years and more, living a solitary existence out here in the forest. Brad had been a loner when she ran away from her Szgany band to be with him, and he was a loner still. A trip into Twin Fords every so often; it was the only pleasure Irma ever had out of life; that and Brad's love, and the knowledge that he would look after herself and their daughter all his days. In days like these, it was more than enough. As for Twin Fords: nothing there now but ruins, empty streets, and doors slamming in the wind like shouts of denial. And so no reason to visit.

'And you two?' The bearded Brad looked at Glina and Nestor sitting by the open door. 'Will you sit up again all night, girl? To be with that one? A pointless exercise! For I wonder: does he sit and think? Or does he just sit?' He took off his jacket and went to the foot of the ladder-like stairs climbing to his bed.

Glina looked at Nestor, whose eyes followed Brad where he began to climb. There wasn't much in those eyes, but they did have soul. Brad was hard-voiced, but he was soft-hearted, too, and Glina believed Nestor knew it. 'I'll sit and talk to him a while,' she said. 'I think he knows what I'm saying, but it doesn't mean much to him, that's all. Maybe we'll walk down to the river under the stars. Nestor likes that.'

Brad thought: Oh, and what else does he like? 'What, the strong, silent type, is he?' He called down, grinning despite himself. He went through the curtains to take off his clothes, and hung them on pegs in the rafters. Shortly he was in bed.

Down below, Glina listened a while to the creaking of her father settling himself, the low, murmuring voice of her mother cautioning him to: 'Shhh! Be quiet… the young 'uns… here, let me.' And then the rhythmic sounds of their sex. Little privacy in a timbered cabin.

Then Nestor's arm went around her waist, and his hand up under her blouse, to squeeze her large breasts. It was an automatic response to being left alone with her; something which he had learned to expect, to enjoy; something which Glina had taught him. 'Yes, yes,' she breathed in his ear, stroking him through his trousers with her fingertips. 'But not here.' And he followed her out of the open door and into the night.

The night wasn't yet cold; they walked slowly at first in bright starlight, then more hurriedly, finally breathing heavily, almost panting along a well-worn path to the river. And on the sand and shingle bank they threw off their clothes and fell on top of them, and she guided him jerking into her flesh. She knew how it would be but surrendered to it, as she had since the first time. But since Glina had been the one to lead him on right from the start, she could hardly complain. And he was a man, and filling her he filled the loneliness, too.

The first time…

That had been when he was back on his feet again, five or maybe six sunups after her father had rescued him from the river. Until then Glina had washed and tended his wounds, fed him, cared for Nestor generally. And she'd rocked him in her arms when, in a fever, he'd called out strange names, shouted his passion at unknown persons and wept bitterly over obscure grievances and disappointments. Despite what Brad Berea said about him now, then there had been fire in Nestor.

But as the fever went out of him so the silence entered, and for a while his eyes had been empty.

In a little while he'd been strong and made no complaint about work. He hunted with a crossbow, fished, used an axe and carried wood and water well enough. Twice a week, when he went to bathe in the river, Glina spied on him. He was big and stirred her inside.

Once, three years ago when she was sixteen, the Bereas had gone into Twin Fords. Brad required new tools; her mother wanted a new dress, pots, pans; Glina just wanted to see and be seen. Then some boy might make inquiries, and find his way to the cabin to see her. Forlorn hope, for even then she had known she was homely: her brown, lustreless hair, nose just a little too sharp, heavy buttocks. She'd been to Twin Fords as a child, often, and had seen the many pretty girls there.

That time when she was sixteen, some young couple had got married. There'd been a party, music, laughter, and in the evening there would be drinking and dancing. An old friend of her father's had said they could stay the night. Well, Brad Berea knew how to drink and dance, and he had seen how Irma needed it. It seemed only fair.

But while Brad and Irma whirled to the wild music, Glina was simply… whirled away! A Gypsy lad shared his wine with her, and walked her behind a tree where the branches came down low. Now, she couldn't even remember how he'd looked. But then he had been the handsomest boy in town, and unlike Nestor he'd known exactly what to do. His mouth had sucked the breath from her lungs, and lifting her skirts he'd slipped into her slick as an eel. Afterwards… he was gone as quick as he came. No one had known but Glina — oh, and the boy, of course — but she'd dreamed of him almost every night since, right up until Nestor came. And then she'd dreamed of Nestor.

One day when her father was off hunting, and her mother washed clothes and stored vegetables, Glina had finished her tasks about the cabin and gone down to the river where Nestor was fishing. She deliberately wore a short dress and a blouse buttoned to the waist. And as soon as she was out of sight of the cabin, she'd quickly unbuttoned the top of her blouse to show the inner curve of her soft breasts.

Sitting down beside Nestor, she'd made a great play of lifting her dress so that her thighs would show, and talking to him she'd held his face towards her and leaned forward, tempting his eyes to her cleavage. And he had looked at her. There had been something in his eyes at least, even if she couldn't say what. But despite that while she talked to him she leaned her hand on his thigh and squeezed it, always when she stopped speaking and relaxed, his attention would return to the river and his line.

Committed, finally Glina had stripped naked, waded into the water, and bathed there right in front of him. He wasn't likely to tell anyone, after all. No longer able to fish, Nestor had watched her; and as she came out of the river gleaming wet, breasts lolling, at last he had stood up. Then… she'd definitely seen something in his eyes, and a little more than something in his hand.

Hurrying him out of his clothes, she had kissed him all over that body she'd so cared for, and guided his hand to her aching flesh while she sucked on his rod. And Nestor: he might be damaged in his mind, but his body was whole; it wasn't long before the fire in his loins sparked faint, fleeting, disjointed memories in his head. And then…

… It had been as it was now, as it had been ever since.

In the sun-dappled shade of a willow, driving into her as if to split her, Nestor's face had been a mask of — what? — hatred? Oh, he had wanted her body, desperately desired to pour all of his angers, his frustrations into her, and so empty himself of them for a little while at least. But it wasn't love or even lust that he felt. No, for if anything Nestor took revenge against something which even he had forgotten, something which he had never understood in the first place.

His hands had crushed her breasts, which were scarcely hurt but yielded to the pain, the pleasure, and his mouth had crushed her mouth. And Nestor had moaned as he came again and again into her, and she felt the burn of his hot spray deep in her core. He had moaned a name — Minha? Minya? — Misha! And it was like a curse coughed from his damp slack mouth as his right hand left her breasts to tighten on Glina's throat.

But Glina was no weak little thing to be throttled. Now as then, she took his hair, yanked back his head, grasped him with her sex and sucked the last drop of loathing out of him; until he fell exhausted on his side, and rolled over on to his back. And then she hugged him, and sobbed while she worked his shrivelling flesh in her hand. She sobbed for herself, because she wasn't this Misha who had hurt him so much — whom he must have loved — and for Nestor himself, because he had been hurt so much…

And so Glina loved him, and was in turn 'loved'.

Later she used him, sat on him where her hands had brought him back to life. But because his eyes were dull again and his body's responses simply that, responses, she took cold pleasure in it…

On their way back to the cabin, suddenly Nestor paused and his face turned up to the sky. He sniffed — an animal sound — and his dark eyes flashed starshine. A

moment later and Glina felt, sensed, heard it too. And gasped!

The moon was floating low over the distant barrier range. But there was more than moon and stars in the sky. Small dark shadows flitted high overhead; they blotted out the starlight and passed on. Then larger, more sinister manta shapes came gliding behind, while bringing up the rear -

— Something pulsed and throbbed, faint at first but growing louder.

'Down!' Glina whispered, dragging Nestor to his knees in a clump of night damp bushes. And a pair of Wamphyri warriors went spurting and pulsing overhead, their chitin armour tinged blue in the glitter of the stars.

A breeze had come up; it formed the blue-grey exhaust gases of the warriors into a veil across the sky; it fell on the forest in an acrid stench of something dead and crawling with maggots. Glina held her breath, but Nestor breathed deep. And suddenly… he was alert! Brushing her hand away, he stood up, came slowly erect as the shapes of nightmare passed from view. He saw the sentient, liquid eyes of the warriors swivelling and scanning in their underbellies, and never knew how lucky he was that they didn't scan him. The hunting party sped off into the deepening night, heading north and slightly west.

And: 'Wamphyri!' Glina breathed, when they had gone.

Wamphyri.' The word burned like cold fire.

Nestor looked at her. He was pale; there was recognition, a question in his eyes. His mouth twitched a little, and spoke at last. 'Wamphyri?'

'Shhh!' she cautioned, despite that they had gone.

Seconds passed and he spoke again, urgently. 'Wamphyri?'

Brad Berea came rushing along the path from the cabin. He was buttoning his jacket, his breath forming plumes in the suddenly cold air. 'Nestor… and Glina!' He brushed Nestor aside, fell on his daughter and hugged her. 'We heard them — their warriors — and I knew you were out here. But we're well hidden away in the trees and they passed us by, again…'

Nestor took his arm, and Brad looked at him in surprise. 'Eh?' he said. 'What's this? Life in the dummy? Has it scared some wits into him, then?'

'Again?' said Nestor. 'They've passed us by, again?'

'A yellow mocklark!' Brad grunted. 'He repeats my words like a bird, without understanding a one of them!'

'Wamphyri!' Nestor suddenly shouted, and grabbed Brad by the throat. But Brad was strong, and now that the danger was past he was also angry. He tripped Nestor and knocked him flying into the bushes.

'Father!' Glina cried. 'He was only frightened!' But she wondered… Nestor's eyes had been so strange watching those monsters fly overhead.. she had sensed his fascination.

Nestor stood up and she took his arm. 'Aye, look after him,' her father grunted, turning back toward the cabin. Tor if he goes for me again you'll be tending his cracked skull a second time!'

As he faded into the darkness, Nestor whispered: 'Again? Have they passed… before?'

'When you were sick,' she told him. 'It was like tonight, just an hour or so after the sun was down. They had been doing some early hunting. We saw them heading home again, toward the Northstar, which shines on Starside's last aerie.'

The Northstar!' he said, turning his head unerringly in that direction, and gazing at the evilly glittering star, frozen like a chunk of ice over the barrier range. 'Heading home. The Wamphyri…'

'Come on,' she said, almost dragging him along the path. 'Let's get in.'

But not far from the cabin she pushed him against a tree and felt to see if there was life in him yet. There was still time, barely. Sometimes, even though she'd had him more than once, he would be ready; but not tonight. And as she took his hand again and led him back to the cabin, still his eyes were fixed on the low silhouette of the mountains, and the star of ill-omen which lit them. And in Nestor's mind, all unheard: Home — the Northstar-the last aerie — the Wamphyri! Compared to which, the lure of Glina's body was nothing…

He left the cabin silently, in the long night. And when Glina woke up to answer a call of nature she saw his bed, empty.

Such a howling then! It woke up the two in the loft. Her father came down and told her: 'What, gone? But he'll probably be back… if not, good riddance! Only one master here, Glina, and I don't much care for a dog that bites his master's hand.'

Then, seeing that Nestor had taken a crossbow and knife, he cursed him long and loud. But what the hell: it wasn't his good crossbow. And certainly the idiot would need some protection, out there on his own in the night.

In a while Brad went back to bed, and even through Glina's sobbing he slept like a baby…

Lured irresistibly by the Northstar, Nestor travelled through the night-dark woods. Where streams were shallow he waded them, and where gullies looked dangerous he skirted around. But always his point of reference was the ice-chip star glittering cold on the barrier mountains. Beyond those mountains lay Starside, the last aerie, home of the Wamphyri. And now that he had seen them again, soaring dark against the night, at last everything had seemed to come together.

Nestor knew he'd been there before; he couldn't remember the circumstances, but he had been there. Perhaps Starside was his source, his origin. Certainly it was his destiny. Maybe he was an outcast, a changeling freak banished from his own kind to make his way as best he might in the world. Well, and now he was on his way back again.

As for Sunside: He had enemies here; he must be careful along the way; men had pursued him, hurt him, would kill him if they could! He had scars to prove it. And he remembered… things. All of his time with the Bereas, he had remembered them but could not, dared not, speak of them. Once, without thinking, he had told Brad Berea, 'I am the Lord Nestor.' But after that he'd said no more. For like his many unfocused thoughts and memories, his tongue was a traitor; it would betray him; there had been enough of betrayals already.

Once, he had a friend, a so-called 'brother', a child who played with him when he himself was a child. But he had been a traitor whose cheating thoughts were hidden behind a screen of numbers, which he'd used like a plague to torment Nestor, even in his dreams. Now: that one was his greatest enemy!

Once, Nestor had loved a girl, who did not love him back. She, too, was treacherous. But like it or not she would 'love' him one day. And she would die loving him. It was his vow.

Once, he had had a flyer. He remembered its fate: boiling away into rottenness in the hills. He also remembered taking a bolt in his side; and the river whose cold caresses had nearly drowned him; and Glina, whose warm caresses had given him his manhood. If she had known who and what he was… perhaps she would not have been so eager. Not even the homely Glina.

I am the Lord Nestor, of the Wamphyri!

But a Lord in exile, stripped of his powers, who was now returning home…

He trekked through all the hours of night, effortlessly. Given purpose, he was tireless. But there would be time enough for sleep in the daylight, before moving on again towards his Starside destination. And always the Northstar tugging at him, and the miles flying under his feet.

He let instinct guide him. Only set his sights on that bright blue ice-shard in the sky, and let his body take over.. the idea itself would do the rest. The hours sped by to match the miles; eventually his footsteps faltered; his body was not as tireless as he'd thought.

He drank from a stream, washed the grit of the forest from his eyes, sat down with his back to a tree. Almost without knowing it he slept, and woke up shivering, lost, wondering where he was. But the Northstar was there, and the idea lived again. As he got his limbs in motion, so his hot blood pounded and soon he was warm.

He came upon an encampment of Szgany. There were guards out, with at least one wolf. No doubt alerted by their watchdog, the men heard him, called out a password; Nestor made no answer but hurried on. They released their animal, which came bounding in his tracks and found him at once. He turned snarling, aimed his bolt right down its throat. But… the wolf wagged its tail, came sniffing, jumped up to lick his face! Dimly then, Nestor remembered how he and… he and… one other (someone close? But he had no one who was close!) had had a way with canines. As a child, wild dogs had come out of the woods to play with him; domesticated wolves, 'guard dogs' like this one, had permitted the very roughest of games without turning on him; wild wolves in the hills had moved cautiously, but without animosity, out of his path.

He'd never made anything of it. Nor did he now. Indeed, he saw the wolf's friendliness as a stupid mistake. He wasn't Szgany. He was the Lord Nestor! But he was one and they were many, and they would be smarter than their tame wolf.

He moved on…

In the night he wasted a deal of time: sleeping, trekking around obstacles, getting mired in this or that bog. But seen through breaks in the trees, black against the dark-blue sky and ice-blue stars, the mountains drew ever closer. Likewise the dawn.

Where the forest thinned out and grew into foothills he rested a while, gazed out over Sunside and saw the first pale blush of light on the horizon. Hours yet to the true dawn, and more to go to sunup, but this was the start of it. Nestor had no fear of the sun: it was part of his freakishness, that the sun had no power over him. His flyer had not been so fortunate. That.. puzzled him, but it was so.

He seemed to remember a pass through the mountains. But where would that lie? To the east or to the west? He thought east. But as he made to follow an old and half-familiar trail through the foothills -

— A sound, even movement up ahead! Grey shadows in the pre-dawn dusk, which was as yet much closer to night than day. Nestor loped silently through a ground mist swirling round his ankles like a disturbed shroud. On his right hand, the forest, and on his left the foothills rising towards the barrier range. But up there where the way was steep: something huge, grey and weird, projecting over the rim of a bluff, nodding and swaying against the dark-blue sky. It scanned the night with dull, disinterested eyes in a diamond-shaped head at the end of a long, tapering neck. An unmistakable design: a flyer! Ideally situated for launching, it waited there. Which could mean only one thing: that somewhere down here its vampire master, a Lord or lieutenant of the Wamphyri, was even now abroad in the night!

Night for the moment, aye, but dawn was fast approaching. Whoever was the beast's keeper, he'd have to be back soon. If he was not already here…

Desiring to see without being seen, to know without being known, Nestor went more quietly yet. He moved like a cat along the trail, and keeping to the darkest shadows passed under the flyer in its launch site. But in a while, higher up the slope and vague in the deceptive light, he saw a second creature. So, two of the flying beasts, and apparently no one in attendance. It could only be a small hunting party.

Though it seemed unlikely that such dull, stupid creatures would be used as observers, still Nestor took no chances but kept himself hidden anyway. A further fifty paces, and.. what was that down there, where an outcrop of boulders tumbled to meet the trees? A fire?

It was a fire, flickering red and yellow in the lee of boulders; smoke rising in a grey spiral, carrying a whiff of roasting — what, rabbit? — to Nestor's nostrils and making his mouth water. And… was that a figure hunkered down, as if turning a spit? Some Szgany loner, fixing himself an early breakfast? It was surely so; for the Wamphyri weren't keen on roasted meat. And they weren't much for rabbits, either! But didn't this idiot know there were vampires about, two of them at least; or three, if Nestor included himself?

He glanced back over his shoulder. The pre-dawn mist was rising, obscuring the trail. No sign of the creatures perched on the hillside now; they were there, of course, but had disappeared utterly in mist and gloom. This fool at his fire was surely unaware of them. But the Wamphyri must return soon. And Nestor had no doubt but that they would be aware of him!

The man had food; Nestor was hungry; he could warn him, share his breakfast. And no treachery to the Wamphyri, his own kind, in this. He was an outcast after all. And his appearance would fool this loner even as it had fooled Brad Berea. But in any case, best to take precautions.

Nestor's crossbow was ready, loaded. Taking care to avoid loose pebbles which might be dislodged, he climbed down boulder to boulder; while below him the fool at the fire coughed where he turned his spit, grunting and grumbling to himself as if he were the only man in the world! Nestor got close, very close, until suddenly the hunched figure fell silent and sniffed the air, looked up and began to turn his head.

The man would be armed; Nestor didn't want another bolt in him; he ducked down behind rocks, waited, gradually nerved himself to look out, even to cry out, and so warn the other of his presence. The mist was thickening, and it had a slimy feel to it. Nestor felt his flesh creeping as he looked out between a 'V in the rocks.

The loner was still there, crouched down. But -

— He was no longer alone!

Emerging from a dark copse to one side, and flowing like some swift and deadly shadow over the mist-wreathed ground, a second figure approached him. But there could be no mistaking this one — or his intentions. He was Wamphyri, and his mind was full of murder! Even in silhouette and little more than a dark blot, still his face was freakish; a jutting bulge of a head with a stunted, vibrating tentacle extended towards his victim.

Nestor scarcely required it, but as if to finally prove this creature's nature it glanced at him — the merest glance — where it sped silent as smoke to its target. Its eyes were red as coals, burning in the hideously misshapen, quivering mask of its face!

Unable to contain himself — jerking with an involuntary, spastic movement — Nestor stood up, and a pebble was squeezed out from beneath his sandal! The man at the fire heard it clattering in the rocks; he swivelled on his heel, came to his feet in one smoothly flowing movement. But in so doing he turned his back on the thing bearing down upon him!

Without conscious thought — all instinct — Nestor cried out a warning, aimed his crossbow, discharged the weapon at the vampire. It seemed he knew, again by instinct, where his loyalties lay. He reacted as a Traveller, Szgany, and not the changeling that he thought he was. Or perhaps it wasn't as complex as that. Maybe it was simply that when the tentacle-faced monster had looked at him with its scarlet eyes, Nestor had known that he was next!

Almost within striking distance of his intended victim, the vampire Lord was hit in the neck, sent staggering. And as Nestor lost his footing and came sliding over the dome of the last great boulder to crash down on his back, so the would-be 'victim' snatched up a brand and turned towards his attacker. Nestor lay there on his back, winded, gaping at the two. For now in the full firelight he could clearly see his mistake: that both of these creatures were Wamphyri!

II The Wamphyri Lords Wran (the Rage) Killglance and Vasagi the Suck glared at each other red-eyed across Nestor where he lay on his back, winded. They ignored him; they would not let him distract them from their quarrel, their duel, their mutual hatred. Now that he had shot his bolt he was nothing to them anyway. But from Nestor's point of view, they were awesome, huge — and hugely malevolent.

Treacherous bastard!' Wran snarled at Vasagi, waving his sputtering brand in the other's hideous face and kicking Nestor out of the way. 'So, you thought to come upon me under cover of this fool's blundering approach, eh? What, and did you think it likely I'd mistake his clatter for your own oily slither?' (In point of fact he had done just that.)

Vasagi's wet, glistening siphon was like the piston shaft of some alien penis; it made an almost sexual, sucking sound as it slid in and out of its sheath in the tip of his defensively mobile trunk or tentacle. He tugged at Nestor's bolt, which had penetrated the base of his thick, corded neck above his left shoulder and emerged at the back, having missed the spinal column by a hair's-breadth. He made no answer that Nestor could hear, but Wran the Rage heard it well enough: Killglance, you spotted dog! OnJy good fortune and this Szgany scum together saved you from my single, clean, killing thrust. So now you face my gauntlet — before I ram my probe deep in your spine, to drain your cringing leech.'

He was more voluble than was his wont; it was bluff and Wran knew it; Vasagi dared not let him see the true colour of his secret thoughts. His wound was not serious: an inconvenience, at worst. But even a bee sting can swing the balance of a fight, and the youth's bolt was more than a bee sting. Wran knew that the Suck was off balance, so why prolong it?

Holding the blazing firebrand awkwardly in his left hand, he flicked back his cloak from his right side and so displayed his gauntlet. It glittered red and yellow in the firelight as he flexed his hand within its metal sheath. Vasagi feinted to the left, the right; his movements were quicksilver; even with the ironwood bolt skewering his neck at an angle from side to back, still he was no mean opponent.

Still sprawling on his back but no longer winded, Nestor attempted to scramble away from the two. But the Suck was moving in the same direction. As Vasagi made a lunge at Wran, his feet got tangled in Nestor's threshing legs. That was the opening Wran needed. While Vasagi stumbled he moved in, hurled his torch into the Suck's writhing face and shrinking eyes, grasping his facial anomaly behind the wad of muscle which propelled its siphon. And with Vasagi's gauntlet tearing his back open to the ribs, Wran aimed a blow at his enemy's proboscis.

Wran's mind telegraphed his grisly intention; Vasagi saw it coming; he had no answer except to scream a desperate mental denial: Nooooo!

Such was the force of the Suck's telepathic terror that even Nestor heard it. With Harry Keogh's blood running in his veins, and with his own share of his brother's as yet undeveloped mentalist talent, Vasagi's mind-shriek got through to him and froze him to the marrow. Somehow he lurched upright, but incapable of flight he simply fell back against the outcrop.

While Vasagi had somehow avoided his enemy's first blow, still Wran had not relinquished his hold on the Suck's proboscis. Now the Rage flexed his metal-clad hand in a certain way, and in the moment before he struck a razor spine like the curved frill on a lizard's back sprang erect from his gauntlet's knuckles to Wran's wrist. And Nestor saw the rest of it as a blur of bloody motion.

Wran's gauntlet sliced into the Suck's shuddering snout and cut it half-way through, and with a tearing, sawing, snatching action, Wran quickly completed the job. Then he stepped back a pace to toss the severed trunk and its siphon tip hissing into the fire, and laughed at Vasagi where he staggered to and fro, clawing at his crimson face.

Despite Wran's own agony — the fact that the back of his cloak had been torn open, and bloody tatters of meat hung from his gouged ribs — he laughed! 'Ah, and what shall they call you now?' he crowed. 'Vasagi the Slobber?'

Vasagi's face spurted blood from the sleeve of raw flesh which had housed his probe. His pain was greater than Wran's, so much so that tears of agony started out of eyes half-blind from the other's torch-thrust. He held out his gauntlet before him, waving it to and fro like a blind man's stick. But there was no mercy in Wran the Rage. Still baying with laughter, he moved in and snatched up the blazing brand again. Vasagi turned to flee, stumbled blindly over sharp, jutting rocks, and went down.

Wran was on him in a flash; he leaped….ame down massively with both booted feet on Vasagi's outstretched gauntlet forearm. Bones snapped sickeningly, and even Vasagi managed a gurgling shriek — an actual sound — through the scarlet orifice which was his ruined face.

Nestor's mouth was dry as kindling. He glanced here and there in the oh-so-gradually brightening air, looked for his crossbow. It had tumbled with him from on high, gone clattering into the scree. He saw a dull gleam among the rocks and edged towards it, but yet continued to watch the now totally unequal fight.

Wran kicked at Vasagi's gauntlet hand until the weapon came loose, then booted it out of reach. Half-blind, siphon-severed, ungauntleted, and his arm flopping loosely, still the Suck tried to stumble to his feet. Every time he almost got up, Wran kicked his feet from under him again. Finally, close to exhaustion, Vasagi flopped and jerked on the ground. Then Wran went to one knee beside him, grasped the ironwood bolt in his neck, and twisted it until the other's writhing was almost a vibration of sheerest agony.

Nestor's trembling hand dragged his crossbow out from a crack in the rocks. He primed it two-handed, undipped the spare bolt from its housing under the tiller. And -

'Aye, load your weapon,' Wran's deep bass voice growled from only four or five swift paces away. 'Load it, and bring it here.' Nestor obeyed the first instruction, but as for the second: he aimed the crossbow at Wran. The other straightened up but kept a booted foot on the writhing Vasagi's neck. 'Well then,' he said, his scarlet gaze rapt on Nestor, 'and what are you waiting for? Shoot me, if you're sure you can hit my heart. But if you're not, best do as I say.'

Nestor found his voice. 'You… are Wamphyri!'

Wran nodded. 'And you're a fool! But a fool who probably saved my life. Who saved me a deal of trouble, anyway. I owe you for that. But only fire that bolt into me, I'll owe you a great deal more. And I'll pay you back bit by bit, until your screams ring out so loud as to bring down the avalanches! Now then, boy. Don't make me wait but put your bolt in this loathsome thing's heart.' He took his foot off the other's neck and Vasagi sat up.

Nestor looked at him, and was more frightened of him now than he'd been before… such a hideous, pitiful sight… it would be a mercy to kill him. He had only one bolt. He looked at the ugly, broken, bleeding Vasagi, and at Wran. The latter was more the man; he was — what, handsome? Handsomely dressed, anyway. He looked every bit the vampire Lord that Nestor had always pretended, imagined, and now believed himself to be.

'Hah/' Wran snorted. 'No guts for it, eh? But when I give orders, I expect my thralls to jump!'

Thrall?' Nestor growled back. 'I… am the Lord Nestor!'

'Eh?' Wran frowned, stepped away from Vasagi, took a pace towards Nestor. 'You're what? A Lord, did you say?' Behind him, Vasagi took up a jagged rock in his left hand, came flowing to his feet.

Nestor yelled, 'Look out!' And Wran hunched his shoulders, ducked down, stepped aside. An instant later, Nestor's bolt was sent thrumming through the air to bury itself to the flight in Vasagi's already scarlet tunic. Except this time when the Suck was knocked down, he stayed down…

The bolt had struck close enough to Vasagi's heart to paralyse him. With Nestor's aid, Wran dragged him by the legs, flopping, away from the rocks and up the slope to a place where the hard earth faced squarely south. There he pegged him out face-down, to await the rising sun.

'Of course, we shall be long gone from here by then,'

Wran said. 'A pity, for I fancy I'd relish the Suck's screams as the sun reduces him to so much smoulder!'

'His screams?' Nestor looked in horror at the pegged-out thing. 'But how can he scream?'

'With his mind,' Wran explained. And Nestor remembered how he had 'heard' Vasagi's shriek of denial as Wran went to sever his proboscis.

'Ah!' he said.

Wran turned his scarlet gaze upon him and snorted. 'Huh! You don't know too much for a "Lord", do you?' He grinned, in his way. 'And just what sort of a "Lord" are you, anyway?'

'An outcast,' Nestor lifted his chin. 'Cast out of Starside. And now I'm on my way back.'

'Really!' the other nodded, fingered his wen soberly. The lad amused him. 'Cast out, you say? For some heinous crime or other, perhaps? Against the Wamphyri?'

'I don't know,' Nestor shook his head, ran a hand through his hair, felt the plate of new bone where his scalp was thick and rough at the back. 'I don't… remember.' Wran looked deep into his dark eyes; they seemed dazed, and the mind behind them not entirely there. Obviously this one had survived some raid or other — barely! But he was well enough now, physically at least.

'So, you'd be a Lord of the Wamphyri, eh?' Wran nodded again. An amusing scheme was taking shape in his mind. How it would work out he didn't know, must wait and see. But as far as Vasagi the Suck was concerned, certainly it would give Wran the last and loudest laugh. 'Well, it's not everyone who gets to be a Lord,' he said. 'But in your case-maybe I can arrange it.' Then he glanced south and saw the pale stain blossoming on the horizon, and his red eyes narrowed at once. 'Except we must do it quickly.'

'Do what?' Nestor was innocent as a child. He started as Vasagi made a slobbering sound and blew red bubbles, and began to come awake.

Wran made no answer but his eyes were totally evil, menacing — inviting? — when he asked: 'Are you… hungry?' He glanced at Vasagi. 'Me, I'm hungry, and this one has a leech in him. If our roles were reversed, he'd do the same to me.'

Again Nestor felt prompted to ask, Do what? But he kept the question to himself and backed away. For Wran had gone to his knees, and his metamorphic face was less manlike now. His mouth was a gash that opened like a trapdoor, impossibly wide. Teeth grew visibly in that crimson hole, elongating, curving like white daggers from the ruptured ridges of his jaws. They were fangs, with eye teeth like knives; their 'blades' were long as Nestor's own knife, and overlapped Wran's trembling lower lip! His nose — dark and squat before, with large black nostrils — grew yet more convoluted, quivering, sensitive as a bat's. And his eyes seemed almost to drip blood.

'Aye, leave me now,' he coughed the words out, shooting Nestor a look that brooked no argument. 'But not too far. And when I call out for you, come at once.' His blunt fingers tore Vasagi's tunic open, and commenced to knead the ridge of his exposed spine.

Nestor left him, went stumbling back down to the trail, and along it to the dying embers of Wran's fire. The roasted meat smell was heavy in the air now. Some wild creature moved there, a fox or feral dog, scurrying at Nestor's approach. It grabbed up the spit and meat entire from where it lay toppled to one side, dropped the hot food and slunk into the shadows, returned in a moment to snatch up the meat again.

Nestor had not looked at Wran's roast before; but now, as it lay there smoking, and as the fox — it was a fox, yes — snapped it up a second time, he saw what it was. At least, he believed he saw what it was. And then he no longer wished to know what it was, except its shape was something his mind couldn't erase: the blackened form of a tiny Szgany infant! The 'bait' which Wran had used to alert Vasagi to his presence here and lure him to his doom.

'Nestor, attend me now!' Wran's shout drifted down to him through the thinning mist. Nestor looked up, saw how the dawn was advancing. Above the barrier range, the Northstar's glitter was much reduced. Ah, but as he saw that star of ill-omen the idea returned to burn as brightly as ever, and his horror shrank down. What, fear? Trembling? Trepidation? No, for this was his legacy. He was the Lord Nestor, and he was going home.

He returned to Wran and saw what he had done, what he was even now about: a nightmarish act or acts! But Nestor's sensitivities were severely blunted, reduced, even reversed. What would so recently have horrified him merely fascinated him now. These were things which he had somehow forgotten or been caused to forget, which he must now remember, re-learn, if he was to be successful in Starside. Perhaps his failure to appreciate such things in the first place was responsible for his current privations!

Wran saw his morbid fascination and nodded. 'Well, you're a rare one, I'll grant you that. I gave you the opportunity to run for it — it's almost dawn; I have to go; I would not have pursued you — but you're still here. You really do want to be Wamphyri.'

Nestor only half heard him, glanced at him, saw that his face and mouth were more nearly 'human' again, however bloody. But mainly he gazed at Vasagi: his back laid open to the naked bone, and something black — his leech? — writhing there, but feebly, like a dying snake of black muscle, half welded to his spine within his body. The black thing had been punctured and leaked crimson, the richest colour Nestor could imagine, whose shade matched precisely the blood on Wran's face and lips.

In a voice filled with wonder but little or no fear, finally Nestor asked: 'What caused you to fight? For plainly you are both Wamphyri.'

Wran laughed. 'Isn't that enough reason?' And then, more soberly: 'He insulted me.' (He shrugged.) 'Well, we insulted each other. Our rivalries were various and couldn't continue. We dwelled too close together and crossed each other's paths too often. When it came, the challenge was mutual and could only be resolved like this: one of us must die. But even so, we had no desire to entertain our "brothers" and our "sister" in Starside's last aerie. And so our duel would be a private thing and take place here, on Sunside. No rules except that we come on our own, with all the length and breadth of Sunside for a battleground, and the long night from sundown to sunup for duration.'

'What if he had not come to you?' Nestor's eyes stayed rapt upon the black thing's spastic movements where it gradually detached itself from Vasagi's spine.

Then there was always tomorrow night,' the other answered. 'But that was unlikely. For to live another night here meant living another day here. Which was the other proviso: that once we set out from Starside, we could not return until it was finished. Aye, and only one of us could go back. Anything else would be seen as — what? — half-hearted at best, cowardice at worst. But we were not cowards, the Suck and I, nor were we half-hearted.'

That… thing,' Nestor nodded towards the maimed, tortured, outstretched form of Vasagi, 'is coming out of him.'

'His leech?' Wran answered. 'Indeed it is! For it knows he is a loser. Perhaps it will have a better chance… elsewhere?' Grinning hideously, he cocked his head on one side.

'Elsewhere?' Nestor watched the thing's struggles as it emerged like a long, corrugated slug from Vasagi onto the hard earth. Blind, indeed eyeless, still its 'head' turned in Wran's direction as it sensed him there. And it lingered like that a moment, swaying this way and that as if it were exhausted and about to collapse. The thing was all of eighteen inches long, ridgy, shiny black and mottled green, and red from the Suck's spilled blood.

'A strong new host,' Wran's chuckle was a clotted gurgle, 'whose precious blood would save its life. Except I can't allow that, for there's far too much of Vasagi in it. So… give me your knife.'

Nestor handed over the knife, and as he moved so Vasagi's leech turned towards him. Wran had been appraised; he already had a leech; he'd been rejected as a possible host. But Nestor… had not. And with slow, painful contractions of its underbelly, it commenced to glide towards him.

But: 'Ah, no, my friend!' Wran cried. He fell on it, grasped its body with an iron hand, quick as a flash detached its six-inch 'head' and hurled it away, out over the misted trail. There was very little blood left in it to bleed, and very little strength. At first it flexed and whipped like a fish fresh from the river, but then in a moment lay still. Wran stood up from it and grunted: 'Now… watch!'

Nestor scarcely needed telling; he couldn't take his eyes off the thing, which had turned a sick, glistening grey. It lay on its back now, more slug-like than ever, its belly silvery in the rapidly improving light. Something like a blister formed in the slit which might be a reproductive organ, and Wran pointed, saying: 'Ah, the very thing! Newborn, it knows nothing. In its way, why, it's much like yourself, Nestor! Aye, Vasagi's egg is all instinct. See!'

The blister was now a small grey sphere no larger than a man's thumbnail, which detached itself from the parent body and slid down the thing's belly to the earth. Nestor saw that there was something mobile within it. He had watched tadpoles emerging from frog-spawn when he was a child; it was like that, but the casing of the egg was more like a film than a jelly. Suddenly it popped like a bubble, releasing its contents. The small, silvery sphere which emerged was frantic; covered with hundreds of flickering hairs, it skittered to and fro among the pebbles.

Wran said: 'Can you believe it? Can you understand, Nestor? For this tiny, harmless thing… is what you would be! It is Wamphyri!' He went to one knee again, reached out his hand to touch it — and the sphere ran along his finger on to his palm and spun there like a top. He held it out so that Nestor could see it more clearly: this whirling thing in his palm — which suddenly grew motionless! And:

'Ah!' Wran said. 'It would test me. Watch closely.'

Nestor moved closer, gaped; his eyes were wide and his jaw hung open. The egg put out a single red thorn which sank effortlessly into the horny flesh of Wran's hand. And it tested — it tasted — him! Then… the stinger was withdrawn in a moment, and the egg commenced spinning again.

'Ah, shame!' Wran cried. 'It rejects me! Only enter my body… it would be devoured in a moment, and knows it. But your body is an entirely different thing!' Wran stopped smiling; his eyes were suddenly huge, blazing with hell's fires; he blew the vampire egg off the palm of his hand like blowing a kiss — directly into Nestor's face!

Nestor closed his mouth, turned his face aside as the stench of Wran's breath hit him. But the egg hit him at one and the same time, and clung like spittle to his cheek — for a single moment. Then he felt it mobile on his flesh, inside his shirt, moving to the back of his neck. And Wran was right: from then on it was all instinct. Instinct told him to crush this thing, remove it, kill it, before he in turn was tested, tasted. Too late, for in his case that wasn't necessary. The egg had instincts, too, and knew that Nestor was innocent.

In position, the shimmering pearly sphere turned scarlet. Requiring no ovipositor, it soaked into him, was absorbed into Nestor's flesh like water into sand. Settling to his spine, it made contact and fused with his shrinking nerve cells. Until which time, Nestor had never really known what pain was. But now he knew.

He started, cried out, leaped, gave a reflex bound into the air with his limbs flying in all directions. He came down on his back among sharp stones and didn't even feel them, but he felt the thing exploring his spine. He jumped up, bounded again, as if to shake it loose. And the pain, which was now spreading through every part of his body — back, skull, all of his limbs — increased. There was a fire in his veins, which burned worse than vinegar in an open wound.

He tripped, fell, rolled among rocks which cut him, and felt nothing of it. For his cuts were like scratches compared to a lashing whip, except there were a hundred whips and they were all lashing inside him.

Through all of this Wran the Rage laughed like a madman — a mad thing — laughed, danced and held his sides, and finally sat down, rocking this way and that in hellish glee. He laughed until tears streamed from his red eyes, ran down his grey cheeks to drip from the wen on his chin; laughed till he leaned back against a rock and the raw flesh of his back was rubbed. And at that… perhaps at last he appreciated something of Nestor's pain, too.

Nestor had passed through panic and desperation and was well on his way into hell. He thought he was dying, that his agonies must soon kill him, but not soon enough, and knew he would welcome Death as a friend, a merciful release. His skull was bursting; his spine was on fire; acid coursed in his veins where he rolled and writhed upon the ground. But as Wran approached him, he summoned strength from somewhere and jerked to his knees, and begged him, 'P-p-please!'

'Aye, enough,' Wran nodded, and hit him just once…

'Wake up!' A hand hard as old leather slapped Nestor's face, rocking his head to and fro. He sat propped against a boulder, exhausted, with the agony of his internal conflict gone now but all of his new cuts and bruises burning and throbbing. Opening his eyes, he saw Wran of the Wamphyri standing huge against the dawn. Dawn, yes, for the vampire Lord was a silhouette with Sunside for a backdrop; while beyond him on the rim of the world, a fan of golden spokes was already probing the sky.

'I go now,' Wran grunted. 'Up there on the bluff,' he jerked his head, 'two flyers are waiting. One of them was Vasagi's. As you're aware, he no longer has need of it. You have his egg, so why not his flyer too, eh?

Earlier, as you approached me in the night, my ears followed you along every inch of your route. Unless you were blind you saw the beasts. Am I right?'

Nestor nodded, which was as much as he could do.

'Well then, my Lord Nestor, the rest is up to you,' Wran told him. 'If you would come to Starside, the way stands open. Command Vasagi's beast and fly it home. Or if you're too weak, then it's best you stay here. Except I would warn you, the egg is sensitive: when it feels the sun upon your flesh its frenzy may well kill you. So fly or die, it's simple as that.'

Again Nestor nodded. But his eyes were less vacant now; indeed they were unwavering, hard, fixed upon Wran's face as if to remember every last line and pore of it. The night is flown,' Wran said. 'An hour at most before a golden blister bursts on the world's rim, and splashes these barrier mountains with yellow pus. But in Starside, all is safe and dark.'

He turned and strode away, and could feel Nestor's eyes burning on his back as he climbed the rugged slope towards his flyer…

Nestor couldn't walk, so he crawled on hands and knees. But as he passed the pegged-out form of Vasagi, something spoke in his head: Boy, loosen these pegs.

It was a whisper, faint, tortured, pitiful. As yet, Nestor could still pity. He looked at Vasagi where he lay: his bloody, mutilated face blowing scarlet froth into the dust; his broken arm and ravaged spine; a bolt projecting from his back, and his neck a gaping mess where the first bolt had been wrenched free and tossed aside. Yet still alive!

Aye, but dying, the voice came again. Wran hurt me sorely, but it was you who brought me down. So perhaps you're worthy to be Wamphyri at that. But you have my egg, my flyer.. must you take my life, too? It is finished anyway — but not like this, I beg you. Pull out the pegs, and let me crawl away into some cave to die. But not in the sunlight, for you can't know what it is… for one like me… to die in sunlight…

Nestor knew well enough. Hadn't his flyer gone the same way, melting into stench and evaporation? But to pull out the pegs… what if this creature were still dangerous?

The laughter which swelled in his mind then was bitter, and filled with a painful irony. Dangerous? Oh, I was, it's true! But now? I have no leech; I am broken, gutted, an empty shell. But you… you are, or you were, Szgany. And you have things in you other than the morbid emotions of the Wamphyri. For a little while longer, at least. Which is why I beg you one last time; pull out the pegs.

Nestor did it, and crawled on. In a little while he could get to his feet. He looked back, and Vasagi was still stretched there; he hadn't moved; perhaps he couldn't. Nestor put him out of his mind and went to his flyer.

The beast saw him coming and looked at him through stupid, lustreless eyes. He approached it carefully, for he saw how it could roll or flop on him and crush his life out. But it was of vampire stuff and sensed the vampire in Nestor; it blinked its great eyes nervously as he took hold of its trappings, no more than that. Then, as he dragged himself up into the saddle, he saw Vasagi's bloody gauntlet hanging from a strap, where Wran had left it for him. Of course, for what's a Lord of the Wamphyri without his gauntlet?

Sunside was all hazy grey and green now, with mists rising out of the dark forests and blue smoke from distant campsites and townships, and all the birds waking up, commencing their dawn chorus. Central on the southern horizon, a yellow glow threatened at any moment to become a golden furnace.

Nestor dug his heels into his mount's sides at the base of its swaying neck, and gave a tentative jerk on the reins. 'Up,' he grunted. 'Let's be away.'

The creature craned its neck, looked at him curiously, stretched its manta wings — and did nothing. Nestor slapped its neck and the grey flesh twitched a little — that was all. 'Up!' he shouted, digging harder with his heels where rasps on Vasagi's boots had furrowed the beast's flanks. It grunted and quivered, but sat still. The answer was in Nestor's head, and finally he found it there.

I want you to fly! he told the creature. Up, now, into the sky, and home to Starside. Or would you rather melt when the sun comes up? Metamorphic muscles bunched then, and the flyer's thrusters coiled themselves as tight as springs. But still the beast would not, could not obey him. Till suddenly Vasagi's almost exhausted 'voice' joined Nestor's: Aye, you were ever a faithful beast. When I told you to stay, you stayed. But now you are his. It pleases me to give you to him.. for a while, at least. So fly — fly!

The beast's wings extended from its sides as alveolate bones, membrane and muscle stretched and flowed in metamorphic flux. A moment more and it tilted forward on the rim of the bluff. Nestor clung with his knees, gripped hard on the reins. The flyer's thrusters uncoiled to hurl it aloft and forward… it flew!

Wind whipped in Nestor's face as his weird mount glided out over Sunside, gaining height. But Sunside wasn't the way to go. And: 'Starside!' he shouted, with mind and mouth both. 'Starside!' Until the flyer arched its manta wings into vast scoops or air-traps, turned in a rising thermal, and climbed for the peaks.

And down in the misted valleys and forests, everything Nestor had been and done — everything which he'd known and had now forgotten, forsaken — was left far, far behind…

Nathan followed the course of the Great Dark River, visiting Crack-in-the-Rocks, Many-Caverns, the twin colonies Lake-of-Light and Lake-of-Stars, and Place-of-the-Beast-Bones. Mostly he travelled the river route, deep under the desert; on occasion, where the river became a borehole with no path as such, he must be ferried through black bowels of earth; sometimes he went on the surface, from oasis to oasis, where wells or potholes connected the drifted sands to the subterranean silt of the river.

There were many Thyre colonies, though few of them accommodated more than a hundred or so individuals. Even Open-to-the-Sky, which was the largest so far visited, had only supported some two hundred and sixty inhabitants. According to Atwei, the total count of Thyre did not exceed five thousand. To expand in excess of that number would be to reduce their living standards in the limited space available.

Nathan passed on lore and learning wherever he went, firmly establishing himself as a friend of the Thyre, never once forgetting the humility which the desert folk — and their dead — so admired in him. And in the process of teaching, Nathan learned.

He came across others who said they 'knew' numbers, but no one whose understanding surpassed Ethloi the Elder's rudimentary grasp. He studied what Ethloi had shown him, worked with his 'Tens System' and explored division, multiplication, even decimals; all without knowing his purpose or even if he had one beyond that he had been told it was important to him. And sometimes he conjured the numbers vortex, trapping whole sections of its fluxing configurations and bringing them to immobility on the screen of his mind, so that he might examine them. They revealed nothing but remained as alien as the farthest stars. Only relax his concentration for a moment… they would flow, mutate, rejoin the vortex and be sucked back into an infinity of fathomless formulae…

The Thyre gave him news of the Wamphyri. Here, far to the east of the great pass into Starside, their works were less in evidence. What Nathan was able to learn fitted well with what he already knew: that only a handful had crossed the Great Red Waste into Starside, and that they had settled in Karenstack, the last aerie. There they consolidated their position, built their army, created vampires. Since all of the 'makings' could be found just across the mountains, an hour's flight away, as yet they'd felt no need to strike east; for the moment it satisfied them merely to scout on the eastern territories; coming in the dead of night, they'd been seen as shadows against the moon and stars, mapping out the land from on high, and gazing down rapaciously on the human wealth of tomorrow's conquests.

West of the pass, however — among the displaced and dispossessed, ensieged and embattled people of Settlement, Tireni Scarp, Mirlu Township, a half-dozen more towns and encampments, and all of the Szgany tribes which now wandered there — things were different. For there could be found the first real victims of the scarlet plague, but only the first. For just as soon as the Wamphyri had recruited sufficient thralls and lieutenants, made enough of flyers and warriors, and established themselves as an utterly incontestable conquering force, then it would be time to advance their borders east. The rape of Sunside would continue, expand, and finally engulf all. The old order would fall, and the Szgany… would be as cattle…

En route east, Nathan spent less time in each new Thyre colony; he felt himself drawn east, to the very roots of the cancer which was even now spreading through Sunside. Perhaps that was the main attraction: no longer satisfied to run from the plague, he had determined to meet it head on. For unless he was prepared to spend the rest of his life with the Thyre, eventually it must overtake him anyway. Why, given time, it might even overrun the Thyre themselves!

Thyre place-names became a blur in his mind as weeks grew into months underground or in the seemingly trackless sands of the surface: Eight-Trees-Leaning, Glowworm Lake, Garden-Gorge-Over and Garden-Gorge-Under, Seven Wells South, Place-of-the-Hot-Springs, Big Swirly Hole and Crumble Cavern. Until, from the dead of Saltstone Sump, he learned the name of an Ancient in River's Rush beyond the Great Red Waste: Thikkoul, who had read men's futures in the stars. Alas, Thikkoul had gone blind before he died, and the stars had become invisible to him. But now, through Nathan… perhaps it was possible he could read them again? Perhaps he might even read Nathan's future in the stars.

Nathan determined to speak with Thikkoul, but many miles yet to River's Rush, and a great many colonies in between…

On the fertile rim of Crater Lake, rising like a false plateau from the surface of the furnace desert, Nathan spoke to his guide Septais, a young Thyre male only five or six years his senior. Septais had been with him now for a three-month; they were firm friends and felt little or nothing of strangeness or alienage in each other's company. Nathan's voice was hushed, even awed, as he asked: 'How can it be that Szgany and Thyre don't know each other? We've dwelled so close, so long, and yet apart from the occasional trading contact, we're strangers!'

'But… we do know you,' Septais answered, blinking.

'Yes,' Nathan nodded, 'you know us — you know something of us, anyway — but the Szgany have never really known you. And they certainly haven't known this!' He held out his hands as if to encompass all of Crater Lake.

The place was simply that: a giant crater a mile across, with a raised inner caldera. The river entered through caverns in the base of the west wall; it formed a great blue lake which emptied through a gap in the reef-like central node of jutting rocks, and from there down into the sump of a whirlpool. After that, deep in the earth again, the Great Dark River ran east as before. And so the colony was an oasis, but vast and very beautiful.

'You mean our oases, our secret places? But if you knew of them they would not be secret. And if you knew of them… how long before the Wamphyri learned of them, too?' Septais gave a shrug. 'You Szgany have your places, the forests and the hills, and we desert folk have ours.'

'I don't blame you for not wanting to share this,' Nathan told him.

'Perhaps different men should live together,' Septais answered. 'But our experience is that they can't. Upon a time, the Eastern Necromancers invaded. In aspect, they seemed much like the Thyre — far more like us than you Szgany — but they were not. For one thing, they did not have our telepathy. But they did have… other arts.'

'I've been told about them,' Nathan nodded. Again Septais's shrug. 'We trade a little with the Szgany, so that they may know us for a peaceful people. It is enough.'

'I understand,' Nathan said. 'But I still can't understand why we don't know about you. So close, and yet so ignorant. And your telepathy: I know that certain men of the Szgany have had such talents before me. Did they never hear your minds conversing? Did they never wonder?'

'Our thoughts are guarded,' Septais said. 'From birth to death, we are careful how we use this skill. Among the Szgany, telepathy is rare. But among the Wamphyri — it is not!'

Nathan nodded. 'That makes sense, for I couldn't bear the thought of them here!' Giving an involuntary shudder, he fell silent for a moment. But he was still curious, puzzled. 'That aside,' he said in a while, 'we are very close — I mean physically, geographically — with nothing so vast as the barrier range to separate us. It surprises me that men, Szgany loners, haven't stumbled upon your oases.'

'Really?' said Septais. 'You are surprised? Well, your geography may be sound in Sunside, Nathan, but it lacks something here in the furnace deserts. You ask, why have men not stumbled upon us?' He pointed north and slightly west. 'Over there, some sixty miles, lies the eastern extent of the barrier range, where the mountains crumble to the Great Red Waste.' Keeping his spindly arm raised, he turned slowly east through ninety degrees. 'And all of that, for a thousand miles, is the Great Red Waste. Beyond it lies a continuation of Sunside, the mountains, the Szgany and the Wamphyri: an unknown or legendary land, to you. Men, Szgany, have not crossed the Great Red Waste. How could they, when even the Thyre have not crossed it on the surface? You shall be the first of the Szgany, but you shall pass around and beneath it!'

Nathan looked where Septais had first pointed. 'Sunside, only sixty miles away,' he mused. 'And not even a crag showing on the flat horizon, because the mountains lie beyond the curve of the world. And of course you are right, Septais: why should any sane man of the Szgany ever venture out here? The forests blend into grasslands, which turn into scrub and sand, and the deserts sprawl sunwards forever. Only the strange, thin, dark-skinned nomads may dwell in the desert, and theirs is a fragile existence among the sun-bleached dunes, the rocky canyons and barren mesas. So we have always supposed; little we knew.' He pulled a wry face. 'But I wonder: if my people are to die out, killed off or… changed, by the Wamphyri, mightn't a few be saved, out here in the desert?'

'That is for the elders,' the other sighed. 'If I were one of them.. you know I could never deny you but would try to arrange it. For I have felt your sadness: how it washes out from you in great waves. A great deal of sadness, but hatred, too — for the Wamphyri!'

'You "feel" it?' Again Nathan's wry smile. 'Do you spy on me, then?'

'No need for that!' said Septais. 'But I think: perhaps you should learn how to guard your thoughts, Nathan, like the Thyre. Why, sometimes they are so strong I must steel myself against them, unless they repel me!'

That strong? He looked at Septais and nodded, but grimly now. Aye, maybe, but 1 wish they were stronger: so strong that I could think all of the Wamphyri into extinction! Especially the one called Canker Canison.

The other shook his head, took Nathan's arm. 'The will is not enough,' he said. 'No man can think something into existence, Nathan, or out of it. Nor would we like it if we could. For as well as good, there is evil in all men. Who knows what a man might think, in some sad, frustrated moment?'

'Evil in all men,' Nathan answered. 'Yes, you're right — but more of it in the Wamphyri! I know, for I've seen it first hand. And you may believe me, I would drown them in my numbers vortex, or think them to death, if I could!'

'Well then,' said Septais, 'in that case you have a great deal of studying to do, for as yet your numbers are weightless and could not drown a fly. Likewise a great deal of thinking; for while your thoughts are passionate, they are also ungovernable, and you are the only one who is likely to die of them!'

And in this Septais showed wisdom far beyond the range of his two-score years..

Nathan had been with the Thyre for a year and five months — some seventy-three 'days' — when he surfaced through Red Well Sump on the edge of the Great Red Waste. He had parted company with Septais eleven sunup cycles earlier, since when he'd had various Thyre guides along the course of the Great Dark River. But from here on in the name of that subterranean torrent would be different: it was now the Great Red River, after all of the mineral wastes washed into it from the rusty, ruined earth.

Nathan's new guide was a spry Thyre elder called Ehtio, whose knowledge of this entirely uninhabitable region was as good as anyone's: at best rudimentary. In the ghastly glow of a crimson twilight, Ehtio showed Nathan a map drawn on lizard skin, which detailed the course of the river from their last stop, Ten-Springs-Spurting, to their current location.

'The river has swung north,' he husked, 'taking us under the Great Red Waste. And this — ' he gazed all about, his soft Thyre eyes blinking, '- is the Great Red Waste, its southern fringe, anyway. Aptly named, as you see.'

They had come up steps cut in the wall of a vast well. A hundred and fifty feet below them, their boat was moored where Thyre oarsmen waited. There was no colony here; their stop was to be of the shortest duration, just long enough for Nathan to see and loathe the place. And from his first glance, he did loathe it.

Standing on the pitted wall of the well, behind its parapet, he turned in a slow circle and gazed out across the Great Red Waste. And in every direction he saw the same thing: wave upon wave of red and black dunes, with areas between like massive blisters which had burst and turned brittle, and crumbled back into themselves, and others which were lakes of seething, bubbling, smoking chemicals. Nathan smelled tar, sulphur, the overpowering reek of rotten eggs, the stench of mordant acids. The contours of the dunes were like wrinkles in diseased skin, as if this entire landscape were the body of some cosmic corpse dead of its lesions and infections, its flesh torn and rotting, and Nathan and Ehtio standing in its navel.

It was the twilight of evening. South, the horizon was a sick, shimmering, smoky ochre: the sunset seen through a smog of rising vapours. North, the horizon was black, humped, alien. Overhead, the stars wavered; they blinked on and off like sick fireflies, dying in the rising reek.

The air is bad,' said Ehtio. 'We can't stay.'

'A thousand miles of this?' Nathan shook his head, turned towards the stairwell. 'I don't want to stay…' The damp, musty air rising from the well seemed sweet by comparison. Descending in flickering torchlight, Nathan asked: 'What happened, up there? Does anyone know?'

'Not for sure,' Ehtio shook his head. Too old to be part of history, it is myth, lore, legend. I cannot guarantee it.'

Tell me anyway.'

'One day in the long ago, a white sun fell from the sky. It skipped over the world like a flat stone bouncing on water. This was one of the places where it bounced; such was the impact, its iron shell was broken and fell on the land in so many pieces they could not be counted. The land became hot; chemicals in the soil gathered into pools; acids ate the white sun's metal skin into rust. It is a process which continues to this day. But the core of the white sun made one final leap. Shrinking, it sped west and slightly north; such was its fascination, it drew up the mountains to form the barrier range, and was in turn drawn to earth.'

Nathan nodded. 'We have much the same legend. The white sun fell on Starside and fashioned the boulder plains. It sits there even now — I've seen it — like a cold blind eye, glaring on Starside. But that's not all, for Szgany legend has it that this sphere of cold white light is a kind of doorway, to hellish lands beyond.' 'Beyond what?' Ehtio looked at him. 'Beyond itself, beyond this world.' Nathan shook his head. 'Beyond my powers to describe. But… it's not just a legend, for men have come through that Gate from the world beyond. And creatures from Starside have likewise crossed to their side.' 'Creatures?'

'Wamphyri! I've heard it said that sometimes they would cast one of their own out — cast him into the Gate.'

'Indeed,' said Ehtio, offering a sad, slow, very thoughtful nod. 'And so vampires have passed through this "Gate", eh?' He nodded again. 'Well then, it strikes me that if these lands "beyond" were not hellish before, they are now.' Which reminded Nathan that Lardis Lidesci had once said much the same thing…

From Red Well Sump the river swung south again and back under a comparatively healthy desert. Such was its load of rust, its waters would run red for a further hundred miles.

Forty miles east of Red Well Sump and eighteen south of the Great Red Waste, the next Thyre colony was called Place-Under-the-Orange-Crags. It reminded Nathan of Place-Under-the-Yellow-Cliffs; also of Atwei, his Thyre sister. The Cavern of the Ancients was similar, too, except there was no Rogei and no crystal ceiling.

Place-Under-the-Orange-Crags fronted a sprawling plateau lying roughly east to west. Looking north from its summit towards the Great Red Waste, Nathan saw that the entire northern horizon was a dirty red smudge. The barrier range lay far to the west; likewise Sunside and Settlement, which through all of his formative years he'd called home. He was homesick; no, he was sick for anything Szgany. Once, he'd been a loner even among the Sunsiders; he'd wanted nothing so much as to escape to an alien world, while in this one Misha had been his only anchor. Now Misha was gone and he actually lived in an alien world, which palled on him more every day.

'Men are contrary,' Ehtio husked from beside him. 'Aye, Szgany and Thyre alike.' His voice drew Nathan back to earth.

'Oh? Was I thinking out loud again?'

'Often,' said the other. 'Do you no longer practise your mind-guard?'

Nathan thought of Misha's face — he couldn't help it; it flashed into his mind — but just as he had been taught by Septais during many an hour of trial-and-error instruction, so now he 'cloaked' both the thought and the picture. And: There,' he said. 'How's that?' He felt Ehtio's probe: a tingle on the periphery of his awareness, which he held at bay.

'Quite excellent,' said the elder after a moment. 'But now that your thoughts are in order and guarded, you must concentrate more on your emotions. The two are closely linked.'

Nathan nodded. 'I've heard much the same before.'

'Nathan,' said Ehtio, 'I have been asked to tell you that should you desire it, there will always be a place for you with the Thyre.'

It was a great honour and Nathan acknowledged it. Except: 'First there are things I must do,' he said. 'And even then… afterwards… I don't know.'

Things you must do? Put your life at risk, do you mean? Go among the eastern Szgany, who give themselves — and their children — to the Wamphyri without protest? Oh? And how then shall they deal with you?'

'It's hard to believe they do that to their own,' Nathan shook his head. 'Not without protest. As for me… I have to know how it is for them there, and how it's yet to be in Sunside.'

Ehtio made a hopeless gesture. 'But what good will it do? What can you change? You have nothing to gain, everything to lose. Yes, and we too, the Thyre, have everything to lose.'

'In me?'

'Of course.'

'You value me too highly.'

'How so? You are invaluable!'

'I have to go,' Nathan was determined. 'But I'm grateful to the Thyre for all I've learned from them. And I will work on my telepathy — yes, my emotions too — and on the numbers shown to me by Ethloi. It strikes me there has to be a reason, a purpose, in all of these things. But I must go east, if only to speak to Thikkoul in River's Rush and discover my future in the stars.'

The first two are things you can do without risking yourself,' Ehtio answered. 'And the last is an excuse, or at best a forlorn hope. It seems to me you go to sacrifice yourself.'

'No,' Nathan denied it. 'I go to improve myself. Some time ago — it seems a long time now — I made my Szgany vow. It may be I made it in anger and horror, but it was still my vow. If I forsake it now, that would be… unseemly. Perhaps these gifts of mine are tools, which I must learn to use in order to fulfil my obligations. In which case it will be a useful thing to know my future.'

'You are stubborn,' Ehtio told him, but without rancour.

'I'm Szgany,' Nathan answered, simply…

A further twelve sunups and Nathan reached River's Rush. Here the Great Red River's course became a borehole, and the river itself a solid chute of water hurtling through eleven miles of narrow, subterranean sumps before widening out and being reasonable, placid again. Below ground those miles were unnavigable; it made little or no difference to Nathan, whose route now lay to the north, across the surface.

As for the Thyre: there were only two more colonies to the east, beyond which the river flowed on into myth and mystery. But the two must remain unvisited; River's Rush was Nathan's last stop at the end of a journey which had carried him more than two thousand miles from his birthplace.

On the surface, the place was a small oasis twenty miles south of 'Sunside' (the Sunside of these unknown eastern regions, at least). Beyond Sunside were mountains, and across the mountains 'Starside'. There the Wamphyri dwelled in a mighty gorge, whose name Nathan had learned from the Thyre: Turgosheim. But even though the vampires were the undisputed masters here, still the restrictions upon them were the same: the night was their element, but the sun was their mortal enemy.

Upon a time the Thyre had traded with the Szgany in the grassland fringe between desert and forest, much as they did in the west; all that had come to an abrupt, bloody end some three years ago. For the Szgany of this region had become a gaunt, greedy people. Worn down by the Wamphyri, their sensitivities had been eroded away until they were little more than feral creatures, no longer trustworthy.

When the members of a Thyre trading party had seen how they were being cheated, even threatened by the Szgany, they had tried to withdraw back into the desert. The Szgany fell on them and murdered them; their few goods were stolen; they paid with their lives for a handful of medicinal salts and a few polished lizard skins. Only one man, wounded in his side, had returned to River's Rush to tell the tale.

The story made Nathan afraid, and not a little ashamed. For these were Szgany, his people. Also, he had intended to visit among them. Maybe now he would change his plans…

In any event, his work came first, and for the duration of a single sunup he proved his credentials in the mausoleum called the Hall of Endless Hours. There, when at last his time was his own, he spoke to Thikkoul: a bundle of venerable rags in a niche lit by a constantly flickering candle.

And so you've come, that one's deadspeak came as a whisper in the Necroscope's mind. Well, it should not surprise me, or I remember how, before I went blind, I saw it in the stars: a visit from one who would make me see again, however briefly. Then I died and still you had not come. And I thought: so much for my astrology! And all my life's work was in doubt. Ah, how could I know that even in death there may be light!p>

'Did you really read men's futures in the stars?' Nathan was fascinated.

Do you doubt me?

'It seems a strange talent, this astrology.'

Oh, and is it stranger than telepathy? Stranger than this deadspeak which allows me to communicate with my myriad colleagues among the Great Majority? Stranger than your own unique talent?

'It's not that I'm without faith,' Nathan answered. 'But even the Thyre bolster their faith with fact. Show it to me.'

The other chuckled. Gladly! Only show me the stars, and I will show you the future.

Nathan nodded. 'But there are no stars in the Hall of Endless Hours, Thikkoul. I'll have to go up into the desert. Stay with me..'

Above, it was night. The stars were diamonds, but they shone softer here than over Starside and the barrier range. Nathan walked out over sands which were cool now, away from the oasis. And in the silence and aching loneliness of the desert, Thikkoul's thoughts came more clearly into his inner mind. Lie down, look up, gaze upon the heavens. Let me look out through your eyes upon all the times which were, are, and will be. For just as the light from the stars is our past, so is it our future. Except…

'Yes?' Nathan put down a blanket, lay upon it, and looked up at the stars. Likewise Thikkoul.

Except.. first I should warn you: things are rarely as I see them.

'You make errors?'

Oh, I see what I see! Thikkoul answered at once. But how the things which I see shall come to pass, that is not always clear. The future is devious, Nathan. It takes a brave man to read it, and only a fool would guarantee its meaning.

'I don't understand,' Nathan frowned, shook his head.

Thikkoul looked out through Nathan's eyes at the stars — looked at them for the first time in a hundred years — and sighed. Ahh! he said. Boy and man, they fascinated me, and continue to fascinate me. I am in your debt, Nathan Kiklu of the Szgany. But repayment may be hard, for both of us.

'No, it will be easy. Read my future, that's enough.'

But that was my meaning. What if I read hard things for you? Must I tell you your fate as well as your fortune?

'Whatever you see, that will suffice.'

I shall do as best 1 can, the other told him, and for a while was silent. Then… it came in a flood, in a flash, a river bursting its banks. So fast that Nathan could scarcely cling to the words and images as Thikkoul threw them into his mind: I see… doors! Like the doors on a hundred Szgany caravans but liquid, drawn on water, formed of ripples. And behind each one of them, a piece of your future. A door opens. I see a man, Szgany, a so-called 'mystic'.

His name is — lo… Jo… lozel! And his game — is treachery! Now I see Turgosheim; the manse of a great wizard; you and he together. He would use you, learn from you, instruct and corrupt you! The door closes, but another opens…

The sun rises and sets, and sunups come and go in a blur where you wander in a great dark castle of many caves. I see your face: your hollow eyes and greying hair? Now I see… a light to freedom, yes! But… upon a dragon? One door closes, and another opens. I see… a maiden; the two of you — three of you? — together. You seem happy; doors continue to open and close; and now you seem sad.. p>

Some hours are long as days; others fly like seconds; long and short alike, they draw you into the future. And always the doors of your mind, opening and closing. I see… a battle — war! — Szgany and Wamphyri! You win, and you lose. Now I see an eye, white and blind and glaring, much like my own before I died, but vast as a cavern! You stand before it and the eye… is another door! It blinks! And in the blink of a great blind eye, you… are…

Thikkoul paused, like a man breathless.

'Yes?' Nathan's real voice was hoarse with excitement… but Thikkoul's deadspeak was hoarse with horror as finally he continued: You are — gone!

Ill In the chill, cheerless hours before dawn, made all the more cold and lonely because he was on his own now, Nathan walked away from the oasis over the blown sands which kept the subterranean caverns of the Thyre secret. He had been told that the going was firm between here and Sunside; but in any case, he'd grown used to walking in the desert and found it no great discomfort. The night was bright and the stars clear; Nathan's shadow walked behind him, cast by the moon as it hurtled over the mountains of the barrier range, whose serrated ridge made a scalloped horizon in the far dark distance. Frequent meteorite showers left brilliant, ephemeral tracks across the sky.

After so much time spent underground, Nathan's night vision was much improved; he could see almost as well as in full daylight. As for direction: no chance that he could lose his way. No one among the Szgany knew the stars as well as he did; not even among the Thyre, that he knew of… except Thikkoul. And as he went at a brisk, long-striding pace across the featureless desert, Nathan thought back on what Thikkoul had told him, the conversation which had followed fast upon the dead astrologer's reading:

'What does it mean?' He had wanted to know.

Everything. And nothing, Thikkoul had answered, a little sorrowfully now.

'I can ignore it?'

Of course. But alas, it won't ignore you.

'Can't you make yourself plainer?'

Thikkoul had sighed. Didn't I warn you? The future is a devious thing, Nathan. This is the problem: will what I have read in the stars come to pass because, believing it, we make it come to pass? Or will it happen whether or no? And what if we should try to avoid it, how then? Could it be that our actions will cause the very event we seek to avoid? But in fact (Nathan had sensed the other's incorporeal shrug), there's no riddle — nothing contrary — in any of this. The answer is simplicity itself: what will be will be! And that is all. 'I can set about making it happen,' Nathan had scratched his chin, repeating what the other had said but in his own way, 'or take steps to avoid it, or simply let it be. But whichever I choose, it will make no difference?'

Exactly. But there is one other complication. My readings are often symbolic. I don't understand the doors 1 saw in your future: they seemed to be part of you. Nor do I understand the dragon-flight, or the vast eye which swallowed you in a blink. For these are things of your future, which are perhaps linked to your past. And so it's for you to know and understand them. Jf not now, most certainly later…

Nathan had frowned as he held to one of the things Thikkoul had told him. 'How may a thing come to pass because I try to avoid it? What if I know of this blind white eye which you mentioned — for indeed I believe I do — and make sure I go nowhere near it? How then can I be swallowed by it?'

There was a man, the other had answered. He feared water and had bad dreams, premonitions, about his death. He came to me that I would read his stars. I told him the dangers but he insisted. The forecast was this: that in the course of a single sunup he would drown in the borehole of River's Rush, and his body never be found!

I did not want to tell him but he insisted. Then, when he knew the truth he left River's Rush and climbed to the surface, and travelled west, alone, into the desert. He would escape his fate, do you see? Well, he found himself a little shade and sat out in the desert for all of that sunup, until the evening was nigh. Then, making to return, he stumbled and took a fall which broke his skin of water. Close by was a well; he went to it and lowered the bucket. But then, when he hauled up the water, the wall crumbled and he fell in.

The well was fed by the Great Red River; the river swept him> away; he was seen, alive, lifting his hand up from the torrent, before being swirled into the borehole, lost forever…

At the end of his story Thikkoul had sighed again before lapsing silent, waiting for Nathan's response.

'But if he went into the desert alone,' Nathan had queried eventually, 'how can you know the sequence of events?' At which, once again he had sensed the other's simplistic shrug, enabling him to guess the answer even before he heard it. It was deadspeak, of course: the ability of the Great Majority, and of Nathan, to converse among themselves in their graves.

Because he told me all on the day I died! Thikkoul confirmed it. And his is a singularly awful 'resting place', Nathan, where in fact he knows no rest at all! For he was trapped in a swirling sump, where to this day his body remains, rotated and whirled in the frothing tumult. And all of his flesh long sloughed away; his bones all broken and reduced to rounded marbles, from the action of the waters. But at least he no longer fears the water, which has done its worst..

Later, Nathan had asked The Five of River's Rush if they knew of a man — Szgany, a 'mystic', perhaps — who dwelled in Sunside. Indeed they did: his name was lozel Kotys, who upon a time had had dealings with the Thyre. He had traded with them: low-grade iron knives for their good skins and medicines. But a mystic? That was a device which lozel had used all his days to avoid being taken in the tithe, until now he was well past his prime and had no need of it. But he was still the cunning one, lozel Kotys! Why, it was rumoured among the Szgany that he had even been to Turgosheim in Starside! If so, then lozel was the only man who ever returned unchanged from that dreadful place.

After that, there had seemed nothing for it but that Nathan must go into Sunside. For quite apart from Thikkoul's predictions — even despite them, anticipating or pre-empting them — he had after all travelled the length of the known world in order to do just that. His original intention had been to see how the Szgany of these parts lived, and so discover how his own people must live one day, in the shadow of the Wamphyri. But beyond that, his reasons were now several.

The things which Thikkoul had told him had come thick and fast, but among the purely verbal had been blurred, indistinct scenes, even as the astrologer had seen them for himself. The impression of insubstantial doors opening and closing; dim figures (chiefly Nathan's) weaving in and out of a succession of situations and locations; strange faces ogling and peering. Except… two of the latter had not been strange at all but loving, and beloved.

Nathan remembered Thikkoul's words, and the fleeting scene which had accompanied them. I see a maiden; the two of you — three of you? — together. You seem happy..

Of course he would seem happy, if such were true. But how could it be? For those dim, wavering female forms had worn the glad shining faces of his mother, and of Misha Zanesti! Which was why, at the end of Thikkoul's reading, Nathan's voice had been hoarse with excitement. Ah, but now, thinking back on the rest of the astrologer's words, his excitement was replaced by doubts and uncertainties.

Nathan had always assumed that his mother and Misha were dead, or worse than dead, even though he had never seen their bodies or known for sure their whereabouts. And how should he think of them now? Thikkoul had told him: These are things of your future, which are perhaps Jinked to your past. And so it is for you to know and understand them.

But how was he to understand them? Had the faces of those loved ones out of past times been simply that: scenes from the past, which yet influenced his future? Of course they had influence over him; they always would have. Or… was there more to it than that? What if they were alive even now: not as monstrous Wamphyri changelings but as simple slaves, thrall servants in some Starside aerie or craggy mansion? And if so, how to find them?

Which was why he walked to Sunside in the brightening air, with the stars gradually fading overhead, and the barrier range growing up before him like a mirage out of the desert. For his future was right here; time bore him forward into it with every passing second; and since he couldn't avoid it, he might just as well meet it head on. And somewhere along the way, all unsuspecting, lozel Kotys was waiting for him. Which seemed as good a place as any to start..

In the Sunside of Nathan's infancy the Szgany had preferred to stay close to their mountains. Most of the Traveller trails had been in the foothills, rarely in the forests. The reasons were several: clouds breaking on the peaks provided good water; wild life was plentiful on the slopes and the hunting was excellent; the roots of the mountains were riddled with hiding places in the rocks, where cavern systems abounded.

Here things were different. While these eastern people were Szgany, or of the same basic stock, they were not Travellers. Perhaps — almost certainly — they had been in the long ago, but no longer. Now, under total Wamphyri domination, they lived in sorry townships (corrals or pens, in effect) and wandered no more. In the Sunside Nathan knew, in the old times, his people had become Travellers in order to avoid and defy the vampires, and had only settled after their supposed 'destruction'. But here the people had settled because the Wamphyri ordered it, which had marked the beginning of the infamous, immemorial tithe system. And so their towns were spread out evenly and in the open, like market places, where the Starside Lords and Ladies sent their lieutenants on regular, long-established errands to replenish their spires and manses. Except that unlike a market, the Wamphyri 'purchased' nothing, but took what was deemed to be theirs by right of conquest. Which amounted to a percentage of everything, from grain and oils to beasts and blood — but mainly blood, and human.

North of the grasslands at the edge of the forest, some twelve townships out of a total of around fifty stood roughly equidistant: four in the west, and eight towards the sprawling morass which lay beyond the habitable region to the east. The Thyre estimated that the distance between the Great Red Waste on the one hand and the swamp on the other was more than six hundred miles; and so Nathan considered himself fortunate that the first of the four towns to the west, a place called Vladistown after its founder, was the origin and last known home of lozel Kotys.

Dressed in his good rich clothes, and with the first rays of the sun warm on his back, Nathan came out of the desert and crossed the savannah, and saw the smoke of morning fires going up in lazy blue-grey spirals along the forest's rim. Angling a little to the left, he headed for the closest huddle of houses where the woods had been cut back into a clearing.

The first man he met was in the grasslands at the very edge of the forest: a hunter, he was shooting rabbits with a crossbow. Nathan heard the deceptively soft whirrr of a bolt and ducked, saw a rabbit bound spastic-ally and fall back dead in the grass. Then… he saw the man with the crossbow, where he rose from his knees in a patch of gorse; and a moment later the hunter saw him. At first, facing each other across a distance of no more than a dozen paces, they froze; then the hunter's jaw dropped, and his face turned pale.

Nathan approached him fearlessly. The man was Szgany after all, and the Thyre had told him that although these people were not trustworthy, they could at least be trusted not to take his life. No, he was far too valuable for that. They might give his life away — give it to the Wamphyri, in return for their dubious favours — but they would never dare to take it for themselves. Also, apart from the ironwood knife he carried, Nathan was unarmed; he posed no obvious threat. But from the reaction of the other, one might very easily suppose that he did, and an extreme threat at that!

The man dropped his weapon, fell to his knees again, and shivered like a naked child in morning sunlight which was warm and bright. He choked out some inarticulate greeting, an apology, and a question all in one. His speech was Szgany but the accent was difficult. Nathan frowned, looked into his eyes… and suddenly the man's words and their meaning gained resolution.

But even assisted by his as yet immature telepathy, still Nathan found the other's thoughts a kaleidoscopic jumble, and his speech even more so:

'Morning!' the other gasped. 'You are early… the tithe is not until sundown! I mean… why are you here? No, no,' (he fluttered his hands), 'for that's no business of mine! Forgive me, Lord, I beg you! I'm a fool taken by surprise, whose words fall all wrong. But… the sun! Come, take cover in the woods! Hide yourself in the shade!'

Now all was apparent. The man thought Nathan was Wamphyri, a lieutenant at least! Comparing himself with the other, he could see how easily the mistake had been made: his clothes of fine leather, yellow hair and strange eyes; but most of all his pale, unblemished flesh, which, seen in silhouette against the sun, might even appear grey. As for the hunter: The man was Szgany, certainly, but not like any other Nathan had ever seen. Where was his personal pride? Where was any sign of pride at all? Maybe twenty-seven or — eight years old, he was dirty, ragged, grovelling; his hair was matted and full of lice, and there were open sores on his face and hands. Why, even the wildest old loner of olden Sunside had cared for himself better than this one! Perhaps he was an idiot; but if so, why did they trust him with a crossbow? Certainly he knew how to handle the thing.

'Get up,' Nathan told him, shaking his head. Tm not Wamphyri.'

'You're not…?' A puzzled frown crossed the other's face; only to be replaced in a moment by narrowed eyes which glittered their suspicion. 'But you are one of theirs.'

'I'm nobody's,' Nathan said, stepping closer. Tm my own man, free, and you have nothing to fear from me.'

He went to take hold of his shoulder, draw the man to his feet. But the other fell backwards away from him, terrified in a moment.

'Your own man,' he babbled. 'Yes, yes, of course you are! And I'm a fool who says and questions too much, when in fact you are the one who should question, and I should supply the answers!'

Nathan felt sick with disgust. Perhaps this creature was the village idiot after all; but at least his words had given him an idea. 'You're right,' he said, nodding. That's what I need: a little shade and a few answers.'

'Then ask away!' the other cried, coming to a crouch and backing away towards the forest, and leaving his crossbow where it had fallen. 'Whatever questions you like, Lord. And if I can answer them I will, be sure!'

Nathan took up the weapon, loaded it with the spare bolt from under the tiller and applied the safety; and the other at once groaned and put up his trembling hands, as if to ward off a shot. Nathan looked at him, then at the crossbow in his hands and frowned again. 'What?' he said. 'Man, I won't shoot you! Do you always greet strangers this way?'

'Strangers!' the other was almost hysterical. 'Do I greet strangers this way… always? But there are no strangers! Who would come? Who can come… except such as you? As yet you are unchanged… but soon, ah, soon! You're one of theirs, I know it, come to practise your deceptions among your slaves!'

'Deceptions?'

'Ah! No! I did not mean it!' The other threw his arms wide and fell to his knees for a third time in the dappled shade of the trees. 'Forgive me! I am confused!'

'You're… a fool!" Nathan couldn't contain himself. The hunter burst out sobbing at once, crying:

'No, no! I was not taken in the tithe! Please don't take me now! Whatever you want, only ask it of me, but let me be a man all my days and not… not a monster!

'Now listen to me,' Nathan hardened his voice. 'You are wasting my time. There's something I want to know. And that's all I want with you.' He tossed the crossbow aside.

'Ask away! Ask away!'

'lozel Kotys — where can I find him?'

'Eh? lozel the mystic? lozel the hermit?'

'If that's what you call him,' Nathan nodded.

'lozel, aye!' the other's eyes started, as if he made some connection. 'For he has been there, of course!'

'Do — you — know him!?' Nathan's patience was exhausted; he spoke through clenched teeth.

'Yes! Yes, of course!' The hunter turned, pointed north across the forest to where a steep, thinly clad knoll or outcrop reared above the trees. There… a mile… the knoll. And at its foot, a cave. lozel lives there, alone. Only head for the knoll, through the woods, you'll cross a path, well-worn, which runs between the town and his cave.'

'Show me,' said Nathan.

'Indeed, yes, of course!' The hunter made to set off at once, but Nathan stopped him.

'Pick up your crossbow.'

'My weapon, aye!' the other licked his lips, trembling as he did as he was told…

Along the way were other hunters; glimpsed dimly between the misty trees, they were like wraiths drawn out of the earth by the warmth of the new day. No one approached, and in a few minutes Nathan's guide found the path: a narrow way cut through the woods. By then it was almost full daylight, and Nathan had had more than enough of the cowed hunter's company. 'You say this path will lead me direct to lozel's cave?'

'Indeed, Lord. Indeed it will.'

'I thank you,' said Nathan. 'From here on I go alone.'

'I… can go?'

'Of course.' Nathan turned his back on him and followed the path. But he was aware that behind him the hunter backed off — slowly at first, breathlessly — then turned and tiptoed away, and finally ran for Vladistown. Shaking his head, Nathan went on.

lozel Kotys was up and about. In the mouth of his cave, the hermit braised slivers of skewered pork on hot stones at the rim of his fire. Becoming aware of Nathan's approach about the same time as Nathan smelled his cooking, lozel looked down from the elevated shelf in front of his cave and saw a vague, grey figure where his feet stirred the lapping mist.

'Now hold!' the hermit's voice rang out, wavering and a little infirm. 'Who comes and why? I receive no casual visitors here…'

'But you'll receive me,' Nathan called back, coming on without pause. And if lozel wouldn't receive him… so much for Thikkoul's stargazing!

There was a ladder at the foot of the rocks. As Nathan strode closer lozel went to draw it up. Nathan caught at the lower rungs and held on, and gazed up at the other's furious face scowling down on him. Against the strength of Nathan's arms and the weight of the ladder both, the hermit could do nothing. Anyway, he'd noted his visitor's dress and curious colouring, and as the anger drained out of him something of anxiety, fear took its place.

'Who are you?' he gasped, releasing the ladder and backing off a pace, until only his grey-bearded face was visible. Nathan fixed him with his eyes, and climbed.

'I'm a Traveller,' he said. 'And I've travelled a long way to see you, lozel Kotys.'

lozel was small, wrinkled, middling clean and reasonably clothed in well-worn leathers. While he wasn't extremely old, he did suffer from some infirmity which caused his limbs and voice to tremble. And his dark eyes ran a little with rheumy fluids. 'Eh? A Traveller?' he said, his eyes darting, taking in all they could of Nathan where he stepped off the ladder on to the shelf. 'And you've come a long way, you say? How is it possible? Unless — from Turgosheim?' And now his voice, fallen to a whisper, was hoarse.

Nathan had learned something of the ways of these people, and something of their fears. 'lozel,' he said, 'I'm not here to harm you. I'm simply… here!' It was difficult to find a reason for being here. He didn't have one, except that Thikkoul had foreseen it, and beyond it to a possible reunion with loved ones whom Nathan had long thought dead and passed from him forever. That alone would be reason enough, but how to explain all that to lozel?

'Simply here?' the hermit repeated him, shaking his head. 'No, if there's one thing I've learned in life it's this: that nothing is "simply" anything, and no one is "simply" anywhere. You were sent — by him!'

'Him?'

'Maglore! You are my… replacement!'

Nathan sighed. Nothing these people said made any sense. 'I don't know this Maglore,' he said.

'Maglore of Runemanse — in Turgosheim!' the other told him.

Things began to connect. Nathan said: 'That makes twice today I've been mistaken for Wamphyri, or one of their changeling lieutenants. But I'm not. I'm Szgany.' He decided to tell it all. 'I'm from the west, beyond the Great Red Waste. Upon a time the Wamphyri were there, but they were driven out, beaten in a great battle.

Now they've come back — from here. Or rather, from Turgosheim. I came to see how you people lived here in this land of vampires, so that I would know how best to advise my own people in the west.' He shrugged. 'Well, and it seems I must tell them to fight on — even to the last drop of blood! For obviously you don't "live" at all but merely exist, like goats fattened for the slaughter.'

While Nathan talked he scratched vigorously at his left wrist. A grain or two of sand must have got under his strap to irritate him, and he still felt lousy from having walked too close to his hunter guide. But as he paused from speaking, finally the itch became too great. In order to scratch more freely, he rolled the leather strap from his wrist and slipped it free of his fingers. Circling his wrist, a band of white skin showed glassy grains embedded and inflamed. Nathan got them out with his fingernail, rubbed spittle into the red patch, and went to pick up his strap.

lozel had been watching closely, however, and beat him to it. Frowning, he took up Nathan's wristlet strap and looked at it — curiously at first, then with studied intensity. Finally his eyes narrowed in what seemed to be recognition, and nodding knowingly, he gave the strap back.

Nathan said: 'Is there something…?'

The other shrugged. 'A strange thing to wear as ornament, that's all. Some weakness in your wrist, that you need to keep it strapped up, "man of the west"? Or is the twisted loop some sort of sigil? Your brand, perhaps?' There was that in lozel's quavering voice which Nathan didn't like, which more than suggested that the hermit considered his visitor a liar.

'You people are suspicious, full of fear,' he said. 'You meet strangers like dogs: yapping and snarling. It was a mistake to come here. Even if I could help you, I can't see that it would be worth it.'

lozel looked beyond him, down at the trail where sunlight came filtering. But more than sunlight had come. And: 'Oh yes, you made a mistake coming here, all right!' the hermit said.

Nathan looked, felt his first pang of apprehension as he saw a handful of men approaching. They were led by the ragged hunter. There! That's him!' the hunter pointed. As the party arrived at the foot of the ladder, Nathan climbed down; lozel stayed where he was, up on the rim of the ledge. Nathan faced the newcomers, and saw that they were much of a likeness; inbred, ugly, rough and ragged. The hunter was no village idiot: they were all cut of much the same cloth. And all of them were armed.

'My name's Nathan,' he said, perhaps lamely. 'I've come from the west, beyond the Great Red Waste, as a friend.'

'He has come from the north,' lozel called down. 'Rather, he is fled here from the north — from Turgosheim — and comes as an enemy, albeit unwitting… maybe! They'll be after him in a trice, and if they find him here…'

The men ringed Nathan about, looked at him, fingered his clothes. One of them took his knife. Nathan stood tall, tried not to appear afraid. He turned to their obvious leader, a man who was burly and big-bellied; the only one who looked as if he ate well. His eyes were piggish in a red, puffy face. Nathan spoke to him. 'lozel is wrong. I'm from the west.'

'Aye,' lozel called down again, his voice heavy with sarcasm. 'And he's come across the Great Red Waste. Why, certainly he has! Only see how desiccated he is, all poisoned from the wasteland's gases. And his clothes all in tatters.' His voice hardened. 'He's fled out of Turgosheim, believe it. Some Lord's unwilling pet, and I think I know which one. Why, he even wears Maglore's sigil upon his wrist!'

The burly one nodded, scratched his chin, looked Nathan in the eye and gave a musing grunt. 'lozel's right,' he said. 'No one has ever come out of the west. In any case, the lands beyond the Great Red Waste are legendary: we're not even sure that they exist.' He frowned. 'But I'll grant you one thing: you don't look Szgany.'

'One of Maglore's experiments,' lozel interrupted again from the safety of his ledge. 'This one's a changeling!'

'Eh?' The leader of the bunch at once drew back from Nathan, likewise his companions. 'A vampire thing?'

'Not him,' lozel shook his head. 'And that's puzzling, I admit. But I was cooking and my hands are smeared with oil of kneblasch, which I rubbed into the leather of his strap. If he were Wamphyri we'd know it: he'd be in pain from that strange strap of his. Also, he carries silver on his person. Last but not least, sunlight falls on him and he suffers no ill.'

'It's true!' the scabby hunter put in. 'He came from the grasslands, with the sun full on him!'

'So,' said their leader, eyeing Nathan up and down. 'And what's to be done with you?'

Nathan glanced at him in disgust, then looked up at lozel until their eyes met and locked. And: What are you thinking, you scruffy, treacherous old dog? Nathan wondered. Treachery, yes — just as Thikkoul had warned.

lozel's thoughts were easy to read; his mind had been opened before, often, so that he couldn't close it. Even Nathan's small talent found no difficulty in breaching his mental defences. Or perhaps it was simply that Nathan was desperate to read the other's thoughts.

He is or was Maglore's, I'm sure of it, lozel was thinking. But is he a runaway, or was he sent? Is he here to replace me, or did he hope to enlist my aid in hiding himself away?

'So,' Nathan said, 'what I've heard about lozel Kotys is true.' (Two could make accusations.)

'What's that?' the burly one was interested.

Nathan glanced at him again, contemptuously. 'Why, that the Wamphyri use him as a spy against the Szgany. Against you! Except he blinds you with the lies of a so-called "mystic", so that you don't see him for what he really is. Now tell me, who else have you ever met who returned out of Turgosheim?'

'Don't listen to him, Dobruj!' lozel screeched. 'What, me, a spy? I spy on no one. To what end? Why, all I ever ask is to be left alone. But this one: just look at him! His clothes, his alien colours, his story! Hah! From beyond the Great Red Waste, indeed! His lies are obvious.'

Dobruj was the burly one, the chief. Craning his neck, he scowled up at lozel. 'Aye, and this isn't the first time you've been suspicioned, old hermit! If I had the proof of it, one way or the other… huh!' He fingered his chin again, and looked at Nathan. 'But meanwhile, what's to be done with you?'

'Only listen to me,' lozel had managed to compose himself, 'and you'll know what to do with him. Put him in the tithe and so save one of your own! Vormulac's tithesmen come tonight, and already your tally is short, because of deserters. So why not let this one make up the numbers, eh? If he, too, is a runaway — from Turgosheim — they'll surely take him back again. Which will stand you and Vladistown in good stead, Dobruj. Ah, but if he's a spy, they'll find reasons not to take him! And then… there will be time later, to deal with him. Either way, you've nothing to lose.'

Dobruj thought about it, cocked his head on one side and glanced yet again at Nathan before making up his mind. Finally he nodded and said: 'It makes sense.' At which, two of his men grabbed Nathan by the arms. He tried to fight them off until a third held the point of his own knife to his ribs. But:

'None of that!' Dobruj commanded. 'If he's going in the tithe we don't want him damaged. Right, enough of this. Back to town…'

As they bundled Nathan along the path, Dobruj called up to the hermit: 'You, lozel — be sure you're close to hand in town when the tithesmen come. For should these accusations of yours make a fool of me, I'll be wanting words with you…'

'Hah!' the hermit called out, shaking his fists from on high. 'You'll see! You'll see!'

Dobruj paused a moment and narrowed his piggish eyes at him. 'Aye, we'll see what we'll see,' he said. 'But make sure you're there anyway.' It was a command, not to be denied. And it was a sure threat.

lozel watched them out of sight, then went to a ledge in the cave and took up a sigil shaped in gold. It had been given to him by the Seer Lord Maglore of Runemanse. Maglore's sigil: whose shape was the very image of the strap on Nathan's wrist, but moulded in heavy metal. Muttering curses, lozel carried it to a dark corner, sat down on the edge of a stool, and closed his eyes. And just as Maglore had instructed him, so the hermit held the golden shape warm in his hand and felt its weird contours, and sent his thoughts winging, winging, winging -

— All across the mountains to Turgosheim…

In Vladistown — a huddle of maybe one hundred and twenty drab dwellings of timber, sod, withes and skins; nothing so sophisticated or large as Mirlu Township, Tireni Scarp or Settlement — Nathan was detained with six other young men in a timbered pen which was largely open to the sky. On the inside, a few narrow awnings kept the sun off the prisoners. These were not criminals but tithelings: the 'legitimate get' of vampire tithesmen, who would arrive out of Turgosheim after sundown to collect their miserable flesh-and-blood levy. Since male and female tithelings were kept apart, there were two such stockades.

Nathan's belt had been taken from him and replaced with a length of twine. To offer him up to a lieutenant of the Wamphyri bearing silver upon his person… the consequences would be unthinkable! He would never see that belt, buckle or sheath again. As for the silver locket and chain given him by Atwei at their parting: they went unnoticed under his flowing hair and soft leather shirt. After dark and before the tithesmen came, he would secrete them in an inside pocket.

Nathan was mortally afraid but tried not to show it. The others penned with him were less reticent. Listening to their whispers, it was plain they'd given up all hope. They saw themselves as fodder for the Wamphyri; even when loved ones came to speak to them through the perimeter fence, they could scarcely be bothered. The place was heavy with depression, rank with the acrid stench of fear. A tented privy in one corner did nothing to improve the atmosphere. Nathan would like to shut the hushed conversations out and think his own thoughts, but could not. In the end he listened however listlessly, gleaning what scraps of information he could.

The tithesmen would come an hour or so after sundown, when the last soft flush lay low on the southern horizon. Should all go well they would take Dobruj's tribute of flesh and be out of here in less than one hour; but if anything was amiss… someone must be made to pay for it. Dobruj was the town's headman, whose back bore the scars of past failures, when the tally had been short now and then. He wasn't likely to make that mistake again. Yet even now a pair of defectors had brought the count down: the tally was two men short — or one man, now that this flashy stranger had been taken — so that Dobruj must find one more, when the tithesmen came.

The day was no shorter than any Sunside day, yet somehow time flew. Nathan likewise thought of flight, but outside the stockade the guards were cautious for their lives; only let a titheling escape… who would take his place? When water was brought Nathan drank it, but he refused the tasteless food. It was snapped up by the others as if they hadn't eaten in a week. Well, things were not that bad, but neither were they good. He continued to listen to their stories…

For a year and nine months now Wamphyri demands had been on the increase, tithe collections more frequent, the sack of Sunside's resources more utter. The Lords of Turgosheim were draining the townships as never before; they seemed unable to get enough of anything; there was such a thirst, a hunger and fire in them as to outdo all previous greed. As for its cause or source: who could say? What man would ever dare to ask? But one thing for sure: their monstrous works across the barrier mountains were grown more monstrous yet!

Things had crashed in the foothills — gigantic, hideous Wamphyri constructs; mad, mewling, ravaging carnivores — word of which had found its way through the forests to the towns on the rim. The Wamphyri made aerial monsters in Turgosheim, from innocent flesh and blood! But these were creatures far removed from their doleful, nodding manta flyers. As to their purpose: again, who would dare ask?

Nathan didn't need to ask; for remembering only too well that night almost a hundred sundowns ago, when a… a creature called Vratza Wransthrall had died on a cross in Settlement — and the things that creature had told to Lardis Lidesci — Nathan knew! Wratha's raiders had been first to fly the coop, yes, but others would soon follow her. And they were preparing even now, in Turgosheim. If the quality of their warriors was such that they were still crashing in the hills, however… well, obviously Wratha had a head start. And how dearly Nathan would love to get that information back to Lardis Lidesci, if Lardis was still alive. Somehow, Nathan fancied that he was…

In the heat of the day Nathan drowsed, and when the flies would let him he slept; it seemed as well to conserve his energies for whatever was to come. Sleeping, he dreamed of several things, most of which were forgotten whenever he started awake. Dimly, he remembered the mournful howling of his wolves in the faraway. And certain of the Thyre dead, whose sad thoughts had reached him even here.

Midday came and went; more water and a crust of bread; the stockade guards changed and changed again. Nathan slept, jerked shivering awake in the shade of his awning, put out an arm into the waning sunlight to absorb a little warmth. Waning, yes — already. For all that Sunside's day was like half a week in the world of his unknown father, still time's inexorable creep was the same in both worlds.

Later.. Nathan was hungry. This time when food came he ate it, and appreciated it. Already his perspective was changing. Once, he read the mind behind a child's sad eyes peering in at him through the stockade fence: When will it be my turn? Not for a long time, for I'm only six. Aye, but soon enough, soon enough.

Another Visitor' as evening drew in was lozel Kotys. His mind was loose as ever; it overflowed with venom, but also with wonder and not a little fear. Who are you, and where from? Out of the west? Is it possible? Not Maglore's man, as I've discovered, though he wants you badly enough now. But who? How? Why?

Nathan looked up at the glaring eyes in the bearded face, which glowered at him through the gapped fence. 'Oh?' he said, in a low voice. 'And have you spoken with your master, then? Are you his thrall, in mind if not in body?'

And lozel gasped and went away…

Nathan slept again, long and deep, and woke up cold and cowed. The first stars were out, and beyond the stockade's wall a fire blazed up. Tables had been set, where barrels of wine stood in a row. A low platform had been erected, with a number of great wooden chairs at its centre. Dobruj was there, striding nervously this way and that, waiting.

Then: it happened all at once.

The stars were blotted out; they blinked off and on again as something black, several things, passed between. There came the throb of powerful wings to fan the fire, as shapes of midnight flowed overhead, settling to a rise in the near-distant grassland border. And finally the tithesmen, Wamphyri lieutenants, were here.

They came striding, four of them — tall, powerful, cruel, arrogant; certain of themselves, showing nothing of fear, only scorn — with lesser vampire thralls bringing up the rear. Nathan saw them through the stockade fence, and knew where he had seen such before. They were much of a kind with Vratza Wransthrall.

No time was wasted: Dobruj met them grovellingly, and was pushed aside. He followed them to the platform where they took seats. And: 'Bring them on,' one of them, the chief among them, commanded. His scarlet eyes glanced towards the stockades. 'But quality this time, if you please, Dobruj. For I was here a year ago, remember? You won't be foisting any more scum on me this time!'

The tithelings were paraded, females first. One at a time, eight girls were taken up on to the platform, where the lieutenant ripped their blouses to the waist, exposing their breasts, and lifted their skirts to admire their thighs. And while they stumbled there in tears, trying to cover themselves, he licked his lips and sniffed at them lewdly, like a dog, but without seeming much impressed. In any case: They'll do,' he grunted shortly, grudgingly. 'And the men?'

As the girls were led away, Nathan was brought out along with the six other young men. He was the fourth put up on to the platform. 'Oh?' said the lieutenant. 'And what have we here?'

Dobruj answered breathlessly: 'A stray — we don't know from where. I thought maybe he'd come… out of Turgosheim?'

The lieutenant was all of six inches taller than Nathan; pinching his face in a massive hand, he squeezed until Nathan opened his mouth and displayed his teeth, much like a shad examined by a man. 'What?' The lieutenant released Nathan, sent him staggering, and turned to Dobruj. 'Eh? Out of Turgosheim, did you say? How so?'

Dobruj flapped his pudgy hands. 'His clothes, Lord, and his colouring. He's not a man of these parts. We thought perhaps…'

'Be quiet!' the other told him. 'You're not supposed to think. We don't need you to think. But this one was never in Turgosheim, believe me! However, he is the best of what we've seen, so I'm not displeased. Now, let's see the rest.'

The other three were brought up together; the lieutenant merely glanced at them, then at Dobruj. 'One short,' he growled, warningly, his eyes reduced to crimson slits.

The eighth comes now,' Dobruj answered, as a scuffling sounded from the edge of the firelight. His men dragged lozel Kotys into view, kicking and screaming. But as soon as he saw the vampires he fell silent, gasping.

The chief lieutenant looked at him for several long seconds, then at Dobruj. Until from deep in his throat, soft and dangerously low, 'Some little joke, perhaps, Dobruj?' He took hold of the headman in the armpit, squeezing him hard there as he drew him close. 'I certainly hope not.'

Dobruj gulped, gasped his pain and fluttered his free arm. 'Lord,' he cried out for his life. 'Please listen! All of your provisions have been put aside on travois, exactly as required. Fruits, nuts, honey in jars, grains, beast-fodder by the bale, and wines. As for the barrels you see on the table there: they are extra to the tithe — for you! Take a sip, a taste, I implore you!' One of his men ran forward with a jug. The lieutenant grabbed it up, drank until it swilled his face, and spilled the rest over Dobruj's head.

'Aye, it's good!' he said, tossing Dobruj aside. 'But what shall I do with this?' He pointed at lozel, grovelling in front of the platform.

lozel looked up. Take me to Maglore!' he cried. 'He will have me. I was his upon a time, until he returned me here…'

'Ah!' the lieutenant's eyes opened wide. 'So you are that one! The Seer Mage mentioned you, of course — his spy!'

'There! There!' lozel grinned, however lopsidedly, aware of Dobruj's eyes — and the eyes of many another — burning on him. 'I knew it would be so.'

'Indeed,' said the lieutenant. 'And Maglore told me: "If lozel is offered in the tithe, by all means bring him in, but don't bring him to me. For if he is a traitor to his own, how then will he serve me? Ah, but the manses will always require provisioning, and even offensive meat is still meat!" So spake Maglore!'

'No — no/' lozel jumped up, turned to run.

'Still him!' Dobruj ordered it, grimly and with some satisfaction. And one of his men cudgelled the hermit behind the ear, so that he fell asprawl. With which it was over.

The chief lieutenant came down off the platform and went among the tithelings. He singled out the two comeli-est girls, plus Nathan and one other youth, then spoke to the lesser vampire thralls who accompanied him. 'These four go with us. The rest are for the march through the pass. Be sure not to lose any on the way.'

He saw them off with their laden travois along a forest track, and without another word headed out of town across the plain to where the silhouettes of flyers nodded grotesquely at the crest of a rise. Nathan and the other youth were each given a small barrel to carry; they and the girls were shepherded ahead; the lieutenants brought up the rear, carrying barrels as if they were weightless. And the rest was dreamlike: The great grey beasts nodding in the night; the barrels loaded into their fetid pouches; the tithelings made fast at the rear of long saddles, where they were warned: 'One false move and we'll ditch you into space, and see if you can fly like the Wamphyri!'

Then the launching and dizzy climb as hugely arched wings trapped wafts from below; the sick, soaring flight over twelve or thirteen miles of forest, foothills, ragged peaks; finally the sighing, slanting descent between crags, spires, flaring orange and yellow gas jets and reeking chimneys. Down, down into a vampire realm, past grim battlements, ruddily glaring windows and balconies, towards communal landing-and launching-bays in the great dark gorge which was Turgosheim…

In normal circumstances, Maglore would rarely if ever lower himself to attend a draw and allocation of common tithelings; he would send a thrall, to collect his get on his behalf. But these were scarcely normal times, and if lozel Kotys could be believed this 'Nathan' was no common or ordinary Sunsider.

Three 'lots' of tithelings had been brought in: four from Vladistown, five from Gengisheim, six out of Kehrlscrag. These were the so-called 'cream', flown in for special treatment; the commoner stuff would follow on foot. But the draw was the same for all: bone sigils in a bag, and luck the only arbiter.

The draw for the best of the batch was worked on a strict roster. Maglore must consider himself fortunate that it was his turn in the round, else he must do some serious bargaining and even then be lucky to obtain this oddity, this Nathan, before it could be… damaged. But his luck was out (his sigils had already been drawn; he'd got two middling girls and a loutish youth), and so was obliged to wait and do a little bargaining after all. Which was his reason for lingering until Nathan had been 'won' by Zindevar Cronesap.

Zindevar wasn't at the fatesaying in person; neither were the Lords Eran Painscar, Grigor Hakson, and Lorn Halfstruck of Trollmanse. All were busy elsewhere — occupied or preoccupied with their various creative endeavours, most likely — but lieutenants were there in their stead. Eventually Zindevar's man had his three — two more males, to go with that 'item' which Maglore found most interesting — and headed for the launching bays. Maglore left one third of his get (the surly youth) in the care of one of his two thralls, and with the half-naked, whimpering girls in tow caught up with Zindevar's unhappy-seeming lieutenant in an antechamber.

'No luck, then?' he said, coming up behind him.

'Eh?' Taken by surprise, the man turned, saw Maglore and said, 'Oh!' He bowed clumsily. 'My Lord Maglore!' His confusion was understandable; it wasn't usual for Wamphyri Lords to pass the time of night with the lieutenants of other Lords or Ladies; even one's own lieutenants could scarcely be considered worthy persons. Then Maglore's query struck home.

'Luck?' the man's face turned sour as he eyed Maglore's girls. 'It appears that you at least have more than enough! As for Zindevar…' He shrugged sorrily.

Maglore nodded. 'She won't be happy with just three lads, be sure.'

'Huh!' the other scowled, then rounded on his charges and glared at them for being male.

Nathan, no less uncertain and afraid than his fellow prisoners, was nevertheless fascinated to recognize Maglore from two separate sources; one was his name (lozel Kotys had mentioned him as a former master); the other was his awesome and awe-inspiring aspect. He was without question that same 'mage' glimpsed however mistily in the eye of Thikkoul's mind as he gazed on Nathan's stars to read his future: the one of whom he'd warned, He would use you, Jearn from you, instruct and corrupt you.'

So that where the other captives cringed back, avert-ing their eyes from Zindevar's lieutenant as he rounded on them, Nathan continued to stand tall and gaze upon Maglore. It was merely his way — the Szgany way, innocent and even nai've — and never intended as a slight or an insult, neither to Maglore nor even to the bullying lieutenant. But that one's eyes blazed up like fires as he mistook Nathan's natural curiosity for dumb insolence.

'What?' he roared, catching Nathan up by the front of his jacket and shirt. 'Why, you — !' He held him like that a moment, then hissed and thrust him violently away, and snatched back his hand as if he'd been stung. Nathan's jacket was torn open; a button popped at the neck of his shirt; Atwei's silver locket, which he had replaced around his neck, dangled into view. And the lieutenant still astonished, gazing at his huge, iron-hard hand. Then:

'What?' he said again, a whisper this time, as finally he noticed the locket at Nathan's neck. 'Silver? Can I believe it? Would you poison me, then? You… prissy… little…!'

Pointing a shaking hand at the locket, he grated: Take it off! Throw it down!'

Nathan did so, and stood with his back to the hewn stone wall. The lieutenant stepped forward snarling, stamped on the locket with a booted foot. It flew into several pieces, and a tight curl of hair sprang free. 'Hah!' The man pounced, snatched up the black wisp and showed it to Nathan. 'And this?'

'A… a keepsake,' Nathan gasped. The pubic hair of… of a maiden.'

'Indeed!' The man grinned, kicked bits of locket in all directions, held out his free hand palm up for Nathan to see. The flesh of his palm was grey, calloused, horny. Even as Nathan watched, it formed sharp scales or rasps like some hideous flensing weapon. Then the lieutenant clasped his hands together, crushing the lock between them. And with a grinding motion he reduced the tight coil to so much black snuff, inhaling it with gusto, in pinches, into eager, quivering nostrils.

'Hah! Delightful!' he crowed then, smacking his lips. 'And was she beautiful?'

'She was Thyre,' Nathan at once answered him, with a great deal of bravery and more than a little satisfaction. If he was going to die it might as well be now. 'She was a desert trog!'

For a moment there was a silence broken only by the whimpering of Nathan's fellow tithelings. Then… the lieutenant's grey-mottled face turned greyer still as he swelled up huge as if to burst. He grabbed Nathan by the throat with one hand, and drew back the other to slap him. Just one such slap would ruin Nathan's face forever. Except -

'Now, hold,' said Maglore, quietly, yet in a voice which brooked no argument. 'Only damage him and it's no deal. And I shall tell Zindevar you lost her a pair of lovely little playmates for her bed.'

The lieutenant's hand froze in mid-air; his head swivelled on his bull neck and he glared at Maglore, then frowned and said: 'What deal?' Finally he remembered his manners, blinked and relaxed a little. And: 'Lord Maglore,' he said, 'I mean no disrespect, but it is the Lady Zindevar commands me, not you.'

'Aye, and she'll command that you are disembowelled!' Maglore chuckled, however humourlessly, '- If you don't take these girls into Cronespire in exchange for that one foppish youth. Make up your mind, quick!'

Now the other was suspicious. He glanced at Nathan again. 'Oh? And what is it with him? Why would you want this one, who is either an idiot, or just plain insolent, or both? Bringing silver into Turgosheim, indeed! What madness! Don't the Szgany teach their Sunside brats anything these days?'

Maglore shrugged, and answered mysteriously, There is Sunside and there is Sunside, and Szgany and Szgany, and what is taught in one place may not be deemed necessary in another… not yet. But this one — ' he shrugged again,'- I like his colours, which are weird. Also, he seems stupidly docile, dumb, even innocent; he shall follow me around Runemanse like a pet. As for Zindevar: she shall have these girls to tweak, which is bound to stand you firmly in her favour.'

A moment's pause for thought, and: 'Done!' Zindevar's lieutenant released Nathan, sent him flying along the wall and out of his sight behind Maglore. And the Mage of Runemanse told his girls:

'Go with this gentleman and he will take you to your new mistress, a very lovely Lady who will show you many wonderful things!' Hearing which, even Zindevar's 'gentleman' burst into baying laughter, as Maglore took Nathan's shoulder and quickly walked away with him…

Along the way to Runemanse — a route covering almost two and a half miles of caves, crags, causeways; often climbing internally through communal cavern systems, or externally over vertiginous chasms and up dizzily spiralling walkways of bone and cartilage — Maglore kept up an onslaught of seemingly innocuous questions. But Nathan knew for a fact that his interest was anything but innocent, which was made obvious by the veritable barrage of mental probes which Maglore used in a prolonged simultaneous attempt to penetrate the shield around Nathan's secret mind. Given the chance (if Nathan were to relax his guard for a single moment), he knew that these probes would at once enter and explore the innermost caverns of his brain.

Even before meeting Maglore, Nathan had known that the Wamphyri Lord was a telepath; however stupidly — unwittingly, whatever — Maglore's spy lozel Kotys, the so-called 'mystic', had given him away. But Nathan could never have anticipated the full range of the Seer Lord's mind, whose insidious energies seethed in his vampire skull like the smoke of balefires, sending out curling black tendrils of thought in all directions.

In order to maintain and reinforce the telepathic wall with which Nathan had surrounded himself, he used the subterfuge of asking questions of his own: he knew how difficult it would be for Maglore to scry upon his mind and construct meaningful answers to his questions at one and the same time. And why shouldn't he question? Nathan knew that Maglore would not harm him, not yet at least and perhaps not ever. No, for Thikkoul had foreseen a long stay for him in Runemanse, but nothing specifically harmful that Nathan could remember.

The sun rises and sets, Thikkoul had read in his stars, and sunups come and go in a blur where you wander in a great dark castJe o/ many caves. I see your face: your hollow eyes and — greying hair?

Well, that last was ominous, admittedly. But now that Nathan was here, what had he to lose? Very little of his own, for in Turgosheim his life was nothing; but still there were certain interests he must protect. His knowledge of the Thyre, for instance: their secret places over and under the desert; also his familiarity with old Sunside, where Wratha and her renegades (and in a little while the vampires of Turgosheim) would do to his people what had been done here. He must give nothing of such knowledge away to benefit the Wamphyri, not if there was a way to avoid it.

'Why didn't we fly to Runemanse?' he asked Maglore where they crossed a swaying bridge of sinew and arching, alveolate cartilage. 'Do you have no flyers?'

'I have one, aye,' Maglore answered, offering him a curious, perhaps indulgent glance. 'It is in use now, where a man of mine flies back a surly Kehrlscrag youth to Runemanse. But flyers are for the younger Lords, my son, and for the generals to ride out and command their armies. Oh, I have made a flyer or two in my time, but mainly I prefer to walk. When I can go on foot I do so, but where the way is too sheer or distant I fly. Personally, I dislike great heights; for gravity is a curious force and insistent. I have never flown in my own right, as certain Lords are wont to do, for that requires an awesome strength, and alas my body is feeble — by comparison.' But he did not say with what.

They were in the middle of the span. In the dark, distant sprawl of the gorge, the lights and flaring exhausts of some of the spires came up level with their eyes. More than a thousand feet below, Turgosheim's depths were lost in dark velvet shadows. Maglore paused and drew his charge to him, and with an arm around his shoulder leaned out over the fretted cartilage wall to look down. Behind Nathan and Maglore, one of the mage's vampire thralls waited silent but alert.

And: 'About flying,' said Maglore quietly, huskily, with a scarlet, sideways glance at Nathan. 'Can you imagine flying from here? To leap out upon the air, and form your flesh into stretchy scoops like the wings of a bat? To trap the currents rising out of Turgosheim, and so glide from peak to peak? Ah, but what an art that would be! Even though I've never used it, I have it, for I am Wamphyri. I probably could do it even now, despite the lack of that special strength which could only be mine by virtue of… a certain lifestyle. But you: you would fall like a stone, and splash like an egg…'

Maglore drew Nathan closer in an arm which contracted like a vice, crushing his shoulders. Nathan felt the other's awesome strength, and for a moment thought it was his intention to lift him up and throw him down. For all his protestations about his 'feeble body', the vampire Lord could do it… just so easily. Nathan looked at his hideous face, so close — that long-lived, evil face, grooved as old leather; its white eyebrows tapering into veined temples under a lichen-furred dome of a skull; the crimson lamps of Maglore's eyes, set deep in purple sockets — and tried not to be afraid. Perhaps Maglore sensed it: the bolstering of Nathan's resolve, his determination, and perhaps he admired it. At any rate he released him, and said:

'Go on, cross the bridge and I shall follow on.' And as Nathan set out: 'Aye, there's a great art to flying,' Maglore repeated himself from close behind, but in a lighter tone now. 'One of the more physical arts of the Wamphyri, called metamorphism. But there are arts and there are arts. Arts of the body, of the will, and of the mind. Indeed, for will and mind are not the same. I have known splendid minds with little or no will at all, and creatures with a rare and wilful tenacity but hardly anything of mind!'

Nathan walked on, across the bridge of bones, the fossilized cartilage of mutated men, and spied ahead at the end of the span a walled staircase carved from the face of the gorge itself. It went up a hundred, two hundred feet, to where Turgosheim's rim had been notched and weathered into wind-, rain-and time-sculpted battlements. But there were landings, too, with dark-arched passageways leading off to rooms and regions within that vastly hollowed jut of rock, that massive promontory turret, Maglore's manse over an abyss of air and darkness. And there were also gaunt windows — some of them aglow with fitfully flickering lights, and others dark as the orbits of a skull — which gloomed out from it.

'Runemanse!' Maglore whispered in Nathan's ear, when his charge came to a stumbling halt. 'In which I practise my arts. And where you will practise… yours?'

At the end of the bridge, as he stepped up into a walled landing or embrasure, Nathan turned to Maglore. 'My arts?'

Peering at him through red-glowing, slitted eyes, Maglore grasped his shoulder in a hand like iron. 'I have sensed arts in you, yes,' he said. 'Undeveloped as yet… perhaps. Do you understand mentalism?'

Nathan was almost caught off guard. 'Mentalism?'

'Call me master,' Maglore growled. 'When you answer me, you must call me master. Here in Runemanse I have creatures, thralls, beings which are mine. I shall require of you what I require of them: obedience. If your ways are seen to be slack, so might theirs grow slack. Wherefore you will call me master. Do you understand?'

'Yes, master.'

'Good.' And returning to his previous subject: 'Mentalism, aye. Telepathy. To read the secret minds — the thoughts — of others, and so discover their wily plots and devious devices.'

'I know nothing of it,' Nathan shook his head. His guard was solid now, or as near solid as he could make it. But Maglore's eyes grew huge in a moment as for one last time he tried to enter his charge's mind. Nathan could almost feel his disappointment as he failed and withdrew.

Then Maglore nodded, and: 'Perhaps you don't at that,' he said. 'But you do have a capacity for strange arts, believe me. Yes, for I sense them in you. Perhaps we can develop them. One such is the opposite of mentalism: it is to create a wall which shields the user's mind from outside interference. In some rare men it is a natural thing. One cannot read their minds, however crafty one's skill.'

Nathan shrugged and tried to look bewildered. 'I am trying to understand, master.'

Maglore relaxed, sighed, and said, 'Let it be.' He indicated an arched entrance across the landing. 'This is to be your home. Enter now and be with Runemanse as you have been with me: unafraid. For to walk with fear is to fail, especially here.'

Nathan held back a little, pausing there on the external landing. But in fact it wasn't fear this time, more the oppressiveness of the place, like the pause before lowering oneself into some deep and lightless hole. Or perhaps it was the sigil carved in the virgin rock of the arch which held him back: the twisted loop which Nathan had known all his days, which indeed was part of him and was now to be even more a part of his life. And so he stood there, looking up at it; until, but impatiently now: 'Enter!' Maglore commanded again. 'Enter now, of your own free will, into Runemanse.'

Nathan could only obey, while in his secret mind he wondered: But at the end of the day, will it be so easy to leave, 'of my own free will'? And as Maglore's hand closed like a claw on his shoulder, guiding him forward into the perpetual gloom of Runemanse, he supposed that it would not..