III
In four speeding arrowhead formations, three bats to a group, the nightmare familiars of the Wamphyri set the air throbbing overhead, disappearing without pause in the direction of Starside and The Dweller's garden. Long moments stretched out, and only the cold stars for company in a sky darkening from amethyst over Sunside to indigo between the peaks. Lardis remained frozen, but Peder Szekarly, the youngest of his men, made as if to stand up. He lacked experience and didn't share Lardis's prescience in these matters.
Lardis felt the other shuffling impatiently, stretching a limb beside him; he reached out a hand and his hard fingers dug irresistibly into Peder's shoulder, holding him down and still. And sensing the way their leader seemed to have shrunk down into himself, Lardis's three crouched lower still, becoming one with the humped silhouettes of the boulders.
'Wha-?' Peder began to speak, his voice the merest whisper; but Lardis at once cautioned him with hoarse, breathless whispers of his own:
'Say nothing! Do nothing! Neither move, breathe, nor yet think - or if you must, then think of silence, of sleep, of what it must have been like in your mother's womb, with nothing to fear but being born! Do exactly as I tell you, if you want to live!'
It wasn't the first time Peder had heard words such as these; they were cautions he'd learned as a child. For like every Traveller child before him, he'd been instructed in the art of silence: of not being heard, not being seen ... of not being. And he remembered how his father had breathed just such words in his ear one monstrous night, and how at sunup he had neither father nor mother. It was so long ago, so terrible to remember, that he'd almost forgotten, that was all.
But now Peder Szekarly wanted very much to live; likewise his colleagues, who grew still as stones; and so the seconds lengthened into minutes.
Then, as time itself slowed and contracted down to now, so the night air thickened, turning leaden with an unspoken but tangible dread. It was as if the heartbeats of the four took on the volume of drums sounding against their ribs, so that each man believed the next must surely hear him - and prayed that nothing else would. And all four of them, they turned their heads and looked back the way they'd come. That was where the great bats had come from, and if their masters were with them ...
"Vampire World 1 - Blood Brothers"
They were, and in the next moment Lardis and the others saw them.
Dark blots, like gigantic kites, or curious leaves whose scalloped rims undulated in the breeze off Starside, they rose menacingly out of the smothering blanket of night. Up from the tree-line - up into the lesser peaks, and rising over them - up into the night sky, where they blotted out the clean stars with their foul, nightmare shapes.
A flock of speeding night birds, winging east, sensed them and fragmented squawking in a dozen different directions. Mating owls launched themselves in pairs from rocky crevices, to glide and hide in the deep gulleys around. Lardis's companions, brave men all, closed their eyes and literally stopped breathing, leaving their leader himself to identify and plot the course of the terrible shapes in the star-bright sky. And on they came, those obscene diamond designs whose manta wings pulsed oh so silently, lifting them into the upper heights.
They were flyers, their once-human flesh converted and fashioned into metamorphic airfoils ... vast webs of membrane over spongy, arching alveolate bones, forming air-trap wings for lift and support... their flattened, spatulate heads nodding this way and that on long necks, sniffing out the breezes from Starside that came blustering between the peaks to form thermals. Flyers, a pair of them: they were the aerial observation and command posts of their Wamphyri makers and masters; and not only this, they were also their mounts!
For a moment Lardis glimpsed two lesser shapes humped in their saddles at the base of each flyer's neck. One was manlike, and the other - Lardis couldn't be sure. But he remembered what a man of the decimated Szgany Scorpi had told him about a sluglike thing called Shaitan ...
Still climbing, the flyers passed directly overhead and disappeared into the upper peaks. But Lardis maintained his frozen crouch, his breathless immobility. For where the Wamphyri Lords aboard their flyers had gone silently, the things that followed in their wake were anything but silent! As they came powering into view, with their propulsive orifices rumbling and throbbing, it took every ounce of Lardis's iron will to keep from closing his eyes and shutting out their total horror.
They were warriors, six of them.
Warriors! Ah, but whatever that single word might convey in other tongues, when the Szgany used it to describe the grotesque fighting beasts of the Wamphyri, then it meant only one thing - shrieking madness! But as for these creatures ... in the case of at least one of them, even that description seemed inadequate. Seeing the beast, Lardis flinched uncontrollably; his lips drew back from his teeth in an involuntary grimace.
While the five - lesser? - creatures flew in a tight arrowhead formation, their far more monstrous cousin came on centrally and slightly to the rear. Its pulsing outline against the stars was such that it riveted Lardis's gaze; he had merely glimpsed the others before this one stamped itself on his disbelieving mind. Longer, bulkier, and carrying more armour than its companions, it seemed impossible that a creature like this could ever lift its bulk an inch from the earth, let alone fly! Yet here it was, squirting like an enormous octopus through the inky, star-spattered sky.
Details burned themselves into Lardis's brain: Its grey-mottled flesh, with scales tinged blue in star-shine like smoothly hinged plates of some weird flexible metal ... clusters of gas bladders like strange wattles, bulking out its throbbing body and detracting from its manoeuvrability, but necessary to carry the extra weight of dinosaur body armour ... its grapples and hooks, cutting appendages in the shape of crab claws ... the evil intelligence of its many eyes, some of which peered forwards, while others scanned the peaks all around. And yet none of these various parts seeming additional to the warrior but integral, built-in, like the armour and weaponry of any smaller creature of the wild. Except Nature in her wildest mood and deadliest dreams had never equipped anything like this!
Like the flyers and their riders before them, the warriors passed directly overhead, so that the last and most terrible of these Wamphyri constructs left a lasting impression of its size and power. With its leathery vanes fluttering like the mantle of some vast cuttlefish, its bladders vibrating as they shrank and expanded, balancing the whole, and the exhaust gases from its propulsors drifting in a cloud of gut-wrenching stench down into the hiding place of the four Szgany, it was awesome. But at last it too was gone.
Lardis's companions, hearing the roaring and sputtering of the monster fading into distance, opened their eyes in time to get a final glimpse of it spurting for Starside; then its trail of foul fumes drifted lower and enveloped them like a fog, and it was as much as they could do to hold their breath while the hot moist stuff settled all about.
"Vampire World 1 - Blood Brothers"
Peder Szekarly wasn't so fortunate and snatched breath at precisely the wrong moment; inexperience has its price. He had only joined with the Szgany Lidesci in the six-month after the battle at The Dweller's garden; his knowledge of warriors consisted of a scattered handful of obscure, reluctant memories from childhood, and sightings glimpsed distantly from the fringes of Wamphryi raids, when as a youth he had fled with other refugees from centres of nightmare activity.
To give him credit he was quiet about it, but before he was done he'd emptied both stomach and bowels, and then must rest for an hour before he was useful for anything else ...
Andrei Romani wasn't really the rebellious sort, merely inquiring. 'I see no point,' he argued, 'in proceeding to the garden now. If there was to have been a fight it's already happening, and we're already out of it! Also, how may we fight such vileness as crossed our trail less than two hours ago? It makes little sense to me.'
The moon was up again, flying, while from eastern peaks and ridges came the inveigling howls of the grey brotherhood, those great wolves who owned the silver moon for mistress and Harry Keogh Jr for master. But their howling was strange and strained, and Lardis read bad omens in it. To Andrei he said:
'Do you hear that, my friend? And can you read it? Those are The Dweller's dogs, I fancy, but I can't decide if they're whipped or what.' Pausing only slightly in his striding, where he led his party across a long, high saddle of stony ground, he let his querulous companion catch up and grasped his arm. 'Now listen, Andrei Romani - you too, Peder Szekarly, Kirk Lisescu - and I'll tell you again what we're about and why we're still about it. This is how I see it:
'The old Wamphyri, Shaithis and at least one other, are back on Starside; it was them and their creatures passed over us in the gulley back there. They inhabit Karenstack and raid from it among the Szgany as of old. Except now it's been made much easier for them; we Travellers travel no more; instead we have houses and tend gardens of our own, which makes us sitting targets. All of this is proven ...
'Upon a time, however, the Szgany fought the Wamphyri off - fought and won - and when they were at their most powerful, at that! It was the Szgany stood up to the Lords Belath, Volse Pinescu, Lesk the Glut and Menor Maimbite; aye, and even this same wily Shaithis, returned now out of the Icelands.
'But ... you and your brothers were actually there in the garden that time, Andrei! Need I tell a Romani how the Szgany fought with The Dweller's own weapons - these very shotguns we carry now, brought from another world - while he used the sun itself to blast his enemies to stinking shreds? Of course not!
'Well, and now he runs with the wolves, I know, and we've only a pact to keep us safe ...
'Ah, but now his father, called Dwellersire, has returned to Starside! I've seen him, even talked with him - though I'll admit that my words weren't so very sweet. Well, now they shall be sweeter. For who could even guess what weapons he might have brought back with him, eh? What, Harry Dwellersire? I tell you, we must go to the garden, if only to seek alliance!' He paused, released his grip on Andrei's arm, continued in a softer tone. 'Or perhaps, in some future time, you'd prefer to fight against Karen, the changeling, and his father, eh?'
'What?' Andrei Romani, a lithe, rangy man, at once frowned and drew a little apart from Lardis. 'But you know I would not! Come what may, I have my loyalties. Why, we fought side by side, even as you've told it -the Szgany, trogs, and the three together - against our common enemies. Nothing can change that. Nothing of my doing, anyway.'
'Agreed, aye,' Lardis answered with a curt nod. 'Nothing of our doing. But wouldn't you deem it "of our doing" if we did ... nothing? Monsters the three may well prove to be in their own right, though as yet they've done us no harm, only good; but tell me, should we let them stand and fight - and possibly die - alone, when it's more our fight than theirs? And what then, eh, when they're dead and gone? Simply return to Sunside and wait for sundown, and the one after that, and ... however few we have left? Ah, but suppose they win, and having won pause awhile and think? And what, pray, will they think? Where were the Szgany in the reek and the roil, eh?'
After a long moment, Andrei shrugged or perhaps shivered in the cooling air. 'Let's get on,' he said gruffly, turning up his collar, and his face to the north. 'Six or seven miles to the last pass, and an easy climb to The Dweller's garden. It's possible that the Wamphyri merely spied out the land - a reconnaissance flight. If it was more than that, then maybe they've missed their prey; there are plenty of hiding places, as we know. Why, just like us, the three could be on their way to the garden even now ...'
In a little while, striding out, Lardis spoke to Andrei in a low aside, confidentially. 'For a moment there you had me worried, old friend,' he said. 'After all these years I've known you, I was beginning to think I didn't know you!'
"Vampire World 1 - Blood Brothers"
When the four reached the back of the saddle which formed the hindmost boundary of The Dweller's garden, they found signs of a ferocious confrontation: the lingering stench of furiously expended gases, scales of armour plate torn from some huge creature's underbelly, massive clots of dark red plasma drenching the hardy mountain heather. That was all for the moment - enough to draw their nerves taut as the wire on a loaded crossbow.
But keeping low and moving silent as shadows between the garden's derelict outbuildings and untended plots, they soon came to the forward boundary wall where Lardis had talked to Harry Dwellersire that time three months ago. And there they discovered the first victim of whatever battle had occurred: a warrior, dead on the ground, dispatched like a pheasant by a fox! Its squat neck had been bitten through armoured scales, leathery hide, flesh and gristly cartilage down to the spine and through it. Almost decapitated, the thing lay there in a pool of its own steaming liquids: fifteen tons of savagery, itself savaged! No need to inquire what living engine of destruction had done this.
Awed, Lardis Lidesci moved cautiously around the giant corpse. He pointed out dislocated main eyes in the crimson-rimmed, empty sockets of the grotesque skull. And, 'See!' he whispered. 'No fight this, but a slaughter! And the butcher, he thrust his claws in through those eyes, to nip the tiny brain and get it done with. And these fluids, still warm and reeking ... Why, this creature of Karen's, it was alive no more than fifteen minutes ago!'
'Lardis!' Kirk Lisescu's call came husking from crags which he'd scaled at the eastern extreme of the wall. 'Quickly! Come see!'
Keeping low, Lardis and the others ran, loped to the foot of the crags, climbed them to Kirk crouching on a ledge in the scoop of a fallen boulder. 'Do you see?' the small, wiry man whispered. 'Do you hear?'
He pointed out over Starside. The others could see well enough, and eventually even hear, though not at first.
Far out over the boulder plains, drifting east like a small cloud of midges, black specks darted, glided, spurted under the dome of a glittering sky. Midges at this distance, yes, but up close they'd be monsters. Likewise in the lee of the barrier mountains sprawling eastwards: shapes in flight, and others in pursuit. It was the Wamphyri, friends and foe alike; though impossible to tell one from the other.
'Who's who?' gasped Peder, jaw slack, eyes peering first this way, then that.
Lardis shook his head, slitted his eyes against the blue glitter of starblaze, tried to count those shapes which spurted. 'How many fighting beasts do you see?' he grunted. 'We know Shaithis had six.'
'Karen and Harry Hell-lander had two at least,' Andrei muttered, however sourly. 'We found signs of the one and the carcass of the other!'
'Better pray they had more than that,' Lardis growled. 'Better pray they had a Jot more!'
Carried on changing winds, sounds of the aerial skirmish ebbed and flowed: the hissing and roaring of warriors, the low rumble of their bio-propulsive systems, the clatter of scales on armoured scales as huge bodies collided in mid-air. But as the commotion faded into distance, Kirk Lisescu had finished counting. There hadn't been much to it, after all.
Two flyers and six warriors out over the boulder wastes,' he reported, 'all heading east, towards the sphere Gate and the tumbled stacks of the Wamphyri. Two more flyers in the lee of the mountains, pursued by a warrior.'
Lardis's tally agreed. 'And the big one's with the main party,' he added. 'Seven warriors in all, and Shaithis hasn't suffered any losses - unless I'm wrong and that huge corpse beside the wall was one of his. But even at best, it's still two against five ...'
Andrei Romani shook his head in dismay and stated, quite simply, 'They're done for, finished!'
Lardis scowled at him. 'If they are, then be sure we won't last much longer - or fare any better!'
He looked out again over Starside, scanning the horizon from the eastern boulder plains inwards to the mountains. The larger cluster of airborne specks was beginning to descend, elongating into a straggling line; the smaller party, consisting of two flyers with a lone warrior in pursuit, was also losing altitude where it skirted the lower peaks. Even as he continued to watch, this secondary group of three disappeared behind a distant jut of crags.
Lardis clambered back down to the garden. 'Come on!' he growled.
Recognizing the urgency in his voice but failing to see the point of it, the others followed him down. 'Come on where?' Peder Szekarly wanted to know. He was somewhat recovered from his poisoning now but still felt he could sleep right through sundown.
At the foot of the crags Lardis turned to him. 'East along the high ridges, where else? However far is necessary to fathom the outcome of that fight. Guess-work isn't good enough - we've got to know which way it went! The future of the Szgany, every man, woman and child of us, hangs in the balance.'
"Vampire World 1 - Blood Brothers"
He turned abruptly and made as if to head for the garden's upward sloping eastern flank ... and just as suddenly the shadows came alive with a massed, furtive creeping motion! Lardis and his three froze. They'd heard nothing, yet found themselves surrounded. But by what? Had Shaithis and the slug-being out of the Icelands left something behind to act as a rearguard? How many things had they left here?
'My father would be ... it would please him,' came a low, faltering voice from the darkness, one which coughed, growled, and was scarcely human at all. 'Please him to know ... to know that he still has ... has friends among the Szgany.'
Legend had it that in the long ago the olden Travellers had owned to a benevolent God. More recently, however, they had only recognized demons ... called Wamphyri! Not that anyone ever prayed to them, nor yet used their name as a curse; let it suffice that they were a curse! So that when it came to praying, the Szgany usually held to the sun; not as a form of true deity, but as a symbol of good fortune. Or, if a man had been born during sundown, he might give thanks to whichever star had been overhead at the hour of his birth. Lardis Lidesci was hardly superstitious; at the moment of the voice out of darkness he couldn't have said if his star was in the sky or not - but he hoped it was!
Flanking Lardis on the left, Peder Szekarly nocked his crossbow; on the other side, Andrei Romani snapped shut his shotgun; both aimed into the shadows. A little apart, Kirk Lisescu frantically shoved shells into his double breech.
But: 'Don't! ' Lardis warned them. The grey brothers are all about us, and that was their leader speaking.' The others must give Lardis his due: if anyone would recognize that awful voice, it was surely him. Similarly, he who had been The Dweller knew Lardis. He came padding forward out of the shadows - a great grey wolf!
Eyes aslant, yellow, feral - and crimson in their cores - Harry Wolfson paused half in darkness. But his hands were visible in the starlight...
He looked at Lardis and cocked his head a little on one side, inquiringly. And the look on his face was never seen on the face of a dog as he half-said, half-snarled, 'I ... know you. Come talk to me, where my gentle mother sleeps under the stones.' He began to turn away, paused and looked back. 'But only you. Your men ... they will wait here.'
'Lardis!' Kirk Lisescu snapped shut his weapon, began to crouch down.
'I said don't!" Lardis barked, as fifty pairs of yellow eyes blinked and moved nervously in the shadows. 'Only let a man of you shoot one of these, I swear I'll kill him with my bare hands!'
'No,' Harry Wolfson coughed at once, 'you wouldn't have to. The grey brotherhood takes care of its own. So put down your ... your weapon, yes ... and come talk.'
At the cairn, the great wolf was silent for long moments. He nuzzled in turn each of the larger burial stones, marking them, whined a little, gazed burningly on Lardis. And eventually he said, 'She, too, remembers you. It was a while ago. After the battle, you joined us here. You were kind. Despite your own privations, your people ... were kind. To me, to my mother, my father. And you and I, we talked together, when I was ... was a man. I remember it.'
'All of this is true,' Lardis nodded, discovering a lump in his throat which had little or nothing to do with fear. 'We talked on several occasions. At the last, you seemed to know what was coming.'
The other looked at him in that curious, alert way of his, and Lardis found it weird that a wolf should understand his words and answer them with a nod and snarled words of its own: 'And now ... now it has come. Strange, even sad in a way. Sometimes I feel I've lost so much; at others I take pleasure in what I've gained. Except ... my man-memory is fading, and all the time more swiftly. I forget the man-times and remember only the wolf-times, and it has made ... made a traitor out of me. For I swore I would be ... be here, when the Wamphyri came a-visiting Karen and my father. But I... forgot, and so was late.'
'You couldn't have helped them,' Lardis shook his head. 'This time the Wamphyri have made invincible creatures, monsters of unbelievable ferocity and power! You and all your grey brothers together, what could you have done?'
The other loped this way and that. 'Still, I should have been here.'
There was nothing you could do,' Lardis insisted.
Harry Wolfson came closer, stood still. 'Did you see it?'
'We saw them fly away eastwards,' Lardis answered. They were still fighting. I think that Harry and Karen ... I think they got the worst of it.'
The great wolf blinked his slanted eyes, and their cores burned yet more scarlet. 'No, not yet - but soon! The worst is what Shaithis has in store for them!'
And suddenly, so suddenly that Lardis gave a great start, the wolf that had been a man pointed his muzzle straight at the stars and howled, and from the derelict garden's shadows came the answering howls of his brothers. Then, he sprang up on to the cairn, glanced once more at Lardis and growled, 'I go.'
"Vampire World 1 - Blood Brothers"
As he made to leap away, Lardis called after: 'But where will you go? And what do you intend? Perhaps we'd do better to go there together.'
The Gate,' the other paused again, however momentarily, and sniffed the night air. 'I sense them there. I don't know what the grey brothers can do, but you and yours would only slow us down.'
Again he turned away - only to collide with a sleek she-wolf who came loping from the shadows. Her eyebrows were bushy, white as the snows of the higher peaks. They faced each other; perhaps some message passed between them; she whined a little, and Harry Wolfson snapped at her, deliberately clicking his teeth on thin air. Plainly the bitch was his. And to Lardis he said, 'She'll stay here, where there's no more danger.'
Lardis tried one last time. 'My men and I, we're going, too. We need to see. I have to know.'
The changeling thought about it for the briefest moment, then snarled his throaty answer: Then I'll leave you a guide. Follow him closely, for he knows the easiest route ...'
Lardis returned to his men and found them on their own; the wolf pack had melted away into the shadows, leaving only one of the grey brothers behind. Lardis marked him: a flame-eyed silhouette, nervous and impatient, atop the garden's eastern flank. Kirk Lisescu nodded and remarked, That one's stayed back, apparently to keep watch over us!'
Lardis shook his head. 'No,' he corrected his colleague, 'he's our guide. We're to follow him to the hell-lands Gate. Or at least, we'll try to get close enough to see what goes on there.'
They struggled up the sloping eastern flank, gazed down on Starside laid out in weird, blue-tinged monochrome beneath them. The boulder plains, reaching out to a curved and shimmering, aurora-lit horizon; the jagged spines of mountains on their right, sprawling eastwards; seemingly endless miles of crags to cover before they would arrive at their destination, where the peaks looked down gauntly on the pockmarked crater which housed the hell-lands Gate.
Lardis had been there only once before, in his youth (and then at the height of sunup, of course, when the Wamphyri slept and dreamed their scarlet dreams behind the draped windows of their aeries), but even then he'd found the place ominous, unquiet, unknowable. That great ball of white light, glaring up and out of the earth like the eye of some buried giant from its socket, unblinking, malevolent, lending all the region around a leprous white and grey-blue aspect as of rotting flesh. And the stony crater itself, which formed the Gate's rim: pocked like rotten wood when the borers have been at work, shot through and through with alien wormholes. Even the solid rock ...
While Lardis was there, a flock of bats had come to hunt midges, moths, other insects hatched or awakened by the sun's natural light blazing through a pass in the barrier range. One small creature, perhaps dazzled, had flitted too close to the Gate; its membrane wing touched the solid-seeming surface of white light; it disappeared without trace, apparently sucked right into the glare! For some little time Lardis had continued to watch, but the bat hadn't returned.
It had been a lesson in caution: don't approach the Gate too closely. Ah, but that time it had been sunup, while now it was a fresh sundown. And Lardis definitely did not intend to approach too closely. What, with the Wamphyri there? Madness! But he did have a plan, which as always was simple.
'See the grey one go?' he said. 'Heading down towards the timber-line? He'll know every tree like an old friend, and all the winding trails between. We'll make best time if we follow in his tracks.'
'Lardis,' said Andrei Romani, conversationally, 'you're a madman, I'm sure! Indeed, we all are, each and every mother's son! Made crazy by the blue-glittering stars!'
'Oh?' Lardis scarcely glanced at him, picked his way down between scree-littered spurs. 'Tell me more.'
'It's sundown on Starside,' the other continued, 'and all sensible folk hidden away. But us? We're following a mountain dog to see what the Wamphyri are up to! We should be in a hole somewhere on Sunside, waiting for the sun to rise and praying we'll still be around to see it!'
'But it's because we hate hiding in holes on Sunside that we're here!' Lardis reminded him. 'Me, I prefer the comforts of my house on the knoll, believe me - except I know I can't find peace there so long as the Wamphyri are wont to come a-hunting in the night. And right now ... why, I've a chance to see with my own eyes how many they are and what are our chances. So that when we go back to Sunside, we'll know to do one of two things: either advise the Szgany of Settlement and the other townships of the precautions they must take, or tell them definitely that the Wamphyri are no more! And let me tell you something else, Andrei ...' But here he paused.
For at the last moment Lardis had recognized a certain dangerous passion blazing up within himself. It was in the heat of his blood, the way he spat out his words, so that he knew he'd been on the point of uttering a vow. He was Szgany and proud of it, and a leader of men at that. Once spoken, a vow like that couldn't be revoked. Not and live with it, anyway.
"Vampire World 1 - Blood Brothers"
'Oh?' Andrei prompted him. 'You were about to tell me ...?'
Lardis bit his tongue, changed the subject:
'Do you know how far it is to the Gate?'
'Too far,' said Kirk Lisescu, clambering behind. 'Even on Sunside's levels it would take us an entire sunup to get from Settlement to the great pass. But up here, through all these crags and peaks ..." He let it tail off, but Peder Szekarly at once took it up:
'Eighty-five miles from Settlement to the pass. But weaving through these high crags ... a hundred, at least. And hard going at that.'
'Something less than forty hours to sunup," Lardis mused. 'Which is when we want to be there. For if by then the Wamphyri are still alive, still abroad, that's when they'll head for Karenstack - to be out of the light when the sun blazes between the peaks!' He made rapid calculations and continued:
'A generous ten hours for sleep, leaves almost thirty for travelling. Why, at something a little more than three miles to the hour, we'll be there in time aplenty!'
'But to see what?' Andrei gloomed. To discover ... what? Hah! The worst, perhaps.'
Lardis gave a grunt and for a little while was silent.
The boles of tall, straight pines loomed out of the darkness below; along a track dappled with starlight, feral eyes gleamed silver and sentient; the grey brother waited patient and passionless while the four gained on him, then turned and headed east. They followed as close as possible in his tracks where he chose the least cluttered, most direct route through the straggling trees.
But while the wolf's passions were at an ebb, Lardis's were still flowing strong. He thought of Lissa and Jason on Sunside, the Szgany Lidesci in its entirety, all of the Traveller tribes in their various camps and townships across the barrier mountains. And then he thought of the horror of the Wamphyri, which he'd once considered over and done with.
But no, it wouldn't be over until it was over ...
Until it was finished ...
Finished utterly!
And at last Lardis's passions got the better of him.
'Whichever way it goes,' he ground out his Szgany vow from between clenched teeth, 'I'll see them dead! Beheaded, staked out, pegged down - spreadeagled in clean yellow sunlight - and steamed away in smoke and stink!'
His words were hot as hell, fiercely spoken: a growl of hatred, a promise, a threat, so that his men knew it was his vow. But it wasn't over yet.
'So far there are only the two of them,' Lardis finally continued. 'Two that we know of for sure, though they'll make lieutenants soon enough. Ah, but they are Wamphyri! And where can they go at sunup, eh? Where else but Karenstack, the last aerie! So mark well my words: if Harry and Karen are done for and we're left to fight on alone, and if Shaithis and his lot take up residence in that last great pesthole of a stack ... then that's where we'll finish this thing. Not in the next sunup, no, nor even the one after that - but maybe in the next!'
"Ware, Lardis!' Andrei cautioned. 'Is this your vow?'
'It is,' Lardis answered, nodding his head in the gloom of the trees. 'It's mine, yours - it's that of all the men of the Szgany Lidesci! Now listen:
'Their works, the terrible works of the Wamphyri, take time. Time to take men and make them lieutenants, and time to make monsters from the flesh of Travellers and trogs. Two or three sunups are nothing, not time enough. But in Karenstack they'll think themselves secure. What? And who would dare to attack them on their own ground? We will, that's who!'
Peder Szekarly was astonished. 'Go against the Wamphyri, on Starside?' he whispered.
'During sunup, aye,' Lardis replied. 'With crossbows and sharp staves, hammers and stakes! With kneblasch, silver, and The Dweller's shotguns.'
'What?' said Kirk Lisescu, his voice hushed. Toys against the Wamphryi? And what about their warriors?'
'But their fighting creatures are vampires no less than the Wamphyri themselves!' Lardis replied, grabbing Kirk's arm for emphasis. 'We'll go there with our mirrors, given to us by The Dweller; we'll set fire to the drapes at the stack's doorways and lower windows; we'll reflect the sun's cleansing rays deep into the foul darkness. That's how we'll do it! Who would know the way better than us? Why, it was The Dweller and his father who showed us how! Well, and now it will be our turn.'
'Tear down the mountains!' Andrei Romani snarled aloud to match the spirit of the other's vision. And then (but a little less vigorously), 'But let's hope it won't come to that. After all, we could be wrong ... maybe it's not such a hopeless case ... it's a fact that Karen and the hell-lander are - or were - enormous powers in their own right.'
Andrei could hardly know it but his qualifying 'were' was close to the mark. For even as the four men set out upon their timber-line trek, far to the east, in the region of the glaring hell-lands Gate, Harry Keogh and the Lady Karen were already Shaithis's prisoners.
"Vampire World 1 - Blood Brothers"
Which is to say, they were as good as dead ...
Events followed slowly and seemed of little consequence, yet later would become concertinaed in Lardis's memory, each one hastening after the last, assuming varying degrees of importance.
After six hours trekking along the timber-line, the four were so exhausted they had to pause, eat, sleep, allow their aching muscles time for replenishment. They awakened with the coming of the hurtling moon, by the light of which their progress was that much faster.
Later, with the moon down again, they took it a little easier and fell into the natural, jingling, fast-striding pace of accustomed Travellers. They held back from talking, saved their breath for the work. Now and then they must climb where ridges and spurs broke the timber-line, but mainly they followed level contours. Plainly The Dweller had been right; their guide was completely familiar with these heights; either that or he was a creature of unerring instinct. They forged steadily east.
Another rest, another meal...
A string of long, flat, shallow saddles between elevated peaks like wave crests, where their striding ate up mile after mile unending, until finally and far too soon the easy going was eaten up entirely ...
A region of sliding scree which the trees had gathered into a treacherous, teetering barricade. Only tread unwary, trip the wrong pebble, and the whole thing -trees, scree, men and all - would go avalanching down on to Starside. To prove it, there were plenty of breaks where the green belt had been swept away right down to the raw rock ...
Another sleep period ...
When they sat down, the grey one sat apart; when they lay flat, he stretched himself out. Coming awake, he'd be up first, waiting for them. They tossed him scraps of dried meat, which he 'wolfed', naturally. His job didn't allow for hunting.
Then, an odd thing: Twenty-five hours or almost two-thirds of the way into the trek, the wolf bitch which Lardis had seen with the changeling overtook them. He recognized her from her pure white, extraordinarily bushy eyebrows. She carried something in her dripping mouth, which she put down on approaching their guide. Then the two wolves went through a careful recognition ritual, following which she sat down with the other a while. Peder Szekarly tossed meat, which she gratefully accepted.
But Lardis was more interested in the item she'd carried in her mouth: a grenade, from The Dweller's armoury in the garden. Lardis knew what it was well enough; there'd been several left over from the battle four years ago; devastating devices, he'd wanted nothing to do with them. Aye, for there are weapons and there are weapons. A shotgun is controllable until the moment you pull the trigger, but one of these ...?
Only arm it ... and from then on, no way to change your mind. The rest was out of your hands - indeed it must be out of your hands, and as quickly as possible! What The Dweller's bitch would want with such a thing was a mystery, but as far as Lardis was concerned she was welcome to it. And in a little while she gathered it up in her mouth again, and set off east as before. Then- Six more hours of trekking, followed by a break (all too brief) before the next incident: a small, unequal dispute. But long before that the beacon of the sphere Gate was already making itself visible from time to time in the east. At first, as the distance between gradually narrowed down, it was the merest firefly glimmer; later it became a weird glow-worm radiation - light without heat - in the shadows of the barrier range where eastern foothills met boulder plains to merge into Starside's blue-tinged moonscape.
As for the dispute: This came where Lardis wanted to leave the pine-clad margin and climb diagonally towards the saddles between the high peaks: his escape route into Sunside, in the event a bolthole should become necessary. Their wolf guide thought differently, however; he had been told to stick to the timber-line and head for the ball of glaring white light close to the great pass, and he didn't intend straying from his duty. So that when the grey brother simply refused to change his tack ... that was the end of the unspoken argument. But in any case (Lardis consoled himself), the way up had looked pretty rough going just there. And so the four men followed on behind their lupine guide as before, except that now they were constantly on the lookout for easy climbing.
They found it an hour later, just as a parting of the ways became absolutely necessary. For if indeed the Wamphyri were still abroad and active in the vicinity of the Gate, then from this point forward it would be madness to remain too far Starside of the peaks.
Climbing along an easy diagonal fault towards a system of crags, saddles and flat-topped plateaux, the four waved a farewell to their guide. For his part he simply watched them out of view, whined a little deep in his throat, finally put them out of mind and headed east...
"Vampire World 1 - Blood Brothers"
Lardis and his colleagues took an hour to climb to the flat summits, a little longer to rest from their labours, then set off again in the direction of the great pass. The ground was unknown to them but the going was fairly easy. On those rare occasions when they caught a glimpse of the southern horizon between the peaks, it was a faint crack of amethyst streaked with silver. Three more hours and the silver would turn to gold.
Sunup, soon, and Lardis should be feeling happier. But he wasn't. Coursing through his veins, the blood of his unknown seer forefather was warning him of ominous times ahead ...
Three hours later it started to rain; the way soon became slippery and precarious; Lardis deemed it dangerous to proceed. After their prodigious trek, they had reached a spot some four to five miles south-west of the Gate and now looked down on it from a vantage point in the high jumbles. Behind them, a promising looking pass wound between the peaks and presumably down to Sunside. And the sky in the south was brightening, however marginally, from minute to minute.
Lardis and his three huddled beneath the groping branches of a wind-blasted, grotesquely malformed tree until the rain stopped. And now their view of Starside and the glaring hell-lands Gate was that much clearer. Some miles east, the plains were heaped with the strange stumps and tumuli of tumbled Wamphyri stacks - Wenstack, once Volse Pinescu's place; the mad Lord Lesk's shattered Glutstack; sprawling, hugely humped sections of Shaithistack; the acromegalic Fess Ferenc's exploded Grosstack; the lesser Lord Grigis's Gougestack; Lascula Longtooth's Fangstack, and several more. Indeed, all of the great aeries of the Wamphyri, lying prone on the plains where they had fallen.
All save one. Karenstack.
But no lights in Karenstack's kilometre-high windows now, no smoke going up from its chimneys, no sinister motion behind its plateau battlements or in its launching bays. For the moment it was ... inert. But not quiescent.
Looking at it, Lardis shivered and felt the blood of his forefather stirring. Like a vision out of some future time, he watched the high windows come blazing into life, smoke start to belch from the chimneys, flyers cruising in the updrafts about the bays, where they queued for landings.
Then, as quickly as it had come, the vision passed, leaving Lardis to shiver again, breathe again, and remember again his vow ...
'What now?' Andrei Romani grunted, but on a rising note. His attention was riveted on the Gate.
'Eh?' Lardis was drawn from his reverie.
