They had all been up and about since the arrival of their first new thralls out of Sunside: allotting quarters, 'victualling' their beasts, choosing lieutenants and instructing them in their duties, apportioning work to commoner thralls ... and last but not least, sating themselves, of course. Which surely accounted for Canker Canison's ravaged look, for where females were concerned he was ever the Great Dog. In Settlement he had excelled himself: at least two thirds of his recruits from the Szgany Lidesci were women.
But even in Canker's case the choosing of new lieutenants had taken priority for a while; for with the single exception of Gorvi the Guile, all of the Lords and the Lady too had lost their right-hand men in the first raids on Twin Fords and Settlement. In Turgosheim's Sunside it would have been unthinkable, and here it was a major setback which not even Wratha had anticipated. Of the six of them, Gorvi had been the fortunate one; or ... could it be that his lieutenant had learned something of the wiles of his master? Whichever, he had survived, and the one thing Gorvi lacked now was a warrior.
Ah, but the makings were to hand in the shape of a procession of dazed Szgany thralls drawn irresistibly out of Sunside and across the boulder plains to the last aerie, all bemoaning their fate even as they came shuffling through the lengthening shadows of the barrier range. The Guile had wasted no time; in the bowels of the stack his vats were seething even now, where altered metamorphic flesh shaped itself to Gorvi's design.
Canker, too (once he'd inspected his get, chosen his men and rutted among his new harem), had set to work at the vats. In just nine or ten sundowns he would have a warrior to beggar the one which he'd lost over the Great Red Waste! And in thirty more there would be a litter of yelping bloodsons to replace the ones left to their fate in Mangemanse.
And so the Lords had been busy when Wratha's great bats called them to attend her. But since they desired words with the Lady anyway, it seemed as good a time as any.
Gorvi, Wran the Rage and Spiro Killglance took the easy route up from their freshly peopled manses, and landed their flyers in Wratha's spacious bays. Canker and Vasagi the Suck, situated that much closer, climbed the stack's internal staircases of hewn stone and grafted cartilage. However they chose to come, upon arrival they all greeted Wratha in the same way: with surly, suspicious, even angry stares and glances. She had anticipated no less and was ready for them.
'So, all goes reasonably well,' she started without preamble, speaking to them from where she sat in the gaping jaws of a huge bone-throne at the head of a table in the largest of her several halls. 'Our new thralls attend us, and though they are fewer than we bargained for their blood is good and strong and fresh: superior in every way to our get of tithelings in Turgosheim. At least we can all agree on that, I think.' The way she expressed herself indicated her presentiment of trouble.
'As far as you go you state hard facts,' Gorvi answered at once, his voice a sly, oily, accusing gurgle. 'Alas, you don't go far enough. And the hardest fact of all is the one you choose not to mention.'
The five were seated with her: Vasagi and Gorvi on one side of the table, Canker and the brothers Killglance on the other. Wratha was dressed in her robe of bat-fur ropes. She had chosen to look like some wanton young Gypsy: precocious, provocative, proud of the power which her sex gave her over men. It was her way of distracting them from their course, their argument. But now she saw that it might not be enough. These Lords had taken their fill of women; for now, there was no lust left in them.
Putting all posing and posturing aside she sat up straight, pulled a wry face and uttered an exaggerated sigh. 'So, here we are,' she said. 'Right at the onset of our great adventure, and already you find something to complain about, Gorvi. Better, I think, if they'd named you Gorvi the Grouch!'
'What you think becomes less important moment to moment!' Gorvi snarled. He stood up and put his knuckles on the table, hunching his shoulders and thrusting his head forward like a great carrion bird. 'Wratha, you are a thief!'
"Vampire World 1 - Blood Brothers"
His words seemed to freeze her ... for perhaps a second. Then she reached up and lifted the bone scarp upon her brow, until her eyes were no longer in shadow. And in a moment her image of true life had fallen away and her flesh was grey as undeath. Her nose became ridged and convoluted, with black, flaring nostrils, and her top lip curled back a little in the right-hand corner, displaying a gleaming fang. And:
'A thief?' she hissed.
Before matters could deteriorate further, Vasagi flowed to his feet and put himself between Gorvi and the Lady. The Suck was extremely susceptible to kneb-lasch - even more so than the others - and knew Wratha's mind and therefore her temper better than them. She considered this her place now; only subject her to too many 'insults' in her own aerie ... she would very likely stink them all right out of here into their sickbeds, so making an end of their complaints. Well, for the moment Vasagi had enough of healing pains. If that bolt which he took in his side last night had been dipped in kneblasch ... even Vasagi, with all of his powers of metamorphism, would have been in trouble then! It didn't bear thinking about.
So, time now to make their point - merely that, and delicately if at all possible - so that at least she would see how she had offended. Time later for correction, if or when she tried it again. There were five of them, after all, and only one Wratha; it should not be too difficult to take her unawares and so even up the account. And if the instrument of such correction were a crescent of sharp metal to scythe the bitch's head from her neck ... so be it! But for now: We are all thieves, Vasagi's thoughts were given form by an elaborate, intricate shrug. He fluttered his hands, shaped his fingers into expressive webs, struck a pose and angled his head a little. It's just that we think it unnecessary to take from one another. Especially in a place like this.
The Suck is right,' Wran tweaked the small black wen on the point of his chin. 'Sunside teems, so why poach your colleagues' thralls, eh, Wratha? We converted them, and yet they have come to you. Why, if my brother and I had not been quick to recognize some of them who climbed through our premises on their way to yours, we'd have lost even more! And them with our marks upon them, which are unmistakable.'
'Did you think it solely for your benefit, Lady,' Wran's brother, Spiro put in, 'that we went recruiting last night on Sunside?'
She studied the five sourly, each in his turn - Gorvi and Vasagi on her right, standing - the brothers and Canker on her immediate left, still seated. But her gaze lingered on Canker, whom she believed most easily swayed. 'Well, and have you nothing to say?'
He shrugged, scratched a fretted ear, finally barked:
'I haven't the patience for all this yelping and bickering. Also, I'm weary unto death! But you've kept your promises as far as I can see. There are women now in my kennel, and a new warrior brewing. But if you must know how I feel - well, I'll admit to being a little disappointed.'
'How so?' She was genuinely curious; Canker was a strange one, whose true mind was hard to know.
'Of men,' he answered, his voice a low whine now, 'of lieutenants,' (he shrugged, awkwardly) 'well, I converted a few, not many - but all of them well-fleshed and strong, mind! And now it seems I've lost most of them to you! Wherefore a pat on the head won't suffice, Lady, not this time. If you expect me to fashion you another warrior, like the one I made for you in Tur-gosheim, then first you'll return my thralls to me.'
'What?' she hissed at him. 'Didn't I warn you against taking too many women?' She jumped to her feet and glared at all of them. 'And how was I supposed to watch your backs and still find time to make changelings of my own? A thief, am I? Is that what you think? Only count my thralls and you'll see who got the better of it. You did, all of you! Now listen: so far I've had time to fuel my creatures, choose my new lieutenants - just two of them -and set about the fashioning of my siphoneers. And how many thralls do I have left, eh? Well, I'll tell you: I have seven! And you, Wran?' She swung to face him. 'What was your get? And you, Gorvi the Greedy?' She spun on her heel. 'How few for you? Twice as many, I'll warrant!'
'But you were the one -' Wran thundered, his blood beginning to boil, so that he must calm himself before going on, '- who said there'd be no such thing as a tithe, not here in Old Starside. Yet now you make yourself a tithemaster, or mistress, no less than old Vormulac himself in Turgosheim! They were our best which you took, Wratha, as well you know. Now enough of prevarication, admit your guilt!'
'And what of the provisioning of the stack?' She glared back at him. 'Do you breed gas-beasts or warriors, Wran? Hah! I thought so! Never a thought for the rest of us, but you can stand and accuse me. And you, Gorvi: have you fashioned a creature to clean the wells, or is it something else that waxes in your vats? And how many things wax there?'
"Vampire World 1 - Blood Brothers"
They made no answer but stood there enraged and glowering; all of them, with the sole exception of Vasagi, whose wound was not yet healed. And again looking at each of the vampire Lords in his turn, Wratha saw that she was right: never a thought for the stack in a single head, only for their own well-being. But she saw more than that, for to a man they had reached the end of their tether - where Wratha herself had driven them.
Ah, and these were furious Lords! Despite that they kept their thoughts cloaked, Wratha could read them clearly enough in their scarlet eyes. They had tasted war and wild, untamed blood, finding both much to their liking. Why stop now? The stack was a big place, true, but bigger still without Wratha.' And what was she anyway but a woman?
She did not like the way Canker looked at her, stripping away her bat-fur robe with his feral dog's eyes; neither that, nor the way in which Gorvi sidled closer. Her hand went inside her robe ... and Vasagi, bobbing wildly and gesticulating like a madman, finally held up a quivering hand.
NOW HOLD! His thought came so hard, a mental shout, that all grew quiet in a moment. But beneath that great blast of a thought were others, which the Suck kept closer to his chest. Cloaked though they were, Wratha could read something of them at least: Last night after Vasagi had been shot, before the attack on Settlement, Wratha had asked him if he felt capable of further venturings. Knowing he was wounded, she'd taken his condition into account. Oh, he had known that her concern was not for him alone but for the party as a whole: seeing herself as a general, she needed her troops in fine fettle. But still it had been worth something. Also, Vasagi could see the value of an aerie properly maintained and provisioned. Right now the stack was little more than a hollow fang of rock, a pesthole of vampires, but it could become a fortress. In that respect the Lady's ideas were good and sound.
And finally ... finally Wratha's hand was still inside her robe, where she kept oil of kneblasch in a small bladder, to fill the air with poison. That, too, was worth taking into account, for now at least. But later, when the stack had been put to rights ...
Gorvi's oily voice broke the uneasy silence. 'Well?' he inquired of no one in particular. But he, too, saw the Lady's hand inside her robe, and wisely he drew back a pace.
Have we come all of this way, Vasagi gestured, out of the tyranny of Turgosheim, to fight among ourselves?
'But -' Wran continued to glower at Wratha. Heart pounding and chest heaving, he remained uncomfortably close to raging.
Now listen to me, Vasagi cut him short. For it seems that I'm the only one who can see what's happening here. We are Wamphyri! And now that the restrictions of Turgosheim are lifted, we are reverting to type. But isn't that why we desired to come here in the first place: to give our leeches full rein? To be as our nature intended us to be? He paused ...
... And seeing that he had their attention, continued: Wratha is no thief - but she is Wamphyri! And apart from this one incident, this one - lapse? - she hasn't put a foot wrong. Well, except in her belie that she could lead us like a warrior Queen. For we're all of us men and warriors in our own right, and as such we resent giving up our hard-earned spoils to any self-styled leader. And I say again: to any leader!
Very well, so from now on we are our own men and Wratha is her own woman. But on the other hand she's right: without that we show a degree of co-operation, the stack can't survive and we are doomed. It is imperative that Gorvi puts the wells in order, that Wran and Spiro service and maintain the refuse pits and methane chambers, and that Wratha fashions siphoneers to draw up water from the wells, for the benefit of the whole stack. To this extent - if only to this extent - we must be of one mind. To this extent, we need each other.
Wran, fingering his wen as before, was calmer now. And: 'I agree all of that,' he said. 'Except -' and he scowled at Wratha, '- she appropriates no more of our thralls!'
Wratha, too, was calm and 'lovely' again. So, she'd lost her army at a stroke. Well, and so what? She could soon build another, and next time loyal in every way. 'So from now on we hunt alone,' she nodded, curtly. 'We attend to the needs of the stack, for everyone's sake, but other than that we fend for ourselves and to hell with the rest! Very well, see if you like it better that way.'
Gorvi had second thoughts. 'But what if we are attacked out of Sunside, or worse, out of Turgosheim? Am I required to hold the lower levels on my own?'
'Oh, we'll be attacked, eventually,' Wratha assured him. Though I think not from Sunside. When it comes, once again we stand or fall together. The stack is our refuge; though we may never be friends, we must be allies.'
All the more reason, Vasagi made elegant shrugs and wriggles, to practise a modicum of co-operation now.
"Vampire World 1 - Blood Brothers"
Spiro, clad in his customary rags of breechclout and headband, took his brother's arm. 'Come,' he said. 'Enough of talk. We have tasks aplenty. But when darkness falls we'll leave our lieutenants to supervise the work, and go raiding for ourselves in Sunside.' He cast a vilifying glance at Wratha. 'Except this time we'll keep what we catch!'
'What of me?' Canker barked. 'Do I get my thralls back?'
'Ungrateful wretch,' Wratha was openly scornful. 'You who have nothing better to do but whine and wench! What's that for co-operation? Best quit your yelping, Canker, if you'd have gas to warm your kennels and clean water to drown your fleas!'
In return, Canker snarled a little and bared his canines, but while Wratha had the kneblasch that was as much as he could do.
And with that it was over. Their courses set - as individuals, as well as interdependent members of the stack - the Lords took their departure from Wratha's apartments. Vasagi was last to leave ...
On his way down, Vasagi must pass close by the Lady Wratha's draughty landing bays. There he found Wran the Rage waiting for him, still seething like an active volcano. Wran came straight to the point: 'Why did you defend her? We could have been rid of her at a stroke; I would have taken her apartments, and left the ones I share now to my brother.'
She had kneblasch, Vasagi shrugged, gestured, backed off a little. Also she has commenced to fashion siphoneers. Why waste the Lady's best efforts? Time later to punish her - if such is required - when the stack is in working order. You agreed as much yourself, if not in so many words.
'It isn't simply that you fancy the whore?' Wran grinned unpleasantly. 'After all, you and she would make a grand team. You with your freakish face, and Wratha a hag under all that sweet girl-flesh! Is that it? Do you hope to partner her? Are you so tired, then, of the shrieks of your odalisques when you go to service them? Do they insist you mount from the rear, so that they need not see your face?'
Vasagi flowed forward now, his gestures sharper, less subtle, his telepathic 'voice' a hiss: Why do you insult me, Wran? Do you seek to provoke me? I have no chin, it's true, but that is of my choosing. Rather that than your chin, with its black and possibly leprous growth!
'Now who speaks insults?' Wran thrust his red face to the fore. 'As for my wen: it is a beauty spot.'
Oh? the Suck laughed scornfully. Then you could use a few more! But as Wran grunted and stepped closer still, Vasagi's tapering snout stiffened and his sharp siphon proboscis slid into view, dripping saliva. And: Best to remember, he warned, that your gauntlet is in your apartments, Wran. But me, why, I carry my weapon with me at all times!
Wran knew that Vasagi could strike at lightning speed, to pierce or pluck an eye, or penetrate an ear to the brain. He withdrew, however grudgingly, then turned on his heel and headed for the launching bays. But over his shoulder: 'Let's have one thing understood, wormface,' he snarled. 'Eventually the Lady's options will be down to two: to be my most obedient wife in Wranstack, or to die and make room for her betters! If it's the first - I'll en;oy cutting the sting out of Wratha's tail, believe me! And if it's the second,' he shrugged, 'so be it.' With that he passed from sight behind a jut of stone.
Not to be outdone, Vasagi sent after him: Better stick to your girl-thralls, Wran! Wratha's far too much woman for a fop such as you! His dart was too late; Wran had closed his mind; Vasagi's thoughts came echoing hollowly back to him.
It was probably as well. Wran was a maniac, after all. And shrugging off his irritation, Vasagi continued on his way . ..
Nathan stirred. The sun had been off his island for quite a while now and he was cold. The river gurgled close by; a fish jumped for flies, making a splash; the combination of sounds woke him up.
He awoke cold, stiff, aching, and saw in a moment how long - and how late - he'd slept. The sun was a bright flash of fire glimpsed through the treetops to the south; except for silvery glints striking from the river's ripples, its entire expanse stood in green, gloomy shade from bank to bank. Nathan had been asleep for ... about fifteen hours?
He waded to the bank and began to backtrack westwards. As he left the boggy region for firmer ground, so something of the stiffness went out of his muscles and a little of the gnawing ache out of his back: Eleni's ointment, he supposed, and wondered where she and the Szgany Sintana were now.
... Jingling along the approach route to fheir new home, most likely. Tonight they would set up a makeshift camp, and tomorrow camouflage the place, make it semi-permanent, settle in. And if only Nathan could make his legs go a little faster, he would be with them -with Eleni -- and have a place among them. In a way he felt like a traitor: to Lardis, to the memory of"Misha'and his mother, especially to his Szgany vow. But in another way he felt ... new? Certainly he was making a new beginning. And in any Case, he knew that as long as he lived his vow would never be entirely forgotten.
"Vampire World 1 - Blood Brothers"
In a spot where a beam of slanting sunlight fell through the riverside foliage, he paused and unfolded Nikha's map. The route didn't seem too difficult: go back to where the Sintanas had made camp, follow the disused trail east by south-east for some fifteen miles, then head south along the bed of a narrow, curving valley in the woods. Where the valley bent westward to follow the course of a stream, there climb a gentle slope onto level ground once more. Finally, still heading south for five or six miles through a broad belt of ironwoods (where with luck Nathan might strike another ancient track), he would come upon the grasslands. By then the woods would be ash, walnut, wild plum, and a few giant ironwoods. And depending upon where he emerged from the declining forest, the Sintana camp should be no more than two or three miles east or west. An accomplished tracker would conceivably follow direct in their footsteps.
That was what Nikha had said, anyway ...
Nathan was furious with himself. If he had woken up just three hours earlier there would be no problem. He would be able to see where the wagons left the trail to turn into the forest, the ruts their wheels left in the loamy earth. There would be signs: crushed foliage, broken twigs, beast droppings. But the best of the light was gone now, and as yet he wasn't even back to their first meeting place.
He put on a little speed, loping through the trees parallel with the river until he was winded, then breaking into a stiff walk. Now, too, he began to feel just a little panicked, and he knew that that wouldn't help, either.
How far did he have to go: thirty, thirty-five miles? And how long in which to do it? It would be sundown in ... oh, ten to twelve hours. Plenty of time, if he'd been out in the open on a good trail. But in the forest
... the light would be failing long before then. Of woodland creatures there wasn't much to fear; but if he got lost, that would be a problem. His new Traveller friends would worry about him; at least he supposed, hoped, that Eleni would. And for his part, he certainly didn't relish the thought of spending a long, lonely night in the forest...
It seemed a long time - too long by far - but at last Nathan was forcing his way through the shrubbery onto the old trail, back where he'd first seen the Szgany Sintana. Breaking camp, they had been careful to cover their tracks; if he didn't know better, he might not suspect that anyone had been here at all! Even so, they hadn't been able to disguise the deep ruts in the overgrown trail, which now he followed east at a steady, mile-eating lope. And as he went the forest grew up around him, the light faded, however imperceptibly, and the long afternoon grew longer ...
Nathan discovered an ancient and entirely unscientific fact: that time in short supply diminishes faster than it is spent. He also found that concentration can be self-defeating: only do enough of it and sooner or later you will be concentrating upon your concentration, and not the matter in hand. His limbs and muscles had grown accustomed to their continuous, rhythmic effort until the dull pain of constant motion was very nearly hypnotic. Indeed it was hypnotic; for suddenly the trail was overgrown, with nowhere a sign to show that men, animals, vehicles had passed this way ... because they hadn't! Despite all his best efforts of concentration, Nathan had passed the turn-off point without even noticing it.
Again he backtracked - a mile, two - and eventually discovered the truth: that the Travellers had left the trail where the soil was thin and the ground full of flints and pebbles. They had deliberately used the hard, stony earth itself to obscure their tracks and make them that much more difficult to follow; not to discourage Nathan, no, but to confuse anyone else who might come sniffing on their heels.
Going much slower now where the way wound along a narrow, thickly forested gully, he found shad droppings and commenced tracking again, following on until the valley widened out and turned west along the course of a deep, darkly gurgling stream. There, where the earth was stony again, he toiled up a gentle incline between the trees until once more he stood upon level ground. But somewhere along the way he'd lost the trail, and now the light was fading much more rapidly.
By now Nathan had been on the move for some eleven hours and his fatigue was rapidly gaining on him. Under the claustrophobic canopy of the trees his lungs couldn't seem to draw enough air, and with every staggering step his legs felt ready to crumple up under his weight. He needed to rest very badly but knew that he daren't stop. And so he pushed on ...
Always he headed directly into the sun where its light was most evident in the sky and through the trees. But there were streams to cross, bramble and creeper thickets to negotiate, places where the forest's canopy was so dense as to shut out the light entirely. Until suddenly ... the light improved a very little, the trees thinned out, lesser shrubs, brambles, undergrowth disappeared under a brittle carpet of poisonous needles. He had found the ironwood groves; but nowhere a sign that the Travellers had come this way, and no track for him to follow. He hurried on, skirted the thicker needle patches and passed safely through the groves.
"Vampire World 1 - Blood Brothers"
The trees thinned out more yet; light, what little was left of it, flowed palely into the forest from the south; the ironwoods gave way to ash, walnut, wild plum. At least Nathan was heading in the right direction. But just when he believed he was through the worst of it, then he felt the sting of a needle sliding through the stitching of his sandal into the ball of his right foot.
Agony! And he must pause a while to draw the thing out. That was a mistake; in just a few minutes of sitting down his muscles stiffened up; from now on he must stumble half-crippled through the gathering twilight. Twilight, yes, and on the rim of the world the sun an orange blister that leaked liquid light onto the cooling deserts. And the forest very still now, where small creatures rustled and the cooing of pigeons was quiet, afraid, and all else was silent...
And coming to the edge of the woodlands he looked south across the broad savannah belt, and saw a great wheel or fan in the sky whose spokes were pink, yellow, gold; a wheel that turned, faded, and passed like a rainbow after the rain, when the sun comes out. Except here the opposite was true, for the spokes of the fan were fading rays of sunlight, a reminder of the golden glory that had been. It was sundown, and for a few hours more the land would lie in velvet twilight; stars would come out, glittering over the barrier range; true night would come down like a creeping thing, painting everything the colours of darkness.
Nathan turned his head this way and that, looked east and west in the deceptive light. Which way to go? He cocked his head, listened for a distant, familiar jingle, and heard nothing. But then, he hadn't really expected to. A wind came up and rushed through the woods, making the branches toss and sough. Streamers of cloud rushed south, following the sun. And to the east ... was that a shout carried on the wind? Or just the shriek of a night-hunting bird?
He limped west a mile, then spied a knoll out on the sea of grass. A further half-mile to the knoll and Nathan was ready to give in, lie down, spend the night there. But he forced himself panting to the top and scanned the land around, and spied in the east at the edge of the forest - a fire? Hardly a bonfire; a dull flicker at best, but better than nothing.
It must be Eleni! Despite Nikha's warning to Nathan, that there'd be no friendly light to guide him after sundown, Eleni had kept a small fire burning. Uplifted, he climbed down again to the plain and started out diagonally across the grasslands in the direction of the fire. And now the going was easy where he swished through tall, windblown grasses under ashen skies, wispy clouds and gathering stars.
But ... the sky was strange tonight; there seemed to be several belts of cloud at various levels; some scudded one way and some another. Directly ahead of Nathan and high above the forest, small black rags of cloud sped north for the mountains and were quickly lost in the deceptive velvet of night.
On the level, the light of the fire was no longer visible. Nathan hurried; he covered a mile, two, and was into his third when he saw the light again. After that, as the nighted forest grew up on his left hand, and a racing moon rose over the distant barrier range to light his way, the beacon eye of the fire shone ever brighter. Until at last he was there.
Where the trees met the prairie he saw the carts and caravans of the Sintanas sheltering under the branches of a trio of mighty ironwoods. Their fire was a welcoming splash of leaping orange and yellow light where it held back the shadows in the triangular space between the trees. It welcomed Nathan ...
... In the same way it had welcomed others, who had been here before him!
He slowed down, reached the clearing, stumbled forward with his bottom jaw slowly lolling open. He smelled a certain odour which the squalling wind had almost but not quite blown away. And Nathan remembered the dark, ragged clouds which the wind had also blown away over the forest, towards the distant Star-side pass. And he saw how the doors on the caravans swung to and fro in the eddies, as if they were protesting at their emptiness. The place was ... deserted?
No, not deserted, just empty. Of life ...
Nathan couldn't accept it. He looked beyond the caravans where an area had been roped off into animal pens. Everything stood in shadows cast by the guttering firelight and starshine made pale by the wind and the scudding clouds. The animals were lying down, forming low, humped, motionless silhouettes; which should have been evidence enough in itself. Shads rarely lie down, and never in a group ...
He made his way to a great ironwood where the ground had been swept free of needles to form a small clearing in its own right. But as he paused there and turned in a circle, bloated black shapes like windblown weeds went lumping and fluttering low along the ground into the shadows. He gasped, took a pace to the rear, glanced this way and that as the wind sighed and the branches soughed. And as Nathan's eyes focused so he saw other eyes - like tiny crimson pinpricks - reflected by the fire and glaring back at him from the encircling underbrush.
"Vampire World 1 - Blood Brothers"
One of the things, whatever they were, was hiding behind a broken table where it had been tipped on its side, crouching there like a vulture. Nathan stood breathlessly still, paralysed under the great tree, until some- thing made a shrill chittering sound in the surrounding darkness ....nd was answered from the other side of the circle!
Then, as he gave a start of recognition -
- Something dripped down and splashed against Nathan's forearm where his sleeves were rolled up, and looking down he saw that his arm was red; likewise the ground under his feet. And looking up ... he saw the tree's strange ripe fruit, male all three, hanging by their heels with their throats slashed, and the last of their scarlet juices running down their dangling arms to drip into space!
A giant desmodus bat, glutted with blood, released its hold on a drained corpse and fluttered to earth. Too bloated to fly, the creature scuttled and flopped out of sight, joining its companions in the shadows ...
All the demons of hell rode the wind then, shrieking mad with laughter as Nathan staggered to the fire, took up a brand and lit his way to Nikha Sintana's caravan. Inside, the place was a shambles, and outside, at the back ... Nikha lay there with his eyes staring and the halves of his chest laid back, and his heart ripped out of his body for a tidbit!
Now Nathan knew he must look for the others -search for Eleni, and pray she'd run off into the woods - but first there was something else he must do. His blue eyes blazed with a sort of madness when he found oil in a large stone jar on the ground beside Nikha's caravan. Lifting it, he sniffed at the uncovered rim: nut oil, mainly, for cooking. But a little kneblasch, too. Little wonder they hadn't wanted it! And carrying the jar back to the slaughter tree, he knew how he must use it.
There under the ironwood, the bloated black familiars of the Wamphyri - more than a dozen of them - had gathered once more in the cleared space to lap like ghouls at the bloodsoaked earth. Keeping well back, Nathan looked at them a moment, shuddered and grimaced. Then without further pause he loped through the underbrush around the perimeter of the great tree, deliberately slopping oil as he went; and when the circle was closed, he tossed his firebrand into the tinder-dry scrub.
The fire crept slowly at first, then with a vengeance as the wind caught it, and finally roared up in a wall of blistering heat and yellow light. Forced back, Nathan laughed, danced, and shook his fists like a madman, which for the moment he was. And: 'Burn, you bastard things, burn!' he yelled.
Greedy tongues of fire licked at the lower branches, took hold, and spread into the whole tree. Jets of fire, whipped by the wind, leaped from bough to bough like demon imps, till all three trees blazed up in unison and the heat was an inferno.
Still Nathan danced, and laughed all the louder when the shrill chittering of the bats turned to shrieking and a handful tried to flee the holocaust. Singed and smoking they rose up into view, burst into flames, spiralled down into the furnace under the mighty torch trees. And so they burned ...
Later, when the wind swung south and blew a widening swath of fire across the grasslands, Nathan's madness passed and he returned to the carts and caravans. Standing to one side of the huge trees and mainly away from the fire, the vehicles had been licked by the flames, blistered by them, then passed by and left intact. Nathan examined them thoroughly ... and found what he found.
Then, skirting the trio of burning, skeletal trees and the blackened scar of undergrowth, he went into the forest. He knew he was taking a chance, that the wind might easily change again, but he had to search. And searching he discovered, and laboured a while carrying what he discovered back to the cleansing fire. Not that these children were going to become vampires - they were mainly pieces, scraps - but it seemed the right thing to do. Nathan knew that Lardis Lidesci would have done it, anyway. As for Nikha's men where they had been bled under the tree: well, the fire had dealt with them. They were still burning where they had fallen, like slow candles slumped upon the earth. And now their leader, Nikha himself, joined them there.
Finally Nathan must see to the women. Dragging them from their various places, he dealt with each in her turn. They had been savaged and raped - no, more than that: they'd been used hideously - then vampirized. The skulls of two of them were dented as by terrific blows; while the other two, including Eleni...
... Nathan could only shake his head in horror and disbelief. There were fist-sized holes to the left of centre in their chests between their breasts, where someone, something, had thrust its hand into their bodies to nip their hearts. Not to kill them, no, but to stun them. For even now they were alive, or undead.
There was no putting it off, not even for Eleni's sake; especially not for her sake. Lardis had shown Nathan how to do it, and now it was up to him. He did it - did it to Eleni, too - and only at the last felt someone's eyes on him. It was the sole survivor, the youth who had gone fishing in the river, now standing at the edge of the firelight gaunt as a ghost and vacant-eyed, with caved-in cheeks the colour of chalk.
"Vampire World 1 - Blood Brothers"
Nathan spoke to him; the youth ignored him. He went to him, took his arm; and the other - a mere boy -snarled at him and bared his teeth. At that Nathan stepped back a little and stared hard at him, very hard; but there wasn't a mark on him, neither bruise nor puncture. He'd simply been ... lucky? If living to witness this could be called luck.
Eventually Nathan left him standing there, watching his world burn. And salvaging a blanket from a caravan, he walked out a little way into the grass at the edge of the scorching, found himself a hollow in the earth and went to sleep. Later, waking up, he looked back and saw the boy standing where he'd left him. He thought to call out, shook his head instead, left the lad to his grief and went back to sleep.
Eight hours later the wind had died away; the fires were smouldering; the ironwoods were blackened corpses of trees at the forest's rim. And the boy was no longer there. Nathan got up and went back to the burned-out place to look for him. And remembering the last time he'd come here, this time he looked up. Sure enough the boy was hanging there, cold and dead.
There was no life in him - not any sort of life - but Nathan couldn't leave him for the crows. He reached up, took hold of his legs and added his own weight. It seemed a cruel thing to do but Nathan was drained of energy; there was none left for climbing, anyway. It worked: the thin rope snapped, and the boy came thumping down.
And now Nathan must build another fire ...
In the middle of the long night, under the coldly glittering stars, Nathan wrapped himself in his blanket, headed south and walked out across the prairie. He never once looked back at the last funeral pyre burning behind him.
He took nothing with him but the blanket, the clothes he was wearing, the leather strap with a half-twist on his left wrist, by which his mother, in what now seemed another world, a different age, had recognized him in the darkest of nights. Because the strap was a familiar thing - his sigil, a token of his identity? - Nathan had kept it through his childhood, replacing it as his wrist thickened first to a boy's, then a youth's, finally a man's. Likewise Nestor: he, too, had kept his wrist band, the straight one, without the half-twist ... but he no longer featured in Nathan's thoughts, except as an echo.
Nothing much featured in his thoughts. Just the faces of the dead: his mother, Misha, Nikha Sintana and his Travellers, Eleni; but all of them fading now as his mind discovered ways to obliterate them. For sometimes a memory - a face or scene out of the past - can be too painful to remember. And Nathan had reached the stage where alJ of his past was much too painful. It was a peculiar thing, but the thought had come to him that a man without a past has very little on which to build a future. Which was why he now walked out across the grasslands into the desert: because he no longer wished for a future.
When he felt tired he sat down, weary he went to sleep, hungry and thirsty he went without. And he knew that while weariness couldn't kill him, deprivation most certainly would: what he had been deprived of, and what he now deprived himself of. That was how he wanted it and how he willed it to be.
There was no bitterness in him; he didn't feel that he was quitting; only that he had never got started and so had nothing to finish, except his life. And even that might not be The End. For of all living men, Nathan knew that death was just another beginning. And maybe then, when his body was dead, all of them who had gone before would talk to him at last and explain the things which he'd never understood in life.
Would he be able to talk to his mother, he wondered, and to all the rest who were lost to him? And if he still couldn't find peace or purpose, would there be other worlds beyond?
The last clump of withered grass was far behind him when the stars began to fade and the first crack of light showed on the horizon. He made straight for it. The stony ground turned to sand under his feet as the sun cleared the shimmering horizon, but Nathan averted his eyes and continued to wander south. Soon he was warm, then hot, finally sweating. It meant nothing to him: just another discomfort, of which he'd had enough. At least this would be the last.
He came to cliffs of sandstone rising out of the desert, and at last looked back. And saw nothing but sand or perhaps, in the far faint distance, a dark wrinkle where blinding blue met dazzling yellow on the shimmering rim of the world. The barrier range? Possibly. But now Nathan had his own barrier to cross. And after that the greatest barrier of all...
The sandstone cliffs were high and sheer. Nathan could not climb them so must skirt around, and so proceed towards the sun and his inevitable end. He turned east, walked a mile in the cool shade of the escarpment, and came to a great gash where the cliffs were split open into a gorge. Perhaps at the back he would find a way to climb the cliffs. He entered the gully and followed its wall half a mile to the rear, then in a semicircle, and finally back to the entrance but on the opposite side. He had discovered no way to climb the cliffs, but what did it matter? This would make as good a place as any to die.
"Vampire World 1 - Blood Brothers"
He was hungry now and thirsty, more so than he had ever been in his entire life. If there had been food he would eat it, and if there was water he would drink it, naturally. But there wasn't. And no way back to Sun-side's forests now; for the sun would sear him in an hour, crush him to the earth in two, and shrivel him to a stick by midday. Which was all according to plan.
Nathan stood in the shade at the foot of the cliffs in the eastern lee of the gorge and looked around. In the otherwise sheer face of the cliff, a narrow ledge or fault climbed diagonally a third of the way to the top. Shading his eyes, he saw the mouths of many caves cut into the cliff where the split in the sandstone petered out. Perhaps this was a natural feature carved by water two or three or ten thousand years ago, in an age when the gulley was a watercourse; or perhaps the caves had been cut by men when the desert was more hospitable. As for now, they could only be homes for lizards and scorpions.
While Nathan thought these things, still they were neither curious nor even conscious thoughts; they were simply the activity of his human brain, which for all his traumas functioned as before. For in fact, even as he considered the origin of the precipitous caves and 'wondered' at their meaning, he couldn't really give a damn. After all, they made no slightest difference to his plan one way or the other.
For his plan was simply to die.
But Nathan had grown cold in the shade and desired to die warm. Stumbling now, he came out from the shadow of the cliffs into the blazing heat of the sun, and stood shivering until it burned through to his bones. Finally he returned to the shade, wrapped himself in his blanket shroud and lay down. And with a stone for a pillow he went to sleep.
With any luck he would not wake up but if he did ... hopefully it would be to a painless and terminal delirium.
Nathan dreamed of the numbers vortex. He floated in black and empty space and the vortex rushed upon him out of the void to sweep him away to other places. But he was determined to stay here and die. He heard the voices of his wolves calling to him out of the spinning core of the maelstrom of numbers, but they were too far away and the din of clashing equations and mutating formulae was too loud; he couldn't make out what they were saying. Something about Misha? About his mother? About death?
Nathan supposed they were commiserating with him, but he didn't need that. 'I know,' he called out into the vortex, and hoped they would hear him and leave him alone to die. 'I know they're dead. It's all right. I ... I'm going there too.'
The wolf voices became impatient, frantic, angry; finally they snapped at him. But why? Did they consider him a deserter? Or were they angry because he refused to understand? Whichever, the numbers vortex had given up trying to snatch Nathan and was shaking itself to pieces, disintegrating into fractions which it sucked into its own core. It snapped out of existence and left him alone, suspended in his dream.
Or perhaps not quite alone.
Did I hear you taJJdng to ... to wolves just then? The question startled Nathan. So much so that he shot upright in his blanket, awake!
'What?' He looked all around in the shade of the cliffs, whose shortening shadows told him that he had been asleep for only an hour or so. The voice had been so real, so close, that he felt certain someone must be hiding behind a boulder close by. Or maybe this was that terminal delirium he had hoped for. And less energetically, forcing the word up from a throat dry as the desert itself: 'What?' he croaked again. But of course he was talking to himself, for there was no one there.
Oh, but there is someone here! The 'voice' spoke again in Nathan's mind, from as close a source as before. Indeed, there are many someones here.
Many someones ...? The short blond hairs at the back of Nathan's neck stood on end and his skin pricked up in gooseflesh. For now he 'knew' what this was, and where he must be. And of course there would be a great 'many someones' in that beyond world called death: more than all the living in all of Sunside. Indeed, a Great Majority!
Are you dead then? the voice inquired, puzzled. If so, it's a strange thing. You don't feel dead. But on the other hand, I can't see how you can be alive. I never belore spolte with a living creature. We]], not since my own time among the ]iving.
Nathan had meanwhile stood up: slowly, achingly, as if all the oils of his body were already dried out. But he felt the pain of it, the emptiness of true hunger and the desiccation of thirst. That was what would kill him: his thirst. But he wasn't dead yet, just delirious. He must be, surely. For he knew that the dead shunned him. And yet here was one who spoke to him with no slightest hint of fear or shyness. It was wish fulfilment, nothing more.
For both of us, perhaps, the voice agreed.
Nathan's throat felt raw as freshly slaughtered meat. His lips were cracked, beginning to puff up. He tried to speak, to say; 'What, and did you also desire to speak to the dead?' But only the first three words came out. It made no great difference; the thought was sufficient in itself.
"Vampire World 1 - Blood Brothers"
Did I wish to speak to the dead? No, for 1 can do that already. Being one of them, of course I speak to them. But to be able to speak to one of the living ... ah, that would be a precious gift indeed!
Nathan sat down on a boulder and thought: I'm delirious!
But I am not, said the voice. And I don't think you are, either. And you're certainly not dead. So who are you?
Nathan looked down at himself, visible, solid, unwavering. He was real. The voice in his head was the unreal thing. Surely it should be answering the question who are you?
First and foremost, I am Thyre, said the voice at once. But I see that you doubt my presence. You believe me to be a figment of your own imagination.
Nathan forced spittle down into his throat for lubrication. 'Your name is Thyre?'
My name is a secret, to any creature who is not Thyre. My race is Thyre. I am - or was - of the desert folk. But you are not. I perceive now that you are Szgany, of the forest and hill folk. You can only be, for if you were Wamphyri, then by now the sun must have melted you away. And the trogs likewise prefer their darkness. So, what is your name?
Again Nathan looked all around, satisfying himself that no one was playing some grotesque, macabre trick on him. 'I'm called Nathan,' he finally answered, speaking more to himself than the unbodied presence, and thinking: how strange, to be a presence without a body! While out loud: 'Nathan Kiklu, of the Szgany Lidesci.'
And you came here to die? Ah, yes, I know! For I've been listening to your thoughts for some little time. But when you talked to wolves, and them so far away ... then I knew I must speak to you. For even though you are Szgany, still you have the secret talent of the Thyre!
A talent? Nathan wondered.