And while their refuge from the night was put in order for them, so the three had told Uruk their entire story …
That was how it had been for them at the leper colony, in the early hours of the previous night. But as they had settled in to wait out the long hours of darkness, their worries were not so much for themselves as for their loved ones.
Not unnaturally, Nana’s thoughts had been for Nathan and Nestor:
How had they fared through Settlement’s devastation, she wondered?—wondered it in her sleep, and through all of her waking hours—till at last, still wondering, she’d shivered awake with the dawn. Had it been just as bad for them? Surely it must have been even worse! And how were they faring now?
Now in the light of early morning, in the foothills over Twin Fords, Nestor finished his rabbit and stretched out his limbs in the long grass to digest it. While behind him and somewhat higher, at the sheer, rearing rim of an outcrop, vile evaporation continued to spill out of the trees and tumble down the cliff like a frothing waterfall—but less vigorously now—from the three-quarters liquefied flyer destroyed by sunlight.
As for Nathan …
Following old Traveller trails between the forest and the foothills, striding east towards Twin Fords, Nathan was tempted to seek out his brother in a way neither of them had used since childhood. It would mean breaking his easy, long-legged, mile-eating lope for a few minutes, which he was scarcely willing to do, but if it proved successful at least his mind would be at rest.
For there had never been a time in Nathan’s life when he was more aware that he was only one half of twins; when, as if to accentuate his and Nestor’s physical differences, he could feel this new rift between them like a great canyon, yawning ever wider the closer he came to its rim. And he knew that Misha Zanesti had been only a part of it, that it had been coming anyway and she had been merely the catalyst.
But it had all culminated so swiftly. First Misha:
Because of her love for Nathan (rather, because of Nestor’s jealousy), the brothers had drifted apart; that rivalry which had seeded itself in childhood had finally bloated into life, separating them. But they weren’t the first brothers to come up against such a problem; it was something which might well have righted itself, eventually. Especially now that… now that Misha …
But no, Nathan couldn’t bring himself to dwell upon that—Misha with the dog-thing, Canker Canison—not in the way Vratza Wransthrall had so gleefully described it. And yet he must, for back in Settlement he’d vowed against the Wamphyri, especially Canker. And though he felt choked inside, still a low growl escaped his throat as he pictured that one! Aye, and his vow was a double, even a triple vow, surely; for the Wamphyri were also responsible for whatever fate had befallen his mother, and for tearing him physically apart from his brother. As for the latter … he could only hope that it wasn’t permanent.
A terrible, terrible thing to have lost all of them: his mother, Misha, and Nestor. He neither knew nor wanted to know what effect the death of his brother would have on him, but he supposed it would be like losing an even bigger part of himself—perhaps the last part.
For he and Nestor: they’d shared their mother’s womb, her milk, the love of the same Gypsy girl—though she’d loved one as a brother and the other for himself. But their blood was one blood, and even their minds had seemed fashioned of like stuff; at least, they were similar enough that sometimes they touched upon each other.
Which was what Nathan intended now: to touch Nestor’s mind, and in so doing prove that he still lived. And if there was nothing there, a vacuum? That was the chance he must take: to be part of something which once was whole, at least, or to be even emptier than the husk he inhabited now.
With all of these thoughts and others swirling in his head and clouding the psychic ether, it was hardly the best moment for such an experiment, but Nathan drew off from the trail anyway, sat down with his back to a boulder and closed out the day, his furious loathing of last night’s raiders, all other emotions, everything, and let his mind drift…
The dead drew back from him!
He felt that at once; their shock, even their horror. But this time Nathan’s interest Jay with the Jiving … he hoped. And up in the high hills, in deep caves, grey-furred ears sprang erect, grey heads were lifted, and triangle eyes blinked in gloomy lairs. There were three of them, three together, who knew his mind as if it were one of theirs: Blaze, whose brow was marked with his mother’s white; Grinner, whose damp black lips forever twitched, as if on the verge of smiling; Dock, whose tail had been shortened when he was a cub and wanted to play with some brave vixen’s brood.
They divined Nathan’s purpose at once but couldn’t help him, not this time. For none of theirs was abroad in the daylight, and no further reports of Nestor had reached them. If it were night, that might be different. But not now.
Nathan acknowledged them anyway, where they whined a little, curled up and resumed their contemplations. And moving on, he let his thoughts drift, drift…
…Until they struck upon a mind he knew, yet at one and the same time did not know! For it seemed different, changed, wiped clean. Or perhaps wiped unclean, with a dirty, bloodstained rag? For this was Nestor, and yet it was not him.
Nathan couldn’t understand. It was as if Nestor’s mind itself was undecided about his identity! And a great rage of pain and frustration, of need and ambition, and of loss and discovery seethed in the core of him!
Such was Nathan’s shock that he snatched himself back from the stranger which was his brother—and jerked erect where he sat with his back against the rock!
And all of his thoughts fled back to him like whipped dogs, and his quandary was deeper than before where he took up the trail again and headed east…
Nestor was asleep, digesting his meal, converting the strong food into energy. He was asleep and wandering in the most fragile of dreams—which were scattered on the instant that the alien Thing entered his mind!
Alien, yes, and a hated enemy! He knew it from the whirlpool of numbers, symbols, meaningless equations and other mathematical devices behind which the Thing concealed its identity and purpose. That same enemy which had plagued him all the days of his life! Shivering despite that the sun blazed down on him, Nestor opened his eyes …
… and looked up at two men, one about his own age and the other much older, who had come across him where he lay!
The enemy of his dreams was at once forgotten; he saw the men—saw that just for the moment they were looking at each other, not at him—and closed his eyes again, feigning sleep. But what he’d seen stayed etched on his mind’s eye:
One of them, the young one, was kneeling beside him with his fist knotted round the handle of a knife whose sharp blade gleamed like liquid silver in the sunlight. Slender, wide-eyed, nervous, he looked more than a little frightened. The other, a weathered, surly-looking man in his middle years, stood erect with a loaded crossbow held in his strong brown hands. He had been scowling and was now quietly muttering to himself:
“Steal a rabbit right out of my trap, would you, boy? And what are you doing up here anyway, eh? Especially this morning, after last night…”
“No vampire,” the one on his knees whispered, still glancing over his shoulder at the first speaker, “else he wouldn’t be out in the sun. And look at the state of him, all bruised and banged about! Was he a lone hunter, perhaps, scared down out of the mountains? What do you think, father?”
“What do I think?” the first one’s answer was a low rumble of unreasoning hatred and suspicion. “Oh, I’ll tell you what I think: that the bloodsucking bastards have thought up some new tricks, and that this one’s some weird Wamphyri changeling! So he’s not changed far enough yet that the sun will hurt him … so what? You saw his flyer up there, all melting away, and its black bones poking through the rot. Too much of a coincidence to find a thing like that up there, and then to find this one down here. That’s what I think!”
Nestor’
s flyer? He remembered it. Indeed, it was one of the very few things which he did remember. But what was that the older man had called him, a changeling? Hah! Little he knew. For Nestor was no mere thrall but a Lord! He was the Lord Nestor—of the Wamphyri!
The word was like a fire in his blood—Wamphyri.
And now he tensed himself—but carefully, guardedly—for action. His arms were folded comfortably on his chest, and one knee was bent a little. All to the good.
“So what do we do about him?” the one who kneeled wanted to know.
“First we wake him,” the other growled. And reluctantly: “Then … I suppose we’d better drag him down into Twin Fords, and find out about him there. For I’d hate to make a mistake.”
Too late! thought Nestor. You’ve made too many already.
He felt the younger one’s hand grip his arm above the elbow, shaking him, and heard him bark: “You, wake up!” Following which, all was a blur of motion.
Nestor’s eyes blazed open! Stiffening his hands and shooting them wide in a slicing motion, he knocked aside the young one’s knife arm, simultaneously wrenching his hand from its hold on his right arm. Suddenly unbalanced, with his hands sliced out from under him, the youth could only topple forward. Grasping his advantage, Nestor slammed his bent knee into the other’s groin, and jerked his head up off the ground to butt him full in the face.
Lips which were already snarling their shock and terror split open bloodily; teeth and bone crunched sick-eningly; the youth’s yelp of astonishment turned to a red gurgle as Nestor grabbed for the knife. He found it in the other’s slackening fingers and gashed himself wrenching it free. But the slicing pain served only to galvanize him further.
The older man was hopping left and right, trying to line up his weapon, shouting, “Stab him! Kill the bastard!” He would get off a shot but his son was in the way, and what he couldn’t see was that Nestor had the knife. And suddenly it seemed that the sprawling, jerking body of his son lifted itself up a foot from the one he was pinning down, and in mid-air shuddered convulsively. Then the youth was thrust aside, turned by Nestor’s arm and knee, and his awful face was a bloody mask with a gasping hole for a mouth. Also bloody was the slit in his jacket, from which Nestor drew out the knife.
“Son!” With a cry of anguish, eyes popping, the father watched his son’s brief death struggles, saw him flop motionless on the bloodstained grass. Then:
“You!” he snarled, swinging his weapon towards Nestor and pulling the trigger. But Nestor was on his feet, his arm already fully extended forward, and the red-blotched knife in flight! Nestor was good with a knife, but on this occasion he was lucky, too. It took the man in the throat, in the “V” of bone directly under his Adam’s-apple, punching a hole there which penetrated to the spine.
Even crumpling to the earth he was as good as dead, and so didn’t see his bolt take Nestor in the side, skewering his flesh like a needle through a blister. He didn’t see it, but there were others higher up the hillside who did.
Nestor heard them cry out, looked up from where shock had knocked him off his feet, and saw them through the wash of scarlet agony flooding over him. A group of four or five men, something less than two hundred yards away, descending the hillside towards him in a series of breakneck leaps and bounds—vampire hunters!
Nestor got his fingers into the tear in his jacket and ripped it open. The bolt had entered his body under the ribcage on his right side, scraping a rib at the back where its barbed head had emerged. Its flight was sticking out at the front, and both holes were dripping thick, dark splashes of blood where a five-inch bridge of white, puffy flesh joined them like a bulging roll of fat.
Nestor didn’t think twice but gripped the head of the bolt with his right hand and the flight with his left, and bent the wooden shaft against his side until it snapped. He saw the skin of his side bulge as the broken shaft forced the white flesh outward, and almost passed out; but he knew that if he did, it would probably be the last thing he ever did. And in any case, breaking the bolt had been only half of it. Now he must draw it out.
He did so without pause, and had to fight from gagging as the red blood spurted. Then, cinching his jacket tightly to his body, he somehow got to his feet and made off down the steep slope. But weak and desperate as he was, his heart was already pounding and his breath faltering. And those men back there—Szgany, and full of bloodlust—they’d not give him a second’s respite or his life a moment’s thought once they had him. It would be the stake, the knife, the fire for Lord Nestor of the Wamphyri!
He limped to the rim of a bluff and looked over, saw deep water rushing into the foam and spray of broad falls, and white water all the way down to the levels and the broken bridges of Twin Fords. But from behind as if to spur him on, rising above the hiss and surge of foaming waters, he could hear the angry shouts of his pursuers.
And looking back just once, to glimpse raised weapons and furious faces, he shouted his defiance—and jumped!
Nathan got into Twin Fords a little less than two hours later. He found the town a shambles—a pesthole of stumbling, slack-mouthed survivors; a bubbling cauldron of narrow-eyed, suspicious, would-be avengers; a chaos of terrified, demented people—with little or nothing of Settlement’s order and discipline about it. Before that, however:
There were guards on the approach roads to the town, who stopped him the moment he crossed the river through the shallows of the fording place, where all that remained of a once-sturdy bridge was a weir of timbers crushed down into the mud. He was recognized as one of Lardis Lidesci’s party, which had passed through heading west for Settlement just yestereve, and allowed to go on into the devastation.
And the chaos was at once apparent. At least two fires were still smouldering where granaries had been gutted; the dead—or their pieces, if they had been vampirized—were still being dragged through barely recognizable streets to be burned on funeral pyres; the wailing of women and weeping of children was nerve-rending. Inside a more or less intact perimeter of wooden buildings, the destruction was enormous, far worse than in Settlement. Here, where a great many houses had been simply smashed flat, it appeared that the Wamphyri and their creatures must have raged out of control.
Approaching the centre, where the leaders and elders of the Szgany Zestos were holding a meeting, Nathan witnessed the discovery and destruction of a vampire thrall who had slept too late. Flushed from her hiding place under the eaves of a house by men brandishing torches, a woman was driven into the street and ringed about. With the sun beating down on her she shrank back and tried to cover herself, all the while raving and gibbering, and cursing the men about her in language so filthy that Nathan couldn’t believe it.
Wild, grey as a cloud, with eyes bubbling like sulphur, finally she braved their torches and launched herself at the nearest man. And as she snarled at him it was at once obvious that her eye-teeth were unnaturally long, white and sharp!
The bolt which cut her down was equally sharp, likewise the knives with which they took her head …
Then Nathan arrived at the meeting place in the shade of a large, hastily erected, open-sided tent. And as the gathering broke up he recognized Karl Zestos, the oldest son of Twin Fords’ former leader. His father, Bela Zestos, was dead now, a heroic victim of the vampire raid; if from the wreckage of his people Karl could salvage a number sufficient to lead, then he would become a Traveller King in his own right.
Recognition like sorrow was mutual; the two spent a few moments trading their grim stories; Nathan picked up several details of last night’s raid on Twin Fords which had not been available in Settlement. More than anything else, he was interested in Canker Canison. But when he explained why … then the other’s face turned grey. And:
“My friend,” Karl told him, shaking his head, “you must pray that your Misha is dead! The reports I have heard …”
“I know,” Nathan answered, cutting him short. “And when I think about it, I’m tempted to try willing her
dead! Except that’s not possible, and I’m glad it isn’t.”
“I understand,” the other nodded, then frowned at Nathan and added: “But something is strange here. I remember you differently: not only from your colouring, which is rare among the Szgany, but also for the fact that you were quiet and retiring. You have a brother, right? He’s the one I remember as forward and outspoken!”
“Am I forward and outspoken?” Nathan was surprised. “Then perhaps I’ve gained from Nestor’s loss.” He explained his meaning and his mission: how his brother had been taken, and how he had “dreamed” of the flyer crashing in the hills close by.
“That … rings bells,” Karl told him then; but if anything his frown was more deeply etched than before. “Some men were up in the hills this morning, looking for changelings who had escaped out of town. You’ll understand that there are many people we can’t account for. Anyway, they discovered a flyer and … a man. A youth, at least.”
Nathan grabbed his arm. “A youth? Alive?”
“He was—living—when they found him, yes,” the other replied. “But “alive”?” He shrugged. “Undead, perhaps.”
Nathan groaned. And: “Explain,” he said. Karl told him the story as he’d had it, finishing with: “He leaped into the torrent and was swept away. They saw him go under in the white water, but they didn’t see him surface.”
“And you say he …he murdered two men?” The other could only nod. “He was seen to do it, aye.” Nathan shook his head. Then it couldn’t be Nestor!” Again Karl’s shrug. “Who else could it be? The description I was given fits. Also, you’ve related how things were in Settlement. So how do you know Nestor wasn’t vampirized before the flyer took him? You don’t.” He sighed. “I’m not unsympathetic, Nathan, but it seems to me you should forget him now and go back home to those you have left.” Nathan was bitter. “I have no one left!” Then follow me,” Karl urged. “I need good, strong young men. I’ll take my people out of here and return to my father’s way of life before he built this place, and be a Traveller.”