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.

  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 barrie
r 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.

  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 something made a shrill chittering sound in the surrounding darkness … and 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.

  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 all 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.