Blood Brothers

  The wind was in his eyes, bringing tears; he could see nothing; the rearing west wall of the gorge was a blur. From somewhere in the east there sounded the dull rumble of propulsors: a training flight, it could only be. Then the gorge lay behind and the mountain range stretched ahead. “Will we make it?”

  I’m well fuelled, Karz answered, well rested, and I have volition and motivation. I want to make it. In this I surely differ from any flyer who came this way before. We’ll make it, yes. Even as he fell silent a tail wind came up, driving them west with a vengeance. Nathan’s eyes were clear now; he felt the exhilaration of his flight “upon a dragon”; he breathed deeply, almost as if he had never really breathed before, of air which tasted clean and sweet.

  And down below, behind, on the very plateau of Runemanse, Maglore and Karpath watched them go; and the Seer Lord said to his lieutenant:

  “Two birds with one stone. I have rid myself of Karz, who in any case was problematic, and I’ve gained a window on a far new world. For Nathan is a telepath, and powerful. Awake he hid it for me, but asleep … oh, I found my way in, from time to time. Now, whenever his guard is down, I can be in again. Why, he wears my sigil in his ear, only six inches from the centre of his brain!” He glanced at Karpath. “Do you understand?”

  “No, Lord,” the other shrugged apologetically.

  Disgusted, Maglore grunted, scowled and looked away. “On the other hand, perhaps there’ll be times when I’ll miss him.” While to himself: And I still don’t know who he talked to in his dreams, except that they were not of this world …

  The night was long, but barely long enough. Only Karz’s will sustained him, while Nathan lolled in the saddle like a zombie: awake one minute, drowsing the next, then starting awake again. But as an amethyst dawn crept in like some glowing tide along the rim of the world, and secret watchers in the barrier mountains yawned and relaxed after their long night’s vigil, making ready to go down into Sunside, so the great grey shadow which was Karz went wafting overhead on arched, aching manta wings, and dipped down towards the foothills over Settlement. He was seen, of course; the blast of a shotgun sounded, not aimed at Karz or Nathan for they were already gone into the gloom; the echoes rolled down into Sunside, faintly but loud enough, and the pair were guaranteed a welcome.

  Nathan had not anticipated that there would be men out and about in the pre-dawn heights. The sound of the shotgun had come as a surprise. Several such weapons existed, he knew, all in the hands of the Szgany Lidesci. So then, the Lidescis had not succumbed to vampire domination. Good, and Nathan had prayed it would be so; but the very fact of it made for a change in those sketchy plans which he’d so hastily prepared in Turgosheim.

  “We’ve been seen,” he told Karz. “I had hoped to go down into Sunside on foot, in secret; show myself to the Szgany in streaming sunlight; approach them as a man—obviously a man! Now … they will surely connect me with a flyer seen settling towards the foothills. Namely, you.”

  It’s your problem, Nathan, the other answered, but weakly. I have played my part and for the moment can do no more …

  They landed on a slope high in the foothills two miles west of Settlement, and while Karz munched on resin-laden pine branches, Nathan found flints and lit a fire under a hornet’s nest in a patch of mountain gorse. Stung three times for his efforts, he didn’t mind. He broke a small corner off the huge comb, chewed wax and honey alike for instant energy, then fed the rest to Karz.

  That will get me where I’m going. The flyer was grateful.

  “I’ve been giving it some thought,” Nathan told him, despondent for the other: that Karz, even a vampire changeling like him, should contemplate so hideous a suicide. For it seemed to Nathan that Karz’s humanity was proven. “Why don’t you fly west, beyond the range of Wratha and her creatures in Karenstack? For you said it yourself: you’re different from any flyer that ever was. You can find a Starside cave and make it your own, sleep out the days and forage for your food in the warm evenings or the long dawns before the sunrise.”

  I’m a vampire thing and bulky, Karz answered simply. Pine cones and honey are not enough.

  Down the slope someone stepped on a branch; there sounded a breathless, whispered query. Karz turned his huge soft eyes on Nathan and said, Szgany, even as I was once Szgany but no longer. These are your people, and it’s time I was on my way.

  Nathan slowly nodded. “At least you are your own … man.” Then he backed off, and Karz launched himself south for the sun and rose up into a bank of cloud heading in the same direction. For a moment he was a misty outline, then gone …

  Nathan knew how it must be and wouldn’t go rushing to his doom. But neither could he flee from it, for that would be to admit his guilt when in fact he was innocent. Waiting for them to come, he sat down on a flinty outcrop. But when he saw the first head bobbing in the gorse, and heard the climber’s hoarse panting, he stood up to shout: “You on the hillside, listen to me! I’m not Wamphyri! My name is Nathan Kiklu! I’m Nathan, of the Szgany Lidesci!”

  “Oh, really?” a young voice, hoarse with fear and breathless from the efforts of its owner’s climbing, came back. “And you came here on a flyer out of Starside, right?”

  Nathan was cold, tired; the wonder was that he was alive, that he hadn’t died of exposure. Now that his feet were on the ground, all he wanted to do was rest. Wearily, he held out his arms and said, “I have no weapons. Only look at me. Do I look like a Wamphyri Lord or lieutenant?”

  Gorse bushes parted and an anxious face peered through; a youth shouldered his way into view; he looked carefully all around, then gave a piercing whistle. His crossbow was loaded, and now he aimed it at Nathan’s heart. “What do you look like to me?” he said, squinting down his sights. “You look like a dead thing!”

  In Nathan’s entire body, there was no ounce of resistance left. But he tried one last time. “I’m Nathan,” he said, “Nathan Kiklu. I’m just a man.”

  “You’re a liar,” said the other. “I saw you and the flyer together. Say goodbye to all this, Nathan Kiklu.”

  “What?” A gruff voice sounded from behind him, and a wiry shoulder knocked him aside. “Did you say Nathan Kiklu?” A face which Nathan knew stared into his across a distance of no more than nine or ten feet. Then, however slowly, recognition registered, and with his jaw hanging slack the other stepped forward. In his arms he cradled a weapon from another world: a shotgun, all gleaming for the care and attention he gave it. And finally: “Why, I’ll be …!”

  Small, wiry, weathered, it was Kirk Lisescu …

  In Old Starside’s last aerie a young Lord came starting awake in a cold sweat. His dream had been very vivid, very weird, and very uneasy. For even the Wamphyri were men upon a time, whose dreams are like those of common men, with the power to transport them back to other times and places; so that the terrors they knew in their youth, before they were vampires, may rise up to trouble them again.

  In this dream there had been no blood. Instead, the young Lord had battled through the ranks of a thousand dead men whose bloodless, crumbling bodies stood up again as quickly as he cut them down! But even though his every effort had seemed useless, still he’d fought through them to get to That which they protected, the Thing which they guarded, his Great Enemy from a youth which was now almost entirely forgotten.

  And when finally he had stood upon a mound of crumbling, stinking human debris—pieces which yet clutched and clawed at him to pull him down—then the aerie of his alien foe had materialized: a rearing cone of whirling, mutating numbers! And within the rush and swirl of the cone, the infinitely sad face of a yellow-haired, blue-eyed giant; made sad, perhaps, by the sacrifice of his teeming dead army, but not by that alone. For strangely, inexplicably, he also felt for his vampire enemy.

  Nestor had somehow known it, that his enemy cared for him. And that was when he’d been wrenched awake, as the sad sapphire eyes of the face in the numbers vortex had gazed right into his soul, or what was left of it??
?

  Now, standing naked and trembling beside the thickly curtained windows with his hand on the rope, Nestor’s scarlet eyes stared almost vacantly west and a little south, as if his gaze might penetrate to the outside and over the boulder plains to the mountains, and across them into Sunside. The drapes were of black bat fur, thick and heavily weighted; not a chink of light passed through from the outside, and nothing of Nestor’s gaze the other way. But he could imagine well enough. The peaks of the barrier range would be golden, and in a little while the sun would aim its beams this way, too, and shine on Wrathspire.

  Wrathspire. That was what the Lady had finally named this place, these upper levels: Wrathspire, after herself and after the memory of another aerie which she’d fled from in the east. The Lady Wratha, aye: Nestor’s Lady, now, for as long as that would last. Why, he might even love her, if he were capable of loving anyone. But all of that had gone out of him a long time ago; a dream which was wrenched from him, just as he had been wrenched from his dream. Except …

  … Something of the dream remained, niggling there in the back of his wounded mind. The whirling wall of numbers, fading but—real? Absent for so long and only now—returned?

  Returned …

  The thought of that—of his Great Enemy, returned—made Nestor’s vampire flesh tingle. And what of his stolen love? Was she out there even now, together with him? And were they lovers again, plotting against Nestor anew as once before they’d plotted in a time long forgotten?

  “What’s on your mind? Do you walk in your sleep?” Wratha’s sleepy mumble reached him from their bed, or her bed, to which she invited him ever more frequently, until it was hard to remember when he’d last slept in his own. “Have no fear but open the drapes if you want to look out, for I would know it if the sun were up. Oh, it is, and burning—but in Sunside! Not on Wrathspire, not yet. No, for I would feel it there, scorching the stone.”

  He glanced at her sprawled unashamed, half-in, half-out of the sheets; then looked again, stared, and held his breath. One marble breast that lolled a little, tip-tilted; a flat, dimpled belly; a pale, rounded hip; the curves of thigh, leg, ankle and delicate foot. And central, a tight black mass where her thigh joined her body, half-hidden by the sheet. He breathed again. She was a wanton, this Wratha, and beautiful.

  “I don’t need to look out,” Nestor told her, his voice already choked with lust, like his bruised manhood, reacting to the lure of her sex as if he’d never known her. “For I know what’s out there … and also what’s in here.” The room was in total darkness; it made no difference, for they were Wamphyri. Wratha lifted her head and saw him as clear as daylight, his shaft rising and hardening as his red eyes fed upon her.

  “Then come to bed and ride awhile,” she said. “Or let me ride you, until you fire your juices into me. Or let my tongue tease the sweet nectar from you. Whichever way you will it, so long as we then may sleep. For though I’m weary, still I won’t rest, not with you at the window like that.” And to herself:

  You are young, strong, beautiful, and mine. And innocent? Oh, you were, you were. Not a virgin, not quite, but next best. Some dull Szgany cow had known you, without knowing how to handle you. Ah, but Wratha knew! A touch was all it took. Why, I remember how you almost came in my hand the first time I touched you, and how I brought you along like an infant learning to walk … since when you’ve learned to run! But to think of you running with someone else … I would kill her first, or you, or both of you! Is that what disturbed you? Did you dream of her again? Of Misha? Only let me come upon a Misha—any Misha—among Sunside’s sluts … I’ll throw her from the highest balcony!

  He went back to the bed and at once sank into her flesh, which sucked at him as powerfully as the first time. That was how it was with Wratha: always like the first time. It was hot and it was cold and it was pain and it was pleasure, and when he thought he had nothing left there was always more. But it was not love, and both he and Wratha knew it.

  Before they slept he let his mind drift out, out across the boulder plains to Sunside. But the searing sun was higher now and he felt it on the mountains; it leeched on his probe and weakened it, until he could feel its heat even from here. If the numbers vortex was there, it was shielded by an impenetrable veil of golden fire, which would last even as long as the day. But when the long day was done—

  —There was always the night…

  Two miles into the woods, in an area of freakish rock formations, hot springs and volcanic blowholes, there Lardis Lidesci and a team of tried and trusted men worked hard and sweated in tropical heat and acrid reek. Settlement lay to the north-east something less than three miles away, and the honeycombed outcrop of Sanctuary Rock stood half a mile closer, due north in the foothills. But here where the sprawling forest thinned out into an ugly scar or natural clearing, and the earth was a treacherous, crumbling, steamy grey crust streaked with ashes, sulphur and other mineral deposits, Lardis and his team built warrior traps.

  The morning was already a quarter spent when Kirk Lisescu and three others, one of them a stranger, came out of the woods from the north. They hailed the old Lidesci where he supervised the lowering of the last framework of brittle poles into position over a lethal sulphur pit, to be covered with a camouflage of coarse nets and tufts of withered gorse dipped in sulphur to simulate life; the finished effect being to imitate firm ground. Tonight someone would stay out here, just one brave soul in all the empty miles around, to light small, discreet fires in the centre of this vast trap. The first would be lit an hour after sundown, the second when the first went out, and the last—if the others proved ineffective—midway through the night. From on high the place would have the appearance of a Szgany encampment, where some fool had forgotten to damp down the evening’s fire. But as for any flyers or warriors who fell to earth here to investigate … they’d very quickly discover that it wasn’t earth!

  Eventually Lardis was satisfied; he looked up, squinted his eyes and frowned inquisitively at Kirk and his party, then walked a well-marked path to the safe margin where they waited. And: “Kirk,” he called out. “But you should be at the Rock and resting by now! And a well-earned rest at that! So what brings you…?” His query petered out, for in that moment Lardis had taken a closer look at the stranger.

  “Someone I thought you’d like to see,” Kirk answered with a grin. “For it’s been … what, almost a three-year?”

  “Lardis,” Nathan smiled, however tiredly. They had slept on the way here, under the trees, but he was still bone-weary. His eyes were hollow and his flesh wan; there was grey in the corn of his hair, which was no longer cropped but fell behind his ears and over the back of his collar; he stood taller, and his voice was deeper. But still, of all the Szgany in all Sunside, there could be no mistaking this one. And yet…

  … For a moment Lardis stood stock still, blinking like a man struck between the eyes. For it seemed as if there were two men here, and that he should know both of them. Or was it simply that his mind made connections with times, places, and faces? No, for Nathan wasn’t born then. What possible connection could there be between him and … Harry Hell-lander?

  But in another moment the double picture swam into one as Lardis’s eyes focused and finally goggled. And as his mental confusion receded, so his jaw fell open and his breath was expelled in a gasp of acceptance, recognition. “Nathan Kiklu!” He choked on the words, staggered forward, grabbed Nathan and clasped him to his barrel chest.

  “Careful, Lardis!” Kirk warned, only half-jokingly. “It’s Nathan, all right, but he came out of Starside—on the back of a Wamphyri flyer!”

  “What?” The old Lidesci stepped back a pace, held Nathan at arm’s length. “You did what?”

  “It’s a long story,” Nathan nodded.

  “Long and daft,” Kirk agreed. “I know for I’ve heard it! But I believe it, because no one could lie like that! Why Nathan’s been where Wratha and the others came from, and come out of it unscathed!”

&nb
sp; “Unscathed?” Lardis had a grip on himself. Narrowing his eyes, he looked at Kirk more seriously, questioningly now.

  “Oh, I’ve tested him,” the wiry hunter nodded his understanding. “Silver, kneblasch, whatever. But the best test of all is sunlight, and here he stands soaking it up! He’s pale as ever, is Nathan, but he’s still one of us.”

  Everything from three years ago came back to Lardis in a rush. “Nathan! We sent a runner after you but he didn’t find you. You don’t know about your mother, and Misha, and—”

  “—I know it all,” Nathan cut him short, laughing. But the laughter went out of him in a moment. “And all that time wasted, when I could have been here with you … with them.”

  Unashamed tears filled Lardis’s eyes and for a moment he couldn’t speak. Then, gruffly, “But now you’re back, and you can make up for lost time. Man, you’ve been a trouble to me!”

  “What?” It was Nathan’s turn to frown. “What makes you say that? How could I be a trouble when I’ve been away?”

  “Aye, and left a broken heart behind you! I gave her a year, then suggested she should marry. Now hold on!—don’t look at me like that!—for she, too, told me what to do with my suggestion! So she takes care of her father still, but only him now, for her brother Nicolae’s been dead a year. Well, and he’s one among many, but there are enough left to remember you and welcome you back. Your mother, too, brave women that Nana is. She never stopped hoping; she knew you would be back! Why, even now she’s always talking about you … and …” He paused and fell silent, and something of the excitement went out of him.

  Nathan understood and shook his head. “I picked up Nestor’s trail, but lost it in a river. I think he drowned.”

  For a moment they were both silent, until Lardis said, “Look, we’re all finished here. We can talk on the way back to Sanctuary Rock. Then, this afternoon, I’ll be busy again while you … renew old acquaintances?” And the familiar grin was back on his face again.