“Down!” Lardis yelled. “Get down!”
The flyers were upon them, buffeting them apart; the one which pursued Nathan made to scoop him up; he stumbled and the flap of the thing’s pouch sent him flying. It formed its wings into air-traps and hovered, following him where he tumbled down a scree slide.
Frantically, Lardis swung his weapon towards the other beast but daren’t fire; Misha was in the way. The creature was almost upon her when suddenly … she gave a scream and disappeared! She was the victim of one of Lardis’s pits! But better that than the other. Far better! She might be injured, but she was safe for the moment. And the old Lidesci launched himself feet-first down the scree slide after Nathan.
Nathan was on his feet. He turned to look back up the slope—and the flyer was there, right behind him! He saw it, and saw that its rider was …
… Nestor!
Nathan might not know the face—that twisted, snarling visage with its scarlet, glaring eyes—but he would recognize the mind anywhere, however warped and changed it had become. At close range there was no mistaking it; he felt its hatred, and knew that recognition was mutual. Nestor was a Power now, and Nathan’s own telepathy that much more enhanced.
You! The word was a hiss, burning like acid as it flowed from Nestor’s mind.
“Nestor!” Nathan gasped, as the flyer’s head passed over him and its belly pouch yawned. He smelled its stench … and in the same moment heard Lardis’s yell:
“Get down!” A split second later and the old Lidesci came skidding on his heels and his rump, collided with Nathan and sent him flying. The two of them rolled and tumbled; but relentless as a shadow and almost as close, the flyer followed after. They hit the bottom of the slope, and Lardis was first on his feet. Growling like a bear he turned his weapon on the flyer and discharged it pointblank into the creature’s eyes—once, twice!
The thing screamed high and shrill, lashed its head left and right, and its wings pounded frantically, uselessly at the air. Then, as a wingtip struck the slope, the beast tilted to one side, which threatened to unseat its rider. Yelling like a madman, Lardis reloaded and aimed at the vampire Lord.
And even if Nathan would wish it otherwise, there was nothing he could do about the rest of it. Dazed and still trying to climb to his feet, he heard the twin shotgun blasts and felt Nestor’s agony! And again he and Lardis were bowled over as the stricken flyer’s thrusters uncoiled downwards and drove it out and away into the night, with Nestor lolling and jerking in the saddle.
By now Sunside lay under a blanket of mist, and because the main body of Wamphyri hunters were in the east, it could only be a natural mist rising from the woods and rivers of the region. Nestor’s flyer dipped low and tore a soft hole in the stuff, which quickly filled in behind it.
Lardis was yelling, “I got the bastard! I got him in the eyes, like I told you! If my aim had been better I could have taken his head off!”
The mist rolled up and covered them, and passed up the slope. And despite that Lardis had been talking about Nestor, there was only one thought in Nathan’s mind now: “Misha?”
“Come on,” Lardis growled. “She fell into one of our own pits. And that other flyer may still be around, might even have landed!” Reloading his shotgun, he headed up the slippery scree slope. But even as they began climbing, so Zahar came gliding from above and fell on them. It was as swift as that: the mist opened and the flyer was there.
Lardis got off a shot before he was buffeted aside. He was on his feet again in a moment, aiming at a nodding, mist-wreathed head, squeezing the trigger. And the gun blew up in his hands! One of the old cartridges, a bad one, had finally let him down. Blown backwards and off his feet, he waited for the shock to pass, then struggled upright and looked for Nathan … and saw nothing but the mist. But in a little while he found the wind to climb the slope.
Misha was waiting at the top, shivering and dishevelled but otherwise unharmed. She took Lardis’s hand and helped him up, then grabbed him and looked into his eyes. He could only lower his head and look away …
EPILOGUE
Unconscious from the flyer’s gases, Nathan lolled in Zahar’s arms where the vampire lieutenant carried him across the wormhole-riddled terrain surrounding the hell-lands Gate and tossed him down on top of its low crater wall. Beyond that wall, snug as an eye in its socket, the vastly glaring Gate shone with a cold white light, causing Zahar to lower his eyelids half-way shut and put up a hand against the dazzle.
He found a toe-hold and stepped up onto the wall, picked Nathan up and paced forward to the very “skin” of the shining hemisphere of light. There he paused, looked at the man in his arms and shrugged. There seemed very little of a “great enemy” in this one, and as any vampire would know, there were better uses for good Szgany flesh than this! On the other hand, his master’s warning couldn’t be ignored; Zahar dared not fail him who had sworn to return. For Nestor was a Lord and crafty necromancer, while Zahar was only a lieutenant.
Well, time now to get it over with. He cradled Nathan like a child in one arm, and slapped his face until his eyes flickered open. “What?” Nathan groaned, rolling his head and seeing first Zahar’s awful face, and then the blinding light spilling from the Gate! The hell-lands portal, which he knew at once, glaring like … like “a great blind eye”!
Zahar grinned at him and said: “Courtesy of the Lord Nestor. Whoever you are, this world has seen the last of you. But I hope they make you welcome in hell!” And so saying he spilled Nathan out of his arms into the glare, which absorbed him in a moment, effortlessly and without a sound, like an eye blinking away the irritation of a dust mote …
Far to the east in a blocked pit in Madmanse, the gigantic monstrosity which was Eygor Killglance lay where he had died, slumped against a nitre-streaked wall, and groaned a vast and terrible deadspeak groan. He was dead, the physical Eygor, but his mind of course went on. Except there was no one now to know it, not with any certainty. For like the guttering of a distant candle in the ultimate darkness of death, Eygor had seen Nathan’s light go out. Which could mean only one thing: that the Necroscope was no more.
In the higher levels of the promontory, called Runemanse, perhaps Maglore “heard” something of Eygor’s groaning; perhaps he “felt” something of Nathan’s passing. At any rate he rushed to his room of meditation and placed his trembling fingers on the sigil shaped in gold, and let his mind drift out from Turgosheim, then hurtle west at the unthinkable speed of thought, which is instantaneous. But the sigil was lifeless now, merely a strangely twisted mass of heavy metal, and Maglore’s “window on an unknown world” was closed. It was weird, because even though Nathan’s aura was gone, the feeling persisted that he was not dead. What, then? Undead? Locked in that metamorphic sleep which precedes the vampire condition? Had he finally succumbed to the seduction of vampirism? Did Wratha or one of hers have him? And Maglore sighed. Better perhaps if he had made him his own after all…
In all the dreaming places of the Thyre, suddenly the darkness was that much deeper. For the ancients also knew of Nathan’s passing from this world, but they knew a little more than the rest: that he was not dead. For if so he would be one with them, an honoured member of an elite, “extinct” society, where his dead-speak voice would always be welcome. No, he was not dead but removed from them, taken away, transported to a place from which no one ever returned.
The teeming dead of Sunside knew it, too, and felt safer for it, however shamefully. But men reap what they sow, and in the child there is always that of the father. Perhaps Nathan had posed a threat, and perhaps not. Whatever, it made no difference now for he was gone. And of all of them who had passed into Sunside’s air and earth, only Jasef Karis missed him and wished that he had spoken to him.
But not a one of them—not Eygor, Maglore, the Thyre, or all the dead of Sunside put together—could ever have dreamed that they would hear Nathan’s dead-speak voice again, or see his candle burning in the darkness as before …
/> Nestor’s awakening was slow and painful. His eyes were burning, his back had been very nearly broken, but his mind … was free of numbers! And with that, it all came back to him:
… His flyer, blinded, with its face half shot away and its tiny brain peppered with poisonous silver pellets. Nestor, too, reeling in the saddle with sightless eyes, his face a raw red mess and consciousness slipping as he fought to command his crippled beast up, away, back to Starside. He remembered a long low glide, and his inability to impress himself on the flyer’s mind. The wonder was that the beast had stayed aloft so long.
… Then the crash: the whiplash as he was hurled from the flyer’s back, his body somersaulting, smashing against the bole of a great tree, falling through branches which snapped under his weight, down to the forest’s floor. And the darkness.
Following which:
Ministering hands? Kindness? Ointments and bandages, to assist in the healing process which Nestor’s leech had already commenced? Brief bouts of consciousness, in which he had known that people moved about him, caring for him, even feeding him a vile soup, which his body accepted readily enough despite that it was not his usual fare. It could only mean that he had made it back to Starside, where Wratha had found him crashed among the great hardy firs of the barrier range below the tree-line, and brought him into the last aerie.
But when he had tried to speak to her, it was not the Lady Wratha’s voice which answered him. And because his eyes were so badly damaged and bandaged, he’d not seen the ones who covered his shivering body with blankets to keep him warm, and fed him, and pricked the silver shot out of his face, and generally succoured him through his fever.
Until now, finally, he heard their whispers, and felt once more the pain in his back, the agony of his ruined face. But he held still as they peeled away the bandages, and listened to their whispers tailing off as they sensed that he was awake. Then, despite the pain of tearing scabs, he gradually forced his eyes open and felt pus begin to ooze as something of sight returned. But —
—Was the room dark, or was it his eyes? It was both, he knew. He was healing, but not yet fully healed. For even a dark room would appear as daylight to one who was Wamphyri. But this room seemed full of a thick grey mist, and his eyes burned like fire when he blinked them to clear his vision. Except his vision would not clear. He was half-blind, and a long way yet to go before his vampire repaired him back to new.
He stirred, groaned, moved his limbs and tested his body. And like shadows the ones who had saved him backed off, melted away and out of this misty room of vague grey shapes and musty odours. Their movements seemed strange, stumbling, crippled as badly as Nestor himself and perhaps worse. For he was at least aware of his blood surging and knew that his limbs were his own again. He was weak but would be strong, and given time he would see as well as ever. But not yet for a while.
Now that Nestor was alone he put out a trembling hand to feel his bed, the wall, the edge of a table. All of wood, and warm. In no way the familiar cold grey stone of the last aerie. So what was this place? Where was he and what had awakened him? Deep down inside, some strange instinctive terror grinned and gurgled, and in the eye of memory showed him a picture out of the past:
Of a flyer, gouting smoke and steam and shrivelling as its hide split open; then spilling its loathsome fats as the sun ate into it like acid and reduced it to so much slop! The sun …! Was that what had awakened him, fear of the sun? But why? Where was he … and what was the hour?
Someone entered the room and Nestor froze, then fought to control his fear as the grey shadow came closer and stood beside his bed. His fear? But of what? He was the Lord Nestor of the Wamphyri! “What …?” he gurgled from scabby, tattered lips. “Who …?”
“Ah!” The grey shape nodded. “And so you’ll recover and return to Starside. Good!”
But though the voice was warm and not unkind, still its tone was strange, bitter, and … satisfied? And what was that it had said? About a return to Starside? Suddenly, anger and frustration flooded Nestor. He struggled to a sitting position and focused his damaged eyes until the grey one’s misty silhouette filled in a little and his features took on shape beneath the cowl of his robe. But they were still grey features, poorly defined and oddly … incomplete? The wraithlike figure leaned a little on a crutch which fitted under his right shoulder, and his robe hung like a shroud from his insubstantial frame.
“It’s so dark in here,” Nestor said stupidly, or perhaps hopefully.
The other shook his head. “No, it’s light enough. Or will be soon.”
Nestor’s pain threatened to engulf him again. He was Wamphyri, but he was still learning their disciplines. As yet he couldn’t suppress pain. He fought it back as best he was able, and asked: “Who are you, and what is this place?”
“My name is Uruk Piatra, called Uruk Long-life,” the grey one answered with a shrug. “But a misnomer, I fear. And as for this place … it’s a leper colony.”
For a single moment Nestor’s brain froze: a leper colony! Leprosy, the great bane of vampires!—but in the next he was galvanized to activity. Then, swinging his legs out from under the blankets, he grabbed the dangling arms of the other’s robe. But they were only empty sleeves and couldn’t take his weight. They ripped at the shoulders and came away in Nestor’s hands where he fell back again onto the bed. And he saw how Uruk’s twig arms ended in swollen fungus nubs at the elbows!
After that: a rush of adrenalin—a madness of vampire-induced flight in which all of Nestor’s previous agonies were forgotten—a blundering confusion of blind terror as he fled the colony out into the forest. And even then no respite, for in the south the light was improving moment by moment. Grey shapes stood gaunt as ghosts in the mist of Nestor’s perception as he rushed this way and that under the trees, trying to avoid them. He crashed among a cage of squawking chickens and wrecked it, fell against a fence and tumbled over it, and felt no pain now but only fear as he careened deeper into the dawn woods in search of a place to hide.
A deep hole in which to find safety from the sun and wait out the long day. A sanctuary in which to rest and recuperate, sleep and dream … and nightmare, certainly.
About what had been, and what was yet to be …
Brian Lumley, Blood Brothers
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