by Brian Lumley
Coming lithely, jinglingly from the mouth of the pass, Nestor and Jason joined the two older men. “No,” Nestor shook his head and gave a disdainful grimace. “My brother’s neither deaf nor daft, nor even dumb. He doesn’t want to speak, that’s all. He’s just… Nathan.”
Lardis glanced at Nestor, could almost taste the bitterness where his mouth puckered on his sour words. A pity they weren’t closer, he thought, like they’d been as children. For then they had been inseparable.
Nestor had looked after his brother until they were well into their teens. Maybe he’d looked after him too well, fought one too many fights for him, taken one too many knocks on his behalf. Whatever, it wasn’t the same between them now. And then there was Misha, of course. Young boys will always be boys and friends, until they grow into youths and become rivals.
Nathan and Nestor Kiklu: Nana’s sons …
Twins, yes (Lardis continued to consider them), but in no way identical. Indeed, they seemed poles apart: in their looks, philosophies, lifestyles. Nestor upright, brash, devil-may-care, outspoken and even noisy; Nathan weighed down (but with what?), withdrawn, serious, and silent of course.
Nestor was like his mother. Only see them together, and there could be no hiding the fact that he was her son. Except where Nana was small, Nestor was tall; as would his brother be tall, if only he would stand up straight! Long-limbed, both of them. Which was somewhat strange in itself; for their father, Hzak Kiklu, had been small like Nana. All the better for hiding in holes in the ground. Perhaps that was the reason. Many children had grown up tall and strong, since the destruction of the Wamphyri.
Nestor had his mother’s dark, slightly slanted eyes, her straight nose however small, her glossy black hair falling to his broad shoulders. Her smile, too, which could be mysterious at times. His forehead was wide; his cheekbones high; his chin jutted a little, more so when he was angry. His body was that of an athlete, and he wore his jacket with the sleeves rolled back, to display the width of his forearms. He looked Szgany through and through. That was Nestor, a youth to be proud of. But as for Nathan:
Well, a throwback there! Though to what, Lardis couldn’t imagine. Nathan’s eyes were less tilted, and for all that they were the deep blue of a sapphire, still they lacked the gem’s great depth. Their gaze was usually vacant, misty, or at best wandering (much like the mind which directed them, Lardis supposed, and indeed, much like the lad himself). But the strangest thing about him was his hair, which was the colour of damp straw! It was like Zek’s hair, but a little darker, and Nathan kept it cropped as if ashamed of it. Possibly he was, for like his other anomalies it set him apart.
As for the rest of his features: they were not too dissimilar from Nestor’s. A strong chin, high cheekbones, broad forehead … his mouth was fuller than Nestor’s, less cynical, but given to twitching a little in the left-hand corner. Then of course there was his skin, which was pale to match the colour of his hair; so that all in all, he scarcely looked Szgany at all.
His mother said his pallor was due to spending too much time indoors, or walking abroad at sundown, when most of the Szgany stayed close to home. According to Nana, his health in general was poor, so that he avoided the common activities of Settlement’s more active youths and preferred his own company. Well, the latter was quite obviously true enough. But to Lardis’s knowledge, the rest of it simply didn’t add up. On the contrary, Nathan seemed a wanderer born, and was forever out and about. Sunup and sundown alike, you would find him in the forest or on the mountain slopes, anywhere but indoors. And sickly? Lardis didn’t think so. A disinclination towards japing, girl-taunting and—chasing, and rough-and-tumbling with the other louts didn’t automatically make him sickly, did it?
No, Nathan wasn’t just the runt of the litter, he was a throwback. But to what? And if he didn’t look Szgany, then what did he look?
Lardis had pondered that question time and again: who did Nathan remind him of? Whose was that soft, that compassionate, indeed that innocent look in his eyes? But as always it remained a puzzle, an aggravation, a word stuck to the tip of his tongue which refused to eject and reveal itself. And Nathan himself an aggravation, so that at times even Lardis could kick him—if only to stir him to life!
That was why he had asked Nana Kiklu if he could bring her boys with him this time, into Starside on his annual pilgrimage: to get Nathan away from his old haunts, try to stir him into life. Maybe he’d find something here in the awesome barren wilderness to lure his mind back from wherever it wandered now …
Even as Lardis Lidesci thought these things, so there sounded the soft, regular pad of flying feet and the clatter of pebbles, and an approaching man-shape silhouetted against the glare of the near-distant Gate. And as the light grew marginally brighter over Starside, Lardis’s thoughts immediately changed tracks.
What, sickly, this one? Well, if so, then Lardis wished he was as sickly as that, with heart and lungs banging effortlessly away, as once they had used to, to power his tireless limbs. And vacant, Nathan? Not now at least. No, for his eyes were shining where he came panting to a halt, and shrugged in that apologetic way of his. He was sorry he’d kept them waiting.
“Did it interest you, then, the Gate?” Lardis asked him, before anyone else could speak.
Nathan already had his breathing under control. He looked at Lardis and nodded, however slowly. But a nod was an answer, which in itself was an improvement; usually you wouldn’t even get that out of him. And Lardis was pleased. It was like when they sat at the campfire in Settlement and he told his stories of the old times, and sensed Nathan’s attention rapt upon him above all the others put together. A dummy? Well, perhaps … but only on the outside.
“Huh!” Nestor grunted. “Oh, he’s interested, sure enough. Interested in all the weird, unanswerable things. Stars in the sky: how many there are. Ripples on a river: why he can’t count them. Where people go when they die, as if the smoke from their funeral pyres isn’t answer enough in itself. And now the hell-lands Gate? Why, of course he’s interested in it! If it doesn’t matter a damn, then Nathan’s bound to be interested in it.”
Again the sourness in his voice.
But Jason, Lardis’s son, who was eighteen months younger than the Kiklu boys, was less hard on Nathan. “The world’s not much to Nathan’s liking,” he said, “and he steers as far clear of it as he can. Which is a very hard thing to do, because of course he must live in it! That’s why he concerns himself with things which seem to us irrelevant. This way he has his world, and we have ours, and we don’t cross over too much one way or the other.”
(And Lardis nodded, albeit to himself, for he considered this a statement of astonishing perception.)
Lardis was proud of his son; Jason was open-handed, instinctively fair-minded, handsome in his dark Gypsy fashion, and intelligent. But just like anyone else, he was wont to err now and then. Like now. And:
“The Gate isn’t irrelevant,” Lardis quickly corrected him. “Come up here a moment.” They climbed a small knoll—no more than a hump of jagged rock—to a slightly higher elevation, and from there looked back on Starside. Specifically at the Gate.
“It’s getting lighter now,” Lardis pointed out what must be obvious to anyone. “Another hour or so and the peaks will turn to gold, and so what I wanted to show you isn’t so clear any more. Far better in the heart of sundown. And anyway it’s fading with the years, washed down into the barren soil by the rains, and carried away by warm winds out of Sunside. But do you see the glow?”
They saw it:
Maybe a hundred and fifty paces beyond the Gate, araw crater in the earth whose sides were rough and broken, with a rim of fused slag like puckered skin around a giant wound. More stark and jagged than Starside’s usually rounded boulders and other natural features, which had been worn down by the elements through untold centuries, this was a more recent thing, as if a shooting-star had crashed to earth here only a few short years ago.
Spreading out from th
e crater’s farthest rim, a faintly glimmering plume of light lay upon the earth like the luminous early-morning ground mists of Sunside. A long, tapering spearhead, feather, or finger, it pointed towards the Icelands on the blue, aurora-lit horizon. But it was the earth itself—the barren soil and the stony ground—which glowed with this soft yet sinister radiance; as if some giant slug had passed this way, leaving its slime-trail to shine in the light of the stars.
“And over there,” said Lardis, pointing, his voice very quiet. Westwards, following the base of the mountains to the horizon and out of sight—given clearer definition in the shadow of the barrier range—the earth shone more brightly yet, with a light which came and went by degrees, like the foxfire of rotten wood or the cold luminescence of glowworms.
“Light,” Lardis gruffly continued. “But not like the good clean light of day, nor even the light of a fire. A body can’t live by it, and mustn’t stay in it too long. It blasted Peder Szekarly that time, fourteen years ago: turned his skin white as a mushroom and robbed him of an heir. Aye, and it killed him, too, in the end. As for the trogs dwelling in the lee of the mountains: they paid the price, all right. It took them in their hundreds! But for their deep caves, they were finished for sure. Why, there are freaks among them still, whose fathers’ blood was poisoned on that night of nights! The one good thing about it: it also fell on the swamps, since when we’ve had precious few vampire changelings …”
“Aye, hellfire!” Andrei Romani nodded in agreement. “And it’s burning still, though not so hot now. Me, I say leave it be, and all of Starside, too. There’s nothing but ghosts here now, and it’s a wise man who leaves them to their own devices.”
“So you see,” said Lardis to Nestor, when they’d climbed down again and were headed for the pass, “the Gate is hardly irrelevant. It’s a marker shining there still, to remind us that this is the spot where the powers of the hell-lands and those of the Wamphyri clashed and cancelled each other out.”
“All very well,” Andrei put in, “but what’s all that to Nathan? Do you think it matters at all? I mean, do you think he understood or was interested in a single damn thing we’ve talked about? If so, well, he’s not much for showing it!”
“He showed plenty of interest in the tumbled stacks of the Wamphyri,” Lardis replied. “And in Karenstack, the last aerie, blackened like a chimney flue on that side facing the Gate. Aye, and I firmly believe he would have entered Karenstack to climb it, if we’d let him! And finally, it seems he also felt the mystery of the shining sphere Gate. If you ask me, I’d say that’s a whole lot of interest—for a dummy.”
Just as they entered the shadow of the pass, he glanced at Nathan and saw the youth looking back at him. Nathan’s eyes were shining again. With gratitude, Lardis thought.
But Nestor only said, “About the Gate: I don’t like to contradict you, Lardis—especially not you, a Lidesci, and leader of your people—but what is the Gate really except a ball of white light? So it attracted my brother … so what? Don’t moths flutter to a candle just as readily? And don’t they get singed just as often?”
Which, however much he disliked it, was another statement Lardis couldn’t dispute …
For fifteen minutes or so they walked in shadows and silence, with only the jingling of their silver baubles to keep their thoughts company. Then a yellow glow came filtering down from above, as the first of the range’s topmost peaks turned gold in the rays of a sun rising even now on Sunside. And:
“I timed that well,” Lardis grunted, pleased with himself. He struck off from the trail and climbed towards a ridge jutting over the western side of the pass. The others, all except Nathan who followed on directly behind Lardis (unquestioningly, of course), came to a halt and watched the two go. Until Nestor inquired of Andrei Romani:
“What now?”
“It’s a ritual,” the other answered, “which Lardis follows every year. Something he likes to see, back there on Starside. That jut of rock’s his vantage point. Me, I’ve seen it before and can get along without it. I’ll wait here and save my pins for walking. But you two can go on up, if you like.”
Nestor and Jason went scrambling after Lardis and Nathan, and after a steep but safe climb came upon them standing on a shelf from which they gazed north and a little east. The sunlight on the peaks was stronger now; it found passage between the high crags and cast a fan of beams out across Starside’s sky. Up there, only the brightest stars survived; the stars, and the rippling auroras where they warped and fluttered over the far northern horizon.
“Sunup,” Lardis panted, his breathing still ragged from the climb. “She rises slowly, the sun, along a low flat curve, and in the old days used to light on all the taller stacks one after the other in their turn. Now there’s but one aerie left, as you’ve seen. But still I like to see the sun striking home in its topmost ramparts, and know that there’s nothing hiding within, behind bone balconies and black-draped windows. Somehow, it’s a very gratifying sight. But don’t take my word for it; just wait and watch, and see for yourselves.” And he continued to gaze out across Starside.
Out there in what was once vampire heartland—rising up dramatically from a plain littered with the broken stumps and shattered segments of all the once-great stacks, which had not survived The Dweller’s war on the Wamphyri—there stood Karenstack. Reaching almost a kilometre in height, the last aerie stood out as a lone fang of rock against the banded blue background of the north, its awesome shadow falling like a black, spastic arm far across Starside, and visibly stretching itself in the improving light, as if blindly groping for the north-eastern horizon.
The group on the bluff waited—a minute or two, three at the outside—for the sun’s rays to sweep down, find them, and flood over them. Following which, in the very next moment, they observed the effect which Lardis had so desired to see: a golden stain spreading itself across the uppermost levels of the stack, burning in windows as hollow as eye-sockets, lighting up the grim mouths of launching bays, and seeming to set the high turrets and embrasures afire in a blinding effulgence.
And so like a giant candle, Karenstack stood falsely radiant amid Starside’s silence, desolation and devastation …
For long minutes the four stood there, their attention rapt upon the molten grandeur of Karenstack’s crest, which had become the centrepiece in an otherwise bleak and barren scene. But as reflective angles changed and the golden fire began to fade on the stack’s stone face, so their momentarily uplifted spirits settled down again and the sense of wonder departed.
And from below: “Ahoy, up there! Time we got on …”
Lardis blinked, nodded, turned his face to the others. “Andrei’s right,” he said, shading his eyes against the unaccustomed dazzle. “Let’s get down.”
The young men went first, with Lardis bringing up the rear. But before following on behind, he cast one more glance out across Starside: its moonscape of endless, boulder-strewn plains, the distant glitter of a frozen ocean, the unvisioned but imagined Icelands under their fluttering aurora banners, and of course Karenstack. And at last he sighed and began to follow the three youths down into the gloom of the pass …
… And having descended a little way paused, rooted to the spot, suddenly frozen in his tracks. For Karen-stack was burning still in his mind’s eye and on the lenses of his retinas. Karenstack and something else he’d seen, or thought to see—but what? He closed his eyes and the picture came up clearer: the aerie’s crest aglow with its false halo of fire. But below the area of reflected light, where the golden rays could never reach:
Black motes swirling, jetting, settling towards the yawning mouth of a vast landing bay; midges at this distance, but what would they be up close?
As if in answer to his inward-directed question, a small black bat hovered close to his face, fanning his cheek before side-slipping and stooping on a moth which he’d disturbed. In the next moment it was gone, and Lardis breathed easier. Bats, yes, that was what he’d seen: great cluste
rs of them, closing on the stack. Except that unlike the little fellow who fanned his cheek, they’d been the great bats of Starside—aye, and familiars of the Wamphyri, upon a time—which Zek had called Desmodus. And their home would be Karen-stack itself, deserted now except for their black-furred colony.
“Father?” Jason’s voice came from below. “Are you coming? Can I give you a hand?”
“No, no,” Lardis husked from a dry throat, then swallowed and found his voice. “I’m fine. I’m coming. Get on down.”
But from then on, and all the way back to where they had tethered their animals at the head of the descent to Sunside, and for most of the trek back to Settlement—which took the greater part of sunup to complete, for they had friends to see along the way—Lardis was far less given to talking and kept his thoughts to himself.
“Bats, yes,” he would mutter, and nod his head furiously, when the others were out of sight and hearing. “The great bats of Starside.” Until, by the time they were home again, he had almost convinced himself.
During his waking hours, at least …
In his dreams, however, Lardis Lidesci was not convinced. For the blood of a seer still ran in his veins, and tormented him whenever he closed his eyes to sleep. It was weaker now, this sixth sense, this blessing or curse passed down to him out of a lost Szgany history, from some long-forgotten ancestor whose second sight must have been potent indeed, that its trace had survived all the sunups—and sundowns—flown between. But potent then, in some unknown long ago, and this was now.
It was now, and what small reserves of the thing remained in him seemed to have been running out ever since that time on Starside, when the Gate spewed fire and fury to write THE END on the last chapter of the Wamphyri. Or … perhaps it ran as strong as ever in his veins, except in recent years there had been no use for it. For the Wamphyri were no more.
So why had it started to bother him again now? And why did it continue to bother him?
