by Brian Lumley
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Feed? He could sense the beast’s querying hesitation, its dull apprehension. But surely these are yours, Master?
Gorvi snorted, nodded his skull-like head. They were mine, aye, but now I give them to you. So feed and grow strong. Take these thralls of mine but leave the flyers where they are; let them rot here.’ Do not glut, but fuel and repair yourself. Then, when you are fit for it, make your way back to Guilesump.
The warrior’s launching limbs surged into motion, turning it about. The saucer eyes in its great armoured head focused as one on the gutted lieutenants. Powerful jaws gaped and saliva slopped from leathery lips as a forked tongue thick as a man’s thigh tasted, then snatched, first one shattered body and then the other. As a chameleon takes flies, so the Guile’s battle-construct took the dead lieutenants.
And if Gorvi’s promise of a few minutes ago had ever registered at all, it was now forgotten — wiped out, obliterated from the monster’s one-track mind — in the brief but passionate rapture of its feeding-frenzy. For these ‘tidbits’ neither screamed nor made any sound at all when they were crunched. But their flesh was soft and succulent for all that.
While his construct refuelled itself, the Guile returned thoughtfully to his nodding flyer, climbed into the saddle and urged the beast aloft. So far the night was a disaster. First, in Guilesump, there had been several unforeseen administrative tasks: morbid fluids to draw off from a stillborn warrior lest the thing go rancid in its vat; quarrelsome thralls to cow; an ill-tempered woman to chastise. (Well, these things would form the substance of Gorvi’s excuse, at least, if ever Wratha and the other Lords should find fault with him or query his tardiness. But that was unlikely; for knowing he would be ‘delayed’, Gorvi had dispatched not only Turgis but others of his lieutenants and a good many aspirant thralls ahead of him to join the Lords and Lady in this their joint venture: an all-out attack on the Szgany Lidesci.)
But .. . he’d felt uneasy about tonight’s mass raid right
from the start. What, to join up with Nestor and Canker, both of whom hated him, Wratha who despised him, and the Killglance twins who were mad, on this less than predictable soiree (more likely a bloody campaign) against the resourceful Lidescis? It had been, indeed, more than a feeling of uneasiness: rather an aura of foreboding, a doom-laden atmosphere hanging over Wrathstack itself, ever since the so-called ‘Lady’ had broached the thing, this onslaught against the Szgany Lidesci. Or perhaps it was simply that dwelling in the stack’s ‘basement’, as it were - in Guilesump, level with the scree jumbles and so open to attack from the ground — Gorvi had come to feel more and more vulnerable. Whichever, tonight he’d held back, determined to be last into the field of battle.
Huh! Much good it had done him, for now this. And perhaps this, too, was an omen, a warning that he was as well out of it. And certainly he was out of it; for there was no way he would join in any grand battle without a strong force of lieutenants, thralls and warriors about him. Not for the sake of the battle itself, at least. Oh, let the others seek glory all they would . .. Gorvi could do without battle-scars! What, cowardice? No, never, for he was Wamphyri! But he was also the Guile, and he well deserved his name.
Wherefore he would watch the others a while and see which way it went; and however it went, at the end of the night Gorvi would have his own tale to tell: of how he had quashed a sneak attack on the last aerie, while Canker and Nestor and the rest were rutting, counting coup and glutting themselves on Sunside booty. And aye, this way he’d yet be a hero in his own right!
Sunside, he ordered his flyer as it gained height. Cross the dome of the hell-lands Gate, climb on the wind off the Icelands, and follow the foothills west. Then up into the western peaks and through them, and down on to Sunside’s flank. There we’ll land in the foothills and see what we shall see .. .
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From their vantage point on the flat-topped bluff in the mouth of the great pass, Nathan, Trask, Chung and Anna Marie - all four of them together - had watched Gorvi’s take-off and had seen him set his course west. Down on the boulder plains, however, his damaged warrior was still very much in evidence; its roaring and grunting echoed up to them, and puffs of exhaust gases rose like vile smoke rings from its venting.
The four couldn’t know it, but the bodies of the vampire Lord’s lieutenants were even now undergoing a process of digestion, their leather gear and all. But they had merely whetted the warrior’s appetite and his attention was now centered upon the vastly sprawled corpses of the flyers. Both were as ‘dead’ as undead vampire things can be, despite that they had that in their blood which would keep them ‘alive’ for a long time yet. But since a good deal of that blood had been spilled, the flyers were dead to all intents and purposes. Depleted, dead .. . and deserted. But the warrior was mindful of Gorvi’s last command — that it must not glut itself - and dared not disobey it. The creature felt very little of and understood even less about physical pain; but even as an ‘infant’ or unformed thing still waxing in the morbid fluids of its vat womb, it had felt the sting of its master’s corrective mind-darts, and knew how he could bring all of its functions to a shuddering, cringing halt with just a single stab.
So the flyers were out of the question, and meanwhile the warrior had clear instructions which it must follow as a t duty to Gorvi the Guile, its master, and to Guilesump, his manse: to rest a while, replenish its gas-bladders and propulsive system, and let its metamorphism seal the holes in its membranous aerial mantle. Then to fly back to the last aerie and its pen in the stem of the stack. And since sleep is the best way of conserving energy and the greatest aid to any healing process - for vampire flesh no less than human -the monster closed its eyes, slowed its metabolism, shut down the bulk of its sensory apparatus, and slept.
Only two ‘scanners’ remained active, and then barely: a pseudo-eye in the thing’s blunt prow skull, and another at the base of a spine in its flail-like rudder. Linked to the rudimentary brain, these would keep watch. Any abrupt or inexplicable change in the warrior’s immediate surroundings, and it would come snarling awake!
Nathan knew that much, at least, for he’d learned a lot about Wamphyri warriors and guardian creatures in Tur-gosheim. And now, atop the bluff, he asked Trask and Chung: ‘I take it you left the weapons hidden away in those boulders?’ The two men glanced at each other, could only shrug. And Trask said:
‘We couldn’t go on the offensive and look after the weapons. Survival had to come first, Nathan.’
The other’s nod. ‘I understand, of course. But until that warrior heals itself and moves off - which could easily take as long as the rest of this sundown, or three days Earth-time - I daren’t go back for the guns. So we have to make do with what we’ve got.’
‘But our friends the cavers took their loads with them,’ Chung pointed out. ‘Er, wherever you took them, I mean.’
Again, Nathan’s nod. ‘Right. But before I can go back for them, I have to carry you to safety in Sunside. Or what should be safety, except .. . well, it’s night now. And so I have one or two things to check out before I can move you. It shouldn’t take too long, but until I’m done you must keep a low profile and wait for me here.’
He conjured a Mobius door, stepped through it and disappeared …
… And reappeared in the Cavern of the Ancients.
Atwei and the three cavers were still there, also a young Thyre male. And so were the sacks of arms which the cavers had brought with them. Nathan had no time for explanations.
‘Atwei, stay here with my friends,’ he told her in her own tongue. And, taking up one of the bundles, he was gone again -
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- To the bald, rounded plateau of Sanctuary Rock, where that landmark refuge backed up on Sunside’s foothills at the edge of the forest to the west of ruined Settlement. Nathan had chosen the Rock because its dome was a vantage point from which he should be able
to spy out the lie of the land east and west along the flank of the barrier mountains, the region which he’d once called home. And travelling there through the Mobius Continuum, he had remembered it as he had known it all his young life.
The dome of the Rock towered more than two hundred feet over the slope of a stony hill. It was like a huge oval boulder, toppled over on its side, half-buried in a hillside that climbed through pines and birches, and bramble and blackthorn undergrowth. Above the rock the green belt was narrow, shaded and gloomy where it wound with the contours of the foothills. Rising steeply across its width, its foliage grew sparse at the feet of frowning cliffs. Below, the patchy woods descended into a thinly swirling mist, levelled out and thickened into forest proper, finally faded with distance into a grey-green fuzz of soft-edged canopy and the gently mobile concentric contours of false, misted horizons.
As to why the place was called ‘Sanctuary’ Rock:
In the olden times - indeed since time immemorial - the Szgany had hidden from Starside’s vampires in the roots of the Rock; hidden in the guts of the boulder, which was mainly solid in its body and dome, but hollow as a rotten tooth in its base. And now the Szgany Lidesci not only hid there, but lived there, too. They also ‘lived’ in Settlement, which was no great distance away, but at night invariably withdrew to the safety of the Rock.
Over the years the Lidescis had burrowed extensively to make the place more nearly inhabitable. And they had opened up a maze of passages, granaries, animal pens, private habitations for family units, storage facilities, even recreational areas. They had tunnelled their way from a huge overhung entrance and various connected cavern systems under the eastern rim of the Rock, right through to the
rear and the far side. Also, they’d strategically mined all of the major entrances with barrels of crude but effective gunpowder. So that the Rock was now a sanctuary, makeshift encampment, lethal trap and escape route all in one.
As for the Rock’s location:
For fifteen to twenty miles around this was Lidesci territory, which Lardis Lidesci had always guarded jealously and protected with his life - especially against the night raids of the vampire Lords of Starside. And it was the Necroscope’s guess that if tonight the Wamphyri could be found anywhere on Sunside, then that.. .
.. . But in the moment that Nathan emerged from the Mobius Continuum, he knew that there was no ‘if about it. For they were here even now. They were actually here - at Sanctuary Rock!
Far to the south, across the sprawling expanse of night-dark woods and the furnace desert which lay beyond, a curved horizon was silhouetted against a band of molten yellow light fading upwards into pink and amethyst, then light- and dark-blue, finally black reaching back to the sky overhead, where the stars were as shards of blue ice frozen in alien (but, to Nathan, familiar) configurations. Or, at least, the sky should be black . ..
… But it should not be shot through with lances of coloured light, and dotted with nightmare shapes that sputtered explosively or glided silently through the black smoke rising from oily fires and the exhaust trails of careening rockets! Sanctuary Rock was suffering a concerted attack, and following the silence and darkness of the Mobius Continuum, it was as if Nathan had stepped forth into hell itself!
Down there on the sparsely wooded slopes at the foot of the Rock, close — too close — to the gaping entrance to the main cavern system, there were warriors on the ground. One of them, the biggest one, seemed crippled. It was burning, roaring and hissing like a herd of rutting shads, and heaving its forequarters this way and that on an
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apparently broken spine. Its hindquarters were writhing, a mass of flames where Travellers had poured oil on the thing and fired it. But there were lesser warriors, too: smaller, less cumbersome, undamaged as yet and very, very dangerous … and enraged, of course.
Even as Nathan watched, one of the things rose up on its forward thrusting limbs and fired a short burst from its propulsors. Seeming to bound in the air, it crashed down among a group of the Rock’s defenders, crushed several of them to the earth, commenced snapping at the rest. Its chitin clubs, pincers and slabbers wove menacingly in all directions.
Nathan also saw flyers down there on the ground, half a dozen of them at least, but they were all positioned well back from the forward edge of the battle area. Ideally situated for relaunching, facing downhill on the narrow trails leading to the Rock, they waited for further instructions. Their masters, lieutenants and senior thralls had dismounted and went afoot like infantrymen, shadowing and directing the battle-engines which were the warriors.
Other flyers and warriors were in the air, probably less than two dozen of them in all, but seeming to Nathan to swarm in their hundreds. They were not quite the height of the dome of the Rock, so that in fact he looked down on them, silhouetted against firelight and the flaring, multicoloured trails of rockets. Only a handful of the warriors were big ones, but the smaller variety was versatile and full of a terrible vitality. Nathan saw two of them go spiralling down, propulsors sputtering, thrusters uncoiling, to land near the base of the Rock on its western approaches. Well, they’d achieve very little there. Uninhabitable and therefore undefended on that flank, the Rock was solid and its face sheer; it sank straight into the stony ground. On the other hand, it wouldn’t take long for the warriors to get airborne again and turn their monstrous energies to the eastern flank . ..
While overhead, maybe two hundred and fifty feet over
the dome of the Rock and six hundred above the forest -circling like vultures over some soon-to-be corpse - the Wamphyri Generals themselves rode the night air, blotted out the stars in their wheeling, and gazed down through red and rapacious eyes on the efforts of their army. There were five of them mounted on armoured flyers, and five first-lieutenants in attendance on lesser beasts.
Aware of their presence from the moment he vacated the Mobius Continuum, Nathan had automatically taken cover in a clump of gorse growing in the scant soil of a deeply scarred depression. Now, having appraised himself of the situation, he looked skyward again to see what the Lords were up to -
— And none too soon, for they were spiralling down towards the dome of the Rock, approaching the flat, central area of its plateau as they prepared to land. This was to be their command position, from which they’d manoeuvre their men and monsters on the ground.
The entire scene had been stunning to Nathan’s senses from the very first moment. The roaring of beasts and screams of men carried up from below on air warmed by fear, fire and fighting. The shrill whistle or occasional shriek of unreliable missiles, and the deafening blasts of sound and blinding explosions when they burst against vampire flesh, or, more frequently, empty air. The stench of sulphur and of warrior exhaust gases drifting in poisonous grey and yellow clouds through the night; and the mind-searing sight of nightmare shapes throbbing or undulating in the star-spattered sky. But over and above everything else, the knowledge that they were his people down there, fighting and dying for the Rock, and for human existence itself.
Stunning to Nathan’s senses, yes … but the vampire Lords would soon be landing!
For long moments frozen, at last Nathan was galvanized into frantic activity. Shaking out some of the arms from his bundle, he saw what he’d got there. Fragmentation grenades; a 30mm twin rocket-launcher, fully loaded; a light-weight
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flame-thrower, and a machine-pistol and ammo. He yanked the rocket-launcher free, stuffed grenades into his pockets, crammed what he could of the rest of the stuff back into the bundle and shoved it deep into the roots of the gorse.
The first flyer was coming in for a landing. It was one of the lesser beasts, commanded by a lieutenant. Nathan stood up and came head and shoulders above the gorse. He’d gone entirely unnoticed so far (or so he thought), but for some little time had been shielding his mind while intercepting the telepathic messages of the Wamphyri Lords - and those of one Lady,
their leader!
Safety down on this great boulder, we’ll see so much more clearly, she was saying. But it seems to me our forces on the ground are already costing the Lidescis dear, and pushing them back into their holes. By the time we send down another three or four warriors, we’ll have them in full rout. After that, if we can only get a beast inside the Rock . …’ She left the rest of it unthought.
The Lady Wratha’s great mount was coming in immediately behind her lieutenant’s lesser beast; the rest of the Wamphyri Lords followed on behind, descending in a loose ‘V formation. But next in line after Wratha the Risen was one whose thoughts grew more anxious and confused moment to moment, who now sent her this urgent message:
Wratha! Back off! Don’t land! There’s someone there! An enemy - even a Great Enemy! Aye, and he’s dangerous!
Recognizing that telepathic voice at once, Nathan thrilled with a variety of emotions, not least horror. For its owner was his twin brother — Lord Nestor, of the Wamphyri!
IV
Nestor
For something less than an hour now, Lord Nestor Lich-loathe of the Wamphyri had known it: the fact that his mainly unremembered brother (his real brother, aye, his ‘blood’ brother, but a brother in name only, and his Great Enemy to all other intents and purposes) was back in Sunside/Starside. In precisely the same moment that Maglore of Runemanse had known it, and the mummied, monstrous Eygor Killglance in his refuse pit, and the dead and dreaming Thyre, and Nathan’s nephew wolves, so too had Nestor known it, and just as surely as the rest.
Except, and paradoxically, Nestor had found it harder to credit, for he had believed that he was his brother’s murderer! Indeed he had known that Nathan was gone forever, banished from this vampire world into the Starside Gate, from which neither man, monster, nor any creature of nature or the vats had ever yet returned. It must be so, for all of seventeen, even eighteen sunups ago, Nestor’s first-lieutenant Zahar Lichloathe had reported the fact of it: that, acting on Nestor’s orders, he’d tossed Nathan into the Gate and sent him to hell! Since when, and until this very night, Nestor had been certain of it. For with his brother’s departure, one other curse at least had been lifted like a yoke from his shoulders … which now was back!
