by Brian Lumley
But pits and trenches were not the Rock’s only defences. Thirty yards within the inner circle, a low dry-stone wall had been built, with upward tilting, kiln-glazed pipes of clay cemented in position every other pace, providing launch-tubes for the stems of Lardis’s rockets: the Old Lidesci’s missile battery. The wall was mainly dry-stone to allow for rapid rebuilding in the event that it was breached, flattened by the sheer bulk of a warrior. And every other pace, were stout wooden stakes with their points sharpened to needles, also facing outwards to impale onrushing monsters.
Also, at the base of the Rock itself, where that colossal boulder’s roots buried themselves in the earth — half-hidden in the natural camouflage of scree-grown vines and shrubbery — a second battery; this time of stone-hurling engines and giant crossbows with bolts formed of young, arrow-straight, stripped-down pines.
While inside the covered pits: beds of slender stakes, harpoon-tipped to catch and hold any flyer, warrior or vampire thrall that might fall on them; and recesses in the walls, where men could wait with buckets of oil, and flints and candles at the ready.
Most of the pits on the level were on fire, their withe frames of twisted straw and gorse camouflage going up in smoke and flame into the reeking night. Meat … was steaming in several of them, while others were simply smoking, blackened holes in the earth. The hot air was full of death smells that caught in men’s throats, making them choke, retch . ..
Nathan had emerged from the Continuum behind the Rock’s defenders, where the fortified wall faced first the trench, then the twin rows of pits. Since the men on the Rock’s side of the wall were all facing the other way, he’d stepped (as it were) into existence all unseen. And now for the first time he saw evidence of the hand-to-hand fighting: how it had washed to and fro over this very spot. Obviously, the warrior which he and Lardis had dispatched in the cavern entrance had been accompanied by vampire thralls led by lieutenants; there were a number of corpses littering the stony ground … many of them without heads. The ones with heads were human, his own people: Szgany killed in the fighting.
Their wounds were horrific, the work of Wamphyri gauntlets. Flensed faces, chests laid open through flesh and ribs, throats ripped out, literally.’ Even through a swirling ground mist it could be seen that the earth was stained black in the fire- and starlight, and the whole area stank of brutal butchery and blood .. .
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… It had been scenes such as this — scenes as violent, mind-stunning as this - that had driven Nathan from his cause and course in the first place, out into Sunside’s furnace desert to die; only to discover the Thyre, his ability to talk to the dead, and fresh hope for the future. And now … this was that future, and he must fight to come to terms with it, get a grip on himself, his soaring emotions. He didn’t have the time to stand and consider what had happened here; it could all too easily happen again, if he simply stood still and let it!
But terrible memories had been set in motion, and terrible scenes out of a none too distant past. Inescapable as a recurrent nightmare, Nathan viewed them as a ghostly tableau against the equally surreal swirly-smoking backdrop of mist, fire and blood-splashed night:
That time when he’d searched for his brother, stolen by a flyer out of ravaged Settlement.. .
The Szgany Sintana, true Travellers in Sunside’s forests, had befriended him. And in turn Nathan had made them a promise: if he couldn’t find Nestor, then he would join them where they planned to establish a permanent camp at the edge of the sprawling savanna dividing the forest from the furnace deserts. The reason they would settle there was simple: that much closer to the sun, and distant from the barrier mountains, it had seemed unlikely that the Wamphyri would venture there. That had been the reasoning, anyway.
And when Nathan was done with his searching, that’s where he’d found them - or what was left of them.
Nikha Sintana, and Eleni, his sister: their faces and the faces of their people haunted Nathan still.
Nikha: young in years, old in his ways, wild as the woods and gentle as its creatures . .. but hard in the ways of survival. So it had seemed. The actual number of his years had been a secret hidden in the agelessness of his penetrating, intelligent brown eyes, and in skin weathered to a
supple leather. He had seemed like part of the landscape, at one with Nature. His hooked nose, sharp as a kite’s beak, but lacking its cruelty; his brow, with the flat slope of a wolf’s, yet broad enough to accommodate a good brain, and wide, inscrutable eyes; his thin lips, and dark grey shoulder-length hair. Nikha had reminded Nathan of nothing so much as a lean and rangy hunting owl.
And Eleni . .. Maybe twenty, twenty-one years old, and typically Szgany. All lithe and sinuous; movements smooth as oil; shiny black hair, and skin tanned to a glow. She’d seemed as wild - even wilder - than her brother; given the chance, and in a better world, Eleni would be ever vivacious and live her life to the full. Her mouth had been generous and sensuous at one and the same time, with a laugh that was husky and teasing, but never quite seducing. Because when finally she did love, the chosen one would get it all.
And because at that time Nathan had thought that Misha was dead (or worse far, stolen out of Settlement into Starside by Canker Canison), he had even considered becoming that one. But it hadn’t worked out that way.
Following their trail through the night to where the forest met the prairie, at last he’d seen the carts and caravans of the Szgany Sintana sheltering under mighty ironwoods. Their fire had been a welcoming splash of leaping light holding back the shadows in the space under the trees.
It had welcomed Nathan, aye .. . but in the same way that it had welcomed others before him!
The Wamphyri!
They weren’t there now, but the evidence of their having been was unmistakable. Nathan remembered it as if it were but a moment ago:
He stood under the ironwoods, where the dusty ground had been swept free of needles to form a small clearing in its own right. But in the shadows, bloated black shapes like windblown weeds went lumping and fluttering low along the ground, hiding from him in dark places.
Then, as he heard a chittering in the night and started in
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recognition of the sound . .. something wet dripped down and splashed on his forearm where his sleeves were rolled up. Looking down, he saw that his arm was red; likewise the earth under his feet. And looking up -
- He saw the tree’s strange ripe fruit, all dripping their juices, strung up by their heels with their throats slashed, ear to ear.’
The drained corpses of the Szgany Sintana, swaying there on creaking ropes under the branches of the ironwoods .. . and all festooned with black Desmodus bats, Wamphyri familiars so glutted with blood they couldn’t fly … and these loathsome, bloated monsters falling or flopping to the ground and scuttling off into the shrieking night!
The shrieking night…
Instinctively, Nathan crouched down and shot a terrified glance overhead - as if expecting to see a body dangling by its heels and dripping blood. But it was only a Szgany rocket gone off-course which showered sparks on him and whistled off into the mist. Its shrieking had startled him to life, except it wasn’t the only thing that shrieked - or roared?
Looking around, perhaps in desperation, Lardis had seen the Necroscope. ‘Nathan, quick!’
He ran to the knot of defenders at the wall, joined Lardis and his men. Lardis pointed east, to the trench, pits and the swirling mist beyond. ‘We’ve fought them off once, twice. The first wave came with the warrior that we destroyed at the entrance, and the second was made up of thralls on a suicide mission. Those who are left are mainly lieutenants, but they are the most dangerous. And they’ve called down another warrior. Look!’
A handful of tall grey figures moved in the mist around the perimeter of one of the innermost pits. From the sinuous, loping flow of their movements they were plainly lieutenants. Along with them, a half-dozen vampire th
ralls held up leather shields against incoming bolts from the defenders at
the wall, so protecting their superiors. And, shouting instructions, all of them urged action from a warrior where it had fallen into the pit.
A small one of its sort, the creature floundered. It was caught on harpoon flukes and several of its gas-bladders had been ruptured. In the event of it freeing itself, however, this superficial damage wouldn’t impede its fighting ferocity, its monstrous thirst for blood, war. Indeed, its frustration would make it yet more ferocious! But jammed awkwardly in the hole, it had difficulty bringing its thrusters and propulsors into play. Hence the thing’s roaring, the occasional sputter of its propulsors and jets of noxious fumes issuing from the pit.
Even as Nathan and Lardis watched, so the creature got its monstrous head up over the rim, and the glare of the red eyes in its bony, prow-like, chitin-scaled slope of a forehead threatened the defenders at the wall with a nightmarish death. Its propulsors fired again, and the horror jerked halfway out of the pit.
Nathan had two grenades left. Handing one of them to Lardis, he said, ‘Now!’
They squeezed through a breach in the wall, ran forward, were met by eager lieutenants loping the other way, in anticipation of their warrior’s imminent attack. But Andrei Romani and other defenders were right on their leader’s heels; crossbow bolts flew in the night, passing far too close by Nathan’s reckoning. A lieutenant was swatted from his feet and blown to bits before he hit the ground. A flame-eyed thrall cursed and spat where he writhed upon the earth, tugging frantically at ironwood bolts in his chest and belly. Snarling men fell on him with sharp knives, hammers, stakes.
Nathan and Lardis left the hand-to-hand fighting behind, arrived at the pit, armed their grenades. Lieutenants came at the run out of the smoke and mist; the pair lobbed their grenades into the pit, then turned and fled. Andrei was still with them; he fired the last of his explosive bolts into a lieutenant’s shoulder and joined them in flight.
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Behind them there was an explosion, the sharp crack of a bolt. And: Now! Nathan thought.
The warrior roared its triumph as it bunched its thrusters, and its propulsors sputtered into life . .. but just a moment too late. Twin blasts tore the night, accompanied by brilliant flashes of light and an agonized mewling, as chitin scales and chunks of raw flesh shot skywards. The detonations had cracked the thing’s carapace, setting fire to its mantle and gas-bladders. Lesser explosions and the flames that roared up to hurl back the shadows — and the mewling that climbed the scales to a continuous high-pitched screaming -signalled the monster’s finish.
Then, arriving back at the wall, Nathan ‘heard’ it: the Lady Wratha’s raging, and her final command from her vantage point on the dome of the Rock.
Fools! Weak fools! What? And have mere men - the
Szgany Lidesci - defeated you yet again? Get out of there,
those of you who may. Flee! Flee for your Jives, aye! For we,
your masters and I your mistress, would have words with
you … back in Wrathstack! Wratha’s promise, or threat,
was all too evident in the grating of her hideous mind-
croak. !
Nathan took Lardis’s arm. They’re pulling out. They’ve had enough. It’s all over. For now, anyway …’
Lardis looked, snarled his triumph, then shook his fist j and laughed like a lunatic. Nathan was right: lieutenants | and thralls were vacating their positions, slinking back into the mist, making for their flyers. But from back along the trail, out of the blood and sulphur reek, the night and its leaping shadows, there sounded a sudden stuttering of automatic fire: Trask and Chung, picking off vampire thralls where they tried to make their escape.
Nathan used the Mobius Continuum, picked up his friends, transferred them back to Lardis and the defenders at the wall. They were safe now, all of them .. . well, from the Wamphyri, at least, if not from the nightmare of what must follow.
In that respect: it would be as well if Anna Marie English and the others were at least offered the opportunity to see it, too, and so know what they were into. With that in mind, Nathan collected them from the Cavern of the Ancients. When they were all together again and perfunctory introductions concluded:
‘Very well,’ said Lardis Lidesci, nodding grimly where he surveyed the littered battlefield. ‘And now let’s be at it…’
All of which had been something less than thirty-five minutes ago. But on high, over the barrier mountains, and heading (some limping) home, the Wamphyri were still feeling bruised by their defeat; and Wratha was still raging, albeit in her secret mind. Raging and rotating the facts of the night - those known, and others as yet unknowable, but facts nevertheless because they had happened - in the depths of her secret vampire thoughts.
She should be grateful to Nestor, that he had warned her not to land as she made her descent, but she was not. How had the necromancer known there was danger? How had he, a veritable infant among the Wamphyri, seen or sensed that which she had not? What? But he’d been a Lord for less than three years! So, he spoke to dead men - so what? That one on top of Sanctuary Rock had been very much alive! But no longer.
What was this thing with Nestor and the Szgany Lidesci? Again, a picture formed in the Lady’s mind: of the one on the Rock, him and his deadly tube .. . Nestor’s Great Enemy? And much like Lardis Lidesci before her, Wratha wondered at the connection:
Nestor, Misha and a Great Enemy. Or a Great Rival? Was that it? Was he still mooning over this Traveller shad Misha? Was that why he’d finally set himself against the Szgany Lidesci, because he had a rival among them? But if so, why wait so long? Also, Wratha had thought that that had been all over and done with, following Nestor’s last abortive strike against this so-called ‘Great Enemy’. And it
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still didn’t explain how he had known there was danger on the Rock’s roof. Was Nestor using her to his own ends, she wondered? Using the rest of them, too, as a punitive force in some private feud? In which case, tonight’s losses were all down to him!
And raging still, she told herself: Very well, let’s see how he reacts to this. Then, opening her mind for all to see and hear, and using her mentalism to the full, she cried:
Now hear my vow! I, Wratha the Risen, make it, and I shall keep it. From now on it is sacred to me, and I make it so that you all may know it and call me Wratha Vow-breaker if I do not keep it. I shall destroy the Szgany Lidesci. By skill or trickery, wit or sheer unbendable will.. . by the blood that is the life, I shall destroy them! Wratha had made such vows before, but never out in the open where she could be held to them. Ah, but no one would have to hold her to this one, be sure!
As she had spoken, so Wratha had cast a sideways glance at Nestor. At him, and into his mind — or at least she had tried. But his mind was clamped shut as a lichen to its rock, impenetrable. He sat there, pale as new lead, in his saddle, his body swathed and his face cowled, and rode the night wind. And never a sign that he had even heard her, he was that cold. Or seemed to be. Until:
All mine who are able, to me! he called abruptly. There’s a j deed must be done. Any who are injured, damaged, get on i back to the last aerie and wait on my return.
He and his peeled off, swooped southwards; and letting a tail-wind off the Icelands take them, they quickly dwindled to gnats in the clouds scudding high over Sunside’s forests. Astonished, Wratha and the others let them go and carried on homewards. But the Lady wondered: What now? Is he also a madman, this necromancer?
Before she could consider it further:
‘Ho, Wratha!’ came a shouted (yet somehow restrained) greeting across the gulf of air. ‘And all you others there! But a sorry looking lot if ever I saw one!’ It was Gorvi the Guile,
wheeling on the wind and coming up alongside to where Wratha and the Lords spearheaded their reduced forces. Gorvi and his flyer, alone. ‘Have I missed something, I wonder?’ he co
ntinued, quieter now. ‘Well, perhaps it were better missed at that! It appears you had problems.’ He seemed to commiserate, but in fact they knew he gloated …
… Until he looked back at the tattered remnants of the army that had left Wrathstack, and especially at what was left of his own contingent. Then:
‘What!?’ Gorvi gasped. ‘But … how have you protected my men and creatures, Wratha? What has become of them?’ His words were supposed to be accusing yet sounded as a wail: the cry of a wrongful child who knows he’s about to be smacked.
Where - were — you - Gorvi? Wratha’s growl sounded in his mind, and the mental voices of all the others with her.
Gorvi would babble an answer — a well-rehearsed excuse concerning a deadly force of strangers on Starside’s boulder plains - but before he could do so there came a diversion:
A giant Desmodus bat, one of Wratha’s familiars, appeared out of the east in a whirring of tired wings and settled to the neck of her mount. There the creature clung, exhausted, finally folding back its black membrane wings and chittering a faint - but not that faint - message. And Wratha at once straightened up rigid in her saddle.
The language of bats ranges from the faint to the fantastic, from barely audible to seeming silence … in the ears of common humanity. But to the Wamphyri each note is distinct and has meaning. And the meaning of Wratha’s familiar was clear. It was one of two creatures which she’d positioned as sentinels in the eastern peaks at the edge of the Great Red Waste, her early-warning system against a surprise attack out of Turgosheim -
- Which was why it was here now!
So that Gorvi the Guile was the only one among them who actually felt a sense of relief as a certain dreaded name took form in the suddenly whirling chaos of Wratha the
