by Brian Lumley
Karz staggered away, out of the room, and made unsteadily for the lower levels.
Maglore followed him a little way, but beyond the arched entrance paused and looked back. His eyes went to the blazon carved in bas-relief over the doorway, as it was carved over all of Runemanse's doors:
This was that sigil of which he'd dreamed at the time of the Light-in-the-West, from which time forward he'd taken it as his own. As for its meaning (if it meant anything at all), that was anybody's guess. Maglore's guess was that it must be potent; else why would he, a mage, have dreamed it?
And what other potent things would Wratha find, he wondered, in Olden Starside?
PART FOUR: The Brothers — The Raids
I
Predawn twilight on Starside, sunup a few hours away, and the peaks of the barrier range already changing from one massively homogeneous black-fanged silhouette to gaunt, grey-featured sentinels in their own right, each taking on its own unique shape. Soon the sun's rays, glancing through the high passes, would colour them gold. The change from dark to light was always inspiring, even gladdening.
So thought Lardis, head man of the Szgany Lidesci.
But to have spent the best part of a night here — on Starside! at sundown! — under the silver light of the moon and the blue glitter of the stars… and to have slept here! It was a thought which invariably set Lardis's scalp to tingling, brought gooseflesh creeping, and a sense of awe, wonder and heart-pounding horror bursting out afresh from every inch of his body and soul…
Every fifty sunups or thereabouts, Lardis would make this.. this what, pilgrimage? — this passage of exorcism, anyway — into Starside, and across the barren boulder plains to the tumbled stacks of the Wamphyri; to Karenstack, the last aerie, and back again through the great pass to Sunside. But he knew he would never make it alone, that the ghosts of all that had been would journey with him, touching their cold fingers now and then to the knobs of his spine.
A rite of exorcism, aye: to drive out the demons from his dreams and the olden nightmares even from his waking hours. A renewal of his faith, his belief — that the Wamphyri were no more, and would never return — in the shape of one more trek across their ancient territories, through all the long lonely hours of sundown, which had been their time. That was why Lardis came, why he continued to come and always would, as long as his legs could carry him: to convince himself of the marvellous truth, that they were no more.
'Dead and gone forever,' he muttered, mainly to himself, pausing to look back on Starside from a vantage point in the foothills, not far from the mouth of the pass. 'Wiped out in a body and cleansed from the world in what they thought was the hour of their triumph, when they toyed with their victims and glutted themselves at the shining sphere Gate. All of them that were left: Lord Shaithis, and even Shaitan the Unborn himself, who was their father, destroyed with their creatures. Likewise the Lady Karen, burned up in a single breath of hell, in the searing fire of something more hateful than all of them together! All gone, those creatures of evil. And possibly… possibly some that were good, too, even if they did bear the seeds of evil within them.'
'Some that were… what, "good", did you say?' An old and trusted friend and companion of Lardis's, Andrei Romani, stood there with him. 'Oh, really? The Wamphyri, d'you mean? Then perhaps you'll be so kind as to refresh my memory, for I'm damned if I can remember any that were good!'
Lardis glanced at him and nodded knowingly. 'Yes, you can. You're being contentious, that's all. What about Harry Hell-lander, called Dwellersire, who came from a world beyond the Gate to stand side by side with his son in the battle for the garden? And what of The Dweller himself, who with his father toppled all the stacks of the Wamphyri down on to the plain? Aye, and even the Lady Karen, who stood with them and fought against her own kind.'
Andrei looked astonished. 'Her own kind? Their own kind, you mean! She and the others, they were all Wamphyri! Harry Hell-lander, who could come and go in a twinkling, and call up the dead: he was Wamphyri, as well you know. Likewise his son, called The Dweller, who became a wolf… and how was that for a hell-spawning menace? As for Karen: you forget, Lardis, that I was there in the garden that time, when she tore the living heart out of Lesk the Glut, and stood there laughing, drenched in his blood! Now she was Wamphyri! Aye, but the plague was in all of them, so don't tell me what's evil and what isn't! Me, I say that somewhere there's a God, and that finally He'd had enough of them. So that night He took 'em all, every last one, which left us to act as custodians of the peace.'
Lardis and Andrei: they were older now and their joints stiffening just a little, their hair mostly turned grey, and their eyes not quite so bright. But their memories were still sharp. And after all, fourteen years isn't such a very long time, not for memories such as theirs. So for all that they argued, each knew that the other was right in part, and so a balance was maintained.
'You're right,' Lardis grunted at last, 'and it's best that they're gone, all of them. But still I often wonder: if not for Harry, The Dweller, Karen… what would have become of us? Where would we be now?'
'Dust, most likely,' Andrei answered, 'and nothing would matter any more.'
'And our children?'
There was no answer to that. Instead of searching for one, Andrei shivered and stamped his feet, then changed the subject. 'What the hell are we waiting for, anyway?' he wanted to know, raising his voice. And: 'Where the hell is that misfit son of Nana Kiklu?'
'What, me, a misfit?' came a loud, laughing inquiry from the shadows in the mouth of the pass. In the next moment there was movement there, where Nestor Kiklu and Lardis's son, Jason, had gone on ahead. They came out of the shadows into full view, and again Nestor inquired: 'Is someone taking my name in vain?'
'No, not you, but your dumbstruck brother Nathan,' Andrei shouted back. 'It's him who's keeping all of us waiting!'
Their shouting echoed reverberatingly through the pass, rolled up into the mountains and bounced down again, rang out across the plains of Starside. Lardis didn't much like it; it caused the small hairs to stir to life at the back of his neck, and made his breath plume that much faster in the cold air. Nor did he care for people calling Nathan Kiklu names, not even in misconceived jest, and not even Andrei. Oh, Nathan was a dummy, true enough, but there was a lot more than that to the lad. And: 'Quiet!' Lardis warned. 'For all that Starside's empty now, still it's no place for shouting…'
But someone had heard them, at least.
Down on the rim of the low crater which housed the Gate, Nestor Kiklu's twin brother Nathan came back to life where he stood gazing into the white hypnotic glare of the half-buried sphere of alien light. He mustn't touch that shining surface, he knew, on penalty of being drawn into it and vanishing forever. Out of this world, anyway. But still he was tempted.
Tempted… but not entirely stupid. For there were times when life seemed very good to Nathan right here, or rather, on Sunside. Sometimes life was good, anyway…
It was just that the Gate was such a weird, inexplicable thing. If it were really a doorway into some other place, for instance — a place where there were people — then why didn't they come through it and make themselves known? Lardis Lidesci said that in the old days they had come through now and then, and that the Wamphyri had prized them for their strange powers. Maybe that's why they'd stopped coming. On the other hand, Lardis had been known to say many things about the Gate, the old days, the hell-landers… everything.
Why, Nathan had even heard it rumoured that there'd once been a hell-lander woman Lardis had fancied! Except she already had a man, also a hell-lander. Her name had been Zek, short for Zekintha, and she could pick a man's thoughts right out of his head! Well, and so could Nathan, sometimes; Nestor's thoughts, anyway. But this Zek: she'd been pale and blonde, blue-eyed and… beautiful? Now how could anyone with colours like those be beautiful? None of the Szgany had them — with the exception of Nathan himself, of course.
Anyway, most of these events
Lardis spoke of had taken place before the Kiklu brothers were even born, and as Nathan had noted, with the passage of time Lardis found a great deal to say about almost everything of yesteryear. It wasn't so much that he was very old (though certainly his youth, as the leader of a wandering Szgany tribe in the shadow of the Wamphyri, must have taken its toll of him), but that there was little now to occupy his mind, so that he was wont to dwell too much in the past. Which was something Nathan understood well enough, for on occasion he was himself given to dwelling in other worlds, and adventuring in lands of fantasy. It helped shut the real world out: the sounds of Settlement and its scathing voices, with all the taunts and questions which in the main Nathan no longer bothered to answer, or answered with his stumbling stutter. For ever since the night of the red clouds and the thunder in the hills, he had spent his time withdrawing from this world.. into others.
Other worlds, yes, and lands of fantasy…
… The twilight mountainsides, for instance, when he was alone and his wolves would come whining out of the hills to be with him. That was a secret, however, something he kept to himself, lest Settlement's Szgany youths call him a liar. For as everyone knew, wolves must be caught as pups and trained, or else they can't be trusted.
… And in his daydreams, which he knew were morbid things, however much they fascinated him.
… But especially when he slept and dreamed of… oh, of all manner and shape of things! Of the crumbling dead in their graves, who could talk to him if they wanted to but would not, though he frequently overheard them talking to each other; of meaningless yet maddeningly familiar numbers, cluttering his reeling brain until he thought his head must fill and burst from their constantly mutating rush and whirl; and of a different world of men which was weird and unknown as the spaces between the stars.
.. Perhaps like the world beyond the Gate?
Again the shouting of the others reached out to him from the foothills and the pass; until at last Nathan backed away from the coldly glaring source of his fascination, and jumped down from the low crater wall. But as he picked his way very carefully between the gaping mouths of giant, perfectly circular wormholes where they pierced the ground and angled down into otherwise solid, compacted earth and rock all around the perimeter of the Gate, still he sensed the lure of the silent, shining sphere, and felt it like a magnet in his mind.
'Nathan!' Andrei Romani's call came yet again, distantly, followed in a while by the echoes of his bull voice rolling down from the hills: 'Nathaaan!'… 'Nathaaan!… Nathaaan!'
Nathan had moved away from the Gate now, but still was unable to tear his eyes or his thoughts from it. The Gate to the hell-lands, another world, and possibly a world that was terrifying.
When Lardis talked of what had happened that night fourteen years ago, he usually spoke of 'a breath of hell', which came roaring out of the Gate to burn the Wamphyri in its fire. But at other times and less romantically, he had admitted that it might have been some kind of unthinkable weapon, whose power was such that the hell-landers themselves had little or no control over it. 'Whatever their world was like before,' (he would say), 'it really must be hell now, if that was merely the backdraught of one of their wars! Zekintha told me all about that: how their weapons were devastating.'
Measuring his pace, Nathan started to run. He had kept the others waiting too long and they'd be impatient. He was right: almost a mile away, Andrei Romani was complaining again. 'Is he deaf as well as dumb?'
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 the
re 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.'
