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Faint yellow patches turned powdery grey on the reflective flanks of the surrounding peaks; the velvet gloom settled that much deeper; there came a high-pitched, querulous squeaking, a sudden throb of membrane wings - bats! But there are bats and there are bats.
Lardis's fiery Gypsy blood ran cold. His world had many bat species, not least the insectivores, like tiny winged mice. But these creatures which suddenly appeared out of the night to speed overhead in close groups of three, with their silhouettes etched blue in starshine, were of no such small, harmless variety. Full-grown adults, they were not unlike the Desmodus or true vampire of a world known to the Szgany only as the hell-lands - but the span of their wings was almost a metre tip to tip.
Despite the size of the creatures, and the fact that campfire legends were full of alleged attacks, Lardis knew that in themselves they were not especially dangerous; it was what they stood for which froze him to a statue. More than four years had passed since he had seen a swarm so intent, so full of purpose, but even as he'd known it then, so in his own instinctive way he knew just exactly what it meant now.
Familiars of the Wamphyri were abroad in the night skies again, winging ahead of their masters on an errand of utmost horror ... searching!
But searching for what?
III
In four speeding arrowhead formations, three bats to a group, the nightmare familiars of the Wamphyri set the air throbbing overhead, disappearing without pause in the direction of Starside and The Dweller's garden. Long moments stretched out, and only the cold stars for company in a sky darkening from amethyst over Sunside to indigo between the peaks. Lardis remained frozen, but Peder Szekarly, the youngest of his men, made as if to stand up. He lacked experience and didn't share Lardis's prescience in these matters.
Lardis felt the other shuffling impatiently, stretching a limb beside him; he reached out a hand and his hard fingers dug irresistibly into Peder's shoulder, holding him down and still. And sensing the way their leader seemed to have shrunk down into himself, Lardis's three crouched lower still, becoming one with the humped silhouettes of the boulders.
'Wha-?' Peder began to speak, his voice the merest whisper; but Lardis at once cautioned him with hoarse, breathless whispers of his own:
'Say nothing! Do nothing! Neither move, breathe, nor yet think - or if you must, then think of silence, of sleep, of what it must have been like in your mother's womb, with nothing to fear but being born! Do exactly as I tell you, if you want to live!'
It wasn't the first time Peder had heard words such as these; they were cautions he'd learned as a child. For like every Traveller child before him, he'd been instructed in the art of silence: of not being heard, not being seen ... of not being. And he remembered how his father had breathed just such words in his ear one monstrous night, and how at sunup he had neither father nor mother. It was so long ago, so terrible to remember, that he'd almost forgotten, that was all.
But now Peder Szekarly wanted very much to live; likewise his colleagues, who grew still as stones; and so the seconds lengthened into minutes.
Then, as time itself slowed and contracted down to now, so the night air thickened, turning leaden with an unspoken but tangible dread. It was as if the heartbeats of the four took on the volume of drums sounding against their ribs, so that each man believed the next must surely hear him - and prayed that nothing else would. And all four of them, they turned their heads and looked back the way they'd come. That was where the great bats had come from, and if their masters were with them ...
They were, and in the next moment Lardis and the others saw them.
Dark blots, like gigantic kites, or curious leaves whose scalloped rims undulated in the breeze off Starside, they rose menacingly out of the smothering blanket of night. Up from the tree-line - up into the lesser peaks, and rising over them - up into the night sky, where they blotted out the clean stars with their foul, nightmare shapes.
A flock of speeding night birds, winging east, sensed them and fragmented squawking in a dozen different directions. Mating owls launched themselves in pairs from rocky crevices, to glide and hide in the deep gulleys around. Lardis's companions, brave men all, closed their eyes and literally stopped breathing, leaving their leader himself to identify and plot the course of the terrible shapes in the star-bright sky. And on they came, those obscene diamond designs whose manta wings pulsed oh so silently, lifting them into the upper heights.
They were flyers, their once-human flesh converted and fashioned into metamorphic airfoils ... vast webs of membrane over spongy, arching alveolate bones, forming air-trap wings for lift and support... their flattened, spatulate heads nodding this way and that on long necks, sniffing out the breezes from Starside that came blustering between the peaks to form thermals. Flyers, a pair of them: they were the aerial observation and command posts of their Wamphyri makers and masters; and not only this, they were also their mounts!
For a moment Lardis glimpsed two lesser shapes humped in their saddles at the base of each flyer's neck. One was manlike, and the other - Lardis couldn't be sure. But he remembered what a man of the decimated Szgany Scorpi had told him about a sluglike thing called Shaitan ...
Still climbing, the flyers passed directly overhead and disappeared into the upper peaks. But Lardis maintained his frozen crouch, his breathless immobility. For where the Wamphyri Lords aboard their flyers had gone silently, the things that followed in their wake were anything but silent! As they came powering into view, with their propulsive orifices rumbling and throbbing, it took every ounce of Lardis's iron will to keep from closing his eyes and shutting out their total horror.
They were warriors, six of them.
Warriors! Ah, but whatever that single word might convey in other tongues, when the Szgany used it to describe the grotesque fighting beasts of the Wamphyri, then it meant only one thing - shrieking madness! But as for these creatures ... in the case of at least one of them, even that description seemed inadequate. Seeing the beast, Lardis flinched uncontrollably; his lips drew back from his teeth in an involuntary grimace.
While the five - lesser? - creatures flew in a tight arrowhead formation, their far more monstrous cousin came on centrally and slightly to the rear. Its pulsing outline against the stars was such that it riveted Lardis's gaze; he had merely glimpsed the others before this one stamped itself on his disbelieving mind. Longer, bulkier, and carrying more armour than its companions, it seemed impossible that a creature like this could ever lift its bulk an inch from the earth, let alone fly! Yet here it was, squirting like an enormous octopus through the inky, star-spattered sky.
Details burned themselves into Lardis's brain: Its grey-mottled flesh, with scales tinged blue in star-shine like smoothly hinged plates of some weird flexible metal ... clusters of gas bladders like strange wattles, bulking out its throbbing body and detracting from its manoeuvrability, but necessary to carry the extra weight of dinosaur body armour ... its grapples and hooks, cutting appendages in the shape of crab claws ... the evil intelligence of its many eyes, some of which peered forwards, while others sca