Страница 128 из 153
'Now, hold,' said Maglore, quietly, yet in a voice which brooked no argument. 'Only damage him and it's no deal. And I shall tell Zindevar you lost her a pair of lovely little playmates for her bed.'
The lieutenant's hand froze in mid-air; his head swivelled on his bull neck and he glared at Maglore, then frowned and said: 'What deal?' Finally he remembered his ma
'Aye, and she'll command that you are disembowelled!' Maglore chuckled, however humourlessly, '- If you don't take these girls into Cronespire in exchange for that one foppish youth. Make up your mind, quick!'
Now the other was suspicious. He glanced at Nathan again. 'Oh? And what is it with him? Why would you want this one, who is either an idiot, or just plain insolent, or both? Bringing silver into Turgosheim, indeed! What madness! Don't the Szgany teach their Sunside brats anything these days?'
Maglore shrugged, and answered mysteriously, There is Sunside and there is Sunside, and Szgany and Szgany, and what is taught in one place may not be deemed necessary in another ... not yet. But this one -' he shrugged again,'- I like his colours, which are weird. Also, he seems stupidly docile, dumb, even i
A moment's pause for thought, and: 'Done!' Zindevar's lieutenant released Nathan, sent him flying along the wall and out of his sight behind Maglore. And the Mage of Runemanse told his girls:
'Go with this gentleman and he will take you to your new mistress, a very lovely Lady who will show you many wonderful things!' Hearing which, even Zindevar's 'gentleman' burst into baying laughter, as Maglore took Nathan's shoulder and quickly walked away with him ...
Along the way to Runemanse - a route covering almost two and a half miles of caves, crags, causeways; often climbing internally through communal cavern systems, or externally over vertiginous chasms and up dizzily spiralling walkways of bone and cartilage - Maglore kept up an onslaught of seemingly i
Even before meeting Maglore, Nathan had known that the Wamphyri Lord was a telepath; however stupidly -unwittingly, whatever - Maglore's spy lozel Kotys, the so-called 'mystic', had given him away. But Nathan could never have anticipated the full range of the Seer Lord's mind, whose insidious energies seethed in his vampire skull like the smoke of balefires, sending out curling black tendrils of thought in all directions.
In order to maintain and reinforce the telepathic wall with which Nathan had surrounded himself, he used the subterfuge of asking questions of his own: he knew how difficult it would be for Maglore to scry upon his mind and construct meaningful answers to his questions at one and the same time. And why shouldn't he question? Nathan knew that Maglore would not harm him, not yet at least and perhaps not ever. No, for Thikkoul had foreseen a long stay for him in Rune-manse, but nothing specifically harmful that Nathan could remember.
The sun rises and sets, Thikkoul had read in his stars, and sunups come and go in a blur where you wander in a great dark castJe o/ many caves. I see your face: your hollow eyes and - greying hair?
Well, that last was ominous, admittedly. But now that Nathan was here, what had he to lose? Very little of his own, for in Turgosheim his life was nothing; but still there were certain interests he must protect. His knowledge of the Thyre, for instance: their secret places over and under the desert; also his familiarity with old Sunside, where Wratha and her renegades (and in a little while the vampires of Turgosheim) would do to his people what had been done here. He must give nothing of such knowledge away to benefit the Wamphyri, not if there was a way to avoid it.
'Why didn't we fly to Runemanse?' he asked Maglore where they crossed a swaying bridge of sinew and arching, alveolate cartilage. 'Do you have no flyers?'
'I have one, aye,' Maglore answered, offering him a curious, perhaps indulgent glance. 'It is in use now, where a man of mine flies back a surly Kehrlscrag youth to Runemanse. But flyers are for the younger Lords, my son, and for the generals to ride out and command their armies. Oh, I have made a flyer or two in my time, but mainly I prefer to walk. When I can go on foot I do so, but where the way is too sheer or distant I fly. Personally, I dislike great heights; for gravity is a curious force and insistent. I have never flown in my own right, as certain Lords are wont to do, for that requires an awesome strength, and alas my body is feeble - by comparison.' But he did not say with what.
They were in the middle of the span. In the dark, distant sprawl of the gorge, the lights and flaring exhausts of some of the spires came up level with their eyes. More than a thousand feet below, Turgosheim's depths were lost in dark velvet shadows. Maglore paused and drew his charge to him, and with an arm around his shoulder leaned out over the fretted cartilage wall to look down. Behind Nathan and Maglore, one of the mage's vampire thralls waited silent but alert.
And: 'About flying,' said Maglore quietly, huskily, with a scarlet, sideways glance at Nathan. 'Can you imagine flying from here? To leap out upon the air, and form your flesh into stretchy scoops like the wings of a bat? To trap the currents rising out of Turgosheim, and so glide from peak to peak? Ah, but what an art that would be! Even though I've never used it, I have it, for I am Wamphyri. I probably could do it even now, despite the lack of that special strength which could only be mine by virtue of ... a certain lifestyle. But you: you would fall like a stone, and splash like an egg ...'
Maglore drew Nathan closer in an arm which contracted like a vice, crushing his shoulders. Nathan felt the other's awesome strength, and for a moment thought it was his intention to lift him up and throw him down. For all his protestations about his 'feeble body', the vampire Lord could do it ... just so easily. Nathan looked at his hideous face, so close - that long-lived, evil face, grooved as old leather; its white eyebrows tapering into veined temples under a lichen-furred dome of a skull; the crimson lamps of Maglore's eyes, set deep in purple sockets - and tried not to be afraid. Perhaps Maglore sensed it: the bolstering of Nathan's resolve, his determination, and perhaps he admired it. At any rate he released him, and said:
'Go on, cross the bridge and I shall follow on.' And as Nathan set out: 'Aye, there's a great art to flying,' Maglore repeated himself from close behind, but in a lighter tone now. 'One of the more physical arts of the Wamphyri, called metamorphism. But there are arts and there are arts. Arts of the body, of the will, and of the mind. Indeed, for will and mind are not the same. I have known splendid minds with little or no will at all, and creatures with a rare and wilful tenacity but hardly anything of mind!'
Nathan walked on, across the bridge of bones, the fossilized cartilage of mutated men, and spied ahead at the end of the span a walled staircase carved from the face of the gorge itself. It went up a hundred, two hundred feet, to where Turgosheim's rim had been notched and weathered into wind-, rain- and time-sculpted battlements. But there were landings, too, with dark-arched passageways leading off to rooms and regions within that vastly hollowed jut of rock, that massive promontory turret, Maglore's manse over an abyss of air and darkness. And there were also gaunt win- dows - some of them aglow with fitfully flickering lights, and others dark as the orbits of a skull - which gloomed out from it.