Страница 145 из 153
The night was long, but barely long enough. Only Karz's will sustained him, while Nathan lolled in the saddle like a zombie: awake one minute, drowsing the next, then starting awake again. But as an amethyst dawn crept in like some glowing tide along the rim of the world, and secret watchers in the barrier mountains yawned and relaxed after their long night's vigil, making ready to go down into Sunside, so the great grey shadow which was Karz went wafting overhead on arched, aching manta wings, and dipped down towards the foothills over Settlement. He was seen, of course; the blast of a shotgun sounded, not aimed at Karz or Nathan for they were already gone into the gloom; the echoes rolled down into Sunside, faintly but loud enough, and the pair were guaranteed a welcome.
Nathan had not anticipated that there would be men out and about in the pre-dawn heights. The sound of the shotgun had come as a surprise. Several such weapons existed, he knew, all in the hands of the Szgany Lidesci. So then, the Lidescis had not succumbed to vampire domination. Good, and Nathan had prayed it would be so; but the very fact of it made for a change in those sketchy plans which he'd so hastily prepared in Turgosheim.
'We've been seen,' he told Karz. 'I had hoped to go down into Sunside on foot, in secret; show myself to the Szgany in streaming sunlight; approach them as a man - obviously a man! Now ... they will surely co
It's your problem, Nathan, the other answered, but weakly. I have played my part and for the moment can do no more ...
They landed on a slope high in the foothills two miles west of Settlement, and while Karz munched on resin-laden pine branches, Nathan found flints and lit a fire under a hornet's nest in a patch of mountain gorse. Stung three times for his efforts, he didn't mind. He broke a small corner off the huge comb, chewed wax and honey alike for instant energy, then fed the rest to Karz.
That will get me where I'm going. The flyer was grateful.
'I've been giving it some thought,' Nathan told him, despondent for the other: that Karz, even a vampire changeling like him, should contemplate so hideous a suicide. For it seemed to Nathan that Karz's humanity was proven. 'Why don't you fly west, beyond the range of Wratha and her creatures in Karenstack? For you said it yourself: you're different from any flyer that ever was. You can find a Starside cave and make it your own, sleep out the days and forage for your food in the warm evenings or the long dawns before the sunrise.'
I'm a vampire thing and bulky, Karz answered simply. Pine cones and honey are not enough.
Down the slope someone stepped on a branch; there sounded a breathless, whispered query. Karz turned his huge soft eyes on Nathan and said, Szgany, even as I was once Szgany but no longer. These are your people, and it's time I was on my way.
Nathan slowly nodded. 'At least you are your own ... man.' Then he backed off, and Karz launched himself south for the sun and rose up into a bank of cloud heading in the same direction. For a moment he was a misty outline, then gone ...
Nathan knew how it must be and wouldn't go rushing to his doom. But neither could he flee from it, for that would be to admit his guilt when in fact he was i
'Oh, really?' a young voice, hoarse with fear and breathless from the efforts of its owner's climbing, came back. 'And you came here on a flyer out of Starside, right?'
Nathan was cold, tired; the wonder was that he was alive, that he hadn't died of exposure. Now that his feet were on the ground, all he wanted to do was rest. Wearily, he held out his arms and said, 'I have no weapons. Only look at me. Do I look like a Wamphyri Lord or lieutenant?'
Gorse bushes parted and an anxious face peered through; a youth shouldered his way into view; he looked carefully all around, then gave a piercing whistle. His crossbow was loaded, and now he aimed it at Nathan's heart. 'What do you look like to me?' he said, squinting down his sights. 'You look like a dead thing!'
In Nathan's entire body, there was no ounce of resistance left. But he tried one last time. 'I'm Nathan,' he said, 'Nathan Kiklu. I'm just a man.'
'You're a liar,' said the other. 'I saw you and the flyer together. Say goodbye to all this, Nathan Kiklu.'
'What?' A gruff voice sounded from behind him, and a wiry shoulder knocked him aside. 'Did you say Nathan Kiklu?' A face which Nathan knew stared into his across a distance of no more than nine or ten feet. Then, however slowly, recognition registered, and with his jaw hanging slack the other stepped forward. In his arms he cradled a weapon from another world: a shotgun, all gleaming for the care and attention he gave it. And finally: 'Why, I'll be ...!'
Small, wiry, weathered, it was Kirk Lisescu ...
In Old Starside's last aerie a young Lord came starting awake in a cold sweat. His dream had been very vivid, very weird, and very uneasy. For even the Wamphyri were men upon a time, whose dreams are like those of common men, with the power to transport them back to other times and places; so that the terrors they knew in their youth, before they were vampires, may rise up to trouble them again.
In this dream there had been no blood. Instead, the young Lord had battled through the ranks of a thousand dead men whose bloodless, crumbling bodies stood up again as quickly as he cut them down! But even though his every effort had seemed useless, still he'd fought through them to get to That which they protected, the Thing which they guarded, his Great Enemy from a youth which was now almost entirely forgotten.
And when finally he had stood upon a mound of crumbling, stinking human debris - pieces which yet clutched and clawed at him to pull him down - then the aerie of his alien foe had materialized: a rearing cone of whirling, mutating numbers! And within the rush and swirl of the cone, the infinitely sad face of a yellow-haired, blue-eyed giant; made sad, perhaps, by the sacrifice of his teeming dead army, but not by that alone. For strangely, inexplicably, he also felt for his vampire enemy.
Nestor had somehow known it, that his enemy cared for him. And that was when he'd been wrenched awake, as the sad sapphire eyes of the face in the numbers vortex had gazed right into his soul, or what was left of it...
Now, standing naked and trembling beside the thickly curtained windows with his hand on the rope, Nestor's scarlet eyes stared almost vacantly west and a little south, as if his gaze might penetrate to the outside and over the boulder plains to the mountains, and across them into Sunside. The drapes were of black bat fur, thick and heavily weighted; not a chink of light passed through from the outside, and nothing of Nestor's gaze the other way. But he could imagine well enough. The peaks of the barrier range would be golden, and in a little while the sun would aim its beams this way, too, and shine on Wrathspire.
Wrathspire. That was what the Lady had finally named this place, these upper levels: Wrathspire, after herself and after the memory of another aerie which she'd fled from in the east. The Lady Wratha, aye: Nestor's Lady, now, for as long as that would last. Why, he might even love her, if he were capable of loving anyone. But all of that had gone out of him a long time ago; a dream which was wrenched from him, just as he had been wrenched from his dream. Except...
... Something of the dream remained, niggling there in the back of his wounded mind. The whirling wall of numbers, fading but - real? Absent for so long and only now - returned?