Vampire World 1 - Blood Brothers

They climbed closer to the Rock, a gigantic outcrop jutting from the wooded hillside, bald and domed on top, but hollow as a rotten tooth in its base. 'And do you live here now?' Nathan had been inside the place as a child; it seemed a dire sort of existence, to actually live here.

'We hide here,' Lardis answered, 'but we still "live" in Settlement - because I won't let go! It's no great distance, and we always come back to the Rock at nights. But the Wamphyri? Territorial? Hah.' They don't know the half of it!'

'But if you still live in town, why have we come up here?'

'Because right now this is where the work is. Enough for everyone. We're hollowing the place out, making it liveable, and charging the larger outer caves with Dimi's powder. Yet another way to kill a warrior: flatten the bastard under a hundred tons of rock!'

'Without flattening yourself?'

'We've tu

In the main entrance a chain of people, men and women, passed heavy leather buckets laden with dirt and small rocks from the inside to the open, and there tipped them over the rim of a shallow bluff on to the scree slopes below. Sweating and grimy, the people looked much alike. Most of them merely glanced at Lardis and his party, nodded, and carried on working. But one of them dropped her bucket and the work came to a halt.

Then ... it was as if a whirlwind had struck! Nana rushed at Nathan so as to almost knock him down. He wrapped her in his arms, grabbed her up fiercely, kissed her dirty neck and hugged her like a lover. His mother! Alive and well! Finally they held each other at arm's length, and Nathan's eyes drank Nana in; he let her aura, her smell - no, her scent - wash over him, and thought, She's so ... small!

'You're so ... big!' she said. There were tears behind her eyes, but she wouldn't cry in front of people.

Lardis put an arm round each of them. And to Nana: 'Take him to your place in the Rock,' he said. 'Let the work go. No one here will grudge you that.' His voice was husky, too.

On their way inside, still holding each other, they found their way blocked as a huge, frowning figure stepped out of the line. It was Varna Zanesti, Misha's father. He clasped forearms with Nathan, nodded and said, 'Well, what a sight for sore eyes you are! And do I have a son at last, or what?' As ever, Varna was straight to the point.

At first Nathan didn't understand, so Varna prompted him, 'That conversation we had, in Settlement that morning?'

Then Nathan understood, sighed and said, 'I'm honoured.'

'Huh!' Varna grunted. 'Damn right you are! Very well then, I'll see to it - and at once!' Finally he gri

'Where is she?' Nathan asked.

'In the woods with the children, teaching, gathering nuts, fruits. Will midday suit you?'

'Eh?'

'To be wed, of course!'

Nathan looked at Nana, who nodded. And: 'Yes, whatever you say,' he answered Varna.

'Consider it done then,' said the other. 'Now be off, and enjoy what time you have left as a free man.'

Nana had a large cave close to the main entrance. There, where beams of sunlight shot in through holes in the perforated rock and dust motes drifted like specks of gold, she sat Nathan down on a blanket on a ledge carved in the wall. And while she saw to the needs of two old ladies in her care - in the course of preparing their food - she talked to him and questioned him over her shoulder. In a little while he stopped answering, and Nana saw that he'd stretched out and gone to sleep.

Then, as the old ones ate their food Nana sat beside him. She stroked the lines from his brow, cried all the tears she'd stored up for so long, and loved her son for all the lonesome times she'd missed loving him ...

Nathan dreamed of Maglore, who in any case had never been far from his thoughts since his escape from Rune-manse; an image of the man, the vampire Lord, the monster, had seemed printed indelibly on his i

Maglore in his aerie, in a darkened room, alone, with a smile on his ancient, evil face and his eyes half-closed, and spider hands with spindly fingers resting upon an image of his sigil, the hammered gold loop with a half-twist. Nathan dreamed of the Seer Lord, and knew that Maglore in turn dreamed of him, of Nathan!

He conjured the numbers vortex and washed Maglore away in its seething swirl - and saw the smile on his fading face turn to a scowl - before he drifted deeper into sleep ...

He dreamed of his wolves. They had felt the swirl of the vortex and stirred in their mountain cave. He knew that their yellow eyes blinked in the gloom, and could feel their warmth and smell the musty heat of their curled bodies. But they were tired and he should let them sleep; it was sufficient that they acknowledged his return ...

His freely drifting mind touched upon the deadspeak minds of Sunside's Great Majority: a Jiving mind listening in on the dead. They knew him at once, but the message of their swiftly receding whispers was as vague and mysterious as ever: That one, Nathan!'

'But the Thyre speak for him; they say there's no harm in him, only good.'

'So was his father good, in his time. But in the end

.?'

'We could tell him much.'

'We daren't!'

Among them was a voice which was very faint. 'I, /asef Karis, could tell him most of all.'

'And be shu

'You are cold and cruel,' the faint one replied.

'But not as cold and cruel as the Wamphyri necromancer who is his brother!'

'He is a vampire. They are not the same.'

'Can Nathan live forever, then? And what will he be when he dies? Ah, and will he stay dead?'

Finally, reluctantly: 'Perhaps you are right,' said /asef Karis. With which their dead voices faded away entirely as the teeming dead fell silent in their graves and resting places ...

At last it was Eygor Killglance's turn; the leathery amalgam which was Eygor, blind and dead in his pit in Madmanse. But Eygor didn't talk about Nathan, he talked to him. The killing eye, Nathan. It can be yours!' The clotted gurgle of his mind spa

Nathan stood at the feet of the Thing in the pit again, and stared up at its dead face, its closed eyes which even now, in his dream, creaked open! And a pair of blind white orbs huge as the eggs of swans, white as shining marble, wept acid tears on to a fretted, crumbling cheek!

'Only see how I cry,' said Eygor, 'because my eyes are blind and white. Ah, but upon a time the right one was filled with blood! See!' And at once, the right eye of the gargoyle dripped scarlet. 'While the left was full of pus!' And indeed the left one turned yellow, and swelled like a boil about to burst. And Nathan knew that if it did and the poison splashed him, then that he would be infected, heir to Egyor's eyes!

He came shouting awake ...!

But the eyes were gone. The original great white blind glaring eyes (like the eye which Thikkoul had seen in Nathan's stars, perhaps?), the bloody eye and the yellow one, too: gone! Only his mother's eyes, Nana's, were there to greet him where he jerked violently upright. And gazing back worriedly into his, all they contained was love and concern.

For Nathan was more than ever like Harry Keogh before him, and she knew from his mumbling that he talked to ... people, in his sleep; or at least listened to them talking to each other. But mainly she was concerned because of who these people were, and the fact that they were no more ...