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Sunup, soon, and Lardis should be feeling happier. But he wasn't. Coursing through his veins, the blood of his unknown seer forefather was warning him of ominous times ahead ...
Three hours later it started to rain; the way soon became slippery and precarious; Lardis deemed it dangerous to proceed. After their prodigious trek, they had reached a spot some four to five miles south-west of the Gate and now looked down on it from a vantage point in the high jumbles. Behind them, a promising looking pass wound between the peaks and presumably down to Sunside. And the sky in the south was brightening, however marginally, from minute to minute.
Lardis and his three huddled beneath the groping branches of a wind-blasted, grotesquely malformed tree until the rain stopped. And now their view of Starside and the glaring hell-lands Gate was that much clearer. Some miles east, the plains were heaped with the strange stumps and tumuli of tumbled Wamphyri stacks - Wenstack, once Volse Pinescu's place; the mad Lord Lesk's shattered Glutstack; sprawling, hugely humped sections of Shaithistack; the acromegalic Fess Ferenc's exploded Grosstack; the lesser Lord Grigis's Gougestack; Lascula Longtooth's Fangstack, and several more. Indeed, all of the great aeries of the Wamphyri, lying prone on the plains where they had fallen.
All save one. Karenstack.
But no lights in Karenstack's kilometre-high windows now, no smoke going up from its chimneys, no sinister motion behind its plateau battlements or in its launching bays. For the moment it was ... inert. But not quiescent.
Looking at it, Lardis shivered and felt the blood of his forefather stirring. Like a vision out of some future time, he watched the high windows come blazing into life, smoke start to belch from the chimneys, flyers cruising in the updrafts about the bays, where they queued for landings.
Then, as quickly as it had come, the vision passed, leaving Lardis to shiver again, breathe again, and remember again his vow ...
'What now?' Andrei Romani grunted, but on a rising note. His attention was riveted on the Gate.
'Eh?' Lardis was drawn from his reverie.
'Fires!' Peder Szekarly gasped. His young eyes were that much sharper, keener. 'And some movement down there, close to the Gate. See, the sudden blazing up casts shadows. But things that big ... can only be warriors!'
'The Wamphyri are camped there, aye,' Lardis's eyes had narrowed under the frowning overhang of his brow. The Lords, their flyers, their warriors. But why are they leaving it so late? Sunup is coming. They should be heading for Karenstack, before the first rays strike through the great pass. What's their business down there, so close to the sphere Gate?' He screwed up his eyes, vainly trying to make out those details which distance had forbidden them. Vainly, and perhaps mercifully, too.
'Look'' Kirk Lisescu's voice was no more than a tremor in the gradually brightening air. They saw where he pointed: the timber-line some hundreds of feet below their vantage point, but full of motion now as The Dweller's entire wolf pack came bounding in a silent flood up through the trees! They headed for the high crags, headed west, headed in any direction as long as it was away from the Gate, the Wamphyri, and their bonfires!
'Now what -?' Andrei began - but Lardis grasped his arm and shut him off.
'Get down!' Lardis gasped, hurling himself out from under the tree's sparse branches and diving behind upthrusting crags. The seer in him had surfaced at last; he knew that whatever was coming ... was already on its way!
As a single, brilliant, prolonged flash of lightning lit the peaks, so Andrei and Kirk joined Lardis where he crouched down, hugging the naked rock. And as thunder played a booming, lingering drum-roll across the sky, so the three heard Peder Szekarly's croaked question: 'But what is it?' Peder had been the last to leave the gnarled tree; he made no attempt to seek cover; he stood trembling, looking down on Starside through a jagged gap in the rocks.
From where Lardis crouched, he couldn't see Peder, didn't know that his young friend stood exposed. 'I don't know what it is,' he finally answered, 'but I saw it - felt it - like a burst of brilliant light, searing my eyes, my soul!'
The lightning?' Peder didn't understand.
At last Lardis looked up and saw him standing there, and knew that the thing of his premonition, whatever, was almost upon them! 'Peder, get down!' he cried.
Too late.
Down on Starside's boulder plain, the sphere Gate disappeared in a LIGHT which ate it in a moment, a light to sear a man's eyes, his soul, as Lardis had said. But it was much more than that, more powerful than that, more terrible than that. In the smallest fraction of a second it leaped the gap between and shone on Peder. Only for a moment, but long enough. Smoke leapt from him. He screamed, clutched at his face, tottered back away from the gap in the rocks. Even as he stumbled, a giant's hand seemed to slap at him, hurling him down!
In the next moment there commenced such a howling of torn earth, riven rock, crazed winds ... it was like the combined hissing, mewling, and bellowing of every warrior the Wamphyri had ever spawned! And as the sky turned red over Starside and the frightened clouds went scurrying, so Lardis looked out - because he had to know, had to see.
And what he saw ...!
It was as if something of the hell-lands themselves had erupted through the sphere Gate. Which was as close to the truth as Lardis or anyone else might ever guess, except perhaps a handful of men a universe away, who knew the truth in its entirety.
For the Gate itself was no longer visible, only a mighty mushroom of frothy white and dirty grey, shot through with red and orange fires, boiling for the sky. Already its billowing dome towered high as the mountains, and even now its stem was leaning towards the Icelands, as if bowed down by the weight of its roiling head.
Lardis's jaw fell open; he mouthed unheard, unremembered things into the warm wind off Starside, that demon breath which whipped his hair back and hurled hot grit in his face. And as the furnace blast died away he shielded his eyes against the tracery of lightnings that leaped and crackled between the incredible mushroom and the boiling earth.
Then, hearing Andrei and Kirk calling to him, he pulled himself together and went to them where they crouched beside Peder. Miraculously, the youth had closed his eyes in the moment of the fireball; though the skin of his face, neck, hands was badly seared, his sight was returning with each passing second. Clutching at his leader's hand, he gasped, 'Lardis, Lardis! It was ... it was -'
'I know,' Lardis nodded. 'It was hell!'
Later, Peder's hair would fall out and his gums and fingernails bleed, and when his face grew new skin it would always be white. But at least he would seem to recover, for a while, and be the whole man again. However that might be, he would die six years later, by which time his appearance would be as grey and gnarly as the aspect of an ancient. Nor would there be heirs to survive him ...
In the wild woods to the west of Settlement, in the predawn silence of sunup, old Jasef Karis had dreamed his last dream and now tried to rouse himself, shake himself awake, stand up. But something was desperately wrong; his arms hurt as if they were cramped, and there was a grinding pain in his chest. It was as much as he could do to open his eyes.
Above him, Jasef saw the oiled skin which Nana had draped over low branches like an awning, to keep the dawn rains from his wrinkled hide. Except he'd rolled to one side in his sleep and so lay uncovered, drenched and shivering. The way he felt - hot on the inside, cold out, yet sweating from the pain of the thing in his chest - he suspected that the dawn light in the green canopy overhead would be the last he'd ever see. It must be the end of him, yes, for he had never felt like this before and didn't much want to feel it again.