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But first he must tell someone about his dream. He must tell... Nana, of course!
His dream. His dream of -
- A corpse, smouldering, with its /ire-blackened arms flung wide, steaming head thrown back as in the final agony of death, tumbling end over end into a black void shot through with thin neon bars or ribbons of blue, green, and red light; indeed descending or retreating into this tu
And when his dream had drifted him closer - then Jasef had seen, and finally he had known. Had known who, and believed he also knew what.
After that: The corpse's gyrating flight into eternity - through this alien continuum of green, blue and crimson bars -had speeded up, leaving Jasef behind. But then, in the moment after the thing had sped away and disappeared -
- An explosion of golden light in the distant haze, where the corpse had been! And a rush of golden splinters like living darts, speeding towards Jasef and past him, each blinking out as it escaped out of this unknowable place into other, more real times and places.'
That was when the scene had changed: To Nona's four-year-old twins, wrapped together in a blanket under a tree, with a roof of oiled skins just like Josef's to keep the rain off. And suddenly - appearing out of nowhere - one of the golden darts, which hovered undecided, first over one twin and then the other. At which the pair stirred in their sleep, which had seemed to decide the matter. Hissing his horror, Jasef had seen the dart lance down, to enter into the head of one of them! Except there was no scar, no blood, nothing but a smile spreading on the face of the sleeping i
And: 'I
Which was when he had awakened, or tried to, only to discover himself bound by these pains like tight thongs across his chest and limbs. But he knew now that indeed he was awake, and also that he must pass on his dream, his vision, while yet he might.
He tried to call out for Nana, and couldn't, for the pain wouldn't let him. His cry came out the merest gasp. Well then, and so he must simply lie here and listen to the first birds calling, and wait until Nana came to him.
But he hoped she wouldn't keep him waiting too long ...
Only a moment earlier, Nana Kiklu had woken up. But she was some little distance away and so failed to hear Jasef's gasping. There had been a noise - the dull, distant booming of thunder, perhaps? - and a little later one of the twins had come tottering, rubbing at his eyes, on the point of tears. Obviously he'd been nightmaring, or else would not have left his bed for his mother's. Small as they were, Nana's twins preferred sleeping alone.
Pulling him down under her blanket, giving him her warmth, Nana had comforted him: 'Oh, dear! There, there,' and stroked his hair. Then, still half-asleep, she'd automatically fumbled for the small leather strap he wore on his left wrist. It was Nana's way of identifying her babies in the dead of night: Nestor's was a plain band, a simple strip of leather joined with a few strong stitches, while Nathan's band had a half-twist. Now, recognizing the child as he snuggled closer, feeling the pounding of his little heart, she asked:
'What was it, eh?' She hugged him closer still. 'A dream? A bad dream?'
The forest was waking up; the birds were filling the air with their dawn chorus; light came down in hazy beams through the trees. Sunup, and all was well. And yet ... something felt wrong. It was in Nana's bones: a gnawing ache, a nagging concern. But for what?
'Mama?' The child in her arms was almost back to sleep.
'Yes?'
'My ... my daddy ...' he said. And that was something he'd never said before.
'Shhh!' she said. 'Shhh!' And to herself, perhaps a little bitterly: Your daddy's on Starside, asJeep in the arms of the Lady Karen, where they hide from the light of the new day.
'Dead,' the child mumbled, where he snuggled to her breast. One word, but such a word! It filled Nana's veins with ice.
'What?' she questioned him. 'Dead? Is something dead?'
'Is he?' came the not-quite-awake question-answer, freezing her blood anew. 'Is he - my daddy - dead?'
Nana knew she wouldn't sleep again and so got up. There in the dawn glade she found Jasef Karis sprawled on his back, eyes glazed, dew dripping from his cold nose, and believed she now understood what her small son had tried to tell her. He had not been talking about the daddy he'd never known (and couldn't possibly know), but the old seer, the old mentalist, Jasef.
But far to the east and across the peaks, an omen!
The boiling sky over Starside was black, and the bellies of its clouds flickered red with reflected fires ...
PART TWO:
Looking Further Back, and Sca
1
This much has been told: Shaitan, first of the Wamphyri, remembered neither mother nor father, nor yet understood his own genesis. To him it was as if he had simply sprung into being, full grown, with a will but no memories of his own to mention. Following which he had fallen, or been thrown, to earth; but fallen, on this occasion, to 'earth' as opposed to Earth. In any event, he discovered himself upon the surface of one of many worlds, in one of the many universes of light. And dimly (and quickly fading in the eye of his mind), he remembered something of ... of an expulsion.
The world into which he had fallen was in one sense an old world, and in another a new one. Recently it had suffered calamity: a Black Hole, losing most of its mass and deteriorating to a Grey Hole, had likewise fallen out of space and time and settled here, reshaping the planet. But where that had been a calculable disaster, the disaster which was Shaitan would be quite incalculable.
From him would spring an order of beings whose nature was such as to threaten not one but two worlds, filling the myths and legends of both with dread and uttermost horror. For Shaitan was a vampire.
And yet, when he fell (or was thrown out), he was not yet a vampire. That was still to come: a matter of choice, of exercising his own free will, his human curiosity. And this is how it came about...
Starting into awareness, Shaitan cried out...!
It was the shock of consciousness cloaking an intelligence previously bereft, will without knowledge inhabiting a mind wiped clean. And as his cry echoed into silence, so he discovered himself kneeling at the edge of stagnant water, with his naked image mirrored in scummy depths. But seeing that he was beautiful, he was proud.
Standing upright, Shaitan saw that he could walk; and in the twilight of a dim, misty dawn he moved by the edge of the dank, rank waters, which were a swamp. And seeing how dismal and lonely was this world where he had fallen, or into which he had been cast, he assumed himself a si
Such assumptions defined not only Shaitan's intelligence but also his nature: that he instinctively understood such concepts as sin and punishment. And he thought his crime must be that he was beautiful, which was his pride working ... which was in fact his crime! For he saw beauty as might, and might as right, and right as he willed it to be.