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Shaitan remembered how, in his first meeting with the trogs, they had likened him to men on the other side of the barrier mountains. Now (having almost forgotten the irritation of the sun's golden rays, and with only one way to test for a recurrence of the problem), he determined the conquest of Sunside. But it would be subtle, as were all his works. First he would approach the Sunsiders as a friend, and later as their master. Thus it would be as it had been with the trogs.
So thought Shaitan ...
Leaving his trog thralls behind to fend for themselves, he climbed the mountains diagonally, heading east as always. He climbed at sunup but was shielded from the sun by the wall of the mountains. Still the sky's brightness troubled him and the light hurt his vampire eyes, so that he wondered if all of this world's creatures were photophobic, himself included. But high over the tree-line and into the peaks, he saw great birds soaring on high, which were not bothered by the sun. They were birds of prey, kites, which scoured the land for food in the last rays of the sun. Also, there were great shaggy goats in the peaks, which had no fear of the light, and likewise small creatures in the coarse grasses and heather.
Shaitan shrugged. Well, he would put his theories to the test soon enough; indeed, he might even impose his will upon the sun! (At which the spore-grown vampire inside him shrank down and was small, for in this matter Shaitan was too wilful and his vampire could neither guide nor control him. Immature in its own right, it must simply go along with him.) While for his part Shaitan felt merely uneasy, as a result of his parasite's concern.
As fate would have it, he crested the mountains in that hour when all that remained of the sun was a spoked wheel of pink and yellow light fa
And as twilight turned to night, Shaitan saw the flickering fires of hunters where they camped on the flank of the mountains. While down on the Sunside levels, the glowing fires of their camps and settlements lit the night in all directions, as far as his eyes could see. Their tribes were legion!
And in his heart Shaitan was glad, believing that at last he had found true men upon whom to impose his will...
The Sunsiders as a race of men were still recovering from the Grey Hole's holocaust, which had reshaped their 'Earth', realigned its orbit, and redesigned its geological features. They were recovering from earthquakes and tidal waves, from seasons of torrential rains and whirlwinds of black frozen ash (which in another world might well have been termed 'nuclear winters'), and from other seasons which had baked half of the planet to a desert while the other half lay cold and wasted, mainly under frozen oceans. But as a race they were recovering, and gradually rebuilding their decimated numbers.
Upon a time: 'Earth' had had continents, oceans, islands, seasons of winds, sun, rains, snow. It had species galore, and a quarter billion of people. They had the wheel, used fire and sails, experimented with rudimentary medicines and coarse chemistry. While gunpowder had not yet been discovered, still they understood the basic elements of the forge and of metalworking; they had metal tools, and the crossbow for hunting. And all in all theirs had seemed a bright future, whose explorers sailed out across the seas in wooden ships to seek new lands.
But that was before the Grey Hole. And now, seven hundred or more years later, in the time of Shaitan? This is what the Sunsiders - less than thirty thousand of them now - knew of their world: That it had been ravaged of most of its species along with its peoples, and might well be considered dead except in that temperate zone whose spine was the barrier range of mountains between Sunside and Star-side. And in their legends (which were confused and contradictory, because the written form of their language had been at best basic and was lost in the aftermath, so that history had become a thing passed down immemorially by word of mouth), the scourge which had visited itself upon them to destroy their world had become synonymous with a forbidden place on Starside known only as 'the Gate to the hell-lands'.
And the legend was this: that one night a strange 'white sun' had appeared in the southern skies ... a portent of terrible times in the offing!
At first it had seemed to move slowly, like a comet, then more swiftly, and finally in a rush like a bar of white light where it speared down out of space to glance off the moon and blaze across the surface of the world! But as it fell to earth so it shimmered and shrank, until it skimmed across the land like a huge flat stone bouncing on water; and at last it thudded down into a crater of its own making, on a world gone mad by reason of its coming. Not a shooting star or a comet, no, but a Force far greater than these whose occurrence in Nature is mercifully rare: a Black Hole which had eaten itself, until only the event horizon remained. A Grey Hole now, and a bridge between universes.
In any case, such science was beyond the people of this world. To the handful of stumbling, stu
And now, whenever hunters climbed those mountains in their central region, or strayed through the great pass to Starside's boulder plains, they saw how an awful revenant of the cataclysm yet survived to reinforce its legend: a crater socket with its sunken, blind white eye glaring up and out, as if some fallen demon lay paralysed, unblinking, and wondering at his lot. And the gaze of his cold, dead white eye was like a beacon, a forbidding pharos, not guiding but warning souls away ...
A demon, yes, why not? Something from hell, anyway. Something which had brought hell here with it.
And in the legends there was also the story of a wandering adventurer, first through the pass after those turbulent centuries of stabilization, who climbed down to the mainly buried sphere of white light to touch it... and was never seen again. For it had opened like a Gate to take him into hell.
Which was why the place had been named like that and why it was now forbidden, along with all of those desolate lands lying north of the mountains: the boulder plains, and further east a region of dizzily rearing stacks of volcanic stone, like vast spears of rock rising to rival the barrier range itself; and beyond the northernmost horizon, sending up a blue shimmer and sheen under the diamond stars and weirdly writhing auroras, the bitterly frozen Icelands.
All of these places, forbidding and forbidden. But in any case, who would want to go there? Nothing lived there; nothing could live there, but bats in the caves, and wolves up in the peaks and passes over Starside, and certain lesser creatures. Surely it was no fit habitation for men. Not for any sort of men. Not yet, anyway ...
Shaitan came across his first true men by the light of their campfire, and saw that they were clad in the furs and skins of animals. There were three of them and they saw him at the same time, saw also that he was naked; which was just as well for Shaitan, for they were hunters. If he had clothed himself and come upon them suddenly like that ... with his height, he could have been mistaken for a great bear. As it was he found himself covered by their crossbows as they scrambled to their feet and turned more fully towards him. But then: