Blood Brothers

PART SIX:

Szgany Sintana — Dissension in the Aerie The Thyre Where the river swung east in a languid curve through deepening forest, broadening out until details on the far bank were hard to discern, there Nathan was about ready to admit defeat. By then the morning was more than half-way through and he was exhausted; he had been on the move nonstop since before first light, a period of some thirty-two hours. Also, since the path had come to an end just four or five miles south-east of Twin Fords, the going had been very difficult.

Now, in a sun-dappled clearing by the bank, he lay down in the long, sweet-smelling grass to sleep, and was just beginning to drowse when he was startled to hear a familiar clop, clop, clop, of cloven hooves, the creak and jolt of caravans, and the jingle of trappings and Szgany bells. Somewhere close to hand, hidden by the river's rearing fringe, there must be an old Traveller trail; for these were surely the sounds of a party of Gypsies, who were even now passing through.

Nathan was wrong: they weren't just passing through but making camp, which he saw when he left the river, pushed his way through a tangle of soft-leaved shrubbery, and emerged on the old trail. And as he appeared in the open, on the ancient rutted track, so they likewise saw him.

Brown, soulful female eyes met his deep blue ones across the trail's width, and Nathan froze on the instant as the girl melted back into the greenery and out of sight. He'd suddenly remembered that these were strange times, and the last thing these people would be expecting was a wild man jumping out at them from the forest! On the other hand there were a good many of them, and Nathan was just one. Also, the sun was high, and so there was little chance of vampires abroad in the woods.

Certainly they were aware that the old threat lived anew in Starside; that was obvious from the moment of their first greeting. Tear down the mountains,' said a soft Szgany voice from one side, startling Nathan.

Jerking his head in that direction, he saw a tall, lean, incredibly weathered man of indeterminate years, propped casually with his shoulder against a tree. And just from looking at him Nathan could tell that these people were real Travellers, Szgany in the fullest sense. No permanent dwelling place for such as these; township comforts had never lured them from their ways, not for more than a night or so; they had been on the move all their days, as much a part of the wilderness as the creatures of the woods.

Which meant that they might not know of the return of the Wamphyri after all. For among the true Travellers the old ways were still remembered as yesterday, and the old greetings — which could as well be maledictions as pleasantries, depending on the times and situation — were still very much alive. 'Tear down the mountains,' this one had intoned, and Nathan knew the answer. He'd heard it from time to time when Travellers passed through Settlement trading their good skins, sharpening knives and axes, and reading palms. He had heard it before, but never used it. Because then he'd neither needed nor wanted to speak to anyone. Things were different now, however. And so:

'Aye, tear down the barrier range,' he answered. 'Let the sun blaze full upon the last aerie, and melt it down to the ground!'

The man acknowledged Nathan's understanding of the old curse and nodded, but at the same time he frowned and said: 'And yet… you're not a Traveller. Then perhaps your town has made us welcome in the past. For we don't hold it against you town people that you have chosen to settle. We visit now and then, and sometimes find it good to talk with others. We merely think it foolish to stay trapped in one place, like a fungus on a tree. For when the tree falls, the fungus goes with it…"

He brought out his right hand from where it had been hidden by the bole of the tree, and in full view applied the safety catch to his loaded crossbow. Then, nodding again, he added: 'Aye, foolish — especially now that the Wamphyri are back! But then, we've always said that they would be. And can you tell me a better reason for having spent all these years on the trail?'

Nathan shook his head, and answered, 'Right now, that's why I'm here, too. But I'm not running away from them, just searching for… for my brother, who was their victim. I… lost him last night, in Twin Fords. A man was seen to fall in the river. I thought that it might be him, and if I followed the river I might find him.' 'And did you?'

'No,' he shook his head. And stepping forward he offered his hand. They clasped forearms, and Nathan said, 'I'm Nathan Kiklu, of the Szgany Lidesci.'

The other smiled, however humourlessly. 'Szgany, you say? The Szgany Lidesci? From Settlement? Well, it's true at least that old Lardis used to be a Traveller! I'm Nikha Sintana, and these are my people. We, too, stayed in Twin Fords last night, and I also lost a brother. At least, I lost one who would have become as a brother to me. So much for the safety of towns! As for running away…'

Nathan saw his error at once and went to correct it. 'I meant no slight or insult!'

'None taken,' the other shook his head. 'We are running away! What? Should we sit in a burning tree, drink poisoned water, tie boulders to our necks and carry them into the river? And should we live in a town, lighting great communal fires to welcome the Wamphyri to their feast?' Again he shook his head. 'From now on I think a great many will be "running away", just like me and mine. But last night — what an error! Of all the nights to choose to spend in the company of settled men!'

While Nikha Sintana talked, Nathan made him the subject of a thorough appraisal. He did so openly, with a display of natural, friendly curiosity; it was the Szgany way when meeting strangers. And what he observed was impressive.

Nikha was — he could be — oh, anything between thirty-five and forty-five years old. The actual number of his years was a secret hidden in the agelessness of his penetrating, intelligent brown eyes, in skin weathered to a supple leather, in the oiled flexibility of sleek-muscled arms and the easy litheness of his posture. When Nikha leaned against a tree he didn't just slump; the tree seemed not only to support him but became one with him, lending him its strength. Indeed, there appeared to be a great deal of Nature's strength in every part of him.

His hooked nose was almost as sharp in profile as a kite's beak, but without its cruelty. His brow — for all that it was broad to accommodate a good brain and wide inscrutable eyes — had the flat slope of a wolf's. His lips were thin, grooved as old bark, and maybe not much given to smiling; but at the same time Nathan could not fail to notice the laughter lines, too, at the corners of his eyes and mouth. Overall, with his dark-grey, shoulder-length hair, Nikha Sintana reminded him of nothing so much as a lean and rangy hunting owl.

The Traveller had fallen silent now, waiting for Nathan's response. And Nathan was not remiss. Tm sorry you lost someone. I feel for you and know your pain well. For just like me, you also lost a brother.'

Nikha nodded. 'But my sister's pain is the greater. She was to have married this one. Which is how he would have become my brother.' 'Ah!' said Nathan, quietly.

He looked around. The Gypsies had led their animals into the forest's shade; a few tents of skins were being erected; a cooking fire was already smoking under a tripod of green branches, fuelling itself on dry bark tinder. Men were moving like shadows under the trees; a crossbow thrummed and a pigeon fell in the sun-dappled glade; a youth with a fishing line made for the river bank, collecting moth larvae bait as he went. There was something very natural, very appealing, about all of this almost casual activity. Nathan felt… comfortable here, in the company of these people. Except comfort was a feeling he couldn't afford.

He straightened his shoulders and said, 'I should get back to my search.1

Nikha took his arm. 'We've stayed in Settlement from time to time. Lardis Lidesci was always a friend, in the old days and in the new. I'm not a man to incur debts, but where they exist I always try to square them. You are tired, Nathan Kiklu. You look fit to drop. As well sleep here among friends as alone along the river, and when you've rested eat with us. That way, in some future time, my debt will have transferred to you. It's from small debts such as these that friendships are forged.'

Nathan felt his weariness dragging on his bones and remembered now that he'd been about to sleep. Also, his back was a mass of blue bruises, whose aching was such that it might soon immobilize him entirely unless he rested first. 'I'm tired, it's true,' he said. 'But I don't wish to inconvenience you.'

'No such thing,' the other replied. This is where we make camp, eat and sleep. You've come across us at the right time. Our lives may be short but Sunside's days are long. At least while the sun is in the sky we may sleep safely. As for your search: the river is wide and its banks overgrown, with miles of forest on both sides. I understand your need, but I can't say I'm envious of the task you've set yourself. A rest can't hurt… and then a little food, to fuel you on your way?'

In this way Nathan found his mind made up for him. 'I'm in your debt,' he said.

Leading him into the camp past a small caravan, Nikha said: 'My wagon. I shared it with my young sister, and cared for her until she was a woman. Then, when Eleni found herself a man in Twin Fords, or when he found her, we made them a tent of skins. This time passing through Twin Fords she would have been married; this very day, in fact! But last night, in the middle of a small celebration… well, you know what happened. All of that became as nothing. Now for a while she'll put up her tent and sit in it, and mourn this man she never got to know.' His voice hardened. 'But she'll forget about him soon enough, and the tent won't go to waste. Maybe it's just as well.'

Nathan glanced at him, perhaps a little sharply. Nikha saw his frown and raised a defensive eyebrow. 'If she'd known him well, then she would mourn him that much harder. And what if there had been children?'

'That seems a hard point of view,' Nathan was frank.

'Because I can remember hard times,' Nikha answered. 'And harder still to come, I fear.' He paused a while to fondle the ear of a beast of burden, a shad, one of a pair hitched to the thill of his vehicle. Shaggy as a hugely overgrown goat and of a like intelligence — but less boisterous, wider in the shoulder and sturdier in the legs — the creature and its companion waited uncomplainingly for someone to unhitch them and put them to graze. Turning its head, it offered up a grateful bleat and allowed Nikha to scratch behind its ear.

And: 'Aye,' he finally continued, as if he talked to himself or to the shad, 'even the smallest comforts will be hard come by from now on, I fancy. For men and beasts alike…'

Meanwhile, Nathan had looked the camp over and noted its size and composition. There were two caravans and a flat, covered cart, half a dozen shads and two calves, and a few goats tethered at the back of the vehicles. Dangling outside the caravans, festooning their sides, were all the tools and utensils necessary to Traveller life, each item muffled now to prevent unwanted jangling and clattering. And under the trees at the rim of the clearing, three good-sized tents stood cool in the shade. Finally, the camp had its own wolves, a dog and a bitch. Capable hunters, they would see to themselves and provide early warning of intruders — which explained how Nikha Sintana had been so quick off the mark and waiting on Nathan's arrival.

According to Lardis Lidesci's campn're stories, there had been hundreds of groups such as this one upon a time. Scarcely larger than a few family units — able to melt away like ghosts into the forests, or hide in small caves during Wamphyri raids — they had made harder targets than the larger, more prominent Traveller tribes.

Several of Nikha Sintana's earlier statements had more than suggested his solitary nature, which the size of his party might appear to confirm; but to Nathan it seemed more likely that he simply adhered to this old tenet, that small is synonymous with secure.

Of people, the group was made up of thirteen in all: four men, including Nikha, three women, and five children whose ages ranged from a small infant to the youth in his early teens who had gone fishing. The thirteenth… was Eleni Sintana, that sister of whom Nikha had spoken.

Nathan had caught only the briefest glimpse of Eleni in the moment he broke through the undergrowth on to the track, but in that same moment he had seen something in her eyes which had seemed to strike a resonant chord within himself… perhaps it had been her eyes, so much like Misha's. In any case, he'd been aware of her presence ever since but was careful not to look at her directly. Travellers are often fiercely protective where their women are concerned, and they don't care for forwardness in strangers. He was aware of her now to one side of the camp's central area, where she used an axe to break up dead, fallen branches into firewood.

This is Eleni,' Nikha confirmed, leading him across the clearing, 'my sister. She cuts firewood to occupy her mind.'

She looked up as they approached — looked at Nathan and smiled, however wanly — and he saw now that it was her eyes. They took him by surprise, for he'd thought that only Misha's eyes could be so warm, black and caring. Obviously he'd been wrong; or perhaps it was just that Misha had been so much on his mind lately, that…

This is Nathan Kiklu,' Nikha said, breaking into his thoughts, and possibly into hers, too. 'A man of Settlement, from Lardis Lidesci's people. He could use a wash, a place to sleep, a blanket to keep him warm. Until our meal is prepared. Will you see to it, little sister?'

She nodded and straightened up. And now that they'd been introduced, Nathan allowed himself to look at her.

Maybe twenty or twenty-one years old, she was typically Szgany. All lithe and sinuous, with movements as smooth as oil, her hair was shiny black, her skin tanned to a glow, her mouth generous and sensuous at one and the same time. And there was something wild as the woods about her — even more so than her brother — so that if Nathan didn't know better he might think there was room for only one mood in her: she should be vivacious and live life to the full, joyously, with a husky laugh that teased, taunted but never quite seduced. Because when finally Eleni did love, then her man would get all that she could give.

Mainly nai've, Nathan was wont to make judgements such as this at first sight. And sometimes he was right. Eleni shouJd be that way; perhaps she would have been and could be again, one day. But for now… she was small and sad and lonely.

As Nikha walked away, back towards his caravan and animals, Nathan began: 'Your brother has told me — ' and paused. '- I mean, I just want you to know that we're two of a kind. For just as you have lost your man, so I have lost my girl.'

She nodded seriously, and answered: 'I know how much you have lost, for it's in your eyes. I knew from the first moment I saw you. Ah, but I saw much more than that in those strange blue eyes of yours, Nathan! They are filled with all sorts of things, and you're not much given to hiding them.'

He was surprised, not quite sure of her meaning. Perhaps he looked at her too openly. He turned his eyes aside at once. 'Have I… been forward? If I've seemed so, then — '

'No, no, not that,' she cut him short. 'And if you were, what of it? Gypsies are forward. If a person is liked no one complains, and if he is not liked we say that he is forward. No, but you have been the sad one for a long, long time, and now is the worst time of all.'

He shook his head, frowned, fingered his chin. 'But… how can you know?' And now her smile was warmer.

'Oh, I read palms,' she said, tossing her ringlets back out of her eyes. 'Like my mother before me. Except, why it's easier far to read faces! And as I said, your face — especially those eyes of yours — tells a long, sad story.' She reached out and touched his brow. 'Such lines, and so very deep, in a face so young…' She shook her head, wonderingly. But before he could question her further:

'Enough of that for now,' she said. 'Come over here, to my tent. Nikha says you need a wash. We can take care of that. And then I'll get you a blanket.'

Close to her tent she set up a tripod and bowl, and brought hot water from the fire. A piece of bark provided a cleansing, milky sap, with which Nathan scoured his face and hands. But watching him, Eleni.saw him wincing whenever he stretched his arms.

He had removed his leather jacket but still wore his shirt. Take it off,' she said.

He looked at her sideways, questioningly. They were alone in the clearing now, almost. The men were off hunting; women tended their offspring or performed other duties; Nikha was seeing to his beasts. Take what off?'

'Your shirt. When you bent over it rode up your back. I have seen your bruises. Were you beaten?'

Beaten? No, merely tossed aside — but by a Thing as strong as four men! The thing that took my Misha. 'A Lord of the Wamphyri very nearly killed me,' he finally answered. 'I suppose I was lucky.'

He tried to reach over his shoulder and grasp the fabric of his shirt, but couldn't. Perhaps it was as well; Nikha had come back and was sitting on the steps of his vehicle. Seeing Nathan glancing that way, Eleni asked him: 'Are you concerned that my brother is watching us? Well, you shouldn't be.' And before he could answer she took the hem of his shirt in both hands and lifted it, and as he bent forward stripped it from his back.

'Now your brother will know I'm forward,' he groaned. 'Or that you are!'

And now for the first time she laughed, and her laugh was as husky as he had guessed it must be. 'Nathan, Nikha will be delighted!' she told him. 'Can't you see that he's still trying to marry me off?' But as she saw the extent of his bruising her laughter died away. And: 'You suppose you were lucky?' she repeated him. 'But your back should have been broken in three places! Now wait.'

She ran to Nikha and past him into the caravan, and was back in a moment with ointment wrapped in a leather pouch. 'It smells, but it's good!' she said, applying the stuff liberally to his back. 'Next sunup the sting will have gone, and by midday the bruises fading. I guarantee it. When we pass through the townships, we Gypsies guarantee all of our products!' And again she laughed.

Then she helped him on with his shirt, took him into her tent and gave him a blanket. Her bed was a huge watertight skin stuffed with down, herbs and dried ferns; more than sufficient for Nathan's needs, he made no complaint. As he lay down she threw the blanket over him, and almost before she left the tent and closed its flap he was asleep…

Numbers formed a whir/pool which sucked Nathan in, whirled him round and around, and dragged him unprotesting down the centra/ funnel of warping algebraic equations. To anyone else it would be a nightmare, but not to him. Unlike the dead, who could have talked to Nathan if they wished it but never did, the numbers were his friends. In a way, they did 'talk' to him; except he didn't have the math to understand their language. In a world largely without science, Nathan had no math at all. What would probably have been instinctive, intuitive in him from his first serious lesson, had never had the chance to develop. Not yet.

But he did understand that the numbers could sometimes carry him — his thoughts at least — to other places, other minds. It was a telepathic talent he shared with Nestor, part of which was to reach out with his mind and make a connection with that of his twin. Another part of it, which was his alone, allowed him to contact and speak with his wolves. In his waking hours this might only be accomplished by an effort of conscious will, and even then it had sometimes failed him, but when he slept it was quite beyond his control. For then his talent seemed to work on its own, or occasionally with the help of what Nathan had long since named 'the numbers vortex'.

Now he was in that vortex, but only for a moment. For in the next he felt himself expelled, hurled out and down — into water! Into the river!

And because he had searched for Nestor, now he was Nestor. He was one with his brother's mind. He knew what Nestor knew, felt what he felt, observed what he observed. Which was nothing.

Nathan knew what 'dead' minds feel like. This was it, and yet at the same time it was less than death. For the dead know many things, and this mind — Nestor's mind — knew nothing at all! And Nathan believed he knew what that meant: that his brother was freshly dead, and as yet had learned nothing from all of those others who had gone before.

He felt what Nestor felt: nothing. Or perhaps he did feel or was aware of something: the gentle flow of cold, cold water — his lungs full of the stuff, which weighed like lead to drag him down — and the first, tentative nibble of some small, curious fish. He observed what his brother observed: nothing. Or if not that, a drift of dark green weed sliding slowly across his blurred, submerged view, to fill the screen of his gaping, glazing eyeballs….efore the final darkness closed in!

And with that he knew that Nestor was dead, drowned, and gone from him forever.

He started awake — .'

— To find Eleni Sintana down on her knees beside him, her brown eyes wide and anxious where they stared into his. She had hold of his shoulders, holding him down under the water. Except… there was no water. And at last he breathed, stopped struggling, allowed her to push him back into his own depression in her bed. And:

'A dream?' she inquired, her concern clearly apparent.

Nathan nodded, felt cold sweat drip from the tip of his nose. More than that, Eleni, he wanted to say, but couldn't, because he knew that she wouldn't understand. But looking up into her face, her eyes… she so reminded him of his mother… and of Misha… he wished she would wrap her arms around him, for his protection.

He saw that she was going to — until Nikha's soft voice sounded from the door of the tent, saying: 'We're about ready to eat, Nathan. Will you join us?'

And the spell was broken.

Nathan joined the others to eat, but he was quiet and had no appetite. There was nothing wrong with the good food, nothing wrong with the company, just with him. For he knew now that he was alone, entirely alone, and that what he'd mistaken for his awakening into this world had only been the beginning of the end. The Wamphyri had wrought reality out of a fantasy — changed everything, made him aware of his place here, and given him an identity — only to rob him of his roots. Now he was drifting, as Nestor's body had drifted, and not even the weeds of what might have been to anchor him.

For the last link had been broken, Nestor was dead, and Nathan felt in his heart the coldness of his brother's watery grave…

And two miles down river, in a shingly bight, a burly, bearded fisherman cried out, tossed aside his rod, went plunging into the water to his thighs.

He had been monitoring the progress of a log drifting out of the main current and into the shallows of the backwater. And knowing that fish sometimes swim in the shadow of floating debris, he had thought to see a big one accompanying this piece of driftwood. But lolling closer to the bank, suddenly the log had given a lurch and turned over, and in the next second the fisherman had seen that what had come adrift from it to slip down into the clear water was anything but a fish!

That had been a moment ago; now Brad Berea waded to the log and thrust it aside, sank to his knees in the shingle, and gathered up the body of a young man from where it bumped slowly along the bottom. The youth's clothes were ragged, waterlogged; he was limp, cold… dead? Well, very likely. But his flesh seemed firm, his limbs were still flexible, and his lips were not entirely blue.

In fact Nestor Kiklu was dead or as close as could be, and had been for several long seconds, but as yet his spirit had not flown the flesh. What his brother Nathan had experienced was not true death but the final sleep which leads up to it, except this time that sleep had been interrupted.

Brad Berea carried Nestor to the bank, dragged him out feet first to let the water rush out of him, and thumped his chest until he coughed up mud, small weeds and more water. Coughed them up, lay still… and breathed!

He breathed — however raggedly, shallowly — and slowly but surely a semblance of life crept back into him.

Into his body, at least…

After their meal, Nikha Sintana and his people took their rest. Later, they would spread out into the forest and hunt more diligently; for they must find game now, in the daylight hours, to see them and their families through the long night ahead. After the hunting — assuming it was successful — they'd be more at their ease; they would play, make music, talk over their short-term plans. The plans of travelling folk were ever short-term, Wamphyri or no; but by midday they would be back on the trail again.

Nikha's idea, which he had told to Nathan while they ate, was this: He and his party would follow the old trail south to the narrow strip of prairie where it bordered on the furnace deserts. He knew the location of a spring there, which in all his years of wandering had never dried out. There was no shortage of game, and the fruits of the forest were always plentiful. In the woods at the edge of the prairie, well away from the customary haunts and routes of other Travellers, there Nikha's group would disguise their caravans in the thickets, stain them green to match the foliage, and pitch their tents under cover of the great trees.

In short, they would quit travelling for a while at least, if only long enough to see how the wind blew. And if it seemed they had chosen a good, safe spot, then perhaps they'd make it permanent. Settling there would go against the grain with Nikha, of course; it would be a solitary, ingrown existence with no company to mention and no external contacts. But at least they would exist, and more or less on their own terms.

As for the Wamphyri: there would be richer pickings for them elsewhere. Word of their return would be spreading even now, but many townships would not hear of it until it was too late. In Twin Fords and other towns, there were plenty of old people who could not or would not move; these must soon fall prey to the vampires. And there would be a great many parties of refugees on the move outwards from threatened towns along the southern flank of the barrier range, whose leaders had forgotten or never known the skills necessary for survival in the wild. For a certainty, the Wamphyri would pick these off first.

In Settlement and possibly a handful of other places, men would stand their ground, fight and inevitably die. The vampires loved to fight, and such bastions of defiance would present irresistible challenges. All of which should provide Nikha and his party a breathing space, ample time to settle into their secret place, discover hiding holes and prepare themselves against every hideous eventuality.

One of the first things they would do would be to breed more watchdog wolves, and train them to be alert for strange sights, sounds, smells..

With luck the vampires would never find their camp — or if they did would discover it deserted, its people fled into the woods or grasslands. And as any fool must see for himself, the closer you live to the sunrise, the safer you are from vampire slavery, death and undeath. Why should the Wamphyri bother to fly across all these miles of woodlands, when they could reap their tithe of blood so much closer to home? For to raid in the southern extremes of Sunside would mean a greater distance to travel back to Starside, before sunup. It was a small point but it seemed to make sense.

As to why Nikha told Nathan all of these things: simply, he hoped to tempt him along. And so Nathan saw that Eleni had been right: Nikha was angling to catch her a husband before he and his people disappeared into solitude. Well, and Nathan supposed he could do much worse. But before that -

— His thoughts were all for Misha, despite that she was lost or dead… or worse than dead. Misha and Nestor, yes. If only Nathan could see Nestor again, find him and take him from the river, and give him a decent grave. For while the teeming dead couldn't bring themselves to speak to Nathan, he was sure they would allow him a little time, a few words, with his own brother at least. The chance to make things right with him?

Which was why, when they had finished eating and talking, he mumbled awkward excuses and headed for the river. Eleni said nothing but went to her tent; but Nikha Sintana, on his way to his bed in the caravan, came after Nathan at once and took his arm. 'Won't you come with us, then?'

'I can't,' Nathan answered. 'Maybe I would, for Eleni's sake, if she'd have me — and if you think I'd make her a capable husband, of course. But first I must try one last time to find Nestor's body. Find and bury him, so that I'll know where he is always. For I think… that he must be quite close to this place. I have a feeling, that's all.'

'I understand,' Nikha nodded, and gave Nathan a skin with a route marked on it, to bring him to their camp. 'We'll sleep now, then hunt, finally move on,' he said. 'By midday we shall be gone from here, and by sundown we'll be in our place, which I've kept in mind these many years. How long will you search?'

Nathan offered a despairing shrug. 'Until I can no longer hope to find him. Perhaps there's no hope even now, but I must try. And Nikha, even then I can't swear I'll be back. There are things in my head… I have memories as fresh as yesterday….t's not easy to swing this way and that, like a reed in the wind. It only looks easy.'

Nikha nodded. 'Very well. But if you should decide that… well, however you decide, only be sure to reach us before sundown, for after that there'll be no fire to guide you, and it might prove dangerous to come too close unannounced.'

Then they clasped forearms, and through the trees Nathan could feel Eleni's eyes upon him until he passed from sight into the undergrowth…

He searched the river bank until the middle of the afternoon, when the ground on his side of the river turned into a bog and became impassable, and the overhanging branches were so full of creepers and rank, secondary foliage that the water was shaded, dappled, opaque. If his brother was down there, there could be no finding him now. As for burying him: Nestor would be buried already, in the weeds which had been part of Nathan's 'dream'.

Now, too, Nathan must decide what to do. Earlier, he had seemed to feel something for Eleni Sintana. Or perhaps he had simply felt it for himself: a yawning void, an aching need. In any case, he had a choice: join the Szgany Sintana in whatever future would be theirs, or return to Settlement and be Lardis Lidesci's son, replacing the one he'd lost. Whichever he chose to be — husband to Eleni, or a son to Lardis — he would be a replacement, not the real thing; and he would always know that he was the second choice.

Settlement seemed a long way off from Nathan, and he knew it could never feel the same if he went back there. If a girl passed by he would look at her, hoping it was Misha. When the women stamped their feet and snapped their fingers thus and so in the dance, he would think of his mother. And if some brash youth came striding, laughing along the road, it would always be Nestor from this time forward. No, the town would be full of ghosts now; indeed, Settlement itself would be a ghost.

But Eleni Sintana was warm and alive…

And what of his vow against the Wamphyri? All very well, when there was a chance that Nestor lived. Together, united under a banner of vengeance, the two of them could have fought alongside Lardis Lidesci and taken whatever revenge was available to them, before they too paid the price. They could have, but no longer. For Nestor was drowned and cold. And again the thought came to Nathan: Eleni is warm and alive.

It was a little more than half-way through the afternoon; there were still some twenty-five hours of full daylight left, and five or six more of twilight; Nathan was feeling worn out, as low as he had ever felt, and quite at the end of his tether. Over a period of time which would equal almost four days in the time-frame of the world beyond the Starside Gate — of which as yet Nathan knew nothing other than that it was there — he'd managed to snatch only a few hours sleep. Now he must sleep, and sleep his fill, before heading south for… for the encampment of the Szgany Sintana, where the forest met the savannah.

Back up the river he had passed a tiny sandy island with a few reeds, shrubs and trees. Now he made his weary way back there, waded out to the island, curled up under a bush half in the shade, and almost at once fell into an exhausted, dreamless sleep. His last conscious thought as the darkness came down was that he would sleep for a good seven or eight hours, and still have plenty of time to trek to Nikha's camp before sundown.

But the fact was that both physically and mentally Nathan was far more depleted than he thought. And while he slept… on Starside the vampire plague-bearers were wide awake, active, and filled to overflowing with their loathsome poisons, their unspeakable ambitions…

Though as yet the rays of a slowly setting sun continued to paint the higher peaks of the barrier range a dazzling gold, its cleansing glare had lifted from the face of that one remaining aerie, whose name upon a time was Karenstack. And in the hour of the sun's passing, Wratha the Risen had called a meeting in her vertiginous apartments; several of her familiar bats had been dispatched into the stack's lower levels, where Wratha's renegades understood their messages far better than men understand the whining of dogs. And now the changeling vampire Lords attended her, however sullenly.

They had all been up and about since the arrival of their first new thralls out of Sunside: allotting quarters, 'victualling' their beasts, choosing lieutenants and instructing them in their duties, apportioning work to commoner thralls… and last but not least, sating themselves, of course. Which surely accounted for Canker Canison's ravaged look, for where females were concerned he was ever the Great Dog. In Settlement he had excelled himself: at least two thirds of his recruits from the Szgany Lidesci were women.

But even in Canker's case the choosing of new lieutenants had taken priority for a while; for with the single exception of Gorvi the Guile, all of the Lords and the Lady too had lost their right-hand men in the first raids on Twin Fords and Settlement. In Turgosheim's Sunside it would have been unthinkable, and here it was a major setback which not even Wratha had anticipated. Of the six of them, Gorvi had been the fortunate one; or… could it be that his lieutenant had learned something of the wiles of his master? Whichever, he had survived, and the one thing Gorvi lacked now was a warrior.

Ah, but the makings were to hand in the shape of a procession of dazed Szgany thralls drawn irresistibly out of Sunside and across the boulder plains to the last aerie, all bemoaning their fate even as they came shuffling through the lengthening shadows of the barrier range. The Guile had wasted no time; in the bowels of the stack his vats were seething even now, where altered metamorphic flesh shaped itself to Gorvi's design.

Canker, too (once he'd inspected his get, chosen his men and rutted among his new harem), had set to work at the vats. In just nine or ten sundowns he would have a warrior to beggar the one which he'd lost over the Great Red Waste! And in thirty more there would be a litter of yelping bloodsons to replace the ones left to their fate in Mangemanse.

And so the Lords had been busy when Wratha's great bats called them to attend her. But since they desired words with the Lady anyway, it seemed as good a time as any.

Gorvi, Wran the Rage and Spiro Killglance took the easy route up from their freshly peopled manses, and landed their flyers in Wratha's spacious bays. Canker and Vasagi the Suck, situated that much closer, climbed the stack's internal staircases of hewn stone and grafted cartilage. However they chose to come, upon arrival they all greeted Wratha in the same way: with surly, suspicious, even angry stares and glances. She had anticipated no less and was ready for them.

'So, all goes reasonably well,' she started without preamble, speaking to them from where she sat in the gaping jaws of a huge bone-throne at the head of a table in the largest of her several halls. 'Our new thralls attend us, and though they are fewer than we bargained for their blood is good and strong and fresh: superior in every way to our get of tithelings in Turgosheim. At least we can all agree on that, I think.' The way she expressed herself indicated her presentiment of trouble.

'As far as you go you state hard facts,' Gorvi answered at once, his voice a sly, oily, accusing gurgle. 'Alas, you don't go far enough. And the hardest fact of all is the one you choose not to mention.'

The five were seated with her: Vasagi and Gorvi on one side of the table, Canker and the brothers Killglance on the other. Wratha was dressed in her robe of bat-fur ropes. She had chosen to look like some wanton young Gypsy: precocious, provocative, proud of the power which her sex gave her over men. It was her way of distracting them from their course, their argument. But now she saw that it might not be enough. These Lords had taken their fill of women; for now, there was no lust left in them.

Putting all posing and posturing aside she sat up straight, pulled a wry face and uttered an exaggerated sigh. 'So, here we are,' she said. 'Right at the onset of our great adventure, and already you find something to complain about, Gorvi. Better, I think, if they'd named you Gorvi the Grouch!'

'What you think becomes less important moment to moment!' Gorvi snarled. He stood up and put his knuckles on the table, hunching his shoulders and thrusting his head forward like a great carrion bird. 'Wratha, you are a thief!'

His words seemed to freeze her… for perhaps a second. Then she reached up and lifted the bone scarp upon her brow, until her eyes were no longer in shadow. And in a moment her image of true life had fallen away and her flesh was grey as undeath. Her nose became ridged and convoluted, with black, flaring nostrils, and her top lip curled back a little in the right-hand corner, displaying a gleaming fang. And:

'A thief?' she hissed.

Before matters could deteriorate further, Vasagi flowed to his feet and put himself between Gorvi and the Lady. The Suck was extremely susceptible to kneblasch — even more so than the others — and knew Wratha's mind and therefore her temper better than them. She considered this her place now; only subject her to too many 'insults' in her own aerie… she would very likely stink them all right out of here into their sickbeds, so making an end of their complaints. Well, for the moment Vasagi had enough of healing pains. If that bolt which he took in his side last night had been dipped in kneblasch… even Vasagi, with all of his powers of metamorphism, would have been in trouble then! It didn't bear thinking about.

So, time now to make their point — merely that, and delicately if at all possible — so that at least she would see how she had offended. Time later for correction, if or when she tried it again. There were five of them, after all, and only one Wratha; it should not be too difficult to take her unawares and so even up the account. And if the instrument of such correction were a crescent of sharp metal to scythe the bitch's head from her neck… so be it! But for now: We are all thieves, Vasagi's thoughts were given form by an elaborate, intricate shrug. He fluttered his hands, shaped his fingers into expressive webs, struck a pose and angled his head a little. It's just that we think it unnecessary to take from one another. Especially in a place like this.

The Suck is right,' Wran tweaked the small black wen on the point of his chin. 'Sunside teems, so why poach your colleagues' thralls, eh, Wratha? We converted them, and yet they have come to you. Why, if my brother and I had not been quick to recognize some of them who climbed through our premises on their way to yours, we'd have lost even more! And them with our marks upon them, which are unmistakable.'

'Did you think it solely for your benefit, Lady,' Wran's brother, Spiro put in, 'that we went recruiting last night on Sunside?'

She studied the five sourly, each in his turn — Gorvi and Vasagi on her right, standing — the brothers and Canker on her immediate left, still seated. But her gaze lingered on Canker, whom she believed most easily swayed. 'Well, and have you nothing to say?'

He shrugged, scratched a fretted ear, finally barked:

'I haven't the patience for all this yelping and bickering. Also, I'm weary unto death! But you've kept your promises as far as I can see. There are women now in my kennel, and a new warrior brewing. But if you must know how I feel — well, I'll admit to being a little disappointed.'

'How so?' She was genuinely curious; Canker was a strange one, whose true mind was hard to know.

'Of men,' he answered, his voice a low whine now, 'of lieutenants,' (he shrugged, awkwardly) 'well, I converted a few, not many — but all of them well-fleshed and strong, mind! And now it seems I've lost most of them to you! Wherefore a pat on the head won't suffice, Lady, not this time. If you expect me to fashion you another warrior, like the one I made for you in Turgosheim, then first you'll return my thralls to me.'

'What?' she hissed at him. 'Didn't I warn you against taking too many women?' She jumped to her feet and glared at all of them. 'And how was I supposed to watch your backs and still find time to make changelings of my own? A thief, am I? Is that what you think? Only count my thralls and you'll see who got the better of it. You did, all of you! Now listen: so far I've had time to fuel my creatures, choose my new lieutenants — just two of them — and set about the fashioning of my siphoneers. And how many thralls do I have left, eh? Well, I'll tell you: I have seven! And you, Wran?' She swung to face him. 'What was your get? And you, Gorvi the Greedy?' She spun on her heel. 'How few for you? Twice as many, I'll warrant!'

'But you were the one — ' Wran thundered, his blood beginning to boil, so that he must calm himself before going on, '- who said there'd be no such thing as a tithe, not here in Old Starside. Yet now you make yourself a tithemaster, or mistress, no less than old Vormulac himself in Turgosheim! They were our best which you took, Wratha, as well you know. Now enough of prevarication, admit your guilt!'

'And what of the provisioning of the stack?' She glared back at him. 'Do you breed gas-beasts or warriors, Wran? Hah! I thought so! Never a thought for the rest of us, but you can stand and accuse me. And you, Gorvi: have you fashioned a creature to clean the wells, or is it something else that waxes in your vats? And how many things wax there?'

They made no answer but stood there enraged and glowering; all of them, with the sole exception of Vasagi, whose wound was not yet healed. And again looking at each of the vampire Lords in his turn, Wratha saw that she was right: never a thought for the stack in a single head, only for their own well-being. But she saw more than that, for to a man they had reached the end of their tether — where Wratha herself had driven them.

Ah, and these were furious Lords! Despite that they kept their thoughts cloaked, Wratha could read them clearly enough in their scarlet eyes. They had tasted war and wild, untamed blood, finding both much to their liking. Why stop now? The stack was a big place, true, but bigger still without Wratha.' And what was she anyway but a woman?

She did not like the way Canker looked at her, stripping away her bat-fur robe with his feral dog's eyes; neither that, nor the way in which Gorvi sidled closer. Her hand went inside her robe… and Vasagi, bobbing wildly and gesticulating like a madman, finally held up a quivering hand.

NOW HOLD! His thought came so hard, a mental shout, that all grew quiet in a moment. But beneath that great blast of a thought were others, which the Suck kept closer to his chest. Cloaked though they were, Wratha could read something of them at least: Last night after Vasagi had been shot, before the attack on Settlement, Wratha had asked him if he felt capable of further venturings. Knowing he was wounded, she'd taken his condition into account. Oh, he had known that her concern was not for him alone but for the party as a whole: seeing herself as a general, she needed her troops in fine fettle. But still it had been worth something. Also, Vasagi could see the value of an aerie properly maintained and provisioned. Right now the stack was little more than a hollow fang of rock, a pesthole of vampires, but it could become a fortress. In that respect the Lady's ideas were good and sound.

And finally… finally Wratha's hand was still inside her robe, where she kept oil of kneblasch in a small bladder, to fill the air with poison. That, too, was worth taking into account, for now at least. But later, when the stack had been put to rights…

Gorvi's oily voice broke the uneasy silence. 'Well?' he inquired of no one in particular. But he, too, saw the Lady's hand inside her robe, and wisely he drew back a pace.

Have we come all of this way, Vasagi gestured, out of the tyranny of Turgosheim, to fight among ourselves?

'But — ' Wran continued to glower at Wratha. Heart pounding and chest heaving, he remained uncomfortably close to raging.

Now listen to me, Vasagi cut him short. For it seems that I'm the only one who can see what's happening here. We are Wamphyri! And now that the restrictions of Turgosheim are lifted, we are reverting to type. But isn't that why we desired to come here in the first place: to give our leeches full rein? To be as our nature intended us to be? He paused…

… And seeing that he had their attention, continued: Wratha is no thief — but she is Wamphyri! And apart from this one incident, this one — lapse? — she hasn't put a foot wrong. Well, except in her belie/ that she could lead us like a warrior Queen. For we're all of us men and warriors in our own right, and as such we resent giving up our hard-earned spoils to any self-styled leader. And I say again: to any leader!

Very well, so from now on we are our own men and Wratha is her own woman. But on the other hand she's right: without that we show a degree of co-operation, the stack can't survive and we are doomed. It is imperative that Gorvi puts the wells in order, that Wran and Spiro service and maintain the refuse pits and methane chambers, and that Wratha fashions siphoneers to draw up water from the wells, for the benefit of the whole stack. To this extent — if only to this extent — we must be of one mind. To this extent, we need each other.

Wran, fingering his wen as before, was calmer now. And: 'I agree all of that,' he said. 'Except — ' and he scowled at Wratha, '- she appropriates no more of our thralls!'

Wratha, too, was calm and 'lovely' again. So, she'd lost her army at a stroke. Well, and so what? She could soon build another, and next time loyal in every way. 'So from now on we hunt alone,' she nodded, curtly. 'We attend to the needs of the stack, for everyone's sake, but other than that we fend for ourselves and to hell with the rest! Very well, see if you like it better that way.'

Gorvi had second thoughts. 'But what if we are attacked out of Sunside, or worse, out of Turgosheim? Am I required to hold the lower levels on my own?'

'Oh, we'll be attacked, eventually,' Wratha assured him. Though I think not from Sunside. When it comes, once again we stand or fall together. The stack is our refuge; though we may never be friends, we must be allies.'

All the more reason, Vasagi made elegant shrugs and wriggles, to practise a modicum of co-operation now.

Spiro, clad in his customary rags of breechclout and headband, took his brother's arm. 'Come,' he said. 'Enough of talk. We have tasks aplenty. But when darkness falls we'll leave our lieutenants to supervise the work, and go raiding for ourselves in Sunside.' He cast a vilifying glance at Wratha. 'Except this time we'll keep what we catch!'

'What of me?' Canker barked. 'Do I get my thralls back?'

'Ungrateful wretch,' Wratha was openly scornful. 'You who have nothing better to do but whine and wench! What's that for co-operation? Best quit your yelping, Canker, if you'd have gas to warm your kennels and clean water to drown your fleas!'

In return, Canker snarled a little and bared his canines, but while Wratha had the kneblasch that was as much as he could do.

And with that it was over. Their courses set — as individuals, as well as interdependent members of the stack — the Lords took their departure from Wratha's apartments. Vasagi was last to leave…

On his way down, Vasagi must pass close by the Lady Wratha's draughty landing bays. There he found Wran the Rage waiting for him, still seething like an active volcano. Wran came straight to the point: 'Why did you defend her? We could have been rid of her at a stroke; I would have taken her apartments, and left the ones I share now to my brother.'

She had kneblasch, Vasagi shrugged, gestured, backed off a little. Also she has commenced to fashion siphoneers. Why waste the Lady's best efforts? Time later to punish her — if such is required — when the stack is in working order. You agreed as much yourself, if not in so many words.

'It isn't simply that you fancy the whore?' Wran grinned unpleasantly. 'After all, you and she would make a grand team. You with your freakish face, and Wratha a hag under all that sweet girl-flesh! Is that it? Do you hope to partner her? Are you so tired, then, of the shrieks of your odalisques when you go to service them? Do they insist you mount from the rear, so that they need not see your face?'

Vasagi flowed forward now, his gestures sharper, less subtle, his telepathic 'voice' a hiss: Why do you insult me, Wran? Do you seek to provoke me? I have no chin, it's true, but that is of my choosing. Rather that than your chin, with its black and possibly leprous growth!

'Now who speaks insults?' Wran thrust his red face to the fore. 'As for my wen: it is a beauty spot.'

Oh? the Suck laughed scornfully. Then you could use a few more! But as Wran grunted and stepped closer still, Vasagi's tapering snout stiffened and his sharp siphon proboscis slid into view, dripping saliva. And: Best to remember, he warned, that your gauntlet is in your apartments, Wran. But me, why, I carry my weapon with me at all times!

Wran knew that Vasagi could strike at lightning speed, to pierce or pluck an eye, or penetrate an ear to the brain. He withdrew, however grudgingly, then turned on his heel and headed for the launching bays. But over his shoulder: 'Let's have one thing understood, wormface,' he snarled. 'Eventually the Lady's options will be down to two: to be my most obedient wife in Wranstack, or to die and make room for her betters! If it's the first — I'll en;oy cutting the sting out of Wratha's tail, believe me! And if it's the second,' he shrugged, 'so be it.' With that he passed from sight behind a jut of stone.

Not to be outdone, Vasagi sent after him: Better stick to your girl-thralls, Wran! Wratha's far too much woman for a fop such as you! His dart was too late; Wran had closed his mind; Vasagi's thoughts came echoing hollowly back to him.

It was probably as well. Wran was a maniac, after all. And shrugging off his irritation, Vasagi continued on his way..

Nathan stirred. The sun had been off his island for quite a while now and he was cold. The river gurgled close by; a fish jumped for flies, making a splash; the combination of sounds woke him up.

He awoke cold, stiff, aching, and saw in a moment how long — and how late — he'd slept. The sun was a bright flash of fire glimpsed through the treetops to the south; except for silvery glints striking from the river's ripples, its entire expanse stood in green, gloomy shade from bank to bank. Nathan had been asleep for… about fifteen hours?

He waded to the bank and began to backtrack westwards. As he left the boggy region for firmer ground, so something of the stiffness went out of his muscles and a little of the gnawing ache out of his back: Eleni's ointment, he supposed, and wondered where she and the Szgany Sintana were now.

… Jingling along the approach route to fheir new home, most likely. Tonight they would set up a makeshift camp, and tomorrow camouflage the place, make it semi-permanent, settle in. And if only Nathan could make his legs go a little faster, he would be with them — with Eleni — and have a place among them. In a way he felt like a traitor: to Lardis, to the memory of" Misha'and his mother, especially to his Szgany vow. But in another way he felt… new? Certainly he was making a new beginning. And in any Case, he knew that as long as he lived his vow would never be entirely forgotten.

In a spot where a beam of slanting sunlight fell through the riverside foliage, he paused and unfolded Nikha's map. The route didn't seem too difficult: go back to where the Sintanas had made camp, follow the disused trail east by south-east for some fifteen miles, then head south along the bed of a narrow, curving valley in the woods. Where the valley bent westward to follow the course of a stream, there climb a gentle slope onto level ground once more. Finally, still heading south for five or six miles through a broad belt of ironwoods (where with luck Nathan might strike another ancient track), he would come upon the grasslands. By then the woods would be ash, walnut, wild plum, and a few giant ironwoods. And depending upon where he emerged from the declining forest, the Sintana camp should be no more than two or three miles east or west. An accomplished tracker would conceivably follow direct in their footsteps.

That was what Nikha had said, anyway…

Nathan was furious with himself. If he had woken up just three hours earlier there would be no problem. He would be able to see where the wagons left the trail to turn into the forest, the ruts their wheels left in the loamy earth. There would be signs: crushed foliage, broken twigs, beast droppings. But the best of the light was gone now, and as yet he wasn't even back to their first meeting place.

He put on a little speed, loping through the trees parallel with the river until he was winded, then breaking into a stiff walk. Now, too, he began to feel just a little panicked, and he knew that that wouldn't help, either.

How far did he have to go: thirty, thirty-five miles? And how long in which to do it? It would be sundown in… oh, ten to twelve hours. Plenty of time, if he'd been out in the open on a good trail. But in the forest

… the light would be failing long before then. Of woodland creatures there wasn't much to fear; but if he got lost, that would be a problem. His new Traveller friends would worry about him; at least he supposed, hoped, that Eleni would. And for his part, he certainly didn't relish the thought of spending a long, lonely night in the forest…

It seemed a long time — too long by far — but at last Nathan was forcing his way through the shrubbery onto the old trail, back where he'd first seen the Szgany Sintana. Breaking camp, they had been careful to cover their tracks; if he didn't know better, he might not suspect that anyone had been here at all! Even so, they hadn't been able to disguise the deep ruts in the overgrown trail, which now he followed east at a steady, mile-eating lope. And as he went the forest grew up around him, the light faded, however imperceptibly, and the long afternoon grew longer…

Nathan discovered an ancient and entirely unscientific fact: that time in short supply diminishes faster than it is spent. He also found that concentration can be self-defeating: only do enough of it and sooner or later you will be concentrating upon your concentration, and not the matter in hand. His limbs and muscles had grown accustomed to their continuous, rhythmic effort until the dull pain of constant motion was very nearly hypnotic. Indeed it was hypnotic; for suddenly the trail was overgrown, with nowhere a sign to show that men, animals, vehicles had passed this way… because they hadn't! Despite all his best efforts of concentration, Nathan had passed the turn-off point without even noticing it.

Again he backtracked — a mile, two — and eventually discovered the truth: that the Travellers had left the trail where the soil was thin and the ground full of flints and pebbles. They had deliberately used the hard, stony earth itself to obscure their tracks and make them that much more difficult to follow; not to discourage Nathan, no, but to confuse anyone else who might come sniffing on their heels.

Going much slower now where the way wound along a narrow, thickly forested gully, he found shad droppings and commenced tracking again, following on until the valley widened out and turned west along the course of a deep, darkly gurgling stream. There, where the earth was stony again, he toiled up a gentle incline between the trees until once more he stood upon level ground. But somewhere along the way he'd lost the trail, and now the light was fading much more rapidly.

By now Nathan had been on the move for some eleven hours and his fatigue was rapidly gaining on him. Under the claustrophobic canopy of the trees his lungs couldn't seem to draw enough air, and with every staggering step his legs felt ready to crumple up under his weight. He needed to rest very badly but knew that he daren't stop. And so he pushed on…

Always he headed directly into the sun where its light was most evident in the sky and through the trees. But there were streams to cross, bramble and creeper thickets to negotiate, places where the forest's canopy was so dense as to shut out the light entirely. Until suddenly… the light improved a very little, the trees thinned out, lesser shrubs, brambles, undergrowth disappeared under a brittle carpet of poisonous needles. He had found the ironwood groves; but nowhere a sign that the Travellers had come this way, and no track for him to follow. He hurried on, skirted the thicker needle patches and passed safely through the groves.

The trees thinned out more yet; light, what little was left of it, flowed palely into the forest from the south; the ironwoods gave way to ash, walnut, wild plum. At least Nathan was heading in the right direction. But just when he believed he was through the worst of it, then he felt the sting of a needle sliding through the stitching of his sandal into the ball of his right foot.

Agony! And he must pause a while to draw the thing out. That was a mistake; in just a few minutes of sitting down his muscles stiffened up; from now on he must stumble half-crippled through the gathering twilight. Twilight, yes, and on the rim of the world the sun an orange blister that leaked liquid light onto the cooling deserts. And the forest very still now, where small creatures rustled and the cooing of pigeons was quiet, afraid, and all else was silent…

And coming to the edge of the woodlands he looked south across the broad savannah belt, and saw a great wheel or fan in the sky whose spokes were pink, yellow, gold; a wheel that turned, faded, and passed like a rainbow after the rain, when the sun comes out. Except here the opposite was true, for the spokes of the fan were fading rays of sunlight, a reminder of the golden glory that had been. It was sundown, and for a few hours more the land would lie in velvet twilight; stars would come out, glittering over the barrier range; true night would come down like a creeping thing, painting everything the colours of darkness.

Nathan turned his head this way and that, looked east and west in the deceptive light. Which way to go? He cocked his head, listened for a distant, familiar jingle, and heard nothing. But then, he hadn't really expected to. A wind came up and rushed through the woods, making the branches toss and sough. Streamers of cloud rushed south, following the sun. And to the east… was that a shout carried on the wind? Or just the shriek of a night-hunting bird?

He limped west a mile, then spied a knoll out on the sea of grass. A further half-mile to the knoll and Nathan was ready to give in, lie down, spend the night there. But he forced himself panting to the top and scanned the land around, and spied in the east at the edge of the forest — a fire? Hardly a bonfire; a dull flicker at best, but better than nothing.

It must be Eleni! Despite Nikha's warning to Nathan, that there'd be no friendly light to guide him after sundown, Eleni had kept a small fire burning. Uplifted, he climbed down again to the plain and started out diagonally across the grasslands in the direction of the fire. And now the going was easy where he swished through tall, windblown grasses under ashen skies, wispy clouds and gathering stars.

But… the sky was strange tonight; there seemed to be several belts of cloud at various levels; some scudded one way and some another. Directly ahead of Nathan and high above the forest, small black rags of cloud sped north for the mountains and were quickly lost in the deceptive velvet of night.

On the level, the light of the fire was no longer visible. Nathan hurried; he covered a mile, two, and was into his third when he saw the light again. After that, as the nighted forest grew up on his left hand, and a racing moon rose over the distant barrier range to light his way, the beacon eye of the fire shone ever brighter. Until at last he was there.

Where the trees met the prairie he saw the carts and caravans of the Sintanas sheltering under the branches of a trio of mighty ironwoods. Their fire was a welcoming splash of leaping orange and yellow light where it held back the shadows in the triangular space between the trees. It welcomed Nathan…

… In the same way it had welcomed others, who had been here before him!

He slowed down, reached the clearing, stumbled forward with his bottom jaw slowly lolling open. He smelled a certain odour which the squalling wind had almost but not quite blown away. And Nathan remembered the dark, ragged clouds which the wind had also blown away over the forest, towards the distant Starside pass. And he saw how the doors on the caravans swung to and fro in the eddies, as if they were protesting at their emptiness. The place was… deserted?

No, not deserted, just empty. Of life…

Nathan couldn't accept it. He looked beyond the caravans where an area had been roped off into animal pens. Everything stood in shadows cast by the guttering firelight and starshine made pale by the wind and the scudding clouds. The animals were lying down, forming low, humped, motionless silhouettes; which should have been evidence enough in itself. Shads rarely lie down, and never in a group…

He made his way to a great ironwood where the ground had been swept free of needles to form a small clearing in its own right. But as he paused there and turned in a circle, bloated black shapes like windblown weeds went lumping and fluttering low along the ground into the shadows. He gasped, took a pace to the rear, glanced this way and that as the wind sighed and the branches soughed. And as Nathan's eyes focused so he saw other eyes — like tiny crimson pinpricks — reflected by the fire and glaring back at him from the encircling underbrush.

One of the things, whatever they were, was hiding behind a broken table where it had been tipped on its side, crouching there like a vulture. Nathan stood breathlessly still, paralysed under the great tree, until something made a shrill chittering sound in the surrounding darkness….nd was answered from the other side of the circle!

Then, as he gave a start of recognition -

— Something dripped down and splashed against Nathan's forearm where his sleeves were rolled up, and looking down he saw that his arm was red; likewise the ground under his feet. And looking up… he saw the tree's strange ripe fruit, male all three, hanging by their heels with their throats slashed, and the last of their scarlet juices running down their dangling arms to drip into space!

A giant desmodus bat, glutted with blood, released its hold on a drained corpse and fluttered to earth. Too bloated to fly, the creature scuttled and flopped out of sight, joining its companions in the shadows…

All the demons of hell rode the wind then, shrieking mad with laughter as Nathan staggered to the fire, took up a brand and lit his way to Nikha Sintana's caravan. Inside, the place was a shambles, and outside, at the back… Nikha lay there with his eyes staring and the halves of his chest laid back, and his heart ripped out of his body for a tidbit!

Now Nathan knew he must look for the others — search for Eleni, and pray she'd run off into the woods — but first there was something else he must do. His blue eyes blazed with a sort of madness when he found oil in a large stone jar on the ground beside Nikha's caravan. Lifting it, he sniffed at the uncovered rim: nut oil, mainly, for cooking. But a little kneblasch, too. Little wonder they hadn't wanted it! And carrying the jar back to the slaughter tree, he knew how he must use it.

There under the ironwood, the bloated black familiars of the Wamphyri — more than a dozen of them — had gathered once more in the cleared space to lap like ghouls at the bloodsoaked earth. Keeping well back, Nathan looked at them a moment, shuddered and grimaced. Then without further pause he loped through the underbrush around the perimeter of the great tree, deliberately slopping oil as he went; and when the circle was closed, he tossed his firebrand into the tinder-dry scrub.

The fire crept slowly at first, then with a vengeance as the wind caught it, and finally roared up in a wall of blistering heat and yellow light. Forced back, Nathan laughed, danced, and shook his fists like a madman, which for the moment he was. And: 'Burn, you bastard things, burn!' he yelled.

Greedy tongues of fire licked at the lower branches, took hold, and spread into the whole tree. Jets of fire, whipped by the wind, leaped from bough to bough like demon imps, till all three trees blazed up in unison and the heat was an inferno.

Still Nathan danced, and laughed all the louder when the shrill chittering of the bats turned to shrieking and a handful tried to flee the holocaust. Singed and smoking they rose up into view, burst into flames, spiralled down into the furnace under the mighty torch trees. And so they burned…

Later, when the wind swung south and blew a widening swath of fire across the grasslands, Nathan's madness passed and he returned to the carts and caravans. Standing to one side of the huge trees and mainly away from the fire, the vehicles had been licked by the flames, blistered by them, then passed by and left intact. Nathan examined them thoroughly… and found what he found.

Then, skirting the trio of burning, skeletal trees and the blackened scar of undergrowth, he went into the forest. He knew he was taking a chance, that the wind might easily change again, but he had to search. And searching he discovered, and laboured a while carrying what he discovered back to the cleansing fire. Not that these children were going to become vampires — they were mainly pieces, scraps — but it seemed the right thing to do. Nathan knew that Lardis Lidesci would have done it, anyway. As for Nikha's men where they had been bled under the tree: well, the fire had dealt with them. They were still burning where they had fallen, like slow candles slumped upon the earth. And now their leader, Nikha himself, joined them there.

Finally Nathan must see to the women. Dragging them from their various places, he dealt with each in her turn. They had been savaged and raped — no, more than that: they'd been used hideously — then vampirized. The skulls of two of them were dented as by terrific blows; while the other two, including Eleni…

… Nathan could only shake his head in horror and disbelief. There were fist-sized holes to the left of centre in their chests between their breasts, where someone, something, had thrust its hand into their bodies to nip their hearts. Not to kill them, no, but to stun them. For even now they were alive, or undead.

There was no putting it off, not even for Eleni's sake; especially not for her sake. Lardis had shown Nathan how to do it, and now it was up to him. He did it — did it to Eleni, too — and only at the last felt someone's eyes on him. It was the sole survivor, the youth who had gone fishing in the river, now standing at the edge of the firelight gaunt as a ghost and vacant-eyed, with caved-in cheeks the colour of chalk.

Nathan spoke to him; the youth ignored him. He went to him, took his arm; and the other — a mere boy — snarled at him and bared his teeth. At that Nathan stepped back a little and stared hard at him, very hard; but there wasn't a mark on him, neither bruise nor puncture. He'd simply been… lucky? If living to witness this could be called luck.

Eventually Nathan left him standing there, watching his world burn. And salvaging a blanket from a caravan, he walked out a little way into the grass at the edge of the scorching, found himself a hollow in the earth and went to sleep. Later, waking up, he looked back and saw the boy standing where he'd left him. He thought to call out, shook his head instead, left the lad to his grief and went back to sleep.

Eight hours later the wind had died away; the fires were smouldering; the ironwoods were blackened corpses of trees at the forest's rim. And the boy was no longer there. Nathan got up and went back to the burned-out place to look for him. And remembering the last time he'd come here, this time he looked up. Sure enough the boy was hanging there, cold and dead.

There was no life in him — not any sort of life — but Nathan couldn't leave him for the crows. He reached up, took hold of his legs and added his own weight. It seemed a cruel thing to do but Nathan was drained of energy; there was none left for climbing, anyway. It worked: the thin rope snapped, and the boy came thumping down.

And now Nathan must build another fire…

In the middle of the long night, under the coldly glittering stars, Nathan wrapped himself in his blanket, headed south and walked out across the prairie. He never once looked back at the last funeral pyre burning behind him.

He took nothing with him but the blanket, the clothes he was wearing, the leather strap with a half-twist on his left wrist, by which his mother, in what now seemed another world, a different age, had recognized him in the darkest of nights. Because the strap was a familiar thing — his sigil, a token of his identity? — Nathan had kept it through his childhood, replacing it as his wrist thickened first to a boy's, then a youth's, finally a man's. Likewise Nestor: he, too, had kept his wrist band, the straight one, without the half-twist… but he no longer featured in Nathan's thoughts, except as an echo.

Nothing much featured in his thoughts. Just the faces of the dead: his mother, Misha, Nikha Sintana and his Travellers, Eleni; but all of them fading now as his mind discovered ways to obliterate them. For sometimes a memory — a face or scene out of the past — can be too painful to remember. And Nathan had reached the stage where alJ of his past was much too painful. It was a peculiar thing, but the thought had come to him that a man without a past has very little on which to build a future. Which was why he now walked out across the grasslands into the desert: because he no longer wished for a future.

When he felt tired he sat down, weary he went to sleep, hungry and thirsty he went without. And he knew that while weariness couldn't kill him, deprivation most certainly would: what he had been deprived of, and what he now deprived himself of. That was how he wanted it and how he willed it to be.

There was no bitterness in him; he didn't feel that he was quitting; only that he had never got started and so had nothing to finish, except his life. And even that might not be The End. For of all living men, Nathan knew that death was just another beginning. And maybe then, when his body was dead, all of them who had gone before would talk to him at last and explain the things which he'd never understood in life.

Would he be able to talk to his mother, he wondered, and to all the rest who were lost to him? And if he still couldn't find peace or purpose, would there be other worlds beyond?

The last clump of withered grass was far behind him when the stars began to fade and the first crack of light showed on the horizon. He made straight for it. The stony ground turned to sand under his feet as the sun cleared the shimmering horizon, but Nathan averted his eyes and continued to wander south. Soon he was warm, then hot, finally sweating. It meant nothing to him: just another discomfort, of which he'd had enough. At least this would be the last.

He came to cliffs of sandstone rising out of the desert, and at last looked back. And saw nothing but sand or perhaps, in the far faint distance, a dark wrinkle where blinding blue met dazzling yellow on the shimmering rim of the world. The barrier range? Possibly. But now Nathan had his own barrier to cross. And after that the greatest barrier of all…

The sandstone cliffs were high and sheer. Nathan could not climb them so must skirt around, and so proceed towards the sun and his inevitable end. He turned east, walked a mile in the cool shade of the escarpment, and came to a great gash where the cliffs were split open into a gorge. Perhaps at the back he would find a way to climb the cliffs. He entered the gully and followed its wall half a mile to the rear, then in a semicircle, and finally back to the entrance but on the opposite side. He had discovered no way to climb the cliffs, but what did it matter? This would make as good a place as any to die.

He was hungry now and thirsty, more so than he had ever been in his entire life. If there had been food he would eat it, and if there was water he would drink it, naturally. But there wasn't. And no way back to Sunside's forests now; for the sun would sear him in an hour, crush him to the earth in two, and shrivel him to a stick by midday. Which was all according to plan.

Nathan stood in the shade at the foot of the cliffs in the eastern lee of the gorge and looked around. In the otherwise sheer face of the cliff, a narrow ledge or fault climbed diagonally a third of the way to the top. Shading his eyes, he saw the mouths of many caves cut into the cliff where the split in the sandstone petered out. Perhaps this was a natural feature carved by water two or three or ten thousand years ago, in an age when the gulley was a watercourse; or perhaps the caves had been cut by men when the desert was more hospitable. As for now, they could only be homes for lizards and scorpions.

While Nathan thought these things, still they were neither curious nor even conscious thoughts; they were simply the activity of his human brain, which for all his traumas functioned as before. For in fact, even as he considered the origin of the precipitous caves and 'wondered' at their meaning, he couldn't really give a damn. After all, they made no slightest difference to his plan one way or the other.

For his plan was simply to die.

But Nathan had grown cold in the shade and desired to die warm. Stumbling now, he came out from the shadow of the cliffs into the blazing heat of the sun, and stood shivering until it burned through to his bones. Finally he returned to the shade, wrapped himself in his blanket shroud and lay down. And with a stone for a pillow he went to sleep.

With any luck he would not wake up but if he did… hopefully it would be to a painless and terminal delirium.

Nathan dreamed of the numbers vortex. He floated in black and empty space and the vortex rushed upon him out of the void to sweep him away to other places. But he was determined to stay here and die. He heard the voices of his wolves calling to him out of the spinning core of the maelstrom of numbers, but they were too far away and the din of clashing equations and mutating formulae was too loud; he couldn't make out what they were saying. Something about Misha? About his mother? About death?

Nathan supposed they were commiserating with him, but he didn't need that. 'I know,' he called out into the vortex, and hoped they would hear him and leave him alone to die. 'I know they're dead. It's all right. I… I'm going there too.'

The wolf voices became impatient, frantic, angry; finally they snapped at him. But why? Did they consider him a deserter? Or were they angry because he refused to understand? Whichever, the numbers vortex had given up trying to snatch Nathan and was shaking itself to pieces, disintegrating into fractions which it sucked into its own core. It snapped out of existence and left him alone, suspended in his dream.

Or perhaps not quite alone.

Did I hear you taJJdng to… to wolves just then? The question startled Nathan. So much so that he shot upright in his blanket, awake!

'What?' He looked all around in the shade of the cliffs, whose shortening shadows told him that he had been asleep for only an hour or so. The voice had been so real, so close, that he felt certain someone must be hiding behind a boulder close by. Or maybe this was that terminal delirium he had hoped for. And less energetically, forcing the word up from a throat dry as the desert itself: 'What?' he croaked again. But of course he was talking to himself, for there was no one there.

Oh, but there is someone here/ The 'voice' spoke again in Nathan's mind, from as close a source as before. Indeed, there are many someones here.

Many someones…? The short blond hairs at the back of Nathan's neck stood on end and his skin pricked up in gooseflesh. For now he 'knew' what this was, and where he must be. And of course there would be a great 'many someones' in that beyond world called death: more than all the living in all of Sunside. Indeed, a Great Majority!

Are you dead then? the voice inquired, puzzled. If so, it's a strange thing. You don't feel dead. But on the other hand, I can't see how you can be alive. I never be/ore spolte with a living creature. We]], not since my own time among the]iving.

Nathan had meanwhile stood up: slowly, achingly, as if all the oils of his body were already dried out. But he felt the pain of it, the emptiness of true hunger and the desiccation of thirst. That was what would kill him: his thirst. But he wasn't dead yet, just delirious. He must be, surely. For he knew that the dead shunned him. And yet here was one who spoke to him with no slightest hint of fear or shyness. It was wish fulfilment, nothing more.

For both of us, perhaps, the voice agreed.

Nathan's throat felt raw as freshly slaughtered meat. His lips were cracked, beginning to puff up. He tried to speak, to say; 'What, and did you also desire to speak to the dead?' But only the first three words came out. It made no great difference; the thought was sufficient in itself.

Did I wish to speak to the dead? No, for 1 can do that already. Being one of them, of course I speak to them. But to be able to speak to one of the living… ah, that would be a precious gift indeed!

Nathan sat down on a boulder and thought: I'm delirious/

But I am not, said the voice. And I don't think you are, either. And you're certainly not dead. So who are you?

Nathan looked down at himself, visible, solid, unwavering. He was real. The voice in his head was the unreal thing. Surely it should be answering the question who are you?

First and foremost, I am Thyre, said the voice at once. But I see that you doubt my presence. You believe me to be a figment of your own imagination.

Nathan forced spittle down into his throat for lubrication. 'Your name is Thyre?'

My name is a secret, to any creature who is not Thyre. My race is Thyre. I am — or was — of the desert folk. But you are not. I perceive now that you are Szgany, of the forest and hill folk. You can only be, for if you were Wamphyri, then by now the sun must have melted you away. And the trogs likewise prefer their darkness. So, what is your name?

Again Nathan looked all around, satisfying himself that no one was playing some grotesque, macabre trick on him. 'I'm called Nathan,' he finally answered, speaking more to himself than the unbodied presence, and thinking: how strange, to be a presence without a body! While out loud: 'Nathan Kiklu, of the Szgany Lidesci.'

And you came here to die? Ah, yes, I know! For I've been listening to your thoughts for some little time. But when you talked to wolves, and them so far away… then I knew I must speak to you. For even though you are Szgany, still you have the secret talent of the Thyre!

A talent? Nathan wondered.

To speak mind to mind with other creatures — telepathy!

'Or to mumble and mutter to myself,' Nathan said out loud, nodding wryly. 'Delirium — or madness!' But at the same time he knew that it was partly true. How often had he listened to the whispers of dead people in his dreams, and sometimes when he was wide awake? And what of the thing he used to have with Nestor? Or had all of that, too, been madness?

To which the voice answered: And am I also mad?

'Not mad,' Nathan shook his head, 'but probably not real, either. You're a mirage, heat haze over a tar pit, an hallucination. When I was a child and ate toadstools, I saw things which weren't there. Now, because I'm hungry, hot and thirsty, I've started to hear things which aren't there.'

Wrong, said the other. For I can prove that I am. Or if not that, I can at least prove that I was.

'You don't have to prove anything,' Nathan shook his head. 'I only want you to go away. I have to sleep and not wake up.'

Oh, you'll do that soon enough, if you don't let me help you!

Nathan was curious despite himself. 'Why should you want to help me? What am I to you?'

A boon! said the other at once. A miracle! A light in the darkness of death! The chance to exchange thoughts, knowledge, legends, with living Thyre! That is what you are to me! There were others before you who spoke to dead men; they dwelled in Starside and talked to the spirits of Szgany and trogs. They didn't come here and in the end never could, because by then they were Wamphyri!

Nathan nodded. 'I've heard that: that sometimes among the Wamphyri there would be a necromancer.'

What? The other was aghast. No, no — not that! The ones of which 'I speak merely talked to the dead; they were beloved of the dead; they didn't torture them!

Beloved of the dead? But hadn't Nathan heard that expression before, as used by Lardis Lidesci in respect of certain hell-landers he'd known? The old Lidesci had never been too explicit with regard to The Dweller and his father, however, and had always spoken of them in hushed tones. It was a subject Nathan might like to pursue, but suddenly…

… His senses were spinning! He swayed dizzily, staggered, and sat down with a bump. He pictured himself standing under a waterfall, letting the water flow over him. It was an entirely involuntary thing: an instinctive longing for old, irretrievable pleasures. But it was easy to see how, under extremes of deprivation, a man's mind might turn to the conjuring of false comforts in his final hours. Except in Nathan's case, his mind seemed to have called up a personal devil to torment him!

So that in answer to what this — this what? mental mirage? — had just said to him, he croakingly replied: 'Why does the idea of the living torturing the dead shock you so? Can't you see how you've reversed the process, so that now the dead torture the living? But for you I would be sleeping my last sleep, dying. And you are keeping me from it, prolonging it, making it worse.'

The other was horrified at Nathan's determination. What has brought you to this? The most precious thing any creature can have is life. And you, so young, reject it? The abnegation of alJ earthJy responsibility? Best be warned, Nathan: give up your pJace among the living — go willingly to an unnecessary death — and you'll find no solace among the Great Majority. What extreme is this you've been driven to, and why?

Nathan took his head in his hands and stared at the sand between his feet, and despite himself the events of the recent past were mirrored in the eye of his mind, where his inquisitor saw them. So that in a little while: In the Thyre there is no urge for vengeance. The 'voice' was quieter now. When we are hurt we move away from it, and never go back there.

'So would I,' Nathan told him. 'If you would let me.'

But in the Szgany (the other ignored him), there is this deep-seated need for revenge upon an enemy. Just as there was in you. So what happened to it?

'My vow against the Wamphyri? Perhaps I saw its futility: they are indestructible. But I am Szgany, and if I've allowed my vow to die within me, then I might as well follow it into oblivion. No great loss, for what use is a man who can't even honour his own vow?'

Self-pity? (The shake of an incorporeal head.) And in any case, you are mistaken. What, you? No great Joss, did you say? But you must believe me when I tell you that you would be the greatest loss of all.' As for the Wamphyri: they are not indestructible. They were destroyed, upon a time, some of them. And by others like yourself. And… I perceive… that what was in those others is also in you! You thought I spoke of necromancy, but you were wrong. There have been — will always be — necromancers among the Wamphyri, that is true. But these were men who talked to the dead before you, Nathan! By no means ordinary men, no, but certainly not necromancers! Neither are you a necromancer. But you are… a Necroscdpe!

Nathan had given up answering with his voice. He didn't need to, anyway. Necroscope? I don't know the word.

Neither did I! It is one of their words. As I am Thyre and you are Szgany, and the great vampire Lords are Wamphyri, so they were Necroscopes. And so are you. Its meaning is simple: you talk to the dead. And I am the dead proof of it.

Then why don't they talk to me in return? Nathan's question seemed perfectly logical. I mean the Szgany, of course. Why don't the dead of my own kind talk to me?

Perhaps later there will be time to ask them, the other told him. Some of them, your people, have spoken to me from time to time; those of them who have graves at least. But you Szgany have strange ways: you've burned so many of your dead, and when they are burned it is that much harder. Harder still if their ashes are scattered. Perhaps that is why your people scatter the ashes of vampires: to deny them even the slightest chance of some monstrous nether-existence.

'I suppose it is,' Nathan answered thoughtfully, reverting to the use of his physical voice again, which after all came more naturally to him. 'But what of the Thyre when they die? What is their lot?'

We are not put down into the darkness of the earth but elevated, the other told him. Neither are we scattered but gathered together. Eventually we are dust, but not for long and long… He paused, and in the next moment suddenly gasped: Ah, you see! Proof that you are a Necroscope! You asked me a question whose answer is a great secret, and yet I made no complaint but merely answered you. For I know that you are good and would never torment me, or use the knowledge to any evil advantage.

'What knowledge?'

Of the last resting places of the Thyre.

'But you've said nothing, only that they are brought up instead of being put down. I didn't even understand you.'

You would understand if you tried to, the other insisted. You Travellers live on the surface, in the woods and hills of Sunside, and when you die you are put down into the earth. Or you were upon a time, until recently. And you would be again, if the Wamphyri should be driven out or destroyed. You spend your lives in the air and the light, and your deaths in the earth and the dark. But among the Thyre the opposite is the case. Our lives -

'- Are spent in the earth?' Nathan finished it for him. 'And your deaths… where?'

You have seen the place, the other answered, reverently. One of the places, at least. One of many such places.

A picture formed in Nathan's mind, which he recognized at once. He looked up, at the stairway cut into the precipitous sandstone cliffs, and the gloomy mouths of caves leading off from it into unknown darkness. The tombs of the Thyre?'

Indeed, and much more than that. For this is one of the places where our world enters yours.

Which was something else Nathan didn't understand. He thought back on what he knew of the desert folk: very little, actually. Only that they were thought of as primitive nomads who wandered at the edge of the furnace desert and occasionally crossed the grasslands to trade with the Szgany. It had always been assumed that they lived above ground, perhaps in caves or tents, but apparently… and there he got a grip of himself. For without even realizing it, suddenly he had begun to believe.

That I am real, an incorporeal mind? That I was real, upon a time? But didn't I say that I could prove it? Well, and the proof lies up there.

Nathan was tempted, but he was also sceptical. Was this really the mind of some dead creature, or was it his own mind trying to provoke him into a futile attempt at saving his life? 'Are you telling me that your bones — your remains — are up there?'

Yes.

Though it was something of an effort, and probably wasted at that, Nathan stood up again. And knowing that it would take a far greater effort to climb the sandstone stairs, nevertheless he made his way to the foot of the cliffs and looked up at the mouths of the caves.

The place is sacred, the Thyre voice sighed in his mind. Only go there and my people will know, and eventually come to see what you are about. In this way you can save yourself.

'But if it's a sacred place,' Nathan answered, starting up the steep climb, 'surely they'll kill me?'

The Thyre don't kill.

Then they'll chase me away, or carry me into the desert to die.' Suddenly giddy, he closed his eyes for a moment and clutched at the sheer face.

In which case you have nothing to lose, said the other, grimly, since that is why you came here. But then, knowing his answer had been cruel: No, they won't harm you in any way. Not if you tell them you were speaking to me. Not if you speak my secret name.'

Already a third of the way to the top, Nathan dragged one leaden foot after the next up the ancient stairway. The ledge was narrow and the sandstone badly weathered. One slip… and none of this would matter anyway. 'But I don't know your secret name,' he said.

It is Rogei. Ro-gay. Now you know it.

'You have a good deal of faith in me, I can tell,' Nathan told him. 'Perhaps more than I have in myself. And I thank you, Rogei, for telling me your secret name. But can you also tell me why it was secret?'

It is our way. The other offered an unbodied shrug, which Nathan sensed. In life all of the Thyre are telepathic, among themselves and sometimes with the creatures of the desert, too. Yes, and very rarely we may even 'hear' one of you Szgany whose mind is similarly gifted — like you, Nathan. And very often we hear the great shouted thoughts of the Wamphyri! But unlike the Szgany we don't fear them, for they would never come into these lands which are closest to the sun. Being telepathic our minds are open, yet we would remain private unto ourselves. Wherefore our secret names are known only to those who are closest to us. This way, if a person does not know your name he won't pry. And thus we remain individuals. It is our way, and that is my best explanation.

'I think I understand,' Nathan said. 'Your secret names protect your privacy.'

That is correct. But… be careful/!!

Almost at the top of his climb, Nathan's foot had slipped and he had very nearly fallen. He clutched at a knob of projecting sandstone, regained his balance and clasped himself to the sheer face. And even without lungs, still Rogei gave a sigh of relief: What, and are you trying to frighten a dead creature out of his wits?

Nathan shook his head, stilled his trembling, and gradually straightened up. 'No need to be… to be frightened on my behalf, Rogei,' he gasped, his words a tortured rasp. 'Do you see what has happened? I stopped myself from falling. Just an hour ago I thought I wanted to die and might even have been glad to fall; but having spoken to you — perhaps there's some purpose to my life after all. Anyway, I no longer wish to die. I only hope my living will prove to be worth it.'

For my purposes it will be, certainly! (The other was eager.) For through you — only through you, Nathan — I can talk to my children, to their children, and theirs, and know what is become of them in the land of the living. I will talk to all the Elders of the people, and explain to them the truth of our world beyond life; they always suspected it but had no proof. Now they shaJJ have proof! And I can teJJ them the secrets of this place, so that when their time is come they won't fear it. All through you, Nathan, only through you.

Nathan had reached the place where the ledge became horizontal and stood in the entrance to the first cave. 'Secrets? In death? But… what can there be to know? Immobile, incorporeal, doomed to everlasting darkness, what do the dead do in their afterlife?'

But that is one of the secrets! His dead friend answered at once. However, since you are the Necroscope, I can tell you. I must, for who else can I tell? Ah, and these are things which I have longed to say.' Now listen: Whatever a man was, thought, and did in life, so he continues to be, think, and do in death. The storytellers make up new stories, which they can only ever tell to the dead. And I have heard some wonderful stories, Nathan! Great thinkers and philosophers — of which, in all modesty, I was one — pursue their thoughts and beliefs to logical conclusions, then exchange their ideas with others of similar leanings. The mystics among us think the deepest, subtlest thoughts of all, and may not be disturbed where their minds fly out beyond the world's rim; by which I mean they are lost in their own con/ecturings. In life, I had a friend who fashioned leather buckets for the wells; now he designs the most wonderful machines, driven by the rivers of the underworld itself, to carry precious water into all the caverns under the desert!

'You have purpose, then,' Nathan nodded. 'Yes, and you achieve.'

But of what use achievements which bring no benefits? The other drove home his point. Donlt you see?

Through you we can pass on this secret knowledge — which is only secret because we have no way to tell it — to all of those we left behind! And so you, too, may achieve and have a purpose.

Nathan had gone a little way into the first cave. It was more a tunnel, narrow and low-ceilinged, so that he must bend his back. In there, it had quickly grown dark and cold. Uncertain, he paused and felt Rogei looking through his eyes, even as his brother Nestor had once been able to look through them, And: Stop! the other cautioned. This is not the Cavern of the Ancients. The entrance is the next cave but one. You will know it from its ornamentation.

Retracing his steps, Nathan groped his way backwards out of the cave into sunlight. Almost spent, his thirst was a constant agony; each rasping breath he took sucked more moisture out of his throat, his entire body. Turning, he looked out and down at the gully's rocky floor… an error; the world seemed to rotate and his head swam dangerously! He went to all fours, waited until he'd regained his balance, then crawled the rest of the way along the ledge to the entrance of the unman fane.

Unman? Rogei queried. Yes, there have been times when we were called that by the Szgany. For they consider that of all thinking creatures, they alone are the true men. Nathan sensed a shrug. But then, so do the trogs! Aye, and so do the Thyre, I suppose. We all have our pride; but pride is only one thing, and we are alike in more ways than one. The main difference is this: that in our becoming, we followed different paths.

Nathan could no longer speak; his thoughts had to speak for themselves. 1 mean no insult, he said, but there's no help for it. Each and every thought I think, you hear it — everything! There's nothing I can hide from you.

He sensed the other's nod of understanding. It seems unfair, I know. But I was born with my telepathy and practised it aJl my days, while in you it is a fledgeling thing. And as a Necroscope you are likewise a novice. But these are skills which may well grow in you with time.

Nathan snorted, perhaps bitterly. Granted, that is, that time is on my side!

Rogei continued to sense his needs. Of food there is none. But water… there may be a little. Except you must get to it.

In here? Nathan looked at the cave's entrance, much larger than the others.

Perhaps, but deep inside, a long way. And that delirium you so desired is much closer now. Rogei's mental voice despaired. I can feel the flickering of your flame.

It would be a shame, Nathan thought wanderingly, to die now when I no longer want to! He stood up, leaned against the arched entrance to the cave, peered with swimming eyes at its weathered carvings. The bas-reliefs were almost as old as the desert and sand-blasted to obscurity, but his trembling fingers could follow their still flowing contours in the stone.

And for the first time he knew something of awe to match the sensation he had known when he stood on the crater rim of the Starside Gate. From out of the cave, an aura of antiquity flowed over him; from unsuspected deeps a cool breath of air carried a not unpleasant musk and a hint, the merest suggestion… of moisture?

Water, yes, but deep down below, Rogei said again. Beyond the Cavern of the Ancients. Come in, Nathan Kiklu, Necroscope. We welcome you.

From some secret inner well, Nathan forced the last drop of spit down his throat, and with it croaked: 'We?

How many of you? And why are you the only one who has spoken to me?' Staggering out of the glaring sunlight into the cool shade, for a moment he was blind, but in the next he saw the walls of the tunnel extending before him into deepening gloom.

When we sensed your presence and heard your thoughts and dreams (Rogei answered, from very much closer now), and when we heard how you spoke to wolves so far away — which was not a dream — then we decided upon a spokesman. Since it seemed you were Szgany, and since in my life I occasionally had dealings with the so-called Travellers, I, Rogei, was honoured.

Nathan leaned forward until he felt he was falling. Then, mustering his feet into reluctant life, he went weaving, stumbling down the high, wide tunnel. Weightless, it seemed as if he floated from wall to wall. But for all that his body was suddenly light, he knew that in fact he was sinking, and each step threatened to be his last. I feel… that I should rest now, he thought! I feel I should rest for a very long time. Except now that it's time, I'm afraid to do it.

Then don't! Rogei's mental voice was vibrant with alarm. Take it from us, Nathan: while death is not the desert which living men believe it to be, life by comparison is an oasis!

Nathan nodded deliriously. But this oasis is drying up.

The passage widened out, became a cave, a cavern. Nathan entered from gloom into light and fell to his knees in drifted dust. Lolling there, knuckles on the floor, shoulders slumped and head swaying, he knew that this could only be the Cavern of the Ancients, a Thyre mausoleum. And from the look of it, it was probably the greatest of them all.

He craned his neck to look up.

Across the centre of the sandstone ceiling wall to wall, set into the yellow rock like the slit pupil of a cat's eye, a gash of white quartz seemed carved from light. The cavern was riven right across its width, which was huge, but the seepage of centuries had filled the gap with crystals which had hardened to stone. Crystal stalactites hung from the ceiling, and glowing humps of it like shining candles reached up from the floor. And all around its perimeter — in alcoves and niches, on shelves and ledges carved from the stone itself — lay the mummied ancients of the Thyre, whose socket eyes gazed back at Nathan where he observed them.

And: 'Here I am,' he croaked, rolling over onto his back, surrendering to the weirdness of it all without further question.

Again Rogei was anxious for him, telling him: Nathan, you may sleep, but you may not die!

Oh? he thought back. And will you stop me again? It might not be so easy a second time.

Brothers/ Rogei cried out, this time speaking to his dead companions and not to Nathan. And were we not right? Only feel the warmth of his thoughts? Is he not a light in the darkness? We dare not let him die.' And they knew that he was right.

The massed voices of more than a hundred dead Thyre rose up in a tumult at first, and sighed like a wind in his strange mind: Nathaaan! But they soon saw the error of that and began to speak as individuals, so that shortly he could distinguish them one from another: You must not die, Nathaaan..

Rogei is riiight…

Szgany youth, you are the light. Continue to shine for us, Nathaaan…

You are like a bridge between worlds, Necroscope: should you fall, one world is cut off foreeever!

On and on, so many of them…

Much like Nathan's own thoughts, those of the dead Thyre were warm as blankets; they wrapped him where he lay. And with their warmth surrounding him, comforting him, he began to drift into sleep. But Rogei was concerned that Nathan might possibly drift beyond sleep, and even in death the anxiety of the Thyre spokesman was such that it gnawed at him. He must be sure, and take whatever measures must be taken.

Nathan thought he heard a groaning of antique leather and a clatter as of dry sticks rattling together. It was a curious sound, but not enough to lure him back from what might well be his last sleep. Neither was the hand which at the last clasped his hand. They were small and shrivelled, those fingers, cool and dry… and dead. But the thoughts which accompanied them were warm, so that Nathan was not afraid, as other men would, assuredly, have been.

The final proof, Nathan Kiklu, Rogei whispered, his awed voice trembling with the wonder of it. A secret which not even I knew! And now rest, Nathan, rest.

Aye, rest, Nathaaan, the others sighed in unison from their many niches and benches in the walls. Your flame is strong and will not die. But should the spark burn low, we will be here to blow on the embers. And so you may sleep, Necroscope, sleep…

The Thyre were not people to desert their dead and leave them unguarded against scavengers; a fox or mangy dog might wander here from the grasslands, or a vulture discover the way in. But as Rogei had been well aware from the start, the Cavern of the Ancients was a natural sounding-chamber. Only let a footfall sound within — the snuffle of a beast's snout, the tearing of old leather or breaking of centuried bones — and its echoes would find their way below.

Down there, beyond a labyrinth of natural and carved passageways, caves and grottoes, the guardian of the place already knew there was an intruder. Nathan's rasping words, 'Here I am,' had thundered down to him like the shout of a giant; the slap, slap, sJap of his sandalled feet had reverberated, and… there had been other sounds, more dreadful sounds. Plainly the ancients were discovered and molested.

Throughout his long watch the guardian, out of respect for his ancestors, had sat in an antechamber within sight of the sacred cavern. He had not entered it, for even the dust was fashioned of men and thus holy. Towards the end of his watch, hearing the signal trill of a whistle blown far, far below, he had set out to meet his relief half-way. But now, before they could even come together, exchange a few words of greeting and pass each other by, there was this: an intruder had entered the Cavern of the Ancients. Worse, a human intruder, but not of the Thyre breed of humanity.

Whistling an alarm, a shrill warning which he knew would be taken up by his relief and passed back into the more populated underworld, and sending a thought — Someone has entered the Cavern of the Ancients.' — the guardian turned on his heel and sped back silently the way he had come, along a well-worn path climbing through bedrock, limestone, finally into the upper sandstone. And approaching the sacred cavern, he fitted a long arrow to his bow.

All was silent now; the intruder was still; perhaps he had heard the guardian coming and was lying in ambush! The guardian went cautiously, allowed time for the huge green pupils of his eyes to shrink commensurate to the light in the quartz chamber, and finally entered. He stood stock still, bowstring drawn and arrow pointing ahead, and saw…

… A man — the intruder, Szgany! — collapsed there on the floor, but not alone. For with him lay a harmless old mummied thing, a clutter of rags and old bones. It was one of the ancients. Desecration!

The guardian crept closer and aimed his arrow directly at the young man's heart. He did not know him, but he knew that he should die — for what he had done to the old one, whose smallest bones lay scattered in a thin trail across the dusty floor. The Thyre do not kill men, but this one should die! Except… what had been done here?

The two were together, sprawled, feet pointing away from each other, right hands touching, indeed clasped. One of them was very dead and had been for, oh, a long time, and the other one was not quite dead. But the Thyre guardian was a skilful tracker who hunted in the desert and often at night, and the tracks in the Cavern of the Ancients were plain for any man to see. The dust lay thick and mainly undisturbed, and the guardian could not be mistaken.

And putting up his bow he backed off, walking slowly and in his own tracks, and returned to the antechamber to wait for his relief and others of the Thyre, by now alerted. And on his way out, he could not take his eyes off the tracks in the dust of the chamber: one set of footprints coming from the passage to the outside world and leading to where the Szgany youth had fallen to the floor, and the other… was scarcely a trail at all. Just a few scuff marks in the dust, where something light and thin had dragged itself towards the fallen youth, shedding its bones as it went…

Time to wake up.'

Nathan heard the 'voice', so much like spoken words that he couldn't differentiate, and felt a gentle hand on his shoulder, shaking him awake. For a moment he thought it must be his mother, come to get him out of his bed; it had the same kind of warmth. But then, all of the voices which had tried to speak to him recently had been like that. He remembered them very dimly, as if he had dreamed them: their careful probing and questioning. Only that, with nothing of any detail, except that they had all been warm.

But as he stirred and mumblingly protested his awakening, and the void of his mind began to come alive with true memories, Nathan knew that this couldn't be Nana Kiklu's voice for she was dead. At which, activated by the sad thought, the cool hand at once transferred from his shoulder to his brow, where it smoothed away the furrows with gentle strokings.

'And now you hear me,' the voice said — actually said it — a throaty rasp which nevertheless conveyed both a nod and a smile. A female voice. That of a Thyre female! And all of Nathan's memories came flooding back at once.

Even as he gasped, lifted his head and opened his eyes, so the hand moved to cover them. And: 'Don't start so!' the husky voice chided. There's nothing harmful here. But… it will be strange,' she warned.

Nathan tried not to swallow and was reluctant to test his voice; but he must, for his question was instinctive. 'Where am I?' Then: relief as the words came out without pain! His throat was moist, flexible, responsive. Which prompted a second question: 'How long was I asleep?'

'Sleep?' she said, slowly removing her hand, knowing now that he knew she was not one of his own. 'Is that what it was? More like death's doorway, Nathan — and you upon the threshold! But now you are in the Place-Under-the-Yellow-Cliffs.'

He looked at her… and looked away, beyond her. In a way the experience was shocking, in that he had never before seen a living female of the Thyre and had not known what to expect, but in another it was less strange than when he was with his wolves. At least his nurse was — what, human? Well, not animal, anyway. Never a wild creature. Nathan checked himself: that was a line of thought he'd do well to avoid. What had Rogei told him: that even trogs consider themselves true men? This Thyre female was human, of a sort. It was just that she wasn't Szgany. Another line of thought best avoided.

And so he looked at the Thyre female again; also at the — room? — in which he now found himself. And she was right: his surroundings were strange! He must give his mind time to absorb them, and slowly.

Seated on a stool beside his bed, the… girl was alert and her demeanour erect, graceful, somehow regal. Nathan saw that standing she would be quite tall. Her youth shone out of her eyes: young eyes are self-apparent in all creatures; they shine and have a brilliant clarity. She was also brown as the kernel of a freshly cracked nut but not at all wrinkled, and like all of the Thyre she was slender to the point of emaciation. The highly sensitive pupils of her large eyes were lemon green against a background of olive irises, and were shaded by the horny ridges of her eyebrows.

She wore a red skirt and sandals, nothing else. Her small breasts were loose, pear-shaped, slightly pendulous; not at all 'deflated paps', which was how Nathan had heard Lardis Lidesci describe the breasts of trogs. Her ears were large, her mouth and chin small, her nose wide and flattened, with dark flaring nostrils. The odour of her body was a light musk, but she also carried a pleasing scent of lemons.

'Is there something?' she said, tilting her head a little. And Nathan was surprised to recognize the source of the sweet lemon smell: it was her breath. Somehow, he had not expected it to be so clean and refreshing. But… if she was reading his thoughts that, too, was one which she might easily find offensive.

He sighed and shook his head. 'Nothing I think conies out the way it was intended,' he said. 'Each time I give my brain free rein it issues insults which then require apologies. I'm sorry.'

'But your thoughts are your own,' she told him, seemingly taken aback. 'I would not enter unless it was necessary. That is an unspoken rule. You, too, have the talent. And would you come into my mind uninvited?'

'Rogei said much the same thing,' Nathan answered, 'that I was gifted. He said it might grow in me. But right now your mind is a blank to me. When I was young I would sometimes read my brother's mind, and… I have a knack with certain wolves of the wild. But I am not a telepath.' He shook his head.

'You will be,' she said. And then, obviously curious:

'But this… Rogei? Who is he? And for that matter, how do you know that the Thyre are telepathic? That is one secret which we have kept well. Or so we thought.'

Nathan was cautious. It might — just might — have been delirium, all of it. But if so his feverish mind had forecast all of this with remarkable accuracy. And so it seemed he must accept what had taken place as fact: he had indeed talked to a dead creature (no, a dead 'man'), and so discovered the things he knew about the Thyre. He was… a Necroscope? That being the case, it seemed Rogei had supplied him with a real reason for living; the Thyre Ancient had not only saved his life but had given it meaning — but had also made it meaningJess, if he couldn't pass the knowledge on.

'Rogei is the one who told me about your telepathy,' he finally answered, aware that she was listening intently and sitting up that much straighter. 'He demonstrated it to me. Except his talent is different now. As Rogei has suffered… a change, so has his telepathy, which in turn allows me the use of my talent. For where the Thyre mind-talk with the living, I…"

'Yes?'

'… What is your name?' He stalled.

'That is a secret!'

'Of course it is,' Nathan sighed, shrugged. 'And so are the things which you have asked me. But you've been my nurse and I thought that made us friends.'

She understood his comment: faith and trust is a two-way system or it doesn't work. 'My name is Atwei — At-we-ay. Now then, who is Rogei?'

Nathan took a deep breath. 'Rogei's body lies in the Cavern of the Ancients, Atwei,' he said. 'He was Thyre. Now he is an Ancient! And I… am a Necroscope and talk to dead people. My talent lets me talk to the dead of the Thyre.'

If Atwei was surprised it scarcely showed. Nodding, she answered quietly: 'There are desert folk who practise such an art. They are a far-away tribe, not Thyre, and do other things which are unseemly. Once, when they would spread into the lands of the Thyre, they made war with us; their warriors invaded our colonies under the earth. The Thyre trapped them there, opened floodgates and drowned them all. Since when they have sent no more armies against us and we no longer kill men, for the mind-cries of the dying are awful! Instead, they are satisfied with their lands beyond the Great Red Waste and the Last Mountains. They are called necromancers, after that art which they use to torture the dead for their secrets.'

'Rogei the Ancient called me a Necroscope,' Nathan told her. 'He knew the word from the dead of the Szgany, with whom he had spoken mind to mind as you speak to the living. Upon a time, not long ago, the Szgany had known just such men as I am. They were not necromancers and neither am I. I've tortured no one, Atwei, neither the living nor the dead. But if you're not convinced, only look inside my head. It is that I hear the dead whispering in their graves, and on occasion they hear me. Rogei was one of them who heard and talked to me. He saw that I had problems and guided me to the Cavern of the Ancients.'

She nodded. 'So, you are not deranged. The Thyre elders have read certain of these things in your mind. They could not be sure but thought you might be mad. If what you say is true, plainly you are sane and have a weird, unique talent. And who am I to decide if it is for good or for evil?'

Nathan frowned. 'It seems I remember something of that: voices which questioned me while I slept. About the Cavern of the Ancients and what happened there.

Also about my past. But… did I invite them into my mind? I don't think so. Which is strange, for as I recall you mentioned an unspoken rule. Also, you awakened me with a mind-call! Do you make and break these rules of yours so easily then, Atwei?'

She drew back from him. 'But several strange things had happened, and there were matters which the elders required to understand. At first it seemed you might not live. Before you could die, it was necessary that they look into your mind. As for myself: how could I determine your progress, without that I first inquire within?'

He nodded but this time made no apology. 'And did they get what they wanted, the elders?'

'Not everything. Your mind is closed to the past, locking out all of the pain which lurks there. There is a great deal of pain in you.'

'I no longer feel it.'

'Because it is locked out — or in! This is not a physical thing, Nathan.'

He changed the subject. 'What will become of me?'

'That is for the elders.'

'Then you should call them, or take me to them.'

'I have called them and they will come, soon. Before then you should eat. Will you eat with me?' She seemed eager now to make up for any possible misunderstandings. And after all, she had told him her name.

'Here?'

'Oh, yes. For it will be a while before you can get up. A long day has passed, and a night. Up above, the sun is freshly risen. And all while you have lain here.'

An entire cycle! Nathan thought, easing his bones a little and stretching in his bed. But he wasn't surprised: it felt at least that and more. And Atwei was right: he was hungry. Til gladly eat with you,' he told her.

'Food has been prepared,' Atwei nodded, stood up, backed away and out through an archway. 'I shall return.' Left alone, he studied his surroundings.

The place where Nathan lay was a cave. Despite its rudimentary furniture, whitewashed walls, and crude mosaic floor of white and green flagstones, which gave it something of a room's appearance and made it habitable, it was still a cave. Central in the high ceiling, an irregular shaft three feet in diameter and possibly artificial ascended out of sight. But in an apparently subterranean room without windows, the most surprising features were the light and the warmth.

Down through the shaft in the ceiling streamed a beam of light, catching drifting dust motes in its ray in exactly the same way as sunlight coming into a barn through a gapped roof. Not solid sunlight, no, but light diffused and scattered, so that it emerged into the room almost as a haze. And falling onto a table near the foot of Nathan's crude wooden bed, the beam or shaft of soft yellow light struck against polished mirrors of gold to further permeate the room.

While Rogei had caused Nathan to believe that the Thyre colonies went deep indeed, as yet he had no idea how far he'd actually been carried underground. With sunlight like this to warm and light the place, however, he was sure it couldn't be far. Perhaps there were passageways leading from the Cavern of the Ancients to caves in the foot of the cliffs. In that case the shaft of light was nothing more than sunlight penetrating through some ancient chimney, and the warmth was residual of the desert.

Wrong! said a voice in his head, one which he recognized at once as Rogei's. The Place-Under-the-Yellow-Cliffs is very deep, Nathan. But the temperature in the Thyre colonies is a constant. It is a natural thing and a great many of the caves under the desert are like this. Why would we dwell in the cold places, or for that matter the hot ones, when so many temperate labyrinth systems exist for our habitation?

Used to this thing now, Nathan sat up in his bed. He saw that under his quilt of furs he was naked. His clothes, washed and mended, lay folded on a shelf at one side of the room. Now, with some effort — leaving his bed and dressing himself on the one hand, and on the other concentrating upon Rogei — he said: 'Well, it appears you were right. I was rescued from the Cavern of the Ancients and brought here. And now the elders are coming to question me.'

Like me, Rogei answered, they've waited patiently for you to wake up. But you must be careful how you answer their questions. They demand respect, elders, and until you prove otherwise they will doubtless accuse you of desecration. Merely to enter a forbidden place is bad enough; and as for the rest of it… Nathan sensed the other's shrug.

The rest of what?' He was mystified. 'You welcomed me in and I entered; I could go no further and collapsed; I spoke to the old ones dead in their niches and upon their shelves. Then, at the end, I dreamed you came to me and comforted me.'

And touched you? Took your hand in mine?

'Yes.'

No dream that, Nathan.

'I don't understand.'

Probably as well, for the time being. Anyway, all is back to rights now.

Nathan frowned but didn't press him; there were too many other things he wanted to know. For example: 'If this place is so deep underground, where does the light come from?'

From the surface.

'The shaft falls straight? Like a well? In that case the sun would have to stand directly overhead, which it never does.'

7 doubt that the shaft falls straight, Rogei answered. No, for the cracks of the earth are like a maze. But some of these mazy cracks have mirrors at every junction!

'Mirrors?'

Where the bedrock breaks through the desert sand, Rogei patiently explained, there, in certain protected places, the Thyre tend and polish their mirrors. The sunlight falls upon them and is deflected into the earth's potholes and passageways. Passed from mirror to mirror, it descends into the dark places under the desert. Thus the Thyre bring a little light into their colonies.

Nathan nodded. 'Else you'd all be blind down here.'

No, for our eyes are like trog or Wamphyri eyes… or perhaps not like the letter's, for the night is their element. But given even a little light, the Thyre see well enough. It is just that the light is a special comfort. Down there in the hollow earth, it is treasured.

Nathan would ask next about the Thyre talent for tongues. Apart from some small initial hesitation, Atwei's conversation had been in perfectly good Szgany. He knew of course that the Thyre traded with Travellers from time to time, but would find it astonishing if they shared the same native tongue.

Seeing the question coming, however, and perhaps far too many more of them, Rogei cried: Wait! Enough of these questions for now, Nathan. There are more important matters. First we must talk about the Thyre elders…

But before he could continue, Atwei returned with a yoke round her slender neck from which depended a pair of thin silver trays laden with small wooden bowls of various edibles. And looking at the bowls as she transferred them from the trays to the table, Nathan found his mouth watering. For the first time in a very long time he knew which matters were most important to him. Most immediately important, anyway.

Seated on tiny stools on opposite sides of the table and between the mirrors, Nathan and Atwei ate. There in the shaft of diffused sunlight, she looked more golden than brown, and he noticed how her pupils shrank to match the light's greater intensity.

The foodstuffs were fascinating, even exotic. Nathan had never imagined that these 'primitive' desert folk enjoyed such variety. Insisting that the food was for him, Atwei took only a little; she was simply keeping him company while he ate. And at that Nathan felt privileged. He rightly supposed himself to be the first of the Szgany to ever learn of such things. Certainly he was the first to ever taste them.

There were walnuts marinaded in vegetable oils, yellow bladder-roots with a bittersweet taste which stung the mouth as the vegetable was crushed, fried slivers of meat in aromatic sauces, several varieties of mushroom, and small, eyeless fishes baked whole. Various fruits followed: tangy cactus apples, figs and round ripe lemons, a bunch of small grey grapes. Everything was delicious, but Nathan had found a sort of small sausage especially succulent and asked Atwei what it was made of. That was a mistake.

'Grubs of the earth,' she answered.

And after a pause: 'Worms?' He cocked his head a little, inquiringly.

'Of a sort. We breed them..'

The meal was at an end.

They cleaned their hands in tiny fingerbowls, following which Atwei closed her eyes, placed the fingertips of her left hand upon her brow, and sat still for a moment. Then she smiled and asked: 'Did you enjoy?'

'Greatly. I thank you.'

Again she smiled. 'And I have thanked Him,' she said.

'Him?'

'Whoever listens.'

'Do you believe there is some One?'

'Don't you?'

'Many of our beliefs died in the day of the white sun,' he quoted Szgany 'history', of which there was little enough. 'Men had writing, numbers, science, and some believed in a god. Very little of science survived, and almost nothing of religion. In the close vicinity of the Wamphyri, it's hard for men to have faith in a merciful god! Now when the Szgany pray or give thanks, they offer them to their stars, which are remote even beyond the influence of the vampires.'

Then if I were you, Rogei said in his mind, I would seek out my guardian star right now! Nathan, I have kept apart out of common decency; the Thyre require privacy for eating; Atwei has honoured you greatly. But finally the time has come when we must talk about the elders!

'Very well,' he answered.

'Your pardon?' Atwei lifted an eyebrow.

'I was talking to Rogei,' he told her.

Her eyebrows went up higher yet, worriedly. 'You should not have got up and dressed yourself. I told you that you must wait, until you had your strength back. You were delirious for a long time and… you could be again!'

Nathan sighed and shook his head. 'I'm a little weak,' he said, 'that's all.' But then he had an idea. 'Atwei, listen to me: could you be delirious, too?'

'I? Now? Of course not!'

'Good! Now tell me if I'm correct: while I am limited in my ability to read minds, you are not. Right?'

'If a mind is telepathic, I can read it,' she said, frowning. 'Also, I can partially block another mind trying to read mine. These things come with practice. As yet, your talent is undeveloped. But your mind has the capacity.'

'I was wondering,' he said, 'if you could talk to Rogei through me? If you were to enter my mind right now, would you be able to overhear our conversation?'

'Eavesdrop on an Ancient?' She sat up straighter, looked more worried yet. 'Even an elder would think twice!'

'You believe me, then?'

'We are friends,' Atwei hesitated a little, 'you said it yourself. It takes two to build a friendship. If one lies it may be broken and have no value. This is proven; not only among the Thyre but also the Szgany, I think? And so I must believe you — at least until you are a proven liar.'

Rogei sighed in Nathan's mind. Very well, try your experiment. Get it over with. Actually, it has merit. It will save a lot of time if it works.

There,' Nathan spoke to Atwei. 'He has nothing against it. And you needn't fear him for after all he's Thyre, one of your own. Also, Rogei's a dead creature and harmless.'

A dead 'man', Nathan, Rogei reminded. And not all dead things are harmless, believe me! Well, will she or won't she?

'Will you or won't you?' Nathan repeated him.

'If you wish it,' she said. She came round the table and he made to stand up. 'No, remain seated, and… talk to this Rogei.' She placed a small, trembling hand on his brow.

Atwei, 1 am Rogei the Ancient, once Rogei the elder. His mental voice was suddenly stern.

She snatched back her hand and placed it on her breast. Nathan got to his feet. 'You heard him?'

Her mouth had fallen slightly open. She closed it, shook her head and said, 'No… but I felt something. A presence!'

An echo, said Rogei. Atwei sensed the merest trace, the smallest ghost of me, amplified by your mind. It doesn't work, and I didn't think it would. You are the Necroscope, Nathan. Such talents are not commonplace.

Soft, padding footsteps sounded from outside the room. Atwei backed shakily away, turned and went to meet the elders. Rogei read Nathan's concern and said, Well, too late or that now. We must deal with it as it comes. More ways than one to strip a cactus.p>

The elders entered.

There were five of them, not all 'old' by any means and certainly not decrepit. Nathan calculated their ages on what he knew of the elderly among his own people. The youngest of the five was possibly forty-five, while the oldest would be well into his seventies. Revise your estimates upwards by at least fifteen years, Rogei told him. The Thyre are long-lived. Since each colony has only jive elders, a man cannot even aspire to become one until he is at least sixty.

Nathan looked openly, respectfully, at each of the elders in turn. The youngest of them was spindly and quite bald, but as yet largely unwrinkled. His eyes were somewhat smaller than those of his companions; their pupils were grey, dartingly alert and (Nathan felt sure) more than a little suspicious. Three of the remaining four were quite simply Thyre; dressed in knee-length, pleated, belted yellow skirts, apart from the difference in their ages there was nothing to distinguish one from the next. The final member of the group was the one anomaly: bearing a torque of gold around his neck, he was heavily wrinkled, bent, and wore flowing white hair to his shoulders. His eyes were huge, moist, and uniformly yellow as the gold of his torque. He was at a glance the Elder of elders.

They peered at Nathan obliquely, blinkingly as they gathered to the table and their eyes adjusted to the extra light. Each carried a small stool, which they placed in a semicircle to enclose him. Then, straightening, they stood facing him.

Atwei, standing behind them, said, 'Nathan, please sit.' And as he sat down, so did they. And without pause the interview and question session got underway.

'We shall dispense with formalities,' said the youngest of the five in a high-pitched, superior tone. 'You are after all Szgany and cannot know the ways of the Thyre.'

Excellent.' said Rogei. This spokesman thinks he knows it all, a common ailing among the young. So you must prove him wrong. Bow your head twice to him, then three times — but more slowly — to the Elder.p>

Nathan did as Rogei instructed and the Thyre, including Atwei, sat up straighter. Then the five turned their heads to look at her, until she huskily protested, 'No, I have not instructed him!' In this way, and without saying a word, Nathan had their attention. But more than that, he had apparently earned himself the enmity of their spokesman.

'So,' said that one, frowning, 'your telepathy is not as embryonic as we thought, for patently you stole this greeting from my mind. What is more, I failed to detect the theft! Yet in your fever these unseemly skills of yours were not obvious, which tends to show a naturally deceptive turn of mind.'

Rogei was quick off the mark. Point out how a man, even an elder, who jumps to concJusions to prove an elusive point may well deceive himself/

Nathan did so, and added: 'One who investigates the mind of another while he is feverish risks discovering phantoms.'

At which point the Elder himself took over. In a voice which creaked like the branch of an old tree in the wind, he asked: 'And how many of these phantoms are there in your mind, Nathan of the Szgany?'

A great many, Rogei whispered in his inner ear, speaking now as Nathan himself. Some of them are the ghosts of my past, which are mine alone to reveal or hold at bay as I see jit. But there are also the voices of an hundred Ancients of the Thyre, who would gladly speak through me to prove my innocence — if the Elder of elders so desires.

Nathan repeated it.

'That is a blasphemy!' the spokesman made to stand up, but the Elder took his arm and held him down. The spokesman glanced at the venerable one and frowned, saying, 'But plainly he is a necromancer! He entered the Cavern of the Ancients in order to molest and torture our dead for their secrets!'

'If so,' the Elder nodded, patiently, 'the more we let him speak the more his words will condemn him. So far he is correct in one respect at least: namely that some are too quick to jump to conclusions! Let him say on.' And again he turned his great soft eyes on Nathan.

Tell them your story in brief, said Rogei, while I spy on them through your eyes.

Nathan complied. The Wamphyri have returned to Starside where they inhabit the last aerie. They raided Settlement, my home in the west of Sunside. During the raid, my mother and….nd a Szgany girl were stolen and my brother went missing. Searching for him, I followed his trail east where I met a band of Travellers and determined to join them. But first I had to try one last time to find my brother. Finally, learning that he was dead, I tracked my Traveller friends to their camp at the edge of the grasslands and discovered that they were — ' He paused and shook his head. '- They were no more. The Wamphyri…' He hung his head for a moment to drive out the memories of these very real phantoms, then looked up.

'I had nothing left in the world, and no longer wished to live. But remembering how I sometimes overhear the dead whispering in their graves — a strange gift, I know, and one which I had kept hidden — I thought that I might join them in death. Perhaps then I would be able to talk to my mother again, to my brother, my girl. Wandering beneath the stars, I crossed the grasslands into the desert, where sunup found me at the foot of sandstone cliffs. There I decided to die.

'But as I lay down to sleep I heard the voice of a man, an Ancient of the Thyre, who called himself Rogei. He told me certain things, led me to the Cavern of the Ancients. By then I was weak and fell unconscious. I woke up and was here. And now I'm accused of desecration and blasphemy.1

The elder spokesman was angry again. 'Despite that Rogei is a revered name among the Thyre, it is not uncommon. There is more than one Rogei in the Cavern of the Elders, as this Szgany necromancer guessed there would be. He must have learned the name from our traders, and remembered it to put to evil use.'

'How so?' The Elder looked at him. 'Who among the Thyre would reveal his secret name to a Szgany youth met briefly at the trading? For what good purpose? No, I think not.' He shook his head. 'Also, if it were so, does it mean you have changed your accusation? If so, then what is this man's crime? Is he a vile necromancer or merely a clever liar?'

The other pursed his lips. 'I say we should speak in our own tongue,' he said sharply. 'He listens; he is intelligent; he is a talented deceiver!'

'I say again: you deceive yourself,' Rogei prompted Nathan into speech. 'I can prove what I've said.'

Then do so,' the spokesman snapped, 'and so condemn yourself!'

I do believe I know this one, Rogei spoke to Nathan. Yes, and also the Elder. Even under the trappings of his great age, still I know him. But the Spokesman: he has the looks and mannerisms of my own son. Why, it could be that he is my grandson! It would explain his vehemence, which is rare among the Thyre. Don't you see? He believes you interfered with the remains of his grandfather'.

'But I didn't!' Nathan burst out — and the Thyre elders drew back a little on their stools, staring at him curiously.

No, but I did touch you.' No dream, Nathan. You are the Necroscope which I named you, beloved of the dead. In the Cavern of the Ancients, when I thought you were about to die, I was — moved — to come to you! And rising up, I was beside you, to comfort you in your fever!

'You… came to me?' Nathan wasn't able to hold back from blurting it out loud. 'But you're a dead man!'

'Hah! He speaks nonsense!' The spokesman sneered, and went on to add some choice invectives in the Thyre tongue. But the Elder had read something in Nathan's strange eyes, causing him to caution his chief accuser:

'No, make yourself understood to him also. For if we desire to bring charges, he must have the benefit of the doubt.'

Rogei came to Nathan's rescue, telling him what to say and how he must say it. And looking at the Thyre spokesman he repeated Rogei word for word, faithfully, only leaving out his acid sarcasm. 'Ah, but your grandfather recognizes you at last, Pe-tey-is!' he said, gazing directly into the spokesman's eyes and nodding slowly. 'Petals, son of Ekhou and grandson of Rogei the Ancient, born in that same hour that your grandfather took to his sickbed. But before he died he saw you in your mother's arms and was proud of you, just as he is proud now to see that you're an elder! Rogei knows you not only from your premature loss of hair, familiar features and bearing in general — which is to say, moulded in an almost exact likeness of your father, his son — but also from your abrupt mannerisms and the heat of your argument. As Ekhou was ever the fiery one, so are you!'

Petais's mouth had fallen open. He couldn't speak and so gurgled a little, his eyes bulging. Under Rogei's expert guidance, Nathan gave him no time to recover but carried on. 'Now tell your grandsire, do you accept that these are his words? I hope so, for if not we must summon Ekhou your father and Amlya your mother, who will know me better. I know that they are not dead, for if they were I would have spoken to them in the Cavern of the Ancients!'

Petais shook his head wildly, stood up, sat down again. He was still lost for words. But the Elder of elders was not. 'Who is it speaks, you or Rogei?'

'A little of both,' Nathan answered. 'I repeat his words, faithfully if I can.'

The Elder nodded, reached out a trembling hand to touch Nathan's arm. 'I perceive that it is true,' he said, his eyes rapt on him and unblinking. 'Plainly a great wonder has come among us!'

Petais groaned and said, 'Still we must be sure!'

'I am sure,' the Elder answered him. 'You do not remember, Petals — of course not, for you were a child newborn — but I too was there when your mother took you before the dying Rogei, and indeed he was proud of you. I know, for I was Rogei's nephew, the son of his brother!'

Nodding, Petais seemed to sag a little. 'What must be must be. But it had to be decided, one way or the other.'

I was right, Nathan, Rogei sighed. The Elder is my nephew, Oltae!

Even as he spoke his ethereal words, the one he had named turned from Petais to Nathan. 'I know you will understand that Petais is correct,' the Elder said. 'We had to be sure. Even now, we must be sure.'

Test me however you will, Oltae,' Nathan told him.

The Elder gasped, gave a small start, and his hand tightened on Nathan's arm. 'That is my name, aye,' he nodded. 'And I know you did not steal it from my mind, for I have built a wall there which is impenetrable! Wherefore, one final test, and I shall be satisfied.'

Rogei prompted Nathan to say: 'Now I speak as Rogei. Let me guess this test, nephew. Has it to do with your examination for a place among The Five? You were a young man then, as Petais is now, but I remember your examination well for I was your examiner! I had many questions for you, but your answer to one of them won exceptional marks! Do you remember it, Oltae?'

'I do indeed,' the Elder whispered.

'And I asked,' Rogei spoke through Nathan, '"When will we know if The One Who Listens exists?" And you answered — '

'- My answer was this,' Oltae the Elder cut him short. ' "We shall know that He exists when finally He speaks, which will not be until we are better capable of knowing and understanding Him.'" And as he gazed deep into Nathan's eyes, for a moment Oltae thought he saw an image of Rogei looking back at him, smiling. But as the Necroscope blinked, it was gone.

The Elder sighed, nodded in his fashion, and creaked to his feet; likewise his four colleagues. But before they left, Oltae said to Nathan (also to Rogei): 'It is my thought that today, perhaps we are one step closer to understanding Him!'

And then to Nathan alone: 'Rest, get back your strength. We shall talk again…'

In the long days which followed — days which would each have been as long as a 'week' in the time-scale of Nathan's unknown hell-lander father — he learned a great many things and did a great deal of 'teaching'. The Thyre called it teaching, anyway, though to Nathan it seemed he merely passed on the messages of the Ancients. But certainly the previously irretrievable knowledge of the dead was of enormous advantage to the living.

Long sessions were spent with The Five in the Cavern of the Ancients, where Nathan's talent as a Necroscope was proved beyond any further doubt; and as the living of the Thyre warmed to him, so did the Ancients themselves. And just as Harry Keogh had been a lone, bravely flickering candle to the dead of a far distant world, so now his son became a light in the darkness of the Thyre beyond.

Much like the Szgany, the Thyre had very little of true writing; rather than words, they used a system of complicated glyphs to illustrate whole ideas, so that a lot of the detail was inevitably lost. Most of their 'history' had come down to them in this way, and in the form of myths and legends passed mouth to mouth (or mind to mind), from generation to generation; out of which had sprung their art-form of storytelling. Foremost amongst makers of Thyre romance had been one Jhakae, dead for more than two hundred and eighty years. Now, through Nathan, Jhakae could relate all of his best stories, created for a limited audience of dead Ancients, and know that they would be passed down to thousands of the living.

Nathan relayed tale after tale, each of them furiously scribbled down and recorded as best as possible in the Thyre glyphs: the Story of the Fox and the Kite, the Fable of the Gourd and the Granule, the Tale of Tiphue and the Dust-Devil. Twenty of them, then thirty, finally forty, and all jewels of Thyre fantasy. But Jhakae's latest and greatest tale, as yet unfinished, would be that of the Szgany Youth in the Cavern of the Ancients: a Parable. And so Nathan was honoured.

In everything Nathan transcribed from death into life, and vice versa, he had the invaluable advice and assistance of Rogei. But such was the body of information to be passed on, the enormous bulk of questions from both sides, that priorities must be decided, time apportioned, and the practical take precedence over theoretical, philosophical, and theological subjects. Within the comparatively narrow confines of Thyre existence, all such subjects were limited forms anyway; far more important and immediately applicable were ideas and devices such as Shaeken's 'Water Ram', his 'Hydraulic Hoist' and 'Wheel of Irrigation'.

Shaeken was that Ancient whose name Rogei had mentioned at their first meeting, who once designed leather buckets for the drawing of water from the wells. Pursuing his obsession in death as in life, Shaeken had proceeded to far greater things; but even without the benefit of his genius, Nathan might have brought the principle of the water wheel to the Thyre. Desert folk, they had never journeyed beyond the grasslands to such townships as Twin Fords, and had not seen how the Szgany used the raw energies of the river to assist them in their work.

But they were the Thyre; the better Nathan knew them the more he understood their pride; making nothing of his own (in any case limited) knowledge, he spent long hours with a graphite stylus and the skins of lizards stretched on frames, creating meticulous sketches of machines direct from Shaeken's mind. And joiners of wood and other artisans pored breathlessly over each drawing as it was completed, so that as his work progressed the principles were grasped and the first models began to be carved.

There were times when Nathan grew tired but he made no complaint. His life had purpose; his mind was so occupied as to hold at bay all the mourning and miseries of his past; he had a deal more of respect from his new friends than his own had ever shown him. He was satisfied, or believed he was satisfied, for a while at least…

He was pleased to perform personal favours. Rogei felt compelled to discover the fortunes of various kith and kin; Nathan stood in his debt and so made inquiries on his behalf; Rogei was enabled to 'speak' with those who were here, still alive. Others however had moved away, to far colonies beyond the range of Thyre deadspeak. For just like the telepathy of the living, that of the dead had its limitations, too. Many of the ones Rogei sought were dead in distant places, beyond his reach.

Meanwhile Nathan's fame had spread abroad; Thyre from other colonies began to arrive at the Place-Under-the-Yellow-Cliffs, all bearing invitations from their elders. Invariably they would seek audience with Nathan and let it be known that he would always find a welcome should he ever decide to visit. He promised Rogei that if ever he accepted such an invitation, he'd be sure to seek out his old friend's relatives en route, wherever his travels took him.

But in the interim he worked…

With the exception of trivial items vetted out by Rogei, first Nathan satisfied all the personal queries of the dead in the Cavern of the Ancients, and of the colony's living alike, before setting to with a will. Then: He made known all of the gourmet Arxei's myriad secret recipes, which that one had never revealed in life; he delivered a formula of preservation from the mirror-polisher Annais, a vegetable varnish to protect the Thyre mirrors and keep them from tarnishing; he gave voice to the gardener Tharkel's conclusions on bees, pollination, and the keeping of hives. In life Tharkel had made an oasis with his own hands, which had failed only through the lack of an adequate water supply; since when he'd planned bigger and better ones. Now, with the advent of Shaeken's Hydraulic Hoist, they could be real!

Nathan did all of these things, and as the work gradually slackened off even found time for a little local travelling and studying among the Thyre. And since the elders did not consider it fitting that a person of Nathan's importance should concern himself with the basic requirements of life, Atwei became his aide among the living just as Rogei was his spokesman among the dead. Dealing with all mundane matters, she left Nathan free to explore the possibilities of his unique talent.

In fact he was given too much freedom and failed to use it to his best advantage. For as the furious pace of his life slackened, so he allowed a host of dreams and memories of past, unbearable things to creep back in to plague him. He dreamed of Canker Canison's barking laugh as the loping dog-thing carried Misha away to the horror of some unthinkable future; and of his mother, a flame-eyed thrall in the service of a hideous vampire Lord; and of Nestor rotting in the river, a thing of weeds and sloughing grey flesh, dissolving into the mud. Nightmares such as these invariably brought Nathan gibbering awake, and Atwei would come running to comfort him..

In black bowels of earth beneath the colony, where even the fishermen of the Thyre must cast their nets by flaring torchlight, Atwei showed Nathan a section of the Great Dark River and explained as best she could its source and destination.

'As Sunside's rains roll down off the barrier mountains,' she said, her husky whisper echoing into the darkness and back from unknown places, 'and as storm-clouds burst less frequently over the furnace desert itself, so great bodies of water find their way underground. Many major tributaries may be found in the west, and others to the east, between the desert and the mountains. And so the Great Dark River under the earth is the sump of the world!

The hard bedrock of the underworld is tilted eastwards; likewise, naturally, the course of the river. Where the rocks are softest, the rain of centuries has formed many cavern systems. Of these, the safest and most suitable have become Thyre colonies. The underworld is as important to the Thyre as your forests are to you Szgany. Temperate, it provides shade from the sun in the heat of the long day, and is a refuge from the bitter chill of desert nights. We could not live without it, or without the river which is its dark lifeblood.

'During its life the river has carved wide ledges in the rock. Of these, the driest and safest are used as paths along which we may follow the water's course where it rushes through dark gullies. In parts the river is navigable over long miles, forming vast sunless lakes where the blind fishes swim; but in other places the way is tighter and the water roars furiously!

'As for its length: the river parallels the barrier mountains; it passes under the Great Red Waste, and meanders past a range of lesser mountains where dwell people much like yourself… or perhaps unlike yourself, for they give of their young to the Wamphyri. And so the river flows into the unknown. Some say it journeys to a sea far in the east, beyond the caverns of the necromancers; but this is rumour, because no one of the Thyre has ever been there.'

Nathan listened attentively to Atwei; he looked at the ledges carved by the river in the canyon walls of the channel through ages immemorial, at the blackly gurgling water flowing swiftly by, and the catches of the fishermen wriggling in their nets. And at one and the same time the river both repulsed and fascinated him. Merely to think of its sheer length was an awe-inspiring exercise in itself: more than three thousand miles of subterranean waterways, if Atwei was right, and Nathan was sure that she was. Why, Sunside's rivers were streams by comparison; the Great Dark River covered more miles than Nathan had seen in his entire life!

And yet it wasn't so much the river's size as its course which most affected Nathan's imagination: a course that followed the mountains east into that region beyond the Great Red Waste where the Wamphyri held sway, out of which they had returned into Starside. And as the river was a road to the Thyre, which they might follow on foot and by boat, colony to colony for all its many leagues, so might Nathan follow it…

Sunups came and went; Nathan's work in the Cavern of the Ancients neared completion; he told The Five that he planned to move on, and they swore him to secrecy. He promised that whatever the future held, he would never tell his brothers in the outside world what he had learned of the Thyre and their ways.

In the meantime his nightmares had got no better; if anything they were worse. Over and over Nathan lived through the hell of that night and morning in Settlement, the time of the Wamphyri raid. Also, he was aware of time fleeting by, and wondered how Lardis and the Szgany Lidesci fared now. Often in the Cavern of the Ancients he would sense his wolves trying to contact him. But they were distant and he was shielded by massive walls of rock; and anyway, what would they have to say except — it seemed likely — things he did not wish to hear? For by now, surely the Wamphyri were mighty again, a plague throughout all of Sunside.

Once (for once on his own), he fell asleep in the Cavern of the Ancients and dreamed that the numbers vortex waited for him. That mighty, bottomless whirlpool of figures tugged at him insistently; he felt that if only he knew the meaning of all of these rapidly mutating symbols.. they could open up whole new worlds to him. Any world would be better than the one he'd left behind, providing that it let him live among his own kind. And again he felt like a traitor who had turned tail and fled from his enemies, his friends, even from himself.

And now he must flee again, put greater distance between himself and the past, go searching for some shadowy fulfilment just around the corner of tomorrow…

In the Cavern of the Ancients he said his farewells. The dead were silent for a while. They would miss him.

But… he might return, one day? He couldn't say for definite, but possibly. Well, they had had their fair share of him, and the dead of other places were eager to meet him.

Nathan spoke to Shaeken. Working so much together, they had developed firm bonds, a warm friendship and understanding. And: 'In time, your works will be a blessing to the Thyre,' he told the great engineer.

They were nothing without you, Nathan, the other was flattered. But in a moment, and much more seriously: Nathan, these numbers which plague your dreams..

'Oh? You've been spying on me?' Nathan knew it wasn't so.

Hardly that! We can't help it. After all, you are the Necroscope. But the numbers: I've seen them, it's true. And as you know I have a small understanding of numbers.

'You understood the vortex?'

He sensed the shake of a head. Did I understand it? No. Was I afraid of it? Yes: even as a child fears the lightning! By comparison, my own calculations are ant tracks in the sand — quickly blown away — while yours are alive and work towards an end. And just as your deadspeak is unique among the living, so is the vortex yours alone. It is a part of you, Nathan! I'm no philosopher; my thoughts are shallow, mechanical things; but I sense that if one day you should fathom it, then you will be that much closer to your destiny. In Open-to-the-Sky there was upon a time an elder who was a mathematician. He is dead now, but what is that for a barrier? Perhaps you should seek him out.

'Maybe I will.' Nathan was grateful.

Finally he spoke to the one who would miss him the most, Rogei, and discovered himself incapable of even a small white deception. This will be my last visit to the Cavern before I leave,' he told him. 'And I don't think I'll be back.'

I know it, the other answered, trying to make light of it. Only think of me now and then; reach out with your mind and… who knows? I might be there. But if you can't speak to me, try speaking to Him Who Listens, for I feel sure He would listen to you. As for what Shaeken told you: will you seek out this mathematician? I think you must, for I am a philosopher and believe a man should follow his destiny.

Til probably seek him out,' Nathan nodded.

Also, Rogei said, there is that which you should know. In your time here you've proved yourself a friend, to both living and dead alike, and I have tried to be the same to you. I have spoken to the dead of the Szgany on your behalf, to tell them what an opportunity they have missed. Alas, only mention your powers, they withdraw. For whatever reasons, they are afraid of you.

'I knew that,' said Nathan.

The reason is simple: the dead have always feared necromancy, and now that the Wamphyri are back in the land they fear it more than ever. Somehow, they associate you with necromancy. Now… they will no longer speak to me! But you Szgany have a saying: 'like father, like son'? Well, I kept reading that thought in their minds before they closed me out. And so I am given to wonder — I hesitate to ask — but could it be, perhaps, that your father did something to alienate the Szgany dead, which now causes them to shun you?

'My father, Hzak Kiklu?' Nathan frowned. 'But he was just a man, murdered by the Wamphyri like so many before and since. Why, I never even knew him… I wasn't born… what could he have done?'

Rogei's baffled shrug. I could only try; I failed; I know no more. However, there is one other matter on which I would advise you.

'I will always value your advice."

Nathan, I know you have put this thing from your mind. The elders have not mentioned it; the subject has never come up; men are wise to leave well enough alone. But the fact is that when you needed someone I came to you. Your power goes beyond simply speaking to the dead. Do you understand me?

'I think so, yes. What is your advice?'

Simply this: beware what you call up to a semblance of life, Nathan, for some things may be harder to put down..

Nathan wasn't sure he did understand, not fully, but he thanked Rogei anyway. And then he said goodbye…