'Nestor!' Nathan gasped, as the flyer's head passed over him and its belly pouch yawned. He smelled its stench… and in the same moment heard Lardis's yelclass="underline"
'Get down!' A split second later and the old Lidesci came skidding on his heels and his rump, collided with Nathan and sent him flying. The two of them rolled and tumbled; but relentless as a shadow and almost as close, the flyer followed after. They hit the bottom of the slope, and Lardis was first on his feet. Growling like a bear he turned his weapon on the flyer and discharged it pointblank into the creature's eyes — once, twice!
The thing screamed high and shrill, lashed its head left and right, and its wings pounded frantically, uselessly at the air. Then, as a wingtip struck the slope, the beast tilted to one side, which threatened to unseat its rider. Yelling like a madman, Lardis reloaded and aimed at the vampire Lord.
And even if Nathan would wish it otherwise, there was nothing he could do about the rest of it. Dazed and still trying to climb to his feet, he heard the twin shotgun blasts and felt Nestor's agony! And again he and Lardis were bowled over as the stricken flyer's thrusters uncoiled downwards and drove it out and away into the night, with Nestor lolling and jerking in the saddle.
By now Sunside lay under a blanket of mist, and because the main body of Wamphyri hunters were in the east, it could only be a natural mist rising from the woods and rivers of the region. Nestor's flyer dipped low and tore a soft hole in the stuff, which quickly filled in behind it.
Lardis was yelling, 'I got the bastard! I got him in the eyes, like I told you! If my aim had been better I could have taken his head off!'
The mist rolled up and covered them, and passed up the slope. And despite that Lardis had been talking about Nestor, there was only one thought in Nathan's mind now: 'Misha?'
'Come on,' Lardis growled. 'She fell into one of our own pits. And that other flyer may still be around, might even have landed!' Reloading his shotgun, he headed up the slippery scree slope. But even as they began climbing, so Zahar came gliding from above and fell on them. It was as swift as that: the mist opened and the flyer was there.
Lardis got off a shot before he was buffeted aside. He was on his feet again in a moment, aiming at a nodding, mist-wreathed head, squeezing the trigger. And the gun blew up in his hands! One of the old cartridges, a bad one, had finally let him down. Blown backwards and off his feet, he waited for the shock to pass, then struggled upright and looked for Nathan… and saw nothing but the mist. But in a little while he found the wind to climb the slope.
Misha was waiting at the top, shivering and dishevelled but otherwise unharmed. She took Lardis's hand and helped him up, then grabbed him and looked into his eyes. He could only lower his head and look away… EPILOGUE
Unconscious from the flyer's gases, Nathan lolled in Zahar's arms where the vampire lieutenant carried him across the wormhole-riddled terrain surrounding the hell-lands Gate and tossed him down on top of its low crater wall. Beyond that wall, snug as an eye in its socket, the vastly glaring Gate shone with a cold white light, causing Zahar to lower his eyelids half-way shut and put up a hand against the dazzle.
He found a toe-hold and stepped up onto the wall, picked Nathan up and paced forward to the very 'skin' of the shining hemisphere of light. There he paused, looked at the man in his arms and shrugged. There seemed very little of a 'great enemy' in this one, and as any vampire would know, there were better uses for good Szgany flesh than this! On the other hand, his master's warning couldn't be ignored; Zahar dared not fail him who had sworn to return. For Nestor was a Lord and crafty necromancer, while Zahar was only a lieutenant.
Well, time now to get it over with. He cradled Nathan like a child in one arm, and slapped his face until his eyes flickered open. 'What?' Nathan groaned, rolling his head and seeing first Zahar's awful face, and then the blinding light spilling from the Gate! The hell-lands portal, which he knew at once, glaring like… like 'a great blind eye'!
Zahar grinned at him and said: 'Courtesy of the Lord Nestor. Whoever you are, this world has seen the last of you. But I hope they make you welcome in hell!' And so saying he spilled Nathan out of his arms into the glare, which absorbed him in a moment, effortlessly and without a sound, like an eye blinking away the irritation of a dust mote…
Far to the east in a blocked pit in Madmanse, the gigantic monstrosity which was Eygor Killglance lay where he had died, slumped against a nitre-streaked wall, and groaned a vast and terrible deadspeak groan. He was dead, the physical Eygor, but his mind of course went on. Except there was no one now to know it, not with any certainty. For like the guttering of a distant candle jn the ultimate darkness of death, Eygor had seen Nathan's light go out. Which could mean only one thing: that the Necroscope was no more.
In the higher levels of the promontory, called Runemanse, perhaps Maglore 'heard' something of Eygor's groaning; perhaps he 'felt' something of Nathan's passing. At any rate he rushed to his room of meditation and placed his trembling fingers on the sigil shaped in gold, and let his mind drift out from Turgosheim, then hurtle west at the unthinkable speed of thought, which is instantaneous. But the sigil was lifeless now, merely a strangely twisted mass of heavy metal, and Maglore's 'window on an unknown world' was closed. It was weird, because even though Nathan's aura was gone, the feeling persisted that he was not dead. What, then? Undead? Locked in that metamorphic sleep which precedes the vampire condition? Had he finally succumbed to the seduction of vampirism? Did Wratha or one of hers have him? And Maglore sighed. Better perhaps if he had made him his own after all…
In all the dreaming places of the Thyre, suddenly the darkness was that much deeper. For the ancients also knew of Nathan's passing from this world, but they knew a little more than the rest: that he was not dead. For if so he would be one with them, an honoured member of an elite, 'extinct' society, where his deadspeak voice would always be welcome. No, he was not dead but removed from them, taken away, transported to a place from which no one ever returned.
The teeming dead of Sunside knew it, too, and felt safer for it, however shamefully. But men reap what they sow, and in the child there is always that of the father. Perhaps Nathan had posed a threat, and perhaps not. Whatever, it made no difference now for he was gone. And of all of them who had passed into Sunside's air and earth, only Jasef Karis missed him and wished that he had spoken to him.
But not a one of them — not Eygor, Maglore, the Thyre, or all the dead of Sunside put together — could ever have dreamed that they would hear Nathan's deadspeak voice again, or see his candle burning in the darkness as before..
Nestor's awakening was slow and painful. His eyes were burning, his back had been very nearly broken, but his mind… was free of numbers! And with that, it all came back to him:
… His flyer, blinded, with its face half shot away and its tiny brain peppered with poisonous silver pellets. Nestor, too, reeling in the saddle with sightless eyes, his face a raw red mess and consciousness slipping as he fought to command his crippled beast up, away, back to Starside. He remembered a long low glide, and his inability to impress himself on the flyer's mind. The wonder was that the beast had stayed aloft so long.
.. Then the crash: the whiplash as he was hurled from the flyer's back, his body somersaulting, smashing against the bole of a great tree, falling through branches which snapped under his weight, down to the forest's floor. And the darkness.
Following which: Ministering hands? Kindness? Ointments and bandages, to assist in the healing process which Nestor's leech had already commenced? Brief bouts of consciousness, in which he had known that people moved about him, caring for him, even feeding him a vile soup, which his body accepted readily enough despite that it was not his usual fare. It could only mean that he had made it back to Starside, where Wratha had found him crashed among the great hardy firs of the barrier range below the tree-line, and brought him into the last aerie.