Running for it will simply delay things, he answered.
So? Panic was rising in her like the wind off Starside.
So let's give it our best shot right here and now!
Overhead, a deadly arrowhead formation stooped on Karen's warrior like hawks to a pigeon. Harry ordered his flyer, Stay with your mistress, then rolled from his saddle through a hastily conjured Möbius door... and emerged in the next moment on the scaled back of Karen's warrior, where he could almost taste the hot stench of the incoming warriors. That close!
Sideslip! he ordered his startled mount. And conjuring a massive door, he guided the monster through it. The enemy trio slammed together in a snarling knot where Harry had been, but now he came squirting out of the Möbius Continuum far above them - on a level with the armoured flyers of Shaithis and Shaitan!
Even as his eyes met theirs across the gulf of air, so he picked up something of Shaithis's telepathic ranting: You and your damned magic, you ordure of the hell-lands!
Harry was distracted; he'd looked into the scarlet eyes of Shaitan, too, and the Fallen One had looked burningly into his. No hatred in the mind of that great leech, no, not for the Necroscope; only an intense curiosity. Save your curses, he told Shaithis. For this one might yet do us great harm. Then you'll have real reason to curse him. And Harry heard that, too.
Down below, the trio of confused warriors had untangled themselves; their propulsors roared as they commenced climbing again. Two of you, Shaithis called to them. To me, and hurry! But to the third warrior: Get after the woman. You know what to do...
Slimy bastard thing! Harry hurled the thought at Shaithis before realizing it was no great insult. He looked for Karen's flyer and saw it turn out of the rising spiral to follow the mountains east. A pair of warriors - one of which was her own wounded creature - spurted in her wake; they clashed sporadically, fiercely in the sky. Karen's warrior was getting the worst of it, but her flyer was gaining time and distance. For the moment Harry seemed to have lost the giant warrior.
Chancing that Karen was in no immediate danger, he clung to the scales of his monstrous mount and sent it spurting head-on at his enemies. They turned tail and sped out over Starside's plain of boulders, heading roughly towards the broken aeries of the Wamphyri. Now it became apparent that their flyers had the advantage of speed in level flight; seeing that he couldn't hope to catch them this way, Harry conjured a door and guided his warrior through it -
- And emerged directly above the flyers where they streamlined themselves and winged east. Shaithis heard the warrior's howling propulsors, felt its shadow on his back and looked up. The Necroscope's grin was scarlet, furious, as he slammed his mount down on Shaithis's flyer and tried to crush him in his saddle. His target at once hurled himself flat in the hollow of his mount's shoulders. Harry's warrior extended grapples, pincers, retractable jaws, began cutting the flyer to pieces in mid-air; its razor-sharp appendages came dangerously close to Shaithis where he squirmed for his life. Dripping the blood of its torn victim, Harry's warrior lifted up a little, again dashed all of its bulk down on the flyer. And slipping from his saddle to hang from its trappings in the scarlet rain, Shaithis knew his beast was a goner.
Shaitan! he cried out where he dangled.
The great leech flew slightly below and to one side. Jump! he advised, passing directly underneath. Shaithis made to leap for his ancestor's flyer... was thrown off course as for the third time Harry's warrior crashed down on to his mount's back, breaking it. And tumbling past Shaitan, Shaithis found himself in free fall.
It was a while since Shaithis had flown in his own right, but he was in fine fettle and had more than sufficient height. His loose clothes ripped as he flattened himself into a prehistoric, pterodactyl airfoil, and gradually his plummet slowed to a glide. Far to the east he spied a glowing beacon down on the boulder plain and knew it for the Gate to the hell-lands. It made a good marker and he aimed himself in that direction.
The Necroscope had lost him. A dark speck in a darker sky, Shaithis had vanished. But Shaitan remained to be dealt with. Meanwhile, that immemorial father of vampires had drawn ahead; Harry could cover the same distance in the time it took to conjure an equation. He made to do so ... and his warrior was hit from behind! The shock almost tore him loose from the plates of his mount's back. Behind him, that most monstrous warrior of all gripped his creature in crab claws and tore out great chunks of meat from the musculature of its sputtering propulsive vents. Shaitan's other creatures stayed well back to let their far more monstrous cousin get on with its work.
In the last few seconds Karen had linked minds with Harry. She saw his problems and he saw hers: the lesser warrior which Shaithis had sent after her had dispatched her fighting creature and was now closing on her flyer. To Karen, it all seemed ended. Necroscope, it's over! she sent. My mount's a weakling, already winded. There's only myself to blame, for I designed him. I'd head for the furnace lands and a golden death in the rising sun, but doubt if we'd make it. Well, at least I'll go out honourably: a gauntlet against a warrior!
Riding Karen's last creature where its mewling, slavering attacker shredded its way to him, the Necroscope looked out through Karen's eyes.
Her flyer heaved and panted where she drove it south for the great pass, for already its altitude was insufficient to carry it over the peaks. But spurting down on her from above and behind came that monster which Shaithis had ordered: Get after the woman. You know what to do! And directly down below, close to where the gash of the great pass split the mountains... that glaring light? Starside's Gate, of course; Harry would have known it at once, except this aerial view was new to him. In the next moment, turning that view red, the torn carcass of Karen's defeated warrior crashed down and burst into pieces.
And its destroyer was falling on Karen ever faster.
Harry tumbled from his doomed creature's back through a Möbius door, stepped out into the foothills rising up from Starside's portal. The Gate was a fault in the matter of the multiverse, a huge distortion in the fabric of Möbius space-time; but the Necroscope was far enough away that it had little effect. He scanned the wide mouth of the pass where the enemy warrior was playing with Karen's exhausted flyer, forcing it down. A second flyer, riderless, flapped uselessly close by: Harry's mount, which he'd ordered to stay with its mistress.
He took the Möbius route into its saddle and called to Karen: We're not done yet.
She heard him, but so did Shaithis. At the end of his long, fast glide he landed close to the Gate and reformed into his man-shape. And seeing his warrior in the sky where it menaced the flyers and their riders, he ordered it: Bring me the woman - in pieces, if that's the only way!
The warrior's response was immediate: it crashed its bulk down on to Karen's flyer and knocked her half out of the saddle. And while she reeled there and tried to recover her senses and balance both, it put out appendages with hooked claspers and snatched her up. Then, with its propulsors roaring triumphantly, the monster smashed down on the riderless flyer one last time to break its neck. And as Karen's crippled beast spun and tumbled down out of the sky into the pass, so the warrior turned back towards the boulder plain.
Good! Shaithis applauded his beast. Bring her to me.