'You saw the castle back there, the keep?'
'Yes.'
'That's why.'
Jazz glanced back. The cliff-hugging castle must be miles back by now. 'But it was empty, deserted.'
'Maybe, and maybe not. The Wamphyri want me — badly. They're not stupid, anything but. They know I came in through the sphere, the Gate, and they've surely guessed that sooner or later I'd try to get out again that way. At least, I credit them with that much intelligence. It would have been easy for them during the last sundown — during any one of many sundowns — to put a creature in there. There'll be plenty of rooms and corners in there that the sun never touches.'
Jazz shook his head, held up a restraining hand. 'Even if I understood all you just said, which I don't, still I wouldn't know what it has to do with me,' he said.
'In this world,' she answered, 'you're careful how you use ESP. The Wamphyri have it — in many diverse forms — and so to a lesser degree do most of the animals. Only the true men are without it.'
'You mean, if the Wamphyri left something in that castle back there — a creature? — it would have heard your thoughts?' Again Jazz was close to incredulous.
'It might have heard my directed thoughts, yes,' she nodded.
'But that's — ' he stilled his tongue before it could offend her.
'Wolf can hear them,' she said, simply.
'And me?' Jazz gave a snort. 'Does that make me an idiot or something, because I can't hear them?'
'No,' she shook her head. 'Not an idiot, just a true man. You're not an esper. Listen, when I came up this way I heard your thoughts, distant and strange and a little confused. But I didn't dare concentrate on you and check out your identity in case that allowed something else to pick out and identify me! Now that we're in the light of the sun, the pressure's off; but the closer I got to Starside the more careful I had to be. And because I couldn't be sure you weren't Vyotsky, so I challenged you. You said he'd probably have killed me. Maybe he would and maybe not. But then he'd have had to kill Wolf, too, which wouldn't be so easy. And if he had killed me, then he really would be on his own. It was a chance I had to take…'
This time Jazz accepted all she told him; he had to start somewhere, and it seemed the best way to go. 'Listen,' he said. 'Even though I like to think I'm fairly quick on the uptake, still there's a lot you'll need to explain about what you've already told me. But before that there's one thing I'd better know right now: do I need to guard my thoughts?'
'Here in the sunlight? No. On Starside, yes — all the time — but with a bit of luck we'll never see Starside again.'
'OK,' Jazz nodded. 'Now let's get to more immediate things. Where's this cave you told me about? I really think we should rest-up. And at the same time I can do a better job on your feet. Also, you look like you could use a more substantial meal.'
She smiled at him, the first time she'd done it. Jazz wished he could see her in good old down-to-earth daylight. 'I'll tell you something,' she said. 'I long ago learned not to listen in on people's thoughts — they can be nice, I'll grant you, but when they're not nice they can be very unpleasant indeed. We sometimes think things we could never express in words. Me, too. Among espers it was a general rule that we observe each other's privacy. But I've been lonely a long time — for a mind I could relate to, I mean. A mind from my own world. So while I've been hearing you talking, well, I've been hearing other things, too. When I've grown used to you, then I'll make an effort not to intrude. I'm trying even now, but… I can't help scanning you.'
Jazz frowned. 'So what was I thinking?' he said. 'I mean, I only said we should rest-up.'
'But you meant I should rest-up. Me, Zek Foener. That's nice of you, and if I really needed it I'd accept. But you've come quite a long way yourself. And anyway, I'd prefer to keep moving until we're right out of the pass. Another four miles or so and we're out of it. But as you can see, the sun is just about to touch the eastern wall.
It's a slow process, but in something less than an hour and a half the pass will be in darkness again. On Sunside it's still sunup for, oh, twenty-five hours yet, and the evening is just as long. After that… then we'll be holed up somewhere.' She shivered.
Jazz knew nothing about ESP, but he did read people very well. 'You're a hell of a brave woman,' he said; and then he wondered why, for passing compliments was something he wasn't good at and didn't usually do. But he knew he'd meant it. So did she, but she didn't agree with him.
'No, I'm not,' she said seriously. 'I think I maybe used to be, but now I'm a dreadful coward. You'll find out why soon enough.'
'Before then,' Jazz said, 'you'd better fill me in on more immediate hazards — assuming they are immediate. You said something about the Sunsiders — Travellers? — being after you? And something about the Wamphyri being desperate to get hold of you? Now what's all that about?'
'Sunsiders.'' she gasped, but not in answer. She stiffened to a halt, glanced wildly all about, especially in the shadows cast by the eastern cliffs. Her hand went to her brow, stroked it with trembling fingers. Wolf's hackles rose; he laid back his ears and offered a low, throaty growl.
Jazz took his SMG off safe. It was already cocked. He checked that the magazine was firmly seated in its housing. 'Zek?' he husked.
'Arlek.' she whispered. And: 'That's what comes of holding back on my telepathy, for your sake! Jazz, I — '
But she had no time for anything else, for by then they were in the thick of it!
11. Castles — Travellers — The Projekt
Something more than an hour earlier:
Keeping alert for bats, Karl Vyotsky rode his motorcycle across the boulder-strewn plain toward the towering, fantastically carved stacks standing like weird sentinels in the east. It had been his first instinct to make for the pass and the thin sliver of sun he'd seen on the horizon in the high wide 'V of the canyon. But half-way to the mouth of the pass the sun had gone down, leaving only its rays to form a fan of pink spokes on the southern sky.
The mountain range reaching east and west as far as the eyes could see was black in silhouette now, highlighted with patches and slices of gleaming gold where the moon's beams lit on reflective features; but the sky over the mountains was indigo shot with fading shafts of yellow, and since night was obviously falling on this world, Vyotsky preferred the open ground under the moon to the inky blackness of the pass. He had no way of knowing that on the other side of the range, the daylight would last for the equivalent of two of his old days.
And so with his headlight blazing, he had turned back and headed for the stacks instead; and as his eyes had grown accustomed to the moonlight, and as the miles sped by under his now slightly eccentric wheels, so he had gazed at those enigmatic aeries some nine or ten miles east with something more than casual curiosity. Were those lights he could see in the topmost towers? If so, and if there were people up there, what sort of people would they be? While he had been pondering that, then he'd seen the bats. But not the tiny, flying-mice creatures of Earth!
Three of them, each a metre across wing-tip to wing-tip, had swooped on him, causing him to swerve and almost unseating him. The beat of their membrane wings had been a soft, rapid whup-whup-whup, stirring the air with its throbbing. They seemed of the same species as Encounter Four: Desmodus the vampire. Vyotsky didn't know what had attracted them; possibly it had been the roar of his engine, which was loud and strange in the otherwise eerie silence of this place. But when one of the bats cut across his headlight beam -