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  Meanwhile, the old meeting place had filled up, and now there was movement, shouting at the East Gate. Lardis and Andrei were here. But in all this great crowd, never a sign of Misha. Where was she? And where Nathan?

  Nestor picked up the jar, drained it, wiped his mouth on his sleeve. And:

  Tonight! he promised himself. I’ll have it out with Misha tonight. Or I’ll have her tonight, one way or the other. And if there’s anything of a man in Nathan—and if he cares for her at all—maybe then he’ll yelp and bare his teeth!

  Jason had disappeared now, out through the North Gate and into the night, on his way home to Lardis’s cabin on the knoll. But here in Settlement … what was going on? That awful commotion and shouting. And angry, furious shouting, at that! Was it Lardis, bellowing like a stag at the rut? It could only be. His voice was unmistakable.

  And pushing his way through the gathering crowd, Nestor went to see what it was all about…

  II

  Some two hours earlier, eastwards, and not quite twenty miles distant:

  … The Lady Wratha climbed down out of the saddle of her flyer on to a high plateau still warm from the sun’s last rays. Stepping to the rim, she looked down through hooded eyes on the fires of a Szgany town nestling in the lee of the barrier range; looked down on the fires of Twin Fords … and smiled. She smiled with all the delight of a young girl, and lusted after Twin Fords with all the evil of an ancient horror.

  And waiting on the rim of the plateau while her band of circling renegades found landing places on the flat, scrubby expanse of rock behind her, she gazed on Sun-side in the twilight of early evening—a sight unseen by Wamphyri eyes for all of fourteen years—and let her mind drift back a little: to her flight from Turgosheim across the Great Red Waste, all along the spine of these unknown mountains, and deep into Old Starside …

  Unlike Turgo Zolte’s flight in the time of Shaitan the Unborn, Wratha’s had been relatively easy. Where Turgo was pursued and unable to pause for respite, Wratha suffered no such handicap. Which was just as well; her flyers were unused to covering vast distances, and for all her boasting in Vormspire’s great hall, her aerial warriors were mainly untried. Oh, no one could doubt that they were superb engines of destruction, but as for flying skills: there had been no way to put those to the test, not in the skies over Turgosheim.

  In the end, however, little had been left wanting in performance; all of the flyers had made the crossing; only one of the warriors had been lost.

  The plan had been to “refuel” at the western edge of the secondary range of which Turgosheim was a part, then climb as high as possible on thermals out of Sun-side before commencing the long glide westwards. The ceiling would of course be that altitude where the sun’s rays, striking tangentially across the curve of the world, intersected the flight path: not very high initially, for the slow-moving sun had only recently set. Phase two would come when it was calculated that the warriors had expended about half of their energy. At this point they would climb again, to whatever limit the sun and exhaustion permitted, before finally gliding and jetting down into Old Starside.

  The warriors were the main cause for concern. For in the end, having converted much of their own mass into fuel, they might be obliged to draw on their flimsy gas-bladder reserves. Loss of weight would compensate in some small degree, but the equation was still a loser. Lacking energy, buoyancy, and conceivably even will (for while small minds are malleable, their attention span is limited), a fatigued warrior might well gravitate to earth. If and when that was perceived as imminent, the weak one would be sacrificed and torn apart in mid-air, to fuel the rest of them on their way.

  In the event, it was Canker’s creature that paid the price. The energies consumed in its landing at Vormspire—its savage work in the great hall, and the subsequent launching from the spire’s shattered window—all had served to deplete it. Thus, at the apex of the second climb, when the warrior was seen to be failing, then Wratha had ordered its dissolution.

  Canker had raged (naturally, and to no avail), but in any case his protest was an automatic, instinctive reaction, his stance untenable, and resistance inconceivable. And three to one the other warriors had fallen on Canker’s weary creature, dismembering and devouring it in short order. After bone and chitin armour had rained to earth, when all that remained was a thin, skeletal frame drifting at the mercy of the winds, finally the bladders had been drained and the empty rag-thing allowed to spiral down to oblivion.

  And replenished, the group had flown on …

  From time to time the Lady, Lords, and their handful of lieutenants would pull cartilage stoppers from wells drilled in the knuckled backbones of their flyers, and sip sparingly on sustaining spinal fluids …

  They took turns to sleep, half of them nodding in their saddles while the rest controlled the beasts and maintained the course …

  On high, the stars glittered like ice-chips; far below, the Great Red Waste seemed endless; the obscenely flowing shadows of the renegades, however faint, diluted and somehow polluted the starlight where they passed …

  Sundown crept towards sunup and they were anxious…

  Now, time and again, the propulsors of the warriors would sputter warningly, the beasts would falter, and even the most vicious mind-darts would fail to inspire them. Such creatures could never turn on their mistress and masters, of course not, but it was conceivable that eventually they might seek to kill and devour one another …

  Then, distantly but closing, moonlit mountains rose up to greet the inevitable descent—but wider, higher, vaster mountains far than those of Turgosheim—so that Wratha knew this could only be Old Starside. And, south of the towering range, Old Sunside, too.

  All propulsive power stilled now, the wind keened under leather canopies where flyers and warriors alike shaped manta wings and fluttering mantle vanes into gliding aerofoils. And as a thin line of silvery light made a crack on the southern horizon, so they skimmed low and silent over the first peaks of Starside’s eastern range … and spied their first signs of life since leaving Turgosheim!

  There on the north-facing flank, in a stony basin lying midway between the foothills and the rearing mountains proper, a circle of small fires sent up spirals of black smoke. Within the circle, figures capered and made intricate, awkward, apparently aimless leaps and twirls. Sounds of guttural, rhythmic grunting, and the jarring clatter of ceremonial crotalae, rose up with the reek of burning wood and dung.

  Huh. Spiro Killglance, flying close to Wratha, sent her a bitter, scornful thought. Trogs. Two dozen of them, performing their rites.

  Her answering thought was darker, more practical, and much more to the point. Meat.

  The warriors were ordered down: two of them would land between the fires and the mountains, so blocking the route of the trogs back to their cavern homes, and the third would make sure that none escaped into the foothills. Propulsors sputtering into hot, stinking life—with stabilizing vanes extended, and tiny saucer eyes in their bellies swivelling to seek landing sites—the monsters came down bellowing and snorting, eagerly to earth.

  On the ground, the trog ceremonies came to an abrupt halt. Wide black eyes under dark, sloping foreheads scanned the starlit sky, found hideous shapes circling, rapidly descending. For a single moment, mouths gasped and jaws fell open in disbelief. Then, shuffling and lurching in their fashion—their leathery limbs galvanized far beyond the earlier exertions of their esoteric devotions—the trogs scattered. But all too late.

  A dozen flyers sideslipped this way and that, settling to earth like leaves falling in still air, or flat stones sinking in water. They flopped down on springy tendrils which uncoiled from their bellies; and Wratha and her five, and their vampire lieutenants, took battle gauntlets from their beasts’ harnesses and climbed down out of their saddles.

  After that … mayhem!

  Five, maybe six trogs attempted to slip through the murderous Wamphyri noose which threatened to close them in; three made it p
ast the circle of long-necked manta flyers with their vacuously swaying, diamond-shaped heads; two were left, after running the gauntlet between the warriors snuffling and snorting in the shadow of the mountains, to make it home. But out of two dozen, only two. And as for the rest:

  It was slaughter where Wratha’s renegades scythed among them, their gauntlets red in the flying spray of their havoc. Hoarse screams echoed through the night, became gurgles, guttered into silence like candles snuffed out. It was the work of minutes, three at most, which in the end saw a terrified silence fall over Star-side; a silence broken only by the panting of a trog priestess, grabbed up alive by Canker Canison. Rabid with lust, he tore her rags from her and took her three times in quick succession—once in each opening—before tearing out her throat and crushing her skull. Then, draining blood from her wounds while her heart still feebly pumped, he glared at the others where they watched him. So, she’d been a trog. She was still female, wasn’t she?

  The rest was routine. Wamphyri, lieutenants, warriors and flyers alike, all took their fill. But shortly, when the edge was off their hunger: Spiro Killglance paused to wipe his mouth on his sleeve, turning it scarlet, and gruntingly inquired, “What now?”

  “Westward,” Wratha answered at once, dabbing a square of coloured Szgany cloth to the perfect bow of her girl’s lips. “The sun will be up soon, and we need to find a place.”

  “Then we should go carefully,” Gorvi the Guile’s voice was oily, insinuating, “and spy out the way before us. For if Maglore is wrong and the Old Wamphyri lie in wait—”

  But Wratha only shook her head. “No. For all my detestation of that old thought-thief, still Maglore is right. When did you last see trogs out in the open in Turgosheim? Speaking for myself, never! Because we, the Wamphyri, are in Turgosheim. But here? … they take no precautions but cavort grotesquely by the light of their fires, and when we fall on them flutter in every direction, like Sunside chickens! No, there are no Wamphyri in Old Starside. Not until now, at least.”

  Replete, then they had rested an hour before mounting up to fly west. The warriors, sated but not glutted, were ordered into a reverse arrowhead formation, one on each flank and the third to the rear. And thus the Wamphyri returned to the long forsaken territories of the Wamphyri…

  As time had passed and the air grew brighter moment by moment, so the jagged shapes and twining contours of the barrier range had stood out that much clearer, until finally the rays of the rising sun had lit golden on the very highest peaks. And as Wratha’s anxiety had risen up in her again, so she’d seen Karenstack, the last aerie. But scattered all about that lone fang—lying there in total disarray, like dismembered stone giants with their stumps scorched as by colossal fires—she also saw the vast sprawls of rubble which were all that remained of the other ancient aeries.

  But … the one stack remained.

  And before the sun could burn her renegades, Wratha led them into the hugely frozen yawn of a cavern launching bay as big as the largest Turgosheim manse, which opened in the east facing wall of the stack two thousand and more feet above Starside. And dismounting there in that high, empty, echoing place:

  “See to the warriors and flyers,” she had instructed the lieutenants, “then see to yourselves. I don’t know how far the sun will rise; it may light upon half of the aerie, for all I know! So find rooms for yourselves—without windows! Or if they have windows, be sure they face north.”

  Then, with her five following on behind, she had set out to explore the rest of the stack.

  They climbed.

  The aerie seemed to go up forever, and Wratha tried not to show the awe she felt. She knew she could house five hundred thralls and lieutenants in this upper third of the stack alone! And below, where the great honeycombed butte widened into its base?

  Why, given a hundred, two hundred sundowns, the place could be filled with an army and stand impregnable! With its great height, it was a giant watchtower on all Starside, which none could approach unseen—especially not from the east. For Wratha had no doubt but that they would come one night, out of Turgosheim to track her down. Except they’d be weary, and their blood thin, and their warriors spawned of feeble, watered-down stuff. While she … she would be Wratha! Wratha the Risen, but risen higher than ever Maglore, Vormulac, Devetaki and all the others together could ever imagine.

  So she pictured it; but for now, all she had was this aching, echoing, empty shell of a stack.

  Dust lay thick; the bone water pipes had come apart in places, and likewise the complicated gas-channelling systems; cartilage stairways were creaking and dangerous, and required earliest possible attention. At windows cut through solid rock, black bat-fur drapes were all fallen into moulder, and in the empty storerooms rotting cocoons had long since slumped into sticky, molten-silk puddles. The great red spiders were still here, however, to spin more cocoons as they were required.

  As for the workshops: they were in good order, and their hollowed vats huge as any in Mangemanse or Suckspire. With the assistance of Canker and Vasagi, crafty masters of metamorphism both, Wratha could have good stuff brewing here in no time. But the basement granaries would be empty, the gas-beast chambers and methane pits reduced to so much dust and bone-shard, and the water in the wells lively with all manner of creeping and swimming things. Oh yes, it would be a long time before the stack could be put back to rights. But when it was, what a fortress then!

  And glancing at her companions through half-shuttered eyes where they gawped and strutted in the vast rooms of the upper levels, Wratha had thought: Mine, all of this—eventually. Except she kept the thought to herself, of course.

  The upper levels …

  At first sight of them, then Wratha had known that this was a Lady’s stack, that its last inhabitant had been female. For one thing, there were mirrors here: plates of gold hammered perfectly flat, polished to a high sheen, giving warmth and life to the features which they reflected. And they had been female features,certainly; for Wratha knew that while all of the Wamphyri Lords were vain, only the vainest would ever adorn his walls with such as these.

  No, for generally mirrors were deemed dangerous things, which in the olden times had been known to reflect death (in the form of sunlight), as easily as life! Long ago, in Turgosheim’s Sunside, Wratha had even owned a silver mirror; this despite that all such lethal devices and metals had been forbidden to the Szgany since time immemorial. Well, and now she could look upon her face again, admiring once more the beauty she’d clung to for over a century. But who last had looked in these mirrors, she wondered? And had she been beautiful, too?

  She had been slim, beyond a doubt! For in the biggest bedroom of the largest suite on the penultimate level, there Wratha found several dresses, or what had been dresses. They were falling into decay now, but if Wratha had been alone and in the mood … she was sure they’d suit her figure perfectly well. So, she had been shapely, this Lady, and young; or having all the outward trappings of youth, at least.

  Her bed was still here. Built high and wide, of great heavy slates, its polished wooden steps and carved headboard remained intact. Wooden rails, too, suspended from the high ceiling on chains, with golden rings which once held sheerest Szgany curtains. But all gone now, turned to dust, and ropes of cobwebs hanging in their place. Likewise the bed’s covers: all blotched with lichens and fluffy mould.

  As for the rest of the room:

  There was an onyx water basin, with bone pipes descending from the roof’s exterior gutters, or from some long-shrivelled siphoneer’s place; narrow shelves of fretted cartilage, filled with all manner of worthless knick-knacks and baubles under an inch of dust, Szgany stuff mainly; airing cupboards with gas jets below, and other pipes leading off to heat a great stone bath … big enough for two?

  With whom had she shared it? Wratha wondered, allowing herself a smile. Or was she a Lady in every respect? But no, for Wratha knew all about Wamphyri “Ladies”. This one had not stinted herself but had taken pleasu
re in all her little luxuries. This one had lived!

  Sniffing the air as she moved through the cavernous apartments, Wratha had felt ever more at home here; but at the same time she’d felt that the five with her were more and more like alien invaders of her privacy. Until at last:

  “Out of here!” she’d rounded on them. “This is my place. All of these upper levels which we’ve explored, they’re mine.”

  “What?” Gorvi the Guile had exploded. “Are you insane? Why, there’s room here for all of us! Our lieutenants, too, and all the thralls we care to muster!”

  For all that his words were snarled, the Guile’s voice was oily as ever. Tall, slender, and with the dome of his head shaven except for a single central lock with a knot hanging to the rear; always dressed in black, so that the contrast of his sallow flesh made him look fresh risen from death; with eyes so deeply sunken in their sockets they were little more than a crimson glimmer, yet shifty for all that—this was Gorvi. He was sinister, but who among the Wamphyri was not? And he cowed Wratha not at all.

  “My lieutenants!” She wrinkled her nose and glowered at him. “And all the thralls I care to muster! But… did I hear you call me insane?” Now she also glared at the brothers Wran the Rage and Spiro Killglance. “But madness is their speciality, surely?” And, redirecting the blaze of her scarlet eyes to Canker Canison where he prowled like a dog, sniffing the floor. “Nor am I too certain of him!”

  “Now hold with these insults!” cried Wran, his eyes flaring dangerously, but not without a certain shrewd intelligence. “For at best they’re a blind—eh, Wratha? And Gorvi’s right: we all should have a say in this.”

  “No!” Wratha turned on him, on all five of them. “Now you hold, all of you, and listen! I was the one who schemed and plotted, and drew you all together, and brought you here out of Turgosheim unscathed. Why, but for me you’d be skulking in your hovels still. Mangemanse, indeed! Suckspire! Madmanse! My place was the best of the lot—a worthy spire—and so I lost the most. Well, now I’ve regained it. So here’s how it will be: