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  Then, as quickly as it had come, the vision passed, leaving Lardis to shiver again, breathe again, and remember again his vow …

  “What now?” Andrei Romani grunted, but on a rising note. His attention was riveted on the Gate.

  “Eh?” Lardis was drawn from his reverie.

  “Fires!” Peder Szekarly gasped. His young eyes were that much sharper, keener. “And some movement down there, close to the Gate. See, the sudden blazing up casts shadows. But things that big … can only be warriors!”

  “The Wamphyri are camped there, aye,” Lardis’s eyes had narrowed under the frowning overhang of his brow. “The Lords, their flyers, their warriors. But why are they leaving it so late? Sunup is coming. They should be heading for Karenstack, before the first rays strike through the great pass. What’s their business down there, so close to the sphere Gate?” He screwed up his eyes, vainly trying to make out those details which distance had forbidden them. Vainly, and perhaps mercifully, too.

  “Look” Kirk Lisescu’s voice was no more than a tremor in the gradually brightening air. They saw where he pointed: the timber-line some hundreds of feet below their vantage point, but full of motion now as The Dweller’s entire wolf pack came bounding in a silent flood up through the trees! They headed for the high crags, headed west, headed in any direction as long as it was away from the Gate, the Wamphyri, and their bonfires!

  “Now what—?” Andrei began—but Lardis grasped his arm and shut him off.

  “Get down!” Lardis gasped, hurling himself out from under the tree’s sparse branches and diving behind upthrusting crags. The seer in him had surfaced at last; he knew that whatever was coming … was already on its way!

  As a single, brilliant, prolonged flash of lightning lit the peaks, so Andrei and Kirk joined Lardis where he crouched down, hugging the naked rock. And as thunder played a booming, lingering drum-roll across the sky, so the three heard Peder Szekarly’s croaked question: “But what is it?” Peder had been the last to leave the gnarled tree; he made no attempt to seek cover; he stood trembling, looking down on Starside through a jagged gap in the rocks.

  From where Lardis crouched, he couldn’t see Peder, didn’t know that his young friend stood exposed. “I don’t know what it is,” he finally answered, “but I saw it—felt it—like a burst of brilliant light, searing my eyes, my soul!”

  “The lightning?” Peder didn’t understand.

  At last Lardis looked up and saw him standing there, and knew that the thing of his premonition, whatever, was almost upon them! “Peder, get down!” he cried.

  Too late.

  Down on Starside’s boulder plain, the sphere Gate disappeared in a LIGHT which ate it in a moment, a light to sear a man’s eyes, his soul, as Lardis had said. But it was much more than that, more powerful than that, more terrible than that. In the smallest fraction of a second it leaped the gap between and shone on Peder. Only for a moment, but long enough. Smoke leapt from him. He screamed, clutched at his face, tottered back away from the gap in the rocks. Even as he stumbled, a giant’s hand seemed to slap at him, hurling him down!

  In the next moment there commenced such a howling of torn earth, riven rock, crazed winds … it was like the combined hissing, mewling, and bellowing of every warrior the Wamphyri had ever spawned! And as the sky turned red over Starside and the frightened clouds went scurrying, so Lardis looked out—because he had to know, had to see.

  And what he saw …!

  It was as if something of the hell-lands themselves had erupted through the sphere Gate. Which was as close to the truth as Lardis or anyone else might ever guess, except perhaps a handful of men a universe away, who knew the truth in its entirety.

  For the Gate itself was no longer visible, only a mighty mushroom of frothy white and dirty grey, shot through with red and orange fires, boiling for the sky. Already its billowing dome towered high as the mountains, and even now its stem was leaning towards the Icelands, as if bowed down by the weight of its roiling head.

  Lardis’s jaw fell open; he mouthed unheard, unremembered things into the warm wind off Starside, that demon breath which whipped his hair back and hurled hot grit in his face. And as the furnace blast died away he shielded his eyes against the tracery of lightnings that leaped and crackled between the incredible mushroom and the boiling earth.

  Then, hearing Andrei and Kirk calling to him, he pulled himself together and went to them where they crouched beside Peder. Miraculously, the youth had closed his eyes in the moment of the fireball; though the skin of his face, neck, hands was badly seared, his sight was returning with each passing second. Clutching at his leader’s hand, he gasped, “Lardis, Lardis! It was … it was —”

  “I know,” Lardis nodded. “It was hell!”

  Later, Peder’s hair would fall out and his gums and fingernails bleed, and when his face grew new skin it would always be white. But at least he would seem to recover, for a while, and be the whole man again. However that might be, he would die six years later, by which time his appearance would be as grey and gnarly as the aspect of an ancient. Nor would there be heirs to survive him …

  In the wild woods to the west of Settlement, in the predawn silence of sunup, old Jasef Karis had dreamed his last dream and now tried to rouse himself, shake himself awake, stand up. But something was desperately wrong; his arms hurt as if they were cramped, and there was a grinding pain in his chest. It was as much as he could do to open his eyes.

  Above him, Jasef saw the oiled skin which Nana had draped over low branches like an awning, to keep the dawn rains from his wrinkled hide. Except he’d rolled to one side in his sleep and so lay uncovered, drenched and shivering. The way he felt—hot on the inside, cold out, yet sweating from the pain of the thing in his chest—he suspected that the dawn light in the green canopy overhead would be the last he’d ever see. It must be the end of him, yes, for he had never felt like this before and didn’t much want to feel it again.

  But first he must tell someone about his dream. He must tell… Nana, of course!

  His dream. His dream of—

  —A corpse, smouldering, with its fire-blackened arms flung wide, steaming head thrown back as in the final agony of death, tumbling end over end into a black void shot through with thin neon bars or ribbons of blue, green, and red light; indeed descending or retreating into this tunnel of streamers. A tortured thing, yes, but dead now from all of its torments and no longer suffering, unknown and unknowable as the weird things of dreams often are. And yet… there had been something morbidly familiar about it, so that Jasef had wished he could look closer at that endlessly rotating, silently screaming, scorched and blistered face.

  And when his dream had drifted him closer—then Jasef had seen, and finally he had known. Had known who, and believed he also knew what.

  After that:

  The corpse’s gyrating flight into eternity—through this alien continuum of green, blue and crimson bars—had speeded up, leaving Jasef behind. But then, in the moment after the thing had sped away and disappeared—

  —An explosion of golden light in the distant haze, where the corpse had been! And a rush of golden splinters like living darts, speeding towards Jasef and past him, each blinking out as it escaped out of this unknowable place into other, more real times and places.

  That was when the scene had changed:

  To Nona’s four-year-old twins, wrapped together in a blanket under a tree, with a roof of oiled skins just like Josef’s to keep the rain off. And suddenly—appearing out of nowhere—one of the golden darts, which hovered undecided, first over one twin and then the other. At which the pair stirred in their sleep, which had seemed to decide the matter. Hissing his horror, Jasef had seen the dart lance down, to enter into the head of one of them! Except there was no scar, no blood, nothing but a smile spreading on the face of the sleeping innocent!

  And: “Innocent?” Jasef had wondered, like a memory from some earlier dream, some previous time. “Still innocent?”


  Which was when he had awakened, or tried to, only to discover himself bound by these pains like tight thongs across his chest and limbs. But he knew now that indeed he was awake, and also that he must pass on his dream, his vision, while yet he might.

  He tried to call out for Nana, and couldn’t, for the pain wouldn’t let him. His cry came out the merest gasp. Well then, and so he must simply lie here and listen to the first birds calling, and wait until Nana came to him.

  But he hoped she wouldn’t keep him waiting too long …

  Only a moment earlier, Nana Kiklu had woken up. But she was some little distance away and so failed to hear Jasef’s gasping. There had been a noise—the dull, distant booming of thunder, perhaps?—and a little later one of the twins had come tottering, rubbing at his eyes, on the point of tears. Obviously he’d been nightmaring, or else would not have left his bed for his mother’s. Small as they were, Nana’s twins preferred sleeping alone.

  Pulling him down under her blanket, giving him her warmth, Nana had comforted him: “Oh, dear! There, there,” and stroked his hair. Then, still half-asleep, she’d automatically fumbled for the small leather strap he wore on his left wrist. It was Nana’s way of identifying her babies in the dead of night: Nestor’s was a plain band, a simple strip of leather joined with a few strong stitches, while Nathan’s band had a half-twist. Now, recognizing the child as he snuggled closer, feeling the pounding of his little heart, she asked:

  “What was it, eh?” She hugged him closer still. “A dream? A bad dream?”

  The forest was waking up; the birds were filling the air with their dawn chorus; light came down in hazy beams through the trees. Sunup, and all was well. And yet … something felt wrong. It was in Nana’s bones: a gnawing ache, a nagging concern. But for what?

  “Mama?” The child in her arms was almost back to sleep.

  “Yes?”

  “My … my daddy …” he said. And that was something he’d never said before.

  “Shhh!” she said. “Shhh!” And to herself, perhaps a little bitterly: Your daddy’s on Starside, asleep in the arms of the Lady Karen, where they hide from the light of the new day.

  “Dead,” the child mumbled, where he snuggled to her breast. One word, but such a word! It filled Nana’s veins with ice.

  “What?” she questioned him. “Dead? Is something dead?”

  “Is he?” came the not-quite-awake question-answer, freezing her blood anew. “Is he—my daddy—dead?”

  Nana knew she wouldn’t sleep again and so got up. There in the dawn glade she found Jasef Karis sprawled on his back, eyes glazed, dew dripping from his cold nose, and believed she now understood what her small son had tried to tell her. He had not been talking about the daddy he’d never known (and couldn’t possibly know), but the old seer, the old mentalist, Jasef.

  But far to the east and across the peaks, an omen!

  The boiling sky over Starside was black, and the bellies of its clouds flickered red with reflected fires …

  PART TWO:

  Looking Further Back, and Scanning Forward

  I

  This much has been told:

  Shaitan, first of the Wamphyri, remembered neither mother nor father, nor yet understood his own genesis. To him it was as if he had simply sprung into being, full grown, with a will but no memories of his own to mention. Following which he had fallen, or been thrown, to earth; but fallen, on this occasion, to “earth” as opposed to Earth. In any event, he discovered himself upon the surface of one of many worlds, in one of the many universes of light. And dimly (and quickly fading in the eye of his mind), he remembered something of … of an expulsion.

  The world into which he had fallen was in one sense an old world, and in another a new one. Recently it had suffered calamity: a Black Hole, losing most of its mass and deteriorating to a Grey Hole, had likewise fallen out of space and time and settled here, reshaping the planet. But where that had been a calculable disaster, the disaster which was Shaitan would be quite incalculable.

  From him would spring an order of beings whose nature was such as to threaten not one but two worlds, filling the myths and legends of both with dread and uttermost horror. For Shaitan was a vampire.

  And yet, when he fell (or was thrown out), he was not yet a vampire. That was still to come: a matter of choice, of exercising his own free will, his human curiosity. And this is how it came about…

  Starting into awareness, Shaitan cried out…!

  It was the shock of consciousness cloaking an intelligence previously bereft, will without knowledge inhabiting a mind wiped clean. And as his cry echoed into silence, so he discovered himself kneeling at the edge of stagnant water, with his naked image mirrored in scummy depths. But seeing that he was beautiful, he was proud.

  Standing upright, Shaitan saw that he could walk; and in the twilight of a dim, misty dawn he moved by the edge of the dank, rank waters, which were a swamp. And seeing how dismal and lonely was this world where he had fallen, or into which he had been cast, he assumed himself a sinner and that the place must be his punishment.

  Such assumptions defined not only Shaitan’s intelligence but also his nature: that he instinctively understood such concepts as sin and punishment. And he thought his crime must be that he was beautiful, which was his pride working … which was in fact his crime! For he saw beauty as might, and might as right, and right as he willed it to be.

  Which was a will he would impose.

  So thinking, Shaitan moved away from the rank waters and went to impose his will upon this world. But behind him the mud boiled and spattered, so that he paused to look back where black bubbles came bursting to the surface. And with the parting of the weeds and the scum, Shaitan saw a figure floating up into view.

  In its body it was bloated and burned, but its face was almost whole. And in that face was an innocence beyond comprehension. Shaitan knew it for an omen, but of what? He had will; he could wait and discover what would be, or move on, according to his will. Also, he suspected that this thing in the swamp harboured evil; why else would such a blackened, blistered thing be here, in this emerging dawn world? For again it was Shaitan’s instinct to know that all things are balanced, and that for any measure of good there may be an equal measure of evil.

  For a moment he stood still, as at a crossroads, then … turned back and knelt again beside the swamp. For his will was that he would know this evil.

  He gazed upon a face he had never known, which he would not recall to memory for numberless years, and sensed nothing of moment except that he tempted fate, which he was proud and glad to do. And as the beasts of this dawn world came to the water to drink, and as the mists were drawn up from the swamp, so the Fallen One, Shaitan the Unborn, gazed upon his own future where the weeds anchored it in scum and slime.

  In a while the scorched, bloated limbs and trunk of the corpse split open and small black mushrooms clustered there, growing out of the rotting flesh and opening their gilled caps. They released red spores into the twilight before the dawn, which rose up and drifted on the warm reek of the swamp. Shaitan saw the clouds of drifting spores, and of his own free will breathed them into his lungs, the better to know of them … his last act of any innocence—

  —At least in this incarnation.

  All of this has been told before. What follows has not been told: it is the tale of Shaitan’s travels and travails, his triumphs and torments from this time forwards …

  Shaitan travelled east through the foothills of gradually rising mountains. He sought for that thing or those things upon which to impose his will. The swamps had not been to his liking, nor the boggy region between the swamps and the foothills. The creatures of these places, while seeming largely unintelligent, had yet been wary to a fault!

  Sunlight had first come streaming, then blasting from the south, where a golden orb had climbed gradually into the sky to commence a low, slow arc eastwards. Its rays had dried out the land around and lured clinging fogs up from the s
odden earth. In those places where there was little or no shade, the yellow rays had irritated Shaitan, reddening and roughening his skin.

  After that—forever after that, in every way—he would always walk in the shadows. And just as he chose to stay on the left-hand side of the mountains, away from the sun, so would he choose a dark and sinistral path through life. He did not know it but he had ever chosen that route, even in worlds before this one.

  When Shaitan was thirsty, he drank. The sweet water quenched his thirst but there was no satisfaction in it. When he hungered, he ate grasses, herbs, fruits. They filled him but … the hunger remained. Within his body a red spore had taken root, forming the nucleus of that which had hungers of its own.

  He was unclothed but unashamed. Knowing that he was beautiful, he would display himself; except he would prefer to make himself known to others of his own design, made more nearly in his mould. For the creatures of the swamps and foothills were other than he was and innocent, so that all of them had fled before him. Therefore, he was unable to impose his will upon them, because of their innocence.

  And so Shaitan journeyed east across a land where the northern sky was dark blue to black and full of the flicker of stars and the cold weave of weird auroras; but always in the south the golden orb of the sun blazed perilously in the pale blue heavens, so that he must keep himself to the shadows in order not to be burned. And he called all of the land lying to the south of the foothills “Sunside”, despising it greatly, and all the land to the north “Starside”, claiming it for his own. And where finally the foothills grew into mountains like a wall on his right hand, shutting out the sun’s harmful rays, there Shaitan discovered creatures which were not afraid of him but merely curious—at first.

  For Shaitan’s part, he was likewise curious, even astonished. These creatures were not human, yet seemed full of an almost-human purpose and intelligence. They communicated among themselves, however witlessly, in a near-inaudible range which Shaitan sensed rather than heard (for the spore-spawned Thing within him was growing, and causing a strange intensification of his five mundane senses …). They were small, lowly, weak creatures, which yet commanded aerial flight: a skill far in excess of Shaitan’s own meagre, as yet unformed talents.