they found signs of a ferocious confrontation: the lingering stench of furiously expended gases, scales of armour plate torn from some huge creature's underbelly, massive clots of dark red plasma drenching the hardy mountain heather. That was all for the moment — enough to draw their nerves taut as the wire on a loaded crossbow.
But keeping low and moving silent as shadows between the garden's derelict outbuildings and untended plots, they soon came to the forward boundary wall where Lardis had talked to Harry Dwellersire that time three months ago. And there they discovered the first victim of whatever battle had occurred: a warrior, dead on the ground, dispatched like a pheasant by a fox! Its squat neck had been bitten through armoured scales, leathery hide, flesh and gristly cartilage down to the spine and through it. Almost decapitated, the thing lay there in a pool of its own steaming liquids: fifteen tons of savagery, itself savaged! No need to inquire what living engine of destruction had done this.
Awed, Lardis Lidesci moved cautiously around the giant corpse. He pointed out dislocated main eyes in the crimson-rimmed, empty sockets of the grotesque skull. And, 'See!' he whispered. 'No fight this, but a slaughter! And the butcher, he thrust his claws in through those eyes, to nip the tiny brain and get it done with. And these fluids, still warm and reeking… Why, this creature of Karen's, it was alive no more than fifteen minutes ago!'
'Lardis!' Kirk Lisescu's call came husking from crags which he'd scaled at the eastern extreme of the wall. 'Quickly! Come see!'
Keeping low, Lardis and the others ran, loped to the foot of the crags, climbed them to Kirk crouching on a ledge in the scoop of a fallen boulder. 'Do you see?' the small, wiry man whispered. 'Do you hear?'
He pointed out over Starside. The others could see well enough, and eventually even hear, though not at first.
Far out over the boulder plains, drifting east like a small cloud of midges, black specks darted, glided, spurted under the dome of a glittering sky. Midges at this distance, yes, but up close they'd be monsters. Likewise in the lee of the barrier mountains sprawling eastwards: shapes in flight, and others in pursuit. It was the Wamphyri, friends and foe alike; though impossible to tell one from the other.
'Who's who?' gasped Peder, jaw slack, eyes peering first this way, then that.
Lardis shook his head, slitted his eyes against the blue glitter of starblaze, tried to count those shapes which spurted. 'How many fighting beasts do you see?' he grunted. 'We know Shaithis had six.'
'Karen and Harry Hell-lander had two at least,' Andrei muttered, however sourly. 'We found signs of the one and the carcass of the other!'
'Better pray they had more than that,' Lardis growled. 'Better pray they had a Jot more!'
Carried on changing winds, sounds of the aerial skirmish ebbed and flowed: the hissing and roaring of warriors, the low rumble of their bio-propulsive systems, the clatter of scales on armoured scales as huge bodies collided in mid-air. But as the commotion faded into distance, Kirk Lisescu had finished counting. There hadn't been much to it, after all.
Two flyers and six warriors out over the boulder wastes,' he reported, 'all heading east, towards the sphere Gate and the tumbled stacks of the Wamphyri. Two more flyers in the lee of the mountains, pursued by a warrior.'
Lardis's tally agreed. 'And the big one's with the main party,' he added. 'Seven warriors in all, and Shaithis hasn't suffered any losses — unless I'm wrong and that huge corpse beside the wall was one of his. But even at best, it's still two against five…'
Andrei Romani shook his head in dismay and stated, quite simply, 'They're done for, finished!'
Lardis scowled at him. 'If they are, then be sure we won't last much longer — or fare any better!'
He looked out again over Starside, scanning the horizon from the eastern boulder plains inwards to the mountains. The larger cluster of airborne specks was beginning to descend, elongating into a straggling line; the smaller party, consisting of two flyers with a lone warrior in pursuit, was also losing altitude where it skirted the lower peaks. Even as he continued to watch, this secondary group of three disappeared behind a distant jut of crags.
Lardis clambered back down to the garden. 'Come on!' he growled.
Recognizing the urgency in his voice but failing to see the point of it, the others followed him down. 'Come on where?' Peder Szekarly wanted to know. He was somewhat recovered from his poisoning now but still felt he could sleep right through sundown.
At the foot of the crags Lardis turned to him. 'East along the high ridges, where else? However far is necessary to fathom the outcome of that fight. Guess-work isn't good enough — we've got to know which way it went! The future of the Szgany, every man, woman and child of us, hangs in the balance.'
He turned abruptly and made as if to head for the garden's upward sloping eastern flank… and just as suddenly the shadows came alive with a massed, furtive creeping motion! Lardis and his three froze. They'd heard nothing, yet found themselves surrounded. But by what? Had Shaithis and the slug-being out of the Icelands left something behind to act as a rearguard? How many things had they left here?
'My father would be… it would please him,' came a low, faltering voice from the darkness, one which coughed, growled, and was scarcely human at all. 'Please him to know… to know that he still has… has friends among the Szgany.'
Legend had it that in the long ago the olden Travellers had owned to a benevolent God. More recently, however, they had only recognized demons… called Wamphyri! Not that anyone ever prayed to them, nor yet used their name as a curse; let it suffice that they were a curse! So that when it came to praying, the Szgany usually held to the sun; not as a form of true deity, but as a symbol of good fortune. Or, if a man had been born during sundown, he might give thanks to whichever star had been overhead at the hour of his birth. Lardis Lidesci was hardly superstitious; at the moment of the voice out of darkness he couldn't have said if his star was in the sky or not — but he hoped it was!
Flanking Lardis on the left, Peder Szekarly nocked his crossbow; on the other side, Andrei Romani snapped shut his shotgun; both aimed into the shadows. A little apart, Kirk Lisescu frantically shoved shells into his double breech.
But: 'Don't/' Lardis warned them. The grey brothers are all about us, and that was their leader speaking.' The others must give Lardis his due: if anyone would recognize that awful voice, it was surely him. Similarly, he who had been The Dweller knew Lardis. He came padding forward out of the shadows — a great grey wolf!
Eyes aslant, yellow, feral — and crimson in their cores — Harry Wolfson paused half in darkness. But his hands were visible in the starlight…
He looked at Lardis and cocked his head a little on one side, inquiringly. And the look on his face was never seen on the face of a dog as he half-said, half-snarled, 'I… know you. Come talk to me, where my gentle mother sleeps under the stones.' He began to turn away, paused and looked back. 'But only you. Your men… they will wait here.'
'Lardis!' Kirk Lisescu snapped shut his weapon, began to crouch down.
'I said don't!' Lardis barked, as fifty pairs of yellow eyes blinked and moved nervously in the shadows. 'Only let a man of you shoot one of these, I swear I'll kill him with my bare hands!'
'No,' Harry Wolfson coughed at once, 'you wouldn't have to. The grey brotherhood takes care of its own. So put down your… your weapon, yes… and come talk.'
At the cairn, the great wolf was silent for long moments. He nuzzled in turn each of the larger burial stones, marking them, whined a little, gazed burningly on Lardis. And eventually he said, 'She, too, remembers you. It was a while ago. After the battle, you joined us here. You were kind. Despite your own privations, your people… were kind. To me, to my mother, my father. And you and I, we talked together, when I was… was a man. I remember it.'
'All of this is true,' Lardis nodded, discovering a lump in his throat which had little or nothing to do with fear. 'We talked on several occasions. At the last, you seemed to know what was coming.'
The other looked at him in that curious, alert way of his, and Lardis found it weird that a wolf should understand his words and answer them with a nod and snarled words of its own: 'And now… now it has come. Strange, even sad in a way. Sometimes I feel I've lost so much; at others I take pleasure in what I've gained. Except… my man-memory is fading, and all the time more swiftly. I forget the man-times and remember only the wolf-times, and it has made… made a traitor out of me. For I swore I would be… be here, when the Wamphyri came a-visiting Karen and my father. But I… forgot, and so was late.'
'You couldn't have helped them,' Lardis shook his head. 'This time the Wamphyri have made invincible
