Nathan looked him straight in the eyes. 'Karpath, listen to me and listen carefully. Maglore prizes me for my colours, and for my 'innocence'. Well, I'm no longer entirely innocent, but he'll keep me free of vampire influences, if he can; you've said as much yourself. But on the other hand he prizes you for your strength and for your… loyalty? And so we're not rivals, you and I. But think about this: if he is forced to make a life or death choice between us, which of us shall live?'
'What?' Karpath's brows gathered like thunderheads as he considered it.
Nathan shrugged. 'Maglore can always make himself a new lieutenant, but where would he find another familiar like me? Now, I say again: we are not rivals, but if you're determined to be my enemy — ' he turned and walked away,'- so be it.'
And behind him, Karpath made no reply but let him go…
Time passed. Nathan spent a great deal of it asleep, conserving both his physical and mental reserves. When he was awake, however, he scarcely went short of exercise: Runemanse was a far more vertical than horizontal place, and the stairwells seemed interminable.
Now that the provisioning was behind him, he felt fit to tackle anything; he didn't think Runemanse would contain anything worse than what he'd already seen or experienced. In a way he was right and it didn't, but in other ways…
He saw the Seer Lord's warriors 'waxing' in their hugely excavated vats. Apart from their armour plating, which reminded him a little of his deadspeak dream of Madmanse and Eygor Killglance's anomalous blue-gleaming appendages, the creatures in their loathsome entirety were like nothing else Nathan had ever seen before. But in any case, they were not things which a healthy mind would want to dwell upon, not if a man desired to sleep soundly. One thing he did notice: for warriors, they were a good deal smaller than those beasts of Wratha's which had ravaged in Settlement, and they weren't built for flying. However Maglore intended to use them, they wouldn't be taking part in any attack upon Wratha the Risen in olden Starside.
But the intentions of Turgosheim's other Lords were less ambiguous. From the window of his room, night after night, Nathan spied upon the training flights of monsters. Any excessive use of torches or brightening of the gas jet flares, or unaccustomed activity in this or that launching-bay along the wall of the gorge, would tell him where to look. And then he would hear again, even as he'd heard it in Settlement that time, the sputtering throb of propulsive vents as nightmare shapes went spurting through the rising vapours of Turgosheim.
Most of the Lords and Ladies tested their creatures from time to time, but not all were successful. During a session in the twilight hours before sunup, Nathan watched one especially disastrous test-flight. Vast and lumbering, the creature flew out from Vormspire with the rumble of its propulsors echoing over Turgosheim, its armour glinting ruddily in the lights of the manses, and its exhaust vapours shaped by the winds into a fantastic, billowing slipstream. A monstrous and terrifying sight, it came throbbing across the gorge with a row of sentient saucer eyes flickering this way and that within the visor of its triple-horned, heavily plated prow. But it was perhaps too heavily plated, and its balance ill-aligned.
Tilting to avoid the jutting promontory of Devetaki's Masquemanse, suddenly its nose dipped and the tilt became too steep. It attempted to adjust its balance but overcompensated. There followed a lurching roll, then a shuddering, total capsize! Upside-down, the monster's starboard gas bladders were torn open on the jagged flank of Masquemanse; deflating in a moment, they fluttered like curtains in the wind as the damaged warrior was deflected out over the gorge.
Then… the thing seemed to sense that it was finished. At the last an anguished howling was clearly audible. Mingling with the angry sputtering of propulsors, this formed a combination of alien, nerve-rending sounds which carried to Nathan as a groaning, echoing ululation: a death cry. And the doomed Thing spiralled down into deepening darkness, then plummeted, finally glanced from a corner turret of Trollmanse and slammed headlong into the rocky bottoms. Chunks of red, fleshy debris and shattered chitin armour flew everywhere, and the sounds of the crash echoed into silence…
Failures of this sort were not infrequent at first, but as time passed and the Lords became more proficient in the making of aerial warriors, they were fewer. And always Nathan was aware that these living engines of destruction were destined for olden Starside, and that eventually they would rain terror on Sunside, too. His Sunside, from which he'd fled like a coward to die in the desert…
Nathan visited the gas-beast caverns located close to the refuse pits, and understood the reason for that proximity. But the gaslings themselves… were something else which he would try in vain to forget. The horror of the thing — of all Runemanse — lay not so much in the physical reality of the system, but in its morbid and pitiless efficiency; for all of Maglore's creatures had once been men and expendable. And whenever Nathan looked at them, always the vestiges of men remained…
Eventually, when he had lived in Runemanse through thirty-odd sunups, Nathan went to see Maglore's flyers penned in the yawn of the landing-bay. The reason he'd not done so before was that Maglore had warned him off it: the north-facing wall was notorious for treacherous updrafts and freakish, blustery winds; the polished rock of the launching ramps was slippery as ice; there were no protective walls to impede the flyers on take-off. The Seer Lord had lost a lieutenant there once, who stepped in the wrong place and shot himself screaming into eternity.
Two of Maglore's three flyers were recent constructs: he had fashioned them as an exercise preparatory to starting work on his warriors. Skittish (for they sensed that Nathan was no vampire), the pair rolled their eyes and reared their diamond-shaped heads as he passed carefully along a railed walkway in front of their pens. But Maglore's scent was on him, and they quickly settled down again.
The third creature was different, however. Housed to one side of the precipitous launching bay, beneath an overhang in the lee of the cavern, it was far less nervous. Something about the thing attracted Nathan's attention. He gazed at the flyer in its pen: huge, grey, mute and comparatively docile, its huge head nodding at the end of a swaying neck, with eyes large as fists, moist and gleaming black in a weirdly manlike face. Eyes which might well be…
… But here Nathan paused in his musing. What on earth had he been thinking about? Manlike? And eyes which might well be…? For of course there was no manlike about it; those eyes were or had been human, Szgany! And again he reminded himself what he was looking at: a mutated, vampire thing — something that Maglore had changed — which, having undergone its metamorphosis, was human no more.
Leaning his elbows on the gated wall of the pen, he gazed into the great, sad, human eyes in the elongated, mutant head; gazed deep, and wondered: Who were you?
I was a youth upon a time, like you. The answer came back at once, shockingly, jerking Nathan rigidly upright against the wall! Then I was a man, a titheling, and Maglore's thralJ. But never a vampire thing… not until the end. Perhaps I of/ended him, though even now I don't know how. What does it matter? It is enough that what you see before you is all that remains of a man. Ah, but the Seer Lord of Runemanse was generous with my brain and made himself a crafty flyer this time — damn his black heart!
Shaken to his roots, Nathan clung to the wall and whispered: 'He left you your brain, a man's brain… entire?'
Not entire, no. The flyer's thoughts were vaguer now.
But enough that I remember… things. And among them my name. You asked me who I was. 7 was a thrall who knew writing and faithfully recorded the history of a race, according to the word of my master, Maglore. And my name was Karz Biteri…
Later, Nathan would spend many a long hour with Karz, or what had been Karz, learning Turgosheim's history from its onset. But on that first occasion he had been far more interested to know how the — creature? — had read his mind and been able to answer him so lucidly.
That was the way of it with all flyers, he was told, for they were the aerial command-posts of the Wamphyri with immediate access to their minds, so that they might react instantly to any order. In the reshaping of Karz's mind, when Maglore had given it something of his own alien essence, telepathy had been the governing factor. Desiring something special, he'd let Karz retain much of his memory and all of his knowledge of old Turgosheim. Thus Karz Biteri, Maglore's flyer now, was also a reference library on all Turgosheim's morbid past.
You, too, are a powerful telepath, Karz had told him then, and so we may converse. But you must learn how to shield your thoughts, and you should always remember: a man is never alone in Runemanse. When you thought you were on your own down here, I read a good many things in your head which Maglore would not like. If I could read them, so could he.
'I have shielded them,' Nathan had answered, 'constantly, or so I thought. But you're right: I thought I was
