alone here. And when I saw you, and realized what you were…'
You were shaken and forgot yourself, I know… The answer had been a sob, soliciting Nathan's pity; so that he'd said:
'You too should guard your thoughts, Karz, for I can feel your hatred for him. If Maglore should discover it…'
Ah, but he has, the other had cut him short. He knows! Why do you think he won't ride out upon the air? Because he fears I would tilt him into space. And so he made these new creatures, but doesn't trust them either! For if I can have such feelings, perhaps they have them, too. Oh, he knows they do not, but will not trust them anyway. It seems I have given him a bad dream that won't go away, for which I'm glad!
'Those are thoughts you really should watch,' Nathan had answered, 'and very carefully.'
He'd sensed a mental shrug as Karz answered, Sometimes I do, and sometimes I don't care. What is my life, anyway? It were as well to launch myself at sunup, and cross the mountains into the sun!
At which Nathan had remembered Thikkoul's reading of his future in the stars:
'Now I see… a flight to freedom, yes! But… upon a dragon?' And Nathan had wondered: a dragon, or something that looks like one? And the thought had entered his head: why fly into the sun when there are other places to go and good works to accomplish along the way? Yes, and scores still unsettled?
Perhaps Karz had 'heard' the thought, perhaps not. But his great head had stopped nodding for a moment, and his huge dark eyes had gleamed a shade brighter…
Maglore made more creatures and cocooned them away in forbidden vaults. The more he worked at the fashioning, the less time he had for Nathan. Apart from taking his meals with Maglore, Nathan rarely saw the Seer Lord, for which he was glad. But that was during his waking hours, while sometimes in his dreams -
— He often wondered about his dreams: How he would start awake to discover his guard down and something other than his own thoughts oozing in his head, but something which always withdrew at once, leaving him his own man again. Maglore? But who else could it be? Not Eygor Killglance, for the old dead Thing in Madmanse made no bones about his presence but invariably introduced himself when he came in the night to wheedle and inveigle.
As for what Eygor wanted: some kind of bargain he wished to strike, some sort of promise to extract, and something evil to engineer from beyond the grave. So far Nathan had resisted him, but still he was curious and had long ago determined to go down into empty, echoing Madmanse one day…
Once, when the moon was full and floating outside his window, Nathan woke up and went to dash his face with water from a bowl beside his bed. But before he could lower his hands to the bowl, he saw the moon mirrored in the still water, and likewise his face. Then, as so often before, the stargazer Thikkoul's words had come back to him:
'I see your face, your hollow eyes and greying hair…' For indeed his eyes were sunken in dark orbits, and his yellow hair was flecked with grey…
Time passed ever more swiftly, and Maglore grew sparing in his use of thralls and recent arrivals out of Sunside. Now that he had enough warriors, it seemed he was conserving his energies and the raw materials of his metamorphic art in anticipation of some new endeavour.
One evening he called Nathan to him, asked for his wrist strap and snapped it into short sections. 'You with your fine clothes,' he said, 'wearing this scrap of leather like a brand! If you must be branded do it in style. Here…' And he gave him a sigil in solid gold, an inch long, whose design was the same familiar loop with a half-twist. Fashioned on Sunside, it was an earring, which Maglore told him to wear in his left ear.
By way of explaining his gift, the Seer Lord said, 'Since you're the very jewel of a lad yourself — and it being a well-known fact how much you Szgany like your jingly bits and pieces — I knew you would appreciate it.'
Til need my ear pierced,' Nathan said, without considering his words. Maglore feigned a coy look, then grinned and displayed eye-teeth as sharp as needles.
'If you were a lass, I might consider doing it myself!' he said. 'Why, I might do it anyway! Except I prize you for what you are, not for what I can make of you. You'd best have Orlea do it with a hot needle, and remain in your room until it's healed.'
Then, as Nathan was leaving, Maglore said: 'When Orlea's finished with her jabbing, send her to me. For while some jabs hurt, others are a pleasure. Oh, I follow Turgo Zolte's teachings, it's true, but even the strictest adherent has certain needs…'
Nathan chose his time carefully. And at the height of sunup when Maglore slept and the aerie was quiet, he made his way down into Madmanse.
I've been expecting you, Eygor's deadspeak voice came oozing in his mind, as he descended the cobwebbed stairwell to the uppermost, deserted levels of the stripped, haunted manse. For plainly you're an inquiring youth who can't bear a mystery to go unfathomed.
Even though a hazy light came in from the gorge, Nathan struck flints to a torch; the innermost rooms and passageways were dark, and the place had the feel of a tomb. Ah, but it is a tomb.' Eygor told him. That of a blind, blameless thing discarded like re/use into a pit, to die there and stiffen to a stone.
'Blameless?'
I was Wamphyri! How can you blame a creature for acting out its nature? Is the wolf to be blamed for worrying rabbits? Or did you only come here to scold me for those deeds which I was obliged to perform, by reason of the monstrous leech which all my life controlled and corrupted me?
'All men have urges,' Nathan answered, descending another stairwell towards the source of Eygor's deadspeak, and checking that his footprints lay clear in the dust behind him. 'But we don't all give in to them.'
Which is of course the difference between us, the other came back at once. For where mere men are not obliged to vent their passions, 1 was Wamphyri.
Tell me your story,' said Nathan. 'I've had some of it, from someone who knows all the history of Turgosheim, but not the end of it. That is the mystery. How did you die, Eygor?'
I died as I lived — as I was, yes, obliged to live — cruelly, even by Wamphyri standards. For I died at the hands of my own bloodsons. Would you hear of it?
That's why I'm here,' Nathan told him.
Then I'll not keep you. It was like this: I had the evil eye. Only show me a man, a target, Szgany, and I could crush him with a glance. Such was the energy of my Wamphyri mind, I could store it up and release it from my eyes like lightning — like a poisoned dart — to wrench my targets and stop their hearts! Do you believe me?
Nathan shrugged. 'Why should you lie — ?' he began.
Just so, Eygor cut him off.
'- You poor, 'blameless' creature…'
The other's turn to shrug. Well then, perhaps not entirely blameless. But… it was my leech! With a creature like that inside me, how might I deny myself? Why, even 'aesthetes' such as Maglore are still Wamphyri.'
And how well Nathan knew it! By now he had descended to the heart of Madmanse, where he paused in a hall with a walled well. But when he held his torch out over the low wall, he saw that the irregular throat of the pit was choked with boulders. The place could hardly be a real well, not this far from Turgosheim's lowest levels, but had more the look of a methane chamber or refuse pit. So why had it been sealed? Nathan's thoughts were deadspeak, of course, which Eygor heard and answered: It was sealed to.keep me down! The dead thing's nightmare voice was very close now, gurgling like a sucking swamp. You've come as close as you can get to me, Nathan Seersthrall, except in your dreams. A stinking refuse pit, aye: the tomb of Eygor Killglance!
Suddenly the darkness was alive with unseen presences. The smoke from Nathan's torch writhed into unearthly shapes as if he'd breathed through it, or as if some draught had come moaning into the room. Except his breathing was more or less controlled, and if there had been a draught, he hadn't felt it. A moment ago, he'd thought to feel the clinging touch of cobwebs where they hung in festoons from the low ceiling, but as the flame of his torch melted them away, they were replaced by the fingers of some invisible wraith which brushed him as gently and secretly as a lover. It was as if something tried to know him, to be sure of his presence, his identity.
Ah, yesss! Eygor's voice seethed in his mind. And now you feel it, which all of the others felt before you. But you feel it more, for you are the Necroscope.
'What… was that?' Nathan had been holding his breath.
This place was mine, said the other. The porous stone, the very air. I was part of it and it was part of me. My breath and my sweat seeped into it, so that even now it remembers me. What was it? Call it my spirit, if you will. It
