creatures, monsters of unbelievable ferocity and power! You and all your grey brothers together, what could you have done?'
The other loped this way and that. 'Still, I should have been here.'
There was nothing you could do,' Lardis insisted.
Harry Wolfson came closer, stood still. 'Did you see it?'
'We saw them fly away eastwards,' Lardis answered. They were still fighting. I think that Harry and Karen… I think they got the worst of it.'
The great wolf blinked his slanted eyes, and their cores burned yet more scarlet. 'No, not yet — but soon! The worst is what Shaithis has in store for them!'
And suddenly, so suddenly that Lardis gave a great start, the wolf that had been a man pointed his muzzle straight at the stars and howled, and from the derelict garden's shadows came the answering howls of his brothers. Then, he sprang up on to the cairn, glanced once more at Lardis and growled, 'I go.'
As he made to leap away, Lardis called after: 'But where will you go? And what do you intend? Perhaps we'd do better to go there together.'
The Gate,' the other paused again, however momentarily, and sniffed the night air. 'I sense them there. I don't know what the grey brothers can do, but you and yours would only slow us down.'
Again he turned away — only to collide with a sleek she-wolf who came loping from the shadows. Her eyebrows were bushy, white as the snows of the higher peaks. They faced each other; perhaps some message passed between them; she whined a little, and Harry Wolfson snapped at her, deliberately clicking his teeth on thin air. Plainly the bitch was his. And to Lardis he said, 'She'll stay here, where there's no more danger.'
Lardis tried one last time. 'My men and I, we're going, too. We need to see. I have to know.'
The changeling thought about it for the briefest moment, then snarled his throaty answer: Then I'll leave you a guide. Follow him closely, for he knows the easiest route…'
Lardis returned to his men and found them on their own; the wolf pack had melted away into the shadows, leaving only one of the grey brothers behind. Lardis marked him: a flame-eyed silhouette, nervous and impatient, atop the garden's eastern flank. Kirk Lisescu nodded and remarked, That one's stayed back, apparently to keep watch over us!'
Lardis shook his head. 'No,' he corrected his colleague, 'he's our guide. We're to follow him to the hell-lands Gate. Or at least, we'll try to get close enough to see what goes on there.'
They struggled up the sloping eastern flank, gazed down on Starside laid out in weird, blue-tinged monochrome beneath them. The boulder plains, reaching out to a curved and shimmering, aurora-lit horizon; the jagged spines of mountains on their right, sprawling eastwards; seemingly endless miles of crags to cover before they would arrive at their destination, where the peaks looked down gauntly on the pockmarked crater which housed the hell-lands Gate.
Lardis had been there only once before, in his youth (and then at the height of sunup, of course, when the Wamphyri slept and dreamed their scarlet dreams behind the draped windows of their aeries), but even then he'd found the place ominous, unquiet, unknowable. That great ball of white light, glaring up and out of the earth like the eye of some buried giant from its socket, unblinking, malevolent, lending all the region around a leprous white and grey-blue aspect as of rotting flesh. And the stony crater itself, which formed the Gate's rim: pocked like rotten wood when the borers have been at work, shot through and through with alien wormholes. Even the solid rock…
While Lardis was there, a flock of bats had come to hunt midges, moths, other insects hatched or awakened by the sun's natural light blazing through a pass in the barrier range. One small creature, perhaps dazzled, had flitted too close to the Gate; its membrane wing touched the solid-seeming surface of white light; it disappeared without trace, apparently sucked right into the glare! For some little time Lardis had continued to watch, but the bat hadn't returned.
It had been a lesson in caution: don't approach the Gate too closely. Ah, but that time it had been sunup, while now it was a fresh sundown. And Lardis definitely did not intend to approach too closely. What, with the Wamphyri there? Madness! But he did have a plan, which as always was simple.
'See the grey one go?' he said. 'Heading down towards the timber-line? He'll know every tree like an old friend, and all the winding trails between. We'll make best time if we follow in his tracks.'
'Lardis,' said Andrei Romani, conversationally, 'you're a madman, I'm sure! Indeed, we all are, each and every mother's son! Made crazy by the blue-glittering stars!'
'Oh?' Lardis scarcely glanced at him, picked his way down between scree-littered spurs. 'Tell me more.'
'It's sundown on Starside,' the other continued, 'and all sensible folk hidden away. But us? We're following a mountain dog to see what the Wamphyri are up to! We should be in a hole somewhere on Sunside, waiting for the sun to rise and praying we'll still be around to see it!'
'But it's because we hate hiding in holes on Sunside that we're here!' Lardis reminded him. 'Me, I prefer the comforts of my house on the knoll, believe me — except I know I can't find peace there so long as the Wamphyri are wont to come a-hunting in the night. And right now… why, I've a chance to see with my own eyes how many they are and what are our chances. So that when we go back to Sunside, we'll know to do one of two things: either advise the Szgany of Settlement and the other townships of the precautions they must take, or tell them definitely that the Wamphyri are no more! And let me tell you something else, Andrei…' But here he paused.
For at the last moment Lardis had recognized a certain dangerous passion blazing up within himself. It was in the heat of his blood, the way he spat out his words, so that he knew he'd been on the point of uttering a vow. He was Szgany and proud of it, and a leader of men at that. Once spoken, a vow like that couldn't be revoked. Not and live with it, anyway.
'Oh?' Andrei prompted him. 'You were about to tell me…?'
Lardis bit his tongue, changed the subject:
'Do you know how far it is to the Gate?'
'Too far,' said Kirk Lisescu, clambering behind. 'Even on Sunside's levels it would take us an entire sunup to get from Settlement to the great pass. But up here, through all these crags and peaks…' He let it tail off, but Peder Szekarly at once took it up:
'Eighty-five miles from Settlement to the pass. But weaving through these high crags… a hundred, at least. And hard going at that.'
'Something less than forty hours to sunup,' Lardis mused. 'Which is when we want to be there. For if by then the Wamphyri are still alive, still abroad, that's when they'll head for Karenstack — to be out of the light when the sun blazes between the peaks!' He made rapid calculations and continued:
'A generous ten hours for sleep, leaves almost thirty for travelling. Why, at something a little more than three miles to the hour, we'll be there in time aplenty!'
'But to see what?' Andrei gloomed. To discover… what? Hah! The worst, perhaps.'
Lardis gave a grunt and for a little while was silent.
The boles of tall, straight pines loomed out of the darkness below; along a track dappled with starlight, feral eyes gleamed silver and sentient; the grey brother waited patient and passionless while the four gained on him, then turned and headed east. They followed as close as possible in his tracks where he chose the least cluttered, most direct route through the straggling trees.
But while the wolf's passions were at an ebb, Lardis's were still flowing strong. He thought of Lissa and Jason on Sunside, the Szgany Lidesci in its entirety, all of the Traveller tribes in their various camps and townships across the barrier mountains. And then he thought of the horror of the Wamphyri, which he'd once considered over and done with.
But no, it wouldn't be over until it was over…
Until it was finished…
Finished utterly!
And at last Lardis's passions got the better of him.
'Whichever way it goes,' he ground out his Szgany vow from between clenched teeth, 'I'll see them dead! Beheaded, staked out, pegged down — spreadeagled in clean yellow sunlight — and steamed away in smoke and stink!'
His words were hot as hell, fiercely spoken: a growl of hatred, a promise, a threat, so that his men knew it was his vow. But it wasn't over yet.
