'So far there are only the two of them,' Lardis finally continued. 'Two that we know of for sure, though they'll make lieutenants soon enough. Ah, but they are Wamphyri! And where can they go at sunup, eh? Where else but Karenstack, the last aerie! So mark well my words: if Harry and Karen are done for and we're left to fight on alone, and if Shaithis and his lot take up residence in that last great pesthole of a stack… then that's where we'll finish this thing. Not in the next sunup, no, nor even the one after that — but maybe in the next!'
'Ware, Lardis!' Andrei cautioned. 'Is this your vow?'
'It is,' Lardis answered, nodding his head in the gloom of the trees. 'It's mine, yours — it's that of all the men of the Szgany Lidesci! Now listen:
'Their works, the terrible works of the Wamphyri, take time. Time to take men and make them lieutenants, and time to make monsters from the flesh of Travellers and trogs. Two or three sunups are nothing, not time enough. But in Karenstack they'll think themselves secure. What? And who would dare to attack them on their own ground? We will, that's who!'
Peder Szekarly was astonished. 'Go against the Wamphyri, on Starside?' he whispered.
'During sunup, aye,' Lardis replied. 'With crossbows and sharp staves, hammers and stakes! With kneblasch, silver, and The Dweller's shotguns.'
'What?' said Kirk Lisescu, his voice hushed. Toys against the Wamphryi? And what about their warriors?'
'But their fighting creatures are vampires no less than the Wamphyri themselves!' Lardis replied, grabbing Kirk's arm for emphasis. 'We'll go there with our mirrors, given to us by The Dweller; we'll set fire to the drapes at the stack's doorways and lower windows; we'll reflect the sun's cleansing rays deep into the foul darkness. That's how we'll do it! Who would know the way better than us? Why, it was The Dweller and his father who showed us how! Well, and now it will be our turn.'
'Tear down the mountains!' Andrei Romani snarled aloud to match the spirit of the other's vision. And then (but a little less vigorously), 'But let's hope it won't come to that. After all, we could be wrong… maybe it's not such a hopeless case… it's a fact that Karen and the hell-lander are — or were — enormous powers in their own right.'
Andrei could hardly know it but his qualifying 'were' was close to the mark. For even as the four men set out upon their timber-line trek, far to the east, in the region of the glaring hell-lands Gate, Harry Keogh and the Lady Karen were already Shaithis's prisoners.
Which is to say, they were as good as dead…
Events followed slowly and seemed of little consequence, yet later would become concertinaed in Lardis's memory, each one hastening after the last, assuming varying degrees of importance.
After six hours trekking along the timber-line, the four were so exhausted they had to pause, eat, sleep, allow their aching muscles time for replenishment. They awakened with the coming of the hurtling moon, by the light of which their progress was that much faster.
Later, with the moon down again, they took it a little easier and fell into the natural, jingling, fast-striding pace of accustomed Travellers. They held back from talking, saved their breath for the work. Now and then they must climb where ridges and spurs broke the timber-line, but mainly they followed level contours. Plainly The Dweller had been right; their guide was completely familiar with these heights; either that or he was a creature of unerring instinct. They forged steadily east.
Another rest, another meal…
A string of long, flat, shallow saddles between elevated peaks like wave crests, where their striding ate up mile after mile unending, until finally and far too soon the easy going was eaten up entirely…
A region of sliding scree which the trees had gathered into a treacherous, teetering barricade. Only tread unwary, trip the wrong pebble, and the whole thing — trees, scree, men and all — would go avalanching down on to Starside. To prove it, there were plenty of breaks where the green belt had been swept away right down to the raw rock…
Another sleep period…
When they sat down, the grey one sat apart; when they lay flat, he stretched himself out. Coming awake, he'd be up first, waiting for them. They tossed him scraps of dried meat, which he 'wolfed', naturally. His job didn't allow for hunting.
Then, an odd thing: Twenty-five hours or almost two-thirds of the way into the trek, the wolf bitch which Lardis had seen with the changeling overtook them. He recognized her from her pure white, extraordinarily bushy eyebrows. She carried something in her dripping mouth, which she put down on approaching their guide. Then the two wolves went through a careful recognition ritual, following which she sat down with the other a while. Peder Szekarly tossed meat, which she gratefully accepted.
But Lardis was more interested in the item she'd carried in her mouth: a grenade, from The Dweller's armoury in the garden. Lardis knew what it was well enough; there'd been several left over from the battle four years ago; devastating devices, he'd wanted nothing to do with them. Aye, for there are weapons and there are weapons. A shotgun is controllable until the moment you pull the trigger, but one of these…?
Only arm it… and from then on, no way to change your mind. The rest was out of your hands — indeed it must be out of your hands, and as quickly as possible! What The Dweller's bitch would want with such a thing was a mystery, but as far as Lardis was concerned she was welcome to it. And in a little while she gathered it up in her mouth again, and set off east as before. Then-Six more hours of trekking, followed by a break (all too brief) before the next incident: a small, unequal dispute. But long before that the beacon of the sphere Gate was already making itself visible from time to time in the east. At first, as the distance between gradually narrowed down, it was the merest firefly glimmer; later it became a weird glow-worm radiation — light without heat — in the shadows of the barrier range where eastern foothills met boulder plains to merge into Starside's blue-tinged moonscape.
As for the dispute: This came where Lardis wanted to leave the pine-clad margin and climb diagonally towards the saddles between the high peaks: his escape route into Sunside, in the event a bolthole should become necessary. Their wolf guide thought differently, however; he had been told to stick to the timber-line and head for the ball of glaring white light close to the great pass, and he didn't intend straying from his duty. So that when the grey brother simply refused to change his tack… that was the end of the unspoken argument. But in any case (Lardis consoled himself), the way up had looked pretty rough going just there. And so the four men followed on behind their lupine guide as before, except that now they were constantly on the lookout for easy climbing.
They found it an hour later, just as a parting of the ways became absolutely necessary. For if indeed the Wamphyri were still abroad and active in the vicinity of the Gate, then from this point forward it would be madness to remain too far Starside of the peaks.
Climbing along an easy diagonal fault towards a system of crags, saddles and flat-topped plateaux, the four waved a farewell to their guide. For his part he simply watched them out of view, whined a little deep in his throat, finally put them out of mind and headed east…
Lardis and his colleagues took an hour to climb to the flat summits, a little longer to rest from their labours, then set off again in the direction of the great pass. The ground was unknown to them but the going was fairly easy. On those rare occasions when they caught a glimpse of the southern horizon between the peaks, it was a faint crack of amethyst streaked with silver. Three more hours and the silver would turn to gold.
Sunup, soon, and Lardis should be feeling happier. But he wasn't. Coursing through his veins, the blood of his unknown seer forefather was warning him of ominous times ahead…
Three hours later it started to rain; the way soon became slippery and precarious; Lardis deemed it dangerous to proceed. After their prodigious trek, they had reached a spot some four to five miles southwest of the Gate and now looked down on it from a vantage point in the high jumbles. Behind them, a promising looking pass wound between the peaks and presumably down to Sunside. And the sky in the south was brightening, however marginally, from minute to minute.
Lardis and his three huddled beneath the groping branches of a wind-blasted, grotesquely malformed tree until the rain stopped. And now their view of Starside and the glaring hell-lands Gate was that much clearer. Some miles east, the plains were heaped with the strange stumps and tumuli of tumbled Wamphyri stacks — Wenstack, once Volse Pinescu's place; the mad Lord Lesk's shattered Glutstack; sprawling, hugely humped sections of Shaithistack; the acromegalic Fess Ferenc's exploded Grosstack; the lesser Lord Grigis's Gougestack; Lascula Longtooth's Fangstack, and several more. Indeed, all of the great aeries of the Wamphyri, lying prone on the plains where they had fallen.
All save one. Karenstack.
