was not him.
Nathan couldn't understand. It was as if Nestor's mind itself was undecided about his identity! And a great rage of pain and frustration, of need and ambition, and of loss and discovery seethed in the core of him!
Such was Nathan's shock that he snatched himself back from the stranger which was his brother — and jerked erect where he sat with his back against the rock!
And all of his thoughts fled back to him like whipped dogs, and his quandary was deeper than before where he took up the trail again and headed east…
Nestor was asleep, digesting his meal, converting the strong food into energy. He was asleep and wandering in the most fragile of dreams — which were scattered on the instant that the alien Thing entered his mind!
Alien, yes, and a hated enemy! He knew it from the whirlpool of numbers, symbols, meaningless equations and other mathematical devices behind which the Thing concealed its identity and purpose. That same enemy which had plagued him all the days of his life! Shivering despite that the sun blazed down on him, Nestor opened his eyes…
.. and looked up at two men, one about his own age and the other much older, who had come across him where he lay!
The enemy of his dreams was at once forgotten; he saw the men — saw that just for the moment they were looking at each other, not at him — and closed his eyes again, feigning sleep. But what he'd seen stayed etched on his mind's eye: One of them, the young one, was kneeling beside him with his fist knotted round the handle of a knife whose sharp blade gleamed like liquid silver in the sunlight. Slender, wide-eyed, nervous, he looked more than a little frightened. The other, a weathered, surly-looking man in his middle years, stood erect with a loaded crossbow held in his strong brown hands. He had been scowling and was now quietly muttering to himself:
'Steal a rabbit right out of my trap, would you, boy? And what are you doing up here anyway, eh? Especially this morning, after last night…'
'No vampire,' the one on his knees whispered, still glancing over his shoulder at the first speaker, 'else he wouldn't be out in the sun. And look at the state of him, all bruised and banged about! Was he a lone hunter, perhaps, scared down out of the mountains? What do you think, father?'
'What do I think?' the first one's answer was a low rumble of unreasoning hatred and suspicion. 'Oh, I'll tell you what I think: that the bloodsucking bastards have thought up some new tricks, and that this one's some weird Wamphyri changeling! So he's not changed far enough yet that the sun will hurt him… so what? You saw his flyer up there, all melting away, and its black bones poking through the rot. Too much of a coincidence to find a thing like that up there, and then to find this one down here. That's what I think!'
Nestor's flyer? He remembered it. Indeed, it was one of the very few things which he did remember. But what was that the older man had called him, a changeling? Hah! Little he knew. For Nestor was no mere thrall but a Lord! He was the Lord Nestor — of the Wamphyri!
The word was like a fire in his blood — Wamphyri.'
And now he tensed himself — but carefully, guardedly — for action. His arms were folded comfortably on his chest, and one knee was bent a little. All to the good.
'So what do we do about him?' the one who kneeled wanted to know.
'First we wake him,' the other growled. And reluctantly: Then… I suppose we'd better drag him down into Twin Fords, and find out about him there. For I'd hate to make a mistake.'
Too late! thought Nestor. You've made too many already.
He felt the younger one's hand grip his arm above the elbow, shaking him, and heard him bark: 'You, wake up!' Following which, all was a blur of motion.
Nestor's eyes blazed open! Stiffening his hands and shooting them wide in a slicing motion, he knocked aside the young one's knife arm, simultaneously wrenching his hand from its hold on his right arm. Suddenly unbalanced, with his hands sliced out from under him, the youth could only topple forward. Grasping his advantage, Nestor slammed his bent knee into the other's groin, and jerked his head up off the ground to butt him full in the face.
Lips which were already snarling their shock and terror split open bloodily; teeth and bone crunched sick- eningly; the youth's yelp of astonishment turned to a red gurgle as Nestor grabbed for the knife. He found it in the other's slackening fingers and gashed himself wrenching it free. But the slicing pain served only to galvanize him further.
The older man was hopping left and right, trying to line up his weapon, shouting, 'Stab him! Kill the bastard!' He would get off a shot but his son was in the way, and what he couldn't see was that Nestor had the knife. And suddenly it seemed that the sprawling, jerking body of his son lifted itself up a foot from the one he was pinning down, and in mid-air shuddered convulsively. Then the youth was thrust aside, turned by Nestor's arm and knee, and his awful face was a bloody mask with a gasping hole for a mouth. Also bloody was the slit in his jacket, from which Nestor drew out the knife.
'Son!' With a cry of anguish, eyes popping, the father watched his son's brief death struggles, saw him flop motionless on the bloodstained grass. Then:
'You!' he snarled, swinging his weapon towards Nestor and pulling the trigger. But Nestor was on his feet, his arm already fully extended forward, and the red-blotched knife in flight! Nestor was good with a knife, but on this occasion he was lucky, too. It took the man in the throat, in the 'V of bone directly under his Adam's-apple, punching a hole there which penetrated to the spine.
Even crumpling to the earth he was as good as dead, and so didn't see his bolt take Nestor in the side, skewering his flesh like a needle through a blister. He didn't see it, but there were others higher up the hillside who did.
Nestor heard them cry out, looked up from where shock had knocked him off his feet, and saw them through the wash of scarlet agony flooding over him. A group of four or five men, something less than two hundred yards away, descending the hillside towards him in a series of breakneck leaps and bounds — vampire hunters!
Nestor got his fingers into the tear in his jacket and ripped it open. The bolt had entered his body under the ribcage on his right side, scraping a rib at the back where its barbed head had emerged. Its flight was sticking out at the front, and both holes were dripping thick, dark splashes of blood where a five-inch bridge of white, puffy flesh joined them like a bulging roll of fat.
Nestor didn't think twice but gripped the head of the bolt with his right hand and the flight with his left, and bent the wooden shaft against his side until it snapped. He saw the skin of his side bulge as the broken shaft forced the white flesh outward, and almost passed out; but he knew that if he did, it would probably be the last thing he ever did. And in any case, breaking the bolt had been only half of it. Now he must draw it out.
He did so without pause, and had to fight from gagging as the red blood spurted. Then, cinching his jacket tightly to his body, he somehow got to his feet and made off down the steep slope. But weak and desperate as he was, his heart was already pounding and his breath faltering. And those men back there — Szgany, and full of bloodlust — they'd not give him a second's respite or his life a moment's thought once they had him. It would be the stake, the knife, the fire for Lord Nestor of the Wamphyri!
He limped to the rim of a bluff and looked over, saw deep water rushing into the foam and spray of broad falls, and white water all the way down to the levels and the broken bridges of Twin Fords. But from behind as if to spur him on, rising above the hiss and surge of foaming waters, he could hear the angry shouts of his pursuers.
And looking back just once, to glimpse raised weapons and furious faces, he shouted his defiance — and jumped!
Nathan got into Twin Fords a little less than two hours later. He found the town a shambles — a pesthole of stumbling, slack-mouthed survivors; a bubbling cauldron of narrow-eyed, suspicious, would-be avengers; a chaos of terrified, demented people — with little or nothing of Settlement's order and discipline about it. Before that, however: There were guards on the approach roads to the town, who stopped him the moment he crossed the river through the shallows of the fording place, where all that remained of a once-sturdy bridge was a weir of timbers crushed down into the mud. He was recognized as one of Lardis Lidesci's party, which had passed through heading west for Settlement just yestereve, and allowed to go on into the devastation.
And the chaos was at once apparent. At least two fires were still smouldering where granaries had been gutted; the dead — or their pieces, if they had been vampirized — were still being dragged through barely recognizable streets to be burned on funeral pyres; the wailing of women and weeping of children was nerve- rending. Inside a more or less intact perimeter of wooden buildings, the destruction was enormous, far worse than
