examined them thoroughly… and found what he found.
Then, skirting the trio of burning, skeletal trees and the blackened scar of undergrowth, he went into the forest. He knew he was taking a chance, that the wind might easily change again, but he had to search. And searching he discovered, and laboured a while carrying what he discovered back to the cleansing fire. Not that these children were going to become vampires — they were mainly pieces, scraps — but it seemed the right thing to do. Nathan knew that Lardis Lidesci would have done it, anyway. As for Nikha's men where they had been bled under the tree: well, the fire had dealt with them. They were still burning where they had fallen, like slow candles slumped upon the earth. And now their leader, Nikha himself, joined them there.
Finally Nathan must see to the women. Dragging them from their various places, he dealt with each in her turn. They had been savaged and raped — no, more than that: they'd been used hideously — then vampirized. The skulls of two of them were dented as by terrific blows; while the other two, including Eleni…
… Nathan could only shake his head in horror and disbelief. There were fist-sized holes to the left of centre in their chests between their breasts, where someone, something, had thrust its hand into their bodies to nip their hearts. Not to kill them, no, but to stun them. For even now they were alive, or undead.
There was no putting it off, not even for Eleni's sake; especially not for her sake. Lardis had shown Nathan how to do it, and now it was up to him. He did it — did it to Eleni, too — and only at the last felt someone's eyes on him. It was the sole survivor, the youth who had gone fishing in the river, now standing at the edge of the firelight gaunt as a ghost and vacant-eyed, with caved-in cheeks the colour of chalk.
Nathan spoke to him; the youth ignored him. He went to him, took his arm; and the other — a mere boy — snarled at him and bared his teeth. At that Nathan stepped back a little and stared hard at him, very hard; but there wasn't a mark on him, neither bruise nor puncture. He'd simply been… lucky? If living to witness this could be called luck.
Eventually Nathan left him standing there, watching his world burn. And salvaging a blanket from a caravan, he walked out a little way into the grass at the edge of the scorching, found himself a hollow in the earth and went to sleep. Later, waking up, he looked back and saw the boy standing where he'd left him. He thought to call out, shook his head instead, left the lad to his grief and went back to sleep.
Eight hours later the wind had died away; the fires were smouldering; the ironwoods were blackened corpses of trees at the forest's rim. And the boy was no longer there. Nathan got up and went back to the burned-out place to look for him. And remembering the last time he'd come here, this time he looked up. Sure enough the boy was hanging there, cold and dead.
There was no life in him — not any sort of life — but Nathan couldn't leave him for the crows. He reached up, took hold of his legs and added his own weight. It seemed a cruel thing to do but Nathan was drained of energy; there was none left for climbing, anyway. It worked: the thin rope snapped, and the boy came thumping down.
And now Nathan must build another fire…
In the middle of the long night, under the coldly glittering stars, Nathan wrapped himself in his blanket, headed south and walked out across the prairie. He never once looked back at the last funeral pyre burning behind him.
He took nothing with him but the blanket, the clothes he was wearing, the leather strap with a half-twist on his left wrist, by which his mother, in what now seemed another world, a different age, had recognized him in the darkest of nights. Because the strap was a familiar thing — his sigil, a token of his identity? — Nathan had kept it through his childhood, replacing it as his wrist thickened first to a boy's, then a youth's, finally a man's. Likewise Nestor: he, too, had kept his wrist band, the straight one, without the half-twist… but he no longer featured in Nathan's thoughts, except as an echo.
Nothing much featured in his thoughts. Just the faces of the dead: his mother, Misha, Nikha Sintana and his Travellers, Eleni; but all of them fading now as his mind discovered ways to obliterate them. For sometimes a memory — a face or scene out of the past — can be too painful to remember. And Nathan had reached the stage where alJ of his past was much too painful. It was a peculiar thing, but the thought had come to him that a man without a past has very little on which to build a future. Which was why he now walked out across the grasslands into the desert: because he no longer wished for a future.
When he felt tired he sat down, weary he went to sleep, hungry and thirsty he went without. And he knew that while weariness couldn't kill him, deprivation most certainly would: what he had been deprived of, and what he now deprived himself of. That was how he wanted it and how he willed it to be.
There was no bitterness in him; he didn't feel that he was quitting; only that he had never got started and so had nothing to finish, except his life. And even that might not be The End. For of all living men, Nathan knew that death was just another beginning. And maybe then, when his body was dead, all of them who had gone before would talk to him at last and explain the things which he'd never understood in life.
Would he be able to talk to his mother, he wondered, and to all the rest who were lost to him? And if he still couldn't find peace or purpose, would there be other worlds beyond?
The last clump of withered grass was far behind him when the stars began to fade and the first crack of light showed on the horizon. He made straight for it. The stony ground turned to sand under his feet as the sun cleared the shimmering horizon, but Nathan averted his eyes and continued to wander south. Soon he was warm, then hot, finally sweating. It meant nothing to him: just another discomfort, of which he'd had enough. At least this would be the last.
He came to cliffs of sandstone rising out of the desert, and at last looked back. And saw nothing but sand or perhaps, in the far faint distance, a dark wrinkle where blinding blue met dazzling yellow on the shimmering rim of the world. The barrier range? Possibly. But now Nathan had his own barrier to cross. And after that the greatest barrier of all…
The sandstone cliffs were high and sheer. Nathan could not climb them so must skirt around, and so proceed towards the sun and his inevitable end. He turned east, walked a mile in the cool shade of the escarpment, and came to a great gash where the cliffs were split open into a gorge. Perhaps at the back he would find a way to climb the cliffs. He entered the gully and followed its wall half a mile to the rear, then in a semicircle, and finally back to the entrance but on the opposite side. He had discovered no way to climb the cliffs, but what did it matter? This would make as good a place as any to die.
He was hungry now and thirsty, more so than he had ever been in his entire life. If there had been food he would eat it, and if there was water he would drink it, naturally. But there wasn't. And no way back to Sunside's forests now; for the sun would sear him in an hour, crush him to the earth in two, and shrivel him to a stick by midday. Which was all according to plan.
Nathan stood in the shade at the foot of the cliffs in the eastern lee of the gorge and looked around. In the otherwise sheer face of the cliff, a narrow ledge or fault climbed diagonally a third of the way to the top. Shading his eyes, he saw the mouths of many caves cut into the cliff where the split in the sandstone petered out. Perhaps this was a natural feature carved by water two or three or ten thousand years ago, in an age when the gulley was a watercourse; or perhaps the caves had been cut by men when the desert was more hospitable. As for now, they could only be homes for lizards and scorpions.
While Nathan thought these things, still they were neither curious nor even conscious thoughts; they were simply the activity of his human brain, which for all his traumas functioned as before. For in fact, even as he considered the origin of the precipitous caves and 'wondered' at their meaning, he couldn't really give a damn. After all, they made no slightest difference to his plan one way or the other.
For his plan was simply to die.
But Nathan had grown cold in the shade and desired to die warm. Stumbling now, he came out from the shadow of the cliffs into the blazing heat of the sun, and stood shivering until it burned through to his bones. Finally he returned to the shade, wrapped himself in his blanket shroud and lay down. And with a stone for a pillow he went to sleep.
With any luck he would not wake up but if he did… hopefully it would be to a painless and terminal delirium.
Nathan dreamed of the numbers vortex. He floated in black and empty space and the vortex rushed upon him out of the void to sweep him away to other places. But he was determined to stay here and die. He heard the voices of his wolves calling to him out of the spinning core of the maelstrom of numbers, but they were too far away and the din of clashing equations and mutating formulae was too loud; he couldn't make out what they were saying. Something about Misha? About his mother? About death?
