'In you it is something else… 'But once again I've strayed.
'In Sunside Shaitan recruited thralls. But the sun was too strong for him and his; they retreated into Starside. And there he built the first aerie of the Wamphyri, in those great stacks out on the boulder plains.
'And the Great Vampire begat other vampires out of Sunside women and even out of trogs, and he raided on Sunside for blood and plunder. And while the Wamphyri prospered, the Szgany suffered every conceivable torment.
'Fortunately the Szgany had been nomadic, Travelling folk for long and long before the advent of the Wamphyri. Since land was their only possession, they had to beat the bounds to protect it and lay claim to ownership. And so they were rarely at rest. Just as well, for their mobility was their survival. They could run and they could breed and they could hide, but that was all. And at night the vampire would ride his flyers out of Starside to hunt and to 'play' in Sunside's darkened forests. And everything that the Szgany are today is built out of the incredible, the despicable depredations of the Wamphyri.
'The Szgany learned to hide, not only their trembling bodies but their very thoughts. Why, eventually they even learned how to fight back! But that was a long time in the coming. And as evolution taught the Szgany its lessons of survival, so the vampire — by nature lazy — found it increasingly difficult to take his prey. And then, from time to time, vampire would turn upon vampire, and all Starside become a battle zone.
'The wars of the WTamphyri, their bloodwars, were endless, and except when truces were called they were times of rejoicing for the Szgany clans. But gutted aeries would always need replenishing, and depleted larders filling, and fallen flyers and broken warrior creatures refashioning in their morbid masters' vats of metamorphosis. And however long it took, the Wamphyri would return to Sunside, its pleasures and plunders.
'The Szgany Lidesci were the fiercest fighters of all. I make no boast, though naturally I'm proud, but merely state a fact when I say that my fathers' fathers — the forefathers of the Szgany Lidesci — were the first of the Travellers to lay traps for the Wamphyri, their lieutenants, thralls and creatures. We were staking, beheading, and burning those bastards a hundred years ago! Aye, even before The Dweller and Harry Hell-Lander took up our fight and showed those monsters what a real war looked like, the Lidescis had the respect of the Wamphyri… along with their hatred, of course.
'I was Chief of the Szgany Lidesci when The Dweller came, and later Zekintha, and later still Jazz Simmons. And finally Harry Hell-Lander, called Dwellersire. But Harry and his sons, The Dweller and Nathan Keogh, they all moved as you move, Jake… between the spaces used by common men, along a route invisible. Nathan Keogh still does, but in Sunside, in my world, on the far side of space-time; or one of its far sides, at least. Which is Ben Trask speaking, you understand. Me? Hah! I don't even know where space-time is!
'Anyway, I was Chief when Harry and his boy fought their battle in The Dweller's garden — their grand battle with the Wamphyri — and won! I couldn't be there with them, more's the pity, couldn't stand alongside Zek, and Jazz Simmons, and the Lady Karen, too; no, for I had problems of my own and arrived too late. But with these very eyes I saw what they had done: how they'd used the science of another world, the Hell-Lands, and weird talents from… well, from beyond any lands of the living, to defeat the forces of Lord Shaithis of the Wamphyri and kick his backside into the Icelands.
'We thought that was the end of it. All of the aeries bar one, Karen's, had been burned out, toppled, and brought crashing down onto the boulder plains. Why, the thunder of it — the shaking of the earth — had been felt in Sunside itself! Well, perhaps not as far away as that, but you get the idea. It had been awesome. And as I have said, we thought that was the end of it, that finally the Wamphyri were no more.
'Most of my people thought so, anyway…
'But I have a seer's blood in me — perhaps even vampire blood… oh, it's possible! — and I didn't believe that the Wamphyri were no more. It simply didn't smell right, it didn't feel right, and for a time equal to four of your Earth years I couldn't settle but watched and waited and held my breath. And from time to time I would climb up into the barrier mountains, through the high crags and passes, and down into The Dweller's garden, all fallen into ruin, where I would sit alone to think it over… and to worry.
'And not without good reason. One time when I went there, Harry came back. But he was changed. No, don't ask my meaning;
he simply wasn't the man I'd known. But I believe he was soil my friend. And the Necroscope had chosen a most opportune time to return to my world, for my seer's blood had told me no lie: the Wamphyri were back in Sunside/Starside! Not only the last of them, but also the first.
'Shaitan the Unborn himself, aye, come back like a plague that can never die…'
CHAPTER TWELVE The Rest Of Lardis's Story
'Shaitan the Fallen — Shaitan the Unborn, Shaitan himself— and his banished descendant, Lord Shaithis: the two of them back in Starside after four years of peace and quiet and nights without nightmares, back from the Icelands. They had flyers and warrior beasts, the makings of a small but deadly army. And Harry Hell-Lander… no longer himself. And his son The Dweller much less than himself, for he was a changeling creature. As for the Lady Karen: who could say what Karen would do or where her loyalties now lay, who for four long years had been alone and brooding in Karenstack, the last great aerie of the Wamphyri?
'Well, the rest of it is strange and frightening. I know, I know: all of it is strange and frightening! But to me far worse, for it came of Earth's science, of which I knew nothing at that time. And when I saw it I knew we had named the Hell-Lands Gate aright, for most certainly this was made in hell. What? It was the very breath of hell.' This is how it was:
'Shaitan, Shaithis and their forces, they had made camp at the Starside Gate. The Necroscope had been taken prisoner, the Lady Karen, too, for in fact she'd sided with Harry. Which was only natural, I suppose. After all, Karen had always been Shaithis's most deadly enemy. As for the details: I can't be definite about any of this, because my observation point was so far away, high in the mountains. I assume they were suffering torture. Certainly bonfires were blazing down there among the many clumps of boulders surrounding the Gate.
'Then, I felt something happening. And I sensed it was of the Necroscope's doing. My seer's blood warned me not to look, and I warned the others there with me. Mostly, they heeded my cry of warning. But one of them, Peder Szekarly, was young and sometimes stupid — brave but stupid. He continued to look, and was witness to it. He saw it… then saw no more, ever again. The light was such that it burned him, burned his eyes out and blinded him. Nor did he live for very long.
'But that lightll swear it shone through the very boulders where we crouched! For comparison, the Gate's glare was but a candle. And the light was merely the beginning, for then came the crack! Rut that doesn't convey it, for it was a sound like the earth splitting! And finally the blast.
'Well, I've seen what a grenade can do, but this…
'Not even a million grenades — and all of them detonating at the same time — could equal it. But before that:
'I had looked up from behind the rocks where I crouched. I didn't know that Peder had failed to heed my warning. There he stood exposed, looking down on Starside. But then, in the smallest fraction of a second, that awful light jumped from Starside into the mountains and shone on Peder. Smoke leaped from him as from a leaf fallen in the fire. He screamed his agony, clutched at his face, tottered back away from the gap in the rocks. But even as he stumbled it was as if a giant's hand slapped at him, hurled him down. And I remember thinking:
''Perhaps this was how it was when the white sun fell!'
'Hot grit stinging, and stones spattering; the earth trembling, and lightning lashing the sky. And myself— aye, and the rest of my men with me — gasping in our terror of the unknown, while Peder moaned and sobbed where he had fallen.
'Then, in a while — as the frenzy of the winds gradually lessened, and the pebbles stopped falling, and the ground stopped shaking — that rumble of sound, that hissing of warm rain, that darkness closing in as the stars were shut out. And, when I dared look, that mushroom cloud going up and up, towering as high and higher than the mountains themselves. And the electrical storm in its dome, and the fires that billowed all up and down its pulsing
