''We were banished,' said Vavara, who had been a hag, but already was regaining much of her former beauty.
''Aye, long and long ago,' said Malinari. And he took her down to the ice-house in the ribs of our long-extinct warrior. Gnawed on by bears, wolves, foxes, whatever, its bones had collapsed to nothing and lay flat to the cold slurry. And: 'A hundred years,' said Malinari. 'Or two, or three — or maybe more! And our enemies in Starside? Killed off by now in their bloodwars. And that diseased old tyrant, Dramal Doombody: by now he is no more, sloughed away to rot and ruin. But we, the forgotten of Starside, go on. We are survivors, Vavara. And we shall return!'
'And we did. But before then we flew west to explore Shaitan the Unborn's fire-mountain. This was only made possible by his absence; Malinari no longer sensed his presence in the extinct volcano, and the smoke of his fires no longer rose up. We found mighty vats of plasma; once frozen, they were now rancid, crawling with maggots, and gave offence. These and other signs of fairly recent habitation told of a Being not long moved on.
' 'It seems that he, too, has returned into Starside,' was Lord Szwart's opinion.
'But be that as it may, we never found him there…'
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Nathan's War
In the sump of the once-refuge (and yet not really there, for in fact Jake Cutter was asleep and uneasily dreaming in a jetcopter speeding east towards Brisbane across the vastly sprawling Simpson Desert) Harry Keogh's deadspeak voice once again startled Jake from the weird reverie induced by Korath MindsthralTs story: You've done well, Korath, and we are almost finished now, Harry said. Almost? The vampire answered gloomily, by now perhaps resignedly. What more can you possibly want of me?
Well, we know what you failed to find when you returned to Starside, the ex-Necroscope, or rather his revenant — or, better still, this facet of him — answered. You didn't find Shaitan or any others of the Wamphyri, and you certainly didn't find their aeries! Instead you found the hollow stumps of those once-great stacks, which you, your master, and Us colleagues were obliged to use as temporary dwelling places. Then, once again, you commenced raiding on Sunside's Szgany. You can take it from there.
But it scarcely seems worthwhile, Korath protested. For it appears you already know it all!
Not all of it. (The shake of an incorporeal head.) How didMalinari and the others fair on Sunside,for instance? We would like to know how the Szgany… welcomed them? Also, we want to know what made those three Great Vampires desert Starside, risk their necks by venturing into the ill-omened subterranean Gate, and come here. And since you were involved, who better to ask?
Very well, Korath grated, his patience all but used up. If it would please you—
— It would, Harry told him. And it would serve to keep us here a while longer at least.
Then, with a sigh, Korath put the finishing touches to his tale:
'We flew home, to what had been our home. You are correct: the aeries were gone, like vast stone corpses fallen on the barren boulder plains. And arriving in the hour before sunup, we were obliged to find shelter in their shattered stumps.
'The desmodus colonies were still there, and we found ourselves greeted by descendants of the descendants of our former familiars. At least they were the same! And like the bats themselves, we sheltered from the sun (which seemed to rise marginally higher in the sky) in their lowly crumbling caverns in the echoing basement levels of the shattered stacks.
'Night came, and with it the fear that perhaps the Szgany were no more: that they, too, might have succumbed to whatever disaster had befallen here. But when we flew to the higher ridges of the barrier mountains and looked down on Sunside—
'—Ah! But the Szgany were there, and in such numbers!
'Their campfires — and in many cases more permanent town or settlement fires — lit the night like so many glow-worms in the dark of forests which, in our time, had not seen so much as a nightlight, but only the tell-tale smoke of cottage or caravan stoves! And here they were all joyous, juicy, and fearless, our beloved Szgany of Sunside. The sounds of their music drifted up to our keen vampire ears, and the smells of their cooking — and of them — to our wide, straining nostrils. Ah, that was a beautiful moment!
'And Malinari said: 'The Wamphyri are gone. We three alone of all the Great Vampires survive.' (He excluded me, of course.) Do you see, Vavara? We are survivors, the only survivors! And so I was right.'
' 'And now we go down,' whispered Szwart, 'to the feast!'
'But: 'Ah, no, not so,' said The Mind, holding up a cautionary hand. 'Those tribes down there, they do not know we are back. If we raid here, now, then they will know. And next time will be that much harder. But we have aeries to build and furnish, lieutenants and thralls to recruit, warrior creatures and flyers to breed in our vats — hah! When we have first discovered or dug vats, in the wreckage of those shattered stumps!
' 'Also, you must ask yourself what happened here. Did the Wamphyri destroy themselves or were they destroyed? And if the latter, by whom? The Szgany? Ah, no, Lord Szwart, having survived the Icelands, I am in no great hurry to show myself here. For my thoughts have gone out and found an odd sense of security and freedom in the Szgany. Why, they are unafraid! Perhaps because they no longer have reason to be afraid. Which in turn might mean that we do. Wherefore we must be cautious and first discover the secret of these changes in the scheme of things.'
' 'So what would you suggest?' Szwart hissed. 'That we sit here all night and admire their fires?'
'Malinari shook his head. 'Those tribes down there, close-packed in this central area of Sunside. If we raid on one, then by morning all of them will know. And we need time to re-establish ourselves. So this is what we will do. Tonight we split up. Vavara raids in the far west, you in the east, but this side of the great pass. I shall raid beyond the pass. And we glut, aye, but mainly we recruit — we recruitfuriously, taking as many as we can. We share our spoils equally, building together, allies by circumstance as we have always been. This way, gradually, we shall discover what's what here: how things stand, and why they seem so different now. Is it agreed?'
'After some small haggling it was so agreed, and as Malinari had decreed we recruited 'furiously'. We converted men into thralls, from whose ranks we chose lieutenants; these were soon able to make more thralls — and so on. And we stockpiled drink and foodstuffs (aye, and other good stuff) out of Sunside, and put a task force to work digging in the rubble-strewn stumps of the old fallen stacks, building walls around our chosen habitations and roofing them over.
'During all of this construction, occasionally our workers would uncover vats, gas-beast chambers, or cocooned matter from yesteryear. Of course, the greater mass of the once-living material was putrid, no longer usable; some of it, however, contained a spark and was digestible, assimilable by newer, fresher material out of Sunside. And so we progressed.
'But time passed, and word of our presence also passed — from tribe to tribe and clan to clan — until all the peoples of Sunside knew that the Wamphyri were back in Starside. It didn't take long, say ten or twelve sundowns.
'Meanwhile we had recruited some eight hundred men, women, and children. Moreover, deep beneath the foundations of a toppled aerie, our workers had discovered a cache of well-preserved metamorphic liquids requiring little more than imprinting — an infusion of essence and a few nodes of rudimentary intelligence — to stimulate growth. And now we could fill the vats with vampiric life.
'First we made flyers, successfully! And later we tried for warriors, but that was when the trouble started. It was a tribe known for its aggressive nature in the olden times, and no less ferocious now: the Szgany Lidesci, whose territory lay midwest of Sunside in fertile forests under cavern-riddled foothills.
'Apparently the Lidescis had found a hero, a youth or man called Nathan Kiklu, who had ventured into forbidden places and returned with awesome weapons. It was a story we heard over and over again from thralls recruited in Sunside: how this Nathan's brother had been Wamphyri — Lord Nestor, of an aerie so mighty it could only have been Dramstack, or whatever it was called in his time — and how he had contrived to hurl his Szgany
