His words had seemed to suffice to draw the other up from whatever morbid depths claimed him, even so far as to correct his temporary imbalance. And: ‘Indeed, these appear to be good warriors, my son!’ he’d at once remarked. A rare compliment; at once qualified by: ‘Which they should be, for in Starside you had a sufficiency of superb clay with which to practise.’
And after that the ancient rambled no more . . .
Later still:
The two had constructed a slender, streamlined, powerful flyer, equipped it with a sucking snout and given it the stripped-to-basic brain of one of Menor Maimbite’s otherwise defunct lieutenants. Fuelling the beast on quality plasma, they’d sent it on a reconnaissance flight to Star-side. After that and over the space of a good many auroral displays, they’d waited on its return but in vain. Eventually, when almost all hope had faded . . . then the flyer had returned, bringing back with it a scrawny shivering waif of a Traveller child.
A boy of eight or nine years, the flyer had snatched him at sundown from a party of Travellers where they camped in the hills over Sunside. It appeared that the Travellers no longer went to earth when the sun sank down into night. Why should they, when the Wamphyri were no more? But the return journey from Starside had been long, and the child almost dead from exposure.
Shaitan had carried him away to his private chambers for ‘questioning’; shortly thereafter, the ancient’s mind-call had summoned Shaithis from where he worked at the vats: Come!
A single word, yes, but its author’s excitement had spoken volumes . . .
5
Sundown – Exorcets – The Godmind
Shaithis stood tall and severe in the black, gapped caldera wall and looked south towards Starside. Overhead, the aurora wove in a sky which was otherwise black, but he knew that on Starside it would be sunup. The mountain peaks would be burning gold, and in Karen’s aerie thick curtains and tapestries woven with her sigil would guard the uppermost windows, where lances of sunfire might otherwise strike through.
He looked south, narrowing his scarlet eyes to focus upon a far faint line of fire all along the horizon, a narrow golden haze which separated the distant curve of the world first from blue then black space, where all the stars of night hung glittering and hypnotic, seeming to beckon him. Which was a call he would answer. Soon.
Indeed he must, for when the aurora died to a flicker and the sky in the south darkened to jet, then it would be sundown; in advance of which, Shaithis and his devolved, depraved ancestor would muster their warriors, mount their flyers and launch a small but monstrous army from the volcano’s steep lava slopes. For them the realization of a dream, and for Starside the advent of a nightmare, was finally in the offing. Shaitan’s dream for so many hundreds of years, now looming into being, brought into sharp relief by a lone flyer’s recent return out of Starside with its burden of a stolen Traveller waif.
Shaithis remembered the event in minute detail: the way his gloating ancestor had carried off the exhausted, half-dead boy into the gloom of his sulphur-floored chambers; following which (eventually), his mental summons: Come!
In his mind’s eye Shaithis saw it all again: the Fallen One, jubilant where he paced or flowed to and fro across the black, grainy floor of his apartments in his excitement. And before Shaithis had been able to frame a question: ‘This Dweller of whom you’ve spoken – ‘ Shaitan had turned to him ‘ – this alien youth who used the power of the sun itself to bring down the mighty Wamphyri.’
‘Yes, what of him?’
‘What of him?’ Shaitan had gurgled darkly, delightedly, in his fashion. ‘Devolved, that’s what! Even as I myself am devolved – but to his far greater cost. So, he bathed you all in blazing sunlight, eh? By which reducing Wamphyri flesh to steam and stench? Well, and he seared himself, too! His vampire must have been injured; it could not repair itself; his metamorphic man-flesh sloughed away even as a leper’s. Then … his desperate vampire returned him to an earlier form: that of its original host and manifestation. Less bulk in that, making the wastage easier to contain, d’you see? And so your Dweller is now … a wolf!’