In the last few seconds Karen had linked minds with Harry. She saw his problems and he saw hers: the lesser warrior which Shaithis had sent after her had dispatched her fighting creature and was now closing on her flyer. To Karen, it all seemed ended. Necroscope, it’s over! she sent. My mount’s a weakling, already winded. There’s only myself to blame, for I designed him. I’d head for the furnace lands and a golden death in the rising sun, but doubt if we’d make it. Well, at least I’ll go out honourably: a gauntlet against a warrior!
Riding Karen’s last creature where its mewling, slavering attacker shredded its way to him, the Necroscope looked out through Karen’s eyes.
Her flyer heaved and panted where she drove it south for the great pass, for already its altitude was insufficient to carry it over the peaks. But spurting down on her from above and behind came that monster which Shaithis had ordered: Get after the woman. You know what to do! And directly down below, close to where the gash of the great pass split the mountains . . . that glaring light? Starside’s Gate, of course; Harry would have known it at once, except this aerial view was new to him. In the next moment, turning that view red, the torn carcass of Karen’s defeated warrior crashed down and burst into pieces.
And its destroyer was falling on Karen ever faster.
Harry tumbled from his doomed creature’s back through a Möbius door, stepped out into the foothills rising up from Starside’s portal. The Gate was a fault in the matter of the multiverse, a huge distortion in the fabric of Möbius space-time; but the Necroscope was far enough away that it had little effect. He scanned the wide mouth of the pass where the enemy warrior was playing with Karen’s exhausted flyer, forcing it down. A second flyer, riderless, flapped uselessly close by: Harry’s mount, which he’d ordered to stay with its mistress.
He took the Möbius route into its saddle and called to Karen: We’re not done yet.
She heard him, but so did Shaithis. At the end of his long, fast glide he landed close to the Gate and reformed into his man-shape. And seeing his warrior in the sky where it menaced the flyers and their riders, he ordered it: Bring me the woman – in pieces, if that’s the only way!
The warrior’s response was immediate: it crashed its bulk down on to Karen’s flyer and knocked her half out of the saddle. And while she reeled there and tried to recover her senses and balance both, it put out appendages with hooked claspers and snatched her up. Then, with its propulsors roaring triumphantly, the monster smashed down on the riderless flyer one last time to break its neck. And as Karen’s crippled beast spun and tumbled down out of the sky into the pass, so the warrior turned back towards the boulder plain.
Good! Shaithis applauded his beast. Bring her to me.
Harry sent his mount plummeting from on high directly into the path of the warrior; ignoring him, the thing came straight on. He sent: Release her to me, directly into its small brain.
Do not! its rightful master countered his command. Knock him aside . . . crush him if you can!
The monster was upon Harry. Karen, held fast in its palps of chitin thorns – which pierced her flesh, holding her like a fish on a hundred hooks – could only scream as its neck arched to strike at him; while jaws like a small cave, more lethally equipped than the mouth of Tyrannosaurus rex, opened to sweep him up.
What happened next was all instinct. It was as if Faéthor Ferenczy lived in the Necroscope yet, and whispered in his ear: When he opens his great jaws at you, go in through them! Harry knew he could never hope to cause this creature any real physical injury, not from the outside. But somewhere within that monstrous skull was a tiny brain; and somewhere inside himself, something was or still desired to be Wamphyri!
Go in through them!
Harry stood up in the saddle, stepped into the stench of the warrior’s mouth as it snapped shut on him. But within that door of teeth was another conjured from his metaphysical mind. He passed through that one, too, into the Möbius Continuum . . . and out again within the warrior’s head. Physically inside its head! Among the rude materials of its cranium, the pulsing pipes and conduits, knobs and nodules, muck and mucous membrane of its living skull!