So, after all these years, finally he had come. And at such a time. Well, nothing for it but to welcome him; and who could say but that shortly he might be sorely needed? And so the Dweller simply went to Harry, where for long minutes he had stood, close to the glaring sphere, gazing on the world of the Wamphyri. . .
Harry was staring at the distantly rearing stacks, wondering about them just as Zek, Jazz and others had wondered before him. Suddenly … he was aware that someone watched him. He spun round and fell into a crouch, swung his gun up and cocked it. Some forty yards north of the sphere, out on the boulder plain, there stood a figure, motionless, watching. It was a slim figure, male from what Harry could see of it, and its face was golden, burning in the reflected glare of the sphere.
‘Don’t shoot!’ the other called out in a young-old voice, holding up a hand. ‘There’s no danger. Not yet.’
There was something about the voice. Harry relaxed a very little, tilted his head on one side enquiringly. ‘Not yet?’
‘No,’ said the other. ‘But soon. Look!’ And he pointed at the sky to the east. Harry looked.
Dark blots were growing large in the sky. Two of them, with others mere dots far behind. They came from the direction of the stacks. One was winged, shaped something like a manta. The other was … a nightmare shape! Gigantic, it squirted through the sky like a squid. ‘I should think that’s Shaithis,’ said the Dweller, pointing. ‘And the other thing, that’ll be one of his warriors. And see behind them? More flyers, carrying a couple of his lieutenants.’
‘Wamphyri?’ Harry guessed.
‘Oh, yes. You’d better come over here.’
Go over there? Harry believed he knew why: to be away from the gate. He knew the voice, too. He didn’t know it – couldn’t possibly know it – but he knew it. He moved to obey, and the flying shapes came closer.
The two leading shapes, Shaithis aboard a flyer, and a riderless warrior, swooped down out of the sky. They began to circle, and Shaithis’s beast sank lower, the wind of its great wings blasting dust and grit up from the plain into Harry’s and the Dweller’s faces. Its shadow fell on them as it shut out the stars, and Shaithis’s booming voice called:
‘Surrender! Surrender now, to the Lord Shaithis!’
‘Are you ready, father?’ said The Dweller. He held up one wing of his cloak.
Harry believed. No, he knew. The child he had searched for was eight years old, and this young man was at least twenty, but the two were one and the same. How didn’t matter, not right now. Harry’s whole world, his entire life, had been filled with things just as strange as this. Stranger.
‘I’m ready, son,’ he answered, his voice catching a little. ‘But . . . does it work here?’
‘Oh, it works. Except you mustn’t use it too close to a Gate.’
‘I know,’ said Harry. ‘I tried it once.’
Shaithis settled his beast to earth to the west, his warrior crunched down to the east. Other shapes loomed in the sky, almost directly overhead. ‘Ho, Dweller,’ Shaithis called, dismounting. ‘It seems I have you!’
‘Let me take you to our garden,’ said Harry Jnr to his father.
Harry stepped forward, took him in his arms and hugged him. He felt his son’s cloak close around him.
Shaithis, striding forward, jerked to a halt. Dust leaped up from the plain, formed itself into a devil that swirled in the vacuum that the two men had left behind. They were no longer there.
For long moments Shaithis stood, his flattened, convoluted snout sniffing the air. Then his great nostrils flared and his eyes blazed their fury. He threw back his head and roared. And as the plain echoed his cry, so he began to curse. And then he made his vow:
‘Dweller, I shall have you!’ he snarled. ‘You and your garden and all you possess. I shall have your magic, your weapons, your cloak of invisibility, your every secret. Do you hear? I shall have you, and the hell-landers, and everything. And when I have these things, then I shall use them to make myself the most powerful Lord there ever has been or ever will be. So speaks Shaithis of the Wamphyri. So let it be!’