As for lieutenants: where were they? Gone – gone with the flyers, the warriors, the trogs – gone with all dreams of conquest and revenge. Only a dozen flyers left in all the sky, exhausted, gliding where they caught the thermals and desperate to conserve energy, carrying their Lords whole or crippled, bearing them back to their stacks and their . . . . . .Their aeries?
Crossing over the glaring dome of the Gate, Shaithis had lifted his blackened face to peer ahead. And he’d seen the unbelievable, the unthinkable. Of all the mighty stacks of the Wamphyri, only one remained standing. And that was the stack of the treacherous Karen!
Fury galvanized him. Karen, that Mother-bearing bitch! He hauled on the reins, lifted the head of his flyer and turned it towards Karen’s stack. His creature tried: its manta wings pulsed once, twice, three times; pulsed feebly at the air, then quivered mightily and formed a shallow ‘V. The thing was barely alive. Its fluids were gone and there was nothing left to power it. The glide grew steeper, swifter, and nothing to be done about it. At the last moment Shaithis bellowed frantic mental commands into his creature’s dull, dying mind, dragged on the reins until he thought they’d surely snap. The beast’s head slowly came up and its wings adopted a more nearly aerodynamic profile. It swooped, levelled out, tilted to one side; the debris-littered plain became a dizzy, whirling, surreal kaleidoscope of rushing landscape. Then –
The creature’s inner wing-tip struck the stump of a stack, accelerating its spin. Its master was hurled from the saddle, felt bones break in his left arm and shoulder, tasted dust and his own blood where his face ploughed the plain and rocks broke his teeth. Long moments passed, silent except for Shaithis’s pounding heartbeat, and the worst of the pain slowly ebbed. Finally, gasping and swaying, he staggered to his feet, shook his gauntlet-clad right hand at Karen’s lone stack. He cursed it long and loud. Her aerie stood as a sure sign of her treachery. She was The Dweller’s, bought and paid for!
A vengeful snarl twisted Shaithis’s broken features more yet. Well, and when she returned from The Dweller’s garden . .-. ah, but then there’d be a reckoning! A reckoning, aye – long and lusty and bloody, bloody, bloody! And oh so very sweet!
He took a stumbling step in the direction of her stack -and froze. Descending toward that solitary needle of rock, that last Wamphyri aerie, was the warrior he’d previously noted. He groaned as it squirted in through the dark mouth of her launching bay. Her warrior! And while she lived it would defend her aerie to the last, against all comers, even against Shaithis of the Wamphyri himself.
How Shaithis raved then; ranted and raved, and no one at all to hear him but a flock of great bats, familiar creatures who doubtless questioned the whereabouts of their crevice colonies in the stricken Wamphyri stacks.
The moon raced on across the sky, and Shaithis grew quiet and became still. His shadow passed through the vertical and began to lengthen on the other side. When it was as long as Shaithis himself, then his shoulders slumped and he turned and headed for the shattered, far-flung ruins he’d once called home . . .
Weary and hollow-cheeked – with half of his body seared, several broken bones, and his face crushed and burned on one side – the once-great Lord Shaithis of the Wamphyri drew nigh the base of that mighty outcrop, that towering rock now gone forever, which had housed him for all of his five and a half centuries. In the stump itself, there he’d had his workshops: the vast vats where with great cunning he’d forced and moulded metamorphic flesh, creating his warriors, flyers, gaslings, siphoneers and various types of cartilage creature. Down there, if the massy ceiling had not fallen in upon it, a freshly formed flyer was even now mewling and floundering in its vat. Once a Traveller, soon it would travel again, and at least Shaithis would have a mount.
There, too, he’d find his pit-things: metamorphosed Travellers and trogs, mindless criers in perpetual night, the raw materials of his warriors and the other creatures he’d made. Well, they could leap in their pits, wail and gibber, stiffen, eventually fossilize. He cared not at all.