A deadspeak gasp: What, all of them? Shaithis, Fess, Lesk? Not Lesk the Glut, surety?
All of them, Nathan told him. He knew the names Cezar mentioned, for they were like old curse-words among the Travellers of Sunside.
And that one who was here that time, your father, he did aJJ this?
He helped to do it, certainly.
And suddenly Cezar guffawed. But that old bastard Menor Maimbite, dead, eh? Oh, hah hah hah/
You didn't much care for your master, then.
Cezar stopped laughing on the instant, and grunted, Care for him? I hated his black heart! He caught me licking a woman of his, cut out my tongue and made her eat it. And: There,' he toJd me, 'now she's tasted your tongue with both her mouths - as I'm sure she's tasted your sex!' Then ... he throttled her, and took me to the Starside Gate.
Nathan had real experience of the Starside Gate and knew what that last meant. At least, he had experience of the Gate whose dome showed above the ground. Something over three years ago he'd seen it when accompanying Lardis Lidesci on his annual pilgrimage into the gaunt, aching emptiness which was then Starside. And just a few months ago he'd passed through it into Perchorsk. Moreover he'd had E-Branch's Keogh files read to him and knew there were two Gates. The upper Gate had been created when a Russian experiment, the Perchorsk Projekt, backfired and blasted a grey hole between parallel dimensions; the second was a thing of nature, lodged beneath the first in what was once a pit and so invisible from the surface by virtue of its manmade twin. Since time immemorial, the lower, natural, original Gate - which had its exit here in this subterranean cavern in Romania - had been used infrequently and according to circumstance as an instrument of Wamphyri punishment, revenge or simple cruelty, into which the Lords of Starside had tossed enemies, vanquished foes and disobedient thralls.
So you were hurled into the white gaping maw of hell. Nathan nodded grimly. Through which you sank down into this place.
Aye, the other grunted. But when I got here the water was high and dark and swift. And so I crept up here onto this ledge and waited, waited, waited. Soon I was too weak to swim, even if I could swim, and the cold and the damp had stiffened all my joints. Starvation ... I was not yet Wamphyri but a lieutenant .. . even a vampire's longevity could not sustain me through the rigours of this place. And like all of these others, I feared the water mightily. Finally I was as you see me now, stiffened to a stone, or very nearly so. And that was the end of Cezar Bitesthrall ... He uttered a deadspeak sigh, and after a moment continued, And you? Do you really intend to go in the other direction? What, and are you then a madman? Ah, but it will take real magic to keep you alive in Starside! Except - and yet again his gasp - No, not so! For They are no more, The Old Wamphyri, dead and gone forever. But... is it really so?
They were gone for a while, Nathan answered.
Eh? Explain!
The Old Wamphyri are dead, aye. But in the east, beyond the Great Red Waste, others were waiting out their time. Now they are back in Starside, in the last great aerie of the Wamphyri. I go as my father went before me: to destroy them who destroy mine.
But your name: Nathan Keogh? The first, however rare, is a Traveller name, be sure .. . but Keogh? Ah! I remember: your father's name. And he -
- Was a hell-lender, yes. Nathan nodded. But my mother was a Kiklu, Szgany.