The dazzling white hemisphere was perhaps thirty feet in diameter and set in a crater like the raised rim of a volcanic blowhole. All around its perimeter, penetrating the earth and the crater walls alike to a radius of over sixty feet, magmass wormholes gaped everywhere. The seven had emerged from one such hole and now must be careful where they stepped; the walls of the holes were glass-smooth, and some were very nearly perpendicular. Their depth was entirely conjectural.
Away from the Gate itself:
The perceptions of the visitors were at first baffled, disorientated by the contrasts of what might easily be considered a surreal or even hallucinogenic landscape; except it was all too real. Perhaps because of the alien nature of the place, their eyes were first drawn to those one or two features which were most readily acceptable. Like the mountains.
Behind the Gate, maybe two miles south, the barrier mountains rose gaunt and grey from foothills and scree escarpments, up sparsely-clad slopes, over crags and buttresses, through ravines and saddles to sloping plateaux and sharp-fanged peaks that were rapidly fading from amethyst to ash-grey silhouettes in the twilight before true night. The immense range sprawled east on the one hand, west on the other as far as the eye could see; its peaks marched away to far horizons, merged with them, passed into purple velvet distances and disappeared at the rim of the world. But for all that the range displayed many of the mundane features of Earthly mountains, still these peaks were most obviously alien; they felt cold and alien. And Trask found himself thinking, as at least one other had thought before him: Only take away the trees under the timberline . .. these could well be the mountains of the moon!
Closer, maybe two to three miles south and a little east, the mouth of a canyon - the great pass - opened onto the barren boulder plains. Apart from this pass, where in ages past the barrier range had cracked open, the march of the mountains seemed entirely unbroken. And so the mountains and the great pass through them, and the hush of twilight, were in the main acceptable to human perceptions. But as for the rest of Starside:
To the west there was only the sparsely-wooded flank of the mountains, and at the foot of the range the boulder plains rolling north, turning blue then dark blue into a mainly featureless distance. But directly to the north, to the far north, the blue turned smoky black and the earth was a darkness shot through with dull silver streaks. There, under the weird weave of ghostly aurora and the glitter of unknown constellations like blue ice-shards frozen in the vaulted dark of the skies, the surface of what might be a sullen sea, or possibly a sheet of glacial ice, made a misty mirror-image of the alien heavens. And if the mountains belonged on the moon, then this was a picture of some cold and dying planet way out beyond Arcturus .. .
A chill wind had come up; blowing from the north, it was gradually eating its way through the clothing of the seven to their very bones. They felt it and shivered, but not only on the outside ... for it was a chill of the soul.
Sensing (or perhaps reading) their thoughts, Nathan told them:
That wind blows off the Icelands. In the olden times, when a vampire Lord was found wanting, sometimes the others would banish him north. Such errant Lords suffered various forms of punishment: to be driven north, possibly to a freezing death; or to be buried alive out on the boulder plains; or maybe to be hurled into the hell-lands Gate, from which no one ever returned. Well, not until now.'
The seven had taken up Nathan's weapons. As he led them away from the hemisphere of white light, he paused for a moment to point east and a little north. Now that the painful glare of the Gate was behind them and their eyes had grown accustomed to Starside's preternatural gloom, their view of the boulder plains was that much clearer. And there to the north-east of the Gate, of all they had seen so far, the barren boulder plains - and what stood or lay in a vast jumble upon them - were the most surreal of all.
The boulder plains were just what the term implied: seemingly endless plains reaching out from the barrier mountains to the northern horizon under its writhing dome of shimmering auroras. They might be the bed of some aeon-dead ocean, like the misnamed mares of the moon. But scattered far and wide across them, like clods of earth thrown haphazardly down on the bed of a dried up lake, boulder piles and inpidual rocks stood starkly silhouetted in the glare of the Gate, casting concentric rings of shadows outwards from the central point of illumination. Well away from the Gate they were like eerie white sentinels, and farther still they were grey ghosts gradually merging into the powder-blue background.
Weathered into weird shapes, many of the boulders were grotesque as gargoyles, so that the overall effect was surreal, like a painting by Salvador Dali. All it would seem to lack was a focal point, an 'object' of form or structure so striking as to distract the eye from what might otherwise be considered its monotony. And out there, some eight or nine miles east and two to three north, indeed that singularity existed.
For even at that distance the seven could make out a nest of squat, mist-wreathed columns like some immense Stone-henge - like the stumps of a ring of gigantic, petrified mushrooms, or the mighty pedestals of toppled, cyclopean statues - rising up from vast heaps of scree and stony debris. And tumbled down on the alien earth itself, half-buried in the riven soil, the shattered bodies of the fallen gods, all formed into tumuli or strewn into dog-legged mounds of rubble about the bases of the naked stumps.
But central in this primal fossil forest a mighty stack remained, unscathed by earthquake or any device of man or monsters: the last great aerie of the Wamphyri! And: 'Karen-stack,' Nathan whispered, in awe of that incredible fang. 'Or whatever they've named it... now.'
And Trask and the others gazed their fascination, however morbid, across all the misted miles to that lone kilometre-high sentinel rock, still standing there in the east among the rubble of the fallen aeries, where Harry Keogh had brought them crashing down onto the boulder plains. Then Trask, Chung and Anna Marie were given to wonder: But if this is only the last of the aeries - and not the greatest by any means - then how must it have looked when all of the stacks were standing? And all of their inhabitants alive ... or undead?