Trask couldn't take his eyes off that alien skyscraper tower, so that he stumbled over small rocks as Nathan led the way even farther from the Gate's glare. Possibly the stack (or stacks, as once were), had weathered out from the barrier range and been left standing there like a series of mighty buttes as the mountains themselves retreated. Certainly, they had been a natural feature of this place, at least until the first of the vampire Lords had commenced work on them. But now, especially in its upper sections or levels, this last great aerie of the Wamphyri looked anything but natural. What? With all of those chimneys and causeways? Those towers, turrets and flying buttresses? Those landing-bays, balconies and ... windows? Behind which, even as Trask gazed, faint glimmering lights were flickering into being one by one!
Or was that simply a whim of his imagination, a trick of the spectral light, a mirage of the twining mists which draped the distant menhir?
'No mirage, Ben,' Nathan told him. 'Look the other way, across the barrier mountains.' Trask and the others, they all looked, and saw that the sky over the mountains was now indigo, shot with fading shafts of gold, and that the shafts formed a slowly turning fan like the spokes of a phantom wheel. Then the fan seemed to fold in upon itself, and faded in a moment to a memory in the mind's eye. And:
'Sundown,' Nathan told them. 'The true night. And time we were gone from here. Those lights in Karenstack ... the Wamphyri are up and about. Perhaps they're already abroad in Sunside. But if not they soon will be, and we stand directly in their path. Now wait a moment...'
He conjured a Mobius door, which shrank a little from the proximity of the Gate, then firmed up and stood steady. 'Good, we can go.' He turned to the cavers. 'You first. If not for me, you wouldn't be here. So I want to make sure you're safe. Form a ring and hold on to each other ... and, well, just hold on. But no questions, and no talking. Just . .. bear with me.'
Then, expanding his door, he guided them through it, and stepped in after them - And Trask, Chung and Anna Marie were left alone on the boulder plains.
But not for long; maybe a minute and a half, at most. And then -
'Jesus!' Trask gasped, as a ragged shadow flitted close overhead. His eyes scanned skyward and his machine-pistol made its typical metallic ch-ching sound as he instinctively cocked it. And: 'Bats!' he whispered, as he spied what spied upon them.
'Desmodus.' Anna Marie's breath was ragged. 'Pretty much the same as the vampires of Earth, but big.' She, too, cocked her weapon.
'Big?' David Chung was quick to follow suit. 'Why, those things must be three feet across, wing-tip to wing-tip!'
'But not especially dangerous.' Anna Marie had regained her composure. 'Oh, if there was only one of us, injured, then they might attack. But right now they're merely curious. We're strange to them. They didn't expect to find us here. Shh! Listen!'
There were half a dozen of the giant bats, and now they were circling, calling to each other with shrill, barely audible whistles; barely audible to human ears, that is. But miles across the boulder plains their cries would certainly be heard by others of their ilk ... and perhaps by others not quite of their ilk. And maybe not too many miles away, at that.
'The advance guard,' said Trask, his throat suddenly dry. 'Aerial observers, trackers, bloodhounds.'
'Right,' Chung choked the word out. 'And look, here come the masters of the hounds!' He pointed a shaking hand.
In the sky, barely half a mile away, a pair of weirdly pulsing manta shapes blotted out the stars as they descended from on high ... and they were headed directly for the three espers where they stood, frozen like rabbits in the glare of headlight beams, on the cold uncaring plain of boulders ...