And so for him there was no tomorrow. His bloodsons had deadened his senses with strong drink, poisoned his food with silver; and while he lay in his stupor they blinded him! When he leapt shrieking awake, then they'd taunted him and led him blundering through Madmanse right to the rim of this very pit ... and over it! And at the last, when he lay broken at the bottom, they had choked the pit with boulders and sealed it.
But Eygor was Wamphyri and did not die. Well, not immediately. For a six-month he lived on muck and bones and, while his metamorphic flesh remained pliable, gathered to himself the remnants of dead constructs: the armour of warriors, debris of cartilage creatures, marrow of monsters. Planning to break out, he made a giant of himself. But the refuse pit was as deep as his sustenance was bad, and Eygor's strength waned even as his size increased. And of course he was blind.
He fashioned eyes for himself, but they were poor things and lacking in power; all of their special evil had been burned out of them. Finally, starved and stiffening, Eygor had slumped against the wall and moved no more. But while the evil and hatred were gone from his eyes, still they burned bright in his undying mind. For just like the minds of common men, those of vampires, too, go on beyond death. And just as the evil power of his mind had been vast during life and undeath, so it continued in the true death. Which perhaps explained the morbid atmosphere of Madmanse; for, if only in mind and spirit, Eygor Killglance dwelled there still. ..
When for a while the Necroscope Nathan Kiklu lived in Maglore's Runemanse, Eygor had spoken to him in his dreams, lured him down into deserted Madmanse, even attempted to bargain with him. For the thing in the pit had eavesdropped on the deadspeak conversations of dreaming Thyre ancients in their cavern mausoleums under the drifted sands of Sunside's deserts, and he understood Nathan's power over the dead: that they would even leave their graves at his command. And his proposition was this:
If Nathan should see fit to bring him back to life - if only long enough to take revenge upon his sons - then the Necroscope could ask what he would of him, and be heir to Eygor's greatest mystery: the secret of his killing eye! That had been Eygor's Wamphyri vow, his promise for the future, which Nathan had spurned.
But ... Eygor knew that the future was a long and devious thing, and that what stands today often falls tomorrow, or most certainly the day after that. At the moment Nathan did not need an extra talent; he had sufficient of his own. But tomorrow and tomorrow ...?
Then what had been Eygor's killing eye in life became his seeing eye in death, so that he followed the youth's adventures from that time forward; even up to the time when Nathan fled to his old home in the west. But after that...
.. . Nathan's passing, or what Eygor had taken for his passing, had been like a cold wind blowing in the pit-thing's mind. And like the guttering of a distant candle in the dark night of death, Eygor had seen Nathan's light go out. Which could mean only one thing: that the Necroscope was no more.
Except (and as Eygor himself had once pointed out): the future is a long and devious thing, and history often repeats itself. And in that selfsame moment during Maglore's inspection of Madmanse, when he had paused and lifted his head, sniffed and sensed Nathan's return ... so too had Eygor sensed it! But where Maglore had breathed Nathan's name, Eygor in the bowels of the place could only deadspeak it: Nathaaan! Like the soughing of the wind in an aerie's battlements, or the sighing of a ghost in its refuse pits.
For Nathan was there in Eygor's mind; far away, true, but shining with his unique light as before, so that Eygor knew him at once. And the pit-thing's all but forgotten desire to be up and about in the world of the living returned immediately, for the Necroscope Nathan was his one hope of revenge against his bloodsons, Wran and Spiro.
And as if the thought of his sons had galvanized Eygor's dead flesh, albeit momentarily, there had sounded in the pit a creaking as of rusted hinges; and before all fell still and eerily silent again, a single streamer of dust had come drifting down from the high, cobwebbed ceiling . ..
The Wamphyri Lord Maglore of Runemanse and the ex-Lord Eygor Killglance were not the only ones who knew
that the Necroscope Nathan was back. All the dead of Starside knew it, too. And as his aura washed out from him, as it was felt and his light was seen in the otherwise uttermost darkness, so would the dead of Sunside know it.
But there were others yet more special who had known of Nathan's return from the moment he moved away from the influence of the Gate onto the plain of boulders. His nephew wolves knew it: Blaze, Dock and Grinner. He had named the first and wisest of these for the white, diagonal stripe across his grey forehead, as if the fur there was marked with frost. Dock was the one with a stump of a tail, where an angry vixen had found cause to chastise him when he was a cub. While Grinner was the one with an uneven temper, whose black-gleaming upper lip was wont to draw back from his teeth, so that it might seem he was grinning. All three of them, they knew he was back for sure.
And waking in their barrier mountains den - blinking triangular yellow eyes and yawning, knowing in their way that it was twilight, and their mistress moon would soon be sailing on high - they simply acknowledged his return and were glad, or as glad as wolves may be. Nor were they the last of Nathan's 'relatives' to know ...