Violent
Homecoming who oppose me and mine. And think on this: when all is done, there wiJJ be a reward. Aye, for I shall feed you the very best of tidbits - the ones that scream when you crunch them!
Riderless, using rocky outcrops and hillocks of stony debris to shield its bulk, the flyer came skimming across the boulder plain. It had only one purpose; its vampire master, dismounted now, had sent only one telepathic command from where he went afoot among the scattered rocks: Fall on them!
A command that Nathan had heard. But Trask and Chung had taken refuge in a cluster of boulders close by; it would be no easy thing to prise them out of there, or to fall on them, and their ability to fire out was unaffected. Their location was a natural vantage point.
Nathan and Anna Marie, however, remained out in the open and so were an easy target. And the flyer was headed for them. Anna Marie saw the brute coming, forming its wings into vast scoops, deliberately stalling itself. Its intention could not be clearer. Panicked, she made to hobble away; Nathan caught her arm and said, 'No, not that way.'
He conjured a door, pulled her in after him, took her to a place he knew. It was a flat-topped bluff to one side of the mouth of the great pass, with an easy scramble down to safety. Lardis Lidesci had brought him here once to watch the sun rising on the last aerie. And steadying her, he said, 'You should be safe here. If all goes well, I'll come back for you. If not ... well, Sunside lies beyond the pass.' It was as much as he had time for.
And then he went back for Trask and Chung.
Frustrated, the flyer was making a low, hovering pass over the cluster of boulders where Nathan's colleagues were sheltering. They cradled their weapons but were saving ammunition and waiting for further developments. Emerging from the Mobius Continuum close to the nest of boulders, Nathan yelled, 'Hold your fire!' But as he sprinted towards them, he saw the two vampire lieutenants creeping up on their flank.
Skidding to a halt and pointing, Nathan shouted, 'On your right! Down in that hollow!' Which was a moment before the lieutenants sprang into view and came loping, zigzagging towards the clump of boulders. Then:
A shadow passed over Nathan where he stood undecided ... and a second shadow; and at the same time he heard a sound to fill his veins with ice water: the sputtering throb of a Wamphyri warrior's bio-propulsive vents! And oh how he knew what that meant; so that his mind and blood froze as he felt himself carried back, back in time - back to that night in Settlement, when Wratha's raiders had left the town in ruins.
The night his brother Nestor had been taken by the Wamphyri, when Nathan had seen Misha with Canker Canison and thought that she, too, had been stolen away into Starside. The night a warrior reduced Nona Kiklu's house to rubble, leaving her son to believe that his mother was ...
'Nathan - for Christ's sake!' Trask's shouted warning snatched him out of it - or back into it; Trask's shout, and the obscene snarling of automatic weapons. Nathan's eyes focused. He saw the vampire lieutenants closing with the boulder clump, saw them hurl themselves headlong in superhuman pes up over the protective rock barrier ... and saw them slam to a halt in mid-air, even thrown backwards by the twin streams of smoking steel that slammed into them!
The two vampire lieutenants were out of it, incapacitated, if only for the moment, but Gorvi's lesser familiars were not. They came shrilling from the west, no longer as mere trackers but more nearly as hounds: harriers! Not in the least clumsy for their size, the giant Desmodus bats seemed like a
horde as they wove this way and that, while in fact there were only six of them at most. Yet such was their speed and erratic patterns of flight, as inpiduals they presented near-impossible targets.
Nathan had reached the jumble of rocks where Trask and Chung had taken cover. If he squeezed his way in with them, it might well prove difficult to conjure a Mobius door within the confines of their sanctuary. No, he must first get them out of there.