And Trask opened up on the warrior. Less than twenty-five yards away, the thing had opened its jaws. Inside ... it wasn't so much a mouth as a cave of daggers! Trask was shaken but held his aim directly into that gaping maw. And slime-dripping teeth flew in shards as steel met bone in shattering collision, none of which deflected the warrior from its course by an inch.
Nathan had his door. Holding it steady, he grabbed Trask's arm, Chung's too.
But the warrior was almost upon them. Grunting its challenge and intent on ramming them against the clump of boulders, it came head on. Trask snarled his fear, aimed at the foremost cluster of gas-bladders, let fly with a final spray of bullets. And as bladders exploded like grenades and the thing screamed, swerved, and turned the armoured mass of its flank to the fore, so Nathan yanked on his colleagues' arms and dragged them off-balance into the Mobius Continuum.
In the void of the Continuum, Trask panted his relief as he fingered his torn jacket and knew that the sleeve had been ripped off on one of the warrior's scales . ..
Gorvi's warrior sprawled, for the moment winded, in the lee of the boulders. Scales had been wrenched loose, several eyes and launching limbs crushed, and more bladders burst in the collision with the rocks. The nightmare beast's air-trap mantle was holed in several places along its left flank, but not so badly it wouldn't mend. First, however, it must rest, feed, fashion fresh bladders from its metamorphic flesh; that is, if its master desired it should ever fly again.
Gorvi had landed. Furious, the vampire Lord approached and examined the space between his construct and the boulders where he hoped to find the crushed remains of his dead foes - whatever they had been! And yet, that space was empty.
Well, not quite empty, for the bodies of his thralls were there at least, all crumpled, broken and dead ... or undead. For even now they were not completely beyond repair, if Gorvi so desired it. Except he did not desire it, not for this pair of unworthy dogs! As well that he'd sent the best and longest lasting of his lieutenants ahead of him into Sunside, to fight alongside Wratha and the others, else it might just as easily be Turgis Gorvisman lying here all full of holes and his blood leaked out!
On the other hand . .. well, he was a one to look out for, that Turgis. Gorvi couJd have left him in charge of Guilesump, except by now he'd probably have been at it with one or another of Gorvi's females - or several of them! Huh.' A man couldn't trust anyone these days.
But the strange and sudden absence of these alien interlopers - or their corpses at least - was a puzzle. Gorvi had seen them here; he was sure he had seen his warrior crash into them. As for their awesome weapons, why, for all he knew they could be trained on him even now ...
... He at once crouched down, sent a cautious vampire probe into the maze of boulders. Their aura - their scent -would soon give these humans away, if they'd somehow managed to wriggle back in there: the warm salty scent of untainted blood. But no, they weren't there; only an oily smell now, and a trace of their human breath hanging sweet on the still air ... and lingering smells of cloth and hot steel, too, from their clothing and their weapons. Alien smells all, but nothing of the flesh and blood people who had made them.
Gorvi snarled his frustration, cursed his misfortune: to have lost two flyers, a pair of lieutenants, a warrior damaged and depleted. Well, at least the last might still be salvaged. And so: Feed! he commanded the beast.
The monster's permanent prow eyes (permanent as opposed to the rudimentary metamorphic sensors in its underbelly and other parts of its anatomy) immediately swivelled in Gorvi's direction. Blank black disks which should scarcely be capable of reasoning intelligence as such - more properly receptors for the tiny brute mind within -they yet displayed all the evil of a warped mutant sentience, a deviousness whose source lay in Gorvi himself. The warrior was after all his construct, and therefore imbued with the Guile's essence.
Feed? He could sense the beast's querying hesitation, its dull apprehension. But surely these are yours, Master?
Gorvi snorted, nodded his skull-like head. They were mine, aye, but now I give them to you. So feed and grow strong. Take these thralls of mine but leave the flyers where they are; let them rot here.' Do not glut, but fuel and repair yourself. Then, when you are fit for it, make your way back to Guilesump.
The warrior's launching limbs surged into motion, turning it about. The saucer eyes in its great armoured head focused as one on the gutted lieutenants. Powerful jaws gaped and saliva slopped from leathery lips as a forked tongue thick as a man's thigh tasted, then snatched, first one shattered body and then the other. As a chameleon takes flies, so the Guile's battle-construct took the dead lieutenants.