He conjured a Mobius door, stepped through it and disappeared ...
... And reappeared in the Cavern of the Ancients.
Atwei and the three cavers were still there, also a young Thyre male. And so were the sacks of arms which the cavers had brought with them. Nathan had no time for explanations.
'Atwei, stay here with my friends,' he told her in her own tongue. And, taking up one of the bundles, he was gone again -- To the bald, rounded plateau of Sanctuary Rock, where that landmark refuge backed up on Sunside's foothills at the edge of the forest to the west of ruined Settlement. Nathan had chosen the Rock because its dome was a vantage point from which he should be able to spy out the lie of the land east and west along the flank of the barrier mountains, the region which he'd once called home. And travelling there through the Mobius Continuum, he had remembered it as he had known it all his young life.
The dome of the Rock towered more than two hundred feet over the slope of a stony hill. It was like a huge oval boulder, toppled over on its side, half-buried in a hillside that climbed through pines and birches, and bramble and blackthorn undergrowth. Above the rock the green belt was narrow, shaded and gloomy where it wound with the contours of the foothills. Rising steeply across its width, its foliage grew sparse at the feet of frowning cliffs. Below, the patchy woods descended into a thinly swirling mist, levelled out and thickened into forest proper, finally faded with distance into a grey-green fuzz of soft-edged canopy and the gently mobile concentric contours of false, misted horizons.
As to why the place was called 'Sanctuary' Rock:
In the olden times - indeed since time immemorial - the Szgany had hidden from Starside's vampires in the roots of the Rock; hidden in the guts of the boulder, which was mainly solid in its body and dome, but hollow as a rotten tooth in its base. And now the Szgany Lidesci not only hid there, but lived there, too. They also 'lived' in Settlement, which was no great distance away, but at night invariably withdrew to the safety of the Rock.
Over the years the Lidescis had burrowed extensively to make the place more nearly inhabitable. And they had opened up a maze of passages, granaries, animal pens, private habitations for family units, storage facilities, even recreational areas. They had tunnelled their way from a huge overhung entrance and various connected cavern systems under the eastern rim of the Rock, right through to the rear and the far side. Also, they'd strategically mined all of the major entrances with barrels of crude but effective gunpowder. So that the Rock was now a sanctuary, makeshift encampment, lethal trap and escape route all in one.
As for the Rock's location:
For fifteen to twenty miles around this was Lidesci territory, which Lardis Lidesci had always guarded jealously and protected with his life - especially against the night raids of the vampire Lords of Starside. And it was the Necroscope's guess that if tonight the Wamphyri could be found anywhere on Sunside, then that.. .
.. . But in the moment that Nathan emerged from the Mobius Continuum, he knew that there was no 'if about it. For they were here even now. They were actually here - at Sanctuary Rock!
Far to the south, across the sprawling expanse of night-dark woods and the furnace desert which lay beyond, a curved horizon was silhouetted against a band of molten yellow light fading upwards into pink and amethyst, then light- and dark-blue, finally black reaching back to the sky overhead, where the stars were as shards of blue ice frozen in alien (but, to Nathan, familiar) configurations. Or, at least, the sky should be black . ..
... But it should not be shot through with lances of coloured light, and dotted with nightmare shapes that sputtered explosively or glided silently through the black smoke rising from oily fires and the exhaust trails of careening rockets! Sanctuary Rock was suffering a concerted attack, and following the silence and darkness of the Mobius Continuum, it was as if Nathan had stepped forth into hell itself!
Down there on the sparsely wooded slopes at the foot of the Rock, close - too close - to the gaping entrance to the main cavern system, there were warriors on the ground. One of them, the biggest one, seemed crippled. It was burning, roaring and hissing like a herd of rutting shads, and heaving its forequarters this way and that on an apparently broken spine. Its hindquarters were writhing, a mass of flames where Travellers had poured oil on the thing and fired it. But there were lesser warriors, too: smaller, less cumbersome, undamaged as yet and very, very dangerous ... and enraged, of course.
Even as Nathan watched, one of the things rose up on its forward thrusting limbs and fired a short burst from its propulsors. Seeming to bound in the air, it crashed down among a group of the Rock's defenders, crushed several of them to the earth, commenced snapping at the rest. Its chitin clubs, pincers and slabbers wove menacingly in all directions.