For something less than an hour now, Lord Nestor Lich-loathe of the Wamphyri had known it: the fact that his mainly unremembered brother (his real brother, aye, his 'blood' brother, but a brother in name only, and his Great Enemy to all other intents and purposes) was back in Sunside/Starside. In precisely the same moment that Maglore of Runemanse had known it, and the mummied, monstrous Eygor Killglance in his refuse pit, and the dead and dreaming Thyre, and Nathan's nephew wolves, so too had Nestor known it, and just as surely as the rest.
Except, and paradoxically, Nestor had found it harder to credit, for he had believed that he was his brother's murderer! Indeed he had known that Nathan was gone forever, banished from this vampire world into the Starside Gate, from which neither man, monster, nor any creature of nature or the vats had ever yet returned. It must be so, for all of seventeen, even eighteen sunups ago, Nestor's first-lieutenant Zahar Lichloathe had reported the fact of it: that, acting on Nestor's orders, he'd tossed Nathan into the Gate and sent him to hell! Since when, and until this very night, Nestor had been certain of it. For with his brother's departure, one other curse at least had been lifted like a yoke from his shoulders ... which now was back!
The numbers vortex!
That cryptic, madly whirling dust-devil device of symbols, figures and cyphers which, bursting out from the core of his twin's weird mind, had often overflowed into Nestor's dreams, too; Nathan's mind-shield, wherein as a child he had used to hide himself away, now revealed him as a light in the night, or as the smell of Traveller campfires floating on the breeze off Sunside reveals a campsite, or the frenzied buzzing of carrion flies a piece of rotting meat.
Nestor had first sensed the thing as he and the others crossed the spine of the barrier mountains midway between the great pass and Settlement. But .. . behind him? Its source had been behind him, in Starside, in the vicinity of the Starside Gate. Now what would a man of Sunside be doing there? And what would a dead man be doing anywhere? But then, as they had descended into Sunside's foothills, so the mountains had blocked it out a little; and, supposing it to have been a rogue memory out of times best forgotten (for what else could it be, since Nestor's Great Enemy was no more?), he had tried his best to do the same: shut it out of his thoughts.
But as the massed might of Wrathstack spurted and pulsed west, like a flock of shadows against the greater shadow of the mountains, so the thing had been there again, swirling in Nestor's vampire mind and stronger than ever before! For where in past times the vortex had been disordered, chaotic, insensible, now it had direction and was purposeful.
And yet if his Great Enemy was in fact alive, then what was happening here? For first Nestor had sensed him close to the hell-lands Gate, and now ... far to the south, in the desert beyond the forests and savanna? It made no sense. No man (and certainly not a dead one) can be in two places at once!
Then Nestor had felt an urgent need to reprimand, or at least to question, his man Zahar, and had called him up alongside, the better to speak to him. And riding the night a little apart from the main force, without so much as glancing at his great grim lieutenant, Nestor had inquired of him in his softest 'voice':
Zahar, are you faithful?
"To you, master? Always.' Zahar spoke the words out
loud, knowing that Nestor would 'hear' them despite the wind's bluster. But for all that he had answered in the affirmative, still he'd been concerned. What was Nestor's purpose, he'd wondered, asking such a question at a time and in a place such as this?
Then the necromancer had looked at him, a frowning, even disapproving glance across the gulf of air. And shuttering his scarlet eyes somewhat: But ... have you never disobeyed me?
The other had given his head a fervent shake. 'Nor shall I ever, Lord!'
For a moment Nestor had held his gaze, eye to eye in the night, across the squalling updrafts, scarlet to feral yellow. And he'd known that his lieutenant spoke the truth. For Zahar Lichloathe feared his master's art and the pain it could bring not only in this world but also in the next. Not even the dead were safe from one such as he: a necromancer who tortured them for their secrets, causing them pain in their dead flesh as if it were alive. But in the course of the last four to five months Zahar had learned to fear him even more, when such a change was apparent in him that, by comparison, Zahar's previous master Vasagi the Suck had seemed a friendly, even a merry creature.
Gazing at Nestor however briefly (for it is not seemly to look upon the Wamphyri too long or too openly), staring at him where he sat forward in the saddle and leaned a little into the wind, this is what Zahar saw: