Well done, son! Sir Keenan Gormley applauded his efforts. And now .. . more than ever you feel like your father.
In answer to which, Nathan was quick to inquire: As he was in the beginning, or at the end?
For a moment the other was silent, but Nathan sensed his shudder. Then: It's true, Harry made mistakes. Sir Keenan gave a deadspeak nod. But don't forget, mistakes are what make us human.
And, almost as if his experience in the Mobius Continuum had soured his mind, making it caustic and cynical (though in fact it was simply nerves), again Nathan's rapid riposte,
Oh? But surely, Harry's mistake made him inhuman! It's what cost him his humanity! But he knew that the other wasn't going to let him get away with that.
A clever man learns by his mistakes, Sir Keenan answered in a little while. By his own mistakes, and by those of others. In your case, by your father's. You have a long way to go yet, son, but Godspeed. And take care along the way, Nathan. Take care along the way ...
After that, and during the next twenty-four hours, which was all the time he had left:
Nathan used the Mobius Continuum and the markers or co-ordinates which were his ever-growing coterie of dead friends constantly, until the geography of this strange world was no longer just a series of contour lines, trigonometrical points, watercolour oceans or bland white ice-caps in the pages of an atlas, but a living, breathing source of constant wonder, astonishment, even awe. For the difference between this world and his own was like that between garlic and honey; and not simply in the sense that one was sour and the other sweet (not necessarily, for Sunside had its sweetness too), but that in almost every other instance they were poles apart. Indeed, they were parallel dimensions apart!
Only in the mountainous regions was there any real similarity, of flora and fauna, if nothing else; but even the mountains were different in a world where the sun shone on both sides of the range! For this Earth was one world - a complete, continuous system; one system, like a living creature in its own right - while Sunside/Starside, as its name might suggest, had often seemed like two. Sunside was a place of light, warmth, love and life; while Starside was cold and gloomy, full of obscene black hatreds, bitter feuds and loathsome undeath. How could it possibly be otherwise? The one housed the Szgany, Nathan's people, while the other was home to the Wamphyri!
But Earth - this parallel Earth - was wholly beautiful, and that, despite that, certain of its people were not. So Nathan thought at first, anyway, before he'd seen the industrial wastelands of Eastern Europe, and those regions closed off to men forever because of their seething nuclear pollution ...
Harry Keogh had had a great many friends among the dead, and now they all wanted to speak to Nathan. In one way it was new to him: the Szgany dead of his home world had wanted nothing to do with him, although he had often heard them whispering to each other in their graves. But on the other hand it seemed very familiar, for the ostensibly 'primitive' Thyre of Sunside's furnace deserts had been eager to know him from the first, when he had gone out into the sweltering desert to die, only to find the will to live and a goal or worthwhile direction in which to aim his life.
The realization of his deadspeak had supplied the will to live, while his goal had been the Mobius Continuum (though at that time he'd had no knowledge of it, except that it was some great secret which hid itself in the mathematical maze of the numbers vortex). Well, and now that he had tamed the vortex, the Mobius Continuum was his to explore at will.
So the two talents went hand in hand, while Nathan's telepathy was a bonus which his father had not known; or at least, not until the last of his days. But as for other esoteric talents, Harry Keogh had not gone wanting. Indeed, he had explored and practised one such 'art' (namely, the resurrection of men out of their immemorial dust) which, in the light of what Nathan had learned of Earth's religions, might only be considered blasphemous. For it was one thing that rotting cadavers should feel empowered to will themselves up from their graves for the love of others, but another entirely that the long dead should be called back into life against their will, and raised up out of their very salts, dust and ashes by a sorcerer for his own dark purposes.
Yes, a monstrous talent, this necromancy. And yet without it...
... In a town called Bonnyrigg, not far from Edinburgh, there had lived a small boy who lost his puppy under the wheels of a speeding car. But for Harry Keogh's 'skill', the pup would have stayed lost. Who could gauge the enduring pleasure that a mongrel dog's life had brought into the world of a boy, a youth, a man, even a family? For Paddy was alive still - the dog and his master both, grown up now - and Nathan had been to visit them.