She was, for a while, Wran growled in his head. And with a strong man to ride and guide her ... who can say? She could be again. Well, a partner in leadership, at least. But that's for the future ... Plainly, he'd grown tired of the conversation. Now let's make haste. For I've been too long away. Aye, and things are wont to change in a hurry, in Wrathstack ...
He drew ahead, put on a spurt and sent his flyer ping into the Great Pass, which split the barrier range in a dogleg north to south. Nestor followed (by his will, or purely of his beast's own inclination, he could not say) to hurtle above the bed of the pass at breakneck speed. The bend in the dogleg lay to the rear, a haze of yellow where the sun's lethal rays were trapped for
now. Any danger of burning was past, and the hackles on Nestor's neck lay flat. The earlier exhilaration of his ride returned; feeling more in control, he began to enjoy it.
He urged his flyer on. Faster, faster! Get in front. Show that sluggish creature how to fly! His beast responded, pulled ahead, left Wran in its wake.
Hah! Wran called after him. And so you see, he bred good creatures, old Vasagi. But on the other hand, why, there's not so much meat on you! And then, less grudgingly: Still, you do sit the beast well, so that what with your mentalism and all, I fancy you'll do all right.
Nestor looked back and laughed, and cried out loud: Til do better than all right!'
Oh, really? Wran pulled alongside again. Well, I hope you do, but the odds are all against it. What you have to remember is this: in Wrathstack we're all vampires born. And me? Why, I might well have been born in the saddle!
But this time his laughter was grating as iron in cold ashes as he swerved his flyer in towards Nestor's, caught it a glancing blow, and almost sent it crashing into the wall of the canyon! Turning side-on to fan the precipitous rock, the creature flattened like a leaf to scrape the weathered stone, and for a moment Nestor felt he'd be tilted into space. Then ... the danger was past and he could breathe again, and from up ahead:
So you'll do better than all right, will you? Maybe you will at that. But first you must live long enough, eh? It had been a lesson, and Nestor wouldn't forget it. Just one of several things which he wouldn't forget ... about Wran the Rage.
The end of the pass was now in sight, where the mountains sloped down to Starside's boulder plains. And on the left, just coming into view, the bulging,blinding dome of the half-buried sphere portal to the hell-lands. Nestor knew it without knowing how he knew; likewise the plume or finger of glowing, poisoned earth that pointed from the Gate out across the barren plains towards the Icelands. To him, these things were more than adequate confirmation that indeed he'd been here before. If only he could remember.
But he was given no time to ponder the enigma; for up ahead Wran swerved right, eastwards, away from the Gate and out towards Karenstack (no, Wrathstack, now), the last great aerie of the Wamphyri. Miles sped by beneath the manta flyers, where their moon- and star-cast shadows flowed like stains in the immemorial dust, or like clots of darkness over bald, domed boulders and riven earth alike. And looming in the north-east, vast monument to the evil of ages past, Wrathstack was a lone fang among the stumps of fallen stacks, where the shattered aeries of the olden Lords lay in tumbled disarray, littering the plain like corpses or rotted mushrooms petrified to stone.
And as if Wran read Nestor's mind again, though in fact he merely conversed, his question came ringing: 'Oh, and have you been here before, too, Lord Nestor?'
Aye, he had, the once at least. These jumbles of toppled stone, their configurations, seemed so familiar they were like memories in themselves; yet they failed to spark others in the aching void of Nestor's head. But he made no comment, neither speech nor thought, except to drive his beast that much faster and draw level again with his vampire companion.
Ahead loomed a stack (or the stump of one), three-quarters of a kilometre broad at its scree-littered base, rising to three hundred metres high by two hundred wide where its hollow neck was like the shattered bole of an ancient tree felled by lightning and turned to
stone. The rest of it, the aerie that had been, lay in blocks like the knuckles of a skeletal spine stretched out across the plain. But it was only the first of many.