with a sigh, Korath put the finishing touches to his tale:'We flew home, to what had been our home. You are correct: the aeries were gone, like vast stone corpses fallen on the barren boulder plains. And arriving in the hour before sunup, we were obliged to find shelter in their shattered stumps.'The desmodus colonies were still there, and we found ourselves greeted by descendants of the descendants of our former familiars. At least they were the same! And like the bats themselves, we sheltered from the sun (which seemed to rise marginally higher in the sky) in their lowly crumbling caverns in the echoing basement levels of the shattered stacks.'Night came, and with it the fear that perhaps the Szgany were no more: that they, too, might have succumbed to whatever disaster had befallen here. But when we flew to the higher ridges of the barrier mountains and looked down on Sunside - ' - Ah! But the Szgany were there, and in such numbers!'Their campfires - and in many cases more permanent town or settlement fires - lit the night like so many glow-worms in the dark of forests which, in our time, had not seen so much as a night-light, but only the tell-tale smoke of cottage or caravan stoves! And here they were all joyous, juicy, and fearless, our beloved Szgany of Sunside. The sounds of their music drifted up to our keen vampire ears, and the smells of their cooking - and of them - to our wide, straining nostrils. Ah, that was a beautiful moment!'And Malinari said: "The Wamphyri are gone. We three alone of all the Great Vampires survive." (He excluded me, of course.) Do you see, Vavara? We are survivors, the only survivors! And so I was right."' "And now we go down," whispered Szwart, "to the feast!"'But: "Ah, no, not so," said The Mind, holding up a cautionary hand. "Those tribes down there, they do not know we are back. If we raid here, now, then they will know. And next time will be that much harder. But we have aeries to build and furnish, lieutenants and thralls to recruit, warrior creatures and flyers to breed in our vats - hah! When we have first discovered or dug vats, in the wreckage of those shattered stumps!' "Also, you must ask yourself what happened here. Did the Wamphyri destroy themselves or were they destroyed? And if the latter, by whom? The Szgany? Ah, no, Lord Szwart, having survived the Icelands, I am in no great hurry to show myself here. For my thoughts have gone out and found an odd sense of security and freedom in the Szgany. Why, they are unafraid! Perhaps because they no longer have reason to be afraid. Which in turn might mean that we do. Wherefore we must be cautious and first discover the secret of these changes in the scheme of things."' "So what would you suggest?" Szwart hissed. "That we sit here all night and admire their fires?"'Malinari shook his head. "Those tribes down there, close-packed in this central area of Sunside. If we raid on one, then by morning all of them will know. And we need time to re-establish ourselves. So this is what we will do. Tonight we split up. Vavara raids in the far west, you in the east, but this side of the great pass. I shall raid beyond the pass. And we glut, aye, but mainly we recruit - we recruitfuriously, taking as many as we can. We share our spoils equally, building together, allies by circumstance as we have always been. This way, gradually, we shall discover what's what here: how things stand, and why they seem so different now. Is it agreed?"
'After some small haggling it was so agreed, and as Malinari had decreed we recruited "furiously". We converted men into thralls, from whose ranks we chose lieutenants; these were soon able to make more thralls - and so on. And we stockpiled drink and foodstuffs (aye, and other good stuff) out of Sunside, and put a task force to work digging in the rubble-strewn stumps of the old fallen stacks, building walls around our chosen habitations and roofing them over.
'During all of this construction, occasionally our workers would uncover vats, gas-beast chambers, or cocooned matter from yesteryear. Of course, the greater mass of the once-living material was putrid, no longer usable; some