the rim, she looked down through hooded eyes on the fires of a Szgany town nestling in the lee of the barrier range; looked down on the fires of Twin Fords . .. and smiled. She smiled with all the delight of a young girl, and lusted after Twin Fords with all the evil of an ancient horror.
And waiting on the rim of the plateau while her band of circling renegades found landing places on the flat, scrubby expanse of rock behind her, she gazed on Sun-side in the twilight of early evening - a sight unseen by Wamphyri eyes for all of fourteen years - and let her mind drift back a little: to her flight from Turgosheim across the Great Red Waste, all along the spine of these unknown mountains, and deep into Old Starside ...
Unlike Turgo Zolte's flight in the time of Shaitan the Unborn, Wratha's had been relatively easy. Where Turgo was pursued and unable to pause for respite, Wratha suffered no such handicap. Which was just as well; her flyers were unused to covering vast distances, and for all her boasting in Vormspire's great hall, her aerial warriors were mainly untried. Oh, no one could doubt that they were superb engines of destruction, but as for flying skills: there had been no way to put those to the test, not in the skies over Turgosheim.
In the end, however, little had been left wanting in performance; all of the flyers had made the crossing; only one of the warriors had been lost.
The plan had been to 'refuel' at the western edge of the secondary range of which Turgosheim was a part, then climb as high as possible on thermals out of Sun-side before commencing the long glide westwards. The ceiling would of course be that altitude where the sun's rays, striking tangentially across the curve of the world, intersected the flight path: not very high initially, for the slow-moving sun had only recently set. Phase two would come when it was calculated that the warriors had expended about half of their energy. At this point they would climb again, to whatever limit the sun and exhaustion permitted, before finally gliding and jetting down into Old Starside.
"Vampire World 1 - Blood Brothers"
The warriors were the main cause for concern. For in the end, having converted much of their own mass into fuel, they might be obliged to draw on their flimsy gas-bladder reserves. Loss of weight would compensate in some small degree, but the equation was still a loser. Lacking energy, buoyancy, and conceivably even will (for while small minds are malleable, their attention span is limited), a fatigued warrior might well gravitate to earth. If and when that was perceived as imminent, the weak one would be sacrificed and torn apart in mid-air, to fuel the rest of them on their way.
In the event, it was Canker's creature that paid the price. The energies consumed in its landing at Vorm-spire - its savage work in the great hall, and the subsequent launching from the spire's shattered window -all had served to deplete it. Thus, at the apex of the second climb, when the warrior was seen to be failing, then Wratha had ordered its dissolution.
Canker had raged (naturally, and to no avail), but in any case his protest was an automatic, instinctive reaction, his stance untenable, and resistance inconceivable. And three to one the other warriors had fallen on Canker's weary creature, dismembering and devouring it in short order. After bone and chitin armour had rained to earth, when all that remained was a thin, skeletal frame drifting at the mercy of the winds, finally the bladders had been drained and the empty rag-thing allowed to spiral down to oblivion.
And replenished, the group had flown on ...
From time to time the Lady, Lords, and their handful of lieutenants would pull cartilage stoppers from wells drilled in the knuckled backbones of their flyers, and sip sparingly on sustaining spinal fluids ...
They took turns to sleep, half of them nodding in their saddles while the rest controlled the beasts and maintained the course ...
On high, the stars glittered like ice-chips; far below, the Great Red Waste seemed endless; the obscenely flowing shadows of the renegades, however faint, diluted and somehow polluted the starlight where they passed ...
Sundown crept towards sunup and they were anxious...
Now, time and again, the propulsors of the warriors would sputter warningly, the beasts would falter, and even the most vicious mind-darts would fail to