(the other ignored him), there is this deep-seated need for revenge upon an enemy. Just as there was in you. So what happened to it?
'My vow against the Wamphyri? Perhaps I saw its futility: they are indestructible. But I am Szgany, and if I've allowed my vow to die within me, then I might as well follow it into oblivion. No great loss, for what use is a man who can't even honour his own vow?'
Self-pity? (The shake of an incorporeal head.) And in any case, you are mistaken. What, you? No great Joss, did you say? But you must believe me when I tell you that you would be the greatest loss of all.' As for the Wamphyri: they are not indestructible. They were destroyed, upon a time, some of them. And by others like yourself. And ... I perceive ... that what was in those others is also in you! You thought I spoke of necromancy, but you were wrong. There have been - will always be - necromancers among the Wamphyri, that is true. But these were men who talked to the dead before you, Nathan! By no means ordinary men, no, but certainly not necromancers! Neither are you a necromancer. But you are ... a Necroscdpe!
Nathan had given up answering with his voice. He didn't need to, anyway. Necroscope? I don't know the word.
Neither did I! It is one of their words. As I am Thyre and you are Szgany, and the great vampire Lords are Wamphyri, so they were Necroscopes. And so are you. Its meaning is simple: you talk to the dead. And I am the dead proof of it.
Then why don't they talk to me in return? Nathan's question seemed perfectly logical. I mean the Szgany, of course. Why don't the dead of my own kind talk to me?
Perhaps later there will be time to ask them, the other told him. Some of them, your people, have spoken to me from time to time; those of them who have graves at least. But you Szgany have strange ways: you've burned so many of your dead, and when they are burned it is that much harder. Harder still if their ashes are scattered. Perhaps that is why your people scatter the ashes of vampires: to deny them even the slightest chance of some monstrous nether-existence.
'I suppose it is,' Nathan answered thoughtfully, reverting to the use of his physical voice again, which after all came more naturally to him. 'But what of the Thyre when they die? What is their lot?'
We are not put down into the darkness of the earth but elevated, the other told him. Neither are we scattered but gathered together. Eventually we are dust, but not for long and long ... He paused, and in the next moment suddenly gasped: Ah, you see! Proof that you are a Necroscope! You asked me a question whose answer is a great secret, and yet I made no complaint but merely answered you. For I know that you are good and would never torment me, or use the knowledge to any evil advantage.
'What knowledge?'
Of the last resting places of the Thyre.
'But you've said nothing, only that they are brought up instead of being put down. I didn't even understand you.'
You would understand if you tried to, the other insisted. You Travellers live on the surface, in the woods and hills of Sunside, and when you die you are put down into the earth. Or you were upon a time, until recently. And you would be again, if the Wamphyri should be driven out or destroyed. You spend your lives in the air and the light, and your deaths in the earth and the dark. But among the Thyre the opposite is the case. Our lives -
'- Are spent in the earth?' Nathan finished it for him. 'And your deaths ... where?'
You have seen the place, the other answered, reverently. One of the places, at least. One of many such places.
A picture formed in Nathan's mind, which he recognized at once. He looked up, at the stairway cut into the precipitous sandstone cliffs, and the gloomy mouths of caves leading off from it into unknown darkness. The tombs of the Thyre?'
Indeed, and much more than that. For this is one of the places where our world enters yours.
Which was something else Nathan didn't understand. He thought back on what he knew of the desert folk: very little, actually. Only that they were thought of as