water ... there may be a little. Except you must get to it.
In here? Nathan looked at the cave's entrance, much larger than the others.
Perhaps, but deep inside, a long way. And that delirium you so desired is much closer now. Rogei's mental voice despaired. I can feel the flickering of your flame.
It would be a shame, Nathan thought wanderingly, to die now when I no longer want to! He stood up, leaned against the arched entrance to the cave, peered with swimming eyes at its weathered carvings. The bas-reliefs were almost as old as the desert and sand-blasted to obscurity, but his trembling fingers could follow their still flowing contours in the stone.
And for the first time he knew something of awe to match the sensation he had known when he stood on the crater rim of the Starside Gate. From out of the cave, an aura of antiquity flowed over him; from unsuspected deeps a cool breath of air carried a not unpleasant musk and a hint, the merest suggestion ... of moisture?
Water, yes, but deep down below, Rogei said again. Beyond the Cavern of the Ancients. Come in, Nathan Kiklu, Necroscope. We welcome you.
From some secret inner well, Nathan forced the last drop of spit down his throat, and with it croaked: 'We?
How many of you? And why are you the only one who has spoken to me?' Staggering out of the glaring sunlight into the cool shade, for a moment he was blind, but in the next he saw the walls of the tunnel extending before him into deepening gloom.
When we sensed your presence and heard your thoughts and dreams (Rogei answered, from very much closer now), and when we heard how you spoke to wolves so far away - which was not a dream - then we decided upon a spokesman. Since it seemed you were Szgany, and since in my life I occasionally had dealings with the so-called Travellers, I, Rogei, was honoured.
Nathan leaned forward until he felt he was falling. Then, mustering his feet into reluctant life, he went weaving, stumbling down the high, wide tunnel. Weightless, it seemed as if he floated from wall to wall. But for all that his body was suddenly light, he knew that in fact he was sinking, and each step threatened to be his last. I feel... that I should rest now, he thought! I feel I should rest for a very long time. Except now that it's time, I'm afraid to do it.
Then don't! Rogei's mental voice was vibrant with alarm. Take it from us, Nathan: while death is not the desert which living men believe it to be, life by comparison is an oasis!
Nathan nodded deliriously. But this oasis is drying up.
The passage widened out, became a cave, a cavern. Nathan entered from gloom into light and fell to his knees in drifted dust. Lolling there, knuckles on the floor, shoulders slumped and head swaying, he knew that this could only be the Cavern of the Ancients, a Thyre mausoleum. And from the look of it, it was probably the greatest of them all.
"Vampire World 1 - Blood Brothers"
He craned his neck to look up.
Across the centre of the sandstone ceiling wall to wall, set into the yellow rock like the slit pupil of a cat's eye, a gash of white quartz seemed carved from light. The cavern was riven right across its width, which was huge, but the seepage of centuries had filled the gap with crystals which had hardened to stone. Crystal stalactites hung from the ceiling, and glowing humps of it like shining candles reached up from the floor. And all around its perimeter - in alcoves and niches, on shelves and ledges carved from the stone itself - lay the mummied ancients of the Thyre, whose socket eyes gazed back at Nathan where he observed them.
And: 'Here I am,' he croaked, rolling over onto his back, surrendering to the weirdness of it all without further question.
Again Rogei was anxious for him, telling him: Nathan, you may sleep, but you may not die!
Oh? he thought back. And will you stop me again? It might not be so easy a second time.
Brothers! Rogei cried out, this time speaking to his dead companions and not to Nathan. And were we not right? Only feel the warmth of his thoughts? Is he not a light in the darkness? We dare not let him die.' And they knew that he was right.
The massed voices of