'During its life the river has carved wide ledges in the rock. Of these, the driest and safest are used as paths along which we may follow the water's course where it rushes through dark gullies. In parts the river is navigable over long miles, forming vast sunless lakes where the blind fishes swim; but in other places the way is tighter and the water roars furiously!
'As for its length: the river parallels the barrier mountains; it passes under the Great Red Waste, and meanders past a range of lesser mountains where dwell people much like yourself... or perhaps unlike yourself, for they give of their young to the Wamphyri. And so the river flows into the unknown. Some say it journeys to a sea far in the east, beyond the caverns of the necromancers; but this is rumour, because no one of the Thyre has ever been there.'
Nathan listened attentively to Atwei; he looked at the ledges carved by the river in the canyon walls of the channel through ages immemorial, at the blackly gurgling water flowing swiftly by, and the catches of the fishermen wriggling in their nets. And at one and the same time the river both repulsed and fascinated him. Merely to think of its sheer length was an awe-inspiring exercise in itself: more than three thousand miles of subterranean waterways, if Atwei was right, and Nathan was sure that she was. Why, Sunside's rivers were streams by comparison; the Great Dark River covered more miles than Nathan had seen in his entire life!
And yet it wasn't so much the river's size as its course which most affected Nathan's imagination: a course that followed the mountains east into that region beyond the Great Red Waste where the Wamphyri held sway, out of which they had returned into Starside. And as the river was a road to the Thyre, which they might follow on foot and by boat, colony to colony for all its many leagues, so might Nathan follow it...
Sunups came and went; Nathan's work in the Cavern of the Ancients neared completion; he told The Five that he planned to move on, and they swore him to secrecy. He promised that whatever the future held, he would never tell his brothers in the outside world what he had learned of the Thyre and their ways.
In the meantime his nightmares had got no better; if anything they were worse. Over and over Nathan lived through the hell of that night and morning in Settlement, the time of the Wamphyri raid. Also, he was aware of time fleeting by, and wondered how Lardis and the Szgany Lidesci fared now. Often in the Cavern of the Ancients he would sense his wolves trying to contact him. But they were distant and he was shielded by massive walls of rock; and anyway, what would they have to say except - it seemed likely - things he did not wish to hear? For by now, surely the Wamphyri were mighty again, a plague throughout all of Sunside.
Once (for once on his own), he fell asleep in the Cavern of the Ancients and dreamed that the numbers vortex waited for him. That mighty, bottomless whirlpool of figures tugged at him insistently; he felt that if only he knew the meaning of all of these rapidly mutating symbols . .. they could open up whole new worlds to him. Any world would be better than the one he'd left behind, providing that it let him live among his own kind. And again he felt like a traitor who had turned tail and fled from his enemies, his friends, even from himself.
And now he must flee again, put greater distance between himself and the past, go searching for some shadowy fulfilment just around the corner of tomorrow ...
In the Cavern of the Ancients he said his farewells. The dead were silent for a while. They would miss him.
But ... he might return, one day? He couldn't say for definite, but possibly. Well, they had had their fair share of him, and the dead of other places were eager to meet him.
Nathan spoke to Shaeken. Working so much together, they had developed firm bonds, a warm friendship and understanding. And: 'In time, your works will be a blessing to the Thyre,' he told the great engineer.
"Vampire World 1 - Blood Brothers"
They were nothing without you, Nathan, the other was flattered. But in a moment, and much more