star-bright sky. And on they came, those obscene diamond designs whose manta wings pulsed oh so silently, lifting them into the upper heights.
They were flyers, their once-human flesh converted and fashioned into metamorphic airfoils ... vast webs of membrane over spongy, arching alveolate bones, forming air-trap wings for lift and support... their flattened, spatulate heads nodding this way and that on long necks, sniffing out the breezes from Starside that came blustering between the peaks to form thermals. Flyers, a pair of them: they were the aerial observation and command posts of their Wamphyri makers and masters; and not only this, they were also their mounts!
For a moment Lardis glimpsed two lesser shapes humped in their saddles at the base of each flyer's neck. One was manlike, and the other - Lardis couldn't be sure. But he remembered what a man of the decimated Szgany Scorpi had told him about a sluglike thing called Shaitan ...
Still climbing, the flyers passed directly overhead and disappeared into the upper peaks. But Lardis maintained his frozen crouch, his breathless immobility. For where the Wamphyri Lords aboard their flyers had gone silently, the things that followed in their wake were anything but silent! As they came powering into view, with their propulsive orifices rumbling and throbbing, it took every ounce of Lardis's iron will to keep from closing his eyes and shutting out their total horror.
They were warriors, six of them.
Warriors! Ah, but whatever that single word might convey in other tongues, when the Szgany used it to describe the grotesque fighting beasts of the Wamphyri, then it meant only one thing - shrieking madness! But as for these creatures ... in the case of at least one of them, even that description seemed inadequate. Seeing the beast, Lardis flinched uncontrollably; his lips drew back from his teeth in an involuntary grimace.
While the five - lesser? - creatures flew in a tight arrowhead formation, their far more monstrous cousin came on centrally and slightly to the rear. Its pulsing outline against the stars was such that it riveted Lardis's gaze; he had merely glimpsed the others before this one stamped itself on his disbelieving mind. Longer, bulkier, and carrying more armour than its companions, it seemed impossible that a creature like this could ever lift its bulk an inch from the earth, let alone fly! Yet here it was, squirting like an enormous octopus through the inky, star-spattered sky.
Details burned themselves into Lardis's brain: Its grey-mottled flesh, with scales tinged blue in star-shine like smoothly hinged plates of some weird flexible metal ... clusters of gas bladders like strange wattles, bulking out its throbbing body and detracting from its manoeuvrability, but necessary to carry the extra weight of dinosaur body armour ... its grapples and hooks, cutting appendages in the shape of crab claws ... the evil intelligence of its many eyes, some of which peered forwards, while others scanned the peaks all around. And yet none of these various parts seeming additional to the warrior but integral, built-in, like the armour and weaponry of any smaller creature of the wild. Except Nature in her wildest mood and deadliest dreams had never equipped anything like this!
Like the flyers and their riders before them, the warriors passed directly overhead, so that the last and most terrible of these Wamphyri constructs left a lasting impression of its size and power. With its leathery vanes fluttering like the mantle of some vast cuttlefish, its bladders vibrating as they shrank and expanded, balancing the whole, and the exhaust gases from its propulsors drifting in a cloud of gut-wrenching stench down into the hiding place of the four Szgany, it was awesome. But at last it too was gone.
Lardis's companions, hearing the roaring and sputtering of the monster fading into distance, opened their eyes in time to get a final glimpse of it spurting for Starside; then its trail of foul fumes drifted lower and enveloped them like a fog, and it was as much as they could do to hold their breath while the hot moist stuff settled all about.
"Vampire World 1 - Blood Brothers"
Peder Szekarly wasn't so fortunate and snatched breath at precisely the wrong moment; inexperience has its price. He had only joined with the Szgany Lidesci in the six-month after the battle at The Dweller's garden; his knowledge of warriors consisted of a scattered handful of obscure, reluctant memories from childhood, and sightings glimpsed distantly from the fringes of Wamphryi raids, when as a youth