existence among the sun-bleached dunes, the rocky canyons and barren mesas. So we have always supposed; little we knew.' He pulled a wry face. 'But I wonder: if my people are to die out, killed off or ... changed, by the Wamphyri, mightn't a few be saved, out here in the desert?'
'That is for the elders,' the other sighed. 'If I were one of them . .. you know I could never deny you but would try to arrange it. For I have felt your sadness: how it washes out from you in great waves. A great deal of sadness, but hatred, too - for the Wamphyri!'
'You "feel" it?' Again Nathan's wry smile. 'Do you spy on me, then?'
'No need for that!' said Septais. 'But I think: perhaps you should learn how to guard your thoughts, Nathan, like the Thyre. Why, sometimes they are so strong I must steel myself against them, unless they repel me!'
That strong? He looked at Septais and nodded, but grimly now. Aye, maybe, but 1 wish they were stronger: so strong that I could think all of the Wamphyri into extinction! Especially the one called Canker Canison.
The other shook his head, took Nathan's arm. 'The will is not enough,' he said. 'No man can think some- thing into existence, Nathan, or out of it. Nor would we like it if we could. For as well as good, there is evil in all men. Who knows what a man might think, in some sad, frustrated moment?'
'Evil in all men,' Nathan answered. 'Yes, you're right - but more of it in the Wamphyri! I know, for I've seen it first hand. And you may believe me, I would drown them in my numbers vortex, or think them to death, if I could!'
'Well then,' said Septais, 'in that case you have a great deal of studying to do, for as yet your numbers are weightless and could not drown a fly. Likewise a great deal of thinking; for while your thoughts are passionate, they are also ungovernable, and you are the only one who is likely to die of them!'
And in this Septais showed wisdom far beyond the range of his two-score years .. .
Nathan had been with the Thyre for a year and five months - some seventy-three 'days' - when he surfaced through Red Well Sump on the edge of the Great Red Waste. He had parted company with Septais eleven sunup cycles earlier, since when he'd had various Thyre guides along the course of the Great Dark River. But from here on in the name of that subterranean torrent would be different: it was now the Great Red River, after all of the mineral wastes washed into it from the rusty, ruined earth.
Nathan's new guide was a spry Thyre elder called Ehtio, whose knowledge of this entirely uninhabitable region was as good as anyone's: at best rudimentary. In the ghastly glow of a crimson twilight, Ehtio showed Nathan a map drawn on lizard skin, which detailed the course of the river from their last stop, Ten-Springs-Spurting, to their current location.
'The river has swung north,' he husked, 'taking us under the Great Red Waste. And this -' he gazed all about, his soft Thyre eyes blinking, '- is the Great Red Waste, its southern fringe, anyway. Aptly named, as you see.'
They had come up steps cut in the wall of a vast well. A hundred and fifty feet below them, their boat was moored where Thyre oarsmen waited. There was no colony here; their stop was to be of the shortest duration, just long enough for Nathan to see and loathe the place. And from his first glance, he did loathe it.
Standing on the pitted wall of the well, behind its parapet, he turned in a slow circle and gazed out across the Great Red Waste. And in every direction he saw the same thing: wave upon wave of red and black dunes, with areas between like massive blisters which had burst and turned brittle, and crumbled back into themselves, and others which were lakes of seething, bubbling, smoking chemicals. Nathan smelled tar, sulphur, the overpowering reek of rotten eggs, the stench of mordant acids. The contours of the dunes were like wrinkles in diseased skin, as if this entire landscape were the body of some cosmic corpse dead of its lesions and infections, its flesh torn and rotting, and Nathan and Ehtio standing in its navel.
It was the twilight of evening. South, the horizon was