have been asked to tell you that should you desire it, there will always be a place for you with the Thyre.'
It was a great honour and Nathan acknowledged it. Except: 'First there are things I must do,' he said. 'And even then ... afterwards ... I don't know.'
Things you must do? Put your life at risk, do you mean? Go among the eastern Szgany, who give themselves - and their children - to the Wamphyri without protest? Oh? And how then shall they deal with you?'
'It's hard to believe they do that to their own,' Nathan shook his head. 'Not without protest. As for me ... I have to know how it is for them there, and how it's yet to be in Sunside.'
Ehtio made a hopeless gesture. 'But what good will it do? What can you change? You have nothing to gain, everything to lose. Yes, and we too, the Thyre, have everything to lose.'
'In me?'
'Of course.'
'You value me too highly.'
'How so? You are invaluable!'
'I have to go,' Nathan was determined. 'But I'm grateful to the Thyre for all I've learned from them. And I will work on my telepathy - yes, my emotions too - and on the numbers shown to me by Ethloi. It strikes me there has to be a reason, a purpose, in all of these things. But I must go east, if only to speak to Thikkoul in River's Rush and discover my future in the stars.'
The first two are things you can do without risking yourself,' Ehtio answered. 'And the last is an excuse, or at best a forlorn hope. It seems to me you go to sacrifice yourself.'
'No,' Nathan denied it. 'I go to improve myself. Some time ago - it seems a long time now - I made my Szgany vow. It may be I made it in anger and horror, but it was still my vow. If I forsake it now, that would be ... unseemly. Perhaps these gifts of mine are tools, which I must learn to use in order to fulfil my obligations. In which case it will be a useful thing to know my future.'
'You are stubborn,' Ehtio told him, but without rancour.
'I'm Szgany,' Nathan answered, simply ...
A further twelve sunups and Nathan reached River's Rush. Here the Great Red River's course became a borehole, and the river itself a solid chute of water hurtling through eleven miles of narrow, subterranean sumps before widening out and being reasonable, placid again. Below ground those miles were unnavigable; it made little or no difference to Nathan, whose route now lay to the north, across the surface.
As for the Thyre: there were only two more colonies to the east, beyond which the river flowed on into myth and mystery. But the two must remain unvisited; River's Rush was Nathan's last stop at the end of a journey which had carried him more than two thousand miles from his birthplace.
On the surface, the place was a small oasis twenty miles south of 'Sunside' (the Sunside of these unknown eastern regions, at least). Beyond Sunside were mountains, and across the mountains 'Starside'. There the Wamphyri dwelled in a mighty gorge, whose name Nathan had learned from the Thyre: Turgosheim. But even though the vampires were the undisputed masters here, still the restrictions upon them were the same: the night was their element, but the sun was their mortal enemy.
Upon a time the Thyre had traded with the Szgany in the grassland fringe between desert and forest, much as they did in the west; all that had come to an abrupt, bloody end some three years ago. For the Szgany of this region had become a gaunt, greedy people. Worn down by the Wamphyri, their sensitivities had been eroded away until they were little more than feral creatures, no longer trustworthy.
When the members of a Thyre trading party had seen how they were being cheated, even threatened by the Szgany, they had tried to withdraw back into the desert. The Szgany fell on them and murdered them; their few goods were stolen; they paid with their lives for a handful of medicinal salts and a few polished lizard skins. Only one man, wounded in his side, had returned to River's Rush to tell the tale.
The story made Nathan afraid, and not a little ashamed. For these were Szgany, his people. Also, he had intended to visit among them. Maybe now he would change his plans ...
In any event, his work came first,