to it than that? What if they were alive even now: not as monstrous Wamphyri changelings but as simple slaves, thrall servants in some Starside aerie or craggy mansion? And if so, how to find them?
Which was why he walked to Sunside in the brightening air, with the stars gradually fading overhead, and the barrier range growing up before him like a mirage out of the desert. For his future was right here; time bore him forward into it with every passing second; and since he couldn't avoid it, he might just as well meet it head on. And somewhere along the way, all unsuspecting, lozel Kotys was waiting for him. Which seemed as good a place as any to start. ..
In the Sunside of Nathan's infancy the Szgany had preferred to stay close to their mountains. Most of the Traveller trails had been in the foothills, rarely in the forests. The reasons were several: clouds breaking on the peaks provided good water; wild life was plentiful on the slopes and the hunting was excellent; the roots of the mountains were riddled with hiding places in the rocks, where cavern systems abounded.
Here things were different. While these eastern people were Szgany, or of the same basic stock, they were not Travellers. Perhaps - almost certainly - they had been in the long ago, but no longer. Now, under total Wamphyri domination, they lived in sorry townships (corrals or pens, in effect) and wandered no more. In the Sunside Nathan knew, in the old times, his people had become Travellers in order to avoid and defy the vampires, and had only settled after their supposed 'destruction'. But here the people had settled because the Wamphyri ordered it, which had marked the beginning of the infamous, immemorial tithe system. And so their towns were spread out evenly and in the open, like market places, where the Starside Lords and Ladies sent their lieutenants on regular, long-established errands to replenish their spires and manses. Except that unlike a market, the Wamphyri 'purchased' nothing, but took what was deemed to be theirs by right of conquest. Which amounted to a percentage of everything, from grain and oils to beasts and blood - but mainly blood, and human.
North of the grasslands at the edge of the forest, some twelve townships out of a total of around fifty stood roughly equidistant: four in the west, and eight towards the sprawling morass which lay beyond the habitable region to the east. The Thyre estimated that the distance between the Great Red Waste on the one hand and the swamp on the other was more than six hundred miles; and so Nathan considered himself fortunate that the first of the four towns to the west, a place called Vladistown after its founder, was the origin and last known home of lozel Kotys.
Dressed in his good rich clothes, and with the first rays of the sun warm on his back, Nathan came out of the desert and crossed the savannah, and saw the smoke of morning fires going up in lazy blue-grey spirals along the forest's rim. Angling a little to the left, he headed for the closest huddle of houses where the woods had been cut back into a clearing.
The first man he met was in the grasslands at the very edge of the forest: a hunter, he was shooting rabbits with a crossbow. Nathan heard the deceptively soft whirrr of a bolt and ducked, saw a rabbit bound spastic-ally and fall back dead in the grass. Then ... he saw the man with the crossbow, where he rose from his knees in a patch of gorse; and a moment later the hunter saw him. At first, facing each other across a distance of no more than a dozen paces, they froze; then the hunter's jaw dropped, and his face turned pale.
Nathan approached him fearlessly. The man was Szgany after all, and the Thyre had told him that although these people were not trustworthy, they could at least be trusted not to take his life. No, he was far too valuable for that. They might give his life away - give it to the Wamphyri, in return for their dubious favours - but they would never dare to take it for themselves. Also, apart from the ironwood knife he carried, Nathan was unarmed; he posed no obvious threat. But from the reaction of the other, one might very easily suppose that he did, and an extreme threat at