said gruffly, turning up his collar, and his face to the north. 'Six or seven miles to the last pass, and an easy climb to The Dweller's garden. It's possible that the Wamphyri merely spied out the land - a reconnaissance flight. If it was more than that, then maybe they've missed their prey; there are plenty of hiding places, as we know. Why, just like us, the three could be on their way to the garden even now ...'
In a little while, striding out, Lardis spoke to Andrei in a low aside, confidentially. 'For a moment there you had me worried, old friend,' he said. 'After all these years I've known you, I was beginning to think I didn't know you!'
"Vampire World 1 - Blood Brothers"
When the four reached the back of the saddle which formed the hindmost boundary of The Dweller's garden, they found signs of a ferocious confrontation: the lingering stench of furiously expended gases, scales of armour plate torn from some huge creature's underbelly, massive clots of dark red plasma drenching the hardy mountain heather. That was all for the moment - enough to draw their nerves taut as the wire on a loaded crossbow.
But keeping low and moving silent as shadows between the garden's derelict outbuildings and untended plots, they soon came to the forward boundary wall where Lardis had talked to Harry Dwellersire that time three months ago. And there they discovered the first victim of whatever battle had occurred: a warrior, dead on the ground, dispatched like a pheasant by a fox! Its squat neck had been bitten through armoured scales, leathery hide, flesh and gristly cartilage down to the spine and through it. Almost decapitated, the thing lay there in a pool of its own steaming liquids: fifteen tons of savagery, itself savaged! No need to inquire what living engine of destruction had done this.
Awed, Lardis Lidesci moved cautiously around the giant corpse. He pointed out dislocated main eyes in the crimson-rimmed, empty sockets of the grotesque skull. And, 'See!' he whispered. 'No fight this, but a slaughter! And the butcher, he thrust his claws in through those eyes, to nip the tiny brain and get it done with. And these fluids, still warm and reeking ... Why, this creature of Karen's, it was alive no more than fifteen minutes ago!'
'Lardis!' Kirk Lisescu's call came husking from crags which he'd scaled at the eastern extreme of the wall. 'Quickly! Come see!'
Keeping low, Lardis and the others ran, loped to the foot of the crags, climbed them to Kirk crouching on a ledge in the scoop of a fallen boulder. 'Do you see?' the small, wiry man whispered. 'Do you hear?'
He pointed out over Starside. The others could see well enough, and eventually even hear, though not at first.
Far out over the boulder plains, drifting east like a small cloud of midges, black specks darted, glided, spurted under the dome of a glittering sky. Midges at this distance, yes, but up close they'd be monsters. Likewise in the lee of the barrier mountains sprawling eastwards: shapes in flight, and others in pursuit. It was the Wamphyri, friends and foe alike; though impossible to tell one from the other.
'Who's who?' gasped Peder, jaw slack, eyes peering first this way, then that.
Lardis shook his head, slitted his eyes against the blue glitter of starblaze, tried to count those shapes which spurted. 'How many fighting beasts do you see?' he grunted. 'We know Shaithis had six.'
'Karen and Harry Hell-lander had two at least,' Andrei muttered, however sourly. 'We found signs of the one and the carcass of the other!'
'Better pray they had more than that,' Lardis growled. 'Better pray they had a Jot more!'
Carried on changing winds, sounds of the aerial skirmish ebbed and flowed: the hissing and roaring of warriors, the low rumble of their bio-propulsive systems, the clatter of scales on armoured scales as huge bodies collided in mid-air. But as the commotion faded into distance, Kirk Lisescu had finished counting. There hadn't been much to it, after all.
Two flyers and six warriors out over the boulder wastes,' he reported, 'all heading east, towards the sphere Gate and the tumbled stacks of the Wamphyri. Two more flyers in the lee of the mountains, pursued by a warrior.'
Lardis's tally agreed. 'And the big one's with the main party,' he added. 'Seven warriors in all, and Shaithis hasn't suffered any losses - unless I'm wrong and that huge corpse beside the wall was one of his.