in turn each of the larger burial stones, marking them, whined a little, gazed burningly on Lardis. And eventually he said, 'She, too, remembers you. It was a while ago. After the battle, you joined us here. You were kind. Despite your own privations, your people ... were kind. To me, to my mother, my father. And you and I, we talked together, when I was ... was a man. I remember it.'
'All of this is true,' Lardis nodded, discovering a lump in his throat which had little or nothing to do with fear. 'We talked on several occasions. At the last, you seemed to know what was coming.'
The other looked at him in that curious, alert way of his, and Lardis found it weird that a wolf should understand his words and answer them with a nod and snarled words of its own: 'And now ... now it has come. Strange, even sad in a way. Sometimes I feel I've lost so much; at others I take pleasure in what I've gained. Except ... my man-memory is fading, and all the time more swiftly. I forget the man-times and remember only the wolf-times, and it has made ... made a traitor out of me. For I swore I would be ... be here, when the Wamphyri came a-visiting Karen and my father. But I... forgot, and so was late.'
'You couldn't have helped them,' Lardis shook his head. 'This time the Wamphyri have made invincible creatures, monsters of unbelievable ferocity and power! You and all your grey brothers together, what could you have done?'
The other loped this way and that. 'Still, I should have been here.'
There was nothing you could do,' Lardis insisted.
Harry Wolfson came closer, stood still. 'Did you see it?'
'We saw them fly away eastwards,' Lardis answered. They were still fighting. I think that Harry and Karen ... I think they got the worst of it.'
The great wolf blinked his slanted eyes, and their cores burned yet more scarlet. 'No, not yet - but soon! The worst is what Shaithis has in store for them!'
And suddenly, so suddenly that Lardis gave a great start, the wolf that had been a man pointed his muzzle straight at the stars and howled, and from the derelict garden's shadows came the answering howls of his brothers. Then, he sprang up on to the cairn, glanced once more at Lardis and growled, 'I go.'
"Vampire World 1 - Blood Brothers"
As he made to leap away, Lardis called after: 'But where will you go? And what do you intend? Perhaps we'd do better to go there together.'
The Gate,' the other paused again, however momentarily, and sniffed the night air. 'I sense them there. I don't know what the grey brothers can do, but you and yours would only slow us down.'
Again he turned away - only to collide with a sleek she-wolf who came loping from the shadows. Her eyebrows were bushy, white as the snows of the higher peaks. They faced each other; perhaps some message passed between them; she whined a little, and Harry Wolfson snapped at her, deliberately clicking his teeth on thin air. Plainly the bitch was his. And to Lardis he said, 'She'll stay here, where there's no more danger.'
Lardis tried one last time. 'My men and I, we're going, too. We need to see. I have to know.'
The changeling thought about it for the briefest moment, then snarled his throaty answer: Then I'll leave you a guide. Follow him closely, for he knows the easiest route ...'
Lardis returned to his men and found them on their own; the wolf pack had melted away into the shadows, leaving only one of the grey brothers behind. Lardis marked him: a flame-eyed silhouette, nervous and impatient, atop the garden's eastern flank. Kirk Lisescu nodded and remarked, That one's stayed back, apparently to keep watch over us!'
Lardis shook his head. 'No,' he corrected his colleague, 'he's our guide. We're to follow him to the hell-lands Gate. Or at least, we'll try to get close enough to see what goes on there.'
They struggled up the sloping eastern flank, gazed down on Starside laid out in weird, blue-tinged monochrome beneath them. The boulder plains, reaching out to a curved and shimmering, aurora-lit horizon; the jagged spines of mountains on their right, sprawling eastwards; seemingly endless miles of crags to cover before they would arrive at their destination, where the peaks looked down gauntly on the pockmarked crater which housed the hell-lands Gate.