go. No one here will grudge you that.' His voice was husky, too.
On their way inside, still holding each other, they found their way blocked as a huge, frowning figure stepped out of the line. It was Varna Zanesti, Misha's father. He clasped forearms with Nathan, nodded and said, 'Well, what a sight for sore eyes you are! And do I have a son at last, or what?' As ever, Varna was straight to the point.
At first Nathan didn't understand, so Varna prompted him, 'That conversation we had, in Settlement that morning?'
Then Nathan understood, sighed and said, 'I'm honoured.'
'Huh!' Varna grunted. 'Damn right you are! Very well then, I'll see to it - and at once!' Finally he grinned.
'Where is she?' Nathan asked.
'In the woods with the children, teaching, gathering nuts, fruits. Will midday suit you?'
'Eh?'
Chapter 30
'To be wed, of course!'
Nathan looked at Nana, who nodded. And: 'Yes, whatever you say,' he answered Varna.
'Consider it done then,' said the other. 'Now be off, and enjoy what time you have left as a free man.'
Nana had a large cave close to the main entrance. There, where beams of sunlight shot in through holes in the perforated rock and dust motes drifted like specks of gold, she sat Nathan down on a blanket on a ledge carved in the wall. And while she saw to the needs of two old ladies in her care - in the course of preparing their food - she talked to him and questioned him over her shoulder. In a little while he stopped answering, and Nana saw that he'd stretched out and gone to sleep.
Then, as the old ones ate their food Nana sat beside him. She stroked the lines from his brow, cried all the tears she'd stored up for so long, and loved her son for all the lonesome times she'd missed loving him ...
Nathan dreamed of Maglore, who in any case had never been far from his thoughts since his escape from Rune-manse; an image of the man, the vampire Lord, the monster, had seemed printed indelibly on his inner eye, but faintly, like an after-image.
Maglore in his aerie, in a darkened room, alone, with a smile on his ancient, evil face and his eyes half-closed, and spider hands with spindly fingers resting upon an image of his sigil, the hammered gold loop with a half-twist. Nathan dreamed of the Seer Lord, and knew that Maglore in turn dreamed of him, of Nathan!
He conjured the numbers vortex and washed Maglore away in its seething swirl - and saw the smile on his fading face turn to a scowl - before he drifted deeper into sleep ...
He dreamed of his wolves. They had felt the swirl of the vortex and stirred in their mountain cave. He knew that their yellow eyes blinked in the gloom, and could feel their warmth and smell the musty heat of their curled bodies. But they were tired and he should let them sleep; it was sufficient that they acknowledged his return ...
His freely drifting mind touched upon the deadspeak minds of Sunside's Great Majority: a Jiving mind listening in on the dead. They knew him at once, but the message of their swiftly receding whispers was as vague and mysterious as ever: That one, Nathan!'
'But the Thyre speak for him; they say there's no harm in him, only good.'
'So was his father good, in his time. But in the end?'
'We could tell him much.'
'We daren't!'
Among them was a voice which was very faint. 'I, Iasef Karis, could tell him most of all.'
'And be shunned among the dead forever?' The others were alarmed.
'You are cold and cruel,' the faint one replied.
'But not as cold and cruel as the Wamphyri necromancer who is his brother!'
'He is a vampire. They are not the same.'
'Can Nathan live forever, then? And what will he be when he dies? Ah, and will he stay dead?'
Finally, reluctantly: 'Perhaps you are right,' said Jasef Karis. With which their dead voices faded away entirely as the teeming dead fell silent in their graves and resting places ...
At last it was Eygor Killglance's turn; the leathery amalgam which was Eygor, blind and dead in his pit in Madmanse. But Eygor didn't talk about Nathan, he talked to him. The killing eye, Nathan. It can be yours!' The clotted gurgle of his mind spanned all the miles between. 'Now look, and see what my sons did to me!'