the last of you. But I hope they make you welcome in hell!' And so saying he spilled Nathan out of his arms into the glare, which absorbed him in a moment, effortlessly and without a sound, like an eye blinking away the irritation of a dust mote ...
Far to the east in a blocked pit in Madmanse, the gigantic monstrosity which was Eygor Killglance lay where he had died, slumped against a nitre-streaked wall, and groaned a vast and terrible deadspeak groan. He was dead, the physical Eygor, but his mind of course went on. Except there was no one now to know it, not with any certainty. For like the guttering of a distant candle jn the ultimate darkness of death, Eygor had seen Nathan's light go out. Which could mean only one thing: that the Necroscope was no more.
In the higher levels of the promontory, called Rune-manse, perhaps Maglore 'heard' something of Eygor's groaning; perhaps he 'felt' something of Nathan's passing. At any rate he rushed to his room of meditation and placed his trembling fingers on the sigil shaped in gold, and let his mind drift out from Turgosheim, then hurtle west at the unthinkable speed of thought, which is instantaneous. But the sigil was lifeless now, merely a strangely twisted mass of heavy metal, and Maglore's 'window on an unknown world' was closed. It was weird, because even though Nathan's aura was gone, the feeling persisted that he was not dead. What, then? Undead? Locked in that metamorphic sleep which precedes the vampire condition? Had he finally succumbed to the seduction of vampirism? Did Wratha or one of hers have him? And Maglore sighed. Better perhaps if he had made him his own after all...
In all the dreaming places of the Thyre, suddenly the darkness was that much deeper. For the ancients also knew of Nathan's passing from this world, but they knew a little more than the rest: that he was not dead. For if so he would be one with them, an honoured member of an elite, 'extinct' society, where his dead-speak voice would always be welcome. No, he was not dead but removed from them, taken away, transported to a place from which no one ever returned.
The teeming dead of Sunside knew it, too, and felt safer for it, however shamefully. But men reap what they sow, and in the child there is always that of the father. Perhaps Nathan had posed a threat, and perhaps not. Whatever, it made no difference now for he was gone. And of all of them who had passed into Sunside's air and earth, only Jasef Karis missed him and wished that he had spoken to him.
But not a one of them - not Eygor, Maglore, the Thyre, or all the dead of Sunside put together - could ever have dreamed that they would hear Nathan's dead-speak voice again, or see his candle burning in the darkness as before .. .
Nestor's awakening was slow and painful. His eyes were burning, his back had been very nearly broken, but his mind ... was free of numbers! And with that, it all came back to him:
... His flyer, blinded, with its face half shot away and its tiny brain peppered with poisonous silver pellets. Nestor, too, reeling in the saddle with sightless eyes, his face a raw red mess and consciousness slipping as he fought to command his crippled beast up, away, back to Starside. He remembered a long low glide, and his inability to impress himself on the flyer's mind. The wonder was that the beast had stayed aloft so long.
. .. Then the crash: the whiplash as he was hurled from the flyer's back, his body somersaulting, smashing against the bole of a great tree, falling through branches which snapped under his weight, down to the forest's floor. And the darkness.
Following which: Ministering hands? Kindness? Ointments and bandages, to assist in the healing process which Nestor's leech had already commenced? Brief bouts of consciousness, in which he had known that people moved about him, caring for him, even feeding him a vile soup, which his body accepted readily enough despite that it was not his usual fare. It could only mean that he had made it back to Starside, where Wratha had found him crashed among the great hardy firs of the barrier range below the tree-line, and brought him into the last aerie.
But when he had tried to speak to her, it was not the