'What?' he said again, a whisper this time, as finally he noticed the locket at Nathan's neck. 'Silver? Can I believe it? Would you poison me, then? You… prissy… little…!'
Pointing a shaking hand at the locket, he grated: Take it off! Throw it down!'
Nathan did so, and stood with his back to the hewn stone wall. The lieutenant stepped forward snarling, stamped on the locket with a booted foot. It flew into several pieces, and a tight curl of hair sprang free. 'Hah!' The man pounced, snatched up the black wisp and showed it to Nathan. 'And this?'
'A… a keepsake,' Nathan gasped. The pubic hair of… of a maiden.'
'Indeed!' The man grinned, kicked bits of locket in all directions, held out his free hand palm up for Nathan to see. The flesh of his palm was grey, calloused, horny. Even as Nathan watched, it formed sharp scales or rasps like some hideous flensing weapon. Then the lieutenant clasped his hands together, crushing the lock between them. And with a grinding motion he reduced the tight coil to so much black snuff, inhaling it with gusto, in pinches, into eager, quivering nostrils.
'Hah! Delightful!' he crowed then, smacking his lips. 'And was she beautiful?'
'She was Thyre,' Nathan at once answered him, with a great deal of bravery and more than a little satisfaction. If he was going to die it might as well be now. 'She was a desert trog!'
For a moment there was a silence broken only by the whimpering of Nathan's fellow tithelings. Then… the lieutenant's grey-mottled face turned greyer still as he swelled up huge as if to burst. He grabbed Nathan by the throat with one hand, and drew back the other to slap him. Just one such slap would ruin Nathan's face forever. Except -
'Now, hold,' said Maglore, quietly, yet in a voice which brooked no argument. 'Only damage him and it's no deal. And I shall tell Zindevar you lost her a pair of lovely little playmates for her bed.'
The lieutenant's hand froze in mid-air; his head swivelled on his bull neck and he glared at Maglore, then frowned and said: 'What deal?' Finally he remembered his manners, blinked and relaxed a little. And: 'Lord Maglore,' he said, 'I mean no disrespect, but it is the Lady Zindevar commands me, not you.'
'Aye, and she'll command that you are disembowelled!' Maglore chuckled, however humourlessly, '- If you don't take these girls into Cronespire in exchange for that one foppish youth. Make up your mind, quick!'
Now the other was suspicious. He glanced at Nathan again. 'Oh? And what is it with him? Why would you want this one, who is either an idiot, or just plain insolent, or both? Bringing silver into Turgosheim, indeed! What madness! Don't the Szgany teach their Sunside brats anything these days?'
Maglore shrugged, and answered mysteriously, There is Sunside and there is Sunside, and Szgany and Szgany, and what is taught in one place may not be deemed necessary in another… not yet. But this one — ' he shrugged again,'- I like his colours, which are weird. Also, he seems stupidly docile, dumb, even innocent; he shall follow me around Runemanse like a pet. As for Zindevar: she shall have these girls to tweak, which is bound to stand you firmly in her favour.'
A moment's pause for thought, and: 'Done!' Zindevar's lieutenant released Nathan, sent him flying along the wall and out of his sight behind Maglore. And the Mage of Runemanse told his girls:
'Go with this gentleman and he will take you to your new mistress, a very lovely Lady who will show you many wonderful things!' Hearing which, even Zindevar's 'gentleman' burst into baying laughter, as Maglore took Nathan's shoulder and quickly walked away with him…
Along the way to Runemanse — a route covering almost two and a half miles of caves, crags, causeways; often climbing internally through communal cavern systems, or externally over vertiginous chasms and up dizzily spiralling walkways of bone and cartilage — Maglore kept up an onslaught of seemingly innocuous questions. But Nathan knew for a fact that his interest was anything but innocent, which was made obvious by the veritable barrage of mental probes which Maglore used in a prolonged simultaneous attempt to penetrate the shield around Nathan's secret mind. Given the chance (if Nathan were to relax his guard for a single moment), he knew that these probes would at once enter and explore the innermost caverns of his brain.
Even before meeting Maglore, Nathan had known that the Wamphyri Lord was a telepath; however stupidly — unwittingly, whatever — Maglore's spy lozel Kotys, the so-called 'mystic', had given him away. But Nathan could never have anticipated the full range of the Seer Lord's mind, whose insidious energies seethed in his vampire skull like the smoke of balefires, sending out curling black tendrils of thought in all directions.
In order to maintain and reinforce the telepathic wall with which Nathan had surrounded himself, he used the subterfuge of asking questions of his own: he knew how difficult it would be for Maglore to scry upon his mind and construct meaningful answers to his questions at one and the same time. And why shouldn't he question? Nathan knew that Maglore would not harm him, not yet at least and perhaps not ever. No, for Thikkoul had foreseen a long stay for him in Runemanse, but nothing specifically harmful that Nathan could remember.
The sun rises and sets, Thikkoul had read in his stars, and sunups come and go in a blur where you wander in a great dark castJe o/ many caves. I see your face: your hollow eyes and — greying hair?
Well, that last was ominous, admittedly. But now that Nathan was here, what had he to lose? Very little of his own, for in Turgosheim his life was nothing; but still there were certain interests he must protect. His knowledge of the Thyre, for instance: their secret places over and under the desert; also his familiarity with old Sunside, where Wratha and her renegades (and in a little while the vampires of Turgosheim) would do to his people what had been done here. He must give nothing of such knowledge away to benefit the Wamphyri, not if there was a way to avoid it.
'Why didn't we fly to Runemanse?' he asked Maglore where they crossed a swaying bridge of sinew and arching, alveolate cartilage. 'Do you have no flyers?'
'I have one, aye,' Maglore answered, offering him a curious, perhaps indulgent glance. 'It is in use now, where a man of mine flies back a surly Kehrlscrag youth to Runemanse. But flyers are for the younger Lords, my son, and for the generals to ride out and command their armies. Oh, I have made a flyer or two in my time, but mainly I prefer to walk. When I can go on foot I do so, but where the way is too sheer or distant I fly. Personally, I dislike great heights; for gravity is a curious force and insistent. I have never flown in my own right, as certain Lords are wont to do, for that requires an awesome strength, and alas my body is feeble — by comparison.' But he did not say with what.
They were in the middle of the span. In the dark, distant sprawl of the gorge, the lights and flaring exhausts of some of the spires came up level with their eyes. More than a thousand feet below, Turgosheim's depths were lost in dark velvet shadows. Maglore paused and drew his charge to him, and with an arm around his shoulder leaned out over the fretted cartilage wall to look down. Behind Nathan and Maglore, one of the mage's vampire thralls waited silent but alert.
And: 'About flying,' said Maglore quietly, huskily, with a scarlet, sideways glance at Nathan. 'Can you imagine flying from here? To leap out upon the air, and form your flesh into stretchy scoops like the wings of a bat? To trap the currents rising out of Turgosheim, and so glide from peak to peak? Ah, but what an art that would be! Even though I've never used it, I have it, for I am Wamphyri. I probably could do it even now, despite the lack of that special strength which could only be mine by virtue of… a certain lifestyle. But you: you would fall like a stone, and splash like an egg…'