Its true nature — the fact that it had transported him to this place, and that he had emerged from it — these things were entirely forgotten. But as twilight brightened into dawn and the rising sun lit up the peaks, and its golden light fell like a slowly descending curtain towards the tree-line, so he had cause to regard the creature anew. For now the thing in the trees was most definitely alive!
It tried to arch its broken wings, craned a prehistoric neck for the sky, and cried out in a hissing, clacking voice. But the shattered pines had pierced its membranous wings and crushed their fragile alveolate bones, and all its energy had drained away along with its fluids. Pinned down, grounded and broken, the creature could only despair its fate, for the vampire stuff in it sensed the sunrise as surely as a lodestone senses north, except the flyer wasn't attracted but repulsed. Or would be, if it still had the power of flight.
Walking unsteadily, gingerly around the perimeter of the triangular stand of pines at the rim of the bluff where the flyer had crashed down, Nestor observed the slate-grey, leathery skin of the thing; its long neck and spatulate head, and dull, near-vacant eyes. Despite that its head was huge, blunt and acromegalic, still there was something vaguely, disturbingly human about it; but nothing remotely human about the tentacular thrusters which it drove into the pine-needle floor each time it arched its torn manta wings, as if to assist in launching itself into flight. These reminded Nestor of nothing so much as a nest of giant maggots erupting from the belly of some dead thing.
And at the base of its neck, where its back widened out into swept-back wings… was that some kind of saddle?
He might have climbed back under the canopy of the trees to make a closer inspection, but such were the thing's struggles that he feared it might flop down on top of him; and so he held back. At which point the jagged rim of sunlight creeping down across the tree-line fell squarely upon the creature — to devour it!
So it seemed to Nestor.
For the pines filled with stench and steam at once, as the doomed flyer's skin shrivelled and turned from slate-grey to the unwholesome blue of corruption and the texture of crumbling pumice. Its flesh quaked, bloated, split open in a dozen places, out of which its smoking fats ran like water! Then the thing screamed — a sound so thin, high and penetrating that it sliced like a sharp edge of ice on Nestor's nerves — and commenced a shuddering vibration which only ceased when several of the shattered pines were displaced and the flyer slumped down between them to the forest's floor.
And there the sun continued its cleansing work, blazing through the trees to reduce the monster to so much glue and blackly smouldering gristle. But in a little while it became obvious that this would take hours, and what with the poisonous odour and disgusting mess, Nestor didn't wait for the end.
But in his mind's eye, now more visions were waking; and as he began to climb down the wooded slope towards the near-distant town — and as a waft of foulness reached down to him from the dissolving flyer — he 'remembered' a previous rush of reeking air…
.. Wind in his hair, yes, and dark diamond shapes adrift on the updrafts under glittering ice-chip stars — flyers just like that one back there, with riders proud and terrifying in saddles upon their backs — and a distant cry of horror faint on the morning air, but fading now as the scene itself faded back into vaults of memory. 'Wamphyri!'
Wamphyri? The cry had been real, carrying to him from the town in the 'V of the rivers; but the Lord Nestor ignored it in deference to its evocation.
He paused, looked back and up the slope to where smoke and steam continued to pour from the pines, spilling out of them like a slow-motion waterfall over the rim of the bluff. Had that been his flyer back there? But that couldn't possibly be, for here he stood in sunlight and felt no harm.
But at the same time… did he still feel com/ortabJe in the sun's warm rays? Had he ever?
Lord Nestor of the Wamphyri…
It seemed like a dream, some game which he'd played as a child, but he remembered now how he had hunted his human prey in the deep forests, sniffing them out, searching for them with all of his vampire senses alert! Except… where were his vampire senses now?
A vampire — indeed, Wamphyri — was he? He shrank down a little from the sun, which paid him no heed but burned, as ever, benevolently on the southern horizon.
Had he been a vampire, then? But if that were so, how may one of the undead return to human life? And why would he want to? And what of the people in the town down there, Twin Fords? How would they receive him if he werht' among them?
He frowned, sat down in the long grasses of the slope and considered his position. He must be cautious; he must know himself, before he dared show himself to others. But where was his past? What had it been? If people asked him, what could he tell them? That he was the Lord Nestor of the Wamphyri? Hardly!
Then, close by, a distraction: A rabbit, emerging from its hole, blinked pink eyes and turned twitching ears this way and that before hopping tentatively forward — and uttered a short shrill scream as a wire snare tightened around its neck! Then, triggered by the animal's sudden frenzy, the weighted branch of a sapling slipped its anchor, sprang erect and hauled the poor creature aloft to hang it.
Now here at last was something that Nestor remembered and understood well enough: hunting and trapping. So what did it matter that the trap wasn't his; surely it would make good sense to satisfy his hunger here rather than in Twin Fords, whose people might well be suspicious of him?
Just a few short paces away, Nestor had already noted the reflective glitter of a flinty outcrop weathering up out of the shallow soil. Using a fist-sized rock to knock a pair of good firestones free of the mass, now he gathered together the rabbit and the makings for a fire. And in a nest of tall boulders which provided him with shade and cover both, he set about to prepare his meal. If the smoke of his fire was seen from below, then he'd probably be reckoned for just another lonely hunter having his breakfast up in the hills.
But for some reason as yet unfathomed (perhaps it had to do with the many fires burning down there, the black smoke roiling, and a too-familiar stench carried up in the heat and the smoke?), Nestor fancied that the people of the town would have problems enough this morning, without worrying too much about him..
Unknown to Nestor and fourteen miles due west of him where he cooked and ate his breakfast, his brother Nathan was striding out for Twin Fords. And in Settlement-
— Nathan had been gone for well over an hour when Misha Zanesti came through the forest from the south and slipped into town through the South Gate. She was seen, recognized by a girl who had been posted to keep her eye on the gate, and her presence reported to Lardis Lidesci. Misha, too, would report to Lardis, but not until she'd been home.
And in her father's house ten seconds after she entered: Astonishment! Rejoicing! A great flood of laughter, questions, tears! The joyful madness (for Misha) of being whirled about, crushed, lifted off her feet, gazed upon! And for them the joy of whirling, crushing, gazing.
Finally, they demanded to know what, how, where — everything.
But she only wanted to know about her brother, and about Nathan. And then the sadness all over again — for her brother, Eugen, taken by the Wamphyri. As for Nathan: he had been here, yes. And her surviving brother, Nicolae, remembering Nathan's visit and how he'd felt then, said: 'Misha, you should marry that one as soon as possible — even today!' And her father saying nothing, which meant that he agreed.