Darkness flowed over them. Vampires began to stream through the pass. Grieving Tube, on watch, alerted the rest.
Cruiser Two’s heavy cargo, still piled in the pass, must have carried a scent. Kay sighted the cannon starboard of that point and waited. He killed twenty with three blasts.
The vampires left the pass empty for a while. Then they’d begun darting across. Kay’s passengers used the chance for target shooting, but otherwise let the vampires through. Bolts and bullets could be recovered, but not gunpowder.
They bunched up again later. Kay used the cannon again, and stopped almost at once. “They had prisoners, Vala. Big slow guys with big hands and big shoulders, wide-bodied women a head shorter, both of ‘em with yellow hair blooming out around their heads like mushrooms. Warvia saw them best. Warvia?”
Warvia roused herself. “We know the Farming People. Herbivores. They grow and tend root vegetables and keep animals, too, in partnership with Red Herder tribes who defend them. We didn’t see any Reds last night.”
Paroom: “They weren’t bunched up and they weren’t trying to escape. They were each with their own vampire, ah, companion. I couldn’t get a clear shot. We shot a few that didn’t have company—”
Twuk: “They sang at us. Grieving Tube played along. That scared them!”
Kay: “I couldn’t use the cannon because of the prisoners. Not that we were any help to them. What under the Arch would vampires want with prisoners?”
Tegger said, “Herds.”
He spoke almost absently; he was studying Warvia, who would meet nobody’s eyes. Still, it was an ugly thought. Double-ugly: it implied uncomfortably high sapience in vampires.
“The wind,” Kaywerbrimmis said, “was cold and wet and clean in our nostrils until the night was half gone. The vampires started crossing again, and these didn’t have prisoners. They ran. Maybe the smell of their own dead made them nervous. It was fine shooting. Then the wind shifted around and we smelled them, too.”
Grieving Tube was looking out from under the awning, listening, though her face was deep in shadow. “I would have hunted them, Kay,” she said. “Our music confuses them, freezes them.”
Kay’s eyes were on Vala. “Whatever. I invited Grieving Tube to join me in rishathra.” Unspoken: the Ghoul woman was about to join the vampires! “She played, we danced. Warvia accused me of abandoning the fight, but the rest got the idea quick enough—”
In the general laughter, Harpster’s tenor whisper sounded clear. “How was he?”
Grieving Tube: “Inspired. Paroom, too.”
“We all—” Kay stopped suddenly, for no more than a heartbeat, but Vala knew at once. “We all joined in. You understand, Vala, we had them backed up at the pass. As soon as we stopped shooting, they flowed through like a wide river. The smell of them, we could have chopped it into bricks to sell to the elderly.”
Tegger was looking up at his mate. Warvia’s silence disturbed him, Vala thought, but he hadn’t noticed anything more ominous. Kaywerbrimmis said, “I think the Thurl gave us Twuk because she’s small. Inspired decision.” Twuk smiled brilliantly at him. Warvia was looking into far distances, her face like stone.
“Two-tenths of night passed this way, I think. Then the wind swung around. I didn’t notice right away: the vampire scent was gone, but we had our own smells by then. But Chit saw—”
Chit: “Vampires trying to creep upon us across the ice. They’re not much darker than snow themselves.”
Kay: “The wind went gusty and stayed that way. They’d get a whiff of us and look around, and we were conspicuous, I guess.”
Paroom: “Ten tens of them.”
Kay: “Toward morning they stopped coming entirely. We left a carpet of vampires dead in the pass.”
Twuk: “There’s nothing under the Arch like the stink of a hundred vampire corpses. They do avoid their own dead.”
Vala: “Might keep it in mind.”
Twuk: “We collected our cargo and our bolts and bullets at halfdawn. Vala, I think we saw the Shadow Nest.”
“Tell it.”
“Warvia?”
The Red woman didn’t look down. “From spin the light of day flowed toward us while we were still in dark. We were exhausted, but I was at my post, here on the cannon tower. The clouds parted. I saw two black lines. Hard to tell how far, hard to tell how high, but a black plate with structures above, high in the center and glittering silver, and its black shadow parallel below.”
“Not much more than what Harpster told us, “ Vala said, probing.
A flash of anger, throttled. “I could see the silver curves of the river, this river, flowing into the shadow.”
“We know of the Shadow Nest.” A new voice heard from: a glossy black shape of uncertain gender and uncertain age slid out of the water and stood erect on the mud. “I am Rooballabl. Welcome to the Homeflow; have free passage of us. I speak the Tongue better than most. I’m told none of you will rish?”
“Not underwater, Roobla,” Vala said with regret. That would be a coup. “Shadow Nest?”
“The Shadow Nest is a cave without walls. A black roof fifteen hundred paces around, with open sides. Vampires have lived and bred below since before any of us were born.”
Harpster spoke without emerging from the awning. Only Vala heard. “Fifteen hundred paces around would be less then five hundred across, in Water People paces. Two hundred for Grass Giants, three for the rest of us. Three hundred paces in diameter, as we were told.”
Vala asked, “Roobla, how high is that roof?”
Rooballabl exchanged a quick sequence of honks with someone still in the water. Then: “Fudghabladl doesn’t know.” More honking. Rooballabl said, “Low enough to block rain even in high wind. Understand, only Fudghabladl has been there.”
“What’s the Homeflow like under the Shadow Nest? Can vampires swim?”
A gabble of honking voices. One came forward-white fringes on his head and along where his jaw would have been-and chattered at Rooballabl. Rooballabl said, “We must hug the bottom when we pass through. None of us go anymore. The water is a sewer, sometimes a whonkee.” Unknown word. “Vampires never swim.”
Unseen, Harpster spoke. “Whonkee, path of the dead.” Vala nodded.
Warvia swung down into the cannon enclosure.
Vala watched Cruiser Two while the discussion ranged. Warvia didn’t emerge. And where was Tegger?
The River People had observed the vampires for generations, but from their own viewpoint. Vampires sporadically rolled corpses into the Homeflow, hundreds at a time, from ten to twenty species including their own. A turn later there would be a glut of fish. That used to be worth knowing… but old Fudghabladl hadn’t been near the Shadow Nest in twenty falans or more. Fishing aside, nothing that lay beyond was worth traversing the Shadow Nest.
Vala dropped her voice. “Harpster. Corpses rolled into the Homeflow are lost to you, aren’t they?”
“Fish eat them, and Fishers eat the fish, and in the end all is ours.”
“Flup. You’re being robbed.”
“Vala, vampires are animals. Animals don’t rob.”
Rooballabclass="underline" “None but the River People may come to the Shadow Nest and leave alive. Why do you ask these things? Why are you here, so many species?”
Beedj spoke before Vala could. “We go to end the vampire menace. We will attack them in their home. Hominids who cannot travel have supported us.”
The River People discussed that. Vala thought she saw silent laughter.
Maybe not. Rooballabl said, “Valavirgillin, we think we saw a Ghoul among your number.”
“Two of the Night People travel with us. Others parallel our path as friends. They don’t like sunlight, Roobla.”