So let's go! Pete was eager to ride. Just climb aboard the old Screamin' Eagle and start 'er up, man.

But the Necroscope shook his head. 'I don't need the bike, Pete. Not any more.'

The ex-Angel was cast down. Hey, that's right. You got your own form of transport. But what about me?

Harry thought about it a while, then gave a wan smile. And it was a measure of his strength that he still had it in him to smile. Pete the biker read his deadspeak thoughts, of course, and whooped wildly. Necroscope, do you mean it? He was breathless with excitement.

'Sure,' said Harry. 'Why not?' And they got aboard the big bike.

They turned her around, found a good straight stretch of hard-packed, boulder-free earth, and took her up to a ton. And it was as if a primal beast bellowed in the starlit silence of Starside. Then, still howling a hundred and waving a tail of dust half a mile long, Harry conjured a Möbius door and they shot through, followed by a future-time door which they likewise crashed. And now they rode into the future with a great many blue and green and (Harry noted) even a few red life-lines. The blues were Travellers, the greens would be trogs, and the reds...

... Vampires? Pete picked the thought out of his mind.

Looks like it, said Harry, sighing.

But Pete only laughed like a crazy man. My kind of people! he yelled.

And on they rode, for a little while.

Until Harry said, Pete, here's where I get off.

You mean... she's all mine?

For ever and ever. And you needn't ever stop.

Pete didn't know how to thank him, so didn't try. Harry opened a past-time door, then paused a while before crossing the threshold and watched the big Harley rocketing away from him into the future. Eventually he heard the Angel's whooping cry come echoing back: Heee-haaaaaaaaaa! Well, at least Pete was happy now.

And then Harry went back to Starside and the garden...

The Necroscope stood at the forward edge of the garden, his hands resting on the low stone wall there, and looked down on Starside. Somewhere between here and the old territories of the Wamphyri, where the broken remains of their aeries now lay in shattered disarray, the sphere Gate - this end of the space-time 'handle', the dimensional warp, whose alternate extension lay in Perchorsk - would be lighting up the stony plain in its painful white glare. Harry fancied he could see something of its light even from here, a ghostly shimmer way down there in the far grey foothills.

He and the incorporeal Pete had come out of the Starside Gate on the big bike - come through the aching dazzle of the 'grey hole' from Perchorsk and out of it on to the boulder plain - but Harry remembered very little of that. He did remember the last time he was here, however, which strangely felt more real to him than all that had gone between. Probably because he now desired to forget all that had gone between.

He turned his head more directly northwards and gazed out across all the leagues of Starside's vast unknown to the curve of the horizon lying dark-blue and emerald-green under fleeting moon, glittering stars and the writhing allure of aurora borealis. That way lay the Icelands where the sun never shone and into which the doomed, forsaken and forgotten of the Wamphyri had been banished since time immemorial. Shaithis, too, after the defeat of the Wamphyri and the destruction of their aeries in the battle for The Dweller's garden. And he remembered how Shaithis had sped north aboard a huge manta flyer in the peace and the silence of the aftermath.

Harry and the Lady Karen had spoken to Shaithis before he exiled himself; unrepentant even then, the vampire Lord had openly lusted after Karen's body, and even more so after The Dweller's and his father's hearts. But he'd lusted in vain. At that time, anyway.

As for the Necroscope: he'd had his own use for the Lady Karen. For just like his son, she had a vampire in her. If he could exorcize Karen's nightmare creature, perhaps he could also cure The Dweller.

He starved Karen in her aerie, used the blood of a piglet to lure her vampire out of her, then burned the thing before it could escape back into her body. But after that, things had not gone according to plan. And the rest of it was still seared on the screen of his memory:

She came to him in a dream, stood over him in her most revealing white gown, and turned his triumph to ashes. 'Can't you see what you've done to me?' she said. 'I who was Wamphyri am now a shell! For when one has known the power, the freedom, the magnified emotions of the vampire... what is there after that? I pity you, for I know why you did what you've done, and also that you've failed!' And then she was gone.

He woke up and searched for her in all the rooms on all the many levels of the aerie, and could not find her.

Eventually he went out on to a high bone balcony and looked down, and saw Karen's white dress lying crumpled on the scree more than a kilometre below, no longer entirely white but red too. And Karen had been inside it.

Harry shook himself, came out of his reverie, deliberately turned his back on Starside and the scars it had given him, and looked at the garden - which now he saw was not entirely as he remembered it. A garden? Well, yes, but not the well-tended garden he had known. And the greenhouses? The hillside dwelling places of the Travellers? The hot springs and speckled trout pools?

There was green algae on the pools; the transparent panels in many of the greenhouses were torn and flapping in cold air eddies out of Starside; the dwelling houses, especially Harry Jr's, showed signs of disrepair where tiles were missing from the roofs, windows were broken, and central-heating pipes from the thermal pools had cracked, spilling their contents out upon the open ground so that the radiators went without.

'Not the same, Harry Hell-lander, is it?' said a deep, sad, growling voice from close at hand, if not in those words exactly. But the Necroscope's telepathy had filled in the bits which his ears had failed to recognize: it's easy to be a linguist when you're also a telepath. Harry turned to face the man approaching him jinglingly along the lee of the wall; as he did so the other noted his gaunt grey flesh and crimson eyes, and paused.

'Hello there, Lardis.' The Necroscope nodded, his own voice as deep and deeper than the other's. 'I hope that shotgun's not for me!' He wasn't joking; if anything, he might have been threatening.

'For The Dweller's father?' Lardis looked at the weapon in his hands as if seeing it for the first time, in something of surprise. He shuffled a little, awkwardly, like a boy caught in contemplation of some small crime, and said, 'Hardly that! But - ' and again the Traveller chief looked at Harry's eyes, and this time narrowed his own, ' -wherever you've been and whatever you've done since last you were here, Harry Hell-lander, I see you've known hard times.' Finally he averted his gaze, glancing here and there all about the garden, then down onto Starside. 'Aye, and hard times here, too. And more still to come, I fear.'

Harry studied the man, and asked, 'Hard times? Won't you explain?'

Lardis Lidesci was Romany; in this world, on Earth, anywhere, there would be no mistaking the Gypsy in him. He was maybe five-eight tall, built like a crag, and looked of one age with the Necroscope. (In fact he was a lot younger, but Starside and the Wamphyri had taken their toll.) In contrast to his squat build he was very agile, and not in body alone; his intelligence was patent in every brown wrinkle of his expressive face. Open and frank, Lardis's round face was framed in dark flowing hair in which streaks of grey were now plainly visible; he had slanted, bushy eyebrows, a flattened nose and a wide mouth full of strong if uneven teeth. His brown eyes held nothing of malice but were careful, thoughtful, penetrating.