by Brian Lumley
Dreaming in a frozen hell? The very scenario Shaithis had conjured only a moment or two ago! Yes, and he believed that whoever this Kehrl Lugoz was who spoke to him, indeed he spoke from a dream. Perhaps the crashing of great icicles had roused him up somewhat from his sleep.
You’re wrong, he said then, relaxing a little, for I’m not Shaitan. A son of his sons, perhaps, but my name is Shaithis, not Shaitan.
Oh? Ha, ha, ha! The other seemed to find his words bitterly amusing. The Lord of Liars even to the end, eh, Shaitan? Perverse as ever. Aye, you were the worst of a bad lot. Well, what does it matter now? Come for me if you will—or begone, and let me return to my dreaming.
The voice faded as its owner sank down again into permafrost dreams; but Shaithis, concentrating all of his vampire senses to their full, believed he’d located its source. I’m up here! that mental voice had told him at the onset. Somewhere up above …
Shaithis was in the heart of the carved, wind-fretted ice castle now. There, locked in clear ice all of three feet thick, he could see a massive central core of volcanic rock thrusting raggedly up like the ossified root of a glass tooth: a “splash” of stony spittle from the ancient volcano. And there, climbing the face of the ice sheath where it covered the castle’s lava foundations, carved into its cold crystal contours, glassy steps wound up out of sight into grottoes of gleaming ice.
There was nothing for it but to follow them; the vampire Lord mounted the frost-rimed stairs and climbed to the jagged peak of the core, where its last black igneous fang pointed straight up, as if threatening to break out of its sheath. And staring through ice hard as stone, finally Shaithis spied the author of the mind-messages he’d heard in the corridors below.
There in blue-gleaming heart of ice—seated upright in a lava niche, with one hand resting lightly upon a ridge of rock, as upon the arm of a favorite chair—a man ancient as time, weary, withered, and weird! Encased as surely as any fly in amber, his eyes were closed, his frozen body motionless, his mien severe as his fate. And yet he sat there proudly with his head held high upon a scrawny neck, and with that certain something in his aspect which spoke mutely but definitely of his origin: the fact that he was Wamphyri! Kehrl Lugoz, whoever he had been.
No, whoever he still was!
Shaithis put out a hand to the wall of smooth ice, pressed down hard until his palm was cold and flat. A minute went by, then another, until finally:
Thud!
It was faint—so very faint and far-seeming—but it was still there. And after a pause of two more minutes:
Thud!—and so on. Kehrl Lugoz lived. However protracted his heartbeat, however fossilized his body (and it was, very nearly, fossilized), still he lived. Except, and as Shaithis had already inquired of himself, what was this for life?
He stared hard at the shriveled thing, studying it through three feet of ice, which, however pure, nevertheless blurred the picture and shifted its focus with Shaithis’s every smallest motion. And now he believed he knew the answer to that other question he’d recently asked himself: Which was worse, to be buried undead, or sent into the Hell-lands, or banished here? And the vampire Lord shivered at the thought of all the nameless centuries gone by since Kehrl Lugoz had come up here and sat himself down, and waited for the ice to form.
Thud! And this time, because he’d been lost in his own thoughts and was startled, Shaithis snatched back his hand.
Kehrl Lugoz was too old to even guess at his age. The Wamphyri, when they age, do not necessarily show it. Shaithis himself was more than five hundred years of age, yet looked no older than a well-preserved fifty. But in the face of privations such as this one had known, it simply couldn’t be hidden. Yes, Lugoz looked almost as old as time.
The eyebrows above his closed, steeply slanted eyes were bushy, white, locked in ice like the rest of him. His hair was white as a halo of snow over a brow wrinkled and brown as a walnut, with white sideburns which frizzed out wildly to half-obscure his conch-like ears. His ancient face was not so much wrinkled as grooved, mummified, like a trog kept overlong in its cocoon until wasted. The grey cheeks were sunken in, the chin pointed, with a thin wisp of white beard fluffing there. Eyeteeth like fangs overshot the withered lower lip; they were yellow and the one on the left was broken. There’d been insufficient strength in the frozen vampire to grow another.
The nostrils in the squat, convoluted nose (more properly a bat’s snout than was usual in most of the Wamphyri) showed signs of fretting: disease, Shaithis supposed. And a huge purple wen was visible bulging under the chin, like the puffed mating wattle of one of Sunside’s birds.
As for Kehrl Lugoz’s garb: he wore a simple black robe, its hood thrown back, wide sleeves floppy about his scrawny wrists, and hem loose around his chicken’s calves. Except of course the sleeves and hem were not loose but frozen in ice hard as stone. His hands where they protruded from his robe were extremely long-fingered, with sharp, pointed nails, and upon his right index he wore a large ring of gold. Shaithis could not make out its sigil. Veins stood out white in the backs of his hands, instead of olive or purple. Before he froze himself, this one had gone without blood for long and long.
Wake up! Shaithis sent. I want to know your history, your secrets. Indeed, for it would seem to me that you are Wamphyri history! This Shaitan you speak of: Do you mean Shaitan the Unborn? He and his disciples were banished to the Icelands in the very dawn of legends. But still here? How? No, I cannot believe it. Wake up, Kehrl Lugoz! Answer my questions.
Nothing came back; the old thing in the ice had returned to his dreaming; his shriveled heart continued to thud, but it seemed to Shaithis more slowly yet. He was dying. Longevity, even suspended animation, is not immortality.
“Damn you!” Shaithis snarled out loud. His curse echoed back to him—along with other echoes?—from the bowels of the ice castle. He waited until the echoes had died away and only the weird moaning of ice winds remained, then sent out his vampire awareness all around. Was anyone there?
… Well, if there was someone, then he was adept at shielding his presence. Except—
—Suddenly, Shaithis remembered his flyer, which he’d left feeding! If someone should find it out there …
He reached out his mind to the creature, discovered it gorging still, cursed long and loud but this time silently and to himself. He’d never get the beast aloft now. But at least he could send it away from here.
Go! he commanded it. Flop, waddle, squirm, slither, but go! Westward, half a mile at least, and there hide. As best you can, anyway. And in his mind he felt the stupid creature moving instantly to obey him.
Then, satisfied that the flyer would put distance between itself, Volse’s dead creature, and what or whoever else might possibly be in the vicinity, Shaithis returned to the problem at hand. Earlier, the old thing in the ice had been awakened by a fall of icicles. So be it.
Exploring an upper terrace, the vampire Lord found a vast spout of ice like a frozen waterfall, and at its fringe many lesser formations. One of these icicles, some four feet long and nine inches through its stem, he snapped off and carried back to the ice-encased husk of Kehrl Lugoz. Since the petrified old fool couldn’t be roused by mental means, let him start awake at the entirely physical shattering of this great blade of ice against his sheath.
Fully absorbed in his task, Shaithis failed to detect the furtive approach of others up the ice staircase. He “shouted” telepathically at the frozen, ice-distorted figure where it sat: Kehrl Lugoz, wake up! Then swung back his icicle hammer to smash it against the face of Lugoz’s sheath. But the great icicle refused to swing, because something was impeding it!
Hissing and spitting his shock from the red-ribbed vault of his throat out over the glistening, vibrating arch of his forked tongue—eyes bulging and crimson, and with his less than human features instinctively flowing into a fearsomely inhuman wolf-mask—Shaithis glanced back over his shoulder, then dropped the great icicle and reached for his gauntlet. But in that same i
nstant a huge talon of a hand fell upon his wrist and trapped it, and Shaithis stared into the grim grey faces of two fellow survivors from the battle for The Dweller’s garden: Fess Ferenc and Volse Pinescu!
He snatched back his hand and stumbled away from them. “Damn your hearts!” he snarled, panting. “But you’ve learned stealth, you two!”
“We’ve learned a great many things.” Volse Pinescu choked the words out past a huge scab of crusted pus which half sealed his lips, impeding his speech. “Not least how the ‘invincible’ vampire army of Shaithis of the Wamphyri could be burned and blasted and crushed, its aeries destroyed, and its survivors banished like whipped dogs into eternal wastelands of ice!”
Volse’s boil-festooned face turned purple with fury as he took a heavy, threatening step closer to Shaithis. But the Ferenc’s temper was less volatile. With his great height and strength, and with his terrible hands, he didn’t much need to work up a rage in himself. “We’ve lost a great deal, Shaithis,” he rumbled. “Since coming here it’s dawned on us just how much. Aye, for this is a cold and lonely place.”
“Cold?” Shaithis blustered. “What is cold to the Wamphyri? You’ll get used to it.”
Volse strained his head forward aggressively, and a batch of boils on the left side of his neck burst and spurted their yellow pus onto the ice. “Oh?” he gurgled. “Like he got used to it, d’you mean?” he inclined his loathsomely decorated head sharply towards Kehrl Lugoz, seated motionless as a mountain not three impenetrable feet away. “Him and all the others we’ve found, encysted in their echoing fortresses of ice?”
“Others?” Shaithis looked uncertainly from Volse to the Ferenc, then back again.
“Dozens of them,” Fess Ferenc finally answered, nodding his huge, acromegalic head. “All taken to the ice, clutching at straws, waiting out their time until some magical thaw shall come and free them into a land filled with life. Or until they die. For the cold of this place is not like the cold of Starside, Shaithis. Here it goes on forever! Get used to it?” (Now he echoed Volse Pinescu.) “Resist it? Warm ourselves? Stoke up our internal fires against it? But fires need fuel—the blood is the life! And with what do we sustain ourselves while we’re ‘getting used to it’? Blood cools, Shaithis, trickle by trickle, hour by hour. Limbs stiffen, and even the stoutest heart runs slow.”
Now Volse took it up. “You ask: What is cold to the Wamphyri? Hah! How often were you cold on Starside, Shaithis? I’ll tell you: never! The heat of the hunt kept you warm, the blaze of battle, the hot salt blood of trog or Traveller. Your bed was warm and welcoming at sunup, as were the breasts and buttocks of the lusty women who sucked the sting from your tail. All of these things you had to keep you warm. We all had them! And we had a ‘leader’ who said to us: ‘Let’s band together and take The Dweller’s garden.’ And now what have we got?”
Shaithis looked at the Ferenc, who shrugged and said: “We have been here longer than you. It is cold and we grow colder. Worse, we grow hungry …” His voice was now a growl.
Volse’s hand touched the ugly gauntlet at his hip … tentatively … perhaps thoughtfully … it could mean anything. But Shaithis backed away.
And as the threatened Lord plunged his hand into his own gauntlet and flexed it there, displaying its gleaming knives, rasps, and cutting edges, Fess Ferenc raised an eyebrow and rumbled: “Two to one, Shaithis? Do you like such odds, then?”
“Not especially,” Shaithis hissed, “but I’ll make sure you lose at least as much blood as you drink! Where’s the profit in that?”
Volse grunted, coughed up yellow phlegm, and spat it out. “I—say—it—would—be worth it!” He went into a crouch, and now he too wore his gauntlet.
But the Ferenc only relaxed, stepped aside, shrugged again, and said: “Fight if you wish, you two. Myself, I’d prefer to eat. Full bellies are less fierce, and brains with blood in them more capable of clever scheming.” His maxim might not fit men, but certainly it was applicable to the Wamphyri.
Volse, seeing he stood alone, thought twice. And: “Hah!” he snorted, this time at the Ferenc. “But it seems your mind schemes just as well when you’re hungry, Fess! For if we were to fight, Shaithis and I, why you’d sup on the loser—and so make yourself stronger than the winner!” He nodded and removed his gauntlet. “I’m no such fool.”
The Ferenc scratched his jutting jaw and grinned, however grimly. “Strange, but I had always considered you just such a fool …”
Shaithis, still wary, hung his own gauntlet at his belt, finally nodded, and took out from his pouch a purple heart as big as his fist. “Here, if you’re so hungry.” And he tossed it. Volse snatched it from the air and closed slavering jaws upon it. But the Ferenc only shook his head.
“Red and spurting for me,” he said. “While I can get it, anyway.”
Shaithis frowned and narrowed his eyes suspiciously as the giant started down the ice steps. “What’s your plan?” he snapped. “Who will you kill?”
“Not who but what,” the Ferenc answered over his shoulder. “And I’ll not kill it but merely deplete it little by little. I should think it’s obvious.”
Shaithis and Volse went skidding after him. “What?” Volse questioned round a mouthful of bear heart. “Something’s obvious?”
The Ferenc glanced back at him. “What did you eat when you crashed your exhausted flyer here?” he said.
“Ah-hah!” Volse spat out chunks of cold dark flesh.
“What?” Shaithis grabbed the Ferenc’s huge shoulder. “Are you talking about my flyer? Would you maroon me here forever?”
The Ferenc paused, turned, looked him straight in the eye. Two steps lower than Shaithis, still the giant looked him in the eye. “And why not?” he answered. “Since it seems to me that you’re the reason we’re all marooned here?”
“No!” Shaithis spat at him, and stabbed again for his gauntlet—and the Ferenc at once swept him from the stairs!
Shaithis fell. Too depleted and restricted for metamorphosis into an airfoil, he could only grit his teeth and wait for gravity to do its worst. On the way down he struck from several ice ledges but suffered no real damage, until at the last he crashed down on his shoulder and chest—in snow! Merciful snow!
Blown in through an arched ice window, the drift was three or four feet deep with a thick crust of ice. Shaithis crunched through the latter, compressed the former, wrenched his right shoulder, and broke a pair of recently healed ribs. And then he lay there in his agony and cursed Fess Ferenc from the depths of his black heart!
Curse me all you will, Shaithis—the Ferenc had heard him—but I’m sure you’ll think better of it. Of course you will, for it was you or your flyer, after all. Volse would have chosen you: for there’s a vampire in you! Ah, the very essence! But personally, I think it were better if you live. A little while longer, at least.
Shaithis stood up, staggered away, looked for a place to hide. He allowed his hurt to wash over him, deliberately conjuring all the agonies of his crash on Starside, when he’d broken his body and face, and of his fight with the she-bears, to add to the pain of this latest tumble. And these were the false impressions of severe damage which he let flood out of him, to be picked up and (hopefully) wrongly translated by the Ferenc’s vampire mind. Volse might conceivably read them, too, but Shaithis doubted it. The boil-fancier was a dullard, too much obsessed with the manufacture of abscesses.
What? the Ferenc seemed surprised, however uncaring. That much pain? Did you crash down face-first, Shaithis? He offered a grim mental chuckle. Well, and now you know how I’ve felt all this time, for your face has always been hurtful to me!
Aye (Shaithis could not restrain himself), laugh long and loud, Fess Ferenc! But remember: he who laughs last …
The Ferenc’s chuckling faded in Shaithis’s mind, and: Not too seriously hurt, then? A pity. Or perhaps you merely put a brave face on it? But in any case, I think a warning is in order: don’t interfere, Shaithis. If you think to command your fly
er into flight, forget it. For if we can’t find your creature, then be sure we’ll come back for you. Order it to attack us, still we’ll triumph in the end. For as you know well enow, flyers make poor warriors and our thoughts would stab it like arrows. And then we’d come back for you! But only let it be our way and make no protest, and for some little time to come … well, at least you’ll know where to go when you’re hungry. And for as long as your flyer lasts—and provided we are not in the vicinity when you go to feed—then you shall last just precisely so long, Shaithis of the Wamphyri.
Shaithis found a deep, sheltered ice niche in the castle’s labyrinth and hid himself away. He wrapped himself in his cloak and toned down his vibrant vampire aura. Now must be a time of healing. Perhaps he would sleep and conserve his energy. And there was still a little bear heart left over for when he awakened. So long as he guarded his thoughts and his dreams alike, Volse Pinescu and Fess Ferenc would not find him.
But first there was something he must know. Why, Fess? he sent out one last telepathic question. You could have killed me yet let me live. Not out of the “goodness” of your heart, surely. So why?
Halfway down the ice stairs, the Ferenc smiled with a mouth almost as wide as his face. You were ever a thinker, Shaithis, he answered. Aye, and a clever one at that. Oh, you’ve made mistakes, certainly, but the man who never made a mistake never made anything. The way I see it, if there’s a way out of this place you’ll find it. And when you do I’ll be right behind you.
And if I don’t?
(The Ferenc’s mental shrug): Blood is blood, Shaithis. And yours is good and rich. Let one thing be clearly understood: if this is as far as we go—if the ice is our destiny —then at the last I shall be the one who sits encased awaiting the Great Thaw, Fess Ferenc and none other. But I shall not go hungry to my fate …
Two exiled Wamphyri Lords—one grotesque and huge, and the other hugely grotesque—left the glittering ice castle and sniffed the bitter air, then let their snouts guide them to Shaithis’s doomed beast.
