Deadspawn

by Brian Lumley

  “It was white, but not a healthy white. The white of hiding in places too dark, like some cavern fungus. It had legs—a great man, I think—with clawed, webbed feet. Its body was fish-like, its head too, with jaws ferocious! But the weapon it bore—”

  “A weapon?” Arkis thrust his face forward. “But you said the thing was mindless. And now … mind enough to carry a weapon?”

  The Ferenc glanced at him scornfully, then held up his own talon hands. “And are these not weapons? This thing’s weapon was part of it, fool, just as your own boar’s tusks are part of you!”

  “Yes, yes, understood,” said Shaithis impatiently. “Say on.”

  Fess settled down again, but his eyes were uneasy, wide in his massive, malformed face. “Its weapon was a knife, a sword, a lance. But with tines like thorns all down its length, from tip to snout. A barbed rod for stabbing, and once stabbed the victim’s hooked, with no way to free himself except tear his own flesh wide open! And at the tip of that bone-plated ram, twin holes like nostrils. But not for breathing …” He paused.

  “ … For what, then?” Arkis could not contain himself.

  “For sucking!” said the Ferenc.

  “A vampire thing.” Shaithis seemed convinced. “A warrior, but uncontrolled, with no rightful master. A creature created by some exiled Wamphyri Lord, which has outlasted its maker.” He said these things, but he did not necessarily believe them. No, he uttered them aloud to cover the nature of his true thoughts, which were different again.

  Fess fell for Shaithis’s ploy, anyway. “These are possibilities, aye,” the giant said. “Stealthy—sly as a fox, and all unheralded—it crept out from a side tunnel; but when it struck—ah!—lightning moves more slowly. It slid into view and its spear stabbed at Volse three times. The first blow ripped him open through boils and all, and spattered me and the walls of the tunnel with all of his pus, whose amount was prodigious. He was like one huge blister, bursting and wetting everything with his vile liquids. I was drenched. The second thrust hit him while he was still reeling from the first; it almost sawed his head off. And the third: that sank into him—into his heart—where it commenced to suck like a great pump! And while the thing held him upright, impaled on its weapon against the wall, sucking at him, so the creature’s saucer eyes fixed me in their monstrous glare. So that I knew I was next.

  “That was when I fled.” (And Fess actually shuddered, which amazed Shaithis.)

  “You couldn’t have saved him?” Arkis sneered, questioning Fess’s manhood; a dangerous line of inquiry at best.

  But the other took it well. “I tell you Volse was a goner! What? And so much of his liquids used up, his head half shorn away, and the thing’s great siphon in him, emptying him? Save him? And what of myself? You, Diredeath, have not seen this creature! Why, even Lesk the Glut—in whichever hell he now resides—would not stray near such a monster! No, I fled.

  “And all the way out of that long, long tunnel, I could hear the thing’s slobbering as it drained Volse’s juices. Also, by the time I struck light and open air, I fancied it slobbered all the louder, perhaps hot on my trail. In something of a panic—yes, I admit it—I called a mist out of myself and hurried out onto the slopes and down to the plain of snow and ice. There I stripped off, for Volse’s drench was poisonous, and without further pause hurried back here … and found you two waiting for me.

  “The tale is told …”

  Arkis and Shaithis sat back, narrowed their eyes, and fingered their chins. Shaithis kept his thoughts mainly to himself (though truth to tell there was nothing especially sinister or vindictive about them); but Diredeath, feeling that he still had the Ferenc at something of a disadvantage, was somewhat loath to let the giant so lightly off the hook.

  “Times and fortunes change,” the leper’s son eventually said. “I went starving—went, indeed, in fear of my life!—when you and the great wen had the upper hand. But now … you are only one man against myself and the Lord Shaithis.”

  “These things are true,” Fess answered, standing up and stretching, and flexing the mighty talons which were his hands. “But do you know, I can’t help wondering what the Lord Shaithis sees in you, leper’s son? For it seems to me there’s about as much use in you as there was in that mighty bag of slops called Volse Pinescu! Also, and now that I come to think of it, it strikes me I sat still for a good many hurtful slights and insults while relating my story. Of course, I was hungry and cold as death, and a man will sit still for a lot while there’s a chance he can fill his belly. But now that my belly’s full and I’m warm again … I think you’d do well to back off, Diredeath. Or come to just such an end as your name suggests.”

  “Aye,” said Shaithis with a quick nod, coming between them. “Well, and enough of that. For let’s face it, we’ve all we can handle in the Icelands themselves, without we’re at each other’s throats, too.” He took their arms and sat down, drawing them down with him. “Now tell me,” he said, “what are the secrets of these Icelands? For after all, I’m the newcomer here; but the two of you … ? Why, you’ve explored and adventured galore! And so the sooner I know all that you know, the sooner we’ll be able to decide on our next move.”

  Shaithis let his gaze wander to and fro, from one to the other, finally allowing it to settle on Arkis’s dark and twitching countenance, his coarse lips and the yellow ivory of his tusks. “So how about it, Arkis?” he said. “You’ve had a little less freedom than Fess, it’s true, but still you’ve managed to explore a few ice castles. Well, the Ferenc has told us his tale of the horror in the cone, so now I reckon it’s your turn. What of the ice aeries, eh? What of these ancient, exiled, ice-encysted Wamphyri Lords?”

  Arkis scowled at him. “You want to know about the frozen ones?”

  “The sooner all is known,” said Shaithis, nodding, “the sooner we may proceed.”

  Arkis shrugged, however grudgingly. “I have no problem with that,” he said. “So … you want to know what I’ve seen, done, discovered? It won’t take long in the telling, I promise you!”

  “Tell us, anyway,” said Shaithis, “and we’ll see what we make of it.”

  Again Arkis’s shrug. “So be it,” he said.

  4

  THE FROZEN LORDS

  “After the mayhem in the Dweller’s garden” (Arkis commenced), “when it was seen how The Dweller and his Hell-lander father had destroyed our armies, shattered our centuried stacks, and brought our aeries crashing down, there seemed no alternative but flight. The Dweller had our measure; the Wamphyri were fallen; to remain in the ruins of Starside would surely bring these Great Enemies down upon us one last time in a final venting of their furious might.

  “However, it is the immemorial right of the fallen to quit Starside and forge for the Icelands. Thus, in the lull which followed on the destruction of our aeries, those survivors who had the means for flight forsook their ancient territories and headed north. Aye, and I was one such survivor.

  “Along with a pair of aspiring lieutenants—ex-Traveller thralls of mine, twin brothers named Goram and Belart Largazi, who vied with each other for my egg—I cleared away the debris of my fallen stack from the deeply buried entrance to subterranean workshops, so freeing one flyer and one warrior kept aside and safe against the event of just such a calamity as The Dweller’s victory. These beasts we saddled and mounted (I myself took the warrior, an ill-tempered creature personally trained to my tastes), finally fleeing on a course roughly northward from the rack and ruin of the aeries.

  “Our heading was not true north—perhaps a little west of north—what odds? The roof of the world is the roof of the world; to left or right it is still the roof. We paused only once, where a shoal of great blue fishes had got themselves trapped in the formation of a shallow ice lake, and there glutted ourselves before proceeding farther.

  “Not long after that the Largazi brothers’ flyer, burdened as it was with two riders, became exhausted. It went down at the rim of a shallow sea and left its r
iders floundering. I landed on the frozen strand, sent my warrior back to the Largazis to let down its launching limbs and tow them ashore.

  “And then it was that we found ourselves in a very curious place. Hot blowholes turned the snow yellow; bubbling geysers made warm pools in the ageless ice; seabirds came down to feed on the froth of small fishes where they spawned at the ocean’s rim. It was the farthest reach of these selfsame volcanic mountains, which are active still in those weird western extremes.

  “After the Largazis were dragged ashore and while they dried themselves out, I looked for a launching place and discovered a glacier where it sloped oceanward. There I ordered my creature down onto the ice; aye, for by now that warrior mount of mine was likewise sore weary, whose valiant efforts in saving the twins from drowning had scarcely buttressed its vitality. They need to kill and devour a deal of red meat, warriors, else rapidly fade away to nothing. And so I thought to myself: Which will prove most useful to me in the Icelands? A powerful warrior, or a pair of bickering, unimportant, and ever-hungry thralls? Hah! No contest.

  “It was my thought to slaughter one of the brothers there and then, and feed him to my warrior. Except … well, I’ll admit it, I’d underestimated that fine pair of Wamphyri aspirants. They too had been busy weighing the odds, and their conclusions had likewise favored my fighting beast. Now they backed off to a safe distance and descended into deep, narrow crevasses from which I could neither threaten nor tempt them to come out and approach me. Mutinous dogs! Very well: let them freeze! Let them starve! Let them both die!

  “I climbed aboard my warrior and spurred the creature slithering down the glacier’s ramp, until at last it bounded aloft and spurted out over the sea. And not before time: the launching of that depleted beast had been a very close-run thing, so that I could almost taste the salt spray from the waves against the glacier. However, I was now airborne.

  “I turned inland, swept high overhead where the treacherous Largazi twins had emerged from the ice to angle their faces up to me, waved them a scornful farewell, and set course for a line of distant peaks standing in silhouette against the sky’s weaving auroral pulse. Those same peaks which stand behind us even now, with their central volcanic cone whose lava vents are guarded—according to the Ferenc, at least—by sword-snouted monsters. Aye, the very same.

  “Nor would I, nor could I, call Fess a liar in that respect—in the matter of Volse’s death by some strange and savage creature—for certainly my warrior came to a sad, suspicious end. And who can say but that Volse and my poor weary warrior were not victims of the selfsame bloodbeast? I will tell you how it was:

  “My warrior was weary unto death … well, perhaps not so weary, for as you know well enow they don’t die easily, and rarely of weariness! But the creature was depleted and panting and complaining. I scanned the land about and saw lava-runs on the higher slopes of the central cone: good, slippery launching ramps if the warrior should ever again find itself fit for flight.

  “Alas, the landing was awkward and the beast threw me; it cracked its armored carapace, wrenched a vane, and tore a propulsion orifice on a jagged lava outcrop. Many gallons of fluids were lost before its metamorphic flesh webbed over the gashes and sealed them. My own injuries were slight, however, and I ignored them; but such was my anger that I cursed and kicked the warrior a good deal before its mood turned ugly and it began to bellow and spit. Then I was obliged to calm the brute, and finally I backed it up and hid it from view in the mouth of a cavern tunnel much similar—perhaps identical?—to that of the leprous white bloodbeast as described by the Ferenc. For this tunnel was likewise an ancient lava-run from the once-molten core, and perhaps I should have explored its interior a little way. But at the time there was no evidence of anything suspicious about that central cone.

  “I ordered the warrior to heal itself, left it there in the cavern entrance, let my curiosity get the better of me, and came down by foot onto the plain of the shimmering ice castles, to see what they contained. For as you’ve seen, they looked for all the world like Wamphyri stacks or aeries formed from ice. As for what I discovered: it was a very strange, very awesome, indeed a frightening thing!

  “Expatriate Lords, all frozen in suspended animation, ice-locked in the cores of their glittering castles. A good many were dead, crushed or sheared by shifting ice; but there were some—too many, I thought—who had variously … succumbed? Others were preserved, however, sleeping still within impenetrable walls of ice hard as iron, their vampire metabolisms so reduced that they seemed scarcely changed over all the long centuries. Ah, this was a false impression; their dreams were fading, ephemeral things, mere memories of the lives they had known in the Old Times, when the first of the Wamphyri inhabited their stacks on Starside and waged their territorial wars there.

  “All of the ex-Lords were dying; ah, slowly, so slowly, but dying nevertheless. Of course they were: the blood is the life, and for centuries without number all they had had was ice …”

  “Some of them!” Fess Ferenc broke in. “Most of them, aye. But one at least had not gone without. This was the conclusion which Volse Pinescu and I arrived at, when we examined the ice-castle stacks.”

  Shaithis looked at him, then at Arkis. “Will one of you—or both—elaborate?”

  Arkis shrugged. “I take it the Ferenc is talking about the matter of the breaking, and of the empty ice thrones. For it’s a fact, as I’ve hinted, that certain of the frozen keeps and redoubts—indeed a good many—have been broken into and their helpless, refrigerated inhabitants removed. But by whom, to where … for what?”

  The huge, hulking, slope-skulled Ferenc, broke in again with: “I’ve reached certain conclusions about these things, too. Should I say on?”

  And again Arkis Leperson’s shrug. “If you can throw some light on the mystery, by all means.”

  And Shaithis said, “Aye, say on.”

  The Ferenc nodded and continued: “As you’ll have noted for yourselves, the ice castles number between fifty and sixty, forming concentric rings about the extinct volcano, which is the central cone. But is the volcano truly extinct? And if so, why is it that a little smoke still goes up from that ancient ice-crusted crater? Also, we have seen—myself far too clearly—how there is at least one monstrous warrior creature guarding the cone’s access tunnels. Ah, but what or who else does it guard?”

  When his pause threatened to go on forever, finally it was Shaithis’s turn to shrug. “Pray continue,” he said. “We’re in the very palm of your hand, Fess, entirely fascinated.”

  “Indeed?” The Ferenc was somewhat flattered. One by one, he very deliberately, very loudly cracked the bony knuckles of his taloned hands. “Fascinated, eh? Well, and rightly so. And so you see, Shaithis, you’re not the only thinker who survived The Dweller’s wrath, eh?”

  Shaithis hummed in his convoluted nose, perhaps a little indecisively, and swung his head this way and that. Finally, he said: “I’ll give credit where credit’s due—when I can see the whole picture.”

  “Very well,” said the Ferenc. “So here’s what I’ve seen and what I reckon:

  “Me and that foul festerer Volse Pinescu, we explored the innermost ice aeries and discovered each and every one looted! Following which—and especially now that Volse is no more, sucked dry by the Thing in the lava-run—I find it easy to piece together a fairly accurate picture of what’s been happening here:

  “The way I see it, some ancient Wamphyri Lord or Lady is master or mistress of the slumbering volcano. In ages past and whenever outcast vampires have happened this way, he or she has fought them off from taking possession of the volcano’s ‘comforts’ … it would seem to have some residual warmth at least. Then, as the vampires lying in siege have succumbed to the cold and put themselves into hibernation, so the crafty master of the volcano has emerged from time to time to pillage their ice chambers and live off their deep-frozen flesh. In effect, the ice castles are his larder!”

  “Hah!” Arkis slapped hi
s great thigh. “It all comes clear.”

  The Ferenc nodded his swollen, grotesquely proportioned head. “You agree with my conclusions, then?”

  “How can it be otherwise?” said Arkis. “What say you, Shaithis?”

  Shaithis looked at him curiously. “I say you blow like a pennant in the wind: now this way, now that. First you wished to kill the Ferenc, and now you agree with his every word. Is your mind so easily changed, then?”

  The leper’s son scowled at him. “I know truth when I hear it,” he said. “Also, I can see the sense in sound scheming. The Ferenc’s reckoning about the state of things sounds right enough to me, and your plea that we run together for our mutual safety seems similarly wise. So what’s giving you grief, Shaithis? I thought you wanted us to be friends?”

  “So I do,” Shaithis answered. “It’s just that I worry when loyalties change so fast, that’s all. And now would you care to finish your own story? The last we heard, you’d left your injured warrior in the mouth of a lava-run and gone down onto the plain to examine the ice castles.”

  “That I did,” Arkis agreed. “And I found things pretty much as the Ferenc described them: the ice-locked thrones of all those unknown Wamphyri Lords out of time, all cracked open and empty, like Sunside hives raped of their honey. Aye, and in those ice castles which stood more distant from the central cone, there too I found evidence of attempted robbery, except in many an instance the ice had been too thick and the eon-shriveled Lords remained safe, unburgled, intact. Which meant that they were also safe from me.

  “Finally, I wearied of my eerie explorations. I was hungry but unable to break into these ancient, permafrost pantries; the small albino bats no longer trusted me but avoided my crushing hands; if my former thralls the Largazis still lived, by now they’d be halfway here. They’d be exhausted, too, and unable to outrun me. Ah, but that was a thought! It was time I returned to my warrior creature to see how it was holding up. And so I climbed up to the high cavern where I’d hidden the beast away.