by Brian Lumley
“Except it was not there. Several small pieces of it were there, but that was all.”
“The sucking thing,” the Ferenc said. “The bloodbeast with the hollow, sword-like cartilage snout.”
“But how so?” Shaithis wasn’t so sure. “For a mindless beast to suck a man or, given time, even a warrior dry, this I can understand. But then, to cut the carcass of so huge a creature into small pieces and drag them away … ?”
The Ferenc only shrugged. “These are the Icelands,” he said. “They harbor strange creatures with stranger habits, and food is scarce here. Now think: On Starside would we ever have dreamed of chewing on the rubbery arteries of a flyer? What, with trogs in our larders and Travellers on the hoof just across the mountains? Not likely! But here? Hah! It didn’t take us long to learn. Oh, we lowered our sights soon enough. And what of the mainly conjectural creatures and beings which have possibly spent their entire lives here? If the loathsome, leprous bloodbeast hunts only for itself, then perhaps it has its own pantry somewhere. And if it hunts for a master?” Yet again his shrug. “Perhaps he’s the one who butchered Arkis’s warrior and dragged its bits away.”
And Shaithis, turning his private thoughts inwards to guard them, thought: A master, aye, you’re right, Fess! A master, of evil—the very source of evil—in the shape of a timeless vampire Lord; indeed one of the first true Lords. The dark Lord Shaitan! Shaitan the Unborn! Shaitan the Fallen!
“Well?” said Arkis Leperson. “Does the Ferenc make sense or what? And if he does, what’s our next move?”
And perhaps cautiously, Shaithis answered, “The Ferenc makes sense—possibly.” And to himself: Indeed he does, for a misshapen fool! But he’s been here longer than I have. Perhaps this isn’t the sudden burgeoning of previously unsuspected intelligence in the great freak, but simply the fact that he’s had longer to feel Shaitan’s influence at work … to feel his ancient eyes on him, staring through the pink orbits of his myriad albino minions!
Now the Ferenc echoed Arkis: “Well? What now, Shaithis? D’you have a plan?”
A plan? Oh, yes, a plan! To discover more about this Shaitan: to seek him out and learn why he allowed me to clothe myself in his albinos for their warmth; but mainly to know what it is, this weird affinity, which draws me to a creature I’ve never known except in muttered myths and legends.
And out loud: “A plan, aye,” he answered. And thinking with his usual, almost casual clarity, he created a plan out of thin air, literally on the spur of the moment. One which would hopefully suit his vampire companions, and one which especially suited himself. “First we cut a good weight of meat out of this flyer,” he said, “as much as we can carry comfortably; and then, on our way to the central cone, you can show me some more of the frozen Lords. So far I’ve seen only the one,” (Kehrl Lugoz, who was banished here along with Shaitan at the dawn of Wamphyri tyranny), “upon which, due to its insufficiency, I may not base a firm opinion. Then, in the inner ice castles, you may also care to show me these shattered keeps wherefrom the bodies of certain Lords have been stolen. These several things for a start, then.” And I’ll think of others as we go along.
Arkis seemed uncertain. “Eh? What’s this for a plan? We take meat with us and visit a handful of shriveled, prehistoric, ice-doomed Lords? Also the sacked, empty tombs of other ancients, whose fate we can only guess at?”
“On our way to the central cone, aye,” said Shaithis.
“And then?” said the Ferenc.
“Perhaps to destroy him who dwells within,” Shaithis answered, “and gain his secrets, his beasts and possessions; and who can say, possibly even discover some means of egress from these hideously boring and barren Icelands?”
The Ferenc nodded his grotesque head. “This all sounds good to me. Very well, then let’s be at it.” He commenced to cut strips of frozen flesh from the curve of the flyer’s rib cage, cramming his pockets with them.
However grudgingly, Arkis followed suit. “Meat is meat, I know,” he grumbled. “But the frozen flesh of flyers? Huh! The blood was the life!”
And Shaithis snapped his fingers and said: “Ah, yes! I knew there was something else. Now tell me, Diredeath: What of your twin thralls, the brothers Largazi? Did they follow you here out of the west? From the fumarole coast, the bubbling geysers and lakes of sulphur? Did they survive? Or perhaps they perished en route?”
“Perished, aye.” The other nodded agreeably and smiled a fond, knowing smile, his boar’s tusks glinting dully. “But not en route. Perished when they got here, and when I found them exhausted and shivering in the hollow core of the westernmost ice castle. Ah, how they begged my forgiveness then. And do you know, I forgave them? Indeed I did. ‘Goram!’ I cried. ‘Belart! My faithful thralls! My trusted lieutenants! Returned at last to the bosom of your mentor!’ Oh, how they hugged me! And I in my turn fell upon their necks—and tore them open!”
Shaithis sighed, perhaps a little glumly. “You fueled yourself on both of them? At once? With never a a thought for tomorrow?”
Arkis shrugged and finished stuffing his pockets with meat. “I had been cold and hungry for more than two auroral periods,” he said. “And the blood of the Largazis was hot and strong. Perhaps I should have exercised a little restraint, kept one of them in reserve … and then again perhaps not. For it was about then that Fess and Volse arrived. So at least I spared myself the frustration of having one of my thralls stolen away from me. As for their corpses: I stored them in the heart of a glacier. Alas, they went the same way as my warrior! Something sneaked them away while I was out exploring.”
Shaithis allowed his narrow-eyed glance to fall upon the Ferenc, who at once shook his head. “Not me,” he denied the unspoken charge. “Neither me nor Volse. We knew nothing of Arkis’s glaciated thralls. If we had, well, perhaps the story were different.” He clambered out from the lee of the ravaged flyer and stood gigantically in starlight and aurora sheen. “Well, and are we all set?”
Shaithis and Arkis joined him; all three, they turned their faces in the direction of the central cone. Directly between the monstrous trio and the ex-volcano, an ice castle had taken (how many?) centuries to crystallize about its core of volcanic rock-splash. It would make as good a starting place as any. Shaithis, taking in the bleak scene, and after glancing a moment into the scarlet eyes of each of his “companions,” finally agreed: “All set. So let’s go and see what the rest of these eon-frozen exiles look like, shall we?”
And united—for the moment united, at least—the vampires set out to cross the snowfields and scintillant ice jumbles, and the weird terraces and shimmering battlements of their target ice castle loomed larger as gradually they narrowed the distance between. And forming a frowning centerpiece to the glittering, concentrically circling aeries, every now and then the duller, darker shape of the “extinct” volcano would appear to puff a little smoke into the radiant, ever-changing sky.
Or perhaps this was just an illusion? Well, possibly. But Shaithis thought not …
Soon Shaithis discovered that one ice castle was much the same as the next. This one, for example, might well be the stark, shivery, tinkling cold stack of Kehrl Lugoz; might be; except, of course, it was not the undead Kehrl who waited out the ages in the densely protective sheath of the core, but some other Lord. Also, and whoever he had been in life, his waiting had long since come to an end and he was now entirely dead. An ice mummy—frozen, starved, desiccated to a condition way beyond life—the olden vampire was one with all past things, leaving only his shell to represent him as part of the present.
Shaithis looked at him through the wavering impurity of the ice and wondered who he’d been. Whoever, it was probably as well that he was dead. His thoughts, if there had been any, might have told Arkis and the Ferenc secrets Shaithis would prefer them not to know … like why he lay there on his carved ice pedestal, propped upon a skeletal elbow, one claw-like hand held up before him as if to ward off some dreadful evil. And his colorless eyes, from
which time had bleached all of the scarlet but none of the nameless horror. Aye, even this member of the olden Wamphyri, horrified! By something or someone who had stood here where Shaithis stood even now.
“What do you make of this?” The sudden, echoing rumble of the Ferenc’s voice caused Shaithis to start. He looked where the giant pointed a taloned hand at a hitherto unnoticed, circular borehole in the ice. Seven or eight inches in diameter, the almost invisible bore seemed to point like an arrow at the preserved Wamphyri relic upon his carved couch.
“A hole?” Shaithis frowned.
“Aye,” the Ferenc said, “like that of some gross worm in the earth. But an ice worm?” He kneeled and stuck his hand and arm into the hole, which extended almost to the depth of his shoulder. And withdrawing his arm and sighting along the channel, he added: “Directed straight at his heart, too!”
“More such holes over here,” Arkis called from a little way around the curve of the core. “And it seems to me they’ve been drilled. See the heaped chips where they’ve spilled out upon the floor?”
And Shaithis thought: Such small privations as my dullard friends have known have made them observant. He followed the core’s curve to Arkis and examined the new holes; rather, the newly discovered holes. For in fact they could have been made a hundred, two hundred years ago. And sighting along them just as the Ferenc had sighted, Shaithis too noted that these perfectly circular runs seemed aimed at the main mass of the ice-shrouded mummy’s body.
He thought to himself: Runs, aye, and narrowed his eyes a little as he examined that concept more closely. For upon a time, Shaithis had visited the settlements of itinerant Szgany metalworkers east of the great mountain range which split Starside from Sunside. These were the “tinkers” who designed and constructed the fearsome Wamphyri war gauntlets. Shaithis had seen the way the colorful Travellers poured liquid metal down clay pipes or along earthen sluices into molds; so that there was that about these boreholes which reminded him of running liquids. Except all of these incomplete runs climbed gentle inclines towards the dead Lord, which seemed to indicate that they had not been designed to carry anything to him. Something away from him, then? Shaithis shivered; he was beginning to find his investigations, and more especially his conclusions, damnable.
Indeed, there was something about this entire setup which even Shaithis’s vampire heart found ominous, oppressive, doom-fraught. And finally, Fess Ferenc voiced his thoughts for him:
“Me and the whelky Volse, we saw cores where the ice wasn’t so thick. In them the boreholes had penetrated right to the center, and all that was left in there were small bundles of rags, skin, and bones!”
“What?” Shaithis frowned at him.
Fess nodded. “As if the onetime inhabitants or slumberers in these frozen stacks had been sucked entire down the bores, all except their more solid bits.”
It had been Shaithis’s thought exactly. “But how?” he whispered. “How, if they were frozen? I mean, how does one draw an entire, frozen-solid body down a hole which can’t even accommodate that body’s head?”
“I don’t know.” The Ferenc shook his own misshapen head. “But still I reckon that’s what this old lad was afraid of. What’s more, I reckon he died from the fear of it …”
Later, a mile closer to the central cone, they entered one of the inner ice castles.
“This is one I’ve not visited before,” said the Ferenc.
“But as close as it is to the old volcano, I’d guess it’s a safe bet what we’ll find.”
“Oh?” Shaithis looked at him.
“Nothing!” the Ferenc said knowingly. “Just shattered ice about a gob of black lava, and the empty hole from which some ancient Lord’s been stolen away.”
And he was right. When they finally found the high lava throne, it was empty, and its ice sheath shattered into a pile of fused, frosted shards. A few fragments of rag there were, but so ancient and stiff that they crumbled at a touch. And that was all.
Shaithis kneeled at the base of the shattered sheath and examined its broken surface, and found what he was looking for: the fluted rims of a good many boreholes, patterned like a scalloped fan, all joining where they converged on the empty niche at the black core. And he looked at Fess and Arkis and nodded grimly. “The author of this dreadful thing could have sucked out the unknown Lord like the yoke of an egg, but that wasn’t necessary, for the sheath was only two and a half feet thick. So he drilled his holes all the way round until the ice was loosened, then wrenched it away in blocks and shards, and so finally came upon his petrified prey.”
And Fess said, “Did I hear you right? Did you say ‘this dreadful thing’?”
Shaithis looked at him, also at Arkis. “I’m Wamphyri,” he growled, low in his throat. “You know me well. There’s nothing soft about me. I take pride in my great strength, in my rages and furies, my lusts and appetites. But if this is the work of a man—even one of my own kind—still I say it is dreadful. Its terror lies in the secrecy, the stealth, the gloating, leering malignancy of the slayer. Ah, yes, I’m Wamphyri! And if I should be trapped in these Icelands, then doubtless I too would develop various life-support systems, including a fortress, sophisticated defenses, and a source or sources of food. And I too would be as secretive and sinister as needs be. But don’t you see? Someone here has already done it! In these Icelands, we are come into the territory of one who victimizes and terrorizes the very Wamphyri themselves! That is the dreadful thing I mentioned. Why, the very atmosphere of this place seethes with its evil. And something else: it seems to me that it is evil for evil’s sake!”
After that … Shaithis could have bitten off his forked tongue. Too late, for he fancied he’d already said or hinted far too much. But such was the crushing weight of this place upon his vampire senses—such was its psychic jangle upon his nerve endings—he felt the others would have to be totally insensitive not to have felt it for themselves.
Arkis’s mouth had fallen open a little while Shaithis was speaking. Now he closed it and grunted, “Huh! You were always the clever one with the speeches, Shaithis. But indeed I too have felt the threatening, doomful aura of this place. I felt it when I discovered those several bloodied scales and various small parts of my warrior’s armored carapace in the high cave; also when the bloodless—but well fleshed, and hung with good meat—Largazis were stolen from the glacier pantry where I’d lodged them. And often I’ve thought: ‘Who is it watches over me so closely and knows my every move? Is he in my very mind? Or do the ice castles themselves have eyes and ears?’”
It was the Ferenc’s turn to speak. “I’ll not deny it, I too have felt the mystery of this place. But I think it’s a ghost, a relic, a revenant out of time. An echo of something which was but is no more. Look around and ask yourselves: Is anything we’ve seen of recent origin? The answer is no. Whatever deeds were done here were done a long, long time ago.”
Arkis snorted again. “And my warrior? And the Largazi twins?”
Fess shrugged and answered: “Stolen by some thieving ice beast. Perhaps a cousin of the pallid, cavern-dwelling sword-snout.”
Shaithis had shaken off his momentary fit of depression, had dispersed the strange and ominous mood which had descended upon him tangible as a bank of fog. The Ferenc’s answer suited him well enough. He did not agree with it—not entirely—but it suited him to let the others think so. Except:
“So if there’s no sly intelligence involved,” he said, “or no longer involved, as the case may be, then what sense is there in moving against the volcano?”
Again Fess shrugged. “Best to be sure, eh?” he said. “And if there was some ‘sly intelligence’ at work here, albeit a long time ago, perhaps his works will still be available to us, deep down in the heart of the volcano. One thing’s sure: we’ll never know unless we go see for ourselves.”
“Now?” Arkis Leperson was eager.
But Shaithis cautioned: “I vote we sleep on it. I for one have tramped enough for the mo
ment, thank you, and would prefer to tackle the cone fresh from my rest and with a hearty breakfast inside me. Anyway, I note that the auroral display is rising to a new peak of activity. That’s a good sign. Let the burning sky light the way for us.”
“I’m with you, Shaithis,” the Ferenc rumbled. “But where to bed down?”
“Why not right here?” Shaithis answered. “Within shouting distance, but each of us secure in his own niche.”
Arkis nodded. “That suits me.”
They separated and climbed to precarious but private ice ledges and niches where no one could come upon them unheard or unobserved, and each in his own place settled down to sleep. Shaithis thought to call to himself a warm, living blanket of albinos, then thought better of it. If the bats came, Fess and Arkis would probably find it a suspicious circumstance. Why should Shaithis have power over the bats when they had none? Why indeed? It was a question he couldn’t answer. Not yet, anyway.
He curled himself inside his cloak of black bat fur and munched on flyer flesh. It was scarcely satisfying but it was filling. And with one eye open and set to scan the ice cavern, from Fess to Arkis and back again, Shaithis thought: Ah, but time for the good stuff later!
The good stuff, aye: Fess and Arkis themselves. Who for certain would be thinking exactly the same thing about him.
And settling down he began to breathe more deeply, and his scarlet eye scanned the cavern, and slowly the dreams started to come …
5
BLOOD RELATIONS
Shaithis of the Wamphyri dreamed a splendid fantasy. As is often the way of it with dreams, it was comprised of a great many scenes and themes with little or no explanation except perhaps as echoes of his waking ambitions. The fantasy had been developing itself for some time in the darker caverns of Shaithis’s subconscious mind before suddenly firming into an ordered sequence of scenarios, which were these:
