by Brian Lumley
“What?” he croaked, as her ravaged lips drew back in a travesty of a smile and showed him her leprous forked tongue, shriveled gums, and loose, decaying teeth. It wasn’t a question proper, but she answered it, anyway, and her voice was a morbid cackle as she reached for Shaithis’s shrinking parts and said:
“My Lord, I’m ready for you!”
Galvanized into frenzied activity, Shaithis slapped the flat of his hand to the siphon’s mouthpiece and drove it home into her body—and a gurgling stream of stinking pus at once jetted out to splash against and adhere to his shuddering flesh! With an inarticulate cry he staggered to his feet, pointed at the dissolving, liquefying thing on the couch, and commanded:
“Destroy it! Remove it now! The refuse pit!” But no one seemed to be listening. Shaithis’s lieutenants and other thralls were in turmoil; The Dweller’s wolf facet was ravaging among them like a fox among chickens; and as for The Dweller’s Hell-lander father … the vampire Lord could scarcely believe his own eyes.
The pair of hulking Wamphyri aspirants who had dragged this small, unassuming human being in here were now slumped, smoldering shreds of blasted flesh puddling the flagged floor with their ichor; and the magician (oh, yes, for this, surely, was magic!) who had cindered them was at the window, gazing out on Starside’s night skies and ruin-scarred plain with devastating eyes. For where and whenever his gaze alighted and lingered it brought fresh ruin; and all across the sky in the deepening gloom of sundown, Shaithis’s New Wamphyri hordes were exploding into fiery tatters and raining their debris down among the shattered stacks of their olden forebears.
Raging his frustration, Shaithis discovered himself robed again, with his gauntlet at his hip. Knowing what must be done—that he alone had the measure of The Dweller and his father—he fitted his deadly weapon to his hand and, in the tradition of the olden Wamphyri, rushed at them to cut them down. And why not? For they were only flesh and blood, after all, just as the great white bears of the Icelands had been flesh and blood. And as the vampire Lord knew only too well, all flesh is weak. Even Wamphyri flesh, in the right circumstances.
In Shaithis’s mind the Dark Hooded Thing heard his chaotic, bloody thoughts and said, Fool! But Shaithis wasn’t listening.
He came upon the Hell-lander first, and swung his gauntlet … which froze in midair, as if time itself had stopped. But then Shaithis saw that time had simply stretched itself, and that his monstrous gauntlet crept across the intervening distance in a maddening slow motion. The Dweller’s father saw it coming and his strange sad eyes turned (but oh so very slowly) to burn upon Shaithis’s face. And the scarlet eyes of his son, the great changeling wolf, were likewise upon Shaithis from where that slavering creature floated on the air, caught at the high point of its spring.
In the manner of the Wamphyri, the pair spoke to Shaithis in his raging, blood-drenched mind; and not only them but the Dark Hooded Thing, too, all saying the same thing:
You have destroyed us all. Your ambition, your passion, your pride.
Die! Shaithis replied, as his gauntlet collided little by little with the Hell-lander’s head and slowly shattered its bright core.
Aye, bright! Bright and blinding and deadly as the furnace sun itself! For there was no blood, no bone, no grey and pulpy brain in the magician’s head at all—nothing but golden fire. Like the seething, searing nuclear fire of the sun.
Indeed, it was the sun, endlessly expanding out of the small destruction of the Hell-lander to encompass and destroy … everything!!!
Shaithis started awake, felt the ice against his flesh, and thought for a moment that it was searing golden fire. He cried out, and a thousand fragile icicles shattered and came tinkling down from the ice castle’s fantastic ceiling. In the next split second the vampire Lord saw where he was and remembered what he was doing here, and as his nightmare receded and reality closed on him, so his breathing and the pounding of his heart gradually slowed. Then—
He scanned across the frozen expanse of the ice castle and found the dark forms of Fess Ferenc and Arkis Leperson in their niches, and saw that the former had likewise come awake. And now the Ferenc’s gaze met his across the glittering ice-sheathed vault.
“Dreaming, Shaithis?” that one called out to him, his words chasing themselves to and fro in the bitter, echoing air of the place. “An omen, perhaps? You cried out, and it seemed to me you were afraid.”
Shaithis wondered if the dream had been self-contained, as his inward-directed thoughts, or if Fess had been “listening in” on it. He hated the idea that anyone should spy on him, especially in his subconscious, where the seeds of all of his ambitions—indeed his intentions—were stored in darkness, awaiting their germination. “An omen?” he eventually answered, but quietly, hiding what confusion lingered still. “No, I think not. Nothing portended, Fess. A pleasurable dream, that’s all, of woman-flesh and sweet traveller blood.” Of the Lady Karen rotting on my couch, and the entire Wamphyri race wiped out in the sunburst of an alien mind!
“Huh!” the other grunted. “I dreamed only of ice. I dreamed I was frozen in an ice tomb, and that some unknown thing was melting its way in to me.”
“Then it’s as well my cry of sweet pleasure woke you up,” said Shaithis.
“Aye, but too early,” the Ferenc grumbled. “Arkis sleeps on. In this he’s the wise one. Let’s drift a further hour or two before we’re up and about.”
Shaithis agreed; and grateful that the giant had not read him, he settled down again and closed an eye …
And again Shaithis dreamed. Except that this time, even more certainly than the last, he knew it was much more than any common dream. The setting was a meeting between himself and the being known as Shaitan the Fallen, whom he recognized at once as that selfsame Dark Hooded Thing who had been his sinister, frowning familiar—perhaps even his alter ego?—in his nightmare of frustrated revenge.
He was aware of the Thing as a shadow among lesser shadows in a cavern of black rock, unsuspected except for the red glow of its eyes where they floated in luminous yellow orbits. What he, Shaithis, was doing in such a place he could not say, except that he felt he’d been called here. Yes, that was it: he was not here entirely of his own free will but mainly because this enigmatic being had called him here. And as if to confirm that thought:
“Shaithis, my son,” said the Dark Hooded Thing, whose true voice was deeper, darker, and probably more deceiving than any Shaithis ever heard before. “And so at last you’ve answered me. Difficult to reach you, my son, through that clever deflective screen of yours, else I had known you and called you here long before now.”
Shaithis’s Wamphyri eyes and awareness were accustomed now to the gloom of the place. Indeed he saw and sensed as well as ever, which is to say very well indeed: as a cat at night or Desmodus on the wing. The darkness made no difference; in fact, and with regard to his whereabouts, it merely served to confirm his first instinctive guess that he was in some natural chamber deep in the belly of the slumbering volcano. Which would appear to make Shaitan the Lord of these subterranean regions.
In such close proximity, the other read his thoughts as if they’d been spoken words and answered: “But of course, just as I have been since … oh, a long, long time.”
Shaithis peered intently at the crimson-eyed shadow which was Shaitan. It was strange, but for all his vampire-enhanced awareness he saw only an outline of the other’s form. No fault of his; his senses were not impaired; Shaitan must be shielding his physical self in a manner like to Shaithis guarding his thoughts. But … Shaitan the Fallen? Could it really be—was it really possible—for any creature to live so long? He made up his mind that indeed it must be, for here he stood in the presence of just such a one. And:
“This isn’t just a dream,” said Shaithis then, with a shake of his head. “I can feel your presence and know you are real: that same Shaitan of whom Kehrl Lugoz was, and is, so mortally afraid, that ancient Being out of the first annals of Wamphyri legend. You w
ere banished here in prehistory, and you live here still.”
“All true,” the other answered, and darkness stirred where he stood, as if he had offered a casual shrug. “I am that same Shaitan, the so-called Unborn, who was and is your immemorial ancestor!”
“Ah!” said Shaithis, as truth finally dawned. “We are of one blood.”
“Indeed, and obviously so. You stand out from the others like a meteor speeding through the stirless stars, much as I stood out in that distant time when I fell to earth. And our ambitions are the same, aye, and our intelligence. I am your origin, Shaithis, and your future. And you are mine.”
“Our futures are bound up together?”
“Inextricably.”
“Outside of these Icelands, you mean? In more civilized places?”
“In Starside, and in worlds beyond Starside.”
“What?” Shaithis was taken aback, for there was something here which smacked of that earlier dream. “Worlds beyond Starside? You mean the Hell-lands?”
“For a start.”
“And you know of such places?”
“Upon a time, I was the inhabitant of just such a place. But that was before I fell—or was thrown—to earth.”
“And you remember it?”
“I remember nothing of it!” The Dark Hooded Thing growled, moving marginally closer; and there was that about its motion—as if its very flux had intelligence, a sentient viscosity—which caused Shaithis to take a pace to the rear. “My memory, all memory, was robbed from me when I was cast out.”
“No memory of what you did, who and how you were?”
Again the Thing moved closer, and once more Shaithis backed away, but not too far for fear he should back right out of his own dream. “Only my name, and that I was vain and proud and beautiful,” said Shaitan, conjuring more echoes of that former dream. “But it was a long time ago, my son, and given time all things change. I too have changed.”
“Changed?” Shaithis tried hard to understand. “You’re no longer vain, no longer proud? But even the least of the Wamphyri know such vices—and enjoy them. They always will.”
Shaitan slowly shook his hooded head, which Shaithis knew from the movement of his crimson eyes in their yellow orbits, the only parts of the creature which were visible through the warp of his inky, impenetrable mental shield. “No longer beautiful!” he said.
“But it’s the same for all of us,” Shaithis answered. “We know we are not beautiful and accept it. And anyway, what has beauty to do with power? Why, there are those of us who even foster our ugliness as a measure of our might!” Inadvertently, he thought of Volse Pinescu.
Shaitan picked the picture clean out of his mind. “Aye, that one was ugly. But he himself willed it. I did not. And physically and mentally hideous as the Wamphyri are, still by comparison they are beautiful.” And for the third time he came closer.
Shaithis stood his ground but groped for his gauntlet. It was a dream, true, but he’d not yet relinquished all control. “Do you wish me harm?” he said.
“On the contrary,” the other answered, “for we’ve a long way to go together. But this art I practice is wearying. It were better if you knew me as I am.”
“Then show me yourself.”
“I was preparing to,” Shaitan answered. “Indeed, I was preparing … you.”
“Enough!” said Shaithis. “I am prepared.”
“So be it!” said his ancestor, and relaxed his hypnotic will.
What Shaithis saw then shocked him awake a second time, as if the sleeping volcano itself had erupted under his feet. He started up gasping in his ice niche, wide-eyed and astonished by the castle’s luminous light after the dream-darkness of the cone’s core, with a chill in his black heart spawned more—far more—of what the Dark Hooded Thing had shown him than of any mundane or merely physical condition. And because the dream had been more than a dream, in fact a visitation, it didn’t fade back into some subconscious limbo of obscurity but remained sharp, etched in the eye of his mind as clear as the sigils on an aerie’s fluttering banners and pennants.
Shaithis, himself a monster in every respect, was not a creature to shock easily. Where the Wamphyri were concerned, “fear” and “horror” were more or less defunct concepts, eradicated and replaced by rage. Adrenalin was rarely released into a vampire’s system to encourage or enable flight, but usually to trigger his animal passions so that he would stand and fight—viciously, brutally! An awareness of their superiority had been bred into Starside’s vampires through all the long centuries of their sovereignty, when it was indisputable that of all their world’s creatures they were far and away the dominant species. Much as common Man was dominant in his world.
But the fact remained that Shaithis had once been a common man—a Traveller vampirized when Shaidar Shaigispawn renamed him, made him his chief lieutenant or “son,” and gave him his egg—and as such he’d learned what fear was all about. Even now after half a millennium he still remembered, if only when he slept. For however monstrous a man may become, the things that frightened him as a youth will continue to do so in his dreams.
What had frightened Shaithis the most in those early days of his abduction from Sunside—in that time now five hundred years in the past, before the Lord Shaidar coughed his scarlet egg into his throat and changed him forever—had been the many and monstrous anomalies of Shaidar’s lofty aerie: the cartilage creatures and gas-beasts, the entirely unthinkable siphoneers, the vast vats in the lower levels of the stack where trogs and Travellers alike became flyers or warriors or yet weirder facets of Shaidar’s hybrid experimentation. For the vampire Lord had delighted in showing to Shaithis (at that time a young, as-yet-innocent Traveller) his most nightmarish creations, and in torturing his mind with the half-threat that one day he too might be a diamond-headed flyer, armor-scaled warrior, or flaccid, pulpy siphoneer.
Morbid distortions and abnormalities such as these, then, had been the harbingers of Shaithis’s worst nightmares during those early days of Wamphyri apprenticeship. But in time, as he himself ascended to the aerie’s throne room, such fears had receded, been suppressed, had succumbed to the vampire in him, which bade him become a maker of monsters in his own right; an art in which finally he’d excelled. And his flyers had been the most weirdly graceful, his warriors ferocious beyond any previous ferocity, and his other creations and experiments … varied. So that it was only in dreams out of his youth that he remembered and took fright at such things. Except that even in the most vivid and awe-inspiring of these, nothing that memory had conjured had been half as monstrous as that which the Dark Hooded Thing had shown him.
“Ugly,” Shaitan had called himself, but there is ugly and there is ugly. And as for hybridism …
Shaithis pictured again the thing which had stood there when his ancestor relaxed his hypnotic shield to let himself be seen as he really was: an abomination which not even the most perverse or insane Wamphyri mind might envisage, made all the worse through its reality. It had been … what? A man-sized slug or leech—corrugated, glistening black and mottled grey-green—but rearing upright like a man? A vampire, yes, such as might develop from an egg inside a man or woman but grown huge beyond all reasonable measure; so that Shaithis had wondered: But if this grew inside a man, then what became of its host!?
Then, as the grotesque but mainly vague picture of the thing (made vague, by virtue of its obscenity) scarred itself into his mind, so he’d become aware of something of its finer detail, which in the next moment had sufficed to shock him awake.
The thing (no, he must not think of it as a “thing” alone but also as Shaitan, his ancestor) had rubbery limbs, some of which ended in suckered tentacles. Others, however, did not but were equipped with vestigial human and other animal parts: mummied hands and withered, rudimentary feet, and even a gleaming bone claw. And it was these parts, and also Shaitan’s flat, composite face on its spade-shaped cobra head, which repulsed Shaithis the most and brought about the resurgence of
his long-forgotten phobia.
For he knew that the hybridism he saw here was not that of some Wamphyri Lord’s experimental vats but of Nature; or rather of the vampire’s unnatural tenacity, its determination to cling to life in circumstances however desperate, through travails and triumphs down all the nameless ages. Aye, for the Lord Shaitan had grown simply too ancient for the accommodation of mortal, human flesh, and his original body had wasted away to be replaced almost in its entirety by the metamorphic organism which was his vampire. Which was, indeed, now him.
Ugly? The result was hideous; especially so to Shaithis in his dream, for there it had been the embodiment of every nightmare of his apprenticeship.
As to how he knew the fate which had befallen Shaitan in his icebound isolation—his evolution, no, devolution, from man-vampire or Wamphyri to pure vampire—that had been written in the vast intelligence, hatred, and sheer evil of the leech-thing’s scarlet eyes, unblinking under their cobra’s hood. Not the unbridled, mindless hatred so often seen in the seething eyes of a warrior, or the vacant, lidless stare of a hugely nodding flyer, and certainly not the watery, vapid gaze of a siphoneer. But such evil intelligence that Shaithis had known this thing was no morbid experiment but a true mutation.
He had known, too, with reinforced certainty, that indeed this was Shaitan the Unborn, called the Fallen. For of all Wamphyri legends there was one of universal prevalence: that to the innermost core of his being, Shaitan had been evil above all other men and creatures …
6
DARK LIAISON
Shaithis’s mental guard was down, his mind accessible as he emerged more fully from sleep. And there was someone there, a dark presence, to take advantage of his confusion. It was Shaitan, of course; even at a distance his gurgling, venomous “voice” was unmistakable:
