Necroscope V: Deadspawn n-5

by Brian Lumley

  Ah! And how was this for revenge? For there is nothing so delightful to a vampire than to torment, torture and tap the life fluids of another or others of his own kind. And: ‘Dweller,’ Shaithis said, his voice so softly threatening it was almost a whisper. ‘Dweller, come, take off your golden mask. For I know you now even as I should have known you right from the start. Ah, but your “magic” had me fooled just as it fooled us all. Magic? Hah! No such thing — but the true art of the great vampire! For who else but a master of every Wamphyri talent — aye, and then some — would dare to wage a one-man war against all the great Lords that were? And who else but the most crafty — ah, crafty vampire — might ever have won such a war?’

  The Dweller made no answer but simply stood there in his loosely flowing robes and golden mask, behind which his red eyes burned. And Shaithis, believing he saw terror in those half-hidden eyes, smiled a grim smile. Oh, yes, for whether or not there was terror there now, he knew that there would be soon enough.

  As for the other prisoner: Shaithis would never forget this one! For not only was he a helllander but also The Dweller’s father, who had stood side by side with his son in the devastating battle at the garden, when the Wamphyri had been swatted out of Starside’s skies and crushed like so many gnats. What was more, when the fighting was over and all the great aeries of the Wamphyri had been levelled (all bar the bitch Karen’s), Shaithis had seen this one with that selfsame ‘Lady’ in these very chambers: Karen’s ‘private’ chambers, as they had been at that time, so that Shaithis had wondered: Are they lovers?

  Well, perhaps they had been and perhaps not. It could be that they’d simply been allies against Shaithis and his army of Wamphyri Lords, and as a reward for her part in his defeat her aerie had been spared; but only to become Shaithis’s in the fullness of time, as everything else had become Shaithis’s. He supposed that one way or the other it made little difference, except that for some ill-defined reason he really would like to know whether or not this helllander had known Karen and been in her. Well, that was a question he could resolve easily enough.

  She sprawled beside the bone-throne where he had left her, and now he called out: ‘Karen, come to me.’ She made to stand up but he added quickly: ‘No, crawl!’

  Luscious body oiled and gleaming in the light of flaring flambeaux, with only her golden bangles and rings to cover a figure which her vampire had made irresistible, she obeyed. Her great bush of pubic hair was a glistening copper tangle; the stains of her aureoles and spiked nipples were dark as bruises against the pale loll of her pendulous breasts; even proceeding in the undignified, animal fashion which Shaithis demanded, still her lithe loveliness could not be disguised.

  When she was close to him, then Shaithis reached down quickly and bunched the mass of her red hair in his hand, jerking back her head and yanking her to her feet. She made no sound, no protest, but The Dweller leaned forward a little — a strange attitude or posture, like a dog balanced on its hind legs — and Shaithis thought he heard a low growl rumbling behind the mask. Had he aroused The Dweller’s passions? And if so, what about those of his helllander father?

  Now, still holding Karen upright, so that she stood upon her crimson-nailed toes, Shaithis deliberately looked away from The Dweller and into the strange, sad eyes of his puny-looking father. He cocked his great head on one side enquiringly. ‘And so you’re the helllander who caused me so much trouble in the garden, eh? Well, little man, it strikes me that you and your son were lucky that time, and that if you’re the best they have going for them beyond the sphere Gate, then it’s high time the Wamphyri went through into the helllands and showed them what we can do! Except… I have to admit there’s something I can’t quite fathom. I mean, a creature like you — small, soft, puny, with the pulpy parts of a virgin boy — and you’d have me believe you’ve been into this?’ He knotted Karen’s hair that much tighter in his great fist, lifting her higher, until she was obliged to dance on the very tips of her toes. ‘What, and lived to brag about it?’ Shaithis’s derisory laughter grated like a hot iron in ashes.

  The helllander stiffened and his scarlet eyes widened a very little; his mouth twitched in one corner; his pale flesh turned paler yet. But he found strength to suppress the cold fury which Shaithis’s scorn had momentarily induced in him. And finally, in a small, quiet voice he answered: ‘You must believe what you will. I neither confirm nor deny anything.’

  Such negativity! Shaithis took it as a sign of the helllander’s impotence. For if he and Karen had been lovers, then doubtless he’d delight in boasting how she was his cast-off, which was the way of it with the Wamphyri; in payment for which insolence Shaithis would have him gutted with middling sharp instruments, and before his living eyes feed his smoking entrails to a warrior! But however impotent he might or might not be, still the vampire Lord’s question went unanswered.

  ‘Very well.’ Shaithis shrugged. Then I shall assume she means nothing to you. If I thought she did I would cut away your eyelids so that you couldn’t close them, and hang you in silver chains from the walls of my bedchamber where you’d have no choice but to observe each smallest intricacy and nuance of our lovemaking — before she died from it!’

  At which moment, even as he said this thing: Don’t!

  The warning echoed like a gong struck in Shaithis’s mind, and he knew its source at once. Glaring across the hall at the Dark Hooded Thing, he saw that where before the interior of its hood had been black and impervious as granite, now the sulphur orbits and scarlet pinpricks of eyes were visible, unblinking, burning their message into his mind. Don’t drive them too far! I hold them enthralled, their powers suppressed, but goading them is like thrusting sharp staves under a warrior’s scales! It makes them unstable, galvanizes them, weakens my hold upon them.

  And Shaithis sent back: But they’re whelmed, conquered, whipped like dogs! Which no one knows better than you; for you hold their minds like grapes in your hands, to peel or crush as you will. But as well as this I have warriors here, and my many lieutenants and thralls. Aye, and all of my creatures without, thronging on the night wind. Now tell me, pray: what have I to fear?

  Only your greed, my son, and your pride, the other answered. But did you say ‘your’ warriors, lieutenants and thralls? Yours and not ours? Have I no part in your triumph, then? There were two of us, Shaithis, remember? And yet now you talk of T when you can only mean ‘we’. A slip of the tongue, obviously. Ah, but then, the tongues of all the Wamphyri are forked, are they not?

  In answer to which Shaithis hissed: What do you want of me?

  Only that you are not prideful, the Dark Hooded Thing told him. For I, too, was prideful in my time, only to discover that it goes before a fall.

  It was all too much. Tell a vampire not to be prideful? Restrict the towering, enhanced emotions of a Being such as Shaithis? But he was Wamphyri! And to the Dark Hooded Thing: I vowed Karen’s death in a certain fashion, at my hands, in my bed. My triumph will not be complete until it has come to pass, or as nearly as possible. Also, The Dweller and his father have been my mortal enemies, whom I intend to destroy.

  Then destroy them! said the other, his eyes blazing up huge, as if gorged on fire. Kill them now, but don’t torture them. For it could be that if they are driven to it…

  Yes?

  … I think that even they do not know their own strength, their own powers.

  Shaithis was astonished. Their strength? But can’t you see that they are weaklings? Their powers? Plainly they are powerless! Aye, and I shall prove it.

  He released Karen’s hair and she collapsed at his feet. And in his dreams Shaithis again turned to his captives, who throughout his conversation with the Dark Hooded Thing had stood as in a frozen tableau, held fast by vampire thralls. ‘There was a time,’ he told the pair then, ‘when the bitch Karen betrayed her rightful master — which is to say myself — and all of the Wamphyri at a stroke. Betrayed us? What? Her treachery almost destroyed us! There and then I vowed that
when times and fortunes had changed I would slip a siphon into her living heart and drain her blood sip by sip. Also, I vowed that while I emptied her of her juices, I would fill her with my flesh. A double ecstasy for a most undeserving Lady. So I vowed it, so let it be!’

  And to his lieutenant: ‘Go, bring me my couch of black, silken sheets, and the sharp, slender golden straw which you shall find upon my pillow.’

  Shaithis’s couch was carried in by six powerful thralls; a fawning lieutenant proffered a small silken cushion bearing a slim wand of gold tubing, whose funnel mouthpiece reflected the flaring torchlight. Shaithis took the golden straw, threw off his robe and beckoned Karen to the couch. But as he moved to join her there… again there came that rumbling growl from deep in The Dweller’s throat, and again Shaithis sensed this oddly-postured being leaning towards him, like some nameless threat.

  The vampire Lord paused a moment, cocked his head in mocking, silent inquiry, and smiled an utterly inhuman smile before seating himself upon the couch beside the apparently enthralled Karen. She lay there in a sort of vacant paralysis, with her scarlet eyes fixed upon him; but her breathing was shallow, palpitating, and gleaming beads of perspiration were starting from her brow in morbid anticipation. Catching up her left breast, Shaithis lifted it and examined the pale rib cage beneath, then slipped the sharp tip of his golden straw between two of her ribs and eased it towards the pounding centre of her body.

  As a bubble of her dark-red blood formed around the siphon at the point of entry, so Shaithis’s vampire lust brought him to massive erection. He released his partially inserted siphon and gripped the inside of Karen’s right thigh with a huge hand, squeezing the flesh there as an indication that she should open herself to him…

  … Which was when he felt her first, tentative rejection of his will — and the resistance of others bolstering her resolve — and sensed the suddenly converging foci of forces previously unsuspected. The Dark Hooded Thing sensed them, too, crying out in Shaithis’s mind: I warned you! But too late, for the vampire Lord’s dream fantasy had now turned to sheerest nightmare.

  For the third time Shaithis heard The Dweller’s now unmistakably animal growl and shot him a wide-eyed glance — in time to see him wrench himself free from the pinioning grip of his guards, then reach up and tear his own golden mask from his face. Except… whatever Shaithis had expected, it was not there beneath that mask; and as for the face which was there, that resembled nothing even remotely human. No, for bristling and flat-eared, it was the face or visage of a great grey wolf — but its blood-gorged eyes were still those of the Wamphyri!

  Its wrinkled, quivering muzzle frothed and dripped saliva; teeth like the blades of small scythes gleamed where the wet, writhing muzzle revealed them; in the next moment the snarling beast (was this really The Dweller?) had turned and snapped at an astonished former guard. And even while Shaithis gaped, the thing’s jaw closed like a steel trap on the lieutenant’s arm and sheared it below the elbow.

  From then on, all was madness.

  As the huge, upright creature more nearly completed its metamorphosis into a grey-furred, lupine form, so its voluminous robes shredded like so much rotten cloth to reveal its sheer size. It was a wolf, yes, but as large as a big man! Shaithis’s thralls, having already witnessed the monster’s speed and savage efficiency, quickly backed off. Hastening their retreat, the great wolf fell to all fours and launched itself at another lieutenant, crunching effortlessly upon his head.

  And through all of this, the vampire Lord on his couch grew only too well aware that fortune’s tide had turned, and that other inexplicable reversals were even now in motion. Nevertheless, he determined that some of his dream-fantasy at least should be made to work for him; and crushing Karen in the circle of one great arm, he gripped the golden straw where it was poised to pierce her heart and prepared to thrust it home.

  He gripped it… and at once snatched back his trembling hand. For a second metamorphosis was even now taking place, in Karen, which was no less rapid and awesome than that of The Dweller into a wolf. Moreover, it was loathsome!

  As if Shaithis’s siphon had poisoned her and brought on some incredibly swift ageing process or corruptive catabolism, Karen’s flesh was collapsing before the vampire Lord’s eyes. Her arms became yellow-veined sticks from which her bangles clattered loosely to the floor; her scarlet eyes turned a sick, sunken yellow under matted eyelashes; her skin was suddenly corrugated as the skin of dried fruit.

  ‘What?’ he croaked, as her ravaged lips drew back in a travesty of a smile and showed him her leprous forked tongue, shrivelled gums and loose, decaying teeth. ‘What?’ 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 helllander 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, smouldering 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 ruins; 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 helllander first, and swung his gauntlet… which froze in mid-air, 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 helllander’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, seering nuclear fire of the sun.

  Indeed, it was the sun, endlessly expanding out of the small destruction of the helllander 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, like 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.