by Brian Lumley
For Radu was no fool; he’d seen for himself the strength of Wratha’s will, her tenacity, her lust for life. Now, for the moment, she was dead, but when—if—she rose up again, then she would be even stronger. And no room for both of them in the service of Lord Karl of Cragspire then …
So that when Karl was out and about seeing to his affairs, Radu took Wratha down into a secret place away from the spires and manses and prepared a chamber for her. And the chamber was a niche at the back of a deep dark cave, which he walled up with many tons of boulders, even bringing the entrance crashing down with his furious energy. So that at last the sentence was carried out, and Radu was satisfied.
Later, when Karl returned to Cragspire and found Wratha’s room empty, he raged a while. Radu could only shrug and look mystified. A flyer was missing: obviously Wratha had woken up, stolen the beast, flown off. Perhaps they could track her down? They tried, Radu, Karl and two lesser lieutenants, to no avail. Then, because it would soon be sunup, they returned to Crag-spire. It was possible Wratha had tried to go back to Sunside. Well, too bad. By now the sun would be melting her away.
But in fact it was only melting the poor flyer, which Radu had ordered south for as long and as far as it could fly. And so life returned to normal in Cragspire, while in a walled-up niche in a blocked cave in a deserted ravine, death returned to undeath …
Wratha woke up!
She woke up with a small cry, in darkness like that of the tomb … and could see as if it were daylight! She could see in fact that this was a tomb—hers! And in a moment she knew what had happened, and even guessed something of how it had happened and who was chiefly responsible. Then for a while she wept, tore her hair and beat her breast, for she believed that already she could feel herself turning into a stone, petrifying in the earth.
Madness swiftly followed. She screamed and tore at the wall of boulders, which shifted ominously and threatened to roll inwards and crush her. Then, sobbing, she sat and hugged herself, and wondered how long the air would last; certainly the jumbled rocks were airtight, sealing her in like wine in a jar.
But … what did the air matter? Even when it was putrid she would live on, for she was a vampire now and could not die twice except she die as a vampire: by the stake, the sword and the fire. Which meant that in a century—or two, or three—she would quite literally stiffen to a lonely fossil here in the earth. But long before then, in days or weeks, she would be so weakened that movement was impossible, when she must simply lie here remembering her miserable life, and loathing the miserable creatures who had brought her to this unthinkable end.
Her madness returned! She cried out, shriek upon pealing shriek! Until it seemed to her that out of the very walls of rock far faint echoes … came back to her?
But echoes? In an airless tomb?
Then Wratha sprang up and searched the cave top to bottom, end to end, what little space had been left for her to search. And at last she found a hole no wider than her shoulders, no higher than the distance between her chin and the top of her head, out of which came a breath from gulfs beyond. A breath of fresh air!
She went head-first into the hole: a nightmare of suffocation, of wriggling, inching forward until exhausted, then resting as best possible, at whichever tortured angle, before starting again; and never knowing when the passage would come to an end, but knowing that if it did there was no way back, no way to wriggle in reverse. And so like a snake she progressed through the pressured rock, with all the tons of the mountains overhead weighing down on her.
Eventually there was a cave, with other cavelets leading off. On hands and knees, fingernails broken, bloodied, Wratha explored every crack and crevice. At ground level, nothing; all of the lesser caves were dead ends. But there, confined in darkness, entombed in rock, her vampire senses were at their best.
She was not Wamphyri, no, for no egg or spore was lodged within her body, but she was a vampire: the vampire thrall of Karl of Cragspire. His thrall—hah! But they would see about that! He had used the entrances of her body, her very throat, for his amusement, and she had absorbed the liquids of his lust like old, dry leather sucking at oil. And this was her reward. Well, and she knew who she must blame as well as Karl. And she did. And he would know of it, if only she could find a way out of here …
She rested awhile, and when she was still felt once more the flow of air across her dirty, rock-scarred body and torn hands, and on the cold-sweating mounds of her bruised breasts and buttocks. And yet what pain she felt was small, and all the while her fear receded. She had no egg, no, but her body was infected nonetheless. The tenacity of undeath complemented her own, and heightened her senses in a like degree. Moreover, the wounds of her hands were healing, and where new flesh grew it was paler but stronger than before. And she felt a certain sinuosity in all her limbs, as if they had a new flexibility. Now when she walked, she would seem to flow, and move with an evil grace. And even her beauty would be greater than before—unless she became mummified first!
She sprang up with a new energy, turned her face to the cave’s ceiling, searched for the lungs of this place. And sure enough a hole was there, like a chimney going up. Ah, but it would take some climber to reach it! She started up the wall of the cave, and at once discovered that she was just such a climber! Her fingers and toes found secure holds in the smallest of cracks; the muscles of her arms were springy as the green branches of trees; she did not seem to have any weight at all! And clinging like a leech, she inched her way up the scarred rock interior and across the cave’s ceiling.
And so Wratha progressed. But slowly, oh so very slowly …
She had been sealed up in the first third of sundown, and was out again by the next sundown … but so depleted that her hunger raged like a fire in her heart. And emerging on to the dry and dusty plains of Starside, in the shadows of the eastern range, Wratha’s first thought—indeed her only thought, for the moment—was of sustenance.
She located a trog cavern, from which the first leathery inhabitants were even then emerging into the gloom, and took one on the spot. He was only a trog, but blood is blood. And from the moment of the piercing, when her freshly lengthened, keenly serrated eye-teeth bit into his neck and found the spurting jugular, Wratha knew the meaning of that immemorial Wamphyri phrase, “the blood is the life!”
The trogs made no protest as she drained the life of one of theirs. She was a vampire, thrall and servant of the Wamphyri. What could they do? Only interfere and the rest of the monsters would fall on them with all their might, like an avalanche out of the crags. Anyway, they rarely suffered in this fashion, for the human leeches of Turgosheim were far more fond of the sweet flesh of Sunsiders. It must be hoped that this attack was the exception to the rule. And as Wratha moved on, they dragged the drained corpse of her victim into their cave and burned it, for even trogs had come to know the nature of vampires …
Strengthened, Wratha made for Turgosheim, for the passes leading to Sunside. It was sundown and the Wamphyri were awake in their manses and abroad on their flyers. But she knew that their warrior creatures were confined in their pens under the crags and spires, which gave her heart. And keeping always to the deepest shadows, eventually Wratha approached a pass.
Here the ground rose sharply, from the bed of the vast gorge which housed Turgosheim to the mouth of the pass, and there was no cover to mention. She couldn’t risk it, not with the high beacons flaring red and orange, and lights burning in all the manses, and flyers overhead where aerial patrols came and went through the pass. Time to rest, and move on in the hour before sunup. Which she did, finding shelter under a shelf of rock away from the trail through the pass …
… The hissing and roaring of hungry warriors brought her awake. They had been let loose from their pens into the gorge where they roamed at will. When two came together they would challenge and rear up but not strike; their Wamphyri masters had lodged commands in their small brains, forbidding fighting among themselves; they were, quite simply,
watchdogs. And they were not watching for other warriors.
For centuries ago, when the tithe system was first established, a party of Sunsiders had come through the mountains at high sunup to seek out and kill the Wamphyri in their manses. And they had actually achieved some small measure of success—the deaths of several lieutenants and thralls, the capture of a lesser spire, the murder of its Lord and master—before the surprised habitants of Turgosheim had put them down. Since when, this daily release of monsters into the gorge had become a matter of habit, passed down all the years between.
Emerging from shelter, Wratha spied the loathsome grey-blue bulk of a warrior moving in the darkness close by! She fled with all speed for the pass; scenting her, the creature roared and snorted all the more and followed after; she might have made it … but another warrior was waiting in the mouth of the pass itself!
Wratha was trapped between them. They came upon her mewling, and glaring murderously with their crimson, night-seeing eyes. She could flee no more, and so simply stood and waited. At least they would make a quick end of it. But snuffling and snorting, and issuing their vile stenches, the warriors came no closer. They had her full scent now and knew that she was vampire stuff no less than they themselves. And Wratha moved between them into the pass …
Sunup came and Wratha proceeded south, but in the deep, twining ravine which was the pass she felt nothing of the sun, merely spied its light spreading through the sky overhead like a pale stain. And all the long day she marched the route of the tithelings and kept her burgeoning vampire senses alert for any strange or inimical thing. So she came to the descending slopes of Sun-side, where rather than brave the furnace sun she rested in the opening of the ravine till sundown. And in the twilight she bathed in a tumbling stream, then made her way through the long night down to the place where her tribe had built a small town on the Wamphyri tithe-route within the border of its territories.
Avoiding the watch, she moved silent as a wraith to the leader’s house of woven withes and skins, where she found him home and abed. His wife was many years dead; he lived on his own and in a slovenly fashion; his loud snoring caused Wratha to smile, for she knew that this was his last sleep. But her smile was awful in the night, having nothing of warmth in it and even less of humanity. And standing naked in the shadows of his room, she called his name but softly.
He grunted and came starting awake, demanding: “Who is it?”
“Wratha!” she answered, moving into the moonlight where it flooded through his window, but keeping her feral eyes hidden for the moment.
“You!” he gasped, seeing her outline, and that she was naked. And, coming more nearly awake: “But … you?”
“I escaped!” she told him in a low whisper. “The Wamphyri think I’m dead. Tonight I must rest, and before sunup go off into the forest like a wild thing to hide there all my days.” She intended no such thing.
He sat up straighter in his bed. “You … you dared come back here? Why, you’ll bring them down on us like—”
“Only for the night, as I’ve said,” she answered, cutting him off. “And anyway, they don’t even know I’m alive … you poor blind fool!”
“What?” He sat there astonished as she moved closer to his bed. “Me, blind? What are you saying?”
“You who would give me to his son, when all that I really wanted … was you!” It was a ploy: words to immobilize him, keep him from exclaiming too loudly. She lifted his blanket, stole beneath it, pressed herself against him. She was a vampire, strange and sensual. He felt her body’s weird heat, which was cold at the same time, and grew dizzy from her fascination.
“But…I was old,” he stuttered. “And you …”
“You were the leader!” she answered, her stroking bringing him burning alive, jerking like a hooked fish in her hand. And in a moment:
“Let me … let me feel you,” he husked, with his coarse hands on her body. She allowed it—until he bent his head to kiss her breasts. And then she saw the throb of his neck where her caresses had caused the blood to course like a river, and he heard the hisss of her breath as her hand slid from his member to the seed-swollen source of his lust. Then, as she tightened her grip with a vampire’s strength, and as her nails dug in, he tried to draw away … too late!
He saw her eyes yellow as molten gold in the night, saw the moonlight gleaming white on her mouth of knives, which she closed on his windpipe to sever it. Perhaps, in the instant of her striking, he issued the small scream of a gelding, cut off along with his air and, less rapidly, his life …
… And perhaps, in the smaller house alongside his own, his son Javez heard or in some way sensed his father’s small scream. At any rate he woke up, and listened awhile to the silence, then came padding to investigate.
Wratha, a child of the night, saw Javez in all detail; he saw only shadows and moonbeams in his father’s room, and a humped outline moving under the blanket. But he also heard the sounds of Wratha’s hungry suction. It sounded like something else: like his father was with a woman! Which he was, but not in the way Javez thought it. The younger man’s jaw fell open as he began to back out of the room.
Wratha stuck her head further out, tossed back her hair, and in a “shocked” voice said, “Oh!—Javez!” Which spoke volumes, however falsely.
He knew that voice at once, and his eyes started from his head as he whispered, “Wratha?” Then, jaw lolling more yet, he choked: “Father.” And blood surging, he leaped to the bed and tore aside the blanket. What had been his father lay there …
Stunned, Javez fell back, tripped, would have fallen. But Wratha was standing beside him, smiling her smile. She held him upright, watched his face, mouth and throat, all working in unison, doing nothing. And the knob of Javez’s throat going up and down like some strange dumb bird’s wattle, as he gathered saliva to cry out. But before he could gather enough—
—She showed him a splinter of ironwood stripped from a shattered tree in the mouth of the pass. And: “Do you remember?” she said, dragging him by the hair back on to the bed with his father. “You gave me a knife like this, upon a time—to kill myself, I suppose. But no, I used it for another purpose. And now I give it back.”
“Wratha-a-o-a!” he gurgled, as she drove the splinter deep into his groin, and drew it out; into his shuddering belly, and drew it out; into his heart, and twisted it there, and wrenched it until it broke … Then, when all was still, she kissed them both gently, upon their clammy foreheads, and left them sprawling in their blood where they had died …
In the morning they were found; the tribe built up the campfire and burned them, and elected a new leader. A search was made, but nothing was found. And no one slept for long and long, because they suspected a vampire had come to them out of the swamps. They were wrong, for she had come from Starside.
And now she was on her way back.
In the hills Wratha waylaid a hunter in the night, killed him, and drew sustenance from his red-pulsing lifestream. And each time she appeased her hunger in this fashion, so the changes in her metabolism accelerated, and her undead vitality went from strength to strength. Her vampire senses developed; she felt the restless, eerie zest of the vampire and a renewed, replenished Just for life—albeit for the lives of others. In the way such passions took her, she knew that she was rare; it was as if she were a vampire born. Perhaps some credit was due Karl of Cragspire, for he contained a leech within him, grown from an egg, whose essence had mingled with Wratha’s.
In the next sunup she went down into the stony gullies and bottoms of Turgosheim, between the spires of the Wamphyri with their massive scree jumbles, and under the very façades of their manses fretted in the glooming faces of soaring ravines and jutting crags. And no warrior bothered her where she flitted like a shadow to the base of Cragspire, whose guards kept watch on the ramps and in the entranceways. Guards, aye, but thralls for all that; but Wratha was more than any mere thrall now, for she went under her own direction.
She cl
imbed Cragspire at its rear, to an unguarded lower level, then came up onto a walkway of cartilage grafted to the stack’s exterior. The walkway spiralled steeply for the heights but there was no one there to stop or challenge Wratha. Higher, the spire was hollow in many of its parts, so that she entered within and proceeded all the faster, from hall to hall, stairway to stairway.
She knew the rooms where Karl’s lieutenants kept their Szgany odalisques, and the closets where the women kept their clothes. And dressed in just such a sheath, which revealed far more than it concealed, finally she made her way to the Lord of Cragspire’s quarters. And all the spire asleep now except for those with duties, whom Wratha had known to avoid.
But in all three of the approaches to the penultimate levels under the seared ramparts of the spire itself, there she found small warriors on guard, protecting their master’s privacy. And in the third such entrance-way, because her patience was used up, she approached the tethered monster openly, with her head held high. The creature blinked its many eyes at her and shuffled, but merely grunted and made no move to stop her. For the beast recognized Wratha: that she had used to come and go with the spire’s master. And HE had instructed that this one should be allowed to pass, with no interference. It was an order which had never been rescinded. Also, the master’s scent was on Wratha, even in her blood.
And she passed the armoured bulk of it by, where its pincers and stabbers worked unceasingly at thin air, and its cavern of a mouth chomped however vacuously.
And so Wratha came to Karl in his rooms, and knew where to find him asleep. Except he wasn’t asleep, for the vampire in him had warned of someone’s approach. And entering his bedroom, she found Karl waiting for her. Then …
… His astonishment was great! He drew her to him, lifted her up, gazed upon her from every angle. There was no word in his mouth, which gaped. And Wratha … she had been beautiful before, even as a lowly thrall (though in truth, she’d never been lowly). But now … everything about her was a man’s fondest, darkest dream. Just looking at her, Karl knew she could make even the most erotic dream reality. And he saw with every glance what he had made: such a vampire!
