by Brian Lumley
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He could rant and rage all he wanted then, but little use for such now.
Aye, she sent back. But only if you and Spiro, Gorvi and Canker - and the necromancer Nestor Lichloathe, whatever that one is up to, and wherever he is now - will agree to put yourselves, your men and monsters at my command. Then I may have a plan.
At your command?
Of course. (Her curt mental nod, and an eyebrow lifted as if in mild surprise.) As Lord Taintspore commands ,his army out of Turgosheim, so I shall command the forces of the last aerie. And just as Vormulac has his generals, I shall have mine. What? And didn’t we always plan it that way?
Huh/ Spiro Killglance scowled across the gulf of air. We should put ourselves and our men under the orders of a woman? And where has that got us so far? Tonight, for instance. Was that an example of your leadership?
Wratha’s scowl was no less severe. My shell is that of a woman, aye, but my leech is a vampire no less than yours. And I am all Wamphyri.’ As for leadership: would you even know that Lord Vormulac was here, if not for me? And as for tonight: so the Lidescis waylaid us. It has happened to the best.. .
Spiro wasn’t satisfied. But in a fight? You’re not built for it, Wratha. Built for other things, certainly; built to be under a man, to … accommodate him? But did you think to fuck them all to death? Tussling with a man in your bed is all very well, Lady, but going up against a gang of them wearing gauntlets is something else again! Now tell me, what do you really know of fighting?
To command is not to fight, fool! Her retort was stinging in its intensity. To command is to direct the fighting! And we aren’t talking about a skirmish or even a battle, but a war - a full-scale bloodwar! Listen, Vormulac is a warlord born … but you? When you and your brother were wetting yourselves if your father so much as glanced at you, Lord Unsleep was settling blood feuds in Turgosheim - and
settling them his way! He bound far greater Lords than you in chains, and strung them up by their heels for the sun to fry! Hah! Only be sure he’ll do it again, here, tonight, if you don’t listen to reason.
Gorvi the Guile had been silent for some time. Fallen out of favour with the rest, he had to mind his words. But at last he felt obliged to ask, So what is this plan of yours, Wratha, and how do we bring it into being? And anyway, what makes you think you’re so much smarter than us when it comes to plotting wars? Just like his real voice, his mental sendings seemed to ooze, insinuate, and cling like glutinous tar.
Hah! she snorted in return. And now the so-called ‘Guile’ says his piece - as if he has the right! But a fairer question might be: ‘Where was Gorvi this night, when the best of his men were being slaughtered at Sanctuary Rock?
What!? he commenced to bluster. But if you’d only hear my story -
No time for stories, Gorvi! Wratha cut him short. Time for action, and barely enough time, at that. Very well, you ask why I am smarter and I’ll tell you: because I’m a woman! All right, you have your guile - but I have my woman’s wiles, all doubled and redoubled by my leech! And I was never the dullard, believe me. As a girl on Sunside I killed a lieutenant. And fresh risen as a vampire I did away with his brother. Then, to be a Lady, I - usurped? - Karl the Crag. All by my wits alone, where muscle would not suffice. So tell me: who better to lead you now, when sheer numbers may whelm you down, and all the tenacity and willpower of a world will not suffice? The simple truth is that none of us is experienced in war. For in Turgosheim we were too soft for too long; we have almost forgotten how to wage war! In the years since I ascended there have been damn few feuds, let alone wars! And as for the Szgany we knew: they were the most docile of creatures. That’s why these Lidescis continue to get the better of us: because we’re not used to resistance. .. .
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Finally, she paused and swept hot red eyes over all of them. Until: There, I’m done, she told them. You may fall in with me or simply .. . fall. And in the morning wake with the sunrise - to find it shining in your eyes! But make up your minds quick, for we’ll soon be home and I’ve orders to give. And then you’ll see if I have a plan or not.
Canker Canison was still groggy from the knock he’d taken, but it was his turn to say his piece. Wratha, I’m with you! he barked in her mind. My head’s still singing and I can’t think a damn, but you’re the only thing that’s held us together so far, and individually we’re finished for sure. So what will you have me and mine do? Order away, Lady.
Wratha turned to scan the hag-ridden sky under its canopy of blue-glittering stars. She looked upon her ‘colleagues’, all grim in their saddles where they rode for the Northstar, whose pharos eye gleamed down on Wrathstack, silhouetted now against the shimmer of the northern aurora. Silent, scowling, the Wamphyri Lords rode the wind, and to a man they were aware of the truth in Canker’s words. But the Lady would have it from their own lips, their own minds. And the rest of you? she said. What of you others? What of you, Wran, Spiro, Gorvi? Will you stand like giants, or fall like swatted flies?
Wran had his pride, but he was not a fool. And in a little while: Say on, Lady, came his mental grunt. Followed by Spiro’s rasped: So be it! And finally Gorvi’s grudging: Any plan has to be better than none.
There was no time for Wratha to take pleasure in their submission, their admission that they needed her skills as a f leader. If anything, she felt a sensation of relief and nothing of elation, and so steered well clear of gloating as she began to outline her plan. Very well. Now listen: It’s my belief that Vormulac is no more than an hour and a half away, at most. Which means we have a lot to do and very little time in which to do it. If you follow my instructions to the letter, we may survive the first assault. After that, it’s in the hands of fortune and the fates, if you believe in such. Personally, I believe in me — and so must you! This is how it shall be …
And as Wrathstack loomed ever closer, so she went on to lay the foundations of survival.
In a little while, hand-picked lieutenants and warriors began to peel off from the main aerial formation and go winging down to those strewn, blackened, exploded stumps of Star-side stacks whose names were long forgotten, and shortly after that Wratha and the rest arrived back in Wrathstack. But even before they landed in their various bays, their orders had been received and acted upon by rear parties left in charge of the manses.
In Guilesump, Madmanse, Wrathspire and Mangemanse -and especially in Suckscar, from which for the moment and possibly for some time to come, the necromancer Lord Nestor Lichloathe was absent; which meant that his thralls and lieutenants were more than usually anxious for their own and the manse’s safety - lights grew dim and blinked out as gas-jets were plugged and mantles hooded, and smoke ceased coiling from the chimneys as fires were extinguished. Cooking smells, escaping from the kitchens to the open air, were wafted this way and that, dissipated by frantic wings of Desmodus; all other culinary activity came to an abrupt halt.
All signs and sigils, pennants and heraldic devices were taken down and replaced by a handful of mouldering, indecipherable rags out of ages past. Water-catchment skins were removed, and likewise replaced by tattered, decaying leathers. All signs of recent usage - of external stairs and causeways, platforms, turrets and such, and, after the various parties had landed in their manses, of the landing-bays themselves — were disguised or camouflaged, which included the removal of main supports and ironwood stanchions, and the indiscriminate scattering of dust and debris where bays had been polished by the constant slither and thrust of flyers’ bellies. So that in less than an hour the stack had taken on an appearance of disuse to the point of dereliction .. . exactly as Wratha required it.
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And not only lights and fires, smoke and smells, but even the thoughts of the stack’s diverse inhabitants - Lords, lieutenants, thralls and creatures alike - were stilled. From the basement of Guilesump, up through the broad levels of the Killglance brothers’ Madmanse, and from Canker Cani-son’s Mang
emanse through Suckscar and Wrathspire to the latter’s topmost turret, such telepathic silence reigned as never couJd be heard. Wrathstack … was dead! Or seemed it.
Perhaps Lord Unsleep’s great bat familiars, his aerial scouts, should have known better, and perhaps not. There was after all something of the bat in the Wamphyri, too, not to mention other creatures, such as the wolf and, in Canker’s case, the fox. But more devious far, there was also that of men in them. They were or had been men; they had the minds of men, and therefore Man’s intelligence, his cunning and tenacity, but vastly enhanced by their vampire leeches. And where cunning and tenacity are concerned .. . Wratha, of course, was a woman.
And so, to Vormulac’s advance intelligence agents, his familiar bats, where they scouted out the way some ninety minutes ahead of the main body of his army, Wrathstack looked as Wratha intended it to look: empty and derelict. Even her own familiars seemed wild, untamed, without purpose in their flitting, side-slipping, weaving and plummeting courtship flights in and about Wrathspire’s towers and turrets. But sensing the approach of strangers, outsiders, the initial curiosity which these indigenous bats displayed quickly turned (or appeared to turn) to anxiety for their colony, their territory; and as three of Vormulac’s creatures commenced circling Wrathspire’s ramparts, so the aerie’s own inhabitants bolted for familiar cranny entranceways into the stack and disappeared within.
Plainly, they weren’t much for defending their territory, these great cowards! Vormulac’s scouts set up a derisive chittering and made to follow the stack’s bats to their very
roost, where in future they would lord it over the entire colony. And so the Lord Unsleep’s creatures entered Wrathstack -
— Whose massive walls muffled to indecipherable squeaks and squeals their panic cries of shock, surprise, and sudden death, and the brief flailing of membrane wings to the fading echoes of a flutter …
A second trio of Vormulac’s creatures had stooped on the tumbled aeries of the old Wamphyri lying broken on the boulder plains, exploring them in the exposed, exploded areas of their shattered stems and bases. But delving too deeply, they fared no better than the others. Netted by lieutenants and trampled by warriors, their cries were trapped in dust and rubble and lost in the ruins of blackened basements. No word of Wratha’s whereabouts would reach Turgosheim’s army through the medium of Desmodus, at least.
And indeed, a half-hour later, neither a creature nor a sound, nor even a thought betrayed the Lady, but an effect of fickle Nature that announced her presence even a dozen miles away, and so went far beyond Wratha’s or anyone else’s control. ..
Ten miles east of the great pass into Sunside, Lord Vormulac Taintspore had landed his army in the heights of the barrier mountains, on what was once a mighty lava flow, now a series of gently sloping plateau summits, like a giant’s causeway rising from east to west and gradually angling south into the fanged caldera of the dead volcano. From there, he and his most valued confidante, the so-called ‘virgin grandam’ Devetaki Skullguise, along with Laughing Zack Shornskull and Lady Zindevar Cronesap (who would much prefer to eschew her mainly derisory cognomen and go simply under the name of Zindevar), mounted fresh flyers and went up again to find a place to perch, spy out the land, and confer a while in private.
But after they found a landing site in the topmost peaks
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of the ages-worn caldera - and when they gazed out from their high vantage point on all of this unknown land - what they saw cut conversation to a minimum. Far to the south, the rim of the world was outlined against a haze of faint starlight, its curve silhouetted by a dim sickle of amethyst light growing dimmer by the minute, residual of sunset. And at the foot of the barrier mountains, ranging out and away to the savanna and the far furnace deserts, all of Sunside’s forests spread like a dark green ocean under ever-brightening ice-cluster stars. From east to west, as far as the eyes (even Wamphyri eyes) could see, that fertile tract with its promise, and much more than a promise, of human life.
For there in the woods, campfires! Four sets of them: two to the east, one directly below, and another a mile or so west. Not the fires of trogs, no, for here in Old Sunside the aboriginals were as their Turgosheim cousins: night creatures, cave-dwellers, Starsiders. Wherefore these must be the camps of men. They could only be! Hot human blood for Lord Taintspore’s army, to fuel his war on Wratha the Risen!
Except … if Wratha and her renegades were here, then what sort of men were these western Sunsiders, that they lit her way with fires to guide her to them in the night? Had she brought them to heel so quickly, then, in the space of only two or three years? Were these the fires of supplicant tribes, as the Szgany of Turgosheim’s Sunside? Or was it that Wratha and her lot, like so many of Vormulac’s men and creatures, had failed to make the crossing from east to west, had been devoured by the rising sun, or had fallen into the reeking acid lakes of the Great Red Waste?
In which case, these people would never have suspected Wratha’s existence in the first place, and so would continue their simple lives as always. Which might possibly explain these apparently careless fires, but in turn posed another question: why so few fires? Or was there another, entirely different, infinitely more threatening solution to this puzzle?
Back in Turgosheim, the venerable Maglore had declared
these western regions free of Wamphyri influence. Indeed, the Seer-Lord Maglore had been sure that the last of the Old Wamphyri had died out some eight hundred sunups ago, in a terrible holocaust wrought by a magician in their midst who had called up Things beyond his control.
But what if Maglore was wrong and the Old Wamphyri survived to this day? What a greeting Wratha would have had from them! The theory might also serve to explain these campfires; for if there were vampires here - and if their reign had been unbroken since time immemorial - then of course a majority of the tribes would be supplicant…
All of these were points which Vormulac and his generals chewed over in the peaks, before Laughing Zack Shornskull said: There is of course a simple way to find out. Take a handful of chosen men and monsters, fly down on the most isolated of those fires and take prisoners. It’s something that must be done anyway, if we’d feed our men and beasts. Then, if the people down there aren’t supplicants already, they damn soon will be! And a heavy tithe to pay, too, I fear.’ And Zack, a squat, barrel-bodied tub of a Lord, chuckled deep in the back of his throat, as was his wont. There was never any humour in Zack’s ‘mirth’, but he chuckled anyway.
Before Vormulac could answer, Devetaki exclaimed: ‘Look there!’ And all heads turned north, where she pointed. Which was the moment that Wratha was discovered; or if not the Lady herself, her fortress stack at least. And: ‘See!’ said Devetaki. ‘See! Now tell me, is that an aerie, or what?’
Erratic in its orbit, the pale disk of a blue and silver moon seemed on a level with their eyes over the cold northern horizon. Perhaps it was lit by the Northstar, or by starshine in general, or its own surface was of reflective rocks. Whichever, and despite that the sun was down, the moon sailed over Starside like a softly glowing bubble in the sky. Except…
… It seemed stabbed in its belly by a mighty spire, by the topmost fang of the last aerie! And just as that telltale moon
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had informed Vormulac of his safe passage over the Great Red Waste, so now it informed on Wrathstack, which was otherwise camouflaged by night and dark and distance.
‘And down there!’ cried Devetaki, whose eyes were keener that the rest put together. ‘There, to the west. That glowing light in the Starside foothills. What of that? See, it throws a plume of foxfire out across the plain of boulders.’ For she had spied the Starside Gate.
Vormulac frowned, snapped his fingers. ‘I sent a team of great bats ahead, along the spine of these barrier mountains,’ he said. ‘Six of them - but only five returned. They reported a great wonder: a ball of cold white light, half-buried in the foo
thills. The familiar who was lost strayed too close to the light, was blinded by it and eaten up. Such was my translation of their report. That -‘ he nodded his great head in the direction of Devetaki’s pointing finger - ‘is perhaps the Thing which they reported. No doubt we’ll find out more as we journey west. Ah, but I sent six more to spy out the land across the plain of boulders and see if they could discover ought of Wratha the Risen. So far they’ve not returned - not a one of them!’ He turned cold, suspicious, gold-flecked scarlet eyes on the distant stack. And as Vormulac’s frown deepened, so his eyebrows drew together over the bridge of his hawk nose. Then, to Zindevar Cronesap:
‘My Lady, what of your own familiars, which you brought with you out of Turgosheim? I trust you instructed them as I required of you?’
Zindevar was a ‘Lady’ in name only; no more or less than any Wamphyri Lady, except she made no effort to hide the truth of her aspect, the facts of her lifestyle - which in any event were plainly evident in her face and form. What looks and shape she had worn on the day of her ascension, she’d kept. They were scarcely desirable to men, but in Zindevar’s case this was just as well. With the exception of a small handful of fighting men, her male thralls and lieutenants were eunuchs; which, and apart from breeding stock, all men shouJd be, according to the Lady.
‘Aye, six of them,’ she answered. ‘I sent three along the Sunside flank, as far as they could go and still return in the first quarter of the night. Don’t expect them back yet a while. The others went out over the Sunside forests, to see what they could discover of secretive Szgany! With a bit of luck, they’ll ignore campfires such as these we’ve seen as being the work of supplicants, and seek out the furtive ones in the forests. If such men are to be found, then my bloodhounds will find them, be sure!’
