by Brian Lumley
It was Shaithis’s reception, his triumph, his moment of glory. The Lady Karen kneeled naked between his spread thighs, teased his great gonads, caressed and even nibbled (but very carefully) upon the purple, bulbous tip of his hugely swollen phallus, and now and then paused to gentle that pulsing rod between her perfect breasts. Sumptuously cushioned, Shaithis reclined upon Dramal Doombody’s raised bone-throne in Karen’s aerie—the last of all the great stacks of the Wamphyri, finally his by right of conquest—and looked upon all of those persons, creatures, and possessions who were likewise his to use, abuse, or destroy as, when, and how he willed it.
Above and beyond the aerie’s kilometer-high buttresses, battlements, and balconies of fossilized bone, stone, membrane, and cartilage, new stars thronged to join those already dusting the darkening sky. The sun issued its last coruscating fan of golden radiation where it sank down behind Sunside, and for breathless moments the barrier mountains were thrown into massive, jagged silhouette while the glaring yellow spikes of their peaks turned purple and finally grey.
Then … the rapidly elongating shadows of the mountains flowed like monstrous stains across Starside’s boulder plains to blot them into darkness, and at last it was that sundown which Shaithis had so long awaited: the hour of his greatest triumph, and of his revenge.
As at a signal his lieutenants threw back the heavy tapestries from the windows and cut free Karen’s sigils so that they went warping and spiraling out and down into darkness; and they shook out the long, tapering pennants bearing Shaithis’s new blazon—a Wamphyri gauntlet, clenched and raised threateningly above the glaring sphere which was Starside’s portal to the Hell-lands—to wave in the thinly gusting currents of air over the aerie’s higher parapets.
And:
“So I willed it,” he growled, “and so it has come to pass.” And he glared all about, defying all and sundry to deny him his sovereignty—if they dared. And yet in his heart Shaithis knew that the victory wasn’t his, not in its entirety. He knew he couldn’t claim that he was its sole engineer, or that he alone had whelmed the strange forces and alien magic of The Dweller. No, for he’d required a deal of help with that.
Shaithis couldn’t remember exactly how the fight had been won but he did know that he’d had a powerful ally who was here with him even now. Since he seemed to be the only one in any way aware of that Other, however, and since he alone of all men was fit to command—fit to proclaim himself Warlord of the New Wamphyri—what difference did it make? A wraith may not usurp a man.
He narrowed his eyes and glanced to the right and back a little (but not so obviously that anyone would notice), and peered a moment at the Dark Hooded Thing in its black cloak where it stood close by watching all that transpired. It was a black, evil Thing, and entirely unknown and invisible to all save Shaithis; yet this was the creature which had made Starside’s conquest possible. Shaithis felt nothing whatsoever of gratitude but merely scowled; for out of nowhere it had come to him that his secret, faceless ally—his invisible familiar—was the true master here and he himself a mere figurehead, which irritated him and turned his victory sour. For he was Wamphyri and territorial, and there simply wasn’t space in this or any other world for two Warlords.
Galvanized by some weird frustration, suddenly Shaithis started to his feet. His prostrate thralls and their kneeling overseer lieutenants rose with him (though all of them, masters and minions alike, shrank back from the severity of his gaze), and four small warriors in dully glinting armor hissed their alarm at such a flurry of movement, but nevertheless held to their positions in the far corners of the great hall.
At Shaithis’s feet, the Lady Karen shrank back from her master. Her scarlet gaze seemed partly adoring (aye, she was treacherous as ever) but mainly fearful; he kicked her sprawling out of his way and strode alone to the high-arched windows. Out there, the dizzy aerial levels were now alive with entire colonies of smoky-furred Desmodus bats like clouds of excited, darting midges alongside Shaithis’s gigantic, sky-spurting warriors; also rank upon rank of manta-shaped flyers in ornate, decorative trappings, with lieutenants and high-ranking thrall riders seated proud in saddles tooled with Shaithis’s gauntlet sigil. It was an airborne display of his power in the wake of his greatest victory.
Shaithis stood there a moment, arms akimbo and head held high, and watched the flypast like a general inspecting his troops. Then he turned his hooded, crimson eyes westward to light upon The Dweller’s garden, or rather the high saddle in the grey hills where once a garden had blossomed. Ah, but that was yesterday and now … flames leaped there and black smoke boiled skyward, and the underbellies of clouds where they scudded across the peaks were ruddy from the inferno blazing below them. Shaithis had vowed it and willed it into being, and now it was real! The garden was burning and its defenders were … dead?
No, not all of them. Not yet.
And: “Bring them to me,” the dreaming vampire commanded of no one in particular. “I would deal with them—now.” A half dozen lieutenants hastened to obey, and in a little while a pair of prisoners were led into Shaithis’s presence. Massive, he dwarfed them. Of course he did, for he was a Lord of the Wamphyri: he hosted a vampire in his body and brain, while his captives were merely human. Or were they? For even now there was that defiant something in their bearing which in itself might almost be … Wamphyri? Then Shaithis saw their eyes and knew the astonishing truth.
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 he was not only a Hell-lander 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 leveled (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 Hell-lander 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 quickly added: “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 areolas and spiked nipples were dark as bruises against the pale loll
of her elastic 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, Shaithis quickly reached down 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 Hell-lander 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 inquiringly. “And so you’re the Hell-lander 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 Hell-lands 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 Hell-lander 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 Hell-lander’s impotence. For if he and Karen had been lovers, then doubtless he’d delight in boasting how she was his castoff, 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 may or may 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 bed-chamber 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 “I” 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, which 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 dream 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 lieutenants: “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 center 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 jaws 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 was 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 aging 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 onto the floor; her scarlet eyes turned a sick, sunken yellow under matted eyelashes; her skin was suddenly corrugated as the skin of dried fruit.