by Brian Lumley
Shaithis leaped on her, buried his awful face in the pulp of her head, filled himself with steaming crimson. The blood is the life!
… In a while he stood up. A small distance away the other bear left a trail of blood where it crawled in crazy patterns on the ice, dragging its useless rear legs behind it. Shaithis fought down his own pain as he went to the crippled creature; when chance permitted, he ripped away the muscles and tendons first from one foreleg, then the other. When finally the bear was totally incapacitated, he tore open its throat and let out the remaining bulk of its life steaming onto the ice.
And again he took hot, reeking blood, and felt himself growing strong.
Some little distance away his flyer nodded its great swaying diamond-shaped head at the top of the ice-cliffs. Shaithis stood up and commanded it: Come!
The thing came. Slipping and slithering at the rim, its many ‘legs’ uncoiled like whipping snakes to thrust it into its launch; and it soared out over the sea, then dipped one huge manta wing, turned and came back. It settled to the ice a respectful distance away, then at Shaithis’s insistence came flopping to where the carcases waited. Meanwhile the vampire Lord had cut out the great smoking hearts of the bears and put them in a pouch for later.
He backed off and sat down on a stump of ice. And: Eat, he commanded his flyer. Fuel yourself.
And in the streaming moon and starlight, the changeling beast took back much of its lost heat, fats and liquids. Aye, eat well, Shaithis told it. There’ll be no more strong meat like this awhile. Not until I’m healed, anyway.
And then, gradually, he let all his pain free to creep in on him, the agony of his split back and crushed arm, and his broken ribs where they’d tested the bear’s pummelling. Pain, great pain! His vampire felt it: all the more spur to that thing within him, to be about the healing. i
Pain, aye. There were times like this, after a battle hard j fought and won, when pain was warmer than the warm, succulent core of a woman. It was Shaithis’s pride to let it wash over him, and to feel the scars of his body start to heal. Perhaps he would keep some of them open, or scabbed at best, as mementoes of his victory.
Except… who would there be to admire them?
After a flight as long again, finally Shaithis spied the ice-castles where they gleamed under the serpentine writhings of polar aurora. They could only be stacks, aeries, surely?
His heart beat faster in his great breast. Wamphyri, here? What manner of creatures would they be, dwelling in the sub-zero temperatures of the Icelands? Albinos like the mythical bats, growing their own white fur for warmth? What would be their sustenance? And perhaps more to the point, how would they react to the Lord Shaithis?
He took his flyer up to higher altitudes, the better to spy out the ice-locked land around. Farther north, possibly at the northernmost extreme, a string of dead volcanoes thrust up their crater cones through ice and drifted snow. In both directions, east and west, they dwindled away as far as Shaithis’s eyes could see, marching out of view across glittering, icy horizons. Some were cased in ice, others showed their naked stone; from which Shaithis deduced that the unclad mountains must still retain a measure of their former fire.
To reinforce his opinion, he noted that the central and largest cone even appeared to issue a little smoke. But the effect came and went and could be an illusion of the general dazzle. Star-dazzle and aurora-dazzle: the entire roof of the world was lit as by some weird blue daylight! Not that light was especially important to the Wamphyri; no, for the night was their element; eyes such as theirs could see even in the darkest places.
As for the ice-stacks: Shaithis gave them his keenest possible scrutiny. They were mere molehills compared to the once-mighty bone and stone stacks of Starside, and even the tallest would be less than half the height of the lowliest aerie. Where they were not coated with snow, it could be seen that their ice was of the purest; like vast, inverted icicles, they grew up in concentric circles away from the central volcano. Also, where the light struck through them at their peaks, he saw that they were pure ice through and through; but at their bases many seemed to have stony cores. Perhaps in its heyday the central volcano had thrown out great gobs of stuff all around, forming splashes of hot rock in these rippling rings, like a handful of mud tossed into a pool. And then, through the centuries, ice-sheaths had accumulated, gradually building into these jagged, sharply-pointed stacks. It seemed as likely an explanation as any.
That the ice-castles were not fit habitation seemed obvious at first, and Shaithis might well have flown on. But then he saw what looked like an exhausted — indeed frozen — flyer at the base of one such castle and went down for a closer look. Again choosing an ice-cliff’s rim for a landing site, he left his flyer and walked a half-mile to that which he had seen from on high, lying crumpled in frozen snow.
A flyer, aye, much rimed, emaciated and seemingly dead. Seemingly. But no one knew better than Shaithis of the Wamphyri how hard it was actually to kill such a creature. Like the vampire Lords who made them, they were created to endure. He sent a telepathic message to the brain of the great diamond-shaped blanket of a thing, all of fifty feet across its wingtips, that it should stir itself, rise up. It did no such thing, which hardly surprised him: their small brains were rarely attuned to any mind other than their master’s. But he might have expected a small twitch of curiosity at least, if only for the fact that some strange Wamphyri Lord had issued the beast an instruction, however invalid. There had been no such twitch, wherefore its brain must be dead. Likewise, of course, the great envelope of flesh which enclosed it.
Then, clambering over the cold humped ridge of its central body to the base of its neck at the forward junction of wings, Shaithis spied its saddle and trappings, and recognized the familiar blazon of its maker/master tooled into the leather: a face in caricature, grotesque and distorted from its weight of mighty wens and warts! And then Shaithis smiled his sardonic smile and nodded. The flyer had been the Lord Pinescu’s creature.
Volse Pinescu: that most ugly of all the Wamphyri, whose habit it had been to foster running sores and festoons of boils all over his face and body, in order that his aspect would be that much more terrifying. So Volse was here, eh? Shaithis was somewhat surprised, for he had seen the Lords Pinescu and Fess Ferenc crash their crippled flyers in clouds of dust on Starside’s plain of boulders after the battle at The Dweller’s garden, and he’d thought that must be the end of them. Either that or they’d have to travel north on foot. In Volse’s case… obviously he’d been wrong. Patently the wily old devil had kept a flyer in reserve, just in case.
And what of ‘the Ferenc’, as that one liked to be known? Could he also be here? Fess Ferenc, aye: one man, or monster, of which to be exceedingly wary. Standing at a hundred inches tall, the Ferenc would have dwarfed even the great she-bears which Shaithis had killed for meat. And he alone of all the Wamphyri carried no gauntlet: no need, for his hands were murderous talons! Well, well! Things might yet prove interesting in these terrible Icelands…
Shaithis sat in Volse’s saddle and chewed on bear-heart, and he called to his flyer: Come, eat.
As his creature arrived and settled to the ice, Shaithis got down and strode the circumference of the dead beast’s body, and so discovered a great hole eaten into its side, where blood vessels as fat as his thumb had been sliced through and sucked upon, then tied off with knots. At which he rightly guessed that Volse Pinescu had survived his stricken mount. Which begged the question, where was Volse now?
Shaithis extended his vampire awareness, sent out a sweeping telepathic probe. Not to speak to anyone but to listen for someone. He heard nothing. Or perhaps the echo of a mind’s or minds’ shutters swiftly slammed shut? If Volse and Fess were here, they weren’t speaking. And again Shaithis smiled his sardonic smile. No one applauds a loser. It would be different if he had won the battle for The Dweller’s garden. But of course it would; for if he’d won, then he wouldn’t be here.
While his fly
er feasted, Shaithis looked up at the ice-castle. The cold, glittering sculpture was mainly Nature’s work. But not all of it. The rims of crude steps in the ice had been rounded by time, but upon a time they had been cut. They led up to an arched entrance under a facade of mighty icicles. Inside, the core was of stone, dark and uninviting.
Shaithis climbed the steps, entered the ice-castle, was aware of crusted rime crunching under his feet where at first he strode then crept through a mazy ice labyrinth. For as he went so he became aware that there was something dreadful here, or that something dreadful had happened here, and for the first time since The Dweller he felt himself in awe of the Unknown.
The place echoed and moaned. The echoes were mainly his, but changed by the cavities and convolutions of the ice-castle into dull bass grindings and slidings like floes crushing together in a heaving sea, or great ice-doors rumbling shut. And the moaning was the freezing wind echoing in the spires of the place, distorted and amplified by the ice into the agonies of dying monsters.
‘Unless he were acclimatized,’ (Shaithis spoke to himself in a whisper, for company if for nothing else), ‘I cannot see how a man, even a vampire, might live here. Oh, he could, for a while, possibly through a span of a hundred sunups — except here it is always sundown — but finally the cold would get him. Yes, and I can see how that would be.
‘The aching cold creeping into his bones, until eventually even Wamphyri flesh would freeze. His heart, beating ever more slowly, pumping thickening ice-crystal blood through shivering veins and arteries. At last he would stiffen and lose all mobility, and the ice wax upon him, until finally he sat upon an ice-throne within a glassy stalactite, thinking slow, frozen thoughts from the core of his ice-brain!
‘Being Wamphyri — if he were Wamphyri — he would not die. At least, not until the ice shifted and sheared him, or ground him away. But what would that be for life? My ancestors disposed of their enemies in three ways. Those whom they scorned they buried undead, to become fossils in their graves. Those who worked mischief against them they banished to the Icelands. And those whom they feared were driven into the sphere Gate on Starside. Who can say which penalty was the most severe? To go to hell, to turn to ice, or to stiffen into a stone? I for one would not care to be a block of ice!’
These thoughts, breathed aloud, were carried away as whispers, amplified and thrown back as gales of sound. It was like whispering in some echoing cavern or grotto, except that these caves of ice were that much more resonant. In the high vaulted ceilings, icicles tinkled, then shivered into shards and came crashing down. Some were quite large, so that Shaithis must leap aside.
At that and when things had quietened a little, he decided to vacate the place — at which precise moment there sounded in his telepathic mind a far, faint quavery voice:
Is it you, Shaitan, come after all this time to discover and devour me? Then you should know that I welcome it! I’m here, up here. Come, get it over with. The cold centuries have chilled even my once-fierce Wamphyri passions. So come, make haste, and snuff this last low-flickering flame!
2 Exiles
Startled, Shaithis fell into a defensive crouch, turned in a slow circle, gazed all about. He saw only ice, but knew now for certain that this place contained more than that. And at last, crimson eyes slitted, he concentrated his own thoughts into a probe: Who speaks?
What? the infirm, quavery voice spoke again in his mind, and Shaithis sensed a derisory snort. Don’t make me laugh, Shaitan! You know well enow who speaks! Or have the long, lonely years addled your wits? Kehrl Lugoz speaks, old fiend. We were exiled together; we dwelled awhile in the caves of the cone; we were ‘companions’, for as long as there was meat. But when the meat was finished our friendship went with it. And I fled while I could.
Kehrl Lugoz? Shaithis frowned as he strove to remember Wamphyri legends almost as old as the race itself. And this Shaitan which the hidden speaker referred to: not the Shaitan, surely? He frowned again, and as suspicion turned to curiosity asked: Where are you?
Where I’ve been for… how long? Preserved in the ice, undead, that’s where I am. Dreaming in my frozen hell of endless time. And you, Shaitan? How has it been for you? Has the cone kept you warm, or are its fires returned to drive you out?
Dreaming in a frozen hell? The very scenario Shaithis had conjured only a moment or two ago! Yes, and he believed that whoever this Kehrl Lugoz was who spoke to him, indeed he spoke from a dream. Perhaps the crashing of great icicles had roused him up somewhat from his sleep.
You’re wrong, he said then, relaxing a little, for I’m not Shaitan. A son of his sons, perhaps, but my name is Shaithis, not Shaitan.
Oh? Ha, ha, ha! The other seemed to find his words bitterly amusing. The Lord of Liars even to the end, eh, Shaitan? Perverse as ever. Aye, you were the worst of a bad lot. Well, what does it matter now? Come for me if you will — or begone, and let me return to my dreaming.
The voice faded as its owner sank down again into permafrost dreams; but Shaithis, concentrating all of his vampire senses to their full, believed he’d located its source. I’m up here! that mental voice had told him at the onset. Somewhere up above…
Shaithis was in the heart of the carved, wind-fretted ice-castle now. There, locked in clear ice all of three feet thick, he could see a massive central core of volcanic rock thrusting raggedly up like the ossified root of a glass tooth: a ‘splash’ of stony spittle from the ancient volcano. And there, climbing the face of the ice-sheath where it covered the castle’s lava foundations, carved into its cold crystal contours, glassy steps wound up out of sight into grottoes of gleaming ice.
There was nothing for it but to follow them; the vampire Lord mounted the frost-rimed stairs and climbed to the jagged peak of the core, where its last black igneous fang pointed straight up, as if threatening to break out of its sheath. And staring through ice hard as stone, finally Shaithis spied the author of the mind-messages he’d heard in the corridors below.
There in blue-gleaming heart of ice — seated upright in a lava niche, with one hand resting lightly upon a ridge of rock, as upon the arm of a favourite chair — a man ancient as time, weary, withered and weird! Encased as surely as any fly in amber, his eyes were closed, his frozen body motionless, his mien severe as his fate. And yet he sat there proudly with his head held high upon a scrawny neck, and with that certain something in his aspect which spoke mutely but definitely of his origin: the fact that he was Wamphyri! Kehrl Lugoz, whoever he had been.
No, whoever he still was!
Shaithis put out a hand to the wall of smooth ice, pressed down hard until his palm was cold and flat. A minute went by, then another, until finally: Thud!
It was faint — so very faint and far-seeming — but it was still there. And after a pause of two more minutes: Thud! — and so on. Kehrl Lugoz lived. However protracted his heartbeat, however fossilized his body (and it was, very nearly, fossilized), still he lived. Except, and as Shaithis had already inquired of himself, what was this for life?
He stared hard at the shrivelled thing, studying it through three feet of ice which, however pure, nevertheless blurred the picture and shifted its focus with Shaithis’s every smallest motion. And now he believed he knew the answer to that other question he’d recently asked himself: which was worse, to be buried undead, or sent into the helllands, or banished here? And the vampire Lord shivered at the thought of all the nameless centuries gone by since Kehrl Lugoz had come up here and sat himself down, and waited for the ice to form.
Thud! And this time, because he’d been lost in his own thoughts and was startled, Shaithis snatched back his hand.
Kehrl Lugoz was too old even to guess at his age. The Wamphyri, when they age, do not necessarily show it. Shaithis himself was more than five hundred years of age, yet looked no older than a well-preserved fifty. But in the face of privations such as this one had known, it simply couldn’t be hidden. Yes, Lugoz looked almost as old as time.
The eyebrows above
his closed, steeply slanted eyes were bushy, white, locked in ice like the rest of him. His hair was white as a halo of snow over a brow wrinkled and brown as a walnut, with white sideboards which frizzed out wildly to half-obscure his conchlike ears. His ancient face was not so much wrinkled as grooved, mummified, like a trog kept overlong in its cocoon until wasted. The grey cheeks were sunken in, the chin pointed, with a thin wisp of white beard fluffing there. Eye-teeth like fangs overshot the withered lower lip; they were yellow and the one on the left was broken. There’d been insufficient strength in the frozen vampire to grow another.
The nostrils in the squat, convoluted nose (more properly a bat’s snout than was usual in most of the Wamphyri) showed signs of fretting: disease, Shaithis supposed. And a huge purple wen was visible bulging under the chin, like the puffed mating wattle of one of Sunside’s birds.
As for Kehrl Lugoz’s garb: he wore a simple black robe, its hood thrown back, wide sleeves floppy about his scrawny wrists, and hem loose around his chicken’s calves. Except of course the sleeves and hem were not loose but frozen in ice hard as stone. His hands where they protruded from his robe were extremely long-fingered, with sharp, pointed nails, and upon his right index he wore a large ring of gold. Shaithis could not make out its sigil. Veins stood out white in the backs of his hands, instead of olive or purple. Before he froze himself, this one had gone without blood for long and long.
Wake up! Shaithis sent. I want to know your history, your secrets. Indeed, for it would seem to me that you are Wamphyri history! This Shaitan you speak of: do you mean Shaitan the Unborn? He and his disciples were banished to the Icelands in the very dawn of legends. But still here? How? No, I cannot believe it. Wake up, Kehrl Lugoz! Answer my questions.