Necroscope V: Deadspawn n-5

by Brian Lumley

  Nothing came back; the old thing in the ice had returned to his dreaming; his shrivelled heart continued to thud, but it seemed to Shaithis more slowly yet. He was dying. Longevity, even suspended animation, is not immortality.

  ‘Damn you!’ Shaithis snarled out loud. His curse echoed back to him — along with other echoes? — from the bowels of the ice-castle. He waited until the echoes had died away and only the weird moaning of ice-winds remained, then sent out his vampire awareness all around. Was anyone there?

  … Well, if there was someone, then he was adept at shielding his presence. Except -

  — Suddenly Shaithis remembered his flyer, which he’d left feeding! If someone should find it out there…

  He reached out his mind to the creature, discovered it gorging still, cursed long and loud but this time silently and to himself. He’d never get the beast aloft now. But at least he could send it away from here.

  Go! he commanded it. Flop, waddle, squirm, slither, but go! Westward, half a mile at least, and there hide. As best you can, anyway. And in his mind he felt the stupid creature moving instantly to obey him.

  Then, satisfied that the flyer would put distance between itself, Volse’s dead creature, and what — or whoever else might possibly be in the vicinity, Shaithis returned to the problem at hand. Earlier, the old thing in the ice had been awakened by a fall of icicles. So be it.

  Exploring an upper terrace, the vampire Lord found a vast spout of ice like a frozen waterfall, and at its fringe many lesser formations. One of these icicles, some four feet long and nine inches through its stem, he snapped off and carried back to the ice-encased husk of Kehrl Lugoz. Since the petrified old fool couldn’t be roused by mental means, let him start awake at the entirely physical shattering of this great blade of ice against his sheath.

  Fully absorbed in his task, Shaithis failed to detect the furtive approach of others up the ice staircase. He ‘shouted’ telepathically at the frozen, ice-distorted figure where it sat: KEHRL LUGOZ, WAKE UP! Then swung back his icicle hammer to smash it against the face of Lugoz’s sheath. But the great icicle refused to swing, because something was impeding it!

  Hissing and spitting his shock from the red-ribbed vault of his throat out over the glistening, vibrating arch of his forked tongue — eyes bulging and crimson, and with his less than human features instinctively flowing into a fearsomely inhuman wolf-mask — Shaithis glanced back over his shoulder, then dropped the great icicle and reached for his gauntlet. But in that same instant a huge talon of a hand fell upon his wrist and trapped it, and Shaithis stared into the grim grey faces of two fellow survivors from the battle for The Dweller’s garden: Fess Ferenc and Volse Pinescu!

  He snatched back his hand and stumbled away from them. ‘Damn your hearts!’ he snarled, panting. ‘But you’ve learned stealth, you two!’

  ‘We’ve learned a great many things.’ Volse Pinescu choked the words out past a huge scab of crusted pus which half-sealed his lips, impeding his speech. ‘Not least how the “invincible” vampire army of Shaithis of the Wamphyri could be burned and blasted and crushed, its aeries destroyed, and its survivors banished like whipped dogs into eternal wastelands of ice!’

  Volse’s boil-festooned face turned purple with fury as he took a heavy, threatening step closer to Shaithis. But the Ferenc’s temper was less volatile. With his great height and strength, and with his terrible hands, he didn’t much need to work up a rage in himself. ‘We’ve lost a great deal, Shaithis,’ he rumbled. ‘Since coming here it’s dawned on us just how much. Aye, for this is a cold and lonely place.’

  ‘Cold?’ Shaithis blustered. ‘What is cold to the Wamphyri? You’ll get used to it.’

  Volse strained his head forward aggressively, and a batch of boils on the left side of his neck burst and spurted their yellow pus on to the ice. ‘Oh?’ he gurgled. ‘Like he got used to it, d’you mean?’ He inclined his loathsomely decorated head sharply towards Kehrl Lugoz seated motionless as a mountain not three impenetrable feet away. ‘Him and all the others we’ve found, encysted in their echoing fortresses of ice?’

  ‘Others?’ Shaithis looked uncertainly from Volse to the Ferenc, then back again.

  ‘Dozens of them,’ Fess Ferenc finally answered, nodding his huge, acromegalic head. ‘All taken to the ice, clutching at straws, waiting out their time until some magical thaw shall come and free them into a land filled with life. Or until they die. For the cold of this place is not like the cold of Starside, Shaithis. Here it goes on for ever! Get used to it?’ (Now he echoed Volse Pinescu). ‘Resist it? Warm ourselves? Stoke up our internal fires against it? But fires need fuel — the blood is the life! And with what do we sustain ourselves while we’re “getting used to it”? Blood cools, Shaithis, trickle by trickle, hour by hour. Limbs stiffen, and even the stoutest heart runs slow.’

  Now Volse took it up. ‘You ask: what is cold to the Wamphyri? Hah! How often were you cold on Starside, Shaithis? I’ll tell you: never! The heat of the hunt kept you warm, the blaze of battle, the hot salt blood of trog or Traveller. Your bed was warm and welcoming at sunup, as were the breasts and buttocks of the lusty women who sucked the sting from your tail. All of these things you had to keep you warm. We all had them! And we had a “leader” who said to us: “Let’s band together and take The Dweller’s garden.” And now what have we got?’

  Shaithis looked at the Ferenc, who shrugged and said: ‘We have been here longer than you. It is cold and we grow colder. Worse, we grow hungry…’ His voice was now a growl.

  Volse’s hand touched the ugly gauntlet at his hip… tentatively… perhaps thoughtfully… it could mean anything. But Shaithis backed away.

  And as the threatened Lord plunged his hand into his own gauntlet and flexed it there, displaying its gleaming knives, rasps and cutting edges, Fess Ferenc raised an eyebrow and rumbled: ‘Two to one, Shaithis? Do you like such odds, then?’

  ‘Not especially,’ Shaithis hissed, ‘but I’ll make sure you lose at least as much blood as you drink! Where’s the profit in that?’

  Volse grunted, coughed up yellow phlegm and spat it out. ‘I — say — it — would — be worth it!’ He went into a crouch, and now he too wore his gauntlet.

  But the Ferenc only relaxed, stepped aside, shrugged again and said: ‘Fight if you wish, you two. Myself, I’d prefer to eat. Full bellies are less fierce, and brains with blood in them more capable of clever scheming.’ His maxim might not fit men, but certainly it was applicable to the Wamphyri.

  Volse, seeing he stood alone, thought twice. And: ‘Hah!’ he snorted, this time at the Ferenc. ‘But it seems your mind schemes just as well when you’re hungry, Fess! For if we were to fight, Shaithis and I, why, you’d sup on the loser — and so make yourself stronger than the winner!’ He nodded and removed his gauntlet. ‘I’m no such fool.’

  The Ferenc scratched his jutting jaw and grinned, however grimly. ‘Strange, but I had always considered you just such a fool…’

  Shaithis, still wary, hung his own gauntlet at his belt, finally nodded and took out from his pouch a purple heart as big as his fist. ‘Here, if you’re so hungry.’ And he tossed it. Volse snatched it from the air and closed slavering jaws upon it. But the Ferenc only shook his head.

  ‘Red and spurting for me,’ he said. ‘While I can get it, anyway.’

  Shaithis frowned and narrowed his eyes suspiciously as the giant started down the ice-steps. ‘What’s your plan?’ he snapped. ‘Who will you kill?’

  ‘Not who but what,’ the Ferenc answered over his shoulder. ‘And I’ll not kill it but merely deplete it little by little. I should think it’s obvious.’

  Shaithis and Volse went skidding after him. ‘What?’ Volse questioned round a mouthful of bear heart. ‘Something’s obvious?’

  The Ferenc glanced back at him. ‘What did you eat when you crashed your exhausted flyer here?’ he said.

  ‘Ah-hah!’ Volse spat out chunks of cold dark flesh.

  ‘What?’ Shaithi
s grabbed the Ferenc’s huge shoulder. ‘Are you talking about my flyer? Would you maroon me here for ever?’

  The Ferenc paused, turned, looked him straight in the eye. Two steps lower than Shaithis, still the giant looked him in the eye. ‘And why not?’ he answered. ‘Since it seems to me that you’re the reason we’re all marooned here?’

  ‘No!’ Shaithis spat at him, and stabbed again for his gauntlet — and the Ferenc at once swept him from the stairs!

  Shaithis fell. Too depleted and restricted for metamorphosis into an airfoil, he could only grit his teeth and wait for gravity to do its worst. On the way down he struck several ice-ledges but suffered no real damage, until at the last he crashed down on his shoulder and chest — in snow! Merciful snow!

  Blown in through an arched ice-window, the drift was three or four feet deep with a thick crust of ice. Shaithis crunched through the latter, compressed the former, wrenched his right shoulder and broke a pair of recently healed ribs. And then he lay there in his agony and cursed Fess Ferenc from the depths of his black heart!

  Curse me all you will, Shaithis. The Ferenc had heard him. But I’m sure you’ll think better of it. Of course you will, for it was you or your flyer, after all. Volse would have chosen you: for there’s a vampire in you! Ah, the very essence! But personally, I think it were better if you live. A little while longer, at least.

  Shaithis stood up, staggered away, looked for a place to hide. He allowed his hurt to wash over him, deliberately conjuring all the agonies of his crash on Starside, when he’d broken his body and face, and of his fight with the she-bears, to add to the pain of this latest tumble. And these were the false impressions of severe damage which he let flood out of him, to be picked up and (hopefully) wrongly translated by the Ferenc’s vampire mind. Volse might conceivably read them, too, but Shaithis doubted it. The boil-fancier was a dullard, too much obsessed with the manufacture of abscesses.

  What? the Ferenc seemed surprised, however uncaring. That much pain? Did you crash down face-first, Shaithis? He offered a grim mental chuckle. Well, and now you know how I’ve felt all this time, for your face has always been hurtful to me!

  Aye, (Shaithis could not restrain himself), laugh long and loud, Fess Ferenc! But remember: he who laughs last…

  The Ferenc’s chuckling faded in Shaithis’s mind, and: Not too seriously hurt, then? A pity. Or perhaps you merely put a brave face on it? But in any case, I think a warning is in order: don’t interfere, Shaithis. If you think to command your flyer into flight, forget it. For if we can’t find your creature, then be sure we’ll come back for you. Order it to attack us, still we’ll triumph in the end. For as you know well enow, flyers make poor warriors and our thoughts would stab it like arrows. And then we’d come back for you! But only let it be our way and make no protest, and for some little time to come… well, at least you’ll know where to go when you’re hungry. And for as long as your flyer lasts — and provided we are not in the vicinity when you go to feed — then you shall last just precisely so long, Shaithis of the Wamphyri.

  Shaithis found a deep, sheltered ice-niche in the castle’s labyrinth and hid himself away. He wrapped himself in his cloak and toned down his vibrant vampire aura. Now must be a time of healing. Perhaps he would sleep and conserve his energy. And there was still a little bear-heart left over for when he awakened. So long as he guarded his thoughts and his dreams alike, Volse Pinescu and Fess Ferenc would not find him.

  But first there was something he must know. Why, Fess? he sent out one last telepathic question. You could have killed me yet let me live. Not out of the ‘goodness’ of your heart, surely. So why?

  Halfway down the ice-stairs, the Ferenc smiled with a mouth almost as wide as his face. You were ever a thinker, Shaithis, he answered. Aye, and a clever one at that. Oh, you’ve made mistakes, certainly, but the man who never made a mistake never made anything. The way I see it, if there’s a way out of this place you’ll find it. And when you do I’ll be right behind you.

  And if I don’t?

  (The Ferenc’s mental shrug): Blood is blood, Shaithis. And yours is good and rich. Let one thing be clearly understood: if this is as far as we go — if the ice is our destiny — then at the last I shall be the one who sits encased awaiting the Great Thaw. Fess Ferenc and none other. But I shall not go hungry to my fate…

  Two exiled Wamphyri Lords — one grotesque and huge, and the other hugely grotesque — left the glittering ice-castle and sniffed the bitter air, then let their snouts guide them to Shaithis’s doomed beast.

  Meat was not the flyer’s usual fare; its diet would normally consist of crushed bone, grasses from Sunside, honey and other sweet liquids, and some blood. Having metamorphic flesh, however, it was capable of consuming almost anything organic. On this occasion, having gorged itself on the frozen flesh of another flyer, it must now rest until the food was digested and converted. Bloated, it no longer lay where the ex-Lords had first spied it beside the gnawed carcass of Volse’s flyer, but had found shelter slumped in the lee of a great block of ice half a mile to the west, where Shaithis had sent it.

  Forming great saucer eyes in its leathery flanks, the dull, stupid thing gloomed on the Ferenc and Volse Pinescu and lolled its diamond head at them as they approached. Moist and heavy-lidded, its eyes ‘saw’ but could scarcely comprehend. Until the flyer was instructed to do something, and then by its rightful master, Shaithis himself, it would do nothing, not even think. Oh, it would seek to protect itself to a degree, but never so far as to harm one of the Wamphyri. For stabs of concentrated vampire telepathy could sting such creatures like darts, bringing them to trembling submission in a moment. Thus, while the flyer would not fly for Fess or Volse, it would lie still for them. Even when they sliced into its warm underbelly to sever great pipes of veins, which they would then suck open.

  Shaithis, in his niche in the ice-castle, ‘heard’ the huge creature’s first mental bleat of distress and was tempted to issue orders, such as: Roll, crush these men who torment you! Bound up and fall upon them! Even now, at a distance, he could transmit such commands and know that the flyer would instantly, instinctively obey him. But he also knew that while the beast might injure the Lords it could not kill them, and he remembered the Ferenc’s warning. To set the flyer upon them (unless it could be guaranteed to incapacitate them utterly) would be to place himself in direst jeopardy. Which was why he ground his teeth a little but otherwise lay still and did nothing.

  To Shaithis it seemed a great waste: his good flyer, used for food. Especially since Volse’s flyer — literally two tons of excellent if not especially appetizing meat — already lay out there going to waste. Except even that were not entirely true. Frozen, the creature would not waste but remain available for long and long. But Shaithis knew that there was more than mere hunger in it; the Ferenc had a purpose other than to fill his belly.

  For one, the beast would be left so depleted by this first gluttonous ‘visit’ of Fess and Volse that any further aerial voyagings would be out of the question; which meant that Shaithis was now stuck here no less than the others. It was partly the Ferenc’s way of paying him back for his failure in the battle for The Dweller’s garden, but it was mainly something else.

  For the fact was that indeed Shaithis had been the great thinker, with a capacity for scheming which had set him above and apart even from his own kind, the universally devious Wamphyri. If any man could find his way out of the Icelands, then Shaithis had to be the one. An escape which must likewise benefit Fess Ferenc, who would doubtless follow his lead. And as Fess had so vividly pointed out, this was the reason Shaithis’s life had been spared: so that he could concentrate on survival to the benefit of all the exiles.

  That ‘all’, of course, meaning Fess Ferenc specifically; for Shaithis had no doubt but that eventually (unless there should occur some large and unforeseen reversal) the entirely loathsome Volse Pinescu must surely go the way of all flesh. As to why the Ferenc had so far suffered Volse to live
: perhaps he simply couldn’t abide the thought of eating him! Shaithis allowed himself a grin, however pained and bitter, before re-examining the question of Volse’s survival. A much more likely explanation would be the loneliness and boredom of these Icelands; perhaps the giant Fess craved companionship! Certainly Shaithis, in the short time he’d been here, had felt a great weight of loneliness pressing down upon him… or had he?

  For all that this place appeared utterly dead and empty of any noteworthy intelligence, still he was not convinced. Even here in his ice-niche, with his thoughts well shielded, still there was this instinctive tingle of awareness in his vampire being, a suspicion in his vampire mind that… someone observed him in his trials? Possibly. But to know or suspect it was one thing, and to prove it another entirely.

  Wherefore he would now sleep and let his vampire heal him, and later turn his attention to matters of more permanent survival -

  — Not to mention a small matter of revenge, of course.

  Battening his mind more securely yet, Shaithis settled down and for the first time felt the cold, the physical cold, beginning to bite. And he knew that the Ferenc and Volse Pinescu had been correct: even Wamphyri flesh must eventually succumb to a chill such as that of these Icelands. There could be no denying it, not in the face of such evidence as Kehrl Lugoz.

  Then, even as Shaithis made to close his right eye (for the left would remain open, even in sleep), something small, soft and white hovered for a moment before his face, finally darting away with tiny, near-inaudible chittering cries into upper aeries of undisclosed ice. But not before Shaithis had recognized it. Pink-eyed, that tiny flutterer, with membrane wings and a wrinkled, pink-veined snout. A dwarf albino bat, it gave Shaithis an idea.

  By now Volse Pinescu and the Ferenc would be absorbed in their meal, probably numb from their gluttony. Shaithis would risk opening his mind again. He reached out and called to the ice-castle’s bats, which eventually came to him. Fearful at first, finally they settled to him singly, then in twos and threes, and at last almost buried him in their soft, snowy blanket. An entire colony of the creatures, they crowded into Shaithis’s niche.