Necroscope V: Deadspawn n-5

by Brian Lumley

  And with their small bodies warming him, so he slept…

  The minion bats of Shaitan the Unborn (also called the Fallen) not only warmed Shaithis where he slept but also watched him, as they had since his arrival. They had watched Fess Ferenc and Volse Pinescu, too; also Arkis Leperson and his thralls (both of whom, within a period of just two auroral displays, Arkis had drained before secreting their bloodless corpses in cold-storage in a glacier) and a pair of Menor Maimbite’s lieutenants, released from thraldom by Menor’s death in the battle for the garden. All of these had wended their various ways here, whose subsequent activities the miniature albinos had faithfully reported back to their immemorial master, Shaitan.

  The last-mentioned duo, ex-Travellers vampirized by Menor, had been the first of this fresh crop of exiles to get here. Having exhausted their dead master’s finest flyer, they had crashed its panting, desiccated carcass in the salt sea at the edge of the Icelands and covered the last thirty miles afoot. Then they’d seen the smoke which Shaitan deliberately sent up from his chimney, and dragged themselves to what might possibly be a warm place. Well, and it had proved warm enough. Now they turned slowly on bone hooks suspended from the low ceiling of an ancient lava blowhole which opened on the volcano’s west-facing flank: Shaitan’s ice-cavern larder.

  The lieutenants had been easy meat; they had no vampires in them; their minds and flesh had been altered but they were not yet Wamphyri. Given a hundred years or more and they might have been harder to take. But time had run out for them right here and now, along with all of their rich red blood.

  As for the four Wamphyri Lords: Shaitan was rather more leery of them. Let them fight among themselves first, wear themselves out. It seemed only prudent. In his youth (which Shaitan scarcely remembered), ah, it would have been different then! He’d have had the measure of all of these and four more just like them. But three and a half thousand years is a long time, and time takes its toll of more than memory. Indeed, of almost everything. Now he was… tired? If it must be admitted, even his vampire was tired! And his vampire was by far the greater part of him.

  Not ailing, frail or dying tired, just… tired. Of the unrelenting cold, which periodically would cut through the volcanic rock to the mountain’s heart, even to the blowhole caverns in its roots; of the interminably dull routine of existence; quite simply, of the sameness and emptiness of being in these eternal, ageless Icelands.

  But not yet tired of life. Not utterly.

  Certainly not to the extent that Shaitan would advertise his presence to such as Fess, Volse, Shaithis and Arkis Leperson! No, for when you came right down to it there were plenty of better ways to die. Aye, and now that the exiles were here there might be more and better reasons to stay alive, too.

  Especially this ‘Shaithis’.

  Indeed, with a name like that he might even prove to be the realization — the embodiment? — of a totally new existence. This last was only a dream of Shaitan’s, true, but it had not faded with time. While all else had turned grey, his dream had stayed clear and bright. And red.

  A dream of youth, renewed vigour, a victorious return to Starside and Sunside and of laying them waste, and then the invasion of worlds beyond. Shaitan’s belief, his instinctive conviction that indeed such worlds existed, had sustained him through all the monotonous centuries of his exile, giving purpose to that which was otherwise untenable.

  But while the dream remained young and bright, the dreamer had grown old and somewhat tarnished. Not in his mind but in his body. The human parts of Shaitan had wasted, been replaced by inhuman tissues; the metamorphism of his vampire had transcended the deterioration of the host body until the man-part had disappeared almost entirely, leaving only rudimentary or vestigial traces of the original flesh, organs and appendages. But the fused mind of man and vampire remained, and for all that a great deal had been forgotten, still the accumulation of that mind’s contents — its knowledge — was vast. And EVIL.

  Shaitan’s EVIL was fathomless, but he was not mad. For intelligence and evil are not incompatible. Indeed they are complementary. The murderer requires a mind to construct his clever alibi. An idiot cannot build an atomic weapon.

  Evil is the perverse rejection of goodness, which in Shaitan was absolute. His was an EVIL which might put the universe itself to the torch, then gaze upon the cinders and find them good! He was Darkness, Light’s opposite; he could even be said to be the Primal Darkness, which opposed the Primal Light. Which was the reason why even the Wamphyri had banished him. But he knew, without knowing how he knew, that he’d been banished long before that.

  Banished… by Good? By some benevolent God? No metagnostic, still Shaitan could conceive of such a One. For how may EVIL exist without GOOD? But for now -

  — He put such thoughts aside. He’d thought them for long enough. In three and a half thousand years a mind has time to think many things, from the remotely trivial to the infinitely profound. For the moment his origin was not important, but his destiny was. And his destiny might well be part and parcel of this man, this being, called Shaithis.

  In the Old Times the Wamphyri had named their ‘sons’ after themselves. Bloodsons, egg-recipients, common vampires — all had adopted the name of their sire. The custom had changed somewhat but not entirely. Arkis Leperson was the recipient son of his leper father Radu Arkis: ‘Arkis the Leper’, they’d called him. Wherefore his ‘son’ — a Traveller lieutenant who more than a century ago found favour in Radu’s scarlet eyes — was now Arkis Leperson. He carried Radu’s egg.

  Similarly Fess Ferenc was the bloodson (born of woman) of Ion Ferenc; his Traveller mother died giving birth to the giant, whose size was such it impressed his father to let him live. A great error, that. While yet a youth Fess had killed Ion, then opened his body to steal and devour his vampire egg whole. This way Ion could not pass it to any other, and his aerie on Starside must devolve ‘naturally’ to Fess.

  Shaitan, in his day, had sired many offspring and by various means, but his egg had gone to Shaithar Shaitanson, who in his turn had become a father of vampires. And Shaitan’s bloodspawned children had been named Shaithos, Shailar the Hagridden, Shaithag, and so on. While among Shaithar Shaitanson’s spawn had been one called Sheilar the Slut, and possibly others with similar-sounding names, derived from the One Original. And all of these before Shaitan himself was banished.

  Wherefore… was it too much to ask, too improbable, that three thousand years later this one, this Shaithis, should now appear, banished like his forebear before him? Shaitan thought not. But a direct descendant? The blood is the life, and only blood would tell.

  Yes, blood would tell.

  Take from him, Shaitan commanded the miniature officers of his law. Just one of you. A nip, the merest sip. Take from him and bring it to me. He said no more.

  And in his ice-crevice hiding place Shaithis scarcely felt the fish-hook-sharp needles that punctured the lobe of his ear and drew blood, and was only faintly aware of the whir of small wings making away from him into the frozen labyrinth of the ice-castle, then out of that amazing sculpture and into the star-bright night of the world.

  Some short time later, the albino swooped down inside the all but extinct central cone to Shaitan’s sulphur-yellow apartments, and there hovered, waiting on his command.

  From his dark corner he commanded it: Come, little one. I won’t crush you.

  The tiny creature flew to him, folded its wings and fastened to Shaitan’s… hand? It coughed up spittle and mucus into what passed for a palm, and one small bright splash of ruby blood. And: Good! said Shaitan. Now go. Only too pleased to obey, the bat hastened from its master and left him to his own devices.

  Fascinated, for a long while Shaitan gazed at the ruby droplet. It was blood, and the blood is the life. He waited impatiently for the vampire flesh of his hand to open into a tiny mouth and sip the droplet in — an automatic thing, born of hideous instinct — from which he would know that this was just the blood of a comm
on man. But he waited in vain, for like himself Shaithis was uncommon. Very much like himself.

  And: ‘Mine!’ said Shaitan at last, in a croaking, shuddering, delighted whisper. ‘Flesh of my flesh!’

  At which the droplet quivered and soaked through the leprous skin of his hand, and into him as if he were a sponge…

  3 The Ferenc’s Story

  Shaithis slept long and long.

  The bats kept him warm (at least kept him from freezing solid in his ice-niche); his wounds healed; his thoughts, like Shaithis himself, remained hidden. Until it was time to rouse himself and be up and about. Which was when his hiding place was discovered.

  What!? Who!? The astonished, involuntary mental exclamations brought Shaithis starting awake, echoing in his mind. While still the echoes rang he was on his feet, his blanket of albino bats breaking up in chittering disarray, whirring away from him like a shock of sentient snow. Another moment and his hand filled his gauntlet; he let his Wamphyri senses reach out — but cautiously, tentatively — to discover who was there. Whoever, he must be near, else he wouldn’t have sensed Shaithis’s emergence.

  While sleeping, Shaithis’s thoughts had flowed inwards, an art in which he was adept; his dreams could not be ‘heard’ by any other. But during the transition from deep, healing sleep to waking they had escaped like a yawn, and someone had been close enough to hear it. Too close by far.

  Shaithis allowed his mental probe to touch that of the other, and immediately snatched it back. Contact had been brief but recognition mutual: insufficient to detail specific identities, but enough that each creature was certain of the other’s presence. Shaithis glanced this way and that. There was only one way out of his niche; if he was trapped then he was trapped; so be it.

  Who is it? he sniffed the cold air with his bat’s snout. Is it you, Fess, come for your supper? Or must I soil my good gauntlet in pus to tear out the loathsome heart of the odious Volse Pinescu?

  And back came the answer, like an astonished gasp in the vampire’s mind: Hah! Shaithis! You survived The Dweller’s death-beams, then?

  Arkis Leperson! Shaithis knew him at once. He breathed his relief, watched curiously for a moment while his breath fell as snow, then made for the exit. Along the way he flexed his muscles, swung his limbs, inhaled deeply and tested his ribs. All seemed in order. Pah! What had those minor dents and scratches been for wounds anyway? Repairs had been minimal; his vampire flesh had scarcely been overtaxed; he was left with an ache here, a bruise there.

  Arkis stood close to the foot of the ice-staircase. He was squat for a Lord of the Wamphyri: scarcely more than six feet tall — ah, but a good three feet broad, too! A massive barrel of a man, his strength had been prodigious. Now: it seemed he’d lost a little weight. Shaithis moved towards him, closing the distance between with the easy, flowing glide of the vampire; sinister to ordinary men, but normal by Wamphyri standards. In another moment they were face to face.

  ‘Well,’ said Shaithis, ‘and is it peace? Or are you too hungry to think straight? I’ll be frank: I could use a friend. And by the look of you… huh! Our circumstances are much the same. The choice is yours, but I know where there’s food!’

  The other’s entirely instinctive reaction was a single belched word: ‘Food?’ His eyes opened wide and his flaring, convoluted snout plumed ice-crystal breath.

  Plainly Arkis was starving. Shaithis offered him a grim smile, took from his pouch the last piece of cold bear-heart and devoured half in a single bite, then tossed the rest to the leper’s son — who snatched it from the air with a cry almost of pain. And without pause he crammed his mouth full.

  Arkis had been sired by Morgis Griefcry out of a Traveller waif. She’d been a leper and her infection had taken Morgis in his member which (along with his lips, eyes and ears) had been among the first of his parts to slough. The disease had been like a fire in him, burning him faster than his vampire could replenish. Finally, with cries of grief echoing his name to the full, Morgis had taken a firebrand and hurled himself and his Traveller odalisque into a refuse pit whose accumulation of methane gas had done the rest. His suicide had left Arkis the youthful Lord and heir to a fine aerie. Even better, Arkis had not contracted his forebears’ disease! Not yet, anyway. Perhaps he never would. It had all been many sundowns agone.

  While Arkis ate, Shaithis studied him.

  Squat in the body, Arkis’s skull was likewise squat, as if it had been crushed down a little. His face seemed pushed out in front, and his bottom jaw farther yet, with boar’s teeth curving upward over his fleshy upper lip. And yet the overall effect wasn’t so much swinish as wolfish, especially with the inordinate length of his furred, tapering ears. Aye, somewhere in his lineage there’d been a grey one for sure. Moreover, he was lean as a wolf; well, by the standards of former times, at least. Now, eyes ablaze with the lust of feeding, upon however small a morsel, he nevertheless narrowed them to gaze on Shaithis. And when he was done: Til grant you it was a bite,’ he grunted, ‘but was that the food you promised?’

  ‘I made no promises,’ Shaithis answered. ‘I stated a fact: I know where there’s food — by the ton!’

  ‘Ah!’ the other grunted, and cocked his head on one side. ‘Volse’s flyer, d’you mean? Ah, but they guard it well, Volse and the Ferenc. It’s a mousetrap, Shaithis; only approach their private pantry too closely and you’ll end up in it! No chivalry here, my friend. Cold, crystallized meat can never taste as good as red juice of meat spurting from a severed artery! But… beggars can’t be choosers. I have tried and failed; they’re never too far away; I know they lust after my blood.’

  ‘Are you reduced to this?’ Shaithis raised a black, spiky eyebrow. ‘Scavenging after each other?’ He knew of course that they were; knew that he would be, too, soon enough. The ‘chivalry’ of the Wamphyri was at best a myth. But in any case, his insult — the word ‘scavenging’ — was lost on Arkis Leperson.

  ‘Shaithis,’ said the other, ‘I’ve been here four, going on five sundowns; five auroral displays, anyway, which I reckon amounts to much the same thing. Reduced to hunting each other? Let me tell you that if it moves I’ll hunt it! I had bats by the handful at first: squeezed ‘em to pulp so they’d drip into my mouth — then ate the pulp, too! — but now they won’t come anywhere near me. They have minds of their own, these tiny albinos. Right now, I’m on my way to see the shrivelled old granddad frozen in the ice up top. I’d have tried to get at him before, if I was desperate enough — which now I am! So don’t talk to me about being reduced to this or that. We’re all reduced, Shaithis, and you no less than anyone else!’

  So maybe Shaithis’s insult had got through after all. That came as something of a surprise; the leper’s son had always seemed such a dullard. Perhaps the cold had sharpened his wits.

  ‘Arkis,’ Shaithis said, ‘there are two of us now and we’ve shared food. That’s good, for it strikes me we’ll do better as a team. While you’ve been here you’ve learned things and must know many of the pitfalls. Such knowledge has value. Also, the disgusting Volse Pinescu and gigantic Fess Ferenc will think twice before coming on the two of us together. Now, what say we leave this echoing shell of ice and find our breakfast?’

  The leper’s son sighed his impatience, which angered Shaithis a little: he wasn’t used to dull, squat creatures playing the equal with him. ‘Now let me repeat myself,’ Arkis grunted. ‘They guard Volse’s flyer, and guard it well! They’re likewise well-fuelled, which we’re not. And as you yourself have just this minute pointed out, the Ferenc’s a bloody giant!’

  Shaithis flared his nostrils and for a moment thought to leave the fool to his own devices. Except that would also mean leaving him to the tender mercies of the others — eventually. And Shaithis wanted Arkis for himself — eventually. But these were thoughts he steered inwards, lest Arkis hear them. ‘And can they guard two beasts?’ he said. ‘And did you think I’d walked here, Arkis Diredeath?’ (the idiot’s other name).

  It stopped
Arkis dead. ‘Eh? Another flyer? I haven’t seen it. But then, I’ve not dared venture too far out on the ice lest they see me! Where then, this flyer?’

  ‘Where I sent it,’ said Shaithis. ‘Still good and fresh and… wait a moment — ‘ He sent out a beast-oriented thought: Do you hear me? — and in return sensed life flickering still, but burning very low. ‘Aye, and not yet bled to death. Not quite.’

  ‘They know it’s there, that great vat of filth and the Ferenc?’

  ‘Of course, else I’d not require assistance from you.’

  ‘Hah!’ Arkis cried. ‘I might have known it! Something for nothing? What? Think again, Arkis my lad. This is the Grand Lord Shaithis you’re talking to. Oh, let’s be friends, Arkis — because I’ve need of you!’

  ‘So be it.’ Shaithis shrugged. ‘I merely envisaged a joint venture which would furnish joint returns, that’s all. Equal shares. But something for nothing? What, and did you think this was Sunside at sundown, with plenty of sweet Traveller game afoot?’ He made as if to turn away. ‘Starve, then.’

  ‘Wait!’ The other took a pace closer. And in a more reasonable tone: ‘What’s your plan?’

  ‘None,’ said Shaithis, ‘except to eat.’

  ‘Eh?’

  Shaithis’s turn to sigh. ‘Listen, and I’ll ask you again: can they guard two flyers, Volse and the Ferenc?’

  ‘Certainly — a man to each.’

  ‘But we are two men!’

  ‘And if they’re both together?’

  ‘Then one beast goes unguarded! Has the cold numbed your once agile brain, Arkis?’ (That last was a lie, but a little flattery wouldn’t hurt.)

  ‘Hmm!’ The leper’s son thought about it for a moment, then scowled and stabbed a finger at Shaithis. ‘Very well — but if we come upon Volse Pinescu on his own, we kill him. And I want his heart! Is it a deal?’