Page 9 (2/2)
’What?’ Shaithis grabbed the Ferenc’s huge shoulder ’Are you talking about my flyer? Would you maroon me here for ever?’
The Ferenc paused, turned, looked hiht 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 hiauntlet - and the Ferenc at once swept him from the stairs!
Shaithis fell Too depleted and restricted for rit his teeth and wait for gravity to do its worst On the way down he struck several ice-ledges but suffered no real dae, until at the last he crashed down on his shoulder and chest - in snow! Merciful snow!
Blown in through an arched ice-, the drift was three or four feet deep with a thick crust of ice Shaithis crunched through the latter, coht 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 hionies 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 tue which he let flood out of hily translated by the Ferenc’s vaht 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 see That much pain? Did you crash down face-first, Shaithis? He offered a grim mental chuckle Well, and now you kno I’ve felt all this time, for your face has always been hurtful toand loud, Fess Ferenc! But re 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 coet 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 knoell enow, flyers hts 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 tio 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 va 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 hi he must know Why, Fess? he sent out one last telepathic question You could have killed oodness’ 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 theThe 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 ood 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 e, 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 norrasses from Sunside, honey and other sweet liquids, and soaled itself on the frozen flesh of another flyer, it ested 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 slureat block of ice half a reat 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 co, and then by its rightful , 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 vaing the submission in a moment Thus, while the flyer would not fly for Fess or Volse, it would lie still for thereat 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 hiht injure the Lords it could not kill the To set the flyer upon theuaranteed to incapacitate them utterly) would be to place hiround his teeth a little but otherwise lay still and did nothing
To Shaithis it seeood flyer, used for food Especially since Volse’s flyer - literally two tons of excellent if not especially appetizingto waste Except even that were not entirely true Frozen, the creature would not waste but re But Shaithis knew that there was er 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 hiarden, but it waselse
For the fact was that indeed Shaithis had been the great thinker, with a capacity for sche 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, ould 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,Fess Ferenc specifically; for Shaithis had no doubt but that eventually (unless there should occur soe and unforeseen reversal) the entirely loathsoo the way of all flesh As to why the Ferenc had so far suffered Volse to live: perhaps he si hirin, however pained and bitter, before re-exa the question of Volse’s survival A much more likely explanation would be the loneliness and boredoiant Fess craved companionship! Certainly Shaithis, in the short tiht of loneliness pressing down upon himor had he?
For all that this place appeared utterly dead and eence, 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 va, 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 pere, of course
Battening his mind more securely yet, Shaithis settled down and for the first ti 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 Ice-lands There could be no denying it, not in the face of such evidence as Kehrl Lugoz
Then, even as Shaithis ht eye (for the left would re small, soft and white hovered for aaith tiny, near-inaudible chittering cries into upper aeries of undisclosed ice But not before Shaithis had recognized it Pink-eyed, that tiny flutterer, with s 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 luttony Shaithis would risk opening his ain He reached out and called to the ice-castle’s bats, which eventually caly, 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
And with their s 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 froarden 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 , 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 froht possibly be a warh Now they turned slowly on bone hooks suspended fro 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 Waht have been harder to take But ti with all of their rich red blood
As for the four Wamphyri Lords: Shaitan was ratherthemselves 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 the time, and time takes its toll ofNoas tired? If it must be admitted, even his vareater part of hi 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 si 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 caht down to it there were plenty of better ways to die Aye, and now that the exiles were here there ht be more and better reasons to stay alive, too
Especially this ’Shaithis’
Indeed, with a naht 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 tirey, his dreaht And red
A dreaour, 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 hi purpose to that which was otherwise untenable
But while the drearown 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 meta-morphism of his vampire had transcended the deterioration of the host body until theonly rudians and appendages But the fused reat deal had been forgotten, still the accue - was vast And EVIL
Shaitan’s EVIL was fathoence and evil are not incompatible Indeed they are complementary The murderer requires a mind to construct his clever alibi An idiot cannot build an atooodness, which in Shaitan was absolute His was an EVIL which aze upon the cinders and find theht’s opposite; he could even be said to be the Priht Which was the reason why even the Wa how he knew, that he’d been banished long before that
Banishedby Good? By sonostic, 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 theh In three and a half thousand years a s, from the remotely trivial to the infinitely profound For the in was not iht well be part and parcel of this , called Shaithis
In the Old Times the Wamphyri had na-recipients, common vampires - all had adopted the naed 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 o found favour in Radu’s scarlet eyes - was now Arkis Leperson He carried Radu’s egg
Similarly Fess Ferenc was the bloodson (born of wo birth to the giant, whose size was such it ireat error, that While yet a youth Fess had killed Ion, then opened his body to steal and devour his va 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 one to Shaithar Shaitan-son, who in his turn had become a father of vampires And Shaitan’s bloodspawned children had been na, and so on While a Shaithar Shaitanson’s spawn had been one called Sheilar the Slut, and possibly others with siinal 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 hiht 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, theit toplace 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 s away from him into the frozen labyrinth of the ice-castle, then out of that aht of the world
Some short time later, the albino swooped down inside the all but extinct central cone to Shaitan’s sulphur-yellow apart on his command
From his dark corner he commanded it: Come, little one I won’t crush you
The tiny creature flew to his and fastened to Shaitan’s hand? It coughed up spittle and ht splash of ruby blood And: Good! said Shaitan Now go Only too pleased to obey, the bat hastened from its master and left hiazed 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 , born of hideous instinct - from which he would know that this was just the blood of a common 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 hie