Necroscope V: Deadspawn

1 The Icelands

The Great Wamphyri Lords Belath, Lesk the Glut, Menor Maimbite, Lascula Longtooth and Tor Tornbody were no more. All of these and many lesser Wamphyri lights, their lieutenants and warrior-creatures, all wiped out by The Dweller and his father in the battle for The Dweller's garden. That battle was lost, the kilometre-high aeries of the Wamphyri (all except the Lady Karen's) reduced to so much stone and bone and cartilage rubble by the massed explosions of methane-belching gas-beasts, and the Wamphyri masters of Starside themselves brought low in the aftermath of their humiliating defeat.

Now Shaithis, once-leader of the vampire army, turned his hybrid flyer's head into a wind whistling out of the bitter north, and rising on its waft set course for the Icelands. He was not the first of the Wamphyri to venture that way. Over the centuries others had gone before him, exiled or fled there, and after the battle at the garden certain survivors of his army had headed that way, too. Better the Icelands, whatever they held in store, than the awesome weapons of The Dweller and his father. Aye, those two, father and son: mere men. But men with talents; men come out of the hell-lands beyond the sphere-Gate; who used the power of the sun itself to blow away the protoplasmic, metamorphic flesh of the Wamphyri into superheated gas and stinking evaporation!

Harry Keogh and his son, called The Dweller: they had destroyed Shaithis's army, ruined his plans, reduced him almost to nothing. But almost nothing is still something, and in all creation there does not exist anything more tenacious than a vampire. Shaithis, if it were at all possible and given even the smallest opportunity, would build on the vestigial power which he still was to become something again. And if and when that day should come, then the hell-landers would pay. Yes, and all who had stood alongside them in the battle for the garden.

The Lady Karen had stood with them, treacherous Wamphyri bitch! Shaithis jerked hard on the leather reins, yanking the gold bit in his flyer's mouth until it tore the flesh there. The creature — once a man, a Traveller, but hideously changed now through Shaithis's mutative art — uttered a complaining grunt through pluming nostrils and flapped its manta wings more rapidly, lifting higher still in the frosty air as if to reach for the cold diamond stars.

Behind Shaithis, suddenly the mountains were split by a golden bomb-burst of searing light; a sliver of sunlight struck like a spear at him from beyond the barrier mountains, from Sunside. He felt it glance against his robe of black bat fur and cringed, and knew that he'd flown too high. Sunup! The sun's slow creep was bringing its molten yellow rim into view. Cold as he was, Shaithis could feel it burning on his back.

Mind-linked to a flying beast made in large part from a man, now Shaithis instructed his weird mount: Glide! A waste of mental effort, however small, for the flyer too had felt the sun's menacing rays. Its enormous manta wings tilted upwards at their tips and stilled their pulsing; its head went down as it slid into a shallow glide; Shaithis sighed his relief and returned to his black brooding.

The Lady Karen…

A 'Mother', some said, whose vampire would one day bring forth a hundred eggs out of her body! There would be aeries again on Starside, in some unforeseen future, and all of them inhabited by Karen's black brood, and the bitch herself hive-queen of all the Wamphyri! Doubtless there would be a truce between Karen and The Dweller, peace between them, even bonds of flesh. How that could ever be Shaithis was at a loss even to think. But hadn't he with his own eyes seen Harry Keogh and Karen together in her stack, her aerie on Starside, which alone stood where all the rest were tumbled into ruins?

Karen…

Without exception, each and every vampire Lord had lusted after her body and her blood. And if things had gone their way in the battle for The Dweller's garden, Shaithis would have been first with her. Now there was a thought to savour!

Karen.

Shaithis remembered her as he had once seen her, at a meeting of all the Wamphyri Lords in Karen's aerie:

Her hair was burnished copper; seeming to burn, it bounced like fine spun gold on her shoulders, competing with the golden bangles she wore on her arms. Gold rings on a slender golden chain around her neck supported her clinging sheath of a gown, which left her jutting left breast and right buttock exposed, or very nearly, so that with no undergarments the effect had been explosive. If the Lords who saw her like that had worn war-gauntlets, and if the meeting's agenda had been anything less than of the utmost importance, then certainly the lustier Lords might have fought over her. And who among the Wamphyri was not lusty?

From one pale, perfect shoulder had depended a smoky black cloak, skilfully woven from the fur of Desmodus, which shimmered with a weave of fine golden stitches; on her feet sandals of pale leather, similarly stitched in gold; and dangling from the lobes of her ears, golden discs fretted with her sigil, which was the head of a snarling wolf.

She had been breathtaking! Shaithis had felt the thoughts of his fellow Lords turn hot as their blood, and he'd known they all wanted to be into her. Even the thoughts of the slyest, most devious of them (Shaithis himself) had been diverted — which of course had been the witch's purpose! Aye, a clever one, Karen. He could still see her, burning on his mind's eye.

Her body had the sinuous motion of Traveller women when they danced, which yet seemed so unaffected as to be innocent. Her face, heart-shaped, with a lock of that fiery hair coiled on her brow, likewise could have been innocent — except her red eyes gave her away. Her mouth was full, curved in a perfect bow; the colour of her lips, like blood, was accentuated by her pale, slightly hollow cheeks. Only her nose marred looks otherwise entirely stunning: it was a fraction tilted, stubby, with nostrils just a little too round and dark. And perhaps her ears, half-hidden in her hair, showing whorls like the strange orchids of Sunside. Beautiful but… Wamphyri, aye!

Shaithis shivered, even Shaithis. Not from the cold but from his lust, and from his loathing. It was a tremor which coursed through him like the vibrating burn of electricity. And it was the sure recognition of his ambition. To destroy The Dweller had been all of it, upon a time. But now there was more.

'One day, Karen,' Shaithis promised himself out loud, his voice a low rumble, 'one day, if there is justice, I shall have you. Ah, and while I fill you to brimming on the one hand, on the other I'll empty you to the last drop! I will feed a straw of gold directly into your heart, and for every milky driblet your sex drains from me, I shall suck a spurt of scarlet from you! Thus of our depletions, mine will be temporary while yours… yours, alas, will be permanent. So shall it be!' It was his Wamphyri oath.

And scowling into the bitter wind, Shaithis flew north…

The sun's slow rising over Sunside could not catch Shaithis of the Wamphyri; flying however slowly around the curve of the vampire world toward its roof, still his going was faster and farther than the sun could chase him. So that in a little while he reached and passed that margin beyond which the sun's rays never fell, and after that he knew that he was in the Icelands.

Shaithis had never been much of a one for legends and histories. Of the Icelands he knew only those details which were items of gossip or matters of common knowledge: that the sun never shone there was self-evident; but rumour also had it that if one crossed the polar cap and kept going, then that he'd find more mountains and fresh territories for the conquering. No one in living memory had tested the legend, however (at least, not of his own free will), for the great stacks of Starside had been the places of the Wamphyri, their homes and aeries since time immemorial. But… that was yesterday. And now it appeared that the myth would be tested in full.

As for the creatures of the Icelands: in the margins of its oceans (some said) great hot-blooded fishes spouted, vast as the mightiest warrior and with shovel mouths that scooped the sea for smaller prey. They swam there from some eastern ocean, along a warm river that ran in the sea itself! It sounded like a lie to Shaithis.

Aye, and there were bats, too, which also ate the smallest fishes. These were miniature albinos and dwelled in caverns of ice, and were attuned to Wamphyri minds as were their kith and kin in more hospitable parts. Another myth to be tested.

Other than the whales and the snow-bats: Shaithis had heard of bears like the small brown bears of Sunside, but huge and pure white, which hid indistinguishable in the snow and ice to leap out on unwary wanderers. But again, he would see what he would see. None of these things held anything of terror for him. They were life and life is blood. And conversely, as in an old Wamphyri saying, the blood is the life…

For the equivalent of two and a half days Earthtime Shaithis flew steadily north; until, at the end of one huge glide and when it was time for his flyer to climb again, he spied bears basking in starlight on a floe at the rim of an ice-crusted sea. Shaithis's flyer was tired, its fats, liquids and metamorphic flesh depleted. Starside had been cold, but the Icelands were colder far. This place would be as good as any to stop and rest a while, for Shaithis was tired too. And hungry.

Where a cliff of ice towered over the sea he brought his flyer down, commanding it to remain there while he strode out along the frozen shore. The elevation of the place would make it a good launching platform when it was time to get under way again. A quarter-mile away the bears sensed him coming; a pair of them towered to their hind feet on the tilting floe, sniffing the air suspiciously and grunting their annoyance. They were females, and cubs tumbled from underfoot as they commenced to roar their furious warnings.

Shaithis smiled grimly and came on. Their roaring was a challenge. His Wamphyri nature reacted to it; his face elongated and needle teeth scythed through the cartilage of his jaws and gums like an eruption of bone daggers. His mouth filled with the salt taste of his own blood, and that too served to speed his monstrous metamorphosis.

The vampire Lord was only an inch or two less than seven feet tall, but the she-bears where they rumbled and roared on the float of ice and threatened to tip it over were all of that and twelve inches more at least! Their paws were three times the size of Shaithis's hands, and tipped with claws sharp enough to spear fish dead in the water at a thrust.

And: Ah! he thought. Good strong flesh, and ferocious fighters born. What warriors I could build from such as you!

Now he was only a hundred yards away, and that was too close for the nursing mothers. Plunging into bitter, slapping wavelets, they struck out for the shore. They'd see this creature off or kill him. If the first, good enough. And if the second: well, he'd make good red meat for the cubs.

Shaithis, fifty yards away from them where they left the water and shook themselves on all fours like huge white shaggy dogs, took his war-gauntlet from his hip and thrust his right hand into it. Come on then, ladies, he urged with his telepathic mind, not knowing if they heard him and caring less. For I've come a long hungry way, and a cold hungry way yet to go.

Still his 'hand' was only two-thirds the size of one of theirs, but deadlier far. He spread wide his fingers inside the gauntlet, and the grotesque palm was a great rasp of cutting edges, blades and scythes. And clenching his hand as nearly as possible to a fist, razor spines stood up inches from the knuckles, and four sharp-filed iron punches sprang out to point forward like ramrods.

The bears were charging, the smaller one (but only inches smaller) leading the larger on. Shaithis had chosen the site of the battle: he shrugged off his cloak, stood tall and central on a flat cake of ice frozen in a field of sharp, jumbled ice-boulders. The bears were disadvantaged, came slipping and sliding over the rough terrain. They roared, and the vampire Lord roared back, which served to increase their fury.

Before, Shaithis had appeared more or less human. Now he was anything but human. His skull had elongated to that of a wolf; the gape of his mouth was enormous, where white needle teeth meshed like those of a shark. His long and sloping nose had broadened and flattened to his face, growing convoluted and sensitive as the snout of a bat. Even if he were blinded, that snout and his whorl-like ears would track the movements of his opponents as surely as his scarlet eyes. His right hand inside its gauntlet had expanded to fill that fearsome weapon and give it yet more weight, while his left hand was now lizard-like and taloned, whose fingers were tipped with sharp chitin chisels. So that for all his manlike silhouette, in fact he had become a composite warrior-creature: Wamphyri!

The leading she-bear came at a shambling run, rearing upright as she entered the arena of battle. Shaithis let her come and at the last moment crouched low and hurled himself forward into her massive legs. He clung there, reached round behind, hamstrung her with one clawing rake of his gauntlet. Howling, she crashed down on him, and before he could escape the tangle tore open his back to the spine. The moment he felt the pain he killed it, willed it away; and kicking himself free of the crippled bear he looked for its larger companion. She was on him!

Huge paws groped for him where he skidded on his damaged back, and crushing jaws fastened in the left forearm he held up before his face for protection. But as her great head worried at his arm and her claws tore his body, so Shaithis swung his gauntlet in a deadly arc. It smacked against her head, demolishing her left ear and slicing into the eye, so that she at once reared upright and away, dragging Shaithis to his feet. His left arm had been released but was crushed, temporarily useless. If she should fasten those great jaws of hers around his neck or shoulder, he'd be finished.

Bloodied and roaring her pain and fury, she shook her red, torn head and sent pearls of blood flying in Shaithis's eyes. He ignored them and, as she lowered her jaws towards his face, thrust his gauntlet direct into her yawning cave of a mouth. Teeth like the heads of claw-hammers sheared as the gauntlet crunched through them. Shaithis drove that terrible weapon in deeper yet, wrenched it to and fro, enlarging her throat, then tore downwards into her gullet.

She staggered this way and that, her great arms beating uselessly. Shaithis opened his gauntlet in her mouth, wrenched it free, dislocated what was left of her bottom jaw. She'd not bite him now! And while still she flailed he swung his gauntlet again, this time with its iron punches extended. They slammed into her skull through the red debris of her ear and crushed the delicate bone inwards, penetrating to her brain.

She was done; she puffed and snorted and swayed, pawing uselessly at empty air. Shaithis gathered all his remaining strength to drive his gauntlet one last time through the ruin of her flapping jaw and into the back of her throat, where he gripped, crushed and severed the spinal column. Virtually decapitated, she was dead on her feet — for a single moment. And in the next the ice shook as her great body thudded down upon it.

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 flyer 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 hell-lands, 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.

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?' 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 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.

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 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 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?'

'Agreed,' said Shaithis. 'Actually, I should think it's the only part worth eating.'

'Hah!' Arkis snorted. And: 'Har, har! Oh, ha — ha — haaa.r he laughed, in his way.

And: Go on, laugh, Shaithis kept his thoughts hidden. But when Volse and Fess are done for, you're next, bone-brain! And out loud: 'Now guard your thoughts. We go out onto the ice…'

Volse Pinescu's flyer was rimed with frost, stiff as a board.

Still Arkis Leperson would have set to, but Shaithis

cautioned him: 'Let's not waste valuable time here. What?

Why, you'd wear those tusks of yours to stumps on this!' Arkis turned to him with a scowl. 'It's food, isn't it?' 'Aye.' Shaithis nodded. 'And half a mile over there a lot more of it — but thick, red and flowing in juicy pipes. Good beasts I breed, Arkis, of the finest flesh. Now listen: do you sense our enemies? No? Neither do I. So today they're not doing much guarding, right?'

Arkis sniffed the icy air. 'It worries me. What are they up to, d'you suppose?'

Time for supposing after we've filled our bellies.' Shaithis had already set off across the blue foxfire ice. And Arkis came shambling after. Shaithis glanced back once and nodded, then faced forward and grinned his sly grin as of old. Ever the leader, Shaithis, and how easy once more to take up the mantle. And behind him Arkis Leperson, like a dog to heel…

A wind came up.

While Shaithis and Arkis Leperson, called Diredeath, sat in a cave carved by Volse and Fess in the underbelly of Shaithis's flyer and sipped the feebly pulsing juices of that now insensate beast, the radiant stars were blotted out by dark, scudding clouds. Snow came down in a shortlived blizzard, which loaned the ice a thin, soft coating.

When the wind died down again the cannibalized flyer was dead and its arteries already stiffening. 'Cold fare from this time forward,' commented Shaithis, sticking up his head to spy out the land around. He looked towards the spine of volcanic peaks. Then looked again. And frowned his concern.

'Arkis, what do you make of this?'

Arkis stood up, belched noisomely, looked where Shaithis pointed. 'Eh? That? A whirlwind, a snow-devil, the last flurry in the wake of the storm. What's this great fascination with Nature, Shaithis?'

'Fascination? With what's natural, none whatsoever. With what's unnatural, plenty! Especially in a place like this.'

'Unnatural?'

'By Nature's mundane standards, aye, if not by those of the Wamphyri.' He continued to study the phenomenon: a whirling cloud of snow forming a squat cylinder twenty feet high and the same in diameter. Something seemed to move in its heart, like a tadpole in a jelly egg, and the whole — device? — making a beeline their way. It threw off whips of snow which quickly settled to the ground without diminishing the central mass.

Shaithis nodded; he knew what it was; 'Fess Ferenc,' he whispered, grimly.

'What, Fess?' Arkis gaped at the thing, now only a hundred yards away across the shining ice, coming at walking pace and beginning to thin out a little. 'How, Fess?'

'That's a vampire mist,' said Shaithis, donning his gauntlet. 'On Starside it would creep, flow, drift outwards from him. Here it turns to snow! Fess was a fine mist-maker… his great mass. During the hunt, I've seen him cover an entire hillside.'

They both threw out their vampire senses towards the weird, earthbound cloud. Only one creature inside it; the Ferenc, aye, but weary as never before. He hadn't the strength to hide himself. 'Ah-hahr growled Arkis. 'We have him!'

'But let's first discover what goes on,' Shaithis cautioned him.

'Isn't it obvious what goes on?' The Leper's son was scowling again. 'Why, he's finally burst that monstrous boil Volse Pinescu, but in the fight depleted himself. So now he's at our mercy, of which I have precious little.'

Twenty paces away the cloud fell as a final flurry and Fess stood there, naked! Entirely naked, and not only of his snow-cloud cover. Arkis gawped but Shaithis called out: 'Well, Fess, and how fortunes change, eh?'

'It would seem so.' The other's deep bass voice echoed over the ice-plain. But there was a shiver in it; he was freezing. And yet under one arm he carried his clothes in a bundle. Shaithis couldn't see the sense of it. There must be a story here and he wanted to know it.

Arkis sensed Shaithis's curiosity. 'Me, I'm not interested,' he snarled. 'I say we kill him now!'

'You say too much,' Shaithis hissed. 'You think only of your own survival, now, without a thought for the future. Myself, I think of my continued survival, now and however long I may sustain it. So you bide your time or our partnership ends here.'

'Am I to die?' The Ferenc stood tall, glooming on Shaithis across that short distance. 'If so then get it over with, for I've no wish to turn to a block of ice.' But he threw down his clothes and hunched forward a little, and his talons were sharp as razors hanging at his sides.

'It seems I have the advantage,' said Shaithis. 'Also a score to settle. You caused me not a little pain.' The Ferenc made no answer. 'However,' Shaithis continued, 'we may yet come to an agreement. As you see, Arkis and I have formed a team of our own: safety in numbers, you know? But two against the Icelands? The odds are too high. Three of us might fare better.'

'Some kind of trick?' Fess couldn't believe it. If their roles had been reversed Shaithis would have been already dead.

'No trick.' Shaithis shook his head. 'Like Diredeath here you have knowledge of this place. And just as the blood is the life, so is knowledge. That has always been my conviction. To fight among ourselves is to die. Sharing knowledge — pooling our resources — we might yet survive.'

'Say on,' said Fess, his voice more shivery than ever.

'Nothing more to say.' Shaithis shook his head. 'Come out of the cold and replenish yourself, and tell us what's happened that you go naked as a babe in such a place, hidden in a weird and very unsubtle mist. Aye, and then perhaps you'd advise us on the whereabouts of the unlovely Volse Pinescu, your erstwhile companion.'

The Ferenc had no choice. Flee and they would catch him, for they were well fuelled. Stand still and freeze, and they'd thaw him out and eat him. Go forward and talk, and… perhaps he could yet make his peace with Shaithis. As for Arkis, that one was something else.

He came on, got down in the lee of the stiffening flyer, tore a vein from the wall of flesh and bit through it. Nothing was forthcoming (the creature's blood was finished or frozen in the outer regions of its bulk) so he merely stripped the pipe down with his teeth and swallowed the pulp. It was sustenance if nothing else. Between mouthfuls he commented, 'Perhaps we should have stayed on Starside. At least The Dweller would have made a quick end of it.'

'Still blaming me, Fess?' Shaithis stood over him, watched him fuelling himself. Arkis sat well away, scowling as usual.

'I blame all of us,' the Ferenc answered, perhaps bitterly. 'Hotheads, we rushed in like blind men over a precipice. Fools, we went to murder and instead committed suicide. It was your plan, aye, but we all fell in with it.' He stood up and went back on to the ice to his garments, there crouching and cleaning them thoroughly with snow. At least there was that to be said for the giant: he'd always been scrupulous. When he was done he returned again to the cave of cooling flesh and lay his clothes aside to dry or freeze out.

'Some strange contamination?' Shaithis wondered out loud.

'You could say that.' The other wrinkled his already much convoluted snout. Those stinking stains were Volse!' And as he continued to eat, so, between mouthfuls, he told them about it.

'Volse and I, we'd noticed smoke from the central cone. Also some strange activity now and then in a high cave. And we thought: if that old mountain contains heat and fire, it's only reasonable that someone's settled there. But who? Common men? Exiled Wamphyri, perhaps? No way to discover, unless we went to see. Oh, we cast our probes ahead of us, of course, but who-or whatever lived in the volcano, he kept his thoughts to himself.

'The way is longer than it looks: maybe five miles to the foot of the mount, then a rising climb of two more to its cone. But near the top where the way gets steep, there was this cave. And that was where we'd seen signs of activity, like mirrors glinting in the starlight. Dwellers, we'd thought. Snow-trogs or the like. Meat, anyway.

'Aye, there was meat, all right,' (the Ferenc's aspect was suddenly grim). 'A ton of it! But best if I tell it as it happened and not go ahead of myself…

'So we arrived at the mouth of this cave, all craggy and yellow with sulphur: an old lava-run, I fancied. But hardly fit habitation, and no jot warmer than any other place around here. We cast our probes ahead of us; there was life in there, some dull intelligence far back in the cave; we hardly felt threatened. And it seemed likely the bore hole passed right through the mountain all the way to the core. And if that's where the warmth was, that's where we'd find the life.

'So we went in. The tunnel had its twists and turns, and it was dark and smelly as a refuse pit in there. But what is darkness to the Wamphyri?

'Volse, who had fashioned the most incredible pustules to enhance his already hideous appearance, took the lead. He'd stripped off his jacket and his upper body was entirely festooned with all manner of morbid things. "Who-or whatever," he said, "only let them see me or feel me near, and they'll know there's nothing for it but to faint and hope it's a bad dream!" I thought he was probably correct and had no objection to his going first.

'Then… Ah — I' Fess gave a small start as he spied a miniature albino bat hovering near, under the overhang of the dead flyer's side. In a lightning swipe he scythed it in two parts in mid-air. And: 'Ah, yes!' he said. 'And perhaps I should mention: Volse and I, we had companions all along the way. These damned bats! They get everywhere.'

'Why treat them so harshly?' Shaithis cut in. 'On Starside they were our small familiars.'

'These aren't the same.' Fess shook his great head. 'They lack obedience.'

Shaithis frowned. They'd obeyed him — hadn't they?

Arkis growled: 'Never mind the bats but finish your story. It interests me.'

Partially replenished, invigorated from his feeding, the Ferenc began to don his clothes, generating body heat to complete the job of drying them out. He was adept at this as he was at mist-making. And while he dressed so he continued with his story: 'Volse went first, then, into the heart of the riddled rock; and I'll be honest, we thought there was nothing there. Nothing to alarm or threaten us, anyway. And yet I sensed that the picture we had of that place, of its suspected dweller or dwellers, was probably a false one. It seemed to me that my mind was watched, even though I'd failed to detect the watcher. But the deeper we proceeded into the mountain, the more the conviction grew in me that our progress was monitored, even minutely; as if each step led us closer to some terrific confrontation, some contrived and monstrous conclusion. In short, an ambush!'

Arkis grunted and nodded his head. 'The very way I felt,' he remarked, in a low, dark mutter, 'on those several occasions when I'd approach Volse's flyer for a bite to eat.'

'Just so.' Fess nodded, without taking offence, and perhaps deliberately failing to find anything of accusation in Arkis's statement. 'And I knew… fear? Well no, not fear, for we're none of us bred that way. Shall we simply say then that I experienced a new sensation, which was not pleasant? Nor was this presentiment without foundation, as will be seen. And all the while those damned albinos tracking our course, until their fluttering and chittering had grown to be such an annoyance that I stayed back a little to strike out at them where they swooped overhead. Which probably saved my life.

'Ahead of me, Volse had gone striding on. But he sensed it coming in the same instant that I sensed it, and he said one word before it struck. The word he said was: "What?" Yes, he questioned it, and even questioning it never knew what hit him.'

'Explain!' Arkis was breathless. And Shaithis was intent, rapt upon the Ferenc's story.

Fess shrugged. Fully dressed again, he sliced gobbets of flesh from the flyer's alveolate ribs, sliding them one by one down his throat. 'Hard to explain,' he said, after a while. 'Fast, it was. Huge. Mindless. Terrible! But I saw what it did to Volse, and I determined that it would not do the same to me. I never fled from anything in my life before — well, except The Dweller and the awesome destruction he wrought in the battle for his garden — but I fled from this.

'It was white, but not a healthy white. The white of hiding in places too dark, like some cavern fungus. It had legs — a great many, I think — with clawed, webbed feet. Its body was fishlike, its head too, with jaws ferocious! But the weapon it bore — '

'A weapon?' Arkis thrust his face forward. 'But you said the thing was mindless. And now… mind enough to carry a weapon?'

The Ferenc glanced at him scornfully, then held up his own talon hands. 'And are these not weapons? This thing's weapon was part of it, fool, just as your own boar's tusks are part of you!'

'Yes, yes, understood,' said Shaithis impatiently. 'Say on.'

Fess settled down again, but his eyes were uneasy, wide in his massive, malformed face. 'Its weapon was a knife, a sword, a lance. But with tines like thorns all down its length, from tip to snout. A barbed rod for stabbing, and once stabbed the victim's hooked, with no way to free himself except tear his own flesh wide open! And at the tip of that bone-plated ram, twin holes like nostrils. But not for breathing…'He paused.

'… For what, then?' Volse could not contain himself.

'For sucking!' said the Ferenc.

'A vampire thing.' Shaithis seemed convinced. 'A warrior, but uncontrolled, with no rightful master. A creature created by some exiled Wamphyri Lord, which has outlasted its maker.' He said these things, but he did not necessarily believe them. No, he uttered them aloud to cover the nature of his true thoughts, which were different again.

Fess fell for Shaithis's ploy, anyway. 'These are possibilities, aye.' The giant nodded. 'Stealthy — sly as a fox, and all unheralded — it crept out from a side tunnel; but when it struck — ah! — lightning moves more slowly. It slid into view and its spear stabbed at Volse three times. The first blow ripped him open through boils and all, and spattered me and the walls of the tunnel with all of his pus, whose amount was prodigious. He was like one huge blister, bursting and wetting everything with his vile liquids. I was drenched. The second thrust hit him while he was still reeling from the first; it almost sawed his head off. And the third: that sank into him — into his heart — where it commenced to suck like a great pump! And while the thing held him upright, impaled on its weapon against the wall, sucking at him, so the creature's saucer eyes fixed me in their monstrous glare. So that I knew I was next.

'That was when I fled.' (And Fess actually shuddered, which amazed Shaithis.)

'You couldn't have saved him?' Arkis sneered, questioning Fess's manhood; a dangerous line of inquiry at best.

But the other took it well. 'I tell you Volse was a goner! What? And so much of his liquids used up, his head half shorn away, and the thing's great siphon in him, emptying him? Save him? And what of myself? You, Diredeath, have not seen this creature! Why, even Lesk the Glut — in whichever hell he now resides — would not stray near such a monster! No, I fled.

'And all the way out of that long, long tunnel, I could hear the thing's slobbering as it drained Volse's juices. Also, by the time I struck light and open air, I fancied it slobbered all the louder, perhaps hot on my trail. In something of a panic — yes, I admit it -1 called a mist out of myself and hurried out onto the slopes and down to the plain of snow and ice. There I stripped off, for Volse's drench was poisonous, and without further pause hurried back here… and found you two waiting for me.

'The tale is told

Arkis and Shaithis sat back, narrowed their eyes and fingered their chins. Shaithis kept his thoughts mainly to himself (though truth to tell there was nothing especially sinister or vindictive about them); but Diredeath, feeling that he still had the Ferenc at something of a disadvantage, was somewhat loath to let the giant so lightly off the hook.

'Times and fortunes change,' the leper's son eventually said. 'I went starving — went, indeed, in fear of my life! — when you and the great wen had the upper hand. But now… you are only one man against myself and the Lord Shaithis.'

'These things are true,' Fess answered, standing up and stretching, and flexing the mighty talons which were his hands. 'But do you know, I can't help wondering what the Lord Shaithis sees in you, leper's son? For it seems to me there's about as much use in you as there was in that mighty bag of slops called Volse Pinescu! Also, and now that I come to think of it, it strikes me I sat still for a good many hurtful slights and insults while relating my story. Of course, I was hungry and cold as death, and a man will sit still for a lot while there's a chance he can fill his belly. But now that my belly's full and I'm warm again… I think you'd do well to back off, Diredeath. Or come to just such an end as your name suggests.'

'Aye,' said Shaithis with a quick nod, coming between them. 'Well, and enough of that. For let's face it, we've all we can handle in the Icelands themselves, without we're at each other's throats, too.' He took their arms and sat down, drawing them down with him. 'Now tell me,' he said, 'what are the secrets of these Icelands? For after all, I'm the newcomer here; but the two of you…? Why, you've explored and adventured galore! And so the sooner I know all that you know, the sooner we'll be able to decide on our next move.'

Shaithis let his gaze wander to and fro, from one to the other, finally allowing it to settle on Arkis's dark and twitching countenance, his coarse lips and the yellow ivory of his tusks. 'So how about it, Arkis?' he said. 'You've had a little less freedom than Fess, it's true, but still you've managed to explore a few ice-castles. Well, the Ferenc has told us his tale of the horror in the cone, so now I reckon it's your turn. What of the ice-aeries, eh? What of these ancient, exiled, ice-encysted Wamphyri Lords?'

Arkis scowled at him. 'You want to know about the frozen ones?'

'The sooner all is known,' said Shaithis, nodding, 'the sooner we may proceed.'

Arkis shrugged, however grudgingly. 'I have no problem with that,' he said. 'So… you want to know what I've seen, done, discovered? It won't take long in the telling, I promise you!'

Tell us anyway,' said Shaithis, 'and we'll see what we make of it.'

Again Arkis's shrug. 'So be it,' he said.

4 The Frozen Lords

'After the mayhem in The Dweller's garden,' (Arkis commenced), 'when it was seen how The Dweller and his helllander father had destroyed our armies, shattered our centuried stacks and brought our aeries crashing down, there seemed no alternative but flight. The Dweller had our measure; the Wamphyri were fallen; to remain in the ruins of Starside would surely bring these Great Enemies down upon us one last time in a final venting of their furious might.

'However, it is the immemorial right of the fallen to quit Starside and forge for the Ice lands. Thus, in the lull which followed on the destruction of our aeries, those survivors who had the means for flight forsook their ancient territories and headed north. Aye, and I was one such survivor.

'Along with a pair of aspiring lieutenants — ex-Traveller thralls of mine, twin brothers named Goram and Belart Largazi, who vied with each other for my egg — I cleared away the debris of my fallen stack from the deeply buried entrance to subterranean workshops, so freeing one flyer and one warrior kept aside and safe against the event of just such a calamity as The Dweller's victory. These beasts we saddled and mounted (I myself took the warrior, an ill-tempered creature personally trained to my tastes), finally fleeing on a course roughly northward from the wrack and ruin of the aeries.

'Our heading was not true north — perhaps a little west of north — what odds? The roof of the world is the roof of the world; to left or right it is still the roof. We paused only once, where a shoal of great blue fishes had got themselves trapped in the formation of a shallow ice-lake, and there glutted ourselves before proceeding further.

'Not long after that the Largazi brothers' flyer, burdened as it was with two riders, became exhausted. It went down at the rim of a shallow sea and left its riders floundering. I landed on the frozen strand, sent my warrior back to the Largazis to let down its launching limbs and tow them ashore.

'And then it was that we found ourselves in a very curious place. Hot blowholes turned the snow yellow; bubbling geysers made warm pools in the ageless ice; sea birds came down to feed on the froth of small fishes where they spawned at the ocean's rim. It was the furthest reach of these selfsame volcanic mountains, which are active still in those weird western extremes.

'After the Largazis were dragged ashore and while they dried themselves out, I looked for a launching place and discovered a glacier where it sloped oceanward. There I ordered my creature down on to the ice; aye, for by now that warrior mount of mine was likewise sore weary — its valiant efforts in saving the twins from drowning had scarcely buttressed its vitality. They need to kill and devour a deal of red meat, warriors, else rapidly fade away to nothing. And so I thought to myself: which will prove most useful to me in the Icelands? A powerful warrior, or a pair of bickering, unimportant and ever-hungry thralls? Hah! No contest.

'It was my thought to slaughter one of the brothers there and then, and feed him to my warrior. Except… well, I'll admit it, I'd underestimated that fine pair of Wamphyri aspirants. They, too, had been busy weighing the odds, and their conclusions had likewise favoured my fighting beast. Now they backed off to a safe distance and descended into deep, narrow crevasses from which I could neither threaten nor tempt them to come out and approach me. Mutinous dogs! Very well: let them freeze! Let them starve! Let them both die!

'I climbed aboard my warrior and spurred the creature slithering down the glacier's ramp, until at last it bounded aloft and spurted out over the sea. And not before time: the launching of that depleted beast had been a very close-run thing, so that I could almost taste the salt spray from the waves against the glacier. However, I was now airborne.

'I turned inland, swept high overhead where the treacherous Largazi twins had emerged from the ice to angle their faces up to me, waved them a scornful farewell and set course for a line of distant peaks standing in silhouette against the sky's weaving auroral pulse. Those same peaks which stand behind us even now, with their central volcanic cone whose lava vents are guarded — according to the Ferenc, at least — by sword-snouted monsters. Aye, the very same.

'Nor would I, nor could I, call Fess a liar in that respect — in the matter of Volse's death by some strange and savage creature — for certainly my warrior came to a sad, suspicious end. And who can say but that Volse and my poor weary warrior were not victims of the selfsame bloodbeast?

'I will tell you how it was: my warrior was weary to death… well, perhaps not so weary, for as you know well enow they don't die easily, and rarely of weariness! But the creature was depleted and panting and complaining. I scanned the land about and saw lava runs on the higher slopes of the central cone: good, slippery launching ramps if the warrior should ever again find itself fit for flight.

'Alas, the landing was awkward and the beast threw me; it cracked its armoured carapace, wrenched a vane and tore a propulsion orifice on a jagged lava outcrop. Many gallons of fluids were lost before its metamorphic flesh webbed over the gashes and sealed them. My own injuries were slight, however, and I ignored them; but such was my anger that I cursed and kicked the warrior a good deal before its mood turned ugly and it began to bellow and spit. Then I was obliged to calm the brute, and finally I backed it up and hid it from view in the mouth of a cavern tunnel much similar — perhaps identical? — to that of the leprous white bloodbeast as described by the Ferenc. For this tunnel was likewise an ancient lava-run from the once molten core, and perhaps I should have explored its interior a little way. But at the time there was no evidence of anything suspicious about that central cone.

'I ordered the warrior to heal itself, left it there in the cavern entrance, let my curiosity get the better of me and came down by foot on to the plain of the shimmering ice-castles, to see what they contained. For as you've seen, they looked for all the world like Wamphyri stacks or aeries formed from ice. As for what I discovered: it was a very strange, very awesome, indeed a frightening thing!

'Expatriate Lords, all frozen in suspended animation, ice-locked in the cores of their glittering castles. A good many were dead, crushed or sheared by shifting ice; but there were some — too many, I thought — who had variously… succumbed? Others were preserved, however, sleeping still within impenetrable walls of ice hard as iron, their vampire metabolisms so reduced that they seemed scarcely changed over all the long centuries. Ah, this was a false impression; their dreams were fading, ephemeral things, mere memories of the lives they had known in the Old Times, when the first of the Wamphyri inhabited their stacks on Starside and waged their territorial wars there.

'All of the ex-Lords were dying; ah, slowly, so slowly, but dying nevertheless. Of course they were: the blood is the life, and for centuries without number all they had had was ice…'

'Some of them!' Fess Ferenc broke in. 'Most of them, aye. But one at least had not gone without. This was the conclusion which Volse Pinescu and I arrived at, when we examined the ice-castle stacks.'

Shaithis looked at him, then at Arkis. 'Will one of you — or both — elaborate?'

Arkis shrugged. 'I take it the Ferenc is talking about the matter of the breaking, and of the empty ice-thrones. For it's a fact, as I've hinted, that certain of the frozen keeps and redoubts — indeed, a good many — have been broken into and their helpless, refrigerated inhabitants removed. But by whom, to where… for what?'

The huge, hulking, slope-skulled Ferenc broke in again, with: 'I've reached certain conclusions about these things, too. Should I say on?'

And again Arkis Leperson's shrug. 'If you can throw some light on the mystery, by all means.'

And Shaithis said, 'Aye, say on.'

The Ferenc nodded, and continued: 'As you'll have noted for yourselves, the ice-castles number between fifty and sixty, forming concentric rings about the extinct volcano which is the central cone. But is the volcano truly extinct? And if so, why is it that a little smoke still goes up from that ancient ice-crusted crater? Also, we have seen — myself far too clearly — how there is at least one monstrous warrior creature guarding the cone's access tunnels. Ah, but what or who else does it guard?'

When his pause threatened to go on for ever, finally it was Shaithis's turn to shrug. 'Pray continue,' he said. 'We're in the very palm of your hand, Fess, entirely fascinated.'

'Indeed?' The Ferenc was somewhat flattered. One by one, he very deliberately, very loudly cracked the bony knuckles of his taloned hands. 'Fascinated, eh? Well, and rightly so. And so you see, Shaithis, you're not the only thinker who survived The Dweller's wrath, eh?'

Shaithis hummed in his convoluted nose, perhaps a little indecisively, and swung his head this way and that. Finally he said: 'I'll give credit where credit's due — when I can see the whole picture.'

'Very well,' said the Ferenc. 'So here's what I've seen and what I reckon: me and that foul festerer Volse Pinescu, we explored the innermost ice-aeries and discovered each and every one looted! Following which — and especially now that Volse is no more, sucked dry by the Thing in the lava-run — I find it easy to piece together a fairly accurate picture of what's been happening here.

The way I see it, some ancient Wamphyri Lord or Lady is master or mistress of the slumbering volcano. In ages past and whenever outcast vampires have happened this way, he or she has fought them off from taking possession of the volcano's "comforts"… it would seem to have some residual warmth at least. Then, as the vampires lying in siege have succumbed to the cold and put themselves into hibernation, so the crafty master of the volcano has emerged from time to time to pillage their ice-chambers and live off their deep-frozen flesh. In effect, the ice-castles are his larder!'

'Hah!' Arkis slapped his great thigh. 'It all comes clear.'

The Ferenc nodded his swollen, grotesquely proportioned head. 'You agree with my conclusions, then?'

'How can it be otherwise?' said Arkis. 'What say you, Shaithis?'

Shaithis looked at him curiously. 'I say you blow like a pennant in the wind: now this way, now that. First you wished to kill the Ferenc, and now you agree with his every word. Is your mind so easily changed, then?'

The leper's son scowled at him. 'I know truth when I hear it,' he said. 'Also, I can see the sense in sound scheming. The Ferenc's reckoning about the state of things sounds right enough to me, and your plea that we run together for our mutual safety seems similarly wise. So what's giving you grief, Shaithis? I thought you wanted us to be friends?'

'So I do,' Shaithis answered. 'It's just that I worry when loyalties change so fast, that's all. And now would you care to finish your own story? The last we heard you'd left your injured warrior in the mouth of a lava-run and gone down onto the plain to examine the ice-castles.'

'That I did,' Arkis agreed. 'And I found things pretty much as the Ferenc described them: the ice-locked thrones of all those unknown Wamphyri Lords out of time, all cracked open and empty, like Sunside hives raped of their honey. Aye, and in those ice-castles which stood more distant from the central cone, there too I found evidence of attempted robbery, except in many an instance the ice had been too thick and the aeon-shrivelled Lords remained safe, unburgled, intact. Which meant that they were also safe from me.

'Finally I wearied of my eerie explorations. I was hungry but unable to break into these ancient permafrost pantries; the small albino bats no longer trusted me but avoided my crushing hands; if my former thralls the Largazis still lived, by now they'd be halfway here. They'd be exhausted, too, and unable to outrun me. Ah, but that was a thought! It was time I returned to my warrior creature to see how it was holding up. And so I climbed up to the high cavern where I'd hidden the beast away.

'Except it was not there. Several small pieces of it were there, but that was all.'

The sucking thing.' The Ferenc nodded. 'The bloodbeast with the hollow, swordlike cartilage snout.'

'But how so?' Shaithis wasn't so sure. 'For a mindless beast to suck a man or, given time, even a warrior dry, this I can understand. But then, to cut the carcase of so huge a creature into small pieces and drag them away…?'

The Ferenc only shrugged. These are the Icelands,' he said. They harbour strange creatures with stranger habits, and food is scarce here. Now think: on Starside would we ever have dreamed of chewing on the rubbery arteries of a flyer? What, with trogs in our larders and Travellers on the hoof just across the mountains? Not likely! But here? Hah! It didn't take us long to learn. Oh, we lowered our sights soon enough. And what of the mainly conjectural creatures and beings which have possibly spent their entire lives here? If the loathsome, leprous bloodbeast hunts only for itself, then perhaps it has its own pantry somewhere. And if it hunts for a master?' Yet again his shrug. 'Perhaps he's the one who butchered Arkis's warrior and dragged its bits away.'

And Shaithis, turning his private thoughts inwards to guard them, thought: A master, aye, you're right, Fess! A master of evil — the very source of evil — in the shape of a timeless vampire Lord; indeed one of the first true Lords. The dark Lord Shaitan! Shaitan the Unborn! Shaitan the Fallen!

'Well?' said Arkis Leperson. 'Does the Ferenc make sense or what? And if he does, what's our next move?'

And perhaps cautiously, Shaithis answered, The Ferenc makes sense — possibly.' And to himself: Indeed he does, for a misshapen fool! But he's been here longer than I have. Perhaps this isn't the sudden burgeoning of previously unsuspected intelligence in the great freak, but simply the fact that he's had longer to feel Shaitan's influence at work … to feel his ancient eyes on him, staring through the pink orbits of his myriad albino minions!

Now the Ferenc echoed Arkis: 'Well? What now, Shaithis? D'you have a plan?'

A plan? Oh, yes, a plan! To discover more about this Shaitan; to seek him out and learn why he allowed me to clothe myself in his albinos for their warmth; but mainly to know what it is, this weird affinity, which draws me to a creature I've never known except in muttered myths and legends.

And out loud: 'A plan, aye,' he answered. And thinking with his usual, almost casual clarity, he created a plan out of thin air, entirely on the spur of the moment. One which would, he hoped, suit his vampire companions, and one which especially suited himself. 'First we cut a good weight of meat out of this flyer,' he said, 'as much as we can carry comfortably; and then, on our way to the central cone, you can show me some more of the frozen Lords. So far I've seen only the one,' (Kehrl Lugoz, who was banished here along with Shaitan at the dawn of Wamphyri tyranny), 'upon which, due to its insufficiency, I may not base a firm opinion. Then, in the inner ice-castles, you may also care to show me these shattered keeps wherefrom the bodies of certain Lords have been stolen. These several things for a start, then.' And I'll think of others as we go along.

Arkis seemed uncertain, 'Eh? What's this for a plan? We take meat with us and visit a handful of shrivelled, prehistoric, ice-doomed Lords? Also the sacked, empty tombs of other ancients, whose fate we can only guess at?'

'On our way to the central cone, aye,' said Shaithis.

'And then?' said the Ferenc.

'Perhaps to destroy him who dwells within,' Shaithis answered, 'and gain his secrets, his beasts and possessions; and who can say, possibly even discover some means of egress from these hideously boring and barren Icelands?'

The Ferenc nodded his grotesque head. This all sounds good to me. Very well, then let's be at it.' He commenced to cut strips of frozen flesh from the curve of the flyer's rib cage, cramming his pockets with them.

However grudgingly, Arkis followed suit. 'Meat is meat, I know,' he grumbled. 'But the frozen flesh of flyers? Huh! The blood was the life!'

And Shaithis snapped his fingers and said: 'Ah, yes! I knew there was something else. Now tell me, Diredeath: what of your twin thralls, the brothers Largazi? Did they follow you here out of the west? From the fumarole coast, the bubbling geysers and lakes of sulphur? Did they survive? Or perhaps they perished en route?'

'Perished, aye.' The other nodded agreeably and smiled a fond, knowing smile, his boar's tusks glinting dully. 'But not en route. Perished when they got here, and when I found them exhausted and shivering in the hollow core of the westernmost ice-castle. Ah, how they begged my forgiveness then. And do you know, I forgave them? Indeed I did. "Goram!" I cried, "Belart! My faithful thralls! My trusted lieutenants! Returned at last to the bosom of your mentor!" Oh, how they hugged me! And I in my turn fell upon their necks — and tore them open!'

Shaithis sighed, perhaps a little glumly. 'You fuelled yourself on both of them? At once? With never a thought for tomorrow?'

Arkis shrugged and finished stuffing his pockets with meat. 'I had been cold and hungry for more than two auroral periods,' he said. 'And the blood of the Largazis was hot and strong. Perhaps I should have exercised a little restraint, kept one of them in reserve… and then again perhaps not. For it was about then that Fess and Volse arrived. So at least I spared myself the frustration of having one of my thralls stolen away from me. As for their corpses: I stored them in the heart of a glacier. Alas, they went the same way as my warrior! Something sneaked them away while I was out exploring.'

Shaithis allowed his narrow-eyed glance to fall upon the Ferenc, who at once shook his head. 'Not me.' He denied the unspoken charge. 'Neither me nor Volse. We knew nothing of Arkis's glaciated thralls. If we had, well, perhaps the story would have been different.' He clambered out from the lee of the ravaged flyer and stood gigantically in starlight and aurora sheen. 'Well, and are we all set?'

Shaithis and Arkis joined him; all three, they turned their faces in the direction of the central cone. Directly between the monstrous trio and the ex-volcano, an ice-castle had taken (how many?) centuries to crystallize about its core of volcanic rock-splash. It would make as good a starting place as any. Shaithis, taking in the bleak scene, and after glancing a moment into the scarlet eyes of each of his 'companions', finally agreed, 'All set. So let's go and see what the rest of these aeon-frozen exiles look like, shall we?'

And united — for the moment united, at least — the vampires set out to cross the snowfields and scintillant ice-jumbles, and the weird terraces and shimmering battlements of their target ice-castle loomed larger as gradually they narrowed the distance between. And forming a frowning centrepiece to the glittering, concentrically circling aeries, every now and then the duller, darker shape of the 'extinct' volcano would appear to puff a little smoke into the radiant, ever-changing sky.

Or perhaps this was just an illusion? Well, possibly. But Shaithis thought not…

Soon Shaithis discovered that one ice-castle was much the same as the next. This one, for example, might well be the stark, shivery, tinkling cold stack of Kehrl Lugoz; might be; except, of course, it was not the undead Kehrl who waited out the ages in the densely protective sheath of the core but some other Lord. Also, and whoever he had been in life, his waiting had long since come to an end and he was now entirely dead. An ice-mummy — frozen, starved, desiccated to a condition way beyond life — the olden vampire was one with all past things, leaving only his shell to represent him as part of the present.

Shaithis looked at him through the wavering impurity of the ice and wondered who he'd been. Whoever, it was probably as well that he was dead. His thoughts, if there had been any, might have told Arkis and the Ferenc secrets Shaithis would prefer them not to know… like why he lay there on his carved ice-pedestal, propped upon a skeletal elbow, one clawlike hand held up before him as if to ward off some dreadful evil. And his colourless eyes, from which time had bleached all of the scarlet but none of the nameless horror. Aye, even this member of the olden Wamphyri, horrified! By something or someone who had stood here where Shaithis stood even now.

'What do you make of this?' The sudden, echoing rumble of the Ferenc's voice caused Shaithis to start. He looked where the giant pointed a taloned hand at a hitherto unnoticed circular bore hole in the ice. Seven or eight inches in diameter, the almost invisible bore seemed to point like an arrow at the preserved Wamphyri relic upon his carved couch.

'A hole?' Shaithis frowned.

'Aye.' The Ferenc nodded. 'Like that of some gross worm in the earth. But an ice-worm?' He kneeled and stuck his hand and arm into the hole, which extended almost to the depth of his shoulder. And withdrawing his arm and sighting along the channel, he added: 'Directed straight at his heart, too!'

'More such holes over here,' Arkis called from a little way around the curve of the core. 'And it seems to me they've been drilled. See the heaped chips where they've spilled out upon the floor?'

And Shaithis thought: Such small privations as my dullard friends have known have made them observant. He followed the core's curve to Arkis and examined the new holes; rather, the newly discovered holes, for in fact they could have been made a hundred, two hundred years ago. And sighting along them just as the Ferenc had sighted, Shaithis, too, noted that these perfectly circular runs seemed aimed at the main mass of the ice-shrouded mummy's body.

He thought to himself: Runs, aye, and narrowed his eyes a little as he examined that concept more closely. For upon a time, Shaithis had visited the settlements of itinerant Szgany metal-workers east of the great mountain range which split Starside from Sunside. These were the 'tinkers' who designed and constructed the fearsome Wamphyri war-gauntlets. Shaithis had seen the way the colourful Travellers poured liquid metal down clay pipes or along earthen sluices into moulds; so that there was that about these bore holes which reminded him of running liquids. Except all of these incomplete runs climbed gentle inclines towards the dead Lord, which seemed to indicate that they had not been designed to carry anything to him. Something away from him, then? Shaithis shivered; he was beginning to find his investigations, and more especially his conclusions, damnable.

Indeed, there was something about this entire set-up which even Shaithis's vampire heart found ominous, oppressive, doom-fraught. And finally Fess Ferenc voiced his thoughts for him: 'Me and the whelky Volse, we saw cores where the ice wasn't so thick. In them the bore holes had penetrated right to the centre, and all that was left in there were small bundles of rags, skin, and bones!'

'What?' Shaithis frowned at him.

Fess nodded. 'As if the one-time inhabitants or slum-berers in these frozen stacks had been sucked entire down the bores, all except their more solid bits.'

It had been Shaithis's thought exactly. 'But how?' he whispered. 'How, if they were frozen? I mean, how does one draw an entire, frozen-solid body down a hole which can't even accommodate that body's head?'

'I don't know.' The Ferenc shook his own misshapen head. 'But still I reckon that's what this old lad was afraid of. What's more, I reckon he died from the fear of it…'

Later, a mile closer to the central cone, they entered one of the inner ice-castles.

'This is one I've not visited before,' said the Ferenc. 'But as close as it is to the old volcano, I'd guess it's a safe bet what we'll find.'

'Oh?' Shaithis looked at him.

'Nothing!' The Ferenc nodded, knowingly. 'Just shattered ice about a gob of black lava, and the empty hole from which some ancient Lord's been stolen away.'

And he was right. When they finally found the high lava throne it was empty, and its ice-sheath shattered into a pile of fused, frosted shards. A few fragments of rag there were, but so ancient and stiff that they crumbled at a touch. And that was all.

Shaithis kneeled at the base of the shattered sheath and examined its broken surface, and found what he was looking for: the fluted rims of a good many bore holes, patterned like a scalloped fan, all joining where they converged on the empty niche at the black core. And he looked at Fess and Arkis and nodded grimly. 'The author of this dreadful thing could have sucked out the unknown Lord like the yoke of an egg, but that wasn't necessary for the sheath was only two and a half feet thick. So he drilled his holes all the way round until the ice was loosened, then wrenched it away in blocks and shards, and so finally came upon his petrified prey.'

And Fess said, 'Did I hear you right? Did you say "this dreadful thing"?'

Shaithis looked at him, also at Arkis. 'I'm Wamphyri,' he growled, low in his throat. 'You know me well. There's nothing soft about me. I take pride in my great strength, in my rages and furies, my lusts and appetites. But if this is the work of a man — even one of my own kind — still I say it is dreadful. Its terror lies in the secrecy, the stealth, the gloating, leering malignancy of the slayer. Ah, yes, I'm Wamphyri! And if I should be trapped in these Icelands, then doubtless I, too, would develop various life-support systems, including a fortress, sophisticated defences, and a source or sources of food. And I, too, would be as secretive and sinister as needs be. But don't you see? Someone here has already done it! In these Icelands, we are come into the territory of one who victimizes and terrorizes the very Wamphyri themselves! That is the dreadful thing I mentioned. Why, the very atmosphere of this place seethes with its evil. And something else: it seems to me that it is evil for evil's sake!'

After that… Shaithis could have bitten off his forked tongue. Too late, for he fancied he'd already said or hinted far too much. But such was the crushing weight of this place upon his vampire senses — such was its psychic jangle upon his nerve-endings — he felt the others would have to be totally insensitive not to have felt it for themselves.

Arkis's mouth had fallen open a little while Shaithis was speaking. Now he closed it and grunted, 'Huh! You were always the clever one with the speeches, Shaithis. But indeed I, too, have felt the threatening, doomful aura of this place. I felt it when I discovered those several bloodied scales and various small parts of my warrior's armoured carapace in the high cave; also when the bloodless — but well-fleshed, and hung with good meat — Largazis were stolen from the glacier pantry where I'd lodged them. And often I've thought: "Who is it watches over me so closely and knows my every move? Is he in my very mind? Or do the ice-castles themselves have eyes and ears?"'

It was the Ferenc's turn to speak. 'I'll not deny it, I too have felt the mystery of this place. But I think it's a ghost, a relic, a revenant out of time. An echo of something which was but is no more. Look around and ask yourselves: is anything we've seen of recent origin? The answer is no. Whatever deeds were done here were done a long, longtime ago.'

Arkis snorted again. 'And my warrior? And the Largazi twins?'

Fess shrugged and answered: 'Stolen by some thieving ice-beast. Perhaps a cousin of the pallid, cavern-dwelling sword-snout.'

Shaithis had shaken off his momentary fit of depression, had dispersed the strange and ominous mood which had descended upon him tangible as a bank of fog. The Ferenc's answer suited him well enough. He did not agree with it — not entirely — but it suited him to let the others think so. Except: 'So if there's no sly intelligence involved,' he said, ' — or no longer involved, as the case may be — then what sense is there in moving against the volcano?'

Again Fess shrugged. 'Best to be sure, eh?' he said. 'And if there was some "sly intelligence" at work here, albeit a long time ago, perhaps his works will still be available to us, deep down in the heart of the volcano. One thing's sure: we'll never know unless we go see for ourselves.'

'Now?' Arkis Leperson was eager.

But Shaithis cautioned: 'I vote we sleep on it. I for one have tramped enough for the moment, thank you, and would prefer to tackle the cone fresh from my rest and with a hearty breakfast inside me. Anyway, I note that the auroral display is rising to a new peak of activity. That's a good sign. Let the burning sky light the way for us.'

'I'm with you, Shaithis,' the Ferenc rumbled. 'But where to bed down?'

'Why not right here?' Shaithis answered. 'Within shouting distance, but each of us secure in his own niche.'

Arkis nodded. That suits me.'

They separated and climbed to precarious but private ice-ledges and — niches where no one could come upon them unheard or unobserved, and each in his own place settled down to sleep. Shaithis thought to call to himself a warm, living blanket of albinos, then thought better of it. If the bats came, Fess and Arkis would probably find it a suspicious circumstance. Why should Shaithis have power over the bats when they had none? Why indeed? It was a question he couldn't answer. Not yet, anyway.

He curled himself inside his cloak of black bat fur and munched on flyer flesh. It was scarcely satisfying but it was filling. And with one eye open and set to scan the ice-cavern, from Fess to Arkis and back again, Shaithis thought: Ah, but time for the good stuff later!

The good stuff, aye: Fess and Arkis themselves. Who for certain would be thinking exactly the same thing about him.

And settling down he began to breathe more deeply, and his scarlet eye scanned the cavern, and slowly the dreams started to come…

5 Blood Relations

Shaithis of the Wamphyri dreamed a splendid fantasy. As is often the way of it with dreams, it was comprised of a great many scenes and themes with little or no explanation except perhaps as echoes of his waking ambitions. The fantasy had been developing itself for some time in the darker caverns of Shaithis's subconscious mind before suddenly firming into an ordered sequence of scenarios, which were these:

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 kilometre-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 shadow 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 spiralling out and down into the darkness; and they shook out the longer, 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 alone, 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 armour 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-scouring 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 not only was he 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 levelled (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 added quickly: '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 aureoles and spiked nipples were dark as bruises against the pale loll of her pendulous 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, then Shaithis reached down quickly 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 enquiringly. '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 cast-off, 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 might or might 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 bedchamber 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 T 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, whom 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 dreams 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 lieutenant: '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 centre 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 jaw 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 grew 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 ageing 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 to the floor; her scarlet eyes turned a sick, sunken yellow under matted eyelashes; her skin was suddenly corrugated as the skin of dried fruit.

'What?' he croaked, as her ravaged lips drew back in a travesty of a smile and showed him her leprous forked tongue, shrivelled gums and loose, decaying teeth. 'What?' It wasn't a question proper, but she answered it anyway, and her voice was a morbid cackle as she reached for Shaithis's shrinking parts and said: 'My Lord, I'm ready for you!'

Galvanized into frenzied activity, Shaithis slapped the flat of his hand to the siphon's mouthpiece and drove it home into her body — and a gurgling stream of stinking pus at once jetted out to splash against and adhere to his shuddering flesh! With an inarticulate cry he staggered to his feet, pointed at the dissolving, liquefying thing on the couch, and commanded: 'Destroy it! Remove it now! The refuse pit!' But no one seemed to be listening. Shaithis's lieutenants and other thralls were in turmoil; The Dweller's wolf facet was ravaging among them like a fox among chickens; and as for The Dweller's hell-lander father… the vampire Lord could scarcely believe his own eyes.

The pair of hulking Wamphyri aspirants who had dragged this small, unassuming human being in here were now slumped, smouldering shreds of blasted flesh puddling the flagged floor with their ichor; and the magician (oh, yes, for this, surely, was magic!) who had cindered them was at the window, gazing out on Starside's night skies and ruin-scarred plain with devastating eyes. For where and whenever his gaze alighted and lingered it brought fresh ruins; and all across the sky in the deepening gloom of sundown, Shaithis's New Wamphyri hordes were exploding into fiery tatters and raining their debris down among the shattered stacks of their olden forebears.

Raging his frustration, Shaithis discovered himself robed again, with his gauntlet at his hip. Knowing what must be done — that he alone had the measure of The Dweller and his father — he fitted his deadly weapon to his hand and, in the tradition of the olden Wamphyri, rushed at them to cut them down. And why not? For they were only flesh and blood after all, just as the great white bears of the Icelands had been flesh and blood. And as the vampire Lord knew only too well, all flesh is weak. Even Wamphyri flesh, in the right circumstances.

In Shaithis's mind the Dark Hooded Thing heard his chaotic, bloody thoughts and said, Fool! But Shaithis wasn't listening.

He came upon the hell-lander first, and swung his gauntlet… which froze in mid-air, as if time itself had stopped. But then Shaithis saw that time had simply stretched itself, and that his monstrous gauntlet crept across the intervening distance in a maddening slow-motion. The Dweller's father saw it coming and his strange sad eyes turned (but oh, so very slowly) to burn upon Shaithis's face. And the scarlet eyes of his son, the great changeling wolf, were likewise upon Shaithis from where that slavering creature floated on the air, caught at the high point of its spring.

In the manner of the Wamphyri, the pair spoke to Shaithis in his raging, blood-drenched mind; and not only them but the Dark Hooded Thing, too, all saying the same thing: You have destroyed us all. Your ambition, your passion, your pride.

Die! Shaithis replied, as his gauntlet collided little by little with the hell-lander's head and slowly shattered its bright core.

Aye, bright! Bright and blinding and deadly as the furnace sun itself! For there was no blood, no bone, no grey and pulpy brain in the magician's head at all — nothing but golden fire. Like the seething, seering nuclear fire of the sun.

Indeed, it was the sun, endlessly expanding out of the small destruction of the hell-lander to encompass and destroy… everything!!!

Shaithis started awake, felt the ice against his flesh and thought for a moment that it was searing golden fire. He cried out, and a thousand fragile icicles shattered and came tinkling down from the ice-castle's fantastic ceiling. In the next split second the vampire Lord saw where he was and remembered what he was doing here, and as his nightmare receded and reality closed on him, so his breathing and the pounding of his heart gradually slowed. Then-He scanned across the frozen expanse of the ice-castle and found the dark forms of Fess Ferenc and Arkis Leperson in their niches, and saw that the former had likewise come awake. And now the Ferenc's gaze met his across the glittering ice-sheathed vault.

'Dreaming, Shaithis?' that one called out to him, his words chasing themselves to and fro in the bitter, echoing air of the place. 'An omen, perhaps? You cried out, and it seemed to me you were afraid.'

Shaithis wondered if the dream had been self-contained, like his inward-directed thoughts, or if Fess had been 'listening in' on it. He hated the idea that anyone should spy on him, especially in his subconscious, where the seeds of all of his ambitions — indeed his intentions — were stored in darkness, awaiting their germination. 'An omen?' he eventually answered, but quietly, hiding what confusion lingered still. 'No, I think not. Nothing portended, Fess. A pleasurable dream, that's all, of woman-flesh and sweet traveller blood.' Of the Lady Karen rotting on my couch, and the entire Wamphyri race wiped out in the sunburst of an alien mind!

'Huh!' the other grunted. 'I dreamed only of ice. I dreamed I was frozen in an ice-tomb, and that some unknown thing was melting its way in to me.'

'Then it's as well my cry of sweet pleasure woke you up,' said Shaithis.

'Aye, but too early,' the Ferenc grumbled. 'Arkis sleeps on. In this he's the wise one. Let's drift a further hour or two before we're up and about.'

Shaithis agreed; and grateful that the giant had not read him, he settled down again and closed an eye…

And again Shaithis dreamed. Except that this time, even more certainly than the last, he knew it was much more than any common dream. The setting was a meeting between himself and the being known as Shaitan the Fallen, whom he recognized at once as that selfsame Dark Hooded Thing who had been his sinister, frowning familiar — perhaps even his alter-ego? — in his nightmare of frustrated revenge.

He was aware of the Thing as a shadow among lesser shadows in a cavern of black rock, unsuspected except for the red glow of its eyes where they floated in luminous yellow orbits. What he, Shaithis, was doing in such a place he could not say, except that he felt he'd been called here. Yes, that was it: he was not here entirely of his own free will but mainly because this enigmatic being had called him here.

And as if to confirm that thought: 'Shaithis, my son,' said the Dark Hooded Thing, whose true voice was deeper, darker, and probably more deceiving than any Shaithis ever heard before. 'And so at last you've answered me. Difficult to reach you, my son, through that clever deflective screen of yours, else I had known you and called you here long before now.'

Shaithis's Wamphyri eyes and awareness were accustomed now to the gloom of the place. Indeed he saw and sensed as well as ever, which is to say very well indeed: as a cat at night or Desmodus on the wing. The darkness made no difference; in fact, and with regard to his whereabouts, it merely served to confirm his first instinctive guess that he was in some natural chamber deep in the belly of the slumbering volcano. Which would appear to make Shaitan the Lord of these subterranean regions.

In such close proximity, the other read his thoughts as if they'd been spoken words and answered: 'But of course, just as I have been since… oh, a long, long time.'

Shaithis peered intently at the crimson-eyed shadow which was Shaitan. It was strange, but for all his vampire-enhanced awareness he saw only an outline of the other's form. No fault of his; his senses were not impaired; Shaitan must be shielding his physical self in a manner like to Shaithis guarding his thoughts. But… Shaitan the Fallen? Could it really be — was it really possible — for any creature to live so long? He made up his mind that indeed it must be, for here he stood in the presence of just such a one.

And: This isn't just a dream,' said Shaithis then, with a shake of his head. 'I can feel your presence and know you are real: that same Shaitan of whom Kehrl Lugoz was, and is, so mortally afraid, that ancient Being out of the first annals of Wamphyri legend. You were banished here in prehistory, and you live here still.'

'All true,' the other answered, and darkness stirred where he stood, as if he had offered a casual shrug. 'I am that same Shaitan, the so-called Unborn, who was and is your immemorial ancestor!'

'Ah!' said Shaithis, as truth finally dawned. 'We are of one blood.'

'Indeed, and obviously so. You stand out from the others like a meteor speeding through the stirless stars, much as I stood out in that distant time when I fell to earth. And our ambitions are the same, aye, and our intelligence. I am your origin, Shaithis, and your future. And you are mine.'

'Our futures are bound up together?'

'Inextricably.'

'Outside of these Icelands, you mean? In more civilized places?'

'In Starside, and in worlds beyond Starside.'

'What?' Shaithis was taken aback, for there was something here which smacked of that earlier dream. 'Worlds beyond Starside? You mean the hell-lands?'

'For a start.'

'And you know of such places?'

'Upon a time, I was the inhabitant of just such a place. But that was before I fell — or was thrown — to Earth.'

'And you remember it?'

'I remember nothing of it!' The Dark Hooded Thing growled, moving marginally closer; and there was that about its motion — as if its very flux had intelligence, a sentient viscosity — which caused Shaithis to take a pace to the rear. 'My memory, all memory, was robbed from me when I was cast out.'

'No memory of what you did, who and how you were?'

Again the Thing moved closer, and once more Shaithis backed away, but not too far for fear he should back right out of his own dream. 'Only my name, and that I was vain and proud and beautiful,' said Shaitan, conjuring more echoes of that former dream. 'But it was a long time ago, my son, and given time all things change. I, too, have changed.'

'Changed?' Shaithis tried hard to understand. 'You're no longer vain, no longer proud? But even the least of the Wamphyri know such vices — and enjoy them. They always will.'

Shaitan slowly shook his hooded head, which Shaithis knew from the movement of his crimson eyes in their yellow orbits, the only parts of the creature which were visible through the warp of his inky, impenetrable mental shield. 'No longer beautiful!' he said.

'But it's the same for all of us,' Shaithis answered. 'We know we are not beautiful and accept it. And anyway, what has beauty to do with power? Why, there are those of us who even foster our ugliness as a measure of our might!' Inadvertently, he thought of Volse Pinescu.

Shaitan picked the picture clean out of his mind. 'Aye, that one was ugly. But he himself willed it. I did not. And physically and mentally hideous as the Wamphyri are, still by comparison they are beautiful.' And for the third time he came closer.

Shaithis stood his ground but groped for his gauntlet. It was a dream, true, but he'd not yet relinquished all control. 'Do you wish me harm?' he said.

'On the contrary,' the other answered, 'for we've a long way to go together. But this art I practise is wearying. It were better if you knew me as I am.'

Then show me yourself.'

'I was preparing to,' Shaitan answered. 'Indeed, I was preparing… you.'

'Enough!' said Shaithis. 'I am prepared.'

'So be it!' said his ancestor, and relaxed his hypnotic will.

What Shaithis saw then shocked him awake a second time, as if the sleeping volcano itself had erupted under his feet. He started up gasping in his ice-niche, wide-eyed and astonished by the castle's luminous light after the dream-darkness of the cone's core, with a chill in his black heart spawned more — far more — of what the Dark Hooded Thing had shown him than of any mundane or merely physical condition. And because the dream had been more than a dream, in fact a visitation, it didn't fade back into some subconscious limbo of obscurity but remained sharp, etched in the eye of his mind as clear as the sigils on an aerie's fluttering banners and pennants.

Shaithis, himself a monster in every respect, was not a creature to shock easily. Where the Wamphyri were concerned, 'fear' or 'horror' were more or less defunct concepts, eradicated and replaced by rage. Adrenalin was rarely released into a vampire's system to encourage or enable flight, but usually to trigger his animal passions so that he would stand and fight — viciously, brutally! An awareness of their superiority had been bred into Starside's vampires through all the long centuries of their sovereignty, when it was indisputable that of all their world's creatures they were far and away the dominant species. Much as common Man was dominant in his world.

But the fact remained that Shaithis had once been a common man — a Traveller vampirized when Shaidar Shaigispawn renamed him, made him his chief lieutenant or 'son', and gave him his egg — and as such he'd learned what fear was all about. Even now after half a millennium he still remembered, if only when he slept. For however monstrous a man may become, the things that frightened him as a youth will continue to do so in his dreams.

What had frightened Shaithis the most in those early days of his abduction from Sunside — in that time now five hundred years in the past, before the Lord Shaidar coughed his scarlet egg into his throat and changed him for ever — had been the many and monstrous anomalies of Shaidar's lofty aerie: the cartilage creatures and gas-beasts, the entirely unthinkable siphoneers, the vast vats in the lower levels of the stack where trogs and Travellers alike became flyers or warriors or yet weirder facets of Shaidar's hybrid experimentation. For the vampire Lord had delighted in showing to Shaithis (at that time a young, as yet innocent Traveller) his most nightmarish creations, and in torturing his mind with the half-threat that one day he, too, might be a diamond-headed flyer, armour-scaled warrior or flaccid, pulpy siphoneer.

Morbid distortions and abnormalities such as these, then, had been the harbingers of Shaithis's worst nightmares during those early days of Wamphyri apprenticeship. But in time, as he himself ascended to the aerie's throne-room, such fears had receded, been suppressed, had succumbed to the vampire in him, which bade him become a maker of monsters in his own right; an art in which finally he'd excelled. And his flyers had been the most weirdly graceful, his warriors ferocious beyond any previous ferocity, and his other creations and experiments… varied. So that it was only in dreams out of his youth that he remembered and took fright at such things. Except that even in the most vivid and awe-inspiring of these, nothing that memory had conjured had been half as monstrous as that which the Dark Hooded Thing had shown him.

'Ugly,' Shaitan had called himself, but there is ugly and there is ugly. And as for hybridism…

Shaithis pictured again the thing which had stood there when his ancestor relaxed his hypnotic shield to let himself be seen as he really was: an abomination which not even the most perverse or insane Wamphyri mind might envisage, made all the worse through its reality. It had been… what? A man-sized slug or leech — corrugated, glistening black, and mottled grey-green — but rearing upright like a man? A vampire, yes, such as might develop from an egg inside a man or woman, but grown huge beyond all reasonable measures; so that Shaithis had wondered: But if this grew inside a man, then what became of its host!?

Then, as the grotesque but mainly vague picture of the thing (made vague, by virtue of its obscenity) scarred itself into his mind, so he'd become aware of something of its finer detail, which in the next moment had sufficed to shock him awake.

The thing (no, he must not think of it as a 'thing' alone but also as Shaitan, his ancestor?) had rubbery limbs, some of which ended in suckered tentacles. Others, however, did not but were equipped with vestigial human and other animal parts: mummied hands and withered, rudimentary feet, and even a gleaming bone claw. And it was these parts, and also Shaitan's flat, composite face on its spade-shaped cobra head, which repulsed Shaithis the most and brought about the resurgence of his long-forgotten phobia.

For he knew that the hybridism he saw here was not that of some Wamphyri Lord's experimental vats but of Nature; or rather of the vampire's unnatural tenacity, its determination to cling to life in circumstances however desperate, through travails and triumphs down all the nameless ages. Aye, for the Lord Shaitan had grown simply too ancient for the accommodation of mortal, human flesh, and his original body had wasted away to be replaced almost in its entirety by the metamorphic organism which was his vampire. Which was, indeed, now him.

Ugly? The result was hideous; especially so to Shaithis in his dream, for there it had been the embodiment of every nightmare of his apprenticeship.

As to how he knew the fate which had befallen Shaitan in his ice-bound isolation — his evolution, no, devolution, from man-vampire or Wamphyri to pure vampire — that had been written in the vast intelligence, hatred and sheer evil of the leech-thing's scarlet eyes, unblinking under their cobra's hood. Not the unbridled, mindless hatred so often seen in the seething eyes of a warrior, or the vacant, lidless stare of a hugely nodding flyer, and certainly not the watery, vapid gaze of a siphoneer. But such evil intelligence that Shaithis had known this thing was no morbid experiment but a true mutation.

He had known, too, with reinforced certainty, that indeed this was Shaitan the Unborn, called the Fallen. For of all Wamphyri legends there was one of universal prevalence: that to the innermost core of his being, Shaitan had been evil above all other men and creatures…

6 Dark Liaison

Shaithis's mental guard was down, his mind accessible as he emerged more fully from sleep. And there was someone there, a dark presence, to take advantage of his confusion. It was Shaitan, of course; even at a distance his gurgling, venomous 'voice' was unmistakable.

Evil? Do you say I was evil? No, I was wronged. Wronged by the Wamphyri, my own kind! For I was stronger than them and they feared me. And you, son of my sons? Do you also fear me? See how you start awake from me, as if I were some DOOM come down upon you rather than your salvation.

Shaithis went to close his mind… and hesitated. His hideous ancestor was the master of the dead volcano, wasn't he? What harm could he do from there? This could well be the perfect opportunity to learn more about him without alerting the others to his presence.

Shaitan picked all these thoughts out of Shaithis's mind and chuckled monstrously. Aye, he gurgled, for it would never do to let them in on our secret. Not until it's too late. Or at least, too late for them.

Shaithis lay back, narrowed his eyes and scanned across the glittering expanse of the ice-castle's hollow heart to focus upon the huddled shapes of Fess Ferenc and Arkis Leperson where they slept on. He reached out with his Wamphyri awareness to touch upon the flimsy mental barriers they'd erected about their sleeping minds, satisfying himself that they were in fact asleep.

And finally he answered that dark intelligence which had proclaimed itself his ancestor: I think I prefer you this way, Shaitan: out in the open, as it were, and not cloaked in dreams. But it was clever of you to break in on me like that. My so-called 'peers' among the Wamphyri were never up to it.

They were not of your blood, Shaitan at once answered. Or should we say, they were not of mine? Our minds mesh like those of twin brothers, Shaithis. It's a sign, that you're a true son of my sons, so that we are as one. We were meant to be as one and triumph over all adversity, and then go on to victories unimaginable.

Aye, Shaithis nodded, wonderingly, in this and in other worlds, as you have stated. I think it would be interesting to know more about that. Indeed it would interest me greatly to retake Starside from the alien enemies who dwell there now, and to avenge myself upon them. Now tell me your thoughts. For you've hinted we've a way to go together. Have you planned our first steps along that way? And how do I know 1 can trust you anyway? Your legends are infamous even among the Wamphyri, who themselves are not much known for straight dealing.

Again Shaitan's loathsome chuckle. My son, you'll trust me because you have to — because without me you're stuck here — and I shall trust you for the same reason. But if a token of my good will is required: have you not already seen enough of it? Who was it sent his small albino bats to you to keep your sore bones warm while you slept? And who was it disposed of one of your enemies, whose intentions were dire against you to say the least?

An enemy? Shaithis raised a mental eyebrow. And who might that have been?

What? The other seemed taken aback. But you know well enow! I speak of the abominable whelky one, who disguised himself with pustules and was companion to the Ferenc. Why, time and again he urged that grotesque giant to seek you out and murder you!

Shaithis nodded. That would be Volse's way, sure enough. I was never a favourite of his. Nor he of mine. The monstrous clown: if his wens had been wits he'd outshone the lot of us! So it was your beast that killed him, eh?

Of course, of course, Shaitan's mental voice sank deeper and darker yet. And do you think I could not kill you, too? Ah, I could, my son, I could… but will not. His tone was light again in a moment. No, for I sense that we'll do well together. And since in various ways I've already shown my good will, the next stage is up to you.

Stage? Shaithis frowned. What stage is that?

Of the plan, Shaitan explained. Or would you have me do it all, and likewise claim all the credit?

Explain.

But there's nothing to explain. Just go along with it in accordance with your own plan — exactly as planned — and that will suffice. In short, bring them to me, my son, so that I may deal with them in my way.

Fess and the leper's son? And will you kill them? And then me, too, perhaps? Maybe I'd do better to stay joined with them against you? Better the devil you know, they say.

And after long moments: Devil? That's a word I don't much care for, said Shaitan. I don't know why, but I don't like it. Be advised not to call me that again, not even obliquely.

Shaithis shrugged. As you will. And before he could say or ask any more: They are waking up, Shaitan hissed. The squat one and the giant both. Best if I leave now and not compromise you. Only bring them to me, Shaithis! A great deal depends upon it.

And as suddenly as that Shaithis's mind was free of outside interference. But only just in time.

'Shaithis?' The Ferenc's rumble echoed in the cold air. 'I sense that you're awake. Hah! It's a bad conscience makes a man restless as you. You'll have to mend your ways.' And he laughed uproariously. The ice-castle shuddered and sent down a cascade of variously sized icicles, which in turn brought Arkis more fully awake.

Scratching himself, the leper's son sat up. 'What's all the noise?' he demanded.

Time we were up,' Shaithis called across to him. 'No more delays. We make our breakfast — poor fare that it is — and then we're on our way. What or whoever the volcano houses, he's our meat today. And all his goods in the bargain.'

'Big talk, Shaithis,' the other answered. 'But we've to get past the pale, cavern-dwelling bloodbeast first.'

Three of us this time,' said Shaithis, 'and forewarned is forearmed. Anyway, Fess knows the beast's lair. We'll give it a wide berth and seek some other way in.'

The Ferenc chewed on cold meat and made his way down to the floor of the hall. 'I for one am ready for it,' he said. 'A man can't live for ever — not even a Lord of the Wamphyri, not that we've seen, anyway — and I'm damned if I'll die of boredom or locked in the ice, terrified that something will find me there and dig me out.'

"Oh? Shaithis kept his thoughts guarded. Not live for ever? Well, perhaps not… but close enough, if Shaitan is anything to go by. And wouldn't that in itself be sufficient reason to team up with the ancient: to discover the secrets of his longevity? It surely would.

As for Arkis and the Ferenc: Shaithis knew that sooner or later he'd be obliged to have it out with them anyway, so why delay matters? And even better if Shaitan desired to have a hand in it.

With these thoughts and others like them in his mind (but always guarded, especially thoughts such as these), Shaithis joined the others where they prepared to leave the ice-castle. And a short time later the three set out upon their long, slow climb up the frozen rise to where the central cone jutted some fifteen hundred feet higher still. Like a black, crouching giant the tower of volcanic rock waited for them, sombre under its canopy of cold stars and writhing auroral fire…

Shaitan's miniature albino bats accompanied them, almost invisible against the snow-and ice-glare, forming an endless entourage whose members came and went, reporting all back to their immemorial master. In this way he was kept informed of the progress of the three and was pleased to note that they followed a most admirable route — one which would lead them directly into one of his many mantraps. An ambush, aye, except that this time there would be no killing.

No, for there were other, better things to do with men such as Fess Ferenc and Arkis Leperson than kill them. What? Good, strong Wamphyri flesh such as theirs. And they had their vampires in them, didn't they? Just as Volse Pinescu had once had his in him…

Ah, but that had been a treat!

Volse had been monstrous on the outside, right enough, with all of his pimples, polyps and other excrescences; but just half an inch under his whelky skin there had been a mass of fatty tissues and good, strong, long-pig meat hanging on a frame of bones like any other man. Except, because he was Wamphyri, there was a lot more to him than there was to other men; for deep inside him there was also his vampire. So that after Shaitan's ingurgitor had drained him of his blood and dragged the shattered shell of him before its master -

— What sheer delight: to tear open Volse's pallid body and seek out his leech, the living vampire whose squirming had so cleverly avoided the ingurgitor's siphon-like probe, but which could not avoid Shaitan. And finally to behead the thing and gorge on its nectar fluids, having first scooped up its skittering egg and stored it in a jar of Volse's brains mushed to a paste, as a tidbit for later. Ah, yes — for to the Wamphyri, such is the essence of a gourmet feast!

Even then Shaitan had not been quite finished with his victim. For extracts of Volse's flesh (which was infected with vampire metamorphism and so not entirely dead even now) would be useful to him in his experimentation, the creation of hybrid creatures such as the ingurgitor and other useful constructs, to which end the flayed, drained, gutted, decapitated, but none the less 'living' remains of Volse had been stored with Shaitan's other materials for use later.

Aye, even as the giant Ferenc's and the squat Arkis Leperson's remains would be stored, if all went according to plan. But as for Shaithis… well, there are plans and there are plans.

Shaithis was of the blood — of Shaitan's blood — and of all the Wamphyri who had been, he was also beautiful. Not by human standards, no, but certainly by Shaitan's. Beautiful, strong, vibrant with life. Ah, but then, the blood is the life! And when Shaitan dwelled on matters such as these, then he, no less than his wily descendant, kept his thoughts well hidden.

Meanwhile, his small albinos continued to apprise him of the trio's progress; in a little while he saw that they'd strayed from the path somewhat, so that he must needs redirect them. But in order to do that he must first contact Shaithis, who at that very moment toiled halfway up the fused volcanic slag cliffs toward the western face of the cone. The other two were within hailing distance, but their minds were concentrated on the task in hand.

Shaitan aimed a narrow, powerful beam of thoughts directly into Shaithis's mind, with which he was now a little better acquainted: Son of my sons, he said, you go somewhat astray. Your route requires some small adjustment.

Shaithis was momentarily startled but quickly controlled the agitated flutter of his thoughts. Not before Fess Ferenc had sensed something, however.

'What?' Fess called out across the precipitous, naked rock face. 'Did something alarm you just then, Shaithis?'

'My foot slipped on a patch of ice,' Shaithis lied. 'It's a long way down. If I had fallen… I was gearing myself for metamorphosis.'

The Ferenc nodded across the gulf. 'Aye, we grow weak. Upon a time I'd revel in forming an air-shape and flying from these heights. Now it would deplete me considerably. We must watch how we go.'

Now Shaithis could answer his ancestor's inquiry, but he must do so carefully, with all of his effort concentrated on keeping his telepathic sendings private. To this end he made himself secure on a small ledge before answering: Shaitan, you almost gave me away then. Now tell me, how do we stray from the path? And how may I correct it? Also, you'd better tell me what to expect. I've no desire to end up pierced to the heart and drained off — like Volse Pinescu.

Fool! the other at once hissed. I thought we had had that out? If I wanted you dead you would be dead. I could send a creature even now to buffet you, all three, from the face of the cliff. Perhaps you'd fly and perhaps not. Whichever, you'd be depleted. And my creatures would find you and finish it. But I need you Shaithis — we need each other — and so you live. As for the others: I do not wish to damage them. I want them whole! Can't you see what a fine pair of warriors Arkis and the Ferenc would make?

Shaitan's words were so ominous he could only be speaking truth. He would not dare boast of such superiority unless he could deliver. It was in effect an ultimatum, even a threat: make up your mind, join me now or suffer the consequences.

In answer to which: Very well, said Shaithis, we work together. Tell me what to do.

Without pause Shaitan explained:

The leper's son climbs too far towards the east, diagonally away from you. In his way lies an old unguarded lava-run which leads directly to my rooms at volcano's core. If Arkis were to discover the mouth of this cave he could jeopardize my position; certainly my plans would require rapid and radical alteration.

An unguarded entrance? Careless of you.

My resources are not unlimited. No more talk. You must draw the others — especially Arkis — back towards you.

Very well, said Shaithis. And to the others, out loud: 'Arkis, Fess, we're too far apart — and I sense a problem to the east.'

Arkis at once secured himself in a lava-niche and peered out and about. 'A problem?' he blustered. 'And close by, you say? Huh! I sense nothing.' But his voice was full of nervous tension and his thoughts went this way and that.

The Ferenc, closer to Shaithis by some fifty feet, began to edge towards him. 'Something has bothered me all along,' he said. 'I've had my suspicions, anyway. And you're right, Shaithis: spread out like this we're too easy to pick off.'

'But I see and feel nothing!' Arkis again protested, like a man whistling in the dark.

With a shrug in his voice, Shaithis called out to him: 'Are you saying that your Wamphyri awareness is stronger than both of ours combined? Then by all means let's test it out. Do as you will. Be the master of your own destiny. At least you were warned.'

That was enough; Arkis started climbing more to the left, bringing himself back into line on a course converging with the others. And not a moment too soon; for Shaithis, from his own position, had finally spotted the dark shadow of a cave to Arkis's right and a little above him. By now the leper's son would certainly have come across it.

In Shaithis's mind the dark thoughts of his ancestor came a little easier. Good! The problem was not insurmountable, but the easy way is usually the best.

What now? Shaithis inquired of him.

Above you is a wide ledge formed of an earlier cone, Shaitan answered. When you strike it, move to the left, that is westward. Soon you will come across another lava-run; ignore it and carry on. The next entrance will seem like a mere crack occasioned as the rock cooled, but this is your route into the volcano. Except you should take up a position to the rear of the others! Do I make myself plain?

Shaithis shivered, perhaps a little from the numbing cold, which was beginning to bite even into his Wamphyri bones, but mainly at what was implied. For thoughts, like speech, often lend themselves to diverse interpretation, and certainly he'd detected the ominous 'tone' of the other's slyly insinuating mental voice. Yes, and he'd known that the depth of Shaitan's thoughts did not bear plumbing. It was strange to be Wamphyri and yet feel something of awe at the implied evil in another's scheming.

Shaitan, he eventually, cautiously answered, I'm putting my trust in you. It seems my future is now in your hands.

And mine in yours, said the other. Now continue to guard your thoughts and concentrate on your climbing.

And he was gone again.

Shaithis suddenly found himself wondering at the wisdom of this dark liaison. Indeed there seemed little of wisdom in it; it was mainly a matter of instinct, and of course necessity. But any advantage was Shaitan's. This was his territory and he knew it well, and he was not without resources. Shaithis could only hope that the ancient's plans for the Ferenc and Arkis Leperson did not extend to him also. But he sensed that they did not. Not for now, anyway.

His Wamphyri instinct again, which had seldom let him down. But there's always a first time. And a last…

He avoided morbid conjecture and looked for brighter omens. Of course there was always his dream: that first dream of the Lady Karen's aerie, where he had been returned to power after some fabulous conquest of Starside and the destruction of The Dweller's garden. He had the feeling that as dreams go there had been an element of foretokening to it. Except there was an old Wamphyri maxim that men should never read the future too closely, for to do so is to tempt destiny. And anyway, the dream had ended in disaster and ruin — but at least it had hinted that there was in fact a future to look forward to. How much of a one was anyone's guess.

'A ledge,' Fess Ferenc grunted, dragging himself up ahead of Shaithis. As Shaithis's face appeared level with the rim, the giant reached down a huge, taloned hand; Shaithis looked at it for several long moments, then took it. And the Ferenc hauled him easily up on to the level surface.

'Last time you had the chance you threw me down,' Shaithis reminded him.

'Last time you were reaching for your gauntlet!' the giant replied.

Then Arkis came up and joined them. 'You and your premonitions!' he grumbled. 'I still say I sensed nothing harmful. Also, I believe I was almost into some sort of cave. It might well have been a tunnel.'

But Shaithis said, 'Oh? An empty cave, d'you think? Or did it perhaps contain one of Fess's sword-snouts?'

'Wouldn't I have sensed it?' Arkis frowned.

Fess Ferenc scowled. 'Volse didn't,' he said. 'Nor did I, until it was too late.' And turning to Shaithis, 'What now?'

Shaithis narrowed his scarlet eyes and made a small show of sniffing the air with his flattened, convoluted snout. 'The area to the right still feels dangerous to me,' he said. 'So I vote we follow this rim to the left a while, out of the suspect region. We'll see where it leads. At least it will give us a breather from all this climbing.'

The Ferenc nodded his grotesque head. 'Suits me. But how we've come down in the world, eh?'

As they set off along the ledge, Arkis said, 'Come down? How so?'

The Ferenc shrugged. 'Just look at us. Three Lords — or ex-Lords — of the Wamphyri, stripped of most of our powers, going like frightened children in a huddled group to explore strange new regions. And afraid of what might jump out on us!'

'Afraid?' Arkis puffed himself up. 'Speak for yourself!'

The Ferenc sighed and said simply, 'But I saw the thing that lanced the Great Boil, remember?'

At that moment it grew darker and the three paused to glance speculatively, apprehensively at each other. A thin cloud layer had drifted in to cover the higher reaches of the cone. The first small flakes of snow began to drift down and coat the ledge.

Arkis looked at the sky all about. 'One cloud?' He voiced his thoughts out loud. 'Which just happened to form here? A vampire mist, d'you think?'

'Obviously,' said the Ferenc. 'Whoever dwells here, he's sensed us coming and seeks to make it harder for us. He makes his lair more obscure, and the way to it more difficult.'

'Which means we're on the right track,' Shaithis added. He set off again along the ledge, and behind him the others almost automatically followed on.

'Huh!' Arkis grunted. 'Well, at least your premonitions were good. Perhaps too good. It seems to me this one has the edge on us. He sees and knows all while we remain in the dark, as it were.' He swatted at a small white bat which flitted too close.

And the Ferenc's eyes went wide as he gave a small start and burst out, 'His albinos! His bats! We should have known. That's how he tracks our course. The midges pursue us like fleas after a wolf cub!'

Shaithis nodded sagely. 'I had suspected as much. They're his minions no less than Desmodus and his small black cousins were ours back on Starside. They scan our whereabouts and circumstances, reporting all back to… whoever.'

Arkis gaped and grasped his arm, drawing him to a halt. 'You suspected these things and said nothing?'

'A suspicion is only a suspicion until it's an established fact,' Shaithis answered, angrily shrugging away the other's restraining hand. 'And anyway, it makes a very important point and gives us an insight into his circumstances.'

'Eh? Insight? Circumstances? What are you on about? What point does it make?'

'Why, that the cone's master fears us! Bats to report our movements; a snowfall to hinder us; a sword-snouted creature guarding his hive, as the soldier bees of Sunside guard their honey? Oh, yes, he fears us — which in turn means that he's vulnerable.' And to himself: Good reckoning — perhaps he really is. But still I'll take my chances with him. At least we have this much in common: our intelligence.

And at once, gurgling in Shaithis's mind: And our blood, my son. Don't forget our blood!

Again, at once, the Ferenc snapped, 'What?' His huge head swung round in Shaithis's direction, and his eyes glared under gathered black brows. 'What was that? Did you say — or think — something just then, Shaithis?'

Shaithis hid his momentary panic behind bland innocence. 'Eh?' He raised an eyebrow. 'Say something? Think something? What's on your mind, Fess?' And as the Ferenc and Arkis scanned nervously all about, he sent a triple-shielded thought: Twice you've almost given me away, Shaitan. Do you think this is a game? If there's so much as a hint of what I'm up to, I'm a goner!

The Ferenc scowled. 'On my mind? No, nothing on my mind, except to get finished with this, that's all.' He straightened from his half-crouch. 'So what say you: do we go on, or do we call it a day? Is he vulnerable, this master of the volcano, or are we even more so? It's a nervy business, this climbing in the snow, not knowing what's waiting for us.'

Shaitan came whispering into Shaithis's mind:

Get on with it; bring them in; bring them to me! Do it quickly. For he's no fool, this giant. He's sensitive and we've both underestimated him. You'll need to watch him — and carefully.

'I've noticed,' said Shaithis to the others, almost conversationally, 'how the small albinos come and go from the west. So I say we stick to the ledge and see where it goes.'

'No!' the Ferenc growled. 'Something's wrong, I'm sure of it.'

Shaithis looked at him, then at Arkis. 'Do you wish to go down again? Have we wasted all our time and effort? Has a cloaking vampire mist entirely unnerved you? But our enemy wouldn't have issued it unless we had unnerved him!'

Arkis said, 'I'm with the Ferenc.'

Shaithis shrugged. 'Then I go on alone.'

'Eh?' The Ferenc stared hard at him. 'Then be sure you go to your death.'

'How so? Is this the place where Volse was taken?'

'No, that was on the other side, but…'

'Then I'll take my chances.'

Arkis said, 'Alone?'

Shaithis shrugged. 'Which is worse, to die now or later? Better to do it here, I think, locked in combat, than locked in the ice with something drilling its way to my heart.' And then, suddenly, as if he'd run out of patience, he hissed at both of them: There are three of us, remember! Three "great" — hah! — Wamphyri Lords against… what? An unknown being who quite obviously fears us almost as much as we — as you — fear him.' And he turned away from them.

'Shaithis!' the Ferenc called after him in a tone half-angry, half-admiring.

'Enough,' Shaithis snapped over his shoulder. 'I've done with you. If I win through all is mine. And if I lose — well, at least I'll die as I've lived, Wamphyri!'

He continued along the ledge, and without looking back sensed the eyes of the two following him. Then: 'We're with you,' came the Ferenc's final decision, but still Shaithis stared straight ahead. And at last he heard Arkis's voice, too, calling out: 'Shaithis, wait for us!'

He did no such thing but hurried on that much faster, so that now they must scramble to catch up. And with the pair hot on his heels so he came upon the mouth of the first cave even as Shaitan had forewarned. Here, because it would be expected of him, Shaithis paused. Breathing heavily, the others saw the dark cavern entrance into which he concentrated his gaze.

'A way in, d'you think?' said Arkis, but none too eagerly.

Shaithis stared harder yet into the cave's gloomy interior, then made a show of carefully backing away from it. 'Obviously so,' he said. 'Perhaps too obviously…' And to the Ferenc: 'What say you, Fess? For it's amply apparent that the cold of these climes has focused your awareness to a fault. Is this a safe way to go or not? Myself, I think not. It seems to me that far back in the cavern something stirs. I sense a thing of great bulk but limited intelligence, yet stealthy, too.' Which was, of course, the Ferenc's own description of a sword-snout. And as Shaithis had hoped might be the case, it put a picture of just such a creature into the giant's mind.

Fess thrust forward his great head into the cave, glared into its depths and wrinkled his snoutlike nose. And, 'Aye,' he growled in a little while, 'I sense it, too. And indeed this could well be a way in, for the cone's master has guarded it with a bloodbeast.'

Shaithis nodded. 'Or maybe with the bloodbeast?'

'Eh?' said Arkis.

'Perhaps he has only the one creature,' said Shaithis. 'For if there were a pair, then Fess here might well have been taken at the same time as Volse.'

'But what does that matter now?' Fess shrugged. 'Even on its own, this thing is a monster. Are you suggesting we might go against it? Madness! One of us would surely die — possibly two, even all of us — or at least end up sorely wounded before this thing succumbed. I saw it strike three times in as many seconds, unerringly, and ram Volse through and through like a fish on a Traveller's spear. Why, he didn't even know what hit him!'

But Shaithis shook his head. 'No, I'm not proposing to take it on; quite the opposite. What I'm saying is this: if there's only one such beast and it's here, then we go in by some other route.'

'What?' Arkis scowled. 'And they come thick and fast, these entrances and exits, do they?'

Shaithis shrugged. 'So it would seem. The tunnel where Volse was taken. The cave you thought you saw back there on the lava-cliff. This dark entrance here before us. Now listen: the master of the cone sent a mist to confuse us, didn't he? But not to keep us from this cave, not if this is where he's stationed his sword-snout. So… perhaps there's another entrance close by.' He gave a sharp nod. 'I say we continue to follow the ledge, a little way at least. Then, even if it comes to nothing, at least we'll have explored this part of the face to the full.'

'Fair enough,' said the Ferenc. 'No argument here. As long as you're not asking me to go in there!'

Arkis growled, 'Then let's get on. We waste time with all this talk and conjecture.' He started off, in the lead, and the Ferenc followed on. And now Shaithis brought up the rear.

Overhead the small cloud had snowed itself out; the aurora writhed and the stars gave the icy curve of the world's horizon a blue sheen; Shaithis sensed the vampire awareness of his two 'companions' focused ahead, leaving him free to converse with Shaitan. And: There, he sent a tight-guarded thought. And how does this formation suit you? Also, what was the idea of the small snow storm? I thought you were eager for them, yet there you go trying to frighten them off.

The answer came back at once:

First, your formation suits both of us very well. Second, the snow served to confuse and distract them — especially the giant. Now listen and I'll describe your route from this point forward. Very soon now you'll come to a place where the rock is riven into deep crevices. One such crack has been filled in with lava which forms a floor. Follow this and it will lead you direct to my abode at the hollow core. As for your companions, alas their time runs very short. Indeed they haven't enough of it to find their way here. Not on their feet anyway.

There was nothing of humour in Shaitan's mental voice, only an icy resolve. Shaithis made no further comment; and anyway Arkis, heading the column, had come to a halt. Fess joined him, then Shaithis.

Before them the surface of the ledge and the near-vertical face of the cliff were split with deep fissures a full pace in width. Arkis looked at the others. 'What now?'

'We go on,' said Shaithis.

Perhaps his reply had been too ready, or he had sounded too sure of himself, for the Ferenc looked at him for long moments. And at last the giant said, 'But the way looks like a jumble of broken rock. Any cave we find will surely have collapsed in upon itself.'

'We won't know that until we look,' Shaithis answered. 'It's just that I feel we're very close now.'

The Ferenc narrowed his eyes. 'It appears I'm not the only one whose awareness has been focused to a fault. But very well, we press on. Arkis, lead the way.'

The leper's son, muttering darkly to himself, stepped out across the first crack, teetered a little on the far side and found his balance. And so they all proceeded.

Then, after negotiating a half-dozen more crevasses: 'Ho!' Arkis called back. 'But this next crack has a floor, formed of a frozen river of rock.'

'An ancient lava-run,' said Fess, joining him.

Shaithis came last and looked at the cliff, riven where in olden times the flow had forced an exit. 'Lava from the secret heart of the volcano,' he said. 'So perhaps we've found our way in after all.'

The Ferenc stepped under the cliff's overhang, into the shadow of the cleft. 'Let me scan it.'

Arkis went after him, with Shaithis bringing up the rear, and they all three sniffed the air, probing the way ahead with keen vampire senses. Until at last Arkis ventured: 'I sense… nothing!'

'Likewise,' said Shaithis, relieved that the small-talented Diredeath had discovered no threat (where in fact he found the place menacing and uninviting in the extreme). The Ferenc, however, seemed of a similar mind to Shaithis; except he was perfectly, and honestly, willing to voice it.

'I don't like it,' he gave his opinion, 'for it smells too much like the cave where Volse got his.'

'You've let Volse's death prey on your mind,' Shaithis told him. 'And anyway — and as has been said before — forewarned is forearmed. Also, there are three of us this time. Arkis and I, we have our mighty gauntlets, and you have your even mightier talons. And in any case we're already decided that the bloodbeast was hidden in that first cave. Myself,' (he paused to sniff the cave's air again), 'I think it likely that the cone's master has worked some beguilement here: he has gloomed on this place and left the smell of death here. But a smell is only a smell, and I smell success! I'm for going in.' He looked from Fess to Arkis.

Arkis shrugged. 'If this so-called "cone's master" has comforts in there, then I'm with you, Shaithis. I've had it to the tusks with hardship! I could use some rich red blood in my belly, and a woman in my bed. D'you suppose it's a harem he guards so jealously?'

Shaithis's turn to shrug. 'I've never been a one for the histories,' he said, 'but I've heard it said that some of the banished Lords took their concubines with them. We can't say what we'll find until we find it.'

'Comforts, aye,' said the Ferenc, licking his lips. 'I could use some of those myself. Very well, we go on.'

Shaithis put on a scowl and said, 'And how's this for a turn of events? Are you suddenly our leader? It seems you like having the last word, Fess Ferenc. "Arkis, you lead the way." And, "Very well, we go on."'

'Bah? was Fess's retort. 'If no one ever made a decision, then we'd be here for ever. Here, let me lead the way…'

Which was exactly what Shaithis had wanted.

The darkness of the interior was like daylight to the vampire Lords, indeed it was preferable to the auroral light and the blue sheen cast by the stars. The Ferenc strode where the way was obvious and unobstructed, inched along where it was made obscure by jumbles, or where the uneven ceiling came down low, or where blisters of lava had burst to form jagged-rimmed, circular cusps of rock like small craters in the almost corrugated texture of the floor. And where other natural fissures or blowholes radiated from the main run, he steadfastly followed the ancient lava flow.

Arkis stayed a pace or so to the Ferenc's rear, followed immediately by Shaithis. As they progressed so the oppressive sensation of ominous expectancy or foreboding lifted a little, which (to Diredeath and the Ferenc, at least) lent credence to Shaithis's 'theory' that the volcano's dweller had deliberately set a fearful aura over the mouth of the run to dissuade any would-be explorers.

Shaithis stayed very much on the alert, kept his thoughts fully guarded, would have liked to contact Shaitan but dared not, not with Fess and Arkis probing in all directions with their minds, their Wamphyri awareness sharp for the smallest hint of mental activity. And always they moved deeper into the heart of the rock.

Eventually the Ferenc called a halt, whispering, 'We must be halfway in at least. Time to take stock.'

'Of what?' Arkis grunted. His blunt query sounded like an avalanche, echoing out and back in slowly decreasing waves of sound.

'Dolt!' Fess whispered again when he could be heard. 'What use to have the senses of bats, to be able to smell out the way ahead like wolves and keep our minds tuned for the thoughts of others, when at every opportunity all you can do is make great noise! Would you alert our enemy to our presence?'

Abashed, Arkis kept his answer low: 'Hell, if he's at home, surely by now he knows we're coming!'

'Perhaps,' Shaithis intervened, 'but in any case, let's keep it quiet.'

'Taking stock, yes,' said the Ferenc. 'Going first all this way has taken the edge of my awareness. Arkis, you can spell me.'

'No problem.' The other took the lead, glad for the chance to make amends. But after moving on only a dozen or so paces: 'Now hold!' Arkis said. 'Something's weird!'

They had all felt it at the same time: a sensory void, a region vacant of all vibrancies, whether for good or evil, a place stagnant as some stirless, sunless subterranean lake. And they likewise knew what that meant: that the place had been made sterile, for even darkness and cold stone have a feel to them. Someone wanted them to believe that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, here… because there was something here.

Shaithis's flesh tingled and he knew the others must be feeling the same sensation. Arkis, in the lead, stood rooted to the spot, gurgling inarticulately; but it was much too late for gurgling anything. Shaithis felt the heavy mental curtain deliberately ripped open — felt fear and horror springing into being behind it and rushing to burst through its tattered drapes — then saw the blur of leprous grey which was to be the end of Arkis Leperson, called Diredeath. And indeed his death was dire!

Where the Thing came from would be hard to say — a niche in the wall of the place, a side-tunnel, a hiding place in the lee of some bulge of lava — but it came at great speed and with fell intent. And it was exactly as the Ferenc had described it. Patched white and grey, mottled like veined marble, it seemed to uncoil or erupt into being, as if some massive boulder half-buried in the floor had come to life and reshaped itself. Its legs were a blur, claws scrabbling as it reared before Arkis; its fishlike head bore a bone lance tapered to a sharp point and equipped with thorns or hooks all along its length; its eyes were like saucers, fixing its victim with their emotionless glare.

Arkis's gauntlet was on his hand, ready; but as he raised his arm the Thing struck at him in a move too fast to follow. Its lance gashed his short, squat neck as it sawed past, and its needle-toothed jaws closed on his gauntlet arm. The arm was severed, swallowed at a gulp. In drawing back, the Thing sawed at Arkis's neck again and sliced into his whistling air-pipe; in the next moment its lance was rammed forward a second time, directly into him, piercing his squat body to the heart. He jerked and throbbed where he was held upright on the bone blade, and his tusks chomped on thin air, turning red as he coughed up a spray of blood.

Fess whirled away from the scene (Shaithis thought to run) and his eyes were huge and scarlet. But a lot more than simple fear lit them: there was fury, too! The giant grabbed Shaithis with one taloned hand and drew back the other like a bunch of black-gleaming scythes. 'Treacherous bastard!' he snarled. 'Your father's egg was rotten, and the pus is still in you!'

'What?' Shaithis forced the metamorphic flesh of his hand to expand within his gauntlet. 'Are you mad?'

'In trusting you? I must be!' The Ferenc readied himself to thrust at Shaithis: to punch in through his ribs with his taloned hand, grasp his living heart and wrench it out. But something stopped him. Something he had seen behind Shaithis.

Shaitan was the colour and texture of black lava. Only his movement against the rock-splash wall had given him away, and only then because he wanted to be seen. Fess saw him, and his jaw fell open. He took a great gulp of air and forgot to strike at Shaithis, who rewarded him by crashing his clenched gauntlet into the side of his head. Then-

— Shaithis's immemorial ancestor brushed him aside, out of the Ferenc's suddenly loose grasp, and wrapped the stunned giant in a nest of lashing tentacles. With his arm locked to his sides, Fess was helpless, but in any case Shaitan allowed no time for any sort of recovery. With a sound like tearing leather, his elastic mouth flowed over and closed upon the Ferenc's entire face and head!

Shaithis, stumbling blindly away, struck stony debris and tripped. And suddenly nerveless — even Shaithis, nerveless — he crashed down on to the lava floor. To one side Shaitan's nightmarish ingurgitor hissed and bubbled as it drained off the last of Arkis's fluids, and to the other Fess Ferenc's 'invincible' body pulsed and vibrated in the primal vampire's coils where Shaitan crushed and devoured his head. And Shaithis thought: If there's a hell, then I stand at its gate!

Shaitan's eyes glowed red out of the darkness which was his crushing, grinding, metamorphic head. And his reply, in Shaithis's staggered mind, was this: Aye, a hell of sorts, where we are the Lords. For it is our hell, son of my sons, which one day we'll take with us to Starside, and then to all the worlds beyond!