Necroscope V: Deadspawn

Chapter 4

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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 blood-beast 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?'