And the one final scene which remained fresh as steaming blood in Shaithis’s mind to this day: the great pulsing mass of the Ferenc held fast for long and long in Shaitan’s many-armed embrace, until at last the giant’s throbbing ceased and elastic cobra jaws released his head, leaving it wet and smoking and apparently whole – except it was seen how the eye-sockets were empty and trickling, with similar dribbles escaping from the nostrils and slack yawning mouth. And Shaithis thinking a thought so cold it burned him still: Oh, yes, surely hell’s gate! Where I’ve just witnessed a so-called ‘ancestor’ of mine emptying the Ferenc’s head like a rat sucking out a stolen egg.
And: ‘Indeed you have!’ Shaitan had at once, gurglingly, agreed, while his crimson eyes in their yellow orbits glared out from the darkness beneath the black, corrugated flesh of his cobra’s hood. ‘My creature siphoned off his blood – for safekeeping, until later, you understand – and I sucked out his brain. But you’ll note how we left the best for you, eh?’
With which he’d made a small effort to propel the corpse in Shaithis’s direction, so that it had appeared to take two stumbling, flopping steps towards him before crashing at his feet. And of course he’d known exactly what the other meant. For hiding in the Ferenc’s huge, pale, dehydrated shell, his vampire (ah, sweetmeat of sweetmeats!) was still to be discovered and reckoned with.
And: ‘Won’t you join me?’ Shaitan had offered a clotted, gurgled invitation – before wrenching Arkis from the bubbling blade of the ingurgitor and throwing him down to the lava floor, there falling or flowing over him as he commenced to search for his frantic, cringing parasite.
To this point events had left Shaithis somewhat stunned – but not for much longer. He was after all Wamphyri, and all of this had been much as anticipated. And of course, the blood was the life. Dining with Shaitan may even have sealed something of a bond between them.
It might have, anyway.
After that . . .
There was a lot to remember and events contrived to jumble. A good many fractured scenes and conversations overlapped their jagged edges in Shaithis’s memory. As contrary breezes blew up off the cold blue star- and aurora-lit waste, bringing nodding snow-devils to swirl around the bases of the glittering, plundered ice-castle tombs of anciently exiled Wamphyri, so he attempted to arrange these fragments in chronological order, or failing that to separate them at least.
Shaitan’s cavernous workshop, for example, located immediately beneath the volcano’s hitherto unseen north-facing scarp, where soon after Shaithis’s advent the Fallen One had escorted him upon a guided tour.
Apart from the high-ceilinged, stalactite-adorned vast-ness of the place – with its near-opaque windows of ice looking out upon and lending grotesque distortion to the very roof of the world, and its deep permafrost pits where Shaitan was wont to confine in ice his more volatile, less manageable experiments – the workshop had seemed much like any other. Shaithis, too, was a master of just such creative metamorphism; or so he had always considered himself, until he saw his ancestor’s work.
Gazing down on one such piece through ice clear as water, he had offered his opinion: ‘This alone would suffice to have you denounced and banished afresh, or destroyed outright, if this were Starside and the Old Wamphyri still held sway. Why, it has reproductive organs, which were forbidden!’
‘A bull, aye,’ Shaitan had answered with a nod of his cowl. ‘Alas but procreation, the act of copulation, its contemplation – even the possession of organs, of the means – drives creatures to rage. I made this one a mate, female, which for thanks he at once tore to pieces! But even if she’d lived and brought forth, what then? I cannot see that he’d permit offspring to survive but would surely devour them at the first opportunity. Just look at him, and as yet half-grown! But so untrustworthy, at last I was obliged to freeze him here. The fault was his sex. It made him prideful and pride is a curse. It’s the same with men, of course . . .’