‘And therefore with the Wamphyri.’ Shaithis had nodded.
‘More so!’ Shaitan cried. ‘For in them all such urges are amplified by ten!’
‘But they don’t tear their odalisks in pieces. At least, not always.’
‘More fool them,’ said Shaitan. ‘For if you can live for ever, what sense to breed that of your own flesh which may one day usurp and destroy you?’
‘And yet you sought out women in which to spend yourself,’ Shaithis had been quick to point out, ‘else I’d not be here.’
And at that their eyes had met and locked across Shaitan’s creature frozen in its pit of ice, and after a while the Fallen One had answered: ‘I did, it’s true – and perhaps for that very reason . . .’
It had been their first argument or discussion as such, but only one of a great many to come. And while it would soon become Shaithis’s complaint that his ancestor conversed with him in terms more befitting a child, generally he accepted that the ancient, evil Being was trying to instruct him. Perhaps he considered his great age gave him the right; for after all, he was Shaithis’s senior to the extent of seven spans.
. . . Another time: Shaithis had been shown a developing siphon-snout, absorbing liquids where it gradually took on shape and substance in a vat. The thing was much similar to the guardian ingurgitors (of which the volcano’s master had three) but the siphon was longer, more flexible, and bedded at its roots in great walls of flesh, so that the creature’s tiny, greedily glittering eyes were almost entirely hidden in bulging bands of grey, gleaming muscle.
Shaithis had known immediately what the thing was, enquiring of Shaitan: ‘But don’t you have enough of these? It surprises me you trouble yourself to make more. By now you’ve surely had the best of the ice-encysted Wamphyri . . . those of them who were readily got at, anyway. So what use to persist?’
Shaitan had cocked his cobra’s head on one side, coiled up his arms and inquired: ‘And have you fathomed it all, my son? Do you know the precise use to which they’re put, these things of mine?’
‘Certainly. They are variations on a theme: ingurgitors not unlike that or those which stopped Volse and Arkis, but rather more specialized. Their slender, bone-tipped cartilage snouts vibrate in ice to shatter it, whereby paths are drilled to the suspended exiles in their otherwise impenetrable sheaths. Once a channel has been cut, then the beast drains off its victim’s liquids through its snout, which siphoned fluids – ‘
‘ – Are then regurgitated into my reservoirs!’ Shaitan, perhaps peeved with Shaithis’s ingenuity, had finished it for him. ‘Yes, yes – but aren’t you curious to know how? How may the driller siphon off solids, eh? For of course his victims are mainly frozen, whose fluids gurgle like glue.’
‘Ah!’ Shaithis had been fascinated.
‘I will explain … in a moment. As to why I bother myself with these Old Lords, when (as you’ve pointed out) they’re now so few in number and invariably low in sustenance, the answer to that is simple: because it pleases me to do so. The terror in the minds of those of them who can still think at all is so rare and delicious as to be exquisite. If I had not them, then whom would I terrify, eh? Could I even exist, without my measure of tyranny and terror?’
And Shaithis had understood. Evil feeds on terror; without one the other cannot exist; they are inseparable as space and time. And reading his thoughts, Shaitan had whisperingly, gurglingly, chortlingly agreed, ‘Aye, it’s simple as that: I like it, and I need the practice!’
So that was why; and the how of it was likewise simple:
The drillers squirted metamorphic acids into their victims, whose desiccated tissues then dissolved into liquids which were drawn off before they could resolidify.
‘It still doesn’t answer my first question,’ Shaithis had argued. ‘Which was: why do you trouble to make more of these creatures?’
(Shaitan’s shrug, of sorts.) ‘I say again, mainly for the practice; as has been almost everything I’ve done these last three thousand years. Practice, yes, towards the time when we shall build an army of warriors, and with them set out against Starside and all the worlds beyond!’