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.