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.