From his dark corner he commanded it: Come, little one. I won’t crush you.
The tiny creature flew to him, folded its wings and fastened to Shaitan’s . . . hand? It coughed up spittle and mucus into what passed for a palm, and one small bright splash of ruby blood. And: Good! said Shaitan. Now go. Only too pleased to obey, the bat hastened from its master and left him to his own devices.
Fascinated, for a long while Shaitan gazed at the ruby droplet. It was blood, and the blood is the life. He waited impatiently for the vampire flesh of his hand to open into a tiny mouth and sip the droplet in – an automatic thing, born of hideous instinct – from which he would know that this was just the blood of a common man. But he waited in vain, for like himself Shaithis was uncommon. Very much like himself.
And: ‘Mine!’ said Shaitan at last, in a croaking, shuddering, delighted whisper. ‘Flesh of my flesh!’
At which the droplet quivered and soaked through the leprous skin of his hand, and into him as if he were a sponge . . .
3
The Ferenc’s Story
Shaithis slept long and long.
The bats kept him warm (at least kept him from freezing solid in his ice-niche); his wounds healed; his thoughts, like Shaithis himself, remained hidden. Until it was time to rouse himself and be up and about. Which was when his hiding place was discovered.
What!? Who!? The astonished, involuntary mental exclamations brought Shaithis starting awake, echoing in his mind. While still the echoes rang he was on his feet, his blanket of albino bats breaking up in chittering disarray, whirring away from him like a shock of sentient snow. Another moment and his hand filled his gauntlet; he let his Wamphyri senses reach out – but cautiously, tentatively – to discover who was there. Whoever, he must be near, else he wouldn’t have sensed Shaithis’s emergence.
While sleeping, Shaithis’s thoughts had flowed inwards, an art in which he was adept; his dreams could not be ‘heard’ by any other. But during the transition from deep, healing sleep to waking they had escaped like a yawn, and someone had been close enough to hear it. Too close by far.
Shaithis allowed his mental probe to touch that of the other, and immediately snatched it back. Contact had been brief but recognition mutual: insufficient to detail specific identities, but enough that each creature was certain of the other’s presence. Shaithis glanced this way and that. There was only one way out of his niche; if he was trapped then he was trapped; so be it.
Who is it? he sniffed the cold air with his bat’s snout. Is it you, Fess, come for your supper? Or must I soil my good gauntlet in pus to tear out the loathsome heart of the odious Volse Pinescu?
And back came the answer, like an astonished gasp in the vampire’s mind: Hah! Shaithis! You survived The Dweller’s death-beams, then?
Arkis Leperson! Shaithis knew him at once. He breathed his relief, watched curiously for a moment while his breath fell as snow, then made for the exit. Along the way he flexed his muscles, swung his limbs, inhaled deeply and tested his ribs. All seemed in order. Pah! What had those minor dents and scratches been for wounds anyway? Repairs had been minimal; his vampire flesh had scarcely been overtaxed; he was left with an ache here, a bruise there.
Arkis stood close to the foot of the ice-staircase. He was squat for a Lord of the Wamphyri: scarcely more than six feet tall – ah, but a good three feet broad, too! A massive barrel of a man, his strength had been prodigious. Now: it seemed he’d lost a little weight. Shaithis moved towards him, closing the distance between with the easy, flowing glide of the vampire; sinister to ordinary men, but normal by Wamphyri standards. In another moment they were face to face.
‘Well,’ said Shaithis, ‘and is it peace? Or are you too hungry to think straight? I’ll be frank: I could use a friend. And by the look of you . . . huh! Our circumstances are much the same. The choice is yours, but I know where there’s food!’