‘Nothing more to say.’ Shaithis shook his head. ‘Come out of the cold and replenish yourself, and tell us what’s happened that you go naked as a babe in such a place, hidden in a weird and very unsubtle mist. Aye, and then perhaps you’d advise us on the whereabouts of the unlovely Volse Pinescu, your erstwhile companion.’
The Ferenc had no choice. Flee and they would catch him, for they were well fuelled. Stand still and freeze, and they’d thaw him out and eat him. Go forward and talk, and . . . perhaps he could yet make his peace with Shaithis. As for Arkis, that one was something else.
He came on, got down in the lee of the stiffening flyer, tore a vein from the wall of flesh and bit through it. Nothing was forthcoming (the creature’s blood was finished or frozen in the outer regions of its bulk) so he merely stripped the pipe down with his teeth and swallowed the pulp. It was sustenance if nothing else. Between mouthfuls he commented, ‘Perhaps we should have stayed on Starside. At least The Dweller would have made a quick end of it.’
‘Still blaming me, Fess?’ Shaithis stood over him, watched him fuelling himself. Arkis sat well away, scowling as usual.
‘I blame all of us,’ the Ferenc answered, perhaps bitterly. ‘Hotheads, we rushed in like blind men over a precipice. Fools, we went to murder and instead committed suicide. It was your plan, aye, but we all fell in with it.’ He stood up and went back on to the ice to his garments, there crouching and cleaning them thoroughly with snow. At least there was that to be said for the giant: he’d always been scrupulous. When he was done he returned again to the cave of cooling flesh and lay his clothes aside to dry or freeze out.
‘Some strange contamination?’ Shaithis wondered out loud.
‘You could say that.’ The other wrinkled his already much convoluted snout. Those stinking stains were Volse!’ And as he continued to eat, so, between mouthfuls, he told them about it.
‘Volse and I, we’d noticed smoke from the central cone. Also some strange activity now and then in a high cave. And we thought: if that old mountain contains heat and fire, it’s only reasonable that someone’s settled there. But who? Common men? Exiled Wamphyri, perhaps? No way to discover, unless we went to see. Oh, we cast our probes ahead of us, of course, but who- or whatever lived in the volcano, he kept his thoughts to himself.
‘The way is longer than it looks: maybe five miles to the foot of the mount, then a rising climb of two more to its cone. But near the top where the way gets steep, there was this cave. And that was where we’d seen signs of activity, like mirrors glinting in the starlight. Dwellers, we’d thought. Snow-trogs or the like. Meat, anyway.
‘Aye, there was meat, all right,’ (the Ferenc’s aspect was suddenly grim). ‘A ton of it! But best if I tell it as it happened and not go ahead of myself . . .
‘So we arrived at the mouth of this cave, all craggy and yellow with sulphur: an old lava-run, I fancied. But hardly fit habitation, and no jot warmer than any other place around here. We cast our probes ahead of us; there was life in there, some dull intelligence far back in the cave; we hardly felt threatened. And it seemed likely the bore hole passed right through the mountain all the way to the core. And if that’s where the warmth was, that’s where we’d find the life.
‘So we went in. The tunnel had its twists and turns, and it was dark and smelly as a refuse pit in there. But what is darkness to the Wamphyri?
‘Volse, who had fashioned the most incredible pustules to enhance his already hideous appearance, took the lead. He’d stripped off his jacket and his upper body was entirely festooned with all manner of morbid things. “Who- or whatever,” he said, “only let them see me or feel me near, and they’ll know there’s nothing for it but to faint and hope it’s a bad dream!” I thought he was probably correct and had no objection to his going first.