Shaithis looked at him through the wavering impurity of the ice and wondered who he’d been. Whoever, it was probably as well that he was dead. His thoughts, if there had been any, might have told Arkis and the Ferenc secrets Shaithis would prefer them not to know . . . like why he lay there on his carved ice-pedestal, propped upon a skeletal elbow, one clawlike hand held up before him as if to ward off some dreadful evil. And his colourless eyes, from which time had bleached all of the scarlet but none of the nameless horror. Aye, even this member of the olden Wamphyri, horrified! By something or someone who had stood here where Shaithis stood even now.
‘What do you make of this?’ The sudden, echoing rumble of the Ferenc’s voice caused Shaithis to start. He looked where the giant pointed a taloned hand at a hitherto unnoticed circular bore hole in the ice. Seven or eight inches in diameter, the almost invisible bore seemed to point like an arrow at the preserved Wamphyri relic upon his carved couch.
‘A hole?’ Shaithis frowned.
‘Aye.’ The Ferenc nodded. ‘Like that of some gross worm in the earth. But an ice-worm?’ He kneeled and stuck his hand and arm into the hole, which extended almost to the depth of his shoulder. And withdrawing his arm and sighting along the channel, he added: ‘Directed straight at his heart, too!’
‘More such holes over here,’ Arkis called from a little way around the curve of the core. ‘And it seems to me they’ve been drilled. See the heaped chips where they’ve spilled out upon the floor?’
And Shaithis thought: Such small privations as my dullard friends have known have made them observant. He followed the core’s curve to Arkis and examined the new holes; rather, the newly discovered holes, for in fact they could have been made a hundred, two hundred years ago. And sighting along them just as the Ferenc had sighted, Shaithis, too, noted that these perfectly circular runs seemed aimed at the main mass of the ice-shrouded mummy’s body.
He thought to himself: Runs, aye, and narrowed his eyes a little as he examined that concept more closely. For upon a time, Shaithis had visited the settlements of itinerant Szgany metal-workers east of the great mountain range which split Starside from Sunside. These were the ‘tinkers’ who designed and constructed the fearsome Wamphyri war-gauntlets. Shaithis had seen the way the colourful Travellers poured liquid metal down clay pipes or along earthen sluices into moulds; so that there was that about these bore holes which reminded him of running liquids. Except all of these incomplete runs climbed gentle inclines towards the dead Lord, which seemed to indicate that they had not been designed to carry anything to him. Something away from him, then? Shaithis shivered; he was beginning to find his investigations, and more especially his conclusions, damnable.
Indeed, there was something about this entire set-up which even Shaithis’s vampire heart found ominous, oppressive, doom-fraught. And finally Fess Ferenc voiced his thoughts for him: ‘Me and the whelky Volse, we saw cores where the ice wasn’t so thick. In them the bore holes had penetrated right to the centre, and all that was left in there were small bundles of rags, skin, and bones!’
‘What?’ Shaithis frowned at him.
Fess nodded. ‘As if the one-time inhabitants or slum-berers in these frozen stacks had been sucked entire down the bores, all except their more solid bits.’
It had been Shaithis’s thought exactly. ‘But how?’ he whispered. ‘How, if they were frozen? I mean, how does one draw an entire, frozen-solid body down a hole which can’t even accommodate that body’s head?’
‘I don’t know.’ The Ferenc shook his own misshapen head. ‘But still I reckon that’s what this old lad was afraid of. What’s more, I reckon he died from the fear of it . . .’
Later, a mile closer to the central cone, they entered one of the inner ice-castles.
‘This is one I’ve not visited before,’ said the Ferenc. ‘But as close as it is to the old volcano, I’d guess it’s a safe bet what we’ll find.’