Again Fess shrugged. ‘Best to be sure, eh?’ he said. ‘And if there was some “sly intelligence” at work here, albeit a long time ago, perhaps his works will still be available to us, deep down in the heart of the volcano. One thing’s sure: we’ll never know unless we go see for ourselves.’
‘Now?’ Arkis Leperson was eager.
But Shaithis cautioned: ‘I vote we sleep on it. I for one have tramped enough for the moment, thank you, and would prefer to tackle the cone fresh from my rest and with a hearty breakfast inside me. Anyway, I note that the auroral display is rising to a new peak of activity. That’s a good sign. Let the burning sky light the way for us.’
‘I’m with you, Shaithis,’ the Ferenc rumbled. ‘But where to bed down?’
‘Why not right here?’ Shaithis answered. ‘Within shouting distance, but each of us secure in his own niche.’
Arkis nodded. That suits me.’
They separated and climbed to precarious but private ice-ledges and -niches where no one could come upon them unheard or unobserved, and each in his own place settled down to sleep. Shaithis thought to call to himself a warm, living blanket of albinos, then thought better of it. If the bats came, Fess and Arkis would probably find it a suspicious circumstance. Why should Shaithis have power over the bats when they had none? Why indeed? It was a question he couldn’t answer. Not yet, anyway.
He curled himself inside his cloak of black bat fur and munched on flyer flesh. It was scarcely satisfying but it was filling. And with one eye open and set to scan the ice-cavern, from Fess to Arkis and back again, Shaithis thought: Ah, but time for the good stuff later!
The good stuff, aye: Fess and Arkis themselves. Who for certain would be thinking exactly the same thing about him.
And settling down he began to breathe more deeply, and his scarlet eye scanned the cavern, and slowly the dreams started to come . . .
5
Blood Relations
Shaithis of the Wamphyri dreamed a splendid fantasy. As is often the way of it with dreams, it was comprised of a great many scenes and themes with little or no explanation except perhaps as echoes of his waking ambitions. The fantasy had been developing itself for some time in the darker caverns of Shaithis’s subconscious mind before suddenly firming into an ordered sequence of scenarios, which were these:
It was Shaithis’s reception, his triumph, his moment of glory. The Lady Karen kneeled naked between his spread thighs, teased his great gonads, caressed and even nibbled (but very carefully) upon the purple, bulbous tip of his hugely swollen phallus, and now and then paused to gentle that pulsing rod between her perfect breasts. Sumptuously cushioned, Shaithis reclined upon Dramal Doombody’s raised bone-throne in Karen’s aerie – the last of all the great stacks of the Wamphyri, finally his by right of conquest – and looked upon all of those persons, creatures and possessions who were likewise his to use, abuse or destroy as, when and how he willed it.
Above and beyond the aerie’s kilometre-high buttresses, battlements and balconies of fossilized bone, stone, membrane and cartilage, new stars thronged to join those already dusting the darkening sky. The sun issued its last coruscating fan of golden radiation where it sank down behind Sunside, and for breathless moments the barrier mountains were thrown into massive, jagged silhouette while the glaring yellow spikes of their peaks turned purple and finally grey.
Then . . . the rapidly elongating shadow of the mountains flowed like monstrous stains across Starside’s boulder plains to blot them into darkness, and at last it was that sundown which Shaithis had so long awaited: the hour of his greatest triumph, and of his revenge.
As at a signal his lieutenants threw back the heavy tapestries from the windows and cut free Karen’s sigils so that they went warping and spiralling out and down into the darkness; and they shook out the longer, tapering pennants bearing Shaithis’s new blazon – a Wamphyri gauntlet, clenched and raised threateningly above the glaring sphere which was Starside’s portal to the hell-lands – to wave in the thinly gusting currents of air over the aerie’s higher parapets.