But the fact remained that Shaithis had once been a common man – a Traveller vampirized when Shaidar Shaigispawn renamed him, made him his chief lieutenant or ‘son’, and gave him his egg – and as such he’d learned what fear was all about. Even now after half a millennium he still remembered, if only when he slept. For however monstrous a man may become, the things that frightened him as a youth will continue to do so in his dreams.
What had frightened Shaithis the most in those early days of his abduction from Sunside – in that time now five hundred years in the past, before the Lord Shaidar coughed his scarlet egg into his throat and changed him for ever – had been the many and monstrous anomalies of Shaidar’s lofty aerie: the cartilage creatures and gas-beasts, the entirely unthinkable siphoneers, the vast vats in the lower levels of the stack where trogs and Travellers alike became flyers or warriors or yet weirder facets of Shaidar’s hybrid experimentation. For the vampire Lord had delighted in showing to Shaithis (at that time a young, as yet innocent Traveller) his most nightmarish creations, and in torturing his mind with the half-threat that one day he, too, might be a diamond-headed flyer, armour-scaled warrior or flaccid, pulpy siphoneer.
Morbid distortions and abnormalities such as these, then, had been the harbingers of Shaithis’s worst nightmares during those early days of Wamphyri apprenticeship. But in time, as he himself ascended to the aerie’s throne-room, such fears had receded, been suppressed, had succumbed to the vampire in him, which bade him become a maker of monsters in his own right; an art in which finally he’d excelled. And his flyers had been the most weirdly graceful, his warriors ferocious beyond any previous ferocity, and his other creations and experiments . . . varied. So that it was only in dreams out of his youth that he remembered and took fright at such things. Except that even in the most vivid and awe-inspiring of these, nothing that memory had conjured had been half as monstrous as that which the Dark Hooded Thing had shown him.
‘Ugly,’ Shaitan had called himself, but there is ugly and there is ugly. And as for hybridism . . .
Shaithis pictured again the thing which had stood there when his ancestor relaxed his hypnotic shield to let himself be seen as he really was: an abomination which not even the most perverse or insane Wamphyri mind might envisage, made all the worse through its reality. It had been . . . what? A man-sized slug or leech – corrugated, glistening black, and mottled grey-green – but rearing upright like a man? A vampire, yes, such as might develop from an egg inside a man or woman, but grown huge beyond all reasonable measures; so that Shaithis had wondered: But if this grew inside a man, then what became of its host!?
Then, as the grotesque but mainly vague picture of the thing (made vague, by virtue of its obscenity) scarred itself into his mind, so he’d become aware of something of its finer detail, which in the next moment had sufficed to shock him awake.
The thing (no, he must not think of it as a ‘thing’ alone but also as Shaitan, his ancestor?) had rubbery limbs, some of which ended in suckered tentacles. Others, however, did not but were equipped with vestigial human and other animal parts: mummied hands and withered, rudimentary feet, and even a gleaming bone claw. And it was these parts, and also Shaitan’s flat, composite face on its spade-shaped cobra head, which repulsed Shaithis the most and brought about the resurgence of his long-forgotten phobia.
For he knew that the hybridism he saw here was not that of some Wamphyri Lord’s experimental vats but of Nature; or rather of the vampire’s unnatural tenacity, its determination to cling to life in circumstances however desperate, through travails and triumphs down all the nameless ages. Aye, for the Lord Shaitan had grown simply too ancient for the accommodation of mortal, human flesh, and his original body had wasted away to be replaced almost in its entirety by the metamorphic organism which was his vampire. Which was, indeed, now him.