‘You do not actually remember falling, then? Only that you were suddenly there, in the vampire swamps?’
‘Close to the swamps, yes, where my vampire came into me.’
Shaithis had been keenly interested in that last. ‘In our time,’ he mused, ‘we’ve both had occasion to kill enemies and tear their living vampires out of them to devour. Fess Ferenc and Arkis Leperson were only the most recent. We know what such parasites look like: full-formed they are barbed leeches, which hide in men to shape their thoughts and urges. And in certain hosts, over long periods, they may grow so fused as to become inseparable.’
‘As in myself, yes,’ Shaitan had answered. ‘Indeed, there remains precious little of the original me at all, while my vampire is grown to what you see.’
‘Just so,’ said Shaithis. ‘You, or rather your vampire -as a result of prolonged metamorphism – is now gross. But how was it then? Did it come to you as an egg? Did the parent creature remain in the swamps? Or did the parasite come to you full grown, take you by surprise and slither into you complete?’
‘It came to me from the swamp,’ Shaitan had repeated. That much I know . . . how I do not know.’
The problem had vexed Shaithis (and his ancestor no less), but on that occasion at least they’d been lost for further questions and answers.
A good many auroral periods later, however, when Shaithis was busy in a corner of the workshop, carefully constructing a warrior for his ancestor’s approval:
‘This is how it was!’ said Shaitan, coming swiftly and in some excitement upon Shaithis where he worked, and flowing up to him like a midnight shadow. ‘In that earliest existence of which I apprised you, I served another or others but desired to serve only myself. As a reward for my pride – which is to say for my wit and great beauty, of which I was perhaps too much aware – and for my pains, I was thrown out and removed from my rightful place in that society. I was not destroyed, not wasted, but used! I became to Them … a tool! A seed of evil, which They would sow between the spheres! Do you see? I was the folly and the penance! I was the Darkness which allows for the Light!’
In the face of this outburst, Shaithis had brought his work at the vat to a halt. Unable to understand the other, he could only shake his head and throw up his hands. ‘Can’t you explain yourself more clearly?’
‘Damn you – no? Shaitan had shouted then. ‘I dreamed it; I know it for the truth; but I cannot understand it! I’ve told it to you so that you also may attempt to fathom it -and likewise fail to fathom it, even as I have failed!’
With which and in a fury, he had rushed off and disappeared into the volcano’s labyrinth.
For a long time after that Shaithis had not seen the other at all; he had merely been aware of his ancestor’s shadowy presence. But a time had come when, going again to the vats, he’d found the ancient gloomily examining his various adaptations where they squirmed and hardened in their liquids; and there, following customary greetings but in answer to no specific remark or query, Shaitan had listlessly mumbled: ‘I have been banished out of many spheres and thrown down from many worlds. Aye, and others like me, throughout all the myriad cone-shaped dimensions of light.’ That had been all.
Mad creature! (Shaithis had kept this thought, and others he was thinking, very much to himself.) But it’s as well you rush around crazed while I’m about my work. The last thing I would want is for you to become interested in what I’m doing now. For in fact he was there at that time in order to inject brain matter into his new construct, so stimulating and even directing the foetal ganglion’s growth. Except . . . these were cells obtained from a rather special source, and by means of Shaitan’s ice-boring ingurgitor . . .
Putting all such business aside for the nonce, however, and pandering to Shaitan’s insanity, if that is what it was, he had answered: ‘In which case, when we go against Starside with these warriors I’m fashioning, your revenge will be so much sweeter. Nothing will stand before us; and if there are higher worlds to conquer, they too shall finally fall, even as you fell to earth.’