The leaf-mould soaked up the bird’s blood as a sponge soaks water – but behind Dragosani’s back a pseudopod of putrefaction slid swiftly up inside the hollow tree, its leprous white tip finding a knot-hole where a branch had decayed and poking through into view not eighteen inches above his head. The tip throbbed, glistening with a strange life of its own, filled with an alien foetal urgency.
Dragosani took up the second bird by its neck, stepped two paces forward to the very rim of the ‘safe’ area. ‘And there’s more, Thibor, right here in my hand. Only show a little trust, a little faith, and tell me something of the powers I’ll command when I become as you.’
I… I feel the red blood soaking into the ground, my son, and it is good. But still I think you came too late. Well, I will not blame you. We were at odds with one another – I was as much to blame as you – and so let the
past be forgotten. Aye, and 1 would not have it end without showing you at least a small measure of what I’ve come to feel for you, without sharing at least one small secret.
‘I’m waiting,’ Dragosani eagerly answered. ‘Go on . . .’
In the beginning, said the Thing in the ground, all things were equal. The primal vampire was a thing of Nature no less than the primal man, and just as man lived on the lesser creatures about him, so too lived the vampire. We both, you see, were parasites in our way. All living things are. But whereas man killed the creatures he fed upon, there the vampire was kinder: he simply took them for his host. They did not die – indeed they became undead! In this fashion a vampire is no less natural a creature than the lamprey or the leech, or even the humble flea; except his host lives, becomes near immortal, and is not consumed as in the normal manner of massive parasitic possession. But as man evolved into the perfect host, so evolved the vampire, and as man became dominant so the vampire shared his dominance.
‘Symbiosis,’ said Dragosani.
I can read the meaning of the word in your mind, said Thibor, and yes, that is correct – except the vampire soon learned to keep himself secret! For along with evolution came a singular change: where before the vampire could live apart from his host, now he was totally dependent upon him. Just as the hagfish dies without its host fish, so the vampire must have his host simply to exist. And if men discovered a vampire in one of their own sort – why, they would simply kill him! Worse, they learned how to kill the greater being within!
Nor was this the last of the vampire’s problems. Nature is a strange one when it comes to correcting errors and quite ruthless. She had not intended that any of her creations should be immortal. Nothing she makes is allowed to live for ever. And yet here was a creature which
seemed to defy that rigid dictum, a creature which -barring accidents – might just survive indefinitely! And furious, she took her spite on the Wamphyri. As the centuries waxed and waned and the Earth grew through all the ages towards the present day, so my vampire ancestors developed within themselves a weakness. It was bred into them – it came down the generations, down all the years. It was a stricture of Nature, and it was this: that since vampires ‘died’ so very rarely, she would allow them only rarely to be born!
‘Which is why,’ said Dragosani, ‘you’re dying out as a race.’
As individuals, we may only reproduce once in a life-span, no matter the great length of that span . . .
‘But you’re so potent! I can’t see that the fault lies with your males. Is it that your females are infertile . . . I mean, that they only have the one opportunity to reproduce?’
Our ‘males’, Dragosani? said the voice in Dragosani’s mind, with a sardonically inquisitive edge that he didn’t like. Our ‘females”. . .? And once again the necromancer stepped back against the tree.