For some years and through many nights this scenario held true. There were times when the Wamphyri came and others when they failed to find Gorgan’s tribe (for the Travellers were never sedentary but constantly on the move, a restlessness bred into them through hundreds of years of Wamphyri rapaciousness), on which fortunate occasions at sunup the prisoners would be set free to fend for and feed themselves, and continue their lives as of old or until the next time they were taken prisoner, perhaps before the next sundown.
And when the Wamphyri did come, why, then there were offerings to be made, and the Wamphyri Lords, their warriors and undead soldiers would collect their tithe of one hundred Travellers and depart. In short, the Wamphyri became like tax-collectors; and true to the scenario, they did no harm to those who paid this regular human tribute.
With the result that the people of Gorgan’s tribe grew weak, fat and increasingly careless. They lost their urge to travel and so avoid Wamphyri incursions; they used regular routes, watering-holes and harbouring areas, and their treks along the Sunside flank of the mountains fell into ever more foreseeable patterns; contrary to the very nature of Travellers, there was no longer any mystery to their movements. In short, they no longer bothered to hide themselves and thus were easily found. Now there were far fewer nights of peace and rest, when more and more often the Wamphyri would come and carry off their human tribute; but what did that matter? The tribe itself was safe, wasn’t it?
Safe, yes – until the brief alliance of a handful of Wamphyri Lords had fallen apart, until they had quarrelled and split up, and each faction of the former alliance determined to build up its individual forces, refill its storehouses, define once more its old territorial boundaries and become strong again in the former Wamphyri traditions! For when armies build for war – and in the case of the Wamphyri not against a mutual enemy but internecine, each vampire Lord against his neighbours -then they take and use whatever resources are available, with never a thought for conservation. And the natural resources of the Wamphyri had ever been the flesh and blood of Travellers!
In a single night of terror and madness – one sundown, the space of time between the sun’s setting and its rising again, a matter of only forty hours – Gorgan’s tribe was decimated! The Wamphyri had come, first Shaithis to demand the usual tribute, which he took; then Lesk the Glut; finally Lascula Longtooth. More might have come, Belath and Volse and the others, except that by then there was nothing left to take; or if they did come, then the survivors of Gorgan’s tribe were no longer in their customary holes waiting for them. For after Shaithis, when the Lords Lesk and Lascula found no tribute, they had simply killed the Council of Elders out of hand and proceeded to herd off the flower of the tribe itself! At which the handful of survivors, maybe fifty old ones and a hundred children, had fled for whichever sanctuaries they could discover. And not many of those in a land where the people of Gorgan’s tribe were universally loathed! From which time forward the tribe had been no more, and the youth Gorgan had vowed never to put his faith in any ‘deals’ with the treacherous Wamphyri. Lardis, in his turn, was of the same mind: let other tribal leaders do what they would, go their own ways and good luck to them, his people would never submit to the Wamphyri, nor would they prey on brother and sister Travellers for dubious personal benefits and the well-being of vile, inhuman Starside overloads. As to how Lardis’s convictions worked in his favour: There were still tribes who operated one tithe system or another, using either captive Travellers stolen from other groups to placate the Wamphyri, or even drawing lots and sacrificing members of their own nomad communities. Such Travellers who had adopted or accepted this servile existence were generally of large eastern-flank tribes numbering more than a thousand strong. Their size protected them from any retaliatory attacks which previous victims might possibly dream up, and/or allowed them to make the required periodic sacrificial cull without appreciably diminishing the strength of the tribe.