‘This time,’ Jazz told Zek, ‘I believe I’ll sleep.’
‘You did last time,’ she reminded him. ‘Are you beginning to feel the strain?’
‘Beginning to feel it?’ He managed a grin. ‘I’m looking for a muscle that doesn’t ache! And yet the Travellers have these damned cumbersome travois to lug around, and I don’t hear them complaining. I suppose it’s like you said: I’ll get used to it. But I’d hate to think what it would be like for anyone who was unfit, or maybe an older person, stranded here.’
‘I wasn’t so fit,’ she reflected. ‘But I’ve had more time to get myself broken in. I suppose in a way I was lucky that the Lady Karen got me first. And then that she was . . . well, a “Lady”, or as much of a one as her condition would allow her to be.’
‘Her condition?’
‘She has Dramal Doombody’s egg,’ Zek nodded. The Wamphyri Lord Dramal was doomed from the day he took a leper – which was how he came to be named that way. I’ll explain:
‘Leprosy is also part of the Travellers’ lot. They are prone to it. Passed on, inherited or simply contracted from another leper – don’t ask me. I don’t know anything about the disease. But when its symptoms start to show in a Traveller, then he’s kicked out. It happens now and then: his tribe simply abandons him. Or her. Dramal, in his youth five hundred years ago, took a female leper. She had the disease but it hadn’t started to show yet. The vampire Lord found her comely; he cohabited with her in his aerie; too late he discovered her curse.’
Jazz was puzzled yet again. ‘You mean she passed it on to him? But I’m amazed that any of these terrible creatures have survived at all! Quite apart from the fact that they continually war with each other, they drink the blood of Travellers, have sex with Traveller women, generally leave themselves wide open to all sorts of diseases.’
‘And yet,’ Zek answered, ‘in their own way they’re scrupulous. The true Wamphyri Lord or Lady is, anyway.’
‘Scrupulous?’ Jazz was taken aback. ‘Are you serious?’
She looked at him, stared unblinking into his eyes. ‘Cockroaches are also scrupulous, in their way. But all in all, the Wamphyri are … choosy, yes. Their retainers, their henchmen – generally Travellers who’ve been changed, vampirized but not given an egg, like those two you saw with Shaithis – they’re not so fussy. But as for “leaving themselves wide open to diseases”: that might be true if they were wholly human. But as you’ve seen, they’re not. Once a man is vampirized his body becomes invulnerable to disease. That’s why they live so long. Even the aging process is defeated.’
‘But not invulnerable to leprosy? Is that what you’re saying?’
‘Apparently. Anyway, this woman of Dramal’s died in the tower where he locked her. Then the disease came out in him. Of course, his vampire flesh fought it. When limbs withered down they were regenerated, and when flesh wasted away it was replenished. But Dramal couldn’t win. The vampire in him was itself infected. As the disease got a hold, all of Dramal’s energies went into combatting it, holding it at bay. His aerie was shunned by the Wamphyri, and even in times of truce he had no visitors. He held his own people in thrall, of course, but as he weakened even they began to whisper and plot against him. They were afraid of catching the disease.
‘Now all of this took time, almost five hundred years of gradual deterioration, but just a few years ago Dramal began to fear that the end was in sight, that one of the Great Undead was about to die – or that he would soon become so weak that his retainers would rise up against him, stake and behead him, and burn his remains to ashes. Then they would flee the aerie, which was now generally considered a pesthole. He determined that before they could do that he must deposit his egg – but not with one of the treacherous gang who now surrounded him. With the egg would go his power, of course, and the aerie would pass into the hands of his successor. So he took Karen Sisclu from an eastern Traveller tribe and made her one of the Wamphyri, and before he died transferred all of his power to her. In better times he would most certainly have passed on his egg through the sex act, but he no longer had the strength for that. He had expended all in teaching Karen the ways of the Wamphyri, the secrets of the aerie, and in passing on his sigils and the loyalty of his various beasts. And so he merely kissed her; that was sufficient; during that monstrous kiss his egg passed into her.’