The Source by Brian Lumley

As Jazz packed his kit again and settled down comfortably where he intended to sleep, Zek continued her story:

‘I had my own room in Karen’s aerie. She and I shared the topmost level – literally acres of rooms, all of them enormous – where we were the only human creatures. Remember, the Wamphyri are human; it’s the vampire in each one of them which makes him alien, and Karen’s vampire had yet to gain total ascendancy. So we were the only people up there, but there was a warrior. It was a small one of its sort, which is to say it was about as big as an armoured personnel carrier and just as deadly! It guarded the stairwell to the next lower level. That was how well Karen trusted her aides.

‘Then there were the water-drawing creatures, which I’ve already mentioned. And that was all, nothing and no one else.

‘Every so often (I calculated at the time that it was about every twenty-four hours) Karen would hold audience. She’d call her lieutenants up from below, all seven of them, none of them having an egg, and apportion the aerie’s duties or check on orders already issued. Then they’d make their reports, warn of any deviations in the balance which the aerie maintained, detail their recommendations, and so forth. It was like a military “O”-group, in a way, with Karen as the C-in-C. And she carried it off very well. These were the only occasions when I saw Karen’s men without their gauntlets. Her warrior had orders – direct from her mind -to savage anyone who attempted to enter her level wearing a gauntlet.

‘But don’t be misled by anything I’ve said about her. Don’t in any way make the error of believing she was vulnerable. For she wasn’t; not physically, anyway. She was Wamphyri! – the real thing – and her lieutenants knew it. She looked, and for the moment perhaps still thought like a young woman, yes, but that was only the shell.

‘Within her she had a vampire and its strengths were hers, growing stronger every day. If she appeared weak it was simply that she didn’t want her underlings to test her, didn’t want to have to punish them as she’d been obliged to punish Corlis, for that might mean calling again upon the monster within her for its assistance. And she was dedicated to her stance, which was to hold it at bay. Let it gain true ascendancy just once . . . she believed it would dominate her always. And eventually it will, of course, for that is the nature of the vampire. Karen is doomed to change, to metamorphosis, to the gradual deterioration of what she was into what she must become . . .

‘I remember that toward the end of my captivity there in her aerie, I asked her what Corlis could have done that she’d wished to banish him to the hell-lands. Perhaps because I was the only one she could talk to without worrying about their motives, she told me all about it.

‘Corlis had been the biggest of Karen’s men, both in size and in the aerie’s pecking order. He was also surly, a troublemaker, the Wamphyri equivalent of a male chauvinist whatever – in spades! Even as a Traveller he’d been a brute, but that had been forty years ago. Then he had been taken in a raid, since when he’d served Dramal Doombody – if “served” is the right word for it. God knows why Dramal suffered him, but the ways of the Wamphyri are never easy to figure out. Maybe at one time Dramal intended that Corlis should have his egg. But that’s pure guesswork, of course.

‘Let me explain Corlis like this: he wasn’t true Wamphyri, but if ever a man should have been then he was that man. And he knew it.

‘Most men would shrink from the idea, but not Corlis. He wanted an egg – and the power it would bring. He wanted to be master of the aerie, a Wamphyri Lord. He would like nothing better than to ride to war on the back of a flying beast, and command his warriors in their terrifying aerial battles. But while he and the others called themselves Wamphyri, they knew that in fact they were merely the undead servants of their true vampire mistress. And that was the great thorn in Corlis’s side.

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