Wamphyri! Brian Lumley

‘My servant?’ Thibor was bewildered. ‘Here?’

‘Do you hear nothing I say?’ Faethor’s turn to scowl. ‘For more than two hundred years I have cared for myself, protected myself, stayed alone and lonely in a world expanding, changing, full of new wonders. This I have done for my seed, which now is ready to be passed on, passed down, to you. You will stay behind and keep this place, these lands, this “legend” of the Ferenczy alive. But I shall go out amongst men and revel! There are wars to be won, honours to be earned, history is in the making. Aye, and there are women to be spoiled!’

‘Honours, you?’ Thibor had regained something of his former nerve. ‘I doubt it. And for a creature “alone and lonely”, you seem to know a great deal of what is passing in the world.’

Faethor smiled his ghastliest smile. ‘Another secret art of the Wamphyri,’ he chuckled obscenely in his throat. ‘One of several. Beguilement is another — which you saw at work between myself and Arvos, binding his mind to mine so that we could talk to each other over great distances — and then there is the art of the necromancer.’

Necromancy! Thibor had heard of that. The eastern barbarians had their magicians, who could open the bellies of dead men to read their lives’ secrets in their smoking guts.

‘Necromancy,’ Faethor nodded, seeing the look in Thibor’s eyes, ‘aye. I shall teach it to you soon. It has allowed me to confirm my choice of yourself as a future vessel of the Wamphyri. For who would know better of you and your deeds, your strengths and weaknesses, your travels and adventures, than a former colleague, eh?’ He stooped and effortlessly flopped the body of the thin Wallach over onto its back. And Thibor saw what had been done. No wolf pack had done this, for nothing was eaten.

The thin, hunched Wallach — an aggressive man in life, who had always gone with his chin thrust forward —seemed even thinner now. His trunk had been laid open from groin to gullet, with all of his pipes and organs loose and flopping, and the heart in particular hanging by a thread, literally torn out. Thibor’s sword had gutted men as thoroughly as this, and it had meant nothing. But by the Ferenczy’s own account, this man had already been dead. And his enormous wound was not the work of a sword . .

Thibor shuddered, turned his eyes away from the mutilated corpse and inadvertently found Faethor’s hands. The monster’s nails were sharp as knives. Worse, (Thibor felt dizzy, even faint,) his teeth were like chisels.

‘Why?’ The word left Thibor’s lips as a whisper.

‘I’ve told you why.’ Faethor was growing impatient. ‘I wanted to know about you. In life he was your friend. You were in his blood, his lungs, his heart. In death he was loyal, too, for he would not give up his secrets easily. See how loose are his innards. Ah! How I teased them, to wrest their secrets from him.’

All the strength went out of Thibor’s legs and he fell in his chains like a man crucified. ‘If I’m to die, kill me now,’ he gasped. ‘Have done with this.’

Faethor flowed close, closer, stood not an arm’s length away. ‘The first state of being — the prime condition of the Wamphyri — does not require death. You may think that you are dying, when first the seed puts out its rootlets into your brain and sends them groping along the marrow of your spine, but you will not die. After that . . .‘ he shrugged. ‘The transition may be laboriously slow or lightning swift, one can never tell. But of one thing be sure, it will happen.’

Thibor’s blood surged one last time in his veins. He could still die a man. ‘Then if you’ll not give me a clean death, I’ll give myself one!’ He gritted his teeth and wrenched on his manacles until the blood flowed freely from his wrists; and still he jerked on the irons, deepening his wounds. Faethor’s long drawn-out hisssss stopped him. He looked up from his grisly work of self-destruction into. . . into the pit, the abyss itself.

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