Necroscope 9: The Lost Years (39 page)

So then, with the bats and the trogs Shaitan had gathered minions unto himself. But was this all there was? The parasite within him was mature now; it desired more; it lived on Shaitan’s blood as he lived on the blood of others, but was not satisfied with its host’s regimen. And so he would seek out other men, on whom to impose his will. Except he sometimes wondered: whose will was it? His or his parasite leech’s? And from then on the question of free will, and integrity of spirit, became matters of great importance to Shaitan, even assuming dimensions of obsession in him.

And in all subsequent vampires.

The trogs likened Shaitan to certain ‘men’ on the far side of the mountains, in Sunside. He determined to conquer Sunside, which would be as subtle as all his works. First he would approach the sunsiders as their friend, later as their master.

And so in the twilight before the night Shaitan went into Sunside, and in the gloamy foothills was drawn to the fires of hunters. East and west as far as his eyes could see, the fires lit up the night like beacons. The Sunsider tribes were legion! In his black heart Shaitan was glad, believing that at last he had found true men upon which to impose his wil.

His dreams of conquest quickly evaporated. With Starside’s trogs it had been easy, but these men (the ‘Szgany’ of Sunside) were very different… and their women different, too. Unlike trog females, Szgany women were lovely creatures. Shaitan was the Great Seducer; he seduced - and he murdered! But his crime was discovered and he was hounded out of the Szgany camps.

His trackers set a wolf upon him, and for the first time Shaitan used metamorphism to change his shape and become more animal than the wolf itself! Furious in his rage, he slew not only the watchdog but certain of his human pursuers, and took others for his thrals. For as a dweler among Starside’s cavern trogs.

Shaitan had discovered his power over men: how his bite infected their blood with an incurable fever, until they became his thrals for ever and ever.

And hidden in a vampire mist caled out of his own pores and up from the earth, Shaitan and one of his thrals went up into the dark foothills, finding refuge in a cave. For the purple dawn twilight was fading, and a poisoned golden blister was poising itself even now on the southern horizon far across the forest. Shaitan’s symbiont had become a two-edged sword - impossible to accept its advantages without its disadvantages.

Sunlight: it was a seething agony in his eyes and against his hide! It burned him, visibly steamed the moisture from his flesh, and sapped his great strength! He could go out from the cave for seconds, but minutes would deplete him horribly, and an hour would kill him and his leech both. He had suspected it, which was why he had gone into Sunside in the evening. But now he had proof positive: the sun
was
his mortal enemy.

The long day crawled endlessly by; more men of the Szgany whom Shaitan had vampirized came to him as thralls; when night fell he took these poor creatures over the mountains and down into Starside, where several trog thralls were waiting on the return of their master. Now his band numbered thirteen in all, and Shaitan named them his disciples (though in fact they were his blood-slaves). And thirteen would become a
number
of ill-omen from that time on, in more worlds than one …

Coming down into Starside, Shaitan saw a light shining up into the night, which one of his band said must be the fallen white sun that some called a gateway into hell. Shaitan was curious, and said he must see this hellgate.

They climbed a low crater wal, stood on its rim and gazed down upon the dome of cold fire within. Blinded, the trogs staggered to and fro. One tripped, fell, landed on a ledge close to the white glare. Fearful of the strange light, he put up a hand to fend it off; his hand touched the dazzle’s surface, and sank into it… he cried out in his guttural fashion, as the hellgate dragged him in and swallowed him whole!

And Shaitan said: This shall be a punishment for any who would offend me three times. Three chances, for I am forgiving, as you see. And there shall be other punishments, aye. I am the Lord Shaitan, who can make men undead!

Anyone who would do me harm, let him first think on this: I shall drain his blood and bury him deep in the ground.

And he shall lie there and scream forever, or until he stiffens to a stone in the earth. And that land there to the north; I perceive it is icy cold and no fit habitation. Therefore, let him who would deny me beware. In my house there shall be no warm bed or soft woman-flesh for him; no kind master to guide and instruct him; neither wonders to be witnessed nor mysteries revealed. For I shall banish him north to freeze in the ice all alone. But for him who would obey me in all things, and be my true servant, a rich red life forever … aye, even unto death - and beyond! So be it…’

Lord Shaitan and his followers came to a region of giant stone stacks weathered out of the mountains. In their bases they were fortified with fallen scree jumbles; in their columns were fissures, ledges and caverns, many as vast as halls.

Shaitan much admired these soaring

Necroscope: The Lost Years - Vol. I

205

Brian Lumley

204

stacks, which were very grand and gaunt. ‘One of these shal be my house,’he said.

And a thral told him: They are like unto the aeries of the mountain eagles!’

‘Aye,’ said Shaitan. The aeries of the Wamphyri!’ He set to and built his house. The task was enormous; only a vampire and his thrals could ever accomplish it.

Except Shaitan would build not only a house but an empire of vampires. He recruited trogs out of their caverns, and sent his lieutenants into Sunside to hunt Szgany. And in the bowels of his rearing house, Shaitan experimented with his own metamorphic flesh, to furnish himself with al of his requirements.

He bred trogs into cartilage creatures, whose minds were smal and bodies elastic. From these he made leathers and coverings for the aerie’s exterior stairways, or articles of furniture for his rooms. And al of his
materials
still living a life of sorts, gradualy petrifying and becoming permanent in their places. He mated men with trog women, the issue of which was unseemly. He got foul, bloated things, al gross and mindless, which he bred into gaslings, for the heating of the stack, and into things-which-consume, for his refuse pits.

Shaitan took mindless vampire flesh and converted it; he would build flying creatures, and soar out from his aerie upon the winds like his familiar bats. At first he failed; later he provided his flyers with the altered brains of men, that they should have something (but never too much) of volition. Al of which creatures, nascent and ful-formed, were his thrals.

Word of his works went abroad into Sunside. Starside was now damned and shunned uterly - by men, at least. But by now the Szgany had problems other than Shaitan and his raiders. Far in the west the swamps were a spawning ground for monsters! Foolish men and innocent creatures went down to the scummy waters to drink, and things other than men and wolves came up!

And in the early years of Shaitan’s ascendancy, a great many beings who were
like
unto him came over from Sunside to build their houses in the rearing stone aeries of the Wamphyri. And because they were even as strong as Shaitan and much of a kind, he made no protest but let them be. For in any case there was space enough among the great stacks and even Shaitan was unable to lay claim to al of them. Also, across the barrier mountains there was food and entertainment for al. Still, as a precaution, Shaitan fashioned fierce warrior-creatures, to. fill any would-be enemies with terror …

And in the next two hundred years the Wamphyri became a great many. Too many …

On Sunside, the Szgany had become clans of Travelers,’ moving nomadicaly from place to place by day, and sleeping in deep forests or caves at night. Even so, the Lords of Starside gave them no peace, and the tol in blood was monstrous!

Then Shaitan saw his error in permitting other Lords to wax so strong and so many. He determined to get bloodsons out of comely women, with which to whelm the other Lords and keep them down; and his sons and daughters were many. Of the latter: he used them in their turn, for his own flesh was the sweetest. Which would be the way of it with vampires down al the ages.

And as the Lords and Ladies of the Wamphyri proliferated, so they degenerated, going from evil to evil, and descending depth to irredeem able depth …

Eventually all of the greater stacks had masters or mistresses; the lesser aeries were occupied; there was no room left in al the heights for men and their sons, daughters, thralls and creatures. And so, finally, they warred for possession of the stacks, until Starside’s skies were ful of flyers and warriors fighting under the ice-chip stars and in the ramparts of the great aeries. Gongs sounded, war-drums pounded, and banners fluttered, displaying the devices of their masters. Vampire destroyed vampire -even fathers, sons and brothers - as the boulder plains and lands around were drenched in blood and littered with the grotesque, shattered corpses of falen beasts.

Even Shaitan came under attack, but he was clever in the defence of his aerie, and went not out to war. But as various Lords were weakened in stacks close by, then he would swoop on them and put them down. In this manner a cluster of aeries al came under Shaitan’s command.

When his strategy was seen, the others called a truce and came upon him as a single force, and Shaitan was almost trapped in Shaitanstack. Only his metamorphism saved him, when like the falen angel he was he used it to develop a bat’s design and glide from his higher ramparts to safety in a secret place. Meanwhile his forces had ralied and regrouped under his lieutenants, and Shaitanstack had not been taken …

The bloodwars lasted a hundred years; the fashioning of flyers and warriors became an art; Wamphyri numbers were decimated in al the reek and roil of mindless slaughter. It was the era in which Sunside’s Szgany backed off from the abyss and breathed again, and reorganized their lives and what little remained of their society. Except it couldn’t last.

For Shaitan was now the undisputed Lord of Vampires, the ‘high magistrate’ to whom lesser Lords took their disputes for his judgement. And as the clamour of war subsided, so the period of mercifully infrequent raids on Sunside was over, and the nightmare sprang up again with renewed vigour. For now the Wamphyri must see to the

Brian Lumley

206

Necroscope: The Lost Years - Vol. I

207

provisioning of their ravaged and undernourished aeries, whose sustenance roamed on Sunside.

For sixty years this was the way of it, and Shaitan doled out hunting permits and took his tithe of trembling flesh from whatever the others brought back. But the lesser Lords loathed him and would whelm him if they could. He knew it and when the coup came at last was ready to put it down. All who had conspired against him, he brought to trial -even his own son, who he banished to the Icelands: the least of his punishments.

As for the others who. had plotted to overthrow him, these were several, and their punishments various. Some were buried alive (or undead) on the boulder plains, to ‘stiffen to stones’ in the shuddering earth. One, Nonari the Gross, was tossed with his entire court and the leaders of his Szgany supplicants into the Hell-lands Gate. And if this Nonari’s bloodname, Ferenczy, had been a curse to the Szgany of this world, then it was destined to become just such a curse in another.

Likewise banished through the Gate were the Drakul brothers, Karl and Egon, who rivalled Shaitan in their evil, and one other who was a great thorn in Shaitan’s side. For in the earliest days of Shaitan’s coming he had tried to work his will on such as Radu Lykan, but all in vain; the grey brothers of the barrier mountains acknowledged no master but the Leader of the Pack and owned no mistress but the hurtling silver moon at her ful. And Radu Lykan was of that sub-order of Wamphyri: a wolf, or more properly, a werewolf! Lord Shaitan abhorred such ‘dog-Lords,’ the sons of wolves, and even if there’d been no bloodwars he would have found a way to dispose of such as Radu.

So for a while there was peace again on Starside, and a truce between the Wamphyri Lords and Ladies. But
because

they were Wamphyri, it couldn’t last. Greedy, jealous, territorial, they were a plague unto themselves. And eventually even Shaitan was whelmed and fell, and was driven from Starside into the cold and inhospitable Icelands.

All of these things are legends told aforetime. But what remains to be told was previously undisclosed …

Perhaps wolves, like men and bears, foxes and bats, and other species, were creatures of both worlds: Sunside/Starside, and the so-called Hell-lands on the far side of the Starside Gate. Perhaps, springing from the one cosmic germ, a universal soup of genesis, similar forms of life were preordained in the primal plastic of many worlds.

The fossil record of earth suggests it was so. But unless some palaeontologist was fortunate (or unfortunate?) enough to know exactly where to dig, he would never in all the world find anything remotely resembling the Wamphyri of Sunside/Starside. He would not discover them among the strata of Earth’s prehistory, for in their beginning Earth was not the homeworld of the Wamphyri. But for an accident of

Nature (the Gate on Starside, and later a second Gate, forged in error and ignorance by men), the Wamphyri could never have ventured here. There would have been wolves of the wild in our world, but not werewolves.

Of the latter:

It has been told how men and beasts went down to the vampire swamps to drink, and how creatures other than men

- but most certainly beasts - returned from that place. Until they learned better, the grey brothers of the mountains were among the first victims of the swamp-born horror. Contaminated with a vampire spore, occasionally a sick wolf would return to the pack. But he would be different and changed forever. Like any human wanderer or explorer suffering the same fate, he would become an outcast from his own kind.