Necroscope 9: The Lost Years (49 page)

Radu still didn’t know too much about the Wamphyri. Since Hengor seemed reluctant to send down another flyer for his lieutenant, Radu used the long night hours to question Emil Hagisman and familiarize himself with vampire codes and customs.

And oddly (or perhaps not) he approved almost everything he learned of them; for after all he was Wamphyri, too! But in fact their nature was much as he’d expected it to be - as he was or would be himself in the fullness of time.

They were proud, vain, lusty, greedy and devious, and they were bestial beyond the beasts, cruel beyond human cruelty, and bloody beyond the deepest gutters and vats of the worst possible charnel house. Their conceit and various vanities were perhaps their weirdest aspect. Every one of them considered him or herself ‘handsome’ or ‘beautiful’ to a fault - except they had no faults, not to mention, and certainly none of their own making! Any shortcomings were blamed on their ‘worthless’ eggs or leeches, while every triumph however small was as a direct result of their own efforts. It was an utter contradiction of the so-called ‘free-will code’ that governed their every interaction with and treatment of their contemporaries, thralls, beasts and victims. Since the Wamphyri
themselves
enjoyed no free will as such, the ideology or concepts of freedom and self-determination in others was paramount. If lesser men controlled their own destinies, then surely the mighty vampire Lords controlled theirs? Why, of course they did …!

The Wamphyri were bloodbeasts. The blood was the life, and the life was or could be eternal as far as was known. Youth and blood went hand in hand; if a Lord wished it, he could keep his ‘looks’, hold back the years and retain his sexual potency forever.

Lesser men could - indeed
must -
shrivel under his bite and die the true death if nothing of him got into them, or rise up again undead and renewed, vampirized and enthralled by their Lord’s essence; while he would go on unchanged, except he would be stronger (made stronger by their loss), and so continuously evolving through his victims’ devolution, always.

And people, the Szgany of Sunside, and their produce … were for using. They were no more than very temporary vassals, (or vessels?) from which all the good things of life including life itself might be taken wholesale as by right, or gradually siphoned off, as was more frequently the case. And the Wamphyri could do no wrong, not in their own red and rapacious eyes, for they were mainly without conscience! Perhaps the first handful of changeling Lords -with the exception of Shaitan - wondered about it from time to time: how they who
had been
Szgany could now live like parasites off their former kith and kin, and put them through such travails of terror.

254

Brian Lumley

Necroscope: The Lost Years - Vol. I

255

Perhaps
they pondered it … but infrequently. For while their own parasites held sway, the host bodies would be and do as their leeches willed it …

Next, Radu learned about the individual Lords and Ladies:

About Shaitan the Unborn, so called because he had neither father nor mother (not that he remembered), but seemed to have bred himself out of the vampire swamps! … And why not, since he was the original vampire Lord? No such creature before him, and none since except he made them or made those who made them, or they had followed him out of the spore-laden western swamps. He alleged that he was the victim of some Great Expulsion, but from where or when he knew not; his persecutors had robbed him of al memory of previous existence! But he believed that his ‘crime’ had been his pride and awesome beauty: he had dared to be more beautiful than the masters of that unremembered place, which to them was unforgivable.

And in fact Shaitan was ‘beautiful’, as handsome a Lord of vampires as could be imagined. ‘Judge for yourself,’ Emil Hagisman told Radu, ‘when you go up to see him. Why, Shaitan is so good-looking you just know he has to be the worst! He makes no pretence of it but calls it the “perfection of evil”: when the external or visible image reaches a peak such as his, then the rot must commence invisibly from within. And Lord Shaitan has been rotting since his very first moment of being!’

Shaitan was the overlord here, the uncrowned King of these beings. But among his closest contemporaries (‘peers’

he would never allow) it was generally suspected that just such a crown, and a throne, were his ambition. Therefore, because he was so powerful, his allies were few. Perhaps that was why he seemed so eager to accept Radu … as a future aly? But in any case, Lord Lykan would do wel to watch his step in Shaitanstack.

As for the rest of the Wamphyri: Radu paid some attention to what Emil Hagisman told him - especially with regard to the Ferenczys - but their descriptions, habits and origins, could only come as something of an anticlimax after Shaitan himself.

There was Hengor, called the Gust for his girth, thunderous outbursts, and bellowing laughter. Not that there was very much of ‘merriment’ in him; his angers were frequently as violent as his ‘mirth’, while his vampire appetite - for anything unholy - matched the size of his belly. Hengor was not a true Hagi; he took his surname from the Szgany Hagi, the first Sunside tribe visited by Shaitan the Unborn during his journey of discovery from the western swamps into Starside. Among the unsuspecting Hagis, the Lord of Vampires had seduced a girl, who later converted Hengor among others before the tribe’s leader, Heinar Hagi, put her down. Hengor had dwelled in Starside only a year less than Shaitan himself; his aerie rivalled Shaitanstack in its

colossal if morbid grandeur. And meanwhile, the Szgany Hagi… were probably no more.

Klaus Lankari was a mountain man, a loner and dullard who had thought to explore the swamps … only to return from them something other than a man. Less ‘scrupulous’ than Shaitan and the others, most of his thralls were trogs recruited from caverns under the barrier mountains. He kept trog odalisques, too, and was pleased to admit that during his years in the wild he had shagged far worse than these.

As for Thereza Three-Eyes’ Lugosi: she would be a gross mistake in any world! Born a freak, as a Sunsider child she’d been fortunate to escape with her life. The Szgany had enough to do in those days of restructuring without the extra burden of caring for monstrous children. But her parents had pleaded her case; however grudgingly, they had been granted the right to care for her; fearing for her safety anyway, they’d become loners in Sunside’s foothills and mountain passes. The source of her eventual vampiric contamination was unknown except to Thereza herself, but that her doting parents had paid in full for letting their deformed ogre of a child grow to full maturity was scarcely a matter for conjecture: she kept their teeth and finger bones on a gold chain around her neck!

Thereza’s deformities were several. One shoulder appeared to be missing entirely; she held the good one high, which gave her the appearance of a hunchback. Her left arm was of normal length, but the right dangled to her knees.

Her breasts were dissimilar flaccid dugs, and all of her skin was mottled with purplish blotches and birthmarks.

But her third eye was the worst of her blemishes. She’d been born with an extra orbit in the back of her skull, and a rudimentary eye skinned over in its socket. Since her change, Thereza had developed this abnormality into an actual optical receptor, an eye which gazed out lidlessly - if not vacantly - from the spot where she kept her hair shorn. Which was perhaps a measure of her
real
monstrousness: that with her metamorphism, while she scarcely required to remain ugly at all but might easily remodel herself, she
preferred
it that way! As to the eye: she declared that of all the Wamphyri, she alone possessed the means of watching her back at all times …

Then there was the Lady Rusha Basti, by all accounts gorgeous as a peach! Except, by whose account? To Emil Hagisman’s knowledge no one had ever seen her entirely … what, exposed? Not even her occasional lovers! Rusha’s hair was red as flame and longer than her ample body, and she wore it in several sensuous designs, strategically bunched, or shaped with clasps to cover or expose her various parts according to her mood. Sometimes she would leave a breast bare, now and then her back and buttocks, or her long and alluring legs … but
never
her face. Perhaps she was a hag after all; rumour had it that she detested her eyes - which were red as her hair, of course - and her 256

Brian Lumley

Necroscope: The Lost Years - Vol. I

257

nose, which had a flange and was convolute beyond her ability to mask it with vampire metamorphism. A rarity, Rusha actually admitted to these small flaws - or rather, she would
not
admit to them, and so must keep them covered. With luck, Radu might find himself ‘on a good thing’ with the Lady Rusha Basti. With the exception of Lord Shaitan the Unborn, who preferred absolute control over his odalisques, and Hengor Hagi, because he had the bulk of a bull shad and Rusha would not suffer the necessary bruising of such an affaire, she’d had all the Lords worth mentioning as lovers. Indeed, she loved them and left them as easily as snapping her fingers!

But on the other hand … Rusha was not so easy as might at first be reckoned. Stolen out of Starside just four or five years ago, she had ascended in very short order. And the young Lord who had taken her … well, where was he? She had his egg, be sure, but did she also have his head? According to Rusha he had died of some wasting disease in her loving embrace. And if so, then he’d probably expired happy - but
expired,
definitely! Emil Hagisman had heard of certain female spiders, who … but he’d made his point, and Radu assured him he need say no more.

Then there were the Drakuls, Karl and Egon. They had been among the first-established in Starside. The younger bloodsons of a loner family vampirized in the swamps, they’d been obliged to care for themselves almost from infancy. For the Drakul family had dwelled in the mountains, where as long as they stayed Starside of the peaks they’d been able to eke out something of an existence.

But allegedly, in those days there had been dog-Lords in the hills -men much like Radu, but with a great deal more of the wolf in them and far less of intelligence - and these and the Drakuls had feuded. One night, hounded by these wolflings, the man, his wife, and one older son had been driven over into Sunside in the twilight hours before the dawn. Unable to find shelter, they’d perished in the blast from the rising sun. But the infant brothers - twins, which were not uncommon among the Szgany - had been left behind and raised half by the wild dog-Lords, half by a pack of common grey brothers.

When they were old enough (and they were only youths even now, perhaps seventeen or eighteen years old, but precocious far beyond their years), then they had come down into Starside to build an aerie among the menhirs of the Wamphyri. Demoniac fighters, both of them were viciously territorial, even more so than the Wamphyri in general. Perhaps it was only natural, for after all their mountain-dwelling parents had had nothing. Currently the brothers occupied Drakstack, which Egon had claimed as his own; wherefore his twin was already at work on nearby Karlscar. Both of these stacks would make tremendous aeries, which together might house vampire armies to rival anything of Shaitan’s making. Shaitan, however, was

aware of Drakul rapaciousness; needless to state, the brothers were not his favourites among the lesser Lords. Nor were they anyone’s, for even by Wamphyri standards their ways were dark …

And finally the Gust’s lieutenant went on to tell Radu of Turgo Zolte, Shaitan’s so-called ‘son.’ But discovered by Shaitan in an act of black treachery, Turgo had been thrown out of his ‘father’s‘ manse onto the boulder plains, to exist as best possible in the scree and the rubble and the dust. It was said he dwelled now in Sunside, sleeping out his days in deep caves where the sun couldn’t find him, and constantly on the run from the Szgany. If so, then he was fortunate indeed - and far more so than his co-conspirators.

One of these had been tossed into the Starside Gate, and so banished to unknown hells; the other lay undead in a deep grave on the boulder plains, slowly stiffening to a stone among stones …

As for the lesser Lords and Ladies: they were diverse as all of the aforementioned, but Emil Hagisman would gladly say on if Radu wished it. He didn’t, for in the new-found conceit or self-assurance of his own strengths and talents, he wasn’t much interested in the lesser personages. Certain things, however, continued to puzzle him; not least how for so long he’d been ignorant of the Wamphyri’s presence here.

The Lords lived on trogs for long and long,’ his informant told him. ‘Until their stacks were established. And it’s only recently that Lord Shaitan bred his first flyers and warriors, thus prompting the others to follow suit. But now … they’re moving that much faster. They’ve organized supplicant tribes east of the great pass, who make their battle gauntlets for them, and other supplicants who … are simply flesh. They take tithe from the poor bastards, even as I was taken. Raids west of the pass have been few and far between; certain of the Szgany tribes fight back! The Lidescis in particular are vicious in their defence of Sunside!

And you say you were a loner, who dwelled in the mountains and kept apart from men? Plainly you were, for there’s that of the great wolf in you. But the barrier mountains are a mighty range; it’s not surprising you didn’t sight the Wamphyri on their infrequent raids. Ask yourself this: why should they raid west of the pass when there’s easy meat in the east? Also, why should they be in a hurry to show themselves? What is time to them? But that was then, and this is now; Sunside will come more and more under attack … ”

And one other subject:

‘Mentalism,’ said Radu. ‘Do they all have it? Who is the craftiest thought-thief, whom I must watch out for? And who is least talented, that I can spy on his mind?’