Call it hell, if you will. Ilya Sul cries out from the dark earth, and sometimes it pleases me to listen to him. But upon a time I decreed three punishments, one of which remains untried. You are a hard man, Turgo Zolte, but only a man for all that. If I send you north as a man, then you'll die — but too quickly! Wherefore I shall first make you a vampire.'
Turgo was bound to the wall, with his feet dangling inches above the stone floor. Shaitan reached up and cut him down, so that he collapsed in great pain, drained of his strength. Then Shaitan went down on his knees beside him, and gloomed upon him with his scarlet eyes. And his anger was very great. 'I treated you as my brother, even my son,' he said. 'And you would repay me by killing me! It would be fair and just if I killed you in your turn, but I want you to freeze in the ice and repent your iniquities.'
Turgo looked at him and knew his time as a man was up. But while he was a man he would never bow to Shaitan. And he said, 'Me, your son? You could never father a son, you swamp-thing! You only look like a man, but your tongue is a snake's, and your blood is the blood of trogs, dupes, thralls. Your familiars are bats full of lice, and the clean sunlight boils your flesh like a snail in its shell. Hah! I, Turgo Zolte, Shaitan's son? No, for I am the son of a man!'
The other was no longer capable of controlling his anger; his parasite creature amplified his passion by ten; his jaws cracked open and his great mouth gushed blood from torn gums as teeth grew out of them like bone sickles. Handsome one moment — even with his blood-hued eyes, handsome — in the next he was the embodiment of all horror. And his passion incensed that of the creature within him, which now was him.
He went to his knees beside his victim, used red-spurting talon claws to tear, prise open his chest, and laid his razor nails upon the pipes of Turgo's pounding heart. None of which meant anything to Turgo, because he was already in the pit of oblivion. But as Shaitan saw his innards, his blood, the very circuits of his life… something new happened.
His creature went into spasm within him. It gripped his spine, put out suckers into his veins and organs to revel in his, its, passion. Shaitan coughed, gagged, felt a rising in his gorge, something creeping in the contracting column of his throat. He choked the thing out: a pale sphere no bigger than an eyeball.
It shimmered; it was alive with flickering cilia; it fell in a froth of spittle to Turgo's open chest. And in the next moment it turned scarlet… and was gone, soaked into him!
Shaitan reeled to his feet. He felt dizzy, nauseous; he knew instinctively that this thing — whatever it was — was irreversible as the breathing of swamp-born spores. Which was reason enough to see it out to its end. And so he left Turgo lying there unconscious, with his chest laid open and bloody, and the scarlet vampire egg burrowing in him and hiding in his flesh…
Turgo Zolte recovered; his torn flesh healed, and quickly; he was Wamphyri!
And he hated Shaitan as no creature was ever hated before. Shaitan knew it, and would say to him: 'But you are my son — my true son — which is why I now name you Shaithar Shaitanson. You are not the ugly spawn of trogs, many of which I have made and put down, but Wamphyri! Oh, you had a father before me, but he made you mortal. And I have made you immortal. Why then do you despise me?'
'I was what I was,' Turgo would growl in answer, from where he hung in chains of silver. 'And I preferred it. You have made me other than that — '
'- More than that!'
'- Which disgusts me. I spit on your name and won't take it! Nor will I drink the blood of men.'
'Oh, but you will, eventually, or wither and die. The blood is the life.'
'Not my life.'
'Fool!'
'Ordure of blood-sucking bats!'
And always Shaitan would be enraged. But he could not kill him. For Turgo was his son, of a sort.
In the end he turned him loose, sent him forth, banished him out of Shaitanstack. Not to the north, for he would watch his progress. No, he merely turned him out on to Starside, to make his own way in the world.
Turgo went to Sunside but could not stay there. The Szgany pursued him; the sun threatened him; his foetal vampire tugged at his will, so that if he stayed he must kill. He did kill — but only to live on beast-blood. Finally he sought out men vampirized in the swamps, recruited them, returned to Starside and gathered together an army of trog thralls. And in thirty years he built Shaith-arsheim, but well away from the aerie of his so-called 'father'. And so in the end Turgo did take his great enemy's name, calling himself Shaithar Shaitanson… by which to remember his 'father' the better and hate him all the more.
By then Shaitan's house was finished and furnished; his banner — a skull head with horns — fluttered from the high ramparts of his aerie, and he was known on both sides of the mountains as Lord Shaitan of the Wamphyri. Which pleased him greatly.
Turgo was still a lesser Lord, and much given to nightmares. One night he dreamed he drank Szgany blood, and when he woke up it was true. In the night he had taken from his odalisque, a girl stolen from a Sunside tribe. He could deny it no longer: he was Wamphyri! Then, blaming Shaitan and loathing him more yet, he devised a sigil of his own: Shaitan's horned skull-head — but split in two halves by a silver axe!
Shaitan saw how he was abhorred and bred more and better warriors. Turgo bred them, too, as a safeguard. And through all of this men came lurching from the vampire swamps to build their aeries in the stacks. Their industry was great, so that they had little time for wars.
Two hundred years flew by and the Wamphyri were mighty and many. Too many…
Now, on Sunside, the Szgany had become Travellers, nomads, Gypsies who went from place to place by day, and slept in deep forests or caves at night. And for them it was as bad or worse than the aftermath of the white sun. The Wamphyri gave them no peace; night after night they raided; the toll of blood was monstrous!
While on Starside… Shaitan saw his error in permitting the other Lords to wax so strong and so many. He determined to make sons for lieutenants, bloodsons, which he would get out of comely women. In this way he would overwhelm the Wamphyri Lords and keep them down. He made a harem of six Szgany women, took from them and gave to them. And his vampire sons and daughters were many. Of the latter, when they were ripe, he used them in their turn; for his own flesh was the sweetest. Which would be the way of it with vampires down all the ages…
And Shaitan begat Shaithos Longarm, Shailar the Hagridden (who was half-mad, for insanity was a curse which the Wamphyri would never eradicate), Shaithag the Harrower, and many others. And his egg-recipient son, now Shaithar Shaitanson, begat Shielar the Slut, Turgo Toothbreaker, Zol Zolteson, and Pedar Slough-skin, who at the age of thirteen contracted leprosy during a Sunside hunt. And thereafter Pedar (also 'the Leper') killed Szgany women on sight and went only with trog females.
And in the great aeries of the Wamphyri the other Lords begat egg-sons and bloodsons of their own, made vampires and warriors galore, and generally filled their stacks with beastliness of every description. Lagular Ferenczy begat Nonari the Gross, whose left hand was a great fist, its fingers fused into a club; Lagular also begat Freyda Ferenc, who for her pleasure suffocated men with her sex. Freyda was a Mother of Vampires, who in a single confinement produced an hundred eggs, being so depleted during the which that she died. But the eggs of Freyda, all save one, were gross and diseased and likewise expired; the one fused with Bela Manculi, a Szgany thrall, who became heir to Freydastack.
And Pedar the Leper begat Tori Trogson, who went on all fours and became Lord of Trogstack. And Shielar of Whorestack brought forth Thador Thornskull; she then made a warrior with an Organ, and died of fornication in the Thing's embrace. And so Thador became Lust-lord of Whorestack. But from that time forward it was generally agreed among all the Wamphyri that none would make monsters with the parts of men, for Shielar's creature had proven difficult to put down.
And as the many Lords and fewer Ladies proliferated, so they degenerated; even the Wamphyri, going from evil to evil and descending from depth to irredeemable depth…
Eventually all of the greater aeries had masters or mistresses; the lesser stacks were occupied; there was no more room in all the vampire heights for men and their sons, their women, thralls and creatures. Some built their aeries in the sheerer crags of the barrier range, looking out on Starside; but they were prone to avalanches, brought about by enemies. Also, they were scorned as worthless Lords, who had not proper aeries of their own. And finally they warred for possession of the lofty stacks, until the winds over Starside were filled with flyers and warriors which fought in the dark sky under blue-glittering stars, and did battle in the higher ramparts of the great aeries.
