Necroscope V: Deadspawn

life. Dining with Shaitan may even have sealed something of a bond between them.

It might have, anyway.

After that…

There was a lot to remember and events contrived to jumble. A good many fractured scenes and conversations overlapped their jagged edges in Shaithis's memory. As contrary breezes blew up off the cold blue star-and aurora-lit waste, bringing nodding snow-devils to swirl around the bases of the glittering, plundered ice- castle tombs of anciently exiled Wamphyri, so he attempted to arrange these fragments in chronological order, or failing that to separate them at least.

Shaitan's cavernous workshop, for example, located immediately beneath the volcano's hitherto unseen north-facing scarp, where soon after Shaithis's advent the Fallen One had escorted him upon a guided tour.

Apart from the high-ceilinged, stalactite-adorned vast-ness of the place — with its near-opaque windows of ice looking out upon and lending grotesque distortion to the very roof of the world, and its deep permafrost pits where Shaitan was wont to confine in ice his more volatile, less manageable experiments — the workshop had seemed much like any other. Shaithis, too, was a master of just such creative metamorphism; or so he had always considered himself, until he saw his ancestor's work.

Gazing down on one such piece through ice clear as water, he had offered his opinion: 'This alone would suffice to have you denounced and banished afresh, or destroyed outright, if this were Starside and the Old Wamphyri still held sway. Why, it has reproductive organs, which were forbidden!'

'A bull, aye,' Shaitan had answered with a nod of his cowl. 'Alas but procreation, the act of copulation, its contemplation — even the possession of organs, of the means — drives creatures to rage. I made this one a mate, female, which for thanks he at once tore to pieces! But even if she'd lived and brought forth, what then? I cannot see that he'd permit offspring to survive but would surely devour them at the first opportunity. Just look at him, and as yet half-grown! But so untrustworthy, at last I was obliged to freeze him here. The fault was his sex. It made him prideful and pride is a curse. It's the same with men, of course…'

'And therefore with the Wamphyri.' Shaithis had nodded.

'More so!' Shaitan cried. 'For in them all such urges are amplified by ten!'

'But they don't tear their odalisks in pieces. At least, not always.'

'More fool them,' said Shaitan. 'For if you can live for ever, what sense to breed that of your own flesh which may one day usurp and destroy you?'

'And yet you sought out women in which to spend yourself,' Shaithis had been quick to point out, 'else I'd not be here.'

And at that their eyes had met and locked across Shaitan's creature frozen in its pit of ice, and after a while the Fallen One had answered: 'I did, it's true — and perhaps for that very reason…'

It had been their first argument or discussion as such, but only one of a great many to come. And while it would soon become Shaithis's complaint that his ancestor conversed with him in terms more befitting a child, generally he accepted that the ancient, evil Being was trying to instruct him. Perhaps he considered his great age gave him the right; for after all, he was Shaithis's senior to the extent of seven spans.

… Another time: Shaithis had been shown a developing siphon-snout, absorbing liquids where it gradually took on shape and substance in a vat. The thing was much similar to the guardian ingurgitors (of which the volcano's master had three) but the siphon was longer, more flexible, and bedded at its roots in great walls of flesh, so that the creature's tiny, greedily glittering eyes were almost entirely hidden in bulging bands of grey, gleaming muscle.

Shaithis had known immediately what the thing was, enquiring of Shaitan: 'But don't you have enough of these? It surprises me you trouble yourself to make more. By now you've surely had the best of the ice-encysted Wamphyri… those of them who were readily got at, anyway. So what use to persist?'

Shaitan had cocked his cobra's head on one side, coiled up his arms and inquired: 'And have you fathomed it all, my son? Do you know the precise use to which they're put, these things of mine?'

'Certainly. They are variations on a theme: ingurgitors not unlike that or those which stopped Volse and Arkis, but rather more specialized. Their slender, bone-tipped cartilage snouts vibrate in ice to shatter it, whereby paths are drilled to the suspended exiles in their otherwise impenetrable sheaths. Once a channel has been cut, then the beast drains off its victim's liquids through its snout, which siphoned fluids — '

' — Are then regurgitated into my reservoirs!' Shaitan, perhaps peeved with Shaithis's ingenuity, had finished it for him. 'Yes, yes — but aren't you curious to know how? How may the driller siphon off solids, eh? For of course his victims are mainly frozen, whose fluids gurgle like glue.'

'Ah!' Shaithis had been fascinated.

'I will explain… in a moment. As to why I bother myself with these Old Lords, when (as you've pointed out) they're now so few in number and invariably low in sustenance, the answer to that is simple: because it pleases me to do so. The terror in the minds of those of them who can still think at all is so rare and delicious as to be exquisite. If I had not them, then whom would I terrify, eh? Could I even exist, without my measure of tyranny and terror?'

And Shaithis had understood. Evil feeds on terror; without one the other cannot exist; they are inseparable as space and time. And reading his thoughts, Shaitan had whisperingly, gurglingly, chortlingly agreed, 'Aye, it's simple as that: I like it, and I need the practice!'

So that was why; and the how of it was likewise simple:

The drillers squirted metamorphic acids into their victims, whose desiccated tissues then dissolved into liquids which were drawn off before they could resolidify.

'It still doesn't answer my first question,' Shaithis had argued. 'Which was: why do you trouble to make more of these creatures?'

(Shaitan's shrug, of sorts.) 'I say again, mainly for the practice; as has been almost everything I've done these last three thousand years. Practice, yes, towards the time when we shall build an army of warriors, and with them set out against Starside and all the worlds beyond!'

For a moment the scarlet eyes beneath the Fallen One's cobra's hood had burned more brightly yet, like fires stoked from within. But then he'd nodded, gradually returned from the privacy of his dark-cloaked thoughts, and said: 'Ah, but now you must tell me: since you seem of the opinion that I breed too many, just how many of my ice-drillers and kindred creatures have you seen?'

Shaithis had been taken aback. He'd imagined a great many such beasts, to be sure. But what evidence he'd seen of them in the looted ice-castles had been the slow work of countless centuries, in no way the concerted effort of a handful of auroral periods, nor even entire cycles of such. And while here in the workshops at the roots of the volcano several vats steamed and bubbled where Shaitan's experiments continued to shape, still there were precious few working beasts. No flaccid siphoneers here as in Starside's aeries, for the cone's caldera contained a small lake of water; nor any great requirement for gas-beasts, where several of the volcano's caverns — especially Shaitan's living quarters — were warmed by active blowholes. So that after giving the question some little thought, Shaithis had been obliged to answer, 'Now that I think of it, I can't say I've actually seen any — except this one cooking in its vat.'

'Exactly, for there are none! Not of the visible, mobile-and-eating-their-heads-off varieties, at any rate. I keep only my ingurgitors, for the protection they afford me. Now come.' And Shaitan had taken his descendant down to black, lightless nether-caverns where every niche, crevice and extinct volcanic vent served as a storage chamber for the ice-encased progeny of his experimental vats.

And there he inquired of him, 'So advise me: how would you keep such as these both awake and full-bellied?' And answered himself, 'Out of the question! What, in these almost barren Icelands? You wouldn't. Which is why, as their various purposes are served, I freeze them into immobility down here. And here they stay, inert for the moment, the raw materiel of tomorrow's army. And when I require another, perhaps different sort of creature — why, I simply design and construct one! The art of metamorphism, Shaithis. But nothing wasted, my son, never that.'

Continuing to gaze down on his ancestor's preserved experiments, Shaithis had nodded. 'I see you've tried a warrior or two,' he commented. 'Fearsome but… archaic? Perhaps I should advise you: Starside's warriors have come a long way since your day. In all truth, these things of yours would not last long against certain of my constructs!'