Blood Brothers

PART TWO: Looking Further Back, and Scanning Forward

1

This much has been told: Shaitan, first of the Wamphyri, remembered neither mother nor father, nor yet understood his own genesis. To him it was as if he had simply sprung into being, full grown, with a will but no memories of his own to mention. Following which he had fallen, or been thrown, to earth; but fallen, on this occasion, to 'earth' as opposed to Earth. In any event, he discovered himself upon the surface of one of many worlds, in one of the many universes of light. And dimly (and quickly fading in the eye of his mind), he remembered something of… of an expulsion.

The world into which he had fallen was in one sense an old world, and in another a new one. Recently it had suffered calamity: a Black Hole, losing most of its mass and deteriorating to a Grey Hole, had likewise fallen out of space and time and settled here, reshaping the planet. But where that had been a calculable disaster, the disaster which was Shaitan would be quite incalculable.

From him would spring an order of beings whose nature was such as to threaten not one but two worlds, filling the myths and legends of both with dread and uttermost horror. For Shaitan was a vampire.

And yet, when he fell (or was thrown out), he was not yet a vampire. That was still to come: a matter of choice, of exercising his own free will, his human curiosity. And this is how it came about…

Starting into awareness, Shaitan cried out…!

It was the shock of consciousness cloaking an intelligence previously bereft, will without knowledge inhabiting a mind wiped clean. And as his cry echoed into silence, so he discovered himself kneeling at the edge of stagnant water, with his naked image mirrored in scummy depths. But seeing that he was beautiful, he was proud.

Standing upright, Shaitan saw that he could walk; and in the twilight of a dim, misty dawn he moved by the edge of the dank, rank waters, which were a swamp. And seeing how dismal and lonely was this world where he had fallen, or into which he had been cast, he assumed himself a sinner and that the place must be his punishment.

Such assumptions defined not only Shaitan's intelligence but also his nature: that he instinctively understood such concepts as sin and punishment. And he thought his crime must be that he was beautiful, which was his pride working… which was in fact his crime! For he saw beauty as might, and might as right, and right as he willed it to be.

Which was a will he would impose.

So thinking, Shaitan moved away from the rank waters and went to impose his will upon this world. But behind him the mud boiled and spattered, so that he paused to look back where black bubbles came bursting to the surface. And with the parting of the weeds and the scum, Shaitan saw a figure floating up into view.

In its body it was bloated and burned, but its face was almost whole. And in that face was an innocence beyond comprehension. Shaitan knew it for an omen, but of what? He had will; he could wait and discover what would be, or move on, according to his will. Also, he suspected that this thing in the swamp harboured evil; why else would such a blackened, blistered thing be here, in this emerging dawn world? For again it was Shaitan's instinct to know that all things are balanced, and that for any measure of good there may be an equal measure of evil.

For a moment he stood still, as at a crossroads, then… turned back and knelt again beside the swamp. For his will was that he would know this evil.

He gazed upon a face he had never known, which he would not recall to memory for numberless years, and sensed nothing of moment except that he tempted fate, which he was proud and glad to do. And as the beasts of this dawn world came to the water to drink, and as the mists were drawn up from the swamp, so the Fallen One, Shaitan the Unborn, gazed upon his own future where the weeds anchored it in scum and slime.

In a while the scorched, bloated limbs and trunk of the corpse split open and small black mushrooms clustered there, growing out of the rotting flesh and opening their gilled caps. They released red spores into the twilight before the dawn, which rose up and drifted on the warm reek of the swamp. Shaitan saw the clouds of drifting spores, and of his own free will breathed them into his lungs, the better to know of them… his last act of any innocence -

— At least in this incarnation.

All of this has been told before. What follows has not been told: it is the tale of Shaitan's travels and travails, his triumphs and torments from this time forwards…

Shaitan travelled east through the foothills of gradually rising mountains. He sought for that thing or those things upon which to impose his will. The swamps had not been to his liking, nor the boggy region between the swamps and the foothills. The creatures of these places, while seeming largely unintelligent, had yet been wary to a fault!

Sunlight had first come streaming, then blasting from the south, where a golden orb had climbed gradually into the sky to commence a low, slow arc eastwards. Its rays had dried out the land around and lured clinging fogs up from the sodden earth. In those places where there was little or no shade, the yellow rays had irritated Shaitan, reddening and roughening his skin.

After that — forever after that, in every way — he would always walk in the shadows. And just as he chose to stay on the left-hand side of the mountains, away from the sun, so would he choose a dark and sinistral path through life. He did not know it but he had ever chosen that route, even in worlds before this one.

When Shaitan was thirsty, he drank. The sweet water quenched his thirst but there was no satisfaction in it. When he hungered, he ate grasses, herbs, fruits. They filled him but… the hunger remained. Within his body a red spore had taken root, forming the nucleus of that which had hungers of its own.

He was unclothed but unashamed. Knowing that he was beautiful, he would display himself; except he would prefer to make himself known to others of his own design, made more nearly in his mould. For the creatures of the swamps and foothills were other than he was and innocent, so that all of them had fled before him. Therefore, he was unable to impose his will upon them, because of their innocence.

And so Shaitan journeyed east across a land where the northern sky was dark blue to black and full of the flicker of stars and the cold weave of weird auroras; but always in the south the golden orb of the sun blazed perilously in the pale blue heavens, so that he must keep himself to the shadows in order not to be burned. And he called all of the land lying to the south of the foothills 'Sunside', despising it greatly, and all the land to the north 'Starside', claiming it for his own. And where finally the foothills grew into mountains like a wall on his right hand, shutting out the sun's harmful rays, there Shaitan discovered creatures which were not afraid of him but merely curious — at first.

For Shaitan's part, he was likewise curious, even astonished. These creatures were not human, yet seemed full of an almost-human purpose and intelligence. They communicated among themselves, however witlessly, in a near-inaudible range which Shaitan sensed rather than heard (for the spore-spawned Thing within him was growing, and causing a strange intensification of his five mundane senses…). They were small, lowly, weak creatures, which yet commanded aerial flight: a skill far in excess of Shaitan's own meagre, as yet unformed talents.

And when he saw their aerial agility he scowled and was jealous of them; for it seemed to Shaitan that upon a time he too had flown — but with such authority and in such places as to put all the best efforts of these small creatures to shame! Why, if only he could will it, he would fly again, right here and now, and show them how it was done!

… Except, having physical limitations, it was beyond the power of his will. He could not will it. Not yet…

But while Shaitan envied them, in some small part he also admired these children of the twilight, the night, the velvet darkness, and chose them for his familiars. And when he called out to them with his mind, he saw that they heeded him and hastened to his beck; for they knew that they were his. But these were only the small cousins of greater creatures, who likewise 'heard' Shaitan's mind-calls from the shadows of Starside; and when they also came to swerve and dip about him, crying out with their shrill voices, then his pride was great. For he saw that indeed he had imposed his will upon all the bats of this world.

They were his first conquests; he enjoyed his triumph, however small; other victories would follow in short order.

Always heading east, Shaitan ate sparingly of tasteless berries gathered on the border of the swamps and in the foothills. Where streams trickled down from the heights, there he would drink, though the brackish water was never to his taste. And before sleeping, he had learned to gather in unto himself his bat minions great and small, for their warmth; so that he quickly became expert in their habits.

The smaller bats were insectivores; their greater cousins.. drank blood! Which seemed only right to Shaitan: that small life-forms should sustain themselves by devouring even smaller forms, and greater life-forms by devouring… why, the very source of life itself! And he believed he now understood his personal dissatisfaction with the common fare of wild animals. Berries, fruits, grasses? What sort of foods were they for one such as him? Water? What was that for a drink? And:

'No, no!' Shaitan now promised himself. 'I'll have no more of them. They are for the hooved beasts and the scuttling foragers of this world. But for me… the blood is the life!' And within him (however vacuously, instinctively) the as yet embryonic spore-creature exulted, for it was or would be of a like mind and nature.

Beyond the mountains the sun sank down; the last yellow glints vanished even from the highest peaks; the stars shone that much brighter in the north and spread themselves like a sprinkling of jewels all across the domed vault of the sky. A breathless moon raced on high, begging of the wild ones in the mountains their adulation. Eerie wolf voices echoed up into the night of Starside, and Shaitan was impressed by the howling of the hunting packs.

And again he reached out his growing vampire awareness to contact and impose his will upon them, even as he had instructed the bats. Except these creatures shied from such contact. For while they were untamed, still they were of a high order of organized intelligence — far higher than the bats — and suspicious; and anyway they had their own leaders, who were jealous of their sovereignty.

'Dogs!' Shaitan called them then, snarling his frustration at them and abusing them with his mind-voice. Which was why (in this world at least), total domination of the wolves by the Wamphyri never came to pass. Later generations of vampires, all springing from Shaitan, might occasionally produce a Lord who would master or befriend this or that lone wolf, but in the main the grey brothers would retain their lupine integrity…

Then, three hundred miles along the north-western fringe of the barrier range of mountains, there Shaitan came across his first tribe of men or sub-men. Aboriginal even before the advent of the Grey Hole — grey and leathery, cavern-dwelling, slow-moving and — thinking — now, in the seventh century of aftermath, the trogs were grown truly primitive. Highly photophobic, they took to their caves at sunup, came out to hunt at sundown. They lived mainly on the grubs of a species of giant moth with a wingspan wide as a man's hand, on mushrooms, and on small bats which they netted and roasted. But still they were men; they understood and used fire, and had a language of their own. And as such they made perfect subjects for the imposition of Shaitan's will.

This is how it was: He saw a group of them bring down a tawny mountain cat which had strayed down on to the Starside levels. They netted the animal, clubbed it unconscious, finished the job with bone knives. And as they set about to skin it, so Shaitan emerged from the shadows of a boulder where he had rested, coming upon them suddenly. They saw him and their jaws fell open. For while they were not conscious of their own ugliness, Shaitan's beauty was inescapable.

He stood before them, naked and proud in starshine, and his appearance — springing up out of nowhere like this — was next to magical. Tall and straight, where the trogs were hunched and shambling, smiling in his darkly sardonic way, where they could only gawp and gabble, he was like a ray of light fallen among shadows. Which was entirely contrary to the fact, for he was the Great Corrupter come among innocents.

And as they came forward to examine him, so Shaitan stood still and suffered their timid touchings and awed, astonished exclamations. He listened attentively to their language, for it had dawned on him that his own (as yet largely untried) was very rudimentary, a vague string of sounds left over from… from when? From what? He could not say, except that he felt his few words to be the fading echoes of many tongues; but he knew that the ability was in him to learn and use all tongues. For he was able, however dimly, to see into the minds of men and creatures alike, from which it is the very smallest step to tie pictures to the spoken words.

'It is un-man!' one of the trogs reported of Shaitan to his companions. 'Its skin is soft, pale, easily broken.'

'Its eyes are blue, not yellow,' another pointed out. 'Yet they see in the dark like ours.'

'Blue, yes,' grunted a third. 'But in their cores… is that a fire burning behind them? From time to time, his eyes burn!'

'He is… a man!' said the first. 'Not unlike the men beyond the mountains, who live in the light — and yet, not like them.'

And another, perhaps wiser trog desired to know: 'But is he a friend?'

Shaitan's guile was great; first he would be friend, then master. 'I am what I am,' he told them, 'and I have come to show you the way.'

They shambled back from him, in awe of their own language slipping so easily from Shaitan's lips. But in a little while the wise one told him: 'We know all of the ways. We are born, we wax, we hunt and forage for food, we make young ones. Then we die and leave our young to do as we have done. These are the ways.'

At which Shaitan smiled and nodded. 'But there are other ways,' he told them. And from within, for the first time, he heard a voice which was not his voice, saying: These shall be yours.' The voice of his conscience (or lack of it), or of something else? At any rate, Shaitan was not troubled. But seeing the mountain cat lying there red and gleaming and shorn of its skin did trouble him. And again, as from within: The blood is the life!

And taking a knife from one of the trogs, he cut himself a portion from the hind leg of the slaughtered beast and squatted down to eat his fill. And as the trogs gathered round him, one of them said: 'See, he eats his meat raw!'

And another: 'His smile is beautiful!'

And a third, the one who had made previous mention of Shaitan's eyes: 'And where is the blue of his eyes now? Gone, as if the blood of the beast had flowed into them!'

Which was true in more ways than one…

Shaitan lived a while with the trogs and learned their ways. They showed him those cavern mushrooms which were edible, but he would not eat them. They showed him those that were deadly poison, which he must not eat. And later, taking meat with the tribal elder (the wise one of the first meeting; who was wary of him and his new ways), Shaitan put what he had learned to use. The wise one died in agony, and Shaitan took his place.

The tribe was small, its people ugly of form and countenance, its caverns smoky and full of stenches. Shaitan quickly became disenchanted. He would instruct these people in… oh, in diverse ways, but their capacity for learning was small. He would open their eyes, take away their childlike innocence and replace it with… what? Again he was not sure, except that he desired to impose his will. But to what end? Existence with the sub-men was severely limited and limiting.

Shaitan was full of vice. He had a man's passions, lusts, desires; and all enhanced, multiplied by the developing thing within him. He detested the trog women, yet gathered together a harem of all their ripest. When an enraged young male protested the theft of his prospective mate, Shaitan castrated him and made him the eunuch overseer of his carnal chambers. When a group of trogs rose up against him to kill him, he hid in a cave where he trembled and sweated… and his sweat formed a mist that hid him from view and frightened his vengeful enemies away. They ran off to other tribes, spreading Shaitan's legend abroad.

He practised arts which were instinct in him, for he knew that he was corrupt in all his parts. And bleeding himself with ticks, he used them to contaminate the storehouses of the trogs until their food seethed with his evil. More of the sub-men ran off, while yet they were unblemished. As for those who stayed: they were sick now in mind and body and called Shaitan master, and followed in his footsteps. Of all Wamphyri thralls, they were the first.

Shaitan planted seed in his women and several brought forth. Such offspring as were produced were hideous, scarlet-eyed, shrieking.. and hungry. They suckled blood from their mothers' paps and grew too fast. And their own mothers smothered them, all but one which Shaitan ate… Until finally he had had enough of the cave-dwellers, for he knew that there was flesh in this world other than the lowly flesh of trogs.

And always his parasite guided him, living on his blood as he lived on the blood of others. It was a very subtle symbiosis, however, so that except in Shaitan's darkest dreams and certain rare waking moments, he believed he was the sole author of his affairs and master of his own will and destiny. But… he could never be sure. And from that time forward the question of free will, self-determination, and all connected theories of integrity of spirit, became matters of vast importance to Shaitan, even assuming dimensions of obsession in him. In him, and in all subsequent vampires…

Shaitan remembered how, in his first meeting with the trogs, they had likened him to men on the other side of the barrier mountains. Now (having almost forgotten the irritation of the sun's golden rays, and with only one way to test for a recurrence of the problem), he determined the conquest of Sunside. But it would be subtle, as were all his works. First he would approach the Sunsiders as a friend, and later as their master. Thus it would be as it had been with the trogs.

So thought Shaitan…

Leaving his trog thralls behind to fend for themselves, he climbed the mountains diagonally, heading east as always. He climbed at sunup but was shielded from the sun by the wall of the mountains. Still the sky's brightness troubled him and the light hurt his vampire eyes, so that he wondered if all of this world's creatures were photophobic, himself included. But high over the tree-line and into the peaks, he saw great birds soaring on high, which were not bothered by the sun. They were birds of prey, kites, which scoured the land for food in the last rays of the sun. Also, there were great shaggy goats in the peaks, which had no fear of the light, and likewise small creatures in the coarse grasses and heather.

Shaitan shrugged. Well, he would put his theories to the test soon enough; indeed, he might even impose his will upon the sun! (At which the spore-grown vampire inside him shrank down and was small, for in this matter Shaitan was too wilful and his vampire could neither guide nor control him. Immature in its own right, it must simply go along with him.) While for his part Shaitan felt merely uneasy, as a result of his parasite's concern.

As fate would have it, he crested the mountains in that hour when all that remained of the sun was a spoked wheel of pink and yellow light fanning the southern horizon, and so felt no discomfort. And the gradually developing thing inside Shaitan, which was now irreversibly part of him, relaxed somewhat. For after all, it could feel the power of its host and knew that he was strong.

And as twilight turned to night, Shaitan saw the flickering fires of hunters where they camped on the flank of the mountains. While down on the Sunside levels, the glowing fires of their camps and settlements lit the night in all directions, as far as his eyes could see. Their tribes were legion!

And in his heart Shaitan was glad, believing that at last he had found true men upon whom to impose his will…

The Sunsiders as a race of men were still recovering from the Grey Hole's holocaust, which had reshaped their 'Earth', realigned its orbit, and redesigned its geological features. They were recovering from earthquakes and tidal waves, from seasons of torrential rains and whirlwinds of black frozen ash (which in another world might well have been termed 'nuclear winters'), and from other seasons which had baked half of the planet to a desert while the other half lay cold and wasted, mainly under frozen oceans. But as a race they were recovering, and gradually rebuilding their decimated numbers.

Upon a time: 'Earth' had had continents, oceans, islands, seasons of winds, sun, rains, snow. It had species galore, and a quarter billion of people. They had the wheel, used fire and sails, experimented with rudimentary medicines and coarse chemistry. While gunpowder had not yet been discovered, still they understood the basic elements of the forge and of metalworking; they had metal tools, and the crossbow for hunting. And all in all theirs had seemed a bright future, whose explorers sailed out across the seas in wooden ships to seek new lands.

But that was before the Grey Hole. And now, seven hundred or more years later, in the time of Shaitan? This is what the Sunsiders — less than thirty thousand of them now — knew of their world: That it had been ravaged of most of its species along with its peoples, and might well be considered dead except in that temperate zone whose spine was the barrier range of mountains between Sunside and Starside. And in their legends (which were confused and contradictory, because the written form of their language had been at best basic and was lost in the aftermath, so that history had become a thing passed down immemorially by word of mouth), the scourge which had visited itself upon them to destroy their world had become synonymous with a forbidden place on Starside known only as 'the Gate to the hell-lands'.

And the legend was this: that one night a strange 'white sun' had appeared in the southern skies… a portent of terrible times in the offing!

At first it had seemed to move slowly, like a comet, then more swiftly, and finally in a rush like a bar of white light where it speared down out of space to glance off the moon and blaze across the surface of the world! But as it fell to earth so it shimmered and shrank, until it skimmed across the land like a huge flat stone bouncing on water; and at last it thudded down into a crater of its own making, on a world gone mad by reason of its coming. Not a shooting star or a comet, no, but a Force far greater than these whose occurrence in Nature is mercifully rare: a Black Hole which had eaten itself, until only the event horizon remained. A Grey Hole now, and a bridge between universes.

In any case, such science was beyond the people of this world. To the handful of stumbling, stunned survivors it was sufficient — and more than sufficient — that a deadly white sun had fallen out of the sky and destroyed everything they had known, leaving them and their descendants to live through a sort of hell for more than two and a half centuries. Until eventually, as the planet's orbit stabilized and its climates polarized — however dramatically — all that was left of humanity dwelled as best they might in the narrow belts of forest and on the plains south of the great barrier range, and in the southern flanks of the mountains themselves.

And now, whenever hunters climbed those mountains in their central region, or strayed through the great pass to Starside's boulder plains, they saw how an awful revenant of the cataclysm yet survived to reinforce its legend: a crater socket with its sunken, blind white eye glaring up and out, as if some fallen demon lay paralysed, unblinking, and wondering at his lot. And the gaze of his cold, dead white eye was like a beacon, a forbidding pharos, not guiding but warning souls away…

A demon, yes, why not? Something from hell, anyway. Something which had brought hell here with it.

And in the legends there was also the story of a wandering adventurer, first through the pass after those turbulent centuries of stabilization, who climbed down to the mainly buried sphere of white light to touch it… and was never seen again. For it had opened like a Gate to take him into hell.

Which was why the place had been named like that and why it was now forbidden, along with all of those desolate lands lying north of the mountains: the boulder plains, and further east a region of dizzily rearing stacks of volcanic stone, like vast spears of rock rising to rival the barrier range itself; and beyond the northernmost horizon, sending up a blue shimmer and sheen under the diamond stars and weirdly writhing auroras, the bitterly frozen Icelands.

All of these places, forbidding and forbidden. But in any case, who would want to go there? Nothing lived there; nothing could live there, but bats in the caves, and wolves up in the peaks and passes over Starside, and certain lesser creatures. Surely it was no fit habitation for men. Not for any sort of men. Not yet, anyway…

Shaitan came across his first true men by the light of their campfire, and saw that they were clad in the furs and skins of animals. There were three of them and they saw him at the same time, saw also that he was naked; which was just as well for Shaitan, for they were hunters. If he had clothed himself and come upon them suddenly like that… with his height, he could have been mistaken for a great bear. As it was he found himself covered by their crossbows as they scrambled to their feet and turned more fully towards him. But then:

'A man!' one of them grunted, frowning.

And: 'An idiot!' said another. 'I very nearly put a bolt in him!'

Shaitan read their expressions, their lips, in part their minds. Their words fitted readily with everything else he saw, so that he understood much of their language from the start. As they came forward to peer at him in the firelight, the last of them queried nervously, 'A madman? Do you think so?'

And the second: 'What else? Up here in the night on his own, naked under the stars.' And to Shaitan, coldly, 'Who are you?'

Smiling his sardonic smile, he answered, 'I am what I am.'

'And your name?'

'Shaitan!' Because finally he remembered it.

'Well, Shaitan,' the first of the three chuckled, but not unkindly, 'you'll excuse me for saying so, but it seems to me you're a bit daft!'

'You think I'm… demented?' He looked at them, and down at himself. 'But if I am mad — a harmless idiot — then why do you point your weapons?'

At that the second man again spoke up, saying: 'Because "idiot" and "harmless" don't necessarily coincide, that's why. Down on the levels, in the camp of Heinar Hagi, we've one such "idiot" who works for his living — and Janni Nunov lugs boulders which I can't even budge!'

Moving artlessly so as to disarm them, Shaitan approached their fire, hunched down and fed a stick to the fitful flames. The three put up their weapons and approached him again, and he pretended not to study them where he warmed his hands. It seemed they had no leader with them but were equals. One was short, squat and bearded; the next of medium height, sturdy, heavy-jawed; the last young and wiry, whose mind seemed entirely innocent. But since they likewise studied him, Shaitan kept his scarlet eyes half-shuttered and gazed mainly into the fire. The red would be taken for reflected firelight.

And finally the squat one, Dezmir Babeni, mused, 'You're soft and pale, whoever you are! For all that you're a big 'un and strong, you haven't known much of hard work. What's your tribe?'

Shaitan shook his head.

The muscular, prognathous Klaus Luncani wanted to know: 'Why are you naked? Were you set upon? Ah, there are too many wild ones in the mountains these days, loners who'd kill a man just for his good leather belt!'

Again Shaitan shook his head, and shrugged.

But the young and wiry one, Vidra Gogosita, opened a pack and took out a long leather jacket, which he draped over Shaitan's shoulders by the fire. It was an old jacket but comfortable. And he said, The nights are cold. A man — even a fool — shouldn't go naked on the hillside!'

And Shaitan smiled and nodded, and thought: Of the three, he alone shall live — but only as my thrall For he is sensitive, wherefore his agonies in my service will be that much sharper! A 'fool' has willed it… so be it.' But out loud he said, 'I thank you. But of myself… I wish I could tell you more. Alas, I can't remember.' It was mainly the truth.

'Set upon, aye,' Klaus Luncani grunted, as if it were now decided beyond all doubt. 'By outcasts in the mountains. Clubbed on the head, all memory flown. Stole his clothes, they did. A man who hunts alone risks much!'

Dezmir Babeni moved closer, went to touch Shaitan's head, perhaps discover a wound there. Shaitan put up a hand to ward him off. 'No! There is… a pain.'

Dezmir nodded, and left it at that.

The matter seemed to be settled: Shaitan was obviously the victim of thieves. He was lucky they'd spared his life.

'Well, and Dezmir's right about one thing,' Klaus Luncani offered Shaitan a chunk of cheese and a bit of coarse bread. 'You certainly look big and strong enough! You'll live, I'm sure.'

Alas, but you won't, Shaitan thought, looking at the food in Luncani's outstretched hand. It was execrable stuff and he shook his head. 'I… I killed a creature,' he lied, 'for its flesh. It wasn't long ago. I'm not hungry.'

'A creature?' This was young Vidra Gogosita.

'With horns, curving back. Like this.' And Shaitan used his long slender hands to demonstrate. 'A small one, but sweet…' Though you will be far sweeter.

'A goat,' said Dezmir Babeni. 'A kid, anyway. Huh! Why, it seems he's had better luck than all of us together!'

'A… goat, yes,' Shaitan slowly repeated him, with a hand to his forehead, to indicate gradually returning memory.

'It'll all come back in time,' said Klaus Luncani, making a bed for himself in a triangle of boulders a short distance from the fire. 'But listen, we've been hard at it for most of the day — though there's only a couple of piglets in our bag to prove it! So now we'll catch a little sleep. A sight safer than climbing in the dark, for sure! A few hours, that's all, until the moon's up again; then it's back down to the levels and the camp of our leader, Heinar Hagi.'

Dezmir Babeni took it up. 'You'd do well to come with us, Shaitan, as you've nothing better in mind. Oh, you're a strange one, to be sure: tall and pale, with your brains all shaken up in that handsome head of yours. No memory to mention, nor even a tribe to claim you. But the Szgany Hagi have taken in a few strays in their time. So… what do you say?'

Shaitan looked up at him, and in that same moment Babeni was struck by the way the fire lit in his eyes. But Shaitan was quick to turn away again, gazing into the glowing embers as before. And: 'Get your sleep, all of you,' he told them. 'I shall likewise sleep. And later… we'll see what we'll see.'

Babeni shrugged, walked off a little way and trampled a bed of bracken for himself; he lay down, pulled a blanket over his lower half, snorted once or twice and fell silent. In his nest of boulders, Klaus Luncani was already snoring. But the youngest of the three, Vidra Gogosita, simply seated himself by the fire, close to Shaitan.

'I'll not sleep,' he said, 'but keep watch. It's my turn. You, however, would do well to get your head down. There's a blanket I can throw over you.'

Shaitan nodded, and in a low voice answered, 'In a little while.'

Aye, in a very little while…

Of the rest: Vidra remembered very little, and all of it ill-defined, unclear in a mind which had rapidly succumbed to the hypnotic allure of Shaitan. He remembered talking to the — man? — and the feeling of drowsiness, lethargy that had crept over his limbs, his mind, his will.

There was something about a face (but not Shaitan's handsome face, surely?) which had changed hideously to a bestial, nightmare mask with the forked tongue and dripping fangs of a snake. The face's approach… a blowhole stench, of sulphur?… and a pain, like the hot sting of a wasp where the artery pulsed in Vidra's neck… no, two wasps, stinging him there, inches apart. And Shaitan's crooning, and his kisses where he sought to suck the stings from — Vidra came awake with a small cry, seemingly in answer to some other's cry. He was cold and cramped in all his limbs, his neck stiff and caked with a great scab… of blood? His dream!

… Not a dream?

He lurched to his feet, stumbling in the ashes at the edge of the fire. But where was his strength? He was dizzy, staggering, weak as water! And tangibly present in his mind — indeed visibly present, burning behind the night scenes which his eyes showed to him — were other eyes, like malignant crimson scars on his soul. Which was precisely what they were. And something was looking at him through those windows on his mind, smiling at him sardonically, leering at him.

The moon was up, arcing over the mountains; the fire was out except in its heart; a ground mist lay all about, writhing where it lapped the scrubby hillside, filled the small hollows, twined in the roots of bracken and heather. No owls hooted, nor wolves sang, nor any earthly or human sounds at all. But in the shadows over there… something slobbered!

That was where Dezmir had made a bed in the bracken, and Vidra lurched in that direction. But here on his right, the triangle of boulders which sheltered Klaus and gave him protection; his legs were sticking out even now, where the mist lapped about them. Vidra stooped, went to grab Klaus's ankle and shake him awake. Before he could do so, the extended foot gave a massive start, trembled violently, flopped loosely and was still.

Vidra's flesh crept. He jerked upright, took two staggering paces down the length of Klaus's prone body to the cluster of boulders, leaned on them to look down on his sleeping friend — and saw that he wasn't merely sleeping. Not any longer.

For someone or something had taken a huge and impossibly heavy rock, levered it up over the top of the three embedded stones, and let it fall squarely on Klaus's face! Its roughly circular rim entirely obscured the area where his head would be, and in the flooding moonlight it seemed that a tarry substance seeped or was squeezed out from beneath. But Vidra Gogosita knew that the moonlight lied: it wasn't black but red.

Scarcely in control of his limbs — choking, unable to cry out by reason of his gulping, the dryness of his throat — the youth went flailing through the sentient mist to where Dezmir Babeni lay in the bracken. 'Dezmir!' he finally forced a warning croak. 'Dez…

'.. mir?'

For Dezmir's blanket had been thrown aside, and over him now Vidra's own long jacket, which his mother had begged him to bring with him. Except the jacket seemed alive, humped and mobile, fluttering like some huge black bat fallen to earth!

Vidra reeled, cried out! And the jacket, and what it contained, flowed upright, stood up and faced him. Shaitan — but no longer handsome, indeed barely human — his monstrous metamorphic face scarlet from gorged blood! And the slimy, alien mist pouring off him like sweat, and billowing out from under his borrowed leather jacket!

Then… Shaitan's talon of a hand reaching out to grip the youth's arm and steady him, and Vidra knowing for certain the source of those eyes in his mind; knowing, too, the terrible truth of his dream. After that: what else could he do but crumple to his knees before his new master? In any case, his legs no longer had the strength to hold him up. No, for the strength would come later.

And Shaitan's burning eyes gazing down upon him, and the monster's voice a clotted gurgle as he said, 'My ways may seem very strange at first, though in the end you'll gladly embrace them. Only tell me, did I hear you calling for Dezmir Babeni? Well, his blood is still hot, vital, if you are… ready for that?'

And then, with perhaps a trace of disappointment, 'Ah, a pity. For I see that you are not…'

The climb down to Sunside's levels on the fringe of the forest took four hours. By then most of the Szgany Hagi's lesser campfires were out, and many of the folk asleep in their makeshift tents of animal hide. But the night watch kept a central fire blazing, and when they were not patrolling the perimeter they gathered beside it to talk. There was, too, a little lamplight issuing from the flap doors of several of the larger tents.

Typically, the tents of the single men formed an evenly spaced outer perimeter: a barrier against intruders or marauders, though in these settled times that was unlikely. A few animals were tethered inside this loose outer circle, or left to graze in corrals roped off between the trees. The larger, family tents stood towards the middle of the camp, with the fire marking the very centre.

There were several carts, a few of which were covered over with stretched skins, the largest being Heinar Hagi's caravan. Though the trails around the borders of the tribe's foothills and forest territories were scarcely better than rutted tracks, still it seemed only decent and right to Heinar — as leader or 'king' of his three-hundred-strong band — to jolt along behind snorting beasts rather than haul a small cart or travois like the rest.

As for 'beating the bounds' of his enclave: it was either that or have some other Szgany group move in and settle on it. Only by constantly measuring his acreage, patrolling its borders, and every mile or so posting his sigil (a highly stylized face, with a turned down mouth and one eye painted over with a black patch), could Heinar ever hope to hold on to it for his and the tribe's descendants. The perimeter of these territories was perhaps thirty-six miles, all of which Heinar guarded jealously. It was the same for most bands and tribes, so that in this respect they had been travellers — indeed, Szgany — right from the new beginning.

But not all of the tribe of Heinar Hagi was on the move. Eastward, in honeycombed cliffs in the roots of the mountains, were caves which housed almost a third of his people. They had sheltered there ever since the holocaust, and there would stay. Likewise in the south, at the edge of the forest where it gave way to grasslands and finally the desert: fifty pioneers of the Szgany Hagi, tending their crops where they'd built permanent homes among the trees. Since both of these locations were on Heinar's roughly triangular route, he looked forward eagerly to sojourning first in the woodlands camp, then at the caves.

As his people grew and expanded, so they would build more towns around the perimeter of Heinar's lands, safely enclosing them. Finally he might be able to settle and live out the rest of his days untroubled by thoughts of land-thieves — except by then Heinar himself would likely be no more, but his sons and their sons would reap the benefits.

These were his thoughts; and at a hundred campfires large and small, east and west all along the Sunside flank of the barrier range, a hundred leaders just like him thought them alike. And he sat at the central fire, chatting with members of the night watch, with a brew of herb tea simmering on its tripod.

Then, close by, on the perimeter…

… The familiar half-growl, half-cough of a wolf! — one of the camp's wolves, it must be. None of the wild grey ones would ever stray so close to such a large body of men. Heinar looked up, his brow furrowing, his good eye glinting in firelight. His men picked up their crossbows; the fire crackled; they all listened to the night.

There came fresh sounds: of a voice raised in challenge, and of another answering with a gasp, a sob! Heinar believed he knew that second voice. He started to his feet and snapped, 'Who's still out?'

'The lads you sent into the forest and down to the river, all are safely back,' one of his men answered. 'If these are ours at all, they can only be Klaus, Dezmir and Vidra.'

'Aye,' Heinar gave a curt nod of agreement. 'That was Vidra's voice just then, for sure. But what ails the lad?' No one ventured to answer; they would find out soon enough.

A party of three entered the clearing: a watchman with his wolf, ushering two others ahead of him. The two came stumbling, dishevelled, apparently exhausted. Heinar recognized only one of them — Vidra Gogosita.

'Heinar!' the youth cried. 'Heinar!'

'What is it?' Heinar demanded, as Vidra all but collapsed in his arms. 'What's happened? Where's Klaus and Dezmir? And who's this?'

'Klaus… Dezmir…' Vidra babbled unashamedly. 'Both….oth of them… dead! In the hills.'

'What?' Heinar gasped. 'Dead, you say? How?'

'We were… were set upon, ambushed!' Vidra appeared to make an effort, pulled himself together. 'Outlaws! They came out of the twilight. And I'd be dead too, if not… if not for… for this one. He… fought them off, saved my life. His name is… is… is…" But he could say no more; his eyes rolled up; he sagged in Heinar's arms.

The stranger swayed, began to topple. Eager hands caught him, lowered him to a prone position. The fire lit strangely in his eyes as they slowly closed. And his voice was a sigh, trailing into silence as he told them:

'My name… is Shaitan.'

II

At first, all had been chaos in the camp of Heinar Hagi.

For almost an hour Heinar and his men, and various women, had chased about, doing their best to care for and see to the immediate needs of young Vidra Gogosita and the stranger he'd brought into the camp, the man called Shaitan.

Vidra's mother, the slender but voluble widow Gogosita, had been first on the scene; she had been awake, waiting in her small tent for her only son's return from the mountains. Hearing something of the excitement, and sensing the sudden tension, the horror creeping in the night, she'd gone to the campfire of her own accord. And when first she'd seen her boy stretched out like that — such a weeping and wailing! But… Vidra was alive, merely exhausted and sleeping! And how she'd cradled the youth in her arms then, while the men told her what little they knew of the tale. And the endless blessings she'd heaped on the tall pale stranger who had saved her son's life: Shaitan, who lay there close at hand, as in a coma, absorbing all he could of these people and their ways.

Then they had sent for the grown-up daughter of Dezmir Babeni, lovely Maria; at first she could not accept the fact of her father's death, so that she looked in vain for his face among the men. And finally her grief, strong but silent, when at last she went to sit alone, rock herself and weep. And the wife and sons of Klaus Luncani, all dazed and staggering from the impact of this unexpected, unacceptable news. So that the traditional peace and quiet of the campfire had been quickly transformed into a scene of tragedy, grief, trauma.

No one felt the Szgany Hagi's loss more than Heinar himself. He couldn't face the weeping women; giving instructions for the welfare of the survivors of this atrocity, he retired to his bed. He would be up and about at intervals through the long, forty-hours night, of course, but long before sunup he would lead a search party into the foothills, to recover the bodies of the dead. And if by any chance they should stumble on a party of loners or outcasts up there… But Heinar knew that the odds were all against it.

Meanwhile, the widow Gogosita had had her son carried to their tent where she watched over him. The badly bruised flesh of his neck was puffy, lacerated, probably infected. His fever was high and he tossed and turned, moaning in his sleep. As for what he moaned: they were things of blackest nightmare, resulting no doubt from what he'd experienced in the hills.

At the campfire Shaitan had been made comfortable, a blanket thrown over him, his head propped up on a bundled skin. And Maria Babeni had come to sit beside him, staring at his drawn, handsome face in the flaring of the fire. It seemed to her he should be taken in, given proper shelter, cared for and protected until he was fully recovered. Hadn't he risked his life for the men of the Szgany Hagi? All in vain where her father and Klaus Luncani were concerned… but at least he had saved young Vidra Gogosita! When the night watch returned she'd have them bring him to her small caravan (hers now, aye, and lonely at that), where she could give him the care he deserved.

Which was exactly what she did.

But most of the camp slept on, with the majority knowing nothing of the night's events; nor would they know until they got up to eat, tend their animals, take turn at watch. Unless something should happen before then, to break the routine.

And the stars turning in their endless wheel, dappling the clearing at the edge of the woods; and high in the mountains a lone wolf howling for his mistress moon, to rise up again and lend him her light for the hunting…

As Maria Babeni prepared for bed behind a curtain, she heard Shaitan stirring, then his moan. Making fast her night clothes, she went to him where he had her father's narrow bed at the other end of the caravan. By the light of a wick burning in oil, she saw that his face was pale as ever, with long, dark hair swept back, the colour of a raven's wing, and lips very nearly as red as a girl's. He would be perhaps forty years old (his looks, at least); his proportions perfect, his brow high, intelligent, lordly. For a man, Shaitan was quite beautiful.

And she thought: Wherever he comes from, he is not Szgany.

Then Shaitan opened his eyes.

And now there could be no mistaking it: his eyes were red!

Maria gasped where she leaned over him. And quick as her thoughts — just exactly as quick — he grasped her arm, rose up half-way on an elbow… then closed his eyes, released her and fell back. And knowing what she had seen, he said, 'My eyes… my eyes! They hurt. There's blood in them. Someone struck me there…'

'Bloodshot?' The word fell from her lips as if conjured, which it had been, half-way. His eyes were bloodshot? So very evenly?

For a moment, only for a moment, Maria had seen something other than a handsome man. Something hideous lurking behind the beauty. But… it could only be the strangeness of the situation: this man in her father's bed, and Maria alone with him in the night. Maria, who for all that she was nineteen years old, had known only her father's close company since the day of her mother's death. And the fact of a new bereavement slowly sinking in. The aftershock; the enormous hole inside of her; the loneliness. Of course she saw shadows where there were none, and phantoms to inhabit them.

He moaned again, tried to sit up, again opened his eyes — but kept them half-shuttered. She helped him, propped him up, said, 'How did… how did he die? My father, Dezmir Babeni. He was the short one, bearded, laughing.'

Shaitan avoided the question. 'I didn't see it all,' he answered. 'I only heard their cries, and went to help. But… your father?' And glancing around the caravan, as if noticing his whereabouts for the first time: 'Where am I?' His question was so innocent, childlike.

She sat on the edge of his bed and told him everything he desired to know. About the Szgany Hagi, the Szgany in general, herself, her situation — everything. And as his eyes opened more fully (but oh so slowly, so gradually), so Maria's small feelings of anxiety retreated, her ill-formed suspicions fell away, her will was subverted.

His voice was so low — like the rumble of a great cat, deceptively gentle but full of a fierce energy — and fluent despite its as yet alien use of her tongue. And behind every word a hint, a suggestion, an enticement. Shaitan beguiled, entranced, seduced; of course, for he was the great seducer. He seduced with his eyes, his tongue, the lure of his magnet personality, so unlike anything Maria had ever known before. And despite his strangeness, and the strangeness of her own innermost feelings, awakened now for the first time, she was drawn like a moth to the blood-red fire of his eyes.

She knew his fingers were at the fastenings of her night clothes, turning them back, laying her flesh bare; but as if to salve each burning brush of those fingers against her sensitized skin, Shaitan poured forth his balm of words. And his furnace heat enveloped her, spreading into every region of her body. So that she grew hot, so very hot.

Maria felt the perspiration swelling in her pores, forming droplets, trickling from neck and shoulders, breasts and belly. And she heard Shaitan's honeyed voice confirming the sultry oppression of the night, telling her how hot it was, how good to be free of such clammy restrictions as clothes and bed covers.

He had turned back his blankets; he sat up and helped her disrobe entirely; their sweat mingled as he rubbed his body against hers. Maria's breasts were firm and proud, with dark brown buds… erect, now, where Shaitan stroked her. Before, she'd known only Szgany lads, clumsy buffoons whose hands and faces she'd slapped. But now, when Shaitan stood up, drew off his shirt, stepped from his breeches… she clung to him and kissed his nipples, and stroked his horn where it steamed and jerked.

'See?' he said. 'My body would know all of you! For while my eyes have observed this softest of soft fruits,' and while my hands have touched its perfect skin, still the lips of my probe would test its flesh for succulence. Aye, for I fear it may be bitter, that a worm may have crept into your juicy core, to itch there in the heart of your heat and spoil your flavour. But don't you feel him itching?'

He touched her belly, the cleft in her bush, and her thighs lolled open. And: 'Ah, you see? You see?' Shaitan's face showed his amaze, and a very little of his lust. This dark and secret hole, all unsuspected! That's where he entered, be sure. So let me in, of your own free will, to drown your worm with my cock's wet kiss.'

He entered her in one, long, slow pulse, breaking her without pause and feeling her sweet virgin's blood hot on his bony shaft. And Maria's hunger was such that she might cry aloud for more, but could only gasp and gurgle as he rode to and fro, in and out between her salivating lips.

And for a long, long time Shaitan took Maria in every way he knew and others which he invented, until his lust was sated, however temporarily. And sprawling there lewdly, with the girl all bruised and insensible between his thighs, and his sperm like foam on all her openings, he thought: These people are clever, yet in many ways they are innocent as trogs. And like the trogs, the Szgany Hagi shall be mine!

It was Shaitan's first major error. His stay with the trogs had lasted for two long years, and little occurring in all that time to tax or stimulate his superior mind and talents; so that in certain respects he had grown lax, and perhaps as naive as the trogs themselves. But as he would soon discover, the men of Sunside were in no way trogs.

For now, however… his excesses with the girl had wearied him. He would join Maria in sleep a while.

Which was his second big mistake…

One third of the way into the night, Turgo Zolte was called to his duty watch. Zolte was a big, taciturn man; tough, iron-grey in the eyes, with shoulder-length hair to match. He wore silver earrings, a silver buckle on his belt, silver buttons to fasten his black clothes; like all Sunsider men he jingled when he walked, only more so. Zolte was a loner, not quite an outsider. The Szgany Hagi had accepted him now.

He'd come to them only a year ago, chased out of his own far western band by a chief whose son he'd killed. According to him, it was a fair fight; the other had called him out over a woman, and Turgo had broken his neck. Well, he had the brawn for it, certainly; and since there was no lack of space among the Hagis for big, strong fighting men — so long as they were working men, too — Heinar had let him stay. Since when no one had bothered with Turgo Zolte very much, and he'd kept mainly to himself. But if a man could catch him in the right frame of mind, with a jug of good plum brandy inside him, he might occasionally tell a few wild tales of his latter days along the western reaches. Campfire tales, of bogeymen and beasts. His audience might snort a bit, but none called him a liar.

This night, when Turgo reported to the fire, the tables were turned; the man he relieved was the one with the tale to tell. Turgo heard it out, scowled and narrowed his glinty eyes, finally said, 'You saw all of this? Young Vidra with his neck torn and scabbed? And this stranger — he was pale, you say? Not much of a description!'

The other shrugged. 'What's to describe? A man: tall, pale, with a girl's long soft hands. Somehow, he didn't look Szgany — he was all smooth and unweathered, like he'd lived in a cave all his days. And his eyes were… they seemed full of blood!'

'Blood? In his eyes?'

'Exactly! Like he'd been poked in them, or had sand thrown in 'em — which no doubt he had, in the fighting.'

Turgo's own eyes narrowed more yet and he nodded, mainly to himself. And sitting down by the fire, he said, 'Tell me more, everything, but in finer detail. Leave nothing out.'

The telling didn't take very long.

And shortly -

— Heinar Hagi came awake instantly, looked at the earnest face of the man who had given him a shake, grunted and glanced up through an opening in the roof of his caravan at the night sky. He knew the hour at once, from the position of the stars, grunted again and growled, 'Anyway, I was due to be up about now.'

Turgo Zolte wasn't much of a diplomat. He shrugged and said, 'Due or undue, you're up.' And: 'It looks like there's business to attend to, Heinar. Bad business, I fear.'

Heinar threw on his clothes, put on his eye-patch to cover the hole which an eagle had torn in his face when he was just a lad. Teach him to hunt eggs in the heights! 'Business?' He repeated the other. 'You'll be talking about murderers in the hills, right? Aye, we'll be doing what we can — but at sunup. You want to come along, you're welcome. Couldn't it wait?'

Turgo shook his head, stepped down from the caravan into the night, waited for Heinar to join him. 'Not what I've got to say,' he answered. 'Not unless you want to see plague in the camp, spreading through all your people!'

And now Heinar was very much awake. 'What?' he grasped the other's arm. 'Plague?'

Turgo nodded. 'But quiet! Let's not wake the entire camp. Not yet. Now listen, and I'll tell you what I heard from the watch. Except I know it may have been exaggerated. But you were there, so if all tallies…' He repeated the story of the watchman. And when he was done:

'Aye, that's the story,' Heinar grunted. 'Blow for blow.'

'Huh!' Turgo returned his grunt. 'Well, and now I've a different story for you…"

And after a moment, as they made for the campfire: 'I came from west of here, as you know,' Turgo began, 'out of the tribe and territories of Ygor Ferenc. That's way up at the end of the barrier range, where the hills slump into misted valleys, fens and mire. The swamps are dire: quicksands, mosquitoes, leeches, but the Ferenc's borders fall short of them by a good seventy miles — which to my mind is still too close by far!'

They had reached the fire; the watchmen were out, patrolling the camp's perimeter; Turgo seated himself on a stool and Heinar chose the well-worn branch of a fallen tree. They each took tea, strong and bitter, and eventually Turgo continued.

'Well, about eighteen months ago, some funny things began to happen there on the edge of nowhere. As you'd imagine, they have their share of mountain men up there, much as you do down here: loners who take to the hills, look after themselves, live on their own in the wild. And now and then such a one will come into camp with a beast he's killed, too much meat for one man, and they'll usually make him welcome. There'll be a feast, and brandy to wash it down; the women will dance till sundown; the likely lads will end up fighting… and so on. That's how it goes.

'But there in the western reaches, that wasn't always the way it went, not in the last six-month. Some of the mountain men up there in the misty hills where they descend to the valleys and swamps, and even the occasional lone wolf… they were suddenly changed, different. Something weird had got into them.

There were rumours: about men with red eyes, madmen with the lusts of beasts, and wolves that snatched people right off the fringes of their camps and territories! Always by night, or in the light of the moon. It was like an infection, a sickness spreading out of the swamps, and people grew wary of any stranger who might come into their camps at twilight or sundown. But in the Ferenc's camps, or on the march, beating his bounds… well, as I've said, all of this was rumour. The other camps may have been hit, if the stories were true, but old Ygor was the lucky one. For a while, anyway.

Then, just before I landed in trouble — Ygor's hotheaded fool of a son, Ymir, forcing me to kill him over a woman's favours and what all — that's when the luck of the Szgany Ferenc ran out. It happened like this:

'I was out with Ygor and maybe a dozen others, beating the bounds just like now. One twilight, we reached this old clearing where we'd make camp. Ygor knew the place well enough: it was about as far west as folks have ever journeyed, except for the loners, of course, who often step where no one else would. Nothing superstitious about that, it's just that west of there the ground's no good for growing things; the water's scummy and the mists are far too frequent. It's like the end of the world! But old Ygor, he likes to beat the ground there anyway, to make sure no one will come down out of the hills and settle on it.

'And there in the clearing, that's where we found Oulio lonescu — something that looked like Oulio, anyway…'

As Turgo paused, so Heinar cast him a sharp glance. 'Eh? Something that looked like him?'

'Give me a chance and I'll explain,' the other held up a restraining hand. And after a moment's thought:

'Oulio was one of these types who'd come into camp for an evening's entertainment. Oh, he liked his own company best, but from time to time got a little too much of it. His parents had been mountain people, too — until an avalanche killed them — and Oulio had a cave up there somewhere. Also, he was known to wander west and trap big lizards in the swamps. See this belt of mine? A bit of Oulio's good leather.

'So, we knew him well. Or thought we did. But this time he was in trouble.

'At first we didn't know what we'd stumbled over. The Oulio we knew was big and wild as they come: clothes all in patches, eyes black as night, hair like a waterfall. And garrulous? He was full to the brim of words that didn't mean much, all spilling out of him because he'd kept them so long bottled up. He played his fiddle like no one I ever heard, drank brandy like water, would dance till he fell. But he danced alone, because he was wary of the women.

'But now? Well, he wouldn't be doing any dancing for a while, for sure.

'How long he'd wandered like that, who knows? But it had slimmed him down a lot. All of his fat was gone, and quite a bit of his skin, too. Why, he was… black! Burned black, by the sun, as it turned out. But he was red, too. Red where the skin had peeled from his face and limbs, and red in his eyes. Aye, red as blood. And there he lay, sprawled like a dead man in the clearing, with only the occasional twitch or moan to hint of any life left in him at all.

'We looked after him. We didn't know what had befallen him, but despite all rumours and old wives' tales we cared for him. Even as we're now caring for this stranger…'

'Eh?' Heinar gave a start. 'The stranger? But he was here, by the fire!'

'Until Maria Babeni took him in,' Turgo nodded grimly. 'She had him carried to her cart.'

And now Heinar thought that maybe he understood something of what was going on here; for he knew that Turgo had paid one or two small, polite attentions to Maria, even though the girl hadn't seemed to notice or acknowledge them. But Turgo saw the Hagi's thoughts written plain in his one good eye, and:

'Better let me finish,' he said, 'before you go jumping to any conclusions.'

'Get on with it, then,' Heinar told him.

'Oulio was taken to the tent of one of the younger men, a man who had his young wife with him. There were four couples like that, who'd come along to form the germ of a settlement in the woods to the south, much as you've started a permanent camp south of this place. He and his slip of a wife knew Oulio from other times; they took him in, bathed him, laid him on a clean blanket and rubbed good butter and salt into all of his sore places. By which time it was night.

'As darkness came down in full and the moon came up, so this same young man was called to keep watch. And he left his girl wife tending the much-ravaged Oulio. Ah, but when he came back all those hours later…

'… Only picture it, only imagine the lad's horror, to discover his much-ravaged wife! And Oulio still grinding away at her like a pig; her breasts all bruised and bloodied from his long nails, and the beast they'd cared for using her as worst he could. He'd gagged her, tied her hair to the tent's pole at the floor. But he'd hit her once or twice, too, and broken her nose and jaw, before having her whichever way he fancied. And he'd fancied them all!

'And there stood this young man, at the flap of his tent, and his wife broken like a doll and still being used by this flame-eyed fiend! Worse, Oulio's teeth were like fangs, which he'd stuck in her neck to suck her blood! And as he heard the lad's horrified gasp behind him, so he bit down on the artery and sliced it through!

'He turned his head and glared at the intruder, snarling at him like a wolf! And his face wasn't dissimilar to that of a wolf, except his eyes weren't feral but crimson! Red as the blood which spurted with each faltering heartbeat from this poor girl's torn neck!'

Heinar's eye bulged and he gripped Turgo's arm. 'Man, what a story!' His voice was hoarse. 'But finish it.'

The other nodded, and continued: The lad had been on watch and carried his crossbow with him, loaded. For a moment he'd been paralysed, unmanned; but now he screamed his outrage, let fly, put a bolt through the sod close to his black heart. It would have finished any other man, to be stuck through and through like that with a hardwood bolt, only a hairbreadth from his heart. But not Oulio, not the thing which Oulio had become. With the strength of a maniac, he knocked the husband aside, kicked him in the face, and rushed out of the tent into the sleeping camp. His hissing and howling woke all of us up…

'Well, everything I've told so far is the way I heard it and how I remember it. But from here on in it's the way I saw it. And I've no sinister motive for telling this tale, Heinar; no, for I've learned my lesson where women are concerned, and I'm not much of a one for subterfuge. But the Szgany Hagi took me in and for that I owe you a favour. So here's how the rest of it goes:

'Before the camp was fully awake, before anyone could say, ask, or do anything, this young lad — who was now mad as Oulio himself — put another bolt in him, in his spine. Oulio toppled into the campfire, and the lad had him! He grabbed a leg, dragged him screaming out of the cinders, noosed him round the neck and strung him up from a tree there and then! And then he took us to his wife, so that we'd understand.

'We'd understand some of it, anyway…

'And no one cut Oulio down, so that he might well be swinging there yet, except… that wasn't the end of it. No, not by a long shot.

'For at sunup, Oulio's coughing and grunting brought us awake again! He was still alive, yes! With a rope round his neck, his face all purple, dangling there in mid-air; one bolt skewering him through the chest, and another deep in his spine. And none of these things had killed him! But something was in the offing which would for sure. It was the sun, coming up over the trees and blazing down into the clearing. And when it lit on Oulio — how he smoked and steamed!

'And then… this awful, impossible commotion: he choked and kicked and danced up there! Until the knot came loose, letting him down. And so he crumpled to the ground and lay there, staring at us with those scarlet eyes of his. And we called for the lad, who'd just finished burying his poor wife, to come and finish it. It seemed only right…

'He brought a machete and went to Oulio where he lay. But before he could take his head… the monster spoke to him! Oh, he didn't cry out, beg for mercy, plead for his life; none of that. His throat, all puffy and grooved, wouldn't have allowed for it, and anyway he had no wind. And in a voice no more than a hoarse whisper, he said: "I'm sorry! It wasn't me!"

The liar! For of course the lad, and everyone else, knew it had been none other! Half crazy, the poor bereaved husband snarled and his machete went up, but before it could fall… Oulio began to choke and flop about, so that we knew it was the end of him. And perhaps the lad thought, "Why should I make it easier for him?" At any rate, he stayed his hand.

'And so Oulio flopped about in his death agonies; his mouth yawned open and his neck grew fat, and his purple face swelled up as if to burst. Until at last… at last something came out of him!'

Heinar half started to his feet. 'Something? What sort of something? Was he sick? Did he throw up his guts?'

Turgo shook his head. 'His guts, no. He threw up nothing. I saw it and I remember. I remember what I thought: that this thing wanted to be out of him! Because while he was finished, there might be another chance for it. Don't ask me where the idea came from, but that's what I thought.'

'But what was it?'

Turgo shrugged, then shuddered, which was something Heinar had never seen him do before. 'A huge slug, a leech, a great fat blindworm — don't ask me, for I don't know. It was partly black, grey, leprous, ridged, writhing. Big as a boy's arm, I thought it would split his face! And it dragged itself out of him and wriggled for cover — because just like Oulio it felt the sunlight. Its head was flattened, like a snake's, but it was blind, eyeless. Yet somehow, it sensed the lad's machete still raised on high and reared back from it. But too late… he was quick… he struck off its head!

'A moment more and men unfroze, sprang forward, kicked the wriggling pieces into the fire. Then… we all looked at each other — all of us, with faces white as chalk — and we looked at the lad, who used his great knife again. This time he took Oulio's head: two, three strokes… it was done. And again we tossed both parts into the fire, then stood there till they'd burned to ashes…'

Heinar stared hard at Turgo, who gazed back unblinkingly. And Heinar knew that every word of it had been the truth. For who could embellish a thing like that? Finally he said, This Shaitan's eyes were red. I thought it was only the firelight, reflected in them. Well, maybe it was — and maybe it wasn't.'

'We'll know for sure at sunup,' the other answered. 'But do you really want to wait that long? Right now, who or whatever that man is, he's with Maria Babeni, in her caravan. And maybe he's with her just like Oulio was with that girl. Also, Heinar, my story still isn't finished.'

There's more? But what else can there be?'

'A plague, I said,' Turgo reminded him, 'and a plague's what I meant. For in the dead of the next night — and after that poor lass's husband had buried her in the woods — who should come ghosting into camp but the girl herself! Oh, her flesh was pale and her nails broken from the digging, but her appetite was healthy enough, and good long teeth to match it!

'Well, the men around the fire had all taken strong drink; at first they didn't know her. She went among them like a whore, tempting, stroking, biting their necks. But suddenly her bites were real! Aye, and her eyes were red! Then, they knew her.

'Well, this time we knew better what we were doing. But we had to hold her poor raving husband down while we did it…"

Heinar shook his head in utter bewilderment. Until at last: 'A plague, aye,' he said. 'But Turgo, what are we talking about here? A creature that lives in a man — or a woman — making him or her crazy enough to live by the blood of other men?'

That's exactly what we're talking about,' said the other. 'A wampir which makes its host victim strong, lusty, devious, and very hard to kill. Old Oulio lonescu wasn't a rapist, and he certainly wasn't a murderer! And what about this girl, who came back from the grave?'

'Isn't it possible she was buried alive?'

'No,' Turgo shook his head in firm denial. 'She was dead for sure. And later — undead!'

Heinar could scarcely take it all in. 'What was that word you used? Wampir?'

Turgo nodded. 'In certain western regions, that's what men call the great bats that suck on goats. If they find a crippled goat under the moon, they'll suck him dry.'

Heinar's mouth was likewise dry. He looked nervously all about — at the tents, the carts and caravans, and not least the shadows — then licked his lips and finally nodded. 'Well, I know about such bats, of course: we Hagis call 'em "vexies". Catch them at our goats, we sneak up, club them, break their wings. But men with giant leeches in them?' He didn't try to hide a small shudder. 'No, I have to admit, you're the expert on this one, Turgo Zolte. So what next? How do we handle it?'

'What we don't do is act too hasty,' Turgo said. 'For we'd never live it down if this Shaitan's innocent — and a hero to boot.'

'Which he could well be,' Heinar let himself down from his branch. 'For after all, young Vidra Gogosita reckons he saved his life!'

Turgo's deep-etched frown showed his dilemma, his uncertainty. 'That's the hell of it,' he nodded. 'It's possible all this talk's for nothing — indeed I hope it is! — but can we risk it?'

'No,' Heinar gave a short, sharp shake of his head, convinced that he'd be far better safe than sorry. 'Vidra's had his head down for a while now. Perhaps we should go and have a word with him.'

They did. The widow Gogosita heard them coming, met them at the flap of her tent with a finger to her lips. 'Shhh/ The poor lad's asleep. And Heinar,' she grasped his arm, 'it's very good of you to show your concern this way. Ah, but it must have been terrible up there! Such nightmares! Vidra rambles as in a fever… he speaks of blood, and murder!'

They went in, all three, to stand quietly beside the youth where he tossed and turned. The night had turned cold, and yet the sweat stood out on Vidra's brow. He was pale as a ghost, with grey hollows in his cheeks and under his eyes.

Turgo glanced at Heinar, went to shake the lad's shoulder. His mother got between. 'What's this?' she hissed. 'But can't you see he needs his sleep? Well, whatever, it will have to keep.'

'No, Elana. It can't keep.' Heinar was familiar with her, but firm. He put her to one side, and…

… And Vidra came breathlessly, babblingly alive!

He was still asleep, but the cold sweat welled up that much faster, and the words jerked out of him in squalls, like sudden bursts of spattering rain. 'No, no… keep off… keep away!' He tugged at his blanket until it was a damp knot. 'Ah, great ghoul… but do you murder men for their clothes? No, no, for I see it's more than their clothes you're after!… Keep off! Go torment Dezmir… not me, not me.' He flopped this way and that. 'Ah, but now I know you, fiend!… Your eyes like lamps… they let you find your way in the dark! But not me, not me! Go suck on Dezmir's neck and let me be!'

And with that last he turned on his side, and his neck was visible where his mother had washed it. Turgo and Heinar looked — and saw.

'Punctures,' Turgo growled. 'Tears in the flesh. And the flesh itself inflamed, poisoned!'

Heinar nodded his grim agreement.

The widow's hand had flown to her mouth. 'What did Vidra say? About murdering men for… for their clothes? But now it comes to me. That stranger was wearing Vidra's long coat. Also Klaus Luncani's trousers! Much too short for him… they have a patched right thigh. I'd know that patch anywhere, for I put it there. His poor wife is no good… with needle and thread… at all!' Her eyes opened like great mad windows.

And so did Vidra's as he came awake, sat bolt upright and snarled his terror, then reached out his trembling arms for his mother. 'Ma! — Mama! — Ma-aaaaa!' His cry was a gasp, a hiss, not loud, but it penetrated Turgo, Heinar and the widow like a long hot iron sliding into their flesh.

And for all that it was quiet, still its echoes reached out a great deal farther than the tent of the Gogositas…

In Maria Babeni's caravan, Shaitan came awake!

What was that? A cry in the night? From which quarter?

The night seemed still, quiet, but Shaitan's vampire intelligence was not. It was unquiet. He sensed movement; men other than the watchkeepers were awake in the camp, stirring furtively.

… And they were with his thrall!

He reached out with his mind — and gasped as the scene in the tent of the widow Gogosita flooded his awareness in all its vivid, telepathic detail. Not a scene from the youth's dreams, no, but from life. Vidra was awake — and talking his head off!

No! Shaitan sent his command like a flung knife. Oh, you faithless one! Much too Idle now to change sides, Vidra Gogosita…

In the widow's tent, suddenly Vidra's terrified eyes went wide where he clasped his mother and babbled the true story to Turgo and Heinar. His words were shut off as Shaitan closed a telepathic fist on his mind; groaning, he slumped to the floor. But the others had heard enough.

'Look after him!' Heinar snapped as the frantic widow got down beside her son. And Turgo thought: Aye, look after him very, very well!

Then the two men were out of the tent, and Heinar blowing on his alert whistle. From out on the perimeter came answering cries, the strange cough of a wolf, sounds of men hurrying to investigate. The girl's caravan is on the other side of the clearing,' Heinar grunted, leading the way. They skirted the campfire, and Heinar blew again.

'He'll be alerted by now,' Turgo warned.

'Distracted, I hope!' Heinar answered.

Turgo loaded his small crossbow, knocked off the safety. 'There are only the two of us.'

'Huh! How many do we need?'

Turgo wasn't known for his patience. Baring his teeth, he snarled, 'More than just the two of us, be sure!' And he grabbed Heinar's arm to slow him down.

By then they had almost reached Maria Babeni's small caravan. Heinar shook himself free of the other's hand, growled, 'Yes, I know: he'll be strong, this creature. But poor Maria, she's just a weak girl — and me, I'm Szgany!'

'Both of us,' Turgo snapped. 'Both fools, too.'

Arriving at the small covered cart, Heinar blew one last blast on his whistle; a glimmer of lamplight shining through the wicker weave of the caravan's door went out at once; the shadows lengthened as watchmen came loping in starlight. But before they could arrive, the door was flung open!

Shaitan stood there, his face a pallid mask, alert but calm. And no disguising the scarlet fire in his eyes now. He made no attempt to do so but said, simply, 'Heinar, my ways will be strange to you at first. But only follow them, and I shall make you the most powerful leader the Szgany ever knew, until the Hagis are feared throughout the length and breadth of Sunside.'

Heinar shook his head. 'It wasn't fear made me a leader,' he answered, 'but respect. That… and justice!' And to the man beside him, in a voice which cracked like a whip to activate his trigger finger: Turgo!'

Turgo's bolt zipped from the tiller of his weapon. But in the same moment, Shaitan snarled and slammed the door in their faces. Still the heavy hardwood bolt struck through the wickerwork to find its target; most certainly, for Shaitan's cry of pain sounded from within like the howl of a stricken animal, and the flights of the bolt were sheared from its shaft as it was wrenched through the tough weave and out of sight.

Men arrived on the scene: three of them, one with his wolf to heel. 'What's going on? What's happening?'

Heinar had no time for explanations. 'That man in there, the stranger Shaitan. I want him brought down. Maybe even dead. Turgo here has shot him; that might be enough…'

Turgo, fitting another bolt to his crossbow, thought not. And he was right. But before he could say anything: A mist sprang up; it sprang into being, literally!

One moment, the five men stood at the door of Maria's small caravan — with lamps in the other tents and carts beginning to flicker into life at the commotion, and grumbling voices raised in inquiry — and the air was dry and sharp. Then, suddenly, as if the earth and the forest had exhaled mightily, a ground mist lapped at their ankles, and the air was damp, even greasy. Time only for one of the watchmen to murmur, 'What?' — and another, 'Eh?' — before the mist was thickening, writhing in the trees, obscuring the camp's silhouettes.

Then, from the covered cart, Maria Babeni's cry rang out!

Galvanized, forgetting for the moment the weirdness of the night, Heinar bounded forward up the single wooden step, charging the door with his shoulder. Simultaneously, there came the sound of ripped leather and the cart rocked a little.

The door burst inwards under Heinar's weight and a wall of mist greeted him, collapsing around him, issuing outwards from the caravan like water when the dam breaks. Then the Hagi was inside, with Turgo hot on his heels; and Maria, naked and sobbing, collapsing into their arms.

A hole gaped in a side wall. Framed in the ripped hide, briefly, they saw the tall pale figure of Shaitan before he fled outwards to the night. Turgo's bolt was in his shoulder, blood flowing freely….ut not only blood. For when Shaitan breathed, he breathed a billowing mist. And the pores of his body, open like tiny pouting mouths, secreted milky vapour as a slug issues slime!

Turgo cursed, fought free of Maria's arms, loosed his second bolt through the hole into Shaitan's mist, hopefully into Shaitan. But no, there came no answering cry, only a red-eyed shadow loping soundlessly through the mist-damp shrubbery.

'Loose your wolf!' Heinar shouted to the men outside.

With a snarl, the animal went bounding, and the watchmen after it. 'Yes, get after him!' Turgo leaned out of the door, urging them on. 'And don't just catch him — kill him on the spot!' If you can…

Heinar had wrapped his coat around the girl. They laid her on her bed, examined her neck. Nothing, just bruises, and more on her body. They were proper about it: they merely glanced at her naked flesh, but that was enough. There were signs which both men knew. And confirming their unspoken thoughts:

'I… had thought I was dreaming,' her voice was tiny, a sob. 'But… when I woke up, I… I knew what he had done. Except I… I couldn't stop him! I swear it! He… he has this power. It's in his eyes…'

Heinar called for women, left Maria in their care. And a little while later, at the campfire:

'Well?' he asked Turgo. 'And what now?'

The mist had thinned out, seeped into the ground, disappeared. The stars were bright again and the hurtling moon just risen. From away in the forest came far, faint shouting. 'For now,' Turgo answered, as the distant cries died away, 'let's just wait and see if they get him.'

Heinar grunted, nodded, said, 'Well, Turgo Zolte, it seems the Szgany Hagi are firmly in your debt. And me, I'll not forget it. Hah.' Who could forget a night like this? But at least young Vidra and the girl are all right.'

The other made no answer, merely stared into the fire and wondered, Ail right, are they? Are they really?

Before the dawn two of the three men returned. They had got cut off from the third watchkeeper and hadn't seen him since. Neither him nor his wolf.

At sunup Heinar found Turgo packing his small tent and a very few personal things, and sniffing out the breeze from the east. 'Something on your mind?' he inquired.

'I came to you with nothing,' Turgo answered, 'and I'm not taking much more away with me. What little I have, I've earned. Any complaints?'

'None. But I don't like to see you go. Has last night upset you? Is it the girl? What happened wasn't her fault; this Shaitan was full of arts; she would still make a good wife… for someone.'

'Not this someone,' Turgo shook his head. Then, galvanized, he hugged the other, and said, 'Heinar, listen… be careful!'

Astonished, the Hagi freed himself. 'I always am careful,' he answered. 'But of what this time?'

Turgo shrugged, looked away. 'Something of innocence has gone,' he said, finally. 'In its place, something full of dark knowledge, power, evil, has come. Like the Szgany Ferenc before them, the Szgany Hagi are touched by it.' Grey-faced, he turned to Heinar and grasped his shoulders. 'Listen: I can't watch it happen again, not to you and yours, and stand there powerless to stop it! It came from the west, and so I'm heading east.'

Frowning, Heinar inquired, 'And if this evil lingers on, how should I guard against it?'

'Chiefly with your eyes. And whenever you see it, put it down! One of your men hasn't returned. If he does, watch him — and his wolf! Watch the ones who did return, likewise Maria Babeni. Most obvious of all, watch Vidra Gogosita.'

'Vidra? His mother's in a state. He wandered off in the night, apparently. His fever…'

'Oh?' Turgo hardly seemed surprised. 'Then say a prayer that he never comes back. Aye, and you'd do well to watch his mother, too.' He put his pack on his shoulder, headed off.

Heinar felt the sun warm on his weatherbeaten face and was seduced by a feeling of well-being. He called after Turgo: 'I think you exaggerate! Whatever evil came with this Shaitan, whatever sickness he carried, it's disappeared with him. Also, and wherever he is, it's bound to kill him in the end. There's nothing here now to run away from.'

'Running?' Turgo called back over his shoulder, dappled by sunlight where he strode among the trees. 'Yes, I suppose I am. It's the only way I know to put distance between.' When he paused to look back, his lips were tight and grim. Then:

'In certain ways we're alike, you and I, Heinar,' he said. 'And do you make camp beside a poisoned pool? No, for you know better than that. Well, and so do I know better. For I've seen this thing before and know that I can't live with it. Now let me warn you one last time, and I pray you'll heed these final words of mine: keep watch, Heinar — keep watch!'

But the sun still felt very warm and reassuring to Heinar. He would keep watch, of course — well, for a while. 'Eat well, then,' he called out after Turgo, perhaps a little too gruffly. 'Stay healthy. Have many children… eventually.'

Turgo's nod was his only answer. And then he was gone…

Turgo Zolte was right: it would take Heinar Hagi eight long years to eradicate Shaitan's vampire taint from his people, a task which in the end would amount to culling the tribe down to less than half its current numbers. It was to be man's first real stand against vampires (if not the Wamphyri proper), out of which would be learned many a valuable lesson for the future.

Of the Szgany Ferenc who had featured in Turgo's tale of Oulio lonescu: the taint in their blood never would be washed away but would stay with them to the end of their days, not only in this world but also in one other.

That, however, is a tale already told…

Ill

Raging, Shaitan fled from the camp of Heinar Hagi. He flowed through the night, which was his element, and covered himself with its darkness; but behind him a watchdog — indeed a wolf — came fast on his heels. And behind the wolf came Sunsiders, Szgany, which he had discovered were in no way trogs. Difficult to impose one's will on such as these. Their own will was so very strong! Shaitan would have more sway over their women, who at least appreciated his beauty. But to remain beautiful, indeed, to remain alive… this was now his chief priority.

Turgo Zolte's bloodied hardwood bolt stood out from his right shoulder, giving him pain. He might will something of the pain away, but not the bolt itself. That would have to be drawn out. And despite the speed of his flowing flight along the forest's fringe, the wolf was gaining. Its eyes were very nearly the equivalent of Shaitan's own in the night and the darkness.

Cliffs reared suddenly on Shaitan's left hand; he lengthened his stride, flowed through the uneven foliage, climbed up onto a low ledge. Vines and creepers hung down from above. But it was not his intention to climb.

He jammed the flight end of the bolt in his shoulder into a niche, wrenched his body sharply to one side. The bolt snapped… and Shaitan cried out! Blood flowed freely, its smell inflaming him. Now he felt behind his shoulder with his left hand. The barb of the iron arrowhead protruded an inch, but he had no leverage to pull it out. He tore down a length of tough vine, looped it over the arrowhead, tied its ends to a creeper growing from a crevice.

The wolf had heard Shaitan's cry, smelled his blood. It came snarling, leaping to attain the ledge, scrabbled there a moment to regain its balance. Then it saw Shaitan and leaped again, locking its jaws on his arm. Its weight overbalanced him; locked together they fell from the ledge; the bolt was torn from Shaitan's back.

In the near-distance, Shaitan's closest human pursuer called out to his wolf: 'Seek him!' But the wolf had already discovered Shaitan, who was himself on the point of discovering a new and terrible weapon. Within him, his vampire was at last mature. Metamorphic, its flesh was Shaitan's flesh.

The wolf had jaws like a bear-trap, clamped fast now to the bones of Shaitan's forearm. Their eyes met, feral yellow against evil scarlet, and the man felt something of the beast's ferocity. So did his vampire, which must make him ferocious to match. Something was summoned to his flesh, summoned from his flesh! He felt a burning in his fingers as if they were on fire, an agony in his face and jaws far greater than the mere pain in his back. And yet these additional pains were not without… pleasure?

It was not unlike those occasions when he had summoned his vampire mist; but he had not summoned this, not knowingly. For this was the instinctive response of his metamorphism, the tenacity of his vampire, its lust for life; and suddenly the great wolf was no more than a puppy!

Shaitan's fingers, grown to claws, rammed into the animal's sides and tore them; his jaws, yawning impossibly wide, elongated into a nightmare cavern of serrated tusks which sprouted from red-gushing gums; his eyes were blobs of sulphur shot with scarlet fire. Gutting the wolf, he let its entrails spill. And when its agonized jaws flew open, then Shaitan's closed — upon its throat. Which he tore out in a welter of pipes and gristle and gore!

In just a moment, the wolf was wolf no more but a mangled carcass; it hadn't even cried out but died silently, in vast astonishment…

A second passed… another… and a third.

'Lupe?' A voice called from close at hand. 'Where in all that's…?' A man stepped out of the trees into starlight — in time to see something move in the undergrowth at the foot of the cliffs. 'Lupe?' the man repeated, but in a whisper now, wonderingly, as he lifted his crossbow.

Crouching down a little, he ran to the place beneath the cliffs. As he got there, so the darkness came flowing to its feet! Starlight gleamed on the horror that was Shaitan, which reached out a bloody hand and caught the other by his throat.

The watchman would have discharged his weapon — but he'd left the safety on! Shaitan knocked it from his trembling hand and drew him closer. And:

'Lupe?' he quietly, almost conversationally growled, his monstrous head cocked on one side. 'Ah, no — for my name is Shaitan!' And as he lowered his face to the other's throbbing neck, 'But from this time forward you must call me master…'

With his new disciple or lieutenant, who was the first entirely human underling of the Wamphyri, Shaitan headed east as before. There were no more pursuers; the night was long; they covered a good many miles — before the sun found them out.

For Shaitan's symbiont or parasite was a two-edged sword: one could not accept its advantages without its disadvantages. Sunlight, which had irritated Shaitan from the outset — almost from the moment of his breathing the red, corpse-spawned spores — now became a seething agony in his eyes and against his hide. It burned him, visibly steamed the moisture from his flesh, ate into him like acid and sapped his strength. He could stand to go out from the shade for seconds, but minutes would deplete him horribly, and an hour would kill him. His thrall was less susceptible for the moment; given time, however, and he, too, must surely succumb to direct sunlight. Such was the measure of Shaitan's corruption, and his contagion.

They were climbing diagonally eastward, above the foothills and towards the tree-line, when sunup came with its fogs in Sunside's valleys and forests, and its probing golden beams on the peaks; beams which gradually joined up to become a wall of yellow fire, creeping down towards them where they went all unsuspecting, like ants on the flank of the mountain.

And yet perhaps Shaitan (or his leech) did suspect something; for there was an anxiety in him, not yet fathomed, to be out of this place and once more into the cool of Starside. But when he felt the effect of the first of those as yet hazy beams on his nakedness, and when he observed in astonishment the rapid evaporation of his body's fluids and the scorching of his flesh, then he understood well enough his instinct — or that of his vampire — to take cover. And so, forced into the shade of a deep cave, Shaitan and his thrall, Ilya Sul, waited out the long day.

The cave had been the lair of some creature but now was empty; lesser caves and branching fissures within were cool, damp, dark; Shaitan felt reasonably secure. But he also felt hungry. The sun's rays, in however brief a time, had depleted him sorely. He fuelled himself on Ilya Sul, which weakened the man more yet but bound him even closer to his master. Also, it fed the vampire fire in Sul's blood, and hastened his change. So that when he went out on to the slopes with his crossbow, to find food for himself, he returned within the hour, feeble and blistered by the sun. But at least he'd shot a kid, which Shaitan gorged upon before tossing the less appealing parts to Sul.

So they fed themselves.

And then they slept, because by now they could feel the weight of the risen sun, like an immovable boulder, blocking the door of the cave; which meant there was no going on for a while. And Shaitan could hear the land outside sizzling with a deadly heat; he could even smell the scorching of the rocks, so that his skin crept with the knowledge of what that golden furnace could do to him…

Shaitan came starting awake!

He shook Sul, cautioned him to silence. The sun is high,' he whispered. 'I can feel it. Also, I feel Sunsiders! So come, find a dark hole for yourself.' They retreated into the cave deeper still, found shadowed niches in which to crawl.

And the weary trackers, with a wolf, came after; but not into the cave. For lying there, Shaitan fought down the urge to create a mist and flee into it (what, into the sunlight?) and instead willed it that the men would turn back. The grey one was their guide: he fastened upon its mind with his vampire awareness, spelling out the doom which would befall if it should enter.

The wolf pawed the remains of their meal at the entrance where they'd tossed the scraps, but came no farther. The men, Szgany Hagi, saw the skin, hair and bones, and knew that this had been a goat. And one of them said, 'A bear, probably a big one. This must be his lair. See, these remains are fresh. Why, he might even be at home!' And so they passed on by.

Shaitan waited a moment, then crept to the entrance. And keeping well back from the dazzle, he taxed his eyes to watch the men move away, marvelling greatly that they went in brilliant sunlight, with no apparent harm! Then… he was filled with bitter resentment. They lived here, where he could not; they hunted here, living on the earth's simple things, which he could not. It was their place, their haven (their heaven?) and could never be his except… in the dark of night.

Well, and so they lived and hunted here: indeed, they even hunted Shaitan himself! But tomorrow and tomorrow there would be other days, and long dark nights, when he would hunt in his own right — for men! Aye, and then he would turn their heaven into a hell.

It was a solemn promise, which Shaitan made unto himself…

Sunside's day was long and long, seeming interminable to Shaitan; but at last the shadows lengthened, the sun became a hot, smoky red blister on the south-eastern horizon, and the first pale stars blinked into being high over the spine of the barrier mountains. Twilight came down, and it was time to move on.

At which point there came a diversion.

Emerging from the cave into the gloom of evening, Shaitan was startled to hear a wailing and moaning, and to observe the approach of two figures — whom he recognized at once. The one who cried out and tore at his hair came, after all, as no great surprise: for this was the treacherous thrall, Vidra Gogosita, who seemed in a bad way indeed. But the other figure, advancing upon Shaitan quietly, hollow-cheeked and flame-eyed, was a shocking sight indeed. For he -

— was a dead man! He — was in fact Dezmir Babeni!

Ah, but there had been changes. He was still bearded, and shortish in the limbs and trunk as before, but much of the fat was gone from him now so that he no longer appeared squat. He was a leaner Dezmir Babeni, certainly, but just as surely the same man. And he was no longer dead.

This was a new thing. Before Babeni, Shaitan had never so depleted a man, or even a trog, as to kill him. The creatures who were his thralls had not died but lived only to accommodate Shaitan's needs. This man, however, had died. Babeni was dead… or undead?

'Master! Master!' the young Gogosita came ghosting to Shaitan, hands fluttering. 'Take me back, I beg you! I have nowhere else to go, nowhere else to be.' Shaitan did not even look at him but put him aside. For his gaze was rapt upon Babeni. And Babeni's rapt upon him, and full of hatred!

The undead man growled and lurched forward, his pale grey hands reaching, his eyes like sulphur pits, lit with fire in their cores. 'You!' he accused, his voice harsh and rasping. 'You, Shaitan, you did this thing to me. And now this youth tells me you've done other things to my daughter!'

He bore down on Shaitan, grasped him, went to fasten his teeth in his neck. And Shaitan saw how those teeth were grown into fangs! Stunned until now, immobilized, finally he summoned his vampire strength to throw the other off, then leaped on him to choke him. Babeni's grey face turned purple under the crushing power of Shaitan's hands, but still he fought back and his body heaved with an impossible strength.

Amazed, Shaitan knocked Babeni's head again and again upon the hard and stony ground, until the skull at the back was soft and dented. Finally the other quit fighting and lay back. But he was not dead and his limbs twitched, and his yellow eyes followed Shaitan wherever he moved.

And Shaitan looked at him and thought: The strength of your body is second only to mine, and its wounds heal even as fast. In relieving you of your frail human life, I have given you this unlife. However unwittingly, it seems I have bestowed certain powers upon you! And yet you are not my thrall and will not accept me as your master. Wherefore I must kill you, lest you become a rival. But how may I kill you, if you are undead?

Babeni was even now taking up a jagged rock, staggering to his feet, mewling brokenly as he lurched towards Shaitan. Spittle dribbled from a corner of his mouth and his head and neck were soaked in blood; because of his damaged brain, he came on lopsidedly, like an idiot. Shaitan stepped aside, tripped him, looked for a large stone with which to finish it. But:

'How may I kill you?' he asked out loud, as yet again the mewling thing clambered upright.

'Master,' Vidra Gogosita clawed at his arm. 'I know how to kill him!' For Vidra had sat at the campfire one time when Turgo Zolte had been telling his stories.

'Oh?' Shaitan looked at him, at the same time avoiding the staggering cripple. 'And would you redeem yourself? Well, and maybe you have your uses after all. Say on then: what will it take to put him down?'

'A stake through his heart,' Vidra gasped. 'To fix him in place. Then cut off his head. Finally, burn him — all of his pieces!'

'All of that?'

Vidra nodded. 'This is how the Szgany Hagi will deal with you, if they catch you!'

Shaitan nodded. 'Indeed? Then we must test this thing. You shall build me a fire.' And to Ilya Sul where he fended off the thing which had been Dezmir Babeni: 'Put your bolt through his heart.'

The other obeyed and Babeni was knocked down, stretched out upon the ground, with only the flight of the bolt sticking up from his chest. He bled the merest trickle, even when Sul took a knife and commenced sawing through his neck, its pipes and the bones of his spine. Through all of which the undead man's limbs jerked and twitched, and air whistled in and out of his chomping jaws, until the pipes were severed and the head detached.

Then they burned him, but even burning he thrashed about while his fats were rendered down…

Observing all, Shaitan nodded again. 'And this is how they would deal with me? Hah! But if you think he died hard, then you don't know the half of it. The Hagi shall not catch me, Vidra Gogosita; and if they do, I will not be the one to die.'

Meanwhile, Ilya Sul had built the fire to a roaring blaze. 'I… I can't seem to warm myself,' he complained, examining his cold grey arms.

'I am the same,' Vidra agreed. 'For we have known the kiss of the great Wampir, our master Shaitan.'

And again Shaitan was interested. 'Wampir?'

Vidra explained, repeating all that he had heard from Turgo Zolte. And when he was done:

'Ah, no!' said Shaitan. 'For the wampir is a common bat, a dull creature which is my Starside familiar. But I am uncommon. Wherefore I shall be called… Wamphyri! Aye, for I like the sound of it. The great Lord Shaitan, first of the Wamphyri! So be it.'

They crossed the mountains in the night, and on the way Shaitan questioned Vidra as to how he had found him. The youth answered that he had 'felt' his master in his mind, and had known that he must go to him. On the way, as the power of the sun's rays waned, he had met with Dezmir Babeni, who had hidden in a crack in a cliff to keep himself out of the sunlight. Being undead, he had been more nearly like unto Shaitan, and the sun was his mortal enemy.

The night passed, and as the three — Shaitan, Vidra and Ilya Sul — descended into Starside, so they discovered Shaitan's trog thralls waiting. They, too, had known where to find their master. And now they numbered thirteen in all: the three, plus seven female trogs and three male. And Shaitan called all of the others his disciples.

Then they saw a light shining up into the night, a white and hazy shimmer unlike the coldly flickering auroras of the north, which Ilya Sul said must be the fallen white sun, which some called a gate into hell.

'White sun?' Shaitan had drawn back.

'I've heard it's cold,' the other answered. 'It isn't harmful, if you keep your distance. But you must never touch it.'

Shaitan was curious, however, and said he must see this hell-gate.

They climbed the low crater wall and stood at the rim, and looked down upon the ball of cold white fire within. The trogs were blinded and staggered this way and that. One tripped and fell, landing on a ledge close to the white glare. Terrified, he put up a hand to fend it off. His hand touched the surface of the dazzle, sank into it… and he cried out in his guttural fashion as the hell-gate dragged him in and swallowed him whole!

The trog was gone, and only his strange slow cry came echoing back. Shaitan believed he could see him down there, a small frightened figure, dwindling, but the light hurt his eyes so that soon he must look away.

And he said: 'This shall be the punishment for those who offend me three times. Three times, aye — for I am forgiving, as you see.'

'A fitting punishment,' Vidra fawned upon him.

'As well you think so,' Shaitan answered. 'And as well you mark my words. One: you told the Hagi about me. Two: you told Dezmir Babeni how I had honoured his daughter. Do not wrong me a third time.' His voice was dark, and very frightening.

'And there shall be other punishments,' he told them all. 'For I am Shaitan who can make men undead. Any who would do me harm, let them think on this: I shall take their blood and bury them deep in the ground. And when they awaken, they shall lie there and scream forever, until they stiffen to stones in the earth.

'Also, that land there to the north; I perceive that it is icy cold. No fit habitation even for such as we. Therefore, let him who would deny me beware. For in my house there shall be no warm bed or 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 and thrall, a rich red life forever! Aye, even unto death — and beyond! So be it…'

'Where shall your house stand, Lord?' Ilya Sul ventured with a shiver, as they left the Gate behind to cross the wide mouth of a pass where the light from Sunside was a pale purplish haze in the' V of the split range. 'For this seems a desolate place — a plain of boulders, lacking rivers, where lichens live and scrubby grasses — with wolves in the mountains and bats in the crags, but never a man.'

There are men of sorts,' Shaitan answered him. 'Under the mountains, in their caverns, dwell trogs. They shall provide — they shall be — my food. Until we are established. But on Sunside there is life galore! Common fare will suffice, at first, but the true blood which is the life lies beyond the mountains. And in all the nights yet to be we shall hunt. As for my house: it shall stand east of here a ways, for I am drawn east.' Then, looking sharply at Sul: 'But do you doubt me?'

'Never, Lord!'

They trekked for several miles, and came to a region of stone stacks worn out from the mountains, which littered the plain like the petrified stalks of gigantic mushrooms. Their bases were fortified with scree jumbles, but in their columns were ledges and caverns, many of which were vast as halls.

Shaitan admired these stacks, for they were very grand and very gaunt. And: 'One of these shall be my house,' he said.

Sul answered him: They are like the aeries of the mountain eagles!'

And: 'Aye,' said Shaitan. The aeries of the Wamphyri!'

And so Shaitan set to and commenced the building of his house. The task was huge; only a vampire and his thralls, with their longevity, could ever have accomplished it. And Shaitan would build not only a house but an empire of vampires.

He recruited trogs out of their caverns in the lee of the mountains, and sent his lieutenants into Sunside's nights to hunt and recruit Szgany. And in dark chambers in the base of the stack which he had chosen, he experimented with his own metamorphic flesh and powers to furnish himself with all of his requirements.

He bred trogs which were no longer trogs but cartilage creatures, whose minds were small and bodies elastic. From these he made leathers and coverings for the aerie's exterior stairways, and articles of furniture for his rooms. And all of them still living a life of sorts, gradually petrifying and becoming permanent in their places. He mated men with trog women, the issue from which was not seemly. He got foul, bloated things, all gross and mindless — but even these were not wasted. In nether caves he bred them into gas-beasts, for the heating of the stack, or into Things-Which-Consume, for his refuse pit.

He took mindless vampire flesh and experimented with it; he would imitate the aerial prowess of the great bats, build flying creatures, soar out from his aerie upon the winds. At first he knew failure, but later he provided his flyers with the metamorphosed brains of men, that they should have something (but never too much) of volition. All of which creatures, nascent and full-formed alike, were Shaitan's thralls.

Word of his works went abroad, even into Sunside. And now Starside was double-damned and shunned utterly… by men, at least.

But by now the Szgany of Sunside had problems other than Shaitan and his night-raiding lieutenants, for in the west the swamps were an entire 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 from that place. So that in the first twenty years several beings who were very like unto Shaitan had come across from Sunside to build their houses in the rearing stone stacks. And because they were even as strong as him and much of a kind, he made no protest but let them build. In any case, there was space enough among the many stacks, so that even Shaitan was unable to lay claim to all of them; and, just across the mountains, there was food and entertainment for all.

And it happened that at this time Shaitan's lieutenants went a-hunting, and brought back from Starside a certain man of their master's previous acquaintance. And as he went among the captives, inspecting them, he knew this one at once. Why, there was still a scar in his shoulder, put there by this very man, which Shaitan had kept as a reminder of that first night on Sunside! For the man was none other than Turgo Zolte, not quite so young but just as proud and independent as ever.

Shaitan laughed and hung him in chains, tormenting him at will from that time forward. But the man had a trick: he could turn pain aside, much like Shaitan himself. And in his fashion, Shaitan liked Turgo for his pride and bravery: the fact that he would not cry out but rather faint from his agonies. So that in a while he took him down and made him his chief lieutenant… which was an error.

For Turgo was strong in many ways, and had this streak in him which would not accept thralldom to any creature. Let the Lord Shaitan drain him all he would, to the very dregs of his blood, but while he lived he would be his own man. Which were feelings he kept very much to himself; likewise the fact that on Sunside he had been the great vampire hunter, who in twenty years had learned many a diverse thing about the swamp-born menace. There was, for instance, a white metal, also the root of a certain plant, both of which were common on Sunside and poison to vampires. Perhaps even to Shaitan himself…

And so Turgo grew close to the Wamphyri Lord Shaitan, who placed his trust in him. And if Shaitan had a brother it might well be Turgo Zolte, except…

Turgo had no blood-lust. Or if he had, then it was special and deeply hidden…

Eventually Turgo took Ilya Sul aside and spoke to him. And because Turgo was strong, Ilya listened to his treason — that they should kill Shaitan in the approved fashion, but with the new skills which Turgo had learned. 'I've made a long knife of silver,' he explained, 'to take his head! And I can devise a hardwood spear, with a barbed silver point. Silver will hold Shaitan in place while I rub him with oil of kneblasch root, which will poison his flesh. Then we'll burn him.'

'And Shaitanstack will be mine?' Sul was greedy.

'Of course,' Turgo shrugged, 'for you deserve it.' But he intended no such thing; for Sul was contaminated and his blood changed, and in the end he must go the same way as his master.

Then Turgo sought out Vidra and said much the same things to him, to which the other agreed readily enough. But when Turgo's back was turned, then the traitor went straight to Shaitan… who listened, smiled and nodded grimly, and did nothing… but merely waited.

And down in his workshop, forbidden now to all others, he worked with an angry zest upon the flesh of trogs and men, designing a great abomination. And where Shaitan's cartilage creatures were for the fashioning of useful things, and his flyers for conveyance and scanning out the land around, and while all of his creations served to supplement his works in one way or another — even his flaccid siphoneers and puffing gas-beasts — this new monster writhing in its vat was a thing entirely apart. Indeed, it seemed nothing so much as a death machine.

It was just such an instrument of death! For fearing the treachery of his thralls, Shaitan had brought into being the very first Wamphyri warrior! And fashioned in part from his own metamorphic flesh, the thing was his in every part, mind and body alike. So that when in due time Turgo and the others came to find and destroy him, this was the nightmare he called down upon them. And no one — not even a dozen Turgo Zoltes — could stand against this. His knife, spear, oil of kneblasch, all were useless to him.

Then Vidra Gogosita cried out to Shaitan, reminding him of his warning. But Shaitan in turn reminded Vidra of his warning, telling him that this was his third and last great treachery.

Vidra was frozen, astonished! How had he offended?

His offence lay not in the direction of his treachery, but in that he was treacherous. Also, in the very fact that he had warned of Turgo Zolte's intended insurrection: Turgo, whom the Lord Shaitan had befriended. That was a bitter taste on Shaitan's forked tongue, and Vidra had put it there.

Without further ado he was taken to the Gate and tossed yelping into its glare, protesting his innocence to the last, and so disappearing there…

As for Ilya Sul: Shaitan drained him of his life's blood until he was pale and dead, then took him out into the boulder plain where his trog army dug a deep grave in the stony ground. And as time passed and the first rays of the sun shone through the great pass, and as Sul cried out and would rise up, naked and undead, so Shaitan said:

'I have made you a vampire. The sun is the proof, which burns you even as it burns me. But you need not fear it, for you shall feel its rays never more. You sought to do me great harm, Ilya, but I am a kind master and shall not hurt you in any degree, except that I shall put you from my sight.'

Then, at his signal, Sul was hurled screaming into the hole, which the trogs filled in with rocks and earth. There let him lie forever,' said Shaitan, gravely, shielded by his bat-fur cloak from the risen sun. 'Even until he stiffens to a stone. So be it!'

And he turned to Turgo Zolte, who stood there pale, bound and scowling, saying: 'You… are a special case. For you were only a man and I liked you. Oh, you suffered some small torment in my care, but I drank not of your blood. As I am what I am, so I allowed you to be as you would be, to see if time could sway you to my cause. It amused me to have a man — not a vampire, nor even a thrall, but a mere man — among them that are mine. Well, my amusement is at an end. I am no longer… amused.'

They went back to Shaitanstack, where Turgo was thrown into a dungeon to repent a while. A very short while.

Then the stack's master came to him and said, 'Vidra Gogosita is gone into unknown places, a land beyond. 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.

And gongs sounded as warriors were brought mewling out of their vats and launched into battle all untried; the drums of war pounded, and banners flew from all the stacks, displaying the sigils of their masters; vampire destroyed vampire, even sons and brothers, as the boulder plains and the lands around the great aeries were drenched in blood and littered with the grotesque and shattered corpses of fallen beasts.

Even Shaitan came under attack, but he was clever and defended 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. And in this manner a cluster of aeries all came under Shaitan's command.

When his strategy was seen, the others called a truce and came upon him as a single force. Surprised, Shaitan found himself trapped in the higher levels of Shaitanstack. The flyers of his enemies were landing in his launching bays; he was cut off from his warriors; their warriors landed on his roof to seek him out!

He was forced out of a window and exposed upon the highest ledge. Flyers closed in, to knock him from his perch. He formed the metamorphic flesh of his hands into great suckers wherewith to clasp the sheer face of the stack, and went in this fashion to find a secure niche. But a warrior, dashing itself into the wall close by, shook him loose. Then, by dint of his great will — coupled with the tenacity of his vampire tenant, which dared not allow him to be broken in such a disastrous fall — Shaitan stretched his flesh into an airfoil and swooped, in a fashion, to earth. Even so he crashed down, but was not greatly harmed.

And meanwhile his forces had regrouped under his lieutenants, and Shaitanstack had not been taken.

So Shaitan was the first of the Wamphyri to fly in his own right. Which seemed hardly strange to him, for he fancied that upon a time, somewhere and when, he had known the power of flight before…

The stack wars continued for a hundred years; men and monsters were born and died fighting; the fashioning of flyers and warriors became an art, and Wamphyri numbers were decimated in all the reek and roil and mindless slaughter. And this was the era in which the Szgany of Sunside stepped back from the brink and breathed again, reorganizing their lives and what little was left of their society. Except it couldn't last.

For Shaitan was now the undisputed Lord of Vampires, the high magistrate to which lesser Wamphyri 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 consistency. For now the Wamphyri must see to the replenishment of their ravaged and undernourished aeries, whose sustenance roamed on Sunside.

For sixty years this was the way of it: three thousand sundowns of horror and misery, while Shaitan doled out hunting permits and took his tithe of trembling flesh from whatever the others brought back. But in the same sixty years, his egg waxed in Shaithar Shaitanson, once Turgo Zolte, and made him a crafty vampire indeed. And Shaithar was strong; likewise his sons, Zol Zolteson and Turgo Toothbreaker. And all of them together, they hated Shaitan worse than any other.

The Lord of Vampires knew it, for he had his spies in all the aeries. And when the coup came at last he was ready to put it down, with never a loss to mention. Then he brought Shaithar to trial with his sons and their lieutenants, and banished them north to the Icelands — all of them that were of his own egg.

They were allowed flyers, certainly, and a female thrall or two, but neither provisions nor beasts to spare and never a warrior between them. So they launched themselves north, and held to that course a spell — before swinging east to follow the spine of the barrier range into lands unknown. Shaitan's familiar bats brought him word of their deception, which was no great surprise. For this, too, he had foreseen.

And he said to himself: Ah, Turgo Zolte, what a son you could have been! Why, we could have ravaged this entire world together, you and I! But 1 have already shown my weakness for you in banishing you when by rights I should kill you, and I know now that you must die, else return one day to plague me with your mischiefs. Well, so be it…

Even as he thought these things, his warriors were aloft and spurting through Starside's night skies, falling towards their prey where Shaithar and his outcasts winged east. And Shaitan reached out to mind-jab his beasts, commanding that they: Destroy them to a man.'

And riding east, exiled, expelled, Shaithar was Turgo Zolte once more. Oh, he was Wamphyri, but his intentions were human so far as he could determine. A pity there was no room now for humanity on Starside.

His plan was simple: find a new home for his small group in the east, far beyond the Great Red Waste which was known to lie there. Perhaps something of their old humanity could still be salvaged from what they had become. Perhaps they could find a new way to live.

Turgo was in no hurry; his flyers were already burdened; he would not exhaust them by spurring them on. To what end? To crash in the Great Red Waste and to go on foot till the rising sun found them out and reduced them all to tar? Better to take them up to their ceiling, then glide them on whichever thermals were available, and so conserve their energies. Which he did.

Shaitan's warriors, coming from behind but still some way off, saw the small knot of flyers spiralling up towards the stars; they too must climb; their propulsors throbbed and gas sacks inflated, and their mantles extended to give them lift. But flyers were fashioned for flying and warriors for warring; they had not the endurance for prolonged pursuit. Shaitan must sacrifice them. Do not return, but destroy them utterly, was his final command, over such a distance that he barely reached them. But it was enough.

Turgo's party flew on, gliding down the wind… but now they spied behind them the instruments of Shaitan's wrath. They urged their flyers to greater effort, sped out across the Great Red Waste. The warriors pursued, gaining however gradually. But in the south the mountains were no more, only flatlands of rustred sand, beyond which showed spokes of sunlight stroking the sky! Sunup, soon!

And the golden fan was even now slanting over the rim of the world, and Turgo must fly lower, ever lower, to avoid the deadly rays. His creatures were tired, their energy expended; Shaitan's warriors, too, but in them there was only one goal, one requirement. No need for conservation: this was their last mission.

Then, beyond the Great Red Waste, Turgo spied a secondary range of mountains, with deep gashes and gulleys facing north, where the sunlight could never reach. There.' he mind-called to his people. In the lee of the mountains. Build your aeries there.

But they knew from his tone that he would not be with them. And what of you?

My flyer is finished, he told them. Anyway… I've done with running away. Now go!

Shaitan's warriors were almost upon them. As Turgo's people sped off into the shadows of the lesser range, he turned back, passed between the pursuers

(but barely), hauled on his reins and climbed for the fading stars — and climbed into blinding sunlight! And the warriors followed at once!

The vampire stuff in them was very strong, for they were of Shaitan's fashioning — which was also their weakness! The sunlight ate into them that much deeper, pitting their flesh into craters and steaming them away. All but one fell, exploding as their skins shrivelled and gas bladders ruptured. Turgo was likewise burned and blistered, until finally he could take no more. Then he guided his hissing beast into a dive, down to the shade of the mountains.

Too late, for he was blind! Fly on, he ordered his creature. Into the east, as far and as fast as you can. For he knew that one warrior yet survived; he could feel its tiny, savage mind intent upon his destruction; he would lure it from his people.

And he did, for thirty more miles: lured it to a place where mists came writhing out of the earth, drawn up by the risen sun, where once more the mountains crumbled into bogs and quagmire. There at last Shaitan's warrior caught him, and tore him and his flyer both. And Turgo Zolte, his flying beast and the warrior, all three, surrendered what was left of life and crashed down into the swamps.

Turgo's flight from the stacks of the Wamphyri had been long and long, but he was of the line of Shaitan and carried a leech grown from his egg. When Turgo died Shaitan knew it. And he sighed, once… and then forgot him.

But on the gluey bed of the eastern swamp Turgo's torn body rotted down and was buoyed up with gases trapped in its tissues, and floated to the surface. And there in the weeds and the quag, black fungi sprouted in his flesh, which as they ripened put out drifting spores from their gills.

The vampire is tenacious…