Deadspawn

Shaithis had been even more astonished. 'You've bled the great fishes in the cold sea?'

'Actually, while I called them fishes, they are mammals.' Shaitan had shrugged in his fashion. They're warm-blooded, those giants, and suckle their young. Soon after I came here I saw a school at play, spouting at the rim of the ocean, so that my first ingurgitor was designed with them in mind. It was a good design and I've scarcely changed it down the centuries. Doubtless you've noted the vestigial gills, fins, and other seeming anomalies in the volcano's guardian creatures; likewise in my driller.'

Shaithis had noted those things. Indeed it was his habit to note everything...

On another occasion, fascinated by the sheer age of his self-appointed 'mentor', Shaithis had thought to suggest: 'But you have been here - upon the earth, in Starside and in the Icelands, mainly in these frozen wastes - almost .since the Beginning!' Even speaking those words he had realized how naive they must sound and how much in awe of the other he must seem, which his ancestor's dark chuckle had at once confirmed.

The Beginning? Ah, no, for I perceive that the world is a million times older than I am. Or did you mean the beginning of the Wamphyri? In which case I can but agree, for I was the first of all.'

'Really?' Again Shaithis forgot to distance himself from his astonishment. It was hard to be inscrutable in the face of revelations such as these. Of course, the legends of Starside said that Shaitan the Fallen had been the first vampire, but as any fool is aware, legends are like myths: mainly untruths or at best exaggerations. The first? The father of us all?'

The first of the Wamphyri, aye,' Shaitan had answered at last, after a long, curious silence. 'But not ... the Father, did you say? No, not the Father. Oh, I fathered my share, be sure, for I was young with a young man's appetites. I had been a man entire and fallen to earth here, where my vampire came to me... came out of ... out of the swamps...' He paused, leaving his words to taper into a thoughtful silence.

And after a while: 'Out of the vampire swamps?' Shaithis had pressed him. There are great swamps to the west of Starside, and according to legend others to the east. I know of them but never saw them. Are these the swamps of which you speak?'

Shaitan was still distanced by strange reverie. Nevertheless he nodded. Those are the swamps, aye. I fell to earth in the west.'

Shaithis had heard him use this term - about 'falling to earth' - before. Frowning and shaking his head, he'd said, 'I fail to understand. How may a man fall to earth? Out of the sky, do you mean? From your mother's womb? But weren't you also called the Unborn? Where did you fall from, and how?'

Shaitan had snapped out of it. 'You are a nosy person, and your questions are rude! Still, I'll answer them as best I may. First understand this: my memories start at the swamps, and even then they are faded and incomplete. Before the swamps, I ... I'm not sure. But when I came naked to this world I came in great pain and great pride. I believe that I was exiled into this place, thrown down here even as the Wamphyri exiled me at last to these Icelands. The Wamphyri exiled me because I would be The One Power. Well, and perhaps I had tried to be a Power in that other place, too, wherefrom I was banished and fell to earth. It is a mystery to me. But this I do know: compared to the other place, this world was like a hell!'

'Someone had sent you here as a punishment, to a life of hell?'

'Or to a world which could become a hell, of my making. It was a question of wilclass="underline" anything could be, if I so willed it or allowed it to be. I repeat: it was because I was wilful and prideful that I was here. Or at least, that is how I seem to remember it.'

'You do not actually remember falling, then? Only that you were suddenly there, in the vampire swamps?'

'Close to the swamps, yes, where my vampire came into me.'

Shaithis had been keenly interested in that last. 'In our time,' he mused, 'we've both had occasion to kill enemies and tear their living vampires out of them to devour. Fess Ferenc and Arkis Leperson were only the most recent. We know what such parasites look like: full-formed they are barbed leeches, which hide in men to shape their thoughts and urges. And in certain hosts, over long periods, they may grow so fused as to become inseparable.'

'As in myself, yes,' Shaitan had answered. 'Indeed, there remains precious little of the original me at all, while my vampire is grown to what you see.'

'Just so,' said Shaithis. 'You, or rather your vampire -as a result of prolonged metamorphism - is now gross. But how was it then? Did it come to you as an egg? Did the parent creature remain in the swamps? Or did the parasite come to you full grown, take you by surprise and slither into you complete?'

'It came to me from the swamp,' Shaitan had repeated. That much I know... how I do not know.'

The problem had vexed Shaithis (and his ancestor no less), but on that occasion at least they'd been lost for further questions and answers.

A good many auroral periods later, however, when Shaithis was busy in a corner of the workshop, carefully constructing a warrior for his ancestor's approvaclass="underline"

'This is how it was!' said Shaitan, coming swiftly and in some excitement upon Shaithis where he worked, and flowing up to him like a midnight shadow. 'In that earliest existence of which I apprised you, I served another or others but desired to serve only myself. As a reward for my pride - which is to say for my wit and great beauty, of which I was perhaps too much aware - and for my pains, I was thrown out and removed from my rightful place in that society. I was not destroyed, not wasted, but used! I became to Them ... a tool! A seed of evil, which They would sow between the spheres! Do you see? I was the folly and the penance! I was the Darkness which allows for the Light!'

In the face of this outburst, Shaithis had brought his work at the vat to a halt. Unable to understand the other, he could only shake his head and throw up his hands. 'Can't you explain yourself more clearly?'

'Damn you - no? Shaitan had shouted then. 'I dreamed it; I know it for the truth; but I cannot understand it! I've told it to you so that you also may attempt to fathom it -and likewise fail to fathom it, even as I have failed!'

With which and in a fury, he had rushed off and disappeared into the volcano's labyrinth.

For a long time after that Shaithis had not seen the other at all; he had merely been aware of his ancestor's shadowy presence. But a time had come when, going again to the vats, he'd found the ancient gloomily examining his various adaptations where they squirmed and hardened in their liquids; and there, following customary greetings but in answer to no specific remark or query, Shaitan had listlessly mumbled: 'I have been banished out of many spheres and thrown down from many worlds. Aye, and others like me, throughout all the myriad cone-shaped dimensions of light.' That had been all.

Mad creature! (Shaithis had kept this thought, and others he was thinking, very much to himself.) But it's as well you rush around crazed while I'm about my work. The last thing I would want is for you to become interested in what I'm doing now. For in fact he was there at that time in order to inject brain matter into his new construct, so stimulating and even directing the foetal ganglion's growth. Except... these were cells obtained from a rather special source, and by means of Shaitan's ice-boring ingurgitor...

Putting all such business aside for the nonce, however, and pandering to Shaitan's insanity, if that is what it was, he had answered: 'In which case, when we go against Starside with these warriors I'm fashioning, your revenge will be so much sweeter. Nothing will stand before us; and if there are higher worlds to conquer, they too shall finally fall, even as you fell to earth.'