Deadspawn

Shaithis nodded; he knew what it was; 'Fess Ferenc,' he whispered, grimly.

'What, Fess?' Arkis gaped at the thing, now only a hundred yards away across the shining ice, coming at walking pace and beginning to thin out a little. 'How, Fess?'

'That's a vampire mist,' said Shaithis, donning his gauntlet. 'On Starside it would creep, flow, drift outwards from him. Here it turns to snow! Fess was a fine mist-maker ... his great mass. During the hunt, I've seen him cover an entire hillside.'

They both threw out their vampire senses towards the weird, earthbound cloud. Only one creature inside it; the Ferenc, aye, but weary as never before. He hadn't the strength to hide himself. 'Ah-hahr growled Arkis. 'We have him!'

'But let's first discover what goes on,' Shaithis cautioned him.

'Isn't it obvious what goes on?' The Leper's son was scowling again. 'Why, he's finally burst that monstrous boil Volse Pinescu, but in the fight depleted himself. So now he's at our mercy, of which I have precious little.'

Twenty paces away the cloud fell as a final flurry and Fess stood there, naked! Entirely naked, and not only of his snow-cloud cover. Arkis gawped but Shaithis called out: 'Well, Fess, and how fortunes change, eh?'

'It would seem so.' The other's deep bass voice echoed over the ice-plain. But there was a shiver in it; he was freezing. And yet under one arm he carried his clothes in a bundle. Shaithis couldn't see the sense of it. There must be a story here and he wanted to know it.

Arkis sensed Shaithis's curiosity. 'Me, I'm not interested,' he snarled. 'I say we kill him now!'

'You say too much,' Shaithis hissed. 'You think only of your own survival, now, without a thought for the future. Myself, I think of my continued survival, now and however long I may sustain it. So you bide your time or our partnership ends here.'

'Am I to die?' The Ferenc stood tall, glooming on Shaithis across that short distance. 'If so then get it over with, for I've no wish to turn to a block of ice.' But he threw down his clothes and hunched forward a little, and his talons were sharp as razors hanging at his sides.

'It seems I have the advantage,' said Shaithis. 'Also a score to settle. You caused me not a little pain.' The Ferenc made no answer. 'However,' Shaithis continued, 'we may yet come to an agreement. As you see, Arkis and I have formed a team of our own: safety in numbers, you know? But two against the Icelands? The odds are too high. Three of us might fare better.'

'Some kind of trick?' Fess couldn't believe it. If their roles had been reversed Shaithis would have been already dead.

'No trick.' Shaithis shook his head. 'Like Diredeath here you have knowledge of this place. And just as the blood is the life, so is knowledge. That has always been my conviction. To fight among ourselves is to die. Sharing knowledge - pooling our resources - we might yet survive.'

'Say on,' said Fess, his voice more shivery than ever.

'Nothing more to say.' Shaithis shook his head. 'Come out of the cold and replenish yourself, and tell us what's happened that you go naked as a babe in such a place, hidden in a weird and very unsubtle mist. Aye, and then perhaps you'd advise us on the whereabouts of the unlovely Volse Pinescu, your erstwhile companion.'

The Ferenc had no choice. Flee and they would catch him, for they were well fuelled. Stand still and freeze, and they'd thaw him out and eat him. Go forward and talk, and... perhaps he could yet make his peace with Shaithis. As for Arkis, that one was something else.

He came on, got down in the lee of the stiffening flyer, tore a vein from the wall of flesh and bit through it. Nothing was forthcoming (the creature's blood was finished or frozen in the outer regions of its bulk) so he merely stripped the pipe down with his teeth and swallowed the pulp. It was sustenance if nothing else. Between mouthfuls he commented, 'Perhaps we should have stayed on Starside. At least The Dweller would have made a quick end of it.'

'Still blaming me, Fess?' Shaithis stood over him, watched him fuelling himself. Arkis sat well away, scowling as usual.

'I blame all of us,' the Ferenc answered, perhaps bitterly. 'Hotheads, we rushed in like blind men over a precipice. Fools, we went to murder and instead committed suicide. It was your plan, aye, but we all fell in with it.' He stood up and went back on to the ice to his garments, there crouching and cleaning them thoroughly with snow. At least there was that to be said for the giant: he'd always been scrupulous. When he was done he returned again to the cave of cooling flesh and lay his clothes aside to dry or freeze out.

'Some strange contamination?' Shaithis wondered out loud.

'You could say that.' The other wrinkled his already much convoluted snout. Those stinking stains were Volse!' And as he continued to eat, so, between mouthfuls, he told them about it.

'Volse and I, we'd noticed smoke from the central cone. Also some strange activity now and then in a high cave. And we thought: if that old mountain contains heat and fire, it's only reasonable that someone's settled there. But who? Common men? Exiled Wamphyri, perhaps? No way to discover, unless we went to see. Oh, we cast our probes ahead of us, of course, but who- or whatever lived in the volcano, he kept his thoughts to himself.

'The way is longer than it looks: maybe five miles to the foot of the mount, then a rising climb of two more to its cone. But near the top where the way gets steep, there was this cave. And that was where we'd seen signs of activity, like mirrors glinting in the starlight. Dwellers, we'd thought. Snow-trogs or the like. Meat, anyway.

'Aye, there was meat, all right,' (the Ferenc's aspect was suddenly grim). 'A ton of it! But best if I tell it as it happened and not go ahead of myself...

'So we arrived at the mouth of this cave, all craggy and yellow with sulphur: an old lava-run, I fancied. But hardly fit habitation, and no jot warmer than any other place around here. We cast our probes ahead of us; there was life in there, some dull intelligence far back in the cave; we hardly felt threatened. And it seemed likely the bore hole passed right through the mountain all the way to the core. And if that's where the warmth was, that's where we'd find the life.

'So we went in. The tunnel had its twists and turns, and it was dark and smelly as a refuse pit in there. But what is darkness to the Wamphyri?

'Volse, who had fashioned the most incredible pustules to enhance his already hideous appearance, took the lead. He'd stripped off his jacket and his upper body was entirely festooned with all manner of morbid things. "Who- or whatever," he said, "only let them see me or feel me near, and they'll know there's nothing for it but to faint and hope it's a bad dream!" I thought he was probably correct and had no objection to his going first.

'Then... Ah - I' Fess gave a small start as he spied a miniature albino bat hovering near, under the overhang of the dead flyer's side. In a lightning swipe he scythed it in two parts in mid-air. And: 'Ah, yes!' he said. 'And perhaps I should mention: Volse and I, we had companions all along the way. These damned bats! They get everywhere.'

'Why treat them so harshly?' Shaithis cut in. 'On Starside they were our small familiars.'

'These aren't the same.' Fess shook his great head. 'They lack obedience.'

Shaithis frowned. They'd obeyed him - hadn't they?

Arkis growled: 'Never mind the bats but finish your story. It interests me.'

Partially replenished, invigorated from his feeding, the Ferenc began to don his clothes, generating body heat to complete the job of drying them out. He was adept at this as he was at mist-making. And while he dressed so he continued with his story: 'Volse went first, then, into the heart of the riddled rock; and I'll be honest, we thought there was nothing there. Nothing to alarm or threaten us, anyway. And yet I sensed that the picture we had of that place, of its suspected dweller or dwellers, was probably a false one. It seemed to me that my mind was watched, even though I'd failed to detect the watcher. But the deeper we proceeded into the mountain, the more the conviction grew in me that our progress was monitored, even minutely; as if each step led us closer to some terrific confrontation, some contrived and monstrous conclusion. In short, an ambush!'