Arkis scowled at him. 'You want to know about the frozen ones?'
'The sooner all is known,' said Shaithis, nodding, 'the sooner we may proceed.'
Arkis shrugged, however grudgingly. 'I have no problem with that,' he said. 'So ... you want to know what I've seen, done, discovered? It won't take long in the telling, I promise you!'
Tell us anyway,' said Shaithis, 'and we'll see what we make of it.'
Again Arkis's shrug. 'So be it,' he said.
4
The Frozen Lords
'After the mayhem in The Dweller's garden,' (Arkis commenced), 'when it was seen how The Dweller and his helllander father had destroyed our armies, shattered our centuried stacks and brought our aeries crashing down, there seemed no alternative but flight. The Dweller had our measure; the Wamphyri were fallen; to remain in the ruins of Starside would surely bring these Great Enemies down upon us one last time in a final venting of their furious might.
'However, it is the immemorial right of the fallen to quit Starside and forge for the Ice lands. Thus, in the lull which followed on the destruction of our aeries, those survivors who had the means for flight forsook their ancient territories and headed north. Aye, and I was one such survivor.
'Along with a pair of aspiring lieutenants - ex-Traveller thralls of mine, twin brothers named Goram and Belart Largazi, who vied with each other for my egg - I cleared away the debris of my fallen stack from the deeply buried entrance to subterranean workshops, so freeing one flyer and one warrior kept aside and safe against the event of just such a calamity as The Dweller's victory. These beasts we saddled and mounted (I myself took the warrior, an ill-tempered creature personally trained to my tastes), finally fleeing on a course roughly northward from the wrack and ruin of the aeries.
'Our heading was not true north - perhaps a little west of north - what odds? The roof of the world is the roof of the world; to left or right it is still the roof. We paused only once, where a shoal of great blue fishes had got themselves trapped in the formation of a shallow ice-lake, and there glutted ourselves before proceeding further.
'Not long after that the Largazi brothers' flyer, burdened as it was with two riders, became exhausted. It went down at the rim of a shallow sea and left its riders floundering. I landed on the frozen strand, sent my warrior back to the Largazis to let down its launching limbs and tow them ashore.
'And then it was that we found ourselves in a very curious place. Hot blowholes turned the snow yellow; bubbling geysers made warm pools in the ageless ice; sea birds came down to feed on the froth of small fishes where they spawned at the ocean's rim. It was the furthest reach of these selfsame volcanic mountains, which are active still in those weird western extremes.
'After the Largazis were dragged ashore and while they dried themselves out, I looked for a launching place and discovered a glacier where it sloped oceanward. There I ordered my creature down on to the ice; aye, for by now that warrior mount of mine was likewise sore weary - its valiant efforts in saving the twins from drowning had scarcely buttressed its vitality. They need to kill and devour a deal of red meat, warriors, else rapidly fade away to nothing. And so I thought to myself: which will prove most useful to me in the Icelands? A powerful warrior, or a pair of bickering, unimportant and ever-hungry thralls? Hah! No contest.
'It was my thought to slaughter one of the brothers there and then, and feed him to my warrior. Except... well, I'll admit it, I'd underestimated that fine pair of Wamphyri aspirants. They, too, had been busy weighing the odds, and their conclusions had likewise favoured my fighting beast. Now they backed off to a safe distance and descended into deep, narrow crevasses from which I could neither threaten nor tempt them to come out and approach me. Mutinous dogs! Very welclass="underline" let them freeze! Let them starve! Let them both die!
'I climbed aboard my warrior and spurred the creature slithering down the glacier's ramp, until at last it bounded aloft and spurted out over the sea. And not before time: the launching of that depleted beast had been a very close-run thing, so that I could almost taste the salt spray from the waves against the glacier. However, I was now airborne.
'I turned inland, swept high overhead where the treacherous Largazi twins had emerged from the ice to angle their faces up to me, waved them a scornful farewell and set course for a line of distant peaks standing in silhouette against the sky's weaving auroral pulse. Those same peaks which stand behind us even now, with their central volcanic cone whose lava vents are guarded - according to the Ferenc, at least - by sword-snouted monsters. Aye, the very same.
'Nor would I, nor could I, call Fess a liar in that respect - in the matter of Volse's death by some strange and savage creature - for certainly my warrior came to a sad, suspicious end. And who can say but that Volse and my poor weary warrior were not victims of the selfsame bloodbeast?
'I will tell you how it was: my warrior was weary to death... well, perhaps not so weary, for as you know well enow they don't die easily, and rarely of weariness! But the creature was depleted and panting and complaining. I scanned the land about and saw lava runs on the higher slopes of the central cone: good, slippery launching ramps if the warrior should ever again find itself fit for flight.
'Alas, the landing was awkward and the beast threw me; it cracked its armoured carapace, wrenched a vane and tore a propulsion orifice on a jagged lava outcrop. Many gallons of fluids were lost before its metamorphic flesh webbed over the gashes and sealed them. My own injuries were slight, however, and I ignored them; but such was my anger that I cursed and kicked the warrior a good deal before its mood turned ugly and it began to bellow and spit. Then I was obliged to calm the brute, and finally I backed it up and hid it from view in the mouth of a cavern tunnel much similar - perhaps identical? - to that of the leprous white bloodbeast as described by the Ferenc. For this tunnel was likewise an ancient lava-run from the once molten core, and perhaps I should have explored its interior a little way. But at the time there was no evidence of anything suspicious about that central cone.
'I ordered the warrior to heal itself, left it there in the cavern entrance, let my curiosity get the better of me and came down by foot on to the plain of the shimmering ice-castles, to see what they contained. For as you've seen, they looked for all the world like Wamphyri stacks or aeries formed from ice. As for what I discovered: it was a very strange, very awesome, indeed a frightening thing!
'Expatriate Lords, all frozen in suspended animation, ice-locked in the cores of their glittering castles. A good many were dead, crushed or sheared by shifting ice; but there were some - too many, I thought - who had variously... succumbed? Others were preserved, however, sleeping still within impenetrable walls of ice hard as iron, their vampire metabolisms so reduced that they seemed scarcely changed over all the long centuries. Ah, this was a false impression; their dreams were fading, ephemeral things, mere memories of the lives they had known in the Old Times, when the first of the Wamphyri inhabited their stacks on Starside and waged their territorial wars there.
'All of the ex-Lords were dying; ah, slowly, so slowly, but dying nevertheless. Of course they were: the blood is the life, and for centuries without number all they had had was ice...'
'Some of them!' Fess Ferenc broke in. 'Most of them, aye. But one at least had not gone without. This was the conclusion which Volse Pinescu and I arrived at, when we examined the ice-castle stacks.'
Shaithis looked at him, then at Arkis. 'Will one of you - or both - elaborate?'
Arkis shrugged. 'I take it the Ferenc is talking about the matter of the breaking, and of the empty ice-thrones. For it's a fact, as I've hinted, that certain of the frozen keeps and redoubts - indeed, a good many - have been broken into and their helpless, refrigerated inhabitants removed. But by whom, to where... for what?'