He stared hard at the shrivelled thing, studying it through three feet of ice which, however pure, nevertheless blurred the picture and shifted its focus with Shaithis's every smallest motion. And now he believed he knew the answer to that other question he'd recently asked himself: which was worse, to be buried undead, or sent into the hell-lands, or banished here? And the vampire Lord shivered at the thought of all the nameless centuries gone by since Kehrl Lugoz had come up here and sat himself down, and waited for the ice to form.
Thud! And this time, because he'd been lost in his own thoughts and was startled, Shaithis snatched back his hand.
Kehrl Lugoz was too old even to guess at his age. The Wamphyri, when they age, do not necessarily show it. Shaithis himself was more than five hundred years of age, yet looked no older than a well-preserved fifty. But in the face of privations such as this one had known, it simply couldn't be hidden. Yes, Lugoz looked almost as old as time.
The eyebrows above his closed, steeply slanted eyes were bushy, white, locked in ice like the rest of him. His hair was white as a halo of snow over a brow wrinkled and brown as a walnut, with white sideboards which frizzed out wildly to half-obscure his conchlike ears. His ancient face was not so much wrinkled as grooved, mummified, like a trog kept overlong in its cocoon until wasted. The grey cheeks were sunken in, the chin pointed, with a thin wisp of white beard fluffing there. Eye-teeth like fangs overshot the withered lower lip; they were yellow and the one on the left was broken. There'd been insufficient strength in the frozen vampire to grow another.
The nostrils in the squat, convoluted nose (more properly a bat's snout than was usual in most of the Wamphyri) showed signs of fretting: disease, Shaithis supposed. And a huge purple wen was visible bulging under the chin, like the puffed mating wattle of one of Sunside's birds.
As for Kehrl Lugoz's garb: he wore a simple black robe, its hood thrown back, wide sleeves floppy about his scrawny wrists, and hem loose around his chicken's calves. Except of course the sleeves and hem were not loose but frozen in ice hard as stone. His hands where they protruded from his robe were extremely long-fingered, with sharp, pointed nails, and upon his right index he wore a large ring of gold. Shaithis could not make out its sigil. Veins stood out white in the backs of his hands, instead of olive or purple. Before he froze himself, this one had gone without blood for long and long.
Wake up! Shaithis sent. I want to know your history, your secrets. Indeed, for it would seem to me that you are Wamphyri history! This Shaitan you speak of: do you mean Shaitan the Unborn? He and his disciples were banished to the Icelands in the very dawn of legends. But still here? How? No, I cannot believe it. Wake up, Kehrl Lugoz! Answer my questions.
Nothing came back; the old thing in the ice had returned to his dreaming; his shrivelled heart continued to thud, but it seemed to Shaithis more slowly yet. He was dying. Longevity, even suspended animation, is not immortality.
'Damn you!' Shaithis snarled out loud. His curse echoed back to him — along with other echoes? — from the bowels of the ice-castle. He waited until the echoes had died away and only the weird moaning of ice-winds remained, then sent out his vampire awareness all around. Was anyone there?
… Well, if there was someone, then he was adept at shielding his presence. Except -
— Suddenly Shaithis remembered his flyer, which he'd left feeding! If someone should find it out there…
He reached out his mind to the creature, discovered it gorging still, cursed long and loud but this time silently and to himself. He'd never get the beast aloft now. But at least he could send it away from here.
Go! he commanded it. Flop, waddle, squirm, slither, but go! Westward, half a mile at least, and there hide. As best you can, anyway. And in his mind he felt the stupid creature moving instantly to obey him.
Then, satisfied that the flyer would put distance between itself, Volse's dead creature, and what — or whoever else might possibly be in the vicinity, Shaithis returned to the problem at hand. Earlier, the old thing in the ice had been awakened by a fall of icicles. So be it.
Exploring an upper terrace, the vampire Lord found a vast spout of ice like a frozen waterfall, and at its fringe many lesser formations. One of these icicles, some four feet long and nine inches through its stem, he snapped off and carried back to the ice-encased husk of Kehrl Lugoz. Since the petrified old fool couldn't be roused by mental means, let him start awake at the entirely physical shattering of this great blade of ice against his sheath.
Fully absorbed in his task, Shaithis failed to detect the furtive approach of others up the ice staircase. He 'shouted' telepathically at the frozen, ice-distorted figure where it sat: KEHRL LUGOZ, WAKE UP! Then swung back his icicle hammer to smash it against the face of Lugoz's sheath. But the great icicle refused to swing, because something was impeding it!
Hissing and spitting his shock from the red-ribbed vault of his throat out over the glistening, vibrating arch of his forked tongue — eyes bulging and crimson, and with his less than human features instinctively flowing into a fearsomely inhuman wolf-mask — Shaithis glanced back over his shoulder, then dropped the great icicle and reached for his gauntlet. But in that same instant a huge talon of a hand fell upon his wrist and trapped it, and Shaithis stared into the grim grey faces of two fellow survivors from the battle for The Dweller's garden: Fess Ferenc and Volse Pinescu!
He snatched back his hand and stumbled away from them. 'Damn your hearts!' he snarled, panting. 'But you've learned stealth, you two!'
'We've learned a great many things.' Volse Pinescu choked the words out past a huge scab of crusted pus which half-sealed his lips, impeding his speech. 'Not least how the "invincible" vampire army of Shaithis of the Wamphyri could be burned and blasted and crushed, its aeries destroyed, and its survivors banished like whipped dogs into eternal wastelands of ice!'
Volse's boil-festooned face turned purple with fury as he took a heavy, threatening step closer to Shaithis. But the Ferenc's temper was less volatile. With his great height and strength, and with his terrible hands, he didn't much need to work up a rage in himself. 'We've lost a great deal, Shaithis,' he rumbled. 'Since coming here it's dawned on us just how much. Aye, for this is a cold and lonely place.'
'Cold?' Shaithis blustered. 'What is cold to the Wamphyri? You'll get used to it.'
Volse strained his head forward aggressively, and a batch of boils on the left side of his neck burst and spurted their yellow pus on to the ice. 'Oh?' he gurgled. 'Like he got used to it, d'you mean?' He inclined his loathsomely decorated head sharply towards Kehrl Lugoz seated motionless as a mountain not three impenetrable feet away. 'Him and all the others we've found, encysted in their echoing fortresses of ice?'
'Others?' Shaithis looked uncertainly from Volse to the Ferenc, then back again.
'Dozens of them,' Fess Ferenc finally answered, nodding his huge, acromegalic head. 'All taken to the ice, clutching at straws, waiting out their time until some magical thaw shall come and free them into a land filled with life. Or until they die. For the cold of this place is not like the cold of Starside, Shaithis. Here it goes on for ever! Get used to it?' (Now he echoed Volse Pinescu). 'Resist it? Warm ourselves? Stoke up our internal fires against it? But fires need fuel — the blood is the life! And with what do we sustain ourselves while we're "getting used to it"? Blood cools, Shaithis, trickle by trickle, hour by hour. Limbs stiffen, and even the stoutest heart runs slow.'