But as his mind cleared and his breathing grew less ragged, suddenly he felt weak . .. made weak, perhaps, by Nathan's strength? Or by abstinence? Well, at least there was a remedy for that.
He reached out for Karpath where he went about his duties elsewhere in Runemanse, and asked him, Karpath, are there fresh ones?
Indeed, master, the other answered at once. Men and women both.
Then send me a strong man. Later, seek out Orlea and tell her ... I am young again, and I have my needs.
And Karpath answered. So be it, master. But when Mag-lore withdrew his probe the lieutenant grinned in his morbid fashion, for he knew what were the Seer-Lord's needs. As for the first, the blood is the life. And as for the second ...
... To live is to lust...
While down in Madmanse, in an airless, diseased, disused refuse pit, sealed up for more than fifty years:
That which upon a time had been Eygor Killglance sat or slumped against a nitre-streaked wall. But while up above in Runemanse the Seer-Lord Maglore's appearance was more or less human, that of Eygor in his pit was nothing less than a nightmare.
For the long exanimate ex-Lord of Madmanse was a vast and monstrous anomaly, an amalgam, a welding together of everything unwholesome into one being, one creature. Anthropomorphic, yes; manlike, in outline at least; but with that any past or present connection with humanity must surely be at an end. For Eygor's metamorphism had long since 'absolved' or removed him from the frailties of form and aspect of mundane mankind.
Much like the beings in the Romanian cavern of the Gate, Eygor Killglance might at first be mistaken for a strange stalagmite formation, a fantastic dripstone creation of Nature. But on closer examination (if any person were morbid enough that he might actually desire to examine such a thing), one would soon discover feverish differences. For example, the petrified creatures in the cavern of the Gate were not eighteen feet tall and composed of fused bone, black mummied flesh, knobs of gristly cartilage and plates of gleaming-blue chitin. Nor had they additional mouths in their dripstone bodies and limbs, to complement the ones in their faces. But there in that gloomy Madmanse pit - a cobwebbed cathedral of a place, vast and high-vaulted, whose walls dripped slime and nitre - such were Eygor's form and aspect.
The floor around him was a clutter of anomalous debris, humped, fibrous, boggy. Spongy bones and white-shining cartilage remains gleamed everywhere, like a boneyard of extinct monsters; of which the ex-Lord of Madmanse had been one, of course. And because he had been intelligent, Wamphyri, he had also been the worst of them.
The shape and delirious design of this thing slumped in a kneeling position and half-welded to the wall were terrible in themselves: its horny fossil feet, shrivelled, leathery thighs, arched back and shoulders, and misshapen, screaming skull. The huge head was thrown back, jaws frozen in some unending rictus; a withered arm lay upon a ledge, ending in a talon that drooped from a wrist thick as a man's thigh; blackened bones protruded from dusty, fretted flesh.
This was Eygor the once-Lord, and once feared more than any other creature in all Turgosheim. Eygor, whose contemporaries had named him 'Killglance' because of that mordant talent which enabled him to murder men with the sheer poison of his looks alone; whose own bloodsons Wran and Spiro had so feared him, that in the end they'd murdered him in this pit. Except there is murder and murder, and Eygor's had lasted long and long.
That he'd deserved it was undeniable, for Eygor was the cruellest of creatures. He had desired that his sons should be powerful, feared in Turgosheim even as he himself was feared. But in order to make them strong he had been ruthless and his brutalities unbearable. Wran and Spiro had feared their Lord and father, aye, but more than the man, they'd feared his evil eye.
For they had seen him use it against the Szgany, and had watched his human victims shrivel and die in the withering furnace of his gaze. And for all that they were Wamphyri in their own right, they too had tasted the bile of Eygor's glance, and knew that his power was exponential; the more he used it, the stronger it grew. Today he killed only men, but tomorrow .. .?