The others, Gorvi and Spiro, were already on their way up a bone-embellished causeway. Wran and Nestor would follow them at once, but there came an interruption. From below, out of one of the sunken stairwells, the huge-shouldered figure of a man appeared, clad in the polished leather garb of a lieutenant. 'My Lady!' he called up to Wratha. 'I beg pardon for the intrusion, but ... I believe it is my right?' His eyes under shaggy black brows were feral, scarlet in their cores. A true disciple of vampirism.
Wratha scowled down on him. 'Vasagi's man?' 'Indeed,' he replied. 'I am Gore Sucksthrall: first out of Sunside ... first-made of Vasagi in Suckscar ... now Keeper of the Vats. It seems my master's manse goes wanting a leader. If I am worthy of that honour, I would ascend.'
While Wratha and Gore exchanged words, the Lords on the stairs and in the landing bay paused to listen. As Gore finished, Gorvi the Guile (devious as his name implied), clapped his hands briefly and cried, 'Well said!' For he could smell trouble a mile away, and invariably encouraged it.
But Wran grasped Nestor's arm tightly and muttered, 'Damn it to hell! A complication .. .'
And Wratha nodded and called down: 'Well then, Gore Sucksthrall, maybe you'd better come up.' And sweeping her eyes over the others: 'But gentlemen, no gauntlets if you please. It is a rule I'm obliged to enforce. Certain of my creatures are easily disturbed ... and volatile to say the least.' It was meant as a warning, not a threat; Wratha kept her small, personal warriors chained when she had visitors. But as she slipped away, her deceptively sweet laughter came floating down to them. And to a man they knew who was mistress here in the aerie's heights.
Through all of this, Nestor didn't take his eyes off her until the moment she drifted out of sight through an archway behind the balcony. Then he blinked, looked at Wran, and said, 'Wratha?' But it seemed as if her afterimage still burned on his retinas, and he could still see her there:
She was tall, even as tall (or as small, in company such as this) as Nestor himself, with hair black as night in plaits that fell to her shoulders. Around her neck, she wore a golden torque or harness, with ropes of black bat fur depending vertically to form a smoky curtain. Milky limbs gleamed as if oiled through the black stripes of fur, but her naked arms projected; likewise the points of her tilted breasts, a Jong pale oval of thigh, and a delicate knee.
The image was fading now, but Nestor continued to examine what remained of it. Wratha's eyes had been least in evidence. Protected by a scarp of figured bone upon her brow, their fire had been subdued by the ornamentation of blue-glittering crystals fixed to her temples, and matching earrings in the furred lobes of her fleshy ears. But apart from the shell-like whorls of those Wamphyri ears, and the somewhat flattened aspect of a nose whose convolutions had not seemed too exaggerated - and the scarlet flicker of her split, vampire's tongue, of course - apart from those things, she might well have been Szgany.
In short, she had looked more woman than a Lady of the Wamphyri as Nestor might have expected one to be ... looked it, at least.
'Wratha the Risen, aye,' Wran answered sourly, starting up the stone stairs. But after two paces he paused, looked back at Nestor and said, 'What, does she interest you then? Stricken, are you? What, you?' He slapped his thigh and laughed, 'Hah!' - and was sober again in a moment. 'Better watch your step, Nestor. She fancies young men out of Sunside.'
Nestor, following behind, inquired: 'Something to fear?'
'Not really,' the other grunted, sweeping up the stairs. 'Not unless you make her angry. It's not a good idea, to make the Lady Wratha angry.'
And behind them both, Gore Sucksthrall followed in surly mood, saying nothing at all...
They climbed through three expansive levels to Wrath-spire's Great Hall, where the Lady's thralls had prepared a table for five. The table was enormous: five feet wide and extending all of forty-five feet down the hall from Wratha's bone-throne, it could easily have accommodated three dozen people. At its head, upon a shallow platform and so slightly elevated, there stood Wratha's great chair, in which sat the Lady herself. The bone-throne was a monstrous, marvellous thing - the skeletal lower jaw of some vast, long-dead creature - which she had acquired along with the furniture and all other appurtenances of Wrathspire the day she'd arrived in this abandoned, derelict place out of Turgosheim. The stack had been derelict then, at least. But now, due chiefly to Wratha's industry, it had returned to loathsome life.
Already seated when her thralls ushered her guests into the Great Hall, Wratha came briefly to her feet and made apology of a sort: