Necroscope V Deadspawn - By Brian Lumley Page 0,198

Shaithis was busy in a corner of the workshop, carefully constructing a warrior for his ancestor's approval:

'This is how it was!' said Shaitan, coming swiftly and in some excitement upon Shaithis where he worked, and flowing up to him like a midnight shadow. 'In that earliest existence of which I apprised you, I served another or others but desired to serve only myself. As a reward for my pride - which is to say for my wit and great beauty, of which I was perhaps too much aware - and for my pains, I was thrown out and removed from my rightful place in that society. I was not destroyed, not wasted, but used! I became to Them ... a tool! A seed of evil, which They would sow between the spheres! Do you see? I was the folly and the penance! I was the Darkness which allows for the Light!'

In the face of this outburst, Shaithis had brought his work at the vat to a halt. Unable to understand the other, he could only shake his head and throw up his hands. 'Can't you explain yourself more clearly?'

'Damn you - no? Shaitan had shouted then. 'I dreamed it; I know it for the truth; but I cannot understand it! I've told it to you so that you also may attempt to fathom it -and likewise fail to fathom it, even as I have failed!'

With which and in a fury, he had rushed off and disappeared into the volcano's labyrinth.

For a long time after that Shaithis had not seen the other at all; he had merely been aware of his ancestor's shadowy presence. But a time had come when, going again to the vats, he'd found the ancient gloomily examining his various adaptations where they squirmed and hardened in their liquids; and there, following customary greetings but in answer to no specific remark or query, Shaitan had listlessly mumbled: 'I have been banished out of many spheres and thrown down from many worlds. Aye, and others like me, throughout all the myriad cone-shaped dimensions of light.' That had been all.

Mad creature! (Shaithis had kept this thought, and others he was thinking, very much to himself.) But it's as well you rush around crazed while I'm about my work. The last thing I would want is for you to become interested in what I'm doing now. For in fact he was there at that time in order to inject brain matter into his new construct, so stimulating and even directing the foetal ganglion's growth. Except... these were cells obtained from a rather special source, and by means of Shaitan's ice-boring ingurgitor...

Putting all such business aside for the nonce, however, and pandering to Shaitan's insanity, if that is what it was, he had answered: 'In which case, when we go against Starside with these warriors I'm fashioning, your revenge will be so much sweeter. Nothing will stand before us; and if there are higher worlds to conquer, they too shall finally fall, even as you fell to earth.'

His words had seemed to suffice to draw the other up from whatever morbid depths claimed him, even so far as to correct his temporary imbalance. And: 'Indeed, these appear to be good warriors, my son!' he'd at once remarked. A rare compliment; at once qualified by: 'Which they should be, for in Starside you had a sufficiency of superb clay with which to practise.'

And after that the ancient rambled no more...

Later still:

The two had constructed a slender, streamlined, powerful flyer, equipped it with a sucking snout and given it the stripped-to-basic brain of one of Menor Maimbite's otherwise defunct lieutenants. Fuelling the beast on quality plasma, they'd sent it on a reconnaissance flight to Star-side. After that and over the space of a good many auroral displays, they'd waited on its return but in vain. Eventually, when almost all hope had faded... then the flyer had returned, bringing back with it a scrawny shivering waif of a Traveller child.

A boy of eight or nine years, the flyer had snatched him at sundown from a party of Travellers where they camped in the hills over Sunside. It appeared that the Travellers no longer went to earth when the sun sank down into night. Why should they, when the Wamphyri were no more? But the return journey from Starside had been long, and the child almost dead from exposure.

Shaitan had carried him away to his private chambers for 'questioning'; shortly thereafter, the ancient's mind-call had summoned