Necroscope V Deadspawn - By Brian Lumley Page 0,199

Shaithis from where he worked at the vats: Come!

A single word, yes, but its author's excitement had spoken volumes...
Part Four Chapter 5
5

Sundown - Exorcets - The Godmind

Shaithis stood tall and severe in the black, gapped caldera wall and looked south towards Starside. Overhead, the aurora wove in a sky which was otherwise black, but he knew that on Starside it would be sunup. The mountain peaks would be burning gold, and in Karen's aerie thick curtains and tapestries woven with her sigil would guard the uppermost windows, where lances of sunfire might otherwise strike through.

He looked south, narrowing his scarlet eyes to focus upon a far faint line of fire all along the horizon, a narrow golden haze which separated the distant curve of the world first from blue then black space, where all the stars of night hung glittering and hypnotic, seeming to beckon him. Which was a call he would answer. Soon.

Indeed he must, for when the aurora died to a flicker and the sky in the south darkened to jet, then it would be sundown; in advance of which, Shaithis and his devolved, depraved ancestor would muster their warriors, mount their flyers and launch a small but monstrous army from the volcano's steep lava slopes. For them the realization of a dream, and for Starside the advent of a nightmare, was finally in the offing. Shaitan's dream for so many hundreds of years, now looming into being, brought into sharp relief by a lone flyer's recent return out of Starside with its burden of a stolen Traveller waif.

Shaithis remembered the event in minute detail: the way his gloating ancestor had carried off the exhausted, half-dead boy into the gloom of his sulphur-floored chambers; following which (eventually), his mental summons: Come!

In his mind's eye Shaithis saw it all again: the Fallen One, jubilant where he paced or flowed to and fro across the black, grainy floor of his apartments in his excitement. And before Shaithis had been able to frame a question: 'This Dweller of whom you've spoken - ' Shaitan had turned to him ' - this alien youth who used the power of the sun itself to bring down the mighty Wamphyri.'

'Yes, what of him?'

'What of him?' Shaitan had gurgled darkly, delightedly, in his fashion. 'Devolved, that's what! Even as I myself am devolved - but to his far greater cost. So, he bathed you all in blazing sunlight, eh? By which reducing Wamphyri flesh to steam and stench? Well, and he seared himself, too! His vampire must have been injured; it could not repair itself; his metamorphic man-flesh sloughed away even as a leper's. Then ... his desperate vampire returned him to an earlier form: that of its original host and manifestation. Less bulk in that, making the wastage easier to contain, d'you see? And so your Dweller is now ... a wolf!'

'A wolf?' Astonished, Shaithis had remembered his dream.

'A beast, aye, going on all fours. A grey one, the leader of the pack, with nothing of powers except those of the wild. The Travellers hold him in awe, whose forepaws are human hands. A little of his mind must be human, too, at least in its memories. And of course his vampire has survived, in however small part, for that was what saved him. But the rest is wolf.'

'A wolf!' Shaithis had breathed it again. Well, it wasn't the first time he'd experienced oneiromantic dreams. It was an art of the Wamphyri, that's all. 'And his father, the hell-lander Harry Keogh?'

'He is back in Starside, aye.'

'Back?'

'Indeed, for following the battle at The Dweller's garden he returned to his own place. Something which you could hardly be expected to know, for by then you were in exile.'

'His own place? The hell-lands?'

'Hell-lands! Hell-lands! They are not hell-lands! How often must I tell you: this place is hell, with its sulphur stenches, vampire swamps and sun-blasted furnace lands beyond the mountains! Ah, but Harry Keogh's world... to the likes of us it would be a paradise!'

'How can you know that?'

'I can't - but I can suspect it.'

'This Harry Keogh,' Shaithis had mused, 'he had powers, to be sure, but he was not Wamphyri.'

'Well, now he is.' Shaitan at once contradicted him. 'But as yet untried. For who is there to test him, in devious argument or in battle? What's more, the Travellers don't much fear him, for he will not take the blood of men.'

'What?!'

'According to the boy - ' Shaitan had nodded ' - The Dweller's