Necroscope V Deadspawn - By Brian Lumley Page 0,60

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