Necroscope V Deadspawn - By Brian Lumley Page 0,72

hit him.'

'Explain!' Arkis was breathless. And Shaithis was intent, rapt upon the Ferenc's story.

Fess shrugged. Fully dressed again, he sliced gobbets of flesh from the flyer's alveolate ribs, sliding them one by one down his throat. 'Hard to explain,' he said, after a while. 'Fast, it was. Huge. Mindless. Terrible! But I saw what it did to Volse, and I determined that it would not do the same to me. I never fled from anything in my life before - well, except The Dweller and the awesome destruction he wrought in the battle for his garden - but I fled from this.

'It was white, but not a healthy white. The white of hiding in places too dark, like some cavern fungus. It had legs - a great many, I think - with clawed, webbed feet. Its body was fishlike, its head too, with jaws ferocious! But the weapon it bore - '

'A weapon?' Arkis thrust his face forward. 'But you said the thing was mindless. And now... mind enough to carry a weapon?'

The Ferenc glanced at him scornfully, then held up his own talon hands. 'And are these not weapons? This thing's weapon was part of it, fool, just as your own boar's tusks are part of you!'

'Yes, yes, understood,' said Shaithis impatiently. 'Say on.'

Fess settled down again, but his eyes were uneasy, wide in his massive, malformed face. 'Its weapon was a knife, a sword, a lance. But with tines like thorns all down its length, from tip to snout. A barbed rod for stabbing, and once stabbed the victim's hooked, with no way to free himself except tear his own flesh wide open! And at the tip of that bone-plated ram, twin holes like nostrils. But not for breathing...'He paused.

'... For what, then?' Volse could not contain himself.

'For sucking!' said the Ferenc.

'A vampire thing.' Shaithis seemed convinced. 'A warrior, but uncontrolled, with no rightful master. A creature created by some exiled Wamphyri Lord, which has outlasted its maker.' He said these things, but he did not necessarily believe them. No, he uttered them aloud to cover the nature of his true thoughts, which were different again.

Fess fell for Shaithis's ploy, anyway. 'These are possibilities, aye.' The giant nodded. 'Stealthy - sly as a fox, and all unheralded - it crept out from a side tunnel; but when it struck - ah! - lightning moves more slowly. It slid into view and its spear stabbed at Volse three times. The first blow ripped him open through boils and all, and spattered me and the walls of the tunnel with all of his pus, whose amount was prodigious. He was like one huge blister, bursting and wetting everything with his vile liquids. I was drenched. The second thrust hit him while he was still reeling from the first; it almost sawed his head off. And the third: that sank into him - into his heart -where it commenced to suck like a great pump! And while the thing held him upright, impaled on its weapon against the wall, sucking at him, so the creature's saucer eyes fixed me in their monstrous glare. So that I knew I was next.

'That was when I fled.' (And Fess actually shuddered, which amazed Shaithis.)

'You couldn't have saved him?' Arkis sneered, questioning Fess's manhood; a dangerous line of inquiry at best.

But the other took it well. 'I tell you Volse was a goner! What? And so much of his liquids used up, his head half shorn away, and the thing's great siphon in him, emptying him? Save him? And what of myself? You, Diredeath, have not seen this creature! Why, even Lesk the Glut - in whichever hell he now resides - would not stray near such a monster! No, I fled.

'And all the way out of that long, long tunnel, I could hear the thing's slobbering as it drained Volse's juices. Also, by the time I struck light and open air, I fancied it slobbered all the louder, perhaps hot on my trail. In something of a panic - yes, I admit it -1 called a mist out of myself and hurried out onto the slopes and down to the plain of snow and ice. There I stripped off, for Volse's drench was poisonous, and without further pause hurried back here... and found you two waiting for me.

'The tale is told

Arkis and Shaithis sat back, narrowed their eyes and fingered their chins. Shaithis kept his thoughts mainly to himself (though truth to tell there