King of these beings. But among his closest contemporaries ('peers' he would never allow) it was generally suspected that just such a crown, and a throne, were his ambition. Therefore, because he was so powerful, his allies were few. Perhaps that was why he seemed so eager to accept Radu ... as a future aly? But in any case, Lord Lykan would do wel to watch his step in Shaitanstack.
As for the rest of the Wamphyri: Radu paid some attention to what Emil Hagisman told him - especially with regard to the Ferenczys - but their descriptions, habits and origins, could only come as something of an anticlimax after Shaitan himself.
There was Hengor, called the Gust for his girth, thunderous outbursts, and bellowing laughter. Not that there was very much of 'merriment' in him; his angers were frequently as violent as his 'mirth', while his vampire appetite - for anything unholy - matched the size of his belly. Hengor was not a true Hagi; he took his surname from the Szgany Hagi, the first Sunside tribe visited by Shaitan the Unborn during his journey of discovery from the western swamps into Starside. Among the unsuspecting Hagis, the Lord of Vampires had seduced a girl, who later converted Hengor among others before the tribe's leader, Heinar Hagi, put her down. Hengor had dwelled in Starside only a year less than Shaitan himself; his aerie rivalled Shaitanstack in its colossal if morbid grandeur. And meanwhile, the Szgany Hagi... were probably no more.
Klaus Lankari was a mountain man, a loner and dullard who had thought to explore the swamps ... only to return from them something other than a man. Less 'scrupulous' than Shaitan and the others, most of his thralls were trogs recruited from caverns under the barrier mountains. He kept trog odalisques, too, and was pleased to admit that during his years in the wild he had shagged far worse than these.
As for Thereza Three-Eyes' Lugosi: she would be a gross mistake in any world! Born a freak, as a Sunsider child she'd been fortunate to escape with her life. The Szgany had enough to do in those days of restructuring without the extra burden of caring for monstrous children. But her parents had pleaded her case; however grudgingly, they had been granted the right to care for her; fearing for her safety anyway, they'd become loners in Sunside's foothills and mountain passes. The source of her eventual vampiric contamination was unknown except to Thereza herself, but that her doting parents had paid in full for letting their deformed ogre of a child grow to full maturity was scarcely a matter for conjecture: she kept their teeth and finger bones on a gold chain around her neck!
Thereza's deformities were several. One shoulder appeared to be missing entirely; she held the good one high, which gave her the appearance of a hunchback. Her left arm was of normal length, but the right dangled to her knees.
Her breasts were dissimilar flaccid dugs, and all of her skin was mottled with purplish blotches and birthmarks.
But her third eye was the worst of her blemishes. She'd been born with an extra orbit in the back of her skull, and a rudimentary eye skinned over in its socket. Since her change, Thereza had developed this abnormality into an actual optical receptor, an eye which gazed out lidlessly - if not vacantly - from the spot where she kept her hair shorn. Which was perhaps a measure of her real monstrousness: that with her metamorphism, while she scarcely required to remain ugly at all but might easily remodel herself, she preferred it that way! As to the eye: she declared that of all the Wamphyri, she alone possessed the means of watching her back at all times ...
Then there was the Lady Rusha Basti, by all accounts gorgeous as a peach! Except, by whose account? To Emil Hagisman's knowledge no one had ever seen her entirely ... what, exposed? Not even her occasional lovers! Rusha's hair was red as flame and longer than her ample body, and she wore it in several sensuous designs, strategically bunched, or shaped with clasps to cover or expose her various parts according to her mood. Sometimes she would leave a breast bare, now and then her back and buttocks, or her long and alluring legs ... but never her face. Perhaps she was a hag after all; rumour had it that she detested her eyes - which were red as her