Monastery commanded.
The face of the initiate was drawn; his eyes were hollow, his yellow skin pale as saffron parchment, with fine blue veins showing through. He smelled of youth, innocence, and everything that Drakesh was not. And the vampire smiled -
- And began to explain the test. The chimney will house you standing upright with your head bowed to your chest
- as if you bore the weight of the world! But nothing so great, be assured. These brothers will place blocks of ice above you, two or three depending on your ... fortitude? This room is not especially cold and the ice will melt soon enough. But the process will be greatly accelerated by the generation of heat from your own body. This, then, is your ordeal, my son: the weight of the ice; its slow cold drip; the confines of the chimney. All these things against your determination, your force for life. Finally, when the last few shards of ice slip down around your feet and you climb out, it will be over and you ... will be a brother!' he clapped his hands. 'No more explaining. Into the chimney!'
The red-robed acolytes climbed the dais with the initiate and helped him down into the chimney. Drakesh stood watching as they operated the pulleys, began loading blocks of ice onto the shoulders of the youth. But...
'Master!' that one called out, the sound of his voice muffled now. There are tiny holes in the floor. A great many... "
'Certainly,' Drakesh called back. 'So that the water from the ice can flow out and the air can flow in. What, and should I let you drown, or suffocate?'
More blocks of ice went into the shaft. Stacked on top of each other, they fitted well; and because the chimney inclined back into the wall a little, they could not topple forward. All of their mass was focused on the youth, who now cried out:
'Master, the weight!' His voice was strained, his words a series of panting grunts.
'An ordeal is an ordeal,' Drakesh's answer was cold as the ice itself. 'Less than that, and it becomes a mockery.' But his very tone of voice was a mockery, while his feral-eyed acolytes grinned and plied the pulleys.
The column of ice reached up eight feet above the hole in the wall now; its weight was that of five men. As another block was released from the grapples and slid into place, so the column settled an inch or two in its slot. And feeling the sudden, rapid compression of his body, the initiate panted so much faster and louder, his voice becoming a screech of protest:
'I... cannot!... Master, I'm being crushed! ... my knees are against the wall... my back is breaking!'
'Cry out, my son,' Drakesh called back. 'It will ease your pain. Pant and groan, even as your mother groaned when her body opened to spit you into the world. She gave you life - as you now give it to me!'
And as the acolytes worked at the rattling pulleys, Daham Drakesh descended the stairwell into the room beneath this room of torture. It was cold, and as he disrobed he shuddered a very little ... but not from the cold. It was an almost sexual shudder of anticipation.
Against one wall of this lower chamber, the floor had been scooped out into a shallow basin. As Drakesh stepped naked into the basin, he looked up. In the ceiling directly overhead, contained in an area of some eighteen by eighteen inches, a hundred small holes had been drilled through to the base of the torture chimney. Through these holes -through the very rock - he could hear the frantic screams of his victim. And coming to him from the stairwell, the relentless rattling of chains.
Finally there was one last recognizable word: a throbbing 'M-m- mother!' Followed by a shriek to end all shrieks that echoed quickly into silence, and a splintering sound that went on and on. And all that remained was a slow crunching and squelching: the compression of flesh and bone into jelly. Then, as the rattling of the chains continued unabated, the warm red rain of Drakesh's shower commenced to smoke down upon him.
But a worse horror was yet to come. For as Drakesh opened his jaws in a yawning gape, turned up his face and threw wide his spindly arms to the crimson spattering deluge, so his parasite leech took over. And all semblance of control, of anything remotely human,