to herself, perhaps a little bitterly: Your daddy's on Starside, asJeep in the arms of the Lady Karen, where they hide from the light of the new day.
'Dead,' the child mumbled, where he snuggled to her breast. One word, but such a word! It filled Nana's veins with ice.
'What?' she questioned him. 'Dead? Is something dead?'
'Is he?' came the not-quite-awake question-answer, freezing her blood anew. 'Is he - my daddy - dead?'
Nana knew she wouldn't sleep again and so got up. There in the dawn glade she found Jasef Karis sprawled on his back, eyes glazed, dew dripping from his cold nose, and believed she now understood what her small son had tried to tell her. He had not been talking about the daddy he'd never known (and couldn't possibly know), but the old seer, the old mentalist, Jasef.
But far to the east and across the peaks, an omen!
The boiling sky over Starside was black, and the bellies of its clouds flickered red with reflected fires ...
PART TWO:
Vampire World 1 - Blood Brothers
Looking Further Back, and Scanning Forward
1
This much has been told: Shaitan, first of the Wamphyri, remembered neither mother nor father, nor yet understood his own genesis. To him it was as if he had simply sprung into being, full grown, with a will but no memories of his own to mention. Following which he had fallen, or been thrown, to earth; but fallen, on this occasion, to 'earth' as opposed to Earth. In any event, he discovered himself upon the surface of one of many worlds, in one of the many universes of light. And dimly (and quickly fading in the eye of his mind), he remembered something of ... of an expulsion.
The world into which he had fallen was in one sense an old world, and in another a new one. Recently it had suffered calamity: a Black Hole, losing most of its mass and deteriorating to a Grey Hole, had likewise fallen out of space and time and settled here, reshaping the planet. But where that had been a calculable disaster, the disaster which was Shaitan would be quite incalculable.
From him would spring an order of beings whose nature was such as to threaten not one but two worlds, filling the myths and legends of both with dread and uttermost horror. For Shaitan was a vampire.
And yet, when he fell (or was thrown out), he was not yet a vampire. That was still to come: a matter of choice, of exercising his own free will, his human curiosity. And this is how it came about...
Starting into awareness, Shaitan cried out...!
It was the shock of consciousness cloaking an intelligence previously bereft, will without knowledge inhabiting a mind wiped clean. And as his cry echoed into silence, so he discovered himself kneeling at the edge of stagnant water, with his naked image mirrored in scummy depths. But seeing that he was beautiful, he was proud.
Standing upright, Shaitan saw that he could walk; and in the twilight of a dim, misty dawn he moved by the edge of the dank, rank waters, which were a swamp. And seeing how dismal and lonely was this world where he had fallen, or into which he had been cast, he assumed himself a sinner and that the place must be his punishment.
"Vampire World 1 - Blood Brothers"
Such assumptions defined not only Shaitan's intelligence but also his nature: that he instinctively understood such concepts as sin and punishment. And he thought his crime must be that he was beautiful, which was his pride working ... which was in fact his crime! For he saw beauty as might, and might as right, and right as he willed it to be.
Which was a will he would impose.
So thinking, Shaitan moved away from the rank waters and went to impose his will upon this world. But behind him the mud boiled and spattered, so that he paused to look back where black bubbles came bursting to the surface. And with the parting of the weeds and the scum, Shaitan saw a figure floating up into view.
In its body it was bloated and burned, but its face was almost whole. And in that face was an innocence beyond comprehension. Shaitan knew it for an omen, but of what? He had will; he could wait and discover what would be, or move on, according to his will. Also, he suspected that this thing in the swamp harboured evil; why else would such a blackened, blistered thing be here,