neither wonders to be witnessed, nor mysteries revealed. For I shall banish him north, to freeze in the ice all alone.
'But for him who would obey me in all things, and be my true servant and thrall, a rich red life forever! Aye, even unto death - and beyond! So be it...'
'Where shall your house stand, Lord?' Ilya Sul ventured with a shiver, as they left the Gate behind to cross the wide mouth of a pass where the light from Sunside was a pale purplish haze in the' V of the split range. 'For this seems a desolate place - a plain of boulders, lacking rivers, where lichens live and scrubby grasses - with wolves in the mountains and bats in the crags, but never a man.'
There are men of sorts,' Shaitan answered him. 'Under the mountains, in their caverns, dwell trogs. They shall provide - they shall be - my food. Until we are established. But on Sunside there is life galore! Common fare will suffice, at first, but the true blood which is the life lies beyond the mountains. And in all the nights yet to be we shall hunt. As for my house: it shall stand east of here a ways, for I am drawn east.' Then, looking sharply at Sul: 'But do you doubt me?'
'Never, Lord!'
They trekked for several miles, and came to a region of stone stacks worn out from the mountains, which littered the plain like the petrified stalks of gigantic mushrooms. Their bases were fortified with scree jumbles, but in their columns were ledges and caverns, many of which were vast as halls.
Shaitan admired these stacks, for they were very grand and very gaunt. And: 'One of these shall be my house,' he said.
Sul answered him: They are like the aeries of the mountain eagles!'
And: 'Aye,' said Shaitan. The aeries of the Wamphyri!'
And so Shaitan set to and commenced the building of his house. The task was huge; only a vampire and his thralls, with their longevity, could ever have accomplished it. And Shaitan would build not only a house but an empire of vampires.
He recruited trogs out of their caverns in the lee of the mountains, and sent his lieutenants into Sunside's nights to hunt and recruit Szgany. And in dark chambers in the base of the stack which he had chosen, he experimented with his own metamorphic flesh and powers to furnish himself with all of his requirements.
He bred trogs which were no longer trogs but cartilage creatures, whose minds were small and bodies elastic. From these he made leathers and coverings for the aerie's exterior stairways, and articles of furniture for his rooms. And all of them still living a life of sorts, gradually petrifying and becoming permanent in their places. He mated men with trog women, the issue from which was not seemly. He got foul, bloated things, all gross and mindless - but even these were not wasted. In nether caves he bred them into gas-beasts, for the heating of the stack, or into Things-Which-Consume, for his refuse pit.
"Vampire World 1 - Blood Brothers"
He took mindless vampire flesh and experimented with it; he would imitate the aerial prowess of the great bats, build flying creatures, soar out from his aerie upon the winds. At first he knew failure, but later he provided his flyers with the metamorphosed brains of men, that they should have something (but never too much) of volition. All of which creatures, nascent and full-formed alike, were Shaitan's thralls.
Word of his works went abroad, even into Sunside. And now Starside was double-damned and shunned utterly ... by men, at least.
But by now the Szgany of Sunside had problems other than Shaitan and his night-raiding lieutenants, for in the west the swamps were an entire spawning ground for monsters! Foolish men and innocent creatures went down to the scummy waters to drink, and things other than men and wolves came up from that place. So that in the first twenty years several beings who were very like unto Shaitan had come across from Sunside to build their houses in the rearing stone stacks. And because they were even as strong as him and much of a kind, he made no protest but let them build. In any case, there was space enough among the many stacks, so that even Shaitan was unable to lay claim to all of them; and, just across the mountains, there was food and entertainment for all.
And it happened that at