his lust like old, dry leather sucking at oil. And this was her reward. Well, and she knew who she must blame as well as Karl. And she did. And he would know of it, if only she could find a way out of here ...
She rested awhile, and when she was still felt once more the flow of air across her dirty, rock-scarred body and torn hands, and on the cold-sweating mounds of her bruised breasts and buttocks. And yet what pain she felt was small, and all the while her fear receded. She had no egg, no, but her body was infected nonetheless. The tenacity of undeath complemented her own, and heightened her senses in a like degree. Moreover, the wounds of her hands were healing, and where new flesh grew it was paler but stronger than before. And she felt a certain sinuosity in all her limbs, as if they had a new flexibility. Now when she walked, she would seem to flow, and move with an evil grace. And even her beauty would be greater than before - unless she became mummified first!
She sprang up with a new energy, turned her face to the cave's ceiling, searched for the lungs of this place. And sure enough a hole was there, like a chimney going up. Ah, but it would take some climber to reach it! She started up the wall of the cave, and at once discovered that she was just such a climber! Her fingers and toes found secure holds in the smallest of cracks; the muscles of her arms were springy as the green branches of trees; she did not seem to have any weight at all! And clinging like a leech, she inched her way up the scarred rock interior and across the cave's ceiling.
And so Wratha progressed. But slowly, oh so very slowly ...
She had been sealed up in the first third of sundown, and was out again by the next sundown ... but so depleted that her hunger raged like a fire in her heart. And emerging on to the dry and dusty plains of Starside, in the shadows of the eastern range, Wratha's first thought - indeed her only thought, for the moment -was of sustenance.
"Vampire World 1 - Blood Brothers"
She located a trog cavern, from which the first leathery inhabitants were even then emerging into the gloom, and took one on the spot. He was only a trog, but blood is blood. And from the moment of the piercing, when her freshly lengthened, keenly serrated eye-teeth bit into his neck and found the spurting jugular, Wratha knew the meaning of that immemorial Wamphyri phrase, 'the blood is the life!'
The trogs made no protest as she drained the life of one of theirs. She was a vampire, thrall and servant of the Wamphyri. What could they do? Only interfere and the rest of the monsters would fall on them with all their might, like an avalanche out of the crags. Anyway, they rarely suffered in this fashion, for the human leeches of Turgosheim were far more fond of the sweet flesh of Sunsiders. It must be hoped that this attack was the exception to the rule. And as Wratha moved on, they dragged the drained corpse of her victim into their cave and burned it, for even trogs had come to know the nature of vampires ...
Strengthened, Wratha made for Turgosheim, for the passes leading to Sunside. It was sundown and the Wamphyri were awake in their manses and abroad on their flyers. But she knew that their warrior creatures were confined in their pens under the crags and spires, which gave her heart. And keeping always to the deepest shadows, eventually Wratha approached a pass.
Here the ground rose sharply, from the bed of the vast gorge which housed Turgosheim to the mouth of the pass, and there was no cover to mention. She couldn't risk it, not with the high beacons flaring red and orange, and lights burning in all the manses, and flyers overhead where aerial patrols came and went through the pass. Time to rest, and move on in the hour before sunup. Which she did, finding shelter under a shelf of rock away from the trail through the pass ...
... The hissing and roaring of hungry warriors brought her awake. They had been let loose from their pens into the gorge where they roamed at will. When two came together they would challenge and rear up