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  “She decked the walls with bronze—shields out of the olden times, when the Szgany had used to fight back, removed from the halls of Cragspire and burnished to mirrors—and all directed upon Karl in his stupor. And then … then she threw wide the curtains!

  “In a moment, Karl woke up screaming. But he was exhausted, drunk. He lolled upon his bed, chained down, and his cries were like the gonging of great cracked bells as his skin peeled back and his blood boiled! The sun’s rays were concentrated in his eyes, which blackened to craters in his head! His hair became smoke, while his limbs and various parts cracked open to issue jets of steam and stench! And through all of this Wratha laughing like a madwoman in a shaded part of the room, dancing from one foot to the other in her excitement, and hauling on a rope which she had fixed to his bed, dragging Karl more surely into the focus of the sunlight.

  “Karl’s body shrank and shrivelled; he was finished; his leech deserted him, came wriggling from his trunk as finally he burst open at the belly. Seeing all of this, Wratha closed the curtains and rushed to Karl’s bed, and took his cindered head with the same silver sword which she’d used to slay Radu Cragsthrall!

  “Then she turned to his vampire, which was also fatally burned and dying. In its final throes, the creature produced its egg—and at last Wratha had what she wanted! Of her own free will she opened herself to the thing, which entered her without pause and hid itself away in her flesh. It was done, and Wratha was or was about to become Wamphyri!

  “Karl’s warriors had been hauling on their chains from the moment of his first scream. Now one of them burst free and came hurrying to discover and destroy his master’s tormentor. Wratha, consumed by that ecstasy of agony which ever attends the transfusion of an egg, nevertheless stood tall and showed herself to the creature. For her time in Cragspire had been well occupied, and she’d made herself known to all of these children of Karl’s vats. However dully, they had grown used to Wratha and responsive to her vampire techniques and aura; and so she’d exercised her will over them, practising for this very day.

  “Now the time had come when these preparations must be put to the ultimate test. Wratha faced the warrior down, shouted at it with voice and will both … and the monster at once backed off! Then, knowing that she had won, Wratha ordered the warrior to a new post right there in a corner of Karl’s bedroom; except that the room was now hers, no less than the warrior itself was Wratha’s. For her will was abroad in all the corridors of Cragspire (soon to be Wrathspire), and Karl’s other creatures were likewise quickly quelled.

  “Beasts are beasts, however, and men are men, of which there were several sleeping in the spire. But Wratha’s sigil—an unseemly device, to my mind—shows all too well what she thinks of men! She called for Karl’s lieutenants one by one, showed herself and her handiwork to them, demanded their allegiance, their obedience. Some were common thralls, while others were undead vampires who had perhaps aspired to Karl’s seat; whichever, none made objection. Let one so much as frown or make wry face, Wratha’s attendant warrior would rumble and vent furious gases. And so now she was risen in every respect, Wratha of Wrath-spire, and ready to announce that fact.

  “Come sundown, she sent out a lieutenant and flyer with messages of invitation to certain other Wamphyri Ladies, such as Zindevar Cronesap and Ursula Tor-spawn, informing them of a gathering in Wrathspire. Vastly intrigued, they all attended of course; but Wratha’s special guest was Devetaki Skullguise, the so-called “virgin grandam” of Masquemanse, whom she much admired. Devetaki, when she was a thrall, had vied with a vampire girl for her master’s egg. She won the ensuing fight but lost the right half of her pretty face, flensed from the cheekbone. Since when and to this very day, she wears gold-filigreed half-masks of lead: a smiling mask if her mood is good, and one which frowns when it is sour. In this way the two halves, both living and leaden, always concur. But being Devetaki, usually she wears the frowning mask. Ah, but when she is most angry, then she wears no mask at all…

  “Well, I will make a long story short: the Ladies accepted their new sister (Zindevar of Cronespire, perhaps grudgingly), and following the Ladies the Lords. For after all, Wratha was Wamphyri now; which was, is, and presumably always will be the way of things. The route to ascension is not important, only the getting there. And it should be remembered: for every one of us born to the spires and manses, there is one who was born on Sunside or in the swamps.

  “So Karl died, and Wratha was risen. Long live Wratha! In Turgosheim only a blind man or a fool would ask why beings who could live as long as the Wamphyri usually live so short.

  “But who shall dictate otherwise, eh? As I’ve said often enough before: we are not true masters but slaves to our parasites, and not even entirely to them but to blind Fate, who leads us all upon our teetering march across the abyss of life and undeath. Such is the nature of the Wamphyri, and jealousy, greed, hatred and lust—and blood—their way of life. So be it. Perhaps it’s as well to leave it at that…”

  Maglore paused, then said, “Very well then, Karz Biteri, Historian, and now you know the history of Wratha the Risen.” Following which he sighed and fell silent.

  And in a while, Karz answered, “For which I am grateful, Master. But if I may make so bold, all that you have told me was yesteryear—even a hundred years in the past—and this is today, when we know that the Lady Wratha breeds warriors in secret for the fighting of aerial battles. But against whom? Which man or men does she hate now, and to what new, even higher station does she aspire?”

  Maglore looked at Karz and said, “Hmm?” But he had heard him well enough. And he thought: Aye, a clever man and a fine brain, but perhaps a dangerous tongue. I’ll grant you a year, Karz my friend, or two at most. After that: you’ll retain some of your intelligence at least—but flyers aren’t much sought after for their conversation.

  While out loud: “Mark this well,” he said. “Let there be no more frivolous discussion of things you may hear from time to time in Runemanse. And never again let the substance of my conversation form the body of yours. Not even with the best of motives or intentions. Do you hear?”

  “Of course, Lord. From now on I’m deaf, dumb and blind.”

  Smiling grimly, Maglore shook his head. “Let dumb suffice,” he said. “Which I can arrange, and swiftly, if you cannot!

  “As for Wratha and certain forbidden flying things which I’ve reason to believe she’s breeding in the bowels of Wrathspire: she’ll be called to give account soon enough. And not only Wratha but others I could name. As for now, let it rest.

  “And as for me: I must rest, for it’s sunup and I grow weary!” He stood up, and Karz backed away, bowing.

  “Put these things of mine away,” Maglore told him, peering about his study workshop. “Make all tidy, then return to your studies or tend your duties. Not least, prepare my good clothes, complete with chain and sigils. And my gauntlet: get the rust off it, if you can. Doubtless I shall be up and about from time to time during the long day, but be sure I am up at sundown!”

  “Indeed, Lord!” Karz answered, who knew why his master must rise with the sinking of the sun, but in light of their conversation made no comment nor even thought about it, not until much later when Maglore was abed.

  Then:

  Looking out through a window and up at the spires and high crags, each one tipped gold in sunlight—and gazing far across the miles-wide gorge of Turgosheim, whose honeycombed walls contained the great manses, to where the pale lights of melancholy Vormspire still burned like glowworms despite that it was day—Karz did think about it, and wondered at its meaning. For it was this:

  That the Lord Vormulac Unsleep, who in his prime had been the most powerful of them all, and still retained a measure of his former might, had called a meeting in Vormspire in the second hour following twilight. And no simple gathering this, for all of the Wamphyri had been called, Lords and Ladies alike, with tithe-penalties for any who might think to abstain.

  Aye, times
were changing in Turgosheim; Karz Biteri could feel it in his water! And he fancied that soon there’d be new histories to write, possibly even in blood …

  Lord Vormulac Taintspore, called Unsleep after his insomnia of seventy years, had seated himself at the head of the great table; this was only proper, for he was convenor and host both. Tithemaster, adjudicator and “aesthete” (the word must be read in the same light as “ascetic” as applied to Maglore, insofar as such words may be said to apply to any of the Wamphyri), Vormulac was greatly respected … generally.

  He was no strict adherent to Zolteism, but neither was he a glutton. He had not dealt his fellow Lords ill, not even in his prime. His forces had never attacked, other than to defend Vormspire; but when they had made war, then it had been utter and ruthless! Eighty years ago, Vormulac had lain Gonarspire and Trog-manse to waste, decked their masters in silver chains and hung them from their own battlements to await the rising sun’s hot melt. Since when Turgosheim had stayed relatively free from internal feuding.

  In aspect:

  Vormulac had kept his shaved head and thrall’s forelocks for all of a hundred and thirty years. What had suited his old master Engor Sporeson in that earlier time had suited Vormulac ever since. His own thralls were similarly cropped, including the women. His forelocks, having lost most of their jet sheen through long years of sleeplessness, were iron-grey; they were plaited and finished with tassles, which dangled down on to his nipples. His eyes, not quite uniformly crimson but marked with curious yellow flecks, were close-set and deep-sunken in ochre orbits.

  Vormulac’s nose was long and thin, and sharply hooked at the bridge; it might be that in some former time it had been badly broken. Its convolutions and the gape of its nostrils were less marked than in most of the Wamphyri, but its great length was a singular anomaly, with a pointed tip which came down almost to the centre of his upper lip and lent his frown a hawkish severity. He wore iron-grey moustaches which dipped at their ends to meet the “V” of his goatish beard, and within this boundary of bristles his mouth was wide, thin as a gash, and held slightly but not cynically aslant. He wore a thin white scar in the hollow of his left cheek, from the orbit of his eye to the corner of his mouth, which might account for the latter’s tilt. His ears lay flat to his head, and their conch-like whorls were tufted with coarse white hair.

  A huge man, he stood almost seven feet tall. The histories had it that gigantism was common among the olden Wamphyri, when some had reached eight feet and more! Vormulac was happy with his seven, which were especially advantageous on occasions such as this. Since the seat of his chair was also an inch or two higher than the rest of them about the table, he made an imposing figure indeed.

  And yet, overall, Vormulac’s face and form were as melancholy in aspect as Vormspire itself, and the aura of his rooms, furniture, and tapestries—despite their richness, intricacy and questionable “beauty”—was likewise doleful. Neither overtly dull nor doom-fraught as such, yet full of some sad nostalgia, theirs was a silent conspiracy to evoke visions of fled or stolen youth, mordant mistakes, and everlasting poignancy.

  Maglore, Vormulac’s contemporary down the years, knew the reason well enough. So might several of the others if they had cared to mark and remember such things; but in a world without proper records, time itself becomes an efficient eraser.

  The reason was this:

  That in his youth, after Vormulac received the dying Engor Sporeson’s egg and ascended in his turn to Vormspire, and while still he retained something of Szgany humanity, he had returned to Sunside to reclaim the love of a sweetheart lost when he’d been taken as a titheling. She had come back with him to Vormspire, where their passion was such that in a very short time his vampire, however immature, produced an egg which passed to her through intercourse.

  Alas, what Vormulac’s former master had not told him was this: that he, Engor, was a leper!

  The Wamphyri, whose metamorphic flesh shrugged off most of the common Szgany diseases, were prone to leprosy. While it made itself manifest in several forms and was little understood, they believed that one strain at least was genetic and passed on through the egg. It might skip one or more generations, but sooner or later must recur somewhere down the line. In the Lord of Vormspire’s case it had skipped just one generation: his own.

  After several years, when his love’s flesh had taken on the hue of decay and begun to slough (and only then recalling his former master’s swift deterioration and death), Vormulac had opened Engor’s mausoleum to see if he might discover some clue there. Within, Engor’s body lay in many crumbling pieces, with more than sufficient evidence to show how the filthy rot had continued to work on his flesh—from his leech outwards—even after he himself was dead!

  Then, to make a quick end of it, Vormulac had poisoned his exhausted, ravaged love with kneblasch and silver, and placed her body with Engor’s in the mausoleum. The tomb had then been fired like an oven; when all was cold again it had been sealed up—forever. Fromwhich day forward Vormulac had dreamed of her burning, and of his own flesh slowly softening, until he’d vowed to sleep and dream no more. Well, and he hadn’t slept, but it was Maglore’s belief that he still dreamed.

  The story accounted for the first of his self-given names, Taintspore, likewise for the melancholy aspect which both he and Vormspire wore like shrouds …

  These were some of Maglore’s thoughts and memories where he sat at Vormulac’s right hand at the head of the table. And as their host named and formally introduced the other guests (such introductions were mainly unnecessary, for each knew the others well enough; it was simply a formality, by way of starting the proceedings), so the Mage of Runemanse also considered them:

  “The Lady Zindevar of Cronespire,” Vormulac intoned, his voice gritty as gravel. And, with some small effort at gallantry: “Never in all her years more … more beautiful.”

  “Hah!” she snorted, and her eyes flashed fire at him. “All what years, pray?”

  Vormulac shrugged. “A handful of handfuls, Lady,” he made amends, however drily. “And after all, what are a few years to the Wamphyri? Why, you are the merest girl!”

  Much to Maglore’s dismay, Zindevar was seated on his immediate right, and she was no “mere girl” but a contemporary. When he had come out of the swamps that time (“lowborn”, as it were, a Szgany mystic who went into the forbidden places to meditate, breathed a spore and came out Wamphyri), Zindevar had already ascended to Cronespire. Then she had been young, but even then she had not been beautiful!

  She was squat, hairy, of lesbian persuasions, and the atmosphere about her pervaded with a manly odour which all her many perfumes together could never hope to obscure. And despite her years—whose number fell far short of Vormulac’s and exceeded Maglore’s—she looked young or in her middle years at most, which said a deal for her mode of life. Zindevar was no great “ascetic”.

  Rouged and painted, with her elbows on the table and one hand scratching at her chin while the clawlike fingers of the other rapped upon the old oak, there was this overpowering air of aggression about her, this impatience, this great disdain—mainly of men, Maglore supposed. He could scarcely contain the urge to shrink his nostrils and creep away from the touch—even from the thought—of that great fat thigh of hers bulging against his where they sat at table. And he refrained from more than a glance into her mind, which was full of breasts and behinds of various shapes and styles; and red-rimmed, yawning, pulsating orifices; and blood, of course. But the worst of it lay in knowing that he shunned the lascivious display of her mind not so much because it was disgusting, but because it was seductive! For whatever his alleged sensitivities, Maglore was Wamphyri no less than the Lady Zindever herself.

  As for the mainly derisory agnomen “Cronesap”: while its use was common among the Wamphyri, it was never used to Zindevar’s face except as a deliberate insult; for which reason Vormulac had avoided it. It referred to the way in which she had ascended: by gradually sapping the blo
od and energy of the ancient Lady who had occupied her aerie before her. Nor was she any different now, as her many female thralls could doubtless testify. Only a handful of her lieutenants were men in the fullest sense of the word (necessary for the protection, maintenance and administration of Cronespire), and even then she kept an equal number of female officers, to guarantee a balance. As for Cronespire’s menials: all of its males were eunuchs to … to a creature.

  So much for Zindevar; Maglore had missed several cursory introductions of lesser lights; even now Vormulac was moving on again:

  “Now I bring to your attention the Lord Grigor Hakson of Gauntmanse,” he said, “with whom we commiserate; his get from the draw these several tithes has been scarcely sufficient to his needs.” Grigor, tall, thin and shifty-eyed, nodded sourly, perfunctorily, all about the table, then returned to examining his fingernails. “Following these proceedings,” Vormulac continued, “and in the event there are persons present who would care to barter with him, Lord Grigor will doubtless make himself available in the pursuit of a mutually advantageous deal or two.”

  Maglore leaned forward a little to scan down the table at Grigor of Gauntmanse, or “Grigor the Lech” as he was known. One of the younger Lords and full of lust, recently his share of the Sunside tithelings—of the lottery in human lives—had been low in women; almost without exception his tokens had matched up with Szgany males, of which he had plenty. Maglore read it in his mind how tonight, if Grigor could find a taker, he would offer four strong men for just two half-decent girls! Someone would make a killing, certainly. In other circumstances it might well be the Lady Wratha. Except, and as Maglore knew, tonight she’d be otherwise engaged.

  So the introductions went on, and next came Canker Canison. To see the Lord of Mangemanse was to know that somewhere in his ancestry was a spore-infected dog or fox. Named for the disease of the inner ear which had driven his father baying mad (till mounting a flyer he’d soared south into the rising sun), Canker had caused the fleshy lobes and fine whorls of his own ears to fret themselves into curious and intricate designs, including his sigil, a sickle moon. His hair was red and the gape of his jaws vast; his long-striding walk was more a lope; when laughing, he would throw back his head and shake tip to toe.