Blood Brothers vw-1 Page 9

  'No, no!' Shaitan now promised himself. 'I'll have no more of them. They are for the hooved beasts and the scuttling foragers of this world. But for me… the blood is the life!' And within him (however vacuously, instinctively) the as yet embryonic spore-creature exulted, for it was or would be of a like mind and nature.

  Beyond the mountains the sun sank down; the last yellow glints vanished even from the highest peaks; the stars shone that much brighter in the north and spread themselves like a sprinkling of jewels all across the domed vault of the sky. A breathless moon raced on high, begging of the wild ones in the mountains their adulation. Eerie wolf voices echoed up into the night of Starside, and Shaitan was impressed by the howling of the hunting packs.

  And again he reached out his growing vampire awareness to contact and impose his will upon them, even as he had instructed the bats. Except these creatures shied from such contact. For while they were untamed, still they were of a high order of organized intelligence — far higher than the bats — and suspicious; and anyway they had their own leaders, who were jealous of their sovereignty.

  'Dogs!' Shaitan called them then, snarling his frustration at them and abusing them with his mind-voice. Which was why (in this world at least), total domination of the wolves by the Wamphyri never came to pass. Later generations of vampires, all springing from Shaitan, might occasionally produce a Lord who would master or befriend this or that lone wolf, but in the main the grey brothers would retain their lupine integrity…

  Then, three hundred miles along the north-western fringe of the barrier range of mountains, there Shaitan came across his first tribe of men or sub-men. Aboriginal even before the advent of the Grey Hole — grey and leathery, cavern-dwelling, slow-moving and — thinking — now, in the seventh century of aftermath, the trogs were grown truly primitive. Highly photophobic, they took to their caves at sunup, came out to hunt at sundown. They lived mainly on the grubs of a species of giant moth with a wingspan wide as a man's hand, on mushrooms, and on small bats which they netted and roasted. But still they were men; they understood and used fire, and had a language of their own. And as such they made perfect subjects for the imposition of Shaitan's will.

  This is how it was: He saw a group of them bring down a tawny mountain cat which had strayed down on to the Starside levels. They netted the animal, clubbed it unconscious, finished the job with bone knives. And as they set about to skin it, so Shaitan emerged from the shadows of a boulder where he had rested, coming upon them suddenly. They saw him and their jaws fell open. For while they were not conscious of their own ugliness, Shaitan's beauty was inescapable.

  He stood before them, naked and proud in starshine, and his appearance — springing up out of nowhere like this — was next to magical. Tall and straight, where the trogs were hunched and shambling, smiling in his darkly sardonic way, where they could only gawp and gabble, he was like a ray of light fallen among shadows. Which was entirely contrary to the fact, for he was the Great Corrupter come among innocents.

  And as they came forward to examine him, so Shaitan stood still and suffered their timid touchings and awed, astonished exclamations. He listened attentively to their language, for it had dawned on him that his own (as yet largely untried) was very rudimentary, a vague string of sounds left over from… from when? From what? He could not say, except that he felt his few words to be the fading echoes of many tongues; but he knew that the ability was in him to learn and use all tongues. For he was able, however dimly, to see into the minds of men and creatures alike, from which it is the very smallest step to tie pictures to the spoken words.

  'It is un-man!' one of the trogs reported of Shaitan to his companions. 'Its skin is soft, pale, easily broken.'

  'Its eyes are blue, not yellow,' another pointed out. 'Yet they see in the dark like ours.'

  'Blue, yes,' grunted a third. 'But in their cores… is that a fire burning behind them? From time to time, his eyes burn!'

  'He is… a man!' said the first. 'Not unlike the men beyond the mountains, who live in the light — and yet, not like them.'

  And another, perhaps wiser trog desired to know: 'But is he a friend?'

  Shaitan's guile was great; first he would be friend, then master. 'I am what I am,' he told them, 'and I have come to show you the way.'

  They shambled back from him, in awe of their own language slipping so easily from Shaitan's lips. But in a little while the wise one told him: 'We know all of the ways. We are born, we wax, we hunt and forage for food, we make young ones. Then we die and leave our young to do as we have done. These are the ways.'

  At which Shaitan smiled and nodded. 'But there are other ways,' he told them. And from within, for the first time, he heard a voice which was not his voice, saying: These shall be yours.' The voice of his conscience (or lack of it), or of something else? At any rate, Shaitan was not troubled. But seeing the mountain cat lying there red and gleaming and shorn of its skin did trouble him. And again, as from within: The blood is the life!

  And taking a knife from one of the trogs, he cut himself a portion from the hind leg of the slaughtered beast and squatted down to eat his fill. And as the trogs gathered round him, one of them said: 'See, he eats his meat raw!'

  And another: 'His smile is beautiful!'

  And a third, the one who had made previous mention of Shaitan's eyes: 'And where is the blue of his eyes now? Gone, as if the blood of the beast had flowed into them!'

  Which was true in more ways than one…

  Shaitan lived a while with the trogs and learned their ways. They showed him those cavern mushrooms which were edible, but he would not eat them. They showed him those that were deadly poison, which he must not eat. And later, taking meat with the tribal elder (the wise one of the first meeting; who was wary of him and his new ways), Shaitan put what he had learned to use. The wise one died in agony, and Shaitan took his place.

  The tribe was small, its people ugly of form and countenance, its caverns smoky and full of stenches. Shaitan quickly became disenchanted. He would instruct these people in… oh, in diverse ways, but their capacity for learning was small. He would open their eyes, take away their childlike innocence and replace it with… what? Again he was not sure, except that he desired to impose his will. But to what end? Existence with the sub-men was severely limited and limiting.

  Shaitan was full of vice. He had a man's passions, lusts, desires; and all enhanced, multiplied by the developing thing within him. He detested the trog women, yet gathered together a harem of all their ripest. When an enraged young male protested the theft of his prospective mate, Shaitan castrated him and made him the eunuch overseer of his carnal chambers. When a group of trogs rose up against him to kill him, he hid in a cave where he trembled and sweated… and his sweat formed a mist that hid him from view and frightened his vengeful enemies away. They ran off to other tribes, spreading Shaitan's legend abroad.

  He practised arts which were instinct in him, for he knew that he was corrupt in all his parts. And bleeding himself with ticks, he used them to contaminate the storehouses of the trogs until their food seethed with his evil. More of the sub-men ran off, while yet they were unblemished. As for those who stayed: they were sick now in mind and body and called Shaitan master, and followed in his footsteps. Of all Wamphyri thralls, they were the first.

  Shaitan planted seed in his women and several brought forth. Such offspring as were produced were hideous, scarlet-eyed, shrieking.. and hungry. They suckled blood from their mothers' paps and grew too fast. And their own mothers smothered them, all but one which Shaitan ate… Until finally he had had enough of the cave-dwellers, for he knew that there was flesh in this world other than the lowly flesh of trogs.

  And always his parasite guided him, living on his blood as he lived on the blood of others. It was a very subtle symbiosis, however, so that except in Shaitan's darkest dreams and certain rare waking moments, he believed he was the sole author of his affairs and master of his own will and destiny. But…
he could never be sure. And from that time forward the question of free will, self-determination, and all connected theories of integrity of spirit, became matters of vast importance to Shaitan, even assuming dimensions of obsession in him. In him, and in all subsequent vampires…

  Shaitan remembered how, in his first meeting with the trogs, they had likened him to men on the other side of the barrier mountains. Now (having almost forgotten the irritation of the sun's golden rays, and with only one way to test for a recurrence of the problem), he determined the conquest of Sunside. But it would be subtle, as were all his works. First he would approach the Sunsiders as a friend, and later as their master. Thus it would be as it had been with the trogs.

  So thought Shaitan…

  Leaving his trog thralls behind to fend for themselves, he climbed the mountains diagonally, heading east as always. He climbed at sunup but was shielded from the sun by the wall of the mountains. Still the sky's brightness troubled him and the light hurt his vampire eyes, so that he wondered if all of this world's creatures were photophobic, himself included. But high over the tree-line and into the peaks, he saw great birds soaring on high, which were not bothered by the sun. They were birds of prey, kites, which scoured the land for food in the last rays of the sun. Also, there were great shaggy goats in the peaks, which had no fear of the light, and likewise small creatures in the coarse grasses and heather.

  Shaitan shrugged. Well, he would put his theories to the test soon enough; indeed, he might even impose his will upon the sun! (At which the spore-grown vampire inside him shrank down and was small, for in this matter Shaitan was too wilful and his vampire could neither guide nor control him. Immature in its own right, it must simply go along with him.) While for his part Shaitan felt merely uneasy, as a result of his parasite's concern.

  As fate would have it, he crested the mountains in that hour when all that remained of the sun was a spoked wheel of pink and yellow light fanning the southern horizon, and so felt no discomfort. And the gradually developing thing inside Shaitan, which was now irreversibly part of him, relaxed somewhat. For after all, it could feel the power of its host and knew that he was strong.

  And as twilight turned to night, Shaitan saw the flickering fires of hunters where they camped on the flank of the mountains. While down on the Sunside levels, the glowing fires of their camps and settlements lit the night in all directions, as far as his eyes could see. Their tribes were legion!

  And in his heart Shaitan was glad, believing that at last he had found true men upon whom to impose his will…

  The Sunsiders as a race of men were still recovering from the Grey Hole's holocaust, which had reshaped their 'Earth', realigned its orbit, and redesigned its geological features. They were recovering from earthquakes and tidal waves, from seasons of torrential rains and whirlwinds of black frozen ash (which in another world might well have been termed 'nuclear winters'), and from other seasons which had baked half of the planet to a desert while the other half lay cold and wasted, mainly under frozen oceans. But as a race they were recovering, and gradually rebuilding their decimated numbers.

  Upon a time: 'Earth' had had continents, oceans, islands, seasons of winds, sun, rains, snow. It had species galore, and a quarter billion of people. They had the wheel, used fire and sails, experimented with rudimentary medicines and coarse chemistry. While gunpowder had not yet been discovered, still they understood the basic elements of the forge and of metalworking; they had metal tools, and the crossbow for hunting. And all in all theirs had seemed a bright future, whose explorers sailed out across the seas in wooden ships to seek new lands.

  But that was before the Grey Hole. And now, seven hundred or more years later, in the time of Shaitan? This is what the Sunsiders — less than thirty thousand of them now — knew of their world: That it had been ravaged of most of its species along with its peoples, and might well be considered dead except in that temperate zone whose spine was the barrier range of mountains between Sunside and Starside. And in their legends (which were confused and contradictory, because the written form of their language had been at best basic and was lost in the aftermath, so that history had become a thing passed down immemorially by word of mouth), the scourge which had visited itself upon them to destroy their world had become synonymous with a forbidden place on Starside known only as 'the Gate to the hell-lands'.

  And the legend was this: that one night a strange 'white sun' had appeared in the southern skies… a portent of terrible times in the offing!

  At first it had seemed to move slowly, like a comet, then more swiftly, and finally in a rush like a bar of white light where it speared down out of space to glance off the moon and blaze across the surface of the world! But as it fell to earth so it shimmered and shrank, until it skimmed across the land like a huge flat stone bouncing on water; and at last it thudded down into a crater of its own making, on a world gone mad by reason of its coming. Not a shooting star or a comet, no, but a Force far greater than these whose occurrence in Nature is mercifully rare: a Black Hole which had eaten itself, until only the event horizon remained. A Grey Hole now, and a bridge between universes.

  In any case, such science was beyond the people of this world. To the handful of stumbling, stunned survivors it was sufficient — and more than sufficient — that a deadly white sun had fallen out of the sky and destroyed everything they had known, leaving them and their descendants to live through a sort of hell for more than two and a half centuries. Until eventually, as the planet's orbit stabilized and its climates polarized — however dramatically — all that was left of humanity dwelled as best they might in the narrow belts of forest and on the plains south of the great barrier range, and in the southern flanks of the mountains themselves.

  And now, whenever hunters climbed those mountains in their central region, or strayed through the great pass to Starside's boulder plains, they saw how an awful revenant of the cataclysm yet survived to reinforce its legend: a crater socket with its sunken, blind white eye glaring up and out, as if some fallen demon lay paralysed, unblinking, and wondering at his lot. And the gaze of his cold, dead white eye was like a beacon, a forbidding pharos, not guiding but warning souls away…

  A demon, yes, why not? Something from hell, anyway. Something which had brought hell here with it.

  And in the legends there was also the story of a wandering adventurer, first through the pass after those turbulent centuries of stabilization, who climbed down to the mainly buried sphere of white light to touch it… and was never seen again. For it had opened like a Gate to take him into hell.

  Which was why the place had been named like that and why it was now forbidden, along with all of those desolate lands lying north of the mountains: the boulder plains, and further east a region of dizzily rearing stacks of volcanic stone, like vast spears of rock rising to rival the barrier range itself; and beyond the northernmost horizon, sending up a blue shimmer and sheen under the diamond stars and weirdly writhing auroras, the bitterly frozen Icelands.

  All of these places, forbidding and forbidden. But in any case, who would want to go there? Nothing lived there; nothing could live there, but bats in the caves, and wolves up in the peaks and passes over Starside, and certain lesser creatures. Surely it was no fit habitation for men. Not for any sort of men. Not yet, anyway…

  Shaitan came across his first true men by the light of their campfire, and saw that they were clad in the furs and skins of animals. There were three of them and they saw him at the same time, saw also that he was naked; which was just as well for Shaitan, for they were hunters. If he had clothed himself and come upon them suddenly like that… with his height, he could have been mistaken for a great bear. As it was he found himself covered by their crossbows as they scrambled to their feet and turned more fully towards him. But then:

  'A man!' one of them grunted, frowning.

  And: 'An idiot!' said another. 'I very nearly put a bolt in him!'

  Shaitan read their expressions, their l
ips, in part their minds. Their words fitted readily with everything else he saw, so that he understood much of their language from the start. As they came forward to peer at him in the firelight, the last of them queried nervously, 'A madman? Do you think so?'

  And the second: 'What else? Up here in the night on his own, naked under the stars.' And to Shaitan, coldly, 'Who are you?'

  Smiling his sardonic smile, he answered, 'I am what I am.'

  'And your name?'

  'Shaitan!' Because finally he remembered it.

  'Well, Shaitan,' the first of the three chuckled, but not unkindly, 'you'll excuse me for saying so, but it seems to me you're a bit daft!'

  'You think I'm… demented?' He looked at them, and down at himself. 'But if I am mad — a harmless idiot — then why do you point your weapons?'

  At that the second man again spoke up, saying: 'Because "idiot" and "harmless" don't necessarily coincide, that's why. Down on the levels, in the camp of Heinar Hagi, we've one such "idiot" who works for his living — and Janni Nunov lugs boulders which I can't even budge!'

  Moving artlessly so as to disarm them, Shaitan approached their fire, hunched down and fed a stick to the fitful flames. The three put up their weapons and approached him again, and he pretended not to study them where he warmed his hands. It seemed they had no leader with them but were equals. One was short, squat and bearded; the next of medium height, sturdy, heavy-jawed; the last young and wiry, whose mind seemed entirely innocent. But since they likewise studied him, Shaitan kept his scarlet eyes half-shuttered and gazed mainly into the fire. The red would be taken for reflected firelight.