For unlike his forebears, Daham was a firm believer in an immemorial Wamphyri maxim—that anonymity is synonymous with longevity. His ancestors, however, had forgotten or chosen to ignore this simple rule; they had made blood- and egg-sons indiscriminately, so spreading their plague abroad … but where were his ancestors now? And where his egg-sire, Egon, last-but-one survivor of an alien parallel world, and brave defender of Wallachia since a time when the horseshoe mountains were known as Dacia? Gone the way of all and even vampire flesh, aye! But not Daham.
And not the Ferenczy Brothers, Anthony and Francesco, now the “Francezcis,” grown rich and strong in their Sicilian fortress. Nor the dog-Lord, Radu Lykan, the last true survivor out of olden Starside, who six hundred years ago had gone to earth—gone to sleep, hypnotized himself into a state of suspended animation—in some far hyperborean lair.
Which was why Drakesh had sent Mahag and a party of “disciples” into Europe (and eventually into the British Isles) in the first place: to seek out the lair of the sleeping dog-Lord and destroy him before his planned awakening. It had been part of an even grander scheme; Drakesh had seen his opportunity to play agent provocateur, to set Radu’s people and the Ferenczys against one another in an all-out bloodwar. Then, when all was finished, he would step in and pick off any survivors—all as a prelude to his Final Solution:
The total conquest, the vampirization, of planet Earth!
This had been Drakesh’s burning ambition ever since learning of the death of his egg-sire, the so-called “Count” Drakul, all of ninety years ago: to make himself the undead, blood-red Emperor of a vampire world … but not while his ancestors’ enemies were still alive in it. And so for half a century he had used his “emissaries”—the thralls he sent out into the world ostensibly as “ambassadors” of his sect—as spies to seek out other pockets of Wamphyri infestation. That was how he had discovered the Ferenczy Brothers in their Sicilian manse, and the approximate location of Radu Lykan in his Cairngorms lair. And so his greater plans had been stalled for a time.
As to the detail of those plans:
The Drakesh Monastery stood close to a junction of many lands, in a place which one hundred years ago had been mainly inaccessible. But distance and cold and inaccessibility, what are these for obstacles? Nothing, to the Wamphyri! Territorialism, on the other hand, is everything! When finally Daham decided to expand, it would be the very simplest thing to send out a handful of chosen lieutenants north into the heart of mysterious Tibet, China and Mongolia; south, into Nepal, India, Burma and Bhutan. And when they were established … the rest of the world would be waiting. By now, the first of these outposts—all masquerading under Drakesh’s “religious” banner, of course—should be in place. But some twenty-four years ago, even as the last Drakul was making ready his expeditionary forces …
… The Chinese Army had intervened. And Drakesh had seen at first hand how the Wamphyri are not alone in their lust for territory, even for a land as desolate as this.
Tibetan cities were swept under; monkish orders were brutally suppressed and temples fell; the Dalai Lama himself fled to safety in the west. But the shunned “monastery” on the wind-swept Tingri Plateau survived. For Drakesh had long been aware of the Red Army’s feasibility studies in parapsychology—and of its experimental ESP-Unit, the Sino-equivalent of the Soviet Union’s and England’s E-Branches—and had deliberately courted the attention of its controller, Colonel Tsi-Hong, at his headquarters on Kwijiang Avenue, Chungking.
He had been called to Chungking, been “studied” for over a year, had allowed them to learn what he desired them to know about him: his alleged “philosophy,” his longevity, immunity to disease, tenacity for life—but no more than that. And Colonel Tsi-Hong had even visited him here at the monastery, to see for himself the extent of Drakesh’s weird abilities in his own environment.
Drakesh had let himself be frozen into a block of ice and had melted it from within. He had demonstrated his night-vision—sharper than Tsi-Hong’s, even when the Colonel was using his British nitelite binoculars!—and scarcely needed to point out the benefits of a possible military application. He had fasted, and after a month was fit and well enough to walk out ten miles into the snows to meditate.
Tsi-Hong had brought scientists, geneticists and mutationists, with him. They had taken away samples of Drakesh’s sperm, frozen for future experimentation. And ten years ago, finally they had experimented with it, to produce, as it later turned out, monsters! All of which was precisely as Drakesh had warned the Colonel it would be—that Tsi-Hong could not hope to grow orchids in a paddy field without they come up pale and twisted. But if they were tended by caring gardeners, watered by familiar rains, and reared in their natural, their native soil … ?
The Colonel hadn’t listened, not then. For how might this man—even with all his weird talents—father the nucleus of an invincible mutant army in such an inhospitable and unyielding wilderness? But Drakesh was more than a man, he was a Lord of the Wamphyri! By sheer force of will, and the laws of alien genetics, he had passed on his instructions to the very sperm that Tsi-Hong’s scientists had taken from him.
And in Chungking, his children had been born. Fifteen of them had been deformed, destroyed at birth. But fifteen out of fifty? It scarcely surprised Drakesh; according to Egon Drakul, freak births and grotesque malformations had been common among the Wamphyri of Starside. But as for the others, they had survived—for the time being. And left to his own devices in his aerie, Daham had waited for his prenatal, genetic triggers to trip.
Two years ago they had.
Major Chang Lun, military commander of the army garrison at Xigaze, some ninety minutes away by snow-cat, depending on the weather, had brought him the news. Now he remembered Chang Lun’s words, and how the Major (no great admirer of Daham Drakesh) had relished them:
“The last half-dozen escaped. Only eight years old; apparently perfect except for their accelerated growth-rate, but they murdered their keepers and instructors. They not only bit the hands that fed them … but fed on them! Drinkers of blood, cannibals, homicidal maniacs! In only eight years they’d grown to men, and sexually voracious women! Finally they were hunted down to the last one, and eradicated. But it wasn’t easy …”
Drakesh had known no pain, no parental anguish, for he had known what the outcome would be. Indeed, he’d arranged it. Colonel Tsi-Hong’s people had tried to teach his blood-brood to be human—albeit human machines, soldiers, warriors. But the next brood would be under their vampire father’s instruction, and he would not fail. Nor would his warriors belong to China.
Nor were human beings, men, the only kind of warriors …
Earlier, before coming up by internal causeways and claustrophobic, flue-like chimneys onto the dome of the skull where it sloped back under the overhanging cliff, Drakesh had paid a visit to the other kind of warrior; three of which were waxing, as they’d waxed for five years now, in the vast stone vats of a lower level. For the moment he controlled their growth, delayed their emergence, waited for the right time. But when finally he allowed them to be “born,” brought up out of their stone wombs, they would be mindless killing machines such as once were bred by the Wamphyri of Starside. And despite that these were other, still they were kin to those anomalies born of his frozen seed in Chungking. For these, too, were his “children,” the produce of his undying vampire flesh.
He thought back to his visit:
Down there in the dark of a reeking cavern, Drakesh kept metamorphic protoplasm—the living or undead material of his warrior creatures, grown of his own flesh, spittle, sperm, and sweat—in a cell apart. Human flesh, fluids, teeth, and bone, when they are shed from the human body, die. But vampire flesh lives on until it is destroyed or ossifies. The last Drakul’s flesh was especially tenacious; its … extruviae lived on the offal, tripes, skin and bone left over from the aerie’s provisioning. But despite that it was mindless, it “knew” its father and Master. Some residual instinct
in the alien DNA played the part of a primitive brain.
Drakesh himself fed the—creature? He must; it would be too dangerous for a lieutenant to even attempt it. Entering its cavern cell with a pan of offal, he’d sat down on a flat-topped rocky outcrop in the centre of the dark place, and waited. Dark or light, it was all the same to the vampire Drakesh. His feral eyes turned to blood in the darkness, and lit like lamps in his face. The cave appeared to be empty, but the thing was here, he knew.
At his sandalled feet the earth was loose, churned up. The Other was a creature of darkness, as Drakesh himself. It burrowed in the earth as if hiding there—or as if lying in wait? And feeling the first, tentative tremor beneath his feet, Drakesh smiled grimly to himself and kept his thoughts guarded, his identity shielded. It was a grand amusement, a game he liked to play: to tempt the thing, and then to deny it.
And with the pan of vile stinking offal in his lap, in the utter darkness, he sat there smiling and feeling his creature’s presence. Then—
—A soft sound, as soil crumbling, behind him. The thing would sneak up on him. Oh so slowly, Drakesh turned his head on its scrawny neck and looked back and down. A mound of dirt was forming, pushing up from the loose, lumpy floor. And in a moment a small eruption, as a leprous grey-green tentacle or pseudopod pulsed up into view. It thickened, rising like some weird beanstalk, and formed a watery, rudimentary eye. What the thing saw—if it “saw” or “recognized” or “remembered” anything at all, in the accepted sense of those words—Drakesh could not say. But what it sensed was food! The food in his lap, or perhaps Drakesh himself.
The tentacle thickened more yet, and Drakesh felt a shuddering in the earth all around. The eye dissolved, reformed into faceless gapingjaws and twin rows of teeth that elongated into fangs even as he watched. And as the dry soil at his feet erupted in a dozen places and put up writhing pseudopod extensions of the thing, caging him in, as it were, so the main “body” or limb-like tentacle swayed towards him, its gaping jaws drooling a yellow, seminal bile.
… At which the Master Vampire opened his mind, revealing his identity. And:
Enough! he said. Thus far, and no further!
It was as if the thing had been electrocuted. The writhing tentacles were withdrawn, snatched back down into the earth; so rapidly indeed that one of them snapped, spurted bile, and left its tip like some weird blindworm snaking on the floor. Drakesh kicked at it and it quickly wriggled down out of sight, to join up with the greater mass. Behind him, the principal thigh-thick pseudopod slumped, melted down, poured back into its hole, and disappeared with a squelching sound like squashed ripe fruit or a thirsty drain. In a matter of seconds, all that remained was a puff of exhaust stench from the trembling, collapsing mounds, and two or three snaking runs, like panicked mole tracks in the floor. Then all was still again.
And Drakesh still smiling, for he sensed the thing’s fear. Which was only right.
Then, upending the pan to slop its vile contents onto the dry earth, he said: Know me. For I am the Drakul, your Master, and I am kind. You have no sense, knowledge or intelligence. I am all the intelligence you will ever need. You have no direction, but I give you purpose. You may not live without the sustenance I bring you, or die without my approval. But you may yet be more than you are now. Your brothers—grown out of you, as you were grown out of me—are stirring even now in my vats of metamorphism. I have elevated them, and may yet elevate you … or destroy you. If you remember little else, you would do well to remember these things.
He moved to the exit, paused and looked back. Now feed and be grateful. So be it.
But as that mindless octopus, that living or undead cancer of metamorphic tissue oozed up out of the floor and fell like a mantle on its food:
Now hold! Drakesh sent a whiplash thought—and the thing froze at once, as if turned to stone. And remember: this place is yours. But beyond this place (he used his sandalled foot to draw a line across the mouth of the cave), belongs to me. Thus far, and no further …
And then he visited his vats of metamorphism, great baths excavated from the solid bedrock of a nearby cavern as dark and even darker than the place of the protoplasm. They prospered in darkness, his creatures; especially these creatures, which were or would be the true warriors. Hybrid monsters waxing in their vats, these were to be the first of Drakesh’s many Guardians of the Curfew, securing the dark, shattered city bottoms and dust-bowl valleys in the long world-wide winter of nuclear aftermath, so that survivors of the wars and the vampire plague both could not scathe among his network of rearing aeries in the dangerous hours of daylight.
But in any case, there’d be little enough of daylight in that world. That, too, was part of his plan—it would be the first part—when finally Drakesh was ready to be Lord of All. For what good to set out to conquer a world of light, when the light itself must conquer in the end? But in a world where the light is weak, filtering through swirling clouds of radiation, and groping blindly in the rubble of man’s greatest works … ?
Drakesh was mad, of course, and knew it. But perverse as every Great Vampire before him, he revelled in it. For if the Emperor has the last say, and if his word is law, then who is to say that the rest aren’t mad and the Emperor sane? And one day, he would be that Emperor!
The vats of metamorphism … Drakesh stood at the rim of one such and looked down into it: the gelatinous surface of a liquid womb, surging with long slow ripples. They waxed, his warriors. They could be brought on quickly if need be, or lie here another hundred years just waiting to be born. And as he gazed the ripples quickened to wavelets—as if the inchoate inhabitant of the vat sensed him there—and something churned just beneath the surface. Then the outline of a grotesque head appeared, languidly turning, plated with what was as yet a softly translucent, grey-gleaming chitin. And for one brief moment a great vacant eye rolled in the gluey liquid.
“Strong!” Drakesh murmured to himself, nodding his skull head. “And faithful to the death.” It was true. Bred from his own metamorphic flesh, from the burrowing thing in the other cave, these creatures would have no mind but his, no thoughts but those he gave them …
Then he looked at the trough-like conduits that serviced the vats, rust-coloured runnels carved in the rock, umbilical sluices to feed the freely-given blood of the brethren to the foetal abnormalities being bred here. Blood-beasts! —and that fool of a Colonel in Chungking, Tsi-Hong, would have him breed human warriors? Well, so he would—so he was—as witness the pregnant Chinese and Tibetan women who worked the stony fields and tended the farm in the walled city. But as for the monastery’s priests, its brotherhood:
The Colonel knew nothing of them, that they were Drakesh’s children, too. And what of these other warriors waxing in their vats? Why, Tsi-Hong would suffer a stroke and die if he knew of them! He would die, aye … would have to, even if Drakesh must attend to it himself. For to know of them would be to know that the High Priest of this place was not a man; another reason why he had built his aerie here in the first place: because of its seeming austerity, its isolation. Because it was less than welcoming. And because in the main (and apart from the prying eyes of Major Chang Lun, that other fool in Xigaze) Drakesh was left much to his own devices here. So that even when the Colonel and his so-called “scientists” came to visit, which they must eventually, they would only visit the city. For the monastery was a “holy” place, where Drakesh might grant them audience, however briefly, but where they could never expect to lodge. But then, who would want to? The place had not been designed for the comfort of strangers …
Turning these and other things over in his pit-deep mind, Drakesh had followed a tortuous route up onto its roof. Now he stood here, face to face with the night under a canopy of brilliant stars, and felt the fluttering of his red robe blown back against his spindly body. One night—soon, perhaps—he must test his talents to the full, shape his body to an airfoil, and fly out from here. For in their time the Drakuls had been grand flyers, and his
father, Egon, a past-master. To have seen that one, circling like a great black bat over the high battlements of his Transylvanian castle … it had been awe-inspiring!
“Yours, in time,” the Count had told him. “All yours. Only be my true son and keep my place in my absence, and you too can be Wamphyri!” And sealing the pact, before leaving for England, he had passed on his egg in a fond fatherly kiss. Then, a brief moment of unbearable agony … and when Daham had regained consciousness his egg-sire had been gone. And in the space of ten days, Daham, too: fled out of Romania en route for this place, with a handful of Szgany thralls, a pouch of gold, and a parasite leech—the very seed of greatness—growing within him.
Then for a while he had feared his father’s revenge. What would the Great Drakul do when he returned to Romania to discover his egg-son flown from his castle and his trust betrayed? And it had been a relief—not to mention a delight!—later to learn of Egon’s demise, his true death, at the hands of a vengeful Doctor, a student of such “legends” as vampirism …
Again the wind blew against him; he instinctively lifted up his arms and leaned into it, was tempted to launch himself, and denied the temptation. All in good time.
But for now:
The plaintive cry of a yak, thin in the gnawing bite of the plateau’s night, was blown to him on the blustery breeze, some three miles from the old walled city. This was what Drakesh had been waiting for. For thoughtful master as he was, he tended the needs of all his creatures and familiars.
And: Up now, you true flyers, he sent. Come!
And from various cracks and crannies in the carved dome of the aerie—up from their colony in the darker recesses of the labyrinth of caves—the true flyers, they came …
With regard to Drakesh, Major Chang Lun had his instructions, his orders—such as they were. “Make periodic visits to the walled city.” Stupid orders, ridiculous orders! Yet that was what he had been told to do, all he had been told to do: make periodic visits.